This is the first of an occasional series of posts centered around my fascination with patterns: visible patterns, audible rhythms, simple habits of being.
How I first came to read science fiction is anybody’s guess. I don’t think any of my friends read it, and I can’t remember any adult steering me in that direction. Possibly, the main draw was that the town library (as I recall) maintained a completely separate section for fantasy and SF — completely separate, that is, from the age-defined “children’s books” and “adult books” sections. Unlike those in the kids’ area, the F/SF section’s books weren’t big-format with lots of pictures. They had lots of words, like the inch-thick (and beyond) monsters of the adult section. But, unlike with the adult section, the librarians didn’t care how old you were. No one took F/SF seriously enough. How could anyone, even a child, possibly come to harm of even the psychological sort by reading about adventures in science, space, and time?
Of course there was plenty of conventional SF available — space operas, mad scientists, that sort of thing. But every now and then, especially in the SF anthologies of short stories, you’d come across something which really made your little pre-high-school brain jump to its toes, throw its arms wide, and turn inside-out. One such story for me — one of the most disturbing stories I’d ever read, remaining so for a long time — was Alfred Bester’s 1959 tale called “The Pi Man.”
It’s not a horror story: that’s not why I say “disturbing.” No scary monsters therein. (Or are there…?) At one level, it disturbed me greatly that the author treated the English language so casually, apparently not caring whether he wrote “professionally” or not.
The narrator — and protagonist — is a Wall Street arbitrageur. Here’s how he describes his job:
…simultaneous buying and selling of moneys in different markets to profit from unequal price. Try to follow simple example: Pound sterling is selling for $2.79-1/4 in London. Rupee is selling for $2.79 in New York. One rupee buys one pound in Burma. See where the arbitrage lies? I buy one rupee for $2.79 in New York, buy one pound for rupee in Burma, sell pound for $2.79-1/4 in London, and I have made 1/4 cent on the transaction. Multiply by $100,000, and I have made $250 on the transaction. Enormous capital required.
See that? All those sentence fragments. Those dropped helping verbs and articles. What, Bester was too hurried to fix the wording before sending the manuscript off? His editor was sloppy drunk or something?
(Leave aside for the moment that no other description of arbitrage I’ve ever read explains it, for me, quite as clearly.)
But heck, that wasn’t by any means the worst example. The author lays out what to expect right in the first paragraph:
How to say? How to write? When sometimes I can be fluent, even polished, and then, reculer pour mieux sauter, patterns take hold of me. Push. Compel.
For a young reader more used to the mysteries of (say) how Tom Swift, Jr.’s latest invention worked, this was challenging stuff. It made me squirm just to read it.
Beyond the sentence structure and grammar, I suddenly faced typographic challenges as well: the way certain passages looked on the page, clearly arranged that way to somehow alter (better?) the meaning. Here’s how the narrator describes what he had to eat for lunch on one occasion:
Martini Martini
Croque M’sieur
RoquefortSalad
Coffee
Even without the first line, there’s no doubt what he’d ordered from the bar.
None of which provided the biggest hurdle for a kid in almost stereotypically conventional early 1960s small-town America. No, the biggest hurdle came from the fact that all this stuff actually made sense… once you thought about it… and once you’d gotten past some of the action.
Occupation aside, the protagonist, Peter Marko, is what he calls the Pi Man. That’s Greek-letter π Man. The pi not to be confused, he says, with psi: he’s not exactly blessed with a form of ESP or other psychic power. No, the pi is like P — P as in pattern. He’s acutely, almost excruciatingly, sensitive to pattern, or rather to its absence. Even more, he’s acutely, almost excruciatingly obsessed with patterning that which is not patterned. For example, on a day when the markets are especially hectic:
Gold fluctuating. I am behind at eleven-thirty, but the patterns put me ahead $57,075.94 by half-past noon, Daylight Saving Time. 57075 makes a nice pattern but that 94¢! Iych! Ugly. Symmetry above all else. Alas, only 24¢ hard money in my pockets. Called secretary, borrowed 70¢ from her, and threw sum total out window.
Okay, that’s weird but not particularly disturbing. Ditto the rhythms — or the arrhythms — of language: Marko goes on quite fluently and eloquently at times; he’s just compelled to balance those times out, with bursts of gibberish, pidgin English, foreign language, sometimes for days at a time. No, the disturbing parts for me were the balances he’s forced to make in his life. Does he like somebody? worse, does he like them a lot? He’s got to compensate, by doing something horrible to them.
And woe betide someone he falls in love with…
The story isn’t airtight. Bester makes no attempt to explain how Marko got to this state (indeed, it’s scarcely like a “science fiction” story at all in that regard). And his compulsive patternizing isn’t absolute, either, but a little arbitrary: he notices some things that are off-balance, but ignores others. (For instance, in the previous example, he lets that “half-past noon” slide by without comment; you might think a purist knee-jerk balancer would square his accounts at exactly noon, or at least 12:12 or 12:21.)
When I re-read it recently, I was still creeped out: a shiver of the old squirms ran up and down my spine.
I was surprised not to find a good-quality version of it anywhere online. I did locate a PDF, obviously created from a word-processing program. It isn’t perfect (those typographic challenges, y’know); but for what it’s worth I’ve cleaned it up a bit and uploaded it here (108KB PDF).
When I can find a copy of the story in its original form, probably from the library, I’ll fix up the remaining loose ends.
earthtopus says
I’m getting a 404 on the upload link? Which is a shame; I’d love to read it.
John says
Fixed — so sorry for the inconvenience!
Ashleigh Burroughs says
Librarians steering me away from “those are too old for you” books … I hated that.
a/b
John says
Oh, a/b… luckily, that sort of librarian can be the source of many an entertaining story. :)
John says
Update, 2012-10-20: I haven’t found a copy of the October ’59 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, which first published “The Pi Man.” So I don’t know if the PDF version I found online was based on that publication or not.
It’s very interesting, in surprising ways. I’d thought I’d just have to correct the layout of some of those odd typographical passages, but it turns out to be rather different in content, too. The protagonist is not named Peter Marko, but Abraham Storm. One (typographically non-pyrotechnic) paragraph in the PDF reads:
In The Dark Side of the Earth‘s presentation, that paragraph looks like this:
Like I said: interesting. I suspect that Bester edited the DSotE version for the anthology, trimming some things, sprucing others up, and — possibly — losing some things which might have been better retained.
Anyway, getting the 1964 version online is going to be a bit more work than I’d thought. I’ll get there eventually.
P.S. And by the way, no, I don’t know which version I first read. The DSotE cover is sorta familiar — the publication date is about right — and I know for certain that I wouldn’t have seen an issue of F&SF magazine in 1958. So I’m guessing I read and maybe owned the book.
Pao says
Hi – I, too, remember having read this story a few decades back.
Don’t be surprised by finding slightly different versions floating around, though. Especially with Bester, everything seems to have been revised whenever it was re-printed or included in some anthology.
_The demolished man_, for example, may include or drop a whole chapter (and this would change the tone of the story a lot, btw) depending on which edition you get.
John says
Hello, Pao — thanks for stopping by!
With SF, especially, trying to pin down “the” version of almost ANY story is almost impossible — because stories get printed, and the original hardcopy books or periodicals disappear, and the stories get anthologized and re-anthologized many times over… giving editors and sometimes the original authors a chance to reconsider, revise, even totally rework the piece. And then the new version becomes the source for the next version, so by the time you get to the 4th or 12th reprinting it’s almost unrecognizable. Writers are fidgeters and fiddlers by nature. :)
John says
P.S. for those who haven’t read it: I haven’t found a PDF or plain text version of The Demolished Man online, but vaguely remember having read it myself. Here’s a good writeup about it, on the Tor.com site — and you can obtain a physical copy from any of several online sources.
marta says
Oh, all those numbers.
If I had come across this as a kid, I don’t think I’d have read it. No one takes me very seriously when I say this, but when encountering most anything to do with numbers, I can almost feel my brain shut down. And I’m not one of those women who can say they were good at math until 7th grade. I was never good at math, even in 2nd grade having to miss recess because I couldn’t understand the math we’d done in class.
Anyway, I read science fiction as a kid. More fantasy, but definitely sci-fi, but my grandmother and my mother read them too, and my dad watched sci-fi tv shows and films. So. No mystery there. But our public library librarian didn’t approve either.
Gene Kendel says
I read “Pi Man” not too long after it was written(I’m 73yrs old); [I was smitten with TZ/Rod Serling, A.Hitchcock, I. Asimov, Sci. Fi Et Al, Erich von Daniken, Edgar Cayce….] (you get the picture). I was always an escapist/intellectual, in pursuit of any and all things unexplainable and unfathomable.
What got me thinking about the “Pi Man” was an allusion to N.A.’s “….one giant leap for mankind” statement; in his attempt at profundity, HE BLEW IT [and he KNOWS* HE BLEW IT!!]. Saying “That’s one small step for man” (And NOT : one small step for A man,*as his documentary shows that he actually “toyed with” THAT wording) creates a redundancy, to wit: In essence he is saying “That’s one small step for Mankind, and one giant leap for Mankind”! My”pi-manship” cannot abide that!! [I believe he was haunted by that ’till his dying day.].
In closing, I would proffer that my own personal “pi-mania”, if you will, is an adjunct to my Alzheimers> the attention to detail, esp. Symmetry,et.cet, et.cet….I can “right it” by saying, “Don’t cry for me (Argentina)….I never really loved you!”G.K.