The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  And it had to be punished. The first punishment was the extra birthday party; the second was--shame. Sonny Trumie, not quite twelve, was made to feel shame and humiliation. Shame is only a little thing, but it makes the one who owns it little too. Shame. The robots were reset to scorn him. He woke to mockery, and went to bed with contempt. Even his little sister lisped the catalogue 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 twelve 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....'

  • • • •

  7

  Garrick raged through the halls of the Private Place like a tiger upon a kid.

  'Kathryn!' he cried. 'Kathryn Pender!' Finally he had found a way in, unguarded, forgotten. But it had taken time. And he was worried. 'Kathryn!'

  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. He passed them by. 'Kathryn!' he called. 'Kathryn!'

  It wasn't that Trumie was dangerous.

  He told himself fiercely: Trumie was not dangerous. Trumie was laid bare in his folder, the one that Roosenburg had supplied. He couldn't be blamed, and he meant no harm. He was once a bad 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 cornucopia. It wasn't necessary to struggle to consume, so the rules were changed....

  And maybe Mr. Trumie knew that the rules had been changed; but Sonny didn't. It was Sonny, the bad 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, with 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. Permissive analysis would clear it 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 the teddy wasn't the key--

  Why, then, the teddy to Trumie was only a robot. And Trumie destroyed them by the score.

  • • • •

  'Kathryn!' cried 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, four hundred 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 sticky like legs pointed straight out, the stick-like 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 fit in well with its surroundings, for the seraglio was upholstered in mauve and pink, and wicked paintings hung about.

  Sonny Trumie rolled the pendulous head and looked squarely at Garrick. The worry was gone from the fearful 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.

  • • • •

  Sonny Trumie nestled his swine's head in the lap of the teddy-bear. It was talking to him so 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, it had been 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 four hundred 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 slept. Not just the four hundred pounds of blubber and the little pig eyes, but even the razor-sharp mind--Trumie that lived in the sad, obedient hulk; it slept; and it had never slept before.

  The Seven Deadly Virtues

  1

  Nobody moaned: 'Buddy, please listen to me! I'm hungry. Couldn't you at least give me something to eat?'

  We paid no attention.

  'Oliver,' she said, 'I love you.'

  I stopped and kissed her. Nobody sobbed and drifted away in the mist

  All of Grendoon was down by the Wallow. Torches inflamed the fog like living lips of fire, kissing each other as they blended. The noise of the big jungle machines boomed in the background, but it was almost drowned out by the crowd, a constant bull's bellow of noise. 'Listen to them, Diane,' I said. 'They're happy.'

  'And so am I,' she whispered.

  'You don't miss the plantation?'

  'No.'

  'Nor-'

  'Nor Albert,' she said, remembering. 'Especially not Albert.'

  I felt her shiver in spite of the fact that the temperature was one hundred and ten.

  Nobody clutched at my arm, looming out of the mist, but I shook him off and he stumbled, muttering, away.

  I stopped, looking at Diane. Suddenly she was tense. 'What's the matter?'

  She said in a small voice: 'Did you recognize that one?'

  It was embarrassing. I shook my head. She said: 'I did, Oliver. He used to work for Albert too. And he crossed him, and now--'

  The joy froze in me. I said roughly: 'Snub Albert! Let's get down to the Wallow. This is our night, Diane--don't let anything spoil it.'

  But behind us in the fog, nobody was sniffling wretchedly.

  • • • •

  It was sundown, you see.

  Not that we ever see the sun on Venus. But it makes a difference.


  During 'day' we stay indoors as much as we can, and when we go out we wear not only thermosuits and hoods, but portable air--at least at 'noon.'

  Towards twilight we can breathe the ambient air; at dusk we can leave off the hoods. At 'night,' sometimes, you can go out without even a thermosuit, but it was a long way from night.

  It is also at night that the fog begins to condense. For about two months right around 'midnight' the ceiling climbs, sometimes to a thousand feet, and all that water has to go somewhere; and it does.

  It makes a nice celebration.

  Grendoon has nearly eighteen hundred people living in it, and I don't think a hundred stayed to mind the store. Everybody else was laughing and joking and wandering around, carrying the torches, waiting for the water.

  The kids always get an enormous lick out of it; so do most of the grownups.

  'It's coming,' whispered Diane.

  'I see.'

  Already the bottom of the Wallow was sticky with red mud, like the blood that runs out of a prime roast of beef. We were at the town end of the Wallow now, following the tapewalks to the deep part towards the hills.

  'Here you are, buddy!' shouted a grinning vendor and thrust a pair of torches at me. I paid him, handed one to Diane and walked on.

  There's a reason for the torches too. The English knew about it; in the old wars, before aircraft bothered much with radar, the English were plagued by fog. They dug trenches around their landing strips and filled them with oil; when the planes came in and the fog was too thick they touched off the trenches of oil and the curtain of flame burned off the fog.

  That's what our torches were for.

  First we could see only outlines, then bright beads of light from the torches themselves, and by the time a thousand torches were all aburn, we could see for more than fifty yards. We didn't need tapewalks then; we hurried down the bank towards the cheering, jostling throng.

  There was a roar from the northern end of the Wallow, where the sludgy creek drained thick juices from the hills. 'It's coming!'

  Diane took her hand off my forearm. I released her hand. We both pressed forward, looking.

  In the licking light of the torches the first thin trickle of water was coming down into the Wallow. Although it happened every few months, every time slow Venus completed a spin on its axis relative to the sun, it was like a miracle. It always was. Even inside my thermosuit I felt cooler, more comfortable. It was like Iowa in October, it was like the first freeze-up on the stream that went by everybody's home long ago. The water was coming down!

  I whispered! 'It's a wonderful time to be in love.'

  But Diane wasn't beside me.

  • • • •

  I bawled: 'Diane! Where are you?'

  And then I saw her.

  She had been separated in the crowd, but she was only a couple of yards away, stumbling back towards me. I couldn't see her face, only the hooded neck and line of the right mandible of her jaw, obscured by the transparent mantle of the thermosuit. But it was enough.

  Diane was terrified.

  A huge hulking cow of a man with a face like a footprint in mud and an expression like a stepped-on lizard was bellowing angrily at her: "Wassamatta thew? Whyntcha watchwatcha doing?'

  Diane turned to me, white-faced. 'Olivier,' she sobbed, 'this gentleman says I stepped on his foot.'

  'What?'

  'I--I didn't, Olivier! You believe me, don't you?'

  'Of course.' But it was like a knell tolling.

  'You've got to believe me!'

  'I believe you.' But it didn't matter; nothing mattered; we both knew the score then.

  I said to the stepped-on lizard: 'Sir, my fiancee is deeply apologetic.

  The crowd ... the excitement... all the confusion...'

  He stared at me, glowering. He glanced around from under shaggy eyebrows, gauging the mood of the crowd around us. It didn't satisfy him.

  He shrugged and moved off.

  'Come on, dear,' I said, and urgently hurried her along.

  She said: 'Olivier. They won't give up. They'll try again.'

  'It won't do them any good!'

  'But it will, Olivier,' she said reasonably. 'You know Albert. He never gives up. That was just one of his bullies. He'll have others.'

  I took her by the elbows and turned her to face me. In the red and shuddering light of the torches her eyes were dark, but luminous; her face was sad and calm. Her beauty wrung my heart.

  'We can take care of ourselves, Diane,' I promised. But it was a lie. I knew it was a lie. Albert Quayle hadn't given up, not that easily. He wasn't going to let me have his wife without a fight.

  He was out to get her--with hired assassins, no doubt.

  And when she was gone, he would be coming after me. I remembered how nobody had whimpered in the fog.

  'Will we whimper, do you think?' Diane asked suddenly. It was no more than I was asking myself. I caught her arm and turned her again towards the Wallow. Our torches were getting low. I threw them into the first few inches of silted water, and we watched without words as they choked and died.

  • • • •

  2

  The world had begun for me six months before.

  I came down on the ship from Earth like a newborn baby, all pink and squally, tied my deceleration-proof bassinet, crushed with the parturition pains of landing by rocket on an alien planet.

  What did I know? The ads said: 'Venus, the New Frontier!' 'Venus, the planet where every man can start over!' 'Own 1,000 Acres! Be Your Own Boss on Venus!'

  Naturally I fell for it. So did thousands of others. It wasn't any lie. It was all there.

  I got out of the ship at Grendoon and got on line at Customs. It wasn't a long line. 'Immigrant?' they asked.

  And I said: 'Sure. I'm going to spend the rest of my life here.'

  It was true. But I didn't know why they laughed. I didn't know there wasn't any choice. I didn't know that, once you were conditioned for Venus, you couldn't ever live on Earth again.

  They let you wear the brassard for two weeks--everybody knows what it means; everybody gives you plenty of leeway. That's so you can find your way around. You find a place to live. You get a job. You make your plans.

  You make up your mind.

  Then--if you want to stay--you get conditioned.

  If not, there's the return rocket waiting.

  It was before I was conditioned, while I was still under the brassard, that I met Albert Quayle. And his wife, Diane.

  • • • •

  Grendoon was the steam chamber outside the gates of Hell. They sold me a thermosuit and pinned a brassard on it, with the sparkling word Visitor brightly picked out in diamonds. They gave me a card with Quayle's name and address on it, and turned me loose to hit him up for a job. I stepped out into the hot, penetrating fog.

  Albert Quayle's address was on Breezy Point, overlooking the Wallow. I struggled along the tapewalks; even inside the thermosuit I was wringing wet. It was a hot day. The fog was whitely bright, a flour of soggy pearls that I stirred as I walked. I sucked a tube of suit air, but my face was exposed to the steam; I felt as if I were being gently boiled. Voices spoke to me out of the fog, begging; I couldn't help them so I ignored them, as might any citizen of Grendoon.

  Then I came to Albert Quayle's house. Enormous blowers ripped the fog to tendrils around it. I could see it through a wavering haze. A big place of pink aluminium with picture windows to look out on fog. A big place for a big shot; and that was Albert Quayle.

  I walked up the cinderblock path. It was like a Japanese garden back on Earth. Out of the condensation sumps in the walls a stream of hot water pulsed. It flowed through cement-walled troughs across a cactus garden; the path became a little arched bridge over one of the gently steaming brooks. With such an expensive layout you couldn't blame him for spending enough on blowers to give it a chance to be seen. The water, of course, came out of the sluice from the air-conditioning. It had to go somewhere.

/>   But the garden, the little stream, the bridge--that took money.

  That was what Quayle had--and he had something more than money... he had Diane.

  I rang. The door opened. There she was.

  I glanced at the card in my gauntleted fingers. 'Mrs. Quayle?'

  'I'm Mrs. Quayle.'

  'I'm looking for a job,' I mumbled. A figure like a night-club moaner.

  Eyes like the sad pits of Hell. Lips that tragically invited. I tore my eyes off her and dashed them against the card again. 'Your husband--they said at the office he could help me.'

  'Help you?' Her voice was like a bitter lullaby. 'He'll help himself. But he'll give you a job, if that's what you want.'

  And then I knew I was in love. And I knew what it meant. Because even then, not twenty-four hours on Venus, I knew who Albert Quayle was. I knew he wasn't a man to tangle with, not in Grendoon, not if you wanted to stay alive.

  • • • •

  But I tangled with him after all. Oh, yes. I took from him the one possession he did not care to lose.

  Diane caught my hand. She was shaking. 'Oliver, Oliver. It's him.'

  'I know.'

  'That fat man--he was working for Albert.'

  'I know.'

  'He's out to get us. Both of us! Oliver, I shouldn't have let you do this.

  It's the end.'

  'I know.'

  'Quit saying "I know!" ' she screamed.

  I patted her hand through the gauntlet to show that I understood.

  Gently I led her along the banks of the Wallow, down to where the crowd was thickest.

  'I'm sorry, Oliver,' she whispered suddenly. 'I'd like to kill him.'

  'You can't.'

  'I know I can't, but I'd like to. If only we weren't conditioned-'