Free The Call-Girls by Arthur Koestler

the points under discussion, but I do not intend to pursue them at this stage.’
    Dr Valenti lifted a carefully manicured hand: ‘With your permission, Mr Chairman.’ He was not only strikingly handsome, with his dark, insinuating eyes and faintly ironic expression, but also had a pleasantly melodious voice. ‘I am of the opinion, Mr Chairman, that Professor Burch’s illuminating remarks about the necessity of social engineering are of great importance to the problems outlined in your admirable opening discourse. But I would like to ask you, my dear colleagues around the table, who all share this worry about the future, whether we think that it is too Utopian to look for remedies not only in the domain of social engineering, but also perhaps in neuro-engineering – to use a term which I diffidently proposed at the last Chicago Symposium …’
    Sir Evelyn Blood, who up to now had been lost in some gloomy day-dream, seemed to come to life:
    â€˜It’s a horrible term which frightens the wits out of me.’
    Valenti smiled. ‘We are a horrible race, living in horrible times. Perhaps we should have the courage to think of horrible remedies.’
    â€˜What exactly do you mean by “neuro-engineering”?’ Blood asked, fixing his bloodshot eyes on him.
    â€˜I shall have occasion to elaborate on it in my humble presentation at our fifth session.’
    Claire, sitting demurely in her upright chair, wondered whether anybody else had also noticed a strange little pantomime during that exchange. Next to her, Miss Carey sat in front of a small folding table with the tape-recorder on it. When she heard Sir Evelyn’s remarks to Valenti coming through her earphones, she frowned with such sudden violent anger that the plastic strap holding her earphones in place slid forward and she was just able to catch it. It made a grotesque impression, as if she were clutching a hat in a gust of wind, until at last she pushed the strap back among the wisps of grey hair, in front of the stacked bun. But already earlier on, Claire had watched with fascination the violent changes of expression in Miss Carey’s thin-lipped, worn face, which she seemed unable to control. She certainly looked more like a patient than a research assistant, Claire thought.
    It was Horace Wyndham’s turn; his brief intervention in the discussion was wrapped in apologetic titters and giggles. He deeply sympathized, he said, with the sense of urgency in Solovief’s opening remarks which, as a private individual, he fully shared, in spite of the shamefully sheltered life he was privileged to lead in the academic backwaters of Oxbridge. But however guilty he felt about this, his own field of research by its very nature could not provide any instant remedies or short-term solutions. That field of research was concerned with babes in the cradle – starting with the first week after birth – and with methods of developing their intellectual and emotive potential in unorthodox ways. He ventured to think that in a sense the sorry state of affairs in which humanity had landed itself was partly or mainly due to its splendid ignorance of these methods. The price paid for civilization was the loss of instinctual certainties as guides of behaviour – with the result that civilized man was adrift like a navigator who has lost his compass and is blind to the stars. We eat too much and copulate too rarely, or perhaps the opposite is true; we impose toilet training toolate or perhaps too early; mothers are over-protective or under-protective, too permissive or too prohibitory, who knows what is best for that helpless creature in its cot? We only know the results, the finished adult products, which make this society as dismal as we know it to be. His own cherished and perhaps foolish hope was that the answer to man’s predicament would emerge literally from the cradle – from the particular field of