In spite of his growing depression, he paradoxically preserved his rather schoolboyish sense of humour, and the faculty of enjoying the small pleasures of life – a melancholy hedonist, as Claire was so fond of saying. She had been one of his laboratory assistants, and she had from the first moment reminded him of Ada – though no one else could possibly have seen a resemblance between Ada’s Assyrian type of beauty and this Southern belle chastely camouflaged in a white laboratory smock. Both had passionate temperaments – but Ada’s emotions were spontaneous and sometimes hysterical, Claire’s controlled, and restrained by irony.
Clairette, now happily married, took after her. Grisha was their only son. He had inherited Nikolai’s innocent eyes and as much success with the girls as Nikolai had had in his time. He was to study anthropology and live with the doomed tribes of Indians on the Amazon, before the last ones succumbed to genocide. Now he was crawling on all fours in another type of jungle, fighting nobody’s war in nobody’s land.
Monday
At 9 AM, on the dot, they were all seated at the long conference table of polished mountain pine, each with a writing pad and a dossier in front. The dossier was to have contained abstracts of all the papers to be delivered, but most of them, as usual, had failed to prepare them. Separated from the conference table, along the wall, sat Claire, who acted as secretary, Miss Carey, who operated the tape-recorder, the Director of Programmes from the Academy, Dr Helen Porter and three other ‘auditors’ – as such underdogs without the full status of participants were called, who had not been invited to deliver papers but were allowed to chime in during the discussions. They sat on austere upright chairs; those of the participants had arm-rests. The ubiquitous mountains behind the plate-glass windows stood watch in their calm glory; one could even see the distant glaciers.
Solovief felt glad that he had insisted on a small number who could sit along a table, all face to face. With larger numbers you had to have rows of chairs and a raised lectern. The man behind the lectern would be addressing an audience, which tended to bring out the actor in him. People around a table, on the other hand, were addressing each other as individuals. It made all the difference.
Two of the chairs were empty. Vinogradov, the Soviet geneticist, had sent a telegram saying that unexpected circumstances prevented him from attending the Symposium. That obviously signified that the authorities had at the last minute refused his exit permit; the empty chairs of Soviet delegates were a permanent fixture of international symposia. The other absentee was Bruno Kaletski, last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace; he had wired that he was delayed by urgent business and would arrive later in the morning. That sort of thing, too, inevitably happened among the call-girls. Some were always late, some had to leave before the end of the conference, some came only for one day, delivered their papers, collected their fee, and dashed off again. Nikolai had insisted that for ‘Approaches to Survival’ you either came for the whole course or not at all. As for Kaletski, it was likely that the only reason for his being late was the need to impress on the others what a busy and important person he was. He was in fact both, but also an incurable show-off, all the time ham-acting the role which he actually played in life.
Nikolai was on the point of opening the proceedings when the clock in the nearby church tower struck nine and the church bells started to toll. They were powerful old bells, the pride of the village, and as they were only a couple of hundred yards away, their majestic booming made conversation difficult. Miss Carey had put on her earphones and was recording the booms with a rapt expression. ‘A happy omen,’ Wyndham said, giggling through his dimples. ‘What do you say, Tony?’ ‘My favourite pop music,’ said Tony.
The bells stopped, and Solovief got up: ‘I declare this conference open.’ Head lowered, he glanced at the faces along the table with a belligerent expression. ‘I shall spare you the ceremonial blah-blah and proceed with my opening statement. It will take twenty minutes…’
He sat down heavily, lit a cigar, and began to deliver his address, elbows on the table. Claire noted with approval that he kept his shoulders squared, without the trace of a stoop; while Helen, listening with a prim expression to that resonant bass-baritone, was reminded of a remark of Harriet’s: ‘Women don’t listen to Niko’s voice with their ears – it goes straight to their uterus.’ On two occasions during the talk von Halder, who sat at the opposite end of the table, was heard to remark ‘old hat’ in an audible whisper. The second time Harriet, who sat next to him, whispered back even more audibly: ‘Rot. He is putting it quite neatly.’ The others thought so too, including Halder himself, though he was prepared to die rather than admit it. In a little less than twenty minutes Solovief, speaking in an informal but precise manner, reminded them of the principal factors which made the survival of the human species an unlikely possibility, counting them one by one on his long nicotine-stained fingers.
First, the situation prevailing since the middle of the twentieth century was without precedent in history, inasmuch as prior to that date the destructive potential of man had been confined to limited areas and limited populations, whereas subsequent to that date it embraced the entire sublunary sphere, i.e. the planet itself, its surrounding atmosphere, and the totality of its flora and fauna, excepting perhaps some radiation-resistant strains of micro-organisms. Second, rapid progress in the manufacturing methods of both types of ultimate weapons, nuclear and biochemical, made their spreading inevitable and their control impracticable. The absurdity of the situation was illustrated by the fact that, according to the last available statistics, the existing stockpiles in nuclear weapons equalled one Hiroshima-sized device for every one of the earth’s three and a half billion people. Third, the annihilation of distance through the increasing speed of communications was in mathematical terms equivalent to a contraction of the planet’s surface to an area smaller than England measured by steam-age standards. Mankind was unprepared for this situation, unable to adapt to it, and largely unaware of its consequences. Fourth, this shrinking of the planet relative to the travelling speed of missiles and men was paralleled by a simultaneous contraction of the available living space and food resources relative to population size, which was now doubling every thirty-three years and quadrupling within the lifetime of a single generation. Fifth, leading this Lemming-race were the culturally backward strata of the population. Sixth, the world-wide migration from rural to urban areas resulted in the cancerous growth of cities, where more and more people were piling up in less and less space. Seven, an inevitable by-product of these runaway processes was the physical poisoning and aesthetic pollution of land, water and air, resulting in a general degradation of human existence, the corruption of values, the erosion of meaning. Eight, just as the conquest of the air and the subsequent annihilation of distance, instead of knitting the nations into a single world-community, exposed them to mutual deterrence at gun-point, so the conquest of the ether by the media of mass-communication, instead of promoting understanding between nations, had the inverse effect of sharpening ideological and tribal conflicts by demagogic propaganda. Nine, in the first twenty-five years since the inauguration of the nuclear age, about forty regional and civil wars had been fought by conventional means, and on two occasions the world had been on the brink of nuclear war. There were no indications that would permit one to assume that the next twenty-five years would be less critical. Yet the danger of man’s self-annihilation as a species was not confined to the next twenty-five years; it was from now onward a permanent aspect of the human condition. Ten, in view of man’s emotional immaturity compared to his technological achievements, the probability of his self-induced extinction was approaching statistical certainty. The task of the conference, as he saw it, was threefold: to analyse the causes of man’s predicament, to arrive at a tentative diagnosis of his present condition, and to explore the possible remedies …
Solovief paused and looked accusingly at his audience, as if they alone were to blame for the sorry s
tate of the world. Then, after a glance at Claire, he continued, trying to sound casual:
‘That is about all – except that I would like to remind you of a certain letter Albert Einstein wrote, in August 1939, to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a short letter, abominably written, which began:
‘“Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard which has been communicated to me in manuscript leads me to expect that the element Uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future … A single bomb of this type … exploded in a port… might very well destroy the whole port, together with the surrounding territory.…”
‘This may well have been the most important letter in human history. I think the situation today is no less critical than it was when Einstein wrote it. The instigators of it were an Italian, Fermi; two Hungarians, Szilard and von Wiegner; and Einstein himself was German. They had formed a sort of action committee. Of course it is easier to achieve unanimity in physics than in the social sciences. I wonder nevertheless whether it is Utopian to believe that this conference might result in the formation of such a committee of action with an agreed programme, determined on a direct approach to the powers that be … What the Einstein letter achieved might be called a miracle – a miracle in black magic. I wonder whether a miracle in white magic of a similar magnitude is beyond the reach of science… I realize that I shall be accused of black pessimism and rosy optimism at the same time. Let us start the discussion …’
There was a long silence. Then von Halder raised a hand and started talking at the same time. ‘Yessir,’ he puffed. ‘Very nice. But in your ten points you have forgotten to mention the most important symptoms of sickness of this contemporary society of ours, which are aggressivity, Sir, and violence, Mein Herr, and pornography, Sir, and the drug mania of the youngsters, and all these tripsters and popouts … So. Therefore we must first of all…’
But he was prevented from explaining what to do first of all by the noisy opening of the glass-panelled French window to the terrace through which the short, dynamic figure of Professor Bruno Kaletski burst in, with a suitcase in one hand and a bulging briefcase clutched under the armpit on the other side, leaving only a few fingers free to cope with the door. Tony jumped up to come to his aid, but Kaletski held him at bay by shouting: ‘I can manage. I can manage,’ holding the door open with his knee while he ferried the suitcase through it. ‘Mr Chairman,’ he continued in the same breath, putting the suitcase down on the floor and approaching with short, quick steps one of the empty chairs at the table, ‘I must apologize, but you know how it is when they suddenly want you for an emergency meeting in Washington – they are like babies crying for their nanny, and at the same time they act as if they owned you, so I apologize again, and as I see that you have already started, which you were quite right to do, I shall not expect you, Mr Chairman, to waste time with formal greetings, but I trust you will put me in the picture with a brief résumé of the conversazione that I missed.’ While talking, his busy hands were extracting wads of papers from the briefcase and, apparently all of their own accord, arranging them in neat piles on the table. This done, the left extracted a cigarette case from a pocket, while the right shook hands with his neighbours – smiling Dr Valenti and somnolent Sir Evelyn Blood. Then both hands co-operated in the ritual lighting of the cigarette, a kind of manual ballet, ending in a flourish which extinguished the match in mid-air.
‘We are all very glad,’ Nikolai said drily, ‘that you were able to make it at all. As for a résumé, my brief opening was in itself a résumé, and I am sure nobody wants to hear it a second time. You will find an abstract of it in your file.’
‘A vos ordres. Anything you say,’ Bruno remarked in a voice intended to convey what a good-natured, non-pompous person he was, while his hands, moving like a stage-magician’s, were getting the abstract out of the dossier. ‘Please proceed. I can read and listen at the same time.’
‘Otto was in the process of making a point,’ Nikolai said.
But von Halder waved an angry hand, as if chasing a fly away. ‘I have forgotten my point because of the interruption. Perhaps later.’
He was incensed, not by the interruption – once launched, nothing could put him off his stride – but because he realized that Kaletski was determined once more to hog the discussions. It depended on the chairman. If he was weak, or too polite to assert his authority, Bruno would talk non-stop in the discussions, and keep interrupting the speakers to cross-examine them, usually starting with: ‘Excuse me, but I am too stupid to understand the point you are trying to make. Do you mean that…, or do you mean …, or do you mean perhaps…?’ and so on. And if he did know the subject, he would refer to some long-forgotten technical paper which had anticipated the speaker’s point – or conversely, to some quite recent works published in some obscure journal which refuted it – and in most cases he was dead right. If he did not know the subject, he would start with ‘I am of course as ignorant in this field as a newborn babe, but I have a sort of hunch that…’ and as often as not his hunch had something to recommend it. Bruno had been a Wunderkind at the age of five, and was still an infant prodigy at the age of seventy-five. At five he had been admired for being intellectually so far in advance of his age, at seventy-five he was admired for being so much younger than his age. If his damned youthful zest was not firmly controlled, he would monopolize the discussions until everybody was worn down, and wreck the symposium as he had wrecked others. So it all depended on the chairman. Von Halder hoped that Nikolai had got his message – had understood his deliberately rude remark about the ‘interruption’. He refrained from looking in Bruno’s direction.
Bruno, on his part, was apparently immersed in reading the abstract that he held in his left hand, while his right was cupped behind his ear to listen to the speaker, and his thoughts ran on yet another, third track, smarting under the insult. That poor Otto with his khaki shorts and carefully dishevelled white mane would obviously never grow up. He would go on playing the enfant terrible with rude manners and a golden boy-scout heart. To think that he, Bruno, had almost been taken in by Otto’s last book, Homo Homicidus, when it was published a few months ago – almost. But then the fallacies and contradictions, camouflaged as it were by the rhetoric, were revealed one by one. He had listed them point by point – just wait for the discussion. Bruno felt like rubbing his hands, but these were otherwise occupied.
Meanwhile, Hector Burch was talking. Unlike Solovief and Halder before him, he talked standing, hands clasped behind his back. His posture reminded Horace Wyndham of what the British Army called ‘standing at ease’ on parade, which was not the same as ‘standing easy’; only the latter conveyed permission to relax. Burch’s voice was precise and dry, but occasionally a faint Texan drawl could be discerned like the mirage of a bubbling spring in the desert. He shared neither the Chairman’s black pessimism nor his rosy optimism – ‘to quote Professor Solovief’s own artistic way of expressing himself’. Scientists should not dramatize but concern themselves with hard, tangible facts. The tangible facts were, to quote the excellent definition in a recent textbook, that ‘man is nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism powered by a combustion system which energizes computers built into his nervous system with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information’. The emphasis, however, was on the word ‘complex’. Science approached complex phenomena by analysing the simple parts which constituted them. The simple parts underlying all human activity were the elementary units of behaviour. They were reflexes or reflex-like responses to stimuli from the environment. Some of these responses were innate, but most of them were conditioned by learning and experience. The future of mankind depended on the elaboration of suitable techniques of conditioning, accompanied by suitable reinforcements. Positive and negative reinforcements – in common parlance, reward and deprivation – were mighty tools of social engineering, which allowed us to look with some confidence into the future. But just
as the electrical engineer learns how to operate complex machines by learning all there is about simple machines first, so the social engineer – the behavioural scientist – studies the mechanisms of behaviour in simple organisms, such as rats, pigeons and geese. Since all behaviour, to quote Professor Skinner of Harvard (here Burch’s voice became reverential, almost lyrical), since all behaviour of the individuals of a given species, and that of all species of mammals, including man, occurs according to the same set of primary, physico-chemical laws, it follows that the differences between the activities of man, rats and geese were merely of a quantitative, not of a qualitative order; and it further followed that experimentation with organisms on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder provided the scientist with all the necessary elements to attain his purpose – that is, ‘to describe, predict and control human behaviour’. The last words Burch uttered with special emphasis, to indicate that he was again quoting revered authority…