On awakening in the morning, Larry Woolford stared glumly at the ceiling for long moments before dragging himself from bed. This was, he decided, the damnedest assignment he’d ever been on. In his day he had trekked through South America, Common Europe, a dozen African states, and even areas of Southern Asia, combatting Commie pressures here, fellow-traveler organizations there, disruptive plots hatched in the Soviet Complex in another place. On his home grounds in the United States he’d covered everything from out and out Soviet espionage to exposing Communist activities of complexions from the faintest of pinks to the rosiest Trotskyite red. But, he decided, he’d never expected to wind up after a bunch of weirds whose sole actionable activity to date seemed to be the counterfeiting of a fantastic amount of legal tender which thus far they were making no attempt to pass.
He got out of bed and went through the rituals of showering, shaving and dressing, of coffee, sausages and eggs, toast and more coffee.
What amazed Larry Woolford was the shrug-it-off manner in which the Boss seemed to accept this underground Movement and its admittedly subversive goals—whatever they were. Carry the Boss’ reasoning to its ultimate and subversion was perfectly all right, just so it didn’t involve force and violence. If he was in his chief’s position, he would have thrown the full resources of the department into tracking down these crackpots. As it was, he, Larry Woolford, was the only operative on the job.
He needed a new angle on which to work. Steve Hackett was undoubtedly handling the tracing down of the counterfeit with all of the resources of the Secret Service. Larry didn’t know much about such activities.
He finished his final cup of coffee in the living room and took up the pipe he was currently breaking in. He loaded it automatically from the humidor and lit it with his pocket lighter. Three drags, and he tossed it back to the table, fumbled in a drawer and located a pack of cigarettes. His status group might be currently smoking Irish briars in public, but, let’s face it, he hated the goddamned things. He couldn’t keep himself from inhaling, and pipe tobacco was never built for inhaling, it was too strong.
He sat down before the phone screen and dialed the offices of the Sun-Post. Eventually he got Sam Sokolski who beat him to the punch this time.
Sam said, “You shouldn’t drink alone. Listen, Larry, why don’t you get in touch with Alcoholics Anonymous? It’s a great outfit. Kind of a mutual masturbation society. You sit around and have kind of a circle jerk.”
“You ought to know,” Larry growled. “If you’d just stop sucking on bottles, you’d probably have prospects of becoming some sort of newspaper man. Look, as science columnist for that rag you work for, you probably come in touch with a lot of eggheads.”
“Laddy-buck, you have said it,” Sam said. “In my life there are more eggheads than eggs, of which I eat two every morning.”
“Fine. Now look, what I want to know is have you ever heard—even the slightest of rumors—about an organization called the Movement?”
“What’d’ya mean, slightest of rumors? Half the weirds I run into are interested in the outfit. Get two or three intellectuals, scientists, technicians, or what have you, together and they start knocking themselves out on the pros and cons of the Movement.”
Larry Woolford goggled at him. “You must be kidding. I’ve never even heard of them until the last few days.”
The other was mystified. “Why should I kid you? As a matter of fact, I was thinking of doing a column one of these days on Voss and this Movement of his.”
“Voss and this movement of his!” Larry blurted. “What do you mean by that?”
“Sure,” Sam said. “Professor Peter Voss, over at the university. He’s the top leader.”
“Oh, great,” Larry growled. “Look, Sam, eventally there is probably a story in this for you. Right now, though, we’re trying to keep the lid on it. Could you brief me a little on this Movement? What are they trying to put over? How do they expect to accomplish it?”
“I seem to spend half of my time briefing you on information any semi-moron ought to be up on,” the newspaperman told him nastily. “However, briefly, they’re in revolt against social-label judgements. They think it’s fouling up the country and that eventually it’ll result in the Russkies passing us in all the fields that really count, although the Russkies have a certain amount of the same situation themselves.”
“I keep running into this term,” Larry complained. “What do you mean, social-label judgements, and how can they possible louse up the country?”
Sam said, “I was present a month or so ago when Voss gave an informal lecture to a group of twenty or so. Here’s one of the examples he used.
“Everybody wants to be rated on a (1) personal, or, (2) social-label basis, depending on which basis is to his greater advantage. The Black who is a no-good, lazy, objectionable person demands to be accepted because Blacks should not be discriminated against. The highly competent, hard working, honest and productive Black wants to be accepted because he is hard-working, honest and productive—and should be so accepted.
“See what I mean? This social-label system is intended to relieve the individual of the necessity of judging, and the consequences of being judged. If you have poor judgement, and are forced to rely on your own judgement, you’re almost sure to go under. So persons of poor judgement support our social-label system. If you’re a louse, and are correctly judged as being a louse, you’d prefer that the social dictum ‘Human beings are never lice’ should apply.”
Larry said impatiently, “What in the devil’s this got to do with the race between this country and the Russkies?”
Sam said, his voice as patient as his caller’s was the opposite, “Voss and the Movement he leads contend that a social-label system winds up with incompetents running the country in all fields. Often, incompetent scientists are in charge of our research; incompetent doctors in charge of our health; incompetent politicians run our government; incompetent teachers, leaden with social-labels, teach our youth. Our young people are going to college to secure a degree, not an education. It’s the label that counts, not the reality.
“Voss contends that it’s getting progressively worse. That we’re sinking into an equivalent of a ritual-taboo, tribal social-like situation. This is the system the low-level human wants, yearns for and seeks. A situation in which no one’s judgement is of any use. Then his lack of judgement is no handicap to him.”
The newspaperman went on. “According to members of the Movement, today the tribesman type is seeking to reduce civilization back to ritual-taboo tribalism wherein no one man’s judgement is of any value. The union wants advancement based on seniority, not on ability and judgement. The persons with whom you associate judge you by the amount of money you possess, the family from which you come, the degrees you hold, by social-labels—not by your own proven abilities. Down with judgement! is the cry.”
“It sounds awfully weird to me,” Larry grumbled in deprecation.
Sam shrugged. “There’a lot of sense in it, so far as I’m concerned. What the Movement wants is to develop a socio-economic system in which judgement produces a maximum advantage.”
Larry sighed and said, “What gets me is that you talk as though half the country was all caught up in debating this Movement. But I haven’t even heard of it, neither has my department chief, nor any of my colleagues, so far as I know. Why isn’t anything about it in the papers, or on the Tri-Di?”
Sam said, “As a matter of fact, I took in Mort Lenny’s show the other night and he made some cracks about it. But it’s not the sort of thing that’s even meant to become popular with the man in the street. To put it bluntly, Voss and his people aren’t particularly keen about the present conception of the democratic ideal. According to him, true democracy can only be exercised by peers and society today isn’t composed of peers. If you have one hundred people, twenty of them competent, intelligent persons, eighty of them untrained, incompetent and less than intelligent, then it’s ridiculous to have the eighty dictate to the twenty.”