Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
Paul, with a trace of drug-inspired whimsey still in his bloodstream, had expected a show of fraternal-order nonsense, full of quasi-Indian talk. Instead, save for Luke Lubbock’s shirt, the meeting belonged very much to the present, a sordid, realistic present, an angry present.
The Ghost Shirt Society, then, was simply a convenient
and dramatic title for a businesslike group, a title whose historical roots were of interest principally to Lasher and his disciple Finnerty, who entertained each other with elaborate commentaries on the insufferable status quo. For the rest, simple commentaries, special personal resentments, were reasons enough for joining anything that promised a change for the better.
Promised a change for the better, or
, Paul amended his thought after looking into some of the eyes,
promised some excitement for a change.
What Bud Calhoun was doing here, Paul couldn’t imagine, since Bud wasn’t at all interested in political action and was without capacity for resentment. As Bud had said of himself, “All Ah want is time an’ equipmen’ to faht around with, and Ah’m happy as a pig in mud.”
“We’ll start with you, Z-II,” said Lasher, looking at Katharine.
There were circles under Katharine’s gentle, wondering eyes, and she looked startled when Lasher called on her, as though Lasher, the meeting, the underground chamber, had suddenly risen about her in her clean, girlish world. “Oh,” she said, and rattled the papers on the table before her. “We now have seven hundred and fifty-eight ghost shirts on hand. Our quota for now was a thousand,” she said wearily, “but Mrs. Fishbein—”
“No names!” cried several of the members.
“Sorry.” She blushed, and referred to her papers. “Er, X-229 came down with cataracts and had to stop the design work. She’ll be all right in about six weeks, and can get back to work. Also—there’s a shortage of red wire.”
“A-12!” said Lasher.
“Yessir,” said a swarthy man, and Paul recognized him as one of the Works security guards out of uniform. A-12 wrote down the requisition for red wire, and grinned sheepishly at Paul.
“The shirts that
are
done are packaged, ready for delivery,” said Katharine.
“Very good,” said Lasher. “G-17, have you anything to report?”
Bud Calhoun smiled, and leaned back and rubbed his hands. “Comin’ along jes’ fine. Got two models ready fo’ trial out at L-56’s place some dark night.”
“They’ll make it through a works fence all right?” asked Lasher.
“Like a dose of salts,” said Bud, “thout trippin’ the alarm, neither.”
“Who cares if the alarm’s tripped or not?” said Finnerty. “The whole country’s going to be in an uproar anyway.”
“Just th’owed thet in,” said Bud. “Also got an idea for a gimmick thet’d feed powah into the telephone system so it’d knock the guards flat on theah tails when they try to call for he’p.” He chuckled merrily.
“Thought we were going to cut the phone wires.”
“Could do thet, I s’pose,” said Bud.
“What we want from you,” said Lasher, “is a design for a good practical, cheap armored car for breaking through the works fences, something our people all over the country ought to be able to knock together in a hurry, with jalopies and sheet metal.”
“Hell, we got thet,” said Bud. “What Ah’m thinkin’ of now, is how we can
really
fox ’em. See, if we wanted to, Ah figger we could fix a li’l ol—”
“Talk to me about it
after
the meeting,” said Lasher.
Bud looked momentarily unhappy, and then began sketching on a pad before him. Paul saw that he had drawn an armored car, to which he was adding antennae, a radar dome, spikes, flails, and other instruments of terrible slaughter. His eyes met Paul’s, and he nodded. “Very in’er’stin’ problem,” he whispered.
“All right,” said Lasher. “Recruiting. D-71—got something for us?”
“He’s in Pittsburgh,” said Finnerty.
“That’s right,” said Lasher. “Forgot. Seeing what he can do with the Moose there.”
Luke Lubbock cleared his throat several times, and riffled papers. “Sir, he asked me to give his report, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
“We got a man in every chapter of the Royal Parmesans. That’s fifty-seven chapters.”
“Good men?” said someone.
“You can count on D-71,” said Lasher. “Anybody he or his boys recruit gets exactly the same treatment you did—the Mickey, then the questioning under sodium pentathol.”
“O.K.,” said the questioner. “Just wanted to make sure nobody was getting sloppy at this stage of the game.”
“Relax,” said Finnerty, very tough, out of the corner of his mouth.
“Him too?” said the questioner, pointing at Paul.
“Him especially,” said Lasher. “We know things about Proteus he’d be surprised to know about himself.”
“No names,” said Paul.
Everybody laughed. It seemed to be a welcome bit of humor that broke the tension of the meeting.
“What’s funny?” said Paul.
“You’re
the
name,” said Lasher.
“Now wait, just a minute—”
“What are you worried about? You don’t have to do anything,” said Finnerty. “What a break, Paul. Wouldn’t
we
like to be able to serve the cause just sitting down here, keeping away from the cops—no responsibilities, no chances to take.”
“It’s pretty soft all right,” said Paul, “but not quite soft enough. I’m walking out. Sorry.”
“They’ll kill you, Paul,” said Finnerty.
“You’d kill him, if you were told to,” said Lasher.
Finnerty nodded. “That’s right, Paul, I would. I’d have to.”
Paul sank back into his chair. He found that he wasn’t
really shocked by the alternatives of life and death just presented to him. It was such a
clean-cut
proposition, unlike anything he’d ever encountered before. Here were honest-to-God black and white, not at all like the muddy pastels he’d had to choose from while in industry. Having it put like that,
Do as we say or get killed
, had the same liberating effect as the drug of a few hours ago had had. He couldn’t make his own decisions for reasons anybody could understand.
So Paul leaned back in his chair and began to take a real interest in what was going on.
Luke Lubbock finished reading D-71’s report on recruiting in the lodges across the country. The goal, to have at least two influential Ghost Shirt Society members in every major social organization in every major industrial city, was about sixty per cent realized.
“S-1—what have you got to say for yourself?” said Lasher.
“We’re getting the word around about who the
Leader
is,” said Finnerty. “Take a few days to see what sort of effect it has.”
“Don’t see how it could be anything but good,” said Lasher.
“Recruiting should really go to town now,” said Finnerty.
“What’s the score on that television bug?” asked the Works security guard. “Wasn’t you going after him personal?”
“Alfy Tucci?” said Finnerty.
“No names!”
“Kick that name around all you want,” said Lasher glumly. “He isn’t ours.”
“That’s right,” said Finnerty. “He isn’t anybody’s, and never will be. He never joined anything, his father never joined anything, and his grandfather never joined anything, and if he ever has a son, he’ll never join anything either.”
“What’s his reason?” asked Paul.
“Says it’s all he can do to figure out what he represents without trying to represent a thousand other people besides,” said Finnerty.
“Are there any conditions under which he’d join?” asked the man who’d been nervous about loose recruiting methods.
“One,” said Finnerty. “When everybody looks and thinks exactly the way Alfy Tucci does.”
Lasher smiled sadly. “The great American individual,” he said. “Thinks he’s the embodiment of liberal thought throughout the ages. Stands on his own two feet, by God, alone and motionless. He’d make a good lamp post, if he’d weather better and didn’t have to eat. All right, where were we?”
“We got a date yet?” asked Mr. Haycox politely.
“We’ll get a date two days before it happens, and no sooner!” said Lasher.
“Could I ask a question?” said Paul.
“Don’t know why not. I haven’t succeeded in heading anybody else off, yet.”
“What, generally, is supposed to happen on
this date?”
“A special meeting of every chapter of every big social organization in the country, outside of the engineers’ and managers’, will have been called. At the meetings, our people, big men in the organizations, will tell the members that all over the country men are marching through the streets on their way to wreck the automatic factories and give America back to the people. Then they’ll put on their ghost shirts and lead whoever will follow, starting with a few more of our people planted around.
“This is the headquarters group here, but the movement is largely decentralized, with regional and local people responsible for their areas. We give them help on organization and recruiting and objectives and tactics, but, on the big day, the local people will be pretty much on their own. We’d like
to have a bigger organization, a more centralized one. But that would lay us that much more open to the police. The way things stand now, the police don’t know who we are and what we’ve got. On paper, we don’t look like much. Actually, with our people placed right, we have a tremendous potential in fellow travelers.”
“How many do you suppose will follow?” said Paul.
“As many people as are bored to death or sick of things the way they are,” said Lasher.
“All of ’em,” said Finnerty.
“And then what?” said Paul.
“And then we get back to basic values, basic virtues!” said Finnerty. “Men doing men’s work, women doing women’s work. People doing people’s thinking.”
“Which reminds me,” said Lasher. “Who’s going to do the job on EPICAC?”
“Last I heard D-71 say was, it’s between the Moose and the Elks in Roswell who’s goin’ to do it,” said Luke Lubbock.
“Put them both on it,” said Lasher. “G-17, any bright ideas on how to knock off EPICAC?”
“Bes’ idee,” said Bud, “ ’d be to put some kind of bomb in the coke machines. They got one in every chambah. That way, we’d git all of him, not just part.” His hands were working in air, fashioning a booby trap for a coke machine. “See? Take a li’l ol’ coke bottle, only fill her full of nitro. Then we run a li’l ol’—”
“All right. Make a sketch and give it to D-17, so he can get it to the right people.”
“An’ balooooooowie!” said Bud, bringing his fist down on the table.
“Great,” said Lasher. “Anybody else got anything on his mind?”
“What about the Army?” said Paul. “What if they’re called out to—”
“Both sides had better throw in the towel if somebody’s crazy enough to give
them
real rifles and ammunition,” said Lasher. “Fortunately, I think both sides know that.”
“Where we stand now?” asked the nervous man.
“Not bad, not good,” said Lasher. “We could put on a pretty good show now, if they forced our hand. But give us two more months, and we’ll really have a surprise for them. All right, let’s get this meeting over with, so we can all get to work. Transportation?”
On and on the reports went: transportation, communications, security, finance, procurement, tactics …
Paul felt as though he’d seen the surface scraped from a clean, straight rafter, and been shown the tunnels and flimsy membranes of a termite metropolis within.
“Public information?” said Lasher.
“We’ve mailed out warning letters to all the bureaucrats, engineers, and managers with classification numbers below one hundred,” said Professor von Neumann. “Carbon copies to the news service, the radio network, and the television network.”
“Damn good letter,” said Finnerty.
“Rest of you like to hear it?” said von Neumann.
There were nods around the table.
“Countrymen,” the professor read—
“Admittedly, we are all in this together. But—
“You, more than any of us, have spoken highly of progress recently, spoken highly of the good brought by great and continued material change.
“You, the engineers and managers and bureaucrats, almost alone among men of higher intelligence, have continued to believe that the condition of man improves in direct ratio to the energy and devices for using energy put at his disposal. You believed this through the three most horrible wars in history, a monumental demonstration of faith.
“That you continue to believe it now, in the most
mortifying peacetime in history, is at least disturbing, even to the slow-witted, and downright terrifying to the thoughtful.
“Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.
“Again, let me say we are all in this together, but the rest of us, for what we perceive as good, plain reasons, have changed our minds about the divine right of machines, efficiency, and organization, just as men of another age changed their minds about the divine right of kings, and about the divine rights of many other things.
“During the past three wars, the right of technology to increase in power and scope was unquestionably, in point of national survival, almost a divine right. Americans owe their lives to superior machines, techniques, organization, and managers and engineers. For these means of surviving the wars, the Ghost Shirt Society and I thank God. But we cannot win good lives for ourselves in peacetime by the same methods we used to win battles in wartime. The problems of peace are altogether more subtle.
“I deny that there is any natural or divine law requiring that machines, efficiency, and organization should forever increase in scope, power, and complexity, in peace as in war. I see the growth of these now, rather, as the result of a dangerous lack of law.
“The time has come to stop the lawlessness in that part of our culture which is your special responsibility.
“Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness.
“Without regard for the changes in human life patterns that may result, new machines, new forms of organization, new ways of increasing efficiency, are constantly being
introduced. To do this without regard for the effects on life patterns is lawlessness.
“I am dedicated, and the members of the Ghost Shirt Society are dedicated, to bringing this lawlessness to an end, to give the world back to the people. We are prepared to use force to end the lawlessness, if other means fail.
“I propose that men and women be returned to work as controllers of machines, and that the control of people by machines be curtailed. I propose, further, that the effects of changes in technology and organization on life patterns be taken into careful consideration, and that the changes be withheld or introduced on the basis of this consideration.
“These are radical proposals, extremely difficult to put into effect. But the need for their being put into effect is far greater than all of the difficulties, and infinitely greater than the need for our national holy trinity, Efficiency, Economy, and Quality.
“Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore, be returned to participation in such enterprises.
“I hold, and the members of the Ghost Shirt Society hold:
“That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God.
“That there must be virtue in frailty, for Man is frail, and Man is a creation of God.
“That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God.
“That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant and stupid, and Man is a creation of God.
“You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man’s being a creation of God.
“But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress—namely, that man is on earth to create more
durable and efficient images of himself, and, hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.
“Faithfully yours,
“Doctor Paul Proteus.”