The Call-Girls (7 page)

There was a long silence. Then von Halder raised a hand and started talking at the same time. ‘Yessir,' he puffed. ‘Very nice. But in your ten points you have forgotten to mention the most important symptoms of sickness of this contemporary society of ours, which are aggressivity, Sir, and violence,
Mein Herr,
and pornography, Sir, and the drug mania of the youngsters, and all these tripsters and popouts … So. Therefore we must first of all…'

But he was prevented from explaining what to do first of all by the noisy opening of the glass-panelled French window to the terrace through which the short, dynamic figure of Professor Bruno Kaletski burst in, with a suitcase in one hand and a bulging briefcase clutched under the armpit on the other side, leaving only a few fingers free to cope with the door. Tony jumped up to come to his aid, but Kaletski held him at bay by shouting: ‘I can manage. I can manage,' holding the door open with his knee while he ferried the suitcase through it. ‘Mr Chairman,' he continued in the same breath, putting the suitcase down on the floor and approaching with short, quick steps one of the empty chairs at the
table, ‘I must apologize, but you know how it is when they suddenly want you for an emergency meeting in Washington – they are like babies crying for their nanny, and at the same time they act as if they owned you, so I apologize again, and as I see that you have already started, which you were quite right to do, I shall not expect you, Mr Chairman, to waste time with formal greetings, but I trust you will put me in the picture with a brief résumé of the
conversazione
that I missed.' While talking, his busy hands were extracting wads of papers from the briefcase and, apparently all of their own accord, arranging them in neat piles on the table. This done, the left extracted a cigarette case from a pocket, while the right shook hands with his neighbours – smiling Dr Valenti and somnolent Sir Evelyn Blood. Then both hands co-operated in the ritual lighting of the cigarette, a kind of manual ballet, ending in a flourish which extinguished the match in mid-air.

‘We are all very glad,' Nikolai said drily, ‘that you were able to make it at all. As for a résumé, my brief opening was in itself a résumé, and I am sure nobody wants to hear it a second time. You will find an abstract of it in your file.'

‘
A vos ordres.
Anything you say,' Bruno remarked in a voice intended to convey what a good-natured, non-pompous person he was, while his hands, moving like a stage-magician's, were getting the abstract out of the dossier. ‘Please proceed. I can read and listen at the same time.'

‘Otto was in the process of making a point,' Nikolai said.

But von Halder waved an angry hand, as if chasing a fly away. ‘I have forgotten my point because of the interruption. Perhaps later.'

He was incensed, not by the interruption – once launched, nothing could put him off his stride – but because he realized that Kaletski was determined once more to hog the discussions. It depended on the chairman. If he was weak, or too polite to assert his authority, Bruno would talk non-stop in the discussions, and keep interrupting the speakers to cross-examine them, usually starting with: ‘Excuse me, but I am too stupid to understand the point you are trying to make.
Do you mean that…, or do you mean …, or do you mean perhaps…?' and so on. And if he did know the subject, he would refer to some long-forgotten technical paper which had anticipated the speaker's point – or conversely, to some quite recent works published in some obscure journal which refuted it – and in most cases he was dead right. If he did not know the subject, he would start with ‘I am of course as ignorant in this field as a newborn babe, but I have a sort of hunch that…' and as often as not his hunch had something to recommend it. Bruno had been a
Wunderkind
at the age of five, and was still an infant prodigy at the age of seventy-five. At five he had been admired for being intellectually so far in advance of his age, at seventy-five he was admired for being so much younger than his age. If his damned youthful zest was not firmly controlled, he would monopolize the discussions until everybody was worn down, and wreck the symposium as he had wrecked others. So it all depended on the chairman. Von Halder hoped that Nikolai had got his message – had understood his deliberately rude remark about the ‘interruption'. He refrained from looking in Bruno's direction.

Bruno, on his part, was apparently immersed in reading the abstract that he held in his left hand, while his right was cupped behind his ear to listen to the speaker, and his thoughts ran on yet another, third track, smarting under the insult. That poor Otto with his khaki shorts and carefully dishevelled white mane would obviously never grow up. He would go on playing the
enfant terrible
with rude manners and a golden boy-scout heart. To think that he, Bruno, had almost been taken in by Otto's last book,
Homo Homicidus,
when it was published a few months ago –
almost.
But then the fallacies and contradictions, camouflaged as it were by the rhetoric, were revealed one by one. He had listed them point by point – just wait for the discussion. Bruno felt like rubbing his hands, but these were otherwise occupied.

Meanwhile, Hector Burch was talking. Unlike Solovief and Halder before him, he talked standing, hands clasped behind his back. His posture reminded Horace Wyndham of
what the British Army called ‘standing at ease' on parade, which was not the same as ‘standing easy'; only the latter conveyed permission to relax. Burch's voice was precise and dry, but occasionally a faint Texan drawl could be discerned like the mirage of a bubbling spring in the desert. He shared neither the Chairman's black pessimism nor his rosy optimism – ‘to quote Professor Solovief's own artistic way of expressing himself'. Scientists should not dramatize but concern themselves with hard, tangible facts. The tangible facts were, to quote the excellent definition in a recent textbook, that ‘man is nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism powered by a combustion system which energizes computers built into his nervous system with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information'. The emphasis, however, was on the word ‘complex'. Science approached complex phenomena by analysing the simple parts which constituted them. The simple parts underlying all human activity were the elementary units of behaviour. They were reflexes or reflex-like responses to stimuli from the environment. Some of these responses were innate, but most of them were conditioned by learning and experience. The future of mankind depended on the elaboration of suitable techniques of conditioning, accompanied by suitable reinforcements. Positive and negative reinforcements – in common parlance, reward and deprivation – were mighty tools of social engineering, which allowed us to look with some confidence into the future. But just as the electrical engineer learns how to operate complex machines by learning all there is about simple machines first, so the social engineer – the behavioural scientist – studies the mechanisms of behaviour in simple organisms, such as rats, pigeons and geese. Since all behaviour, to quote Professor Skinner of Harvard (here Burch's voice became reverential, almost lyrical), since all behaviour of the individuals of a given species, and that of all species of mammals, including man, occurs according to the same set of primary, physico-chemical laws, it follows that the differences between the activities of man, rats and geese were merely of a quantitative, not of a qualitative
order; and it further followed that experimentation with organisms on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder provided the scientist with all the necessary elements to attain his purpose – that is, ‘
to describe, predict and control human behaviour'.
The last words Burch uttered with special emphasis, to indicate that he was again quoting revered authority…

‘Professor Burch, may I ask you a question?' Horace Wyndham piped up with an apologetic titter. ‘When you talk of “predicting and controlling behaviour”, do you include the types of activity which in common parlance are referred to as, well – literature – or playing the harp?'

‘Most certainly. We refer to these activities as verbal behaviour and manipulative behaviour, specifying in the latter case the materials or media of the manipulations involved. Both the verbalizer and the manipulator act in response to stimuli from the environment and are controlled by the contingencies of reinforcement.'

‘Thank you, Professor Burch,' Wyndham said; and later on it was generally agreed that this had been the moment when the symposium began to divide into two camps. However, the only overt signs of the incipient split were some clearings of throats and shufflings of feet. All took it for granted that Burch – as could be expected – had made a monumental ass of himself. The majority – later on to be referred to as the Nikosians – thought what a clever bastard Solovief was to invite the most extreme, rigid and orthodox representative of a school of thought to which he was known to be passionately opposed; a school of thought which, though in slightly watered-down versions, still dominated the philosophical outlook of the scientific community. The others, however, who basically shared that outlook, but preferred to express it in less provocative and more circuitous terms than Burch, understood just as well that Nikolai had invited him as a kind of fall-guy who would reduce their position to absurdity, and resented this as a cheap trick – ‘positively Machiawellisch', Halder later remarked.

The uneasy pause was ended by Harriet, who had listened
to Burch with an air of patient exasperation, occasionally turning her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Mr Chairman,' she suddenly bellowed, ‘I cannot see what on God's earth Professor Burch's excursion into ratology has to do with your introductory remarks about the mess we are in, and the urgency of the situation. I gather from the programme that Professor Burch will read a paper about “recent advances in operant conditioning of lower mammals” in the morning session on Thursday, so I suggest we control our impatience to hear about that subject and discuss now your proposal to form a committee of action.'

‘Hear, hear,' Tony said half aloud, and blushed.

‘You need not worry,' Burch said drily. ‘I believe my remarks were relevant to the points under discussion, but I do not intend to pursue them at this stage.'

Dr Valenti lifted a carefully manicured hand: ‘With your permission, Mr Chairman.' He was not only strikingly handsome, with his dark, insinuating eyes and faintly ironic expression, but also had a pleasantly melodious voice. ‘I am of the opinion, Mr Chairman, that Professor Burch's illuminating remarks about the necessity of social engineering are of great importance to the problems outlined in your admirable opening discourse. But I would like to ask you, my dear colleagues around the table, who all share this worry about the future, whether we think that it is too Utopian to look for remedies not only in the domain of social engineering, but also perhaps in neuro-engineering – to use a term which I diffidently proposed at the last Chicago Symposium …'

Sir Evelyn Blood, who up to now had been lost in some gloomy day-dream, seemed to come to life:

‘It's a horrible term which frightens the wits out of me.'

Valenti smiled. ‘We are a horrible race, living in horrible times. Perhaps we should have the courage to think of horrible remedies.'

‘What exactly do you mean by “neuro-engineering”?' Blood asked, fixing his bloodshot eyes on him.

‘I shall have occasion to elaborate on it in my humble presentation at our fifth session.'

Claire, sitting demurely in her upright chair, wondered whether anybody else had also noticed a strange little pantomime during that exchange. Next to her, Miss Carey sat in front of a small folding table with the tape-recorder on it. When she heard Sir Evelyn's remarks to Valenti coming through her earphones, she frowned with such sudden violent anger that the plastic strap holding her earphones in place slid forward and she was just able to catch it. It made a grotesque impression, as if she were clutching a hat in a gust of wind, until at last she pushed the strap back among the wisps of grey hair, in front of the stacked bun. But already earlier on, Claire had watched with fascination the violent changes of expression in Miss Carey's thin-lipped, worn face, which she seemed unable to control. She certainly looked more like a patient than a research assistant, Claire thought.

It was Horace Wyndham's turn; his brief intervention in the discussion was wrapped in apologetic titters and giggles. He deeply sympathized, he said, with the sense of urgency in Solovief's opening remarks which, as a private individual, he fully shared, in spite of the shamefully sheltered life he was privileged to lead in the academic backwaters of Oxbridge. But however guilty he felt about this, his own field of research by its very nature could not provide any instant remedies or short-term solutions. That field of research was concerned with babes in the cradle – starting with the first week after birth – and with methods of developing their intellectual and emotive potential in unorthodox ways. He ventured to think that in a sense the sorry state of affairs in which humanity had landed itself was partly or mainly due to its splendid ignorance of these methods. The price paid for civilization was the loss of instinctual certainties as guides of behaviour – with the result that civilized man was adrift like a navigator who has lost his compass and is blind to the stars. We eat too much and copulate too rarely, or perhaps the opposite is true; we impose toilet training too
late or perhaps too early; mothers are over-protective or under-protective, too permissive or too prohibitory, who knows what is best for that helpless creature in its cot? We only know the results, the finished adult products, which make this society as dismal as we know it to be. His own cherished and perhaps foolish hope was that the answer to man's predicament would emerge literally from the cradle – from the particular field of research to which he had referred. There might even be signs of a possible break-through in the near future if certain recent experiments were to be confirmed-experiments which could be reported in his paper at a forthcoming session of the conference. But even if the results were to be positive, as he hoped, even so the beneficial effects would be slow, very slow to make themselves felt – and they could hardly be a fitting subject for an Einstein letter to Mr President or Her Majesty the Queen …