In the Problem Pit

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 I 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 I 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 saying, "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 the 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, you'll wreck the whole project!" Girty said ominously. "And when the Projects go, the 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 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 troublemaker. 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, exactly, 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 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 that 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 that 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 them 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 there, 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 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 dormitory 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 the 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 sneering word from his torturers. Rafferty hadn't the scope left to resent small injuries.

The electronic call-me-up whispered on old Miss Sandburg'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 burning. "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 silently on Girty's desk.

But Girty hardly looked at him, only grunted with his fat, angry cow's grunt and thumbed irritably through the envelopes. 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 they 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 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 Rafferty, some careless and impolite, some doddering and apologetic, 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, watching the clicking black numbers on the meter and doing something that was close to praying. But of course it wasn't really praying, under the New Way.

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 the 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 place like this. But he didn't need even 45 cents, not for what he had in mind.

But there 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 then. 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 there 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 pinltly 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 thing. You're dirty, cow.

"Fat and dirty—

"I'll kill you, Girty."

Rafferty stood in the steam room, peering across the corridor 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 benches in the steam. The metal door burned Rafferty's hand, he noticed, but it was a cool thing compared to the 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, head-high, candle-pale. There was a fourth light that was burned out, and Rafferty sat down in the 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 backward 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

.75 1.50

Salt Rub ....................

Sun Lamp & Massage

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 thoughtfully for a moment before he spoke, but all he said was: "Good evening, Sir. Swedish rub today?"

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. "Anything, 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, forever, 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 carefully 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 problems 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. "I'll 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. Rafferty peered and saw another man, as pink as Girty but nothing like as fat, as old but not nearly as flabby, advancing as bare as a baby and talking to Girty.

"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 Rafferty 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 hostile 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 petulantly insisting that the machine-education treatments had—unspecified—faults.

Rafferty didn't listen. The New Way treatments were machines droning and flashing in your ears and hammering, hammering, hammering at you until you couldn't make a mistake, 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 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 the 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 anybody, anybody you liked. Mudgins cleaned all that up. 'Keep them busy,' he said, 'and you'll keep them out of trouble.' Get rid of the Machine, put people back to work. If they don't want to work the way they ought to—make them! 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 goggles, 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. Nearsighted 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 soundlessly. 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 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 bookkeeping machine. Kill and slice and tear! They overturned furniture, squealing and thundering, like a trapped horse kicking 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 noticed 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 anti New 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. 'People like Rafferty 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, because 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 violently . . . but not out loud. He sat up, wonderingly. He wasn't in the habit of talking to himself and he wondered 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 resentment—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 under the machines, could have told him Rafferty'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.