The following morning, hands on the pillow beneath his head, Joe Mauser
stared up at the ceiling of his room and rehashed his session with
Nadine Haer. It hadn't taken him five minutes to come to the conclusion
that he was in love with the girl, but it had taken him the rest of the
evening to keep himself under rein and not let the fact get through to
her.
He wanted to talk about the way her mouth tucked in at the corners, but
she was hot on the evolution of society. He would have liked to have
kissed that impossibly perfectly shaped ear of hers, but she was all for
exploring the reasons why man had reached his present impasse. Joe was
for holding hands, and staring into each other's eyes, she was for
delving into the differences between the West-world and the Sov-world
and the possibility of resolving them.
Of course, to keep her company at all it had been necessary to suppress
his own desires and to go along. It obviously had never occurred to her
that a Middle might have romantic ideas involving Nadine Haer. It had
simply not occurred to her, no matter the radical teachings she
advocated.
Most of their world was predictable from what had gone before. In spite
of popular fable to the contrary, the division between classes had
become increasingly clear. Among other things, tax systems were such
that it became all but impossible for a citizen born poor to accumulate
a fortune. Through ability he might rise to the point of earning
fabulous sums--and wind up in debt to the tax collector. A great
inventor, a great artist, had little chance of breaking into the domain
of what finally became the small percentage of the population now known
as Uppers. Then, too, the rising cost of a really good education became
such that few other than those born into the Middle or Upper castes
could afford the best of schools. Castes tended to perpetuate
themselves.
Politically, the nation had fallen increasingly deeper into the
two-party system, both parties of which were tightly controlled by the
same group of Uppers. Elections had become a farce, a great national
holiday in which stereotyped patriotic speeches, pretenses of unity
between all castes, picnics, beer busts and trank binges predominated
for one day.
Economically, too, the augurs had been there. Production of the basics
had become so profuse that poverty in the old sense of the word had
become nonsensical. There was an abundance of the necessities of life
for all. Social security, socialized medicine, unending unemployment
insurance, old age pensions, pensions for veterans, for widows and
children, for the unfit, pensions and doles for this, that and the
other, had doubled, and doubled again, until everyone had security for
life. The Uppers, true enough, had opulence far beyond that known by the
Middles and lived like Gods compared to the Lowers. But all had
security. They had agreed, thus far, Joe and Nadine. But then had come
debate.
* * * * *
"Then why," Joe had asked her, "haven't we achieved what your brother
called it? Why isn't this Utopia? Isn't it what man has been yearning
for, down through the ages? Where did the wheel come off? What happened
to the dream?"
Nadine had frowned at him--beautifully, he thought. "It's not the first
time man has found abundance in a society, though never to this degree.
The Incas had it, for instance."
"I don't know much about them," Joe admitted. "An early form of
communism with a sort of military-priesthood at the top."
She had nodded, her face serious, as always. "And for themselves, the
Romans more or less had it--at the expense of the nations they
conquered, of course."
"And--" Joe prodded.
"And in these examples the same thing developed. Society ossified. Joe,"
she said, using his first name for the first time, and in a manner that
set off a new count down in his blood, "a ruling caste and a
socio-economic system perpetuates itself, just so long as it ever can.
No matter what damage it may do to society as a whole, it perpetuates
itself even to the point of complete destruction of everything.
"Remember Hitler? Adolf the Aryan and his Thousand Year Reich? When it
became obvious he had failed, and the only thing that could result from
continued resistance would be destruction of Germany's cities and
millions of her people, did he and his clique resign or surrender?
Certainly not. They attempted to bring down the whole German structure
in a Götterdammerung."
Nadine Haer was deep into her theme, her eyes flashing her conviction.
"A socio-economic system reacts like a living organism. It attempts to
live on, indefinitely, agonizingly, no matter how antiquated it might
have become. The Roman politico-economic system continued for centuries
after it should have been replaced. Such reformers as the Gracchus
brothers were assassinated or thrust aside so that the entrenched
elements could perpetuate themselves, and when Rome finally fell,
darkness descended for a thousand years on Western progress."
Joe had never gone this far in his thoughts. He said now, somewhat
uncomfortably, "Well, what would replace what we have now? If you took
power from you Uppers, who could direct the country? The Lowers? That's
not even funny. Take away their fracases and their trank pills and
they'd go berserk. They don't _want_ anything else."
Her mouth worked. "Admittedly, we've already allowed things to
deteriorate much too far. We should have done something long ago. I'm
not sure I know the answer. All I know is that in order to maintain the
status quo, we're not utilizing the efforts of more than a fraction of
our people. Nine out of ten of us spend our lives sitting before the
Telly, sucking tranks. Meanwhile, the motivation for continued progress
seems to have withered away. Our Upper political circles are afraid some
seemingly minor change might avalanche, so more and more we lean upon
the old way of doing things."
Joe had put up mild argument. "I've heard the case made that the Lowers
are fools and the reason our present socio-economic system makes it so
difficult to rise from Lower to Upper is that you cannot make a fool
understand he is one. You can only make him angry. If some, who are not
fools, are allowed to advance from Lower to Upper, the vast mass who are
fools will be angry because they are not allowed to. That's why the
Military Category is made a channel of advance. To take that road, a man
gives up his security and he'll die if he's a fool."
Nadine had been scornful. "That reminds me of the old contention by
racial segregationalists that the Negroes _smelled_ bad. First they put
them in a position where they had insufficient bathing facilities, their
diet inadequate, and their teeth uncared for, and then protested that
they couldn't be associated with because of their odor. Today, we are
born within our castes. If an Upper is inadequate, he nevertheless
remains an Upper. An accident of birth makes him an aristocrat;
environment, family, training, education, friends, traditions and laws
maintain him in that position. But a Lower who potentially has the
greatest of value to society, is born handicapped and he's hard put not
to wind up before a Telly, in a mental daze from trank. Sure he's a
fool, he's never been _allowed_ to develop himself."
* * * * *
Yes, Joe reflected now, it had been quite an evening. In a life of more
than thirty years devoted to rebellion, he had never met anyone so
outspoken as Nadine Haer, nor one who had thought it through as far as
she had.
He grunted. His own revolt was against the level at which he had found
himself in society, not the structure of society itself. His whole
_raison d'être_ was to lift himself to Upper status. It came as a shock
to him to find a person he admired who had been born into Upper caste,
desirous of tearing the whole system down.
His thoughts were interrupted by the door opening and the face of Max
Mainz grinning in at him. Joe was mildly surprised at his orderly not
knocking before opening the door. Max evidently had a lot to learn.