(Hu)man vs. Self
From “Speed Trap,” by Frederik Pohl:
Now, question is, what do all the meetings accomplish?
…
So I gave up that idea and concentrated on ways of doing it better. You know, there really is no more stupid way of communicating information than flying three thousand miles to sit on a gilt chair in a hotel ballroom and listen to twenty-five people read papers at you. Twenty-three of the papers you don’t care about anyway, and the twenty-fourth you can’t understand because the speaker has a bad accent and, anyway, he’s rushing it because he’s under time pressure to catch his plane to the next conference, and that one single twenty-fifth paper has cost you four days, including travel time, when you could have read it in your own office in fifteen minutes. And got more out of it, too. Of course, there’s the interplay when you find yourself sitting in the coffee shop next to somebody who can explain the latest instrumentation to you because his company’s doing the telemetry; you can’t get that from reading. But I’ve noticed there’s less and less time for that. And less and less interest, too, maybe, because you get pretty tired of making new friends after about the three hundredth; and you begin to think about what’s waiting for you on your desk when you get back, and you remember the time when you got stuck with that damn loudmouth Egyptian at the I.A.U. in Brussels and had to fight the Suez war for an hour and a half.
Frederik Pohl plays “Speed Trap” in two ways.
He offers this man, Dr. Chelsey Grew, who is obsessed with efficient systems and trying to make the world run more predictably and more quickly. And in the same instant, Pohl offers this same man, Dr. Grew, who presents himself in the manner which he describes himself and his predicament above.
This duality shapes the text that forms through Grew as he describes himself and his surroundings as the short story’s first-person narrator.
As one example of this character against himself, count the number of times that Grew spells out a numerical value in his recounting of the conference he attended and the number of characters it took to spell out those figures:
three thousand miles (13)
twenty-five people (11)
twenty-three of the papers (12)
the twenty-fourth you can’t understand (13)
that one single (3)
twenty-fifth paper (12)
four days (4)
fifteen minutes (7)
about the three hundredth (14)
an hour and a half (6)
If we’re being generous and offering the “th” on the end of values like the 24th, Grew could have saved himself more than seventy characters in his retelling if he’d used 3000, 25, 23, 24th to explain himself.
Sure this is all esoteric given that we’re reading about a man’s mental process. He’s not actually spelling out those words when he speaks — nor will most anyone else. And I wouldn’t expect Grew to be the sole person I’d ever met who spelled out the letters to numeric terms as he thought of them. He’s an efficient, intelligent man after all.
Then again, how efficient can he be when at times he’s willing to pour out the minutia of this conference and its shortcomings at such length?
Even framed in his task of creating a more efficient way to gather people and share information, he seems to enjoy the self-importance of his retelling by, among other things, reflecting on:
How conferences reinforce a stupid way of communicating
How reading is much more efficient than listening
How a chance meeting with an expert affirms the correctness of other manners of communication
How a chance meeting with a boastful sort will likely result in hours of lost time
Grew infuses his statements and ideas with a fervor that goes beyond the examination of facts. He brags here more than he brainstorms, and in doing so, he creates more of a rift between the title of his character and the expression of that person to the reader.
One of the most fun parts of writing and reading is that masters of the craft like Pohl can use situations like this to build tension in the story and create depth of character in ways that might seem odd at first. If you were to think only in a straightforward manner about how you would create a “systems” man who is meant to embody the concept of efficiency, would you begin by making him blather on and on about the minutia of his days?
I suspect that Pohl made this rigid type of person as a first draft. He created a Grew who spoke quickly about 15 minutes and 3000 miles and who never gave a second thought to past encounters with inefficient others. This Grew was consistent in considering nothing but the facts. He was also boring and lacked depth, so he lacked reality.
Pohl must have built inefficiencies into Grew’s character to make him exuberant, arrogant, lifelike. He developed those traits to make Grew a human being among the rest of the conference participants who view the gathering as a worthwhile endeavor.
Because if you wanted to read something like this:
So I gave up the idea and concentrated on ways of doing it better. Instead of 3000 miles, we could hold the conference in multiple cities closer to major cities where participants live and connect them with high-speed communications devices… Papers could be read and heard though pre-recordings… Professionals could schedule meeting times to discuss, in depth, topics of expertise such as telemetry…
you could instead have picked up a technical manual about the logistics of scheduling.
Pohl presents something much more worthwhile. He lets me imagine the internal strife of this man who, later, probably regrets having spent extraneous time recalling his fight with the Egyptian and who becomes nervous and restless on the long flight to conferences which he is obliged to attend.
No person is a perfect representation of what their title suggests they should be. What Grew shows through his musings is an up-front picture of the differences between his profession and his real-life expression of living. I found his humanity engaging from the start. From there, it was thoroughly rewarding to watch him navigate the challenges of “Speed Trap” and to find out which parts of his character caused him to buckle and grow.