Mack Reynolds - After Utopia

“What waste?” Edmonds said. “Practically everything we use that can be recycled, we recycle. With nuclear fusion, power is all but free. With unlimited power you can tap the resources of the sea. As has been pointed out, one cubic mile of sea water contains some one hundred and fifty million tons of solid material, including about twenty tons of gold, eighteen million tons of magnesium and just about all of the other elements in quantity. Given infinite power, they can be extracted. Or take a hundred tons of plain igneous rock such as granite. It contains on an average, eight tons of aluminum, five of iron, twelve hundred pounds of titanium, one hundred and eighty pounds of magnesium, seventy of chromium, forty of nickel, twenty of copper, four of lead, ten of tungsten and many others. What natural resources did you think we were running out of, Tracy?”

For some reason, Tracy was irritated with them once again. Their answers were all so damned pat. Perhaps it was because they made him appear like a fool.

“Okay,” he said. “If the world is so affluent now, if you’ve got so damn much of everything, why aren’t you happy? The picture you’ve been drawing for me is that the world is going to pot, then you turn around and tell me everybody has everything they want.”

Stein smiled sadly. “Perhaps that’s it, Tracy. Perhaps we don’t want everything we want.”

“That obviously doesn’t make any sense at all, damn it,” Tracy snapped.

“Perhaps it does,” the other said. “There is no such thing as happiness, Tracy. Or, at least, only for very short periods of time. There is only the pursuit of happiness, as they put it in the Declaration of Independence. Whoever wrote that—and it has been debated whether it was Tom Paine, rather than Thomas Jefferson, though he has been given the credit—knew of what he spoke. Man pursues happiness, he doesn’t achieve it. Have you ever met anyone of whom you could say, ‘there is a happy man?’ Can you point out a single example in all of history of which you could say, ‘there was a happy nation?’ The Greeks, the Cretans, the Mayans, the Peruvians under the Incas? No. There has never been a happy nation, and I rather doubt that there ever will be one.”

‘This is getting a little far out for me,“ Tracy said, finishing his coffee. “What have we been fighting for, down through the ages, if it wasn’t for happiness? No matter how square that might sound.”

“Man has been pursuing happiness. Like your branding of this society Utopia; it is a goal never attained. It can never be attained. Happiness is a contrast, not a permanent reality. No mentally balanced human being has ever attained permanent happiness. He can’t because it is a contrast. It’s like pleasure and pain. You must have them both, in their time. Some individuals obtain more than the average of one, and less of the other, but for all of us there must be both. That’s why the conception of heaven and hell are invalid. Suppose, under the beliefs of some of the primitive religions I was consigned to either paradise or hell. Can you imagine perpetual pleasure… for all eternity? I suspect it would become quite boring after the first few thousand years. Or can you picture perpetual pain? Suppose they threw me into that lake of boiling sulphur, or whatever it was that Dante portrayed in his Inferno. Do you think it would bother me after the first five thousand years?”

“As I said,” Tracy protested, “this gets a little far out for me. I’m a simple soul. The breakfast was excellent, Betty. Thanks.”

“No thanks to me,” she said, beginning to put the remnants on the tray. “And tomorrow I’ll show you how to do the ordering and you can take your turn at it, my fine feathered friend.”

He looked at her quickly. “You mean that everybody shares in… well, whatever housework has to be done and that I’ve been freeloading?”

All three of them laughed at him.

Stein said, “There’s precious little that has to be done, these days, Tracy, but yes, everyone in a household shares. Didn’t you have something called women’s lib in your days? Well women have been ‘libbed.’ ”

Tracy shook his head. “It must have come later. I’ve never heard of it.”

Jo Edmonds said cooly, “You seem to be up to just about anything by now. How about a night on the town, after you’ve finished your studies today?”

Tracy spent the day on his Interlingua, taking stimmy after stimmy. He had gotten to the point now where all he needed was vocabulary. Even correct accent and pronounciation had been quite easily acquired, since the rules were so few and so obvious. There was no such thing as having three words— lea, lee , and leigh , for example—all meaning something different, and being pronounced exactly the same. There was no such thing as having pliers, trousers, and scissors, all supposedly plural when there is no singular pliar, trouser, or scissor.

No, he was taking to Interlingua like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. He took time out only for lunch and hurried through that. During it, he had just one major argument in the continuing debate with the other three about the workings of this present-day society.

He said to Stein, “At breakfast you mentioned that in my day everyone wanted to accumulate property, privately owned possessions. Okay, and you say these days nobody cares a damn about owning things. But there must be exceptions. That rich man you mentioned, that owned a private airplane and even a yacht. Suppose I wanted a yacht these days? Everything is free, so I’d get it, eh?”

The other was puzzled. “Why not? But what would you do with it?”

“What do you think I’d do with a yacht? Obviously, I’d sail in it.”

Edmonds said, “It would have to be a rather small yacht, if you just wanted it for yourself. Otherwise, who would crew it for you?”

Tracy looked at him in frustration.

Betty said, “A good many people like yachting. They usually join a yachting club and share the work involved. Or several compatible people will team together and operate one. In the old days the men that crewed a big yacht were the servants of the owner. We don’t have servants any more.”

He didn’t give up, quite yet. “Okay. That private airplane deal. Today, I could just order one and keep it as long as I wanted, eh?”

“Certainly,” Stein said.

“All right. Suppose it develops a knock in the engine, or whatever, and I have to take it into an airport to have it worked on. If practically nobody works, who’d repair my engine?”

Edmonds said, “It would probably be pulled, with automated equipment, and a new engine inserted and… ”

“I know, I know. And the old one recycled. But suppose it was something besides the engine, something that just couldn’t be replaced automatically?”

The academician said, “If the aircraft was in such bad shape as all that, they would probably recycle the whole thing and give you a new one. You see, Tracy, we very seldom repair things anymore. With the computers, with automation, with unlimited power and with unlimited raw materials, we find it easier to build a new object rather than repair an old one.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tracy said, tossing his napkin to the table and coming to his feet. “I’m going on back to my Interlingua. As soon as I get it really down pat, I’m going to take a course in historic developments between the years 1955 Old Calendar and 45 New Calendar.”

“A very good idea,” Stein nodded approvingly.

As Tracy left, Jo Edmonds called after him, “Don’t forget our night on the town.”

He hadn’t forgotten, although he had wondered what the other had in mind, and how it fitted into the scheme of things. He doubted very much if the younger man would have made such a suggestion unless he was up to something. Whatever it was, Betty and her father were probably in on it, since they had nothing to say.