The Playboy Panel: 1984 and Beyond

Panelists

Science-fiction-fantasy writers Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Ray Bradbury, Algis Budrys, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Rod Serling, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn and A. E. Van Vogt. (Capsule biographies will be found at the beginning of Part One in last month's issue.)

Playboy: Last month we began our symposium of prognostications about life in 1984 and beyond with the subject of space exploration. Most of you predicted that the Russians will be the first to reach the Moon, but that lunar real estate, as well as that of Mars, Venus and the other planets, will ultimately be explored and colonized under international jurisdiction. With a dissenting view from Dr. Asimov, the rest of you went on to prophesy that we are more than likely to encounter many forms of extraterrestrial life in space -- possibly including beings more advanced than man both culturally and technologically, though perhaps totally alien not only in appearance but in psychology, society and intellect. Discussing the one disaster which you felt might prevent these prophecies from coming true, many of you viewed nuclear war, triggered by accident or miscalculation, as a grim probability -- while conceding that "civilization as we know it" might possibly survive such a cataclysm. Barring war, you foresaw a continuation of competitive coexistence with Russia on the economic and ideological fronts, but also the possibility of a U.S.-U.S.S.R. alliance catalyzed both by coinciding cultures and by the mutual threat of Red Chinese belligerence. But perhaps even more ominous than China's war potential, you felt, is its proliferating population -- and that of the entire planet. You predicted the exhaustion of available living space and existing food supplies, possibly within our lifetimes, if the present annual increase in world population is allowed to continue at its present geometric rate. You foresaw the necessity of plankton farming, whale ranching and extracting food from rock in order to feed the population; and such measures as compulsory chemical contraception, abortion, infanticide, sterilization and genetic control in global practice as methods to stem the human tide. You anticipated also that genetic selection and manipulation will be used to breed human beings of exceptional intelligence, creative imagination, physical strength and resistance to disease; but you expressed grave doubts about our ability to decide wisely who should be empowered to select which individuals will be allowed to breed -- and for what specific traits. In appraising the impact of enforced genetic control on the function and status of the family in 1984, opinion was divided between those who felt that marriage will become obsolescent in an era of test-tube babies bred and raised by the state; and those who were convinced that the institution would continue to flourish because the family-security drive is in the nature of man and not of society. Part One of our discussion ended as we introduced the subject of nonmatrimonial changes in the relationship between the sexes. Algis Budrys responded with the prophecy that "the concept of a social or sexual norm will become nearly meaningless" in an age of unprecedented social freedom and permissiveness. Do you agree, gentlemen?

Clarke: Today's social and sexual revolution is an earthquake of the first magnitude in terms of its current and future impact both on the foundation and superstructure of human society. The arbitrary barriers between the sexes -- along with the arbitrary bonds of marriage -- are destined to dissolve.

Pohl: I agree. When we're finally able to buy nonprescription oral antibiotics and contraceptives over every drugstore counter -- which I would guess will come to pass within the next few years -- bingo, there goes the last surviving major threat of venereal disease and pregnancy. Just as the diminishing social and economic need for the family is bound to remove all but the moral and legal pressures toward monogamy in coming years, so will the vanishing fears of illegitimate pregnancy and venereal disease remove all but the moral and legal pressures against pre- and extramarital intercourse. Most of us wouldn't steal a dollar from an unguarded newsstand, even if we knew we could get away with it. But in practice, how long could dealers afford to leave their stands unguarded if it weren't for the general knowledge that there are policemen? In practical effect, then, contraception, penicillin and the emancipation of women have abolished the sexual police force. Hence only the social inhibitions remain.

Playboy: How potent will they remain?

Pohl: In my opinion, not very. For I suggest that the pulpits and the schoolbooks and the editorials which preach the virtues of purity and monogamy are voices which no longer speak for society. What speaks for society, first and foremost -- thanks to the subliminal excavations of motivational research -- is advertising. It is an axiom that sex sells. My corollary to that axiom is that sex also sells sex. When a commercial shows a luscious babe racing out of the surf and flinging herself dripping wet, in an attitude of abandon, onto the sand beside a handsome, virile guy who proceeds to thrust a mentholated filtertip cigarette between her pursed lips, it's saying that smoking a mentholated filtertip cigarette equals sex equals fun. Now please don't anybody say that nobody needs to be told that sex is fun. Sensually speaking, of course, it's a truism; but in terms of social acceptability, it's still a pretty racy notion. Nevertheless, day in and day out, hour after hour on the TV screen, in our newspapers and magazines and on billboards, Madison Avenue is pounding home the message that we should think of sex in terms of fun and games. This sort of evidence indicates to me that the association of sex with sin is on the way out in precept as well as in practice. Hence I foresee extracurricular sex, that is, sex for recreation rather than procreation -- continuing to become more acceptable, more prevalent, more lightly, openly and guiltlessly engaged in as a social phenomenon -- and without that unpleasant aftertaste of bitter recriminations and/or gravid consequences traditionally attendant upon such liaisons dangereuses.

Clarke: I'll go further than that. In our advertising and in our everyday lives, I predict we shall be facing up -- probably within our lifetimes, and without the present hysteria -- to the elementary fact of nature that men are not merely polygamous but ambisexual, at least before being brainwashed by society.

Tenn: Man's multifarious sexual customs have been described by a British zoologist as characteristic of a primate horde. He studied the mating habits of a group of gibbons and orangutans and concluded that man has invented no new perversions. If you put a bunch of primates of the same species into any given enclosed area, sooner or later everybody will do everything to everybody.

Pohl: True. With unmarried intercourse becoming as casual as hand holding, we can expect that group sex in every conceivable permutation and combination will become as commonplace as bridge parties. I can even imagine a profitable new field for some future Arthur Murray. Just as you now sign up to learn a new dance step, you might register in 1984 for personal tuition in the technique of sexual intercourse -- an area in which I venture to say that 99 out of 100 Americans consider themselves just a bit under par. And I don't think it will be too many years before we begin to explore the possibilities of sexual pleasure multiplied by telepathy, so that you experience not only your own sensations but also those of your partner, because you're able to read his or her mind.

Playboy: Do you foresee any new frontiers in the realm of enhancing sexual pleasure chemically -- in particular through the development of the effective, nontoxic aphrodisiac man has always dreamed of possessing?

Budrys: A technological society which has completely dissociated sexual pleasure from procreation will inevitably devise, mass-manufacture and use with gusto countless drugs and devices of every description for variegating, intensifying and prolonging one's sex life.

Anderson: I don't see any reason, for example, why we couldn't develop a safe contraceptive-potency pill for men and women which would absolutely protect us from impregnation while making us all as athletically and inexhaustibly potent as we like to think we are. Paradoxically, this might lead to a de-emphasis of sex -- in our thinking, if not in our daily lives; for boasts about virility would become meaningless as our doubts about virility disappeared. Thus -- with the maximum of ability combined with the maximum of opportunity in a liberated society -- sex might begin to lose both its mystery and its obsessive importance.

Playboy: Experiments with LSD, peyote and the other hallucinatory drugs would seem to have opened the door to many new horizons in the dramatic expansion of man's sensory capacities. Do you foresee the use of these psychochemicals as a means of intensifying the pleasure of sexual experience?

Pohl: It's a damned-good guess that if in 1984 you feel depressed it will be because you want to feel depressed; if you don't, you'll need only open your medicine cabinet to feel just about any way you want -- including erotic to the nth power. I can envision, for example, a slightly denatured variant of LSD which would induce a state resembling paranoia -- but without harmful or lasting effects, and without LSD's rather asexual properties -- in order to perceive intense sensory phenomena that the normal mind doesn't even notice. Add to this a few extra ingredients to produce just the proper touch of schizophrenia, which will enable you to render yourself oblivious to everything not directly related to sex itself. Compress it all into a single pill -- and you'll be able to experience a transcendental orgasm that any Reichian would sell his orgone box to attain. Of course, we've had a pretty good primitive drug for releasing sexual inhibitions on the market for some time; we call it liquor. But that's kid stuff. Why should we limit our ways of getting bombed to those provided by the happenstance products of fermented plant life? Let the chemists cook up some new alcoholic libations: smoother, more palatable, odor- and hangover-free. Or let's not bother with alcohol at all. Other selective poisons are available, like the toxins elaborated by disease microorganisms. I remember writing a story in which the characters got on a jag by incubating smallpox viruses: nice flush, nice delirium, nice sense of spatial and temporal disorientation; while at the same time they dosed themselves with antibiotics so that they wouldn't get too sick to enjoy themselves.

Anderson: I can think of less heady but equally exciting possibilities for psychochemicals in the cure and prevention of mental illness. If schizophrenia, for example, is really a metabolic disease, as many experts believe, then a chemical cure for it will probably be found rather soon. I personally believe that neurosis and psychosis themselves will eventually be matters for physical treatment rather than for psychoanalysis.

Van Vogt: I look forward to a class of psychochemical pills which will balance off the body upset created by a wide range of emotional disturbances. LSD and the other current drugs of chemotherapy aren't the answer. I'm thinking of chemicals which will affect only specific areas of the brain, seek out that tiny spot which is charged with rage or fear or guilt -- and neatly cancel out the charge.

Blish: This would eventually lead, of course, to the extinction of all the "talk" psychotherapies; and a society devoid of Freudians, Jungians and Adlerians strikes me as Utopian almost by definition.

Anderson: Allied with cybernetics-oriented neurology, psychochemistry is on the threshold of giving us a precise physical-science understanding of the human psyche which may someday enable us to explore and exploit the ultimate potentialities of the human organism. At present we just don't know what they are. But we do know that a man can be tuned and trained to a fantastic physical and mental pitch. Can we find chemical ways to endow every normal human being with the physical coordination of a high-wire performer, the intellectual power of an Einstein, the serenity of a Buddhist saint? Once we have a background of exact and comprehensive knowledge, I think we can and will.

Sturgeon: I think it would be relevant, at this point, to suggest another line of pioneering research in this uncharted area which seems to presage no less profound discoveries about the human mind. For some years now, using a technique called stereotaxia, medical scientists have been mapping brains. They clamp the head of a cat, a monkey or a human rigidly in a frame and by manipulating three thumbscrews, one for each dimension, they can position an electrode precisely where they want it deep in the tissues of the brain. This way they can stimulate tiny areas and chart the reactions. Not only have they found out what part of the brain controls the hand; they can discriminate among the individual fingers. Not only have they learned to locate and operate the motor centers, but they can do the same with the sensories, and with such higher functions as speech and memory, and such complex emotions as pleasure and anger and fear. Experiments like these, in the past two years, have explored more deeply into the brain, and through it, the labyrinth of the mind, than humanity has probed in the past two millennia. You just don't make breakthroughs like that and expect life and society to amble on as before.

Anderson: You certainly don't. Psychoelectronics has already got a lot of people terribly fearful -- and terribly hopeful for the same reason. Rats wired up so that they can turn on the current in their cephalic pleasure centers will forgo everything else day after day -- sex, sleep, nourishment -- just to keep pushing that peddle, some of them to the point of exhaustion, others to starvation. And it seems to have the same sort of effect on humans. In one case I know of, a terminal cancer patient was given a few minutes of stimulation, and spent many hours afterward happy, energetic and free of pain. When brain stimulation becomes possible without the necessity of putting electrodes through the skull, we can expect to see psychoelectronics in widespread use not just for therapy but also for kicks. There are dangers, of course, but they don't seem any more risky than those of euphoric drugs. Electronics, in fact, may offer us the only euphoriac with no undesirable side effects.

Budrys: In the kind of moral-philosophical climate we seem to be headed for -- predicated on the premise that man is a kind of experimental organism in a laboratory run by man -- it seems to me that all the fine pigeonhole distinctions between good and evil, worth and worthlessness, will be simplified down to the twin criteria of pleasure and pain. We can expect to witness and participate in, therefore, a veritable golden age of sensuality spawned and nurtured on ever-new refinements in the chemistry and electronics which induce hallucinatory phenomena -- phenomena which in effect will move the theater out of the TV set and into the interior of the skull. This will become particularly true when pleasure technology advances to the point of introducing plot and purpose to these hitherto random hallucinations and raw stimulations. We will soon be assaulted by assorted Spansules which actively and explicitly direct the course of dreams or your money back, and by low-voltage stimulae--safe for children--which weave emotions into soaring sonatas of sensation. I have been drawing a close parallel to show business because I am positive that the next generation will greet these titillations as yet another appendage of the entertainment world. Some nations will establish state pleasure monopolies while others will reaffirm their faith in the free-enterprise system with freelance pleasure technicians, performers, producers, directors, costumers, set designers and scriptwriters under contract to mammoth pleasure-drug manufacturers and Hollywood "Feelie" studios.

Playboy: You foresee, then, an explosion of technological developments and discoveries which promises to enlarge and--hopefully--enrich man's insight, intellect, emotions, sensations and self-knowledge. Do you anticipate similar scientific strides in his search for complete comprehension and mastery of the human body--and of all the ills to which flesh is heir?

Serling: Well, this may be pretty small potatoes in the technological world of 1984, but I envision a highly sophisticated computing machine programed to analyze medical symptoms, conduct blindingly fast chemical analyses of sample cultures, and then dispense infallible diagnoses for every known disease.

Anderson: I think we can expect to see even more spectacular advances in the field of curing illnesses--such as major breakthroughs in the transplantation of whole organs, and less dramatic but more important advances in the development of antivirus drugs, including, at long, long last, a cure for the common cold.

Budrys: By the turn of the century, I anticipate that medical research will have progressed at a geometric rate which will have ushered all illnesses, from psychosis to heart disease, as well as all sensory aids such as glasses and hearing aids, into permanent extinction.

Playboy: The elimination of disease would seem to bode well for the prospects of lengthening the human lifespan dramatically in years to come -- if not of attaining man's immemorial dream of eternal life. What do you predict will be the longevity of the average American by the year 2000?

Budrys: I think that the first man to live forever -- or for two centuries, at the very least -- may already have been born. But before we can attain true immortality, we'll have to hurdle a few remaining obstacles. Once we eliminate disease as a causative factor in fatality, we'll have to apply ourselves to the task of expunging irrationality from the species. It's not such an impossible dream; conceivably we could instill everyone hypnotically, chemically, or electronically with the same general view of life, so that people will be deprived of their moral, economic, racial, ideological, psychological and sociological pretexts for destroying each other. There will then remain beyond our control only two principal factors: the inhuman workings of the Universe -- which we will be able to harness to our needs, for all practical purposes, with only a slight extension of current technology; and the ability to restore life to those who are temporarily inconvenienced by accidental death; this will be accomplished within a matter of years. Gross mutilative accidents are already being minimized with radical new surgical techniques involving both regeneration and replacement of limbs. Thus we are close to the point where the human body can be treated as a machine with plug-in and screw-on replacement capabilities. That leaves us with the simple deterioration of old age. Some of this will be subsumed by the attack on degenerative diseases, by surgical organ transplants, and by the development of increasingly sophisticated artificial organs. But these stopgaps will do little or nothing to abate the slow decay of the organism as a whole; and this you won't solve by transplanting the brain into a fresh body -- because the brain, too, is not immune to aging. But I think the day is not far off when we can decelerate or even suspend the aging of all the individual cells of the body. We are already beginning to learn a great deal about these processes, and their control is the next logical step.

Anderson: Well, imagine a synthetic virus, tailored to the individual's genetic pattern, which takes over the job of chemistry control and self-renewal as his own cells become too old to handle the job. A man so inoculated might potentially be immortal, eternally young.

Pohl: Recently I bought for Galaxy a manuscript by a biologist named R. C. W. Ettinger, called Prospects of Immortality, in which he explores the practical possibilities of all-but-eternal life through "frozen sleep" -- a process in which a human body is frozen in liquid helium at close to absolute zero so that he or she will not decay or deteriorate in any detectable way for essentially as long as the temperature is maintained -- which could be months, years, centuries, millennia, or even eons if you wish. It is already a fact, Ettinger says, that we can freeze a man's body to that temperature without irreparable damage. All it will take is money -- about $8500 per person; we already have the know-how. It's a pretty good gamble, says Ettinger, that no matter what you might die of today -- heart attack, stroke, cancer, T.B., a bullet in the belly, or even such tissue wasters as starvation or senility -- at some future date this damage will be surgically, medically or prosthetically reparable, along with any cellular injury that might have been inflicted on your body in the act of being frozen to await resurrection in some later age. Thus immortality of a kind may very well be attainable for you and me right now.

Budrys: It seems to me that actual emancipation from death may not become a reality within the next generation or two, but lifetimes greatly extended by biomedical techniques are a strong probability for some of the children in today's maternity wards. And I don't mean that this will be accomplished with such evasions as deep-freezing for decades, metabolic arrest, or any other technique which increases chronological age while doing nothing for the useful lifespan. I mean that some of our children will live actively and usefully for perhaps 200 years. And after that generation, the figure will go up exponentially, so that our grandchildren may live to a ripe old 1000, and our great-grandchildren essentially forever.

Anderson: There'd be a price to pay for all this, of course: Very few children could be allowed to be born, or the planet would soon be packed solid with human flesh; and a world with hardly any children would be emotionally barren for a great many people. Then, too, a civilization of polygenarians is inevitably going to become archconservative in thought and action. They would be less likely to question or contradict the comfortable established order; thus the world of the very long-lived would probably be pretty static and stagnant. So we might at last weary of such a life.

Pohl: If you think that's bad, consider the consequences of achieving immortality through freezing: What will happen, for example, if you poison your rich uncle for an inheritance, live out your life and die in luxury, have yourself frozen -- and wake up a century later to find the old bastard standing there with the police and the doctors who found strychnine in his stomach while reviving him?

Playboy: Well, there's another kind of life extension which would seem to be free of such perils: a period up to one-third the length of an ordinary lifespan, which many people wish could be added to their life total of active waking hours by reducing or eliminating the need for sleep. What do you gentlemen feel are the prospects of fulfilling that wish?

Budrys: Well, there's a good deal of research being done on the subject, and the data collected so far would seem to indicate that not merely sleeping but dreaming is necessary to the mind, that dreams are not simply the images of an idling brain but an actual function of the self-restoring process which is necessary to rational thought during the waking hours. I would guess that it will prove possible to take control of the necessary dream process at least to the extent of compressing its duration, and to devise some kind of therapy or equipment which will help the body to recuperate fully from a day of mental and physical exertion in far less time than the natural process now consumes.

Pohl: I'm afraid the Russians may have beaten us to it. The other day I heard the first glimmerings of a most unusual technique of sleep abbreviation which they have developed and claim to have perfected. By taping the brain waves of a sleeping subject and playing them back to another man, they are reported to have materially shortened the amount of rest required by the second subject. If my information is accurate, they've come uncannily close to duplicating one of the hoariest and heretofore most improbable gimmicks in science fiction's overflowing bag of tricks: Instant Sleep. You put this shiny helmet on your head, press a button, get up, stretch, yawn and go back to work -- completely refreshed.

Anderson: I have my doubts that either we or the Russians will ever be able to capsulize sleep quite so neatly, but I will venture to predict that it should be possible inside of 20 years, with the help of nontoxic drugs, to work or socialize for several days at a stretch without getting tired.

Pohl: A promising line of research, I should think, would be the possible use of appropriate hormone treatments for sleep reduction, since thyroid activity seems to regulate the amount of rest we need. But I don't really see why it couldn't be possible to eliminate the need for sleep entirely and permanently -- conceivably by surgical removal of the sleep center from the brain; the dangers of disturbing the body's metabolic balance would seem to be negligible, for people whose sleep centers have been accidentally damaged or destroyed lead what seem to be essentially normal lives in every way -- except that they never sleep.

Budrys: Still, if we can possibly produce the same results without resorting to such drastic measures, I certainly think we ought to. And I think we probably can and will: by short-circuiting the entire natural process to recuperate mind and body by artificial means involving no loss of consciousness or mobility -- using antisleep drugs which are not harsh stimulants but specific medications developed from detailed research into the sleeping process. Even with such medicines, however, we may have to pay a price. Any antisleep potion intended to increase alertness and efficiency must inevitably accelerate the total metabolism to the point where it will mean an almost-certain (continued on page 108) Playboy Panel(Continued from page 35) diminution of the user's chronological lifespan in exchange for heightened per-day efficiency. This, in turn, means that the high-metabolism antisleep drugs will have to be taken as part of a therapeutic program which includes life-extension techniques such as those we talked about earlier.

Playboy: Do you foresee any other possible fields for prolonging human life?

Budrys: I can think of one which will make it possible to achieve near immortality -- paradoxically, without increasing the normal lifespan by a single day. Thanks to a corollary of Einstein's relativity theory, we've learned that the passage of time on interstellar rocket flights will slow down appreciably relative to Earth; the astronauts on board will actually age more slowly than they would at home. This deceleration in time rate will become greater and greater as the speed of the spaceship increases, until, at close to the speed of light, both the aging process and the passage of time would grind virtually to a halt -- thus extending their lifetimes indefinitely by Earthly time scales, though they would continue to age normally by the spaceship's clock and calendar.

Asimov: On returning to Earth from a seven-year voyage to Vega, for example, they would find their wives, families and friends 30 years older than when they parted. If the flight had been a longer one, say to Andromeda, they would return home to find not only their loved ones long since turned to dust, but very probably also civilization as they knew it, and possibly even Homo sapiens himself; for in the quarter-century of their absence, some two-million years will have passed on Earth.

Pohl: So apart from the supreme adventure of being an eyewitness to evolution, the price of immortality, in terms of long and lonely isolation from mankind, may be very dear indeed.

Anderson: It will be worth it, though, I think; for they will be man's torchbearer to the stars.

Playboy: Will it ever be possible to attain -- or perhaps even exceed -- the speed of light in bridging the gigantic distances between Earth and even the nearest stars?

Anderson: It may very well be possible to travel slower than light and still get to the stars. In case anybody cares, I've looked into the matter mathematically and have reached the conclusion that 75 percent of light speed can be achieved. That's on the basis of some fairly conservative assumptions; other men have suggested that by using interstellar hydrogen in a sort of ramjet, a spaceship may be able to travel faster yet, maybe up to 99 percent of the speed of light, but it would still take more than four years by the ship's calendar to reach the nearest star. Obviously this will limit both the rate and the extent of expansion into space. It will also cut down the amount of communication between our explorers and the home world.

Budrys: If my own arithmetic is right, we are going to need speeds of one light-year per day -- roughly 68 million miles per second, or around 360 times the speed of light -- before we can make any significant strides in intergalactic travel. There are only a few stars within 30 light-years of Earth, and not a really large number more within 100 light-years, and none of them are known to have planets in the sense that our Sun has planets on which intelligent life can exist. But the problem isn't one of propulsive systems, just as the sound barrier wasn't broken by using essentially more powerful engines; it was a matter of vehicle design. The "light barrier" is a theoretical limit arrived at because Einstein calculated that as the speed of a vehicle approaches the speed of light, the mass of that vehicle approaches infinity -- in practical terms, the faster you go, the more you have to push, until finally your most powerful energy source cannot move you any faster. But if we can find some way to control mass, we can crack 186,000 mps using pressurized insect bombs, roman candles, or simply by heaving bricks back over our shoulders -- provided we bring along enough bricks.

Pohl: While writers and any number of physicists speculate if light speed is ever going to be possible, there are other physicists right now measuring speeds exceeding light, as in the case of certain radiations produced in linear accelerators.

Blish: A number of eminent men have already voiced dissatisfaction with the Einstein scholium. I think it's quite possible that some sort of faster-than-light interstellar propulsion will be discovered before we get manned rockets any farther out than Jupiter. Now I don't think this is probable, but I do think it's possible. If it does happen, our range of places to go will be vastly broadened, and the human race will be able to go on in space and in time, essentially, forever.

Playboy: Meanwhile, back on Earth, it has been estimated by aeronautics authorities that 2000-mile-an-hour commercial jetliners will be in service within five years. What speeds do you estimate will be possible for Earthbound travel by 1984?

Pohl: Except for sightseeing orbital flights by commercial rocketlines which I expect to be in regularly scheduled service by 1984, I think we'll find that travel within the Earth's atmosphere will become impractical at speeds higher than about 3000 miles an hour.

Clarke: I suspect that's about right, Fred -- unless there is a new breakthrough such as matter transmission, which I wrote about for Playboy last August in World Without Distance. By this I mean virtually instantaneous transportation achieved by sending the essential patterns of solid objects, including ourselves, by radio or other telecommunications devices. If this is ever achieved, it will depend on technologies as far beyond radio as radio is beyond smoke signals; but I think that in a few centuries it may actually happen.

Playboy: What new departures do you anticipate in the realm of more-conventional transportation such as the automobile?

Clarke: By 1984 private cars will in all probability be steered from a central control rather than driven by their owners. It may even become a serious offense for a human being to attempt to drive a car. We can also expect that gasoline vehicles will be replaced by electrically powered autos, not only because the Earth's remaining supply of gas will be virtually exhausted, but because its toxic ellects in the atmosphere will be more widely realized.

Blish: I rather expect that we will eventually see the utter extinction of the private motorcar in any form. It's too wasteful of energy, too wasteful of space, both inside and outside. And I think one of the major ellects will be to wipe out the highway system. We are going to need that land badly for much more important things. Heavy hauling, much of which is done by trucks now, is going to have to go, too. I think it will go back to the railroad. I think that passenger transportation is going to be entirely communal, via subways and buses -- in the same way that air travel became largely communal, since private aircraft never did become the boom envisioned by science fiction.

Budrys: Even without cars and highways, I'm afraid that the increasingly congested urban glut of human beings and structures is going to force us to decentralize our culture very soon.

Pohl: In the meanwhile, I think we can expect that more and more high-rent residential skyscrapers with smaller and smaller apartments and lower and lower ceilings will continue to be built higher and higher over a larger and larger area of our cities. The millions of lower-in-come families thus displaced will simply have to dig, die, or get out. A few will die, and some will move out of town -- along with thousands of better-heeled neighbors -- in a heavy and continuing exodus to the hinterlands which will eventually urbanize the suburbs, suburbanize the exurbs, and extend our cities' commuter outposts -- via high-speed monorails -- as far as 200 and 300 miles from the heart of town. But most of these uprooted throngs, I suspect, will be taking up molelike residence in windowless multiple (Continued on page 112) Playboy Panel (continued from page 108)family warrens which will almost certainly be built beneath the subways and water mains when every inch of land and air above ground is finally occupied to overflowing.

Budrys: Another way to alleviate the congestion of our densest population nuclei would be to reduce the heavy flow of traffic to, from, between and within our overcrowded cities -- by developing and marketing highly sophisticated person-to-person communication devices which, if universally used, could eliminate the need for most urban travel.

Playboy: What other advances do you foresee in the field of communications?

Heinlein: Well, it's interesting to note that the futuristic communication devices which Algis Budrys just predicted have already been invented: things like a portable telephone small enough for a man's coat pocket or a lady's purse; and a home telephone that records messages, has twoway vision, and can be set for automatic relay to any other number. Either of these gadgets will be commercially available anytime Western Electric sees a market for it.

Serling: The dreary record of commercial television as an entertainment medium might lead one to wish that this particular communication device had never been invented. But I think there may be some reason to hope that its effectiveness as an informational and reportorial medium will improve manyfold in the next 20 years. Thanks to a skyful of Telstars, live telecasts from everywhere in the world -- as well as from the Moon and Mars -- will have an impact and immediacy which promises to make news programing the most compelling and informative on television. Surprisingly, we may also find that the quality of the so-called "entertainment" shows will actually improve to some degree, not through any awakening sense of public responsibility on the part of its entrepreneurs, certainly, but simply because of the voracious nature of the medium -- which will long since have reached the saturation point in camouflaging and retreading all the standard plot clichés. So there is some hope that producers and scriptwriters will finally be forced to look elsewhere -- perhaps even in the musty attic of their imaginations -- for new kinds of entertainment and fresh ideas for story lines. It's entirely possible, even probable, however, that these yet unexplored veins of entertainment ore will themselves be mined out and burned up by 1984, thus leaving us slightly worse off even than we are today -- since we'll be watching, and maybe even smelling, the same old small-screen slop blown up biliously on wall-size screens in 3-D and living color.

Budrys: I think we can expect no less dramatic advancements in the technology of publishing -- happily, in a social climate of unprecedented freedom of expression on the printed page. Would-be censors will find it physically impossible to bottleneck the pipeline from publisher to reader by seizing shipments and boycotting newsstands -- thanks to an invention which promises to eliminate the need either for newsstands or distribution: the home facsimile receiver, a kind of combination duplicating machine and parlor newsstand which will print and deliver newspapers and magazines right in your living room. We've been writing about this sort of thing for years in science fiction, but just lately I read an item in The Gallagher Report -- a highly respected communications-media newsletter -- which officially predicts the same thing.

Playboy: How far and in what areas of future life, beyond publishing, do you expect such revolutionary automation to progress, and with what consequences?

Pohl: We have seen the automation of so many industries that human workers are already almost a luxury in the manufacturing part of our economy, and they may soon be a luxury in white-collar work. By 1984 wage-earning itself may no longer be important. It may not be important even to have a job; it may be possible for a person to do his chosen work as he sees fit at a time he likes. I'm not sure if it would be a Utopia, but it's quite easy to imagine a world in which all of these immemorial pressures on humanity are no longer there.

Anderson: But even the prospect of liberation from labor has ominous potentialities: the probability that it will create a new pressure of its own -- the fear of boredom. We already have more leisure here in America than we know what to do with. Too many people lack the inner resources to get very much out of their free time. Look how miserable most men become after they retire. If we are to avoid ending up supporting most of the population in a meaningless idleness which will breed misery, crime and possibly revolution, we will simply have to find some genuine contribution for them to make. Even the geniuses will suffer from a sense of ennui and purposelessness -- unless a tremendous development in human personality takes place. And such a development won't happen of its own accord; it will require something unprecedented in the way of both universal education and pervasive cultural influences.

Budrys: If we have a world in which nobody needs to work, I agree with everything you've said. But I think we may find that one of the more paradoxical effects of automation will be to increase rather than decrease work, in a sense, for large numbers of people, as the distinction between working and nonworking hours -- which are already blurring -- all but disappears in a mingling of the two. Much "leisure" time is already spent in conducting informal business or thinking about it; and many purported recreational pursuits are in reality status hobbies useful in business. By 1984, a New York shop foreman may be running his automated production facilities via a shirt-pocket control instrument on a Bahama beach.

Playboy: What other such labor-saving devices do you envision?

Clarke: Well, within the next century or so, man will devise an electronic horn of plenty which I call the Replicator; it will be able to manufacture any object from a coded matrix, just as a hi-fi set reproduces a symphony from a record. When this time comes, it will be just as easy to dial for a thumbtack as for a necklace of walnut-size diamonds. It will mean, of course, the end of all present production techniques and may make every individual household almost entirely selfsufficient.

Tenn: The only trouble with your Replicator, Arthur, is that it undoubtedly won't be available like an ordinary appliance to every household that wants and can afford one. It will probably be a piece of rented equipment like a telephone, supplied for a monthly fee by a big utility outfit which will call itself something like General Everything, Inc. You ask what kind of payment can they levy when everything usable -- including, presumably, money -- can be made by the Replicator? Well, where there's a will, avarice will find a way: possibly so many hours of manual labor in return for each use of the instrument. For in our automated future, objects made by human hands -- even an orange-crate scooter -- will have enormous prestige value and will probably be accompanied by written pedigrees. If we're living in a socialist society at the time, of course, there will be none of these sordid financial problems. All we'll have to do is sign up our children for a Replicator on the day they're born -- and the machine will be delivered promptly on their 65th birthday. The model they finally get may have one or two bugs in it, of course: perhaps metal Christmas trees and plastic display fruit will come out real; but these imperfections will eventually be ironed out.

Heinlein: Even without Replicators, the field of household appliances and laborsaving devices is destined to be an era of tremendous breakthrough in the near future, simply because it is so retarded, so woefully underdeveloped today. Contemporary domestic living -- particularly the continuing burden of cooking and cleaning duties -- lingers lamentably behind the times. There's just no valid technological reason why anyone today should be squandering his precious time and energy on these age-old chores -- unless he happens to enjoy them. We will need a home food-processing machine which will prepare meals by following a coded tape and thereby reproduce exactly all the best recipes of the greatest chefs. And we'll need a housecleaning robot which will perform swiftly and efficiently all the tedious dirtywork we now inflict on wives and cleaning women. Both of these gadgets are completely feasible, and there's no doubt that someday we will have them.

Playboy: Will these various electronic master chefs, dietitians and family retainers be made -- in man's image -- to resemble the gleaming robots traditionally depicted in horror movies and on pulp-magazine covers, or will they be designed along the lines of such conventional appliances as vacuum cleaners and electric ranges?

Asimov: I think we will want them in humanoid form, despite the fact that they would perform many jobs far more efficiently in various nonanthropomorphic forms better fitted functionally to each specialized task. There will be a certain comfort, I think, in having robots look vaguely human, so that we can deal with them as we would human beings. And this, I think, will climax itself at the point where a machine becomes so human that it can be treated, for all practical purposes, like a faithful family retainer of flesh and blood. While no one would confuse them with human beings, there would still be strong feelings of affection for them -- and vice versa. I would like to see them become intelligent enough, in fact, to become our friends, for it seems to me that a fairly intelligent robot which has been divested of such human traits as selfishness, connivery, fibbery and oneupmanship would make a friend indeed. I wouldn't want to make them completely human, of course, even if we could. It would be a kindness to keep them on an intellectual level that would make them content with dull work.

Playboy: Doesn't it seem unlikely that the working masses of mankind will unprotestingly accept the possible prospect of replacement by a race of robots?

Asimov: It seems to me that robots capable of performing most manual tasks more speedily and efficiently than human laborers will quickly render the lowest grades of human being rather obsolete. So I sincerely hope that robot development will be accompanied by advancements in genetic knowledge which will eventually breed the inferior grade of people out of humanity -- though not, of course, through any Hitlerian policies. As to when we can expect to share our homes and our lives with humanoids: the miniaturization and sophistication of computers is moving ahead so rapidly that I don't think it will take more than a century to pack the circuitry essential to a fairly complex computer into the space of the human skull.

PlayBoy: Turning from subhuman to superhuman robots, what would you say are the prospects of creating a race of superintelligent metal men and women like those envisioned by Karel Capek in R.U.R.: beings so perfect in design and manufacture that they eventually make the human race obsolete?

Budrys: The notion that so-called "thinking machines" may someday surpass and subdue man is based on the fallacy that computers represent a form of intelligence independent of man. Though they combine facts much more rapidly than a man could, and will reach conclusions that could not be reached by every man unaided, they will always know only what man tells them. And unlike man, no machine will ever be able to genuinely create anything -- simply because machines don't care. I don't doubt that man and machine together will be able to take giant creative strides that neither could take alone; but only man will be able to recognize the significance of those strides, to act on them, and to enlarge upon them, and above all, to be exalted and inspired by them.

Anderson: I think man and machine may eventually merge in a rather profound and startling way. I envision direct electronic hookups between human and computer brains. This is no Kafkaesque nightmare, but an entirely practical and exciting possibility. The linkage could be temporary and might not even require wires or any other material contacts at all; electromagnetic induction might do the job. A union like this would, in effect, multiply by many times the number of brain cells available to you, and these extra cells would enable you to conduct every mental process, particularly those involving logic, reasoning and memory, with a speed, certainty and brilliance of which gray matter alone -- anyone's gray matter -- would otherwise be totally incapable.

Playboy: So far we've been discussing future life rather generally and imper sonally. Can we attempt now to bring this era to life in a more personal way for the reader by asking you to draw together and elaborate these varied visions with your conception of an average day in the life of an affluent city-dwelling bachelor at the turn of the coming century?

Anderson: Well, assuming that he bothers to sleep at all, our bachelor will be awakened more gently than by a yammering alarm clock. He'll get soft music off a tape piped into his pillow. His bed, which rocked him to sleep and fell quiet when his regular breathing told it he'd dropped off, now gives him a mild shaking till he orders it to stop, and then rises at the head to become a chaise longue.

Pohl: Then a timed mechanical servitor offers him freshly brewed coffee, maybe with a touch of amphetamine.

Anderson: And while he sips it, he dials for his breakfast, choosing from a menu that flashes onto a panel.

Pohl: Next a recorded voice reminds him: "Today is August 4th. You have an appointment with Esterhazy at 11 a.m., a dinner date with Rosemary at 7, and your vacation begins the day after tomorrow." When he steps out of bed the floor is warmed with radiant heat. His shower cubicle is preset to sluice him with gentle floods of water just warm enough to be relaxing, followed by a wash of nonirritating detergent shampoo, then a bracing head-to-toe needle spray of cold water, a spritz of skin bracer and a final dusting from a pleasantly scented, deodorant aerosol.

Anderson: He uses an electric massager on his gums, not a toothbrush; cavities are a thing of the past. And he won't have to shave this morning, because his last depilation, which included a beard-inhibiting hormone, is good for another week.

Pohl: Or if even that's too much trouble, a facial electrolysis at the barber shop can free him permanently from the surgery of scraping the beard off his chin. He will dress in clothes which have been cleaned and pressed overnight by a robot valet.

Anderson: All of his suits, incidentally, will be entirely synthetic, designed more sensibly and comfortably than the contemporary business suit, and tailormade by an automaton which takes his measurements and follows his specifications about cut, color, pattern and material, all at very little cost.

Pohl: So little cost, in fact, that they will be as disposable as Kleenex.

Budrys: Or he may decide to slip into something even more comfortable: a dirtproof, stainproof, rainproof, shrinkproof, tearproof, wrinkleproof suit in a synthetic fiber which never requires cleaning, pressing or repair. It's also wired for sight and sound with such optional accessories as a self-contained heating and cooling system for comfortable all-weather wear; a matchbook-size FM-AM receiver with cordless stereo earplug speakers; a dictaphone machine no larger than a cigarette case; and a transistorized two-way audio-visual pocket communicator with direct-dial to any place in the world.

Anderson: At any rate, when he finishes dressing, our man presses a button to inform the robot chef that he's ready for breakfast. In the minute or two he has to wait, he checks his television phone to see if it visitaped any messages for him during the night, then punches up the morning news on the wall screen in three-dimensional color. The machine-made meal that comes up the delivery shaft and rolls on its tray to his table is typically delicious. Afterward he smokes his first cigarette of the day; the tobacco contains a mild euphoriac to put him in a cheerful mood. As he leaves, the front door slides automatically open before him and locks itself behind him; the apartment, detecting his departure, activates the housekeeping robots. He lives in a gigantic urban complex of interwoven buildings that forms a city within the city. Almost all of his material needs can be fulfilled without leaving the premises, and from his wall-windows -- when they aren't opaqued for privacy or sleeping -- he commands a spectacular view of the city: a forest of glass-sheathed skyscrapers extending in all directions as far as the eye can see. But his job is elsewhere, so he catches the high-speed elevator down from the 100th floor to street level.

Pohl: On his way down he orders transportation over his wrist communicator, and by the time he is at the curb the robot doorman has electronically flagged a robot cab, the door is open and the destination already set. He gets in and goes -- his route preset and his progress guided by an electronic highway-control system which -- like an automatic pilot -- takes over the job of starting, steering and braking for all vehicular traffic -- thus eliminating the possibility of collisions and rush-hour jams. The only thing missing en route is the hackie's conversation -- though Cyril Korubluth and I once wrote a story in which auto-cabs were programed to discuss baseball, politics, weather and women by means of a library of selected tapes.

Budrys: Or our man might spend the time in transit getting a start on the day's work, dictating memoranda into his pocket recorder, and phoning ahead to his office on his wrist communicator to get the day's mail and messages.

Pohl: Meanwhile, of course, he is being continuously reminded by his communicator playback of any errands he needs to run, any office problems he needs to be ready for, etc. Carrying this a little further, he might even have a reminding machine like the one Fritz Leiber once wrote a story about: in addition to routine reminders, it dispensed advice, reassurance and morale-building suggestions.

Playboy: He's on his way to work, but you haven't told us yet what kind of job he has.

Pohl: Let's say he's a young white-collar executive; whatever his field, he'll have to possess a commodity in great demand on the labor market of the 21st Century: originality and freshness of thought. There won't be many dull, routine jobs available anymore; machines will be doing most of them. There will really be only three major fields open to a young man just out of college: He can become a cyberneticist -- a sort of glorified repair man and machine tender; he can go into technical research; or he can try his hand at "communications," that immense and still-growing field which embraces everything from personnel management and sales to covering football games and writing sonnets. Let's say our man has elected communications. It pays handsomely -- perhaps $50,000 a year to start, partly because of inflation, partly because real income keeps going up every year as the increasing rate of production creates more and more riches for everyone. In any event, our man needn't worry whether he can afford a sportscopter or a Black Sea cruise. He can afford anything -- a 90-foot yacht, a 12-room penthouse, a castle in Spain -- if not to buy them, then surely to lease them or rent them on his all-purpose credit card whenever he likes and for as long as he likes.

Anderson: But today is a work day, so on to the office for five or six hours. He works four days a week, and has three months' paid vacation; unlimited paid sick leave, too -- of which he uses very little, thanks to modern medicine.

Pohl: He's greeted at his desk by a mound of messages and mail, which he deals with by means of an automatic stenographer. He'll still have a live secretary, of course, but he won't waste her on mechanical chores like typing or running out for coffee. He'll dictate his letters to the machine, which will type them out in any number of copies indicated, using magnetic ribbon inks like those now used on check forms, so that other machines -- as well as the human recipient -- can scan and read them for automatic classification and filing.

Anderson: If one of his letters is going to a foreign country, it's automatically translated, then dispatched immediately by wire or radio directly to the address given. He'll also have face-to-face communication via visual telephone with associates around the world. Of course with correspondence so easy, there'll be an unholy lot of unnecessary calls and memos, but at least people will finally have acquired enough regard for health and sanity to take an hour off at lunch and not spend it talking business. He dines in an excellent restaurant near his office.

Pohl: Big Brother picks up the check, because such things are still on the almighty expense account. So is the men's club he repairs to afterward for a dip in the pool, a supine session under the electronically stimulated muscle exercisers, then the ultraviolet lamp, a mechanical massage and back to the office at 3 or 3:30 for another hour or two of work.

Anderson: At the end of the workday, our man hops a robot cab and relaxes with a drink while it threads him through traffic to the apartment of the young lady with whom he's planning to spend the evening. Of course she isn't ready yet; some things will never change. Her door scans him as he approaches it, transmits his picture to her in the dressing room, and lets him in when she says OK. Over the intercom she invites him to pour himself a drink while he's waiting. He presses the autobar button for a vodka martini, very dry, with a twist of lemon. While he sips it he lights up another euphoric cigarette and watches the three-dimensional scenic color projection which covers one wall of the living room -- a live television view of the Swiss Alps; it's a bit overcast tonight. He dials for a view of Maui, where they've made reservations for dinner, to check on the weather and the surf: the Moon is full, the water calm.

The other walls and the ceiling are luminous; no more lamps. This girl is quite a reader, but like most people, owns only a few books, special editions. When she wants to read something apart from these, she calls the central library, which has everything in print filed on microtapes, ready to screen directly for her on a portable home monitor equipped with a button she presses to have the pages turned. There's a small charge for this, out of which the author gets a cut. Like most other charges, it's sent directly to her automatic bank, which pays the bill and sends her a monthly accounting.

When she's finally ready, they take the elevator up to the roof heliport and shuttle out to the city's vast aerospace port. They board the rocket and take their seats with the 200 other passengers. The liftoff is a bit violent, but the cushioned contour seats and anti-acceleration pills make it rather fun. Once up in the stratosphere at 3000 miles an hour, the ship goes into an enormous glide. The passengers gather at the bar and look out the huge picture ports at a sky turned dark and starry, and at the planet rolling green and blue and brown below them.

In an hour or so they're in Hawaii. Of course they've gained hours of daylight, but a fatigue-chasing drug with no harmful aftereffects makes it unnecessary to sleep. They have a swim in the surf, lounge around on the beach awhile, and finally enter a communal refresher house, where they share a shower and then slip into more-formal clothes.

Then they catch a submarine to a seafood restaurant famous for its spectacular view of coral reefs and flitting fish from within the giant plastic hemisphere which encloses it on the ocean floor. Afterward they go back topside for an evening of island hopping. First stop is a new club which has been built cantilevered directly over Mauna Loa crater, where they can watch the lava bubble beneath the transparent dance floor and the smoke fume up past the sealed windows.

Pohl: The robot waiters will be programed for super efficiency and against rudeness, and to know after being told once exactly how many drops of angostura and what sort of pickled artichoke you like in your drink, though I seriously doubt that human technology will ever be able to improve on the functional and decorative design of today's Playboy Club Bunnies. Anyway, before the evening is over, our man will suggest that they get together again the following weekend -- perhaps for a champagne-service rocket flight to Pago Pago, or a hydroplane-liner cruise to Cap d'Antibes.

Anderson: Or if things are really going well, he may even invite her to join him on a summer vacation in space. It's as expensive as hell, but well worth the cost -- offering such amusements as swimming in and out of a floating globe of water in a zero-gravity orbital station, and riding a 500-mile-an-hour monorail across the mountains of the Moon. Let's hope she's duly impressed, and that he doesn't have to return to his apartment alone.

Pohl: He can always invite her up to see his etchings -- in this case, perhaps, a collection of rare trading stamps from the 1960s. His door key turning in the lock, of course, dims the lights inside and flips on a continuous tape of the latest electronic mood music. The divertissements which ensue, unfortunately, can't be programed so predictably; nor are they likely to be conducted any differently than they are today. There are some things, after all, that simply can't be improved by automation.

Tenn: That was a virtuoso vision of things to come -- complete with happy ending and fadeout clinch. I must congratulate you on your originality and aptness of thought as tellers of fairy tales, and for your apparently unshakable faith in the possibility of human advancement. Despite your persuasiveness, however, I can't seem to rid myself of the nagging suspicion that there is no potentially great advance in technology or human relations which man, in all his ingenuity, won't find a way to pervert and subvert into a historic step backward. I agree that we're coming to an age of unexampled social emancipation and scientific revolution -- an age abristle with all the blandishments you've described -- but I believe that it's going to be repetitious in many ways both of our present and our past -- though in exactly what ways we can't yet imagine. Possibly it's just as well for our egos that we can't. Thoreau wrote over a hundred years ago that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Well, the world has changed fantastically since then, but the mass of men still do. History always repeats itself, but on another step of the spiral. We are a wildly imaginative, inordinately idealistic, incredibly persistent, hopelessly naive, incurably corrupt species, and no matter what we do we always seem to wind up somehow or other in the same position on the tree, except that occasionally it's a different tree. Tomorrow we'll be looking for the mechanical bananas in a nickel-plated jungle.

Sturgeon: When we talk about humanity's far future through the skies, I couldn't agree more. But I can't help getting a bit impatient with all this prognostication about how we must continue to be as stupid as we are. Bill Tenn insists that we are going to continue to behave the way we do and remain what we are in the midst of an immense pushbutton society, but it's just not going to be so because we're not going to be the same kind of people after it happens.

Tenn: Ted, you have faith, and it's something I respect. But when it comes to the human race, I firmly believe that faith is what keeps mountains firmly in place. With all my pessimism about our species, I do believe we're going places -- but we're going places in a small way, a few fumbling steps at a time. If we're going to progress either on Earth or in space, we will have to understand one basic fact about progress: that every advance that we might make is an advance that can be prostituted to vicious and vulgar ends, exactly as other advances -- technological and societal -- have been prostituted in the past. This will continue to be true as long as man remains what he is. And I don't see man changing. I see him slowly evolving, getting hurt, burning himself again and again and again, and then one day in the far future, learning to dread the fire -- nothing more.

Heinlein: I agree that mankind is still barbarous and ignorant. But I disagree with you, Bill, that we're destined to remain this ignorant. I expect our descendants to exceed our grandest achievements at least as much as we exceed the cavemen. We have been "civilized" for only an instant in our long history, it's true; but what will our children accomplish? Take the wildest speculation you can imagine, then square it and cube the result, and the answer still won't be big enough to match the truth. They will go out to the stars and beyond, to the other island Galaxies. And they will flourish by the billions, by the trillions, by numbers too high to guess. They will meet many other intelligent species, make friends with some, fight with others, be enriched by both. They will gain knowledge and power beyond our antediluvian ability to imagine. And in time, of which there will be plenty, they will unravel all that is mysterious to us. They will number the billion names of God.

Budrys: You make our destiny sound almost too golden to be true, Bob -- but I don't doubt for a minute that it will all come to pass more or less as you predict. This age, in which 60 years have carried us from Kitty Hawk to Venus, will someday seem a stagnant time to most men of the future age -- though there's no need expatiating on the fact that we are going to have what appear to be tragic setbacks, that men and causes which have been entrusted with the popular vision of the future will prove false. But the future -- not just a fresh page in the calendar, but as time when things are basically different, and basically better -- is constantly arriving, at voracious speed, whether we like it or not, whether we wish we hadn't wished for it or not. We will never be ready for it -- but it will most certainly come.

Bradury: I think that what we have been leading up to is the fact that we are part of a miraculous explosion of the senses. The Universe has come alive, through us, and we go in search of ourselves. We go to put together yet more pieces of a puzzle we will be jiggering with for the next 10 billion billion years. Any tool that comes to hand we will use. We will construct technologies and rend them asunder, we will build philosophies and wreck them by the wayside, we will use and discard, try and fail, try and succeed -- but always remain in constant motion outward from this explosion point. It will be a terrifying struggle; the human agony that must go into it is immeasurable at this time. But how can we expect less agony from our future than we have known in our past? The important thing is that the race is on the move, and that we, selfishly, as writers, have long dreamt of this movement and cannot help but be exhilarated at our own involvement in this voyage of self-discovery. We know so very little. But this we know irrevocably: We love life and living, we hate death and darkness. Creatures of the Sun, we will take the Sun with us, in our blood, to warm the great night, to light our way in the darkness beyond our system. Love of day and motion, fear of dark and immotion is all we need know now. The rest will come. We will find it along the way.

Playboy: Thank you, gentlemen.