Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  So I keep busy and applaud what I can’t do. It isn’t a bad life. I have everything I need, except pride.

  Let me tell you what a typical day is like here between Sol and Centaurus. We wake up (if we have been sleeping, which some of us still do) and eat (if we are still eating, as all but Ski and, of course, Will Becklund do). The food is delicious and Florence has induced it to grow cooked and seasoned where that is desirable, so it’s no trouble to go over and pick yourself a nice poached egg or clutch of French fries. (I really prefer brioche in the mornings, but for sentimental reasons she can’t manage them.) Sometimes we ball a little or sing old campfire songs. Ski comes down for that, but not for long, and then he goes back to looking at the universe. The starbow is magnificent and appalling. It is now a band about 40° across, completely surrounding us with colored light. One can always look in the other frequencies and see ghost stars before us and behind us, but in the birthright bands the view to the front and rear is now dead black and the only light is that beautiful banded ring of powdery stars.

  Sometimes we write plays or have a little music. Shef had deduced four lost Bach piano concerti, very reminiscent of Corelli and Vivaldi, with everything going at once in the tuttis, and we’ve all adapted them for performance. I did mine on the Moog, but Ann and Shef synthesized whole orchestras. Shef’s is particularly cute. You can tell that the flautist has early emphysema and two people in the violin section have been drinking, and he’s got Toscanini conducting like a risorgimento metronome. Flo’s oldest daughter made up words and now she sings a sort of nursery-rhyme adaptation of some Buxtehude chorales; oh, I didn’t tell you about the kids. We have eleven of them now. Ann, Dot and I have one apiece, and Florence has eight. (But they’re going to let me have quadruplets next week.) They let me take care of them pretty much for the first few weeks, while they’re little, and they’re so darling.

  So mostly I spend my time taking care of the kids and working out tensor equations that Ski kindly gives me to do for him, and, I must confess it, feeling a little lonely. I would like to watch a TV quiz show over a cup of coffee with a friend! They let me do over the interior of our mobile home now and then. The other day I redid it in Pittsburgh suburban as a joke. Would you believe French windows in interstellar space? We never open them, of course, but they look real pretty with the chintz curtains and lace tiebacks. And we’ve added several new rooms for the children and their pets (Flo grew them the cutest little bunnies in the hydroponics plot).

  Well, I’ve enjoyed this chance to gossip, so will sign off now. There is one thing I have to mention. The others have decided we don’t want to get any more messages from you. They don’t like the way you try to work on our subconsciouses and all (not that you succeed, of course, but you can see that it’s still a little annoying), and so in future the dial will be set at six-six-oh, all right, but the switch will be in the “off” position. It wasn’t my idea, but I was glad to go along. I would like some slightly less demanding company from time to time, although not, of course, yours.

  Washington Five

  Once upon a time the building that was now known as DoD Temp Restraining Quarters 7—you might as well call it with the right word, “jail,” Knefhausen thought—had been a luxury hotel in the Hilton chain. The maximum security cells were in the underground levels, in what had been meeting rooms. There were no doors or windows to the outside. If you did get out of your own cell you had a flight of stairs to get up before you were at ground level, and then the guards to break through to get to the open. And then, even if there happened not to be an active siege going on at the moment, you took your chances with the roaming addicts and activists outside.

  Knefhausen did not concern himself with these matters. He did not think of escape, or at least didn’t after the first few panicky moments, when he realized he was under arrest. He stopped demanding to see the president after the first few days. There was no point in appealing to the White House for help when it was the White House that had put him here. He was still sure that if only he could talk to the president privately for a few moments he could clear everything up. But as a realist he had faced the fact that the president would never talk to him privately again.

  So he counted his blessings.

  First, it was comfortable here. The bed was good, the rooms were warm. The food still came from the banquet kitchens of the hotel, and it was remarkably good for jailhouse fare.

  Second, the kids were still in space and still doing some things, great things, even if they did not report what. His vindication was still a prospect.

  Third, the jailers let him have newspapers and writing materials, although they would not bring him his books or give him a television set.

  He missed the books, but nothing else. He didn’t need TV to tell him what was going on outside. He didn’t even need the newspapers, ragged, thin and censored as they were. He could hear for himself. Every day there was the rattle of small-arms fire, mostly far-off and sporadic, but once or twice sustained and heavy and almost overhead, Brownings against AK-47s, it sounded like, and now and then the slap and smash of grenade launchers. Sometimes he heard sirens hooting through the streets, punctuated by clanging bells, and wondered that there was still a civilian fire department left to bother. (Or was it still civilian?) Sometimes he heard the grinding of heavy motors that had to be tanks. The newspapers did little to fill in the details, but Knefhausen was good at reading between the lines. The Administration was holed up somewhere—Key Biscayne or Camp David or Southern California, no one was saying where. The cities were all in red revolt. Herr Omnes had taken over.

  For these disasters Knefhausen felt unjustly blamed. He composed endless letters to the president, pointing out that the serious troubles of the Administration had nothing to do with Alpha-Aleph; the cities had been in revolt for most of a generation, the dollar had become a laughing stock since the Indochinese wars. Some he destroyed, some he could get no one to take from him, a few he managed to dispatch—and got no answers.

  Once or twice a week a man from the Justice Department came to ask him the same thousand pointless questions once again. They were trying to build up a dossier to prove it was all his fault, Knefhausen suspected. Well, let them. He would defend himself when the time came. Or history would defend him. The record was clear. With respect to moral issues, perhaps, not so clear, he conceded. No matter. One could not speak of moral questions in an area so vital to the search for knowledge as this. The dispatches from the Constitution had already produced so much!—although, admittedly, some of the most significant parts were hard to understand. The Gödel message had not been unscrambled, and the hints of its contents remained only hints.

  Sometimes he dozed and dreamed of projecting himself to the Constitution. It had been a year since the last message. He tried to imagine what they had been doing. They would be well past the midpoint now, decelerating. The starbow would be broadening and diffusing every day. The circles of blackness before and behind them would be shrinking. Soon they would see Alpha Centauri as no man had ever seen it. To be sure, they would then see that there was no planet called Aleph circling the primary, but they had guessed that somehow long since. Brave, wonderful kids! Even so they had gone on. This foolishness with drugs and sex, what of it? One opposed such goings-on in the common run of humanity, but it had always been so that those who excelled and stood out from the herd could make their own rules. As a child he had learned that the plump, proud air leader sniffed cocaine, that the great warriors took their sexual pleasure sometimes with each other. An intelligent man did not concern himself with such questions, which was one more indication that the man from the Justice Department, with his constant hinting and prying into Knefhausen’s own background, was not really very intelligent.

  The good thing about the man from the Justice Department was that one could sometimes deduce things from his questions, and rarely—oh, very rarely—he would sometimes answer a question himself. “Has there been a message fr
om the Constitution?” “No, of course not, Dr. Knefhausen; now, tell me again, who suggested this fraudulent scheme to you in the first place?”

  Those were the highlights of his days, but mostly the days just passed unmarked.

  He did not even scratch them off on the wall of his cell, like the prisoner in the Chateau d’If. It would have been a pity to mar the hardwood paneling. Also, he had other clocks and calendars. There was the ticking of the arriving meals, the turning of the seasons as the man from the Justice Department paid his visits. Each of these was like a holiday—a holy day, not joyous but solemn. First there would be a visit from the captain of the guards, with two armed soldiers standing in the door. They would search his person and his cell on the chance that he had been able to smuggle in a——a what? A nuclear bomb, maybe. Or a pound of pepper to throw in the Justice man’s eyes. They would find nothing, because there was nothing to find. And then they would go away, and for a long time there would be nothing. Not even a meal, even if a meal time happened to be due. Nothing at all, until an hour or three hours later the Justice man would come in with his own guard at the door, equally vigilant inside and out, and his engineer manning the tape recorders, and his questions.

  And then there was the day when the man from the Justice Department came and he was not alone. With him was the president’s secretary, Murray Amos.

  How treacherous is the human heart! When it has given up hope, how little it takes to make it hope again!

  “Murray!” cried Knefhausen, almost weeping, “it’s so good to see you again! The president, is he well? What can I do for you? Have there been developments?”

  Murray Amos paused in the doorway. He looked at Dieter von Knefhausen and said bitterly, “Oh, yes, there have been developments. Plenty of them. The Fourth Armored has just changed sides, so we are evacuating Washington. And the president wants you out of here at once.”

  “No, no! I mean—oh, yes, it is good that the president is concerned about my welfare, although it is bad about the Fourth Armored. But what I mean, Murray, is this: Has there been a message from the Constitution?”

  Amos and the Justice Department man looked at each other. “Tell me, Dr. Knefhausen,” said Amos silkily, “how did you manage to find that out?”

  “Find it out? How could I find it out? No, I only asked because I hoped. There has been a message, yes? In spite of what they said? They have spoken again?”

  “As a matter of fact, there has been,” said Amos thoughtfully. The Justice Department man whispered piercingly in his ear, but Amos shook his head. “Don’t worry, we’ll be coming in a second. The convoy won’t go without us…Yes, Knefhausen, the message came through to Goldstone two hours ago. They have it at the decoding room now.”

  “Good, very good!” cried Knefhausen. “You will see, they will justify all. But what do they say? Have you good scientific men to interpret it? Can you understand the contents?”

  “Not exactly,” said Amos, “because there’s one little problem the code room hadn’t expected and wasn’t prepared for. The message wasn’t coded. It came in clear, but the language was Chinese.”

  Constitution Six

  Ref.: CONSIX T51/11055/ *7

  CLASSIFIED MOST SECRET

  Subject: Transmission from U.S. Starship Constitution.

  The following message was received and processed by the decrypt section according to standing directives. Because of its special nature, an investigation was carried out to determine its provenance. Radio-direction data received from Farside Base indicate its origin along a line of sight consistent with the present predicted location of the Constitution. Strength of signal was high but within appropriate limits, and degradation of frequency separation was consistent with relativistic shifts and scattering due to impact with particle and gas clouds.

  Although available data do not prove beyond doubt that this transmission originated with the starship, no contraindications were found.

  On examination, the text proved to be a phonetic transcription of what appears to be a dialect of Middle Kingdom Mandarin. Only a partial translation has been completed. (See note appended to text.) The translation presented unusual difficulties for two reasons: One, the difficulty of finding a translator of sufficient skill who could be granted appropriate security status; two, because (conjecturally) the language used may not correspond exactly to any dialect but may be an artifact of the Constitution’s personnel. (See PARA EIGHT, Lines 43-49 below, in this connection.)

  This text is PROVISIONAL AND NOT AUTHENTICATED and is furnished only as a first attempt to translate the contents of the message into English. Efforts are being continued to translate the full message, and to produce a less corrupt text for the section herewith. Later versions and emendations will be forwarded when available.

  TEXT FOLLOWS:

  PARA ONE. The one who speaks for all [Lt.-Col. Sheffield

  H. Jackman?] rests. With righteous action comes surcease

  from care. I [identity not certain, but probably

  Mrs. Annette Marin Becklund, less probably one of

  the other three female personnel aboard, or one of

  their descendants] come in his place, moved by charity

  and love.

  PARA TWO. It is not enough to study or to do

  deeds which make the people frown and bow their

  heads. It is not enough to comprehend the

  nature of the sky or the sea. Only through

  the understanding of all can one approach

  wisdom, and only through wisdom can one act

  rightly.

  PARA THREE. These are the precepts as it is given us to

  see them.

  PARA FOUR. The one who imposes his will by force

  lacks justice. Let him be thrust from a cliff.

  PARA FIVE. The one who causes another to lust for a

  trifle of carved wood or a sweetmeat lacks courtesy.

  Let him be restrained from the carrying out of wrong

  practices.

  PARA SIX. The one who ties a knot and says, “I do

  not care who must untie it,” lacks foresight. Let him

  wash the ulcers of the poor and carry nightsoil for all

  until he learns to see the day to come as brother to the

  day that is.

  PARA SEVEN. We who are in this here should not impose

  our wills on you who are in that here by force.

  Understanding comes late. We regret the incident of

  next week, for it was done in haste and in error. The

  one who speaks for all acted without thinking. We

  who are in this here were sorry for it afterward.

  PARA EIGHT. You may wonder [literally: ask thoughtless

  questions of the hexagrams] why we are communicating

  in this language. The reason is in part recreational,

  in part heuristic [literally: because on the staff

  hand one becomes able to strike a blow more ably

  when blows are struck repeatedly], but the nature

  of the process is such that you must go through it before

  you can be told what it is. Our steps have trodden

  this path. In order to reconstruct the Chinese of the

  I Ching it was first necessary to reconstruct the German

  of the translation from which the English was

  made. Error lurks at every turn. [Literally: false apparitions

  shout at one each time the path winds.] Many

  flaws mark our carving. Observe it in silence for hours

  and days until the flaws become part of the work.

  PARA NINE. It is said that you have eight days before

  the heavier particles arrive. The dead and broken

  will be few. It will be better if all airborne nuclear reactors

  are grounded until the incident is over.

  PARA TEN. When you have completed rebuilding send

  us a message, directed
to the planet Alpha-Aleph. Our

  home should be prepared by then. We will send a

  ferry to help colonists cross the stream when we are

  ready.

  The above text comprises the first 851 groups of the transmission. The remainder of the text, comprising approximately 7,500 groups, has not been satisfactorily translated. In the opinion of a consultant from the Oriental Languages Department at Johns Hopkins it may be a poem.

  /s/ Durward S. RICHTER

  Durward S. RICHTER

  Maj. Gen. U.S.M.C.

  Chief Cryptographer

  Commanding

  Distribution: X X X BY HAND ONLY

  Washington Six

  The president of the United States (Washington) opened the storm window of his study and leaned out to yell at his Chief Science Adviser. “Harry, get the lead out! We’re waiting for you!”

  Harry looked up and waved, then continued doggedly plowing through the dripping jungle that was the North Lawn. Between the overgrown weeds and the rain and the mud it was slow going, but the president had little sympathy. He slammed down the window and said, “Damn that man, he just goes out of his way to aggravate me. How long am I supposed to wait for him so I can decide if we’re gonna have to move the capital or not?”