Read Online Orwell's Revenge by Peter Huber - Free Book Online Page A

the Outer Party. Burgess was an idiot, Blair thought behind his smile. An absolute idiot, venomously orthodox, typical of the types who controlled everything of any importance these days. The man had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that Blair had ever encountered. He had not a thought in his head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that he was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to him. “The human sound track” Blairnicknamed him in his own mind.
    It was always the Burgess types who got promoted. People like Burgess and Connolly, across the hall. The smart ones, the ones with any spark of real technical skill, got vaporized. Bernal, for example. Bernal and his Hush-a-Screen.
    Blair glanced back at his rival. Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Connolly was busy on the same job as himself. Connolly obviously suspected the same. He was doing his utmost not to let his voice carry, addressing his screen in a sort of hoarse whisper. But that never worked; the screen then picked up stray sounds from other cubicles. It was in fact a constant problem in the long, windowless hall, with the double row of cubicles and the ceaseless background drone of voices. Sometimes the noise level got so high your screen recorded complete gibberish.
    Bernal, Blair reflected bitterly, had solved the problem, and had been immediately vaporized for doing so. It was appalling! Bernal, the closest thing to a friend Blair had ever had at the office, Bernal with his mocking eyes, with his irrepressible interest in the technicalities of everything—vaporized, because he had lacked discretion and thesaving stupidity needed to survive within the Party.
    He had arrived in the office one day hugely pleased, and announced that he had the solution to the whole problem. It was a sort of rigid plastic tent—Bernal had even built a prototype—that fitted neatly over the rim of the telescreen, creating a small zone of quiet. The “Hush-a-Screen,” he had called it. Bernal had vanished soon after. A morning came, and he was missing from work. Despite himself, Bernal had ended up a perfect member of the Party. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
    And short of death itself, the best orthodoxy of all was a belligerent, anti-intellectual stupidity, of the kind that Burgess had been born with. Small wonder that all the useful arts in the world were either standing still or going backward. The Party dimly understood that it still needed the telescreens, still needed science for war and police espionage, and so toleratedempirical approaches in these two areas. The Party’s managers all ended up like Burgess anyway.
    Blair felt a sense of helplessness take hold of him. If there is hope, Smith had written in the diary, it lies in the proles. But there was no hope. A prole’s loyalty extended only as far as a prole could see, and for only as long as he could remember. Their market was justa rubbish heap of detail, tiny things that would stay forever tiny. A prole saw no further than the stalls in the marketplace, and remembered nothing bigger than razor blades. A prole was like an ant, which can see small objects but not large ones, simplyanother species of insect. Only Big Brother was an eagle. He alone saw everything.
    This, Blair thought in despair, was the Party’s real triumph. There were electronic files but no records, telescreens but no human contacts. Everything was connected, the past with the present, the people with Big Brother, yet all the connections ended in the empty basement of a single, huge Ministry. There were no humans anywhere, only insects, the machine, and the Ministry.
    As Blair settled back in his chair, he took a last look at Connolly across the hall. The little men who scuttled so nimbly throughthe labyrinthine corridors of Ministries were never vaporized. One of these days, thought Blair with sudden deep conviction, Connolly will