Pohlstars

by Frederik Pohl

  So Ben the Bastard fouled Owner's Quarters with his fat dark wife and their sallow brat, Betsy, who never liked me. Nor I her, to be sure. That whole family was repellent. I never knew Ben's mother, but I knew who she was. A file clerk in a lawyer's office. The Commodore seduced her to get a look into the lawyer's contract files, where there was something worth money for him to see. He got his look. She got his child. He would never marry her, of course, for she hadn't a dime, and when she pupped his bastard, he was long gone away. I will say for the Commodore that he acknowledged the son. He paid the bills to bring him up, even when it was hard for him. He sent the boy through school and gave him a place with the Fleet, though not at sea, but would never give him his name.

  So it was Benjamin (which means "gift of God") Zoll (for that was the woman's name) who came aboard with the will in his pocket and the resolve in his heart to reign.

  Well, he had more than arrogance. He was a mean- hearted man, but a hardworking one. The first day he was over the side in a diving mask, discovering cracks in the antifouling plates and surfacing in a fury. Twenty maintenance workers lost their jobs that day, but the next crew kept the plates repaired, and we saved a thousand dollars worth of steaming fuel a week.

  An ocean-thermal generating boat lives off the temperature difference between deep water and sun-warmed surface water. The top water warms the working fluid- a halocarbon with a low boiling point-and it becomes steam and goes through the low-pressure turbines to make electricity; the electricity splits water into hydrogen and fixes nitrogen from the air, and we sell what it makes. The difficulty is the halocarbon working fluid. It is too expensive to vent to the air. It must be condensed and recycled, and for that we need something cold. The sea gives us that. There is plenty of cold water in every deep sea, but it is half a kilometer down or more, and so we must pump it to the surface. Pumping and pumping. Pumping cold water up from the deep. Pumping the working fluid through the solar collectors. Pumping water past the electrodes to be split into its gases; pumping the gases into the refrigerator ships to be carried away. Out of every hundred kilowatt-hours of energy we make, ninety-seven go into running the gear itself.

  But that three percent left over makes us rich, for once the boat is built it is all free.

  Ben Zoll had never worked on an oaty-boat, and so he had much to learn He learned it fast If he did not have the Commodores name, he had at least inherited his drive.

  May had the name. And bastard Ben kept her from everything else, kept her from the presidency of the Fleet, kept her from the voting rights to her stock.

  He did not begrudge her money. She had the best schools. She had horses to ride and clothes for a princess. It was no sacrifice to Ben to allow her any money she needed. The billions of land people hungered insatiably for every grain of ammonia and every wisp of hydrogen we could make. The company prospered under bastard Ben.

  And so did I, for my pitiful fifty shares of stock had already made me a millionaire. I didn't need the job anymore. But I kept it, and I stayed on the O.T. Where else was there to go? No sensible person would want to live on a continent with all those writhing billions. Land people are a suing, assassinating, conniving bunch. And I had formed the habit of living under the Law of the Sea- And, besides, every now and then May came home to visit.

  She did not come often. But there were school holidays. Any time there were afew days together, she would take the long five-hour flight from Massachusetts to the Bismarcks or the Coral Sea or wherever we were grazing, and in the summers, always, for weeks on end. It was not May alone, for the four other Mays always came too, to visit their families and to get away from the stink and strife. They were beautiful girls. Girls to break a thousand hearts, and I suppose they did. There was Maisie Richardson, huge and blond and glowing with health, and May Holliston-Peirce, the hydrologist's daughter, with trusting blue eyes and a sweet, guileful tongue, and Tseling Mei, who became a movie star, and May Bancroft, black and handsome and the wisest of them all. And May herself. My May. She was always the most beautiful of them all. There are pretty babies who grow up blotchy or sullen or fat, but there was never a day in any company when May was not the most beautiful there. They were all almost of an age, May and the four other Mays, and, oh, heaven, how they brightened up the old O.T.! There was a May for any man's taste, and all of them for every taste, for they were kind and clever, they were lovely and loving. They chattered and whispered among themselves, and if ever a joke went the wrong way or a word touched a nerve, they made it up at once with a kindness and a kiss.

  And then there was Betsy.

  Betsy Zoll. Bitch child of the bastard, Ben. If you take the raw materials for two young women and give all of the beauty and kindness and grace to one-say, to May- what is left over is Betsy Zoll. May was a diamond. Betsy was flawed glass. When the Mays were not aboard, Betsy was the princess royal, and sometimes, on a good day, she almost looked the part. But in their shade she drooped and sulked. The shiny glass was beside true diamonds, and its luster was gone. They let her tag along with them, out of kindness. Out of envy, she wished them dead. So the holidays were no joy for Betsy Zoll, and she couldn't wait, couldn't wait for them to be over and the Mays back in school so she could try to reign again.

  And then there was a Christmas season coming when Betsy was all smiles and triumph.

  * * *

  She must have hunted all over the boat for me, for I was down in the boiler room to see if there was a need, as ship's gossip said there was a plan, to buy new generators. "Well, Jason, she said, beaming so fondly that my heart sank, "getting ready for Christmas?

  The engineers and oilers watched us from a distance, whispering to themselves, although no one needed to whisper with the great coughing sigh of the low-pressure turbines in every ear. I wished her a Merry Christmas civilly and excused myself to let my office know where I was-there was no reason not to now, you see, because Betsy had already found me. When I finished with the phone, she giggled. "Next week that will cost you a quarter, she said.

  I had known she would bring bad news, of course, because that was her nature, but what she said was astonishing. "It will cost money to use the ship's phone? She pursed her lips and inclined her head. "To use the phone, and to run your video, and to turn on a fan, yes, she said, the sallow face and the pale eyebrows twitching with pleasure. "Father says it's time we started charging for all the electricity the crew uses. Fifty cents a kilowatthour to start, Father says.

  "It makes no sense!

  "Dollars and cents, she said gleefully. "That's our electricity, old man. It's worth money. Why should we give it away when we can sell it?

  I drew back from her, because she had pressed her face almost into mine and her breath was like a sewer. Betsy was fifteen years old then, but the freshness of youth had never touched her. I said, "We can't sell electricity, Betsy, only what we can make from it. If we want to produce more to sell, we'll have to devote more space to conversion processes, and where's the space to come from?

  "Good question, old man, she said triumphantly. "Father has of course thought of all that. To begin with, there's a thousand cubic meters wasted under the foredeck. We'll do our hydrogen electrolysis up there, which gives more room amidships for the ammonia and-

  "Owner's Quarters! I said.

  "Old man, she lectured, "people like us won't live on this little tub forever. We've got new boats building ten times the size of this. We're going to move the flag.

  The ship's gossip was not only gossip, then, and the truth was worse than the gossip. It was worse than I knew, in fact, for Betsy had saved the worst for the last. "When May comes home for Christmas, we'll see what she has to say, I said, for it was in the Commodore's will that May's own quarters were hers forever. And I had delivered myself into Betsy's hands.

  "When May comes home for Christmas, she parroted spitefully, "what we'll see, old man, is that she isn't comming home for Christmas. Why, Jason! Do you mean she never told you that she's go
t a boyfriend? His name's Frank Appermoy, and she's spending her Christmas with him and his mother.

  And May had not written me a word! As Betsy well knew. She did not bother to disguise her triumph as she glanced at her watch and moved her lips for a moment before she spoke, that charnel breath well suited to the words she said. "Allowing for the time differences, she said, "I'd guess they're probably humping in his big water bed on Hawaii right now. Tough shit, old man, she said, and turned and left me standing.

  * * *

  Back in my office, the first thing I did was order up all the data we had in store on Frank Appermoy and the rest of the Appermoy clan. The second thing, while I was waiting for the readouts, was to put through a call to May at the Appermoy estate on the Big Island. It was 10 P.M. on the 'Kona coast, and according to the butler who answered my call, Miss May and Master Frank were at a luau and were not expected to return for at least two hours. So I asked them to call me, and got down to the hard-copy prints.

  I already knew that the Appermoys were rich. I even knew that they competed with us, or wanted to, though their total production of nitrogen and hydrogen in a year was less than that of the smallest of our boats. Their process was not the same as ours, either.

  The Appermoy money came, in the first place, from radioactive waste. Old Simon Appermoy had been as clever as the Commodore and as diligent. He had worked out a plan, and then had sought out and signed disposal contracts with every nuclear power plant he could find and half a dozen national defense departments, all of them so madly happy to find anyone who would take their waste radionuclides away that they paid huge amounts for every ton. Then Simon Appermoy vitrified the dirty stuff. He dissolved it in glassy chunks, and then he did the clever thing. He bought a couple of seamounts in the Pacific, the tail end of the Hawaiian chain, the volcanic islands that had risen from the sea bottom and been planed flat by the waves over tens of millions of years. Whether the sovereign state of Hawaii had any title to sell them was a whole other question, but a clouded title never worried old Appermoy-I'll say why in a minute. Then he drilled holes in the flat summits of the seamounts and dumped the glassy radionuclides in.

  So far it was simple waste disposal. Enough to make him rich, but only the beginning. His next step was to become our competitor.

  Some unsung genius on Appermoy's payroll had informed him that all that hot stuff a thousand fathoms down would start a warm-water plume moving up toward the surface; and that plume contained energy that Appermoy could suck out with slow, huge, vertical-axis blades. And so he did, and used that energy just as we did, to make electricity that would fix nitrogen and split water into fuel. But he did not suck all the energy out, because he wanted some of that warmed plume to reach the surface so that it could carry with it the organic detritus from the bottom that had accumulated for tens of millions of years. If you saw that trash in your living room, you would call it filth and try to mop it away; but if you saw it in your garden, it would delight your heart, for it was rich in organics. And as it came to the surface, it fed microorganisms to feed krill to feed fish. Any kind of fish Appermoy chose to stock, in fact, because the steel skeletons that held his works above the seamounts made marvelous habitats for food fish arid game fish and every fish that swam in the sea. I don't know what reward Simon Appermoy gave the flunky who devised this plan. Most likely Appermoy gave him cement overshoes and a quick drop without a face mask to the surface of the seamount, where his poor empty-eyed skull could watch the muck swirl slowly upward.

  But it all worked. It was almost the opposite of our process, you see. We pumped up cold water to condense the warmed vapor that the sun boiled for us. Appermoy warmed the waters of the deep with his radioactive filth- to make much of the same end products, yes, but also to gain what we did not, several thousand tons a day of high- quality ocean fish to feed the billions on the land.

  A rich family they were. A decent family they were not. Their empire was built on poisons at the base, and the money that gave Appermoy his start was more poisonous still. He got it the same way the Commodore did- he married it-but while the Commodore married a lady, what Simon Appermoy married was the spawn of four generations of Mafia chiefs. That was how they got their first contracts for disposing of radioactive waste. That was how they kept competition away. Others saw what Appermoy had done and tried to find seamounts of their own, but if strikes did not befall them, unexplained accidents did.

  So the family was foul; young Frank Appermoy himself, less so. There were no great sins to his record in the datastore, unless you call polo playing a sin. He did not, however, meet Ben Zoll's specifications except for the first of them. He was rich. But you can't call someone who lives to hit a little ball from horseback sensible, and handsome he certainly was not. One of his horses had thrown him and kicked him. He was not yet fully recovered, the datastore said, and the picture confirmed it. Although the right side of his face had been very much rebuilt since the accident, he looked odd. He did not look terrifying or repulsive, but not even a mother could call him handsome-not even the mother of all lies and wickedness who had borne him, Simon Appermoy's wretched wife.

  And yet my May had chosen him to wed.

  * * *

  The scouts had found us a nice flow of cold water in the deeps south of the Philippines, and that is always a great treasure. Every extra degree of differential between surface temperature and deep makes a great enhancement in power yield when you work with such short margins as ours. So we were thousands of kilometers west of Hawaii, and yet it was well dark before May and her gallant called me back. I was sitting on my private little weather deck, gazing at the Southern Cross and wishing I had been born a couple of decades later than I was, when the phone rang.

  There they were, the two of them. His arm was around her shoulder, and he was grinning at me with that twisted- but not evil-face, and May was looking apologetic but ecstatic. "It has all gone so very fast, Uncle Jason. She had never called me "uncle before. "I wanted to call you a thousand times, but-

  "It doesn't matter," I said, lying.

  "You will come to the wedding, though, won't you? Please?

  As though there were any doubt of that! But the boy added his pleas as well. "You're the only real family May has, sir. None of her young men had ever called me "sir before, either. "My mother says she'll try to be her mother, too, since I never had a sister, and heaven knows, sir, I'll do all I can to make her happy! And it wouldn't be right to marry May if you weren't here.

  The statute of limitations had expired long since, of course, but there was nothing I wanted on land. Even on an island. Especially an island belonging to the Appermoys. But he added the clincher: "You really have to, sir, because we want you to give her away.

  And I gave her away.

  I gave her away on the steps of the mansion at South Point, with Kilauea steaming behind the house, with a lei around May's sweet neck and the priest wearing a microphone in his collar so that all the fourteen hundred guests could hear, and Betsy grinning wickedly at me from the first row, and the groom white-faced and sweating, for he had had some kind of convulsion just before the ceremony. He had good enough manners, young Frank Appermoy. But I did not want to give May away to any man, with good manners or bad, rich or poor, young or old, as long as that man was not me. Especially not to one who, as I learned, every now and then had blinding headaches and convulsions. I wish that horse had kicked a little harder.

  Whether they were happy or not I do not know.. I suppose they were. The next year they had a baby, James Reginald Appermoy, and the year after that young Frank's scrambled brain quit trying to keep him alive and my May was a widow at twenty-two. The bitch mother-in-law said she killed him.

  At one and twenty to a husband was wed. At two and twenty the husband was dead. Her mother, no mother, called her no wife. Her sister, no sister, plagued all of her life. Her living was bounded in snares and guiles, The sweet, luckless queen of the grazing isles.

  May could not
stay on the Big Island with the old Appermoy woman spreading scandalous tales about her. Ben the bastard invited her home. Not to the boat she had grown up on, because her old home there had become part of the new electrolysis plant, but to the homes on the biggest of the new oaty-boats. Two million deadweight tons! The oaties weren't boats anymore, they were floating islands, and there was room for a dozen large families in owner's country on the foredeck. In spite of this, Ben claimed at first that there was no room for me, but that was only to make May beg. "Oh, well, he said, giving in as he had planned to all along, "at least he can change the baby's diapers. I'll find him quarters with the crew.

  Quarters with the crew. And I custodian of May's vast estate and a part owner in my own right, with my fifty shares. May owned three Fleet shares to bastard Ben's one, but they did us little good. For Ben had the will, and control of the voting rights until she reached the age of thirty. I could not believe the Commodore had been so insane. Yet when I slipped away to Reykjavik and spoke to a lawyer at the Sea court, he told me the will was firm, and I went back to May with a shifty lie about where I had been and watched her nurse the child. I did not know what to say to her.

  But May did not ask. In those first months she was all for the child, singing to him, petting him, nursing him- wincing now and then, for he was a terrible biter. And a terribly ugly little brat, too. May would sit by the great oval pool among the palms on the foredeck with Jimmy Rex in her arms or whimpering in a bed beside her; and I would be there to give her company; and surely, almost every time, there would be Betsy as well, practicing her dives off the high board or sipping mai tais with one of the corrupt, pretty young men who were always her houseguests. And always with one eye on May and the child.