Looking Backward From the Year 2000
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Release date: March 1, 1973
Publisher: Ace Books
Print pages: 237
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Looking Backward From the Year 2000
Mack Reynolds
For some years the present writer has been doing social science fiction, extrapolating in the field of socio-economics. During that period I have attempted to explore various future possibilities. This is the culmination. Old reader friends will recognize that I have pirated some of my own ideas in Looking Backward, From the Year 2000 from early work. They will please forgive me but the story would be impossible otherwise.
The student of political economy will also note that I have called upon the ideas of such authors of the past as Proudhon for the medium of exchange of the future, upon Daniel DeLeon for the structure of industry, upon Edward Bellamy for much of the basic idea and upon many contemporary writers such as Vance Packard, Ferdinand Lundberg, Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, Michael Young, Robert L. Heilbroner, Arthur C. Clarke, John Kenneth Galbraith and the late Frank Tannenbaum. I have also drawn extensively on the many participants in the work being done by many contributors to the American Academy’s Commission on the Year 2000 which appears in Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
I should also like to thank Raymond A. E. Klein, Director of the Eidos Theoretical Research group for his comments upon some of my pioneering ideas. A fiction writer is seldom blessed with a think tank to fall back upon.
“Man may be skeptical about following the flight of the dodo bird into extinction, but the evidence points increasingly to just such a pursuit.
“The planet and mankind are in grave danger of irreversible catastrophe if the political structure that now prevails is not drastically changed during the next few decades.
“We live in a high-risk environment, and the trends that create the present level of risk continue to increase the danger and reduce the possibilities of creatively controlling it…. There are four interconnected threats to the planet—wars of mass destruction, overpopulation, pollution and the depletion of resources. They have a cumulative effect. A problem in one area renders it more difficult to solve the problems in any other area…. The basis of all four problems is the inadequacy of the sovereign States to manage the affairs of mankind in the 20th Century.”
Professor Richard A. Falk, Princeton
“… those societies which cannot combine reverence for their symbols with freedom for their revision must ultimately decay, either from anarchy or the slow atrophy by useless shadows.”
Alfred North Whitehead
“Is America’s romance with practicality and efficiency enough to sustain it? Men serving a system with no other goal than its further advance have no transcendent aims.”
David Riesman
“Why should men struggle to maximize income when the price is many dull and dark hours of labor? Why especially should they do so as goods become more plentiful and less urgent? Why should they not seek instead to maximise the rewards of all the hours of their days? And since this is the plan and obvious aspiration of a great and growing number of the most perceptive people, why should it not be the central goal of the society?”
John Kenneth GalbraithThe Affluent Society
“The present, for men who have no utopia, is inevitably constricting; and, similarly, cultures which have no utopia remain imprisoned in the present and quickly fall back into the past, for the present can be fully alive only in tension between past and future. This is the fruitfulness of utopia—its ability to open up possibilities.” Paul Tillich
Critique and Justification of Utopia
“… through a strange alchemy of the Gods, there are a disproportionate number of kids coming along these days with IQ’s that are soaring toward a level too high to measure. These kids have very cold eyes. They are the ones who, one day, will stop playing with transistors, diodes and microcircuitry and look at Barrentown and start asking the rude questions. Or build a machine that will ask.”
John D. MacDonaldThe Quick Brown Fox
“… if we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that in the long run—and often in the short one—the most daring prophecies turn out to be laughably conservative.”
Arthur C. ClarkeThe Promise of Space
“… one must either anticipate change or be its victim.”
John K. Galbraith
“All human beings are equal in rights and dignity, and only such a system of wealth distribution can therefore be defensible as respects and secures those qualities.”
Edward BellamyEquality
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”
Thomas Jefferson
“The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
Alfred North Whitehead
The transformation we’re now seeing will make the Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century look like a pink tea.
Louis LevineChief Analyst in Employment SecurityU.S. Department of Labor
Now
“Thirty years,” Julian West said. “You mean all this has taken place in a third of a century?”
Leete nodded. “Don’t underestimate thirty odd years in terms of history when times are ripe for change.” He thought about it for a moment, pursing his lips as he attempted to put his finger on the illustration he wanted to use. “The Egyptians managed to go through thirty dynasties without any substantial changes in their culture, their socio-economic system, their science. It was during their early fourth dynasty that the great pyramid, that of Khufu, or Cheops as we usually call him, was built. Two thousand years later at the time of the Persian and then the Macedonian conquests, the Egyptians were substantially the same, their society fundamentally unchanged. They aren’t the sole example. The Mayans of Guatemala and Yucatan came on the scene with a surprisingly advanced culture—we’re not sure, perhaps inherited from the Olmecs. They maintained this culture for a millennium, for all practical purposes unchanged.”
“That’s what I mean,” Julian West said. “It would take… why, a thousand years to—”
The other was shaking his head. “No. I was giving you the reverse of the coin. But take the United States in, say, 1840. She was a small, new country and, although the Louisiana Purchase had given her large portions of the West, had hardly penetrated beyond the Mississippi. Her economy was largely agricultural and based on slavery in the South. In world affairs she was a third-rate power, at best. Thirty-three years later she had spread from coast to coast, engulfing such areas as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California and had become the most powerful country in the world, though it took Europe a time to realize the fact. The economy had become industrial, railroads spanned the continent, development had become a geometric progression.
“But perhaps that isn’t the best example of what a third of a century can do in history. Consider Europe in June of 1914. All had been peace and progress since Napoleon’s era. William Hohenzollern was Kaiser of Germany; Franz Josef, Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Czar Nicholas the Second, Czar of Russia; all seemingly secure on their thrones. The airplane was a flimsy affair, not considered a serious military weapon. The submarine was in its infancy and when submerged most of the crew would sit on the floor, unmoving, to preserve trim. Weapons? The most dangerous were probably heavy cannon and the recently evolved Maxim machine gun. Lenin, unknown to the world as a whole, was a shabby refugee in Switzerland. Hitler was a paper-hanger in Vienna, Mussolini the editor of a small so-called socialist newspaper. Thirty years later? Consider for a moment. The Nazi armies were reeling back from the interior of Communist Russia. The V-2 rockets, the first spaceships, were bombing England. The first atomic bomb was about to be tested in Alamagordo. In China, Mao’s guerrillas were already making their plans to take over the most populous country in the world. Tito was largely in control of Yugoslavia, and shortly the Eastern half of Europe was to be under communist control. Fascism, a word unknown in 1914, was already a dead duck and within a year Hitler was to be a suicide and Mussolini hanging by his heels.”
Julian West said, “You make your point. A lot of history can happen in thirty years. But all this—”
The other waggled a finger at him. “But there are new elements at work now. Back in your time, someone mentioned that ninety percent—or was it ninety-five?—of all scientists who had ever lived were presently alive and working. What would you say the percentage was today?”
“Why, I don’t know. I haven’t the vaguest idea.”
“Approximately the same. Ninety percent of all the scientists who have ever lived are at present alive and working. You see, during the past thirty years our universities have doubled, tripled and quadrupled the out-turn of scientists, engineers, technicians. We have become a nation of such. I would estimate that at least half of our adults of the working years are scientists, engineers or technicians.
“But there is still another factor in which we differ from the past. About the year 1950 Dr. Robert Oppenheimer pointed out that human knowledge was doubling every eight years. Since that time, in some fields, at least, progress has accelerated. Of course, I don’t mean that this is a progress that is steady and easily measurable. It comes in fits and starts. One sciene will forge ahead dramatically under the influence of several new breakthroughs, another will plod along. Archeology, for instance, is usually a plodder, although from time to time such discoveries as carbon dating will revolutionize the field. But medicine, physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry? Each discovery made leads for two or more others. Were it not for the International Computer Data Banks, no man could begin to keep up. Even with them, it is all but impossible, no matter how narrow your sub-specialization.”
He leaned forward in emphasis. “Consider the ramifications, Julian. Let us assume that when you took on your experiment the sum of human knowledge was expressed by the number one. In eight years, it had doubled to two. In sixteen years, it was four, in twenty-four years, eight. Today we have more than sixteen times as much information at our disposal as was available in your period, and in a few years it will be thirty-two times.”
Julian West made a gesture of despair. “Even then, I was far from being up on most of the sciences.”
Most Americans—citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful and most ideal-swathed country in the world—by a very wide margin own nothing more than their household goods, a few glittering gadgets such as automobiles and television sets (usuually purchased on the installment plan, many at second hand) and the clothes on their backs. A horde if not the majority of Americans live in shacks, cabins, hovels, shanties, hand-me-down Victorian eyesores, rickety tenements and flaky apartment buildings…. At the same time, a relative handful of Americans are extravagantly endowed, like princes in the Arabian Nights tales. Their agents deafen a baffled world with a never-ceasing chant about the occult merits of private-property ownership… and the vaulting puissance of the American owners… It would be difficult in the 1960s for a large majarity of Americans to show fewer significant possessions if the country had long labored under a grasping dictatorship.
Ferdinand LundbergThe Rich and the Super-Rich
Then
Julian West said, “All right. How much time do I have?” There was a slight tic at the side of his mouth.
“If you take care, every care, you might have as much as a year, or even two.”
“And if I don’t?”
The doctor said slowly, “You might go next week, next month—or even tomorrow.”
“I see. And what do you mean by taking care?”
“You must give up smoking and alcohol. And all other stimulants for that matter. Coffee, tea, cocoa. Even such beverages as Cocoa Cola or Pepsi Cola, both of which have a rather high caffeine content.”
“So, I can’t even drink a coke, eh?”
“Above all, you must avoid physical exertion. Never allow yourself to grow tired. Avoid ascending stairs. When you walk, walk slowly. And you must avoid as well, emotional upset. Don’t get into arguments. Don’t participate in sex.”
Absently, Julian West fished his pipe from his jacket pocket. It was a gold-bound Barling shell briar, a gift from his fiancée, Edith Bartlett. The doctor looked at it expressionlessly. His patient ignored him, brought a tobacco pouch from his other pocket and began to load up.
He said, “I’ve been reading quite a bit about heart transplants recently. Down in South Africa and so forth.”
The doctor nodded. “The field of organ transplant is in its infancy. I, myself, have performed three heart transplants. The most successful patient lived for six months. One died on the operating table, the other lived eight days.”
“However, there wouldn’t seem to be much choice in my case.” Julian West brought a gold lighter from his pants pocket, fired his pipe, and sucked aromatic British tobacco smoke into his mouth. He exhaled through his nostrils.
In his mid-thirties, Julian West’s hair was thick and dark, but there were touches of premature gray at the temples and a small amount in his mustache. However, these signs of age were an attractive counterbalance to his otherwise youthfully fresh complexion, to his flat stomach, square shoulders and strong arms and legs. He had never known it but the women who had loved him in his time had usually been attracted to the certain vulnerable quality about his eyes and mouth.
The doctor was shaking his head. “Were you otherwise in good shape, I might consider it. However, neither your kidneys nor your liver are up to the strain involved. Even though the heart operation was a success—” He let the sentence dribble away.
“In short, you offer me no hope whatsoever.”
The doctor shifted in his chair, unhappily. “Mr. West, there is always hope. As I said, the field of organ transplant is in its infancy. However, amazing progress is already being made. Perhaps within six months or so major discoveries will be hit upon which would make an operation on you worth the risk.”
“But you don’t really expect such developments so soon?”
“No”
“How soon? One year? Two years? The absolute limit you give me?”
“No. You wanted the whole truth, Mr. West. Perhaps in five years, more likely ten, medical science will have arrived at the point where organ transplant is a standard operation with as great a chance of success as an appendectomy.”
“But you could be wrong?”
“Yes.”
“It might come as soon as six months?”
“Mr. West, I don’t wish to arouse false hopes. As you told me when you first solicited my services, I am thought one of the outstanding specialists in my field. I do not expect organ transplanting to be a developed branch of our medical science in less than five to ten years.”
Edith Bartlett, as ever, was late. When she came hurrying up, as ever, there was a whimsical, apologetic air.
Julian West came to his feet from the table tucked away in an alcove of the cocktail lounge. He put his pipe into a side pocket and held her chair for her.
Before she could say anything, he said, “Par for the course, sweetie. You’re only fifteen minutes late.”
“I got to shopping, Jule, and lost track of the time. I found the most darling—” She broke it off. “But that’s not important, is it?” She put her bag on the table and looked at him.
He realized, all over again, that for him she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. Perhaps not for the judges of the Miss America or Miss Universe contests. Perhaps not for those of Hollywood who had the job of selecting the sex symbols for films and television. But for Julian West. His taste ran to brunettes, to greenish eyes, to peaches-and-cream complexions in the English tradition, to figures less than lush and breasts smaller than currently in demand, to fine ankles and narrow feet, to full mouths and perky noses, to well-shaped ears and… in short, to Edith Bartlett.
“Martini?” he said, as the waiter came up.
“I suppose so.”
“Doubles,” he said. “A twist of lemon in one, two onions in the other. Be sure the glasses are preliminarily chilled.”
“Yes, Mr. West.” The waiter retreated.
She looked at him. “What did Doctor Almenroder say?”
“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Why… why the good news, I guess.”
He took a breath and said, “Within five or ten years techniques will probably be developed that would make an operation a possible success.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. “Well, but… the bad news.”
He said wryly, “I’m not going to last five years, not to speak of ten.”
Her eyes rounded in disbelief. “But, Jule, you’re no more than thirty-five.”
The drinks had come. He took up the one with the lemon peel and made a mock gesture in the way of a toast. “That’s the trouble with belonging to the jet set, I suppose. Evidently I not only burned my candle at both ends, but had it lit in the middle. Of course, the stint in the Asian War didn’t help any. Evidently that liver and kidney infection never really completely cleared up.”
“What… what did he say?”
“If I take it easy as it is possible to take it, I just might last as much as two years.”
“Two years!”
“No alcohol, no tobacco, no nothing. I walk, I don’t run. I don’t climb stairs. I don’t argue with anybody, not even Democrats, Civil Righters, or hippies. In short, I don’t do anything except sit, real quietly, and wait.”
“Darling.” Her voice was urgent and she put her perfectly manicured fingers on his arm. “Let’s get married immediately.”
He twisted his face. “Among other things I avoid is sex.”
“That’s not important.”
He was even able to laugh. “Don’t go overboard, sweetie. The engagement is obviously off.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Almenroder told me never to argue.” He flicked a finger for the waiter.
He took in Edith’s glass, which had hardly been touched, and said to the man, “Another double.”
When the other had gone, Edith said, “Jule, be sensible. That isn’t the way.”
“What is the way?”
Her mouth was tense and distress was in the greenness of her eyes. She shook her head. “He said no alcohol.”
“And no tobacco and no excitement and no sex and no everything.” Julian West fished his pipe from out of his jacket pocket, knocking the ash and unburned tobacco out against the palm of his hand and hence to the ashtray. He reached for his tobacco pouch.
“What did you think of Hemingway,” he said.
She was surprised at the sudden switch. “Papa? Oh, he was great fun. A monster.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Why, I suppose there during the mano a mano thing in Spain. In Torremolinos at a party. But, darling—”
Julian West said, “He was already going by then. And he knew it. He could have hung on, possibly, for a few more years. Possibly five or ten. But not as Papa Hemingway. No booze, watching himself, continual trips to the Mayo Clinic for everything from surgery on his kidneys, to treatment of his high blood pressure, to shock treatments for his chronic mental depression. But it wouldn’t have been Papa. He called it quits instead. A lot of fools called him a coward.”
The martini came and he took down almost half of it in one long swallow. The waiter looked at him nervously before taking off again.
Edith looked down into her own glass. “You’re not thinking of suicide? That’s silly.”
He considered it. “No. Not really. But I don’t expect to sit around like a cabbage, waiting for the end. I’ve got an idea.”
“Jim,” Julian West said, “I’ve got a problem for you.”
“Fire away,” his stockbroker said, crossing his hands over his well-larded belly.
“We’ve got a man who is going to disappear for ten years. During that period there will be no possible way for him to handle his financial affairs. He wants to put his fortune into something that will be absolutely safe, so that when he returns it won’t have been stolen from him, eroded away by inflation or devaluation or by a collapse in securities values. So the problem is, what does he put it into?”
James Dempsey Lynch thought about it, only slightly intrigued. “How about one or more of the bluest of blue chips? Say, American Telephone and Telegraph.”
Julian West said, “That was my first reaction. But the trouble is he wouldn’t be around to supervise, in case something came up. For instance, every year that goes by the government gets further into business. AT&T is all but a monopoly and now with the coming of the communications satellites it’s in the cards that the government might take over. The petroleum corporations? In ten years there might be some breakthroughs in nuclear power. If there are, what happens to oil? IBM? There you go again, almost a monopoly in the computer field. Computers are getting more important by the day. Might the government decide that their development is too important to remain in private hands?”
Lynch grimaced. “You’ve got a point.”
Julian West said, “How about government bonds?”
His broker laughed. He was becoming more interested in the question. “Inflation is developing at the rate of more than six percent a year and each year that goes by the rate ups. Put your friend’s fortune into bonds and in ten years he’d have a good chance of being broke. When I was a boy, back during the Depression, a pack of cigarettes cost ten cents, now you pay fifty. A glass of beer, when Roosevelt called prohibition quits, cost ten cents. Now it will be thirty-five or even fifty. Fords and Chevrolets cost less than six hundred dollars then. In a restaurant you paid a dollar for a meal that would cost five now. No, you couldn’t put your fortune in any form of money, bonds, sa. . .
The student of political economy will also note that I have called upon the ideas of such authors of the past as Proudhon for the medium of exchange of the future, upon Daniel DeLeon for the structure of industry, upon Edward Bellamy for much of the basic idea and upon many contemporary writers such as Vance Packard, Ferdinand Lundberg, Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, Michael Young, Robert L. Heilbroner, Arthur C. Clarke, John Kenneth Galbraith and the late Frank Tannenbaum. I have also drawn extensively on the many participants in the work being done by many contributors to the American Academy’s Commission on the Year 2000 which appears in Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
I should also like to thank Raymond A. E. Klein, Director of the Eidos Theoretical Research group for his comments upon some of my pioneering ideas. A fiction writer is seldom blessed with a think tank to fall back upon.
“Man may be skeptical about following the flight of the dodo bird into extinction, but the evidence points increasingly to just such a pursuit.
“The planet and mankind are in grave danger of irreversible catastrophe if the political structure that now prevails is not drastically changed during the next few decades.
“We live in a high-risk environment, and the trends that create the present level of risk continue to increase the danger and reduce the possibilities of creatively controlling it…. There are four interconnected threats to the planet—wars of mass destruction, overpopulation, pollution and the depletion of resources. They have a cumulative effect. A problem in one area renders it more difficult to solve the problems in any other area…. The basis of all four problems is the inadequacy of the sovereign States to manage the affairs of mankind in the 20th Century.”
Professor Richard A. Falk, Princeton
“… those societies which cannot combine reverence for their symbols with freedom for their revision must ultimately decay, either from anarchy or the slow atrophy by useless shadows.”
Alfred North Whitehead
“Is America’s romance with practicality and efficiency enough to sustain it? Men serving a system with no other goal than its further advance have no transcendent aims.”
David Riesman
“Why should men struggle to maximize income when the price is many dull and dark hours of labor? Why especially should they do so as goods become more plentiful and less urgent? Why should they not seek instead to maximise the rewards of all the hours of their days? And since this is the plan and obvious aspiration of a great and growing number of the most perceptive people, why should it not be the central goal of the society?”
John Kenneth GalbraithThe Affluent Society
“The present, for men who have no utopia, is inevitably constricting; and, similarly, cultures which have no utopia remain imprisoned in the present and quickly fall back into the past, for the present can be fully alive only in tension between past and future. This is the fruitfulness of utopia—its ability to open up possibilities.” Paul Tillich
Critique and Justification of Utopia
“… through a strange alchemy of the Gods, there are a disproportionate number of kids coming along these days with IQ’s that are soaring toward a level too high to measure. These kids have very cold eyes. They are the ones who, one day, will stop playing with transistors, diodes and microcircuitry and look at Barrentown and start asking the rude questions. Or build a machine that will ask.”
John D. MacDonaldThe Quick Brown Fox
“… if we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that in the long run—and often in the short one—the most daring prophecies turn out to be laughably conservative.”
Arthur C. ClarkeThe Promise of Space
“… one must either anticipate change or be its victim.”
John K. Galbraith
“All human beings are equal in rights and dignity, and only such a system of wealth distribution can therefore be defensible as respects and secures those qualities.”
Edward BellamyEquality
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”
Thomas Jefferson
“The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
Alfred North Whitehead
The transformation we’re now seeing will make the Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century look like a pink tea.
Louis LevineChief Analyst in Employment SecurityU.S. Department of Labor
Now
“Thirty years,” Julian West said. “You mean all this has taken place in a third of a century?”
Leete nodded. “Don’t underestimate thirty odd years in terms of history when times are ripe for change.” He thought about it for a moment, pursing his lips as he attempted to put his finger on the illustration he wanted to use. “The Egyptians managed to go through thirty dynasties without any substantial changes in their culture, their socio-economic system, their science. It was during their early fourth dynasty that the great pyramid, that of Khufu, or Cheops as we usually call him, was built. Two thousand years later at the time of the Persian and then the Macedonian conquests, the Egyptians were substantially the same, their society fundamentally unchanged. They aren’t the sole example. The Mayans of Guatemala and Yucatan came on the scene with a surprisingly advanced culture—we’re not sure, perhaps inherited from the Olmecs. They maintained this culture for a millennium, for all practical purposes unchanged.”
“That’s what I mean,” Julian West said. “It would take… why, a thousand years to—”
The other was shaking his head. “No. I was giving you the reverse of the coin. But take the United States in, say, 1840. She was a small, new country and, although the Louisiana Purchase had given her large portions of the West, had hardly penetrated beyond the Mississippi. Her economy was largely agricultural and based on slavery in the South. In world affairs she was a third-rate power, at best. Thirty-three years later she had spread from coast to coast, engulfing such areas as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California and had become the most powerful country in the world, though it took Europe a time to realize the fact. The economy had become industrial, railroads spanned the continent, development had become a geometric progression.
“But perhaps that isn’t the best example of what a third of a century can do in history. Consider Europe in June of 1914. All had been peace and progress since Napoleon’s era. William Hohenzollern was Kaiser of Germany; Franz Josef, Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Czar Nicholas the Second, Czar of Russia; all seemingly secure on their thrones. The airplane was a flimsy affair, not considered a serious military weapon. The submarine was in its infancy and when submerged most of the crew would sit on the floor, unmoving, to preserve trim. Weapons? The most dangerous were probably heavy cannon and the recently evolved Maxim machine gun. Lenin, unknown to the world as a whole, was a shabby refugee in Switzerland. Hitler was a paper-hanger in Vienna, Mussolini the editor of a small so-called socialist newspaper. Thirty years later? Consider for a moment. The Nazi armies were reeling back from the interior of Communist Russia. The V-2 rockets, the first spaceships, were bombing England. The first atomic bomb was about to be tested in Alamagordo. In China, Mao’s guerrillas were already making their plans to take over the most populous country in the world. Tito was largely in control of Yugoslavia, and shortly the Eastern half of Europe was to be under communist control. Fascism, a word unknown in 1914, was already a dead duck and within a year Hitler was to be a suicide and Mussolini hanging by his heels.”
Julian West said, “You make your point. A lot of history can happen in thirty years. But all this—”
The other waggled a finger at him. “But there are new elements at work now. Back in your time, someone mentioned that ninety percent—or was it ninety-five?—of all scientists who had ever lived were presently alive and working. What would you say the percentage was today?”
“Why, I don’t know. I haven’t the vaguest idea.”
“Approximately the same. Ninety percent of all the scientists who have ever lived are at present alive and working. You see, during the past thirty years our universities have doubled, tripled and quadrupled the out-turn of scientists, engineers, technicians. We have become a nation of such. I would estimate that at least half of our adults of the working years are scientists, engineers or technicians.
“But there is still another factor in which we differ from the past. About the year 1950 Dr. Robert Oppenheimer pointed out that human knowledge was doubling every eight years. Since that time, in some fields, at least, progress has accelerated. Of course, I don’t mean that this is a progress that is steady and easily measurable. It comes in fits and starts. One sciene will forge ahead dramatically under the influence of several new breakthroughs, another will plod along. Archeology, for instance, is usually a plodder, although from time to time such discoveries as carbon dating will revolutionize the field. But medicine, physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry? Each discovery made leads for two or more others. Were it not for the International Computer Data Banks, no man could begin to keep up. Even with them, it is all but impossible, no matter how narrow your sub-specialization.”
He leaned forward in emphasis. “Consider the ramifications, Julian. Let us assume that when you took on your experiment the sum of human knowledge was expressed by the number one. In eight years, it had doubled to two. In sixteen years, it was four, in twenty-four years, eight. Today we have more than sixteen times as much information at our disposal as was available in your period, and in a few years it will be thirty-two times.”
Julian West made a gesture of despair. “Even then, I was far from being up on most of the sciences.”
Most Americans—citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful and most ideal-swathed country in the world—by a very wide margin own nothing more than their household goods, a few glittering gadgets such as automobiles and television sets (usuually purchased on the installment plan, many at second hand) and the clothes on their backs. A horde if not the majority of Americans live in shacks, cabins, hovels, shanties, hand-me-down Victorian eyesores, rickety tenements and flaky apartment buildings…. At the same time, a relative handful of Americans are extravagantly endowed, like princes in the Arabian Nights tales. Their agents deafen a baffled world with a never-ceasing chant about the occult merits of private-property ownership… and the vaulting puissance of the American owners… It would be difficult in the 1960s for a large majarity of Americans to show fewer significant possessions if the country had long labored under a grasping dictatorship.
Ferdinand LundbergThe Rich and the Super-Rich
Then
Julian West said, “All right. How much time do I have?” There was a slight tic at the side of his mouth.
“If you take care, every care, you might have as much as a year, or even two.”
“And if I don’t?”
The doctor said slowly, “You might go next week, next month—or even tomorrow.”
“I see. And what do you mean by taking care?”
“You must give up smoking and alcohol. And all other stimulants for that matter. Coffee, tea, cocoa. Even such beverages as Cocoa Cola or Pepsi Cola, both of which have a rather high caffeine content.”
“So, I can’t even drink a coke, eh?”
“Above all, you must avoid physical exertion. Never allow yourself to grow tired. Avoid ascending stairs. When you walk, walk slowly. And you must avoid as well, emotional upset. Don’t get into arguments. Don’t participate in sex.”
Absently, Julian West fished his pipe from his jacket pocket. It was a gold-bound Barling shell briar, a gift from his fiancée, Edith Bartlett. The doctor looked at it expressionlessly. His patient ignored him, brought a tobacco pouch from his other pocket and began to load up.
He said, “I’ve been reading quite a bit about heart transplants recently. Down in South Africa and so forth.”
The doctor nodded. “The field of organ transplant is in its infancy. I, myself, have performed three heart transplants. The most successful patient lived for six months. One died on the operating table, the other lived eight days.”
“However, there wouldn’t seem to be much choice in my case.” Julian West brought a gold lighter from his pants pocket, fired his pipe, and sucked aromatic British tobacco smoke into his mouth. He exhaled through his nostrils.
In his mid-thirties, Julian West’s hair was thick and dark, but there were touches of premature gray at the temples and a small amount in his mustache. However, these signs of age were an attractive counterbalance to his otherwise youthfully fresh complexion, to his flat stomach, square shoulders and strong arms and legs. He had never known it but the women who had loved him in his time had usually been attracted to the certain vulnerable quality about his eyes and mouth.
The doctor was shaking his head. “Were you otherwise in good shape, I might consider it. However, neither your kidneys nor your liver are up to the strain involved. Even though the heart operation was a success—” He let the sentence dribble away.
“In short, you offer me no hope whatsoever.”
The doctor shifted in his chair, unhappily. “Mr. West, there is always hope. As I said, the field of organ transplant is in its infancy. However, amazing progress is already being made. Perhaps within six months or so major discoveries will be hit upon which would make an operation on you worth the risk.”
“But you don’t really expect such developments so soon?”
“No”
“How soon? One year? Two years? The absolute limit you give me?”
“No. You wanted the whole truth, Mr. West. Perhaps in five years, more likely ten, medical science will have arrived at the point where organ transplant is a standard operation with as great a chance of success as an appendectomy.”
“But you could be wrong?”
“Yes.”
“It might come as soon as six months?”
“Mr. West, I don’t wish to arouse false hopes. As you told me when you first solicited my services, I am thought one of the outstanding specialists in my field. I do not expect organ transplanting to be a developed branch of our medical science in less than five to ten years.”
Edith Bartlett, as ever, was late. When she came hurrying up, as ever, there was a whimsical, apologetic air.
Julian West came to his feet from the table tucked away in an alcove of the cocktail lounge. He put his pipe into a side pocket and held her chair for her.
Before she could say anything, he said, “Par for the course, sweetie. You’re only fifteen minutes late.”
“I got to shopping, Jule, and lost track of the time. I found the most darling—” She broke it off. “But that’s not important, is it?” She put her bag on the table and looked at him.
He realized, all over again, that for him she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. Perhaps not for the judges of the Miss America or Miss Universe contests. Perhaps not for those of Hollywood who had the job of selecting the sex symbols for films and television. But for Julian West. His taste ran to brunettes, to greenish eyes, to peaches-and-cream complexions in the English tradition, to figures less than lush and breasts smaller than currently in demand, to fine ankles and narrow feet, to full mouths and perky noses, to well-shaped ears and… in short, to Edith Bartlett.
“Martini?” he said, as the waiter came up.
“I suppose so.”
“Doubles,” he said. “A twist of lemon in one, two onions in the other. Be sure the glasses are preliminarily chilled.”
“Yes, Mr. West.” The waiter retreated.
She looked at him. “What did Doctor Almenroder say?”
“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Why… why the good news, I guess.”
He took a breath and said, “Within five or ten years techniques will probably be developed that would make an operation a possible success.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. “Well, but… the bad news.”
He said wryly, “I’m not going to last five years, not to speak of ten.”
Her eyes rounded in disbelief. “But, Jule, you’re no more than thirty-five.”
The drinks had come. He took up the one with the lemon peel and made a mock gesture in the way of a toast. “That’s the trouble with belonging to the jet set, I suppose. Evidently I not only burned my candle at both ends, but had it lit in the middle. Of course, the stint in the Asian War didn’t help any. Evidently that liver and kidney infection never really completely cleared up.”
“What… what did he say?”
“If I take it easy as it is possible to take it, I just might last as much as two years.”
“Two years!”
“No alcohol, no tobacco, no nothing. I walk, I don’t run. I don’t climb stairs. I don’t argue with anybody, not even Democrats, Civil Righters, or hippies. In short, I don’t do anything except sit, real quietly, and wait.”
“Darling.” Her voice was urgent and she put her perfectly manicured fingers on his arm. “Let’s get married immediately.”
He twisted his face. “Among other things I avoid is sex.”
“That’s not important.”
He was even able to laugh. “Don’t go overboard, sweetie. The engagement is obviously off.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Almenroder told me never to argue.” He flicked a finger for the waiter.
He took in Edith’s glass, which had hardly been touched, and said to the man, “Another double.”
When the other had gone, Edith said, “Jule, be sensible. That isn’t the way.”
“What is the way?”
Her mouth was tense and distress was in the greenness of her eyes. She shook her head. “He said no alcohol.”
“And no tobacco and no excitement and no sex and no everything.” Julian West fished his pipe from out of his jacket pocket, knocking the ash and unburned tobacco out against the palm of his hand and hence to the ashtray. He reached for his tobacco pouch.
“What did you think of Hemingway,” he said.
She was surprised at the sudden switch. “Papa? Oh, he was great fun. A monster.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Why, I suppose there during the mano a mano thing in Spain. In Torremolinos at a party. But, darling—”
Julian West said, “He was already going by then. And he knew it. He could have hung on, possibly, for a few more years. Possibly five or ten. But not as Papa Hemingway. No booze, watching himself, continual trips to the Mayo Clinic for everything from surgery on his kidneys, to treatment of his high blood pressure, to shock treatments for his chronic mental depression. But it wouldn’t have been Papa. He called it quits instead. A lot of fools called him a coward.”
The martini came and he took down almost half of it in one long swallow. The waiter looked at him nervously before taking off again.
Edith looked down into her own glass. “You’re not thinking of suicide? That’s silly.”
He considered it. “No. Not really. But I don’t expect to sit around like a cabbage, waiting for the end. I’ve got an idea.”
“Jim,” Julian West said, “I’ve got a problem for you.”
“Fire away,” his stockbroker said, crossing his hands over his well-larded belly.
“We’ve got a man who is going to disappear for ten years. During that period there will be no possible way for him to handle his financial affairs. He wants to put his fortune into something that will be absolutely safe, so that when he returns it won’t have been stolen from him, eroded away by inflation or devaluation or by a collapse in securities values. So the problem is, what does he put it into?”
James Dempsey Lynch thought about it, only slightly intrigued. “How about one or more of the bluest of blue chips? Say, American Telephone and Telegraph.”
Julian West said, “That was my first reaction. But the trouble is he wouldn’t be around to supervise, in case something came up. For instance, every year that goes by the government gets further into business. AT&T is all but a monopoly and now with the coming of the communications satellites it’s in the cards that the government might take over. The petroleum corporations? In ten years there might be some breakthroughs in nuclear power. If there are, what happens to oil? IBM? There you go again, almost a monopoly in the computer field. Computers are getting more important by the day. Might the government decide that their development is too important to remain in private hands?”
Lynch grimaced. “You’ve got a point.”
Julian West said, “How about government bonds?”
His broker laughed. He was becoming more interested in the question. “Inflation is developing at the rate of more than six percent a year and each year that goes by the rate ups. Put your friend’s fortune into bonds and in ten years he’d have a good chance of being broke. When I was a boy, back during the Depression, a pack of cigarettes cost ten cents, now you pay fifty. A glass of beer, when Roosevelt called prohibition quits, cost ten cents. Now it will be thirty-five or even fifty. Fords and Chevrolets cost less than six hundred dollars then. In a restaurant you paid a dollar for a meal that would cost five now. No, you couldn’t put your fortune in any form of money, bonds, sa. . .
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Looking Backward From the Year 2000
Mack Reynolds
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