A LIFE AND A HALF

Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl is an ironist: by no means exclusively that-he has many other substantial claims to consideration; but in this story, at any rate, the ironist part of him is in charge. As with A Work of Art (and as so often in science fiction), the apparent subject-matter of A Life and a Half turns out on scrutiny not to be its true subject-matter at all. (For a story in which the population explosion genuinely is the subject-matter, see Billennium.) No: what is here being lightly outlined is a sort of incurable preposterousness in human affairs, a tropism towards self-defeat which can confidently be expected to be still fully in operation when the very last man confronts his very last crisis. Poor Saul, joyously incapacitating himself with the germ of the universal impulse whose consequences only he can alleviate! And poor us, too: for we, after all, are at one and the same time Saul and Saul’s fellow-creatures, whom his innocent diversions left so dismally in the lurch.

I remember when I was a boy the weather was better. No, really. All the rain showers from condensation of somebody’s air conditioner, and the terrible cold winters because the heat is sucked in from out, and the frantic purple sunsets one night after another-who needs a spectacle every night? And why should there be so much dust from H-tests to make them?

All these things weren’t. It was simple and nice, the world of my youth. Now it is not so nice, but I’m living, so I won’t complain.

Today was like every day.

Do you understand what this means? Get up, smile like an angel when some fiend elbows his way ahead of you to the shower, turn the faucet on full and the hot water has just run out, eat, dress, work, eat, work again, eat again… and I have now used that word “eat” three times and each time, I tell you, it was a he. Because what is eating when it’s a kind of spinach Jello?

Listen, I’ll tell you what the wisest men might forget.

A hundred years ago when I was a boy - don’t laugh, a hundred years will do it - it was more comfortable and more interesting to be alive.

Oh, positively it was not as efficient. For whoever keeps score, it is clear that the present way produces more units of “living” with a lower cost in raw-material-factor and work-energy-factor.

Of course.

It is definite that more “living” can be done if the quality is lowered, you see; and I could discuss this at length.

I won’t, because it is too personally painful. I once fought for wage-hour legislation and the guaranteed annual income, and to contemplate such innocence even at the distance of nearly a century is too sad for n,^ to discuss, even not at length.

So what was it that I had to look forward to, after my battle with the bath queue, the breakfast queue, the subway queue, the time-clock queue, the lunch queue, the coffee-break queue, the returning subway queue, the dinner queue, the latrine queue, the pillow-and-sheet queue? After all this, what orgiastic pleasures to cap my day? I’ll tell you what orgiastic pleasures. After all that, it was permitted that I spend two solid hours in my bunk, watching television.

A hundred years ago, why, I could have done almost anything. I could have gone for a walk in the park. (A “park” is a place in a city that has trees and grass. “Trees” are like grass, only bigger. To “walk” means to go somewhere - on foot, that is, not on the subway. Once it was done for pleasure, but that was when somewhere else was different than where you already were.)

Or I could have played cards. (“Cards” are a game played among friends, sometimes for gambling although the principal object is the friendly passage of time. A “game” is-like the panel shows on TV, do you see? And “friends” are persons whose interests are close enough to make them want to spend time with each other.)

Or I could have taken a drive to the beach. (A “beach” is-oh, this is all too tragic.)

No, you do not understand, you cannot understand. Let me tell you about one particular day and let that answer everything.

There was this sweet, sweet morning in June. It was Sunday, which meant that by the grace of God I didn’t have to work in the jewellery findings business and could do what I liked. Now this will interest you: On that particular morning I got up out of a bed that no one ever slept in but me. (We were very poor, a concept which I cannot explain without fantastic trouble since the concept of poverty has disappeared from the Earth. But I must mention this, to-to please myself is why. In that day, when I was very, very poor, I had a bed of my very own.)

And once up, I took all the time I wanted in the bathroom - subject only to the natural requirements of four brothers and a sister. Maybe there were cockroaches sometimes in the wet place under the linoleum, but there were no coin slots on any of the equipment.

I then ate breakfast.

Breakfast! It began with a glass of orange juice. Two pieces of shredded wheat (this would be familiar to you, I regret to state; you would hardly think it strange at all if tomorrow it should turn up in the Adult Ration 1 at Midtown Serving Centre.) But on the shredded wheat was real milk. And real sugar. And usually (I was the oldest son, you see) a large spoonful of strawberry jam, made out of real strawberries.

All this I ate. Sometimes I did not finish it. And then, I swear, what was not eaten was thrown away. Fabulous! It was never reprocessed and served again, never!

However, I did not appreciate this treasurehouse of marvels which was mine to live in, at (I still remember!) 2783 East 22nd Street, Brooklyn. On the morning of which I tell you I got out of there. I went to see my friend Saul.

To see my friend Saul, that is a journey which cannot be duplicated any more. It was necessary to take a bus, and transfer to another bus, and then a ferry, and then another bus; it took two hours, but what else is a Sunday morning for? And I did not begrudge it to him, not on weekends in the summer. But when I got there, he was down in the cellar, of course. I dragged him by the shoulders and showed him that there was a sun.

“Interesting,” he said, scratching his jaw, “and a very difficult astrogational problem. Why, the gravity field in the vicinity of the sun is nothing less than astronomical!”

“I was showing it to you,” I told him, “not so much as a problem in space travel as as an object of art.”

He looked at me as though I had turned purple.

I accepted what I could not fight. “Tell me then, Saul, what are you working on?” I asked, hiding behind me my bathing suit in its paper bag.

He told me, that fine boy. He told me with words until I must indeed have turned purple, and then he dragged me to a blackboard and showed me some more. What did I know? He knew what he was talking about, I was sure.

“Space travel?” I asked.

He nodded happily. You would have thought I was a big genius like a Baruch.

“But what about rocket ships?” I asked him.

Saul looked at me as though Baruch had just turned into an ape.

“No, not in rocket ships, Charlie McCarthy,” he told me with savage affection, “but by the power of the mind.” And he tapped his skull with a bent finger.

Saul lived in Bockaway, where his mother owned a colony of beach bungalows. You would have understood these houses, with “rooms” that were only partitions, head high, with walls that were made of thin shingles and floors that were permanently washed with a little of sand from the beach. Outside each cottage was a shower - hot water, or hot enough, because the bare pipes soaked in heat from the sun. Just like the baths at the Midtown Adult Dormitories, do you see?

If you were first in line, you got hot water. But of course you were never first in line. Because each of those four-room bungalows held three families-the mommy, the kids and on weekends the daddy - clubbing up to save expenses.

But Saul had a cellar. He lived there all year round, in winter when the snow was unbroken from his door to the high-water line on the sand, and no other human moved in sight; and also in the summer. This was summer, you see. I had my bathing suit with me. It was not because I liked so well to swim - who needs to swim? But outside that cellar of Saul’s, in the streets, on the boardwalk, on the beach, were thousands and thousands of persons, one-half of whom were female. They were dressed for the sun.

And Saul puttered in his cellar!

“Come, Saul,” I said gently. “Go to Mars some other time. Invent a method of flying to the Moon when winter comes. Now put on a bathing suit and come with me.”

And I took him out to show him Girls.

Up in the morning, work, eat, work. I’m a 664.8I8-A, and all my days are reading and reading. From Shakespeare, Mallarmé, and the prose-poems of Kahlil Gibran, it is my task to extract the essential truth, the bare statement of fact, which alone deserves the space to be retained. (The other day I reduced Moby Dick to “Nineteenth-century knowledge of cetaceans was inexact.”) And the secret which I clutch to my bosom is that even that job is of no real importance; it is like raking leaves for the W.P.A., a metaphor which I have not the youth to untangle for you.

For once I met another 664.818-A in the laundry queue, an old crone, a step-dame or a dowager, long withering out the waiting for my shirts. We compared notes.

She had done Christopher Marlowe the month before, and I had been assigned him for my next; she did the Beau Geste books of Percival Christopher Wren, and I had done them early the previous year.

I gloated secretly over her, for she had got only that “cafard” was a Legionnaire’s term for desert insanity from Wren, missing entirely the important observation that socks breed foot blisters.

Then I gloated no longer. It had been barely possible to pretend the job was useful when I thought I alone did it, but two of us? And where there were two there were more. And I wondered just what the file clerks did with my neatly lettered green slips headed: Synoptic Analysis of Essential Information Content of… (Fill in Title and Author). They made binary digits of it all somehow, I suppose. But what then?

So I concealed the vixen in my shirtfront and chatted with her of other things. She had drawn an April, 2037 slot on the Mars colonization rocket. I certainly hope she lived to make it.

My own emigration date is October of 2071. Since this will require attaining an age of more than a hundred and fifty years, I am not wildly hopeful.

I can therefore look forward to a good many additional mornings of wake, dress, eat, work, eat… to spinach Jello. I suppose it is better in the colonies, or else we wouldn’t all be so anxious to get there. Certainly it is less crowded. That’s the trouble with atomic rockets, and of course I blame it all on my friend Saul.

I can tell you a story.

Once there was a very rich man who took a poor man into his house. The poor man, whose name was Ittel, ate at the rich man’s table, slept in a good warm bed, wore the rich man’s clothes. One night the rich man was about to eat when Ittel stopped him.

“Stop,” he cried, “don’t eat!”

“Don’t eat?” repeated the rich man, puzzled.

“Don’t eat,” cried Ittel, and he jumped up from his place at the table and rushed over to the rich man’s seat. “You call that salt?” he scolded, and put more salt on the rich man’s food.

“But I don’t like so much salt,” objected the rich man, “and besides it’s bad for my heart.”

“Heart!” scoffed Ittel. “Enjoy your food!” And he dumped the silver salt dish on the rich man’s meat. “You call that pepper?” he demanded, and dumped on the pepper, too. “You call that garlic?” And he chopped up a whole clove of garlic and put that on, too.

“But I’m not well, Ittel,” the rich man complained. “My doctor says———”

“Doctor, schmoctor,” ordered Ittel, “you paid for this salt, right? You paid for this pepper? Enjoy them.”

So the rich man ate, and what do you think? He had a heart attack that night and died.

And what did Ittel do? The whole household was wailing and moaning, and Ittel just stood there with a scowl on his face and a lip curled in scorn. The doctor came by and saw him. “Ittel,” he accused, “what’s with you? This man was your benefactor! Now that he is dead, can’t you at least look sorry?”

Ittel gave the doctor a look. “Sorry!” he said. “Sorry! I try to do something nice for him, and look how he pays me back!”

So I remember my friend Saul. There he was in his cellar, and maybe he was the only man in the world who knew that the way to the planets did not lie through rockets and metal ships but (I remember him tapping his skull) the power of the mind.

I took his mind off his science.

I showed him Girls.

He never did anything. He was a bum all his life, this boy that maybe could have shown us all the way from 18 billion people and Spinach Jello.

I tried to do something nice for him - and look how he paid us all back!

You call that gratitude?

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