Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  When I get out of this, he corrected himself, whimpering.

  He wondered whether he was crying.

  Of course, if those lying voices were, by some chance, not lying, then he couldn’t be crying. Because he wouldn’t have any eyes to cry with. And, he told himself reasonably, there wasn’t much doubt that the voices were plausible. He had been injured somewhere around his eyes; he had felt the pain, and it was too intense and specific to be unreal. That was in the old days—how long ago they were, he could not begin to imagine—when there had been only a few needles now and then, and even if he did have a little trouble moving and talking, he was still in perfect possession of his faculties.

  All right, he thought. So I was injured around the eyes.

  But the rest—that was a damned lie. He had even believed it for a while—when the Broderick-voice said, with hypocritical sympathy, that he wouldn’t be able to see anything, ever, unless they got him new corpse’s eyes out of an eye bank on Earth. It had been a blow, but he believed it. Until, he reminded himself triumphantly, he had seen! Seen as clearly as he knew the voices were lying, that was when he began to suspect the existence of the whole horrible, senseless plot.

  “No!” he screamed. “Please, please—no!” But they couldn’t be hearing him, because they were going right on with another needle; he could feel it. Furiously he fought to pull back the alien arm, make the marble lips move, the black velvet tongue speak, “Please—”

  On the bridge, the captain was staring fixedly at the alien stars. It was a measure of his state of mind that he was on the bridge at all, at a time when the ship was going nowhere and there was nothing to be done beyond the routine.

  He leaned forward in his chair, jerking free the little magnets sewn into the waist of his trunks, and walked heel-and-toe across the bridge. The little Recorder Mate, Eklund or whatever her name was, was standing humbly in a corner, waiting for him to tell her why he had sent for her. But, the captain confessed to himself, the trouble was he didn’t exactly know why himself. And, after all, why should he? It was so damned hot—

  Belay that kind of talk, he told himself. He said: “Eklund! Index.” The girl’s eyes closed like the snapping of a shutter.

  “Take over,” the captain ordered the exec. “Run her through the Riemannian configurations again. We’ll get every bit of dope she has.” And they would, he knew. Because they had already.

  And none of it helped.

  It was a good thing, Ensign Lorch told himself, sweating, that spaceships were not painted. Otherwise he would surely have been set to commanding a crew chipping paint.

  Terra II being welded of unpainted metal, the color a part of the alloy itself, his crew was defluffing the filter traps in the air circulators. It was a job for idiots, planned by morons; it took six men five hours to disassemble the air trunks and the junction boxes, five minutes to blow out the collected fluff on the static accumulators, five hours to put them back together again. There was an alternative method, which involved burning them clean with a high-voltage arc; that took one man slightly under three seconds. But that, the exec had decreed, meant heat.

  And heat was the enemy.

  Of course, there was still a third alternative, which was to leave the fluff in the filter traps undisturbed. This would have generated no heat at all. But it also would have taken no time and occupied no personnel, which were decisive counts against it in the eyes of the exec. A little fluff in the filters would make no conceivable difference to the operation of the ship, but idle men might make a very great difference indeed.

  “Hurry it up,” growled Ensign Lorch. The men didn’t even look at him. Lorch looked around him self-consciously. As an officer, he had made inspection tours in the enlisted women’s quarters before, but he couldn’t help feeling out of place and slightly apprehensive.

  That girl, the Recorder Mate—Eklund was her name—was droning all the parts of Cyrano de Bergerac to an audience in the far end of the lounge, and parts of Cyrano’s farewell to Roxanne kept mixing in with Lorch’s thoughts.

  It didn’t matter; he wasn’t thinking to any purpose, anyhow. Neither he nor anyone else on Terra II, he told himself bitterly. Fifteen thousand light-years. The light that came to them from Sol—how weak and faint!—had been bright summer sunlight beating down on the skin tents of Neolithic Man creeping northward after the retreating ice. And the light from the nearest stars beyond Terra II’s skin, contrariwise, would fall on an Earth inconceivably advanced, a planet of mental Titans…

  “Mister Lorch,” someone was repeating plaintively.

  The ensign shook himself and focused on the spaceman wavering before him. “Eh?”

  “We’re done,” the man repeated. “It’s all put together again. The filter traps,” he explained.

  “Oh,” said Ensign Lorch. He glanced self-consciously at the women at the far end of the lounge, but they were absorbed in Rostand’s love story. There was a murmur of gossip from them—“so all at once I knew there was somebody looking at me. Well, I called the duty officer and we searched, but—”

  Ensign Lorch cleared his throat. “Well done,” he said absently. “Dismissed.” He turned his back on the detail and propelled himself down the passageway toward the sick bay.

  If he went back to the bridge, the old man would find work for him; if he went to the wardroom, the exec would find an excuse to send him to the old man. And his own quarters were horribly, stifling hot.

  He accosted the ship’s surgeon and demanded, “How long are we expected to live in this heat?”

  Commander Broderick said irritably, “How should I know? You don’t die of the heat, that’s sure. There are other things that will come first—suffocation, thirst, maybe even starvation.”

  Lorch looked thoughtfully at the medical officer. Red-eyed, his face lined with worry and weariness, Broderick was showing strain. Through his scanty shorts, you could see the fishbelly whiteness of his skin; it was old man’s skin, and Broderick, for all of his passing the annual fitness exam, was getting on toward being an old man.

  Lorch said more gently, “I guess you’re getting a rough time all round.”

  “Good Lord, am I!” the surgeon snapped. “Half the ship’s complement has been in here today—little fiddling things like prickly heat and dizzy spells. Dizzy spells! How the devil can anyone not have dizzy spells? The women’s quarters have practically a regular courier service. If it isn’t antiperspirants, it’s salt tablets; if it isn’t salt tablets, it’s alcohol from the ship’s store for rubdowns.” He passed his hand shakily over his eyes. “Then,” he said, “to top it all off there’s him.” He pointed to the inner chamber of the sick bay. Lorch, listening, could hear the blinded Groden’s rasping breath.

  There was a shrill whistle from the speaking tube, then, tinnily, a voice from the bridge. “Commander Broderick! Captain requests you report to the bridge at once.”

  The surgeon blinked and swore. “How the devil am I supposed to do that?” he demanded. “Two of my crewmen are out with heat prostration, and the other two were working all night. All right, I go up to the bridge. Suppose there’s some trouble? Suppose Groden starts acting up again?” He stared irresolutely at the speaking tube.

  Lorch said thoughtfully, “Say, Commander, could I keep an eye on him for you?”

  It was a fine idea. Broderick took off for the bridge and Lorch, hastily briefed on the simple task of sticking a new needle in Groden’s arm if he showed any signs of trouble, bade him a careful good-bye and waited until he was well out of sight before, whistling, he knelt before the cabinet of emergency medical supplies.

  Broderick had given him an idea. And, he told himself blissfully, moments later, it had been a good one. Alcohol rub! Now why hadn’t he thought of that himself?

  He hardly noticed that Groden’s heavy breathing had changed pitch and character. It almost formed words now.

  On the bridge, the captain was briefing the ship’s officers—all but Groden, in the sick
bay, and Lorch, who, the captain had agreed, was easily enough spared to watch after Groden—on what in his mind he called Project Desperation. It didn’t take much briefing because it was the only thing left for them to do and every man on the ship knew it.

  “We have,” the captain said precisely, “margin for just under forty minutes of rocket blast at standard thrust. That will bring our overall temperature up to sixty degrees, give or take a degree according to Engineering’s best guess. And that’s the maximum the human body can stand—that’s right, Broderick?”

  The surgeon quickly translated into the Fahrenheit scale; a hundred and forty degrees or so.

  “That’s right, sir,” he said. “If we can stand that much,” he added reluctantly after a moment. “It hits that on Earth in a couple of places—around the Dead Sea, Aden, places like that. But it isn’t sustained heat; it drops considerably after dark.”

  The captain nodded somberly. “We’ll hope,” he said, “that we’ll find ourselves out of this before we hit sixty degrees. If we don’t—well, at least we won’t starve or suffocate. You understand, gentlemen, that the odds are against us. I suggested to Lieutenant Ciccarelli that it was a million-to-one-shot. He said I was an optimist. But one chance in a million, or a billion, or whatever the number may be, is better than no chance at all. Do you all agree?”

  There was no answer. The captain went on, “Before we jump, I presume no one has a better idea?” No one had. “Thank you. Then, gentlemen, if you will assume your stations, we’ll get down to business. Stand by to jump.”

  The captain took his place with an air of benign detachment. It wasn’t a captain’s job to take the conn of a ship in a perfectly routine maneuver. He watched approvingly as the exec put the ship on alert, then on standby, then went through the checklist that culminated in the “jump” into hyperspace.

  The captain was a model of placid, observant command officership, but behind the placid face, the agitated mind was churning out awful calculations.

  Consider the Galaxy, he was thinking to himself; a hundred thousand light-years broad, perhaps forty thousand through its axis. Call it a lens-shaped figure with a volume of three hundred trillion light-years. Say that their cruising radius, in normal space, was within a volume of one light-year; that meant that the chances of their coming out, by accident, within cruising distance of Earth was—not one in a million, or one in a hundred million, or one in a billion…

  It was one chance in three hundred trillion.

  The captain juggled the numbers comfortably enough in his mind. They were absolutely meaningless, far too big to be comprehended or feared.

  There it was, the beautiful Master Pattern.

  Groden lay tense and fearful, seeing it. It had been a long time since the last needle; by the only clock he owned, his heartbeat, it had been more than two hours since he discovered that he could move his lips and his fingers again. He had feverishly wondered why; and had not dared speak or move after the first trials for fear of bringing the needle again. But now he knew.

  There was the Master Pattern. He scanned it slowly in every part. There was the giant star-cluster of Hercules; and there the bridge of Terra II; there was the fat red disc of Betelgeuse; and there the shower room of the enlisted women’s quarters. He took in the ordered ranks of the constellations as easily as he noted that Broderick was gone from the sick bay, and in his place the young ensign, Lorch, was clinging with harried expression to a stanchion. They were in hyperspace. Broderick was on the bridge. Lorch had been left in charge, and it had not occurred to him, since his patient had been so carefully quiet, to administer another needle.

  Groden carefully moved his hands, and found that they would do what he wanted. He was getting the hang of—well, it was not seeing, exactly, he confessed to himself. It was like being alone on a starless night, in the middle of a dark wood. It took time to get used to the darkness, but by and by shapes would begin to make themselves known.

  It was not the same thing; this was no mere matter of the expanding pupil of the eye; but the effect was something the same. But explain it or not, he was being able to use it; each time the beautiful vision was more complete, and therefore more beautiful.

  He found the straps that bound him, and unbuckled them.

  On the bridge, he “saw,” the jump at random was nearing its end. It would be only a matter of minutes before they were back in normal space, and he was blind again.

  In the outer room of the sick-bay, Ensign Lorch was staring dismally at the hallucinations of hyperspace. It was almost certain, thought Groden to himself, that if Lorch was so fortunate as to see him at all, he would pass off the sight as another of the lies light told. The important thing was sound; he must not make a noise.

  He crept through the door, carefully holding to the guide rails. Broderick had been right about one thing, though, he admitted—the pain. The wreck of his eyes no longer seemed as important, with the wonderful things hyperspace’s cloudless perception brought to him, but the shattered bone and tissue and nerve ends hurt.

  Algol’s dark primary occluded the radiant star for a second and confused him; they were moving faster than he had thought. He hastily scanned the Master Plan again, fearful for a second. But there was Sol and its family of planets, and there was Earth. Terra II might be lost, but Lieutenant Groden was not, and if only he could get to the bridge…

  He scanned the bridge. It was later than he thought. He felt the vibrations in the floor as he realized that the jump was at an end. Panicked, he hesitated.

  Blackness again, and no more stars.

  He stood there, incredibly desolate, and the pain was suddenly more than he could bear.

  And from behind him he heard a startled yell, Lorch’s voice: “Hey, Groden! Come back here! What the devil are you doing out in the passage?”

  It was the last straw. Groden had no tear ducts left with which to weep, but he did the best he could.

  Broderick worked over the girl, Eklund, for a moment, and brought her to. She stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, but she was all right. As all right, he thought, as anyone on Terra II had any chance to be.

  “Plain heat prostration,” he reported to the captain. “It’s been a pretty rough job for her, trying to keep on top of all this.”

  The captain nodded unemotionally. “Well, Ciccarelli?” he demanded.

  The navigator ran his hands through his hair. ‘No position, sir,’ he said despondently. “Maybe if I ran down the third and fourth magnitude stars—”

  “Don’t bother,” the captain said. “If we aren’t within a light-year of Sol, we’re too far to do us any good. At your convenience, gentlemen, we’ll take another jump.”

  The executive nodded wearily and opened his mouth to give the order, but Broderick protested, “Sir, we’ll all be falling over if we don’t take a break. The temperature’s past forty-five now. The only way to handle it is frequent rests and plenty of liquids.”

  “Ten minutes be enough?”

  The surgeon hesitated. Then he shrugged. “Why not? No sense worrying about long-term effects just now, is there?”

  “There is not,” said the captain. “Make it so,” he ordered the exec.

  The captain half-closed his eyes, fanning himself mechanically. When the runner from the wardroom brought him his plastic globe of fruit juices he accepted it and began to sip, but he wasn’t paying very much attention. He had the figures on the tip of his tongue: the first blind jump in Project Desperation had cost them sixteen minutes of rocket time. He could be a little more conservative with the next one—maybe use only ten minutes. That way he could squeeze out at least one more full-length, or nearly full-length, jump; and then one last truly desperate try, not more than a minute or two. And if that didn’t work, they were cooked.

  Literally, he told himself wryly.

  In fact, he continued, counting up the entries in red ink on their ledger, they were just about out of luck now. For even if their next jump took th
em within cruising distance of Earth, there was still the time factor to be considered. They had left only twenty-four minutes of jet-time before Terra II’s hull temperature passed the critical sixty-degree mark.

  True, he had maintained some slight reserve in that not all their expansible gas had been used. There remained a certain amount in the compressed tanks. And even beyond that, it would be possible to valve off some of the ship’s ambient air itself, dropping the pressure to, say ten pounds to the square inch or even less.

  That might give them maneuvering time in normal space—provided they were God-blessed enough to come out of one of the three remaining jumps within range of Earth, provided all the angels of heaven were helping them…

  Which, it was clear, he told himself, they weren’t.

  “Sir,” said Commander Broderick’s voice, “I think you can proceed now.”

  The captain opened his eyes. “Thank you,” he said gravely and nodded to the exec. It was a quick job by now. The kerosene lamps were already lit, the main electric circuits already cut; it was only a matter of double-checking and of getting the nucleophoretic generators up to speed.

  The captain observed the routine attentively. It did not matter that the fitness reports for which he was taking mental notes might never be written. It was a captain’s job to make his evaluations all the same.

  “Stand by to jump!” called the exec, and the talker repeated it into the tubes. Down in the generator-room, the jumpmen listened for the command. It came; they heaved on the enormous manual clutches.

  And Terra II slipped into Riemannian space once more.

  The stars whirled before the captain’s eyes and became geometrical figures in prismatic colors. The slight, worn figure of the library, the girl named Eklund, ballooned and wavered and seemed to float around the bridge. The captain looked on with composure; he was used to the illusions of hyperspace. Even—almost—he understood them. From the girl’s vast stored knowledge, he had learned of the connection between electric potential and the three-dimensional matrix.