The Escape, page 4
“I doubt it.” The noise of a match, struck against Mandelbaum’s shoe, was startlingly loud. “We’re still the same old animal.”
“What was your I.Q. before the change?”
“I don’t know.”
“Never took a test?”
“Oh, sure, they made me take one now and then, to get this or that job, but I never asked for the result. What’s I.Q. except the score on an I.Q. test?”
“It’s more than that. It measures the ability to handle data, grasp and create abstractions—”
“If you’re a Caucasian of West European-American cultural background. That’s who the test was designed for, Pete. A Kalahari bushman would laugh if he knew it omitted water-finding ability. That’s more important to him than the ability to juggle numbers. Me, I don’t underrate the logic and visualization aspect of personality, but I don’t have your touching faith in it either. There’s more to a man than that, and a garage mechanic may be a better survivor type than a mathematician.”
“Survivor—under what conditions?”
“Any conditions. Adaptability, toughness, quickness—those are the things that count most.”
“I think kindness means a lot,” said Sheila timidly.
“It’s a luxury, I’m afraid, though of course it’s such luxuries that make us human,” said Mandelbaum. “Kindness to whom? When I stumped for intervention, back in Hitler’s time, and when I joined O.S.S. to help liquidate the ba—bum, was that kind? It meant that a lot of people would get hurt. Only in the long run, it would have been harder on the world to let the Nazis live.”
Bitterness edged his voice. “You scientists always oversimplify. That’s how physics has achieved so much, I guess: by working with a distorted fraction of the real world, and ignoring everything else. I’ll give you a for instance, even if it is rather personal. One of my sons is in Chicago now. He changed his name and had his nose bobbed. He’s not ashamed of his parents, no, but he’s saved himself and his family a lot of trouble and humiliation. And—well—I honestly don’t know whether to admire him for tough-minded adaptability, or call him a spineless whelp. Is there any simple yes-or-no answer to that question?”
“We’re getting rather far from the point,” said Corinth, embarrassed. “It’s a matter of estimating what we, the world, are in for.”
He shook his head. “It feels strange. My I.Q. has gone from its former 160 to about 200 in a week. I’m thinking things that never occurred to me before. My former professional problems are becoming ridiculously easy. My mind keeps wandering off into the most fantastic trains of thought, some of them pretty wild and morbid. I’m nervous as a kitten, jump at shadows, afraid for no good reason at all. Now and then I get flashes where everything seems grotesque—like in a nightmare.”
“You’re not adjusted to your new brain power yet, that’s all,” said Sarah.
“I feel the way Pete does,” said Sheila. “It isn’t worth it.”
The other woman shrugged, spreading her hands. “Me, I think it’s kind of fun.”
“Matter of basic personality, which has not changed,” said Mandelbaum. “Sarah’s always been a pretty down-to-earth sort. You just don’t take your new mind seriously, Liebchen. To you, the power of abstract thought is a toy. It’s got little to do with the serious matters of housework.” He puffed, meshing his face into wrinkles as he squinted through the smoke. “And me, I feel the sort of things you do, Pete, but I don’t let it bother me. Haven’t time for such fumblydiddles, not the way things are now. Everybody in the union seems to have come up with some crank notion of how we—and that could be anybody from the local office to the Almighty—ought to run things.”
“Sure,” said Corinth. “The average man—” He stopped as the doorbell rang. “That must be them now. Come in.”
Dagmar Arnulfsen entered, her slim height briefly concealing Nathan Lewis’ bulk. She looked as cool and smooth and hard as before, but there were shadows under her eyes. “Hullo,” she said tonelessly.
“No fun, huh?” asked Sheila with sympathy.
Dagmar grimaced. “Dreams.”
“Me too.” A shudder ran along Sheila’s small form.
“How about the psych man you were going to bring, Nat?” asked Corinth.
“He refused at the last minute,” said Lewis. “Had some kind of idea for a new intelligence test. And his partner was too busy putting rats through mazes. Never mind, I think we can dispense with them.” He wandered over to the buffet and picked up a sandwich and bit into it. “Mmmmm—delikat. Sheila, why don’t you ditch this long drink of water and marry me?”
“Trade him for a long drink of beer?” she smiled.
“Touché! You’ve changed too, haven’t you? But really, you might have done better by me. A long drink of Scotch, at the very least. King’s Ransom or Ambassador by choice.”
“After all,” said Corinth gloomily, “it’s not as if we were here for any special purpose. I just thought a general discussion would clarify the matter in all our minds and maybe give us some ideas.”
“What’s the world news?” asked Lewis, settling himself near the table. “I’ve been too busy to keep up.”
“Not much different yet,” said Dagmar. “These things take time to generate their effects. There was a rather sensible proposal for settling international tension made in the U.N. the other day; riots in Calcutta, questions asked in the House of Commons, a new chiliastic prophet out in Los Angeles. And oh, yes, the stock market tumbling in Wall Street. And the papers are full of this and that story about clever things done by animals.” She lit a cigarette, sucking in her cheeks and half closing her eyes. “That seems to be about all so far which could be attributed to this—intelligence phenomenon.”
“Censorship on the facts, eh?”
“Apparently.” She shrugged flawlessly tailored shoulders. “There have been a few stories, of course, mostly of the Sunday-supplement type, but American papers, at least, are sitting pretty tight on the big news.”
“The lid’s going to blow off soon,” said Corinth. “They’re just stalling for time, hoping something can be done. You can’t suppress something that every man on Earth is noticing in his neighbors and himself.”
“There was a clever piece of misdirection in one paper today,” ventured Sheila. “About—what’s his name?—Huntington’s theory that ozone may make people smarter. Also a lot about sunspots. The whole thing gave the impression that this is just temporary and unimportant.”
“John Rossman’s in Washington now,” said Dagmar. She added to the Mandelbaums: “He came to the Institute a few days back, asked our bright boys to investigate this business but keep their findings confidential, and flew to the capital. With his pull, he’ll get the whole story if anyone can.”
“I don’t think there is much of a story, to tell the truth,” said Mandelbaum. “Not yet.”
“Just you wait,” said Lewis cheerfully. He took another sandwich and a cup of coffee. “I predict that within about one week, things are going to start going to hell in a handbasket.”
“The fact is—” Corinth got out of the chair into which he had flopped and began pacing the room. “The fact is, that the change isn’t over. It’s still going on. As far as our best measurements can tell—though they’re not too exact, what with our instruments being affected themselves—the change is even accelerating.”
“Within the limits of error, I think I see a more or less hyperbolic advance,” said Lewis. “We’ve just begun, brethren. The way we’re going, we’ll all have I.Q.’s in the neighborhood of 400 within another week.”
They sat for a long while, not speaking. Corinth stood with his fists clenched, hanging loose at his sides, and Sheila gave a little wordless cry and ran over to him and hung on his arm. Mandelbaum blew clouds of smoke, scowling as he digested the information; one hand stole out to caress Sarah’s, and she squeezed it gratefully. Lewis grinned around his sandwich and went on eating. Dagmar sat without motion, the long clean curves of her face gone utterly expressionless. The city banged faintly below them, around them.
“What’s going to happen?” breathed Sheila at last. She trembled so they could see it. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“God alone knows,” said Lewis, not without gentleness.
“Will it go on building up forever?” asked Sarah.
“Nope,” said Lewis. “Can’t. It’s a matter of neurone chains increasing their speed of reaction and the intensity of the signals they carry. The physical structure of the cell can take only so much. If they’re stimulated too far—insanity, followed by idiocy, followed by death.”
“How high can we go?” asked Mandelbaum practically.
“Can’t say. For one thing, normal nervous processes are too little understood, and for another, nothing at all, really, is known about this new phenomenon. What brought it on? I can’t tell you. How does it work? I can’t tell you that either. And anyway—” Lewis took out a cigar and bit off the end. “Anyway, my friends, the I.Q. is a limited and comparative measurement which becomes quite meaningless when it gets outside the range for which the tests were designed. To speak of an I.Q. of 400 just doesn’t make sense. Intelligence of that speed and scope may not be intelligence at all as we know it; it may become something entirely different.”
“Good God!” Corinth had had an idea that the change was on the increase, but had been too busy with his own work of physical measurements to know what Lewis’ department had found out. The appalling realization was only beginning to grow on him. “Oh, my Lord!”
Dagmar grinned without much humor. “You know what a lot of people are going to say,” she put in. “Them scientists should’a left well enough alone. They shouldn’t’a started monkeying around, with that there atomic bomb. Let’s lynch ‘em.”
“It’s not of human origin, this,” said Lewis seriously. “It’s cosmic.”
“I know. But does the much-touted Common Man?”
“He’s got more sense than you think,” said Mandelbaum evenly. “You theorists who make the average man—a non-existent invention in the first place—either a hero or a lout, should get out and meet some workers sometime. If the human race is biologically able to survive this, the plain man will come through.”
“I wonder,” said Corinth. “Sheer social inertia has carried us along so far. People continue in their daily rounds because there’s nothing else available. But when things really start changing—”
“Oh, sure, Pete, it won’t be an easy time,” said Mandelbaum. “I agree we’re in for a rough transition. But that’s no excuse for sitting down and bewailing something we can’t change. What counts is a sensible program of action.”
He knocked out his pipe and went over to get some coffee. “What we need is an interim organization which can see us through the next few months. It’ll probably have to be on a local level. I do agree that human society as it is can’t survive a change in the nature of humanity, and it’s quite possible that the national government will break down.”
“The janitor and the elevator man at the Institute quit yesterday,” said Dagmar. “Said the work was too monotonous. What happens when all the janitors and garbage men and ditch-diggers and assembly-line workers decide to quit?”
“That’s part of it,” nodded Mandelbaum. “Though they won’t all do it. Some will be afraid, some will have the sense to see that we’ve got to keep going, some—well, there’s no simple answer to this.”
“Too many unknowns for a prediction,” assented Lewis.
“You haven’t any idea as to the cause of the change?” asked Dagmar.
“Oh, yes,” said Lewis. “Any number of ideas, and no way of choosing between them. We’ll just have to study and think some more, that’s all.”
“It’s a physical phenomenon embracing at least the whole Solar System,” declared Corinth. “The observatories have established that much. It may be that the sun, in its orbit around the center of the galaxy, has entered some kind of force-field. But on theoretical grounds—dammit, I won’t scrap general relativity till I have to!—on theoretical grounds, I’m inclined to think it’s likely a matter of our having left a force-field which slows down light and otherwise affects electromagnetic and electrochemical processes.”
“In other words,” said Mandelbaum slowly, “we’re actually entering a normal state of affairs? All our past has been spent under abnormal conditions?”
“Maybe. Only, of course, those conditions are normal for us. We’ve evolved under them. We may be like deep-sea fish, which explode when they’re brought up to ordinary pressures.”
“Heh! Pleasant thought.”
“I don’t think I’m afraid to die,” said Sheila in a small voice, “but being changed like this—”
“Keep a tight rein on yourself,” said Lewis sharply. “I suspect this unbalance is going to drive a lot of people insane. Don’t be one of them.”
He knocked the ash off his cigar. “We have found out some things at the lab,” he went on in a dispassionate tone. “As Pete says, it’s a physical thing, either a force-field or the lack of one, affecting electronic interactions. The effect is actually rather small, quantitatively. Ordinary chemical reactions go on pretty much as before, in fact I don’t think any significant change in the speed of organic reactions has been detected. But the more complex and delicate a structure is, the more it feels that slight effect.
“You must have noticed that you’re more energetic lately. We’ve tested basal metabolism rates, and they have increased, not much but some. Your motor reactions are faster too, though you may not have noticed that because your subjective time sense is also speeded up. In other words, not much change in muscular, glandular, vascular, and the other somatic functions, just enough to make you feel nervous; and you’ll adjust to that pretty quick.
“On the other hand, the most highly organized cells—neurones, and above all the neurones of the cerebral cortex—are very much affected. Perception speeds are way up; they measured that over in psych. You’ve noticed, I’m sure, how much faster you read than before. Reaction time to all stimuli is less.”
“I heard that from Jones,” nodded Dagmar coolly, “and checked up on traffic accident statistics for the past week. They’re significantly lower. If people react faster, naturally they’re better drivers.”
“Uh-huh,” said Lewis. “Till they start getting tired of poking along at sixty miles an hour and drive at a hundred. Then you may not have any more crackups, but those you do have—wham!”
“But if people are smarter,” began Sheila, “they’ll know enough to—”
“Sorry, no.” Mandelbaum shook his head. “Basic personality does not change, right? And intelligent people have always done some pretty stupid or evil things from time to time, just like everybody else. A man might be a brilliant scientist, let’s say; but that doesn’t stop him from neglecting his health or driving recklessly for a thrill or—”
“Or voting Democrat,” nodded Lewis, grinning. “That’s correct, Felix. Eventually, no doubt, increased intelligence would react on the whole personality, but right now you’re not changing anyone’s weaknesses, ignorances, prejudices, blind spots, or ambitions; you’re just giving him more power, of energy and intelligence, to indulge them.”
His voice became dry and didactic: “Getting back to where we were, the most highly organized tissue in the world is, of course, the human cerebrum, the gray matter or seat of consciousness if you like. It feels the stimulus—or the lack of inhibition, if Pete’s theory is right—more than anything else on Earth. Its functioning increases out of all proportion to every other part of the organism. Maybe you don’t know how complex a structure the human brain is. Believe me, it makes the sidereal universe look like a child’s building set. There are many times more possible interneuronic connections than there are atoms in the entire cosmos—the factor is something like ten to the power of several million. It’s not surprising that a slight change in electrochemistry—too slight to make any important difference to the rest of the organism—will change the whole nature of the mind. Look what a little dope or alcohol will do, and then remember that this new factor works on the very basis of the cell’s existence. The really interesting question is whether so finely balanced a function can survive such a change at all.”
“Well,” said Corinth grayly, “we’ll know pretty soon.”
“How can you just sit there and talk about it that way?” cried Sheila. There was horror in her tone.
“My dear girl,” said Dagmar coolly, “do you imagine we can, at this stage, do anything else?”
V
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Selections from the
New York Times
June 23:
PRESIDENT DENIES DANGER IN BRAIN SPEEDUP
‘Keep Cool, Stay on Job,’ Advises White House—No Harm to Humans in Change U.S. Scientists Working on Problem—Expect Answer Soon
FALLING STOCK MARKET WORRIES WALL STREET
Declining Sales Bring Down Stock Market and Prices U.S. in Danger of Recession, Says Economist
CHINESE TROOPS MUTINY IN INDO-CHINA
Communist Government Declares Emergency
PALACE REVOLUTION IN SPAIN
Moorish Guard Ousts Government—Proclaims Spain a Caliphate Under Sidi Hassan Call on Moslem World to Unite
NEW THEORY OF RELATIVITY ANNOUNCED
Rhayader Revises Einstein’s Work—Believes Interstellar Travel a Theoretical Possibility
NEW RELIGION FOUNDED IN LOS ANGELES
Sawyer Proclaims Self ‘The Third Ba’al’—Thousands Attend Mass Meeting
FESSENDEN CALLS FOR WORLD GOVERNMENT
Iowa Isolationist Reverses Stand in Senate Speech
