by James Gunn
“You are content,” Gavin said, “to exist here, playing games with information and discovery, keeping the results to yourself.”
“In part, that is so,” the Director said. “When the scientist isolated himself from the distractions and temptations of society, he regained his ability to control the effects of his own ingenuity. In fact, it would be an infringement on the liberty of others if he did not.”
“To withhold the benefits of your research...”
“There is much we do not withhold.”
“Nuclear research, longevity studies, infertility drugs, chemical-learning improvements...”
“Man needs power, not explosives,” the Director said. “If we could, we would denature all nuclear materials, but we have done the next best thing. All fusion plants have been placed in orbit. They themselves would burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere if disturbed. The state of the art makes the construction of a hydrogen bomb almost impossible without fissionable materials to start with, and fission plants have been driven out of business, because, like fossil-fuel plants, they were unable to compete with virtually free power. A nuclear war may be impossible.”
“What about fertility depressants?” Gavin said. “Surely the world needs better methods of birth control.”
“In general, it is controlling its fertility. We have made birth-control pills or implants available, which can be taken by women or men, or both, but we have kept to ourselves those chemicals which might be applied indiscriminately, through the water supply or the food, or even the air. The possibilities of misuse by an enemy nation or even a tyrannical government are too horrendous.”
“Longevity, then,” Gavin said.
“We can't have it both ways,” the Director said. “We can't both hold down on population and increase longevity. As a matter of fact, we have the ability to lengthen the life span, particularly the mature life span, by about fifty percent. I myself am over one hundred years old.”
Gavin looked at the chubby white-haired man in disbelief. Old men should be less substantial. “And you aren't giving that to the world?”
“At the cost of what turmoil? Even if it were possible for everyone—which it isn't, because it demands constant medical monitoring, diet, exercise, an expensive drug, and a serene environment—it would mean that the world would have to reduce its birth rate by another fifty percent, a not impossible goal but one which seems difficult to realize at this time.”
“And chemical learning is too explosive as well, I suppose,” Gavin said.
“True chemical learning contains the potential for revolutionizing society more radically than Marx and Marcuse ever imagined.”
“If it is misused?”
“Through natural evolution,” the Director said. “It is theoretically possible—it has even been accomplished in the laboratory—to encode not just knowledge but experience. If people can live other lives, why should they be content with one? Some identities are intolerable; others simply less desirable. If men and women can get the thrills and satisfactions of a hundred existences through a hypodermic or a pill, why should they struggle to modify a highly resistant reality?”
“And one man,” Gavin said slowly, “has the power to decide which blessing to give the world and which to withhold.”
“Which blessing and which curse,” the Director said. “I am old,” he continued, and for the first time Gavin thought he looked old; but this is what he offers me, long life and more power than I ever knew existed. “I have seen much, and I have nothing to gain from the release or suppression of others’ work. But in the long run, we do not withhold; we merely delay the release of information to an appropriate time.”
“And how do you decide these things?”
“The researcher presents his recommendations, along with the comments of his colleagues. Then I have a group of science-fiction writers take the facts, toy with the possibilities, and translate them into human terms.”
“Into stories?”
“Yes. The best eventually get published or broadcast or filmed. Thus they creep into the dreams of the general public, and their collective unconscious begins to work upon it, assimilating it, naturalizing it. Having immersed myself in it, then, I make the final decision. Someone must make it—a committee is only a device to decrease efficiency and diffuse responsibility—and I make it. Everybody knows who to blame. Meanwhile, what is delayed is not permanently suppressed; it remains alive for discussion, input of new information, and reconsideration. We are a flexible organization.”
“But basically,” Gavin insisted, “you have withdrawn. Your isolation in these mountains is a symbol of your isolation from society. You have the power to revolutionize society, to make it a paradise, and you refuse to act.”
The Director looked at the walls above the bookcases as if gauging whether they were thick enough to hold out the world. “The world is engaged in a dangerous experiment,” he said, “a social experiment called freedom. The experiment began on this continent more than two hundred years ago, and spread eventually to the rest of the world. Its final conditions have been realized through free power and automation. For the first time in its life, humanity has been liberated from necessity; it is free to be just as individualistic, just as idiosyncratic, just as angelic or devilish as it chooses. The consequences are all around us—little groups springing up, glorifying their prejudices into universal principles of behavior, magnifying their little insights into eternal truths.
“It is a dangerous experiment. We do not know whether it will succeed; if it fails, it will fail disastrously. We will not interfere, because it might contain the ultimate expression of humanity's potential. Perhaps there is some fundamental human goodness that can flower into understanding and tolerance and love. But if the experiment fails, we choose not to let all human hopes die with it. There are other worthwhile human aspirations besides freedom, and we will be here, preserving the human heritage, for man to find again.”
“You choose not to act,” Gavin said sadly.
“We are not wise enough to direct man's destiny, nor even wise enough to control the revolutionaries who think they know enough to change the world for the better.”
The Director studied Gavin with old eyes. They had seen a great many things, and Gavin thought, though he did not dare to ask, that they were the eyes which had first seen this crater and later had seen much of the world's riches. “You cannot stay,” the Director said finally.
“No,” Gavin said. “I don't know why. Am I an unregenerate romantic, a compulsive participant, or simply a person who has too many personal questions unanswered? You have taken me up on the mountain and offered me the ultimate temptation. But I must go on to the Coast. There are matters I have yet to settle.”
“A helicopter is leaving tomorrow to pick up supplies,” the Director said. “You will be notified where to go and when. If you should ever wish to return, if you get your personal problems resolved...”
“You offer me a reprieve,” Gavin said. He felt a little dizzy.
“That's all we ever get from life,” the Director said.
Elaine came to Gavin in the night. He was almost asleep when he heard the rustle of her robe and felt the mattress sink under her as she sat down on the edge of the Cardinal Richelieu bed. “Are you awake?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You're leaving.”
“Yes.”
Her face was a pale oval in the darkness. “Jackson told me.” She was silent for a moment. “I'm staying,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Not because of Jackson. He's just a pleasant companion. With him there are no commitments, no responsibilities. No, what I want to say is that I've been asked to stay, and this place is what I've been looking for.”
“I understand,” he said.
“I don't think you do. I don't think you've ever understood me. My childhood. Growing up. What I want, what I need, is independence. I don't want to be dependent upon anybody for anyt
hing. Here I can do whatever I wish. We're all free to do what we wish. No dependence.”
He heard the rustle of cloth, and the pale oval that was her face was now part of a paleness that extended from her waist. As if they had a separate will of their own, her hands picked up his hands where they lay on the coverlet and lifted them to her chest.
She hadn't stopped talking. With his hands filled with her firm, small breasts, their nipples hardening into his palms, she said, “But we've come a long way together. It must have seemed strange to you that I would tag along wherever you went, but I hoped that you would see me—really see me sometime—and not always be thinking about that girl or the Professor or the revolution.”
His hands moved, and he wished she would stop talking, but she only took a deeper breath and said, “It was mostly me. I was in love with you. Why do we love people? What makes one person different from another? But I didn't want to be dependent on you. I didn't want to become involved unless it was on a basis of equality. You know—love freely offered and freely returned ... no obligations ... no responsibilities.”
She was lying beside him now, and his hands were discovering the rest of her. “But it doesn't matter now,” she said, “because you're leaving, and there's no dependence either way. But I have to tell you this, too—you're going to find whatever is at the end of your quest, and I don't want to be there when you find it. The end of my quest is right here. Oh, I don't mean in this bed, but in this place, where everybody is equal, and—”
He stopped her voice with his lips, and then there was no more talking for a long time. Toward dawn she said quietly, “I hope you find what you're looking for.”
It had been a night filled with surprises and delights. For perhaps the first time in his life Gavin had felt completely eased, had felt reconciled with the world. But when Elaine spoke, the old doubts crept back into his mind. He had to go on; he had to discover what awaited him in Berkeley.
11. Thus I Refute Berkeley
"Here I sell what all men desire,” said Matthew Boulton, proprietor of the first steam-engine factory. “Power.” Power. That's what we think we want. The power to make people do what we tell them. The power to say no. The power to change people's minds. The power to act without fear of consequences or concern for others. The power to change the world. The struggle for power—or frustration at its absence—is the cause of all the crime and violence in the world. And yet we know that intervention in human events is almost always futile. Those we compel resent us. Those we refuse ignore us. Those we try to change reject us. The willful act does not finally satisfy. And even the most passionate of revolutions do less than normal economic developments. The French Revolution only speeded a process of equalization that would have destroyed the power of the aristocracy; slavery was dying before the Civil War; protests may have prolonged the Vietnam war through middle-class resentment of the protesters. Violent revolutions do not redistribute wealth or ensure equality; they destroy wealth, and freedom restores inequality.
—THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK
No Berlin walls for Berkeley. As was only proper for the nursery of revolution, the campus at Berkeley was surrounded by a wall neatly constructed of sawed limestone. The sun broke through clouds behind San Francisco, and the sunset turned the stones to rust, as if they had been painted with the blood of martyrs.
Gavin stood on the cleared ground between the decayed and battle-weary edge of the city and the south gate. He looked upon the fabled castles and towers of Berkeley. They loomed above the walls: the buildings of the Student Center, Sproul Hall, Sather Tower—he knew them all as if he had lived among them. Indeed, he had kept them, like a fairy land, inside his head for private moments, to walk those fairy streets and recreate those fairy battles; and now that they were here, in reality, before him, he could not yet bring himself to step on the streets where Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, and Art Goldberg had put their feet. He did not know whether he held back out of reverence or a fear of disillusion; he was not the same man who had set out from Kansas to seek a holy place.
The way was open. The tough wrought-iron gates were parted casually, as if he were being invited to enter. They should have been closed and locked against intruders and the coming of night, and he wondered what this breach of security portended. Had the guards grown careless, or were those outside the walls no longer a menace? Or was destiny welcoming him to his spiritual home?
Gavin walked slowly across the cleared ground, glancing uneasily behind him twice. But nothing moved. He edged between the gates. No guard challenged his right to enter; no one asked to see his student ID. He could see no one at all. The plaza between the Student Center and Sproul Hall was empty. The shabby benches sat like tattered old men in the sunset. Odd bits of paper tumbled about in the evening breeze.
An uneasy quiet hung over the place. It was like an arena after the bull has been killed and the matador has bowed to the cheering crowd, and now the bull has been dragged away and the people all have gone, but the stones still remember. Gavin walked on the cracked concrete and felt history beneath his feet.
Ludwig's Fountain was dry and filled with cans and papers and broken bottles. Gavin looked up the steps toward the wide expanse of Sproul Hall. The walls were old and pockmarked, and the windows were broken, but Gavin did not see them. He saw another time. He saw students by the thousands gathered here in this plaza, surrounding a police car in which sat a martyred Jack Weinberg for twenty-four hours. He saw Mario Savio climb atop the police car and mold the casual, excitement-seeking students into a revolutionary army. He saw them charge up the steps to take over Sproul Hall, and he saw them dragged down again, limp and unresisting, by fascist kops.
He stood where it all had happened. It was worth the journey, he thought. It was worth everything he had suffered.
And yet it was not enough. The exaltation of standing on hallowed ground could not endure. The remembered scene faded; the cheering and the cursing died; the silence returned. He glanced again at the half-open gate in the limestone wall. Why wasn't it guarded from the city that surrounded it like a watchful beast?
He shook his sweatered shoulders as if shuddering away bad dreams, turned, and walked quickly to the north, toward the metal archway with stone pillars on either side. On top of each pillar was a hollow metal sphere. Once they had been glass and metal, but the glass had been broken and the light bulbs inside were shattered or stolen. Beyond the gate was a green belt of trees and shrubs running east and west.
Gavin's footsteps sounded hollow between the buildings, and he resisted an urge to look behind him to see if anyone had emerged to frown at this desecration of Berkeley's silence.
He paused at the archway and looked up. Above his head, embossed on the metal, were the words “Sather Gate.” This was it. The famous Sather Gate. He was walking under Sather Gate, over Strawberry Creek. The green belt on either side was mostly weeds; the trees were broken and dead, as if they had been a battlefield, and Strawberry Creek smelled like an open sewer, but he didn't mind. It was Berkeley.
Only, where was everybody?
To his left was Dwinelle, to his right was Wheeler, and straight ahead was Durant.
“Notice!” someone said.
Gavin stopped.
“Notice!” the voice said again.
Gavin looked around. There was nobody nearby, unless he was hiding behind a kiosk to his right. It was a cylindrical little structure covered with the tattered remains of messages stacked one atop another like the artifacts of extinct civilizations. The kiosk had a conical, overhanging roof; underneath the overhang, a circle of shattered glass globes had once illuminated the communications that now no one read. The kiosk looked like an overgrown, long-dead mushroom.
“Notice!” the kiosk said. “A book burning will be held at Doe Library in honor of the wedding of...”
Gavin moved around the kiosk, trying to locate the person who was speaking. One message stopped abruptly and another began.
�
�Wanted: roommates, sex no obstacle...”
The kiosk was speaking. It was reading aloud, in a cracked and uncertain voice, the announcements posted on its surface over the months and years. “Lost: a pair of matched tarantulas; can be recognized...”
Gavin continued to circle the kiosk, trying to determine by the freshness of the printed notices which might still be current.
“Notice: the faculty coven will meet tonight at midnight for unspeakable practices in the Faculty Glade ... For sale: coke, a spoon or a shovel ... Notice: the end of the world is scheduled for next Tuesday at exactly ... Wanted: sex, no questions asked ... Notice: the Doomsday Society will meet Wednesday at Alumni House unless canceled by unforeseen ... Notice: the Fernwald-Smith Terrorists will shoot it out with the International House Guerrillas today at Memorial Stadium; admission will be...”
The last one was so old that the words were almost incomprehensible.
“Notice: a new batch of LSD is available at Chemical Bio Lab ... Notice: exhibition of living art now open at the Gallery ... Wanted: love, no questions asked ... Notice: a book burning will be held at Doe Library in honor of the wedding of the Chief of the Kampuskops and the Homecoming Queen...”
Gavin was back where he had started. He turned away. He knew no more now than he had known before. It was a campus. He was on it. It felt good. But it wasn't enough.
“Who are you?” a voice asked.
Gavin shrugged.
“I said, ‘Who are you?'”
Gavin didn't turn around. “I'm not going to talk to a bulletin board,” he said.
A pebble fell at Gavin's feet. Another hit him on the shoulder.
“I wouldn't talk to a bulletin board either,” the voice said, “but you'd better talk to me. You might get into trouble, you know.”
Gavin turned around. A tall, thin man smoking a twisted cigarette now was sitting on top of the kiosk. Gavin realized that he had been smelling the odor of burning leaves.
