Mack Reynolds: Ability Quotient

When the other’s face was gone, Bert returned the phone to his pocket. He said, meaninglessly, “Bugs Paul.”

His drink was suddenly tasteless to him. He got to his feet and wended his way through the tables and chairs to the door. He passed within a short distance of the two kids who had been with Jim and Jill the day before. They were seated, holding hands across the table, and staring raptly into each other’s faces. What were their names? Clyde and Betty. He grunted. Had he ever been that young? He had gone into the war at seventeen; he hadn’t had much time for youth.

He took the elevator up to the top floor and entered his apartment, thinking that part of the treatment that Marsh was giving him must involve stimulation of desire to achieve learning. He had always considered himself on the lazy side, before, but now he was keen to get to his next course.

Jill’s voice called, “Bert? Jim?” from her suite.

He went to the bedroom that adjoined her quarters and passed on through to her place. He called, “Jill? It’s Bert.”

She was in her living room.

She said something, but the words came out so fast, so run together, that he couldn’t make them out. When she moved, it was like one of the early silent movies where for gag reasons the Keystone Cops, or Charlie Chaplin, or whoever, were speeded up to an impossible pace.

Bert looked around. On the room’s small desk were two bottles he recognized. He went over and picked up the green one and shook out a pill. “Here take this.”

There was a carafe of water. He poured her a glass to chase down the pill. Although he had already been under the effect of Marsh’s stimulants himself several times, this was the first he had witnessed it in another. It was on the startling side.

The antidote worked with surprising speed.

She looked at him and shook her head as though in rejection. She said, “You were moving so slowly. As though you were an old, old man.”

“Yeah, I know. Obviously, Doc Marsh gave you your preliminary shot this morning and your turn-on and turn-off pills.”

She came over to him and put a hand on his arm. “Bert, it’s fantastic. Since you were here, I finished a course in Comparative Religion and one on the Humanities.”

He nodded. “I know. I’ve been on the stuff for several days now.”

She said, “You’ve seen Professor Katz? What did he say? What did he say about Kneedler’s accusations?”

“Among other things, he revealed that we are to be given what amounts to all the accumulated knowledge (he world possesses. Not just the complete curriculum of this university city, but all other schools in the world that have material not available here. Even some behind the so-called iron curtain. We’re to be made into walking encyclopedias. By the way, he claims your accusation was incorrect. They aren’t particularly interested in my, in our, I.Q.s. Evidently they can be, are being, stimulated.”

She said, “Bert, Bert. What in the name of heavens is this all about? What do they ultimately expect?”

He rubbed his mouth ruefully. “You know, Jill, I sometimes suspect they don’t even know. I get the feeling from Katz that they’re being pushed, at least the real scientists among them are. There are forces working that they’re not sure how to deal with. Elements like Kneedler’s group—God only knows how many of them there are—who want the information released to everybody. I get the feeling that General Paul, who is evidently high up in the thing, possibly their liaison man with the top echelons of the government, wants it restricted to an elite. He being one of them, of course. Then they’re being pushed by the fear that the Soviets or Chinese will hit on the same techniques.”

He took a deep breath. “We’re guinea pigs, Jill. According to what happens to us, they’ll move this way or that.”

“Bert,” she cried, “I’m afraid. It’s so fascinating that I don’t want to give it up, but I’m afraid.”

He took her into his arms and patted her on the back. She came very willingly.

She raised her face and, totally unexpected by them both, their lips met. He had a silly thought come to him, two babes in the woods . However, her generous mouth had a warm, delicately soft quality that he couldn’t remember ever experiencing with another woman.

A voice behind them said indignantly, “Hey, old buddy, that’s my girl.”

Bert and Jill came quickly apart, embarrassed.

Bert Alshuler said, “Jill had her wind up a little. I don’t blame her.”

Jim said, “Holy smokes, Killer. There’s not enough of her for both of us. She’s too small. Share and share alike is all great between buddies, but there comes a point—”

“Oh, good heavens, Jim, don’t be silly,” Jill protested. “You’re not my lord and master.” She looked up into Bert’s face and there was a new shine in her eyes that irritated him. Damn it all, he hadn’t asked for this. He had no intention of stepping on his friend’s toes.

Bert said gruffly, “Let’s go back into the other apartment and have a pow-wow. There’s some stuff to discuss.”

“No hooch,” Jim told her. “They put a nice bar in Bert’s joint, but they evidently figure ladies don’t drink.”

Back in Suite G, Jim took over the bar. “How about me mixing a John Brown’s Body?” he asked, staring at the collection of bottles happily.

“How about a beer instead?” Bert growled. “We’ve got some thinking to do.”

“Beer?” Jim said plaintively. “With all this fancy hooch?”

“Shut up, you rummy, and bring the beer and sit down.”

When they were organized in chairs, drinks in hand, Bert Alshuler said, “The time has come for Machiavellian tactics.”

“Come again?” Jim said.

Bert said, “I continually get the impression in this whole deal that nobody is being straight forward. There are wheels within wheels. I get the feeling that everybody involved has a different idea of what the end product should be.”

“Even Professor Katz?” Jill wanted to know. “He strikes me as having a basic integrity.”

“Maybe. But he’s got something up his sleeve we don’t know about. And somehow I get the feeling that possibly General Paul doesn’t know about it either.”

“So what do we do?” Jim said, crossing his impossibly long legs.

Bert looked at Jill. “The theory is that we study the subjects that the computers shove off on us. It’s probably a valid idea so far as the project is concerned. They’d undoubtedly take us along, step by step, until we’d assimilated everything there was to be assimilated.”

“I can see it coming,” Jim chortled. “Old Killer Caine’s going to fox them.”

“What can we do instead?” Jill said cautiously.

“Oh, we can study the courses the computers give us. We’ll have to, or Marsh, or Katz, or some of the other eggheads who must be in on this will smell a rat. However, we only spend half of our time at our scheduled courses.”

“And the other half?” Jill asked.

“When this started, they lowered my priority rating on the National Data Banks to One, so that I couldn’t stick my nose into angles they didn’t want me to know about, at least not yet. And I suspect they did the same to you. But today I put it to them and Katz agreed to an unlimited priority—short of classified military and such, I imagine. At any rate, we’re now free to dig out anything in the National Data Banks that’s there.”

She was beginning to get it.

Bert leaned forward. “This big explosion in the field of neuro-physiology and related subjects started at least a quarter of a century ago. Some of the research people got a mite frightened at some of the ramifications and they’ve done a bang-up job of keeping a lot of the developments from the layman. But it’s all there, somewhere in the data banks. It has to be. Kay. We’re going to fish it out. We’re going to learn as much or more about the subject than Katz and Marsh and all the rest of them do.”