So why the hell do I feel so goddamn happy?
FULCRUM
When he finished explaining how he had contrived their escape, Kate said incredulously, “Was that all?”
“Not quite. I also made a call to the ten nines.”
“Ah. I should have guessed.”
A MATTER OF HYSTERICAL RECORD
When the short-lived Allende government was elected to power in Chile and needed a means of balancing that unfortunate country’s precarious economy, Allende appealed to the British cybernetics expert Stafford Beer.
Who announced that as few as ten significant quantities, reported from a handful of key locations where adequate communications facilities existed, would enable the state of the economy to be reviewed and adjusted on a day-to-day basis.
Judging by what happened subsequently, his claim infuriated nearly as many people as did the news that there are only four elements in the human genetic code.
LIKE THEY SAY, IT’S BOUNCE OR BREAK
At Ann Arbor, Michigan, research psychologist Dr. Zoë Sideropoulos had house guests for a week. She was an expert in hypnosis and had written a well-known study of the regression effect which, in suitable cases, makes possible the recovery of memories ordinarily lost to conscious awareness without such crude physical aids as electrodes planted in the subject’s brain.
During the week she made exceptionally intensive use of her home computer terminal. Or rather, that was what the machines believed.
When he was able to take a break from using Dr. Sideropoulos’s terminal—a new and extremely efficient model—Kate brought him omelets and the nearest surviving commercial equivalent of “real beer.”
“Eat before it’s cold,” she commanded. “Then talk. In detail and with footnotes.”
“I’m glad you said that. We’re going to have a lot of time to fill. I need to scramble some circuitry at Canaveral, or wherever, rather more completely than you scrambled these eggs, and I know for sure I’m going to have to make the computers do things they’re specifically forbidden to. But not to worry. When they built their defenses they weren’t reckoning on somebody like me.”
He set about demolishing the omelet; it lasted for a dozen hungry bites.
“But I do worry,” Kate muttered. “Are you certain you can trust Paul Freeman?”
He laid aside his empty plate. “Remember how at Lap-of-the-Gods you upbraided me because I wouldn’t believe anyone else was on my side?”
“Touchée. But I want my answer.”
“Yes. There’s an honest man. And finally he’s figured out what constitutes evil in the modern world.”
“So what’s your definition?”
“One that I already know you agree with, because we talked about Anti-Trauma Inc. If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.”
In a dry voice she said, “I won’t argue.”
At Boulder, Colorado, Professor Joachim Yent of the School of Economics and Business Administration had house guests for a few days. During that time, it was duly recorded that he made exceptionally frequent use of his home computer terminal.
“Kate, when you take a liking to somebody, do you speed up or slow down?”
“Do I what—? Oh, got it. Slow down, I guess. I mean to get where we can talk to each other I quit skipping for a while.”
“And vice versa?”
“Most times, no. In fact you’re the only person I ever met who could work it the other way—uh … Sandy? What is your name, damn it? I just realized I still don’t know.”
“You decide. Stick with Sandy if you like, or switch to what I started out with: Nicholas, Nickie, Nick. I don’t care. I’m myself, not a label.”
She puckered her lips to blow him a kiss. “I don’t care what you’re called, either. I only know I’m glad we slowed down to the same speed.”
At Madison, Wisconsin, Dean Prudence McCourtenay of the Faculty of Laws had house guests for a long weekend. It was’ similarly recorded that during their visit she made more than averagely frequent use of her domestic computer terminal.
It was becoming very cold. Winter had definitely begun.
“Yes, slowing down to the same speed is what everybody needs to do. With a lot of incidental energy to be dissipated. In fact a good many brakes are apt to melt. But the alternative is a head-on flatout smash.”
“Why?”
“Because everybody isn’t like you yet.”
“Sounds like a monotonous world!”
“I mean in the sense of being equally able to cope.”
“But …” She bit her lip. “It’s a fact of existence that some can and some can’t. Punishing those who can’t is cruel, but holding back those who can for the sake of the rest is—”
He broke in. “Our present society is cruel both ways. It does punish those who can’t cope. We bought our veephones and our data-net and our asteroid ore and the rest of it by spending people who wound up dead or in mental hospitals.” His face darkened briefly. “And it holds back those who can cope. I’m an example of that.”
“I find it terribly hard to believe, seeing what you can do now you’re working at full stretch!”
“But I have been held back, damn it. I didn’t know how much I could achieve until I saw you, shaven and limp like a lab specimen due to be carved up and thrown away with no more memorial than entry in a table of statistics. The sight forced me into—I guess you’d say mental overdrive.”
“What was it like?”
“As inexplicable as orgasm.”
In Shreveport, Louisiana, Dr. Chase Richmond Dellinger, a public-health analyst under contract to the city, had house guests during whose stay he had unusually frequent recourse to his home computer terminal. In the south it was still pleasantly warm, of course, but there was a lot of rain this year.
“So I absolutely had to find a way out—not just for you, not just for me, but for everybody. In an eyeblink I had discovered a new urge within myself, and it was as fundamental as hunger, or fear, or sex. I recall one argument I had with Paul Freeman …”
“Yes?”
“The idea came up that it took the advent of the H-bomb to bring about in human beings the response you see in other animals when confronted with bigger claws or teeth.”
“Or a dominant figure in his private cosmos. Like Bagheera rolling over kitten-style to greet me when I get back from school. I do hope they’re looking after him properly.”
“We’ve been promised that.”
“Yes, but … Never mind. I didn’t mean to change the subject.”
“On principle I differed with him, but he was quite justified in saying that for all we know maybe that is the case. Well, if it’s true that our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus than you find among our four-legged cousins?”
On his ranch in northern Texas, political historian Rush Compton and his wife Nerice, some years his junior and in occasional practice as a market-research counselor, entertained a couple of house guests. Considerable use was made of their home computer terminal. The weather was fresh and clear, with intermittent gusts of sharp northerly wind.
“Wait a moment. That threshold may be dangerously high. Think of population.”
“Yes indeed. I started with population. Not having a fixed breeding season was among the reasons why mankind achieved dominance; it kept our numbers topped up at an explosive rate. Past a certain stage restrictive processes set in: male libido is reduced or diverted into nonfertile channels, female ovulation is regularized and sometimes fails completely. But long before we reach that point we find the company of our fellow creatures so unbearable we resort to war, or a tribal match. Kill one another or ourselves.”