More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day.
“Do you suppose there’ll be a Third Industrial Revolution?” Paul paused in his office doorway. “A third one? What would that be like?” “I don’t know exactly. The first and second ones must have been sort of inconceivable at one time.” “To the people who were going to be replaced by machines, maybe. A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.” “Uh-huh,” said Katharine
...more
It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line.
He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn’t have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality. In short, Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.
He felt somehow conspiratorial, and got a small lift from the feeling. Being with Finnerty had often had that effect. Finnerty had an air of mysteriousness about him, an implication that he knew of worlds unsuspected by anyone else—a man of unexplained absences and shadowy friends. Actually, Finnerty let Paul in on very little that was surprising, and only gave him the illusion of sharing in mysteries—if, indeed, there were any. The illusion was enough. It filled a need in Paul’s life, and he went gladly for a drink with the odd man.
“You think I’m insane?” said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. “You’re still in touch. I guess that’s the test.” “Barely—barely.” “A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.” Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded. “Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.”
Their superiority is what gets me, this damn hierarchy that measures men against machines. It’s a pretty unimpressive kind of man that comes out on top.”
“Well, you know, in a way I wish I hadn’t met you two. It’s much more convenient to think of the opposition as a nice homogeneous, dead-wrong mass. Now I’ve got to muddy my thinking with exceptions.”
They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego.
Finnerty shook his head admiringly. “So what’s the answer right now?” “That is a frightening question,” said Lasher, “and also my favorite rationalization for drinking. This is my last drink, incidentally; I don’t like being drunk. I drink because I’m scared—just a little scared, so I don’t have to drink much. Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it’s sure to be a bloody business.”
“I’m going to get myself a uniform, so I’ll know what I think and stand for.”
He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn’t see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.
“That man’s got a lot of get up and go,” said Anita. “He fills me full of lie down and die,” said Paul.
“God knows it’d be easy enough to stick with the system, and keep going right on up. It’s getting out that takes nerve.”
DOCTOR PAUL PROTEUS, for want of a blow severe enough to knock him off the course dictated by the circumstances of his birth and training, arrived uneventfully at the day when it was time for men whose development was not yet complete to go to the Meadows.
While Halyard brooded, Homer Bigley, with the reflexes born of a life of barbering, selected his scissors, clicked them in air about the sacred head, and, as though his right hand were serviced by the same nerve as his diaphragm and voicebox, he began to cut hair and talk—talked to the uncomprehending Shah after the fashion of an extroverted embalmer chatting with a corpse.
Paul, by contrast, had played heads-up ball all the way, effortlessly, laughingly, wholly out of character. In analyzing the magical quality of the afternoon during the cocktail hour, Paul realized what had happened: for the first time since he’d made up his mind to quit, he really hadn’t given a damn about the system, about the Meadows, about intramural politics. He’d tried not to give a damn before, but he hadn’t had much luck. Now, suddenly, as of the afternoon, he was his own man.
It was as though a navigator, in order to free his mind of worries, had erased all the reefs from his maps.
As the doorknob turned, Paul continued to contemplate trivia, to atomize the fixtures and conventions of the only way of life he’d ever known, an easy, comfortable life, with simple answers for every doubt. That he was quitting that life, that now was perhaps the time he would do it—the grand idea over-shadowing all the little ones—rarely occupied his consciousness. It showed itself mainly in a sensation of being disembodied, or now and then of standing in a chilling wind. Maybe the right time to quit would come now, or a few months from now. There was no need to hurry, no need at all.
“Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.”
“Show me a specialist, and I’ll show you a man who’s so scared he’s dug a hole for himself to hide in.” “Yes, sir.”
No one looked as though he were willing to bring the drama to an end, or as though he thought he could. It was like seeing a man caught in a threshing machine, beyond saving. As long as God had precipitated the tragedy, the onlookers might as well watch and learn what a threshing machine would do to a man once it caught him.
“You want a piece of advice from a tired old man?” “Depends on which tired old man. You?” “Me. Don’t put one foot in your job and the other in your dreams, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It’s just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you’ve made up your mind which way to go.”
“It’s a long story.” She dried her eyes. “My husband, Ed, is a writer.” “What’s his classification number?” said Halyard. “That’s just it. He hasn’t one.” “Then how can you call him a writer?” said Halyard. “Because he writes,” she said.
“Well, a fully automatic setup like that makes culture very cheap. Book costs less than seven packs of chewing gum. And there are picture clubs, too—pictures for your walls at amazingly cheap prices. Matter of fact, culture’s so cheap, a man figured he could insulate his house cheaper with books and prints than he could with rockwool. Don’t think it’s true, but it’s a cute story with a good point.”
He didn’t really think somebody’d print it, did he?” “He didn’t care. He had to write it, so he wrote it.”
He settled, winded, in the seat next to Paul’s. “Son-of-a-bitch won’t even wait a second for an old man,” he said bitterly. “It’s a machine,” said Paul. “All automatic.” “Don’t mean he ain’t a son-of-a-bitch.” Paul nodded appreciatively.
The conductor’s plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn’t that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn’t do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.
His eyes were half closed, and after the fashion of benign drunks he seemed on the verge of tears, so powerfully was he compelled to love and help others. “If you are good,” he said, “and if you are thoughtful, a fractured pelvis on the gridiron will pain you less than a life of engineering and management. In that life, believe me, the thoughtful, the sensitive, those who can recognize the ridiculous, die a thousand deaths.”
Paul sank back into his chair. He found that he wasn’t really shocked by the alternatives of life and death just presented to him. It was such a clean-cut proposition, unlike anything he’d ever encountered before. Here were honest-to-God black and white, not at all like the muddy pastels he’d had to choose from while in industry. Having it put like that, Do as we say or get killed, had the same liberating effect as the drug of a few hours ago had had. He couldn’t make his own decisions for reasons anybody could understand.
“I hold, and the members of the Ghost Shirt Society hold: “That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God. “That there must be virtue in frailty, for Man is frail, and Man is a creation of God. “That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God. “That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant and stupid, and Man is a creation of God. “You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man’s being a creation of God. “But I find it a far more
...more
You would force this artificial condition, this step backward, on the American people?” “What distinguishes man from the rest of the animals is his ability to do artificial things,” said Paul. “To his greater glory, I say. And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”
She had married Paul, she’d explained, when she was but a child, and she thanked God things had come to a head while she was still young enough to salvage a little real happiness for herself. “Salvage” seemed a particularly apt term to Paul, with its implications of picking over city dumps and dragging harbor bottoms, for Anita had announced in her next breath that she was going to marry Doctor Lawson Shepherd as soon as she could get a divorce from Paul.
“But, even if there weren’t this unpleasant business between me and the memory of my father, I think I would believe in the arguments against the lawlessness of the machines. There are men who don’t hate their fathers, so far as I know, who believe in the arguments. What the hate does, I think, is to make me not only believe, but want to do something about the system. Does the needle agree?”
“Lord,” said Paul, “I didn’t think it’d be like this.” “You mean losing?” said Lasher. “Losing, winning—whatever this mess is.”
“Things don’t stay the way they are,” said Finnerty. “It’s too entertaining to try to change them.
“If only it weren’t for the people, the goddamned people,” said Finnerty, “always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, earth would be an engineer’s paradise.”
They fought against the same odds we fought against: a thousand to one, maybe, or a little more.” Paul and Ed Finnerty looked at him incredulously. “You thought we were sure to lose?” said Paul huskily. “Certainly,” said Lasher, looking at him as though Paul had said something idiotic. “But you’ve been talking all along as though it were almost a sure thing,” said Paul. “Of course, Doctor,” said Lasher patronizingly. “If we hadn’t all talked that way, we wouldn’t have had that one chance in a thousand. But I didn’t let myself lose touch with reality.”
