Read Online Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson - Free Book Online

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    And Pibble’s long apathy was stirred at the prospect of meeting the man. To allay his shame he glanced at Doll and saw that she was at the teetering point of recovering her composure, and wouldn’t welcome chitchat now. So he looked back to the doctors. Both of them were playacting—that is to say, Pibble was aware that their poses would have been different if there’d been no one to watch them. It probably meant nothing; Silver, however impressive, was something of a poseur; and Pibble had seen Rue use almost the same expanded gestures in the Black Boot, during the long campaign to persuade Oenone behind the bar that he really was a spy, just as Pibble really was a policeman. Oenone was never quite convinced, never quite disbelieving, and both Rue and Pibble got steady pleasure out of her wavering faith. Now Rue was teasing Dr. Silver in much the same way. An olive finger shot out and pointed at the chart. Rue gesticulated blandly.
    And all around the motionless sleepers dreamed their way down the long slope to the dark. It was an easy ride for them, freewheeling; not the tumble over the cliff, not a slither down agonizing scree; down they glided, dreaming as they went. What dream? Lovely, the waking children had said—but they said that about everything, not counting Marilyn Goddard, whose step­father had done the Paperham jobs. Odd that Silver should extend his multiple­ persona to using thieves’ cant about so sick and sensational­ a horror. Pibble shivered. Retirement was softening him, or the atmosphere of the room was unmanning—twenty-something ex-dormice, not long ago capable of summoning up in strangers a freshet of unwonted affection, now lying inert, fed through tubes, evacuating into diapers. Mrs. Dixon-Jones would never bring her ledger up here to harry them about the movement of their bowels. The room was more dismaying than a mortuary, because it was not formaldehyde but some still functioning processes of life that prevented the young flesh from rotting away to reveal the not yet fully hardened bone. How old? Fourteen, fifteen? And already they had retired—or been sacked, if you were a theist. He shivered again.
    â€œAre you all right?” whispered the girl.
    Pibble jerked his head toward the door and followed her quietly out.
    â€œIt’s horrid until you get used to it,” she said. “Then you find it sort of restful. Rue put that notice up to stop us from coming and hanging about between the beds.”
    â€œHow long has he been here?”
    â€œNot long. About three years.”
    â€œAnd Doctor Silver’s been here four months, and so’s the money.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œSo Rue stuck it out for. . . It must have seemed quite long to him. I mean, it’s not the sort of setup you expect to appeal to anyone with Rue’s brains and drive.”
    â€œThere aren’t a lot of jobs where you can do fundamental research absolutely on your own. Rue says ‘colleague’ is a dirty word.”
    â€œHe seems to get along all right with Doctor Silver.”
    â€œHe was bloody to him at first. Have you been to Whipsnade?”
    â€œNo. . .”
    â€œYou go in winter. Choose a dismal day and walk up the path from the main gate. There’s a pine wood on your right, tall red trunks, quite empty. It looks as though the animals in it must have been taken away for the winter, so you walk on. Then something snags at the corner of your attention, like a bramble catching your skirt, and you look again and it’s eyes. Green eyes. Hundreds of them between the trunks. And then you see the notice which says the wood is called Wolf Wood.”
    â€œI see what you mean about the eyes. But the wolves have colleagues, don’t they?”
    â€œRue is a lone wolf. Lone, alone. Wolf, like a wolf in Wolf Wood.”
    â€œUm. How fundamental is fundamental research?”
    â€œI don’t know.