Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  And Don, of course, has Dora. Adrift on a sponson city a few hundred yards over her head or orbiting Arcturus, fifty light-years away, Don has only to command his own symbol-manipulator to rescue Dora from the ferrite files and bring her to life for him, and there she is; and rapturously, tirelessly they ball all night. Not in the flesh, of course; but then his flesh has been extensively altered and it wouldn’t really be much fun. He doesn’t need the flesh for pleasure. Genital organs feel nothing. Neither do hands, nor breasts, nor lips; they are only receptors, accepting and transmitting impulses. It is the brain that feels, it is the interpretation of those impulses that makes agony or orgasm; and Don’s symbol-manipulator gives him the analog of cuddling, the analog of kissing, the analog of wildest, most ardent hours with the eternal, exquisite and incorruptible analog of Dora. Or Diane. Or sweet Rose, or laughing Alicia; for to be sure, they have each of them exchanged analogs before, and will again.

  Balls, you say, it looks crazy to me. And you—with your aftershave lotion and your little red car, pushing papers across a desk all day and chasing tail all night—tell me, just how the hell do you think you would look to Tiglath-Pileser, say, or Attila the Hun?

  THE MAYOR OF MARE TRANQ

  As mentioned more than once earlier in this collection, Frederik Pohl has written as a partner-in-crime with a number of other writers. One of the writers with whom he has collaborated most successfully is Jack Williamson, the venerable dean of science fiction. With more than a half-dozen novel cowritten works, including the Starchild trilogy, Pohl and Williamson have proven to be a marvelously creative and productive team.

  In 1996, Tor Books published The Williamson Effect, an anthology of stories written especially for that volume, a festschrift in honor of Williamson. Some of the stories took place in the settings of memorable Williamson works such as Darker Than You Think or The Legion of Space. Others were about Williamson himself.

  “The Mayor of Mare Tranq” is alternate history in which Jack Williamson becomes an astronaut. How he got to do this is part of the charm of the story. A seamlessly entertaining tale of human striving in the face of daunting odds, “Mayor…” will have special meaning for anyone who has ever had lunar dreams.

  The incident that changed young Johnny Williamson’s life took place in Arizona, in the year of 1916. If it had just rained a little more in that bad, dry year, Johnny’s father, Sam Williamson, might have made a go of the farm. But it didn’t. The soil dried. The seedlings withered. The crop would not be made. Sam let the dust flow through his fingers and made his decision: dryland farming was too chancy to feed a family; something had to be done.

  His first thought was to move on to some more hospitable area, Texas or maybe even Old Mexico, where it did sometimes rain. But he didn’t have to. His neighbor, the Republican party boss of the county, made him an offer: he would give Sam a job in his general store if only Sam would put his name in as a candidate for the Congress of the United States. That wasn’t meant as a serious prospect for a career in government. The boss only wanted a name to put before the voters in order to complete the ticket, with no real chance of being elected. Big Bill Bronck, the Democratic incumbent, was well known to be unbeatable in any election. However, Fate intervened. The day before the election Big Bill Bronck was shot to death in the parlor of a county-seat brothel, and when the votes were counted Sam Williamson, with his wife and children, was on his way to the capital.

  The city of Washington, D.C., was a marvel to Sam’s boys, young Johnny and his brother Jim. They had never been in a big city before. The storefront moving-picture shows, the clanging trolley cars in the streets, the hordes of people rushing about on their business—the boys blossomed there. It wasn’t all to their good. The city was a lot more fun than school, and, sadly, they both developed a talent for playing hookey in order to explore the wonders of the metropolis. Happily, that didn’t much matter, because they were both bright enough to breeze through their classes in grammar and high school. When Johnny was eighteen years old he graduated from high school as valedictorian of his class…the week before his father died.

  That was a terrible blow to the family. They were left with no reason to stay in Washington, and only a Congressman’s pension to feed the young family. Johnny’s mother decided their best bet was to head west for Texas, where cousins had land outside of Dallas and ranch living was cheap. That didn’t solve Johnny’s problem. He was ready for college, but where was the tuition money to come from? However, in the event that problem was no problem. Representative Bob Blakeless of Ohio, formerly Sam Williamson’s closest associate on the Fish, Game and Poultry Subcommittee, was ready and willing to give his late colleague’s boy a Congressional appointment to any service school he chose, and young Johnny selected the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

  At the Academy Johnny stopped playing hookey. He thrived at the Point. He paid attention to his studies, lived by the cadet code, and walked off his demerits until he stopped getting them. He turned out to be a first-rate cadet. When he graduated, fifth in his class, he was privileged to pick his own branch of Army service, and what he chose was the fledgling Army Air Corps.

  Those were bad years economically. The stock market had collapsed and the country was groaning under the weight of the Great Depression. Money was scarce everywhere, even for the military, and the equipment of the Army Air Corps showed it. The slow, cranky biplanes the Corps was flying belonged to another, obsolete generation; every airman knew that the sleek new planes the Germans and the English were practicing with across the Atlantic could outfly and outfight any of them. Accidents were frequent and often terminal, but Second Lieutenant Williamson was lucky…and skilled, too. He took to flying like a duck to water. He became an instructor, then a check pilot for the new P-36s that were coming in, and then war broke out in Europe. Pearl Harbor changed everything—for Williamson as well as for everyone else. He was one of the first fighter pilots sent to North Africa and quickly showed he was one of the best. The ten-year lieutenant became a captain, then a major commanding a squadron. He had four clusters to his Air Medal and his confirmed kills amounted to eleven by the time of V-J Day. He was one of the few urged to stay on when most of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps were demobbing. By the time he reached his twenty-year retirement he was a full colonel…and possessed by a new ambition.

  John had been in London at the time of the V-2s. He had sneaked across the Channel to Peenemunde to see the place where those rockets came from, and he had been struck by the thought that those same rockets could take something—maybe even someone—into space, and he wished with all his heart for that to happen. To him. So, now a civilian, he went to work for an aerospace company in Texas, doing his best to make sure that if ever someone tried to make that great leap into the unknown there would be machines available to make it work.

  He thrilled when the new President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, made his speech about putting men on the Moon. It was his chance. Slim, yes, but a lot better than no chance at all, and so Williamson instantly began calling in old favors. His former seconds-in-command were now colonels and generals; he begged them to help get him into the space program. And they tried. They really tried. They pulled all the strings they could for their old boss, but time was against them. Col. John Stewart Williamson (Retd.) was fifty-three on the day when Kennedy made his historic speech…and that was simply Too Old.

  His dream was over. His prospects of getting into space were exactly zero…that is, they were until the events of November 1963.

  What brought John Williamson into the city that day was his brother’s little son, Gary. The boy was as dedicated to the idea of space travel as his uncle, and a devoted admirer of the President who was going to make it real. What Gary Williamson wanted, more than anything else, was to see his hero and maybe even take some pictures of him with his new movie camera.

  By the time they got to a point where the Presidential procession was going to pass all the good places were ta
ken, but John Williamson was up to that challenge. There was a kind of a warehouse building by the side of the road, apparently unoccupied at the moment. Williamson tried doors until he found one that would open, and he and the boy climbed stairs to look out on the street. They found a good window at once, but there was a tree that seemed to be in the way. Williamson left the boy there and scouted some of the other rooms…and, in the third one, was startled to see a scruffy man with a rifle glaring angrily down at the street.

  It could have been something innocent. It could even have been (Williamson thought later) a Dallas detective in plain clothes, guarding the route of the procession. He didn’t stop to think of any of those possibilities. Reflexes took over. He charged the man, knocked the rifle out the window, overpowered the would-be assassin and was sitting on his chest when a pair of actual Dallas cops, alerted by the sight of the rifle falling out of the window, came pounding up the stairs to take charge.

  That night Williamson and his nephew were called to see the President on Air Force One. Mrs. Kennedy was there, looking sweet and appealing in her pink suit and pink pillbox hat; so were Texas Governor John Connally and his wife; so were a couple of Secret Service men, amiably but carefully watching every move Williamson and the boy made. The President got up from his overstuffed chair, grimacing with some sort of pain in his back, and extended a hand to Williamson. “Colonel Williamson,” he said, “they tell me you’re the one who took out this fellow—”

  “Oswald,” his wife supplied. “His name is Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  “Yes, Oswald. I don’t know what kind of a shot he was. My Secret Service friends here tell me that we would have been a pretty tough target to hit—”

  “A damn impossible target,” Governor Connally grumbled, and the First Lady said sweetly:

  “Oh, not impossible. I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.”

  “But anyway,” the President said, “it looks like you just might have saved my life and maybe Jackie’s, too. I owe you, Colonel. Is there something I can do for you?”

  “I want to go to the Moon,” Williamson said promptly.

  Kennedy grinned. “Can’t blame you there; so do I. Well, put in your application and we’ll—”

  “I did,” Williamson interrupted. “They turned me down. They said I was too old. But I have eighteen hundred hours, mostly in P-38s and P-51s but some jets, too. I believe I can handle a spacecraft whenever there’s one to handle, and I know I can pass any physical they can give me.”

  The President looked at him thoughtfully. “I bet you could, at that. All right. Put in your application again…and this time, write on the bottom that you have an age waiver officially granted by the President of the United States.”

  Williamson did pass the physical. Williamson did excel in astronaut training. Williamson was the second one of the Mercury Eight to make a suborbital flight, and when the Apollo program reached the point of actually doing what President Kennedy had promised and putting a man on the surface of the Moon, Colonel John Stewart Williamson was one of the three men strapped into the capsule as the giant Saturn-V lifted off from Cape Canaveral.

  He was not, however, one of the landers. Williamson’s job was to remain in the orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin rode the lunar landing capsule down to the surface. It wasn’t perfect. He would have preferred to be in on the actual descent. But it was one hell of a lot better than anything else around, and he accepted the assignment with grace and pleasure…until the moment when the capsule was scheduled to take off again for orbital rendezvous.

  For all those hours of waiting in the orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin capered around the lunar surface in their ungainly suits, John Williamson had worn around his neck a leather strap that held a small volume with complete, preplanned instructions for actions he should take in every possible emergency. Almost every possible emergency, anyway. There was one exception.

  At the planned moment of liftoff Williamson was over the horizon in his orbit, out of sight of the landing area in Mare Tranquilitatis. He could neither see the capsule nor hear their transmissions to Mike Collins at Earth Control at that second. He didn’t know what had happened until he rounded the curve of the Moon, and by the time he could pick up their messages the situation had become critical. “—tipping too far,” said Buzz Aldrin’s voice from the surface. “Try again!” urged the voice from Earth Control. “Can’t,” said Aldrin despairingly. “Looks like the soil’s a little soft under that leg. We’re tipping already from the vibration. If we go to full burn we’ll just tip this beast over on its side.”

  That was when Williamson cut in. “You can’t get lift?” he demanded unbelievingly.

  “’Fraid not, Johnny,” said Aldrin. “We’re stuck. Say good-bye to everybody for us when you get back.”

  And that was the one contingency for which Williamson had no instructions. In the event that the lunar module was unable to lift off there was no way for the orbiter to come down to their rescue. And so the book did not say what to do, because in that case there was simply nothing to be done.

  Or at least nothing that the people who wrote the book had been able to foresee.

  Colonel John Stewart Williamson, on the other hand, was not in the habit of doing nothing. He was a pilot. Stuff happened, but no matter how bad things looked there was always something you could try—right up to the moment when you crashed or died, and that was all she wrote. But until that moment came you never gave up.

  So he did three more lunar orbits, keeping his camera on the landing module in its drunken, half-toppled posture every minute he was above the horizon, knowing that all around the world there were two billion people—now two and a half billion—now maybe three, as new ones heard what was going on and tuned in—billions of Earth’s people, all watching the terrible scene on the lunar surface. Williamson’s heart was heavy, but his mind was still racing. And when at last he started the burn that would lift him out of lunar orbit and start him on the long, slow fall toward reentry he got on the radio again. “Earth Control, Earth Control,” he said into his microphone, “Earth Control, don’t stand around with your thumbs up your asses, start figuring out what you’re going to do for these guys.”

  The time it took for an answer was longer than the normal couple of seconds transit-time delay. Then Mike Collins, the Boston controller, said, “Hey, Johnny, cut that out! The whole world’s listening to you. Don’t get their hopes up when you know we can’t do a thing.”

  “I say again, Earth Control,” Williamson snapped, “you don’t want to waste any more time talking about what you can’t do. You have to do something. You don’t want to let them die there!”

  The next pause was longer, and when the voice came on it wasn’t Mike Collins, it was the Director himself, and savage. “Colonel Williamson, have you gone out of your tree? We can’t rescue them! They’re well and truly stuck!”

  “Who said rescue? Just keep them alive! There are two more lunar modules and three Apollos at the Cape right now, and enough Saturn Fives to lift them. All right, you can’t send another crew down until you figure out what went wrong. But you can send a goddam capsule down—crewless, on automatic—and load it with air and water—lots of it, because you don’t have to bother filling the tank with return fuel—and keep them going for a couple of weeks—until you send another one down—and another, and another until you figure out how to get them home. You can do that, all right. The only thing you can’t do is let them die there!”

  Would NASA have listened to what Williamson was saying if half the world hadn’t heard it at the same time? Perhaps it would have. But also, perhaps not. Perhaps organization and precedent would have carried the day, and the proposal been turned over to an assessment committee. And only then, a week or month later, would a decision have been made—to abandon the pair on the Moon to preserve the project’s orderly schedule, or perhaps even to do what Williamson urged…though by then Armstrong and Aldrin would, of course, be dead.

&nb
sp; That didn’t happen. Neither the controllers in Boston nor their masters in Washington had the choice. Within minutes the phone lines to NASA were hot with loud-talking citizens demanding that the space agency send immediate help to the stranded astronauts—and so were the lines to the White House, and to both houses of Congress, and to every newspaper and broadcasting station, too, and not just in the United States. The whole world was crying out to save the astronauts, and within the hour the order went out to start preflighting the next Moon-bound Apollo.