The Early Pohl

by Frederik Pohl

That was not so good. "Check—come here," I called after a space. He stirred suddenly, as though my command had jolted him out of some deep thought. He stepped slowly forward, still with puzzlement at something in his eyes, and looked a question at me.

  "Take the rod from one of them," I ordered, stabbing my weapon at one of the men. He hesitated. "Go ahead," I cried with irritation. "There may be more along in a minute,"

  He hesitated for only a second after that. Then, with a swift swoop, he snatched a rod, stepped back a pace—and snatched my rod!

  Swinging it to cover all of us, Clory and Braid and me as well as the men, he wrinkled his brow. "Now, wait a minute, all of you," he muttered. "I want to think—" He stared at the men, and at us, then shrugged. "Get up!" he cried to the original owner of the rod. "I'm going to see this through. We're going to the Council Chamber!"

  The man rose, smiling. "You are coming along very well," he observed cryptically, and led the way along the hall. Nor did he say anything more.

  The man who, in my dream, I had replaced as leader of the Council, widened his eyes in surprise as the lot of us entered. "Weapons?" he murmured questioningly. "There should be no weapons in here."

  But Check said, "I am not sure of that, yet—though I am beginning to believe it. But I shall keep this until you explain things to me."

  The man smiled. "There is no need to explain," he said, seating himself. I saw with a start that he had not taken the seat of the day before, but was in a small, less conspicuous seat to one side of it and below. That was how I had dreamed it!

  "No," repeated the old man, "there is no need to explain any more. We have explained already. Did you not have dreams last night? . . . Yes. Those dreams, then, were fact. We induced them, hypnotically, to tell you what words could not tell as well.

  "If you had accepted them as fact, they would have told you that this city is your home. Your real home, more so than the Tribes from which you came. Even, it is Glory's home, though she was born in a Tribe. Her father and her mother lived here."

  "This snake hole?" ejaculated Braid.

  The man laughed gently. "This is not all of the world. This city here, which houses a paltry few thousand people, is only one of a hundred thousand such; the others all on other planets. This world is merely the sixth satellite of the fifth planet circling one sun. And each of the other planets is inhabited, and many planets of other suns. On the third planet of the sun is the home of our race, from which we all stem, but there are a thousand times as many people of our race now as the planet could hold—even were there still Death."

  "But why—" I began, and then stopped, for the man had raised a hand.

  "I shall tell you the 'whys' in a moment," he said. "And when I have told you a few of them, to prepare you for the shock, your minds shall be returned to you."

  Check quickened his breath at those words. His rod dropped unnoticed to the floor; one of the men picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. Before we could ask another question, the old man went on.

  "As I have said, there is no more Death, save by accident. You know that; you know that, though many disappear, few die. Those who disappear come here.

  "For immortality brings age. The fine blade of the mind dulls from constant use. The body does not sicken nor age, but the mind grows old. It must be rested.

  "And for that are these rest planets—one in every System—established. All knowledge, save of the simple art of language, walking, and the others, is taken from a man when he is discovered to need rest. He is given an artificial, hypnotic memory, and sent to join a Tribe. For a dozen years or more he lives with the Tribe, while his mind grows younger. Then he is brought back, as were Check and Braid, or finds his way back as you did. And he takes up his place again, refreshed."

  He paused and looked sharply at the door. It was open; a man was entering, bearing a shimmering bright gem in his hand. "You have all been examined," he continued slowly, "and found to be completely rejuvenated. Then you were given the sleep-teaching treatment, to prepare you, and then this little speech. You are now ready to have returned to you your full minds, with all the memories of your long, long lives!"

  The man with the crystal stepped forward, looking from one to the other of us. "Keefe will be first," said the older one. "Simply look into the jewel."

  I looked—I heard the man who carried it commence to speak, a droning voice that compelled sleep. In seconds the voice faded away, and the lights dimmed and the entire world was dark. Then there was a sound like thunder, and I heard the word, "Awake!"

  My eyes opened, and I felt a maddening, dizzying swirl of thoughts into my brain. I reeled and clutched at the man as my brain, stung into swift activity, sorted and filed the knowledge it had taken me a long lifetime to acquire.

  I stood there, swaying. Then there was a sudden feeling of released tension, and I opened my eyes.

  Everything suddenly was familiar. I knew my life, and what I had to do.

  And with a sort of joyous gravity I had never known in the life of the Tribe, I stepped forward and, with the ease of long experience, slid quietly into the seat of pre-eminence among the Council.

  There are two things I've been meaning to talk about, because they seem to me relevant, but I haven't found a place for them—so I'll arbitrarily put them in here.

  One is Futurian games.

  We were a competitive bunch, all arrogant individualists. When we played games we played for blood. We started with the usual games everyone knows—all the card games; all the board games; parlor games like Twenty Questions and Ghosts. Then we improved on them. Instead of Twenty Questions we played Impossible Questions, the point of which was to ask a question to which no one else knew the answer. It had to be fair. It had to be something that any highly intelligent Renaissance man could have been expected to have come across in the course of a lifetime's study. Ideally, it should also contain an item of information interesting in itself, because of its oddity or its significance. (Example—from the last time I played it, shortly after World War II: "What did Wernher von Braun say when the American rocket experts asked him what the aerodynamic reason was for having such small tail fins on the V-2?" Answer: "Wernher von Braun laughed and laughed and said, 'Aerodynamics, nicht. We had to make them small because we shipped them by rail, and the German train tunnels were so narrow.'") The end of the game was when anybody present could answer any question. Sometimes that never happened.

  Ghosts palled after a while,* So we began playing Tsohg (Ghosts backward), then Le Spectre, which was Ghosts in French. (What made it hard was that none of us knew any French, except for the occasional word like tiens!, alors, merde and so on.) When that began to run out of steam we invented a whole new game, or way of life, called Djugashvili. Superficially this resembled Ghosts, but every player said whatever he felt was appropriate (Reverse! Foot fault!—whatever), and the loser was whoever the other players could brainwash into admitting he had lost a point. The rule was there were no rules.

  Then there was the Piece of String. That was not a game we played with each other, we played it on people, in parks, on warm summer nights, when there were plenty of strollers and the light was not too good. Two of us would stand in the middle of a path, gazing expectantly at approaching strollers. Then, as they came close, we would back away into the underbrush on opposite sides, paying out nonexistent cord with our fingers; when it was all out we would lower it to shoetop level and wait to see what happened.

  What happened was never, for some reason, that people killed us, or even chased us. Some people would feel with their feet. Others would stride right through, glaring at us, daring us to trip them. Now and then somebody would say something, either hostile or now and then amused; but usually they would just walk away.

  Jack Gillespie and I went hitchhiking to Washington one weekend, not for any particular reason, just to have something to do. On the way back we decided on a detour through Hagerstown, Maryland. Sf fan Harry Warner lived there; we had corresp
onded with him, but never met him. So we had a pleasant visit, and then moved on. But not very far. On the way out of Hagerstown toward Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, we realized we had made a mistake. We were off the well-traveled roads. There just wasn't much traffic to hitch from, and what there was wasn't stopping for us. Along about three o'clock in the morning it stopped being fun, but we were committed by then. There was nothing. No diner, no filling station, not even a house with lighted windows. It was getting cold, a damp, dreary night that did not make the idea of sleeping in the open attractive. We got to hate the occasional driver that zoomed past without picking us up, and along about 5 a.m. we invented a variation on the Piece of String to get even.

  *You know what Ghosts is—every player says a letter, and the one on whom a word ends gets a letter G, then an H, then an O until he himself is a Ghost and cannot be spoken to by any other player without the penalty of a letter.

  We heard a car coming. We bent down together in the middle of the road, struck a match, held it to the concrete long enough to be sure it was seen and then ran like hell. The driver decelerated from an easy eighty to zero in five or six car lengths, nearly popping his tires in the process and winding up with one wheel in the ditch. We watched from behind trees while he got out of the car, stamped around for a while, looking for a bomb and talking to himself, and then drove away. We didn't play that game any more.

  And then on Monday morning I would put on a clean shirt and a tie and go in and be an editor.

  The other thing that I've been meaning to put in was a rather major aspect of my teen-age life, and that of some other fans of the late thirties: A number of us, myself most certainly included, got involved in Communist groups around then.

  For me it began in 1936, when a fan friend took me to a meeting of the Flatbush Young Communist League. It was a sort of wide-angle loft over some stores on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. I don't know what I expected, exactly. I don't think I got it. No one talked about throwing bombs or destroying capitalist oppression. To the extent that what went on was political at all, it had to do with trying to get Franklin D. Roosevelt re-elected President by drumming up votes for him on the "third party" Farmer-Labor ticket. There was a lot of talk about the evils of Hitlerism, about how desperately the legally elected government of Spain needed help against the Fascist invaders and about how collective security for all democratic peoples was the only way to ensure world peace. It all sounded pretty good, especially since everybody there seemed open, friendly, joking and caring with each other. We listened to the talk, sang a few lefty songs like Joe Hill and the Internationale and chatted over coffee. The Flatbush YCL was just planning to publish a club magazine, mimeographed. Well, that was right down my alley; at sixteen I already considered myself a world expert in how to edit, lay out and produce mimeographed magazines, and by virtue of my experience with fan mags, I pretty nearly was. So before I left I was signed up as editor.

  There was, to be sure, a certain amount of lip service paid to the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Pamphlets by all of them were on sale. After a time I did, in fact, try to read some of them. I gave up. I am a person who will read almost any book on almost anything, any time. But I drew the line at Das Kapital and the Little Lenin Library. Nothing in them seemed to relate to what I perceived as happening in the Communist movement in America—i.e., boycotting Japanese goods, trying to get Hitler stopped, helping the newborn C.I.O. organize the underpaid workers and so on.

  The head of the C.P.U.S.A. was an intelligent, humorous, decent man named Earl Browder. I heard him speak several times, actually met him once; I liked him. The pamphlet of his I remember best was called Communism Is 20th Century Americanism. It seemed reasonable enough to me, and Browder apparently believed it; while he was running things the C.P. and its satellite groups like the Y.C.L. acted it out. When the party line changed in Russia Browder was unceremoniously fired and, of course, systematically reviled as a revisionist traitor and Fascist by his successors.

  The Y.C.L.ers I knew over the next three years were a smart, likable, incredibly moral lot. I was quite disappointed about that. I had had some hope of free love, if not actual orgies. There were plenty of parties—fund-raisers, every one; there was never enough money. They would play records, or someone would have a guitar. Sometimes there was dancing. But I don't remember seeing even wine served, and there sure wasn't much sex. Not none. But not much; about, I guess, like any young people's church auxiliary.

  The majority of the Futurians stayed clear of the Y.C.L., not so much because they seriously objected to the politics of it as because it just didn't interest them, I think. Me, I liked it. At first I was desperate to graduate into the Communist Party, but they would have none of me because I was too young. By the time I was old enough I didn't want it any more. After the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 I found myself less and less able to stand the about-face from people I had liked and trusted; the ones who had been most passionately against Hitler now being equally virulent against Roosevelt. And the cut-off date, when I decided once and for all that, whatever else happened, I would not ever be able to belong to the American Communist movement again, was six or eight months after that. I can give the exact date, maybe even the hour. It was the fifteenth of June, 1940, somewhere between three and four o'clock in the afternoon.

  I had lunch with a friend of mine, both a fellow sf writer and a Y.C.L. member. He proposed we have a glass of wine. "Why?" said I. Wine was maybe twenty cents a glass, which would put the cost of our meal well over a dollar apiece. "To celebrate," said he; and when the wine came he raised his glass in a toast: "To the liberation of Paris from the decadent bourgeoisie by the forces of the people's socialism."

  Well, sir, that took me aback. Paris had fallen to the Wehrmacht the day before. I took no joy from that, and it really had never occurred to me that anyone I thought of as a friend would, either.

  To my eternal discredit I drank his lousy wine. Then I went back to the office and spent the afternoon deep in thought, and at the end of that time I knew I had had it, forever.†

  Anyway. Something puzzles me about this whole business and that is that, try as I will, I can't find much trace of my boy-Bolshevik orientation in any of the stories I was writing around that time. A certain amount of loathing is visible, aimed at government and power structures in general; well, I still feel that; Lord Acton was right on. But that's all I can see. The science fiction I was writing was much more concerned with the glamour, the color, the excitement of the field—what Sam Moskowitz calls "the sense of wonder." It had not yet occurred to me to poke fun at power concentrations by science-fiction satire. It was not that the form didn't exist. Heinlein and de Camp were doing it in Astounding every month. Huxley had already published Brave New World, and there was a legitimacy to the genre going back through Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes to Swift's Gulliver and beyond. But in my own work it was another decade or so until I got around to stories like—well, a couple of dozen, from The Space Merchants to The Gold at the Starbow's End.

  The chaos of World War II did not merely throw the Communist Party into catatonic shock, it of course affected everybody, even before Pearl Harbor. It affected young men very directly; Congress passed the first peacetime draft laws ever, and any of us might be called any time.

  Except that I, personally, seemed reasonably immune. Being married, I was automatically entitled to some deferment on the grounds of having a dependent. Moreover I lived in a high-rise housing development called Knickerbocker Village, in downtown New York, just up against the New York side of the Manhattan Bridge. The importance of that point lay in the fact that Knickerbocker Village was part of Selective Service Local Board No. 1's bailiwick, which also took in Chinatown. That made a difference. When war came and young men over America volunteered to fight the Japanese, in Chinatown they were all volunteering. I don't know if Local Board No. 1 ever had to draft anyone.

  Doë and I had apartment BH8-Building B, Floor 8, Apartment H—with
a handsomely large living room, small bedroom, tiny kitchen and almost invisible bath. We liked it a lot, and liked most of all the fact that Knickerbocker Village really was a village, almost a small city of its own. Restaurants, bars, a co-op supermarket, newsstands, drugstore—they were all in the building. We could get to them through the underground maze without ever setting foot out of doors. And we had our friends there. Dick Wilson and his pretty new wife Jessica were in apartment EE2, across the courtyard. We didn't have to waste money on phone calls; we could wigwag to each other from window to window. In the penthouse of our own building was Willard Crosby and his wife, child and Siamese cats; a couple of buildings away was Loren Dowst. Bill and Dusty were senior editors at Popular Publications, admirable, intelligent, droll people. Other old friends turned up as tenants, and we made new friends with some of the neighbors. KV was generally a nice place to be.

  That was fortunate, because I spent a lot of time there.

  † A little while later my friend had had it forever, too.

  Like most fan groups, the Futurians had schismed. The basic power struggle was between Don Wollheim and myself. I don't remember what we were fighting about. Probably everything. At one of our meetings there was some kind of vote. I claimed my side had won, Donald claimed it was his side, and so the Futurians split apart.

  We still stayed on speaking terms, but the social life in Knickerbocker Village was beginning to appeal more than the social life of the Futurians anyway. I had discovered a few new interests. Doë had introduced me to the ballet: first the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with Frederic Franklin taking sixty-four bars of music to die as the slave in Scheherazade; then Ballet Theatre, with Anton Dolin and Nora Kaye and Eglevsky and Toumanova and all of those other great dancers in marvelous three-part performances. The format was always the same: something classical, like Sylphides; a virtuoso piece like Gala Performance; something modern, like the Tudor ballet with Nora Kaye to Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht.‡ Ballet led me to listen to the music the ballets were danced to, which led me to other music; slowly I began to accumulate records and even ventured out to concerts. Even opera, although I felt then (and am sure, now) that there aren't more than five operas that are really fun to watch, and when you've named La Boheme and Don Giovanni you have to start thinking pretty hard to find the other three.*