Time Will Run Back

Chapter 22

PETER stood before the full-length mirror and admired his brilliant new Air Force uniform.

He had finally succumbed to Adams’ argument that he must build himself up as a public figure to counter Bolshekov’s influence, and above all that he must solidify his relations with the Air Force. So he had ordered this afternoon’s air maneuvers over Moscow and arranged to review them in the Red Square from the top of Lenin’s Tomb. Following Adams’ advice he had declared a half holiday and ordered all the factory heads of the Moscow district to march their workers to the square to insure a huge audience.

The uniform was pure white, the only pure white uniform in Wonworld with the exception of his father’s. Adams had arranged to have it covered with ribands and medals. Peter hadn’t the slightest idea of what any of them stood for, but in addition to the uniform they made him look so glamorous that even he himself was impressed. Forms, flash, ostentation, pomp, ceremony, distort the judgment of everybody, he thought, even those who pride themselves most on their realism or cynicism.

Sergei entered. “Colonel Torganev and your escort wait upon you, Your Highness.”

“I’ll be right out, Sergei.” He took one last look in the mirror, put his cap on at a rakish angle, and left.

Centered among his air officers, at the top of Lenin’s Tomb, with a sea of faces as far as his eye could reach looking toward him, Peter raised his arm. The band blared forth, and the air maneuvers began....

“How much are we producing, Adams?”

Adams looked bewildered.

“How much is Wonworld producing?” repeated Peter.

“Of what?”

“Of everything.”

“That’s a meaningless question, chief. I can tell you how much we are producing of iron, of wheat, of cotton, of shoes, of whisky, or of any other single thing—At any rate, I can telephone the Central Planning Board and ask them to look up the statistics. But I can’t tell you how much we are producing of ‘everything.’ That question doesn’t mean anything.”

“I ask you how much we are producing,” said Peter, “and you offer to tell me how much we are producing of thousands of different things. I could read tables and tables of such figures and be completely groggy at the end, and know no more than I did before. All I want is one figure: the total.”

“But, chief, how can you possibly have such a figure? What is 200,000,000 pairs of shoes added to 1,000,000,000 bushels of wheat added to 1,000,000 quarts of gin? It’s 1,201,000,000—of what? You can only add things of precisely the same kind—otherwise the total is meaningless.”

“Let’s take the shoes,” said Peter. “Those shoes are of different sizes and qualities, aren’t they?”

“Of course.”

“So if you have a pair of bad baby shoes, made for Proletarian children, and a pair of the best men’s shoes, made for the Protectorate, you add them to get two pairs of shoes?”

Adams nodded.

“And it’s by adding all different sizes, types and qualities of shoes that you get your total, say, of 200,000,000 pairs?” Adams nodded. “And again, Adams, your 1,000,000,000 bushels of wheat represents wheat of all different grades, quality and condition?”

Adams nodded.

“So,” concluded Peter, “even your totals of individual commodities are rather meaningless, aren’t they?”

“Perhaps they are, chief; but you’re only proving my point. That would make the total of ‘everything,’ if you could figure it, still more meaningless.”

“And you prefer thousands of different meaningless figures, Adams, to one single meaningless figure?”

“But when these totals consist of the same commodities, chief, they do at least have some definite meaning. If you started breaking down shoes to subtotals in accordance with different sizes and qualities, you might end with 200,000,000 different classifications of shoes alone, for I suppose there are no two pairs of shoes exactly alike. You’ve got to be reasonable about these things. To know that we make, say, 200,000,000 pairs of shoes a year, no matter how they vary in size and type and quality, is good enough for practical decisions.”

“It is precisely enough knowledge for making practical decisions that I’m trying to get,” said Peter. “Suppose somebody in the Central Planning Board thought that we needed more shoes. And suppose we could make them only by taking more labor away from the production of leather belts, or even away from the production of wheat. Suppose we increased the production of shoes from 200,000,000 to 250,000,000 pairs a year, but only at the cost of reducing the production of wheat from 1,000,000,000 to 800,000,000 bushels a year. Would we be better off or worse off?”

“That’s hard to say. We could only judge from the volume of complaints.”

“The complaints of the people who would be shot for complaining?”

“No, chief; but from—from the judgment of members of the Central Planning Board.”

“Well, suppose you and I were two members of the Board, and that you thought we were better off as a result of the change and I thought we were worse off. How would the decision be made between us?”

“Well, you’re the boss,” said Adams, grinning.

“Let’s skip that. Suppose I couldn’t make up my own mind. Is there any way I could decide the point? Would there be any objective guidance?”

Adams shrugged his shoulders.

“If we were producing 250,000,000 pairs of shoes and 800,000,000 bushels of wheat,” Peter continued, “would we be producing more on net balance than when we were producing 200,000,000 pairs of shoes and 1,000,000,000 bushels of wheat—or would we be producing less?”

Adams shrugged his shoulders again. “I suppose it would depend on the relative urgency of our needs.”

“And who would decide that?”

“Perhaps we would have to interview the entire Wonworld population, man by man, woman by woman, and child by child—assuming we could get honest answers free from fear.”

“So when we compare the hundreds of different commodities we produced last year, Adams, with the hundreds of different commodities we are producing this year, with some totals up and some totals down, there is no way of knowing whether, on net balance, our total production has gone up or down, or how much?”

“Our overall production this year is 14.3 per cent higher than last year,” replied Adams, deadpan.

Peter stared at him. “But I thought—”

“That is the official figure of the Central Planning Board, chief.

That is the official figure of the Five Year Plan.”

“How was it arrived at?”

Adams’ face slowly broadened into a grin. “I arrived at it.

By divine revelation, by direct communion with the spirit of Karl Marx.”

“You mean you just pulled the figure out of the air?”

“For propaganda purposes. It’s part of our indispensable statistical demagogy. If it weren’t precise, people would begin to think it was a mere guess.” He smiled shrewdly.

“But seriously then, Adams, strictly between you and me, we haven’t the least knowledge of whether total overall production has gone up or down?”

“Not the least.”

“And no way of finding out?”

“Can you think of any, chief?”

“But the question has to be answered,” said Peter. “Otherwise we are planning completely in the dark. Otherwise we are flying blind. Our resources of labor and land and the tools of production are strictly limited; we simply must know how to apportion the production of thousands of different commodities and services in order to provide most satisfactorily for everybody’s need. And we can’t even begin to solve that problem unless we have”—his mind groped for the concept—“some common... some common unit of measurement. If we find that we want to produce more overcoats, and that we can do so only by producing fewer trousers, or shoes—or even cigarettes—we have to find which commodity we can afford to produce less of. And therefore we have to find out how many overcoats are equivalent to how many cigarettes, or how many cigarettes to how many—clarinets, or what not. And we can only do that by finding some quantity or quality common to all of them.”

Adams thought a moment. “How about weight?” he suggested. “You are trying to measure the quantity of production. Very well: we measure the quantity of coal produced by the number of tons. We measure the production of pig iron and steel by tonnages. We can convert wheat production and all other production into tonnage figures—and so we can get the total overall tonnage of production.”

“That doesn’t seem to me to be any better than adding bushels of wheat to pairs of shoes and quarts of whisky,” said Peter. “How does weight matter? Are we going to add a ton of fine watches to a ton of coal? If you add a ton of gravel to a ton of binoculars you get two tons—of what? Would such a total mean anything? Wouldn’t such information be entirely worthless for practical guidance—or even as an abstract figure?”

“But what other standard have you?” asked Adams. “Would you like volume better than weight? Would you like to measure production by the cubic foot?” “A cubic foot of feathers, I suppose,” said Peter sarcastically, “to count for as much as a cubic foot of platinum?” “Well, weight and volume are the only common units I can think of, chief.”

“For our purposes they are meaningless,” said Peter. “There’s no difference in weight between coal still unmined in the earth and the same coal in the furnace of this building. If tonnages are what matter we may as well count them in the earth itself, without going to all the trouble of digging the coal up, breaking it, washing it, sorting it by sizes, loading it on freight cars, unloading it into trucks, delivering it to houses and factories, and so on.” He thought of another gibe: “And what is the weight of a haircut? What is the volume of a shoeshine?”

“Maybe we could measure production by energy, chief! By kilowatt hours!”

“Worse and worse,” said Peter. “You can measure electrical power by kilowatt hours, and then you have to stop.”

“Maybe we could find certain equivalents, chief.”

“Well, find them. A bushel of wheat is equivalent to how many kilowatt hours? Maybe,” Peter added in an even more ironic tone, “we could measure production in triangles!”

“Well, you raised the problem, chief. I didn’t.”

“I apologize for my sarcasm, Adams. You have no more responsibility for solving this problem than I have. But we’ve got to solve it. Otherwise our boasted planning is meaningless—except on the basis of supplying people with their most primitive and obvious needs as we estimate those needs. We’ve got to have some common unit to measure all our production. Otherwise, I repeat, we’re working completely in the dark.”

He lit a cigarette. Adams took a pinch of snuff, and got up and walked back and forth. He began warming up to the subject.

“I’ve got it—now I’ve really got it!” he shouted finally. “It’s incredible that I didn’t think of it before, chief! I went a few weeks ago to the Politburo’s private library and took out the master copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital—the one unexpurgated copy—at least they claim this one’s unexpurgated—and I’ve been studying afresh all these weeks since you accused me of being a deviationist. And here I’d already forgotten that Marx raised and solved that very problem in the first pages of the first volume. It’s solved, it’s solved! All our work has already been done for us! The greatness of Marx was beyond bounds!”

From Adams such enthusiasm was amazing.

“What’s the solution?” asked Peter skeptically.

“I think it would be better if I didn’t depend on memory, chief, but gave it to you exactly in Marx’s own words.”

“All right.” Peter glanced at his wrist watch. “It’s already nearly six, and I’m due for dinner at my father’s apartment. Bring that master copy tomorrow.”