by William Tenn
Situated amid the still-radioactive rubbish of modern war, the people of Europe listened devoutly to readings from Fouffnique’s monograph. They were enthralled by the peaceful monotonies said to exist in the United States and bored by the academician’s reasons thereto: that a governing group who knew to begin with that they were “unbest” would be free of the myriad jealousies and conflicts arising from the need to prove individual superiority, and that such a group would tend to smooth any major quarrel very rapidly because of the dangerous opportunities created for imaginative and resourceful people by conditions of struggle and strain.
There were oligarchs here and bosses there; in one nation an ancient religious order still held sway, in another, calculating and brilliant men continued to lead the people. But the word was preached. Shamans appeared in the population, ordinary-looking folk who were called “abnegos.” Tyrants found it impossible to destroy these shamans, since they were not chosen for any special abilities but simply because they represented the median of a given group: the middle of any population grouping, it was found, lasts as long as the group itself. Therefore, through bloodshed and much time, the abnegos spread their philosophy and flourished.
Oliver Abnego, who became the first President of the World, was President Abnego VI of the United States of America. His son presided—as Vice-President—over a Senate composed mostly of his uncles and his cousins and his aunts. They and their numerous offspring lived in an economy which had deteriorated very, very slightly from the conditions experienced by the founder of their line.
As world president, Oliver Abnego approved only one measure—that granting preferential university scholarships to students whose grades were closest to their age-group median all over the planet. The President could hardly have been accused of originality and innovation unbecoming to his high office, however, since for some time now all reward systems—scholastic, athletic, and even industrial—had been adjusted to recognition of the most average achievement while castigating equally the highest and lowest scores.
When the usable oil gave out shortly afterwards, men turned with perfect calmness to coal. The last turbines were placed in museums while still in operating condition: the people they served felt their isolated and individual use of electricity was too ostentatious for good abnegism.
Outstanding cultural phenomena of this period were carefully rhymed and exactly metered poems addressed to the nondescript beauties and vague charms of a wife or old mother. Had not anthropology disappeared long ago, it would have become a matter of common knowledge that there was a startling tendency to uniformity everywhere in such qualities as bone structure, features and pigmentation, not to mention intelligence, musculature, and personality. Humanity was breeding rapidly and unconsciously in toward its center.
Nonetheless, just before the exhaustion of coal, there was a brief sputter of intellect among a group who established themselves on a site northwest of Cairo. These Nilotics, as they were known, consisted mostly of unreconstructed dissidents expelled by their communities, with a leavening of the mentally ill and the physically handicapped; they had at their peak an immense number of technical gadgets and yellowing books culled from crumbling museums and libraries the world over.
Intensely ignored by their fellowmen, the Nilotics carried on shrill and interminable debates while plowing their muddy fields just enough to keep alive. They concluded that they were the only surviving heirs of Homo sapiens, the bulk of the world’s population now being composed of what they termed Homo abnegus.
Man’s evolutionary success, they concluded, had been due chiefly to his lack of specialization. While other creatures had been forced to standardize to a particular and limited environment, mankind had been free for a tremendous spurt, until ultimately it had struck an environmental factor which demanded the fee of specialization. To avoid war, Man had to specialize in nonentity.
Having come this far in discussion, the Nilotics determined to use the ancient weapons at their disposal to save Homo abnegus from himself. However, violent disagreements over the methods of reeducation to be employed led them to a bloody internecine conflict with those same weapons in the course of which the entire colony was destroyed and its site made untenable for life. About this time, his coal used up. Man reentered the broad, self-replenishing forests.
The reign of Homo abnegus endured for a quarter of a million years. It was disputed finally—and successfully—by a group of Newfoundland retrievers who had been marooned on an island in Hudson Bay when the cargo vessel transporting them to new owners had sunk back in the twentieth century.
These sturdy and highly intelligent dogs, limited perforce to each other’s growling society for several hundred millennia, learned to talk in much the same manner that mankind’s simian ancestors had learned to walk when a sudden shift in botany destroyed their ancient arboreal homes—out of boredom. Their wits sharpened further by the hardships of their bleak island, their imaginations stimulated by the cold, the articulate retrievers built a most remarkable canine civilization in the Arctic before sweeping southward to enslave and eventually domesticate humanity.
Domestication took the form of breeding men solely for their ability to throw sticks and other objects, the retrieving of which was a sport still popular among the new masters of the planet, however sedentary certain erudite individuals might have become.
Highly prized as pets were a group of men with incredibly thin and long arms; another school of retrievers, however, favored a stocky breed whose arms were short, but extremely sinewy; while, occasionally, interesting results were obtained by inducing rickets for a few generations to produce a pet whose arms were sufficiently limber as to appear almost boneless. This last type, while intriguing both esthetically and scientifically, was generally decried as a sign of decadence in the owner as well as a functional insult to the animal.
Eventually, of course, the retriever civilization developed machines which could throw sticks farther, faster, and with more frequency. Thereupon, except in the most backward canine communities, Man disappeared.
Afterword
The army was where I began writing this story—somewhere in the European Theater of Operations, in 1944. I didn’t have a typewriter, but I did have an early ballpoint pen (bought in Greenock, Scotland, the evening after we disembarked from the troop ship) and a pile of blank V-Mail (V-Mail was the unfolded one-page letter forms distributed to overseas soldiers for writing home).
My first intention was to write a satire about the inherent mediocrity of officialdom, especially as exemplified by the officers of the Army of the United States. By the time I completed that draft, in Saarbrucken, Germany, 1945, I had changed my opinion of the army several times over—and, to my chagrin, the army never seemed to notice, or care.
After discharge, but before I began my professional career as a writer, I whittled away at the piece, picking first this target, then that. By 1947, I had settled on the most mediocre man I could see in a high position: Harry S Truman, the President of the United States. He, I admit to my shame and sorrow, was the original original of George Abnego.
(Why this S. and S.? Well, growing up has apparently been a constant process of growing up so far as I’m concerned. I now rank Truman very high in my opinion of U.S. presidents, a couple of micrometers or so behind Abraham Lincoln.)
I had also, years back, been very much impressed with the early science fiction of A.E. van Vogt. His “Black Destroyer” and “Discord in Scarlet” had been among my favorites when it came to stories about aliens. But when I read his The World of Null-A, however, I had immediately wondered, “Why limit it to non-Aristotelian logic? Why not non-Platonic politics? There’s the rub in our social history ever since the fifth century B.C!” Now, in 1947, I remembered that overlook of van Vogt’s. I worked that into the story and used it as a title.
I wrote and rewrote the story, intending it for The New Yorker. When I was seventeen, I had sent The New Yorker a cycle of stories that perhaps
only an acned seventeen-year-old could write—“The Adventures of God” and “The Further Adventures of God Junior.” Instead of the expected printed rejection slip, I had received a postcard from the editor, Harold Ross (Harold Ross, himself, in his own handwriting!), inviting me to come up and see him about the stories. I went there in my best—and only—blue serge suit, seeing myself as the new Perelman, the latest Thurber, the latter-day Robert Benchley.
I didn’t even get to Ross’s office. He came to me outside, in the smallish reception room. He talked to me for a few minutes, asking me what I read, what other things I had written, just why I had set myself to write “The Adventures of God.” Then he handed me back the pieces I had sent in and touched me lightly on the shoulder. “We don’t need these,” he said. “But keep punching, keep writing. We’ll be publishing you one day.” And he watched me take the elevator down.
But I went home with the virus in me. No matter where I published first, no matter what book awards I might win, I knew I must fulfill Harold Ross’s promise—I must one day appear in The New Yorker.
Now, at last, in 1950 (I had been potschkeying with the story for three years) I felt I had the wherewithal to fulfill that promise. I took it to my agent, told him of the market it must go to. He read it and shrugged. “Could be,” he said.
Then, the next day, he called me and told me he’d sent it to Damon Knight’s new science-fiction magazine, Worlds Beyond.
Damon had liked it a lot and had immediately bought it for a hundred dollars.
“A hundred dollars!” I wept. “I intended it for The New Yorker.”
“A hundred dollars definite,” he said, “is better than The New Yorker maybe. You need the money to eat on.”
I really couldn’t argue with that last sentence. My ninety-dollar part of the check from Worlds Beyond bought a lot of groceries.
Well, at least, I said, the story will be noticed. It will be noticed and commented-on everywhere.
It wasn’t.
For a long time, there seemed to be only three people in the world who thought “Null-P” a particularly good story: myself, Damon Knight, and August Derleth, who used it in an anthology he edited. Everybody else ignored it. Then, a decade after its first publication, “Null-P” was especially noted by Kingsley Amis in his critical study, New Maps of Hell. Anthology requests began coming in from everywhere and references to it appeared in the most unexpected places. All right—maybe it isn’t all that good, but certainly it couldn’t have been that bad either for ten long years.
(By the way, Amis said that the satire in “Null-P” did not seem to be aimed at any one in particular. I would have quarreled bitterly with that definitely non-American Brit. By the time New Maps of Hell was published, I damn well knew who I had intended to satirize, who the most mediocre of leaders was. Eisenhower, I would have told him. It was President Eisenhower all along, I would have said. Eisenhower, who followed that great president, Harry S Truman.)
And how do I feel today about the story’s never having been submitted to The New Yorker? I feel as my mother would have put it:
“Oy, it’s The New Yorker’s loss. And The New Yorker’s loss is my loss.”
Written 1947/ Published 1950
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