O Pioneer!
by Frederik Pohl
To Betty Anne
for, among other reasons,
keeping me alive
I
Bal Harbor Residential Park. Low-cost Luxury for the Discriminating Few. Fully retractable private residences, 100 per-cent soundproofed, payments in cash accepted. Kitchen and all conveniences nearby,
Evesham Giyt’s mailing address was care of the Bal Harbor Residential Park, but he didn’t use the address much. He practically never received any mail. He didn’t expect to. He didn’t even have a terminal, at least not one that anybody knew about. Certainly not one that had his name on it. Anyway, there wasn’t anybody he’d ever known whom he had any interest in keeping in touch with. He had no living relatives. He had not retained any old friends.
Even if he had, Bal Harbor wasn’t the kind of place you’d especially want people to know you were living in. Located in the industrial fringe of Wichita, Kansas, it looked more like a district of broken-down warehouses than anything you would call residential. About the only time Giyt mentioned that Bal Harbor was his home was when he was applying for a job as a bug-killer. That happened only when his money began to run out—maybe three or four times a year. That was because he had no choice, since employers always wanted to know where you lived. In this one rare case Giyt found that it was easier to tell the truth than to fake something.
What did have to be faked, of course, were his references. Giyt naturally wrote those himself, complete with net addresses that were keyed to divert any inquiries into one of his own programs.
However, Giyt’s skills at bug-killing were very real, because Giyt was an absolute computer genius. In the first two or three weeks at any job he never failed to turn up and cancel a whole nest of the little nasties, some of them surveillance scout programs implanted by business competitors, some just the mischief of some harebrained hacker. Now and then, though, he turned up some really ugly time bomb that had been sneaked in by a bloodthirsty competitor or left as a parting gift by a disgruntled former employee—left, often enough, by the particular former employee Giyt was replacing. By the time that had been going on for a few weeks his bosses were invariably congratulating themselves over their good judgment in taking him aboard. So they always took it hard when, all apologies and sorrow, he told them the bad news about the sudden emergency in his family that made it necessary for him to quit and move to, say, Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe Key West. By then Giyt had also located some good and undetectable ways to divert a decent nest egg to one of his own six or seven untraceable dummy accounts. Thus solvency was assured for the next few months.
The cops considered that sort of activity seriously illegal. Giyt didn’t agree. He didn’t think that what he did was stealing. He thought of it as what it really was—namely, making sure he got the proper payment for the really very valuable services he had rendered. Who was in a better position to calculate the value of those services than the person who had rendered them?
Giyt never embezzled large amounts. He could have, easily enough. It would have been no trouble at all to reach into some megabank’s files and siphon away a few million cues before they noticed—by which time the money would have disappeared into one of his untraceable ratholes—and then he would never need to lift a finger again.
Giyt didn’t do that. In his view, that would have been dishonest. He earned everything he took, and he didn’t need large amounts, anyway. It cost very little to live in Bal Harbor. He didn’t need to keep on living in a dump like Bal Harbor, either, but the place suited him. Evesham Giyt had a very rich fantasy life. He spent a lot of time in the history net, with people like Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler and the Spanish conquistadors and Alexander the Great. It would be a lot of fun, he sometimes thought wistfully, to conquer the world, or anyway some good-sized piece of it. Something about as big as, say, Canada would be nice, and he even spent a number of pleasurable hours rummaging through the secret defense files of both the United States and Canadian governments to figure out just how you could go about it. It didn’t look all that hard. The only question was where to invade. Vancouver was a tempting beachhead. It would fall quickly, and then it would be hard for the Canadians to reinforce across the Rockies; but by the same token it would be a poor jumping-off place for invading the rest of Canada. He considered upstate New York, too; you could start by driving into Quebec, perhaps enlisting the more radical Francophones as guerrilla troops. But, taking one thing with another, he favored striking right across the northern tier into the prairie provinces, with their open terrain so marvelous for tanks.
It was fantasy, of course. Nobody fought actual wars any more, wars of conquest or any other kind. Especially not the kind that involved killing and maiming. The Earth’s big battleground was commerce—an extra import tax here, some merchandise dumping there, a lot of juggling exchange rates everywhere. There were plenty of people who yearned for the good old glory days, but Giyt wasn’t one of them. In old-style wars he could have been a Napoleon, at least a Patton, but he didn’t want to fight. Not actually. Only in daydreams.
Anyway, all the places Giyt might have wanted to invade, given a few army corps to help the job along, were pretty well messed up by the inroads of civilization. Urban crime, drug cartels, street violence—who needed those kinds of problems? Not to mention that if you really wanted to physically conquer any sizable chunk of real estate in the way the old guys had, it would require a lot of—well—killing.
That was a stopper, right there.
Killing people had never been Evesham Giyt’s style. He had no desire to hurt or enslave anybody. Not any person, much less the large numbers of persons that would die if you used those unpleasant mass-destruction weapons that made up modern warfare. The fact was that Evesham Giyt didn’t like guns.
Guns, or at least one particular gun, were the reason why Giyt hadn’t had any living relatives since his first year in college.
That was the year when his father had taken one of his carefully maintained guns from his private and highly illegal weapon collection and used it to blow his brains out.
That had been a traumatic watershed event for young Evesham Giyt. As a small child he had adored the old man, who was a skilled and highly prized technician in the field of parts assembly. The older Giyt was not just an important employee in the little boutique factories that hired his services. Often enough he was nearly the only one.
Sometimes when Giyt was little his father would take him along to watch him work. Evesham was fascinated by the way his father would sit there, patient and smiling, while his helpers dotted his wrists and fingers with tiny, almost invisible reflective patches. When he was fully marked he would sit before the bunch of parts he had laid out on the workbench and, as he had practiced, put them quickly together into the finished product—whatever the finished product for that day’s run might be. Harriman Giyt only had to do it once. As he worked, the Hdar scanners of the factory computer system registered each step. When he was finished the computers had only to repeat each step as many times as required for the run of the product—seldom more than a couple of thousand pieces, not enough to go through the bother of writing a program for.
It was a good living for the old man and his young son until the computers got a little more efficient. When all-purpose assembling programs had become capable of reverse-engineering a finished product and going back to work out the steps needed to put it together for themselves, Harriman Giyt abruptly found himself as unemployed as the piece workers he and the robots had replaced.