The laity doesn’t realize how crucial patience is in the pursuit of science. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand dead ends, no matter. You go on, and as long as funding holds out, you try the ten thousand and first. That may be the one the works. When jealous, covetous Nature opens the door just a crack and gives you a glimpse of something new.

I voted against hiring Ritter. Others voted against him because he was so young, a good five years younger than the youngest member of the team. I voted against him because I thought his  barely controlled energy would be disruptive and possibly even destructive. We would all soon enough find out that I was both very right, and very wrong.

No need to bother you with the details of the project he was hired into. Though important, even critical, to our national defense, this project along with so many others involving our best minds ceased to have any relevance after the events we all now refer to as D-Day. Very soon after that awful time, as the effects began to accumulate, our lab was directed to stop everything and shift our focus to the dreaded D-Syndrome.

To give him credit, Ritter was the source of the first discovery of a workable, partially protective measure against the Syndrome. At an early staff meeting, when we were all flailing about, none of us really with any idea how to proceed, he had, with totally cool assurance, asked Director Williams’ permission to fly to Sikkim, a small province of India, between Nepal and Bhutan. He had, he said, a friend there from graduate school, with whom he had been in email contact. The friend had allegedly observed that drinkers of a certain rare tea native to Sikkim seemed less affected by the D-Syndrome. Young Dr. Ritter wanted to go there, collect cuttings and bring them back for testing.

Several of us spoke up to ask why not just have his friend ship them to us. Ritter argued that he should also observe first-hand the alleged effects in situ. Director Williams acceded, and next day Ritter was on his way to Sikkim.

In retrospect it is still baffling, sometimes maddening, to contemplate how quickly everyone, everyone in the world had accommodated the neurological, social, cultural disaster represented by the Syndrome. How quickly we all learned to cope with the sudden appearance of the Daemon. How did we learn to tolerate the possible, unpredictable disruption of any discourse by this calm, easy voice suddenly coming from one’s own mouth, saying over and over, "No, no. Not this way. Wrong path, wrong path." In every mouth, in every country, in every language, always the same damning admonition, from where? Nobody knew. Somebody called it the "Daemon." So, the Daemon Syndrome.

Always, always, the same words. And, whatever their source, that source was never responsive. The words could be recorded, which many did over and over, as if to prove their realness. Yes, they were real, spoken words. But where did they come from? Brain scans during the very speaking of the damnable syllables showed none of the usual brain activity that is always associated with verbalization. Yet there the words were, coming out of everybody’s mouth, young, old, poor, rich, educated, uneducated. Not constantly, but just often enough to remind us that something very, very strange was going on. The words were a mystery. The very source of the words, an even bigger mystery.

And to have it start globally on that one dreadful day? Simultaneously, all over the planet? No, it couldn’t be. But it was.

It seemed that perhaps humanity had at last found its common enemy, the one to unify us and make us forget our petty, destructive intraracial squabbling. Within weeks, the research capabilities of the entire planet had been refocused. Everyone, not only in all the sciences, but historians, philosophers, theologians, was at work on the problem.

Of course it was the TV interview with that flaky Ivy League philosopher, whose name I refuse to write, that gave the label that immediately caught on everywhere. Holding his erudition in check, he had used words of two syllables or less to point out that the ancient Greeks had had a concept in their psychology that was very close to what we were experiencing. Every person, the Greeks had suggested, has a daemon, a spirit which, if we but can let it, will show us the right way, our path, our destiny. The Greek daemon, fortunately for the Greeks, was quiet, only nudging a person this way or that. If you strayed too far, chased some illusory pot of gold, then the unhappiness or depression you feel indicates, the Greeks said, that you are headed in the wrong direction… Now, the esteemed professor said, we appeared stuck with our own very talkative daemons. Who just would not shut up. And it all started, he pointed out, on D-Day. Daemon Day. The Daemon Syndrome started on Daemon Day.

And everyone immediately felt better, as if finally naming the thing was half the battle. Weeks past, and it became very clear that naming the thing was not even the beginning of the battle. Drugs were tried, electroshock, even surgery. Nothing would stop the daemon.

"No, no, not this way. Wrong path, wrong path."

In my own field, nuclear biology, many of us were convinced that somewhere in the brain something had to be happening as the dreaded words took over. I quickly got my own team looking into areas of possible research that only months before would have seemed outlandish: what quantum effects could be perceived, or even inferred, in the synapses that might account for what we were all hearing, all experiencing, all, for Christ's sake, saying? We were only beginning to understand the chemistry of synaptic behavior, and now we were forced to forget the chemistry and leap into the vast uncertainties of quantum physics as it might manifest itself in the brain.

Still, as my salesman-father’s favorite TV preacher used to say, "Purpose is what gives life meaning." Tautology though it is, for most of us it happens to be true. Give us a defined goal, and we feel better. Even if the goal seems impossible to achieve. Even if every hour or so, somebody’s voice, somewhere in the lab, pipes up with the totally unhelpful suggestion, "No, no, not this way. Wrong path, wrong path."

Ritter returned from Sikkim with his tea, and he quickly confirmed that the tea did in fact have a slight—slightly—reductive effect on the Syndrome. Drink a cup or two, and you might be free of the Daemon’s voice for as long as a couple of hours.

There was no keeping such a remarkable find secret. The news of course did wonders for the economy of Sikkim, and for the entire global tea industry. Unfortunately, no other beverage, no other herb—and God knows we tried thousands—had a similar effect. The cultivation of the Sikkimese tea quickly became a major industry, though the plant was finicky, growing well only at elevations and in soil very much like that in its Himalaya home.

As so many others did, we threw ourselves into analysis of the tea. Gross, atomic, herbicultural—all kinds of analysis. We decanted, we sublimated, we distilled, we refined, we solidified, we isolated, we combined, we catalyzed… In vain.

Governmental tribunals, UN committees, commercial conglomerates formed and met, disbanded and re-formed, in search of, well, some better… path.

Ritter—how did he do it—was again the linchpin. He came in my office early in the second year of the madness, sat down. He was looking at a printout in his hand, that left leg bouncing.

Without looking up, he said, "I know you didn’t want to hire me. I’m bringing you this before it goes to the director. I didn’t want it circulating in the email system."

He handed me the paper. It was a message from the biology department at the University of Sao Paulo. One word: "yojimbe."

I looked at Ritter.

"I met this guy at a conference last month. He said he might be onto something. This is the first I’ve heard from him."

We were both no doubt thinking the same thing. The Sikkimese tea had done something, though we still had no idea how. Could it be that this hallucinogenic plant, yojimbe, found all over Central and Amazonian South America, also had an effect?

"Did you respond yet?" I asked.

"No. I wanted to talk to you." He smiled. The leg was bouncing away.

. . .

Three weeks later, we were back from Brazil ready to test, and a week after that the treatment was released to a waiting world. The treatment officially known as the Calhoun-Ritter-Jirahão Cure. In our last meeting before the press conference, Ritter still insisted that my name come first. He insisted very strongly, his insistence reinforced by his bouncing left leg. I agreed, and the leg stopped.

We went out together, with the director, and informed the world that small daily doses of yojimbe stopped the D-Syndrome.

In the immediate uproar, few people paid attention to our cautionary remarks. The Syndrome will stop, we said. No doubt about that. And then we quoted Aldous Huxley quoting William Blake: But the doors of human perception will open wider than we have ever dreamed possible.

Few heard. Few cared. Anything to stop the voice. And thus was the world remade by one impatient young man whose bouncing left leg still irritates the hell out of me even if I now see it in a vortex of swirling rainbow energies which delight my eyes and pleasure my heart.

END

Address queries concerning rights to:
douglasmilburn@texaschapbookpress.com

Back to Movie Pitches Intro and Contents

Back to Magellan's Log 20

Magellan's Log front page

Send this page to a friend.