Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Well, this time next month I probably won’t. They even took out the Coke machine.”

  Boccanegra sat in thoughtful silence for a moment. Then he laughed out loud and waved to the grouchy waitress for more coffee.

  “You, too,” he said. “Well, let’s put our heads together and see if we can figure something out.”

  By the time of the fourth refill the waitress was muttering audibly to herself.

  The problem wasn’t just the fickle tastes of the public. It was the Martians. There simply was no room for imaginary wonders in the public attention when the real thing was getting a few hundred thousand miles closer to Earth every day. And the unfair part of it was that the Martians were so damned dull. They didn’t have spiritual counseling for the troubled billions of Earth. They didn’t warn of impending disasters, or offer hope of salvation. They just stood there in their stalls on the spaceship Algonquin 9, swilling down their scummy soup.

  “I guess you’ve gone over all your books to see if there’s anything about Martians in them?” Moore said hopefully.

  Boccanegra shook his head. “I mean, yes, I looked. Nothing.”

  “Me, too,” Moore sighed. “I’ll tell you the truth, Marco, I never for one minute considered the possibility that when we were visited by creatures from outer space they would be stupid. Say!” he cried, sitting up. “What if we say they aren’t real? I mean, they’re like the household pets of the real Eudorpans?”

  “The Great Galactics,” Boccanegra corrected eagerly. “Or maybe not pets but, you know, like false clues the superior space beings put there to throw us off the trail?”

  “And we can say we’ve had revelations about it, and—well, hell, Marco,” said Moore, suddenly facing reality. “Would anybody believe us?”

  “Has that ever made any difference?”

  “No, but really, it’d be good if we had some kind of, you know, evidence.”

  “Evidence,” Boccanegra said thoughtfully.

  “See, these Martians will actually be here in a few months, right? Next thing you know they’ll be landing, and they’ll be in a zoo or something, and people can see them for themselves. They don’t talk, but they might, you know, communicate something that could blow us right out of the water.”

  “They really are stupid, Tony.”

  “Yes, but, Marco, if they’ve got some kind of writings that we don’t know about, because all we’ve ever seen is what they sent on the TV from the spaceship—”

  “But maybe they’re degenerate,” Boccanegra cried, “so they don’t know what the stuff really means!”

  “Well,” Moore said doggedly, “there might be a real problem there, all the same. If we wait until they land…” Then he shook his head. “Scratch that. We can’t wait that long, at least I can’t. I could stall the creditors for maybe a month or two, but the spaceship isn’t going to land till nearly Christmas.”

  “And this is only June.” Boccanegra puzzled for a moment; there had been, he was almost sure, something good they had come quite close to. But what was it?

  “How about,” said Moore, “if we found some other Martians?”

  Boccanegra frowned. “Besides the ones they’ve found, you mean? Somewhere else on Mars?”

  “Not necessarily on Mars. But the same sort of creatures, maybe on Venus, maybe on the Moon—we say they live in caves, see? So nobody’s seen them? I mean, they do live in caves on Mars, right? There could even have been some long ago on, what’s its name, that moon of Jupiter that’s always having volcanic eruptions, only the volcanoes killed them off.”

  “Um,” said Boccanegra. “Yeah, maybe.” He was scowling in concentration, because that faint ringing of cash registers was still in his ears, only he couldn’t quite tell where it came from. “I don’t see where we get any kind of evidence that way, though,” he pointed out. “I’d like it if we had something right here on Earth about that.”

  “Okay, Antarctica! There’s a colony of them on Antarctica, or at least there used to be, but they died of cold after the continents migrated.”

  “There are people all over Antarctica, Tony. Scientific camps. Russians and Americans and everybody.”

  “Well, could they be at the bottom of the sea?”

  “They’ve got those robot submarines going down there all the time.”

  “Sure,” Moore said, improvising, “but those are all U.S. Navy or something, aren’t they? The subs have seen all the proof in the world, but the government’s covering up.”

  “That’s good,” Boccanegra said thoughtfully. “Let’s see if I’ve got the picture. There were beings like these Martians all over the solar system once. Of course, they’re not really ‘Martians.’ It’s just that the first live specimens that turned up were on Mars, all right? They’ve been on Earth, too, ever since the time the Great Galactics came—the people from Planet Theta, too,” he added quickly. “And all these years they’ve been hiding down there, exerting an influence on what has happened to the human race. It hasn’t all been good: wars, depressions—”

  “Crazy fads. Narcotics,” Moore put in.

  “Right! All the things that have gone wrong, it’s because these Martians have been willing it; they’ve degenerated and become evil. We don’t call them Martians, of course. We call them something like Emissaries, or Guardians, or—what’s a bad kind of guardian?”

  “Dead Souls,” said Moore triumphantly.

  “Sure, they’re Dead Souls. Sounds kind of Russian, but that’s not bad, either. And they’ve been in Antarctica under the ice and…Aw, no,” he said, disappointed. “It won’t work. We can’t get to Antarctica.”

  “So?”

  “So how do we get evidence that there really are Dead Souls there?”

  “I don’t really see why you keep harping on evidence,” Moore said irritably.

  “I don’t mean evidence like finding a real, live Dead Soul kind of Martian,” Boccanegra explained. “You know. We need some sort of message. Mystic drawings. Carvings. Something like the Nazco lines, or whatever they call them, or the rune stone in Minnesota. Of course,” he explained, “they wouldn’t be in any Earthly language. We work out translations. Partial translations, because we don’t give the whole thing at once; we keep translating new sections as we go along.”

  “We get the key from Planet Theta in a trance,” Moore said helpfully.

  “Or astral projection,” Boccanegra nodded, “from the Great Galactics.” He thought for a moment, and then said wistfully, “But it would be better if we had something to take photographs of. I always put photographs in my books; they really make a difference, Tony.”

  “Maybe we could crack open some rocks, like Richard Shaver? And find mystic drawings in the markings?”

  “I don’t like to repeat what anybody else has done,” Boccanegra said virtuously. “And I don’t know where Shaver got the rocks, either. Maybe in a cave, or—”

  He stopped in midsentence, the ringing of the cash bells now loud and clear. They stared at each other.

  “A cave,” Moore whispered.

  “Not under the ocean. Under the ground! Tony! Are there any caves under the Retreat?”

  “Not a one,” Moore said regretfully. “I didn’t think of that when I bought the tract. But, listen, there are millions of caves all over. All we have to do is find one big one with a lot of passages no one ever goes into—”

  “There are lots right along the Mississippi River,” Boccanegra chimed in. “There’s even the Mammoth Cave, or Carlsbad—why, there are some in Pennsylvania that haven’t even been explored much.”

  “And then maybe I can say I’ve seen the carvings while I was in astral projection—”

  “And then I can actually go there and discover them and take pictures!” Boccanegra finished triumphantly. “I wouldn’t say where they came from at first—”

  “—until we got a chance to put the drawings there—”

  “—and nobody would argue, because everybody knows you and I ha
ve never worked together—”

  “—and they’d be kind of like Shaver’s Deros—”

  “—only not deranged robots; they’ll look kind of like the Martians, because they’re the same Dead Souls, and they mess everything up for humanity because they’re evil—”

  “And we’ll split the money!” Moore cried. “You do your books. I’ll do the Retreats. Maybe along about Labor Day you and I can have a public reconciliation, submerging our old differences because now we’ve discovered this ultimate reality not even we suspected before—”

  “—and I can come to the Retreat—”

  “And, sure, you can have black robes,” Moore said generously. “Marco, it’s doable! The good old days are coming back, for sure!”

  The two men smiled at each other, their minds racing. Then Moore said, “What about the ‘Today’ show? That’d be a great place to start, if you can get in.”

  Boccanegra pursed his lips. Thank heaven he’d sweetened the receptionist; she’d let him in, probably, and then he could just walk in on the booking woman; then it would just be a matter of how fast he could talk. “At least fifty-fifty,” he estimated, “if I get back to NBC before the offices close.”

  “And I’ll go right down to the library and start looking up caves,” Moore said. “And we don’t want to be seen too much together, so what do you say we just get together for a minute later on tonight, say about seven?”

  “Lobby of the Grand Hyatt,” Boccanegra agreed. He clapped his hands imperiously at the waitress, sulking by the kitchen door. She came over and dropped the check in front of him.

  “I’ll get the tip,” Moore offered, pulling out a handful of silver. Boccanegra, back in character, merely inclined his head in silent agreement, although inside he was marking up the mental ledger: $9.50 for the pastrami sandwiches, and only five quarters for the tip; next time they would eat in a better place and he would take care of the tip. As he waited for the cashier to fill out the slip on the one remaining valid credit card he possessed, Boccanegra said suddenly, “My cane!” He hurried back to the table before the waitress got there and picked up two of the quarters. Then he rejoined Anthony Makepeace Moore at the door and the two prophets went out into the world they were about to conquer.

  THE GOLD AT THE STARBOW’S END

  Anyone who was old enough to understand the politics that ended NASA’s lunar program is quite aware of the constant tug-of-war between those who have a desperate desire to explore the unknown and those who feel that exploring the unknown is a waste of time and money.

  “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” is about many things. It is at least partly about the conflict between the needs of science and the exigencies of balancing a budget, but that’s just the beginning. Here is wild adventure of a most unexpected kind and irony piled upon irony.

  A finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards when first published in 1972, this extravagantly original novella remains as remarkable and poignant today as it was when it first appeared.

  Constitution One

  LOG OF LT.-COL. SHEFFIELD N. JACKMAN, U.S.A.F., commanding U.S. Starship Constitution, Day 40.

  All’s well, friends. Thanks to Mission Control for the batch of personal messages. We enjoyed the concert you beamed us, in fact we recorded most of it so we can play it over again when communication gets hairy.

  We are now approaching the six-week point in our expedition to Alpha Centauri, Planet Aleph, and now that we’ve passed the farthest previous manned distance from Earth we’re really beginning to feel as if we’re on our way. Our latest navigation check confirms Mission Control’s plot, and we estimate we should be crossing the orbit of Pluto at approximately 1631 hours, ship time, of Day 40, which is today. Letski has been keeping track of the time dilation effect, which is beginning to be significant now that we are traveling about some 6 percent of the speed of light, and says this would make it approximately a quarter of two in the morning your time, Mission Control. We voted to consider that the “coastal waters” mark. From then on we will have left the solar system behind and thus will be the first human beings to enter upon the deeps of interstellar space. We plan to have a ceremony. Letski and Ann Becklund have made up an American flag for jettisoning at that point, which we will do through the Number Three survey port, along with the prepared stainless-steel plaque containing the president’s commissioning speech. We are also throwing in some private articles for each of us. I am contributing my Air Academy class ring.

  Little change since previous reports. We are settling down nicely to our routine. We finished up all our post-launch checks weeks ago, and as Dr. Knefhausen predicted we began to find time hanging heavy on our hands. There won’t be much to keep us busy between now and when we arrive at the planet Alpha-Aleph that is really essential to the operating of the spaceship. So we went along with Kneffie’s proposed recreational schedule, using the worksheets prepared by the NASA Division of Flight Training and Personnel Management. At first (I think the boys back in Indianapolis are big enough to know this!) it met with what you might call a cool reception. The general consensus was that this business of learning number theory and the calculus of statement, which is what they handed us for openers, was for the birds. We figured we weren’t quite desperate enough for that yet, so we fooled around with other things. Ann and Will Becklund played a lot of chess. Dot Letski began writing a verse adaptation of War and Peace. The rest of us hacked around with the equipment, and making astronomical observations and gabbing. But all that began to get tiresome pretty fast, just as Kneffie said it would at the briefings. We talked about his idea that the best way to pass time in a spaceship was learning to get interested in mathematical problems—no mass to transport, no competitive element to get tempers up and all that. It began to make sense. So now Letski is in his tenth day of trying to find a formula for primes, and my own dear Flo is trying to prove Goldbach’s Conjecture by means of the theory of congruences. (This is the girl who two months ago couldn’t add up a laundry list!) It certainly passes the time.

  Medically, we are all fit. I will append the detailed data on our blood pressures, pulses, etc., as well as the tape from the rocket and navigating systems readouts. I’ll report again as scheduled. Take care of Earth for us—we’re looking forward to seeing it again, in a few years!

  Washington One

  There was a lull in the urban guerrilla war in Washington that week. The chopper was able to float right in to the South Lawn of the White House—no sniper fire, no heat-seeking missiles, not even rock-throwing. Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen stared suspiciously at the knot of weary-looking pickets in their permitted fifty yards of space along the perimeter. They didn’t look militant, probably Gay Lib or, who knew what, maybe nature-food or single-tax; at any rate no rocks came from them, only a little disorganized booing as the helicopter landed. Knefhausen bowed to Herr Omnes sardonically, hopped nimbly out of the chopper and got out of the way as it took off again, which it did at once. He didn’t trouble to run to the White House. He strolled. He did not fear these simple people, even if the helicopter pilot did. Also he was not really eager to keep his appointment with the President.

  The ADC who frisked him did not smile. The orderly who conducted him to the West Terrace did not salute. No one relieved him of the dispatch case with his slides and papers, although it was heavy. You could tell right away when you were in the doghouse, he thought, ducking his head from the rotor blast as the pilot circled the White House to gain altitude before venturing back across the spread-out city.

  It had been a lot different in the old days, he thought with some nostalgia. He could remember every minute of those old days. It was right here, this portico, where he had stood before the world’s press and photographers to tell them about the Alpha Aleph Project. He had seen his picture next to the president’s on all the front pages, watched himself on the TV newscasts, talking about the New Earth that would give America an entire colonizable planet four light-years away. He remembered t
he launch at the Cape, with a million and a half invited guests from all over the world: foreign statesmen and scientists eating their hearts out with envy, American leaders jovial with pride. The orderlies saluted then, all right. His lecture fees had gone clear out of sight. There was even talk of making him the vice presidential candidate in the next election—and it could have happened, too, if the election had been right then, and if there hadn’t been the problem of his being born in another country.

  Now it was all different. He was taken up in the service elevator. It wasn’t so much that Knefhausen minded for his own sake, he told himself, but how did the word get out that there was trouble? Was it only the newspaper stories? Was there a leak?

  The Marine orderly knocked once on the big door of the Cabinet room, and it was opened from inside.

  Knefhausen entered.

  No “Come in, Dieter, boy, pull up a pew.” No vice president jumping up to grab his arm and slap his back. His greeting was thirty silent faces turned toward him, some reserved, some frankly hostile. The full Cabinet was there, along with half a dozen department heads and the president’s personal action staff, and the most hostile face around the big oval table was the president’s own.

  Knefhausen bowed. An atavistic hankering for lyceum-cadet jokes made him think of clicking his heels and adjusting a monocle, but he didn’t have a monocle and didn’t yield to impulses like that. He merely took his place standing at the foot of the table and, when the president nodded, said, “Good morning, gentlemen, and ladies. I assume you want to see me about the stupid lies the Russians are spreading about the Alpha-Aleph program.”

  Roobarooba, they muttered to each other. The president said in his sharp tenor, “So you think they are just lies?”

  “Lies or mistakes, Mr. President, what’s the difference? We are right and they are wrong, that’s all.”

  Roobaroobarooba. The secretary of state looked inquiringly at the president, got a nod and said: “Dr. Knefhausen, you know I’ve been on your team a long time and I don’ want to disagree with any statement you care to make, but are you so sure about that? They’s some mighty persuasive figures comin’ out of the Russians.”