Time Will Run Back

PART TWO: GROPING

Chapter 17

WHEN Stalenin regained consciousness he was, as the doctor had predicted, almost completely paralyzed on his right side. His talk was reduced to monosyllables: “No—yes—it—he—she—that—who—where—what?”

Particularly “what?”—asked in every connection, and sometimes without any apparent connection at all. Peter had constantly to guess what it was that Stalenin was asking about. His father seemed to understand a good deal that was said to him, and to be able to indicate his wishes. But his wishes, with the passage of time, became constantly more passive, except in things that concerned his immediate animal comforts.

But the stroke had brought about something far more remarkable than hemiplegia. It had completely transformed Stalenin’s character. The strength, the hardness, the brutality, the cynicism, melted away. He became gentle, childlike, affectionate.

For ten days after Stalenin’s stroke Peter spent every evening at his bedside. They were dreary vigils. At the same time that Stalenin’s supper was brought in, his food-taster would enter, hollow-cheeked and expressionless, and take a little something from everything on the tray, to make sure it was not poisoned.

When Stalenin was sitting up again Peter cut his visits down to three evenings a week. He found his father astonishingly easy to manage now. He discovered that he could get approval for almost any course of action he proposed, merely by the tone and manner in which he proposed it.

Peter’s first task, he was convinced by Adams, was to strip Bolshekov of any real power over the political and economic life of Wonworld and to assume it himself. But he felt it would be dangerous to do this in so pointed a way as to humiliate Bolshekov publicly. So he relieved him (by forging orders signed Stalenin) of his duties as Commissar of Production, Chief of the Central Planning Board, Chief of the Supreme Economic Council, and Chief of the Congress of Coordinators. Peter turned all these offices over to Adams, with the understanding that he himself was to make all the really crucial decisions.

To save face for Bolshekov, and to pacify him, Peter decided to appoint him Chief of the Armed Forces, and to announce in the name of Stalenin that this position was so important that it would occupy all of Bolshekov’s time.

“That is the worst thing you could do,” warned Adams. “Bolshekov will make the armed forces loyal to himself, not to you.”

“I have gone as far as I safely can for the present,” Peter said.

“There is only one safe course with Bolshekov,” said Adams. “You must liquidate him. Arrest him quickly and quietly; have him shot immediately; make no announcement unless you have to; if you do, accuse him of treachery; arrest everyone friendly to him, everyone capable of leading a revolt; wring confessions out of them that they are Bolshekovites, and plotted—”

“I’m not going to have anything to do with such methods,” Peter said. “If my mind is clear about any one thing today, it is that brutal and degraded means inevitably lead to brutal and degraded ends.”

“With Bolshekov in power, or even with Bolshekov alive and free, you are in danger of achieving nothing but your own downfall. And mine—if I may be permitted to refer to so minor a consequence. It’s his life or ours.”

“I’m not going to begin my deputized rule with a murder,” Peter answered. “I intend to strip Bolshekov of power, and I’ve gone as far as I can at the moment.”

“Will you do at least one thing?” pleaded Adams. “Make Bolshekov head of the Army and Navy, if you must, but at least turn over the Air Force to someone else.”

“Whom would you suggest?”

“Why not take that portfolio yourself? Just sign a decree by Stalenin appointing yourself to the job. You could design a very dramatic uniform for yourself.”

So Peter signed two new decrees, one appointing Bolshekov head of the Army and Navy and another appointing himself head of the Air Force. He forgot about the uniform.

He began to take up with Adams the problems that had been troubling him increasingly since his arrival in Moscow.

“I’m going to ask your advice,” he said, “on every important problem. I hope you won’t simply approve whatever I suggest. If you do I’ll make some fantastic mistakes. Can I count on you to be completely outspoken and candid with me?”

“Candor is what I like most. You can count on me absolutely.”

“We ought to be on a less formal basis,” said Peter. “It’s obviously so awkward for us to call each other ‘Your Highness* that we practically haven’t been calling each other anything at all. What is your first name?”

“My full name is Thomas Jefferson Adams. It’s my real name too. I never took a party name, like Stalenin or Bolshekov. Most people that know me well just call me Adams.”

“I’ll call you Adams, then. Will you call me Peter?”

Adams nodded. But he apparently felt awkward about it. He took to calling Peter “chief,” in a half-ironic, half-affectionate way, as a sort of compromise.

Peter began to speak about the poverty, misery, inefficiency, waste, tyranny, servility, and terror of Wonworld. “Surely it is possible, Adams, for mankind to devise a better system than this!”

“I agree that it is possible, chief. But I should like to remind you that the best minds in Wonworld had been working on this problem ever since the triumph of communism. Successive reforms only seem to substitute one set of evils for another.... This, of course, is only what a few of us in the Party have been saying to each other. Stalenin and Bolshekov are two of those to whom I have never dared to say it.” “But haven’t changes brought any increase of knowledge, any progress?”

“We always officially announce that they have. Every experiment we make must of course be pronounced a success, even when we abandon it. But personally—and entre-nous—I have never noticed any progress in my lifetime.”

“But before that?”

“Well, of course, if you believe the official histories—”

“Well, let’s put all moral, political and economic questions on one side for a moment,” Peter said, “and take merely technical and scientific progress.”

“I’ve gone into that question, chief, out of personal curiosity. So far as I can figure, in the whole century and a quarter since the founding of Wonworld we have on net balance made no technical progress whatever. We have improved a few practical things—or rather, we have applied what was already known in a few new directions. But in theoretical knowledge, as I told you once, we are actually far behind the level that the bourgeois scientists had reached in the last throes of the capitalistic world. Our official histories pooh-pooh it, but it seems to me that there is strong circumstantial evidence for thinking that the bourgeois scientists of the capitalist world had actually succeeded in splitting the atom. There are even grounds for believing that the bourgeois scientists had used this knowledge to invent an appallingly destructive bomb, and had actually used this. When I was a youngster, my father—the only American up to that time who had ever got to be a member of the Central Committee of the Party—once repeated whispers to me that the Soviet scientists stole the secret from the capitalist countries, with the help of bourgeois scientists and bourgeois fellow travelers, and that Russia got the jump on the capitalist world in using it. Some whispers went on to say that this, and not—as our histories have it—the inner technological decay of capitalism, was the real reason for the communist triumph. Apparently after our victory was complete, all the scientists who knew the atomic secrets were liquidated.”

“But surely,” said Peter, “nobody believes any of this melodramatic nonsense!”

“Oh, I’m not saying I believe it, chief—My father didn’t believe it; he merely cited it to show how fantastic the anticommunist lies could become.”

“It certainly shows what childish minds these anticommunists had,” Peter said.

“Yes, chief. We inner-circle communists have named this sort of thing ‘Buck Rogers’ stuff, after a notorious capitalist liar of that name.”

“Who was Buck Rogers?”

“He was the richest man of his time, and invented such tales to keep the masses in subjection.”

“Let’s get back, Adams, to this question of technological progress.”

“Well, my best guess, chief, as I’ve said, is that we are now technologically in the state of the capitalist world in the capitalist years circa 1918 to 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.”

“Didn’t capitalism make any technological progress in the decades after that?”

“Personally, I think it did,” said Adams. “One hears stories of airplanes propelled by jet power that went faster than the speed of sound—”

“More Buck Rogers stuff?”

Adams shrugged his shoulders.

“Anyway,” announced Peter with determination, “there is going to be progress now. Adams nodded a loyal but skeptical assent. “Where do we begin?”

“That is the question that has been bothering me for some time,” said Peter. “There are so many places to begin.... But the first thing that needs to be done is to free the people from terror, to free them from servility and groveling.... We must give them freedom from fear.”

“From fear of what?”

“From fear of us, of course. From fear of the government.”

“But fear is the only thing that keeps people in line! If people didn’t fear the government, if they didn’t fear our police, how would we be able to keep them from committing every sort of crime?”

“Crime would continue to be made illegal,” said Peter, “and people would be punished for it by penalties graded according to the seriousness of the crime. But crime must be carefully defined by law.”

“It already is.”

“Maybe. But we should change the laws so that nobody can be arrested unless he is charged with a definite crime. He should be told what that crime is. He should be allowed to confront his accusers and to answer them. These accusers should present real evidence. The man accused should be assumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty and not, as now, the other way round. And maybe—I haven’t yet thought this out—the accused ought to be entitled, if he wants, to have someone else who knows the law better than he does, and who knows better than he does what his rights are, to defend him. Maybe the government itself ought to provide him with such a defender.”

“I shudder to think what would happen, chief, if the cards were stacked so much in favor of the criminals. You would practically never be able to find anyone guilty. The criminals would certainly be freed from fear—”

“I think it can be made to work,” Peter said. “Anyway, I’m going to try.... Don’t misunderstand me. Crime will continue to be illegalized. But each crime will be carefully defined, and nobody will be punished unless he is guilty of an act that had already been defined as a crime before he did it. We are no longer going to have acts declared to be crimes retroactively.’

“But suppose somebody does something that is clearly antisocial, that is clearly against the interests of the State, and we have merely neglected beforehand to define that act as a crime?”

“Then that will be our fault, Adams, and we will have to define it as a crime so that we can punish it in the future. But we will not punish anybody for having done it before it was defined as a crime. If I may invent a term, we will not pass any ex post facto laws.”

“It seems to me, chief, that you have thought of a most ingenious way of tying the government’s hands in advance. How can we guess ahead of time every crime that anyone can think of committing? And what’s the use of having prosecutors and judges if we are not going to allow them to exercise any discretion?”

“The discretion of the judges will be exercised,” replied Peter, “in interpreting and applying the existing body of law. The judge will have to decide whether the evidence presented by the prosecutor or the plaintiff is substantial enough to show that the accused actually did the act with which he is charged. But first the judge will have to decide whether the act with which a man is charged would fall within the pre-existing definition of a crime.”

“How are you going to get a judge to act with all this impartiality and self-restraint?”

“We’ll remove any judge who doesn’t.”

“In other words, chief, we’ll remove any judge who doesn’t act the way we should like him to act. Stalenin has been doing that already.”

“But the government until now, Adams, has been removing judges for being too merciful or too impartial. I will remove them for being too harsh or too biased.”

“This arrangement then, chief, will last only as long as your own power lasts—certainly no longer than there is someone in power who feels exactly as you do.”

“Well then,” said Peter, reconsidering, “we will have to make the judiciary independent of the whims of the government.” “Won’t the judges be part of the government?”

“Well, independent of the executive arm of the government.”

“Pardon me, chief, but aren’t you contradicting what you just said a minute ago? You were going to remove any judge who did not act with impartiality and self-restraint, and did not conscientiously apply the law as it stood. If you make your judges independent of you, how are you going to discipline them and make them carry out their duties and powers without abuse?”

Peter lit a cigarette.

“You’re right. I’ll have to give all this more thought.... But what I am trying to do is to establish what we might call a rule of law. The only way, as I see it, in which we can free the people from constant fear of their own government is to set up a definite code of rules, a definite set of laws, and then say to them: ‘As long as you live in accordance with these rules, as long as you stay within these laws, you are free to do whatever else you wish without fear. You need no longer be in terror of being sent to a concentration camp or being shot just because you have incurred the personal displeasure of the judge, or of some government official, or of someone higher up than yourself. If you are accused, your accusers must definitely prove your guilt, instead of forcing you to try to prove your innocence. And above all, no so-called “confession” will be wrung from you by threats or fatigue or force or torture. As long as you stay within the pre-established code of laws, you are free to do as you like.’ Such a rule of law, as I see it, is the only thing that will free the people from terror and from the arbitrary decisions of those in power.”

“That’s a very pretty picture, chief, but the problem isn’t quite that easy. For example, what things are you going to legalize and illegalize?”

“Well... I will illegalize murder, and assault and theft, and other forms of injury to other people—”

“I have something more fundamental in mind,” interrupted

Adams. “How are you going to get people to work? How are you going to get them to do the unpleasant tasks rather than the pleasant ones? How are you going to get them to do their best on the tasks to which they have been assigned? These, and not the comparatively infrequent crimes you have just mentioned, are the problems that come up every day with everybody.”

Peter sighed, and thoughtfully put out his cigarette stub. It was six o’clock, and he was due for dinner with his father. “That, Comrade Adams,” he said wearily, “is a problem we will have to solve some other day.”