He’d pounded out messages at up to forty words per minute for the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad, and he still recalled an old saying reflecting his pride in his craft:
“If a telegram takes more than twenty-four hours to be delivered, it has whiskers.”
My friend had a feel for the scraps of history. For years he’d kept a Teletype message announcing the Third Reich’s surrender, and I asked about the ARC-5 receiver that he’d given me: could it really have flown over Germany? “Go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington,” Lynn said, “and you’ll see a cockpit with an ARC-5. I’ve even seen an ARC-5 with a .50-caliber bullet hole right through it.”
Lynn was hardly a foe of every piece of post-ARC-5 technology. In late 1983 he hoped to be among the hams talking on the two-meter wavelength to an astronaut aboard the space shuttle.[[96]] Just the same, Lynn feared the years ahead—not so much his own fate as other people’s.
“Aren’t computers turning people into useless objects against their will?” Lynn asked Clarke. Gene Meyer, Eric’s father, of course had wanted Eric to ask a somewhat similar question. But it meant more coming from Lynn.
“Computers eliminate people, who take vacations, sick leave, and retirement,” he said. “I myself haven’t suffered. I took voluntary retirement at full pension at sixty-two. But computers were why I left then instead of sixty-five. I would have had to go to school for three years, and by then I would have been ready for regular retirement. So it didn’t make sense for me to stay. But not everyone can retire at full pension when the new technology takes over. What do you do about the people being forced out? What’s the answer?”
“Anyone who can be turned into a useless object against his/her will is one!” Clarke said. “You obviously weren’t.”
That was too pat an answer for me. The other day I’d talked to my old state editor, who’d visited Lorain, Ohio, west of Cleveland on Lake Erie. He feared that Lorain might become a husk of a town. A decade ago, when I’d been a reporter there, more than eight thousand had worked at the U.S. Steel mills, and Dick worried that the company might pull out of Lorain except for a bare-bones plant employing just a few hundred. Downtown, he’d seen dozens of shattered store windows. Oddly, however, the newspaper enjoyed some new subscribers—Dick said some of his friends could afford to do little more than watch television and read. Were Dick’s friends to be shrugged off as “useless objects”? In Imperial Earth Clarke had told of stringent population control, of an American Midwest replanted with forests, of steel mills neatly preserved as museums; but three centuries earlier, Lorain untidily abounded with angry, idle men. Cheap steel imports were one threat to them. So, perhaps, was the eagerness of many steel-company officers to pour their capital into more profitable industries. But computers and other high tech also had helped deprive Lorain of some steel jobs.
In the future, however, couldn’t even a factory technician telecommute—overseeing robots from home and using them to turn out custom-crafted products requiring a human “touch”? Ideally, America in 2001 would be producing something besides “information,” Big Macs, and look-alike toasters. And ideally, too, average workers could afford to enjoy the cornucopia. In fact, widespread genetic enhancement of IQs might eventually make everyone capable of appreciating high tech at a high level, so that “workers” in the old sense disappeared. Huxley’s Brave New World hierarchy might never exist, and in the twenty-second century we might all be Alphas smarter than any of today’s computer wizards. Robots would be our real Epsilons.
Meanwhile, regardless of the traumas of society at large, some of the most unlikely people could befriend new machines. Jack LaVriha—the cigar-chomping newspaperman in Chapter 8 who dated back almost to the Front Page days—had done fine in the Lorain Journal’s electronic city room.