Equality: In the Year 2000 jw-2

by Mack Reynolds

  “You just got out of the hospital for doing that, sir.”

  “That’s enough, Sergeant. Let’s go. I’ll take the first hour of walking point, then you can take it.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The sergeant was a good man. Like Sergeant Karp, he was a veteran of Korea, as well as two hitches here in ’Nam.

  Now Julian said to Siu Priu, one of the three Vietnamese assigned to the company as interpreters, “You three stick to the center of the column. You’re not expendable. I don’t know why in the hell Saigon doesn’t set up some schools to teach more of you Vietnamese English. We could cooperate better.”

  “Yis, sor,” Siu Priu said.

  “That’s English?” Sergeant Teichert demanded. “Some interpreter.” He didn’t like gooks, not even those on the American side, and didn’t go to the bother of disguising the fact.

  Marking your way through the jungle was slow work, particularly when you knew that Charlie was in the vicinity. They had a nasty habit of sinking Bouncing Bettys into the ground. You stepped on one and the initial charge bounced it up about four or five feet, and then it blew frags in all directions. The irony of it was that they were American-made mines, either captured from the Americans, or bought by the Viet Cong from South Vietnamese who would sometimes sell a part, or all, of their equipment when in need of a wad of Military Payment Certificates, the money of the ’Nam war.

  They plowed on through, Julian alternating with the sergeant as point, watching the ground immediately before their feet, darting looks into the trees and brush to either side.

  Suddenly, just as they had started up a low hill, the jungle erupted into a G ötterdammerung of sounds. Tracers reached out at them—green tracers, Charlie’s tracers. To the right, a RPG rocket-propelled grenade went off. Julian didn’t know if it was the enemy’s or their own. He was down on one knee, behind a tree. He fired and fired into the jungle.

  Teichert went down suddenly some twenty meters ahead, yelling, “Medic! Oh Christ, Medic!”

  Julian looked back over his shoulder. There was a lot of firing going on but the only man he could spot was Forry Jackson, calmly launching grenade after grenade in the direction of Charlie.

  He dropped his gun and rucksack and, crouching low, ran for his wounded sergeant. Lead and steel were flicking through the leaves of the trees like bees, thudding when they struck the trunks.

  He got to Teichert, and dropped down on his knees.

  “Get me out of here, Captain,” the other wheezed, his face ghost-pale. “I’m hit bad.”

  Julian couid see that he had taken three hits in the stomach. Where the hell was a medic? Teichert was bleeding all over the place. He fumbled for his first aid kit and pressure bandages.

  And that was when he took his own hits. It must have been a grenade, although he hadn’t heard it.

  He stared down at his upper leg, at a purple spot welling larger and larger. He could feel the wound pulsing. An artery: he could bleed to death in minutes.

  He started hobbling down the trail, holding his hand over the wound.

  Behind him, Sergeant Teichert called weakly, “Don’t leave me…”

  He came to the tree where he had left his gun and rucksack, and sank down, afraid to go further for fear that movement would increase the bleeding.

  Not far down the trail he could hear the M-60 chattering. The men had got it set up in short order.

  “Medic!” he screamed. “Goddammit, Medic!”

  One came hurrying up. He slapped a pressure bandage and a tourniquet on Julian’s leg and said, “You’re all right.”

  “Teichert’s up the trail. Belly wounds. Hurry, for shit’s sake!”

  The medic ran. When he came back, he said, “He’s dead. If I got to him just a minute sooner…”

  It was there the dream ended and Julian woke up, sweat-drenched as usual, the memory flooding through him: Teichert bleeding to death while his own comparatively minor wounds occupied the medic’s time; deserting his combat buddy, alone on the trail, to save his own skin…

  When he had recovered, they gave him a promotion and awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross. The citation read that he had gallantly led his men into combat against serious odds; that when one of his men fell he had gone into enemy fire to rescue him.

  That’s what the citation said, but he knew better, and he told the psychiatrist so.

  The doctor looked at him speculatively. It was their third session. He said, “You did what you could.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “If you had remained, you might both have died.”

  Julian just shook his head.

  “How many times have you been seriously wounded?”

  “Three.”

  The psychiatrist looked down at the papers on his desk. He took a deep breath and reached for his pen.

  “Major, I am recommending that you be discharged and returned to the States.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Year 2, New Calendar

  To waste, to destroy, our natural resources. To skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  Julian had been so upset by his Vietnamese nightmare that he had skipped breakfast and taken himself to the Leete apartment down the hall. He found the doctor standing at the window, looking out over the university campus, his face thoughtful. Edith was sitting at the desk, a stylo in hand, making notes.

  She looked up at his entrance, smiled and said, “Good morning, Jule.”

  He crossed to her. “What are you up to? I thought you always made notes into the International Data Banks.”

  “Oh, I’ve just been doing some planning for my vacation next year. I’ve never been to Egypt before.”

  “Egypt? I never liked the place, particularly the Egyptians. How long do you have?”

  “A year. I’m going to help build the pyramid.”

  He looked at her blankly. “Build the pyramid? What pyramid?”

  “Cheops. Archaeology and history students and, well, buffs are going to do a complete replica of the original pyramid of Cheops.”

  “Cheops! That’s the largest of them all!”

  “Yes. Exciting, isn’t it?” She smiled enthusiastically.

  He shook his head in bewilderment. “Well, at least you’ll have modern machinery.”

  “Oh, no. We’re going to use all the original methods as a way of figuring out how they accomplished it. Methods and materials.”

  “But why ?”

  “What better way to study archaeology? We’re going to have to figure out, mostly from hieroglyphic inscriptions and so forth, just how the Egyptians quarried, and how they got the stones across the Nile. We’ll have to make papyrus boats such as they used. We’ll use the same sort of rollers they did…”

  “You mean you’re going to pull those king-sized stones by hand? How many of you are in on this crackpot idea?”

  “Over ten thousand so far. Mostly students from United America, but a good many from other countries too. It’s all the thing among archaeology buffs.”

  “But it will take years!”

  “Of course. And each year some of us will have to drop away, but others will take their place. When it’s all finished, it will be a museum, and for tourists to see, and so forth. It will look exactly the way the original did when it was first completed, and it will be close enough to the original that one will be able to walk between them to compare.”

  “Look,” he said almost desperately, “why in the hell don’t you start on something easier? Something like rebuilding the Acropolis in Athens, complete with the Parthenon?”

  “Oh, some European students are doing that.”

  “Then why not start with one of the smaller pyramids, something not quite so ambitious? Down in Yucatan, maybe. One of the Mayan pyramids.”r />
  “Oh, the Mexicans and other Meso-American specialists are doing that. I’m an Egyptologist, with a concentration in the first five dynasties.”

  “I thought you were a farmer.”

  “I am. That’s my work. But Egyptian archaeology and anthropology is one of my hobbies.”

  He shook his head and went over to stand next to Doctor Leete. The doctor still had somewhat of a shiner from his fracas of the day before.

  Julian asked, “Have you figured out why those fellows jumped you?”

  Leete looked at him and frowned. “I’m not sure. If you don’t mind, Julian, I’d rather not talk about it, at least until I’m more certain of my facts. The whole thing is quite unprecedented.”

  “As you wish. I don’t want to pry.”

  “How go the studies?”

  “I’m still concentrating on learning Interlingua, but yesterday I got a resum é of scientific and technological breakthroughs that have occurred since I went into stasis. I’ve got quite a few questions I’d like to ask you.”

  “Ah? Fire away. That’s my assignment.”

  Julian gestured at the view out over the campus. “I’m continually amazed by the abundance; how you ever got to the point, in a third of a century, where you produce so much more than we used to, is a complete mystery to me.”

  The doctor seemed amused. “We don’t produce more than you used to. We produce less, I’m sure.”

  Julian looked at him as though he were joking. “That’s ridiculous. Everyone lives on a scale that only the wealthy could afford in 1970.”

  Leete chuckled, then gestured that they should take seats. “It’s not how much you produce but what you produce and how you distribute it. You measured your product in 1970 in dollars. Just how great was your yearly production?”

  “Gross National Product was approximately a trillion dollars.”

  The doctor thought about that. “In actuality, that takes a bit of qualification. The method of calculating that Gross National Product had its weak points.”

  “How do you mean? It was simply the combined products and services of the whole population.”

  The doctor pursed his lips. “Well, let’s take one example. The United States had long been proud of its per capita production as compared to that of other advanced countries, say, Sweden, or the Soviet Union. Let us say we have an American surgeon who makes twenty-five thousand dollars a year. That amount is added to the supposed total of the Gross National Product. In Sweden, his equal is paid but ten thousand dollars a year, since medicine is socialized there. Thus, in calculating Sweden’s Gross National Product, the doctor’s contribution is but ten thousand dollars. Over in Leningrad, a Soviet surgeon, the exact equal in ability to his American and Swedish colleagues, is paid but five thousand dollars a year, working for the state. In calculating Russian GNP, that sum is part of the total.

  “And that isn’t the end. The following year, the American decides to get on the gravy train, as the expression goes, and moves to New York where he doubles his fees and makes fifty thousand dollars a year. So he now contributes ten times as much to the GNP as does his Soviet equal.”

  Julian had to laugh.

  “Nor is that all,” the doctor went on. “Let us leave services and take definite products. The Japanese of your time were turning out compact automobiles that were built to last. Some of them utilized the Wankel rotary engine, which gave good mileage and emitted very little in the way of pollution. American cars selling for the same amount, on the contrary, were built with planned obsolescence in mind. Detroit wanted the customer to desire a new car approximately every three years. Suppose that each of these cars cost three thousand dollars. The Japanese car gave double or more the mileage and lasted at least twice as long. Is it, then, accurate to add to the GNP of both the United States and Japan the amount of three thousand dollars?”

  “I see what you mean,” Julian said. “GNP can be a somewhat elastic term. But what’s this got to do with your producing less than we used to? On the face of it—”

  “Once again,” the doctor interrupted, “it’s a matter of what you produce and how you distribute it. For instance, we no longer produce weapons of destruction. What was your yearly bill for war, preparation for war, and paying off past wars?”

  “I think it was pushing a hundred billion a year,” Julian said. “We even had widows on the pension lists who went back to the Civil War and the Indian Wars.”

  “That took a considerable portion of the product of your trillion dollar economy. We have no military today. Also, in your day you had a top-heavy bureaucracy of some ten million persons, very few of whom produced anything worthwhile for the nation. Their labors were largely wasted.”

  “You still have government workers.”

  “Yes, but now they are part of the production process and are necessary. And most certainly they are fewer in number. But most important, your socioeconomic system was one of waste: your automobiles with power steering, power windows, air conditioning, engines which could drive them over one hundred twenty miles an hour but got only seven to ten miles to the gallon. The Japanese cars I mentioned before got up to thirty. And while it was possible to produce cars that could have lasted half a century, few American cars lasted ten years. Today, we build our cars to last as long as possible.

  “But that’s only the beginning. In your grandfather’s day, when he bought a watch he expected it to last the rest of his life. Indeed, he often willed it to his son. By your time, they were turning out watches so poorly made that when one stopped, the owner simply threw it away and bought a new one. It. was cheaper than having it repaired, or even cleaned. Today, once again, we manufacture watches that will last as long as possible—when we use watches at all; usually we dial the time on our transceivers. I remember, when I was a boy, cigarette lighters that were meant to be thrown away when they had used up their fuel, rather than refilled. Many of the ballpoint pens were the same—non-refillable. And planned obsolescence didn’t apply only to cars. Kitchen appliances, light bulbs, tires, batteries, furniture—just about all products. You used throwaway bottles and so-called tin cans by the billions each year.”

  “Wait a minute,” Julian said. “What do you do with tin cans today?”

  “Actually, we use them very infrequently,” the other told him. “For instance, we prefer our food fresh. When we do use cans the metal is recycled. Mainly, we use plastic containers and the plastic too can be recycled.”

  Julian said, “It seems to me that you can carry that recycling bit to an extreme. Suppose you go on a picnic way out in the boondocks somewhere and you take along a a dozen bottles or cans of beer. After you’re finished, do you have to carry them all the way back home to be thrown into the disposal chute and recycled?”

  The doctor smiled. “Hardly. We have a special type of plastic for such use. In two or three days, exposure to either sun or rain will cause it to melt away into the ground. It is not harmful to soil.”

  “Isn’t that waste?”

  Leete nodded agreement. “Yes. But we are not fanatical. Also, it is not as though we were throwing away cans made of steel or aluminum. The plastic is made from wood and other things that grow and hence are replaceable.”

  “You must use up a good many trees, if you manufacture as much plastic as all that.”

  “There have been advances in forestry since your time, Julian. We now have trees that grow to maturity in one year. And, with nuclear fision and solar power, it is practical to desalinate ocean water and pump it into such areas as the Sahara and the Arabian and Gobi deserts. They are rapidly being reforestrated. We use wood and other agricultural products wherever we can, rather than metals and such irreplaceable natural resources. We husband such things for future generations. Such metals as we do utilize are recycled over and over again.”

  The doctor paused. “Another example of waste in your time was your houses. In Europe today there are houses many hundreds of years old that are still lived in. B
ack at the time of the American Revolution, there were homes built that are still in existence. But in your day? A homeowner with a thirty-year mortgage could expect the house to have deteriorated before he finished paying for it. So bad was the workmanship and the materials that many had become hovels or shacks before ten years were up. Today, as in the long-ago past, we build houses that will last for centuries.”

  “I suppose you’re right there,” Julian begrudged him. “We constructed millions of buildings each year and tore down almost an equal number—not just houses, but every other type of building as well.”

  “Another great waste of your time,” Leete went one, “was power. You were going through your fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal, and natural gas as though there was an unlimited supply. For example, everyone who could afford it air-conditioned not only their homes, their offices, their stores and public buildings, but their cars as well.”

  “You mean to tell me that you no longer use air-conditioning?”

  “Sometimes, but not the to the extent you did. You see, most of us have come to believe that man’s body was designed for the temperatures nature provides. It did your health little good to go back and forth from the heat outside to air-conditioned interiors. How many colds and other respiratory diseases resulted from the practice, we’ll never know. You also drastically overheated your buildings in the winter months. Today, we still heat our houses, of course, but we are more inclined to wear heavier clothing, warm underwear and sweaters, rather than swelter in summer temperatures in December. Why, those who could afford it even heated their swimming pools. Can you imagine the amount of power that consumed?”

  “That’s one of the things I meant to ask you about,” Julian said. “When I went into stasis, we were beginning to face a power shortage. How did you lick that? Though, from what you say, you now have unlimited power from nuclear fision.”

  “It’s not as simple as all that,” Leete told him. “Unlimited power through nuclear fision could bring with it unlimited heat, which would be bound to get us into all sorts of trouble. So although we utilize it to some degree, we also call upon other sources, particularly renewable energy sources, so that we can live on the earth’s energy income, rather than its capital. We now utilize much more wind and water power—even the tides. We tap the heat of the interior of the planet. But most of all we are calling upon solar power, the vast energy pouring down on us from the sun. It produces some fifty thousand times as much energy as man’s current rate of consumption.”