Brain Wave

Originally published in serial form in Space Science Fiction in 1953.

RUNAWAY IQ

The Change had come.

The world was suddenly, incredibly different. Somehow, the Earth had escaped from a force field that had until then slowed down light and otherwise affected electromagnetic and electrochemical processes. Almost overnight the intelligence of every living creature – man and beast – trebled. And the world went mad.

Archie Brock, the near moron, found himself in sole charge of a farm of strangely uncooperative animals and had to enlist the aid of superintelligent chimpanzees who had escaped from a nearby circus.

Peter Corinth, a physicist who started out life bright, was suddenly translated to an order of intelligence that left his rather dumb wife far behind... and she was no longer too dumb to notice.

But the biggest problem of all was the ultimate one. In a world without problems, where all the questions that have plagued mankind throughout history are solved, what is man to do with his time?