In the Problem Pit

by Frederik Pohl

  “Kathryn!” yelled Garrick. “Trumie, wait a minute! That isn’t Mata Hari!”

  No one was listening. Kathryn Pender disappeared into the Private Place. Trumie, leaning heavily on the hobbling Long John Silver robot, followed.

  Garrick, coming back to life, leaped after them.

  The scarlet-coated guards jumped before him, their shakos bobbing, their crooked little rifles crossed to bar his way.

  He ordered: “One side! Out of my way! I’m a human, don’t you understand? You’ve got to let me pass!”

  They didn’t even look at him; trying to get by them was like trying to walk through a wall of moving, thrusting steel. He shoved and they pushed him back; he tried to dodge and they were before him. It was hopeless.

  And then it was hopeless indeed, because behind them, he saw, the drawbridge had gone up.

  VI

  Sonny Trumie collapsed into a chair like a mound of blubber falling to the deck of a whaler.

  Though he made no signal, the procession of serving robots started at once. In minced the maitre d’, bowing and waving its graceful hands. In marched the sommelier, clanking its necklace of keys, bearing its wines in their buckets of ice. In came the lovely waitress robots and the sturdy steward robots, with the platters and tureens, the plates and bowls and cups.

  They spread a meal—a dozen meals—before him, and he began to eat.

  He ate as a penned pig eats, gobbling until it chokes, forcing the food down because there is nothing to do but eat. He ate, with a sighing accompaniment of moans and gasps, and some of the food was salted with the tears of pain he wept into it, and some of the wine was spilled by his shaking hand. But he ate. Not for the first time that day, and not for the tenth.

  Sonny Trumie wept as he ate. He no longer even knew he was weeping. There was the gaping void inside him that he had to fill, had to fill; there was the gaping world about him that he had to people and build and furnish… and use.

  He moaned to himself. Four hundred pounds of meat and lard, and he had to lug it from end to end of his island, every hour of every day, never resting, never at peace! There should have been a place somewhere, there should have been a time, when he could rest. When he could sleep without dreaming, sleep without waking after a scant few hours with the goading drive to eat and to use, to use and to eat…

  And it was all so wrong!

  The robots didn’t understand. They didn’t try to understand; they didn’t think for themselves. Let him take his eyes from any one of them for a single day and everything went •wrong. It was necessary to keep after them, from end to end of the island, checking and overseeing and ordering—yes, and destroying to rebuild, over and over!

  He moaned again and pushed the plate away.

  He rested, with his tallow forehead flat against the table, waiting, while inside him the pain ripped and ripped, and finally became bearable again. And slowly he pushed himself up, and rested for a moment, and pulled a fresh plate toward him, and began again to eat.

  After a while, he stopped. Not because he didn’t want to

  go on, but because he absolutely couldn’t.

  He was bone-tired, but something was bothering him—-one more detail to check, one more thing that was wrong. Mata Hari. The houri at the drawbridge. It shouldn’t have been out of the Private Place. It should have been in the harem, of course. Not that it mattered, except to Sonny Trumie’s never-resting sense of what was right.

  Time was when the houris of the harem had their uses, but that time was long and long ago; now they were property, to be fussed over and made to be right, to be replaced if they were worn, destroyed if they were wrong. But only property, as all of North Guardian was property—as all of the world would be his property, if only he could manage it.

  But property shouldn’t be wrong.

  He signaled to the Crockett robot and, leaning on it, walked down the long terrazzo hall toward the harem. He tried to remember what the houri had looked like. The face didn’t matter; he was nearly sure it had changed it. It had worn a sheer red blouse and a brief red skirt, he was almost certain, but the face—

  It had had a face, of course. But Sonny had lost the habit of faces. This one had been somehow different, but he couldn’t remember just why. Still—the blouse and skirt were red, he was nearly sure. And it had been carrying something in a box. And diat was odd, too.

  He waddled a little faster, for now he was positive it was wrong.

  “Thar’s the harem, Mistuh Trumie,” said the robot at his side. It disengaged itself gently, leaped forward and held the door to the harem for him.

  “Wait for me,” Sonny commanded, and waddled forward into the harem halls.

  Once he had so arranged the harem that he needed no help inside it; the halls were railed, at a height where it was easy for a pudgy hand to grasp the rail; the distances were short, the rooms close together.

  He paused and called over his shoulder: “Stay where you can hear me.” It had occurred to him that if the houri robot was wrong, he would need Crockett’s guns to make it right.

  A chorus of female voices sprang into song as he entered the main palio. They were a bevy of beauties, clustered around a fountain, diaphanously dressed, languorously glancing at Sonny Trumie as he waddled inside.

  “Shut up!” he shrieked. “Go back to your rooms!”

  They bowed their heads and, one by one, slipped into the cubicles.

  No sign of the red blouse and the red skirt. He began the rounds of the cubicles, panting, peering into diem.

  “Hello, Sonny,” whispered Theda Bara, lithe on a leopard rug, and he passed on. “I love you!” cried Nell Gwynn, and, “Come to me!” commanded Cleopatra, but he passed them by. He passed Du Barry and Marilyn Monroe, he passed Moll Flanders and he passed Troy’s Helen. No sign of the houri in red—

  Yes, there was. He didn’t see the houri, but he saw the signs of the houri’s presence: the red blouse and the red skirt, lying limp and empty on the floor.

  Sonny gasped: “Where are you? Come out here where I can see you!”

  Nobody answered Sonny.

  “Come out!” he bawled.

  And then he stopped. A door opened and someone came out; not an houri, not female; a figure without sex but loaded with love, a teddy bear figure, as tall as pudgy Sonny Trumie himself, waddling as he waddled, its stubby welcoming arms stretched out to him.

  He could hardly believe his eyes. Its color was a little darker than Teddy. It was a good deal taller than Teddy. But unquestionably, undoubtedly, in everything that mattered, it was—

  “Teddy,” whispered Sonny Trumie, and let the furry arms go around his 400 pounds.

  Twenty years disappeared. “They wouldn’t let me have you,” Sonny told the teddy bear.

  It said, in a voice musical and warm: “It’s all right, Sonny. You can have me now, Sonny. You can have everything, Sonny.”

  “They took you away,” he whispered, remembering.

  They took the teddy bear away; he had never forgotten. They took it away and Mother was wild and Father was furious. They raged at the little boy and scolded him and threatened him. Didn’t he know they were poor, and Did he want to ruin them all, and What was wrong with him, anyway, that he wanted his little sister s silly stuffed robots when he was big enough to use nearly grown-up goods?

  The night had been a terror, with the frowning, sad robots ringed around, and the little girl crying; and what had made it terror was not the scolding—he’d had scoldings—but the worry, the fear and almost the panic in his parents’ voices. For what he did, he came to understand, was no longer a childish sin. It was a big sin, a failure to consume his quota—

  And it had to be punished.

  The first punishment was the extra birthday party.

  The second was—shame.

  Sonny Trumie, not quite 12, was made to feel shame and humiliation. Shame is only a little thing, but it makes the victim of it little, too.

  Shame.

&nb
sp; The robots were reset to scorn him. He woke to mockery and went to bed with contempt. Even his little sister lisped the catalog of his failures.

  You aren’t trying, Sonny, and You don’t care, Sonny, and You’re a terrible disappointment to us, Sonny.

  And finally all the things were true, because Sonny at 12 was what his elders made him.

  And they made him … “neurotic” is the term; a pretty-sounding word that means ugly things like fear and worry and endless self-reproach…

  “Don’t worry,” whispered the Teddy. “Don’t worry, Sonny. You can have me. You can have what you want. You don’t have to have anything else.”

  VII

  Garrick raged through the halls of the Private Place like a tiger. “Kathryn!” he shouted. “Kathryn Pender!”

  The robots peeped out at him worriedly and sometimes they got in his way and he bowled them aside. They didn’t fight back, naturally—what robot would hurt a human? But sometimes they spoke to him, pleading, for it was not according to the wishes of Mr. Trumie that anyone but him rage destroying through North Guardian Island. Garrick passed diem by.

  “Kathryn!” he called. “Kathryn!”

  He told himself fiercely: Trumie was not dangerous. Trumie was laid bare in his folder, the one diat Roosenburg had supplied, and he couldn’t be blamed; he meant no harm. He was once a little boy who was trying to be good by consuming, consuming, and he wore himself into neurosis doing it; and then they changed the rules on him. End of the ration, end of forced consumption, as the robots took over for mankind at the other end of the farm-and-factory cornucopia. It wasn’t necessary to struggle to consume, so the rules were changed.

  And maybe Trumie knew that the rules had been changed, but Sonny didn’t. It was Sonny, the little boy trying to be good, who had made North Guardian Island.

  And it was Sonny who owned the Private Place and all it held—including Kathryn Pender.

  Garrick called hoarsely: “Kathryn! If you hear me, answer me!”

  It had seemed so simple. The fulcrum on which the weight of Trumie’s neurosis might move was a teddy bear. Give him a teddy bear—or, perhaps, a teddy-bear suit, made by night in the factories of Fisherman’s Island, witii a girl named Kathryn Pender inside—and let him hear, from a source he could trust, the welcome news that it was no longer necessary to struggle, that compulsive consumption could have an end. Then Garrick or any other psychist would clear it all up, but only if Trumie would listen.

  “Kathryn!” roared Roger Garrick, racing through a room of mirrors and carved statues. Because, just in case Trumie didn’t listen, just in case the folder was wrong and Teddy wasn’t the key—

  Why, then, Teddy to Trumie would be only a robot. And Trumie destroyed them by the score.

  “Kathryn!” bellowed Roger Garrick, trotting through the silent palace, and at last he heard what might have been an answer. At least it was a voice—a girl’s voice, at that. He was before a passage that led to a room with a fountain and silent female robots, standing and watching him. The voice came from a small room. He ran to the door.

  It was the right door.

  There was Trumie, 400 pounds of lard, lying on a marble bench with a foam-rubber cushion, the jowled head in the small lap of—

  Teddy. Or Kathryn Pender in the teddy-bear suit, the sticklike legs pointed straight out, the sticklike arms clumsily patting him. She was talking to him, gently and reassuringly. She was telling him what he needed to know—that he had eaten enough, that he had used enough, that he had consumed enough to win the respect of all, and an end to consuming.

  Garrick himself could not have done better.

  It was a sight from Mother Goose, the child being soothed by his toy. But it was not a sight that fitted in well with its surroundings, for the seraglio was upholstered in mauve and pink, and the paintings that hung about were wicked.

  Sonny Trumie rolled the pendulous head and looked squarely at Garrick. The worry was gone from the fear-filled little eyes.

  Garrick stepped back.

  No need for him just at this moment. Let Trumie relax for a while, as he had not been able to relax for a score of years. Then the psychist could pick up where the girl had been unable to proceed, but in the meantime, Trumie was finally at rest.

  The Teddy looked up at Garrick and in its bright blue eyes, the eyes that belonged to the girl named Kathryn, he saw a queer tincture of triumph and compassion.

  Garrick nodded, and left, and went out to the robots of North Guardian, and started them clearing away the monstrous child’s-eye conception of an empire.

  Sonny Trumie nestled his head in the lap of the teddy bear. It was talking to him nicely, so nicely. It was droning away: “Don’t worry, Sonny. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right. Everything’s all right.” Why, it was almost as though it were real.

  It had been, he calculated with the part of his mind that was razor-sharp and never relaxed, nearly two hours since he had eaten. Two hours! And he felt as though he could go another hour at least, maybe two. Maybe—maybe even not eat at all again that day. Maybe even learn to live on three meals. Perhaps two. Perhaps—

  He wriggled—as well as 400 greasy pounds can wriggle— and pressed against the soft warm fur of the teddy bear. It was so soothing.

  You don’t have to eat so much, Sonny. You don’t have to drink so much. No one will mind. Your father won’t mind, Sonny. Your mother won’t mind…”

  It was very comfortable to hear the teddy bear telling him those things. It made him drowsy. So deliciously drowsy! It wasn’t like going to sleep, as Sonny Trumie had known going to sleep for a dozen or more years, the bitterly-fought surrender to the anesthetic weariness. It was just drowsy.

  And he did want to go to sleep.

  And finally he slept. All of him. Not just the 400 pounds of blubber and the little tormented eyes, but even the razor-sharp mind-Trumie that lived in the sad, obedient hulk.

  It slept.

  It had not slept all these 20 years.

  SF: The Game-Playing Literature

  Science fiction is fun, other wise it wouldn’t exist at all. But sometimes, I think, it is more than fun, it is a way of looking at the world that cannot he duplicated in any other way, or improved on in some very important respects. And this short essay tells why I believe that.

  My late collaborator, Cyril Kornbluth, once wrote a story called “The Only Thing We Learn.” He didn’t think it necessary to complete the quotation, or indeed to attribute it. He was, after all, writing for a science-fiction audience. Ess Effers are usually cynics and always time-binders. The message that die only thing to be learned from history is that no one ever learns anything from history is not news to them. In fact, the only quarrel an sf writer or reader might have with the statement would be that it is incomplete, and should properly read: “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history—unless we view history, both past and present, as a science-fiction story.”

  In order to see why this statement is true we must first explain what we mean by a “science-fiction story.” This isn’t easy, since the defining of the term “science fiction” has never been done in a really satisfactory fashion. Science fiction may be a story about the future, or a story about space travel, or a Japanese monster movie, or a political parable. It may also be none of those things. It may be about anything, anything at all, because diat quality which most clearly distinguishes sf from non-sf writing has to do not with content but with method.

  This is true, of course, not only of science fiction but of its collateral relative science. Most of us rather hastily and thoughtlessly regard “science” as a sort of collection of linear accelerators and space vehicles and organic chemistry models. In fact it is not any of these things; it is only a systematic method of gathering and testing knowledge, involving certain formal procedures: gathering information, forming a theory to explain the information, predicting certain consequences of the theory and performing an experiment to t
est the prediction. If you investigate any area of knowledge (whether it is stellar physics or the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin) by this method, you are doing science. If you use any other method, you are doing something else.

  In the same way, science fiction has to do with methodology, and “the science-fiction method”1 is that quality in the creative process of the science-fiction writer which describes the parameters within which he can speculate. The sf method is parallelistic, universal, and antideterministic. If we throw dice and see a six come up, the layman sees only a six; the writer using the sf method sees that a six has come up, but that any of five other possibilities might have come up.

  I do not pretend, of course, that all sf writers consciously view the universe in this way, or even that sf stories do not exist in which this feature is minimal if it exists at all. What I do think is that it is this feature which gives sf the special qualities which make it more interesting than any other kind of fiction. I think it is what Arthur Clarke meant, for instance, when he said that he wrote sf in preference to other kinds of fiction “because most other literature isn’t concerned with reality.”

  Science fiction makes good propaganda literature, and there have in fact been times when the freedom to think and say unorthodox sentiments was severely repressed outside of science fiction. Probably that is why Jonathan Swift chose (or innovated) the sf form for Gulliver’s Travels; he could not compare France to England to the disadvantage of England in open terms without running risks to his livelihood, but he could say the same things without fear as long as he used the science-fiction disguises of “Blefuscu” and “Lilliput.” In

  America a decade or two ago, when Joseph McCarthy reduced journalists, academics, and even statesmen to terrified silence, sf magazines went right on talking about anything and everything as though the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee had never existed.