“That’s Chad!” Donald raised his head.
“Right,” Norman muttered, and went to the door. In the foyer beyond, Chad was confronting two junior officials with an overdeveloped sense of protocol. On seeing Norman he pushed them out of his way and stormed into the room.
“Hi, Elihu—Donald! Christ, where did you spring from? Never mind, tell me in a minute. Norman, I had to find you and tell you at once.”
He put both hands triumphantly on his hips and planted his feet apart on the floor.
“Norman me old beddy, it looks as if we finally solved it!”
“What?” Norman was half out of his chair. “You—”
“I so testify. At least on present evidence. Elihu, can you ask one of your lackeys to bring me a good big drink? I think this deserves celebrating!”
He kicked around a vacant chair and plumped himself into it with a broad grin.
“So what is it?” Norman urged.
“It’s a mutation.”
* * *
They thought that over in silence for a second or two. Donald, annoyed at losing the attention he had been attracting when Chad interrupted, said, “That means change. I was going to tell you what they did to change me. They—”
“Donald, fasten it, will you?” Chad grunted. “I’m bursting to tell Norman the good news. I think maybe it’ll tickle his sense of humour.”
Astonished, Donald stared at him. He appeared to be out of the habit of being told to shut up. However, he shrugged and fell obediently silent.
“Ah, thanks!” Chad accepted the drink he was offered and took a healthy swig. “Well, you see, what happened was essentially this—for the benefit of Donald and Elihu and maybe Gideon if you haven’t been keeping in touch. Have you?”
Headshakes.
“I started off with these teams of sociologists and psychologists and anthropologists and none of them could tell me more than I already knew. So I said hell, maybe it’s in the food, and got Norman to hire me some dieticians and while I was at it I thought metabolic environment as well as external environment and insisted on some geneticists and—”
“And single-handed managed to upset my staffing budget for the entire year,” Norman sighed.
“A few months ago you were saying there was nothing more important in the world. If you’re back to penny-pinching I don’t want to know. As I was saying: way, way back at the beginning I decided I wasn’t going to be capable of co-ordinating all these people myself, so I asked for synthesists to link ’em together, but it wasn’t until just the other day that Norman got me one. Count him, one. When I could have used half a dozen and cut this business short—”
“Prophet’s beard, Chad! I did my best for you. I told you I—”
“Fasten it, Norman. Don’t be so touchy! I’m not blaming you for anything, just recounting what happened. So anyhow, the moment I got this codder I put him together with the geneticist we’d got hold of who had most offended his academic mentors in college, and they had a marvellous bull-session the whole of one night. I sat on it—wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. And they reached a conclusion.
“One: Shinkas don’t think killing each other is a good idea, under any circumstances.
“Two: everybody else, practically, does. They say they don’t and then they lose their tempers and smash in a few heads.
“Three: the situation here is a classic example of the overpopulation syndrome—poverty, influx of strangers who take a fat chunk of a small cake, lack of privacy, lack of property, et caetera. Port Mey is the only really big city in the country, I grant, but on the most favourable estimate it’s twenty per cent too large to escape violence and vandalism with its present standards of living.
“Four—am I keeping count? The hole with it! My tame synthesist explained to the geneticist all about releasers. Catch? I see a blank expression over there. A releaser is anything that triggers off a violent emotional outburst. It can be an insult, or it can be the sight of a shiggy taking off her clothes, or a fetish, or the areola provoking the nursing response—lots of things. Also, and far more important, it can be something we don’t consciously notice.
“Ever graphed the increasing sales of deodorants against those of commercial aphrodisiacs? A friend of mine once did. The lines ran virtually parallel. Pubic hair is there for a purpose—to concentrate a sexually exciting odour and provoke a reflex response.
“But we couldn’t manage without deodorants, because other body odours are also releasers. The scent of another male who’s been indulging in violent physical exertion is a releaser for the territorial-aggression response. Crudely, here’s a rival who’s come far and fast and I ought to send him back where he belongs. Every single densely populated urban community I can find has used disguising perfumes to counteract this, and then put on top erotic aromas like musk to restore the reflexes that the artificial scents have suppressed.
“Men in battle wear the same clothes for weeks or months on end and don’t get the chance to wash or scent themselves. If they’re penned up under siege they begin to crack, not through fear and despair alone but because they’re surrounded by other males whom they are not supposed to fight. The odour accumulates and pow!
“All this is a disgustingly simplified rehash of what my new beddy was telling this geneticist codder. So the latter says well, this is obviously a factor that’s been selected for on a perfectly conventional basis, which means it must be assignable to some part of the human genetic map we haven’t yet managed to analyse, so let’s go see what part and whether there’s an identifiable gene carrying the right secretions. We had to go up north and run a lot of comparative tests on immigrants who’d intermarried with the Shinka, and brothers, today, this very morning, we got it.”
He beamed around and gulped the rest of his drink.
“There’s a dominant mutation among the Shinka. I can’t see it, but my geneticists say it stands out a mile if you put a genotype from someone of pure Inoko blood alongside somebody’s who’s half Inoko and half Shinka. It makes the Shinka secrete, along with all their other bodily odours, a specific suppressant for the territorial-aggression reaction! You just walk into a nice, crowded, insanitary hut full of Shinkas, armed to the teeth and dead set on getting level with your rival males, and take a deep breath. You’ll be a happy, lazy, inoffensive slob inside the hour. It falleth as the gentle dew from— Excuse me. I’m a trifle manic at the moment.”
“Prophet’s beard,” Norman said. “Then they weren’t so wrong when they used to say Shinkas could steal a warrior’s heart out of his body.”
“Sheeting right they weren’t! And if anyone had taken that folk-saying seriously, I’d have been saved half a year of work!”
“Just a moment,” Elihu put in, frowning. “Are you saying a Shinka carries about with him—exudes—a sort of tranquilliser?”
“I guess you could say that,” Chad nodded.
“Well, why hasn’t this been noticed before? I mean, it must be a pretty conspicuous difference between—”
“It has. It has! Norman knew about it and you did for pity’s sake, and it went into Shalmaneser along with the rest of the data and he rejected it because he saw the significance of it and you hadn’t. I thought I’d only outwitted him when I put him back in orbit for the Beninia programmes, but he was smarter than me after all.”
“But if the geneticist said it showed up so clearly,” Norman objected, “then surely—”
“Ah, this is the bit I was just coming to, the one I said would tickle your sense of humour.” Chad was enjoying himself hugely. “Why hasn’t an expert spotted it before, is that what you’re going to say? Because it saved the Shinka from being made slaves in any great number. The Holaini, who settled down with the intention of sort of farming the Shinka as a slave-crop, lost their determination within a generation or so, partly because of interbreeding and partly because their aggression was being undermined by the company they were keeping. After that other slave-trading peoples avoided Shinka territory like the plague. They thought some powerful magic had been worked. Correctly!