And more quietly she added almost to herself, “For it will go on after you have left the city.”
“I know that,” I said soberly. “I think I do understand, pretty well, what forces are at work. But I haven’t had time to explore them, trace them to their source. I’ve just seen them impersonally affecting the lives of people I know. You say I’m shallow, but it isn’t true. It’s simply that detachment is necessary to my job. I’m pretty good at remaining detached now, and yet there are some times when I can’t. A few moments ago, when you arrived, I was thinking how different it is to be able to regard Vadeanos as people instead of units of traffic—but you can’t separate the two completely. A person is a unit of traffic if he lives in a social group; he’s a lot more besides, but that doesn’t prevent it. And in a way you can parallel the behavior of people as traffic and people as just people. I’m certain that someone like—oh, Alejandro Mayor, for example, if he’d lived—could develop the kind of math I employ to describe far more general activities than simple point-to-point progress.”
“Please go on, señor.” Sudden interest showed in Señora Posador’s face; she leaned forward as though not to miss a word.
A familiar-looking trio came in through the main entrance; people I had seen before, on my first day in the city. The mousy man with the notebook and the sheaf of pens was still shadowed by the same two gigantic escorts. He marched importantly up to one of the waiters, asked him a solemn question, which the waiter answered respectfully, and then went out again.
“What’s the question this time?” I asked Señora Posador, reflecting in passing that I hadn’t yet seen the result of one of these opinion polls published.
“Something to do with dispossessing Sigueiras,” came the impatient answer. “But please continue!”
I was only too ready. “Yes, in fact, I had an impression from some of Mayor’s early work that he might be aiming for something of the kind. Look, I can generalize about people as though they were identical molecules of gas; in fact, most of the formulae I employ are adapted from hydrodynamics and fluid mechanics. When people crowd into a subway on the way to work, they’re driven by a force which may be more abstract but is certainly no less efficient than a high-powered fan. That force doesn’t care if Auntie Mae has had a bad night, or the baby cried till four a.m., or Pedro overslept and hasn’t had his cup of coffee to quiet his grumbling belly. There’s a definite force at work, moving people, compelling them to form a visible flow.
“Now take advertising. Advertising isn’t actually a force—the motive power is compounded of some basic impulses, like hunger, thirst, the need for clothing and shelter, and some superficial impulses. The urge to keep up with the neighbors, for instance. Nonetheless, advertising men can and do channel this impalpable flux. They can launch a campaign of which the end-product is once again physical action, visible movement. In other words, people will go to a store and buy. That’s infinitely more subtle, but it’s still capable of direction, it can still be defined in predictable terms. You can say, ‘So many people will probably buy this product in such a period,’ quite as confidently as I can say, ‘So many people under such and such circumstances will be fouling up the subway system ten minutes after the offices close.’
“So as far as I can see only the sheer impossibility of gathering a totality of data about all the individuals involved prevents us from developing a system of forecasting and influencing all the actions of a person in his entire daily life.”
“Señor,” said Maria Posador a little faintly, “it is well-known that Alejandro Mayor sought to achieve total control of our people—I myself showed you one method he employed. But are you saying that people can be controlled in this way?”
“People are controlled,” I said in surprise. “Look, the man in the subway going to work of a morning has no more real control over his own activities than—well, than a piece on a chessboard! Because he has to earn a wage, he has to go to work. He can choose his kind of work, within strict limits. Maybe he likes—oh, meeting people and talking to them. So he wants to be a salesman. Unfortunately, that product doesn’t sell very well. His family gets hungry, so he takes a job he loathes, processing company data for computers. It pays more, perhaps, but it pays in practice slightly less than what it would cost to install a machine to read ledger-postings with a scanner system.
“What other choices has he? He could quit work altogether, but if he has a family to support, he won’t. He could cut his throat: sometimes people do. But he’s a Catholic, and suicide is a mortal sin. So there he is, on that subway train at the same time as everyone else.”
“You’re a cynic, señor,” said Señora Posador. Her face was pale under its golden tan; her breath came so quickly that even in those few words I could hear a quaver.
“No, I was lucky,” I said. “I think—I hope—I actually saw this sort of thing coming when I was in college. I read Mayor’s first book, The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State, and as I said, there were pointers in it. … So I picked a job where there were openings for only a few specialists, so few their work wouldn’t be worth automation. Result: I have comparative freedom to choose my jobs, I enjoy the work I do because I’m good at it—and am, as you tell me, rootless.”
“So you are master of your fate, and we in Ciudad de Vados are not?” suggested Señora Posador, her violet eyes troubled.
I shook my head. “I said comparative freedom. Ultimately, I’m at the mercy of the same impersonal forces. I have to eat and drink and sleep and wear clothes and all the rest of it, and I have a fair burden of nonessential desires created by advertising and habit—I smoke, I drink alcohol, I like to enjoy myself when I’m off the job. I’m still a chessman. A pawn being shifted hither and yon across the face of the earth by the same processes that have shaped history since man first discovered how to walk on his hind feet.”
“You puzzle me, Señor Hakluyt,” said Señora Posador after a pause. “You must be aware that your work here has laid the foundations for a long and bloody struggle—”
I interrupted her by slamming my fist into my open palm. “Laid the foundations hell!” I snapped. “Don’t accuse me of not understanding the situation, much less being fooled by remarks like that. The current situation was implicit in Vados’s first decision to found his city, and that in its turn may have depended on the fact that his wife was too damned vain to spoil her figure by having children—or maybe he’s impotent or sterile, but whichever way it happened, he needed a surrogate. Whatever the reason, the same forces are driving him that drive the rest of us. I’ve done my best to make things better, not worse. Oh, I’ve been under orders, so all I could do was cushion the blow where I could, but if Vados manages to avoid open revolt within the next few weeks, then he’ll get two years of comparative peace—that’s my guess—and two years from now the situation will be no better, no worse, than it is today. The problems will be different, but they’ll still exist. Maybe then they’ll tackle the root causes—poverty, lack of education, those things. Then, again, maybe they won’t. People don’t do logical things like that.”
“A few moments ago you were saying people were predictable. Does that not imply that they are logical, too?”
“No-o-o. … You run out of logic about the time you start taking imponderables like religion into account, or genetic predisposition. In theory, I imagine, there are logical reasons to be got at; one can imagine in some far future society people will say, ‘This man has propinkidinkidol of utterbimollic acid in his genes, so he’ll have cold feet, so he’ll be a good customer for electric blankets’—only even then it’d probably turn out he got shocked as a kid and he’s so scared of electricity he won’t use anything but a plain hot-water bottle.”
Señora Posador was staring into space. “I remember the first time—oh, when I was at school, señor, learning English in a junior class. That was when I first heard the word ‘cussed.’ The teacher said it was slang, and we should not use it. But I like
the word. It expresses something so—so human—”
She spread her graceful hands in a helpless gesture, at a loss for a precise definition. “But if what you say is to be believed, if one could—given the time and the necessary information—treat individuals as readily as you forecast the behavior of crowds, hurrying for a train, why, there is nothing left for anyone. Except to be one of the persons who gathers and uses this information, rather than a—a victim.”
I shook my head. “No, no. There is so simple a way of interfering with the process that it could never become reality.”
“How so? You have said just the opposite—”
“Well, you yourself provided me with one example. After you showed me how television was used to force ideas on Vadeanos, I simply stopped watching it. Do you suppose that a chessman possessed of conscious thought would calmly sit on its square and wait to be taken if it knew the rules and the state of the game? Not likely. It would sidle quietly to another square where it was safer, or scuttle across the board when the players weren’t looking, to crown itself a queen.
“No, the sort of absolute system I’ve been talking about couldn’t work unless everyone was ignorant of what was happening. Outwardly there would have to be no change at all in everyday life. You and I and that waiter over there would have to be able to eat and drink and sleep and fall in love and get indigestion as always—so what would be the difference, anyway? Maybe such a system is already in operation—how would we know? We’re like pawns on a chessboard who do know the rules and the state of the game, but we prefer to ignore that knowledge because we have no legs, and we can’t leave our squares unless we’re moved.”
Señora Posador sat without moving, looking at nothing, for a long moment. She said at length, “You paint a bleak picture of the world, Señor Hakluyt.”
“Not very. We’re bound to accept that we’re restricted by forces beyond our control. So long as they remain beyond anyone’s control, we’re all in the same boat, and we don’t care. But to be ruled, and to know one was ruled, by people who were controlling those impersonal forces—that would be different.”
“Yet we are ruled by people; often there have been absolute regimes, and even you, with your freedom of action—are you not ruled by men controlling economic forces, by those who pay you, in the most immediate case?”
“That’s nothing to disturb me, is it? But what I am afraid of is—let’s say the situation where in a restaurant at noon the cooks prepare exactly so many of each different dish, because they know that, faced with the day’s menu with such-and-such items on it, just that number of their patrons will select just those dishes, and nothing at all will be left over. You see, there is a subtle horror in that. No one, except the cooks, and perhaps not even the cooks, would realize that anything had changed.”
Visibly, literally, Señora Posador shivered.
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” I said. She came back to herself with a start, and glanced at her watch.
“Not at all, señor. Not more than usually, to be frank. I find you a disturbing person in some ways—but I cannot say how.”
She rose to her feet, still with a faraway expression. “You will forgive me, but I have an appointment in a little while. I hope that”—she smiled slightly—“the impersonal forces will direct that we meet again before you leave. Hasta la vista, señor. And—good moves in your game.”
I stood up quickly. “Thank you. I hope the same. Will you not have dinner with me before I have to leave—perhaps help me make the best of my few days’ holiday?”
She shook her head, not smiling. “No,” she said calmly. “I cannot see you any longer as a person, you understand. I can see you only as an agent of the forces against which I am struggling. I would prefer it otherwise—but …”
She shrugged and turned away.
XXIX
I was restless that evening. I had intended to relax in the hotel bar, but I couldn’t relax at all, and in the end I decided to go for a stroll; the evening was fine and clear, and there was a light breeze.
I was thinking as I started out about the man who had been my seat-companion in the plane coming down from Florida, the one who had boasted about his European accent and his country of adoption in equal proportions. I had found his card again in my wallet as I was paying for dinner this evening. The name was Flores. I recalled telling myself that I knew more about his city than he probably did, although I had never visited it.
What had I known? Anything at all? I couldn’t have said then, as I could now, that that man driving a European sports car rather too fast through the main highway nexus was probably a supporter of the Citizens of Vados, and that consequently the long-faced Amerind lighting a candle and crossing himself before the wall shrine in the market was prepared to hate him on principle. I couldn’t have said that the old woman carrying a sleepy-eyed baby through the glittering evening streets probably worried more about the health of the family livestock than of the child—for a crippled and sickly child might still be able to beg, while a crippled and sickly animal was good for nothing at all.
Lord, there was power waiting for anyone who had the determination and patience to employ knowledge of human beings!
Of course, demagogues and dictators all through history had used such techniques. Only they had been amateurs, empiricists, and their lack of knowledge led to eventual ruin. You couldn’t rule people totally—they were, as Maria Posador put it, too cussed—unless you were responsible not only for externals like their living conditions, their right to walk the streets in freedom, their binding laws and regulations, but also for far more subtle things: for their prejudices, their fears, beliefs, and hatreds.
I’d been talking wildly about developing mathematical tools on the analogy of the ones I used every day, to cope with general as well as particularized behavior. Now it occurred to me that perhaps I already had some of those tools.
Suppose, for example, I went from here to work on the Pietermaritzburg project. It would certainly be the biggest planned traffic system in Africa if it came off. There I’d have to make allowances for the local system; I’d have to complicate simple suggestions to make provision for blankes and nie-blankes. Even here that held good. Making allowances for the local system …
Why had I been brought into this, anyway? Not because a genuine traffic problem existed; rather, because legal and political factors combined to dictate that a traffic problem be solved in order to smooth over an unpopular decision. I wanted desperately to believe that I had done the best I could. But the fact remained: I hadn’t done my job. I mean, I hadn’t done my job. I’d done the dirty work for people without the necessary special knowledge to do it themselves.
It was as well that I was an outsider. I could leave Ciudad de Vados behind me, and with it the dispute between the Nationals and the Citizens, between foreign-born and natives, between Vados and Diaz; and when the results were all in, I might be found to have set a precedent.
Oh, there were similar cases on the books—there was Baron Haussmann’s work in Paris, and there was the clearing of the St. Giles rookery in London, when street-planning and slum clearance had been used to get rid of nests of crime and vice. But there the primary object had been to improve the city. To coerce social change by altering the balance of factors that had led to undesirable conditions—that was subtler, and very different. Inherently different.
Good God, I had been right, at that!
I had been walking, lost in thought, for several hundred yards without knowing where I was going. Now I stopped in my tracks, and a young man and a girl coming arm-in-arm behind me bumped into me. I apologized, let them pass, and resumed my aimless stroll, repeating under my breath, “I was right!”
Sometimes you can have knowledge right in the palm of your hand and never use it, because you don’t recognize it for what it’s worth, or because you aren’t the kind of person it’s worth anything to. I hoped the second alternative applied to myself.
For I had just realized I had power I never knew about.
I explained it to myself step by step, saying look at it this way. Here in Vados, capital city of the “most governed country in the world,” they conceive the idea of applying my indirect leverage to enforce a desired social change. They don’t have the knowledge to work the trick themselves; they know the next best thing, though—where to lay hands on the knowledge, as I would look up figures in a table of logs.
Now it had been done, it would be copied. Recipe: specialized knowledge.
I remembered hearing about a time-and-motion man—forerunner in some ways of my own discipline—who achieved one of the earliest major successes in the field when they gave him the problem of improving the ground-to-upper-floor communications of a skyscraper, whose lobby was swamped with people entering and leaving and whose elevators were crammed to capacity.
He studied the situation—and recommended putting an information booth in the lobby. Result: people entering slowed down, perhaps went to the desk, at least hesitated while they decided not to. And the flow of people thereafter moved at a pace which the elevators could handle.
I could do that. In South Africa the hatreds engendered by apartheid smoldered always below the surface. Suppose I designed a main station so that two segregated streams bumped each other or crossed each other, so that neither had the easiest access to its own part of the train, or to waiting rooms and conveniences. Plan skillfully; estimate the irritation caused and allow for it to become unbearable on a blazing hot day at the time when, tempers frayed, people are going home from work tired out. It needs just one man in a crowd to push another, to be struck down—and explosion!
If the critical points were too obvious, people might see them in the plans and demand changes. But who would think such factors had been built-in deliberately?