Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (278 page)

“Nonsense. I’ve seen the good parson’s book with its eighteenth-century logic and its quaint rationalism, and know it for a waste of ink and paper. Man does not think; he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he responds to external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.”

“You mean that there’s no free will? Not even a marginal minimum of choice?”

“Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what we do because someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another action.”

“But there must have been a beginning,” I objected. “And if there was a beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice exists once it can exist again.”

“You have the makings of a metaphysician, Hodgins,” he said witheringly, for metaphysics was one of the most despised words in his vocabulary. “The reasoning is infantile. Answering you and the Reverend Shaw on your own level, I could say that time is a convention and that all events occur simultaneously. Or if I grant its dimension I can ask, What makes you think time is a simple straight line running flatly through eternity? Why do you assume that time isn’t curved? Can you conceive of its end? Can you really imagine its beginning? Of course not; then why aren’t both the same? The serpent with its tail in its mouth?”

“You mean we not only play a prepared script but repeat the identical lines over and over and over for infinity? There’s no heaven in your cosmos, only an unimaginable, never-ending hell.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That you should spout emotional apologetics at me is part of what you call the script, Hodgins. You didn’t select the words nor speak them voluntarily. They were called into existence by what I said, which in turn was mere response to what went before.”

Weakly I was forced back to a more elementary attack. “You don’t act in accordance with your own conviction.”

He snorted. “A thoughtless remark, excusable only because automatic. How could I act differently? Like you, I am a prisoner of stimuli.”

“How pointless to risk ruin and imprisonment as a member of the Grand Army when no one can change what’s predestined.”

“Pointless or not, emotions and reflections are responses just as much as actions. I can no more help engaging myself in the underground than I can help breathing, or my heart beating, or dying when the time comes. Nothing, they say, is certain but death and taxes; actually everything is certain. Everything,” he repeated firmly.

I went back to sorting some pamphlets which were to be sold for wastepaper, shaking my head. His theory was unassailable; every attack was discounted by the very nature of the thesis. That it was false I didn’t doubt; its impregnability made its falseness still more terrifying.

There were fully as many imaginary discussions with Tyss as real ones. Yet even in these disembodied arguments I could gain no advantage. Why do you look back on the War of Southron Independence with regret for what might have been, if no might-have-been is possible? I asked him mentally, knowing his answer, I cannot help myself, was no answer at all.

The logical illogic of it was only one of the multitude of contradictions in him. The Grand Army to which he was devoted was a violent organization of violent men. He himself was an advocate and implement of violence—one illegal paper, the
True American
, came from his press, and I often saw crumpled proofs of large-type warnings to “Get Out of Town You Conf. TRAITOR or the GA Will HANG YOU!” Yet cruelty, other than intellectually, was repugnant to him; his vindictiveness toward the Whigs and Confederates rose from commiseration for the condition into which they had plunged the country.

Pondible and the others who bore an indefinable resemblance to each other, bearded or not, came to the store on Grand Army business, and I was sure many of the errands I was sent on advanced or were supposed to advance the Grand Army’s cause. Those who signed receipts with an X—and in the beginning, at least, Tyss was strict about assurance of delivery—seemed unlikely customers for the sort of merchandise we handled.

I was relieved, but puzzled and perhaps a little piqued, that aside from the very first conversation with Pondible no attempt was made to persuade me into the organization. Tyss must have perceived this, for he explained obliquely:

“There’s the formative type, Hodgins, and the spectator type. One acts, and the other is acted upon. One changes events, the other observes them. Of course,” he went on hastily, “I’m not talking metaphysical rubbish. When I say the formative type changes events I merely mean he reacts to a given stimulus in a positive way while the spectator reacts to the same circumstances negatively, both reactions being inevitable and inescapable. Naturally, events are never changed.”

“Why can’t one be one type sometimes and the other at other times? I’ve certainly heard of men of action who have sat down to write their memoirs.”

“You are confusing the aftereffect of action with nonaction, the dying ripples on a pond into which a stone has been tossed with the still surface of one which has never been disturbed. No, Hodgins, the two types are completely distinct and unchangeable. The Swiss police chief, Carl Jung, has refined and improved the classifications of Lombroso, showing how the formative type can always be detected.”

I felt he was talking pure nonsense, even though I had never read Lombroso or heard of Chief Jung.

“To the formative type the spectator seems useless, to the spectator the man of action is faintly absurd. A born observer would find the earnest efforts of the Grand Army—the formation of skeleton companies, the appointment of officers, the secret drills, the serious attempt to become a real army—lacking in humor and repellent.”

“You think I’m the spectator type, Mr. Tyss?”

“No doubt about it, Hodgins. Certain features might be deceptive at first sight: the wide-spaced eyes, the restrained fleshiness of the mouth, the elevation of the nostril; but they subordinate to more subtle indicators. No question but that Chief Jung would put you down as an observer.”

If his fantastic reasoning and curious manner of classifying personalities as though they were zoological specimens could relieve me of having to refuse point-blank to join the Grand Army I was content. While this hardly alleviated my disturbance at being, no matter how remotely, accessory to mayhem, kidnapping, and murder I compromised with my conscience by trying to believe I might after all be mistaken in thinking I was being used. There were times when I felt I ought boldly to declare myself and leave the store, but when I faced the prospect of having to find a way to eat and sleep, even if I put aside the imperative necessity of books, I lacked the courage.

Spectator? Why not? Spectators had no difficult decisions to make.

V.

OF WHIGS AND POPULISTS

A country defeated in a bitter war and divested of half its territory loses its drive and spirit and suffers a shock which is communicated to all its people. For generations its citizens brood over what has happened, preoccupied with the past and dreaming of a miraculous change, until time brings apathy or a reversal of history. The Grand Army, with its crude and brutal philosophy and methods, was pride’s answer to defeat.

It was not the only answer; the two major political parties had others. The realistic Whigs wanted to fit the country and its economy into actual world conditions, to subordinate it wholly and openly to the great manufacturing nations and accept with gratitude foreign capital and foreign protection. The immediate result would be more prosperity for the propertied classes; they contended this would mean a gradual raising of the standard of living, since employers could hire more hands, and that indenture, faced by competition with wages, would dwindle away.

This the Populists denied. The government, they insisted when they were out of office, should create industries, forbid indenting, buy up the indentures of skilled workers and offer high enough pay to create new markets, and defy the world by building a new army and navy. That they never put their program into effect they laid to the wily tricks of the Whigs.

The presidential election of 1940 was as violent as if the office were really a prize to be sought rather than a practically empty title, with all real power now held by the Majority Leader of the House and his cabinet of Committee Chairmen. As early as May one of the leading contenders for the Populist nomination was shot and badly crippled; the Cleveland hall where the Whig convention was being held was fired by an arsonist.

I would not be old enough to vote for two years, yet I, too, had campaign fever. Jennings Lewis, the Populist, was perhaps the ugliest candidate ever offered, with a hairless, skeletonlike face; Dewey, the Whig nominee, had a certain handsomeness, which might have been an asset if the persistent advocates of woman suffrage had ever gotten their way.

Traditionally, candidates never ventured west of Chicago, concentrating their appearances in New York and New England and leaving the campaign in the sparsely settled trans-Mississippi to local politicians. This year both office seekers used every device to reach the greatest number of voters. Dewey made a grand tour in his balloontrain; Lewis was featured in a series of short phonotos which were shown free. Dewey spoke several times daily to small groups; Lewis specialized in enormous weekly rallies followed by torchlight parades.

One of these Populist rallies was held in Union Square early in September; outgoing President George Norris spoke, and ex-President Norman Thomas, the only Populist to serve two terms since the beloved Bryan. Tyss indulgently gave me permission to leave the store a couple of hours before the meeting was to commence so I might get a place from which to see and hear all that was going on. Though he characterized all elections as meaningless exercises devised to befuddle, he had been active in this one in some mysterious and secretive way.

The square was already well filled when I arrived, with the more acrobatic members of the audience perched on the statues of LaFayette and Washington. Calliopes played patriotic airs, and a compressed-air machine shot up puffs of smoke which momentarily spelled out the candidate’s name. Resigned to pantomime glimpses of what was going on, I moved around the outside edge of the crowd, thinking I might just as well leave altogether.

“Please don’t step on my foot so firmly. Or is that part of the Populist tradition?”

“Excuse me, miss; I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

We were close enough to a light standard for me to see she was young and well dressed, hardly the sort of girl to be found at a political meeting, few of which ever counted much of a feminine audience.

She rubbed her instep briefly. “It’s all right,” she conceded grudgingly. “Serves me right for being curious about the mob.”

She was plump and pretty, with a small, discontented mouth and pale hair worn long over her shoulders. “There’s not much to see from here,” I said; “unless you’re enthusiastic enough to be satisfied with a bare look at the important people, perhaps you’d let me help you to the streetcar. For my clumsiness.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “I can manage by myself. But if you feel you owe me something for trampling me, maybe you’ll explain why anyone comes to these ridiculous gatherings.”

“Why…to hear the speakers.”

“Hardly any of them can. Only those close up.”

“Well then, to show their support of the party, I guess.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s a custom or rite or something like that. A stupid amusement.”

“But cheap,” I said. “And those who vote for Populists usually haven’t much money.”

“Maybe that’s why,” she answered. “If they found more useful things to do they’d earn money; then they wouldn’t vote for Populists.”

“A virtuous circle. If everyone voted Whig we’d all be rich as Whigs.”

She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture I found pleasing. “It’s easy enough to be envious of those who are better off; it’s a lot harder to become better off yourself.”

“I can’t argue with you on that, miss…um…?”

“Why Mister Populist, do ladies always tell you their names when you step on their feet?”

“I’m not usually lucky enough to find feet to step on that have lovely ladies attached,” I answered boldly. “I won’t deny Populist leanings, but my name is really Hodge Backmaker.”

Hers was Tirzah Vame, and she was indentured to a family of wealthy Whigs who owned a handsome modern cast-iron and concrete house near the reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. She had used the apt word “curious” in characterizing herself, but it was, as I soon found out, a cold and inflexible curiosity which explored only what she thought might be useful or which impressed her as foolish. She was interested in the nature of anything fashionable or popular or much talked of; the idea of being concerned with anything even vaguely abstract struck her as preposterous.

She had indented, not out of stark economic necessity, but calculatedly, believing she could achieve economic security through indenture. This seemed paradoxical to me, even when I contrasted my “free” condition with her bound one. Certainly she seemed to have minimum restriction on her time; soon after our introduction at the rally she was meeting me almost every evening in Reservoir Square where we sat for hours talking on a bench or walking briskly when the autumn weather chilled our blood.

I did not long flatter myself that her interest—perhaps tolerance would be a better word—was due to any strong attraction exerted by me. If anything she was, I think, slightly repelled by my physical presence, which carried to her some connotation of ordinary surroundings and contrasted with the well-fed smooth surfaces of her employers and their friends. The first time I kissed her she shuddered slightly; then, closing her eyes, she allowed me to kiss her again.

She did not resist me when I pressed my lovemaking; she led me quietly to her room in the big house on my transparent plea that the outdoors was now too cold even for conversation. I was no accomplished seducer, but even in my awkward eagerness I could see she had made up her mind I was to succeed.