Switching it on, he zeroed the tape and adjusted the speaker volume. ‘Whitby and I often talked this over. Towards the end I took it all down. He was a great biologist, so let’s hear it in his own words. It’s absolutely the heart of the matter.’

He flipped the table on, adding: ‘I’ve played it over to myself a thousand times, so I’m afraid the quality is poor.’

An older man’s voice, sharp and slightly irritable, sounded out above a low buzz of distortion, but Coma could hear it clearly.

WHITBY:… for heaven’s sake, Robert, look at those FAQ statistics. Despite an annual increase of five per cent in acreage sown over the past fifteen years, world wheat crops have continued to decline by a factor of about two per cent. The same story repeats itself ad nauseam. Cereals and root crops, dairy yields, ruminant fertility — are all down. Couple these with a mass of parallel symptoms, anything you care to pick from altered migratory routes to longer hibernation periods, and the overall pattern is incontrovertible.

POWERS: Population figures for Europe and North America show no decline, though.

WHITBY: Of course not, as I keep pointing out. It will take a century for such a fractional drop in fertility to have any effect in areas where extensive birth control provides an artificial reservoir. One must look at the countries of the Far East, and particularly at those where infant mortality has remained at a steady level. The population of Sumatra, for example, has declined by over fifteen per cent in the last twenty years. A fabulous decline! Do you realize that only two or three decades ago the Neo-Malthusians were talking about a ‘world population explosion’? In fact, it’s an implosion. Another factor is — Here the tape had been cut and edited, and Whitby’s voice, less querulous this time, picked up again. just as a matter of interest, tell me something: how long do you sleep each night?

POWERS: I don’t know exactly; about eight hours, I suppose.

WHITBY: The proverbial eight hours. Ask anyone and they say automatically ‘eight hours’. As a matter of fact you sleep about ten and a half hours, like the majority of people. I’ve timed you on a number of occasions. I myself sleep eleven. Yet thirty years ago people did indeed sleep eight hours, and a century before that they slept six or seven. In Vasari’s Lives one reads of Michelangelo sleeping for only four or five hours, painting all day at the age of eighty and then working through the night over his anatomy table with a candle strapped to his forehead. Now he’s regarded as a prodigy, but it was unremarkable then. How do you think the ancients, from Plato to Shakespeare, Aristotle to Aquinas, were able to cram so much work into their lives? Simply because they had an extra six or seven hours every day. Of course, a second disadvantage under which we labour is a lowered basal metabolic rate — another factor no one will explain.

POWERS: I suppose you could take the view that the lengthened sleep interval is a compensation device, a sort of mass neurotic attempt to escape from the terrifying pressures of urban life in the late twentieth century.

WHITBY: You could, but you’d be wrong. It’s simply a matter of biochemistry. The ribonucleic acid templates which unravel the protein chains in all living organisms are wearing out, the dies inscribing the protoplasmic signature have become blunted. After all, they’ve been running now for over a thousand million years. It’s time to re-tool. Just as an individual organism’s life span is finite, or the life of a yeast colony or a given species, so the life of an entire biological kingdom is of fixed duration. It’s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downward to the common biological grave. It’s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it’s the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time. Believe me, I pity them, as I pity myself. My total failure, my absolute lack of any moral or biological right to existence, is implicit in every cell of my body…

The tape ended, the spool ran free and stopped. Powers closed the machine, then massaged his face. Coma sat quietly, watching him and listening to the chimp playing with a box of puzzle dice.

‘As far as Whitby could tell,’ Powers said, ‘the silent genes represent a last desperate effort of the biological kingdom to keep its head above the rising waters. Its total life period is determined by the amount of radiation emitted by the sun, and once this reaches a certain point the sure-death line has been passed and extinction is inevitable. To compensate for this, alarms have been built in which alter the form of the organism and adapt it to living in a hotter radiological climate. Softskinned organisms develop hard shells, these contain heavy metals as radiation screens. New organs of perception are developed too. According to Whitby, though, it’s all wasted effort in the long run — but sometimes I wonder.’

He smiled at Coma and shrugged. ‘Well, let’s talk about something else. How long have you known Kaldren?’

‘About three weeks. Feels like ten thousand years.’

‘How do you find him now? We’ve been rather out of touch lately.’

Coma grinned. ‘I don’t seem to see very much of him either. He makes me sleep all the time. Kaidren has many strange talents, but he lives just for himself. You mean a lot to him, doctor. In fact, you’re my one serious rival.’

‘I thought he couldn’t stand the sight of me.’

‘Oh, that’s just a sort of surface symptom. He really thinks of you continually. That’s why we spend all our time following you around.’ She eyed Powers shrewdly. ‘I think he feels guilty about something.’

‘Guilty?’ Powers exclaimed. ‘He does? I thought I was supposed to be the guilty one.’

‘Why?’ she pressed. She hesitated, then said: ‘You carried out some experimental surgical technique on him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Powers admitted. ‘It wasn’t altogether a success, like so much of what I seem to be involved with. If Kaldren feels guilty, I suppose it’s because he feels he must take some of the responsibility.’

He looked down at the girl, her intelligent eyes watching him closely. ‘For one or two reasons it may be necessary for you to know. You said Kaldren paced around all night and didn’t get enough sleep. Actually he doesn’t get any sleep at all.’

The girl nodded. ‘You…’ She made a snapping gesture with her fingers.

‘…narcotomized him,’ Powers completed. ‘Surgically speaking, it was a great success, one might well share a Nobel for it. Normally the hypothalamus regulates the period of sleep, raising the threshold of consciousness in order to relax the venous capillaries in the brain and drain them of accumulating toxins. However, by sealing off some of the control loops the subject is unable to receive the sleep cue, and the capillaries drain while he remains conscious. All he feels is a temporary lethargy, but this passes within three or four hours. Physically speaking, Kaldrenhas had another twenty years added to his life. But the psyche seems to need sleep for its own private reasons, and consequently Kaldren has periodic storms that tear him apart. The whole thing was a tragic blunder.’

Coma frowned pensively. ‘I guessed as much. Your papers in the neurosurgery journals referred to the patient as K. A touch of pure Kafka that came all too true.’

‘I may leave here for good, Coma,’ Powers said. ‘Make sure that Kaidren goes to his clinics. Some of the deep scar tissue will need to be cleaned away.’

‘I’ll try. Sometimes I feel I’m just another of his insane terminal documents.’