Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  All along, obviously, the big job was to build a machine that would make up our minds for us, so that we could concentrate on moving our arms and legs and the mechanical supplements to our arms and legs without having to bother our heads with the questions of why? in what direction? to what purpose? To drain the Hamletism from military behavior, which is the efficiency expert’s idealization of all human behavior, human doing at its most effortful, purposeful, and efficient. Neat division of labor: the machine proposes, man, builder of the machine, disposes.

  It was bound to happen, of course. Once men stopped manufacturing gods, they began to manufacture machines. Whence EMSIAC, the god-in-the-machine, the god-machine. . . .

  We could have predicted it. If we’d had our eyes open, we would have seen it coming. EMSIAC is simply the end development of something that’s been threatening for a long time in human affairs, especially in modern times. Hobbes called it the Leviathan—I’d call it the Steamroller. War—this present war, this epitome of warness—is only the Steamroller come of age.13

  I’m not entirely sure I know what I mean by that, but I think I’ve got hold of something. I’ll just ramble on a bit, maybe it’ll come clear. At least it’ll take my mind off Helder’s sound-effects. . . .14

  After all, what’s the great evil in war and in the totalitarian systems which make war? It’s not the killing and maiming of people, no matter how much agony that entails. No: it’s the Steamroller Effect. The flattening of human spirit, I mean. What the steamroller does to the human spirit is immeasurably worse than anything shrapnel and atomic blast could possibly do to the human flesh, and infinitely more lasting. Why? Because of the humiliation. Because the victim had no say in the matter. Because the loss of an arm or leg or a pair of eyes is a thousand times more unbearable when it’s involuntary—when the decision is made not by the victim but by the steamroller. It’s the willy-nillyness of the thing. The smothering of the “I” by the “It.”

  It’s interesting, for example, that in World War II amputees began to refer to themselves as clipped. The word had about the same overtones as it does when it’s applied to a duck that’s been hit by a hunter. You say the bird’s been winged or clipped, and what you mean is that some outside agency over which it had no control and of which it wasn’t even aware has suddenly swooped down on it and knocked the hell out of one of its vital parts, leaving it crippled—without so much as a by-your-leave. That’s the steamroller. “It,” the robber of free will and dispenser of fates.

  What’s so terrible about all this? Isn’t it actually a relief to unburden oneself of responsibility and leave decisions to some machine?

  Well, there’s an unfortunate twist to the thing. The machine doesn’t simply decide for its inventor—it eventually decides against him. It has a built-in malice against its sire which must come out sooner or later. For a very good reason.

  From the beginning man has been cursed with a chronic need to believe in the myth of the steamroller; he needs it as he needs oxygen. The worst psychic flaw in man has always been his tendency to overwhelming self-pity, his deep masochistic component—his enduring fiction that he is set upon and victimized by a menacing outside. Man is the animal that collects injustices and keeps a score board of hurts. Over the centuries he’s given a lot of fancy names to his persecutors: demons, furies, witches, ghosts, God, the elements, fate, karma, kismet, germs, ruling classes, glands, id, norns, and so on. And he’s even been able to demonstrate experimentally that many of these forces exist and do him positive harm—but up to now he’s seldom been able to prove conclusively that they’re united in a foul, fiendish plot to do him in, out of sheer malevolence: that the whole universe is an unrelieved continuum of malevolence. Nor has he ever been able to prove conclusively that, when such hostile forces do exist around him, he hasn’t secretly misused them, set them upon himself so that he could then bewail his unhappy fate: the psychosomaticists, for example, have shown that you can choose to be downed by the TB bacillus, which is the theme of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain; and who made the modern Western God so starkly Calvinist but a mortal man named Calvin? In other words, except in certain extreme situations (floods, hurricanes, epidemics, concentration camps, gas chambers), man has never been able to advance quite sufficient data—sufficient for his audience or himself—to substantiate and fully motivate his feeling of being kicked around, harried, dogged. This is the only thing that has saved him until now: his masochistic myth of victimization was never well enough grounded, quite, so that he could give way entirely to his fits of passivity and self-pitying lamentation. . . .

  Now, however, we’ve managed to arrange things a bit more convincingly for ourselves. The myth, with our help, has sprung into crunching life. Now, thanks to the marvels of technology, we’ve succeeded in converting the outside world into a very real steamroller—robotized industry, robotized culture, robotized war—and one which fairly bristles with menace. H-bombs, RW dust, proximity fuses, guided missles, etc., etc. The whole shebang ruled over, not by poor innocent beleaguered little man, of course, but by the epitome of menace, EMSIAC, the mechanical brain which has “robbed” man of his decision and “made” him not master but slave of his destiny. Almost as though the myth couldn’t be sustained any longer, as man more and more spectacularly subdued his environment and thus freed himself from the very real terrors of Nature—as though it couldn’t be sustained without being externalized, concretized, and dramatized. EMSIAC had to be invented in order that man could go on feeling sorry for himself.

  Rimbaud sensed all this; he sensed a lot of things. At the age of nineteen—backward child: he hadn’t yet wiped out a city, nor even a whistle stop—he shouted: “Don’t be a victim!” This, at the very height of the Industrial Revolution. But what a silly bastard he was, really. This wish was coupled with another: he wanted to be—an engineer! Intent on dodging the steamroller,15 he yearned to become a designer of steamrollers. Naturally; he was the perennial victim type himself: didn’t he woo gangrene and the syphilitic spirochete?

  Oh, the steamroller must be dodged, no question about it. But not by improving its lines. And not by running away to Africa as Rimbaud did, to map uncharted territories (or to the lobotomy labs, to map uncharted neural pathways). The maps will only serve as guides for the steamroller, as witness what our armadas are doing at this very moment to the whole bloody continent of Africa (as witness lobotomy). . . .

  Is there any other way? Sure. The idea came to me just a couple of hours ago, right after I finished sewing up Babyface’s scalp. By this time Helder had sawed the jagged bone splints off the kid’s stumps and sewed flaps of skin over them, so the job was done. Helder asked me to give him a hand in lifting Babyface from the operating table onto a stretcher, and I did.

  Two things happened.

  First, I slipped my arms under the boy’s body and lifted as gently as I could. Immediately my stomach clamped tight and I was sick all through me. The reason was, of course, that this boy—a big fellow, judging from his torso and football shoulders: close to a 200-pounder, I’d say—was so revoltingly light.

  And then, as we were easing him down on the stretcher, I suddenly became aware that his eyes were open. And fastened on me; at least they seemed to be.

  I knew that was silly. It would be hours before the anesthetic wore off, he couldn’t be looking at anything: no doubt the cortical centers controlling the blinking reflex had been damaged and the lids had just popped open mechanically. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was looking straight at me. And I thought: Suppose he’s coming to? Suppose he is just now becming aware of the fact that he has no legs? All the while staring at me? He wouldn’t be rational at this moment, of course: since I’m the first living object he’ll see, he might very naturally assume that I was responsible, personally, for the loss of his legs. Naturally: at such a time a man needs some living thing to blame, and I would be his personal EMSIAC for the moment.

  He didn’t blink, he didn’t
say a word—he just looked, or seemed to be looking. I couldn’t stand it. I looked back, horrified and fascinated, trying to figure out what those unblinking eyes were trying to convey to me: accusation? terror? cosmic revulsion? I couldn’t tell.

  Afterwards I took a turn about the clearing. I kept thinking about the disgusting feel of that body in my arms, I kept seeing those ball-bearing eyes that were trying to say something to me and couldn’t. I began to hold an imaginary conversation with those eyes, reading into them all sorts of wild things. Things I had to refute—my sanity depended on it. . . .

  ME: Why are you staring at me?

  BABYFACE: You look a little green around the gills. What’s wrong?

  ME: Nothing. Not a thing.

  BABYFACE: Don’t pull my leg—oh, sorry, it’s a little late for that, isn’t it? . . . I can guess what the trouble is, though.

  ME: Can you?

  BABYFACE: Yes. It must be pretty upsetting to pick up a full-grown man and find he weighs no more than a sack of potatoes.

  ME: Well, yes, it was a bit of a shock.

  BABYFACE: Funny that your least essential parts—least essential in terms of staying alive, anyhow—seem to carry the most weight. Surely as a doctor you knew that a man’s legs account for two-fifths of his total poundage?

  ME: Of course I knew it—as a statistic, that is, an abstract datum. Cerebrally, not kinesthetically. My nervous system wasn’t quite as well coached as my intellect.

  BABYFACE: It’s the other way around with me just now. My nervous system is becoming aware of what happened to me, the stumps are beginning to hurt like hell in spite of the morphine—but my intellect’s having a tough time trying to catch up with the anatomic reality. . . . Tell me, Doc. How much more of me do you think you could hack away before I kicked the bucket—kicked it metaphorically, that is? How light could you make a man, by whittling away all but the absolutely essential parts? What’s your guess?

  ME: I don’t know—close to half of the body could be cut away, I’d say. But look here—you seem to have an entirely false idea of what’s happened to you. I didn’t cut off your legs. Nobody around here did.

  BABYFACE: Then who would you say is responsible?

  ME: The fact is that your legs are several hundred miles from here, somewhere on the North African coast, mixed up with a few shreds of your dura mater. I couldn’t have done that to you, could I? I wasn’t even there.

  BABYFACE: Who did?

  ME: The simplest way to explain it is to say that a certain robot brain called EMSIAC directed certain planes and guided missiles to proceed to the area around Tunis and bomb your legs off. The enemy’s EMSIAC did this to you, if anybody did.

  BABYFACE: Not very convincing, Doc. For one thing, I wouldn’t have been anywhere near Tunis to be shot at if our EMSIAC hadn’t sent me there—with instructions to bomb the enemy airmen’s legs off, along with their heads.

  ME: All right, I’ll accept your qualification. What you can say, then, is that two EMSIACS were having it out and you got caught in the middle. That’s still no reason to be sore at me.

  BABYFACE: Isn’t it? Don’t you work for one of these EMSIACS?

  ME: Sure. So what? You seem to forget that you work for it too—we’re fellow workers.

  BABYFACE: I used to work for it. We were fellow workers.

  ME: All right, were. You forget, too, that until this afternoon you and I were doing very different jobs for our mutual boss—you were going around blowing up people and getting blown up yourself, I was just trailing along to patch you up whenever you came undone at the seams.

  BABYFACE: You’re letting yourself off a little too easy, Doc. Hear that EMSIAC clicking away? Have you ever said no to one of its clicks?

  ME: No, but it only tells me to save lives.

  BABYFACE: Only when that’s part of its plan to snuff out other lives. Frankly, I don’t give a shit whether EMSIAC tells you to drop a thermonuclear bomb on Paris or stuff somebody’s meandering guts back into his abdominal cavity. The point is that whatever you do, you do under orders. So don’t give me that crap about saving my life: what do you think you would have done for me if EMSIAC had ordered you to let me bleed to death? You’re a humanitarian by dictation from above—so long as those goddamned clicks say this rather than that.

  ME: I don’t blame you for being bitter but, Christ, use a little logic. If you’d said no to EMSIAC this morning, when you were ordered to Tunis, you wouldn’t be here minus your legs now.

  BABYFACE: Never mind all that. All that was this morning. Just take now. Now I’m lying here without my legs. Do you hear? Without my legs, without my legs, lighter than a sack of potatoes. Lying here thinking only one thing, that it’s a pack of shit unless you stand up to EMSIAC and tell it to go fuck itself.16 Thinking that nothing makes sense but that. And you’re still saying yes to it—you’re going along with one ear cocked for the clicks, so you won’t miss out on your instructions. You say yes to the thing that took my legs off, that I’ll never say yes to again in my life.

  ME: That’s easy for you: you won’t have to. You’ll probably be a hero. You can rest on your laurels and your pensions.

  BABYFACE: So now we’re on opposite sides of the barricades. You’re the enemy, the only enemy I can see. Because you’re EMSIAC’S agent and yes man. You acquiescent tailor boy. You obedient hemstitcher. You heel-clicking humanitarian. Fuck you.

  ME: Have it your way. You’re partly right, of course—anybody who doesn’t manage to say no to EMSIAC one way or another is guilty of everything EMSIAC does, one way or another. That’s pretty much the normal state of affairs at the moment: nobody says no, so everybody’s guilty., Maybe, in the ultimate sense, I do bear responsibility for your legs lying up there around Tunis—but in that ultimate sense everybody is responsible, the whole human race.

  BABYFACE: Don’t give me that everybody’s-responsible crap. Follow that line of thought a little further and it’s bound to wind up in an orgy of gabble about no-man-an-island-is and all that slop.

  ME: Right, that kind of sentimentality would be a bit absurd—the only thing that would make any sense right now would be a program for severing one’s connection with the foul mainland and becoming as inaccessible an island as possible. . . . However. What’s much more to the point is that you’ve got to scream, you’ve a supreme right to—and you’ve got to scream at me because EMSIAC’S much too remote and impersonal and you don’t even know where it’s at. O.K., call me all the dirty names you can think of. I’ll play scapegoat for you if it relieves your anguish any. And that’s one service EMSIAC didn’t order me to perform. That’s an entirely self-willed bit of “humanitarianism,” for whatever it’s worth.

  BABYFACE: Why are you so sure I’m using you for a scapegoat? Aren’t you falling back on a clever formula to dodge responsibility again? Turning the spotlight on me and away from yourself?

  ME: Nothing of the sort. I know that you need a scapegoat for the simplest of reasons—I know that I need one. In that respect all men are pretty much alike today.

  BABYFACE: No man an island is, after all? Oh, brother.

  ME: No man unsteamrollered is—put it that way. And we’ve all got the urge to strike back somehow, if only to prove that we don’t really like it, didn’t arrange it ourselves. But how in hell do you strike back at an invisible cold mountain of metal and electronic tubes—assuming the will to strike is there? Kids can get some satisfaction out of kicking chairs and bicycles they’ve skinned their knees on, but that kind of animism won’t work for grown men. Besides, even if it would do some good to kick EMSIAC, we can’t—where is it? We need living targets to vent our venom on. Go ahead: spit at me. I wish to hell I could do some spitting too.

  BABYFACE: You’ve got something there, I’ll have to admit. There’s some kind of fury growing in me that isn’t simply a reaction to what’s happened to me, although that’s bad enough. The most maddening thing isn’t the what but the how, the fact that it was done to me—I wasn�
�t even consulted.

  ME: Now we’re getting somewhere. That’s the reason every war is self-defeating—the steamroller of war never consults any of its victims, and everybody’s victimized.

  BABYFACE: You mean war, all war, by the nature of the case, is one kind of EMSIAC or another?

  ME: Sure. Of course, the combatants cook up some pretty fancy slogans to sugar-coat what’s going on. But no matter what banners are waved, or who wins, the people on both sides emerge slugged, insect like, spiritually flattened. Each war brings the human race a little closer to the insects, whose lives are all “It” and no “I”; at the end of the war people feel less human and more insectlike, very much like the hero in that Kafka story who wakes up one morning to find that he’s turned into an enormous cockroach. Interestingly enough, Kafka wrote that story during the First World War.

  BABYFACE: Why do people feel more and more like insects?”

  ME: The insect’s life is all compulsion, and war is the last word in compulsion. All through the slaughter people have been impelled and propelled by vast impersonal forces, agencies beyond their reach. That’s a characteristic of modern life in general, of course. Every day of their lives, even in peacetime, people feel that they’re pushed around and mistreated—at work, in school, even back in the nursery, where the myth of mistreatment really starts when the kid’s grandiosity takes a beating at the hands of reality. But when war rolls around the whole thing is dramatically stepped up and takes on spectacular new dimensions—now they feel that they’ve been drained of all self-determination and reduced completely to the status of puppets, robots, mechanisms, beasts of burden, cannon fodder. All those sodden will-less things that move only when forces from the outside give them a shove, that are lost and bewildered when guidance doesn’t come “from above.” That kind of passivity, of will-lessness, is a regression to the helpless mewling and puking state of infancy, which is an unbearable blow to a grown man’s dignity. Especially because, in secret, it’s so avidly sought after by everybody.