Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  And this was his masterpiece. East River East was just one more big damn housing development. The Inwood Freezer complex was only a cold-storage plant. Nathanael Greene was just another jail. But Bed-Stuy—

  Bed-Stuy was the closest human beings could come to heaven on earth. The original idea wasn’t his; he had ferreted it out from old publications and dusty data chips; somebody named Charles Engelke had described a way of making a small suburban community self-sufficient for energy as far back as the 1970s—but who was interested in suburbs after that? Somebody else had pointed out that the blighted areas of American cities, the South Bronxes and the Detroits, could be rebuilt it new, human ways. But it was de Rintelen Feigerman who put it all together, and had the muscle, the auteur prestige, the political connections, the access to capital—had all the things that could make the dreams come true. Solar energy. Solar energy used in a thousand different ways: to heat water in the summer and pump it down into rechargeable lenses of fossil water far under the surface; the new hot water squeezes out the old cool, and the cool water that comes up drives summer air-conditioning. In winter the pumps go the other way, and the hot summer water warms the homes. Solar energy as photovoltaics, for driving electronic equipment. Solar energy as wind, also for generating electricity, more typically for pumping water in and out of the thermal aquifers. Solar energy, most of all, for the thing it was best equipped to do—domestic heating. Feigerman made an adjustment, and under his fingers the vista of Bed-Stuy grew from what it was to what it would be, as his datastore fed in the picture of the completed project.

  Even forty thousand pixels could not give much detail in a plan that encompassed more than a square mile. Each element represented something about the size of a truck; a pedestrian, a fire hydrant, even a parked car was simply too tiny to be seen.

  But what a glorious view! Feigerman’s fingers rested lovingly on the huge, aerodynamically formed hill that would enclose the surface-level water store and support the wind engines that would do the pumping. The smaller dome for the ice pond, where freezing winter temperatures would provide low-temperature reserves for summer cooling, even for food-processing. The milder slope that hid the great methane digesters—perhaps he loved the methane digesters best of all, for what could be more elegant than to take the most obnoxious of human by-products—shit!—and turn it into the most valuable of human resources—fuel? All the sewage of the homes and offices and factories would come here, to join with the lesser, but considerable, wastes from the men’s prison next to it. The shit would stew itself into sludge and methane; the heat of the process would kill off all the bacteria; the sludge would feed the farms, the methane would burn for process heat. Industries like glass-making, needing the precise heating that gas could produce better than anything else, would find cheap and reliable supplies—meaning jobs—meaning more self-sufficiency—meaning—

  Feigerman sighed and brought himself back to reality. At command, the future Utopia melted away under his fingers and he was touching the pattern of Bed-Stuy as it was. The methane generator was still only an ugly hole in the ground next to the prison. The great wind hill was no more than a ragged Stonehenge circle of concrete, open at the top. The idle construction machinery was still ranked along a roadway—

  “I didn’t want to disturb you, so I just let myself in, okay?”

  The blind man started, twisted in his chair, banged his head against the support for the camera behind him. He was trying to do two things at once, to reach for the sonar crown that would let him see this intruder, to switch the tactile matrix back to the inside cameras so that he could feel him. The man said gently, amusedly, “You don’t need that gadget, Feigerman. It’s me, Mr. Gambiage. We’ve got business to talk.”

  Feigerman abandoned the search for the coronet; the camera behind his head had caught the image of his visitor, and Feigerman could feel it under his fingers. “Sit down, Mr. Gambiage,” he said—pointedly, because the man was already sitting down. He moved silently enough! “You’re holding up my money,” he said. “Is that what you want to talk about?”

  The image rippled under his fingers as Gambiage made an impatient gesture. “We’re not going to crap around,” he informed Feigerman. “I can get your money loose from Albany, no problem, or I can hold it up forever, and that’s no problem too. On the other hand, you could cost me a lot of money, so I’m offering you a deal.”

  Feigerman let him talk. The tactile impression of Gambiage did not tell much about the man. Feigerman knew, because the news reports said so, that Gambiage was about fifty years old. He could feel that the man was short and heavyset, but that his features were sharp and strong. Classic nose. Heavy brows. Stubborn broad chin. But were his eyes mean or warm? Was his expression smile or leer or grimace? Gambiage’s voice was soft and, queerly, his accent was educated under the street-talk grammar. It could even be Ivy League—after all, there was nothing to say that the sons of the godfathers couldn’t go to college. And Feigerman had to admit that the man smelled good, smelled of washed hair and expensive leather shoes and the best of after-shave lotion. He could hear the faint sound of movement as Gambiage made himself comfortable as he went on talking: could smell, could hear, could feel…could be frightened. For this man represented a kind of power that could not be ignored.

  Feigerman had dealt with the mob before—you could not be involved in large construction in America without finding you had them for partners in a thousand ways. The unions; the suppliers; the politicians—the city planners, the building inspectors, the code writers—wherever a thousand-dollar bribe could get a million-dollar vote or approval or license, there the mob was. It did not always control. But it could not be set aside. The ways of dealing with the mob were only two, you went along or you fought. Feigerman had done both.

  But this time he could do neither. He couldn’t fight, because he didn’t have time left in his life for a prolonged battle. And he couldn’t go along with what came to nothing less than the perversion of the dream.

  “It’s the cogeneration thing,” Gambiage explained. “You make your own power, you cost the utilities a fortune. I’ve got stock options. They’re not going to be worth shit if the price doesn’t go up, and you’re the one that’s keeping the price from going up.”

  “Mr. Gambiage, the whole point of the Bed-Stuy project is to be self-sufficient in energy so that—”

  “I said we’re not going to crap around,” Gambiage reminded him. “Now we’re going to talk deal. You’re going to change your recommendations. You’ll agree to selling all the power-generating facilities to the utilities. Then I’ll recommend to my friends in Albany that they release your funds, and everything goes smoothly from there on. And I’ll make it more attractive to you. I’ll sell you my stock options for fifty thousand shares for what I paid for them. Thirty cents a share, for purchase at ninety-one and a quarter.”

  Feigerman didn’t respond at once. He turned to his data processor and punched out the commands for a stock quotation. As he held the little earpiece to his ear the sexless synthesized-speech voice said: “Consolidated Metropolitan Utilities current sale, eighty-five.”

  “Eighty-five!” Feigerman repeated.

  “Right,” said Gambiage, and his voice was smiling. “That’s what you cost me so far, Feigerman. Now get a projection with us owning the cogeneration facilities and see what you get. We make it a hundred and ten, anyway.”

  Feigerman didn’t bother to check that; there would be no point in lying about it. He simply punched out a simple problem in arithmetic: $110 - (91.25 + .30)—say 1 percent for brokers’ fees, × 50,000. And the voice whispered, “Nine hundred thirteen thousand two hundred seventy-five dollars.”

  He was being offered a bribe of nearly a million dollars.

  A million dollars. It had been a legacy of less than a tenth of that that had put him through school and given him the capital to start his career in the first place. It was a magic number. Never mind that his assets were already cons
iderably more than that. Never mind that money was not of much use to a man who was already too old to spend what he had. A million dollars! And simply for making a decision that could be well argued as being the right thing to do in any case.

  It was very easy to see how Mr. Gambiage exercised his power. But out loud Feigerman said, his voice cracking, “How many shares have you got left? A million or two?”

  “My associates and I have quite a few, yes.”

  “Do you know we could all go to jail for that?”

  “Feigerman,” said Gambiage wearily, “that’s what you pay lawyers for. The whole transaction can be handled offshore anyway, in any name you like. No U.S. laws violated. Grand Cayman is where the options are registered right now.”

  “What happens if I say no?”

  With his fingers on the bas-relief, Feigerman could feel the ripple of motion as Gambiage shrugged. “Then Albany doesn’t release the funds, the project dies and the stock bounces back to where it belongs. Maybe a hundred.”

  “And the reason you come to me,” Feigerman said, clarifying the point, “is that you think I come cheaper than a couple of dozen legislators.”

  “Somewhat cheaper, yes. But the bottom line comes out good for me and my associates anyway.” The needles tickled Feigerman’s palm as the man stood up; irritably Feigerman froze the image. “I’ll be in touch,” Gambiage promised, and left.

  It would be, Feigerman calculated, not more than three minutes before his stepson would be on the intercom.

  He wasn’t ready for that. He slapped the privacy switch, cutting off calls, locking the door.

  The important thing, now, was to decide what was the important thing forever. To get the project built? Or to get it built in a fashion in which he could take smug and virtuous personal pride?

  Feigerman knew what he wanted—he wanted that sense of triumph and virtue that would carry him through that not-long-to-be-delayed deathbed scene, for which he found himself rehearsing almost every day. His task now was to reconcile himself to second best—or to find a way to achieve the best. He could fight, of course. The major battles had been long won. The general outlines of the project had been approved, the land acquired, the blueprints drawn, the construction begun. Whatever Gambiage might now deploy in the way of bribed legislators or court injunctions—or whatever other strategies he could command, of which there were thousands—in the long run the game would go to Feigerman—

  Except that Feigerman might well not be alive to see his victory.

  He sighed and released the hold button; and of course his stepson’s voice sounded at once, angry: “Don’t cut me off like that, Dad. Why did you cut me off? What did he say?”

  “He wants to be our partner, David.”

  “Dad! Dad, he already is our partner. Are you going to change the recommendation?”

  “What I’m going to do is think about it for a while.” He paused, then added on impulse, “David? Have you been picking up any stock options lately?”

  Silence for a moment. Then, “Your seeing-eye kid is here,” said David, and hung up.

  When Marc came in to help Mr. Feigerman get ready he was prepared for a bad time. The other guy, Mr. Tisdale, was all in a sweat and grumbling to himself about trouble; the trouble centered around old Feigerman, so maybe the day’s walk was off, maybe he’d be in a bad mood—at his age, maybe he’d be having a stroke or something.

  But actually he was none of those things. He was struggling to put his camera thing on his head by himself, but spoke quite cheerfully: “Hello, Marcus. You ready for a little walk?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Feigerman.” Marc came around behind Feigerman to snap the straps for him, and his glance fell on that pinboard thing the old man used to see.

  “What’s the matter?” Feigerman said sharply.

  “Aw, nothing,” said Marc, but it was a lie. He had no trouble recognizing the face on the pinboard. It was not a face he would forget. He had seen it many times before, arriving at his father’s candy store in the black limousine.

  4

  Inmate 838-10647 HARVEY John T. did not merely have one of the best jobs in Nathanael Greene Institute for Men, he had two of them. In the afternoons he had yard detail, up on the surface. That was partly because of his towering seniority in the prison, mostly because he had been able to produce medical records to show that he needed sunshine and open air every day. Inmate Harvey had no trouble producing just about any medical records he liked. In the mornings he worked in the library. That was partly seniority, too, but even more because of his special skills with data processors. Inmate Harvey’s library work generally involved fixing the data-retrieval system when it broke down, once in a while checking out books for other inmates. This morning he was busy at something else. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Under the eyes of two angry guards and the worried head librarian, Harvey was painfully assembling the shards of broken glass that had once been a ten-by-twenty-six-inch window in the locked bookshelves. When it was whole it had kept a shelf of “restricted” books safe—books that most of the inmates were not permitted to have because they were politically dangerous. Now that it was a clutter of razor-sharp fragments it was something that inmates were even less permitted to have, because they were dangerous, period. On the edge of Harvey’s desk, watched by a third guard, sat the two other inmates whose scuffling had broken the glass. One had a bleeding nose. The other had a bleeding hand. Their names were Esposito and La Croy, and neither of them looked particularly worried—either by their injuries or by the forty-eight-hour loss of privileges that was the inevitable penalty for fighting.

  Those were small prices to pay for the chance of escape.

  Hardly anyone ever escaped from Nathanael Greene. Of course, a lot of inmates tried. Every inmate knew that there were exactly three ways to do it, and that two of them were obvious and the other one impossible.

  The obvious ways, obviously, were the ways through which people normally exited the prison—the “visitors’ gate,” which was also where supplies came in and manufactured products and waste went out; and the high-security “prisoner-transfer gate.” Trusties lucky enough to be working on the surface, farming or cutting grass, could pretty nearly walk right out of the visitors’ gate. Sometimes they made the try; but electronic surveillance caught them every time. The prisoner-transfer facility had been a little easier—three times there had been a successful escape that way, usually with fake transfer orders. But after the third time the system was changed and that way looked to be closed permanently.

  Scratch the two obvious ways. The only way left was the impossible one. To wit, leaving the prison through some other exit.

  What made that impossible was that there wasn’t any. Nathanael Greene was underground. You could try to dig a tunnel if you wanted to, but there wasn’t anywhere to tunnel to nearer than a hundred yards—mostly straight up—and besides there were the geophones. The same echo-sounding devices that located oil domes and seismic faults could locate a tunnel—usually in the first three yards—assuming any prisoner could escape the twenty-four-hour electronic surveillance long enough to start digging in the first place.

  That was why it was impossible, for almost everyone, almost all the time. But inmates still hoped—as Esposito and La Croy hoped. And even took chances, as Esposito and La Croy were willing to do; because there never was a perfect system, and if there was anyone who could find a way through the safeguards of Nathanael Greene it was Inmate 838-10647 HARVEY John T.

  He never did get the jigsaw put back together to suit the guards, but after two hours of trying, after he had crunched some of the pieces twice with his foot and it was obvious that no one was ever going to reconstruct the pane properly anymore, the guards settled for picking up all the pieces they could find and marching Esposito and La Croy away. They had no reason to hassle Inmate Harvey. That didn’t stop them from threatening, of course. But when the lunch-break signal sounded they let him go.

  The
trip from the library to his cell took three flights of stairs and six long corridors, and Harvey did it all on his own. So did every other prisoner, because no matter where they were or what they were doing the master locator file tagged them in and out every time they came to a checkpoint. You lifted your leg to present the ID on your ankle to the optical scanner. The scanner made sure you were you by voice prints or pattern recognition of face or form, sometimes even by smell. It queried the master file to find out if you were supposed to be going where you were going, and if all was in order you simply walked right through. The whole process took no longer than opening an ordinary door, and you didn’t screw around if you could help it because, anyway, you were under continuous closed-circuit surveillance all the time. Inmate Harvey, carrying his book and his clean librarian’s shirt, nodding to acquaintances hurrying along the same corridors and exchanging comments about the methane stink that was beginning to pervade the entire prison, reached his cell in less than five minutes.

  His cellmate was a man named Angelo Muzzi, and he was waiting for Harvey. “Gimme,” said Moots, extending his hand for the copy of God-Emperor of Dune.

  Harvey entered the cell warily—you watched yourself with Muzzi. “You’re fuckin up the whole plan,” he pointed out. “You don’t need this.” But he handed the volume over just the same, and watched Muzzi open it to the page where the shard of glass lay.

  “It’s too fuckin short, asshole,” Muzzi growled. He wasn’t particularly angry. He always talked that way. He ripped a couple of pages out of the book, folded them over and wrapped them around the thick end of the glass sliver. When he held it as though for stabbing, about three inches of razor-edged stiletto protruded from his fist—sharp, deadly and invisible to the prison’s metal detectors. “Too fuckin short,” he repeated fiercely, but his eyes were gleaming with what passed in Muzzi for pleasure.

  “It’s the best I could do.” Harvey didn’t bother to tell him how long he had sat with the fragments, pretending to try to reconstruct a complete pane; Muzzi wouldn’t be interested. But he offered, “The screws were going to give me a twenty-four.” Muzzi would be interested in that.