Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  Immob!

  Immob!

  As the magical word boomed through the stadium, great banners unfurled from the proscenium arch. On them, emblazoned in lumi-letters twenty feet high, were the sensational new phrases: NO DEMOBILIZATION WITHOUT IMMOBILIZATION, PACIFISM MEANS PASSIVITY, A LEG SHORTER AND A HEAD TALLER, ARMS OR THE MAN, DODGE THE STEAMROLLER, DODGE THE STEAMROLLER, DODGE THE STEAMROLLER. . . .

  What, Helder demanded, did Immob mean? Immobilization, of course. Immobilization through vol-amp. He explained what vol-amp was, how it was designed to outwit the steamroller.

  But Immob was more than that. Much, much more. Something more positive. He and Theo had pondered its meaning in Martine’s guarded remarks and they had come to see, in a burst of revelation, what else it meant. It was the name of a whole new movement, a new way of life, a new and fully human order. Its letters were the initials of the new and spiritually soaring thing that Tri-P must become if it was to capture the missing ingredient of theological devotion. Those initials stood for—

  International Mass for the Manumission of the Benign!

  Mass, not movement. There had been too much movement in the world. Immob was designed to cure the malady of activity. Mass—that summoned up a picture of humanity becalmed by a new quiescent faith, impervious to all steamrollers, just triumphantly standing there.

  Helder and Theo had pondered long and soberly. They had come to see who had to make the first gesture. And now—it was to be made.

  At a signal, attendants appeared from the wings. Two of them stepped up to Theo, reached for his jacket and slipped it off.

  A quick gasp, choked off in many throats. For when the jacket came off, the shirt underneath was exposed and it was seen that there were no sleeves on the shirt—there was no need for sleeves, Theo had nothing to fill any sleeves with, his arms were gone!

  The world’s first Immob!

  But he was not alone. The attendants advanced to the rostrum, took hold of the wooden framework supporting the bunting and removed it.

  Another great convulsive shudder ran through the audience. Helder was not standing behind the draped table, as everyone had thought. He was standing on the table! On his two stumps!

  The world’s second vol-amp!

  “This is our answer to the charges made against us!” Helder cried, his voice thick with sobbing. “This is our answer to men of faltering commitment everywhere! We are not imperialists! We give ourselves fully, all the way, forever, to peace! Where is the man who will join us?”

  Great lamentation through the stadium. Sobs, wails, screams, women falling in a faint. Weeping, much wringing of hands.

  But then—something else. Another, more positive sound. A wild affirmatory shouting, hoorays, whoops, hysterical and surging.

  It was the young men, reacting now after the first paralyzing shock. Leaping to their feet. Jumping up and down. Waving their arms frenziedly in the air in a surge of benignity. And running, bounding, stampeding down the aisles—to the recruiting booths which were now being set up on the great stage.

  It was a wild time. And it lasted for many days. Like a great tidal wave Immob swept across the Strip: very soon all but a few queer, iconoclastic elements among the youth—not much in the literature about them—were recruited. Before long the thing began to get institutionalized; there were Immob clubs set up and M.E. universities, and the academicians began to overhaul their ancient disciplines and a new philosophy and ethos began to take form. The atmosphere crackled with magic.

  And the magic was infectious, on a scale beyond Holder’s wildest dreams. Almost overnight Immob captured the public imagination all through the East Union. The Union youth too rushed to the recruiting stations. Now, indeed, on a basis of full commitment, of theological fervor, the one world had come into being. Even Vishinu threw in his hat and both legs.

  All bitter talk of imperialism ceased. Men who are rushing to have their limbs cut off in the interests of peace do not call each other imperialists.

  SIXTH PHASE (1980-1990): Artificial Limbo.

  There was just one fly in the saccharine ointment. Helder had reckoned without modern technology—the electronic tube, the transistor, communications science, cybernetics, atomic energy, etc., etc. He had been so engrossed in programmatic matters these past years that he did not even know about the small group of cyberneticists who had, ever since the war, been working quietly in a little neurological laboratory attached to the Denver University Medical School.

  These men were, almost without exception, expert neurocyberneticists who had studied under Wiener at M.I.T. They had been inspired by Wiener’s contention that, granted the techological savvy of the 1940’s, an artificial limb superior in many ways to the real one could easily be created if society wanted to spend as much money on such a humanitarian project as it was willing to spend on developing an atom bomb. Their research on prosthetics had begun under the aegis of the Advisory Committe on Prosthetics Appliances which had been set up in 1948 by the American Congress to aid the amputee veterans of the Second; it had been given a great impetus by the Third, in which scores of thousands of people, both military personnel and civilians, lost one or more limbs. (It was their laboratory, as a matter of fact, which had built the aluminum pros for Theo when he was flown back from Africa in ’72.) And when the Inland Strip got organized in ’75, their project was granted a subsidy by the new government, purely in the spirit of encouraging humanitarian research.

  Less than a year after Immob was founded, these cyberneticists made a startling announcement: they had perfected an artificial limb superior in many ways to the real thing, integrated into the nerves and muscles of the stump, powered by a built-in atomic energy plant, equipped with sensory as well as motor functions, etc. It was a neutral, valueeschewing announcement. They did not know whether this invention was good or bad, whether it should be fostered or suppressed, any more than physicists a quarter century earlier had known whether their discovery of atomic fission and robot brains was good or bad—they merely had the thing, it was up to the politicos to figure out what to do with it. Science discloses, politics disposes.

  Great agitation on the heels of this announcement. Heated pros and cons. Shouldn’t this doodad be unceremoniously suppressed—after all, if Immob was the idea, what was the point to devices which would provide still greater mobility? Yes; but weren’t the vol-amps our great heroes, hadn’t they made the supreme sacrifice in the spirit of Martine? Was anything too good for our heroes?

  The battle went on. Sides were taken. It became the basic political issue, the split in opinion started to take on institutionalized shape in the form of parties, Pro-Pro and Anti-Pro came into being. And Pro-Pro soon became the government party. Helder and Theo, after looking the problem over from all angles, decided to go along with Pro-Pro—they could not see how any kind of mechanical gadget could vitiate the inner moral revolution brought about by vol-amp. After all pros were removable; and besides, many of the vol-amps were getting restless, the first intense glow of passivity had begun to wear off and they were complaining that, now that they had given themselves irrevocably to peace, they wanted to get up and around and do something a bit active for the cause instead of lying flat on their backs. And their women complained that they fretted and pouted quite a bit, lying there in their baskets (although many women joined the Anti-Pro Ladies’ Auxiliaries). These psychological problems had to be considered.

  Prosthetics plants were set up. Neuro-Loco Centers were organized. More active M.E.’s were devised. The dexterities and discernments became basic sports. A new philosophy came into being, based on expectations as to how cybernetic limbs would affect the cytoarchitectonic structure of the cortex and produce a new superior type of man. And as all this happened on the double in the Strip, similar developments took place in the Union: technological, political, philosophical, the whole works.

  In 1982 the Olympic Games were revived, this time as an annual cybernetic competition. Vishinu had neve
r gone back into the Union government, but he did accept a post as chairman of the Union delegation to the Olympic Arrangements Committee. In the first Olympic Games, Theo and Vishinu were the outstanding competitors of their respective teams—at first duo-amps like Vishinu were allowed to compete in some events—Theo trounced Vishinu every time, the Unioneers never won a single event.

  Those were eventful times; real ferment, a progression of red-letter days. Much excitement, and a great international friendliness—everybody alive and benign. But there was an entirely unforeseen development.

  As soon as the mass production of prosthetics got under way, it became clear that they couldn’t possibly be manufactured in quantity without big supplies of columbium. And the known deposits of columbium in the world were very meager indeed—not enough to answer the needs of even one Immob nation, let alone two of them. The pinch had begun to be felt by the U.S. Air Force as far back as the forties. No substitutes for the rare metal were possible, this was the one problem that continued to stump all the metallurgists.

  What to do? Both the Strip and the Union began to send out parties to look for columbium in the unexplored wildernesses—the Andes, the Himalayas. There was talk of looking into the situations in Madagascar and Greenland, perhaps even at the North and South Poles. It was quickly realized that this sort of exploration might develop a certain competitive spirit, not quite as innocent as the spirit of the Olympic Games, and to guard against that eventuality the more promising areas were pretty carefully staked out between the two powers. But then, as the years went by and the shortage grew more and more acute—to the point of being an insuperable bottleneck in many cybernetic projects—a certain tension developed. Each party began to think that perhaps the other one had the better of the bargain—and each began to wonder if the other wasn’t, in the old imperialist manner, organizing sub rosa expeditions in the hope of getting the jump on its partner. Vishinu was still not hampered by public office: he made the first guarded references to this lurking suspicion. Soon the references became less guarded. After three or four years, the situation got pretty serious. The whole thing culminated in the hammer-blow speech made by Vishinu three weeks ago in New Jamestown. . . .

  It looks like Jerry was right: the earth has played a very cute little joke on the pacifists. Everything else it yields up in teeming abundance, fruits to delight the palate, all the rotas and ganjas the human organism can stand—but with this one thing, this silly metal which can hold up under the blasting fires of hell, it turns miserly. After whetting men’s appetites for this heat resister beyond all slaking, Mother Nature coyly withdraws the mineral breast.

  There it is: the world is now irrevocably committed, with theological devotion, to only one thing, columbium, and there is not enough of the stuff to go around. So long as men want cybernetic super-limbs to super-move and super-grasp with, they will not find anywhere under this good green earth enough columbium to build them with. . . .

  And so, almost eighteen years after I made the last entry in my notebook, two men, one a Russian and the other a Eurasian, came after me with a rubber truncheon and a stubby automatic. Yes, the event has a long and complex history. What is its meaning, exactly?

  It makes no difference what Vishinu and Dai had consciously in their minds. The event has an objective significance, quite aside from the conscious intent of its participants. By an oversight, the new world’s martyr hadn’t been quite reduced to a corpse; now it meant to rectify the error. This kind of society wants its martyrs to stay quite dead—the martyr who turns into a Lazarus only makes trouble. Just like an Unknown Soldier coming back to life, it would be embarrassing as hell—what in Christ’s name would you say to him, what heretical things might he not say to you?

  They haven’t got me yet. Not quite. I’m a bit of a slippery customer, thank God, for the martyr-makers.

  So far I’ve given the slip to all the martyrizers of Martine—except myself.

  But they got me indirectly. They got my son.

  And just about the whole youthful population of the entire civilized world.

  For which I can’t entirely dodge the responsibility. After all, I did make the jokes

  Point there somewhere, wish I could see if I weren’t so tired but

  AUGUST 7, 1990

  Hunting lodge

  Swimming in the lake a lot. Like old times, keep diving to see how long I can stay under. This afternoon almost caught a trout with my bare hands but it wriggled free.

  AUGUST 13, 1990

  Lodge

  Keep thinking of Tom in the perambulator. Dreamt about him last night—I was trying to pull the covering away from him, it was very important to me to see if he was castrated but the blanket was like a sheet of steel riveted in place, wouldn’t budge, I was soaked with sweat. He looked up at me with a malicious grin. “Nothing doing,” he said. “I know what you’re up to but you can’t change places with me, from each according to his need.”

  Woke up with bad rheumatic stiffness in my arms and legs, it lasted several hours, disappeared the moment I went swimming. Toward evening I opened a vacuum-packed chocolate cake, delicious, took one bite and immediately threw up.

  AUGUST 22, 1990

  Lodge

  News report on the video. Vishinu and Theo meeting in Los Alamos with the Olympic Arrangements Committee. Making plans for the Games, due to start October 5 and run through October 19, Peace Day.

  SEPTEMBER 13, 1990

  Lodge

  Peace Day one month off. Twentieth anniversary of my much martyrologized desertion. Of my birthday; except I still don’t know what the hell I started to get born as.

  “Ambulatory basket case.” Why does the phrase keep bothering me? “You are already one of us in your heart”—that bothers me too.

  Can’t think. Can’t think.

  Hunting today. Took a pot shot at a rabbit, winged it in the foreleg. Clipped. Set the bone, rigged up some splints, put it back in the forest.

  Rummaging in the closet. Found an old mildewed collection of stories with my father’s name inscribed on the flyleaf. Hemingway’s Men Without Women.

  SEPTEMBER 22, 1990

  Lodge

  So, then: Immob started as a joke. A joke that miscarried.

  But every one of the big Salvationist movements in history—from the Ten Commandments all the way down to the Mormons’ Later Day Sainthood and Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Fletcherism and Bolshevik-Leninism and Dianetics and Orgonotics and Santa Monica Vedanta and Mandunga—every one of them might have started out as a great Swiftean joke. That some humorless man got hold of and took literally.

  The jokes get wilder and wilder, people laugh less and less.

  Suppose some Helder had come across Swift’s tract on a method to abolish the famine problem in Ireland by eating the children of the poor. Jesus.

  SEPTEMBER 27, 1990

  Lodge

  Notoa. Oh, he’s no great shakes as an artist, really. Even if he had greatness in him, the Mandunji village wouldn’t call it out or even give it leeway to operate. In a society that’s dedicated to naive whites, the best an artist can hope to produce, even a supremely gifted one, is equally naive blacks. No esthete is going to amount to very much in an atmosphere which isn’t complex enough—ambiguous enough, emotionally and ethically—to have an esthetic dimension. Esthetically my enthusiasm about Notoa was often pretty damned sophomoric, he’s no bush-league Hieronymus Bosch, it was just an easy way to take sides against Ubu.

  Still, non esthetically, what Notoa was trying to do was valid and important, granted the nature of the village in which he had to operate. What was he trying to prove when he carved a canoe for a nose or showed cobra fangs darting from a man’s genitals? Just this: Everything is possible. The more outrageously illogical a thing is, the more possible it is. The fundament of reality is the incongruous, the grotesque, the absurd, the miraculous, the improbable. The blind faith, the leap beyond logic, which Helder looked for in m
essianic politics, Notoa was after in the only kind of art he knew. The only way he knew to make his point was to put eyes on fingers and cassava leaves in ears. And who am I to argue with him? I’ve seen fingers turn into nipples and hypodermic needles and automatics and glasses of milk—God, I haven’t thought of that dream for over two months. I’ve seen lichens coming out of General Smut’s ears. I’ve seen all the improbability there is, I’ve seen Immob. I’ve looked at myself in a baby carriage. Baby miscarriage.

  I’ve seen the corpse of Rosemary. But I don’t like to think about it it’s

  OCTOBER 1, 1990

  Lodge

  Turning chilly. Flurries of snow during the night. Chopped some firewood.

  Just got an idea about Immob: it’s all done, not with mirrors, but with Hyphens. First you amputate, then you hyphenate.

  Thing is, man has always been uneasy with the world as it is—its disarray, its slipshoddiness. Can’t stand an indefinite turbulence in his affairs. People are too damned neat to live with the world’s litter; maybe it comes from too much toilet training. Man isn’t the tool maker, the speech maker, the concept maker: pre-eminently he’s the system maker, the compulsive bringer of order into primordial messiness. Always chasing one gilt-edged Hyphen or another.

  That’s the ineradicable sickness, Hyphen-addiction. The paranoiac urge to find the one all-embracing formula that subsumes and explains everything, one slap-happy Brahman or another. The Packaging Urge, you might call it.

  All along, the philosopher’s Holy Grail has been the magical Hyphen, some unified-field theory or other. After the religious short cuts to Oceania had been tried and failed—the Catholic’s hierarchical stepladder to the One, the Protestant’s individual pipeline—the philosophers had a try at patching things up. They were all variations on Descartes, trying to find the missing cosmic link in one pineal gland or another. During my student days, I remember, I was instinctively leery of the then current systems (which were later absorbed by Immob), Koestler’s insight-and-outlook, Reich’s orgonotic cosmos, Korzybski’s semantics, Helder’s good will—who was it who wrote that human history is “an endless tableau of the ugly fact slaying the beautiful hypothesis”? Often a guy seemed to have got hold of some provocative kernel of an idea, some puny lever with which to pry open this or that chunk of reality—but invariably he palmed it off as the Ultimate Lever. Some of these guys, in fact, judging from the grandiosity and fanatical intensity in their writings, were in the strictest clinical sense pathological, determined to find the one key that would open all doors. It never occurred to them that different doors might be fitted with totally different kinds of locks. So that anybody rash enough to pose as a cosmic locksmith should, in the interests of public safety, himself be locked up. To mix the figure still further, a key which is fobbed off as a cosmic can opener can very easily be turned into a bull whip or truncheon or automatic—or steamroller. Helder could never see that, poor Unitarian. He was dead sure that you had to make the panorama of odds-and-ends sequential before it could be consequential. . . .