IV
“As you see,” said Roosenburg, “he’s dangerous.”
Garrick looked out over the water, toward Nordi Guardian. “I’d better look at his tapes,” he said.
The girl swiftly picked up the reels and began to thread them into the projector. Dangerous. This Trumie indeed was dangerous, Garrick conceded. Dangerous to the balanced, stable world, for it only took one Trumie to topple its stability. It had taken thousands and thousands of years for society to learn its delicate tightrope walk. It was a matter for a psychist, all right.
And Garrick was uncomfortably aware that he was only 24.
“Here you are,” said the girl.
“Look them over,” Roosenburg suggested. “Then, after you’ve studied the tapes on Trumie, we’ve got something else. One of his robots. But you’ll need the tapes first.”
“Let’s go,” said Garrick.
The girl flicked a switch and the life of Anderson Trumie appeared before them, in color, in three dimensions—in miniature.
Robots have eyes; and where the robots go, the eyes of Robot Central go with them. And the robots go everywhere. From the stored files of Robot Central came the spool of tape that was the frightful life story of Sonny Trumie.
The tapes played into the globe-shaped viewer, ten inches high, a ciystal ball that looked back into the past. First, from the recording eyes of the robots in Sonny Trumie’s nursery. The lonely little boy, 20 years before, lost in the enormous nursery.
“Disgusting!” breathed Kathryn Pender, wrinkling her nose. “How could people live like that?”
Garrick said: “Please, let me watch this. It’s important.”
In the gleaming globe, the little boy kicked at his toys, threw himself across his huge bed, sobbed. Garrick squinted, frowned, reached out, tried to make contact. It was hard. The tapes showed the objective facts, but for a psychist, it was the subjective reality behind the facts that mattered.
Kicking at his toys. Yes, but why? Because he was tired of them—and why was he tired? Because he feared them? Kicking at his toys. Because—because they were the wrong toys? Kicking—hate them! Don’t want them! Want—
A bluish flare in the viewing globe. Garrick blinked and jumped, and that was the end of that section.
The colors flowed and suddenly jelled into bright life. Garrick recognized the scene after a moment—it was right there in Fisherman’s Island, some pleasure spot overlooking the water. A bar, and at the end of it was Anderson Trumie at 20, staring somberly into an empty glass. The view was through the eyes of the robot bartender.
Anderson Trumie was weeping.
Once again, there was the objective fact—but the fact behind the fact, what was it? Trumie had been drinking, drinking. Why?
Drinking, drinking.
With a sudden sense of shock, Garrick saw what the drink was—the golden, fizzy liquor. Not intoxicating. Not habit-forming! Trumie had become no drunk. It was something else that kept him drinking, drinking, must drink, must keep on drinking, or eke—
And again the bluish flare.
There was more—Trumie feverishly collecting objects of art, Trumie decorating a palace, Trumie on a world tour, and Trumie returned to Fisherman’s Island.
And then there was no more.
“That,” said Roosenburg, “is the file. Of course, if you want the raw, unedited tapes, we can try to get them from Robot Central, but—”
“No.” The way things were, it was best to stay away from Robot Central; there might be more breakdowns and there wasn’t much time. Besides, something was beginning to suggest itself.
“Run the first one again,” said Garrick. “I think maybe I’ll find something there.”
Garrick made out a quick requisition slip and handed it to Kathryn Pender, who looked at it, raised her eyebrows, shrugged and went off to have it filled.
By the time she came back, Roosenburg had escorted Garrick to the room where the captured Trumie robot lay chained.
“He’s cut off from Robot Central,” Roosenburg was saying. “I suppose you figured that out. Imagine! Not only has Trumie built a whole city for himself—but even his own Robot Central!”
Garrick looked at the robot. It was a fisherman, or so
Roosenburg has said. It was small, dark, black-haired; possibly the hair would have been curly, if the sea water hadn’t plastered the curls to the scalp. It was still damp from the tussle that had landed it in the water and eventually into Roosenburg’s hands.
Roosenburg was already a work. Garrick tried to think of the robot as a machine, but it wasn’t easy. The thing looked very nearly human—except for the crystal and copper that showed where the back of its head had been removed.
“It’s as bad as a brain operation,” said Roosenburg, working rapidly without looking up. “I’ve got to short out the input leads without disturbing the electronic balance—”
Snip, snip. A curl of copper fell free, to be grabbed by Roosenburg’s tweezers. The fisherman’s arms and legs kicked sharply like a dissected, galvanized frog’s.
Kathryn Pender said: “They found him this morning, casting nets into the bay and singing ‘O Sole Mio.’ He’s from North Guardian, all right.”
Abruptly the lights flickered and turned yellow, then slowly returned to normal brightness. Roger Garrick got up and walked over to the window. North Guardian was a haze of light in the sky, across the water.
Click, snap. The fisherman robot began to sing:
Tutte le serre, dopo quel fanal, Dietro la caserma, ti staro ed— Click.
Roosenburg muttered under his breath and probed further. Kathryn Pender joined Garrick at the window.
“Now you see,” she said.
Garrick shrugged. “You can’t blame him.”
“I blame him!” she said hotly. “I’ve lived here all my life. Fisherman’s Island used to be a tourist spot—why, it was lovely here. And look at it now. The elevators don’t work. The lights don’t work. Practically all of our robots are gone. Spare parts, construction material, everything—it’s all gone to North Guardian! There isn’t a day that passes, Garrick, when half a dozen bargeloads of stuff don’t go north, because he requisitioned them. Blame him? I’d like to kill him!”
Snap. Sputters-nap. The fisherman lifted its head and caroled:
Forse dommani, piangerai, E dopo tu, sorriderai—
Roosenburg’s probe uncovered a flat black disc. “Kathryn, look this up, will you?” He read the serial number from the disc and then put down the probe. He stood flexing his fingers, looking irritably at the motionless figure.
Garrick joined him. Roosenburg jerked his head at the fisherman.
“That’s robot repair work, trying to tinker with their insides. Trumie has his own Robot Central, as I told you. What I have to do is recontrol this one from the substation on the mainland, but keep its receptor circuits open to North Guardian on the symbolic level. You understand what I’m talking about? It’ll think from North Guardian, but act from the mainland.”
“Sure,” said Garrick.
“And it’s damned close work. There isn’t much room inside one of those things—” He stared at the figure and picked up the probe again.
Kathryn Pender came back with a punchcard in her hand. “It was one of ours, all right. Used to be a busboy in the cafeteria at the beach club.” She scowled. “That Trumie!”
“You can’t blame him,” Garrick said reasonably. “He’s only trying to be good.”
She looked at him queerly. “He’s only—”
Roosenburg interrupted with an exultant cry. “Got it! Okay, you—sit up and start telling us what Trumie’s up to now!”
The fisherman figure said obligingly, “Yes, Boss. What you wanna know?”
What they wanted to know, they asked; and what they asked, it told diem, volunteering nothing, concealing nothing.
There was Anderson Trumie, king of his island, the compulsive consumer.
It was like an echo of the bad o
ld days of the Age of Plenty, when the world was smothering under the endless, pounding flow of goods from the robot factories and the desperate race between consumption and production strained the whole society. But Trumie’s orders came not from society, but from within. Consume! commanded something inside him, and Use! it cried, and Devour! it ordered. And Trumie obeyed, heroically.
They listened to what the fisherman robot had to say, and the picture was dark. Armies had sprung up on North Guardian; navies floated in its waters. Anderson Trumie stalked among his creations like a blubbery god, wrecking and ruling. Garrick could see the pattern in what the fisherman had to say. In Trumie’s mind, he was dictator, building a war machine. He was supreme engineer, constructing a mighty state. He was warrior.
“He was playing tin soldiers,” said Roger Garrick, and Roosenburg and the girl nodded.
“The trouble is,” Roosenburg said, “he has stopped playing. Invasion fleets, Garrick! He isn’t content with Nordi Guardian any more. He wants the rest of the country, too!”
“You can’t blame him,” said Roger Garrick for the third time, and stood up. “The question is, what do we do about it?”
“That’s what you’re here for,” Kathryn told him.
“All right. We can forget about the soldiers—as soldiers, that is. They won’t hurt anyone. Robots can’t.”
“I know that,” Kathryn snapped.
“The problem is what to do about Trumie’s drain on the world’s resources.” Garrick pursed his lips. “According to my directive from Area Control, the first plan was to let him alone—there is still plenty of everything for anyone, so why not let Trumie enjoy himself? But that didn’t work out too well.”
“Didn’t work out too well,” repeated Kathryn Pender bitterly.
“No, no—not on your local level,” Garrick explained quickly. “After all, what are a few thousand robots, a few hundred million dollars’ worth of equipment? We could re-supply this area in a week.”
“And in a week,” said Roosenburg, “Trumie would have us cleaned out again!”
“That’s the trouble,” Garrick declared. “He doesn’t seem to have a stopping point. Yet we can’t refuse his orders. Speaking as a psychist, that would set a very bad precedent. It would put ideas in the minds of a lot of persons—minds that, in some cases, might not prove stable in the absence of a completely reliable source of everything they need, on request. If we say no to Trumie, we open the door on some mighty dark corners of the human mind. Covetousness. Greed. Pride of possession—”
“So what are you going to do?” demanded Kathryn Pender.
Garrick said resentfully: “The only thing there is to do. I’m going to look over Trumie’s folder again. And dien I’m going to North Guardian Island.”
V
Roger Garrick was all too aware of the fact that he was only 24. But his age couldn’t make a great deal of difference. The oldest and wisest psychist in Area Control’s wide sphere might have been doubtful of success in as thorny a job as the one ahead.
He and Kathryn Pender warily started out at daybreak. Vapor was rising from the sea about them, and the little battery-motor of their launch whined softly beneath the keelson. Garrick sat patting the little box that contained their invasion equipment, while the girl steered.
The workshops of Fisherman’s Island had been all night making some of the things in that box—not because they were so difficult to make, but because it had been a bad night. Big things were going on at North Guardian; twice, the power had been out entirely for an hour, while the demand on the lines from North Guardian took all the power the system could deliver.
The Sun was well up as they came within hailing distance of the Navy Yard.
Robots were hard at work; the Yard was bustling with activity. An overhead traveling crane, eight feet tall, laboriously lowered a prefabricated fighting top onto an 11-foot aircraft carrier.
A motor torpedo boat—full-sized, this one was, not to scale —rocked at anchor just before the bow of their launch. Kathryn steered around it, ignoring the hail from the robot lieutenant-j.g. at its rail.
She glanced at Garrick over her shoulder, her face taut. “It’s—it’s all mixed up.”
Garrick nodded. The battleships were model-sized, the small boats full-scale. In the city beyond the Yard, the pinnacle of the Empire State Building barely cleared the Pentagon, right next door. A soaring suspension bridge leaped out from the shore a quarter of a mile away and stopped short a thousand yards out, over empty water.
It was easy to understand—even for a psychist just out of school, on his first real assignment. Trumie was trying to run a world singlehanded, and where there were gaps in his conception of what his world should be, the results showed.
“Get me battleships!” he ordered his robot supply clerks, and they found the only battleships there were in the world to copy, the child-sized, toy-scaled play battleships that still delighted kids.
“Get me an Air Force!” And a thousand model bombers were hastily put together.
“Build me a bridge!” But perhaps he had forgotten to say to where.
Garrick shook his head and focused on the world around him. Kathryn Pender was standing on a gray steel stage, the mooring line from their launch secured to what looked like a coast defense cannon—but only about four feet long. Garrick picked up the little box and leaped up to the stage beside her. She turned to look at the city.
“Hold on a second.” He was opening the box, taking out two little cardboard placards. He turned her by the shoulder and, with pins from the box, attached one of the cards to her back. “Now me,” he said, turning his back to her.
She read the placard dubiously:
I AM A SPY!
“Garrick,” she said, “you’re sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Put it on!” She shrugged and pinned it to the back of his jacket.
Side by side, they entered the citadel of the enemy.
According to the fisherman robot, Trumie lived in a gingerbread castle south of the Pentagon. Most of the robots got no chance to enter it. The city outside the castle was Trumie’s kingdom, and he roamed about it, overseeing, changing, destroying, rebuilding. But inside the castle was his Private
Place; the only robots that had both an inside-and outside-die-castle existence were the two bodyguards of his youth, Davey Crockett and Long John Silver.
‘That,” said Garrick, “must be the Private Place.”
It was decidedly a gingerbread castle. The “gingerbread” was stonework, gargoyles, and columns; there were a moat and a drawbridge, and there were robot guards with crooked little rifles, wearing scarlet tunics and fur shakos three feet tall. The drawbridge was up and the guards stood at stiff attention.
“Let’s reconnoiter,” said Garrick. He was unpleasantly conscious of the fact that every robot they passed—and they had passed thousands—had turned to look at the signs on their backs.
Yet it was right, wasn’t it? There was no hope of avoiding observation in any event. The only hope was to fit somehow into the pattern—and spies would certainly be a part of the military pattern.
Wouldn’t they?
Garrick turned his back on doubts and led the way around the gingerbread palace.
The only entrance was the drawbridge.
They stopped out of sight of the ramrod-stiff guards. Garrick said: “We’ll go in. As soon as we get inside, you put on your costume.” He handed her the box. “You know what to do. All you have to do is keep him quiet for a while and let me talk to him.”
“Garrick, will this work?”
Garrick exploded: “How the devil do I know? I had Trumie’s dossier to work with. I know everything that happened to him when he was a kid—when this trouble started. But to reach him takes a long time, Kathryn. And we don’t have a long time. So—”
He took her elbow and marched her toward the guards. “So you know what to do,” he said.
“I hope so,” breathed Kathryn
Pender, looking very small and very young.
They marched down the wide white pavement, past the motionless guards—
Something was coming toward them. Kathryn held back.
“Come on!” Garrick muttered.
“No, look!” she whispered. “Is that—is that Trumie?”
He looked, then stared.
It was Trumie, larger than life. It was Anderson Trumie, the entire human population of the most-congested-island-for-its-population in the world. On one side of him was a tall dark figure, on the other side a squat dark figure, helping him along. His face was horror, drowned in fat. The bloated cheeks shook damply, wet with tears. The eyes squinted out with fright on the world he had made.
Trumie and his bodyguards rolled up to them and past. And then Anderson Trumie stopped.
He turned the blubbery head and read the sign on the back of the girl. I AM A SPY. Panting heavily, clutching the shoulder of the Crockett robot, he gaped wildly at her.
Garrick cleared his throat. This far his plan had gone, and then there was a gap. There had to be a gap. Trumie’s history, in the folder that Roosenburg had supplied, had told him what to do with Trumie; and Garrick’s own ingenuity had told him how to reach the man. But a link was missing. Here was the subject, and here was the psychist who could cure him, and it was up to Garrick to start the cure.
Trumie cried out in a staccato bleat: “You! What are you? Where do you belong?”
He was talking to the girl. Beside him, the Crockett robot murmured: “Reckon she’s a spy, Mistuh Trumie. See thet sign a-hangin’ on her back?”
“Spy? Spy?” The quivering lips pouted. “Curse you, are you Mata Hari? What are you doing out here? It’s changed its face,” Trumie complained to the Crockett robot. “It doesn’t belong here. It’s supposed to be in the harem. Go on, Crockett, get her back!”
“Wait!” said Garrick, but the Crockett robot was ahead of him. It took Kathryn Pender by the arm.
“Come along thar,” it said soothingly, and urged her across the drawbridge. She glanced back at Garrick, and for a moment it looked as though she were going to speak. Then she shook her head, as if giving an order.
In the Problem Pit Page 21