Los Angeles

by Philip Wylie

  What was that basically wrong with us all?

  In the young woman’s absence Glenn wrestled with such self-queries. For he felt, knowing the consequences now—of all his generation, his establishment, the system—he felt forced to understand. It wouldn’t be possible, Glenn briefly felt—and then, in a rush, one answer came to him.

  It was a strange one, new to Glenn and one that Glenn felt might serve, in some degree, at least, if he were made the villain-symbol, the whipping boy, for the terrible and nearly unanimous sin of his “civilization.”

  The answer related to time.

  He lifted his head from its mourning posture and his face showed a certain calm as Leandra returned.

  This time, he didn’t ogle or erotically respond.

  This time, his eyes merely noted her changed appearance and resumed their lucid but inturned shining.

  “What is it?” she asked, softly, a little fearfully, and as if he might have lost his sanity in her short absence, unsure of him and his mind—well aware of the shock to which she had subjected him, on command.

  “I was thinking,” Glenn replied, in a very steady tone, “that what you showed me had to happen.” He felt her negative reaction as a tensing of body, caught in an eye-corner. She stood in front of him and waited to recover some lost assurance. “It had to?”

  “Yes. Why, Leandra? because of this; for a million years or more, from the time some species became our own, men were sufficiently intelligent to try to better their state, in a world that seemed utterly hostile, or all but that. We slowly managed, right? We made tools, captured fire, learned better and better ways to hunt, by cooperation, and to treat hides, polish stones and bones and bend wood for arms and implements and clothes. And at last we learned about seeds and agriculture, having already domesticated a few animals.”

  He waited for an answer, his eyes raised to hers. “Yes, Glenn. And thanks for that ‘Leandra’! Go on.”

  “Not hard, and not much to add. Civilizations rose and vanished and left, or failed to leave, their added cultural discoveries. Thousands and thousands of years after the first field was planted and the first lasting ‘village’ of stone was erected—the ancestral city, call it—man began to gain in technology—though, for centuries and centuries his gains were pragmatic—windmills, water wheels, roads, carts drawn by horses, spinning, all the metalurgical steps, from, say, ancient Greece to about the 1600s. Even then, men had not actually commenced to be ‘scientists.’ Up to then, the laws of nature on which the progress of man had been based were neither understood, nor widely, and not yet systematically, investigated. You with me?”

  She seemed slightly impatient now—the watchglance to show it.

  He ignored the signs and sat with little movement as he continued:

  “About a century and a half ago, men began to be scientists, to look rationally into natural law. That was the start of the gigantic explosion which, actually, only became exponential and incomprehensible to men with the twentieth century. In the 1900s any decently educated man still understood the principles behind the technology he then had attained, steam power, locomotives, telegraphy, telephone, the first plane flights, high explosives and the weapons they led to, trolley cars and so on. But, as the next brief decades passed, scientific knowledge exploded until the parallel might be measured by the H-bomb, as greater than the A-bomb, and that, comapred to the prior explosives, TNT, dynamite, gun cotton—”

  “I don’t see—” she interrupted. “And, anyway, we have to go to your place to dress, and then the Mayor’s home in a couple of hours. We’ll walk. You can tell me …”

  So they entered the rather impressive square in front of the city hall, Glenn thought it was, and turned into a wider street than those he’d seen. There were people, all sorts, on the sidewalks and in the shops they passed. Small vehicles hummed by, going both ways, but not in numbers that would be called even “light” traffic, by Glenn’s scale.

  For a time he was so full of his thought that he gave little attention to his surroundings. Novel, of course; but to Glenn, the novelties could be appraised later—while his insight had to be stated, as a way to firm it up and to test it.

  “In America, as in all other civilized or ‘advanced’ nations, man’s knowledge and his applications of that for his technological wonders shifted humanity in one lifetime—from an understandable world to one so terribly complex and technically varied that hardly any one man was able to grasp the major concepts of science, the pure knowledge, that was applied to this period, one a single life could span. Do you see that?”

  She said, “Of course. Not the part that seems to hit you so hard. We turn right at the next corner.”

  “Well, maybe I can’t express it well enough. Though it’s simple. Humanity tried, for what seemed unarguable reasons, to ‘conquer nature’ and make human life less subject to natural menaces and calamities, from disease to crop-failure and the adversity of nature. Mankind actually began to achieve those goals of conquest, in his term, because he began to make use of his reason for scientific study, experiment, research and so gained truth-finding and knowledge-accrueal. When he had done that for about a century, the effort suddenly burst into every field of knowledge and produced concepts so valid that man’s understanding of such gains, for a million years and more, probably became impossible. Who, for instance, in 1913, could understand Einstein’s first theories? Who, next, understood what part of them, derived from that whole, underlay the atom bomb? How many people with color TV sets, in 1970 or ’71, could furnish you with a clear account of electro-magnetic radiation propagation as it was applied to permit the building of their TV sets? Only those physicists, engineers and technicians trained to know. The rest of us were 99.999% ignorant, there.

  “Or anywhere else. Who understood the medical advances? Who knew the mechanism of immunity, as of its state in 1971? Or the facts then known by geneticists?”

  She guided him into a narrower and relatively darker street. “I get the point of the public ignorance. So what’s that meant to say?”

  “Two things. The lesser one is, if the masses, however highly educated, don’t understand the concepts underlying what they have and use and take for granted every day and every night, and these concepts are constantly added to by new and even less understood ‘advantages,’ ‘benefits,’ health aids and machines to save physical labor, tedious mental work—well, how can they see what else is happening?”

  “What is?”

  “Every technical step forward, in the long past of man, was made without any realization that it had some sort of backlash effect on nature. Always, to some degree, adverse. Or so nearly always as not to matter. Then, in this one-lifetime-period, what was merely knowledge and called ‘science,’ was exploited for practical ends, more human blessings, greater jumps in that conquest of nature, but, still, in the old, innocent, blind, ignorant way—without any reference to all knowledge, the whole of science. Don’t you see? You develop a new and faster and cheaper way to make steel, the oxygen process, say, and you build the new plants. Start them up. But do you ask all science including biology and ecology about the total effect of these furnaces on the environment? You do not! It doesn’t even enter your head to do so! Economically, and from the mere standpoint of reduced man-hours-of-sweat; it’s a leap ahead. What the plant’s effluents, wastes, liquid and gaseous, will do to the air and earth and water where they are spewed, isn’t even a relevant-seeming matter. Never was—so far as most men had noted. That countless civilizations and cultures committed ecological suicide just that way hadn’t occurred to a soul except in special, visible instances. I mean, the fact that all civilized advances were innately counterproductive went unseen. There was no historical, scientific, visible, aware precedent of the absolute fact of that counteradaptive result.”

  “But—ecologists—?”

  “Yes! Ecology—which draws upon all the information, data, proven fact and sound theory in every science and every branch of sci
ence—had a name, and some specialist scientist-spokesmen, and some actual researchers—but as of when? I’ll look it up. But it didn’t even reach any people but certain biologists, with any wide comprehension, till, at the earliest, after the Second World War. Nineteen fifty, say. And that’s the whole point!”

  He fell silent and she took a few smooth steps before she got it. She was anything but a dull woman. When she understood, she stopped dead and restrained him, too, seizing an arm. “Yes. I do see! You mean that the entire—impetus—force—direction—and the entire ‘general’ knowledge and viewpoint—were concentrated on ‘progress,’ on ‘nature-conquest,’ right up till the middle of the twentieth century! And that there was no public awareness of the ecological costs—not even in science—till mid-century?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And that only about … twenty-eight?… years elapsed between the time any trained and specialized group, a tiny one, calling themselves ‘ecologists,’ began to realize the stupendous damage man had done, was doing, and intended to do in mightier ways in the years ahead—a situation that wasn’t even much contemplated by science itself till too late?”

  He merely nodded.

  She turned him into a lane, flanked by what seemed three-story apartments, crowded, noisy, evil-smelling, littered and in every way poor. His attention now concentrated on this dingy neighborhood while she went on talking.

  “I don’t believe that has been entered in our history texts. In fact, I’m sure not! And it’s so obvious! By the time some few men began to discover—and then try to tell the public—that civilized man was in deep trouble, close to self-extinction, because of this exploitation of science, this one-way blind trend of ‘technical progress,’ so much had to be learned, just to understand the implications of those ecologists’ statements, that it couldn’t be learned at all.”

  He nodded and averted his gaze to the ugly flats.

  “The whole drive of the species was one way, and when the new data showed it was suicidal, nobody could understand their technologies, so, the damage being done was even more incomprehensible.”

  “Exactly.”

  By and by she slowed and stopped him, again.

  “What a tragedy!” she murmured. “And how ironic! Almost a farce! Look, Glenn. Don’t spread that idea around, for now!”

  “Why not, for God’s sake? It’s true. Simple. Logical.”

  “But your fellow Board members and the rest of the corporation top people still won’t understand the idea. It doesn’t fit in with their programs and plans.”

  “I don’t understand that, Leandra.”

  “Then, just believe me! Let’s put it this way. The number of people now alive is pretty small, compared to your time and later years. So our capacity for production and our plans for better living conditions—our current industrial expansion, call it, by your terms—is no longer on a scale big enough to threaten an already ruined surface-air-sea-water environment. I mean, the earth’s surface, the biosphere, is slowly recovering even though present technology isn’t attempting to limit whatever wastes and so on are deposited above us. Too small in overall amount to matter. In plain English, Glenn the USA Corporation, and all other foreign bodies like it, don’t need to worry about today’s polluting because it’s assumed to be trivial, dispersible and reducible by nature to manageable substances. Present thinking is much like pre-ecological industrial thinking. But for a different reason.”

  Glenn heard more than she’d said. “Are you trying to tell me something more, or—other?”

  She shook her head. “No. Just the situation now. If you started a crusade to limit the present, small-scale harm being done to the surface environment, the Board would be hostile. And perhaps rightly. Temporarily. They must have to weigh any current outdoor damage against efforts to support the surviving people, and to better their living conditions. Especially since the outside is gaining in the ecological sense.”

  “Maybe.” She walked him on, talking quietly. “How much recovery has occurred, they don’t say. Maybe don’t measure, with any exactness. Because you can’t breathe the air, even now, after all these years spent below ground. Or drink the water. Or grow edible crops. All our food is raised under enormous plastic ‘hangars’—a mile long apiece and half as wide, and hundreds of them! With regenerated air, cleaned irrigation water, controlled everything.”

  “I see.” He had several questions in mind, then. But the basic one concerned the fact, if it was fact, that the biosphere was slowly “recovering” while man went on polluting it, on a minor scale. But still, after his experiences, the act seemed mad, diabolic, and if essential, one that Glenn wanted to understand that way. He had no chance to put more questions. Leandra nodded at a brightly lighted dead end of this lane, this narrow street fit only for pedestrians.

  “That’s the Mayor’s gate.”

  It seemed strange that the abode of so important a man would have this location.

  This grubby lane and these beat-up buildings with their plainly overcrowded interiors. She half explained that unvoiced perplexity:

  “You’ll find the whole of L.A. like this. Grade C living space next to Grade A homes. Yes, we’re all graded, A, B, C, D: and below that, you are released—that is, painlessly killed. Because”—she saw his shock and took it lightly—“we came here—my parents, since I was born here—so used to mass death, and under such restrictions for ways merely to exist, at first, that we couldn’t maintain your sentimentality.”

  Sentimentality?”

  She pushed a button beside a tall, ivory-white door in a wall that blocked the lane completely and rose, solid, to the bare-rock ceiling of the city, some forty feet above. In the time they waited, she said, “You called it humanitarian. Keeping alive every worthless person, every mere human vegetable, every senile living zero, every person in constant and unrelievable agony. What a horrible burden! What a waste to sustain nonpeople! What a cost in human time and money and materials! It is something—on the public scale—like not having your arm set, even when you broke it on purpose, or carelessly!”

  Glenn accepted that, in a way. He had delicately sponsored euthenasia, within limits, in his media. But the then-frightening contrary arguments came to mind. Who decides you should be painlessly “put away” if you cannot decide, or will not, or if your family refuses even though their doctors are ready and willing to put the sufferer to sleep—which had been a crime, at that?

  There was a certain cold-bloodedness here. And, from the faces he’d glimpsed, people had a strange but nearly universal look of blankness, lack of feeling. He tried for a clearer concept. They seemed to be bland, and inert, in some way faintly cheerful if they knew you observed, but for no apparent reason. Not stoical Glenn felt, but—as if stoicism wasn’t even needed to face their day-to-day life—as if, he mused, they all had similar thoughts and feelings and these were experienced at a diminished level from the feelings of past people.

  Glenn straightened his shoulders as the door opened and a servant—the man’s costume and manner made that evident—bowed them in.

  “The Mayor,” he murmured, “is waiting for you in the central parlor.”

  Glenn could see the long hall behind the fellow: an elegantly carpeted, beautifully painted corridor with stands of flowers, framed paintings and a small wall fountain, halfway along. Obviously, the Mayor had a home which nothing he’d seen so far had remotely suggested.

  “Remember,” the girl murmured so softly the servant could not hear, “you are taking me home. Early. You’re tired!”

  That, Glenn thought, was one true thing.

  He followed the girl, wondering.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE HOUR BEFORE, A FLASH-BACK

  She had taken him from the Mayor’s office to his apartment and then back to the office where he waited while she had changed to evening clothes in her “almost-next-door” place, which he had not seen.

  That adventure, because it was one, now bemused him whil
e the Mayor showed off his incredibly luxurious residence.…

  They went away from the office and the nightmare cinema in a little electric car. She parked it in front of a decent-looking brick building and led him up two flights of stairs to his apartment where he would change to evening clothes. She seemed excited and she had the key.

  What had happened was appealing, tempting, strange.

  From the hall he was ushered into a good-sized living room. The lights were on, indirect and from sources in the walls and around the tops of them. There was a comfortable amount of furniture, big chairs, a huge divan facing what must be a TV-like, or movie like screen, since it was off-white and bare of pictures. There was a wall of shelves and books. An open door led to a dark room, a bedroom, he assumed. Another, to a bath. And there was a panel in the wall beside the entrance which held two vertical rows of buttons with printed notations of their function.

  She followed him in and spun around as if to say, “See me, I’m lovely!” and then she said, “I bet you’d like a drink!”

  “I certainly would! I’ve needed one, since arriving. Or several. Nobody offered … so I didn’t ask.”

  She laughed and went to the panel. From an enclosed recess beside it she took out a phone like device. Then she studied the list and pushed a button.

  A voice, female, modulated, came instantly. “Yes, Mr. Howard?”

  “This is Miss Smith. Mr. Howard will have a drink.” She looked back smilingly, and with a question.

  He said, “Bourbon, if it’s possible. A double.”

  “Two double bourbons,” she told the instrument, “with double Aphrons, added.”

  Aphron, again. He thought to reject the drug, eyed the girl in her strange, half-transparent costume—the feminine version of his own—and said nothing.

  She hung up and sat on the divan, patting him to join her there which he did.

  “Nobody drinks alcoholic things anymore. I never did, so this’ll be new for me. You heard me add Aphron—it’s customary, for late afternoon or early evening. If one is paired or will be. There is bourbon—and probably everything else of that sort. It was brought down after you were identified. From the city above. Nobody’s there. A lot of useable things come down from there, like looting, only there’s nobody to claim you stole anything. I happened to realize you surely drank alcohol. So I told the Mayor.”