The Call-Girls (9 page)

Tony, who had been listening for several minutes in respectful silence, now blurted out: ‘You are discussing the existential vacuum as if it were a modern phenomenon. But perhaps it was always there as part of the human condition. I have just read Ecclesiastes in the new English translation. “Vanity” has been replaced by vacuum: “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, all is emptiness and chasing the wind”. That dates from the Bronze Age and God was still supposed to be alive then.'

‘Not much ecclesiastical comfort there,' said Blood.

‘Baal was a god of the hippies,' said Petitjacques.

Blood shrugged, eyeing with suspicion the dessert which Mitzie had brought. It was a chocolate cake called a
Pischinger Torte,
a celebrated Viennese speciality out of a tin made in Ohio, of which the Foundation had bought a consignment from the American Army surplus stores.

On that second night, two of the participants wept into their pillows. Bruno Kaletski wept, interrupted by convulsive hiccoughs, because he had done it again, and made himself loathsome to all with his verbal diarrhoea though he had sworn never, never to do it again. And Harriet wept, her big blotchy face suddenly like a little girl's, partly out of pity for Niko, who had looked so disappointed after the disastrous opening discussion, but also because she felt too old and ugly to seduce blue-eyed Tony, for whom she had developed a violent, aching crush.

‘Rot,' she said aloud, and blew her nose with vigour. From the basement of the building came radio music – the Blue Danube. That must be Gustav, the driver with the waxed moustache. He did not look unpromising – she and Helen had exchanged guesses about the quality and dimensions of his equipment. H.E. washed her face in cold water and made it up in front of the mirror. It did not look all that old and all that bad.

Five minutes later she entered Gustav's room, without knocking and without her stick, in her scarlet dressing-gown. ‘Mind if I keep you company?' she said. ‘It's too hot to sleep.'

Gustav was lying in his bed, sunburnt torso uncovered, smoking. He did not look the least bit surprised. He would have preferred the dark one with the shaven neck, but one couldn't always choose, and this one had her points too – haunches like a mare. ‘Komm here please,' he said politely, putting out first his cigarette, then the light. A moment later he remembered that scarifying experience on the Schafberg when he lay buried under an avalanche.

Claire was not weeping, though she felt rather like it. She was lying on her balcony, moon-bathing, waiting for the return of Nikolai who had gone for a walk. The morning session had been a disaster, thanks to Bruno; and the afternoon one successful in the wrong way. John D. John Junior, the young genius from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had given his lecture on ‘Computerizing the Future'. With his crew-cut, regular features, earnest expression and fluent delivery in a flat monotone, he himself seemed to have been designed and programmed by one of those efficient IBM computers. Claire had tried to follow him into the complexities of communications-theory, of information-storage and retrieval, memory banks and automated traffic, feedback and cybernetic control, character-analysers and robot-diagnosticians, learning machines and decision-calculators, but after ten minutes she had given up, bored and repelled – although she knew that she had a right to be repelled, but not to be bored. Once you got bored with your enemy, the battle was lost. Yet how could one not become somnolent listening to the monotonous flow of words which John D. John disgorged like a string of spaghetti? She had heard it all before: that the proud mind of man was nothing but a system of linked computers, rather slow compared to hardware circuitry, but with a remarkable storage capacity of approximately 10
¹²
bits of coded information, including a prodigious percentage of redundancy and noise. His biochemical combustion system was of moderate efficiency while his interrelations with the environment and in interpersonal exchanges seemed to indicate an insufficient systemization or elaboration of the feedback controls on the levels of ecological and social organization. According to the paradigms provided by current communication theory …

Claire had studied the faces of the call-girls along the table. Nikolai was doodling with his lower lip pushed forward like a chimpanzee's, indicative of a mental state that
she called ‘fog-bound'. Professor Burch listened with concentrated attention, occasionally nodding with approval. Von Halder had his right hand cupped behind his ear, a sure sign that he was not listening. Harriet kept handing little notes to Tony which he acknowledged with polite smiles. Blood's chair was empty. Valenti sat impassive, a handsome statue, ignoring the frequent glances cast in his direction by Miss Carey in her earphones. Wyndham's benign smile was so sustained that he seemed to be risking cramp in his dimples. Bruno was taking notes at furious speed. Helen, sitting next to Claire, was scratching under her mini.

Recalling the scene, Claire was reminded of Madame Tussaud's. But wax-figures that could move about were even more frightening. Was that why people were so scared of robots – the more life-like, the more frightening? Robots made of software, with the right elasticity, right temperature, right eye-movements … Was that why she herself had such an irrational horror of the computer-image of the mind drawn by John D. John? For, if he and Burch were right, then she herself
was
nothing but an animated figure from Madame Tussaud's, with built-in circuitry powered by chemical combustion. Whether conceived in a test-tube or designed on a drawing-board, matured in womb or lab, the end-product would be the same: a robot called Claire. Was her revulsion against John D. John caused by the fear that he and Burch might, after all, be right? And that the drama, in which she thought she was acting, was nothing but a dance of jerking marionettes?

They now had a computer at Caltech, John D. John had explained, which could be programmed to transform the material that it was fed into Freudian or Jungian dreams, expressed in the appropriate symbols…

And yet the discussion after John D. John's paper had not been bad, as discussions go. None of the participants had expressed horror, or resigned acceptance, in the naive terms of poor Claire. Those hoary metaphysical conundrums were sixth-form stuff – at least so long as everybody was sober and the tape-recorder was on. But they all had re-stated their
positions on specialized aspects of the problem with great lucidity. And though all were careful to avoid a head-on collision, the antagonism between the two camps – Nikosians and Burchers – had become more obvious and acerbated. It also occurred to Claire that Hector Burch and John D. John were her only true compatriots, Americans by birth. Nikolai, Bruno, Valenti and von Halder taught at American universities, but they were Europeans, imported to her country by that reversed Gulf stream which had transformed its intellectual climate and made it into the Mecca of science. Tony, Wyndham and Blood were British, Harriet Australian, Valenti Italian, Petitjacques French; but somehow with all their weaknesses and vanities, they seemed more human than her two true-blooded countrymen, straight out of the Brave New World – or the waxworks.

Claire saw Nikolai approaching on the moonlit path leading to the terrace, followed by a well-defined shadow. When he joined her on the balcony he looked refreshed and cheerful.

‘The woods smell of bath-salts,' he said. ‘I have been thinking.'

‘You have?'

‘That Einstein letter. The conference will be a failure, but we must insist that it appoints a committee of action. We must bully them into it…'

‘I am all for bullying.'

‘We shall have to work on them individually, in private, starting with those on our side: Harriet, Tony, Wyndham, Blood…'

‘Blood?'

‘He is a clown, and a queen – the queen of the clowns – but he
cares.
I don't understand a line of his poetry – it gives me toothache. But he is supposed to be the only poet alive who has an inkling of what quantum physics or the genetic code is about.'

‘Three cheers for Bloody.'

‘Valenti I do not like. But he will be eager to co-operate. Almost too eager, I fear.'

‘“Horrible times – horrible remedies”?'

‘Precisely. Then Halder. He does not like me. But he, too,
cares.
Perhaps with some diplomacy…'

‘I am all for diplomacy.'

‘Bruno will talk and talk and sit on the fence. In the end he will say he cannot sign because he is a member of several official bodies. But he could be helpful behind the scenes … On the other side you have the two hard-core robotomaniacs, Burch and John Junior, and that mad-hatter Petitjacques. In matters of
Weltanschauung
we have no common language. I am not even sure whether they
care.
They might regard caring as sentimental. But we had to have them to complete the spectrum and avoid giving the impression that we are biased.'

‘Which we are, thank God.'

‘Which we are. But though we hate each other's philosophical guts, emergencies create alliances. They may cooperate out of opportunism, to be on the band-waggon. Or they may not. Then at least we shall have tried, and to hell with them.'

‘I am all for hell. But who is going to make the diplomatic overtures to Johnny junior or Burch? If you were to try, you might lose your patience.'

‘Don't worry. I have worked out a plan. On strictly conspiratorial lines. Please don't say “I am all for conspiring”.'

‘But I am.'

Nikolai explained his plan. He would first talk to two or three of those closest to his ideas and they would form a sort of secret caucus, meeting every night to discuss how to steer discreetly the next day's debates, and who should try to convert whom. It sounded very conspiratorial and rather school-boyish, but that was apparently how these things were done at international conferences. Claire was all for it, and though she did not believe for a moment that they would succeed, she felt more cheerful as they prepared for bed.

The second day of the symposium started peacefully enough, with Horace Wyndham's lecture accompanied by lantern-slides and delivered with the apologetic smiles of a Japanese host. His paper was entitled ‘The Revolution in the Cradle', but, he explained, its first part should have been called The Battle of the Womb. For the womb was the most dangerous environment which man had to face in all his life, and the period spent in it was the period of highest mortality: around twenty per cent of all embryos died before they were born, not counting induced abortions.

The human embryo was generally believed to be a happy creature, but there were reasons for doubting this. Human childbirth, compared to animal, was painful and laborious, and more painful among civilized than among primitive peoples. Being born was, if the expression be permitted, a tight squeeze. Could it be that the squeeze started already in the womb? The worst danger to the unborn babe in the later stages of development was oxygen starvation, which could kill it or cause lasting brain damage. This led to the question whether relaxing the squeeze could produce the opposite effect – improved brains? Wyndham's revered friend and colleague, Dr Heyns of Witwatersrand, had been the first to try the idea by means of a plastic decompression dome placed over the abdomen of expectant mothers …

‘That was in the late 1950's,' Wyndham went on. ‘You may have read what has happened since. The rate of physical and mental development among the decompressed babies turned out to be thirty per cent faster than normal, and a number of them became infant prodigies. The medical profession, which looks at new ideas as if they were something brought in by the cat, first ignored, then attacked poor
Heyns. As a result, we only have a few private clinics here and there which practise his method with remarkable results for the benefit of the few who have the courage and the money to go to them, but no officially sponsored large-scale experiments have been undertaken to date…

Helen Porter, from the ring-side row of chairs along the wall, waved a sun-tanned, sleeveless arm at Solovief who nodded briefly.

‘Mr Chairman, surely Dr Wyndham is aware of the objection that the high IQ of these super-babies is not due to the oxygen supplied to the foetus, but to the high IQ of their mothers …'

Wyndham tittered. ‘Tell that to the marines. I expected this point to be raised and shall go into it in the Discussion. But in the meantime let me remind you of the fate of poor Dr Semmelweiss from Budapest, who in 1847 was the first to introduce antisepsis in the delivery ward he was in charge of. Within a few weeks, the death-rate from child-bed fever in that ward fell from thirteen per cent to less than one per cent. His colleagues declared that this was due to extraneous causes, called him a charlatan, and deprived him of his post. He in turn called them assassins, went raving mad and died in a strait-jacket…'

‘Spurious analogies don't prove much, you know,' said Helen primly.

‘I
do
know,' said Horace, giggling. He then turned to alternative possibilities of revolutionizing man's fate in the cradle, or the womb. He reminded his colleagues that already in the late 'sixties Dr Zamenhoff at UCLA had injected pregnant rats with certain specific hormones; the litters produced by the injected rats showed a thirty per cent increase in the weight of their cerebral cortex and had a correspondingly higher IQ – maze-learning capacity – than normal rates. Schenkein
et al
had produced similar results in chicks, after injecting the eggs with a nerve growth factor. Again, as far back as the middle 'sixties, McConnell, Jacobson and Unger had trained first flatworms, then rats, to respond to certain stimuli in certain ways, then extracted
stuff from their brains and injected it into untrained animals. The recipients then learnt the same tasks much faster than the normal controls…