Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Meanwhile, we all knew this wonderful new truth: We weren’t alone in the universe! Excitement exploded. The market for sci-roms boomed. My very next book was The Radio Gods, and it sold its head off.

  I thought it would go on forever.

  It might have, too…if it hadn’t been for the timorous censors.

  I slept through the tunnel—all the tunnels, even the ones through the Alps—and by the time I woke up we were halfway down to Rome.

  In spite of the fact that the tablets remained obstinately blank, I felt more cheerful. Lidia was just a fading memory, I still had twenty-nine days to turn in a new sci-rom and Rome, after all, is still Rome! The center of the universe—well, not counting what new lessons in astronomical geography the Olympians might teach us. At least, it’s the greatest city in the world. It’s the place where all the action is.

  By the time I’d sent the porter for breakfast and changed into a clean robe we were there, and I alighted into the great, noisy train shed.

  I hadn’t been in the city for several years, but Rome doesn’t change much. The Tiber still stank. The big new apartment buildings still hid the old ruins until you were almost on top of them, the flies were still awful and the Roman youths still clustered around the train station to sell you guided tours to the Golden House (as though any of them could ever get past the Legion guards!), or sacred amulets, or their sisters.

  Because I used to be a secretary on the staff of the Proconsul to the Cherokee Nation I have friends in Rome. Because I hadn’t had the good sense to call ahead, none of them were home. I had no choice. I had to take a room in a high-rise inn on the Palatine.

  It was ferociously expensive, of course. Everything in Rome is—that’s why people like me live in dreary outposts like London—but I figured that by the time the bills came in I would either have found something to satisfy Marcus and get the rest of the advance, or I’d be in so much trouble a few extra debts wouldn’t matter.

  Having reached that decision, I decided to treat myself to a servant. I picked out a grinning, muscular Sicilian at the rental desk in the lobby, gave him the keys for my luggage and instructed him to take it to my room——and to make me a reservation for the next day’s hoverflight to Alexandria.

  That’s when my luck began to get better.

  When the Sicilian came to the wineshop to ask me for further orders he reported, “There’s another citizen who’s booked on the same flight, Citizen Julius. Would you like to share a compartment with him?”

  It’s nice when you rent a servant who tries to save you money. I said approvingly, “What kind of a person is he? I don’t want to get stuck with some real bore.”

  “You can see for yourself, Julius. He’s in the baths right now. He’s a Judaean. His name is Flavius Samuelus.”

  Five minutes later I had my clothes off and a sheet wrapped around me, and I was in the tepidarium, peering around at every body there.

  I picked Sam out at once. He was stretched out with his eyes closed while a masseur pummeled his fat old flesh. I climbed onto the slab next to his without speaking. When he groaned and rolled over, opening his eyes, I said, “Hello, Sam.”

  It took him a moment to recognize me; he didn’t have his glasses in. But when he squinted hard enough his face broke out into a grin. “Julie!” he cried. “Small world! It’s good to see you again!”

  And he reached out to clasp fists-over-elbows, really welcoming, just as I had expected; because one of the things I like best about Flavius Samuelus is that he likes me.

  One of the other things I like best about Sam is that, although he is a competitor, he is also an undepletable natural resource. He writes sci-roms himself. He does more than that. He has helped me with the science part of my own sci-roms any number of times, and it had crossed my mind as soon as I heard the Sicilian say his name that he might be just what I wanted in the present emergency.

  Sam is at least seventy years old. His head is hairless. There’s a huge, brown age spot on the top of his scalp. His throat hangs in a pouch of flesh, and his eyelids sag. But you’d never guess any of that if you were simply talking to him on the phone. He has the quick, chirpy voice of a twenty-year-old, and the mind of one, too—of an extraordinarily bright twenty-year-old. He gets enthusiastic.

  That complicates things, because Sam’s brain works faster than it ought to. Sometimes that makes him hard to talk to, because he’s usually three or four exchanges ahead of most people. So the next thing he says to you is as likely as not to be the response to some question that you are inevitably going to ask, but haven’t yet thought of.

  It is an unpleasant fact of life that Sam’s sci-roms sell better than mine do. It is a tribute to Sam’s personality that I don’t hate him for it. He has an unfair advantage over the rest of us, since he is a professional astronomer himself. He only writes sci-roms for fun, in his spare time, of which he doesn’t have a whole lot. Most of his working hours are spent running a space probe of his own, the one that circles the Epsilon Eridani planet, Dione. I can stand his success (and, admit it!, his talent) because he is generous with his ideas. As soon as we had agreed to share the hoverflight compartment I put it to him directly. Well, almost directly; I said, “Sam, I’ve been wondering about something. When the Olympians get here, what is it going to mean to us?”

  He was the right person to ask, of course; Sam knew more about the Olympians than anyone alive. But he was the wrong person to expect a direct answer from. He rose up, clutching his robe around him. He waved away the masseur and looked at me in friendly amusement, out of those bright black eyes under the flyaway eyebrows and the drooping lids. “Why, do you need a new sci-rom plot right now?” he asked.

  “Hells,” I said ruefully, and decided to come clean. “It wouldn’t be the first time I asked you, Sam. Only this time I really need it.” And I told him the story of the novel the censors obstatted and the editor who was after a quick replacement—or my blood, choice of one.

  He nibbled thoughtfully at the knuckle of his thumb. “What was this novel of yours about?” he asked curiously.

  “It was a satire, Sam. An Ass’s Olympiad. About the Olympians coming down to Earth in a matter transporter, only there’s a mixup in the transmission and one of them accidentally gets turned into an ass. It’s got some funny bits in it.”

  “It sure has, Julie. Has had for a couple dozen centuries.”

  “Well, I didn’t say it was altogether original, only—”

  He was shaking his head. “I thought you were smarter than that, Julie. What did you expect the censors to do, jeopardize the most important event in human history for the sake of a dumb sci-rom?”

  “It’s not a dumb—”

  “It’s dumb to risk offending them,” he said, overruling me firmly. “Best to be safe and not write about them at all.”

  “But everybody’s been doing it!”

  “Nobody’s been turning them into asses,” he pointed out. “Julie, there’s a limit to sci-rom speculation. When you write about the Olympians you’re right up at that limit. Any speculation about them can be enough reason for them to pull out of the meeting entirely, and we might never get a chance like this again.”

  “They wouldn’t—”

  “Ah, Julie,” he said, disgusted, “you don’t have any idea what they would or wouldn’t do. The censors made the right decision. Who knows what the Olympians are going to be like?”

  “You do,” I told him.

  He laughed. There was an uneasy sound to it, though. “I wish I did. About the only thing we do know is that they don’t appear to just any old intelligent race; they have moral standards. We don’t have any idea what those standards are, really. I don’t know what your book says, but maybe you speculated that the Olympians were bringing us all kinds of new things—a cure for cancer, new psychedelic drugs, even eternal life—”

  “What kind of psychedelic drugs might they bring, exactly?” I asked.

  “Down, boy! I’m telling you no
t to think about that kind of idea. The point is that whatever you imagined might easily turn out to be the most repulsive and immoral thing the Olympians can think of. The stakes are too high. This is a once-only chance. We can’t let it go sour.”

  “But I need a story,” I wailed.

  “Well, yes,” he admitted, “I suppose you do. Let me think about it. Let’s get cleaned up and get out of here.”

  While we were in the hot drench, while we were dressing, while we were eating a light lunch, Sam chattered on about the forthcoming conference in Alexandria. I was pleased to listen. Apart from the fact that everything he said was interesting, I began to feel hopeful about actually producing a book for Mark. If anybody could help me, Sam could, and he was a problem addict. He couldn’t resist a challenge.

  That was undoubtedly why he was the first to puzzle out the Olympians’ interminably repeated squees and squahs. If you simply took the “dit” to be “1,” and the squee to be “+” and the squah to be “=,” then

  Dit squee dit squah dit dit

  simply came out as

  1 + 1 = 2

  That was easy enough. It didn’t take a super-brain like Sam’s to substitute our terms for theirs and reveal the message to be simple arithmetic—except for the mysterious “wooooo”:

  dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squah wooooo.

  What was the “wooooo” supposed to mean? A special convention to represent the number four?

  Sam knew right away, of course. As soon as he heard the message he telegraphed the solution from his library in Padua:

  “The message calls for an answer. ‘Wooooo’ means question mark. The answer is four.”

  And so the reply to the stars was transmitted on its way: dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squah dit dit dit dit.

  The human race had turned in its test paper in the entrance examination, and the slow process of establishing communication had begun.

  It took four years before the Olympians responded. Obviously, they weren’t nearby. Also obviously, they weren’t simple folk like ourselves, sending out radio messages from a planet of a star two light-years away, because there wasn’t any star there; the reply came from a point in space where none of our telescopes or probes had found anything at all.

  By then Sam was deeply involved. He was the first to point out that the star folk had undoubtedly chosen to send a weak signal, because they wanted to be sure our technology was reasonably well developed before we tried to answer. He was one of the impatient ones who talked the collegium authorities into beginning transmission of all sorts of mathematical formulae, and then simple word relationships, to start sending something to the Olympians while we waited for radio waves to creep to wherever they were and back with an answer.

  Sam wasn’t the only one, of course. He wasn’t even the principal investigator when we got into the hard work of developing a common vocabulary. There were better specialists than Sam at linguistics and cryptanalysis.

  But it was Sam who first noticed, early on, that the response time to our messages was getting shorter. Meaning that the Olympians were on their way toward us.

  By then they’d begun sending picture mosaics. They came in as strings of dits and dahs, 550,564 bits long. Someone quickly figured out that that was the square of 742, and when they displayed the string as a square matrix, black cells for the dits and white ones for the dahs, the image of the first Olympian leaped out.

  Everybody remembers that picture. Everyone on Earth saw it, except for the totally blind—it was on every broadcast screen and news journal in the world—and even the blind listened to the anatomical descriptions every commentator supplied. Two tails. A fleshy, beardlike thing that hung down from its chin. Four legs. A ruff of spikes down what seemed to be the backbone. Eyes set wide apart on bulges from the cheekbones.

  That first Olympian was not at all pretty, but it was definitely alien.

  When the next string turned out very similar to the first, it was Sam who saw at once that it was simply a slightly rotated view of the same being. The Olympians took forty-one pictures to give us the complete likeness of that first one in the round…

  Then they began sending pictures of the others.

  It had never occurred to anyone, not even Sam, that we would be dealing not with one super-race, but with at least twenty-two of them. There were that many separate forms of alien beings, and each one uglier and more strange than the one before.

  That was one of the reasons the priests didn’t like calling them “Olympians.” We’re pretty ecumenical about our gods, but none of them looked anything like any of those, and some of the older priests never stopped muttering about blasphemy.

  Halfway through the third course of our lunch and the second flask of wine Sam broke off his description of the latest communique from the Olympians—they’d been acknowledging receipt of our transmissions about Earthly history—to lift his head and grin at me.

  “Got it,” he said.

  I turned and blinked at him. Actually, I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to his monologue because I had been keeping my eye on the pretty Kievan waitress. She had attracted my attention because—well, I mean, after attracting my attention because of her extremely well developed figure and the sparsity of clothing to conceal it—because she was wearing a gold citizen’s amulet around her neck. She wasn’t a slave. That made her more intriguing. I can’t ever get really interested in slave women, because it isn’t sporting, but I had got quite interested in this one.

  “Are you listening to me?” Sam demanded testily.

  “Of course I am. What have you got?”

  “I’ve got the answer to your problem,” he beamed. “Not just a sci-rom novel plot. A whole new kind of sci-rom! Why don’t you write a book about what it will be like if the Olympians don’t come?”

  I love the way half of Sam’s brain works at questions while the other half is doing something completely different, but I can’t always follow what comes out of it. “I don’t see what you mean. If I write about the Olympians not coming, isn’t that just as bad as if I write about them doing it?”

  “No, no,” he snapped. “Listen to what I say! Leave the Olympians out entirely. Just write about a future that might happen, but won’t.”

  The waitress was hovering over us, picking up used plates. I was conscious of her listening as I responded with dignity. “Sam, that’s not my style. My sci-roms may not sell as well as yours do, but I’ve got just as much integrity. I never write anything that I don’t believe is at least possible.”

  “Julie, get your mind off your gonads—” so he hadn’t missed the attention I was giving the girl “—and use that pitifully tiny brain of yours. I’m talking about something that could be possible, in some alternative future, if you see what I mean.”

  I didn’t see at all. “What’s an ‘alternative future’?”

  “It’s a future that might happen, but won’t,” he explained. “Like if the Olympians don’t come to see us.”

  I shook my head, puzzled. “But we already know they’re coming,” I pointed out.

  “But suppose they weren’t! Suppose they hadn’t contacted us years ago.”

  “But they did,” I said, trying to straighten out his thinking on the subject. He only sighed.

  “I see I’m not getting through to you,” he said, pulling his robe around him and getting to his feet. “Get on with your waitress. I’ve got some messages to send. I’ll see you on the ship.”

  Well, for one reason or another I didn’t get anywhere with the Kievan waitress. She said she was married, happily and monogamously. Well, I couldn’t see why any lawful, free husband would have his wife out working at a job like that, but I was surprised she didn’t show more interest in one of my lineage—

  I’d better explain about that.

  You see, my family has a claim to fame. Genealogists say that we are descended from the line of Julius Caesar himself.

  I mention that claim myself, sometimes
, though usually only when I’ve been drinking—I suppose it is one of the reasons that Lidia, always a snob, took up with me in the first place. It isn’t a serious matter. After all, Julius Caesar died more than two thousand years ago. There have been sixty or seventy generations since then, not to mention the fact that, although Ancestor Julius certainly left a lot of children behind him, none of them happened to be born to a woman he happened to be married to. I don’t even look very Roman. There must have been a Northman or two in the line, because I’m tall and fair-haired, which no respectable Roman ever was.

  Still, even if I’m not exactly the lawful heir to the divine Julius, I at least come of a pretty ancient and distinguished line. You would have thought a mere waitress would have taken that into account before turning me down.

  She hadn’t, though. When I woke up the next morning—alone—Sam was gone from the inn, although the skip-ship for Alexandria wasn’t due to sail until late evening.

  I didn’t see him all day. I didn’t look for him very hard, because I woke up feeling a little ashamed of myself. Why should a grown man, a celebrated author of more than forty bestselling (well, reasonably well-selling) sci-roms, depend on somebody else for his ideas?

  So I turned my baggage over to the servant, checked out of the inn and took the underground to the Library of Rome.

  Rome isn’t only the imperial capital of the world, it’s the scientific capital, too. The big old telescopes out on the hills aren’t much use anymore, because the lights from the city spoil their night viewing, and anyway the big optical telescopes are all out in space now. Still, they were where Galileus detected the first extra-solar planet and Tychus made his famous spectrographs of the last great supernova in our own galaxy, only a couple of dozen years after the first spaceflight. The scientific tradition survives. Rome is still the headquarters of the Collegium of Sciences.