End of the Dream

by Wylie, Philip;

  BEYOND ARMAGEDDON

  THE END OF THE DREAM

  Philip Wylie

  UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS • LINCOLN

  © 1972 by Fredericka B. Wylie as executrix of the estate of Philip Wylie

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wylie, Philip, 1902–1971.

  The end of the dream / Philip Wylie.

  pages; cm.—(Beyond Armageddon)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-4543-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-5331-5 (electronic: e-pub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-5332-2 (electronic: mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS3545.Y46E53 2013

  813′.52—dc23 2013003459

  This edition follows the original in beginning the main text on arabic page 7; no material has been omitted.

  Contents

  Prologue: An Impossible Task

  I: Selections from 1975: Date of No Return

  II: “Vengeance is Mine,” sayeth Nature

  III: The Eighties

  VII: The Search for Energy

  Epilogue

  Prologue: An Impossible Task

  The date (Old Calendar) was June 6, 2023, and the place, Faraway, New York, again in the Old Geography.

  Faraway, a twenty-five-thousand-acre stand of largely virgin timber, lies in the Adirondack Mountains somewhat to the north and west of the familiar Placid-Saranac vacation region. It was owned by Miles Standish Smythe and his sister Nora, and had been in the family since 1854. It had been the hideaway of a group of Eastern millionaires who had constructed a huge central lodge and a number of cottages together with service buildings and homes for guides on the northern shore of the largest of three bodies of water within its fenced boundaries, Lake Enigma. The other two were less than a mile at their widest points: Big Panther and Little Panther ponds.

  Originally, the only means of reaching the “camp,” as its owners called it, was by rail, a spur fifteen miles long served by a single small locomotive and a rolling stock of three baggage cars and one very elegant private car. Massive iron gates barred the spur, which was, by intention, seemingly blocked by a hardwood scrub. Behind that barrier and invisible from the main line was a guard’s house, initially occupied by a dull-witted chap named Seth Bartlet and his more capable wife, who had seen to it for more than a decade that none but club members and guests entered the property.

  A fire in the winter of 1853 had destroyed the lodge and several cottages, after which the aging members decided to sell the tract. It was purchased by Daniel Smythe, who built a lodge of modest proportions and new cottages. Faraway then became the summer resort and hunting preserve of Daniel Smythe, his family and their descendants.

  Early in the twentieth century that lodge had been replaced by an immense clubhouse of fieldstone, and over the years various members of the family and numerous friends had built elaborate summer places along the shore of Lake Enigma. The property included several mountains, and through the uncut forest ran the Mystery River and several tributary creeks. The Mystery fed Lake Enigma and flowed from it, underground, for some miles, which presumably accounted for the names of both the lake and the small, clear river.

  There were, of course, other private holdings as fast in the Adirondacks. But more of them had repeatedly known the ring of axes and later the snarl of power saws. None had maintained through the twentieth century a comparable stand of virgin forest. Not surprisingly, Faraway had been the last northern refuge of the ivory bill and was, still, one of the few places in the Adirondacks populated by otters, fishers and martins. In very cold winters it also became the range of wolves, driven south from Canada by hunger.

  The rail spur had long since been replaced by a fifteen-mile graveled road still guarded by descendants of Seth Bartlet.

  When, on Miles Smythe’s twenty-first birthday, it came into his and his sister Nora’s possession, he maintained it in the customary way, security measures included. In his boyhood he had spent his summers and many a winter vacation at Faraway. In the long and the shorter periods one of the resident guides had trained him and his young friend Willard Gulliver in the northwoodsman’s skills. But, though he accepted his heritage with aplomb, he did not visit Faraway for several summers. He had graduated from Princeton magna cum laude, and immediately launched the Foundation which had begun in his precocious teens as a response to anger in the form of a creative dream. The Foundation for Human Conservancy made Miles a world figure but failed in its purpose as Miles had surely expected from the start.

  When he could, in the ensuing decades, Miles got up to Faraway from Manhattan or elsewhere. He loved the place. His boyhood chum, Will Gulliver, after finishing his graduate work in ecology and becoming Miles’s right-hand man in the Foundation, usually accompanied him. He had married Miles’s sister Nora. Little by little, as both men perceived the approaching ruin of the civilization they had dedicated their lives to trying to rescue, they began to prepare Faraway as a retreat, a place where, if all else gave way, their families and those of selected friends and colleagues might escape any ultimate horror and, hopefully, survive in that guarded wilderness with the makings—or remakings—of a viable society. By 2010 a miniature, self-sustaining city had been quietly constructed on Lake Enigma and, five years later, wives, children and elderly folk were being quietly assembled there. The others were to come later. Not all of them made it.

  Now, on a day in what once would have been June 6, in the year A.D. 2023 by Old Calendar reckoning, this nucleus of forest-bound civilization served a purpose for which it had not been designed. Faraway was the “Central City” of District Two. It lay in Area Six.

  That meant it was the capital of what had been the United States and Canada.

  District One was now Europe, Britain and Soviet Russia.

  Area Six was that part of USA which had been New England and New York State along with Canada’s Maritime Provinces and Quebec. The New Calendar described this June day as 6/17/23, since the year had been divided into thirteen months of twenty-eight days and an Added Day, yearly, and two in each fourth year. The extra month followed December and was called Aurora by people who still used the old system. But children of school age were already puzzled by the Old Calendar, which they found absurd and confusing.

  A day, then, in late spring.

  The time, midmorning.

  The sky was quite blue, bluer, many were saying, than it had been since it became gray all over the world.

  The population of Faraway had just passed the four-thousand mark, a new high. It was a busy population. The children were in school, the older youths taking accelerated courses at college or on graduate levels. All able adults were occupied in servicing what Miles called the “habitat” or in its two major undertakings.

  The first of these involved the recovery and reorganization of human beings in District Two. As of that June date 2,310,065 survivors in the USA and Canada had been registered. Many were aged or ill and many, young children. They were being assembled in suitable towns and in a few cities according to their needs, desires and skills. That number could be said to have at least minimally adequate shelter, enough food, limited communications and basic transportation.

  It was estimated that a half million persons in District Two were still “at large,” and an unknown but plainly considerable fraction of them were willfully so, and in violation of the New Laws. During the years after 2011 when civilized nations faltered and fell, a shocking percentage of once satisfactory (or once criminal) human beings regressed to banditry and barbarism. In mid-2023, such bands were still being located and dealt with in ways as humane as circumstances permitted. Many of these wild folk could, with treatment, be
reclaimed as useful citizens and their professional skills thereby recovered—in a time when skills of all sorts were precious. Many of these bands contained numbers of children, all of whom were regarded as salvageable.

  As rapidly as possible, then, the survivors in District Two were being settled and were both supplying and being supplied with essentials. Similar procedures were taking place in District One and in Three through Seven, though the pace of recovery was slower and the degree less well known for Five (China and India), Six (Africa) and Seven (Latin America). District Eight (Island Communities, Atlantic, Pacific and Other Seas) was still unformed.

  The second major activity of the Central City was the integration of District Two with the others for the establishment of a world government. Toward that end the Third World Congress was now in session in Paris, attended by Miles Smythe, who was director for District Two, and a score of his associates.

  This endeavor was difficult, owing to the magnitude of physical problems, and it was further hampered by language translation. No lack of will and no national fealty or political dogma appreciably interfered with the work. In three generations genus Homo had been reduced by its own acts, and in spite of every possible warning, to an estimated fifty millions from a peak more than a hundred times as great. One person existed in 2023 for every hundred-plus alive at the century’s turn.

  That was a sufficient reduction and it had happened in a sufficiently short period to make mandatory the need for a central government (and a totally different way of life from the recent and most “highly civilized” sort). Even that stubborn breed called mankind got the point. It had taken a ninety per cent extermination, in a series of incalculably grim calamities, to shatter man’s deluded attitude toward his special nation and its political and economic system and, above all, to erase man’s near indelible idea that he existed above and outside nature and could do with and to nature as he pleased.

  The First World Congress was called in 2020. Between them and the Third, present, Congress (2023) nine out of ten in the residual world population perished and in 2023 there was still no certainty that the efforts of a world government could save humanity. That uncertainty was well understood by all literate people and most others. The past half century had shown that, however fast the scientists exerted their efforts toward anticipating new perils, others of unknown deadliness were overlooked or even not detectable.

  The havoc man had wreaked on his planet was so immense and of so many sorts that assurance of safety had become absurd.

  All that remained was hope.

  If man could reorganize, if he could continue to live with minimal damage to his ruined environment, if no future catastrophe of a sort and scope he could not manage were to occur, then, at some future date not soon expectable, he could say with modest confidence that he had succeeded and could look to a future of open-ended duration. But even hope was exhilarating after the past decades.

  The opaque and usually densely clouded sky itself was turning pale blue again. And, everywhere else on the depeopled planet, nature showed signs of recoveries of greater or lesser magnitudes. The seas were slowly returning to their pre-inundation levels. The Antarctic ice was building up anew and ice was forming in the northern seas. Pests and plagues were under control or had burned themselves out and so vanished. And, almost anywhere, there could be found evidence that the titanic “vengeance” of nature which had left few people had also allowed tiny samples of uncounted life forms to persist. These were becoming the “seed beds” of regeneration and redistribution. Upland brooks were often as pellucid as those at Faraway. Many rivers were becoming almost as clear. Birds, mammals, insects, reptiles and plants that had been thought extinct, or had vanished from huge regions, were beginning to reappear or return.

  Hardly a day passed that the Central City at Faraway did not receive reports, often a number of them, of such welcome surprises. A pair of nesting scarlet tanagers was reported from what had been Pennsylvania. A school of bottle-nosed dolphin was cited off the eastern tip of Long Island. A black bear was photographed in former Wyoming. A man in Texas was bitten by a rattlesnake. After several unusually heavy and unusually uncontaminated rains in the vicinity of Palm Springs, California, six species of desert flowers bloomed and a rare species of desert shrimp hatched in standing pools.

  Each such “bulletin” was an excitement for all. The fact that the snake-bitten Texan died was not nearly so cogent as the fact that another and supposedly extinct reptile had lived and could perhaps take its place again in the ecological life chains so hideously interrupted. And man’s powers of recuperation surely are no less than those of other living creatures!

  The four-thousand-plus citizens of the Central City, Area Six, were undoubtedly the most nearly optimistic group in District Two. What all but a few young children had experienced was so appalling that, had they not been chosen for their condition and characteristics, all might expectably be mad: husbands without wives, wives widowed by disasters, orphaned youths and only a few complete families, most people at Faraway went about their work with a visible if understated joy. Why?

  There was hope.

  Not long ago and for a long while there had been none.

  Life, even at this odd capital, was not luxurious. Working hours were unlimited and the work was never finished. There was no “America” any more, and most of what had been that was still devastated. Less than three hundred remained in hospitals, maimed, ill or still suffering mental collapse. For everybody’s loved ones and friends were lost in their majority . . . dead by ways known or unknown and ways all too easily envisaged.

  Nevertheless they had elected representatives to a government of all humanity and it was in its third session. As the New Laws were passed by the Congress they were universally accepted and with only occasional, usually technological debate. The ancestors and even the parents of these survivors would have called the New Laws intolerably confining, even dictatorial. Such was not the case. People in the organizing and differently governed world were free in the fundamental sense and the tasks they performed were executed voluntarily, however stringent and demanding they might be. Their privations—or what would thitherto have seemed that, and intolerable in degree—were welcomed.

  It was, all over the recovering world of man, “good to be alive” for the one, real and unchanging reason: each individual’s aliveness meant that humanity lived and it meant that humanity had a hope of going on, even of biological immortality, all man ever had the sane right to hope.

  At Faraway, on that morning of June 6, a man sat in a singular building among the ultra-modern structures on or near the shores of Lake Enigma. This extensive structure was underground and reached by a covered stairway. Over its massive portal chipped letters described its function:

  RECORDS BUILDING

  The Foundation for Human Conservancy

  The heavy, power-swung portal gave on a set of business offices, artificially lighted, air-conditioned, luxurious even by the highest-achieved standards. It housed business machines and other equipment developed before the End. There were six offices opening off a wide hallway but only one was occupied by a single man, Willard Page Gulliver, Miles Smythe’s lifelong friend and his second in command while the Foundation was viable.

  The structures and technical facilities at Faraway anticipated the world calamity that had taken place. It was Miles’s belief that by using the two immense fortunes he and his sister had inherited it would be possible to unite every individual and every organization with an interest in saving the environment, so as to form a giant body dedicated to the rescue of man from himself, from his environment-despoiling “technology.”

  What Miles considered the vital needs, as he rapidly built up his ultimately world-renowned Foundation, consisted of a galaxy of acts and of things. One such effort concerned research. For, as Miles used to state at every opportunity in the early years (the early seventies), “Until we know exactly what threatens us, our planet, its life f
orms and ecology, we cannot know what priorities to set for escaping doom.” The Foundation backed a research program in order to find the most imminent threats.

  His second effort was to set up a clearinghouse for all relevant scientific data as such data existed and were developed. At one time (1989–95) the Foundation employed more than twenty thousand persons in those two efforts alone. The material thus gathered had been shipped to the Records Building at Faraway and filed in auto-retrieval banks in an atmosphere of inert gas, for its preservation. Thus there was stored here an almost complete history both of the facts relating to the environmental debacle and of what mankind said and did in the increasingly dreadful decades.

  This was now Will Gulliver’s “library,” a repository of 3,900,000,000 catalogued items.

  Alone in the edifice, he prepared to dictate to a computransor a letter to Miles, or what would have been a letter in his younger years and what he still thought of as such. Actually, his words would be stored electronically on a single “chip” which would be lasogramed in “open” periods to a satellite and thence to a sister copier in Paris at the rate of a hundred and eighty thousand words per second. From the Paris recording Miles could play back Will’s “letter” while noting, as he listened to this “audio,” any portions he wished transcribed for later, careful perusal.

  The day before, Miles had requested from Paris that Will forward by computransor all he had thus far done on what Will had, from the first, called “an impossible task.”

  This task had occupied him for more than half his working time in the past eighteen months. It was, in so far as the directive went, simple-seeming. Will was to gather and annotate a selection of material from the fabulous stores in the Records Building that would show how the world had come to its present state in the half century just past.

  This project was not to be formal history.