I stood up quickly. “Thank you. I hope the same. Will you not have dinner with me before I have to leave — perhaps help me make the best of my few days’ holiday?”
She shook her head, not smiling. “No,” she said calmly. “I cannot see you any longer as a person, you understand. I can see you only as an agent of the forces against which I am struggling. I would prefer it otherwise — but…”
She shrugged and turned away.
XXIX
I was restless that evening. I had intended to relax in the hotel bar, but I couldn’t relax at all, and in the end I decided to go for a stroll; the evening was fine and clear, and there was a light breeze.
I was thinking as I started out about the man who had been my seat-companion in the plane coming down from Florida, the one who had boasted about his European accent and his country of adoption in equal proportions. I had found his card again in my wallet as I was paying for dinner this evening. The name was Flores. I recalled telling myself that I knew more about his city than he probably did, although I had never visited it.
What had I known? Anything at all? I couldn’t have said then, as I could now, that that man driving a European sports car rather too fast through the main highway nexus was probably a supporter of the Citizens of Vados, and that consequently the long-faced Amerind lighting a candle and crossing himself before the wall shrine in the market was prepared to hate him on principle. I couldn’t have said that the old woman carrying a sleepy-eyed baby through the glittering evening streets probably worried more about the health of the family livestock than of the child — for a crippled and sickly child might still be able to beg, while a crippled and sickly animal was good for nothing at all.
Lord, there was power waiting for anyone who had the determination and patience to employ knowledge of human beings!
Of course, demagogues and dictators all through history had used such techniques. Only they had been amateurs, empiricists, and their lack of knowledge led to eventual ruin. You couldn’t rule people totally — they were, as Maria Posador put it, too cussed — unless you were responsible not only for externals like their living conditions, their right to walk the streets in freedom, their binding laws and regulations, but also for far more subtle things: for their prejudices, their fears, beliefs, and hatreds.
I’d been talking wildly about developing mathematical tools on the analogy of the ones I used every day, to cope with general as well as particularized behavior. Now it occurred to me that perhaps I already had some of those tools.
Suppose, for example, I went from here to work on the Pietermaritzburg project. It would certainly be the biggest planned traffic system in Africa if it came off. There I’d have to make allowances for the local system; I’d have to complicate simple suggestions to make provision for blankes and nie-blankes. Even here that held good. Making allowances for the local system…
Why had I been brought into this, anyway? Not because a genuine traffic problem existed; rather, because legal and political factors combined to dictate that a traffic problem be solved in order to smooth over an unpopular decision. I wanted desperately to believe that I had done the best I could. But the fact remained: I hadn’t done my job. I mean, I hadn’t done my job. I’d done the dirty work for people without the necessary special knowledge to do it themselves.
It was as well that I was an outsider. I could leave Ciudad de Vados behind me, and with it the dispute between the Nationals and the Citizens, between foreign-born and natives, between Vados and Diaz; and when the results were all in, I might be found to have set a precedent.
Oh, there were similar cases on the books — there was Baron Haussmann’s work in Paris, and there was the clearing of the St. Giles rookery in London, when street-planning and slum clearance had been used to get rid of nests of crime and vice. But there the primary object had been to improve the city. To coerce social change by altering the balance of factors that had led to undesirable conditions — that was subtler, and very different. Inherently different.
Good God, I had been right, at that!
I had been walking, lost in thought, for several hundred yards without knowing where I was going. Now I stopped in my tracks, and a young man and a girl coming arm-in-arm behind me bumped into me. I apologized, let them pass, and resumed my aimless stroll, repeating under my breath, “I was right!”
Sometimes you can have knowledge right in the palm of your hand and never use it, because you don’t recognize it for what it’s worth, or because you aren’t the kind of person it’s worth anything to. I hoped the second alternative applied to myself.
For I had just realized I had power I never knew about.
I explained it to myself step by step, saying look at it this way. Here in Vados, capital city of the “most governed country in the world,” they conceive the idea of applying my indirect leverage to enforce a desired social change. They don’t have the knowledge to work the trick themselves; they know the next best thing, though — where to lay hands on the knowledge, as I would look up figures in a table of logs.
Now it had been done, it would be copied. Recipe: specialized knowledge.
I remembered hearing about a time-and-motion man — forerunner in some ways of my own discipline — who achieved one of the earliest major successes in the field when they gave him the problem of improving the ground-to-upper-floor communications of a skyscraper, whose lobby was swamped with people entering and leaving and whose elevators were crammed to capacity.
He studied the situation — and recommended putting an information booth in the lobby. Result: people entering slowed down, perhaps went to the desk, at least hesitated while they decided not to. And the flow of people thereafter moved at a pace which the elevators could handle.
I could do that. In South Africa the hatreds engendered by apartheid smoldered always below the surface. Suppose I designed a main station so that two segregated streams bumped each other or crossed each other, so that neither had the easiest access to its own part of the train, or to waiting rooms and conveniences. Plan skillfully; estimate the irritation caused and allow for it to become unbearable on a blazing hot day at the time when, tempers frayed, people are going home from work tired out. It needs just one man in a crowd to push another, to be struck down — and explosion!
If the critical points were too obvious, people might see them in the plans and demand changes. But who would think such factors had been built-in deliberately?
Almost, they could have done this when they were planning Ciudad de Vados. They didn’t have access to enough information, of course. They couldn’t have foreseen that Fernando Sigueiras would be a stubborn man with a streak of mulelike tenacity, or that Felipe Mendoza would become famous outside his own country and language group, or that Judge Romero would become incompetent and crotchety in his old age. But they could have deduced that peasants deprived of water would move to the city. They could have guessed that the native-born citizens would be jealous of the foreign-born. They could have guessed a good many more things — no, not guessed. Reasoned out. Only they didn’t know what they knew.
And I did have the knowledge, and I had been used. Made to go through motions like a — a pawn on a chessboard.
I found myself on the fringe of a large crowd and looked to see where I had got to. I had somehow found my way to the Plaza del Oeste, and I was now facing the public tournament hall. Posters announced that tonight the finals of the Ciudad de Vados regional competition in the series for the national chess championship were being played off. Pablo Garcia was advertised to play.