Astronauts called that period of time in which it is possible to launch a rocket at a certain target, taking into account all the variables, a “window.” Before the window is open, you can’t launch and get where you’re going. After it’s closed, you can’t launch. Well, it occurred to Harry that there may be a “learning window,” like that that makes it possible for normals to learn speech at a genius level, a window that opens on something else. It was here that his fingers touched the thing he couldn’t grasp—what that something else might be. Maybe ESP or telekinesis or that kind of thing, but maybe not—maybe something different, something entirely new, something as incomprehensible to a normal adult as the transistor or a sonnet would be to a Neanderthal—as incomprehensible as normal speech is to a feral child. The feral child had his speech window open for—how long is a speech window open? Months? Two years, three?—but there was nobody around to put anything into it. So in its own natural time, it closed, as it does for us all (except maybe a thin crack) and the finest teachers with the best teaching methods and devices can’t put anything through it ever again, except maybe for a little thin bits pushed into the crack.
And this, in his collection of sadnesses, was unique, because it was the only one he’d never heard or read about; he had worked it out for himself. His conviction was absolute that there was such a window, that it opened, stayed open, stayed open … and closed, never to be open again, never to accept anything but slivers or flashes even if someone should appear who had that something else in full flower, and the desire and ability to teach it. Down through the generations, child after child had gone about in his jungle, with this window wide and waiting, and while he scratched for food here and knowledge there, nobody, nobody ever came along who was able to put that something else through that special window, until, one day, the window was forever closed. My Dad and Mom, thought Harry, never put anything into mine, because their folks never put it into theirs, and when theirs were open … back and back; Oh God, he would think, why didn’t the right person come along back there somewhere and start it; where would we be now.… It was a full-fledged, collectible sadness, but terribly difficult to explain to anybody.
Whether or not the Man from Mars understood it, he was not sure. His assumption was that the Man understood everything.
Harry, mysterious as it was to his friends and acquaintances, loved his work. He was a statistical typist. You know those entire halfpages you’ll see in the financial pages sometimes, lists of bonds by number, all in tiny print, and all absolutely correct? That’s what he did, stuff like that, and he could proofread it too. Maybe it was a natural talent, plus years of practice, but he could move the figures from copy to eye to keyboard with great speed and accuracy, and never let them touch his mind at all. And that’s why he loved it, because nowhere else, not even drowsing on the riverbank on a sunny Sunday, was his mind so free to rove and ponder. The nature of the work meant no phones to answer, hardly even a word to anyone all day: he had an IN box and an OUT box; people slid paper in and took paper away and, unlike the riverbank, no one whanged him awake with a misplaced frisbee or started fighting or baby-bawling, and he was free of bird-droppings and ants.
During the many weeks of his communication with the Man from Mars, he strove and drove to squeeze some pattern out of the questions, and the kinds of questions, he was being asked (but there were so many of them, and so many kinds!). Yet no one at work was aware of it—same old Harry, doing the same old thing in the same way every day. And in the evenings he simply stopped seeing anybody or going anywhere where he might; and after Susan left, that was easy. So when things came to a head, there was no one to know, no one to stop it.
“Could the earth produce enough food to take care of everybody on it?”
“I guess so. Yes, it could—I read that some place.”
“Does the earth produce enough for everyone?”
“Oh no. Well, now—wait. We throw a lot away, here in this country and others, too. And we eat more than we need to, that’s for sure. Seems like seven, eight people out of ten are all the time trying to lose weight. I dunno. Maybe if it was shared around, and all that money didn’t go into junk and convenience food, yes, maybe we do produce enough. It wouldn’t be much fun, though, eating, I mean.”
“What about energy?”
“Oh, you mean oil. We’re not in very good shape about oil. There’s not enough of it in the right places, and the guys who have it are getting more and more hard-nosed, and it is costing more all the time to find it and get it out. We could have a war over that, if it gets tight enough.”
“Does energy mean oil?”
“Mostly it does. Then there’s natural gas, but the problem there is the same as with oil, and we’re using it up awful awful fast. Then, coal. There is plenty of coal, but the cheapest way to get it tears up whole counties, and if the mining people have to straighten out the mess, the cost goes up. And mostly it burns dirty, and to get clean burning fuel out of it, or to make a substitute gasoline, that costs more again.”
“Is there no other kind of energy except through fossil fuels?”
“Oh sure. Geothermal, but that can be tapped in only a few places here and there. Atomic—atomic fission, that is, but there’s a lot of worry about where to bury the waste, because it’s radioactive and will stay radioactive for a lot of years. We have a handhold on fusion, so I hear, but it won’t be ready in any amount in a long time. There’s some new work in wind power and even tidal energy from the sea, and solar power, but none that amounts to much, yet. And yeah, methane and methanol. I read some place where Los Angeles, California produces enough solid waste every single day that if it could be turned into methane and methanol, it could power the entire tier of Pacific states from Canada to Mexico!”
“And there’s no effort to use this instead of fossil fuels?”
“Here and there—Seattle, St. Louis, a few farmers, maybe some more I haven’t heard about.”
“Why isn’t a really major effort being made to get rid of fossil fuels altogether?”
“Search me. Turning all our solid pollution into clean fuels like methanol would get rid of most air pollution as well, right? I guess it’s because fossil fuels offered the biggest profit the fastest, and that just has to go on until they’re gone, no matter what the side effects—even war.”
“Do you really need all the energy you use?”
“Well, we’re trying to cut down.”
Patiently, “Do you really need all the energy you use?”
“Well, no. I guess not. Not here, anyway. It’s like the food.”
At work, while eyes and fingers did their mindless thing, Harry mulled over the true nature of the Man from Mars, who wasn’t a man, who wasn’t from Mars. Right at the beginning he had said—asked—something about synchronicity, something about past and future and “now” existing all at once. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in Slaughterhouse Five, came up with an idea like that, on the planet Tralfalmadore, where the natives could see time, all of time, as if it were a long valley and they were looking down on it from a mountaintop—beginning, middle, end, all of it. And we think that time as a moving stream, sequential, linear, we are sealed inside a tank car on a railroad running up through the valley, and we could look out through lengths of four-inch pipe sticking out of the tank car like naval rifles out of a battleship, and we could see the scenery passing as the train moved up the valley, only we didn’t know it was a train, we didn’t know it was moving, we thought we were seeing events begin and progress and end.
Well, maybe that’s where the Man came from, or somewhere like it. There are a lot of mystics and the like who come up with ideas like that: that there’s really only one electron in the whole universe, and it travels backward and forward in time so it seems to reproduce itself exponentially. Some say consciousness affects the universe, even creates it; some say the universe is a consciousness. It’s not only mystics: some far out, high-altitude physicists are going that route.
“Wow,” said Harry, loud enough to cause a financial editor to swivel around in his chair; but Harry went on working and the editor swiveled back.
What he dredged up out of all this was that no matter where or when the Man came from, he probably knew the future; and (although up to now Harry had not been particularly successful at it) had allowed that he was willing to answer questions. Maybe Harry just hadn’t asked the right questions.
Well, now he would.
He felt good.
He felt—armed.
“Would it make a difference in this world,” asked the Man from Mars, “if every person treated every other person exactly the way he or she would like to be treated?”
“A difference? It wouldn’t be this world. It would be heaven. Anyway it can’t happen here.” He felt very sure of this one. He’d been through this one in college. “What you are talking about is the Golden Rule. A very old idea. I once read a collection of quotations from seventeen major religions, and every single one of them said the same thing, although the phrasing was slightly different. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ ‘Do as you would be done by.’ A fine old notion, but it can’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Well, take a big simple example. Balance of trade. When a country exports more than it imports—sells more than it buys—that’s called a ‘favorable balance of trade.’ If you’re the seller and I’m the buyer, you win on the deal; to the extent you win, I lose.”
“So it isn’t a balance?”
“Of course it isn’t. If men and nations started treating each other by a Golden Rule sort of balance, maybe nobody would lose—but nobody would win either, and that’s where it breaks down.”
“Wouldn’t the whole world win?”
Harry hit himself on the chest. “Number One here wouldn’t—couldn’t win, and that’s intolerable to a man or nation.”
“Is there no feeling that all men are one, that all of them get tired in the same way, or hungry, or happy?”
“There’s a word for that. Em-something. Empathy. Feeling with someone else’s fingertips, seeing through someone else’s eyes. ‘Walk a mile in another man’s moccasins,’ some Indian said. Sympathy, now, there’s a lot of that from time to time, like when someone has an earthquake or a typhoon or something. But empathy, there’s not too much of that around.”
“Is there no teaching not only that all men are one, but that all things are one thing?”
“Oh sure. Millions of people practice a religion that says just that. They go around chanting a word: Aum or Om that means (if I understand it right) both ‘one’ and ‘all.’ And they keep saying to each other (and anyone else who happens along) ‘Thou art God.’ But I can’t see how it’s changed the way the world is run in any important way. But speaking of ‘Thou arts,’ I have a couple questions to ask, and I think you’ll agree it’s time I had my innings.”
“You wish to question me?”
“Yes I wish.”
“Are you aware that any correctly structured question embodies its own answer, and therefore need not be asked?”
“No you don’t!” rapped Harry. “I’m not getting led around the corral and right back to the gate again, not this time.”
“What is your question?”
“Questions, plural. First: do you know the future?”
“What future is that? Yours? This nation’s? Your species’? This planet? What you call the universe, perhaps, or what I call it?”
Harry had to admit that that was a good response. He certainly wasn’t calling for a detailed chronology of the cosmos from now on out to the next Big Bang. He did feel, too, that buried in that response somewhere was “Yes.” It certainly wasn’t a “No.”
“Okay, okay, I see I’ll have to take it by little steps or you’ll lose me. Let’s start with you, and your ‘correctly structured questions.’ If they need not be asked, how come you’ve been asking? Wouldn’t the World Almanac have done a better job for you?”
“Is there anything in the World Almanac which deals, not with facts, but with your perception of the facts? Is there any way to study that without questioning you?”
“All right, I can buy that. It isn’t my world and my time you’re studying, but how a man of my world and my time thinks about it. Hmp. I really think we’re getting somewhere.” Also, he was more than a little flattered, but he wouldn’t say that. “Now, about that mutation I told you about, that would turn out to be meaningless unless it was identified, understood, exercised: was the man right?”
“Can there be any doubt?”
That was as close to a flat ‘Yes’ as he gotten so far. He was increasingly pleased.
“And has it been identified and understood?”
“Haven’t you heard the chants of Om? Aren’t you aware of all the consciousness-raising groups, the Macro Philosophy, TA, TM, the Self Realization Fellowship, and all those people you yourself describe (and there are nearly a billion of them by now, by the way) as going around saying ‘Thou art God’?”
“Then we’ve found it, we’ve got it, we’ve saved it! right?”
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
This manuscript arrived in my mailbox, forwarded from one of my publishers. The covering letter was signed “Susan” but neither it nor the envelope bore a return address. And with the manuscript was a sealed envelope. I give you excerpts from Susan’s letter, with my annotations.
“Harry’s notebook was found on his desk with a letter to me clipped to it. The letter is personal, so I’m not sending it, but the part about you is, he wanted me to type up what he wrote double-spaced, inch-and-a-half margins, one side of the paper, pages numbered. [She did—impeccably. TS] he said to send it to you, maybe you can get it published. He said maybe you better use your name, it might have a better chance that way. He said if they pay you any money, keep it, you earned it because of something you wrote long time ago. He said you would know what that was. [I don’t. TS]
“He said after I typed the last page to put it in a separate envelope and seal it. He wanted you to look at what he wrote and think about it a while before reading the last page and decide whether it is too dangerous to print, some people might get upset.
“I have to tell you I am upset. I feel real bad about the whole thing. To me what he wrote is a suicide note. My shrink says it is usual for a survivor to feel responsible for a death, especially if it is or might be a suicide, so don’t worry, I’ll get over it, thousands have. Anyway he had a bad heart. I think the story is very sad. Harry likes sad things. I once told him sad things make him happy. If that is so and this is the saddest thing he ever dreamed up, then he died happy. I guess that is a bitter thing to say but I will leave it lay. Like I said, I’m upset. Harry and I had a good thing going for quite a while until he got the crazies with talking to himself and all and I took off.
“One thing I can tell you, why it is he wrote this thing in third person ‘He’ instead of first-person ‘I.’ My shrink believes in journals, the patient should write about himself in third person, it makes him stand off fro
m himself. I told Harry that and I think that’s why he did it. They found him dead at his desk at home week ago Monday, he must of died right after he finished the letter to me. Don’t try to find me, I just did what he wanted, now I don’t want any part of this anymore, and thank you.”
I read the story without the last page, and then I read the last page. In Susan’s words, because “I just did what he wanted,” (and I’m intuitively sure that is what he wanted) I give you his last page. Rest in peace, Harry.
And the Man from Mars hesitated, for the very first time; and in that exceedingly brief moment, Harry had a flash of insight that cut deep into his marrow. It was this: that he had been insulated against fear by this Man; and when you have no fear, you may not be reached by anyone else’s emotion. Anger can’t reach the fearless, danger, hopelessness, despair; fear is the trigger to the healthy survival mechanisms of fight and of flight; fear also is the measure of that which is dear and cherished: fear of its loss. Never until now had Harry perceived the slightest hint of emotion from the Man; but now, in that slight hesitation, a hot wave of emotion burst from him and sliced through the barrier of fearlessness—and was gone. Harry identified it. It was compassion.
Case and the Dreamer Page 15
