by Chad Oliver
“Maybe that’s the answer,” she said, trying to help. “Maybe if you drew up one that was long on tradition—play on the let’s-put-our-roots-in-the-soil routine—”
“Please. I may be an old man, but I’ve still got some pride. Anyhow, Lloyd tried a back-to-the-good-old-days gimmick in Miami just last year, and even he couldn’t put it through. The devil of it is, there’s just plain nothing new under the sun, to coin an inspired phrase.”
“There never was, George.”
“What?”
“You always used to say that, way back even before we were married. You said it was a little like writing—only ten and three-quarters basic plots, or whatever it was, but the trick was to string ’em together differently.”
“Well,” George admitted, “it’s a long damned way from Homer to Joyce, but I guess the old boy’s still Ulysses, no matter how you stick him together.”
Lois waited patiently.
“Ummmmm,” George said, and sat up in his hammock. “Maybe if we just filched an item here and there from different systems—even made a random assortment—and functioned them—”
Lois smiled, and resumed work on her nails.
George walked over to the library line, dialed a stack of books, and proceeded to his desk. He sat down and began making rapid notes on his scratch-pad.
Bobby stuck his blond head into the room, and yawned. “Mom,” he asked, “can I play in here?”
“Not now, Bobby,” Lois said. “Your father’s working.”
Bobby eyed the ample figure of George at the desk, shrugged, and went back to his room, monumentally unimpressed.
Three weeks later, it was another Monday and the rain had showed up on schedule. It was a weary drizzle this time, and it exactly suited George Sage’s mood.
Will Nolan, his promotions officer, slouched back behind his big desk, extracted the lenses from his eyes, and studied the ceiling without interest.
“It’s great, George,” he said flatly. “A great, great pattern.”
George began to sweat. That was the mildest comment he had ever got from Nolan in fifteen years—ever since his nomadic-reindeer-herder program. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but George had his own misgivings, even more so than usual.
” Really swell,” Nolan continued. “Of course, there may be some small difficulty with the Patent Office.”
“In other words, you don’t think it’s original enough to get a patent on. And if we can’t get a patent, we can’t put it on the market. That right?”
“Well, George,” Nolan said, shifting uncomfortably. There was a pause of singular length. “Well, George,” he repeated.
“Will, you’ve got to push this through. I don’t care how you do it, but it’s got to be done.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Nolan said insincerely.
George eyed his promotions officer, more in sympathy than in anger. George had few illusions about himself; he knew that his career as an inventor had been on the mediocre side. Naturally since he wasn’t one of the big boys, he couldn’t expect the top agencies to handle his promotions. He and Will Nolan were in the same boat, and it was not the sturdiest craft ever built.
“Let’s look on the bright side,” George said, trying to sell himself as much as Nolan. “It’s not subversive, is it? It doesn’t violate any of the American Ways of Life, does it?”
“It’s clean, George. Real clean.”
“Okay. It’s got good things in it, right? It’s got a small town deal with country stores and neighborliness and a slow pace; that gives tradition. Security. You know. It’s got a cosmopolitan nucleus, right in the center, that only operates on market days and holidays. When the people Go To the City, they know they’re supposed to act like an urban population; that takes the tedium out of it, get me? It’s a kind of alternating social organization, and it requires enough service personnel in the urban nucleus to handle anyone who doesn’t go for rural life no matter how he’s brought up. The big city gives ’em direction, expansion. Now look, Will, the sex angle is good, you’ve got to admit that. The teen clubs give the kids a healthy outlet, and the merit badges give them status while they’re adolescents. Not only that, but the chaperons give the older adults something to do with their time—their valuable experience isn’t wasted at all. When the kids get ready to settle down and get married, they’ll go into it with their eyes open.”
“Sex is always good,” Nolan admitted.
“That isn’t all,” George went on, warming to his topic. “Look at the way I’ve got the small businesses distributed: kids start right in, manufacturing and selling equipment for the high school and the football team. Farm children supply the lunch wagons, city kids handle accounts at the banks.”
“Free enterprise is always good,” Nolan agreed.
“Sure, and I haven’t neglected the spiritual side, either. Look at all the Sunday Schools, and how about that Pilgrim Society? I tell you, Will, this system has got everything.”
“Has it got a name?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Got to have a name, George. You know that. Can’t sell a system without a name. We’ll need some slogans, too.”
“Okay, okay. What are your writers for?”
Will Nolan inserted the lenses in his eyes and made a few notations. “It’s great, George,” he said. “If we can just get it by the boys in Patents.”
“They can’t turn it down. It’d be against the Constitution. What grounds would they have?”
“They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, of course, not with a great, great idea like this one. It’s just that there isn’t anything in it that’s—well—new. You know.”
George waved his hand with a confidence he was far from feeling. “Hell, there’s nothing new about pyramids, the Roman circus, the Empire State Building, wigwams—not all by their lonesomes. But all in one society, that’s different, different in kind.”
“I’ll push it, George,” Nolan said. “Try not to worry.”
George Sage was getting decidedly tired of having people tell him not to worry, but he realized that this was no time to blow up about it. He took a cue from Lois and made a neutral noise.
“I’ll call you,” Nolan said.
George left the promotions building and wandered aimlessly down past the Washington Monument. It was still raining: a bored, gray drizzle with all the character of a clam.
He walked on, hands in his pockets, beginning the long wait that always had emptiness at the end of it, emptiness that was neither success nor failure, but only existence.
“Damn the rain,” he said. “Damn it anyway.”
Election Day.
Perhaps it was of some significance—it had better be of some significance, George thought—that the weather could not have been more pleasant. A balmy sun coated the fields outside Natchezville with melted gold, and summer breezes whispered lazily through the sweet gum trees.
“Sit still, Bobby,” Lois said. “Your father has to be careful not to fly our copter inside the city limits while voting is going on.”
“Aaaaahh,” Bobby commented, and continued to twitch around.
Not without some disgust at himself, George noticed that the fingers on his left hand were firmly crossed. Well, the election was important to him; if Natchezville didn’t give him a tumble, he might as well turn himself out to pasture. Nolan had just barely snaked it through the Patent Office, and Mr. George Sage was not precisely the fair-haired boy around Washington these days.
More like a bald-headed mummy, in fact.
The copter loafed along in the sunshine, and George swerved a few degrees to make certain he did not get too close to an ancient blimp that Nolan had dredged up somewhere. The blimp hovered over Natchezville, trailing a long airsign: LET’S GIVE OUR KIDS A BETTER SOCIAL ORGANIZATION THAN WE HAD—FULL CIRCLE MEANS A FULLER LIFE!
Not bad, George thought. Not bad at all.
Natchezville, spread out like a toy town below them and to their left
, was a pretty little village, with its white houses gleaming in the sun. It was surrounded by large cotton plantations, for Natchezville was currently patterned after the Old South. If you looked closely, you could see belles in crinoline sipping tall drinks on pillared porches, and gray robots dancing in the slave quarters.
The Court House was a hive of activity as the voting picked up in tempo.
George switched on the TV. Yes, it was still there on Channel 7: a white circle flashing on and off, alternating with a bass voice that kept chanting: “Full Circle—a design for living designed for living—Full Circle—a design for living—”
George noticed that his hands were sweating, and wiped them on his handkerchief.
“We’re lucky,” he said for the tenth time, “that the competition isn’t too hot this time around. Neither Lloyd nor Brigham has a system in the race—Natchezville would be pretty small potatoes for them. Really, we’ve got only three challengers going down there. Krause’s Urbania routine is all right—but we’ve got that plus the rural appeal. Old Gingerton’s Greenwich Village deal is strictly from senility, and the Mammoth Cave entry is just a dark horse.”
Lois laughed dutifully.
George took the copter down almost to road level, where wagons and horses were plodding along toward Natchezville. He smiled and waved, but he was primarily intent on checking his roadsigns. Yes, there was one now, starting just ahead:
WHEN YOU MAKE YOUR TURN
ON YOUR ROAD AND MINE
DON’T BE SCARED
TO BE PREPARED
TO GO TO THE END OF THE LINE
FULL CIRCLE
“I like that, Dad,” Bobby said. “That’s good.”
There was a conventional billboard not far ahead, but it was too close to the city limits for him to risk a close look at it. Basically, it seemed to show two stupendously healthy and starry-eyed children gazing worshipfully into a future filled with circles.
George waved again, and took the copter up.
“Damn this waiting,” he said.
“Try not to worry, dear,” Lois advised.
George thought of a cutting retort, but had been married long enough not to make it.
The copter hummed through the air like an insect, as the sunlight faded and night shadows darkened the land below. A cool breeze sprang up in the north, and Bobby was getting emphatic about his hunger.
It was close to midnight when the copter’s private-line TV blinked into life.
It was Will Nolan, and George knew the result by the glow on his face.
“We’re in!” Nolan said. “Not a landslide, George boy, but a great, great victory. Congratulations!”
George grinned his thanks, put his arm around Lois, and headed the copter for home. Bobby made gentle boy-snores behind them. Stars sprinkled the sky and the moon was close and warm.
“I’m so proud of you, dear,” Lois said.
“It wasn’t really anything,” George said. “But wait until the Concordburg elections next year! I’ve got an idea cooking that’ll set them on their ears.”
The copter hummed on through the friendly night.
Of course, as you might suppose (the historian said to young Robert Sage over a second glass of beer), what happened to your father and to Fullcircle is hardly understandable except in terms of the social and historical context of the phenomena. If I may interrupt you for a moment, I think I can show you what I mean.
Looking at the whole thing now, it all takes on a sort of spurious inevitability, as though it couldn’t have happened any other way. That’s the crudest sort of teleological thinking, to be sure, and we must be careful of it.
Still, if we consider certain tendencies in American culture during the last seventy-five years of the century just past—say from 1925 until the year 2000—it helps us to explain your father and what happened to him.
Take two key ideas: individualism and progress. You are doubtless familiar enough with the notion of individuation, and the value American culture placed on the individual. You may not have realized that the idea of progress is a relatively recent one in history. A great many peoples failed to see that constant change necessarily meant improvement—how do you know that what you’re getting is better than what you had, and what do you mean by better? But Americans believed in progress; it was part of their value system. If you weren’t “making progress” you were as good as dead, in an individual as well as a national sense.
It was possible to demonstrate progress in some areas, such as technology. If by progress you mean efficiency, it could be shown that some tools were more efficient than other tools. Progress in terms of other spheres of culture was harder to define, but Americans believed in that kind of progress too. If you should ever go back and read some of the historical documents of that period, Robert, I’m sure you will be struck by the constant references to spiritual growth and social betterment.
Now, cultures are funny things. All of them change, but all of them are inherently conservative; they have to be. You can’t have a culture—which is an integrated system—charging off in ten different directions at once. In America, the slogan might well have been this: the same, with a difference. In other words, you must preserve the traditions of your forefathers, but be more up-to-date than they were.
You probably know that our industry was not always robotized and controlled by cybernetic systems, but it is hard to imagine today that it was ever anything else. This was a fundamental change in our way of life. As long ago as the middle of the last century, a man named Riesman was already pointing out that our culture was becoming oriented toward the consumers; he called it “other-direction,” I believe, and he noticed the increasing dominance of peer groups and the growing discriminations of taste. People were becoming sophisticated in what they consumed, you might say.
Atomic power, as you have read in your elementary history books, meant the end of old-style warfare. War was no longer an efficient instrument of national policy. It became necessary to win men’s minds. At the same time, the physical sciences went into a bit of a decline. Most of the work went into the making of bigger and better super weapons, which were never employed in warfare but were simply set off first in isolated areas, and later on the Moon—in order to keep the other side too scared to fight. The social sciences, meanwhile, had got far enough along to know what made sociocultural systems tick.
It was rather neat, really. Americans had always loved gadgets, and as they became more sophisticated they turned to really fundamental gadgets: social systems. It was all phrased in terms of healthy variety and showing the world what we could do with free enterprise and respect for the individual; but what it was, in fact, was social gadgeteering.
Inventors had always been highly regarded in America, but now the focus of their inventions changed. It was all very well for Edison to have thought up an electric light, of course, but how much more rewarding it was to invent a way of life for a whole generation!
What came out of it all was a series of flexible, delimited social groups—about the size of the old counties—with variant social systems competing for prestige. Every village and town had always thought of itself as different from and better than its neighbor down the road—perhaps you have heard of Boston or of some cities in Texas—and now they could really put on the dog. Of course, they weren’t completely different; that would have been chaos. They were all American, but with the parts put together differently. And there was a national service culture—a government—that was centered in Washington and had colonies in each area.
I hope you’ll excuse me for talking so long, Robert, but I think all this has a bearing on what your father did. The defects—if that is the right word—of this way of running things were not apparent until after the Natchezville elections, where Fullcircle began. That’s why I’m particularly anxious to hear about the next decade or so, when you were growing up. I recall that George lost the Concordburg elections the next year, but after that I’m a little hazy
.
I have always wondered just how long it was before your; father knew what had happened to him …
“Look,” George Sage said, with a moderately successful imitation of long-suffering patience, “do you have to shoot marbles right under my hammock?”
“It’s raining outside, Pop,” Bob answered, laconically chalking another circle on the living-room carpet.
“It’s always raining,” George muttered, half to himself. “It’s been raining for a million years.”
“Don’t be depressed, dear,” Lois said.
“Now you’re turning on me! How the hell am I supposed to get any work done?”
“Don’t swear in front of Bobby, George.”
“Aaaahh.” George stared grimly at his son. “You know plenty of worse words than that, don’t you, Bobby?”
“Sure,” the boy said solemnly. “And my name is Bob, not Bobby.”
“Hell,” George said again.
“Come on, Bob,” Lois said. “You run get in the copter and go to the store with Mother.”
“Can I pilot?”
“Of course,” Lois said, hiding a shiver of anticipation.
They hurried up to the roof.
George was alone.
It was ten years since he had won the Natchezville elections with his Full Circle. Not one of his ideas had panned out since. To make matters worse, he was in competition with himself.
And losing.
He swung out of his hammock, made some half-hearted notes on the pad on his desk, and called Will Nolan. The promotions officer faded into the screen like a reluctant spirit.
“Great to see you, George boy,” he said with an appalling lack of sincerity. “What’s new?”
“That’s what I want to know. Any new figures on that Frankenstein of ours?”
“It wasn’t Frankenstein,” Nolan corrected, removing the lenses from his eyes. “It was Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Monster, shmonster. What’s the box-score?”