Star Science Fiction 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  But as I look back, it seems to me that the crowning uncertainty of this adventurous age was the hazardous hold we had on life itself. Even the most sanguine of us had to admit that we could be forcibly removed from the planet, or the planet from us, at a moment’s notice. Throughout history, enterprising men had been farsighted enough to work up a war whenever their economy began to wobble and needed a shot in the arm. A big war or a little one as the occasion required. Almost any excuse was satisfactory to the people at large so long as you invented the right slogans and beat enough drums. But not until the middle of the twentieth century did it occur to our leaders that we need not have the wobble at all if we could somehow avoid the uneasy and enervating stretches of peace—or truce may be a more accurate word—that had to be endured between wars. Out of this realization came the brilliant concept of a war which could be put under thermostatic control and maintained at an even temperature, not too hot and not too cold, keeping our economy at a nice slow boil. To avoid stepping on squeamish toes, this was not officially declared to be a war. The present semantic craze of calling everything by its scientifically accurate name was virtually unknown then. The Madison Avenue public relations offices, who merchandized our politics along with everything else (politicians having become by then more or less nominal figures), came up with the phrase “waging peace,” a neat blend of belligerence and piety. This is what we proceeded to do, with great zeal and devotion.

  * * * *

  First of all, the world was divided into two teams, East and West. Sides were chosen the way boys do when they are getting ready to play sandlot baseball.

  I confess I am over-simplifying a process that was infinitely subtle and ramified but this is what, in essence, it amounted to. Sometimes one side would be clever enough to snatch a player that had originally lined up with the opposing team. This was called “subversion” or “liberation,” depending on who was doing it and whose side you were on. In spite of the generous inducements we were in a position to offer, there remained a few spoil-sports, usually small countries that, either out of scruple or plain obstinacy, refused to play the game at all. These benighted peoples insisted on what they called neutrality which we deplored even more than we did our adversary, knowing that an adversary, no matter how wicked, was essential if the whole scheme was to work.

  And regardless of what our moralistic critics say today, it did work. It worked magnificently. Up to then, despite all the sales pressures and techniques for going into debt, we had never consistently been able to consume all that our vast industrial machinery produced. The inevitable result had been recurrent stoppages, unemployment and depressions. But now with three-quarters of our economy devoted to waging peace, we had a steady and insatiable customer— obsolescence. A few months after a bomber or a missile came off the assembly-line, it was already obsolescent and a new design was being rushed off the drawing-boards to take its place. The only troublesome problem was where to put all the junk after we had scrapped it.

  While both sides played this game with deadly seriousness and built up huge stock-piles of the most devastating explosives, there was a sort of gentleman’s agreement not to toss them at each other except as a last resort. If we had let loose on our adversary some of the stuff our chemists conjured up, there would very soon have been no adversary, leaving us in the embarrassing position of bristling with defense and no one left to defend ourselves against. Again the ingenuity of our super-statesmen was equal to the challenge. They compromised by setting off our biggest bombs on islands fringing the Asiatic mainland where the prevailing winds could be counted on to waft some of the radio-active smoke in the enemy’s face, giving him something to think about without seriously decimating his population. Inevitably some alarmists came forth—among them, I regret to say, eighteen Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry and medicine, men who should have known better—with the hysterical claim that the earth’s atmosphere was already over-loaded with radio-active poison. To increase the load, they asserted, would be catastrophic not only to the enemy but to the whole human race. Then they went into gory details about cancers eating away our bones and how our grandchildren might be born with two heads, or even three—typical highbrow scare stuff. The State Department handled this outburst with great dignity. They called in their own physicist who issued a reassuring statement to the effect that the learned gentlemen had grossly exaggerated the danger (delicately implying that they had been taken in by enemy propaganda), that the military had the situation completely under control and that, even if they didn’t, wasn’t it better to take a calculated risk on a poisoned atmosphere than to lose our freedom? The controversy continued to rage but this answer satisfied me, as it did all sensible-minded citizens.

  More than satisfied me. The idea of a calculated risk fascinated me. Throughout the centuries we had had to get along with just the normal risks—like wolves and microbes and earthquakes—but now we could add calculated risks, dreamed up by some of our best friends. I tingled with anticipation at the possibilities that lay ahead.

  Re-living this exciting period as I set it down on paper, I recall that one of the high spots was a month’s vacation I spent in a place called Las Vegas. I don’t remember the exact date of my trip but it was either in the late nineteen fifties or the early sixties. The heart of Las Vegas was a row of luxurious hotel-casinos that rose arbitrarily out of a naked scorching desert. One of them was called The Last Frontier. This turned out to be prophetic, for Las Vegas was the high-water mark for a way of life whose passing I shall regret to my dying day—if that day ever comes. In my mind’s eye I can still see those sprawling, desert cathedrals which enshrined the only god I ever felt was worth a pilgrimage to worship. We still had churches then, and I had nothing against religion except its teachings. They were often difficult to reconcile with our other activities. However, I noticed that our most fervent prayers came not in church but with the roll of dice or the turn of a roulette wheel. Las Vegas had all these and much more. You could gamble on anything. No stake was too high. They even had a sort of divorce-remarriage adjunct where you could take a chance on a new wife for the one you had just shed at the downtown courthouse.

  And only a few miles out in the desert was the ultimate gamble—the atomic proving grounds. On one occasion we had been playing roulette all night and the hands of the casino clock were nearing five, the time a new bomb was scheduled to be tested. There was a hush over the room as we waited, pulses racing, for the appointed hour. A guest who had been drinking steadily at the bar since midnight suddenly began to pray out loud. I shall never forget his words for they reflected what was in all our hearts. “Whoever You are that rules all this in here and all that out there, give us a break. We know that the odds favor the house. But just give us a little break, that’s all we—” The prayer was buried under the concussion of sound waves that shattered every window in the building. My sweaty hands still clutching the few chips I had left, I watched the false dawn draw blood from the pale sky. This, I truly believe, was my finest hour.

  * * * *

  I can imagine my critics saying at this point that I have only been telling one side of the story. Very well, I’m willing to admit that not everyone of my generation could keep step to such a lively tune. Some fell by the wayside, unable to bear the anxieties and uncertainties which gave zest to the lives of those of us who were healthy. However, a wide range of choice was open to the emotional cripples. Those who wanted to quit the game altogether were free to withdraw into institutions erected for the purpose, although it must be admitted that most of them were rather overcrowded. However, the general run of these disturbed people asked only for a respite to get their breath, repair their damaged psyches and then plunge back into the competitive whirl, often with renewed vigor and aggressiveness. The most popular refuge for these part-timers was the analyst’s couch.

  By 1970 every twentieth adult was a psychoanalyst or a lay brother. Even then, they were so besieged by patients that they had
to treat them in groups. Patients were lined up, couch after couch, in large rooms resembling dormitories. Although I never participated, I paid a visit to one of these séances and found it quite attractive—a vast roomful of people grumbling about their father-images or reciting the most extraordinary pornographic dreams to the obvious delight of everybody else. In spite of the present skeptical attitude toward these exhibitions, I maintain they provided useful therapy, as well as excellent entertainment.

  By now people have become so accustomed to leisure it is difficult to conceive that it was once regarded as a problem, and that mass entertainment was then the only known solution. When automatic machinery first began to displace human labor in industry, most of us, I’m sorry to say, were at a loss as to what to do with all the time at our disposal. In fact, the situation became so serious that the announcement of a new reduction in the length of the working day for employees of the Motor Super-Corporation occasioned such a violent reaction that there was even talk of a strike to demand longer hours. Nothing came of it, of course, since by then strikes were recognized as a threat against security and therefore illegal (another boon of the thermostatic war). Personally, I never sympathized with grumbling about leisure. The Entertainment Super-Corporation took ample care of our recreational needs without requiring any effort or participation on our part. If you could just keep up your payments on your radio or television set, they did the rest. It was possible to kill hour after hour seated in a chair in your own living room, listening to some cheerful voice extol your favorite motor car or watching a beautiful girl inhale the fumes of your chosen brand of cigarettes in courageous defiance of medical science, all with appropriate background music. Every once in a while this parade of delectable products would pause long enough to give you a chance to fill in the order blank on easy credit terms. During these intervals the little shop windows would turn into arenas where you could witness part of a football game or a prizefight or even a political convention (which came into the entertainment category after its original purpose had ceased to exist).

  Another way to kill leisure time was to make yourself oblivious to it—or partly oblivious, depending on the durability of your nervous system. When a person’s eyesight or nerves buckled under the impact of television and the other hazards of the day, there was always available a generous supply of the so-called escape drugs. The overanxious consumer who was unable to afford psychiatry could satisfy his lust for tranquility merely by dropping into the nearest drug store. The Pharmaceutical-Tobacco-Spirits Super-Distillery, which had cornered the escape market, advised a balanced diet—a benzedrine on rising, a tranquilizer at ten o’clock to level off the push of the benzedrine, caffeine at twelve to lift the depression occasioned by the tranquilizer, a sedative at three to neutralize the caffeine, three dry double martinis at five to get over the last hump and finally, before going to bed, a sleeping pill with two spaced booster doses that, with some luck, would get you through the night.

  * * * *

  When modern historians write about this enterprising period, they make a practice of pointing out its resemblances to the Roman Empire, implying that we might have heeded its warnings and escaped a similar fate. But I say this is hindsight and, therefore, an invalid judgment which reflects unfairly on my generation. Except for misfits and chronic non-conformists, those of us who were alive then believed that we had achieved the ultimate society, foolproof and impervious to change. Like a beautifully wrought clock with its weights and counterweights, every element of our corporate life appeared to be in perfect balance. We were convinced that for the first time in history we had succeeded in reconciling the public good and private initiative, design and accident, freedom and conformity, love and hate, peace and war, creation and destruction. How were we to know that the balance was so precarious that the slightest shift in our thinking would bring it all tumbling down on our heads! In the light of what followed, it is simple enough for critics today to prove that these concepts were actually irreconcilable and that our attempt to equate them led us down a labyrinth of illusions into a schizoid world divided against itself. After Einstein and the new physics it was possible to demonstrate that Euclid’s concept of the universe was unrealistic. The point I want to make is that it is always easy to demonstrate the truth after it has happened.

  Before going further, I want to make it clear that I have never been one to object to truth—in moderate doses that can be absorbed without producing organic changes. But when it came on us from all sides, giving no quarter to our most cherished illusions, I regarded it—and still do—as a usurper and tyrant. If this seems perverse or heretical in the face of present attitudes, let me pause in this history to give my reasons.

  Illusions are like mistresses. You can enjoy any number of them without tying yourself down to responsibility. But truth insists on marriage. Once you embrace her, you’re chained for life.

  It is no answer to point out that most people today consider the marriage a happy one. They have no basis for comparison. They have never experienced the thrill of being foot-loose and fancy free. On the other hand, I was brought up to value my personal freedom above all other things. And the essence of freedom is choice. Unless you have alternatives to choose from, freedom is a meaningless word since you have no way to exercise it.

  You may make the wrong choice—you may turn left when you should have turned right—but this is a necessary risk if you want to be free. Truth, on the other hand, shunts all traffic toward itself. Every road leads to Rome, whether you want to go to Rome or not. Gone are the bypaths and the crossroads, gone is the excitement of the gamble, the enchantment of uncertainty.

  For almost a century after the thing happened, I used to go over and over in my mind how we might have prevented it. If we had done this, or not done that, we might have escaped. But I finally came to the reluctant conclusion that the modern historians are right to this extent: one way or another, our dream had to end. Yet no one could have predicted the innocent manner in which it came about. Who could have guessed that the invader was within our own gates, in a sense within our own minds!

  Perhaps our blindness to the real danger was the result of our preoccupation with outside enemies. We were beginning to see them everywhere, in every nook and cranny of the world, even among those we once thought were our friends. On top of all this, we had begun to suspect that the heavens themselves were plotting against us. Hardly a day passed that some of us failed to report unidentified flying objects in the sky. The thermostatic war began to take on interplanetary proportions as the impression grew that these celestial objects were the advance scouts of an invading army from outer space.

  I know it is fashionable for modern psychologists to diagnose our suspicions as paranoic symptoms. They have a pat theory that the contradiction between our acts and what we professed to believe made us feel guilty and that we invented enemies to punish us, like children who have misbehaved. I don’t believe this at all. I think that we sensed a real danger to our way of life and were holding on to our freedom with such an iron grip that, quite by accident, and to our utter astonishment, she died in our hands. Yet if it had not been for one man, she might possibly, just possibly, have survived.

  But there I go again with futile speculations. I must get on with my history.

  * * * *

  It was many years before I could speak the name of Martin Smith without bitterness.

  But time heals all wounds, or perhaps some of the compassion which saturates the New Age has finally rubbed off on me. At any rate, I am now able to tell his part in our downfall with a reasonable amount of detachment although I still refuse to regard him as a martyr, no matter how many statues they erect in his memory.

  I am even willing to concede that Smith was a genius of a sort. When I first met him, he was only thirty-two years old and had just been appointed chief engineer in Plant Number 16 or the Office Machines Super-Corporation where we both worked. As a reporter on the plant newspaper, I was assi
gned to interview him about the new model computer machines that he had just designed and that were now going into production. I found him a soft-spoken, unassuming young man with nothing unusual about his features except his eyes. When he turned his gaze on you, he seemed to look right through you and beyond, as though estimating not only your present character but how you might be expected to behave under some future, hypothetical circumstances. Perhaps this impression is somewhat influenced by what happened later, but I remember very clearly that I had an uncomfortable feeling that he wasn’t altogether reliable.

  Also I had heard certain things about him that were not reassuring. Before he came with us, the Guided Missiles Super-Corporation had offered him a princely salary to work on their designs for intercontinental rockets, but he had refused on the grounds of conscience. It seemed that he belonged to an obscure religious sect called the Quakers who insisted on a literal interpretation of Christ’s teachings, maintaining that you could not love your enemy in any proper sense while you were pointing a gun at his head. Since our company made no weapons —at least none that were recognizable as weapons—we were able to utilize his highly talented services. But even after six years in our plant he never quite fitted into the accepted patterns of our corporate behavior. This was noticeable in little things like the car he drove. Although it was five years old, he kept repairing it instead of turning it in on a new model. Evenings, instead of watching television so that he could keep up on what products to buy, he and his wife spent their time reading books. Although he never talked much about himself, it was whispered around the plant that he could speak six languages. In short, he was an intellectual of the most flagrant sort.