Фред Хойл: October the First Is Too Late

‘Surely we’re faced now with a situation that doesn’t concern you alone? Your technology is naturally better than ours, but there are now at least twenty times as many people in our world as there are in yours.’

‘That is quite incorrect I am afraid. Your people exist only in a ghost world. For a little while your world may have a vivid reality, but very soon now, now that we have made our decision, it will be gone. It will go in a brief flash, just as it arrived.’

I found it difficult to conceive of myself as a ghost. ‘I would not have said there was anything ghostlike about the two of us.’

‘Not in the least, you are real enough.’

Melea spoke for the first time. ‘The different zones of the Earth will change back to what they were before. The Greece in which we met, the temple, will be gone. It will be gone far more completely than even the ruined remains of your own time. It will be gone almost without trace. It will be gone, except for the records in our libraries. Europe too will be gone, so will the great Plain of Glass. It will only be this zone here that will remain.’

The man nodded and went on. ‘So you must decide. For the people of your country there is no decision to make. For us, we have made our decision. But for you it will be difficult. If you leave here you will disappear, into oblivion. If you stay, you will continue to live out your lives among us. The decision you will take must depend on your own thoughts and emotions. We cannot guide you further. Between you there is both reason and emotion. You must find where your balance lies.’

Before they left, Melea came to me and said, ‘I will not stay with you tonight, because I do not want to influence the way you will decide.’

The three of them, the two girls and the white-haired man, looking almost infinitely sad, left us to our thoughts and deliberations.

My first reaction was to question what had been said. ‘Is there any possibility of it not turning out the way they think? I mean about Britain and Europe simply disappearing. It seems preposterous.’

‘Well, it’s only the inverse of what happened before. If it was possible to go one way, it must be possible to go the other.’

‘But everything back home, John, it was real enough. Those weren’t ghost people, they were people with real feelings.’

‘Of course they had real feelings, but they were apparitions nevertheless. For us it’s different. We shall live out a perfectly real life if we stay here, but only if we stay here.’

‘Well, there can’t be any doubt about it. Going back—to oblivion I mean.’

‘That was the way I felt until I began to think about it. What you must realize is, you really wouldn’t be going back to oblivion, you’d be going back to one life not two.’

‘I don’t understand, even faintly.’

‘Surely you could see from the film we’ve just watched that we’ve already lived our proper lives. Our lives exist—you remember the pigeon hole business—lives in which we quitted Los Angeles for Hawaii. Somewhere in Hawaii there was a forking point. Instead of a single set of pigeon holes, suddenly there became two sets. One of them went along perfectly normal lines.’

‘You mean the lines we expected, a life in which we returned to the Los Angeles of the twentieth century?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Why don’t we know anything about it?’

‘Because the two have separated, they’ve forked apart. There’s no connection between them. You’re either in the one or the other. It’s the sequence all over again. Whichever you’re in you never know of the other. In this sequence you can never know what happened when you returned to Los Angeles. In that other sequence you can never know even a single thing about this one. The two are utterly separated. In the other sequence, neither you nor I will know about the future, about the film we saw this morning.’

‘Then what does it come down to? What’s the decision?’

‘The decision is whether we want this particular sequence to end in a kind of cul-de-sac. We can either prolong it out into the usual lifetime or we can simply chop it off.’

‘What would be the sense of chopping it off?’

‘Because we might find this sequence intensely painful. Let me put it to you this way. You know you’ve got two lives to live. One life is perfectly normal and pleasant, but in the other you commit some serious offence, an offence which carries either the death penalty or a penalty of life imprisonment. You have the choice of which it shall be. If you only had one single life you might well choose imprisonment, in order to be able to go on. But with two lives do you really make that choice? There would be a lot to be said for avoiding the continual agony of being cooped up in prison, without any possibility of escape, year after year for several decades. You might well say to yourself—remembering you know about the other more or less pleasant life—let’s make an end of this one, let’s make it into a cul-de-sac. You see my point?’

‘Except I don’t see any parallel between being in prison and being here.’

‘That’s exactly the thing we’ve got to decide. That’s exactly what our friend meant by saying we’ve got a difficult decision. I’m going to argue in favour of us both leaving. You take the other line. Then we must sleep on it and each make up his own mind about it.’

So we started. It was a long talk, very long, so I will give only a condensed version of what John said.

‘Try to see what we’re in,’ began John. ‘We’re in a fossilized society. They’ve decided, completely as a matter of policy, that they’re not going to change. They’re not going to seek after progress. They’re satisfied with the way life is. For them this may be fine but to us it would be a living death. We have a drive that forces us towards further achievement. Of course it may be quite illusory, probably it is. But being the way we are I think we would find it very much an imprisonment.’

‘I don’t see there’s anything to stop us from going on doing the things we want to do.’

‘I see plenty. I’ve got several thousand years of scientific development to learn before I could possibly get down to any really useful work. Of course it would be interesting enough to begin with. There’d be the solution to the problems that I know about. In a way it would be marvellous to read about it all. But just think of the years of grind and drudgery that would be needed before I could do anything at all creative. It’s likely I’d never succeed. You’ve got to begin as a child, with a child’s ability to learn, if you’re to break through the wall of an entirely new civilization. I’m afraid I should be reduced to a useless potterer.

‘You yourself may be a little better off. The kind of music you know of has some validity. In fact you’ve got more or less a completely open field. Yet even your position wouldn’t be too good. These people may have a liking for music, they may be able to compose it, but none of them can actually play. You can see for yourself that everything is done electronically. Perhaps you would get them to sing but that would be about all. You would never hear a real orchestra again.

‘These are the bigger issues but think of the smaller ones. There are a million and one simple things these people take for granted. Yet they’d all be strange to us. It’s fine enough for a few days, but think how it’d be for a whole lifetime. We’d never really belong. We’d never again hear our own language spoken, except through an artificial electronic device. Remember Art Clementi and his boys. Remember the night you were first in La Jolla. It was all very wild and woolly maybe compared to these people. But wouldn’t you come to ache for some of the zip and zest of that old life? In a way it was very squalid, but it had a vigour we should miss terribly. Remember we’re not just walking out into nothingness. We’re simply saying that this is a life we don’t want to live, just as these people themselves have refused to follow a life of what we are pleased to call progress. Logically I can go along with them, but emotionally I’m not conditioned to their sort of existence.’