told Giovanni where, in his terminology, “the game was to be played.”
“The future,” said Melmoth, sipping his pink champagne, “is in aphrodisiacs. Cancer cures we can only sell to people with cancer. Life-expectation is great, but it isn’t worth a damn unless people can enjoy extended life. To hell with better mousetraps—what this world wants is better beaver-traps. You make me a red-hot pheromone, and I’ll make you a billionaire.”
Giovanni explained to Melmoth that there could be no such thing as a powerful human pheromone. Many insects, he pointed out, perceive their environment almost entirely in olfactory terms, so that it makes sense for female insects with limited periods of fertility to signal their readiness with a smelly secretion which—if produced in sufficient quantities—could draw every male insect from miles around. Humans, by contrast, make very little use of their sense of smell, and their females are unafflicted by short and vital phases of fertility, which must at all costs be exploited for the continued survival of the species.
“All this I know,” Melmoth assured him, “and the fact that you thought to tell me about it reveals to me that you have an attitude problem. Let me give you some advice, son. It’s easy to find people who’ll tell me what isn’t possible and can’t be done. For that I can hire morons. I hire geniuses to say ‘If that won’t work, what will?’ Do you get my drift?”
Giovanni was genuinely impressed by this observation, although it could hardly be reckoned original. He realized that his remarks really had been symptomatic of an attitude problem, which had manifested itself all-too-powerfully in his personal life. He went to his laboratory determined to produce for Mr. Melmoth something that would stand in for the impossible pheromone, and determined to produce for himself some sexual encounters that would put him on course for a career as an authentic Casanova. It was simply, he decided, a matter of strategy and determination.
In fact, Giovanni was now in a position where he had more than a little prestige and influence. Although he was notionally starting at the bottom at Cytotech, there was no doubting that he would go far—that he was a man to be respected no matter how unlovely his appearance might be.
Thus advantaged, he had little difficulty in losing his virginity at last, with a seventeen-year-old blonde lab assistant called Helen. That was a great relief, but he was all too well aware of the fact that it represented no considerable triumph. It was a fumbling affair, throughout which he was trembling with anxiety and embarrassment; he felt that his everyday clumsiness and awkwardness, although he could leave them behind in his laboratory work, were concentrated to grotesque extremes in his sexual technique. Pretty Helen, who was not herself overburdened with experience or sophistication, uttered not a word of complaint and made no reference to his surname, but Giovanni found himself quite convinced that in the privacy of her thoughts she was crying out “Casanova! Casanova!” and laughing hysterically at the irony of it. He dared not ask her to his bed again, and tended to shun her in the workplace.
Deciding that he needed more practice, Giovanni arranged visits to whores whose telephone numbers he found scrawled on the walls of the payphones in the main lobby, and although he avoided by this means the embarrassment of knowing that his partners knew his name, he still found it appallingly difficult to improve his performance. If anything, he thought, he was getting worse instead of better, becoming steadily more ludicrous in his own eyes.
Clearly this was what Melmoth would have called an attitude problem, but Giovanni now knew that simply calling it by that name would no more solve it than calling him Casanova had made him into an avatar of his famous namesake. Self-disgust made him give up visiting prostitutes after his third such experience, and he could not bring himself to try to resuscitate his relationship with Helen. He had little difficulty convincing himself that celibacy was to be preferred to continual humiliation.
In his work, however, he was making great strides. Taking Melmoth’s advice to heart, he asked himself what would constitute, in human terms, an alternative to pheromones. The dominant human sense is sight, so the nearest human analogue of an insect pheronome is an attractive appearance, but this has so long been taken for granted that it sustains a vast cosmetics industry dedicated to helping members of the desired sex to enhance their charms. Giovanni felt that there was relatively little scope in this area for his expertise, so he turned his attention instead to the sense of touch.
He eventually decided that what was needed was something that would make the touch of the would-be seducer irresistible to the target of his (or her) affections: a love-potion of the fingertips. If he could find a psychotropic protein that could be absorbed quickly through the skin, so that the touch of the donor could become associated with subsequent waves of pleasurable sensation, then it should be fairly easy to achieve an operant conditioning of the desired one.
Giovanni brought all his artistry in protein-design to bear on the production of a psychotropic that would call forth strong feelings of euphoria, tenderness, affection and lust. It wasn’t easy—understanding of that kind of psychochemistry was then at a very primitive level—but he was the man for the job. Having found the ideal protein, he then encoded it in the DNA of an artificial cytogene, which he tailored for incorporation in subepidermal cells, whose activation would be triggered by sexual arousal. The protein itself could then be delivered to the surface of the skin via the sweat-glands.
When the time came to explain this ingenious mechanism to Marmaduke Melmoth, the company president was not immediately enthused.
“Hell’s bells, boy,” he said. “Why not just put the stuff in bottles and let people smear it on their fingers?”
Giovanni explained that his new psychotropic protein, like the vast majority of such entities, was so awesomely delicate that it could not be kept in solution, and would rapidly denature outside the protective environment of a living cell. In any case, the whole point was that the object of desire could only obtain this particular fix from the touch of the would-be seducer. If it were to be used for conditioning, then its sources must be very carefully limited. This was not a technology for mass distribution, but something for the favored few, who had to use it with the utmost discretion.
“Oh shit,” said Melmoth, in disgust. “How are we going to make billions out of a product like that?”
Giovanni suggested that he sell it only to the very rich at an exorbitant price.
“If we’re going to do it that way,” Melmoth told him, “we’re going to have to be absolutely sure that it works, and that there’s not the ghost of an unfortunate side-effect. You work for customers like that, they have to get satisfaction.”
Giovanni agreed that this was a vital necessity. He set up a series of exhaustive and highly secret clinical trials, and did not tell Melmoth that he had already started exploring the effects and potentials of the tissue-transformation. In the great tradition of scientific self-sacrifice, he had volunteered to be his own guinea-pig.
To say that the method worked would be a feeble understatement. Giovanni found that he only had to look at an attractive girl, and conjure up in his imagination fantasies of sexual communion, to produce the special sweat that put magic at his fingertips. Once he was sufficiently worked up, the merest touch sufficed to set the psychochemical seduction in train, and it required only the simplest strategy to achieve the required conditioning. Girls learned very quickly—albeit subconsciously—to associate his touch with the most tender and exciting emotions. They quickly overcame their natural revulsion and began to think that, although he was not conventionally attractive, he was really rather fascinating.
Within three weeks of the experiment’s launch four female lab assistants, two word-processing operatives, three receptionists, one industrial relations consultant and a traffic warden were deep in the throes of infatuation. Giovanni was on top of the world, and gloried in the
