Brain Wave (5 page)

Communist Government Declares
Emergency

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

JOHNSON SAYS WORLD GOVERNMENT
IMPRACTICAL AT PRESENT TIME

Oregon Senator Reverses Former
Stand

REBELLION IN UPSTATE HOME FOR FEEBLE-MINDED

RIOT IN ALABAMA

   Conference.

Everybody was working late, and it was ten o’clock before the meeting which Corinth had invited to his place was ready. Sheila had insisted on putting out her usual buffet of sandwiches and coffee; afterward she sat in a corner, talking quietly with Sarah Mandelbaum. Their eyes strayed occasionally to their husbands, who were playing chess, and there was a creeping fear in the gaze.

Corinth was playing better than he had ever done before. Usually he and Mandelbaum were pretty evenly matched, the physicist’s slow careful strategy offsetting the unionist’s nerve-racking bravura. But tonight the younger man was too distracted. He made schemes that would have delighted Capablanca, but Mandelbaum saw through them and slashed barbarically past his defenses. Corinth sighed at last and leaned back.

“I resign,” he said. “It’d be mate in, uh, seven moves.”

“Not so.” Mandelbaum pointed a gnarled finger at king’s bishop. “If you moved him over here, and then—”

“Oh, yes, you’re right. No matter. I’m just not in the mood. What’s keeping Nat?”

“He’ll be along. Take it easy.” Mandelbaum removed himself to an armchair and began stuffing a big-bowled pipe.

“I don’t see how you can sit there like that when—”

“When a world’s falling to pieces around my ears? Look, Pete, it’s been falling apart as long as I can remember. So far, in this particular episode, no guns have come out.”

“They may do so yet.” Corinth got up and stood looking out the window, hands crossed behind his back and shoulders slumped. The restless glimmer of city light etched him against darkness. “Don’t you see, Felix, this new factor—if we survive it at all—changes the whole basis of human life? Our society was built by and for one sort of man. Now man himself is becoming something else.”

“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? 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 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. 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—”