from science fiction by
Frederik Pohl

The pipeline of production spewed out riches that no king in the time of Malthus could have known.

But a pipeline has two ends. The invention and power and labor pouring in at one end must somehow be drained out at the other . . .

Lucky Morey, blessed economic-consuming unit, drowning in the pipeline’s flood, striving manfully to eat and drink and wear and wear out his share of the ceaseless tide of wealth.

Morey felt far from blessed, for the blessings of the poor are always best appreciated from afar.

The feed-back circuits aimed the anti-aircraft guns and, reshaped and newly planned, found a place in a new sort of machine—together with a miraculous trail of cams and levers, an indestructible and potent power source and a hundred thousand parts and sub-assemblies.

And the first robot clanked off the bench.

Its mission was its own destruction; but from the scavenged wreck of its pilot body, a hundred better robots drew their inspiration. And the hundred went to work, and hundreds more, until there were millions upon untold millions.

And still the riots never happened.

For the robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was “Plenty.”

And by the time the gift had shown its own unguessed ills, the time for a Robot Riot was past. Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely.

It was worse than a hangover. The name is “holdover.” You’ve had some drinks; you’ve started to sober up by catching a little sleep. Then you are required to be awake and to function. The consequent state has the worst features of hangover and intoxication; your head thumps and your mouth tastes like the floor of a bear-pit, but you are nowhere near sober.

There is one cure.

Call it a dichotomy, if the word seems more couth. A kind of two-pronged struggle, the struggle of two unwearying runners in an immortal race. There is the refrigerator inside the house. The cold air, the bubble of heated air that is the house, the bubble of cooled air that is the refrigerator, the momentary bubble of heated air that defrosts it. Call the heat Yang, if you will. Call the cold Yin. Yang overtakes Yin. Then Yin passes Yang. Then Yang passes Yin. Then—

Give them other names. Call Yin a mouth; call Yang a hand.

If the hand rests, the mouth will starve. If the mouth stops, the hand will die. The hand, Yang, moves faster.

Yin may not lag behind.

Then call Yang a robot.

And remember that a pipeline has two ends.

“Exploring the mind, Morey, is like sending scouts through cannibal territory. You can’t see the cannibals—until it’s too late. But if you send a scout through the jungle and he doesn’t show up on the other side, it’s a fair assumption that something obstructed his way. In that case, we would label the obstruction ‘cannibals.’ In the case of the human mind, we label the obstruction a ‘trauma.’ What the trauma is, or what its effects on behavior will be, we have to find out, once we know that it’s there.”

[...]

Semmelweiss sighed. “The trouble with healing traumas and penetrating psychic blocks and releasing inhibitions—the trouble with everything we psychiatrists do, in fact, is that we can’t afford to do it too well. An inhibited man is under a strain. We try to relieve the strain. But if we succeed completely, leaving him with no inhibitions at all, we have an outlaw, Morey. Inhibitions are often socially necessary.”

Right then and there Morey learned the first half of the embezzler’s lesson: Anything different is dangerous.

For punishment for a crime is not satisfied by a jail sentence—how does it hurt a man to feed and clothe and house him, with the bills paid by the state? [...] Savage tribes used to lop off a finger or an ear to punish a criminal. Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits and pieces of the personality. Chop-chop, and a man’s reputation comes off; chop again, and his professional standing is gone; chop-chop and he has lost the respect and trust of his fellows. The jail itself isn’t the punishment. The jail is only the shaman’s hatchet that performs the amputation. If rehabilitation in a jail worked—if it was meant to work—it would be the end of jails.

I must say they were a nice family. I’ve worked elections before: Connick was a good candidate because he was a good man. The way his kids behaved around him proved it, and the way he behaved around me was the clincher.

“Anyway, frankly, I think people’s minds are made up, and you can’t change them.”

“We don’t have to,” I said. “Don’t you know why people vote the way they do, Connick? They don’t vote their ‘minds.’ They vote attitudes and they vote impulses.”

Perfection is so rare that it is interesting to find a case in which one has been perfectly wrong all the way.

2473 km. Houston, although pleasantly located, is not recommended for more than a short visit because of the unpleasant odor of a native hydrocarbon compound. Once used as fuel, “oil,” as it is called, invades the drinking water, the air, and the conversation of the locals, who firmly believe it will once again have value, and who attempt to trade “leases” to travelers in exchange for chocolate bars or bits of colored glass.

The natives are intelligent, cooperative, and cultured. They are not to be confused with the biped land form with whom they once contended for the domination of the planet. Aquatic but air-breathing, the Terrestrials of Gulfhaven are known locally as “dolphins.”

5781 km. In Philadelphia an old lamasery contains a cantrip, or Q’ran, which provides a focus for religious observances by the natives. Copperplate-printed in 1776, it purports to be a “declaration of independence,” setting forth a program designing to abolish certain iniquities, such as standing armies and “a multitude of new offices, and . . . swarms of officers (who) harass our people and eat out their substance.” It is interesting, if fruitless, to speculate on the consequences if this program had succeeded.

But he didn’t have time to waste on that particular emotion, or indeed on any emotion at all. He felt time draining away from him and sat up straight again, looking around. At 96, you dare not do anything slowly, not even daydream.