The Call-Girls by Arthur Koestler

chemically more active, and endowed with a richer ‘circuitry’ than the control litters who had been brought up in normal conditions…
    As for man, experiments of Skeels and his team, pursuedover a period of thirty years, demonstrated that one-year-old babies in slums and orphanages, who had been diagnosed as mentally subnormal, could be transformed into slightly above average adults if they were handed over in time to foster-parents who gave them optimal care and stimulation. During the first two years in their new homes, these children gained around thirty per cent IQ points, and no doubt their brains underwent anatomical changes similar to the Berkeley rats. A control group of twelve children, with the same background and the same diagnosis of mental subnormality, though slightly less severe, was left to their fate; all except one had to be later on institutionalized in mental hospitals…
    â€˜To sum up: the brain is a voracious organ. It has to be nourished from the cradle if it is to realize its full growth-potential. It appears that throughout history, most people carried brains in their heads which in the decisive early years had been starved, and thus stunted in their growth. Once this fact is fully understood, the revolution in the cradle will have started. By a crash-programme applying the principles already known to us, we should be able to raise the average level of human intelligence by something like twenty per cent on the IQ scale within a single generation. This would be the equivalent of a biological mutation, the consequences of which I prefer to leave to your imagination …’ After a final giggle, Wyndham sat down.
    Petitjacques jumped to his feet: ‘You want to produce
des petits vieux.
Little professors with tiny feet and big bald heads. With hypertrophic intellects and atrophic hearts. Can you not understand that our misfortune is to have too much intellect, not too little? That is the existential tragedy of man.’
    â€˜How do you cure it? With LSD?’ Wyndham fluted.
    â€˜Why not? Anything is beneficial if it opens the windows in your head to the wind – anything which expands the
mystique
and strangles the
logique
.’
    â€˜How do you reconcile mysticism with your Marxist dialectics?’
    â€˜But perfectly. It is the synthesis of the opposites. Whenyou partake of the magic mushroom or the sacred cactus sauce in the sacramental dialectic mood, it is a feast of spiritual gastronomy and you understand the secret of the universe, which can be expressed in a simple motto: “Love, not Logic”.’
    â€˜Love, eh?’ grunted Blood. ‘That’s why your baboons carry bicycle chains.’
    Petitjacques smiled with Mephistophelean benevolence: ‘The medium is not always the message. The Apocalypse must precede the Kingdom. Chopping heads is more effective than chopping logic.’
    Nikolai rapped the table with his cigarette lighter.
    â€˜Let us take turns,’ he said. ‘Otto wished to make a remark.’
    Von Halder got up and, under the pretext of smoothing his white prophet’s mane, ruffled it even more. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Professor Wyndham shows us the way to Nietzsche’s superman. Perhaps. And why not? As a simple anthropologist I cannot follow Monsieur Petitjacques’s philosophic flight of ideas – what do you call them? Hipsterish, tripsterish, sit-in, drop-out, pop-out or what?’ He paused, waiting for the hilarity which did not materialize, then continued: ‘So I am not going along with Petitjacques, but I am going along with him a short way. As a simple anthropologist I know only a little about the human brain, but if the revolution promised by Wyndham is going to affect only the cortex, the seat of intelligence and cunning, and leave the areas which govern our passions unchanged – then I fear, I very much fear, that your superman will be a super-killer. Because, as I have