The Man in the Tree (31 page)

"And now you know what you want to do?" Irma asked..
"Irma, I knew what I wanted to do
before
-- I just didn't see how to
do it."
"And what is that?" asked Linck.
"Save the world." He sat back and looked at them. "Why not? The problems
are not that difficult. I mean, most of these things are
obvious
: we
have to reduce population and pollution, we have to have world-wide
disarmament, and so on. People aren't
dumb
. They know their
institutions are pushing them into stupid and destructive things,
but nobody wants poverty, and nobody wants to get killed. Suppose you
could get, let's say, sixty percent of the people on earth into one room
and talk to them, show them how to get out of this mess. If you could
convince them, and then send them home, do you think they wouldn't change
the world?"
"That's a very large number of people," said Linck.
"Sure it is. Three billion. But let's take some arbitrary numbers. Suppose
I can sign up ten thousand people a month through public appearances, and
suppose each one of those can recruit one more person a month -- how long
would it take to get up to three billion? Has anyone got a calculator?"
"That is not necessary," said Coomaraswami. He thought a moment. "At the
end of eighteen months you would have about two and a half billion people,
and of course, doubling at that rate, at the end of the nineteenth
month you would have five billion. But that is not a reasonable rate
of increase. People can only recruit other people who live in their
own locality, you see. Pretty soon, if you have a rapidly growing
organization, everybody is trying to recruit everybody else. That is
why pyramid schemes always collapse."
"What would you say was a reasonable rate of increase?"
"That depends on a lot of factors. But I would say that if you have good
organization and very enthusiastic people, a million at the end of the
first year would be a reasonable goal, and then perhaps ten million the
second year, and so on. Most organizations of this kind reach a point
of diminishing returns fairly early, but supposing yours did not, then
I would say it would take at least ten years to reach three billion."
After a moment he added, "Gene, you know, what you are talking about
sounds a good deal like what some other people are already doing --
Barry Commoner, for instance, the Planetary Initiative, and so on. They
are doing all right, but they are not sweeping the world. Why do you
think you can succeed where they are failing?"
"Because I can do something they can't do. I can really heal the
sick. Think about this a minute. I'll have people with incurable
ailments. Paraplegics, people with cancer. They'll be screened by
physicians, we'll do before and after x-rays. I'll heal them publicly,
you'll see it happen. And people will listen to me."
"And what will you tell them?"
"That's what I want you all to think about. Tomorrow we'll meet again
after breakfast, if you're willing. Good night." He stood up and left
the room.
The rest looked at each other. No one seemed to want to speak. At last
Wilcox said, "There's your question again with knobs on, Maggie. What
would you do if you were God? I'm not sure I want to know."
They got up and separated, Pongo and Irma to the kitchen, Margaret
and most of the others to separate corners of the living room. Wilcox
went into the garden by himself; through the glass doors they could
see him pacing up and down. After a while he went up to his room. One
by one, the others joined Linck in his pool of light at the end of the
room. Conversation was desultory until Salomon said, "Did you see in
the paper that there's another expedition to Ararat to find the Ark?"
"No, but I am not surprised," Coomaraswami answered. "It seems to me
they have found it three or four times in the last thirty years, but it
always gets lost again."
"Maybe so, but I think the reason for this expedition is interesting. it's
a little fundamentalist group in Florida -- they say they have to find
the Ark in order to measure it, so they can find out how long a cubit is."
"Why a cubit?"
"Because until they know how long a cubit is, they can't rebuild the
temple in Jerusalem, and until they do that, Christ can't come again."
"Have they got government funding?" Linck asked drily.
"Not that I know of, but it may come to that. You know, these people
give me a royal pain. Of all the ways there are of being wrong, I think
theirs is the worst."
"What do you mean by that? What way are they wrong?" Cliff Guthrie
asked. "I'm a Baptist myself," he added.
"Well, Cliff, no offense to your religion, but they're wrong because
they claim to know what the answers are. They say the Bible is literally
true because it's the word of God, but that can't be: because the Bible
is full of contradictions. There are two accounts of the Creation in
Genesis, two genealogies of Jesus, two different accounts of the death
of Judas Iscariot."
"I never heard that before."
"Well, it's true -- you can look it up."
Linck coughed delicately. "In justice to the Christians, I should say
that they have explanations for all this. They say that the second
chapter of Genesis merely expands on the first chapter, for instance,
and that one of the genealogies is Jesus' father's father's line, the
other one his father's mother's line. And they say that Judas hanged
himself, and then the rope broke and he burst his bowels over a stone."
"Yes, but the Jews
never
reckoned descent through the female line. We
aren't even told who Mary's father was."
"According to the Coptic Gospels, and I think also in Pseudo-Matthew,
her father was Cleopas," Linck said apologetically. "But that gets us
into a terrible muddle, because Hegesippus says that Cleopas or Cleophas
was an uncle of Jesus, who was married to another Mary, who also had
three sons with the same names -- James, Joses, and Simon. And then,
some authorities say that Cleopas is a Greek form of the name Alphaeus,
which turns up in some of the Gospels as the name of one of the disciples,
and these names are also a terrible muddle. For instance, in the Gospel
of Matthew the disciple who is a publican" -- he bowed slightly toward
Cliff Guthrie -- " is called Matthew, in Mark he is Levi of Alphaeus, in
Luke he is just Levi, and John does not mention him at all. And so on. I
sometimes think that when we read the name Cleopas or Alphaeus in the
Bible, it is a code word meaning, 'We don't know this person's name.' "
Later Guthrie found Linck alone in the garden, lighting a cigar.
"Piet, there were a couple of things you said before that I didn't quite
understand. Those gospels you mentioned, I never heard of them -- the
Coptic, and pseudo-Matthew?"
"They are apocryphal gospels. They were not included in the canon, but
some of them were quite widely read -- more so than one or two of the
canonical gospels, perhaps."
"And you read these, what, in the original languages?"
"I do read a little Coptic and Greek," said Linck mildly, "but that is
not necessary. You can find them in a translation by M. R. James called
'The Apocryphal Gospels.' "
Guthrie produced a small notebook and wrote it down. "The other thing,"
he said, "I noticed you looked at me when you were talking about the
publican, and I had a feeling I was missing something."
"Don't you feel that we are all Gene's disciples, Cliff?"
Guthrie stared at him. "But what's that got to do with -- A publican is
a bartender, isn't it?"
"Yes, quite right, but at the time the King James Bible was translated,
it meant a tax collector."
Chapter Twenty-five
All around him, the other worlds sheaved away in layers of gray
mist. There were worlds in which the Chinese had colonized North and
South America, in which the Christian religion did not exist, in which
giant sloths and tapirs roamed the Great Plains. Even closer to home,
there were things even more bizarre in their own way: there was a world in
which Shirley Temple had been appointed an ambassador, and Ronald Reagan
was President of the United States. Most of the time it seemed to make
no difference at all who was president, premier, or chairman; the world
drifted in its massive way toward the same catastrophe just the same.
There were worlds in which it had already happened: there were rotting
corpses along the highways, beside the lines of abandoned cars. The
cities were fields of rubble, like vast firebombed junkyards.
Since the idea had occurred to him, or rather since the first moment
when he had known with an electric tingle in his nerves that he was
going to take the risk, he had thought carefully about groups and their
dynamics. He already knew that the only comfortable place in a group
for him was at the center; he had formed groups around himself again
and again solely for that reason, and not because of any impulse toward
hospitality or benevolence, although he was glad enough to let people
think those were his reasons.
Others liked to be near the center of power but did not care for the
responsibility or the risk of managing a group of their own. And there
were still others who liked to be on the fringe, to be told what to do.
He did not understand it, but it must be so, or every adult human being
would have his own group, with a membership of one.
He ate in his room, and did not go downstairs until the others had had
time to finish breakfast. He found them in the dining room, with pads
and pencils in front of them. They fell silent and their heads turned
as he walked in.
"Good morning," he said. "I hope you've all been thinking about what
I said last night. You probably have some questions, but I'd like to
hold those until later. What I want us to do this morning is to have a
brainstorming session -- does everybody know what that is?"
"Sounds like a fit of lunacy," said Wilcox.
"Brainstorming is a way of getting ideas," Coomaraswami explained. "The
rule is, you have a certain problem to talk about, and you try to generate
as many ideas as possible, never mind whether they are good ideas or not:
that you can decide later. But I am not quite clear what we are going to
talk about."
"All right," said Gene. "The problem is this: the organization that
we talked about last night has to be a political movement, even if it
looks like something else, and yet it can't be a nationalist or ethnic
movement -- it has to be universal, or it won't work. That suggests to
me that we must have a very simple core message. It has to be something
that even a child can understand, and something that can be expressed
in any language. Yes, Stan?"
"When you say the idea has to be simple, that rules out things like
'Support scientific education,' for instance."
"Yes, and also it's not enough to be simple. 'Save the whales' is a
simple idea, and a good idea, but it's not universal -- not everybody
can do anything about saving the whales."
"So, then, you just want something that will improve people's behavior
generally, is that it?"
"Maybe."
"What about, 'You shall love thy neighbor as thyself'?" Irma asked
quietly.
"That has been tried," said Linck. "Unfortunately it always turns out
that most people love themselves better."
"Not always," Salomon retorted. "I'm tired of hearing that you can't
change 'human nature.' People who say that usually assume that whatever
behavior their own society produces is natural. So if you grew up
in a highly competitive and cynical society, you think that's human
nature. But the Pueblo Indians were not like that, for instance --
they were cooperative, nurturant, nonaggressive. To them, that was
human nature."
"Remember that we're not going to criticize these ideas now, just try
to get as many out as we can. Maggie, are you making notes?"
She nodded. Linck, she saw, was also writing on his pad; one or two of
the others were doodling.
"So, then," said Coomaraswami, "what we are looking for is an idea
that will make people behave better toward each other? How about 'Be
kind'? That is simple enough -- two words."
"Before we go any further," Salomon said, "I think I see something
missing. It isn't enough for your idea to be simple and universal; there
also has to be some reward for the person who adopts the idea. It could
be something just as simple as 'Be kind.' And if everybody heard that
and said, 'Great, I'll be kind,' it would make a big difference. But
how are you going to get them to do it? What's in it for them?"
"We could give them a dollar whenever they're kind to somebody," Wilcox
said with a grin. There was a ripple of laughter.
"Maybe that's not such a dumb idea," said Salomon slowly.
"How, Start?" asked Linck. "There isn't enough money in the world."
"No, not money, but -- " Salomon was sketching on the pad in front
of him. He tore off the sheet and held it up: he had drawn a circle in
which a scribble of a face appeared, and around the edge he had lettered:
YOU WERE NICE TO ME.
"Call them 'Gene's dollars,' "he said. "Hand them out at meetings, maybe
five or ten to a customer. The idea is, they give them to people who are
nice to them. And so on. An instant reinforcement."
The group was silent for a while.
"Instead of tokens, we could pass out our own credit cards. People could
get them punched, or something, when they were kind to somebody else."
"Rubber stamps -- you could stamp somebody's forehead."
"Free balloons."
"Or gerbils -- they breed like crazy, so that would take care of the
manufacturing problem."
They branched out into suggestions about the meetings:
"There should be music."
"Not rock."
"No, something very quiet, to give a kind of feeling of expectancy."
"Moog would be best."
"You need ushers to lead people to their seats, and so on. Give them
something distinctive to wear."
"Not a uniform. Smocks, maybe, or little vests."
"The lighting is important. It has to be bright enough so they can see
the healing, but it ought to be diffuse, kind of golden."
"How do they sign up? There has to be a long table at the front, and
people to take down their names and addresses, give them membership
cards or whatever, and maybe little leaflets -- "