William Tenn: The Servant Problem

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.