Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Captain O’Leary said, face furrowed, “What about the warden, Governor? They say the category system is what makes the world go round, it fits the right man to the right job and keeps him there. But look at Momma Schluckebier! He fell apart at the seams. He—”

  “Turn it around, O’Leary.”

  “Turn—?”

  The governor nodded. “You’ve got it backward. Not the right man for the job—the right job for the man! We’ve got Schluckebier on our hands, see? He’s been born; it’s too late to do anything about that. He will go to pieces in an emergency. So where do we put him?”

  O’Leary stubbornly clamped his jaw, frowning.

  “We put him,” the governor went on gently, “where the best thing to do in a crisis is to go to pieces! Why, O’Leary, you get some hot-headed man of action in here, and every time an inmate sneezes in E-G you’ll have bloodshed! And there’s no harm in a prison riot. Let the poor devils work off steam. I wouldn’t have bothered to get out of bed for it—except I was worried about the hostages. So I came down to make sure they were protected.”

  O’Leary’s jaw dropped. “But you were—”

  The governor nodded. “I was a hostage myself. That’s one way to protect them, isn’t it? By giving the cons a hostage that’s worth more to them.”

  He yawned, and looked around for his car. “So the world keeps going around,” he said. “Everybody is somebody else’s outgroup, and maybe it’s a bad thing, but did you ever stop to realize that we don’t have wars anymore? The categories stick tightly together. Who is to say that that’s a bad thing?” He grinned. “Reminds me of a story, if you two will pay attention to me long enough to listen. There was a meeting—this is an old, old story—a neighborhood meeting of the leaders of the two biggest women’s groups on the block. There were eighteen Irish ladies from the Church Auxiliary and three Jewish ladies from B’nai B’rith. The first thing they did was have an election for a temporary chairwoman. Twenty-one votes were cast. Mrs. Grossinger from B’nai B’rith got three, and Mrs. O’Flaherty from the Auxiliary got eighteen. So when Mrs. Murphy came up to congratulate Mrs. O’Flaherty after the election, she whispered, ‘Good for you! But isn’t it terrible, the way these Jews stick together?’”

  He stood up and waved wildly, as his long official car came poking hesitantly through the gate. “Well,” he said professionally, “that’s that. As we politicians say, any questions?”

  Sue-Ann hesitated. “Well,” she said—“yes, I guess I do have a question. What’s a Jew?”

  Maybe there was an answer. And maybe the question answered itself; and maybe the governor, riding sleepily homeward in the dawn, himself learned something from it which was true: That a race’s greatest learning may be in the things it has learned enough to forget.

  THE KINDLY ISLE

  The protagonist of this story is someone who has lucked out. He used to work for a laboratory that was set up to design biological warfare weapons for use against enemies of the United States. He wasn’t a researcher, but he knew what was going on, and we get the feeling that he was glad to work instead for a company that developed commercial properties. Checking out the prospects of a half-built resort on a tropical island is what brings him to the isle of the story’s title.

  One of the pleasures of 1984’s “The Kindly Isle” is watching the plot develop as the characters also develop. Clever and skilled is Pohl in painlessly integrating these elements in a tale that has no big explosions but a few real surprises.

  1

  The place they called the Starlight Casino was full of people, a tour group by their looks. I had a few minutes before my appointment with Mr. Kavilan, and sometimes you got useful bits of knowledge from people who had just been through the shops, the hotels, the restaurants, the beaches. Not this time, though. They were an incoming group, and ill-tempered. Their calves under the hems of the bright shorts were hairy ivory or bald, and all they wanted to talk about was lost luggage, unsatisfactory rooms, moldy towels and desk clerks who gave them the wrong keys. There were a surly couple of dozen of them clustered around a placatory tour representative in a white skirt and frilly green blouse. She was fine. It was gently, “We’ll find it,” to this one and sweetly, “I’ll talk to the maid myself,” to another, and I made a note of the name on her badge. Deirdre. It was worth remembering. Saints are highly valued in the hotel business. Then, when the bell captain came smiling into the room to tell me that Mr. Kavilan was waiting for me—and didn’t have his hand out for a tip—I almost asked for his name, too. It was a promising beginning. If the island was really as “kindly” as they claimed, that would be a significant plus on my checklist.

  Personnel was not my most urgent concern, though. My present task was only to check out the physical and financial aspects of a specific project. I entered the lobby and looked around for my real-estate agent—and was surprised when the beachcomber type by the breezeway stretched out his hand. “Mr. Wenright? I’m Dick Kavilan.”

  He was not what I expected. I knew that R. T. Kavilan was supposed to be older than I, and I took my twenty-year retirement from government service eight years ago. This man did not seem that old. His hair was blond and full, and he had an all-around-the-face blond beard that surrounded a pink nose, bronzed cheeks and bright blue eyes. He didn’t think of himself as old, either, because all he had on was white ducks and sandals. He wore no shirt at all, and his body was as lean and tanned as his face. I had dressed for the tropics, too, but not in the same way: white shoes and calf-length white socks, pressed white shorts and a maroon T-shirt with the golden insignia of our Maui hotel over the heart. I understood what he meant when he glanced at my shoes and said, “We’re informal here—I hope you don’t mind.” Formal he certainly was not.

  He was, however, effortlessly efficient. He pulled his open Saab out of the cramped hotel lot, found a gap in the traffic, greeted two friends along the road and said to me, “It’ll be slow going through Port, but once we get outside it’s only twenty minutes to Keytown”—all at once.

  “I’ve got all day,” I said.

  He nodded, taking occasional glances at me to judge what kind of a customer I was going to be. “I thought,” he offered, “that you might want to make just a preliminary inspection this morning. Then there’s a good restaurant in Keytown. We can have lunch and talk—what’s the matter?” I was craning my neck at a couple we had just passed along the road, a woman who looked like a hotel guest and a dark, elderly man. “Did you see somebody you wanted to talk to?”

  We took a corner and I straightened up. “Not exactly,” I said. Somebody I had once wanted to talk to? No. That wasn’t right, either. Somebody I should have wanted to talk to once, but hadn’t, really? Especially about such subjects as Retroviridae and the substantia nigra?

  “If it was the man in the straw hat,” said Kavilan, “that was Professor Michaelis. He the one?”

  “I never heard of a Professor Michaelis,” I said, wishing it were not a lie.

  In the eight years since I took the hotel job I’ve visited more than my share of the world’s beauty spots—Pago-Pago and the Costa Brava, Martinique and Lesbos, Bermuda, Kauai, Barbados, Tahiti. This was not the most breathtaking, but it surely was pretty enough to suit any tourist who ever lived. The beaches were golden and the water crystal. There were thousand-foot forested peaks, and even a halfway decent waterfall just off the road. In a lot of the world’s finest places there turns out to be a hidden worm in the mangosteen—bribe-hungry officials, or revolutions simmering off in the bush, or devastating storms. According to Dick Kavilan, the island had none of those. “Then why did the Dutchmen give up?” I asked. It was a key question. A Rotterdam syndicate was supposed to have sunk fourteen million dollars into the hotel project I had come to inspect—and walked away when it was three-quarters built.

  “They just ran out of money, Mr. Wenright.”

  “Call me Jerry, please,” I said. That was what the preliminary report had indicated. P
robably true. Tropical islands were a bottomless pit for the money of optimistic cold-country investors. If Marge had lived and we had done what we planned, we might have gone bust ourselves in Puerto Rico…if she had lived.

  “Then, Jerry,” he grinned, turning into a rutted dirt road I hadn’t even seen, “we’re here.” He stopped the car and got out to unlock a chainlink gate that had not been unlocked recently. Nor had the road recently been driven. Palm fronds buried most of it and vines had reclaimed large patches.

  Kavilan got back in the car, panting—he was not all that youthful, after all—and wiped rust off his hands with a bandanna. “Before we put up that fence,” he said, “people would drive in or bring boats up to the beach at night and load them with anything they could carry. Toilets. Furniture. Windows, frames and all. They ripped up the carpets where they found any, and where there wasn’t anything portable they broke into the walls for copper piping.”

  “So there isn’t fourteen million dollars left in it,” I essayed.

  He let the grin broaden. “Look now, bargain later, Jerry. There’s plenty left for you to see.”

  There was, and he left me alone to see it. He was never so far away that I couldn’t call a question to him, but he didn’t hang himself around my neck, either. I didn’t need to ask many questions. It was obvious that what Kavilan (and the finders’ reports) had said was true. The place had been looted, all right. It was capricious, with some sections apparently hardly touched. Some were hit hard. Paintings that had been screwed to the wall had been ripped loose—real oils, I saw from one that had been ruined and left. A marble dolphin fountain had been broken off and carted a few steps away—then left shattered on the walk.

  I had come prepared with a set of builder’s plans, and they showed me that there were to have been four hundred guest rooms, a dozen major function areas, bars and restaurants, an arcade of shops in the basement, a huge wine cellar under even that, two pools, a sauna—those were just the sections where principal construction had gone well along before the Dutchmen walked away. I saw as much of it as I could in two hours. When my watch said eleven-thirty I sat down on an intact stone balustrade overlooking the gentle breakers on the beach and waited for Kavilan to join me. “What about water availability?” I asked.

  “A problem, Jerry,” he agreed. “You’ll need to lay a mile and a quarter of new mains to connect with the highway pipes, and then when you get the water it’ll be expensive.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “What’s that smell?”

  He laughed. “Those are some of the dear departed of the island, I’m afraid, and that’s another problem. Let’s move on before we lose our taste for lunch.”

  Kavilan was as candid as I could have hoped, and a lot more so than I would have been in his place. It was an island custom, he said, to entomb their dead aboveground instead of burying them. Unfortunately the marble boxes were seldom watertight. The seepage I had smelled was a very big minus to the project, but Kavilan shook his head when I said so. He reached into the hip pocket of his jeans, unfolded a sweatproof wallet and took out a typed, three-page list.

  I said he was candid. The list included all the things I would have asked him about:

  Relocation of cemetery

  $350,000

  New water mains, 1.77 miles

  680,000

  (10-inch)

  790,000

  (12-inch)

  Paving access road, 0.8 miles

  290,000

  But it also included:

  Lien, Windward Isles Const. Co.

  1,300,000

  (Settlement est.

  605,000

  )

  Damage judgment, Sun/Sea Petro.

  2,600,000

  (Settlement est.

  350,000

  )

  Injunction, N.A. Trades Council

  (Est. cost to vacate

  18,000

  )

  The total on the three-page list, taking the estimated figures at face value, came to over three million dollars. Half the items on it I hadn’t even suspected.

  The first course was coming and I didn’t want to ruin a good lunch with business, so I looked for permission, then pocketed the paper as the conch salad arrived. Kavilan was right. It was good. The greens were fresh, the chunks of meat chewed easily, the dressing was oil and vinegar but with some unusual additions that made it special. Mustard was easy to pick out, and a brush of garlic, but there were others. I thought of getting this chef’s name, too.

  And thought it again when I found that the escalope of veal was as good as the conch. The wine was even better, but I handled it sparingly. I didn’t know Dick Kavilan well enough to let myself be made gullible by adding a lot of wine to a fine meal, a pretty restaurant and a magnificent view of a sun-drenched bay. We chatted socially until the demitasses came. How long had he been on the island? Only two years, he said, surprising me. When he added that he’d been in real estate in Michigan before that, I connected on the name. “Sellman and Kavilan,” I said. “You put together the package on the Upper Peninsula for us.” It was a really big, solid firm. Not the kind you take early retirement from.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I liked Michigan. But then I came down here with some friends who had a boat—I’m a widower, my boys are grown—and then I only went back to Michigan long enough to sell out.”

  “Then there really is a lure of the islands.”

  “Why, that’s what you’re here to find out, Jerry,” he said, the grin back again. “How about you? Married?”

  “I’m a widower too,” I said, and touched my buttoned pocket. “Are these costs solid?”

  “You’ll want to check them out for yourself but, yes, I think so. Some are firm bids. The others are fairly conservative estimates.” He waved to the waiter, who produced cigars. Cuban Perfectos. When we were both puffing, he said, “My people will put in writing that if the aggregate costs go more than twenty percent over that list we’ll pay one-third of the excess as forfeit.” Now, that was an interesting offer! I didn’t agree to it, not even a nod, but at that point Kavilan didn’t expect me to. “When the Dutchman went bust,” he added, “that list added up to better than nine million.”

  No wonder he went bust! “How come there’s a six million dollar difference?”

  He waved his cigar. “That was seven years ago. I guess people were meaner then. Or maybe the waiting wore the creditors down. Well. What’s your pleasure for this afternoon, Jerry? Another look at the site, or back to Port?”

  “Port, I think,” I said reluctantly.

  The idea of spending an afternoon on the telephone and visiting government offices seemed like a terrible waste of a fine day, but that was what they paid me for.

  It kept me busy. As far as I could check, the things Kavilan had told me were all true, and checking was surprisingly easy. The government records clerks were helpful, even when they had to pull out dusty files, and all the people who said they’d return my calls did. It wasn’t such a bad day. But then it wasn’t the days that were bad.

  I put off going to bed as long as I could, with a long, late dinner, choosing carefully between the local lobster and what the headwaiter promised would be first-rate prime rib. He was right; the beef was perfect. Then I put a quarter into every fifth slot machine in the hotel casino as long as my quarters held out; but when the light by my bed was out and my head was on the pillow the pain moved in. There was a soft Caribbean moon in the window and the sound of palms rustling in the breeze. They didn’t help. The only question was whether I would cry myself to sleep. I still did that, after eight years, about one night in three, and this was a night I did.

  2

  I thought if I had an early breakfast I’d have the dining room to myself, so I could do some serious thinking about Val Michaelis. I was wrong. The tour group had a trip in a glass-bottomed boat that morning and the room was crowded; the hostess apologetically seated me with a young woman I had seen before. We’d cro
ssed paths in the casino as we each got rid of our cups of quarters. Hair to her shoulders, no makeup—I’d thought at first she was a young girl, but in the daylight that was revised by a decade or so. She was civil—civilly silent, except for a “Good morning” and now and then a “May I have the marmalade?”—and she didn’t blow smoke in my face until we were both onto our second cups of coffee. If the rest of her tour had been as well-schooled as she it would have been a pleasant meal. Some of them were all right, but the table for two next to us was planning a negligence suit over a missing garment bag, and the two tables for four behind us were exchanging loud ironies about the bugs they’d seen, or thought they had seen, in their rooms. When she got up she left with a red-haired man and his wire—one of the more obnoxious couples present, I thought, and felt sorry for her.

  Kavilan had given me the gate key, and the bell captain found me a car rental. I drove back to the hotel site. This time I took a notebook, a hammer, a Polaroid and my Swiss Army knife.

  Fortunately the wind was the other way this morning and the aromatic reminders of mortality were bothering some other part of the shoreline. Before going in I walked around the fence from the outside, snapping pictures of the unfinished buildings from several angles. Funny thing. Pushing my way through some overgrown vines I found a section of the fence where the links had been carefully severed with bolt cutters. The cuts were not fresh, and the links had been rubbed brighter than the rest of the fence; somebody had been getting through anyway, no doubt to pick up a few souvenirs missed by his predecessors. The vines had not grown back, so it had been used fairly recently. I made a note to have Kavilan fix that right away; I didn’t want my inventory made obsolete as soon as I was off the island.