In the Problem Pit

by Frederik Pohl

  So we juggled ourselves around cautiously and sat on the top step, which was just wide enough for the three of us, even Dolly-Belly. We listened to the silence and looked at the emptiness, until Barbie said suddenly:

  “I hear something.”

  And Dolly said, “I smell something. What do you hear?”

  “What do you smell?”

  “Sort of like vinegar.”

  “What I hear is sort of like somebody breathing.”

  And a light flared up at us from the bottom of the stairs, blinding us by its abruptness although it was only a tiny light, and the voice of Willie the Weeper said, “Great balls o’ fahr, effen ‘tain’t the Revenooers come to bust up mah lil ol* still!”

  I flung my head away from the light and yelled, “Willie, for Christ’s sake! What are you doing here?”

  “Dumb question, my David,” said Barbie beside me. “Don’t you remember about cave drippings? Willie’s got himself a supply of home brew out here.”

  “Right,” said Willie benevolently. “Thought I recognized your voice, my two-toned sepia queen. Say, how are your roots doing?”

  Barbie didn’t say a word, and neither did any of the rest of us. After a moment Willie may have felt a little ashamed of himself, because he flicked off his light. “I’ve only got the one battery,” he explained apologetically from the darkness. “Oh, wait a minute. Take a look.” And he turned on the little penlight again, shined it at arm’s length on himself, and then against the wall, where he had four fruit bowls covered by dinner plates and a bunch of paper cups. “I thought you might like to see my little popskull plant,” he said pridefully, turning the light off again. “Care for a shot?”

  “Why not?” said Barbie, and we all three eased ourselves down to the lower steps and accepted a paper cup of the stuff, sharing it among us.

  “Straining it was the hard part,” said Willie. “You may notice a certain indefinable piquancy to the bouquet. I had to use my underwear.”

  Barbie, just swallowing, coughed and giggled. “Not bad, Willie. Here, try it, David. It’s a little bit like Dutch gin.”

  To me it tasted like the liquid that accumulates in the bottom of the vegetable bins in a refrigerator, and I said so.

  “Right, that’s what I mean. My compliments to the vintner, Willie. Do you come here a lot?”

  “No. Oh, well, maybe, I guess so. I don’t like being hassled around in there.” I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but I could imagine it: angry and defensive. So, to make it worse, I said,

  “I thought you volunteered for this.”

  “Hell! I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  “What did you think it would be like, Willie?” Barbie asked. But her voice wasn’t mocking.

  He said, with pauses, “I suppose, in a way … I suppose I thought it would be kind of like the revolution. I don’t suppose you remember. You’re probably too young, and anyway it was mostly on the West Coast. But we were all together then, you know … I mean, even the ones we were fighting and struggling were part of it. Chaos, chaos, and out of it came some good things. We struggled with the chief of police of San Francisco in the middle of Market Street, and afterwards he was all bruised and bleeding, but he thanked me.”

  We didn’t say anything. He was right, we were too young to have been involved except watching it on TV, where it seemed like another entertainment.

  “And then,” said Willie, “nothing ever went right.” And he didn’t say anything more for a long time, until Dolly-Belly said:

  “Can I have another shot of drippings?”

  And then we just sat for a while, thinking about Willie, and finally not thinking about anything much. I didn’t feel blind any more, even with the light off. Just that bit from

  Willie’s flash had given me some sense of domain. I could remember the glimpse I had got: the flat, unreflective black wall off to my right, just past Dolly-Belly, the wooden steps down (there had been nine of them), the duckboards along the rough shelf above us, the faint occasional drip of water from the bumps in the cave roof over us, the emptiness off to the left past where the light from Willie’s penlamp did any good, Willie’s booze factory down below. With a girl on either side of me I didn’t even feel cold, except for my feet, and after a while Willie put his hand on one of them. It felt warm and I liked it, but I heard myself saying, “You’ve got the wrong foot, Willie. Barbie’s on my left, Dolly’s on my right.”

  After a moment he said, “I knew it was yours. I’m already holding one of Dolly’s.” But he took it away.

  Barbie said thoughtfully, “If you’d been a voter in your district, Willie, who would you have voted for?”

  “Do you think I haven’t asked myself that?” he demanded. “You’re right. I would have voted for Tom Gdansk.”

  Dolly said, ‘It’s time for a refill, Willie friend.” And we all churned around getting our paper cups topped off and readjusting ourselves and when Willie prudently turned the penlight off again, we were all sitting together against the wall, touching and drinking, and talking. Willie was doing most of the talking. I didn’t say much. I wasn’t holding back; it was just that I had had the perception that it was more important for Willie to talk than for me to respond. I let the talk wash over me. Time slowed and shuddered to a stop.

  It came to me that we four were sitting there because it was meant from the beginning of time that we should be sitting there, and that sitting there was the thing and the only thing that we were ordained to do. My spattered statue for the library? It didn’t matter. It was in a different part of reality. Not the part we four were in just then. Willie’s worries about being not-loved? It mattered that he was telling us about it (he was back to his third birthday, when his older brother’s whooping cough had canceled Willie’s party), but it didn’t matter that it had happened. Dolly’s fatness? N’importe. Barbie’s fitful soft weeping, over she never said what? De nada. Lara leaving me for the USIS goon? Machts nicht … well, no. That did amount to something real and external. I could feel it working inside me.

  But I was not prepared to let it interfere with the groupness of our group, which was a real and immanent thing in itself. After a while, Dolly began to hum to herself. She had a bad, reedy voice, but she wasn’t pushing it, and it fitted in nicely behind Willie’s talking and Barbie’s weeping. We eased each other, all four of us. It must have been in some part Willie’s terrible foul brew, but it could not have been all that; it was weak stuff and tasted so awful you could drink it only one round at a time. It was, in some ways, the finest time of my life.

  “Time,” I said wonderingly. “And time, and time, and all of the kinds of time.” I don’t suppose it meant anything, but it seemed to at that—yes. At that time. And for a time we talked timelessly about time, which, in my perception, had the quality of a mobile or a medallion or a coffee-table book, in that it was something one discussed for its pleasant virtues but not something that constrained one.

  Except that there too there was some sort of inner activity, like stomach rumblings, going on all the time.

  While we were there, what was happening in those external worlds we had left? In the world in the caves behind us? Had the group been judged and passed and discharged while we were gone? If it had, how would we ever know?

  But Barbie said (and I had not known I had asked her, or spoken out loud) that that was unlikely because, as far as she could see, our group had done damn-all about solving any problems, especially its own, and if we were to be excused only after performance, we had all the performance yet to perform. Everybody knew the numbers. Most groups got out in some three weeks. But what was three weeks? Twenty-one sleeps? But we slept when we chose, and no two of us had exactly the same number. Sixty-three meals? Dolly had stopped eating almost entirely. How could you tell? Only by the solutions of problems, maybe. If you knew what standards were applied, and who the judges were. But I could see little of that happening, like Barbie, like all of us, I was still trapp
ed in my own internal problems that, even there, came funneling in by some undetectable pipeline from that larger external world beyond the caves. And I had solved no part of them. Lara was still gone and would still be gone. Whatever time it was in Djakarta, she was there. Whatever was appropriate to that time, she was doing, with her USIS man and not with me, for I was not any part of her life and never would be again. She probably never thought of me, even. Or if she did, only with anger. “I feel bad about the anger,” I said out loud, only then realizing I had been talking out loud for some time, “because I earned it richly and truly. I own it and acknowledge it as mine.”

  “So do you want to do anything about it?” asked somebody, Dolly I think, or maybe Willie.

  I considered that for a timeless stretch. “Only to tell her about it,” I said finally, “to tell her what’s true, that I earned it.”

  “Do you want her back?” asked Willie. (Or Barbie.)

  I considered that for a long time. I don’t know whether I ever answered the question, or what I said. But I began to see what the answer was, at least. Really I didn’t want her back. Not exactly. At least, I didn’t want the familiar obligatory one-to-oneness with Lara, the getting up with Lara in the morning, the making the coffee for Lara, the sharing the toast with Lara, the following Lara to the bus twenty minutes after, the calling Lara at her office from my office, wondering who Lara was seeing for lunch, being home before Lara and waiting for Lara to come in, sharing a strained dinner with Lara, watching TV with Lara, fighting with Lara, swallowing resentments against Lara; I didn’t even want going to bed with Lara or those few moments, so brief and in recollection so illusory, when Lara and I were peacefully at one or pleasuring each other with some discovery or joy. Drowsily I began to feel that I wanted nothing from Lara except the privilege of letting go of her without anger or pain; letting go of all pain, maybe, so that I did not have to have it eating at me.

  But how much of this I said, or heard, I do not know, I only remember bits and tableaux. I remember Willie the Weeper actually weeping, softly and easingly like Barbie. I remember that there was a point when there was no more of the cave drippings left except some litde bit that had just begun to work. I remember kissing Dolly, who was crying in quite a different and more painful way, and then I only remember waking up.

  At first I was not sure where I was. For a moment I thought we had all got ourselves dead drunk and wandering, and perhaps had gone out into the cave and got ourselves lost in some deadly, foolish way. It scared me. How could we ever get back?

  But it wasn’t that way, as I perceived as soon as I saw that we were huddled in a corner of one of the sleeping rooms. I was not alone in my sleeping bag; Barbie was there with me, her arms around me and her face beautiful and slack. There was a weight across our feet which I thought was Dolly.

  But it wasn’t. It was Willie Murtagh, wrapped in his own

  bag, stretched flat and snoring, and Dolly was not anywhere around.

  Aspects of External Reality

  Geology. About a hundred million years before the birth of Christ, during the period called the Upper Cretaceous when the Gulf of Mexico swelled to drown huge parts of the Southern United States, a series of volcanic eruptions racked the sea that would become the Caribbean. The chains of islands called the Greater and Lesser Antilles were bom.

  As the molten rock boiled forth and the pressure dropped, great bubbles of trapped gas evolved, some bursting free into the air, others remaining imprisoned as the cooling and hardening of the lava raced against the steady upward crawl of the gas. In time the rock cooled and became agelessly hard. The rains drenched it, the seas tore at it, the winds scoured it, and all of them brought donations: waveborne insects, small animals floating on bits of vegetation or sturdily swimming, air-borne dust, bird-borne seeds. After a time the islands became densely overgrown with reeds and grasses, orchids and morning-glories, bamboo, palm, cedar, ebony, calabash, whitewood; it was a place of karst topography, so wrinkled and seamed that it was like a continent’s worth of landscaping crammed into a single island, and overgrown everywhere.

  Under the rock the bubbles remained; and as the peaks Weathered, some of the bubbles thinned and balded at the top, opened, and collapsed, leaving great, round, open valleys like craters. When astronomers wanted to build the biggest damned radio telescope the world had ever seen, they found °ne of these opened-out bubbles. They trimmed it and 4 smoothed it and drained it and inlaid it with wire mesh to become the thousand-foot dish of the Arecibo Observatory. Countless other bubbles remained. Those that had been farther under the surface remained under the surface and were hidden until animals found them, then natives, then pirates, then geologists and spelunkers, who explored them and declared them to be perhaps the biggest chain of connected caverns ever found in the earth. Tourists gaped. Geologists plumbed. Astronomers peered, in their leisure hours. And then, when all radio telescopy was driven to the far side of the Moon by a thousand too many radio-dispatched taxicabs and a million too many radar ovens, the observatory no longer served a function and was abandoned.

  But the caves remained.

  Physical Description. After examining nearly all of the Puerto Rican cave system, a group of four linked caverns was selected and suitably modified. By blasting and hammering they were shaped and squared. Concrete flowed into the lower parts of the flooring to make them level. Wiring reached out to the generators of the old observatory, and then there were lighting, power, and communications facilities. In a separate cavern near the surface, almost burst through to the air, rack upon rack of salt crystals were stored; in the endless Puerto Rican sun the salt accepted heat, and when warmth was needed below, air was pumped through the salt. Decorators furnished and painted the chambers. Plumbers and masons installed fixtures and the pool. Water? There was endless water from the inexhaustible natural springs in the mountains. Drainage? The underground rivers that flowed off to the sea earned everything away. (When the astronomers came to build their telescope, they found that the valley had become a stagnant lake; its natural drain, through underground channels to the sea, had become blocked. Divers opened it, and the water swept sweetly away.) Two short elevator shafts, one for use and one for backup, completed the construction program. The result was an isolation pit exempt from the diurnal swing and the seasonal shift, without time or external stimuli, without distraction.

  Support facilities. Maintenance, care and supervision of the problem pits is provided by a detachment of 50 VISTA volunteers, working out their substitute for military service. They tended the pumps, kept the machinery in repair, and did the housekeeping for the inmates. Their duties were quite light. The climate was humid but pleasant, especially in the northern hemisphere’s winter months. Except for the long jackknifing drive to the city of Arecibo on the coast, for beer and company, the VISTA detachment was well pleased to be where they were. The principal everyday task was cooking, and that was no problem; it was all TV dinners, basically, prefabricated and prefrozen. All the duty chefs had to do was take the orders, pull them out of the freezers, pop them in the microwave ovens, and put them on the dumbwaiter. Plus, of course, something like scrambling eggs and buttering toast from time to time. There were seldom problems of any importance. The attempt of the United Brotherhood of Government Employees, in 1993, to organize the paramilitary services was the most traumatic event in the detachment’s history. There had been a strike. Twenty-two persons, comprising the ongoing group of problem personnel, were temporarily marooned in the caves. For 18 days they were without food, light or communications, except for a few dumbwaiter loads of field rations smuggled down by one of the strikers. The inconvenience was considerable, but there were no deaths.

  Monitoring and evaluation. Technical supervision is carried on by administratively separate personnel. There are two main areas of technical project control.

  The first, employing sophisticated equipment originally designed for observatory use but substantially modified, is based n
ear the old thousand-foot dish in the former administration and technical headquarters. Full information retrieval and communications capabilities exist, with on-line microwave links to the Heptagon, in Terre Haute, Indiana, via synchronous satellite. This is the top headquarters and decision-making station, and the work there is carried on by an autonomous division of SAD with full independent departmental status. The personnel of both technical supervision installations are interchangeable, and generally rotate duty from Indiana to Puerto Rico, six months or a year at a time.

  The personnel of the technical project control centers are primarily professionals, including graduate students in social sciences and a large number of career civil service scientists in many disciplines. While stationed in Puerto Rico, most of these live along the coast with their families and commute to the observatory center by car or short-line STOL flight. They do not ordinarily associate with the VISTA crews, and only exceptionally have any firsthand contact with the members of the problem-solving groups, even the professional resource people included. This was not the original policy. At first the professionals actually participating in the groups were drawn by rota from the administrative personnel. It was found that the group identity was weakened by identification with the outside world, and so after the third year of operation the group-active personnel were kept separate, both administratively and physically. When off duty the group-active professionals are encouraged to return to their own homes and engage in activities unrelated to the work of the problem pits.

  The problem pits were originally sponsored by a consortium consisting of the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Institute, Cornell University, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce, under a matched-funds grant shared bv SAD and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1994 it was decided that they could and should be self-financing, and so a semipublic stock corporation similar to COMSAT and the fusion-power corporations was set up. All royalties and licensing fees are paid to the corporation, which by law distributes 35 percent of income as dividends to its stockholders, 11 percent to the State of Puerto Rico, and 4 percent to the federal government, reinvesting the balance in research-and-development exploitation.