Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  He would build something here far superior to anything up there. He and his mother. She would help him.

  She needed some time, he knew, to let the wound heal. Then they would go up there, together, and get what they needed. Two more girls should be enough. Young ones.

  He turned over on his side and snuggled up to Mary’s back. His hand felt the smooth swell of her baby. Yes. He smiled to himself. This baby girl and two more.

  Frederik Pohl

  We Purchased People

  Fred Pohl is one of the great living science fiction writers and editors, winner of many awards for his novels and stories, including both the Hugo and Nebula Awards several times. Kingsley Amis, in his study of the literature of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, called him the best living science fiction writer. He edited Galaxy magazine for more than a decade and has held various senior editorial positions in book publishing, but has always returned to writing. He has written no category horror. This piece however, whose ending may be compared to the finale of Mark Twain’s Puddin’head Wilson for horrific effect, is a pure example of the style, tropes, and conventions of science fiction being used to create a devastating and horrid impact. Furthermore, this compressed and intense social allegory is not merely a tricky plotted story, but a work that uses horror to awaken the sensitivities of the reader to good and evil, humane feeling, social injustice. Pohl is a moralist, like Twain, like Vonnegut, and in spite of his utopian strain, his major mode has been satire, sometimes quite dark. It is also a fascinating transformation of Robert Silverberg’s “Passengers,” showing how writers in a genre (in this case, science fiction) make the tropes evolve.

  In the third of March the purchased person named Wayne Golden took part in trade talks in Washington as the representative of the dominant race of the Groombridge star. What he had to offer was the license of the basic patents on a device to convert nuclear power plant waste products into fuel cells. It was a good item, with a ready market. Since half of Idaho was already bubbling with radioactive wastes, the Americans were anxious to buy, and he sold for a credit of $100 million. On the following day he flew to Spain. He was allowed to sleep all the way, stretched out across two seats in the first-class section of the Concorde, with the fastenings of a safety belt gouging into his side. On the fifth of the month he used up part of the trade credit in the purchase of fifteen Picasso oils-on-canvas, the videotape of a flamenco performance and a fifteenth-century harpsichord, gilt with carved legs. He arranged for them to be preserved, crated, and shipped in bond to Orlando, Florida, after which the items would be launched from Cape Kennedy on a voyage through space that would take more than twelve thousand years. The Groombridgians were not in a hurry and thought big. The Saturn Five booster rocket cost $11 million in itself. It did not matter. There was plenty of money left in the Groombridge credit balance. On the fifteenth of the month Golden returned to the United States, made a close connection at Logan Airport in Boston, and arrived early at his home kennel in Chicago. He was then given eighty-five minutes of freedom.

  I knew exactly what to do with my eighty-five minutes. I always know. See, when you’re working for the people who own you you don’t have any choice about what you do, but up to a point you can think pretty much whatever you like. That thing you get in your head only controls you. It doesn’t change you, or anyway I don’t think it does. (Would I know if I were changed?)

  My owners never lie to me. Never. I don’t think they know what a lie is. If I ever needed anything to prove that they weren’t human, that would be plenty, even if I didn’t know they lived 86 zillion miles away, near some star that I can’t even see. They don’t tell me much, but they don’t lie.

  Not ever lying, that makes you wonder what they’re like. I don’t mean physically. I looked that up in the library once, when I had a couple of hours of free time. I don’t remember where, maybe in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale, anyway I couldn’t read what the language in the books said. But I saw the photographs and the holograms. I remember the physical appearance of my owners, all right. Jesus. The Altairians look kind of like spiders, and the Sirians are a little bit like crabs. But those folks from the Groombridge star, boy, they’re something else. I felt bad about it for a long time, knowing I’d been sold to something that looked as much like a cluster of maggots on an open wound as anything else I’d ever seen. On the other hand, they’re all those miles away, and all I ever have to do with them is receive their fast-radio commands and do what they tell me. No touching or anything. So what does it matter what they look like?

  But what kind of freaky creature is it that never says anything that is not objectively the truth, never changes its mind, never makes a promise that it doesn’t keep? They aren’t machines, I know, but maybe they think I’m kind of a machine. You wouldn’t bother to lie to a machine, would you? You wouldn’t make it any promises. You wouldn’t do it any favors, either, and they never do me any. They don’t tell me that I can have eighty-five minutes off because I’ve done something they like, or because they want to sweeten me up because they want something from me. Everything considered, that’s silly. What could they want? It isn’t as if I had any choice. Ever. So they don’t lie, or threaten, or bribe, or reward.

  But for some reason they sometimes give me minutes or hours or days off, and this time I had eighty-five minutes. I started using it right away, the way I always do. The first thing was to check at the kennel location desk to see where Carolyn was. The locator clerk—he isn’t owned, he works for a salary and treats us like shit—knows me by now. “Oh, hell, Wayne boy,” he said with that imitation sympathy and lying friendliness that makes me want to kill him, “you just missed the lady friend. Saw her, let’s see, Wednesday, was it? But she’s gone.” “Where to?” I asked him. He pushed around the cards on the locator board for a while, he knows I don’t have very much time ever so he uses it up for me, and said: “Nope, not on my board at all. Say, I wonder. Was she with that bunch that went to Peking? Or was that the other little fat broad with the big boobs?” I didn’t stop to kill him. If she wasn’t on the board she wasn’t in eighty-five-minute transportation range, so my eighty-five minutes—seventy-nine minutes—wasn’t going to get me near her.

  I went to the men’s room, jerked off quickly, and went out into the miserable biting March Chicago wind to use up my seventy-nine minutes. Seventy-one minutes. There’s a nice Mexican kind of restaurant near the kennel, a couple of blocks away past Ohio. They know me there. They don’t care who I am. Maybe the brass plate in my head doesn’t bother them because they think it’s great that the people from the other stars are doing such nice things for the world, or maybe it’s because I tip big. (What else do I have to do with the money I get?) I stuck my head in, whistled at Terry, the bartender, and said: “The usual. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” Then I walked up to Michigan and bought a clean shirt and changed into it, leaving the smelly old one. Sixty-six minutes. In the drugstore on the corner I picked up a couple of porno paperbacks and stuck them in my pockets, bought some cigarettes, leaned over and kissed the hand of the cashier, who was slim and fair-complexioned and smelled good, left her startled behind me, and got back to the restaurant just as Alicia, the waitress, was putting the gazpacho and the two bottles of beer on my table. Fifty-nine minutes. I settled down to enjoy my time. I smoked, and I ate, and I drank the beer, smoking between bites, drinking between puffs. You really look forward to something like that when you’re working and not your own boss. I don’t mean they don’t let us eat when we’re working. Of course they do, but we don’t have any choice about what we eat or where we eat it. Pump fuel into the machine, keep it running. So I finished the guacamole and sent Alicia back for more of it when she brought the chocolate cake and American coffee, and ate the cake and the guacamole in alternate forkfuls. Eighteen minutes.

  If I had had a little more time I would have jerked off again, but I didn’t, so I paid the bill, tipped everybody, and left the restaurant. I got to the blo
ck where the kennel was with maybe two minutes to spare. Along the curb a slim woman in a fur jacket and pants suit was walking her Scottie away from me. I went up behind her and said, “I’ll give you fifty dollars for a kiss.” She turned around. She was all of sixty years old, but not bad, really, so I kissed her and gave her the fifty dollars. Zero minutes, and I just made it into the kennel when I felt the tingling in my forehead, and my owners took over again.

  In the next seven days of March Wayne Golden visited Karachi, Srinagar, and Butte, Montana, on the business of the Groombridgians. He completed thirty-two assigned tasks. Quite unexpectedly he was then given 1,000 minutes of freedom.

  That time I was in, I think it was, Pocatello, Idaho, or some place like that. I had to send a TWX to the faggy locator clerk in Chicago to ask about Carolyn. He took his time answering, as I knew he would. I walked around a little bit, waiting to hear. Everybody was very cheerful, smiling as they walked around through the dusty, sprinkly snow that was coming down, even smiling at me as though they didn’t care that I was purchased, as they could plainly see from the golden oval of metal across my forehead that my owners use to tell me what to do. Then the message came back from Chicago: “Sorry, Wayne baby, but Carolyn isn’t on my board. If you find her, give her one for me.”

  Well. All right. I have plenty of spending money, so I checked into a hotel. The bellboy brought me a fifth of Scotch and plenty of ice, fast, because he knew why I was in a hurry and that I would tip for speed. When I asked about hookers he offered anything I liked. I told him white, slim, beautiful asses. That’s what I first noticed about Carolyn. It’s special for me. The little girl I did in New Brunswick, what was her name—Rachel—she was only nine years old, but she had an ass on her you wouldn’t believe.

  I showered and put on clean clothes. The owners don’t really give you enough time for that sort of thing. A lot of the time I smell. A lot of times I’ve almost wet my pants because they didn’t let me go when I needed to. Once or twice I just couldn’t help myself, held out as long as I could and, boy, you feel lousy when that happens. The worst was when I was covering some kind of a symposium in Russia, a place with a name like Akademgorodok. It was supposed to be on nuclear explosion processes. I don’t know anything about that kind of stuff, and anyway I was a little mixed up because I thought that was one of the things the star people had done for us, worked out some way the different countries didn’t have to have nuclear weapons and bombs and wars and so on anymore. But that wasn’t what they meant. It was explosions at the nucleus of the galaxy they meant. Astronomical stuff. Just when a fellow named Eysenck was talking about how the FG prominence and the EMK prominence, whatever they were, were really part of an expanding pulse sphere, whatever that is, I crapped my pants. I knew I was going to. I’d tried to tell the Groombridge people about it. They wouldn’t listen. Then the session redactor came down the aisle and shouted in my ear, as though my owners were deaf or stupid, that they would have to get me out of there, please, for reasons concerning the comfort and hygiene of the other participants. I thought they would be angry, because that meant they were going to miss some of this conference that they were interested in. They didn’t do anything to me, though. I mean, as if there was anything they could do to me that would be any worse, or any different, from what they do to me all the time, and always will.

  When I was all clean and in an open-necked shirt and chinos, I turned on the TV and poured a mild drink. I didn’t want to be still drunk when my thousand minutes were up. There was a special program on all the networks, something celebrating a treaty between the United Nations and a couple of the star people, Sirians and Capellans it seemed to be. Everybody was very happy about it, because it seemed that now the Earth had bought some agricultural and chemical information, and pretty soon there would be more food than we could eat. How much we owed to the star people, the Secretary General of the UN was saying, in Brazilian-accented English. We could look forward to their wise guidance to help Earth survive its multitudinous crises and problems, and we should all be very happy.

  But I wasn’t happy, not even with a glass of John Begg and the hooker on her way up, because what I really wanted was Carolyn.

  Carolyn was a purchased person, like me. I had seen her a couple of dozen times, all in all. Not usually when either of us was on freedom. Almost never when both of us were. It was sort of like falling in love by postcard, except that now and then we were physically close, even touching. And once or twice we had been briefly not only together, but out from under control. We had had about eight minutes once in Bucharest, after coming back from the big hydropower plant at the Iron Gate. That was the record, so far. Outside of that it was just that we passed, able to see each other but not to do anything about it, in the course of our duties. Or that one of us was free and found the other. When that happened the one of us that was free could talk, and even touch the other one, in any way that didn’t interfere with what the other was doing. The one that was working couldn’t do anything active, but could hear, or feel. We were both totally careful to avoid interfering with actual work. I don’t know what would have happened if we had interfered. Maybe nothing? We didn’t want to take that chance, though sometimes it was a temptation I could almost not resist. There was a time when I was free and I found Carolyn, working but not doing anything active, just standing there, at TWA Gate 51 at the St. Louis airport. She was waiting for someone to arrive. I really wanted to kiss her. I talked to her. I patted her, you know, holding my trenchcoat over my arm so that the people passing by wouldn’t notice anything much. I told her things I wanted her to hear. But what I wanted was to kiss her, and I was afraid to. Kissing her on the mouth would have meant putting my head in front of her eyes. I didn’t think I wanted to chance that. It might have meant she wouldn’t see the person she was there to see. Who turned out to be a Ghanaian police officer arriving to discuss the sale of some political prisoners to the Groombridgians. I was there when he came down the ramp, but I couldn’t stay to see if she would by any chance be free after completing the negotiations with him, because then my own time ran out.

  But I had had three hours that time, being right near her. It felt very sad and very strange, and I wouldn’t have given it up for anything in the world. I knew she could hear and feel everything, even if she couldn’t respond. Even when the owners are running you, there’s a little personal part of you that stays alive. I talked to that part of her. I told her how much I wished we could kiss, and go to bed, and be with each other. Oh, hell. I even told her I loved her and wanted to marry her, although we both know perfectly well there’s not ever going to be any chance of that ever. We don’t get pensioned off or retired; we’re owned.

  Anyway, I stayed there with her as long as I could. I paid for it later. Balls that felt as though I’d been stomped, the insides of my undershorts wet and chilly. And there wasn’t any way in the world for me to do anything about it, not even by masturbating, until my next free time. That turned out to be three weeks later. In Switzerland, for God’s sake. Out of season. With nobody in the hotel except the waiters and bellboys and a couple of old ladies who looked at the gold oval in my forehead as though it smelled bad.

  It is a terrible but cherished thing to love without hope.

  I pretended there was hope, always. Every bit of freedom I got, I tried to find her. They keep pretty careful tabs on us, all two or three hundred thousand of us purchased persons, working for whichever crazy bunch of creepy crawlers or gassy ghosts happens to have bought us to be their remote-access facilities on the planet they themselves cannot ever visit. Carolyn and I were owned by the same bunch, which had its good side and its bad side. The good side was that there was a chance that someday we would be free for quite a long while at the same time. It happened. I don’t know why. Shifts change on the Groombridge planet, or they have a holiday or something. But every once in a while there would be a whole day, maybe a week, when none of the Groombridge people would be doing anything at
all, and all of us would be free at once.

  The bad side was that they hardly ever needed to have more than one of us in one place. So Carolyn and I didn’t run into each other a lot. And the times when I was free for a pretty good period it took most of that to find her, and by the time I did she was like a half a world away. No way of getting there and back in time for duty. I did so much want to fuck her, but we had never made it that far and maybe never would. I never even got a chance to ask her what she had been sentenced for in the first place. I really didn’t know her at all, except enough to love her.

  When the bellboy turned up with my girl I was comfortably buzzed, with my feet up and the Rangers on the TV. She didn’t look like a hooker, particularly. She was wearing hip-huggers cut below the navel, bigger breasted than I cared about but with that beautiful curve of waist and back into hips that I like. Her name was Nikki. The bellboy took my money, took five for himself, passed the rest to her, and disappeared, grinning. What’s so funny about it? He knew what I was, because the plate in my head told him, but he had to think it was funny.

  “Do you want me to take my clothes off?” She had a pretty, breathless little voice, long red hair, and a sweet, broad, friendly face. “Go ahead,” I said. She slipped off the sandals. Her feet were clean, a little ridged where the straps went. Stepped out of the hip-huggers and folded them across the back of Conrad Hilton’s standard armchair, took off the blouse and folded it, ducked out of the medallion and draped it over the blouse, down to red lace bra and red bikini panties. Then she turned back the bedclothes, got in, sat up, snapped off the bra, snuggled down, kicked the panties out of the side of the bed, and pulled the covers over her. “Any time, honey,” she said. But I didn’t lay her. I didn’t even get in the bed with her, not under the covers; I drank some more of the Scotch, and that and fatigue put me out, and when I woke up it was daylight, and she had cleaned out my wallet. Seventy-one minutes left. I paid the bill with a check and persuaded them to give me carfare in change. Then I headed back for the kennel. All I got out of it was clean clothes and a hangover. I think I had scared her a little. Everybody knows how we purchased people came to be up for sale, and maybe they’re not all the way sure that we won’t do something bad again, because they don’t know how reliably our owners keep us from ever doing anything they don’t like. But I wished she hadn’t stolen my money.