The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  Perhaps it was a projector for the lightnings that blasted the sand cars or the golden glow that had struck down at us from the sand dunes, perhaps some even more deadly Martian device. But whatever it was it was at point-blank range; and when he was finished with it, we were dead.

  Demaree said thinly, We've got to get out of here.'

  The only question was, did we have enough time? We scrabbled together our flame rifles and packs from the back of the cave and, eyes fearfully on the busy Martian across the chasm, leaped for the cave mouth--

  just in time to see what seemed a procession coming down the other side.

  It was a scrambling, scratching tornado, and we couldn't at first tell if it was a horde of Martians or a sand car with the treads flapping. But then we got a better look.

  And it was neither. It was Dr. Solveig.

  The Martian across the way saw him as soon as we, and it brought that strange complex of bits and pieces slowly around to bear on him. 'Hey!'

  bellowed Demaree, and my yell was as loud as his. We had to warn Solveig of what he was running into--death and destruction.

  But Solveig knew more than we. He came careening down the ledge across the crevasse, paused only long enough to glance at us and at the Martian, and then came on again.

  'Rocks!' bellowed Demaree in my ear. 'Throw them!' And the two of us searched feverishly in the debris for rocks to hurl at the Martian, to spoil his aim.

  We needn't have bothered. We could find nothing more deadly than pebbles, but we didn't need even them. The Martian made a careful, last-minute adjustment on his gadget, and poked it once, squeezed it twice and pressed what was obviously its trigger.

  And nothing happened. No spark, no flame, no shot. Solveig came casually down on the Martian, unharmed.

  Demaree was astonished, and so was I; but the two of us together were hardly as astonished as the Martian. He flew at his gadget like a tailgunner clearing a breach jam over hostile interceptors. But that was as far as he got with it, because Solveig had reached him and in a methodical, almost a patronizing way he kicked the Martian's gadget to pieces and called over to us:

  'Don't worry, boys. They won't hurt us here. Let's get back up on top.'

  • • • •

  It was a long walk back to Niobe, especially with the cumbersome gadgetry Solveig had found--a thing the size of a large machine gun, structurally like the bits and pieces the Martian had put together, but made of metal and crystal instead of bits of rubble.

  But we made it, all four of us--we had picked up Garcia at the stalled cars, swearing lividly in relief but otherwise all right. Solveig wouldn't tell us much. He was right, of course. The important thing was to get back to Niobe as soon as we could with his gimmick. Because the gimmick was the Martian weapon that zeroed in on sand cars, and the sooner our mechanics got it taken apart, the sooner we would know how to defend ourselves against it. We were breathless on the long run home, but we were exultant.

  And we had reason to be, because there was no doubt in any of our minds that a week after we turned the weapon over to the researchers we would be able to run sand cars safely across the Martian plains. (Actually it wasn't a week; it was less. The aiming mechanism was nothing so complex as radio, it was a self-aiming thermocouple, homing on high temperatures. We licked it by shielding the engines and trailing smoke-pots to draw fire.) Overconfident? No--any Earthman, of course, could have worked out a variation which would have made the weapon useful again in an hour's leisurely thought. But Earthmen are flexible. And the Martians were not.

  Because the Martians were not-the Martians.

  That is, they were not the Martians.

  'Successors,' Solveig explained to all of us, back in Niobe. 'Heirs, if you like. But not the inventors. Compared with whoever built those machines, the Martians we've been up against are nothing but animals--or children. Like children, they can pull a trigger or strike a match. But they can't design a gun--or even build one by copying another.'

  Keever shook his long, lean head. 'And the original Martians?'

  Solveig said, 'That's a separate question. Perhaps they're hiding out somewhere we haven't reached--underground or at the poles. But they're master builders, whoever and wherever they are.' He made a wry face.

  'There I was,' he said, 'hiding out in a cleft in the rock when the dawn wind came. I thought I'd dodged the Martians, but they knew I was there. As soon as the sun came up I saw them dragging that thing towards me.' He jerked a thumb at the weapon, already being checked over by our maintenance crews. 'I thought that was the end, especially when they pulled the trigger.'

  'And it didn't go off,' said Demaree.

  'It couldn't go off! I wasn't a machine. So I took it away from them--

  they aren't any stronger than kittens--and I went back to look for you two.

  And there was that Martian waiting for you. I guess he didn't have a real gun, so he was making one--like a kid'll make a cowboy pistol out of two sticks and a nail. Of course, it won't shoot. Neither did the Martians, as you will note.'

  We all sat back and relaxed. 'Well,' said Keever, 'that's our task for this week. I guess you've shown us how to clean up what the Earthside papers call the Martian Menace, Doc. Provided, of course, that we don't run across any of the grownup Martians; or the real Martians, or whatever it was that designed those things.'

  Solveig grinned. 'They're either dead or hiding, Keever,' he said. 'I wouldn't worry about them.'

  And unfortunately, he didn't worry about them, and neither did any of the rest of us.

  Not for nearly five years...

  The Day of The Boomer Dukes

  Just as medicine is not a science, but rather an art--a device, practised in a scientific manner, in its best manifestations--time-travel stories are not science fiction.

  Time-travel, however, has become acceptable to science fiction readers as a traditional device in stories than are otherwise admissible in the genre. Here, Frederik Pohl employs it to portray the amusingly catastrophic meeting of three societies.

  1

  Foraminifera 9

  PAPTASTE UDDERLY, semped sempsemp dezhavoo, qued schmerz--Excuse me. I mean to say that it was like an endless diet of days, boring, tedious....

  No, it loses too much in the translation. Explete my reasons, I say.

  Do my reasons matter? No, not to you, for you are troglodytes, knowing nothing of causes, understanding only acts. Acts and facts, I will give you acts and facts.

  First you must know how I am called. My "name" is Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey's Beam, and I am of adequate age and size. (If you doubt this, I am prepared to fight.) Once the--the tediety of life, as you might say, had made itself clear to me, there were, of course, only two alternatives. I do not like to die, so that possibility was out; and the remaining alternative was flight.

  Naturally, the necessary machinery was available to me. I arrogated a small viewing machine, and scanned the centuries of the past in the hope that a sanctuary might reveal itself to my aching eyes. Kwel tediety that was!

  Back, back I went through the ages. Back to the Century of the Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass of dullness.

  Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth--wherever I looked, tediety was what I found.

  I SNAPPED off the machine and considered. Put the problem thus: Was there in all of the pages of history no age in which a 9-Hart Bailey's Beam might find adventure and excitement? There had to be! It was not possible, I told myself, despairing, that from the dawn of the dreaming primates until my own time there was no era at all in which I could be--happy? Yes, I suppose happiness is what I was looking for. But where was it? In my viewer, I had fifty centuries or more to look back upon. And that was, I decreed, the trouble; I could spend my life staring into the viewer, and yet never discover the time that was right for me. There w
ere simply too many eras to choose from. It was like an enormous library in which there must, there had to be, contained the one fact I was looking for--that, lacking an index, I might wear my life away and never find.

  "Index! "

  I said the word aloud! For, to be sure, it was the answer. I had the freedom of the Learning Lodge, and the index in the reading room could easily find for me just what I wanted.

  Splendid, splendid! I almost felt cheerful. I quickly returned the viewer I had been using to the keeper, and received my deposit back. I hurried to the Learning Lodge and fed my specifications into the index, as follows, that is to say: Find me a time in recent past where there is adventure and excitement, where there is a secret, colorful band of desperadoes with whom I can ally myself. I then added two specifications--second, that it should be before the time of the high radiation levels; and first, that it should be after the discovery of anesthesia, in case of accident--and retired to a desk in the reading room to await results.

  It took only a few moments, which I occupied in making a list of the gear I wished to take with me. Then there was a hiss and a crackle, and in the receiver of the desk a book appeared. I unzipped the case, took it out, and opened it to the pages marked on the attached reading tape.

  I had found my wonderland of adventure!

  AH, HOURS and days of exciting preparation! What a round of packing and buying; what a filling out of forms and a stamping of visas; what an orgy of injections and inoculations and preventive therapy! Merely getting ready for the trip made my pulse race faster and my adrenalin balance rise to the very point of paranoia; it was like being given a true blue new chance to live.

  At last I was ready. I stepped into the transmission capsule; set the dials; unlocked the door, stepped out; collapsed the capsule and stored it away in my carry-all; and looked about at my new home.

  Pyew! Kwel smell of staleness, of sourness, above all of coldness!

  It was a close matter then if I would be able to keep from a violent eructative stenosis, as you say. I closed my eyes and remembered warm violets for a moment, and then it was all right.

  The coldness was not merely a smell; it was a physical fact. There was a damp grayish substance underfoot which I recognized as snow; and in a hard-surfaced roadway there were a number of wheeled vehicles moving, which caused the liquefying snow to splash about me. I adjusted my coat controls for warmth and deflection, but that was the best I could do.

  The reek of stale decay remained. Then there were also the buildings, painfully almost vertical. I believe it would not have disturbed me if they had been truly vertical; but many of them were minutes of arc from a true perpendicular, all of them covered with a carbonaceous material which I instantly perceived was an inadvertent deposit from the air. It was a bad beginning!

  However, I was not bored.

  I MADE my way down the "street," as you say, toward where a group of young men were walking toward me, five abreast. As I came near, they looked at me with interest and kwel respect, conversing with each other in whispers.

  I addressed them: "Sirs, please direct me to the nearest recruiting office, as you call it, for the dread Camorra."

  They stopped and pressed about me, looking at me intently. They were handsomely, though crudely dressed in coats of a striking orange color, and long trousers of an extremely dark material.

  I decreed that I might not have made them understand me--it is always probable, it is understood, that a quicknik course in dialects of the past may not give one instant command of spoken communication in the field. I spoke again: "I wish to encounter a representative of the Camorra, in other words the Black Hand, in other words the cruel and sinister Sicilian terrorists named the Mafia. Do you know where these can be found?"

  One of them said, "Nay. What's that jive?"

  I puzzled over what he had said for a moment, but in the end decreed that his message was sensefree. As I was about to speak, however, he said suddenly: "Let's rove, man." And all five of them walked quickly away a few "yards." It was quite disappointing. I observed them conferring among themselves, glancing at me, and for a time proposed terminating my venture, for I then believed that it would be better to return "home," as you say, in order to more adequately research the matter.

  HOWEVER, the five young men came toward me again. The one who had spoken before, who I now detected was somewhat taller and fatter than the others, spoke as follows: "You're wanting the Mafia?" I agreed. He looked at me for a moment. "Are you holding?"

  He was inordinately hard to understand. I said, slowly and with patience, "Keska that 'holding' say?"

  "Money, man. You going to slip us something to help you find these cats?"

  "Certainly, money. I have a great quantity of money instantly available," I rejoined him. This appeared to relieve his mind.

  There was a short pause, directly after which this first of the young men spoke: "You're on, man. Yeah, come with us. What's to call you?" I queried this last statement, and he expanded: "The name. What's the name?"

  "You may call me Foraminifera 9," I directed, since I wished to be incognito, as you put it, and we proceeded along the "street." All five of the young men indicated a desire to serve me, offering indeed to take my carry-all. I rejected this, politely.

  I looked about me with lively interest, as you may well believe. Kwel dirt, kwel dinginess, kwel cold! And yet there was a certain charm which I can determine no way of expressing in this language. Acts and facts, of course. I shall not attempt to capture the subjectivity which is the charm, only to transcribe the physical datum--perhaps even data, who knows? My companions, for example: They were in appearance overwrought, looking about them continually, stopping entirely and drawing me with them into the shelter of a "door" when another man, this one wearing blue clothing and a visored hat appeared. Yet they were clearly devoted to me, at that moment, since they had put aside their own projects in order to escort me without delay to the Mafia.

  MAFIA! Fortunate that I had found them to lead me to the Mafia! For it had been clear in the historical work I had consulted that it was not ultimately easy to gain access to the Mafia. Indeed, so secret were they that I had detected no trace of their existence in other histories of the period. Had I relied only on the conventional work, I might never have known of their great underground struggle against what you term society. It was only in the actual contemporary volume itself, the curiosity titled U.S.A. Confidential by one Lait and one Mortimer, that I had descried that, throughout the world, this great revolutionary organization flexed its tentacles, the plexus within a short distance of where I now stood, battling courageously. With me to help them, what heights might we not attain! Kwel dramatic delight!

  My meditations were interrupted. "Boomers!" asserted one of my five escorts in a loud, frightened tone. "Let's cut, man!" he continued, leading me with them into another entrance. It appeared, as well as I could decree, that the cause of his ejaculative outcry was the discovery of perhaps three, perhaps four, other young men, in coats of the same shiny material as my escorts. The difference was that they were of a different color, being blue.

  WE HASTENED along a lengthy chamber which was quite dark, immediately after which the large, heavy one opened a way to a serrated incline leading downward. It was extremely dark, I should say. There was also an extreme smell, quite like that of the outer air, but enormously intensified; one would suspect that there was an incomplete combustion of, perhaps, wood or coal, as well as a certain quantity of general decay. At any rate, we reached the bottom of the incline, and my escort behaved quite badly. One of them said to the other four, in these words: "Them jumpers follow us sure. Yeah, there's much trouble. What's to prime this guy now and split?"

  Instantly they fell upon me with violence. I had fortunately become rather alarmed at their visible emotion of fear, and already had taken from my carry-all a Stollgratz 16, so that I quickly turned it on them. I started to replace the Stollgratz 16 as they fell to the floor, yet I real
ized that there might be an additional element of danger. Instead of putting the Stollgratz 16 in with the other trade goods, which I had brought to assist me in negotiating with the Mafia, I transferred it to my jacket. It had become clear to me that the five young men of my escort had intended to abduct and rob me--indeed had intended it all along, perhaps having never intended to convoy me to the office of the Mafia. And the other young men, those who wore the blue jackets in place of the orange, were already descending the incline toward me, quite rapidly.

  "Stop," I directed them. "I shall not entrust myself to you until you have given me evidence that you entirely deserve such trust."

  THEY ALL halted, regarding me and the Stollgratz 16. I detected that one of them said to another: "That cat's got a zip."

  The other denied this, saying: "That no zip, man. Yeah, look at them Leopards. Say, you bust them flunkies with that thing?"

  I perceived his meaning quite quickly. "You are 'correct'," I rejoined. "Are you associated in friendship with them flunkies?"

  "Hell, no. Yeah, they're Leopards and we're Boomer Dukes. You cool them, you do us much good." I received this information as indicating that the two socio-economic units were inimical, and unfortunately lapsed into an example of the Bivalent Error. Since p implied not-q, I sloppily assumed that not-q implied r (with, you understand, r being taken as the class of phenomena pertinently favorable to me). This was a very poor construction, and of course resulted in certain difficulties. Qued, after all. I stated:

  "Them flunkies offered to conduct me to a recruiting office, as you say, of the Mafia, but instead tried to take from me the much money I am holding." I then went on to describe to them my desire to attain contact with the said Mafia; meanwhile they descended further and grouped about me in the very little light, examining curiously the motionless figures of the Leopards.