Appointment in Tomorrow

Appointment in Tomorrow by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber's "Appointment in Tomorrow" opens on a bomb-scarred, superstitious late-twentieth-century America ruled less by its elected government than by the Thinkers, a cabal of publicists and propagandists headquartered at the Thinkers' Foundation in New Washington, who have supplanted the discredited professional scientists (still remembered for the martyred "Three Physicists" of the Hell Bomb era) as the nation's source of miracles and reassurance. Jorj Helmuth, a 40-year-old Thinker trained since youth in somno-learning, hypnosis, and mental discipline, wakes in his Foundation apartment beside Caddy (Arkady Simms), a girl he keeps as a lover but has reserved a private hypnotic trigger-word over for use only in extremity. He conceives what he believes is a genuine technical breakthrough, a direct neutron-sail spaceship, and impulsively summons a dozen rocket physicists to a conference, bypassing his partner Jan Tregarron. He then presides, via the tape-fed super-computer "Maizie," over a meeting with the President, two generals, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Space, all of whom regard Maizie with quasi-religious awe as they route questions about the Endless War, crop planning, and Soviet affairs through her, and watch a Mars rocket launch that the Thinkers have shut the Secretary of Space out of. One submitted question — "Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?" (a reference to Poe's exposed chess-playing automaton hoax) — is traced to physicist Morton Opperly's circle at the Institute. Inside Maizie, a fat man, revealed as Tregarron, actually writes the "brain's" answers by hand, confirming Maizie is a fraud. Aboard the Mars rocket, the pilot and his cat Sappho drift in an orbit that will occupy two idle months, the pilot poring over "wisdom" he expects to bring back from Mars. At Opperly's home, young physicist Willard Farquar admits he planted the Maelzel question to bait the Thinkers, whom he and Opperly's circle know to be charlatans: Maizie is fake, the Mars rockets go nowhere, and the Martian wisdom is invented. Opperly counsels against needling the Thinkers, arguing that a demoralized postwar public needs magicians rather than truth-tellers, and recalls his own past disillusionment; Farquar insists on continuing to "act" rather than merely react, invoking Hitler's early bluffs as a cautionary parallel and reminding Opperly that Farquar's former girlfriend, "Miss Arkady," left him for a Thinker. A radiogram then arrives: Helmuth has invited Farquar to the Foundation that afternoon, ostensibly about a deep-space project. Back in his own apartment, Jorj savors his neutron-sail spaceship concept, resolves to eventually build a "true" Maizie and expose the Thinkers' deceptions to the professional scientists as equals, and finds Caddy absent, which faintly unsettles him. Meanwhile Tregarron instructs Caddy to serve as "contact girl" for the incoming Farquar, over her strong objection that Farquar is a crude, frightening man; Tregarron manipulates her into compliance by needling her pride. At the White House, the President anxiously asks his secretary whether the Maelzel hint about Maizie could be true; the secretary avoids a direct answer but affirms the administration is too dependent on the Thinkers to act against them regardless, concluding that only a scientist could ever move against the Thinkers. Farquar arrives at the Foundation, is processed through its theatrical, faintly menacing decontamination ritual, and is greeted not by Helmuth but by Tregarron and Caddy — now presented as "Arkady Simms," his former love. Meanwhile Jorj's promised conference collapses: his invited physicists were secretly told by a countermanding note, forged in Tregarron's name, that the meeting was off. Alone, Jorj despairs over his childhood dream of being a real scientist and grows suspicious of Tregarron's sabotage. He summons Caddy hypnotically by her trigger name, "Caddums," and she responds in submissive trance. Later, Farquar returns to Opperly transformed, composed and satisfied, and announces he has abandoned open confrontation for infiltration: he will join the Thinkers, "bore from within," and eventually strike, working with Tregarron rather than Helmuth, since Helmuth's position is about to be undermined. Opperly, unsurprised, quietly bids him goodbye. In Tregarron's office, Jorj confronts him over the canceled conference and lays out the original shared vision behind founding the Thinkers: that showmanship and deception were meant only as a temporary means to win the public to science, to be followed by a "second big step" reconciling the Thinkers with genuine professional scientists, a reconciliation Jorj believes he alone is prepared to execute. Tregarron dismisses this as naive and premature, declares that the realists must go on ruling the credulous indefinitely, and reveals he anticipated this rupture: armed guards will send Jorj on a two-year "trip to Mars" aboard the drugged/robot-controlled rocket, ostensibly to commune with Martian wisdom, while Willard Farquar takes his place at the Foundation. As Tregarron gloats and produces a pistol, the entranced Caddy — summoned earlier by Jorj's own hypnotic word — moves behind Tregarron, but instead of aiding Jorj she hands Tregarron the weapon and, looking at Jorj with bright eyes, says only, "Poor Superman."

By Fritz Leiber · First published 1952 · Genre: Science Fiction, Dystopian, Political Thriller · 11,803 words

First lines

Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?

The first angry rays of the sun -- which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals -- pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.

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science fiction · short stories · speculative fiction · futurism · dystopia · time travel · human condition · philosophical · existentialism · technology · society · imagination

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