Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Don’t read us that just now,” said the president harshly. “We’ll hear it, but first there is something else. I want you to tell this group the full story of the Alpha-Aleph project.”

  “The full story, Mr. President?” Knefhausen hung on gamely. “I see. You wish me to begin with the very beginning, when first we realized at the observatory that we had located a planet—”

  “No, Knefhausen. Not the cover story. The truth.”

  “Mr. President!” cried Knefhausen in sudden agony. “I must inform you that I protest this premature disclosure of vital—”

  “The truth, Knefhausen!” shouted the president. It was the first time Knefhausen had ever heard him raise his voice. “It won’t go out of this room, but you must tell them everything. Tell them why it is that the Russians were right and we lied! Tell them why we sent the astronauts on a suicide mission, ordered to land on a planet that we knew all along did not exist!”

  Constitution Three

  Shef Jackman’s journal, Day 130.

  It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I’m sorry for being such a lousy correspondent. I was in the middle of a thirteen-game chess series with Eve Barstow—she was playing the Bobby Fischer games, and I was playing in the style of Reshevsky—and Eve said something that made me think of old Kneffie, and that, of course, reminded me I owed you a transmission. So here it is.

  In my own defense, though, it isn’t only that we’ve been busy with other things. It takes a lot of power for these chatty little letters. Some of us aren’t so sure they’re worthwhile. The farther we get the more power we need to accumulate for a transmission. Right now it’s not so bad yet, but, well, I might as well tell you the truth, right? Kneffie made us promise that. Always tell the truth, he said, because you’re part of the experiment, and we need to know what you’re doing, all of it. Well, the truth in this case is that we were a little short of disposable power for a while because Jim Barstow needed quite a lot for research purposes. You will probably wonder what the research is, but we have a rule that we don’t criticize, or even talk about, what anyone else is doing until they’re ready, and he isn’t ready yet. I take the responsibility for the whole thing, not just the power drain but the damage to the ship. I said he could go ahead with it.

  We’re going pretty fast now, and to the naked eye the stars fore and aft have blue-shifted and red-shifted nearly out of sight. It’s funny, but we haven’t been able to observe Alpha-Aleph yet, even with the disc obscuring the star. Now, with the shift to the blue, we probably won’t see it at all until we slow down. We can still see the Sun, but I guess what we’re seeing is ultraviolet when it’s home. Of course the relativistic frequency shifts mean we need extra compensating power in our transmissions, which is another reason why, all in all, I don’t think I’ll be writing home every Sunday, between breakfast and the baseball game, the way I ought to!

  But the mission’s going along fine. The “personal relationships” keep on being just great. We’ve done a little experimental research there too that wasn’t on the program, but it’s all okay. No problems. Worked out great. I think maybe I’ll leave out some of the details, but we found some groovy ways to do things. Oh, hell, I’ll give you one hint: Dot Letski says I should tell you to get the boys at Mission Control to crack open two of the stripey pills and one of the Blue Devils, mix them with a quarter-teaspoon of black pepper and about 2 cc of the conditioner fluid from the recycling system. Serve over orange sherbet, and oh boy. After the first time we had it Flo made a crack about its being “seminal” which I thought was a private joke, but it broke everybody up. Dot figured it out for herself weeks ago. We wondered how she got so far so fast with War and Peace until she let us into the secret. Then we found out what it could do for you, both emotionally and intellectually: the creative over the arousing, as they say.

  Ann and Jerry Letski used up their own recreational programs early (real early—they were supposed to last the whole voyage!), so they swapped microfiches, on the grounds that each was interested in an aspect of causality and they wanted to see what the other side had to offer. Now Ann is deep into people like Kant and Carnap, and Ski is sore as a boil because there’s no Achillea millefolium in the hydroponics garden. Needs the stalks for his researches, he says. He is making do with flipping his rouble to generate hexagrams; in fact, we all borrow it now and then, but it’s not the right way. Honestly, Mission Control, he’s right. Some thought should have been given to our other needs, besides sex and number theory. We can’t even use chop bones from the kitchen wastes, because there isn’t any kitchen waste. I know you couldn’t think of everything, but still—Anyway, we improvise as best we can, and mostly well enough.

  Let’s see, what else? Did I send you Jim Barstow’s proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture? Turned out to be very simple once he had devised his multiplex parity analysis idea. Mostly we don’t fool with that sort of stuff anymore, though. We got tired of number theory after we’d worked out all the fun parts, and if there is any one thing that we all work on (apart from our private interests) it is probably the calculus of statement. We don’t do it systematically, only as time permits from our other activities, but we’re all pretty well convinced that a universal grammar is feasible enough, and it’s easy enough to see what that leads to. Flo has done more than most of us. She asked me to put in that Boole, Venn and all those old people were on the wrong track, but she thinks there might be something to Leibniz’s “calculus ratiocinator” idea. There’s a J. W. Swanson suggestion that she likes for multiplexing languages. (Jim took off from it to work out his parity analysis.) The idea is that you devise a double-vocabulary language. One set of meanings is conveyed, say, by phonemes—that is, the shape of the words themselves. Another set is conveyed by pitch. It’s like singing a message, half of it conveyed by the words, the other half by the tune. Like rock music. You get both sets of meanings at the same time. She’s now working on third, fourth, and nth dimensions so as to convey many kinds of meanings at once, but it’s not very fruitful so far (except for using sexual intercourse as one of the communications media). Most of the senses available are too limited to convey much. By the way, we checked out all the existing “artificial languages” as best we could—put Will Becklund under hypnotic regression to recapture the Esperanto he’d learned as a kid, for instance. But they were all blind alleys. Didn’t even convey as much as standard English or French.

  Medical readouts follow. We’re all healthy. Eve Barstow gave us a medical check to make sure. Ann and Ski had little rough spots in a couple of molars so she filled them for the practice more than because they needed it. I don’t mean practice in filling teeth; she wanted to try acupuncture instead of procaine. Worked fine.

  We all have this writing-to-Daddy-and-Mommy-from-Camp-Tanglewood feeling and we’d like to send you some samples of our home handicrafts. The trouble is there’s so much of it. Everybody has something he’s personally pretty pleased with, like Barstow’s proof of most of the classic math problems and my multimedia adaptation of Sur le pont d’Avignon. It’s hard to decide what to send you with the limited power available, and we don’t want to waste it with junk. So we took a vote and decided the best thing was Ann’s verse retelling of War and Peace. It runs pretty long. I hope the power holds it. I’ll transmit as much of it as I can…

  Washington Three

  Spring was well advanced in Washington. Along the Potomac the cherry blossoms were beginning to bud, and Rock Creek Park was the pale green of new leaves. Even through the whap, whap of the helicopter rotor Knefhausen could hear an occasional rattle of small-arms fire from around Georgetown, and the Molotov cocktails and tear gas from the big Water Gate apartment development at the river’s edge were steaming the sky with smoke and fumes. They never stopped, thought Knefhausen irritably. What was the good of trying to save people like this?

  It was distracting. He found himself dividing his attention into three parts—the scarred, greening landscape below; the escort fires
hips that orbited around his own chopper; and the papers on his lap. All of them annoyed him. He couldn’t keep his mind on any of them. What he liked least was the report from the Constitution. He had had to get expert help in translating what it was all about, and he didn’t like the need, and even less liked the results. What had gone wrong? They were his kids, hand-picked. There had been no hint, for instance, of hippiness in any of them, at least not past the age of twenty, and only for Ann Becklund and Florence Jackman even then. How had they got into this I Ching foolishness, and this stupid business with the Achillea millefolium, better known as the common yarrow? What “experiments”? Who started the disgustingly antiscientific acupuncture thing? How dared they depart from their programmed power budget for “research purposes,” and what were the purposes? Above all, what was the “damage to the ship”?

  He scribbled on a pad:

  With immediate effect, cut out the nonsense. I have the impression you are all acting like irresponsible children. You are letting down the ideals of our program.

  Knefhausen

  After running the short distance from the chopper pad to the shelter of the guarded White House entrance, he gave the slip to a page from the Message Center for immediate encoding and transmission to the Constitution via Goldstone, Lunar Orbiter and Farside Base. All they needed was a reminder, he persuaded himself, then they would settle down. But he was still worried as he peered into a mirror, patted his hair down, smoothed his mustache with the tip of a finger and presented himself to the president’s chief secretary.

  This time they went down, not up. Knefhausen was going to the basement chamber that had been successively Franklin Roosevelt’s swimming pool, the White House press lounge, a TV studio for taping jolly little two-shots of the President with congressmen and senators for the folks back home to see, and, now, the heavily armored bunker in which anyone trapped in the White House in the event of a successful attack from the city outside could hold out for several weeks, during which time the Fourth Armored would surely be able to retake the grounds from its bases in Maryland. It was not a comfortable room, but it was a safe one. Besides being armored against attack, it was as thoroughly soundproof, spyproof and leakproof as any chamber in the world, not excepting the Under-Kremlin or the Colorado NOROM base.

  Knefhausen was admitted and seated, while the president and a couple of others were in whispered conversation at one end of the room, and the several dozen other people present craned their necks to stare at Knefhausen.

  After a moment the president raised his head. “All right,” he said. He drank from a crystal goblet of water, looking wizened and weary, and disappointed at the way a boyhood dream had turned out: the presidency wasn’t what it had seemed to be from Muncie, Indiana. “We all know why we’re here. The government of the United States has given out information which was untrue. It did so knowingly and wittingly, and we’ve been caught at it. Now we want you to know the background, and so Dr. Knefhausen is going to explain the Alpha-Aleph project. Go ahead, Knefhausen.”

  Knefhausen stood up and walked unhurryingly to the little lectern set up for him, off to one side of the president. He opened his papers on the lectern, studied them thoughtfully for a moment with his lips pursed, and said:

  “As the president has said, the Alpha-Aleph project is a camouflage. A few of you learned this some months ago, and then you referred to it with other words. ‘Fraud.’ ‘Fake.’ Words like that. But if I may say it in French, it is not any of those words, it is a legitimate ruse de guerre. Not the guerre against our political enemies, or even against the dumb kids in the streets with their Molotov cocktails and bricks. I do not mean those wars, I mean the war against ignorance. For you see, there were certain sings—certain things we had to know for the sake of science and progress. Alpha-Aleph was designed to find them out for us.

  “I will tell you the worst parts first,” he said. “Number one, there is no such planet as Alpha-Aleph. The Russians were right. Number two, we knew this all along. Even the photographs we produced were fakes, and in the long run the rest of the world will find this out and they will know of our ruse de guerre. I can only hope that they will not find out too soon, for if we are lucky and keep the secret for a while, then I hope we will be able to produce good results to justify what we have done. Number three, when the Constitution reaches Alpha Centauri there will be no place for them to land, no way to leave their spacecraft, no sources of raw materials which they might be able to use to make fuel to return, no nothing but the star and empty space. This fact has certain consequences. The Constitution was designed with enough hydrogen fuel capacity for a one-way flight, plus maneuvering reserve. There will not be enough for them to come back, and the source they had hoped to tap, namely the planet Alpha-Aleph, does not exist, so they will not come back. Consequently they will die there. Those are the bad things to which I must admit.”

  There was a sighing murmur from the audience. The president was frowning absently to himself. Knefhausen waited patiently for the medicine to be swallowed, then went on.

  “You ask, then, why have we done this thing? Condemning eight young people to their death? The answer is simple: knowledge. To put it with other words, we must have the basic scientific knowledge we need to protect the free world. You are all familiar, I si—I believe, with the known fact that basic scientific advances have been very few these past ten years and more. Much R&D. Much technology. Much applications. But in the years since Einstein, or better since Weizsäcker, very little basic.

  “But without the new basic knowledge, the new technology must soon stop developing. It will run out of steam, you see.

  “Now I must tell you a story. It is a true scientific story, not a joke; I know you do not want jokes from me at this time. There was a man named de Bono, a Maltese, who wished to investigate the process of creative thinking. There is not very much known about this process, but he had an idea how he could find something out. So he prepared for an experiment a room that was stripped of all furniture, with two doors, one across from the other. You go into one door, you go through the room, you walk out of the other. He put at the door that was the entrance some material—two flat boards, some ropes. And he got as his subjects some young children. Now he said to the children, ‘Now, this is a game we will play. You must go through this room and out of the other door, that is all. If you do that, you win. But there is one rule. You must not touch the floor with your feet or your knees or with any part of your body or your clothing. We had here a boy,’ he said, ‘who was very athletic and walked across on his hands, but he was disqualified. You must not do that. Now go, and whoever does it fastest will win some chocolates.’

  “So he took away all of the children but the first one and, one by one, they tried. There were ten or fifteen of them, and each of them did the same thing. Some it took longer to figure out, some figured it out right away, but it always was the same trick. They sat down on the floor, they took the boards and the ropes, and they tied one board to each foot and they walked across the room like on skis. The fastest one thought of the trick right away and was across in a few seconds. The slowest took many minutes. But it was the same trick for all of them, and that was the first part of the experiment.

  “Now this Maltese man, de Bono, performed the second part of the experiment. It was exactly like the first, with one difference. He did not give them two boards. He only gave them one board.

  “And in the second part every child worked out the same trick, too, but it was of course a different trick. They tied the rope to the end of the single board and then they stood on it, and jumped up, tugging the rope to pull the board forward, hopping and tugging, moving a little bit at a time, and every one of them succeeded. But in the first experiment the average time to cross was maybe forty-five seconds. And in the second experiment the average time was maybe twenty seconds. With one board they did their job faster than with two.

  “Perhaps now some of you see the point. Why did not any of the
children in the first group think of this faster method of going across the room? It is simple. They looked at what they were given to use for materials and, they are like all of us, they wanted to use everything. But they did not need everything. They could do better with less, in a different way.”

  Knefhausen paused and looked around the room, savoring the moment. He had them now, he knew. It was just as it had been with the president himself, three years before. They were beginning to see the necessity of what had been done, and the pale, upturned faces were no longer as hostile, only perplexed and a little afraid.

  He went on:

  “So that is what Project Alpha-Aleph is about, gentlemen and ladies. We have selected eight of the most intelligent human beings we could find—healthy, young, very adventurous. Very creative. We played on them a nasty trick, to be sure. But we gave them an opportunity no one has ever had. The opportunity to think. To think for ten years. To think about basic questions. Out there they do not have the extra board to distract them. If they want to know something they cannot run to the library and look it up, and find that somebody has said that what they were thinking could not work. They must think it out for themselves.

  “So in order to make this possible we have practiced a deception on them, and it will cost them their lives. All right, that is tragic, yes. But if we take their lives we give them in exchange immortality.

  “How do we do this? Trickery again, gentlemen and ladies. I do not say to them. ‘Here, you must discover new basic approaches to science and tell them to us.’ I camouflage the purpose, so that they will not be distracted even by that. We have told them that this is recreational, to help them pass the time. This too is a ruse de guerre. The ‘recreation’ is not to help them make the trip; it is the whole purpose of the trip.