Small Changes

by Marge Piercy

  “People weren’t exactly unanimous behind this idea. I like to feel my technical people are agreed that an idea has merit before I would go pulling someone off a project he’s already on.”

  “But with any idea that has a certain amount of risk—that involves taking a giant step—you can’t have agreement beforehand.”

  “It is an exciting idea, Miriam, and I’d be the last to deny that, and we certainly got some excitement out of the boys on Wednesday. But you know we’re not a big outfit with a lot of extra capital to bankroll our ideas. Even if this idea does pan out, chances are it’d be too costly to have much commercial application. Now”—he held up his hand to head her off at the pass—“you know and I know we’re here to do research. But we aren’t in a financial position right at this moment to fund our own pure research off the cuff.”

  “It wouldn’t take long for me to reach the point where we could see if it works or not. It really would be a breakthrough if I’m right. If I’m wrong, it wouldn’t take long.”

  “I know that you feel strongly, and I wish I could give you the green light. Tell you what we can do. I don’t want you to give up. I want you to go ahead and work on your idea on the side while you’re on the ABM contract. Then in six months or so we can review your progress. I think we might have a reserve for developing our own technical ideas by then. You’ll have your idea roughed out and filled in. I like to feel the staff is behind any idea we finance on the cuff, because it’s a risk to all of us. But you’re not to feel discouraged. Work on it, keep at it, and we’ll see if we can’t come up with something in six months, nine months. You don’t want people to feel you can get supported on a project of your own because Neil threw his weight around.”

  “You know Neil would never do that. He didn’t say a word in the seminar.”

  “You know that, and I know that, because we know Neil. But technical people are always apt to be a bit jealous.” He stood, signaling her audience was finished. “Don’t let a little criticism dampen your spark. Back to the drawing boards. I bet that in six months you’ll have something for us to see.”

  “Look,” she said with rising desperation, feeling herself backed out the door, “I really do feel out of place on the missile contract. What about Ted’s project? Couldn’t I work on a piece of that?”

  “Why, Dick thinks you’re doing fine. We’re satisfied. You’re too critical of yourself. As for Ted’s project, it’s one of those government contracts written for one full-time class three systems man and one part-time class five. You don’t meet the specs. Be seeing you. Right. Any time.”

  That weekend she came down with a cold and Monday she stayed home from work. Immediately after Neil left and she snuggled down in their bed upstairs, in the corner room with the tower, she knew she wanted to be sick. Normally she would have gone to work with a cold. She rarely took to bed with anything less than the flu. But today she wanted to stay home and sulk.

  Why not? What was a house for if sometimes she could not stay in it and not have to see anyone or pretend she was not hurt and furious and miserable? Why should she be so hurt? It was only a technical idea that had misfired. But a good one. Bastards. Jealous bastards. Nobody liked it when somebody else was the one to pull down a good technical idea. What they all loved more than anything was to be able to say about somebody what they did about Dick: that he could only manage, because he could no longer do technical work. Like saying somebody was impotent. In fact she had once heard Ted say that Dick couldn’t cut the mustard any more, meaning do good work. Logical was supposed to be such a rarefied jolly pure atmosphere, ideal setup, small software outfit controlled not by business types but by the scientists themselves. But a company existed to make money. Money came only from certain sources. Those sources determined the work to be done, determined ultimately what people came to feel was technically interesting work.

  She got up to make herself tea. Brought it back upstairs with an orange and an apple. Weighed herself with anxiety and climbed back into bed. This room could really be special, a retreat, if she ever got off her ass and fixed it up. Time, time, never enough time. The basic layout of the house was interesting, with that dramatic cascade of stairway and the marvelously well preserved woodwork. They had furnished the dining room with care and done a reasonable job with materials at hand on the bedroom and kitchen and Neil’s study. But the living room was still basically empty—wasted.

  At first they had lived in Neil’s apartment. After looking for a while at larger apartments they’d decided to think about a house. Everybody else they knew had bought or built expensive modern objects out in the tracts, as Neil said, where they lacked doors to shut and sounds reverberated and nobody could be alone with his thoughts or work. A box of noise in a sea of mud: they both thought of the house that Fred lived in with his herds of children and exhausted whining wife. Not for them.

  They searched until they found a big old house in a pleasant area of Brookline. They had not really decided to buy a house, to commit themselves financially, but in the course of looking they crossed that line. They could not afford it but they would get by. Neil was optimistic about Logical. The house was a mess. They had despaired of ever getting the work done—not right, they gave up on that, but sufficiently so they could move out of the cramped bachelor quarters and spread out at their ease.

  The house could be something people would enjoy, a house that did not look like every other house, a good environment—if she ever had the time. At least this weekend they must get a couch. People put effort into everything except their own pleasure. That driven Protestant work ethic, what was she doing with it nattering away in her? Why try to be so original and creative when, supposing she had got Abe to back her work, any products of her effort must necessarily be misused? The only kind of context where her ideas would ever be applied was the military-industrial complex. Her best ideas fed the war games. What was the use?

  Oh, she knew who had made her see that, rubbing her nose in it. Charming Wilhelm, who wasn’t even radical. He was just more civilized than the men she worked with. He had a global sense of the society and how it fit together that only políticos tended to have, and they lacked the facts generally. Wilhelm had loads of fact.

  Wilhelm Graben was of the older generation of computer people who had created the field in the fifties, after his already distinguished career in physics. He had come to the States from Austria in 1938, in early adolescence, his father a scholarly refugee. He was the most exciting teacher she had ever had, and she had retained for years a special awe of him. He told her he thought in English, though he sometimes dreamed in German. He had a fine trace of accent that vanished when he spoke of technical matters. He was perhaps an inch or two shorter than her, almost bald, and the first much older man she had ever found attractive. She had found him very attractive. He projected a charm and a sexuality unusual in an older man and unusual among scientists, a sort of sensual amused feeling tone, very civilized, ironic and right on the beam. That he picked her out to pay attention to flattered her.

  She had been more or less living with Neil already. Neil was pressing her about marriage but she was dubious. Neil had asked, however, that she be assigned to another project. Without enthusiasm she went along with the team to Washington for a presentation. Wilhelm appeared in some advisory capacity. Her hands shook when it was time for her performance—she had been his student. She wanted desperately to impress him.

  They all had dinner together. She managed to ask him what he had thought of her presentation, and he suggested they might talk about it afterward. She had gone off with him to his hotel room, giddy with his attention. He could advise her. She had still been a believer in Logical, and he had made it clear she sounded naïve. Pushing on her was the judgment she would have to make about Neil, who could not understand her hesitation and interpreted it as a lack of confidence in him or his feelings. If she phrased her doubts in terms of herself, he would tell her that she was humble about her own best
qualities. He wanted the ceremony, the fact of marriage. He kept saying that it was easy to drift in and out of relationships, to slam the door from the outside when things did not go well, and at least the commitment of marriage made it harder to give up. He wanted it to be very hard for them to give up, he said.

  She liked Neil’s being in her field. She had had nothing but misunderstanding and antagonism and unreasoning counter-demands from Phil and Jackson. They had not understood what she did, they had given her no comfort, no support, and often they had not even been willing to listen. Oh, Phil had listened, but his antagonism to technology was so profound, his listening did little good.

  But a man in her own field could understand her problems. They shared a common basis for communication. They shared pleasures and tensions. Perhaps she was attracted to Wilhelm as another dimension of that feeling. But Willie had had two careers already, both distinguished, and he was a star. Doubtless she felt curious about what lay behind the elegance and the wit, even the arrogance. Following him to his hotel room, she was quite aware of the tarnished elements in the attraction, but curious, curious still.

  He drank brandy. He carried with him a snifter in his attaché case. “Oh, not crystal—clumsy, heavy glass—but of an ample size for the nose. But a solipsist like myself carries only one. I’m afraid we will have to rely on the hotel glassware to serve you. Then you’re not an aficionado of cognac?”

  He talked and he talked. He had liked her presentation but told her that almost no one else had followed it. “You must learn on these occasions to draw nice-looking diagrams on the board and give those diagrams snappy names. It does not matter that they mean nothing. You present too much material too fast. It annoys. I find you the most interesting of your group, but you’ll never do anything in the field.”

  “Why not?” She stared, attacked suddenly through the cocoon of attraction and brandy and talk. “You think I lack the ability to develop good technical ideas?”

  “On the contrary, you have an unusual intuitive mind—the best thing one can say about any scientist. But you’re an attractive, a very attractive woman. So you’ll do nothing. Why should you?”

  “You’re an attractive man. Why do you bother if all that matters is sex appeal?”

  “Ah, that is not the same and you know it. Only homely women survive to accomplish in their field. Or perhaps a woman has the luck to become widowed. Who would ever have heard of Madame, if Monsieur Curie had survived? The husband stands in the light, the wife waits in the shadows.”

  “I’m thinking of marrying Neil Stone. We wouldn’t be working together, though. Already Neil thinks we should be on different projects.”

  “If you were thinking seriously, would you be here with me? Perhaps. But what a waste. You admire Stone a great deal—I do not. But you are something far rarer in this country than a wife. You have the makings of a great courtesan. You will not find here many men to appreciate what you are, but the ones who can, will appreciate you a great deal.”

  “I … I don’t think of myself that way.” Her face froze. He was older, European, she must remember that he had a different frame of reference. “I simply like to follow my curiosities toward people sometimes.”

  “You would go much farther, my dear, as a grand courtesan—such as the hetaeras of ancient Greece, cultivated, highly regarded, a class of women apart—than as a systems analyst. You have too original a mind. You’re sloppy, of course. And you lack that awareness of the opponent’s responses essential to success. You stare into the depth of your idea and see fires. You neglect to watch the faces of the gentlemen in the room who control the budgetary decisions. That’s a fatal error for you and for your idea. You forget that government people want only to solve their problems. The academics want only to stare at the head of a pin technically. They adore men like your fiancé, who pile up in their papers—and they write a great many tedious papers—enormous technical detail on some unimportant point. Mathematically exacting papers. Your academic prefers a nitwit who reasons very carefully about nothing to yourself, who have such large grandiose free-swinging ideas and go swinging them about the room, knocking over the ashtrays and the china of people’s prejudices. Everyone prefers to deal with a closed mind, my dear, it is less challenging. Further, with someone like your fiancé or Ted Barnes who reasons in tiny steps, that reasoning is easy to check. Intuitive power does not make one popular! I know.” He chuckled, sniffing the cognac. “But I take great care how I present my ideas, cloaking the leaps in minute spidery webs of mathematics. But I’m afraid that you lack that necessary patience. You don’t understand the rules of the game. I suspect you’re playing the wrong game altogether.”

  “I’ve heard you use that phrase so many times. Everybody’s always talking that way at Logical.”

  “Intelligent people know they’re playing games, and that makes life amusing. We all seek a technical situation in which we can play our own intricate and fascinating games, rather than the dull and shoddy games that the powers-that-be would have us play.”

  Why was she frightened? She did not think he could read the steel fear penetrating her chest. She was smiling, she was curled in a chair swirling the brandy in the glass. She could tell from his eyes drifting over her that she looked attractive. If he could see inside she would look like a rabbit crouched in headlights. He had hit a sore nerve in her. She did not want to think of herself ever, not even for five minutes, as a high-class whore trailing unraveled affairs across the landscape. That anyone could tell her that was what she was, that was how they saw her, and expect her to blandly agree threatened her profoundly. Made her feel backed against a jagged wall she thought she had left far behind her. What was she doing here? Perhaps he was right, that if she truly intended to live sanely and not bleed herself out in meaningless beddings she would not be here. Quickly she changed the subject. She got him into high instructional mode. She questioned him about the project she was being shunted into. “I don’t feel comfortable working on software for missiles, frankly. I feel like I’m being hired by death.”

  “What nonsense. It’s scuttlebutt that the system will never operate. For instance, assuming that the computer technology works out perfectly—for the first time in history, perhaps—but assuming that, the crucial interface is that combination of radar equipment and computers. Now there cannot possibly in any real war situation be enough time to discriminate the raw data in the radar inputs about what would be real missiles and what simply extra junk floating about. All weapons are programed to fill the heavens with large quantities of objects that induce noise on the radar. Chaff for instance—aluminum foil—reflects radar beams quite nicely and produces responses that would indicate serious objects approaching. The electronic countermeasures will be jamming, with strong transmission at the same frequency that the radar operates on.…

  “But forget military questions. Think about the most amusing aspect of the ABM. Now you are exploding, say, a five-megaton warhead to knock down a missile no bigger than a barn. Obviously, this does not require a warhead of five hundred million tons of TNT—Hiroshima was destroyed by twenty thousand tons’ equivalent. Thus you can deduce that accuracy is simply not in it. They’re figuring on exploding a five-megaton bomb to knock down a missile because they are not counting on being in the same state with it—states imagined to be lines superimposed upon the air.…” His voice was calm and mocking. She grew colder and colder. He thought all this funny. He had learned to live with it. Perhaps she would too. Or perhaps it was better to be a high-class whore than a high-class scientist. She sipped the brandy while the fumes crept up her nose and the room floated in the cold blackness of outer space and megadeaths.

  “Defense, it’s called. The rhetoric of defense, of course, is that human beings are being defended. But the type of weaponry we are discussing is absolutely useless in defending human beings. It would make little difference, I would imagine, to someone on the ground whether he was fried alive because an enemy missile explo
ded twenty miles to his right hand, or because one of ‘his’ missiles exploded as far overhead. The temperature on the ground would instantly rise several hundred degrees, in either case. Defense is defense of missile silos, not of people or the landscape, which would be eliminated.… But you must admit, the rhetoric with which American politicians address their constituencies about defense spending is amusing.”

  “The more you talk, the less I want any part. It makes me sick, truly.”

  “This project could be a computer man’s dream, if the nitwits don’t hamper too much. It’s a chance, as Abe was saying loudly in his folksy back-porch manner, to get in on the ground floor of a whole new technology. I must say, I should rather have a top-floor view myself. However I may fault his use of metaphors, I cannot fault what he means. A string of identical large computers linked up to work on the same problems—it’s a system designer’s paradise. In what other context could we seize the chance to do anything as delightful? The economics of the thing are simply ridiculous, staggering. Nothing but defense could siphon off the money for so many king-sized computers lashed together.”

  “You thick that, because the system is a large boondoggle actually considered as a weapon, it’s not inhumane to work on it.”

  “I think that a scientist can only be a scientist—or perhaps also a lovely woman.” He lifted his snifter to her. “We can never know what those who govern will do with our ideas. Our duty is to the state of the art—the cutting edge of knowledge. Now we have talked and talked and talked—I am a middle-aged man, certainly, and I talk a great deal too much. But not so old I am not ready to stop talking, my dear. Come.”

  Then indeed she felt like a whore, for the last thing she felt like doing was being touched by him. There being no question of her pleasure—her mind was frozen, her nerves jammed—she performed.