“Jest a minute, Ma,” Jed thought, “Harry wants me.” He opened his eyes and the lights came on.
“How did he do it?” the colonel breathed.
“He thought them out, sir,” Harry said.
“He… WHAT?” Cartwright spluttered.
“That’s right, sir,” Harry repeated. “He ‘thought’ them out. Jed, get Ma on the line again.”
Jed shut his eyes. The lights went out again.
Colonel Cartwright sagged against the door jam. He moaned, “How long has this one been running around loose?”
“Colonel,” Harry said cautiously, “he does the same thing with radios, telephones, cars, anything requiring electrical power. He just shuts it off.”
The post commander looked stunned.
“That’s not all either, sir,” Harry continued. “He can ‘think’ bullets to a target.”
“Come in the house,” the colonel said weakly. “That’s an order, soldiers.”
Three weeks later, Sergeants First Class Harold Fisher and Jediah Cromwell were putting the finishing touches to their own private room. Jed sank down onto the soft mattress on the big bed. “Glory be, Harry, I jest can’t seem to catch my breath, we’ve been movin’ so fast ‘n doin’ so much. All them there tests with them tanks and them airyplanes in Californy and that other funny place. Ma thought it wuz kinda funny I had so much time fer jest a-sittin’ ‘n chattin’ with her. Now we’re here ‘n I ain’t allowed to say nothing to her.
He stole a proud glance at the new chevrons on the sleeve of his fancy, blue dress uniform. “Gosh but Ma would be proud to hear about all what’s happened to us. I purely wish I could tell her.”
Harry snapped up from the bureau drawer where he had been placing his clothing.
“Watch it, Jed. You know what the general said. Now don’t you go and queer this deal for us just because you’re getting a little homesick,” Harry warned. “We’re the only Army GI’s in this outfit and this is pretty plush. You know what the general said, ‘no talking with Ma until you get permission.’ Remember?”
Jed sighed. “Oh, I remember, rightly enough. Only I shore wish they’d let me just think ‘hello’ to her. I ain’t never been so far from her afore and its gonna take a heap of powerful mind-talk to get to her.”
“Never you mind, now Jed,” Harry said, “you’ll get all the chances you want to talk with her. Just be patient.”
He turned back to his clothing. There was a knock at the door and then it opened to admit a small, conservatively-dressed civilian. Both sergeants jumped to their feet.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the civilian said. “I’m George Wadsworth, first secretary at the Embassy here.” He looked around the room and smiled. “Your quarters satisfactory, men?” Both soldiers nodded happily.
“Good,” Wadsworth said. “Oh, by the way Sergeant Cromwell,” he turned to Jed, “we’ve just learned that our hosts plan to launch their manned Moon rocket within the next hour or so. Isn’t that interesting?”
Jed nodded vigorously.
“I thought so, too,” Wadsworth continued. “I should imagine that your mother would find this quite interesting as well, don’t you think, Sergeant Cromwell?”
“ ‘Deed she would, sir,” Jed said enthusiastically.
“Quite so,” Wadsworth said mildly. “Why don’t you just take the rest of the day off and tell her all about it. While you’re at it, you might bring her up to date on your trip. And there’s a wonderful view of the Kremlin from this window. I’m sure she’ll be interested in all this. Just have a nice long chat. Take all day. Take two days if you like. No hurry, you know.”
He smiled and turned to leave the room. “Don’t forget to tell her about your airplane ride, too,” he added and then walked to the door.
“Thank you, sir,” Jed called out after him.
Jed grinned happily and lay down on the nice, soft mattress.
“Ma,” he thought, concentrating harder than he ever did before, “it’s me agin.”
All electrical power went off over the western dominions of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Forty years ago, the Theory of Evolution went to court in Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan won a Pyrrhic victory, and the Great Controversy was settled at last.
Twenty years ago, controversy returned—this time not Religion embattled against Science, but a fight between scientific-political ideologies. The USSR claimed Dr. Lysenko had demonstrated the pre-Darwinian (Lamarckian) theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. American scientists laughed.
A decade later, Lysenko was “out” in his own country; and a young instructor at the University of Michigan started playing With worms. By now, several thousands of flatworms have run mazes, suffered electric shocks, had bright lights shined in their eyes, eaten their shredded relatives, bathed in solutions of RNAse—and firmly established the fact that acquired characteristics can be inherited (not to mention, ingested).
Although the worms are running—or wriggling, more likely-all over the “free world,” the center of activity is Dr. James V. McConnell’s Planaria Research Group, at the University of Michigan. In last year’s Annual, I reported happily on the PRCs highly unsettling publication, The Worm Runner’s Digest. Now Prentice-Hall has brought out The Worm Re-Turns, a sampler from the Digest (featuring more of the satiric than the serious side of recent events in the evolution of Evolution—but with a gleeful “compulsory introduction,” by Arthur Koestler providing a colorful account of the subversive behavior of flatworms).
“As matters stand at present,” the introduction explains, “the asexual transmission of learnt experience can no longer be denied, whereas its sexual transmission is passionately denied by orthodox science—which leads to the perversely paradoxical conclusion that the lower animals must have an incomparably more efficient evolutionary mechanism at their disposal than the higher ones. Thus Coli bacteria have the privilege of inheriting acquired immunity against streptomycin, whereas the evolution in higher animals depends on chance alone; the lower species are capable of profiting from the past experience of the race, in the higher species it is wasted.”
Which brings us roughly even with the present state of confusion—except for the contribution provided by Dr. Nesvadba.
THE LAST SECRET WEAPON OF THE THIRD REICH
Josef Nesvadba
“Nobody has yet been able to prove,” I ended on a flourish of oratory, “that man is not the slave of heredity, that in all he thinks he does not depend on his forebears, and that there is any other hope of changing him than by crossbreeding like horses or rabbits. There’s no need to give me that scornful smile,” I said to the doctor sitting by my side. “You believe that environment is the strongest influence on people, because you are living in a new society. But you can’t prove it by experiment, because you can’t play with people like you can with dogs or guinea pigs.”
We were in the night train; the heating was not working and so we were trying to keep warm by getting heated about our theories. There was a blonde of about seventeen sitting facing me; I could not see her eyes, but I hoped she was listening. It was for her that I was making such eloquent speeches; the doctor seemed rather a dangerous rival.
“I’m smiling because I have just remembered an experiment on people that might apply here,” he answered quietly. “I heard it about a year ago, from our pharmacist Hutzvalek, who had a peculiar experience toward the end of the last war.”