However, Leo Bulero had emerged from this room so that proved it was authentic big-time; Bulero would never have settled for less.
Heartened, he began to undress.
Somewhere out of sight Emily squeaked.
He redressed and left the side room, boiling with concern. However, he found Denkmal at a desk, reading Emily’s medical chart; she was off, he realized, with a female nurse, so everything was all right.
Criminy, he thought, I certainly am edgy. Once more entering the side room he resumed undressing; his hands, he found, were shaking.
Presently he lay strapped to one of the twin tables, Emily in a similar state beside him. She, too, seemed frightened; she was very pale and quiet.
“Your glands,” Dr. Denkmal explained, jovially rubbing his hands together and wantonly eying Emily, “will be stimulated by this, especially Kresy’s Gland, which controls rate of evolution, nicht Wahr? Yes, you know that; every schoolchild knows that, is taught now what we’ve discovered here. Today what you will notice is no growth of chitinous shell or brain-shield or loss of fingernails and toenails—you didn’t know that, I bet!–but only a slight but very, very important change in the frontal lobe… it will smart; that is a pun, you know? It smarts and you become, ah, smart.” Again he giggled. Richard Hnatt felt miserable; he waited like some hog-tied animal for whatever they had in store for him. What a way to make business contacts, he said ruefully to himself, and shut his eyes.
A male attendant materialized and stood by him, looking blond, Nordic, and without intelligence.
“We play soothing Musik,” Dr. Denkmal said, pressing a button. Multiphonic sound, from every corner of the room, filtered out, an insipid orchestral version of some popular Italian opera, Puccini or Verdi; Hnatt did not know. “Now höre, Herr Hnatt.” Denkmal bent down beside him, suddenly serious. “I want you to understand; every now and then this therapy—what do you say?– blasts back.”
“Backfires,” Hnatt said gratingly. He had been expecting this.
“But mostly we have successes. Here, Herr Hnatt, is what the backfires consist of, I am afraid; instead of evolving the Kresy Gland is very stimulated to—regress. Is that correct in English?”
“Yes,” Hnatt muttered. “Regress how far?”
“Just a trifle. But it could be unpleasant. We would catch it quickly, of course, and cease therapy. And generally that stops the regression. But—not always. Sometimes once the Kresy Gland has been stimulated to—” He gestured. “It keeps on. I should tell you this in case you might have scruples. Right?”
“I’ll take the chance,” Richard Hnatt said. “I guess. Everyone else does, don’t they? Okay, go ahead.” He squirmed, saw Emily, even paler now, almost imperceptibly nodding; her eyes were glassy.
What’ll probably happen, he thought fatalistically, is that one of us will evolve–probably Emily—and the other, me, will devolve back to Sinanthropus. Back to fused molars, tiny brain, bent legs, and cannibalistic tendencies. I’ll have a hell of a time closing sales that way.
Dr. Denkmal clamped a switch shut, whistling along with the opera happily to himself.
The Hnatts’ E Therapy had begun.
He seemed to feel a loss of weight, nothing more, at least not at first. And then his head ached as if rapped by a hammer. With the ache came almost instantly a new and acute comprehension; it was a dreadful risk he and Emily were taking, and it wasn’t fair to her to subject her to this, just to further sales. Obviously she didn’t want this; suppose she evolved back just enough to lose her ceramic talent? And they both would be ruined; his career hung on seeing Emily remain one of the planet’s top ceramists.
“Stop,” he said aloud, but the sound did not seem to emerge; he did not hear it, although his vocal apparatus seemed to function—he felt the words in his throat. And then it came to him. He was evolving; it was functioning. His insight was due to the change in his brain metabolism. Assuming Emily was all right then everything was all right.
He perceived, too, that Dr. Willy Denkmal was a cheap little pseudo-quack, that this whole business preyed off the vanity of mortals striving to become more than they were entitled to be, and in a purely earthly, transitory way. The hell with his sales, his contacts; what did that matter in comparison to the possibility of evolving the human brain to entire new orders of conception? For instance—
Below lay the tomb world, the immutable cause-and-effect world of the demonic. At median extended the layer of the human, but at any instant a man could plunge—descend as if sinking—into the hell-layer beneath. Or: he could ascend to the ethereal world above, which constituted the third of the trinary layers. Always, in his middle level of the human, a man risked the sinking. And yet the possibility of ascent lay before him; any aspect or sequence of reality could become either, at any instant. Hell and heaven, not after death but now! Depression, all mental illness, was the sinking. And the other… how was it achieved?
Through empathy. Grasping another, not from outside but from the inner. For example, had he ever really looked at Emily’s pots as anything more than merchandise for which a market existed? No. What I ought to have seen in them, he realized, is the artistic intention, the spirit she’s revealing intrinsically.
And that contract with Chew-Z Manufacturers, he realized; I signed without consulting her–how unethical can one become? I chained her to a firm which she may not want as a minner of her products… we have no knowledge of the worth of their layouts. They may be shoddy. Substandard. But too late, now; the road to the hell-layer is paved with second-guessing. And they may be involved in the illegal manufacture of a translation drug; that would explain the name Chew-Z… it would correspond with Can-D. But—the fact that they’ve selected that name openly suggests they have nothing illegal in mind.
With a lightning leap of intuition it came to him: someone had found a translation drug which satisfied the UN’s narcotics agency. The agency had already passed on Chew-Z, would allow it on the open market. So, for the first time, a translation drug would be available on thoroughly policed Terra, not in the remote, unpoliced colonies only.
And this meant that Chew-Z’s layouts—unlike Perky Pat—would be marketable on Terra, along with the drug. And as the weather worsened over the years, as the home planet became more of an alien environment, the layouts would sell faster. The market which Leo Bulero controlled was pitifully meager compared to what lay eventually—but not now–before Chew-Z Manufacturers.
So he had signed a good contract after all. And—no wonder Chew-Z had paid him so much. They were a big outfit, with big plans; they had, obviously, unlimited capital backing them.
And where would they obtain unlimited capital? Nowhere on Terra; he intuited that, too. Probably from Palmer Eldritch, who had returned to the Sol system after having joined economically with the Proxers; it was they who were behind Chew-Z. So, for the chance to ruin Leo Bulero, the UN was allowing a non-Sol race to begin operations in the system.