One Human Minute

III

Now One Human Minute has indeed been computerized, but not in the way I imagined. The fact is, the contents of the book were becoming, slowly but surely, anachronistic. The number of people in the world keeps increasing; new catastrophes and calamities are added to the old ones; new means of production create different articles for daily consumption. Therefore, as in the case of yearly almanacs, it came time to revise the book — or rather, to recalculate it from scratch. But a character appeared, even cleverer than the Johnsons; he decided to put a perpetual One Human Minute on the market — valid from year to year — like a perpetual calendar! In an era of pocket calculators, electronic chessplayers, and a host of similar devices claiming to embody “artificial intelligence” (which has not been attained yet but someday, no doubt, will be), when you can buy even a pocket translator to carry on simple conversations in a foreign language, it was possible to make an electronic version of this book, avoiding the need for continual corrections and new editions.

The year is entered, the subject code selected from the menu. Also, one can move both forward and backward in time. Naturally, seeing that the machine can show how many children were born thirty years ago, and how many three hundred years ago, a person is tempted to give it a tougher problem: how many people watched television when Columbus discovered America? The machine is not that stupid, however, and is not taken in. The answer that appears in the little window is “0.” We are soon convinced that the past has all been entered in the memory of this new, microcomputerized version of One Human Minute. But it is more interesting to use it to look at the future. You cannot jump more than one hundred years forward: when you try, you get an “E” in the little window, signaling overload, as in any ordinary calculator. Future data are extrapolations, derived from such weighty mathematics that I wouldn’t dream of going into it. The only thing certain is that all the data are uncertain, like any statement about the future. But since The Perpetual Human Minute is really not a book, the book reviewer has no further obligation to it; there remains for him only this parting, possibly profound remark:

In the Holy Scriptures it is said that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. Paraphrasing for our earthly use, we can observe that in the beginning was a computer, which brought forth this book, which became a computer again. An accident, perhaps, a superficial analogy — but I am afraid that it is not.

THE UPSIDE-DOWN EVOLUTION

I

Having gained access (by what means, I’m not at liberty to reveal) to several volumes on the military history of the twenty-first century, I pondered, first and foremost, how to hide the information they contained. The question of concealment was most important, because I understood that the man who knew this history was like the finder of a treasure who, defenseless, could easily lose it along with his life. I alone possessed these facts, I realized, thanks to the books that Dr. R.G. loaned to me briefly and which I returned just before his premature death. As far as I know, he burned them, thus taking the secret with him to the grave.

Silence seemed the simplest solution: if I kept quiet, I would save my skin. But what a shame, to sit on a thousand and one extraordinary things having to do with the political history of the next century, things opening up completely new horizons in all areas of human life. Take, for example, the astonishing reversal — completely unforeseen — in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which became a force to be reckoned with precisely because it did not become the machine embodiment of the human mind. If I remained silent for my own safety, I would be depriving myself of all the advantages stemming from that knowledge.

Another idea occurred to me: to write down exactly what I remembered of those volumes and place the manuscript in a bank vault. It would be necessary to write down everything I retained from my reading, because with the passage of time I would forget many particulars of such a broad subject. Then, if I wanted to refresh my memory, I could visit the vault, take notes there, and return the manuscript to the strongbox. But it was dangerous. Someone could spy on me. Besides, in today’s world no bank vault was 100-percent secure. Even a thief of low intelligence would figure out, sooner or later, what an extraordinary document had fallen into his hands. And even if he discarded and destroyed my manuscript, I would not know it and would live in constant dread that the connection between my person and the history of the twenty-first century would come to light.

My dilemma was how to hide the secret forever but at the same time take advantage of it freely — to hide it from the world but not from myself. After much deliberation, I realized that this could be done very easily. The safest way to conceal a remarkable idea — every word of it true — was to publish it as science fiction. Just as a diamond thrown on a heap of broken glass would become invisible, so an authentic revelation placed amid the stupidities of science fiction would take on their coloration — and cease to be dangerous.

At first, however, still fearful, I made a very modest use of the secret I possessed. In 1967 I wrote a science-fiction novel entitled His Master’s Voice (published in English in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). On page 125 of that edition, third line from the top, are the words “the ruling doctrine was… ‘indirect economic attrition,’” and then the doctrine is expressed by the aphorism “The thin starve before the fat lose weight.'

The doctrine expressed publicly in the United States in 1980 — thirteen years after the original edition of His Master’s Voice — was put a little differently. (In the West German press they used the slogan “den Gegner totrusten” — “arm the enemy to death.')

Once I had confirmed — and there had been time enough to do so, after all, since the book’s appearance — that no one had noticed how my “fantasizing” agreed with later political developments, I grew bolder. I understood that truth, when set in fiction, is camouflaged perfectly, and that even this fact can be safely confessed. For that matter, no one takes anything seriously if it’s published. So the best way to keep a top secret secret is to put it out in a mass edition.

Having ensured the safety of my secret thus, I can now serenely set about giving a complete report. I will confine myself to the first two volumes of Weapons Systems of the Twenty-first Century: The Upside- down Evolution, published in 2105. I could even name the authors (none of whom has been born yet), but what would be the point? The work is in three volumes. The first presents the development of weapons from the year 1944; the second explains how the nuclear-arms race gave rise to the “unhumanizing” of warfare by transferring the production of weapons from the defense industry to the battlefield itself; and the third deals with the effect this greatest military revolution had on the subsequent history of the world.

II

Soon after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American nuclear researchers founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. On its cover they put the picture of a clock with the minute hand at ten to midnight. Six years later, after the first successful tests of the hydrogen bomb, they moved the hand five minutes closer, and when the Soviet Union acquired thermonuclear weapons the hand was moved three minutes closer. The next move would mean the end of civilization. The Bulletin’s doctrine was “One World or None': the world would either unite and be saved, or would perish.

With the nuclear build-up on both sides of the ocean and the placing of ever larger payloads of plutonium and tritium in ever more accurate ballistic missiles, none of the scientists who were the “fathers of the bomb” believed that peace — troubled as it was by local, conventional wars — would last to the end of the century. Atomic