Time Will Run Back

Chapter 18

PETER knew it would be futile to try to get anything out of Bolshekov himself. But he had every top official of the secret police, from Kilashov down, report to him individually in his father’s office for cross-examination. All professed to have no knowledge whatever of what had happened either to Edith or to Maxwell. There was no record to be found in any file of their arrest. Kilashov protested that if they had been arrested it had been without his orders and without his knowledge. And he swore to Peter that for an arrest to take place without a record of it somewhere in the secret police files was impossible. Peter must remember, however, that there was always a chance that private gangsters and wreckers might pose as secret police.... Such things happened. These impostors, for reasons of their own, may have done away with the Maxwells.... At any rate he, Kilashov, had ordered the Security Police to make the most thorough search. Naturally he was just as much concerned about the mystery as was Peter himself....

In his spare time Peter began to make personal systematic visits to all the women’s and men’s jails in the Moscow district. In each jail he ordered the prisoners lined up before him. Gray, listless, burned-out faces without end that filled him with pity and horror; but among them he did not find the two he was so desperately looking for.

“Of course, Adams—coming back to the questions you raised the other day—of course people ought to consider it a privilege to work for the State, because when they work for the State they are working for themselves; they are working for each other...”

Peter stopped. He found that he was mechanically repeating the arguments of Bolshekov.

“I agree that people ought to feel this way,” said Adams, “but our experience shows that they just don’t. The hard fact is that some people simply have to do more unpleasant chores than others, and the only way we can get the unpleasant chores done is by compulsion. Not everybody can be a manager, or an actor or an artist or a violin player. Somebody has to dig the coal, collect the garbage, repair the sewers. Nobody will deliberately choose these smelly jobs. People will have to be assigned to them, forced to do them.”

“Well, perhaps we could compensate them in some way, Adams—say by letting them work shorter hours than the others.”

“We thought of that long ago, chief. It didn’t work. It unluckily turned out that it was only the pleasant jobs, like acting or violin playing, that could be reduced to short hours. But we simply can’t afford to have people work only a few hours on the nasty jobs. These are precisely the jobs that have to be done. We couldn’t afford to cut our coal production in half by cutting the hours in half, for example; and we just haven’t got the spare manpower to rotate. Besides, we found that on most such jobs a considerable loss of time and production was involved merely in changing shifts.”

“All right,” agreed Peter; “so under our socialist system we can’t have freedom in choice of work or occupation. But couldn’t we provide some freedom of initiative—at least for those who direct production? Our propaganda is always urging more initiative on the part of commissars or individual plant managers. Why don’t we get it?”

“Because a commissar or plant manager, chief, is invariably shot if his initiative goes wrong. The very fact that he was using his own initiative means that he was not following orders. How can you reconcile individual initiative with planning from the center? When we draw up our Five Year Plans, we allocate the production of hundreds of different commodities and services in accordance with what we assume to be the needs of the people. Now if every plant manager decided for himself what things his plant should produce or how much it should produce of them, our production would turn out to be completely unbalanced and chaotic.”

“Very well,” Peter said; “so we can’t permit the individual plant manager to decide what to produce or how much to produce of it. But this is certainly a big disadvantage. For if someone on the Central Planning Board doesn’t think of some new need to be satisfied, or some new way of satisfying an old need, then nobody thinks of it and nobody dares to supply it. But I have in mind something different from that. How can we encourage individual plant managers to devise more efficient ways of producing the things they are ordered to produce? If these plant managers can’t be encouraged to invent new or better consumption goods, at least they can be encouraged to invent new methods or machines to produce more economically the consumption goods they are ordered to produce, or to produce a higher quality of those consumption goods.”

“You’re just back to the same problem,” Adams said. “If I’m a plant manager, and I invent a new machine, I’ll have to ask the Central Planning Board to get somebody to build it, or to allocate the materials to me so that I can build it. In either case I’ll upset the preordained central plan. I’ll have a hard job convincing the Central Planning Board that my invention or experiment won’t fail. If my invention does fail, and it turns out that I have wasted scarce labor and materials, I will be removed and probably shot. The member of the Central Planning Board who approved my project will be lucky if he isn’t shot himself. Therefore, unless the success of my invention or experiment seems absolutely certain in advance, I will be well advised to do what everybody else does. Then if I fail, I can prove that I failed strictly according to the rules.... Now take your other suggestion, chief. Suppose I devise a more economical method of making the product assigned to my factory. I will probably need different proportions of labor and materials, or different kinds of labor and materials, than I would with the old method. And in that case I will again be upsetting the central plan.”

Peter sighed. “That doesn’t seem to leave much room under our system for initiative, improvement and progress.”

Adams shrugged his shoulders.

Peter lit a cigarette and thoughtfully blew some smoke rings.

“Very well then, Adams. So under our socialist system we can’t have freedom in choice of work or occupation; we can’t have freedom of initiative. But can’t we at least give people more freedom in the choice of what they consume?”

“How are you going to do that?” Adams asked. “We issue ration tickets for everything we produce, and we try to distribute them evenly—at least within each of the Four Functional Groups. We can’t let people have ration tickets for more than we produce. They complain about that already.”

“No, Adams; but some people like cigarettes and others don’t; some like beer and others don’t; some prefer spinach to potatoes, and some like it the other way round. Why not permit everyone his choice?”

“Well, maybe we could work out something better than the present rationing system, chief, but the fundamental problem remains. People can consume only what is produced. We must draw up our production plans in advance, on the basis of the known needs and assumed wants of consumers. And then... well, I repeat: people can consume only what is produced. So how can they have freedom of choice?”

“I think there are two answers to that,” said Peter, after blowing a few more smoke rings. “We could still give consumers considerable freedom of choice individually, even if they did not have much when considered collectively. In other words, out of the stock of goods already produced, we could devise some method under which one person could get more spinach if he preferred, and the other more potatoes, instead of each having to take the exact proportion in which the total supplies of spinach and potatoes were raised.”

“Well—maybe, chief. But I still insist that the fundamental problem would remain unsolved. Considered collectively, how can consumers have any freedom of choice? They have to take what there is.”

“But can’t we find out in advance what it is they really want, and then make that? In other words, can’t we guide production to anticipate the wants of consumers, instead of merely obliging consumers to take what we have produced?”

“We are always trying, chief; but it isn’t so simple. Suppose, for example, that in relation to the wants of consumers we turn out too many peanuts as compared with pins? Then we will run out of pins sooner than we run out of peanuts. In other words, people will use up their ration tickets for pins before they use them up for peanuts. They will then start taking peanuts because they can’t get any more pins—”

“Oh, come!”

“Well, change the illustration—They will start taking more spinach, for example, because they can’t get any more potatoes. But because they are entitled by their ration tickets to the entire supply of both, and because their need for goods exceeds the entire supply of goods, they will end by consuming the entire supply of spinach as well as of potatoes.”

“But if people consume all of one product before they turn to another,” asked Peter, “don’t we know that we are producing too little of the first or too much of the second?”

“Usually we do, chief. But we can’t know from that just how much more of the first we should have produced and how much less of the second.”

“Can’t we tell from the preceding rate at which the two products have been consumed?”

“No. Because if people begin to think that soap is going to run short before salt, they will all scramble for soap. Therefore soap will run short in the state commissaries sooner than otherwise. The relative rate at which soap is taken by consumers while it lasts will be faster than if people thought that both soap and salt were going to last them throughout the consuming year.”

“But can’t we keep making readjustments in the relative amounts produced, Adams, based on this experience, until we get consumption of soap and salt and everything else to come out even?”

“That’s what we are always trying to do, chief. But I still haven’t got to some of the real problems. The trouble is that very few things are consumed evenly throughout the year even if we should get the relative production of each thing exactly right. People don’t burn coal evenly throughout the year, but only in winter. And if they have the storage room, they ask for the entire supply they are entitled to as soon as the ration ticket permits it. Yet the fact that three-quarters of the whole supply of coal is asked for in the first week of the consuming year doesn’t necessarily mean that the coal supply is short or is going to run short. Again, ice is consumed mainly during the summer, and all sorts of other things are wanted only seasonally. The only reason people turn in their coupons for new clothes evenly each month throughout the year is that we stagger the validity dates on the clothes coupons in the first place so only one-twelfth become due each month.... And still again, some things, like vegetables and fruits, are consumed entirely within a few months of the year for the simple reason that that’s when they come on the market, and they won’t keep. In short, trying to figure relative shortages and surpluses by relative rates of consumption throughout the year is a tough problem. In most cases we who direct the economy have to solve it by pure guesswork.”

“Couldn’t we figure it out by mathematics?” asked Peter.

Adams grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “How are you going to find the mathematical formula for somebody’s wayward desires? How are you going to find the equation for when I want a cocktail—or whether I want a Marxattan or a Stalini?... And I haven’t even mentioned one problem. Suppose there is some product, or some potential product, which is not produced but which, if it were invented or discovered or produced, people would want in great quantities? How are you going to find by mathematics that people would want such a product if it existed? Or even that such a product is missing?”

Peter sighed. “It’s all pretty discouraging. We seem to be reduced to the conclusion that under our socialist system we can’t have freedom in choice of work or occupation and we can’t permit freedom of choice for consumers. Is that right?”

“People are free to use or not to use their ration tickets,” answered Adams.

“In other words,” said Peter, “they are free to consume what we tell them they can consume. They are free to consume what we, the rulers, have decided to produce.”

“Right, chief.”

There was a long pause.

“Well, I can think of one more kind of freedom,” Peter said, “and I am determined to create it. That is the freedom to criticize the government.”

Adams started. He seemed to waver between incredulity and alarm. “You mean that you would permit people to criticize the actions of the government, and perhaps even denounce the government, and go unpunished?”

“Exactly!”

“Why, chief, you and I would be destroyed in a few weeks! If we allowed people to criticize us with impunity they would lose all fear of us—all respect for us. There would be an explosion of criticism that would blow us out of our seats—out of Wonworld. And what would we accomplish? Our successors would, of course, immediately suppress criticism again, for their own survival. If we are going to make reforms, let’s find out for ourselves what’s wrong. Let’s make our reforms quietly, not under pressure....”

But Peter concluded that Adams was wedded to the status quo and would argue against any innovation whatever. He was determined to go ahead with at least this one great reform.

He issued a proclamation inviting criticism of the government. It promised that there would be no punishment if this criticism was constructive, truthful and responsible. The proclamation was published in all the government newspapers, broadcast on the radio, even published on billboards.

“This young idiot will soon hang himself,” Bolshekov confided to Kilashov, when he heard the news. “Maybe it won’t be necessary for us to lift a finger.”