Even Phil, noting the syndrome down, can’t help smiling a little.
“But what I don’t understand,” says Howard later, with genuine humility, “is how you know more about everything than I do. Not only about the city, but about myself, even.”
“Oh, plenty of people know things,” says Phil, and sighs. “It’s the skill you’ve got that really counts — the ability not to know things, or to know them without knowing that you know them. If we can get man set up the same way we’ll have a real world-beater on our hands.”
“Obviously,” says Howard seriously, “I shall have to get out of mountains. I can’t go on working on instruments of mass destruction.”
Quietly, unhesitatingly — just like that — he faces up to the moral consequences of his realization. In that moment he changes careers — changes lives.
“What are you going to do instead?” asks Phil, chewing up little pieces of graph paper into sodden balls, and flicking them at the laboratory ceiling with a slide-rule to try and make them stick.
“I suppose I’ll go into rivers,” says Howard.
“Rivers drown people.”
“Or forests.”
“Forests fall on people.”
“I don’t know. Plains, perhaps. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Howard,” says Phil, grinning. “I don’t think you’ve got the point. There isn’t anything that isn’t going to cause trouble. Make the whole world as smooth as a billiard ball, and people are still going to fall over and split their skulls open. Fill the world with nothing but good clean pure air and someone’s going to get up into it and fall out of it. I can tell you, the people we’re putting together on my project are going to drop to pieces without doing anything. They’ll sit in their armchairs safely watching television and smiling at the children, and be eaten away by growths and shot in the heart by the disintegration of their own arteries.”
Howard stares at him.
“You’re joking, of course,” he says.
“No.”
“But this is terrible!”
“Yes.”
“What job can I do, then?”
“You could try doing nothing,” says Phil. “We could all try doing nothing.”
“Nothing? How do you mean nothing?”
“Not create the world.” Howard tries to focus his mind on this idea.
“We couldn’t do that,” he says.
“Why not?” says Phil. “Why don’t we leave everything as a nice quiet lot of nothingness?”
“Because obviously …” says Howard. “Because … Well, because …”
“Because,” says Phil, “if we didn’t have a universe to create and run, and a nice lot of trouble to sort out, there wouldn’t be any point to our existence. The whole thing’s a gigantic boondoggle.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” says Howard.
“Exactly,” says Phil.
“The world’s not perfect — all right. We’re responsible for some of its troubles — all right. We’re all profiting from its trouble — all right! But that’s not to say that we’re not doing a reasonably good job on the whole! After all, we’re the ones who’ve provided them with … I don’t know … fresh air to breath, and … sunsets to look at, and …”
“The soft refreshing rain?”
“Right! And on the whole they’re very grateful to us! They’re very pleased with what we’ve done for them!”
“Are they?”
“Of course they are!”
“Has anyone ever bothered to find out? Has anyone ever actually gone over there and had a look at them? Asked them what they felt?”
Howard gazes out of the window of Phil’s laboratory, thinking. With natural neatness a new career is opening up to replace the old.
~ ~ ~
At the airport, planes of astonishingly different sizes — like children’s toys on different scales mixed up in the same game — queue to use the runway for takeoff. They are bound for Brazzaville, Tucson, Irkutsk, Belfast, London, and Caracas. They wait in the sunshine, trembling slightly, shimmering like mirages in each other’s jetstreams, while incoming planes land, from Fairbanks, Bucharest, Huntsville, Glasgow, Karachi, and Albuquerque.
Coming and going, at a cost of 16,450.00 and 34,200.00 and 122,000.00 per person, are cargoes of men in lightweight no-iron suits, and women with carefully underlined eyes and neat pairs of knees. They are examining the world’s bauxite reserves, investigating the potentialities of Gabon as a market for learning machines, using their influence to secure the release of political prisoners, setting up conferences to standardize labour law and regulations for contraceptive pills. They are maintaining contact with the world.
Aboard the plane bound for London, and wearing a pale grey lightweight no-iron suit, with pale blue shirt and striped silk tie, is Howard.
“I’ve got a research grant,” he explains to the man sitting next to him, who is wearing a dark grey lightweight no-iron suit, with a pale pink shirt and polka-dotted silk tie, as they at last climb out though the heat haze, and undo their seat belts. “It’s a kind of travelling fellowship, really. There are certain aspects of our involvement in the developing world which I feel need looking at. Is our aid getting through to where it’s most needed? Is it producing a client mentality? Are we managing to do any good?”
“High time someone started asking a few awkward questions,” says his neighbour, who turns out to be an expert in Moral Law. “Because they all hate us, you know. Never a word of thanks from any of them for all we’ve done. I honestly can’t see why we bother.”
“No … well …” says Howard tactfully. “I think there is a real problem in mutual communication here.”
“England, you’re looking at, are you?”
“I thought that would be as good a place to start as any. I speak the language, you see.”
“Do you? Good God.”
“Oh, I used to live there.”
“I can’t stand the people, myself,” says the moral lawyer. “Feckless lot of layabouts. Dishonest. Dirty. And too big for their boots, on top of everything else. There’s some very reasonable golf and fishing, though, if you know where to look for it. And the local woollens are good value. I always try to bring back a sweater for my wife, something like that.”
“I’m quite looking forward to seeing the place again,” says Howard, politely but firmly. He wonders how many of his fellow-countrymen visit Britain with this kind of attitude, undoing all the good work the rest of them are struggling to do. He ostentatiously orders a can of Worthington with his lunch, to show where his sympathies lie.
As they approach London they let down through the shining white floor of cloud into a dull grey light. Drops of rain run back across the windows, almost horizontally.
He had forgotten how small London is. As the car which has been sent for him comes in along the odd little elevated motorway, only four lanes wide, most of the city seems to be below eye-level. Later they wait at fussy complications of traffic lights. Dumpy Chinese girls walk past along the pavement carrying umbrellas and bags of washing. Elderly ladies with maroon hats fitting closely over tight grey curls turn slowly, dragging their sticks, to look at people who have passed by minutes before.
“I used to live in London,” Howard tells the driver, smiling.
“Oh, yes?” says the driver. He is wearing a faded navy-blue trench-coat with a collar that curls shrunkenly upwards. It looks like a school-child’s coat. His sandy hair is brushed straight back over his head, but then turns up a little at the ends, echoing the collar.