It had been impossible not to react. Hatred bred hatred, and the ghostly white skin of a stranger had come to make him tense up momentarily and think “White!” however objective he tried to keep himself. Yet he had been pitched calamitously into love at sight of the whitest skin of all…
Afra had come out of it. “I am wrong. I know it. But I can’t just change it, presto. I can call myself a white bigot and feel guilty, but that’s still my nature.” She looked at him in a way that hurt him. “You and Brad and Schön — all together?”
“Yes.”
“The color and the IQ and the sex — all at once?”
“Yes.”
“Why did he lie to me!” she cried in anguish.
That required no answer.
“And you, Ivo — you’re lying to me too!”
“Yes.” A half-truth was also a half-lie.
“You were in this free-love thing too. You’ve had more experience—”
“The project broke up when we were fifteen.”
“Stop it! I can read you, Ivo. Tell me the truth. Tell me about you and Brad and Schön.”
“It isn’t—” He stopped. What she was after, she would get, however much he might temporize. “There were a hundred and seventy boys and a hundred and sixty girls. We were raised together from infancy — one big dormitory, no segregation between sexes. We chose our own rooms and roommates and there were no hours.”
“A commune,” she said tersely.
“A commune. But the adults always appeared when there was real trouble, so everyone knew we were watched all the time. It didn’t matter. Most of the kids were pretty smart.”
“They were selected for that,” Afra said. “The complete man was supposed to be a genius.”
“Genetics and environment and statistics indicated that there would be something like genius somewhere within that group, yes. Every day there was education, starting as soon as a child could react to stimulation. Maybe before that — I don’t remember. We were fed high-potency diets and protected against every disease known to man and given constant physical and intellectual stimulation. I think there were as many adult supervisors as children, but they only showed up for the teaching. Almost everyone could speak and read by the age of three, even the slow ones.”
“Group dynamics,” she said. “It was competitive.”
“I guess so. But they were always snooping — the adults, I mean. That was another game — to fool them. Rigging the scores, faking sleep, that sort of thing. They were so gullible. Maybe it was because they were all so educated. They had too much faith in their tests and their bugs and their bell-shaped curves.”
“I can imagine. What about the girls?”
He did not pretend to misunderstand her. “They knew they were female. A number of the kids were precocious that way too. But children four years old don’t see sex the same way as adults do. The anal element—”
“And Schön? That’s where he got his name, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. We named ourselves; we were just numbers to the adults. To keep it impartial, I suppose. That’s why my name is a pun. Schön — he got interested in language early—”
“How early?”
“Nobody knows. It just seemed he learned six or seven languages at once, along with English, and I understand he could write them too. I didn’t know him then — or ever, for that matter. I think he knew a dozen by the time he was three.”
Afra digested this in silence.
“And he was very pretty. So he roomed with lots of kids, and they all liked him at first. So he was sehr schon. I think the sehr means—”
“I see. Just how far can four-year-olds go?”
“Sexually? As far as anybody, the motions. I think. At least, Schön could, and the… girls. But he got bored with it pretty soon.”
“You’re still lying by indirection, but I can’t pin it down. How did Brad fit into this?”
“He was Schön’s best friend. His only friend at the end, perhaps. Schön didn’t really need anybody. I guess it was because they were the two smartest, though Schön was really in a class by himself.”
She was silent again, and he knew she was thinking of Brad’s 215 IQ. “They were — roommates.”
“Yes.” Then he grasped the direction of her thinking. “You have to understand — there weren’t any social conventions from outside. No restrictions.” But it bothered him as sharply as it bothered her; he was defending it from necessity. “It was all play — homo or hetero or group—”
“Group!”
Ivo shrugged. “What’s wrong with it, objectively?”
“I seem to have more prejudices than I thought.” Ivo was discovering how much more reasonable a shared prejudice seemed.
“But there wasn’t any challenge to that. It didn’t mean anything. So most of our energies were concentrated on learning, and outwitting the fumbling adults.”
“How intelligent was the average child, if the supervisors didn’t know?”
“I don’t know either. But I’d guess the adults thought it was one twenty-five, while actually it was 25 or 30 points above that.”
She became thoughtful once more, perhaps pondering existence in a group where she would have been barely average. But her next words proved otherwise: “Your ‘experts’ didn’t do their homework well enough. Didn’t they know what happens to children deprived of their family life?”
“It wasn’t possible to have—”
“Yes it was, if they’d really wanted to take the trouble. They could have placed each child in an adoptive home, or at least foster care, with the formal training and stimulation and what-have-you provided centrally. Similar in that respect to the way the Peckham Experiment functioned.”
Ivo tried to conceal his surprise at her reference. She was better educated than he had thought, despite what he already knew of her abilities. “They weren’t trying for family harmony. They wanted brains.”
“So they defeated themselves by precipitating an unrestrained peer-group. When parental guidance is absent, the standards of the peer-group take over early — and they aren’t always ‘nice’ standards. If the average American child is perverted to some extent by the increasing preoccupation, neglect and absence of his parents, and by the violence of TV and news headlines, and the viciousness of deprived peers that are his chief contact with the world, think how much worse it would be for the children who never had families at all! No incentive to excel at useful tasks, no development of conscience. You need a father in the house for that, or a good strong father-substitute. And the notion that only persons with masters degrees in education are qualified to raise children — no wonder they came up with someone like Schön!”