Star SHort Novels - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

  In Spain that day, though word of it did not reach us at once, all the adult population was very substantially reduced. Germany, with its weakness for leaders, has provided more recruits than any other country to the anti-war crusade of Wilbur Oren. The Orenites, who in this country are fanatic enough, God knows, have in Germany added a mysticism to their fanaticism which makes Orenism nothing less than a religion. Nowhere has there been such a cleavage between Chileking practices and the Smalfri practices which they superseded as in Germany.

  * * * * * * * *

  Once again and in spite of my resolution, I find myself slipping into matters of opinion, abandoning my chronological outline, writing of happenings as familiar to you as to myself. These slips will no doubt be taken care of in the offices of the Commemoration Commission. I find it easier to write as I please, and trust them to delete.

  In San Francisco on that first day of general Reduction and Amplification we were not only subjected to an overwhelming emotional shock, but deprived of those material conveniences which we had come to believe were essential. Not a streetcar, not a bus moved. Telephone and telegraph services were completely disrupted. Some communication was kept up by means of amateur short-wave radio operators. The commercial radio systems were silent. Stores did not open. Restaurants and movie houses were locked.

  Toward evening of that first day when the news began to get about that the catastrophe was general, the roads began to fill up again—carloads of gaping, bewildered Smalfri piloted by proud Chilekings; Smalfri, reassured, and at the same time stunned and shocked to see in a thousand other dwarfed ones their own lineaments. This riding about in cars did not last long. California had gasoline again, sooner than other states, for we had no long-distance transportation problems to cope with and we had stores of gas on hand—but it was years before there were again long lines of cars bumper to bumper on the highways.

  I found that I had no car at all. Mary Frances pedalled up to the Presidio about noon on a borrowed bicycle to get news of me for her mother.

  “Where is the car?” I asked her.

  “Elizabeth has it today.”

  “Elizabeth?” I wanted to know.

  “Yes, you know. My friend Elizabeth Purdy. They don’t have a car so I said she could have ours every other day. They need it a lot.”

  Oh, the seeds of almost everything that followed were right there in the happenings of that first week, had we then had the eyes to see them. Little laxities, concessions, which in the emotional upheaval of the time we permitted, were seized and held by the Chilekings, made an entering wedge which, in time, separated us Smalfri from every right and privilege we had ever enjoyed as parents and adults.

  When, twelve years afterwards, the Smalfri made a united effort to regain their control of the world, it was too late. I knew it at the time, though I was heart and soul in the movement. Useless blood was shed then. Had the blow been struck earlier, before the Chilekings had become so expert technologically, we would have won. But we waited too long. And though I shall never be content with this world reversal under which I live, it has advantages which I will not try to deny. Our present custom of work in youth and study in age, for instance, has proved far more feasible than I ever anticipated.

  It grew, naturally enough, out of the necessity in those early days of having the Chilekings carry on the work of which we were incapable. Of course we could have made no headway with this, had the Chilekings been of another mind. But they would have done it even had we opposed them. They were determined to drive the tractors, man the generators, operate the grain elevators. They left their schools as though leaving prisons. We had at that time in our schools a philosophy of learning by doing—but what the students learned by doing was usually of no possible use to them outside the school room. They had looms on which they made little rugs—or they made clay jugs like those of the Egyptians, or Indian bows and arrows, and they knew how to build a stockade like those of our pioneer forefathers, or duplicate the slave galleys of the Roman Empire. But out of school there was hardly any demand for, or pleasure in, stockades or slave galleys—and even while they made these things the Chilekings have confessed they felt as if they were working with shadows. They knew well enough this was sugar, and not very palatable sugar, on a pill being rammed down their throats.

  Now, set loose among the realities of our own day, they learn processes, techniques, operational routines in weeks instead of months and years as in the old days. There were mistakes and fatalities of course, but they acquired these muscular patterns far faster than the Smalfri had ever been able to do. It began to. appear that our schools had been, not so much a place for teaching children, as a place where adults served as governors on the child’s natural learning speed.

  When the Chileking later becomes a Smalfri and takes up, if he wishes, his speculative and abstract studies, it appears that his learning habits have, as a result of this practical work, become so sharpened and acute that his progress here is also helped. And in his years of work he has gained a desire to relate his studies to the concrete world which gave them wonderfully increased point and validity.

  * * * * * * * *

  I have taken no pains to hide the fact that many things that have come with the Chileking reversal are to me lastingly intolerable; but I freely admit that this revolution is not one of them. It is still, I confess, a shock to see our great universities filled with these little, bearded, gnomish figures—these Peascods and Buttercups; see the gridirons and diamonds grass-grown. Organized athletics have become a thing of the past. It appears now that the young never had, actually, nearly as much pleasure in the bruising, semiprofessional collegiate sports as did the adults who were their spectators. Once out from under the directorial thumb of the adults there was a spontaneous abandonment of these grueling athletic contests and a growth of interest in rather ragged, so far as performance is concerned, spontaneous sports.

  Our system of universal compulsory education has naturally broken down. Now only those Smalfri who have some real hunger for learning go to school. The results are mixed but not wholly bad. It is certainly strange, for one who remembers the old world, to find men, like Goyen the painter, scarcely able to pick out the headlines and never twice spelling a word the same way. But it hasn’t seemed to hurt his painting. In the old days it often happened that a man who wrote or painted had scarcely ever smelled the real world. He put his nose into a book, and never took it out until he was twenty-six, when he then suspended it over a piece of foolscap and began writing.

  Oh, yes, the seeds of almost everything that has followed were seen in that first chaotic week. It is easy enough to say that we should have stopped it at the time. We did say “No,” and we were not listened to. And at that time a civil war between fathers and children was unthinkable.

  When, toward the end of that first week, certain foodstuffs began to grow scarce, the Chilekings made a collection of these scarce articles and apportioned them equally among the people. What could we do? They wielded the crowbars that broke in the doors of the warehouses, they drove the trucks that distributed the food.

  The economic structure was incapable of bearing the burden of this and similar quixoticisms. The profit system disappeared and today we have the uninspiring spectacle of men content simply to have a home and sufficient food; to travel a little, to have a few objects they believe to be beautiful, and to spend their Smalfrihood in study or in some unprofitable avocation. The memory of the great men of my youth has almost left the earth: men who did not permit their needs to become the measure of their productivity, but who accumulated oil fields and railroads and ships and factories. From a thousand chimneys there once poured the smoke of one man’s furnaces; he put wages into the hands of ten thousand men; in the banks he counted his reserves in the millions.

  * * * * * * * *

  But these spacious days are forever gone. And in large part, it is our fault. The Chilekings had received an unrealistic upbringing. There was a dichot
omy in their training which they were never able to bridge. We had permitted them to hear in school and in church the old sentimental platitudes about sharing their plenty. We continually said to them, “Don’t be selfish—give Johnny half,” considering this but a charming grace which they would give up when they left childhood behind. The trouble was that they came to power before childhood was left behind, and someone with more taste for irony that I might smile at the way in which they have proceeded to put us Smalfri over these same platitudinous hurdles.

  I think the chief trouble was that the Chilekings had no real conception of the significance of money. They had never had much themselves and they had been fairly content. Money to them was simply a metal that would take them to a show— or buy a bag of candy. They had no understanding whatever of money as a productive agent. They had no desire to have more of it than they needed for the day. They literally took no thought for the morrow. Well, you know as well as I where that has brought us. The Chilekings have been far more cruel and unscrupulous in their seizure of an individual’s property than the Smalfri would ever have been. Since they themselves are not interested in anything beyond their daily needs, they cannot enter into the minds of men more imaginative than themselves. They can see distributed without a qualm the properties men had spent a lifetime accumulating. Their only concern has been the anthill, beehive, regard of seeing that all have enough to eat and drink. It is as simple as that for them. And we Smalfri are helpless. I watched my own son David loading the Chileking trucks that first week.

  There have always been those who have opposed distributionism and we Smalfri who have kept faith with the old order have now and again been able to make numerous converts even among the Chilekings. This has usually proved extremely unrewarding labor however, for a Chileking seemed no sooner to be converted to reason than he was Subtracted. And Subtracted, he was of very little use to us in any actual overthrow of the Chilekings.

  Because of my firsthand knowledge, I know a report of the earliest meetings for “Chilesex” is expected of me. Inadvertently, hunting Mary Frances, who had slipped off to attend a “rally” she said, at one of the barracks, I happened in upon the first of these get-togethers. (Later, when the practice became more ritualistic and better organized such a phrase would not be suitable. At this state “get-together” is about right.)

  I am loath, in spite of expectations, to say anything at all about a practice so entirely repellent to me. After all I was brought up in an era in which sex was a private matter for adults, not a public one for adolescents. I am no historian, no anthropologist. Nor do their protestations that practices similar to those of our Chilekings have been common with primitive peoples throughout history move me. I am not a primitive and it was never my intention that my children should behave as if they were. Before the Chileking Era there was never a more demure, self-respecting, modest child than Mary Frances. One month after Inflation and she was behaving like a South Sea Islander in a grass hut.

  I know that such meetings and practices are today a commonplace. We see signs, “Chilesex Headquarters,” as openly displayed as, “Public Library,” or “Men’s Room.” “Meeting for Chilesex at Seven Tonight,” is as common now as “Choir Practice at Seven,” was in my youth. Familiarity has nevertheless not diminished either my disapproval nor my early feeling of shock, and I find it completely impossible to make any concrete report of what I encountered that first night in “A” barracks. Lighthearted, affectionate (they tell me) experimental sexual play on the part of Chilekings, some as young as twelve! How am I, for whom such matters were of life and death importance, to react to these Chileking practices?

  * * * * * * * *

  They tell me that these Chilesex activities are less seriously regarded by their participants than the activities of a communal reading hour! Chilekings hoot with unbelief when I tell them that in my day sexual union was so sacred a matter that men often shot their mates for obtaining sexual gratification outside a legal union, then committed suicide themselves. Sex was no trivial matter with us. Chilekings consider death for such a cause on a plane with death for reading a poem with an “illegal” person or for drinking an “unsanctified” soda. Sex has lost the deep, awful, and romantic meaning it had for us. I can not, I freely confess, understand what man’s deepest instinct can mean to those who have, from the time of puberty to marriage, expressed it quite freely. When I ask them they jibe at me. “Fun,” they answer and look down at me laughing, as if I were an insect, not a man, and unknowing about these matters. Fun! indeed.

  But how were we. to stop them? Once they had the upper hand physically over us, parents, and teachers, there was no longer any reason not to be public about practices which (they now tell us) were formerly quite commonly indulged in secretly. Children; it now appears, are born without shame, and since the Change, parents have been too preoccupied with their own troubles to instill in their offspring suitable feelings about sex. Since the Chilekings made full use, from the beginning, of our own contraceptive devices there has been surprisingly enough no increase in illegitimacy.

  But something is lost, I feel sure, in today’s marriages. There is no longer that sense of breathless wonder as the two young people approach the moment of unveiling. Weddings have become quite cheerful, unromantic, matter-of-fact. My feeling when I attend one is of witnessing the establishment of a partnership between two business associates, rather than the legalizing of the union of two tremulous, innocent, and yearning young bodies: which was marriage as we experienced it fifty years ago, I do assure you.

  * * * * * * * *

  My contention that Chilesex has taken the bloom off marriage and the romance out of the man-woman relationship is borne out by the fact that, once wedded, Chilekings cling to their original marriage beds with all the unimaginative obstinacy of a pair of ring-necked doves! Not that I do not believe in conjugal fidelity. I do, indeed. But the Chilekings practice this fidelity, once they are married, not as we did, because it was our duty, but because they can think of nothing better to do! Their imaginations have been depleted, their zest destroyed by their early experiences. They have, in fact, only derisive terms for those who seek romance outside of marriage. A “Go Babe,” as I have related earlier, is the name for a Smalfri of middle age. But an adulterous “Go Babe” is called by the Chilekings a “Slobabe.” Why? Because they think it is “slow,” that is, “stupid,” not to have experienced enough, learned enough in the “Meetings for Chilesex” to enable one to pick out a permanently satisfactory mate. The “Slobabe” is regarded today much as a retarded child was regarded in my time. No criticism is attached to his incompetence, rather a kind of pity.

  Now this is surely a far cry from the days of my youth when men and women took sex seriously enough to die for it. Or at least to kill for it. Are there any Paolas and Francescas today? Any Heros and Leanders? Any Tristrams and Iseults? Tristram today would be a “Slobabe.” Is this an advance in civilization?

  And though what has happened in the area of reproduction cannot be “blamed” on the Chilekings, and though from all I gather they like it as little as we, still it is part and parcel of the topsy-turvy world which is theirs. No Subtracted woman, whatever her age, bears children. But a woman who has never been Subtracted goes right on having children, if she wants to (and several have), until her death—even if she lives until she is in her seventies or eighties. I must say that I find a pregnant woman of seventy a shocking sight.

  A Subtracted man is capable of fathering children in unions with un-Subtracted women. Not many such unions exist however.

  The Amplified, as soon as they are sexually mature—and this maturity comes chronologically at the age it always has —can and do have children. The fact of early Chilesex together with the inability of the Subtracted to have children has induced early marriage and childbearing. Nevertheless the birth rate is falling off considerably and I foresee a time when we must . . .

  I know this is not what was asked of me by the Co
mmission. They want what “I saw,” not what “I think.” Well, they have the power to strike this out if they want. Or strike me. It won’t be the first time. I am an old man and a little one. But what I saw is locked behind my two eyes and is not to be exposed at command.

  One “eyewitness” event which Ican report with a free conscience is the first Chileking Meeting for Worship. I was there; through no desire on my part, it is true. Amy and I were bundled up willy-nilly, and taken there for the good of our souls—so we were told. My own feeling is that the Chilekings knew that the whole experience would be most miserable for us and for this reason forced it sadistically upon us. When any group has the power the Chilekings have over us Smalfri it is impossible to determine to what extent they are exercising power for its own sake and covering up by telling us it is for our own “good.”

  Whatever their reasons, Mary Frances told her mother and me the day before, that there would be a service of prayer and thanksgiving in the cathedral next morning at dawn. This was toward the end of the third month of the Chileking Era.

  “Dawn?” I asked, seizing, as one does in astonishment, upon the least significant detail of all.