Equality: In the Year 2000

Chapter Seven The Year 2, New Calendar

Julian had been so upset by his Vietnamese nightmare that he had skipped breakfast and taken himself to the Leete apartment down the hall. He found the doctor standing at the window, looking out over the university campus, his face thoughtful. Edith was sitting at the desk, a stylo in hand, making notes.

She looked up at his entrance, smiled and said, “Good morning, Jule.”

He crossed to her. “What are you up to? I thought you always made notes into the International Data Banks.”

“Oh, I’ve just been doing some planning for my vacation next year. I’ve never been to Egypt before.”

“Egypt? I never liked the place, particularly the Egyptians. How long do you have?”

“A year. I’m going to help build the pyramid.”

He looked at her blankly. “Build the pyramid? What pyramid?”

“Cheops. Archaeology and history students and, well, buffs are going to do a complete replica of the original pyramid of Cheops.”

“Cheops! That’s the largest of them all!”

“Yes. Exciting, isn’t it?” She smiled enthusiastically.

He shook his head in bewilderment. “Well, at least you’ll have modern machinery.”

“Oh, no. We’re going to use all the original methods as a way of figuring out how they accomplished it. Methods and materials.”

“But why ?”

“What better way to study archaeology? We’re going to have to figure out, mostly from hieroglyphic inscriptions and so forth, just how the Egyptians quarried, and how they got the stones across the Nile. We’ll have to make papyrus boats such as they used. We’ll use the same sort of rollers they did…”

“You mean you’re going to pull those king-sized stones by hand? How many of you are in on this crackpot idea?”

“Over ten thousand so far. Mostly students from United America, but a good many from other countries too. It’s all the thing among archaeology buffs.”

“But it will take years!”

“Of course. And each year some of us will have to drop away, but others will take their place. When it’s all finished, it will be a museum, and for tourists to see, and so forth. It will look exactly the way the original did when it was first completed, and it will be close enough to the original that one will be able to walk between them to compare.”

“Look,” he said almost desperately, “why in the hell don’t you start on something easier? Something like rebuilding the Acropolis in Athens, complete with the Parthenon?”

“Oh, some European students are doing that.”

“Then why not start with one of the smaller pyramids, something not quite so ambitious? Down in Yucatan, maybe. One of the Mayan pyramids.”

“Oh, the Mexicans and other Meso-American specialists are doing that. I’m an Egyptologist, with a concentration in the first five dynasties.”

“I thought you were a farmer.”

“I am. That’s my work. But Egyptian archaeology and anthropology is one of my hobbies.”

He shook his head and went over to stand next to Doctor Leete. The doctor still had somewhat of a shiner from his fracas of the day before.

Julian asked, “Have you figured out why those fellows jumped you?”

Leete looked at him and frowned. “I’m not sure. If you don’t mind, Julian, I’d rather not talk about it, at least until I’m more certain of my facts. The whole thing is quite unprecedented.”

“As you wish. I don’t want to pry.”

“How go the studies?”

“I’m still concentrating on learning Interlingua, but yesterday I got a resum é of scientific and technological breakthroughs that have occurred since I went into stasis. I’ve got quite a few questions I’d like to ask you.”

“Ah? Fire away. That’s my assignment.”

Julian gestured at the view out over the campus. “I’m continually amazed by the abundance; how you ever got to the point, in a third of a century, where you produce so much more than we used to, is a complete mystery to me.”

The doctor seemed amused. “We don’t produce more than you used to. We produce less, I’m sure.”

Julian looked at him as though he were joking. “That’s ridiculous. Everyone lives on a scale that only the wealthy could afford in 1970.”

Leete chuckled, then gestured that they should take seats. “It’s not how much you produce but what you produce and how you distribute it. You measured your product in 1970 in dollars. Just how great was your yearly production?”

“Gross National Product was approximately a trillion dollars.”

The doctor thought about that. “In actuality, that takes a bit of qualification. The method of calculating that Gross National Product had its weak points.”

“How do you mean? It was simply the combined products and services of the whole population.”

The doctor pursed his lips. “Well, let’s take one example. The United States had long been proud of its per capita production as compared to that of other advanced countries, say, Sweden, or the Soviet Union. Let us say we have an American surgeon who makes twenty-five thousand dollars a year. That amount is added to the supposed total of the Gross National Product. In Sweden, his equal is paid but ten thousand dollars a year, since medicine is socialized there. Thus, in calculating Sweden’s Gross National Product, the doctor’s contribution is but ten thousand dollars. Over in Leningrad, a Soviet surgeon, the exact equal in ability to his American and Swedish colleagues, is paid but five thousand dollars a year, working for the state. In calculating Russian GNP, that sum is part of the total.

“And that isn’t the end. The following year, the American decides to get on the gravy train, as the expression goes, and moves to New York where he doubles his fees and makes fifty thousand dollars a year. So he now contributes ten times as much to the GNP as does his Soviet equal.”

Julian had to laugh.

“Nor is that all,” the doctor went on. “Let us leave services and take definite products. The Japanese of your time were turning out compact automobiles that were built to last. Some of them utilized the Wankel rotary engine, which gave good mileage and emitted very little in the way of pollution. American cars selling for the same amount, on the contrary, were built with planned obsolescence in mind. Detroit wanted the customer to desire a new car approximately every three years. Suppose that each of these cars cost three thousand dollars. The Japanese car gave double or more the mileage and lasted at least twice as long. Is it, then, accurate to add to the GNP of both the United States and Japan the amount of three thousand dollars?”

“I see what you mean,” Julian said. “GNP can be a somewhat elastic term. But what’s this got to do with your producing less than we used to? On the face of it—”

“Once again,” the doctor interrupted, “it’s a matter of what you produce and how you distribute it. For instance, we no longer produce weapons of destruction. What was your yearly bill for war, preparation for war, and paying off past wars?”

“I think it was pushing a hundred billion a year,” Julian said. “We even had widows on the pension lists who went back to the Civil War and the Indian Wars.”

“That took a considerable portion of the product of your trillion dollar economy. We have no military today. Also, in your day you had a top-heavy bureaucracy of some ten million persons, very few of whom produced anything worthwhile for the nation. Their labors were largely wasted.”

“You still have government workers.”

“Yes, but now they are part of the production process and are necessary. And most certainly they are fewer in number. But most important, your socioeconomic system was one of waste: your automobiles with power steering, power windows, air conditioning, engines which could drive them over one hundred twenty miles an hour but got only seven to ten miles to the gallon. The Japanese cars I mentioned before got up to thirty. And while it was possible to produce cars that could have lasted half a century, few American cars lasted ten years. Today, we build our cars to last as long as possible.

“But that’s only the beginning. In your grandfather’s day, when he bought a watch he expected it to last the rest of his life. Indeed, he often willed it to his son. By your time, they were turning out watches so poorly made that when one stopped, the owner simply threw it away and bought a new one. It. was cheaper than having it repaired, or even cleaned. Today, once again, we manufacture watches that will last as long as possible—when we use watches at all; usually we dial the time on our transceivers. I remember, when I was a boy, cigarette lighters that were meant to be thrown away when they had used up their fuel, rather than refilled. Many of the ballpoint pens were the same—non-refillable. And planned obsolescence didn’t apply only to cars. Kitchen appliances, light bulbs, tires, batteries, furniture—just about all products. You used throwaway bottles and so-called tin cans by the billions each year.”

“Wait a minute,” Julian said. “What do you do with tin cans today?”

“Actually, we use them very infrequently,” the other told him. “For instance, we prefer our food fresh. When we do use cans the metal is recycled. Mainly, we use plastic containers and the plastic too can be recycled.”

Julian said, “It seems to me that you can carry that recycling bit to an extreme. Suppose you go on a picnic way out in the boondocks somewhere and you take along a a dozen bottles or cans of beer. After you’re finished, do you have to carry them all the way back home to be thrown into the disposal chute and recycled?”

The doctor smiled. “Hardly. We have a special type of plastic for such use. In two or three days, exposure to either sun or rain will cause it to melt away into the ground. It is not harmful to soil.”

“Isn’t that waste?”

Leete nodded agreement. “Yes. But we are not fanatical. Also, it is not as though we were throwing away cans made of steel or aluminum. The plastic is made from wood and other things that grow and hence are replaceable.”

“You must use up a good many trees, if you manufacture as much plastic as all that.”

“There have been advances in forestry since your time, Julian. We now have trees that grow to maturity in one year. And, with nuclear fision and solar power, it is practical to desalinate ocean water and pump it into such areas as the Sahara and the Arabian and Gobi deserts. They are rapidly being reforestrated. We use wood and other agricultural products wherever we can, rather than metals and such irreplaceable natural resources. We husband such things for future generations. Such metals as we do utilize are recycled over and over again.”

The doctor paused. “Another example of waste in your time was your houses. In Europe today there are houses many hundreds of years old that are still lived in. Back at the time of the American Revolution, there were homes built that are still in existence. But in your day? A homeowner with a thirty-year mortgage could expect the house to have deteriorated before he finished paying for it. So bad was the workmanship and the materials that many had become hovels or shacks before ten years were up. Today, as in the long-ago past, we build houses that will last for centuries.”

“I suppose you’re right there,” Julian begrudged him. “We constructed millions of buildings each year and tore down almost an equal number—not just houses, but every other type of building as well.”

“Another great waste of your time,” Leete went one, “was power. You were going through your fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal, and natural gas as though there was an unlimited supply. For example, everyone who could afford it air-conditioned not only their homes, their offices, their stores and public buildings, but their cars as well.”

“You mean to tell me that you no longer use air-conditioning?”

“Sometimes, but not the to the extent you did. You see, most of us have come to believe that man’s body was designed for the temperatures nature provides. It did your health little good to go back and forth from the heat outside to air-conditioned interiors. How many colds and other respiratory diseases resulted from the practice, we’ll never know. You also drastically overheated your buildings in the winter months. Today, we still heat our houses, of course, but we are more inclined to wear heavier clothing, warm underwear and sweaters, rather than swelter in summer temperatures in December. Why, those who could afford it even heated their swimming pools. Can you imagine the amount of power that consumed?”

“That’s one of the things I meant to ask you about,” Julian said. “When I went into stasis, we were beginning to face a power shortage. How did you lick that? Though, from what you say, you now have unlimited power from nuclear fision.”

“It’s not as simple as all that,” Leete told him. “Unlimited power through nuclear fision could bring with it unlimited heat, which would be bound to get us into all sorts of trouble. So although we utilize it to some degree, we also call upon other sources, particularly renewable energy sources, so that we can live on the earth’s energy income, rather than its capital. We now utilize much more wind and water power—even the tides. We tap the heat of the interior of the planet. But most of all we are calling upon solar power, the vast energy pouring down on us from the sun. It produces some fifty thousand times as much energy as man’s current rate of consumption.”

Julian, as usual, was lost. He said, “You and Edith have mentioned solar power several times and although they were working on it even earlier than 1960, I never did quite understand it. You know, that was true about just almost everybody in my day. We accepted things but didn’t have the vaguest idea of how they worked. For instance, I don’t know what radio is, not really. It goes in here and it comes out there, but I haven’t the slightest idea of just what happens. I was an average citizen, with an average citizen’s knowledge of the gadgets we had; I haven’t the vaguest idea what makes a refrigerator cold. But back to solar power…1 think there were some two hundred houses completely, or at least mostly, powered by solar sources, even in my time.”

Leete nodded. “The solar battery was developed by the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1954. It’s been improved considerably since then. The early batteries were a flat sandwich of n-type and p-type semi-conductors. Sunlight striking the plate would knock some electrons out of place. The transfer was connected, as in the ordinary-type battery, in an electrical circuit. The freed electrons move toward the positive pole and holes move toward the negative pole, thus constituting a current. Those early solar batteries developed electric potentials of up to half a volt and up to nine watts of power from each square foot exposed to the sun. Not very much, perhaps, but its advantage was that it had no liquids, no corrosive chemicals, no moving parts. Electricity continued to be generated indefinitely, so long as the sun shined.”

“You’ve already lost me,” Julian said. “I’m afraid I’m no science student.”

“It is a bit technical,” the doctor agreed. “The amount of energy falling upon one acre of a sunny area of the earth is 9.4 million kilowatt-hours per year. Square mile upon square mile have been covered with solar batteries in places such as parts of the Sahara not suited for reforestation, in Death Valley, in the deserts of what was once Utah and other parts of the West. The Chinese have emplaced them in areas of the Gobi and the Russians in desert areas of Siberia. The Arabs have a source of power as great as that of their oil of the mid-twentieth century, in the broiling sun of the Arabian peninsula. In short, Julian, in solar power we have a source of energy that will undoubtedly last as long as the human race endures.”

“What’s wrong with nuclear atomic reactors? You have unlimited power from hydrogen taken from the oceans. They were the thing when I went into stasis.”

“Radioactive wastes are more carefully handled now, but there is still danger. The United States Atomic Energy Commission, the official custodian of the deadly byproducts of the nuclear age, took calculated risks which, looking backward, have horrified us. For instance, back in the early nineteen seventies more than a half million gallons of deadly radioactive liquid leaked from huge storage tanks at the A EC’s Hanford facility, near Richmond, Washington.

“No, we are leery about nuclear power and I have no doubt that they will phase it out as our power resources from solar energy continue to grow. Perhaps future generations will revive its use again, when science has learned more about handling it.”

Edith Leete put down her stylo, got up from the desk, and took a chair nearer to them. “I can’t concentrate with you two jabbering away,” she said. “I thought you were talking about waste under the old system. You hardly touched on some of the major ways there were to throw away valuable products.”

Julian looked at her. “Such as?”

“Take something like clothing. In your day, there were thousands of clothing manufacturers in this country alone. They would design, say, a woman’s dress, keeping their fingers crossed that the potential customer would go for the lower hem or higher hem, the lower waist or the higher waist, or this, that, or the other thing in the way of style. The shopper had tens of thousands of stores to choose from, ranging from tiny one-room affairs to department stores covering acres of land. There were mail-order houses which put out catalogues as large as the phone book of a considerable city. No woman could begin to examine all the varieties of dresses manufactured to part her from her dollars.”

Julian took in the coverall-type garment she wore, which was almost identical to that he and the doctor were garbed in.

He said, an edge of sarcasm to his voice, “In my day, people, and women in particular, dressed for attractiveness. Now everybody wears the same thing. I’m not so sure I don’t prefer the old days.”

The doctor laughed, but let his daughter carry the ball.

She smiled, looking down at her outfit. “These aren’t the only clothes we wear. They just happen to be the uniform, more or less, of the university. They’re practical, comfortable, suitable for anything from laboratory work to most sports. But I wouldn’t expect to go to a party, or dancing, or skiing…” she grinned at him “…or swimming in these dungarees.”

“Okay,” Julian acknowledged. “But then what’s the difference between 1970 and the Year 2, New Calendar?”

“To get back to our woman buying a dress. She could choose among tens of thousands of dresses and so forth. So big was the choice that if she went shopping, she couldn’t possibly check out everything. Besides that, she had a choice of quality, superior and inferior textiles, cheaper and more expensive designs. In our system there is still a choice, but there are only a few hundred different designs. And all textiles are the best possible; there are no inferior materials.”

“But isn’t it monotonous?” Julian argued.

Edith laughed. “A few hundred basic dresses is no small matter. Three hundred different types of skirts, three hundred different types of blouses, three hundred sweaters, three hundred belts, three hundred shoes and sandals. Work that out mathematically and you can see that you have literally hundreds of thousands of potential costumes. But if you are still unhappy, you can buy material and design your own clothing. A good many women do, and more men are drifting into it too. Textile design and making your own clothing are growing hobbies these days. The big thing is that we don’t produce and then destroy literally millions of articles of clothing each year simply because they have gone out of fashion. For all practical purposes, styles and fashions as such have disappeared. Our clothing is made for comfort, to be warm or cool as the season dictates, and to be attractive without being garish or ridiculous. We wouldn’t dream of wearing anything as silly as a girdle, nor a tie on a man.”

“As you say,” Julian sighed. “I’ll admit we had some far-out fads in our day. You should have seen some of the hats.”

Doctor Leete had been silent while his daughter sounded off on the subject of style. He said, “It seems to me that when I was a boy in my teens, one of the greatest wastes was the lack of planning of production. Under capitalism, capital flowed to where profit was greatest. Suppose, for instance, artichokes became a food fad. Prices would go up. Thousands of farmers would immediately put in crops of artichokes. They would overflow the market. Prices would break. Then tons upon tons of artichokes would become surplus and rot in the fields since it wouldn’t be worth harvesting them.

“Or take something like toys. Do you remember the Davy Crockett fad? I barely do. Suddenly Davy Crockett coonskins hats, Davy Crockett frontiersman shirts, Davy Crockett moccasins were a must for every child. Hundreds of manufacturers leaped in to profit in the market. Then, overnight, the youngsters tired of Davy Crockett and found a new fad, leaving literally millions of coonskin hats and moccasins to mold in warehouses or be destroyed. As far as a reasonable socioeconomic system was concerned, it was anarchy.”

Edith yawned mightily and said, “I’m getting bored with all this talk. If poor Julian hasn’t already become convinced that the socioeconomic system under which he lived was a madhouse compared to today, he never will. Jule, how would you like to take a drive out to our home? I have some things I have to pick up.”

He looked at her quizzically. “Your home? Isn’t this your home?”

“Oh, good heavens, Jule. This is a university city. We’re just in residence here while Father continues his research on your case and while I study various projects of mine. Mother is taking a few courses too.”

“Let’s go,” Julian said.