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The Child Buyer is John Hersey's 1960 novel about a project to engineer super-intelligent persons for a project whose aim is never definitely stated. Told entirely in the form of minutes from a State Senate Standing Committee, it relates the story of the appearance and efforts of a mysterious stranger in the small town of Pequot, and the repercussions of his attempt to buy a boy, Barry Rudd.

The novel is primarily a satire on the school system, although it also posits questions about intelligence, the validity of intelligence/personality tests, and the efficacy of attempts to quantify humanity. One of its major themes is corruption--in the stranger's (Wissey Jones's) relentless quest to buy Barry, Jones manages to persuade everyone concerned with the transaction, including Barry himself, to go along with him, primarily through favours (money, honorary degrees, positions, status, et al.), although Barry and his would-be defender, a Dr. Gozar, are convinced through a sort of desperate logic.

The novel, in its description of a non-existent mental-conditioning process possibly intended as a means of leaving Earth, approaches science fiction, although it is more properly put in the genre of speculative fiction.

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Wissey Jones - the influential and brilliant antagonist of The Child Buyer. Mr. Jones buys children for his company United Lymphomilloid, a sinister conglomerate that is operating a national security project for the United States government. Jones' special talent is being able to identify the levers in each person to make them go along with his purchases. He fulfills desires (gifts, influence, stature, and petty needs) to enlist the help of others. He is the perfect salesman.

COMMITTEE MEMORANDUM No. i

Chairman MANSFIELD asked the witness to proceed in his own
way. Mr. WISSEY JONES then deposed that the methods used by
United Lymphomilloid to eliminate all conflict from the inner
lives of the purchased specimens and to ensure their utilization
of their innate equipment at maximum efficiency are and will
be the following:

First, Period of Mental and Reflexive Reconditioning, Orien-
tation, and Preparation. During this period, the length of which
varies from one to six weeks, depending on the adaptability of
the subject, each specimen is placed naked in a bare and con-
fined chamber, six feet cubed, without exterior lighting, dimly
lit within, so that the consciousness can take in nothing but the
totality of barrenness of the setting. There is nothing. There is
silence. There is nothing to do, except during one period of ac-
tivity each day, when a single meal appears through a trap door
and when feces can be removed if the subject desires and takes
the step. The discomfort and rather extreme apprehension ex-
perienced by the specimen during the first part of this period,
together with applications of the drug 'L.T./ introduced
through food, produce a complete elimination, or purge, of
memory; all experience, education, knowledge are permanently
cleared away, with no impairment whatsoever of the mind's ac-
quisitive faculties and capacity for future new memory. As the
mind goes blank, all thinking ceases, and the subject experiences
a progressive feeling of warmth and relaxation. About three
quarters of the way through this period, orientation is begun in
the form of constant whispering which is piped into the chamber,
barely perceptible at first, gradually increasing in volume and
clarity, but never rising above an aspirated murmur, the con-
tent of which is entirely devoted to United Lymphomilloid to
the motherly, protective, nourishing qualities of the corporate
image, and later to Her creativity, fecundity, and later still to
Her great Mystery the Miracle of the Fifty-Year Project. This
whispering continues for several days and produces in the speci-
men a growing desire, which in due course becomes almost ec-
static, to be exposed to the image and to feel (the subject has
forgotten he can think and therefore do anything besides feel)
Her benignity and sovereignty, which the specimen apparently
pictures as a kind of primitive comfort, a sort of swaddling.
Upon its completion, this phase of preparation is followed by
Second, Education and Desensitization in Isolation. The
specimen is removed from the Forgetting Chamber and is
placed in a small but comfortable room, containing a hard bed,
a table, a washbasin, and a toilet. (Toilet training is necessary,
since the subject has forgotten, of course, how to avail him-
self of plumbing.) There are no windows in the room in fact,
the specimen will never again look out at the complexity of na-
ture, which would only confuse him. Education now begins. A
most important aspect of the United Lymphomilloid method is
that the specimen shall have no contaminating (in a mental
sense) contact with other human beings. All teaching must
therefore be done mechanically by the technique of whisper-
ing to which the specimen is already conditioned, by films and
symbols projected against walls of the room, by recorded mate-
rial infiltrated into the subject's hard pillow during sleeping
hours, and by other devices so far too secret to discuss Mr.
JONES simply said that one of them involves, for example, hyp-
notic high-frequency vibrations. Reading is taught entirely by
sound film. Gradually, as the student progresses (because of the
emptiness of the mind at first and the possibility of excluding
all irrelevancies, great and small, the progress is astonishingly
rapid, so that in mathematics, for instance, which begins with
adding one and one, the calculus is reached in five weeks of
teaching, and logarithm tables are quite unnecessary), his life is
made more comfortable. Television, radio, and books are in-
troduced into his room, but the specimen is never exposed to
anything that does not relate to the Miracle of the Fifty-Year
Project. The television programs he sees have all been specially
taped for him and him alone, the radio programs specially re-
corded, the books specially written and printed and bound. Ev-
erything the specimen learns has been built around the fecund
female corporate image of U. Lympho. She is Truth. She is the
Source and Secret of Life. She is the One and Only Television
Sponsor. She becomes the motivating force for all activity in-
deed, She, U. Lympho, becomes the Divinity. By slow and sub-
tle training, in which rhythms of repetition play a great part, the
specimen's relationship to Her becomes ritualistic. He begins to
worship Her by solving problems simple ones, to begin with,
then increasingly trying ones. His whole life becomes an at-
tempt to please Her by spurts of creative mental activity, which
are seen as worshipful acts. This religion is, however, entirely in-
tellective. Emotion of all kinds is eliminated as far as possible
from the specimen's life, partly by keeping from his emptied
mind all images and ideas that might stimulate feeling, and
partly by a drug, enthohexylcenteron, related to the tranquiliz-
ers used in psychiatric therapy but specially developed by United
Lymphomilloid researches to deaden all affective responses with-
out, however, removing the elements of pain and joy in the
specimen's new motivation specifically, the particularly intense
motivation to genuflect before Her, as it were, by problem-
solving. This schooling period lasts about four months and is
followed by

Third, Data-feeding Period. The specimen is now almost pre-
pared to work for Her on the Mystery of the Fifty-Year Project
or at least on one isolated corner of the project. Into his mind
is fed an enormous amount of data that will be needed in find-
ing episodic solutions to certain problems in connection with
the Mystery. Mr. JONES pointed out to the committee that it is
common knowledge that electronic calculating machines have
proved fallible because they are fed data by human beings.
United Lymphomilloid reverses the process. The subject's hu-
man mind, capable of illimitable subtlety, is fed data by abso-
lutely reliable and matter-of-fact calculating machines. (The
machines are fed, in turn, by previously conditioned specimens.)
The specimen's mind is now working so fast, and his motiva-
tion is so powerful, that this stage takes only about three weeks
and is followed by

Fourth, Major Surgery. The subject is now perfectly prepared
to do Her work. There are, however, two dangers. One is that
through some inadvertence, unforeseen by the minds of tech-
nicians who have not been conditioned as the specimen has,
scraps of information that are not wholly related to the subject's
particular area of worship-solving may creep into his mind. The
second is that he may develop emotions; it has been found that,
despite the prophylaxis and enthohexylcenteron, extremely dan-
gerous emotions may arise, apparently stemming from tiny
doubts about Her, the source of which Project researchers have
not yet been able to pin down. The specimen therefore under-
goes major surgery, which consists of 'tying off' all five senses.
Since the subject need not take in any more data, he has no
further need of sight or hearing. Smell and taste have long since
been useless to him, since he regards the intake of food as a me-
chanical process that he carries on only for Her sake. Only so
much sense of touch is left the specimen as to allow him to carry
on his bodily functions and 'write* on a Simplomat Recorder, a
stenographic machine the use of which has long since become a
ceremonial rite for the subject. Most specimens are also steri-
lized, though a certain few will be left their reproductive equip-
ment in order to breed further specimens for the Project. It is
thought that some of these breeders, after they have solved most
of the problems arising from their data, will be retired to stud
the servicings for which will of course all be mechanical. The
surgical period lasts about two months, whereupon ensues

Fifth, Productive Work. The specimen worships U. Lympho
by offering up to Her solutions of incredibly difficult problems
relating to the Mystery.