Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “They are false, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Ah, well, Dr. Knefhausen. I might be inclined to take your word for it, but they’s others might not. Not cranks or malcontents, Dr. Knefhausen, but good, decent people. Do you have any evidence for such as them?”

  “With your permission, Mr. President?” The president nodded again, and Knefhausen unlocked his dispatch case and drew out a slim sheaf of slides. He handed them to a major of Marines, who looked to the president for approval and then did what Knefhausen told him. The room lights went down and, after some fiddling with the focus, the first slide was projected over Knefhausen’s head. It showed a huge array of Y-shaped metal posts, stretching away into the distance of a bleak, powdery-looking landscape.

  “This picture is our radio telescope on Farside, the Moon,” he said. “It is never visible from the Earth, because that portion of the Moon’s surface is permanently turned away from us, for which reason we selected it for the site of the telescope. There is no electrical interference of any kind. The instrument is made up of thirty-three million separate dipole elements, aligned with an accuracy of one part in several million. Its actual size is an approximate circle eighteen miles across, but by virtue of the careful positioning its performance is effectively equal to a telescope with a diameter of some twenty-six miles. Next slide, please.”

  Click. The picture of the huge RT display swept away and was replaced by another similar—but visibly smaller and shabbier—construction.

  “This is the Russian instrument, gentlemen. And ladies. It is approximately one quarter the size of ours in diameter. It has less than one-tenth as many elements, and our reports—they are classified, but I am informed this gathering is cleared to receive this material? Yes—our reports indicate the alignment is very crude. Even terrible, you could say.

  “The difference between the two instruments in information-gathering capacity is roughly a hundred to one, in our favor. Lights, please.

  “What this means,” he went on smoothly, smiling at each of the persons around the table in turn as he spoke, “is that if the Russians say ‘no’ and we say ‘yes,’ bet on ‘yes.’ Our radio telescope can be trusted. Theirs cannot.”

  The meeting shifted uneasily in its chairs. They were as anxious to believe Knefhausen as he was to convince them, but they were not sure.

  Representative Belden, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, spoke for all of them. “Nobody doubts the quality of your equipment. Especially,” he added, “since we still have bruises from the job of paying for it. But the Russians made a flat statement. They said that Alpha Centauri can’t have a planet larger than one thousand miles in diameter, or nearer than half a billion miles to the star. I have a copy of the Tass release here. It admits that their equipment is inferior to our own, but they have a statement signed by twenty-two academicians that says their equipment could not miss on any object larger or nearer than what I have said, or on any body of any kind which would be large enough to afford a landing place for our astronauts. Are you familiar with this statement?”

  “Yes, of course, I have read it—”

  “Then you know that they state positively that the planet you call ‘Alpha-Aleph’ does not exist.”

  “Yes, that is what they state.”

  “Moreover, statements from authorities at the Paris Observatory and the UNESCO Astrophysical Center at Trieste, and from England’s Astronomer Royal, all say that they have checked and confirmed their figures.”

  Knefhausen nodded cheerfully. “That is correct, Representative Belden. They confirm that if the observations are as stated, then the conclusions drawn by the Soviet installation at Novy Brezhnevgrad on Farside naturally follow. I don’t question the arithmetic. I only say that the observations are made with inadequate equipment, and thus the Soviet astronomers have come to a false conclusion. But I do not want to burden your patience with an unsupported statement,” he added hastily as the congressman opened his mouth to speak again, “so I will tell you all there is to tell. What the Russians say is theory. What I have to counter is not merely better theory, but also objective fact. I know Alpha-Aleph is there because I have seen it! Lights again, Major! And the next slide, if you please.”

  The screen lit up and showed glaring bare white with a sprinkling of black spots, like dust. A large one appeared in the exact center of the screen, with a dozen lesser ones sprinkled around it. Knefhausen picked up a flash pointer and aimed its little arrowhead of light at the central dot.

  “This is a photographic negative,” he said, “which is to say that it is black where the actual scene is white and vice versa. Those objects are astronomical. It was taken from our Briareus Twelve satellite near the orbit of Jupiter, on its way out to Neptune fourteen months ago. The central object is the star Alpha Centauri. It was photographed with a special instrument which filters out most of the light from the star itself, electronic in nature and something like the coronascope which is used for photographing prominences on our own Sun. We hoped that by this means we might be able actually to photograph the planet Alpha-Aleph. We were successful, as you can see.” The flash pointer laid its little arrow next to the nearest small dot to the central star. “That, gentlemen, and ladies, is Alpha-Aleph. It is precisely where we predicted it from radio-telescope data.”

  There was another buzz from the table. In the dark it was louder than before. The secretary of state cried sharply, “Mr. President! Can’t we release this photograph?”

  “We will release it immediately after this meeting,” said the president.

  Roobarooba. Then the committee chairman: “Mr. President, I’m sure if you say that’s the planet we want, then it’s the planet. But others outside this country may wonder, for indeed all those dots look about alike to me. I wonder if Knefhausen could satisfy a layman’s curiosity. How do we know that’s Alpha-Aleph?”

  “Slide Number Four, please—and keep Number Three in the carriage.” The same scene, subtly different. “Note that in this picture, gentlemen, that one object, there, is in a different position. It has moved. You know that the stars show no discernible motion, of course. It has moved because this photograph was taken eight months later, as Briareus Twelve was returning from the Neptune flyby, and the planet Alpha-Aleph had revolved in its orbit. This is not theory, it is evidence; and I add that the original tapes from which the photoprint was made are stored in Goldstone, so there is no question that arises of foolishness.”

  Roobarooba, but in a higher and excited key. Gratified, Knefhausen nailed down his point. “So, Major, if you will now return to Slide Three, yes—And if you will flip back and forth, between Three and Four, as fast as you can—Thank you.” The little black dot called Alpha-Aleph bounced back and forth like a tennis ball, while all the other star points remained motionless. “This is what is called the blink comparator process, you see. I point out that if what you are looking at is not a planet, it is, excuse me, Mr. President, the damnedest funniest star you ever saw. Also it is exactly at the distance and exactly with the orbital period we specified based on the RT data. Now, are there any more questions?”

  “No, sir!” “That’s great, Kneffie!” “Clear as a cow’s ass to the stud bull.” “I think that wraps it up.” “That’ll show the Commies.”

  The president’s voice overrode them all.

  “I think we can have the lights on now, Major Merton,” he said. “Dr. Knefhausen, thank you. I’d appreciate it if you would remain nearby for a few minutes, so you can join Murray and myself in the study to check over the text of our announcement before we release these pictures.” He nodded sober dismissal to his chief science adviser and then, reminded by the happy faces of his cabinet, remembered to smile with pleasure.

  Constitution Two

  Sheffield Jackman’s log. Starship Constitution. Day 95.

  According to Letski we are now traveling at just about 15 percent of the speed of light, almost 30,000 miles per second. The fusion thrust is operating smoo
thly and well. Fuel, power, and life-support curves are sticking tight to optimum. No sweat of any kind with the ship, or, actually, with anything else.

  Relativistic effects have begun to show up as predicted. Jim Barstow’s spectral studies show the stars in front of us are showing a shift to the blue end, and the Sun and the other stars behind us are shifting to the red. Without the spectroscope you can’t see much, though. Beta Circini looks a little funny, maybe. As for the Sun, it’s still very bright—Jim logged it as minus-six magnitude a few hours ago—and as I’ve never seen it in quite that way before, I can’t tell whether the color looks bright or not. It certainly isn’t the golden yellow I associate with type GO, but neither is Alpha Centauri ahead of us, and I don’t really see a difference between them. I think the reason is simply that they are so bright that the color impressions are secondary to the brightness impressions, although the spectroscope, as I say, does show the differences. We’ve all taken turns at looking back. Naturally enough, I guess. We can still make out the Earth and even the Moon in the telescope, but it’s chancy. Ski almost got an eyeful of the Sun at full light-gathering amplitude yesterday because the visual separation is only about twelve seconds of arc now. In a few more days they’ll be too close to separate.

  Let’s see, what else?

  We’ve been having a fine time with the recreational-math program. Ann has taken to binary arithmetic like a duck to water. She’s involved in what I take to be some sort of statistical experimentation (we don’t pry too much into what the others are doing until they’re ready to talk about it), and, of all things, she demanded we produce coins to flip. Well, naturally none of us had taken any money with us! Except that it turns out two of us did. Ski had a Russian silver rouble that his mother’s uncle had given him for luck, and I found an old Philadelphia transit token in my pocket. Ann rejected my transit token as too light to be reliable, but she now spends happy hours flipping the rouble, heads or tails, and writing down the results as a series of six-place binary numbers, heads for 1 and tails for 0. After about a week my curiosity got too much so I began hinting to find out what she was doing. When I ask she says things like, “By means of the easy and the simple we grasp the laws of the whole world.” When I say that’s nice but what does she hope to grasp by flipping the coin? she says, “When the laws of the whole world are grasped, therein lies perfection.” So, as I say, we don’t press each other and I leave it there. But it passes the time.

  Kneffie would be proud of himself if he could see how our recreation keeps us busy. None of us has managed to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem yet or anything like that, but of course that’s the whole point. If we could solve the problems, we’d have used them up, and then what would we do for recreation? It does exactly what it was intended to. It keeps us mentally alert on this long and intrinsically rather dull boat-ride.

  Personal relationships? Jes’ fine, fellows, jes’ fine. A lot better than any of us really hoped, back there at the personal-hygiene briefings in Mission Control. The girls take the stripey pills every day until three days before their periods, then they take the green pills for four days, then they lay off pills for four days, then back to the stripes. There was a little embarrassed joking about it at first, but now it’s strictly routine, like brushing the teeth. We men take our red pills every day (Ski christened them “stop lights”) until our girls tell us they’re about to lay off (you know what I mean, each of our individual girls tells her husband), then we take the Blue Devil (that’s what we call the antidote) and have a hell of a time until the girls start on the stripes again. None of us thought any of this would work, you know. But it works fine. I don’t even think sex until Flo kisses my ear and tells me she’s getting ready to, excuse the expression, get in heat, and then like wow. Same with everybody. The aft chamber with the nice wide bunks we call Honeymoon Hotel. It belongs to whoever needs it, and never once have both bunks been used. The rest of the time we just sleep wherever is convenient, and nobody gets uptight about it.

  Excuse my getting personal, but you told me you wanted to know everything, and there’s not much else to tell. All systems remain optimum. We check them over now and again, but nothing has given any trouble, or even looked as though it might be thinking about giving trouble later on. And there’s absolutely nothing worth looking at outside but stars. We’ve all seen them about as much as we need to by now. The plasma jet thrums right along at our point-seven-five Gee. We don’t even hear it anymore.

  We’ve even got used to the recycling system. None of us really thought we’d get with the suction toilet, not to mention what happens to the contents, but it was only a little annoying the first few days. Now it’s fine. The treated product goes into the algae tanks, feces and urine together. The sludge from the algae goes into the hydroponic beds, but by then, of course, it’s just greeny brown vegetable matter like my father used to get out of his mulch bed. That’s all handled semiautomatically anyway, of course, so our first real contact with the system comes in the kitchen. The food we eat comes in the form of nice red tomatoes and nourishing rice pilaf and stuff like that. (We do miss animal protein a little; the frozen stores have to last a long time, so each hamburger is a special feast, and we only have them once a week or so.) The water we drink comes actually out of the air, condensed by the dehumidifiers into the reserve supply, where we get it to drink. It’s nicely aerated and chilled and tastes fine. Of course, the way it gets into the air in the first place is by being sweated out of our pores or transpired from the plants (which are irrigated direct from the treated product of the reclamation tanks), and we all know, when we stop to think of it, that every molecule of it has passed through all our kidneys forty times by now. But not directly. That’s the point. What we drink is clear sweet dew. And if it once was something else, can’t you say the same of Lake Erie?

  Well. I think I’ve gone on long enough. You’ve probably got the idea by now: We’re happy in the service, and we all thank you for giving us this pleasure cruise!

  Washington Two

  Waiting for his appointment with the president, Dr. Knefhausen reread the communique from the spaceship, chuckling happily to himself. “Happy in the service.” “Like wow.” “Kneffie would be proud of himself”—indeed Kneffie was. And proud of them, those little wonders, there! So brave. So strong.

  He took as much pride in them as if they had been his own sons and daughters, all eight of them. Everybody knew the Alpha-Aleph project was Knefhausen’s baby, but he tried to conceal from the world that, in his own mind, he spread his fatherhood to include the crew. They were the pick of the available world, and it was he who had put them where they were. He lifted his head, listening to the distant chanting from the perimeter fence where today’s disgusting exhibition of mob violence was doing its best to harass the people who were making the world go. What great lumps they were out there, with their long hair and their dirty morals. The heavens belonged only to angels, and it was Dieter von Knefhausen who had picked the angels. It was he who had established the selection procedures (and if he had done some things that were better left unmentioned to make sure the procedures worked, what of it?). It was he who had conceived and adapted the highly important recreation schedule, and above all he who had conceived the entire project and persuaded the president to make it come true. The hardware was nothing, only money. The basic scientific concepts were known; most of the components were on the shelves, it took only will to put them together. The will would not have existed if it had not been for Knefhausen, who announced the discovery of Alpha-Aleph from his radio-observatory on Farside (and gave it that name, although as everyone realized he could have called it by any name he chose, even his own) and carried on the fight for the project by every means available until the president bought it.

  It had been a hard, bitter struggle. He reminded himself with courage that the worst was still ahead. No matter. Whatever it cost, it was done, and it was worthwhile. These reports from Constitution proved it. It was going
exactly as planned, and—

  “Excuse me, Dr. Knefhausen.”

  He looked up, catapulted back from almost half a light-year away.

  “I said the president will see you now, Dr. Knefhausen,” repeated the usher.

  “Ah,” said Knefhausen. “Oh, yes, to be sure. I was deep in thought.”

  “Yes, sir. This way, sir.”

  They passed a window and there was a quick glimpse of the turmoil at the gates, picket signs used like battle-axes, a thin blue cloud of tear gas, the sounds of shouting. “King Mob is busy today,” said Knefhausen absently.

  “There’s no danger, sir. Through here, please.”

  The president was in his private study, but to Knefhausen’s surprise he was not alone. There was Murray Amos, his personal secretary, which one could understand; but there were three other men in the room. Knefhausen recognized them as the secretary of state, the Speaker of the House and, of all people, the vice-president. How strange, thought Knefhausen, for what was to have been a confidential briefing for the president alone! But he rallied quickly.

  “Excuse me, Mr. President,” he said cheerfully. “I must have understood wrong. I thought you were ready for our little talk.”

  “I am ready, Knefhausen,” said the president. The cares of his years in the White House rested heavily on him today, Knefhausen thought critically. He looked very old and very tired. “You will tell these gentlemen what you would have told me.”

  “Ah, yes, I see,” said Knefhausen, trying to conceal the fact that he did not see at all. Surely the president did not mean what his words said; therefore it was necessary to try to see what was his thought. “Yes, to be sure. Here is something, Mr. President. A new report from the Constitution! It was received by burst transmission from the Lunar Orbiter at Goldstone just an hour ago, and has just come from the decoding room. Let me read it to you. Our brave astronauts are getting along splendidly, just as we planned. They say—”