{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_51549/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_51549","id":"gutenberg_51549","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51549","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Science-Fiction & Fantasy","Category: Short Stories","Philosophy -- Fiction","Science Fiction","Science fiction","Short stories"],"text":"THE BIG ENGINE\n\n                            By FRITZ LEIBER\n\n           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n                    Galaxy Magazine February 1962.\n         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\n\n\n\n                   Have you found out about the Big\n                    Engine? It's all around us, you\n                   know--can't you hear it even now?\n\n\nThere are all sorts of screwy theories (the Professor said) of what\nmakes the wheels of the world go round. There's a boy in Chicago who\nthinks we're all of us just the thoughts of a green cat; when the green\ncat dies we'll all puff to nothing like smoke. There's a man in the\nwest who thinks all women are witches and run the world by conjure\nmagic. There's a man in the east who believes all rich people belong to\na secret society that's a lot tighter and tougher than the Mafia and\nthat has a monopoly of power-secrets and pleasure-secrets other people\ndon't dream exist.\n\nMe, I think the wheels of the world just go. I decided that forty\nyears ago and I've never since seen or heard or read anything to make\nme change my mind.\n\nI was a stoker on a lake boat then (the Professor continued, delicately\nsipping smoke from his long thin cigarette). I was as stupid as they\nmake them, but I liked to think. Whenever I'd get a chance I'd go to\none of the big libraries and make them get me all sorts of books.\nThat was how guys started calling me the Professor. I'd get books on\nphilosophy, metaphysics, science, even religion. I'd read them and try\nto figure out the world. What was it all about, anyway? Why was I here?\nWhat was the point in the whole business of getting born and working\nand dying? What was the use of it? Why'd it have to go on and on?\n\nAnd why'd it have to be so complicated?\n\nWhy all the building and tearing down? Why'd there have to be cities,\nwith crowded streets and horse cars and cable cars and electric cars\nand big open-work steel boxes built to the sky to be hung with stone\nand wood--my closest friend got killed falling off one of those steel\nboxkites. Shouldn't there be some simpler way of doing it all? Why did\nthings have to be so mixed up that a man like myself couldn't have a\nsingle clear decent thought?\n\nMore than that, why weren't people a real part of the world? Why didn't\nthey show more honest-to-God response? When you slept with a woman,\nwhy was it something you had and she didn't? Why, when you went to a\nprize fight, were the bruisers only so much meat, and the crowd a lot\nof little screaming popinjays? Why was a war nothing but blather and\nblowup and bother? Why'd everybody have to go through their whole lives\nso dead, doing everything so methodical and prissy like a Sunday School\npicnic or an orphan's parade?\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nAnd then, when I was reading one of the science books, it came to me.\nThe answer was all there, printed out plain to see only nobody saw it.\nIt was just this: Nobody was really alive.\n\nBack of other people's foreheads there weren't any real thoughts or\nminds, or love or fear, to explain things. The whole universe--stars\nand men and dirt and worms and atoms, the whole shooting match--was\njust one great big engine. It didn't take mind or life or anything else\nto run the engine. It just ran.\n\nNow one thing about science. It doesn't lie. Those men who wrote those\nscience books that showed me the answer, they had no more minds than\nanybody else. Just darkness in their brains, but because they were\nmachines built to use science, they couldn't help but get the right\nanswers. They were like the electric brains they've got now, but hadn't\nthen, that give out the right answer when you feed in the question. I'd\nlike to feed in the question, \"What's Life?\" to one of those machines\nand see what came out. Just figures, I suppose. I read somewhere that\nif a billion monkeys had typewriters and kept pecking away at them\nthey'd eventually turn out all the Encyclopedia Brittanica in trillions\nand trillions of years. Well, they've done it all right, and in jig\ntime.\n\nThey're doing it now.\n\nA lot of philosophy and psychology books I worked through really fit\nin beautifully. There was Watson's _Behaviorism_ telling how we needn't\neven assume that people are conscious to explain their actions. There\nwas Leibitz's _Monadology_, with its theory that we're all of us lonely\natoms that are completely out of touch and don't effect each other in\nthe slightest, but only seem to ... because all our little clockwork\nmotors were started at the same time in pre-established harmony. We\n_seem_ to be responding to each other, but actually we're just a bunch\nof wooden-minded puppets. Jerk one puppet up into the flies and the\nothers go on acting as if exactly nothing at all had happened.\n\nSo there it was all laid out for me (the Professor went on, carefully\npinching out the end of his cigarette). That was why there was no\nhonest-to-God response in people. They were machines.\n\nThe fighters were machines made for fighting. The people that watched\nthem were machines for stamping and screaming and swearing. The bankers\nhad banking cogs in their bellies, the crooks had crooked cams. A woman\nwas just a loving machine, all nicely adjusted to give you a good time\n(sometimes!) but the farthest star was nearer to you than the mind\nbehind that mouth you kissed.\n\nSee what I mean? People just machines, set to do a certain job and\nthen quietly rust away. If you kept on being the machine you were\nsupposed to be, well and good. Then your actions fitted with other\npeople's. But if you didn't, if you started doing something else, then\nthe others didn't respond. They just went on doing what was called for.\n\nIt wouldn't matter what you did, they'd just go on making the motions\nthey were set to make. They might be set to make love, and you might\ndecide you wanted to fight. They'd go on making love while you fought\nthem. Or it might happen the other way--seems to, more often!\n\nOr somebody might be talking about Edison. And you'd happen to say\nsomething about Ingersoll. But he'd just go on talking about Edison.\n\nYou were all alone.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nExcept for a few others--not more than one in a hundred thousand, I\nguess--who wake up and figure things out. And they mostly go crazy and\nrun themselves to death, or else turn mean. Mostly they turn mean. They\nget a cheap little kick out of pushing things around that can't push\nback. All over the world you find them--little gangs of three or four,\nhalf a dozen--who've waked up, but just to their cheap kicks. Maybe\nit's a couple of coppers in 'Frisco, a schoolteacher in K.C., some\nartists in New York, some rich kids in Florida, some undertakers in\nLondon--who've found that all the people walking around are just dead\nfolk and to be treated no decenter, who see how bad things are and get\ntheir fun out of making it a little worse. Just a mean _little_ bit\nworse. They don't dare to destroy in a big way, because they know the\nmachine feeds them and tends them, and because they're always scared\nthey'd be noticed by gangs like themselves and wiped out. They haven't\nthe guts to really wreck the whole shebang. But they get a kick out of\nscribbling their dirty pictures on it, out of meddling and messing with\nit.\n\nI've seen some of their fun, as they call it, sometimes hidden away,\nsometimes in the open streets.\n\nYou've seen a clerk dressing a figure in a store window? Well, suppose\nhe slapped its face. Suppose a kid stuck pins in a calico pussy-cat, or\nthrew pepper in the eyes of a doll.\n\nNo decent live man would have anything to do with nickel sadism or dime\nparanoia like that. He'd either go back to his place in the machine and\nact out the part set for him, or else he'd hide away like me and live\nas quiet as he could, not stirring things up. Like a mouse in a dynamo\nor an ant in an atomics plant.\n\n(The Professor went to the window and opened it, letting the sour old\nsmoke out and the noises of the city in.)\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nListen (he said), listen to the great mechanical symphony, the big\nblack combo. The airplanes are the double bass. Have you noticed how\nyou can always hear one nowadays? When one walks out of the sky another\nwalks in.\n\nPresses and pumps round out the bass section. Listen to them rumble\nand thump! Tonight they've got an old steam locomotive helping. Maybe\nthey're giving a benefit show for the old duffer.\n\nCars and traffic--they're the strings. Mostly cellos and violas. They\npurr and wail and whine and keep trying to get out of their section.\n\nBrasses? To me the steel-on-steel of streetcars and El trains always\nsounds like trumpets and cornets. Strident, metallic, fiery cold.\n\nHear that siren way off? It's a clarinet. The ship horns are tubas,\nthe diesel horn's an oboe. And that lovely dreadful french horn is an\nelectric saw cutting down the last tree.\n\nBut what a percussion section they've got! The big stuff, like\nstreetcar bells jangling, is easy to catch, but you have to really\nlisten to get the subtleties--the buzz of a defective neon sign, the\nclick of a stoplight changing.\n\nSometimes you do get human voices, I'll admit, but they're not like\nthey are in Beethoven's _Ninth_ or Holst's _Planets_.\n\n_There's_ the real sound of the universe (the Professor concluded,\nshutting the window). That's your heavenly choir. That's the music\nof the spheres the old alchemists kept listening for--if they'd just\nstayed around a little longer they'd all have been deafened by it. Oh,\nto think that Schopenhauer was bothered by the crack of carters' whips!\n\nAnd now it's time for this mouse to tuck himself in his nest in the\ndynamo. Good night, gentlemen!","title":"The Big Engine","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":1739}