“Oneirine, and Methoneirine. Variations reported by Laszlo Jamf in the ACS Journal, year before last. Jamf was on loan again, this time as a chemist, to the Americans, whose National Research Council had begun a massive program to explore the morphine molecule and its possibilities—a Ten-Year Plan, coinciding, most oddly, with the classic study of large molecules being carried on by Carothers of du Pont, the Great Synthesist. Connection? Of course there’s one. But we don’t talk about it. NRC is synthesizing new molecules every day, most of them from pieces of the morphine molecule. Du Pont is stringing together groups such as amides into long chains. The two programs seem to be complementary, don’t they? The American vice of modular repetition, combined with what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain without causing addiction.

“Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can’t have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle’s velocity—”

“I could have told you that. But why—”

“Why. My dear captain. Why?”

“The money, Wimpe. To pour funds down the latrine on such a hopeless search—”

A man-to-man touch then on his buttoned epaulet. A middle-aged smile full of Weltschmerz. “Trade-off, Tchitcherine,” whispers the salesman. “A question of balancing priorities. Research people come cheap enough, and even an IG may be allowed to dream, to hope against hope… . Think of what it would mean to find such a drug—to abolish pain rationally, without the extra cost of addiction. A surplus cost—surely there is something in Marx and Engels,” soothe the customer, “to cover this. A demand like ‘addiction,’ having nothing to do with real pain, real economic needs, unrelated to production or labor… we need fewer of these unknowns, not more. We know how to produce real pain. Wars, obviously… machines in the factories, industrial accidents, automobiles built to be unsafe, poisons in food, water, and even air—these are quantities tied directly to the economy. We know them, and we can control them. But ‘addiction’? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. ‘Compulsion’? Who is not compelled? ‘Tolerance’? ‘Dependence’? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could not plan… .”

What premonition has begun to throb in Tchitcherine’s right knee? What direct conversion between pain and gold?

“Are you really this evil, or is it just an act? Are you really trafficking in pain?”

“Doctors traffick in pain and no one would dream of criticizing their noble calling. Yet let the Verbindungsmann but reach for the latch on his case, and you all start to scream and run. Well—you won’t find many addicts among us. The medical profession is full of them, but we salesmen believe in real pain, real deliverance—we are knights in the service of that Ideal. It must all be real, for the purposes of our market. Otherwise my employer—and our little chemical cartel is the model for the very structure of nations—becomes lost in illusion and dream, and one day vanishes into chaos. Your own employer as well.”