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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59252 ***
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+                             FIRTH'S WORLD
+
+                          BY IRVING COX, JR.
+
+                _His world was Utopia inhabited only by
+            wealthy, brilliant, creative, ambitious people;
+              it was the ultimate in freedom, exempt from
+          taxes, social problems, petty responsibilities...._
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+                Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1955.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+Let him go. It's quite safe to leave us. I want to talk to him.
+
+Sit over there, Chris, where you can be comfortable.
+
+A paradox, isn't it? You were taught we may never go back. Now I've
+authorized the building of the rocket. From your point of view you
+were justified in trying to destroy it. I'm violating the regulations;
+you weren't. But time changes the shape of the truth, Chris; it isn't
+static. No one had the insight, then, to grasp the insanity of John
+Firth's dream. People hated Firth or envied him; but no one called him
+mad.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+John Firth was an industrialist; yet far more than that,
+too--politician, scientist, financier, even an artist of sorts. There
+was nothing he couldn't do; and few things he didn't do superbly
+well. That accounts for his philosophy. He never understood his own
+superiority. He honestly believed that all men could achieve what he
+had, if they set their minds to it.
+
+"Lazy, incompetent fools!" he would say. "The world's full of them. And
+they've elected a government of fools, taxing me to support the others."
+
+As billionaires go, John Firth was very young. Six months after World
+Government became an established reality, Earth ships began to explore
+the skies; and in less than a year Mars, Venus and the Earth had formed
+a planetary confederacy.
+
+A new feeling came to men when the burden of war-fear was lifted from
+their minds. Men were free--free for the first time in centuries. Their
+full energies were channeled into invention, exploration, experiment.
+The Earth was like a frontier town: booming, uproarious, lusty,
+dynamic--but with a social conscience: poverty and deprivation for none
+and unlimited opportunity for all. For Man--that abstract symbol of
+mass humanity--it was the best of all possible worlds. Yet there were
+misfits; John Firth was one of them.
+
+"We're coddling people," he said. "We're teaching them to live on
+charity, on government hand-outs--and I'm expected to pay for it all.
+Cut them loose; let them sink or swim for themselves. If some of them
+don't survive--well, they won't; that's all. We'd be a stronger people
+if we could rid ourselves of the leeches."
+
+He was a man of the new age,--stubbornly holding to ideas from the old.
+
+And then the Stranger came to see him. We don't know who the Stranger
+was or where he came from. A force of evil, perhaps--the symbol of
+Satan refurbished and streamlined to fit the concepts of the modern
+world.
+
+"I've been reading your political pamphlets, Mr. Firth," the Stranger
+said. "You hold rather--rather fascinating views."
+
+"Now that I'm suitably flattered," Firth answered, "may I ask what
+particular form of hand-out you want?"
+
+"None. I've something for sale." The Stranger took a pamphlet out of
+his pocket. "But tell me this, first: do you honestly believe what
+you've written here?"
+
+"Every word of it. If I could find my sort of world anywhere in the
+universe, I'd pull up stakes in a minute and--"
+
+"You can create your own world, Mr. Firth."
+
+"Do you suppose I haven't tried? In every election I back my candidates
+with all I have--prestige, propaganda, money. It does no good. The
+fools prefer to be governed by other fools, like themselves."
+
+"I didn't mean here, Mr. Firth." The Stranger smiled as he lit a
+cigarette. "You see, my friend, I have a world for sale--a brand new
+world."
+
+"One of the asteroids?" Firth laughed bitterly. "I could have done that
+years ago. They're too close to the commercial orbits. How long would
+it be before one of our ships found the place? Then I'd be right back
+in the system again--and a laughing stock as well."
+
+"This is a planetoid beyond Pluto. It'll be generations before any of
+our ships--"
+
+"A frozen world? No thanks!"
+
+"Only on the surface. It's a hollow sphere, with a granite crust half
+a mile thick. Inside there's a suggestion of passageways and caverns,
+which may have been made artificially. Perhaps this was an outpost of a
+race which lived and died billions of years before our time."
+
+"An archeological gold mine!"
+
+"But Science pays so little, Mr. Firth. I'm interested in cash, not
+prestige."
+
+"Why should I pay you anything? You've told me where it is and what it
+is. I can find it for myself."
+
+The Stranger laughed. "I said beyond Pluto; that covers a lot of
+space, Mr. Firth." He paused for a moment. "My price is the stock in
+your Martian mines. Convert the rest of your holdings into any form of
+wealth that seems convenient and usable. In your case, Mr. Firth, you
+_can_ take it with you--to your own world. Think of it! No taxes; no
+social problems; no unfortunate masses to prey on your conscience; no
+government but your own."
+
+That was the beginning of the dream. The seed of the idea grew in John
+Firth's mind until it over-shadowed everything else. It became an
+obsession, driving him so that he had no peace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the course of a year Firth and the Stranger imported and
+installed the machinery to make the sphere livable: hydroponic tanks,
+air machines, gravitators, electric generators and an Atomic Power
+Core. In the crust of the planetoid they found enough fissionable
+material to keep Firth's world running for an eternity. They laid
+out the decorative landscaping, planned the living quarters, the
+laboratories, the amusement hall and the university.
+
+It is interesting to speculate how much the Stranger contributed to the
+scheme; and it is an ironic speculation, for as soon as the larger idea
+took shape in Firth's mind, his only logical course was to murder the
+Stranger.
+
+Firth could allow no outsider to know of the planetoid. To him it
+had become far more than a means of personal escape. It was to be an
+archive for the survival of John Firth's ideas, for the survival of
+civilization itself. John Firth believed that sincerely.
+
+Firth's world--that magnificent dream which was like a holy
+crusade--was founded on murder, deception and greed. The reasoning of
+fanaticism engenders its own kind of ruthlessness. As soon as John
+Firth had disposed of the Stranger, he began to select his colonists.
+Men who by his definition, were not fools. He had to make his choice
+very carefully. If he misjudged his candidate and his proposition was
+rejected, Firth had given away his secret. Any man who refused him had
+to die. Murder was Firth's only guarantee of silence.
+
+But he made few mistakes. John Firth was a good judge of men--his kind
+of men. All of them were wealthy, ambitious, brilliant. Nearly three
+hundred men and women were recruited.
+
+They came here to escape; the record tells us that until we gag over
+the repetition. But to escape what? Taxes they resented unanimously,
+and restrictions on their freedom. They placed a value on the ownership
+of property that we can no longer understand. But, if you read the
+record closely, all that becomes superfluous. The thing they wanted to
+escape was responsibility. Responsibility to their fellow men.
+
+Physically, Firth's world was a paradise. It still is. Yet the
+dissolution began before the last colonist had arrived. Here they
+had assembled their wealth--in terms of machines, comforts, books,
+art treasures, amusements, laboratory equipment. They were entirely
+free from the burden of taxation. But, somehow, their wealth lost its
+meaning.
+
+They claimed they had not withdrawn from the world in order to
+hibernate and decay among their luxuries. They wanted freedom in order
+to create, to invent, to experiment as they pleased. And they had
+that in Firth's world: a maximum opportunity for the development of
+individual initiative. For a short time they turned out a wonderful
+assortment of new gadgets and new machines, but slowly their industry
+ground to a stop.
+
+If they had faced the truth then--but they were far too human to admit
+the failure of the dream. Instead, they found a scapegoat. John Firth
+has left us a record of a conversation he had with Adam Boetz; it is
+typical of their thinking at the time.
+
+Boetz, as you may know, was one of the outstanding physicists of his
+day; he had created and built Atomic Cores, Incorporated, until it was
+the largest power company in the Confederation.
+
+John Firth met Boetz one morning on the golf course in the recreation
+cavern.
+
+"Adam!" Firth cried, with his usual, boisterous good-humor. "I never
+thought I'd find you out here at this time of day."
+
+"Why not?" The physicist shrugged. "I'm tired, Firth. I had to do my
+four hour shift in the light plant last night. Maybe I'll feel like
+working in the lab tomorrow--and maybe not. I'm scheduled for a shift
+in hydroponics then."
+
+"The shifts are short, Adam, and--"
+
+"Still too long for me. I'm not used to so much physical labor." The
+physicist's lips curled in a sneer. "So very democratic, isn't it,
+Firth? Back home I hired men to do that kind of work for me."
+
+Firth clapped him heartily on the back. "But we have other
+compensations, Adam. Four hours out of twenty-four is a small price to
+pay for freedom."
+
+"Twenty-eight hours a week. Remember the new labor law the Earth
+government put into effect before we left? It proscribed a maximum
+work week of twenty-five hours for every man. We came here to escape
+restrictions, but we've saddled ourselves with more hours of manual
+labor than the least skilled laborer has to do on Earth. Firth! I'm not
+a manual laborer; neither is anyone else you've brought here."
+
+"Do you want to go back?"
+
+"What answer can I make to that? We're executives, Firth; but here
+we're a brain without a body. We can formulate the orders, but we've
+neither arms nor legs to carry them out."
+
+"In other words, you're saying we should import a labor force to do our
+basic work for us?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"They're the fools, Adam, the incompetents! On Earth they were the
+millstones around our necks--envying us, hating us, building a prison
+for us with their laws and their regulations."
+
+"All very true, Adam, where the government is in their hands. But we
+could keep them under control."
+
+After that John Firth heard the same complaint from the others, over
+and over. They said they could not take advantage of their freedom
+because of the chores they had to do to keep Firth's world functioning.
+
+Firth called a meeting of the colonists. It was the closest
+approximation to a government they had; government itself was one of
+the things they wanted to escape. They unanimously agreed that a labor
+force had to be recruited, and they settled upon one hundred and fifty
+as the necessary number, half of them to be women. Working eight hours
+a day, such a force could perform the work of Firth's world, yet the
+colonists would outnumber them two-to-one and the labor force would not
+be large enough to constitute a threat.
+
+"We'll insist that they marry, of course," Adam Boetz said, "and each
+couple will provide us with two children, so that we shall always have
+a stabilized labor supply."
+
+"We're talking," one of the women whispered, "as if we were buying
+cattle!"
+
+"We are."
+
+"But how can you recruit men and women under these conditions? What
+inducement can you possibly offer them?"
+
+Firth smiled. "When we find the people who meet our specifications,
+they'll come; don't worry. In the days of the sailing ships the
+technique was called shanghaiing."
+
+"What specifications, Mr. Firth?"
+
+"They must be young, strong, healthy, single--"
+
+"And low-level morons," Adam Boetz cut in. "Imbeciles won't give us any
+trouble later on."
+
+To his other crimes, John Firth then added kidnapping; the end
+justified the means. He was creating a world and that world would save
+civilization. I doubt that his conscience ever troubled him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within two years the second group of colonists was established in
+Firth's world. Apparently they made an easy adjustment to their new
+environment. We have no record of complaints or protests. They were
+docile, obedient people. They took orders well; they liked to be told
+what to do; they needed very little supervision.
+
+The first colonists were entirely free, then, of any sort of
+work-responsibility. For a while they went back to work in their
+laboratories or in the university--inventing, exploring, accumulating
+their store of knowledge. In imperceptible stages, however, their
+interest lagged, their production came to a halt again. This time they
+had no excuse, no scapegoat.
+
+We can assume that some of them faced the truth squarely and honestly,
+yet they had chosen Firth's world and there was no way to turn back.
+We find only one actual hint of their despondency, in a diary page
+written by an unknown woman.
+
+
+    _Karl stayed home again to-day. He has nearly finished the design
+    for his machine, but he has no more enthusiasm to complete it. I
+    know how he feels; I can't go on with my painting, either. We have
+    no purpose, no goal to achieve. We sit isolated in space, counting
+    over the wealth of our talent and ability; but we can make no use
+    of it. I wish I knew how many of the others think as I do, but
+    I'm afraid to ask._
+
+The key to understanding them, is that last sentence. Perhaps they
+all felt her disillusionment, but they had to pretend. Firth's world
+couldn't be at fault. If they were dissatisfied, it was because of a
+failure within themselves. At all costs, the flaw had to be hidden from
+their neighbors.
+
+Their first labor trouble was a welcome interlude in the creeping
+boredom. The docile labor battalion suddenly discovered they were
+being overworked. Just what they could have done in Firth's world with
+shorter hours, no one knows. They staged a spotty, amateurish strike;
+speakers made reference to the labor laws applicable on the Earth and
+demanded better pay. To what end, it's hard for us to say. If the first
+colonists had turned over all their wealth, the workers would have had
+no more use for it.
+
+John Firth was unusually alarmed by the threatened strike. He reacted
+with excessive violence and the other colonists followed his lead.
+Three of the leaders of the uprising were executed; others were
+brutally whipped. The Outlaw Pit was built then. Thereafter, at the
+first hint of any dissatisfaction, workers were condemned to it.
+
+The violence taught the workers resentment. Silently, sullenly they
+passed on their hatred to their children. The aristocracy created the
+revolution, and nurtured it; for it would have made no real difference
+if they had surrendered entirely to the strikers' demands.
+
+The children of the first colonists made no pretense of using Firth's
+world to advance knowledge, invention or art. They were hedonists, bred
+to luxury, supported by slaves.
+
+The slaves, for their part, felt no emotion but hatred. From their
+parents they learned that the aristocracy had violated the labor law.
+The children knew nothing about the law or the distant Earth where it
+applied, but it was held in deep and sacred reverence.
+
+The laboratories and the university stood empty; only the recreation
+cavern held any interest for the new aristocracy. A change took place
+among the slaves too. Their parents had been hand-picked morons. But
+neither brilliant achievement nor the moronic mind is hereditary. Most
+of the workers' children had an average intelligence; one or two would
+have been classified as geniuses. To their hatred the second generation
+joined intelligence, and Firth's world was ready to blow apart.
+
+They struck the light plant first. Sudden and unexpected violence
+surged through the dark, stone-walled corridors.
+
+John Firth led a band of men against the enemy. But his attack failed
+and the workers seized the Atomic Power Core--the heart of our world.
+If they shut down the reactors, they would stifle not only our lights,
+but the gravitators and the air machines as well; they would kill us
+all.
+
+The workers knew that. They were willing to risk suicide. Every
+bargaining counter was on their side. It was John Firth who surrendered.
+
+Firth's world died then. In the bitter depths of the Pit, John Firth
+remembered what Adam Boetz had said to him so many years before,
+
+"We've become a brain without a body. We can formulate the orders, but
+we've neither arms nor legs to carry them out.
+
+Suddenly John Firth understood the fallacy of his fanaticism. A society
+was like a living body, an integrated organism of many members. No
+one could function without the others. No man--no group of men--could
+create an isolate world. The social equation seemed as clear to Firth
+as the simplest sum in arithmetic. Each man was a part of a functioning
+social unit which included them all. Each man's talent, whether it was
+the plodding docility of a moron or the brilliance of genius, belonged
+to all men.
+
+In the meantime, the workers found that they could not run Firth's
+world alone, either. They gloried in forbidden luxuries until they
+were satiated. Shortly they became as indolent as the aristocracy had
+been; and the food supply was nearly exhausted.
+
+The treaty they made was direct and to the point: the two groups
+agreed to live in equality, sharing the burden of the labor and the
+accumulated wealth of knowledge. The treaty was made when you were
+a child; we have perfected the technique of co-operation within one
+generation. We're ready, now, to go back to Earth.
+
+You'll be with us? Fine, Chris!
+
+No. Please, no apologies. I understand why you intended to destroy
+our ship; others have attempted it, too. No harm was done. You're
+free,--entirely free ...
+
+... The Organizer waited until he was alone in the office. Then, with
+trembling, aging hands, he took the log book out of the safe and slowly
+made another entry:
+
+    _Chris was the last, I think. He accepted the lie, just as most of
+    the others have. When they return to Earth, they will be sound men
+    with whole minds. For them Firth's world will always stand as a
+    symbol of man's highest achievement in co-operation. May this sham,
+    in some small way, expiate the crime and the folly of my arrogant
+    delusion._
+
+John Firth's head dropped on his arm and his shoulders shook; but the
+sobs were sobs of relief. Chris was saved; Chris would go back. That
+mattered very much--for Chris was his grandson.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Firth's World, by Irving Cox
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59252 ***