The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  The Ipsy-Wipsy was some two hundred years old, with sculptured plaster ceilings in the billiard room and immense fireplaces in the drawing room and the dining hall, and a strange, huge painting that went with the house (because there was no way to remove it) on the landing of the stairs. The Pratts had bought it cheaply enough, but I cannot imagine how many tens of thousands must have gone into jacking up the fireplaces, stopping the leaks in the roof, replacing wood that had rotted and plaster that had peeled away. Owning a big old house is a career. They are like beaver dams, a dynamic interplay between creation and decay. If you take your eyes off them for a moment, they are down around your ears: the heating system goes, the roof tiles separate and blow away, water stains the walls you have just repainted, the floors begin to pop. But it’s worth it. Maybe it’s worth it. It’s worth it if you enjoy the house, and if you keep it filled with life.

  The Pratts surely filled theirs, with people, books, and marmosets. Fletcher raised the little wooly monkeys; they lived in bird cages in the billiard room huddling under scraps of blanket and peering out with their old-man faces cocked to one side, wistful for a mealworm or a grape. Fletcher, who was the dearest man alive, looked like a marmoset himself with his own head held in exactly the same position, and with his marmoset beard and bright marmoset eyes. Sometimes we borrowed the Ipsy’s company. Sometimes they borrowed ours. Basil Davenport was an Ipsy-Wipsy regular, a Book-of-the-Month-Club editor who came out one weekend in great exultation because he had persuaded the Club to take an Arthur Clarke book as an alternate selection, and thus struck a great blow for science fiction. St. Leger Lawrence was another. So was John Ciardi, paying his bills by teaching in a New England college and doubling as a science-fiction editor for Twayne while waiting for poetry to pay off. So were any number of literary skin divers, former dictators of obscure countries, rocket millionaires, space chemists, and, naturally, science-fiction writers: Ted Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Katherine MacLean and her husband, Charley Dye, the Kornbluths, the de Camps, the del Reys. William Lindsay Gresham was there a lot just at the end of his life, an irascible, mean-mouthed man who was having troubles he could not handle, and one night a little later, checked into a Times Square hotel and killed himself. Willy Ley and his wife, Olga, came out frequently with their two small girls (enough bigger than ours so that we had inherited Xenia’s crib for, successively, Annie and Karen). When Doña and John Campbell were divorced, Doña married George O. Smith, and by and by they came to the Ipsy not as house guests but to live. (The old original house, four or five rooms of it, was still part of the structure, with its own independent facilities and entrances, and it became theirs.) Laurence and Edie Manning came for a few weekends. Larry had written The Man Who Awoke and many other science-fiction stories in the old days and now was the proprietor of his own mail-order nursery; they made up their minds quickly, bought a piece of Fletcher’s property, and built a house of their own next door. Meanwhile, the del Reys had come out to spend a weekend with Carol and me, stayed several months, and then moved into their own place down the street. The science-fiction population of Monmouth County was growing by leaps and bounds.

  Saturday was the special day at the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute. At five the cocktail flag was hoisted while Fletcher tootled the trumpet, and the guests began to assemble. We drank for hours around the huge oak cocktail table in the billiard room, before dining on the quail or eel or roast hump of bison. Fletcher, God save him, was a lousy cook. He did not believe in overexposing food to fire, and so it was always all bloody. (He actually served the only rare bouillabaisse I have ever encountered.) What saved us all from terminal trichinosis was Grace, the all-purpose maid, who lied to him about cooking times.

  Ceremonial was a joy to Fletcher. He had been born a Buffalo farm boy, achieved prosperity and fame,51 and set out to re-create himself in the image of a landed gentleman. The Ipsy-Wipsy made it all come true. The port was always passed to the left. The after-dinner liqueurs were drunk to courteous toasts and responses. It was easy to tease Fletcher for his pretensions, but he knew what game he was playing. He saw as much humor in it as anyone else, and there was nothing mean or pretentious in it, or in Fletcher. He made the world a nicer place.

  In 1957 he began to feel ill. Staunch Christian Scientist, he would have nothing to do with the doctors of the flesh. By the time Inga bullied him into seeing one, it was too late. He died of cancer of the stomach.

  A year or two later Inga remarried and moved away and the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute was sold to a dentist from Jersey City. One night it burned to the ground. The dentist cleared away the rubble and built himself a split-level ranch house on the spot. It may be a nice enough place, but it has nothing of the majesty of the Ipsy, or of the memories.

  Early in the 1950s something else happened that changed my life in ways I had never anticipated, and it began when I subscribed to Scientific American.

  I had a fair grounding in science and mathematics from Brooklyn Tech and Chanute Field, but I was not terribly interested in the subjects. SciAm began to turn me on.

  The precipitating incident was a brief, popularized article on the theory of numbers. At that time it was a terribly arcane subject. Now it is less so, particularly for ten-year-olds, because the “new math” of the public schools leans heavily on number theory: which is to say, the properties of numbers.

  Now, I don’t really expect you to sit still while I explain number theory to you. I am not sure if I could even answer the question if you were to ask me if it mattered at all. One answer would be, “My God, yes!” Another would be, “Of course not.” The best answer would be that it has the same importance as God has. Either it is of transcendental concern or it doesn’t matter at all, and which it is to you depends on you.

  The article was only a teaser, but it included a bibliography. I had my secretary order all the books in the bibliography and I read them—not, dear God, without pain! They stretched my head to its limits. I found that they were teasers, too. I found that number theory was one of the very few domains of science and mathematics in which an amateur might well achieve something all the professionals had always missed, and, in fact, in which quite a few amateurs had done so.

  Well, that seemed like pretty jazzy fun, and so I plunged into a couple of the classic problems. The seductive thing about them is that they are almost all quite easy to understand. Solving them, not so easy.

  For instance, there is the case of Fermat’s last theorem.

  This fellow, Pierre de Fermat, who died some three hundred and more years ago, had some flaky habits. There is no question that he was a genius of a mathematician, everyone knew that. The trouble was that he knew it, too, and knew it so well that he never felt any obligation to prove it to anyone. Most of what he said he mentioned offhandedly in casual letters to friends, or even in little scribbles to posterity in the margins of his books, and one of those scribbles has caused immense pain to all the world’s greatest mathematicians—and also to me!—ever since.

  It goes like this:

  When you were in high school, you learned that the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse. You learned to write it as a2 + b2 = c2. That was a powerful discovery in itself, but it wasn’t made by Fermat; a fellow named Pythagoras laid that one on us two thousand years ago.

  A different ancient fellow named Diophantos looked at the equation in a different way and proposed a general solution for the formula; and there matters languished till flaky old Fermat came along. And in his copy of Diophantos’s book he wrote:

  It is impossible to write a cube as the sum of two cubes, a fourth power as the sum of two fourth powers, and in general any power beyond the second as the sum of two similar powers.

  That’s not news in itself. It means that equations like a3 + b3 = c3 or even a115 + b115 = c115 might as well never be written, because they don’t mean anything—there aren’t any numbers you can put into them that will make them come out with exact
answers. But everyone rather suspected that, anyway.

  But Fermat didn’t stop there. He added one more sentence, which was the kicker:

  For this I have discovered a truly wonderful proof, but the margin is too small to contain it.

  Now, what a spot to leave generations of mathematicians in! It cannot be ignored. You or I could write that in the margins of anything we liked, and no one would lose a moment’s sleep. But Fermat did not make claims he could not support, ever.

  Well, I never found that “truly wonderful proof.” No one else has, either. But in looking for it I came across half a dozen other brain teasers: verifying Goldbach’s conjecture,52 looking for a formula for primes.53 Finding a general rule to explain the recurring rhythms in sums of powers—well, never mind about that one; I may get back to it someday.

  From first to last, I must have spent a year on number theory, reading papers in things like Scripta Mathematica, doodling endless series of numbers. About half of what I did that year could have been done in minutes on a computer, or in a few days, anyway, on a pocket calculator of the kind my son carries in his shirt pocket to classes, but I didn’t have them. Then finally the fever spent itself.

  But there were sequelae. I’m not fully recovered yet.

  I discovered that I could learn quite a lot about a particular subject; having demonstrated this on one subject, I tried it on some others. I became interested in recent American history and began to look into the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. After a time I realized I knew enough to write a book and began systematically to prepare it. That one never made it to print—not yet, anyway54—but first-century Rome also interested me, and that one did turn into a book, Tiberius. One on the Ku Klux Klan made it all the way to final draft and a publishing contract, but then I found I was dissatisfied with it and withdrew it, meaning to go over it one more time when I found an opportunity. (It hasn’t come yet.) I learned the uses of reference collections and the microfilmed periodicals in the big Fifth Avenue library. I developed an appetite. School had never sated it, or even let me know I had it.

  I don’t think of myself as a scholar. I think I have the same relation to knowledge that your brother-in-law has to the Los Angeles Rams. Learning—all kinds of learning, but especially history, politics, and above all, science—to me is the greatest of spectator sports. It gives me pleasure.

  Real-fun, kicky pleasure? Well—yes, maybe. Pleasure in the sense that sex is pleasure, but also painful in the sense that unfulfilled sex can be a yearning and obsessive pain. It hurts me to be ignorant. It is unpleasant, in an interior, unfulfilled way, for me to discover that there is a whole space of knowledge I don’t share.

  God knows, I am no scientist. There is no prospect at all that I will ever make any fundamental discoveries in physics, chemistry, or biology. I don’t have the equipment. I don’t just mean the skills, although they are daunting. I mean the hardware that is pretty fancily outside my amateur reach: mile-long particle accelerators, radio-telescope dishes with hearts of liquid helium and skins that spread across a valley, whole populations of nude mice and genetically pure tree frogs. I can accept that. Scientific discovery is not the sort of challenge that I feel compelled to take up personally. I really want to know very much what the world of Venus is like under its opaque, searing clouds. But it’s all right to leave the problem to the Soviet and American space establishments. Little by little, they are fitting the pieces together, and when they learn something new, the JPL or Carl Sagan or Walter Sullivan will be sure to tell me, one way or another. I am content with that. I think that somewhere I have a basic religion, and its dogma is that the purpose of life is to understand the world and all it contains. I don’t need to make the discoveries. But I do need to know about them.

  And so I read Scientific American and New Scientist and Science and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Spaceflight and the Journal of the B.I.S. and, oh, hell, I don’t know, maybe a dozen other publications. And when in one of them somebody says something new and elegant, it is almost like it used to be when Roy Campanella drove Jackie Robinson across the plate in the old days.

  Sometimes people ask me what my scientific background is, and I have worked out an answer. I point to my friend Isaac Asimov, who is about the same age as I am. We met when we were both still in high school. I dropped out without graduating, and most of what I have learned I have picked up catch-as-catch-can. While Isaac did graduate from high school, and went on to college, and got a bachelor’s degree, and then a master’s degree, and then a doctorate, and finally became a professor. And that proves that, when the will to learn is present, obstacles can be overcome; because when you come right down to it, Isaac knows as much science as I do.

  The 1950s were boom years for science-fiction magazines. At the peak there were some thirty-eight of them, and anybody who could write science fiction at all could get published in one or another of them. (So did a lot of people who couldn’t.)

  Making a living was something else. A lot of the word rates were low—well, they were all low, compared with the kind of money sf writers expect now. Three cents a word was a good price. Horace paid me four, and that was super. In that decade I was Galaxy’s most prolific contributor, with some seven serials and about thirty shorter pieces; I counted on some three or four thousand dollars a year from Galaxy, and somewhat more than that amount from all the other markets combined. In the 1950s eight or ten thousand dollars a year was well above the poverty level, and if I hadn’t had that thirty-thousand-dollar millstone hanging around my neck, I would have felt pretty prosperous.

  Unfortunately the debts did exist. I paid them off as best as I could. In the process new debts developed. I discovered that my local grocer would let me charge. So, a while later, did my friend and down-the-street neighbor, Lester del Rey. Within a year or two we each had four-figure tabs with the poor grocer.55 He was incredibly good about it. As prosperity seeped back Lester paid him off and he built a new entrance to his store. A little later I did, too, and he built a new store.

  After The Space Merchants Cyril and I began a new novel,56 and when it got far enough along to show I turned it over to Horace Gold. Fine, he said, I’ll publish it. I’ll do more than that. I’ll consider it as an entry in the Galaxy $7,000 Prize Novel Contest, and I can tell you right now, from looking at the other entries, it’s practically a sure thing to win. Only thing is, you have to use a pen name. Why is that? I asked. Because I say so, he explained. But the rules don’t say anything about it having to be by a new name, I protested. No, but the purpose of the contest is to discover new talent, and I by-gosh will discover new talent even if I have to find it in you, he clarified.

  So I went home and talked it over with Cyril, and Cyril shared my view: seven thousand dollars was mighty attractive numbers, but not, when you come right down to it, any more than we would get anyway from serial and book sales, and we liked the book, which meant we wanted to have it under our own names. I told this to Horace, and he accepted defeat gracefully enough; he did serialize it, just as planned, without involving the contest at all.

  I do not think I was a good enough person to refrain from telling Horace I had told him so. I had. Prize contests are a terrible way to find talent. I do not believe they have ever worked well, and mostly they don’t work at all. So it happened with Horace’s. As the deadline approached and he read through the hundreds of entries that blocked every doorway in his apartment, it became clear that there was nothing there that was really outstanding, and an awful lot that was preposterously bad.

  By then Lester and I had gotten together on a novel about the future of the insurance business, Preferred Risk. Gladiator-at-Law was already in type, and I offered the new one to Horace. He read it and called me up: Uh, Fred? How about if we make this one the winner?

  The stipulation was the same: we had to use a brand-new pen name, and everyone concerned was to pretend it was a real person. I talked it over with Lester, who is philosophi
cal about the vagaries of editors. Why not? he said, and we proceeded to cook up a pen name. We divided the labor equally. I chose the first name—“Edson”—and he provided the other—“McCann.” And then a few days later he came to me with the look of wild pleasure that serendipitous flakiness always gives Lester and pointed out that the initials E. McC. could equally well be written e = m c2.

  All of this was a terribly deep secret. We made up a whole life for this Edson McCann person, celebrated nuclear physicist, so heavily into classified research that he did not dare show his face in public. But the secret was really no secret. Five or six years later, when I went to work for Bob Guinn, Galaxy’s publisher, he let me know as gently as he could that he had found out about it long since.

  Collaborating is a familiar life-style to me, I’ve done it with at least a score of writers, some of whom I’ve never met. But this time was especially tricky. Lester and I do not collaborate well. He has his own very idiosyncratic way of working. While I have, of course, a well-thought-out and admirable set of work habits of my own. The two do not meet at any point, and the whole exercise took twice as long as it should have with ten times the trouble. Lester and I have been close friends for a very long time. One reason we have stayed so is that, after Preferred Risk, we never collaborated again.

  Especially not for Horace Gold, who added a whole other dimension of complication to the effort. With Preferred Risk the complication was almost entirely in the Byzantine conspiracy of silence. In the work with Cyril Kornbluth it was at every step. Working with two individuals as quirkily brilliant as Horace and Cyril kept me on my toes twenty-four hours a day. Horace would edit. He would also come up with suggestions as the work was going along, great gobs of them, some bright and some lunatic. To the maximum extent possible I believe in humoring editors, and so, at Horace’s special request, we, for instance, added a couple of chapters to the serial version of Gravy Planet, carrying the action of the story onto the surface of the planet Venus. (It was easy enough to drop them out again when we came to publish the story in its book form as The Space Merchants.) But when Horace asked for something of the same sort on Gladiator-at-Law, I flatly refused. As far as I was concerned, that closed the matter. Cyril and I had a working treaty. After the rough draft of the book was done, he was out of it. I always did the final revisions (except on the last novel we did together, Wolfbane), and I always did all the dealing with editors and publishers. But with Gladiator-at-Law Horace outwitted me; he got on the phone with Cyril when I wasn’t looking, and persuaded him to borrow the setting copy of the manuscript and write in some additional scenes.57