The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid by L. Sprague de Camp Read Free Book Online Page B

extended life span for the sake of a quick profit among the Krishnans. And the only record of Earthmen on Zá in the last half-century is a missionary couple, who are known to have been eaten.”
    Althea winced. Bahr added, “There is said to be a brilliant chief named Yuruzh directing their efforts. He at least would be worth testing.”
    “Gottfried my boy, wasn’t there a fellow on Earth who treated some monkeys so they became as intelligent as men, only more so?” asked Kirwan.
    “Yes, that was J. Warren Hill, an American psychologist—unless like many of his colleagues you consider him a charlatan. And it was apes, not monkeys.”
    “But it worked, didn’t it?” said Kirwan.
    “His system? Yes and no. He had a system of hypnotherapy called Pannoëtics, developed from some heterodox schools of twentieth-century psychological thought.”
    “What did it do?” asked Althea.
    “Pannoëtics claims to clear up all the traumata not only in the nervous system but in the germplasm as well. Of course, orthodox psychology does not yet admit that an alteration to the soma can affect the germplasm, but there is still some inconclusive evidence pointing in that direction. Well, the reason the original systems of hypnotherapy did not work was, it is supposed, that the human race had been civilized so long that the ancestors of all the present-day men have been subjected to frustrations and similar traumata for hundreds of generations. So one must by one’s hypnotherapy cure not only the man but a long line of ancestors, too. Therefore, when Hill tried his system on human beings, it simply made most of them completely and hopelessly psychotic.”
    Kirwan said, “Ha! And doesn’t that prove the Roussellians right about your rotten decadent civilization?”
    Ignoring him, Bahr continued. “But, Hill thought, if the germplasm of human beings is hopelessly traumatized, that of chimpanzees would not be, as they have never been civilized. So he modified his system for application to chimpanzees, with astounding results. He gave them an intelligence rating, on the Mangioni scale, of 134—which puts them up with the geniuses among Earthmen.”
    Althea said, “I should think that would be fine; you’d have ready-made geniuses to solve all human problems.”
    “It did not work out that way. Having no civilized culture, these apes had none of the inhibitions and cultural attitudes that made civilized life possible. In personality they were still apes: excitable, irresponsible, mischievous, destructive, sexually promiscuous, and emotionally unstable.”
    “Why just apes?” growled Kirwan. “Sure, you’ve just described most human beings.”
    “It is a matter of degree, my friend. Anyway, it soon became obvious that the ape-geniuses were a menace, because they used their intelligence not to help humanity, but also to plot to enslave mankind to a race of super-apes. At that point, the World Federation forbade Hill to go on with his experiments. They did not destroy the apes already treated, as that might have been considered genocide.”
    Althea interjected, “Might Hill have come to Krishna?”
    “No. One ape, thwarted in his plot to impose an ape aristocracy on the world, used his genius secretly to manufacture a quantity of nitroglycerine. One day, Hill’s laboratory in Cuba, Hill himself, and his whole ape colony blew up with a frightful explosion. Naturally, I at once thought of a connection between Hill and the events on Zá, but in spite of all my detective work I have not been able to find any. The few tailed Krishnans who have been allowed to visit Earth either died there or returned to Krishna no more intelligent than they left it.”
    Kirwan glanced about and said in a lowered voice, “Speaking of detective work, I found out what this cargo is. I pried open one of the cases and peeked.”
    “What is it?” said Althea.
    “Weapons.”
    Bahr spoke up. “Do you mean Terran weapons, guns and the like, such as