The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  Mobley, who had breakfasted on more cold lamb and his “four fingers” of gin, seemed nonetheless to be his old self. He now jumped thumpingly to his feet. “Doctor,”

  he boomed, facing the physicist, “you’ll find yourself alone in that position. I was fascinated by Bill’s argument that genus homo had made a basic psychological error

  ‘way back in the dawn age—and stupidly stuck to it. If for no other reason than that man’s history ever since he came down from trees has been a constant parade of ambitious starts and flat failures, the thing seems worth considering. Is there”—he turned to the group of men in the way a panoramic camera surveys a crowd—“anybody else here, who thinks it’s wrong for an abstract thinker to contemplate, critically, the legends in Genesis?”

  One or two men laughed.

  Mobley nodded. “There you are, Dr. Wendley! My own feeling, as I read the paper at the end of Bill’s report, was that he had got to the edge of some new foundation of the relation of mass energy to consciousness. But I couldn’t go on from there.”

  “I think,” Blake said, “Bill made himself pretty clear.”

  Gaunt had not expected the meeting to begin with a discussion of his essay. He had not even anticipated his effort would come in for much comment. He said embarrassedly, “It was intended merely to suggest lines for a new orientation. Perhaps we’d do best just to skip it.”

  “No, no, no!” Blake responded cheerfully. “The implications are too important.

  One of them is what we think incorrectly about man—so that all man thinks and does is incorrect. The corollary that most interested me was the notion that as fast as we found anything out, from how to use fire to how to split atoms, we had applied it in the most immediately expedient fashion.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Gaunt protested. “Not precisely.”

  The young physicist chuckled and nodded. “Implied it.” He dropped a leg over the table edge and began to swing it. “And it’s true! Objectivity, you said, was our God.

  Subjectivity—where our God is—we avoided or treated in some banal stereotype. That was the thesis, Bill. What does it mean in everyday terms? It means that man never developed-he never even seriously considered developing a way of evaluating what he learned before he applied it. When he hit on fire, who knows what he did first with it?

  Maybe, for centuries, he used it only in religious ceremony. Maybe only for torturing captives. Maybe only to signal with. Maybe only as a weapon, to burn out an enemy ambush or to hurl on spear points. The artifacts don’t go back that far, that lucidly.

  Maybe he hit on light and warmth and cookery only after millenniums of misuse! If so—

  why? Because he didn’t work up a technique for self-evaluation. Because he never bothered to consider, to discover, what he really was and really needed. He made up that part, conceitedly! We still do. He never extrapolated long-range consequences. We don’t now. He probably never meditated the discovery of fire, as a whole, in relation to his species, as a continuing whole.” Blake paused and said, “Yes, Tretter?”

  Excited by this line of thought, the New Yorker leaped to his feet. His black eyes shone. His black Vandyke bristled as if its follicles were capable of pointing their separate hairs. Incredibly learned, fabulously energetic, Saul Tretter was a renowned anthropologist. At this time, in an unspotted tweed jacket and unsullied gray slacks, he also happened to be the best-dressed man in the lecture room.

  “A very useful analogue!” he began in a shrill voice. “Another way of saying what I have harped on all my life! The twentieth-century procession of discovery and invention has been accompanied by social imbecility. Take electronics. Did anybody ever ask whether we wanted the so-called commercial radio? Needed it? Would benefit by it?

  Not really, no! Was there a social body to consider whether or not the arts and the sciences—every communicable idea—should be crassly exploited for the mere purpose of selling oatmeal? No! Were the people ready? We didn’t ask. Was there serious meditation on the moral lullaby effect? The hypnosis? Or the spectacle of young children disturbed by titillations of a nightmarish sort? Of students doing their lessons in the bland, psychological bath of comfortable sales talk? No! Or television. Were we asked to ask ourselves what it could do, would do, and therefore should do? No! Or what it should never be allowed to do? Not by anybody! Gentlemen, consider! For century after century the Chinese had gunpowder and never used it in a weapon! Most laudable! The protective and directive functioning of what Dr. Gaunt would call an instinct has been repressed in Western man. Also the dignifying function and the integrating function.” He bowed jerkily toward the philosopher. “Others would call these things common sense.”

  Gaunt nodded back. The audience chuckled.

  Tretter went on: “In short and in sum, to exploit every finding amongst a public not well enough educated, not even bright enough in many cases to understand the exploitative mechanisms, has been insane. Yet it has been going on since the first human brain made the first superanimal finding. What appealed at the moment to the finder—

  what seemed useful at the moment to the group—that, alone, controlled the future use of the new information. From that, I argue as follows: vanity has been the potent motive: the desire of the little person, or the little people, to do, right now, the most immediately prestigious thing. To profit. To become powerful. To defeat unexamined adversaries. To make garments and ornaments without regard to the extirpation of species. To eat now even though it destroys tomorrow’s topsoil. To attract a woman unnaturally. To make women attractive, according to any of a thousand momentary criteria. Hence, to show off.

  That, above all else! And here is my point, gentlemen. We learned to use time as a dimension and it greatly differentiated us from ‘the instinctual world, the merely three-dimensional world. Man had a fourth. But we exploited it, wholly. We never used the time we had to contemplate what we were or what we did. For determining that, we merely took a tradition, a religion, a culture—lock, stock and barrel, and went ahead uncritically. It was convenient. And mad! The brain that learned, the brain that discovered, the brain that invented, was never brain enough to say, ‘I must also think about results. About applications. Consequences. About needs and uses beyond my own and those of my tribe.’ Never! Never! Never!”

  “Hear, hear!” someone murmured.

  Tretter whirled in apparent rage. “You, gentlemen! With the knowledge of an atomic chain reaction, what did you make? A power plant? A still to remove salt from the sea and irrigate deserts? An engine for travel? No! A bomb. It was the expedient thing, the final and quintessential example of the process. Ah—this vanity! I will not assert that Dr. Gaunt has correctly explained its etiology. But I do insist that the fact of human vanity—the failure to use our new human dimension of time—not just to discover and exploit the new discovery but equally to think of how to use it, or whether to spread it everywhere instantly—is the curse of the species. In that, Dr. Gaunt is eminently correct!

  We are mad. We have been mad since we decided to use our frontal lobes consistently, but only in half a fashion. In the present tense alone, and the future—posterity—be damned!

  “It is not surprising that so many older societies were repelled by America! They felt instinctively the lack of balance here. Most of us were devoted most of the time to accelerating appetite. To creating enlarged and abnormal appetite. To setting up hungers even in areas where we were already stuffed and overstuffed. Then, to satisfying these induced excesses. We called the process ‘creating new and broader markets.’ We called the result our ‘high living standard.’ Like banqueting Romans, we built short life and obsolescence into our products, or we soon made them obsolete with new things and arranged to junk the old, to market them secondhand or to export them. We feasted on objects and vomited them up, to gorge anew—around the clock and through the year and down the decades.

  “In the face of such gluttony the God of our forebears became a depraved symbol.


  Churches were able to abet the farce only by degrading God. In any case, we hadn’t had the courage and the initiative to revaluate God to match, at least, what we did know. And that, gentlemen, is a historical necessity, for whenever human images of God and human learning diverge—when God stands still and man progresses—it is God who must evolve, not learning that must be erased.

  “We didn’t bother with God. We raised the living standard and left untouched the standard of being. It declined, perforce. I’m an anthropologist, not a psychologist; certainly not a theologist, which is something I have hooted at all my life not so much for theology’s lack of reason as for its cowardly failure to learn what’s known. But I believe, gentlemen, that we, sitting here, right now, are in a state of schizophrenia. As Bill Gaunt said, the sexes were intended to add up to make one personality. Through the process he described, we have become split personalities. The women are here. It is we who are absent, absent because we have lost our minds, by default, by discord!”

  He sat down abruptly and, for some time, no one spoke.

  At last Blake, who had listened with half-smiling lips and occasional nods, said easily, “Well, Saul, supposing you and Bill are right?” He chuckled at his copying of Tretter’s emphatic way of talking. “Supposing we have been crazed for ages, which any detached reading of our history would tend to confirm? Supposing we, sitting here, are lunatics? But, supposing, now—by some lucky stroke—we learned what happened to our females and got them back? How would you proceed to restore sanity?”

  Tretter, it seemed, had not actually been angered at any time. His bright, black eyes Hashed with amusement and his body shook with unvoiced laughter. “How shall the inmates of an asylum deliver themselves? you ask. Why, gentlemen, if I have put the right question—if Dr. Gaunt has done so—isn’t it part of your scientific faith that you can then find the answer?”

  Blake grinned ruefully. “We’ve boasted it was, yes.”

  Tretter got up again. “If— if we should hit upon one more miracle and undo the sinister condition in which we have spent nearly two hideous years, I would earnestly suggest that we at once assemble to consider what applications of science in our culture are dangerous, foolish, wasteful, or of no immediate great value. Abolish them. Continue research, of course. But concentrate, for a century or two, on human nature and its needs!

  Shape environment to those findings, but only after a long and judicious evaluation of humanity. Perhaps reduce the population by controlling birth; we breed with the immoral violence of fish! It is obscene, such a nonuse of the brain! Abandon cities! Who can live sanely in such places? Teach a good clean sex desire to the young: so taught, they might be prepared for more eugenical matings and they’d cease to be hundred per cent neurotics. Improve the stock. Great Heaven! We’ve applied the knowledge to cattle and superstitiously denied we could apply it to men—denied, even, we have the ‘right’ to try!

  What is the brain for, but to study rights and learn the right? Here’s the dismal phenomenon I have often outlined, again at work, making us think in some obsolete moral pattern that we have the compulsive duty to save all life, prolong it, maintain hordes of the senile, but that we must not use the same brain to guide, control or delimit such repellent results of its activities! You understand? Suspend the old ecologies that have kept down our numbers and determined what sort of ‘the strong’ shall survive—as we’ve done—and man must then arrange a deliberate ecology! Moral—yes! But what is morality if it does not embody all the truth we know? It is rubbish! Superstition!

  Obscenity! Crime on racial scale—on planetary scale! Death!”

  Wendley again said, “Diabolism!”

  Ascott rose tremblingly and tremblingly said, “I agree with Tretter.” He sat down, nodding, perhaps involuntarily.

  Tateley, who had listened to the anthropologist with his head tilted back, his fingers raking through his white hair, now said, without getting up, “It would be a hell of a blow to what we used to call ‘business enterprise’—until of course, men of affairs caught up with the new conditions. I agree, also.”

  “Does anybody,” asked the hugely fat Miersner, of Harvard, “care to argue with these gentlemen? I mean to say, will anyone defend man’s ways and works of, say, 1950?”

  Wendley responded, “We deviated from God’s will!”

  To which Tateley answered kindly, “Perhaps we did, Wen. The trouble with your viewpoint is, you won’t find a man here who regards your personal capacity to know, to accept on faith, to discover by revelation—or otherwise singlehanded to infer and assert

  ‘God’s will’ is in any way superior to his capacity. Why should anyone knuckle to your faith? And isn’t that the trouble with religion in general? Gaunt says it’s merely instinct.

  Lord knows, men cling to whatever they happen to have been taught in childhood, or whatever they have accepted since, with all the tenacity of the most instinctual insects.

  I’m no biologist. But the present behavior of religious men, and the whole past history of their behavior, looks entirely compulsive to me. Inflexible, unadaptive in the individual, reasonless. It sure does seem like instinct, like tropisms blown up to n th degrees by creatures capable of turning their sensations into images—who then deny they invented the images in order to worship and serve them. ‘Faith,’ seen that way, is wholly a denial.

  Another description of ‘Original Sin’ which I give Bill Gaunt free of charge. Religions explain what is autonomous in man and then are used to escape man’s responsibility for servicing the creeds with reason and integrity. Compulsion and taboo is the process at the root of every living thing but man, and probably at man’s roots, though he hasn’t yet more than glimpsed the fact.”

  Wendley sighed without responding.

  Blake said presently, “As we indicated some while ago, Bill Gaunt’s summary might lead somewhere in our present situation. We physical scientists have hit on nothing suggestive. Nothing a tenth so suggestive, at any rate. However, bearing Bill’s thesis in mind, I think this meeting should now review the main lines of current inquiry.”

  It was raining when Gaunt stepped outdoors. Raining in the cold, late afternoon.

  His colleagues moved, alone or in pairs, down a long walk under skeletal trees. Gaunt turned up the collar of his worn overcoat. Blake locked up the building and ran a little to overtake the philosopher.

  “Pretty dim prospect.”

  Gaunt nodded.

  “Where’s your next stop?”

  “Urbana.”

  “Good.” They walked slowly in the sodden leaves. “Then?”

  “Cal Tech. Maybe a stop or two en route.”

  “It’s rugged—traveling, these days! But we need you, Bill. We need you—

  especially—to try to build up morale, and a co-operative sense, in the research teams. A lot of men have quit. Some are dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Branleigh committed suicide the other day.”

  Gaunt made no comment.

  The young physicist went on: “Good man. He’d been working on the neoplasm end. Under Steady. Too bad.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Incidentally,” Blake said, after several silent steps, “don’t drop off at Portland.

  Trouble there.”

  “Riots?”

  “Nothing so easy. Rain. Radioactive. Nobody knows how badly the area was poisoned—how many have been fatally injured. Place is being evacuated until the counterstudies come in.”

  “Russians?”

  Blake sighed. “Yeah. Thank God, at least, we know what happened! They are still working on the power angle. But they let go a particularly potent hydrogen blast on the edge of the Yellow Sea. Bigger effect than anticipated—trust the muzhiks to make some damned grandiose mistake! They radioed instantly. Apologized mightily. Nothing we could do but watch. And traces began to show on our side of the Pacific in early December. Must have been a concentration—intact—that moved over Portland.
And came down in the rain.”

  Gaunt shook his head sadly. They reached the corner. Blake grasped his arm.

  “I’ve got a 1ittle gas, Bill. Give you a lift anywhere?”

  “No, thanks. Only going to the station from Em Mobley’s house. Not far. There’s supposed to be a train around eight.”

  “Em,” the physicist mused, “is cracking up too. Liquor, for one thing. Notice?”

  “Yes.”

  The younger man sighed heavily; his breath eddied visibly in front of his sharp features and rain drizzled through the vapor. “Seems as if the brighter they are the faster they go, when the crack appears! You won’t mind, Bill, if I replace him on your committee—?”

  “He seemed all right today—”

  “It’s at night that he’s anything but fine. In an emergency—”

  “Of course, Bob. If you have to, then replace him. He’s a friend. Good brain. I’d hate to lose him. But—”

  Bob squeezed the philosopher’s arm. For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes with friendship, with understanding, with the utmost compassion. Rain trickled down Gaunt’s neck. Rain dribbled from the brim of Blake’s flat felt hat. They shook hands.

  “So long,” Blake said, and swallowed.

  Gaunt threw his arm over the other’s shoulders and hugged him. “Stay on the job, Bobbie, God bless you!”

  They parted.

  In a shadowless glare at once too bright and not bright enough, the hard, mean illumination of railroad stations, Gaunt put his suitcase where he could watch it and queued up to buy a ticket. A few undergraduates were in line, boys who had not gone home for Christmas because they had no homes to go to and were on their way to Trenton, perhaps, or Philadelphia, in search of such squalid diversion as these cities afforded. A few plain citizens of Princeton, going God knew where.

  The queue moved up and waited, moved up and waited, in the accustomed pace.

  Gaunt found himself looking at the ticket seller with a realization that the man’s face was familiar. He couldn’t place it. But the conundrum was preferable to his dismal thoughts, to a vacuous observation of countenances pinched by the unkind illumination, to the chill and the enduring of the burnt tobacco smell.