He wakened next morning feeling tired and sick, but the nurses brought a bland omelette which restored vitality. On a chair by the bed they laid clothes with the same soft glazed texture as the food: underwear, socks, shirt, dark trousers, a pullover and a white coat. They said, “You’re joining us today, Bushybrows.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a doctor now. I hope you aren’t going to bully us poor nurses.”
“I am not a doctor!”
“Oh, don’t refuse! The ones who refuse at first always bully us worst.”
When they left Lanark arose and dressed in all but the coat. He found shoes of suède-like stuff below the bed. He put them on, entered the corridor, lifted the blind and saw a white flagpole in the middle of a warm, sunlit terrace of level grass. Children ran about playing anarchic ballgames and on the far edge two older boys sat on a bench gazing across a great valley, the valley-floor covered by roofs made prickly by smokestacks. On the right a river meandered among fields and slag bings, then the city hid it though the course was marked by skeletal cranes marching to the left. Beyond the city was a bleak ridge of land, heather-green and creased by watercourses, and the summits of mountains appeared behind that like a line of broken teeth. This view filled Lanark with such unexpected delight that his eyes moistened. He returned and lay down on the bed, wondering why.
“Anyway,” he told himself, “I’ll go there.”
Munro came through an arch and Lanark sat up to face him saying, “Before you speak, I want to assure you I will not be a doctor.”
“I see. How do you intend to pass the time while you stay here?”
“I don’t want to stay. I want to leave.”
Munro flushed suddenly red and pointed to the window. Outside it grey waves were rising and falling against a great cliff with mist on the summit.
“Yes, leave! Leave!” he said in a controlled voice, “I’ll take you to an emergency exit. It will let you out at the mountain foot, and after that you can find your own way through the world. Men used to find homes like that, leaving the safe oasis or familiar cave and crossing wildernesses to make houses in unknown lands. Of course these men knew things you don’t. They could plant crops, kill animals, endure pains that would deprive you of your wits. But you can read and write and argue, and if you go far enough you may find people who appreciate that, if they talk the same language.”
“But a minute ago I saw a habitable city out there!”
“And have you never heard how fast and far light travels? And how masses warp it and surfaces reflect it and atmospheres refract it? You have seen a city and think it in the future, a place to reach by travelling an hour or day or year, but existence is helical and that city could be centuries ahead. And what if it lies in the past? History is full of men who saw cities, and went to them, and found them shrunk to villages or destroyed centuries before or not built yet. And the last sort were the luckiest.”
“But I recognized this city! I’ve been there!”
“Ah, then it lies in the past. You’ll never find it now.”
Lanark looked miserably at the floor. The view had given him dreams of a gracious, sunlit life. He said, “Are there no civilized places I can reach from here?”
Munro had regained his mandarin calm and sat down beside the bed. “Yes, several. But they won’t take you without a companion.”
“Why?”
“Health regulations. When people leave without a companion their diseases return after a while.”
“Am I the only healthy individual who wants to leave this place?”
“One woman doctor hates her work so much that she’ll leave with anyone, but take care. Entering another world with someone is a form of wedding, and this woman will hate any world she lands in.”
Lanark groaned and said, “What can I do, Dr. Munro?”
Munro said cheerfully, “That is your first sensible question Lanark, so stop worrying and listen. You can look for a companion among three classes of people: the doctors, the nurses and the patients. Not many doctors want to leave, but when they do, it is with a colleague. Nurses leave more often, with men they thoroughly trust, and doctors have proverbial advantages where they are concerned. But the biggest class are the patients, and you can only know them by working on them.”
“I’m not qualified to work on anybody.”
“And were you not nearly a dragon? And are you not cured? The only qualification for treating a disease is to survive it, and right now seventeen patients are crushing themselves under belligerent armour without one reasonable soul to care for them. Don’t be afraid! You need see nobody whose problem is not a form of your own.”
They sat in silence until Lanark stood up and put the white coat on. Munro smiled and produced a hospital radio saying, “This is yours. You know how to make contact through it, so I’ll show how it contacts you.”
He flicked the switch and said to the mesh, “Send a signal to Dr. Lanark in ten seconds, please. There’s no message, so don’t repeat it.”
He dropped the radio into Lanark’s pocket. A moment later two resonant chords from there said plin-plong.
“When you hear that, your patient is near a crisis or a colleague needs help. If you need help yourself, or lose your way in the corridors, or want a lullaby to soothe you to sleep, speak to the operator and you’ll be connected to someone suitable. Now get your books and we’ll go to your new apartment.” Lanark hesitated. He said, “Has it a window?”
“As far as I know this is the only room with a viewing screen of that kind.”
“I prefer to sleep here, Dr. Munro.”
Munro sighed slightly. “Doctors don’t usually sleep in a patients’ ward, but certainly this is the smallest and least required. All right, leave the books. I’ll show you something of the institute’s scope then we’ll visit Ozenfant, your head of department.”
They went through an arch to one of the circular doorways. The curtain of red pleated plastic slid apart for them and closed behind.
The corridors of the institute were very different from the rooms they connected. Lanark followed Munro down a low curving tunnel with hot gusts of wind shoving at his back, his ears numbed by a clamour of voices, footsteps, bells going plin-plong and a dull rhythmic roaring. The tunnel was six feet high and circular in section with a flat track at the bottom just wide enough for the wheels of a stretcher. The light kept brightening and dulling in a way that hurt the eyes; dazzling golden brightness slid along the walls with each warm blast and was followed by fading orange dimness in the ensuing cold. The tunnel slanted into another tunnel and grew twice as large, then into another and grew twice as large again. The noise, brightness and windpower increased. Lanark and Munro travelled swiftly but doctors and nurses with trolleys and stretchers kept overtaking and whizzing past them on either side. Nobody was moving against the wind. With an effort Lanark came beside Munro and asked about this, but though he yelled aloud his voice reached his ears as a remote squeaking and the reply was inaudible; yet amid the roaring and gongings he could hear distinct fragments of speech spoken by nobody in the vicinity:
“… is the pie that bakes and eats itself …”
“….. is that which has no dimensions…..”
“… is the study of the best …”
“….. an exacting game and requires patience…..”
They entered a great hall where the voices were drowned in a roaring which swelled and ebbed like waves of cheering in a football stadium. Crowds poured over the circular floor from tunnels on every side and disappeared through square doors between the tunnel entrances. Among white-coated nurses and doctors Lanark saw people in green dustcoats, brown overalls, blue uniforms and charcoal-grey business suits. He looked upward and staggered giddily. He was staring up a vast perpendicular shaft with gold and orange light flowing continually up the walls in diminishing rings like the rings of a target. Munro gripped his arm and led him to a door which opened, then slid shut behind them.
They were in a lift with the still air of a small ward. Munro looked up at a circular mesh in the middle of the ceiling and said, “The sink, please. Any entrance.”
There was a faint hum but no sense of movement. Munro said,
“Our corridors have confusing acoustics. Did you ask something?”
“Why do people only walk in one direction?”
“Each ward has two corridors, one leading in and the other out. This allows the air to circulate, and nobody goes against the current.”
“Who were the people in the big hall?”
“Doctors, like you and me.”
“But doctors were a tiny minority.”
“Do you think so? I suppose it’s possible. We need engineers and clerks and chemists to supervise lighting and synthesize food and so on, but we only see those in the halls; they have their own corridors. They’re a strange lot. Every one of them, even the plumbers and wireless operators, think their own profession is the institute, and everyone else exists to serve them. I suppose it makes their work seem more worthwhile, but if they reflected seriously they would see that the institute lives by purging the intake.”
“Purging the intake?”
“Doctoring the patients.”
The lift door opened and Lanark’s nostrils were hit by a powerful stink, the foul odour he had first noticed when Gloopy vanished in the dark. Munro crossed a platform to a railing and stood with his hands on it, looking down. To right and left the platform curved into distance as though enclosing an enormous basin, but though searchlights in the black ceiling cast slanting beams into the basin itself Lanark was unable to see the other side. From high overhead came huge dismal sounds like a dance record played loudly at an unusually low speed, and from the depths beyond the railing came a multitudinous slithering hiss. Lanark stood at the door of the lift and said shakily, “Why did we come here?” Munro looked round.
“This is our largest deterioration ward. We keep the hopeless softs here. They’re quite happy. Come and look.”
“You said I need see nobody whose problem is not a form of my own!”
“Problems take different forms but they’re all caused by the same error. Come and see.”
“If I look over that railing I think I will be sick.” Munro stared at him, then shrugged and re-entered the lift. He said to the mesh, “Professor Ozenfant,” and the door closed and the air softly hummed. Munro leaned against the wall with his hands tucked into the opposite sleeves. He frowned at his shoes for a moment then looked up with sudden brightness saying, “Tell me, Dr. Lanark, is there a connection between your love of vast panorama and your distaste for human problems?”
Lanark said nothing.
The door opened and they entered another huge roaring ceilingless hall. Pulses of sound and bright air beat down from above and flowed out into the surrounding tunnels with crowds of people from the surrounding lifts. Munro led the way to a tunnel with a block of names on the wall by the entrance:
| McADAM | McIVOR | McQUAT | McWHAM |
| McCAIG | McKEAN | McSHEA | MURRAY |
| McEVOY | McMATH | McUSKY | NOAKES |
| McGILL | McOWEN | McVARE | OZENFANT |
They sped along it hearing bodiless voices conversing among the clamour:
“… glad to see the light in the sky …”
“….. frames were shining on the walls …..”
“… you need certificates …”
“….. camels in Arabia …..”
“… annihilating sweetness …”
They reached a place where half the names were printed on one wall and half on the other, and here the tunnel forked and diminished. It forked and diminished three more times until they entered a single low tunnel labelled ozenfant. The red glossy curtain at the end opened on a surface of heavy brown cloth. Munro pulled that aside and they stepped into a large and lofty apartment. Tapestries worked in red, green and gold thread hung from an elaborate cornice to a chequered floor of black and white marble. Antique stools, chairs and sofas stood about in no kind of order with stringed instruments of the lute and fiddle sort scattered between them. A grand piano stood in a corner beside a cumbersome, old-fashioned X-ray machine, and in the middle Lanark saw, from behind, a figure in black trousers and waistcoat leaning over a carpenter’s bench and sandpapering the edge of a half-constructed guitar. This figure stood up and turned toward them, smiling and wiping hands on a richly patterned silk handkerchief. It was a stout young man with a small blond triangular beard. His sleeves were rolled well above his elbows exposing robust hairy forearms, but collar and tie were perfectly neat, the waistcoat unwrinkled, the trousers exactly creased, the shoes splendidly polished. He came forward saying, “Ah, Munro, you bring my new assistant. Sit down both of you and talk to me.” Munro said, “I’m afraid I must leave. Dr. Lanark has tired of my company and I have work to do.”
“No, my friend, you must stay some minutes longer! A patient is about to turn salamander, an always impressive spectacle. Sit down and I’ll show you.”
He gestured to a divan and stood facing them and dabbing his brows with the handkerchief. He said, “Tell me, Lanark, what instrument do you play?”
“None.”
“But you are musical?”
“No.”
“But perhaps you know about ragtime, jazz, boogie-woogie, rock-and-roll?”
“No.”
Ozenfant sighed. “I feared as much. No matter, there are other ways of speaking to patients. I will show you a patient.”
He went to the nearest tapestry and dragged it sideways, uncovering a circular glass screen in the wall behind. A slender microphone hung under it. He brought this to the divan pulling a fine cable after it, and sat down and said, “Ozenfant speaking. Show me chamber twelve.”
The neon lights in the ceiling went out and a blurred image shone inside the screen, seemingly a knight in gothic armour lying on the slab of a tomb. The image grew distinct and more like a prehistoric lizard on a steel table. The hide was black, the knobbly joints had pink and purple quills on them, a bush of purple spines hid the genitals and a double row of spikes down the back supported the body about nine inches above the table. The head was neckless, chinless, and grew up from the collarbone into a gaping beak like the beak of a vast cuckoo. The face had no other real features, though a couple of blank domes stuck out like parodies of eyeballs. Munro said, “The mouth is open.”
Ozenfant said, “Yes, but the air trembles above it. Soon it shuts, and then boom!”
“When was he delivered?”
“Nine months, nine days, twenty-two hours ago. He arrived nearly as you see him, nothing human but the hands, throat and sternum mastoid. He seemed to like jazz, for he clutched the remnant of a saxophone, so I said, ‘He is musical, I will treat him myself.’ Unluckily I know nothing of jazz. I tried him with Debussy (who sometimes works in these cases) then I tried the nineteenth-century romantics. I pounded him with Wagner, overwhelmed him with Brahms, beguiled him with Mendelssohn. Results: negative. In despair I recede further and further, and who works in the end? Scarlatti. Each time I played The Cortege his human parts blushed as pink and soft as a baby’s bottom.”
Ozenfant closed his eyes and kissed his fingertips to the ceiling. “Well, matters remain thus till six hours ago when he goes wholly dragon in five minutes. Perhaps I do not play the clavichord well? Who else in this wretched institute would have tried?”
Munro said, “You assume he blushed pink with pleasure. It may have been rage. Maybe he disliked Scarlatti. You should have asked.”
“I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.”
Lanark moved impatiently. Light from the screen showed Ozenfant’s mouth so fixed in a smile that it seemed expressionless, while the eyebrows kept moving in exaggerated expressions of thoughtfulness, astonishment or woe. Ozenfant said, “Lanark is bored by these technicalities. I will show him more patients.”
He spoke to the microphone and a sequence of dragons on steel tables appeared on the screen. Some had glossy hides, some were plated like tortoises, some were scaled like fish and crocodiles. Most had quills, spines or spikes and some were hugely horned and antlered, but all were made monstrous by a detail, a human foot or ear or breast sticking through the dinosaur armour. A doctor sat on the edge of one table and studied a chessboard balanced on a dragonish stomach. Ozenfant said, “That is McWham, who is also unmusical. He treats the dryly rational cases; he teaches them chess and plays interminable games. He thinks that if anyone defeats him their armour will fall off, but so far he has been too clever for them. Do you play any games, Lanark?”
“No.”
In another chamber a thin priest with intensely miserable eyes sat with his ear close to a dragonish beak.
“That is Monsignor Noakes, our only faith healer. We used to have lots of them: Lutherans, Jews, Atheists, Muslims, and others with names I forget. Nowdays all the hardened religious cases have to be treated by poor Noakes. Luckily we don’t get many.”
“He looks unhappy.”
“Yes, he takes his work too seriously. He is Roman Catholic and the only people he cures are Quakers and Anglicans. Have you a religion, Lanark?”
“No.”
“You see a cure is more likely when doctor and patient have something in common. How would you describe yourself?”
“I can’t.”
Ozenfant laughed. “Of course you can’t! I asked foolishly. The lemon cannot taste bitterness, it only drinks the rain. Munro, describe Lanark to me.”
“Obstinate and suspicious,” said Munro. “He has intelligence, but keeps it narrow.”
“Good. I have a patient for him. Also obstinate, also suspicious, with a cleverness which only reinforces a deep, deep, immeasurably deep despair.”
Ozenfant said to the microphone, “Show chamber one, and let us see the patient from above.”
A gleaming silver dragon appeared between a folded pair of brazen wings. A stout arm ending in seven brazen claws lay along one wing, a slender soft human arm along the other. “You see the wings? Only unusually desperate cases have wings, though they cannot use them. Yet this one brings such reckless energy to her despair that I have sometimes hoped. She is unmusical, but I, a musician, have stooped to speech therapy and spoken to her like a vulgar critic, and she exasperated me so much that I decided to give her to the catalyst. We will give her to Lanark instead.”
A radio said plin-plong. Ozenfant took one from a waistcoat pocket and turned the switch. A voice announced that patient twelve was turning salamander.
Ozenfant said to the microphone, “Quick! Chamber twelve.”
Chamber twelve was obscured by white vapours streaming and whirling from the dragon’s beak, which suddenly snapped shut. Radiant beams shot from the domes in the head, the figure seemed to be writhing. Ozenfrant cried, “No light, please! We will observe by heat alone.”
There was immediate blackness on which Lanark’s dazzled eyes projected stars and circles before adjusting to it. He could hear Munro’s quick dry breathing on one side and Ozenfant breathing through his mouth on the other. He said, “What’s happening?”
Ozenfant said, “Brilliant light pours from all his organs—it would blind us. Soon you will see him by his heat.” A moment later Lanark was startled to feel Ozenfant murmuring into his ear.
“The heat made by a body should move easily through it, overflowing the pores, penis, anus, eyes, lips, limbs and fingertips in acts of generosity and self-preservation. But many people are afraid of the cold and try to keep more heat than they give, they stop the heat from leaving though an organ or limb, and the stopped heat forges the surface into hard insulating armour. What part of you went dragon?”
“A hand and arm.”
“Did you ever touch them with your proper hand?”
“Yes. They felt cold.”
“Quite. No heat was getting out. But no heat was getting in! And since men feel the heat they receive more than the heat they create the armour makes the remaining human parts feel colder. So do they strip it off? Seldom. Like nations losing unjust wars they convert more and more of themselves into armour when they should surrender or retreat. So someone may start by limiting only his affections or lust or intelligence, and eventually heart, genitals, brain, hands and skin are crusted over. He does nothing but talk and feed, giving and taking through a single hole; then the mouth shuts, the heat has no outlet, it increases inside him until … watch, you will see.” The blackness they sat in had been dense and total but a crooked thread of scarlet light appeared on it. This twitched and grew at both ends until it outlined the erect shape of a dragon with legs astride, arms outstretched, the hands thrusting against darkness, the great head moving from side to side. Lanark had a weird feeling that the beast stood before him in the room. There was nothing but blackness to compare it with, and it seemed vast. Its gestures may have been caused by pain but they looked threatening and triumphant. Inside the black head two stars appeared where eyes should be, then the whole body was covered with white and golden stars. Lanark felt the great gothic shape towering miles above him, a galaxy shaped like a man. Then the figure became one blot of gold which expanded into a blinding globe. There was a crash of thunder and for a moment the room became very hot. The floor heaved and the lights went on.
It took a while to see things clearly. The thunder had ended, but throughout the apartment instruments were jangling and thrumming in sympathy. Lanark noticed Munro still sitting beside him. There was sweat on his brow and he was industriously polishing his spectacles with a handkerchief. The blank screen was cracked from side to side but the microphone hung neatly under it. Ozenfant stood at a distance examining a fiddle. “See!” he cried. “The Α-string has snapped. Yet some assert that a Stradivarius is without a soul.”
Munro said, “I am no judge of salamanders, but that vibration seemed abnormally strong.”
“Indeed yes. There were over a million megatherms in that small blast.”
“Surely not!”
“Certainly. I will prove it.”
Ozenfant produced his radio and said, “Ozenfant will speak with engineer Johnson…. Johnson, hello, you have received our salamander; what is he worth? … Oh, I see. Anyway, he cracked my viewing lens, so replace it soon, please.”
Ozenfant pocketed the radio and said briskly, “Not quite a million megatherms, but it will suffice for a month or two.” He bent and hoisted up a harp which had fallen on its side. Lanark said sharply, “That heat is used?”
“Of course. Somehow we must warm ourselves.”
“That is atrocious!”
“Why?”
Lanark started stammering then forced himself to speak slowly. “I knew people deteriorate. That is dismal but not surprising. But for cheerful healthy folk to profit by it is atrocious!”
“What would you prefer? A world with a cesspool under it where the helplessly corrupt would fall and fester eternally? That is a very old-fashioned model of the universe.”
“And very poor housekeeping,” said Munro, standing up. “We could cure nobody if we did not utilize our failures. I must go now. Lanark, your department and mine have different staff clubs but if you ever leave the institute we will meet again. Professor Ozenfant is your adviser now, so good luck, and try not to be violent.”
Lanark was so keen to learn if the last remark was a joke that he stared hard into Munro’s calm benign face and let his hand be gravely shaken without saying a word. Ozenfant murmured, “Excellent advice.”
He uncovered a door and Munro went through it.
Ozenfant returned to the centre of the room chuckling and rubbing his hands. He said, “You noticed the sweat on his brow? He did not like what he saw; he is a rigorist, Lanark. He cannot sympathize with our disease.”
“What is a rigorist?”
“One who bargains with his heat. Rigorists do not hold their heat in, they give it away, but only in exchange for fresh supplies. They are very dependable people, and when they go bad they crumble into crystals essential for making communication circuits, but when you and I went bad we took a different path. That is why an exploding salamander exalts us. We feel in our bowels the rightness of such nemesis. You were exalted, were you not?”
“I was excited, and I regret it.”
“Your regret serves no purpose. And now perhaps you wish to meet your patient.”
Ozenfant lifted the corner of another tapestry, uncovered a low circular door and said, “Her chamber is through here.” “But what have I to do?”
“Since you are only able to talk, you must talk.”
“What about?”
“I cannot say. A good doctor does not carry a remedy to his patient, he lets the patient teach him what the remedy is. I drove someone salamander today because I understood my cure better than my invalid. I often make these mistakes because I know I am very wise. You know you are ignorant, which should be an advantage.”
Lanark stood with his hands in his pockets, biting his lower lip and tapping the floor with one foot. Ozenfant said, “If you do not go to her I will certainly send the catalyst.”
“What is the catalyst?”
“A very important specialist who comes to lingering cases when other treatments have failed. The catalyst provokes very rapid deterioration. Why are you reluctant?”
“Because I am afraid!” cried Lanark passionately, “You want to mix me with someone else’s despair, and I hate despair! I want to be free, and freedom is freedom from other people!” Ozenfant smiled and nodded. He said “A very dragonish sentiment! But you are no longer a dragon. It is time you learned a different sentiment.”
After a while the smile left Ozenfant’s face, leaving it startlingly impassive. He let go the tapestry, went to the carpenter’s bench and picked up a fretsaw.
He said sharply, “You feel I am pressing you and you dislike it. Do what you please. But since I myself have work to do I will be glad if you waste no more of my time.”
He bent over the guitar. Lanark stared frustratedly at the corner of the tapestry. It depicted a stately woman labelled Correctio Conversio standing on a crowned and sprawling young man labelled Tarquinius. At last he pulled this aside, stepped through the door and went down the corridor beyond.