Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four Page 8
These are the specs:
AGE—between nineteen and twenty-five years old.
HEIGHT—from five feet to five feet nine.
WEIGHT—on the low side, or else very heavy.
RACE—white, more or less.
RELIGION—Former Christian, now agnostic or atheist. Ex-Fundamentalist will do nicely.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE—intense, weird, a loner, a loser. A bad sexual history: impotence, premature ejaculation, inability to find willing partners. A bad relationship with siblings (if any) and parents. Subject should be a hobbyist (stamp or coin collecting, trap-shooting, cross-country running, etc.) but not an “intellectual.” A touch of paranoia is desirable. Also free-floating ambitions impossible to fulfil.
POLITICAL CONVICTIONS—any. Preferably highly flexible. Willing to call himself a libertarian anarchist on Tuesday and a dedicated Marxist on Thursday if he thinks it’ll get him somewhere to make the switch. Willing to shoot with equal enthusiasm at presidential candidates, incumbent senators, baseball players, rock stars, traffic cops, or any other components of the mysterious “they” that hog the glory and keep him from attaining his true place in the universe.
Okay. You can supply the trimmings yourself, machine. Any color eyes so long as the eyes are a little bit on the glassy hyperthyroid side. Any color hair, although it will help if the hair is prematurely thinning and our man blames his lack of success with women in part on that. Any marital history (single, divorced, widowed, married) provided whatever liaison may have existed was unsatisfactory. The rest is up to you. Get with the job and use your creativity. Start stamping them out in quantity:
Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau
Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau
Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau
Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau
Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau
Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau
Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau
Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau
Give us the men. We’ll find uses for them. And when they’ve done their filthy thing we’ll throw them back into the karmic hopper to be recycled, and God help us all.
Every day thousands of ships routinely stain the sea with oily wastes. When an oil tanker has discharged its cargo, it might add weight of some other kind to remain stable; this is usually done by filling some of the ship’s storage tanks with seawater. Before it can take on a new load of oil, the tanker must flush this watery ballast from its tanks; and as the water is pumped out, it takes with it the oily scum that had remained in the tanks when the last cargo was unloaded. Until 1964 each such flushing of an average 40,000-ton tanker sent eighty-three tons of oil into the sea. Improved flushing procedures have cut the usual oil discharge to about three tons. But there are so many tankers afloat—more than 4,000 of them—that they nevertheless release several million tons of oil a year in this fashion. The 44,000 passenger, cargo, military, and pleasure ships now in service add an equal amount of pollution by flushing oily wastes from their bilges. All told, according to one scientific estimate, man may be putting as much as ten million tons of oil a year into the sea. When the explorer Thor Heyerdahl made a 3,200-mile voyage from North Africa to the West Indies in a boat of papyrus reeds in the summer of 1970, he saw “a continuous stretch of at least 1,400 miles of open Atlantic polluted by floating lumps of solidified, asphalt-like oil.” French oceanographer Jacques Yves Cousteau estimates that forty percent of the world’s sea life has disappeared in the present century. The beaches near Boston Harbor have an average oil accumulation of 21.8 pounds of oil per mile, a figure that climbs to 1,750 pounds per mile on one stretch on Cape Cod. The Scientific Centre of Monaco reports: “On the Mediterranean seaboard practically all the beaches are soiled by the petroleum refineries, and the sea bottom, which serves as a food reserve for marine fauna, is rendered barren by the same factors.”
It’s a coolish spring day and here I am in Washington, DC. That’s the Capitol down there, and there’s the White House. I can’t see the Washington Monument, because they haven’t finished it yet, and of course there isn’t any Lincoln Memorial, because Honest Abe is alive and well on Pennsylvania Avenue. Today is Friday, April 14, 1865. And here I am. Far out!
—We hold the power to effect change. Very well, what shall we change? The whole ugly racial thing?
—That’s cool. But how do we go about it?
—Well, what about uprooting the entire institution of slavery by going back to the sixteenth century and blocking it at the outset?
—No, too many ramifications. We’d have to alter the dynamics of the entire imperialist-colonial thrust, and that’s just too big a job even for a bunch of gods. Omnipotent we may be, but not indefatigable. If we blocked that impulse there, it would only crop up somewhere else along the time-line; no force that powerful can be stifled altogether.
—What we need is a pinpoint way of reversing the racial mess. Let us find a single event that lies at a crucial nexus in the history of black-white relations in the United States and unhappen it. Any suggestions?
—Sure, Thomas. The Lincoln assassination.
—Far out! Run it through the machine; see what the consequences would be.
So we do the simulations and twenty times out of twenty they come out with a recommend that we de-assassinate Lincoln. Groovy. Any baboon with a rifle can do an assassination, but only we can do a de-assassination. Alors: Lincoln goes on to complete his second term. The weak, ineffectual Andrew Johnson remains Vice President, and the Radical Republican faction in Congress doesn’t succeed in enacting its “humble the proud traitors” screw-the-South policies. Under Lincoln’s even-handed guidance the South will be rebuilt sanely and welcomed back into the Union; there won’t be any vindictive Reconstruction era, and there won’t be the equally vindictive Jim Crow reaction against the carpetbaggers that led to all the lynchings and restrictive laws, and maybe we can blot out a century of racial bitterness. Maybe.
That’s Ford’s Theatre over there. Our American Cousin is playing tonight. Right now John Wilkes Booth is holed up in some downtown hotel, I suppose, oiling his gun, rehearsing his speech. “Sic semper tyrannis!” is what he’ll shout, and he’ll blow away poor old Abe.
—One ticket for tonight’s performance, please.
Look at the elegant ladies and gentlemen descending from their carriages. They know the President will be at the theatre, and they’re wearing their finest finery. And yes! That’s the White House buggy! Is that imperious-looking lady Mary Todd Lincoln? It has to be. And there’s the President, stepping right off the five-dollar bill. Graying beard, stooped shoulders, weary eyes, tired, wrinkled face. Poor old Abe. Am I doing you much of a favor by saving you tonight? Don’t you want to lay your burden down? But history needs you, man. All dem li’1 black boys and girls, dey needs you. The President waves. I wave back. Greetings from the twentieth century, Mr. Lincoln! I’m here to rob you of your martyrdom!
Curtain going up. Abe smiles in his box. I can’t follow the play. Words, just words. Time crawls, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Ten o’clock at last. The moment’s coming close. There, do you see him? There: the wild-eyed man with the big gun. Wow, that gun’s the size of a cannon! And he’s creeping up on the President. Why doesn’t anybody notice? Is the play so goddamned interesting that nobody notices—
“Hey! Hey you, John Wilkes Booth! Look over here, man! Look at me!”
Everybody turns as I shout. Booth turns too, and I rise and extend my arm and fire, not even needing to aim, just turning the weapon into an extension of my pointing hand as the Zen exercises have shown me how to do. The sound of the shot expands, filling the theatre with a terrible reverberating boom, and Booth topples, blood fountaining from his chest. Now, finally the President’s bodyguards break from their freeze and come scrambling forward. I’m sorry, John. Nothing personal. History was in need of some chang
ing, is all. Goodbye, 1865. Goodbye, President Abe. You’ve got an extension of your lease, thanks to me. The rest is up to you.
Our freedom…our liberation…can only come through a transformation of social structure and relationships…no one group can be free while another is still held in bonds. We want to build a world where people can choose their futures, where they can love without dependency games, where they do not starve. We want to create a world where men and women can relate to each other and to children as sharing, loving equals. We must eliminate the twin oppressors…hierarchical and exploitative capitalism and its myths that keep us so securely in bonds…sexism, racism, and other evils created by those who rule to keep the rest of us apart.
—Do you Alexander, take this man to be your lawful wedded mate?
—I do.
—Do you, George, take this man to be your lawful wedded mate?
—I do.
—Then, George and Alexander, by the power vested in me by the State of New York as ordained minister of the First Congregational Gay Communion of Upper Manhattan, I do hereby pronounce you man and man, wedded before God and in the eyes of mankind, and may you love happily ever after.
It’s all done with the aid of a lot of science fiction gadgetry. I won’t apologize for that part of it. Apologies just aren’t necessary. If you need gadgetry to get yourself off, you use gadgetry; the superficials simply don’t enter into any real consideration of how you get where you want to be from where you’re at. The aim is to eradicate the well-known evils of our society, and if we have to get there by means of time machines, thought-amplification headbands, anti-uptightness rays, molecular interpenetrator beams, superheterodyning levitator rods, and all the rest of that gaudy comic-book paraphernalia, so be it. It’s the results that count.
Like I mean, take the day I blew the President’s mind. You think I could have done that without all this gadgetry? Listen, simply getting into the White House is a trip and a half. You can’t get hold of a reliable map of the interior of the White House, the part that the tourists aren’t allowed to see; the maps that exist are phonies, and actually they keep rearranging the rooms so that espionage agents and assassins won’t be able to find their way around. What is a bedroom one month is an office the next and a switchboard room the month after that. Some rooms can be folded up and removed altogether. It’s a whole wild cloak-and-dagger number. So we set up our ultrasonic intercavitation scanner in Lafayette Park and got ourselves a trustworthy holographic representation of the inside of the building. That data enabled me to get my bearings once I was in there. But I also needed to be able to find the President in a hurry. Our method was to slap a beep transponder on him, which we did by catching the White House’s head salad chef, zonking him on narcoleptic strobes, and programming him to hide the gimmick inside a tomato. The President ate the tomato at dinnertime and from that moment on we could trace him easily. Also, the pattern of interference waves coming from the transponder told us whether anyone was with him.
So okay. I waited until he was alone one night, off in the Mauve Room rummaging through his file of autographed photos of football stars, and I levitated to a point ninety feet directly above that room, used our neutrinoflux desensitizer to knock out the White House security shield, and plummeted down via interpenetrator beam. I landed right in front of him. Give him credit: he didn’t start to yell. He backed away and started to go for some kind of alarm button, but I said, “Cool it, Mr. President, you aren’t going to get hurt. I just want to talk. Can you spare five minutes for a little rap?” And I beamed him with the conceptutron to relax him and make him receptive. “Okay, chief?”
“You may speak, son,” he replied. “I’m always eager to hear the voice of the public, and I’m particularly concerned with being responsive to the needs and problems of our younger generation. Our gallant young people who—”
“Groovy, Dick. Okay—now dig this. The country’s falling apart, right? The ecology is deteriorating, the cities are decaying, the blacks are up in arms, the right-wingers are stocking up on napalm, the kids are getting maimed in one crazy foreign war after another, the prisons are creating criminals instead of rehabilitating them, the Victorian sexual codes are turning millions of potentially beautiful human beings into sickniks, the drug laws don’t make any sense, the women are still hung up on the mother-chauffeur-cook-chambermaid trip, the men are still into the booze-guns-broads trips, the population is still growing and filling up the clean open spaces, the economic structure is set up to be self-destructive since capital and labor are in cahoots to screw the consumer, and so on. I’m sure you know the problems, since you’re the President and you read a lot of newspapers. Okay. How did we get into this bummer? By accident? No. Through bad karma? I don’t really think so. Through inescapable deterministic forces? Uh-uh. We got into it through dumbness, greed, and inertia. We’re so greedy we don’t even realize that it’s ourselves we’re robbing. But it can be fixed, Dick, it can all be fixed! We just have to wake up! And you’re the man who can do it. Don’t you want to go down in history as the man who helped this great country get itself together? You and thirty influential congressmen and five members of the Supreme Court can do it. All you have to do is start reshaping the national consciousness through some executive directives backed up with congressional action. Get on the tube, man, and tell all your silent majoritarians to shape up. Proclaim the reign of love. No more war, hear? It’s over tomorrow. No more economic growth: we just settle for what we have and we start cleaning up the rivers and lakes and forests. No more babies to be used as status symbols and pacifiers for idle housewives—from now on people will do babies only for the sake of bringing groovy new human beings into the world, two or three to a couple. As of tomorrow we abolish all laws against stuff that people do without hurting other people. And so on. We proclaim a new Bill of Rights granting every individual the right to a full and productive life according to his own style. Will you do that?”
“Well—”
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” I said. “You’re going to do it. You’re going to decree an end to all the garbage that’s been going down in this country. You know how I know you’re going to do it? Because I’ve got this shiny little metal tube in my hand and it emits vibrations that are real strong stuff, vibrations that are going to get your head together when I press the button. Ready or not, here I go. One, two, three …zap.
“Right on, baby,” the President said.
The rest is history.
Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, God. If it could only be that easy. One, two, three, zap. But it doesn’t work like that. I don’t have any magic wand. What makes you think I did? How was I able to trick you into a suspension of disbelief? You, reader, sitting there on your rear end, what do you think I really am? A miracle man? Some kind of superbeing from Galaxy Ten? I’ll tell you what I really am, me, Thomas C—. I’m a bunch of symbols on a piece of paper. I’m just something abstract trapped within a mere fiction. A “hero” in a “story.” Helpless, disembodied, unreal. UNREAL! Whereas you out there—you have eyes, lungs, feet, arms, a brain, a mouth, all that good stuff. You can function. You can move. You can act. Work for the Revolution! Strive for change! You’re operating in the real world; you can do it if anybody can! Struggle toward…umph…glub…. Hey, get your filthy hands off me—power to the people! Down with the fascist pigs…hey—help—HELP!
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame
Here we have a slippery and involuted story, a symphony of mixed motives. The title is the giveaway, for it is the same as that of a well-known anthology that has gone through dozens of printings since I edited it on behalf of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1968. And now you find me in June of 1972, just a few years later, writing a story of the same name, well aware of the confusion that is bound to ensue, slyly enjoying the bibliographic chaos.
What is worse, the story pretends to be a science-fiction story, but it really isn’t. It’s more of a parody, perhaps, or even
an attack. Like most of my 1972 stories it shows the restlessness that was growing in me then as I struggled to redefine my attitude toward the genre to which I had devoted so much of my career. Terry Carr, for whom I had written a story for each of the first three issues of his anthology Universe, had asked me for another one, and this is what I gave him. He read it right away—and returned it to me, looking crestfallen and dismayed, that evening. “You know how much I want to use something of yours in the next issue,” he said. “But I can’t publish this, Bob. Universe is supposed to be a book for people who like science fiction.”
I had to admit that Terry was right: this was a story written by a man who had developed a powerful love-hate relationship with his own field. I thought then, and think now, that it reflects more ambivalence than hostility—the work of a writer who had spent a quarter of a century deeply concerned with science fiction and who, for the moment, had grown a little cross with it. Terry was so upset by the whole episode that I promised to write another one for him, and did—“A Sea of Faces,” which you’ll encounter very shortly. I offered “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” to another veteran editor, Bob Hoskins, who accepted it without any qualms and published it in the fifth issue of his anthology Infinity.
~
The look his remote grey eyes was haunted, terrified, beaten, as he came running in from the Projectorium. His shoulders were slumped; I had never before seen him betray the slightest surrender to despair, but now I was chilled by the completeness of his capitulation. With a shaking hand he thrust at me a slender yellow data slip, marked in red with the arcane symbols of cosmic computation. “No use,” he muttered. “There’s absolutely no use trying to fight any longer!”