Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Yes, that’s true, Mr. Wenright,” he admitted, but added eagerly, “I’m sure they’ll come back.”

  I said, “I absolutely guarantee it.” He left chuckling, and wondering if he’d missed the point of the joke.

  I looked at Edna. She looked at me. We both nodded.

  But all either of us said, after quite a while, was Edna’s, “I wonder what kind of seafood they eat in Moscow?”

  THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

  When “The Middle of Nowhere” was published in 1955, we knew a lot less about Mars than we know today. We were more than forty years away from flybys, landings, Mars rovers…it was still pretty much a Red Planet of mystery. Therefore, science fiction writers could write anything they wanted about Mars, so long as it didn’t seem ridiculous.

  Frederik Pohl has written a number of stories about Mars, and his Martian stories have changed with the available scientific knowledge. But this story could take place on any planet we don’t know a lot about. It’s not so much about the planet itself as it is about what might happen to a world—Earth, Mars, or another—where technology outlasts its creators.

  It’s not a new theme, but Pohl’s treatment is full of the excitement and danger of the unknown…and its possibilities.

  Just ahead of us we saw a cluster of smoke trees suddenly quiver, though there wasn’t a whisper of a breeze, and begin to emit their clouds of dense yellow vapor from their branch tips.

  “Let’s get a move on, Will,” said Jack Demaree. His voice was thin and piercing, like the thin air all about us. “It’s going to get really hot here in the next twenty minutes.”

  The steel and glass town of Niobe was in sight, a quarter mile ahead. “Sure,” I said, and changed pace. We had been shambling along, as lazily as we could, in the effort-saving walk you learn in your first week on Mars. I stepped it up to the distance-devouring loose run that is only possible on a light-gravity planet like Mars.

  It is tough to have to run in a thin atmosphere. Your lungs work too hard; you feel as though every step is going to be your last. Hillary and Tenzing found no harder going on Everest than the friendliest spot on the surface of Mars—except, of course, that by day the temperature is high, and the light gravity lets you stand effort that would otherwise kill you. But we hadn’t much choice but to run. The smoke trees had passed their critical point, and the curious gelatinous sulfur compounds that served them for sap had passed into gas with the heat. When that happened, it meant that the sun was nearly overhead; and with only Mars’s thin blanket of air to shield you, you do not stay out in the open at high noon.

  Not that we needed to see the smoke trees to know it was getting hot. A hundred and twenty in the shade it was, at least. If there had been any shade.

  Demaree passed me with a spurt just as we reached the outskirts of Niobe, and I followed him into the pressure chamber of the General Mercantile office. We use helium in our synthetic atmosphere, instead of Earth’s nitrogen. So they gave us the pressure in one big ear-popping dose, without any danger of the bends we might have got from nitrogen. I swallowed and rubbed my ears; then we shed our sand-capes and respirators and walked into the anteroom.

  Keever looked out of his private office, his lean horse face sagging with curiosity.

  “Demaree and Wilson reporting,” I said. “No sign of natives. No hostile action. No anything, in fact, except it’s hot.”

  Keever nodded and pulled his head back in. “Make out a slip,” his voice floated out. “And you go out again in two hours. Better eat.”

  Demaree finished shaking the loose sand out of his cape into a refuse shaft and made a face. “Two hours. Oh, lord.” But he followed me to the Company cafeteria without argument.

  The first thing we both did was make a dash for the drinking fountain. I won, and sopped up my fill while Demaree’s dry and covetous breath seared the back of my neck. Sand patrol can dehydrate a man to the point of shock in three hours; we had been out for four. You see why we were taking it easy?

  We sat down in the little booth where we had put aside our card game with Bolt and Farragut a few hours before, and Marianna, without waiting for our order, brought coffee and sandwiches. Her eyes were hooded and unhappy; nerves, I thought, and tried to catch Demaree’s eye. But it didn’t work. He said in his customary slow and biting drawl, “Why, Mary, you’re getting stupider than ever. You took away our cards. I swear, girl, I don’t know why the Company keeps you—”

  He trailed off, as she looked straight at him, and then away.

  “You won’t need them,” she said after a moment. “Farragut’s patrol got it this morning.”

  Farragut and Bolt, Cortland and VanCaster. Four good men, and it was the same old story. They were a four-man patrol, ranging far beyond the defense perimeter of Niobe; they had got caught too far from town before it got really hot, and it was a choice between using their cached sand cars or getting stuck in the noonday sun. They had elected to try the sand car; and something bright and hot had come flashing over a sand dune and incinerated men and car alike.

  The hell of it all was we never saw the Martians.

  The earliest expeditions had reported that there wasn’t any life on Mars at all, barring the tiny ratlike forms that haunted the sparse forests of the North. Then air reconnaissance had reported what turned out to be the Martians—creatures about the size of a man, more or less, that stood up like a man, that built villages of shacks like men. But air reconnaissance was severely limited by the thinness of Mars’ air; helicopters and winged aircraft simply did not work, except at speeds so high that it was nearly impossible to make out details. It wasn’t until one of the orbiting mother spacecraft, after launching its space-to-ground shuttle rockets and standing by for the return, spent a dozen revolutions mapping Mars’ surface that the first really good look at Martians and their works was available. Really good? Well, let’s say as good as you could expect, considering the mother ship was five hundred miles up.

  It was easy enough to send a surface party to investigate the Martian villages; but they were empty by the time Earthmen got there. Our sand cars could move faster than a Martian afoot, but it wasn’t healthy to use a sand car. Somehow, what weapons the Martians found to use against us (and nothing resembling a weapon had ever been found in the deserted villages) seemed most effective against machines. It was flatly impossible that they should have electronic aimers to zero in on the radio-static from the machines; but if it had been possible, it would have been certain—for that was the effect.

  I had plenty of time to think about all this as Demaree and I ate our glum and silent meal. There just wasn’t anything much for us to say. Farragut and Bolt had been friends of ours.

  Demaree sighed and put down his coffee. Without looking at me he said, “Maybe I ought to quit this job, Will.”

  I didn’t answer, and he let it go. I didn’t think he meant it, but I knew how he felt.

  General Mercantile was a good enough outfit to work for, and its minerals franchise on Mars meant a terrific future for any young fellow who got in on the ground floor. That’s what everybody said, back on Earth, and that’s what kept us all there: the brilliant future.

  That—and the adventure of developing a whole new world. Suppose those old Englishmen who went out for the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company and the other Middle-Ages monopolies must have had the same feeling.

  And the same dangers. Except that they dealt with an enemy they could see and understand; an enemy that, regardless of skin color or tongue, was human. And we were fighting shadows.

  I tasted my coffee, and it was terrible. “Hey, Mary—” I started, but I never finished.

  The alarm klaxon squawked horrifyingly in the cafeteria; we could hear it bellowing all over the GM building. We didn’t wait to ask questions; we jumped up and raced for the door, Demaree colliding with me as we tried to beat each other through. He clutched at me and looked at me blankly, then elbowed me aside. Over his shoulder he said, “Hey,
Will—I don’t really want to quit…”

  The news was: Kelcy.

  Kelcy was our nearest village, and the Martians had schlagged it. Demaree and I were the first in the Ready Room, and Keever snapped that much information at us while we were waiting the few seconds for the rest of the patrols to come racing in. They had been in other buildings and came leaping in still wearing their sandcaps; they had had to race across the blindingly hot streets in the midday Martian glare. There were twelve of us all together—the whole station complement, less the four who had been lost that morning. We were on the books as “personnel assistants”; but what we really were was guards, the entire troubleshooting force and peace-and-order officers for the town of Niobe.

  Keever repeated it for the others: “They attacked Kelcy thirty minutes ago. It was a hit-and-run raid; they fired on all but one of the buildings, and every building was demolished. So far, they report twenty-six survivors. There might be a couple more—out in the open—that’s all that are in the one building.” Out in the open—that meant no other survivors at all; it was just past high noon.

  Big, fair-haired Tom van der Gelt unsteadily shredded the plastic from a fresh pack of cigarettes and lit one. “I had a brother in Kelcy,” he remarked to no one.

  “We don’t have a list of survivors yet,” Keever said quickly. “Maybe your brother’s all right. But we’ll find out before anybody else, because we’re going to send a relief expedition.”

  We all sat up at that. Relief expedition? But Kelcy was forty miles away. We could never hope to walk it, or even run it, between the end of the hot-period and dark; and it made no sense for us to be out in the open at the dusk sandstorm. But Keever was saying:

  “This is the first time they’ve attacked a town. I don’t have to tell you how serious it is. Niobe may be next. So—we’re going to go there, and get the survivors back here; and see if we can find out anything from them. And because we won’t have much time, we’re going to travel by sand car.”

  There was a thoroughgoing silence in that room for a moment after that, while the echoes of the words “sand car” bounced around. Only the echoes made it sound like “suicide.”

  Keever coughed. “It’s a calculated risk,” he went on doggedly. “I’ve gone over every skirmish report since the first landings, and never—well, almost never—have the Martians done more than hit and run. Now, it’s true that once they’ve hit a settlement the usual custom is to lay low for a while; and it’s true that this is the first time they’ve come out against a town, and maybe they’re changing their tactics. I won’t try to tell you that this is safe. It isn’t. But there’s at least a chance that we’ll get through—more of a chance, say, than the twenty-six survivors in Kelcy have if we don’t try it.” He hesitated for a second. Then, slowly: “I won’t order any man to do it. But I’ll call for volunteers. Anybody who wants to give it a try, front and center.”

  Nobody made a mad rush to get up there—it still sounded like suicide to all of us.

  But nobody stayed behind. In under a minute, we were all standing huddled around Keever, listening to orders.

  We had to wait another forty minutes—it took time for the maintenance crew to get the sand cars out of their hideaways, where they’d been silently standing, not even rusting in the dry Martian air, since the first Earthman drew the connection between sand cars and Martian attack. Besides, it was still hot; and even in the sand cars, it would help for the sun to be a few degrees past the meridian.

  There were fourteen of us in three cars—the patrols, Keever and Dr. Solveig. Solveig’s the only doctor in Niobe, but Keever requisitioned him—we didn’t know what we might find in Kelcy. Keever’s car led the party; Demaree, Solveig and I were in the last, the smallest of the lot and the slowest.

  Still, we clipped off fifteen miles of the forty-mile trip in eight minutes by the clock. The cats were flapping until I was sure they would fly off the drive wheels, but somehow they held on as we roared over the rolling sand. It sounded as though the car was coming to pieces at every bump—a worrisome sound but not, I think, the sound that any of us was really worrying about. That sound was the rushing, roaring thunder of a Martian missile leaping at us over a dune; and none of us expected to hear it more than once…

  The way to Kelcy skirts what we call the “Split Cliffs,” which all of us regarded as a prime suspect for a Martian hangout. There had been expeditions into the Split Cliffs because of that suspicion; but most of them came back empty-handed, having found nothing but an incredible tangle. However, the ones that didn’t come back empty-handed didn’t come back at all; it was, as I say, a prime suspect. And so we watched it warily until it was almost out of sight behind us.

  Martians or no, the Split Cliffs is a treacherous place, with nothing worth an Earthman’s time inside. Before Mars’ internal fires died completely, there were centuries of fierce earthquakes. The section we called the Split Cliffs must have been right over a major fault. The place is cataclysmic; it looks as though some artist from the Crazy Years, Dali or Archipenko, had designed it, in a rage. Sharp upcroppings of naked, metallic rock; deep gashes with perfectly straight hundred-foot sides. And because there happens to be a certain amount of poisonously foul water deep underground there, the place is as heavily vegetated as anything on Mars. Some of the twisted trees reach as high as thirty feet above the ground—by Martian standards, huge!

  Even Demaree, at the wheel of the sand car, kept glancing over his shoulder at the Split Cliffs until we were well past them. “I can’t help it,” he said half-apologetically to me, catching my eyes on him. “Those lousy trees could hide anything.”

  “Sure,” I said shortly. “Watch what you’re doing.” I wasn’t in a mood for conversation—not only because of the circumstances, but because my nose was getting sore. Even in the car we wore respirators, on Keever’s orders—I think he had an idea that a Martian attack might blow out our pressure before we could put them on. And three hours that morning, plus five hours each of the several days before, had left my nose pretty tender where the respirator plugs fit in.

  Dr. Solveig said worriedly, “I agree with William, please. You have come very close to the other cars many times. If we should hit—”

  “We won’t hit,” said Demaree. But he did concentrate on his driving; he maintained his forty meters behind the second car, following their lead as they sought the path of least ups-and-downs through the sand dunes toward Kelcy. It began to look, I thought as I watched the reddish sand streaming by, as though Keever’s “calculated risk” was paying off. Certainly we had come nearly twenty miles without trouble, and past the worst danger spot on the trip, the Split Cliffs. If our luck held for ten minutes more—

  It didn’t.

  “God almighty!” yelled Demaree, jolting me out of my thoughts. I looked where he was looking, just in time to see flame coursing flat along the ground. It snaked in a quivering course right at the middle sand car of our three; and when the snaking light and the jolting car intersected—

  Catastrophe. Even in the thin air, the sound was like an atomic bomb. The spurt of flame leaped forty yards into the air.

  We were out of the car in seconds, and the men from Keever’s car joined us. But there was nothing to do for the seven men in the second car.

  “They went after the biggest,” Keever said bitterly. “Now—” He shrugged. One thing was sure, and he didn’t have to say it. None of us wanted to be in a sand car with the motor going right there and then.

  There was no sign of the enemy. Around us were empty sand dunes—but not empty, because out of them had come the missile. The only break was the fringe of the Split Cliffs behind us.

  Keever methodically zipped up his sand cape and went through the routine of tucking in flaps at the neck and arms without speaking. None of us had anything to say either. Demaree, with a stronger stomach than mine, took another look inside the blackened frame of the second sand car, and came back looking as though his stomach wasn�
�t so strong after all.

  We scattered away from the parked sand cars and the wreck of the one that would never move again, and held a council of war. By Keever’s watch, we had time to get to Kelcy or go back to Niobe—at a half trot in either case. We were exactly at midpoint between the two towns. No one even suggested using the sand cars again, though there wasn’t a flicker of a threat from the dunes.

  But we knew by experience how abruptly they could explode.

  The decision was for Kelcy.

  But the Martians took the decision out of our hands.

  We trotted along for nearly an hour, on the move for twenty minutes, resting for five, and it began to look as if we’d make it to Kelcy without any more trouble—though, in truth, we had had trouble enough; because it would be enough of a job to try to get ourselves back to Niobe without the strong probability of carrying injured survivors from Kelcy. The remorseless noonday deadline would apply the next day; and travel on Mars by night was nearly out of the question. It is a thin-aired planet, so the sun beats down fiercely; it is a thin-aired planet, so the heat is gone minutes after sundown. I suppose all of us were thinking those thoughts, though we hadn’t the breath to speak them, when the Martians struck again, this time with something new. There was a golden glow from a sand dune ahead of us to the right, and one from a dune ahead of us to the left. Keever, in the lead, hesitated for a second; but he didn’t hesitate enough. He plunged on, and when he and two of the others were between the two dunes, golden lightning flashed. It was like the spray of a fiery hose, from one dune top to the other; and where it passed, three men lay dead.

  It wasn’t fire; there wasn’t a mark on the bodies; but they were dead. We instinctively all of us blasted the tops of the glowing dunes with our flame rifles, but of course it was a little late for that. Demaree and I broke for the dune to the right, rifles at the ready. We scrambled up the sides and spread out halfway up to circle it—it was slagged from our own rifles at the top, and certainly nothing could be alive up there. But nothing was alive behind it, either—nothing we could see. The sands were empty.