Time Will Run Back (9 page)

“But isn’t all this, Your Highness, a class system?”

“Nothing of the kind! Nobody gets any higher income than anybody else! Nobody exploits anybody else! Never confuse a difference in
function
with a difference in class.”

“What about all these differences in uniforms?”

“They simply mark differences in function. I assumed you had been told about that. The Protectors include less than i per cent of the population, and the Deputies only about 10 per cent. As their names imply, they are merely the instruments of the Ruling Proletariat-—their spokesmen, their representatives. They act only in the name of the Proletariat, which constitutes three-fourths of the whole population.”

“If the Proletariat constitutes 75 per cent of the population, the Deputies 10 per cent and the Protectors 1 per cent,” said Peter, “that still leaves 14 percent unaccounted for.”

Bolshekov gave him a sharp glance. “You are an excellent mathematician,” he said drily. “But the 14 per cent may be disregarded. They’re lucky to be alive. They are in our Correction Camps. We shall visit one some time.... Today I am taking you to our new workers’ dormitories. They are my own project.”

A limousine guarded by sentries was waiting for them, with a chauffeur and an armed guard in the front seat. They drove to the outskirts of the city and pulled up before a row of drab new one-story wooden structures with tar-paper roofs and siding.

An obsequious commissar came out to welcome them.

“Male quarters first,” ordered Bolshekov.

The first building they entered consisted of a long narrow room lined with regularly spaced single iron beds on each side, as in a hospital or an army barracks. The beds were made up haphazardly, and the room was deserted except for a few attendants.

The three-man inspection party marched through. The floor was unswept, the windows dirty.

They went through still another barracks of the same sort, then through a smaller building with washstands, toilets and urinals, then through a mess hall with long tables in the center and backless benches on each side. A kitchen was at one end. The kitchen was filled with cooks, helpers, and the odor of garbage, sweat and boiling cabbage soup.

“The lunch period will begin in an hour,” explained the commissar.

“Female quarters,” ordered Bolshekov.

The only difference Peter noticed between the men’s and women’s sleeping quarters was a crisscross of overhead wires, like those he had seen in the room occupied by Edith and her father, supporting pulled-back curtains.

A woman commissar joined the party to conduct them through.

“All these are just temporary quarters, I presume?” said Peter.

“Everything on earth—except communism—is temporary,” was Bolshekov’s tart reply. “I think these buildings excellent for their purpose. Of course we would like to have them bigger and better—made of steel and glass. But we simply can’t get the labor and materials for all the tasks to be done. I will give you the statistics showing the enormous number of square feet of living space we have added in the last two years!”

Perhaps if you talked of it simply in terms of square feet, thought Peter, it might sound good.

“This is only for single men and women, I suppose,” he asked. “When a man and a woman register permanently with each other, I assume they are assigned to quarters by themselves, where they can raise their children?”

Bolshekov gave him a glance of mingled pity and contempt. “This so-called family life you speak of is merely a relic of an ancient capitalistic institution called marriage. Such relics, unfortunately, still exist, because our communist ancestors lacked the courage to follow their new vision to its logical end. Fm making it my business to rectify this. Marx and Engels unequivocally demanded the abolition of the bourgeois family. They pointed out that it was based on capital, on private gain. They denounced the disgusting bourgeois claptrap about the family and ‘the hallowed correlation of parent and child.’ I have full authority by the Politburo to stamp out the last vestige of the bourgeois family—at least among the Proletarians, in all cities of 50,000 population and over. When I get through, nobody—at least among the Proletarians—is going to be anybody’s property! Nobody is going to belong to anybody!”

“But, Your High—”

“In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed out that ‘bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common.’ All that the communists at most could be accused of wanting to do, they said, was ‘to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized communization of women.’ “

“The collective use of women now means the liberation of women,” explained the woman commissar.

“Exactly,” said Bolshekov. “Commissar, will
you
tell Comrade Uldanov how the system works?”

“Proletarian men and women,” she said to Peter, as if talking to a child, “are permitted to have sexual relations on Marxday and Stalinsday nights. All that is necessary is for a male and female to come together to the license bureau, not less than twenty-four hours in advance, and take out a license, good for the date stamped. The female is then permitted to close the curtains around her bed for an hour—”

“Still a concession to the old bourgeois fetish of privacy,” admitted Bolshekov, “but we move by stages.”

“No single couple,” continued the woman commissar, “may receive licenses for more than a single month without change of partners. Prolonged registration together would lead to a tendency on the part of each partner to believe that he or she
belonged
to the other. This would lead to jealousy.”

“And even keep alive concepts of private property,” added Bolshekov.

“What about children resulting from—” Peter asked.

“These are taken to the public nurseries,” said the woman commissar, “and brought up and educated in public institutions.”

“You’ll see all this some other day,” Bolshekov promised him. “The children are assigned license numbers,” continued the woman commissar, “that have no relation to the license numbers of their parents. No mother is allowed to know the number of her child. That again might breed ideas of
belonging
, of private property.”

“In short,” said Bolshekov, “we can’t afford to tolerate any ‘family’ loyalties in danger of being put ahead of loyalty to the communist state.”

“Your Highness,” said the woman commissar, “may I ask a question?”

Bolshekov nodded curtly.

“One of our histories—Valik’s,” she continued, “—says that the idea of separating children immediately from their parents actually originated with a bourgeois named Plato, and that all that Marx and Engels asked for at first was free love and free cohabitation; and there have been some disputes among us regarding the present official party line.”

“That history is being withdrawn,” said Bolshekov. “There was nobody named Plato. And there is nobody named Valik.” He looked at her icily.

“That’s precisely what I’ve been saying, Your Highness,” said the woman commissar.

They inspected another female dormitory. In this a girl of about eighteen was just getting up from one of the beds. The woman commissar smilingly introduced her as SL-648, a Stakhanovite worker who had broken a production record one day last week. As a special reward she had been allowed this morning to stay in bed till noon.

As they talked with her the girl proceeded to change her clothes. She took off her pajama top. Peter’s heart beat faster. No one else was embarrassed. The girl unbuttoned her pajama trousers and let them slip to the floor. The blood rushed to Peter’s face.

Bolshekov gave her a friendly pinch on the buttocks. She smiled proudly, and leisurely put on her gray blouse and slacks. When they were outside, the woman commissar was dismissed. Bolshekov took the man commissar aside.

“The floors and windows in the men’s dormitories were filthy. Who’s fault?” “I can’t say, Your Highness, I—” “Somebody must be sent to a Correction Camp for that within the next twenty-four hours. We must have an example!”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

WHEREVER he accompanied Bolshekov, Peter detected the same terror in the eyes of the officials and workers, and found the same fawning servility.

For everything that went wrong, Bolshekov demanded an immediate scapegoat. He rarely allowed a day to pass without accusing someone of slackness, sabotage or treason. A few weeks afterwards Peter was always sure to read in the
New Truth
the same self-abasing “confession.” It was always couched in the same stilted, stereotyped language.

The accused would then disappear.

Bolshekov took Peter through nurseries and schools. The children were taught to repeat endlessly that Stalenin was omniscient, that their parents had no claim on them, that their only loyalty war to the State, that private property was theft, that hell meant capitalism and heaven socialism.

“Do they understand what all these phrases mean?” asked Peter. “They will when they grow up,” answered Bolshekov, “and then they will be incapable of believing anything else.”

At the visits to the government publishing bureau Peter learned how books were written and selected. The bureau was divided into many divisions: political propaganda, economics, engineering, the sciences, art, history, drama, fiction, and so forth. Usually the publishers decided themselves what kind of book was needed, what the correct party line and conclusions should be, and who should be ordered to write it. The principal qualification demanded of a writer was fervor for the existing regime. If he also had the necessary technical knowledge, the government publishers considered themselves fortunate.

Peter thumbed through many volumes. They were all dedicated to Stalenin—who, it appeared, depending on the particular subject matter of the book, was the greatest political genius, economist, engineer, mathematician, chemist, architect, chess player, of them all.

Each writer in every field insisted that his book was written from a completely orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Staleninist point of view. He often contended that his predecessor had been a deviationist. Peter learned that in these cases the predecessor had already been shot for coming to the wrong conclusions.

He tried the fiction, but could not read it. It was always designed to point some moral, such as the precedence of love for the State over that of mere sexual attraction or the accident of family relationship, the need of reporting to the secret police the slightest transgression on the part of one’s closest friend or sexual companion, or the duty of long hours of work.

“Reports are coming in, Peter, of another serious famine in Kansas,” said Stalenin. “I’m sending Bolshekov right out there.” In the first day of Bolshekov’s absence, Peter was promoted to membership in the Protectors.

“I’m turning your education meanwhile over to Adams,” Stalenin said. “He is to teach you everything that an Inner Circle Protector should know.”

Peter had felt drawn to Adams even from his first meeting. He had not known exactly why. Adams was far from handsome or imposing. But a probable reason suddenly occurred to him. Adams’ thin, wizened face, so full of shrewdness and intelligence, strikingly resembled a small bust of Voltaire that had stood, as far back as Peter could remember, in the library of his home in Bermuda. It was this resemblance, he now saw, that had made Adams seem vaguely familiar to him. Peter was constantly reminded afresh of the resemblance by Adams’ strongly anachronistic habit of taking snuff.

Adams was remarkably frank. No doubt this was partly because Peter was now to be treated as part of the “inner circle”; but it seemed to spring, also, from a certain open cynicism in Adams’ nature.

“What are some of the things that have been puzzling you?” Adams asked.

Peter hardly knew where to begin.

“One thing I would like to know is just how much progress Wonworld has made since the beginning.”

“Since the overthrow of capitalism?”

“Yes.”

“There are two answers. One is the answer for the Proletarians—the public answer. The other is the answer for the Central Committee of the Party—what we sometimes call the
entre-nous
answer. These two answers exist for most questions in Wonworld.”

“But only the second answer, the
entre-nous
answer, is the truth?”

“We do not ask in Wonworld whether a statement is ‘true’ or not. We only ask: What good will it do? And what good—or harm—a statement does depends on whom you are talking to. It is obviously important, for example, that the Proletarians should believe that Wonworld has made tremendous progress; but it is also important that the Central Committee should know exactly how much progress it
has
made.”

It is important, thought Peter to himself, that at least the Central Committee should really know the
truth.
He said aloud: “I should like to know both answers.”

“The only thing it does any good to tell the Proletarians, of course,” said Adams, “is that our technological progress has been so great since capitalism that any comparison would be absurd. ‘How could there have been any progress under capitalism?’ we ask them. ‘Nobody then sought anything but profit; and everybody maximized profits by selling the public shoddier and shoddier goods.’ “

“Is that true?” asked Peter. “I’m sorry; I mean, what is the
entre-nous
answer?”

“The records kept by the Central Committee for its own guidance, as far as I can interpret them,” said Adams, “indicate that the present state of technological progress in Wonworld is the same as it was from about 100 to 120 A.M.”

“Under the old calendar,” Peter figured quickly, “that would have been in what the bourgeoisie called the years from 1918 to 1938?”

“Yes. In some things—in airplanes, say, and in most direct war weapons, we are probably a little ahead of that period, and in other things a little behind.”

“But how could that have happened? After all, the bourgeois world was not finally annihilated until—”

“You are about to say,” Adams cut in, “that the bourgeois world continued for several decades even beyond 1938?”