The Call-Girls (10 page)

This time it was Dr Valenti who raised a hand, flashing golden cuff-links. But Wyndham had by now acquired his own momentum, like a tennis ball bouncing down a hillside.

‘I know, I know,' he smiled at Valenti, ‘these experiments are still controversial, half the laboratories which repeated them reported positive results, the other half did not. But there is an impressive amount of evidence to show that biochemistry, within the next few years, will deliver the means to produce animals and men with vastly improved brains from the cradle onward. Though I wouldn't go as far as that illustrious Nobel laureate in Chemistry, who calmly envisaged the breeding of truly egg-headed babies brought into the world by Caesarean section to avoid the squeeze …' He giggled, and Blood grunted: ‘That, to my mind, is a joke in abominable taste.'

But Wyndham reassured him: brain improvement did not necessitate any drastic increase in size. Neanderthal men had a larger cranial cavity than
homo sapiens,
and geniuses often had skulls of less than normal size. What mattered was richness in nerve-cells and the elaborateness of their connections in the cerebral cortex, which was only about a tenth of an inch thick. However, there were less hazardous methods than those of biochemistry to produce superior brains in animals and man. In the nineteen-sixties, David Krech's team in Berkeley had demonstrated, to everybody's surprise, that teaching baby-rats all sorts of playful skills made them not only livelier and brighter, but produced definite anatomical improvements in their brains. These litters were reared in a kind of rat's Disneyland, and after fifteen glorious weeks of games and lessons they were ‘sacrificed', as the euphemism goes. It could then be shown that their cerebral cortex was heavier and thicker, chemically more active, and endowed with a richer ‘circuitry' than the control litters who had been brought up in normal conditions…

As for man, experiments of Skeels and his team, pursued
over a period of thirty years, demonstrated that one-year-old babies in slums and orphanages, who had been diagnosed as mentally subnormal, could be transformed into slightly above average adults if they were handed over in time to foster-parents who gave them optimal care and stimulation. During the first two years in their new homes, these children gained around thirty per cent IQ points, and no doubt their brains underwent anatomical changes similar to the Berkeley rats. A control group of twelve children, with the same background and the same diagnosis of mental subnormality, though slightly less severe, was left to their fate; all except one had to be later on institutionalized in mental hospitals…

‘To sum up: the brain is a voracious organ. It has to be nourished from the cradle if it is to realize its full growth-potential. It appears that throughout history, most people carried brains in their heads which in the decisive early years had been starved, and thus stunted in their growth. Once this fact is fully understood, the revolution in the cradle will have started. By a crash-programme applying the principles already known to us, we should be able to raise the average level of human intelligence by something like twenty per cent on the IQ scale within a single generation. This would be the equivalent of a biological mutation, the consequences of which I prefer to leave to your imagination …' After a final giggle, Wyndham sat down.

Petitjacques jumped to his feet: ‘You want to produce
des petits vieux.
Little professors with tiny feet and big bald heads. With hypertrophic intellects and atrophic hearts. Can you not understand that our misfortune is to have too much intellect, not too little? That is the existential tragedy of man.'

‘How do you cure it? With LSD?' Wyndham fluted.

‘Why not? Anything is beneficial if it opens the windows in your head to the wind – anything which expands the
mystique
and strangles the
logique
.'

‘How do you reconcile mysticism with your Marxist dialectics?'

‘But perfectly. It is the synthesis of the opposites. When
you partake of the magic mushroom or the sacred cactus sauce in the sacramental dialectic mood, it is a feast of spiritual gastronomy and you understand the secret of the universe, which can be expressed in a simple motto: “Love, not Logic”.'

‘Love, eh?' grunted Blood. ‘That's why your baboons carry bicycle chains.'

Petitjacques smiled with Mephistophelean benevolence: ‘The medium is not always the message. The Apocalypse must precede the Kingdom. Chopping heads is more effective than chopping logic.'

Nikolai rapped the table with his cigarette lighter.

‘Let us take turns,' he said. ‘Otto wished to make a remark.'

Von Halder got up and, under the pretext of smoothing his white prophet's mane, ruffled it even more. ‘So,' he said. ‘Professor Wyndham shows us the way to Nietzsche's superman. Perhaps. And why not? As a simple anthropologist I cannot follow Monsieur Petitjacques's philosophic flight of ideas – what do you call them? Hipsterish, tripsterish, sit-in, drop-out, pop-out or what?' He paused, waiting for the hilarity which did not materialize, then continued: ‘So I am not going along with Petitjacques, but I am going along with him a short way. As a simple anthropologist I know only a little about the human brain, but if the revolution promised by Wyndham is going to affect only the cortex, the seat of intelligence and cunning, and leave the areas which govern our passions unchanged – then I fear, I very much fear, that your superman will be a super-killer. Because, as I have shown and explained in my last book, man is an animal with a killer-instinct, directed in the first place at his own, his very own species; he is
homo homicidus,
who will kill for territory, kill for sex, kill for greed, kill for the pleasure of killing…'

‘Rot,' Harriet interrupted. ‘I am only a simple zoologist, but I know enough history to realize that all this talk about the killer-instinct is just fashionable nonsense. Men don't kill out of hatred, but out of love for their gods.'

‘
Quatsch
,' said Halder. ‘I have heard all that before.'

‘You have,' said Harriet. ‘But you did not listen.'

It was time for lunch.

Between lunch and the beginning of the afternoon session, the Soloviefs went for a walk.

They followed a lane which climbed gently into the pine-woods, then emerged onto a vast open meadow, with a chain of widely spaced farmhouses strung out until the path vanished into the next forest round the shoulder of the mountain. Though it was July, there were patches of snow higher up on the slopes facing north.

On farmhouse after farmhouse there were handwritten notices announcing rooms to let with full board. It was the hour of the midday dinner, and Claire watched with fascination the fare being served to the families on the crowded terraces: soup with dumplings; large helpings of pork chops, cabbage and potatoes, followed by chocolate cake, washed down with beer. ‘I can lip-read the sounds of their munching,' she said.

‘Don't listen. Look at the mountains. Listen to the cowbells.'

But the sound of the cowbells was blocked out by the juke-boxes and the motor-bikes without silencers, which echoed like machine-guns from the road lower down. The peasant boys had a craze for motor-bikes – big, shiny, pepped-up brutes. They left school at fifteen, mooched about on the farm for a year or two, then half-learned a trade, to become garage mechanics, electricians, plasterers or waiters, hoarding their wages until, at forty, they were able to realize their life's dream: to open another
pension
with thirty beds, offering healthy country fare out of plastic packs.

‘The doctor's wife told me,' said Claire, ‘that six years ago she ordered the first frigidaire which the village had seen. When it arrived, she explained its purpose to Hilda, the next
door farmer's daughter, who worked for her as a daily. Hilda got very excited and asked if she could borrow two ice-cubes and take them down on a saucer to her husband, to put into his beer, but only for a very short while – then she would bring the cubes back. The next morning she came in with red eyes – in her excitement she had slipped on the path, broken the saucer, lost the ice-cubes and spent a sleepless night. Now Hilda has a huge deep-freeze in her boarding house and all the other gadgets which the doctor's wife cannot afford. She hardly speaks to her.'

‘Who hardly speaks to whom?'

‘Hilda to the doctor's wife, of course.'

They walked on along the blissfully empty lane – the tourists were busy digesting on the terraces of the farms below, spread over flimsy deck-chairs which looked like collapsing from the overload. The summer guests, unlike the winter skiers, nearly all came from those regions of Central Europe where body volume was still considered an index of prosperity. They were not beautiful to behold. The beautiful people used mountains only for skiing. In summer they wore schnorkels, not rucksacks.

Nikolai and Claire made way for a family which did carry rucksacks and sticks, trudging down the lane. Claire, too, had to stand aside on the verge of the lane, confronted with the sheer bulk of the couple. Two children were gambolling as outriders in front of them. All four stared at the Soloviefs with unfathomable disapproval. When they had gone a few steps past, the woman pronounced the verdict:

‘
Engländer
…! '

Nikolai walked a little faster. Claire giggled: ‘That dame looked exactly like a chest of drawers mounted on stovepipes with the top-drawer pulled out… Were they like that when you were taken on vacation as a little boy?'

‘Little boys love big bosoms,' said Nikolai.

‘So all American men are little boys,' said Claire. ‘I am just being silly. I know this transformation is a shock to you.'

‘I did love the mountains,' said Nikolai. ‘And the mountain
peasants. They called themselves not farmers but peasants –
Bauern.
They were proud of it. Official communications were addressed to “Herrn Bauer Moser” or “Herrn Bauer Hübner”. Bauer is still one of the commonest names in their telephone directory – but hardly anybody in ours is called John Peasant, or Jean Paysan.'

‘But perhaps as a little boy your view of the
Bauern
was somewhat dewy-eyed.'

‘Perhaps. One has no right to blame them. It was a hard life. Until they made the greatest discovery in their history: tourists are easier to milk than cows. You don't have to get up at four in the morning.'

They sat down on a public bench provided by the municipality of Schneedorf, a few steps off the lane. It had a magnificent view and an advertisement for a new deodorant painted on the back-rest. A few steps from them there was a souvenir stall displaying native woodcarvings of stags, mountain-goats and golden eagles copied from Disney comics.

‘I am not being sentimental,' said Niko. ‘You think the tourist explosion is just a minor nuisance. But the tourist industry occupies first place in the economy of this country, and of others as remote as the Fiji islands; and in some the annual turnover of tourists far outnumbers the native population. They flood the mountains, the beaches, the islands. They turn the natives into parasites, erode their ways of life, contaminate their arts and crafts, their music…' Niko was getting steamed up. He hit the ground with his walking stick.

‘… You think it's a minor nuisance, but it is a global phenomenon, spreading global corruption. It is levelling down all cultures to the lowest common denominator, to a stereotyped norm, a synthetic pseudo-culture, expanding like a plastic bubble. Colonialism is dead; now we have coca-colonization, all over the world. Each nation does it to the other.'

Claire knew that when he got into that mood there was no arguing with Niko. Nevertheless she tried:

‘Isn't there another side to it? People like that chest-of-drawers lady have never before had a chance to travel abroad. Why grudge them their fun?'

‘Fun? Do you remember those bus-loads of blue-haired matrons on package tours in Hawaii? Two hundred of them in each package. The organizers treated them like a bunch of battery-reared hens expected to lay a golden egg per day. And they felt just like that, hating it all, the natives who robbed them, the food that gave them diarrhoea, the lingo which they couldn't speak. Instead of bringing nations closer to mutual understanding, travel spreads mutual contempt.'

Niko evidently had a bee in his bonnet about it. Claire could not quite understand why, although she knew that the philanthropist in him was always ready to turn into a misanthropist by the throw of a switch. Yet he always took such childish pleasure in travelling in foreign countries. Even the exotic uniforms of the customs officials delighted him.

‘Have you noticed,' he said, ‘that nothing sounds so contemptuous as a tourist calling another tourist a tourist?'

‘But we both love being tourists,' protested Claire.

‘Ah!' said Niko. ‘Because we love looking out of the window of the train. But they travel like registered parcels.'

Suddenly it dawned on Claire that there was some connection in Niko's mind between those dumb travellers and the call-girls – between the tourist explosion and the knowledge explosion – and the corrosive fall-out left by both. But pursuing the subject would only get him fog-bound again.

‘To come back to Hilda,' she said.

‘What Hilda?'

‘The one who used to work for the doctor's wife, and was an honest peasant woman until she discovered that tourists were easier to milk than cows. You yourself said that one cannot blame them.'

‘I was repeating a cliché. Blame is a word which has no place in Burch's vocabulary. Or in John D. John's. They say it is meaningless to blame a person for his deeds – or to praise him. You can judge only the chromosomes in his balls, the circuitry in his cerebral vortex, the adrenalin in his
arteries, the phobias of his mum, the society in which he lives. And so on – alibis and excuses all the way, right back to Adam and Eve. They have provided even God with an alibi by declaring him dead. Remember Archimedes: “Give me but one firm spot in the universe to stand on and I will move the earth”. We have no firm spot to stand on. In fact, no moral leg to stand on.'