For the record: Dr. Fleon Sunoco at the NIH, who is independently rich, hires grave robbers to bring him the brains of deceased members of Mensa, a nationwide club for persons with high Intelligence Quotients, or IQs, as determined by standardized tests of verbal and non-verbal skills, tests which pit the testees against the Joe and Jane Sixpacks, against the Lumpenproletariat

His ghouls also bring him brains of people who died in really stupid accidents, crossing busy streets against the light, starting charcoal fires at cookouts with gasoline, and so on, for comparison. So as not to arouse suspicion, they deliver the fresh brains one at a time in buckets stolen from a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Needless to say, Sunoco's supervisors have no idea what he's really doing when he works late night after night.

They do notice how much he likes fried chicken, apparently, ordering it by the bucket, and that he never offers anybody else some. They also wonder how he stays so skinny. During regular working hours, he does what he is paid to do, which is develop a birth control pill that takes all the pleasure out of sex, so teenagers won't copulate.

At night, though, with nobody around, he slices up high-IQ brains, looking for little radios. He doesn't think Mensa members had them inserted surgically. He thinks they were born with them, so the recievers have to be made of meat. Sunoco has written in his secret journal: "There is no way an unassisted human brain, which is nothing more than a dog's breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge, could have written 'Stardust', let alone Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

*****

One night he finds an unexplained little snot-colored bump, no larger than a mustard seed, in the inner ear of a Mensa member, who as a junior high schooler had won spelling bee after spelling bee. Eureka!

He reexamines the inner ear of a moron who was killed when she was grabbing door handles of fast-moving vehicles while wearing Rollerblades. Neither of her inner ears has a snot-colored bump. Eureka!