Ol’ David was an authentic hero. He was cited for gallantry and awarded a decoration, one that figures into the rest of his story.
Dave had resigned himself to—or looked forward to, as may be—retiring at the rank of lieutenant commander, as there weren’t many billets higher than that in the flying boats. But the war jumped him to lieutenant commander in a matter of weeks, then to commander a year later, and finally to captain, four wide gold stripes, without facing a selection board, taking a promotion examination, or commanding a vessel. The war was using them up fast, and anyone not killed was promoted as long as he kept his nose clean.
Dave’s nose was clean. He spent part of the war patrolling his country’s coasts for enemy underwater vessels—“combat duty” by definition but hardly more dangerous than peacetime practice. He also spent a tour turning clerks and salesmen into fliers. He had one assignment into a zone where actual fighting was going on, and there he won his medal. I don’t know the details, but “heroism” often consists in keeping your head in an emergency and doing the best you can with what you have instead of panicking and being shot in the tail. People who fight this way win more battles than do intentional heroes; a glory hound often throws away the lives of his mates as well as his own.
But to be officially a hero requires luck, too. It is not enough to do your job under fire exceptionally well; it is necessary that someone—as senior as possible—see what you do and write it up. Dave had that bit of luck and got his medal.
He finished the war in his nation’s capital, in the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics, in charge of development of patrol planes. Perhaps he did more good there than he did in combat, since he knew those multiple-engine craft as well as any man alive, and this job put him in position to cut out obsolete nonsense and push through some improvements. As may be, he finished the war at a desk, shuffling papers and sleeping at home.
Then the war ended.
Dave looked around and sized up the prospects. There were hundreds of Navy captains who, like himself, had been lieutenants only three years earlier. Since the peace was “forever,” as politicians always insist, few would ever be promoted. Dave could see that he would not be promoted; he had neither the seniority, the traditionally approved pattern of service, nor the right connections, political and social.
What he did have was almost twenty years’ service, the minimum on which to retire at half pay. Or he could hang on until he was forced to retire through failure to be selected for admiral.
There was no need to decide at once; twenty-year retirement was a year or two off.
But he did retire almost at once—for medical reasons. The diagnosis was “psychosis situational,” meaning that he went crazy on the job.
Ira, I don’t know how to evaluate this. Dave impressed me as one of the few completely sane men I ever knew. But I wasn’t there when he retired, and “psychosis situational” was the second commonest cause for medical retirement of naval officers in those days but—how could they tell? Being crazy was no handicap to a naval officer, any more than it was to an author, a schoolteacher, a preacher, or several other esteemed occupations. As long as Dave showed up on time and signed paper work some clerk prepared and never talked back to his seniors, it would never show. I recall one naval officer who had an amazing collection of ladies’ garters; he used to lock himself into his stateroom and examine them—and another one who did exactly the same with a collection of paper stickers used for postage. Which one was crazy? Or both? Or neither?
Another aspect of Dave’s retirement requires knowledge of the laws of the time. Retiring on twenty years’ service paid half pay—subject to income tax which was heavy. Retiring for medical disability paid three-quarters pay and was not subject to income tax.
I don’t know, I just don’t know. But the whole matter fits Dave’s talent for maximum results with minimum effort. Let’s stipulate that he was crazy—but was he crazy like a fox?
There were other features of his retirement. He judged correctly that he had no chance of being selected for admiral—but that citation for gallantry carried with it an honorary promotion on retirement—so Dave wound up the first man in his class to become admiral, without ever commanding a ship much less a fleet—one of the youngest admirals in history, by his true age. I conjecture that this amused the farm boy who hated to plow behind a mule.
For at heart he was still a farm boy. There was another law for the benefit of veterans of that war, one intended to compensate lads who had had their educations interrupted by having to leave home to fight: subsidized education, one month for every month of wartime service.
This was intended for young conscripts, but there was nothing to keep a career officer from taking advantage of it; Dave could claim it and did. With three-quarters pay not subject to taxation, with the subsidy—also not taxable—of a married veteran going to school, Dave had about the income he had had on active duty. More, really, as he no longer had to buy pretty uniforms or keep up expensive social obligations. He could loaf and read books, dress as he pleased, and not worry about appearances. Sometimes he would stay up late and prove that there were more optimists playing poker than mathematicians. Then sleep late. For he never, never got up early.
Nor did he ever again go up in an aeroplane. Dave had never trusted flying machines; they were much too high in case they stalled. They had never been anything to him but a means to avoid something worse; once they had served his purpose, he put them aside as firmly as he had put aside fencing foils—and with no regrets in either case.
Soon he had another diploma, one which stated that he was a Bachelor of Science in agronomy—a “scientific” farmer.
This certificate, with the special preference extended to veterans, could have obtained him a civil service job, telling other people how to farm. Instead, he took some of the money that had piled up in the bank while he loafed in school and went way back into those hills he had left a quarter of a century earlier—and bought a farm. That is, he made a down payment, with mortgage on the balance through a government loan at a—subsidized, of course—very low rate of interest.
Did he work the farm? Let’s not be silly; Dave never took his hands out of his pockets. He made one crop with hired labor while he negotiated still another deal.
Ira, the completion of Dave’s grand plan involves one factor so unbelievable that I must ask you to take it on faith —it is too much to ask any rational man to understand it.
At that pause between wars, Earth held over two billion people—at least half on the verge of starvation. Nevertheless —and here is where I must ask you to believe that I was there and would not lie to you—despite this shortage of food which never got better other than temporarily and locally in all the years that followed, and could not, for reasons we need not go into—in spite of this disastrous shortage, the government of David’s country paid farmers not to grow food.
Don’t shake your head; the ways of God and government and girls are all mysterious, and it is not given to mortal man to understand them. Never mind that you yourself are a government; go home tonight and think about it—ask yourself if you know why you do what you do—and come back tomorrow and tell me.
As may be—David never made but one crop. The following year his acreage was “soil-banked,” and he received a fat check for not working it, which suited him just fine. Dave loved those hills, he had always been homesick for them; he had left them simply to avoid work. Now he was being paid not to work in them—which suited him; he had never thought that their charms were enhanced by plowing and getting them all dusty.
The “soil bank” payments took care of the mortgage, and his retired pay left a tidy sum over, so he hired a man to do those chores a farm requires even though it is not being worked for a crop—feed the chickens, milk a cow or two, tend a vegetable garden and some fruit trees, repair fences—while the hired man’s wife helped David’s wife with the house. For himself, David bought a hammock.
But David was not
a harsh employer. He suspected that cows did not want to be waked at five in the morning any more than he did—and he undertook to find out.
He learned that cows would happily change their circadian to more reasonable hours, given the chance. They had to be milked twice a day; they were bred for that. But nine o’clock in the morning suited them for a first milking quite as well as five, as long as it was regular.
But it did not stay that way; Dave’s hired man had the nervous habit of work. To him there was something sinful in milking a cow that late. So David let him have his way, and hired man and cows went back to their old habits.
As for Dave, he strung that hammock between two shade trees and put a table by it to hold a frosty drink. He would get up in the morning when he woke, whether it was nine or noon, eat breakfast, then walk slowly to his hammock to rest up for lunch. The hardest work he did was endorsing checks for deposit, and, once a month, balancing his wife’s checkbook. He quit wearing shoes.
He did not take a newspaper or listen to radio; he figured that the Navy would let him know if another war broke out —and another did break out about the time he started this routine. But the Navy had no need for retired admirals. Dave paid little attention to that war, it was depressing. Instead, he read everything the state library had on ancient Greece and bought books about it. It was a soothing subject, one he had always wanted to know more about.
Each year, on Navy Day, he got all spruced up and dressed as an admiral, with all his medals, from the Good Conduct medal of an enlisted man to the one for bravery under fire that had made him an admiral—let his hired man drive him to the county seat and there addressed a luncheon of the Chamber of Commerce on some patriotic subject. Ira, I don’t know why he did this. Perhaps it was noblesse oblige. Or it may have been his odd sense of humor. But each year they invited him, each year he accepted. His neighbors were proud of him; he was the epitome of Local Boy Makes Good—then comes home and lives as his neighbors lived. His success brought credit to them all. They liked it that he was still just “home folks”—and if they noticed that he never did a lick of work, nobody mentioned it.
I’ve skipped lightly over Dave’s career, Ira, had to. I haven’t mentioned the automatic pilot he thought up, then had developed years later when he was in a position to get such things done. Nor the overhaul he made of the duties of the crew of a flying boat—except to say now that it was to get more done with less effort while leaving the command pilot with nothing to do save to stay alert—or to snore on his copilot’s arm if the situation did not require his alertness. He made changes in instruments and controls, too, when at last he found himself in charge of development for all Navy patrol planes.
Let it go with this: I don’t think Dave thought of himself as an “efficiency expert” but every job he ever held he simplified. His successor always had less work to do than his predecessor.
That his successor usually reorganized the job again to make three times as much work—and require three times as many subordinates—says little about Dave’s oddity other than by contrast. Some people are ants by nature; they have to work, even when it’s useless. Few people have a talent for constructive laziness.
So ends the Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail. Let’s leave him there, in his hammock under the shade trees. So far as I know, he is still there.
III
Domestic Problems
“After more than two thousand years, Lazarus?”
“Why not, Ira? Dave was my age, near enough as not to matter. I’m still here.”
“Yes, but—Was David Lamb a member of the Families? Under another name? There is no ‘Lamb’ in the lists.”
“I never asked, Ira. Nor did he ever offer me a password. In those days a member kept the fact to himself. Or, if he was, Dave might not have known it, since he left home so young and so abruptly. Back then a youngster wasn’t told until he or she was old enough to think about marriage. Eighteen for boys, usually, and sixteen for girls. Reminds me what a shock it was when I was told—at less than eighteen. By Gramp, because I was about to do something foolish. Son, one of the weirdest things about the human animal is that it grows up physically years and years before its brain grows up. I was seventeen, young and horny and wanted to get married the worst way. Gramp took me out behind the barn and convinced me that it was indeed the worst way.
“‘Woodie,’ he said, ‘if you want to elope with this girl, nobody will stop you.’
“I told him belligerently that nobody could stop me, because just over the state line I could swing it without my parents’ consent.
“‘That’s what I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘Nobody will stop you. But nobody will help you. Not your parents, nor your other grandparents—nor me. Not a one of us will even stake you to the price of a marriage license, much less help you support a wife. Not a dollar, Woodie, not a thin dime. If you don’t believe me, ask any of them.’
“I said sullenly that I didn’t want any help.
“Gramp had bushy eyebrows, they shot up. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Is she going to support you? Have you looked at the “Help Wanted” in the paper lately? If not, be sure to do so. And glance at the financial section while you’re about it; reading “Help Wanted” ads won’t take you more than thirty seconds.’ He added, ‘Oh, you can find a job peddling suck brooms from door to door on commission. Which will give you fresh air, healthy exercise, and an opportunity to demonstrate your charm, of which you don’t have much. But you won’t sell vacuum cleaners; nobody is buying.’
“Ira, I didn’t know what he was talking about. This was January, 1930. Does that date mean anything to you?”
“I’m afraid not, Lazarus. Despite much study of the Families’ history, I have to convert those earlier dates into Galactic Standard in order to feel them.”
“Don’t know as it would be mentioned in the Families’ records, Ira. The country—well, the whole planet—had just taken a plunge into an economic fluctuation. ‘Depressions,’ they called ’ em. There were no jobs to be had—at least not for a smart-alec youngster who didn’t know anything useful. Which Gramp realized, having been through several of these swings. But not me. I was sure I could grab the world by the tail and swing it over my shoulder. What I didn’t know was that graduate engineers were taking jobs as janitors and lawyers were driving milk wagons. And ex-millionaires were jumping out windows. But I was too busy sniffing after girls to notice.”
“Senior, I’ve read about economic depressions. But I’ve never understood what caused them.”
Lazarus Long went tsk-tsk. “And yet you are in charge of a whole planet.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t be,” I admitted.
“Don’t be so confounded humble. I’ll let you in on a secret: At that time nobody knew what caused them. Even the Howard Foundation might have gone broke had not Ira Howard left firm instructions about how the fund must be handled. On the other hand, everybody, right down to street sweepers and professors of economics, was certain they knew both causes and cures. So almost every remedy was tried—and none worked. That depression continued until the country blundered into a war—which didn’t cure what was wrong; it just masked the symptoms with a high fever.”
“Well . . what was wrong, Grandfather?” I persisted.
“Do I look smart enough to answer that, Ira? I’ve gone broke many times. Sometimes financially, sometimes through abandoning my baggage to save my skin. Um. Be durned if I’ll offer any fancy explanations but—what happens when you control machinery by positive feedback?”
I was startled. “I’m not sure I understand you, Lazarus. One doesn’t control machinery by positive feedback—at least I can’t think of a case. Positive feedback will cause any system to oscillate out of control.”
“Go to the head of the class. Ira, I’m suspicious of arguments by analogy—but from what I’ve seen over the centuries, there doesn’t seem to be anything that a government can do to an economy that does not act as positive feedback,
or as a brake. Or both. Maybe someday, somewhere, someone smart as Andy Libby will figure out a way to tinker with the Law of Supply and Demand to make it work better, instead of letting it go its own cruel way. Maybe. But I’ve never seen it. Though God knows everybody has tried. Always with the best of intentions.
“Good intentions are no substitute for knowing how a buzz saw works, Ira; the worst criminals in history have been loaded with good intentions. But you got me sidetracked into making a speech when I was telling you hew I happened not to get married.”
“Sorry, Grandfather.”
“Hummph! Can’t you be rude occasionally? I’m a garrulous old man who has crowded you into wasting time listening to trivia. You ought to resent it.”
I grinned at him. “So I resent it. You are a garrulous old man who demands that I cater to your every whim . and I am a very busy man with serious matters worrying me and you’ve wasted half a day of my time telling me a yarn—pure fiction, I feel certain—about a man who was so lazy he always succeeded. Intended to irritate me, I think. When you implied that this fictional character was a long-lifer, you evaded a simple question about it and started talking about your grandfather. This—Admiral Ram, you said?—was he redheaded?”
“‘Lamb,’ Ira—‘Donald Lamb.’ Or was that his brother? It’s been a long time. Odd that you should ask about his hair —as that reminds me of another naval officer in that same war who was just the opposite of—Donald? No, ‘David.’ Just the opposite of David in every respect save that he had hair so red that Loki would have been proud of it. Tried to choke a Kodiak bear to death. Didn’t work of course. It doesn’t seem possible that you’ve ever seen a Kodiak bear, Ira.
“The fiercest carnivore that Earth ever spawned, and outweighed a man ten to one. Claws like scimitars, long yellow teeth, bad breath—and a worse disposition. Yet Lafe tackled him with bare hands . . and mind you, when he had no need to. I would have faded over the horizon. Want to hear about Lafe and the bear and the Alaskan salmon?”