by James Gunn
Landis had looked up at the sign above his computer. He didn't like committees. They were frustrating, boring, and useless. They were set up to relieve pressures for action or to diffuse blame for unpopular decisions already reached. He had served on more than his share, and he knew that knowledgeable administrators determined the results of committees by the kinds of people they appointed to them.
On the other hand, the subject had interested him. It had fitted into the book he was writing. Besides, this had been the first indication that the Federal government thought of him as some kind of expert. That was heady stuff for a man who lived by his wits. He had recognized the flattery and his response to it at the same time that he couldn't resist the feelings.
Didn't Heinlein have a science-fiction story about that kind of thing? He had looked it up. No, Heinlein had a series of stories that dealt with the rise of religious fanaticism after the year 2000, but it was Asimov's story “Trends,” published in 1940, that described religious opposition to spaceflight. He would have to read it, mention it in a committee meeting, maybe look up other stories that dealt with similar issues. They would make good conversation points during dull sessions, and useful interpolations into an otherwise deadly committee report, and perhaps even offer insights into the problem at hand.
Besides, maybe he could wangle a trip into space out of his NASA contacts. He had dashed off a quick acceptance before he could think better of it and called up his file labeled “Catastrophe,” although his word-processing program recognized only the first eight letters. An hour later he began to write, slowly at first, and then, as his ideas began to flow, with increasing speed until his fingers jigged across the keyboard as if each one were a worker bent on contributing its share to the output of the other nine. The work went well, and by noon, when he quit for lunch, the computer told him he was on page nine.
From a bachelor uncle, he had learned the joys of preparing a big pot of beef stew that he let simmer on the stove for hours and then put away in the refrigerator to draw upon at times when he didn't want to go out. He had warmed up a bowl in the microwave and thought about what he had missed in the pursuit of his own intellectual pleasures: the intimacy, the sharing of one's life with another person, the joys of raising children with all their developing awarenesses and needs.
He had missed all that. There had been a few women in his life with whom he had been close, but never close enough to want to share a life with one of them—or they had convinced him, by their behavior, that they would not welcome intimacy. Perhaps they thought he was too much attached to his books or his work. He could imagine their mothers telling them, “Never get involved with a writer.” Or maybe, like April, they simply wanted someone who acted instead of talked. Sometimes he felt a hollowness in the center of his life, wondering about what might have been; then he immersed himself in his work. He had traded a more complete life for the books he had written and, generally, he was satisfied to be doing what he was doing. He had been searching for something when he was growing up and now, he thought, he had found it. He would not give it up, not for thirty years more of living, and he wouldn't lose it for a woman.
That was love, he had thought: the loss of self, the obsession with someone else, the feeling that one was incomplete without the other, that life was only existing unless one was with the other. He understood the attractions of the condition and the pleasures of its strong emotions at the same time that he preferred his own state of cool self-knowledge.
He wondered whether what he had experienced wasn't life itself, the way it was supposed to be, whether the natural progression of human existence was not a struggle for identity, to find what one was and then express it through what one did, a struggle that was forgotten as the need of the genes to reproduce themselves turned young bodies into yearning glands. No, that was wrong: It was all a part of life—the growing up, the pairing off, the reproduction, and then, if people were lucky, the chance to discover and express their unique selves.
That hadn't been true for most of human history. After reproduction came death, as to the mate of the black widow spider. “Reproduce and die,” said the genes. “Get out of the way so that evolution can proceed.” But then the development of intelligence produced an alternative to nature's way: social evolution, intellectual evolution. People could survive their reproductive deaths and discover what else they were good for. He had just skipped the first part.
If the genes could think, imagine their surprise! These creatures that they created, that they commanded, were good for something besides reproducing genes. What they were good for, apparently by accident, was discovering answers, thinking, creating. What is life for? these creatures began to ask, and answered by giving it meaning through the creation of something other than bodies that carried and transmitted in their turn old and new genetic combinations.
Although most of the world did not believe it, there was life after sex. Not that there was anything wrong with sex—or love, which was the mythology that romantic poets created to pretty up the reproductive instinct. Like all significant inventions, the myth became reality and guided human affairs by influencing the way people thought about it. Laws, on the other hand, remained realistic. They were all concerned with who controlled the food supply and who could reproduce with whom.
Everything has meaning, he thought, if you looked for it, and every part of life has its place. Youth was no better than middle-age, and middle-age no better than old age. One lives through it, one survives if one is lucky, and does that kind of thing for which that stage of life and development is appropriate. There was no more use in looking back with regret than in looking ahead with apprehension.
The point of life was to find what you were good at and, if you were lucky, to be able to do it, and if you were very lucky to be rewarded for it. He was lucky, and he didn't want to change things.
When he had returned to his computer, the invitation from the Twenty-First Corporation glowed at him. “Say no,” he thought, and then he noticed that there were more pages, and those pages contained a list of people invited. It read like a who's who of the financial, political, scientific, and intellectual community, including the name of environmentalist Paul Gentry, whom he had long wanted to meet. Indeed, though the knew most of the names, he had never met anyone on the list. Quickly, before he changed his mind, he typed out a short acceptance and dispatched it to the appropriate address.
With that decision behind him he got back to his book with renewed energy and by the time five o'clock had arrived, he had completed twelve good pages and hadn't watched a single bowl game. That was a first. He rewarded himself with a martini and settled down to watch the end of the Rose Bowl. Pretty soon he found himself caring who won, as if it really mattered and the world might not end before the next one rolled around.
CHAPTER TWO
February 15, 2000
Paul Gentry
Paul Gentry had frightened his audience almost to the point of action. Not quite—even Gentry, with all his skills and Jeremiads, could not work miracles—but the students and academics who made up the group before him in the auditorium stood, applauding, when he finished.
Even more important for his immediate future, he had frightened the nubile blonde in the second row. He liked to select a member of the audience and address his Cassandra-like prophecies to her. It was almost always a “her” and a beautiful one at that, and if he frightened her enough she often fell into his arms at the end of the evening, as if she could ease her fears by embracing the source of them.
But now, over the heads of the group that surrounded him, he could see the promise of the evening disappearing up the aisle that led into the night. It promised to be a night as bleak as the nuclear winter he had described.
Gentry had looked out at the audience of five hundred people that filled every seat in the auditorium. Most of them had been students, stuffed with youth and yearning fluids that stretched their skins across their flesh. Here and there ha
d appeared the older faces and figures of faculty members, like blemishes on the greater body of the audience. Life had thinned their hair and stolen some of its color; character had shaped their faces, and choice, not fashion, clothed them. But Gentry preferred the stuffed ones, particularly the girls. Character was overrated.
“The world is going to end,” he had said, his dark eyes narrowed under their black eyebrows and his face shadowed by gloom. “Perhaps today. Perhaps tomorrow. Probably this year, but if not this year, certainly within the lifetimes of most of us."
They paid him for this. His fee was ten thousand dollars plus expenses. At that rate, the five hundred people in the audience had paid twenty dollars each for the privilege of being depressed about the future. Of course, they hadn't paid him. If his audience had been compelled to pay for his performance individually, as if they were buying tickets to a Broadway play or a rock concert, few of them would be there. No, a generous administration had supplied the funds and a committee had selected him, not counting the cost per person.
Too crass. Calculating the cost-benefit ratio of an experience was business for accountants. A liberal education cannot be totted up like a balance sheet. He had heard those arguments often enough. When he had asked the question directly, in the blunt and practiced drawl that enabled him to say outrageous things because of his reputation as a public gadfly, the sponsors had frowned and replied that if knowledge and the arts had to be priced in the marketplace civilization would not long endure.
The barbarians were inside the gates. He was a realist about that as well as other things. He knew what he was, and he knew that the world was going to end because people were unwilling to count the costs of their desires and their beliefs. Meanwhile, if they wanted to pay him twenty dollars a head to point this out to them, he would not turn it down. He would give them good measure, heaping ashes upon their heads without stint and weaving their shirts from the scratchiest hair he could find.
“I could raise the specter of cosmic doom,” he had said. “I am called a Jeremiah, and I could point out our fragile grip upon this privileged fragment of matter we call Earth. We think we are powerful, but in the face of the great and largely unsuspected forces that lurk in the great darkness where our mightiest telescopes cannot hope to penetrate we are as helpless as the dodo bird and the dinosaurs."
He always liked to start with the insignificance of the human species in the universe. He had told them about distant stars and the tremendous power they controlled—most of the time. Sometimes that power became too great to contain and then it was all released in an explosion sufficient to shatter space itself.
He had told them about black holes that might lurk unseen and unseeable at the hearts of galaxies, even their own, and how they might someday pull the sun and its planets into its insatiable and irresistible maw. And how the center of the galaxy might be exploding, and that unimaginable release of energy might be approaching indetectably at the speed of light, indeed, might reach them at any moment.
He had told them about the miniature black holes that had been wandering through space since the explosion of the original monobloc, that might be oscillating at the heart of the sun or of the planets, or that might strike any spot on earth and destroy it utterly as scientists speculate might have happened in 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia. Or, if not a black hole, a sizable meteor or the head of a comet, which would do almost as much damage and before which the inhabitants of this small planet were equally helpless.
In fact, he had said, the evidence of the earth and its extinct species suggested that periodically most life on Earth had been extinguished in a collision with a comet. Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs and many other species died out suddenly. Perhaps every twenty-six million years a comet, disturbed in its distant orbit in the Oorts Cloud beyond Pluto by a dim companion star of the sun, called Nemesis, or by some as yet unknown phenomenon, plunged toward the sun and found the Earth in its way. The result: a cataclysmic bombardment of the Earth, a great cloud of smoke and debris that would shut out the sunlight and bring a winter that might last for years, and with it the end of many species. The human species could be one of them.
Then he had got to the sun and the possibilities that it might expand or contract or explode, or even simply alter its output, up or down, by ten percent or so. Even that small a change would modify the conditions of human existence so greatly that civilization would collapse. By the time he had finished with cosmic catastrophe, his audience would be pushovers for any less cataclysmic scenario. Particularly the young women, custodians of the continuation of the species, whose confident grasp on the future would have been loosened. Some of them were always so breathless at the prospect of never fulfilling their biological destinies that they would clutch at the nearest source of strength. Many times that had been Gentry.
He had picked out a young woman in the second row with blonde hair and brown eyes and a sensual mouth. He imagined her lips trembling beneath his and then, emboldened, pressing his body there and there and there in the growing abandonment of passion.
“But the truth is,” he had growled, looking directly at the blonde, “we probably won't go that way. We will die not because we are so helpless but because we are so powerful and so stupid. It used to be thought, before the latest theory about cometary collision, that the dinosaurs died off because they got too big for their brains. That may be a better description of the human species. And its fate.
“Some scientists speculate about the presence of aliens in the galaxy. Planet formation seems to be commonplace, if not automatic, and with so many billions of stars, some of them must have evolved intelligent species. Such scientists tend to be optimistic not only about the existence of alien creatures but about their intentions. Why should aliens be inimical? What can they gain by conquest? And yet, if they are wrong, and aliens arrive on Earth, as U.F.O. fanatics believe already has happened, the human species might be eradicated or enslaved.
“But we needn't fear such a fate, nor should aliens—like H. G. Wells's invading Martians, envious of our privileged piece of real estate in the solar system—waste their efforts in clearing us from this valuable soil. We will do the job for them."
Then he had told them about human folly. That was the part he liked the best, and the part they liked the best, too. They liked to be told what idiots they were. He sometimes wondered what disease of the will had infected contemporary Western culture so that its citizens were eager to assume humility and guilt. What once was the “me generation” had become the “mea culpa generation."
He had told them about the great tragedies brought upon human society by unrestrained human selfishness. He had told them about the perils of overpopulation. It was all very well, he had said, to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it,” when the Earth was large and the numbers of people small. But when the Earth was small and the number of people large, unfettered fruitfulness was madness from which other madness flowed.
“But people as a whole will accept no limitation upon their right to unrestricted and unprotected fornication,” he had said, staring right at the blonde. She did not flinch at the word. Instead she stared at his face as if trying to memorize his Lincolnesque features; that was always a good sign. “Nor will they accept any limitation upon their right to breed."
Certainly, here and there in the world, he had told them, people in certain countries practiced birth control and had stabilized their populations, but only by raising their levels of consumption so high that they impoverished the rest of the world, and the rest of the world had taken its revenge, naturally enough, by reproducing. Children were a form of social security in countries where there was no other. And although birth control always followed an increase in the standard of living, to increase the standard of living worldwide to the point where everyone would practice birth control in their own best interests would place unbearable pressure on other resources.
“We are doomed by our very
numbers,” he had said. “The United Nations Office of Population will announce late this year that the world's population has passed six billion, doubling in the past thirty-five years. If you think that six billion people is not too many, what about twelve billion by 2030? Twenty-four billion by 2055? Forty-eight billion before the end of the next century?"
No, he had told them, let us face reality: Malthus was right. Food supplies increase arithmetically, but population increases geometrically. For awhile, with the opening of new farmlands in the American and Canadian and Australian and Latin American frontiers, the invention of new methods of agriculture, including fertilizer and new varieties of grain, and the burgeoning production of the Industrial Revolution, Malthus had seemed refuted, but those two centuries were only temporary aberrations, and now reality was catching up. As Brian Aldiss said once, Nemesis was overtaking hubris.
The human species had doomed itself by its own reproductive instincts. Even with the best will in the world, if every wealthy country in the world shared half its national gross product with the underdeveloped nations in an effort to provide incentives for birth control, the juggernaut of population increase could not be stopped. It would crush everything in its path and would, in its turn, die and decay.
“Today the world has more people of child-producing years than ever before, and they will not refrain from producing children because we say so,” he had said. “And the children they produce will produce more children, simply because there are more of them."
But that, of course, could not go on. The Earth might be able to sustain six billion people—barely. But not twelve billion. Malthus's correctives would come into play: famine, disease, and war. And one or two more that Malthus had never known about.
