Ecotopia (20 page)

This system is integrated with book publishing as well. Although many popular books are printed normally, and sold in kiosks and bookstores, more specialized titles must be obtained through a special print-out connection. You look the book’s number up in a catalogue, punch the number on a jukebox-like keyboard, study the blurb, sample paragraphs, and price displayed on a videoscreen, and deposit the proper number of coins if you wish to buy a copy. In a few minutes a print-out of the volume appears in a slot. These terminals, I am told, are not much used by city dwellers, who prefer the more readable printed books; but they exist in every corner of the country and can thus be used by citizens in rural areas to procure copies of both currently popular and specialized books. All of the 60,000-odd books published in Ecotopia since Independence are available, and about 50,000 earlier volumes. It is planned to increase this gradually to about 150,000. Special orders may also be placed, at higher costs, to scan and transmit any volume in the enormous national library at Berkeley.

This system is made possible by the same fact that enables Ecotopian book publication to be so much more rapid than ours: authors retype their edited final drafts on an electric typewriter that also makes a magnetic tape. This tape can be turned into printing plates in a few minutes, and it can simultaneously be fed into the central storage computer, so it is immediately available to the print-out terminals.

Aside from this “professional” publishing, Ecotopia also supports a sizable “amateur” industry. Authors, artists, political groups, and specialized organizations have easy and cheap access to print because Ecotopia early developed portable, fool-proof, easily repairable offset printing presses, and deployed them everywhere—in schools, offices, factories and so on. Ecotopian children of eight know how to operate them with satisfactory results.

The variety of materials printed in this way is staggering: cookbooks (many Ecotopians are devoted to fine eating, no doubt one of their cultural links to the French), political tracts, scientific papers, comic books (these have a wide and weird development, being the chosen medium of some excellent artists), experimental literature, poetry, how-to-do-it manuals for crafts or skills, and so
on. These range in style from the tawdrily homemade to the superbly personal and creative.

The Ecotopian fondness for a craft, guild, almost medieval approach to things also surfaces in their publishing, despite its modern technology. Each newspaper, magazine, or book bears a colophon—a listing of who edited the manuscript, typed it for the tape, ran the press, handled the binding, etc. When I said this seemed rather immodest in the modern world, I was told that vanity had nothing to do with it—the main consideration was to fix responsibility, which the Ecotopians try to decentralize and personalize wherever possible.

(June 3) Sitting around the fire at the Cove last night, swapping old newspaper stories, drinking mulled wine. Every once in a while somebody would stomp in out of the chilly evening and join us to warm up. But they still like to tease me. After a while Bert began it: “Come on, Will, tell us what’s the biggest story the
Times
ever suppressed.” “What do you mean by the biggest?” I parried. “Well, whatever
you
think was biggest. Bay of Pigs was pretty big, I guess, but that was a long time ago and anyway they did decide to run it, even if it took three days to get around to it.”

“I would have opposed holding up on that,” I said, frowning. “They ran it, as I understand, when they realized other papers would break the story. Even then the old man felt he was betraying the President.” A burst of unkind laughter greeted this remark, which didn’t surprise me, of course—you don’t find much sympathy for U.S. government policies or figures among Ecotopians. “After that the paper printed everything, as far as I heard. Do you know about the Pentagon Papers?”

“Yeah, they were okay on that one,” Tom agreed, “even if it
was
stale news.”

“Look, Will,” Bert said, leaning back with that intent expression he gets when he’s getting down to serious business. “What are you going to write about the Helicopter War? We think
that
was the most serious suppressed story since Independence. I know you were only 19 or 20 at the time: so was I. But there wasn’t a
line about it in any of your major papers. Your underground papers had some stuff, but they never get anything straight—it all sounded like third-hand paranoiac raving.”

Dead silence, all eyes on me. I took some deep slow breaths. I know, even though I was just a reporter on a student paper at the time, that rumors had circulated for some while about trouble on the Ecotopian borders. A couple of young hotshot friends, a few years older than I, wanted to go out and track them down. But the wire service had a good man in Reno, and of course a whole bureau in Los Angeles, The editors thought that if anything important happened, they’d know about it all right. Soon after, the army had put through unusual rush orders for large numbers of replacement helicopters, but these were explained as part of the Latin American build-up that was beginning then. Besides, by then the shock of the secession had largely spent itself, and readers were tired of Ecotopia. Public attention was mostly on the chronic economic crisis. The public opinion polls showed that while nobody was happy about Ecotopia, nobody was too unhappy about it either. The likelihood that our government would risk a secret invasion seemed remote; I certainly hadn’t lost any sleep over it.

“Are you putting me on?” I said. “What Helicopter War?” “Oh, come
on,
said Bert angrily. “Are you giving us the old
no se nada?”
“We heard a few rumors,” I admitted. “Our people must have looked into it. What happened, some skirmishes on the border?” “It was a fucking
war,
man! There were thousands killed on both sides!”

Red, who must be about 50, spoke up from the sidelines. He’s less talkative than most Ecotopians, so his words tend to carry extra weight. “I was in it,” he said simply. “Tomorrow morning I could take you down and show you something that might convince you.” But he wouldn’t tell me what it was.

We talked on through the evening. Their stories seem to agree too closely to be merely fabrications. Amount to something like this: a minor war took place in almost total secrecy. It lasted only a few days, but they claim it was a major turning point in maintaining the new nation. Ecotopians knew, of course, that Washington was full of hawks favoring an immediate and if necessary
genocidal “solution” to the secession. Ecotopians also knew that the hawkish views had so far never won out—partly because of the economic problems that reannexing Ecotopia would have presented by then, partly because it had been feared since secession that New York, Chicago, Washington, and maybe other cities had been mined with atomic weapons.

Red’s story is that immediately after Independence, the Ecotopians realized that anti-helicopter devices were a high priority, and several rather novel ones were produced in very large numbers. One, taken over by the Ecotopians from the U.S. Army upon secession and then manufactured by the former missile plants near Sacramento and San Francisco, was a radar-guided rocket carried by a single man (or woman). After its bazooka-like shell was fired, however, the firer continued to point the weapon at the moving target, and the radar beam actually steered the rocket till it hit the target. Another type was based on a French and Russian device, and used infrared homing to guide a missile toward the exhaust of a flying target; these were especially useful at night. Another, much cheaper, used a very simple rocket that trailed long wires, which tangled with the copter’s rotors and caused them to lose control and crash. These weapons were, apparently, distributed throughout the country. “You mean to all army units?” I asked. “To all army units and all households and living groups too,” Red smiled. “They were everywhere, hundreds of thousands of ’em, believe it or not.”

What he says happened was that the U.S. Army and Air Force launched a major secret attack: from bases in Southern California, Colorado and Montana, and from several carriers offshore, huge squadrons of helicopters roared over the Ecotopian frontiers, escorted by fighter-bombers. This may not have been too much of a surprise: the Ecotopians claim an excellent intelligence operation. Much destruction was of course caused by the jets, which attempted to “soften up” landing sites in the approved Vietnam technique. An alarming number of jets, however, were shot down. Worse still, when the copters came in, they encountered heavy ground fire from the borders and coastline all the way to their touch-down points.

“We just shot them all down,” said Red calmly.

“What do you mean, shot them all down? That’s impossible!”

“You might think so,” he replied. “But we had many times more rockets than they had helicopters. We just finished them off as fast as they came in. They might have got some on the ground if they had concentrated them
all
on some open area out in the Valley. But they were overconfident and they had it all carefully programmed to lay down men all over the country. Well, we got something like seven thousand in three days. A lot near the borders, but all over the place too. When they counted up their losses, and still didn’t have any men on the ground, they stopped.”

“That’s incredible,” I said. “They soon would’ve realized what was going on and changed their strategy.” “Maybe their computer wasn’t set up for that,” said Bert drily. “Also we messed up their communication channels a little bit. I’ve heard that half the time when they thought they were talking to each other they were actually talking to our guys. Who gave them, um, a lot of wrong information and got them into some nasty wrong places. What really stopped them, though, was probably that we finally told them we would detonate the mines in American cities if the attack went on another day. It was that close.”

This fratricidal vision stunned me, though I know what civil wars are like. “What did you do with prisoners of war?” I asked. “There weren’t too many,” said Red. “You don’t usually survive the crash of an exploding copter. We hung onto the pilots for a couple of months, until we were pretty sure it was over. (Your people were getting busy in Brazil along about then, too.) The other guys we talked to for a while and then shipped them down to L.A. Some of them, I’ve heard, later came back out here to live.”

We talked long into the night. “Well, what are you going to do, Will?” Bert finally asked. What the hell did he expect me to say? “More checking, first of all,” I replied. “And then I’d have to find a way to handle it that wouldn’t be inflammatory. I don’t want another war any more than you do.”

“Lucky you have broad shoulders so you can carry the world around on it so easily!” Bert laughed. And everybody seemed disappointed by my reply. But I’m not some irresponsible nut who can write whatever comes into his head.

ECOTOPIAN EDUCATION’S
SURPRISES

San Francisco, June 4. Schools are perhaps the most antiquated aspect of Ecotopian society. Our computer-controlled individual home instruction has no parallels here. Pupils are still assembled physically all day for their lessons. (Indeed few electronic teaching aids are used at all, in the belief that simply being in the presence of teachers and fellow pupils has an educational effect.) In fact if Crick School, which I visited, is any example, Ecotopian schools look more like farms than anything else. An Ecotopian teacher replied to this observation, “Well, that’s because we’ve crossed over into the age of biology. Your school system is still physics-dominated. That’s the reason for all the prison atmosphere. You can’t allow things to
grow
there.”

Crick School is situated on the outskirts of the minicity of Reliez and its 125 students trudge
out
to the country every day. (About a dozen such schools ring the city.) The school owns eight acres, including a woodlot and a creek. The name is in honor of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. There is not a single permanent building of any significance; instead, classes take place either outdoors or in small, temporary-seeming wood buildings barely big enough to hold a teacher and 10 pupils, which are scattered here and there on the school grounds. I was unable to locate the school office, and when I inquired, I was told the school has none—its records consist of a single drawerful of cards! With only a half dozen teachers, my informants said, the coordination and decision-making for the school is simply part of everyday life. Since class periods fluctuate wildly (there are no hour bells) the teachers can always get together if they feel like it, and they also eat supper together once a week for more extended discussions.

Incredibly enough, the children spend only an hour or so a day in actual class work. When I asked how they are kept from destroying the school during the times they are not under teacher control, I was told that they are usually busy attending to their “projects.” I could see evidence of such projects on every hand,
so perhaps the explanation, optimistic though it may seem to us, is accurate.