the differences. Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence—his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a nonvisualizer? Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense nonverbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered. For example, does this child absorb all the vitamins in his food or is he subject to some chronic deficiency that, if it isn’t recognized and treated, will lower his vitality, darken his mood, make him see ugliness, feel boredom and think foolishness or malice? And what about his blood sugar? What about his breathing? What about his posture and the way he uses his organism when he’s working, playing, studying? And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts. Does he show signs of having a talent for music, for mathematics, for handling words, for observing accurately and for thinking logically and imaginatively about what he has observed? And finally how suggestible is he going to be when he grows up? All children are good hypnotic subjects—so good that four out of five of them can be talked into somnambulism. In adults the proportion is reversed. Four out of five of them can never be talked into somnambulism. Out of any hundred children, which are the twenty who will grow up to be suggestible to the pitch of somnambulism?”
“Can you spot them in advance?” Will asked. “And if so, what’s the point of spotting them?”
“We can spot them,” Mr. Menon answered. “And it’s very important that they should be spotted. Particularly important in your part of the world. Politically speaking, the twenty percent that can be hypnotized easily and to the limit is the most dangerous element in your societies.”
“Dangerous?”
“Because these people are the propagandist’s predestined victims. In an old-fashioned, prescientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn that twenty percent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist. And under a dictatorship these same potential somnambulists can be talked into implicit faith and mobilized as the hard core of the omnipotent party. So you see it’s very important for any society that values liberty to be able to spot the future somnambulists when they’re young. Once they’ve been spotted, they can be hypnotized and systematically trained not to be hypnotizable by the enemies of liberty. And at the same time, of course, you’d be well advised to reorganize your social arrangements so as to make it difficult or impossible for the enemies of liberty to arise or have any influence.”
“Which is the state of things, I gather, in Pala?”
“Precisely,” said Mr. Menon. “And that’s why our potential somnambulists don’t constitute a danger.”
“Then why do you go to the trouble of spotting them in advance?”
“Because, if it’s properly used, their gift is so valuable.”
“For Destiny Control?” Will questioned, remembering those therapeutic swans and all the things that Susila had said about pressing one’s own buttons.
The Under-Secretary shook his head. “Destiny Control doesn’t call for anything more than a light trance. Practically everybody’s capable of that. The potential