Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  When boredom made me decide that I needed a glass of wine and a quick snack more than I needed to sit there with my still blank tablet I found out there was hardly anyone even in the lounges. There was no familiar face. No one seemed to know where Sam was. And in the afternoon, the Presidor, bowing to the inevitable, announced that the remaining sessions would be postponed indefinitely.

  The day was a total waste.

  I had a lot more hopes for the night.

  Rachel greeted me with the news that Sam had sent a message to say that he was detained and wouldn’t make dinner.

  “Did he say where he was?” She shook her head. “He’s off with some of the other top people,” I guessed. I told her about the collapse of the convention. Then I brightened. “At least let’s go out for dinner, then,” I offered.

  Rachel firmly vetoed the idea. She was tactful enough not to mention money, although I was sure Sam had filled her in on my precarious financial state. “I like my own cook’s food better than any restaurant,” she told me. “We’ll eat here. There won’t be anything fancy tonight—just a simple meal for the two of us.”

  The best part of that was “the two of us.” Basilius had arranged the couches in a sort of Vee, so that our heads were quite close together, with the low serving tables in easy reach between us. As soon as she lay down Rachel confessed, “I didn’t get a lot of work done today. I couldn’t get that idea of yours out of my head.”

  The idea was Sam’s, actually, but I didn’t see any reason to correct her. “I’m flattered,” I told her. “I’m sorry I spoiled your work.”

  She shrugged and went on, “I did a little reading on the period, especially about an interesting minor figure who lived around then, a Judaean preacher named Jeshua of Nazareth. Did you ever hear of him? Well, most people haven’t, but he had a lot of followers at one time. They called themselves Chrestians, and they were a very unruly bunch.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about Judaean history,” I said. Which was true, but then I added, “But I’d really like to learn more.” Which wasn’t; or at least hadn’t been until just then.

  “Of course,” Rachel said. No doubt to her it seemed quite natural that everyone in the world would wish to know more about the post-Augustan period. “Anyway, this Jeshua was on trial for sedition. He was condemned to death.”

  I blinked at her. “Not just to slavery?”

  She shook her head. “They didn’t just enslave criminals back then, they did physical things to them. Even executed them, sometimes in very barbarous ways. But Tiberius, as Proconsul, decided that the penalty was too extreme. So he commuted Jeshua’s death sentence. He just had him whipped and let him go. A very good decision, I think. Otherwise he would have made him a martyr, and gods know what would have happened after that. As it was, the Chrestians just gradually waned away…Basilius? You can bring the next course in now.”

  I watched with interest as Basilius complied. It turned out to be larks and olives! I approved, not simply for the fact that I liked the dish. The “simple meal” was actually a lot more elaborate than she had provided for the three of us the night before.

  Things were looking up. I said, “Can you tell me something, Rachel? I think you’re Judaean yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I’m a little confused,” I said. “I thought the Judaeans believed in the god Yahveh.”

  “Of course, Julie. We do.”

  “Yes, but—” I hesitated. I didn’t want to mess up the way things were going, but I was curious. “But you say ‘gods.’ Isn’t that, well, a contradiction?”

  “Not at all,” she told me, civilly enough. “Yahveh’s commandments were brought down from a mountaintop by our great prophet, Moses, and they are very clear on the subject. One of them says, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Well, we don’t, you see? Yahveh is our first god. There aren’t any before him. It’s all explained in the rabbinical writings.”

  “And that’s what you go by, the rabbinical writings?”

  She looked thoughtful. “In a way. We’re a very traditional people, Julie. Tradition is what we follow; the rabbinical writings simply explain the traditions.”

  She had stopped eating. I stopped, too. Dreamily I reached out to caress her cheek.

  She didn’t pull away. She didn’t respond, either. After a moment, she said, not looking at me, “For instance, there is a Judaean tradition that a woman is to be a virgin at the time of her marriage.”

  My hand came away from her face by itself, without any conscious command from me. “Oh?”

  “And the rabbinical writings more or less define the tradition, you see. They say that the head of the household is to stand guard at an unmarried daughter’s bedroom for the first hour of each night; if there is no male head of the household, a trusted slave is to be appointed to the job.”

  “I see,” I said. “You’ve never been married, have you?”

  “Not yet,” said Rachel, beginning to eat again.

  I hadn’t ever been married, either, although, to be sure, I wasn’t exactly a virgin. It wasn’t that I had anything against marriage. It was only that the life of a sci-rom hack wasn’t what you would call exactly financially stable, and also the fact that I hadn’t ever come across the woman I wanted to spend my life with…or, to quote Rachel, “not yet.”

  I tried to keep my mind off that subject. It was sure that if my finances had been precarious before, they were now close to catastrophic.

  The next morning I wondered what to do with my day, but Rachel settled it for me. She was waiting for me in the atrium. “Sit down with me, Julie,” she commanded, patting the bench beside her. “I was up late, thinking, and I think I’ve got something for you. Suppose this man Jeshua had been executed after all.”

  It wasn’t exactly the greeting I had been hoping for, nor was it something I had given a moment’s thought to, either. But I was glad enough to sit next to her in that pleasant little garden, with the gentled early sun shining down on us through the translucent shades. “Yes?” I said noncommittally, kissing her hand in greeting.

  She took a moment before she took her hand back. “That idea opened some interesting possibilities, Julie. Jeshua would have been a martyr, you see. I can easily imagine that under those circumstances his Chrestian followers would have had a lot more staying power. They might even have grown to be really important. Judaea was always in one kind of turmoil or another around that time, anyway—there were all sorts of prophecies and rumors about messiahs and changes in society. The Chrestians might even have come to dominate all of Judaea.”

  I tried to be tactful. “There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your ancestors, Rachel. But, really, what difference would that have made?” I obviously hadn’t been tactful enough. She had turned to look at me with what looked like the beginning of a frown. I thought fast, and tried to cover myself: “On the other hand,” I went on quickly, “suppose you expanded that idea beyond Judaea.”

  It turned into a real frown, but puzzled rather than angry. “What do you mean, beyond Judaea?”

  “Well, suppose Jeshua’s Chrestian-Judaean kind of—what would you call it? Philosophy? Religion?”

  “A little of both, I’d say.”

  “Religious philosophy, then. Suppose it spread over most of the world, not just Judaea. That could be interesting.”

  “But, really, no such thing hap—”

  “Rachel, Rachel,” I said, covering her mouth with a fingertip affectionately, “we’re saying what if, remember? Every sci-rom writer is entitled to one big lie. Let’s say this is mine. Let’s say that Chrestian-Judaeanism became a world religion. Even Rome itself succumbs. Maybe the City becomes the, what do you call it, the place for the Sanhedrin of the Chrestian-Judaeans. And then what happens?”

  “You tell me,” she said, half amused, half suspicious.

  “Why, then,” I said, flexing the imagination of the trained sci-rom writer, “it might
develop like the kind of conditions you’ve been talking about in the old days in Judaea. Maybe the whole world would be splintering into factions and sects, and then they fight.”

  “Fight wars?” she asked incredulously.

  “Fight big wars. Why not? It happened in Judaea, didn’t it? And then they might keep right on fighting them, all through historical times. After all, the only thing that’s kept the world united for the past two thousand years has been the Pax Romana. Without that—Why, without that,” I went on, talking faster and making mental notes to myself as I went along, “let’s say that all the tribes of Europe turned into independent city-states. Like the Greeks, only bigger. And more powerful. And they fight, the Franks against the Vik Northmen against the Belgiae against the Kelts.”

  She was shaking her head. “People wouldn’t be so silly, Julie,” she complained.

  “How do you know that? Anyway, this is a sci-rom, dear.” I didn’t pause to see if she reacted to the “dear.” I went right on, but not failing to notice that she hadn’t objected: “The people will be as silly as I want them to be—as long as I can make it plausible enough for the fans. But you haven’t heard the best part of it. Let’s say the Chrestian-Judaeans take their religion seriously. They don’t do anything to go against the will of their god. What Yahveh said still goes, no matter what. Do you follow? That means they aren’t at all interested in scientific discovery, for instance.”

  “No, stop right there!” she ordered, suddenly indignant. “Are you trying to say that we Judaeans aren’t interested in science? That I’m not? Or my Uncle Sam? And we’re certainly Judaeans.”

  “But you’re not Chrestian Judaeans, sweet. There’s a big difference. Why? Because I say there is, Rachel, and I’m the one writing the story. So, let’s see—” I paused for thought “—all right, let’s say the Chrestians go through a long period of intellectual stagnation, and then—” I paused, not because I didn’t know what was coming next, but to build the effect. “And then along come the Olympians!”

  She gazed at me blankly. “Yes?” she asked, encouraging but vague.

  “Don’t you see it? And then this Chrestian-Judaean world, drowsing along in the middle of a pre-scientific dark age, no aircraft, no electronic broadcast, not even a printing press or a hovermachine—and it’s suddenly thrown into contact with a super-technological civilization from outer space!” She was wrinkling her forehead at me, forgetting to eat, trying to understand what I was driving at. “It’s terrible culture shock,” I explained. “And not just for the people on Earth. Maybe the Olympians come to look us over, and they see that we’re technologically backward and divided into warring nations and all that…and what do they do? Why, they turn right around and leave us! and…and that’s the end of the book!”

  She pursed her lips. “But maybe that’s what they’re doing now,” she said cautiously.

  “But not for that reason, certainly. See, this isn’t our world I’m talking about. It’s a what if world.”

  “It sounds a little far-fetched,” she said.

  I said happily, “That’s where my skills come in. You don’t understand sci-rom, sweetheart. It’s the sci-rom writer’s job to push an idea as far as it will go—to the absolute limit of credibility—to the point where if he took just one step more the whole thing would collapse into absurdity. Trust me, Rachel. I’ll make them believe it.”

  She was still pursing her pretty lips, but this time I didn’t wait for her to speak. I seized the bird of opportunity on the wing. I leaned toward her and kissed those lips, as I had been wanting to do for some time. Then I said, “I’ve got to get to a scribe, I want to get all this down before I forget it. I’ll be back when I can be, and—And until then—well, here.”

  And I kissed her again, gently, firmly, and long; and it was quite clear early in the process that she was kissing me back.

  Being next to a rental barracks had its advantages. I found a scribe to rent at a decent price, and the rental manager even let me borrow one of their conference rooms that night to dictate in. By daybreak I had the first two chapters and an outline of Sidewise to a Chrestian World down.

  Once I get that far in a book, the rest is just work. The general idea is set, the characters have announced themselves to me, it’s just a matter of closing my eyes for a moment to see what’s going to be happening and then opening them to dictate to the scribe. In this case, the scribes, plural, because the first one wore out in a few more hours and I had to employ a second, and then a third.

  I didn’t sleep at all until it was all down. I think it was fifty-two straight hours, the longest I’d worked in one stretch in years. When it was all done I left it to be fair-copied. The rental agent agreed to get it down to the shipping offices by the harbor and dispatch it by fast air to Marcus in London.

  Then at last I stumbled back to Rachel’s house to sleep. I was surprised to find that it was still dark, an hour or more before sunrise.

  Basilius let me in, looking startled as he studied my sunken eyes and unshaved face. “Let me sleep until I wake up,” I ordered. There was a journal neatly folded beside my bed, but I didn’t look at it. I lay down, turned over once, and was gone.

  When I woke up at least twelve hours had passed. I had Basilius bring me something to eat, and shave me, and when I finally got out to the atrium it was nearly sundown and Rachel was waiting for me. I told her what I’d done, and she told me about the last message from the Olympians. “Last?” I objected. “How can you be sure it’s the last?”

  “Because they said so,” she told me sadly. “They said they were breaking off communications.”

  “Oh,” I said, thinking about that. “Poor Sam,” I said, thinking about Flavius Samuelus. And she looked so doleful that I couldn’t help myself, I took her in my arms.

  Consolation turned to kissing, and when we had done quite a lot of that she leaned back, smiling at me.

  I couldn’t help what I said then, either. It startled me to hear the words come out of my mouth as I said, “Rachel, I wish we could get married.”

  She pulled back, looking at me with affection and a little surprised amusement. “Are you proposing to me?”

  I was careful of my grammar. “That was a subjunctive, sweet. I said I wished we could get married.”

  “I understood that. What I want to know is whether you’re asking me to grant your wish.”

  “No—well, hells, yes! But what I wish first is that I had the right to ask you. Sci-rom writers don’t have the most solid financial situation, you know. The way you live here—”

  “The way I live here,” she said, “is paid for by the estate I inherited from my father. Getting married won’t take it away.”

  “But that’s your estate, my darling. I’ve been poor, but I’ve never been a parasite.”

  “You won’t be a parasite,” she said softly, and I realized that she was being careful about her grammar, too.

  Which took a lot of will-power on my part. “Rachel,” I said, “I should be hearing from my editor anytime now. If this new kind of sci-rom catches on—If it’s as popular as it might be—”

  “Yes?” she prompted.

  “Why,” I said, “then maybe I can actually ask you. But I don’t know that. Marcus probably has it by now, but I don’t know if he’s read it. And then I won’t know his decision till I hear from him. And now, with all the confusion about the Olympians, that might take weeks—”

  “Julie,” she said, putting her finger over my lips, “call him up.”

  The circuits were all busy, but I finally got through—and, because it was well after lunch, Marcus was in his office. More than that, he was quite sober. “Julie, you bastard,” he cried, sounding really furious, “where the hells have you been hiding? I ought to have you whipped.”

  But he hadn’t said anything about getting the aediles after me. “Did you have a chance to read Sidewise to a Chrestian World?” I asked.

  “The what? Oh, that thing. Nah. I hav
en’t even looked at it. I’ll buy it, naturally,” he said, “but what I’m talking about is An Ass’s Olympiad. The censors won’t stop it now, you know. In fact, all I want you to do now is make the Olympian a little dumber, a little nastier—you’ve got a biggie here, Julie! I think we can get a broadcast out of it, even. So when can you get back here to fix it up?”

  “Why—Well, pretty soon, I guess, only I haven’t checked the hover timetable—”

  “Hover, hell! You’re coming back by fast plane—we’ll pick up the tab. And, oh, by the way, we’re doubling your advance. The payment will be in your account this afternoon.”

  And ten minutes later, when I unsubjunctively proposed to Rachel, she quickly and unsubjunctively accepted; and the high-speed flight to London takes nine hours, but I was grinning all the way.

  5 • The Way It Is When You’ve Got It Made

  To be a freelance writer is to live in a certain kind of ease. Not very easeful financially, maybe, but in a lot of other ways. You don’t have to go to an office every day, you get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing your very own words being read on hovers and trains by total strangers. To be a potentially bestselling writer is a whole order of magnitude different. Marcus put me up in an inn right next to the publishing company’s offices and stood over me while I turned my poor imaginary Olympian into the most doltish, feckless, unlikable being the universe had ever seen. The more I made the Olympian contemptibly comic, the more Marcus loved it. So did everyone else in the office; so did their affiliates in Kiev and Manahattan and Kalkut and half a dozen other cities all around the world, and he informed me proudly that they were publishing my book simultaneously in all of them. “We’ll be the first ones out, Julie,” he exulted. “It’s going to be a mint! Money? Well, of course you can have more money—you’re in the big time now!” And, yes, the broadcast studios were interested—interested enough to sign a contract even before I’d finished the revisions; and so were the journals, who came for interviews every minute that Marcus would let me off from correcting the proofs and posing for jacket photographs and speaking to their sales staff; and, all in all, I hardly had a chance to breathe until I was back on the high-speed aircraft to Alexandria and my bride.