Look about you, Reader! Glance at your television set, riffle through your check stubs, study the cigarette you are about to smoke. There is no need to scan the sky for UFOs, for the enemy is already at hand. Howard Koch warns us that the attack has begun, as all about us Earth reels under the-
by Howard Koch
My present contemporaries regard me as one of the last of the die-hards, which I suppose is a fair description of a man who has put off dying for two hundred and twenty-seven years and still longs for the world he knew when he was a youngster of forty-five.
That was my age when the invasion occurred in the spring of 1976.
It always seemed to me ironic that we lost our independence on the two hundredth anniversary of the year we Americans had won it. But when I mention this to the others, they only smile tolerantly as though indulging an old man’s whim. Let them smile. Very few were alive then. I secretly pity them for having missed the golden age which I now propose to record—how it flourished and how it came to an untimely end.
I realize that my prose style may seem a little rusty and old-fashioned compared to the austere simplicity that is fashionable today. Also, this must necessarily be a minority report since my opinions on the subject are shared by only a few duocentenarians like myself. Yet I feel impelled to make the effort to put my twentieth century compatriots in a better light than the one in which history now regards them. No, this is not strictly true. (See how the truth has infected even me when I imagined myself immune from its contagion.) Frankly, I don’t really care what anyone thinks of anyone else. Probably this testament amounts to no more than a gesture, a desire to pay a last tribute to a generation, now gone and almost forgotten, with whom I shared the vivid and adventurous years of my youth.
In those bygone days we had a saying about truth (in fact, we had a saying about almost everything) that one day it would set us free. What a travesty! As events turned out, it was the truth that undid us, that drove literally millions to take their lives rather than submit to its tyranny, that, in short, swept away the last vestiges of our freedom. But I am getting ahead of my story.
April was the month of the great disillusionment. I remember remarking that the weather was more unsettled than usual. One day it was too warm for a light jacket, on the next you needed an overcoat to ward off the chill of a northeast wind. However, I always enjoyed matching my wits against the vagaries of an intemperate climate, trying to outguess its sudden shifts. And the uncertainty of the weather was reflected in everything else. I think I can safely say that no previous generation had been blessed with more stimulating anxieties. And my own country, the United States, as it led the world in every other way, was also far ahead of all in the opportunities it offered for peril and adventure. Danger was in the air—quite literally. You couldn’t turn on your radio or television set, or glance at the daily news headlines, or even talk to your next-door neighbor without a vague sense that some crisis was impending and that all you possessed or hoped to possess, including life itself, was hanging by a thread.
None of this, I hasten to add, affected our material welfare. Oversized cars bulged out of our garages; our giant refrigerators were crammed with more food than we could possibly consume. Not only did most of us have all we needed, but the great producing organizations employed experts who figured out new things for us to need. The prefix “super” invaded on our vocabulary, inflating old trade names with a sort of second wind—supermarkets, super-colossal films, super-de luxe this and super-duper that. For example, no motorist worth his salt denied his car the super-extra-tetra ethyl when the gas station attendant cheerily inquired, “Which kind, sir?” Not that there was more mileage in the super but it seemed degrading to a three-toned, dynaflow stratocruiser to make it open its tank to a hose attached to an unadorned pump whose gasoline could boast of nothing better than just being “regular.” Besides, it would have been an admission that the four cents a gallon saving was more important than motoring prestige. Adroit advertisers had needled us into a welcome awareness that our social position depended on our having the best and latest of everything. Not to consume as much as your neighbors was unenterprising, slovenly, even unpatriotic.
I realize that such widespread opulence might be expected, in the long run, to induce a lulling sense of satiety and security. This, I am proud to say, never occurred. The saving grace was the fact that most of what we possessed was not paid for. We were in debt to each other, to the credit companies and banks that financed our purchases and often to the government for taxes on earnings we had already spent. Most of us worked in some department of the dozen super-corporations that had managed to absorb their smaller rivals and, since they were by then the only sources of employment, it is understandable that we clung to these jobs for dear life. If our income stopped for even a month, we would fall hopelessly behind in our installment payments, like a swimmer who suddenly finds himself too far out to make shore. With diligence and luck we were usually able to keep afloat, but there was always the exciting possibility that we might become ill or be laid off. I remember how anxiously we followed the fluctuations in the market price of shares, since we knew that our livelihood depended on the prosperity of the corporation we worked for. When the stock exchange ticker skipped a beat, so did our hearts. Alas, that institution has vanished: that delicious thrill is no longer possible.
To do full justice to the complexity of our financial machinery would go beyond the scope of this history, but I have yet to mention its most ingenious feature—the unbalanced budget. When I was a child and alone at table, I used to erect lofty pyramids with my eating utensils, saucer on cup, glass on saucer, cereal bowl on glass, fork on bowl and two spoons perched on either end of the fork until something added, perhaps as small as a toothpick, upset the precarious balance and brought the whole tower crashing to the table with the inevitable broken china and parental displeasure.
I think tins is something of the thrill we had watching what we called our national debt mount as each new billion was delicately poised on the apex of hundreds of billions already obligated. During the three decades between 1945 and 1975 this public debt grew to such a staggering figure that only bankers and astronomers could comprehend it. And even they couldn’t explain its significance. Most of us were vaguely conscious that the U.S. government owed Someone an incredible amount of money and, should that Someone ever refuse to extend further credit, the whole structure of values would come tumbling down like my china tower. Since theoretically we, the people, were the government, we felt some responsibility to see that the debt was eventually paid off. However, in view of the perilous state of our personal finances, it was never apparent how this was to be done. Nor did we even know precisely to whom this vast obligation was owed. Was it to the banks? In that case, the banks being merely repositories for our funds, it seemed to follow that in the final analysis we owed this money to ourselves. Since this was rather a confusing hypothesis, I believe most people preferred to assume that there was some Atlas-like colossus of finance who supported the vast structure on his shoulders and understood all its intricacies. However, I secretly suspected that there was no one there at all and that the debt itself was nothing but a huge bubble which could go on inflating indefinitely so long as no one pricked it. This seemed to me a charming notion—that the value of everything we owned, if indeed we owned anything in the strict sense, rested on nothing more tangible than a myth.
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 assigned 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.
Yet he was allowed to continue in one of the most responsible positions in our industry. This will seem even more baffling when I explain that we had the most comprehensive loyalty checks that had ever been devised.
It was called the decimal security system. One man in every ten was an agent of the plant who kept a check on the other nine employees in his group. He was watched, in turn, by another security officer who checked on the activities of the ten agents in his division. And so on up. The ten top security officers reported to Central Military Intelligence in the Hexagon Building in Washington. (The building originally had five sides but another had to be added to house the files which contained the most minute information on all of us—who our friends were, what we talked about, what periodicals we read, etc.) None of us knew, of course, who was an agent and who wasn’t. The expert who devised the system had wisely foreseen that the more insecure each of us felt the more secure we were as a whole. I still ponder how Martin Smith managed to slip through this web, and I can only conclude that his unconventional ways were looked upon as the eccentricities of a mechanical genius.
While the 1976 computer model may seem primitive to us today, at the time Smith designed it, the machine was far in advance of any previous model in its capacity to produce instantaneous answers to the most complicated problems. Furthermore, over the past several years he had succeeded in reducing the size of the computer from the unwieldy giants the company had first put out. As a result, the market for the machines had expanded until there was scarcely an office or a classroom in the country that didn’t have one as part of its standard equipment. And as improvements came every year, old models were turned in for new ones as frequently as cars. Our public relations department had begun to concentrate on the family market and had come up with several catchy slogans like, “Why waste your brain? Let an O.M.S. computer think for you” and “Don’t let your neighbor out-think you. Buy our new model computer.” This promotion campaign was already having its effect, as many of the better homes were buying the machines on easy credit terms.
* * * *
I remember it was in the autumn of 1975 that I dropped in on Smith’s experimental wing of the plant and had my first glimpse of the next year’s model. It was streamlined, handsomely lacquered and no larger than a refrigerator. The hundreds of levers and dials were like miniatures of the earlier models. When I marveled at the ingenuity of a machine that could do such prodigious things within such a small case, Smith smiled and said, “Look at the size of our brain. Only a few cubic inches. Think what it does and what it still could do if we gave it half a chance.”
I thought this remark a little odd coming from a man whose job it was to produce machines that could be sold on the basis of their superiority over the human brain, but I let it pass. At my request, he showed me some of the improvements over previous models. Then he said something that sounded innocent enough at the time but which, I realize in retrospect, should have struck an ominous note. He remarked that there were two or three features about the new machines he would rather not have publicized because they were highly experimental and he wasn’t sure exactly how they were going to work out.
However, I had seen enough to convince me that next year would mark the biggest sale of computers in the company’s history, a prediction that turned out to be an underestimate. Operating in day and night shifts, our plant could hardly keep up with the orders that flooded in from all parts of the country and even from overseas.
While the new model was universally praised for its appearance and efficiency, several months passed before there was any indication that the machines we were distributing so widely had certain sinister features unknown to any of us except the man who had designed them. It was late the following March that General Rufus Welford came to Columbia College to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree and to address the student body. He brought along the usual prepared speech out of the Madison Avenue files on how we must be ever-vigilant if we were going to safeguard our liberties. After the speech, which the students listened to with respect if not enthusiasm, there was a question and answer period. The general was not a very bright man except in his field which was biological warfare. (It was rumored he had managed to crossbreed typhus and cholera, but I am not certain of this. The information was classified.) Aware that students have a habit of asking tricky questions, he had one of the new model computers brought into the lecture room with full confidence that the machine would come to his rescue if any of the questions got too tough for him. The first query seemed innocent enough and was the sort of question a general might expect on such an occasion. I think I can remember the exact wording as it was reported back to the plant. “If both we and the enemy continue the production of nuclear weapons at the present rate, where will each of us be in 1986?”
The general, beaming confidence, had his assistant feed the question, along with certain material he had brought along, into the machine. Dials turned, lights flashed on and off and a piece of paper was disgorged from the computer’s lips. The assistant turned pale and his hands trembled a little as he read aloud the answer which consisted of a single word—”dead.”
A stunned silence fell over the room. Hardly able to believe his ears, the general snatched the slip of paper from the assistant’s hand, but there was no mistake. The word “dead” looked even deadlier when he read it in cold print. However, the general was not a man to panic at the first volley. He tried to pass it off as a joke, remarking that it was a hot day and no doubt the machine was a little out of sorts. The laughter which greeting this sally was not altogether convincing.
They decided to try again. This time three assistants worked with the general, stuffing into the computer’s maw sheet after sheet of loaded headlines, carefully doctored statistics, half truths, angled news and mangled facts out of context—practically the entire contents of the general’s briefcase. Never before had a machine failed to respond to this sort of persuasion by coming up with the desired answer. But this computer obstinately refused to change its mind. With maddening persistence it kept repeating the laconic “dead . . . dead . . . dead.”
The perspiring general glared at the offending machine as though he would tear it apart, bolt by bolt. But this would have been extremely rude; the computer belonged to the university and not to him. By this time the students were in full cry, like a pack of hounds closing in on a fox. One question led to another, each more embarrassing than the last. Having lost faith in the loyalty of the machine, the general tried to make up his own answers. The students would have none of them. They wanted the computer to give them the “lowdown” as they put it. And the machine was tireless in its effort to oblige them. With an infuriatingly smug “cluck-cluck” of its moving parts as they responded to the electronic impulses from its center “brain,” the computer seemed to take a delight in exploding every sacred assumption of the general’s profession. If the thermostatic war continues, can it be kept under control? No. Then if real war breaks out, is there an effective defense against atomic attack? None. How much strontium 90 is now in the earth’s atmosphere? Here the computer gave precise and alarming figures in percentages of radioactive poison to the other components of the atmosphere. By this time the flustered general was yelling “No, No!” at the top of his voice. But the students, angry themselves as well as frightened, paid no attention to his protests. They began spreading the questions into related fields like, “Who is paying for this nuclear arms race?” Again in its laconic mood, the machine answered, “You are.” The general could stand no more. Leaving behind his briefcase and his three bewildered assistants (all of them classified), he fled to Washington.
* * * *
In the meantime, the machine, aided and abetted by the rebellious students, continued its deadly assault on our cherished myths, some of which had come down to us from earliest times. One stabbing answer pierced the bubble of our “prosperity.” With irrefutable statistics the computer proved that most of us were deeply in debt and, since we could not possibly repay these debts, obviously our creditors could not collect; hence, in actuality, we were all bankrupt. The next question followed inevitably. If none of us were solvent, what about the national debt? Who would pay this colossal sum and to whom? One of the students later told me—and I have no reason to disbelieve him—that the machine just chuckled. It refused to waste a single electronic impulse tilting with such an unsubstantial windmill.
If only this miasma of truth could have been confined to that one room, quarantined so to speak!
But it was out before anyone could stop it, racing through city streets and villages, down country lanes to remote farmhouses, leaping over mountains, rivers, and even crossing oceans. Thousands of machines were kept up all night and the next day as the anxious population indulged themselves in an orgy of wanting to know the worst. I heard of one machine that worked steadily and uncomplainingly for seventy-two hours without so much as a break for a drop of oil.
You might wonder why the people were ready to accept the computers as oracles when the information that gushed out of them was so much at variance with almost everything they had been patiently taught. I think the main reason was the tendency of twentieth century man to trust machines more than he did human beings. When the most eminent scientists in the world warned of the danger from radioactive toxin in the air, people paid scant attention but, when the computers said the same thing, it never occurred to them to doubt the machines. Also there may be some slight validity in the theory of modern-day sociologists that many who were alive then had more misgivings about the prevailing shibboleths than they thought it prudent to admit. According to this school of thought, the computers merely touched off a vein of repressed awareness that ran like dry powder just under the surface of our conditioned responses.
I want to say here that the authorities, both corporate and military, acted with commendable energy to put out the conflagration. A law was rushed through Congress making it a crime to ask the machines any more questions. Unfortunately, even our efficient security system broke down under the strain of trying to enforce it. There were not enough agents and informers to watch every machine and, alas, the security officers themselves were beginning to ask questions. The next order, coming directly from the Hexagon, was more drastic. Smash all the machines! But our company records showed that there were over five hundred thousand in the United States alone. How was it possible to force a half million consumers to smash the thing they had just purchased and, in most cases, hadn’t even paid for yet?
And in all honesty I must admit our own company, one of the Big Twelve, secretly helped to sabotage the order in a misguided effort to protect their investment in the computers. Anyway, it was all too late. The cat was out of the bag or, more accurately, a million cats were out of a million bags. For soon word-of-mouth took over where the machines left off.
The results were diverse but overwhelming. The majority of our people resigned themselves to the loss of their illusions and faced reality with calm stoicism; some even welcomed it. But the military and the financial communities were hard hit. In one week the thermostatic war was over and the Hexagon Building looked like a ghost town. What happened on Wall Street was even more awful. No matter at what price stocks were offered, there were simply no bidders. You couldn’t even call it a crash. When the words “peace perpetual” flashed over the tape, the ticker machine groaned out a few last quotations and died.
The holocaust that followed has no parallel in human history.
Since the records kept in this panicky period are not reliable, no one will ever know the number of men and women who took their lives rather than face living in a world which each day grew more unrecognizable. Suffice it to say that the number ran into the millions. It was the way I had imagined England during the time of the Black Death. Even in rural areas like ours there was scarcely a household that didn’t suffer a loss and sometimes whole families were wiped out. But this was nothing compared to what was happening in the great urban centers. Eyewitnesses who were in New York at that time told macabre tales of the streets so littered with bodies that it was next to impossible to pick your way through them. Lines of people formed in front of the upper windows in all the high office buildings. I heard of many cases where the line was so long that the intended suicide, while waiting his turn to jump, changed his mind and decided to live.
But the uncounted multitudes who resorted to an overdose of the escape drugs rarely got a second chance because there were not enough doctors to give them first-aid even if they wanted it. For that fatal week the sales of the Pharmaceutical Super-Corporation soared to a new height. Officials of the company were momentarily encouraged to believe that they, at least, might weather the storm. But this hope was short-lived. The following week the drug stores had scarcely any customers at all. Most of those who had chosen this means of escape had sunk into a sleep from which no amount of benzedrine could arouse them.
* * * *
The last official act of the military was the arrest and execution of Martin Smith.
From where I stand now I’m willing to admit that this was purely and simply a gesture of revenge which served no useful purpose. But when you consider the enormity of his deed and the atmosphere of hysteria, it was natural that the frustrated passions of our leaders should have demanded a victim whom they might have spared in calmer times.
They gave him a brief hearing. In the same quiet, dispassionate voice he had used in talking to me about the new model computer, he confessed freely what he had done and gave his reasons. This was our first knowledge of the secret features he had added to the machine which has accomplished our downfall. The most ingenious one was a sort of second “brain”—a control center which carefully checked and sifted all the material which was fed into the machine. If the statistics were loaded, ever so slightly, to prove a desired point, the mechanical censor detected the error and corrected the figures before they were allowed to filter into the computing “brain” which produced the answer. If a news item was angled to bolster up a policy which might otherwise have been unpopular, the control mechanism penetrated the motive and straightened out the angle before admitting it into its calculations. If the question was framed in emotional or unsemantic terms, the computer’s censor rejected it altogether.
What Smith had done, in brief, was to build into the machine his own skepticism.
While up to then we had been free to fashion a fact into the image of what we wanted to believe or wanted others to believe, now the truth held us captive. For this betrayal Smith had to die. The last words he uttered, before ascending the hastily rigged scaffold, are engraved over the entrance of Humanities Hall which straddles Lower Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson— “You cannot hang the truth.”
Smith’s famous computer is now a revered museum-piece, nothing more. Even his genius could not produce a machine that was omniscient. The computer was proof against us but not against time. After twenty years service, it showed definite signs of age; no longer certain of its answers, it began to repeat itself, became querulous and opinionated when questioned too closely. The truth was unfolding too fast for any machine to keep pace with it. The last Smith computer was tenderly taken apart and now rests in a glass case in the Smithsonian Institute. But as Smith predicted, the human brain proved more adaptable. Once it took up the pursuit of knowledge, there was no stopping it until now there is hardly a mystery left that man isn’t threatening to illuminate. Oldsters like me have dragged our feet, but it is no use. We are pulled along in spite of ourselves.
So different is the world today that sometimes when I close my eyes and try to picture it as it was then, the images which come to mind seem more like illustrations for a fairy tale than anything that has actually happened.
Take religion, for instance. In those early days you were free to do pretty much as you pleased so long as you observed certain rules and weren’t too obvious. If you were troubled with a conscience and wanted to feel righteous, you could slip into a church and say a few propitiatory words or make a few gestures. This put you back in good standing so that you could begin all over again. What I’m trying to say is that the church was there to comfort you but it never interfered with your normal drives and instincts. And those instincts weren’t something we invented in the twentieth century—they had a long tradition behind them. You might say they were the rungs on the evolutionary ladder. Hadn’t we climbed out of the primaeval swamp by the long chain of accidents known as natural selection? Any individual existence was purely a matter of luck. Those who happened to be strong enough or cunning enough survived and bred strength and cunning into their descendants.
And now what do we have? Einstein where we once had Darwin, reason lording it over anarchy, compassion melting away man’s natural antagonism that has graced the pages of history with heroic adventures. And instead of keeping religion where it belongs—in a beautiful building erected for that purpose and supervised by a professional —now any amateur can practice it—and does. I use “amateur,” of course, in its root derivation from the latin word “amo” as meaning “a person who loves.” It is as though Christ, securely pinioned on a million crosses for two thousand years, had suddenly got loose and, coming out of the cathedrals, had entered into us.
I often chuckle when I think of the world Orwell pictured in his book 1984. In some ways he was prescient but what neither he nor anyone else foresaw was that a world could be organized for benevolent as well as for sinister purposes. From my point of view, it might have been better if we had gotten Orwell’s Big Brother. No matter how entrenched a dictator may be or how abject his populace, there is always a chance of overthrowing him and getting back your freedom. But what can you do when you live in a society where everyone’s your Big Brother and you’re even in danger of becoming one yourself!
Apologists for the New Age ask me why I still moon over the good old days when people lived in fear of almost everything. How am I to explain to those who have never felt it that fear can be a pleasurable emotion? Why do children delight in ghost stories that send chills up their spines? And they still do to this day. My friends reply that fiction is one thing, reality another, implying that this is a distinction my generation failed to observe. There is no getting past this deadlock. They have logic on their side; on mine is the hallowed memory of nearly fifty adventurous years.
I’m willing to concede that we still have pioneering today but mostly in the realm of ideas. Only very rarely is it possible to enjoy a physical experience that involves any appreciable risk—which to me is the essence of adventure. Once it was out of military control, science began to intrude itself into everything we did, leaving almost nothing to accident. Even in space travel we have seen the new science calculate extra-terrestrial conditions with such accuracy that a passenger rocket can now take off for an unexplored planet with scarcely more of a flurry than a plane flying from New York to Paris. In the last fifty years I can recall only one incident of any importance that hadn’t been anticipated and prepared for. I can still feel the good, old-fashioned goose-pimples I got when word came back that interplanetary life had finally been encountered in the outer reaches of the solar system in what had been known as the “ring” of Saturn. Call me bellicose or what you will, I confess that I relished the prospect of a little action between us and these creatures who were described in the report as “thought existing in a frame of hydrogen atoms.” In the old days strangers whose appearance, was so odd and different from our own would have been treated as inferiors and put in their place. But it goes to show to what extremes religion can take you once you let love get into your system. There was no battle at all. Before anyone could so much as blow a bugle, we and the strangers were amiably exchanging the latest information about the universe.
I think we got the best of the bargain if that’s any consolation. In spite of their rather elementary appearance, it seems that they had once been as complex as we and it had taken them several light years to achieve their present degree of simplicity and immateriality. And as we know, they were already experimenting to find ways of shedding the few atoms of matter they had left. Complaining that they found any material substance cumbersome in getting places, they hoped soon to become pure thought which could flash through space in no time at all. In answer to our questions they said that the method they intended to use was to gradually fuse their identity with— as nearly as we could translate it—the creative mind pervading the universe.
I admit this is all beyond me, but I tried to make a rough analogy that it was like separate railways merging into a great trunk line, doing away with obsolete rolling stock and giving more efficient service. Incidentally, the Saturnians remarked that they had tried for many centuries to communicate with us but, aside from intuitive flashes picked up by certain sensitive individuals, they were not very successful. With extreme tact they observed that possibly we were slightly retarded in telepathy because we seemed to be more concerned with matter than with mind.
* * * *
At least that’s no longer the case. We now use our minds on almost everything—with some pretty strange results, to my way of thinking. Take the question of original sin. The modern ethical scientists claim that sin isn’t original at all and that, if the Book of Genesis means anything, it means that the serpent in the Garden tipped us off on how to slide away from our primal knowledge of what is right. In other words virtue was original, sin had to be cultivated. Even if that’s so, they can’t deny it has added spice to our lives. Try to imagine our literature if sex, for instance, hadn’t been regarded as a natural territory for sinning. I remember the fun we had finding out about it in back of the barn. Now there isn’t a child in nursery school who hasn’t learned scientifically all there is to know about it. Whatever satisfaction he is able to get from sex when he grows up, it can never be the same as when it was seasoned with a delicious sense of sin.
And consider what’s happening to death. Every year it’s getting harder and harder to die. I know from my own experience. With the molecular injections they’ve been giving me, my cell tissue refuses to wear out. I think I can truthfully say I don’t feel a day older than fifty years ago when I was still in my hundreds. The most virulent germs are coaxed into a genial embrace with mating molecules, a union that produces nothing but health. As for accidents, they hardly ever occur. But when they do, any organ in the body, damaged beyond repair, can easily be replaced.
But this isn’t the worst. Science is not only needlessly prolonging individual lives by medical means, it is beginning to attack the whole concept of death on a broad philosophical front. They learned from the Saturnians that space is a sort of mental bridge to the infinite, open to human traffic as soon as it has unloaded its excess weight of matter. Already a few venturesome minds have been out roaming around the universe on exploratory missions. And where they lead, the rest will follow. I can’t predict how long it will take but, with all the resources of modern science mustered for the effort, I know the outcome is inevitable. Our body, the last refuge of our sweet mortality, is definitely on the way out. It is no longer the fashion for our poets to pay their melancholy tribute to the brevity and transitoriness of life. They are now more moved by mathematics than by sentiment.
And what about me?
I can confess it to these pages because no one will see them until after my death. Yes, I’ve made up my mind. While there is still time, I shall “forget” to take my injections for two or three years. No one is going to deprive me of the last great adventure left to my kind.