And the Greek message was a meaningful phrase. I pulled out the copy of Thucydides I had gotten from the library and checked on the references the professor had given me. It checked out.
Pride. Rule by force. Finally, unnecessary cruelty. I flipped through several books on Greek history. It was that philosophy that led to the downfall of Athens. It motivated the war that ended the golden age of Athens. It ruined her alliances. Finally, it lost the war for her.
That message, then, had a meaning. If not a purpose.
The others.
The Louis XV bed. Was that message a reflection of the times or a cause of the mores it implied? It had a result. Louis XV said, “Apres moi, le deluge.” And there sure was. Heads rolled the next generation.
MOVE TO THE CITY. A direct command.
That one set me thinking. The growth of the factory. The move to the city. Inventions or no inventions, would the Industrial Revolution have come about merely because the means for it were there? Why were the means for it not there just as well in the seventeenth century? The sixteenth? Or even earlier.
Why were the Greeks, who displayed such outstanding ability in all other ways, so technologically backward? Could they envision no other way of life?
Or was it because they were not motivated that way?
They had fire and metal and craft to work it.
They had brains and world enough and time.
They even had legends of robots. There were the automatic handmaidens of silver and gold wrought by Hephaestus to serve the gods on Olympus. There was the brazen man Talus who guarded the island of Crete for King Minos.
And yet all their work was done by hand.
Then take the Chinese. All the centuries they had gunpowder they used it for toys. And yet they fought wars. Did no one think of using gunpowder for weapons?
It’s not the circumstances of life that matter, I decided. It’s the motivation.
Where does motivation come from?
When I asked myself this question I had to get up and pour myself a drink. For the question suddenly slid into the question I had really been after when I sought to find what the messages meant. What I really wanted to know was where they came from.
My reaction was instinctive. I looked upward.
“I know you’re there,” I shouted. “Now I know you’re there. Who are you?”
There was only the silence of my familiar, frowzy sitting room. The worn furniture, tired with years of living with me, seemed to look at me curiously. What answer did I expect?
It occurred to me, briefly, to wonder if I were being blasphemous. Then I dismissed the thought as illogical. The creator has no need for such crude methods of communication.
My eyes dropped to the floor. your credit is good. Sure that motivated us now. It had become the entire basis of our economy. Let people start doubting it and what would result? Not a local depression. A free-world depression. The pivot would break and life would come tumbling around our shoulders. Then there would be too many angry men. What matter which side would start the war? If men are angry enough, they can destroy the world. The means are too easy now.
However, a depression wasn’t likely. Nobody needs to be told, your credit is good. We just assume it. We live on it.
We live, I concluded, on some one else’s motivation. Have been.
Why? Are we animals in someone’s zoo? A giant child’s toy? A sociological experiment of some other race?
O.K. So I knew we were being motivated by subliminal suggestion. Free will was a laugh. How would I tell the world?
Make a speech? Write letters to the paper? Write my congressman?
I could make quite a splash in California, I knew. But that wasn’t the sort of thing I had in mind.
It’s the classic situation. If I did the wrong thing once I’d be considered a crackpot forever.
I thought of getting in touch with Dr. Rhine at Duke. But then my problem was not one in para-psychology. It was a physical reality. It should be explainable in molecular terms—the messages were there, on matter, calculated to appear just below the level of conscious sight. They must make at least some faint disturbance in the matter on which they were printed. Some discoverable disturbance.
And their effect was a psychological fact. Who would be interested? Psychologists.
How would I find those least likely to laugh at me?
I thought of calling one of the big Foundations and finding out who had been given grants to work on psychological problems. But that was too big. My problem was specialized. And I didn’t know which Foundation would have it.
Finally I called the public library and said I wanted to find out who could help me with a problem in subliminal motivation. They dug out their lists of research teams. There were plenty of them. I had my choice.
The one I finally settled on was a semi-military psychological research program studying cultural motivation. It was a good choice.
It was a small, tense man who interviewed me. He held a cold pipe and kept glancing at it as though it were going to make some remark. Dr. Thane was his name. When I’d finished my story he lighted the pipe and smoked for a moment. Not purposely leaving me hanging in the air and waiting to see his reaction. Pondering what he would say to me in turn. Then he put the pipe down. He did not have the annoying habit of clattering his pipe between his teeth as he spoke.
“You have remarkable insight,” he said, meaning it. “Most people don’t trust their own senses any more. We just assume they’re distorted. One of the bad side-effects of scientific training. We tend to forget that all information starts with the senses in the first place. And science has nothing so subtle to offer as the human eye.”
“In other words,” I said, amazed that it had turned out to be so easy, “you believe my story.”
He smiled, splitting the bleached face that went with his small, tense frame. “Nothing so naive. It’s not a matter of evaluating your sincerity. It happens I’ve got a team Working on these messages. But let me say here and now I didn’t know they were messages. You’ve furnished the most valuable information we’ve had so far.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it sounds to me like you’re making paradoxes. If you didn’t know there were messages, how could you be looking for them? I don’t understand.”
He lighted the pipe again, blowing smoke into the pleasant litter of books and papers on his desk. A man not given to the pigeon-holing and precision that keeps you on the mere edges of ideas. I liked him. The shared smoke that drifted around the office made me feel less strange and presumptuous.
“You started out with the messages and ended up with the theory. Because you had the native good sense to trust yourself.
“We went at it from the other end. We started out with the theory and ended up one step short of the message.”
“What theory?”
“Our project was a study in motivation. We’re attached to psychological warfare. What we wanted to know was what had motivated the great cultural changes of history. Our ultimate interest, of course, was to be able to motivate cultural changes for the better, instead of for the worse, as sometimes happens in history. Particularly, we would like to be able to motivate the enemy by psychological infiltration in case of war. Hell, not in case of war. Right now. Before a war makes everything too late.
“I’m not a psychologist. I’m a historian. But I don’t make a move without a psychologist at my elbow. I don’t pretend that a knowledge of what people have done in the past gives you a knowledge of why they did it.
“So we looked for motivation and came to the same conclusion as you did when you thought the problem through. All I can add to what you’ve told me is that you’ve got experts backing you up.”
“Then you found no real motivation from within the . . . do you call it culture?”
“We have to call it something. Yes. No motivation. Now don’t get me wrong. A lot of people would quarrel with this. A lot of experts. But as far as we’re concerned, we’re sati
sfied that the great cultural changes of history have been motivated from outside in some way.
“Subliminal motivation was only one of the possibilities we explored. Several people on the project were particularly interested in subliminal motivation because it is a new thing and we’re just beginning to crack the surface of its possibilities. I hoped my mixed metaphors don’t get on your nerves.”
“I don’t know them from the straight kind.”
“I’ve spent too much time among scholars. You get self-conscious about things like that. I cut out cigarettes and took up a pipe because my colleagues kept saying, ‘As a cigarette should.’
“Well, we settled on a characteristic of our culture to study. A recent change. The switch from a saving to a debt economy.
“Do you have any idea what would happen if people suddenly stopped spending more than they have and started saving?”
“I’ve thought about it,” I said. “Our economy would break down. A depression would hit. Then war. The end of things.”
“You’re more right than you know. I am personally acquainted with a man who could press a button and end the world. Not immediately, of course. But he could make a good beginning.”
The dead pipe had gone stale and unpleasant. Dr. Thane stoked it up again and blew fresh smoke around.
“We began to investigate, as I say, the phenomenon of a credit society. We picked certain typical suburbs where expenditures far outrun income. We found people blithely running into more debt than they could pay off in a hundred years. Most people actually didn’t know how much money they owed. All they knew was how much the payments, were every month. Were they worried? Not on your life. They felt that what they were doing was right. The proper way to live. They would feel guilty doing anything else.
“We had depth psychologists to find all this out. Don’t ask me how they work. That’s their job and they know how to do it.
“Then they tried to find out why. Why do these people, raised in a crippling depression, trained from childhood to believe that a penny saved is a penny earned, suddenly spend money they don’t have and feel virtuous about it?
“Do you know what answer they got out of it?”
“What?”
“None. There are certain rules of human behavior. Latitudinous rules, I grant you, but rules beyond which we have to classify a person as insane. Either all these people were so untrue to their own personalities as to be insane, or someone was wabbling with their minds. Someone or something.
“Some outside force was motivating them. How?
“We all know about the power of advertising. We also know that advertising does not create anything in the mind. It can only pull out what’s already there.
People can turn advertising on or off at will.
“Something was at work which could not be turned on and off at will. It was with this realization that we really began to look for subliminal motivation, a picture in a color or an angle just below conscious perception. Rather like camouflage, where you consciously accept the deceit but something you are not conscious of in your mind may not.
“We’ve got scientists working on chromato-sensitive instruments. It’s not just a matter of detecting color. It’s a matter of detecting a certain kind of color and perhaps alien matter in almost infinitesimal quantities. Only enough to be barely invisible, if you see what I mean. And perhaps set at an angle oblique to normal vision.”
“So they couldn’t find it.”
“Oh, yes, they found it. Minute variations in wave patterns. On the side of a house. But we couldn’t see it, even with the instruments we had. We’re still working on it.
“But I don’t need to tell you now how glad to see you we are.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” I said. “You’ve told me all I need to know about how you investigate the subliminal motivation. But there’s something else that’s even more important.
“I don’t sleep nights any more.”
He sighed and held on to his pipe as though it was the last sure thing in the universe. “I know,” he said. “It’s so monstrous we hardly ever talk about it here. Where do the messages come from?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. But I do think this. Given time and money, we may find out. First we investigate the messages. Find out what they mean. Find out what sort of material or force they’re made of. Then we can experiment. Rub them out, when we know how. See what happens. Write some ourselves. Write a question and see if it’s answered. All we need is time and money. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have plenty of both.
“Maybe whoever or whatever put the messages there is dead or gone now. Then all we have to do is erase the messages and see what the human race can do with a few centuries of real free will.”
“And suppose whoever or whatever is not gone?”
“How can I answer that?” Dr. Thane answered almost irritably. “I can’t make your mind comfortable. My own mind isn’t comfortable. We just have to face it and fight it our own way. We can’t even run. There’s no place to run to. And you might as well understand right now that you’re top secret, high priority security and all the other mumbo jumbo.”
“Because of what you told me?”
“Because of what you already knew. We’re keeping you here. In the project building.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t mind helping. I’ll do everything humanly possible to help you. Die, if necessary. But I don’t want to be stuck in a prison. I’ve got my own life, too.”
“You want to keep it, don’t you?”
I stood up. The room was stale and a little chilly. “Is that a threat?”
“Oh, sit down,” Dr. Thane said. “Do you think I carry a space gun? You need to stay here for your own protection. Didn’t it occur to you that who or what is behind the messages might have some interest in not having its little game interfered with? That you might furnish some clue we might otherwise never find? Here we have guards.”
I was sitting down. Hot on the outside and getting colder within, down to a little point of ice somewhere deep inside. “I have a feeling guards wouldn’t do much good.”
“Maybe not. Maybe this is all cloak and dagger for nothing. Still, I think you’d better stay.”
“I will,” I said stiffly.
“Tomorrow we’ll dig in,” Dr. Thane said. “Get to sleep early and prepare to be busier than you’ve ever been in your life. We’ll be at it every minute.”
I don’t know how you prepare to be busy. I had a reasonably comfortable little room, with a single bed and a wash stand against one wall. The walls were that “soothing” shade of green that you come to associate with the impersonal desolation of public places.
I’m used to sleeping in strange places. But I’m not used to having guards pacing discreetly outside my door. It made me feel silly.
I opened the door. “You boys like a drink?” I called, for I had found the wherewithall in a cabinet under the washstand.
“No, thank you, sir,” the tall one said.
“Not allowed to,” the short one said. “Try us after six o’clock in the morning.”
“I’m afraid that would try me,” I confessed.
I got in bed and tried to sleep. Finally I got up and opened the door again.
“If you’re hungry,” I offered, “you can go get a sandwich or something and say I sent you for one.”
“Thanks, anyway,” the tall one said.
“I can’t eat when I’m on a top security job like this,” the short one said. “Nervous.”
“It’s worth our necks to take our eyes off your door,” the tall one said.
“Well, I guess you’re used to it,” I said, wondering if I’d ever get used to it.
I closed the door and dug my head into the pillow to dull the soft, regular tread of their feet on the rubber tile. The late traffic noises of the night came dimly and sporadically through the walls. I finally gave myself up to the dark comfort of my blankets and
a vast silence.
A vast silence!
I sat up and switched on the light. I don’t know how much time had passed. The room was cold as a vault and the forgotten alienness of a strange room in the night came back to me from some distant memory.
“Guard!” I called, hearing my word fall blank on the wall. There was no sound of their feet on the tile.
I leapt out of bed and swung the door open, half afraid it would be locked.
There were no guards. Just beyond the door, on the dark tiles, was the ultimate message.
“Dr. Thane!” I called, running down the hall, to his office.
A light penciled under the door. He opened it, rumpled and looking almost childlike in a pair of over-sized white pajamas.
“Dr. Thane, I . . .” I wasn’t sure I could tell him.
“You’ve gotten a new message,” he guessed.
I nodded. “I don’t know that there’s any use telling you. Now there won’t be time.”
“Tell me anyhow.”
I told him.
He was silent for a moment, calculating the movements of the future.
“No,” he said, “Not time. And soon, perhaps, not even world enough.”
The message grins up at me from every street corner.
SAVE FOR THE FUTURE.
THE END
1960
A LITTLE HUMAN CONTACT
Rosel George Browns last story here, “Lost in Translation” had whimsically to do with a trip back to ancient Greece; the present example of the lady’s rounded talents concerns the day-to-unusual-day problems of a young mother of the future—familiar problems, but with a difference.
NOW JUST WHY IS IT THAT MEN are so different from women? And how did it happen that I was faced not only with Bob, who became more inexplicable each day, but also with his offspring, who was even less explicable. Indeed, I could see how women used to feel like Vessels, for I could find no vestige of my heredity in son Robert.
I floated disconsolately in the foamy Floatwater, trying to feel as luxuriant as the ladies in the advertisements. I calculated I should have at least eight extra minutes in which to relax and think. The thing to do was relax first . . . provided Robert didn’t once more start stuffing the good china down the garbage grinder. What a noise that had made! And my mother-in-law had said, What happened to the Large Vegetable Bowl I gave you and Bob for your anniversary? And then, I don’t understand how Robert got so . . .
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