Killdozer!

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “The first successful synthetics, or plastics, as they were then known,” said the Drip didactically, “were bakelite (so called because as a thermosetting plastic it was baked, and it was light) and celluloid. They were inv—”

  “THE REASON WE—” shouted Jay over this local interference, “—called you in is that we have run into a logistic problem. We can synthesize any element—most in commercial quantities—and with them we can compound any synthetic. But almost without exception, our transmutatory processes are exothermic. Theoretically we can absorb a good part of this excess heat in compounding and treating our thermosetting materials; but even under ideal conditions—are you listening?”

  “No,” said the Drip. “I was, but I can’t see the bearing of all this on my work. If you’ll excuse me, and give me another appointment, I’ll come back when you’ve gotten to the point.”

  Jay puckered up slowly and completely like a two-year-old just realizing that mother meant it when she said no dessert. “Pellit,” he whispered, “why does he do that?”

  “That,” beamed the Drip, “is rudeness. It was the basic tone of the entire pre- Fourth and Last age. Men were men in those days. Friction between ego and ego, between nation and nation—that was a holy tradition. In those golden days, ‘the common weal’ could not be presented as an unanswerable argument to the desired action of man or state, as it is among you pantywaists. The man who earned the respect of the people was the man who forcibly bent the public mind to his own will. I will not freely co-operate with the internal stasis of this effeminately harmonious culture. I must be bludgeoned and forced into it against my will. I will uphold my position as a social misfit. I am the most offensive man in the known universe, and I hold my offensiveness as a sacred trust.” He leaned over and smashed his fist down on the yielding synthetic of Jay’s desktop. “What your forebears had during their glorious history, the one constant in the ebb and flow of their social evolution was the ‘underdog.’ The underdog was the minority group, the constant author of change through strife, the source of the magnificently gruesome virility of the age. I am the underdog. I will be exploited. I will be oppressed, whether you like it or not. See?”

  “This,” said Jay Scanlon faintly, “is not reasonable.”

  “A strong term to use,” said Pellit. “Remember, ‘That which exists is reasonable.’ Second Book, G.E. Schenectady.”

  “Thank you, Pellit. The Scriptures help.”

  “G.E. Schenectady,” said the Drip gratuitously, “was, it may surprise you to learn, merely a pseudonym for the pamphleteer who composed your precious Edicts of Efficiency. The name originally applied to a corporation organized for private profit, circa—”

  “Stop it!” Jay screamed. “I will not have another word of your iconoclastic semanticism in my office!”

  “The Basic Tenet,” said Mauritius suavely. “ ‘Freedom of utterance in gatherings of three or more.’ ”

  “I yield,” said Jay, with the traditional conditioned reflex. “I ask that you restate and contin—”

  “No, No!” cried the Drip eagerly. “Don’t retract! Stop that uncerebrated mouthing! Don’t you see that at last you are oppressing me? I’m persecuted. I’m ground under your heel. What was it you were saying about heat?”

  Feeling that the enemy had encircled him only to reinforce his lines of supply, Jay sat and gaped. Pellit grabbed the opportunity.

  “What Jay was getting at,” he said, “was that although it is perfectly possible for us to transmute and synthesize all of our raw materials for this project, most of the processes involved are exothermic. What are we going to do with all the excess heat we can’t use? We could circulate lake water, up to a point; but what to do when the lake warms up? In this one job alone we will release enough heat to raise all of the Great Lakes over 90°C—let alone just Lake Michigan.”

  “You’ll kill all the fish.”

  “Fish? That’s the least of it! Have you any idea of how long it would take for those bodies of water to cool? Fifty-eight trillion cubic meters of water at 90°? Over ten years. I think we could hypothesize an annual average loss of a possible 6.5°. It would be anyway twelve, possibly fifteen years. That’s pasteurization with a vengeance! The lakes would be completely sterile. All of the bacteria of decomposition, all of the algae necessary to the carbon-oxygen cycle would perish. Can you imagine the windstorms, the rain, over those millions of square kilometers of hot area?” He shook his head. “And I’m just fooling with theory. All that would be true if we could distribute the heat evenly all over all of the lakes simultaneously. We can’t. We couldn’t hope to construct circulators which would do more than concentrate our surplus heat over more than the southern half of Lake Michigan. And then what would we have? In two months, a steaming swamp around Chicago Center, with a constant holocaust going on two hundred miles north as the cold water rushed in to compensate for our vaporization loss. Where is our advantage then, of floating the hull? What of the men who will have to work on it?”

  “Why don’t you use the ocean?”

  “For the same reason. Too much heat locally distributed. You know our synthetics. Strong, but very light. That hull, big as it will be, won’t displace much. Can you imagine the winds we’d generate offshore in the sea? Can you imagine what the windage stresses on a hull of that size would be? At least, in Lake Michigan, we can train repulsors from the hull to the shore on both sides at all times and in all stages of construction. And we won’t have ocean storms to fight.”

  “Very fine,” said the Drip. “So your precious efficient technology has fallen down!” He leered delightedly. “That, my friend, is the price of technical skill when it advances out of proportion to its milieu. As long as a machine civilization accomplishes nothing which could not be duplicated by muscle-power, however inefficiently, then it cannot start anything it is impossible to finish.”

  “All right,” said Pellit resignedly. “We’ve substituted skill for strength to such a degree that when we need material in volume, we find that our techniques have outpaced themselves. How did a business discussion get turned into this ‘you rub my nose in it and I’ll rub yours,’ anyway?”

  “We need carbon,” said Jay desperately, recovering from his own speechlessness, as Pellit relapsed exasperatedly into his. “We need it in bulk. And silicon. And boron. Of all the elements, those are the three which are easiest to compound into synthetic molecules. As I have said, we can synthesize what we need from lake water, air, and the surrounding earth, but it is impracticable. The alternative is to locate large deposits of specifically what we need, and extract it in bulk from the earth.”

  “That’s mining,” said the Drip. “There is a twenty-third century legend that youth was conscripted to work in mines. Anyhow, all young people were known as miners at one period.”

  “Mining? All right; call it that. And what we want from you is an idea of the equipment and techniques used when mass extraction of natural resources was an industry.”

  Mauritius the Drip pulled at his lower lip and looked at the ceiling. “That might be hard to get. My sources in the Archives are mixed, incomplete, and hopelessly jumbled by fools who, through the ages, have superimposed one filing system after another on the material. But I think I know …” He snapped his fingers suddenly and sat upright. “Bulldozer!” he roared. “Bulldozer!”

  Jay’s breath caught with such violence that he inhaled two cc of saliva and fell back choking. Pellit blanched and stood up. “Mauritius! You forget where you are! A roomful of stenos right through that open door, work to be—” He leaned over and looked at the meter. “Forty-three minutes lost time. Oh Lord—four ‘show cause’ requests and two resignations. Why can’t you keep your offensiveness inside this office?”

  Jay, red-eyed and gasping, said thinly, “He couldn’t,” with the two-tenths of a voice that was left him. “I fell against the general annunciator control. That w-word of his went all over this section.”

  Mauritius grinned
jovially. “Ah, the power of semantics! Isn’t it wonderful? Jay Scanlon, I sincerely wish I had meant to do that, but I didn’t. So help me, that was the name of the machine they used; and a remarkable machine it was. I can see its ideological impact on the times, and its legendary quality through the Thousand-Year Dark. From a mechanical quintessence of primal brute power, the word became associated with any basic force, or driving urge. And then it became particularized. So nowadays bad children write it on fences. Dear dear.” He rose. “I’m going to the Archives now and see what I can dig up on it. By the way. I just thought of another way to be offensive. I am a historical purist. I refuse to have anything to do with your project unless you agree to use the proper names of the machines involved. That means every requisition, every shop order, every transcription, every job schedule.” He laughed. His bony face was startlingly presentable when he did that. “And if you don’t you bulldozers can go bulldoze yourselves.” He strode through the Anson dilator, which blinked shut behind him.

  “Oh …” said Jay Scanlon; and it probably the most eloquent syllable he had ever uttered. He looked sadly at Pellit and shook his head. “Pellit, can’t we get somebody else?”

  Pellit shook his head too. “Can’t do it, Jay. He’s the only one. He lives in the Archives, you know. He’s the only man alive who knows anything about them. He’s willfully broken a two-thousand-year old tradition by his work. You know that. You know that after the Fourth and Last humanity slipped into the Thousand-Year Dark and went static. What few men that were left had enormous resources; there was no further cause for the age-old frictions that had culminated in the Fourth and Last. Their heritage was blood and force and death, and they turned their backs on it. All we are taught about that desperate period of human history has come to us through legend—and through the rare efforts of Mauritius and his few predecessors.”

  “And Segundo Revenir.”

  “Ah—Segundo was different. What an extraordinary man he must have been! Can you imagine yourself doing what he did? Can you imagine him, musing about his tragic and suicidal culture, fired with such a driving, burning faith in humanity and its future? It was his belief in the future that has become the basic philosophy of modern society. that is Onward and Upward. It was his lifetime of labor that built the Vaults of Constructive Culture, and the Call.”

  “Just what was the nature of the Call, Pellit? I don’t think I ever thought much about it, except as one those things you learn about when you are very young and accept for life.”

  “Can’t tell you precisely; it’s out of my technology. But as I understand it, it was a gravitonic torsion-field set up over the Vaults, which as you know were buried in the center of the South American continent. The field varied regularly in intensity, enough to set up a signal detectable anywhere on Earth—when humans had shaken off enough of their stasis to build a machine which would detect it. The genius of the man! For a thousand lost years, mankind lived its useless, scavenging life in the great automatic cities—lived on the stored resources of the billions who died in the Fourth and Last—and around them beat ceaselessly the undetected Call. Only when Mickle and Bruder, two thousand years ago, discovered—or rediscovered—the principles of magnetronics and detected it, only then did men know that the Call existed. It was Svoboda who build the direction-finders which located the Vaults, and discovered Segundo Revenir’s work.

  “Segundo! Could mankind produce such a man again? We work and build for the future, on Segundo’s precept that all our history is in tomorrow, and the morrow of tomorrow; but is there a man alive who could do what he did? He knew his tomorrows. He predicted the Third, and the Fourth and Last and the Thousand-Year Dark; and when he had reasoned it out he began to build the Vaults. He knew that only a handful would survive, and that for centuries they would have resources, and that while they had they would not progress. So in his Vaults he put basic examples of all mankind’s Constructive Technology; not the fumbling, imperfect commercial applications, but careful and concise demonstrations of the principles involved in each science, clear and simple graphs and models of the three nuclear theories—gravitic, electronic, magnetic—and an indication of the few possible lines of research beyond which even he could not go at the time. He gave us a universal language so that we could understand what he had done.”

  “This is doing me good,” said Jay, figuratively smoothing the feathers Mauritius had ruffled. “How on earth did you get the story as detailed as that?”

  “I like it. Anybody can get it; few do, because it’s traditional, basic, and—well, right. I—studied for the priesthood, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know. Then you’re—”

  “A misfit? Yes, Jay. Don’t look so shocked! It happens, you know. Of course, I’m not like Mauritius. He’s an extreme and probably hopeless case. I simply developed, belatedly, a bent for research too powerful to exist in the carefully balanced priestly mind. So my training was changed to public relations research, to the greater glory of the Wholly Efficient.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not used to unusual things—who is? Go on about Segundo.”

  “Segundo … He was obviously a superb technologist; but his greatest brilliance was in his prophetic ability. All of his stupendous work was predicated on the belief that when the bulk of humanity killed itself off, the tiny remainder would at last learn what it had refused to learn in all its previous history: the fear of mankind. And he was right. Only man’s fear of mankind, and the infinite resources available, checked the ancient cycle of race suicide. The design of the Call was part of this. What magnificent reasoning! If any social unit survived, it would exist on the principles of sharing, and it would unite in an attitude of shame and horror of the past. As long as it could live on the stored resources of the dead, it would not progress. The one danger-point would be when the end of the resources was in sight; then man’s brutal acquisitiveness might assert itself. But Segundo’s faith in humanity told him that when that happened someone would take the technological step necessary to develop magnetronics, the key technique of transmutation. Mickle and Bruder did it—and the Vaults were found. Can you see it? If humanity were to die, Segundo was ready to let it die in ignorance. If it wanted to live, it would help itself and when it helped itself, Segundo’s great gift would fall at its feet, and humanity need never want for anything again.”

  “And what of Segundo himself? Is it really true that nothing is known of the man?”

  “Quite true. Whether Segundo Revenir was a man or a group of men is something we shall never know. Certainly one man alone could not have built and filled the vaults. And it’s very unlikely, though possible, that any one man could have had such a detailed grasp of all the sciences. In any case, Segundo’s effacement of himself was only part of his faith. He had culled the best of his culture, and the worst was dead. But he obviously felt that he himself was a part of the worst, since he had lived in that tragic time. He did not do his work to perpetuate himself, but purely to immortalize what was constructive in humanity. So when he had finished his work, after he had designed the Call mechanism—a mechanism technologically centuries ahead of his contemporary science—he activated it, closed the vaults and went off into the jungle to die. He must have been very old, and he probably went unarmed. Did he return to civilization, to watch the frightful fulfillment of his prophecies? Probably not; I don’t think he would trust his secret even to himself should he grow into a cackling and incautious senility. We know only that his secret was kept, and I think we can assume that he simply gave himself up to the jungle, for what value the jungle could get out of such an infinitesimal and unimportant package of tainted hydrocarbons.”

  Jay stared thoughtfully at the erg-per-worker meter. “And he never knew whether he succeeded.”

  “Nonsense!” snapped Pellit. “He was a prophet. He knew.”

  Jay flashed him an understanding glance. “And that’s why, in his only message, he expressly forbade us to worship a man, and instead reverence
the ideals of Efficiency and the History of the Future.”

  “That’s right. Mankind’s achievements outside of what was in the Vaults were hardly representative of anything that could be worshipped.”

  “What about the Inconsistencies?”

  “I wish something could be done about that name! They weren’t inconsistencies, by any means, those two precepts. Segundo asked that we retain the old calendar, at the same time he asked us to turn our backs on our history. Can’t you see why? The date—any day’s date—is a written phrase with a semantic impact. No human being ever disregards the date for very long. Therefore, if only subconsciously, we realize when we read or write or speak the date that human history is a little over two thousand years older than we, with our stability and progress, care to remember with pride. It’s a reminder as constant and directional as the Call itself, and it helps to keep alive the one thing of value we learned from the Fourth and Last—man’s fear of mankind. It reminds us that our origins were in horror and pain and shame, and it says a dozen times a day to millions of human beings, ‘don’t let it happen again.’ The other so-called inconsistency is the thing that started this discussion—good grief, it’s getting late—I’m sorry, Jay.”

  “I can’t think this is lost time. Go ahead.”

  “The existence of the Archives. Segundo warned against past human history in the strongest possible terms, in everything he did, including the way he died. He made it logically possible to ignore the past, by the gateways of achievement he opened for the future. And then he gave the location of the Archives, asked that they be opened and that free access to them be permitted. It does seem inconsistent, doesn’t it?