t meant about as much to Benson as some
of his chemistry did to Bill Myers. There was also a secondary, purely
psychological, effect. Certain musical chords had definite effects on
the emotions of the hearer, and the subject, beside being directly
influenced by the music, was rendered extremely open to verbal
suggestions accompanied by a suitable musical background.

Benson transferred the final results of this stage of the research to
the black notebook and burned the scratch-sheets.

"That's how it happened, then," he said. "The Munich thing was the
result of all that Goetterdaemmerung music. There was a band at the
baseball park in Baltimore. The New Orleans Orgy started while a local
radio station was broadcasting some of this new dance-music. Look, these
tone-clusters, here, have a definite sex-excitation effect. This series
of six chords, which occur in some of the Wagnerian stuff; effect, a
combined feeling of godlike isolation and despair. And these consecutive
fifths--a sense of danger, anger, combativeness. You know, we could work
out a whole range of emotional stimuli to fit the effects of Ingredient
Beta...."

"We don't want to," Myers said. "We want to work out a substitute for
Beta that will keep the flavor of the drink without the
psycho-physiological effects."

"Yes, sure. I have some of the boys at the plant lab working on that.
Gave them a lot of syrup without Beta, and told them to work out cheap
additives to restore the regular Evri-Flave taste; told them it was an
effort to find a cheap substitute for an expensive ingredient. But look,
Bill. You and I both see, for instance, that a powerful world-wide
supra-national sovereignty is the only guarantee of world peace. If we
could use something like this to help overcome antiquated verbal
prejudices and nationalistic emotional attachments...."

"No!" Myers said. "I won't ever consent to anything like that, Fred! Not
even in a cause like world peace; use a thing like this for a good,
almost holy, cause now, and tomorrow we, or those who would come after
us, would be using it to create a tyranny. You know what year this is,
Bill?"

"Why, 1984," Benson said.

"Yes. You remember that old political novel of Orwell's, written about
forty years ago? Well, that's a picture of the kind of world you'd have,
eventually, no matter what kind of a world you started out to make.
Fred, don't ever think of using this stuff for a purpose like that. If
you try it