Pohl, Frederik - SS - The Tunnel Under The World.pdf

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The Tunnel Under The World
Frederik Pohl
The novels and short stories of Frederik Pohl (some written in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth) are
among the finest and most important in science fiction. His attacks on the institutionalized holders of
wealth and power-especially his portrayals of uncontrolled corporate greed and domination-found many
admirers and imitators in the fifties and sixties. Pohl's particular concern was the manipulation of human
desires through advertising and the resulting drive to consume. He has produced a series of stories (and,
with Kornbluth, the seminal novel The Space Merchants) on this theme, including "The Midas Plague,"
"The Man Who Ate the World," "Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus," and the present selection.
Marketing research is an important component of the advertising business and vast sums are expended
in efforts to perfect techniques and approaches and to identify the audience for a particular product.
Most of this is accomplished through the process called sampling, and it is more effective if one can
control the variables affecting the group being sampled. In "The Tunnel Under the World" we enter a
closed system, one where the variables are more carefully controlled than usual.
On the morning of June 15, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear and feel the sharp,
ripping-metal explosion, the violent heave that had tossed him furiously out of bed, the searing wave of
heat.
He sat up convulsively and stared, not believing what he saw, at the quiet room and the bright sunlight
coming in the window.
He croaked, "Mary?"
His wife was not in the bed next to him. The covers were tumbled and awry, as though she had just left
it, and the memory of the dream
was so strong that instinctively he found himself searching the floor to see if the dream explosion had
thrown her down.
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But she wasn't there. Of course she wasn't, he told himself, looking at the familiar vanity and slipper
chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled wall. It had only been a dream.
"Guy?" His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs. "Guy, dear, are you all right?"
He called weakly, "Sure."
There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, "Breakfast is ready. Are you sure you're all right? I
thought I heard you yelling."
Burckhardt said more confidently, "I had a bad dream, honey. Be right down."
In the shower, punching the lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told himself that it had been a beaut
of a dream. Still bad dreams weren't unusual, especially bad dreams about explosions. In the past thirty
years of H-bomb jitters, who had not dreamed of explosions?
Even Mary had dreamed of them, it turned out, for he started to tell her about the dream, but she cut him
off. "You did?" Her voice was astonished. "Why, dear, I dreamed the same thing! Well, almost the same
thing. I didn't actually hear anything. I dreamed that something woke me up, and then there was a sort of
quick bang, and then something hit me on the head. And that was all. Was yours like that?"
Burckhardt coughed. "Well, no," he said. Mary was not one of the strong-as-a-man, brave-as-a-tiger
women. It was not necessary, he thought, to tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so
real. No need to mention the splintered ribs, and the salt bubble in his throat, and the agonized
knowledge that this was death. He said, "Maybe there really was some kind of explosion downtown.
Maybe we heard it and it started us dreaming."
Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. "Maybe," she agreed. "It's almost half-past eight, dear.
Shouldn't you hurry? You don't want to be late to the office."
He gulped his food, kissed her and rushed out-not so much to be on time as to see if his guess had been
right.
But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus, Burckhardt watched critically
out the window, seeking evidence of an explosion. There wasn't any. If anything, Tylerton looked better
than it ever had before. It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was
cloudless, the buildings were clean and inviting. They had, he observed, steam-blasted the Power &
Light Building, the town's only skyscraper-that was the penalty of having Contro Chemicals' main plant
on the outskirts of town; the fumes from the cascade stills left their mark on stone buildings.
None of the usual crowd was on the bus, so there wasn't anyone Burckhardt could ask about the
explosion. And by the time he got out at the corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a
muted diesel moan, he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination.
He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but Ralph wasn't behind the counter.
The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes was a stranger.
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"Where's Mr. Stebbins?" Burckhardt asked.
The man said politely, "Sick, sir. He'll be in tomorrow. A pack of Marlins today?"
"Chesterfields," Burckhardt corrected.
"Certainly, sir," the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid across the counter was an
unfamiliar green-and-yellow pack.
"Do try these, sir," he suggested. "They contain an anticough factor. Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes
make you choke every once in a while?"
Burckhardt said suspiciously, "I never heard of this brand."
"Of course not. They're something new." Burckhardt hesitated, and the man said persuasively, "Look,
try them out at my risk. If you don't like them, bring back the empty pack and I'll refund your money.
Fair enough?"
Burckhardt shrugged. "How can I lose? But give me a pack of Chesterfields, too, will you?"
He opened the pack and lit one while he waited for the elevator. They weren't bad, he decided, though
he was suspicious of cigarettes that had the tobacco chemically treated in any way. But he didn't think
much of Ralph's stand-in; it would raise hell with the trade at the cigar stand if the man tried to give every
customer the same high-pressure sales talk.
The elevator door opened with a low-pitched sound of music. Burckhardt and two or three others got in
and he nodded to them as the door closed. The thread of music switched off and the speaker in the
ceiling of the cab began its usual commercials.
No, not the usual commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed to the captive-audience
commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear anymore, but what was coming from the
recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands
were most unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.
There were jingles with an insistent, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks he had never tasted. There was a
rapid patter dialogue between what sounded like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by
an authoritative bass rumble: "Go right out and get a DELICIOUS Choco-Bite and eat your TANGY
Choco-Bite all up. That's ChocoBite!" There was a sobbing female whine: "I wish I had a Feckle
Freezer! I'd do anything for a Feckle Freezer!" Burckhardt reached his floor and left the elevator in the
middle of the last one. It left him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was
no feeling of use and custom to them.
But the office was happily normal-except that Mr. Barth wasn't in. Miss Mitkin, yawning at the reception
desk, didn't know exactly why. "His home phoned, that's all. He'll be in tomorrow."
"Maybe he went to the plant. It's right near his house."
She looked indifferent. "Yeah."
A thought struck Burckhardt. "But today is June 15! It's quarterly tax-return day-he has to sign the
return!"
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Miss Mitkin shrugged to indicate that that was Burckhardt's problem, not hers. She returned to her nails.
Thoroughly exasperated, Burckhardt went to his desk. It wasn't that he couldn't sign the tax returns as
well as Barth, he thought resentfully. It simply wasn't his job, that was all; it was a responsibility that
Barth, as office manager for Contro Chemicals' downtown office, should have taken.
He thought briefly of calling Barth at his home or trying to reach him at the factory, but he gave up the
idea quickly enough. He didn't really care much for the people at the factory and the less contact he had
with them, the better. He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing and, in a way,
a frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and engineers, there wasn't a soul in the
factory-that is, Burckhardt corrected himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a living soul just
the machines.
According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer
which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an
unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing
graveyards and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man's habit
patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn't hurt the man and it didn't make the machine into a
monster.
But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same.
He put Barth and the factory and all his other little irritations out of his mind and tackled the tax returns.
It took him until noon to verify the figures-which Barth could have done out of his memory and his private
ledger in ten minutes, Burckhardt resentfully reminded himself. He sealed them in an envelope and
walked out to Miss Mitkin. "Since Mr. Barth isn't here, we'd better go to lunch in shifts," he said. "You
can go first."
"Thanks." Miss Mitkin languidly took her bag out of the desk drawer and began to apply makeup.
Burckhardt offered her the envelope. "Drop this in the mail for me, will you? Uh-wait a minute. I wonder
if I ought to phone Mr. Barth to make sure. Did his wife say whether he was able to take phone calls?"
"Didn't say." Miss Mitkin blotted her lips carefully with a Kleenex. "Wasn't his wife, anyway. It was his
daughter who called and left the message."
"The kid?" Burckhardt frowned. "I thought she was away at school. "
"She called, that's all I know."
Burckhardt went back to his own office and stared distastefully at the unopened mail on his desk. He
didn't like nightmares; they spoiled his whole day. He should have stayed in bed, like Barth.
A funny thing happened on his way home. There was a disturbance at the corner where he usually
caught his bus-someone was screaming something about a new kind of deep-freeze-so he walked an
extra block. He saw the bus coming and started to trot. But behind him, someone was calling his name.
He looked over his shoulder; a small, harried-looking man was hurrying toward him.
Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual acquaintance named Swanson.
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Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already missed the bus.
He said, "Hello."
Swanson's face was desperately eager. "Burckhardt?" he asked inquiringly, with an odd intensity. And
then he just stood there silently, watching Burckhardt's face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled to a
faint hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for something, Burckhardt
thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt didn't know how to supply it.
Burckhardt coughed and said again, "Hello, Swanson."
Swanson didn't even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very deep sigh.
"Nothing doing," he mumbled, apparently to himself. He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned
away.
Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an odd sort of day, he
thought, and one he didn't much like. Things weren't going right.
Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn't anything terrible or disastrous; it was
something out of his experience entirely. You live .your life, like any man, and you form a network of
impressions and reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is
expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight
extra tug to make it latch.
It isn't the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a
little bit wrong-the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because
the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot.
It wasn't just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt's life; it was that the wrong things
were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn't come into the office, yet Barth always came in.
Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife's attempt to interest
him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all through the evening. The neighbors were people he
liked-Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding,
too, this night and he barely listened to Dennerman's complaints about not being able to get good
phone service or his wife's comments on the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these
days.
Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when, around
midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him-he was strangely aware of it happening-he turned over in
his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep.
On the morning of June 15, Burckhardt woke up screaming.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear the explosion, feel the
blast that crushed him against a wall. It did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an
undisturbed room.
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