Ann was scrabbling Herbie to her in the main room, feeling his arms, caressing his hair, pulling him in for a wild hug and crying out yet again. “Herbie! Herbie! Herbie!”
“I know you're gonna lick me, pop. I—I just want you to know that I think you ought to.”
“I'm not going to lick you, son.”
“You're not? But gee, I deserve a licking. I deserve the worst—”
“You may,” Plunkett said, gasping at the wall of clicking Geigers. “You may deserve a beating,” he yelled, so loudly that they all whirled to face him, “but I won't punish you, not only for now, but forever! And as I with you,” he screamed, “so you with yours! Understand?”
“Yes,” they replied in a weeping, ragged chorus. “We understand!”
“Swear! Swear that you and your children and your children's children will never punish another human being—no matter what the provocation.”
“We swear!” they bawled at him. “We swear!”
Then they all sat down.
To wait.
Afterword
For a long time (until I wrote “The Custodian”), “Generation of Noah” was my favorite among my stories. But the science-fiction magazines didn't want it: too hortatory. The general fiction magazines all said something on the order of “too fantastic.” Six years after publication, it was rejected by a movie producer who was interested in filming some of my work (“far too prosaic for today's audiences”).
Fred Pohl, the agent who finally sold the piece, liked it almost as much as I did. But he begged me and begged me to change what he called “the Greek chorus ending.” And I kept telling him that the goddam Greek chorus ending was why I had written the story in the first place. He would walk away from me muttering, “That's no excuse at all.”
So from the white-bearded standpoint of eighty years of age, let me remind the reader:
In 1947 when I wrote “Generation of Noah,” the Federation of Atomic Scientists kept trying to tell everyone how much they apologized for having helped to develop our nuclear weaponry. And a lot of them got investigated as un-American for making such noises. (After all, the military kept saying, the atomic bomb was a weapon just like any other weapon. A bigger bang for the buck, some general shrugged.)
By 1957, six years after the story was published, we knew full well that the Soviet Union not only had nuclear weapons too, but might even have better means of delivering them than we. Everyone had heard of the atomic bomb drills in the schools where the children learned that at a given signal they were to jump off their benches and lie down under their desks with their hands locked behind their heads to protect vital parts. I knew people—I swear this!—who said that in the event of an atomic attack one should above all close the windows and pull down the window shades. That would reduce the amount of radiation reaching you.
And, of course, this was the tail-end of the period where every new home built had a bomb shelter in the basement, a tiny room surrounded by well-plastered walls and maybe, if the contractor was an especially responsible type, by some walls of brick. You go now into homes built in this period and you find that those bomb shelters are being used as fruit cellars or wine vaults or, most likely, extra storage space.
Well, the bipolar Cold War has given way to the sunshine of monopolar power, and all that is behind us now.
Like hell.
John Campbell wrote a number of editorials in Astounding Science Fiction of the 1940s that were remarkably strong and good and gave him a free pass to be forgotten as the chief publicist of Dianetics and the Hieronymus Machine. I remember one where he talked of the atomic bomb as The Great Equalizer.
He pointed out that when the Colt six-gun reached the West, it had a tremendous effect on the relationships between small, weak men and the big, strong men who formerly had been able to bully them at will. Billy the Kid and others now had their equalizer. And from Los Alamos on, Campbell said, small countries that were unable to afford big navies and big artilleries and big air forces now could have weapons that would equalize the difference between them and the great powers of the Earth. All they had to do was find the right messenger with a suitcase to deliver them.
War is by no means gone from our planet, as a glance at almost any continent will unmistakably show. And if war ever comes our way again…
There is Lenin's dictum as enunciated in State and Revolution: “No ruling class in history ever laid down power of its own free will.” Which makes me think of Hitler, 1945, in that last bunker in the ruins of Berlin. An aide comes to him and says, “Mein Fuhrer, we have just now perfected a weapon that will vaporize the enemy, city by city, patch of countryside by patch of countryside. But—”
“But what?” yells red-eyed Hitler.
“If we use it, we just may set off a reaction that will destroy the entire planet. What should we do?”
And Hitler, hearing the Russian guns going off in one direction, and knowing that the Americans, British, and French are scant miles off in the other direction—what do you think Adolf Hitler would say to do?
No, until we as a species grow a couple of moral inches, or until we have daughter colonies on planets outside Earth, until then—
I will keep my Greek chorus ending.
Written 1947 / Published 1951