LITMIR.BIZ

      PROLOGUE

      The experts agree that it is now physically and factually possible for man to destroy himself. Some of us may dare to debate whether it will happen, or when. But the likelihood, while most certainly and terrifyingly great, is completely incalculable; and the deadline can't even be guessed. For our eradication will probably be assured quite invisibly, long before the outcome grows obvious, without any dramatic or arresting advance signs. The acts of countless individuals will contribute to making the disaster a certainty; while most contributors remain blind to the mounting, combined effect of the separate pressures and attitudes. In fact, this horror may very well happen wholly unintended, simply because of ignorance by the participants, of the numberless anonymous nudges pushing us toward the edge of the abyss. If human past-performance gives any guide, we may take (or may already have taken) the step-past-returning all unknowingly, swayed forward by myriad moods, whims and opinions none of us can even identify.

      In any case, the cold calculation of "odds" in so serious a matter is irrelevant and inhuman. To chance the utter destruction of all life at all is infinitely too extreme a risk from the instant it is incurred. The danger must be considered immediate, dreadful, and definite no matter how distant. It seems trivial, and even sinister, to divert any of the ability or time needed to prevent the disaster into games of ineffectual speculation about it. Whether we like it or not, whether we face it or not, the possibility of humanity's utter annihilation through human acts now exists. The probability is, in the same breath, far too great. The only intelligent concern remaining is to remove the threat.

      The source of the problem is obvious: man's technology has advanced with murderous speed—very, very sharply in the last fifty years—while social thinking still lags at primitive levels.

      Most of us have shuddered away from our suicidal dilemma, suppressing it as intolerable. Finding ourselves incapable of any easy or immediate answer, and equally unable to cope with our daily duties under a cloud of constant fear, we seek to sweep our terror under the rug of the rest of our thinking, in order to live sanely.

      But actually, our problem is not a bomb at all. It's behavior. Even a lowly hammer will become a vicious weapon in the hands of the ill-intentioned. And in our intents and attitudes lies our real danger. We simply can't seem to get along with one another. We writhe over the things other people do, or won't do, or don't do. We can hardly conceal our rage when others try to make us do things. And for the most part, even after we've had our way, we're disappointed and discontent.

      Until now this habitual human unhappiness disturbed only the immediately affected. It apparently did no lasting damage to the race as a whole. But today we're being crowded closer and closer together, as our machines shrink time and distance between us and around us. As more of us are affected by each individual act, growing numbers of us are injured by every human error. Now we find ourselves faced with the fact that just a few frightened or confused people can actually erase man from the earth forever.

      It was quite natural for those who became concerned with this common threat to turn first toward the scientists who created it—the experts on fission, fusion and the design of these ever-multiplying horror-weapons. These men said then, and assert now, with arresting unanimity, that our only possible protection is a social defense. And they confess in the next breath that they simply have no specific suggestion as to its necessary nature or structure.

      But it takes no expert to know what we require. We need a workable way to get along with one another. Putting it very plainly: unless we learn how better to behave, we're dead. Literally. All of us. Forever. This is no bugaboo to frighten us, like children, into minding our manners. No person remotely capable of considering this matter intelligently would dare deny the inevitable outcome of a projection of our present patterns along a path lined with ever more powerful weapons available to an increasing number of hands. This makes the problem and its solution every single human being's most pressing business, dwarfing personal preoccupations and transcending niceties of opinion. Unless we can solve the dilemma, the odds are overwhelming that there'll soon be no humans to have problems.

      It is particularly shameful and horrible that we adults continue to risk the lives and bodies of our own children. It is unbelievable that we'd allow even the least chance of their being crippled or burned alive. Surely we do not raise and tend them so carefully, only to let them be wantonly destroyed because of our omissions. It is almost unthinkable that so terrible a threat is being ignored out of negligence and laziness, or because we're too stubborn and selfish to abandon a few easily obvious lies—comforting because of long familiarity.

      The least we can do is realistically to contemplate these questions. There is definite reason to hope the entire answer may lie in the very act of honestly and earnestly seeking one. Perhaps if enough of us constructively admit that only general and race safety can guarantee our own personal security, the

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