Collected Short Fiction, page 574
“I’m going to burn my bridges. Give up the warehouse business, scrap the thesis—it doesn’t make sense any more anyway—and chuck the University. I might as well quit before Griggs finds some excuse to fire me. I’m going to hole up here with a stack of typing paper and write a book.”
“A book?”
Wilson nodded. “I’m going to put down on paper what I think about the world—how it works and why, where it’s heading. By writing it down I’ll begin to understand things for the first time—I hope. I don’t care whether it gets published or not. I even hope it doesn’t. But I’m going to write it. And I’m going to do it without help, without collaborators, without suggestions.”
“How does Sorine feel about this?”
“She doesn’t know, yet. It’s a decision I just made, right now, while I’ve been talking to you. But I’m sure Sorine won’t object.”
“I’m sure, too,” Chambers said. “She’s a fine girl.”
“And I have you to thank for her. I owe you thanks for a lot of things, Paul—including coming here today. You gave me the strength to go ahead and do what I’ve wanted to do. After today I won’t need to borrow strength from anybody.”
The book had no title, no outline, no plan of chapters. It was being written, not to express ideas already formulated, but to help him grope toward some sort of formulation.
He gave up the warehouse job simply by not going there. After a week, someone from the bookkeeping department called up to find out what had happened to him, and Sorine said he had found a better job. That was that; his pay for the last half-week he had worked arrived in the morning mail.
They had a little in the bank, and Sorine’s afternoon teaching job brought in a little more. It was enough to get by on, with economies. Working at home, he would save a couple of dollars a week on carfare.
Simpler dinners, a moratorium on book-buying and play-going, a dime saved here, half a dollar there. They managed.
Wilson began work each day after breakfast and typed steadily through to late afternoon, with a break for lunch. The early chapters were rambling and discursive, a kind of running interior dialogue. As his ideas clarified, he scrapped the early pages and replaced them.
And he saw what his theme was: Who am I? What am I here for? Where are we all heading?
He had no easy answers. But he had plenty of problems to raise.
There was the matter of personal security. His fellow leaders at the warehouse had been secure in their jobs, secure in their relationship to the universe. Sam Fuseli, I.Q. approximately 75, knew that he was serving himself and the universe best by doing the job he was doing, even if he couldn’t frame the idea in words. And society, with its pension plans and unions and medical insurance saw to it that Sam Fuseli was not plagued by the doubts and fears that had tormented the Fuselis of other centuries.
And then there was Don Keats, I.Q. approximately 165, secure and snug in his research job at the transistor outfit—and rapidly bringing his mind to a state of permanent numbness with a steady diet of gin and vermouth. Keats was secure, but was Keats happy? He lacked challenge. He was too well taken care of for his own good. And though he recognized this as his problem, he could not or would not do anything to alter the situation. So he drank.
And, too, there was Howard Wilson, no slouch in the I.Q. department himself. A concatenation of mishaps had contrived to rob him of his cushion of security, and so for the first time he was thinking, evaluating himself and the world, instead of simply going through routine academic chores. And he was happy in his new insecurity, he realized with a shock of surprise. Far happier than he had been while moving with the tide, preparing his thesis and drifting along toward virtually automatic promotion and long years of pleasant somnolence in his professorship.
He wrote for three weeks, while the stack of manuscript grew steadily. Sorine did not disturb him. She saw something stirring to life in him like a pupa within a cocoon, and she did not intend to interfere until the da velopment was complete. He made no attempt to show her his incomplete manuscript or to seek out her advice. He valued her ideas, but this was one problem he had to work out entirely by himself.
At the end of the third week he paused and read through what he had written. Words, phrases from a mostly-forgotten conversation sprang vividly to life in his mind. The pieces of a huge puzzle were dropping solidly into place, one after another. The pupal stage was ending. Something new was thrashing into life.
He put the manuscript away; it no longer mattered to him now. It had helped him to see the problem, and it had served his purpose. He looked up a telephone number he had never expected to call again.
“Oh-five-three-six-one,” the operator’s smooth voice said. “Who is calling, please?”
“Howard Wilson. I want to talk to Mr. Brewster.”
A moment passed. Then Brewster’s calmly assured voice boomed in Wilson’s ear. “Hello, there, Wilson! I’ve been waiting for your call all week.”
“I’d like to see you. Right away.”
“You’re welcome here at any time,” Brewster said.
The brightly-lit office had not changed, nor had Brewster. Even the desk was the same, with its little dinosaur statuette perched at the corner. Only Wilson had changed.
He lit his cigarette with steady hands and said, “The last time I was here, you were talking double-talk—in the true sense of the word. You said one thing, but you meant another. It took me all this time to figure out what was going on, and I had to get kicked in the teeth a couple of times first.”
“Just what do you think is going on, then?” Brewster asked with an amused twinkle in his eyes.
“I think that the Institute for Human Progress is a darned sight more active than it looks on the outside,” Wilson said. “I think you’ve got a sort of front organization that takes blustering ads denouncing social security and the U.N. and income tax—while the real business of this organization goes on in the back room.”
“And that real business is?”
“Holding our culture together,” Wilson said flatly. “You take ridiculous reactionary stands because you don’t want to be taken seriously; who in this day and age would seriously want the income tax law to be repealed? Or social security? So no one takes the Institute seriously—and you’re left free to do your work. Whatever that work is. I’m not clear on that part, yet. But I know that in some way you and your outfit is busily operating to counteract the great leveling that’s going on in our culture.” Brewster nodded slowly. “The great leveling. Yes, that’s an accurate phrase. You finally have your eyes open, then.”
“I’ve been looking around. I see how easy things are for people today. We have machines to do the really tough work, and we have laws that make certain no one suffers. No one starves to death any more. No one dies of polio or tuberculosis or diphtheria. No one wears himself out in a sweatshop. We’re getting along toward Utopia.”
“And you say this is bad!” Brewster asked quizzically. “You, the liberal? The contributor to The Republic? The man who votes National Liberal every year?”
Wilson shook his head. “I’m not saying it’s bad or good. Naturally I don’t want to see people starve or suffer or die of disease. Here’s where I bog down. I see that all the social progress of this century is good—and yet, in the long run, it isn’t good.”
“The conflict between present benefit and long-range effects,” Brewster said quietly. “That’s what you can’t resolve.”
“That’s it! We’ve done away with biological selection,” Wilson half-shouted. “Everyone grows up, practically everyone has children and lives to a ripe old age content and fulfilled. Cleverness is canceled out. By eliminating the responsibility of each individual to look after himself, and by leveling the chances of every man, it tends to rule out real competition of talents—”
“And puts a brake on the biological evolution of man,” Brewster added. He tapped the dinosaur statuette on his desk. “That’s what I meant by putting him here. Dinosaurs didn’t adapt, after a while. They coasted on their size and strength. And so they aren’t here any more. Perhaps man won’t be either, in a few million years.”
Wilson laughed. “A few million years! But how can you get anyone to worry about what’ll happen then? You can’t. The concern over present benefit always outweighs worry over future dangers.”
“I know,” Brewster said. “That’s why I founded this organization twenty years ago. Not to secure repeal of the income tax law. Not to turn the clock back. That’s just the superficial aspect of it. What I’m trying to do, and all my colleagues with me, is to guard against this inevitable down grading of mankind.”
“Inevitable?”
Brewster shrugged. “It may not have to be inevitable. I hope not. That all depends on whether this institute is actually able to buck the trend. And I think we’ll do it, Wilson.
“We’re heading toward the age of the lowest common denominator. There’s no longer any premium on having brains, you see. As a matter of fact, there’s a positive advantage nowadays in not having brains, as you and a lot of others have found out. The man who’s content with his lot, who fits into the right slot and stays there, gets along splendidly. He’s happy. But what about the talented misfit who wants to strike out in new directions, and is afraid to break loose? He suffers. And he knows there won’t be any pretty pension plans protecting him if he does start thinking independently, so he tries to disconnect his brain and slide along with everybody else. Only he can’t. He knows he’s wasting himself, and it hurts.”
“All right,” Wilson agreed. “So the human race is going to Hell in a handbasket. Do you really think this Institute of yours is going to set things right? That you can counteract a gigantic cultural trend like this?”
“I believe we can,” Brewster said quietly.
“How? Don’t tell me that your newspaper ads yelling about income tax and the social security laws are ever going to accomplish anything!” Brewster smiled. “Those ads establish our existence. We’re kept in the public eye—a cinder in the public eye, you might say. Or a Socratic kind of gadfly, making people uncomfortable. We made you uncomfortable enough to denounce us in print—which gave me a chance to invite you up for our first talk.” He paused, drew in a deep whiff of smoke. “This Institute is engaged in the biggest engineering project in the history of the world, Wilson. An entire species—maybe the universe’s potentially greatest species—is wilfully sliding down a greased runway into a mud puddle. Our job is to stick a baling-hook into that species’ belt and haul it back up onto dry land.”
Wilson chuckled. “Pretty tall order, I’d say. You’re going to need one dickens of a winch.”
“I know,” Brewster said soberly. “And we’re busy forging that winch right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your field research showed you what the trend of contemporary culture is. The moron is favored; the moron is going to thrive. We’re busy trying to arrest that trend—and like any dynamic minority trying to control a huge and passive majority, we have to sweat to do it. Part of our operation is to bring together worthwhile people to preserve and enhance the spark of intelligence and ingenuity that sets mankind off from every other living thing. By selecting people whose traits should survive, we arrest the progressive deterioration of mankind—and supply ourselves with new recruits in the next generation. So Institute people marry, and bring forth children.
“We get our recruits in other ways, too. Our newspaper ads bring some of them in. Intelligent people get hot under the collar about what they think is our utter wrongheadedness, and they come in to argue—and go away converted. Then, too, we have scouts in the colleges who look for promising people and guide them in our direction. And there are Institute members all over the place. Right now we have sixteen men in Congress, four in the Senate—but the number increases each election. Institute men are working their way into high positions in the world’s parliaments, its newspapers, its schools, its laboratories. Every place where influence can be exerted, we have a man on his way to the top. Give us time and we’ll have the control we need—the winch we’re trying to build.”
“And who pays for this operation?” Wilson asked.
“The members of the Institute do. It’s a feedback process in the simplest sense of the word. We’re a nonprofit organization, taxed as such. And many of our people, if they were utilizing their own income, would be paying tax in the highest brackets. They have brains, and they use them well—so they make money. But in our society the government would take almost all of it away in taxes. The Institute is so chartered as to help get around this kind of tax setup, that penalizes a man for having brains and shrewdness. By turning their surplus income over to us, instead of to the government, that tax loss is averted and we have our funds. We use them, as I’ve said, in a variety of ways. We operate extremely informally, you see.”
“So I notice.”
Brewster’s eyes narrowed. “One function of the Institute that you’re probably not aware of yet is our matrimonial service.”
“Huh?”
“We see to it that likely couples ‘happen’ to meet and get married. It’s a way of getting maximum long-range benefit out of a good set of genes. That’s why I had Paul Chambers bring you and Sorine together, for example.”
It was like an unexpected blow in the solar plexus. “You . . . arranged that? Chambers—”
“Naturally. Chambers advised you to take his course, didn’t he? He also advised Sorine to register for it. He saw to it that you sat near her in the classroom. And quite casually he arranged a meeting between the two of you. That was all he needed to do.”
“So Chambers is an Institute man, then?”
“He’s a consulting member—not officially connected with us, but working with us all the same. So is David Harrell, the administrator of the Dornfeld Foundation. When I recommended you, you received a Dornfeld grant. When I decided to stop the grant, I told Harrell to cancel it, and he did. You happened to need an independence-stimulus; a kick in the teeth, as you put it. Well, you got it! One of the subeditors on The Republic is with us, too. He received instructions to intercept your manuscripts and send them back unread, with rejection slips.”
“And I suppose someone also conveniently arranged for me to get drunk at that party and insult the head of my department,” Wilson said curtly.
“No,” Brewster told him. “You did that part all by your own. We simply set the process in motion and you followed through yourself.”
“And here you sit,” Wilson said. “Like some sinister spider with a net reaching all around the world. Manipulating, probing, pushing, changing—”
“Exactly,” Brewster agreed. “I’m a scheming, conniving, calculating so-and-so. I manipulated you, Wilson.”
“O.K., you needled me out of my rut. But—where am I now?”
“You ought to be able to answer that question yourself.”
“Oh?”
“Of course. You’re cut loose from the pleasant, sleepy academic existence you had been trapped in. You’re independent now. Are you sorry about it?”
“Why . . . no,” Wilson said. “I was stagnating. And I was trying to fool myself into thinking I was happy, that I was fulfilling myself, by bucking for my little promotions and smiling at department heads. And now I’m on my own. No tenure, no foundation grants, nothing at all. Nothing but the Institute, that is.”
“Right. You’ve passed the test for the Institute. You were thrown into a stress pattern, and you bent—but you didn’t break. Which means you’re the kind of man we want. And Sorine’s the sort of woman.”
“How do you know? Have you tested her, too?”
“Indirectly, through you. She put up with you, didn’t she? Let’s face it: you’ve been pretty unbearable lately. But Sorine had an idea of the kind of crisis you were going through. She stuck with you. She’ll do.”
Wilson was very quiet for a moment. He was still trying to square the conflict in his mind. It was good, he thought, that society take care of people, and free them from insecurity and fear—but, viewed from the long-range standpoint of man’s biological evolution, the coddling of second-raters was a bad thing. Good . . . bad. Did the words have any real meaning? Only in context, it seemed.
He wrestled with the idea. An organism, he thought, only moves forward through conflict and resolution. Warm cozy security simply makes it stay put. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis—that was the key to any sort of progress. And all the values Wilson had automatically embraced as a “liberal” now seemed to him to be false—to be driving mankind toward a morass of enforced mediocrity instead of toward the stars. It was a numbing realization.
“Don’t try to work it all out at once,” Brewster said gently. “The truth is hard to swallow in one big chunk. But you’ll manage. You’re getting there.”
“All right,” Wilson said quietly. “I see the picture. In the last eighty years we’ve moved so far in the direction of individual welfare that we’ve practically trampled out the need for dynamic intelligence. So the Institute is trying to halt this process before it becomes irreversible. You’re selecting young people all over the world, training them to become leaders, working them into key positions, setting up a network of . . . well, philosopher-kings. Am I right?”
“That’s the essence of our program,” Brewster agreed.
“Well, what about me? What job does the Institute have for me? Am I going to run for Congress?” Brewster laughed. “Hardly. When you’re so superbly qualified in one valuable position, why shift you to another? Your job is going to be as a professor of sociology.”
Wilson’s mouth sagged open in astonishment. “What? After all the trouble you went through to make me lose my job?”
“You were going about it in the wrong way—and at the wrong place. You were trying to make your thesis fit your preconceived notions of how our society works. O.K., now: tear up what you wrote, start all over, put down the facts as you see them. That the working-men are not unhappy; that, on the contrary, they’ve never had it so good. Write your thesis and get your doctorate.”
