"By a—what?"
"And some of the other plants have evidently hybridized."
"Wait a minute. This thing reproduces how?"
"To put it plainly, parts of the stalk grow constricted when the plant reaches a height of approximately eight inches, and a blow or moderate wind causes it to break off. The plant has quite a lightweight structure, you see, Morton, and as a result of the construction of the stem, apparently it becomes partially desiccated—that is, dried out."
"I know what desiccated means," snapped Hommel. "Then what happens?"
"Then the . . . er . . . dried-out portion of stem and leaves is carried off a considerable distance, tumbling, rolling, being lifted up by the wind—"
"Then what?" The air-conditioner in the room was providing pure, pollen-free air, but Hommel could feel his nose tingle. "What happens when this thing goes tumbling—"
"Why, bits of the leaves break off, somewhat in the manner of—Possibly you're familiar with a plant commonly known as . . . ah . . . the 'lawyer plant,' I believe, or possibly it's called the . . . let's see . . . 'maternity plant,' which—Are you acquainted—"
"No. What does this have to do—"
"Why, essentially the same mechanism, Morton. When the leaf finds a little moisture, a suitable bit of ground—it takes root, and grows. A new plant, you see."
Hommel had a mental image of the world covered with a rolling carpet of ragweed.
"Listen, if you break a piece of leaf off of this super-ragweed, the piece of leaf grows into another super-ragweed?"
The reply was cold. "Rather an imprecise way to express it, Dr. Hommel, but—Yes, essentially, that is correct."
Hommel got control of himself. "Excuse me, Dr. Schmidt. My excitement at this, ah, this extraordinary achievement—So timely, too—You understood."
"Certainly, Morton, certainly. Forgive me if I seemed a trifle sharp. I misunderstood."
"Will you excuse me now? I want to inform Mr. Banner of the achievement."
"Banner? What does he know about it? Oh, he has money . . . but in a scientific sense, he is an ignoramus."
"Yes, of course. But when a piece of research particularly impresses him, he often provides more . . . ah . . . funds, to extend—"
"Yes, yes, Morton. I understand. Yes, I think he should know."
Hommel hung up. "My God! Little ragweeds all over the place!" Despite the air-conditioning, Hommel sneezed.
"Dr. Hommel?" said Peabody blankly.
Hommel stared at him, then said abruptly. "You say you have the 'antidote.' You were looking for some chemical that would stimulate the function the Nullergin-200 depressed?"
"That didn't work. I went back to another idea—something that would go right into the body and break up the Nullergin-200. Well, I've got it."
"What are the side effects?"
"That's one of the things that's taken me so long. So far as I can see, there are no noticeable side effects. You see, this is similar to an enzyme. A comparatively small amount will break down any quantity of Nullergin-200, given time. But, in the body, the enzyme is itself slowly broken down. Since only a comparatively small quantity needs to be used, the side effects are negligible, so far as I've been able to find out."
"And the decomposition products?"
"They're excreted."
"Is this enzyme hard to produce?"
"The process is partly biological. Temperature, pH—quite a number of factors need to be carefully controlled to get a good yield. But there's nothing particularly hard about it."
Hommel sat back. "Have you thought how we might use this?"
"Well, if for now we put it in the coating of the pills, the pills will still work—but the effect will wear off faster. And the more pills taken the more quickly the following pills will wear off, because the Neutranull, as I call it, will accumulate. By varying the proportion of Neutranull to Nullergin, we determine, subject to individual variation, the length of time a given daily dosage will be effective."
"And," said Hommel excitedly, "since hay-fever season lasts only so long, this is what we need."
A little work with pencil and paper, with Peabody providing the constants involved, suggested that varied proportions of Neutranull would eliminate the Nullergin-200, as slowly or rapidly as desired, and that the only way to get protection after a given time was to increase the dosage. If this was carried far enough, the effect of the Nullergin could be strung out for a long time—but as a result the Neutranull would build up to such a point that it would still make trouble during the next attack of hay fever.
"Well," said Hommel, "if anyone takes a reasonable dosage, he'll be all right. Good enough. Now, can we market this in time?"
Together, they went over the details. Then they went down to Banner's office.
Before the day was out, Banner Drugs was hard at work on the new process. But, as Banner pointed out, their problems were not solved.
"Even if we get this distributed without any trouble, Mort, there's still Schmidt's improved ragweed. If that pollen is blowing around, how do we stop it?"
"Possibly, it was developed indoors, in a greenhouse," said Hommel grimly. "At any rate, there isn't much of anything I wouldn't be prepared to try to stop it."
"Luckily," said Banner, "we are now well enough known to get our suggestions listened to. Maybe we can get this genie back in the bottle. Get Schmidt on the phone—if you can get him on the phone—and have him come down here. If he drives at night, he may be able to make it without getting glued fast in friendship along the way."
Late the following afternoon, Banner and Hommel met with a tough-looking individual who arrived wearing his hat like a uniform cap, a suave personage who smiled easily and radiated power, and a bulky glum-looking man with a Russian name. There were also three technicians and a quantity of electronic equipment.
As Banner explained courteously to Schmidt. "This is in your honor, Dr. Schmidt. These people are here to learn about your . . . ah . . . epochal discovery. This is General Harmer, Mr. Hall, and Ambassador Kurenko. Your description of your discovery will be simultaneously broadcast and recorded as you give it. Thanks to your reputation, there, of course, is no doubt as to the reality of your achievement. Nevertheless, there are experts of various nationalities listening in, and they may want to ask some questions, which they can do over this hookup. Your words will be translated, incidentally, as you speak them"
Schmidt looked impressed. "May I ask, Mr. Banner, what is the advantage of having a military man here?"
"General Harmer is the President's personal representative. The President couldn't come himself."
"Ah—" said Schmidt. "I see. Excuse me. Well, gentlemen—Shall I begin?"
Banner glanced at the technicians, who nodded.
"Start whenever you want," said Banner, "and just tell us in whatever way you want."
"Well, then—I will begin with method. Knowing time was short, I decided upon a brute-force approach. Not so crude, perhaps, as adopted by the well-known innovator, Edison, but using the same general principle, developed more scientifically. I decided to try every conceivable method and combination of methods, possible in the space and time, and with the equipment available, sacrificing precise determination of the interrelations of the causative factors involved, in favor of—results."
Schmidt then proceeded to describe, in short clear language, a set of procedures designed to produce the maximum possible genetic variation in the shortest possible time. At the end, he concluded, "With such methods, success or failure depends on chance and the unknown. Our tools are still too crude, and our knowledge too imprecise to enable us to proceed on a basis of exact knowledge. However, the method that worked for Edison has also worked in this instance, as I shall demonstrate. We now have, gentlemen, a variant of the common ragweed that no drug on earth can resist. For the record, I here produce a sample of biologically-inactivated pollen." He removed a small, thick glass tube, about the size of a two-inch cut off a lead
pencil. "Is anyone here subject to hay fever?"
Banner, Hall, Harmer, Kurenko, and the three technicians all shook their heads. Hommel reached into his side pocket, said, "I am," and shook three small old-style pills of Nullergin-200 into his hand. As Schmidt nodded, and began to pull the stopper out of the vial, Hommel, who know Schmidt as a demon experimenter, at once took the pills. A warm feeling of friendship spread through him, reassuring him that the Nullergin-200 had taken effect.
"Ah," said Schmidt, "here we are. You see, the biologically inactive pollen, still—" He got the stopper out of the bottle, and instantly shoved it back in again.
A sensation like a double-prong fork made of red-hot pepper moved up Hommel's nose. His vision blurred as a layer of burning dust seemed to coat his eyes. His ears itched. The inside of his mouth felt as if he had just eaten two large plates of overseasoned chili. The room rang with violent sneezes from Banner, Harmer, and everyone save Schmidt. Through a sea of tears, Hommel could see Schmidt stretched out on the floor, his face covered with red blotches.
Every breath Hommel drew was like a breath of finely-ground pepper. He sneezed until he ached so that he didn't dare to sneeze, while at the same time he had to sneeze. His throat constricted so that to draw a breath was like sucking a half-frozen drink through a flattened straw.
Something flashed across his wavering field of vision, and there was the crash of breaking glass.
For a brief instant, Hommel could see Banner, his heavy cane upraised, knocking out one window after another, in a room full of choking, gasping, strangling men.
Then Hommel drew in the wire-thin end of a breath of air so cool and uncontaminated that it seemed as sweet as fresh spring water to a man dying of thirst. Then everything whirled around him.
Hommel came to fitfully several times, and finally awoke in a pastel-green room, where several other pajama-clad occupants crowded around a big TV.
Banner, wearing a blue bathrobe, prodded Harmer and Kurenko to move apart, leaving a slot through which Hommel could see a stretch of barren lifeless landscape, across which there slowly came into view a small figure in some kind of dully-glinting suit, carrying a kind of wand in one hand. As this figure passed out of Hommel's range of vision, there appeared a large-wheeled slow-moving armored machine.
The whole scene looked so alien to Earth that Hommel said, "What is that—the surface of the Moon?"
"No," said Banner, "that's what's left of the ragweed test site. They're checking for radioactivity right now."
Hommel leaned back. They could take the whole site and throw it into orbit beyond Pluto as far as he was concerned.
Banner said thoughtfully, "It's an odd thing. Progress is generally supposed to mean, moving forward. Once a scientific development appears, for instance, you generally can't suppress it. You have to adapt to it, and go on."
"Let's hope," said Hommel fervently "that we can suppress one or two of these latest developments."
Banner nodded gravely. Then he said in a low voice:
"Sometimes, if you can even move backward, that's progress."
The Great Intellect Boom
Morton Hommel, PH.D., director of the Banner Value Drug and Vitamin Laboratories, Inc., proudly put the bottle of yellow capsules on the desk of old Sam Banner, president of the company.
Banner glanced at them dubiously.
"What are they good for, Mort?"
Hommel said, with quiet pride, "They increase intelligence."
Banner looked up.
"What's that again?"
"The drug stimulates intellectual activity. It channels energy from gross physical pursuits into imaginative creativity."
Banner looked at him alertly.
"Have you been taking it?"
"No. But we've carried out exhaustive—"
"It works?"
"It's extremely effective."
Banner sat back, and studied the capsules.
"Well, a thing like this would sell to students. Lawyers would want it. Doctors, engineers—Just about everybody could use more brains these days. Quite a market." Then he shook his head. "But it might be that what we've got here is a catastrophe in a bottle. How did we get into this, anyway? I don't remember any work on brain pills."
Hommel winced. "We prefer to think of it as a drug mediating the enhancement of intellectual activity."
"That's what I say. Brain pills. How did we get into this in the first place?"
"Well, you remember that problem of parapl—"
"Put it into words an ordinary human can follow, Mort."
Hommel's face took on the expression of a truck driver faced with a detour off a six-lane highway onto a mountain road. With a visible effort, he said, "I mean, that problem of broken nerve tracts that wouldn't grow together."
"I remember that. So what?"
"We thought we had a promising lead. It had seemed satisfactory with experimental animals. What we wanted, of course, was something to stimulate the broken ends of the nerve, to cause them to grow and rejoin. We thought at first this would have to be administered locally; but we found, purely by accident, that it could be given by mouth. When we had every reason to believe that the drug would prove successful, we tried it on a human volunteer. This volunteer . . . ah . . . had evidently lacked proper motivational opportunities for educational develop—"
Banner stared. "He what, Mort?"
"He'd lacked the proper motivational opportunities for educa—"
"Was the fellow stupid?"
"Well, I'd hesitate to say he—"
"Mort," said Banner, "a junkyard is a junkyard—whether you decide to call it a junkyard or a 'storage module for preprocessed metals.' Was the fellow stupid, or wasn't he?"
Hommel blew out his breath.
"He wasn't the brightest person I ever met."
"All right. What happened?"
"He'd been badly injured. Yet it certainly seemed, from our previous work, that the drug ought to produce a cure. But it didn't."
"The broken ends of the nerves didn't grow together?"
"No."
Banner nodded sympathetically.
"What then?"
"Well, we were very much disappointed. But we were also surprised, because the patient suddenly seemed to gain insight into his accident. Prior to this time, he'd simply blamed the other driver."
"How did he get hurt?"
"He was driving in heavy traffic, got on the wrong turnoff, and tried to get back by making a quick U-turn in a cloverleaf intersection."
Banner looked blank.
Hommel said, "Not only that, but he was convinced that the other drivers owed him a lifetime pension. After he'd been treated with our drug, he saw there was another side to the question."
Banner glanced thoughtfully at the capsules. "Maybe we have something here, after all. What happened next?"
"Well, at first we didn't realize what had happened. But we continued treatment, still hoping for a cure. The patient enrolled in a correspondence course and completed his high-school education. Meanwhile, we'd started treatment on another patient, who read comic books at the beginning of the treatment, and was studying medieval history at the end. It began to dawn on us that there might be some connection. After that, we carried out thorough investigations, and found that there is invariably a marked increase in the patient's intellectual activity. It's no longer possible to think of this as a coincidence. The increase in intellectual activity is caused by our drug."
"Any side effects?"
"In some few patients there's a rash. Occasionally, there's a complaint of a temporary numbness—a sense of being removed from reality. The rash subsides in a day or two after discontinuance of treatment. The numbness fades away in a few hours. Neither reaction seems serious, and neither is especially common."
"How about this increased intelligence? Does it fade away when the patient stops taking the pills?"
"There's a drop, but there's also a residual increase that remains. One of t
he men on the hospital staff compared intelligence with the amount of traffic a road network will bear. The 'mental traffic' will depend on the mental 'road system'—the number and condition of the brain's nerve cells and connections. The drug speeds up mental 'road building.' When the drug is discontinued, this 'road building' drops back to a much lower level. Those 'roads' only partly finished quickly become unusable. But those already finished remain in use, allowing an increase in 'traffic'—intelligence—over what there was to begin with, although lower than at the peak."
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