Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  The old man thought: It all began ninety years ago, I was all right until then…and he had to laugh, though laughing choked him, because ninety years ago he had been all of five years old. But up until then there had been nothing to worry about.

  Was it the crash? Yes. And fire. The white man. The song about the bear. The terrible auto smash, just outside his window—for his window had looked out on an elevated automobile highway in Brooklyn, the Gowanus Parkway, where cars raced bumper to bumper, fifty miles an hour, within five yards of the bed he slept in. Whoosh. Whoosh. All day long and all night. At night the strokes were slow, a lagging wire-brush riff; in the mornings and evenings they were faster, whooshwhooshwhoosh, a quick rataplan. He listened to them and dreamed tunes around them. And there was the night he had gone to sleep and wakened screaming, screaming.

  His mother rushed in—poor woman, she was already widowed. (Though she was only twenty-five, the old man thought with amazement. Twenty-five! Maureen was that.) She rushed in, and though the boy Noah was terrified he could see through the shadow of his own terror to hers. “Momma, momma, the white man!” She caught him in her arms. “Please, my God, what’s the matter?” But he couldn’t answer, except with sobs and incoherent words about the white man; it was a code, and she was not skilled to read it. And time passed, ten minutes or so. He was not comforted—he was still crying and afraid—but his mother was warm and she soothed him. She bounced him on her knee, ka-bump, ka-bump, ka-bump, and even though he was crying he remembered the song with that beat, He SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, he SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, and the cars whooshed by and in the next room the little TV set murmured and laughed. “You’re missing your program, Momma,” he said; “Go to sleep, dear,” she answered; he was almost relaxed. Crash. Outside the window two cars collided violently. A taxicab was bound for New York with a boy in a satin jacket at the wheel and four others crammed in the back; the boy at the wheel was high on marijuana and he hit the divider. The cab leaped crazily across into the Long Island—bound lane. There was not much traffic that night, but there was one car too many. In it a thirty-year-old advertising salesman rushed to meet his wife and baby at Idlewild. He never met them. The cars struck. The stolen taxicab was hurled back into its own lane, its gas tank split, its doors flung open. Four boys in the jackets of the Gerritsen Tigers died at once and the fifth was thrown against the retaining wall—not dead; but not with enough life left to him to matter. He stood up and tried to run, and the burning gasoline made him a white-hot phantom, auraed and terrible. He lurched clear across the roadway to just outside Noah’s window and died there, flaming, hanging over the wall, fifteen feet above the wreck of the space salesman’s convertible.

  “The white man!” screamed someone in Noah’s room, but it was not the boy but his mother. She looked from the white-flamed man outside to her son, with eyes of fear and horror; and from then on it was never the same for him.

  “From the time I was five,” the old man said aloud, wondering, “it was never the same. She thought I was—I don’t know. A devil. She thought I had the power of second sight, because I’d been scared by the accident before it happened.”

  He looked around the room. “And my son!” he cried. “I knew when he died—telepathy, at a distance of a good eight thousand miles. And—” he stopped, thinking. “There were other things,” he mumbled…

  Dr. Shugart fussed kindly: “Impossible, don’t you see? It’s all part of your delusion. Surely a scientist should know that this—witchcraft can’t be true! If only you hadn’t come down here tonight, when you were so close to a cure…”

  Noah Sidorenko said terribly: “Do you want to cure me again?”

  “Doctor!”

  The old man shouted: “You’ve done it a hundred times, and a hundred times, with pain and fear, I’ve had to undo the cure—not because I want to! My God, no. But because I can’t help myself. And now you want me to go through it again. I won’t let you cure me!” He pushed the electric buttons; the chair began to spin but too slowly, too slowly. The old man fought his way to his feet, shouting at them. “Don’t you see? I don’t want to do this, but it does itself; it’s like a baby that’s getting born, I can’t stop it now. It’s difficult to have a baby. A woman in labor,” he cried, seeing the worry in their eyes, knowing he must seem insane, “a woman in labor is having a fit, she struggles and screams—and what can a doctor do for her? Kill the pain? Yes, and perhaps kill the baby with it. That happened, over and over, until the doctors learned how, and—and you don’t know how…

  “You mustn’t kill it this time! Let me suffer. Don’t cure me!”

  And they stood there looking at him. No one spoke at all.

  The room was utterly silent; the old man asked himself, Can I have convinced them? But that was so improbable. His words were such poor subsitutes for the thoughts that raced about his thumping head. But—the thoughts, yes, they were clear now; maybe for the first time. He understood. Psionic power, telepathy, precognition, all the other hard-to-handle gifts that filled the gap between metaphysics and muscle…they lay next door to madness. Worse! By definition, they were “madness,” as a diamond can be “dirt” if it clogs the jet of a rocket. They were mad, since they didn’t fit self-defining “sane” science.

  But how many times he had come so close, all the same! And how often, how helpfully, he had been “cured.” The delusional pattern had been so clear to “sane” science; and with insulin shock and hypnosynthesis, with electrodes in his shaved scalp and psychodrama, with Group therapy and the silence—with every pill and incantation of the sciences of the mind they had, time after time, rooted out the devils. Precognition had been frightened out of him by panic. Telepathy had been electroshocked out of him in the Winford Retreat. But they returned and returned.

  Handle them? No, the old man admitted, he couldn’t handle them, not yet. But if God was good and gave him more time, an hour or two perhaps…or maybe some years; if the doctor was improperly kind and allowed him his “delusion”—why, he might learn to handle them after all. He might, for example, be able to peer into minds at will and not only when some randomly chosen mind, half shattered itself, created such a clamorous beacon of noise that then the (telepathically) nearly deaf might hear it. He might be able to stare into the future at will, instead of having his attention chance-caught by the flicker of some catastrophic terror projecting its shadow ahead. And this ancient and useless hulk that was his body, for example. He might yet force it to live, to move, to walk about, to stand—

  To stand?

  The old man stood perfectly motionless beside his chair. To stand? And then, rather late, he followed the direction of the staring eyes of Maureen and Shugart and the others.

  He was standing.

  But not as he had visioned it, in wretched bedridden hours. He was standing tall and straight; but between the felt soles of his slippers and the rubber tiles of the office floor there were eight inches of untroubled air.

  No. They wouldn’t cure him again, not ever. And with luck, he realized slowly, he might now proceed to infect the world.

  THE MAPMAKERS

  Ever since science fiction writers started trying to get around Einstein’s theory and write stories about spaceships traveling faster than the speed of light, there have been stories about ships traveling through what is often called “hyperspace.” It’s as good a term as any and has worked for dozens of writers for many decades.

  “The Mapmakers,” first published in 1955, is about navigating hyperspace—and what happens when the normal navigation tools are no longer available. There are several notable aspects of this story, aside from the kicker, which I have been sworn not to reveal. First, the crew isn’t all men—there are women on the Terra II, and the women are full members of the crew, not just pretty nurses or secretaries. Secondly, the story is launched by an accident, the sort of thing that could happen anytime, anywhere in space, but that is seldom noted in stories.

  These aspects, plus the too
realistic atmosphere of life in a ship with a sizeable crew confined for more than a little time, give “The Mapmakers” a lively, engaging quality that sets it apart from other spaceship tales. The rest you’ll have to find out for yourself.

  It was one of those crazy, chance-in-a-million accidents. A particle of meteoric matter slammed into Starship Terra II in hyperspace. It was only a small particle, but it penetrated three bulkheads, injuring Lieutenant Groden and destroying the Celestial Atlas. It couldn’t happen in a hundred years—but it had happened.

  That was the end of the road for Starship Terra II. The damage-control parties patched the bulkheads easily enough. But the Atlas—the only record on board of the incomprehensible Riemannian configurations of hyperspace—was a total loss.

  The captain gave orders for Spohn, the Celestial Atlas, to be buried in space and called an emergency officers’ meeting in the wardroom.

  Terra II was in normal space and free fall. A trace of smoky kerosene odor still hung in the wardroom, but there was none of the queasy unrecognizable slipping motion of the hyperspace “jump,” and the captain had ordered the ship spun to give them a touch of simulated gravity. The officers were managing to look alert and responsive as they faced their skipper.

  The captain was a hard-muscled, hard-eyed career naval officer, and by definition an ambitious man—else he would hardly have asked for the command of a charting flight. He walked briskly in from his own quarters, neither hurrying nor slow. He would walk at that same pace to receive his admiral’s stars when that day came, or to his execution, if it ever came to that.

  He assumed his place at the head of the table and took the precise ten seconds his martinet mind allotted him for looking around the wardroom. Then he said, “We’re in trouble.”

  The men in the wardroom hitched their hips a quarter-inch closer to the ward table.

  The captain nodded and said it again, “We’re in the soup, and we’re a long way from home, and nobody is going to come to get us out of it. We’ll have to do it ourselves, if we can. Ciccarelli’s trying to get us a fix, but I can tell you right now, we’re not close to Sol. There isn’t a constellation in the sky that you or I or anybody else ever saw before. We might be a hundred light-years from home, we might be ten thousand.”

  The exec cleared his throat. “Sir, what about our records?”

  “What records? They went with the Atlas, Hal. We can’t retrace our way to Earth.”

  “No, sir, that’s not what I mean. I understand that. But our charting records from Earth to here, we still have those. They won’t do us any good, because we can’t follow them backward—hyperspace doesn’t work that way. But Earth needs them.”

  “Sure. What can we do about it? If we could get them back, we could get back ourselves. The whole trouble—Yes? What is it, Lorch?”

  Ensign Lorch saluted from the door of the wardroom. “Spohn’s body, sir,” he rapped out. “It’s ready for burial now. Would the captain like to conduct the services?”

  “The captain will. What about Groden?”

  Lorch said. “He isn’t good, sir. He’s unconscious and his head is bandaged up. The surgeon thinks it’s bad. But we won’t know for sure for at least a couple of hours.”

  The captain nodded, and Lorch quickly took his seat. He was the youngest officer in Terra II in years, six months out of the academy and still unable to vote. He listened to the discussion of ways and means with deference masking a keen feeling of excitement. The adventure of the unknown star lanes! That was why Lorch had signed up in the charting service, and he was getting it.

  Perhaps more, even, than he had bargained for.

  The trouble with Terra II was that she was playing a cosmic game of blindman’s buff. Jumping into hyperspace was like leaping through a shadow, blindfolded; there was no way of knowing in advance what lay on the other side.

  The first hyperspace rocket had taught a few lessons, expensively learned. On its first jump into hyperspace, Terra I had been “out” for just under one second—just enough, that is, for the jump generators to swing the ship into and out of the Riemannian n-dimensional composite that they called hyperspace for lack of a better term.

  And it had taken Terra I nearly a year to limp back home, in normal space all the way, its generators a smoldering ruin. Back still again to the drawing boards!

  But it was no one’s fault. Who could have foreseen that any electric current, however faint, would so warp the field as to blow up the generators? The lesson was plain:

  No electrical equipment in use during a jump.

  So Terra I, rebuilt, reequipped and with a new crew, tried again. And this time there were no power failures. The only failure, this time, was the human element.

  Because in hyperspace, the Universe was a crazy quilt of screaming patterns and shimmering lights, no more like the ordered normal-space pattern of stars than the view through a kaleidoscope is like the colored shreds of paper at its focus.

  So the Celestial Atlas was added to the complement of a hyperspace rocket’s crew. And Terra I was rebuilt, and Terra II and Terra III and Terra IV came off the ways. And Earth cast its bait into the turgid depths of hyperspace again and again…

  The crews of the charting service were all volunteers, all rigidly screened. The ten officers who made up the wardroom of Terra II were as brilliant and able a group as ever assembled, but the emergency officers’ meeting was a failure, all the same.

  There just wasn’t any way back.

  “We’re the trailblazers,” rumbled the captain. “If we had a duplicate Celestial Atlas—but we don’t. Well, that’s something for the next ship to bear in mind, if we ever get back to tell them about it.”

  Ensign Lorch said tentatively, “Sir, don’t we have one?”

  The captain rasped, “Of course not, man! I just finished saying we didn’t. You should know that.”

  “Yes, sir. But that’s not exactly what I meant. We have a library and, as I understand it, the library is basically the same as the atlas—a trained total-recall observer. Doesn’t any of the information in the library duplicate the atlas?”

  “Now that,” said the captain after a pause, “is worth thinking about. What about it, Hal?”

  The exec said, “Worth a try, captain.”

  “Right. Yoel, get her up here.” Lieutenant Yoel saluted and spoke into the communications tube. The captain went on reflectively. “Probably won’t work, of course, but we’ll try anything. Anybody else got a suggestion?”

  “Dead reckoning, sir?” Yoel suggested. “I know we’ve got the record of our fixes so far; can we try just backtracking?”

  “Won’t work,” the captain said positively. “If we could be absolutely exact, maybe. But without an atlas we can’t be. And a centimeter’s divergence at the beginning of a run might put us a thousand kilometers off at the end. A thousand kilometers in hyperspace—heaven knows what that might come to in normal space. Anything from a million light-years down.

  “I couldn’t do it, Yoel. Even Groden couldn’t do it with his eyes, and he’s the best shiphandler on board. And I don’t think he’s going to have his eyes, anyway, at least not for a long time. Maybe forever, if we don’t get back to the eye banks on Earth. Without the atlas, we’re as blind as Groden.”

  The speaking tube interrupted and rescued Yoel. It whistled thinly: “Recorder Mate Eklund reporting to the wardroom.”

  “Send her in,” said the exec, and the library, Nancy Eklund, RM2c, marched smartly into the meeting.

  It wasn’t going to work; the captain knew it in the first few words. They spent an hour sweating the library of all of her relevant data, but it was wasted effort.

  The captain thought wistfully of Recorder Mate Spohn, the lost Celestial Atlas. With him on the bridge, hyperspace navigation had been—well, not easy, but possible. For Spohn was trained in the techniques of total recall. The shifting, multicolored values of Riemannian space formed totals in his mind, so that he could actually navigate by m
eans of a process of mental analysis and synthesis so rapid and complex that it became a sort of gestalt.

  Of course, a twelve-stage electronic computer could have done the same thing, just as quickly. But Terra II had its limitations, and one of the limitations was that no electronic equipment could be operated in a jump—just when the computer would most be needed. So the designers came up with what was, after all, a fairly well tested method of filing information—the human brain. By the techniques of hypnotic conditioning all of the brain opened up to subconscious storing.

  Recorder Mate Spohn, trancelike on the bridge, had no conscious knowledge of what was going on as, machinelike, he scanned the Riemannian configurations and rapped out courses and speeds; but his subconscious never erred. With its countless cells and infinite linkages, the brain was a tank that all the world’s knowledge could hardly fill—just about big enough, in fact, to cope with the task of recognizing the meaning of hyperspace configurations.

  And the process worked so well that the delighted designers added another recorder mate to the personnel tables—the library—which enabled them to dispense with the dead weight of books as well.

  The entire wardroom, in order of rank, shot questions at their library, and her disciplined mind dutifully plucked out answers.

  But most of them she never knew. For Terra II was a charting ship, and though the Atlas had, as a matter of routine, transcribed his calibrations into the ship’s log—and thence into the library—all that Nancy Eklund knew was how Terra II had reached its checkpoints in space. Hyperspace was a tricky business; backtracking was dangerous.

  When Terra II got back—if Terra II got back—those who came after them would have complete calibrations for a round trip. But they did not. Their task was as difficult and dangerous, in its way, as Columbus’s caravels. Except that Columbus had only one great fear; falling off the edge of the Earth.