“That’s not what I said,” Lansing told him. “I was simply helping you along. You were bogging down. I made the remark to put you back on track.”
“Well, thank you, sir. That was kind of you. I was wandering a bit. You go over, sir, and put a quarter in the slot. The quarter wakes it up and it speaks to you, asking what you want, and—”
“You mean the slot machine speaks to you?”
“That’s exactly right, sir. It asks you what you want and you tell it, and it tells you what it’ll cost, and when you pay for it, it cranks it out for you. It can crank out a paper on almost any subject. You tell it what you want —”
“So that is what you did. Would you mind telling me how much it might have cost you?” “Not at all. Two dollars. That’s all.” “Dirt cheap,” Lansing said.
“Yes, you’re right, sir. It really is a bargain.”
“Sitting here,” said Lansing, “I’m thinking of how unfair it is that only a chosen few should know about this wondrous machine. Think of all of those hundreds sitting out there now, hunched above their desks, beating out their brains to scribble down a paragraph that has some meaning in it, when, if they only knew it, down there in the Union building there is an answer to all the problems that they face.”
Jackson’s face was frozen. “You don’t believe me, sir. You think it’s just a story. You think that I am lying.”
“What did you think I’d think?”
“I really didn’t know. It seems so simple to me because it really is the truth. You don’t believe me when I tell the truth. I would have done better lying.”
“Yes, Mr. Jackson, I think perhaps you might have.”
“What are you going to do, sir?”
“Nothing at the moment. I’ll give the matter some thought over the weekend. When I reach a decision, I will let you know.”
Jackson rose stiffly and stalked out of the office. Lansing listened to him clumping down the hall until the sound of the clumping faded out. Then he placed Jackson’s paper in a drawer and locked the desk. Picking up his briefcase, he headed for the door. Halfway there he swung about and dropped the briefcase on the desk top. Today he’d carry nothing home with him. The weekend was free, and he was going to keep it free.
Walking down the hall to the entrance that opened on the mall, he felt strange to be deprived of the briefcase. It had become a part of him, he thought. As much a part of him as his slacks and shoes. It was a part of the uniform he wore. For years he had carried it, and without it he felt slightly naked, as if it might somehow be indecent to expose himself to the public view without it clutched beneath his arm.
As he was walking down the building’s broad stone steps, someone hailed him from half a block away. He turned and saw that it was Andy Spaulding, who was hurrying up the sidewalk to intercept him.
Andy was an ancient and a trusted friend, but something of a windbag who at times could be slightly pompous. He was a sociologist and had a good head on him, a head bubbling with ideas. The only trouble was that he never kept the ideas to himself. Whenever he could corner someone, he’d zero in on his cringing victim and talk his ideas out, clinging tightly to the lapels of the victim so that he could not get away, arguing with himself even as he expounded on that mighty tide of thought that surged within himself. But for all of this, he was a good and loyal companion, and Lansing was marginally pleased to see him.
He waited at the foot of the stairs until Andy came up.
“Let’s wander over to the club,” said Andy. “I’ll stand you drinks.”
2
The faculty club was on the top floor of the Student Union. The entire outer wall was a series of plate-glass windows looking out over a placid, well-tended little lake hemmed in by birch and pine.
Lansing and Andy sat at one of the tables next to the wall.
Spaulding lifted his glass and looked over it, speculatively, at Lansing.
“You know,” he said, “I have been thinking the last few days how fortunate it would be if there should be visited upon us another medieval plague such as wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. Or another world war or even a second biblical flood — anything that would force us to start over once again, to erase some of the mistakes that we have made in the last thousand years or so, giving us the opportunity to arrive at some new social and economic principles. A chance to escape from mediocrity, the chance to organize ourselves more sanely. The work-and-wage system has become obsolete, it defeats itself, and still we cling to it…”
“Don’t you think,” Lansing suggested mildly, “that the methods you suggest might prove rather drastic?”
Not meaning to argue by saying it. No one argued with Andy; he simply overrode anyone who tried. He rumbled on and on, in a voice that was just short of a monotone, marshaling his thoughts and cataloguing them, spreading them out for one to see, as one might fan out a deck of playing cards.
Not wanting to argue, not intending to, but entering into the spirit of the game, which required that at certain intervals Andy’s victim or victims murmur some appropriate response.
“One of these days,” said Andy, “we will suddenly realize — I have no thought how such a realization will come about — but we’ll realize that our human effort so far is a futile effort because it is being pushed in the wrong direction. For centuries we have sought for knowledge, pursuing it in the name of reason, in the same reasonable manner as the ancient alchemists pursued their search for a method that would transform base metals into gold. We may find that all this knowledge is a dead end, that beyond a certain point all meaning ceases. In astrophysics we seem to be nearing that point. In a few years more, all the old and solid theories about space and time may collapse to nothing, leaving us standing in the rubble of shattered theories that we then will know are worthless and always have been worthless. There may then exist no reason to make further study of the universe. We may find that there are, in actuality, no universal laws, that the universe may operate on pure randomness, or worse. All this frantic study, all this pursuit of knowledge, not only about the universe but other things as well, has come about because we seek some advantage in it. But let us ask ourselves if we have the right to seek advantage. Basically we may have no right to expect a thing from the universe.”
Lansing played the game. “You seem, this afternoon,” he said, “to be more pessimistic than is your usual style.”
“I am not the first,” said Andy, “to indulge in this brand of pessimism, although mine is pitched from a slightly different viewpoint. There was a school of thinkers, some years ago, who advanced a similar argument. That was at a time when the cosmologists were convinced that we existed in a finite universe. At the moment the cosmological viewpoint is not that rigid. Right now we are undecided what kind of universe we’re in. It may be finite, it may be infinite; no one really knows. It all depends on how much matter there may be in the universe, and estimates of the matter present fluctuate from year to year, if not from month to month. But that’s neither here nor there. At the time, some years ago, when the conviction of a finite universe still obtained, the theory then was that scientific knowledge, based on a finite universe, must itself be finite. That somewhere there was a boundary to the universe and therefore a boundary to knowledge. There was only so much to be learned, and once we learned that much, that was the end of it. If knowledge was advancing and accumulating, doubling every fifteen years, as was estimated at the time, then it was said that it would not take long, perhaps a few centuries at the most, to reach a point at which the limiting factors of a finite universe would call a halt to any further accumulation of knowledge. The men of that day who supported this kind of thinking went so far as to conjure up exponential curves by which they professed to show at what point scientific and technological knowledge would finally reach an end.”
“But you say,” said Lansing, “that a finite universe no longer is an accepted fact — that it may be infinite.”
“You miss the point,” Andy rumbled. “I am not talking about the finiteness or infiniteness of the universe. I simply used it as an example to refute your charge of pessimism on my part. I was trying to explain that under other situations there were those who at times had voiced their own brands of pessimism.
“What I said to start with was that it would be a blessing should we be forced to undergo some catastrophic event that would cause us to change our thinking and to seek another way of life. For we are running down a dead-end street, and, what is more, we are running at full tilt. When we reach the dead end, we are going to pile
