Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  I looked up, blinking a couple of times as though trying to remember what I was doing there.

  “Dr. Smith and Miss Baker will see you in just a few minutes in the conference room.”

  “Oh, thank you,” I said. “I’ll be ready.” But the fact was that I already was.

  “You got by the people at S.R.I.,” Fritzl said, “you got by the people at M.I.T., you got by Carson and ‘Good Morning America’ and the ‘Today’ show. You can handle these two people.”

  “Naturally I can handle them,” I said. “It isn’t a question of handling them. It’s a question of what you can go to jail for.”

  “You just don’t make any claims, stupid,” he said. The way he talked to me!

  “Of course I don’t make any claims.” I never did. I always said these things weren’t under my control. I didn’t promise a thing. I stayed on the move, sure, and if I got a chance to get away with it I’d turn your watch back or unzip your fly, and when your ballpoint pen breaks I’m just as surprised as you are. But if I don’t get any chances, well, then I just give you the shamefaced grin that says some days are like that. “Get me a drink,” I said, and got up and went over to the window. We were staying in the Plaza. A suite. Not a very big suite, but do you know how much even the little ones cost? But you can’t be at the Y.M.C.A. when you want to do the “Today” show.

  He brought me my Campari and black cherry soda, and along with it a bracelet. I always wear a lot of jewelry; this one was intertwined snakes, and it fit right in, but I hadn’t asked for it. “What now?” I asked.

  He said, “Try to bend it.” I couldn’t. “Stainless steel, silver-plated,” he said. “You want to bend a ten-penny spike, just stick it in there and push hard. It’ll bend.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I don’t like to bend anything stronger than spoons, because it’s hard to do it without grunting and straining.

  “No maybe. And it’s magnetic, for in case you want to do a compass…” Hell, I had six different ways of doing the compass effect already, all of them good. The best is this little plastic marble with a magnet inside that I hold in my mouth. You’ve seen me do the compass on television? I just lean over it, concentrating, and the needle spins all around the card? Mostly I use the marble, and if I think some wise guy is going to look in my mouth afterward all I have to do is swallow it. Only they cost thirty bucks each, and it’s kind of undignified to have to look for them afterward. “…when you go to see this guy Smith and his schatzi,” he explained, but I’d already figured out what he was up to.

  “I didn’t say I’d do that,” I said.

  “No, stupid, you didn’t say that,” he mimicked me, “but you don’t got no choice, believe me.”

  “We’re not doing so bad,” I said.

  “We are doing schrecklich,” he said. “Go see these two shtunkers. Let them tell you what a great psychic you are. Let them give you that fifty thousand dollar prize, then come back here and we split it up and head for some other country. Australia, maybe. We ain’t ever done Australia.”

  “And what if I don’t like Australia?”

  “Machts nicht, kiddo. This place we used up. Only when you see them don’t screw it up, okay?”

  I said huffily, “I never screw it up! I’ve been doing this a long time, Fritzl.” And he looked at me with those big, brown, hostile Kraut eyes.

  “That’s what bothers me, stupid. You’re getting sloppy.”

  But I wasn’t sloppy with the Reverend, or with the Honorable Miss either. She wasn’t wearing her Grecian robes. She was wearing a three-piece gray wool pantsuit that looked like she’d bought it by mail order and forgotten her size. I told them my name, bashful and polite, and the Honorable Miss sniffed and said, “Oh, yes, Geissen. You’re the show-business one. We’ve heard of you. I suppose you’ve come about the prize.”

  I have to say Fritzl had had a good idea about that. I was not surprised to hear that they’d heard of me—hell, crazies watch television, too—and I was ready with surprise and indignation. “Prize? I’m not looking for anything from you. I came because—” I pulled the clipping out of my pocket—“somebody sent me this classified ad.” FREE TEST was the headline, and then it went on to say that anyone who thought he might have ESP or clairvoyance or any other paranormal experience could come to this office to be tested.

  “And you want to be tested?” asked the Reverend Doctor. His voice was hostile. So was his body stance; he was sitting, tightly clutching his belly, erect on the far side of the conference table.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if I’m a fake or not,” I said.

  Looks passed between them. I waited. “Get the file,” said Smith, and the Honorable Miss rose to pluck a folder out of a cabinet. She pawed through it, extracted a sheet and handed it to him. He looked it over, nodded and passed it to me.

  I had seen it before. It was a report that I knew well.

  From Preliminary Notes on H.G., by Gerard T. K. Shapman, Journ. Amer. Parapsych., Vol. VIII No. 3 Pg. 262:

  I first encountered the subject H.G. as an undergraduate in August, 1970. A number of incidents suggested latent noumetic talents but, in the absence of rigorous controls and a statistical base for analyses, I was unable to make a satisfactory assessment. However, three incidents from that era are worthy of recording.

  1. H.G.’s early ability to manipulate objects at a distance (“telekinesis”1) was displayed in a laboratory experiment in which I was present at all times. Nevertheless, six connections in a transformer system were displaced.2 I had set up and tested the connections myself. The room was locked and empty until H.G. entered it in my company. He was under my constant observation until I discovered the displaced connections. There was only one door, which was secured by a deadfall bolt lock. The windows were barred. There was no possibility, or evidence, of any intrusion.3 Significantly, the telekinetic effects were exerted in a manner which seriously and adversely affected H.G.’s laboratory credits; causing him to fail the course. (Similar observations have been made by others. Cf., Renfrew,4 Bayreuth,5 and others.)

  2. In the second instance, H.G. was able to describe the contents of a closed box6 to which he had no possibility of previous access. There were no visual, auditory, olfactory or tactile clues. Although his description was not exact in detail it was inarguably correct in principle.

  3. In the third instance, from a distance of more than 3,000 miles (4800 km.) he referred to my new wife by her personal nickname in a letter mailed to me from Germany after our marriage. He had never met her. The letter was in response to a notice in the alumni magazine, Tech Times,7 which gave only her actual name, not in the least like the “pet name,” by which I called her, which he had never heard.

  All of these, and other, incidents were suggestive but, of course, by no means conclusive. However, when in the following year H.G. was discharged from the United States Army and returned to the Cambridge area I asked him to participate in a series of rigorous tests which established conclusively that he possessed paranormal powers to a previously unknown degree.

  “Ah, yes. The M.I.T. tests,” I said. “I was working as a French Fry Man in the McDonald’s at Harvard Square when Dr. Shapman came in for a Big Mac and vanilla shake.”

  “Tests have been faked,” said suspicious old Sam Smith, looking skinny and mean.

  I threw myself abjectly on the ground and licked his shoes—I don’t mean literally. “I know that,” I said. “I don’t blame you if you don’t believe them.”

  “What about believing you, Geissen?” asked the old lady. “Do you think you’re a trustworthy witness?”

  “Not at all,” I said, and squeezed out a tear—I do mean literally. I’ve always been able to cry whenever I wanted to. “I don’t even know what happens, Miss Baker. No. I shouldn’t have come here. I’ll go—”

  Smith let me get as far as standing up, crossing the room, putting my hand on the doorknob. Then he said, voice like a rusty oven door, “We don’t go by belief, Geiss
en. We go by evidence.”

  “And it’s true,” said Miss Baker judgmatically, “that this Dr. Shapman was not as big a fool as most.”

  But about that I couldn’t agree with her.

  I’d known Shapman a long time, since I was a sophomore at M.I.T., the year before I dropped out. He was my physics prof. He was also into psychic phenomena, though he didn’t bring it into his classes, and some of the other guys tried to ass-kiss him by bragging about the dreams they’d had that foretold when their fathers would run off the road coming home from a party, stuff like that. I didn’t bother. I listened to the gossip, mostly about how he was being given a hard time by those other faculty types Minsky and Lettvin and so on. Shapman got cut up by them, but he had tenure. And nobody could say he was crooked. He and his mother were in it together, I guess she turned him on to it. They’d been members of the Society for Psychical Research, fooled around with Rhine cards, all that stuff. Never got far until they got me, and then you never saw such happy people.

  They didn’t show it to me much. Old lady Baker was right, Shapman wasn’t as big a fool as most, and when he got down to rigorous testing, after I got back from my eighteen months in the army and he found me in the McDonald’s, he was suspicious as hell. He had me doing my stuff inside a Faraday cage, a room completely enclosed in a dielectric, and he was always going over the copper screen with capacitance detectors, looking for leaks. He never found any. Who needed leaks by then? By then I had had eighteen months with Fritzl.

  He did, though, start me in the business, when I was still his student.

  I was squeezing out a “D,” right on the narrow edge of flunking the course and being kicked out of the whole school. What was wrong with that was that the draft was still going, and there was the Army hot for my bod the minute the Institute bounced me. So I was hungry to pass.

  So, this day in October, Shapman told me I was getting an F for a lab demonstration and I squeezed out my tear and he gave me permission to redo the experiment. I forget exactly what it was, but I was supposed to do something with a laser and I couldn’t make it lase. I got there early, checked over the equipment, screwed it up. I began to pump, but I wasn’t watching the voltages. We blew a fuse. I replaced the fuse, and then the whole damned thing wouldn’t work.

  Hell with it. I turned everything off, locked the door and went out into the yard to smoke a joint. The late warm Massachusetts October sunlight was precious. The dope was good. I sat there, reading a book on spiders. I don’t get all choked up about spiders, but one of the guys was telling me how spiders make love, and it sounded dirty enough to tell girls in bars, so I was looking it up. And I forgot the time. And when I thought of going back in the hall Shapman was there already, unlocking the door, balancing a four-inch cardboard box with holes in it. “Ah,” he said, watching me bounce trippily toward him, “I see you’re in a good mood, Mr. Geissen.”

  “Sorry I’m late, sir.” I squinted at the box. “What’ve you got there, sir, a black widow?”

  “What?” He stopped with the door half open, staring suspiciously.

  “I said I thought maybe you had a black widow spider in there, sir,” I said, courteous, alert, reverent.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Come on in, Geissen.” He held the door for me to pass, then came in after me and set the box down. He was in a brown study. “How did you know that?” he asked.

  “Know what, sir?” He glared at me. “You mean it really is a black widow spider?”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s a banded argiope, but it’s a spider all right.”

  I didn’t push it. “I don’t know, Professor Shapman,” I said, all open and honest. “It just, I don’t know, it felt all crawly and leggy, like. Maybe it was seeing the holes in the box.”

  “Yeah.” Still frowning to himself, he turned on the lights and sat down next to his spider. I could see that it had a little tag attached to it, you know, the kind you put on presents. “Get on with the experiment,” he said. “I have to meet somebody.”

  “Yes, sir.” I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d screwed the equipment up. I was feeling nice and warm and comfortable from the good dope, and I went through the motions with him frowning at me every second.

  “You’re not getting enough voltage,” he said sharply.

  “I know that, Professor Shapman,”—lawdy, massah, I’se doin’ the bestest I kin—“there seems to be something wrong.”

  “Impossible,” he said sharply, put down the spider, came over to the rig. After a minute of fooling around he went over to the bench with the transformer. “That’s very funny,” he complained.

  “What’s that, Professor Shapman?” I dripped humility.

  “The wiring is wrong.” He looked up at me, sharp suspicion. “Did you fool around with this part?”

  “Me, Professor Shapman?” Injured innocence this time; and he shook his head.

  “No, you couldn’t have, could you? You weren’t even in this part of the room.” Suspicion was fading, but he was still staring at me. And me, I was feeling pretty mellow.

  “That’s the way it goes sometimes, Professor,” I said, meaning nothing in particular by it.

  Unfortunately, he asked me, “What do you mean by that?”

  He was chilling my nice warm marijuana glow, and I didn’t want him to. I improvised. “Oh, well,” I said, “I mean…well, it’s hard to put into words, but things happen.”

  “Things happen?”

  “Different kinds of things. Like fuses blow. Clocks stop. Wires come loose from distributor caps. Things like that, Professor, I don’t know why they happen but they do.” I was just winging it. The dope was talking, more than me.

  It made him look thoughtful, but that’s as far as it went. He fiddled with the power source and I fiddled with the argon tube and we finally got a good stream of coherent light. But we didn’t talk much after that, and the son of a bitch failed me for the course anyway.

  So the army got my bod, I wound up in Wiesbaden, and in the Amerika Haus there I met Fritzl. He was stealing books out of the library to improve his English. Dumb-looking little Kraut, he looked about fourteen, was actually two years older than I was—in some ways, oh, much older. He was going to be a famous conjuror. We used to meet in the back of the magic shop where he worked in Frankfurt and he told me how he would go on the stage in America and make his fortune.

  Then he got the better idea.

  Have I mentioned that the Honorable Miss Gwendoline Stella Baker looked a lot like a snake? Not one of your friendly little garter snakes, I mean, not even a rattler. What she looked like was a cobra, with her hair spread out like the cobra’s hood and her long neck wavering as though getting ready to strike. She struck. “I am surprised, Mr. Geissen,” she hissed, “that a man who is as much of a television star as you hasn’t been here before.”

  “To see if you can fool us out of the fifty thousand dollars,” The Reverend Dr. Samuel Shipperton Smith chimed in.

  I nodded to show that I was trying to see their point of view. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious,” I said. “I would be too. I guess you get a lot of phonies coming in here for that money.”

  “You must think we’re very stupid, Geissen,” she went on, still sounding snaky. It was a hiss, all right, but it was more than that, it was a kind of false-teeth whistle. Looking at her closely her teeth did look funny. Probably china choppers; probably the bustline was falsies; she didn’t seem to fit the figure she displayed. And Smith himself was obviously wearing a toupee and, I was pretty sure, some kind of suntan makeup on his face. He added his two cents’ worth:

  “You probably think everybody is stupid. Do you expect anyone to believe that there are people on the planet Clarion who make your tricks fail most of the time?”

  “I don’t do tricks, Mr. Smith,” I said politely. “Do you want me to go away?”

  Pause while they looked at each other. Then, “We didn’t tell you to come,” said Smith. “G
o if you want to.”

  He didn’t sound as if he really meant it, so all I did was open the door to the outside office. I stood there for a minute, while the receptionist looked up to see what I was doing. I took a quick look at my wristwatch, then turned back to the freaks. I looked as though I were making up my mind to say something to them. I didn’t think I would really have to, because the secretary had seen me look at my watch, and naturally that made her look at the clock, and her gasp came later than I expected it but it came. “Reverend Smith!” she called. “The clock’s stopped.”

  I looked embarrassed.

  Smith looked sarcastic. That skinny face didn’t look handsome the best day of its life, and when it was looking sarcastic it looked particularly weasely. “Used your time in the waiting room profitably, did you?” he asked me.

  “My time?” I blinked. “In the waiting room? Oh, you mean I could have done something to the clock?” I allowed myself to look hangdog. “If you think that, Mr. Smith, I guess I should stop wasting your time.”

  “No, do stay,” said the Honorable Miss Baker, looking as poisonous as he but in her own snaky, rather than weasely, way. “What other little surprises did you set up for us?”

  “Things just happen,” I said miserably. “I’m sorry! I always tell them I’m sorry!”

  “And do you tell them you’re a fake, Geissen?” she demanded.

  “That, too! Yes! I tell them I think it is all a fake, this whole thing—only I don’t know who is faking it!”

  Because, you see, that’s really what I did tell them, because that’s what Fritz] told me to do. It always worked. The more you say you don’t do anything, the more they prove to you that you do. And of course, after all those hours of practicing with Fritzl in the back room of the magic shop in Frankfurt, there was plenty I could do.