The Servant Problem Read online

  The Servant Problem

  William Tenn

  The Servant Problem

  by William Tenn

  This was the day of complete control…

  Garomma, the Servant of All, the World’s Drudge, the Slavey of Civilization, placed delicately scented finger-tips to his face, closed his eyes and allowed himself to luxuriate in the sensation of ultimate power, absolute power, power such as no human being had ever dared to dream of before this day.

  Complete control. Complete…

  Except for one man. One single ambitious maverick of a man. One very useful man. Should he be strangled at his desk this afternoon, that was the question, or should he be allowed a few more days, a few more weeks, of heavily supervised usefulness? His treason, his plots, were unquestionably coming to a head. Well, Garomma would decide that later. At leisure.

  Meanwhile, in all other respects, with everyone else, there was control. Control not only of men’s minds but of their glands as well. And those of their children.

  And, if Moddo’s estimates were correct, of their children’s children.

  “Yea,” Garomma muttered to himself, suddenly remembering a fragment of the oral text his peasant father had taught him years ago, “yea, unto the seventh generation.”

  What ancient book. burned in some long ago educational fire, had that text come from?, he wondered. His father would not be able to tell him, nor would any of his father’s friends and neighbors; they had all been wiped out after the Sixth District Peasant Uprising thirty years ago.

  An uprising of a type that could never possibly occur again. Not with complete control.

  Someone touched his knee gently, and his mind ceased its aimless foraging. Moddo, the Servant of Education, seated below him in the depths of the vehicle, gestured obsequiously at the transparent, missile-proof cupola that surrounded his leader down to the waist.

  “The people,” he stated in his peculiar half-stammer. “There. Outside.”

  Yes. They were rolling through the gates of the Hovel of Service and into the city proper. On both sides of the street and far into the furthest distance were shrieking crowds as black and dense and exuberant as ants on a piece of gray earthworm. Garomma, the Servant of All, could not be too obviously busy with his own thoughts; he was about to be viewed by those he served so mightily.

  He crossed his arms upon his chest and bowed to right and left in the little dome that rose like a tower from the squat black conveyance. Bow right, bow left, and do it humbly. Right, left—and humbly, humbly. Remember, you are the Servant of All.

  As the shrieks rose in volume, he caught a glimpse of Moddo nodding approval from beneath. Good old Moddo. This was his day of triumph as well. The achievement of complete control was most thoroughly and peculiarly the achievement of the Servant of Education. Yet Moddo sat in heavy-shadowed anonymity behind the driver with Garomma’s personal bodyguards; sat and tasted his triumph only with his leader’s tongue—as he had for more than twenty-five years now.

  Fortunately for Moddo, such a taste was rich enough for his sytem. Unfortunately, there were others—one other at least—who required more…

  Garomma bowed to right and left and, as he bowed, looked curiously through the streaming webs of black-uniformed motorcycle police that surrounded his car. He’ looked at the people of Capital City, his people, his as everything and everyone on Earth was his. Jamming madly together on the sidewalks, they threw their arms wide as his car came abreast of them.

  “Serve us, Garomma,” they chanted. “Serve us! Serve us!”

  He observed their contorted faces, the foam that appeared at the mouth-corners of many, the half-shut eyes and ecstatic expressions, the swaying men, the writhing women, the occasional individual who collapsed in an unnoticed climax of happiness. And he bowed. With his arms crossed upon his chest, he bowed. Right and left. Humbly.

  Last week, when Moddo had requested his views on problems of ceremony and protocol relative to today’s parade, the Servant of Education had commented smugly on the unusually high incidence of mob hysteria expected when his chief’s face was seen. And Garomma had voiced a curiosity he’d been feeling for a long time.

  “What goes on in their minds when they see me, Moddo? I know they worship and get exhilarated and all that. But what precisely do you fellows call the emotion when you talk about it in the labs and places such as the Education Center?”

  The tall man slid his hand across his forehead in the gesture that long years had made thoroughly familiar to Garomma.

  “They are experiencing a trigger release,” he said slowly, staring over Garomma’s shoulder as if he were working out the answer from the electronically pinpointed world map on the back wall. “All the tensions these people accumulate in their daily round of niggling little prohibitions and steady coercions, all the frustrations of `don’t do this and don’t do this, do that’ have been organized by the Service of Education to be released explosively the moment they see your picture or hear your voice.”

  “Trigger release. Hm! I’ve never thought of it quite that way.”

  Moddo held up a hand in rigid earnestness. “After all, you’re the one man whose life is supposedly spent in an abject obedience beyond anything they’ve ever known. The man who holds the—the intricate strands of the world’s coordination in his patient, unwearying fingers; the ultimate and hardest-worked employee; the—the scapegoat of the multitudes!”

  Garomma had grinned at Moddo’s scholarly eloquence. Now, however, as he observed his screaming folk from under submissive eyelids, he decided that the Servant of Education had been completely right.

  On the Great Seal of the World State was it not written: “All Men Must Serve Somebody, But Only Garomma Is the Servant of All”?

  Without him, they knew, and knew irrevocably, oceans would break through dikes and flood the land, infections would appear in men’s bodies and grow rapidly into pestilences that could decimate whole districts, essential services would break down so that an entire city could die of thirst in a week, and local officials would oppress the people and engage in lunatic wars of massacre with each other. Without him, without Garomma working day and night to keep everything running smoothly, to keep the titanic forces of nature and civilization under control. They knew, because these things happened whenever “Garomma was tired of serving.”

  What were the unpleasant interludes of their lives to the implacable dreary—but, oh, so essential!—toil of his? Here, in this slight, serious-looking man bowing humbly right and left, right and left, was not only the divinity that made it possible for Man to exist comfortably on Earth, but also the crystallization of all the subraces that ever enabled an exploited people to feel that things could be worse, that relative to the societal muck beneath them, they were, in spite of their sufferings, as lords and monarchs in comparison.

  No wonder they stretched their arms frantically to him, the Servant of All, the World’s Drudge, the Slavey of Civilization, and screamed their triumphant demand with one breath, their fearful plea with the next: “Serve us, Garomma! Serve us, serve us, serve us!”

  Didn’t the docile sheep he had herded as a boy in the Sixth District mainland to the northwest, didn’t the sheep also feel that he was their servant as he led them, and drove them to better pastures and cooler streams, as he protected them from enemies and removed pebbles from their feet, all to the end that their smoking flesh, would taste better on his father’s table? But these so much; more useful herds of two-legged, well-brained sheep were as thoroughly domesticated. And on the simple principle they’d absorbed that government was the servant of the people and the highest power in the government was the most abysmal servant.

  His sheep. He smiled at them paternally, po
ssessively, as his special vehicle rolled along the howling, face-filled mile between the Hovel of Service and the Educational, Center. His sheep. And these policemen on motorcycles, these policemen on foot whose arms were locked against; the straining crowds every step of the way, these were his sheepdogs. Another kind of domesticated animal.

  That’s all he had been, thirty-three years ago, when he’d landed on this island fresh from a rural Service of Security training school to take his first government job as a policeman in Capital City. A clumsy, over-excited sheepdog. One of the least important sheep-dogs of the previous regime’s Servant of All.

  But three years later, the peasant revolt in his own district had given him his chance. With his special knowledge of the issues involved as well as the identity of the real leaders, he’d been able to play an important role in crushing the rebellion. And then, his new and important place in the Service of Security had enabled him to meet promising youngsters in the other services — Moddo, particularly, the first and most useful human he had personally domesticated.

  With Moddo’s excellent administrative mind at his disposal, he had become an expert at the gracious art of political throat-cutting, so that when his superior made his bid for the highest office in the world, Garomma had been in the best possible position to sell him out and become the new Servant of Security. And from that point, with Moddo puffing along in his wake and working out the minutiae of strategy, it had been a matter of a few years before he had been able to celebrate his own successful bid in the sizzling wreckage of the preceding administration’s Hovel of Service.

  But the lesson he had taught the occupants of that blasted, projectile-ridden place he had determined never to forget himself. He couldn’t know how many Servants of Security before him had used their office to reach the mighty wooden stool of the Servant of All: after all, the history books, and all other books, were rewritten thoroughly at the beginning of every new regime; and the Oral Tradition, usually a good guide to the past if you could sift the facts out properly, was silent on this subject. It was obvious, however, that what he had done, another could do—that the Servant of Security was the logical, self-made heir to the Servant of All.

  And the trouble was you couldn’t do anything about the danger but be watchful.

  He remembered when his father had called him away from childhood games and led him out to the hills to tend the sheep. How he had hated the lonesome, tiresome work! The old man had realized it and, for once, had softened sufficiently to attempt an explanation.

  “You see, son, sheep are what they call domestic animals. So are dogs. Well, we can domesticate sheep and we can domesticate dogs to guard the sheep, but for a smart, wide-awake shepherd who’ll know what to do when something real unusual comes up and will be able to tell us about it, well, for that we need a man.”

  “Gee, Pa,” he had said, kicking disconsolately at the enormous shepherd’s crook they’d given him, “then why don’t you—whatdoyoucallit-domesticate a man?”

  His father had chuckled and then stared out heavily over the shaggy brow of the hill. “Well, there are people trying to do that, too, and they’re getting better at it all the time. The only trouble, once you’ve got him domesticated, he isn’t worth beans as a shepherd. He isn’t sharp and excited once he’s tamed. He isn’t interested enough to be any use at all.”

  That was the problem in a nutshell, Garomma reflected. The Servant of Security, by the very nature of his duties, could not be a domesticated animal.

  He had tried using sheepdogs at the head of Security; over and over again he had tried them. But they were always inadequate and had to be replaced by men. And —one year, three years, five years in office—men sooner or later struck for supreme power and had to be regretfully destroyed.

  As the current Servant of Security was about to be destroyed. The only trouble—the man was so damned useful! You had to time these things perfectly to get the maximum length of service from the rare, imaginative individual who filled the post to perfection and yet cut him down the moment the danger outweighed the value. And since, with the right man, the danger existed from the very start, you had to watch the scale carefully, unremittingly…

  Garomma sighed. This problem was the only annoyance in a world that had been virtually machined to give him pleasure. But it was, inevitably, a problem that was with him always, even in his dreams. Last night had been positively awful.

  Moddo touched his knee again to remind him that he was on exhibition. He shook himself and smiled his gratitude. One had to remember that dreams were only dreams.

  They had the crowds behind them now. Ahead, the great metal gate of the Educational Center swung slowly open and his car rumbled inside. As the motorcycle policemen swung off their two-wheelers with a smart side-wise flourish, the armed guards of the Service of Education in their crisp white tunics came to attention. Garomma, helped nervously by Moddo, clambered out of the car just as the Center Band, backed by the Center Choir, swung into the roaring, thrilling credo of Humanity’s Hymn:

  Garomma works day and night,

  Garomma’s tasks are never light;

  Garomma lives in drudgery,

  For the sake of me, for the sake of thee…”

  After five verses, protocol having been satisfied, the band began The Song of Education and the Assistant Servant of Education, a poised, well-bred young man, came down the steps of the building. His arm-spread and “Serve us, Garomma,” while perfunctory, was thoroughly correct. He stood to one side so that Garomma and Moddo could start up the steps and then swung in, straightbacked, behind them. The choirmaster held the song on a high, worshipping note.

  They walked through the great archway with its carved motto, All Must Learn from the Servant of All, and down the great central corridor of the immense building. The gray rags that Garomma and Moddo wore flapped about them. The walls were lined with minor employees chanting, “Serve us, Garomma. Serve us! Serve us! Serve us!”

  Not quite the insane fervor of the street mobs, Garomma reflected, but entirely satisfactory paroxysms nonetheless. He bowed and stole a glance at Moddo beside him. He barely restrained a smile. The Servant of Education looked as nervous, as uncertain as ever. Poor Moddo! He was just not meant for such a high position. He carried his tall, husky body with all the elan of a tired berry-picker. He looked like anything but the most important official in the establishment.

  And that was one of the things that made him indispensable. Moddo was just bright enough to know his own inadequacy. Without Garomma, he’d still be checking statistical abstracts for interesting discrepancies in some minor department of the Service of Education. He knew he wasn’t strong enough to stand by himself. Nor was he sufficiently outgoing to make useful alliances. And so Moddo, alone of all the Servants in the Cabinet, could be trusted completely.

  In response to Moddo’s diffident touch on his shoulder, he walked into the large room that had been so extravagantly prepared for him and climbed the little cloth-of-gold platform at one end. He sat down on the rough wooden stool at the top; a moment later, Moddo took the chair that was one step down, and the Assistant Servant of Education took the chair a further step below. The chief executives of the Educational Center, dressed in white tunics of the richest, most flowing cut, filed in slowly and stood before them. Garomma’s personal bodyguards lined up in front of the platform.

  And the ceremonies began. The ceremonies attendant upon complete control.

  First, the oldest official in the Service of Education recited the appropriate passages from the Oral Tradition. How every year, in every regime, far back almost to prehistoric democratic times, a psychometric sampling had been taken of elementary school graduating classes all over the world to determine exactly how successful the children’s political conditioning had been.

  How every year there had been an overwhelming majority disclosed which believed the current ruler was the very pivot of human welfare, the mainspring of daily life, and a small minority—f
ive per cent, seven per cent, three per cent—which had successfully resisted indoctrination and which, as adults, were to be carefully watched as potential sources of disaffection.

  How with the ascension of Garomma and his Servant of Education, Moddo, twenty-five years ago, a new era of intensive mass-conditioning, based on much more ambitious goals, had begun.

  The old man finished, bowed and moved back into the crowd. The Assistant Servant of Education rose and turned gracefully to face Garomma. He described these new goals which might be summed up in the phrase “complete control,” as opposed to previous administrations’ outdated satisfaction with 97% or 95% control, and discussed the new extensive fear mechanisms and stepped-up psychometric spot-checks in the earlier grades—by which they were to be achieved. These techniques had all been worked out by Moddo—“under the never failing inspiration and constant guidance of Garomma, the Servant of All”—and had, in a few years, resulted in a sampling which showed the number of independent juvenile minds to be less than one per cent. All others worshipped Garomma with every breath they took.

  Thereafter, progress had been slower. They had absorbed the most brilliant children with the new conditioning process, but had hit the hard bedrock of the essential deviates, the psychological misfits whose personal maladjustments made it impossible for them to accept the prevailing attitudes of their social milieu, whatever these attitudes should happen to be. Over the years, techniques of conditioning had been painfully worked out which enabled even misfits to fit into society in the one respect of Garomma-worship and, over the years, the samplings indicated the negative doctrinal responses to be receding in the direction of zero: .016%, .007%, .0002%.

  And this year. Well! The Assistant Servant of Education paused and took a deep breath. Five weeks ago, the Uniform Educational System of Earth had graduated a new crop of youngsters from the elementary schools. The customary planet-wide sampling had been taken on graduation day; collation and verification had just been completed. The results: negative response was zero to the very last decimal place! Control was complete.