Stories

by Doris Lessing

  THEIR EDUCATION

  The ability to define these, and to differentiate them from those of other people’s, forms a large part of their education. When two of these creatures meet for the first time, they will set about finding out what opinions the other holds and will tolerate each other accordingly. Non-stimulating, easily tolerated opinions can also be called “received ideas.” This means that an idea or a fact has been stamped with approval by some form of authority. The phrase is used like this: “That is a received idea.” “Those are all received ideas.” This does not necessarily mean that the idea or fact has been acted on nor that behaviour has been changed. Essentially, a received idea is one that has become familiar, whether effective or not, and no longer arouses hostility or fear. The mark of an educated individual is this: that he has spent years absorbing received ideas and is able readily to repeat them. People who have absorbed opinions counter to the current standard of ideas are distrusted and may be called opinionated. This description is earned most easily by women and young people.

  By that time, we were well known to everyone in the institute as Herbert Bond, thirty-five years old, male, and John Hunter, forty years old, male. We had learned enough to avoid the direct “Why don’t you take such-and-such steps?” since we had learned that this approach caused some sort of block or fault in their functioning, but approached like this: “Let us discuss the factors militating against the taking of such-and-such a step”; for instance, making sure that new buildings were not erected close to the area where tremors or vibrations must occur.

  This formulation was initially successful, evoking the maximum amount of animated talk without arousing hostility. But very shortly, strong emotion was aroused by phrases and words of which we list a few here: profit motive, conflicting commercial interests, vested interests, capitalism, socialism, democracy—there are many such emotive words. We were not able to determine, or not in a way that our economic experts would recognise as satisfactory, the significance of these phrases, since the emotions became too violent to allow the conference to continue. The animals would certainly have begun to attack one another physically. In other words, the range of opinion (see above) was too wide to be accommodated. Opinion, that is, on matters to do with disposal and planning of population. Opinion concerning earth disturbance was virtually unanimous.

  BARBARIC METHOD OF TOWN PLANNING

  UNIQUE IN OUR SYSTEM, BUT SEE

  HISTORIES OF PLANETS 2 AND 4

  It appears that their population disposal, their city planning, is not determined by the need of the people who live in an area but is the result of a balance come to by many conflicting bodies and individuals whose reason for participating in such schemes is self-interest. For instance: before the violence engendered by this subject closed the conference, we had gathered that the reason a particularly large and expensive group of buildings was built directly in the line of maximum earth disturbance was that that part of the city commands high “rents”—that is, people are prepared to pay more to live and work in that area than elsewhere. Nor can the willingness of the builders and planners to erect buildings in the maximum danger area be put down to callousness, since in many cases the individuals concerned themselves live and work there—

  … THE EMERGENCY UNIT AT THE HOSPITAL IN WHICH A TEAM OF TEN DOCTORS AND NURSES WORKS AROUND THE CLOCK TO SAVE LIVES THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN LOST AS RECENTLY AS FIVE YEARS AGO—AND ARE STILL LOST IN HOSPITALS NOT EQUIPPED WITH EMERGENCY UNITS. THE PATIENTS ARE USUALLY THE VICTIMS OF CAR ACCIDENTS OR STREET FIGHTS AND ARRIVE AT THE UNIT IN A STATE OF SEVERE SHOCK. SINCE AS SHORT A DELAY AS FIVE MINUTES CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH, TREATMENT IS STARTED AS THE PATIENT IS LIFTED OUT OF THE AMBULANCE—

  … as a good deal of the anger was directed against their own young, we left the institute and returned to the centre of the city, where we again made contact with the young.

  THE INSTITUTE FOUND NOT USEFUL

  The young ones working at the institute in menial and assistive positions were all of a different subculture, patterned on the older animals in clothing and behaviour. The young animals we met in the city were in herds, or smaller groups, and not easily contacted by Herbert Bond and John Hunter, who, being older and dressed in the uniform of the dominant males, were suspected of being spies of some sort. We therefore reincarnated ourselves as two youngsters, male and female, having decided to spend a fourth of what was left of our supply of power in trying to persuade them to agree on one issue and to act on it. For, like their elders, they discuss and talk and sing endlessly, enjoying pleasurable sensations of satisfaction and agreement with others, making these an end in themselves. We suggested that in view of what was going to happen to the city, they, the young ones, might try to persuade all those of their age to leave and live elsewhere, to make for themselves some sort of encampment if to build a new city was beyond their resources, at any rate, a place in which refugees would be welcomed and cared for.

  FAILURE WITH THE YOUNG

  All that happened was that a number of new songs were sung, all of a melancholy nature, all on the theme of unavoidable tragedy. Our encounter with these young ones was taking place on the beach and at the time of the fading of the sunlight. This is a time that has a powerfully saddening effect on all the animals. But it was not until afterwards that we understood we should have chosen any time of the day but that one. There were large numbers of young, many with musical instruments. Half a dozen of them converted the occasion into a conference (see above) by addressing the mass not as their elders do, through talking, but through singing—the heightened and emotional sound. The emotion was of a different kind from that at the conference at the institute. That had been violent and aggressive and nearly resulted in physical attack. This was heavy, sad, passive. Having failed to get them to discuss, either by talking or by singing, a mass exodus from the city, we then attempted discussing how to prevent individuals from massing in the most threatened areas (we were on one at the time) and how, when the shock occurred, to prevent mass deaths and injuries and how to treat the injured, and so forth.

  DESPAIR OF THE YOUNG

  All these attempts failed. We might have taken a clue from the drugged condition of the three whose minds we at first occupied and from the indifference to death of the four in the metal conveyance. We have concluded that the young are in a state of disabling despair. While more clear-minded, in some ways, than their elders—that is, more able to voice and maintain criticism of wrongs and faults—they are not able to believe in their own effectiveness. Again and again, on the beach, as the air darkened, versions of this exchange took place:

  “But you say you believe it must happen, and within five years.”

  “So they say.”

  “But you don’t think it will?”

  “If it happens, it happens.”

  “But it isn’t if—it will happen.”

  “They are all corrupt, what can we do? They want to kill us all.”

  “Who are corrupt?”

  “The old ones. They run everything.”

  “But why don’t you challenge them?”

  “You can’t challenge them. They are too strong. We have to evade. We must be fluid. We must be like water.”

  “But you are still here, where it is going to happen.”

  “So they say.”

  A song swept the whole gathering. It was now quite dark. There were many thousands massed near the water.

  It will happen soon,

  So they say,

  We will not live to fight

  Another day.

  They are blind.

  They have blown our mind.

  We shall not live to fight,

  We live to die.

  MASS SUICIDES

  And hundreds of them committed suicide—by swimming out into the water in the dark, while those who stood on higher ledges by the water threw themselves in—

  … A DONATION OF $500,000 TO BUILD A BIRD SANCTUARY IN THE PARK.
THIS WILL HAVE SPECIMENS OF EVERY KNOWN SPECIES IN THE WORLD. IT IS HOPED THAT SPECIES THREATENED WITH EXTINCTION DUE TO MAN’S CRUELTY AND UNCONCERN WILL FIND THIS SANCTUARY A USEFUL BANK FROM WHICH THEY CAN REPLENISH AND STRENGTHEN VARIETIES UNDER THREAT—

  … very low stock of power. We decided to make one last attempt, to concentrate our material in a single place. We decided to leave the herds of young and to return to the older animals, since these were in authority. Not to the institute, since we had proved their emotional instability. It was essential to choose a set of words that would not cause emotion—a received idea.

  Now, the idea that the behaviour of an individual or a group can be very different from its, or their, self-description is already part of their mental furniture and is enshrined in many time-worn word sets. For instance, “Don’t judge by what he says but by what he does.”

  We decided to reinforce this soothing received idea with another of their anxiety-reducing devices. We have already noted that a conference is such a device. A variety of this is to put ideas into heightened or emotional sound, as was done by the young on the beach. We decided that neither of these was suitable for our last attempt. We considered and discarded a third that we have not yet mentioned. This is when disturbing or unpalatable ideas are put into ritual form and acted out in public to small groups or relayed by a technical device, “television,” which enables visual images to be transmitted simultaneously to millions of people. A sequence of events that may fall outside their formal code of morality, or be on its borderline, will be acted out, causing violent approval or disapproval—it is a form of catharsis. After a time, these sequences of acted-out events become familiar and are constantly performed. This way of trying out, of acclimatising unfamiliar ideas, goes on all the time, side by side with ritual acting out of situations that are familiar and banal—thus making them appear more interesting. This is a way of making a life situation that an individual may find intolerably tedious and repetitive more stimulating and enable him to suffer it without rebelling. These dramas, of both the first and the second kind, can be of any degree of sophistication. But we decided on a fourth mechanism or method: a verbal game. One of their games is when sets of words are discussed by one, two or more individuals, and these are most often transmitted through the above-mentioned device.

  We had reassumed our identities as Herbert Bond and John Hunter, since we were again contacting authority, and approached a television center with forged credentials from a geographic area called Britain, recently a powerful and combative subspecies, which enjoys a sort of prestige because of past aggressiveness and military prowess.

  LAUGHTER, FUNCTIONS OF, SEE ABOVE

  We proposed a game of words, on the theme “Don’t judge by words but by actions.” The debate took place last night. To begin with, there was a good deal of laughter, a sign that should have warned us. This was not antagonistic, “laughing at,” which is found disagreeable but which, in fact, is much safer a reaction than “laughing with,” which is laughter of agreement, of feeling flattered. This second type is evoked by ideas that are minority ideas, when the minorities consider they are in advance of the mass. The aggressive and hostile laughter is a safer reaction because it reassures onlookers that a balance is being kept, whereas the sympathetic laughter arouses feelings of anxiety in those watching if the ideas put forward are challenging to norms accepted by them. Our thesis was simple and as already outlined: that this society is indifferent to death and to suffering. Fear is not experienced, or not in a way that is useful for protecting society or the individual. No one sees these facts, because all the sets of words that describe behaviour are in contrast to the facts. The official sets of words are all to do with protection of oneself and others. Throughout all this—that is, while we developed our thesis—we were greeted by laughter.

  These games have audiences invited to the places where they are played, so that the makers of the ritual can judge the probable reaction of the individuals outside all over the city in front of their television. The laughter was loud and prolonged. Opposing Herbert Bond and John Hunter, professors of words from Britain, were two professors of words from the local university. They have rules of debate, the essence of which is that each statement must have the same weight or importance as the preceding. The opposing professors’ statements, of equal length as ours, stated the opposite view and were light and humorous in tone. Our turn coming again, we proved our point by stating the facts about this city’s behaviour in the face of a certain disaster—but we did not get very far. As soon as we switched from the theoretical, the general, to the particular, the laughter died away and violent hostility was shown. There is a custom that if people watching a ritual dislike it, they send hostile messages to the relay point. What Herbert Bond and John Hunter said caused so much violent emotion that the technical equipment used for listening to these messages broke down. While the two local professors maintained the calmness of manner expected during these games, they were nervous and, the ritual over, they said they thought they would lose their employment. They were hostile to us, as being responsible. They complained that as “foreigners,” we did not realise that these rituals must be kept light in tone and general in theme.

  When we two got to the door of the building, there was a mob outside, mostly of older animals, very hostile. The managers of the ritual game pulled us back and took us up to the top of the building and set guards on us, as apparently the mob was angered to the point of wishing to kill us—again, the focus of their anger was that we were foreign. We complied, since there was no point in creating further disorder and—

  … BRING YOUR DECEASED TO US, WHO ARE FRIENDS OF YOUR FAMILY, FRIENDS IN YOUR DISTRESS. TREATED WITH ALL REVERENCE, CARED FOR AS YOU CARED WHEN MOTHER, FATHER, HUSBAND, WIFE, BROTHER, OR LITTLE SISTER WAS STILL WITH YOU, THE SLEEPING ONE WILL BE BORNE TO THE LAST HOME, LAID GENTLY TO REST IN A PLOT WHERE FLOWERS AND BIRDS WILL ALWAYS PLAY AND WHERE YOU CAN VISIT AND MUSE…. IN YOUR LEISURE HOURS, YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE A HAVEN WHERE YOUR THOUGHTS CAN DWELL IN LOVING HAPPINESS ON YOUR DEPARTED FRIENDS, WHO—

  … We are running very short of power. There is nothing more we can do. This mission must be regarded as a failure. We have been able to achieve nothing. We have also failed to understand what is the cause of their defectiveness. There is no species like this one on any other planet known to us.

  As the guards on our place of detention relaxed their vigilance, we simply dematerialised and returned to the craft. They will think we escaped or perhaps were the subjects of kidnapping by the still-hostile crowd that we could see from the top of the building where—

  … SHOCKING AND DISGUSTING PROGRAM THAT OFFENDED IN A WAY NO OTHER PROGRAM HAS IN THIS COMMENTATOR’S MEMORY. IT IS NOT WHAT WAS SAID BY OUR TWO VISITORS, IT WAS THE WAY IT WAS SAID. AFTER ALL, WE ALL HAVE TO LIVE WITH “THE FACTS” THAT THEY SO NAIVELY SEEM TO IMAGINE ARE A REVELATION TO US. FOR SHEER BAD TASTE, CRUDITY OF TONE, UGLINESS OF MANNER, AND INSENSITIVITY TO THE DEEPER FEELINGS OF THE VIEWERS, NOTHING CAN BE COMPARED WITH PROFESSORS BOND AND HUNTER LAST NIGHT.

  DEPARTURE FROM THE PLANET

  We are now reassembled as our original six and will shortly be returning. We have a tentative conclusion. It is this: that a society that is doomed to catastrophe, and that is unable to prepare for it, can expect that few people will survive except those already keyed to chaos and disaster. The civil, the ordered, the conforming, the well-tempted can expect to fall victim at first exposure. But the vagabonds, criminals, mad, extremely poor will have the means to survive. We conclude, therefore, that when, within the next five years, the eruption occurs, no one will be left but those types the present managers of society consider undesirable, for the present society is too inflexible to adapt—as we have already said, we have no idea why this should be so, what is wrong with them. But perhaps concealed in this city are groups of individuals we did not contact, who saw no reason to contact us, who not only foresee the future event but who are taking steps—


  The West Coast Examiner

  Sam Baker, a farmer from Long Ridge, said he saw a “shining round thing” take off 100 yards away from his fence yesterday evening as the sun went down. Says Sam: “It rose into the air at such a rate it was almost impossible to follow it with my eyes. Then it disappeared.” Others from the same area claim to have seen “unusual sights” during the past few days. The official explanation is that the unusually vivid sunsets of the past month have caused strong reflections and mirages off rocks and stretches of sand.

  MILITARY SECTOR III TO H.Q.

  (TOP CONFIDENTIAL)

  The UFO that landed some time in the night of the 14th, and was viewed as it landed, remained stationary for the entire period of seven days. No one was seen to leave the UFO. This is exactly in line with the previous twelve landings in the same spot. This was the thirteenth UFO of this series. But this was rather larger and more powerful than the previous twelve. The difference registered by Sonoscope 15 was considerable. This UFO, like the previous twelve, was only just visible to ordinary vision. Our observer, farmer Jansen H. Blackson, recruited by us after the first landing a year ago, volunteered that this one was much more easily seen. “You had to stare hard to see the others, but I saw this one coming down, also lifting off, but it went up so fast I lost it at once.” The suggestion from M 8 is that all thirteen are observation craft from the Chinese. The view of this section is that they are from our Naval Department 15, and it is our contention that as they have no right of access to this terrain, which is under the aegis of War Department 4, we should blast them to hell and gone next time they try it on.

  AIR FORCE 14 TO CENTER

  The alightings continue—number thirteen last week. This was also unmanned. Confirm belief Russian origin. Must report also two further landings to the south of the city, both in the same place and separated by an interval of three weeks. These two craft identical with the series of fifty-five alighting to north of city last year. The two southern landings coincided with the disappearance of eleven people, five the first time, six the second. This makes 450 people gone without trace during the past two years. We suggest it is no longer possible to dismiss the fact that the landings of these craft always mean the disappearance of two to ten people with the word “coincidence.” We must face the possibility that all or some are manned, but by individuals so dissimilar in structure to ourselves that we cannot see them. We would point out that Sonoscope 4 is only just able to bring these types of craft within vision and that, therefore, the levels of density that might indicate the presence of “people” might escape the machine. We further suggest that the facetiousness of the phrase “Little Green Men” might mask an attitude of mind that is inimical to a sober evaluation or assessing of this possibility.