Prescription for Chaos by Christopher Anvil Page B

remember that problem of parapl—"
    "Put it into words an ordinary human can follow, Mort."
    Hommel's face took on the expression of a truck driver faced with a detour off a six-lane highway onto a mountain road. With a visible effort, he said, "I mean, that problem of broken nerve tracts that wouldn't grow together."
    "I remember that . So what?"
    "We thought we had a promising lead. It had seemed satisfactory with experimental animals. What we wanted, of course, was something to stimulate the broken ends of the nerve, to cause them to grow and rejoin. We thought at first this would have to be administered locally; but we found, purely by accident, that it could be given by mouth. When we had every reason to believe that the drug would prove successful, we tried it on a human volunteer. This volunteer . . . ah . . . had evidently lacked proper motivational opportunities for educational develop—"
    Banner stared. "He what , Mort?"
    "He'd lacked the proper motivational opportunities for educa—"
    "Was the fellow stupid?"
    "Well, I'd hesitate to say he—"
    "Mort," said Banner, "a junkyard is a junkyard—whether you decide to call it a junkyard or a 'storage module for preprocessed metals.' Was the fellow stupid, or wasn't he?"
    Hommel blew out his breath.
    "He wasn't the brightest person I ever met."
    "All right. What happened?"
    "He'd been badly injured. Yet it certainly seemed, from our previous work, that the drug ought to produce a cure. But it didn't."
    "The broken ends of the nerves didn't grow together?"
    "No."
    Banner nodded sympathetically.
    "What then?"
    "Well, we were very much disappointed. But we were also surprised, because the patient suddenly seemed to gain insight into his accident. Prior to this time, he'd simply blamed the other driver."
    "How did he get hurt?"
    "He was driving in heavy traffic, got on the wrong turnoff, and tried to get back by making a quick U-turn in a cloverleaf intersection."
    Banner looked blank.
    Hommel said, "Not only that, but he was convinced that the other drivers owed him a lifetime pension. After he'd been treated with our drug, he saw there was another side to the question."
    Banner glanced thoughtfully at the capsules. "Maybe we have something here, after all. What happened next?"
    "Well, at first we didn't realize what had happened. But we continued treatment, still hoping for a cure. The patient enrolled in a correspondence course and completed his high-school education. Meanwhile, we'd started treatment on another patient, who read comic books at the beginning of the treatment, and was studying medieval history at the end. It began to dawn on us that there might be some connection. After that, we carried out thorough investigations, and found that there is invariably a marked increase in the patient's intellectual activity. It's no longer possible to think of this as a coincidence. The increase in intellectual activity is caused by our drug."
    "Any side effects?"
    "In some few patients there's a rash. Occasionally, there's a complaint of a temporary numbness—a sense of being removed from reality. The rash subsides in a day or two after discontinuance of treatment. The numbness fades away in a few hours. Neither reaction seems serious, and neither is especially common."
    "How about this increased intelligence? Does it fade away when the patient stops taking the pills?"
    "There's a drop, but there's also a residual increase that remains. One of the men on the hospital staff compared intelligence with the amount of traffic a road network will bear. The 'mental traffic' will depend on the mental 'road system'—the number and condition of the brain's nerve cells and connections. The drug speeds up mental 'road building.' When the drug is discontinued, this 'road building' drops back to a much lower level. Those 'roads' only partly finished quickly become unusable. But those already finished remain in use, allowing an increase in 'traffic'—intelligence—over what