'Quite. I understand that. However, your answer explains something to me. Some of his ideas almost verged on the irrational. He was always worried, it seemed to me, about the connection between what he called 'cultural spurts' and calamities of one sort or another. Now such connections have been noted frequently. The time of a nation's greatest vitality may come at a time of great national insecurity. The Netherlands is a good case in point. Her great artists, statesmen, and explorers belong to the early Seventeenth Century at the time when she was locked in a death struggle with the greatest European power of the time, Spain. When at the point of destruction at home, she was building an empire in the Far East and had secured footholds on the northern coast of South America, the southern tip of Africa, and the Hudson Valley of North America. Her fleets fought England to a standstill. And then, once her political safety was assured, she declined.
'Well, as I say, that is not unusual. Groups, like individuals, will rise to strange heights in answer to a challenge, and vegetate in the absence of a
challenge. Where Dr. Ralson left the paths of sanity, however, was in insisting that such a view amounted to confusing cause and effect. He deckred that it was not times of war and danger that stimulated 'cultural spurts', but rather vice versa. He claimed that each time a group of men snowed too much vitality and ability, a war became necessary to destroy the possibility of their further development.'
'I see,' said Blaustein.
'I rather laughed at him, I am afraid. It may be that that was why he did not keep the last appointment we made. Just toward the end of that last conference he asked me, in the most intense fashion imaginable, whether I did not think it queer that such an improbable species as man was dominant on earth, when all he had in his favor was intelligence. There I laughed aloud. Perhaps I should not have, poor fellow.'
'It was a natural reaction,' said Blaustein, 'but I must take no more of your time. You have been most helpful.'
They shook hands, and Thaddeus Milton took his leave.
'Well,' said Darrity, 'there are your figures on the recent suicides among scientific personnel. Get any deductions out of it?'
'I should be asking you that,' said Blaustein, gently. 'The F.B.I, must have investigated thoroughly.'
'You can bet the national debt on that. They are suicides. There's no mistake about it. There have been people checking on it in another department. The rate is about four times above normal, taking age, social status, economic class into consideration.'
'What about British scientists?'
'Just about the same.'
'And the Soviet Union?'
'Who can tell?' The investigator leaned forward. 'Doc, you don't think the Soviets have some sort of ray that can make people want to commit suicide, do you? It's sort of suspicious that men in atomic research are the only ones affected.'
'Is it? Perhaps not. Nuclear physicists may have peculiar strains imposed upon them. It is difficult to tell without thorough study.'
'You mean complexes might be coming through?' asked Darrity, warily.
Blaustein made a face. 'Psychiatry is becoming too popular. Everybody talks of complexes and neuroses and psychoses and compulsions and whatnot. One man's guilt complex is another man's good night's sleep. If I could talk to each one of the men who committed suicide, maybe I could know something.'
'You're talking to Ralson.'
'Yes, I'm talking to Ralson.'
'Has he got a guilt complex?'
'Not particularly. He has a background out of which it would not surprise
me if he obtained a morbid concern with death. When he was twelve he saw his mother die under the wheels of an automobile. His father died slowly of cancer. Yet the effect of those experiences on his present troubles is not clear.'
Darrity picked up his hat. 'Well, I wish you'd get a move on, Doc. There's something big on, bigger than the H-Bomb. I don't know how anything can be bigger than that, but it is.'
Ralson insisted on standing. 'I had a bad night last night, Doctor.'
'I hope,' said Blaustein, 'these conferences are not disturbing you.'
'Well, maybe they are. They have me thinking on the subject again. It makes things bad, when I do that. How do you imagine it feels being part of a bacterial culture, Doctor?'
'I had never thought of that. To a bacterium, it probably feels quite normal.'
Ralson did not hear. He said, slowly, 'A culture in which intelligence is being studied. We study all sorts of things as far as their genetic relationships are concerned. We take fruit flies and cross red eyes and white eyes to see what happens. We don't care anything about red eyes and white eyes, but we try to gather from them certain basic genetic principles. You see what I mean?'
'Certainly.'
'Even in humans, we can follow various physical characteristics. There are the Hapsburg lips, and the haemophilia that started with Queen Victoria and cropped up in her descendants among the Spanish and Russian royal families. We can even follow feeble-mindedness in the Jukeses and Kal-likakas. You learn about it in high- school biology. But you can't breed human beings the way you do fruit flies. Humans live too long. It would take centuries to draw conclusions. It's a pity we don't have a special race of men that reproduce at weekly intervals, eh?'
He waited for an answer, but Blaustein only smiled.
Ralson said, 'Only that's exactly what we would be for another group of beings whose life span might be thousands of years. To them, we would reproduce rapidly enough. We would be short-lived creatures and they could study the genetics of such things as musical aptitude, scientific intelligence, and so on. Not that those things would interest them as such, any more than the white eyes of the fruit fly interest us as white eyes.'
'This is a very interesting notion,' said Blaustein.
'It is not simply a notion. It is true. To me, it is obvious, and I don't care how it seems to you. Look around you. Look at the planet, Earth. What kind of a ridiculous animal are we to be lords of the world after the dinosaurs had failed? Sure, we're intelligent, but what's intelligence? We think it is important because we have it. If the Tyrannosaurus could have picked out the one quality that he thought would ensure species domination, it would
be size and strength. And he would make a better case for it. He lasted longer than we're likely to.
'Intelligence in itself isn't much as far as survival values are concerned. The elephant makes out very poorly indeed when compared to the sparrow even though he is much more intelligent. The dog does well, under man's protection, but not as well as the house-fly against whom every human hand is raised. Or take the primates as a group. The small ones cower before their enemies; the large ones have always been remarkably unsuccessful in doing more than barely holding their own. The baboons do the best and that is because of their canines, not their brains.'
A light film of perspiration covered Ralson's forehead. 'And one can see that man has been tailored, made to careful specifications for those things that study us. Generally, the primate is short-lived. Naturally, the larger ones live longer, which is a fairly general rule in animal life. Yet the human being has a life span twice as long as any of the other great apes; considerably longer even than the gorilla that outweighs him. We mature later. It's as though we've been carefully bred to live a little longer so that our life cycle might be of a more convenient length.'
He jumped to his feet, shaking his fists above his head. 'A thousand years are but as yesterday-'
Blaustein punched a button hastily.
For a moment, Ralson struggled against the white-coated orderly who entered, and then he allowed himself to be led away.
Blaustein looked after him, shook his head, and picked up the telephone.
He got Darrity. 'Inspector, you may as well know that this may take a long time.'
He listened and shook his head. 'I know. I don't minimize the urgency.'
The voice in the receiver was tinny and harsh. 'Doctor, you are minimizing it. I'll send Dr. Grant to you. He'll explain the situation to you.'
Dr. Grant asked how Ralson was, then asked somewhat wistfully if he could see him. Blaustein shook his head gently.
Grant said, 'I've been directed to explain the current situation in atomic research to you.'
'So that I will understand, no?'
'I hope so. It's a measure of desperation. I'll have to remind you-'
'Not to breathe a word of it. Yes, I know. This insecurity on the part of you people is a very bad symptom. You must know these things cannot be hidden.'
'You live with secrecy. It's contagious.'
'Exactly. What is the current secret?'
'There is ... or, at least, there might be a defense against the atomic bomb.'
'And that is a secret? It would be better if it were shouted to all the people of the world instantly.'
'For heaven's sake, no. Listen to me, Dr. Blaustein. It's only on paper so far. It's at the E equal me square stage, almost. It may not be practical. It would be bad to raise hopes we would have to disappoint. On the other hand, if it were known that we almost had a defense, there might be a desire to start and win a war before the defense were completely developed.'
'That I don't believe. But, nevertheless, I distract you. What is the nature of this defense, or have you told me as much as you dare?'
'No, I can go as far as I like; as far as is necessary to convince you we have to have Ralson-and fast!'
'Well, then tell me, and I too, will know secrets. I'll feel like a member of the Cabinet.'
'You'll know more than most. Look, Dr. Blaustein, let me explain it in lay language. So far, military advances have been made fairly equally in both offensive and defensive weapons. Once before there seemed to be a definite and permanent tipping of all warfare in the direction of the offense, and that was with the invention of gunpowder. But the defense caught up. The medieval man-in-armor-on-horse became the modem man-in-tank-on-treads, and the stone castle became the concrete pillbox. The same thing, you see, except that everything has been boosted several orders of magnitude.'
'Very good. You make it clear. But with the atomic bomb comes more orders of magnitude, no? You must go past concrete and steel for protection.'
'Right. Only we can't just make thicker and thicker walls. We've run out of materials that are strong enough. So we must abandon materials altogether. If the atom attacks, we must let the atom defend. We will use energy itself; a force field.'
'And what,' asked Blaustein, gently, 'is a force field?'
'I wish I could tell you. Right now, it's an equation on paper. Energy can be so channeled as to create a wall of matterless inertia, theoretically. In practice, we don't know how to do it.'
