Collected Short Fiction, page 121
The Ad Institute had the truth then, and the truth cannot be killed. Not in this case, anyway. Too many people knew about it, underpaid researchers and students. Know the truth and the truth shall make you—rich. The only thing to do was to try to control it. So the Institute became a commercial center.
“Horrible,” I said. I looked down at my twitching hands. “Horrible.”
Wilson shook his head. “Not entirely. It has had its blessings. The cold war, for instance, is over. The Russian empire crumbled before the onslaught of scientific advertising. It fell to pieces—literally—within a month. It was only necessary to arouse desires—or to intensify them—which the existing regime was unable to satisfy. The pieces are still being reassembled.
“War is impossible now, as long as the avenues of communication are kept open. And that is the foundation stone of the reorganized United Nations. Much more important than armaments. Inspection teams are everywhere. The first hint of censorship, the first jamming static, and the barrage of words descends. The offending government is overthrown. On the whole, I think the world is better off.”
“No,” I muttered. “No. The world is populated with automatons. Buying. Buying. Buying. Spending. Spending. Spending.”
“There has always been a certain amount of robotism in the world,” Wilson pointed out. “Throughout history, millions have been bereft of their senses by those who have known how to punch the right emotional button. Witness the great movements of history, the Crusades, the French and Russian Revolutions, countless wars. At every point between global and community affairs, robotism has played its part. Now, at least, the command is not to fight, not to revolt, but to buy. As a consequence, the world is more prosperous than it has ever been. Everybody is making good wages, everybody is buying. What could be better?”
“The wastage,” I groaned.
“The wastage,” Wilson said, “is a vital part of our economy. In a period of peace, of high production in a heavily mechanized society, wastage is necessary to avoid collapse. That and a rapid turnover keep up the level of consumption to which our industrial machine is geared. Better wastage than war.”
“The ad men could take over the world,” I said. “Who could stop them? Not a race of slaves.”
“IT isn’t that bad. Resistance to modern advertising varies from complete submission to complete immunity, as it always has, usually according to intelligence, although there are psychological factors which are sometimes of even greater importance. Those who are immune run the world, as they always have, and see to it that the greater percentage of submissives get the work done.”
“And you are immune?” I asked. Wilson nodded, shrugging. I felt a dawn of hope. “I must be immune, too. I haven’t bought anything. I haven’t even been tempted.”
Wilson raised an eyebrow. “The science of advertising, like all sciences of mass phenomena, is based on the norm—”
I looked up quickly, angrily. “And I am not normal. Is that what you mean?”
Wilson raised a pacifying hand. “You didn’t let me finish. A norm, I said. In that sense you are not normal. Anyone who can stay sane for three years, in complete isolation, is not normal to begin with. And the psychological impact of advertising is dependent upon the society in which the individual finds himself. You were not at home in our society when you volunteered for the beacon. Now that you have returned, you belong even less. Three years alone has not made you more social. And the society is almost new. You are like a newborn child. You must learn to belong.”
“Learn to belong,” I echoed? The meaning came to me slowly. “No! I don’t want to belong. I’m immune. I must stay immune. I don’t want to be a slave like the rest of them.” I thought of Jean; I thought of $150,000. “Besides, I have no money.”
“But what of your salary?” Wilson said.
“Gone. Wasted. Thrown away. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I mourned.
Wilson shook his head sympathetically. “Unfortunate. It was something none of us could foresee. That a rising standard of living would wipe out the money that seemed a more than fair salary at the time. Some people have called it inflation. But it isn’t inflation. Wages have risen along with prices. They have more than kept pace. It is the standard of living. I am sure that you can find a job. Since we are partly responsible, I imagine we will be able to find some kind of work for you.”
I thought about the robots on the subway, the captive audience rising on command to buy and coming back to be commanded again. I thought about going home to Jean and a house full of junk, ever full of more and more, piling up, deteriorating, crowding us out. Suddenly the hollow sphere that paced the asteroids did not seem so lonely any more. Suddenly it seemed like home.
“Look!” I said. “Can I go back? Can I go back to the beacon?” I pulled a crumpled sheet of yellow paper from my pocket. “I have your offer here. I wouldn’t want any more money. I’ll cut it in half—”
Slowly, sadly, Wilson shook his head. “I’m afraid not. You can take the psychological tests, of course. But I can tell you right now that the results will be negative. Your return has changed the situation radically. Instead of fleeing from society, you are rebelling against it. It makes all the difference.”
“I can’t go back,” someone was whimpering. “I can’t go back. . . .”
Slowly I realized that it was me.
Kaleidoscope:
“. . . ALL IS CALM, ALL IS BRIGHT . . .”
Wreaths, holly, bells, candles—green and red; a man in a red and white suit. A flaming sun . . .
“GIVE-GIVE-GIVE GIVE-GIVE . . .”
A swirl of colors, a pattern of dots, smoke rising . . .
WHINRR-R-R! “BE-E-E-E BEWITCHING! BUY-Y-Y-Y BEWITCHING!” THUMP! THUMP!
Eyes, blank eyes, painted eyes . . .
WHANG-NG! STRNNN-NH! “NERVES TAUT? SMOKE A LOT? DON’T JITTER, JET.TER! BETTER BUY BILLOWS! Relax-x-x!” Sigh. WHANG-NG! . . .
Sliding doors, marching feet, automatic, all . . .
“S O O-S O O-S O O-SOOTHE . . .”
THUMP-THUMP! “BUY NOW!” THUMP-THUMP!
SLOWLY, dazedly, I opened the front door of my house. “SWISH-SWASH SWISHSWASH WITH WISH-WASH WISH-WASH. WISH YOUR WASH DON’T SWISH YOUR WASH DON’T SWISH YOUR WASH USE WISH-WASH SWISH-SWASH SWISHSWASH WITH . . .”
Jean sat in front of a television set, new, bigger, shinier, more glaring. She did not look up. She did not lift her eyes from the swirling colors.
My shoulders slumped. I felt in my pocket. The two little black books were there, but it didn’t make any difference. She had bought it on time, of course. Now I was in debt. I felt myself sinking into a morass of sucking mud. The grass around it grew in the shape of dollar signs.
I felt in my pants pockets. They were empty. Empty? I pulled out my billfold. It was empty, too. Empty! Impossible. I had started out this morning with almost fifty dollars and a pocket full of change. I searched frantically. Caught in the lining of my coat pocket was a single quarter. Where—? But I couldn’t have lost it. It couldn’t have been stolen. My billfold was still there.
Vaguely, distantly, I heard a voice chanting: “GIVE-GIVE-GIVE-GIVE-GIVE . . .”
A dry sob rose in my throat. Immunity!
I rushed to the bedroom. I tossed clothing wildly in the air, digging down to the desk I knew had to be here somewhere. But when I reached it at last, it was filled with everything but what I wanted. I raged through the house. Finally I reached the basement. It was cluttered with junk. But there I found it, in a dark corner. It was a little rusty, but it moved freely when I worked the slide back. A shell flipped out into my hand. Loaded and ready. I ejected the clip, slipped the shell back into it, clicked the clip back into position.
I came up the basement stair, holding the automatic in one hand. Jean was gone, but the television set was lit up in all its prismatic glory.
I slipped the gun into my coat pocket and walked out of the house. . . .
KLING-KLANK! “GIVEGIVE-GIVE-GIVE . . .”
CRACK-K-K! CRACK-CRACK-K-K! The gun jumped in my hand. The man in the red and white suit looked down at his swollen, red and white belly in astonishment. It had begun to smoke. There was no blood. Slowly, like a stuffed doll, he folded to the sidewalk. He lay there beside the tripod on top of which was the sign: “IT IS MORE BLESSED TO GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE”.
“. . . SLEEP IN HEAVENLY PEACE. SLEEP . . .”
“What was that?”
“There was this cracking noise, and then he fell over. . . .”
“Somebody shot Santa Claus!”
“Don’t be silly. Nobody shoots Santa Claus . . .”
WE were riding somewhere.” I turned to the man in blue on my right. “You’ll hang me, won’t you?” I said eagerly. “Or electrocute me? Or whatever you do to murderers?”
“Now, now,” the kindly man said. “We aren’t going to punish you. Prisons aren’t for that. We’re going to make you a fit member of society. I think you will enjoy your stay here. The cells are really quite comfortable.”
“No, no!” I screamed when they put me in the room. “You can’t! Take me out! Please, oh, please. . . .”
Inexorably, from behind the impregnable protective screen, came the music and the chant: WHANG-NG! STRNNN-NH! “NERVES TAUT? SMOKE A LOT? DON’T JITTER, JETTER! BETTER BUY BILLOWS! Relax-x-x!” WHANG-NG! STRNNN-NH! “NERVES TAUT? . . .”
Ad infinitum. . . .
THE END
Green Thumb
If the law of cause and effect is overthrown, and if ultimate understanding is impossible, and intelligence becomes less than worthless, where can a man turn—except to madness?
Johnny Sundance was seven parts Cherokee Indian and one part tramp printer. He was born in 1972 at the Chilocco Indian School, Oklahoma, where his father taught mathematics.
Johnny’s father was all Cherokee, with a Cherokee’s fierce pride and a Cherokee’s stoicism. When he discovered what his child was, he poured his frustrated ambition and his knowledge into Johnny as his ancestors had once poured powder into a trade musket.
Johnny learned to read when he was three. When he was five he was reading all the books in his father’s library, and his father started him on algebra.
His parents died in the last of the great airplane crashes, before automatic avoidance mechanisms became compulsory. They had a reservation on an earlier plane, but their helicab had been trapped in a Los Angeles traffic jam.
Johnny was six years old.
The government put him into a primary grade pool in a modern school at the Haskell Indian Institute. He graduated to the fourth grade at seven, began his scientific education at eight, and advanced at his own best speed until he graduated from high school at eleven, from college at fourteen, got his Ph.D. at sixteen, and passed his boards the same year.
He was a specialist. Those qualified to judge his work considered him the most brilliant quantum physicist in the country.
He won his first contest at nine with an original paper on atomic models. In the years following he published five books on particle physics and innumerable articles in scholarly journals.
He liked poetry, beer, and mountain climbing.
Just after his nineteenth birthday, he disappeared.
THE TYPE bars slamming viciously through the ribbon and paper against the hard rubber platen made the old-fashioned typewriter jump on the cluttered solid walnut desk. Gideon McKenzie glared at the paper as his stubby fingers jabbed at the keys. Occasionally a distant clink of metal against metal made him twitch, miss a key, and swear.
“The principle of specialization became inextricably embedded in the social matrix during the late 1960’s,” he wrote. “It was based on a recognition of the green thumb phenomenon: everyone has a talent which needs only the proper environment of social approval, favorable circumstances, and frequent, much admired successes to develop genius out of what may be only superior original capacity. It was at once the savior and the curse of Twentieth Century civilization.
“The arguments for it went like this: you can’t have a complex civilization without specialists; knowledge has become too extensive for any one man to encompass it all. It’s as much as he can do to master one small aspect of a subject. When there was much to learn, a spade was sufficient, but now that all the ground has been turned over, a man must dig deep to find virgin soil. He needs a sharpshooter.
“What has been called a revolution is actually the maturation of tendencies evident in the early years of the Electronic Age, and this is a lot of over-ripe manure!”
Gideon jerked the paper out of the typewriter, crumpling it in his hand, and glowered at the machine as if it were to blame. A McKenzie glare was a terrifying thing, but a glower was enough to freeze even a typewriter’s bearings.
Gideon was a lumpy man. He looked like he had been molded in a bass fiddle case and then a clumsy child had stuck on fat blobs for legs and arms. But his face was his own creation. Once it had been fat and jolly, but it had been carved by indignation and mottled by choler. The nose was a piece of red-veined putty; his eyebrows were dark bushes under which his pale blue eyes lurked in wait for the unwary bungler. His hair was thick, black, and unkempt, like a nest he had slept in.
The typewriter waited, unmoved, amid the precarious stacks of dusty books and tattered manuscripts on the desk. Gideon rolled another sheet of paper into the machine and began to pound the keys again. When he finished, he drew the sheet carefully out of the typewriter and leaning back in the wooden desk chair read it with an expression of Machiavellian delight.
Dear Barney:
I have written many potboilers in my career, but I cannot stomach this tripe. If you want to put out a revised edition of Green Thumb, you will have to do it yourself or have some specialist hack it out. Specialization, I am unalterably convinced, is a plague on all our houses.
Gideon
P.S. If you publish that book in any form, I will sue you.
P.P.S. Where are this quarter’s royalties?
The chair in which Gideon sat was the only chair in the room. An ancient green wool rug covered the floor. The walls, except for two doors, a real window looking out upon the concrete and aluminum peaks and cliffs of a city, and the desk, were books from rug to ceiling, stacked, heaped, stuck in sideways, backwards, and upside down.
From behind the door on the opposite side of the room the clinking sounds started again. A man cursed. Gideon’s eyebrows became a single thicket over his eyes.
Something crashed. In a blur of motion, Gideon was out of his chair. He flung open the door and revealed three men in a narrow, tiled closet. They were standing over the remains of what had been an excellent medicine cabinet.
Gideon thundered, “What in the name of Moloch do you think you’re doing? Three men sent to do a boy’s job, and you’ve been here all morning!”
A surly, dark-haired lavatorbot specialist second class said defensively, “This lavatorbot hasn’t been repaired for so long it wouldn’t work at all. When he tried to remove it, the thing slipped and fell.”
Gideon asked dangerously, “Why didn’t you remove it?”
The young man drew himself up proudly. “I am an electronic lavatorbot specialist. He”—the young man pointed—“is the mechanical lavatorbot specialist.”
Muted violence was in his voice as Gideon said, “Did it ever occur to you that the lavatorbot was not a lavatorbot at all? It was a perfectly good medicine chest, and you will procure me a new one immediately—and replacements for all the pharmaceuticals within.” He pointed at the old-fashioned, whitechina commode in the corner. “That is what I wanted fixed—a simple, three-minute job an idiot child could perform.”
“That is completely outside my specialty!”
Gideon pointed a pudgy finger at the third man, a tall, thin young man with red hair. “Why don’t you fix it!”
The young man said indignantly, “I am a plumber, not an antiquarian. If you had a modem disposerbot, it would be a simple matter. That is an atrocity.”
Gideon roared, “Keep my personal preferences out of this. Can you fix that thing?”
The plumber flinched. He said meekly, “What seems to be wrong with it?”
-It—won’t—flush.”.
Gingerly the red-haired plumber twisted the handle on the water closet. Water gurgled into the bowl and swirled up dangerously close to the edge before it subsided. Slowly the level dropped. “Well,” said the plumber. “Well. My suggestion is that you get rid of the whole affair. I can get a crew of men in a few days, rip this thing out, and put in a modem disposerbot—”
“Young man! I like this commode. I have become accustomed to it. I sometimes stand here for hours and flush it for recreation, just to listen to its long, withdrawing, melancholy roar.” Gideon’s pale eyes lighted on the plumber’s open tool box. “What’s that!”
“This?” The plumber picked up a rubber plunger on a stick. “This is known as a plumber’s friend.”
“No doubt the only one you have,” Gregor said scathingly. “Use it!”
“This, sir,” the plumber said icily, “is my specialist’s badge. It is purely ornamental.”
With a roar of rage, Gideon grabbed the plunger and jabbed it several times into the commode. The water surged down and out. “There! Now out! All of you!”
They fled before him, scrambling through the doorway and the room beyond, fumbling with the old-fashioned door into the hall. Gideon pursued them, the plumber’s friend waving in one hand like a mace. Finally the lavatorbot specialist, electronic, got the door open, and they scattered in all directions down the hall.
With a triumphant swing of his arm, Gideon threw the plunger after them, narrowly missing a tall, gray-haired man whose hand was raised to knock on the door.
