“No, I don’t,” Dolbe insisted. “No. You’re wrong; I’m right.”
“Well, then, kindly explain to us in what way it ‘worked,’ Dolbe! We didn’t learn one effing thing about Beta-2. And look what happened to those tubies!”
“Precisely.”
“Oh for sweet Jesus SAKES!” Showard bellowed.
“No, wait a minute,” said Dolbe. “Try to control yourselves, and listen to what I have to say. It is true — we didn’t make any progress with the acquisition of Beta-2. But — and this is very, very important — we did make progress with the project itself, as project. You don’t seem to remember, men — but those babies did not die. They did not go mad. They did not suffer. Nothing happened to them.”
“Naw. Except that we destroyed their minds.”
“Oh Showard, you’re worse than a woman with your damn sickening sentimentality! There is no reason whatsoever to believe that we destroyed their minds, or harmed their minds, or in any way interfered with their minds in a negative sense. None! You’ve seen their tests; their minds are perfectly normal.”
“Yeah? Then how come they don’t communicate, Dolbe? With their perfectly normal minds.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I thought the Lingoe explained it,” said Lanky. “I didn’t understand one damn thing he said, but I thought the rest of you did.”
“Never mind that,” said Dolbe impatiently. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t claim that the results of the experiments were perfect — only that they did, at last, show progress. Positive advancement. For the very first time, since the beginning of this project! Now I am not for one minute willing to just let that go down the drain here, no siree. I intend to build upon that progress — and I must say that it astonishes me that you men are not solidly behind me.”
“Dolbe, you’re such a shit,” said Brooks.
“Thank you. I’m very fond of you, too, I’m sure.”
Beau St. Clair glared at both of them and told them to for chrissakes cut it out, they had enough trouble.
“Let me see if I understand what you’re suggesting,” he said to Dolbe. “You want us to take the new volunteer infant that came in last night, right? And start it on the drugs we wiped out the tubies with? And then you want us to Interface it, whatever it turns into. Is that right, Dolbe?”
“I wouldn’t have added all the embellishments, Beau, but you have the general idea.”
“Aw, hell, Dolbe,” Beau moaned, wholly miserable, “you know what’s going to happen if we do that!”
“I don’t know anything of the kind,” Dolbe objected. “And neither do you. We have absolutely no way of knowing what will happen if that experiment is carried out with a normal human infant rather than a test-tube baby. And it was my understanding — in fact, I have referred to my notes on the meeting at which we discussed this originally, and my understanding is entirely accurate — it was my own understanding that the whole point of beginning with the tubies was so that when we once again had a volunteered womb-infant we would have had sufficient experience with the hallucinogens to be reasonably certain of what we were doing.”
“He’s right,” said Lanky. “I hate to admit it, but he’s right. That was the idea.”
“Yeah, but that was before we saw what happened to the tubies!”
“By god, Showard, you’re going to make me angry if you keep on like that!” Dolbe declared. “I tell you nothing happened to the tubies. You can go over to the orphanage any time and see them — they’re doing just fine.”
“Are they communicating?”
“They’re eating. They’re sleeping. They’re healthy. They’re up walking around, playing.”
“Playing?”
“Well… doing things. They’re not hurt.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Be that as it may, Showard, it’s time to get on with this! We’ve got a healthy infant, a normal ordinary born-of-woman infant, and it’s only two weeks old. The mother died in a flyer accident, and the father’s young; he doesn’t want to be saddled with the kid and was glad to have us take it off his hands… he had plenty of places to put the ten thousand credits, like they always do. It’s an ideal situation, if we move on it; there hasn’t been time for the child’s perceptions to even thicken up, so to speak, much less harden. And I want to get right to it.”
“Great,” said Beau. “Just great.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, Beau.”
Dolbe looked down at a sheet of paper in front of him, his lips moving as he read it over, and then he looked at them again.
“I’ve spoken to the pediatricians,” he said. “We’ve discussed each of the previous experimental subjects. And we are agreed that the most satisfactory regime of drugs is the one used with #23 — we’ll follow that one with the volunteer infant.”
“In what way was that the most satisfactory?” asked Beau curiously. “How the hell did they decide that? They all turned out the same way.”
Dolbe refused to discuss it, saying that it was irrelevant, and Brooks Showard declared that that had to mean they’d closed their eyes and stuck a number with a pin, and Dolbe sighed deeply. Sonorously. A good and weary man, overburdened by his incompetent subordinates.
“Gentlemen,” he said tightly, “whatever your personal feelings on this matter are, we have work to do. And we are keeping the government waiting. I’ve already notified the lab, and the drugs are on their way — we’ll begin this afternoon.”
“What the devil’s the hurry, Dolbe?” Showard demanded. “I’d rather get drunk this afternoon, and start in the morning.”
“Sorry, Showard. We don’t know what the critical point is, and we aren’t going to take any chances. We’re very lucky to get a volunteer this young; let’s not waste any time. In fact, if you hadn’t been drunk last night, we would have started then.”
“You really think this is worth a try?” asked Lanky Pugh. Lanky didn’t care anything about babies or tubies either one, but he had a low tolerance for failure when he was involved in a project. Lanky was accustomed to clearing up other people’s failures, not making messes of his own. He was awfully tired of this whole damned thing.
“We know,” Dolbe said solemnly, clasping his hands in front of him, “that there is some crucial difference between the brain of the normal infant and the brain of the test-tube infant. It isn’t possible for us to determine exactly what that difference is, in physiological or neurological or even psychological terms — but the scientists are all in agreement that there is a difference and they are working to identify it. There is certainly the possibility that whatever it is, it has something to do with the language acquisition mechanism in the human child. That is, it may be precisely the difference that we need. And we will never find out unless we try.”
“Okay,” said Lanky. “You’re the boss.”
“Thank you, Pugh,” said Arnold Dolbe. “It’s a pleasure to know that somebody in this room remembers that.”
None of them, not in their wildest dreams, not in the depths of their most alcoholic delusions, had anticipated what did happen. They thought they had seen everything, but they were quite wrong.
The baby tolerated the regime of hallucinogens without incident. No side effects, no allergic reactions; it seemed perfectly contented. (It still seemed perfectly contented, for that matter, even now.) They had put it through the regime, patiently spending the full four weeks the doctors insisted on.