Mack Reynolds: Ability Quotient

“Why, you ass! Don’t you see that you, yourself, are in on the ground floor of this? You would be one of us!”

Bert looked at him with disgust. ” I did not ask to be. I had most of my driving ambition burned out of me back when I was heading the Elite Service. Since then I’m a little philosophical about elites.”

“Holy smokes,” Jim muttered, unwinding himself to his feet. “My old buddy sure does talk pretty these days.” He repaired to the bar, poured himself another, and leaned there.

Bert ignored him and turned back to Professor Katz. “And where do you stand, Professor? Whom do you back? Kneedler’s group, which wants to release your new mind expanding and teaching techniques to everyone, or the general’s, which wants a small minority to have it so that they can dominate the country, and ultimately the world?”

The professor smiled his rueful smile. “You have presented the case very neatly, my dear Alshuler. Very well, I will tell you. Neither.”

All eyes were on him.

Katz leaned forward, the tips of his finger together. “I am afraid that with the exception of Professor Marsh here, one of our inner circle, none of you have seen quite all of the cards.”

The general snapped, “What does that mean, Katz?”

Leonard Katz ignored him and continued to speak to Bert. “You are mistaken in one thing. About your Ability Quotient and the other requirements you fulfilled before you were selected. You quoted very neatly from G. R. Taylor and I am gratified to see how quickly you are developing an all but photographic memory. However, you should also become aware of the work of the French statesman of science, Pierre Auger, who at about the same time asked whether there are some operations beyond the capacity of the human brain as we know it. It may equally be asked whether an enlarged brain might not carry man above some threshold as yet uncrossed. When the brain became large enough and complex enough to encompass speech, man separated from the animals. Men with still better brains might have capacities which we cannot even envisage and as such would constitute a different species, even a different order of beings from ourselves.” He hesitated.

Bert said, “Kay. Follow through. You have the rostrum, Professor.”

“Very well. In actuality, you have most of the picture already, my dear Alshuler. The general is quite right when he states that not every Tom, Dick and Harry are equipped to handle an I.Q. of 400, nor a truly universal education.”

“That is correct,” the general snorted.

Professor Leonard Katz looked at him. “Neither is the general, nor the group he represents.”

“What!”

Kneedler insisted, “It belongs to all of the people!”

Bert said coldly, “And why should you and I be exceptions, Katz?”

“We aren’t.”

Silence fell.

The professor said, and there was a sad tone in his voice, “Gentlemen, we are to be the first species that ever presided over its own extinction. And that is the ultimate raison d’etre of this project.”

“Holy smokes,” Jim said, from the bar.

“Shut up, Jim,” Bert Alshuler growled. “Begin making sense, Professor.”

The professor said, “The human race was not… ah… designed for an I.Q. of 400 nor a really universal mind. I am sorry, perhaps, but it was not. Even in our world today a man with an abnormally high I.Q. is often not a happy man, any more than a moron is happy. He is often a misfit. The argument can be made that if everyone, almost overnight, was bounced up four hundred percent in I.Q. that there would be no basic difference. But no. We are animals who issued forth from our caves, or down from the trees, but a few thousand years ago. Indeed, in some remote areas of our planet, we are still in them. Neolithic society to this day remains on Earth in some places. A few thousand years is no span at all, in nature. We are animals with all of our original instincts. We are unfitted for the godhead.

“In the past century we have had an information explosion as it is sometimes called. It accelerates. Robert Oppenheimer, back in the 1950s, pointed out that human knowledge was doubling every eight years. To what do we devote it? Look at what we are doing to our world. We are destroying its resources, we are polluting it, we are devoting our energies to greater and greater means of destruction. What do we do with what intelligence we have; what do we do with the information we have accumulated? What would man, as he is, do with four times as much intelligence and soon a hundredfold as much information? I am not optimistic, gentlemen.”

Kneedler said, “But… but…”

Katz shrugged unhappily. “Obviously, we will all live our lives out. However, super-intelligence and ultra-knowledge is not for such as we.”

The general said abruptly, “You’ve gone around the bend. You’ve never talked this way before.”

“No. Of course not. Not to you, Bugs.”

“Bugs!”

Katz looked at Bert and Jim. “Isn’t that what the military people called him?”

Bert laughed. “Yes,” he said. “He bugged everybody.”

Leonard Katz nodded and went on. “You must understand, my dear Alshuler, that the biological explosion did not take place in the field of neuro-physiology alone but in practically every branch of the science, including my own, Gerontology. In the past it had been tacitly assumed that the degenerative changes occurring in the aging human being and animal are natural processes, yet when we looked for the evidence we found that it did not exist. Research in the past couple of decades has, to the contrary, shown that the degeneration is associated with identifiable extraneous causes which we are now capable of erasing.”

“What in the name of Cain are you talking about?” the general demanded.

Bert looked over at him. “He’s saying that they can prolong life—indefinitely, I suppose.”

“Yes,” the professor said. “And we have come to the conclusion—I and my colleagues—that it is just as well that the process must be begun before the birth of the child,” He looked to Bert ruefully. “Your children, and those of Miss Masterson will never die, Alshuler, except through accident, or possibly suicide.”

The silence in the room could have been cut with a knife.

The professor sighed and went on. “It was fortuitous that the two breakthroughs came almost simultaneously. Our race as it is could never have handled either an all but unlimited I.Q. nor could it have handled immortality. I leave it to your imagination the effect of the latter on the population explosion. So our project involved the selecting of our very highest Ability Quotient young people to be the parents of the new race. We sought not only I.Q. but all the other factors needed to breed the super-race, including superb health.”

Bert said slowly, “But what is the need of this ultimate education you are giving us?”

“The great need is that the new race have as beneficial an environment in which to be raised as possible. Your children, by the time they have reached maturity, will be far and beyond you, Alshuler. But compared to the rest of us here, they will be as gods and we Neanderthals.”

Bert stood and rammed his hands in his jacket pockets and began to pace in agitated thought.

The general stood too.

He said, “No.”

All eyes turned to him. “I have no intention of standing by while a group of double-domed scientists reads the human race out of existence. My group is going to take over this whole project. We’ll suppress this immortality nonsense. And we’ll take over the new perception increasing techniques and the speeded up education. Later on, possibly, there’ll be more breakthroughs in Gerontology and we’ll be able to extend prolonged life to our elite, even though we’re adults.”