by JOHN SCOTT CAMPBELL

(Illustrations by Tom O'Reilly)

 

“I’m Marilyn Mills," she began without entering the door. "Howard Sipple's friend. Something ter­rible has happened and I thought that you might help ..."

I interrupted to invite her in. As she sat on the sofa, she drew her feet up under her in a manner suggestive of an animal settling down. She paused a moment to gather her thoughts, and then began:

"You remember in May I came to ask advice on a wide-hand amplifier for use in certain biological ex­periments?"

I blinked in surprise. "Why, I don't believe so ... Dr. Dunn dropped in with a question about amplifiers, but . . ."

I had never seen the girl before, although Howard had spoken to me of her. She was good looking, but she appeared distraught.

"I'm sorry. I keep using the wrong words. Dr. Dunn came to see you. And you recommended that Howard build the co-ordinator for him. An excellent choice. He completed the machine and we have used it for a week. It has co-ordinated Dunn, Howard and me. You understand what I mean?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Well, the co-ordinator is an amplifier and re-radiator of certain very high frequency oscillations which take place in resonant structures in the brain. It induces oscillations in similar parts of other brains within range, and so duplicates thought patterns. The effect is one of exceedingly powerful telepathy, amounting to a merging of personalities."

She paused. My face apparently mirrored my amazement, for she guessed my confusion and smiled for the first time. "Then Howard hasn't told you about it?"

"I haven't seen Howard in a month. But . . ." I tried to express my astonishment. I was in fact less surprised at what she said than at her casual use of such technical expressions!

"I'll tell you all about it in a moment. But, for the present keep this much in mind: you are not talking only to Marilyn Mills. You are talking to a combination—we call it a combo—of three people, Marilyn Mills, Howard Sipple, and Dr. Robert Dunn—and Bozo, Dunn's pet boxer. We are all the same, except for Bozo, in terms of memory, technical skills, attitudes and beliefs. We are merged! Dunn's co-ordinator is, I assure you, the greatest discovery ever made. It is the means of accomplishing the dreams of humanity since Utopia was first thought of. It unites men's desires and ambitions, eliminates disagreement and conflict. It will end hate, persecution, and war.

"I became a member quite by accident. I entered the range of the integrator in Dunn's lab one night, when I went there to meet Howard. Thought transmission is really thrilling, Professor . . . thrilling."

She stopped abruptly and looked at me. I did not reply at once. I tried to digest this remarkable statement, but even more I tried to identify the elements of personality that made it. It was clearly not the original idea of the usual eighteen-year-old girl. I de­tected the naive exasperation of the man of science, inexperienced at world affairs. I had felt that way myself, some years ago, when several atomic scientists tried to influence politics. And I also detected the angry protest of idealistic youth against the turmoil and uncertainty of our age.

"I think I get the general idea," I told her. "Now, what has happened?"

"Dr. Dunn has been kidnapped."

"Kidnapped?" I had expected that the troubles were between her and Howard, or were in some way a consequence of the weird experiment. "But, by whom, for Heaven's sake? Maybe it's some joke."

She shook her head. "It's no joke. I saw the men, that is, Bozo saw them and managed to transmit a fair picture to me later. They're total strangers appar­ently outsiders who read in the Sentinel about the machine. We should have had the sense to keep quiet. We should have taken in somebody who knew more about the world. Here we are—a college professor, his novice assistant, and me. What a combination of people to own the secret of the ages!"

I tried to get her back on the track. "But, what could be the motive? Don't you know anything about them?"

"I believe they are what the papers call bunko artists. Confidence men who sell phony stocks to un­suspecting buyers. Cheap grifters. They read that we had developed a hypnosis machine which they figured would be useful in their business. So they did the natural thing: kidnapped Dunn and stole the portable model which Howard just finished."

"That is serious. They might kill him. Have you notified the police?"

She shook her head. "That's the last thing to do. No, they won't hurt him. But something even worse may happen. They took Dunn because they did not know how to operate the machine. So what will they do first thing? Plug it in and order him to give a demonstration."

"Where is Howard?" I asked.

"In the lab, finishing up another portable co-ordinator. We're going to find them, but we'll need expert help. And why argue with the police when there is a much better way?" She looked at me, and I shook my head with determination.

"You don't want me. I'm just another college pro­fessor. What you need is a composite of Sherlock Holmes, Abraham Lincoln, Socrates . . ."

"They're all dead," said Marilyn, disgustedly. "Name a few who are still alive."

"Now look, Miss Mills. Don't you two start indiscriminately kidnapping people, too."

"But that is our plan. We need more brains and experience in our combo, so we arranged for a demon­stration in Washington. Why, there was a chance of getting the joint chiefs of staff all at once. And then this happened. Perhaps they have killed him."

It was too much for me. "With that sort of pow­er," I said, "you don't have to worry. Dunn will no doubt come back dragging two reformed confidence-men behind him." My fingertips felt cold with the horror of the idea. "No, Miss Mills," I said with studied determination. "I cannot help you. And I think you need to worry only about the danger of your machine."

I hurried her out of the door, for I dreaded to connect myself with such an unknown quantity. Much relieved by my solitude, I settled down to work again. Thoughts of Dunn and the girl ran steadily in my mind.

I recollect Dr. Dunn, in the pleasant warm spring days, as an amiable, somewhat preoccupied little man of fifty. He was a research associate in biochemistry. As my field is electronics, I had little contact with him. In fact, when he first called one day in March, I could not remember his name. He had a problem in electronic circuit design, but he knew so little about the subject that he could hardly describe what he really wanted. At least, I think it was ignorance and not a desire for secrecy that made him so vague.

Dr. Dunn apparently wanted an extremely wide-band radio-frequency amplifier. When I had given him the technical terms, he blandly asked for uniform response from zero to thirty thousand megacycles. I informed him that no such thing had ever been achieved with a single amplifier and suggested that he review his requirements to see whether they could be reduced without impairing the experiment. He went away, considerably disappointed, promising to study the question. I returned to my laboratory con­vinced that I had seen the last of the biologist.

But he came back exactly four days later. He had greatly reduced the frequency range, although it was somewhat complicated by a requirement of small phase shift. I told him that this design was feasible and that Howard Sipple, a graduate student in elec­tronics, could construct it for him. He did, in fact, help the Doctor. He told me a little about the project one day in July.

The Doctor was working on brain waves!

I asked Howard why he needed an amplifier with a wide range when brain waves were around four or five cycles per second.

"Those are just power-supply waves," Howard had explained. "They don't represent thought—just the demands made by thinking processes upon the electro-chemical balance in the brain. According to Dr. Dunn, chains of nerve cells in the brain not only transmit direct impulses, they also act as oscillators—tiny radio transmitters which broadcast complex waves depending upon the thought pattern. These signals of course are very weak, but when they are amplified, they are capable, under the right condi­tions, of exciting corresponding parts of another brain."

From that July day until August 27, I was in­creasingly busy with my magnetic research and heard only casual gossip about Dunn. My work required complete shielding from all electromagnetic fields. The whole laboratory was surrounded by two shields of sheet copper and a magnetic screen of mu-metal. Not even pipe or wire pierced the shield, as power for the apparatus came from storage batteries within the room. Since many of the experiments involved electri­cal isolation for periods of 36 to 48 hours, I virtually set up housekeeping, with food and cot, and lived with my equipment. Therefore I was quite out of touch with the events of the world. The actual progress of the so-called combo I learned primarily from Bozo, Dunn's boxer. By chance he was absorbed into the combination. His understanding was limited, but in areas which he could understand, he became literate. He could not speak, but he understood several thousand concrete nouns and verbs. He could read these, too. He also understood much elementary electronics and biology, but with many gaps in theory. Several months after my interview with Miss Mills, Bozo began to describe his feelings to me, spelling out words with a pencil tied to one paw.

 

HERE is the story as I have reconstructed it from sundry sources.

Now, Dr. Dunn had been kidnapped. The crooks, who were hoping to use the co-ordinator for their own purposes transported the Professor to their hide-out in typical melodramatic style, then ordered him to show them how the machine worked. Dunn fired it up willingly, certain that he could subdue the men by mental concentration. As soon as the co-ordinator began to broadcast, all three men awoke to the Nir­vana of understanding and agreement. The kidnapers marveled over the magnitude of his plans for human­ity and promptly forgot their own petty schemes. Dunn, on the other hand, discovered in these shrewd and experienced men a practical balance for his idealism. The con-men's natural mistrust of authority per­meated the combo. The plan for a demonstration of the co-ordinator was therefore abandoned in favor of a series of clandestine coups!

Dunn and his two new partners held a long men­tal council of war before they ventured from the hide-out. The basic plan of action was simple: to envelop the world leaders surreptitiously in the radiation field from the co-ordinator. It was plain, of course, that it was not just a matter of walking up to Stalin, or some other guarded leader, and turning a switch. They would first have to make preliminary contacts, with men who could arrange such a meeting. They realized, of course, that each new member provided new atti­tudes, but they felt it unlikely that the basic plan was in jeopardy.

After several hours of thought, the members of the combo started off. They withdrew a few thousand dollars from Dunn's savings account, and bought railroad tickets for Washington. They engaged a drawing room, and there they turned on the co-ordinator for another conference.

The moment the broadcasting began, however, a new sensation interfered with the first interchange of thoughts. The three men sensed a new element. A fourth human being was within the radius of the machine, a human who had been sleeping but whose mind was now being aroused by the flood of strange thoughts. The combo was not apprehensive about the interloper as they would have been a moment before; as usual, sensing a new personality was exquisitely pleasant, especially in this case, because of the slow awakening of the new mind. As consciousness un­folded, the combo could picture the adjoining com­partment, and feel an easy-going literal personality, confined in experience primarily to material pleas­ures, and whose occupation was making beds in pullman cars and serving passengers.

It was the pullman porter.

Upon its arrival in Washington, the combo made no progress, in fact they bungled badly at the start.

But the great power they wielded could absorb any number of blunders. Like dislodging a stone to start an avalanche, it required mere stumbling around to precipitate the world.

They first attempted to secure hotel rooms to­gether, but the dark color of the porter barred this, so, without further delay they checked their luggage at Union Station and walked toward the Capitol where Congress was in session.

On the tree-lined avenue leading to the seat of Government, large and small groups of sightseers wandered among the usual pedestrians. Taking turns carrying the heavy co-ordinator, the foursome min­gled with them. Nevertheless they excited much at­tention among the spectators. Laboriously they climbed the marble steps and entered the rotunda. A milling crowd gaped at the dome and the great his­torical paintings, and waited for the guided tours of the building. It was at once obviously impossible to plug in the co-ordinator and capture a senator. In fact, the guards viewed the bulky suitcase with sus­picion. If they were to seize the machine the whole venture would end!

The combo was about to leave the building when Jones, the porter, remembered that an acquaintance of his, a former porter, now worked in the House washroom, where he also shined the shoes of the rep­resentatives. He quickly whispered to the others (since telepathic communication existed only while the in­tegrator was transmitting and they hurried as un­obtrusively as possible through Statuary Hall, down the corridor to the House wing. Here, after a few wrong turns, the conspirators found the hall behind the House Chamber and ducked into the washroom.

They were very fortunate. No lawmakers were there. Only Jones' friend was there, sitting in the shoeshine chair, reading a newspaper. At the sound of footsteps, he scrambled to his feet in a hurry.

"I'm sorry, gentlemen, but the public is not allowed in here. This room is for . . ." He paused at the sight of Jones.

"Remember me, Horatio?" inquired Jones. Horatio remembered, but he also remembered his duty.

"Hiyah, Sam, but we can't visit in here. You and your friends will have to . . . Here now, what you doin' over there?" His eye had caught Dunn in the act of plugging the integrator into a wall outlet. He made two steps toward Dunn, but suddenly stopped, cured forever of the desire to restrain other people. Dunn straightened after checking plate voltage, and the combo proceeded to absorb its seventh member.

The successful integration of Jones assured them that their purposes would not be deviated by the ad­dition of the House washroom attendant. Jones' easygoing mind contributed little, save a sense of physical enjoyment and a pleasant, primitive trust in Lady Luck.

Now Horatio stood rooted to the spot, taking in the flow of thoughts with a happy grin on his face.

With the co-ordinator humming, the combo waited like a spider for its prey. Almost twenty min­utes elapsed before the first victim came. The field evidently did not quite extend to the washroom door, for a congressman entered the room and had time to register brief surprise at the reception committee. He was caught when the question forming on his lips was answered more fully and adequately than he could expect.

The impact of the congressman upon the combo was much more severe than that provided by the other converts. Dunn and his associates received a most stunning impression of problems and arguments and compromises, along with a welter of human faces, many filled with greed or supplication. A door was suddenly opened upon a world of complex strife, unresolved difficulties, a world in which tempers were held by conscious effort, and every act had to be measured in terms of its effect upon many divergent forces. It was not a pleasant world and it even shocked the experienced con-men.

The congressman stared at the others while his brain whirled. His mind was trained for quick per­ception and analysis, and he absorbed the others' thoughts at a remarkable speed, even considering the aid of the co-ordinator. He had been debating on for­eign policy, and he obediently fitted Dunn's plan into his own matrix of ideas. Yes, his mind said, it can and must be done, but we will have to be very careful. First we must get the support of our own executive branch. I'm only a junior member of the House, however, and I'd have trouble getting an appointment for interviews with the right people, but I can ask Representative McKenzie, the minority leader, to help with that."

With this in mind, the congressman hurried to the lobby and spoke briefly to one of the pages. In a moment a grey-haired man came out of the Chamber. The younger man took him by the arm and spoke to him earnestly. McKenzie hesitated, but finally came along. As the washroom door opened, Dunn heard McKenzie's voice: "I know, Jack, but I can't decide at once. You've got to learn . . ."

And he was in the field!

 

 

Representative Duncan McKenzie proved to be a powerful addition to the combo. His view, wider than that of the younger congressman, was not cluttered with detail. Seen through his eyes, lawmaking was not just a confusion of petty squabbles and pat­ronage; a broad scheme with steady purpose emerged from the conflict. McKenzie agreed to the outline of the combo's plan, but he pointed out something which the others had completely missed.

Utopia could not be attained by the world's lead­ers. These men, though nominally in control, were actually lieutenants of a powerful force—the temper of their people. No dictator's propaganda machine could alter the basic nature of the people. And, McKenzie emphasized, the changes proposed by the Plan constituted an excursion far beyond anything that even a dictator could accomplish. People do not lend themselves to change, even for the better. In history, many benevolent tyrants gave the people more than they could assimilate. The story of Count Strensee in eighteenth-century Denmark flitted through McKen­zie's mind. No, the idea of converting the Security Council to end the world's woes was naive and im­practicable.

 

MCKENZIE proposed a different course of action, so bold and direct that it won the instant agreement of the rest of the combo. They decided to enlist the aid of executives in both government and business, for the purpose of building thousands of powerful integrators. Then they would flood the whole world with telepathic radiation and bring into unity, not just the leaders, but all of humanity.

In twenty minutes McKenzie's idea was fully de­veloped. Meanwhile, three other people inadvertently entered the washroom and were ingested by the combo: two other congressmen and a page boy.

And so it was an hour since Dunn and his three companions had excited the suspicions of the guards in the Rotunda. When the little procession of ten crossed through that same chamber, the guards were more than ever mystified. But this time they did not consider interfering, for leading the group was the magnificent figure, Minority Leader Duncan McKenzie.

Events in the next few days occurred on an ever-accelerating schedule. McKenzie arranged confer­ences with key Government officials in Washington and made flying trips with several integrators to New York. London, Paris, and Rome. The combo grew in strength and experience; we now know it did not grow in true wisdom. Its development was lateral, not vertical. Its skill and knowledge were the sum of the life experiences of many of the world's most bril­liant men, but its intuition and insight could not sur­pass that of the wisest member. Even here, at what was probably the combo's golden period, there were signs of degeneration. From time to time the distin­guished ministers and business leaders had to take time off to enjoy each other's pastimes.

The combo expanded like chain reaction. First, with one integrator, there was only a single point of active growth, which wound back and forth across the world like some monstrous vine. But when it touched the top managers of the great electrical com­panies, other buds sprouted. Now, at last, mass manu­facture of integrators began, and the first products were employed to finish the preliminary phase of the plan.

Within five days the whole of Congress, the Pres­ident and his Cabinet, and every military man above the rank of Colonel or Navy Captain, were captive.

To prevent annoyance, the headquarters of the FBI and the Army's Central Intelligence Agency were taken. As a result of this move, came an interesting amalgamation: Howard Sipple, Marilyn Mills, and a small combo of twenty were brought into the fold. The group had been under observation by the FBI as a subversive organization, and their arrest was im­minent when Dunn's combo took control of the Bu­reau and its files. Sipple's organization, it seemed, consisted primarily of police officers and detectives, endeavoring to trace Dunn's abductors.

But now events raced toward a climax, while the world blundered along unaware of the impending change. The Security Council was deadlocked over the American delegate's request for permission to bring a tape recorder to the sessions. Dunn succeeded in realizing his original dream. The visitors' galleries were packed with combo members, ready to steer the Council into the proper track. Dunn would have liked to have seen the radiation interrupt one of Russia's diatribes, but instead, it started just as the chairman began to call the afternoon session to order.

The conversion of the Security Council marked the high point in the life of the combo. For the first time in history, a group of brilliant and able men representing the highest development of conflicting na­tional viewpoints, suddenly achieved perfect understanding. The assimilation took minutes. Newsmen beyond the range of the integrator could not compre­hend the quiet agreement. Delegates from East and West then embraced, wept with joy, and swore eternal friendship. The Soviet delegate proposed an imme­diate trip to Moscow, and telephoned Malenkov to prepare a welcome. This demand jolted the Russian Presidium so severely that orders were prepared for the arrest of the whole Soviet delegation upon arrival. Needless to say, these orders were not followed, for both Malenkov and Molotov came to the airport to ob­serve this lunacy, and were converted on the spot. The rest of the tightly-knit Soviet bureaucracy was assimi­lated within twenty-four hours.

Meanwhile research rapidly blossomed into mass production. Integrators by the thousand were made and installed on ships and in aircraft. Newsmen wrote of developments, especially on diversion of materials, but after a visit from the combo descended to only conformative announcements. The days passed in feverish production and positioning of the transmitters by means of test signals on an innocuous frequency, until every inhabited bit of land, every ship, every airplane was in range. At 9 a.m., Greenwich time, August 27, Dr. Dunn gave the signal.

Six hours before, 7 p.m. Pacific time, I settled down in my shielded room for a long test. I was com­pletely isolated from every electric effect in the world for a period of 36 hours.

I finished my test at 7 o'clock on the morning of August 28. The integrators had been operating for 24 hours, until 1 a.m., local time. I escaped the Change by six hours!

The world was very quiet. The rays of the morn­ing sun slanted into the hall outside of my lab, illumi­nating bright specks of dust in the air. Yawning and blinking in the light, I made my way across the campus. Nobody else was abroad; there was no life to be seen, save a flock of pigeons. I glanced at them casu­ally, and then looked again. Something was wrong—very wrong. The birds clustered around another ani­mal—a large grey tomcat! I changed course and ap­proached the animals in amazement. Neither the pigeons nor the cat were frightened by my presence, but they all turned toward me. The cat rose deliber­ately upon his hind legs and gravely saluted me with a front paw. At this the birds broke into excited cooing and chirping, almost like laughter.

For an instant I was horrified; then I remembered Bozo, and the answer poured over me like a wave. They've broadcast it! I stared at the cat and birds for a moment, and then returned the salute and groaned, "Good morning."

My wife met me at the door of the house, her face radiant. "Isn't it wonderful," she said. "And to think that you knew about it from the very start!"

"Anna!" I cried, "you too?"

She nodded happily.

"You should have told me—no, of course not. I wouldn't have understood, before. But now everything's all right. You know what I've been doing this morning? Calling up people. Old Mrs. Blakeman at the Bridge Club, who was so nasty last fall about the musical . . . why, she's a fine woman, she apologized to me! Imagine! The way we fought over who was to be chairman of the membership committee . . . Why, it was so much work and all I ever got out of the job was the satisfaction of keeping her from having it. I told her she could have it, but now she doesn't want it either. I guess nobody will be chairman any more!

"Mr. Petrillo, the roofer, who never fixed that leak, called me wanted to come over right away and tend to it. We had quite a talk, all in Italian!"

"Italian? But, where did you learn Italian?"

"Why, of course. Italian, Russian, Chinese. Nat­urally we know best the languages that many people speak. But . . . but why do you ask?"

Anna looked doubtful, then gradually realization and pity spread over her face. It was an expression with which I was to become very familiar in the days ahead.

"Anna, I was in the shielded room last night. I'm ... I'm no part of it."

 

IN the next few days I learned something about the Change. What happened to humanity in a few charmed hours, I had to figure out by old-fashioned methods—observation, talking, reading. It was a slow and tedious process, which at first filled me with frus­tration and bitterness. Everyone was kind and sym­pathetic, yet I felt like an outsider and a freak. Ev­eryone answered my questions, showed me the new co-operative nurseries and recreation centers that were springing up everywhere. Everyone tried valiantly to give me some idea of the change that had taken place in the minds and hearts of men. I could grasp the immense dissemination of factual knowledge and technical skills, but the heart of the matter somehow always eluded me. As I figured it, all of mankind was included in the magic circle of a single integrated human personality. When the integrators were oper­ating, each mind was in actual telepathic contact with every other mind. Afterward, this close contact ceased, but immense and permanent changes had been wrought in every brain. The nature of these changes could not be put into words, but the consequences were obvious on every hand.

Thus Utopia came to Earth. Mankind's ancient disputes—strikes, crimes, vicious competition, reli­gious bigotry, interracial persecution, and wars—all were gone! Gossip, backbiting, and the other petty ways in which people torment one another, vanished from civilization. It was truly a world of the Golden Rule. Telepathic communication ceased, but within each human dwelt an all-pervading sense of unity with all life on the planet, animal as well as human.

 

 

Dumb beasts were changed in varying degrees. Dogs and chimpanzees became literate. Simpler crea­tures merely greeted every human they saw. Overnight men and animals became vegetarians, abso­lutely refusing to eat meat.

For a time I wandered alone across the country. Everywhere I was treated with courtesy and friendship, but as the days passed, I became increasingly lonely. People were always good and kind far better than they had ever been before—but they were all alike! I felt most strongly the uniformity of my former close friends and associates, and most of all of my wife. Anna treated me with the same impersonal pity that nauseated me. Universal brotherhood indeed ex­isted, but the old, intense, personalized affections were gone. I could dimly understand why this generaliza­tion must follow the erasure of sharp personal dif­ferences, but I still felt lost.

At first my mood did not encourage me to examine critically the new world, but even in my un­happiness, the less pleasant aspects of the Change gradually became obvious. The world was one of happy confusion. Only essential services were manned. Trains and public utilities operated in a haphazard way, according to the pleasure of the tech­nicians. However, nobody minded the inconvenience. When the electricity went out, there were candlelight parties. When the streetcars failed, a great share-the­-ride program went into effect. Police were unneces­sary. The frequent fires were fought with gusto by whomever happened to be nearby.

The business and industrial districts of the cities were almost deserted. A few people went to work from habit, but they spent their time playing games and carousing. As the days passed, I looked for sober heads to straighten things out; gradually I realized there were no "sober heads"—everybody was the same. When I met one human being, I had met the entire human race. Friendly, affectionate, utterly carefree, with no responsibility, no morality. Peo­ple lived only for the moment. In vain I searched for the wisdom of the leaders, of the solid citizens who had kept the wheels turning. But wisdom was lost, averaged out by the overwhelming majority of lazy, fun-loving mankind. Individuals such as Dr. Dunn kept a degree of personal identity and at times were capable of rational thought, but, like men pos­sessed by the fairies, they were apt at any moment to dissolve into complete hilarity.

And so, at last I realized what the combo had missed during the last days before the Change: they missed the exceptional men, the few who had climbed to the surface of the human stream, who gave stability and direction to the world. The idea existed before only as a statistical concept: the average man—the true democratic numerical average—had engulfed, by sheer weight of numbers, the wisdom and leadership which had sustained and protected him. Just before the Change the combo had indeed achieved great knowledge, because it had selected its members. And then, in one act, it undid all of the good, all of the millennia of slow, human struggle toward civilization, by capturing poor, happy, stupid, lovable, amoral mankind!

During the first weeks of Utopia I wanted des­perately to be integrated into the world combo, and I asked Dunn to set up an integrator and bring me in. But he regretfully turned me down, because, he explained, it required world-wide coverage to tie me in completely. A partial integration could not do it, and besides, it would upset whoever was involved to absorb part of my frustration and inadequacy. He added, however, that in six months or a year when the Survivors had all been discovered, another world integration would be held.

There were others beside myself! I had never heard the name, Survivor. The news that there were yet human beings formerly considered as normal, filled me with excitement, and I at once tried to seek them out. This was not easy—not because integrated humanity objected, but because integrated human­ity simply didn't care. People were too busy with their own new happiness to bother about poor Sur­vivors.

It was more than a month before I came face to face with a man like myself. He was a very unhappy gunner's mate, second class, from a submarine. He had jumped ship and "gone native" when his craft made port, three days after the change. The sub had been on a long practice dive during August 27, and its crew had been shielded by the steel hull and a hundred feet of salt water. Where it was now, the sailor did not know, although he guessed it was in port, because it was impossible to get stores, fuel, or even orders at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We hurried to New York. Six harried officers lived aboard the undersea craft, while the crew made merry with the integrated citizens of Brooklyn.

It required many months of mutual searching for all of the Survivors finally to find one another. Besides sixty-seven men from the submarine, there were forty-one members of a scientific expedition to the Antarctic who returned four months after the Change. There were hundreds of slaves freed from subjugation in a Russian mine, who first discovered the new order when a committee, headed by Stalin himself, came to welcome them back to freedom. There were other groups of people who were shielded by magnetic effects or tricks of radio transmission. The total was almost four thousand. The wonder of it is, not that there were survivors, but that their number was so small. The combo had been most thorough in its coverage.

The Survivors met in small groups at first. Later, through the organizing ability of Sir Albert Gale, the head of the polar expedition, we all gathered for a convention in Arizona. We halfway feared that inte­grated humanity might object, might in some way see a threat in the organization of Survivors, especially since industry and communication were crumbling into chaos, and there was a growing food shortage. But our worries were groundless. Ragged and hungry, but still happy, they waved to us from every roadside as our cars converged upon the meeting place. When Dunn heard about us, he offered to advance the date for our Integration, although by this time disorgan­ization had progressed to the point where such a project was a technical impossibility.

At last we all sat together in an open stadium near Phoenix. I found that my own observations and views were generally shared by the others. Some were still in doubt, others still tried to hold to the tinsel and glamor of the first days, but all listened eagerly when Sir Albert Gale arose to summarize the situa­tion.

"I believe," said Sir Albert, "that we have a valu­able advantage in observing the Change, for we must be objective to gain understanding. Most of what we saw at first was truly utopian. We saw the realization of the dreams of every philosopher since the world began. It began in a flash of joy so bright that we Survivors sickened with envy and despair. Even the physical decline could not convince us that it was all wrong. The people were still happy after all, and is not happiness the goal of life? It is our duty to ana­lyze, for we alone are capable of analysis; we alone have independent minds to make discussion possible. Let us consider for a moment the brotherhood of perfect mutual love and appreciation. It destroyed much evil indeed, but there is another side to the ledger. There is motivation, the inner drive, which makes us work and struggle, and creates the sum of human progress. Part of this motivation derives from the physical hungers, for food and a mate. The drive keeps civilization going is spiritual—the desire to grow, work, and gain the respect of our fellows. Such desires often lead to much unhappiness. But they provide the incentive for achievement beyond imme­diate need. Civilization is not built upon carefree play; it rests upon the labors of men, many of whom did not know how to play. But now motivation is gone. We see so-called perfection. What will happen now? Civilization cannot be static, it must advance or fall. Perfection, as with ripe fruit, is followed by decay.

"We witness the start of the degeneration. We watch endless playing and wandering about, and the breakdown of orderly work. Some things we applaud: generosity of the rich, sharing of homes, ears, clothing. But we also see the death of ambition. Every activity that does not create pleasure at the moment, is aban­doned. It is tragic to realize that our dreams must forever remain dreams!

"We Survivors face a dreadful responsibility. Let me give you the facts of the situation and my thoughts as to what we might do to bring order out of chaos.

"Since the Change, the best of our remaining un­affected scientists have determined conclusively, that certain brain cells were injured by the integration. Therefore, even if it were possible to reverse the ef­fects of the Change, it is doubtful if the peoples of the world could be restored to mental normalcy.

"Fortunately, there is no evidence that the high-frequency currents which damaged the brain and caused the Change, have had any effect whatsoever upon the genes of the body. Therefore, any children born of such parents should be unharmed.

"We must resist, then, the easy way—the way of integration. We must await the end of this generation, and perhaps the end of the next, for our children, while normal at birth, shall have been corrupted by the example of their parents. It may be many years before the last trace of this—this upside-down Utopia is gone.

"In the long course of history, this may prove to be a milestone in man's social progress, for the newer generations will follow our principles of brotherhood. They will learn true values of life as well as the correct scientific method for progress. We may yet make a world in which the concepts of brotherhood and tolerance are consciously practiced, yet with man's ambition and driving energy must still be strong and channeled in the proper directions.

"Our responsibility is surely plain to us all. We must keep records for the day when bewildered man will ask, `What has happened?' We must guard against a reversion to a new stage of savagery ..."

 

As I was copying these words from my notes, these words of Sir Albert Gale, a shadow fell across the room. I looked up guiltily as a Utopian visitor noticed my manuscript. For an instant fear gripped me, but I relaxed and we laughed together. Some of his friends joined us.

"You know," I said to the group of happy people who stood beside me, "I feel just like a conspirator plotting treason against mankind."

One chuckled gaily. "We don't care," he said. "You poor Survivors, always reasoning things out! And your reasoning always makes you so unhappy! But now, forget all this dreary, sad stuff, and come to the beach—they've just invented the craziest new game you ever saw!"