Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson Page B

you another drink?”
    Her hand flew to her mouth and the peachy softness of her face began to crumple as she bit at her knuckles.
    â€œWhat really happened,” said Kelly, “was that Ram Silver queered my pitch with Posey Dixon-Jones. You met her, Jimmy?”
    â€œThis is what the children call ‘upstairs,’ is it?” said Pibble. “I imagine she doesn’t like the waking ones to know that it’s here.”
    â€œThey all know ,” insisted the girl, risking a glance at Kelly to see how he took this continued defiance.
    â€œCourse they do,” said Kelly. “It’s a big house, but not that big. They’re stupid, but not that stupid. Anyway Posey’s mad. What did you make of her, Jimmy?”
    â€œShe seemed tough but sensible. I suppose she might have sudden emotional patches—like air pockets. You’re flying along and without warning the bottom falls out of the sky.”
    He explained about the meeting with Mr. Costain.
    â€œPsychotic,” said Kelly. “Her own drives make the rules, and the hell with the rest of us. Of course she’s never thought that she has any drives—that type never does. There’s a reason for everything. I hope the bloody little pansy doesn’t drive her too far. She might do anything, absolutely anything. She wouldn’t worry about the consequences. She’d blow the whole place up, with us in it, rather than let him move one brick without her permission. Love has passed her by, poor old bitch, and—”
    â€œMay I enter your territory, dear colleague?” boomed Dr. Silver from the door.
    Kelly smiled, sharp but charming.
    â€œOne for your notebooks, Ram,” he said. “I’ve been praying all morning you’d come, and you came. Telekinesis or telepathy? I’ve got something to show you.”
    â€œYou have? In fact I was looking for the good Mr. Pibble. Mr. T. has expressed a wish to see him.”
    â€œOho!” said Kelly. “Be a pal, Jimmy, and ask him when I’m going to get my scintillation counter.”
    â€œDo no such thing,” said Dr. Silver. “Mr. T. needs very precise handling.”
    â€œOnly Ram knows how to pray to the rain god,” said Kelly.
    â€œPerfectly expressed,” said Dr. Silver, beaming. “Show me this something, Rue. Your somethings are becoming most interesting.”
    Like coequal hierarchs of a schismatic church, the two doctors paced down the aisle and turned up a side chapel between two beds; here they bowed their heads over a graph.
    Athanasius Thanatos! said part of Pibble’s mind. Crippen!
    The rest of his mind told it, prissily but vainly, to shut up. A man is only a man, it said, even if his name sends shivers down the spines of gossip columnists. Think, it said, of that hotel at—where was it? Mary would remember—not that the Pibbles could afford to stay there, but they’d seen the thing, seen how its drab slab diminished the Aegean sky and its reflection polluted the blue bay. And now the man was manoeuvring to build something just as ugly, but five times bigger, on the South Bank.
    Athanasius Thanatos! Him!
    And what about the Thanatos Disposable Hotel, only a few weeks back so loudly deplored in every responsible paper? A pure despoiler’s idea, a quick, cheap prefab shipped in to wherever he could find sun and a beach and cheap local booze, just to catch the ever-quickening eddies of the tourist mania. He’d boasted to Time magazine that any government who asked for a tourist resort one autumn could see it pullulating the next spring. And when the tourist tide receded, all the rooms and equipment could be shipped elsewhere, leaving only the scar tissue of dead cement where the hotel had stood, pocked with a few drain holes. He had publicly rejoiced in the fact that few of the ardent preservationists were likely to be citizens of the countries that actually needed the