While we are thinking about how best to defend the nation, it is good also to think about the condition of the nation we want to defend. “The Sightseers” is a rather dark vision of some of the disturbing trends that you can see in almost any of our largest cities.
Actually, this short-short story is the result of an embarrassment of riches.
Years ago, when the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference was actually held in Milford, Pennsylvania, I found myself in a quandary. It was a week before the conference started. To participate in the conference, you had to bring an
unpublished
piece of fiction and submit it to the workshop. I did not have any unpublished fiction on hand. Everything I had written, at that point in time, had been bought.
So I sat down and dashed off this short-short, based on a vague idea that was gestating in the back of my mind.
The idea is this: large cities and large stars exhibit the same kind of life cycle.
As massive stars burn up their energy fuels, they swell gigantically while their cores get hotter and denser and finally become the kind of matter that astronomers call “degenerate.” As large cities use up their energy sources (taxpaying citizens and corporations, who eventually leave the city), the city swells into urban sprawl while its core degenerates into ghettos.
For massive stars, the ultimate outcome of this evolutionary track is a catastrophic explosion. We have already seen serious riots in many of our large cities. Will a city-wrecking explosion occur one fine day?
As I recall that Milford workshop twenty-some years ago, most of the participants did not think much of this story. Except for Gordon Dickson, canny pal that he is. “This looks to me like the germ of an idea for a novel,” he suggested.
How right he was. The novel is called
City
of
Darkness.
It attracted a fair amount of attention in Hollywood after it was published, but no firm offers were made. A few years later, somebody produced a film called Escape from New York, which bothered me somewhat. It seemed to have certain elements from
City of Darkness
. But plagiarism laws do not protect ideas; if they did, Hollywood would have starved to death long ago. Still, the producers of that film may well have come on their ideas independently.
The film does have one element that “The Sightseers” and
City of Darkness
could only hint at: Adrienne Barbeau's bosom. That is one of the great advantages of film over print.
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My heart almost went into fibrillation when I saw the brown cloud off on the horizon that marked New York City. Dad smiled his wiser-than-thou smile as I pressed my nose against the plane's window in an effort to see more. By the time we got out of the stack over LaGuardia Airport and actually landed, my neck hurt.
The city's fantastic! People were crowding all over, selling things, buying, hurrying across the streets, gawking. And the noise, the smells, all those old
gasoline-burning taxis rattling around and blasting horns. Not like Sylvan Dell, Michigan!
“It's vacation time,” Dad told me as we shouldered our way through the crowds along Broadway. “It's always crowded during vacation time.”
And the girls! They looked back at you, right straight at you, and smiled. They knew what it was all about, and they liked it! You could tell, just the way they looked back at you. I guess they really weren't any prettier than the girls at home, but they dressed ⦠wow!
“Dad, what's a bedicab?”
He thought it over for a minute as one of them, long and low, with the back windows curtained, edged through traffic right in front of the curb where we were standing.
“You can probably figure it out for yourself,” he said uncomfortably. “They're not very sanitary.”
Okay, I'm just a kid from the north woods. It took me a couple of minutes. In fact, it wasn't until we crossed the street in front of oneâstopped for a red lightâand I saw the girl's picture set up on the windshield that I realized what it was all about. Sure enough, there was a meter beside the driver.
But that's just one of the things about the city. There were old movie houses where we saw real murder films. Blood and beatings and low-cut blondes. I think Dad watched me more than the screen. He claims he thinks I'm old enough to be treated like a man, but he acts awfully scared about it.
We had dinner in some really crummy place, down in a cellar under an old hotel. With live people taking our orders and bringing the food!
“It's sanitary,” Dad said, laughing when I hesitated about digging into it. “It's all been inspected and approved. They didn't put their feet in it.”
Well, it didn't hurt me. It was pretty good, I guess ⦠too spicy, though.
We stayed three days altogether. I managed to meet a couple of girls from Maryland at the hotel where we stayed. They were okay, properly dressed and giggly and always whispering to each other. The New York girls were just out of my league, I guess. Dad was pretty careful about keeping me away from them ⦠or them away from me. He made sure I was in the hotel room every night, right after dinner. There were plenty of really horrible old movies to watch on the closed-circuit TV; I stayed up past midnight each night. Once I was just drifting off to sleep when Dad came in and flopped on his bed with all his clothes on. By the time I woke up in the morning, though, he was in his pajamas and sound asleep.
Finally we had to go. We rented a sanitary car and decontaminated ourselves on the way out to the airport. I didn't like the lung-cleansing machine. You had to work a tube down one of your nostrils.
“It's just as important as brushing your teeth,” Dad said firmly.
If I didn't do it for myself, he was going to do it for me.
“You wouldn't want to bring billions of bacteria and viruses back home, would you?” he asked.
Our plane took off an hour and a half late. The holiday traffic was heavy.
“Dad, is New York open every year ⦠just like it is now?”
He nodded. “Yes, all during the vacation months. A lot of the public health doctors think it's very risky to keep a city open for more than two weeks out of the year, but the tourist industry has fought to keep New York going all summer. They shut it down right after Labor Day.”
As the plane circled the brown cloud that humped over the city, I made up my mind that I'd come back again next summer. Alone, maybe. That'd be great!
My last glimpse of the city was the big sign painted across what used to be the Bronx:
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NEW YORK IS A SUMMER FESTIVAL OF FUN!
This a good-news, bad-news story.
After four years of editing
Omni
magazine, it was fun to be a free-lance writer and be asked to do a story for the magazine.
“What will the phones of the future be like?” the new editor asked me.
The answer is “Telefuture.”
That's the good news.
The bad news is that when the article appeared in the magazine, it had been edited much more extensively than I liked. In particular, the editors had chopped the final lines into hash. I know that every writer screams that whatever the editor cuts “are the best lines in the piece.”
But in this case I think it's quite true! Here is the original article, as I wrote it. If you have a copy of the February 1985
Omni,
compare the two and let me know what you think.
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It is growing.
Like a living, sentient creature it has spread its tendrils across the land and snaked them along the bottom of the sea. It has even probed upward into space, growing, learning, expanding, becoming more complex, more sophisticated with every passing year.
Like an extraterrestrial invader of superhuman powers, the Creature acquires human workers to serve it, to help it grow, to become more subtle, more pervasive, and so ubiquitous that we barely notice its presence among us. The Creature's proclaimed desire is nothing less than to serve humankind. Its instruments have penetrated virtually every home in the United States, and every office of business and government in the world.
The “Creature” is, of course, the telephone system, that incredibly complex electronic infrastructure that links the people of the world in just the same way that the human nervous system links together the billions of individual cells in our bodies.
When the Creature was born, little more than a century ago, telephones were a curiosity, a luxury. Today they have evolved into a necessity that no one can do without. We proudly proclaim that our human civilization of today is international, global in scope. But it is the telephone system that holds our global civilization together, the Creature's tendrils unite the human world. Without telephones, melons grown in California would never get to supermarkets in New York. Jet airliners would be grounded, or take off empty, without the passengers who book their reservations by phone. Clothes designed in Paris and manufactured in Hong Kong out of materials produced in New Zealand, Mississippi, and Manchester would never get to their retail markets in São Paulo, Pretoria, or Podunk without telephonic signals that cross the oceans and leap out to relay satellites hovering 22,300 miles above the equator.
Most human beings have no idea of how complex the Creature is. We see little more than the instrument that sits on the desk, by the bed, or hangs on the kitchen wall. But that is merely a fingertip, a nerve ending, compared to the Creature's entire body. Beyond
that visible, palpable instrument is the Creature's vast, almost-alive nervous system, changing, evolving, humming with electrical signals, flickering with pulses of laser light, learning, growing. Its tendrils hide in our walls, snake out to the streets, run from pole to pole, tunnel beneath the pavement, leap across empty air on microwave links. Like nerve pathways, the Creature's electrical circuits converge to form nodes called
exchanges,
where the messages they carry are routed with the speed of light to their destinations.
When the Creature first came into existence, it carried the babble of human voices over copper wires. Human work crews strung tens of thousands of miles of wire, across continents, through tunnels, along the abyssal beds of the oceans. Probably the richest deposit of copper in the world lies beneath the streets of Manhattan, tons upon tons of purified copper, like the bulging node of a giant nerve ganglion.
Within recent years, though, the Creature has become aware that another kind of voice is using its circuits with rapidly growing frequency. The digital chatter of computers is taking up more and more of the Creature's time and capability. At first, it was merely the computers that served the Creature itself: the computers used by the telephone network to help route messages along the system. But increasingly, computers in homes and offices are speaking to one another over the phone links, threatening to overload the Creature's capacity.
The answer to this is twofold: the Creature is itself becoming a digital entity, a mammoth interlinked computer the size of North America; and it is adding fiber optics
lightguide
circuits to its systems, nerve pathways made of glass rather than copper.
The Creature's heartâno, really, its
brain
âresides in a complex of modernistic buildings in
several locations spread over a twenty-five-mile radius of northern New Jersey: the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories. Since 1925 the men and women of Bell Labs have faithfully served the Creature, working night and day to help it grow and learn. The transistor was invented here; radio astronomy began here; the basic research that led to the development of the maser and the laser was done here; fiber optics lightguides, which transmit pulses of laser light for many miles, is another BTL development.
The first city-to-city television broadcast, carrying President Herbert Hoover's image from Washington to New York, was accomplished by Bell Labs. High-fidelity and stereo records were developed at Bell Labs. The movies learned to talk with Bell Labs' Vitaphone system. The latest breakthrough made here is
solitons:
single pulses of light that may be able to glide through hundreds of miles of fiber optics cables without losing their strength. Seven Bell Labs scientists have received the Nobel prize.
Never far from the high-speed Jersey Expressway, Bell Labs centers in Holmdel, Murray Hill, Whippany, and Short Hills look rather more like the campuses of very posh universities than industrial research laboratories. The buildings are sleek and new; even the older ones have had their exteriors refaced in reddish brick and sweeping glass facades. The interiors tend to have dual personalities: the lobbies look as if they are sets in the latest Fellini film, while the actual laboratories are like labs everywhere âbusy, crowded with people and equipment, metal desks topped with humming computer terminals.
Bell Labs is the one part of American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation that has been allowed to retain the name of Bell, even after AT&T divested itself of its operating telephone companies. It is here that the Creature's future growth and evolution are
being planned and developed. Some 25,000 men and women work here, supported by a budget of more than $2
billion
per year.
Solomon J. Buchsbaum, executive vice-president of AT&T Bell Labs, sees the Creature's future in terms of its usefulness to people. Today, he points out, the average American home contains a telephone, a television receiver, and a computer.
“The key question,” he says, “is what kind of integration, or synergy, between these various forms of communications services can we produce? None of them will be obliterated ⦠but the telephone of tomorrow will be very different from the telephone of today.”
Buchsbaum sees computers and telephones merging into a new instrument, the
telephone terminal
. In essence, today's telephone is evolving into a true computer-communications device capable of linking not only human voices but much denser computer data and video signals as well. To handle the enormous growth in demand for the Creature's time and capacity, the Creature itself is being changed. It is evolving, in Buchsbaum's words, into “one giant interconnected computer.”
For more than two decades, computers have been taking over more and more of the Creature's work load. Having human operators handle phone traffic was fine in the early days. But by the 1950s it became obvious that either the phone network would move toward automation or every human being in the United States would be needed to serve the Creature's growing work load. Computers began to take over the tasks of the telephone operator, so much so that in 1983, when some 750,000 operators and repair personnel went on strike against AT&T for several weeks, the Creature was hardly affected at all.
Today, when you speak into a telephone, your voice
is transformed into an electrical current that is carried to a telephone exchange, where the message is routed to your intended listener. The telephone converts the fluctuations in air pressure caused by your voice into fluctuations of the electric current, then converts the current back into audible sound at the receiving end of the transmission. This is called an
analog
system.
At more and more exchanges, though, the electrical signal is converted into digital bits so that it can be processed by the computers that handle the work there. Voice signals are carried at a rate of 64,000 bits (64 kilobits) per second over the Creature's existing copper wires, while lightguide links can carry 90 million bits (90 megabits) per second, and have achieved 2 billion bits (2 gigabits) per second in laboratory tests.
The path of the Creature's evolution is toward digitizing the entire system, from the phone instrument in your hand to the receiver on the other end of your conversation.
A digital system is powerful and flexible. It can handle voice, computer data, or video signals with equal ease. Its performance quality is superior because the digital signal is less likely to be distorted in transmission than a continuously varying electrical current. And digital systems can yield all these benefits at lower cost than the older analog systems, because the cost of the microchips that are the heart of all digital systems is constantly moving downward.
Bell Labs developed its own 256K memory chip, which is the heart of the digitization of the Creature. More than 80 percent of AT&T's urban exchanges are now digital. The growth in long-distance links, the switching systems that transmit calls from one urban center to another, is slower: 10 percent now, growing to some 40 percent over the next ten years.
Digital systems can also use pulses of light in place of electrical signals. “Optical signal processing is the wave of the future,” says Ira Jacobs, director of Bell Labs' Wideband Transmission Facilities Laboratory.
Hair-thin glass fibers can transmit laser light pulses, and light waves can carry tremendously more information than can electrical currents.
Today's copper telephone cable, three inches wide, consists of 1,500 pairs of wires. It can carry 20,000 two-way voice signals. It needs repeaters to boost the signal every mile, and it costs thirty dollars per meter. Optical cables are half-inch-wide bundles of 144 fibers. They can carry 80,000 two-way signals today and will handle three times that amount in a few years, and need repeaters only every six to twenty miles. In a test in 1983, Bell Labs transmitted an optical signal through a one-hundred-mile length of lightguide fiber without a repeater to boost the signal: the world record for optical transmission. Optical fibers cost roughly twice as much as copper, meter for meter, but they carry four times the work load and will soon carry twelve times the load.
The light that optical fibers transmit is generated by ultrasmall semiconductor lasers, transistorlike devices that emit pulses of light. Their power output is only a few watts, but this is sufficient to carry thousands of conversations along lightguide cables.
The Creature is also acquiring more and more microwave links, where signals are beamed by ultrashort radio waves from one antenna to another. Neither copper nor optical fiber cables are needed, but microwave transmission is horizon-limited: the radio beams do not bend around the curve of the horizon, so antennas are needed every few miles, at least.
As the Creature's central nervous system begins to flicker with laser pulses carrying digitized voice, computer,
and video data, the part of the Creature that we seeâthe telephone itselfâis evolving swiftly.
On Buchsbaum's desk at Bell Labs, next to a symbolic quill pen, sits “the phone of the future”: EPIC, which stands for Everyone's Planning and Information Communication system.
EPIC looks like a small computer terminal, which it is, in part. It has a display screen, a keyboard for typing out commands and messages, and a handset for talking and listening, together with a speakerphone feature if you don't want to use the handset. It also includes a touch-screen feature: instead of typing commands on the keyboard, you can tell the terminal what you want it to do merely by touching the cues displayed on its screen.
It is a very smart telephone, an evolutionary step beyond the clever phones available today. Where they have a few chips built into them to remember a short list of often-called numbers, EPIC's built-in computer gives it much more power. No need for phone books with EPIC; the terminal can store your entire personal phone list, and even query the Creature's various information services for phone numbers anywhere in the country. Local telephone companies will not need to print phone directories: the telephone itself will find the numbers you want.
EPIC's screen can show you the number of the phone that is calling you, so that you can decide if you want to take the call, ignore it, or have EPIC's answering service record the caller's message. If you are not at home, EPIC can refer your caller to the phone where you are. It can also be mated to sensors that will detect smoke, or fire, or burglars, and immediately contact the police or fire department. In service for more than two years at Bell Labs, EPIC also handles mail electronically. Phone your letters to other EPIC terminals across town or across the country.
They will arrive with the speed of light, instead of the speed of the Postal Service.