The Age of the Pussyfoot

Author’s Note

Once upon a time, a quarter of a century or so ago, I was a weatherman for the United States Army Air Force in Italy. It was my first experience in the art of predicting real-time events—that is, in the kind of prediction where money, and lives, are bet on its accuracy.

This was a long time before the advent of the computer and the facsimile machine and TIROS and all the other handy little gadgets that have since come reasonably close to turning meteorology into an exact science. Still, we had our gadgets even then, quite a few of them. Our group weather officer, in my part of the Fifteenth Air Force, was a disheveled captain who smiled and nodded a lot, but rarely spoke. He would hum to himself for an hour or two as he pored over the teletype reports and the synoptic map and the adiabatic charts and the PIREPS. Then he would go out to the instrument shelter and swing the psychrometer and tap the aneroid barograph with his fingernail. And then he would climb on the roof of the station and perhaps he would see, off on the horizon, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand; and he would say, “Ha! Looks like rain,” and come back and make a bad-weather forecast for the pilots of the B-24s.

Actually, that’s the way to write science fiction. (Well, one kind of science fiction. There are many varieties of the science fiction experience!) First you do your homework with the books and the scientific journals. Then you talk to the astronomers and biochemists and computer people, and if you’re lucky perhaps they’ll let you play with their machines and look through their lenses. And then you get up on a high place and look at the world around you.

The Age of the Pussyfoot was constructed to those specifications. Little of it represents invention on my part, barring the personalities and some of the details of settings and events. Almost every aspect of it is visible right now, in July of 1968, as a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand; and I too am forecasting rain.

The joymaker? M.I.T.’s Project MAC was what made me think of the joymaker—well, that’s not quite true; I had thought of it before Project MAC ever existed, but certainly MAC is a sort of Jurassic ancestor of my toy. At M.I.T., two big IBM 7094s, plus half a dozen or so servant computers, are available to anyone with a remote-access console in his home or office. The console right now can be anywhere a telephone line will go—including Europe, if you like, or for that matter Antarctica. My only additional assumption is that it will be convenient to do the same thing by radio. The MAC consoles are presently about the size of biggish electric typewriters; my only change involves microminiaturizing them into portability—and, while you’re at it, fitting them with a few of such necessities of modern urban life as Miltown, contraceptive pills, aspirin, and the like. I also assume that the pharmacopeia of the next few centuries will be more extensive than our own, but that seems like a reasonably good bet.

Immortality through freezing? Robert C. W. Ettinger has been on a crusade for that for more than five years now. The funny thing about it is that it will probably work. (I offer no money-back guarantees, you understand, only an opinion. But it is an opinion shared by such prestigious men as Jean Rostand, France’s most illustrious biochemist.) The other funny thing about it is that there have been very few takers for this offer of immortality in the flesh—as Bob Ettinger says, many are cold, but few are frozen. There are fewer than half a dozen corpses currently in the deep freeze, although there are some hundreds of thousands of persons who would be, except that they haven’t yet happened to die. But the facilities are there, including some three competing lines of the man-sized thermos bottles with the liquid gas tanks that are now commercially available for those who would die and live to die again. I mentioned “death-reversal” equipment in the story. Several years ago, I saw an unpublished manuscript that stated, apparently on good authority, that the U.S.S.R. had such vehicles in service then; it implied that one of these had saved the life of the noted Russian scientist Lev Landau. (Who was dead four times, clinically, incontrovertibly dead, before he was brought to life again permanently enough to be released from the hospital.) And, three months ago, parked outside the headquarters of the New York Academy of Sciences, I saw the first American death-reversal machine. The New York DR vehicle is a truck; those in the story are helicopters. Otherwise they are much the same.

It is true, however, that no corpsicle has yet been thawed and returned to life, and there’s no firm estimate of when one will be. Yet it could happen tomorrow. The odds appear to be very great that it will happen sometime, and according to my personal reading of human psychology, the minute it does we will have a rush to the freezers comparable to no human migration since the opening of the Cherokee Strip. It strikes me that we are all, from birth, so often reminded that we are inevitably going to die that we cannot accept an offer of immortality when it is presented, until and unless it is shown to work. Demonstrate that it works one time, and we’ll grab for it as we’ve grabbed for few things before . . . and then the building of such installations as the West Annex Center will proceed apace.

The economic, social, and cultural “predictions” of the story are perhaps a little less defensible than the hardware. But I think the reason for that is that economics and sociology, et al., are at the present time rather less “scientific” than the hard sciences are. The money part of the story is pretty reliably stated. Obviously we will continue to have both of the two kinds of inflation that have been going on throughout history—both the devaluation of existing currencies (as the Romansolidus, worth several hundred dollars at least, was devalued over two thousand years into the French sou, worth not even a thank you); and the multiplication of things to spend money on, which is the psychological root of a good deal of the “poverty” of our own age and nation. (America’s poor usually do have enough money to survive on. It is the fact that they see around them so many desirable things, which they don’t have money to buy, that makes them really, miserably, unarguably “poor.”)

The notion of being paid a salary for things we might now consider to be properly unpaid, leisure-time activities is not particularly fanciful, either. Witness the proposals of the guaranteed annual wage and the negative income tax; witness institutionalized welfare programs; witness how many “leisure” activities have already become paying professions. Who would have paid a salary to a ski instructor in the Middle Ages? Already in America almost every large volunteer organization has a hard-core paid professional staff. (It is not quite as common in Europe—yet.) I am only suggesting that the memberships as well as the leaderships might as well be paid for what they do.

As to the mating customs, the interpersonal folkways and so on of my twenty-sixth-century characters, I confess I am on shakier ground. I am not sure that things will go exactly this way. But form follows function. There is a need for a family even now, as a sort of nest designed for the raising of children, and there no doubt will be such a need in the foreseeable future. I do not think it will be the same need as in the recent past, however. Then there was enough work at home to keep an able-bodied woman busy from dawn to dark, and enough work involved in earning a living to keep her husband away at the farm or factory almost every waking hour. With the increase in leisure time, in productivity of labor, especially in such external aids to child-rearing as schools and nurseries, the functional need for the family is somewhat different. Our social structure has not yet really caught up with that fact, although the signs are writ large; I am only assuming that in five hundred years it will have done so.

A similar defense could be made for almost every speculation in this novel, including the presence of Sirians. (Or, anyway, extraterrestrial creatures capable of doing the sort of thing that Sirians do in the story. There are more than one hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, and it is a dead-certain bet that at least some of them have inhabited planets.) But I should confess that there are two areas in which I am defenseless.

One of these includes the things I have left out. I have not taken into consideration the probabilities of large-scale disaster—through nuclear warfare, or lethal pollution of the air, or a runaway population explosion sufficient to starve us all back to the Neolithic. But there’s just so much you can discuss in one story, and I wasn’t happening to discuss those possibilities here.

And the other thing I can’t defend is the time scale.

If you put together Project MAC and Bob Ettinger’s freezers and the negative income tax, you have something that is really quite a lot like The Age of the Pussyfoot . . .constructed out of materials that are to hand right now. In the novel, the time scale is large: five centuries. Charles Forrester’s revival is as far in one direction along our time scale as Christopher Columbus’s voyage is in the other.

I don’t really think it will be that long. Not five centuries.

Perhaps not even five decades.

Frederik Pohl

Red Bank, New Jersey

July 1968

“The Age of the Pussyfoot” appeared in a shorter version in Galaxy Magazine.