Null-P

William Tenn

Several months after the Second Atomic War, when radioactivity still held one-third of the planet in desolation, Dr. Daniel Glurt of Fillmore Township, Wisc., stumbled upon a discovery which was to generate humanity’s ultimate sociological advance.

Like Columbus, smug over his voyage to India; like Nobel, proud of the synthesis of dynamite which made combat between nations impossible, the doctor misinterpreted his discovery. Years later, he cackled to a visiting historian:

“Had no idea it would lead to this, no idea at all. You remember, the war had just ended: we were feeling mighty subdued what with the eastern and western coasts of the United States practically sizzled away. Well, word came down from the new capital at Topeka in Kansas for us doctors to give all our patients a complete physical check. Sort of be on the lookout, you know, for radioactive burns and them fancy new diseases the armies had been tossing back and forth. Well, sir, that’s absolutely all I set out to do. I’d known George Abnego for over thirty years—treated him for chicken-pox and pneumonia and ptomaine poisoning. I’d never suspected!”

Having reported to Dr. Glurt’s office immediately after work in accordance with the proclamation shouted through the streets by the county clerk, and having waited patiently in line for an hour and a half, George Abnego was at last received into the small consulting room. Here he was thoroughly chest-thumped, X-rayed, blood-sampled, and urinanalyzed. His skin was examined carefully, and he was made to answer the five hundred questions prepared by the Department of Health in a pathetic attempt to cover the symptoms of the new ailments.

George Abnego then dressed and went home to the cereal supper permitted for that day by the ration board. Dr. Glurt placed his folder in a drawer and called for the next patient. He had noticed nothing up to this point; yet already he had unwittingly begun the Abnegite Revolution.

Four days later, the health survey of Fillmore, Wisc., being complete, the doctor forwarded the examination reports to Topeka. Just before signing George Abnego’s sheet, he glanced at it cursorily, raised his eyebrows and entered the following note: “Despite the tendency to dental cavities and athlete’s foot, I would consider this man to be of average health. Physically, he is the Fillmore Township norm.”

It was this last sentence which caused the government medical official to chuckle and glance at the sheet once more. His smile was puzzled after this; it was even more puzzled after he had checked the figures and statements on the form against standard medical references.

He wrote a phrase in red ink in the right-hand corner and sent it along to Research.

His name is lost to history.

Research wondered why the report on George Abnego had been sent up—he had no unusual symptoms portending exotic innovations like cerebral measles or arterial trichinosis. Then it observed the phrase in red ink and Dr. Glurt’s remark. Research shrugged its anonymous shoulders and assigned a crew of statisticians to go further into the matter.

A week later, as a result of their findings, another crew—nine medical specialists—left for Fillmore. They examined George Abnego with coordinated precision. Afterwards, they called on Dr. Glurt briefly, leaving a copy of their examination report with him when he expressed interest.

Ironically, the government copies were destroyed in the Topeka Hard-Shelled Baptist Riots a month later, the same riots which stimulated Dr. Glurt to launch the Abnegite Revolution.

This Baptist denomination, because of population shrinkage due to atomic and bacteriological warfare, was now the largest single religious body in the nation. It was then controlled by a group pledged to the establishment of a Hard-Shelled Baptist theocracy in what was left of the United States. The rioters were quelled after much destruction and bloodshed; their leader, the Reverend Hemingway T. Gaunt—who had vowed that he would remove neither the pistol from his left hand nor the Bible from his right until the Rule of God had been established and the Third Temple built—was sentenced to death by a jury composed of stern-faced fellow Baptists.

Commenting on the riots, the Fillmore, Wisc., Bugle-Herald drew a mournful parallel between the Topeka street battles and the destruction wreaked upon the world by atomic conflict.

“International communication and transportation having broken down,” the editorial went on broodingly, “we now know little of the smashed world in which we live beyond such meager facts as the complete disappearance of Australia beneath the waves, and the contraction of Europe to the Pyrenees and Ural Mountains. We know that our planet’s physical appearance has changed as much from what it was ten years ago, as the infant monstrosities and mutants being born everywhere as a result of radioactivity are unpleasantly different from their parents.

“Truly, in these days of mounting catastrophe and change, our faltering spirits beg the heavens for a sign, a portent, that all will be well again, that all will yet be as it once was, that the waters of disaster will subside and we shall once more walk upon the solid ground of normalcy.”

It was this last word which attracted Dr. Glurt’s attention. That night, he slid the report of the special government medical crew into the newspaper’s mail slot. He had penciled a laconic note in the margin of the first page:

“Noticed your interest in the subject.”

Next week’s edition of the Fillmore Bugle-Herald flaunted a page one five-column headline.

FILLMORE CITIZEN THE SIGN?

Normal Man of Fillmore May Be Answer From Above

Local Doctor Reveals Government Medical Secret

The story that followed was liberally sprinkled with quotations taken equally from the government report and the Psalms of David. The startled residents of Fillmore learned that one George Abnego, a citizen unnoticed in their midst for almost forty years, was a living abstraction. Through a combination of circumstances no more remarkable than those producing a royal flush in stud poker, Abnego’s physique, psyche, and other miscellaneous attributes had resulted in that legendary creature—the statistical average.

According to the last census taken before the war, George Abnego’s height and weight were identical with the mean of the American adult male. He had married at the exact age—year, month, day—when statisticians had estimated the marriage of the average man took place; he had married a woman the average number of years younger than himself; his income as declared on his last tax statement was the average income for that year. The very teeth in his mouth tallied in quantity and condition with those predicted by the American Dental Association to be found on a man extracted at random from the population. Abnego’s metabolism and blood pressure, his bodily proportions and private neuroses, were all cross-sections of the latest available records. Subjected to every psychological and personality test available, his final, overall grade corrected out to show that he was both average and normal.

Finally, Mrs. Abnego had been recently delivered of their third child, a boy. This development had not only occurred at exactly the right time according to the population indices, but it had resulted in an entirely normal sample of humanity—unlike most babies being born throughout the land.

The Bugle-Herald blared its hymn to the new celebrity around a greasy photograph of the family in which the assembled Abnegos stared glassily out at the reader, looking, as many put it, “Average—average as hell!”

Newspapers in other states were invited to copy.

They did, slowly at first, then with an accelerating, contagious enthusiasm. Indeed, as the intense public interest in this symbol of stability, this refugee from the extremes, became manifest, newspaper columns gushed fountains of purple prose about the “Normal Man of Fillmore.”

At Nebraska State University, Professor Roderick Klingmeister noticed that many members of his biology class were wearing extra-large buttons decorated with pictures of George Abnego. “Before beginning my lecture,” he chuckled, “I would like to tell you that this ‘normal man’ of yours is no Messiah. All he is, I am afraid, is a bell-shaped curve with ambitions, the median made flesh—”

He got no further. He was brained with his own demonstration microscope.

Even that early, a few watchful politicians noticed that no one was punished for this hasty act.

The incident could be related to many others which followed: the unfortunate and unknown citizen of Duluth, for example, who—at the high point of that city’s Welcome Average Old Abnego parade—was heard to remark in good-natured amazement, “Why, he’s just an ordinary jerk like you and me,” and was immediately torn into celebratory confetti by horrified neighbors in the crowd.

Developments such as these received careful consideration from men whose power was derived from the just, if well-directed, consent of the governed.

George Abnego, these gentry concluded, represented the maturation of a great national myth which, implicit in the culture for over a century, had been brought to garish fulfillment by the mass communication and entertainment media.

This was the myth that began with the juvenile appeal to be “A Normal Red-Blooded American Boy” and ended, on the highest political levels, with a shirt-sleeved, suspendered seeker after political office boasting. “Shucks, everybody knows who I am. I’m folks—just plain folks.”

This was the myth from which were derived such superficially disparate practices as the rite of political baby-kissing, the cult of “keeping up with the Joneses,” the foppish, foolish, forever-changing fads which went through the population with the monotonous regularity and sweep of a windshield wiper. The myth of styles and fraternal organizations. The myth of the “regular fellow.”

There was a presidential election that year.

Since all that remained of the United States was the Middle West, the Democratic Party had disappeared. Its remnants had been absorbed by a group calling itself the Old Guard Republicans, the closest thing to an American Left. The party in power—the Conservative Republicans—so far right as to verge upon royalism, had acquired enough pledged theocratic votes to make them smug about the election.

Desperately, the Old Guard Republicans searched for a candidate. Having regretfully passed over the adolescent epileptic recently elected to the governorship of South Dakota in violation of the state constitution—and deciding against the psalm-singing grandmother from Oklahoma who punctuated her senatorial speeches with religious music upon the banjo—the party strategists arrived, one summer afternoon, in Fillmore, Wisconsin.

From the moment that Abnego was persuaded to accept the nomination and his last well-intentioned but flimsy objection was overcome (the fact that he was a registered member of the opposition party) it was obvious that the tide of battle had turned, that the fabled grass roots had caught fire.

Abnego ran for president on the slogan “Back to Normal with the Normal Man!”

By the time the Conservative Republicans met in convention assembled, the danger of loss by landslide was already apparent. They changed their tactics, tried to meet the attack head-on and imaginatively.

They nominated a hunchback for the presidency. This man suffered from the additional disability of being a distinguished professor of law in a leading university; he had married with no issue and divorced with much publicity; and finally, he had once admitted to a congressional investigating committee that he had written and published surrealist poetry. Posters depicting him leering horribly, his hump twice life-size, were smeared across the country over the slogan: “An Abnormal Man for an Abnormal World!”

Despite this brilliant political stroke, the issue was never in doubt. On Election Day, the nostalgic slogan defeated its medicative adversary by three to one. Four years later, with the same opponents, it had risen to five and a half to one. And there was no organized opposition when Abnego ran for a third term…

Not that he had crushed it. There was more casual liberty of political thought allowed during Abnego’s administrations than in many previous ones. But less political thinking and debating were done.

Whenever possible, Abnego avoided decision. When a decision was unavoidable, he made it entirely on the basis of precedent. He rarely spoke on a topic of current interest and never committed himself. He was garrulous and an exhibitionist only about his family.

“How can you lampoon a vacuum?” This had been the wail of many opposition newspaper writers and cartoonists during the early years of the Abnegite Revolution, when men still ran against Abnego at election time. They tried to draw him into ridiculous statements or admissions time and again without success, Abnego was simply incapable of saying anything that any major cross-section of the population would consider ridiculous.

Emergencies? “Well,” Abnego had said, in the story every schoolchild knew, “I’ve noticed even the biggest forest fire will burn itself out. Main thing is not to get excited.”

He made them lie down in low-blood-pressure areas. And, after years of building and destruction, of stimulation and conflict, of accelerating anxieties and torments, they rested and were humbly grateful.

It seemed to many, from the day Abnego was sworn in, that chaos began to waver and everywhere a glorious, welcome stability flowered. In some respects, such as the decrease in the number of monstrous births, processes were under way which had nothing at all to do with the Normal Man of Fillmore; in others—the astonished announcement by lexicographers, for example, that slang expressions peculiar to teenagers in Abnego’s first term were used by their children in exactly the same contexts eighteen years later in his fifth administration—the historical leveling-out and patting-down effects of the Abnegite trowel were obvious.

The verbal expression of this great calm was the Abnegism.

History’s earliest record of these deftly phrased inadequacies relates to the administration in which Abnego, at last feeling secure enough to do so, appointed a cabinet without any regard to the wishes of his party hierarchy. A journalist, attempting to point up the absolute lack of color in the new official family, asked if any one of them—from Secretary of State to Postmaster-General—had ever committed himself publicly on any issue or, in previous positions, had been responsible for a single constructive step in any direction.

To which the President supposedly replied with a bland, unhesitating smile, “I always say there’s no hard feelings if no one’s defeated. Well, sir, no one’s defeated in a fight where the referee can’t make a decision.”

Apocryphal though it may have been, this remark expressed the mood of Abnegite America perfectly. “As pleasant as a no-decision bout” became part of everyday language.

Certainly as apocryphal as the George Washington cherry-tree legend, but the most definite Abnegism of them all was the one attributed to the President after a performance of Romeo and Juliet. “It is better not to have loved at all, than to have loved and lost,” he is reported to have remarked at the morbid end of the play.

At the inception of Abnego’s sixth term—the first in which his oldest son served with him as Vice-President—a group of Europeans reopened trade with the United States by arriving in a cargo ship assembled from the salvaged parts of three sunken destroyers and one capsized aircraft carrier.

Received everywhere with undemonstrative cordiality, they traveled the country, amazed at the placidity—the almost total absence of political and military excitement on the one hand, and the rapid technological retrogression on the other. One of the emissaries sufficiently mislaid his diplomatic caution to comment before he left:

“We came to America, to these cathedrals of industrialism, in the hope that we would find solutions to many vexing problems of applied science. These problems—the development of atomic power for factory use, the application of nuclear fission to such small arms as pistols and hand grenades—stand in the way of our postwar recovery. But you, in what remains of the United States of America, don’t even see what we, in what remains of Europe, consider so complex and pressing. Excuse me, but what you have here is a national trance!”

His American hosts were not offended: they received his expostulations with polite smiles and shrugs. The delegate returned to tell his countrymen that the Americans, always notorious for their madness, had finally specialized in cretinism.

But another delegate who had observed widely and asked many searching questions went back to his native Toulouse (French culture had once more coagulated in Provence) to define the philosophical foundations of the Abnegite Revolution.

In a book which was read by the world with enormous interest, Michel Gaston Fouffnique, sometime Professor of History at the Sorbonne, pointed out that while twentieth-century man had escaped from the narrow Greek formulations sufficiently to visualize a non-Aristotelian logic and a non-Euclidean geometry, he had not yet had the intellectual temerity to create a non-Platonic system of politics. Not until Abnego.

“Since the time of Socrates,” wrote Monsieur Fouffnique, “Man’s political viewpoints have been in thrall to the conception that the best should govern. How to determine that ‘best,’ the scale of values to be used in order that the ‘best’ and not mere undifferentiated ‘betters’ should rule—these have been the basic issues around which have raged the fires of political controversy for almost three millennia. Whether an aristocracy of birth or intellect should prevail is an argument over values; whether rulers should be determined by the will of a god as determined by the entrails of a hog, or selected by the whole people on the basis of a ballot tally—these are alternatives in method. But hitherto no political system has ventured away from the implicit and unexamined assumption first embodied in the philosopher-state of Plato’s Republic.

“Now, at last, America has turned and questioned the pragmatic validity of the axiom. The young democracy to the West, which introduced the concept of the Rights of Man to jurisprudence, now gives a feverish world the Doctrine of the Lowest Common Denominator in government. According to this doctrine as I have come to understand it through prolonged observation, it is not the worst who should govern—as many of my prejudiced fellow-delegates insist—but the mean: what might be termed the ‘unbest’ or the ‘non-elite.’”

Situated amid the still-radioactive rubbish of modern war, the people of Europe listened devoutly to readings from Fouffnique’s monograph. They were enthralled by the peaceful monotonies said to exist in the United States and bored by the academician’s reasons thereto: that a governing group who knew to begin with that they were “unbest” would be free of the myriad jealousies and conflicts arising from the need to prove individual superiority, and that such a group would tend to smooth any major quarrel very rapidly because of the dangerous opportunities created for imaginative and resourceful people by conditions of struggle and strain.

There were oligarchs here and bosses there; in one nation an ancient religious order still held sway, in another, calculating and brilliant men continued to lead the people. But the word was preached. Shamans appeared in the population, ordinary-looking folk who were called “abnegos.” Tyrants found it impossible to destroy these shamans, since they were not chosen for any special abilities but simply because they represented the median of a given group: the middle of any population grouping, it was found, lasts as long as the group itself. Therefore, through bloodshed and much time, the abnegos spread their philosophy and flourished.

Oliver Abnego, who became the first President of the World, was President Abnego VI of the United States of America. His son presided—as Vice-President—over a Senate composed mostly of his uncles and his cousins and his aunts. They and their numerous offspring lived in an economy which had deteriorated very, very slightly from the conditions experienced by the founder of their line.

As world president, Oliver Abnego approved only one measure—that granting preferential university scholarships to students whose grades were closest to their age-group median all over the planet. The President could hardly have been accused of originality and innovation unbecoming to his high office, however, since for some time now all reward systems—scholastic, athletic, and even industrial—had been adjusted to recognition of the most average achievement while castigating equally the highest and lowest scores.

When the usable oil gave out shortly afterwards, men turned with perfect calmness to coal. The last turbines were placed in museums while still in operating condition: the people they served felt their isolated and individual use of electricity was too ostentatious for good abnegism.

Outstanding cultural phenomena of this period were carefully rhymed and exactly metered poems addressed to the nondescript beauties and vague charms of a wife or old mother. Had not anthropology disappeared long ago, it would have become a matter of common knowledge that there was a startling tendency to uniformity everywhere in such qualities as bone structure, features and pigmentation, not to mention intelligence, musculature, and personality. Humanity was breeding rapidly and unconsciously in toward its center.

Nonetheless, just before the exhaustion of coal, there was a brief sputter of intellect among a group who established themselves on a site northwest of Cairo. These Nilotics, as they were known, consisted mostly of unreconstructed dissidents expelled by their communities, with a leavening of the mentally ill and the physically handicapped; they had at their peak an immense number of technical gadgets and yellowing books culled from crumbling museums and libraries the world over.

Intensely ignored by their fellowmen, the Nilotics carried on shrill and interminable debates while plowing their muddy fields just enough to keep alive. They concluded that they were the only surviving heirs of Homo sapiens, the bulk of the world’s population now being composed of what they termed Homo abnegus.

Man’s evolutionary success, they concluded, had been due chiefly to his lack of specialization. While other creatures had been forced to standardize to a particular and limited environment, mankind had been free for a tremendous spurt, until ultimately it had struck an environmental factor which demanded the fee of specialization. To avoid war, Man had to specialize in nonentity.

Having come this far in discussion, the Nilotics determined to use the ancient weapons at their disposal to save Homo abnegus from himself. However, violent disagreements over the methods of reeducation to be employed led them to a bloody internecine conflict with those same weapons in the course of which the entire colony was destroyed and its site made untenable for life. About this time, his coal used up. Man reentered the broad, self-replenishing forests.

The reign of Homo abnegus endured for a quarter of a million years. It was disputed finally—and successfully—by a group of Newfoundland retrievers who had been marooned on an island in Hudson Bay when the cargo vessel transporting them to new owners had sunk back in the twentieth century.

These sturdy and highly intelligent dogs, limited perforce to each other’s growling society for several hundred millennia, learned to talk in much the same manner that mankind’s simian ancestors had learned to walk when a sudden shift in botany destroyed their ancient arboreal homes—out of boredom. Their wits sharpened further by the hardships of their bleak island, their imaginations stimulated by the cold, the articulate retrievers built a most remarkable canine civilization in the Arctic before sweeping southward to enslave and eventually domesticate humanity.

Domestication took the form of breeding men solely for their ability to throw sticks and other objects, the retrieving of which was a sport still popular among the new masters of the planet, however sedentary certain erudite individuals might have become.

Highly prized as pets were a group of men with incredibly thin and long arms; another school of retrievers, however, favored a stocky breed whose arms were short, but extremely sinewy; while, occasionally, interesting results were obtained by inducing rickets for a few generations to produce a pet whose arms were sufficiently limber as to appear almost boneless. This last type, while intriguing both esthetically and scientifically, was generally decried as a sign of decadence in the owner as well as a functional insult to the animal.

Eventually, of course, the retriever civilization developed machines which could throw sticks farther, faster, and with more frequency. Thereupon, except in the most backward canine communities, Man disappeared.

Afterword

The army was where I began writing this story—somewhere in the European Theater of Operations, in 1944. I didn’t have a typewriter, but I did have an early ballpoint pen (bought in Greenock, Scotland, the evening after we disembarked from the troop ship) and a pile of blank V-Mail (V-Mail was the unfolded one-page letter forms distributed to overseas soldiers for writing home).

My first intention was to write a satire about the inherent mediocrity of officialdom, especially as exemplified by the officers of the Army of the United States. By the time I completed that draft, in Saarbrucken, Germany, 1945, I had changed my opinion of the army several times over—and, to my chagrin, the army never seemed to notice, or care.

After discharge, but before I began my professional career as a writer, I whittled away at the piece, picking first this target, then that. By 1947, I had settled on the most mediocre man I could see in a high position: Harry S Truman, the President of the United States. He, I admit to my shame and sorrow, was the original original of George Abnego.

(Why this S. and S.? Well, growing up has apparently been a constant process of growing up so far as I’m concerned. I now rank Truman very high in my opinion of U.S. presidents, a couple of micrometers or so behind Abraham Lincoln.)

I had also, years back, been very much impressed with the early science fiction of A.E. van Vogt. His “Black Destroyer” and “Discord in Scarlet” had been among my favorites when it came to stories about aliens. But when I read his The World of Null-A, however, I had immediately wondered, “Why limit it to non-Aristotelian logic? Why not non-Platonic politics? There’s the rub in our social history ever since the fifth century B.C!” Now, in 1947, I remembered that overlook of van Vogt’s. I worked that into the story and used it as a title.

I wrote and rewrote the story, intending it for The New Yorker. When I was seventeen, I had sent The New Yorker a cycle of stories that perhaps only an acned seventeen-year-old could write—“The Adventures of God” and “The Further Adventures of God Junior.” Instead of the expected printed rejection slip, I had received a postcard from the editor, Harold Ross (Harold Ross, himself, in his own handwriting!), inviting me to come up and see him about the stories. I went there in my best—and only—blue serge suit, seeing myself as the new Perelman, the latest Thurber, the latter-day Robert Benchley.

I didn’t even get to Ross’s office. He came to me outside, in the smallish reception room. He talked to me for a few minutes, asking me what I read, what other things I had written, just why I had set myself to write “The Adventures of God.” Then he handed me back the pieces I had sent in and touched me lightly on the shoulder. “We don’t need these,” he said. “But keep punching, keep writing. We’ll be publishing you one day.” And he watched me take the elevator down.

But I went home with the virus in me. No matter where I published first, no matter what book awards I might win, I knew I must fulfill Harold Ross’s promise—I must one day appear in The New Yorker.

Now, at last, in 1950 (I had been potschkeying with the story for three years) I felt I had the wherewithal to fulfill that promise. I took it to my agent, told him of the market it must go to. He read it and shrugged. “Could be,” he said.

Then, the next day, he called me and told me he’d sent it to Damon Knight’s new science-fiction magazine, Worlds Beyond.

Damon had liked it a lot and had immediately bought it for a hundred dollars.

“A hundred dollars!” I wept. “I intended it for The New Yorker.”

“A hundred dollars definite,” he said, “is better than The New Yorker maybe. You need the money to eat on.”

I really couldn’t argue with that last sentence. My ninety-dollar part of the check from Worlds Beyond bought a lot of groceries.

Well, at least, I said, the story will be noticed. It will be noticed and commented-on everywhere.

It wasn’t.

For a long time, there seemed to be only three people in the world who thought “Null-P” a particularly good story: myself, Damon Knight, and August Derleth, who used it in an anthology he edited. Everybody else ignored it. Then, a decade after its first publication, “Null-P” was especially noted by Kingsley Amis in his critical study, New Maps of Hell. Anthology requests began coming in from everywhere and references to it appeared in the most unexpected places. All right—maybe it isn’t all that good, but certainly it couldn’t have been that bad either for ten long years.

(By the way, Amis said that the satire in “Null-P” did not seem to be aimed at any one in particular. I would have quarreled bitterly with that definitely non-American Brit. By the time New Maps of Hell was published, I damn well knew who I had intended to satirize, who the most mediocre of leaders was. Eisenhower, I would have told him. It was President Eisenhower all along, I would have said. Eisenhower, who followed that great president, Harry S Truman.)

And how do I feel today about the story’s never having been submitted to The New Yorker? I feel as my mother would have put it:

“Oy, it’s The New Yorker’s loss. And The New Yorker’s loss is my loss.”

Written 1947/ Published 1950

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