Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  from dr. martine’s notebook

  (mark ii)

  JULY 27, 1990

  At the old hunting lodge

  Back in New Jamestown about three weeks ago, Fourth of July, two men, a Russian and a Eurasian, were all set to save humanity by working me over, maybe killing me. Complicated event. Long history behind it, over eighteen years in the making. Been doing some background reading and the pieces are beginning to fit. The historical picture’s something like this:

  FIRST PHASE (1972-1975): Myth-Making.

  At 3:25 A.M., October 19, 1972, Helder jumped for his anti-blast suit and found the notebook sticking out from under my pillow. He put two and two together—he’d never read Dostoevsky, didn’t suspect that twice-two sometimes equals five—and decided I’d gone out in a blaze of unauthorized heroics. Beginnings of the myth.

  Teddy Gorman was ordered to be flown home, and Helder wangled it so that he went along as surgeon in charge. Teddy was brought to a secret underground hospital installation outside Oklahoma City, Helder attending him. It was touch and go for Teddy for some time, he didn’t even regain consciousness for over a week; but finally he rallied. When he was on the mend Helder began to read him passages from Martine’s notebook. During these sessions several ideas began to shape up in Helder’s programmatic head:

  First, Martine had worked out a whole new philosophy for the pacifist movement, based on the principle of saying no to all EMSIACS. Second, Martine had picked Helder to unravel his thought and Teddy to put it into action. Third, to inspire Helder and Teddy and those who would flock to their banner, Martine had sacrificed his life to say the first thunderous no to EMSIAC. Elaboration of the myth. So began the deification of Dr. Martine, much misunderstood deserter, who couldn’t get his jokes taken seriously.

  Many weeks passed. Teddy was finally fitted with some old-fashioned artificial legs, aluminum ones. Coached by Helder every inch of the way, he finagled his way into the EMSIAC area and blew the whole works sky-high. Before many hours had passed, Vishinu, a Russian flier somewhat older than Theo (he’d been a protégé of Vasili Stalin’s) but pretty much his opposite number, heard about what Teddy had done and got the idea of clobbering his own EMSIAC.

  America and Russia were a shambles; so were all the heavily populated areas of the world. Nothing could be done on a national or international level—no nations left. Reconstruction had to get going on a purely local basis, town by town and village by village. Slowly the survivors came out of their state of shock and began to huddle together in areas where there were vital industrial plants underground.

  All this time Helder, with Teddy now his strong right arm, was busy in his makeshift headquarters in Los Alamos, planning to launch a refurbished Tri-P movement. Early in 1975 he decided the time had come and over the one partially rebuilt radio network he made the electrifying announcement: Tri-P was a going concern again. Under the leadership of Helder, the mentor, and Teddy Gorman, the protégé. Under the martyrship of Martine. Nobody thought to mention one little fact: in the years before 1970 Martine had consistently resisted Helder’s efforts to get him into Tri-P. Myth now become movement. . . .

  SECOND PHASE (1975-1977): The Bid for Power.

  Tri-P in its reincarnation had a brand new gimmick, one that Helder had dreamed up entirely on his own. The essential problem, of course, was that of pacifism vs. defensism—the tendency of pacifists, except for a fringe of ineffectual cranks and crackpots, to break down and turn patriotic in situations where their own countries seemed to be threatened with attack. The shift from turn-the-other-cheek to eye-for-an-eye: the Judeo-Christian ambivalence. In his notebook Martine had indicated that this was the core of the pacifist dilemma. Now Helder announced that he had found the solution—the Assassination Clause.

  Simple gadget, this Assassination Clause. Wherever Tri-P came into power it was to be written into law; as the twenty-third amendment to the old American constitution, the first amendment to the old Soviet constitution. The Clause read as follows:

  Every person who offers himself as a candidate for public office automatically takes oath never to encourage or countenance or condone the manufacture of arms or their distribution; never to make hostile utterances about other nations or peoples; never to carry out the functions of his office with any degree of secrecy, or enter into diplomatic negotiations or agreements which are not fully open; never to obtain information of any sort through the use of confidential agents; never to employ bodyguards or take any steps toward the securing of his personal safety; never to suggest, under any circumstances whatsoever, that the foregoing commitments must be suspended because of a state of “crisis” or “emergency”; never to adopt or even advocate a strategy of defensism, political or personal, no matter what “external” threat appears to exist. If during his tenure of office he engages in any of the illegal acts enumerated above, or even suggests that such acts are called for by a “new” situation, this shall be construed by the citizenry as an invitation to assassinate said offficial in the public interest; and if the official takes any measures whatsoever to protect himself against such assassination, that act in itself shall be construed as an invitation to all genuine pacifists to assassinate him; and if he does no more than argue against this Assassination Clause, and press for its revocation, that act too shall be construed as an act of treason and an invitation to assassination.

  The new pacifist program was a thing of lean, monotoned beauty: any pacifist who doesn’t act like a pacifist in office begs other pacifists to bump him off without further ado. In other words, the old Oxford Pledge foolproofed, with no outs.

  Of course, Helder went on, a certain logical objection could be made. Peace, according to the cliché, was indivisible; workers for peace and a better world had always understood the necessity for spreading their programs across the frontiers of nations. So, in the crisis of war, each internationalist shrugged his shoulders, acknowledged despairingly that no one could disarm unless all disarmed, and reached for a gun.

  The premise was logical enough, Helder confessed. If one country was disarmed it could easily be attacked by others that retained their arms. Nothing more obvious. But logic was not enough—pacifists had been rigidly logical whenever they had risen to power, and the result had been one ruinous war after another. There was something beyond logic, some outrage to logic, some magical thing, that had been lacking in the pacifist brew all along. Martine had supplied the missing ingredient. It was, simply, the faith that surpasess all logic and understanding, utterly blind faith, a fanatical dogged devotion that could only be called theological. From this moment on, Helder announced, Teddy Gorman was to be known as Theo, as a living reminder of Martine’s bequest to humanity.

  But coupled with this blind faith in the rightness of the program must be an equally blind faith in something else: the potential of good will in all people. One must believe that when a genuine pacifist gesture such as the adoption of the Assassination Clause is made in one country, its moral audacity will exert such a magical pull on the pacifist impulses of other peoples that a mighty wave of good will will sweep over all countries and, in one mystic surge, achieve the oceanic internationalism that all the “practical” and “responsible” leaders of the past had talked about but never gotten anywhere near. Did history refute this belief? Well, when in history had such a gesture ever been made? Who had ever really turned the other cheek?

  That was the burden of Helder’s opening-shot speech. It was a stunner. People were sick to the marrow of war; they were fed up to the point of nausea with leaders who had promised peace and then sold them out. They wanted peace at any cost—anything, literally anything, would be better than war.

  There was great excitement in the new cities that were being founded up and down the far western strip of America. Soon an election was arranged, Tri-P swept into office with practically no opposition, Helder became president and Theo his right-hand man, emissary, and all-round troubleshooter. So the Inland Strip was born
. And the magic ground swell which Helder had predicted came to pass. Very soon the theological excitement of the Assassination Clause filtered into the East to take the burgeoning pacifist movement there by storm; it led to a new order headed by Vishinu and some of his associates. So, by ignoring the logic of internationalism, Helder’s “blind faith” had finally brought about a genuinely international order.

  Martyr: myth: movement: macrocosm. But in his haste to proclaim the martyr and get going, Helder forgot, first, to locate the martyr’s corpse. . . .

  THIRD PHASE (1977-1978): Crisis of the Outmoded Cortices. And immediately there was trouble. For one thing, a whole slew of materials like cobalt, petroleum, uranium, thorium, columbium, important deposits of which were to be found only in the great no man’s lands left throughout the backward colonial patches of the globe after the Third World War, was vitally needed by each of the powers. Wouldn’t either power, simply in order to protect its geopolitical situation, have to maneuver for control of such areas even when it did not yet need the specific materials available in it?

  Such “protective” ideas, of course, could not develop in a world in which people were nothing but pacifists. But the trouble was that nowhere in the Tri-P world could you find a man who was nothing but a pacifist. To be that, a man would need to have a very long and very rich and overwhelmingly persuasive tradition of pacifism behind him—and there was no such tradition in the world, even that strand of the Judeo-Christian heritage which had to do with turning the other cheek was cunningly intertwined with another strand which suggested an eye was suitable payment for an eye and a tooth the minimum recompense for a tooth. But the peoples of the Tri-P world did have another sort of tradition which was still very much with them. A long, rich, remarkably persuasive history now folded deep into the cortex, only thinly overlaid with benignity, which told every Easterner that the Western world was rapacious, and materialistic, and contemptuous of those with darker skins and more meager technologies, and Wall Street imperialist; every Westerner that the Eastern world was wily and rapacious and totaliarian and benighted and clumsy with machines and irrational and contemptuous of democratic human values and Soviet imperialist.

  To be sure, the leaders of the Strip and the Union never gave voice to such thoughts—there was, after all, the Assassination Clause to think about. But the Clause could not be enforced against whole populations. Private citizens of both countries—newspaper editors, journalists, professors, economists, businessmen—were not bound by the Clause; they were free to make accusatory statements, and make them they did.

  Then a completely unforeseen thing happened. No holder of public office could make accusations against another power, not if he valued his neck. But—and this was something the clause makers had not anticipated—he could resign his office and, using his prestige as a recent leader to gain an audience, yell out his accusations all over the place with the immunity of a private citizen. This is exactly what Vishinu did. He kept mum for almost two years after he became head of the Union. Then he quit, on the ground that he could be more useful to his country as a private citizen, and let fly.

  There was hell to pay. Vishinu threw the whole motheaten Soviet book at Helder and his associates—charged them with everything from imperialism to bed wetting. Helder and his associates, of course, could not reply.

  It was a bad time for Helder. Vishinu, it was suggested, was preparing a coup in the Union which would overthrow the nominal Tri-P government and set up a defensist one. What was Helder to do? To give up Tri-P would mean to give up everything which stamped his messianic life with meaning and direction. But he could not disprove the terrifying reports which appeared daily in the Strip press—and neither could he do anything to muzzle the press. He could not even be sure that the aroused citizens of the Strip were not doing exactly what they accused Vishinu of doing—there were such rumors too. War, a thoroughly off-the-record war, was obviously being prepared by the citizens of two pacifist nations in a thoroughly off-the-record way, and there was no way to stop it.

  Crisis. In three short years the world was on the brink again. Some essential ingredient, obviously, was still missing from the pacifist stew. And if it could not be found in a hurry, the human race was very probably doomed—that was being corny and histrionic, maybe, but there it was. . . .

  Helder was in a state of panic. He had missed up somewhere. He had to find out where, exactly—otherwise his life made no sense. And he was a man to whom it was enormously important to make sense—he always forgot his Rosemarys.

  FOURTH PHASE (1978): Revelation of the Word.

  He went into retreat in the mountains. For almost a month he was gone; only Theo knew his whereabouts. He thought and thought, pacing the floor of his cabin nights. Where had he gone wrong?

  In desperation he went back once more to study the bible. And suddenly, one febrile night, it struck him. None so blind as those who will not see. The answer was as simple as a twice-two-equals-four Euclidean theorem—it had been there in Martine’s notebook all the time.

  It was as though a veil had suddenly dropped from Helder’s eyes and he saw for the first time. Martine had sensed, with his breathtaking insight, that pacifism was all child’s play and dust in the eyes unless it was nonreversible—and it would never be nonreversible until it was rooted in the very anatomy of man and the aggression which vitiated it was rooted out. Martine had meant to suggest all that in his apparently casual and haphazard speculations about inducing good will in Theo through lobotomy. And then he had gone on to suggest the real surgical solution to the problem through a series of apparent jokes and wisecracks—the solution of Immob!

  The big problem was to prove to the world that in becoming a pacifist you were not simply stepping from one ideological suit of clothes into another, while inside you remained the same; you had to demonstrate for everyone that you were thinking and feeling with a completely new cortex, from which all the old suspicions and wily strategies had been removed. Immob would do just that: no one would suspect a vol-amp of harboring any anachronistic imperialism under his cranium. It was not by accident that Martine had put so much of the Immob philosophy into Theo’s mouth, in that incredible imaginary dialogue which no one had understood before this moment. It was glaringly obvious that this was Martine’s way of saying: because Theo was already a duo-amp quite involuntarily, because he’d been mauled by the steamroller, he must now become the initiator of Immob by voluntarily making himself a quadro-amp—and thus launch mankind’s first real effort to dodge the steamroller.

  In great excitement Helder summoned Theo to his hideout. He closeted himself with the young man and, stammering with the furious glory of his revelation, explained the whole thing—quoting the lines from Martine’s notebook which, several years ago, he had deleted as irrelevancies. (All the lines—except those having to do with masochism.) At first Theo thought Helder was joking; then he grew silent.

  Finally Helder asked him what he thought. He said that he would have to go off by himself and worry it over a little—it was a pretty big idea to swallow all at once.

  Theo went out and sat on the mountain top all that night long. God only knows what ideas went through his mind as he felt his aluminum legs, then raised his hands and studied them in the moonlight. But when the sun came up and he went back to the cabin, Helder knew by the saintly glow on his face what his answer was. Theo was not one to refuse the mantle of destiny, especially when it was flung to him by a Martine.

  The whole thing was arranged by Helder in absolute secrecy. A remote place was selected for the operations, surgeons were sneaked away to do the job. For almost two months Helder and Theo remained in hiding, recuperating.

  By this time, of course, the whole Strip was in a panic—the leaders were gone, the bombast from the Union propagandists was getting wilder and wilder.

  FIFTH PHASE (1978-1979): Tri-P to Immob.

  Loud-speakers all through the Strip trumpeted the sensational news: Helder and Theo were
about to return to public life—they would appear at a monster rally at New Jamestown. The rally, of course, was scheduled for October 19, 1978; that had already become the big holiday of the new order, known as Peace Day.

  Came the great day. People poured into New Jamestown from all parts of the Strip. A quarter of a million spectators crowded into the giant stadium. When the curtains finally rolled back, they revealed two people on the stage: Helder, standing behind a table draped with bunting, and Theo, standing directly to his right.

  A tense hush. Slowly, with great emotion, Helder began to speak. He held up one hand, in it a volume; this, he explained, was the original manuscript of Martine’s notebook, the manual of humanism bequeathed to all men of good will by the great martyred hero. In it was the great lesson—the need for absolute faith.

  Now he turned and pointed to Theo.

  Here, as they all knew, was the prototype of the great faithful, so named by Martine himself. Martine’s plenipotentiary to humanity. For some three years now the remnants of the civilized world had been living under Martine’s banner, striving to reach the theological purity of Theo. Through the political instrument known as the Assassination Clause, the best device invented by man so far to make his moral commitments stick.

  And yet—something had gone wrong. Wild recrimination filled the air all through the pacifist world. Charges, threats, and bitterness everywhere. The moral commitment had not stuck. Somehow, the Assassination Clause was inadequate. Another catastrophe impended, one which would eliminate whatever tag ends of the human race were left. What, what had happened?

  He would tell them what had happened. They had not reached out joyously to accept their heritage from Martine. The one true lesson in the notebook, they had not learned. The Assassination Clause was not the way. It was a puny, halfway measure. The wholeway measure, the full triumphant leap into irrevocable faith, they had not taken—but Martine had defined it and pointed the way. It was—