The pilot did as Elda had predicted, down the slopes of the eastern range, out over the sea, and cautiously back in to the little fishing village. As they landed, red-tipped flashlights guiding them, the copter’s landing lights picked out a white lump, vaguely saucer-shaped. “Radar dish,” said Malibert to the boy, pointing.
Timmy pressed his nose to the freezing window. “Is it one of them, Daddy Harry? The things that could talk to the stars?”
The pilot answered: “Ach, no, Timmy—military, it is.” And Malibert said:
“They wouldn’t put one of those here, Timothy. It’s too far north. You wanted a place for a big radio telescope that could search the whole sky, not just the little piece of it you can see from Iceland.”
And while they helped slide the stretcher with the broken child into the helicopter, gently, kindly as they could be, Malibert was thinking about those places, Arecibo and Woomara and Socorro and all the others. Every one of them was now dead and certainly broken with a weight of ice and shredded by the mean winds. Crushed, rusted, washed away, all those eyes on space were blinded now; and the thought saddened Harry Malibert, but not for long. More gladdening than anything sad was the fact that, for the first time, Timothy had called him “Daddy.”
In one ending to the story, when at last the sun came back it was too late. Iceland had been the last place where human beings survived, and Iceland had finally starved. There was nothing alive anywhere on Earth that spoke, or invented machines, or read books. Fermi’s terrible third answer was the right one after all.
But there exists another ending. In this one the sun came back in time. Perhaps it was just barely in time, but the food had not yet run out when daylight brought the first touches of green in some parts of the world, and plants began to grow again from frozen or hoarded seed. In this ending Timothy lived to grow up. When he was old enough, and after Malibert and Elda had got around to marrying, he married one of their daughters. And of their descendants—two generations or a dozen generations later—one was alive on the day when Fermi’s paradox became a quaintly amusing old worry, as irrelevant and comical as a fifteenth-century mariner’s fear of falling off the edge of the flat Earth. On that day the skies spoke, and those who lived in them came to call.
Perhaps that is the true ending of the story, and in it the human race chose not to squabble and struggle within itself, and so extinguish itself finally into the dark. In this ending human beings survived, and saved all the science and beauty of life, and greeted their star-born visitors with joy … .
But that is in fact what did happen!
At least, one would like to think so.
ALSO BY FREDERIK POHL
THE HEECHEE SAGA
Gateway
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Heechee Rendezvous
The Annals of the Heechee
The Gateway Trip
*The Boy Who Would Live Forever
THE ESCHATON SEQUENCE
*The Other End of Time
*The Siege of Eternity
*The Far Shore of Time
Slave Ship
Drunkard’s Walk
A Plague of Pythons
The Age of the Pussyfoot
Man Plus
Jem
The Cool War
The Years of the City
Black Star Rising
The Coming of the Quantum Cats
The Day the Martians Came
Narabedla Ltd.
Homegoing
Starburst
The World at the End of Time
The Merchants’ War
*O Pioneer!
Stopping at Slowyear
Mining the Oort
Midas World
With C. M. Kornbluth
The Space Merchants
Gladiator-at-Law
Search the Sky
Wolfbane
STORY COLLECTIONS
Tomorrow Times Seven
Pohlstars
Alternating Currents
Day Million
The Early Pohl
The Case Against Tomorrow
Digits and Dastards
Survival Kit
Gold at the Starbow’s End
With Jack Williamson
THE STARCHILD TRILOGY
Reefs of Space
Starchild
Rogue Star
THE UNDERSEA TRILOGY
Undersea Quest
Undersea Fleet
Undersea City
Wall Around a Star
The Farthest Star
*Land’s End
The Singers of Time
Preferred Risk (with Lester del Rey)
The Best of Frederik Pohl
(edited by Lester del Rey)
The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (editor)
Star Science Fiction series (editor)
Nonfiction
The Way the Future Was (memoir)
*Chasing Science
*Our Angry Earth (with Isaac Asimov)
*denotes a Tor Book
WELCOME TO THE FABULOUS WORLDS OF FREDERIK POHL!
TAKE A TOUR of the hot spots of Venus with guide Audee Walthers, in the very first Heechee story, “The Merchants of Venus.”
FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS when the world’s greatest mentalist gets a little too good at fooling his public in “The Things That Happen.”
EXPLORE A FUTURISTIC NEW YORK CITY, where new technology and old vices vie for control of radical urban re-engineering in “The Greening of Bed-Stuy.”
SHARE THE EXCITEMENT of an alternate history in which aging pilot Johnny Williamson is rejected by NASA’s astronaut program, until his act of heroism on a fateful day in Dallas gives him the chance to play a pivotal role in the Apollo program in “The Mayor of Mare Tranq.”
GET A PEEK into the world of Marchese Boccanegra in “Saucery,” when the discovery of real Martians makes it hell for honest frauds to make a living.
EXPERIENCE A SPINE-CHILLING VIEW of nuclear holocaust, where the best luck is to just survive, in the chilling, poignant Hugo Award—winning “Fermi and Frost.”
GO ALONG FOR AN INCREDIBLE RIDE to a far star, in a mind-bending trip with a crew bound for a payoff beyond human comprehension, in the stunning novella “The Gold at the Starbow’s End.”
“These carefully selected tales really are platinum Pohl, so there’s not a foot misplaced in all the thirty stories.”
—Gahan Wilson, Realms of Fantasy
AFTERWORD FIFTY YEARS AND COUNTING
I DON’T KNOW IF Johnny Appleseed ever went back, after dropping all those seeds over all those years, to see how the trees had grown. I think I know how he would have felt if he had, though. In much the same way, what we have here is a big slice of my life—half a century’s worth of those of my short stories and novelettes that best pleased my estimable editor, James Frenkel. Some of these stories were written while I was in my twenties, some when I was well into my—well, never mind exactly which decade we’re talking about. Many were written in whatever home I was living in at the time—the big old New Jersey house, where I could look from my third-floor office across the river at the town of Red Bank, or my present office in my almost as big (but never big enough) home in Palatine, Illinois. Many were written wherever I happened to be at the time—sitting on a wharf in the East River on sunny summer days, or in an airplane, in a hotel, on a ship or (in at least one case) in the pro station of the Air Force Base of Chanute Field, Illinois, the only place where I could use my typewriter late on a Saturday night.
Apart from the sites of their generation many of these stories have special personal associations for me. “The Celebrated No-Hit Inning” came about when Horace Gold told me I couldn’t write a science fiction story about baseball. If you’ve ever heard the 1970s British rock group that called themselves The Icicle Works, my story “The Day the Icicle Works Closed” will tell you where they got their name. “Day Million” is special to me because it wrote itself so quickly and e
asily, one night between midnight and dawn—and (I should admit) because the piece works so well when I do a reading. “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” was in two ways a first: the first story all my own that appeared in Analog (although John Campbell had published a number of my collaborations he never took a solo job), as well as being the very first story Ben Bova bought when he took over after John’s death. (The readers, used to thirty-seven years of John Campbell’s G-rated editing, didn’t quite know what to make of my story’s somewhat sexual content. In that month’s poll 50 percent of the readers voted it in first place, the other 50 percent in last.) “The Meeting” gave me the first Hugo I had ever won as a writer (I’d picked up a couple as editor of the magazine If)—and the only one ever given to my vastly underappreciated collaborator, Cyril Kornbluth. “Shaffery Among the Immortals” sticks out in my memory because of two things Isaac Asimov said to me about it—first, that he hadn’t known I was capable of writing that sort of story; second, that he wished he had done it himself. “Let the Ants Try” was the first short story of mine that I remained pleased with after I saw it in print (which makes all the more humbling the fact that the idea was given to me by my friend and boss at Popular Science, George Spoerer, who would not accept a share in either the payment or the byline.) “Growing Up in Edge City” stays with me because I didn’t know I was going to write it until it happened; I was visiting friends in Cape May, New Jersey; they had to go out on family business, leaving me alone in an otherwise empty house with a coffee pot and a typewriter, and the story came out. “To See Another Mountain” is in my mind inextricably linked to my favorite of all violin concerti, Mendelssohn’s E-minor, because I played the record of it over and over while I was writing the story … .
Well, enough of that; the stories really must speak for themselves. I should only add that, as every writer knows, writing is hard and sometimes painful work, while having written, on the other hand, is pure joy. So producing these stories has, on balance, been fun for me … and I hope reading them has been pleasurable for you as well.
—Frederik Pohl
Palatine, Illinois
March 2005
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgments are made for:
“The Merchants of Venus.” Copyright © 1972 by U. P. D. Publishing Corporation. First published in Worlds of If, August 1972.
“The Things That Happen.” Copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1985.
“The High Test.” Copyright © 1983 by Davis Publications. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1983.
“My Lady Green Sleeves.” Copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1957.
“The Kindly Isle.” Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1984.
“The Middle of Nowhere.” Copyright © 1955 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1955.
“I Remember a Winter.” Copyright © 1972 by Damon Knight. First published in Orbit 11, edited by Damon Knight (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972).
“The Greening of Bed-Stuy.” Copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1984.
“To See Another Mountain.” Copyright © 1959 by Mercury Press. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1959.
“The Mapmakers.” Copyright © 1955 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1955.
“Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair.” Copyright © 1983 by Mercury Press. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1983.
“The Celebrated No-Hit Inning.” Copyright © 1956 by King-Size Publications. First published in Fantastic Universe, September 1956.
“Some Joys Under the Star.” Copyright © 1973 by UPD Publishing Corporation. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1973.
“Servant of the People.” Copyright © 1983 by Davis Publications Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1983.
“Waiting for the Olympians.” Copyright © 1988 by Davis Publications. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1988.
“Criticality.” Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1984.
“Shaffery Among the Immortals.” Copyright © 1972 by Mercury Press. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1972.
“The Day the Icicle Works Closed.” Copyright © 1959 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1960.
“Saucery.” Copyright © 1986 by Mercury Press. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1986.
“The Gold at the Starbow’s End.” Copyright © 1972 by Condé Nast Publications. First published in Analog, March 1972.
“Growing Up in Edge City.” Copyright © 1975 by Frederik Pohl. First published in Epoch, edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975).
“The Knights of Arthur.” Copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1958.
“Creation Myths of the Recently Extinct.” Copyright © 1993 by Dell Magazines. First published in Analog, January 1994.
“The Meeting.” Copyright © 1972 by Mercury Press. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1972.
“Let the Ants Try.” Copyright © 1949 by Love Romantic Publishing Corporation. First published in Planet Stories, Winter, 1949.
“Speed Trap.” Copyright © 1967 by H. M. H. Publishing Corporation. First published in Playboy magazine, November 1967.
“The Day the Martians Came.” Copyright © 1967 by Harlan Ellison. Originally published in Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1967).
“Day Million.” Copyright © 1966 by Rogue magazine. First published in Rogue magazine, February/March 1966.
“The Mayor of Mare Tranq.” © 1996 by Frederik Pohl. First published in The Williamson Effect, edited by Roger Zelazny (New York: Tor Books, 1996).
“Fermi and Frost.” Copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1985.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FREDERIK POHL has written science fiction for more than fifty years. His novel Gateway won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for best SF novel. Man Plus won the Nebula Award, and altogether he has won four Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards, among his many awards. His most recent novel is The Boy Who Would Live Forever.
In addition to his solo fiction, Pohl has collaborated with other writers, including C. M. Kornbluth, Lester del Rey, and Jack Williamson. One Pohl-Kornbluth collaboration, The Space Merchants, is a bestselling classic of satiric science fiction. The Starchild Trilogy with Williamson is one of the more notable collaborations in the field.
Pohl became a magazine editor when still a teenager. In the 1960s he piloted Worlds of If to three successive Hugos for best magazine. He has edited original-story anthologies, notably the seminal Star series of the early 1950s. Among his other activities in the field, he has been a literary agent, has edited lines of science fiction books, and has been president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He and his wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull, an academic active in the Science Fiction Research Association, live in Palatine, Illinois.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously
PLATINUM POHL: THE COLLECTED BEST STORIES
Copyright © 2005 by Frederik Pohl
Introduction copyright © 2005 by Tom Doherty Associa
tes, LLC.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
First publication and copyright information for reprinted material appears on pages 461 through 463, which constitute a continuation of this copyright page.
PLATINUM POHL Page 80