The Meddlers (13 page)

“Where was I, then? Ah, yes. I was able to identify specific gene factors which carry personality traits. And I chose a conception that promised me a child of certain defined personality characteristics as well as physical ones. If our predictions are correct, he was
born with an even temperament, high intelligence, a low aggression response. And we have in fact been able to demonstrate already that this is so. His responses to his environment have been measured in detail from his birth. Oh, and incidentally, I must tell you at this point that his pre-birth environment was most carefully handled. The mother was as perfect a physical specimen as we could find. Throughout the pregnancy, we used vacuum decompression to ensure that the infant’s blood and therefore oxygen and food supplies were maximal.”

“Vacuum decompression?” Gerrard asked quickly, wrinkling his brows with a neatly sketched-in expression of intelligent inquiry.

“An acceptable question,” George said dryly. “Very well. This is a device we used that created a vacuum over the mother’s abdomen for regular periods during the pregnancy. It was derived from an ordinary domestic vacuum cleaner. She sat in an envelope from which air was removed. This lifted the atmospheric pressure—fifteen pounds per square inch, as you may know—from the walls of the uterus and thus allowed the maximum free passage of blood through the maternal and infant blood vessels. So, we could be sure the unborn child was given a full and more than adequate food and oxygen supply throughout.

“Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The investigations we have made. Well, we have measured the child’s responses from birth. His high intelligence has been early manifested. He has modified his inherent reflexes according to the type of stimuli he gets. For example, all babies turn the head and the mouth towards a touch on the cheek, seeking the nipple. This ‘rooting’ reflex is quite outside the infant’s conscious control. Now, when I touch his cheek with my finger, he responds normally, but not as quickly as he responds when he is held to the breast. Within this first week he has learned the difference between the touch of a finger and the touch of his nurse’s body. I must tell you, if you don’t already know from the newspapers, that he is cared for by a most responsive nurse who has been enabled by hormone therapy to breast feed him.

“He has also responded with increasing rapidity to other stimuli, particularly sound. When I speak to him he responds; but not with
the same speed with which he responds to his nurse, from whom of course he obtains satisfaction of his physical needs. We know too that he more than normally rapidly recognizes differences in temperature as well as differences in individual voices. All this points to a higher than usual intelligence quotient.”

For the first time Michael Bridges stirred, and George looked at him over his shoulder, momentarily surprised. “There is one point, Dr. Briant,” he said. “Controls. You can’t measure any response without something against which to measure it. You’ve got to have a yardstick of some sort—”

“Oh, I know! That was one of my greatest initial problems,” George said approvingly. “You clearly see the importance of this point. It does you credit. But I couldn’t set up an ideal control system. I had considered selecting a twinning conception, and using the other infant as a control. But this would have been difficult because of the problem of creating the ideal pre-birth environment. Twins have a lesser chance of good pre-birth life since they must share the available food and oxygen supplies. And anyway, if I monitored two babies, I would be creating the same environment for both of them, wouldn’t I? No, I got over this problem by collecting data on a large series of babies to whom I had access during the preliminary work on this project. A pediatrician at my hospital—the same one now supervising the infant’s general health—gave me enormous help, enormous. I have a great deal of essential data on infant behavior that I am using as control material. And there is no doubt in my mind that this infant is of higher than average intelligence.

“Now, this infant has been put in a perfect environment. He is being so carefully nurtured that never yet has he suffered any frustration. In normal situations, babies experience frequent frustration from birth. They want food, and the only way they can express their desire for it is to cry. This is their signaling method. But the moment a baby cries for food he is frustrated in his desire. He cannot understand that he is waiting only a matter of moments before his desire will be satisfied. He just feels the desperation of hunger that is not being dealt with. And one thing we do know
from the work of really scientific psychologists—those of the behaviorist school—is that frustration creates an aggressive response, anger.

“We have trained the nurse caring for this infant to recognize the first signs of desire for food. He has never-never since his birth—cried to be fed. As soon as he shows the slight movements that herald developing hunger, he is put to the breast. Similarly, as soon as he shows the smallest sign of being too cold, or too warm, his environment is manipulated to create the conditions of maximum comfort. I must tell you that this infant has never cried
at all
apart from at the moment of birth when he took his first breath— and that must be accepted as an unavoidable demand for satisfaction of an impossible desire. He could not be returned, as he would have wished, to his pre-birth environment, but he was put into a close facsimile of it immediately. He lies in a cot equipped with a special mattress which is filled with liquid; he lies on so resilient a surface that it is very close to actually lying in liquid, as of course the unborn infant does. His cot pulses gently too with a rhythm matched to that of his mother’s average pulse rate during pregnancy.

“He has never suffered discomfort or pain, either. When blood tests are taken, we use local anesthesia, sprayed on the skin. The electrodes permanently attached to his scalp—we need those to take the frequent and essential measurements of electric impulses produced by his brain—are also imperceptible to him, since the resilience of his mattress ensures he feels no pressure from them at all.

“So, as I say, this child has been given the most perfect environment possible. And already he has shown some most interesting behavior, apart from the signs of his intelligence I have already described for you. For example, he has a waking and sleeping pattern that follows closely the one regarded as normal—sleeps most at night, feeds at four regular intervals during the day even though he is so young. Which suggests that the life patterns imposed on infants in fact derive from biological need. The difference with this baby is that he himself has selected the time at which he will display the pattern, rather than having it imposed on him by a
mother’s pattern of giving care. That completes my statement. You may now question and comment if you choose.”

There was another brief silence, and then Bridges said softly, “A baby who never cries, because he never needs to.”

He raised his head and looked very directly at J. J. Gerrard. “He sounds a most fortunate baby,” he said loudly. “How many infants can be as free from distress as that? I’ve always thought babies have a pretty rotten life, completely under the control of people who don’t have any idea of what goes on inside a baby’s mind—”

“A fair point, and a very reassuring one,” Gerrard said with a fine judicial air. “All right. The baby, despite the fact that he has been denied his birthright of the care of deeply loving parents who created him in love, is as well cared for—”

“Now, let’s stop right there,” George said sharply, and his voice was louder than he meant it to be. “Let’s get this business of birthrights and loving parents in some sort of perspective. You labor under the idea that the best people to care for a child are the people who conceived and bore him. Human society has always operated this way. And in my opinion the results of this method of child rearing show what an inefficient method it is. We live in a world that operates on greed, on aggression, on violence and cruelty. We are faced with one of the unhappiest young generations we have ever had—antisocial, with juvenile delinquency causing immense distress, not least to the young themselves. And on the physical helath side, enormous numbers of children are badly fed, physically neglected, by the loving parents who bore them! Is that the system you want to maintain? Do you want to see humanity kill itself off because of its inability to rear improved generations to follow on?”

“Is that what you’re trying to do then? Take our kids away from us because you reckon you know what’s good for them better than what we do? You’re no better than a Hitler.”

Startled, George turned his head to stare at a woman who was standing up somewhere in the middle of the tight-packed rows of the audience. Her face was red with emotion and she was standing with her head poked angrily forward.

“Who do you think you are, you scientists?” she cried shrilly.

“Didn’t you have a mother that loved you? And haven’t you got kids of your own? Would you let someone take
your
kids away? Or is it all right for you to keep your own kids, but the likes of us, ordinary people, who’ve got to give up—”

“Madam, I wish you would listen instead of jumping to ridiculous conclusions!” George shouted above her voice. “I have not for a moment suggested that children should be removed from the care of their parents. And I have no political motives! If you will wait with reasonable patience, I will explain—”

“You’ll get your chance in a moment,” Gerrard called, equally loudly. “We must give Dr. Briant a fair hearing first, please, but since the point has been raised—Dr. Briant?”

Unwillingly the woman sat down, and George said acidly, “Thank you. Very well. I do
not
propose that children be removed from their parents’ care. I
do
propose to seek information that will help them to make a better job of rearing those children. Love sounds like an important word, but it is shapeless, it can’t be defined. And it can’t replace knowledge. However deeply you care for your children, without knowledge of how they develop, how their experiences affect their personalities, you can’t give them this… this
birthright
you talk about so glibly. It is precisely because I care about the future of humanity that I am undertaking this work.”

“All right, Dr. Briant.” For the first time the man on Gerrard’s other side spoke, and his voice was smooth and the accent very carefully cultured. “If we accept this—that you can give us information that will help us to rear better offspring—how do you propose this information be used?”

“How do you mean, be used? How is any information used? We have information about methods of curing disease, for example, and apply them. It’s as simple as that.”

“Is it? I’m not so sure. It seems to me that you propose to tell us, on the basis of your researches, the right way to create super children, and then the right way to bring them up. But how is it to be done? Will the whole population have to submit itself to tests of their suitability to have children? And if you had to seek through two thousand people to find your pair of suitable parents, does that
mean that—let me see—only point naught naught one of the population will be considered fit for parenthood? And once they are permitted to produce their babies, will they have to accept constant control over the way they care for them? I’m not afraid to make judgments, Mr. Gerrard. And I tell you here and now, I find this whole idea utterly revolting.”

Immediately a great roar of applause broke out, and Gurney looked at the audience, and this time his self-satisfied smirk seemed to be so obvious, to George at any rate, that he could not understand how the audience too could fail to see it. But clearly they didn’t. Their approval was so strong it was almost tangible, filling the big cluttered studio with sound.

Gerrard was waving his hands from side to side, and gradually the noise diminished, and he turned to George and raised his eyebrows.

“Well, Dr. Briant? Can you answer that?”

“I can answer it only as any other scientist would,” George said, and anger clipped his words. “By asking you for the answer. My goals are clear-cut. I must seek knowledge, the truth that derives from knowledge. I am trying to give you hard facts, tell you how the traits of human personality are carried from parents to offspring, tell you accurately how the environment modifies inherited characteristics. When this child involved in my project reaches maturity, I will have amassed a body of immensely valuable knowledge, but what you, what humanity as a whole does with it, is out of my hands. I must repeat, I have no political motives, I’m not in the least interested in the dismal machinations of politicians. It is
you
who must concern yourself with the… the ethical problems involved. You who must decide whether you are prepared to go on allowing dangerous aggression to mar life for all of us. If you are happy to go on living under the constant threat of war, if you are prepared to see the discoveries of science perverted by inadequate people to the creation of foul weapons, what can I do? What can any scientist do? I know perfectly well that certain of my colleagues have made some attempt to concern themselves with these questions. No doubt you have heard of the Pugwash conferences. But they concern themselves primarily with discussing the application
of nuclear physics, and I cannot see that the work of a biologist could profitably be discussed at such a conference, and certainly not by me. I can only repeat, I have no involvement with political ideas or so-called social ethics. I can only give you a tool for good. It is up to you whether you use it or not.”

“You say it is a good tool, sir!” This time the interruption came from a man in the front row of the audience, a tall man who was leaning forward, and George looked at him, feeling less hostility than the woman who had shouted at him earlier had created; and then he realized it was because he spoke in an educated voice.

“But as you so clearly realize, scientists have many times created tools that can be used for good, but which have then been perverted to evil use. Now tell me the answers to two points. One, is there not a way in which
your
good tool could be perverted, and two, since this tool must inevitably be given into the hands of the people you despise for their aggressiveness and bad inheritance and rearing, how do you expect them to use it? Isn’t this a selfdefeating exercise upon which you are engaged?”