"Yes?"

"And here's some bad news for us shrinks." He winks at me. "Hospital admissions for depression, chemical dependence, anxiety reduced by seventy-nine percent."

"Yes?"

"And get this." He leans close. "AIDS by seventy-six percent."

"You've reduced AIDS by a heavy-sodium additive?"

"Not directly, but the numbers are there."

"How, if not directly?"

He sinks back, eyes me speculatively, turns up "Wiener Blut." "I'll give you the easy answer first."

"All right."

"By reducing anal intercourse and drug use, shooting up with needles. That's how the LAV-HTLV-III virus is mainly transmitted, right?"

"Right. But-"

"Here comes the interesting part. Why we need you. Tom, hear this. We don't have stats for obvious reasons, but in the sodium treatment areas we've mentioned, the incidence of homosexuality has declined dramatically."

"How could you know such a thing?"

Bob shrugs. "Clinical impressions. How many homosexuals have you treated lately? And a couple of interesting items. The Gay and Lesbian Club at L.S.U. has disbanded. Voluntarily. Tom, every gay bar and bathhouse in Baton Rouge is out of business, and not from police pressure. And a tiny but telling little item: the sale of gay and S.M. video cassettes is down almost to zero. Not from censorship, Tom! From lack of interest."

"How does that come to pass, Bob?"

He appraises me. "I think you might have an idea, Tom, but I'm asking the questions, remember?"

"Then ask."

"Tom, how much do you know about chimpanzees?"

"Not much. Some. I did some work with them."

I know. Tom, how many homosexual chimpanzees did you run across?"

"Then are you saying that you're zapping homosexuals with heavy sodium and regressing them to lower primates?"

He shakes his head, wags a finger. "You know better, Doctor. That's why we want you. For one thing, these same subjects have an average twenty percent increase in I.Q.-plus an almost total memory recall which makes you and me look like dummies. We ain't talking chimps, Tom."

"I know," I say absently. "They can tell you where St. Louis and Cut Off are."

"What?" he says sharply. "Oh, map and graphic recall. Yes, sir, they've got it. We're not zapping them. No zombies here. Far from it."

"Then what are you doing?"

He turns down "Wiener Blut." "You know what?"

"What?"

"I have an idea you might know more than we."

"Is that so?"

"That's so, but I'll tell you how much we do know."

"All right."

"We know that the heavy ion inhibits dopamine production in the prefrontal cortex-which as you know is probably the chemical basis of schizophrenia. We know it increases endorphin production, which as you know gives you a drug-free natural high. We know it suppresses the cortical response to bombardment from the limbic system, which again you know is the main source of anxiety. Tom, we can see it! In a PETscanner! We can see the glucose metabolism of the limbic system raising all kinds of hell and getting turned off like a switch by the cortex. We can see the locus ceruleus and the hypothalamus kicking in, libido increasing-healthy heterosexual libido-and depression decreasing-we can see it! And here's the damnedest thing, Tom!-here's where we need your help-we need your help because of your expertise with the CORTscan, your baby-we know and you know that there are certain inhibitory functions in the cortex-you call it superego, Freudian forgetting-which wipe out most memory recall from the temporal lobe. Tom-!" He's as exhilarated now as "Wiener Blut." "Those suckers can remember everything. We can see it both on PET and SPECT. Ask them a question: What did you do on your fifth birthday? and, Tom, I'm telling you, it's like watching the mainframe at NIH scanning its data bank. They retrieve it! If it's in the neurones, they get it! What do you think?"

"I'm impressed."

"Then be the devil's advocate. Attack us from your own expertise. Name one thing wrong we're doing." Both Bob and "Wiener Blut" wind up with a triumphant chord.

"Well, there's the technicality of civil rights. You're assaulting the cortex of an individual without the knowledge or consent of the assaultee."

"Assault!" He leans forward again, eyes blazing. "Let me tell you about assault and who's assaulted!"

"All right."

He points north, past Grand Mer. "Do you know what's up the river fifteen miles or so?"

"Sure. Angola."

"Right. Angola. The Louisiana State Prison Farm. Ten thousand murderers, rapists, armed robbers, society's assholes, who would as soon kill you as spit on you. That's where the assault comes from."

"So?"

"So, two little numbers, Tom. One: The admissions to Angola for violent crime from the treatment area have declined seventy-two percent since Blue Boy began."

"Blue Boy?"

"The name of our little pilot program."

"I see."

"Two: The incidence of murder, knifings, and homosexual rape in Angola, which is of course in the treatment area, has-declined-to-zero." He pauses. "Zero," he whispers.

"So why do you need me? It sounds like your pilot has succeeded."

"I'll tell you why we need you." He turns over the cassette. Here comes "Tales from the Vienna Woods." "First, you know as much about the action of radioactive isotopes on neurones as anyone-you're the pioneer. But I need you for something else."

"Yes?"

"Tom, as you intimated a moment ago, we've got an interesting philosophical question here. Both my colleagues and I need some dialoguing on the subject and we think you could contribute a very creative input."

The Strauss is very lovely. The Feliciana woods here, bathed as they are in the gold autumn sunlight, are surely as lovely as the Vienna woods. "What creative input do you have in mind, Bob?"

"Okay, try this for size. What we have here is a philosophical question. Yes, you're right, though your language was pejorative. Yes, we're treating cortical neurones by a water-soluble additive, just as we treated dental enamel by fluoride in the water fifty years ago-without the permission or knowledge of the treated. The courts upheld us then, probably will again. But that's not the question. The real, the fascinating, question is this. What do you think of this hypothesis, which is gaining ground among psychologists, anthropologists, neurologists, to mention a few disciplines-as well as among academics and in liberal-arts circles-even among our best novelists!-Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book setting forth this very thesis." He eyes me. "You already know, don't you?"

"Tell me."

"The hypothesis, Tom," says Bob, speaking slowly, "is that at least a segment of the human neocortex and of consciousness itself is not only an aberration of evolution but is also the scourge and curse of life on this earth, the source of wars, insanities, perversions-in short, those very pathologies which are peculiar to Homo sapiens. As Vonnegut put it"-his arm is on the back of the seat; I feel his pointy, jokey finger sticking into my shoulder -"the only trouble with Homo sapiens is that parts of our brains are too fucking big. What do you say to that?"

I don't say anything. He has gone elegaic. We're in the golden woods of old Vienna.

"Homo sapiens sapiens" he murmurs, lilting. "Or Homo sap sap." Reviving, he pokes me again. "We're not zapping the big brain, Tom. To put it in your terms, what we're doing is cooling the superego which, as you of all people know, can make you pretty miserable, and strengthening the ego by increasing endorphin production. No drugs, Tom-except our own-we're talking natural highs. Energies are freed up instead of being inhibited!" Here comes another poke. "News item: L.S.U. has not lost a football game in three years, has not had a point scored against them, and get this, old Tom, has not given up a single first down this season. As you well know, nobody talks in Louisiana about anything else." A final poke. "News item, Tom-not as well known but quite as significant: L.S.U. engineering students no longer use calculators. They're as obsolete as slide rules. They've got their own built-in calculators."

I look at him. "Do you mean to tell me-"

"All I mean to tell you is that cortical control has unlimited possibilities, once cortical hang-ups are eliminated. Just imagine a team that is always psyched up but never psyched out."

When Bob Comeaux says "hang-ups," there is just a faint echo of his Long Island City origins in "hang-gups."

"That is remarkable."

"Any questions, Doctor?" He's made his case and looks at his watch even as I'm looking at mine.

"Why don't you use some?" I ask him.

He looks right and left for eavesdroppers. "Between you and me I have-in my own family, Tom."

"I see."

"You got it, Doc?"

"I was just wondering about the decline in teen pregnancies. The mechanism of that escapes me."

He lights up. "Tom, it's beautiful. It's beautiful because it's so simple. All great scientific breakthroughs are simple. One change and presto, all the old hassles, twelve-year-olds getting knocked up, contraceptives in school, abortion, child abuse-all the old political and religious hassles are simply bypassed, left behind. Did you ever notice that the great controversies in history are never settled, that they are simply left behind? Somebody has a new idea and the old quarrels become irrelevant."

"What's the new idea?"

"It's been under our nose, so close we couldn't see it for looking. You'll kick yourself for asking."

"Tell me anyway."

"We simply change cycles, Tom."

"Change cycles."

"Sure, from menstrual to estrus. Look, Tom-"

"Yes?"

He rattles off the answer like a talk-show guest who's used to the question. "You know and I know the difference between a woman's cycle and most of female mammals'."

"Yes."

"The human female can conceive during twenty of the twenty-eight days of her cycle. Any other female mammal can only conceive during estrus-say, eight days out of a hundred and eighty."

"So?"

"As I like to say, our sister Homo saps, God bless them, are in heat seventy-five percent of the time, and what I say is hurray for them and hurray for us. But any other lady mammal is in heat, say, nine percent of the time. Tom, the numbers tell the story. All you have to do with the hypothalamus is lack it into the estrus cycle and you've got a marvelous built-in natural population control. Then it's merely a matter of controlling a few days of estrus-hell, all you have to do is add one dose of progesterone twice a year to the school cafeteria diet and that's the end of it-goodbye hassles, goodbye pills, rubbers, your friendly abortionist. Goodbye promiscuity, goodbye sex ed-who needs it? Mom and Dad love it, the kids love it, and the state saves millions. Family life is improved, Tom."

"You mean you've tried it?"

"In one junior high school in Baton Rouge, five hundred black girls, year before last forty percent knocked up by age thirteen, last year one girl pregnant-one girl!-and why? because her mamma was packing her lunch box and she missed her progesterone during estrus. And, Tom, get this: a one hundred percent improvement in ACT scores in computation and memory recall in these very subjects."

"How about language?"

"Language?"

"You know, reading and writing. Like reading a book. Like writing a sentence."

"You son of a gun." Bob gives me another poke. "You don't miss much, do you? You're quite right. And for a good reason, as you must also know. We're in a different age of communication-out of McGuffey Readers and writing a theme on 'what I did last summer.' Tom, these kids are way past comic books and Star Wars. They're into graphic and binary communication-which after all is a lot more accurate than once upon a time there lived a wicked queen."

"You mean they use two-word sentences."

"You got it. And using a two-word sentence, you know what you can get out of them?"

"What?"

"They can rattle off the total exports and imports of the port of Baton Rouge-like a spread sheet-or give 'em pencil and paper and they'll give you a graphic of the tributaries of the Red River."

"How about the drop in crime and unemployment?"

Bob smiles radiantly. "Tom, would you laugh at me if I told you what we've done is restore the best of the Southern Way of Life? Would you think that too corny?"

"Well-"

"Well, never mind. Just the facts, ma'am. Here are the facts: Instead of a thousand young punks hanging around the streets in northwest Baton Rouge, looking for trouble, stoned out, ready to mug you, break into your house, rape your daughter, packed off to Angola where they cost you twenty-five thousand a year, do you want to know what they're doing? Doing not because somebody forces them-we ain't talking Simon Legree here, boss-but doing of their own accord?"

"What?"

"Cottage industries, garden plots, but mainly apprenticeships."

"Apprenticeships?"

"Plumber's helpers, mechanic's helpers, gardeners, cook's helpers, waiters, handymen, fishermen-Tom, Baton Rouge is the only city in the U.S. where young blacks are outperforming the Vietnamese and Hispanics."

"You're not talking about vo-tech training."

"I'm talking apprenticeship. What would you do if you're running an Exxon station and a young man or woman shows up and makes himself useful for gratis, keeps the place clean, is obviously honest and industrious and willing. I'll tell you what you'd do, because I know. You'd hire him. You want to know what we're talking about?"

"What?"