Mack Reynolds - After Utopia

“… and without a program or any clear idea of what it wants.”

Stein said, “We know what we want. We want to get the human race back on the road to progress. I repeat, it’s turned to mush.”

“Mush,” Tracy said in disgust, and throwing his napkin to the table top as he came to his feet. “From what I saw last night, it’s turning to gruel. I’m going in to study my Interlingua.”

Betty looked up at him and said anxiously, “But how do you stand now?”

“I’m beginning to think I can stand anything,” he said. “I don’t know. Let me think about it. One of you come in later and help me out with getting that historic rundown on the past century. From now on, I’ll spend half the day on Interlingua and the other half on trying to find out what has gone on, and what’s going on.”

He turned and left, not bothering to hide his feelings.

Tracy spent much of the next two weeks at the autoteacher, first perfecting his Interlingua then launching into his studies of what had transpired in the past ninety years since Academician Walter Stein had seized first his mind, then his physical body. He at first took a quick resume of this, accomplishing it in one day, then went back and picked out periods and subjects which particularly interested him and went into more detail. In some cases, he went into a great deal of detail. He didn’t truly know what he was looking for, but he gathered a lot of information.

The autoteacher fascinated him. He realized that such a device was the only possible answer to the knowledge explosion. Utilizing it, a dedicated scholar of the old school could have become as universal a brain as a Roger Bacon, a Leonardo, or, say, a Benjamin Franklin… all updated.

The other three kept themselves continually available to answer his questions, though he could have done with the information in the Data Banks, usually. However, there was a certain advantage in personal conversation. You can’t get into an argument with a data bank, no matter how sophisticated, and arguments sometimes bring out ideas.

They had become somewhat contrite in his presence now that they had revealed that their organization was nonexistent. They refrained from asking him if he had come up with anything in the way of answers to their problems, and he assumed that they figured that if he did he’d let them know… if there were any answers.

The brick wall he ran into was that it’s hard to argue with success, and by all the criteria that had come down through the ages, the modern world was a success. Everybody had it made. Absolute abundance, absolute freedom to do anything that the individual wanted to do. How can you talk a man into change when he has everything he wants? How can you approach the average man and say that the race is going to pot? Why should he give a damn? He had it made.

Back in Tracy’s day, suppose you had approached a Henry Ford, a Howard Hughes, a Nelson Rockefeller, and said that as a result of the present politicoeconomic system the world was going to pot; pollution, population explosion, crime, narcotics, hunger in the backward countries, reoccurring war, depletion of natural resources, and on and on. Suppose that you had requested any of them to sponsor basic changes in the system. What would their response have been? They would have had you thrown out. They had it made. They didn’t want any basic changes. Oh, yes, you might have gotten a contribution to help fight one or the other of the results of the overall system, say pollution… or, better still, crime… but you couldn’t have convinced any of them about basic changes in the whole system. They had it made.

Most of his nights were spent with Betty and she made a perfect bed companion. He had never slept with a more frank woman, nor a more knowledgeable one. If nothing else, the present system of sex instructors certainly taught the students good technique. He doubted if there had ever been a period in history in which sex technique was more highly developed. It simply couldn’t have been more developed.

It was about a week after the revelation of the three to him that Tracy surprised Betty. They were relaxed, after a particularly strenuous sexual encounter, and temporarily, at least, sated.

She said, making lazy talk, “Do you find life considerably better in this age, Tracy?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well,” she said, “it must have been difficult, the life you led in your own time. Wars, prisons, poverty… I suppose that you spent the larger part of your life in want of one sort or the other. I assume you had your high points, success of one sort or the other. Perhaps a successful romance. You still had romantic love in your day, didn’t you?”

He looked from his pillow to hers. “In my day? Are you suggesting that you don’t have it now?”

“Oh, don’t be silly, darling.”

“Well, what in the devil is the relationship between you and me? I was considering asking you to marry me, if other things work out.”

“Marry you?” she said in wonder. “Good heavens, how anachronistic can you get? We don’t have marriage anymore, Tracy. The institution of marriage was largely a property relationship, a legal contract. The laws that regulated it were devised when private property came in and primitive institutions were overthrown. A man wanted to be sure that his own children, particularly his sons, inherited his property. To accomplish this, he had to be sure that his woman—his wife—slept with nobody but him. It got quite extreme sometimes. The way the Greeks kept their wives cooped up in their homes, even when the men were out spending the evening with pretty boys. The ultimate extreme was the harem of Asia and Africa. They were attempting to frustrate the old adage that a child knows its mother but it’s a wise one that knows its father.”

Tracy said stiffly, “The same situation didn’t apply in the West of my day, particularly in America. We married for love.”

“Did you truly?” she said, with mockery in her voice. “All of you? Or was it a society in which women were second-class citizens, dependent on the men they married and hence desperate to make ‘a good marriage?’ Did a man who might be as ugly as a monkey and with a nasty temper and a tendency to cheat on his wife at every opportunity, but who also had a million dollars or so in his bank account, have any difficulty taking his pick of the girls? And didn’t he demand that she be a virgin, though he had been having all the sex he wanted for years?”

Tracy scowled and said, “Okay. So how does it differ now?”

“We no longer have property. A woman is no longer dependent on a man, nor are his children. She doesn’t have to worry about them. There is no longer any need for marriage. The only reason for a woman sleeping with a man is that she likes him and wants to. There is no marriage and no divorce.”

He said stiffly, “Weren’t your father and mother married?”

“Certainly not. And I hardly know her. She didn’t like children. I don’t know why she ever bothered to have me. And she doesn’t particularly like my father anymore. Currently, I think she’s up in the Alps. She likes to ski and has no interest whatsoever in social questions.”

Tracy said, “But you live with your father. That’s a family relationship.”

She shrugged that off. “We live together because we like each other. Father likes children and consequently raised me, rather than turning me over to the Children Guild, as most children usually are. And I like him. I don’t always live with him. From time to time I’ve met a man, or for some other reason have taken off for periods of as long as a year or more. But largely we find ourselves compatible and live together.”

Tracy shook his head. He had always considered himself in advance of the mores of his time, but this was far beyond him.