In the Problem Pit

by Frederik Pohl

  “Or Sanger,” said someone.

  “I don’t know anything about Sanger. But I know where they are. They’re wandering.”

  Tina said from the entrance, “No, not in the caves, they aren’t.” All at once she looked every year of her age. “They’re outside,” she said. “I just heard from the VISTA crew; they identified four persons leaving the caves about a quarter of a mile from here, one alone, then three more about an hour ago.”

  “At least they’re outside,” said Willie thankfully.

  “Oh, yes,” said Tina, “they’re outside. In the dark. Wandering around. Did you look at the terrain when you came in, Willie?” She absentmindedly pressed her hands against her face. It smeared her make-up, but she was no longer aware she had it on. “One other thing,” she said. “You can all go home now. The word just came down over the teletype; our group is discharged with thanks and, how did they say it?— oh, yes. ‘Tell them it was a good job well done,’” she said.

  Running Home

  I didn’t really believe Willie even when it was clearly to his advantage to tell the truth, but it was the way he said: follow the piece of string he had laid out, exploring the caves to keep from exploring his own head, and you came to a rock slope, very steep but with places where somebody had once cut handholds into it, and at the end of the handholds you found yourself out in the fresh air. When we got out we were all beat. Bob Sanger was the worst off of us, which was easy to figure when you considered he was a pretty old guy who hadn’t done anything athletic for about as long as Barbie and I had been alive. But he was right with us. “I’ll leave you now,” he said. “I do appreciate your help.”

  “Cut it out, Bob,” wheezed Barbie. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  It had turned out to be night, and a very dark night with a feeble tepid rain coming down, too—perhaps they had ho other kinds around there. I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine his expression, very remote and contented with whatever interior decisions he had reached. “Ill make my own way, thank you,” he said politely. “It is only a matter of finding a road, and then following it downhill, I imagine.”

  “Then what?” I demanded. “We’re AWOL, you know.”

  “That’s why I have attorneys, Mr. Jaretski,” he said cheerfully.

  “Sitting on the bottom of the hill waiting for you?”

  “Of course not. Really, you should not worry about me. I took the precaution of retaining my money belt when we checked our valuables. U.S. currency will get me to Ponce, and from there there are plenty of flights to the mainland. I’ll be in California in no more than eight or nine hours, I should think.”

  “Listen, Bob!” I exploded—but stopped; Barbie squeezed my shoulder.

  “Bob,” she said, in a tone quite different from mine, “it isn’t just that we’re worried about you. We’re worried about Dolly. Please help us find her.”

  Silence. I wished I could have seen his face. Then he said, “Please believe me, I am not ungrateful. But consider these facts. First, as I explained to all of you when we started this affair, it is of considerable importance to me to keep my company solvent. I believe that I have reasoned out a way to do so, and I have no spare time. I have no idea how much time we’ve wasted, and it may already be too late. Second, this is a big island. It is quite hopeless to search it for one girl with a long start, with no lights and no idea of where she has gone. I would help you if I could. I can’t.”

  I said, trying to crawl down from my anger, “We don’t have any other way to do it, Bob. I think I know where she is; anyway, that’s where I want to look. But three of us can look fifty percent better than two.”

  “Call the VISTA crew,” he said.

  “I don’t know where they are.”

  “Anyway, you’re assuming she may be in some kind of danger. She is quite capable of taking care of herself.”

  “Capable, yes. Motivated, no. She’s jealous and angry, Bob. Barbie and I were shacked up and it—” I hesitated; I didn’t know exactly how to say it. “It spoiled things for her,” I said. “I think she might do something crazy.”

  Sanger spluttered, “Your f-fornications are your own business, Mr. Jaretski! I must go. I—”

  He hesitated and became, for him, confidential. “I believe that the discussion of my problem has in fact borne fruit. The, ah, gynecological instruments are an area in which I had little knowledge.”

  “You’ve invented a warmer for the thingy?” Barbie asked, interestedly.

  “For the speculum, yes. A warmer, no. It isn’t necessary. Metal conducts heat so rapidly that if it isn’t warm it feels cold. Plastic such as our K-14A is as strong as metal, as poreless and thus readily sterilized as metal and has a very low thermal conductivity. I think—well. The remainder of what I think is properly my own business, Miss Devereux, and I want to get back to my own business to implement it before it is too late.”

  “Jesus, Bob,” I said, really angry, “don’t you feel anything at all? You got something good out of the group. Don’t you want to help?”

  I could hear him walking away. “Not in the least,” he said.

  “Won’t you at least come over to the radio mirror widi us to look? There’s a road there …”

  But he didn’t even answer.

  And we had wasted enough time, more than enough time. I took Barbie’s hand, and we started off to where the faint sky glow suggested there were buildings. There was nothing much else in these hills; it had to be either the administration buildings around the radio dish or the cave entrance, and either way I could find my way from there. Of course, Dolly might not have gone to the dish. But where else would she go? Down the hill to civilization, maybe, but in that case she would be all right. But if she had gone to the dish, if she had been listening when I told her about the slippery catwalk and the five-hundred-foot drop—no, there was not much more time to waste.

  There was no road near the outcropping with the crevice through which we had come. People had been there before. There was a sort of bruised part of the undergrowth that might have been a kind of path. It didn’t help much. We bulldozed our way through the brush, with wet branches slapping at us and wet vines and bushes wrapping themselves around our legs; a little of that was plenty, on the up-and-down hillsides, but after half an hour or so we did hit a road. Something like a road, anyway; two parallel ruts that presumably were used from time to time, because the vegetation had not quite obliterated it. It circled a hill, and from the far side of it I could see not one but two glowing spots in the cloud. The nearer and brighter one looked like the entrance to the pit. Ergo, the other was where we wanted to go.

  I think it took us a couple of hours to get there, and we didn’t have the breath for much talking. We were lower down than I had been before. The suspended thing that looked like an old trolley car slung from wires was now higher up than we were; the rain had stopped, and the clouds were beginning to lighten with dawn coming. I stopped, gasping, and Barbie leaned against me, and the two of us stared around the great round bowl.

  “I don’t see her,” Barbie said.

  I didn’t see her either, That was not all bad. The good part was that I didn’t see her body spread out over the rusting wire mesh at the bottom of the bowl. “Maybe she didn’t come here after all,” I said.

  “Where else would she go?”

  “She could have got lost.” Or she could have blundered down the mountains looking for a road. Or she could have found another cliff to jump off.

  But I didn’t think so, and then Barbie said, very softly, “Oh, look up there, my David. What’s that that’s moving?”

  I looked. It was still gray and I could not be sure; but, yes, there was something moving.

  It was actually in the big metal instrument cage, whatever it was.

  I said, “I don’t know, Barb. Let’s go find out.”

  It was easy to say that, hard to do; the catwalk started out from the side of a hill but unfortunately not the hill
we were on; we had to skirt one and circle around another before we reached the end of the catwalk. That was twenty minutes or so, I guess; and by then the day was brighter. And that was not all good. The bad part was that I could see the catwalk very clearly. It had not been used much for, I would guess, ten or fifteen years. Maybe more. It had a plank floor with spaces between the planks and spaces where planks seemed to have rotted out and fallen off. It had a wire-net side-barrier: rusty. The cables themselves, the overhead ones from which it was slung and the smaller ones that bound it to them, looked sturdy enough, but what good would that do us if the boards split under us and we fell through?

  There were, however, only two alternatives, and neither of them was any good. The tangible alternative was a sort of bucket car that rose from the administration buildings to the machine cage, but to get to that meant going halfway around the bowl, and who could know if it would be working? The intangible alternative was to turn away. So in effect we had no alternatives, and I took Barbie’s hand and led her out onto the catwalk. By the time we were ten yards along it, we became aware of wind (we had not felt it before) and the rain (which slammed into us from the side). And we became aware that the whole suspended walk was swaying, and making creaking, testy, failing sounds as it swayed. We walked as lightly as we could …

  I was almost surprised when we discovered that we were at the machine cage. Down between our feet was a whole lot of emptiness, with the wire mesh and the greenery poking through at the end. Over us was the machinery. And I didn’t know what to do next.

  Barbie did; she called, “Dolly dear, are you up there?”

  There was no answer.

  I tried: “Dolly, please come down! We want you.”

  No answer, except what might have been the wind blowing, and might have been a sob.

  Barbie looked at me. “Do you want to go up and look around?”

  I shook my head. There was a metal ladder, but it went into a hatch and the hatch was shut. I really didn’t like the idea of climbing those few extra feet, but most of all I didn’t like the idea of driving Dolly farther and farther away, until I drove her maybe out of some window. I yelled, “Dolly, we didn’t come all this way just to say good-bye. We want you with us, Dolly!” I hadn’t asked Barbie if that was true; it didn’t matter.

  Silence that prolonged itself, and then there was a grating sound and the hatch opened. Dolly peered down at us, looking cross but otherwise not unusual. “Crap,” she said. “Okay, you’ve soothed your consciences. Now go back to bed.”

  Barbie, holding on to the ladder—the whole structure was vibrating now—looked up at her and said, “Dolly, are you mad because David and I went to bed?”

  With dignity Dolly said, “I have nothing to be angry about. Not to mention I’m used to it.”

  “Because it wasn’t that big a deal, Dolly,” Barbie went on. “It just happened that way. It could have been you and David, and I wouldn’t have been mad.”

  “You’re not me,” said Dolly, and added, very carefully and precisely, “you’re not a girl that’s always been fifty pounds too fat, that everybody laughs at, that buys the kind of clothes you wear all the time and tries them on in front of a mirror, and then throws them out and cries herself to sleep.”

  She stopped there. Neither Barbie nor I said anything for a moment. Then I started, “Dolly dear—” But Barbie put her hand on my shoulder and stopped me.

  She gathered her thoughts and then said, “Dolly, that’s right, I’m not you. I’m me, but maybe you don’t know what it’s like to be me, either. Would you like me to tell you who I am? I’m a girl who really looked forward to this group, which took all the guts I had, because it meant letting myself hope for something, and then ran out of courage and never asked anybody for the help I wanted. I’m a black girl, Dolly, and that may not seem like much of a bad thing to you, but I happen to be a black girl who’s going to die of it. Or to put it another way, Dolly dear, you’re a girl who can make plans for Christmas, and I’m a girl who won’t be here then.”

  You hear words like that, and for a minute you don’t know what it is you’ve heard. I stood there, one hand holding on to the ladder, looking at Barbie with the expression of polite interest you give someone who is telling you a complicated story of which you have not yet seen the point. I couldn’t make that expression go off my face. I couldn’t find the right expression to replace it with.

  Dolly said, “What the hell are you talking about?” And her voice was suddenly shrill.

  “What I say,” said Barbie. “It’s what they call sickle-cell anemia. You white folks don’t get it much, but us black folks, we get it. You know. All God’s chillun got hemoglobin, but where your hemoglobin has something they call glutamic acid, my hemoglobin has something they call valine. Sounds like nothing much? Yeah, Dolly, but we die of it. Used to be we died before we grew up, most of the time, but they do things better now. I’m thirty-one, and they say I’ve got, oh, easily another five or six months.”

  Dolly’s face pulled back out of the hatch, and her voice, muffled, yelled, “Wait a minute,” and Dolly’s legs and bottom appeared as she lowered herself down the ladder. When she got there, all she said was Barbie’s name, and put her arms around both of us.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that, but it was a long time. And might have been longer if we hadn’t heard voices and looked up and saw people coming toward us along the catwalk. A hell of a lot of people, a dozen or so, and we looked again, and it was Bob Sanger leading all the rest.

  “Why, son of a bitch,” said Barbie in deep surprise. “You know what he did? He went and got the group to see if we needed help.”

  And Dolly said, “And you know what? We do. We all do.” And then she said, “Dear Barbie. We could all be dead before Christmas. If David will have us, let’s stick together a while. I mean—a while. As long as we want to.” And before Barbie could say anything, she went on. “You know, I volunteered for this group. I didn‘t exactly ever say what I wanted, but I can tell you two. I guess I could tell all of them, and maybe I will.” She took a deep breath. “What I wanted,” she said, “was to find out how to be loved.”

  And I said, “You are.”

  The Wrap-Up

  Tina Wattridge Final Report. Attached are the analysis sheets, work-ups, recommendations, and SR-4 situation cards.

  There is one omission. I left out Jerry Fein’s solution to his own problem. If you refer to D6H2140, you will find the problem stated (epidemiological control measures for VD). He ultimately provided his own solution, quote his words from my notes: “Suppose we make a monthly check for VD for the whole population. Everybody who shows up and is clear on the tests gets a litde button to wear, like in the shape of a heart, with a date. You know, like the inspection sticker in a car. It could be like a charm bracelet for girls, maybe love beads for men. And if you don’t pass the test that month, or start treatment if you fail, you don’t get to wear the emblem.” The reason I did not forward it was not that I thought it a bad idea; actually, I thought it kind of cute, and with the proper promotion it might work. What I did think, in fact what I was sure of, was that it was a setup. Jerry planted the problem and had the solution in his head when he came in, I guess to get brownie points. Maybe he wants my job. Maybe he just wanted to end the session sooner. Anyway he was playing games, and the reason I’m passing it on now is that I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really care if he was playing games. It’s still not a bad idea and is forwarded for R&D consideration.

  One final personal note: Dev Stanwyck kissed me sweetly and weepily good-bye and took off for Louisiana with the Teitlebaum girl. I hated it, but there it is, and anyway— Well, I don’t mind his being young enough to be my youngest son, but I was beginning to kind of mind being his mother. When I was a little girl, I saw an old George Arliss movie on TV; he played an Indian rajah who had tried to abduct an English girl for his harem, and after his plot was foiled, at the end of the picture, he said s
omething that I identify with right now. He looked into the camera and lit a cigarette and said, “Ah, well. She would have been a damn nuisance anyhow.”

  All in all, it was a good group. I’m taking two weeks accumulated leave effective tomorrow. Then 111 be ready for the next one.

  Let the Ants Try

  In the late 1940s I worked in the advertising business for some years, largely at Popular Science Publishing Company, under a wonderful, tall, grave, intelligent man named George R. Spoerer. We lived about four blocks from each other in Greenwich Village and we both liked to walk, so when the weather was halfway decent we would walk home, and over three years I spent a lot of time with George in 45-minute strolling conversations.

  One night he said, “Over the weekend I thought up a science-fiction story,” and proceeded to tell me the story as we walked. “Good story,” I said. “Why don’t you write it?” “No,” he said, “I want you to write it.” After about six such exchanges I said I would, and I went home and that evening I did—and this is it.

  Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn’t; he was on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag, when the bombs struck.

  He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her body was ever found. The children, of course, weren’t as lucky as that. Their summer camp was less than 20 miles away, and unfortunately in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.

  That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of 1960.