Ishmael

only a few of those found here in the New World. ‘Why,’ they wonder, ‘are these craft on the ground instead of in the air? Why would any people prefer to be earthbound when they could have the freedom of the air, as we do?’ It’s beyond comprehension, an unfathomable mystery.

“Ah well, the vagaries of such foolish people are nothing to the Takers. They’re pedaling away and having a wonderful time. They’re not going to abandon their craft. They’re going to enjoy the freedom of the air forever. But alas, a law is catching up to them. They don’t know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects. This is a law as unforgiving as the law of gravity, and it’s catching up to them in exactly the same way the law of gravity caught up to our airman: at an accelerating rate.

“Some gloomy nineteenth–century thinkers, like Robert Wallace and Thomas Robert Malthus, look down. A thousand years before, even five hundred years before, they would probably have noticed nothing. But now what they see alarms them. It’s as though the ground is rushing up to meet them—as though they are going to crash. They do some figuring and say, ‘If we go on this way, we’re going to be in big trouble in the not–too–distant future.’ The other Takers shrug their predictions off. ‘We’ve come all this enormous way and haven’t even received so much as a scratch. It’s true the ground seems to be rising up to meet us, but that just means we’ll have to pedal a little harder. Not to worry.’ Nevertheless, just as was predicted, famine soon becomes a routine condition of life in many parts of the Taker Thunderbolt—and the Takers have to pedal even harder and more efficiently than before. But oddly enough, the harder and more efficiently they pedal, the worse conditions become. Very strange. Peter Farb calls it a paradox: ‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ ‘Never mind,’ the Takers said. ‘We’ll just have to put some people pedaling away on a reliable method of birth control. Then the Taker Thunderbolt will fly forever.’

“But such simple answers aren’t enough to reassure the people of your culture nowadays. Everyone is looking down, and it’s obvious that the ground is rushing up toward you—and rushing up faster every year. Basic ecological and planetary systems are being impacted by the Taker Thunderbolt, and that impact increases in intensity every year. Basic, irreplaceable resources are being devoured every year—and they’re being devoured more greedily every year. Whole species are disappearing as a result of your encroachment—and they’re disappearing in greater numbers every year. Pessimists—or it may be that they’re realists—look down and say, ‘Well, the crash may be twenty years off or maybe as much as fifty years off. Actually it could happen anytime. There’s no way to be sure.’ But of course there are optimists as well, who say, ‘We must have faith in our craft. After all, it has brought us this far in safety. What’s ahead isn’t doom, it’s just a little hump that we can clear if we all just pedal a little harder. Then we’ll soar into a glorious, endless future, and the Taker Thunderbolt will take us to the stars and we’ll conquer the universe itself.’ But your craft isn’t going to save you. Quite the contrary, it’s your craft that’s carrying you toward catastrophe. Five billion of you pedaling away—or ten billion or twenty billion—can’t make it fly. It’s been in free fall from the beginning, and that fall is about to end.”

At last I had something of my own to add to this. “The worst part of it is this,” I said, “that the survivors, if there are any, will immediately set about doing it all over again, exactly the same way.”

“Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. Trial and error isn’t a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft, but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.”

SEVEN

1

“Here is a puzzle for you to consider,” said Ishmael. “You are in a faraway land and find yourself in a strange city isolated from all others. You’re immediately impressed by the people you find there. They’re friendly, cheerful, healthy, prosperous, vigorous, peaceable, and well educated, and they tell you things have been this way for as long as anyone can remember. Well, you’re glad to break your journey here, and one family invites you to stay with them.

“That night you sample their food at dinner and, finding it delicious but unfamiliar, ask them what it is, and they say, ‘Oh, it’s B meat, of course. That’s all we eat.’ This naturally puzzles you and you ask if they mean the meat of the little insects that gather honey. They laugh and take you to the window. ‘There are some B’s there,’ they say, pointing to their neighbors in the next house.

“ ‘Good lord!’ you exclaim in horror, ‘you don’t mean that you eat people!’ And they look at you in a puzzled way and say, ‘We eat B’s.’

“ ‘How atrocious,’ you reply. ‘Are they your slaves then? Do you keep them penned up?’

“ ‘Why on earth should we keep them penned up?’ your hosts ask.

“ ‘To keep them from running away, of course!’

“By now your hosts are beginning to think you’re a little weak in the head, and they explain that the B’s would never think of running away, because their own food, the A’s, live right across the street.

“Well, I won’t weary you with all your outraged exclamations and their baffled explanations. Eventually you piece together the whole ghastly scheme. The A’s are eaten by the B’s and the B’s are eaten by the C’s and the C’s in turn are eaten by the A’s. There is no hierarchy among these food classes. The C’s don’t lord it over the B’s just because the B’s are their food, because after all they themselves are the food of the A’s. It’s all perfectly democratic and friendly. But of course it’s all perfectly dreadful to you, and you ask them how they can stand to live in this lawless way. Once again they look at you in bafflement. ‘What do you mean, lawless?’ they ask. ‘We have a law, and we all follow it invariably. This is why we’re friendly and cheerful and peaceable and all those other things you find so attractive in us. This law is the foundation of our success as a people and has been so from the beginning.’

“Here at last is the puzzle. Without asking them, how can you discover what law it is they follow?”

I blinked at him for a moment. “I can’t imagine.”

“Think about it.”

“Well… obviously their law is that A’s eat C’s and B’s eat A’s and C’s eat B’s.”

Ishmael shook his head. “These are food preferences. No law is required.”

“I need something more to go on then. All I’ve got is their food preferences.”

“You have three other things to go on. They have a law, they follow it invariably, and because they follow it invariably, they have a highly successful society.”

“It’s still very tenuous. Unless it’s something like… ‘Be cool.’ ”

“I’m not asking you to guess what the law is. I’m asking you to devise a method for discovering what the law is.”

I slid down in my chair, folded my hands on my stomach, and stared at the ceiling. After a few minutes I had an idea. “Is there a penalty for breaking this law?”

“Death.”

“Then I’d wait for an execution.”

Ishmael smiled. “Ingenious, but hardly a method. Besides, you’re overlooking the fact that the law is obeyed invariably. There has never been an execution.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. A few minutes later I said: “Observation. Careful observation over a long period.”

“That’s more like it. What would you be looking for?”

“For what they didn’t do. For what they never did.”

“Good. But how would you eliminate irrelevancies? For example, you might find that they never slept standing on their heads or that they never threw rocks at the moon. There would be a million things they never did, but these wouldn’t necessarily be prohibited by the law.”

“True. Well, let’s see. They have a law, they follow it invariably, and according to them… ah. According to