from the science fiction of
Alfred Bester

“Baby dreams. Pfui! All men have them. . . . To be the last man on earth and own the earth. . . . To be the last fertile man on earth and own the women. . . . To go back in time with the advantage of adult knowledge and win victories. . . . To escape reality with the dream that life is make-believe. . . . To escape responsibility with a fantasy of heroic injustice, of martyrdom with a happy ending. . . . And there are hundreds more, equally popular, equally empty. God bless Father Freud and his merry men. He applies the quietus to such nonsense. Sic semper tyrannis. Avaunt!”

“But if everybody has those dreams, they can’t be bad, can they?”

“God damn. Everybody in fourteenth century had lice. Did that make it good?”

This one wasn’t the last war or a war to end war. They called it the War for the American Dream. General Carpenter struck that note and sounded it constantly.

There are fighting generals (vital to an army), political generals (vital to an administration), and public relations generals (vital to a war).

“You’re a nest of ants . . . all working and toiling and specializing. For what?”

“To preserve the American Dream,” Carpenter answered hotly. “We’re fighting for Poetry and Culture and Education and the Finer Things in Life.”

“Which means you’re fighting to preserve me,” Scrim said. “That’s what I’ve devoted my life to. And what do you do with me? Put me in jail.”

“You were convicted of enemy sympathizing and fellow-travelling,” Carpenter said.

“I was convicted of believing in my American Dream,” Scrim said. “Which is another way of saying I was jailed for having a mind of my own.”

He doesn’t know which one of us I am these days, but they know one truth. You must own nothing but yourself. You must make your own life, live your own life and die your own death . . . or else you will die another’s.

“If his imagination is slight, a man will always find the world a source of deep and infinite wonder, a place of many delights. But if his imagination is strong, vivid, restless, he finds the world a sorry place indeed—a drab jade beside the wonders of his own creations!”

“These are wonders past all imagining.”

“For whom? Not for me, my invisible friend. Nor for any earth-bound, flesh-bound creature. Man is a pitiful thing. Born with the imagination of gods and forever pasted to a round lump of spittle and clay. I have within me the uniqueness, the ego, the fertile loam of a timeless spirit . . . and all that richness is wrapped in a parcel of quickly rotting skin!”

“The ego,” Braugh continued abstractedly, “desires only what it cannot hope to attain. Once a thing is attainable, it is no longer desired. Can you grant me a reality where I may possess something which I desire because I cannot possibly possess it; and by that same possession not break the qualifications of my desire? Can you do this?”

“I’m afraid,” the voice answered hesitantly, “that you imagination reasons too deviously for me.”

“Ah,” Braugh murmured, half to himself, “I was afraid of that. Why does the universe seem to be run by second-rate individuals not half so clever as myself? Why this mediocrity in the appointed authorities?”

“You seek to attain the unattainable,” the voice said in reasonable tones, “and by that act not to attain it. The limitations are within yourself. Would you be changed?”

“You might think plumbing is pretty unimportant compared to ancient Greek philosophers. Lots of people do. But the fact is, we already know the philosophy. After a while you get tired of seeing the great men and listening to them expound the material you already know. You begin to miss the conveniences and familiar patterns you used to take for granted.”

“That,” said Adyer, “is a superficial attitude.”

“You think so? Try living in the past by candlelight, without central heating, without refrigeration, canned foods, elementary drugs. . . .”

Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life.

Nobody knows where Unknown University is or what they teach there. It has a faculty of some two hundred eccentrics, and a student body of two thousand misfits—the kind that remain anonymous until they win Nobel prizes or become the First Man on Mars. You can always spot a graduate of U.U. when you ask people where they went to school. If you get an evasive reply like: “State,” or “Oh, a freshwater school you never heard of,” you can bet they went to Unknown.

It is a known fact that all wars are founded in economic conflict, or to put it another way, a trial by arms is merely the last battle of an economic war.

The difference between a Welfare State and a Benevolent Despot is slight. In times of crisis, either can be traduced by the sincerest motives into the most abominable conduct.