by James Gunn
“Get on with it,” Gavin muttered.
“You must learn to pronounce your words more accurately and say them clearly,” the instructor said. “The voicewriter is remarkably flexible, but it cannot be expected to cope with sloppy diction or regional dialects or slang usages. Now, repeat clearly after me, ‘Clear. End. Readout...'”
Lunch was a communal meal in the commons, another of the large domes. In this one the big central column contained a computer and prepared meals on metal trays. Students studied the menu in the computer readout windows, pressed a series of buttons, and received their selections as the tray slid out of a slot beneath the buttons. Students tried to be early; latecomers had to take potluck. And once the half-hour period for serving was over, the column sank into the floor until it was only a platform about three feet off the ground.
Gavin sat hunched over his meal, digging at pork chops and mashed potatoes and green beans and thinking about the fate that had placed him here among mechanics and mindless consumers. “What to them,” he thought, “are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?”
He had never believed in any of the superstitions that had sprouted on campus—not astrology or scientology or satanism or spiritualism or theosophy. He had not become a Jesus freak or a member of the Aetherius Society or the Feedback Church or a Hare Krishnan. But he had a strange feeling of certainty that he had been brought to this place for a purpose, and that purpose was to lead these poor benighted mechanics into a realization of the true state of the world. He felt words welling up in his throat unbidden, a compulsion to spring up and shout them like challenges to the universe.
Revolutionary consciousness—that's what they needed. The first thing, he decided, was to discover causes of dissatisfaction in their personal situations and then lead them against the administration. Nonnegotiable demands, he thought. Unconditional amnesty.
“Where do they get this lousy food?” he said to his neighbors. “Out of the reclamation project?” Actually, it was pretty good food, but Gavin didn't reflect on the irony of the criticism from a person who had subsisted for almost four years on greasy hamburgers. He had to repeat his comment more loudly before his right-hand neighbor turned.
“I see you finished it.”
Gavin shrugged and turned his attention to the center platform. A film had just finished about employment opportunities and fringe benefits at IBM, and a dark-haired woman stood up in the center of the circular platform. She was dressed in IBM tans, and she was apparently accustomed to speaking in the round. Her voice was confident and rich. It rang with power.
“As the personnel director for IBM,” she said, “I want you to know that all the statements made in the film were false.”
That quieted the audience. They turned their attention to the platform.
“They are false,” the recruiter said, “because they no longer reflect the current conditions at IBM. Since that film was completed, the working week has been reduced from twenty hours to eighteen; these can be scheduled in three days or five. Stock options have been improved—a schedule will be available following my brief talk. Country-club dues and marina rentals have been authorized. Free group tours overseas are available as an alternate for those who aren't sportspersons. The rent allowance has been raised. Retirement now is at the age of forty-five—with full pay and a crash course on leisure activities and avocations.
“We know that you're here because you aren't satisfied with a handout from society. You want to do honest work. You want to become a producer, not just a consumer. You want to be an owner, not a renter. Some of you will go on to become part of management itself.
“I could continue, but those of you who have personal questions can see me privately this afternoon. Oh, yes—the bonuses. We are prepared to offer substantial cash bonuses for those of you who sign up today. We want all you computer-maintenance students and programmers to know that we're eager for you to join IBM and become a member of our happy family.”
Gavin was enraged. Rage was an emotion that started in his stomach and radiated out to his skin in hot waves. He could not remember when he had been so moved, and he found himself at the base of the round platform. The recruiter had walked off the platform. Gavin leaped up where she had been.
“Fellow students,” he shouted.
A clattering of silverware and metal trays stilled as students turned toward the platform.
“You are too smart to be taken in by a patter of slick talk by the business conspiracy,” Gavin said. “That's no happy family they're talking about. That's a savage, cannibalistic world out there, and they want you to come and be the food. They don't want to give you anything. They want to take from you your lives, your free time, your free will, and your basic humanity.
“They don't have anything to give you, because IBM belongs to you, General Electric belongs to you, Xerox belongs to you, the electric company and the nuclear-fusion company—all of them belong to you, because you are the people, and the people created them and built them. You own them, and you are entitled to all the wealth that pours from them, not just a pittance, what they spill from the horn of plenty.”
He was moving them. He could sense their response, and the feedback made his voice stronger and his words more eloquent.
“This isn't a technical institute,” he said. “This is a school for slaves. They're teaching you to be slaves to a society which doesn't even need slaves; they're forging your chains with promises, and binding them together with lies. They want you to trade your precious humanity for the role of a robot in this machine world. You're being brainwashed with pretty pictures of a wonderful world of consumption. Consume! Consume! Consume! That's all you mean to IBM. Someone has to devour the surpluses of the industrial machine.”
They were on their feet now.
“Well, don't fall for their sucker game. Revolution is the only answer. Reform society! Take over the factories! Set them to turn out what people need, not what the factories want to sell. Don't let them parcel out your patrimony, give away in niggardly charity what the masses possess by right. The world was made for people, not for machines, and it should be run for people, by people, not for something called profits or production. Rise up and demand your rights!”
Some of them were shaking their fists at the ceiling. Soon they all would be ready to march with him. But—march where? And then, as he knew it would, inspiration came to him.
“Now, many of you are thinking: ‘What can I do?'” Gavin said more quietly. “You're saying to yourself: ‘I'm only one person. How can I fight a system, a whole society?’ Well, I'm here to tell you that you're not alone. There's a whole world of brothers and sisters out there who want to join you, who are waiting to rise with you in the final revolution of humanity.”
They were roaring now. He had them. He had them.
“But the time for that is not yet. We have to start where we are, and we are here at the technical institute. First we must reform this reactionary place. We will go to the administration. We will demand a revolutionary organization, a council of students to make whatever rules need to be made. We will run our lives through participatory democracy.
“We will demand better food. We will demand freedom—freedom to dress as we please, to come and go as we please, to go to class when we please and if we please. We will demand human instructors to be hired and fired by the students. We will demand the banning of recruiters from the campus. Our demands will be nonnegotiable, and the first demand will be amnesty. Let's go! Let's take over the superintendent's office!”
He leaped from the platform and ran toward the nearby door. The students roared behind him. “Come on!” he shouted, waving an arm in the classic pose of the leader of troops, and they followed. Exultation rose in his throat like the sweetness of forbidden fruit; and power was like an aura around him, lifting his feet from the ground, propelling him forward.
He heard footsteps running beside him. He turned his head, a word of brotherhood on his lips, until he s
aw that it was the superintendent. He was running well for a man who carried so much weight above the waist, but he had difficulty speaking, particularly with the crowd noise behind.
“Think ... better ... turn ... left,” he gasped. “Evade ... mob!”
“You don't like it so well now,” Gavin said triumphantly. “You're not so sure of your students as you were.”
“Don't ... be ... silly!” the superintendent got out. “You! Get ... away ... while ... you ... still ... can!”
And then he drifted back and away. Gavin was almost to the administration building, where he had enrolled the day before and received an advance on his student allowance. He slowed as he neared the door, and turned to guide the crowd, and the crowd ran over him.
He got up, thinking “that's a stupid way to start a takeover,” and a large dark-haired student knocked him down, shouting that he was a lousy rabble-rouser.
“You do that again,” Gavin said, “and I just may not lead this revolution.”
Someone else kicked him and called him a chickenshit saboteur. And-then they were all beating and kicking him, each blow accompanied by an appropriate epithet: liar, spy, seditionist, traitor, renegade, degenerate, pervert, scum...
Finally, battered and hurting, he found himself lost in a surging forest of legs, and he crawled between them on hands and knees to the edge of the turbulence, and then he was out of their shadow, on grass, with the sun shining down upon him. He would have collapsed, but he drew upon some secret reservoir of will and pulled himself up and staggered away from the crazy mob. When he had gone about ten paces, a man shouted behind, “There he is,” and the pursuit began.
“Many a man,” the Professor said once, “who thinks he is leading a charge actually is being pursued by a mob.”
Gavin had limped only a few feet when an old steam-turbine panel truck pulled up beside him, the right door swinging open like a wall in front of him.
“Get out of the way!” he shouted.
“Get in!” someone yelled back. “Get in, you damned fool!”
He peered into the truck. A girl was sitting in the driver's seat. She was gesturing for him to get in. The girl was Elaine. Elaine! Elaine was in the truck telling him to get in. What was she doing here on the campus of the technical institute, driving where there was no street?
“Get in, Gavin! Get in!”
The footsteps were close behind him. He caught the handle of the moving door, staggering, put his right foot onto the doorjamb, and threw himself into the seat. The car took off along one of the old deserted runways, the door flapping painfully against Gavin's leg, the noise of the pursuit fading.
Gavin felt a hand on his shirt, pulling him into the cab, helping him sit up.
“Elaine,” he said dazedly to the girl behind the steering wheel. “You should be in the hospital.”
“No,” the girl said, looking at him grimly, “that's where you should be. You're beaten up worse than I was.”
“But what are you doing here?” Gavin asked. The events of the past day and a half were confused in his mind.
“After I woke up this morning, it took me several hours to talk myself out of the hospital. Finally I raised enough hell that they had to let me go.”
“Why did you do that?”
The panel truck had reached the end of the runway. It plunged down a hillside, the tall weeds parting in front of the truck and thrashing against the sides. The door slammed shut.
“I heard your talk about organizing and moral commitments and obligations,” Elaine said, her eyes on the hillside ahead, her hands white on the bucking steering wheel. “I know these students. I was one of them. I knew what they would do if you started spouting revolutionary nonsense. I'd have been here sooner, but it took me a while to steal this truck.”
“You stole the truck?” Gavin exclaimed. He put his hand to his head. It came away bloody.
“We had to have transportation,” Elaine said. “And I had to get you away from there before you were killed.”
“But my parents!” Gavin said. “Your money!”
“I wasn't going back anyway,” Elaine said. “Even if you hadn't kissed me. Oh, I know it didn't mean anything, so don't get uptight. Besides, you're such a simpleton, I felt responsible. What I can't understand is why you had to do it. Why can't you be satisfied just to get along for a while?”
The truck had reached the bottom of the hill. Now it slithered onto a graveled road.
“Why?” Gavin asked vaguely. He wanted the answer to that question himself.
“Yes. Why?”
The graveled road led to an asphalt side road and then to an access road for an interstate highway. It wasn't their highway. It went north, but it crossed the highway going west, and they were soon back on the road again, this time in a stolen car. But no matter! They were back on the road again toward the West Coast.
Gavin still was thinking about Elaine's question. He hadn't been such a radical on campus. Why had he turned into an activist when he left it? Was it only his natural reaction to the smugness, the hypocrisy, the sellout mentality of the world he had not seen upclose for nearly four years?
“Chester,” the Professor said.
“It was Chester,” Gavin said.
“Chester?”
“You know,” Gavin said, trying to figure it out as he went, “I tried to turn him in, and I felt guilty. No matter what he did, it was like finking. He was a revolutionary, and I felt guilt about informing on him. I think, subconsciously, I was trying to make it up—to myself—by acting at the institute the way I thought he might have acted.”
“That's strange!” Elaine said, shaking her head.
But she didn't know half the strangeness, Gavin thought glumly. Because that hadn't been what the Professor meant. He hadn't felt guilty for turning Chester in. He felt guilty because he wanted to do what Chester did. He wished that he had been the one who had beaten and raped the fair Elaine.
8. The Cybernated Psyche
The ultimate cause or causes of our splintered society may never be known, but we can identify various contributing factors: the widespread use of cybernation to perform the necessary labor of the world; the development of chemotherapies, chemical mood changers, and chemical learning; the liberation of the individual to do his thing; a supportive intellectual climate; and the release of the innate cussedness of the human species. But the most dangerous human discovery may have been leisure. Hardship and necessity make cooperation essential; they rub people together and wear off the abrasive edges; they create a polite and gregarious society. Given half a chance, people will go off on their own tangents, cherishing their idiosyncrasies, glorifying their likes and dislikes into universal truths.
—THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK
As the sun rose like a mashed orange behind them, the Rocky Mountains rose ahead, jagged, dark, fading from the purple-black of nearer peaks to the pearl gray of those receding toward the horizon. Elaine woke Gavin to see it, but he only grumbled about his bruises and complained about his hunger.
“It's the first time I've really seen the mountains,” Elaine said, sounding awed for the first time. “Don't you have any appreciation for beauty?”
“Not when I'm hungry,” Gavin said, but he was awake now, and he rubbed his eyes, wincing at the pain, and contemplated the mountains briefly before he began to survey the countryside through which they were passing.
They had driven all night after stopping at a clear stream outside town to bathe Gavin's face and inspect his injuries. Elaine's hands had been gentle and efficient.
Denver, Gavin decided, must not be far away. Isolated houses and then small communities appeared along the highway. He was contemplating a big breakfast in Denver when the old panel truck began to sputter.
“What's wrong?” Gavin asked.
“I think,” Elaine said, “we're out of fuel.”
“Why didn't you stop and get some?” Gavin asked.
“Where? Nobody drives a steam turbi
ne on the highway any more. Not for any distance. So there aren't any service stations on the highway. The only place to get fuel is in town.”
“You could have stopped in a town.”
“What would I have used for money?”
Gavin shrugged. There was that. The little cash he had accumulated was still in his room at the institute, and Elaine had been robbed of everything. “I shouldn't take it out on you,” he said. “I haven't been much help.”
The engine sputtered again and cut off. The turbine rapidly slowed as Elaine guided the truck onto the shoulder of the road and stopped. “Here we are,” she said, “on foot again. At least until we reach Denver.” She opened her door and got out onto the highway.
Groaning, Gavin straightened himself and joined her. He stood stretching and shivering a little in the morning cold, but the air seemed as if it had been newly created in some chilly cavern of the world, and his depression lifted. “Let's go,” he said.
They had walked only half a mile along the shoulder of the highway, and Gavin's muscles had just begun to loosen and slide smoothly over one another, when he saw a long, low, dun-colored structure off to the right. Almost simultaneously a delightful odor drifted to his bruised nose, which, nevertheless, had no difficulty recognizing the smell of baking bread.
There was something basic and primitive about the smell and his reaction to it. The Professor once had attributed the development of civilization to the discovery that grains could be ground and eaten. Paleolithic man had discovered the game he depended upon disappearing before the changing climate, and even in those long-ago days, hunted into extinction. He was forced to turn to the wild grains his women had discovered, but he had to be there when the seeds ripened and before the heads shattered and were lost. So he built his villages—many hands were necessary to harvest the grain—alongside the fields, and later, when irrigation was discovered and grains were cultivated, along the big rivers and flood plains. And he would roast the heads of wild wheat to make the seed easier to separate from the chaff, sometimes grinding the roasted grains and mixing with water to eat as a kind of paste, but then gradually learning to cook the paste on a flat rock near the fire into flatbread and later mixing with yeast and other ingredients to create a more enduring product which was still edible when cold. “Imagine,” said the Professor, “this primitive hunter coming back to his fireside after an unsuccessful hunt, and squatting beside his mate, picking up a flatcake steaming from the fire's heat, and tearing at it with his teeth—it wasn't raw meat, but it was good. This was the start of civilization: the fire and the baking grain...”
