Pohlstars

by Frederik Pohl

  "I know, I said. I also knew the reason he had told me for turning her down-young Betsy was a terror to her servants.

  "You know a lot about my business, don't you? she purred, watching me. "I think you meant something by that remark about the air pollution.

  I shrugged. "I have heard, I said carefully, "that you are contracting for large amounts of Australian coal. The only thing I can think of you wanting to do with it is pyrolize it into gasoline, so we'll have a floating Galveston out here.

  "You have very good sources of information, Jay. I do too. You were a fool to turn Dougie down, you know.

  She was sitting between me and the setting sun. I moved to get the sun out of my eyes so that I could see her better, and she laughed and hitched her chair closer to me. "You're always a surprise to me, Jason, she said. "Those nineteen letters coming in all these years, and nobody knew but you.

  I had finally puzzled it out. "You've got a spy in May's house, I said.

  "My dear Jason! Of course I'm always interested in what's happening with my sister.

  "She's not your sister.

  "I think of her as my sister. She hitched her chair a bit closer, and our knees touched. "Would you like to know how I think of you?

  Now, the advancing years had not made me any more handsome. I was older than Betsy's father. I could not think of any reason why she would be after my body, but her eyes were half closed, and her lips were half smiling, and her voice was husky.

  I got up to replenish her drink, and when I was seated again, we were no longer touching. "Why was I stupid, Betsy?

  "Accidents happen, she whispered over the rim of her glass. "You've got a few good years left if you're careful, Jay. I moved restlessly, rejecting the implication. "May has more than that, she went on, "unless there was an accident. Why, do you know, Jason, under the terms of the Commodore's will, if May died your trusteeship would terminate? And then you'd have nothing to say about what happened to her stock.

  "It would just go to Jimmy Rex.

  "And if something happened to Jimmy Rex?

  I was getting angry-it was not because she was putting new thoughts in my head, for what angered me was that these same thoughts had occurred to me long since. Fortunately for my peace of mind I had reasoned out an answer to that. "May's money, I said, "is a lot, but it's nothing compared to what Jimmy Rex is going to inherit from his grandmother. The Appermoys have billions, and Jimmy's the only heir.

  And Betsy laughed out loud. "To think, she marveled, "that you were the one who got us interested in the dead fish!

  I nodded as though I understood. I doubt that I fooled her. I did not understand at all, and to make time to help puzzle it out I poured myself a brandy after all. I dawdled, savoring the Courvoisier. Either she was being deliberately mystifying, or I was more tired and hung over and, yes, already slightly drunk all over again than I thought. Perhaps I had not made myself clear? The logic was very simple. Nothing would happen to Jimmy Rex-at least nothing that Dougie might arrange-as long as his grandmother was alive, because Dougie would not endanger his chances of somehow getting his hands on the Appermov fortune. What dead fish had to do with all this I did not know, and Betsy was not helping me think. She leaned forward, with her eyes as close to sparkling as she knew how to make them, and licked the lobe of my ear. "You're an exciting man, Jason, she whispered.

  "For God's sake, Betsy! I protested, not quite sure whether it was the sense of what she was saying that I objected to, or her warm, moist tongue in my ear. I was getting to be an elderly man, but I wasn't dead. I didn't like Betsy at all. She was not beautiful. But she was young, and she was healthy, and she was wearing at least a hundred dollars' worth of French perfume in the folds of the clinging gossamer gown. I tried to redirect the conversation. "Will you please tell me what you're trying to say?

  She smiled mistily and leaned back-it was not a way of putting space between us, it was only so that she could throw her breasts out. I did not fail to notice them. "Jason, she murmured, "I think better when I'm lying down. In bed. With a nice warm body next to me.

  There was no possible doubt in my mind that it was Betsy's intention to add me to her already outstanding collection of lovers. I am embarrassed to say that at that moment I could almost believe that it was for my own aging body's sake-almost. I croaked. "Why are you doing this, Betsy?

  "Aw She pouted. Then she shrugged. "Because I want everything that belongs to May. But I promise you it'll be worth it. I'm really good, Jason. And I also promise you, she added, getting slowly up and tugging me to my feet, "that in that nice big bed that you sleep in, that used to be May's, after the important stuff has been taken care of, I will tell you everything you want to know, and it will truly fascinate you.

  On that promise she cheated me, though not on anything else. I did not sleep much that night. When I woke at daylight and remembered who I had for a bedmate, she was gone. I pulled myself raggedly out of bed and threw a robe on, and while I was puzzling over what had happened, I heard a jet scream. I went to the lanai and there was Betsy's plane, a bright blue-white trail streaking across the pink morning sky. She had gotten what she wanted, and gone.

  She spoiled my sleep for more than one night. I could not get out of my mind what she had said and hinted. The worst was the implication that Jeff's death had not been an accident. Dougie was filth, of course. I had not thought he was a murderer, at least in my conscious mind; but now that Betsy had made me think about it, I could not doubt it anymore.

  I called in the security chief again, and from then on I was never without a couple of huskies within call.

  But that protected only me. What could protect my May? Logic told me that it would not make sense for Dougie to harm May as long as the boy would simply inherit-nor would it be reasonable for him to want the boy out of the way as long as Jimmy Rex stood to inherit the vast Appermoy billions. It would surely pay Dougie to bide his time, at least until the old lady died.

  But the stink of dead fish showed me there was something wrong with that chain of reasoning. Betsy knew what it was but, typically, had not told me. So I started other inquiries into motion.

  They weren't necessary. Before my agents had a chance to report, a morning came when I was awakened by the Fleet bursar pounding at the door, bursting with news.

  The dead fish had done the Appermoys in.

  For old man Appermoy had not been able to resist one more villainy before he died. The glassy pellets he dissolved the radionuclides in for disposal were not expensive. It was not usually worth his while to steal in so trivial an area. But there was a strike in a settling farm that he had not been able to buy off, and an accident to one of the vitrifying plants that put him behind schedule, and so he had eight hundred ton lots of high-level radio active waste with no legitimate place to put them. He had dumped them, raw, into his seamount. Of course, they had begun to dissolve into the sea almost at once.

  Appermoy had not killed the Pacific Ocean, for it was too big for even him. But he had so polluted three million square kilometers that fish were dying. The family had been able to keep the lid on-it is cheaper to bribe than to comply-until the weather betrayed them. For a solid month the Hawaiian winds blew the wrong way. They swept the waters out of the west, and washed radioactively hot waves onto Oahu and Maui and the Kona coast.

  The damage was too immense for bribes to work anymore, and they were a land-based conglomerate. So the land law could reach them, and that meant something like twenty billion dollars in damage suits already, with more in the offing, and the lax government agencies forced at last to stir themselves. "I'm sure, said the bursar gleefully, "that the old lady's tucked a few million away in pocket change here and there. But the company's bust!

  So Jimmy Rex had lost most of his legacy. . . and May had lost her insurance.

  Since I no longer believed that Jeff's accident had been an accident, I had to believe that an accident could easily happen to May and her son. What could I do to prevent
it? I ruminated a thousand plans. I could confront Dougie with my suspicions and warn him that he was being watched-foolish idea! The one thing you could not do to Dougie d'Agasto was frighten him off. I could warn May. I could tell her what I believed and beg her to leave him. But that was almost as foolish. If she had been willing to listen, she would never have married the creature in the first place. The best plan was the one that I rejected most positively and at once. I could, I thought out of my anger and despair, do to Dougie himself what I feared he would do to May.

  But I could not stoop so low, though for many years I have wished I had.

  And while I was stewing over whether to call May, and what to say to her if I did, I got a call from her. She looked troubled and very weary, but she was trying to sound happy. "Good news, Jason," she cried, though her eyes made liars of her words. "Dougie says we won't have to worry about that-that letter problem, anymore. He says he is certain of it. He has gone to get documentary proof, and he'll bring it to you. But she added, although I could see that it cost her, "But you're the one who has to decide if the proof is enough, Jay. I'll abide by whatever you decide.

  And two days later, before dawn, Dougie's plane screamed in. It woke me from my sleep. By the time I got to the landing strip he was gone, the pilot waiting by the ship to pass on his instructions for me. Mr. d'Agasto had had the deck crew take his materials down to the scavenging deck. Mr. d'Agasto would wait for me there. Mr. d'Agasto asked that I join him at once.

  Mr. d'Agasto was getting on my nerves. Why the scavenging deck? It was not much more than a sewer head- when we built lips around the oaty-boats, we could no longer throw our garbage over the side, so there was a well that opened out under the hull. It was a tiny, dirty chamber down near the waterline, not a place where anyone went for choice. I didn't like Dougie's choice of a place, I didn't like getting orders from him-most of all, of course, I didn't like Dougie himself. But I went. And all the way down on the hoist, and all across the wide, hissing, rumbling of the boat's workings as the tram carried me through the low-pressure turbine decks, I was wondering if this was a scheme of Dougie's to kill me and dump me down the scavenging well. I had not forgotten what he was.

  I also had not forgotten some of the other things Betsy had told me. They were not useful things. They were what she thought were sexually stimulating things. They had to do with Dougie's tastes: How he liked to do that, she said showing me that and also this, demonstrating this, and most of all he likes to do these others... But some of those others I would not allow at all, and my stomach turned as the images formed in my mind of what went on between Dougie and my May in their private hours. So I did not want to see the man at all. And if it was his plan to kill me-well, then at least I would never again be troubled with these poisonous thoughts.

  He did not have any such plans, it turned out.

  He was alone in the scavenging chamber. It reeked, for he had opened the main access hatch and the oily, warm water was only a few meters below, with all its leftover stinks. Dougie had a great packing ease at his feet, and he was smoking a joint to combat the stench. "Close the door, he ordered.

  I did as I was told. Dougie could see that I was ill at ease. It amused him. "This won't take long, he promised. "Help me open the box.

  I did that, too, very obedient to his instructions. The box was very heavy, and there was waterproof sacking around it, a metal container nearly two meters long. It was sealed and locked. "You take good care of your documents, I panted as I lifted one corner so that Dougie could unlock the strapping.

  He laughed-I did not then know why. It took him some time to get the lid open- The lid of the coffin.

  A terrible miasma of decay poured out. The body inside was days dead, but I could recognize the tired old face. In life it had belonged to Elsie Van Dorn. "I never thought of her, I gasped.

  "You don't have to think of her anymore, chuckled Dougie. "You're really pretty dumb, old man. It stood to reason that the Commodore would have arranged for your guard dog to get some money. All I had to do was get a look at his private bequests-you know how that's done, don't you? I flinched, but didn't meet his eyes. "Once I found her, it wasn't hard. She even had copies of the letters in her safe deposit box.

  I could not speak. I could only stare at poor Elsie, who had loved the child she had cared for and at the last paid the tariff on that love.

  "You've seen enough? You're convinced? And Dougie shoved the box into the scavenging chute. It was a two- meter drop, splash, gone forever into the secret deeps of the ocean. "So you don't have any excuse anymore, old man, said Dougie, "and I've had the papers drawn up for you. Here they are. Sign.

  And of course, as soon as he could get back to Miami with the signed papers, May turned over all her stock to him. I had begged her not to. She wouldn't meet my eyes on the phone as she said, "I feel-anyway, I hope-that once he has what he needs, he won't have to-

  She stopped there and shook her head, not wanting to name what he "had to do otherwise. And Dougie d'Agasto was crowned king of the grazing isles.

  Toll the bell, sound the knell, My lady she married the lord of hell. Her life she gave as wife and slave To a treacherous, lecherous, blood-soaked knave, An impudent villain whose touch defiles The sweetness and woe of the queen of the isles.

  The oaty-boats had a long run for their money, but there were clouds on the horizon. There was a new land- based energy source, deep methane from far under the crust; there was a new sky-based one, with MHD generators in orbit beaming down floods of microwave power. And every month a new huge oaty-boat appeared, or more than one, to add to our fleet or Betsy's or some foreigner's. They all had five-kilometer intakes now, and we were all huddling in the same patches of ocean, sucking out the delta-Ts. It was not just that the sea was never empty now, it was worse than that. The sweet Pacific reeked of oil. My suspicions about Betsy's plans were correct though it wasn't just gasoline she was making. She bought cheap coal from Australia, pyrolized it to make liquid hydrocarbons, and reacted them with her electrolysis gases to turn the waste char into fuel alcohol. It was cheap fuel to ship and cheap fuel to store, for it needed no liquefying, and she sold every drop of it back to the Australians, or to the Americans or the Europeans or the Japanese. And left the stink of her oil and the smudge of her filth far beyond the horizon.

  Half the other fleets were beginning to do the same, and Dougie called me on the carpet to find out why I had not proposed it for ourselves. They were back in the owner's country now, he and May and the boy, for he simply had overruled her objections to living in the place where Jeff had died. He kept me standing before his huge teak desk for ten minutes while he punched out data sets to study, face impassive, head twisted back to avoid the drifting smoke from the joint he never took out from between his lips, and then he confronted me: "Well? Can you explain why we missed the boat on this?

  Dougie d'Agasto's opinion of me didn't matter at all, but I didn't want him convincing May I was an old fool. "The market has peaked already, I said. "There's too many boats doing it.

  "Because we're getting to it too late!

  I shook my head. "Because hydrogen's a cleaner fuel- I saw that wasn't registering with him- and will always get a higher price- that did- and this little boom won't last long enough to amortize the cost of the pyrolytic converters. All it will do is turn the Pacific into Los Angeles. And indeed, there were days when my eyes stung out in the open sea wind.

  "Well, he said, as though he were giving me one more chance and begrudging it, "we'll say no more about it. Anyway, I've got plans of my own.

  But he didn't tell me what they were. I didn't ask. I confess to curiosity, though, because to give the reptile his due, Dougie had not entirely wasted his time in "studying" oceanthermal industrial processes in Miami. He hadn't wasted much time doing any actual studying, either; I do not believe more than one hour a week went to his tutoring, and where the rest of it went I could guess-and so could May, for the lines on her face were not
all due to too much golf and sunshine. He found that there was a simpler way, though. He simply bought the school. He hired away twenty of the expert instructors and flew them to the Fleet. He knew enough to make good choices, anyway. All of them were skilled, and one or two I knew myself-Desmond MacLean had worked as a junior engineer on the Commodore's first boat, before going back to school and winding up a teacher. But even Desmond did not volunteer what Dougie's plans were.

  I must give the devil one more measure of due. He was a worker. He worked as hard as Jeff Ormondo even, though how he found time for it all I could not guess. When they were aboard the boat, he was everywhere, looking into every hold and engine room and control point; but he and May lived jet-set lives, parties everywhere, on all the seas and on the land. He took May away from me for three weeks out of four. It was not only May he took. Dougie was grossly and tastelessly-and after a while almost openly-an addicted womanizer. I could not forgive him his infidelity, for was there any other man alive in the world who would have wanted more woman than May'?

  I understood at last what Dougie wanted: Everything. He wanted it all. He had grown up as a very junior poor relation in his mob family. Now he was almost the richest of them-but that "almost was the iron in his soul. He wanted Betsy's half of the Fleet back to add to May's. If he had twenty thermal engineers on the payroll, he had ten times as many lawyers-but so did Betsy. When they met, which at one ball or race meet or another was often, they joked with each other about their lawsuits, and both would have pointed the jests with steel if they had dared.