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 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 . . .
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
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 anybody's standards, including my own, are awful. (They comprise 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.
Frederik Pohl
Red Bank, New Jersey November, 1974
In the Problem Pit
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 come 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 metalworker) 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 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 plating 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.
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 sticking 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.