The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  “I’ve seen pictures,” Gaunt said. He hadn’t been asked to sit or to take off his coat. He did both. “Somewhere. Years ago. The New York Academy, probably.”

  Steadman stared at him for a moment and grinned a little. “Damn! Bob Blake told a bunch of us you knew everything. Maybe it’s true!”

  “I wish it were,” Gaunt said ruefully.

  “Well. About these quasi-embryonic cells. We thought, if we could get them in a live state—the poor devil afflicted with the thing has to undergo orchidotomy, anyway—

  we could implant them in other-than-human hosts, naturally, since no human ones exist—

  and perhaps rear something that began to have a human look.”

  “They didn’t ‘take’?”

  “Our little effort to find the means to continue the species without females came a rather remarkable cropper.” Steadman raised his voice, “Oh, Jenkins! Bring my exhibits!”

  A pasty-faced young man in a white coat soon appeared with three glass specimen jars. They were filled with alcohol. In it floated what looked like fetuses. The assistant hurried away after setting the bottles on the desk in front of Gaunt.

  Steadman tapped them with a pencil, one by one. “These three most clearly exhibit the invariable phenomenon. Take a look. They seem human. All are in the fifth month. Notice the well-formed body—heads—sensory organs—and so on. These are the standard results of biological science we’ve pushed ahead—ten years? Fifty? Maybe a hundred! In the last two. They look promising, Bill. But not one has internal organs. Not one has a brain. Not one is viable except in utero. These were reared in cattle. The host doesn’t matter.

  And we’ve found out enough in the past four months to realize the dividing spermatozoa never will give rise to a whole human being!”

  “I see.”

  A full minute passed while Steadman stared at his glass jars. He shrugged. “It was my only really hopeful concept. One of my men killed himself. You know, I see. Flat failure. Blind alley. Only thing left is to wait a few million years and see if the monkeys are fools enough to try again.”

  Gaunt stirred uneasily. “Surely, Steady, you intend to turn now to some new line of investigation!”

  “I don’t! I’m through, Bill. I wish you hadn’t come out. I hate to have you see me in this shape. I feel we’re up against something so much bigger than we are—

  intellectually so much beyond us—that I have decided research is a waste of time.”

  “Stead, what else is there to do?”

  The once-huge man leaned back and grinned with an expression like malice.

  “How do you like L.A.?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Nervous. Hungry. Jobless. Someday it’s going to pop.”

  “Pop?”

  “Wide open. Men can’t stand the idleness, the inanity, the pressures. Every kind of cockeyed cult has been initiated here. Nothing, makes any real difference to anybody.

  Someday, in a blaze of pure bestial rebellion, this city is going to tear itself apart. I’m quitting, Pasadena next week. I know a little village in Mexico where I used to go to fish.

  I’m sneaking down there and I’m going to fish and drink pulque and sing, with a bunch of Mexicanos I like.”

  “A damned good idea,” Gaunt immediately agreed. “Rest up! Forget biology awhile. When you come back—”

  “I’m never coming back, Bill.” Silence returned between them. Gaunt considered whether to ask his friend for lunch or to wait to, be asked. He was heartsick—and used enough to that to realize he was hungry as well. But the geneticist merely stood up and held out his hand. “Appreciate the call, Bill—”

  “But—I’ll be around awhile. Other men to see—”

  “Don’t advise it. Nothing else going on here worthy of the name of science. If I were you, I’d beat it while I could. You are going back to Florida, I presume?”

  Gaunt said eagerly, “Why not go with me? Wonderful weather now! No end of room in my house! I’m alone. Food’s plentiful there too, compared to California. Got a man to take care of me—colored fellow. You could fish all you wanted in Florida—”

  The flicker in Steadman’s eyes had already expired. “Thanks, Bill. But—no. I’ve done too much. I don’t want even to hear about work any more. And you’re still steamed up. Someday you’ll quit. Like our crowd. Thanks. But definitely, absolutely, no.”

  Three days later, Gaunt began the tedious trip back to Florida. He made a stop in Texas and another in New Orleans. He wished he had not taken the trouble.

  When the slow day coaches at last rolled into Miami, into the level land where the vegetation was jungle lush even in late March, where the sea sparkled and the sun was warm, Gaunt did not know whether he was glad to be home again or not.

  PART IV

  Dream and Dimension

  16

  IN WHICH PRACTICAL MEN FOUNDER AND A MYSTIC TRIES AN

  IMPRACTICAL APPROACH TO THE COMMON PROBLEM.

  Time passed like time in a sinister dream: who would run in such nightmares finds his feet glued; who longs to stay is propelled toward his dread. The dramatis personae are similarly turned about: the virtuous seem foul and the meek ferocious.

  Gaunt, who was alone except for Byron (and for occasional visits from Rufus), found that the summer days and then the winter days were either interminable or shockingly brief. A morning spent with the reports that crammed his mailbox seemed like a week and he would discover that he was waiting with an inexplicable impatience for the call, ceremonial and often short, of Edwinna’s spaniel, which now made its home with the Elliots. Then a week would pass as if it had been an afternoon while he cooked food and did his errands, pondered and conjectured, wrote and rewrote.

  In the period, those men he knew best and saw oftenest showed odd reversals of character. Jim Elliot, from whose house came the frequent sound of hammering, had grown as taciturn as his Yankee forebears and would not say what project engaged him.

  The extroverted Teddy Barker was as glum as the lawyer. Young Gordon Elliot, so quiet and sensitive in his earlier years, had taken to the company of rowdy boys and was forever shooting things off in the yard or whizzing about the unkempt back lanes on scooters, using stolen gasoline. Even Connauth, who had agonizedly confessed adultery, these days brought up the matter whenever he could, as if, with the women gone, it was more important to have known another woman than to have had intimate knowledge of the Holy Ghost.

  It was grotesque.

  Grotesque, yet, to the philosopher, predictable.

  When frustrated in one means of realizing its purpose, instinct spontaneously attempts the opposite method. Thus, the good man, whose virtue balks his inner necessities, often turns to evil; thus the conscious sinner compensates with deeds of charity or heroism. And only the arrogant Western person, white and Christian, dedicated to “reason” however mad his social scene may be, presumes his species can be made to follow his special description of right and wrong, and does follow it; he winds up deluded, reasonless, and wrong about nearly everything.

  Gaunt, among a handful of his compatriots, understood the schizoid process and was not surprised (but only bemused) to see how a unique adversity threw character into uncharacteristic behavior.

  What surprised him, what had always surprised him, was not the collapses and alterations in his country but the momentum of his culture: not decay, but the slowness of decay.

  The people of the so-called Christian nations had long been appallingly vulnerable to psychological assault. Hitler had proved that with his many aggressions and the lies that covered each; half of America had been deceived by the trick. Russia had gone ahead with it and the “free” world had not even then caught on.

  The recent cold war had been, in Gaunt’s opinion, the same theatrical for which Nazism had provided a dress rehearsal but Americans had not discovered the ways and degrees in which their “sacred” beliefs and commercial wishes duped them. Turned hot, become shooting at the parallel
s, military difficulties, fighting without declaration, war itself, the ideological aggressions had not been met by that better ideology of liberty but only with hasty arms and hastier emotions. Even the final effort, the mining of a nation and its assault by air and sea with fusing atoms, had not in any way shown the surviving American men how they had betrayed liberty through half a century by a refusal to resist the oppression of others. So long as they thought what they did was reasonable, so long would the laws of instinct remain obscure to them.

  Hence, in this third winter of the Disappearance, Gaunt was not surprised to hear that those nations which had endured tyranny and peonage were turning toward freedom or to discover day by day how dictatorial his own land was becoming. All his adult life he had resisted the process because he had understood the psychology and the biology of it; he resisted still, in his writing. There was no other way or place to resist.

  A man who thinks ahead of his era and who knows beyond its common knowledge must only write or be written about. His sole opportunity is to advise the future. Action along his lines of thought is impossible; the lag in the evolution of awareness prohibits action. It would have been as foolish to try to compel all twentieth-century men to act according to the hard-earned knowledge of a few as to try to force amphibians to open schools and elect senators on the grounds that amphibians eventually would evolve into mammals and those mammals into men.

  Gaunt often thought that even the truth which Jesus knew and uttered fell so far ahead of its possible enactment in the human calendar that nearly everything done in Jesus’ name would have outraged Him. What He said that was enlightened and important went ignored. The word for Him, affixed to every sort of cult, merely supported further millenniums of pagans—of animals who had neither the desire nor the intention, yet, to behave as men.

  Action would have resulted in martyrdom. And martyrdom, Gaunt felt, was the mistake too many had already made. The beastly aspect of it produced neither decency nor forbearance but only collective blood lusts. Thus, the Bhuddists were peaceable men; but the Christians were forever alight with devilment, carrying their Cross and everywhere avenging it by tormenting the innocent with it. Gaunt therefore concentrated upon his thesis of what men ought to become, and could become, but not now. And he watched freedom, that only valuable truth of his age, crumble away at home as inferior social tendencies persisted.

  Stern dictates were of course necessary to meet the shock of Disappearance and to deal with its horrendous sequels. But these did not diminish even when no planetary foe remained and even when order was attained—when supply and demand had been adjusted downward to much less than half the previous standards owing to the fact that women had been the greater consumers and that men had consumed many things for the sake of women. Reason for alarm diminished but the government seemed ever more afraid of the people. The government no longer appeared to trust the people. There were causes for that.

  Elected men had come to fear above all that they would fail to be re-elected by the people. Bureaucrats, ignorant of their century, its sciences and psychologies, unable to predict what people would do, feared people. And multitudes of men in government, without probity or integrity, attributed the same rotted nature to all with the unastonishing result that they, too, feared everybody.

  In addition, the wars (and the threats of wars the Americans had refused to face when they were but threats) had turned the national confidence away from civilian authority and invested it in the military, so that the very basis of liberty was exchanged for myths of secrecy and faiths in weapons. The pure faith in freedom existed almost nowhere in America by the middle of the century; hardly anyone appreciated what such freedom was, and what it had meant, or what was necessary to regain and maintain it. An idea opposed the Americans but they had been jockeyed away from the idea that would have destroyed the concept of tyranny. Nothing but brute force remained.

  Yet a perverted ghost of liberty still whispered to Americans.

  It was the ghost that gave incentive to the General Strike that winter.

  The railroads stopped. The telephones went dead. The wheels in factories stood still, greased heavily against rust and idle time, while armed guards and pickets marched outside eying each other with malevolence. The newspapers hurled black ink at labor for adding misery to perpetual dismay. Labor, in turn, defied public opinion and demanded, not shorter hours or higher wages, but a mitigation of restrictions and regulations, rationing, paper work, and the mazes of taxation. In the midst of this dissension, with facilities paralyzed and many beginning to suffer hunger, medical deprivation and other wants, a federal attempt was initiated to help feed Europe and perishing Asia. The effort, noble in itself, was accompanied by a new reduction of farm parities and the withdrawal of certain crop supports, a drain the government could no longer afford. Indignant farmers, accustomed to vote—purchased priorities at the economic teats, rebelled as individuals; their machines also fell silent.

  A stasis came, a sullen hush.

  Martial law returned.

  What Gaunt witnessed on Miami’s MacArthur Causeway happened in a thousand places.

  A power plant stood on the causeway, a handsome object of tall chimneys, shining metal and soaring cables; it was set along the ship channel so that tankers might be moored hardby—such a technological plaything as a Brobdingnagian’s child might build with his box of structural toys.

  Here, on a brisk, bright January morning, wind from the northwest and the sun friendly, several hundred strikers held the powerhouse, supplied with food by boats at night and supported by the crews of two tankers. A high wire fence surrounded the grounds. The men behind the fence had kept the plant inoperative for more than five weeks.

  Nearby was a Coast Guard station. . . .

  Apprised by friends in Washington, Gaunt went as an observer to a position close to the causeway’s traffic lanes and somewhat below their level on the appointed day.

  With him were a dozen city and county officials. They had come in the scant morning traffic, parked their cars and waited about, nervously watching the movement of strikers inside the plant and the pacing of their armed patrols. They were not surprised (and the strikers probably were not) when a column of men, rifles shouldered and bayonets fixed, emerged from the Coast Guard base and began marching down the causeway toward the plant.

  That was what Gaunt and the rest had come to observe. It was what was happening at other struck plants and factories.

  The marching men followed a band which approached playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Behind the band was a sound truck and behind that were Coast Guardsmen bearing arms and a company of National Guardsmen.

  The column halted at the fence. No further traffic appeared from either direction, the police having closed the causeway.

  Gaunt and the officials, most of whom wore threadbare garments and were somewhat unkempt, moved through weedy grass to the place where the land descended into the Bay. The tide had gone out and a mass of algae-covered coral rocks was exposed on the slope, which in an emergency would provide cover. So Gaunt stood amongst the slimy stones with the politicians—at their backs the villa—crowded islands of Biscayne Bay and ahead of them grass, a three-lane road, a narrow parkway planted with oleanders, hibiscus, yuccas and sea grapes, another three-lane road which ordinarily bore traffic in the opposite direction, and last, the fence.

  The Anthem came to an end. The patrolling strikers beyond the fence had not waited it out at attention but, instead, had one by one vanished into the immense building.

  Now a Coast Guard commander stepped up to the truck, gestured pacifically toward the plant and addressed a hand microphone. His voice boomed immensely:

  “All other measures having failed, the President of the United States, acting under emergency powers granted to him by Congress, has ordered the end of all strikes as of today and throughout the nation. New arbitration boards will be set up, but persons refusing to obey the order will be dealt with forcibly. F
ifteen minutes are hereby granted for the evacuation of this plant. Strike leaders inside will arrange men in a double file.

  They will march out with hands raised, carrying no arms, stones or other weapons.

  Failure to comply with the order will be regarded as an act of treason. The plant will then be stormed. There is no wish and no disposition on the part of the government to use such methods. Nevertheless, disobedience will be met by assault. It is now ten twenty-six o’clock. Unless you men begin to emerge as directed at ten forty-one o’clock, firing will commence.”

  Gaunt thought the arrangements were perilous. He knew that here on the causeway at least, police had not been able to prevent the bringing in of arms as well as food to the strikers; small fast boats had managed that at night. Hence the soldiers and Coast Guardsmen “were as exposed as the British before Bunker Hill. No doubt their vulnerability was agreed on-an attempt to show the willingness of law to take risks and an evidence of the government’s reluctance to employ force. A foolish display.

  Five minutes passed. The commander picked up the microphone and repeated his speech. No response came from the plant. No one could now be seen inside it. The band began “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” and a panickiness was detectable in the music. The leader, a thin man in a red and gold uniform, waved his baton with white-faced urgency; but the horns lagged and the drums rolled uncertainly.

  Gaunt found himself both frightened and angry. Suddenly, face tense and fists clenched, he raced across the causeway and up to the cool commander. He gave his name and said that he was a personal friend of the President.

  “Mine’s Werdlum.” The officer held out his hand.

  Gaunt talked rapidly. “I doubt if they’re coming out! I think they may start shooting any time! I’d like to offer to go in and talk to them—”