Expanded Universe Part 38

Glorify the military? Would I have picked it for my profession and stayed on the rolls the past 56 years were I not proud of it?

I think I know what offends most of my critics the most about STARSHIP TROOPERS: It is the dismaying idea that a voice in governing the state should be earned instead of being handed to anyone who is 18 years old and has a body temperature near 3 7C.

But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Democracies usually collapse not too long after the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses. . . for a while. Either read history or watch the daily papers; it is now happening here.

Let's stipulate for discussion that some stabilizing qualification is needed (in addition to the body being warm) for a voter to vote responsibly with proper consideration for the future of his children and grandchildren-and yours. The Founding Fathers never intended to extend the franchise to everyone; their debates and the early laws show it. A man had to be a stable figure in the community through owning land or employing others or engaged in a journeyman trade or something.

But few pay any attention to the Founding Fathers today-those ignorant, uneducated men-they didn't even have television (have you looked at Monticello lately?)- so let's try some other "poll taxes" to insure a responsible electorate: a) Mark Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondor"- if you have not read it, do so.

b) A state where anyone can buy for cash (or lay-away installment plan) one or more franchises, and this is the government's sole source of income other than services sold compet.i.tively and non-monopolistically. This would produce a new type of government with several rabbits tucked away in the hat. Rich people would take over the government? Would they, now? Is a wealthy man going to impoverish himself for the privilege of casting a couple of hundred votes? Buying an election today, under the warm-body (and tombstone) system is much cheaper than buying a controlling number of franchises would be. The arithmetic on this one becomes unsolv able. . . but I suspect that paying a stiff price (call it 20,000 Swiss francs) for a franchise would be even less popular than serving two years.

c) A state that required a bare minimum of intelligence and education-e.g., step into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on over that booth-and you slink out, face red, you having just proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of the grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system-smart 12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers-and fathers-decline to be humiliated twice.

There are endless variations on this one. Here are two: Improving the Breed-No red light, no bell.. . but the booth opens automatically-empty. Revenue-You don't risk your life, just some gelt. It costs you a 1/4 oz troy of gold in local currency to enter the booth.

Solve your quadratic and vote, and you get your money back. Flunk-and the state keeps it. With this one I guarantee that no one would vote who was not interested and would be most unlikely to vote if unsure of his ability to get that hundred bucks back.

I concede that I set the standards on both I.Q. and schooling too low in calling only for the solution of a quadratic since (if the programming limits the machine to integer roots) a person who deals with figures at all can solve that one with both hands behind him (her) and herhis eyes closed. But I just recently discovered that a person can graduate from high school in Santa Cruz with a straight-A record, be about to enter the University of California on a scholarship.. . but be totally unable to do simple arithmetic. Let's not make things too difficult at the transition.

d) I don't insist on any particular method of achieving a responsible electorate; I just think that we need to tighten up the present warm-body criterion before it destroys us. How about this? For almost a century and a half women were not allowed to vote. For the past sixty years they have voted.. . but we have not seen the enormous improvement in government that the suffragettes promised us.

Perhaps we did not go far enough. Perhaps men are still corrupting government. . . so let's try the next century and a half with males disenfranchised. (Fair is fair. My mother was past forty before she was permitted to vote.) But let's not stop there; at present men outnumber women in elective offices, on the bench, and in the legal profession by a proportion that is scandalous.

Make males ineligible to hold elective office, or to serve in the judiciary, elective or appointed, and also reserve the profession of law for women.

Impossible? That was exactly the situation the year I was born, but male instead of female, even in the few states that had female suffrage before the XIXth A mendment, with so few exceptions as to be unnoticed. As for rooting male lawyers out of their cozy niches, this would give us a pool of unskilled manual laborers-and laborers are very hard to hire these days; I've been trying to hire one at any wages he wants for the past three months, with no success.

The really good ones could stay on as law clerks to our present female lawyers, who will be overworked for a while. But not for long. Can you imagine female judges (with no male judges to reverse them) permitting attorneys to take six weeks to pick a jury? Or allowing a trial to ramble along for months?

Women are more practical than men. Biology forces it on them.

Speaking of that, let's go whole hog. Until a female bears a child her socio-economic function is male no matter how orthodox her s.e.xual preference. But a woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future. So let's limit the franchise and eligibility for office and the practice of law to mothers.

The phasing over should be made gentle. Let males serve out their terms but not succeed themselves.

V.! ale lawyers might be given as long as four years to retire or find other jobs while not admitting any more males into law schools. I don't have a candidate for President but the events of the last fifty years prove that anybody can sit in the Oval Office; it's just that some are more impressive in appearance than others.

Brethren and Sistern, have you ever stopped to think that there has not been one rational decision out of the Oval Office for fifty years?

An all-female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been enduring. Let's try it!

"I have sworn upon the altar of G.o.d eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

-Thomas Jefferson-1800 A.D.

FOREWORD.

After I got STARSHIP TROOPERS out of the way, I indulged in some stone masonry (my favorite recreation and reconditioning after writing when I was younger), installed a fountain in our lower irrigation pool and landscaped it-then got back to work on THE HERETIC aka STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, and finally finished it more than ten years after I had plotted it. I had been in no hurry to finish it, as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right.

Many people have said that it is clear that STRANGER was written in two parts; the division point showed. But no two people have ever picked the same putative division point. . . and this is the first time I have ever admitted that it was not written in two chunks but in four.

No one ever will spot the actual starts and stops because STRANGER is one of the very few stories in which I plotted every detail before writing it, and then stuck precisely to that plot. What readers pick as places where I "must have" broken the writing are in fact division points planned for dramatic reasons.

Then I had to cut the d.a.m.ned thing; sticking to that complex and ponderous plot resulted in a MS more than twice as long as it should have been, either commercially or dramatically. Cutting it took more working time than writing it.

In the meantime my wife signed up for University of Colorado Extension cla.s.ses in Russian. She has always believed that anything worth doing at all is worth overdoing; for two solid years she lived and breathed Russian. She never missed a cla.s.s, was always thoroughly prepared, hired a private conversation tutor to supplement her cla.s.sroom work, bought every brand ofRussian language instruction records available then, kept them stacked on the record changer and played them all day long while she did other things-our home had a speaker in every room, and a large speaker for the garden.

(This did not bother my work; since I knew no Russian then, it was random noise to me.) Two years of this and she could read Russian, write Russian, speak Russian, understand Russian-and think in Russian.

Then we went to the USSR.

Other countries, too, of course-Poland and Czechoslovakia won my undying sympathy, as well as the captive Baltic states. I should include the Turkestan countries, too, but they don't seem quite as oppressed- much farther from Moskva and off the beaten track. All in all we traveled about 10,000 miles inside USSR and saw about twenty cities. Ginny's hard work paid off; we saw and heard far, far more than we could have learned had we been dependent on a politically-cleared guide- we often ducked out without our guide. I picked up some pidgin Russian but never learned to speak it-I could give directions, ask directions, order a meal, pay a bill- and swear in Russian (essential!).

The article below I wrote in Hotel Torni, Helsinki, immediately after "escaping" (that's how it felt) from the Soviet Union. The lighter article following "PRAVDA" I wrote a couple of weeks later in Stockholm. By then my nerves had relaxed in the free air of Scandinavia and I could see humor in things that had not seemed at all funny at the time.

"PRAVDA" Means "TRUTH"

"Pravda" means "truth."

That's what it says, right here in my English-Russian dictionary: Pravda-Truth. Surely one may depend on the dictionary.

In Al Smith's bleak, skeptical words: "Let's take a look at the record."

On May Day, 1960, a United States U-2 reconnaissance plane made some type of unplanned landing in the Soviet Union. This much is both "truth" and "pravda." Beyond this bare fact, "truth" and "pravda" diverge widely.

TRUTH: On May 1 this U-2 plane grounded near Sverdlovsk in the heartland of the Soviet Union about 1,500 miles from the border it crossed. The plane was wrecked but the pilot was not killed. Much of the equipment in the plane, such as radio gear, was undamaged. The pilot's survival and the condition of the wreckage, plus the undamaged equipment, suggest a forced landing in rough country, such as would result from engine failure.

The U-2 is extremely fast and it cruises at very high alt.i.tude, 60-70,000 feet. The kinetic energy stored in a moving object varies as the square of its velocity (E = 1/2MV2). A staggering amount of kinetic energy is stored in a U-2. If such a plane is. .h.i.t by anti-aircraft rocket fire what happens in the next split second would make a head-on collision between two hot-rod- ders seem like a mother's loving pat. The anti-aircraft damage merely triggers the disaster; the major violence comes from the plane's great speed-it explodes! Suddenly the sky is filled with junk.

The chance of the pilot's surviving is small. He may escape if the plane's ejection capsule is not damaged when the plane is. .h.i.t. But there is only the tiniest chance that radios and other relatively fragile pieces of equipment would reach the ground undamaged. Nevertheless, such items were "recovered"

from the "shot-down" U-2. A crate of eggs, uncracked, would be equally convincing.

We may never know the exact truth of what happened to that U-2. Only Soviet officials talked to unlucky pilot Powers before his trial.

But the nervous nellies among us should stop beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s over the shame of it all. Photo reconnaissance is not the same thing as a bombing run. An overflight by an unarmed plane is not in the same league with what Khrushchev did to Budapest. What we are dealing with here is the security of the United States and-very possibly-the survival, and certainly the freedom, of the entire human race.

Espionage is not illegal under International Law. Neither is it immoral. The penalty for getting caught at it is very high. It usually means the spy's neck. It is not illegal under U.S. laws for us to attempt to spy on the U.S.S.R., nor is it illegal under Soviet law for them to attempt to spy on us. Nor, in either case, is it an act of war. Throughout history every country has striven to learn the military secrets of any potential enemy, and to protect its own. Spying is wise and necessary insurance against utter military disaster.

That we have been conducting photo reconnaissance over the Soviet Union so successfully and for four vital years is the most encouraging news in the past decade. Among other things it means we have accurate maps by which to strike back. The Soviet Union does not have to send spy planes over us to obtain sim ilar information. Excellent large-scale maps with our military installations and industrial complexes clearly marked may be obtained free from Standard Oil or Conoco. Still better maps may be ordered by the Soviet Emba.s.sy from our Coast and Geodetic Survey at very low prices. Soviet agents move freely among us and many of them enjoy the immunity and complete freedom of travel afforded by U.N.

pa.s.sports. If a Red spy wants aerial color photographs at low alt.i.tude of our Air Defense installation just south of Kansas City-in America's heartland-until recently he could hire a pilot and a plane at the Kansas City airport for about $25 an hour and snap pictures to his heart's content without taking any of the risks of being hanged or shot down that Francis Powers took for us. If Mr. Eisenhower had failed to obtain by any possible means the military intelligence that the U.S.S.R. gets so easily and cheaply about us, he would have been derelict in his duty.

So, if you hear anyone whining about how "shameful" the U-2 flights were, take his lollipop away and spank him with it.

PRAVDA: It took the fat boy with the bad manners five days to decide just what sort of "pravda"

to feed his people. The situation must have been acutely embarra.s.sing for him, much more so than it was to us, because for four years he had been totally unable to stop the flights, despite his boasts and missile brandishing, despite the fact that every flight was certainly observed in Soviet radar screens.

K. could keep quiet, in which case there was little chance that the Free World news services would ever learn about it, and no chance that the Russian people would ever find out. Our Central Intelligence Agency would know that a reconnaissance plane was missing, but it would not have advertised a top secret.

K. could refurbish the incident, give it a new paint job and peddle it as propaganda.

Or K. could tell the simple truth. This alternative is mentioned simply to keep the record technically complete, as the simple truth is a tactic not contemplated under Marxism-Leninism doctrines. Here we have the essential distinction between truth and pravda.

Truth, to the West, consists of all the facts without distortion.

Pravda is that which serves the World Communist Revolution. Pravda can be a mixture of fact and falsehood, or a flat-footed, bra.s.sbound, outright lie. In rare cases and by sheer coincidence, pravda may happen to match the facts. I do not actually know of such a case but it seems statistically likely that such matching must have taken place a few times in the past 43 years.

This comparison is not mere cynicism. I appeal to the authority of V. I. Lenin himself, in his tactics of revolution. By the doctrines of dialectical materialism, simple truth as we know it is abolished as a concept. It can have no existence of its own separate from the needs and purposes of the Communist Party and the World Revolution. Our ingrained habit of believing that the other fellow must be telling the truth at least most of the time is perhaps our greatest weakness in dealing with the Kremlin.

Apparently K. and his cohorts encountered much trouble in deciding just what the pravda should be about the U-2. They spent almost a week making up their minds. I was in Moscow at the time and there was no indication of any sort that anything unusual had happened on May 1. Russians continued to treat us American visitors with their customary almost saccharine politeness and the daily paper (I hesitate to call it a newspaper) known as Pravda hinted not of U2's. This situation continued for several days thereafter. I was not dependent on an Intourist guide-interpreter in reaching this impression as my wife reads, writes, understands and fluently speaks Russian. She's not of Russian descent. She learned it at a University of Colorado Extension night school, plus a private tutor and a lot of hard work.

After May Day, we went on out to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, north of India and a very short distance from the Red China border, about 2,000 miles beyond Moscow. Be-Kind-To-Americans Week continued. Three Americans, the only travelers in that remote part of Asia, received the undivided attention of the Alma Ata Director of Intourist, two school teachers (pulled off their teaching jobs to act as guides), two chauffeurs, and most of the attention of the hotel staff. We had but to express a wish and it was granted.

As of Thursday morning, May 5, the pravda was still that nothing had happened.

Thursday afternoon the climate abruptly changed. K's cohorts had at last decided on a pravda; to wit: an American military plane had attempted to cross the border of the Soviet Union. Soviet rocket fire had shot it down from an alt.i.tude of 60,000 feet as soon as it had crossed the border. The Soviet peoples were very much distressed that America would even attempt such an act of bald aggression. The Soviet peoples wanted peace. Such aggression would not be tolerated. Any other such planes would not only be shot down but the bases from which the attacks were made would be destroyed. Such was K's new pravda at the end of a five-hour speech.

The only connection between pravda and fact lay in the existence of an American plane down on Soviet soil. The locale of the incident shifted 1,500 miles. The plane is "shot down" at an extremely high alt.i.tude (if true then those exhibits in Gorky Park were as phony as K's promises of safety to Nagy and Pal Maleter). No mention at all is made of four long years of humiliating defeat. Pravda suppresses the truth and turns the incident into a triumph of Soviet arms. The Soviet newspapers and radio stations, all state-owned, spout the same line. All during this period the Voice of America was jammed. K. made certain his serfs heard nothing but the pravda.

We learned it by being ordered-not requested-to report to the Alma Ata office of the Director of Intour ist. There we were given a long, very stern, but fatherly, lecture on the aggressive misbehavior of our government, a lecture that included a careful recital of the U-2 pravda.

Once I understood, I did something no American should ever do in the Soviet Union. I lost my temper completely. I out-shouted the director on the subject of American grievances against the Soviet Union. My red-headed wife most ably supported me by scorching him about Soviet slave labor camps, naming each one by name, pointing out their location to him on the big map of the Soviet Union which hung back of his desk, and telling him how many people had died in them- including Americans.

We stomped out of his office, went to our room and gave way to the shakes. I had lost my temper and with it my judgment and thereby endangered not merely myself but my wife. I had forgotten that I was not protected by our Bill of Rights, that I was not free to bawl out a public official with impunity-that I was more than 2,000 miles from any possible help.

Communism has no concern for the individual. The Soviets have liquidated some 20 to 30 millions of their own in "building socialism." They kept after Trotsky until they got him. They murdered a schoolmate of mine between stations on a train in Western Europe and dumped his body. Terror and death are as fixed a part of their tactics as is distortion of the truth. Their present gang boss is the "liberator" of Budapest, the "pacifier" of the Ukraine-a comic butcher personally responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people.

All this I knew. I knew, too, that our own policies had softened beyond recognition since the day when Teddy Roosevelt demanded the return of an American citizen alive-or the man who grabbed him, dead- and made his threat stick. In these present sorry days no American citizen abroad can count on protection from our State Department. We have even voluntarily surrendered our own soldier's Const.i.tutional rights, drafted and sent w.i.l.l.y-nilly to foreign lands. We still permit the Red Chinese to hold prisoner hundreds of our boys captured nearly ten years ago in Korea.

We do nothing about it. I did have the cold comfort of knowing that I had behaved as a free man, an American. I cherished the thought. But I could not honestly pat myself on the back. My anger had been a reflex, not courage. Pride would not be much to chew on if it had got my wife and myself into a Soviet slave labor camp.

I began to listen for that knock on the door, the one you read about in Darkness at Noon, the knock that means your next address may be Vorkuta or Karaganda. The address doesn't matter. You are never, never going to receive mail.

My fears were not groundless. I'd read Philip Wylie's The Innocent Amba.s.sadors and I knew what had happened to his brother. I vividly recalled Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom.

The knock never came because the political climate engendered by the new pravda was "more-in-sorrowthan-in-anger." The next morning, May 6, we were again ordered to report to the Director's office. We had decided to brazen it out. We refused to go. Presently, we were allowed to catch a plane for Tashkent.

Pravda lasted 12 days, until K. shattered the Summit and revealed a new pravda.

We arrived in Leningrad just as the news reached there that the Summit had failed and that President Eisenhower had cancelled his proposed trip to the USSR and that Khrushchev was returning to Moscow via East Berlin.

The climate suddenly turned very chilly.

A month earlier, in Moscow, we had been picked up by two Russians the very first time we went out on the street. One was a technical translator; the other, a lady, was a museum curator. They were very friendly and stayed with us almost three hours, asking ques tions about the U.S. and inviting questions about the Soviet Union. This happened to us daily thereafter; we were always making casual acquaintance with Soviet citizens, on the Street, in parks, in restaurants, during intermissions at the theatre, everywhere. They were always curious about America, very friendly and extremely polite. This att.i.tude on the part of individual Soviet citizens toward individual Americans continued throughout the first pravda, ending May 6. It lessened slightly during the "more-in-sorrow"

second pravda.

K's Paris news conference set up a new pravda. From the time we reached Leningrad until we left for Helsinki, Finland, not one Soviet citizen other than Intourist employees-who had to deal with us professionally-spoke to us under any circ.u.mstances. Not one.

In dealing with Intourist it is always difficult to tell whether one's frustrations arise from horrendous red tape or from intentional obstructionism. In Leningrad it at once became clear that Intourist now just did not want to give service. Even the porter who took up our bags made trouble.

Our first afternoon we were scheduled to visit the Hermitage, one of the world's great art museums.

The tour had been set with Intourist for that particular afternoon before we left the States.

At the appointed time our guide (you have to have one) had not arranged for a car. After awhile it whisked up and the guide said, "Now we will visit the stadium."

We said that we wanted to visit the Hermitage, as scheduled. The guide told us that the Hermitage was closed. We asked to be taken to another museum (Leningrad has many). We explained that we were not interested in seeing another stadium.

We visited the stadium.

That is all Intourist permitted us to see that afternoon.

When we got back to the hotel we found someone in our room, as always in Leningrad. Since maid service in Intourist hotels varies from non-existent to very ubiquitous we did not at once conclude that we were being intentionally inconvenienced. But one afternoon we found six men in our room, busy tearing out all the pipes and the question of intent became academic. A hotel room with its plumbing torn up and its floor littered with pipes and bits of wood and plaster is only slightly better than no hotel room at all.

We went to the ballet once in Leningrad. Intermissions are very long in Soviet theatres, about half an hour, and on earlier occasions these had been our most fruitful opportunity for meeting Russians.

Not now, not after K's Paris pravda. No one spoke to us. No Russian would even meet our eyes as we strolled past. The only personal attention we received that evening at the ballet was an unmistakably intentional elbow jab in the ribs from a Russian major in uniform. Be-Kind-To-Americans Week had adjourned, sine die.

How can the att.i.tudes of 200 million people be switched on and off like a light bulb? How can one set of facts be made to produce three widely differing pravdas? By complete control of all communications from the cradle to the grave.

Almost all Soviet women work. Their babies are placed in kindergartens at an average age of 57 days, so we were told, and what we saw supported the allegation. We visited several kindergartens, on collective farms and in factories. By the posted schedules, these babies spend 131/2 hours each day in kindergarten- they are with their mothers for perhaps an hour before bedtime.

At the Forty-Years-Of-October Collective Farm outside Alma Ata some of the older children in one of the kindergartens put on a little show for us. One little girl recited a poem. A little boy gave a prose recitation. The entire group sang. The children were clean and neat, healthy and happy. Our guide translated nothing so, superficially, it was the sort of beguiling performance one sees any day in any American kindergarten.