I laughed, and was at ease, sharing the superiority of this little hawk on its high perch; or watching this queerly sophisticated terrier sniffing out vermin.

  He continued. "Next I undress them, and see them all nakedly huddled together. And of course naked they really are. That woman with the creased face and bloody claws-I take off her fashioned dress and corsets to observe the sagging belly, the flapping dugs like empty hot-water bottles. The paunched headman, stripped of all trappings, becomes a sheer grizzled human gorilla. That young bitch of the species, all sexed up for market, is now unpainted, unpermed, disheveled, grimy with soot and grease and blood from her savage cooking. And how she stinks! Yet to the prime young male, there, the slut is a seductive morsel. See how he leans toward her! His nakedness betrays an excitement which clothes conveniently mask."

  I was enjoying his fantasy. It appealed strongly to the terrier in myself. But a vague protest was brewing in me. I thought of you, so real in person; beneath your simplicity, so complex; in all your doing, so well orientated to the spirit. Did this young man, I wondered, suppose that by stripping the human onion of its coats he would expose some indestructible core of brute humanity?

  He continued. "The next gambit goes deeper. Take away from each of them all that is human. But preserve for identification some characteristic feature of each individual; for instance, that paunch, and that priestly dignity, and that lusty musculature. Let us operate on the asking bitch there. We must recreate the ape in her, or at least the subhuman, while somehow preserving the demurely lascivious expression of her whole face. First, then, thicken her, bandy her legs, tip her forward with knuckles to earth for support. Cover her breasts and her whole body with coconut hair. Cut away her saucy chin and her lips like fruit, and plaster them above her eyes to harden into a great brow ridge.

  Snip off her nose, revealing the septum. Forget there's meaning in her chatter (if there is), and hear it as sheer auditory sex stimulation, almost as heady to the male as her sexual stink."

  He flashed a gleeful look at me; as though the terrier, in his enthralling investigation, had spared a moment to look round and say, "Good fun, isn't it!"

  He said, "When you have had enough of her in this near-human repulsiveness, you can amuse yourself by shrinking her to a little goggle-eyed wire-fingered tarsier, scampering along branches and twigs. Then, if you like, see her (always with her expression of veiled bawdiness) as the primitive, undifferentiated mammal. Or remake her still more radically to be a monotreme. Now the young male will have to be content with a cruder and less intimate sexual contact, since he must copulate without penetration. And she will lay eggs. It is a delicate but an amusing operation to remould that marble and sculptured human arm of hers stage by stage back to the sketchy forelimb of a lizard, altering the set of the bones, the proportions of each muscle. And for those Atalanta legs of hers (which one easily pictures under the silk dress) we must achieve a still more radical feat of plastic surgery, crooking them, splaying them sideways, reducing the plump buttocks almost to extinction, and parting them to make room for a great crocodile tail. Now watch her go slithering among (or over) her fellow reptiles, while the male, chained by the nose to the bawdy smell of her, slobbers along behind."

  He paused, and I sniggered politely, but anxiously. Again he shot his terrier glance at me and said, "You think I am unfair to her; but after all, that is what she really is even now, under the knickers and the brassiere, in spite of the breasts and the vagina, and the human hypertrophy of the cerebral cortex."

  All I could say was, "But if you take away so much of her, where is she?" He answered, "She, of course, is what we see before us and what I have laid bare; but what I have laid bare is the controlling mechanism of the whole system even now." "But, but-" I said, and fell silent.

  He resumed his fantasy. "The game can be continued indefinitely. When one is in the mood one can reduce the creatures to the amphibian, the fish, the worm, the micro-organism. Or one may vary it by retaining their human shapes but seeing them inwardly as physiological going concerns. Under the skin see the blood-soaked muscles, pumping blood or air or words; or composing themselves to idiotic smiles or affected laughter; or churning food. The bitch, for instance, has a stomach, a muscular bag stuffed now with sandwiches and cocktails, which it assiduously mixes, till the pulp is ripe for passing down through the tangle of tubing that her neat belly conceals. Meanwhile that crumpled muscular hosepipe, seething like a nest of snakes, is probably dealing with a half-digested mess of chops and chips. And further still, the unwanted rubbish is collecting, to be ejected in due course into the socially approved receptacle. The creature also has a brain, a fantastically subtle texture of fibres, which even now are being activated in inconceivably complex and coordinate rhythms. Mentally these neural events have the form of (presumably) a perception of the young male as an eligible mate, and a using of every wile (primitive and sophisticated) to catch him. Meanwhile at the other end of her anatomy, stored in a recess convenient for access by the male seed, her egg is ripe. It is a pinhead; but it is a continent still mainly unexplored by science. Somewhere within its vast yet microscopic interior lie, meticulously located, all the factors for reproduction of her kind, and indeed of her own special idiosyncrasies, even down to that intriguing twist of the left eyebrow. And if ever she is so careless as to have a child, its whole physique and temperament will be an expression of the chancy collocation of genes (hers and her mate's) in the union of sperm and ovum; in conjunction, of course, with the appropriate environment."

  "You are very sure," I said. He replied, "There is no certainty, but the probability is overwhelming."

  Then he started a new gambit, saying, "Now let us expose the bitch's fundamental structure. It is an inconceivably complex tissue of the ultimate physical particles or wavetrains, say 1012n of protons, electrons, positrons, neutrons and perhaps other units still to be discovered. Thus the bitch keeps her Atalanta figure, her human complexion, her fruity lips; but within their volume, within the contours of breast, buttock and so on, one must conceive a great void, fretted by midges of electromagnetic potency." The young man paused, then concluded, "But in the end the game palls. It is the early moves that stimulate."

  *****

  His flight of fantasy seemed to have spent itself. Presently I asked him, "Are you a writer? You have a quick imagination, and you seem to care about words." For his ornate and rather stilted speech had puzzled me. "God, no!" he said. "I am a geneticist, but addicted to verbiage off duty." Then with a sidelong look to measure me he added, "A geneticist, you know, is a biologist who studies inheritance." I replied politely that his profession must be indeed interesting, an endlessly enthralling adventure. He laughed deprecatingly, and said, "Counting flies with black tummies or misshapen wings, breeding monstrosities from nature's well-tried normalities is humdrum work." "But," I said, "the significance of it all!" With a sigh he answered, "The minutiae are so exacting that one almost loses sight of the significance. But doubtless we shall someday produce human monstrosities, men with tails or two heads, or tricks like the waltzing mouse, or special lusts for obedience, or coal mining, or cleaning lavatories."

  Provokingly I added, "Or perhaps for the life of the spirit?" The words clearly jarred on his scientific mind, like obscenity in a church, or prayer in a laboratory. After a silence he said, "I have no use for words that are mere emotive noises without clear significance."

  We both fell dumb. Presently I ventured, "Tell me! What is your real aim in genetic research?" Without hesitation he answered, "To earn a living; and by work that is not too irksome. Incidentally, of course, impulses of curiosity, self-assertion, cooperation and so on find a healthy outlet." I waited for more, then prompted him, "Is that all? Is there no sense of a calling, or participation in a great common enterprise?" After a further silence he said, "No! That is really all. But greater definition is possible. The study of inheritance appears to be socially desirable, for the advancement of our species. And I, as a social animal and humanly intelligent, direct my social impulses to that end--so far as this can be done without frustrating my far stronger self-regard."

  The slow swirl of the crowd had swept us into an alcove, and there, cast high and dry on a window seat, we were almost in seclusion.

  I questioned, "What precisely do you mean by 'the advancement' of the species?" He lightly replied, "Oh, more pleasure and less pain for its members; and for this end more power over its environment and over human nature itself. That is where we geneticists come in. We seek control of other species for man's sake, and ultimately the manipulation of man's own genetic makeup, so as to abolish disease and all other grave frustrations, and to evoke new possibilities of pleasurable activity." I asked if he would maintain that up to our day science had in fact increased the possibility of pleasure. "Surely!" he answered. "What with the radio, the cinema, improved travel and so on." I added to his list improved warfare, industrial servitude, modern engines of oppression and mass production of stereotyped minds. But he protested that all this was the consequence not of science itself but of man's foolish use of science. "Man's purposes," he said, "are in the main still primitive. Little by little science itself will change them. For science will become man's wise ruler instead of his misused slave. At present the affairs of the species are directed by scientifically uneducated politicians, charlatans whose policy is determined merely by the need to pander either to the money magnates or to the ignorant swarms in the trade unions."

  I commented, "So you would have the scientists themselves rule society." He answered, "Social affairs should of course be directed by the relevant experts in each field." "And who," I demanded, "is to control the experts?" "Why, of course," he said, "the scientifically educated public. And scientists will have to see to it that the whole really educable population is educated scientifically. Surely that is the reasonable goal. Meanwhile, we must pin our faith to the gradual spread of the scientific spirit."

  I challenged him, "Are you really confident that science has increased men's pleasure and reduced their pain? Are you quite sure that the mediaeval peasant's life was less pleasurable and more distressful than the modern industrial worker's?" With an affectation of patience, he replied, "All that we actually know is that the wretches were undernourished, undersized, crippled by disease, hard-driven by the landlords and the priests, tormented by religious superstition. Perhaps they enjoyed their condition, but it seems unlikely." "On the other hand," I suggested, "their environment was perhaps more appropriate to their biological nature than the industrial environment. They seem to have enjoyed the round of the seasons and all the varied processes of tillage. And they were securely anchored to the conviction that--well, that goodness mattered." "Goodness," he retorted, with some exasperation, "is another of those emotive noises that mean nothing. And surely it is well known that today primitive peasants all over the world (and they must be very like the mediaeval sort) are only too eager to give up their primitive ways and enjoy the amenities that science offers." I answered, "Oh yes! The poor creatures are given alcohol and the cinema, and soon ' they crave these drugs, and succumb to them."

  Evidently my companion felt that he had proved his case, for he ignored my reply, and said, "But to return to the motives of the geneticist. He is mainly kept going by sheer lust of discovery. Intelligence, you see, clamours for exercise, even if only in crossword puzzles. But there is another motive. We crave power; and, being highly social, we crave it not merely in competition with others but also in the cooperative service of our species. At the back of all our minds, I suspect, is this sublimation of the crude lust of power." I provoked him by enquiring if the will to serve the species could be satisfied merely by providing it with more gadgets, amenities, titillations. He shot a wary glance at me before replying, "In the last resort, I suppose, what we want to give our species is not just pleasure, just any sort of pleasure, but the pleasure of power, the satisfaction of the cunning and resolute animal conquering its environment. Evolution favours in the long run the more developed types, those that show more versatility and adaptability in securing power over the environment. Yes! We want to give man greater power over his environment. We want him to be master of his world, and perhaps of other worlds; and of his own nature and destiny."

  "But tell me!" I insisted. "What is he to do with his power? What destiny should be choose?"

  The young man shrugged. "That," he said, "is not really my affair. Presumably he should choose to make the most of himself and his world, to impress himself as vigorously as possible on the universe. You see, between organism and environment there is constant action and reaction. Through the pressure of man's actual environment the universe makes man what in fact he is; and since, through automatic natural selection, it has made him sensitive, intelligent and versatile, he reacts strongly and effectively on the universe. What in the last resort he should choose depends, I suppose, on what his nature finally demands for fullest satisfaction, what in the last resort he pleases to do." I said, "For you, then, the final criterion is always the feeling of pleasure. The question, what ought man to please to do, is meaningless. Have I understood you?" He paused before replying, and again he shot a wary glance at me. Then cautiously he said, "In a sense the individual 'ought' to serve the species; for only in the advancement of the species can he find the deepest satisfaction." I asked, "But if he does not, as a matter of fact, want to serve the species, if he wants merely individual advantage and personal luxury, does the 'ought' not apply to him at all?" "In the final analysis," he answered, "it does not. The statement that he 'ought' to do otherwise merely registers the fact that he is blind to the greatest satisfaction, enthralled to lesser pleasures, which if he were wise and resolute, he would sacrifice. Apart from this, 'ought' is meaningless, an outgrown relic of our subjection to parental authority and the convention of the herd."

  A little wearily, a little sadly and without facing me; a little in the style of the senior amiably condescending to the junior (though I was twice his age), f he gave me a cigarette. The terrier had for the time l1 vanished, and in its place I saw a bored old hound. We smoked in silence, watching the throng.

  Presently I said to my companion, "You scientists, v and above all you biologists, seem very sure that in the end you will be able to analyse out the whole of human nature, leaving no unexplained residue." He replied, "Our confidence is strengthened every day. Anyone who spends his life on detailed, and on the whole impressively successful, analysis is bound to realize that the main mechanisms of human behaviour are by now as well established as the principles of engineering. Genes, Mendelian laws, the central nervous system, hormones, individual and social conditioning leave no excuse for postulating a surd. Of course much remains to be discovered, but by now it is quite clear that our nature is strictly determinate, and systematic through and through."

  "To the cobblers," I said, "there's nothing like leather! How can you be so confident that science cannot mislead us. It does, of course, throw a bright beam in some directions; but does it, perhaps, impose a deeper darkness in others? May not the very fact of your absorption in the minutiae of your special skill have blinded you to other kinds of experience?"

  The party was now disintegrating, and my companion rose to leave. He said, "It is of course possible. But science is a varied and a well-criticized discipline. And the beam searches in every direction. Success has been spectacular. It is difficult to doubt that the course of progressive thought will henceforth be set by science."

  As we were parting, I asked him to spare time for a dinner and another talk. Nonchalantly he accepted, and we fixed a date. As an afterthought he invited me to "look in at the Department first," and he would perhaps be able to show me some impressive things.

  *****

  In due course I appeared at his Department. He took me into a room lined with shelves that were loaded with bottles. In the centre and also under the window were tables bearing many rectangular glass tanks, each containing in miniature the appropriate environment of some beast under study, and in each of these artificial worldlets the creatures listlessly lived.

  My companion called out a girl's name, and from another room came an undecorated but not ignorable young woman in trousers and a little threadbare jacket that coped gallantly with her ample breasts. With a man-to-man downrightness she gripped my hand, smiling firmly. But her lips in repose were luscious, and her eyes, though superficially sparkling, were deep as the Atlantic or the evening zenith. Her hair, glossy as old well-polished leather, was drawn severely back; but it too was of a generous nature, revolting against discipline. A heavy strand drooped over one ear, needing constant attention. A hairpin projected from the large but disintegrating bun on her nape. I confess her presence distracted me somewhat from the lowlier fauna.

 

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