The Call-Girls (15 page)

‘Well roared, lion,' said Blood, glancing at Tony with pink lover's eyes.

‘As a matter of fact,' Solovief broke in, ‘mankind renounced language a long time ago – if by language you mean a method of communication for the whole species. Other species do possess a single system of communication by sign, sound or odour, which is understood by all its members. Dolphins travel a lot, but when they meet a stranger in the ocean they need no interpreter. Mankind is split into three thousand different language groups. Each language acts as a cohesive force within the group and as a divisive force between groups. Maharat hates Gujurat, Walloon despises Fleming, upper-class Englishman sneers at dropped aitches, and friend Blood detests our jargon…'

Language, he continued, seems to be the main agency that made the disruptive forces triumph over the cohesive forces throughout the history of the species. One might even ask whether the term ‘species' was applicable to man. Halder had pointed out that animals had a built-in inhibition against killing con-specifics; yet it might be argued that Greeks killing Barbarians, Moors slaughtering Christian dogs, Nazis exterminating
Untermenschen
did not consider their victims to be members of their own species. Man displayed much greater variety in physique and behaviour than any other creature – except for the products of artificial breeding – and language, instead of bridging over these differences, erected further barriers. It was significant that in an age when communication-satellites made it possible for a message to be
heard by the entire planet, there existed no planet-wide language which could also make it understood. It seemed even more paradoxical that the various international bodies, mentioned by Professor Kaletski, had never discovered that the simplest way to promote understanding was to promote a language that was understood by all…

Kaletski's right hand shot into the air. ‘If I may interrupt, Mr Chairman, we have a sub-committee…'

‘You have a sub-committee,' Solovief boomed, ‘for studying the possibilities of an improved Esperanto which last met eighteen months ago, and was unable to agree whether its proceedings should be conducted in English or in French.'

‘Then you are better informed than I am,' said Bruno, peeved. ‘I can assure you that I shall make inquiries into the matter at the proper quarters.'

‘Good luck,' said Niko.

Blood raised the predictable objection that he did not intend to read Verlaine in Esperanto; Solovief reassured him that he need not worry, quoting as a precedent the happy co-existence of native vernaculars and Latin as a
lingua franca
in mediaeval Europe.

He went on to say that if a message was to emanate from the conference, it should urge that the matter be given high priority on the international agenda. Even the most awkward customers in the United Nations would have to agree that a shared world needed a shared language.

And there the discussion ended for the day.

‘Today was a little better?' Claire wrote. ‘At least Niko is again taking an active interest, though it is difficult to see how seriously he – and the others – take the whole enterprise. Some bits and pieces emerged during the discussion, small parts of the jig-saw which is meant to show
what ails Man,
but they do not add up to much, or am I too dumb? Or is the patient suffering from as many different diseases as
there are diagnosticians? Niko talked about the need for a language understood by all nations, but we do not even have a language which would enable specialists in different fields to understand each other.

‘The news from Asia is frightening. On the brink once more. A small fringe benefit: the tourists are packing their bags and the mountains are less crowded. Always look on the sunny side of things – that's Claire, yours truly …'

She never mentioned in her letters the boy in the paddy-field, whose image haunted Niko and her – like a pain which one sometimes forgot, but which was always there. They generally avoided talking about it.

Professor Burch's lecture on Thursday morning was a fiasco. Niko might have cunningly hoped that this would happen, but now he regretted having invited him. And yet Burch occupied one of the most coveted chairs in the United States, his text-books were mandatory reading, and the particular brand of psychology which he represented had recently been shown, by a nation-wide poll among students, to be by far the most popular.

His lecture was called ‘The Technology of Behaviour' and most of his time was taken up by showing lantern slides of rats in boxes learning to press a lever to obtain a food pellet, and of pigeons being trained to strut around in figures of eight. The reward was called a positive reinforcer, withholding the reward a negative reinforcer, the rate at which the creatures responded was recorded by electronic equipment, and the whole procedure was called operant conditioning. At the first mention of this term Blood gave a leonine yawn and Niko gently rapped the table. In the last three minutes of his talk Burch proclaimed, without further ado, that the method he had demonstrated was applicable, with only minor technical modifications, to the control of human behaviour – which obeyed the same elementary laws as that of pigeons and rats. All that the technology of behaviour needed to solve the problems of mankind were scientifically controlled schedules of positive and negative reinforcements. To talk about good or bad, freedom, dignity and purpose was antiquated poppycock. If a message was to be sent to the White House, it should strongly recommend that the teaching machines invented by Professor Skinner, the founder of behavioural engineering, should be made mandatory in schools
on an international scale, and their programme be done in the international language advocated by Professor Solovief.

At the end of the lecture, only one pair of hands was heard clapping, those of John D. John junior. Blood, slumped in his chair, said in a somnolent voice:

‘In my salad days, as an undergrad much in demand, I did some slumming – listened to lectures in biology. In those days it was fashionable to warn students against the heresy of anthropomorphism, of attributing human thoughts and feelings to animals. Now Burch is preaching to us the opposite heresy – that we should not attribute to man thoughts and feelings which are not demonstrable in his rats. As my favourite writer said somewhere: the pundits of Burch's school have replaced the anthropomorphic view of the rat with a ratomorphic view of man. I am surprised they are not growing whiskers.'

‘The rudeness of Dr Blood,' said Burch with commendable restraint, ‘indicates that in his early youth he was exposed to a schedule of negative reinforcers.'

‘But I liked the stick and disliked carrots,' said Blood. ‘What do you make of that?'

‘Human nature is unfathomable,' giggled Wyndham. Burch shrugged in silence and there, to everybody's relief, the discussion came to an end.

During the lunch break, the newly installed air-raid siren had a trial run. Its purpose seemed questionable to the natives of Schneedorf, who did not believe that anybody would be interested in dropping a bomb on their village – except for the people in the rival skiing resort of Schneeberg, on the other side of the valley, who spoke a different, abominable dialect, but fortunately possessed no bombs. Besides, the village of Schneedorf had its powerful church bells, whose message, when there was a fire, could be heard in the remotest
farm; and each farmstead had its own picturesque belfry, which could be reactivated should the church-bells go
kaputt.
But the government in its wisdom had ordered that every hamlet should be equipped with a siren; and there it was, installed in the fire-brigade's tower out of the tax-payers' money. Nevertheless, it was a special occasion; the members of the voluntary fire-brigade had turned out in their becoming uniforms, and so had the Herr Pfarrer, the Burgomaster, the Kongresshaus-Gustav, and some other VIPs. The Burgomaster was the village blacksmith, a moronic giant; but as he was the last of his profession in the whole district, they had elected him as a tourist attraction.

The siren sounded eerie in the
Höhenluft,
and the small group of people in the square listened to it glumly. When it was over, the loudspeaker of the Hotel Post blared out a sentimental song with the refrain
Auf Wiedersehn
to a busload of departing tourists. They were the last of the lot. The square suddenly felt empty. The villagers, accustomed to the despised crowd of strangers which normally filled it at this hour, felt left to themselves and did not like it.

Niko and Claire, out on a stroll, walked up to Gustav and inquired about the latest news on the radio. ‘Very bad news,' Gustav said cheerfully. ‘The tourist season is
kaputt
.' In his privileged position he looked down with contempt at the bed-and-breakfast providers. ‘And in Asia?' Claire asked. Gustav shrugged. ‘Also very bad. They are shooting.'

The Soloviefs installed themselves at a table on the empty terrace of the Hotel Post and ordered a bottle of wine and two pairs of
Würstl.
The mustard looked like liquid gold in the sun. It was the first time they were playing truant from a meal at the Kongresshaus.

‘I won't try to cheer you up,' said Claire. ‘This morning was a disaster.'

‘The conference is
kaputt
,' said Niko.

‘There is still Tony and Valenti to come,' said Claire. ‘And the general discussion.'

‘It will be the usual Blind Man's Buff. What surprises me is that I don't care.'

‘I am all for not caring,' said Claire, lifting her glass. ‘Here's to Burch's rats.'

Suddenly they felt as if on a holiday. The natives called it
Galgenhumor.

Tony's lecture, too, was a disappointment. His innocence combined with impertinence, may have charmed Harriet and Blood, but did not go down well with most of the others.

Before he had even started to speak, Burch had raised his hand and demanded to be informed by Tony what his Order – Burch confessed never to have heard of it – was ‘up to'.

Tony was glad to comply. The Copertinian Order, he explained, derived its name from St Joseph of Copertino, a wayward saint who lived in the seventeenth century and performed extraordinary feats of levitation at about the same time as Isaac Newton proclaimed the law of universal gravity. When his case for canonization came up before the Congregation of Rites, the part of the Devil's Advocate was played by Cardinal Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV, known as the Philosopher King. Lambertini was a notoriously sceptical expert on miracles, and looked with a jaundiced eye at the reports of Copertino's alleged aviatory achievements; but the eye-witness accounts finally convinced him, and it was Lambertini himself, when he became Pope, who published the decree of beatification. Among the many eye-witnesses were the Spanish Ambassador to the Papal Court and his wife. When they passed through Assisi, where Copertino lived at the time, they expressed a desire to converse with him, and the Father Guardian sent word to his cell. But no sooner did the saint enter the church where the illustrious guests were assembled, than his eyes became fixed on a statue of the Virgin standing in a niche high above the altar, and ‘he at once flew about a dozen paces above the heads of those present to the feet of the statue. After paying homage there for a short space and uttering his customary shrill cry, he flew back again to his cell, leaving the Ambassador,
his wife and the large retinue which attended them speechless with astonishment.'

‘And that,' commented Tony, ‘might be called rather an understatement.'

‘Do you believe in that poppycock?' rasped Burch.

‘I have been quoting the eye-witness accounts without drawing conclusions. We are held to that,' Tony said smugly.

As for the activities of the Order, he could only describe them in traditional terminology as being of a contemplative kind, making, however, extensive use of scientific method and electronic apparatus. These enabled the Brothers to take a short-cut to those substrata of the mind which otherwise are not easily attainable – ‘unless', Tony smiled engagingly, ‘you are willing to spend ten years in a Zen monastery or a Himalayan cave'. It was common knowledge, he continued, that the conscious mind had little control over the emotions, and no awareness of the activities of its own nervous system. Several decades ago, a clumsy and unreliable gadget, vulgarly called a lie-detector, provided a first step towards such an awareness. It recorded delicate changes in the electrical activity of the skin, induced by emotive reactions such as anger, fear and excitement, in response to certain words or situations – fleeting reactions of which the subject himself was unaware. Towards the end of the 1960s, new, more refined gadgets were invented, which enabled the user to be his own inquisitor and detect his own lies in the service of self-deception. These handy little machines transformed the changes in electric skin resistance into changes of pitch in a musical tone emitted by a loudspeaker. By listening to that tone, the subject obtained intimate information about the activities of his autonomic nervous system, and thus of the tensions and anxieties at the back of his mind. This information-feedback system, by making the person instantly aware of processes in the depths of the unconscious, at the same time enabled him to bring them to some extent under voluntary control. He could learn, in a short time, to relax his blood-pressure, to alter his pulse-rate, even his gastric secretion, and enter the contemplative state…

‘Whatever that may mean,' remarked Burch.

‘It means,' said John D. John, mollified by the term ‘feedback', ‘that mysticism can be cyberneticized.'

‘I would not talk of mysticism – not at this stage,' said Tony. ‘It is merely the first step. But it shows that mind can perhaps one day gain complete control of the machine which is his body.'