Time Will Run Back (16 page)

“We always officially announce that they have. Every experiment we make must of course be pronounced a success, even when we abandon it. But personally—and
entre-nous
—I have never noticed any progress in
my
lifetime.”

“But before that?”

“Well, of course, if you believe the official histories—”

“Well, let’s put all moral, political and economic questions on one side for a moment,” Peter said, “and take merely technical and scientific progress.”

“I’ve gone into that question, chief, out of personal curiosity. So far as I can figure, in the whole century and a quarter since the founding of Wonworld we have on net balance made no technical progress whatever. We have improved a few practical things—or rather, we have applied what was already known in a few new directions. But in theoretical knowledge, as I told you once, we are actually far behind the level that the bourgeois scientists had reached in the last throes of the capitalistic world. Our official histories pooh-pooh it, but it seems to me that there is strong circumstantial evidence for thinking that the bourgeois scientists of the capitalist world had actually succeeded in splitting the atom. There are even grounds for believing that the bourgeois scientists had used this knowledge to invent an appallingly destructive bomb, and had actually used this. When I was a youngster, my father—the only American up to that time who had ever got to be a member of the Central Committee of the Party—once repeated whispers to me that the Soviet scientists stole the secret from the capitalist countries, with the help of bourgeois scientists and bourgeois fellow travelers, and that Russia got the jump on the capitalist world in using it. Some whispers went on to say that this, and not—as our histories have it—the inner technological decay of capitalism, was the real reason for the communist triumph. Apparently after our victory was complete, all the scientists who knew the atomic secrets were liquidated.”

“But surely,” said Peter, “nobody believes any of this melodramatic nonsense!”

“Oh, I’m not saying I
believe
it, chief—My father didn’t
believe
it; he merely cited it to show how fantastic the anticommunist lies could become.”

“It certainly shows what childish minds these anticommunists had,” Peter said.

“Yes, chief. We inner-circle communists have named this sort of thing ‘Buck Rogers’ stuff, after a notorious capitalist liar of that name.”

“Who was Buck Rogers?”

“He was the richest man of his time, and invented such tales to keep the masses in subjection.”

“Let’s get back, Adams, to this question of technological progress.”

“Well, my best guess, chief, as I’ve said, is that we are now technologically in the state of the capitalist world in the capitalist years circa 1918 to 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.”

“Didn’t capitalism make any technological progress in the decades after that?”

“Personally, I think it did,” said Adams. “One hears stories of airplanes propelled by jet power that went faster than the speed of sound—”

“More Buck Rogers stuff?”

Adams shrugged his shoulders.

“Anyway,” announced Peter with determination, “there is going to be progress now. Adams nodded a loyal but skeptical assent. “Where do we begin?”

“That is the question that has been bothering me for some time,” said Peter. “There are so many places to begin.... But the first thing that needs to be done is to free the people from terror, to free them from servility and groveling.... We must give them freedom from fear.”

“From fear of what?”

“From fear of
us,
of course. From fear of the government.”

“But fear is the only thing that keeps people in line! If people didn’t fear the government, if they didn’t fear our police, how would we be able to keep them from committing every sort of crime?”

“Crime would continue to be made illegal,” said Peter, “and people would be punished for it by penalties graded according to the seriousness of the crime. But crime must be carefully defined by law.”

“It already is.”

“Maybe. But we should change the laws so that nobody can be arrested unless he is charged with a definite crime. He should be told what that crime is. He should be allowed to confront his accusers and to answer them. These accusers should present real evidence. The man accused should be assumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty and not, as now, the other way round. And maybe—I haven’t yet thought this out—the accused ought to be entitled, if he wants, to have someone else who knows the law better than he does, and who knows better than he does what his rights are, to defend him. Maybe the government itself ought to provide him with such a defender.”

“I shudder to think what would happen, chief, if the cards were stacked so much in favor of the criminals. You would practically never be able to find anyone guilty. The criminals would certainly be freed from fear—”

“I think it can be made to work,” Peter said. “Anyway, I’m going to try.... Don’t misunderstand me. Crime will continue to be illegalized. But each crime will be carefully defined, and nobody will be punished unless he is guilty of an act that had
already
been defined as a crime
before
he did it. We are no longer going to have acts declared to be crimes
retroactively.’

“But suppose somebody does something that is clearly antisocial, that is clearly against the interests of the State, and we have merely neglected beforehand to define that act as a crime?”

“Then that will be our fault, Adams, and we will have to define it as a crime so that we can punish it in the
future.
But we will not punish anybody for having done it before it was defined as a crime. If I may invent a term, we will not pass any
ex post facto
laws.”

“It seems to me, chief, that you have thought of a most ingenious way of tying the government’s hands in advance. How can we guess ahead of time every crime that anyone can think of committing? And what’s the use of having prosecutors and judges if we are not going to allow them to exercise any discretion?”

“The discretion of the judges will be exercised,” replied Peter, “in interpreting and applying the existing body of law. The judge will have to decide whether the evidence presented by the prosecutor or the plaintiff is substantial enough to show that the accused actually did the act with which he is charged. But first the judge will have to decide whether the act with which a man is charged would fall within the pre-existing definition of a crime.”

“How are you going to get a judge to act with all this impartiality and self-restraint?”

“We’ll remove any judge who doesn’t.”

“In other words, chief, we’ll remove any judge who doesn’t act the way we should like him to act. Stalenin has been doing that already.”

“But the government until now, Adams, has been removing judges for being too merciful or too impartial.
I
will remove them for being too harsh or too biased.”

“This arrangement then, chief, will last only as long as your own power lasts—certainly no longer than there is someone in power who feels exactly as you do.”

“Well then,” said Peter, reconsidering, “we will have to make the judiciary
independent
of the whims of the government.” “Won’t the judges be
part
of the government?”

“Well, independent of the
executive arm
of the government.”

“Pardon me, chief, but aren’t you contradicting what you just said a minute ago? You were going to remove any judge who did not act with impartiality and self-restraint, and did not conscientiously apply the law as it stood. If you make your judges independent of you, how are you going to discipline them and make them carry out their duties and powers without abuse?”

Peter lit a cigarette.

“You’re right. I’ll have to give all this more thought.... But what I am trying to do is to establish what we might call a
rule of law.
The only way, as I see it, in which we can free the people from constant fear of their own government is to set up a definite code of rules, a definite set of laws, and then say to them: ‘As long as you live in accordance with these rules, as long as you stay within these laws, you are free to do whatever else you wish without fear. You need no longer be in terror of being sent to a concentration camp or being shot just because you have incurred the personal displeasure of the judge, or of some government official, or of someone higher up than yourself. If you are accused, your accusers must definitely prove your guilt, instead of forcing you to try to prove your innocence. And above all, no so-called “confession” will be wrung from you by threats or fatigue or force or torture. As long as you stay within the pre-established code of laws, you are free to do as you like.’ Such a rule of law, as I see it, is the only thing that will free the people from terror and from the arbitrary decisions of those in power.”

“That’s a very pretty picture, chief, but the problem isn’t quite that easy. For example, what things are you going to legalize and illegalize?”

“Well... I will illegalize murder, and assault and theft, and other forms of injury to other people—”

“I
have something more fundamental in mind,” interrupted

Adams. “How are you going to get people to work? How are you going to get them to do the unpleasant tasks rather than the pleasant ones? How are you going to get them to do their best on the tasks to which they have been assigned? These, and not the comparatively infrequent crimes you have just mentioned, are the problems that come up every day with everybody.”

Peter sighed, and thoughtfully put out his cigarette stub. It was six o’clock, and he was due for dinner with his father. “That, Comrade Adams,” he said wearily, “is a problem we will have to solve some other day.”

PETER knew it would be futile to try to get anything out of Bolshekov himself. But he had every top official of the secret police, from Kilashov down, report to him individually in his father’s office for cross-examination. All professed to have no knowledge whatever of what had happened either to Edith or to Maxwell. There was no record to be found in any file of their arrest. Kilashov protested that if they had been arrested it had been without his orders and without his knowledge. And he swore to Peter that for an arrest to take place without a record of it somewhere in the secret police files was impossible. Peter must remember, however, that there was always a chance that private gangsters and wreckers might pose as secret police.... Such things happened. These impostors, for reasons of their own, may have done away with the Maxwells.... At any rate he, Kilashov, had ordered the Security Police to make the most thorough search. Naturally he was just as much concerned about the mystery as was Peter himself....

In his spare time Peter began to make personal systematic visits to all the women’s and men’s jails in the Moscow district. In each jail he ordered the prisoners lined up before him. Gray, listless, burned-out faces without end that filled him with pity and horror; but among them he did not find the two he was so desperately looking for.

“Of course, Adams—coming back to the questions you raised the other day—of course people ought to consider it a privilege to work for the State, because when they work for the State they are working for themselves; they are working for each other...”

Peter stopped. He found that he was mechanically repeating the arguments of Bolshekov.

“I agree that people ought to feel this way,” said Adams, “but our experience shows that they just don’t. The hard fact is that some people simply have to do more unpleasant chores than others, and the only way we can get the unpleasant chores done is by compulsion. Not everybody can be a manager, or an actor or an artist or a violin player. Somebody has to dig the coal, collect the garbage, repair the sewers. Nobody will deliberately
choose
these smelly jobs. People will have to be assigned to them, forced to do them.”

“Well, perhaps we could compensate them in some way, Adams—say by letting them work shorter hours than the others.”

“We thought of that long ago, chief. It didn’t work. It unluckily turned out that it was only the pleasant jobs, like acting or violin playing, that could be reduced to short hours. But we simply can’t afford to have people work only a few hours on the nasty jobs. These are precisely the jobs that have to be done. We couldn’t afford to cut our coal production in half by cutting the hours in half, for example; and we just haven’t got the spare manpower to rotate. Besides, we found that on most such jobs a considerable loss of time and production was involved merely in changing shifts.”

“All right,” agreed Peter; “so under our socialist system we can’t have freedom in choice of work or occupation. But couldn’t we provide some freedom of initiative—at least for those who direct production? Our propaganda is always urging more initiative on the part of commissars or individual plant managers. Why don’t we get it?”

“Because a commissar or plant manager, chief, is invariably shot if his initiative goes wrong. The very fact that he was using his own initiative means that he was not following orders. How can you reconcile individual initiative with planning from the center? When we draw up our Five Year Plans, we allocate the production of hundreds of different commodities and services in accordance with what we assume to be the needs of the people. Now if every plant manager decided for himself what things his plant should produce or how much it should produce of them, our production would turn out to be completely unbalanced and chaotic.”

“Very well,” Peter said; “so we can’t permit the individual plant manager to decide what to produce or how much to produce of it. But this is certainly a big disadvantage. For if someone on the Central Planning Board doesn’t think of some new need to be satisfied, or some new way of satisfying an old need, then nobody thinks of it and nobody dares to supply it. But I have in mind something different from that. How can we encourage individual plant managers to devise more efficient ways of producing the things they are ordered to produce? If these plant managers can’t be encouraged to invent new or better consumption goods, at least they can be encouraged to invent new methods or machines to produce more economically the consumption goods they are ordered to produce, or to produce a higher quality of those consumption goods.”