Damon Knight: Orbit 17

“Hell, Sam, that’s just what I’m trying to do. Listen, I’ve called off the meeting for today, but some bombshells are in the offing. We’re in line for some really fat, all but pork-barrel HEW monies, but it has to be spent on patient contact— in other words, direct, soap-and-water-level stuff. Bluntly put, all of us are going to have to start thinking like businessmen, and start seeing more patients.”

“But I’m a scientist.”

“Well, then, come up with a scientific solution to the problem. We’ve got a three-million-dollar payroll to meet in four days, and the projected overdraw is one million. We court HEW or we court the bank.” “Courting disaster” flickered through both men’s minds.

“Get a logician, or an actuary,” Sam said. “Hell, you’re the fiscal wizard around here, not me.” Guglielmo stood and wiped his face. Sam could not help but think that he probably sweated olive oil.

“You’re my oldest friend, Sam. We’ve seen lean times and good times here. Help me figure this out if you can.”

“Hell, man, what do I know about finances?”

“Just think on it. Brainstorm it. Ask me anything you like. Take any approach you like—take a scientific approach, a parascientific one, supra—anything you like—and keep all this under your hat, for Chrissakes.”

Leighton sank deep into a chaise and looked out the window at the lawn behind his low sprawling house. The Bermuda grass was as thick as rug matting, and the setting sun lit up the groves of trees in unusually bright shades of green. The stereo purred out unobtrusive Muzak, and a liver-colored Weimaraner dozed on the floor beside Sam. If I am a scientist, he thought, am I thereby able to know all things? Are matters of high finance amenable to scientific inquiry? Poor Vic, he must feel low indeed. He can’t use his cord, medulla, and pons to figure this out; and he doesn’t need any Rolandic fissures, it’s all praefrontal, prefrontal—ah, the frontal lobe—the acme of evolution! But belay that—a specimen of raw occipital lobe would be morphologically like the hallowed frontal. The beam, the stem, looks just like the prow. The simplest functions of the brain are stereotyped and imperious—but, but, he thought, it is the highest cognitive levels that are most susceptible to deleterious effects—the old Jacksonian doctrine of levels. Would not this highest level be most susceptible to psychomimetic enervation—hey, would overloading the reticulates with stimulants constitute a genuine electrochemical brainstorm? Some well-known psychologist wanted political leaders to take nonaggression pills—I wonder if amphetamines would work as a temporary smart pill? His thinking raced ahead—keep manicky patients down with Vais and Thors, nudge the sluggish ones up with Ellies and Rits—weak as I am on my pharmacology, why not expand cognition with stimulants? He pictured half a dozen key faculty people around a table, the security level in the room tighter than an Interpol summit, and the flow of verbalization stupendously cumulative, collative, correlative, exponential—tours de force a dime a dozen. He pictured the men glowing, neocortical mantles giving off visible halos, ions racing through neurons under exquisite pressure, 600 mgs of intellectual irritants fueling the meeting. Hell, the planet’s business could flow through such minds easily; it would be like robots stacking bullion. Surely a conclave of scientists could solve something as mundane as an overdrawn payroll account—or could they?

Surely this is a matter of linear, cause-and-effect sequences, Sam continued his silent brainstorm; we could tackle it at a statics and mechanics level. If that wouldn’t do it, on to probability theory and quantum mechanics; and, if it’s any tougher, we’ll do a Drucker calculus of potential, and whatever else we need—who knows what might come out of supercharged psychomimetic thought engrams?

He poured himself a small vial of tequila and drained it. No stimulant there, he laughed to himself. He put the stereo headphones on and disconnected the plug. He blindfolded himself with a handkerchief, switched on a recorder. “I have just ingested enough alcohol to produce some perceptible electrotonic synchrony. A shot of strychnine would put me under for good, after producing some highly abnormal neuronal discharges. Nicotine would alter the synchrony—shit, I want to think in multifactorial-transactional ways, so language is a problem. I cannot do other than speak linearly—I’m no eight-track speaker—I must produce subject-verb-predicate sequences. I have to talk and write in stimulus-response paradigms. But would I be able to think multi-linearly? Christ, is cranial wattage a simple, one-shot circuit? There’s got to be a way to skirt the limitations of Aristotelian logic—Korzybski, you nutty, saintly genius, we need you here! Stimuli go and responses come, afferent-efferent, input-output, chaining, chaining, chaining, lineal, lineal—hey, I’m no tabula rasa, I’ve got intricate microanatomical connections, dynamic microscopic electrotonic field forces ... I’m dozing... let’s see, one point seven million afferent neurons entering the central neuraxis, and two-thirds of them are for the optic nerve... ten billion in the entire central nervous system—"talk about macrocosms! So, how many variables do I get to control, two? four? nineteen? none? . . . lights! camera! psychomimetic action! I knew I’d fall asleep. . .

Leighton awoke, slobbering on his tie, a crick in his neck. The sun had set and the fat orange cat was at the window. The recorder had cut itself off, and the tiny microphone lay in Leighton’s lap. He stirred, and found the brief neck pain excruciating. It’s easy to say my neck hurts, he thought, but just what the hell is pain anyway? Malaise, stitch-in-the-side pain, pain-with-a-thou-sand-teeth, lancinate, kill by inches, a reverse-barb shaft thrust transversely into the hydraulic neuronal duct?

He began to concentrate again, a kind of free association, clearly and purposefully introspective. He recalled William James writing, “I am a psychologist, and my method is introspection.” ‘‘I am cerebral, ” Leighton spoke again into the mike. “I am proprioceptive, my life is in my genitals about once a week, and my frontal lobes get obliterated in orgasm, but I am basically cerebral. My brain is in a hard bony box, supported by fibrous meningeal coverings and partitions, buoyed up by cerebrospinal fluid, and magically separated from the bloodstream—what a competent homeostasis! I wear a beautiful cortical mantle. Mass actions are for salamanders—I am infinitely individuated—am I not neurobiotaxic? If so, I need almost no neurons. I am lost, deliciously lost, in a de facto neuronal macrocosm, yet my nerve cells are biologic computers, synthesizing tremendous amounts of conflicting information, and delivering unambiguous outputs. And, by Christ, I may have to talk and write linearly, but my thinking is global: three-d, four-d, five-d, sum of big X in dimensions. I’ve got cascading force-fields, yes, even the holy, cosmic, Newtonian aethers, expanding reticular blastulae, topologic edifices, and clusters of exponential spears racing outward in all azimuths, like an exploding air-rocket, orange against a black sky—”

He snapped off the recorder and slapped his thigh. The dog started, then lowered its muzzle back to the floor. Enough ideational masturbation, Sam thought, walking up a shallow stylobate into the main hall of the house, what I need is a little incubation time—a nice long refractory period, say eight hours. The dog wagged its tail and headed for a favorite sofa. Time to reduce my mental rpm’s, Sam thought, I don’t want to go anywhere near the red line. Upshifts at three thousand for the rest of the night. No downshifts, all meshes silent and synchronized. He undressed and splashed his face with cold water. Drying his face slowly, repeatedly, with a huge towel, he let himself begin to wind down to lethargy. Maybe I can get another fifty-two-beat heart count tonight, he thought. And, he thought decisively, I’ll do the psychomimetic bit and brainstorm the hospital’s fiscal crisis alone. I’ll be the man with the golden reticulates.