“Mister Mac,” he said, mildly surprised.
The other shook his head. “Nope. He’s dead.”
“So am I.”
Another deadpan headshake from the old man. “Dirty rumor. We get ’em all the time, you and I.”
His eyes widened. The voice was changed, but unmistakable. “Oh my God—it’s you!”
“I often wonder.”
“But you’re old.”
“So are you, son. Oh, you don’t look it, I’ll grant you that, but if I told you how old you are you’d laugh yourself spastic, honest. Here, let me lift your bed.”
The bed raised him to a half-sitting position, deliciously comfortable. “So you froze me carcass and then brought me back to life?”
The old man nodded. “Me and him.” He gestured behind him.
The light was poor, but he could make out a figure seated in the darkness on the far side of the room. “Who—?”
The other stood and came forward slowly.
My God, was his first thought. It’s me! Then he squinted—and chuckled. “What do you know? The family Jules. Hello, son.”
“Hello, Dad.”
“You’re a man grown, I see. It’s good to see you. You look good.” He ran out of words.
The man addressed began to smile, and burst into tears and fled the room.
He turned back to his older visitor. “Bit of a shock, I expect.”
They looked at each other for an awkward moment. There were things that both wanted to say. Neither was quite ready yet.
“Where’s Mother?” he asked finally.
“Not here,” the old man said. “She didn’t want any part of it.”
“Really?” He was surprised, not sure whether or not to be hurt.
“She’s into reincarnation, I think. This is all blasphemy and witchcraft to her. She cooperated—she gave us permission, and helped us cover up and all. But she doesn’t want to hear about it. I don’t know if she’ll want to see you, even.”
He thought about it. “I can understand that. I promised Mother once I’d never haunt her. Only fair. She still makin’ music?”
“I don’t think so.”
There was another awkward silence.
“How’s the wife?” he asked.
The old man winced slightly. “Gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorriest thing I’ve seen all day, son. You comfy?”
“Yeah. How about Sean?”
“He doesn’t know about this yet. His mother decided not to burden him with it while he was growing up. But you can see him if you want, in a few days. You’ll like him, he’s turned out well. He loves you.”
A surge of happiness suffused him, settled into a warm glow. To cover it he looked around the room, squinting at the bewildering array of machines and instruments. “This must have set you back a packet.”
The old man smiled for the first time. “What’s the good of being a multimillionaire if you can’t resurrect the dead once in a while?”
“Aye, I’ve thought that a few times meself.” He was still not ready to speak his heart. “What about the guy that got me?”
“Copped it in the nick. Seems a lot of your best fans were behind bars.”
“Why’d he do it?”
“Who knows? Some say he thought he was you, and you were an impostor. Some say he just wanted to be somebody. He said God told him to do it, ’coz you were down on churches and that.”
“Oh, Jesus. The silly fucker.” He thought for a time. “You know that one I wrote about bein’ scared, when I was alone that time?”
“I remember.”
“Truest words I ever wrote. God, what a fuckin’ prophet! ‘Hatred and jealousy, gonna be the death of me.’”
“You had it backwards, you know.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nobody ever had a better reason to hate you than Jules.”
He made no reply.
“And nobody ever had better reason to be jealous of you than me.”
Again he was speechless.
“But it was him thought it up in time, and me pulled it off. His idea and enthusiasm. My money. Maybe nobody else on Earth could have made that much nicker drop off the books. So you got that backwards, about them bein’ the death of you.” He smiled suddenly. “Old Jules. Just doin’ what I told him to do, really.”
“Makin’ it better.”
The old man nodded. “He let you under his skin, you see.”
“Am I the first one they brought back, then?”
“One of the first half-dozen. That Wilson feller in California got his daughter back. It’s not exactly on the National Health.”
“And nobody knows but you and Jules? And Mother?”
“Three doctors. My solicitor. A cop in New York used to know, a Captain, but he died. And George and Ringo know, they send their best.”
He winced. “I was rough on George.”
“That you were, son. He forgives you, of course. Nobody else knows in all the wide world.”
“Christ, that’s a relief. I thought I was due for another turn on the flaming cupcake. Can you imagine if they fuckin’ knew? It’d be like the last time was nothing.”
It was the old man’s first real grin, and it melted twenty years or more from his face. “Sometimes when I’m lying awake I get the giggles just thinking about it.”
He laughed aloud, noting that it did not hurt to laugh. “Talk about upstaging Jesus!”
They laughed together, the old man and the middle-aged man. When the laugh ended, they discovered to their mutual surprise that they were holding hands. The irony of that struck them both simultaneously. But they were both of them used to irony that might have stunned a normal man, and used to sharing such irony with each other; they did not let go. And so now there was only the last question to be asked.
“Why did you do it, then? Spend all that money and all that time to bring me back?”
“Selfish reasons.”
“Right. Did it ever occur to you that you might be calling me back from something important?”
“I reckoned that if I could pull it off, then it was okay for me to do it.”
He thought wistfully of the green light…but he was, for better or worse, truly alive now. Which was to say that he wanted to stay alive. “Your instincts were always good. Even back in the old scufflin’ days.”
“I didn’t much care, if you want to know the truth of it. You left me in the lurch, you know. It was the end of the dream, you dying, and everybody reckoned I was the one broke us up so it was my fault somehow. I copped it all. My music turned to shit and they stopped comin’ to hear it, I don’t remember which happened first. It all went sour when you snuffed it, lad. You had to go and break my balls in that last interview…”
“That was bad karma,” he agreed. “Did you call me back to haunt me, then? Do you want me to go on telly and set the record straight or something?”
The grip on his hand tightened.
“I called you back because you’re a better songwriter than I am. Because I miss you.” The old man did not cry easily. “Because I love you.” He broke, and wept unashamedly. “I’ve always loved you, Johnny. It’s shitty without you around.”
“Oh Christ, I love you too, Paulie.” They embraced, clung to each other and wept together for some time.
At last the old man released him and stepped back. “It’s a rotten shame we’re not gay. We always did make such beautiful music together.”
“Only the best fuckin’ music in the history of the world.”
“We will again. The others are willing. Nobody else would ever know. No tapes, nothing. Just sit around and play.”
“You’re incorrigible.” But he was interested. “Are you serious? How could you possibly keep a thing like that secret? No bloody way—”
“It’s been a long time,” the old man interrupted. “You taught me, you taught all three of us, a long time ago, how to drop off the face of the earth.
Just stop making records and giving interviews. They don’t even come ’round on anniversaries any more. It’ll be dead easy.”
He was feeling somewhat weary. “How…how long has it been?”
“Since you snuffed it? Get this—I told you it’d give you a laugh. It’s been two dozen years.”
He worked it out, suddenly beginning to giggle. “You mean, I’m—?”
The old man was giggling too. “Yep.”
He roared with laughter. “Will you still feed me, then?”
“Aye,” the old man said, “And I’ll always need you, too.”
Slowly he sobered. The laugh had cost him the last of his strength. He felt sleep coming. “Do you really think it’ll be good, old friend? Is it gonna be fun?”
“As much fun as whatever you’ve been doing for the last twenty-four years? I dunno. What was it like?”
“I dunno any more. I can’t remember. Oh—Stu was there, and Brian.” His voice slurred. “I think it was okay.”
“This is going to be okay, too. You’ll see. I’ve given you the middle eight. Last verse was always your specialty.”
He nodded, almost asleep now. “You always did believe in yesterday.”
The old man watched his sleeping friend for a time. Then he sighed deeply and went to comfort Julian and phone the others.
THE CRAZY YEARS
A Mission Statement
In 1939, the greatest science fiction writer who ever lived, Robert Anson Heinlein, produced one of the first of the many stunning innovations he was to bring to his field: he sat down and drew up a chart of the history of the future, for the next thousand years.
The device was intended as a simple memory aid, to assist him in keeping straight the details of a single, self-consistent imaginary future, which he could then mine as often as he liked for story ideas. But because Heinlein was who he was, his famous Future History came, over the next six decades, to have an uncanny—if nonspecific—predictive function. That is, no specific event he wrote of came to pass exactly as he invented it…but he was simply so smart and so well educated that, more often than not, he correctly nailed the general shape of things to come. He was, for instance, just about the only thinker in 1939 to seriously predict a moon landing before the 21st century—and he invented the water bed.
And in Heinlein’s Future History chart, the last decades of the 20th century—the ones he wrote about and discussed as seldom as possible—were clearly and ominously marked: “THE CRAZY YEARS.”
I discussed this with him several times, before his death in 1987. He had decided—half a century in advance—that a combination of information overload, overpopulation and Millennial Madness was going to drive our whole culture slug-nutty by the Eighties. One of his characters summed it up by describing The Crazy Years as “…a period when a man with all his gaskets tight would have been locked up.”
I intend to test that proposition. This column will be dedicated to the notion that Heinlein was right: that future generations will look back on us as the silliest, goofiest, flat-out craziest crew of loonies that ever took part in the historical race from womb to tomb; that never before in human history has average human intelligence been anything like so low as it is today; and that no culture on record has ever behaved as insanely as this one now does routinely. I will seek out—I do not expect it to be much of a chore—outstanding examples of widespread brain damage, and discuss them in the light of reason. I intend to speak plain horse sense, on as many different societal psychoses as I can…and if Heinlein is right, before long I’ll be comfortably ensconced in a padded cell, my frayed nerves soothed by powerful calming drugs.
Having summarized my mission, I have space left only to offer the most immediate and egregious specific contemporary example of the kind of thing I mean: The Terrorist Panic of ’96. Every single commentator in/on every possible medium is babbling insane nonsense about terrorists; our own Minister of Foreign Affairs has begun to mutter warnings that we will have to toss all that Rights & Freedoms silliness now that There’s a War On and we’re beset by terrorists…
Whatever turns out to have been behind the destruction of Flight 800, it cannot have been terrorists. This was reasonably certain within an hour of the explosion, and became more utterly certain with every minute that passed thereafter; by dawn of the next day it was clear fact.
A terrorist blows up stuff to make you do what he wants. “Do what I say or I will blow up more stuff.” There is no point in blowing up stuff if you fail to tell people who you are and what you want them to do.
Every single pundit, commentator, analyst and expert (“expert”: an ordinary person, a long way from home) on the planet wants you to believe in terrorists smart enough to take a huge airplane out of the sky in a single instant…and too stupid to operate a payphone or a fax machine.
Feh. We may never know whether those people were the innocent bystander victims of a Mafia hit, CIA “wetwork,” some pathetic cretin’s suicidal selfishness, simple psychosis…or, just possibly, the thing you only see mentioned in the last paragraph of news stories continued on page D28: a 747 model identical to Flight 800 exploded in Iran about a decade ago, apparently from a fuel leak that built up in one wing and blew off an entire engine (sound familiar?).
But the one thing we know for certain is that it had nothing to do with terrorists. Which does not mean some poor swarthy political crackpot won’t eventually be identified, hunted down and paraded before the media as The Mad Terrorist of Flight 800…just that he’ll be innocent.
Ask me, there’s a clear shortage of terrorists, lately. The media all but dared terrorists to come to Atlanta, hyping Olympic “security” for months…and all they could dredge up was some yahoo with a fizzle-yield pipe-bomb, one fatality. In 1949, hundreds more people than that were beaten unconscious with pipes while leaving a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, as the cops watched, if you want to talk about real terrorism.
Is all this a sign of some vast media conspiracy to foment war?
Oh, no. You’re not going to get me doing it, too! Basic principle of The Crazy Years: never attribute to evil genius what can be satisfactorily explained by stupidity.
My 21-year-old daughter refuses to watch videos with her mother and me, because she says it drives her crazy when we sit there and pick apart the gaping holes in the plot logic. We spoil the fun. I now live in a world where every single reporter, shaper and explainer of current events and public affairs would, in his or her heart of hearts, really much rather be writing an Arnold Schwarzenegger script. Because that’s what the public wants. Simple, clear—LOUD—hallucinations. Because the public is stupider and more insane at the moment than it has been for millennia—just as we reach the thinnest and most slippery part of the tightrope of history. We’re living in The Crazy Years.
Watch this space for further bulletins, on such symptoms of declining societal mental health as antismoking psychosis, anti-“nucular” neurosis, “environmental” brigandage, sexual hysteria and gender gibberish, galloping innumeracy, illiterate newscasters, the tragic general decline in public manners, and the general growing refusal of loud ignorant nitwits to mind their own damn business and quit telling their betters how to live.
Futures We Never Dreamed
Futures that science fiction never dreamed of have come to pass.
Sf has never claimed to predict the future, mind you. That’s not its job. What most sf writers do is try to create plausible futures, which will generate compelling stories. Even our implausible futures are plausible, sometimes. That is, even when we create a satirical future, one we don’t expect you to really believe—say, a world in which politicians are selected for intelligence—nonetheless once we’ve set the original, wild-card ground rules, we tend to proceed with rigorous logic and internal consistency. We can’t help it; that’s our training. (I speak here only of written sf; Hollywood sci fi is quite a different thing.)
Part of the theory is that a reader comfortable at adapt
ing to unlikely-but-possible futures—for recreation—will be less disoriented by Future Shock in real life, and thus be a more intelligent voter and a happier citizen. But this only works if the imaginary futures make sense. Spending time in a cartoon universe, with rules that change as the author finds convenient, accomplishes little of use. So sf writers generally expend immense (and almost completely invisible) effort on making even our most improbable future worlds work logically.
One would think that after a century or so of this, we would—quite incidentally—have produced quite a few startlingly accurate predictions by now. This turns out to be the case…and the case has been made elsewhere, and I do not propose to make it here. Successful “prediction” by throwing darts is a trivial aspect of sf, one which can easily get in the way of understanding its true strengths and virtues.
What I’d like to talk about instead are some of the futures we sf writers could never have imagined…that have come true.
The recent fuss about evidences of life on ancient Mars brings up the most obvious and appalling: in eighty-some years of commercial sf, not one writer ever predicted, even as a joke, that humanity would achieve the means to conquer space—and then throw it away. None of us guessed there might be raised up a generation so dull and dreamless they would not realize (or listen when they were told) that incalculable wealth, inexhaustible energy and unlimited adventure are hanging in the sky right over their heads, a mere two hundred miles away. We could never have conceived of a society that, faced with an imminent rain of soup, would throw away its pails.
A few years ago in Florida I saw and photographed perhaps the most transcendently sad, baffling, infuriating sight I have ever seen: an Apollo Program booster, one of two or three left in the world, one of the most stupendous devices ever built by free men…lying on its side on the ground, rusting in the rain. I wept along with the sky. It is as if Ferdinand, informed of the discovery of the New World, were to have forbidden any more of his ships to sail beyond sight of land—“We’ve got urgent problems right here in Spain: we can’t go throwing money away in the ocean.”—and no more sensible monarch could be found anywhere in Europe. Even in retrospect, I have trouble believing in a society that doesn’t know it needs a frontier.
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