Reid’s eyes were shining, his voice happy. He was like that when an idea took hold of him, and he prophesied. It sounds prophetic enough now, but it wasn’t an original idea even then, in December 1975. (That’s AD, by the way.) He’d got it from a book.
‘How d’you mean, “away”?’ I asked.
‘If we,’ he said, slowing down, ‘can make a machine that’s smarter than us, it can make another machine that’s smarter than the first. And so on, faster and faster. Runaway evolution, man.’
‘And where does that leave us?’
Reid pushed a heavy mug of cider towards me.
‘Behind,’ he said happily. ‘Like apes in a city of people. Come on, let’s find a seat.’
Glasgow University’s original Students’ Union dated back to before women were accepted as students. It still hadn’t quite caught up. The female students had their own union building, the QM, which did allow students of both sexes. It was therefore the one in which the more radical and progressive male students hung out, and the better by far for picking up girls.
Which was what we had in mind: a few pints with our mates in the bar for the first part of the evening, and then down to the disco about ten o’clock and see if anybody fancied a dance. The reason for getting in as much drinking as you could beforehand was that diving into the queue in front of the disco bar was best reserved for when you had to buy a round for your companions or – better – a drink for a girl who’d just danced with you.
The bar – the union bar rather than the disco bar – was fairly quiet at this time in the evening. So we got a good seat in the place, the one that ran most of the way around the back wall, from which we could see everybody who came in and – just by getting up slightly and turning around – could check out the state of play on the dance-floor below.
I rolled a skinny Golden Virginia cigarette and raised my pint of Strong-bow.
‘Cheers,’ Reid said.
‘Slainte,’ I said.
We grinned at our respective manglings of each other’s national toast – to my ear, Reid had said something like ‘Cheeurrsh’, and to his I’d said ‘Slendge.’ Reid was from the Isle of Skye, where his great-grandfather had come to work as a shepherd after the Clearances. I was from North London, and we were both somewhat out of place in Central Scotland. We hadn’t known each other very long, having met a month earlier at a seminar on War Communism. The seminar was sponsored by Critique, a left-wing offshoot of the Institute for Soviet Studies, where I was doing a one-year $.Sc. course in the Economics of Socialism.
I didn’t agree with their ideas, but I’d found the Critique clique (as I privately called them) congenial, and stimulating. They were the Institute’s Young Turks, Left Opposition, Shadow Cabinet and Government-In-Exile. They regarded both mainstream and Marxist critical theories of the Soviet Union as all of a piece with the most starry-eyed, fellow-travelling naivety in their assumption that it was at least a new system, when it was hardly even a society.
The seminar was a lunchtime session. As always, it was crowded, not so much because of its popularity but because of a shrewd tactic of always booking a room just a little smaller than the expected attendance. In that ill-assorted congregation of exiles – from America, from Chile, from South Africa and from the Other Side itself – Reid, hunched in a new denim jacket, constantly relighting, puffing and forgetting his roll-up, his lank black hair falling around his young and good-looking but somehow weathered face, seemed entirely at home, and the question he’d asked the speaker afterwards showed at least that he knew what he was asking about. But none of us had seen him before, and in the pub later (these seminars had several features in common with socialist meetings, especially the pub afterwards) he’d admitted to being a Trotskyist, which was not surprising, and a computer science student, which was.
The woman sitting next to me was American and also a Trotskyist. Reid was getting up to buy a round and asked her, ‘What will you be having?’
‘Tomato juice,’ she said. He nodded, frowning.
‘How come you’ve not met him, Myra?’ I asked as he slouched off to the bar. ‘Aren’t you in the IMG too?’ I’d picked this up while chatting to her occasionally over coffee in the Institute – almost chatting her up, to be honest, because I was rather taken with her. She was tall and incredibly slim, with a blonde bob and a perky, peaky face, the concavities of her orbits and cheeks looking like they’d been delicately, lovingly smoothed into shape with broad thumbs, her grey eyes bright behind huge round glasses.
‘I don’t go much to meetings,’ she admitted with a shake of her head. ‘Like I got pissed with comrades urging me to do more in the fight against the fucking Leninist-Trotskyist Faction? I mean, what do these guys think I came to England to get away from?’
‘You mean Scotland, England?’ I drawled derisively, unable to comment on her – to me – utterly incomprehensible remark.
Myra laughed. ‘Go give the guy a hand. He seems to be having a problem.’
Reid turned to me with relief. ‘I’ve got everybody’s except Myra’s. What the hell are “tamadages”?’
‘And one tomato juice!’ I said to the bar-tender.
‘Oh, thanks,’ Reid said. He looked up at me. (He’d unconsciously pulled himself up to his full height, something folk often did around me, but he was still looking up.) ‘What you were saying back there about the market, that was interesting. The millions of equations stuff.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, gathering up some of the drinks. ‘The millions of equations. And that’s not the half of it.’ I knew what was coming next, having been around the block several times already on this one.
‘Why can’t we just use computers?’
‘Because,’ I said over my shoulder as I threaded my way back to the table, ‘without a market, you won’t have the fucking computers!’
Myra was laughing as I put down the drinks. ‘Don’t worry about Jon’s bourgeois economics,’ she said to Dave Reid as we sat down. ‘Even the Soviet Union has computers.’ She waited for some sign of reassurance in his honestly puzzled face, and added: ‘The biggest in the world!’
Reid smiled but went on doggedly: ‘Look at IBM. Do they bother about market forces? Do they fuck! Friend of mine worked at their factory in Inverkip one summer. He said they supply spare parts anywhere in the world within forty-eight hours, even if it means taking an axe to a mainframe that’s already built – and pulling the parts out!’
‘Yeah, that sounds just like the Soviet Union,’ I said, to general laughter. ‘And you sound just like my old man.’
‘Is he a socialist?’ Reid asked. He sounded incredulous.
‘Lifelong SPGB member,’ I said.
‘SPGB? Oh, brilliant!’ Reid said.
‘What’s the SPGB?’ Myra asked. Reid and I both began to say something, then Reid smiled, shrugged and deferred.
I took a long swallow, but it wasn’t the beer that I smelt but some strange remembered whiff of mown grass, dog-shit, and vanilla: Speaker’s Corner. ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain,’ I explained, falling almost automatically into the soapbox cadence of the autodidact agitator, ‘set out in 1904, with less than a hundred members, to win a majority of the workers of the world. They already have 800, so they’re well on their way. At that rate, the best projections put them on course for a clear majority by the twenty-fifth century.’
‘You gotta be kidding,’ Myra said.
‘He is,’ Reid said sternly. ‘It’s, well, not a bad caricature, I’ll give you that. But I’ve read some of their stuff, and I’ve never seen that calculation.’