Mr. Latham Won't Change His Mind

Mr. Latham Won't Change His Mind

TO: Director, Tourism and Education, Department of the Interior

FROM: Julie Adams, Administrative Assistant, Office of the Director of Tourism

SUBJ: Incident of 07 JUL 2055, Newell Latham

DATE: 07 JUL 2055

Sir, along with my resignation, I am submitting the following report:

I acknowledge I was witness to the following incidents relating to my superior and Newell Latham. My desk is immediately outside George Adams, Director of Tourism’s office so I was able to hear or, in some cases, actually observe what occurred there over a period of some weeks and then today. Other comments and observations in this report are strictly my own.

Newell Latham, I might say first, abhorred the idea of space travel. I did not say he hated space travel. Mr. Latham had never before gone up in space. He simply was against the idea of it. Impossibly, considering all the news coverage, he didn’t believe it. When he was granted his second delay but not exemption, he came once more to our offices, raving. I expected a replay of the anger of his first visit and I got it. He pushed right past me and confronted Mr. Adams who told him, in as gentle a manner as possible, that his behavior was totally unacceptable but he only laughed – a harsh, mocking laugh. Mr. Adams motioned me to come in, I suppose as a witness.

I stood in the background as Mr. Latham began. “In the first place,” he spat through clenched jaws, “it’s unnatural. Things CAN'T go faster than the speed of light. Einstein said so. ‘Light is a constant,’ he said. At the speed of light, mass becomes infinite. Space travel is, therefore, impossible.” His eyes blinked frantically and bushy eyebrows bobbed up and down. Face red, jowls quivering, he nearly shouted, “I know you’ve got people going to Planet 7. I see them on the cube when they come back. I hear their stories. I just don’t believe it! It can’t be done. This is FACT. You can’t get me to change my mind on a matter of fact!”

As a personal aside, I had walked to work that day as I had so often. Our offices in the Ministry of Tourism are housed in an ancient brownstone many times refurbished on Dearborn Street in Chicago. I had reason to believe that my building was well over a hundred and fifty years old. I was quite proud of it. It was one of the few remaining original structures on the block, the rest replaced with plasticized rock edifices, such as I lived in, and recently conceived to resemble medieval castles. My morning walk under the gentle shade of newly cloned Belgium Elms had reinforced a calm sense of well being ever since I began work here. It did that day until, of course, I reached the office. Newell Latham was waiting for me, presumably to plead for yet another exemption or extension. I felt a moment of despair. It always took an enormous amount of psychic energy on Mr. Adam’s part to balance Mr. Latham’s anger.

As I have been indoctrinated through high school, college and many agency training segments, now it would have been popular to call Newell a “fossil,” someone stuck in the past. Einstein, we had been taught, had been superseded nearly a generation ago. Caldwell’s “New Tech,” a truly innovative mélange of quantum theory and traditional particle physics had pushed the old concept of the impossibility of faster than light flight onto the proverbial dustbin of history. Dark Energy, the hyper-accelerant of the universe, once understood, had opened the gates of interstellar flight. Of course, only a very few people actually understood the mathematics, but everyone knew the mathematics worked. After all, we were sending people to Planet 7 on almost a weekly basis. And they were returning in six weeks. Mr. Adams had made the voyage nearly twelve years ago. That was when it was mandatory for all senior government employees everywhere to make the trip for educational purposes. The United Nations had so ruled.

That day, Mr. Latham had sat in my outer office, waiting for his appointment, fidgeted really, clenching and unclenching his fists. Mr. Adams had known him from before, of course. They both had taught at the University of Illinois, Mr. Adams had said after the previous encounter. Mr. Adams called him a “sad little man.” Once a renowned physics professor, a math prodigy and a multi-discipline whiz, now he was an “adjunct” professor of general science at the local community college. His fall was cosmic and legendary, Mr. Adams explained, and it was all because Mr. Latham wouldn’t or couldn’t recognize the possibility of faster than light travel. Once a wunderkind, Mr. Adams said, now he was an embarrassment. “It can’t be done,” was Mr. Latham’s motto.

Soon Mr. Adams’s door opened and he waved Mr. Latham in. A cocked finger informed me that my presence was requested as well. I assumed it was to be a witness.

“I’m not going,” Mr. Latham stated flatly.

“I’m not going to argue with you, Newell,” Mr. Adams answered in a soothing voice. “I have to remind you; however, I have been there and back myself.” This seemed to frustrate Mr. Latham. He fumed for a few moments then lapsed into silence.

Wearily, Mr. Adams repeated, “You know you have to go.” This was perhaps the tenth time during Mr. Latham’s visits that he had been told that. “The law says that every teacher of every curriculum must, and I am quoting here, ‘in order to maintain tenure and/or employment, experience interstellar travel to Planet 7 by October 15, 2055’. Newell, the law was written six and a half years ago. It set a seven year limit for mandatory educational travel. I repeat: you have to go. You’ve been putting this off for four years now. Everyone else is dying to go. What’s the matter with you?”

“All I’m asking for is a couple of months,” he whined. “A lousy couple of months.”

“No can do. Either you take the trip or your career is at an end. It’s as simple as that. And you have to go now. It’s summer. If you don’t go now, the deadline will pass in the middle of term. You know what that means. They won’t let you start a term you can’t finish. They’ll let you go now.” Just hearing them was giving me a headache.

Mr. Latham loosed an extravagant sigh of defeat. He rose and paced, then his shoulders slumped. “I just don’t get it,” he said.

“Get what?” Mr. Adams queried, obviously annoyed that this was taking so long.

“It’s not so bad that everyone on the planet is rejecting everything I ever learned about science, economics and sociology, it’s that they’re all so happy about it.”

I stood in the office watching as Mr. Latham’s spirit collapsed like a deflated airbag. He was apparently accepting the inevitable. “Alright, where do I sign?”

I stepped forward and handed him the query stick. He held the flat oblong delicately between thumb and forefinger like it was some piece of nastiness he was ready to toss in the reducer. “There they are,” Mr. Adams said with a smile. “Call them up, fill in the blanks, zip mail them in. It’s all self returning. Just punch mail. Central will automatically schedule you. Just report on time. Got it, friend?”

“Got it,” he mumbled then trudged to the door, shoulders slumped in defeat. After opening it, he turned and said, “You know, George, considering what a pain in the ass I’ve been, you’re too nice. Yeah, that’s it.” His eyes widened as if with some internal revelation. “That’s it – you’re too nice.” He left then without closing the door.

I had a clear view then of Mr. Adams alone in his office. He spun his chair around, propped his loafers on the credenza and flicked on the halo cube. It spun into life with one of the CNN anchors prattling on with yet another tale of how much better life was A. C., After Caldwell.

Mr. Latham was such a nuisance. I didn’t know why I bothered even to think about him. Of all of the people who passed though our office, it was so much easier with the congressmen and senators and the executive branch people. They were the first to volunteer. They leapt at the chance. Wonderful people. When they got back they authorized enormous sums to build more and ever larger ships to transport, first, scientists and then engineers of every description. Now more than thirty million people from every country on earth had made the trip to fabulous Planet 7 and every one came back with the same tale, or rather, their own personal vision of the “Teaching Planet”. There were only a handful of people in America who didn’t want to make the trip. Those passed through our offices, too. Less than a handful returned disappointed. Those were processed elsewhere.

As to what our office conveyed to Newell over the course of his visits, petitions and pleadings, the United Nations information packet, “Understanding Planet 7” explains it best:

“Imagine you’re a doctor finding yourself in a vast library a hundred years in the future. You open a book and see before you the answers to thousands of mysteries, answers to the problems of aging and disease. Or, say you are an economist, an entire room beckons with the promise of ending poverty. You’re an engineer and suddenly a whole new class of inventions is possible.

“Why was this fabulous “learning planet” abandoned? Perhaps we will never know. What we do know is that it is a vast repository of technology just waiting to be mined for the betterment of our planet and our lives.”

This was the exact message we conveyed. We never drifted from the approved line.

On other visits to our offices, always pleading for more time, or ideally, an exemption, Mr. Adams had taken Newell back through the approved history. Caldwell was the first. His team, Rosen, Matthews and the rest went to the Moon and landed there to do experiments. It isn’t clear … to any on the planet … what happened up there. We do know that Caldwell, alone in the dark of space, had some sort of epiphany. When Caldwell returned he spent six months in seclusion and then published his paper on Dark Energy. It was cataclysmic. Hailed as the new Einstein, he lobbied incessantly for funds to build a ship to … well, to go anywhere. And it happened. Caldwell’s next crew “blasted off” (for that was literally what they did then) mounted on the now ancient seeming rocket boosters.

Miraculously, he and the same crew who flew to the Moon, found a far distant star, hidden sixteen light years behind Arcturus, almost on a direct line with that huge star and our own. It was a red giant in its death throws and orbiting it were seven planets. Caldwell did a fly-by of the one closest to its sun. The planet was totally dark, he reported. It appeared to be without vegetation or atmosphere, bare. However, at its equator radar showed what had to be a complex of buildings. Caldwell photographed them and returned to earth. The entire journey took only six days.

With volunteers clamoring for places, another expedition was planned. This one would include a landing with more than twenty scientists. It turned out that while it appeared we had, indeed, “made contact”, no one was home. All that remained of the civilization that may have once existed were several buildings housing grey cubicles, each containing a type of “reader”. When the readers were activated, the first program to appear was a language tutorial. Well, you obviously know all this. I’m just trying to line up my logic.

Within several years an enormous range of technological advances began to occur, as anyone could well imagine. At first, there was nothing but toys: True Halo, an authentic 3-D projection was the first. Simplified musical instruments were next. Once the true scientists had visited, of course, we found cures for cancers, new ways to synthesize plastics and, eventually, the reducer. The reducer was something else Newell didn’t believe in. “Don’t ask me how it works,” I heard Mr. Adams once tell Mr. Latham. “I just know whatever you put in it disappears.” Ten years ago that meant everything from New York City’s garbage to nuclear waste. Now they are mass produced and everyone has a home version. Millions of garbage collectors had to find a new source of income.

That was the sum and substance of the information we provided Newell. I really don’t know how our office can be faulted here. Finally persuading Mr. Adam’s former colleague to “board the bus”, as they say, was difficult, to be sure; but, as is our office’s policy, in the long run it is better to eliminate the dissenters. How else, for example, could we truly build an economic model based on total sharing?

Additionally, Mr. Adams told Newell that what was most surprising was how people all over the world readily adapted to the new ethical standard we seemed to almost grow into. Perhaps it was because it were all so straightforward now. The new technological horizon gave us no reason to lie, cheat or steal. Our new ethos was fair play. Newell objected to that, too. He was a true curmudgeon.

On a personal level, I realize that even with the dozens of new technologies coming along every week, we still have to rely on the technological base that had developed with old Planet Earth. With years on the job here, for example, it is obvious that Mr. Adams had really to work to bridge the gap from old technology to new. After his trip it appeared that he had to relearn many of even the simplest office procedures.

The day that Mr. Newell’s ship was scheduled to depart found me back in the office at my desk outside Mr. Adam’s office. I toggled my personal cube over to CNN. Planet 7 voyages were still, after all these years, a novelty and regularly haloed. I watched as the stately vessel taxied down its fifteen mile ramp, accelerating ever faster, and then rose like a silver bird, heading for, everyone presumed, the distant star. Some hours later it disappeared behind the moon and CNN switched coverage to ancient news footage of a Palestinian peace march in Jerusalem. An enormous crowd of Muslims thronged the streets. It converged on a plaza where waited thousands of Jews. The two mobs met and merged. Man embraced man, woman embraced woman. The halo zoomed in to show smiles of joy. Later the whole crowd gathered around an enormous bonfire where burned tons of Hamas weapons. It was like that back in the “old days”. That was when all the world’s leaders began to systematically divide the earth’s treasures. Billionaires returning from Planet 7 simply turned the bulk of their assets over to their governments. Taxes disappeared, naturally, but so did the stock market as suddenly all wealth was held in common. Dissenters, like Mr. Latham, of course, were few.

Today, six weeks after his departure, surprisingly, I found Mr. Latham back in front of my desk. To say he was a changed man would be an understatement. He was trim. The pot belly had vanished. His skin tone was a ruddy healthfulness. He was obviously happy. He was a picture of health. It was only what I had expected from his trip, of course. But something indefinable seemed amiss.

“Mr. Newell, so good to see you back, none the worse for your adventure, I assume?” I asked tentatively. He nodded but said nothing and simply took a chair, waiting for entry to Mr. Adams’ office. When Mr. Adams buzzed me and he was granted entry, he strode confidently into the office.

I could hear everything said in the office quite clearly. “Hallo, George,” he greeted Mr. Adams. “How do you like the new Newell?”

“Vast improvement,” Mr. Adams said. “What did you think of our so called Planet 7?” I sensed wariness in his voice.

Surprisingly, Mr. Newell laughed unpleasantly. The sound, through the thin wall chilled me with a sense of dread.

“I’d like to say it was swell, George, but considering all it is is huts on the dark side of the Moon, I’m not so sure.” This statement stopped my every movement. I sat there, stunned.

I heard Mr. Adams say, “I…” And then there was silence. And then “A gun? There’s no need for any of that, Newell. Are you mad?”

At the words, “a gun”, I automatically reached for the phone, but then I heard, Mr. Latham say, “How many hundreds of years did it take to transport you monsters here at a tenth of the speed of light, George? I’ve spent the last six weeks hiding from you ugly bastards up on the moon base, stealing enough food to live and freezing my ass off. I wasn’t in the mood for a mind transfer, George. I suspected something was up, but I never in a million years would have believed all this faster-than-light gibberish was a cover up for an invasion.”

I think my jaw dropped down to the desk. My hand re-cradled the phone. Then I heard, “It started dawning on me as soon as they herded us on to the flight referring to us as “predecessors”. I started a fight and in the general melee I hid in a cubby hole. Six weeks of licking condensation off a cooling pipe really takes the weight off, you know. I was lucky I wasn’t discovered when I got back on the bus.”

I suddenly felt an unreasoning terror. It was like the world collapsing. I heard, “What are you going to do, Newell, kill me?”

Mr. Latham’s voice came back. “Nope. Nothing like that. I’m going to disappear. I’m going to become an outlaw. You and your pals will have to find me. Know why I’m so happy, George? Why I’ve changed? Why, I’m a MAN again? It’s because I now I know I was right all along. That means all the boundaries have been lifted. I can rob, steal and kill now, do anything I want, because I’m waging war on your kind, not real people. I was right. You were wrong. Your stupid “dark energy” will only let us travel a tenth the speed of light.”

I held my breath and then Mr. Newell said, “I’ll bet those pictures we all saw of Planet 7 were real, aren’t they. You screwed up your planet with your crazy ideas and you had to abandon it and find someplace else to screw up. What are you doing to us on the Moon, George? Is it a mind transfer or do you just scoop out our brains and pop in yours?”

“We’ll catch you, Newell,” I heard Mr. Adams say.

“No, they won’t,” replied Mr. Latham calmly. “There will always be enough real people around to hear the truth. We’ll band together. We’ll win. There’s something you don’t understand about humans, George.”

“Wha … What’s that?”

“You can’t easily change our minds.” I heard a giggle. “That’s a joke, George, but as long as there is one person on Earth, we’ll fight you.”

“You can’t, Newell,” Mr. Adams said as his final words.

Mr. Latham sounded calm as he said, “Yes, we can and the reason we will is because we won’t play fair. We’re not what you want us to be, George, or whoever you are now. We’re killer apes. What you want us to be, with all this caring and sharing, it’s unnatural. Killer apes rob, steal, cheat and lie because we like it. Your boys can’t compete with that. You can’t compete with an insurgency. Nobody who plays fair can. You haven’t got the guts to do what you’d have to do to win. You won’t hate. You won’t murder.” Mr. Latham paused for a moment and then said, “Notwithstanding that you snuffed out the consciousness of millions of people while leaving their bodies whole, you cold blooded monster!” Well, George, we can murder the old fashioned way, with plenty of blood. I’ll find others who think like me. Plan on a reign of terror, George. Bombs in government buildings, all that stuff. It won’t be ‘nice’.”

A chill went through me. What was going on here? How could Mr. Latham think of this? Right before the gunshot sounded I heard Mr. Latham say, “Nice! Remember what I told you the last time we talked? George, you idiot, you’re too nice. That’s what tipped me off. The government’s too nice. Something had to be wrong. We’re not nice, George, we’re humans.”

And then there was that single gunshot. Moments after there was an explosion far below us that rocked the building like an earthquake. I sat still, paralyzed. In a few moments Mr. Latham came out of the inner office. We stared at each other for a full minute, I wondering what would come next, and then I reached over and switched on the cube. Mr. Latham pulled up a chair. Within minutes, the halo showed reporters on the scene and the smoke and devastation of the first floor.

I learned it was a bomb. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mr. Latham’s head nod as if in approval. As coverage continued we were told that there were a hundred and thirty dead. You could see bodies crumpled and tattered beneath a sign with a crude scrawl that said, “IT’S ALL FAKE.” Mr. Newell and I sat in the outer office for perhaps an hour and watched the cube and talked. It was an interesting conversation.

I quit. Forget about my last check. Mr. Latham and I have things to do.