In essence science fiction reduces the
entire continuum of human knowledge
to a sort of board game, and by
systematically changing the rules of the
game one or a few at a time investigates]
the possibility of alternate societies ...
Science fiction gives us a sort of
catalogue of possible worlds. From
the wish-book we can pick the ones
we want. . .
Some sf p eople are right-wingers and
some are left; some are deeply religious,
some not at all; some battle for
women's lib or black power or the
freedom of the drug scene and some are
firmly for the Establishment; and yet
all of them are able to join in the
game . . .
Perhaps the Method can spread.
Perhaps the world at large can learn
from sf. And perhaps then the ants won't
have to replace us after all.
FREDERIK POHL

Frederik Pohl
In The
Problem Pit
CORGI BOOKS
A DIVISION OFTRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS LTD

IN THE PROBLEM PIT
A CORGI BOOK 0 552 10334 9
First publication in Great Britain
PRINTING HISTORY
Corgi edition published 1976
Copyright © 1976 by Frederik Pohl
'In the Problem Pit,1 originally published in Tile Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction, copyright © 1973 by Mercury Press, Inc.
'Let the Ants Try,' originally published in Planet Stories, copyright © 1949 by
Love Romances Publishing Corporation.
'To See Another Mountainoriginally published in The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, copyright © 1959 by Mercury Publications, Inc.
'The Deadly Mission ofPhineas Snodgrass,' originally published in Galaxy (as
'The Time Machine of Phineas Snodgrass'), copyright © 1962 by Galaxy
Publishing Corporation.
'Golden Ages Gone Away,' originally published in Clarion II, copyright © 1972
by Robin Scott Wilson.
'Rajferty's Reasons,' originally published in Fantastic Universe, copyright © 1955
by King-Size Publications, Inc.
'I Remember a Winter,' originally published in Orbit 11, copyright © 1972 by
Damon Knight.
'The Schematic Man,' originally published in Playboy, copyright © 1968 by
HMH Publishing Company, Inc.
'What to Do Until the Analyst Comes,' originally published in Imagination!,
copyright © 1955 by Greenleaf Publishing Company.
'Some Joys Under the Star,' originally published in Galaxy, copyright © 1973 by
UPD Publishing Corporation.
'The Man Who Ate the World,' originally published in Galaxy, copyright © 1956
by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.
'SF: The Game-Playing Literature,' originally published in Clarion (as 'The
Game-Playing Literature'), copyright © 1971 by Robin Scott Wilson.
Corgi Books are published by Transworld Publishers Ltd.,
Century House, 61-63 Uxbridge Road,
Ealing, London, W.5.
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd., Aylesbury, Bucks.

For Betsy,
far out and fine

Contents
Introduction: Science-Fiction Games 1
✓In the Problem Pit 3
Let the Ants Try 59
** To See Another Mountain 71
VThe Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass 91
' Golden Ages Gone Away 95
Rafferty's Reasons 106
Remember a Winter 120
The Schematic Man 127
What to Do Until the Analyst Comes 134
Some Joys under the Star 147
The Man Who Ate the World 160
SF: The Game-Playing Literature 190

In The
Problem Pit

Introduction: Science-Fiction Games
Choosing which stories to put in an anthology is a lot like
being asked which two of my four children should go into
a "best of the family" collection. Like most writers, I try to
maintain a pose of public professionalism. Also like most
writers, in fact I bleed and die with everything I write. The
stories don't always turn out to be masterpieces. I will go
farther than that: I have written some stories that by any-
body's standards, including my own, are awful. (They com-
prise a thick wad of wastepaper in my file cabinet, or at
least the ones that didn't get published anyway do.) But in
no case is it the story's fault, it is only mine. And whatever
I privately know, it gives me some kind of pain to admit to
anyone that this child is in any way deficient, and almost
as much pain to claim that this other child is better than
the rest.
So I have used several sets of criteria in picking out the
contents of this volume: some are personal favorites, some
are new, and some are that special kind of sf I call "science-
fiction games."
And to make it possible for vou to know what I mean by
a science-fiction game, I am also including an essay on the
subject at the end of the book. It may not explain all of
these particular stories, but I hope it will go some way toward
explaining why I, and a lot of other people like me, have
considered science fiction not a bad thing to devote our lives
to.
Fredekk Pohl
Red Bank, New Jersey
November, 1974
1

In the Problem Fit
Sometimes people ask me where I get the idea for a
science-fiction story, and 1 never know how to answer
that. There is seldom a single idea involved, is one
reason. When I wrote "In the Problem Pit," I had just
comc back from visiting the big radio telescope at
Arecibo; not long before, I had spent a weekend with
an encounter group in New Jersey; before that, I had
taken part in a World Future Society discussion of
group problem-solving methods in Washington . . . and
all those things (plus a casual remark of my minister's
wife about why she preferred female gynecologists, and
a friendly conversation with a young Canadian metal-
worker) came together in my head . . . and "In the
Problem Pit" came out.
David
Before I left the apartment to meet my draft call I had
packed up the last of Lara. She had left herself all over our
home: perfumes, books, eye shadow, Tampax, ivory animals
she had forgotten to take and letters from him that she had
probably meant for me to read. I didn't read them. I packed
up the whole schmear and sent it off to her in Djakarta, with
longing and hatred.
Since I was traveling at government expense, I took the
hyperjet and then a STOL to the nearest city and a cab
from there. I paid for the whole thing with travel vouchers,
even the cab, which enormously annoyed the driver; I didn't
tip him. He bounced off down the road muttering in Spanish,
racing his motor and double-clutching on the switchbacks,
and there I was in front of the pit facility, and I didn't want
3

4
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
to go on in. I wasn't ready to talk to anybody about any
problems, especially mine.
There was an explosion of horns and gunned motors from
down the road. Somebody else was arriving, and the drivers
were fighting about which of them would pull over to let
the other pass. I made up my mind to slope off. So I looked
for a cubbyhole to hide my pack and sleeping bag in and
found it behind a rock, and I left the stuff there and was
gone before the next cab arrived. I didn't know where I was
going, exactly. I just wanted to walk up the trails around
the mountains in the warm afternoon rain.
It was late afternoon, which meant it was, I calculated,
oh, something like six in the morning in Djakarta. I could
visualize Lara sound asleep in the heat, sprawled with the
covers kicked off, making that little ladylike whistle that
served her in place of a snore. (I could not visualize the
other half of the bed.)
I was hurting. Lara and I had been married for six years,
counting two separations. And the way trouble always does,
it had screwed up my work. I'd had this commission from
the library in St. Paul, a big, complicated piece for over the
front foyer. Well, it hadn't gone well, being more Brancusi
and interior-decorator art than me, but still it had been a
lot of work and just about finished. And then when I had it
in the vacuum chamber and was floating the aluminum plat-
ing onto it, I'd let the pressure go up, and air got in, and
of course the whole thing burned. >
So partly I was thinking about whether Lara would come
back and partly whether there was any chance I could do a
whole new sculpture and plate it and deliver it before the
library purchasing commission got around to canceling my
contract, and partly I wasn't thinking at all, just huffing and
puffing up those trails in the muggy mist. I could see morning
glories growing. I picked up a couple and put them in my
pocket. The long muscles in my thighs were beginning to
burn, and I was fighting my breathing. So I slowed down,
spending my concentration on pacing my steps and my
breathing so that I could keep my head away from where
the real pain was. And then I found myself almost tripping
over a rusted, bent old sign that said Pericoloso in one
language and Danger in another.
The sign spoke truth.

5	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

In front of me was a cliff and a catwalk stretching out
over what looked like a quarter of a mile of space.
I had blundered on to the old telescope. I could see the
bowl way down below, all grown over with bushes and trees.
And hanging in the air in front of me, suspended from three
cables, was a thing like a rusty trolley car, with spikes stick-
ing out of the lower part of it.
No one was around; I guess they don't use the telescope
any more. I couldn't go any farther unless I wanted to go
out on the catwalk, which I didn't, and so I sat down and
breathed hard. As I began to get caught up on my oxygen
debt, I began to think again; and since I didn't want to do
that, I pulled the crushed morning glories out of my pocket
and chewed on a few seeds.
Well, I had forgotten where I was. In Minneapolis you
grow them in a window box. You have to pound them and
crush them and soak them and squeeze them, hundreds of
seeds at a time, before you get anything. But these had grown
in a tropical climate.
I wasn't stoned or tripping, really. But I was—oh, I guess
the word is "anesthetized." Nothing hurt any more. It wasn't
just an absence of hurting, it was a positive not hurting, like
when you've broken a tooth and you've finally got to the
dentist's office and he's squirted in the novocaine and you
can feel that not-hinting spread like a golden glow across
your jaw, blotting up the ache as it goes.
I don't know how long I sat there, but by the time I
remembered I was supposed to report in at the pit the
shadows were getting long.
So I missed dinner, I missed signing in properly, I got
there just in time for the VISTA guard to snap at me, "Why
the hell can't you be on time, Charlie?" and I was the last
one down the elevators and into the pit. Everybody else was
gathered there already in a big room that looked like it had
been chopped out of rock, which I guess it had, with foam
cushions scattered around the floor and, I guess, 12 or 14
people scattered around on the cushions, all with their bodies
pointed toward an old lady in black slacks and a black
turtleneck, but their faces pointed toward me.
I flung down my sleeping bag and sat on it and said,
"Sony."
She said, rather nicely, "Actually, we were just beginning."

6
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
And everybody looked at me begrudgingly, as though they
had no choice but to wait while I blew my nose or built
myself a nest out of straws or whatever I was going to do
to delay them all still further, but I just sat there, trying
not to look stoned, and after a while she began to talk.
Tina's Talk
Hello. My name is Tina Wattridge, and I'm one of your
resource people.
I'm not the leader of this group. There isn't any leader. If
the group ever decides it has to have a leader, well, it can
pick one. Or if you want to be a leader, you can pick your-
self. See if anybody follows. But I'm not it, I'm only here
to be available for answering questions or giving information.
First, I will tell you what you already know. The reason
you are all here is to solve problems.
(She paused for a moment, scratching her nose and smil-
ing, and then went on.)
Thank you. A lot of groups start complaining and making
jokes right there, and you didn't. That's nice, because I
didn't organize this group, and although I must say I think
the groups work out well, it isn't my fault that you're here.
And I appreciate your not blaming it on me.
Still, you are here, and we are expected to state some
problems and solve them, and we will stay right here until
we do that, or enough of it so that whoever's watching us
is satisfied enough to let us go. That might be a couple of
weeks. I had a group once that got out in 72 hours, but
don't expect that. Anyway, you won't know how long it Ls.
The reason we are in these caves is to minimize contact with
the external world, including all sorts of times cues. And if
any of you have managed to smuggle watches past the
VISTA people, please give them to me now. They're not
allowed here.
I saw some of you look interested when I talked about
who is watching us, and so I ought to say right now I
don't know how they watch or when, and I don't care. They
do watch. But they don't interfere. The first word we will
get from them is when the VISTA duty people unlock the
elevator and come down and tell us we can go home.
Food. You can eat whenever you want to, on demand.

7	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

If you want to establish meal hours, any group of you can
do so. If you want to eat singly, whenever you want to,
fine. Either way you simply sign in in the dining room—
"sign in" means you type your names on the monitor; they'll
know who you are; just the last name will do—and order
what you want to eat. Your choices are four: "Breakfast,"
"snack," "light meal" and "full meal." It doesn't matter what
order you eat them in or when you want them. When you
put in your order, they make them and put them in the
dumbwaiter. Dirty dishes go back in the dumbwaiter except
for the disposable ones, which go in the trash chute. You
can ask for certain special dishes—the way you want vour
eggs, for instance—but in general you take what they give
you. It's all explained on the menu.
Sleep. You sleep when you want to, where you want to.
In these three rooms—this one, the problem pit and the
eating room, as well as the pool and showers—the lights
are permanently on. In the two small rooms out past the
bathrooms and laundry the lights can be controlled, and
whoever is in the room can turn them on or off anv way you
like. If you can't agree, you'll just have to work it out.
(She could see them building walls between themselves
and her, and quickly she tried to reduce them.)
Listen, it's not as bad as it sounds. I always hate this part
because it sounds like I'm giving you orders, but I'm not;
those are just the ground rules and they bind me too. And,
honestly, you won't all hate it, or not all of it. I've done this
15 times now, and I look forward to coming back!
All right, let's see. Showers, toilets and all are over there.
Washer-dryers are next to them. I assume you all did what
you were told and brought wash-and-wear clothes, as well as
sleeping bags and so on; if you didn't, vou'll have to figure out
what to do about it yourselves. When vou want to wash your
clothes, put your stuff in one of the net bags and put it in the
machine. If there's something alreadv in the machine, just take
it out and leave it on the table. The owner will pick it up
when he wants it, no doubt. You can do three or four people's
wash in a single cycle without anv trouble. They're big ma-
chines. And there's plenty of water—you people who come
from the Southwest and the Plains States don't have to worry.
Incidentally, the sequenced water-supply system that you use
there to conserve potable water was figured out right in this
2

8
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
cave. The research and development people had to work it
over hard, to get the fluidic controls responsive enough, but
the basic idea came from here; so, you see, there's a point to
all this.
(She lit a cigarette and looked cheerfully around at the
group, pleased that they were not resisting, less pleased that
they were passive. She was a tall and elderly red-headed
woman, who usually managed to look cheerful without smil-
ing-)
That brings me to computation facilities, for those of you
who want to work on something that needs mathematical
analvsis or data access. I will do a certain amount of key-
boarding for you, and I'll be there to help—diat's basically
my job, I guess. There are two terminals in the pit room. They
are on-line, real-time, shared-time programs, and those of you
who are familiar with ALGOL, COBOL, and so on can use
them direct. If you can't write a program in computer lan-
guage, you can either bring it to me—up to a point—or you
can just type out what you want in clear. First, you type the
words HELP ME; then you say what you want; then you
type THAT'S ALL. The message will be relayed to a pro-
grammer, and he will help you if I can't, or if you don't want
me to. You can blind-type your queries if you don't want me
looking over your shoulder. And sign your last name to every-
thing. And, as always, if more of you want to use the termi-
nals than we have terminals, you'll have to work it out among
you. I don't care how.
Incidentally, the problem pit is there because some groups
like to sit face to face in formal surroundings. Sometimes it
helps. Use it or not, as you like. You can solve problems any-
where in these chambers. Or outside, if you want to go out-
side. You can't leave through the elevator, of course, because
that's locked now. Where you can go is into the rest of the
cave system. But if you do that, it's entirely your own re-
sponsibility. These caves run for at least 80 miles and maybe
more, right down under the sea. We're at least ten miles by
the shortest route from the public ones where the tourists
come. I doubt you could find your way there. They aren't
lighted, and you can very easily get lost. And there are no,
repeat no, communications facilities or food available there.
Three people have got lost and died in the past year, al-
though most people do manage to find their way back—or

9	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

are found. But don't count on being found. No one will even
start looking for you until we're all released, and then it can
take a long time.
My personal advice—no, I'm sorry. I was going to say that
my personal advice is to stay here with the rest of us, but it
is, as I say, your decision to make, and if you want to go out
ypu'll find two doors that are unlocked.
Now, there are two other resource people here. The rest of
you are either draftees or volunteers. You all know which you
are, and for any purposes I can think of it doesn't matter.
I'll introduce the two other pros. Jerry Fein is a doctor.
Stand up, will vou, Jerry? If any of you get into anything you
can't handle, he'll help if he can.
And Marge Klapper over there is a physiotherapist. She's
here to help, not to order you around, but—advice and per-
sonal opinion again, not a rule—I think you'll benefit from
letting her help you. The rest of you can introduce yourselves
when we get into our first session. Right now I'll turn you
over to—what? Oh, thanks, Marge. Sorry.
The pool. It's available for any of you, any time, as many
of you as want to use it. It's kept at 78 degrees, which is two
degrees warmer than air temperature. It's a good place to have
fun and get the knots out, but, again, you can use it for any
purpose you like. Some groups have had active, formal prob-
lem-solving sessions in it, and that's all right too.
Now I think that's it, so I'll turn you over to Marge.
Marge Interacting
Marge Klapper was 24 years old, pretty, married but sep-
arated, slightly pregnant but not by her husband, and a vet-
eran of eight problem-group marathons.
She would have challenged every part of the description of
her, except the first and the last, on the grounds that each
item defined her in terms of her relationship to men. She did
not even like to be called "pretty." She wasn't in any doubt
that she was sexually attractive, of course. She simply didn't
accept the presumption that it was only her physical ap-
pearance that made her so. The men she found sexually at-
tractive came in all shapes and sizes, one because he was so
butchy, one because of his sense of humor, one because he
wrote poems that turned into bars of music at the end. She

10
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
didn't much like being called a physiotherapist, either; it was
her job classification, true, but she was going for her master's
in Gestalt psychology and was of half a mind to become an
M.D. Or else to have the baby that was just beginning to
grow inside her; she had not yet reached a decision about
that.
"Let's get the blood flowing," she said to all of them, stand-
ing up and throwing off her shorty terry-cloth robe. Under it
she wore a swimsuit with a narrow bikini bottom and a halter
top. She would have preferred to be nude, but her breasts
were too full for unsupported calisthenics. She thought the
way drey flopped around was unaesthetic, and at times it
could be actively painful. Also, some of the group were likely
to be shy about nudity, she knew from experience. She liked
to let them come to it at their own pace.
Getting them moving was the hard part. She had got to the
pit early and chatted with some of them ahead of time, learn-
ing some of the names, picking out the ones who would work
right away, identifying the difficult ones. One of the difficult
ones was the little dark Italian man who was "in construc-
tion," he had said, whatever that meant; she had sat down
next to him on purpose, and now she pulled him up next to
her and said:
"All right. Let's start nice and slow and get some of the fug
out of our heads. This is easy: we'll just reach."
She lifted her arms over her head, up on tiptoe, fingers up-
stretched. "High as vou can go," she said. "Look up. Let's
close our eyes and feel for the roof."
But what Marge was feeling for was the tension and needs
of the group. She could almost taste, almost smell, their feel-
ings. What Ben Ittri, next to her, was feeling was embarrass-
ment and fear. The shaggy man who hnd come in late: a sort
of numb pain, so much pain that it iad drowned out his
receptors. The fat girl, Dolores: anger. Marge could identify
with that anger; it was man-directed anger.
She put the group through some simple bending energetics,
or at least did with those who woidd cooperate. She had al-
ready taken a census of her mind. Not counting the three
professionals, there were five in the group who were really
witli the kinetics. She supposed they were the volunteers, and
probably they had had experience of previous sessions. The
other eight, the ones she assumed were draftees, were a

11	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

spectrum of all the colors of disengagement. The fat girl
simply did not seem physically able to stand on tiptoes,
though her anger carried her through most of the bending
and turning; it was like a sack of cement bending, Marge
thought, but she could sense the bones moving under the
fat. The bent old black man who sat obstinately on the floor,
regarding the creases on his trousers, was a different kind of
problem; Marge had not been able to see how to deal with
him.
She began moving around the room, calling out instruc-
tions. "Now bend sidewise from the waist. You can do it with
your hands up like this, or you might be more comfortable
with your hands on your hips. But see how far you can go.
Left. Right. Left—"
They were actually responding rather well, considering. She
stopped in front of a slight black youth in a one-piece Che
Guevara overall. "It's fun if we do it together," she said, reach-
ing out for his hands. He flinched away, then apologetically
allowed her to take his hands and bend with him. "It's like
a dance," she said, smiling, but feeling the tension in his arms
and upper torso as he allowed himself unwillingly to turn with
her. Marge was not used to that sort of response from males,
except from homosexuals, or occasionally the very old ones
who had been brought up under the Protestant ethic. He
didn't seem to be either of those. "You know my name," she
said softly. "It's Marge."
"Rufous," he said, looking away from her. He was acutely
uncomfortable; reluctantly she let him go and moved on. She
felt an old annovance that these sessions would not allow her
j
to probe really deeply into the hangups she uncovered, but of
course that was not their basic purpose; she could only do that
if the people themselves elected to work on that problem.
The other black man, the one who was so obdurately sitting
on the floor, had not moved; Marge confronted him and said,
"Will you get up and do something with me?"
For a moment she thought he was going to refuse. But then,
with dignity, he stood up, took her hands and bent with her,
bending left, bending right. He was as light as a leaf but
strong, wire rather than straw. "Thank you," she said, and
dropped his hands, pleased. "Now," she said to the group,
"we're going to be together for quite a while, so let's get to
know each other, please. Let's make a circle and put our

12
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
arms around each other. Right up close! Close as you can getl
All of us. Please?"
It was working out nicely, and Marge was very satisfied.
Even the old black man was now in the circle, his arms
looped around the shoulders of the fat girl on one side and a
middle-aged man who looked like an Irish tenor on the other.
The group was so responsive, at least compared to most
groups in the first hour of their existence as groups, that for
a moment Marge considered going right into the pool, or non-
verbal communication—but no, she thought, that's imposing
my will on them; I won't push it.
"All right, that's wonderful," she said. "Thank you all."
Tina said, "From here on, it's all up to you. All of you.
There's tea and coffee and munch over there if anyone wants
anything. Marge, thank you; that was fun."
"Anytime," called Marge, stretching her legs against the
wall. "I mean that. If any of vou ever want to work out with
me, just say. Or if you see me doing anything and want to
join in, please do."
"Now," said Tina, "if anvbodv wants to start introducing
himself or talking about a problem, I, for one, would like to
listen."
Introductions
The hardest thing to leam to do was wait.
Tina Wattridge worked at doing it. She pushed a throw
pillow over to the floor next to the corner of a couch and sat
on it, cross-legged, her back against the couch. Tina's opinion
of Marge Klapper was colored by the fact that she had a
granddaughter onlv seven or eight years younger than Marge,
which, Tina was aware, led her to think of the therapist as
immature; nevertheless, there was something in the notion
that the state of the body controlled the state of the mind,
and Tina let her consciousness seep into her toes, the tendons
on the soles of her feet, her ankles, her knees, all the way up
her body, feeling what they felt and letting diem relax. It was
good in itself, and it kept her from saying anything. If she
waited long enough, someone would speak . . .
"Well, does anybody mind if I go first?"
Tina recognized the voice, was surprised and looked up. It
was Jerry Fein. It was not against the rules for one of the
pros to start, because there were no rules, exacdy. But it was

13	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

unusual. Tina looked at him doubtfully. She had never worked
with him before. He was the plumpish kind of young man
who looks older than he is; he looked about forty, and for
some reason Tina was aware that she didn't like him.
"The thing is," said Dr. Fein, haunehing himself backward
on the floor so that he could see everyone in the group at
onije, "I do have a problem. It's a two-part problem. The first
part isn't really a problem, except in personal terms, for me. I
got a dose from a dear friend two months ago." He shrugged
comically. "Like shoemaker's children that never have shoes,
you know? I think we doctors get the idea somewhere in med
school that when we get into practice we'll be exempt from
diseases, they're only things that happen to patients. Well,
anyway, it turned out to be syphilis, and so I had to get the
shots and all. It's not too bad a thing, you know, but it isn't a
lot of fun because there are these resistant strains of spiro-
chetes around, and I had one of the toughest of them, Mary-
Bet 13 it's called—so it didn't clear up overnight. But it is
cleared up," he added reassuringly. "I mention this in case
any of you should be worrying. I mean about maybe using
the same drinking glass or something.
"But the part of the problem I want to throw in front of
you is, why should anybody get syphilis in the first place? I
mean, if there are any diseases in the world we could wipe
out in thirty days from a standing start, syphilis and gonor-
rhea are the ones. But we don't. And I've been thinking about
it. The trouble is people won't report themselves. They won't
report their contacts even more positively. And they never,
never think of getting an examination until they're already
pretty sure they've got a dose. So if any of you can help me
with this public health problem that's on my mind, I'd like to
hear."
It was like talking into a tape recorder in an empty room;
the group soaked up the words, but nothing changed in their
faces or attitudes. Tina closed her eyes, half hoping that
someone would respond to the doctor, half that someone else
would say something. But the silence grew. After a moment
the doctor got up and poured himself a cup of coffee, and
when he sat down again his face was as blank as the others.
The man next to Tina stirred and looked around. He was
young and extremely good-looking, with the fair hair and
sharp-featured face of a Hitler Youth. His name was Stan-

14
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
wyck. Tina had negative feelings toward him, too, for some
reason she could not identify; one of the tilings she didn't like
about Jerry Fein was his sloppiness—he was wearing two
shirts, one over the other, like a Sicilian peasant. One of the
things she didn't like about Stanwyck was his excessive neat-
ness; like the old black man, Bob Sanger, he was wearing a
pressed business suit.
But Stanwyck didn't speak.
The fat girl got up, fixed herself a cup of tea with sugar
and milk, took a handful of raisins out of a bowl and went
back to her place on the floor.
"I think I might as well talk," said somebody at last. (Tina
exhaled, which made her realize she had been holding her
breath.)
It was the elderly black man, Sanger. He was sitting, hug-
ging his knees to himself, and he stayed tiiat way all the time
he was talking. He did not look up but addressed his words
to his knees, but his voice was controlled and carrying. "I am
a volunteer for this group," he said, "and I think you should
know that I asked to join because I am desperate. I am
seventy-one years old. For more than forty years I have been
the owner and manager of a dental-supply manufacturing
company, Sanger Hygiene Products, of Fresno, California. I
do not have any response to make to what was said by the
gentleman before me, nor am I very sympathetic to him. I
am satisfied that God's Word is clear on the wages of sin.
Those who transgress against His commandments must expect
the consequences, and I have no desire to make their foulness
less painful for them. But mine is, in a sense, also a public
health problem; so perhaps it is not inappropriate for me to
propose it to you now."
"Name?" Tina murmured.
He did not look up at her, but he said, "Yes, Mrs. Watt-
ridge, of course. My name is Bob Sanger. My problem is that
halidated sugar and tooth-bud transplants have effectively de-
pleted the market for my products. As you all may be aware,
there simply is not a great demand for dental therapy any
more. What work is done is preventive and does not require
tiie bridges and caps and plates we make in any great volume.
So we are in difficulties such that, at the present projection,
my company will have crossed the illiquidity level in at most

15	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

twelve months, more likely as little as four; and my problem
is to avoid bankruptcy."
He rubbed his nose reflectively against one knife-creased
knee and added, "More than three hundred people will be out
of work if I close the plant. If you would not care to help
me for my sake, perhaps you will for theirs."
\)h, Bob, cut the crap," cried the fat girl, getting up for
more raisins. "You don't have to blackmail us!"
Ho did not look at her or respond in any way. She stood
bv the coffee table with a handful of raisins for a moment,
looking around, and then grinned and said:
"You know, I have the feeling I just volunteered to go
next."
She waited for someone to contradict her, or even to agree
with her. No one did, but after a moment she went on. "Well,
why not? My name is Dolores Belli. That's bell -eye, not bell-
ee. I've already heard all the jokes and they're not too funny;
I know I'm fat, so what else is new? I'm not sensitive about
it," she explained. "But I am kind of tired of the subject.
Okay. Now about problems. I'll help any way I can, and I do
want to think about what both of you have said, Jerry and
Bob. Nothing occurs to me right now, but I'll see if I can
make something occur, and then I'll be back. I don't have any
particular problem of my own to offer, I'm afraid. In fact, I
wouldn't be here if I hadn't been drafted. Or truthfully," she
said, smiling, "I do have a problem. I missed dinner. I'd like
to see what the food is like here. Is that all right?"
When no one volunteered an answer, she said sharply,
"Tina? Is it all right?"
"It's up to you, Dolores," said Tina gently.
"Sure it is. Well, let's get our feet wet. Anybody want to
join me?"
A couple of the others got up, and then a third, all looking
somewhat belligerent about it. They paused at the door, and
one of them, a man with long hair and a Zapata mustache,
said, "111 be back, but I really am starving. My name is David
Jaretski. I do have a problem on my mind. It's personal. I
don't seem to be able to keep my marriage together, although
maybe that's because I don't seem to be able to keep my life
together. I'll talk about it later." He thought of adding some-
thing else but decided against it; he was still feeling a little

16
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
stoned and not yet ready either to hear someone else's troubles
or trust the group with his own.
The man next to him was good-looking in the solid, self-
assured way of a middle-aged Irish tenor. He said, in a com-
fortable, carrying voice, "I'm Bill Murtagh. I ran for Congress
last year and got my tail whipped, and I guess that's what
111 be hoping to talk to you folks about later on."
He did not seem disposed to add to that, and so the other
woman who had stood up spoke. Her blond schoolgirl hair
did not match the coffee-and-cream color of her skin or the
splayed shape of her nose, but she was strikingly attractive
in a short jacket and flared pants. "My name's Barbara Dever-
eux," she said. "I'm a draftee. I haven't figured out a prob-
lem yet." She started to leave with the others, then turned
back. "I don't like this whole deal much," she said thought-
fully. "I'm not sure I'm coming back. I might prefer going
into the caves."
The Cast of Characters
In Terre Haute, Indiana, at the Headquarters of SAD, the
Social Affairs Department, in the building called the Hepta-
gon, Group 95-114 had been put together with the usual care.
The total number was 16, of whom three were professional
resource people, five were volunteers and the remainder se-
lectees. Nine were male, seven female. The youngest had just
turned 18; the oldest 71. Their homes were in eight of the 54
states; and they represented a permissible balance of religions,
national origins, educational backgrounds and declared polit-
ical affiliations.
These were the people who made up the 114th group of
the year:
Belli, Dolores. 19. White female, unmarried. Volunteer
(who regretted it and pretended she had been drafted; the
only one who knew this was untrue was Tina Wattridge, but
actually none of the others really cared). As a small child her
father had called her Dolly-Belly because she was so cutely
plump. She wanted very much to be loved. The men who ap-
pealed to her were all-American jocks, and none of them had
ever shown the slightest interest in her.
Del La Garza, Caspar. 51. White male. Widower, no

17	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

surviving children. Draftee. In Harlingen, Texas, where he
had lived most of his life, he was assistant manager of an
A&P supermarket, a volunteer fireman and a member of the
Methodist Church. He had few close friends, but everyone
liked him.
Deveretjx, Barbara. 31. Black female, unmarried. Draftee.
Altlibygh she had been trained as an architect and had for a
time been employed as a fashion artist, she was currendy
working for a life insurance agent in Elgin, Illinois, processing
premiums. With any luck she would have had seven years of
marriage and at least one child by now, but the man she
loved had been killed serving with the National Guard during
the pollution riots of the '80s.
Fein, Gerald, M.D. 38. White male. Professional resource
person, now in his third problem marathon. Jerry Fein was
either separated or partially married, depending on how you
looked at it; he and his wife had opted for an open marriage,
but for more than a year they had not actually lived in the
same house. Still, they had never discussed any formal change
in the relationship. His wife, Aline, was also a doctor—they
had met in medical school—and he often spoke complimen-
tarily of her success, which was much more rapid and impres-
sive than his own.
Galifiniakis, Rose. 44. White female, married, no chil-
dren. She had been into the Christ Reborn movement in her
twenties, New Maoism in her thirties and excursions into com-
mune living, Scientology and transcendental meditation since
then, through all of which she had maintained a decorous
home and conventional social life for her husband, who was
an accountant in the income tax department of the state of
New Mexico. She had volunteered for the problem marathon
in the hope that it would be something productive and excit-
ing to do.
Ittri, Benjamin. 32. White male. Draftee. Ittri was a car-
penter, but so was Jesus of Nazareth. He thought about that a
lot on the job.
Jaretski, David. 33. White male, listed as married but de
facto wifeless, since Lara had run off with a man who traveled
in information for the government. Draftee. David was a
sculptor, computer programmer and former acid head.
Jefferson, Rufous, III. 18. Black male, unmarried. Draftee.

18
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
Rufous was studying for the priesthood in the Catholic Church
in an old-rite seminary which retained the vows of celibacy
and poverty and conducted its masses in Latin.
Klapper, Marjorie, B.A., Mem. Am. Guild Ther. 24. White
female, separated. Professional resource person. Five weeks
earlier, sailing after dark with a man she did not know well
but really liked, Marge Klapper had decided not to bother
with anything and see if she happened to get pregnant. She
had, and was now faced with the problem of deciding what
to do about it, including what to say to her husband, who
thought they'had agreed to avoid any relationship with any-
body, including each other, until they worked things out.
Lim, Felice. 30. White female, married, one child. Tech-
nically a draftee, but she had waived exemption (on grounds
of dependent child at home—her husband had vacation time
coming and had offered to take care of the baby). Felice Lim
had quite a nice natural soprano voice and had wanted to be
an opera singer, but either she had a bad voice teacher or
the voice simply would not develop. It -was sweet and true,
but she could not fill a hall, and so she got married.
Menchek, Philip. 48. White male, married, no children.
Draftee. Menchek was an associate professor of English Liter-
ature in a girl's college in South Carolina and rather liked the
idea of the problem marathon. If he hadn't been drafted, he
might have volunteered, but this way there was less chance
of a disagreement with his wife.
Murtac.h, William. 45. White male, married (third time),
five children (aggregate of all marriages). Volunteer. Mur-
tagh, when a young college dropout who called himself Wee
Willie Wu, had been a section leader in the Marin County
Cultural Revolution. It was the best time of his life. His orig-
inal True Maoists had occupied a nine-bedroom mansion on
the top of a mountain in Belvedere, overlooking the Bay, with
a private swimming pool they used for struggling with polit-
ical opponents and a squash court for mass meetings. But they
were only able to stay on Golden Gate Avenue for a month.
Then they were defeated and disbanded as counterrevolu-
tionaries by the successful East Is Red Cooperative Mao
Philosophical Commune, who had helicopters and armored
cars. Expelled and homeless, Murtagh had dropped out of the
revolutionary movement and back into school, got his degree
at San Jose State and became an attorney.

19	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

Sanger, Robert, B.Sc., M.A. 71. Black male. Wife de-
ceased, one child (male, also deceased), two grandchildren.
Volunteer. Bob Sanger's father, a successful orthodontic den-
tist in Parsippany, New Jersey, celebrated his son's birth,
which happened to occur on the day Calvin Coolidge was
elected to his own full term as President, by buying a bottle
of bo(HJeg champagne. It was a cold day for November, and
Dr. Sanger slipped on the ice. He dropped the bottle. It
shattered. A week later the family learned that everyone
drinking champagne out of that batch had gone blind, since
it had been cooked up out of wood alcohol, ethylene glycol,
Seven-Up and grape squeezings. They nicknamed the baby
"Lucky Bob" to celebrate. Lucky Bob was, in fact, lucky. He
got his master's degree just when the civil rights boom in op-
portunities for black executives was at its peak. He had ac-
cumulated seed capital just when President Nixon's Black
Capitalism program was spewing out huge hunks of invest-
ment cash. He was used to being lucky, and the death of his
industry, coming at the end of his own long life, threw him
more than it might have otherwise.
Stanwyck, Devon. 26. White male, unmarried. Volunteer.
Stanwyck was the third generation to manage the family real
estate agency, a member of three country clubs and a leading
social figure in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When he met
Ben Ittri, he said, "I didn't know carpenters would be at this
marathon." His grandfather had brought his father up con-
vinced that he could never do anything well enough to earn
the old man's respect; and the father, skills sharpened by
thirty years of pain, did the same to his son.
Teitlebaum, Khanya. 32. White female, divorced, no chil-
dren. Draftee. Khanya Teitlebaum was a loving, big Male-
mute of a woman, six feet four inches tall and stronger than
any man she had ever known. She was an assistant personnel
manager for a General Motors auto-assembly plant in an
industrial park near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she kept
putting cards through the sorter, looking for a man who was
six feet or more and unmarried.
Wattridge, Albertina. 62. White female, married, one
child, one grandchild. Professional resource person. A curious
thing about Tina, who had achieved a career of more than
thirty years as a group therapist and psychiatric counselor for
undergraduates at several universities before joining the SAD

20
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
problem-marathon staff, was that she had been 28 years old
and married for almost four before she realized that every
human being had a navel. Somehow, the subject had never
come up in conversation, and she had always been shy of
physical exposure. At first she had thought her belly button
a unique and personal physical disfigurement. After marriage
she had regarded it as a wondrous and fearful coincidence
that her husband bore the same blemish. It was not until her
daughter was born that she discovered what it was for.
David Again
It was weird never knowing what time it was. It didn't take
long to lose all connection with night and day; I think it hap-
pened almost when I got off the elevator. Although that may
have been because of the morning glory seeds.
It was sort of like a six-day bash, you know, between
exams and when you get your grades, when no one bothers
to go to classes but no one can afford to leave for home yet.
I would be in the pool with the girls, maybe. We'd get out,
and get something to eat, and talk for a while, and then
Barbie would yawn, and look at the bare place on her wrist
the way she did, and say, "Well, how about if we get a
little sleep?" So we'd go into one of the sleeping rooms and
straighten out our bags and get in. And just about then some-
body else would sit up and stretch and yawn, and poke the
person next to him. And they'd get up. And a couple of others
would get up. And pretty soon you'd smell bacon and eggs
coming down the dumbwaiter, and then they'd all be jump-
ing and turning with Marge Klapper just as you were chop-
ping off.
Barbie and Dolly-Belly and I stayed tight with each other
for a long time. We hadn't picked each other out, it just
happened that way. I felt very self-conscious that first night
in the common room, still flying a little and expecting every-
body could see what I was doing. It wasn't that they were so
sexually alluring to me. There were other women in the group
who, actually, were more my type, a girl from New Mexico
who had that long-haired, folk-singer look, a lot like Lara.
Even Tina. I couldn't figure her age very well. She might
easily have been fifty or more. But she had a gorgeous teenage
kind of figure and marvelous skin. But I wasn't motivated to

21	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

go after them, and they didn't show any special interest in
me.
Barbie was really very good-looking, but I'd never made it
with a black girl. Some kind of leftover race prejudice, which
may come from being born in Minnesota among all those fair-
haired WASPs, I suppose. Whatever it was, I didn't think of
her tH&t way right at first, and then after that there were the
three of us together almost every minute. We kept our sleep-
ing bags in the same corner, but we each stayed in our own.
And Dolly-Bellv herself could have been quite prettv, in a
way, if all that fat didn't turn you off. She easily weighed two
hundred pounds. There was a funny thing about that. I had
inside my head an unpleasant feeling about both fat women
and black women, that they would smell different in a repul-
sive way. Well, it wasn't true. We could smell each other very
well almost all the time, not only because our sleeping bags
were so close together but holding each other, or doing non-
verbal things, or just sitting back to back, me in the middle
and one of the girls propped on each side of me, in group,
and all I ever smelled from either of them was Tigress from
Barbie and Aphrodisia from Dolly-Belly. And yet in my head
I still had that feeling.
There was no time, and there was no place outside the
group. Just the sixteen of us experiencing each other and our-
selves. Every once in a while somebody would say something
about the outside world. Willie Murtagh would wonder out
loud what the Rams had done. Or Dev Stanwyck would
come bv with Tina and sav, "What do vou think about build-
ing underground condominium homes in abandoned strip
mines, and then covering them over with landscaping?" We
didn't see television; we didn't know if it was raining or hot
or the world had come to an end. We hadn't heard if the
manned Grand Tour fly-by had anything to say about the
rings of Saturn, which it was about due to be approaching,
or whether Donnie Osmond had announced his candidacy for
the presidency. We, or at least the three of us, were living in
and with each other, and about anything else we just didn't
want to know.
Fortunately for the group, most of the others were more
responsible than we were. Tina and Dev would almost always
be in the problem pit, hashing over everybody's problems all
the time. So would Bob Sanger, sitting by himself in one of

22
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
the top rows, silent unless somebody spoke to him directly, or
to his problem, or rarely when he had a constructive and well-
thought-out comment to offer. So would Jerry Fein and that
big hairy bird, Khanya. Almost everybody would be working
hard a lot of the time, except for Willie Murtagh, who did
God knows what by himself but was almost never in sight
after the three of us decided we didn't like him much, that
first night, and the young black kid, Rufous, who spent a lot
of his time in what looked like meditation but I later found
out was prayer. And the three of us.
I don't mean we copped out entirely. Sometimes we would
look in on them. Almost any hour there would be four or five
of them in the big pit, with the chairs arranged in concentric
circles facing in so that no matter where you sat you were
practically looking right in the face of everyone else. We even
took part. Now and then we did. Sometimes we'd even offer
problems. Barbie got the idea of making them up, like, "I'm
worried," she said once, "that the Moon will fall on us. Could
we build some kind of a big net and hang it between moun-
tains, like?" That didn't go over a bit. Then Dolly tried a sort
of complicated joke about how the CIA should react if Am-
azonia intervened in the Ecuadorian elections, with the USIS
parachuting disc jockeys into the Brazilian bulge to drive them
crazy with concentrated-rock music. I didn't like that a bit;
the USIS part made me think of Lara's bov friend, which
made me remember to hurt. I didn't want to hurt.
I guess that's why we all three of us stayed with made-up
problems, and other people's problems: because we didn't
want to hurt. But I didn't think of that at the time.
"Of course," Dolly-Belly said one time, when she and I
were rocking Barbie in the pool, "we're not going to get out of
here until Joe Good up there in the Heptagon marks our pa-
pers and says we pass."
I concentrated on sliding Barbie headward, slowing her
down, sliding her back. The long blond hair streamed out be-
hind her when she was going one way, wrapped itself around
her face when she was going the other. She looked beautiful
in the soft pool light, although it was clear, if it had needed
to be clear, that she was a natural blond. "So?" I said.
Barbie caught the change in rhythm or something, opened
her eyes, lifted one ear out of the water to hear what we were
saying.

23	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

"So what's the smart thing for us to do, my David? Get
down to work and get out faster? Or go on tie way we're
going?"
Barbie wriggled off our hands and stood up. "Why are we
worrying? They'll let the whole group go at the same time
anyway," she said.
Dolly-B^lly said sadly, "You know, I think that's what's
worrying me. I kind of like it here. Hey! Now you two swing
mel"
Preliminary Reports
The one part of the job that Tina didn't like was filing
interim reports with the control monitors up at the old radio-
telescope computation center. It seemed to her sneaky. The
whole thing about the group was that it built up trust within
itself, and the trust made it possible for the people to speak
without penalty. And every time Tina found the computer
terminals unoccupied and dashed in to file a report she was
violating that trust.
However, rules were rules. Still dripping from the pool,
where nearly all the group were passing each other hand to
hand down a chain, she sat before the console, pulled the
hood over her fingers, set the machine for blind-typing and
began to type. Nothing appeared on the paper before her, but
the impulses went out to the above-ground monitors. Of
course, with no one else nearby that much secrecy was not
really essential, but Tina had trained herself to be a method-
ical person. She checked her watch, pinned inside her bra—
another deceit—and logged in:
Day 4, hour 0352. Wattrhxje reporting. Interaction
good, Consenuality satisfactory. No incapacitating illnesses
or defections.
Seven individuals have stated problem areas of general in-
terest, as follows:
De La Garza. Early detection of home fires. Based on ex-
perience as a volunteer fireman (eight years), he believes
damage could be reduced "anyway half" if the average time
of reporting could be made ten minutes earlier. Group pro-
posed training in fire detection and diagnosis for household-
ers.
3

24
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
(That had been only a few hours before, when most of the
group were lying around after a session with Marge's ener-
getics. The little man had really come to life then. "See, most
people, they think a fire is what happens to somebody else;
so when they smell smoke, or the lights go out because wires
have melted and a fuse blows, or whatever, they spend 20
minutes looking for cigarettes binning in the ashtrays, or put-
ting new fuses in. And then half the time they run down to
the kitchen and get a pan of water and try to put it out them-
selves. So by the time we get there it's got a good start, and
there's three, four thousand dollars just in water damage get-
ting it out, even if we can save the house.")
Fein. National or world campaign to wipe out VD. States
that failure to report disease and contacts is only barrier to
complete control of syphilis and gonorrhea. Group proposal
for free examinations every month, medallion in the form of
bracelet or necklace charm to be issued to all persons disease-
free or accepting treatment.
(That one had started as a joke. That big girl, Khanya,
said, "What you really need is a sort of kosher stamp that
everybody has to wear." And then the group had got inter-
ested, and the idea of issuing medallions had come out of it.)
Lim. Part-time professional assistance for amateur theater
and music groups. States that there are many talented musi-
cians who cannot compete for major engagements but would
be useful as backup for school, community or other music
productions. Could be financed by government salaries repaid
from share of admissions.
Murtagh. Failure of electorate to respond to real issues in
voting. Statement of problem as yet unclear; no Group pro-
posals have emerged.
Sanger. Loss of market for dental supplies. Group cur-
rendy considering solutions.
Stanwyck. Better utilization of prime real estate by com-
bining function. Group has proposed siting new homes under-
ground, and/or building development homes with flat joined
roofs with landscaping on top. Interaction continuing.

25	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

(Tina wanted to go on with Dev Stanwyck's problem, be-
cause she was becoming aware that she cared a great deal
about solving problems for him, but her discipline was too
good to let her impose her personal feelings in the report.
And anyway, Tina did not believe that the problem Dev
stated was anywhere near the real problems he felt)
\
Teitlebaum. Stated problem as unsatisfactory existing
solitaire games. (Note: There is a personality problem here
presumably due to unsatisfactory relationships with other
sex.) Group proposed telephone links to computer chess-,
checker, or card-playing programs, perhaps to be furnished as
a commercial service of phone company.
Personality Problems exhibited by nine group members,
mostly marital, career or parental conflicts. Some resolution
apparent.
Transmission Ends.
No one had disturbed Tina, and she pushed the hood away
from the keyboard and clicked off the machine without rising.
She sat there for a moment, staring at the wall. The group
was making real progress in solving problems, but it seemed
to her strange that it also appeared to have generated one in
herself. All therapists had blind spots about their own be-
havior. But even a blind person could see that Tina Wattridge
was working herself in pretty deep with a boy not much too
old to be her grandchild, Devon Stanwyck.
David Cathecting the Leader
One time when we were just getting ready to go to sleep,
we went into the room we liked—not that there was much
difference between them, but this one they had left the walls
pretty natural, and there were nice, transparent, waterfally
rock formations that looked good with the lights low—and
Tina and Dev Stanwyck were sitting by themselves in a cor-
ner. It seemed as though Dev was crying. We didn't pay
much attention, because a lot of people cried, now and then,
and after a while they went out without saying anything, and
we got to sleep. And then, later on, Barbie and I were eating
some of the frozen steaks and sort of kidding Dolly-Belly

26
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
about her fruit and salads, and we heard a noise in the
shower, and I went in, and there were Tina and Dev again.
Only this time it looked as though Tina was crying. When I
came back I told die girls about it. It struck me as odd; Tina
letting Devon cry was one thing, Devon holding Tina while
she was crying was another.
"I think they're in love," said Dolly-Belly.
"She's twice as old as he is," I said.
"More dian that, for God's sake. She's pushing sixty."
"And what has that got to do with it, you two Nosy Park-
ers? How does it hurt you?"
'Teace, Barbie," I said. "I only think it's trouble. You'd
have to be blind not to see she's working herself in pretty
deep."
"You've got something against being in love?" Barbie de-
manded, her brown eyes looking very black.
I got up and direw the rest of my 'light meal, steak" away.
I wasn't hungry any more. I said, "I just don't want them to
get hurt."
After a while Dolly said, "David. Why do you assume being
in love is the same as being hurt?"
"Oh, cut it out, Dolly-Belly! She's too old for him, that's
all."
Barbie said, "Who wants to go in the pool?"
We had just come out of the pool.
Dolly said, "David, dear. What kind of a person was your
wife?"
I sat down and said, "Has one of you got a cigarette?"
Barbie did, and gave it to me. "Well," I said, "she looked
kind of like Felice. A little younger. Blue eyes. We were mar-
ried six years, and then she just didn't want to live with me
any more."
I wasn't really listening to what I was saying, I was listen-
ing to myself, inside. Trying to diagnose what I was feeling.
But I was having trouble. See, for a couple of weeks I'd al-
ways known what I felt about Lara, because I hurt. It was
almost like an ache, as though somebody were squeezing me
around the chest. It was a kind of wriggly feeling in my
testicles, as though they were gathering themselves up out of
harm's way, getting ready for a fight. It was as if I was five
years old and somebody had stolen my tricycle. All of those
things. And the tiling was that I could feel them all, every

27	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

one, but I suddenly realized I hadn't been feeling them. I had
forgotten to hurt at all, a lot of the time.
I had not expected that would happen.
Along about that time, I do not know if there was a casual
relationship, I became aware of the fact that I was feeling
pretty chipper pretty much of the time, and I began to like
it. Only sonetimes when I was trying to get to sleep, or when
I happened to think about going back to Minnesota and re-
membered there was nobody there to go back to, I hurt. But
I could handle it because I knew it would go away again.
The cure for Lara was Barbie and Dolly-Belly, even though I
had not even kissed either of them, except in a friendly good-
night way.
Time wore on, we could only tell how much by guessing
from things like the fact that we all ran out of cigarettes.
Dolly's were the last to go. She shared with us, and then
she complained that Barbie was smoking them twice as fast
as she was, and I was hitting them harder than that; she'd
smoke two or three cigarettes, and I'd have finished the pack.
It was our mixed-up time sense, maybe? Then Rufous came
and shared a meal with us once and heard us talking about
it, and later he took me aside and offered to trade me a car-
ton for a couple of bananas. I grabbed the offer, ordered
bananas, picked them off the dumbwaiter, handed them to
Rufous, took the cigarettes and was smoking one before it oc-
curred to me that he could have ordered bananas for himself
if he'd wanted them. Barbie said he knew that, he just wanted
to give me something, but he didn't want me to feel obligated.
We were all running out of everything we'd brought in with
us. There wasn't any dope. Dolly-Belly had brought in some
grass, and I guess some of the others had too, but it was gone.
Dolly smoked hers up all by herself the first night, or any-
way the first time between when we decided we were sleepy
and when we got to sleep finally, before we were really close
enough to share.
We were all running out, except Willie the Weeper. He had
cigarettes. I saw them. But he didn't smoke them. He also
had a pocket flask that he kept nipping out of. And he kept
ordering fruit off the dumbwaiter, which surprised me when I
thought about it because I didn't see him eating any. "He's
making cave drippings somewhere," Dolly told me.
"What's cave drippings?"

28
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
"It's like when you make homemade wine. Only you drink
it as soon as it ferments. Any kind of fruit will do, they say."
"How do you know so much about it if you've never been
here before?"
"Oh, screw you, David, are you calling me a liar?"
"No. Honesdy not, Dolly-Belly. Get back to cave drip-
pings."
"Well. It's kind of the stuff you made when you're in the
Peace Corps in the jungle and you've run out of beer and
hash. I bet you a thousand dollars Willie's got some stewing
away somewhere. Only I don't smell it." And she splashed
out of the pool and went sniffing around the connecting caves,
still bare. There was a lot of Dolly-Belly to be bare, and quite
a few of the people didn't care much for group nudity even
then. But she didn't care.
Out of all the people in our group, 16 of us altogether,
Willie was about the only one I didn't really care for. I mean,
I didn't like him. He was one of those guys my father used to
bring home for dinner when I was little. So very tolerant of
kids, so verv sure we'd change. So very different in what they
did from the face thev showed the world. Willie was always
bragging about his revolutionary youth and his commitment
to Goodness and Truth, one of those fake nine-percenters that,
if you could see his income tax form, wasn't pledging a penny
behind what he had to give. Even when he came in with us
that first night and as much as asked us for help, you couldn't
believe him. He wasn't asking what he did wrong, he was ask-
ing why the voters in his district were such perverse fools that
they voted for his opponent.
Some of the others were strange, in their ways. But we got
along. Little Rufous stayed to himself, praying mosdy. That
big broad Khanya would drive vou crazy with how she had
poltergeists in her house if you'd let her. Dev Stanwyck was
a grade-A snob, but he was tight with Tina most of the time,
and he couldn't have been all lousy, because she was all right.
I guess the hardest to get along with was the old black mil-
lionaire, or ex-millionaire, or maybe-about-to-be-ex-millionaire,
Bob Sanger. He didn't seem to like any part of us or the
marathon. But he was always polite, and I never saw anybody
ask him for anything that he didn't try to give. And so every-
body tried to help him.

29	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

Some Solutions for Sanger
After several days, only Tina knew exactly how many, the
group found itself united in a desire to deal with die problems
of Bob Sanger, and so a marathon brainstorming took place in
the problem pit. Every chair was occupied at one time or
another. Some 61 proposals were written down by Rose
Galifiniakis, who appointed herself recorder because she had a
pencil.
The principal solutions proposed were the following:
1.		Reconvert to the manufacture of medical and surgical
equipment, specifically noble-metal joints for prostheses,
spare parts for cyborgs, surgical instruments "of very high
quality" and "self-warming jiggers that they stick in you when
you have your Papp test, that are always so goddamn cold
you scream and jump right out of the stirrups."
2.		Take all the money out of the company treasury and
spend it on advertising to get kids crazy about cotton candy.
3.		Hire a promoter and start a national fad for the hobby
of collecting false teeth, bridges, etc., "which you can then sell
by mail and save all the dealers' commissions."
4.		Reconvert to making microminiaturized parts for guided
missiles "in case somebody invents a penetration device to get
through everybody's antimissile screens."
5.		Hire a lobbyist and get the government to stockpile
dental supplies in case there is another Cultural Revolution
with riots and consequendy lots of broken teeth.
6.		Start a saturation advertising campaign pitched to the
sado-maso trade about "getting sexual jollies out of home den-
tistry."
7.		Start a fashion for wearing different-colored teeth to
match dresses for formal wear. "You could make caps, sort of,
out of that plastic kind of stuff you used to make the pink
parts of sets of false choppers out of."
8.		Move the factory to the Greater Los Angeles area in
order to qualify for government loans, subsidies, and tax ex-
emptions under the Aid to Impoverished Areas bill.
9.		Get into veterinarian dentistry, particularly for free
clinics for the millions of cats roaming the streets of de-

30
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
populated cities "that some old lady might leave you a million
dollars to take care of."
10. Revive the code duello, with fistfights instead of
swords.
There were 51 others that were unanimously adjudged too
dumb to be worth even writing down, and Rose obediently
crossed them out. Bob Sanger did not say that. He listened
patiently and aloofly to all of them, even the most stupid of
them. The only effect he showed as the marathon wore on was
that he went on looking thinner and blacker and smaller all
the time.
Of the ten which survived the initial rounds, Numbers 2,
3, 6, 7, and 10 were ruled out for lack of time to develop
their impact. Bob thanked the group for them, but pointed
out that advertising campaigns took time, maybe years, and
he had only weeks. "Especially when they involve basic
changes in folkways," agreed Willie Murtagh. "Anyway, seri-
ously. Those are pretty crazy to begin with. You need some-
thing real and tangible and immediate, like the idea I threw
into the hopper about the Aid to Impoverished Areas fund-
ing"
"I do appreciate your helpfulness," said Bob. "It is a matter
of capital and, again, time. I have not the funds to relocate the
entire plant."
"Surely a government loan—"
"Oh, drop it, Willie," said Marge Klapper. "Time, remem-
ber? How fast are you going to get SAD to move? No, Bob, I
understand what you're saying. What about the idea of the
cats? I was in Newark once and there were like thousands of
them."
"I regret to inform you that many of my competitors have
anticipated you in this, at least insofar as the emphasis of
veterinary dentistry in concerned," said Bob politely. "As to
the notion of getting some wealthy person to establish a
foundation, I know of no such person. Also the matter of
stockpiling supplies has been anticipated. It is this that has
kept us going since '92."
Rufous Jefferson looked up from his worry beads long
enough to say, "I don't like that idea of making missiles, Mr.
Sanger."
"It wouldn't work," said Willie the Weeper positively. "I

31	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

know. You couldn't switch over and get the government back
in the missile business in time anyway."
"Besides," said Dolly-Belly, "everybody's got plenty of mis-
siles put away already. No, forget it, fellows, we've bombed
out except for one thing. It's your only chance, Bob. You've
got to go for that surgical stuff. And that self-warming jigger.
You don't know. Bob, you're not a woman, but I swear to God
every time I go to my gynecologist I leap right up the wall
when he touches me with that thing. Brrr!"
"Dumb," said Tina affectionately. "Dolores, dear, I bet you
go to a man gynecologist."
"Well, sure," said Dolly defensively. "It's kind of a sex
thing with me, I don't like to have women messing me around
there."
"All right, but if you went to a woman doctor she'd know
what it feels like. How could a man know? He never gets that
kind of an examination."
Bob Sanger uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other
way. "Excuse me," he said with a certain amount of pain in
his voice. "I am afraid I'm not quite following what you are
saying."
Tina said with tact, "It's for vaginal examination, Bob. In
order to make a proper examination they use a dilator, which
is kept sterile, of course, so it has to be metal. And it's cold.
My doctor keeps the sterile dilators in a little jar next to an
electric light so they're warm . . . but she's a woman. She
knows what it feels like. Long ago, when I was pregnant, I
went to a male obstetrician, and it's just like they say, Bob.
You jump. You really do. A self-warming dilator would make
a million dollars."
Sanger averted his eyes. His face seemed darker than usual;
perhaps he was blushing. "It is an interesting idea," he said,
and then added reluctantly, "but I'm afraid there are some
difficulties. I can't quite see a place for it in Our product line.
Self-warming, you say? That would make them quite expen-
sive, and perhaps hard to sterilize, as well. Let me think. I
can envision perhaps marketing some sort of little cup con-
taining a sterile solution maintained at body temperature by
a thermostat. But would doctors buy it? Assuming we were
able to persuade them of the importance of it—and I accept
your word, ladies," he added hastily. "Even so. Why wouldn't

32
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
a doctor just keep them by an electric light, as Tina's does?"
"Come on, Bob. Don't you have a research department?"
Willie demanded.
"I do, yes. What I don't have is time. Still it could have
been a useful addition to our line, under other circumstances,
I am sure," Bob said politely, once again addressing the crease
in his trousers.
Then nobody said anything for a while until Tina took a
deep breath, let go of Dev Stanwyck's hand and stood up.
"Sorry, Bob," she said' gendy. "We'll try more later. Now how
about the pool?"
And the group dispersed, some yelling and stripping off
their clothes, and slapping and laughing as they headed for
the pool chamber, one or two to eat, Bob Sanger remaining
behind, tossing a dumbbell from hand to hand and looking
angrily at his kneecap, left alone.
David Cathecting the Group
They keep the pool at blood temperature, just like one of
Tina's thingamabobs. As, in spite of everything, the walls
stay cold—I suppose because of the cord miles and miles of
rock behind them—it stays all steamy and dewy in there. And
the walls are unfinished, pretty much the way God left them
when he poked the caves out of the Puerto Rican rock. Some
places they look like dirty green mud, like the bottom of a
creek. Some places they look like diamonds. There is one
place that is like a frozen waterfall, and one like icicles melt-
ing off the roof; and when they built the pool and lighted it,
they put colored lights behind the rocks in some places, and
you, can switch them to go on and off at random. We liked
that a lot. We went racing in, and Dolly-Belly pushed me in
right on top of Barbie and went to turn on the lights, and
then she came leaping like a landslide into the pool almost on
top of both of us. Half die water in the pool came surging
out, it looked like. But it all drains right back and gets
churned around some way to kill the bugs and fungi, and so
we jumped and splashed most of it out again and yelled and
dived and then setded down to just holding each other, half
drowsing, until the pool got too crowded and we felt ourselves
being pushed into a corner and decided to get out.
We put some clothes on and sort of stood in the corridor,

33	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

between the pool and the showers, trying to make up our
minds what to do.
"Want to get some sleep?" Barbie asked, but not very
urgendy. Neither of us said yes.
"How about eating something?" I offered.
Dolly-Belly said politely, "No thanks. I'm not hungry now."
I found one of Rufous the Third's cigarettes and we passed it
around, trying to keep it dry although the girls' hair kept
dripping on it, and then we noticed that we were in front of
the door that opens into the empty caves. And we realized we
had all been looking at it, and then at each other, and then at
the door again.
So Dolly tried the knob, and it turned. I pushed on the
door, and it opened. And Barbie stepped through, and we fol-
lowed.
It closed behind us.
We were alone in the solid dark and cold of the caves. A
little line of light ran around three sides of the door we had
just come through; and if we listened closely, we could hear,
very faindy, an occasional word or sound from the people be-
hind it. That was all. Outside of that, nothing.
Barbie took one of my hands. I reached out and took
Dolly's with the other.
We stood silently for a moment, waiting to see if our eyes
would become dark-adapted, but it was no use. The darkness
was too complete. Dolly-Belly was twisting around at the end
of our extended arms' length, and after a moment she said,
"I can feel along a wall here. There's a kind of a rope. Watch
where you step."
Someone had put duckboards down sometime. Although
we couldn't see a thing, we could feel what we were doing.
I had socks on; the girls were barefoot. Since I had one
hand in the hand of each of them, I couldn't guide myself by
the rope or the wall, as Barbie and Dolly could, but we went
very slowly.
We had done a sensitivity thing a while earlier, two sleeps
and about 11 meals earlier, I think, blindfolding each of us in
turn and letting ourselves be led around to smell and hear and
feel things. It was like that. In the same way, none of us
wanted to talk. We were extending our other senses, listening,
and feeling, and smelling.
Then Dolly-Belly stopped and said, "End of the rope." She

34
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
disengaged her fingers and bent down. Barbie came up beside
me, and I slipped my hand free of hers and around her waist.
Dolly said, "I think there are some steps going down. Be
careful, hear? It's scary."
I let go of Barbie, passed myself in front of Dolly, felt with
my toes, knelt down and explored with my fingertips. It was
queasy, all right. I felt as though I were falling over forward,
not being able to see where I might be falling. There were
wooden steps there, all right. But how far down they went
and what was at the end of them and how long they had been
rotting away there and what shape they were in, I could not
tell.
So we juggled ourselves around cautiously and sat on the
top step, which was just wide enough for the three of us, even
Dolly-Belly. We listened to the silence and looked at the
emptiness, until Barbie said suddenly:
"I hear something."
And Dolly said, "I smell something. What do you hear?"
"What do you smell?"
"Sort of like vinegar."
"What I hear is sort of like somebody breathing."
And a light flared up at us from the bottom of the stairs,
blinding us by its abruptness although it was only a tiny light,
and the voice of Willie the Weeper said, "Great balls o' fahr,
effen 'tain't the Revenooers come to bust up mah lil ol* still!"
I flung my head away from the light and yelled, "Willie, for
Christ's sakel What are you doing here?"
"Dumb question, my David," said Barbie beside me. "Don't
you remember about cave drippings? Willie's got himself a
supply of home brew out here."
"Right," said Willie benevolently. "Thought I recognized
your voice, my two-toned sepia queen. Say, how are your
roots doing?"
Barbie didn't say a word, and neither did any of the rest of
us. After a moment Willie may have felt a little ashamed of
himself, because he flicked off his light. "I've only got the
one battery," he explained apologetically from the darkness.
"Oh, wait a minute. Take a look." And he turned on the little
penlight again, shined it at arm's length on himself, and then
against the wall, where he had four fruit bowls covered by
dinner plates and a bunch of paper cups. "I thought you

35	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

might like to see my little popskull plant," he said pridefully,
turning the light off again. "Care for a shot?"
"Why not?" said Barbie, and we all three eased ourselves
down to the lower steps and accepted a paper cup of the
stuff, sharing it among us.
"Straining it was the hard part," said Willie. "You may
notice a certain indefinable piquancy to the bouquet. I had to
use my underwear."
Barbie, just swallowing, coughed and giggled. "Not bad,
Willie. Here, try it, David. It's a littie bit like Dutch gin."
To me it tasted like the liquid that accumulates in the bot-
tom of the vegetable bins in a refrigerator, and I said so.
"Right, that's what I mean. My compliments to the vintner,
Willie. Do you come here a lot?"
"No. Oh, well, maybe, I guess so. I don't like being hassled
around in there." I couldn't see his face in the darkness, but
I could imagine it: angiy and defensive. So, to make it worse,
I said,
"I thought you volunteered for this."
"Hell! I didn't know it would be like this."
"What did you think it would be like, Willie?" Barbie
asked. But her voice wasn't mocking.
He said, with pauses, "I suppose, in a way ... I suppose I
thought it would be kind of like the revolution. I don't sup-
pose you remember. You're probably too young, and anyway
it was mostly on the West Coast. But we were all together
then, you know ... I mean, even the ones we were fighting
and struggling were part of it. Chaos, chaos, and out of it
came some good things. We struggled with the chief of police
of San Francisco in the middle of Market Street, and after-
wards he was all bruised and bleeding, but he thanked me."
We didn't say anything. He was right, we were too young
to have been involved except watching it on TV, where it
seemed like another entertainment.
"And then," said Willie, "nothing ever went right." And he
didn't say anything more for a long time, until Dolly-Belly
said:
"Can I have another shot of drippings?"
And then we just sat for a while, thinking about Willie,
and finally not thinking about anything much. I didn't feel
blind any more, even with the light off. Just that bit from

36
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
Willie's flash had given me some sense of domain. I could
remember the glimpse I had got: the flat, unreflective black
wall off to my right, just past Dolly-Belly, the wooden steps
down (there had been nine of them), the duckboards along
the rough shelf above us, the faint occasional drip of water
from the bumps in the cave roof over us, the emptiness off
to the left past where the light from Willie's penlamp did any
good, Willie's booze factory down below. With a girl on either
side of me I didn't even feel cold, except for my feet, and
after a while Willie put his hand on one of them. It felt warm
and I liked it, but I heard myself saying, "You've got the
wrong foot, Willie. Barbie's on my left, Dolly's on my right."
After a moment he said, "I knew it was yours. I'm already
holding one of Dolly's." But he took it away.
Barbie said thoughtfully, "If you'd been a voter in your
district, Willie, who would you have voted for?"
"Do you think I haven't asked myself that?" he demanded.
"You're right. I would have voted for Tom Gdansk."
Dolly said, 'It's time for a refill, Willie friend." And we all
churned around getting our paper cups topped off and read-
justing ourselves and when Willie prudently turned the pen-
light off again, we were all sitting together against the wall,
touching and drinking, and talking. Willie was doing most of
the talking. I didn't say much. I wasn't holding back; it was
just that I had had the perception that it was more important
for Willie to talk than for me to respond. I let the talk wash
over me. Time slowed and shuddered to a stop.
It came to me that we four were sitting there because it
was meant from the beginning of time that we should be
sitting there, and that sitting there was the thing and the only
thing that we were ordained to do. My spattered statue for
the library? It didn't matter. It was in a different part of
reality. Not the part we four were in just then. Willie's wor-
ries about being not-loved? It mattered that he was telling
us about it (he was back to his third birthday, when his older
brother's whooping cough had canceled Willie's party), but
it didn't matter that it had happened. Dolly's fatness?
N'importe. Barbie's fitful soft weeping, over she never said
what? De nada. Lara leaving me for the USIS goon? Machts
nicht . . . well, no. That did amount to something real and
external. I could feel it working inside me.
But I was not prepared to let it interfere with the groupness

37	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

of our group, which was a real and immanent thing in itself.
After a while, Dolly began to hum to herself. She had a bad,
reedy voice, but she wasn't pushing it, and it fitted in nicely
behind Willie's talking and Barbie's weeping. We eased each
other, all four of us. It must have been in some part Willie's
terrible foul brew, but it could not have been all that; it was
weak stuff and tasted so awful you could drink it only one
round at a time. It was, in some ways, the finest time of my
life.
"Time," I said wonderingly. "And time, and time, and all of
the kinds of time." I don't suppose it meant anything, but it
seemed to at that—yes. At that time. And for a time we talked
timelessly about time, which, in my perception, had the qual-
ity of a mobile or a medallion or a coffee-table book, in that
it was something one discussed for its pleasant virtues but not
something that constrained one.
Except that there too there was some sort of inner activity,
like stomach rumblings, going on all the time.
While we were there, what was happening in those external
worlds we had left? In the world in the caves behind us? Had
the group been judged and passed and discharged while we
were gone? If it had, how would we ever know?
But Barbie said (and I had not known I had asked her, or
spoken out loud) that that was unlikely because, as far as she
could see, our group had done damn-all about solving any
problems, especially its own, and if we were to be excused
only after performance, we had all the performance yet to
perform. Eveiybody knew the numbers. Most groups got out
in some three weeks. But what was three weeks? Twenty-one
sleeps? But we slept when we chose, and no two of us had
exacdy the same number. Sixtv-three meals? Dolly had
stopped eating almost entirely. How could you tell? Only by
the solutions of problems, maybe. If you knew what standards
were applied, and who the judges were. But I could see little
of that happening, like Barbie, like all of us, I was still
trapped in my own internal problems that, even there, came
funneling in by some undetectable pipeline from that larger
external world beyond the caves. And I had solved no part of
them. Lara was still gone and would still be gone. Whatever
time it was in Djakarta, she was there. Whatever was ap-
propriate to that time, she was doing, with her USIS man
and not with me, for I was not any part of her life and never

38
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
would be again. She probably never thought of me, even. Or
if she did, only with anger. "I feel bad about die anger," I
said out loud, only then realizing I had been talking out loud
for some time, "because I earned it richly and truly. I own it
and acknowledge it as mine."
"So do you want to do anything about it?" asked some-
body, Dolly I think, or maybe Willie.
I considered that for a timeless stretch. "Only to tell her
about it," I said finally, "to tell her what's true, that I earned
it."
"Do you want her back?" asked Willie. (Or Barbie.)
I considered that for a long time. I don't know whether I
ever answered the question, or what I said. But I began to
see what the answer was, at least. Really I didn't want her
back. Not exacdy. At least, I didn't want the familiar oblig-
atory one-to-oneness with Lara, the getting up with Lara in
the morning, the making the coffee for Lara, the sharing the
toast with Lara, the following Lara to the bus twenty minutes
after, the calling Lara at her office from my office, wondering
who Lara was seeing for lunch, being home before Lara and
waiting for Lara to come in, sharing a strained dinner with
Lara, watching TV with Lara, fighting with Lara, swallowing
resentments against Lara; I didn't even want going to bed
with Lara or those few moments, so brief and in recollection
so illusory, when Lara and I were peacefully at one or plea-
suring each other with some discovery or joy. Drowsily I be-
gan to feel that I wanted nothing from Lara except the
privilege of letting go of her without anger or pain; letting go
of all pain, maybe, so that I did not have to have it eating
at me.
But how much of this I said, or heard, I do not know, I
only remember bits and tableaux. I remember Willie the
Weeper actually weeping, softly and easingly like Barbie. I
remember that there was a point when there was no more of
the cave drippings left except some litde bit that had just
begun to work. I remember kissing Dolly, who was crying in
quite a different and more painful way, and then I only re-
member waking up.
At first I was not sure where I was. For a moment I
thought we had all got ourselves dead drunk and wandering,
and perhaps had gone out into the cave and got ourselves

39	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

lost in some deadly, foolish way. It scared me. How could
we ever get back?
But it wasn't that way, as I perceived as soon as I saw that
we were huddled in a corner of one of the sleeping rooms.
I was not alone in my sleeping bag; Barbie was there with
me, her arms around me and her face beautiful and slack.
There was a weight across our feet which I thought was
Dolly.
But it wasn't. It was Willie Murtagh, wrapped in his own
bag, stretched flat and snoring, and Dolly was not anywhere
around.
Aspects of External Reality
Geology. About a hundred million years before the birth of
Christ, during the period called the Upper Cretaceous when
the Gulf of Mexico swelled to drown huge parts of the South-
ern United States, a series of volcanic eruptions racked the
sea that would become the Caribbean. The chains of islands
called the Greater and Lesser Antilles were bom.
As the molten rock boiled forth and the pressure dropped,
great bubbles of trapped gas evolved, some bursting free into
the air, others remaining imprisoned as the cooling and
hardening of the lava raced against the steady upward crawl
of the gas. In time the rock cooled and became agelessly
hard. The rains drenched it, the seas tore at it, the winds
scoured it, and all of them brought donations: waveborne
insects, small animals floating on bits of vegetation or sturdily
swimming, air-borne dust, bird-bome seeds. After a time the
islands became densely overgrown with reeds and grasses,
orchids and morning-glories, bamboo, palm, cedar, ebony,
calabash, whitewood; it was a place of karst topography, so
wrinkled and seamed that it was like a continent's worth of
landscaping crammed into a single island, and overgrown
everywhere.
Under the rock the bubbles remained; and as the peaks
Weathered, some of the bubbles thinned and balded at the
top, opened, and collapsed, leaving great, round, open valleys
like craters. When astronomers wanted to build the biggest
damned radio telescope the world had ever seen, they found
°ne of these opened-out bubbles. They trimmed it and
4

40
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
smoothed it and drained it and inlaid it with wire mesh to
become the thousand-foot dish of the Arecibo Observatory.
Countless other bubbles remained. Those that had been
farther under the surface remained under the surface and
were hidden until animals found them, then natives, then
pirates, then geologists and spelunkers, who explored them
and declared them to be perhaps the biggest chain of con-
nected caverns ever found in the earth. Tourists gaped.
Geologists plumbed. Astronomers peered, in their leisure
hours. And then, when all radio telescopy was driven to die
far side of the Moon by a thousand too many radio-dispatched
taxicabs and a million too many radar ovens, the observatory
no longer served a function and was abandoned.
But the caves remained.
Physical Description. After examining nearly all of the
Puerto Rican cave system, a group of four linked caverns was
selected and suitably modified. By blasting and hammering
they were shaped and squared. Concrete flowed into the
lower parts of the flooring to make them level. Wiring reached
out to the generators of the old observatory, and then diere
were lighting, power, and communications facilities. In a
separate cavern near the surface, almost burst through to
the air, rack upon rack of salt crystals were stored; in the
endless Puerto Rican sun the salt accepted heat, and when
warmth was needed below, air was pumped through the salt.
Decorators furnished and painted the chambers. Plumbers
and masons installed fixtures and the pool. Water? There was
endless water from the inexhaustible natural springs in the
mountains. Drainage? The underground rivers that flowed off
to the sea earned everything away. (When the astronomers
came to build their telescope, they found that the valley had
become a stagnant lake; its natural drain, through under-
ground channels to the sea, had become blocked. Divers
opened it, and the water swept sweedy away.) Two short
elevator shafts, one for use and one for backup, completed
the construction program. The result was an isolation pit
exempt from the diurnal swing and the seasonal shift, with-
out time or external stimuli, without distraction.
Support facilities. Maintenance, care and supervision of
the problem pits is provided by a detachment of 50 VISTA
volunteers, working out their substitute for military service.
They tended the pumps, kept the machinery in repair, and

41	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

did the housekeeping for the inmates. Their duties were
quite light. The climate was humid but pleasant, especially
in the northern hemisphere's winter months. Except for the
long jackknifing drive to the city of Arecibo on the coast, for
beer and company, the VISTA detachment was well pleased
to be where they were. The principal everyday task was
cooking, and that was no problem; it was all TV dinners,
basically, prefabricated and prefrozen. All the duty chefs
had to do was take the orders, pull them out of the freezers,
pop them in the microwave ovens, and put them on die
dumbwaiter. Plus, of course, something like scrambling eggs
and buttering toast from time to time. There were seldom
problems of any importance. The attempt of the United
Brotherhood of Government Employees, in 1993, to organize
the paramilitary services was the most traumatic event in the
detachment's history. There had been a strike. Twenty-two
persons, comprising the ongoing group of problem personnel,
were temporarily marooned in the caves. For 18 days they
were without food, light or communications, except for a
few dumbwaiter loads of field rations smuggled down by one
of the strikers. The inconvenience was considerable, but there
were no deaths.
Monitoring and evaluation. Technical supervision is carried
on by administratively separate personnel. There are two
main areas of technical project control.
The first, employing sophisticated equipment originally
designed for observatory use but substantially modified, is
based near the old thousand-foot dish in the former adminis-
tration and technical headquarters. Full information retrieval
and communications capabilities exist, with on-line micro-
wave links to the Heptagon, in Terre Haute, Indiana, via
synchronous satellite. This is the top headquarters and
decision-making station, and the work there is carried on by
an autonomous division of SAD with full independent de-
partmental status. The personnel of both technical super-
vision installations are interchangeable, and generally rotate
duty from Indiana to Puerto Rico, six months or a year at
a time.
The personnel of the technical project control centers are
primarily professionals, including graduate students in social
sciences and a large number of career civil service scientists
in many disciplines. While stationed in Puerto Rico, most of

42
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
these live along the coast with their families and commute to
the observatory center by car or short-line STOL flight. They
do not ordinarily associate with the VISTA crews, and only
exceptionally have any firsthand contact with the members
of the problem-solving groups, even the professional resource
people included. This was not the original policy. At first the
professionals actually participating in the groups were drawn
by rota from the administrative personnel. It was found that
the group identity was weakened by identification with the
outside world, and so after the third year of operation the
group-active personnel were kept separate, both administra-
tively and physically. When off duty the group-active pro-
fessionals are encourged to return to their own homes and
engage in activities unrelated to the work of the problem pits.
The problem pits were originally sponsored by a consortium
consisting of the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Institute,
Cornell University, the New York Academy of Sciences, and
the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce, under a matched-
funds grant shared bv SAD and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In 1994 it was decided that they could and should be self-
financing, and so a semipublic stock corporation similar to
COMSAT and the fusion-power corporations was set up. All
royalties and licensing fees are paid to the corporation, which
by law distributes 35 percent of income as dividends to its
stockholders, 11 percent to the State of Puerto Rico, and 4
percent to the federal government, reinvesting the balance
in research-and-development exploitation.
Results to date. The present practice of consensual labor
arbitration, the so-called "Nine Percent" income tax act, eight
commercially developed board games, some 125 therapeutic
personality measures, 51 distinct educational programs (in-
cluding the technique of teaching elementary schoolchildren
foreign languages through folksinging), and more than 1,800
other useful discoveries or systems have come directly from
the problem-solving sessions in the Arecibo caves and else-
where and from research along lines suggested by these
sessions.
Here are two examples:
The Nine Percent Law. After the California riots, priority
was assigned to social studies concerning "involvement," as
the phrase of the day put it. Students, hereditarily unem-
ployed aerospace workers, old people, and other disadvan-

43	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

taged groups who had united and overthrown civil govern-
ment along most of the Pacific Coast for more than 18
months, were found to be suffering from the condition called
anomie, characterized by a feeling that they were not related
to the persons or institutions in their environment and had
no means of control or participation in the events of the
day. In a series of problem-pit sessions the plan was pro-
posed which ultimately was adopted as the Kennedy-Moody
Act of 1993, sometimes called "The Nine Percent Law."
Under this act taxpayers are permitted to direct a proportion
of their income tax to a specific function of government, e.g.,
national defense, subsidization of scientific research, educa-
tion, highways, etc. A premium of 1 percent of the total tax
payable is charged for each 10 percent which is allocated
in this way, up to a limit of 9 percent of the base tax (which
means allocating 90 percent of the tax payable). The con-
sequences of this law are well known, particularly as to the
essential disbanding of the DoD.
The militia draft. After the 1991 suspension of Selective
Service had caused severe economic dislocation because of
the lack of employment for youths not serving under the
draft, a problem-pit session proposed resuming the draft
and using up to 60 percent of draftees, on a volunteer basis,
as adjuncts to local police forces all over the nation. It had
been observed that law enforcement typically attracted rigid
and often punitive psychological types, with consequent dam-
age to the police-civilian relations, particularly with minority
groups. The original proposal was that all police forces cease
recruiting and that all vacancies be filled with national militia
draftees. However, the increasing professionalization of police
work made that impractical, and the present system of assign-
ing militia in equal numbers to every police force was
adopted. The success of the program may be judged from
the number of other nations which have since come to imitate
it.
In recent years some procedural changes have been made,
notably in giving preference to nongoal-oriented problem-
solving sessions, in which all participants are urged to generate
problems as well as solutions. A complex scoring system,
conducted in Terre Haute, gives credits for elapsed time, for
definition of problems, for intensity of application and for
(estimated) value of proposals made. As the group activity

44
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
inevitably impinges on personality problems, a separate score
is given to useful or beneficial personality changes which
occur among the participants. When the score reaches a
given numerical value (the exact value of which has never
been made public), the group is discharged and a new one
convened.
The procedures used in the problem pits are formative,
eclectic and heuristic. Among the standard procedures are
sensitivity training, encounter, brainstorming, and head-
cloning. More elaborate forms of problem-solving and deci-
sion-making, such as Delphi, relevance-tree construction, and
the calculus of statement, have been used experimentally from
time to time. At present they are not considered to be of
great value in the basic pit sessions, although each of them
retains a place in the later R&D work carried on by pro-
fessional teams, either in Terre Haute or, through subcon-
tracting, in many research institutions around the country.
Selection procedures. Any citizen is eligible to volunteer
and, upon passing a simple series of physical and psychologi-
cal tests designed to determine fitness for the isolation ex-
perience, may be called as openings occur. Nearly all volun-
teers are accepted and actually participate in a pit session
within 10 months to one year after application, although in
periods when the number of volunteers is high, some propor-
tion are used in sessions in other places than Arecibo, under
slighdy different ground rules.
In order to maintain a suitable ethnic, professional, reli-
gious, sexual, and personality mix, and as part of a randomiz-
ing procedure, about one half of all participants are selectees.
These are chosen through Selective Service channels in the
first instance, comprising all citizens who have not otherwise
discharged their military obligation. Of course, the number
thus provided is far in excess of need, and so a secondary
lottery is then held. Those persons thus chosen are given
the battery of tests required of volunteers, and those who
pass remain subject to call for the remainder of their lives.
As a matter of policy, many of the youngest age groups are
given automatic deferments for a period of years, to provide
a proper age mix for each working group.
Summary and future plans. The problem-pit sessions have
proven so productive that there have been many attempts
to expand them to larger formats, e.g., the so-called "Uni-

45	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

versal Town Meeting." These have achieved considerable
success in special areas, but at the cost of limiting spontaneity
and interpersonal interaction. Some studies have criticized the
therapeutic aspects of pit sessions as distractive and irrelevant
to dieir central purpose. Yet experimental sessions conducted
on a purely problem-solving basis have been uniformly less
productive, perhaps due to the emergence of a professionalist
elite group who dominate such sessions; as their expertise
is acquired through professional exposure over a period of
time, their contributions are often too conventional and thus
limited. The fresh, if uninformed, thoughts of nonexperts
give the pit sessions their special qualities of innovation and
daring. Most observers feel that the interpersonal quality of
the sessions cannot be achieved on a mass scale except with
the comcomitant danger of violence, personal danger and
property destruction, as in the California Cultural Revolu-
tion. However, studies are still being pursued with the end
in view of enlarging the scope and effectiveness of the ses-
sions.
In conclusion, we can only agree with the oft-quoted
extemporaneous rhyme offered by Sen. Moody at the cere-
monies attendant on the tenth anniversary of the establish-
ment of the problem pits:
The pits are quirky,
Perfection they're not.
The best you can say's
They're the best we've got.
The Statement of Tina's Problem
In Tina Wattridge's head lived a dozen people, all of whom
were her and all of whom fought like tigers for sole owner-
ship. Pit Leader Tina moved among the group, offering en-
couragement here, advice there, bringing one person to inter-
act with another. Mother Tina remembered, after a third of
a century, the costive agony of childbirth and the inexpressible
love that drowned her when they first laid her daughter in
her arms. Tina the Spy eavesdropped and snooped and
furtively slipped into the communications room to type out
her reports on group progress. Homemaker Tina loathed the
cockroach yellow paint on the walls of the main social room

46
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
and composed unsent demands to the control authorities for
new mats for the pool chamber, where the dank and the
hard use had eaten them into disgraceful tatters. And all the
Tinas were Tina Wattridge, and when they battled among
themselves for her, she felt fragmented and paralyzed. When
she felt worst was when one of the long-silent Tina's came
arrogantly to the fore and drove her in a direction she had
long forgotten. It was happening now. She knew what a
spectacle she must seem to everyone present, most of all to
the other parts of herself, but she could not help herself;
she was in love; could not possibly be in love; was.
And while she was numb to everything but the external
love and the interior pain of reproach, her group was ex-
ploding in a dozen directions. She couldn't cope; somehow
she did cope, moment by moment, but always at the cost of
feeling that there she had spent the last erg of energy, the
last moiety of will and had nothing left—until another de-
mand came. And they came every minute, it seemed. Bob
Sanger shouting and trembling, demanding that the group
be terminated and he be let to get back to his collapsing
business. David Jaretski and Barbara Devereux screaming
that their friend Dolores had blundered off into the caves
to die. Marge Klapper (who should have known better!)
whispering that she wanted to get out now, right now, to
have the other man's baby pumped out of her so she could
go back to the man she was married to. And back and forth
to the teletypes, sneaking in reports; and worrying about
every person there; and most of the time, all of the time,
with her mind full of Dev Stanwvck and their utterly pre-
posterous, utterly overpowering love.
She could not sleep. She would lie down exhausted, more
often than not with Dev beside her, and sometimes there
would be sex, fast and total, and sometimes there would be
his passionate attempt to explain and justify all of his life.
Sometimes nothing but exhaustion alone; she would feel her-
self falling away into sleep and hear Dev's breathing deepen
beside her. And then some voice from the other room, or
some memory, or some discomfort from the fold of the sleep-
ing bag would come. Not much. Enough. Enough to pull
her back from sleep, fighting angrilv against it, and in a
minute she would be wide awake with her mind furiously
circling into a kind of panic.

47	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

Then she would get up, trying not to disturb Dev, trying
to avoid die rest of the group, and head for the only place
in the caves where she could have privacy, die toilets. And
with the door locked, in the end stall, she would reach behind
the flush tank and slide one piece of molding over another
and take out the rough copies of her reports, trying to force
her mind back onto her job.
Day 1, hour 2300. Wattridge reporting. Fein introduced
VD epidemiology problem; no group uptake. Sanger states
problem of approaching bankruptcy in dental findings in-
dustry; n.g.u. Jefferson made no overt statement but indi-
cates sexual inadequacy problem. Jaretski marital situation;
wife has left him. Ittri despondent career status; attributes
lack of education. Murtagh states criticism of Congressional
election procedure; n.g.u. Group interaction in weak normal
range.
They had all been strangers then. Dev Stanwyck's name
did not even appear in that first report!
Day 4, hour 2220. Wattridge reporting. Klapper and
Belli hostility; fought with bats without resolution. Group
effective in bioenergetics and immersion therapy. Some pre-
liminary diagnoses: Devereux passive-aggressive, deep frus-
tration feelings. Belli compulsive and anal-retentive. Stan-
wyck latent homosexual father-dominated. (Note: I have
personal feelings toward Stanwyck. I diink of him as a son.)
She flipped hastily through the pages of the notebook, try-
ing to ignore the fact that somebody was silently moving
around outside the toilet door, apparentiy listening. Then
she found the page she was looking for:
Day 13, hour 2330. Wattridge reporting. Clique for-
mation: Belli-Devereux-Jaretski: semisexual triad, some
boding to rest of group. Stanwyck-Ittri, bivalent pairing,
sociopersonal conflict vs. joint hostility to rest of group, little
interaction. Fein-Klapper-Sanger, weak professional com-
munality of interest in medical areas; unstable bond, with in-
dividual links to other group members. No overt sexual inter-
action observed. Problem-solving: Sanger received full group

48
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
brainstorm but did not consider any proposal satisfactory; for-
warded for analysis. Fein received approximately 30 minutes
intensive discussion, no formal proposals but interaction taking
place. Ittri: Has become able to perceive own failure to make
use of adult-education and other resources, accepts sugges-
tions for courses and new career orientation. (Note: Belli
noticed in the pool that I was wearing my watch. I tried to
persuade her that it was only an ornament and did not keep
time. However, she told some of the others. Stanwyck in
particular has been observing me closely, making these trans-
missions difficult even with blind-typing.)
And there it was, an absolute fraud! It hadn't happened
that way at all. It had been Dev Stanwyck who had noticed
it first, Dolly Belli only a day later; and Tina remembered
cringingly with what anger and passion she had blown up
at Dolly's half-joking question. It had stopped the ques-
tioning, all right; Dolly climbed out of the pool without an-
other word, and her friends followed her. What else had it
stopped: How close had Dolly been to opening up to die
group at large?
And where had the anger come from? It was only when
Tina had realized that the anger was all out of proportion
to the stimulus that she had plumbed in her mind for another
source and found it transferred from her own feelings about
Dev Stanwyck.
Slowly she turned to a blank page and began her latest
report:
Day 17, hour 2300. Wattridge reporting. Belli still miss-
ing. Tensions peaking. Group interaction maintaining plateau
in high normal range. Sexual pairing marked: Jaretski-
Devereux, Klapper-Fein (temporary and apparently dis-
continued), Ittri-Teitlebaum. Also Wattridce-Stanwyck.
(Note: I find this professionally disconcerting and am at-
tempting to disengage. I am too old for him!)
She put down the pencil and wrinkled her eyes; repentance
oft I swore, yes, but was I sober when I swore? How could
she disengage herself from someone a third her age who
found that she turned him on? And how could she not?

49	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

The breathing outside stopped for a moment, and then
Dev's voice said, "Tina, is that you in there?"
She could not answer; some maiden shyness kept her from
speaking while sitting on a toilet, or else she simply did not
know what to say to Dev.
"I think you better come out," he went on. "Something's
happening."
Hassling Willie
In the main social room Marge Klapper was facing Willie
Murtagh across a mat. Both were tense and angry, which
troubled Marge more than Willie because she did not like
to be professionally inept. The one-night stand with Jerry
Fein had left her upset, especially as Jerry didn't want to
let it stay a one-night stand; she was angry; she wanted to
get out to get rid of her souvenir of one other one-night
stand; she wanted to go back to her husband and find out
if the marriage could be made to work; and, most difficult
of all, she wanted to do all diose things while retaining her
self-image as a competent professional intact. So she reached
out for Willie:
"Do you want to fight?"
He stood angrily mute and shook his head.
She dropped the soft, inflated plastic bats and put a pro-
fessional smile on her face. "Shall we push? Would you like
to go in the pool?"
"No." He wasn't helping at all. He was uptight and souring
the whole group with his tensions and giving her notiiing to
work on—nothing, she realized, except that intensity with
which he was looking at her, as though hoping the next
word out of her mouth would be what he wanted. So she
tried again. She stepped up on the edge of the mat and said
sweedy to Willie, "Would you like to try something with
me? Let's jump."
Willie said, "Oh, Christ."
"Go on," Jerry Fein put in helpfully. "Shake the tensions
out."
"Stay out of this, Jerry!" Marge snapped. And then forced
herself to relax. "Like this, Willie," she said, jumping, coming
down, jumping again. "Try it."

50
IN THE PROBLEM PIT
He glowered, looked around the room and gave a half-
hearted hop.
"Great!" cried Marge. "Higher!"
He shrugged and jumped a mighty leap, twice as high as
hers. Then another. "Beautiful, Willie," said Marge breath-
lessly. "Keep it up!" It was like an invisible seesaw, first Marge
in the air, then Willie, Marge again; he began to move his
feet like a Russian dancer, coming down with one knee half
bent, then the other, turning his body from side to side.
"Make a noise, Willie!" Marge yelled triumphandy, and
demonstrated: "Yow! Wheel Hoooo!"
The whole group was joining in—anyway, that part of it
that was in the room, all yelling with Willie. Marge felt
triumphant and fulfilled; and then Tina had to come in and
spoil it all.
"Sorry, Marge," she called from the doorway. "Listen,
everybody. Does anybody know where Barbie and David
are?"
"In the pool?" somebody guessed helpfully.
"No. I looked everywhere."
Marge panted angrily, "Tina, do you have to take at-
tendance right now?"
"I'm sorry, Marge. But I'm afraid they've gone into the
caves after Dolly. Is anyone else missing?"
The group looked around at itself. "Rufous!" cried Jerry
Fein. "Where's he?"
Dev Stanwyck, as always tagging along after Tina, said in
his superior way, "We've already checked the sleeping rooms.
Rufous is there. Anybody else?"
No answer for a moment, and then three or four people at
once: "Bob Sanger!"
Tina looked around, then nodded grimly. "Thanks." And
she disappeared, Stanwyck hurrying after.
Nevertheless, the interruption had wrecked Marge's mood.
And hadn't done any good for Willie, either; he was col-
lapsed on the floor, staring into space.
"Well," said Marge heartily, "want to get back to it,
Willie?"
He looked up and said, "I know where they are. It's kind
of my fault." He straightened up and said, "Hell, it's exactly
my fault. I was trying to get with that colored girl, and I
said something I shouldn't have. Dolly took it the wrong

51	IN THE PROBLEM PIT

wav and split for the caves, and I—well, I told David it was
his fault, so he went after her. I didn't actually think he'd
take Barbie with him."
"Or Sanger," said someone.
"I don't know anything about Sanger. But I know where
they are. They're wandering."
Tina said from the entrance, "No, not in the caves, they
aren't." All at once she looked every year of her age. "They're
outside," she said. "I just heard from the VISTA crew; they
identified four persons leaving the caves about a quarter of
a mile from here, one alone, then three more about an hour
ago."
"At least they're outside," said Willie thankfully.
"Oh, yes," said Tina, "they're outside. In the dark. Wander-
ing around. Did you look at die terrain when you came in,
Willie?" She absentmindedly pressed her hands against her
face. It smeared her make-up, but she was no longer aware
she had it on. "One other thing," she said. "You can all go
home now. The word just came down over the teletype; our
group is discharged with thanks and, how did they say it?—
oh, yes. 'Tell them it was a good job well done,'" she said.
Running Home
I didn't really believe Willie even when it was clearly to
his advantage to tell the truth, but it was die way he said:
follow the piece of string he had laid out, exploring the caves
to keep from exploring his own head, and you came to a rock
slope, very steep but with places where somebody had once
cut handholds into it, and at the end of the handholds you
found yourself out in the fresh air. When we got out we
were all beat. Bob Sanger was the worst off of us, which
was easy to figure when you considered he was a pretty old
guy who hadn't done anything athletic for about as long as
Barbie and I had been alive. But he was right with us. "I'll
leave you now," he said. "I do appreciate your help."
"Cut it out, Bob," wheezed Barbie. "Where do you think
you're going?"
It had turned out to be night, and a very dark night with
a feeble tepid rain coming down, too—perhaps they had ho
other kinds around there. I couldn't see his face, but I could
imagine his expression, very remote and contented with

52
est the problem pit
whatever interior decisions he had reached. "Ill make my
own way, thank you," he said politely. "It is only a matter
of finding a road, and then following it downhill, I imagine."
"Then what?" I demanded. "We're AWOL, you know."
"That's why I have attorneys, Mr. Jaretski," he said cheer-
fully.
"Sitting on the bottom of the hill waiting for you?"
"Of course not. Really, you should not worry about me. I
took the precaution of retaining my money belt when we
checked our valuables. U.S. currency will get me to Ponce,
and from there there are plenty of flights to the mainland.
I'll be in California in no more than eight or nine hours, I
should think."
"Listen, Bob!" I exploded—but stopped; Barbie squeezed
my shoulder.
"Bob," she said, in a tone quite different from mine, "it
isn't just that we're worried about you. We're worried about
Dolly. Please help us find her."
Silence. I wished I could have seen his face. Then he said,
"Please believe me, I am not ungrateful. But consider these
facts. First, as I explained to all of you when we started this
affair, it is of considerable importance to me to keep my
company solvent. I believe that I have reasoned out a way
to do so, and I liave no spare time. I have no idea how much
time we've wasted, and it may already be too late. Second,
this is a big island. It is quite hopeless to search it for one
girl with a long start, with no lights and no idea of where
she has gone. I would help you if I could. I can't."
I said, trying to crawl down from my anger, "We don't
have any other way to do it, Bob. I think I know where she
is; anyway, that's where I want to look. But three of us can
look fifty percent better than two."
"Call the VISTA crew," he said.
"I don't know where they are."
"Anyway, you're assuming she may be in some kind of
danger. She is quite capable of taking care of herself."
"Capable, yes. Motivated, no. She's jealous and angry, Bob.
Barbie and I were shacked up and it—" I hesitated; I didn't
know exactly how to say it. "It spoiled things for her," I said.
"I think she might do something crazy."
Sanger spluttered, "Your f-fornications are your own busi-
ness, Mr. Jaretski! I must go. I—"

53	est the problem pit

He hesitated and became, for him, confidential. "I believe
that the discussion of my problem has in fact borne fruit.
The, ah, gynecological instruments are an area in which I
had little knowledge."
"You've invented a warmer for the thingy?" Barbie asked,
interestedly.
"For the speculum, yes. A warmer, no. It isn't necessary.
Metal conducts heat so rapidly that if it isn't warm it feels
cold. Plastic such as our K-14A is as strong as metal, as
poreless and thus readily sterilized as metal and has a very
low thermal conductivity. I think—well. The remainder of
what I think is properly my own business, Miss Devereux,
and I want to get back to my own business to implement it
before it is too late."
"Jesus, Bob," I said, really angry, "don't you feel anything
at all? You got something good out of the group. Don't you
want to help?"
I could hear him walking away. "Not in the least," he said.
"Won't you at least come over to the radio mirror widi us
to look? There's a road there . . ."
But he didn't even answer.
And we had wasted enough time, more than enough time.
I took Barbie's hand, and we started off to where die faint
sky glow suggested there were buildings. There was nothing
much else in these hills; it had to be either the administra-
tion buildings around the radio dish or the cave entrance,
and either way I could find my way from there. Of course,
Dolly might not have gone to the dish. But where else would
she go? Down the hill to civilization, maybe, but in that
case she would be all right. But if she had gone to the dish,
if she had been listening when I told her about the slippery
catwalk and the five-hundred-foot drop—no, there was not
much more time to waste.
There was no road near the outcropping with the crevice
through which we had come. People had been there before.
There was a sort of bruised part of the undergrowth that
might have been a kind of path. It didn't help much. We
bulldozed our way through the brush, with wet branches
slapping at us and wet vines and bushes wrapping them-
selves around our legs; a little of that was plenty, on the
up-and-down hillsides, but after half an hour or so we did
hit a road. Something like a road, anyway; two parallel ruts

54
est the problem pit
that presumably were used from time to time, because the
vegetation had not quite obliterated it. It circled a hill, and
from the far side of it I could see not one but two glowing
spots in the cloud. The nearer and brighter one looked like
the entrance to the pit. Ergo, the other was where we wanted
to go.
I think it took us a couple of hours to get there, and we
didn't have the breath for much talking. We were lower
down than I had been before. The suspended thing that
looked like an old trolley car slung from wires was now
higher up than we were; the rain had stopped, and the
clouds were beginning to lighten with dawn coming. I
stopped, gasping, and Barbie leaned against me, and the
two of us stared around the great round bowl.
"I don't see her," Barbie said.
I didn't see her either, That was not all bad. The good
part was that I didn't see her body spread out over the
rusting wire mesh at the bottom of die bowl. "Maybe she
didn't come here after all," I said.
"Where else would she go?"
"She could have got lost." Or she could have blundered
down the mountains looking for a road. Or she could have
found another cliff to jump off.
But I didn't think so, and then Barbie said, very softly,
"Oh, look up there, my David. What's that that's moving?"
I looked. It was still gray and I could not be sure; but,
yes, there was something moving.
It was actually in the big metal instrument cage, whatever
it was.
I said, "I don't know, Barb. Let's go find out."
It was easy to say that, hard to do; the catwalk started
out from the side of a hill but unfortunately not the hill
we were on; we had to skirt one and circle around another
before we reached the end of the catwalk. That was twenty
minutes or so, I guess; and by then the day was brighter.
And that was not all good. The bad part was that I could
see the catwalk very clearly. It had not been used much for,
I would guess, ten or fifteen years. Maybe more. It had a
plank floor with spaces between the planks and spaces where
planks seemed to have rotted out and fallen off. It had a
wire-net side-barrier: rusty. The cables themselves, the over-

in the problem pit
55
head ones from which it was slung and the smaller ones that
bound it to them, looked sturdy enough, but what good
would that do us if the boards split under us and we fell
through?
There were, however, only two alternatives, and neither of
them was any good. The tangible alternative was a sort of
bucket car that rose from the administration buildings to the
machine cage, but to get to that meant going halfway around
the bowl, and who could know if it would be working? The
intangible alternative was to turn away. So in effect we had
no alternatives, and I took Barbie's hand and led her out
onto the catwalk. By the time we were ten yards along it,
we became aware of wind (we had not felt it before) and
the rain (which slammed into us from the side). And we
became aware that the whole suspended walk was swaying,
and making creaking, testy, failing sounds as it swayed. We
walked as lightly as we could . . .
I was almost surprised when we discovered that we were
at the machine cage. Down between our feet was a whole
lot of emptiness, with the wire mesh and the greenery poking
through at the end. Over us was the machinery. And I didn't
know what to do next.
Barbie did; she called, "Dolly dear, are you up there?"
There was no answer.
I tried: "Dolly, please come down! We want you."
No answer, except what might have been the wind blow-
ing, and might have been a sob.
Barbie looked at me. "Do you want to go up and look
around?"
I shook my head. There was a metal ladder, but it went
into a hatch and the hatch was shut. I really didn't like the
idea of climbing those few extra feet, but most of all I didn't
like the idea of driving Dolly farther and farther away, until
I drove her maybe out of some window. I yelled, "Dolly,
we didn't come all this way just to say good-bye. We want
you with us, Dolly!" I hadn't asked Barbie if that was true;
it didn't matter.
Silence that prolonged itself, and then there was a grating
sound and the hatch opened. Dolly peered down at us, look-
ing cross but otherwise not unusual. "Crap," she said. "Okay,
you've soothed your consciences. Now go back to bed."
5

56
est the problem pit
Barbie, holding on to the ladder—the whole structure was
vibrating now—looked up at her and said, "Dolly, are you
mad because David and I went to bed?"
With dignity Dolly said, "I have nothing to be angry about.
Not to mention I'm used to it."
"Because it wasn't that big a deal, Dolly," Barbie went on.
"It just happened that way. It could have been you and
David, and I wouldn't have been mad."
"You're not me," said Dolly, and added, very carefully and
precisely, "you're not a girl that's always been fifty pounds
too fat, that everybody laughs at, that buys the kind of
clothes you wear all the time and tries them on in front of
a mirror, and then throws them out and cries herself to
sleep."
She stopped there. Neither Barbie nor I said anything for
a moment. Then I started, "Dolly dear—" But Barbie put her
hand on my shoulder and stopped me.
She gathered her thoughts and then said, "Dolly, that's
right, I'm not you. I'm me, but maybe you don't know what
it's like to be me, either. Would you like me to tell you who
I am? I'm a girl who really looked forward to this group,
which took all the guts I had, because it meant letting myself
hope for something, and then ran out of courage and never
asked anybody for the help I wanted. I'm a black girl, Dolly,
and that may not seem like much of a bad thing to you, but
I happen to be a black girl who's going to die of it. Or to
put it another way, Dolly dear, you're a girl who can make
plans for Christmas, and I'm a girl who won't be here then."
You hear words like that, and for a minute you don't know
what it is you've heard. I stood there, one hand holding on
to the ladder, looking at Barbie with die expression of polite
interest you give someone who is telling you a complicated
story of which you have not yet seen the point. I couldn't
make that expression go off my face. I couldn't find the right
expression to replace it with.
Dolly said, "What the hell are you talking about?" And
her voice was suddenly shrill.
"What I say," said Barbie. "It's what they call sickle-cell
anemia. You white folks don't get it much, but us black
folks, we get it. You know. All God's chillun got hemoglobin,
but where your hemoglobin has something they call glutamic
acid, my hemoglobin has something they call valine. Sounds

57	est the problem pit

like nothing much? Yeah, Dolly, but we die of it. Used to be
we died before we grew up, most of the time, but they do
things better now. I'm thirty-one, and they say I've got, oh,
easily another five or six months."
Dolly's face pulled back out of the hatch, and her voice,
muffled, yelled, "Wait a minute," and Dolly's legs and bottom
appeared as she lowered herself down the ladder. When she
got there, all she said was Barbie's name, and put her arms
around both of us.
I don't know how long we stayed like that, but it was a
long time. And might have been longer if we hadn't heard
voices and looked up and saw people coming toward us along
the catwalk. A hell of a lot of people, a dozen or so, and we
looked again, and it was Bob Sanger leading all the rest.
"Why, son of a bitch," said Barbie in deep surprise. "You
know what he did? He went and got the group to see if we
needed help."
And Dolly said, "And you know what? We do. We all
do." And then she said, "Dear Barbie. We could all be dead
before Christmas. If David will have us, let's stick together
a while. I mean—a while. As long as we want to." And be-
fore Barbie could say anything, she went on. "You know, I
volunteered for this group. I didn't exactly ever say what I
wanted, but I can tell you two. I guess I could tell all of
them, and maybe I will." She took a deep breath. "What I
wanted," she said, "was to find out how to be loved."
And I said, "You are."
The Wrap-Up
Tina Wattridge Final Report. Attached are the analysis
sheets, work-ups, recommendations, and SR-4 situation cards.
There is one omission. I left out Jerry Fein's solution to his
own problem. If you refer to D6H2140, you will find the
problem stated (epidemiological control measures for VD).
He ultimately provided his own solution, quote his words
from my notes: "Suppose we make a monthly check for VD
for the whole population. Everybody who shows up and is
clear on the tests gets a litde button to wear, like in the
shape of a heart, with a date. You know, like the inspection
sticker in a car. It could be like a charm bracelet for girls,
maybe love beads for men. And if you don't pass the test

58
est the problem pit
that month, or start treatment if you fail, you don't get to
wear the emblem." The reason I did not forward it was not
that I thought it a bad idea; actually, I thought it kind of
cute, and with the proper promotion it might work. What I
did think, in fact what I was sure of, was that it was a setup.
Jerry planted the problem and had the solution in his head
when he came in, I guess to get brownie points. Maybe he
wants my job. Maybe he just wanted to end the session
sooner. Anyway he was playing games, and the reason I'm
passing it on now is that I've come to the conclusion that
I don't really care if he was playing games. It's still not a bad
idea and is forwarded for R&D consideration.
One final personal note: Dev Stanwyck kissed me sweedy
and weepily good-bye and took off for Louisiana with the
Teitlebaum girl. I hated it, but there it is, and anywav—
Well, I don't mind his being young enough to be my youngest
son, but I was beginning to kind of mind being his mother.
When I was a little girl, I saw an old George Arliss movie on
TV; he played an Indian rajah who had tried to abduct an
English girl for his harem, and after his plot was foiled, at
the end of the picture, he said something that I identify with
right now. He looked into the camera and lit a cigarette and
said, "Ah, well. She would have been a damn nuisance any-
how."
All in all, it was a good group. I'm taking two weeks
accumulated leave effective tomorrow. Then 111 be ready
for the next one.

Let the Ants Try
In the late 1940s I worked in the advertising business
for some years, largely at Popular Science Publishing
Company, under a wonderful, tall, grave, intelligent
man named George R. Spoerer. We lived about four
blocks from each other in Greenwich Village and we
both liked to walk, so when the weather was halfway
decent we would walk home, and over three years I
spent a lot of time with George in 45-minute strolling
conversations.
One night he said, "Over the weekend I thought up
a science-fiction story," and proceeded to tell me the
story as we walked. "Good story," I said. "Why don't
you write it?" "No," he said, "I want you to write it."
After about six such exchanges I said I would, and I
went home and that evening I did—and this is it.
Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit
didn't; he was on his way to Washington, with his blueprints
and models in his bag, when the bombs struck.
He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a
trace of her body was ever found. The children, of course,
weren't as lucky as that. Their summer camp was less than
20 miles away, and unfortunately in the direction of the
prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain until the
last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy
managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic
airline controls to them. Even though he knew they would
certainly die of radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there
was still a whole blessed week of companionship before the
pain got too bad.
59

60
est the problem pit
That was about all the companionship Gordy had for die
whole year of 1960.
He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had
died down; he had nowhere else to go. He found a house
on the outskirts of the city, and tried to locate someone to
buy it from. But the Emergency Administration laughed at
him. "Move in, if you're crazy enough to stay."
When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that
he was in a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind
almost stopped functioning. He ate and slept, and when it
grew cold he shivered and built fires, and that was all. The
War Department wrote him two or three times, and finally a
government man came around to ask what had happened to
the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington.
But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed
unmolested in the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful
distance away from Gordy's hairy face and torn clothes.
He said, "The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He
takes a personal interest in your discovery."
Gordy shook his head. "The Secretary is dead," he said.
"They were all killed when Washington went."
"There's a new Secretary," the man explained. He puffed
on his cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was
scrabbling into a truck garden. "Arnold Cavanagh. He knows
a great deal about you, and he told me, 'If Salva Gordy has
a weapon, we must have it. Our strength has been shattered.
Tell Gordy we need his help.'"
Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.
"I haven't got a weapon," he said.
"You have something that can be used as a weapon. You
wrote to Washington, before the war came, and said—"
"The war is over," said Salva Gordy. The government man
sighed, and tried again, but in die end he went away. He
never came back. The thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly
written off as a crackpot idea after the man made his report;
it was exacdy that kind of a discovery, anyhow.
It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was
spading his garden. "Give me something to eat," said the
voice behind Gordy's back.
Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man

let the ants try
61
who spoke. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.
"You'll have to work for it," he said.
"All right." The newcomer set down his pack. "My name is
John de Terry. I used to live here in Detroit."
Salva Gordy said, "So did I."
Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him
after they had eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed
—it had been that long since he'd smoked—and through the
smoke he looked at John de Terry amiably enough. Company
would be all right, he thought. The pink mice had been com-
pany, of a sort; but it turned out that the mutation that made
them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And
after the morning when he had awakened to find tiny tooth-
marks in his leg, he'd had to destroy them. And there had
been no other animal since, nothing but the ants.
"Are you going to stay?" Gordy asked.
De Terry said, "If I can. What's your name?" When Gordy
told him, some of the animal look went out of his eyes, and
wonder took its place. "Doctor Salva Gordy?" he asked.
"Mathematics and physics in Pasadena?"
"Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena."
"And I studied there." John de Terry rubbed absently
at his ruined clothes. "That was a long time ago. You didn't
know me; I majored in biology. But I knew you."
Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cig-
arette. "It was too long ago," he said. "I hardly remember.
Shall we work in the garden now?"
Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that after-
noon, and Gordy discovered that what had been hard work
for one man went quickly enough for two. They worked clear
to the edge of the plot before the sun reached the horizon.
John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade, panting.
He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy's patch.
"We can make a bigger garden," he said. "Clear out that
truck, and plant more food. We might even—" He stopped.
Gordy was shaking his head.
"You can't clear it out," said Gordy. "It's rank stuff, a sort
of crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can't even cut it.
It's all around here, and it's spreading."
De Terry grimaced. "Mutation?"
"I think so. And look." Gordy beckoned to the other man

62
est the problem pit
and led him to the very edge of die cleared area. He bent
down, picked up something red and wriggling between his
thumb and forefinger.
De Terry took it from his hand. "Another mutation?" He
brought the thing close to his eyes. "It's almost like an ant,"
he said. "Except—well, the thorax is all wrong. And it's soft-
bodied." He fell silent, examining the thing.
He said something under his breath, and threw the insect
from him. "You wouldn't have a microscope, I suppose? No—
and yet, that thing is hard to believe. It's an ant, but it doesn't
seem to have a tracheal breathing system at all. It's something
different."
"Everything's different," Gordy said. He pointed to a couple
of abandoned rows. "I had carrots there. At least, I thought
they were carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me
sick." He sighed heavily. "Humanity has had its chance,
John," he said. "The atomic bomb wasn't enough; we had
to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made a weapon
out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our
weapons have blown up in our faces."
De Terry grinned. "Maybe the ants will do better. It's their
turn now."
"I wish it were." Gordy stirred earth over the boiling en-
trance to an an thole and watched the insects in their con-
sternation. "They're too small, I'm afraid."
"Why, no. These ants are different, Dr. Gordy. Insects have
always been small because their breathing system is so poor.
But these are mutated. I think—I think they actually have
lungs. They could grow, Dr. Gordy. And if ants were die size
of men . . . they'd rule the world."
"Lunged ants!" Gordy's eyes gleamed. "Perhaps they will
rule the world, John. Perhaps when the human race finally
blows itself up once and for all. . ."
De Terry shook his head, and looked down again at his
tattered, filthy clothes. "The next blow-up is the last blow-
up," he said. "The ants come too late, by millions and millions
of years."
He picked up his spade. "I'm hungry again, Dr. Gordy,"
he said.
They went back to the house and, without conversation,
they ate. Gordy was preoccupied, and de Terry was too new
in the household to force him to talk.

let the ants try
63
It was sundown when they had finished, and Gordy moved
slowly to light a lamp. Then he stopped.
"It's your first night, John," he said. "Come down-cellar.
Well start the generator and have real electric lights in your
honor."
De Terry followed the older man down a flight of stairs,
groping in the dark. By candlelight they worked over a gas-
oline generator; it was stiff from disuse, but once it started it
ran cleanly. "I salvaged it from my own," Gordy explained.
"The generator—and that."
He swept an arm toward a comer of the basement. "I told
you I invented a weapon," he added. "That's it."
De Terry looked. It was as much like a cage as anything,
he thought—the height of a man and almost cubical. "What
does it do?" he asked.
For the first time in months, Salva Gordy smiled. "I can't
tell you in English," he said. "And I doubt that you speak
mathematics. The closest I can come is to say that it displaces
temporal coordinates. Is that gibberish?"
"It is," said de Terry. "What does it do?"
"Well, the War Department had a name for it—a name
they borrowed from H. G. Wells. They called it a Time Ma-
chine." He met de Terry's shocked, bewildered stare calmly.
"A time machine," he repeated. "You see, John, we can give
the ants a chance after all, if you like."
Fourteen hours later they stepped into the cage, its bat-
teries charged again and its strange motor whining . . .
And, forty million years earlier, they stepped out onto quak-
ing, humid soil.
Gordy felt himself trembling, and with an effort managed
to stop. "No dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers in sight," he re-
ported.
"Not for a long time yet," de Terry agreed. Then, "My
Lord!"
He looked around him with his mouth open wide. There
was no wind, and the air was warm and wet. Large trees
were clustered quite thickly around them—or what looked
like trees; de Terry decided they were rather some sort of
soft-stemmed ferns or fungi. Overhead was deep cloud.
Gordy shivered. "Give me the ants," he ordered
Silendy de Terry handed them over. Gordy poked a hole

64
est the problem pit
in the soft earth with his finger and carefully tilted the flask,
dropped one of the ant queens he had unearthed in the back
yard. From her belly hung a slimy mass of eggs. A few yards
away—it should have been farther, he thought, but he was
afraid to get too far from de Terry and the machine—he
made another hole and repeated the process.
There were eight queens. When the eighth was buried he
flung the bottle away and came back to de Terry.
"That's it," he said.
De Terry exhaled. His solemn face cracked in a sudden,
embarrassed smile. "I—I guess I feel like God," he said.
"Good Lord, Dr. Gordy! Talk about your great moments in
history—this is all of them! I've been thinking about it, and
the only event I can remember that measures up is the Flood.
Not even that. We've created a race!"
"If they survive, we have." Gordy wiped a drop of con-
densed moisture off the side of his time machine and puffed.
"I wonder how they'll get along with mankind," he said.
They were silent for a moment, considering. From some-
where in the fern jungle came a raucous animal cry. Both
men looked up in quick apprehension, but moments passed
and the animal did not appear.
Finally de Terrv said, "Maybe we'd better go back."
"All right." Stiffly they climbed into the closet-sized interior
of the time machine.
Gordy stood with his hand on the control wheel, thinking
about the ants. Assuming that thev survived—assuming that
in 40,000,000 years they grew larger and developed brains
—what would happen? Would men be able to live in peace
with them? Would it—might it not make men brothers, joined
against an alien race?
Might this thing prevent human war, and—his thoughts
took an insane leap—could it have prevented the war that de-
stroyed Gordy's family!
Beside him, de Terry stirred restlessly. Gordy jumped, and
turned the wheel, and was in the dark mathematical vortex
which might have been a fourth dimension.
They stopped the machine in the middle of a city, but the
city was not Detroit. It was not a human city at all.
The machine was at rest in a narrow" street, half blocking
it. Around them towered conical metal structures, some of

let the ants try
65
them a hundred feet high. There were vehicles moving in the
street, one coming toward them and stopping.
"Dr. Gordyl" de Terry whispered. "Do you see them?"
Salva Gordy swallowed. "I see them," he said.
He stepped out of the time machine and stood waiting to
greet the race to which he had given life.
For these were the children of ants in the three-wheeled
vehicle. Behind a transparent windshield he could see them
clearly.
De Terry was standing close behind him now, and Gordy
could feel the younger man's body shaking. "They're ugly
things," Gordy said mildly.
"Ugly! They're filthy!"
The andike creatures were as big as a man, but hard-look-
ing and as obnoxious as black beedes. Their eyes, Gordy saw
with surprise, had mutated more than their bodies. For, in-
stead of faceted insect eyes, they possessed iris, cornea and
pupil—not round, or vertical like a cat's eyes, or horizontal
like a horse's eyes, but irregular and blotchy. But they seemed
like vertebrate's eyes, and they were strange and unnatural in
the parchment blackness of an ant's bulged head.
Gordy stepped forward, and simultaneously the ants came
out of their vehicle. For a moment they faced each odier, the
humans and the ants, silendy.
"What do I do now?" Gordy asked de Terry over his shoul-
der.
De Terry laughed—or gasped. Gordy wasn't sure. "Talk to
them," he said. "What else is there to do?"
Gordy swallowed. He resolutely did not attempt to speak
in English to these creatures, knowing as surely as he knew
his name that English—and probably any other language in-
volving sound—would be incomprehensible to them. But he
found himself smiling pacifically to them, and that was of
course as bad . . . the things had no expressions of their own,
that he could see, and certainly they would have no precedent
to help interpret a human smile.
Gordy raised his hand in the semantically sound gesture of
peace, and waited to see what the insects would do.
They did nothing.
Gordy bit his lip and, feeling idiotic, bowed stiffly to the
ants.

66
est the problem pit
The ants did nothing. De Terry said from behind, "Try
talking to them, Dr. Gordy."
"That's silly," Gordy said. "They can't hear." But it was no
sillier than anything else. Irritably, but making the words very
clear, he said, "We . . . are . . . friends."
The ants did nothing. They just stood there, with the un-
winking pupiled eyes fixed on Gordy. They didn't shift from
foot to foot as a human might, or scratch themselves, or even
show the small movement of human breathing. They just
stood there.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said de Terry. "Here, let me try."
He stepped in front of Gordy and faced the ant-things. He
pointed to himself. "I am human," he said. "Mammalian." He
pointed to the ants. "You are insects. That—" He pointed to
the time machine—"took us to the past, where we made it
possible for you to exist." He waited for reaction, but there
wasn't any. De Terry clicked his tongue and began again. He
pointed to the tapering metal structures. "This is your city,"
he said.
Gordy, listening to him, felt the hopelessness of the effort.
Something disturbed the thin hairs at the back of his skull,
and he reached absently to smooth them down. His hand en-
countered something hard and inanimate—not cold, but, like
spongy wood, without temperature at all. He turned around.
Behind them were half a dozen larger ants. Drones, he
thought—or did ants have drones? "John," he said softly . . .
and the inefficient, fragile-looking pincer that had touched
him clamped his shoulder. There was no strength to it, he
thought at once. Until he moved, instinctively, to get away,
and then a thousand sharp serrations slipped through the cloth
of his coat and into the skin. It was like catching oneself on a
cluster of tiny fishhooks. He shouted, "John! Watch out!"
De Terry, bending low for the purpose of pointing at the
caterpillar treads of the ant vehicle, straightened up, startled.
He turned to run, and was caught in a step. Gordv heard him
yell, but Gordy had troubles of his own and could spare no
further attention for de Terry.
When two of the ants had him, Gordy stopped struggling.
He felt warm blood roll down his arm, and the pain was like
being flayed. From where he hung between the ants, he could
see the first two, still standing before their vehicle, still mo-
tionless.

let the ants try
67
There was a sour reek in his nostrils, and he traced it to the
ants that held him, and wondered if he smelled as bad to
them. The two smaller ants abruptly stirred and moved for-
ward rapidly on eight thin legs to the time machine. Gordy's
captors turned and followed them, and for the first time since
the scuffle he saw de Terry. The younger man was hanging
limp from the lifted forelegs of a single ant, with two more
standing guard beside. There was pulsing blood from a wound
on de Terry's neck. Unconscious, Gordy thought mechanical-
ly, and turned his head to watch the ants at the machine.
It was a disappointing sight. They merely stood there, and
no one moved. Then Gordy heard de Terry grunt and swear
weakly. "How are you, John?" he called.
De Terry grimaced. "Not very good. What happened?"
Gordy shook his head, and sought for words to answer. But
the two ants turned in unison from the time machine and
glided toward de Terry, and Gordy's words died in his throat.
Delicately one of them extended a foreleg to touch de Terry's
chest.
Gordy saw it coming. "John!" he shrieked—and then it was
all over, and de Terry's scream was harsh in his ear and he
tinned his head away. Dimly from the corner of his eye he
could see the sawlike claws moving up and down, but there
was no life left in de Terry to protest.
Salva Gordy sat against a wall and looked at the ants who
were looking at him. If it hadn't been for that which was
done to de Terry, he thought, there would really be nothing
to complain about.
It was true that the ants had given him none of the com-
forts that humanity lavishes on even its criminals . . . but they
had fed him, and allowed him to sleep—when it suited their
convenience, of course—and there were small signs that they
were interested in his comfort, in their fashion. When the
pulpy mush they first offered him came up 30 minutes later,
his multilegged hosts brought him a variety of foods, of which
he was able to swallow some fairly palatable fruits. He was
housed in a warm room, and, if it had neither chairs nor win-
dows, Gordy thought, that was only because ants had no use
for these themselves. And he couldn't ask for them.
That was the big drawback, he thought. That. . . and the
memory of John de Terry.

68
est the problem pit
He squirmed on the hard floor until his shoulderblades
found a new spot to prop themselves against, and stared again
at the committee of ants who had come to see him.
They were working an angular thing that looked like a
camera—at least, it had a glittering something that might be
a lens. Gordy stared into it sullenly. The sour reek was in his
nostrils again . . .
Gordy admitted to himself that things hadn't worked out
just as he had planned. Deep under the surface of his mind
—just now beginning to come out where he could see it—
there had been a furtive hope. He had hoped that the rise
of the ants, with the help he had given them, would aid and
speed the rise of mankind. For hatred, Gordy knew, started
in the recoil from things that were different. A man's first
enemy is his family—for he sees them first—but he sides with
them against the families across the way. And still his neigh-
bors are allies against the ghettos and Harlems of his town—
and his town to him is the heart of the nation—and his na-
tion commands life and death in war.
For Gordy, there had been a buried hope that a separate
race would make a whipping-boy for the passions of human-
ity. And that, if there were struggle, it would not be between
man and man, but between the humans . . . and the ants.
There had been this buried hope, but the hope was denied.
For the ants simply had not allowed man to rise.
The ants put up their camera-like machine, and Gordy
looked up in expectation. Half a dozen of them left, and
two stayed on. One was the smallish creature with a bangle
on the foreleg which seemed to be his personal jailer; die
other a stranger to Gordy, as far as he could tell.
The two ants stood motionless for a period of time that
Gordy found tedious. He changed his position, and lay on the
floor, and thought of sleeping. But sleep would not come.
There was no evading the knowledge that he had wiped out
his own race—annihilated them by preventing them from
birth, forty million years before his own time. He was like no
other murderer since Cain, Gordy thought, and wondered
that he felt no blood on his hands.
There was a signal that he could not perceive, and his
guardian ant came forward to him, nudged him outward from
the wall. He moved as he was directed—out the low exit-hole

let the ants try
69
(he had to navigate it on hands and knees) and down a cor-
ridor to the bright day outside.
The light set Gordy blinking. Half blind, he followed the
bangled ant' across a square to a conical shed. More ants were
waiting there, circled around a litter of metal parts. Gordy
recognized them at once. It was his time machine, stripped
piece by piece.
After a moment the ant nudged him again, impatiendy, and
Gordy understood what they wanted. They had taken the ma-
chine apart for study, and they wanted it put together again.
Pleased with the prospect of something to do with his
fingers and his brain, Gordy grinned and reached for the
curious ant-made tools ...
He ate four times, and slept once, never moving from the
neighborhood of the cone-shaped shed. And then he was
finished.
Gordy stepped back. 'It's all yours," he said proudly. "ItH
take you anywhere. A present from humanity to you."
The ants were very silent. Gordy looked at them and saw
drone-ants in the group, all still as statues.
"Hey!" he said in startlement, unthinking. And then the
needle-jawed ant claw took him from behind.
Gordy had a moment of nausea—and then terror and
hatred swept it away.
Heedless of the needles that laced his skin, he struggled
and kicked against the creatines that held him. One arm came
free, leaving gobbets of flesh behind, and his heavy-shod foot
plunged into a pulpy eye. The ant made a whistling, gasping
sound and stood erect on four hairy legs.
Gordy felt himself jerked a dozen feet into the air, then
flung free in the wild, silent agony of the ant. He crashed into
the ground, cowering away from the staggering monster. Sob-
bing, he pushed himself to his feet; the machine was behind
him; he turned and blundered into it a step ahead of the other
ants, and spun the wheel.
A hollow insect leg, detached from the ant that had been
closest to him, was flopping about on the floor of the machine;
it had been that close.
Gordy stopped the machine where it had started, on the
same quivering, primordial bog, and lay crouched over the
controls for a long time before he moved.

70
est the problem pit
He had made a mistake, he and de Terry; there weren't
any doubts left at all. And there was . . . there might be a
way to right it.
He looked out at the Coal Measure forest. The fern trees
were not the fem trees he had seen before; the machine had
been moved in space. But the time, he knew, was identically
the same; trust the machine for that. He thought: I gave the
world to the ants, right here. I can take it back. I can find
the ants I buried and crush them underfoot ... or intercept
myself before I bury them . . .
He got out of the machine, suddenly panicky. Urgency
squinted his eyes as he peered around him.
Death had been very close in the ant city; the reaction
still left Gordy limp. And was he safe here? He remembered
the violent animal scream he had heard before, and shud-
dered at the thought of furnishing a casual meal to some
dinosaur . . . while the ant queens lived safely to produce
their horrid young.
A gleam of metal through the fem trees made his heart
leap. Burnished metal here could mean but one thing—the
machine!
Around a clump of fem trees, their bases covered with thick
club mosses, he ran, and saw the machine ahead. He raced
toward it—then came to a sudden stop, slipping on the damp
ground. For there were two machines in sight.
The farther machine was his own, and through the screen-
ing mosses he could see two figures standing in it, his own
and de Terry's.
But the nearer was a larger machine, and a strange design.
And from it came a hastening mob—not a mob of men, but
of black insect shapes racing toward him.
Of course, thought Gordy, as he turned hopelessly to run—
of course, the ants had infinite time to work in. Time enough
to build a machine after the pattern of his own—and time to
realize what they had to do to him, to insure their own race
safety.
Gordy stumbled, and the first of the black things was upon
him.
As his panicky lungs filled with air for the last time, Gordy
knew what animal had screamed in the depths of the Coal
Measure forest.

To See Another Mountain
When I wrote "To See Another Mountain," I had just
got a new record player and some new records, includ-
ing my first LP of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
(Actually his second, though only a few of us true-blue
aficionados ever listen to his rather immature first.) My
whole memory of writing the story is permeated with that
lovely violin. That particular concerto happens to be my
favorite, probably because one of the first real live con-
certs I ever attended featured it, played by Fritz Kreisler,
fresh out of the hospital after being almost killed in a
car accident and making his comeback. What an evening
that was, with old Fritz staring out over packed Carnegie
Hall and sawing away like a Vienna Woods carpenter,
with a half smile on his face and the most beautiful
sounds I had ever heard washing over us ... So I had
the concerto, I think it was Oistrakh's version, on the
record player, and every time I came to a pause in the
story I would get up and start it over again. I have al-
ways thought of it as the Mendelssohn story; and what
astonishes me, reading it over now, is how little the
concerto has to do with the story.
Trucks were coming up the side of the mountain again. The
electric motors were quiet enough, but these were heavy-duty
trucks and the reduction gears could be heard a mile off. A
mile by air; that was 18 miles by the blacktop road that
snaked up the side of the mountain, all hairpin curves with
banks that fell away to sheer cliffs.
The old man didn't mind the noise. The trucks woke him
up when he was dozing, as he so often was these days.
"You didn't drink your orange juice, Doctor."
6	71

72
est the problem pit
The old man wheeled himself around in his chair. He liked
the nurse. There were three who took care of him, on shifts,
but Maureen Wrather was his personal favorite. She always
seemed to be around when he needed her. He protested: "I
drank most of it." The nurse waited. "All right." He drank
it, noting that the flavor had changed again. What was it this
time? Stimulants, tranquilizers, sedatives, euphoriants. They
played him up and down like a yo-yo. "Do I get coffee this
morning, Maureen?"
"Cocoa." She put the mug and a plate with two arrowroot
cookies down on the table, avoiding the central space where
he laid out his endless hands of solitaire; tiiat was one of the
things the old man liked about her. "I have to get you dressed
in half an hour," she announced, "because you've got com-
pany coming."
"Company? Who would be coming to see me?" But he
could see from the look in her light, cheerful eyes, even be-
fore she spoke, that it was a surprise. Well, thought the old
man with dutiful pleasure, that was progress; only a few
weeks ago they wouldn't have permitted him any surprises
at all. Weeks? He frowned. Maybe months. All the days were
like all the other days. He could count one, yesterday; two,
die day before; three, last week—he could count a few simple
intervals with confidence, but the ancient era of a month ago
was a wash of gray confusion. He sighed. That was the price
you paid for being crazy, he thought with amusement. They
made it that way on purpose, to help him "get well." But it
had all been gray and bland enough anyhow. Back very far
ago there had been a time of terror, but then it was bland for
a long, long time.
"Drink your cocoa, young fellow," the nurse winked, cheer-
fullv flirting. "Do you want any music?"
That was a good game. "I want a lot of music," he said
immediately. "Stravinsky—that Sac thing, I think. And Al-
ban Berg. And—I know. Do you have that old one, 'The
Three Itta Fishes?'" He had been very pleased with the com-
pleteness of the tape library in the house on the Hill, until he
found out that there was something in that orange juice too.
Every request of his was carefully noted and analyzed. Like
the tiny microphones taped to throat and heart at night, his
tastes in music were data in building up a picture of his con-

to see another mountain
73
dition. Well, that took some of the joy out of it, so the old
man had added some other joy of his own.
The nurse turned solemnly to the tape player. There was a
pause, a faint marking beep and then the quick running open-
ing bars of the wonderful Mendelssohn concerto, which he
had always loved. He looked at the nurse. "You shouldn't
tease us, Doctor," she said lighdy as she left.
Dr. Noah Sidorenko had changed the world. His Hypoth-
esis of Congruent Values, later expanded to his Theory of
General Congruences, was the basis for a technology fullv as
complex and even more important than the nucleonics that
had come from Einstein's energy-mass equation. This morn-
ing the brain that had enunciated the principle of congruence
was occupied in a harder problem: What were the noises from
the courtyard?
He was going to have his picture taken, he guessed, taking
his evidence from the white soft shirt the nurse had laid out
for him, the gray jacket and, above all, from the tie. He al-
most never wore a tie. (The nurse seldom gave him one. He
didn't like to speculate about the reasons for this.) While he
was dressing, the trucks ground into the courtyard and
stopped, and men's voices came clearly.
'1 don't know who they are," he said aloud, abandoning
the attempt to figure it out.
"They're the television crew," said the nurse from the next
room. "Hush. Don't spoil your surprise."
He dressed quickly then, with excitement; why, it was a
big surprise. There had never been a television crew on the
mountain before. When he came out of the dressing room
the nurse frowned and reached for his tie. "Sloppy! Why
can't you large-domes leam how to do a simple knot?" She
was a very sweet girl, the old man thought, lifting his chin to
help. She could have been his daughter-—even his grand-
daughter. She was hardly 25; yes, that would have been about
right. His granddaughter would have been about that now—
The old man frowned and turned his head away. That was
very wrong. He didn't have a grandchild. He had had one
son, no more, and the boy had died, so they had told the
old man, in the implosion of the Haaroldsen Free Trawl in
the Mindanao Deep. The boy had been 19 years old, and

74
est the problem pit
certainly without children; and there had been something
about his death, something that the old man didn't like to
remember. He squinted. Worse than that, he thought, some-
thing he couldn't remember any more.
The nurse said: "Doctor, this is for you. It isn't much, but
Happy Birthday."
She took a small pink-ribboned box out of the pocket of
her uniform and handed it to him. He was touched. He saw
his fingers trembling as he unwrapped the litde package. That
distracted him for a moment but then he dismissed it. It was
honest emotion, that was all—well, and age too, of course.
He was 95. But it wasn't the worrying intention tremor that
had disfigured the few episodes he could remember clearly,
in his first days here on the Hill. It was only gratitude and
sentiment.
And that was what the box held for him, sentiment. "Thank
you, Maureen. You're good to an old man." His eyes stung. It
was only a little plastic picture-globe, with Maureen's young
face captured smiling inside it, but it was for him.
She patted his shoulder and said firmly: "You're a good
man. And a beautiful one, too, so come on and let's show
you off to your company."
She helped him into the wheelchair. It had its motors, but
he liked to have her push him and she humored him. They
went out the door, down the long sunlit corridors that di-
vided the guest rooms in the front of the building from the
broad high terrace behind. Sam Krabbe, Ernest Atkinson, and
a couple of the others from the Group came to the doors of
their rooms to nod, and to wish the old man a happy birthday.
Sidorenko nodded back, tired and pleased. He listened crit-
ically to the thumping of his heart—excitement was a risk, he
knew—and then grinned. He was getting as bad as the doc-
tors.
Maureen wheeled the old man onto the little open elevator
platform. They dropped, quickly and smoothly on magnetic
cushions, to the lower floor. The old man leaned far over the
side of his chair, studying what he could see of the elevator,
because he had a direct and personal interest in it. Some-
body had told him that the application of magnetic fields to
nonferrous substances was a trick that had been learned from
his General Congruences. Well, there was this much to it:
Congruence showed that all fields were related and inter-

to see another mountain
75
changeable, and there was, of course, no reason why what
was possible should not be made what is so. But the old man
laughed silently inside himself. He was thinking of Albert
Einstein confronted with a photo of Enola Gay. Or himself
trying to build the communications equipment that Congru-
ence had made possible.
The nurse wheeled him out into the garden.
And there before him was the explanation of the morning's
trucks.
A whole mobile television unit had trundled up those ter-
rible roads. And a fleet of cars and, yes, that other noise
was explained, too; there was a helicopter perched on the
tennis court, its vanes twisting like blown leaves in the breeze
that came up the mountain. The helicopter had a definite
meaning, the old man knew. Someone very important must
have come up in it. The air space over the institute was closed
off, by government order.
And reasoning the thing through, there was a logical con-
clusion; government orders can be set aside only by govern-
ment executives, and—yes. There was the answer.
"Are you sure you're warm enough?" the nurse whispered.
But Sidorenko hardlv heard. He recognized the stocky blue-
eyed man who stood chatting with one of the television crew.
Sidorenko's contacts with the world around him were cen-
sored and small, but everyone would recognize that man.
His name was Shawn O'Connor; he was the President of the
United States.
The President was shaking his hand.
"Dear man," said President O'Connor warmly, "I can't tell
you how great a pleasure this is for me. Oh, no. You wouldn't
remember me. But I sat in on two of your Roose lectures.
Ninety-eight, it must have been. And after the second I went
up and got your autograph."
The old man shook hands and let go. 1998? Good lord,
that was close to 50 years ago. True, he thought, cudgeling
his memory, not very many persons had ever asked for the
autograph of a mathematical physicist, but that was an end-
less time past. He had no recollection whatever of the event.
Still, he remembered the lectures well enough. "Oh, of
course," he said. "In Leeds Hall. Well, Mr. President, I'm not
certain but—"

76
est the problem pit
"Dear man," the President said cheerfully, "don't pretend.
Whatever later honors I have attained, as an engineering
sophomore I was an utterly forgettable boy. You must have
met a thousand like me. But," he said, standing straighter,
"you, Dr. Sidorenko, are another matter entirely. Oh, yes. You
are probably the greatest man our country has produced in
this century, and it is only the smallest measure of the esteem
in which we hold you that I have come here today. How-
ever," he added briskly, "we don't want to spoil things for the
cameramen, who will undoubtedly want to get all this on
tape. So come over here, like a good fellow."
The old man blinked and allowed the cameramen to bully
the President and himself into the best camera angles. One
of them was whistling through his teeth, one was flirting with
the nurse, but they were very efficient. The old man was
trembling. All right, I'm 95, I'm entitled to a little senility,
he thought; but was it tiiat? Something was worrying him,
nagging at his mind.
"Go ahead, Mr. President," called the director at last, and
tailored men a blue and silver ribbon.
The camera purred faintly, adjusting itself to light and
distance, and the President began to speak. "Dr. Sidorenko,
Shawn O'Connor took from the hand of one of his alert, well-
todav's investiture is one of the most joyous occasions that
has been my fortune—" Talk, talk, thought the old man, try-
ing to listen, to identify the tune the cameraman had been
whistiing and to track down the thing that was bothering him
all at once. He caught the President's merry blue eyes, now
shadowed slightly as they looked at him, and realized he was
trembling visibly.
Well, he couldn't help it, he thought resentfully. The body
was shaking; the conscious mind had no control over it. He
was ashamed and embarrassed, but even shame was a luxury
he could only doubtfully afford. Something worse was very
close and threatening to drown out mere shame, a touch of
the crawling fear he had hoped never to feel again and had
prayed not even to remember. He assumed a stiff smile.
"—of America's great men, who have received the honors
due them. For this reason the Congress, by unanimous resolu-
tion of both Houses, has authorized me—"
The old man, chilled and shaking, remembered the name of
the tune at last.

to see another mountain
77
The hear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain.
The bear went over the mountain—•
And ivhat do you think he sawP
It worried him, though he could not say why.
"—not only your scientific achievements which are hon-
ored, Dr. Sidorenko, great though these are. The truths you
have discovered have brought us close to the very heart of
the universe. The great inventions of our day rest in large
part on the brilliant insight you have given our scientific work-
ers. But more than that—"
Oh, stop, whispered the old man silently to himself, and
he could feel his body vibrating uncontrollably. The President
faltered, smiled, shrugged and began again: "More than that,
your humanitarian love for all mankind is a priceless—"
Stop, whispered the old man again, and realized with hor-
ror that he was not whispering at all. He was screaming.
"Stop!" he bawled, and found himself trying with withered
muscles to stand erect on his useless feet. "Stop!" The cameras
deserted the President and swung in to stare, with three great
glassy eyes, at the old man; and for old Sidorenko tenor
struck in and fastened on him. Something erupted. Something
exploding and bursting, like a crash of automobiles in flame;
someone shouted near him with a voice that made him cringe.
He saw the nurse run in with a hypodermic, and he felt its
bite.
Endless hours later (though it took less than 60 seconds for
the blood to pump the drug to his brain) he felt the falling,
spiralling falling that he remembered from other needles at
other times, and there was the one moment of clearness be-
fore sleep. Maureen was staring down at him, the needle
still in her hand. "I'm sorry I spoiled the party, dear," he
whispered, his eyes closing, and then he was firmly asleep.
It really wasn't worth the trouble. Why should they want
to waste so much effort on curing him?
The nurse fussed: "There's nothing to worry about, Doc-
tor. A fine, big man like you. Sure you had a bad spell. What's
that? Do you think the President himself has never had a bad
spell?"
"Why don't they leave me alone, Maureen?" he whispered.

78
est the problem pit
"Leave you alone, is itl And you with twenty good years
Inside of you."
"You're a good girl, Maureen," he said faintly, hoarding
his strength. It was really more than they had a right to ex-
pect of him, he thought drowsily. He couldn't afford many
blow-ups like this morning's, and it seemed they were always
happening. Still, it was nice of the President. .
He was a little more alert now, the effects of the needle,
and its later measured, balancing antidotes, beginning to wear
off. This was Wednesday, he remembered. "Do I have to go
in with the Group?" he whined.
"Doctor's orders, Doctor," she said firmly, "and doctor as
you may be, you're not doctor enough to argue with doctor's
orders." It was an old joke, limp to begin with, but he owed
her a smile for it. He paid her, faintly.
After lunch she wheeled him into the Group meeting room.
They were the last to arrive.
Sam Krabbe, said, surly as always in the Group though he
was pleasant enough in social contacts, outside: "You take a
lot of hostility out on us, Sidorenko. Why don't you try being
on time?"
"Sam forgets," said the Reynolds woman to the air. "It
isn't up to Sidorenko, as long as he and Maureen act out
that master-slave thing of having her push his chair. If she
doesn't want to pay us the courtesy of promptness, Sidorenko
can't help it." Maria Reynolds had murdered her husband
and four teenaged children; she had told the Group so at
least 50 times. Sidorenko thought of her as the only legitimate
lunatic the Group owned—except himself, of course; the old
man kept an open mind about himself.
He struggled to hold his head up and his eyes open. You
didn't get any benefit out of the Group's sessions unless you
participated. The way to participate started with keeping the
appearance of alertness and proceeded through talking (when
you didn't really want to talk at all), to discharging emotion
(when you were almost certain you had no emotion left to
discharge). This he knew. Dr. Shugart had told him, in pri-
vate analysis and again before the entire Group.
The old man sighed internally. Sam Krabhe could be re-
lied on to interpret everyone's motives for them; he was doing
it now. Short, squat, middle-aged . . . well, "middle-aged" by
the standards of Dr. Sidorenko. Actually Sam Krabbe was

to see another mountain
79
close to 70. Sidorenko glanced up at the attentive, involved
face of his nurse and let the conversation wash over him.
Sam: "What about that, Maureen? Do you have to focalize
your aggressions on us? I'm getting damned sick and tired of
it, for one."
Nelson Amster took over (35 years old, a bachelor, his life
a chain of false steps and embarrassments because he saw his
mother in every other female he met): "It's a stinking female
attention-getting device, Sam. Ignore it."
Maria Reynolds: "That's fine talk from a pantywaist like
you!"
Eddie Atkinson (glancing first at the bland face of Dr.
Shugart for a cue): "Come on, you old harpies. Give the girl
a break. What do you say, Dr. Shugart? Aren't they just dis-
placing their own hostilities onto Maureen and the doctor?"
Dr. Shugart, after a moment's pause: "Mmm. Maureen, do
you have a reaction to all this?"
Maureen, her eyes lively but her voice serious: "Oh, I'm
sorry if I've made trouble. I didn't think we were late. Hon-
estly. If there was any displacement it was certainly on the
subconscious level. I love you all. I think you're the finest,
friendliest Group I ever—-and—well, there just isn't any am-
bivalence at all. Honestly."
Dr. Shugart, nodding: "Mmm."
The old man tinned restlessly in his chair. Pretty soon, he
thought with a familiar and tolerable ache, they would all
start looking at him and prodding him to participate. All but
Dr. Shugart, anyway; the psychiatrist didn't believe in prod-
ding, except in a minor emergency as a device to pass along
the burden of talk from himself to one of the Group. (Though
he always said he was part of the Group, not its master: "The
analyst is only the senior patient. I leam much from our ses-
sions") But the others would prod, they had no such profes-
sional hesitations, and Sidorenko didn't like that. He was still
turning over inside himself the morning's fiasco; true, he
should voice it, that was what the Group was for; but the
old man had learned in nearly a century to live his life his
own certain way, and he wanted to think it out for himself
first. The best way to keep the Group off him was to volunteer
a small remark from time to time. He said at the first op-
portunity: "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I didn't mean to
upset you."

80
est the problem pit
Everyone looked at him.
Ernie Atkinson scolded: "We're not here to apologize,
Sidorenko. We only want you to know your motives."
Maria Reynolds: "One wonders if all of us know just why
we are here? One wonders how the rest of us are to get proper
attention, if some of us get first crack at the doctor's thought
because they are more important."
Sidorenko said weakly: "Oh, Mrs. Reynolds—Maria—I'm
sure there's nothing like that. Is there, Dr. Shugart?"
Dr. Shugart, pausing: "Mmm. Well, why are we here? Does
anyone want to say?"
The old man opened his mouth and then closed it. Some
evenings he joined with these youngsters in the Group, as
demanding and competitive as any of them, but this was not
one of the nights. Energy simply did not flow. Sidorenko was
glad when Sam Krabbe took over the answer.
"We're here," said Sam pompously, "because we have prob-
lems which we haven't been able to solve alone. By Group
sessions we help each other discharge our basic emotions
where it is safe to do so, thus helping each other to reduce
our problems to dimensions we can handle." He waited for
agreement.
"Parrot!" smirked Ernie Atkinson.
"The doctor doesn't like our using pseudo-psychiatric
double-talk," Maria Reynolds accused the air.
"All right, let's see you do better!" Sam flared.
"Gladly! Easily!" cried Atkinson. He hooked a thumb in
his lapel and draped a leg over the arm of the chair. "The
institution is a place where very special and very concen-
trated help can be given to a very few." ("Snob," Nelson
Amster hissed.) "I'm not a snob! It's the plain truth. We get
broad-spectrum therapy here, everything from hormones to
hypnosynthesis. And the reason we get it is that we deserve
it. Everybody knows Dr. Sidorenko. Amster created a whole
new industry with mergers and stock manipulations. Maria
Reynolds is one of the greatest composers—well, the greatest
woman composers—of the century." ("Damn some people!"
grated Maria). "And I myself—well, I need not go on. We
are worth treating, all of us. At any cost. That's why the gov-
ernment put us here, in this very expensive, very thorough
place."

to see another mountain
81
"Mmm," said Dr. Shugart, and considered for a moment.
"I wonder," he said.
Ernie Atkinson suddenly shrank a good two sizes. His dark
little face turned sallow. The leg slid off the aim of the chair.
"What's that, Doc?" he asked dismally.
Dr. Shugart said: "I wonder if that's a personal motivation."
"Oh, I see," cried Atkinson, "it's what each of us is here
for that's important, eh? Well, what about it? How about your
motivations, Sidorenko?"
The old man coughed.
It always came to this, reliably. He would put out the weak
decoy remarks but it would do no good, one of the Group
would pounce past the decoys to reach his flesh. Well, there
was no fighting it.
"I—" he began, and stopped, and passed a hand over his
face. Maureen was close beside him, her eyes warm and in-
tent. "I know I shouldn't apologize," he apologized, "but it
has been a bad day. You know about it. The thing is, I'm an
old man, and even Dr. Shugart tells me that the old cells
aren't in quite the shape they used to be. There was," he
said mildly, as though he were reading off a dossier from a
statistical sample, "a stroke a few years ago. Fortunately it
limited itself; they're not operable, you know, when you get
to a certain age. The blood vessels turn into a kind of rotten
canvas and, although you can clamp off the hemorrhage, it
only makes it pop again on the other side of the clamp, and
—I'm wandering. I apologize," he finished wryly.
"Mmm," Dr. Shugart said. "There's no such thing as total-
ly undirected speech."
"Of course. All right. But that's why I apologize, because
I'm not getting around very rapidly to an answer.
"I had my—trouble—a few years ago. I don't remember
much about it, except that I gather I was delusional. Thought
I was God, was the way it was expressed to me once. Well,
if I had been a younger man I suppose I could have been
treated more easily. I don't know. I'm not. Time was, I
know, when most doctors wouldn't bother with a man of
ninety-five, even if he did happen to be," he said wryly,
"celebrated not only for his scientific attainments but for his
broad love for mankind. I mean, there's a point of obsoles-
cence. Might as well let the old fool die."

82
est the problem pit
He choked and coughed raspingly for a second. The nurse
reached for him, but he waved her off.
"Mmm," said Dr. Shugart.
And the nurse whispered in a hard bright voice: "I love
you, Noah Sidorenko."
He sat up straight, suddenly struck to the heart.
"I love you," she said stubbornly, "and I'll make you get
well. It can't hurt you if I tell you I love you. I'm not asking
for anything. It's a free gift."
The old man swallowed.
"Don't argue with me, old sport," she said tenderly, and
patted his creased cheek. "Now, how about some psycho-
drama? Let's do the big one! The slum you lived in, Doctor
—remember? The night you were so scared. The accident.
Stretch out," she ordered, wheeling him to a couch and help-
ing him onto it. He went along, dazed. She scolded: "No, curl
up more. You're four years old, remember? Maria, pull that
chair over and be the mother. Ernie, Sam. Let's go out in the
hall. We'll be cars speeding along the elevated highway outside
the window. And let's make some noise! Honk, honk! Aooga!"
But it hadn't been like that at all, he told himself a few
hours later, trying to go to sleep. It had been a big frighten-
ing experience in his childhood. Very possibly it was the
thing that had caused his later troubles (though he couldn't
remember the troubles well enough to be sure). But it was
not what they were portraying in psychodrama. They were
showing a frightened child, and the old man was stubbornly
certain there was more to it than that. But very likely it was
lost forever.
It was only natural that at the age of 95 a great many
experiences should be lost forever. (Such as meeting a soph-
omore who asked for an autograph, when you could have had
no idea that the sophomore would grow up to be President.)
He thought of the white man, wondered who the white
man was, and shifted restlessly in the bed. He could feel his
old muscles tensing up.
Curse the fool thing, the old man said to himself, referring
to his own body; it has lost the knack of living. But it wasn't
the body that was at fault, really. It was the brain. The body
was only crepe and brittle sticks, true, but the heart still beat,
blood flowed, stomach acids leached the building-blocks they

to see another mountain
83
needed from the food he ate. The body worked. But the brain
worked against it; it was brain, not body, that tautened his
muscles and shortened his breath.
That fantastic girl, the old man thought ruefully, she had
said: I love tjou. Well. Let's interpret what she meant, he
commanded, it could only have been an expression of the
natural affection a nurse has for a patient. Still, it was ridicu-
lous, the old man told himself, striving to catch a free and
comfortable breath.
That was the worst thing about the tension. You couldn't
breathe. With much effort Noah Sidorenko wedged his el-
bows under him and raised his chest cage a trifle, not quite
off the mattress, but resting lightly on it, relieving some of
the pressure his shriveled body exerted. It helped, but it
didn't help enough. He thought wistfully of free-fall. Rocket
jockies, he dreamed, floated endlessly with no pressure at all;
how deeply they must be able to breathe! But, of course, he
couldn't live to get there, not through rocket acceleration.
He was wandering, when he wanted most particularly to
think clearly.
He turned on one side and pressed the tip of his nose
lightly with a finger. Sometimes opening the nostrils wide
helped to get a breath. He thought of what the microphones
taped to rib and throat must be recording, and grinned faint-
ly. Funny, though, he thought, that Maureen hadn't come in
to check on him. The purpose of the microphones was to
warn the nurse when he needed attention. Surely he needed
attention now.
He listened critically to his thumping heart. Ka-hump, ka-
bump, ka-bump. It made a little tune:
The bear went over the mown-tain
The song was very disturbing to him, though he did not
even now know why. Somehow it was connected with that
scene in his youth, the crashing cars and the white man. The
old man sighed. He had come very close to remembering all
of it once. They had put him in silence. "Silence" was an
acoustically dead chamber, 20 feet cubed, hung with muffling
fabric and strung with spiderwebs of the felt; there was no
echo and no sound from outside could come in. It was a
conventional tool of study for mental disorders; strapped in

84
est the problem pit
a canvas cot, hung in the center of the cube, eyes closed,
hearing deadened, a subject began very quickly to seek with-
in himself. Fantasies came, delusions came. And ultimately
knowledge came, if the subject could stand it; but three out
of five reached hysteria before they reached any worthwhile
insight, and the old man was one of the three. He had nearly
died . . .
He paused to count the times he had nearly died under
therapy of one kind or another, but it was too hard. And be-
sides, he was beginning to think that he was nearly dying
again. He pushed himself back on his elbows and fought once
more for breath.
This one was very bad.
He slumped back on the bed and reached out for the inter-
com button. "Maureen," he whispered.
She slept in the room next to him, and though he seldom
woke in the night—there was something in the evening cocoa
to make sure of that—when it happened that he did, if he
called, she was there promptly, sometimes in a pink wrapper,
once or twice in lounging pajamas. But not tonight. "Mau-
reen," he whispered to the intercom again, but there was no
answer.
The old man, with an effort, rolled onto his side. The move-
ment dislodged one of the taped microphones. He felt it tear
his skin and, simultaneously, heard the sharp alarm ping in
Maureen's room. But the alarm didn't bring her.
The old man opened his eyes wide and stared at the inter-
com. "I have to get up," he told it reasonably, "because if I
lie here I think I will die."
It was impossible, of course. But what could he lose by
trying? He pushed himself to the edge of the bed. The chair
was within reach, but very remote to Noah Sidorenko, who
had not stood on his own feet in years . . .
And then he was in the chair. Somehow he had made it!
He sat erect and gasping, for a moment. The pain was bad,
but it was better sitting up. Then his hand found the buttons
of the little electric motors.
He spun slowly, navigated the straits between the nurse's
desk and the comer of the bed, went out the door, as it
opened quietly before him.
Maureen's room was empty. The outer door opened, too.

to see another mountain
85
That was good, he thought; he hadn't been sure it would
open; it was never very clear to him whether he was a pris-
oner or not. It was, after all, a sort of madhouse he was in . . .
But it opened.
The hall was empty and silent. He listened for the familiar
grunch, grunch of Ernie Atkinson grinding his teeth in his
sleep, but even that was stilled tonight. He rolled on. The lift
rose silently to meet him.
He let it carry him gently down, and turned inward. The
lower hall was blindingly bright. He made his way to Dr.
Shugart's office.
He paused. There were voices.
No wonder he hadn't heard Ernie Atkinson's grinding teeth!
Here was Atkinson, his voice coming plain as day: "I don't
care what you say, we weren't getting through to him. No.
The Group and psychodrama aren't working."
And Dr. Shugart's voice: "They have to work." Yes, the
old man thought dazedly, it was Shugart's voice all right. But
where was the hesitation, the carefully balanced, noncom-
mittal air? It cracked sharp as a whip!
And Maureen's voice: "Do I have to go on building up this
emotional involvement with him?"
Shugart crackled: "Is it so distasteful?"
"Oh, no!" (The old man sighed. He found he had stopped
breathing until she answered.) "He's an old dear, and I do
love him. But I'd like to give him little presents because I
want to, not because it's part of his therapy."
Shugart rasped: "It's for his own good. This is one of the
finest brains in the world, and it's falling apart. We've tried
everything. Radical procedures—silence, psychosurgery, che-
motherapy—are too much for him to take. Remember what
happened when Dr. Reynolds tried electroshock? So we've
got to work with what we've got."
The old man stirred.
Old as he might be, and insane if they liked, but he wasn't
going to linger out here and listen. A quarter after one in
the morning, and the whole Institute was gathered here in
Shugart's office, plotting the recovery of himself.
"All right," he gasped, rolling in, "what is this?"
They gaped at him.
"All of you!" he said strongly. "What are you doing to me?
Is it a hoax?"

86
est the problem pit
Shugart moved restlessly. Maria Reynolds reached up to pat
her hair, avoiding his eyes.
"You, Doctor Reynolds? Want to explain? I mean—I
mean," he said in a changed tone, no longer gasping, "there
seems to be only one explanation. There's a conspiracy of
some sort, and I'm the target."
Maureen got up and walked toward him. "Come in, Doc-
tor," she said, in a voice of resignation tinged with pleasure.
"Maybe it's better this way. We're not going to get very far
continuing to He to you, are we? So I guess we'll have to tell
you the truth."
The tune rocked crazily through his head. The old man
spun his chair and turned pleadingly to Maureen. "Of course,
Doctor," she said, understanding without words, and fetched
him a fizzy drink. "Only a litde stimulant," she coaxed.
The old man glanced at Dr. Shugart. Shugart laughed.
"Who do you think has been prescribing for you? There isn't
a human being in the Institute without a first-rate degree.
Maureen's our internist—with, of course, a thorough ground-
ing in psychology."
The old man drank reproachfully, looking at Maureen. She
said, clouding: "I know. It isn't fair, but we had to get you
well."
"Why?"
Maureen said somberly: "A brain like yours doesn't come
along too often. I'm not a physicist, but as I understand it
Congruence comes close to doing what Einstein tried with the
unified field theory. You were on the point of doing something
more when you—when you—"
"When I went crazy," the old man said crudely. She shook
her head. "All right, I used a bad word. But that's it, isn't it?"
The girl nodded. "I see."
But the stimulant wasn't doing much good. Ninety-five
years, he thought confused, and perhaps I won't see that
other mountain. It was hard to accept, hard to believe he had
been hoaxed, hard to believe that it wasn't working, that the
delusions would not be cured. "I'm flattered," he whispered
hoarsely, and tried to hand the glass back to Maureen. It
clattered to the floor and bounced without breaking. Maria
with her schizoid detachment, Emie with his worries, Sam
Krabbe and his surly anger—doctors acting parts? The room
swooped around Sidorenko; he was cut off from his reference

to see another mountain
87
points. And they were all afraid; he could see it, it was a
gamble they had taken, that he would never find out, and
now they didn't know what would happen. And he—
He didn't know either.
"I'm sorry to be so much trouble," he gasped.
"You mustn't feel personal guilt," Dr. Shugart said anxious-
ly. "These personality disorders—personality traits—go with
greatness. Sir Oliver Lodge swore he believed in levitation.
Think of Newton, sleepless and paranoid. Think of Einstein.
Religious mania is very common," the doctor assured him,
"and you were spared that, at least. Well, almost—of course,
certain aspects of your—"
"Shut up!" cried Maureen, and reached for the old man's
wrist. He stared up at her, touched by the worry in her face,
trying to find words to tell her there was nothing to worry
about, nothing to fear. He felt his heart lunging against his
ribs and his breathing seemed, oddly, to have stopped. He
made a convulsive effort and drew an enormous, loud breath.
Why, that was almost—what did they call it?—a death rattle.
He did it again.
"Doctor!" moaned the nurse, but he found the strength to
shake his wrist free of her. This was interesting. He was be-
ginning to remember something, or to imagine something—
They were all coming toward him.
"Leave me alone," he croaked. He held them off while
he practiced breathing again; it wasn't hard; he could do it.
He closed his eyes. He heard Maureen catch her breath and
opened them to glare at her, then closed them again.
Noah Sidorenko's brain was perfectly lucid.
He saw—or remembered? But it was as though he were
seeing it with an internal eye—all of his previous life, the
childhood, the government office where he had received the
first scholarship, the four professors quizzing him for his doc-
tor's, even the cloudy days of therapy and breakdown.
The old man thought: It all began 90 years ago, I was all
right until then . . . and he had to laugh, though laughing
choked him, because 90 years ago he had been all of five years
old. But up until then there had been nothing to worry about.
Was it the crash? Yes. And fire. The white man. The song
about the bear. The terrible auto smash, just outside his win-
dow—for his window had looked out on an elevated auto-
mobile highway in Brooklyn, the Gowanus Parkway, where
7.

88
est the problem pit
cars raced bumper to bumper, 50 miles an hour, within five
yards of the bed he slept in. Whoosh. Whoosh. All day long
and all night. At night the strokes were slow, a lagging wire-
brush riff; in the mornings and evenings they were faster,
whooshwhooshwhoosh, a quick rataplan. He listened to them
and dreamed tunes around diem. And there was the night he
had gone to sleep and wakened screaming, screaming.
His mother rushed in—poor woman, she was already wid-
owed. (Though she was only 25, the old man thought with
amazement. Twenty-five! Maureen was that.) She rushed in,
and though die boy Noah was terrified he could see through
the shadow of his own terror of hers. "Momma, Momma, the
white man!" She caught him in her arms. "Please, my God,
what's the matter?" But he couldn't answer, except with sobs
and incoherent words about the white man; it was a code, and
she was not skilled to read it. And time passed, ten minutes
or so. He was not comforted—he was still crying and afraid—•
but his mother was warm and she soothed him. She bounced
him on her knee, ka-bump, Va-hump, Ya-bump, and even
though he was crying he remembered the song with that
beat, He SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, he SAW anOTHer
MOUNTain, and the cars whooshed by and in the next room
the little TV set murmured and laughed. "You're missing your
program, Momma," he said; "Go to sleep, dear," she an-
swered; he was almost relaxed. Crash. Outside the window
two cars collided violently. A taxicab was bound for New
York with a boy in a satin jacket at the wheel and four others
crammed in the back; the boy at the wheel was high on mar-
ijuana and he hit the divider. The cab leaped crazily across
into the Long Island-bound lane. There was not much traffic
that night, but there was one car too many. In it a 30-year-
old advertising salesman rushed to meet his wife and baby
at Idlewild. He never met them. The cars struck. The stolen
taxicab was hurled back into its own lane, its gas tank split,
its doors flung open. Four boys in the jackets of the Gerritsen
Tigers died at once and the fifth was thrown against the re-
taining wall—not dead; but not with enough life left to him
to matter. He stood up and tried to run, and the burning gas-
oline made him a white-hot phantom, auraed and terrible.
He lurched clear across the roadway to just outside Noah's
window and died there, flaming, hanging over the wall, 15
feet above the wreck of the space salesman's convertible.

to see another mountain	89
"The white manl" screamed someone in Noah's room, but
it was not the boy but his modier. She looked from die white-
liamed man outside to her son, with eyes of fear and horror;
and from then on it was never the same for hixu.
"From the time I was five," the old man said aloud, won-
dering, "it was never the same. She thought I was—1 don't
know. A devil. She thought I had the power of second sight,
because I'd been scared by the accident before it happened."
He looked around the room. "And my son!" he cried. "I
knew when he died—telepathy, at a distance of a good eight
thousand miles. And—■" he stopped, thinking. "Tnere were
other things," he mumbled ...
Dr. Shugart fussed kindly: "Impossible, don't you see? It's
all part of your delusion. Surely a scientist should know that
this—witchcraft can't be true! If only you hadn't come down
here tonight, when you were so close to a cure ..."
Noah Sidorenko said terribly: "Do you want to cure me
again?"
"Doctor!"
The old man shouted: "You've done it a hundred times,
and a hundred times, with pain and fear, I've had to undo the
cure—not because I want to! My God, no. But because I can't
help myself. And now you want me to go through it again.
1 won t let you cure me!" He pushed die electric buttons; die
chair began to spin but too slowly, too slowly. Tne old man
fought his way to his feet, shouting at them. "Don't you see?
I don't want to do this, but it does itself ; it's like a baby diat's
getting born, I can't stop it now. It's difficult to have a baby.
A woman in labor," he cried, seeing the worry in dieir eyes,
knowing he must seem insane, "a woman in labor is having
a fit, she struggles and screams—and what can a doctor do for
her? Kill the pain? Yes, and perhaps kill die baby widi it.
That happened, over and over, until the doctors learned how,
and—and you don't know how ...
"You mustn't kill it this timel Let me suffer. Don't cure
mel"
And they stood there looking at him. No one spoke at all.
The room was utterly silent; die old man asKod himself,
Can 1 have convinced them? But diat was so improbable. His
words were such poor substitutes for die dioughts that raced
about his thumping head. But—the thoughts, yes, diey were

90
est the problem pit
clear now; maybe for the first time. He understood. Psionic
power, telepathy, precognition, all die other hard-to-handie
gifts that filled the gap between metaphysics and muscle . . .
diey lay next door to madness. Worse! By definition, they
were "madness", as a diamond can be "dirt" if it clogs the
jet of a rocket. They were mad, since they didn't fit self-de-
fining "sane" science.
But how many times he had come so close, all the samel
And how often, how helpfully, he had been "cured." The de-
lusional pattern had been so clear to "sane" science; and with
insulin shock and hypnosynthesis, with electrodes in his
shaved scalp and psychodrama, with Group dierapy and the
silence—with every pill and incantation of the sciences of the
mind they had, time after time, rooted out the devils. Precog-
nition had been frightened out of him by his modier's panic.
Telepathy had been electroshocked out of him in the Winford
Retreat. But they returned and returned.
Handle them? No, the old man admitted, he couldn't han-
dle them, not yet. But if God was good and gave him more
time, an hour or two perhaps ... or maybe some years; if
die doctor was improperly kind and allowed him his "delu-
sion"—why, he might learn to handle them after all. He
might, for example, be able to peer into minds at will and not
only when some randomly chosen mind, half-shattered itself,
created such a clamorous beacon of noise that then the (tele-
pathically) nearly deaf might hear it. He might be able
to stare into the future at will, instead of having his attention
chance-caught by the flicker of some catastrophic terror pro-
jecting its shadow ahead. And this ancient and useless hulk
that was his body, for example. He might yet force it to live,
to move, to walk about, to stand-
To stand?
The old man stood perfectly motionless beside his chair.
To stand? And then, rather late, he followed the direction of
the staring eyes of Maureen and Shugart and the others.
He was standing.
But not as he had visioned it, in wretched bedridden hours.
He was standing tall and straight; but between the felt soles
of his slippers and the rubber tiles of the office floor there
were eight inches of untroubled air.
No. They wouldn't cure him again, not ever. And with luck,
he realized slowly, he might now proceed to infect the world.

The Deadly Mission of Fhineas Snodpaa..
When I was still in my teens, L. Sprague de Camp
published a wonderful novel called Lest Darkness Fall,
which had to do with a man who was thrust back
through time into the years just before Rome fell to the
barbarians, and through skill and sagacity averted that
fall and, thus, the Dark Ages. This is both a sort of
belated rejoinder to de Camp and a snap at the heels of
the pronatalists and other sweet, dangerous people who
believe that there is some way of dealing with the world's
ills that does not include population limitation.
This is the story of Phineas Snodgrass, inventor. He built a
time machine.
He built a time machine and in it he went back some two
thousand years, to about the time of the birth of Christ. He
made himself known to the Emperor Augustus, his lady Livia
and other rich and powerful Romans of the day and, quickly
making friends, secured their cooperation in bringing about a
rapid transformation of Year One living habits. (He stole the
idea from a science-fiction novel by L. Sprague de Camp,
called Lest Darkness Fall.)
His time machine wasn't very big, but his heart was, so
Snodgrass selected his cargo with the plan of providing the
maximum immediate help for the world's people. The princi-
pal features of ancient Rome were dirt and disease, pain and
death. Snodgrass decided to make the Roman world healthy
and to keep its people alive through twentieth-century med-
icine. Everything else could take care of itself, once the hu-
man race was free of its terrible plagues and early deaths.
Snodgrass introduced penicillin and aureomycin and pain-
less dentistry. He ground lenses for spectacles and explained
91

92
est the problem pit
the surgical techniques for removing cataracts. He taught
anesthesia and the germ theory of disease, and showed how to
purify drinking water. He built Kleenex factories and taught
the Romans to cover their mouths when they coughed. He
demanded, and got, covers for the open Roman sewers, and
he pioneered the practice of the balanced diet.
Snodgrass brought health to the ancient world, and kept his
own health, too. He lived to more than a hundred years. He
died, in fact, in the year a.d. 100, a very contented man.
When Snodgrass arrived in Augustus's great palace on the
Palatine Hill, there were some 250,000,000 human beings
alive in the world. He persuaded the principate to share his
blessings with all the world, benefiting not only the hundred
million subjects of the Empire, but the other one hundred mil-
lions in Asia and the tens of millions in Africa, the Western
Hemisphere and all the Pacific islands.
Everybody got healthy.
Infant mortality dropped at once, from 90 deaths in a hun-
dred to fewer than two. Life expectancies doubled immedi-
ately. Everyone was well, and demonstrated their health by
having more children, who grew in health to maturity and
had more.
It is a feeble population that cannot double itself every
generation if it tries.
These Romans, Goths, and Mongols were tough. Every 30
years the population of the world increased by a factor of
two. In the year a.d. 30, the world population was a half bil-
lion. In a.d. 60, it was a full billion. By the time Snodgrass
passed away, a happy man, it was as large as it is today.
It is too bad that Snodgrass did not have room in his time
machine for the blueprints of cargo ships, the texts on metal-
lurgy to build the tools that would make the reapers that
would harvest the fields—for the triple-expansion steam tur-
bines that would generate the electricity that would power the
machines that would run the cities—for all the technology
that 2,000 subsequent years had brought about.
But he didn't.
Consequently, by the time of his death conditions were no
longer quite perfect. A great many were badly housed.
On the whole, Snodgrass was pleased, for all these things
could surely take care of themselves. With a healthy world

the deadly mission of pihneas snodgrass ■ 93
population, the increase of numbers would be a mere spur to
research. Boundless nature, once its ways were studied, would
surely provide for any number of human beings.
Indeed it did. Steam engines on the Newcomen design were
lifting water to irrigate fields to grow food long before his
death. The Nile was dammed at Aswan in the year 55. Bat-
tery-powered streetcars replaced oxcarts in Rome and Alex-
andria before a.d. 75, and the galley slaves were freed by
huge, clumsy diesel outboards that drove the food ships across
the Mediterranean a few years later.
In the year a.d. 200 the world had now something over
twenty billion souls, and technology was running neck-and-
neck with expansion. Nuclear-driven ploughs had cleared the
Teutoburg Wald, where Varus's bones were still mouldering,
and fertilizer made from ion-exchange mining of the sea pro-
duced fantastic crops of hybrid grains. In a.d. 300 the world
population stood at a quarter of a trillion. Hydrogen fusion
produced fabulous quantities of energy from the sea; atomic
transmutation converted any matter into food. This was neces-
sary, because there was no longer any room for farms. The
Earth was getting crowded. By the middle of the sixth cen-
tury the 60,000,000 square miles of land surface on the Earth
was so well covered that no human being standing anywhere
on dry land could stretch out his arms in any direction with-
out touching another human being standing beside him.
But everyone was healthy, and science marched on. The
seas were drained, which immediately tripled the available
land area. (In 50 years the sea bottoms were also full.)
Energy which had come from the fusion of marine hydrogen
now came by the tapping of the full energy output of the Sun,
through gigantic "mirrors" composed of pure force. The other
planets froze, of course; but this no longer mattered, since in
the decades that followed they were disintegrated for the sake
of the energy at their cores. So was the Sun. Maintaining life
on Earth on such artificial standards was prodigal of energy
consumption; in time every star in the Galaxy was trans-
mitting its total power output to the Earth, and plans were
afoot to tap Andromeda, which would care for all necessary
expansion for—30 years.
At this point a calculation was made.
Taking the weight of the average man at about a hundred
and thirty pounds—in round numbers, 6 x 104 grammes—and

94
est the problem pit
allowing for a continued doubling of population every 30
years (although there was no such thing as a "year" anymore,
since the Sun had been disintegrated; now a lonely Earth
floated aimlessly towards Vega), it was discovered that by the
year 1970 the total mass of human flesh, bone, and blood
would be 6 x 1027 grammes.
This presented a problem. The total mass of the Earth itself
was only 5.98 x 1027 grammes. Already humanity lived in
burrows penetrating crust and basalt and quarrying into the
congealed nickel-iron core; by 1970 all the core itself would
have been transmuted into living men and women, and their
galleries would have to be tunnelled through masses of their
own bodies, a writhing, squeezed ball of living corpses drift-
ing through space.
Moreover, simple arithmetic showed that this was not the
end. In finite time the mass of human beings would equal
the total mass of the Galaxy; and in some further time it
would equal and exceed the total mass of all galaxies every-
where.
This state of affairs could no longer be tolerated, and so a
project was launched.
With some difficulty resources were diverted to permit the
construction of a small but important device. It was a time
machine. With one volunteer aboard (selected from the 900
trillion who applied) it went back to the year 1. Its cargo was
only a hunting rifle with one cartridge, and with that cartridge
the volunteer assassinated Snodgrass as he trudged up the
Palatine.
To the great (if only potential) joy of some quintillions of
never-to-be-born persons, Darkness blessedly fell.

Golden Ages Gooe Away
This us a sort of reminiscence of what the world of
science fiction has been like over the last 30 or 40 years
—or at least, that part of it that 1 inhabited. We are all
being encouraged to write our autobiographies these days
—it is part of the "age of respectability"—and some of
us are proving very easy to persuade. By publishing this
short sketch here, I hope to postpone my own succumb-
ing by at least, oh, umm, maybe a month.
When the Apollo 15 astronauts landed on the moon they
named craters after characters and scenes in stories by Ray
Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Heinlein, Verne, Frank Herbert,
and E. E. Smith. University libraries beg the privilege of
collecting the papers of science-fiction writers. Routinely we
get called on to keynote a scientific gathering or advise large
corporations on how to run their affairs. We are very Estab-
lishment, these days. So much so that when I teach my
college course in science fiction and divide the history of sf
into four eras, the name I use for the present stage is the
Age of Respectability.
It was not always thus. Time was when science fiction was
one pulp category out of a dozen, no more respectable than
sports or horror, nowhere near as financially successful as the
detectives and the westerns. The magazines typically had
names like Thrilling Wonder Stories or Super Science Stories.
The covers matched the titles. A typical scene would be a
fire-eyed monster covered with green scales, crashing through
the window of a spaceship intent on the rape of a terror-
stricken blonde in a stainless-steel bra.
How did we get from there to here?
It was not a straight line. It was a couple of quantum jumps
95

96
est the problem pit
that really didn't seem like much at the time to us who lived
through them (is a germ in an astronaut's bloodstream aware
that he has gone to the moon and back?), but have come
since to be looked on as golden ages in science fiction. For
the world in general these golden ages were gritty, trouble-
some times; one coincided with the buildup and first dis-
astrous years of the second World War, the other with the
sullen McCarthy period in the United States; there was littie
joy in either, for most people. But for science fiction they were
yeasty times ...
As far as I am concerned, the first golden age began around
1937. Probably the dating is personal to me; it happens that
1937 was when I first made a professional appearance, with
a poem in Amazing Stories. But that's close enough, and all
the dates are a little fuzzy. (Even that date, because as it
happens I wrote the poem in 1935, and it was accepted in
1936, and published in 1937—and paid for in 1938, because
that was how things went in those days.) It was around that
time, at any rate, that John Campbell took over Astounding
Stories from F. Orlin Tremaine; the Thrilling Group's editorial
collective of Leo Margulies, Mort Weisinger, and others had
replaced father figure Hugo Gemsback himself on Wonder
Stories; Raymond A. Palmer was about to acquire Amazing
Stories from white-bearded T. O'Conor Sloane, Ph.D. And
then or in the next couple of years, writers like Theodore
Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury,
and a dozen others, better known or less, were about to make
their debuts.
It wasn't only in the titles and the covers of the magazines
that science fiction was a different breed of cat then. The
craftsmanship was poorer. Thematically, it was limited. Large
areas of discussion common in today's science fiction simply
did not then exist: race, for one. If a black man appeared in
a 1937 sf story he was likely to be either a villain or a sham-
bling Stepin Fetchit figure of low comedy—or if neither of
those, he was certain to come from Mars. Sex was a dirty
word. It existed on the covers, but inside the magazines it
was important mostly for its consequences: usually a state of
mind which caused the principal boy to invent space travel
so that he could win the principal girl. What he did with her
after he won her was not described.

golden ages gone away
97
These were areas of science fiction which were not explored
because they were off limits. There were other areas, and
more important ones, which writers did not investigate be-
cause they didn't know they were there. In sf as in any other
creative effort, today's practitioners stand on the shoulders
of their predecessors. None of the kinds of sf that we write
today fell as a gift from heaven. Each was given to us by
some single writer somewhere in the world who woke up one
morning and proceeded to invent a new kind of sf story, and
some of them were just doing the inventing at that time.
Their insights and innovations provided capital on which all
of us have since drawn.
For instance, there was A. E. Van Vogt, a young Canadian
who had been reading science fiction for some time and, at
the age of 27, decided he could do as well as the published
writers. He was right. His first stories included "Black De-
stroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet," and with them he was an
immediate success. The impact of "Discord in Scarlet" was
perhaps helped along by the otherwise irrelevant fact that at
the time the advertising department of Astounding was play-
ing with two-color printing on a few pages, as a ploy to lure
in advertisers, and so some of the pictures for "Scarlet" were
scarlet—we will see again how front-office decisions have had
large effects on science fiction—but they would have been
hits anyway. Van Vogt had enlarged the canvas for everyone
with his alien protagonists. Other writers had invented aliens
—Wells made them real in The War of the Worlds, Wein-
baum made them personalities in A Martian Odyssey—but
Van Vogt's aliens carried the whole story; we saw events
through their eyes and discovered that to them Earthmen
were aliens.
Then there was that former bulldozer artist, hotel clerk, and
would-be trapeze artist (he gave it up after six years' training,
figuring that if he hadn't caught on by then he must be in the
wrong line of work), Theodore Sturgeon. He started slow
with a smart-alecky little joke piece called "Ether Breather,"
but before long he found a line of country all his own, with
stories like "Killdozer" and "Microcosmic God" and dozens
more. Sturgeon once said that all of his stories were about a
single subject and that subject was love. What most writers
have to say about their own work is interesting only to psy-
chologists, but there is truth to this statement; he did indeed

98
est the problem pit
bring into science fiction a sort of tenderness and compassion
which was very much his own—but which, too, has become
a part of the repertoire for a hundred writers since.
Then there were L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A.
Heinlein. I link them together because in their early work "at
least they were rather alike, and quite different from anybody
else. Their heroes were not aliens or supermen. They were
not even heroes. They were the kind of fellow who pumped
your gas at any crossroads filling station. What was special
about de Camp and Heinlein was the engineering exactitude
with which they fleshed out their imaginings. Their cities were
complete with toilets and tax collectors; they were not stage
sets but habitats, and though they might be filled with
thousand-year-hence machines, one felt they were real and
could be built and made to work. Heinlein and de Camp
taught the rest of us to imagine in detail, warts and all.
One could go on forever cataloguing writers from this time.
It is hard to omit the likes of L. Ron Hubbard, that dominat-
ing, picaresque creature who learned how to make his fan-
tasies come true with Dianetics and Scientology, or a dozen
writers hardly remembered now, but new and innovative then,
like Ross Rocklynne and Malcolm Jameson. But the most
interesting thing about these writers is not only what they are
in themselves, but the organizing fact about them all. What
gave them a home in science fiction was a single editor, with
a single magazine. The magazine was Astounding Stories
(now rechristened Analog as part of the general process of
dignifying what we do), and the editor was, right up until
his death the other day, John W. Campbell.
That particular golden age is usually called the Golden Age
of Campbell's Astounding, and it was all that. There were
other writers, good ones. There were other magazines, with
merits of their own. But Campbell was the one who picked
up everything and put it down again in a different and
better form. As one who has labored long in that same vine-
yard, I cannot conceal my admiration for his feat. In a period
of no more than a few years he single-handedly wrote off a
whole generation of science-fiction writers and bred a new
one to his own new standards.
That statement is so true that it is partly true even where
it is false. There were writers—Clifford D. Simak, Jack Wil-
liamson, Murray Leinster—who were ornaments to Campbell's

golden ages gone away
99
Golden Age, and who had been ornaments to other magazines
while Campbell was still an undergraduate at M.I.T. What
he did with them was almost more remarkable. He made
them new writers. From purveyors of space opera and gim-
mick adventure, Campbell retooled them into writers who
competed on equal terms with the best of his new breed.
How did he do it? I'm not sure I know. Perhaps Campbell
never knew himself; perhaps no one can tell how much was
due to his own wit and wisdom, and how much to the power
of an idea whose time has come. Certainly the '30s and '40s
were years of technological ferment. The fission of the ura-
nium atom was discovered in 1938, and Campbell recognized
its importance and had his writers using it in stories in a
matter of months. It was a time of marvels. It seemed that
every day there was a faster plane, or a bigger ocean liner,
or a taller building. It was a time for looking ahead, and one
of Campbell's great innovations was the systematic process
of describing possible futures that the think tanks have called
morphological mapping.
Of course, after a while other people began to see what he
had done. Some of his writers were won away from him by
the blandishments of other editors. New writers came along,
and new things happened in science fiction, to which John
Campbell and Astounding contributed only a minor part. But
those few years of growth and change are a landmark forever,
and they are all John Campbell's.
It was a golden age for me, too, although I really had no
role in those Campbell years of Abounding, I did manage to
appear once or twice, in pseudonymous or collaborative stories
of no great importance, and I even managed to be one of the
competitors wooing his discoveries away from him when, at
the age of 19, I became editor of two sf magazines of my
own, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories.
But I came at science fiction in a different way. I was a
writer and editor pretty early, but long before that I was
a fan.
That was the other revolution that took place in science
fiction around the beginning of our golden age: The develop-
ment of fandom, as an auxiliary force and seedbed for science-
fiction writers.
The beginnings of fandom are lost in antiquity; it may be

100
est the problem pit
as far back as 1930 when the first trufans appeared: here and
there around the world, mostly in the big cities of the United
States, addict met addict and started a club. They weren't
big, and they didn't last, but around 1932 Wonder Stories
tried to type its circulation by starting a big mail-order club
called the Science Fiction League. It did nothing for Wonder
Stories, but it was the making of fandom. While Wonder was
slipping steadily down the drain, the SFL was signing up
members, chartering local clubs, bringing fanpower into con-
tact with itself. Chapter Number One was in Brooklyn, and
by mid-1933 it was having monthly meetings at which 15 or
20 of us teenagers (plus an occasional old man of 20 or 25)
solemnly debated whether A. Hyatt Verrill or John Taine was
the best writer in science fiction and bragged about our col-
lections. Live chapters sprang up in Chicago, Los Angeles,
and Philadelphia (the latter two are still in existence, though
they've changed names and membership lists over the years).
A few split off from the SFL, and new clubs were borri.
Along about 1937 (remember that landmark date!) a group
of us formed a club of our own called the Futurian Society of
New York. The founders and general big men were Don
Wollheim, Robert W. Lowndes (editor of various science-
fiction and fantasy magazines over the years) and myself; the
troops included people like my late collaborator C. M. Korn-
bluth, Richard Wilson, and Isaac Asimov; and a little later
on, Damon Rnight, Judith Merril, Hannes Bok, and others
joined up. We were all pretty young. Don Wollheim was
probably our senior citizen, for he had been old enough to
vote in 1936, and he was senior in an even more important
respect: he had actually sold a story or two to Wonder Stories.
That proved it could be done, and so the rest of us started
out to win our share of the gold and glory.
We worked hard. Probably we worked hard because it
didn't really seem like work to write science-fiction stories.
(In all truth, it hardly seems like work now. In my downest
moments I find to say for our world at least that it has man-
aged to pay me a lifelong living for doing things I would
have been perfectly happy to do for nothing.) Not all of our
work was aimed at the paying markets, for all of us had our
own little fan magazines—mimeographed or hectographed,
published in editions of a dozen or a hundred copies—for
which we wrote invariably rotten amateur stories and some-

golden ages gone away
101
times quite good scathing attacks on everybody else. But our
sights were aimed higher, and by and by most of us began to
sell to the newsstand magazines. Not easily. Not often. But all
the same, somehow, we began to break in. Asimov got the
new editor of Amazing to buy a story called "Marooned Off
Vesta," which for some reason he does not usually include
in his book collections these days. Wollheim and John B.
Michel together managed to get a story into Astounding. Bob
Lowndes sold a poem to Unknown. In permutations and com-
binations beyond counting we collaborated: Wollheim with
Michel, Kornbluth with myself, Lowndes with somebody,
Dirk Wylie with Dick Wilson . . . sometimes three of us
would join forces on a single story, sometimes even more.
The all-time record may have been six Futurians collaborating
on a single 2,500-word story, which sold somewhere for a
fraction of a cent a word, bringing each of them a dollar and
change for their efforts. After a while, in 1939, I somehow got
it into my head that I could edit a science-fiction magazine.
I had no particular reason for believing this, but it didn't
look particularly hard. So I went to see an editor named
Robert O. Erisman, whom I had come to know in the course
of having a dozen or two stories rejected by him, and
explained to him that as it seemed too difficult to make a
living out of writing stories I would be delighted to become
his assistant, please. He was marvelously kind. He didn't
throw me out of his office. He didn't give me a job, either, but
he suggested that I go to see another editor who was in
charge of a large chain of pulps that did not include an sf
magazine and see if I could talk him into giving me a shot
at it. And so I went to see Rogers Terrill at Popular Publica-
tions, and Rog surprised all of us by giving me a desk and
a budget and a printing schedule and orders to create a
couple of sf magazines.
The budget was tiny, to be sure. My salary was even tinier.
But there I was, buying stories and hiring artists and having
a hell of a time. It was so much fun that the rest of the
Futurian Society wanted to play that game too, and so Bob
Lowndes persuaded a publisher named Louis Silberkleit to
put him in charge of a magazine called Future, and Don
Wolheim convinced a father-and-son team named Albert that
what they needed was an sf magazine called Cosmic Stories
with him as editor (they went along, but only up to a point:

102
est the problem pit
the sticking point was that they refused to pay for the stories,
so Don had the problem of getting his writers to donate their
stories). And all of a sudden, we Futurians were no longer on
the outside looking in, we were the inside. We were being
allowed to act out our fantasies in the real world. The inmates
had taken charge of the institution.
Camelot never lasts; a war came along and blew us all
away. Some of us went into the service. Others stayed out, but
the magazines died in the wartime paper shortages. And that
interlude passed into history.
But a few years later, a little older and hopefully a shade
wiser, we were all back for more.
The war ended in 1945. Three or four years later the pub-
lishing industry had got back to its normal state of rosy
optimism shaded by bankruptcies, and science fiction began
to move again. Honorable hardcover houses (Random House
was the biggest) brought out sf collections from the maga-
zines; four or five fans around the country took their savings
out of the bank and set up as semipro book publishers spe-
cializing in sf and fantasy, and there was talk of new maga-
zines.
In the years just around 1950 occurred another of those
editorial revolutions like John Campbell's; the difference was
that this new golden age appeared on two fronts at once.
We mentioned earlier that business-office decisions have
had major effects on the history of science fiction. Two of the
quirkier ones occurred here. The publishers of Ellery Queen's
Mystery Magazine decided that for corporate strength it
ought to add a couple of titles. And an Italian publisher of
gamy comics was making so much money that he decided to
break into the American publishing world.
What the Ellery Queen people did was talk to their con-
tributor Anthony Boucher, then mosdy known as a mystery
writer with a few sf stories and fantasies to his credit. Tony
proposed what they called The Magazine of Fantasy (the
title later broadened to include and Science Fiction, or F&SF
for short). They thought it worth trying out. Tentatively.
They brought it out as a one-shot, and were pleased enough
with the sales to try it again as a quarterly, as a bi-monthly,
and ultimately as a monthly.
What the Italian publisher did was to open a New York

golden ages gone away
103
office and then go looking for magazines to publish. I will not
list the magazines because it is too painful; but somehow
someone put "science fiction" on the list, and their editor,
Vera Cerutti, was appointed to make it happen. Vera didn't
know that much about sf, but she knew that she didn't, and
more than that she knew somehow who did. His name was
Horace Gold.
The Golden Age of Gold sounds like either a misfired
attempted joke or a Shostakovich ballet, but it was very real.
Around 1950, Horace Gold was a prematurely bald man in
his mid-30s, somewhat the worse for a World War II dis-
ability but well able to cope with the world. Where the
coping was difficult it was the world that had to change, not
Horace. He had written God's own quantity of material of
all kinds, and among the comic scenarios and the radio scripts
and the true detectives there were a few sf stories—not bad,
but not great—and a couple of outstanding fantasies:
"Trouble with Water," and above all a fine, tingly novel
called None but Lucifer (which, for reasons which cannot
possibly be any good, has never appeared in book form, to
everyone's loss).
All this was commendable, but was there anything in that
record which qualified Horace Gold to make sf over in a
new and better form? If so, it is hard to identify the diag-
nostic symptom; yet that's what he did. He wasn't scien-
tifically trained. His own writing was best where it had least
to do with science fiction. But he had two traits that served
him well. For one, he had a mind that retained everything;
for another, he had persistence that moved mountains. Horace
Gold's chosen weapon was the telephone. There are few
writers active in sf in the decade of the '50s who do not
remember the phone ringing at any hour, at all hours, and
Horace's voice picking up a month-old conversation about
writing a story or revising one without missing a beat.
His new magazine was called Galaxy. It began with a burst
of bombastic promises about a new kind of science fiction.
The funny thing was that it made them good. In its first years
it published any number of wise and witty and wonderful
stories—by Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, William Tenn, Robert
Sheckley, Robert A. Heinlein (wooed away from Astounding),
Clifford D. Simak (coaxed out of semiretirement), and count-
less others. Very few of those writers set out to write for
8

104
est the problem pit
Galaxy. Even fewer intended to write the stories they ulti-
mately published. Mountie-like, Horace Gold tracked them
down wherever they hid and made them stand and deliver.
I mean no denigration of him when I say that he himself
suggested relatively few stories to his writers. (There are
exceptions, including one of the most successful of my own.)
But Horace's talent was not tutorial. It was obstetrical. When
he came at you with those forceps, the story got born. Nearly
every one of those early stories has appeared in the best sf
anthologies, some of them a dozen times and more; a pub-
lisher offered a not-so-small fortune, not long ago, for the
privilege of reprinting all those issues verbatim; and that's
what Horace Gold did, all by himself.
And uptown at the offices of The Magazine of Fantasy,
Tony Boucher and his sidekick, J. Francis McComas, were
doing something rather similar with a quite different list of
writers. Their notion was that it was possible to merge the
two previously disparate streams of science fiction: the
literary-humanist tradition (the novels of Wells, Olaf Staple-
don, S. Fowler Wright, and others) and the gimmicky, high-
flying, innovative, adventurous sf of the pulps. They made it
happen. They broadened the universe of discourse for sf
writers to include everything there is. Nothing was off limits.
No concept could not be explored.
If this seems like a small tiling, consider what the world
was like in those days of the early '50s. It was the Joe
McCarthy era in the United States. Dissent was penalized.
Careers were being blasted. In those years, when senators
and Presidents headed for the storm cellar, when journalists
and statesmen guarded their tongues, science fiction was the
home of free speech—almost die only public forum there
was, for some people, in some ways. One still meets graying
ministers and scientists who remember those 1950s issues of
Galaxy and F6-SF with eternal gratitude, for letting them
think about the untiiinkable when it was cosdy to speak out
loud.
But that Camelot ended, too, with a whimper. All golden
ages come to an end. Pericles met the Peloponnesian War;
the Caesars lost out to Alaric and the barbarians. What de-
feated tiiat golden age of science fiction was a stock manipu-
lation.

golden ages gone away
105
It was one of those front-office things we have seen before,
but on a heroic and catastrophic scale. Magazine publishers
do not deliver their publications to your local newsstand
themselves. They employ intricate chains of distributors and
wholesalers to do the job. Until the mid-1950s there were two
major channels for national distribution: the collective re-
sources of a dozen independents and their wholesalers on the
one hand, and on the other the massive, ancient American
News Company with its countless subsidiaries.
In the mid-1950s a stock investor looked upon the Ameri-
can News balance sheet and found it good. Over the decades
it had acquired vast equities in restaurants and warehouses
and real estate, and all of those assets had been bought when
the world was young and prices were low. You could buy
up the stock, he mused, and sell off all the assets, and close
up the company, and come out with a ruddy fortune. And
so he did. ANC was liquidated, and dealt the magazine
business in general a blow from which it has never recovered
—as anyone can see who has tried to buy a copy of Look
or Collier's lately.
So science-fiction magazines were done in, most of them.
There were 37 titles at the peak of the boom in the 1950s;
at last count, there were perhaps half a dozen struggling to
stay alive. There's still plenty of science fiction—in books.
But the magazines are only a shadow . ..
It could be different. A new publisher to take a chance.
Another Campbell, or a latter-day Gold. Some bright new
ideas, and some bright new writers to make them real . , .
But that's another story, and a different Golden Agel

Rafferty's Reasons
I wrote this story twice—once when I was in my early
20s, when it went the rounds of the magazines without
connecting, and again 10 or 15 years later, when 1 came
across the yellowed sheets and decided I knew what I
had done wrong the first time, and could do it right the
second. When I finished it I was quite pleased with it.
It happened that that same day I finished another story
with which 1 was not very pleased at all. I sent both of
them to my favorite editor, with a note saying, "You'll
like one of these, I'm sure, but the other I have doubts
about and I won't be disappointed if you reject it." By
return mail came a manuscript, a check and a letter say-
ing, "Boy, were you right!" Only he bought the wrong
one.
It was the year of the projects, and nearly Election time.
Vote for Mudgins! screamed die posters. He put us back to
work!
Even Rafferty was back at work, taken off the technological
dole, and he sat there in his boss's office, looking at him and
hating him. Fat old John Girty, his boss. A Mudgins man
from the old Fifth Precinct days, a man with the lowest phase
number in the state.
"Riffraff!" Girty stormed. "A good job is wasted on a bum
like you. You wish you were back on relief!"
Rafferty only nodded, his face full of misery, his heart
black murder.
"Mark my words, youH wreck the whole project!" Girty
said ominously. "And when die Projects go, die Machine will
come back."
Rafferty nodded again. He wasn't listening, although he
appeared to be. He was watching his hand on the desk. The
106

rafferty's reasons
107
hand was moving, crawling slowly over the chipped plastic
top like a thick-legged spider. It was crawling toward a letter
opener.
"Take warning, Rafferty," said Girty. "You're a trouble-
maker. Thank heaven I've got a few loyal workers in the
Project, to tell me about skunks like you! Don't let me hear
about any complaints from you again. If you don't like your
job, you can quit." Of course, he couldn't, and Girty knew it.
But it was a way to end the conversation, and he turned and
stalked out of the room.
Rafferty sat there, watching his hand, but it was only a
hand again. His hand, weak and helpless like himself; and
the letter opener was only a letter opener. He got up after
a while and leaned absently against the hooded computer
that could have unemployed them all—if it weren't for
Mudgins and his New Way. You couldn't say he was thinking,
exacdy, although there was a lot to think about in the silent
computer under its sealed plastic cover. But he couldn't be
doing that.
Not under the New Way.
It as half an hour before Rafferty opened his books again,
before he dipped his pens in the red ink and the black ink
and wrote down the figures. If Rafferty was capable of pride
he was proud of the way he kept the Project's books.
Machines had taught him how to keep books, and even
Mudgins granted that machines were useful for that sort of
thing. The dark fever inside him slowly receded, and the
artist that lived in Rafferty, the creator inside of every man,
admired the cool, neat numbers that he made.
He lived with the cool numbers all the long afternoon.
(Vote for Mudgins and the Ten-Hour Day! the slogans said.)
And they calmed him. But when the end of the day came
and fat John Girty came out of his office and took down his
black hat and walked out, without a smile, without a word—
Then it was that the black heat inside Rafferty surged up
again, and the smoke of it bit his nostrils. Not for ten minutes
did he get up to leave himself, not until all the others had
gone and no one was there to see him tremble as he walked
out with a look of utter desperation in his eyes.
Rafferty walked past the lines of tables, walked up the
slideway, and to the far corner of the balcony before he put

108
est the problem pit
down his tray. All by himself he sat there, as far as he could
get from the other people who were eating their Evening
Issue meal. He sat down and ate what was before him, not
caring what it was or how it tasted, for everything tasted
alike to Rafferty. All bitter with the bitterness that is the taste
of hatred.
"I hate him," Rafferty said woodenly. "I would like very
much to kill him. I think it would be nice to kill him. Fat
Girty, some day I will kill you."
Rafferty talked to himself, hardly making a sound, never
moving his lips. It wasn't thinking out loud, because it wasn't
thinking, only talking, and it was not out loud. Wherever he
was, Rafferty talked to himself. No one heard him, no one was
meant to hear him.
"I hate your lousy guts," Rafferty would say, and the man
beside him would smile and bob his head and never know
tiiat Rafferty had said anything at all.
He would talk to people who weren't there. When he first
went on the Projects, Rafferty thought that some day he
would say those things to people. Now he knew tiiat he would
never say them to anyone but himself.
"You are a cow," Rafferty said. He was talking to Girty,
who wasn't anywhere near the New Way cafeteria where the
Projects personnel ate. "You say I'm a troublemaker, when I
only want tiiem to leave me alone. You think I make mistakes
with the numbers in the books. I don't. I never make mistakes
when I write down numbers and add them. But you think
I do."
If Girty had been tiiere, he would have denied it—because
how could Rafferty make mistakes after the machines had
taught him? But Girty wasn't there, and the rest of the people
around Rafferty in the cafeteria went on eating and talking
and reading, except for a few as silent and solitary as Rafferty
himself. None of them heard him.
Rafferty picked up the big dish and put it away from him,
picked up a smaller dish and put it down in front of him,
touched a fork to the soggy but vitamin-rich and expertly
synthesized pie.
"Your secretary," said Rafferty in his silent voice, "she
makes mistakes, though. Perhaps I should kill her too, cow."
Rafferty finished the pie and went down the stairs.
"You blame me for everything," Rafferty said, pushing

rafferty's reasons
109
silently through the crowd at the coffee-beverage um. He put
a Project-slug in the slot and held the lever down while his
cup filled with three streams of fluid, one black, one white,
one colorless. "You don't treat me right, cow," he said, and
turned away.
A man jostled him and scalding pain ran up Rafferty's wrist
as the hot drink slopped over.
Rafferty turned to him slowly. "You are a filthy pig," he
said voicelessly, smiling. "Your mother walked the streets."
The man muttered, "Sorry," over his shoulder.
Rafferty sat down at another table with a party of three
young Project girls who never looked at him, but talked loudly
among themselves.
"I'll kill you, Girty," Rafferty said, as he stirred the coffee-
beverage and drank it.
"Ill kill you, Girty," he said, and went home to his dormi-
tory bed.
John Girty said peevishly: "I want you all to try to act like
human beings this morning. We have an important visitor
from Phase Four."
The Project nodded respectfully and buckled down to work
and when the important visitor arrived and stood with Girty,
looking over the busy room, not even Rafferty looked up.
But the visitor looked at Rafferty, and said something in an
undertone to Girty. "Oh, well, of course," said Girty. "We get
all kinds here. That one has a bad record. He was some kind
of an artist, or picture painter, or something like that under
the Old Way. They take a lot of work, those marginal ones,
and, as you see, they're likely to turn out sullen."
The visitor said something again and Girty laughed. "He
might not like it," he said with heavy, angry humor. "Heaven
help us all if we ran this Project die way he likes. But come
on into my private office. You'll be interested in our overtime
schedule—"
They were gone, and Girty was right, Rafferty did not
resent the way they talked about him, no more than St.
Lawrence, roasting on his grid, would have resented a sneer-
ing word from his torturers. Rafferty hadn't the scope left to
resent small injuries.
The electronic call-me-up whispered on old Miss Sand-

110
est the problem pit
burg's desk, and she limped into Girty's office, clutching her
stenographer's pad as though it might bite. She was a sour
one too, for all she was second in command of the Project
office. She had been a wife and a mother once, and they said
that she didn't really want to work. But she worked, of course.
Rafferty sat hunched over his books, looking at John Girty's
door without turning his head. He saw old Ellen Sandburg
go in, and saw her come out again ten minutes later, with
the spiderweb lines sharper around her eyes, and the white
lips pressed hard together. "You are a slave," Rafferty said
without a sound. "You let him bully you because you like to
be a slave. But I don't."
But he was working with the cool numbers then, and he
lost himself. The zeroes and fives and decimals moved in
orderly progression, and there was no hate in them, nothing
but chill straightness that never changed.
Only at three o'clock in the afternoon when he had to take
the Saturday payroll into fat John Girty's office to be checked
and verified, did the coolness fall away and leave him burn-
ing. "I won't kiss your foot," said Rafferty, and opened the
door without knocking. "I'm as good as you are, cow," said
Rafferty, and dumped the carton of pay envelopes silendy on
Girty's desk.
But Girty hardly looked at him, only grunted with his fat,
angry cow's grunt and thumbed irritably dirough the enve-
lopes. But when Rafferty went back to his desk the numbers
would not go right. They were hot red and smoldering black,
and they swirled and bloated before his stinging eyes. He sat
there and watched them swirl and swell as fat as fat John
Girty. He just sat there, Rafferty did, holding his pen over
the ledger, moving his fingers as though he were writing, but
never touching pen to paper until five o'clock, early Saturday
quitting time.
Then fat John Girty came out of his office and dumped the
pay envelopes on Rafferty's desk again, and took his hat and
left. The clerks and the girls put away their papers, and took
their coats from where diey had hidden them behind the
sheeted bookkeeping machines and lined up before Rafferty's
desk to get their pay.
"The Project pays you to work, not to collect money." That
was what Girty said. "On the Project's time you work. You

rafferty's reasons
111
get paid on your own time. You get off early on Saturdays
anyhow."
It wasn't fair. But all Rafferty could do when Girty went
out of the office was to stare after him for a second, with his
own hot, black heart showing in his eyes, and try to rush
through handing out the payroll.
'You're a coward, Girty," he said without a sound, and
handed a fat yellow envelope of Project-vouchers and Project-
slugs to Ellen Sandburg.
"You know that I hate your guts, so you run away," he
said. "But it won't help you, cow. You can run away. But I
can catch you."
Fifteen minutes start John Girty had. No more. But it took
Rafferty over an hour to make it up. An hour of looking in
all the expensive, free-market restaurants where Girty might
be, pressing his forehead against the glass like an urchin on
Christmas day, only with the blackness coming out of no
urchin's eyes.
The streets were packed, and crowds bumped against Raf-
ferty, some careless and impolite, some doddering and apolo-
getic, and once or twice a man as bleak and frozen as Rafferty
himself.
It was weekend going-out night, and every street comer
had its Mudgins Demonstrator on his flag-draped platform,
frightening the passersby with prophecies of the return of
Unemployment and the Machine. Rafferty noticed that he
was hungry, but he didn't have time to eat, not while he was
looking for fat John Girty and while the letter opener was
secretly fondled in his pocket.
And then at the end of the search, to see John Girty just as
he was coming out of the biggest free-market restaurant of
all and get into a taxicab. A taxicab, that cost real money.
And there was Rafferty, with two dollar bills of real money in
his pocket, hoarded over months, and a pocketful of Project-
vouchers and Project-slugs.
He did it. He took another cab to follow Girty, but he
sat with his heart in his mouth behind the cab driver, watch-
ing the clicking black numbers on the meter and doing some-
thing that was close to praying. But of course it wasn't really
praying, under the New Way.

112
est the problem pit
Rafferty snarled voiceless curses at the cab driver, who had
looked so openly suspicious of his Project suit and his
panther's eyes, and so contemptuous of Rafferty's fumbling
directions as he tried to keep them on die trail of the fat man
in the cab ahead.
"I ought to kill you, too," Rafferty told the driver, but
silently. "I ought to cut your throat the way I'm going to cut
the fat cow's throat with what I have hidden here."
The driver sat on his little bucket seat, where they had
ripped out the automatic control apparatus to make room foil
a human driver under the New Way, and never knew than
murder was right behind him. But it was only a short ride—
fortunately for Rafferty's two dollars. The meter said forty
cents.
"I ought to kill you," Rafferty said again, not looking at the
driver who was fumbling for change but staring at the
enormous white Old Way building Girty had gone into. "You
deserve to be killed. I'll give you a tip, and you'll go and tell
the Mudgin's police that I'm following Girty to cut his throat.
Take my money and tell the police, that's what you'll do." He
picked up the half dollar from the driver's palm and left the
dime. "I ought to kill you, too."
But the driver couldn't tell them what he didn't know, so
Rafferty bought a newspaper at a stand and stood looking
at the headlines obstinately until he heard the cab drive
away. The headlines on the news stories said Liquidation of
80,000 Wilfully Unemployed and Legislators Hail Mudgins
Way and Project Kitchens to Get New Wonder Yeast Meal,
but it had been a long time since Rafferty had read even a
headline in a newspaper, and he didn't read them now. He
only looked at them unseeing until the cab was gone, and
then he looked up at the big white building. It was a Turkish
bath.
"Fat old cow," Rafferty laughed silently. "So fat you go to
a place like this to die."
Rafferty tore the newspaper in half and threw it on the
street, and then he went in, one hand on the thing in his
pocket, although the man in the lobby looked at him oddly.
He had to pay a dollar, real money, to get in, and that left
him with 45 cents and the Project-vouchers, the useless
Project-vouchers that they wouldn't take in a free-market

rafferty's reasons
113
place like this. But he didn't need even 45 cents, not for what
he had in mind.
But diere was a problem. He had to put all his clothes in a
locker, all of them. He stood there naked, a lean, bent man
with panther's eyes, wishing he had a pocket. But there was
no pocket in his skin, and he had to leave the long, sharp
letter opener in the locker.
Once upon a time, it seemed to Rafferty, a long, long time
ago someone who then had been that which was Rafferty
now had been in a place like this. That was during what they
called the "Old Way," although it seemed to Rafferty, they
hadn't called it that dien. There was something there that
did no add up neatly in his mind, but he was walking through
a hot, steamy corridor of tile, and he didn't bother about that
any more. It was damp underfoot, and diere were splashing
showers alongside. He stepped into a shower and let the
water thunder on him.
And he turned his face up into the stream and cowered
back, out of sight, as fat old John Girty puffed pinldy past;.
Girty was naked as a newborn, soft as a moulted crab,
flabby as a pink harem eunuch. "I spit," Rafferty soundlessly
told the roaring water. "Fat, soft diing. You're dirty, cow.
"Fat and dirty—
"I'll kill you, Girty."
Rafferty stood in the steam room, peering across the cor-
ridor at the massage tables where fat Girty was presenting
his flabby pink flesh to be thumped. Rafferty couldn't see
through the clouded glass and so he had to keep opening the
door, and every time he opened it steam billowed out and
drafts knifed in on the men who sat naked on wooden bcnches
in the steam. The metal door burned Rafferty's hand, he
noticed, but it was a cool thing compared to die black heat
that stung his throat inside him.
Girty was still waddling and puffing around the massage
table, talking to the rubber. Rafferty let the door to the steam
room close on him, and squinted around the little cube of
hell he was in. There were dim, loose shapes sprawled around
the walls. Some were fat and many were old, but none was as
flabby as John Girty.
There were three lights on the wall of the steam room,

114
est the problem pit
head-high, candle-pale. There was a fourth light that was
burned out, and Rafferty sat down in die little dark under it,
waiting until it was time.
"I have a knife to kill you with," he crooned soundlessly.
"Fat cow. I have a knife to cut you with and stab you with.
I'll kill you, Girty."
Rafferty sat there with patient violence, like an avalanche
waiting on cue in the wings of a spectacular drama. He was
in no hurry; he might perhaps move very fast indeed, fast as
lightning or the star rays that shoot across the void, but he
would not be hurrying.
There was no time for such as Rafferty, and no longing
for waiting to come to an end, and no regret for time lost.
Though perhaps there once had been, before Mudgins, and
the New Way, and the machines that taught Rafferty and
those like Rafferty how to do the work of machines.
It was time to look out the door again, and he got up,
squinting his white-hot eyes against the steam, and walked
over. In the massage room Girty was on the table now, with
a while towel over his ugliness. A tall, brown man in trunks
clapped goggles to Girty's eyes and pressed a switch that lit
a shimmering violet light overhead.
"Close the door, damn it!" One of the dim white shapes
behind Rafferty was sitting up and swearing at him.
"Your mother loved hogs," Rafferty said without voice, but
he closed the door and walked out.
This was the part that was hard to do. He walked back-
ward and sidewise like a crab, keeping his face hidden from
even the closed, goggled eyes of Girty. He climbed onto a slab
next to Girty and lay down with his head turned away.
"Put goggles on me, you filthy pig," he soundlessly ordered
the rubber. "Hide my face before Girty looks this way." His
averted eyes saw a sign on the wall:
Swedish Rub	$1.00
Rafferty had a 25-cent-piece and two dimes. And the
Project-vouchers, of course, but not for here. The rubber,
came then, and covered Rafferty. He looked at him thought-
fully for a moment before he spoke, but all he said was:
"Good evening, Sir. Swedish rub today?"
Salt Rub 	
Sun Lamp & Massage
.75
1.50

raj-ferty's reasons
115
Rafferty nodded, looking expressionlessly into the rubber's
coarse, tanned face. He could not speak out loud, so close to
Girty's fat but listening ears, but he only had to nod. "Any-
diing, filthy pig," he said soundlessly. "One dollar is nothing.
Perhaps I will pay you with the same knife I pay Girty with."
The rubber assembled his greases and cloths and Rafferty
waited until it was time. He thought about the one dollar
of real money that someone in this place would expect him to
pay, but of course he would have paid all his bills in full, for-
ever, before he came to the cashier's window again. He
thought of the letter opener, lost to him in the locker down
below. But the knife was better, eight inches long and care-
fully honed, with a thin blade that would slash a throat or go
between two ribs.
"It will make meat out of Girty," he told the unhealing
rubber. "Perhaps it will make meat out of you. I know it
will make meat out of me, too, but not until I have finished
with fat Girty."
It was good that the knife was there, to solve all his prob-
lems at once. He waited until it was time.
Girty's lamp went out, and his rubber rolled him over, and
Girty immediately began talking to the man. Rafferty could
hear the hard-muscled, cupped-hand slaps on the sagging
pink flesh, and Girty's wheezing, jolting voice.
"I'll kill you, Girty," he said, and it was like a hymn. "Ill
kill you, Girty," he said without sound.
Girty was saying proudly, "Hell, I've—ugh—worked with
Mudgins just like—ugh—that. Ever since the old Fifth—ugh
—Precinct days. He and I—"
Rafferty wasn't listening, not exactly. He was letting the
words flow over him as unnoticed as his rubber's attentions,
waiting for it to be time. There would be some sort of signal,
it seemed to him, and then he would make meat out of Girty.
Not exactly listening, he caught a sudden change in Girty's
voice and for a second he tensed, thinking perhaps it was the
signal. "Easy, sir," said his rubber, thinking he had hit a sore
spot.
But Rafferty didn't relax until he realized that the change
in Girty's voice was because he was greeting a friend. Raf-
ferty peered and saw another man, as pink as Girty but noth-
ing like as fat, as old but not nearly as flabby, advancing as
bare as a baby and talking to Girty.

116
in the problem pit
"Lay down with dogs, you fool," said Rafferty venomously,
not making a sound, "and you get up with fleas. I warn you,
Girty-lover. I'll kill you, too, with a knife that will hack your
heart out before you even see it. Cows."
Rafferty's rubber flopped him over then, and for a plunging
moment it seemed to Rafferty the man would surely see the
knife. But he didn't say anything, only: "Easy, sir. Let me
know if I'm too brisk."
Rafferty lay face down on the slab, watching his fingers
crawl across the cloth beside his face. "The hands can kill
you, Girty," he said voicelessly. "But the knife is better. Go
and run, with your Girty-loving friend. Wherever you go, IH
be there."
They were talking, Girty and the Girty-lover, and Raf-
ferty reached out to taste the conversation. The friend was
complaining, while another masseur eased the kinks out of
his shoulders. The friend was saying, "Sixty hours? That's
a good long workweek, yes. And it keeps them out of trouble,
I'm not denying it. But there's a fatigue factor, John. After
sixty hours a worker is bound to make mistakes."
Girty said: "Not if he's been disciplined. Give them the
New Way treatment, that's all." He laughed, like a pig's
squeal. "I'd like to see them make mistakes then."
His friend said: "I don't hold with the treatments."
Girty said, after a moment, in a voice that was still a
cow's voice, but the voice of a shocked and stern cow: "Are
you against Mudgins?"
Rafferty stopped feeling the texture of the conversation
then, because what did it matter to him? The Girty-lover
was defensive and overemphatic, and Girty himself was hos-
tile and only slowly allowed himself to be soothed. They
were talking about full employment and the horrors of the
Old Way and the Machines, and the Girty-lover was petulant-
ly insisting that the machine-education treatments had—un-
specified—faults.
Rafferty didn't listen. The New Way treatments were ma-
chines droning and flashing in your ears and hammering,
hammering, hammering at you until you couldn't make a mis-
take, not in the things they taught you to do. Because you
were half machine yourself, by the time they finished fluxing
and forging your mind. And full employment was overtime at

raj-ferty's reasons
117
the Project and an end to the—the studio, or whatever the
word was, that once had meant something back in the days of
the Machine and—and Ait, whatever that word was.
But what did it matter to Rafferty, that he should listen?
Better to lie there with die secret knowledge of eight inches
of honed steel, waiting.
John Girty was saying in his hoarse cow's rumble, "I tell
you, Mudgins saved us from going to hell in a handbasket!
You don't remember the Old Way. Love. Churches. And
crackpots making speeches—about anything. Voting—for any-
body, anybody you liked. Mudgins cleaned all that up. 'Keep
them busy,' he said, 'and you'll keep them out of trouble.'
Get rid of die Machine, put people back to work. If they
don't want to work the way they ought to—make dieml I
remember, back in the Fifth—"
Rafferty wasn't listening, not exactly, but the words were
fuel to keep him going. But the rubber was through with
him, and flopped him right-side-up again, and again there
was that moment when the universe stopped, waiting to see
if the man would see the knife.
The rubber said cheerfully, "There you are, sir. That'll fix
you up. Now how about a little suntan to tone up the skin?"
His hand was already on the switch, and the tube overhead
flared violent. Rafferty stared ragingly at it through his gog-
gles, hating the darkened, shapeless core of the light.
Girty's oration broke off: "—but that's the way Mudgins
always— Hey. Say, excuse me, but— Hey."
Rafferty froze. From the corner of .his eye he saw John
Girty ponderously pushing himself up on one flabby arm,
staring at him with doubt in the wrinkled little eyes. Near-
sighted Girty—but he had recognized Rafferty!
It was the moment of the knife. Quite slowly Rafferty
lowered his legs to the floor. "Dirty cow," he said sound-
lessly. He felt the knife, keen and ruthless in his hand. Eight
slim inches to kill with. "Dirty, dirty, dirty," he chanted—
but it was not soundlessly. "Dirty, dirty, I'll kill you, Girty."
It was loud now, his own voice.
Oh, they tried to stop him. He could have laughed at that,
if he had remembered how. Try to stop Rafferty, with an
eight-inch killing knife! They were all shrieking and yowling
and running about at once, and they grabbed at him, but he

118
in the problem pit
brushed them off like the staining soot of the air. And they
got in his way, but it cost them. He hacked and stabbed and
sliced and slew.
He was a Spartacus, and a Lizzie Borden, swordsman and
butcher. He stabbed every one of them to the heart and
ripped them up and down, and for the first time in longer
than he could know, Rafferty was Rafferty, Mister Rafferty,
a man who had once been a human being and, God save
the mark, an artist, and not a mere flesh ersatz for a book-
keeping machine. Kill and slice and tear! They overturned
furniture, squealing and thundering, like a trapped horse kicfc-
ing at the flaming, booming walls of its stall. But he killed
them all, many times, this Rafferty who was Spartacus and
Lizzie Borden—
And, at last, a warrior of the Samurai as well.
When he had killed them enough to slake the fever, he
killed himself. Into the pit of the stomach and up. He felt
the blade slide and slice, too sharp to tear, a warrior's weapon.
The eight-inch steel made cat's meat of his bowels and heart
and lungs. Rafferty felt himself dying, but it was worth it,
it was worth it, it was worth everything in the world . . .
After he committed suicide, he sat there and watched his
victims running about. It was several seconds before he no-
ticed that he wasn't dead.
Girty's friend demanded: "Do you still think the machine
treatments are good?"
Girty said: "Ow. The ugly son beat me black and blue."
He rubbed his bruised pink paunch, staring at the door where
they had carried Rafferty out, weeping.
"You're lucky," said Girty's friend. "Suppose he really had
a knife, instead of that old cigar butt he picked up. Suppose
somebody else on your Project cracks up, only this one gets a
gun somewhere."
Girty said petulantly, "Where would anybody get a gun
these days?" He was getting his breath back, and his nerve.
"Suppose he did," his friend insisted.
Girty said truculently: "Watch yourself. I don't stand for
antiNew Way talk. So Rafferty cracked up. I knew he was a
weak one. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,
and what's it to me if somebody like Rafferty gets broken?^
He measured his words carefully. 'Teople like Rafferty

raj-ferty's reasons
119
are troublemakers, they don't want to work, they don't want
full employment. They liked the soft, rotting life under the
Old Way and the Machine. If you don't give them treatments,
they'll make trouble now. Sure, some of them crack up—like
sometimes you put a casting in the press and it cracks, be-
cause it's brittle. Worthless. Mudgins knows what to do with
the worthless ones. Make them fit, or break them."
"But I don't like Mudgins and his treatments," Girty's friend
said violendy . . . but not out loud. He sat up, wonderingly.
He wasn't in the habit of talking to himself and he won-
dered if other people ever talked like that to themselves.
Girty, unhearing, was brooding: "You'd think even a piece
of trash like Rafferty would want to be part of something.
Why wouldn't he? But no, he has to work up some crazy re-
sentment—try to kill me. Why? What reason could he have?"
Girty's friend could not give him the answer, though he
might have had suspicions. Mudgins could have answered
him, and a few others around Mudgins or elsewhere. A few
in high places who didn't need even touch-up courses un-
der the machines, could have told him Raffertv's reasons.
But only a few. The others, the many, many millions, they
could never sav what the reasons were; because some of them
had never known them, and some had had to forget.

I Remember a Winter
1 wrote this story on a balcony of the Century Vl/yM
Hotel in Beverly Hills one afternoon, while my wife tvas
taking a nap in our room and, having finished it, could
not quite decide what to do next. 1 was pleased with it,
and I thought it was science fiction, but 1 wasn't at all
sure that anyone eke would. So I sent it to Damon
Knight for an opinion. He never said whether he thought
it was sf or not, but he did publish it in Orbit.
I remember a winter when the cold snapped and stung,
and it would not snow. It was a very long time ago, and in
the afternoons Paulie O'Shaughnessy would come by for me
after school and we'd tell each other what we were going to
do with our lives. I remember standing with Paulie on the
corner, with my breath white and my teeth aching from the
cold air, talking. It was too cold to go to the park and we
didn't have any money to go anywhere else. We thumbed
through the magazines in the secondhand bookstore until the
lady threw us out. "Let's hitch downtown," said Paulie; but I
could feel how cold the wind would be on the back of the
trolley cars and I wouldn't. "Let's sneak in the Carlton," I
said, but Paulie had been caught sneaking in to see the Marx
Brothers the week before and the usher knew his face. We
ducked into the indoor miniature golf course for a while; it
had been an automobile showroom the year before and still
smelled of gas. But we were the only people there, and con-
spicuous, and when die man who rented out the clubs started
toward us we left.
So we Boy Scout-trotted down Flatbush Avenue to the
big old library, walk 50, trot 50, die cold air slicing into
die insides of our faces, past the apple sellers and die wine-
120

i remember a winter
121
brick stores, gasping and grunting at each other, and do you
know what? Paulie picked a book off those dusty old shelves.
We didn't have cards, but he liked it too much to leave it
unfinished. He walked out with it under his coat; and 15
years later, shriveled and shrunken and terrified of the priest
coming toward his bed, he died of what he read that day. It's
true. I saw it happen. And the damn book was only Beau
Geste.
I remember the summer that followed. I still didn't have
any money but I had found girls. That was the summer when
Franklin Roosevelt flew to Chicago in an airplane to accept
his party's nomination to the Presidency, and it was hotter
than you would believe. Standing on die corner, the sparks
from the trolley wheels were almost invisible in the bright
sim. We hitched to the beach when we could, and Paulie's
pale, Jewish-looking face got red and then freckled. He hated
that; he wanted to be burned black in the desert sun, or may-
be clear-skinned and cleft-chinned with the mark of a helmet
strap on his jaw.
But I didn't see much of Paulie that summer. He had fin-
ished all the Wren books by then and was moving on to-
Daredevil Aces; he'd wheedled a World War French bayonet
out of his uncle and had taken a job delivering suits for a
tailor shop, saving his money to buy a .22. I saw much more
of his sister. She was 15 then, which was a year older than
Paulie and I were. In his British soldier-of-fortune role-play-
ing he cast her as much younger. "Sport," he said to me,
eyes a little narrowed, half-smile on his lips, "do what you
like. But not with Kitty."
As a matter of fact, in the end I did do pretty much as I
liked with Kitty, but we had each married somebody else
before that and it was a long way from 1932. But even in
1932 I tried. On a July evening I finally got her to go up on
the roof with me; it was no good; somebody else was there
ahead of us, and Kitty wouldn't stay with them there. "Let's
sit on the stoop," she said. But that was right out in the street,
with all the kids playing king-of-the-hill on a pile of sand.
So I took her by the elbow, and I walked her down the
Avenue, talking about Life and Courage and War. She had
heard the whole thing before, of course, as much as she
would listen to, but from Paulie, not from me. She listened.

122
in the problem pit
It was ritual courtship, as formal as a dog lifting his leg. It
did not seem to me that it mattered what I said,, as long as
what I said was masculine.
You can't know how masculine I wanted to be for Kitty.
She was without question the prettiest doll around. She looked
like—-well, like Ginger Rogers, if you remember, with a
clean, friendly face and the neatest, slimmest hips. She knew
that. She was studying dancing. She was also studying men,
and God knows what she thought she was learning from me.
When we got to Dean Street I changed from authority on
war to authority on science and told her that the heat was
only at ground level. Just a little way above our heads, I told
her, the air was always cool and fresh. "Let's go up on^he
fire escape," I said, nudging her toward the Adantic Theatre.
The Adantic was locked up tight that year; Paulie and I
were not the only kids who didn't have movie money. But
the fire escapes were open, three flights of strap-iron stairs
going up to what we called nigger heaven. I don't know why,
exactly. The colored kids from the neighborhood didn't sit
up there, in fact. I never saw them in the movies at all. The
fire escapes made a good place to go. Paulie and I went up
there a lot, when he wasn't working, to look down on every-
body in the street and not have anyone know we were watch-
ing them. So Kitty and I went up to the second landing and
sat on the steps, and in a minute I put my arm around her.
And all of this, you know, I'd thought out like two or
three months in advance, going up there by myself and ex-
perimentally bouncing my tail up and down on die steps to
test for discomfort, calculating in a wet morning in May
what it would be like right after dark in August, and all. It
was a triumph of 14-year-old forethought. Or it would have
been if it had come to anything. But somebody coughed,
higher up on the fire escape.
Kitty jabbed me with her elbow, and we listened. Some-
body was mumbling softly up above us. I don't know if he
had heard us coming. I don't think so. I stood up and peered
around the landing, and I saw candlelight, and an old man's
face, terribly lined and unshaven and sad. He was living
there. All around the top landing he had carefully put up
sheets of cardboard from grocery cartons, I suppose to keep
the rain out. If it rained. Or perhaps just to keep him out of

i remember a winter
123
public view. He was sitting on a blanket, leaning his forearm
on one knee, looking at the candle, talking to himself.
And that was the end of that. We tiptoed down the stairs,
and Kitty said she had to go home. And did. Otherwise, I
honestly think that in the long run I would have married her.
I remember the years of the war, the headlines and the
blackouts and the crazy way everything was changing under
my very eyes. Paulie had it made. He enlisted first thing, and
wrote me clipped, concise letters about the joys of close-order
drill. I remember buying his old car the last time he came
home on furlough, with his cuffs tucked in his paratrooper
boots, telling deadpan stories about the hazards of basic train-
ing. The car was a 1931 Buick, with a jug cork in the gas tank
instead of a cap. I sold it for the price of two train tickets
when I ran out of gas-ration coupons in Pittsburgh, on my
honeymoon. Not with Kitty. Kitty had gone far out of my
life by then. Her dancing lessons had paid off: amateur-night
tap dancer to Film Fun model to showgirl at the International
Casino; and then she'd gone abroad to Paris with a troupe
and been caught in the Occupation. Well. Mutatis mutandis
and plus 9a change and so on. Or, as one might say, things
keep getting all screwed up.
I breezed through the war. Barring a company clerk in
Jefferson Barracks who I really wanted to kill, there was noth-
ing I couldn't handle; Paulie had lied. Or maybe for me it
was a different war. I had got into newspaper work, which
let me get into Special Services when my time came. Nobody
was shooting at unit managers for USO shows. I went dirough
forty-one months of exaltation and shame. You see, this was
the war that really mattered and had to be won; and how I
burned, with what a blue-white flame, with pride to be a part
of it. And how I groveled before anyone who would listen
because my part was mostly chasing enlisted men away from
big-breasted starlets. Do you suppose it's really true that
somebody had to do that job, too? I couldn't believe it, but it
was because of that that I met Kitty again.
She turned up looking for a job as a translator, looking
very much as she always had. She was different, though. She
was married, to this very nice captain she had met during
Occupation days in Paris, and she had become a German

124
in the problem pit
national. It was a grand reunion. I took her to dinner and
she told me that Paulie had been wounded in the Salerno
landing and was still in the hospital. And a little bit later she
told me about her husband, the darling, dimpled SS officer,
who was now a POW on the Eastern front. And for four
months in Wiesbaden she lived in my billet with me, trans-
lating day and night; and, actually, that's what happened to
that first marriage of mine, because my wife found out about
it. I don't think she would have minded a Fraulein. She
minded my shacking up with a girl I'd known before I knew
her.
I remember more consequential causes than I can count.
When I look inside my skin I don't see anything but con-
sequences; all I am is the casual aftereffects of, item, an
unemployed carpenter evicted from his home and, item, a
classification clerk who had been in the newspaper game
himself once, and all the other itemized seeds that have now
blossomed into 52-year-old me.
I remember more than I absolutely want to, in fact, and
some things I remember in the context of a certain time and
a certain place when, in fact, I really learned them later on.
The man on the landing. Years after die war, when I had
become a TV producer doing a documentary on the De-
pression, I put one of my research girls on checking him out.
She was a good girl, and tracked him down. That's how I
know he had been a carpenter. The banks closed and the
jobs vanished, and he wound up on the fire escape. It hap-
pened that when the police chased him away a reporter was
in the precinct house, and he wrote the story my girl found.
And I remember Paulie, 29 years old and weighing a fast
90 pounds, gasping hoarsely as he reached out to shake my
hand in the VA hospital ward, the day before he died. He
had been there for three years, dying all that time. He looked
like his own grandfather. That was a consequence, too: a
landing in the second wave at Salerno and a mine the en-
gineers had missed. He got his Purple Heart for a broken
spine that kept getting worse until it was so bad that it killed
him.
I think I've seen the place where he got it—assuming that
I remembered what he said well enough, or understood him
well enough, when he was concentrating mostly on dying. I

i remember a winter
125
think the place it happened was on the city beach at Salerno,
way at the north horn of that crescent, about where there's a
little restaurant built out over the water on stilts. I stood
there one afternoon on that beach, looking at the floating
turds and pizza crusts, trying to see the picture of Paulie hit-
ting the mine and being thrown into the sky in a fountain of
saltwater and blood. But it wasn't any good. I can only see
what I've seen, not what I've been told about. I couldn't see
the causality. All I could do was ask myself questions about
it: What made him sign up for his hero suit? Was it really
reading that Percival Christopher Wren book when he was
13 years old? Or: What made me alive, and sort of rich,
when Paulie was so poor and dead? Was it the four or five
really good contacts I made in the USO that turned me into
a genius television producer? Is there any of me, or of any of
us, that isn't just consequence?
I think, and I've thought it over a lot, that everything that
ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of it-
self endlessly into the moving present tense of time, produc-
ing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever. Just
being careful isn't enough to save us, but we do have to be
careful. Smoky Bear wouldn't lie to you about that.
If I'd married Kitty I think we would have had fine kids,
even grandchildren by now; but I didn't, not even batting
.500 out of my two chances at her. First it was the old man
on the fire escape, then it was the kindly Nazi she decided to
go back to waiting for. She waited very well and for a long
time, all through the years while the Russians were taking
their time about letting him go and all through the de-
Nazification trials after that. I suppose by then she felt she
was too old to want to start a family. And none of my own
wives have really wanted the PTA bit.
And think of the consequences of that—I mean, the
negative consequences of the babies that Kitty and I didn't
have. Did we miss out on a new Mozart? A Lee Harvey
Oswald? Maybe just a hell of a solid Brooklyn fireman who
might have saved a more largely consequential life than his
own, or mine? Think of them. And that's all you can do with
those particular consequences, because they didn't get born.
Percival Christopher Wren didn't mean to kill Paulie. The
sad old derelict on the fire escape never intended to break up
Kitty and me. Intentions don't matter.

126
in the problem pit
We all live in each others' pockets. If I drive -my car along
Mulholland Drive tonight, I only mean to keep my date with
that pretty publicity girl from Paramount. I don't even know
you're alive, do I? But the car is burning up the gasoline and
pumping out the poison gas that makes the smog; and maybe
it's just that little bit of extra exhaust fume in the air that
bubbles your lungs out with emphysema. It doesn't matter to
you what I mean to do. You're just as dead. I don't suppose
I ever in my life really meant to hurt anybody, except pos-
sibly that J.B. company clerk. But he got off without a scratch,
and meanwhile I may be killing you.
So I walk out on my balcony and stare through the haze
at the lights of Los Angeles. I look at where they all live,
the black militants and the aerospace engineers, the Desilu
sound men and the storefront soul-savers, the kids who go to
the Academie Fran§aise and the little old ladies with/"Back
Up Our Boys" bumper stickers on their cars. I remember
what they, and you, and each and every one of you have
done to me, this half a century I've been battered and bribed
into my present shape and status; but what are they, and all
of you, doing to each other this night?

The Schematic Man
Playboy once had an illustration that they liked so well
that they wanted to get a story written around it, and
they asked me to write it. They were paying, I think,
$750 for a very short story at that time, so I did. In
fact, I wrote them two stories for the same illustration,
and they bought one.
The other was this one, "The Schematic Man." 1 really
had thought they might buy it, and it puzzled me that
they hadn't, so 1 put it in my file in the hope that time
would make clear to me why they hadn't snapped it up,
and I forgot it. Until a couple of years later, when I
came across it, and read it, and still could not see why
they hadn't bought it.
So I retyped it, making a few fairly small revisions,
and sent it off to them, and this time they did buy it .. .
not for $750, but for $2,000.
I know I'm not really a funny man, but I don't like other
people to know it. I do what odier people without much sense
of humor do: I tell jokes. If we're sitting next to each other
at a faculty senate and I want to introduce myself, I probably
say: "Bederkind is my name, and computers are my game."
Nobody laughs much. Like all my jokes, it needs to be ex-
plained. The joking part is that it was dirough game theory
that I first became interested in computers and the making of
mathematical models. Sometimes when I'm explaining it, I
say there that the mathematical ones are the only models I've
ever had a chance to make. That gets a smile, anyway. I've
figured out why: Even if you don't really get much out of the
play on words, you can tell it's got something to do with sex,
127

128
in the problem pit
and we all reflexively smile when anybody says anything
sexy.
I ought to tell you what a mathematical model is, right? All
right. It's simple. It's a kind of picture of something made out
of numbers. You use it because it's easier to make numbers
move than to make real things move.
Suppose I want to know what the planet Mars is going to
do over the next few years. I take everything I know about
Mars and I turn it into numbers—a number for its speed in
orbit, another number for how much it weighs, another num-
ber for how many miles it is in diameter, another number to
express how strongly the Sun pulls it toward it and all that.
Then I tell the computer that's all it needs to know about
Mars, and I go on to tell it all the same sorts of numbers
about the Earth, about Venus, Jupiter, the Sun itself—about
all the other chunks of matter floating around in the neigh-
bourhood that I think are likely to make any difference to
Mars. I then teach the computer some simple rules apout how
the set of numbers that represents Jupiter say, affects the
numbers that represent Mars: the law of inverse squares,
some rules of celestial mechanics, a few relativistic corrections
—well, actually, there are a lot of things it needs to know.
But not more than I can tell it.
When I have done all this—not exacdy in English but in a
kind of language that it knows how to handle—the computer
has a mathematical model of Mars stored inside it. It will then
whirl its mathematical Mars through mathematical space for
as many orbits as I like. I say to it, "1997 June 18 2400
GMT," and it . . . it . . . well, I guess the word for it is, it
imagines where Mars will be, relative to my back-yard
Questar, at midnight Greenwich time on the 18di of June,
1997, and tells me which way to point.
It isn't real Mars that it plays with. It's a mathematical
model, you see. But for the purposes of knowing where to
point my little telescope, it does everything that "real Mars"
would do for me, only much faster. I don't have to wait for
1997; I can find out in five minutes.
It isn't only planets that can carry on a mathematical
metalife in the memory banks of a computer. Take my friend
Schmuel. He has a joke, too, and his joke is that he makes 20
babies a day in his computer. What he means by that is that,

the schematic man	129
after six years of trying, he finally succeeded in writing down
die numbers that describe the development of a human baby
in its mother's uterus, all the way from conception to birth.
The point of that is that then it was comparatively easy to
write down the numbers for a lot of things that happen to
babies before they're born. Momma has high blood pressure.
Momma smokes three packs a day. Momma catches scarlet
fever or a kick in the belly. Momma keeps making it with
Poppa every night until they wheel her into the delivery room.
And so on. And the point of that is that this way, Schmuel
can see some of the things that go wrong and make some
babies get born retarded, or blind, or with retrolental fibro-
plasia or an inability to drink cow's milk. It's easier than
sacrificing a lot of pregnant women and cutting them open
to see.
O.K., you don't want to hear any more about mathematical
models, because what kicks are there in mathematical models
for you? I'm glad you asked. Consider a for instance. For
instance, suppose last night you were watching the Late, Late
and you saw Carole Lombard, or maybe Marilyn Monroe with
that dinky little skirt blowing up over those pretty thighs. I
assume you know that these ladies are dead. I also assume
that your glands responded to those cathode-tube flickers as
though they were alive. And so you do get some kicks from
mathematical models, because each of those great girls, in
each of their poses and smiles, was nothing but a number
of some thousands of digits, expressed as a spot of light on a
phosphor tube. With some added numbers to express the fre-
quency patterns of their voices. Nothing else.
And the point of that (how often I use that phrase!) is that
a mathematical model not only represents the real thing but
sometimes it's as good as the real thing. No, honesdy. I mean,
do you really believe that if it had been Marilvn or Carole in
the flesh you were looking at, across a row of floodlights, say,
that you could have taken away any more of them than you
gleaned from the shower of electrons that made the phosphors
display their pictures?
I did watch Marilyn on the Late, Late one night. And I
thought those thoughts; and so I spent the next week prepar-
ing an application to a foundation for money; and when the

130
in the problem pit
grant came through, I took a sabbatical and began turning
myself into a mathematical model. It isn't really that hard.
Kookie, yes. But not hard.
I don't want to explain what programs like Fortran and
simscript and sir are, so I will only say what we all say:
They are languages by which people can communicate with
machines. Sort of. I had to leam to speak Fortran well
enough to tell the machine all about myself. It took five
graduate students and ten months to write the program that
made that possible, but that's not much. It took more than
that to teach a computer to shoot pool. After that, it was just
a matter of storing myself in the machine.
That's the part that Schmuel told me was kookie. Like
everybody with enough seniority in my department, I have a
remote-access computer console in my—well, I called it my
"playroom." I did have a party there, once, right after I
bought the house, when I still thought I was going to get
married. Schmuel caught me one night walking in the door
and down the stairs and found me methodically typing out
my medical history from the ages of four to fourteen. "Jerk,"
he said, "what makes you think you deserve to be embalmed
in a 7094?"
I said, "Make some coffee and leave me alone till I finish.
Listen. Can I use your program on die sequelae of mumps?"
"Paranoid psychosis," he said. "It comes on about the age of
forty-two." But he coded the console for me and thus gave
me access to his programs. I finished and said:
"Thanks for the program, but you make rotten coffee."
"You make rotten jokes. You really think it's going to be
you in that program. Admit!"
By then, I had most of the basic physiological and environ-
mental stuff on the tapes and I was feeling good. "What's
me?" I asked. "If it talks like me, and thinks like me, and re-
members what I remember, and does what I would do—who
is it? President Eisenhower?"
"Eisenhower was years ago, jerk," he said.
"Turing's question, Schmuel," I said. "If I'm in one room
with a teletype. And the computer's in another room with a
teletype, programmed to model me. And you're in a third
room, connected to both teletypes, and you have a conversa-
tion with both of us, and you can't tell which is me and which

the schematic man
131
is the machine—then how do you describe the difference? Is
there a difference?"
He said, "The difference, Josiah, is I can touch you. And
smell you. If I was crazy enough I could kiss you. You. Not
the model."
"You could," I said, "if you were a model, too, and were in
the machine with me." And I joked with him (Lookl It solves
the population problem, put everybody in die machine. And,
suppose I get cancer. Flesh-me dies. Mathematical-model-me
just rewrites its program), but he was really worried. He real-
ly did think I was going crazy, but I perceived that his rea-
sons were not because of the nature of the problem but
because of what he fancied was my own attitude toward it,
and I made up my mind to be careful of what I said to
Schmuel.
So I went on playing Turing's game, trying to make the
computer's responses indistinguishable from my own. I in-
structed it in what a toothache felt like and what I remem-
bered of sex. I taught it memory links between people and
phone numbers, and all the state capitals I had won a prize
for knowing when I was ten. I trained it to spell "rhythm"
wrong, as I had always misspelled it, and to say "place" in-
stead of "put" in conversation, as I have always done be-
cause of the slight speech impediment that carried over from
my adolescence. I played that game; and by God, I won it.
But I don't know for sure what I lost in exchange.
I know I lost something.
I began by losing parts of my memory. When my cousin
Alvin from Cleveland phoned me on my birthday, I couldn't
remember who he was for a minute. (The week before, I had
told the computer all about my summers with Alvin's family,
including the afternoon when we both lost our virginity to the
same girl, under the bridge by my uncle's farm.) I had to
write down Schmuel's phone number, and my secretary's, and
carry them around in my pocket.
As the work progressed, I lost more. I looked up at the sky
one night and saw three bright stars in a line overhead. It
scared me, because I didn't know what they were until I got
home and took out my sky charts. Yet Orion was my first and
easiest constellation. And when I looked at the telescope I had

132
in the problem pit
made, I could not remember how I had figured the mirror.
Schmuel kept warning me about overwork. I really was
working a lot, 15 hours a day and more. But it didn't feel like
overwork. It felt as though I were losing pieces of myself. I
was not merely teaching the computer to be me but putting
pieces of me into the computer. I hated that, and it shook me
enough to make me take the whole of Christmas week off. I
went to Miami.
But when I got back to work, I couldn't remember how to
touch-type on the console any more and was reduced to peck-
ing out information for the computer a letter at a time. I felt
as though I were moving from one place to another in install-
ments, and not enough of me had arrived yet to be a quorum,
but what was still waiting to go had important parts missing.
And yet I continued to pour myself into the magnetic memory
cores: the He I told my draft board in 1946, the limerick I
made up about my first wife after the divorce, what Margaret
wrote when she told me she wouldn't marry me.
There was plenty of room in the storage banks for all of it.
The computer could hold all my brain had held, especially
with the program my five graduate students and I had writ-
ten. I had been worried about that, at first.
But in the event I did not run out of room. What I ran out
of was myself. I remember feeling sort of opaque and stunned
and empty; and that is all I remember until now.
Whenever "now" is.
I had another friend once, and he cracked up while work-
ing on telemetry studies for one of the Mariner programs. I
remember going to see him in the hospital, and him telling
me, in his slow, unworried, coked-up voice, what they had
done for him. Or to him. Electroshock. Hydrotherapy.
What worries me is that that is at least a reasonable work-
ing hypothesis to describe what is happening to me now.
I remember, or think I remember, a sharp electric jolt. I
feel, or think I feel, a chilling flow around me.
What does it mean? I wish I were sure. I'm willing to con-
cede that it might mean that overwork did me in and now I,
too, am at Restful Retreat, being studied by the psychiatrists
and changed by the nurses' aides. Willing to concede it? Dear
God, I pray for it. I pray that that electricity was just shock
therapy and not something else. I pray that the flow I feel is
water sluicing around my sodden sheets and not a flux of elec-

the schematic man
133
trons in transistor modules. I don't fear the thought of being
insane; I fear the alternative.
I do not believe the alternative. But I fear it all the same. I
can't believe that all that's left of me—mv id, my ucs, mv me
—is nothing but a mathematical model stored inside the banks
of the 7094. But if I ami If I am, dear God, what will happen
when—and how can I wait until—somebody turns me on?

What tin Do Until the Analyst Comes
The thing 7 would like you to note about this story is
that, although it is about a sort of tripping, it was written
quite a while before the hippies and the beats made
dropping out a national conversational topic.
I just sent my secretary out for a container of coffee and
she brought me back a lemon Coke.
I can't even really blame her. Who in all the world do I
have to blame, except myself? Hazel was a good secretary
to me for 15 years, fine at typing, terrific at brushing off peo-
ple I didn't want to see, and the queen of them all at pump-
ing office gossip out of the ladies' lounge. She's a little fuzzy-
brained most of the time now, sure. But after all!
I can say this for myself, I didn't exacdy know what I
was getting into. No doubt you remember the—Well, let
me start that sentence over again, because naturally there
is a certain doubt. Perhaps, let's say, perhaps you remember
the two doctors and their headline report about cigarettes
and lung cancer. It hit us pretty hard at VandenBlumer &
Silk, because we've been eating off the Mason-Dixon Tobacco
account for 20 years. Just figure what our 15 percent
amounted to on better than ten million dollars net billing a
year, and you'll see that for yourself. What happened first
was all to the good, because naturally the first thing that the
client did was scream and reach for his checkbook and pour
another couple million dollars into special promotions to
counteract the bad press, but that couldn't last. And we knew
it. V.B. & S. is noted in the trade as an advertising agency
that takes the long view; we saw at once that if the client
was in danger, no temporary spurt of advertising was going to
pull him out of it, and it was time for us to climb up on top
134

■what to do until the analyst comes 135
of the old mountain and take a good long look at the country-
side ahead.
The Chief called a special Plans meeting that morning and
laid it on the line for us. "There goes the old fire bell, boys,"
he said, "and it's up to us to put the fire out. I'm listening,
so start talking."
Baggott cleared his throat and said glumly, "It may only
be the paper, Chief. Maybe if they make them without pa-
per . . ." He's the a.e. for Mason-Dixon, so you couldn't really
blame him for taking the client's view.
The Chief twinkled: "If they make them without paper
they aren't cigarettes any more, are they? Let's not wander
off into side issues, boys. I'm still listening."
None of us wanted to wander off into side issues, so we
all looked patronizingly at Baggott for a minute. Finally Ellen
Silk held up her hand. "I don't want you to think," she said,
"that just because Daddy left me a little stock I'm going to
push my way into things, Mr. VandenBlumer, but—well, did
you have in mind finding some, uh, angle to play on that
would take the public's mind off the report?"
You have to admire the Chief. "Is that your recommenda-
tion, my dear?" he inquired fondly, bouncing the ball right
back to her.
She said weakly, "I don't know. I'm confused."
"Naturally, my dear," he beamed. "So are we all. Let's see
if Charley here can straighten us out a little. Eh, Charley?"
He was looking at me. I said at once, "I'm glad you asked
me for an opinion, Chief. I've been doing a little thinking,
and here's what I've come up with." I ticked off the points
on my fingers. "One, tobacco makes you cough. Two, liquor
gives you a hangover. Three, reefers and the other stuff—
well, let's just say they're against the law." I slapped the
three fingers against the palm of my other hand. "So what's
left for us, Chief? That's my question. Can we come up with
something new, something different, something that, one, is
not injurious to the health, two, does not give you a hangover,
three, is not habit-forming and therefore against the law?"
Mr. VandenBlumer said approvingly, "That's good think-
ing, Charley. When you hear that fire bell, you really jump,
boy."
Baggott's hand was up. He said, "Let me get this straight,
Chief. Is it Charley's idea that we recommend to Mason-
10

136
in the problem pit
Dixon that they go out of the tobacco business and start mak-
ing something else?"
The old man looked at him blandly for a moment. "Why
should it be Mason-Dixon?" he asked softly, and left it at
that while we all thought of the very good reasons why it
shouldn't be Mason-Dixon. After all, loyalty to a client is
one thing, but you've got an obligation to your own people,
too.
The old man let it sink in, then he turned back to me.
"Well, Charley?" he asked. "We've heard you pinpoint what
we need. Got any specific suggestions?"
They were all looking at me to see if I had anything con-
crete to offer.
Unfortunately, I had.
I just asked Hazel to get me the folder on Leslie Clary
Cloud, and she came in with a copy of my memo putting
him on the payroll two years back. "That's all there was in
the file," she said dreamily, her jaw muscles moving rhyth-
mically. There wasn't any use arguing with her, so I handed
her the container of lemon Coke and told her to ditch it and
bring me back some coffee, C-O-F-F-E-E, coffee. I tried go-
ing through the files myself when she was gone, but that was
a waste of time.
So I'll have to tell you about Leslie Clary Cloud from
memory. He came in to the office without an appointment
and why Hazel ever let him in to see me 111 never know.
Rut she did. He told me right away, "I've been fired, Mr.
McGory. Canned. After eleven years with the Wyoming Ru-
reau of Standards as a senior chemist."
"That's too bad, Dr. Cloud," I said, shuffling the papers on
my desk. "I'm afraid, though, that our organization doesn't—"
"No, no," he said hastily. "I don't know anything about
advertising. Organic chemistry's my field. I have a, well, a
suggestion for a process that might interest you. You h^/e
the Mason-Dixon Tobacco account, don't you? Well, in my
work for my doctorate I—" He drifted off into a fog of long-
chain molecules and short-chain molecules and pentose sugars
and common garden herbs. It took me a little while, but I
listened patiently and I began to see what he was driving at.
There was, he was saying, a substance in a common plant
which, by cauliflamming the whingdrop and ditricolating the

■what to do until the analyst comes 137
residual glom, or words something like that, you could con-
vert into another substance which appeared to have many
features in common with what is sometimes called hop, snow,
or joy-dust. In other words, dope.
I staied at him aghast. "Dr. Cloud," I demanded, "do you
know what you're suggesting? If we added this stuff to our
client's cigarettes we'd be flagrandy violating the law. That's
the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of! Besides, we've al-
ready looked into this matter, and the cost estimates are—"
"No, no!" he said again. "You don't understand, Mr. Mc-
Gory. This isn't any of the drugs currendy available, it's
something new and different."
"Different?"
"Nonhabit-forming, for instance."
"Nonhabit-forming?"
"Totally. Chemically it is entirely unrelated to any narcotic
in the pharmacopeia. Legally—well, I'm no lawyer, but I
swear, Mr. McGory, this isn't covered by any regulation. No
reason it should be. It doesn't hurt the user, it doesn't form a
habit, it's cheap to manufacture, it—"
"Hold it," I said, getting to my feet. "Don't go away—I
want to catch the boss before he goes to lunch."
So I caught the boss, and he twinkled thoughtfully at me.
No, he didn't want me to discuss it with Mason-Dixon just
yet, and yes, it did seem to have some possibilities, and cer-
tainly, put tiiis man on the payroll and see if he turns up with
something.
So we did; and he did.
Auditing raised the roof when the vouchers began to come
through, but I bucked them up to the Chief and he calmed
them down. It took a lot of money, though, and it took nearly
six months. But then Leslie Clary Cloud called up one morn-
ing and said, "Come on down, Mr. McGory. We're in."
The place we'd fixed up for him was on the lower East
Side and it reeked of rotten vegetables. I made a mental note
to double-check all our added-chlorophyll copy and climbed
up the two flights of stairs to Cloud's private room. He was
sitting at a lab bench, beaming at a row of test tubes in front
of him.
"This is it?" I asked, glancing at the test tubes.
"This is it." He smiled dreamily at me and yawned. "Ex-

138
in the problem pit
cuse me," he blinked amiably. "I've been sampling the little
old product."
I looked him over very carefully. He had been sampling
something or other, that was clear enough. But no whiskey
breath; no dilated pupils; no shakes; no nothing. He was re-
laxed and cheerful, and that was all you could say.
"Try a little old bit," he invited, gesturing at the test tubes.
Well, there are times when you have to pay your dues in
the club. V.B. & S. had been mighty good to me, and if I had
to swallow something unfamiliar to justify the confidence the
Chief had in me, why I just had to go ahead and do it. Still,
I hesitated for a moment.
"Aw," said Leslie Clary Cloud, "don't be scared. Look, I
just had a shot but I'll take another one." He fumbled one
of the test tubes out of the rack and, humming to himself,
slopped a little of the colorless stuff into a beaker of some
other colorless stuff—water, I suppose. He drank it down and
smacked his lips. "Tastes awful," he observed cheerfully, "but
we'll fix that. Wheel"
I looked him over again, and he looked back at me, gig-
gling. "Too strong," he said happily. "Got it too strong.
We'll fix that, too." He rattled beakers and test tubes aimless-
ly while I took a deep breath and nerved myself up to it.
"All right," I said, and took the fresh beaker out of his
hand. I swallowed it down almost in one gulp. It tasted ter-
rible, just as he said, tasted like the lower floors had smelled,
but that was all I noticed right away. Nothing happened for
a moment except diat Cloud looked at me thoughtfully and
frowned.
"Say," he said, "I guess I should have diluted that."
I guess he should have. Wham.
But a couple of hours later I was all right again.
Cloud was plenty apologetic. "Still," he said consolingly,
standing over me as I lay on the lab bench, "it proves one
diing. You had a dose ahout the equivalent of ten thousand
normal shots, and you have to admit it hasn't hurt you."
"I do?" I asked, and looked at the doctor. He swung his
stethoscope by the earpieces and shrugged.
"Nothing organically wrong with you, Mr. McGorv—not
that I can find, anyway. Euphoria, yes. Temporarily high

■what to do until the analyst comes 139
pulse, yes. Delirium there for a little while, yes—though it
was pretty mild. But I don't think you even have a headache
now."
"I don't," I admitted. I swung my feet down and sat up,
apprehensively. But no hammers started in my head. I had
to confess it: I felt wonderful.
Well, between us we tinkered it into what Cloud decided
would be a "normal" dosage—just enough to make you feel
good—and he saturated some sort of powder and rolled it into
pellets and clamped them in a press and came out with what
looked as much like aspirins as anything else. "They'd prob-
ably work that way, too," he said. "A psychogenic headache
would melt away in five minutes with one of those."
"We'll bear that in mind," I said.
What with one thing and another, I couldn't get to the
old man that day before he left, and the next day was the
weekend and you don't disturb the Chief s weekends, and it
was Monday evening before I could get him alone for long
enough to give him the whole pitch. He was delighted.
"Dear, dear," he twinkled. "So much out of so little. Why,
they hardly look like anything at all."
"Try one, Chief," I suggested.
"Perhaps I will. You checked the legal angle?"
"On the quiet. It's absolutely clean."
He nodded and poked at the little pills with his finger. I
scratched the back of my neck, trying to be politely incon-
spicuous, but the Chief doesn't miss much. He looked at me
inquiringly.
"Hives," I explained, embarrassed. "I, uh, got an overdose
the first time, like I said. I don't know much about these
things, but what they told me at the clinic was I set up an
allergy."
"Allergy?" Mr. VandenBlumer looked at me thoughtfully.
"We don't want to spread allergies with this stuff, do we?"
"Oh, no danger of that, Chief. It's Cloud's fault, in a way;
he handed me an undiluted dose of the stuff, and I drank it
down. The clinic was very positive about that: Even twenty
or thirty times the normal dose won't do you any harm."
"Um." He rolled one of the pills in his finger and thumb
and sniffed it thoughtfully. "How long are you going to have
your hives?"

140
in the problem pit
"They'll go away. I just have to keep away from the stuff.
I wouldn't have them now, but—well, I liked it so much I
tried another shot yesterday." I coughed, and added, 'It
works out pretty well, though. You see the advantages, of
course, Chief. I have to give it up, and I can swear that there's
no craving, no shakes, no kick-off symptoms, no nothing. I,
well, I wish I could enjoy it like anyone else, sure. But I'm
here to testify that Cloud told the simple truth: It isn't habit-
forming."
"Um," he said again; and that was the end of the discus-
sion.
Oh, the Chief is a cagey man. He gave me my orders:
Keep my mouth shut about it. I have an idea that he was
waiting to see what happened to my hives, and whether any
craving would develop, and what the test series on animals
and Cloud's Bowery-derelict volunteers would show. But even
more, I think he was waiting until the time was exacdy,
climactically right.
Like at the Plans meeting, the day after the doctors' report
and the panic at Mason-Dixon.
And that's how Cheeiy-Gum was bom.
Hazel just came in with the cardboard container from the
drugstore, and I could tell by looking at it—no steam coming
out from under the lid, beads of moisture clinging to the sides
■—that it wasn't the coffee I ordered. "Hey!" I yelled after
her as she was dreamily waltzing through the door. "Come
back here!"
"Sure 'nough, Massa," she said cheerfully, and two-stepped
back. "S'matter?"
I took a grip on my temper. "Open that up," I ordered.
"Take a look at what's in it."
She smiled at me and plopped the lid off the container.
Half the contents spilled across my desk. "Oh, dear," said
Hazel, "excuse me while I get a cloth."
"Never mind the cloth," I said, mopping at the mess with
my handkerchief. "What's in there?"
She gazed wonderingly into the container for a moment;
then she said, "Oh, honestly, boss! I see what you mean.
Those idiots in the drugstore, they're gummed up higher than
a kite, morning, noon, and night. I always say, if you can't
handle it, you shouldn't touch it during working hours. I'm

■what to do until the analyst comes 141
sorry about this, boss. No lemon! How can they call it a lemon
Coke when they forget the—"
"Hazel," I said, "what I wanted was coffee. Coffee."
She looked at me. "You mean I got it wrong? Oh, I'm
sorry, Mr. McGory. Ill go right down and get it now." She
smiled repentandy and hummed her way toward the door.
With her hand on the knob, she stopped and turned to look
at me. "All the same, boss," she said, "that's a funny combi-
nation. Coffee and Coke. But I'll see what I can do."
And she was gone, to bring me heaven knows what in-
credible concoction. But what are you going to do?
No, that's no answer. I know it's what tjou would do. But
it makes me break out in hives.
The first week we were delighted, the second week we
were triumphant, the third week we were millionaires.
The sixth week I skulked along the sidewalks all the way
across town and down, to see Leslie Clary Cloud. Even so, I
almost got it when a truckdriver dreamily piled into the glass
front of a saloon a yard or two behind me.
When I saw Cloud sitting at his workbench feet propped
up, hands clasped behind his head, eyes half-closed, I could
almost have kissed him. For his jaws were not moving. Alone
in New York, except for me, he wasn't chewing Cheery-Gum.
"Thank heaven!" I said sincerely.
He blinked and smiled at me. "Mr. McGory," he said in a
pleasant drawl. "Nice of you."
His manner disturbed me, and I looked more closely.
"You're not—you're not gummed up, are you?"
He said gently, "Do I look gummed up? I never chew the
stuff."
"Good!" I unfolded the newspaper I had carried all the
way from Madison Avenue and showed him the inside pages
—the ones that were not a mere smear of ink. "See here,
Cloud. Planes crashing into Radio City. Buses driving off the
George Washington Bridge. Ships going aground at the Bat-
tery. We did it, Cloud, you and I!"
"Oh, I wouldn't get upset about it, old man," he said com-
fortably. "All local, isn't it?"
"Isn't that bad enough? And it isn't local—it can't be. It's
just that there isn't any communication outside the city any
more—outside of any city, I guess. The shipments of Cheery-

142
in the problem pit
Gum, that's all that ever gets delivered anywhere. Because
that's all anybody cares about any more, and we did it, you
and I!"
He said sympathetically, "That's too bad, McGory."
"Curse you!" I shrieked at him. "You said it wasn't a drug!
You said it wasn't habit-forming! You said—"
"Now, now," he said with gende firmness. "Why not chew
a stick yourself?"
"Because I can't! It gives me hives!"
"Oh, that's right." He looked self-reproachful. "Well," he
said dreamily at last, "I guess that's about the size of it, Mc-
Gory." He was staring at the ceiling again.
"What is?"
"What is what?"
"What's about the— Oh, the devil with it. Cloud, you got
us into this, you have to get us out of it. There must be some
way of curing this habit."
"But there isn't any habit to cure, McGory," he pointed out.
"But there is!"
"Tem-per," he said waggishly, and took a corked test tube
out of his workbench. He drank it down, every drop, and
tossed the tube in a wastebasket. "You see?" he demanded
severely. "I don't chew Cheery-Gum."
So I appealed to a Higher Authority.
In the eighteenth century I would have gone to the Church,
in the nineteenth, to the State. I went to an office fronting on
Central Park where the name on die bronze plaque was The-
odor Yust, Analyst.
It wasn't easy. I almost walked out on him when I saw
that his jaws were chewing as rhythmically as his secretary's.
But Cloud's concoction is not, as he kept saying, a drug, and
though it makes you relax and makes you happy and, if you
take enough of it, makes you drunk, it doesn't make you unfit
to talk to. So I took a grip on my temper, the only bad temper
left, and told him what I wanted.
He laughed at me—in the friendliest way. "Put a stop to
Cheery-Gum? Mr. McGory!"
"But the plane crashes—"
"No more suicides, Mr. McGory!"
"The train wrecks—"
"Not a murder or a mugging in the whole city in a month."

■what to do until the analyst comes 143
I said hopelessly, "But it's wrong!"
"Ah," he said in the tone of a discoverer, "now we come
down to it. Why is it wrong, Mr. McGory?"
That was die second time I almost walked out. But I said
"Let's get one thing straight: I don't want you digging into
my problems. That's not why I'm here. Cheery-Gum is wrong,
and I am not biased against it. You can take a detached view
of collisions and sudden death if you want to, but what about
slow death? All over the city, all over the country, people are
lousing up their jobs. Nobody cares. Nobody does anything
but go through the motions. They're happy. What happens
when you get hungry because die farmers are feeling too good
to put in their crops?"
He sighed patientiy. He took the wad of gum out of his
mouth, rolled it neatly into a Kleenex and dropped it in the
wastebasket. He took a fresh stick out of a drawer and un-
wrapped it, but stopped when he saw me looking at him.
He chuckled. "Rather I didn't, Mr. McGory? Well, why not
oblige you? It's not habit-forming, after all." He dropped the
gum back into the drawer and said: "Answering your ques-
tions, they won't starve. The farmers are farming, the workers
are working, the policemen are policing, and I'm analyzing.
And you're worrying. Why? Work's getting done."
"But my secretary—"
"Forget about your secretary, Mr. McGory. Sure, she's a
litde fuzzy-brained, a little absentminded. Who isn't? But she
comes to work, because why shouldn't she?"
"Sure she does, but—"
"But she's happy. Let her be happy, Mr. McGory!"
I looked scandalized at him. "You, a doctor! How can you
say that? Suppose you were fuzzy-brained and so on when a
patient desperately needed—"
He stopped me. "In the past three weeks," he said gendy,
"you're the first to come in that door."
I changed tack: "All right, you're an analyst. What about a
G.P. or a surgeon?"
He shrugged. "Perhaps," he conceded, "perhaps in one case
out of a thousand—somebody hurt in an accident, say—he'd
get to the hospital too late, or die surgeon would make some
litde mistake. Perhaps. Not even one in a thousand—one in a
million, maybe. But Cheery-Gum isn't a drug. A quarter-grain
of sodium amytol, and your surgeon's as good as new." Ab-

144
in the problem pit
sentmindedly he reached into the drawer for the stick of gum.
"And you say," I said accusingly, "that it's not habit-form-
ing!"
He stopped with his hand halfway to his mouth. "Well,"
he said wryly, "it is a habit. Don't confuse semantics, Mr.
McGory. It is not a narcotic addiction. If my supply were
cut off this minute, I would feel bad—as bad as if I couldn't
play bridge any more for some reason, and no worse." He put
the stick of gum away again and rummaged through the bot-
tom drawers of his desk until he found a dusty pack of cig-
arettes. "Used to smoke three packs a day," he wheezed,
choking on the first drag.
He wiped his streaming eyes. "You know, Mr. McGory,"
he said sharply, "you're a bit of a prig. You don't want people
to be happy."
bj »
He stopped me before I could work up a full explosion.
"Wait! Don't think that you're the only person who thinks
about what's good for die world. When I first heard of
Cheery-Gum, I worried." He stubbed the cigarette out dis-
tastefully, still talking. "Euphoria is well and good, I said,
but what about emergencies? And I looked around, and there
weren't any. Things were getting done, maybe slowly and
erratically, but they were getting done. And then I said, on a
high moral plane, that's well and good, but what about the
ultimate destiny of man? Should the world be populated by
cheerful near-morons? And that worried me, until I began
looking at my patients." He smiled reflectively. "I had 'em
all, Mr. McGory. You name it, I had it coming in to see me
twice a week. The worst wrecks of psyches you ever heard of,
twisted and warped and destroying themselves; and they
stopped. They stopped eating themselves up with worry and
fear and tension, and then they weren't my patients any more.
And what's more, they weren't morons. Give them a stimulus,
they respond. Interest them, they react. I played bridge the
other night with a woman who was catatonic last month; we
had to put the first stick of gum in her mouth. She beat the
hell out of me, Mr. McGory. I had a mathematician coming
here who—well, never mind. It was bad. He's happy as a
clam, and the last time I saw him he had finished a paper he
began ten years ago, and couldn't touch. Stimulate them—

■what to do until the analyst comes 145
they respond. When things are dull—Cheery-Gum. What
could be better?"
I looked at him dully, and said, "So you can't help me."
"I didn't say that. Do you want me to help you?"
"Certainly!"
"Then answer my question: Why don't you chew a stick
yourself?"
"Because I can't!" It all tumbled out, the Plans meeting
and Leslie Clary Cloud and the beaker that hadn't been di-
luted and the hives. "A terrific allergy," I emphasized. "Even
antihistamines don't help. They said at the clinic that the anti-
bodies formed after a massive initial—"
He said comfortably, "Soma over psyche, eh? Well, what
would you expect? But believe me, Mr. McGory, allergies are
psychogenic. Now, if youll just—"
Well, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em, that's what die old
man used to say.
But I can't join them. Theodor Yust offered me an invita-
tion, but I guess I was pretty rude to him. And when, at
last, I went back, ready to crawl and apologize, there was
a scrawled piece of cardboard over the bronze nameplate; it
said: Gone fishing.
I tried to lay it on the line with the Chief. I opened the
door of the Plans room, and there he was with Baggott and
Wayber, from Mason-Dixon. They were sitting there whittling
out model ships, and so intent on what they were doing that
they hardly noticed me. After a while the Chief said idly,
"Bankrupt yet?" And moments passed, and Wayber finally re-
plied, in an absentminded tone:
"Guess so. Have to file some papers or something." And
they went on with their whittling.
So I spoke sharply to them, and the minute they looked
up and saw me, it was like the Rockettes: The hands into
the pockets, the paper being unwrapped, the gum into the
mouth. And naturally I couldn't make any sense with them
after that. So what are you going to do?
No! I can't!
Hazel hardly comes in to see me any more, even. I bawled
her out for it—what would happen, I demanded, if I sud-
denly had to answer a letter. But she only smiled dreamily

146
in the problem pit
at me. "There hasn't been a letter in a month," she pointed
out amiably. "Don't worry, though. If anything comes up, I'll
be with you in a flash. This stuff isn't a habit with me, I can
stop it any time, you. just say the word and ol' HazelH be
there . . ."
And she's right because, when you get right down to it,
there's the trouble. It isn't a habit.
So how can you break it?
You can stop Cheery-Gum any time. You can stop it this
second, or five minutes from now, or tomorrow.
So why worry about it?
It's completely,voluntary, entirely under your control; it
won't hurt you, it won't make you sick.
I wish Theodor Yust would come back. Or maybe I'll just
cut my throat.

Some Joys under the Star
I once wrote a story called "The Plot to Kill Einstein."
Horace Gold changed the title to "Target One" when he
bought it, but he did publish it at a noteworthy time: it
was on the stands the day that Einstein died. This story,
about a comet, was on sale all through the hoo-hdh about
Comet Kohoutek, and a dozen of my friends congrat-
ulated me, marveling at my prediction of a future event.
This is what I call the "broken clock" method of predict-
ing the future, from the old French saying: "Even a
broken clock is right twice a day." The hits are note-
worthy but, oh, the dozens and scores of missesl
In a few recognizable ways were Albert Novak—the man
who stalked Myron Landau—and die Secretary of State alike,
but they had this in common: they wanted. They each wanted
something very badly and, as it happens, the thing that each
wanted was not good by the general consensual standards of
your average sensual man.
Let us start with the man who stalked Myron Landau or,
more accurately, with Myron Landau himself. Myron also
wanted, and what he wanted was his girl friend Ellen, with
that masked desperation that characterizes the young man
of seventeen who has never yet made out.
On this night of July in New York City the factors against
Myron were inexperience, self-doubt, and the obstinacy of
Ellen herself, but ranged on his side were powerful allies.
Before him was the great welcoming blackness of Central
Park, where anydiing might happen, and spread across the
sky was a fine pretext for luring her into die place. So he
bought her a strawberry milkshake in Rumpelmeyer's and
147

148
in the problem pit
strolled with her into the park, chatting of astronomy, beauty,
and love.
"Are you sure it's all right?" asked Ellen, looking into the
sodium-lit fringes of the undergrowth.
"Cripes, yes," said Myron, in the richly amused tone of a
Brown belt in karate from one of the finest academies on the
upper West Side, although in fact he had never gone into
Central Park at night before. But he had thought everything
out carefully and was convinced that tonight there was no
danger. Or at any rate not enough danger to scare him off the
prize. Overhead was die great beautiful comet that everybody
was talking about and it was a clear night. There would be
lots of people looking at the sky, he reasoned, and in any
case where else could he take her? Not his apartment, with
Grandma's ear to the living-room door, just itching for an
excuse to come in and start hunting for her glasses. Not Ellen's
place, not with her mother and sister remorselessly there.
"You can't see the comet well from the middle of the street,"
he said reasonably, putting his arm around her and nodding
to a handsome white-haired gentleman who had first nodded
benevolently to them. "There's too much light and anyway,
honestly, Ellen, we won't go in very far."
"I never saw a comet before," she conceded, allowing her-
self to be led down the path. In truth, the comet Ujifusa-
McGinnis was not all that hard to see. It spread its tail over
a quarter of the sky, drowning out Altair, Vega, and the
stars around Deneb, hardly paled even by the lights of New
York City. Even a thousand miles south, where NASA tech-
nicians were working around-the-clock shifts under the flood-
lights of the Vehicle Assembly Building, trying to get ready
the launch of the probe that would plumb Ujifusa-McGinnis's
mysteries, it dominated the sky.
Myron looked upward and allowed himself to be distracted
for a moment by the spectacle, but quickly caught himself.
"Ah," he said, creeping his fingers toward the lower slope of
Ellen's breast, "just think, what you see is all gas. Nothing
really there at all. And millions of miles away."
"It's beautiful," Ellen said, looking over her shoulder. She
had thought she had heard a noise.
She had. The noise was in fact real. The foot of the hand-
some white-haired gentleman had broken a stick. He had
turned off the flagstone path into the shelter of the dwarf

some joys under the stab
149
evergreens and was now busy pulling a woman's nylon
stocking over his white hair and face. He, too, had planned
his evening carefully. In his right-hand coat pocket he had
the woolen sock with half a pound of BBs knotted into the
toe—that was for Myron. In Iris left-hand pocket he had the
clasp knife with die carefully honed edge. That was for
Ellen, first to make sure she didn't scream, then to make sure
she never would. He had not known their names when he
loaded his pockets and left his ranch house in Waterbury,
Connecdcut, to go in for an evening's sport to the city, but
he had known there would be somebody.
He, too, looked up at the comet, but with irritation. In his
Connecticut back yard, as he had shown it to his daughter,
it had looked pretty. Here it was an unqualified nuisance. It
made the night brighter tiian he wanted it although, he
thought in all fairness, it was not as bad as a full moon.
It would not be more than five minutes, he calculated,
before the boy would lead the girl in among the evergreens.
But which way? If only they would choose his side of the
path! Otherwise it meant he had to cross the walk. That was
a small danger and a large annoyance, because it meant scut-
tling in an undignified way. Still, the fun was worth the
trouble. It always had been worth it.
With the weighted sock now ready in his hand, the hand-
some white-haired gentleman followed them silently. He
could feel the gleeful premonitory stirrings of sexual excite-
ment in his private parts. He was as happy as, in his life, he
ever was.
At a time approximately two thousand years earlier, when
Jesus was a boy in Nazareth and Caesar Augustus was count-
ing up his statues and his gold, a race of creatures resembling
soft-shelled crabs on a planet of a star some two hundred
light-years away became belatedly aware of the existence of
the Great Wall of China.
Although it alone among the then existing works of Man
was quite detectable in their telescopes, it was not surprising
they had not noticed it before. It had been completed less
than 250 years before, and most of that time had been lost
in the creeping traverse of light from Earth to their planet.
Also they had many, many planets to observe and not a great
deal of time to waste on any one. But they expected more of

150
in the problem pit
their minions than that, and 10,000 members of a subject
race died in great pain as a warning to the others to be more
diligent.
The Arrogating Ones, as they called themselves and were
called by their subjects, at once took up in their collective
councils the question of whether or not to conquer Earth
and add humanity to their vassals, now that they had dis-
covered that humanity did exist. This was their eon-long
custom. It had made them extremely unpopular over a large
volume of the galaxy.
On balance, they decided not to bother at that particular
time. What were a few heaped-up rocks, after all? Oh, some
sort of civilization no doubt existed, but the planet Earth
seemed too distant, too trivial, and too poor to be worth
bothering to conquer.
Accordingly they contented themselves with routine pre-
cautionary measures. Item, they caused to be abducted in
their disc-shaped vessels certain specimens of Earthly human
beings and other fauna. These also died in great pain and in
die process released much information about their body
chemistry, physical structure, and modes of thought. Item,
die Arrogating Ones dispatched certain of their servants with
a waiting brief. They were instructed to occupy the core of
a comet and from it to keep an eye on those endoskeletal, but
potentially annoying, creatures who had discovered agricul-
ture, fire, the city, and the wheel, but not as yet even chemical
explosive weapons.
They then dismissed Earth from their collective soft-bodied
minds, and returned to the more interesting contemplation of
measures to be taken against a race of insect-like beings that
lived in a steamy high-G planet in quite the other direction
from Earth, toward the core of the galaxy. The insects had
elected not to be conquered by the Arrogating Ones. In fact,
they had destroyed quite a large number of war fleets sent
against them.
Nearly a quarter of the collective intelligence of the Arro-
gating Ones was devoted to plans to defeat these insects in
battle. Most of the rest of their intelligence was devoted to
the pleasant contemplation of what they would do to the
insects after the battle was won to make tiiem wish they
hadn't resisted so hard.

some joys under the stab
151
While the handsome white-haired gentleman was stalking
Myron and Ellen, the second person who wanted, the Secre-
tary of State of the United States of America, was about a
hundred miles north of and 40,000 feet above Central Park.
He was on board a four-engined jet aircraft with the American
flag emblazoned on its prow and he was having a temper
tantrum.
The President of the United States was gloomily running
his fingers between the toes of his bare feet. "Shoot, Danny,"
he said, "you're getting yourself all hot about nothing. I'm
not saying we can't bomb Venezuela. I'm only saying why do
we want to bomb Venezuela? And I'm saying you ought to
watch how you talk to me, too."
"Watch how you talk to me, Mr. President!" shouted the
Secretary of State over the noise of the jets. "I'm pretty fed
up with your procrastinations and delays and it wouldn't take
much for me to walk right out and dump the whole thing
back in your lap. Considering your track record—I am think-
ing of Iceland—I don't imagine you'd relish that prospect."
"Danny boy," snarled the President, "you've got a bad
habit of digging up ancient history. Stick to the point. We've
got to have oil, agreed. They have oil, everybody knows that.
They don't want to sell it to us at a reasonable price, so you
want me to beat on them until they change their minds.
Right? Only what you don't see is, there's a right way and a
wrong way to do these things. Why can't we just go in with
some spooks and Tommy-guns, as usual?"
"But their insolence, Mr. President! The demeaning tone
of this document they sent me. It isn't the oil, it is die
national credibility of the country that is involved here."
"Right, Danny, right," groaned the President. "You can
talk. You don't have Congress breathing down your neck at
every little thing." He sighed heavily and opened another can
of no-calorie soda. "What I don't see," he said, with a punc-
tuation mark of gas, "is why we have to hit them tonight, with
Congress still in session."
The Secretary said petulantly, "I have explained to you, Mr.
President, that our communications system is malfunctioning.
We've lost global coverage. There is strong dissipation
of ionosphere scatter, due to interference from an unprece-
dentedly strong influx of radiation apparendy emanating
from—"
ii

152
in the problem pit
"Oh, cut it out," complained the President. "You mean it's
that comet that's bollixed up our detection."
The Secretary pursed his lips. "Not precisely the comet,
no, Mr. President. No such effect has ever been detected
before, although it is possible that there is a connection.
Doesn't matter. The situation before us is that we do not have
total communication at this time. And so we have no way of
knowing whether the Venezuelans are treacherously planning
a sneak attack or not. Do you want to take a chance on the
security of the Free World, Mr. President? I say preempt
now!"
"Yes, you've made your point, Danny," said the President
He swiveled his armchair and gazed out at the bright spray
of white light across the eastern horizon where Comet Ujifusa-
McGinnis lay. "I've heard worse excuses for starting a war,"
he mused, "but I can't remember exactly when. All right,
Danny. We'll do what you say. Get me Charlie on the
scrambler and I'll put in the attack in two hours."
The watchers for the Arrogating Ones, hiding inside the
pebbly core of the comet named after the two amateur as-
tronomers who had simultaneously discovered it, studied the
results of their radar-like scan of the Earth. This was routine.
They were not aware that tiieir scanning had damaged man-
kind's communications, but tiiat was not their problem. Their
only task was to spray out a shower of particles and catch the
returning ones to study—this they did, and what their study
told diem was that the planet Earth had reached redpoint
status. It was now well ino a technological age and was thus
an active, rather than merely a potential, threat to their
masters.
The Arrogating Ones were no longer quite as effectively
arrogant as they had once been. They had been creamed
rather frequently in their millennia-long struggle against the
insectoids. The score was, roughly, Arrogating Ones 53, In-
sectoids 23,724. The watchers, knowing this, were aware that
at least their task would not under these circumstances in-
volve the actual physical conquest of the Earth. It would
simply be destroyed.
This was no big deal. Plenty of mechanisms for wiping out
a populated planet were stockpiled in the arsenals of the
Arrogating Ones. They had not worked very well against the

some joys under the stab
153
insectoids, unfortunately, but they would be plenty powerful
enough to deal with, say, mankind. The weapons for accom-
plishing this were readily available at any time, but not to
the watchers, who were far too low in the hierarchy of
authority to be trusted with anything like that.
Their task was much simpler. They were only required to
report what they saw and then to soften up the human race
so that it would not be able to offer resistance, even ineffec-
tual resistance, to the clean-up teams when they arrived with
their planet-busters.
Softening up was a technical problem of some magnitude,
but it had been solved long ago. The abducted humans had
died messily but not in vain. At least, from die point of view
of the Arrogating Ones their deaths had not been in vain, for
in dieir dying agonies they had supplied information about
themselves which had enabled the Arrogating Ones to devise
appropriate softening-up mechanisms. The watchers had been
equipped with these on a standby basis ever since.
Of course, from the point of view of the abducted humans
the question of whether their deaths had been in vain might
have had a different answer. No one had troubled to ask
them.
At any rate, the watchers now energized the generators
which would soften up mankind for its destruction.
While they were waiting for a charge to build up they
looked up the coordinates and call signal for the nearest
cruising superdreadnaught of the Arrogating Ones and trans-
mitted a request for it to come in and finish up the job with
a core-bomb. They then discussed among themselves the
prospects of what their next assignment would be. It was not
a fruitful discussion. Core-bombs are messy and there was
not much chance that Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis's orbit would
get them far enough away to be out of its range when it went
off. Even if tiiey survived, none of them had any idea what
the Arrogating Ones' future plans for the watchers were. All
they were sure of was that they were certain not to enjoy
them.
We now turn to Albert Novak. He was in another four-
engined jet, climbing to cruising altitude out of Kennedy
en route to Los Angeles International. He was a crew-cut
young man, with something on his mind. His neighbor was a

154
in the problem pit
short, white-haired, dark-tanned Westerner with the face of
a snapping turtle, who offered his hand and said aggressively,
jerking his head toward the window, "That confounded thing!
Do you know the space agency wants to spend thirty million
dollars of your tax money just to go sniff around it? Thirty
million dollars! Just to sniff some marsh gas! Not as long as
I'm on the Aeronautics and Space Committee. Let me intro-
duce myself. I'm Congressman—" But he was talking to gas
himself. Albert Novak had not accepted his hand, had not
even met his eyes. Although the "Fasten Seat Belts" sign was
still lighted in three languages, he unstrapped himself and
walked down the aisle. Hostesses hissed at him and tardily
began to unsnap themselves to make him return to his seat.
He ignored them. He had no intention of ever arriving at
L.A. International and when he wanted to talk to a hostess
he would do so on his own terms. He carried a cassette
recorder into a toilet and locked the door against everyone.
The cassette recorder could no longer be used to record or
play. He had removed its insides the day before, replacing
them with more batteries and a coil of fine wire, which he
now carefully connected to 30 Baggies full of dynamite and
firing caps he had sewn into the lining of his trenchcoat while
his mother nearsightedly smiled on him from across the room.
Although Novak thought of himself as a hijacker, it was not
his intention to cause the jet to head for Cuba, Caracas, or
even Algiers. He did not want the airplane. He didn't even
want the one hundred million dollars' ransom he planned to
ask for.
What Novak wanted, mostly, was to matter to somebody.
As far as he had thought out his plan of action, it was to
walk up to a stewardess with his hand on the detonating
switch, show her the ingenious arrangement he had gotten
past the metal detectors, be escorted to the flight deck in
the traditional manner and then, after the airline had begun
trying to get together the 5,000,000 unmarked twenty-dollar
bills he intended to demand and the maximum of annoyance
and confusion had been caused, to close the switch and
explode the dynamite.
He knew that in destroying the airplane he would die.
That was not very important to him. The one important failure
that he regretted very much was that he would not be able
to see his mother's face when the reporters and TV crew

some joys under the stab
155
began to swarm around her and she learned he had been
pushing around all kinds of people and thirty million dollars'
worth of airplane.
The generators at the core of Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis
were now up to full charge.
Disgruntledly, the watchers of the Arrogating Ones sighted
the beam in on the planet Earth. They were quite careful to
get it aligned properly, for they remembered very well what
die consequences were for slipshod work. When it was locked
in, they released the safety switch that allowed the contact to
close that discharged the heam.
More than three million watts of beamed power surged out
toward the near hemisphere of the planet. Certain chemical
changes at once took place in the atmosphere and were borne
by jet stream, trade winds, and the aimless migration of air
masses all around the Earth.
The equipment used was highly directional, but the
watchers who operated it were very close and large magni-
tudes of energy were involved. Some of the radiation sprayed
them. There was some loss from corona points, some reflec-
tion even from the tenuous gases of die comet's halo.
As the radiation had been designed specifically for use
against mankind, on the basis of the experiments conducted
on the kidnappees of 2,000 years before, it was only of limited
effect on the watchers. But they happened to be warm-
blooded oxygen-breathers with two sexes and many of human-
ity's hangups, so that the weapon did do to them much what
it was intended to do to mankind.
First they felt a sudden, sharp pang of an emotion which
they identified (but only by logical deduction) as joy. The
diagnosis was not simple, for they had little in their lives
that would enable them to recognize such a state. But they
looked at each other with fatuous fondness and, in their not
really very human ways, shared pleasure.
The next thing they shared was serious physical pain,
accompanied by vomiting, dizziness, and a feeling of weak-
ness, for they were receiving a great deal more of the radia-
tion than was necessary for the mere task of turning them into
pussycats to receive the knockout blow of the Arrogating
Ones. They recognized that, too. They deduced that they
were dying, and doing it pretty fast.

156
in the problem pit
They did not mind that any more than Albert Novak
minded blowing himself up with the airliner. It was worth-
while. They were happy. It was what the ray was intended
to do to people and it did its work very well.
And all over the near side of the Earth, as the radiation
searched out and saturated humanity, joy replaced fear, peace
replaced tension, love replaced anger.
In Central Park three slum youths released the girl they had
lured behind the 72d Street boat house and decided to apply
for Harvard, while a member of the Tactical Patrol Force lay
down on Umpire Rock and gazed jubilantly at the comet. At
the park's southern margin the white-haired gentleman came
leaping out at Myron Landau and his girl. "My dear children!"
he cried, tugging the women's stocking off his face. "How
sweet and tender you are. You remind me so much of my own
beloved son and daughters that you must let me stand you
to the best hotel room in New York, with unlimited room
service."
This spectacle would normally have disconcerted Myron
Landau, especially as he had just succeeded in solving the
puzzle of Ellen's bra snap. But he was so filled with the
sudden rapture himself that he could only say, "You bet you
can, friend. But only if you come with us. Ellen and I
wouldn't have it any other way."
And Ellen chimed in sweedy: "What do we need a motel
room for, mister? Why don't we just get out of these clothes?"
Forty thousand feet directly overhead, as the Presidential
jet sped back from the Summer White House near Boothbay
Harbor, Maine, the Secretary of State lifted eyes streaming
with joy and said, "Dear Mr. President, let's give the spies
another chance. It's too nice a night to be H-bombing
Caracas." And the President, flinging an arm around him,
sobbed, "Danny, as a diplomat you're not worth a bucket of
warm snot, but I've always said you've got the biggest damn
heart in the cabinet."
A great bubble of orange-yellow flame off on the western
horizon disconcerted diem for a moment, but it did not seem
relevant to their transcendental joy. They began singing all
the good old favorites like "Down by the Old Mill Stream,"
"Sweet Adeline," and "I've Been Working on die Railroad,"
and had so much fun doing it that the President quite forgot

some joys under the stab
157
to radio the message that would cancel his strike order against
Caracas. It did not matter very much. The B-52 ordnance
crews had dumped the bombs from the fork lifts and were
now giving each other rides on them, while the commanding
general of the strike, Curtis T. "Vinegar Ass" Pinowitz, had
decided he preferred going fishing to parachuting into Vene-
zuela in support of the bombing. He was looking for his
spinning reel, oblivious to the noise on the hardstand where
the 101st Airborne was voting whether to fly to Disneyland
or the Riviera. (In any event, the Venezuelans, or those
members of the Venezuelan government who were bothering
to answer their telephones, had just voted to give the Yankees
all the oil they wanted and were seriously considering scent-
ing it with jasmine.)
The ball of flame on the horizon, however, was not without
its importance.
Arnold Novak had released the armlock he had got around
the little brown-eyed stewardess's neck and had begun to
try to explain to her that his intention to blow up the jet
meant nothing personal, but was only a way of inducing his
mother to pay as much attention to him as she had, all
through their lives, to his brother, Dick. Although he stam-
mered so that he was almost incoherent, the stew understood
him at once. She, too, had had both a mother and an older
brother. Her pretty brown eyes filled with tears of sympathy
and with a rush of love she flung her arms around him. "You
poor boy," she cried, covering his stubbly face with kisses.
"Here, honey! Let me help you." And she caught the cassette
from his hand, careful not to pull the wires loose, and closed
the switch that touched off the caps in all the 30 Baggies.
One hundred and thirty-one men, women, and children
simultaneously were converted into maltreated chunks of
barbecued meat falling through the sky. Their roster included
the pilot, the co-pilot, the third pilot, and 8 other members
of the flight crew; plus, among the passengers, mothers, in-
fants, honeymooning couples, nonhoneymooning but equally
amorous couples who did not happen to be married to each
other, a middle-aged grape picker returning home after a
5-days-4-nights all-expense tour of Sin City (which he had
found disappointing), a defrocked priest, a disbarred lawyer,
and a Congressman from Oregon who would never now
achieve his dream of dismantling NASA and preventing the

158
in the problem pit
further waste of the taxpayer's funds on space, which he held
to be empty and uninteresting.
Whoever they had been when whole, the pieces of barbecue
all looked pretty much alike now. It did not matter. Not one
of the passengers or crew had died unhappy, since they had
all been touched by the comet.
And deep inside the core of the comet Ujifusa-McGinnis,
the device which was meant to display the wave forms sig-
nifying receipt of the destruction order for Earth remained
blank. No signal was received. No one would have observed
it if it had been, certainly not the watchers, but it was un-
precedented that a response should not be received.
The reason was quite simple. It was that that particular
superdreadnaught of the Arrogating Ones, like most of the
others in their galactic fleet, had long since been hurled
against the fortresses of the insectoids of the core. There, like
the others, it had been quickly destroyed, so that the message
sent by the watchers had never reached its destination.
It was, in a way, too bad, to think of all that strength and
sagacity spent with no more tangible visible result than to
give pleasure to a few billion advanced primates. Although
diis was regrettable, it did not much bother the Arrogating
Ones. They had plenty of other regrets to work on. What
remained of their collective intelligence was fully taken up
with the problem of bare survival against the insectoid fleets
—plus, to be sure, a good deal of attention given to mutual
recrimination.
The watchers did not mind; they had long since perished of
acute terminal pleasure.
And, as it turned out, they had not died entirely in vain.
Because the Oregon congressman did not live to complete
his plan to dismantle NASA, all his seniority and horse-trading
power having perished with him, the projected comet-study
mission was not canceled. To be sure, the bird did not fly on
schedule. The effects of the joy beams from the comet did
not begin to wear off for several days and the NASA tech-
nicians simply could not be bothered while their joy was in
its manic phase.
But gradually the world returned to—normal? No. It was
definitely not normal for everyone to be feeling rather cheerful
most of the time. But the world settled down, sweetly and

some joys under the stab
159
fondly, to something not unlike its previous condition of
work and play. So the astronauts found another launch win-
dow and made rendezvous with the comet; and what they
found there made quite a difference in the history of both
the human race and the galaxy. The watchers were gone,
but they had left their weaponry behind.
When the astronauts returned with the least and weakest
of the weapons, all they could cram into their ship, the
President of the United States gave up his shuffleboard game
to fly to the deck of the Independence and stare at it. "Oh,
boy!" he chortled, awed and thrilled. "If that'd turned up two
months ago Brazil would've had a seaport on the Caribbean!"
But Venezuela went about its business untouched. The Presi-
dent was tempted. Even cheerful and at peace with himself
and the world, he was tempted—old habits die hard. But he
had several thoughts and the longest and most persuasive of
them was that weaponry like this meant that somewhere there
was an enemy who had constructed and deployed it and
someday might return to use it. So with some misgivings, but
without any real freedom of choice, he flew back to Washing-
ton, summoned the ambassadors of Venezuela, Cuba, Canada,
the U.S.S.R., the People's Republic of China, and the United
Irish Republics of Great Britain and laid everything before
them.
Although politicians, too, were residually cheerful still from
the effect of the comet, they had not lost their intelligence.
They quickly saw that there was an external foe—somewhere
—which made each of them look like a very good friend.
Nobody was in a mood to fool with little international wars.
So treaties were signed, funds were appropriated, construction
was begun.
And the human race, newly armed and provided with
excellent spaceships, went looking for the Arrogating Ones.
They did not, of course, find them. By the time they were
ready to make their move, the last of the Arrogating Ones
had gone resentfully to his death. But a good many genera-
tions later, humans found the insectoids of the core instead
and what then happened to the insectoids would have satis-
fied even the Arrogating Ones.

The Man Who Me the World
During the presidential election of 1948 I was spend-
ing a lot of time with an enchantinghj beautiful girl, all
of five years old, named Merril Zissman. She knew what
an election was, and she knew that Harry Truman was
battling for survival against the favorite contender, Tom
Dewey; but she had a little trouble remembering which
was which. So she called them both "Trumie." It wasn't
until I had actually written "The Man Who Ate the
World," and sold it, and seen it in print that I realized
where the name of the lead character had come from,
tucked away for years in my subconscious and emerging
through my fingertips onto the tijpewriter paper with no
intervention at all of the conscious mind.
I
He had a name but at home he was called "Sonny," and he
was almost always at home. He hated it. Other boys his age
went to school. Sonny would have done anything to go to
school, but his family was, to put it mildly, not well off. It
was not Sonny's fault that his father was so unsuccessful. But
it meant no school for Sonny, no boys of his own age for
Sonny to play with. All childhoods are tragic (as all adults
forget), but Sonny's was misery all the way through.
The worst time was at night, when the baby sister was
asleep and the parents were grimly eating and reading and
dancing and drinking, until they were ready to drop. And
of all bad nights, the night before his twelfth birthday was
perhaps Sonny's worst. He was old enough to know what a
birthday party was like.
It would be cake and candy, shows and games.
It would be presents, presents, presents.
160

the man who ate the world
161
It would be a terrible, endless day.
He switched off the color-D television and the recorded
tapes of sea chanteys and, with an appearance of absent-
mindedness, walked toward the door of his playroom.
Davey Crockett got up from beside the model rocket field
and said, "Hold on thar, Sonny. Mought take a stroll with
you." Davey, with a face as serene and strong as a Tennessee
crag, swung its long huntin' rifle under one arm and put its
other arm around Sonny's shoulders. "Where you reckon the
two of us ought to head?"
Sonny shook Davey Crockett's arm off. "Get lost," he said
petulandy. "Who wants you around?"
Long John Silver came out of the closet, hobbling on its
wooden leg, crouched over its knobby cane. "Ah, young mas-
ter," it said reproachfully, "you shouldn't ought to talk to old
Davey like that! He's a good friend to you, Davey is. Many's
the weary day Davey and me has been a-keepin' of your
company. I asks you this, young master: Is it fair and square
tiiat you should be a-tellin' him to get lost? Is it fair, young
master? Is it square?"
Sonny looked at the floor stubbornly and didn't answer.
What was the use of answering dummies like them? He stood
rebelliously silent and still until he just felt like saying some-
thing. And then he said: "You go in the closet, both of you.
I don't want to play with you. I'm going to play witii my
trains."
Long John said unctuously: "Now there's a good idea, that
is! You just be a-havin' of a good time with your trains and
old Davey and me'll—"
"Go ahead!" shouted Sonny. He kept stamping his foot
until they were out of sight.
His fire truck was in the middle of the floor; he kicked at
it, but it rolled quickly out of reach and slid into its little
garage under the tanks of tropical fish.
He scuffed over to the model railroad layout and glared at
it. As he approached, the Twentieth Century Limited came
roaring out of a tunnel, sparks flying from its stack. It crossed
a bridge, whistled at a grade crossing, steamed into the Union
Station. The roof of the station glowed and suddenly became
transparent, and through it Sonny saw the bustling crowds of
redcaps and travelers—

162
in the problem pit
"I don't want that," he said. "Casey, crack up old Number
Ninety-Nine again."
Obediently the layout quivered and revolved a half-turn.
Old Casey Jones, one and an eighth inches tall, leaned out of
the cab of the S.P. locomotive and waved good-bye to Sonny.
The locomotive whistled shrilly twice and picked up speed—
It was a good crackup. Little old Casey's body, thrown
completely free, developed real blisters from the steam and
bled real blood. But Sonny turned his back on it. He had
liked that crackup for a long time—longer than he liked
almost any other toy he owned. But he was tired of it.
He looked around the room.
Tarzan of the Apes, leaning against a foot-thick tree trunk,
one hand on a vine, lifted its head and looked at him; but
Tarzan was clear across the room. The others were in the
closet.
Sonny ran out and slammed the door. He saw Tarzan start
to come after him, but even before Sonny was out of the
room, Tarzan slumped and stood stockstill.
It wasn't fair, Sonny thought angrily. They wouldn't even
chase him, so that at least he could have some kind of chance
to get away by himself. They'd just talk to each other on their
little radios, and in a minute one of the tutors, or one of the
maids, or whatever else happened to be handy would vector
in on him—
But, for the moment, he was free.
He slowed down and walked along the Great Hall toward
his baby sister's room. The fountains began to splash as he
entered the hall; the mosaics on the wall began to tinkle
music and sparkle with moving colors.
"Now, chile, whut you up to?"
He turned around, but he knew it was Mammy coming
toward him. It was slapping toward him on big, flat feet, its
pink-palmed hands lifted to its shoulders. The face under the
red bandanna was frowning, its gold tooth sparkling as
Mammy scolded: "Chile, you is got usns so worried, we's fit to
die! How you 'speck us to take good keer of you efn you run
off lak that? Now you jes come on back to your nice room
with Mammy an' we'll see if diere ain't some real nice pro-
gram on the TV."
Sonny stopped and waited for it, but he wouldn't give it the

the man who ate the world
163
satisfaction of looking at it. Slap-slap, the big feet waddled
cumbersomely toward him; but he didn't have any illusions.
Waddle, big feet, 300 pounds and all, Mammy could catch
him in 20 yards with a ten-yard start. Any of them could.
He said in his best icily indignant voice: "I was just going
in to look at my baby sister."
Pause. "You was?" The plump black face looked suspicious.
"Yes, I was. Doris is my own sister and I love her."
Pause—long pause. "Dat's nice," said Mammy, but its voice
was still doubtful. "I 'speck I better come 'long with you. You
wouldn't want to wake your lil baby sister up. Ef I come, I'll
he'p you keep real quiet."
Sonny shook free of it—they were always putting their
hands on kids! "I don't want you to come with me, Mammy!"
"Aw, now, honey! Mammy ain't gwine bother nothin', you
knows that!"
Sonny turned his back on it and marched grimly toward
his sister's room. If only they would leave him alone! But
they never did.
It was always that way, always one darn old robot—yes,
robot, he thought, savagely tasting the naughty word. Always
one dam robot after another. Why couldn't Daddy be like
other daddies, so they could live in a decent little house and
get rid of those dam robots—so he could go to a real school
and be in a class with other boys, instead of being taught at
home by Miss Brooks and Mr. Chips and all those other
robots?
They spoiled everything. And they would spoil what he
wanted to do now. But he was going to do it all the same,
because there was something in Doris's room that he wanted
very much.
It was probably the only tangible thing he wanted in the
world.
As he and Mammy passed the imitation tumbled rocks of
the Bear Cave, Mama Bear poked its head out and growled:
"Hello, Sonny. Don't you think you ought to be in bed? It's
nice and warm in our hear bed, Sonny."
He didn't even look at it. Time was when he had liked that
sort of thing, too, but he wasn't a four-year-old like Doris any
more. All the same, there was one thing a four-year-old had—
He stopped at the door of her room. "Doris?" he whispered.

164
in the problem pit
Mammy scolded: "Now, chile, you knows that lil baby is
asleep! How come you tryin' to wake her up?"
"I won't wake her up." The furthest thing from Sonny's
mind was to wake his sister up. He tiptoed into the room and
stood beside the little girl's bed. Lucky kid! he thought en-
viously. Being four, she was allowed to have a tiny little
room and a tiny bed—while Sonny had to wallow around in
a 40-foot bedchamber and a bed eight feet long.
He looked down at his sister. Behind him, Mammy clucked
approvingly. "Dat's nice when chilluns loves each other lak
you an' that lil baby," it whispered.
Doris was sound asleep, clutching her teddy bear. It wrig-
gled slighdy and opened an eye to look at Sonny, but it didn't
say anything.
Sonny took a deep breath, leaned forward and gently
slipped the teddy bear out of the bed.
It scrambled pathetically, trying to get free.
Mammy whispered urgently: "Sonny! Now you let dat old
teddy bear alone, you heah me?"
Sonny whispered: "I'm not hurting anything. Leave me
alone, will you?"
"Sonny!"
He clutched the little furry robot desperately around its
middle. The stubby arms pawed at him, the furred feet
scratched against his arms. It growled a tiny doll-bear growl,
and whined, and suddenly his hands were wet with its real
salt tears.
"Sonny! Come on now, honey, you knows that's Doris's
Teddy. Aw, chile!"
He said: "It's mine!" It wasn't his. He knew it wasn't. His
was long gone, taken away from him when he was six because
it was old, and because he had been six, and six-year-olds had
to have bigger, more elaborate companion-robots. It wasn't
even the same color as his—it was brown and his had been
black and white. But it was cuddly and gently warm and he
had heard it whispering litde bedtime stories to Doris. And
he wanted it very much.
Footsteps in the hall outside. A low-pitched pleading voice
from the door: "Sonny, you must not interfere with your
sister's toys. One has obligations."

the man who ate the world
165
He stood forlornly, holding the teddy bear. "Go away, Mr.
Chips!"
"Really, Sonny! This isn't proper behavior. Please return
die toy."
"I won't!"
Mammy, dark face pleading in the shadowed room, leaned
toward him and tried to take it away from him. "Aw, honey,
now you know that's not—"
"Leave me alone!" he shouted. There was a gasp and a
little whimper from the bed, and Doris sat up and began to
cry.
The little girl's bedroom was suddenly filled with robots—
and not only robots, for in a moment the butler appeared,
leading Sonny's actual flesh-and-blood mother and father.
Sonny made a terrible scene. He cried, and he swore at
them childishly for being the unsuccessful clods they were,
and they nearly wept, too, because they were aware that their
lack of standing was bad for the children. But he couldn't
keep Teddy.
They marched him back to his room, where his father
lectured him while his mother stayed behind to watch
Mammy comfort the little girl.
His father said: "Sonny, you're a big boy now. We aren't
as well off as other people, but you have to help us. Don't
you know that, Sonny? We all have to do our part. Your
mother and I'll be up till midnight now, consuming, because
you've made this scene. Can't you at least try to consume
something bigger than a teddy bear? It's all right for Doris
because she's so little, but a big boy like you—"
"I hate you!" cried Sonny, and he turned his face to the
wall.
They punished him, naturally. The first punishment was
that they give him an extra birthday party the week following.
The second punishment was even worse.
II
Later—much, much later, nearly a score of years—a man
named Roger Garrick in a place named Fisherman's Island
walked into his hotel room.
The light didn't go on.

166
in the problem pit
The bellhop apologized, "Were sorry, sir. Well have it
attended to, if possible."
"If possible?" Garrick's eyebrows went up. The bellhop
made putting in a new light tube sound like a major industrial
operation. "All right." He waved the bellhop out of the room.
It bowed and closed the door.
Garrick looked around him, frowning. One light tube more
or less didn't make a lot of difference; there was still the light
from the sconces at the walls, from the reading lamps at the
chairs and chaise lounge and from the photomural on the
long side of the room—to say nothing of the fact that it was
broad, hot daylight outside and light poured through the
windows. All the same, it was a new sensation to be in a room
where the central lighting wasn't on. He didn't like it. It was
—creepy.
A rap on the door. A girl was standing there, young,
attractive, rather small. But a woman grown, it was apparent.
"Mr. Garrick? Mr. Roosenburg is expecting you on the sun
deck."
"All right." He rummaged around in the pile of luggage,
looking for his briefcase. It wasn't even sorted out! The bell-
hop had merely dumped the stuff and left.
The girl said: "Is that what you're looking for?" He looked
where she was pointing; it was his briefcase, behind another
bag. "You'll get used to that around here. Nothing in the right
place, nothing working right We've all gotten used to it.
We. He looked at her sharply, but she was no robot; there
was life, not the glow of electronic tubes, in her eyes. "Pretty
bad, is it?"
She shrugged. "Let's go see Mr. Roosenburg. I'm Kathryn
Pender, by the way. I'm his statistician."
He followed her out into the hall. "Statistician, did you
say?"
She turned and smiled—a tight, grim smile of annoyance.
"That's right. Surprised?"
Garrick said uneasily: "Well, it's more a robot job. Of
course, I'm not familiar with the practice in this sector—"
"You will be," she promised bluntly. "No, we aren't taking
the elevator. Mr. Roosenburg's in a hurry to see you."
"But—"
She actually glared at him. "Don't you understand? Day

the man who ate the world
167
before yesterday, I took the elevator and I was hung up be-
tween floors for an hour and a half. Something was going on
at North Guardian and it took all the power in the lines.
Would it happen again today? I don't know. But, believe me,
an hour and a half is a long time to be stuck in an elevator."
She turned and led him to die fire stairs. Over her shoulder,
she said: "Get it straight once and for all, Mr. Garrick. You're
in a disaster area here . . . Anyway, it's only ten more flights."
Ten flights. Nobody climbed ten flights of stairs any morel
Garrick was huffing and puffing before diey were halfway,
but the girl kept on ahead, light as a gazelle. Her skirt
reached between hip and knees, and Garrick had plenty of
opportunity to observe that her legs were attractively tanned.
Even so, he couldn't help looking around him.
It was a robot's eye view of the hotel that he was getting;
this was the bare wire armature that held up the confection-
ery suites and halls where the humans went. Garrick knew, as
everyone absently knew, that there were places like this be-
hind the scenes everywhere. Belowstairs, the robots worked;
behind scenes, they moved about their errands and did dieir
jobs. But nobody went there.
It was funny about the backs of this girl's knees. They
were paler than the rest of the leg—
Garrick wrenched his mind back to his surroundings. Take
the guardrail along the steps, for instance. It was wire-thin,
frail-looking. No doubt it could bear any weight it was re-
quired to, but why couldn't it look that strong?
The answer, obviously, was that robots did not have
humanity's built-in concepts of how strong a rail should look
before they could believe it really was strong. If a robot
should be in any doubt—and how improbable that a robot
should be in doubt!—it would perhaps reach out a sculptured
hand and test it. Once. And then it would remember, and
never doubt again, and it wouldn't be continually edging
toward the wall, away from the spider-strand between it and
the vertical drop—
He conscientiously took the middle of die steps all the rest
of the way up.
Of course, that merely meant a different distraction, when
he really wanted to do some thinking. But it was a pleasurable
12

168
in the problem pit
distraction. And by the time they reached the top, he had
solved the problem. The pale spots at the back of Miss
Pender's knees meant she had got her tan the hard way—■
walking in the Sun, perhaps working in die Sun, so that the
bending knees kept the Sun from the patches at the back;
not, as anyone else would acquire a tan, by lying beneath a
normal, healdiful sunlamp held by a robot masseur.
He wheezed: "You don't mean we're all the way up!"
"All the way up," she said, and looked at him closely.
"Here, lean on me if you want to."
"No, thanks!" He staggered over to the door, which opened
naturally enough as he approached it, and stepped out into
the flood of sunlight on the roof, to meet Mr. Roosenburg.
Garrick wasn't a medical doctor, but he remembered
enough of his basic pre-specialization to know there was
something in that fizzy golden drink. It tasted perfectly
splendid—just cold enough, just fizzy enough, not quite too
sweet. And after two sips of it, he was buoyant with strength
and well-being.
He put the glass down and said: "Thank you for whatever
it was. Now let's talk."
"Gladly, gladly!" boomed Mr. Roosenburg. "Kathryn, the
files!"
Garrick looked after her, shaking his head. Not only was
she a statistician, which was robot work, she was also a file
clerk—and that was barely robot work. It was the kind of
tiling handled by a semisentient punchcard sorter in a de-
cently run sector.
Roosenburg said sharply: "Shocks you, doesn't it? But that's
why you're here." He was a slim, fair little man and he wore
a golden beard cropped square.
Garrick took another sip of the fizzy drink. It was good
stuff; it didn't intoxicate, but it cheered. He said: "I'm glad to
know why I'm here."
The golden beard quivered. "Area Control sent you down
and didn't tell you this was a disaster area?"
Garrick put down the glass. "I'm a psychist. Area Control
said you needed a psychist. From what I've seen, it's a supply
problem, but—"
"Here are the files," said Kathryn Pender, and stood
watching him.

the man who ate the world
169
Roosenburg took the spools of tape from her and dropped
them in his lap. He asked tangentially: "How old are you,
Roger?"
Garrick was annoyed. "I'm a qualified psychist! I happen
to be assigned to Area Control and—"
"How old are you?"
Garrick scowled. "Twenty-four."
Roosenburg nodded. "Umm. Rather young," he observed.
"Maybe you don't remember how things used to be."
Garrick said dangerously: "All the information I need is
on that tape. I don't need any lectures from you."
Roosenburg pursed his lips and got up. "Come here a
minute, will you?"
He moved over to the rail of the sun deck and pointed.
"See those things down there?"
Garrick looked. Twenty stories down, the village straggled
off toward the sea in a tangle of pastel oblongs and towers.
Over the bay, the hills of the mainland were faintly visible
through mist and, riding the bay, the flat white floats of the
solar receptors.
"It's a power plant. That what you mean?"
Roosenburg boomed: "A power plant. All the power the
world can ever use, out of this one and all the others, all over
the world." He peered out at the bobbing floats, soaking up
energy from the Sun. "And people used to try to wreck them,"
he added.
Garrick said stiffly: "I may only be twenty-four years old,
Mr. Roosenburg, but I have completed school."
"Oh, yes. Of course you have, Roger. But maybe schooling
isn't the same thing as living through a time like that. I grew
up in the Era of Plenty, when the law was Consume! My
parents were poor and I still remember the misery of my
childhood. Eat and consume, wear and use. I never had a
moment's peace, Rogerl For the very poor, it was a treadmill;
we had to consume so much that we could never catch up,
and the further we fell behind, the more the Ration Board
forced on us—"
"That's ancient history, Mr. Roosenburg. Morey Fry liber-
ated us from all that."
The girl said softly: "Not all of us."
The man with the golden beard nodded. "Not all of us—
as you should know, Roger, being a psychist."

170
in the problem pit
Garrick sat up straight and Roosenburg went on: 'Try
showed us that the robots could help at both ends—by pro-
ducing and by consuming. But it came a little late for some
of us. The patterns of childhood do linger on."
Kathryn Pender leaned toward Garrick. "What he's trying
to say, Mr. Garrick, is that we've got a compulsive consumer
on our hands."
Ill
North Guardian Island—nine miles away. It wasn't as much
as a mile wide and not much more than that in length, but it
had its city and its bathing beaches, its parks and theaters. It
was possibly the most densely populated island in the world
.. . for the number of its inhabitants.
The President of the Council convened their afternoon
meeting in a large and lavish room. There were 19 council-
men around a lustrous mahogany table. Over the President's
shoulder, the others could see the situation map of North
Guardian and the areas surrounding. North Guardian glowed
blue, cold, impregnable. The sea was misty green; the main-
land, Fisherman's Island, South Guardian and the rest of the
little archipelago were hot, hostile red.
Little flickering fingers of red attacked the blue. Flick, and
a ruddy flame wiped out a comer of a beach. Flick, and a
red spark appeared in the middle of the city, to grow and
blossom, and then to die. Each little red whip-flick was a
point where, momentarily, the defenses of the island were
down; but always and always, the cool blue brightened
around the red and drowned it.
The President was tall, stooped, old. It wore glasses, though
robot eyes saw well enough without. It said, in a voice that
throbbed with power and pride: "The first item of the order
of business will be a report of the Defense Secretary."
The Defense Secretary rose to its feet, hooked a thumb in
its vest and cleared its throat. "Mr. President—"
"Excuse me, sir." A whisper from the sweet-faced young
blonde taking down the minutes of the meeting. "Mr. Trumie
has just left Bowling Green, heading north."
The whole council turned to glance at the situation map,
where Bowling Green had just flared red.

the man who ate the world
171
The President nodded stiffly, like the crown of an old red-
wood nodding. "You may proceed, Mr. Secretary," it said after
a moment.
"Our invasion fleet," began the Secretary, in its high, clear
voice, "is ready for sailing on the first suitable tide. Certain
units have been, ah, inactivated, at the, ah, instigation of
Mr. Trumie. But on the whole, repairs have been completed
and the units will be serviceable within the next few hours."
Its lean, attractive face turned solemn. "I am afraid, however,
that the Air Command has sustained certain, ah, increments
of attrition—due, I should emphasize, to chances involved
in certain calculated risks—"
"Question! Question!" It was the Commissioner of Public
Safety, small, dark, fire-eyed, angry.
"Mr. Commissioner?" the President began, but it was inter-
rupted again by the soft whisper of the recording stenog-
rapher, listening intently to the earphones that brought news
from outside.
"Mr. President," it whispered, "Mr. Trumie has passed the
Navy Yard."
The robots turned to look at the situation map. Bowling
Green, though it smoldered in spots, had mostly gone back to
blue. But the jagged oblong of the Yard flared red and bright.
There was a faint electronic hum in the air, almost a sigh.
The robots turned back to face each other. "Mr. PresidentI
I demand that the Defense Secretary explain the loss of the
Graf Zeppelin and the 456th Bomb Group!"
The Defense Secretary nodded to the Commissioner of Pub-
lic Safety. "Mr. Trumie threw them away," it said sorrowfully.
Once again, that sighing electronic drone from the assem-
bled robots.
The Council fussed and fiddled with its papers, while the
situation map on the wall flared and dwindled, flared and
dwindled.
The Defense Secretary cleared its throat again. "Mr. Presi-
dent, there is no question that the, ah, absence of an effective
air component will seriously hamper, not to say endanger, our
prospects of a suitable landing. Nevertheless—and I say this,
Mr. President, in full knowledge of the conclusions that may
—indeed, should!—be drawn from such a statement—never-

172
in the problem pit
theless, Mr. President, I say that our forward elements will
successfully complete an assault landing—"
"Mr. President!" The breathless whisper of the blonde
stenographer again. "Mr. President, Mr. Trumie is in the
building!"
On the situation map behind it, the Pentagon—the building
they were in—flared scarlet.
The Attorney General, nearest the door, leaped to its feet.
"Mr. President, I hear him!"
And they could all hear now. Far off, down the long cor-
ridors, a crash. A faint explosion, and another crash, and a
raging, querulous, high-pitched voice. A nearer crash, and a
sustained, smashing, banging sound, coming toward them.
The oak-paneled doors flew open with a crash, splintering.
A tall, dark male figure in gray leather jacket, rocket-gun
holsters swinging at its hips, stepped through the splintered
doors and stood surveying the Council. Its hands hung just
below the butts of the rocket guns.
It drawled: "Mistuh Anderson Trumie!"
It stepped aside. Another male figure—shorter, darker, hob-
bling with the aid of a stainless steel cane that concealed a
ray-pencil, wearing die same gray leather jacket and the same
rocket-gun holsters—entered, stood for a moment, and took
position on the other side of the door.
Between them, Mr. Anderson Trumie shambled ponder-
ously into the Council Chamber to call on his Council.
Sonny Trumie, come of age. He wasn't much more than
five feet tall, but his weight was close to 400 pounds. He
stood there in the door, leaning against the splintered oak,
quivering jowls obliterating his neck, his eyes nearly swal-
lowed in the fat that swamped his skull, his thick legs
trembling as they tried to support him.
"You're all under arrest!" he screeched. "Traitors! Traitors!"
He panted ferociously, glowering at them. They waited
with bowed heads. Beyond the ring of councilmen, the situa-
tion map slowly blotted out the patches of red as the repair
robots worked feverishly to fix what Sonny Trumie had
destroyed.
"Mr. Crockett!" Sonny cried shrilly. "Slay me these traitors!"
Wheep-wheep, and the guns whistled out of their holsters

the man who ate the world	173
into the tall bodyguard's hands. Raia-lat-iat, and two by two,
the 19 councilmen leaped, clutched at air and fell as the
rocket pellets pierced them through.
"That one, tool" Mr. Trumie pointed at the sweet-faced
blonde.
Bang. The sweet young face convulsed and froze; it fell,
slumping across its little table.
On the wall, the situation map flared red again, but only
faintly—for what were 20 robots?
Sonny gestured curtly to his other bodyguard. It leaped
forward, tucking the stainless steel cane under one arm, put-
ting the other around the larded shoulders of Sonny Trumie.
"Ah, now, young master," it crooned. "You just get ahold o'
Long John's arm now—"
"Get them fixed," Sonny ordered abruptly. He pushed the
President of the Council out of its chair and, with the robot's
help, sank into it himself. "Get them fixed right, you hear?
I've had enough traitors! I want them to do what I tell them!"
"Sartin sure, young master. Long John'll be pleased to—•"
"Do it now! And you, Davey, I want my lunch!"
"Reckoned you would, Mistuh Trumie. It's right hyar." The
Crockett robot kicked the fallen councilmen out of die way
as a procession of waiters filed in from the corridor.
Sonny ate.
He ate until eating was pain, and then he sat there sobbing,
his arms braced against the tabletop, until he could eat more.
The Crockett robot said worriedly: "Mistuh Trumie,
moughtn't you rear back a mite? Old Doc Aeschylus, he don't
hold with you eatin' too much, you know."
"I hate Doc!" Trumie said bitterly.
He pushed the plates off the table. They fell with a rattle
and a clatter, and they went spinning away as he heaved
himself up and lurched alone over to the window.
"I hate Doc!" he brayed again, sobbing, staring through
tears out the window at his kingdom with its hurrying throngs
and marching troops and roaring waterfront. The tallow
shoulders tried to shake with pain. He felt as though hot
cinderblocks were being thrust down his throat, the ragged
edges cutting, the hot weight crushing.
"Take me back," he wept to the robots. "Take me away
from these traitors. Take me to my Private Place!"

174
in the problem pit
TV
"As you see," said Roosenburg, "he's dangerous."
Garrick looked out over the water, toward Nordi Guardian.
"I'd better look at his tapes," he said.
The girl swiftly picked up the reels and began to thread
them into the projector. Dangerous. This Trumie indeed was
dangerous, Garrick conceded. Dangerous to the balanced,
stable world, for it only took one Trumie to topple its stability.
It had taken tiiousands and thousands of years for society to
learn its delicate tightrope walk. It was a matter for a
psychist, all right.
And Garrick was uncomfortably aware that he was only 24.
"Here you are," said the girl.
"Look them over," Roosenburg suggested. "Then, after
you've studied the tapes on Trumie, we've got something else.
One of his robots. But you'll need the tapes first."
"Let's go," said Garrick.
The girl flicked a switch and the life of Anderson Trumie
appeared before them, in color, in three dimensions—in
miniature.
Robots have eyes; and where the robots go, the eyes of
Robot Central go with them. And the robots go everywhere.
From the stored files of Robot Central came die spool of tape
that was the frightful life story of Sonny Trumie.
The tapes played into the globe-shaped viewer, ten inches
high, a ciystal ball that looked back into the past. First, from
the recording eyes of the robots in Sonny Trumie's nursery.
The lonely little boy, 20 years before, lost in the enormous
nursery.
"Disgusting!" breathed Kathryn Pender, wrinkling her nose.
"How could people live like that?"
Garrick said: "Please, let me watch this. It's important."
In the gleaming globe, the little boy kicked at his toys,
threw himself across his huge bed, sobbed. Garrick squinted,
frowned, reached out, tried to make contact. It was hard. The
tapes showed the objective facts, but for a psychist, it was
the subjective reality behind the facts that mattered.
Kicking at his toys. Yes, but why? Because he was tired of
them—and why was he tired? Because he feared them? Kick-
ing at his toys. Because—because they were the wrong toys?
Kicking—hate them! Don't want them! Want—

the man who ate the world
175
A bluish flare in the viewing globe. Garrick blinked and
jumped, and that was the end of that section.
The colors flowed and suddenly jelled into bright life.
Garrick recognized the scene after a moment—it was right
there in Fisherman's Island, some pleasure spot overlooking
the water. A bar, and at the end of it was Anderson Trumie
at 20, staring somberly into an empty glass. The view was
through the eyes of the robot bartender.
Anderson Trumie was weeping.
Once again, there was the objective fact—but the fact
behind the fact, what was it? Trumie had been drinking,
drinking. Why?
Drinking, drinking.
With a sudden sense of shock, Garrick saw what the drink
was—the golden, fizzy liquor. Not intoxicating. Not habit-
forming! Trumie had become no drunk. It was something else
that kept him drinking, drinking, must drink, must keep on
drinking, or eke—
And again the bluish flare.
There was more—Trumie feverishly collecting objects of
art, Trumie decorating a palace, Trumie on a world tour, and
Trumie returned to Fisherman's Island.
And then there was no more.
"That," said Roosenburg, "is the file. Of course, if you want
the raw, unedited tapes, we can try to get them from Robot
Central, but—"
"No." The way things were, it was best to stay away from
Robot Central; there might be more breakdowns and there
wasn't much time. Besides, something was beginning to
suggest itself.
"Run the first one again," said Garrick. "I think maybe I'll
find something there."
Garrick made out a quick requisition slip and handed it to
Kadiryn Pender, who looked at it, raised her eyebrows,
shrugged and went off to have it filled.
By the time she came back, Roosenburg had escorted Gar-
rick to the room where the captured Trumie robot lay chained.
"He's cut off from Robot Central," Roosenburg was saying.
"I suppose you figured that out. Imagine! Not only has Trumie
built a whole city for himself—but even his own Robot
Central!"
Garrick looked at the robot. It was a fisherman, or so

176	in the problem pit
Roosenburg has said. It was small, dark, black-haired; pos-
sibly the hair would have been curly, if the sea water hadn't
plastered die curls to the scalp. It was still damp from the
tussle that had landed it in the water and eventually into
Roosenburg's hands.
Roosenburg was already a work. Garrick tried to think of
the robot as a machine, but it wasn't easy. The thing looked
very nearly human—except for the crystal and copper that
showed where the back of its head had been removed.
"It's as bad as a brain operation," said Roosenburg, working
rapidly without looking up. "I've got to short out the input
leads without disturbing the electronic balance—■"
Snip, snip. A curl of copper fell free, to be grabbed by
Roosenburg's tweezers. The fisherman's arms and legs kicked
sharply like a dissected, galvanized frog's.
Kathryn Pender said: "They found him this morning, cast-
ing nets into the bay and singing 'O Sole Mio.' He's from
North Guardian, all right."
Abruptly the lights flickered and turned yellow, then slowly
returned to normal brightness. Roger Garrick got up and
walked over to the window. North Guardian was a haze of
light in the sky, across the water.
Click, snap. The fisherman robot began to sing:
Tutte le serre, dopo quel fanal,
Dietro la caserma, ti staro ed—
Click.
Roosenburg muttered under his breath and probed further.
Kathryn Pender joined Garrick at the window.
"Now you see," she said.
Garrick shrugged. "You can't blame him."
"I blame him!" she said hotly. "I've lived here all my life.
Fisherman's Island used to be a tourist spot—why, it was
lovely here. And look at it now. The elevators don't work. The
lights don't work. Practically all of our robots are gone. Spare
parts, construction material, everything—it's all gone to North
Guardian! There isn't a day that passes, Garrick, when half a
dozen bargeloads of stuff don't go north, because he requisi-
tioned them. Blame him? I'd like to kill him!"
Snap. Sputters-nap. The fisherman lifted its head and
caroled:

the man who ate the world
177
Forse dommani, piangerai,
E dopo tu, sorriderai—
Roosenburg's probe uncovered a flat black disc. "Kathryn,
look this up, will you?" He read the serial number from die
disc and then put down the probe. He stood flexing his
fingers, looking irritably at the motionless figure.
Garrick joined him. Roosenburg jerked his head at the
fisherman.
"That's robot repair work, trying to tinker with their in-
sides. Trumie has his own Robot Central, as I told you. What
I have to do is recontrol this one from the substation on the
mainland, but keep its receptor circuits open to North Guard-
ian on the symbolic level. You understand what I'm talking
about? It'll think from North Guardian, but act from the
mainland."
"Sure," said Garrick.
"And it's damned close work. There isn't much room inside
one of those things—" He stared at the figure and picked up
the probe again.
Kathryn Pender came back with a punchcard in her hand.
"It was one of ours, all right. Used to be a busboy in the
cafeteria at the beach club." She scowled. "That Trumie!"
"You can't blame him," Garrick said reasonably. "He's only
trying to be good."
She looked at him queerly. "He's only—"
Roosenburg interrupted with an exultant cry. "Got it! Okay,
you—sit up and start telling us what Trumie's up to now!"
The fisherman figure said obligingly, "Yes, Boss. What you
wanna know?"
What they wanted to know, they asked; and what tiiey
asked, it told diem, volunteering nothing, concealing nothing.
There was Anderson Trumie, king of his island, die com-
pulsive consumer.
It was like an echo of the bad old days of the Age of Plenty,
when the world was smothering under the endless, pounding
flow of goods from the robot factories and the desperate race
between consumption and production strained the whole
society. But Trumie's orders came not from society, but from
within. Consume! commanded something inside him, and
Use! it cried, and Devour! it ordered. And Trumie obeyed,
heroically.

178
in the problem pit
They listened to what the fisherman robot had to say, and
the picture was dark. Armies had sprung up on North Guard-
ian; navies floated in its waters. Anderson Trumie stalked
among his creations like a blubbery god, wrecking and ruling.
Garrick could see the pattern in what the fisherman had to
say. In Trumie's mind, he was dictator, building a war ma-
chine. He was supreme engineer, constructing a mighty state.
He was warrior.
"He was playing tin soldiers," said Roger Garrick, and
Roosenburg and the girl nodded.
"The trouble is," Roosenburg said, "he has stopped playing.
Invasion fleets, Garrick! He isn't content with Nordi Guardian
any more. He wants the rest of the country, too!"
"You can't blame him," said Roger Garrick for the third
time, and stood up. "The question is, what do we do about
it?"
"That's what you're here for," Kathryn told him.
"All right. We can forget about the soldiers—as soldiers,
that is. They won't hurt anyone. Robots can't."
"I know that," Kathryn snapped.
"The problem is what to do about Trumie's drain on the
world's resources." Garrick pursed his lips. "According to my
directive from Area Control, the first plan was to let him
alone—there is still plenty of everything for anyone, so why
not let Trumie enjoy himself? But that didn't work out too
well."
"Didn't work out too well," repeated Kathryn Pender bit-
terly.
"No, no—not on your local level," Garrick explained
quickly. "After all, what are a few diousand robots, a few
hundred million dollars' worth of equipment? We could re-
supply this area in a week."
"And in a week," said Roosenburg, "Trumie would have us
cleaned out again!"
"That's the trouble," Garrick declared. "He doesn't seem
to have a stopping point. Yet we can't refuse his orders.
Speaking as a psychist, that would set a very bad precedent.
It would put ideas in the minds of a lot of persons—minds
that, in some cases, might not prove stable in the absence of
a completely reliable source of everything they need, on
request. If we say no to Trumie, we open the door on some

the man who ate the world	179
mighty dark corners of the human mind. Covetousness. Greed.
Pride of possession—"
"So what are you going to do?" demanded Kathryn Pender.
Garrick said resentfully: "The only thing there is to do. I'm
going to look over Trumie's folder again. And dien I'm going
to North Guardian Island."
V
Roger Garrick was all too aware of the fact that he was
only 24. But his age couldn't make a great deal of difference.
The oldest and wisest psychist in Area Control's wide sphere
might have been doubtful of success in as thorny a job as the
one ahead.
He and Kathryn Pender warily started out at daybreak.
Vapor was rising from the sea about them, and the little
battery-motor of their launch whined softly beneath the
keelson. Garrick sat patting the little box that contained their
invasion equipment, while the girl steered.
The workshops of Fisherman's Island had been all night
making some of the diings in that box—not because tiiey
were so difficult to make, but because it had been a bad night.
Big diings were going on at North Guardian; twice, the power
had been out entirely for an hour, while the demand on die
lines from North Guardian took all the power the system
could deliver.
The Sun was well up as they came within hailing distance
of the Navy Yard.
Robots were hard at work; the Yard was bustling with
activity. An overhead traveling crane, eight feet tall, labori-
ously lowered a prefabricated fighting top onto an 11-foot
aircraft carrier.
A motor torpedo boat—full-sized, this one was, not to scale
—rocked at anchor just before the bow of their launch.
Kadiryn steered around it, ignoring the hail from the robot
lieutenant-j.g. at its rail.
She glanced at Garrick over her shoulder, her face taut.
"It's—it's all mixed up."
Garrick nodded. The battleships were model-sized, the
small boats full-scale. In the city beyond the Yard, die pin-
nacle of the Empire State Building barely cleared die Penta-
gon, right next door. A soaring suspension bridge leaped out

180
in the problem pit
from the shore a quarter of a mile away and stopped short a
thousand yards out, over empty water.
It was easy to understand—even for a psychist just out of
school, on his first real assignment. Trumie was trying to run
a world singlehanded, and where there were gaps in his con-
ception of what his world should be, the results showed.
"Get me battleships!" he ordered his robot supply clerks,
and they found the only battleships there were in the world
to copy, the child-sized, toy-scaled play battleships that still
delighted kids.
"Get me an Air Force!" And a thousand model bombers
were hastily put together.
"Build me a bridge!" But perhaps he had forgotten to say
to where.
Garrick shook his head and focused on the world around
him. Kathryn Pender was standing on a gray steel stage, the
mooring line from their launch secured to what looked like
a coast defense cannon—but only about four feet long. Gar-
rick picked up the little box and leaped up to the stage beside
her. She turned to look at the city.
"Hold on a second." He was opening the box, taking out
two little cardboard placards. He turned her by the shoulder
and, with pins from the box, attached one of the cards to her
back. "Now me," he said, turning his back to her.
She read the placard dubiously:
I
AM A
SPY!
"Garrick," she said, "you're sure you know what you're
doing?"
"Put it on!" She shrugged and pinned it to die back of his
jacket.
Side by side, they entered the citadel of the enemy.
According to the fisherman robot, Trumie lived in a ginger-
bread castle soudi of the Pentagon. Most of the robots got no
chance to enter it. The city outside the castle was Trumie's
kingdom, and he roamed about it, overseeing, changing, de-
stroying, rebuilding. But inside the castle was his Private

the man who ate the world
181
Place; the only robots that had both an inside- and outside-
die-castle existence were the two bodyguards of his youth,
Davey Crockett and Long John Silver.
'That," said Garrick, "must be the Private Place."
It was decidedly a gingerbread castle. The "gingerbread"
was stonework, gargoyles, and columns; there were a moat
and a drawbridge, and tiiere were robot guards with crooked
little rifles, wearing scarlet tunics and fur shakos three feet
tall. The drawbridge was up and die guards stood at stiff
attention.
"Let's reconnoiter," said Garrick. He was unpleasantly
conscious of die fact that every robot diey passed—and they
had passed thousands—had turned to look at the signs on
their backs.
Yet it was right, wasn't it? There was no hope of avoiding
observation in any event. The only hope was to fit somehow
into the pattern—and spies would certainly be a part of the
military pattern.
Wouldn't they?
Garrick turned his back on doubts and led the way around
the gingerbread palace.
The only entrance was the drawbridge.
They stopped out of sight of die ramrod-sdff guards. Gar-
rick said: "We'll go in. As soon as we get inside, you put on
your costume." He handed her the box. "You know what to
do. All you have to do is keep him quiet for a while and let
me talk to him."
"Garrick, will this work?"
Garrick exploded: "How the devil do I know? I had
Trumie's dossier to work with. I know everything that hap-
pened to him when he was a kid—when this trouble started.
But to reach him takes a long time, Kathryn. And we don't
have a long time. So—"
He took her elbow and marched her toward the guards.
"So you know what to do," he said.
"I hope so," breadied Kathryn Pender, looking very small
and very young.
They marched down the wide white pavement, past the
motionless guards—
Somediing was coming toward them. Kathryn held back.
"Come onl" Garrick muttered.
"No, lookl" she whispered. "Is that—is that Trumie?"

182
in the problem pit
He looked, then stared.
It was Trumie, larger than life. It was Anderson Trumie,
die entire human population of die most-congested-island-for-
its-population in the world. On one side of him was a tall
dark figure, on die other side a squat dark figure, helping
him along. His face was horror, drowned in fat. The bloated
cheeks shook damply, wet with tears. The eyes squinted out
with fright on the world he had made.
Trumie and his bodyguards rolled up to them and past.
And then Anderson Trumie stopped.
He turned the blubbery head and read the sign on the
back of the girl. I AM A SPY. Panting heavily, clutching the
shoulder of the Crockett robot, he gaped wildly at her.
Garrick cleared his throat. This far his plan had gone, and
then there was a gap. There had to be a gap. Trumie's his-
tory, in the folder that Roosenburg had supplied, had told
him what to do with Trumie; and Garrick's own ingenuity
had told him how to reach the man. But a link was missing.
Here was the subject, and here was the psychist who could
cure him, and it was up to Garrick to start the cure.
Trumie cried out in a staccato bleat: "You! What are you?
Where do you belong?"
He was talking to the girl. Beside him, the Crockett robot
murmured: "Reckon she's a spy, Mistuh Trumie. See thet sign
a-hangin' on her back?"
"Spy? Spy?" The quivering lips pouted. "Curse you, are
you Mata Hari? What are you doing out here? It's changed its
face," Trumie complained to the Crockett robot. "It doesn't
belong here. It's supposed to be in the harem. Go on,
Crockett, get her back!"
"Wait!" said Garrick, but the Crockett robot was ahead of
him. It took Kathryn Pender by the arm.
"Come along thar," it said soothingly, and urged her across
the drawbridge. She glanced back at Garrick, and for a
moment it looked as though she were going to speak. Then
she shook her head, as if giving an order.
"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 man who ate the world
183
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 blub-
ber 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 die 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
die 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; diere 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 goad-
ing drive to eat and to use, to use and to eat...
And it was all so tvrong!
13

184
in the problem pit
The robots didn't understand. They didn't try to under-
stand; they didn't diink 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 overl
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 die 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 diey were wrong. But only property,
as all of North Guardian was property—as all of die 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

the man who ate the world	185
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 glanc-
ing 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 mat-
tered, it was—

186
in the problem pit
"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, any-
way, 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.
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."

the man who ate the world
187
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 accord-
ing to the wishes of Mr. Trumie that anyone but him rage
destroying through North Guardian Island. Garrick passed
diem by.
"Kathrynl" 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 con-
suming, 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 man-
kind 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

188
in the problem pit
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 die 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 die door.
It was the right door.
There was Trumie, 400 pounds of lard, lying on a marble
bench with a foam-rubber cushion, die jowled head in die
small lap of—
Teddy. Or Kathryn Pender in the teddy-bear suit, the stick-
like 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, die 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 mon-
strous 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:

the man who ate the world	189
"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 sur-
render 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-Flaying Literature
Science fiction is fun, otherioise 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 re-
spects. And this short essay tells why Z believe that.
My late collaborator, Cyril Kornbluth, once wrote a story
called "The Only Thing We Learn." He didn't think it neces-
sary to complete die 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 tiiat
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 state-
ment 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, bodi 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 die 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 anydiing, anydiing
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
dioughtlessly regard "science" as a sort of collection of linear
190

sf: the game-playing literattxre	191
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: gadiering information, forming a dieory to
explain the information, predicting certain consequences of
the theory and performing an experiment to test the predic-
tion. 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 methodol-
ogy, and "the science-fiction method"* is that quality in die
creative process of the science-fiction writer which describes
the parameters within which he can speculate. The sf method
is parallelistic, universal, and antideterminisdc. 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 widiout 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
*For the term "the science-fiction method" I am indebted to an
English sf writer named John T. PhiUifent, more frequently seen under
his pen name of John Rackham. I am not sure that he means the same
thing by it as I do, but the first use of the term I encountered was in
a private communication from him.

192
in the problem pit
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 every-
thing as though the Senate Permanent Investigations Sub-
committee had never existed.
The existence of sf-as-agitprop has obscured the to-my-
mind far more important feature of sf-as-analysis. But it is the
analytical powers of the sf method that make its effectiveness
as propaganda great; an sf story not only makes a statement
about a particular imaginary world but carries the broad
general implication that an infinite number of differing worlds
are possible, and tiiat small random changes in causal factors
may produce overwhelming changes in social structures, kinds
of morality, and even "human nature."
For one example, consider religion. Theologians are just
now beginning to catch up with science-fiction writers in
thinking about the religious implications of possible non-
human life on other planets. Few if any of them have yet
faced the problem of wholly alien theologies. Nearly every
human society stipulates One True God, a Heavenly Father
who rewards and punishes. Clearly this is biology-related;
humans have two sexes and a helplessly dependent infancy,
requiring a family structure for survival. But what would be
the theology of a sexless race, or one hatched from eggs laid
and abandoned like the sea turtle's? Nor has any theologian
that I know of approached the question raised in Brian
Aldiss's The Dark Light-Years. Most humans, Aldiss argues,
attach sacramental importance to such biological functions as
sex (ritual marriage) and eating (saying grace at meals, in-
gestion of bread and wine at mass, etc.). But why should
some other race not attach equal sacramental importance to
such other biological functions as, for instance, excretion?
It is this systematic investigation of what causal factors are
possible and what social consequences may follow them that
makes science fiction a splendid tool for social analysis. To
be sure, it need not be done exclusively within the pages of
Analog or Amazing Stories, or even in the form of a story at
all. Think tanks like the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Insti-
tute, the Institute for the Future in Connecticut, Bertrand de
Jouvenel's "futuribles" panels in Paris, and many others do
in fact use these techniques in nonliterary ways. But science

sf: the game-playing literature	193
fiction taught them all how, and science fiction is still the
most pleasurable way of doing these things.
In essence science fiction reduces the entire continuum of
human knowledge to a sort of board game, and by systemati-
cally changing the rules of the game one or a few at a time
investigates the possibility of alternate societies. Is this an
important thing to do? No, not just important; it is transcen-
dental, for there can be no hope of making a change in any
condition we deplore until we know what alternatives are
open to us. Science fiction gives us a sort of catalog of possible
worlds. From the wish-book we can pick the ones we want.
Without it we can resent and deplore, but our capacity to
change is veiy small.
One of the great personal satisfactions of living in the world
of science-fiction readers and writers is observing how game-
playing reduces partisan tensions. Our uptight "real" world
affects science fiction, too. Some sf people are right-wingers
and some are left; some are deeply religious, some not at all;
some battle for women's lib or black power or the freedom
of the drug scene and some are firmly for the Establishment;
and yet all of them are able to join in the game.
In a real world that every day seems more partisan, more
grimy, more sullen, and more violent, this is a source not only
of pleasure but of hope. Perhaps The Method can spread.
Perhaps the world at large can learn from sf. And perhaps
then the ants won't have to replace us after all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frederik Pohl is a double-threat science fictioneer, being
tlie only person to have won science fiction's top award,
the Hugo, both as an editor and as a writer. As a writer,
he has published more than thirty novels and short story
collections, including The Space Merchants (with C. M.
Kornbluth), The Age of the Pussyfoot, Day Million and
The Gold at the Starbow's End. His awards include four
Hugos and the Edward E. Smith Award. As an editor, he
published the first series of anthologies of original stories
in the science fiction field, Star Science Fiction; was for
many years the editor of two leading magazines in die
field, Galaxy and If; and is currently science fiction editor
of Bantam Books. His interests extend beyond science fic-
tion to national affairs (his book, Practical Politics, was a
handbook for party reformers in the 1972 election year);
history, (he is die Encyclopedia Britannica's authority on
die Roman emperor. Tiberius); and almost the entire
range of human affairs. He is currentiy president of the
Science Fiction Writers of America, and makes his home
in Red Bank, New Jersey.

THE DOORS OF HIS FACE, THE LAMPS OF HIS
MOUTH by ROGER ZELAZNY
A collection of fifteen stories of man in the future, ranging in
time from a few decades to a few millenia into the future, in
setting from the solar system to deepest space. The prize-
winning title story is the highly imaginative and very be-
lievable tale of a fishing expedition for an enormous sea
monster under the oceans of the planet Venus; the rest of the
collection maintains the high standard thus set, with tales
of a rebellious preacher's son finding a different religion on
Mars, of an expedition to an electrically-haunted mountain
where a girl is discovered in hibernation state awaiting the
discovery of a cure for her fatal disease, and of man's
penchant for aggrandisement. All display the style, wit,
imagination which have made Roger Zelazny one of the
most highly praised writers of science fiction today.
0 552 10021 8 - 50p
LOGAN'S RUN by WILLIAM F. NOLAN and GEORGE
CLAYTON JOHNSON
It was a nightmare society - a world of the 'cubs' - rebel
hipsters drugged to a point of frenzy - of a vast underwater
city gradually collapsing under the pressures of the sea . . .
of an ice hell in polar regions where criminals were sent to
survive if they could ... of a desert inhabited by psychotic
savages.
It was a world where there was little beauty and no peace. ..
where man, condemned to a short lifespan, fought against
his own terror and dreamed of Sanctuary . . .
0 552 10123 0 - 50p

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME by H. G. WELLS
First published in 1933 it was described by Wells as 'A Short
History of the Future', and spans the period from a.d. 1929
to the end of the year 2105. It is a chronicle of world events,
a memorable catalogue of prediction involving war, technical
revolution and the cultural changes which await mankind in
the years to come. . .
0 552 09532 X - 95p
THE SHAPE OF FURTHER THINGS by BRIAN ALDISS
'Haven't you ever thought to yourself after a pleasant evening
- or even a dull afternoon - that if you could have it all again,
preferably in slow motion, then you could trace in it all the
varied strands of your life?'
In this provocative book Brian Aldiss seeks to recapture
some of the strands of his life, and in basic diary form he
works alternately back into the past and forward into the
future; the realities of our world alternate with the un-
realities of fantasy.
The result is an autobiography spanning one month - a
month in the life of a speculative writer, with topics ranging
from the growth of science fiction in Britain today to new
theories on the nature and importance of dreams.
0 552 09533 8 - 65p

THE SHIP WHO SANG by ANNE McCAFFREY
The brain was perfect, the tiny, crippled body useless. So
technology rescued the brain and put it in an environment
that conditioned it to live in a different kind of body - a
spaceship. Here the human mind, more subtle, infinitely
more complex than any computer ever devised, could be
linked to the massive and delicate strengths, the total recall,
and the incredible speeds of space. Bat the brain behind the
ship was entirely feminine - a complex, loving, strong, weak,
gentle, savage - a personality, all-woman, called Helva.. ..
0 552 10163 X - 65p
RESTOREE by ANNE McCAFFREY
There was a sudden stench of a dead sea creature.. ..
There was the horror of a huge black shape closing over
her. . ..
There was nothing. ...
Then there were pieces of memory . . . isolated fragments
that were so horrible her mind refused to accept them . . .
intense heat and shivering cold . . . excruciating pain . . .
dismembered pieces of the human body . . . sawn bones and
searing screams ...
And when she awoke she found she was in a world that was
not earth, and with a face and body that were not her face
and body.
She had become a Restoree. ...
0 552 10161 3 - 65p

A SELECTED LIST OF CORGI SCIENCE FICTION
FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE
-h
□		10022 6	NEW WORLDS NINE
□		10182 6	NEW WORLDS TEN
□		09824 8	NEQ THE SWORD
□		09731 4	SOS THE ROPE
□		09736 5	VAR THE STICK
O 09081 6	STAR TREK 2
□		09082 4	STAR TREK 3
□		09445 5	STAR TREK 4
□		09446 3	STAR TREK 5
□		09447 1	STAR TREK 6
□		09492 7	NEW WRITINGS IN SF 22
□		09681 4	NEW WRITINGS IN SF 23
□		09554 0	NINE PRINCES IN AMBER
□		09608 3	JACK OF SHADOWS
□		09906 6	THE GUNS OF AVALON
□		10021 8	THE DOORS OF HIS FACE
□		10161 3	RESTOREE
□		10162 1	DECISION AT DOONA
□		10163 X	THE SHIP WHO SANG
ed. Hilary Bailey 50p
ed. Hilary Bailey 50p
Piers Anthony 40p
Piers Anthony 40p
Piers Anthony 40p
James Blish 25p
James Blish 25p
James Blish 30p
James Blish 30p
James Blish 30p
ed. Kenneth Bulmer 35p
ed. Kenneth Bulmer 40p
Roger Zelazny 35p
Roger Zelazny 35p
Roger Zelazny 45p
Roger Zelazny 50p
Anne McCaffrey 65p
Anne McCaffrey 65p
Anne McCaffrey 65p
CORGI SF COLLECTOR'S LIBRARY
D 09237 1	FANTASTIC VOYAGE
□		09784 5	THE SILVER LOCUSTS
□		09882 5	DANDELION WINE
o 09706 3	I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC
D 09333 5	THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN
□		09413 7	REPORT ON PLANET THREE
□		09473 0	THE CITY AND THE STARS
□		10067 6	FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD
□		09236 3	DRAGONFLIGHT
□		09474 9	A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWTTZ
□		09414 5	EARTH ABIDES
□		09239 8	MORE THAN HUMAN
□		10213 X	STAR SURGEON
□		10214 8	HOSPITAL STATION
Isaac Asimov 50p
Ray Bradbury 40p
Ray Bradbury 45p
Ray Bradbury 45p
Ray Bradbury 40p
Arthur C. Clarke 40p
Arthur C. Clarke 40p
Robert A. Heinlein 65p
Anne McCaffrey 65p
Walter M. Miller Jr. 45p
George R. Stewart 35p
Theodore Sturgeon 35p
James White 50p
James White 50p
All these books are available at your bookshop or newsagent; or can be ordered direct from
the publisher. Just tick the titles you want and fill in the form below.
CORGI BOOKS, Cash Sales Department. P.O. Box 11, Falmouth, Cornwall.
Please send cheque or postal order, no currency.
U.K. send 19p for first book plus 9p per copy for each additional book ordered to a
maximum charge of 73p to cover the cost of postage and packing.
B.F.P.O. and Eire allow 19p for first book p!us9p per copy for the next 6 books, there-
after 3p per book.
Overseas Customers. Please allow 20p for the first book and lOp per copy for each
additional book.
name (block letters)		
address 		
(oct 76) 	
While every effort is made to keep prices low. it is sometimes necessary to increase
prices at short notice. Corgi books reserve the right to show new retail prices on covers
which may differ from those previously advertised in the text or elsewhere.