Brain Wave Read online

  “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? Sometimes you just have to cut loose and get violent. Some wars are necessary.”

  “They wouldn’t be, if people had more intelligence,” said Corinth. “We needn’t have fought World War II if Hitler had been stopped when he entered the Rhineland. One division could have bowled him over. But the politicians were too stupid to foresee—”

  “No,” said Mandelbaum. “It’s just that there were reasons why it wasn’t—convenient, shall we say?—to call up that division. And ninety-nine per cent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences. We’re just built that way. And then, the world is so full of old hate and superstition, and so many people are nice and tolerant and practical about it, that it’s a wonder hell hasn’t boiled over more often throughout history.” Bitterness edged his voice. “Maybe the practical people, the ones who adapt, are right after all. Maybe the most moral thing really is to put ‘myself, my wife, and my little Hassan with the bandy legs’ first. Like one of my sons has done. He’s in Chicago now. 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 I honestly don’t know whether to admire him for tough-minded adaptability, or call him a spineless whelp.”

  “We’re getting rather far from the point,” said Corinth, embarrassed. “What we want to do tonight is try and estimate what we, the whole world, are in for.” He shook his head. “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. Only, everything else is confused. 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 yet, that’s all,” said Sarah.

  “I feel the same sort of things Pete does,” said Sheila. Her voice was thin and scared. “It isn’t worth it.”

  The other woman shrugged, spreading her hands. “Me, I thing 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 get crazy spells like you do, Pete, but I don’t let it bother me. It’s only physiological, and I 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 ought to run things. A guy in the electrical workers has a notion that the electricians ought to go on strike and take over the whole government! Somebody even fired a shotgun at me the other day.”

  “Huh?” They stared at him.

  Mandelbaum shrugged. “He was a lousy shot. But some people are turning crank, and some are turning mean, and most are just plain scared. Those like me who’re trying to ride out the storm and keep things as nearly normal as possible, are bound to make enemies. People think a lot more today, but they aren’t thinking straight.”

  “Sure,” said Corinth. “The average man—” He started as the doorbell rang. “That must be them now,” he said. “Come in.”

  Helga 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.

  Helga grimaced. “Nightmares.”

  “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, we don’t really need them.” Alone of them all, he seemed without worry and foreboding, too busy reaching for the sudden new horizon to consider his own troubles. 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 tremulously.

  “Touché! You’ve changed too, haven’t you? But really, you ought to have done better by me. A long drink of Scotch, at the very least.”

  “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.”

  Lewis settled himself at the table. “I see the government has finally admitted something is going on,” he said, nodding at the newspaper which lay beside him. “They had to do it, I suppose, but the admission won’t help the panics any. People are afraid, they don’t know what to expect, and—well, coming over here, I saw a man run screaming down the street yelling that the end of the world had come. There was a monster-sized revival in Central Park. Three drunks were brawling outside a bar, and not a cop in sight to stop them. I heard fire sirens—big blaze somewhere out Queens way.”

  Helga lit a cigarette, sucking in her cheeks and half closing her eyes. “John Rossman’s in Washington now,” she said. After a moment 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 for us if anyone can.”

  “I don’t think there is much of a story yet, to tell the truth,” said Mandelbaum. “Just little things like we’ve all been experiencing, all over the world. They add up to a big upheaval, yes, but there’s no over-all picture.”

  “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 hand-basket.”

  “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 instruments 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. Helga 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?”

  “Christ 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 phy
sical 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. The mechanism of the change—and of the nerve cell itself—just isn’t known well enough. Anyway, the I.Q. concept is only valid within a limited range; to speak of an I.Q. of 400 really doesn’t make sense, intelligence on that level may not be intelligence at all as we know it now, but something else.”

  Corinth had been too busy with his own work of physical measurements to realize how much Lewis’ department knew and theorized. The appalling knowledge was only beginning to grow in him.

  “Forget the final results,” said Helga sharply. “There’s nothing we can do about that. What’s important right now is: how do we keep organized civilization going? How do we eat?”

  Corinth nodded, mastering the surge of his panic. “Sheer social inertia has carried us along so far,” he agreed. “Most people continue in their daily rounds because there’s nothing else available. But when things really start changing—”

  “The janitor and the elevator man at the Institute quit yesterday,” said Helga. “Said the work was too monotonous. What happens when all the janitors and garbage men and ditchdiggers and assembly-line workers decide to quit?”

  “They won’t all do it,” said Mandelbaum. He knocked out his pipe and went over to get some coffee. “Some will be afraid, some will have the sense to see we’ve got to keep going, some—well, there’s no simple answer to this. I agree we’re in for a rough period of transition at the very least—people throwing up their jobs, people getting scared, people going crazy in one way or another. What we need is a local interim organization to see us through the next few months. I think the labor unions could be a nucleus—I’m working on that, and when I’ve got the boys talked and bullied into line, I’m going to approach City Hall with an offer to help.”

  After a silence, Helga glanced over at Lewis. “You still haven’t any idea as to the cause of it all?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the biologist. “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 through spectroscopic studies. 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 more 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 actually 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 inorganic 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 purely somatic functions, just enough to make you feel nervous; and you’ll adjust to that pretty quick, if nothing else happens.

  “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. Reaction time to all stimuli is less.”

  “I heard that from Jones,” nodded Helga coolly, “and checked up on traffic accident statistics for the past week. Definitely 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 crack-ups, 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 from driving recklessly or patronizing spiritualists or—”

  “Or voting Democrat,” nodded Lewis, grinning. “That’s correct, Felix. Eventually, no doubt, increased intelligence would affect the total personality, but right now you’re not removing anyone’s weaknesses, ignorances, prejudices, blind spots, or ambitions; you’re just giving him more power, of energy and intelligence, to indulge them—which is one reason why civilization is cracking up.”

  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 lack of inhibition, if Pete’s theory is right—more than anything else on Earth. Its functioning increases out of all proportion to the rest 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 body—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.”

  There was no fear in his tones, and the eyes behind their heavy lenses held a flash of impersonal excitement. To him this was sheer wonder; Corinth imagined him dying and taking clinical notes on himself as life faded.

  “Well,” said the physicist grayly, “well know pretty soon.”

  “How can you just sit there and talk about it that way?” cried Sheila. Horror shook her voice.

  “My dear girl,” said Helga, “do you imagine we can, at this stage, do anything else?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Selections from The New York Times, June 30:

  CHANGE DECELERATING

  Decline Noted, Effects

  Apparently Irreversible

  Rhayader Theory May

  Hold Explanation

  UNIFIED FIELD THEORY ANNOUNCED

  Rhayader Announces Extension of Einstein

  Theories—Interstellar Travel

  a Theoretical Possibility

  FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MAY RESIGN FUNCTIONS

  President Asks Local Authorities

  to Exercise Discretion

  N Y. Labor Authority Under Mandelbaum

 
Pledges Co-operation

  REVOLUTION REPORTED IN

  SOVIETIZED COUNTRIES

  News Blackout Declared—Organized

  Insurrection Spreading

  Revolutionaries May Have Developed New

  Weapons and Military Concepts

  WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS WORSENING

  Food Riots in Paris, Dublin,

  Rome, Hong Kong

  Shipping Approaches Complete Standstill

  as Thousands of Workers Quit

  THIRD BA’AL CULT REVOLTS IN LOS ANGELES

  National Guard Demoralized

  Fanatics Seize Key Points-

  Street Fighting Continues

  N Y. City Hall Warns of Local

  Activities of Cultists

  TIGER KILLS ATTENDANT, ESCAPES

  FROM BRONX ZOO

  Police Issue Warning, Organize Hunt

  Authorities Consider Shooting All Formidable

  Specimens

  FRESH RIOTING FEARED IN HARLEM

  Police Chief: ‘Yesterday’s Affair

  Only a Beginning’—Mounting Panic

  Seems Impossible to Halt

  PSYCHIATRIST SAYS MAN CHANGED

  ‘BEYOND COMPREHENSION’

  Kearnes of Bellevue: ‘Unpredictable Results

  of Neural Speedup Make Old Data and Methods

  of Control Invalid—Impossible Even to

  Guess Ultimate Outcome’

  They had no issue the following day; there was no newsprint to be had.

  Brock thought it was strange to be left in charge of the estate. But a lot of funny things had been happening lately.