They marched him back to his room, where his father lectured him while his mother stayed behind to watch Mammy comfort the little girl.
His father said: “Sonny, you’re a big boy now. We aren’t as well off as other people, but you have to help us. Don’t you know that, Sonny? We all have to do our part. Your mother and I’ll be up till midnight now, consuming, because you’ve made this scene. Can’t you at least try to consume something bigger than a teddy bear? It’s all right for Doris because she’s so little, but a big boy like you—”
“I hate you!” cried Sonny, and he turned his face to the wall.
They punished him, naturally. The first punishment was that they give him an extra birthday party the week following.
The second punishment was even worse.
II
Later—much, much later, nearly a score of years—a man named Roger Garrick in a place named Fisherman’s Island walked into his hotel room.
The light didn’t go on.
The bellhop apologized, “Were sorry, sir. Well have it attended to, if possible.”
“If possible?” Garrick’s eyebrows went up. The bellhop made putting in a new light tube sound like a major industrial operation. “All right.” He waved the bellhop out of the room. It bowed and closed the door.
Garrick looked around him, frowning. One light tube more or less didn’t make a lot of difference; there was still the light from the sconces at the walls, from the reading lamps at the chairs and chaise lounge and from the photomural on the long side of the room—to say nothing of the fact that it was broad, hot daylight outside and light poured through the windows. All the same, it was a new sensation to be in a room where the central lighting wasn’t on. He didn’t like it. It was —creepy.
A rap on the door. A girl was standing there, young, attractive, rather small. But a woman grown, it was apparent. “Mr. Garrick? Mr. Roosenburg is expecting you on the sun deck.”
“All right.” He rummaged around in the pile of luggage, looking for his briefcase. It wasn’t even sorted out! The bellhop had merely dumped the stuff and left.
The girl said: “Is that what you’re looking for?” He looked where she was pointing; it was his briefcase, behind another bag. “You’ll get used to that around here. Nothing in the right place, nothing working right We’ve all gotten used to it.
We. He looked at her sharply, but she was no robot; there was life, not the glow of electronic tubes, in her eyes. “Pretty bad, is it?”
She shrugged. “Let’s go see Mr. Roosenburg. I’m Kathryn Pender, by the way. I’m his statistician.”
He followed her out into the hall. “Statistician, did you
say?”
She turned and smiled—a tight, grim smile of annoyance. “That’s right. Surprised?”
Garrick said uneasily: “Well, it’s more a robot job. Of course, I’m not familiar with the practice in this sector—”
“You will be,” she promised bluntly. “No, we aren’t taking the elevator. Mr. Roosenburg’s in a hurry to see you.”
“But—”
She actually glared at him. “Don’t you understand? Day before yesterday, I took the elevator and I was hung up between floors for an hour and a half. Something was going on at North Guardian and it took all the power in the lines. Would it happen again today? I don’t know. But, believe me, an hour and a half is a long time to be stuck in an elevator.”
She turned and led him to the fire stairs. Over her shoulder, she said: “Get it straight once and for all, Mr. Garrick. You’re in a disaster area here … Anyway, it’s only ten more flights.”
Ten flights. Nobody climbed ten flights of stairs any morel
Garrick was huffing and puffing before they were halfway, but the girl kept on ahead, light as a gazelle. Her skirt reached between hip and knees, and Garrick had plenty of opportunity to observe that her legs were attractively tanned. Even so, he couldn’t help looking around him.
It was a robot’s eye view of the hotel that he was getting; this was the bare wire armature that held up the confectionery suites and halls where the humans went. Garrick knew, as everyone absently knew, that there were places like this behind the scenes everywhere. Belowstairs, the robots worked; behind scenes, they moved about their errands and did dieir jobs. But nobody went there.
It was funny about the backs of this girl’s knees. They were paler than the rest of the leg—
Garrick wrenched his mind back to his surroundings. Take the guardrail along the steps, for instance. It was wire-thin, frail-looking. No doubt it could bear any weight it was required to, but why couldn’t it look that strong?
The answer, obviously, was that robots did not have humanity’s built-in concepts of how strong a rail should look before they could believe it really was strong. If a robot should be in any doubt—and how improbable that a robot should be in doubt!—it would perhaps reach out a sculptured hand and test it. Once. And then it would remember, and never doubt again, and it wouldn’t be continually edging toward the wall, away from the spider-strand between it and the vertical drop—
He conscientiously took the middle of the steps all the rest of the way up.
Of course, that merely meant a different distraction, when he really wanted to do some thinking. But it was a pleasurable 12 distraction. And by the time they reached the top, he had solved the problem. The pale spots at the back of Miss Pender’s knees meant she had got her tan the hard way— walking in the Sun, perhaps working in die Sun, so that the bending knees kept the Sun from the patches at the back; not, as anyone else would acquire a tan, by lying beneath a normal, healthiful sunlamp held by a robot masseur.
He wheezed: “You don’t mean we’re all the way up!”
“All the way up,” she said, and looked at him closely. “Here, lean on me if you want to.”
“No, thanks!” He staggered over to the door, which opened naturally enough as he approached it, and stepped out into the flood of sunlight on the roof, to meet Mr. Roosenburg.
Garrick wasn’t a medical doctor, but he remembered enough of his basic pre-specialization to know there was something in that fizzy golden drink. It tasted perfectly splendid—just cold enough, just fizzy enough, not quite too sweet. And after two sips of it, he was buoyant with strength and well-being.
He put the glass down and said: “Thank you for whatever it was. Now let’s talk.”
“Gladly, gladly!” boomed Mr. Roosenburg. “Kathryn, the files!”
Garrick looked after her, shaking his head. Not only was she a statistician, which was robot work, she was also a file clerk—and that was barely robot work. It was the kind of tiling handled by a semisentient punchcard sorter in a decently run sector.
Roosenburg said sharply: “Shocks you, doesn’t it? But that’s why you’re here.” He was a slim, fair little man and he wore a golden beard cropped square.
Garrick took another sip of the fizzy drink. It was good stuff; it didn’t intoxicate, but it cheered. He said: “I’m glad to know why I’m here.”
The golden beard quivered. “Area Control sent you down and didn’t tell you this was a disaster area?”
Garrick put down the glass. “I’m a psychist. Area Control said you needed a psychist. From what I’ve seen, it’s a supply problem, but—”
“Here are the files,” said Kathryn Pender, and stood watching him.
Roosenburg took the spools of tape from her and dropped them in his lap. He asked tangentially: “How old are you, Roger?”
Garrick was annoyed. “I’m a qualified psychist! I happen to be assigned to Area Control and—”
“How old are you?”
Garrick scowled. “Twenty-four.”
Roosenburg nodded. “Umm. Rather young,” he observed. “Maybe you don’t remember how things used to be.”
Garrick said dangerously: “All the information I need is on that tape. I don’t need any lectures from you.”
Roosenburg pursed his lips and got up. “Come here a minut
e, will you?”
He moved over to the rail of the sun deck and pointed. “See those things down there?”
Garrick looked. Twenty stories down, the village straggled off toward the sea in a tangle of pastel oblongs and towers. Over the bay, the hills of the mainland were faintly visible through mist and, riding the bay, the flat white floats of the solar receptors.
“It’s a power plant. That what you mean?”
Roosenburg boomed: “A power plant. All the power the world can ever use, out of this one and all the others, all over the world.” He peered out at the bobbing floats, soaking up energy from the Sun. “And people used to try to wreck them,” he added.
Garrick said stiffly: “I may only be twenty-four years old, Mr. Roosenburg, but I have completed school.”
“Oh, yes. Of course you have, Roger. But maybe schooling isn’t the same thing as living through a time like that. I grew up in the Era of Plenty, when the law was Consume! My parents were poor and I still remember the misery of my childhood. Eat and consume, wear and use. I never had a moment’s peace, Roger; For the very poor, it was a treadmill; we had to consume so much that we could never catch up, and the further we fell behind, the more the Ration Board forced on us—”
“That’s ancient history, Mr. Roosenburg. Morey Fry liberated us from all that.”
The girl said softly: “Not all of us.”
The man with the golden beard nodded. “Not all of us— as you should know, Roger, being a psychist.”
Garrick sat up straight and Roosenburg went on: ‘Try showed us that the robots could help at both ends—by producing and by consuming. But it came a little late for some of us. The patterns of childhood do linger on.”
Kathryn Pender leaned toward Garrick. “What he’s trying to say, Mr. Garrick, is that we’ve got a compulsive consumer on our hands.”
III
North Guardian Island—nine miles away. It wasn’t as much as a mile wide and not much more than that in length, but it had its city and its bathing beaches, its parks and theaters. It was possibly the most densely populated island in the world… for the number of its inhabitants.
The President of the Council convened their afternoon meeting in a large and lavish room. There were 19 councilmen around a lustrous mahogany table. Over the President’s shoulder, the others could see the situation map of North Guardian and the areas surrounding. North Guardian glowed blue, cold, impregnable. The sea was misty green; the mainland, Fisherman’s Island, South Guardian and the rest of the little archipelago were hot, hostile red.
Little flickering fingers of red attacked the blue. Flick, and a ruddy flame wiped out a comer of a beach. Flick, and a red spark appeared in the middle of the city, to grow and blossom, and then to die. Each little red whip-flick was a point where, momentarily, the defenses of the island were down; but always and always, the cool blue brightened around the red and drowned it.
The President was tall, stooped, old. It wore glasses, though robot eyes saw well enough without. It said, in a voice that throbbed with power and pride: “The first item of the order of business will be a report of the Defense Secretary.”
The Defense Secretary rose to its feet, hooked a thumb in its vest and cleared its throat. “Mr. President—”
“Excuse me, sir.” A whisper from the sweet-faced young blonde taking down the minutes of the meeting. “Mr. Trumie has just left Bowling Green, heading north.”
The whole council turned to glance at the situation map, where Bowling Green had just flared red.
The President nodded stiffly, like the crown of an old redwood nodding. “You may proceed, Mr. Secretary,” it said after a moment.
“Our invasion fleet,” began the Secretary, in its high, clear voice, “is ready for sailing on the first suitable tide. Certain units have been, ah, inactivated, at the, ah, instigation of Mr. Trumie. But on the whole, repairs have been completed and the units will be serviceable within the next few hours.” Its lean, attractive face turned solemn. “I am afraid, however, that the Air Command has sustained certain, ah, increments of attrition—due, I should emphasize, to chances involved in certain calculated risks—”
“Question! Question!” It was the Commissioner of Public Safety, small, dark, fire-eyed, angry.
“Mr. Commissioner?” the President began, but it was interrupted again by the soft whisper of the recording stenographer, listening intently to the earphones that brought news from outside.
“Mr. President,” it whispered, “Mr. Trumie has passed the Navy Yard.”
The robots turned to look at the situation map. Bowling Green, though it smoldered in spots, had mostly gone back to blue. But the jagged oblong of the Yard flared red and bright. There was a faint electronic hum in the air, almost a sigh.
The robots turned back to face each other. “Mr. President! I demand that the Defense Secretary explain the loss of the Graf Zeppelin and the 456th Bomb Group!”
The Defense Secretary nodded to the Commissioner of Public Safety. “Mr. Trumie threw them away,” it said sorrowfully.
Once again, that sighing electronic drone from the assembled robots.
The Council fussed and fiddled with its papers, while the situation map on the wall flared and dwindled, flared and dwindled.
The Defense Secretary cleared its throat again. “Mr. President, there is no question that the, ah, absence of an effective air component will seriously hamper, not to say endanger, our prospects of a suitable landing. Nevertheless—and I say this, Mr. President, in full knowledge of the conclusions that may —indeed, should!—be drawn from such a statement—nevertheless, Mr. President, I say that our forward elements will successfully complete an assault landing—”
“Mr. President!” The breathless whisper of the blonde stenographer again. “Mr. President, Mr. Trumie is in the building!”
On the situation map behind it, the Pentagon—the building they were in—flared scarlet.
The Attorney General, nearest the door, leaped to its feet. “Mr. President, I hear him!”
And they could all hear now. Far off, down the long corridors, a crash. A faint explosion, and another crash, and a raging, querulous, high-pitched voice. A nearer crash, and a sustained, smashing, banging sound, coming toward them.
The oak-paneled doors flew open with a crash, splintering.
A tall, dark male figure in gray leather jacket, rocket-gun holsters swinging at its hips, stepped through the splintered doors and stood surveying the Council. Its hands hung just below the butts of the rocket guns.
It drawled: “Mistuh Anderson Trumie!”
It stepped aside. Another male figure—shorter, darker, hobbling with the aid of a stainless steel cane that concealed a ray-pencil, wearing the same gray leather jacket and the same rocket-gun holsters—entered, stood for a moment, and took position on the other side of the door.
Between them, Mr. Anderson Trumie shambled ponderously into the Council Chamber to call on his Council.
Sonny Trumie, come of age. He wasn’t much more than five feet tall, but his weight was close to 400 pounds. He stood there in the door, leaning against the splintered oak, quivering jowls obliterating his neck, his eyes nearly swallowed in the fat that swamped his skull, his thick legs trembling as they tried to support him.
“You’re all under arrest!” he screeched. “Traitors! Traitors!”
He panted ferociously, glowering at them. They waited with bowed heads. Beyond the ring of councilmen, the situation map slowly blotted out the patches of red as the repair robots worked feverishly to fix what Sonny Trumie had destroyed.
“Mr. Crockett!” Sonny cried shrilly. “Slay me these traitors!”
Wheep-wheep, and the guns whistled out of their holsters into the tall bodyguard’s hands. Raia-lat-iat, and two by two, the 19 councilmen leaped, clutched at air and fell as the rocket pellets pierced them through.
“That one, tool” Mr. Trumie pointed at the sweet-faced blonde.
Bang. The sweet young face co
nvulsed and froze; it fell, slumping across its little table.
On the wall, the situation map flared red again, but only faintly—for what were 20 robots?
Sonny gestured curtly to his other bodyguard. It leaped forward, tucking the stainless steel cane under one arm, putting the other around the larded shoulders of Sonny Trumie. “Ah, now, young master,” it crooned. “You just get ahold o’ Long John’s arm now—”
“Get them fixed,” Sonny ordered abruptly. He pushed the President of the Council out of its chair and, with the robot’s help, sank into it himself. “Get them fixed right, you hear? I’ve had enough traitors! I want them to do what I tell them!”
“Sartin sure, young master. Long John’ll be pleased to—•”
“Do it now! And you, Davey, I want my lunch!”
“Reckoned you would, Mistuh Trumie. It’s right hyar.” The Crockett robot kicked the fallen councilmen out of the way as a procession of waiters filed in from the corridor.
Sonny ate.
He ate until eating was pain, and then he sat there sobbing, his arms braced against the tabletop, until he could eat more.
The Crockett robot said worriedly: “Mistuh Trumie, moughtn’t you rear back a mite? Old Doc Aeschylus, he don’t hold with you eatin’ too much, you know.”
“I hate Doc!” Trumie said bitterly.
He pushed the plates off the table. They fell with a rattle and a clatter, and they went spinning away as he heaved himself up and lurched alone over to the window.
“I hate Doc!” he brayed again, sobbing, staring through tears out the window at his kingdom with its hurrying throngs and marching troops and roaring waterfront. The tallow shoulders tried to shake with pain. He felt as though hot cinderblocks were being thrust down his throat, the ragged edges cutting, the hot weight crushing.
“Take me back,” he wept to the robots. “Take me away from these traitors. Take me to my Private Place!”
In the Problem Pit Page 20