For Us, The Living

VII

Shortly after breakfast Perry was interviewed at length by a board of five psychiatrists. Joseph was present and facilitated the work. The talk seemed inconsequential. At one point one of them engaged him in an animated discussion of the effect of the invention of flying on the logistic problem in warfare. For some reason the others seemed to follow this discussion with interest. Another inquired into some details of customs or 'rates' observed by midshipmen, and as to what extent a midshipman's life differed socially from that of a civilian student. By lunch time they seemed satisfied and adjourned.

Perry's trial was set for fourteen o'clock. It turned out to be anticlimactic. On counsel's advice he stipulated the facts in the complaint and requested a trial without jury. The examining judge found affirmatively and read the findings of the psychiatric board. Then he spoke to Perry:

"Young man, according to the board you are for all practical purposes unacquainted with our customs in the field of social correction. In the terms you are familiar with you have been found guilty and I am about to pass sentence. In other terms familiar to you, you have been diagnosed and found to be sick and I am about to prescribe for your illness. You don't have to take your medicine unless you want to, but I hope you will. The findings of the board are encouraging if somewhat startling, and I think you will have a complete recovery."

"May it please the Court?"

"May it what? Oh yes, surely. Go ahead."

"What is the alternative to taking treatment?"

"The alternative is Coventry, by which I mean that you will be delivered to the gate of a reservation set aside for non-cooperative individuals, along with your credit turned into any chattels you choose. Or, if you prefer, you may emigrate to any country willing to receive you."

"What happens if I enter Coventry?"

"You must enter the gate. What happens thereafter is no concern of the state."

"How long must I stay in the reservation?"

The judge shrugged his shoulders and did not reply.

"I'll take treatment. I was simply curious about the other."

"Very good. I see from the report that certain typical moral reactions may be expected from you with a general classification of aristocratic. Do you recognize my authority?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

"I am going to ask you to make me a promise. You need not if you prefer not to. I want you to promise that you will refrain from doing any violence to any person whatsoever including yourself for any reason whatsoever until you are pronounced cured or until you come to me and tell me that you withdraw your word. Will you do it?"

"That's fair enough. I promise."

"Good. I want to parole you to someone not in need of treatment himself. Who is your next friend?"

Perry looked disconcerted. "Why, I don't believe I have any." As he spoke, Diana stepped forward. The judge smiled.

"Is she your next friend?" They both nodded. "Very well then, you must understand that she is responsible to me that the instructions of this court are carried out." He turned to Diana. "Take him to the State Correction Hospital at Tahoe. The Chief Clerk will help you with the details. That's all. Goodbye and good luck."

In the air car Diana set the controls and turned to Perry with anxious concern in her eyes. "Well, darling, how do you feel?"

Perry considered this. "I don't know. I was braced for a pretty unpleasant outcome, but I've been treated very decently. On the other hand I have to go off someplace away from you and submit to treatment of indefinite duration and unknown sort. It's humiliating and I don't feel happy about it. I don't like to be regarded as crazy because I know that I am not."

Diana patted his hand. "Nobody thinks you are crazy, darling. They think that you are suffering from bad emotional reactions through faulty training. Now they will attempt to re-train you so that you can be happy."

He grasped her fiercely. "Do those fools think that they can train me out of loving you with a bunch of fancy phrases?"

She kissed him tenderly before she answered. "Not at all, darling. You'll love me just as much or more, but you'll be happier in it, because you won't be all cluttered up with a bunch of false reflexes and wrong identifications."

"You may be right but I can't see it. I don't see how you can change human nature."

"You'll understand that better in a few days. Relax and don't worry about it now. Come here and let me hold you." She took him in her arms, cradling his lean young shoulders like a baby. She smoothed the wrinkles from his brow and closed his eyes. Presently the little stubborn lines about his mouth ironed out and he breathed more slowly. Diana suspected that he was sleeping and was still. The miles slipped by underneath. Then she roused him gently. "Perry. Perry, dearest. It's time to land."

"I wasn't asleep."

"No, but it is time to land. See below—that flat over there to the left. Put her down as close to the buildings as you can find room."

"Right-O."

Inside the administration wing, Diana gave Perry his instructions. "Ask for Master Hedrick and tell them who you are. They'll tell you what to do." They were asked to wait for a few minutes. When Master Hedrick appeared, he turned out to be an unimpressive little man, rather thin, with scanty grey hair and a quick bird-like manner. He trotted up, hand outstretched.

"Ah, there you are. We've been expecting you. Welcome to Shangri La."

"Shangri La?"

"Just a poetical expression, an old man's fancy from a piece of classic literature I read when a boy. You've probably never heard of it."

"I've read it." Perry spoke abruptly.

"Oh, you have really? Then you'll appreciate the allusion. Not quite as Elysian as the original perhaps, but very beautiful, very beautiful." Master Hedrick beamed as if he personally had weeded the gardens. "And we try to make the place have the same effect, the same effect. Hope to, hope to." He cocked his head on one side and regarded them with chipper benignity. "But here, what are we waiting for? Visitors to Shangri La must be fed first. Have you lunched? Then perhaps some tea, or a liqueur? No? A cigarette?" Perry took one from the proffered pack. It was already lighted when he withdrew it. He regarded it with some surprise. Hedrick beamed anew. "Clever, isn't it? Designed for me by one of our guests. Very clever man, but a little too preoccupied with mechanical devices. Designed one intended to blow up the earth. Didn't work, but he doesn't want to anymore. Designs integrating fabricators instead. Very ingenious. Very ingenious. Never could understand them, but they work like a top, like a top. But come, you're not settled yet. Want to live in bachelor hall? No, of course not. We have some lovely apartments. Or how about a cottage?"

Perry didn't answer, but Diana diffidently suggested that they see the latter.

"Yes indeed. Come along." He led them at a quick trot downstairs and into a passage where a moving way delivered them to another stairway. They climbed the stair and found themselves in a pleasant comfortable living room complete in all necessary details except kitchen equipment. A fine view window faced out over Lake Tahoe. No other buildings were in sight. Hedrick indicated a path that lead to the right along the shore. "The main buildings are a couple hundred meters down there," said he. "You'll prefer to walk in fine weather. Now I'll leave you for a while. Just make yourselves at home. We won't really get busy until tomorrow." He trotted away.

Perry glanced after him. "Funny little guy. What is he, kind of a glorified janitor?"

"My heavens, no. He's the chief psychiatrist and director of the whole institution." Perry whistled, then he changed the subject.

"How soon do you have to go?"

"Why, I don't have to go. I don't have a broadcast until Tuesday."

"Do you mean they will let you stay here?"

"Surely. Why not? I'll have to be away a good deal because there is no place to rehearse here, nor to broadcast. They may want me to leave you a good bit of the time, but I'm certainly staying over night and most nights—if I'm asked." She lowered her lashes.

He placed a finger under her chin, turned it up and kissed her. "Of course you're asked."

The next morning Hedrick appeared and asked if he might come in and talk for a while. The men settled down to becoming acquainted, as Diana announced that she was going to run over and pick up Captain Kidd. The conversation rambled on for hour after hour. Perry found himself led into doing most of the talking and doing so with great freedom. The little man was curiously disarming. His bird-like twitter and mild ways broke down the younger man's reticence. Gradually he found himself talking about factual events alone. To it all Hedrick offered a sympathetic attention, his head cocked on one side, his eyes bright and alert. When he arose to leave, Perry inquired somewhat nervously as to when the treatment would commence. Hedrick beamed. "It has commenced. Didn't you know it?" Then he departed, having promised to arrange as soon as possible for a competent economist to come in for a chat, which Perry had requested.

The talks continued, both with and without others present. Hedrick turned over a part of Perry's case to Olga, a sturdy blond earthy person who seemed out of place on the staff of a psychiatric institution. She had the hips and breasts for childbearing and the calm eyes of the natural mother. But Diana assured him that Olga had more than once collaborated with Diana's mother in complicated brain surgery. Olga directed Perry in a more comprehensive study of the modern world than he had undertaken with Diana's help. In addition to technical and non-fiction works, Olga selected for him many fictional and dramatic works which she urged him to read or view. The two women got along together like old friends. Often Olga would appear with some book or record that she wished Perry to absorb, then the ladies would go for long walks in the surrounding hills. During Diana's numerous absences Olga would frequently eat and spend the evening with him.

Olga required Perry to do considerable writing, which he referred to facetiously as his 'homework' or his 'examinations'. There was an entire series in which he was asked to define terms. In the earlier papers the words to be defined were comparatively simple, such as 'walking', 'road', 'apple', 'cat'. Perry started in on these blithely determined to show that he positively was not chasing butterflies. But these papers came back to him with discrepancies and confusing terms pointed out and with a request for more nearly unmistakable definitions. He grew hot and sweaty and struggled with attempts to say in words just exactly what he meant. Then his second attempts came back with a congratulatory note on the care with which he had made his definitions, but with a comment on his definition of 'horse': 'Does this definition include clothes' horse, saw horse, horse play, horse dice? Please examine your other definitions with this comment in mind.' Grimly he sat down to modify the definitions which he had believed to be so beautifully exact. He hit upon the following dodge, a phrase which he added to each definition:'—and many other meanings, determined by the context, the speaker and listener, and the idiom of the period.' Finally he stated the proposition that a word is adequately defined when it is used in such a fashion that it means the same thing to the listener as it means to the speaker. He sent this in with the hope that it would settle the matter. He was soon undeceived for he was requested the next day to define 'human nature', 'patriotism', 'justice', 'love', 'honor', 'duty', 'space', 'matter', 'religion', 'god', 'life', 'time', 'society', 'right', and 'wrong'. After three days of fruitless struggle in an attempt to do something with these words, he sent back the following statement: 'Insofar as I am able to tell these words have no meaning whatsoever, for I am unable to devise any means of defining them so that they mean the same to the speaker as to the listener.' The answer that came back was cryptic: 'Let the problem lie, but do not abandon it. Could you design a turbine without a knowledge of calculus and of entropy?' He was then requested to formulate a mechanics of a pseudo-gravitation based on a law of attraction by inverse cubes instead of inverse squares. He became fascinated with the beautiful logical consequences of this problem and produced a monograph on the resulting ballistics. He was then asked if he could design sights for a gun to be fired under the postulated conditions. This request struck him as ridiculous and he demanded an explanation of Olga.

"Olga, what is all this rigamarole? What possible use is it for me to design a worthless gun?"

Olga smiled a long slow smile. "I would like to tell you the meaning but I can't. If you knew the meaning the rigamarole would not be necessary. But you must discover meaning for yourself. We are trying to help you discover the meaning of the words you didn't define."

"I'd like to lay hands on the guy who thought up this last little joke." She took his hand and placed it on her shoulder. "You did? Olga, I thought you were a pal of mine."

"I am, Perry, but it's part of my business to see that your treatment is approached through fields you understand and to watch its effect on you. However I think we can skip a step at this point. You obviously don't want to bother with designing this gun sight. But you could design it, could you not?"

"Certainly. Nothing to it. You see—" Perry launched into a flow of the technicalities used in ordnance and ballistics, and described with sweeps of his hands what would happen to a shell unlucky enough to be constrained by an inversed-cube type acceleration. "—and all this is in vacuo, of course. I wouldn't attempt to predict without empirical data the effect of a gaseous medium constrained by the same field."

"That's enough, Perry. I didn't understand a third of what you said, but I'm convinced that you could design the gunsight. Suppose we had such a gun and set it up here. Could you hit that sailboat over there across the lake?"

"Of course not."

"Why not?"

"Why, the mathematical formulas under which it was designed don't apply to the conditions under which the gun is fired. The more carefully you aimed the more certain you would be of missing."

"Does that suggest anything to you, Perry?"

"No, not offhand."

"You remember those words you didn't define—Weren't those words the names for things by which a man guides his life?—Honor, love, truth, justice, duty, and so forth?"

A look of dawning comprehension came into his face. "Yes, yes, I think so."

"Aren't these things just as powerful to move a man as the hunger of the belly or the stirring of the loins. "

"Yes, yes indeed. More powerful."

"Then they aren't meaningless. But like that gunsight, unless the meaning you attribute to them bears a correct relationship to the world in which you act, you cannot possibly use them as guides to go where you wish to go. Yet without these guides, a man himself is as meaningless as a gun that can't be aimed."

"You make it sound very plausible, yet a man is not a shell in a gun and truth and honor are not gunsights."

"No, they aren't. Let us drop the analogy before it leads us into absurdities. Nevertheless I think you see that what I said is true, quite independently of the analogy. Men are moved to act by very complicated motivations tagged duty, love, sin, and so forth. You yourself are moved by them and yet you are unable to define what you mean by these terms. You have accepted these concepts more or less unconsciously yet you know so little about them that you cannot possibly know whether they lead where you want to go, or to disaster. If you attempted to pilot a plane with as little knowledge of the controls, you would be sure to wreck it. You are here because you did such faulty piloting of your own life, and smashed another person in the chin in the process."

"Granting that what you say is true—and I don't concede yet that I was wrong to hit that fellow—how do you discover proper meanings for these words that will enable me to conduct myself properly by them?"

"How did you discover how to design gunsights that would enable you to hit the mark?"

"Why the theory of gravitation makes it a mathematical necessity."

"Are you sure? I seem to remember that the theory of gravitation was turned upside down and inside out in your lifetime. Did that cause all the gunsights to be junked?"

He slapped his thigh. "By God, you're right. Exterior ballistics evolved by purely empirical means, trial and error. Whenever we got enough data to analyze we invented formulas to fit. We never tried to make the practice fit the theory. When the theory didn't fit, we junked it and made up a new one. But it worked. We built machines in that way that were marvels of accurate prediction," he said and thought, then his face clouded. "But how can you apply that technique to the problems of living?"

"Well, Perry, so far as I know there are just two ways of working out a practical theory of human relations that will enable us all to live happily together. One is the hard way of trying to work out empirical principles from what we know of the real world. The other is by divine revelation. I won't say that the second way is impossible, but we moderns have grown to distrust it. Our conclusions in 2086 from the first method are embodied in the current code of customs. He who complies with that code will live with reasonably little conflict in 2086 whether he believes that the code is a list of final truths or simply rough generalizations. The code embodies our 2086 meanings for these troublesome words that you could not define. You have other meanings, unspoken, and in my opinion your meanings are both inaccurate and dangerous, for I believe that if you were able to define your code in spoken objective words you would find that your code did not correspond to the real world around you."

"But that still doesn't tell me how you arrive at these customs, or empirical formulas for conduct, or whatever you care to call them."

"Much as you perfected the art of ballistics. By a willingness to junk theories that didn't fit the facts. For example, the churches, by and large, set their faces against divorce. Divorce was a 'sin'. No attempt was made to study marriage and divorce objectively, divorce was 'sin' by divine revelation and that settled it. It is almost inconceivable the amount of harm that was done by that one false generalization alone. By rejecting the dogmatic viewpoint and examining the problem in its environment we reached quite different conclusions. In the 2086 environment divorce is not a 'sin', although it is possible to conceive different social patterns in which divorce would be 'sin'. Consider again the subject of clothing as a taboo. Again a dogmatic generalization for social conduct decreed that it was 'wrong', 'dishonorable', 'immodest' to appear unclothed. Original sin was involved, complicated aesthetic ideas were given a false objective reality, and so forth. An amazing mass of philosophical nonsense was written on this one taboo alone by people who would never think of taking off their clothes in the presence of others in order to see what it felt like. Their faces were resolutely set against such irreverent experiment, even as the scholasticists of the Middle Ages refused to watch any experiment which threw doubt on the perfection of Aristotle's Mechanics, and yet the experiment was always available and easy to perform. In 2086 from purely experimental considerations, the clothes taboo is destroyed. It does not appear in our code of customs, and one may dress or not as convenience and personal aesthetic taste indicates.

"Again, take politics. For centuries philosophers attempted to formulate the perfect state, reasoning from their own unexamined prejudices, which they usually assumed to be divine revelation. In 2086 we consider that the 'perfect state' is a meaningless sound having no objective reality. Instead we set up a political system to achieve whatever we wish to accomplish in 2086. We have no notion that it would have suited 1000 A.D. nor that it would suit contemporary Europe nor that we will leave it unchanged in the future. But we do believe that we have evolved a technique by which we can make the state serve our purposes in any age."

She glanced at the chronometer. "I have other things that I must do now, and I believe that you should think over and develop for yourself any new ideas from this talk. Bye bye!"