The Meddlers (25 page)

“I see!” Mike had relaxed then as the pieces fell into place. “Briant will play it your way, on the understanding that he deals with a man who speaks his language, is that it? He likes me better than any of the other people he’s had to talk to?”

“There is no special virtue in you that makes this so,” Sir Daniel had said sharply. “It reflects, rather, credit on the
Echo
that we had the wit to find a raw man who happened to have a scientific background and train him into the sort of journalist a man like Briant can work with. And having invested so much effort in training you, we are now ready to reap the benefits. Now, as I said, I still expect to get a story on the girl from you, and still expect you
to try to contact her. But in the interim, we need some hard background stuff on Briant and his immediate plans for the future of his work. I have arranged that you see him tomorrow at three
P.M
. Don’t be late. And file copy immediately after completing the interview. Good afternoon, Bridges.”

But, secure in the knowledge that Sefton needed him more than he needed Sefton at the moment, Mike had pushed his advantage and prised out of the Old Man some more information about the “advantageous arrangement” with Briant. And he had gone away feeling curiously uncomfortable about it. Was it the whisky he had drunk, or the mixed sense of failure and triumph about the way his work was going, or the way that Sefton was handling Briant, that made him feel so? He didn’t know, but he wasn’t comfortable.

And relaxed though he now felt, waiting for Briant, enough of the discomfort lingered to make him, when Briant came into the room, greet the man with a brusquerie he hadn’t intended, added as it was to a sharp surge of embarrassment at the sight of his tired face. He looks ten years older than he did at the press conference, Mike thought with sudden compassion.

“Good afternoon,” George said and sat down and looked at Mike with a thin smile. A good man, none of that sickening effusiveness about him that made so many newspaper people obnoxious, he thought. And then he spoke in his usual dry manner.

“Before we go any further this afternoon, I want to be absolutely sure you’ve got the arrangement clear in your head. Until the child is a year old, none of these pictures you get are to be published. Without that guarantee the whole thing is off. I’ve got to avoid any possible damage to the project during this very sensitive first year. Nor is the baby to be … to be exploited commercially in any way until then.”

He frowned sharply and then went on a little painfully. “I still hate the whole thing, that he will be used commercially. But I’m over a barrel.”

It was suddenly important to George that this man should understand that. From the time he had first met him at the press conference he had felt a respect for him, journalist though he was,
and he still had it. The man was a scientist too, albeit a non-working one, and the sympathy of fellow scientists was necessary to George. For all he was a man with a clear view of his goal and was not given to considering in much depth the ethical views outsiders might hold about his work, he was well aware that the ethical problem existed. But as long as other people in his field reconized his integrity, he could ride over the mewing doubts of people like Gerrard and his ilk.

“I know perfectly well how you must feel about it,” Mike said. “In your shoes I’d be sick. You shouldn’t have to depend on the money of men like Sefton to do your job. But at the same time, I think it’s vital that science shouldn’t operate in secret. People, even the dimmest of them, have a right to know what’s going on. If I didn’t believe that, I couldn’t do the job I do. All I want out of you is facts, facts about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and above all why. I’ll write them up as honestly as I can, and that will give Sefton pretty good value for his money, without splashing the infant over advertisements for baby foods.”

He laughed a little bitterly. “My God, it will! He’s tied me up pretty tightly too. He’s got all rights in every word I write for the
Echo
on your project. He’ll resell every piece I produce to Christ knows how many foreign papers and magazines. He’ll recoup his investment in you one way or another, while I’ll go on getting a living wage and have to settle for that.”

“I’m glad you appreciate my difficulties,” George said, and there was genuine relief in his voice. “Not everyone would. And that brings up another point. Sefton has agreed that his financial involvement shall be kept quiet. That’s part of our deal. He’s told you that?”

“He’s told me,” Mike said and grinned suddenly. “You needn’t worry on that score. It’s as much to his benefit as yours to keep it under wraps. If it gets out that he’s bought the baby—sorry, I mean invested in your project—it’ll throw doubt on anything the Echo publishes. It’s important to him that it should appear the Echo is non-partisan, free, fearless, honest, probing, the usual crap. When the paper runs my stuff on your work, every other paper on
the Street’ll spit. But if they find out how I got access, they’ll make mincemeat of him. No, you needn’t worry about that. It’ll be the best kept secret ever, I promise you.”

“Good. Now that we fully understand each other, we can get on. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do my best to give it to you.”

“Right.” Mike leaned forward in his chair and switched on his tape recorder. “We’ll use this instead of written notes, if you don’t mind. Saves time. What I’d like to have today is a brief rundown on your plans for the next few months.”

“A tall order. In which specific area?”

“Something that will make it possible for me to reiterate that the baby is at present living in a perfect environment. I’ve said it before, and I’d like the chance to say it again. This child is a fortunate one in many ways.”

“If you can tell your readers that, I’ll be very happy,” George said a little sardonically. “I’m not swayed by public opinion to any great extent, but the horror in which I would appear to be held by a section of the public does … irritate sometimes.”

“I’ll tell them,” Mike said. “And where you go from here. Or will it be possible to maintain this perfection for a long time?”

“No, not for much longer. We’re about to embark on phase two. Now we know that this infant has the temperament we thought he would have, that he has shown no aggression, both because he lacks aggression-making genes and because he hasn’t needed to, we can demonstrate the effect of environment on creating aggression. It is aggression that I’m particularly interested in, you’ll remember. I genuinely believe it will be possible to exclude dangerous aggressive behavior from human life when we recognize how it arises.”

“I’ll keep off that point, of course.”

“Because of the ethical arguments? How will the work be applied,
should
it be applied, and the rest of that?” George bit the words back and then let his irritation burst out. “For Christ’s sake, what do these bloody people want of me? When will they see that I can’t fritter away my mental energies on questions of this sort? When Euclid organized geometry, did we have to stop and think that it would lead to … to navigation and gunnery, that they in their turn would lead to exploitation of primitive peoples and weapons
that could kill at a greater distance? If he had, he’d never have got past his first theorem. Did Pasteur have to fear that his work might lead to a human ability to control killing diseases, and ultimately to the sort of death control that has brought us to the brink of overpopulating this planet with one species? When scientists have to think in that way, they emasculate themselves. Is that what these puking little moaners want?”

He stood up suddenly and began to walk about the room restlessly.

“Someone once said that Time is the destroyer, the eternal leveler, constantly trying to break everything down to its basic elements. That man is constantly fighting the ravages of Time, trying to build up what it breaks down. But the longer I live, the more I see that man is as blind and as unthinking as Time itself. Will there always be these attempts to hold back on genuine progress? Must people like me always be dragged down to the lowest common denominator of timorous spirits? Why can’t they be glad they have us? Even the superstitious religious brigade should be able to do that. That was the one really useful thing that man Gerrard said, that my ability to work as I do is as God-given as anything else. If little men need such reassurances as they find in blind belief in unprovable entities that they think guide their silly little lives, then why can’t they accept and believe in the value—the clearly demonstrable value—of what science does? I am not unintelligent, but I will never, never be able to comprehend these idiotic people—”

“Because they don’t think in a comprehensible way,” Mike said. “Not in your sense, that is. You assume that because you think with logic, that everyone else could if they wanted to, that all that is needed is the willingness to do so. Well, it isn’t. Very few people have minds that operate like yours, and if you wait until the sun falls into the English Channel, you’ll never understand them, and they’ll never understand you. But you’ll win. Scientists always have, and they always will.”

“It’s a small comfort at the moment,” George said bleakly and sat down again. He rubbed his face wearily then and produced another of his thin smiles.

“This sort of polemic production is getting to be a bad habit. I find myself making speeches about science when I needn’t. Instead of getting on with what we’re here for, I let myself be carried off into … into pointless perorations.”

“When you use words so elegantly, you make me fear for my future, Dr. Briant,” Mike said, a little maliciously.

“What? Oh.” George laughed shortly. “Thank you. I am not entirely of one culture, you see. I have a smattering of the other side, for all I’m a scientist. But this really won’t do. What was it we were talking about before I so ridiculously interrupted myself?”

“You said you were about to embark on phase two of your project.”

“Yes. Phase two. Well, we must now try to establish how aggressive responses are created in individuals who do not have a genetically determined aggression quotient. So, the next step will be to expose the child to experiences that are known to be likely to cause such responses. We’ll then be able to evaluate those influences, and thus teach people how to rear their offspring so that they do not expose them to the sort of stimuli that result in undesirable behavior.”

He stopped and then went on a little diffidently. “Look, it is at this point that I may be laying myself open to charges of being … less than kind to the infant. In order to discover which experiences frustrate him sufficiently to cause aggressive responses, he’ll have to be exposed to unpleasant ones. In a way, he’ll suffer more from them than the infant who meets them from birth. You see that? It will mean that we will be deliberately grafting onto his genetic inheritance some of the very responses the work is ultimately designed to remove. But I can defend this. First, I can’t get my results if I don’t do it, and second, well, he won’t be any worse off than any other person when he reaches adult life. We all show … well, certain forms of undesirable behavior which we demonstrate in response to the stimuli we meet. I have a foul temper, for example. I wasn’t born with it, though I suspect, from study of my own family patterns, that I have inherited a fairly strong aggressive gene from somewhere. But it overtakes me very often because of obscure stimuli, obscure because I never really know what
triggers it off, not in depth. I know that idiots anger me, but I don’t know why they anger me. It isn’t enough to say it’s just because they’re idiots. I feel, as a sentient human being, I should be able to avoid my upsurge of aggressive anger when it comes. Well, I can’t. And this infant, as an adult, won’t be able to either. But as I say, he won’t be any worse off than you or I or any one of a million others. It will be later generations who will benefit from the work we’re doing and not him.”

“And you have a conscience about it. Is that it? You’d like to be able to produce your perfect individual from this infant, instead of using him to show how other infants can be made perfect. You want to have your cake and eat it?”

“That sounds extremely unscientific,” George said after a moment, and then grimaced. “Damn it. You’re right, of course. If I were to be completely honest, I’d admit I care about the opinions of others, even those woolly-minded idiots I so despise. To be a prophet in one’s own time and country is never a position enjoying approbation. Is it? And I know—
know
, don’t merely think—that what I’m doing is of inestimable value. That isn’t arrogance. The knowledge is the result of clear logical thinking. I know the value of my work. I know it derives not from some special virtue in my conscious life but from the genetic makeup I have, that my ability to think as I do and work as I do is as inevitable a part of me as the color of my eyes or the shape of my nose. But I’m still human. Still want to be … be recognized for what I am. Still have a conscience. And when I think about that, I wonder how much my conscience derives from … from a true desire to behave in a genuinely scientific manner, and how much it is rooted in the more ignoble desire for the approbation of others. I have my dilemmas, you know.”

There was a short silence, and then Mike said softly, “You are a remarkable man, Dr. Briant. Yet I pity you, deeply. May I say that without offending you? Without sounding—oh, I don’t know—arrogant. Condescending. Whether you’re right or wrong in your thinking, I’m not really qualified to judge. But I can judge you as another man, like me, and I’m bloody sorry for you. You’ve got a vision and it must hurt like hell to see it as you do. And, Christ,
but you must be lonely! I’m just a second-rater, hung up on my stupid little personal problems, but at least they’re comprehensible to other people if I want to share them. But who can you share yours with? Oh, hell, I’m sorry. I’ve no right to—”

“No, don’t apologize. There’s no need. In fact—” George smiled then, as awkwardly as a child. “Thank you. Your degree of understanding is a considerable comfort. And as for your being a second-rater, you do yourself an injustice. You may at the moment be doing second-rate work, but the fact that you’re aware of it indicates you have a first-rate mind.”