Time Will Run Back (48 page)

He had failed! The people would use their new power to destroy the system he had given them, to destroy even their own new-found liberties!

But Adams had a different interpretation.

“The result had very little to do with principles, chief. I told you what would happen from the start. You had the solid Chinese vote against you—and the solid Indian vote, and the solid African vote. All these people are tired of being ruled by the West. It was you who gave the East the chance to throw us out. I was always against it!”

Yet the next day an almost unanimous demand arose in the press that Peter Uldanov be named the first constitutional President of the Republic of Freeworld. Wang himself called on Peter and urged him to accept.

“No,” said Peter. “I am deeply touched by your magnanimity; but I’ve disqualified myself by campaigning against you, and I’m already labeled as a partisan.”

“But I’m as deeply attached to a free market system as you are,” Wang insisted. “There is no real difference of principle between us. We differ only on details. The only problem is, how can we best purify and perfect that system?”

“I’m immensely relieved to hear you talk like that,” said Peter. “But I’ve had my share of public life. You know, I was thrown into it against my will, and my fiancee wants me to give it up—”

“Think it over,” said Wang, “and let me know after the week end.”

Peter and Edith Robinson spent the week end as Adams’ guests at his country home high in the Berkshires. Edith went to bed early on the first evening, but Adams and Peter sat before the open fire—it was April—and talked late into the night.

“You ought to accept Wang’s offer,” Adams said. “It’s a tremendous honor.”

“No, Adams. You know, when the election results first came in I got a jolt. Then I got depressed. But it’s all over in two days. Now I feel immensely relieved. For the first time in my life I’m free. And now that Wang has announced his program, I’m convinced that I did succeed. After all, I wouldn’t have discovered much of a system if only one man could be trusted to operate it. I was beginning to get the obsession that only I understood how to keep the system from going on the rocks. The election cured me.”

“Tell me,” Adams said: “now that we have achieved a free system, do you think mankind will at last be happy? Will people not only be enterprising, but just, generous, kind?”

Peter gazed thoughtfully into the fire. “We can’t tell whether man, now that he is free, will turn out to be wholly admirable. No system, I suppose, can be any better than the men and women who operate it. If they are selfish, stupid, unjust, hungry for power at the expense of their fellows, I don’t suppose our new system, or any conceivable system, can wipe out such vices or save people from themselves. But under a free system man has the opportunity, at least, to do his best, and to show the moral and intellectual stature to which he is capable of growing....”

Adams put a new log on the fire.

“No,” Peter went on, “we can’t be sure that man, now that he is free, will use his freedom only for acts that are praiseworthy. He may even begin to develop social theories that present his own shortcomings as the shortcomings of the system under which he lives. He may call his own faults the faults of the system. Free man may come even to blame his own freedom, to blame the very system that makes him free, to imagine that there is some other possible system, some other arrangement or distribution of human rights and powers, under which he might be completely perfect and everlastingly happy.”

“That isn’t the most optimistic conclusion to arrive at, Peter, concerning your own accomplishment.”

“But while we don’t know, Adams, whether free men will necessarily be noble and magnanimous, one thing we do know—that
unfree
man has been, and will always be, contemptible and wretched....”

The new log suddenly burst into flame. Both men watched it in silence.

“Tell me,” Adams resumed at last: “If you are not going to take Wang’s offer, what
are
you going to do.”

Peter smiled. “I told you I was free. Edith and I are planning to get married next month—quietly, if that is possible—and then we plan to live in the nearest thing to paradise, and to raise a family. We have found a house in Nantucket on a cliff overlooking the sea—”

“Is that all?”

“Not quite. You know, I was trained as a pianist, and until my father—and Bolshekov—forced me into politics my one ambition was to be a great pianist. It hasn’t quite left me. I intend to compose music, and to play the piano.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough? To try to play with perfection, and never succeed, but always to feel one’s self getting better; to help to enlarge, if I can, that great manmade world of harmony that seems to be beyond the vicissitudes of nature itself; to walk along the beach, to look out on the sea, to—” he felt embarrassed—“to love and be loved—to raise a family. Isn’t that enough to fill out the rest of my life?”

“How old are you now, Peter?”

“Twenty-eight.”

Adams smiled. “And so you are old, and wish to retire.”

“No: and so I am young, and wish to live. Of course
your
definition of life is politics. But even on that definition you’ll have to admit that I’ve lived a pretty full political life in the last nine years!”

“Tell me honestly. Do you really think it possible that you can ever stop worrying about political problems?”

“I hope so. After all, the better political and economic conditions get, the less interest I will have to take in them. Things have arrived at the point, it seems to me, where I can safely leave politics and economics to those who have a predominant taste for such matters. I will play Mozart.”

“But suppose there is a crisis? Suppose Wang makes a mess of things, or is voted out of power, and the people turn to you as the Elder Statesman and demand that you return from your retirement?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, which I hope we never do. You are assuming things will go wrong; I am assuming they will go right. And if they go right, I need have no feeling of guilt for not taking part in them. After all, my new definition of a good society is simple: it is one in which it is possible for a man who loves Mozart to devote himself to Mozart. In other words, it is one in which an artist can feel free to devote himself exclusively to his art. And, you know, I’m particularly blessed in that respect, for Edith not only wants me to be a musician but she herself wants seriously to take up the violin—”

“You know,” broke in Adams, “in our old Marxist histories, which may or may not be true, they tell about an emperor who fiddled while Rome burned.”

“The story may even be true, Adams. But let’s not get mixed up. The real disaster was not the fiddling but the burning. After all, it’s up to you politicians not to go around starting any more fires-”

Edith broke into the room. She looked fresh and sparkling, and had on a neat tweed suit.

“Good heavens! What does this mean? Have you two been up talking the whole night long? It’s after five o’clock. Haven’t you heard the news? It was just on the radio a few minutes ago. Do you know what’s happened?
You’ve won!
The count has just been completed from the Chinese and Indian country districts; the result on six seats in Parliament is changed—enough to give the Freedom Party an absolute majority of two seats!”

“That can’t be so—” began Adams.

The telephone rang. Adams answered. “Really?... No!... Astounding!... No, you didn’t wake me up. I appreciate your generosity.... I’m very grateful for your call.

“You know who that was?” he said to Peter. “Wang. He called up to tell me that the radio reports are right, and that he’s conceded our victory! My first act is going to be to ask the new Parliament, when it meets tomorrow, to name
you
as the first President. I’m sure the election will be unanimous. You
must
accept! It’s your absolute duty to accept!”

“After all I’ve just said?”

“After all you’ve just said. This is your program that we’re going to put into effect. You can’t walk out on responsibility for it.”

“And Mozart?”

“Mozart can wait. Others will play him. So far as that’s concerned, there’s nothing to prevent you from playing him all you want, in private, in your leisure moments.”

“But,” protested Peter, “the President’s term is ten years!”

“And so you’ll be an old man of thirty-eight when you get out,” said Adams sarcastically, “all used up and ready to be thrown on the scrap heap!”

Peter looked appealingly at Edith.

“You’ve got to accept, darling!” she said. “You know you do. Adams is right: it’s your duty.”

“You too think I’m a better politician than I am a pianoplayer?”

She laughed. “I know you’re a better pianist than I am a violinist. It will take me at least ten years’ hard practice before I’m fit to accompany you.”

Peter sighed, and then smiled. “All right, Adams, make your announcement. But I warn you—I’m not going to be a mere figurehead. I accept on condition that you promise to ask my advice on all serious matters, and even to weigh it carefully.”

“Why do you think I’m asking you to serve?” asked Adams.

Edith kissed them both. “Don’t you boys know yet that it’s after five o’clock? Look at those streaks of light,” she said, pointing toward the picture window, “just above that range of mountains. Come, darling,” she continued, taking Peter by the arm, “as long as you’ve stayed up this long, you’re going with me on the terrace to see the dawn.”

And they watched the sun come up in all its glory.

¹
See New York Times, Oct. 29, 1961.

²
For the foregoing and other examples, see
Time
, Feb. 12, 1965.

³
New York Herald-Tribune
, Sept. 27, 1965

⁴
G. William Trivoli in
National Review
, March 22, 1966.

⁵
All the conversations in this book are, of course, translations from the Marxanto. Wherever Marxanto terms are literally untranslatable, I have used what seemed to me to be the nearest English equivalent.—The Translator.

⁶
*The reader is again reminded that this is a translation from the Marxanto. The terms used are in each case merely the nearest English equivalent.

⁷
The reader is once more reminded that all these terms are merely the nearest English equivalents to those in the original Marxanto, or Revised Marxanto, text.—

The Translator.