Roy grins.
“More apple crumble, anyone?” he says.
And everyone knows that really he is advising medieval kings and nineteenth-century prime ministers.
There’s room for them all to do well in this place, that’s the thing. There’s plenty of demand for their talents. Because here they are, right at the centre of things, with the whole universe to plan and control and advise and entertain. And they have the satisfaction of knowing that they are indispensable. For what would the universe be without this concentration of moral and intellectual power in the metropolis? Mere chaos. Undifferentiated interstellar gas. Nothing.
And there is room for them all to do better than each other.
“I mean,” says Howard to a girl called Rose he meets at a party, as they sit on the stairs around two in the morning, talking seriously, her dark eyes looking up seriously into his, “I’m the best mountain-designer in the universe. It sounds ridiculous — it is ridiculous — it’s one of those huge ridiculous facts that one tries to close one’s eyes to, they’re so absurd — and I’m only mentioning it because it’s two o’clock in the morning, and I feel I can say anything to you. And this would be an insupportable thing to know about oneself, if one thought that this implied some superiority over the people around one. But in this society it doesn’t! Because the people around one are all the best at something else in the universe. Charles Aught has the best working relations with Donne, Roy Chase is the best at helping people, and so on. You might say, what about the other mountain-designers I work with? How can they be best at mountain-designing if I am? And that’s a very good question. But the answer is, each one secretly thinks he’s the best. And the more obvious it is that I’m the best, the more convinced they are that under the surface, in some subtler way that only a more discriminating critic would appreciate, they are…. This is what we’ve achieved by extreme centralization and extreme specialization — a society so complex that everyone in it is winning the race. Do you see what I mean?“
Rose runs her finger slowly round the rim of her glass.
“What about me?” she says. “What am I best at?”
Howard takes her hand emotionally.
“What you’re best at,” he says, “is sitting here on these particular stairs at this particular hour of the night with that particular way of looking, and then saying ‘What am I best at?’ ”
What astonishes Howard, though, is why he should be allowed to be who he is, and live in such a perfectly organized society.
“Why me?” he asks Phil Schaffer, as the two of them sit late in Indian restaurants, eating blazing vindaloos after watching old Humphrey Bogart movies at cinemas beyond the railway sidings, on autumn nights when each sodium light has a yellow halo in the foggy air. “What have I ever done to deserve this?”
“What do you mean?” says Phil shortly (he makes a point of trying to keep Howard’s modesty within reasonable bounds). “You passed the exam to get into the place, didn’t you? What do you expect?”
The exam! Of course! Howard has entirely forgotten about it. He came up on the train for a few days, very nervous, wearing his best suit. He remembers sitting on a hard seat, among a hundred other candidates in a large, impressively ancient room, scribbling a General Essay paper for three hours on EITHER Political Necessity OR “Enrichissez-vous!” not at all sure what the examiners would be looking for in the answers — their ideas or his ideas, or the former subtly disguised as the latter, or the latter masquerading as the former.
In the end he boldly put down his own ideas, without any thought as to whether the examiners would find them palatable or not. He set forth an idealistic view of a society in which all privilege would be done away with, and in which wealth and power would be fairly shared, on the basis of competitive public examinations with General Essay papers on EITHER Natural Justice OR “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
And passed. So the foundations of his existence in this society are absolutely secure.
Phil has an incredibly good job, too. He is creating man.
Or at any rate, he is with one of the research teams working on the man project. Half the university departments and industries in the city are involved. The end product, as everyone knows from all the projections and mock-ups they keep making public to try to justify the wildly escalating costs, will have two arms and two legs, a language capability, and a fairly sophisticated emotional and moral response. The general idea is to build something pretty much in their own image.
“As a matter of fact,” Phil tells Howard one day, as they walk along the street eating fish and chips from a Greek newspaper, “I think it’s probably going to be the spit and image of you.”
“What?” says Howard, frowning.
“I sit there in the laboratory,” says Phil, “trying to think how people go, and I can’t remember. Do they really physically raise a sardonic eyebrow, and make a long face, or only metaphorically? What expression do they have when they’re thinking black thoughts about someone they’re trying to ingratiate themselves with, or when they’re being praised for qualities they’re aware they don’t possess? I think of all the people I know, and I can’t remember how any of them behave. The only person I can ever think of is you. I always know what you’d do. I can always imagine what you’d think, and how you’d look. So bit by bit you’re being written into the programme and fed into the computer. I hope you’re flattered.”
Howard is flattered. But he doesn’t like to let Phil see this. So he adopts a humorous apelike shamble, knees bent and feet turned out.
“Ferkin ell,” he says, in a special humorous artificial voice which he uses from time to time with Phil, to ward off jokes he has not entirely understood.
“I must get that down,” says Phil. “When told that man is being created in his image, he bends knees, turns feet out, and utters a small trisyllabic croak from the bottom of the larynx.”
For Christmas Howard buys his children a complete working model of their family and its life. There, on the playroom floor on Christmas morning, are their house, the children’s school, the great towers of the city…. Switch on and move the appropriate levers on the banks of controllers, and the children come running out of the house, little pink-cheeked creatures half an inch high, who turn to wave at Felicity as she comes out on the terrace to see them off to school. Cars purr back and forth along the expressways, bearing the Bernsteins to dinner with the Chases, the Chases to the Waylands, the Waylands for a Christmas-morning drink with the Bakers. And there’s Howard himself, three-quarters of an inch high, and a little too freshly complexioned to be true, climbing into his car, running upstairs to his office, ushering Felicity through lighted front doors, shaking hands, kissing cheeks….
The children play with it for half an hour, then run outside with their new toboggan instead. But Howard can’t tear himself away from it. Late that night, after the children have finally gone to bed, Felicity finds him lying full-length on the playroom floor once again, still absorbed.
“Look,” he says, “here are the Waylands coming up the Parkway to call on Charles Aught…. There you are, taking the children out to tea with Ann Keat….”
He glances up and sees her expression.