18
PARTISAN REVIEW
could become rich by pressing a button with the result of killing a
Mandarin in China whom you had never seen, and without anybody
ever knowing about it-would you do it or not ...
?
Needless to say,
every one of us has, on some occasion, killed a Mandarin in his
thoughts.... " Gruber had paused, then continued with a kind of
suppressed enthusiasm in his voice:
"But now listen. The beauty of playing about with the synapses
is that we have discovered methods whereby we can make a man be–
lieve that he has
really
killed his Mandarin and confess with earnest
conviction that the victim had a gold crown in his left upper molar,
that he had met him at such-and-such a place, at such-and-such an
hour, and killed him in such-and-such a way with the help of X, Y
and Z, who were his accomplices.... Damn it all, if we were allowed
to publish our results, our colleagues at the American universities
would realize that we are ten years ahead of them."
Gruber had shut up abruptly and there was a silence during
which, as it so often happened at that time and in that country, the
listener realized that the speaker had realized that he had said some–
thing which should have remained unsaid. Their thoughts echoed
each other's, and each silent rebound reinforced their apprehension.
They were about the same age, both in their early fifties; but Leontiev
with his sturdy build and military countenance looked about ten
years younger than the Professor. The latter was completely bald,
held his head cocked to one side like a bird, fidgeted incessantly, and
had such a jerky way of moving about that Leontiev wouldn't have
been surprised if Gruber had suddenly jumped to the top of the
cupboard and continued the conversation with his feet dangling from
it-as in fact he had been in the habit of doing in their student days.
The two men had been on friendly terms at the University, then
they had drifted apart and for the last twenty years Leontiev had
completely lost sight of Gruber. But everybody else had also lost sight
of Gruber at that time; he seemed to have vanished from circulation.
The last paper he had published, on the effects of two little-known
exotic drugs, had created a minor sensation in academic circles.
Gruber and his associate, another young psychiatrist, had studied the
effects of tlle drugs on themselves
in
a series of experin1ents over a
period of three months.
It
was rumored that they had both become
addicts, and a few months after they published their paper, Gruber's
