If the size of the audience congregated in the music auditorium that evening was any indication, the Associated Parents and Teachers of the Reedville High School had more than a casual interest in the future. Only the last rows in the balcony were vacant. Dr. and Mrs. Pearson were accorded the honor of viewing the balance of the evening’s performance from the Surveyor’s Box, a comfortable elevated platform in the left wing of the stage just out of sight of the audience. The vantage point was excellent: they could see everything that happened on stage without being seen. There was room in the box for only two people, which limited their interaction with everyone except each other.
The first ten minutes of the program were consumed by announcements and business items concerning the APT, delivered out in front of the curtain by the president, the mother of one of the students. Meanwhile the members of the band were hustled to their places on stage. They and their director, the chap who had snapped to attention that morning, seemed unusually keyed up by the prospect of this particular performance. Kay thought she had never seen such handsome uniforms. In the spotlights from above, the shimmering hues of silky bright yellow and green blended in stunning harmony with each other in splendid contrast to the braided bright red tassels dangling from their epaulettes.
A weak applause was heard and madame president ducked backstage. A few moments of heavy suspense prevailed. The band director raised his arms. Then he plunged his organization into the crashing chords of the opening number at the very moment the curtains flew apart as if in alarm. Some applause greeted the band’s appearance but quickly retreated behind the noise. The conductor was making powerful definitive sweeps of his arms in response to which the musicians were plunging ahead in muddled rhythmic lurches. “Modern harmonies” battered up against each other from all sides. At first a semblance of order was detectible in the belting discords, a sort of alternation between the sustained and the moving parts of the piece. From where they were sitting the Pearsons observed that this din seemed to be exactly what the conductor was expecting. He never once showed any sign of faltering as he pumped his long arms up and down in great pendulum strokes, giving the impression of exercising perfect control.
Before long, however, the cacophony became so tumultuous that this impression of control slowly disintegrated into the sham it was. The individual sections of the band were clearly now going their own stentorian ways, and even within each section there seemed to be little concern for presenting a united front. Steve noticed two trombonists who shared a music stand arguing over whether it was time to turn the page. The same issue was causing a furious debate in the flute section. About then, with a courageous display of self-assurance, the conductor flung himself at the tubas just as the piccolos pierced the air with a shrill squeal. Undaunted, he turned and made a commanding gesture at the clarinets just as two of them laid their instruments across their laps, only to be stabbed in the back by a deep blast from the tubas.
“Subtle signals, these!” Kay shouted into Steve’s one uncovered ear.
“How will this ever end?” he called back.
She shrugged her shoulders. “The uniforms look nice.”
Steve was now covering both ears. The tears were rolling down their cheeks.
The poor conductor’s face had turned a gorgeous vermilion. He looked like a man on his forty-ninth push-up whose capacity is fifty. Finally, with a look of desperation on his face, he held his arms aloft straight up into the air until he thought that every last player had seen them and had settled down on one note. Then he triumphantly dropped them and the battle came to a halt—except for one lone guerrilla, a third saxophonist whom news of the armistice did not reach on time. She continued to fire away after everyone else had laid down their arms. The startled conductor attempted to redeem the situation by pretending this was intentional and directing her into a proper closure. But the moment she realized she was all alone, she stopped playing in midair. And the farce was over.
Steve and Kay couldn’t tell whether the clapping or the laughter was the louder.
“That was a work of the Hungarian composer, Bela Bartok,” announced the conductor facing the audience. “He is considered the most representative composer of the modern school of anharmonics. He also founded it.”
“That was Bartok?” stammered Steve.
“And now on the lighter side, we play the familiar theme from the television show, Flash Gordon, composed by Willie Smith.”
There followed a tremulous, fragile rendition of those familiar notes that are supposed to suggest travel through the asteroids out toward the galaxies and stars of outer space. The tone poem is intended to make the listener feel as though he is dangling in space without support, a feat even more successfully achieved by a poor rendition of the work than by a good one. The audience clung to their armrests from start to finish.
During the applause, Kay leaned over and said, “Take your choice of futures—will it be chaotic self-confidence or terrified suspension in outer space?”
The stage was swiftly cleared. Everyone in the band seemed eager to get out of there. A lectern was set up front and center on the stage and Mr. Hoopes from the English Department walked over to it, flanked by the next two speakers. He summed up the five minutes allotted to him with these words at the end: “The literature of tomorrow is being forged in the classrooms of today and will take on the salient characteristics of the men and women who produce it.”
The next speaker was Mr. Jennings of the Department of Business and Commerce who elected to spend his five minutes about the future of South America, issuing an urgent warning to any businessmen in the audience not to overlook the growing menace of Communism across that continent. He summed his message up in these words: “From the point of view of business, we must face the fact that our investments in most countries on that backward continent will be severely jeopardized in the years ahead by those Red tentacles which are even now getting a stranglehold on the poor. So you are well advised to make most of your foreign investments in safer places, like Canada and Western Europe, where there is still room for expansion. No one who, for short-term gains, puts his whole nest-egg in South America has taken the risks into account. The enemy could end up with every cent of his money.”
The final speaker, Mr. Armstrong, the electronics teacher, called the attention of his hearers to the diverse applications of television technology in the future. “The day is just ahead when we will find television screens hanging from the wall of every room like pictures or mirrors. Women whose housework takes them from room to room will be able to keep track of their favorite TV serial.” The merger of the telephone and television industries too was right around the corner, he assured them, first for industrial purposes and later for everyone. TV monitoring systems would soon be protecting homes and businesses and apprehending criminals. From there he rambled off into certain technical issues not included in his notes and finally jarred to halt when he noticed that he had overshot his time limit by a good ten minutes.
The audience politely clapped the three teachers off stage and settled back to enjoy the skit.
The skit was entitled 1984 Revisited, obviously intended to satirize the excessively pessimistic outlook of 1984 by George Orwell. The narrator opened with the timely reminder that most of the exotic amenities which the audience was about to witness in the skit would be commonplace by the time the students of Reedville had reached middle age, a thought calculated to be at once startling and exciting.
The personages in the skit were the members of the Johnson family, a happy group of Reedvillites consisting of Dad, Mom, Marjorie, and Johnny. The plot consisted of a typical Wednesday in their lives some twenty years hence. Dad, who was a branch manager of Wickle Bickle Pickles, Inc., customarily checked with the IBM machine in his office on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So this morning he got out of bed at 10:00 and pushed the breakfast button which activated a number of lights next to his bed and one minute later served up two fried eggs, a cup of coffee, two slices of toast and raspberry jam, and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Then he got dressed and stepped out the front door onto a covered conveyor belt which took him to his office two blocks away. The IBM’s were fine, and he was home from work in time for lunch.
Mom had got up a bit earlier to clean the house. This little trick was facilitated by a robotic noiseless vacuum cleaner that you simply started up and turned loose on the house, eliminating all strenuous bending and dragging. Her several other chores required equally little effort on her part and were attended by Mr. Armstrong’s omnipresent wall screens affording her a morning of nonstop entertainment. At noon she faced the challenge of deciding which buttons to push to serve up four different lunches, according to each one’s personal preference.
Marjorie determined, so to speak, to stay in bed all morning in the company of Prince Charming. So she hooked her head up to her Dream Guide into which she inserted a disc involving the celebrity of her choice, and settled back to become the star of her own romance. Thus she sailed off into a state of bliss that lasted all morning.
Johnny, somewhat younger and uninterested in such pursuits, chose to spend the morning with his Personality Developer. This handy device relieved parents of most of the annoyance of having to raise children since it was guaranteed to produce the results programmed into it, or your money back. It played with Johnny, taught him to read and write through games, erased undesirable blemishes from his character “four times out of five,” and provided all the companionship a child needs to grow up secure and well-rounded. Up to six hours a day could be spent in the company of your Personality Developer before undesirable side-effects became noticeable.
That afternoon the family decided they were in the mood for some “kicks.” So they took off in their family pulse-jet helicopter and whisked up north to the Lake of the Woods, landing near the boathouse where their atomic speedboat was housed. What fun they had, making breakers and crashing back into them at an angle, racing with other boating enthusiasts, water-skiing and swimming and diving, and using the Devapor-Heater to avoid the chill of having to dry off in the breeze!
That evening at the pavilion onshore there was a big party attended by hundreds of people. Four different kinds of dance bands played in different areas of the mammoth pavilion. Food and drinks abounded, everything it takes to make a good party. Afterwards, tired but happy, the Johnsons returned home in their helicopter, with controls turned over to the auto-pilot which took them straight to their house while they were all sound asleep.
The curtain closed to enthusiastic applause and many comments.
“Just imagine! Only twenty-six years from now.”
“Fantastic!”
“Maybe it’s rubbish, but in 1932 who could have imagined our world of 1958?”
“You’re right.”
“I’m glad that Personality Developer is extra equipment. I wouldn’t want my Johnny exposed to one of them.”
“Maybe not, but the Tollefsons could sure use one.”
“Do you think it would lower the crime rate?”
“You must admit that’s the way things are heading. You can’t turn the tide of progress. I hope I live to see some of it.”
“Yeah! Imagine owning a pulse-jet helicopter instead of a car.”
“They must have put a lot of work into developing those props.”
“Pretty ingenious, all right.”
There were a few demurrals in the audience.
“I’m not sure I like the younger generation’s summum bonum.”
“Work is the elixir of life. If this is what our kids are learning at school, it’s no wonder I can’t get Bruce to lift a finger in the yard.”
“If that world ever comes true, I’ll be the first to volunteer to colonize the moon.”
“You won’t have to go to the moon. South America will be far enough.”
“Bertha, where do God’s plans for the world fit into a picture like that?”
Backstage Dr. Pearson was slowly rising to his feet. It was his turn now. His eyes were pinched into that glassy squint of his. He made his way down to the stage level and waited for the lectern to be placed back on center stage. Mr. Pfister was on the other side of the curtain introducing the speaker to the audience. He gave them a brief account of their guest’s life and accomplishments and of his present position at Christiania College.
Kay’s heart was pounding. She had squeezed Steve’s hand as he was leaving the box. It was ice cold. But he had squeezed her hand back and their eyes had met.
“Pray for me,” were his only words as he turned to go.
Now the curtain was opening to polite applause. Dr. Pearson made his way to the lectern. Kay closed her eyes and prayed for him with all her might.
Providence has graciously preserved for us a tape recording of Steve’s entire speech that evening, as well as all the rest of the program. I have listened to these words of his many times, to that gentle voice trembling under the weight of the things he had to say, forming each thought as carefully and as clearly as he could.
And I am still moved by them.