Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  His eyes were wide open now but vacant, the eyeballs rolled back so that the pupils were almost entirely hidden, over them the oceanic glaze of trance. His lips moved but they made no sound, they seemed to be forming one word over and over, Om, breath, Om, breath, Om, breath.

  “Wait, wait, please,” Martine said urgently. “One last thing. He, my friend I mean, I’m sure he’s dead, he was always arguing the way you do, he was always saying that all things exist within us and we must unleash them because they are all good. He would sometimes lean over from his bunk in great excitement and interrupt me when I was writing in my notebook just to tell me that, almost in your words. I wonder, could you have known him? He was full of words too, I told him he would eat ’em some day, the whole goddamned fountain pen, no I didn’t say that, of course. Well, no matter. But he was always arguing about the endless panorama within, that’s what he called it, you see. And listen, here’s the point, I would always answer by telling him what Baudelaire said to the lesbians—Shun the Infinity in you! Can’t you see? I kept telling him that, do you hear, you fool. . . .”

  But the amp was far away now, riding the quanta, there was no perceptible movement in his body at all, he seemed to have stopped breathing entirely. Or, there now, were the lips trembling ever so faintly? Puffing? Oms? Snoring intergalactically?

  Martine looked down the row of baskets. Some of the other amps were still talking softly, magisterially, into their microphones, others had drifted off into a trance too, they lay like infant corpses, lips fallen open and eyeballs tipped as though to stare at their own insides. Martine turned away with a curse.

  Now for the first time he noticed a large booth in the interior of the store, festooned with drapes of bright bunting. It was a recruiting desk, he could see, above it a large sign urged,

  The Human Race Needs YOU!

  Dodge The Steamroller

  Register Now For Immob

  and in front of the desk there was a line of young men, waiting to affix their signatures to a registry book. They all seemed bemused, their thoughts far away as men’s thoughts often are at the moment of great and irrevocable decisions; there was something robotlike, “It”-propelled, about the way they shuffled along and the absent-minded air each one had as he stepped up to take the pen offered by a smiling blond young lady clerk. One of the applicants, Martine noticed, stood in line staring at his hands, examining them wonderingly—fascinated, no doubt, by the spectacle of appendages which, as their last act in the world, were about to sign their own Moscow confessions and death warrants.

  Automatically Martine’s eyes lowered and came to rest on his own trembling fingers. “You are already one of us in your heart.” It would be a double irony, he thought with a sudden vicious jolt in his gut, if his hands, hands of the world’s most skillful aggression excavator, were to sign their own lives away in a burst of surgical abandon. There was some sort of ghastly fascination in the idea, his legs were taut with the urge to move in the direction of the booth and fall in line. Why this sweating, choking, nauseating guilt which had been plaguing him all afternoon, all the creepy word-gutted afternoon? Was it because he was intolerably reminded somehow that his fingers, his cunning fingers, had done terrible things with a scalpel? Did the incredible loathsome word “steamroller” somehow remind him of the crimes his fingers had perpetrated for eighteen years with a scalpel? Was that why, in a surge of masochism, he now, contrary to all logic, to all life impulse, toyed, despite his conscious moral horror, with the idea of surgical mea culpas? Or—was it because of something else his fingers had once held—in a lower bunk under a blanket of snores, a sackcloth of snores—sweatingly, wordily, heldishly—something, a fountain pen. . . .

  “He must be dead,” he muttered. “Sure, he’s got to be.”

  Looking for something to distract his attention, any stray object, he turned his head and caught sight of the rack of books fastened to the wall on his left. There, he saw, were the Basic Immob Texts, containing what were clearly the classic works of the movement; familiar names leaped out tauntingly at him—Freud, Korzybski, James, Tolstoy, Swami Prabhavananda, Aldous Huxley, Nietzsche. Etcetera, etcetera. The very first one, the one marked Basic Immob Text Number One, bore the title, in large letters, DODGE THE STEAMROLLER.

  Eyes unfocused, mind unfocused, he reached for a copy of the book and shoved it in his pocket. Then, body trembling, legs so weak he was afraid they would buckle, he picked his way through the crowds to the door, straining with the effort to keep his eyes away from the booth, a sickening turmoil in his stomach. “You are already one of us. . . .”

  “But Theo isn’t dead,” he said to himself. “Then—”

  He hurried along the boulevard, panting. When he came once more to the great statue at the hub, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the book, at the same instant aware even before the words came into sight that his breath had quickened to a desperate chug and his whole knotted body was filmed with clammy sweat and his gut was a hopeless writhing rope of anxiety; aware of this extraordinary upset now culminating the distress of the whole vile day, aware of it and wondering why it should be so and yet somehow not wondering but knowing and yet not knowing and in terror of the unknown undodgeable knowledge. And then his eyes fixed on the cover of Basic Immob Text Number One and knowingly they drank in the sickening abominable knowledge, squirming in outrage that was somehow prepared, stunned but not without anticipation and a pre-set for the stunning—

  Whammo! Thunderclap in his head. All the drawers of all the filing cabinets tumbling out and spilling their screeching turkeys in a vast upheaving and at last, as he struggled to keep above the surface of nausea, not to sink, not to faint, at last, as the convulsion sped down, down to his stomach, the collected works of Martine were complete again, the crucial volume had been slipped back into place and it was a torment and a relief too, it was what he had been fleeing from all day and yet somehow seeking too, dodging and yet dogging, in misery and revulsion and need he had all day secretly been looking for this key volume and now it was there in his fingers, the fingers from which it had come a long long time ago while the son-of-a-bitch snored. He read with blurred terrified anticipatory knowing-dodging eyes the words on the cover of the volume:

  Dodge the Steamroller

  The Notebook of

  DR. MARTINE

  Edited and with an Introduction

  by Dr. Helder

  PRESIDENT OF THE INLAND STRIP

  “Of course,” Martine said. “Naturally. President.”

  Directly across the drive which circled the state was a clump of trees, to one side of a row of benches on which a few people were sitting. He hurried across, blind to everybody and everything, and at last, at last, hidden behind a thick eucalyptus, he bent over and retched—horribly, endlessly, gaspingly, shudderingly, eating his words and spewing them out at last and straining with each heave to force the guilt up with them. Thinking that this was surely the greatest bellylaugh belly-emptying laugh of all time and yet he could not laugh, he had no laughter left, now he was crying uncontrollably and broken-heartedly.

  He stayed there for a long time, doubled over. Finally he straightened up and wiped the tears and muck from his face. Then he found a seat on a nearby bench and began to read.

  from dr. martine’s notebook

  (mark i)

  (BASIC IMMOB POCKETBOOK EDITION)

  OCTOBER 18, 1972

  With Flying Hospital Unit X-234-BL

  Belgian Congo, north of Stanleyville

  Almost midnight. Dog-tired. Can’t sleep. Hell of a battle going on somewhere around Tunis, casualties pouring in. On duty in surgery plane for almost eleven hours, spent last three of them patching up Babyface’s noggin, what was left of it.1

  The kid’s face haunts me. Dedicated, that’s probably it. Dedication is mother’s milk to this young onward-and-upwarder—he’s a priest in an anti-gravity suit. Johnny One-Note—no doubt he looks exactly the same, exudes waves of goodness, whethe
r he’s harranguing people about signing the Peace Pledge or erasing Paris from the map. I’ve seen that kind of unswerving intensity on only one other human face: Helder’s.2 Such built-in rapture can only be described as theological, the neon of belief. Teddy Gorman. Christian name Theodore, according to his papers. Wonder why they didn’t nickname him Theo?3

  Lying in the bunk plane now, skinful of ache, wondering if I’ll ever sleep again. Wondering if I’m going batty.

  Infernal clicking from the ticker-tape machine up forward—EMSIAC, electronic chatterbox. No Hamlets in EMSIAC’S vacuum tubes, he’s even more single-minded than Babyface and Helder. Only EMSIAC’S really sane: knows exactly what he wants. Which is enough in itself to raise the whole question of sanity.

  Rest of the crew’s asleep. Characteristic of yes men: so long as they do their little duties dutifully, nod vigorously to the world and EMSIAC, they have ready access to the Land of Nod. It’s nihilists like me who turn insomniacs—keep a sharp eye on the world during the day and that eye refuses to shut at night.4

  Noddism: the state of modern man. He says yes, and he sleeps.

  Helder’s bunk is right above mine. He’s snoring away like a buzz-saw, the pig.5

  Since I can’t sleep, I’ve been reading. Got several things with me I’ve been dipping into: Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games, Berkeley’s Giant Brains, McDonald’s Strategy in Poker, Business and War, Père Dubarle’s prophetic little paper on cybernetics. I thumbed through all of them long before the war, and brought them along when I was drafted—plus a volume of poetry by Rimbaud. They make nice hammock reading now.

  How can all the noddings sleep? How can that pig above me snore away?6 Least they could do would be to lie here with their eyes open, listening to EMSIAC and grinning. Really, it’s the funniest goddamned thing I ever heard of. And I never thought it possible—that’s a laugh too.

  No, I never thought it could happen. Back in med school, when Helder first called my attention to Wiener’s book (published in 1950), I thought it was just another example of his calamity-howling. I got the giggles when I read it and learned that back in ’48 a Mr. Claude Shannon of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, following up an idea of Wiener’s, had seriously proposed the building of an electronic calculating machine which would play chess “of a high amateur level and even possibly of a master level.” Hell of a joke, I thought. It really tickled me, the idea of making a machine which, as Wiener put it, would show a “statistical preference for a certain sort of behavior” and a statistical disgust for other sorts of behavior—the preference and disgusts you need to play chess. And when Wiener went on to say that the chess-playing machine he had suggested and Shannon had determined to build might have important consequences, how I hooted.7 How most people hooted. But not, as it turned out, in Washington—and not in Moscow. Not even in 1950; let alone the sixties, when I got around to reading the few books available on the subject. As early as 1950, McDonald hinted just how seriously this chess business was being taken in military circles.8

  While most of us were hooting, the games specialists quietly went about their job of turning the innocent old-style robot brain, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), into a chess champ, and then into the Electronic Military Strategy Integrator and Computer (EMSIAC). The problem was licked by the mid-sixties. From which it follows, as the mare the night, that my crew is holed up at this moment somewhere in the stinking heart of Africa, with EMSIAC batting out instructions to us on the ticker tape. And on the other side of the world, Christ knows where, another EMSIAC is clattering away, sending out orders to all the units of the enemy’s forces. Because there are two such superduper machines in the world today, one somewhere in the West (Grand Coulee? under Fort Knox? on top of Popocatepetl?) and one somewhere in the East (the Urals? Siberia? the Himalayas?), and what they’re playing is one hell of a superduper chess game across the face of the earth, with a couple billion squirts like me for pawns. And the pawns are being knocked off fast, a continentful at a time, click, clack, neat gambit. . . .

  No, most of us didn’t see it, even after World War II—and God knows there’d already been enough danger signals: anti-aircraft tracking equipment, acoustical torpedoes, proximity fuses, servo-mechanisms, the later robotization of one industry after another. A few guys called the shots, though, even as far back as 1948, the year Wiener began his second book. In the same year this little French Dominican friar, Père Dubarle, wrote that cute little piece about cybernetics and “turbulence.”

  At first I thought the guy was kidding; the brackets I’ve inserted only occurred to me laterly.9 I didn’t sense that, if there was an “obvious inadequacy of the brain” when it came to coping with the complicated machinery of modern politics, there might be an even more glaring inadequacy of said brain when it came to coping with the incredible complexities of modern global warfare. It just didn’t hit me that while an “indefinite turbulence” in affairs of state was becoming more and more obnoxious to the modern bureaucratic-managerial-political temperament, the same turbulence in affairs of war would be utterly repulsive to the bureaucratic-military temperament. I had too much faith in the durability of chaos, the human business-as-usual. I had read too much of Dostoevsky and other disheveled minds. I didn’t realize that the modern mind was rebelling entirely against the turbulent Hamletism, the palsied ambivalence, of the human condition, and that machined, click-clack thought was its most ardent daydream in all departments. So I just grinned and passed over Wiener’s summing-up of the whole business.10

  But he was right. The “beneficent bureaucracy” was being planned—by two cyberneticized militaries. Each thinking, of course, of course, that it was acting in the interests of self-defense, preserving civilization, cutting down “turbulence,” etc., etc. And when I got around to reading these texts some fifteen years later, during my student days, the thing was pretty far along, although nobody knew about it. The result is World War III, in which we’re all being swept from continent to continent by the clacking commands of a couple of computing machines buried in a couple of unlikely places somewhere on the globe—and the aerial armadas, every plane of which is equipped with its little ticker to receive moment-to-moment orders, go hurtling around the world, dusting the hemispheres with H-bombs and RW powder. And we, the robotized progeny of Hippocrates, trail along in their wakes, patching skulls and guts together. . . .

  Wish that damned machine would stop jiggling. Or is it really inside my head?

  Wish Helder would stop snoring. Can’t get him out of my mind.11

  Did the greatest patching job of my career tonight. On Babyface, I mean. He interests me, this Babyface: seems to have such a statistical preference for wiping out the capitals of the world. Great little machine à boom-boom. He’s undoubtedly the most efficient agent EMSIAC has, by a long blast; far and away the greatest hero of the West in this war, and just turned twenty-one too. And to think that he was once a leader of the pacifist youth movement—perfect machine à être gouverné. . . .

  For three hours I suctioned and sutured and sewed, fitting together the bloody fragments of his brain. Rather like a jig-saw puzzle in aspic. And all the time I kept telling myself that such a brain would be worth salvaging on only one condition: if I could shuffle its parts around so that, once it started functioning again, it would operate with one compulsion—not to carry out EMSIAC’S bidding but to destroy EMSIAC, to take all the H-bombs that were left and ram them down EMSIAC’S throat. It was worth the bother only if I could give this robot machine a statistical preference for an indefinite turbulence in human affairs and a statistical revulsion with all Leviathans. But I didn’t know which cortical-thalamic pathways to fool with in order to produce this effect—in which Brodmann areas does one find aggressiveness, in which cortical centers yes-manism and the nodding reflex?

  For three hours my fingers were inside Babyface’s skull, itching with frustration. I�
��m not a scientist, an artist, a truly knowledgeable man. Only a tailor of protoplasm, working with needle and shears on human tissues. The only things surgically worth doing, I cannot do.

  Don’t even know where to sink my scalpel in Helder to stop that snoring. Except in his throat.12

  World War III, it’s clear, is the first real war we’ve ever had. The essence of warness. War brought for the first time from the realm of concept all the way into the realm of thumping fact. For it is the first homicidal chess game in which the full gaming board has been used and all the pawns thrown into action with perfect mathematical precision.

  The millennia-old promise of warfare has been fulfilled. The promise made when the first cave men went at each other with the first shillelaghs. Finally we have a war which has robotized all the men engaged in it, from buck privates up to top brass and the whole general staff. And now that war is really total, all men are engaged in it one way or another. In other words, damned near the whole human race has been robotized this time. Therein lies the essence of warness: the elimination of Hamletish ambivalent wavering in human affairs, the triumph of the pure hammer-blow direct act. War is the engineer’s answer to palsy.

  Yes, men aren’t only robotized; they’re activized as well. Action has been made more spectacularly possible than ever, thanks to the mechanical extensions of our bodies which technology has produced: we’ve all become supreme activists. But at the same time, all decisions as to the nature of our action have been taken out of our hands and brains—all that’s handled, much more efficiently and less turbulently than mere human brains ever could, by special decision machines. The general staff has come of age in EMSIAC.