Free The Chromosome Game by Christopher Hodder-Williams Page A

personally can do to assist in the restoring of your own health he will, in complete confidence, do what he can. His promise of aid is, I assure you, entirely without rancour and devoid of any moral judgements.
    Here, then, is a brief summary of my own university’s working party on the false premises inherent in the Project:
    1. Because words, phrases, scenes from movies and so on which imply hostility or violence are to be excluded from the incubants’ education, the children are likely to appear to each other perfectly friendly until the pubescent phase. This means that the emerging adolescents will not be able to determine which are their friends and which enemies within the community.
    2.The prolonged repression of aggressive traits such omissions in their learning processes must inevitably induce will cause some personality-types to store up hostile instincts which will become amplified in their minds for want of ventilation. Thus, resentments etc that may accumulate will be subsequently expressed as violent impulses which the semi-developed personalities will be ill-equipped to control.
    3.The more intelligent of the incubants will in any case question the gaps in their education and seek the answers — thus defeating the whole object of screening them from such information. The knowledge would, of course, spread rapidly throughout the community and encourage the formation of competing groups.
    In view of the secrecy and urgency evidently surrounding this project I hope that you will, at very least, pass on to the President or his immediate staff the collective findings of experts who, for one reason or another, were not invited to join the Steering Committee. It goes without saying that Professor Huckman must, at all costs, have this letter made available to him at the earliest possible date.
    Cordially yours,
    (SIGNED)
    David Z. Dollenburg
    Professor of Civic Psychology
    University of Illinois
    *
    Trell-484 stirs in his sleep, then awakes. As he does so, an unfamiliar notion spreads through his brain, linking half-conceived ideas so smoothly and naturally that there is no shock, no ripple in his thought-processes that could in any way damage his mind nor interfere with what he has so far learned.
    As his eyes rove the plasticised dormitory he realises that he has become self-aware. The other children are not part of his own mind. He is neither imagining their existence nor is he mingled with them in a way that makes him indistinguishable. He is not part of a composite organism even though he is a part of the community.
    Naturally, he does not see it in this way and in those words. But he does know that he is Trell. He knows he is unique to the same extent as Eagle or Scorda are unique. And though he is only ten and a bit, this a moment of wonder. Still only half awake, he is conscious of a transition he can’t fully identify. To him, when dreams are still receding and reality begins to emerge from fantasy, this seems to be an amazing moment in his life.
    And yet, by the time he is fully awake and out of bed and on the way to the Ablutions area he is quite certain that he knew this all along. What had seemed, during those few seconds of semi-slumber, a definite step forward is already absorbed into his personality. So his perception is heightened though he has already forgotten the metamorphosis. For he’s sensed something peculiar about his environment.
    Something is missing.
    Although Trell is instinctively aware that there already exist certain clues that might go some way to explain it, at the age of ten he is not ready to reason it out. It is a Feeling … to be noted and stored and quiescently shrugged-off for retrieval at some future time.
    Yet, at the same time there is a sensation of paradox. Although he doesn’t know how it feels to be a grown-up, the urge to play — to enter into games that lack something at the end of them that signifies that there had been some objective at the outset — seems to