"William Tenn - Null-P" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)

Whenever possible, Abnego avoided decision. When a decision was unavoidable, he made it entirely on the basis of precedent. He rarely spoke on a topic of current interest and never committed himself. He was garrulous and an exhibitionist only about his family.
"How can you lampoon a vacuum?" This had been the wail of many opposition newspaper writers and cartoonists during the early years of the Abnegite Revolution, when men still ran against Abnego at election time. They tried to draw him into riнdiculous statements or admissions time and again without success, Abnego was simнply incapable of saying anything that any major cross-section of the population would consider ridiculous.
Emergencies? "Well," Abnego had said, in the story every schoolchild knew, "I've noticed even the biggest forest fire will burn itself out. Main thing is not to get excited."
He made them lie down in low-blood-pressure areas. And, after years of building and destruction, of stimulation and conflict, of accelerating anxieties and torments, they rested and were humbly grateful.
It seemed to many, from the day Abnego was sworn in, that chaos began to waver and everywhere a glorious, welcome stability flowered. In some respects, such as the decrease in the number of monstrous births, processes were under way which had nothing at all to do with the Normal Man of Fillmore; in othersЧthe astonished announcement by lexicographers, for example, that slang expressions peculiar to teenagers in Abnego's first term were used by their children in exactly the same conнtexts eighteen years later in his fifth administrationЧthe historical leveling-out and patting-down effects of the Abnegite trowel were obvious.
The verbal expression of this great calm was the Abnegism.
History's earliest record of these deftly phrased inadequacies relates to the adminнistration in which Abnego, at last feeling secure enough to do so, appointed a cabinet without any regard to the wishes of his party hierarchy. A journalist, attempting to point up the absolute lack of color in the new official family, asked if any one of themЧfrom Secretary of State to Postmaster-GeneralЧhad ever committed himнself publicly on any issue or, in previous positions, had been responsible for a single constructive step in any direction.
To which the President supposedly replied with a bland, unhesitating smile, "I always say there's no hard feelings if no one's defeated. Well, sir, no one's defeated in a fight where the referee can't make a decision."
Apocryphal though it may have been, this remark expressed the mood of Abnegite America perfectly. "As pleasant as a no-decision bout" became part of everyday language.
Certainly as apocryphal as the George Washington cherry-tree legend, but the most definite Abnegism of them all was the one attributed to the President after a perforнmance of Romeo and Juliet. "It is better not to have loved at all, than to have loved and lost," he is reported to have remarked at the morbid end of the play.
At the inception of Abnego's sixth termЧthe first in which his oldest son served with him as Vice-PresidentЧa group of Europeans reopened trade with the United States by arriving in a cargo ship assembled from the salvaged parts of three sunken destroyers and one capsized aircraft carrier.
Received everywhere with undemonstrative cordiality, they traveled the country, amazed at the placidityЧthe almost total absence of political and military exciteнment on the one hand, and the rapid technological retrogression on the other. One of the emissaries sufficiently mislaid his diplomatic caution to comment before he left:
"We came to America, to these cathedrals of industrialism, in the hope that we would find solutions to many vexing problems of applied science. These problemsЧthe development of atomic power for factory use, the application of nuclear fission to such small arms as pistols and hand grenadesЧstand in the way of our postwar recovery. But you, in what remains of the United States of America, don't even see what we, in what remains of Europe, consider so complex and pressing. Excuse me, but what you have here is a national trance!"
His American hosts were not offended: they received his expostulations with poнlite smiles and shrugs. The delegate returned to tell his countrymen that the Ameriнcans, always notorious for their madness, had finally specialized in cretinism.
But another delegate who had observed widely and asked many searching quesнtions went back to his native Toulouse (French culture had once more coagulated in Provence) to define the philosophical foundations of the Abnegite Revolution.
In a book which was read by the world with enormous interest, Michel Gaston Fouffnique, sometime Professor of History at the Sorbonne, pointed out that while twentieth-century man had escaped from the narrow Greek formulations sufficiently to visualize a non-Aristotelian logic and a non-Euclidean geometry, he had not yet had the intellectual temerity to create a non-Platonic system of politics. Not until Abnego.
"Since the time of Socrates," wrote Monsieur Fouffnique, "Man's political viewнpoints have been in thrall to the conception that the best should govern. How to deнtermine that 'best,' the scale of values to be used in order that the 'best' and not mere undifferentiated 'betters' should ruleЧthese have been the basic issues around which have raged the fires of political controversy for almost three millennia. Whether an aristocracy of birth or intellect should prevail is an argument over values; whether rulers should be determined by the will of a god as determined by the entrails of a hog, or selected by the whole people on the basis of a ballot tallyЧthese are alternaнtives in method. But hitherto no political system has ventured away from the imнplicit and unexamined assumption first embodied in the philosopher-state of Plato's Republic.
"Now, at last, America has turned and questioned the pragmatic validity of the axiom. The young democracy to the West, which introduced the concept of the Rights of Man to jurisprudence, now gives a feverish world the Doctrine of the Lowest Comнmon Denominator in government. According to this doctrine as I have come to understand it through prolonged observation, it is not the worst who should governЧas many of my prejudiced fellow-delegates insistЧbut the mean: what might be termed the 'unbest' or the 'non-elite.'"
Situated amid the still-radioactive rubbish of modern war, the people of Europe listened devoutly to readings from Fouffnique's monograph. They were enthralled by the peaceful monotonies said to exist in the United States and bored by the academician's reasons thereto: that a governing group who knew to begin with that they were "unbest" would be free of the myriad jealousies and conflicts arising from the need to prove individual superiority, and that such a group would tend to smooth any major quarrel very rapidly because of the dangerous opportunities created for imaginative and resourceful people by conditions of struggle and strain.
There were oligarchs here and bosses there; in one nation an ancient religious order still held sway, in another, calculating and brilliant men continued to lead the people. But the word was preached. Shamans appeared in the population, ordinary-looking folk who were called "abnegos." Tyrants found it impossible to destroy these shamans, since they were not chosen for any special abilities but simply because they represented the median of a given group: the middle of any population grouping, it was found, lasts as long as the group itself. Therefore, through bloodshed and much time, the abnegos spread their philosophy and flourished.
Oliver Abnego, who became the first President of the World, was President Abnego VI of the United States of America. His son presidedЧas Vice-PresidentЧover a Senate composed mostly of his uncles and his cousins and his aunts. They and their numerous offspring lived in an economy which had deteriorated very, very slightly from the conditions experienced by the founder of their line.
As world president, Oliver Abnego approved only one measureЧthat granting preferential university scholarships to students whose grades were closest to their age-group median all over the planet. The President could hardly have been accused of originality and innovation unbecoming to his high office, however, since for some time now all reward systemsЧscholastic, athletic, and even industrialЧhad been adjusted to recognition of the most average achievement while castigating equally the highest and lowest scores.
When the usable oil gave out shortly afterwards, men turned with perfect calmнness to coal. The last turbines were placed in museums while still in operating conнdition: the people they served felt their isolated and individual use of electricity was too ostentatious for good abnegism.
Outstanding cultural phenomena of this period were carefully rhymed and exнactly metered poems addressed to the nondescript beauties and vague charms of a wife or old mother. Had not anthropology disappeared long ago, it would have beнcome a matter of common knowledge that there was a startling tendency to uniforнmity everywhere in such qualities as bone structure, features and pigmentation, not to mention intelligence, musculature, and personality. Humanity was breeding rapнidly and unconsciously in toward its center.
Nonetheless, just before the exhaustion of coal, there was a brief sputter of intelнlect among a group who established themselves on a site northwest of Cairo. These Nilotics, as they were known, consisted mostly of unreconstructed dissidents expelled by their communities, with a leavening of the mentally ill and the physically handiнcapped; they had at their peak an immense number of technical gadgets and yellowнing books culled from crumbling museums and libraries the world over.
Intensely ignored by their fellowmen, the Nilotics carried on shrill and intermiнnable debates while plowing their muddy fields just enough to keep alive. They conнcluded that they were the only surviving heirs of Homo sapiens, the bulk of the world's population now being composed of what they termed Homo abnegus.
Man's evolutionary success, they concluded, had been due chiefly to his lack of specialization. While other creatures had been forced to standardize to a particular and limited environment, mankind had been free for a tremendous spurt, until ultimately it had struck an environmental factor which demanded the fee of specialнization. To avoid war, Man had to specialize in nonentity.
Having come this far in discussion, the Nilotics determined to use the ancient weapons at their disposal to save Homo abnegus from himself. However, violent disнagreements over the methods of reeducation to be employed led them to a bloody internecine conflict with those same weapons in the course of which the entire colony was destroyed and its site made untenable for life. About this time, his coal used up. Man reentered the broad, self-replenishing forests.
The reign of Homo abnegus endured for a quarter of a million years. It was disнputed finallyЧand successfullyЧby a group of Newfoundland retrievers who had been marooned on an island in Hudson Bay when the cargo vessel transporting them to new owners had sunk back in the twentieth century.
These sturdy and highly intelligent dogs, limited perforce to each other's growling society for several hundred millennia, learned to talk in much the same manner that mankind's simian ancestors had learned to walk when a sudden shift in botany destroyed their ancient arboreal homesЧout of boredom. Their wits sharpened furнther by the hardships of their bleak island, their imaginations stimulated by the cold, the articulate retrievers built a most remarkable canine civilization in the Arctic before sweeping southward to enslave and eventually domesticate humanity.
Domestication took the form of breeding men solely for their ability to throw sticks and other objects, the retrieving of which was a sport still popular among the new masters of the planet, however sedentary certain erudite individuals might have become.
Highly prized as pets were a group of men with incredibly thin and long arms; another school of retrievers, however, favored a stocky breed whose arms were short, but extremely sinewy; while, occasionally, interesting results were obtained by inнducing rickets for a few generations to produce a pet whose arms were sufficiently limber as to appear almost boneless. This last type, while intriguing both esthetically and scientifically, was generally decried as a sign of decadence in the owner as well as a functional insult to the animal.
Eventually, of course, the retriever civilization developed machines which could throw sticks farther, faster, and with more frequency. Thereupon, except in the most backward canine communities, Man disappeared.

Afterword

The army was where I began writing this storyЧsomewhere in the European Theater of Operations, in 1944. I didn't have a typewriter, but I did have an early ballpoint pen (bought in Greenock, Scotland, the evening after we disembarked from the troop ship) and a pile of blank V-Mail (V-Mail was the unfolded one-page letter forms distributed to overseas soldiers for writing home).
My first intention was to write a satire about the inherent mediocrity of officialdom, especially as exemplified by the officers of the Army of the United States. By the time I completed that draft, in Saarbrucken, Germany, 1945, I had changed my opinion of the army several times overЧand, to my chagrin, the army never seemed to notice, or care.
After discharge, but before I began my professional career as a writer, I whittled away at the piece, picking first this target, then that. By 1947, I had settled on the most mediocre man I could see in a high position: Harry S Truman, the President of the United States. He, I admit to my shame and sorrow, was the original original of George Abnego.
(Why this S. and S.? Well, growing up has apparently been a constant process of growнing up so far as I'm concerned. I now rank Truman very high in my opinion of U.S. presiнdents, a couple of micrometers or so behind Abraham Lincoln.)
I had also, years back, been very much impressed with the early science fiction of A.E. van Vogt. His "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" had been among my favorites when it came to stories about aliens. But when I read his The World of Null-A, however, I had immediately wondered, "Why limit it to non-Aristotelian logic? Why not non-Plaнtonic politics? There's the rub in our social history ever since the fifth century B.C!" Now, in 1947, I remembered that overlook of van Vogt's. I worked that into the story and used it as a title.
I wrote and rewrote the story, intending it for The New Yorker. When I was seventeen, I had sent The New Yorker a cycle of stories that perhaps only an acned seventeen-year-old could writeЧ"The Adventures of God" and "The Further Adventures of God Junior." Instead of the expected printed rejection slip, I had received a postcard from the editor, Harold Ross (Harold Ross, himself, in his own handwriting!), inviting me to come up and see him about the stories. I went there in my bestЧand onlyЧblue serge suit, seeing myself as the new Perelman, the latest Thurber, the latter-day Robert Benchley.
I didn't even get to Ross's office. He came to me outside, in the smallish reception room. He talked to me for a few minutes, asking me what I read, what other things I had written, just why I had set myself to write "The Adventures of God." Then he handed me back the pieces I had sent in and touched me lightly on the shoulder. "We don't need these," he said. "But keep punching, keep writing. We'll be publishing you one day." And he watched me take the elevator down.
But I went home with the virus in me. No matter where I published first, no matter what book awards I might win, I knew I must fulfill Harold Ross's promiseЧI must one day appear in The New Yorker.
Now, at last, in 1950 (I had been potschkeying with the story for three years) I felt I had the wherewithal to fulfill that promise. I took it to my agent, told him of the market it must go to. He read it and shrugged. "Could be," he said.
Then, the next day, he called me and told me he'd sent it to Damon Knight's new sciнence-fiction magazine, Worlds Beyond.
Damon had liked it a lot and had immediately bought it for a hundred dollars.
"A hundred dollars!" I wept. "I intended it for The New Yorker."
"A hundred dollars definite," he said, "is better than The New Yorker maybe. You need the money to eat on."
I really couldn't argue with that last sentence. My ninety-dollar part of the check from Worlds Beyond bought a lot of groceries.