Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Sam had agreed to give the bride away, and he met me at the airpad. He looked older and more tired, but resigned. As we drove to Rachel’s house, where the wedding guests were already beginning to gather, I tried to cheer him up. I had plenty of joy myself; I wanted to share it. So I offered, “At least, now you can get back to your real work.”

  He looked at me strangely. “Writing sci-roms?” he asked.

  “No, of course not! That’s good enough for me, but you’ve still got your extra-solar probe to keep you busy.”

  “Julie,” he said sadly, “where have you been lately? Didn’t you see the last Olympian message?”

  “Well, sure,” I said, offended. “Everybody did, didn’t they?” And then I thought for a moment, and, actually, it had been Rachel who had told me about it. I’d never actually looked at a journal or a broadcast. “I guess I was pretty busy,” I said lamely.

  He looked sadder than ever. “Then maybe you don’t know that they said they weren’t only terminating all their own transmissions to us, they were terminating even our own probes.”

  “Oh, no, Sam! I would have heard if they’d stopped transmitting!”

  He said patiently, “No, you wouldn’t, because the data they were sending is still on its way to us. We’ve still got a few years coming in. But that’s it. We’re out of interstellar space, Julie. They don’t want us there.”

  He broke off, peering out the window. “And that’s the way it is,” he said. “We’re here, though, and you better get inside. Rachel’s going to be tired of sitting under that canopy without you around.”

  The greatest thing of all about being a bestselling author, if you like traveling, is that when you fly around the world somebody else pays for the tickets. Marcus’s publicity department fixed up the whole thing. Personal appearances, bookstore autographings, college lectures, broadcasts, publishers’ meetings, receptions—we were kept busy for a solid month, and it made a hell of a fine honeymoon.

  Of course any honeymoon would have been wonderful as long as Rachel was the bride, but without the publishers bankrolling us we might not have visited six of the seven continents on the way. (We didn’t bother with Polaris Australis—nobody there but penguins.) And we took time for ourselves along the way, on beaches in Hindia and the islands of Han, in the wonderful shops of Manahattan and a dozen other cities of the Western Continents—we did it all.

  When we got back to Alexandria the contractors had finished the remodeling of Rachel’s villa—which, we had decided, would now be our winter home, though our next priority was going to be to find a place where we could spend the busy part of the year in London. Sam had moved back in and, with Basilius, greeted us formally as we came to the door.

  “I thought you’d be in Rome,” I told him, once we were settled and Rachel had gone to inspect what had been done with her baths.

  “Not while I’m still trying to understand what went wrong,” he said. “The research is going on right here; this is where we transmitted from.”

  I shrugged and took a sip of the Falernian wine Basilius had left for us. I held the goblet up critically: a little cloudy, I thought, and in the vat too long. And then I grinned at myself, because a few weeks earlier I would have been delighted at anything so costly. “But we know what went wrong,” I told him reasonably. “They decided against us.”

  “Of course they did,” he said, “but why? I’ve been trying to work out just what messages were being received when they broke off communications.”

  “Do you think we said something to offend them?”

  He scratched the age spot on his bald head, staring at me, then he sighed. “What would you think, Julius?”

  “Well, maybe so,” I admitted. “What messages were they?”

  “I’m not sure. It took a lot of digging. The Olympians, you know, acknowledged receipt of each message by repeating the last hundred and forty groups—”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, they did. The last message they acknowledged was a history of Rome. Unfortunately, it was six hundred and fifty thousand words long.”

  “So you have to read the whole history?”

  “Not just read it, Julie; we have to try to figure out what might have been in it that wasn’t in any previous message. We’ve had two or three hundred researchers collating every previous message, and the only thing that was new was some of the social data. We were transmitting census figures—so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freedmen, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, “Paulus Magnus—I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan—pointed out that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”

  I waited for him to go on. “Yes?” I said encouragingly.

  He shrugged. “Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got it on his mind a lot.”

  “I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”

  “Oh,” he said, “there are a thousand theories. There was some health data, too, and some people think the Olympians might have suddenly got worried about some new microorganism killing them off. Or we weren’t polite enough. Or maybe, who knows, there was some sort of power struggle among them, and the side that came out on top just didn’t want any more new races in their community.”

  “And we don’t know yet which it was?”

  “It’s worse than that, Julie,” he told me somberly. “I don’t think we ever will find out what it was that made them decide they didn’t want to have anything to do with us;” and in that, too, Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus was a very intelligent man. Because we never have.

  CRITICALITY

  Life has always been stressful. Even when our ancestors were hunting and gathering, there was pressure to bring home the bacon or the berries or something else to eat. But modern life, we are constantly told by sociologists and psychologists, is much more stressful than life even a century ago.

  The people in “Criticality” have to deal with another kind of pressure, but as Frederik Pohl has illustrated in numberless stories, people are adaptable. The dictum Judge not lest you be judged has been thrown out the window in the intriguing New York of “Criticality,” a story published in 1984.

  In this world, judging—or more properly, rating things—is what it’s all about, from the neatness of someone’s clothing…to the performance of the president. While such a system might seem petty, to the people in the story, it matters more than you can imagine.

  The night I met Arne Kastle the computer dating service had turned up a tall blonde named Marian for me. We flipped a coin to decide who decided where to go. I won. That is, I got the privilege of making the decision. I know there are some people who would look at that a different way. They would figure that if you don’t make the decision you aren’t to blame if it turns out bad, so that winning that toss is actually a kind of loss. I don’t agree. As I see it, you look better if you’re the one that takes the initiative. Anyway, I had made my mind up ahead of time that I would choose going to the Tom-a-Hawk Inn in Coney Island, and I’d been there often enough before to feel pretty sure it would score high with her. I was at least partly right. “That’s a good nine for originality,” she conceded, tapping her lower lip thoughtfully. “But I don’t know about convenience. I’d say only a three.”

  “It’s a long trip,” I agreed and added that she was close to losing a point for grooming since she had smudged her lipstick. That was risky. It’s the sort of thing that can antagonize them, but I knew I was a certain ten for grooming anyway. I’d spent an hour with the hair blower and the cuticle sticks and everything else, and if she tried to downrate me on any of that she’d just make a fool of herself.

  So, feeling satisfied with the way the opening gambits had gone. I handed her through the turnstiles and we took the long train ride through Brooklyn. Apart from the bothersome showing of papers at the checkpoints at the tunnel and Fort Hamilton Parkway it was a pleasa
nt enough journey. Computer dating doesn’t really let you know a person. We passed the time enjoyably exploring each other. When we came aboveground and the noise level dropped I took my box off my shoulder. “Would you like a little music?” I asked, turning it on. As the first sounds came through I pursed my lips, then nodded. “It’s Mahler’s First Symphony, of course. I’ve always thought it was a little overblown, but some of the themes are lovely—or perhaps you don’t care for the late romantics?” She had put “classical music” on her database for the service, and it had taken only a few minutes with the program guides to memorize the listings for that evening. But Marian had been into the guides, too.

  “That’s Mehta conducting, isn’t it?” she said deprecatingly. “He never understood Mahler, did he? But you can’t deny the Philharmonic has a first-rate wind section.” She closed her eyes for a moment, satisfied with the way she had performed so far, and I studied her carefully. Her figure was good—eight, at least—and she had thrown her shoulders back cleverly to make the most of it. I thought her eyes a bit too close together, but had to admit she had made an effort to widen them with eye shadow. Annoyingly, I couldn’t identify her perfume. It was certainly not one of the standard reliables that always call for a five or a six; she’d taken a chance with something offbeat—rather tropical and jungly; if it didn’t become tiresome over the evening I would have to give it perhaps a nine. “On the other hand, Wilbert,” she said without opening her eyes, “the Cardinals are in town. The game ought to be starting about the time this symphony’s over—shall we switch stations then?” That was a nice try, since I had listed “sports” for the dating service—but actually I was more into football and ice hockey. I let it slide, though, and when we got to the end of the line and the conductor came through with the Won’t You Tell Us How You Enjoyed Your Ride? folders, I was charmed to see that she handed hers over to me to fill out along with my own. The computer service doesn’t list “docility” in its after-date checklist, but I consider it an important constituent of the “good personality?” entry, so she had earned at least four points there already.

  The peacekeeping forces at the Coney Island station don’t worry much about young couples on a Saturday night. They waved us through with hardly a glance at our papers. There was a cab right there, and in a moment we were at our hotel.

  The Tom-a-Hawk is an old hotel, but it was completely refurbished by the Apache Nation’s hotel chain when they took it over. It advertises the fastest check-ins in the business. If you and your date are not on your way to your room within seven minutes after reaching the registration counter you get a pretty little feathered hatchet, which is supposed to be exchangeable for two complimentary Bloated Marys in the rooftop bar. Our time was just over five minutes. No hatchet. But we were in plenty of time for the Happy Hour.

  The room was a six for size of bed, a nine for the view over the Atlantic, but only about a four for elegance. The furniture had not all been replaced by the Apache Nation. Marian disappeared into the bathroom to freshen her makeup, and while she was gone I rumpled the bed so the night maid would think we had been in it. When Marian came out she glanced approvingly at the bed, smiled and took my arm, turning me so that we faced the wall mirror. “I think we’ll do, Wilbert,” she said, studying our reflection. I was less sure. Marian was quite tall and blond. Very good-looking, really, but she was so fair that she made my light brown hair and medium complexion seem rather sallow. I was surprised that she had said that and, as we made our way up to the Sachem’s Nest on the top floor, I was thinking Marian would not, after all, score very high for empathy. But then, while we were waiting for the hostess to seat us, she snuggled right up to me, slouching a little so that she could look up into my face. It was an endearing touch. A lot of dates are far more interested in their own appearance than in making their escort look good. For that, a ten.

  Then, as we were going to our table, a soldier in the uniform of the peace-keeping force lurched while stepping from the moving outer rim to the stationary inner core and bumped right into Marian. Although I did not yet know his name, it was Arne Kastle. “’Scuse me, lady,” he said, with an admiring look. “I guess I’m not used to this high-tech stuff, eh?” And ten minutes later, when I happened to glance behind me, there he was, staring at her.

  A “Bloated Mary” turns out to be a kind of vanilla milkshake with grain alcohol added. It is passed under a broiler to give it a sort of baked-Alaska top, then served in a scooped out corncob. (They call it a “maize” cob.) It is a pretty small drink for the money—perhaps because their punctuality isn’t all that reliable, so they keep the freebies small. The purchased ones are no bigger. One round of Bloated Marys went fast, and it was while I was looking for the waitress to order another that I saw the soldier again.

  I had chosen three good topics of conversation—childhood memories; sports; and dream vacations—but one of the things I always score high on is going with the flow. I changed the subject without a hitch. “They’re SasPeace,” I told her. “I watched them parade at the changing of the guard yesterday on television. They were very colorful, although the Ghurkas marched better. The Saskatchewan detachment will be here for six months, then they’ll be relieved by one of the other occupying powers—”

  “Wilbert,” she said gently, “I know all that.” A head-on confrontation! A very risky maneuver, so early in a date, but she carried it off marvelously. “I think they look funny in those soldier suits,” she laughed. “Don’t you suppose they envy you terribly?”

  Actually they did look funny, because the Ghurkas they relieved averaged about five feet four and the new troops hadn’t yet been given a new issue of uniforms. I decided to overlook it. Besides, we were coming around to some interesting views as the bar turned. “Look,” I said. “That lighted bridge—it’s the Verrazzano. Isn’t it pretty? And just beyond it you can see in the distance the skyline of Manhattan.”

  “And on this side,” she said, “is that sandy-haired Canadian soldier. He’s coming over here, Wilbert.”

  Indeed he was. His eyes were on Marian, but he spoke to me. “Sir,” he said, “do you mind if I ask the lady for a dance?”

  That could have been a really tricky situation. A lot of dates would have handled it badly. Marian was very good. She simply looked at me to see how I felt, read my expression correctly and gave a slight nod. “What’s your name?” I asked the soldier.

  “Arne Kastle, sir.”

  “Marian, may I present Arne? Arne, Marian. Have a nice dance.” I watched them step back onto the dance floor with a certain feeling of pride; I’d at least matched Marian’s cool handling of the incident!

  By the time she came back they were getting ready to give out the door prizes and discount coupons. I forgot all about Arne Kastle in the excitement. When it was over and Marian and I had won a two-for-one shore dinner in the Tom-a-Hawk Inn’s Lobster Lounge on the Boardwalk, I happened to glance toward his table. All four of the Canadian soldiers were gone.

  I wasn’t surprised. The peacekeeping forces have no authority in extraterritorial enclaves like the Tom-a-Hawk hotels or their rival Saudi chain. They only come in off-duty hours, to eye the tourists. I commented to Marian, “I guess they’ve gone back to their barracks.”

  She looked up from where she was counting our prizes, discount certificates for the souvenir shops and beauty salon and rolls of complimentary coins for the dollar slot machines in the casino. “Who?” she asked.

  “The SasPeace soldiers. They’re gone. How was he, by the way?”

  She leaned back, tapping one of the discount certificates against her teeth. “Oh—overall, maybe a seven. Not much makeout. He held me nicely while we danced, not too tight, not too loose, and he chatted me up pretty well. But he didn’t ask for my phone number.” I only smiled, although I was surprised—a seven? Sounded like a marginal five or six to me. “Anyway,” she said, “the two-for-one shore dinner is only good if we get there in the next thirty minutes, and the dolla
rs have to be played tonight—shouldn’t we get going?”

  By then I knew I had lucked in. As I rose and helped her with her chair I was confident that this weekend was going to be special.

  Indeed it was. I found my companion inventive and responsive and physically very enjoyable. She was quite beautiful, with her suntanned skin and fair complexion, almost like one of those bikinied Scandinavian tourists who throng our beaches. By the time we were on the return train Sunday night I knew I would have to put this weekend well up in the top ten for the whole year. When she shyly handed me her How Did I Rate With You? card as our train dipped into the tunnel for Manhattan I had no hesitation in awarding her four tens, and nothing below a six in any category. I almost thought of making a private date with her for some other weekend. However, that would have verged on a commitment and I knew neither of us wanted that. So I said good night to her at the Twenty-third Street station, just where we had met, regretting—but accepting—the fact that we would probably never see each other again.

  Of course, I never thought I’d see Arne Kastle again, either, and I was surely wrong about that.

  He turned up in my apartment when it was full of police, and at first I didn’t notice him—what was one more uniform among many? Then I perceived that his was Peacekeeper green instead of police blue, and then I placed the face. “Oh,” I said, “you’re the soldier. How did you find me?”

  “I checked your registration at the hotel,” he said, glancing around. The police were spreading fingerprint powder and making notes and calling back to the precinct on their hand radios. “It looks like I came at a bad time.”