She looked at him with a bewilderment which slowly cleared. “Good-bye,” she said. Her back was straight as she walked out. It wasn’t till much later that he noticed she’d left his purse where it fell.
17
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This is the way the world ends.
They were quiet, pleasant men in the university, they had grave good manners but little formality and they were considerate of the man from the past. Langley recalled his own college days—he’d been a graduate assistant for a while and had seen a bit of faculty life. Here there was none of the gossip and small intrigue and hypocritical teas he remembered; but neither was there any spirit of eagerness and intellectual adventure. Everything was known, everything settled and assured, it remained only to fill in the details. Back in the Twenty-first Century, masters” theses about the commas in Shakespeare had still been a subject for humor -today, the equivalent was a matter of course.
The library was magnificent and astonishing: a billion volumes reduced to magnetic patterns, any of them instantly located and copied by pressing a few buttons. The robots would even do your reading for you and make summaries, they would draw conclusions if you wanted them to: logical deductions with no hint of speculative imagination. The professors—they were called by a title which meant, roughly, ‘repository of information’—were mostly of commoner stock, a few petty aristocrats, all selected by tests which made no allowance for birth. The rules of their order kept them strictly out of politics. There were only a few students, some dilettantes and some earnest youngsters intending to become professors in their turn. The sons of Ministers went from private tutors to special academies; the university was a dying vestige of an earlier period, maintained simply because the Technon had not ordered its abolition.
Nevertheless, Langley found these graying, brown-robed men congenial company. There was one historian in particular, a little wizened man with a huge bald head, Jant Mardos, with whom he got quite friendly: the chap had enormous erudition and a refreshingly sardonic viewpoint. They used to spend hours talking, while a recorder took down everything which was said for later evaluation.
For Langley, it was the nights which were worst.
“... The present situation was, of course, inevitable,” said Mardos. “If a society is not to petrify, it must innovate, as yours did; but sooner or later a point is reached at which further innovation becomes impractical, and then petrifaction sets in anyway. For example, the unification of Earth was necessary if man was to survive, but in time that unification destroyed the cultural variety and interplay which had been responsible for much progress up to then.”
“Seems to me you could still make changes,” said the spaceman, “Political changes, at least.”
“What sort? You might as well face it, the Technon is the best possible device for government—if we wrecked it, we’d go back to corruption, incompetence, and internecine strife. We have those already, of course, but they don’t matter very much, since policy is decided by a machine which is able, incorruptible, and immortal.”
“Still, why not give the Commoners a break? Why should they have to spend their lives down on low-level?”
Mardos raised his brows. “My dear romantic friend, what else can they do? Do you think they’re fit to share administrative responsibilities? The average IQ of the Commons is about 90, the average for the Ministerial class is closer to 150.” He laid his fingertips carefully together. “To be sure, by automatizing all operations, it would be possible for every man iii the Solar System to quit work: all his needs would be supplied free. But what, then, is your IQ-90 Commoner going to do with himself? Play chess and write epic poems?
“Even as things are, there isn’t enough work to go around for the Ministers. That’s why you see so many wastrels and so much politicking among them.—
“Let’s admit it: man in the known universe has exhausted the possibilities of his own culture. You wouldn’t expect them to be infinite, after all. There are only so many shapes into which you can carve a block of marble; once the sculptors have made the best ones, their successors face a choice between dull imitation and puerile experiment. The same applies to all the arts, the sciences, and the permutations of human relationships. As for politics, our civilization today may be ossified, but it is at least stable, and the majority are content that it remain so. For the ordinary man, instability—change—means dislocation, war, uncertainty, misery, and death.”
Langley shook his head. “The universe is bigger than we are,” he said. “We can always find something new out there, always make a fresh start.”
“Are you thinking of the lost colonies?” asked Mardos. He snorted. “Several bales of romantic nonsense have been written about them. But they were only people who couldn’t make the grade at home and tried to escape. I doubt if they did any better out there.”
“You’re pretty far from your own colonial period,” said Langley. “In my time, though, we were still close to ours. I have a notion that progress, the new outlook on life, the fresh start, is mostly due to those same failures.”
“So?” Mardos pricked up his ears. “What basis?”
“Oh... all the history I know. Take Iceland; I had a friend from there who explained it to me. The first colonists were big men, even petty kings of a sort, who got kicked out of Norway when it was unified because they wouldn’t knuckle under. They founded what was just about the first republic since Greek times; they wrote down some of the finest literature in the world; they made good tries at colonizing Greenland and America.
“Then the Americans themselves, my own people. Some of them were religious dissenters who couldn’t get along with the churches at home. Some of them were deported criminals. The later immigrants were mostly impoverished bums, some few liberals who didn’t like what was happening in Europe. And yet this bunch of malcontents and Commoners took over half a continent, gave republican government its first real start, led the parade in creating industry and technology, and grabbed the leadership in world affairs ... no, wait, they didn’t grab it, didn’t really want it, but they had it thrust on them because nobody else could hold that particular potato.
“Then there were the early interplanetary colonies, which I saw with my own eyes. The personnel weren’t exactly fugitives, they were planted there, but they were the sort who fitted best into the new environment and got quite unhappy if you sent them back to Earth. The average intelligence was pretty terrific.”
“You might be right,” said Mardos thoughtfully. “Perhaps some few of the lost colonies have found a better way. For instance, if a shipload of really high-caliber people went off, no morons to drag them down—”
“And most rebels are high-caliber,” put in Langley. “They wouldn’t be rebels if they were dumb enough and spineless enough to accept things as they are.”
“Well, who wants to spend perhaps thousands of years external time looking for them? That’s sheer escapism.”
“I’ve got a hunch that history is made by that kind of escapist.”
“The Commercial Society has ranged for hundreds of light-years and found nothing like what you dream of.”
“Certainly not. A group which wanted to get away from what it considered an evil civilization would go further than that. And there’s the idea of something hid behind the ranges—”
“Immature!”
“Of course. Don’t forget, the immature human—or society—is in process of growing up. But speaking of the Society, I’d like to know more about it. I’ve got a kind of suspicion—”