Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  And, of course, the rest is history. On any clear night when the Moon is at quarter everyone in the world can see the diamond-dust lights of the community in Mare Tranq, and everyone knows how it got there. How twelve separate missions brought air, food and water down to Mare Tranquilitatis. How on the seventh mission Colonel Williamson himself piloted the module down to the surface to become the third man on the Moon…and to stay. How by the time all the design flaws in the landing struts had been identified and fixed there was such a wealth of matériel clustered around the original landing site—“The Earthlight Trailer Park,” one astronaut dubbed it—that it had become a de facto lunar outpost, and before long a priceless resource. The next step in space travel was clearly the stars. The way to get there was clearly by nuclear-fusion propulsion, fueled by helium-4…and where else in the solar system was there a richer store of He-4 than the masses the solar wind had sown into the lunar soil, atom by atom, over the four-and-a-half-billion-year life of the Sun?

  And then there was no question of who was the right person to head it…and so John Stewart Williamson became the first, and so far the only, loved and honored Mayor of Mare Tranq.

  FERMI AND FROST

  In 1986, “Fermi and Frost” won the Hugo Award for best short story.

  Several other stories in this collection dealt with nuclear war. This is the only one that gives an account of how such a war might happen and what results would ensue.

  War, death, the threat of extinction—these are powerful themes. Facing these prospects with humanity and down-to-earth practicality is the only response that might ennoble mankind in such a situation.

  Here, then, is the final story in this collection. Like the best of Frederik Pohl’s short fiction, it is deceptively simple, elegant in its execution.

  They say you should save the best for last. I couldn’t agree more.

  On Timothy Clary’s ninth birthday he got no cake. He spent all of it in a bay of the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, sleeping fitfully, crying now and then from exhaustion or fear. All he had to eat was stale Danish pastries from the buffet wagon and not many of them, and he was fearfully embarrassed because he had wet his pants. Three times. Getting to the toilets over the packed refugee bodies was just about impossible. There were twenty-eight hundred people in a space designed for a fraction that many, and all of them with the same idea. Get away! Climb the highest mountain! Drop yourself splat, spang, right in the middle of the widest desert! Run! Hide!—

  And pray. Pray as hard as you can, because even the occasional planeload of refugees that managed to fight their way aboard and even take off had no sure hope of refuge when they got wherever the plane was going. Families parted. Mothers pushed their screaming children aboard a jet and melted back into the crowd before screaming, more quietly, themselves.

  Because there had been no launch order yet, or none that the public had heard about anyway, there might still be time for escape. A little time. Time enough for the TWA terminal, and every other airport terminal everywhere, to jam up with terrified lemmings. There was no doubt that the missiles were poised to fly. The attempted Cuban coup had escalated wildly, and one nuclear sub had attacked another with a nuclear charge. That, everyone agreed, was the signal. The next event would be the final one.

  Timothy knew little of this, but there would have been nothing he could have done about it—except perhaps cry, or have nightmares, or wet himself, and young Timothy was doing all of those anyway. He did not know where his father was. He didn’t know where his mother was, either, except that she had gone somewhere to try to call his father; but then there had been a surge that could not be resisted when three 747s at once had announced boarding, and Timothy had been carried far from where he had been left. Worse than that. Wet as he was, with a cold already, he was beginning to be very sick. The young woman who had brought him the Danish pastries put a worried hand to his forehead and drew it away helplessly. The boy needed a doctor. But so did a hundred others, elderly heart patients and hungry babies and at least two women close to childbirth.

  If the terror had passed and the frantic negotiations had succeeded, Timothy might have found his parents again in time to grow up and marry and give them grandchildren. If one side or the other had been able to preempt, and destroy the other, and save itself, Timothy forty years later might have been a graying, cynical colonel in the American military government of Leningrad. (Or body servant to a Russian one in Detroit). Or if his mother had pushed just a little harder earlier on, he might have wound up in the plane of refugees that reached Pittsburgh just in time to become plasma. Or if the girl who was watching him had become just a little more scared, and a little more brave, and somehow managed to get him through the throng to the improvised clinics in the main terminal, he might have been given medicine, and found somebody to protect him, and take him to a refuge, and live…

  But that is in fact what did happen!

  Because Harry Malibert was on his way to a British Interplanetary Society seminar in Portsmouth, he was already sipping Beefeater martinis in the terminal’s Ambassador Club when the unnoticed TV at the bar suddenly made everybody notice it.

  Those silly nuclear-attack communications systems that the radio stations tested out every now and then, and nobody paid any attention to anymore—why, this time it was real! They were serious! Because it was winter and snowing heavily Malibert’s flight had been delayed anyway. Before its rescheduled departure time came, all flights had been embargoed. Nothing would leave Kennedy until some official somewhere decided to let them go.

  Almost at once the terminal began to fill with would-be refugees. The Ambassador Club did not fill at once. For three hours the ground-crew stew at the desk resolutely turned away everyone who rang the bell who could not produce the little red card of admission; but when the food and drink in the main terminals began to run out the Chief of Operations summarily opened the club to everyone. It didn’t help relieve the congestion outside, it only added to what was within. Almost at once a volunteer doctors’ committee seized most of the club to treat the ill and injured from the thickening crowds, and people like Harry Malibert found themselves pushed into the bar area. It was one of the Operations staff, commandeering a gin and tonic at the bar for the sake of the calories more than the booze, who recognized him. “You’re Harry Malibert. I heard you lecture once, at Northwestern.”

  Malibert nodded. Usually when someone said that to him he answered politely, “I hope you enjoyed it,” but this time it did not seem appropriate to be normally polite. Or normal at all.

  “You showed slides of Arecibo,” the man said dreamily. “You said that radio telescope could send a message as far as the Great Nebula in Andromeda, two million light-years away—if only there was another radio telescope as good as that one there to receive it.”

  “You remember very well,” said Malibert, surprised.

  “You made a big impression, Dr. Malibert.” The man glanced at his watch, debated, took another sip of his drink. “It really sounded wonderful, using the big telescopes to listen for messages from alien civilizations somewhere in space—maybe hearing some, maybe making contact, maybe not being alone in the universe anymore. You made me wonder why we hadn’t seen some of these people already, or anyway heard from them—but maybe,” he finished, glancing bitterly at the ranked and guarded aircraft outside, “maybe now we know why.”

  Malibert watched him go, and his heart was leaden. The thing he had given his professional career to—SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence—no longer seemed to matter. If the bombs went off, as everyone said they must, then that was ended for a good long time, at least—

  Gabble of voices at the end of the bar; Malibert turned, leaned over the mahogany, peered. The Please Stand By slide had vanished, and a young black woman with pomaded hair, voice trembling, was delivering a news bulletin:

  “—the president has confirmed that a nuclear attack has begun against the United
States. Missiles have been detected over the Arctic, and they are incoming. Everyone is ordered to seek shelter and remain there pending instructions—”

  Yes. It was ended, thought Malibert, at least for a good long time.

  The surprising thing was that the news that it had begun changed nothing. There were no screams, no hysteria. The order to seek shelter meant nothing at John F. Kennedy Airport, where there was no shelter any better than the building they were in. And that, no doubt, was not too good. Malibert remembered clearly the strange aerodynamic shape of the terminal’s roof. Any blast anywhere nearby would tear that off and send it sailing over the bay to the Rockaways, and probably a lot of the people inside with it.

  But there was nowhere else to go.

  There were still camera crews at work, heaven knew why. The television set was showing crowds in Times Square and Newark, a clot of automobiles stagnating on the George Washington Bridge, their drivers abandoning them and running for the Jersey shore. A hundred people were peering around each other’s heads to catch glimpses of the screen, but all that anyone said was to call out when he recognized a building or a street.

  Orders rang out: “You people will have to move back! We need the room! Look, some of you, give us a hand with these patients.” Well, that seemed useful, at least Malibert volunteered at once and was given the care of a young boy, teeth chattering, hot with fever. “He’s had tetracyclin,” said the doctor who turned the boy over to him. “Clean him up if you can, will you? He ought to be all right if—”

  If any of them were, thought Malibert, not requiring her to finish the sentence. How did you clean a young boy up? The question answered itself when Malibert found the boy’s trousers soggy and the smell told him what the moisture was. Carefully he laid the child on a leather love seat and removed the pants and sopping undershorts. Naturally the boy had not come with a change of clothes. Malibert solved that with a pair of his own jockey shorts out of his briefcase—far too big for the child, of course, but since they were meant to fit tightly and elastically they stayed in place when Malibert pulled them up to the waist. Then he found paper towels and pressed the blue jeans as dry as he could. It was not very dry. He grimaced, laid them over a bar stool and sat on them for a while, drying them with body heat. They were only faintly wet ten minutes later when he put them back on the child—

  San Francisco, the television said, had ceased to transmit.

  Malibert saw the Operations man working his way toward him and shook his head. “It’s begun,” Malibert said, and the man looked around. He put his face close to Malibert’s.

  “I can get you out of here,” he whispered. “There’s an Icelandic DC-8 loading right now. No announcement. They’d be rushed if they did. There’s room for you, Dr. Malibert.”

  It was like an electric shock. Malibert trembled. Without knowing why he did it, he said, “Can I put the boy on instead?”

  The Operations man looked annoyed. “Take him with you, of course,” he said. “I didn’t know you had a son.”

  “I don’t,” said Malibert. But not out loud. And when they were in the jet he held the boy in his lap as tenderly as though he were his own.

  If there was no panic in the Ambassador Club at Kennedy there was plenty of it everywhere else in the world. What everyone in the superpower cities knew was that their lives were at stake. Whatever they did might be in vain, and yet they had to do something. Anything! Run, hide, dig, brace, stow…pray. The city people tried to desert the metropolises for the open safety of the country, and the farmers and the exurbanites sought the stronger, safer buildings of the cities.

  And the missiles fell.

  The bombs that had seared Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck matches compared to the hydrogen-fusion flares that ended eighty million lives in those first hours. Firestorms fountained above a hundred cities. Winds of three hundred kilometers an hour pulled in cars and debris and people, and they all became ash that rose to the sky. Splatters of melted rock and dust sprayed into the air.

  The sky darkened.

  Then it grew darker still.

  When the Icelandic jet landed at Keflavik Airport Malibert carried the boy down the passage to the little stand marked Immigration. The line was long, for most of the passengers had no passports at all, and the immigration woman was very tired of making out temporary entrance permits by the time Malibert reached her. “He’s my son,” Malibert lied. “My wife has his passport, but I don’t know where my wife is.”

  She nodded wearily. She pursed her lips, looked toward the door beyond which her superior sat sweating and initialing reports, then shrugged and let them through. Malibert took the boy to a door marked Snirting, which seemed to be the Icelandic word for toilets, and was relieved to see that at least Timothy was able to stand by himself while he urinated, although his eyes stayed half closed. His head was very hot. Malibert prayed for a doctor in Reykjavik.

  In the bus the English-speaking tour guide in charge of them—she had nothing else to do, for her tour would never arrive—sat on the arm of a first-row seat with a microphone in her hand and chattered vivaciously to the refugees. “Chicago? Ya, is gone, Chicago. And Detroit and Pittisburrug—is bad. New York? Certainly New York too!” she said severely, and the big tears rolling down her cheek made Timothy cry too.

  Malibert hugged him. “Don’t worry, Timmy,” he said. “No one would bother bombing Reykjavik.” And no one would have. But when the bus was ten miles farther along there was a sudden glow in the clouds ahead of them that made them squint. Someone in the USSR had decided that it was time for neatening up loose threads. That someone, whoever remained in whatever remained of their central missile control, had realized that no one had taken out that supremely, insultingly dangerous bastion of imperialist American interests in the North Atlantic, the United States airbase at Keflavik.

  Unfortunately, by then EMP and attrition had compromised the accuracy of their aim. Malibert had been right. No one would have bothered bombing Reykjavik—on purpose—but a forty-mile miss did the job anyway, and Reykjavik ceased to exist.

  They had to make a wide detour inland to avoid the fires and the radiation. And as the sun rose on their first day in Iceland, Malibert, drowsing over the boy’s bed after the Icelandic nurse had shot him full of antibiotics, saw the daybreak in awful, sky-drenching red.

  It was worth seeing, for in the days to come there was no daybreak at all.

  The worst was the darkness, but at first that did not seem urgent. What was urgent was rain. A trillion trillion dust particles nucleated water vapor. Drops formed. Rain fell; torrents of rain; sheets and cascades of rain. The rivers swelled. The Mississippi overflowed, and the Ganges, and the Yellow. The High Dam at Aswan spilled water over its lip, then crumbled. The rains came where rains came never. The Sahara knew flash floods. The Flaming Mountains at the edge of the Gobi flamed no more; a ten-year supply of rain came down in a week and rinsed the dusty slopes bare.

  And the darkness stayed.

  The human race lives always eighty days from starvation. That is the sum of stored food, globe wide. It met the nuclear winter with no more and no less.

  The missiles went off on the eleventh of June. If the world’s larders had been equally distributed, on the thirtieth of August the last mouthful would have been eaten. The starvation deaths would have begun and ended in the next six weeks; exit the human race.

  The larders were not equally distributed. The Northern Hemisphere was caught on one foot, fields sown, crops not yet grown. Nothing did grow there. The seedlings poked up through the dark earth for sunlight, found none, died. Sunlight was shaded out by the dense clouds of dust exploded out of the ground by the H-bombs. It was the Cretaceous repeated; extinction was in the air.

  There were mountains of stored food in the rich countries of North America and Europe, of course, but they melted swiftly. The rich countries had much stored wealth in the form of their livestock. Every steer was a million calories of protein and fat. When i
t was slaughtered, it saved thousands of other calories of grain and roughage for every day lopped off its life in feed. The cattle and pigs and sheep—even the goats and horses; even the pet bunnies and the chicks; even the very kittens and hamsters—they all died quickly and were eaten, to eke out the stores of canned foods and root vegetables and grain. There was no rationing of the slaughtered meat. It had to be eaten before it spoiled.

  Of course, even in the rich countries the supplies were not equally distributed. The herds and the grain elevators were not located on Times Square or in the Loop. It took troops to convey corn from Iowa to Boston and Dallas and Philadelphia. Before long, it took killing. Then it could not be done at all.

  So the cities starved first. As the convoys of soldiers made the changeover from seizing food for the cities to seizing food for themselves, the riots began, and the next wave of mass death. These casualties didn’t usually die of hunger. They died of someone else’s.

  It didn’t take long. By the end of “summer” the frozen remnants of the cities were all the same. A few thousand skinny, freezing desperadoes survived in each, sitting guard over their troves of canned and dried and frozen foodstuffs.

  Every river in the world was running sludgy with mud to its mouth, as the last of the trees and grasses died and relaxed their grip on the soil. Every rain washed dirt away. As the winter dark deepened the rains turned to snow. The Flaming Mountains were sheeted in ice now, ghostly, glassy fingers uplifted to the gloom. Men could walk across the Thames at London now, the few men who were left. And across the Hudson, across the Whangpoo, across the Missouri between the two Kansas Cities. Avalanches rumbled down on what was left of Denver. In the stands of dead timber grubs flourished. The starved predators scratched them out and devoured them. Some of the predators were human. The last of the Hawaiians were finally grateful for their termites.