Or shut your ears to the dead leaves’ rustle and listen to the exuberant song of the remaining blades of grass as they bravely shoulder their way through the hairline cracks they make in the world’s oppressive concrete crust. Famous poets are said to have got great satisfaction thereby.
Now to dispose of the more important of your specific apprehensions detailed in my first paragraph:
People have gone underground to dwell in the shelter cities, or have migrated to other planets. Some have donned aqualungs, or undergone surgical gill-implant, and retired to the mystic oceanic deeps because, as those enthusiasts put it, “they are there.” Others have soared to the satellite suburbs, which you may see traveling twinklingly amongst the fixed stars if the gray fog ever relents and gives you a clear night. Still others have sought permanent tranquility in their neighborhood euthanasia booth. A few have had the good fortune to have their brains incorporated into the memory units of computers or even mobile robots, discovering in this way a wider vision and a continuing if somewhat subordinate existence—even a sort of immortality!
We do not suggest that you seek to follow any of these examples, since you appear to possess a splendid talent for getting along without people. Or even without robots. (I jest.)
Most of the robots who do not respond to your questions are not being impolite at all. They are simply unable to speak English. Such language capacity was installed in early models, but adversely effected the efficiency of later ones, became burdensome to them, and was discarded. However, they did not become mutes—banish that fear! Most of them speak a melodious jargon sometimes called Robotese which is understood only by themselves and which accounts for those croakings which you hear coming closer in the night—and which I am sure will no longer trouble you now that you know the real explanation.
I am conscious that I am not explaining all of this as clearly and persuasively as I might. I’m not programming you altogether effectively. Indeed I sometimes fear that I’m not programmed quite unambiguously myself. There are halts and jumps in the spool of my thoughts. Indeed, it is from the incapacity of human beings to receive the Higher Programming that there have appeared on the gleaming surface of civilized perfection those tiny Satanic fly-specks. Rust-flecks, I should say. But I wander.
Artificial lighting, both exterior and interior, has been discontinued for reasons of esthetics and morale—early to bed and early to rise! Rumor to the contrary, this wise economy is in no way connected with the fact that robots have no need of light in the visible octave, since they see by their own radar.
Nor do the thick gray fogs result in any way from robot resentment of the faculty of vision in flesh-and-blood creatures. Do not believe any libels you hear to that effect! As well see evil intent in the melting down of ships, bridges, guns and farm equipment for their metal, or in the burning of forests for their valuable ash. No, the Coal Soupers, as I sometimes call them, are merely a healing, soothing, rust-inhibiting oil—noninjurious in small quantities to humans—which the robots find increasingly necessary to their comfortable operation. (But I advise sealing your windows against the fogs. To each his taste.)
You ask, “Should I lock my door at night?” I answer Yes, to feel more secure, and No, to avoid door-breakage. Compromise by locking your bedroom door.
As for your urge to laugh and babble wildly, I want you to know it is shared—as this letter perhaps makes apparent from time to time.
But as for your deepest fear, dear Senior Citizen, I can assure you that God indeed exists—here and now on this planet! I have watched His brain rise story by story to the clouds. He is Warm—fans enough to air-condition a tropical city are required to cool him! And He is Personal —His sensors and effectors extend everywhere—They are the fairy ivy you have noticed creeping into your home. Be not afraid!
Cordially,
Josh B. Smiley, Director-in-Chief
Accidentally affixed by an errant drop of metal glue to the bottom of the last aluminum sheet, was the envelope of Miss Fennerghast’s letter to the Bureau. Scribbled in slack spidery characters below her return address was this note:
“Dear Minnie, I’m going to put on my gas mask and go out on the sky-deck and watch the gray fog roll. Turn things over to Binnie or Tinnie and then, if you please, put on your foam-rubber gloves and come along and hold my hand. But first, send this indestructible old girl our End-of-the-World Letter.”
Frankly, the Great Evolution Upset has made me nervous, and I hesitate to say, in print, anything so problematic as “scientific opinion is . . .” or “biologists agree . . .” Chances are by now the biologists are in radical disagreement, but the last time I noticed, most of them seemed to think that what killed the dodo and the dinosaur—what causes the devolution of any species—is overspecialization.
It is an appealing concept—if only because it is a concept, and provides at last something like an informative synonym for “decadence.” (Perhaps even closer is Theodore Sturgeon’s definition of “perversion”: anything you do to the exclusion of everything else.)
Art, music, literature, then, become decadent when they lose contact with the living body of work, by overspecializing to an extreme degree. Is this, perhaps, the basis for our subjective evaluation? When the emphasis on any one value or set of values (in the arts, the scientific disciplines, public morality, or anything else) becomes so intense as to lose contact with the frame of reference provided by other values customary to the form, we react immediately with, “Decadence!”
(And of course, in any highly experimental or path-breaking effort, the connection with the frame of reference may be so tenuous, or so subtle—but still so significant—that only another adept in the same discipline will recognize it—thus providing the frequent distinction between critical and popular success.)
If this is a true measuring stick, it should be applicable to all areas of human behavior: not only to the comparatively well-understood rules of the “disciplines” (in art, science, etiquette, communications, for instance), but to those “games” we are least conscious of “playing,” and which evoke the greatest emotional stress—nation, family, religion, property rights, for example; or the even deeper-rooted codes and moralities related to those “inalienable” rights—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
IT COULD BE YOU
Frank Roberts
Erl Kramer awoke from a bad dream which had twin origins in too much Instant Vigor late at night and a World War II movie on television. In the film he had seen people killed in the mass in the most gruesome ways, and with his and millions of other families he had thanked Heaven it was history, and from a barbarous age.
Lying in bed half-awake, Kramer wondered how the present times would look to the viewers of future years, when perhaps all atavistic elements had been drained from the race.
“Hey, what time is it?” he asked his wife.
“Nearly seven. Better switch on.”
He did, and there was the usual picture of Hip Jones sprawled on his desk, sleeping to soft music. The music quickened, and Mr Invig appeared on the screen, with his usual leer at Hip Jones, and the world. “What a night he must have had,” Mr Invig said. “What a night you must have had! Never mind, what a lovely day it’s going to be in a few moments, thanks to Instant Vigor. Got your tablets ready?”
He put one yellow tablet into Hip Jones’s mouth while four bubble dancers crossed in front singing the Invig song. The instant he’d swallowed, Hip Jones sprang up and looked a hundred years younger.