Prescription for Chaos by Christopher Anvil Page A

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