OPUS 21 (20 page)

"Vogt? Osborne? I read them. What's true humanity? I don't know--except sometimes, in individual cases. What about old people, for instance?"

"What about them?"

He looked back over his shoulder as if he could see through the night, the trees of Central Park, and the blocks of buildings, to the East River. "Out on the island--I take care of a ward filled with them. Chronics. Sixty years old. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. Some been in bed for twenty years. No cure. No hope. No chance--in a high percentage--of doing a thing, ever. An organ's shot--ruined beyond repair. Half of them touched with senile dementia; a quarter, sunk in it. Mess their beds. You feed 'em with spoons. And yet they go on--year after year after year."

"I've seen the ward."

"America has millions of such people. Only a fraction of 'em in hospitals. Moms and pops, grandmas and grandpas, hanging on to the last, sick gristle of existence.

Spoiling the lives of other millions of people. Taking their time and their energy.

Absorbing funds that young kids desperately need. All for nothing. Wheedling and whining and complaining if everything isn't soft and easy for them. Reminding sons and daughters and grandchildren of their 'duty.' The duty to be enslaved by meaningless, useless senility. The food and the clothes, the beds and the service, the tax money, the energy, the topsoil, if you go for Vogt--and the metal--pours down their gullets and is worn out by their worn-out bodies--and not one single, solitary useful thing is accomplished."

"You're stealing my act," I said.

Tom laughed ruefully. "It's an easy act for a doctor to crib! Tell me, why in hell do people look forward so much to old age? Nine times out of ten, it's a mess. Even proud, independent people, when they get old, usually lose their pride and their independence--and go down begging for handouts."

"The best reason I can think of," I said, "is that they're disappointed in life as they've lived it up to middle age."

"The whole country grows older," Tom went on, after nodding to himself. "The American landscape will soon be cluttered with human antiques. Pension-seeking, vengeful, dogmatic, persecuting, bloc-voting, parasitic millions. An ocean of wasteful protoplasm--Old Men of the Sea--and old Women--riding on the backs of everybody. Is a thing like that humane?"

"It is richly sentimental."

"In the labs, thousands of my colleagues are sweating to bring it about. Studying the degenerative diseases. Trying to lick cancer and heart trouble and hypertension.

Trying to lick aging itself--to keep the old, old indefinitely! Geriatrics--a whole science for the maintenance of second childhood! Sometimes, Phil, I actually think the world is as crazy as you say it is. Sometimes--when I run into a bright kid whose parents can't afford to have its legs straightened--and then when I visit my ward--I'd like to sweep the place clean with a Thompson gun and move in the kids who need it."

"There is the Townsend Plan," I offered. "Two hundred dollars a month for everybody who's old, if they spend it right away--and millions are too stupid to see the catch. In fifty years--Pensioned Old Age may be the great goal that progress and prosperity are today. Of course, there isn't enough stuff to go around, and there will never be, so two hundred bucks, if you gave it to the gaffers to spend, soon wouldn't buy a good-sized roast. But they may try for it."

Tom laughed somberly. "They are trying. You should see the pension literature in my ward. The letters they write. The voting they do. Should I shoot them? What the hell do you really believe about it?"

"There is the death wish," I said.

"They don't want to die! Not one in a dozen! Even if they're blind, vomiting on the hour, spoon-fed, and in pain--they want to go on living--and are proud of it."

"It's lung," I answered, "who keeps talking about the law of opposites. The death wish is subjective. But we translate it into its opposite form--in this case, the objective.

We want other people to die--to suffer--to bear our load--to take our responsibility. We hate. What did you say about your old folks? Vengeful and persecuting and parasitic?

That's the death wish turned wrong-side-out. Or--take this pair of opposites. We have applied reason to extending life. So we have automatically obliged ourselves to apply reason to death. That is a psychological consequence of administering life-stretching it, maintaining it--of baby-saving and so on. Only--being egoists--blind to the basic laws of instinct--we won't kill anybody. Millions of Russians, maybe, but not one American. It's even against the law for a person to kill himself, for whatever merciful and laudable a reason. So what? We insist on our right to save and maintain every life. We also insist on dodging the resultant duty at the other end of the natural spectrum: death. The living have no recourse left but to extravert their death wish. To hate others because of the hatefulness of the trap they're in."

"How do you work it out?"

"In the better world," I said, "a person who had enjoyed the long conscious control of his life would feel somewhat responsible for controlling his death. When he got useless, he would give up. He would regard it as rational--and as part of that 'greater love' that almost no man, these days, hath a sign of."

"Voluntary euthanasia?"

"Why not? And if you came a header and couldn't do it for yourself-the state would do it."

"Do you think," Tom said with asperity, "that the people would permit anything like that? Or think of it as
idealism?
Why--it's a sin--!"

"Sure. Sin. It's one of the sins that keep the churches full and the heads and hearts of the folks empty. Vested interest."

"How many people would do it?"

I shrugged. "Couldn't say. You've seen cases. You'll likely witness another--my own--before long--"

"Good God! I'm sorry--Phil--!"

I laughed and he relaxed--visibly.

"The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of insight, education, nerve--"

"No. Maybe not. Hasn't--as I'd put it--even that much access to its own instincts.

Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs--the work of a few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not."

"Appalling," Tom said.

"Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics. But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense."

We sat awhile.

"What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?"

"Woodsy," I answered.

I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the topsoil?"

"Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods are pleasant."

"The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in the desert.

And the sewage would go through processing plants and then be put back on the land."

"Not many factories, anyhow," I said.

"No? Why?"

"Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would--people did--cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion. Then--the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk. A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the junk they'd want."

"Cities, do you think?"

"Maybe a few small ones--where people put in a few years before going back to the open country."

"Villages? Small towns?"

"Sure. Lots of schools and colleges. Everybody would be pretty bright--and pretty anxious to learn. Everybody would be artistic. Everybody would want to do a certain amount of work with his hands."

"Why?"

"That's the instinct of the critter, isn't it?"

"How come they'd all be bright?"

"Because the biggest fun we're going to have--when we get that wise, if we ever do--is breeding bright people. Living for the sake of future generations--and having some happiness doing it. Happiness with sex, amongst other things, when it ceases to scare us to pieces."

"Maybe," Tom's tone objected, "you might finally convince the folks that knocking themselves off when they got useless was evidence of a great love--an assimilated employment of the death wish. I can even see certain remedial effects in the idea--if that were the common philosophy: people would want to make a bigger effort while they did live, for example. But you can't get dumb babies to knock themselves off."

"You could start--though--at the other end. Clamping down on the people who overproduce and are least qualified to do so."

"Birth control for the morons? The Jukes and Kallikaks?"

"Yeah."

"Too difficult. They fornicate when drunk."

"Then set your lab wizards to find an easy, lasting system. They ought to work toward stopping the output of predefeated babies--of society-defeating hordes of nitwits--

as a compensatory duty for working on longevity and the diseases of old age. Fill the drugstores with something you take a sip of that'll sterilize you for five years straight.

Chocolate flavor. And back it with national advertising."

"Try to sell that idea! Every church would say it would mean the suicide of the race."

"Suicide of church members, maybe! Kidding aside, the more intelligent specimens of mankind, who do use birth control, still do have offspring--on purpose. It's just that they're outnumbered--and the net result is genetic decline."

"What else-in the better world?"

"No mummery about sex. No mysteries. The young allowed to develop according to their impulses--without shame or restraint so long as they aren't hurtful. The sex manners and aesthetics of the mature built upon that background of unashamed, free experience."

"And what would those manners be?" "Don't ask me! I'm a shame-produced human gimmick, myself."

"You're welching!"

"Not exactly. I suspect--in the better world--sex would be such a different set of ideas and acts and experiences and feelings that we can't even imagine them."

"Nobody would dare bring up kids that way."

"People already have dared. A school in England does it. A school for difficult kids--not the socially elite specimens. And they turn out fine. Normal; and nice people.

Which is something you definitely cannot say of the kids turned out by our own reform schools."

"It's hard to believe," Tom said.

"Isn't it! That's the trouble with truth--these days."

We went on talking for a long while about the better world.

As we designed it, that hot night, I kept thinking how much of our envisioned heaven-on-earth was constituted of what are now considered to be mortal sins.

By and by, Tom said, "Half the doctors in the Utopia would be psychiatrists-right?"

"No."

"Doesn't it follow--in your idea of the state of things? Half the people who go to doctors, you say, have psychological causes for their physical symptoms. And I'd just about agree. Half the hospital beds are occupied by nuts."

"The better world, though, is designed to keep people from getting neuroses and psychoses--individually. And to stop the massive neuroses and psychoses of nations and races."

"So it is!" He chuckled. "That's your everlasting premise, isn't it? If all the people understood themselves, they'd live according to their understanding, and be well, wise and happy, if not particularly wealthy."

"Doctors, like factories, would be scarcer in the better world."

"But what in hell would people
do?"

"Oh--they'd do unto others as they'd be done by. And they'd add a step even to the Golden Rule. They'd do unto the unborn generations as they would wish their ancestors had done unto them. The existing Golden Rule--which nobody practices anyhow--is objective. Its subjective counterpart refers to the people to come, not the people around at the moment. That's the Golden Rule of instinct--what instinct is all about. Evolution. The increase of consciousness down the aeons. Obvious, isn't it--that the history of evolution steadily spells increasing consciousness? Logical, therefore, that such is the inevitable bent of the future of life--as life is conveyed in man, or as it might someday be conveyed in another form, if man doesn't catch on, consciously, to the scheme behind his consciousness."

"Biological immortality," Tom said.

"Psychobiological immortality. Only--modern man, being so pompous about what goes on in his cortex and repressing so much of what goes on in the rest of his brain, has construed the 'immortal' aspect of instinct as a property of his ego. The natural urge to live through his species, through kids--to love, that is--to be man's father--is drained off into the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy eternity."

"Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that personal immortality. Hard to shake."

"Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. It's a childish mistake. But even a child, when it's mistaken about the actual nature of an instinct, still has as powerful a compulsion in his error as he would have if he were correct. Say he's frightened by something that isn't really frightful: he's still just as much afraid. And we--most of us--are in that state about pretty much all of our inner selves."

"And have been, you think, for a long while?"

"Sure.
Since thousands of years before Christ. You guys in medicine ought to quit studying tissue per se--and study its functioning some more. Contemporary man--as a rule--never gets even a glimmering of how his personality is split and how the conscious part can bamboozle the unconscious part--and believe it has got away with it. You know the fact--you ignore the implications. For instance, Tom, we actually see upside-down, right?"