Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Good morning, Mr. Feigerman,” said the night duty officer. He knew her voice, a pretty young woman, or one whose face felt smooth and regular under his fingers and whose hair was short and soft. Janice something. “Today’s weather, no problems. Overnight maintenance on schedule; no major outages. Shift supervisors are reporting in now, and we anticipate full crews. We’ve been getting, though,” she added, a note of concern creeping into her voice, “a lot of queries from the furloughed crews. They want to know when they’re going to go back to work.”

  “I wish I could tell them, Janice. Talk to you later.” He hung up, sighed and got ready for the memorized trip to the toilet, the shower, the coffee pot—he could already feel the heat from it as it automatically began to brew his first morning cup—and all the other blind man’s chores. He had to face them every morning, and the most difficult was summoning up the resolution to get through one more day.

  Rinty Feigerman had lived in this apartment for more than thirty years. As soon as Jocelyn’s son, David, was out of the house they had bought this condo in Brooklyn Heights. It was big and luxurious, high up in what had once been a fashionable Brooklyn hotel, when Brooklyn had still considered itself remote enough from The City to want its own hotels. Fashionable people stopped staying there in the thirties and forties. In the fifties and sixties it had become a welfare hotel, where the city’s poor huddled up in rooms that, every year, grew shabbier and smelled worse, as the big dining restaurant, the swimming pool, the health club, the saunas, the meeting rooms, the rooftop night club withered and died. Then a developer turned it into apartments. It was Rinty Feigerman who picked the place, studying the view and the builders’ plans while he still had eyes that worked. But Jocelyn had furnished it. She had put in end tables and planters, thick rugs on slippery floors, a kitchen like a machine shop, with blenders and food processors and every automatic machine in the catalog. When Feigerman lost his eyes, every one of those things became a booby trap.

  For the first couple of years Jocelyn grimly replaced candy dishes and lamps as they crashed. She had not quite accepted the fact that the problem was not going to get better. After the damage toll began to be substantial, the week a whole tray of porcelain figures smashed to the floor and a coffeemaker burned itself out until the electrical reek woke her up, Jocelyn, sullen but thorough, attacked the job of blindproofing their home. The living spaces she kept ornate. Rinty stayed out of them, except on the well established routes from door to door. They wound up with three separate establishments. One was for company. One was Jocelyn’s own space, formerly dainty but in the last two years more like a hospital suite. And the rest was Feigerman’s own: a bedroom, a bath, a guest room converted into a study, a guest bath rebuilt into a barebones kitchen, all crafted for someone who preferred using only his sense of touch. And the terrace.

  For a blind man with a Seeing Eye dog, that was maybe the best thing of all. It had started out flagstoned, with two tiny evergreens in wooden pots. Jocelyn’s son had had a better idea, and so he filled it from wall to wall with twenty cubic yards of topsoil. It grew grass, though nothing much else, and so became a perfect dog’s toilet. No one had to walk Rosalyn in the morning. Rinty opened the thermal French windows, Rosalyn paced gravely out; when she had done what she had to do she scratched to come back in, and then lay attentively near her master until he called her to put on her harness. Feigerman always accoutered Rosalyn before he did himself. He wondered if she disliked it as much as he did, but of course he had no way to know. Rosalyn never complained. Not even when he was so busy working that he forgot to feed her for hours past her time; she would take food from no one else, and he supposed that if he continued to forget she would simply starve. Not even now, when she was so slow and tired so quickly that he left her home on almost every day, except when guilt made him take her—and a human being like the boy Marcus, for insurance—for a walk in a park. He stood in the open doorway, letting the morning sun warm his face, trying to believe that he could see at least a reddening of the darkness under his eyelids, until Rosalyn came back and whined softly as she put her cold nose in his hand.

  Someone was in the apartment. Feigerman hadn’t put his hearing aid on because, as he told himself, he wasn’t really deaf, just a little hard of hearing; but he had not heard the door. He opened the door to his own room and called, “Is that you, Gloria?”

  “No, Mr. Feigerman, it’s me. Nillie. Want me to fix you a cup of coffee?”

  “I’ve got some in here. Wait a minute.” He reached for the robe at the foot of his bed, slid into it, tied it over his skinny belly—how could he be so thin and yet so flabby?—and invited her in. When she had poured herself a cup out of his own supply and was sitting in the armchair by the terrace window he said, “I’ll be sorry to be losing you, Nillie. Have you got something else lined up?”

  “Yes I do, Mr. Feigerman. There’s a job in the recycling plant, just the right hours, too, so don’t worry about me.”

  “Of course I’d like Marcus to keep on guiding me, if that’s all right.”

  “Surely, Mr. Feigerman.” Pause. “I’m really sorry about Mrs. Feigerman.”

  “Yes.” He had not really figured out how to approach that particular subject. If your wife was dead, that was one thing; if she was sick, but there was some hope of recovery, that was another. A wife now resting at a temperature about a dozen degrees above absolute zero was something else. Not to mention the five or six years as her aging body began to deteriorate—or the years before that when their aging marriage was doing the same. Jocelyn’s life was political and dedicated. His was no less dedicated, but his social objectives were carried out in bricks, steel and mortar instead of laws. The two lifestyles did not match well—“I beg your pardon?”

  “I said I’m going to clear my stuff out of Mrs. Feigerman’s room now, Mr. Feigerman.”

  “Oh, sure. Go ahead, Nillie.” He realized he had been sitting silent, his coffee cooling, while his mind circled around the difficulties and problems in his world. And he realized, too, if a bit tardily, that Vanilla Fudge de Harcourt’s voice had sounded strained. Particularly when she mentioned her son. Small puzzle. Sighing, Feigerman fumbled his way to the sink, poured the cold coffee away and set himself to the job of dressing.

  “Dressing,” for Rinty Feigerman, was not just a matter of clothes. He also had to put on the artificial vision system, which he disliked, and postponed as long as he could every day. It wasn’t any good for reading, little better for getting around his rooms. Information Feigerman took in through braille and through audiotapes, the voices of the readers electronically chopped to speed them up to triple speed, without raising the frequency to chipmunk chirps. Nearly everything he chose to do in his rooms he could do without the vision system. He could speak on the phone. He could listen to the radio. He could dictate, he could typewrite; he could even work his computer console, with its audio and tactile readouts, at least for word processing and mathematics, though the graphics functions were of no use at all to him anymore. Feigerman was never able to see the grand designs he helped to create, except in the form of models. There were plenty of those, made in the shops of the consultancy firm he owned with his stepson; but it was not the same as being able to look down on, say, the future Bed-Stuy in the God’s-eye view of every sighted person. At the computer he was quite deft, as artificial speech synthesizers read him the numbers he punched into the keyboard and the results that flashed on the CRT, now usually turned off. Of course, he did not really need to see, or even to feel a model of, Bed-Stuy. The whole plan was stored in his mind…He was stalling again, he realized.

  No help for it. He patted Rosalyn and sat down on the foot of his bed, reaching out for the gear.

  The first step was to strap the tickler to his chest. Between the nipples, in a rectangular field seven inches across and five deep, a stiff brush of electrical contacts touched his skin. Feigerman had never been a hairy man, but even so, once a week or so, he had to shave wh
at few sparse hairs grew there to make sure the contacts worked. Then the shirt went on, and the pants, and the jacket with the heavy-duty pocket that held most of the electronics and the flat, dense battery. Then he would reach down under the bed to where he had left the battery itself recharging all night long, pull it gingerly from the charger, clip it to the gadget’s leads and slip it into the pocket. Then came the crown. Feigerman had never seen the crown, but it felt like the sort of tiara dowagers used to wear to be presented to the queen. It wasn’t heavy. The straps that held it made it possible to wear it over a wool cap in winter, or attached to a simple yarmulke in warm weather. It beeped at a frequency most people couldn’t hear, though young children’s ears could sometimes pick it up—Marcus claimed to hear it, and there was no doubt that Rosalyn did. When he first got the improved model the dog whined all the time it was on—perhaps, Feigerman thought, because she knew it was taking her job away from her.

  When he turned the unit on now, she didn’t whine, but he could feel her move restlessly against his leg as he sat and let the impressions reach his brain. It had taken a lot of practice. The returning echo of the beeps was picked up, analyzed and converted into a mosaic that the ticklers drew across his chest with a pattern of tiny electric shocks. Even now it was not easy to read, and after a long day there was more pain than information in it; but it served. For a long time the patterns had meant nothing at all to Feigerman, except as a sort of demented practical joke someone was playing on him with tiny cattle prods. But the teacher promised he would learn to read it in time. And he did. Distance and size were hard to estimate from the prickling little shocks until he came to realize that the sonar’s image of a parked car covering a certain area of his chest had to represent a real vehicle ten feet away. When he became accustomed to the sonar he didn’t really need Rosalyn very much, and she was already beginning to limp on long walks. But he kept her. He had grown to like the dog, and did not want to see her among the technologically unemployed…Then the coat; then the shoes; then Feigerman was ready to summon his driver and be taken to the offices in the Williamsburgh Bank Building for one more day of dealing with the world.

  It was ever so much better, Feigerman’s teacher had said, than the way things were for the unsighted even a few years earlier. Better than being dead, anyway, in Feigerman’s estimation. Marginally so.

  By the time Feigerman was at his office in the Williamsburgh Bank Building he was almost cheerful, mostly because his driver was in a good mood. Julius was a suspended cop; he had been a moonlighting cop, working for Feigerman only in his off-duty hours, until his suspension. The suspension was because he had been caught in a surprise blood test with marginal levels of tetrahydrocannabinol breakdown products in his system. Julius claimed he was innocent. Feigerman thought it didn’t matter, since everybody was doing it, cops and all; and what made Julius’s mood high was that his rabbi had phoned to say the charges were going to be dropped. So he joked and laughed all the way to the office, and left Feigerman still smiling as he got out of the elevator and beeped his way to his desk, answering the good-mornings of the staff all the way.

  The first thing to do was to get out of the heaviest part of the harness again, which he did with one hand while he was reaching for his stepson’s intercom button with the other. “David?” he called, lifting off the headpiece. “I’m in and, listen, I’m going to need another driver next week. Julius is getting reinstated.”

  “That’s good,” said the voice of his stepson, although that voice hardly ever sounded as though it found anything good. “I need you for a conference in half an hour, Dad.”

  Dad. Feigerman paused in the act of rubbing the imprinted red lines on his forehead, scowling. “Dad” was something new for David. Was it because his mother’s death had reminded him that they were a family? David didn’t seem to show any other effect. If he had shed one tear it had not been in Feigerman’s presence. That wasn’t surprising, maybe, because David’s mother had devoted far more of her attention to her political causes than to her son. Or her daughter-in-law. Or, for that matter, to her husband…“What kind of conference?” Feigerman asked.

  There was a definite note of strain in David’s voice, part wheedling, part defiant. “It’s a man from S. G. & H.”

  “And who are S. G. & H. when they’re home?”

  “They’re investment bankers. They’re also the people who own all the legislators from Buffalo to Rochester, and the ones who can get the Bed-Stuy money out of committee.”

  Feigerman leaned back, the scowl deepening. There was enough tension in David’s voice to make him wish he could see David’s face. But that was doubly impossible—“The man from S. G. & H. wouldn’t be named Gambiage, would he?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “He’s a goddamn gangster!”

  “He’s never been convicted but, yes, I would agree with you, Dad.” The truculence was suppressed, but the wheedling was almost naked now. “All you have to do is listen to him, you know. His people have been buying utility stock options, and naturally he has an interest in Bed-Stuy—”

  “I know what that interest is! He wants to own it!”

  “He wants a piece of it, probably. Dad? I know how you feel—but don’t you want to get it built?”

  Feigerman breathed out slowly. “I’ll see him when he comes in,” he said, and snapped the connection.

  If he had only thirty minutes before a very unpleasant task, he needed to get ready for it. He reached to the gadget beside his chair and switched it on. It was his third set of eyes, the only ones that were any good at all over a distance exceeding a few yards. They had another advantage. Feigerman called them his daydreaming eyes, because they were the ones that allowed him to see what wasn’t there—yet.

  Feigerman had designed it himself, and the machine on and around his desk had cost more than three hundred thousand dollars—less than half recouped when he licensed it for manufacture. It was not a mass-market item. Even the production models cost more than a hundred thousand, and there were no models which were in any sense portable. The size constraints could not be removed by engineering brilliance; they were built in to the limitations of the human finger.

  The heart of the device was a photon-multiplier video camera that captured whatever was before it, located the areas of contrast, expressed them digitally, canceled out features too small to be displayed within its limits of resolution; and did it all twice, electronically splitting the images to produce stereo. Then it drove a pinboard matrix of two hundred by two hundred elements, each one a rounded plastic cylinder thinner than a toothpick—forty thousand pixels all told, each one thrust out of the matrix board a distance ranging anywhere from not at all to just over a quarter of an inch.

  What came out of it all was a bas-relief that Feigerman could run his fingers over, as he might gently touch the face of a friend.

  Feigerman could, in fact, recognize faces from it, and so could nearly a hundred other blind people well connected enough to be given or rich enough to buy the device. He could even read expressions—sometimes. He could, even, take a “snapshot”—freeze the relief at any point, to study in motionless form as long as he liked. What was astonishing was that even sighted persons could recognize the faces, too; and it was not just faces. Feigerman had no use for paintings on the walls, but if he wanted to “behold” the Rocky Mountains or the surface of the Moon his device had their stereo-tactile images stored in digital form, and a simple command let him trace with his fingers the Donner Pass or walk along the slopes of Tycho.

  What he chose to do this morning, waiting for the gangster to show up and ruin his day, maybe even ruin his project!, was to “look out the window.”

  For that the electronic camera mounted behind his chair was not good enough. The electronic “pupillary distance” was too small for a stereoscopic image. But he had mounted a pair of cameras high up on the wall of the observation deck of the building, and when he switched over to them all of Bedfor
d-Stuyvesant rippled under his fingers.

  What Feigerman felt with his fingers was not really much unlike the surface of the Moon. There were the craters of excavation, for the underground apartment dwellings that would house two hundred thousand human beings and for the garment workshops, the electronic assembly plants and all the other clean, undegrading industries that would give the two hundred thousand people work to do. There were the existing structures—the tenements not yet torn down, the guardhouses atop Nathanael Greene, the derelict factories, the containment shell over the breeder reactor, the Long Island Rail Road lines—a late shoppers’ express came hissing in on its maglev suspension, and the ripple of its passage tickled his fingers. There were the projects begun and the projects now going up—he recognized the slow, steady turn of a crane as it hoisted preformed concrete slabs onto the thermal water basin.

  And there were the silent rows of dumpsters and diggers, backhoes and augers, that were not moving at all because of the lack of funds.

  De Rintelen Feigerman didn’t count up his years anymore. Now that his wife was a rimey corpsicle somewhere under Inwood no one alive knew the total; but everyone knew that it was a lot of years. There could not be very many more. Feigerman was used to delays. You did not make a career of major construction in the most complicated city in the world without accepting long time overruns. But this one time in all his life he was not patient, for every minute wasted was a minute taken off what had to be a slender reserve.