The Midas Plague

by Frederik Pohl

  “Hold it a minute, Tan,” Howland interrupted critically. “You’ve got too many per cents there. Start over again.”

  “Oh, the hell with it,” the woman said moodily. “I wish my husband were here. He expresses it so much better than I do.” She swallowed her drink. “Since you’ve wriggled off the hook,” she said nastily to Morey, “how about setting up another round—on my ration book this time?”

  Morey did; it was the simplest thing to do in his confusion. When that was gone, they had another on Howland’s book.

  As near as he could figure out, the woman, her husband and quite possibly Howland as well belonged to some kind of anti-robot group. Morey had heard of such things; they had a quasi-legal status, neither approved nor prohibited, but he had never come into contact with them before. Remembering the hatred he had so painfully relived at the psychodrama session, he thought anxiously that perhaps he belonged with them. But, question them though he might, he couldn’t seem to get the principles of the organization firmly in mind.

  The woman finally gave up trying to explain it, and went off to find her husband while Morey and Howland had another drink and listened to two drunks squabble over who bought the next round. They were at the Alphonse-Gaston stage of inebriation; they would regret it in the morning; for each was bending over backward to permit the other to pay the ration points. Morey wondered uneasily about his own points; Howland was certainly getting credit for a lot of Morey’s drinking tonight. Served him right for forgetting his book, of course.

  When the woman came back, it was with the large man Morey had encountered in the company of Sam, the counterfeiter, steerer and general man about Old Town.

  “A remarkably small world, isn’t it?” boomed Walter Bigelow, only slightly crushing Morey’s hand in his. “Well, sir, my wife has told me how interested you are in the basic philosophical drives behind our movement, and I should like to discuss them further with you. To begin with, sir, have you considered the principle of Twoness?”

  Morey said, “Why—”

  “Very good,” said Bigelow courteously. He cleared his throat and declaimed:

  Han-headed Cathay saw it first,

  Bright as brightest solar burst;

  Whipped it into boy and girl,

  The blinding spiral-sliced swirl:

  Yang And Yin.

  He shrugged deprecatingly. “Just the first stanza,” he said. “I don’t know if you got much out of it.” “Well, no,” Morey admitted. “Second stanza,” Bigelow said firmly:

  Hegal saw it, saw it clear;

  Jackal Marx drew near, drew near:

  O’er his shoulder saw it plain,

  Turned it upside down again:

  Yang

  And Yin.

  There was an expectant pause. Morey said, “I—uh—” “Wraps it all up, doesn’t it?” Bigelow’s wife demanded. “Oh, if only others could see it as clearly as you do! The robot peril and the robot savior. Starvation and surfeit. Always twoness, always!”

  Bigelow patted Morey’s shoulder. “The next stanza makes it even clearer,” he said. “It’s really very clever—I shouldn’t say it, of course, but it’s Howland’s as much as it’s mine. He helped me with the verses.” Morey darted a glance at Howland, but Howland was carefully looking away. “Third stanza,” said Bigelow. “This is a hard one, because it’s long, so pay attention.”

  Justice, tip your sightless scales; One pan rises, one pan fails.

  “Howland,” he interrupted himself, “are you sure about that rhyme? I always trip over it. Well, anyway:

  Add to A and B grows less;

  A’s B’s partner, nonetheless.

  Next, the Twoness that there be

  In even electricity.

  Chart the current as it’s found:

  Sine the hot lead, line the ground.

  The wild sine dances, soars and falls,

  But only to figures the zero calls.

  Sine wave, scales, all things that be

  Share a reciprocity.

  Male and female, light and dark:

  Name the numbers of Noah’s Ark!

  Yang

  And Yin!

  “Dearest!” shrieked Bigelow’s wife. “You’ve never done it better!” There was a spatter of applause, and Morey realized for the first time that half the bar had stopped its noisy revel to listen to them. Bigelow was evidently quite a well-known figure here.

  Morey said weakly, “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  He turned hesitantly to Howland, who promptly said, “Drink! What we all need right now is a drink.”

  They had a drink on Bigelow’s book.

  Morey got Howland aside and asked him, “Look, level with me. Are these people nuts?”

  Howland showed pique. “No. Certainly not.”

  “Does that poem mean anything? Does this whole business of twoness mean anything?”

  Howland shrugged. “If it means something to them, it means something. They’re philosophers, Morey. They see deep into things. You don’t know what a privilege it is for me to be allowed to associate with them.”

  They had another drink. On Howland’s book, of course.

  Morey eased Walter Bigelow over to a quiet spot. He said, “Leaving twoness out of it for the moment, what’s this about the robots?”

  Bigelow looked at him round-eyed. “Didn’t you understand the poem?”

  “Of course I did. But diagram it for me in simple terms so I can tell my wife.”

  Bigelow beamed. “It’s about the dichotomy of robots,” he explained. “Like the Utile salt mill that the boy wished for: it ground out salt and ground out salt and ground out salt. He had to have salt, but not that much salt. Whitehead explains it clearly—”

  They had another drink on Bigelow’s book.

  Morey wavered over to Tanaquil Bigelow. He said fuzzily, “Listen. Mrs. Walter Tanaquil Strongarm Bigelow. Listen.”

  She grinned smugly at him. “Brown hair,” she said dreamily.

  Morey shook his head vigorously. “Never mind hair,” he ordered. “Never mind poem. Listen. In pre-cise and el-e-men-ta-ry terms, explain to me what is wrong with the world today.”

  “Not enough brown hair,” she said promptly.

  “Never mind hair!”

  “All right,” she said agreeably. “Too many robots. Too many robots make too much of everything.”

  “Ha! Got it!” Morey exclaimed triumphantly. “Get rid of robots!”

  “Oh, no. No! No! No. We wouldn’t eat. Everything is mechanized. Can’t get rid of them, can’t slow down production—slowing down is dying, stopping is quicker dying. Principle of twoness is the concept that clarifies all these—”

  “No!” Morey said violently. “What should we do?”

  “Do? I’ll tell you what we should do, if that’s what you want. I can tell you.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “What we should do is—” Tanaquil hiccupped with a look of refined consternation—“have another drink.”

  They had another drink. He gallantly let her pay, of course. She ungallantly argued with the bartender about the ration points due her.

  Though not a two-fisted drinker, Morey tried. He really worked at it.

  He paid the price, too. For some little time before his limbs stopped moving, his mind stopped functioning. Blackout. Almost a blackout, at any rate, for all he retained of the late evening was a kaleidoscope of people and places and things. Howland was there, drunk as a skunk, disgracefully drunk, Morey remembered thinking as he stared up at Howland from the floor. The Bigelows were there. His wife, Cherry, solicitous and amused, was there. And oddly enough, Henry was there…

  It was very, very hard to reconstruct. Morey devoted a whole morning’s hangover to the effort. It was important to reconstruct it, for some reason. But Morey couldn’t even remember what the reason was; and finally he dismissed it, guessing that he had either solved the secret of twoness or whether Tanaquil Bigelow’s remarkable figure wa
s natural.

  He did, however, know that the next morning he had waked in his own bed, with no recollection of getting there. No recollection of anything much, at least not of anything that fit into the proper chronological order or seemed to mesh with anything else, after the dozenth drink when he and Howland, arms around each other’s shoulders, composed a new verse on twoness and, plagiarizing an old marching tune, howled it across the boisterous bar-room:

  A twoness on the scene much later

  Rests in your refrigerator.

  Heat your house and insulate it.

  Next your food: Refrigerate it.

  Frost will damp your Freon coils,

  So flux in nichrome till it boils.

  See the picture? Heat in cold

  In heat in cold, the story’s told!

  Giant-writ the sacred scrawl:

  Oh, the twoness of it all!

  Yang

  And Yin!

  It had, at any rate, seemed to mean something at the time.

  If alcohol opened Morey’s eyes to the fact that there was a twoness, perhaps alcohol was what he needed. For there was.

  Call it a dichotomy, if the word seems more couth. A kind of two-pronged struggle, the struggle of two unwearying runners in an immortal race. There is the refrigerator inside the house. The cold air, the bubble of heated air that is the house, the bubble of cooled air that is the refrigerator, the momentary bubble of heated air that defrosts it. Call the heat Yang, if you will. Call the cold Yin. Yang overtakes Yin. Then Yin passes Yang. Then Yang passes Yin. Then-Give them other names. Call Yin a mouth; call Yang a hand.

  If the hand rests, the mouth will starve. If the mouth stops, the hand will die. The hand, Yang, moves faster.

  Yin may not lag behind.

  Then call Yang a robot.

  And remember that a pipeline has two ends.

  Like any once-in-a-lifetime lush, Morey braced himself for the consequences—and found startledly that there were none.

  Cherry was a surprise to him. “You were so funny,” she giggled. “And, honestly, so romantic.”

  He shakily swallowed his breakfast coffee.

  The office staff roared and slapped him on the back. “Howland tells us you’re living high, boy!” they bellowed more or less in the same words. “Hey, listen to what Morey did—went on the town for the night of a lifetime and didn’t even bring his ration book along to cash in!”

  They thought it was a wonderful joke.

  But, then, everything was going well. Cherry, it seemed, had reformed out of recognition. True, she still hated to go out in the evening and Morey never saw her forcing herself to gorge on unwanted food or play undesired games. But, moping into the pantry one afternoon, he found to his incredulous delight that they were well ahead of their ration quotas. In some items, in fact, they were out—a. month’s supply and more was gone ahead of schedule!

  Nor was it the counterfeit stamps, for he had found them tucked behind a bain-marie and quietly burned them. He cast about for ways of complimenting her, but caution prevailed. She was sensitive on the subject; leave it be.

  And virtue had its reward.

  Wainwright called him in, all smiles. “Morey, great news! We’ve all appreciated your work here and we’ve been able to show it in some more tangible way than compliments. I didn’t want to say anything till it was definite, but—your status has been reviewed by Classification and the Ration Board. You’re out of Class Four Minor, Morey!”

  Morey said tremulously, hardly daring to hope, “I’m a full Class Four?”

  “Class Five, Morey. Class Five! When we do something, we do it right. We asked for a special waiver and got it—you’ve skipped a whole class.” He added honestly, “Not that it was just our backing that did it, of course. Your own recent splendid record of consumption helped a lot. I told you you could do it!”

  Morey had to sit down. He missed the rest of what Wainwright had to say, but it couldn’t have mattered. He escaped from the office, side-stepped the knot of fellow-employees waiting to congratulate him, and got to a phone.

  Cherry was as ecstatic and inarticulate as he. “Oh, darling!” was all she could say.

  “And I couldn’t have done it without you,” he babbled. “Wainwright as much as said so himself. Said if it wasn’t for the way we— well, you have been keeping up with the rations, it never would have got by the Board. I’ve been meaning to say something to you about that, dear, but I just haven’t known how. But I do appreciate it. I— Hello?” There was a curious silence at the other end of the phone. “Hello?” he repeated worriedly.

  Cherry’s voice was intense and low. “Morey Fry, I think you’re mean. I wish you hadn’t spoiled the good news.” And she hung up.

  Morey stared slack-jawed at the phone.

  Howland appeared behind him, chuckling. “Women,” he said. “Never try to figure them. Anyway, congratulations, Morey.”

  “Thanks,” Morey mumbled.

  Howland coughed and said, “Uh—by the way, Morey, now that you’re one of the big shots, so to speak, you won’t—uh—feel obliged to—well, say anything to Wainwright, for instance, about anything I may have said while we—”

  “Excuse me,” Morey said, unhearing, and pushed past him. He thought wildly of calling Cherry back, of racing home to see just what he’d said that was wrong. Not that there was much doubt, of course. He’d touched her on her sore point.

  Anyhow, his wristwatch was chiming a reminder of the fact that his psychiatric appointment for the week was coming up.

  Morey sighed. The day gives and the day takes away. Blessed is the day that gives only good things.

  If any.

  The session went badly. Many of the sessions had been going badly, Morey decided; there had been more and more whispering in knots of doctors from which he was excluded, poking and probing in the dark instead of the precise psychic surgery he was used to. Something was wrong, he thought.

  Something was. Semmelweiss confirmed it when he adjourned the group session. After the other doctor had left, he sat Morey down for a private talk. On his own time, too—he didn’t ask for his usual ration fee. That told Morey how important the problem was.

  “Morey,” said Semmelweiss, “you’re holding back.”

  “I don’t mean to, Doctor,” Morey said earnestly.

  “Who knows what you ‘mean’ to do? Part of you ‘means’ to. We’ve dug pretty deep and we’ve found some important things. Now there’s something I can’t put my finger on. Exploring the mind, Morey, is like sending scouts through cannibal territory. You can’t see the cannibals—until it’s too late. But if you send a scout through the jungle and he doesn’t show up on the other side, it’s a fair assumption that something obstructed his way. In that case, we would label the obstruction ‘cannibals.’ In the case of the human mind, we label the obstruction a ‘trauma.’ What the trauma is, or what its effects on behavior will be, we have to find out, once we know that it’s there.”

  Morey nodded. All of this was familiar; he couldn’t see what Semmelweiss was driving at.

  Semmelweiss sighed. “The trouble with healing traumas and penetrating psychic blocks and releasing inhibitions—the trouble with everything we psychiatrists do, in fact, is that we can’t afford to do it too well. An inhibited man is under a strain. We try to relieve the strain. But if we succeed completely, leaving him with no inhibitions at all, we have an outlaw, Morey. Inhibitions are often socially necessary. Suppose, for instance, that an average man were not inhibited against blatant waste. It could happen, you know. Suppose that instead of consuming his ration quota in an orderly and responsible way, he did such things as set fire to his house and everything in it or dumped his food allotment in the river.

  “When only a few individuals are doing it, we treat the individuals. But if it were done on a mass scale, Morey, it would be the end of society as we know it. Think of the whole collection of anti-social actions that you see in every paper. Man beats wife; wife tur
ns into a harpy; junior smashes up windows; husband starts a black-market stamp racket. And every one of them traces to a basic weakness in the mind’s defenses against the most important single anti-social phenomenon—failure to consume.”

  Morey flared, “That’s not fair, Doctor! That was weeks ago! We’ve certainly been on the ball lately. I was just commended by the Board, in fact—”

  The doctor said mildly, “Why so violent, Morey? I only made a general remark.”

  “It’s just natural to resent being accused.”

  The doctor shrugged. “First, foremost and above all, we do not accuse patients of things. We try to help you find things out.” He lit his end-of-session cigarette. “Think about it, please. I’ll see you next week.”

  Cherry was composed and unapproachable. She kissed him remotely when he came in. She said, “I called Mother and told her the good news. She and Dad promised to come over here to celebrate.”

  “Yeah,” said Morey. “Darling, what did I say wrong on the phone?”

  “They’ll be here about six.”

  “Sure. But what did I say? Was it about the rations? If you’re sensitive, I swear I’ll never mention them again.”

  “I am sensitive, Morey.”

  He said despairingly, “I’m sorry. I just—”

  He had a better idea. He kissed her.

  Cherry was passive at first, but not for long. When he had finished kissing her, she pushed him away and actually giggled. “Let me get dressed for dinner.”

  “Certainly. Anyhow, I was just—”

  She laid a finger on his lips.

  He let her escape and, feeling much less tense, drifted into the library. The afternoon papers were waiting for him. Virtuously, he sat down and began going through them in order. Midway through the World-Telegram-Sun-Post-and-News, he rang for Henry.

  Morey had read clear through to the drama section of the Times-Herald-Tribune-Mirror before the robot appeared. “Good evening,” it said politely.

  “What took you so long?” Morey demanded. “Where are all the robots?”

  Robots do not stammer, but there was a distinct pause before Henry said, “Belowstairs, sir. Did you want them for something?”