“We’ve got to do something, Fred!” There was almost a whiff of hysteria in Myers’ voice.
“We will. We’ll start, first thing tomorrow, on a series of tests—just you and I, like the old times at Eisenhower High. First, we want to be sure that Evri-Flave really is responsible. It’d be a hell of a thing if we started a public panic against our own product for nothing. And then. …”
It took just two weeks, in a soundproofed and guarded laboratory on Benson’s Carondelet estate, to convict their delicious drink of responsibility for that Munich State Opera House Horror and everything else. Reports from confidential investigators in Munich confirmed this. It had, of course, been impossible to interview the two thousand men and women who had turned the Opera House into a pyre for their own immolation, but none of the tiny minority who had kept their sanity and saved their lives had tasted Evri-Flave.
It took another month to find out exactly how the stuff affected the human nervous system, and they almost wrecked their own nervous systems in the process. The real villain, they discovered, was the incredible-looking long-chain compound alluded to in the original notes as Ingredient Beta; its principal physiological effect was to greatly increase the sensitivity of the aural nerves. Not only was the hearing range widened—after consuming thirty C.C. of Beta, they could hear the sound of an ultrasonic dog-whistle quite plainly—but the very quality of all audible sounds was curiously enhanced and altered. Myers, the psychologist, who was also well grounded in neurology, explained how the chemical produced this effect; it meant about as much to Benson as some of his chemistry did to Bill Myers. There was also a secondary, purely psychological, effect. Certain musical chords had definite effects on the emotions of the hearer, and the subject, beside being directly influenced by the music, was rendered extremely open to verbal suggestions accompanied by a suitable musical background.
Benson transferred the final results of this stage of the research to the black notebook and burned the scratch-sheets.
“That’s how it happened, then,” he said. “The Munich thing was the result of all that Götterdämmerung music. There was a band at the baseball park in Baltimore. The New Orleans Orgy started while a local radio station was broadcasting some of this new dance-music. Look, these tone-clusters, here, have a definite sex-excitation effect. This series of six chords, which occur in some of the Wagnerian stuff; effect, a combined feeling of godlike isolation and despair. And these consecutive fifths—a sense of danger, anger, combativeness. You know, we could work out a whole range of emotional stimuli to fit the effects of Ingredient Beta. …”
“We don’t want to,” Myers said. “We want to work out a substitute for Beta that will keep the flavor of the drink without the psycho-physiological effects.”
“Yes, sure. I have some of the boys at the plant lab working on that. Gave them a lot of syrup without Beta, and told them to work out cheap additives to restore the regular Evri-Flave taste; told them it was an effort to find a cheap substitute for an expensive ingredient. But look, Bill. You and I both see, for instance, that a powerful worldwide supranational sovereignty is the only guarantee of world peace. If we could use something like this to help overcome antiquated verbal prejudices and nationalistic emotional attachments. …”
“No!” Myers said. “I won’t ever consent to anything like that, Fred! Not even in a cause like world peace; use a thing like this for a good, almost holy, cause now, and tomorrow we, or those who would come after us, would be using it to create a tyranny. You know what year this is, Bill?”
“Why, 1984,” Benson said.
“Yes. You remember that old political novel of Orwell’s, written about forty years ago? Well, that’s a picture of the kind of world you’d have, eventually, no matter what kind of a world you started out to make. Fred, don’t ever think of using this stuff for a purpose like that. If you try it, I’ll fight you with every resource I have.”
There was a fanatical, almost murderous, look in Bill Myers’ eyes. Benson put the notebook in his pocket, then laughed and threw up his hands.
“Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!” he cried. “You’re right, of course, Bill. We can’t even trust the U.N. with a thing like this. It makes the H-bomb look like a stone hatchet. … Well, I’ll call Grant, at the plant lab, and see how his boys are coming along with the substitute; as soon as we get it, we can put out a confidential letter to all our distributors and syrup-manufacturers. …”
He walked alone in the garden at Carondelet, watching the color fade out of the sky and the twilight seep in among the clipped yews. All the world could be like this garden, a place of peace and beauty and quiet, if only. … All the world would be a beautiful and peaceful garden, in his own lifetime! He had the means of making it so!
Three weeks later, he murdered his friend and partner, Bill Myers. It was a suicide; nobody but Fred Benson knew that he had taken fifty C.C. of pure Ingredient Beta in a couple of cocktails while listening to the queer phonograph record that he had played half an hour before blowing his brains out.
The decision had cost Benson a battle with his conscience from which he had emerged the sole survivor. The conscience was buried along with Bill Myers, and all that remained was a purpose.
Evri-Flave stayed on the market unaltered. The night before the national election, the World Sovereignty party
