The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  Chanute Field was more like real Army. You could smoke in the mess halls (“You’re at an Air Base now, soldier!”), you could get weekend passes to go as far away as Chicago; I even think there was no bed check, although that seems more wildly indulgent than I can believe. As a special bonus particularly for me, Jack Williamson turned up at the weather school. Jack was a year or so ahead of me on the track. He had already done his basic, become a weather observer, and gone out for a year or two in the field; now he was back at Chanute for advanced training as a forecaster. He was a most welcome sight, and reminded me that ordinality was still not permanently beyond reach. Joe Winters’s wife, Dorothy, came out from New York to spend the summer in the tiny town of Rantoul; they took a room, Joe got an off-base pass, and they introduced me to square dancing and the delights of string quartets. Tina stopped by on her way from her own basic training to a commission as a second lieutenant in the WACs. When I finally came in season for a weekend pass to Chicago, I spent it with the new editor of Amazing Stories, Raymond A. Palmer. I had read Ray’s own stories as a kid, and his magazine (though under a prior editor) had actually printed the first words of mine that anyone paid money for. But we had never met. His appearance was a great surprise. Ray had suffered some sort of spinal damage and carried a conspicuous hump on his shoulders. He was twisted and tiny, not much more than four feet tall. I had not known! It was impossible not to notice it. I had often discussed him with mutual friends, and yet no one had ever mentioned that about him. I am sure the reason was Ray himself—bright, warmhearted, willing to put himself to immense trouble for a stray GI like me.

  All this mingling with writers and other human beings made my typing fingers itch again.

  I had asked my mother to ship down my lavender portable while still in basic training, as soon as I was sure there wasn’t any rule against having it. But I had used it only for letters. Now I wanted to try a story.

  The problem was finding a place to work. There were thirty thousand GIs in Chanute Field, and they occupied all the holes. I knew when I could write. Saturday nights were my own, and there was no reveille on Sunday mornings, so I could write until I couldn’t stay awake any more and sleep late the next day. But where? The day rooms closed at midnight. The barracks lights went out at ten-thirty. The classrooms were locked.

  But in all of Chanute Field there was one facility that never closed, day, night, or Sunday; moreover, it would disturb no one if I typed there, because there was no one sleeping there to disturb: the pro station.

  So there I sat, rattling away on one story or another, while the soldiers who had expended their raunchiness in a doubtful place lurched in and stumbled out. They didn’t bother me. And none of them lingered long enough for me to bother them.

  I think one of the stories I wrote in the Chanute pro station was a detective short called “The Life of Riley.” Oddly, I don’t seem to have made any use of the surroundings for what I now perceive as interesting local color.

  After Chanute I made corporal and shipped out to an operational air base in Enid, Oklahoma. I had made private first class as soon as I completed basic. That came to one rise in grade every sixty days or so, which meant that the war would only have to last another two years to see me a brigadier general, if nothing went wrong with the system.32

  Enid’s weather station was a real working facility. Enid was a basic flying school. The kay-dets had to rely on what we told them about the weather, so there were real values at stake when we played at spotting synoptic maps and following pilot balloons through a theodolite. A nice touch was that several of the weather observers were WACs, notably a very fine-looking and highly smart blonde divorcée from Florida named Zenobia Qualls Grizzard. Zenobia and I were seriously misgraffed in respect of years, but we had a lot of fun, golfing together, bowling together, drinking three-point-two beer together in the Passion Pit of the Hotel Youngblood in town. Zenobia outclassed me in all those activities. She was a champion golfer, tournament type; fortunately for my ego, she had broken her ankle not long before and still couldn’t put much muscle into her swing. So I always lost, but not always badly.

  Our drinking was somewhat affected, if not really handicapped, by Oklahoma’s quaint image of itself as a dry state. Only three-point-two was legal, but you could get anything you cared to name from the bellboys at the Youngblood. At least they said you could; I never heard them turn down a request, but every bottle came with the seal broken, and I have my suspicions about where and how they were filled.

  After six months at Enid it ’peared to me that I could hear the step of the Fool-Killer coming up behind me. It seemed time to move on. The trouble with Oklahoma was that there weren’t very many Nazis there to fight. I wanted action. My 201 file bulged with applications to be transferred to a combat theater. None of them seemed to move anyone to action, and the war was moving on. Then a circular came through, soliciting volunteers for Arctic training. I signed up at once.

  In the fullness of time my orders came through. I was sent to Lowry Field, Colorado, for cold-weather instruction, they pulled all the fillings out of my teeth and replaced them with freezeproof North Pole models, and then they sent me to Italy.

  The troopship Cristobal steamed into the Bay of Naples and moored, not at your usual New York or London variety of pier, but next to a bombed-out, belly-up freighter. The Bay of Naples had been hit very hard by bombers, everybody’s bombers. First the Americans and the British had stamped it bloody; then, when the city changed hands, the Luftwaffe finished up what was left. Nobody cared about bombing the city, but the port was big business; so in order to get ashore we had to march on catwalks across those capsized ships.

  I was not quite prepared for the reality of war—I don’t mean the fighting itself (I had read all about that, and seen it in a hundred Hollywood movies), but the open wounds that were left behind when a war moved on. We went by truck to a repple-depple on the Caserta Road, and it took me time to realize that those buildings with holes in them had not been marked for urban renewal by a demolition crew but were the inadvertent targets of bombs or shells aimed at something else. In the evenings the women pressed up against the fence of the replacement depot, offering, in their soft, hoarse peasant voices, laundry services, home-cooked meals, and themselves. We spare parts lay in the bin for a week or so while the scoops came through and shoveled us out to our stations. I wound up with the 456th Bomb Group—“Colonel Steed’s Flying Colts,” for God’s sake—in a place called Stornara, surrounded by walnut groves, a few miles from the Adriatic on the Foggia plain.

  The 456th flew B-24s, clumsy four-engine bombers that rumbled out to Romanian oil installations and Yugoslavian marshaling yards every day they could fly. They did not always come back. Sometimes they didn’t even get out of sight of the field. We lost a few on takeoff—blam! and a pillar of smoke at the end of the runway—and one awful night, at the time of the invasion of southern France, two pairs of B-24s collided as they were forming up and another was ignited by a scrap of debris, so that five of them were burning in the air at once over the field. The equation

  5 B24 = 50 0+EM

  solved itself in all our minds, and we ground crew stood staring while those fifty human beings died. Some of them jumped, but none of them lived, because the parachutes were on fire.

  Shortly after I reached the 456th, I got a lawyer’s letter from Florida to tell me that Doë had brought suit for divorce. As I was a soldier and therefore divorce-proof for the duration, I could have stopped it. But I deduced she had something in mind, and so I signed the paper and sent it back. A little while later I heard through mutual friends that she had married Tommy Owens, a neighborhood kid who had known Doë longer than I had, now a B-25 navigator in the States.

  And about that time my mother’s letters became shorter and less frequent. I knew she was ill. She never talked about her illness in her letters, but when two weeks went by with no mail at all, I realized she was sicker than I had thought.

&n
bsp; Well, I knew what to do about that. It was in all the magazines. When our brave soldier boys at the fighting fronts had a problem, the Red Cross was always there. They would know how to help.

  So I went looking for the 456th’s own Red Cross man. The Red Cross had communications facilities denied to the rest of us; he could send a cable to the hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and get an answer back in hours. He could even arrange compassionate leave, a quick trip back to the States on a courier plane via Dakar and Natal. He could do a lot. And I really think he might have, at that. If I had ever been able to find him. Unfortunately his schedule did not permit him to be in his little office very often, and for a solid week, every time I went looking for him, he was out playing golf. And then I did get a cable and the issue became moot. My mother had died of bone cancer in Allentown.

  The headquarters squadron facilities at Stornara had been improvised out of tents, barns, and wineries, but there was one building that was solid and new: the enlisted men’s club down the hill. Square, empty cinder-block building, it had been someone’s fantasy of Red Cross dances and film showings, but in practice it seldom held anything more than the all-weather, all-group crap games. I claimed a corner of it and set up my typewriter.

  Because I was a little homesick about New York, I decided to write about it. A novel—why not? I meditated on the plot and decided that the most interesting thing in New York was the advertising business, and so, page by page, I began to hammer out a long, complicated, and very bad novel called For Some We Loved.33 The Italian civilian who cleaned up the EM club respected what I was doing immensely, guarded my privacy, and gave me a picture of himself which I still have, taken while he was in Mussolini’s army in Ethiopia. It shows him brandishing an immense revolver and looking exactly like the reason the Italians lost the war: a gentle man with a great sense of humor; it is impossible to imagine him ever firing that gun at a human being.

  There wasn’t really a lot to do. For a few hours before the group took off on a mission we were all busy; the rest of the time we played chess or wrote letters or talked during our duty hours. Donovan Bess was there, perhaps the best chess player I’ve ever encountered; he had the curious idiosyncrasy of calling a knight a horse, but his country-boy dialogue covered up grand-master play. The station commander was an apple-cheeked second lieutenant named Jack Adler, who had just discovered T. S. Eliot, and for a solid week we went over the imagery in Prufrock to make sure we knew what the man was talking about.

  The weather wing picked up all the high-IQ oddballs in the Air Force, and we had among us a tithing fundamentalist from Ohio, a Polish halfback from Hamtramck and the first admitted homosexual I had ever known on a social basis; he was out of action for the duration, he said, because that was grounds for court-martial and a dishonorable discharge, but he enjoyed telling everyone who would listen what his preferences and plans were.

  When the resources of the air base ran thin, I borrowed a jeep and went to visit Foggia, Cerignola, or Barletta. There wasn’t much in Foggia, because it had been bombed flat. There wasn’t a lot in Cerignola, either, because there never had been; sleepy farm town with a huge new cathedral that smelled like a latrine, it was the kind of community that the Italians used to say Christ never bothered to visit. But Barletta lay on the lovely, limpid Adriatic, not yet a septic tank, and you could swim and lie on the beach and gaze speculatively at the beautiful fifteen-year-old Whore of Barletta, rejecting commercial offers in the afternoon for the sake of improving her suntan, and even meet civilians of a different kind. One was a former Italian Army artillery captain named Ugo Vittorini, whose brother, Elio, was one of Italy’s finest novelists. Ugo had served in Yugoslavia. A fierce anti-Fascist, he had managed to persuade his entire battery to desert to the partisans there, while his wife, Maria, was operating a “safe house” for partigiani between the lines in northern Italy. Now they were a quiet professorial couple with children and a pleasant apartment on a courtyard, and they impressed me very much.

  Twenty-two years after the war my wife, Carol, and I attended the Science Fiction Film Festival in Trieste and arranged to meet our two older daughters (then at school in England) in Naples as soon as their term ended. We had a week to spare, and we spent it driving a rented Fiat through my war. I don’t know what it did for Carol, except a little heat prostration here and there, but I found it fascinating. Foggia! In 1944 there had been almost nothing standing except the beat-up tower of the church; in 1967 it was all pastel stucco high-rises, and I couldn’t even find the church in the towers around it. Barletta, too, was all high-rise pink and blue apartment buildings and a whole new battery of hotels and restaurants. But in Cerignola time had stopped. Not a building had been added, none taken away, and the church still smelled like a latrine, while all the rest of the area had risen from the grave and turned into Miami Beach.

  Around the same time I found the solution to a minor mystery that dated back to Stornara. A bomb wing was made up of four groups, but our wing had only three: the 455th, 456th, and 458th. I always wondered where that last group had got to, and then in a casual conversation with Hal Clement, he supplied the answer. The 457th had been detached to fill a hole in the AAF in England, and he had been in it. Pity it worked out like that. I would have been thrilled to meet Hal Clement in Italy.

  An observed fact of my life is that I have almost always gotten everything I wanted, sooner or later. Another observed fact is that sometimes by the time I get it I don’t want it any more. For Christmas the Army gave me that thing I had been scheming and contriving for, for a year and a half, a chance to transfer to the Infantry, go to OCS, and become an expendable second lieutenant with the Fifth Army as it crawled up the mountains toward the Po.

  Catch-22 was that in order to take advantage of this boon, one had to re-up for two more years, and it was clear to everyone who looked at a map that the war wouldn’t stretch that long. It was annoying that the Germans didn’t seem to perceive this fact. Indeed, they had just launched the Ardennes attack, perplexingly as if they thought they were still a viable military force. But the Russians were grinding bloodily west, and the Fifth Army was creeping north up the Apennines; even the Japanese were being pushed off one island after another, and there was no doubt in my mind that the European part of the war would run out in a few months and the rest of it not long after.

  But still—

  A third of a century later, with Vietnam so huge in the recent past, it is hard for me to remember how righteously most of us viewed our cause. But we did. The Nazis had done terrible things. How terrible we were being reminded every day, as the Americans and British liberated one concentration camp after another. It was a moral obligation to stop them, even at risk—maybe especially if at risk, to prove, well, something to, well, somebody.

  So I stewed over this problem for a while, doing arithmetic in my head. Allow a month for the papers to be processed; that brings us into January. Add ten weeks for the OCS course, and say another two to hang around a replacement depot waiting for an assignment. That brought us to early April at best before I would be handed my platoon to lead into combat, and where would the combat be? Surely not in Europe any more. And the war against Japan seemed mostly a matter of Air Force and Navy, even if it managed to stay in business long enough to get me there.

  As it turned out, my arithmetic was a little wrong. The Germans managed to hold out until May, plenty of time for me to get my head blown off if I had really wanted it. But in the event it was taken out of my hands, anyway. Someone in AAF/MTO headquarters in Caserta had his eye on me. They had discovered that I had been a writer and an editor as a civilian, and decided I would be more use with words than with weapons or weather instruments. So in January, 1945, I packed up and headed west across the peninsula.

  U.S. Army Air Forces/Mediterranean Theater of Operations was headquartered in the King’s Palace in the town of Caserta, a few miles inland from Naples: immense rectangular tenement of a building that reminded me a l
ot of Knickerbocker Village. It wasn’t just Air Force, or even just Americans. The whole allied Mediterranean war effort was directed from there. People like Eisenhower and Churchill passed through from time to time, causing much pain to the headquarters troops who were required to shine themselves up for ceremonial parades. (We Weather Squadron people were never involved in that sort of thing, fortunately for the good name of the service.) The place was full of foreigners. There was a big RAF unit, and I became friendly with some of them on a bridge-playing and beer-drinking basis. There were French troops, including black colonials; co-belligerent Italians; and quite a few former members of the Wehrmacht, now working in the mess halls as KPs to feed us conquerors. There I met my longtime friend Eddie Cope, the sage of Houston, Texas, who passed on to me all he had learned at the University of Texas’s drama department. (“There are only three reasons for any line: to show character, advance the action, or get a laugh,” “If you show a gun on the stage, you have to fire it.” Etc. They are all good rules, tolerant about being broken when necessary.)