Time Will Run Back

Chapter 9

BOLSHEKOV motioned Peter to a chair.

“There is something,” he began, “that I perhaps failed to explain yesterday. You asked how I happened to know so much about the history of the Ancients and the Dark Ages when all the records had been destroyed. I told you that what I knew was the agreed-upon history of those times, the history we had decided to teach. But I should have made it clear that a few specialists among the Protectors are permitted to know more about the past than the rest of Wonworld. If you think about the matter a moment it will be easy to understand why this is so. The old fallacies, the old errors, the old vicious and dangerous doctrines held before and during the Dark Ages are liable to recur. They might recur through the discovery of some old book—though that doesn’t seem likely—or by a sort of spontaneous combustion. In any case we must be prepared with the answers. So a small group of scholars among the Protectors are permitted access to some things that it would be too dangerous to allow everyone to have access to. That’s how you—prematurely—happen to know about Mozart’s music, for example.”

“You mean, Your Highness, that this is withheld from the masses?”

“You’d better not be caught playing it in their hearing! I might give you a better illustration from economics. The version of Karl Marx’s Capital that is available in the State bookstores is, of course, an abridged and expurgated volume. It is not a mere translation into the Marxanto of Marx’s original book.”

“Why not?”

“Because if our communist ancestors had retained all the passages in which Marx denounced capitalism it might have been possible for someone to reconstruct from them what capitalism was actually like, and to try to restore it. It would be obviously foolish to allow any such idea to get into anyone’s head. The people, left to themselves, are capable of any sort of perverse idea.”

“But might not the same idea occur to a Protector?”

“There we have powerful safeguards. In the first place, the Protectors comprise less than one in a hundred out of the whole population. You will gradually come to realize how enormous are the power and prestige which that confers. No Protector risks his position lightly. In the second place, our communist ancestors were not so foolish as to permit even the Protectors complete access to Marx’s Capital and the other sacred writings in the original. Even the special editions for the Protectors have been edited in translation—abridged and expurgated—but not as much as the editions for the masses. We must give the scholars of the Protectorate just enough knowledge to be ready with answers should any old errors reappear.”

“But isn’t all this, Your Highness, a class system?”

“Nothing of the kind! Nobody gets any higher income than anybody else! Nobody exploits anybody else! Never confuse a difference in function with a difference in class.”

“What about all these differences in uniforms?”

“They simply mark differences in function. I assumed you had been told about that. The Protectors include less than 1 percent of the population, and the Deputies only about 10 per cent. As their names imply, they are merely the instruments of the Ruling Proletariat-—their spokesmen, their representatives. They act only in the name of the Proletariat, which constitutes three-fourths of the whole population.”

“If the Proletariat constitutes 75 per cent of the population, the Deputies 10 per cent and the Protectors 1 per cent,” said Peter, “that still leaves 14 percent unaccounted for.”

Bolshekov gave him a sharp glance. “You are an excellent mathematician,” he said drily. “But the 14 per cent may be disregarded. They’re lucky to be alive. They are in our Correction Camps. We shall visit one some time.... Today I am taking you to our new workers’ dormitories. They are my own project.”

A limousine guarded by sentries was waiting for them, with a chauffeur and an armed guard in the front seat. They drove to the outskirts of the city and pulled up before a row of drab new one-story wooden structures with tar-paper roofs and siding.

An obsequious commissar came out to welcome them.

“Male quarters first,” ordered Bolshekov.

The first building they entered consisted of a long narrow room lined with regularly spaced single iron beds on each side, as in a hospital or an army barracks. The beds were made up haphazardly, and the room was deserted except for a few attendants.

The three-man inspection party marched through. The floor was unswept, the windows dirty.

They went through still another barracks of the same sort, then through a smaller building with washstands, toilets and urinals, then through a mess hall with long tables in the center and backless benches on each side. A kitchen was at one end. The kitchen was filled with cooks, helpers, and the odor of garbage, sweat and boiling cabbage soup.

“The lunch period will begin in an hour,” explained the commissar.

“Female quarters,” ordered Bolshekov.

The only difference Peter noticed between the men’s and women’s sleeping quarters was a crisscross of overhead wires, like those he had seen in the room occupied by Edith and her father, supporting pulled-back curtains.

A woman commissar joined the party to conduct them through.

“All these are just temporary quarters, I presume?” said Peter.

“Everything on earth—except communism—is temporary,” was Bolshekov’s tart reply. “I think these buildings excellent for their purpose. Of course we would like to have them bigger and better—made of steel and glass. But we simply can’t get the labor and materials for all the tasks to be done. I will give you the statistics showing the enormous number of square feet of living space we have added in the last two years!”

Perhaps if you talked of it simply in terms of square feet, thought Peter, it might sound good.

“This is only for single men and women, I suppose,” he asked. “When a man and a woman register permanently with each other, I assume they are assigned to quarters by themselves, where they can raise their children?”

Bolshekov gave him a glance of mingled pity and contempt. “This so-called family life you speak of is merely a relic of an ancient capitalistic institution called marriage. Such relics, unfortunately, still exist, because our communist ancestors lacked the courage to follow their new vision to its logical end. I’m making it my business to rectify this. Marx and Engels unequivocally demanded the abolition of the bourgeois family. They pointed out that it was based on capital, on private gain. They denounced the disgusting bourgeois claptrap about the family and ‘the hallowed correlation of parent and child.’ I have full authority by the Politburo to stamp out the last vestige of the bourgeois family—at least among the Proletarians, in all cities of 50,000 population and over. When I get through, nobody—at least among the Proletarians—is going to be anybody’s property! Nobody is going to belong to anybody!”

“But, Your High—”

“In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed out that ‘bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common.’ All that the communists at most could be accused of wanting to do, they said, was ‘to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized communization of women.’ “

“The collective use of women now means the liberation of women,” explained the woman commissar.

“Exactly,” said Bolshekov. “Commissar, will you tell Comrade Uldanov how the system works?”

“Proletarian men and women,” she said to Peter, as if talking to a child, “are permitted to have sexual relations on Marxday and Stalinsday nights. All that is necessary is for a male and female to come together to the license bureau, not less than twenty-four hours in advance, and take out a license, good for the date stamped. The female is then permitted to close the curtains around her bed for an hour—”

“Still a concession to the old bourgeois fetish of privacy,” admitted Bolshekov, “but we move by stages.”

“No single couple,” continued the woman commissar, “may receive licenses for more than a single month without change of partners. Prolonged registration together would lead to a tendency on the part of each partner to believe that he or she belonged to the other. This would lead to jealousy.”

“And even keep alive concepts of private property,” added Bolshekov.

“What about children resulting from—” Peter asked.

“These are taken to the public nurseries,” said the woman commissar, “and brought up and educated in public institutions.”

“You’ll see all this some other day,” Bolshekov promised him. “The children are assigned license numbers,” continued the woman commissar, “that have no relation to the license numbers of their parents. No mother is allowed to know the number of her child. That again might breed ideas of belonging, of private property.”

“In short,” said Bolshekov, “we can’t afford to tolerate any ‘family’ loyalties in danger of being put ahead of loyalty to the communist state.”

“Your Highness,” said the woman commissar, “may I ask a question?”

Bolshekov nodded curtly.

“One of our histories—Valik’s,” she continued, “—says that the idea of separating children immediately from their parents actually originated with a bourgeois named Plato, and that all that Marx and Engels asked for at first was free love and free cohabitation; and there have been some disputes among us regarding the present official party line.”

“That history is being withdrawn,” said Bolshekov. “There was nobody named Plato. And there is nobody named Valik.” He looked at her icily.

“That’s precisely what I’ve been saying, Your Highness,” said the woman commissar.

They inspected another female dormitory. In this a girl of about eighteen was just getting up from one of the beds. The woman commissar smilingly introduced her as SL-648, a Stakhanovite worker who had broken a production record one day last week. As a special reward she had been allowed this morning to stay in bed till noon.

As they talked with her the girl proceeded to change her clothes. She took off her pajama top. Peter’s heart beat faster. No one else was embarrassed. The girl unbuttoned her pajama trousers and let them slip to the floor. The blood rushed to Peter’s face.

Bolshekov gave her a friendly pinch on the buttocks. She smiled proudly, and leisurely put on her gray blouse and slacks. When they were outside, the woman commissar was dismissed. Bolshekov took the man commissar aside.

“The floors and windows in the men’s dormitories were filthy. Who’s fault?” “I can’t say, Your Highness, I—” “Somebody must be sent to a Correction Camp for that within the next twenty-four hours. We must have an example!”

“Yes, Your Highness.”