Equality: In the Year 2000
( Julian West - 2 )
Mack Reynolds
Equality: In the Year 2000
by Mack Reynolds
To Arthur C. Clarke
With whom I couldn’t agree more when he wrote in his excellent PROFILES OF THE FUTURE: It is impossible to predict the future, and all attempts to do so in any detail appear ludicrous within a very few years… If this book seems completely reasonable and all my extrapolations convincing, I will not have succeeded in looking very far ahead; for the one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.
INTRODUCTION
Almost a century ago, an obscure, unsuccessful writer named Edward Bellamy wrote a novel. Looking Backward, the success of which was as much a surprise to him as it was to the rest of the world. Indeed, it shortly became the most influential Utopian book ever written. Sales were in the millions; it was translated into twenty languages: countless editions were issued and it has never gone out of print. It deeply influenced such men as John Dewey. William Allen White, Norman Thomas, Thorstein Veblen. Franklin D. Roosevelt reported that in his youth, it was his “Bible.” Not too long ago, when a committee of three literary personalities—John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks—was named to designate the twenty-five most influential books published since 1885, Bellamy’s novel was voted unanimously as second only to Marx’ Das Kapital.
But a century is a longtime, and although Looking Backward is still highly readable, even inspiring to those who envision a better world, it is very dated. Much of what Bellamy foresaw in portraying his future society has already been accomplished: much can never be.
So it was that I had decided to use the fundamental plot, the basic characters, and aim for the same goal as did Bellamy—a portrayal of the world in 2000 A.D. as it might be if man comes to his senses. The novel, dedicated to Edward Bellamy, was entitled Looking Backward: From the Year 2000.
As mentioned, Bellamy was amazed at the reception of his Utopian story. All over the country, “Bellamy Clubs” sprang up, particularly in the colleges. Thousands of letters poured in, praising, criticizing, questioning, sometimes reviling various aspects. In defense, he wrote a sequel, expanding his ideas, going into more detail. It was entitled Equality, was unsuccessful, and soon disappeared from the scene.
The present writer finds himself in the same predicament. Letters began pouring in—not all of them flattering. In defense, I have written my own sequel. Equality: In the Year 2000.
Though a sequel to Looking Backward: From the Year 2000, this novel can be read without a knowledge of the first book. However, it will do no harm to have a brief summary of what has gone before.
When Julian West, playboy multimillionaire, is informed by his doctor that his heart gives him at most two years to live, he seeks out the top authority on stasis—placing bodies into artificial hibernation. With the hope that science will evolve to the point where his disease is curable and he can be revived, he creates a foundation to finance the radical experiment.
Julian had expected it to be a matter of a few years at most. He is flabbergasted to be awakened thirty-three years later in the apartment of Academician Raymond Leete, his wife Martha, and daughter Edith. They have been given the task of helping him adjust to the geometrically developing changes.
Leete points out that since 1940, when Julian was a child, human knowledge has been doubling every eight years, so that now the race has 256 times the knowledge that prevailed then. The computers and automation are in full swing, so that only two percent of the population are needed to produce all that the country can consume and ninety-eight percent are on Guaranteed Annual Income. There have been radical changes in government, in industry, in the arts and sciences. Julian finds himself at sea in almost every field. Money is no longer in use, so all his efforts to perpetuate his fortune were meaningless. Cities no longer exist, nor wars, nor pollution. nor the threat of the exhaustion of the planet’s resources—none of the problems of his own time. There is no crime, no juvenile delinquents or the use of drugs.
He cannot believe so many changes could take place in but a third of a century. Leete asks him to consider, in comparison, the changes that took place between June 1914… June 1947. the same length of time.
The book ends with Julian disillusioned with this world as a Utopia—at least for him. Interlingua, an international language, has been established and the new generations do not even speak English. The Leetes had been especially trained to take care of him, as an interesting experiment. But the generation gap is such now, with human knowledge over 250 times greater than in his youth, that Julian cannot even communicate with the average person. When he proposes to Edith, she points out the impossibility. And he is too far behind, at the age of thirty-five, to ever catch up. By the time he got through the equivalent of grammar school, human knowledge would have doubled again.
He says, in despair, “I’ve been calling this Utopia, but it isn’t. For me, it’s dystopia, the exact opposite. I’m a freak. Why did you ever awaken me?”
Edith shook her head sadly. “It wasn’t my decision to make, Julian. I was against it.”
“We are free today substantially; but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will become concentrated in the hands of a few. A Republic cannot exist upon bayonets; and when that day comes, when the wealth of the nation is in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements of the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.”
James Madison, 4th President of the U.S. Father of the Constitution
Chapter One
The Year 2 New Calendar
Old people’s skills, experience, and knowledge seldom make them authorities, and are no longer critical factors in our culture. The speed and pervasiveness of social change now transforms the world within a generation, so that the experience of the old becomes largely irrelevant to the young.
—Irving Roscow, Social Scientist
When Edith Leete entered the sanctum of the Leete apartment in the high-rise building in the Julian West University City that morning, Julian was sitting at the desk before the auto-teacher. The expression on his face was one of sour despair.
He was a man in his mid-thirties. Youthfully fresh of complexion, handsome in the British aristocrat tradition, hair dark and thick, touches of premature gray at the temples and a small amount in his mustache, flat of stomach, square of shoulders, medium tall. There was a certain vulnerable quality about his eyes and mouth which women had always found attractive, though he had never known that.
She said, “Bon maten, Jule.”
“Bon maten,” he muttered, not quite graciously.
“How goes the study of Interlingua?” she asked in English.
“Jupli mi legas gin. Des malpli mi komrenas gin.”
“Pri kio vi paroles? What are you saying? The more you study it the less you understand it?”
“I wish to hell you people had stuck to English, instead of dreaming up this new international language.”
She sank down in a seat and let her hands flop limply over the chair arms. “Nonsense, Jule. Interlingua is a scientific language. It works. Take spelling and pronunciation. They are absolutely phonetic and there are only five vowel sounds, where most of the old languages have twenty or more. Each letter has one sound only, and a sound is always indicated by the same letter. English was a bastard language—goodness knows how anyone ever learned it, including me. Take the word can. It means a container; it can also be a verb meaning to can something in a container; it also means you can, or are able to,
do something; and it also means, spelled C-a-n-n-e-s, a town in southern France. In American idiom it could mean to dismiss or fire someone, and in British idiom it meant a tankard.
“Or take this sentence: ‘There are three ways of spelling to.’ Now how would you go about spelling that, t-o,’t-o-o, or t-w-o?”
Julian had to laugh. “I admit we had some lulus.”
Edith continued, “And take grammar and syntax. Interlingua is so ingeniously devised that in place of the usual maze of rules occupying a sizable volume on grammar, we have only sixteen short rules, which may be written comfortably on a single sheet of notepaper.”
“The vocabulary is so damned extensive…”
“That’s due to the many new words that have come into the language, but in actuality the rules are such that we cover several times the wordage you do in a given area. For example, we carry the principle of affixes through to its logical conclusion. In English you often form the feminine of a noun by adding e-s-s: author-authoress, lion-lioness. Often, but by no means always. You are not allowed to say bull-bulless or hero-heroess. In Interlingua, the feminine ending may be added to any noun, and so throughout the language there is no exception to any rule and no limit to its applicability.”
“As you say, as you say…” Julian sighed. “At any rate, I’m plodding away. At this late date in life, it’s a little difficult to get back into studying.”
She frowned at his notepad and stylo. “What in the world are you doing?”
“Taking notes as I go along. I’ve always been a great note-taker when I study.”
“So am I, but the days when Abe Lincoln made his notes on a wooden shovel with a piece of charcoal have passed.”
He looked at her, not failing to note all over again the blue eyes, the classical nose, the well-formed mouth, the golden hair cut boy-fashion. It was a healthy face, bright and open—projecting honesty, sincerity. She had told him that she had never worn any sort of cosmetic; it hadn’t hurt her complexion any. He refused to let his eyes drop to her figure. He had long since been brought to the belief that her body was the most sexually attractive that he had ever seen, and he didn’t wish to tantalize himself further. When he had mentioned marriage, she had pointed out, without cruelty, how impossible a permanent relationship between them would be: she, and her father and mother, had been selected to deal with this man from a third of a century past; to be brutally frank, they had learned to speak in what amounted to baby talk in order to communicate with him.
Now he asked, “What do you mean? This stylo isn’t exactly a piece of charcoal. So far as I understand, it’s sort of a combination pencil and pen, except you don’t use either lead or ink, and it evidently lasts forever.”
“The equivalent of lead or ink is in the paper,’ Edith explained patiently. “The advantage with this type of paper is that if you’ve mislaid your stylo, you can still write with anything pointed—even with a finger nail, if necessary. But what I meant was that your method of taking notes is antiquated.”
He kept his eyes on her, wearily waiting for more. An hour didn’t go by in the company of any of the Leetes but that they came up with something that floored him.
She said, “There, next to you, is the voco-typer. I thought father explained it to you.”
“Briefly. You talk into it and it types up what you say.”
“There’s more to it. I’m continually surprised, Jule, at your lack of knowledge of what was developing back in the 1960s and ’70s, right under your nose. Most of what we have now in technological developments go back to your era, though I acknowledge it takes time—less so now than before—to bring a new breakthrough into widespread use. For instance, the basic facts of nuclear fission were known at least a decade before Einstein wrote President Roosevelt that an atomic bomb was possible:”
“What in the dickens has this to do with my taking notes with my stylo?” Julian asked.
“I was leading up to the fact that even in your day, the voco-typer, the computer data banks, and the computer translators were already in embryo.”
“Go on.”
She indicated the voco-typer that sat to one side of him on the desk. “They’ve all been amalgamated. You speak your notes into the voco-typer. It is connected to the data banks; your notes are recorded and you can check back on them any time you wish. And, if you desired, you could record your notes in English now, and, after your Interlingua becomes more fluent, have your notes played back to you in that language—or any other language, for that matter.”
“You mean that anyone at all can put anything he wants into the International Data Banks?”
“Of course. No problem. You see, all you could possibly write in your whole lifetime can be recorded on a disk no larger than your little fingernail, and about as thick.”
“Well, how long do they keep the record?”
“Forever. Fifty years from now, you might have some reason to check back on some of the notes you take today. They’ll be on file. Then there are other aspects. Suppose, a century or two from now, some biographer wishes to check back on your notes in order to do your life. There they are. Can you imagine how some historian in your time would have loved to have the notes of, say, Thomas Jefferson—made while he was composing the Declaration of Independence? I suggest that you have Information send you its material on filing and cross references. Speeds things up so that you’ll be able to check back more easily.”
Julian said indignantly, “Just one minute. Suppose there’s something in my notes I don’t want some goddamned biographer to see?”
“Don’t be silly. Anything of yours in the data banks can be wiped any time you wish. Your notes don’t have to remain if you don’t want them there. Or you can simply make a requirement that they are available to no one but you until such and such a date—or never.”
“Suppose I’m out somewhere without a voco-typer handy?”
“Then simply record your material by voice into your transceiver, ordering that it be put into the data banks in print.”
He shook his head. “Every day, I realize all over again how much there is for me to learn. Why, it’ll take me the better part of my life to reach the point you’re at now. How about a drink, Edie?”
“I’ll get it,” she offered, rising. She headed to the auto-bar. “Scotch for you, I suppose?”
There was a distressed look in her eyes when she handed him his whisky. “I don’t know what to say, Jule. I heard father tell you about the so-called knowledge explosion the other day, but I wonder if you completely followed through on the ramifications.”
“You mean that quote from Dr. Robert Oppenheimer that human knowledge is doubling every eight years?”
She nodded. “You see, he made that statement about 1955. So let’s take the year 1940 as the takeoff point. In the following eight years, various major breakthroughs were made, including nuclear fission, the first space ship, the German V-2, the first practical radar, and, in medicine, penicillin and the sulfas. Between 1948 and 1956 came additional breakthroughs: the conquest of polio, the modern computer, the first Sputnik in space, transistors. By this time, doubling each eight years, human knowledge was four times what it had been in 1940. Between 1956 and 1964, organ transplants; man went into space, following his history-long companion, the dog. Lasers and masers made their appearance, the supersonic aircraft, and nuclear fision, and human knowledge was eight times what it was in 1940. By 1972 it was sixteen times, we were on the moon, constructing space platforms, and relaying communications from scores of artificial satellites. Among other achievements, for the first time a living man—you—was put into artificial hibernation, to be awakened thirty-three years in the future.”
She took a sip of her wine and regarded him thoughtfully. “And while you slept, the knowledge explosion went on. In 1980 knowledge was thirty-two times that of 1940; by 1988 it was sixty-four; by 1996 it was one-hundred twenty-eight times greater than in 1940. And shortly, in 2004, or the year 4 New Calendar,
the multiple will be two-hundred fifty-six.”
Julian shook his head wearily.
Edith continued, “Suppose we put it another way. Let us say a child was born in the year 1940 and that, given modern medicine, he lives to be ninety-six years of age, dying in an accident. That would mean in the year 2036, using the old calendar. By that time, Jule, human knowledge will be 4096 times as much as when he was born. Believe me, it even shakes us up. Way back in your day, a Julius Horwitz of the New York Department of Welfare, put it bluntly. The aged in a big city have no economic status; they have no status in the household, they have no vocational skills to pass on to the younger generation. Their special problem is survival in a society which finds their minds and bodies superfluous.”
“Well, we cherish our older people these days, as we do our children; nevertheless, the generation gap is present with a vengeance. In fact, the gap begins no more than halfway through a generation: the thirteen-year-olds show impatience with the twenty-five-year-olds.”
“What are you leading up to, Edie?” he asked.
She eyed him compassionately. “Jule, when you went into stasis, human knowledge was sixteen times what it had been in 1940. Do you remember 1940?”
“Vaguely; I was a young child.”
“When you went into stasis, to what degree were you up on the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs?”
He snorted in self-depreciation. “I had already been left far behind. Half the time I couldn’t even follow the science, medical, and space articles in Time and Newsweek, though they were written for the layman. I never did figure out what lasers were, and the workings of computers simply floored me; I recall reading about one fellow programming a computer to play chess and it beat a chess buff. Space travel was all very interesting to watch on TV but when I tried to read a bit about it, I was at sea instead of in space. The simplest articles on the subject were too technical for me. The data banks, which were just beginning to start up in earnest… I read of a new storage device which would allow for every book in the Library of Congress to be stored in an area a couple of square feet in size. Things like that simply boggled my mind. I gave up trying to keep up. But what’s the point, Edie?”
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