The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  'It's him, all right,' babbled Andy Grammis, plopping himself down on the steps, his face chalk. 'It's him and there's nothing we can do! He came into the store this morning. Brought Marlene with him. We should have done something about that girl, Jack. I knew she'd come to no good--'

  'What did he want?'

  'Want? Jack, he had a pad and a pencil like he wanted to take down orders, and he kept asking for--asking for--"Breakfast foods," he says,

  "what've you got in the way of breakfast foods?" So I told him. Oatmeal and corn flakes. Jack, he flew at me! "You don't stock Coco-Wheet?" he says.

  "Or Treets, Eets, Neets or Elixo-Wheets? How about Hunny-Yummies, or Prune-Bran Whippets, The Cereal with the Zip-Gun in Every Box?" "No, sir," I tell him.

  'But he's mad by then. "Potatoes?" he hollers. "What about potatoes?" Well, we've got plenty of potatoes, a whole cellar full. But I tell him and that doesn't satisfy him. "Raw, you mean?" he yells. "Not Tater-Fluff, Pre-Skortch Mickies or Uncle Everett's Converted Spuds?" And then he shows me his card.'

  'I know,' said Jack Tighe kindly, for Grammis seemed to find it hard to go on. 'You don't have to say it, if you don't want to.'

  'Oh, I can say it all right, Jack,' said Andy Grammis bravely. 'This Mr.

  Coglan, he's an adver--'

  'No,' said Jack Tighe, standing up, 'don't make yourself do it. It's bad enough as it is. But it had to come. Yes, count it that it had to come, Andy.

  We've had a few good years, but we couldn't expect them to last forever.'

  'But what are we going to do ?'

  'Get up, Andy,' said Jack Tighe strongly. 'Come inside! Sit down and rest yourself. And I'll send for the others.'

  'You're going to fight him? But he has the whole United States Army behind him.'

  Old Jack Tighe nodded. 'So he has, Andy,' he said, but he seemed wonderfully cheerful.

  Jack Tighe's place was a sort of ranch house, with fixings. He was a great individual man, Jack Tighe was. All of you know that, because you were taught it in school; and maybe some of you have been to the house.

  But it's different now; I don't care what they say. The furniture isn't just the same. And the grounds--

  Well, during the big war, of course, that was where the radio-dust drained down from the hills, so nothing grew. They've prettied it up with grass and trees and flowers. Flowers! I'll tell you what's wrong with that. In his young days, Jack Tighe was an account executive on the National Floral account. Why, he wouldn't have a flower in the house, much less plant and tend them.

  But it was a nice house, all the same. He fixed Andy Grammis a drink and sat him down. He phoned down-town and invited half a dozen people to come in to see them. He didn't say what it was about, naturally. No sense in starting a panic.

  But everyone pretty much knew. The first to arrive was Timmy Horan, the fellow from the television service, and he'd given Charley Frink a ride on the back of his bike. He said, breathless: 'Mr. Tighe, they're on our lines. I don't know how he's done it, but Coglan is transmitting on our wire TV

  circuit. And the stuff he's transmitting, Mr. Tighe!'

  'Sure,' said Tighe soothingly. 'Don't worry about it, Timothy. I imagine I know what sort of stuff it is, eh?'

  He got up, humming pleasantly, and snapped on the television set.

  'Time for the afternoon movie, isn't it? I suppose you left the tapes running.'

  'Of course, but he's interfering with it!'

  Tighe nodded. 'Let's see.'

  The picture on the TV screen quavered, twisted into slanting lines of pale dark and snapped into shape.

  'I remember that one!' Charley Frink exclaimed. 'It's one of my favourites, Timmy!'

  On the screen, Number Two Son, a gun in his hand, was backing away from a hooded killer. Number Two Son tripped over a loose board and fell into a vat. he came up grotesquely comic, covered with plaster and mud.

  Tighe stepped back a few paces. He spread the fingers of one hand and moved them rapidly up and down before his eyes.

  'Ah,' he said, 'yes. See for yourself, gentlemen.'

  Andy Grammis hesitatingly copied the older man. He spread his fingers and, clumsily at first, moved them before his eyes, as though shielding his vision from the cathode tube. Up and down he moved his hand, making a sort of stroboscope that stopped the invisible flicker of the racing electronic pencil.

  And, yes, there it was!

  Seen without the stroboscope, the screen showed bland-faced Charlie Chan in his white Panama hat. But the stroboscope showed something else. Between the consecutive images of the old movie there was another image--flashed for only a tiny fraction of a second, too quick for the conscious brain to comprehend, but, oh, how it struck into the subconscious!

  Andy blushed.

  'That--that girl,' he stammered, shocked. 'She hasn't got any-'

  'Of course she hasn't,' said Tighe pleasantly. 'Subliminal compulsion, eh? The basic sex drive; you don't know you're seeing it, but the submerged mind doesn't miss it. No. And notice the box of Prune-Bran Whippets in her hand.'

  Charley Frink coughed. 'Now that you mention it, Mr Tighe,' he said, 'I notice that I've just been thinking how tasty a dish of Prune-Bran Whippets would be right now.'

  'Naturally,' agreed Jack Tighe. Then he frowned. 'Naked women, yes.

  But the female audience should be appealed to also. I wonder.' He was silent for a couple of minutes, and held the others silent with him, while tirelessly he moved the spread hand before his eyes.

  Then he blushed.

  'Well,' he said amiably, 'that's for the female audience. It's all there.

  Subliminal advertising. A product, and a key to the basic drives, and all flashed so quickly that the brain can't organize its defences. So when you think of Prune-Bran Whippets, you think of sex. Or more important, when you think of sex, you think of Prune-Bran Whippets.'

  'Gee, Mr. Tighe. I think about sex a lot.'

  'Everybody does,' said Jack Tighe comfortingly, and he nodded.

  There was a gallumphing sound from outside then and Wilbur LaFarge from the Shawanganunk National came trotting in. He was all out of breath and scared.

  'He's done it again, he's done it again, Mr. Tighe, sir! That Mr. Coglan, he came and demanded more money! Said he's going to build a real TV

  network slave station here in Pung's Corners. Said he's opening up a branch agency for Yust and Ruminant, whoever they are. Said he was about to put Pung's Corners back on the map and needed money to do it.'

  'And you gave it to him?'

  'I couldn't help it.'

  Jack Tighe nodded wisely. 'No, you couldn't. Even in my day, you couldn't much help it, not when the agency had you in its sights and the finger squeezing down on the trigger. Neoscop in the drinking water, to make every living soul in Pung's Corners a little more suggestible, a little less stiff-backed. Even me, I suppose, though perhaps I don't drink as much water as most. And subliminal advertising on the wired TV, and subsonic compulsives when it comes to man-to-man talk. Tell me, LaFarge, did you happen to hear a faint droning sound? I thought so; yes. They don't miss a trick. Well,' he said, looking somehow pleased, 'there's no help for it. We'll have to fight.'

  'Fight?' whispered Wilbur LaFarge, for he was no brave man, no, not even though he later became the Secretary of the Treasury.

  'Fight!' boomed Jack Tighe.

  Everybody looked at everybody else.

  'There are hundreds of us,' said Jack Tighe, 'and there's only one of him. Yes, we'll fight! We'll distill the drinking water. We'll rip Coglan's little transmitter out of our TV circuit. Timmy can work up electronic sniffers to see what else he's using; we'll find all his gadgets, and we'll destroy them.

  The subsonics? Why, he has to carry that gear with him. We'll just take it away from him. It's either that or we give up our heritage as free men!'

  Wilbur LaFarge cleared his throat. 'And then--'

  'Well you may say "and then",' agreed Jack Tighe. 'And then the United Sta
tes Cavalry comes charging over the hill to rescue him. Yes. But you must have realized by now, gentlemen, that this means war.'

  And so they had, though you couldn't have said that any of them seemed very happy about it.

  • • • •

  5

  Now I have to tell you what it was like outside in those days.

  The face of the Moon is no more remote. Oh, you can't imagine it, you really can't. I don't know if I can explain it to you, either, but it's all in a book and you can read it if you want to ... a book that was written by somebody important, a major, who later on became a general (but that was much later and in another army) and whose name was T. Wallace Commaigne.

  The book? Why, that was called The End of the Beginning, and it is Volume One of his twelve-volume set of memoirs entitled : I Served with Tighe: The Struggle to Win the World.

  War had been coming, war that threatened more, until it threatened everything, as the horrors in its supersonic pouches grew beyond even the dreads of hysteria. But there was time to guesstimate, as Time Magazine used to call it.

  The dispersal plan came first. Break up cities, spread them apart, diffuse population and industry to provide the smallest possible target for even the largest possible bomb.

  But dispersal increased another vulnerability--more freight trains, more cargo ships, more boxcar planes carrying raw materials to and finished products from an infinity of production points. Harder, yes, to hit and destroy, easier to choke off coming and going.

  Then dig in, the planners said. Not dispersal but bomb shelter. But more than bomb shelter--make the factories mine for their ores, drill for their fuels, pump for their coolants and steams--and make them independent of supplies that may never be delivered, of workers who could not live below ground for however long the unpredictable war may last, seconds or forever--even of brains that might not reach the drawing boards and research labs and directors' boards, brains that might either be dead or concussed into something other than brains.

  So the sub-surface factories even designed for themselves, always on a rising curve:

  Against an enemy presupposed to grow smarter and slicker and quicker with each advance, just as we and our machines do. Against our having fewer and fewer fighting men; pure logic that, as war continues, more and more are killed, fewer and fewer left to operate the killer engines.

  Against the destruction or capture of even the impregnable underground factories, guarded as no dragon of legend ever was--by all that Man could devise at first in the way of traps and cages, blast and ray--and then by the slipleashed invention of machines ordered always to speed up--more and more, deadlier and deadlier.

  And the next stage--the fortress factories hooked to each other, so that the unthinkably defended plants, should they inconceivably fall, would in the dying message pass their responsibilities to the next of kin--survivor factories to split up their work, increase output, step up the lethal pace of invention and perfection, sill more murderous weapons to be operated by still fewer defenders.

  And another, final plan--gear the machines to feed and house and clothe and transport a nation, a hemisphere, a world recovering from no one could know in advance what bombs and germs and poisons and--

  name it and it probably would happen if the war lasted long enough.

  With a built-in signal of peace, of course: the air itself. Pure once more, the atmosphere, routinely tested moment by moment, would switch production from war to peace.

  And so it did.

  But who could have known beforehand that the machines might not know war from peace?

  Here's Detroit: a hundred thousand rat-inhabited manless acres, blind windows and shattered walls. From the air, it is dead. But underneath it--ah, the rapid pulse of life! The hammering systole and diastole of raw-material conduits sucking in fuel and ore, pumping out finished autos. Spidery passages stretched out to the taconite beds under the Lakes. Fleets of barges issued from concrete pens to match the U-boat nests at Lorient and, unmanned, swam the Lakes and the canals to their distribution points, bearing shiny new Buicks and Plymouths.

  What made them new?

  Why, industrial design! For the model years changed. The Dynaflow '61 gave place to the Super-Dynaflow Mark Eight of 1962; twin-beam headlights became triple; white-wall tyres turned to pastel and back to solid ebony black.

  It was a matter of design efficiency.

  What the Founding Fathers learned about production was essentially this: It doesn't much matter what you build, it only matters that people should want to buy it. What they learned was: Never mind the judgmatical faculties of the human race. They are a frail breed. They move no merchandise. They boost no sales. Rely, instead, on the monkey trait of curiosity.

  And curiosity, of course, feeds on secrecy.

  So generations of automotivators reacted new cosmetic gimmicks for their cars in secret laboratories staffed by sworn mutes. No atomic device was half so classified! And all Detroit echoed their security measures; fleets of canvas-swathed mysteries swarmed the highways at new-model time each year; people talked. Oh, yes--they laughed; it was comic; but though they were amused, they were piqued; it was good to make a joke of the mystery, but the capper to the joke was to own one of the new models oneself.

  The appliance manufacturers pricked up their ears. Ah, so. Curiosity, eh? So they leased concealed space to design new ice-tray compartments and brought them out with a flourish of trumpets. Their refrigerators sold like mad. Yes, like mad.

  RCA brooded over the lesson and added a fillip of their own; there was the vinylite record, unbreakable, colourful, new. They designed it under wraps and then, the crowning touch, they leaked the secret; it was the trick that Manhattan Project hadn't learned--a secret that concealed the real secret. For all the vinylite programme was only a façade; it was security in its highest manifestation; the vinylite programme was a mere cover for the submerged LP.

  It moved goods. But there was a limit. The human race is a blabbermouth.

  Very well, said some great unknown, eliminate the human race! Let a machine design the new models! Add a design unit. Set it, by means of wobblators and random-choice circuits, to make its changes in an unforeseeable way. Automate the factories; conceal them underground; programme the machine to programme itself. After all, why not? As Coglan had quoted Charles F. Kettering, 'Our chief job in research is to keep the customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has,' and proper machines can de that as well as any man. Better, if you really want to know.

  And so the world was full of drusy caverns from which wonders constantly poured. The war had given industry its start by starting the dispersal pattern; bomb shelter had embedded the factories in rock; now industrial security made the factories independent. Goods flowed out in a variegated torrent.

  But they couldn't stop. And nobody could get inside to shut them off or even slow them down. And that torrent of goods, made for so many people who didn't exist, had to be moved. The advertising men had to do the moving, and they were excellent at the job.

  So that was the outside, a very, very busy place and a very, very big one. In spite of what happened in the big war.

  I can't begin to tell you how busy it was or how big; I can only tell you about a little bit of it. There was a building called the Pentagon and it covered acres of ground. It had five sides, of course; one for the Army, one for the Navy, one for the Air Force, one for the Marines, and one for the offices of Yust & Ruminant.

  So here's the Pentagon, this great big building, the nerve centre of the United States in every way that mattered. (There was also a 'Capitol', as they called it, but that doesn't matter much. Didn't then, in fact.) And here's Major Commaigne, in his scarlet dress uniform with his epaulettes and his little gilt sword. He's waiting in the anteroom of the Director's Office of Yust & Ruminant, nervously watching television. He's been waiting there for an hour, and then at last they send for him.

  He goes in.

  Don't try to imagi
ne his emotions as he walks into that pigskin-panelled suite. You can't. But understand that he believes that the key to all of his future lies in this room; he believes that with all his heart and in a way, as it develops, he is right.

  'Major,' snaps an old man, a man very like Coglan and very like Jack Tighe, for they were all pretty much of a breed, those Ivy-League charcoal-greys, 'Major, he's coming through. It's just as we feared. There has been trouble.'

  'Yes, sir!'

  Major Commaigne is very erect and military in his bearing, because he has been an Army officer for fifteen years now and this is his first chance at combat. He missed the big war--well, the whole Army missed the big war; it was over too fast for moving troops--and fighting has pretty much stopped since then. It isn't safe to fight, except under certain conditions.

  But maybe the conditions are right now, he thinks. And it can mean a lot to a major's career, these days, if he gets an expeditionary force to lead and acquits himself well with it!

  So he stands erect, alert, sharp-eyed. His braided cap is tucked in the corner of one arm, and his other hand rests on the hilt of his sword, and he looks fierce. Why, that's natural enough, too. What comes in over the TV

  communicator in that pigskin-panelled office would make any honest Army officer look fierce. The authority of the United States has been flouted!

  'L.S.,' gasps the image of a tall, dark old man in the picture tube,

  'they've turned against me! They've seized my transmitter, neutralized my drugs, confiscated my subsonic gear. All I have left is this transmitter!'

  And he isn't urbane any more, this man Coglan whose picture is being received in this room; he looks excited and he looks mad.

  'Funny,' comments Mr. Maffity, called 'L.S.' by his intimate staff, 'that they didn't take the transmitter away too. They must have known you'd contact us and that there would be reprisals.'

  'But they wanted me to contact you!' cries the voice from the picture tube. 'I told them what it would mean. L.S., they're going crazy. They're spoiling for a fight.'