The Early Pohl

by Frederik Pohl

  "I had not wished to come," he said gravely. "It is against the custom of the Conference for delegates of different powers to fraternize. But your young friend here has a certain claim on me, which she exercised."

  Barbara flushed. "Not against your will," she reminded him aloud. "This will be to your interest as much as to ours."

  The Mercurian made no visible motion, but I received an impression of judicious agreement, as though he had nodded his great, spined plastic head.

  "True," he thought compellingly. "But it is not the habit of our race to violate custom—not even the customs of others."

  I was still in the dark about the purpose of the visit.

  He began to explain: "Have you noticed the wording of the resolution the Rhean delegate introduced today?" he asked. "No? I thought not. It was not intended to be noticed—one little phrase. The resolution, if enacted, would totally outlaw the construction of all existing types of warships. Those which are already built would be either destroyed or irrevocably converted to peace-use spaceships. And a very efficient policing system would prevent any power from disobeying that law. I have reason to believe that the Oberonians are willing to obey that law implicitly. To the letter of the law. But only that far, no farther!"

  Barbara broke in there, her hazel eyes shaded. "What he is saying, Lee, is that there's a rider on that definition of a battleship." She dug in the pocket of her coverall. "I'll read it to you. The construction is outlawed of 'all ships constructed in whole or in major part of steel, iron, a similar ferrous metal, or an allotropic form thereof, excepting'—Well, I won't read the rest. The exceptions are small ships. Do you see the catch?"

  "No," I said frankly. "You can make passenger and freight ships without steel, because they have pretty easy going. But a battleship needs ray-gun armor, and that has to contain iron alloys. Nothing else is strong enough; Earth has tried practically everything else."

  "Earth has," she flashed back. "But does it occur to you that the Oberonian Empire is not Earth? It's a good deal different—and that difference is important. The Oberonians have developed an allotropic form of mercury. It's harder than any steel yet devised. It works perfectly for ray screens. It's lighter than most steel, and it seems to have every necessary quality for making battleships. There's only one thing wrong with it, from our standpoint. At normal Earthly temperatures it's a liquid."

  That was the why of the Oberonlan's actions. "Can you prove what you say?" I asked tensely. "How do you know about it?"

  The Mercurian answered that. "We of Mercury have a special power for reading thoughts," he said obliquely. "It is not used ordinarily, for it would not be courteous. But now and again a situation will call for it. You'll see the delicacy of trying to prove any such statement. It would be necessary first for me to admit that I had—infringed on the privacy of the Oberonian delegate."

  And that would not be good. It looked as if the situation called for some tall thinking.

  I was getting ready to try and fill that order when Barbara said, "There's one thing we haven't told you yet. Besides finding out about the new construction material, he found out that what we had deduced was true. There is a secret Oberonian Empire. It's run by a dictator, not the old emperor or any of his successors. The dictator is an army fanatic, one of the generals who forced the emperor into war. We couldn't get his name, but we found out one thing. He is in a warship of the new design, somewhere in space, not a hundred thousand miles from here."

  We three discussed the question for an hour or more without coming to any particular conclusion. The Mercurian, whose intelligence was unquestionable, nevertheless did not seem to be up to the problem of doing anything constructive about our dilemma. He became gloomier and gloomier as the discussion went on. Finally he left, after taking precautions so that he would be unobserved as he went back to his own quarters. He told us not to worry. The intimation was that he would take care of things for us. But I couldn't see what he could do.

  I said as much to Barbara. She, surprisingly, seemed to put a lot of confidence in him.

  "Don't forget, Lee, it meant a fight against all his training to come here at all. He said he'd help us and he will. I don't know what he can do, but mark my words, he'll do something."

  He did something, all right. The next morning the news of what he'd done was all over Juno. Sometime during the night he'd taken a helico-ray pistol and destroyed his metal brain-case and the almost immortal brain within.

  Confronted with a problem, his answer had been suicide.

  A special funeral ship brought his remains back to his native planet, and an alternate delegate filled his place in the Conference until a fully accredited one could be sent from Mercury.

  In the three days that it took for the new delegate to arrive from Mercury, events moved rapidly. The proposal of the Oberonian had been adopted and implemented by codes and rules suggested by delegates from every planet. An interplanetary police force had already been authorized, to be paid for and staffed jointly by all civilized planets. An iron tracer, the military secret of Callisto, had been given to all, particularly to the policing agency mentioned before. With the aid of this device, it was possible to spot an iron-bearing ship within a distance of a half-million miles, and aim your guns at it without even seeing it.

  The outlook for peace would have been rosy. . . . If the Oberonians hadn't managed to develop the new metal. For every bill for disarmament presented to the Conference was only an amplification of the first one drawn up by the Oberonians. And the definition of a warship remained the same.

  I dropped hints right and left to all the Terrestrial delegates I could manage to buttonhole, but my hands were tied. Barbara had asked for and received a promise of secrecy in regard to everything she'd told me. As yet, it was not quite imperative that I act immediately. Full-scale disarmament, including the dismantling of all war rockets, wouldn't be begun by Earth until the Peace Conference was over and all the agreements signed. Before they were signed, there was no great need for action and I could keep my promise. If the actual signing became imminent without any encouraging sign, I'd have to tell the whole story to any Terrestrial diplomat I could convince.

  I didn't see much of Barbara in those three days. I tried hard enough but she made herself scarce. And I was kept rather busy too, so I never had a really good chance to get her alone and find out what she was planning to do.

  The new Mercurian delegate came and nothing happened. I was one of the crowd of newsmen of assorted shapes and races who met him at the entrance-porte to the Halls of the Delegates when his ship landed. He was nothing special, I thought, just a typical Mercurian—and probably, I thought bitterly, as worthless as the one before him. He didn't pause for much of a personal interview, just distributed printed statements to the reporters and went off to his chambers.

  But that night I suddenly found cause to remember him vividly.

  I woke to find someone in my room, rummaging through my things. I rose and was about to challenge the intruder when he whirled and stared at me. It was the new Mercurian delegate!

  The mind-power of the Mercurian cannot be overrated. His metal-glass eyes seemed to shine with a weird inner fire as they stared into mine. They enlarged and became more brilliant, and I found myself swirling off to sleep again. . . .

  Pure hypnosis, a type impossible for a human being to exercise. But the superior mentality of the Mercurian made it possible for him to dominate my lesser mind so completely that I had to obey his unspoken command to sleep.

  But the command could not have any lasting effect. It wore off, probably in a matter of seconds. As I came to again, I heard the door to my room slide gently shut.

  I leaped out of bed and examined my belongings. I quickly discovered what the Mercurian had been after: my photo-key to the Press Relations Bureau.

  Hastily I climbed into my one-piece coverall and followed.

  No one was in sight in the corridors. I made my way quickly to the Press Relations roo
m. I found the door open, and the night attendant asleep within.

  The hall was almost totally dark, and, except for the Mercurian and myself, empty. I stared through the blurring transparencies and tried to find him. I saw him moving—yes, it was he—walking rapidly through the Callistan section to the Oberonian one beyond.

  I followed. I was totally unequipped for such a venture. The Callistan section, I knew, would be all right. The air pressure would be lower and the atmosphere would have a pungent reek of rare gases, but otherwise it would be much the same as Earth's.

  But the Oberonian—this was the Rhean division—section would be considerably different. Cold—frightfully cold.

  So I was forced to watch his actions from a distance. He seemed to be doing something—I couldn't tell what—to the mechano-translator, by the light of a small pocket-torch, to judge by the feeble glow. Then the light went out and I could see his gleaming form coming back.

  I made myself inconspicuous and allowed him to pass.

  I followed him through the door to the Bureau, slipped past the again unconscious night man, and went back to bed. I immediately fell asleep. When I awoke my light-key was in its accustomed place once more.

  That was the morning of the day the Oberonian Empire died once and for all. . . .

  Barbara King saw the blow struck. "I was on the way from my room," she said that night while we were celebrating. "I had a little time to spare and I had an idea of what was coming, so I walked along the promenade. Lucky the Earth-section happened to be facing the right direction then. It was a big, blue flare of light. It blotted out the stars, almost blinded me."

  "And it killed the Oberonian dictator," I said. "But I'm still wondering about some of the details."

  I turned to the steel-bodied Mercurian who stood by, mentally benign. "I realize you could find out everything that was going on in the minds of the Oberonians by thought-reading. That's how you knew they were in tight-beam radio connection with the dictator on their new allotropic-mercury ship. And when you rigged up that super-heterodyne gadget on their secret transmitter, it started a vibration in the receiver located on the ship. I'll take your word for it that a vibration of that certain special type is all that's necessary to destroy one of their ships, by destroying the complex arrangement of the mercury atoms. But what I want to know is—how did you happen to bring the gadget with you?"

  The Mercurian's thoughts turned suddenly grave. "For that we owe a debt to my predecessor, the delegate who destroyed himself. Thought transmission is normally carried on only at short distances. But by a special intense effort, thought can be made to reach any individual to whom the sender is attuned, wherever he may be, within hundreds of millions of miles. The consequences of an effort like that cause insanity to the sender.

  "My predecessor—who was also my intimate friend—deliberately forced his brain to destroy itself by working it too hard. His mind reached out to me on Mercury, told me all that had happened. Then, when the first symptoms of degeneration began to be felt, he killed himself. And that served a purpose too. As a substitute for a dead man, my coming aroused no curiosity. As a diplomat, my effects were inviolate. I was able to bring in the 'gadget' with impunity."

  Barbara nodded. "I was pretty sure that the Mercurian would do something."

  I leaned back and lit a cigarette, feeling good. These minor powers with their mental powers were mighty handy allies.

  Early in 1942 I got a telegram from my former masters at Popular Publications offering to rehire me. It was not as elevated a job as I had had before. I would not be a Real Editor, with buy-or-bounce decision-making power over my very own magazines. I would be an assistant to Alden H. Norton on his group of pulps. On the other hand there were advantages. As a Real Editor I had earned $20 a week; as a lowly assistant they were willing to pay me $35.

  It required no thought. The steady paycheck was irresistible. Besides, Al Norton was a good man to work for. He had come aboard in the first place as editor of the sports magazines, had accumulated titles in the fields of mystery, horror, Western and air-war, and had inherited my two sf magazines. I was helping on all of them.

  It seems to me now that they were pretty awful specimens, considered as examples of American literature. Once in a great while there was some good writing. Surprisingly, some of it was in the sports magazines; even a little in the Westerns. A few individual writers—Joel Townsley Rogers in particular struck me as stunningly good, compared to the hacks he was usually surrounded with—seemed literate. But mostly editing the stories was about as much fun as repairing sewer pipes. You could take a certain amount of pride in the skill with which you did the job, but the end product was not noble.

  Pulp writers in those days had very few recognized rights. The concept that an author, any author, had a certain privilege of control over the published version of his work did not apply to them. Mostly they didn't deserve it, being pretty poor writers, but whether they deserved it or not the idea of giving them such rights never crossed any of our minds.

  It was not just at Popular Publications. My friend and colleague, Horace Gold, worked for Popular's chief competitor at the time, a firm known as the Thrilling Group. There each day's work by an editor was checked over by the boss. He didn't bother to read the stories. He did carefully assess the quantity of pencil markings on each page. If there wasn't a lot, the editor was called on the carpet. No one did that to us at Popular, but the stories provided an imperative of their own.

  The air-war magazines were particularly awful; some of them were written entirely on contract, by single authors. Editing them was agony. When the two magazines written by contract authors were killed because of the paper shortage of World War II, the two authors each opined that they would have to find new markets. I'll try the Saturday Evening Post, said one of them, while the other decided he would change over to mystery novels, because he thought there would be money in the film rights. We snickered behind our hands—but the Saturday Evening Post did indeed buy everything the first author sent them, at about twenty times as high a rate as we had ever paid him; and the other's mysteries have, in fact, been made into at least two very successful films.

  As John F. Kennedy was wont to remark, it is not a fair world.

  With competition like the slop I was editing every day, I was emboldened to try to write for markets outside the science-fiction field, and it turned out that I could sell them without much trouble. The first sales I made were love poems. Like most literate teen-agers, I had put a few together to impress girls. It was a revelation to me that people would give me money for them. Other revelations were in store. I had sold a love poem which began:

  You never knew I waited for your footsteps in the spring

  Or counted fifty at your door before I dared to ring. . . .

  I was paid about a dime a line for these things, which came, as you can see, to twenty cents for the sample above. Then the editor took pity on me. She was a stocky, good-natured ex-circus aerialist named Jane Littell, and she pointed out that the same poem could have been written:

  You never knew

  I waited for

  Your footsteps in the spring,

  Or counted fifty

  At your door

  Before I dared to ring. . . .

  instantly tripling my income.

  There wasn't much income in love poetry at best, though. I liked Janie, but I couldn't bring myself to write stories for her love pulps; nor, ever, have I been able to write a Western. But I tried all the rest. My card file for that period is laced with titles like Cure for Killers and R.A.F. Wings East. What the pulps demanded was tightness of plot, action and pace. I learned a lot about that; maybe more than was good for me. And I think some of that pulp tightness begins to show up even in the sf I wrote around that time, like Earth, Farewell!, which appeared in the February 1943 issue of Astonishing Stones.

  Earth, Farewell!

  JAMES MacCREIGH

  1

  Lords of t
he Vassal Earth

  Collard came in to see me a while ago. He told me that they were nearly ready. I have an hour and a little; then it will be my turn.

  I don't know what will happen. I think I will die when they put me under the rays of the machine and try to make me a creature of theirs, puppet to their renegade wills; when they try to make me flout the law and the wisdom of the Others. I want to die now, but the strength that the Others gave me forbids it. I can't die by my own hand. I tried poison. It doesn't work. I wish I could die.

  But I have an hour yet. If at this eleventh hour something should happen and the rule of the masters be restored, I want to tell my story for those who will come after. Not for my own sake; for the sake of those who will be loyal to the Others.

  I think it is deliberate, on Collard's part, that I can see the shadow of the machine from where I am. Through the transparency of the door that I cannot open I see a hall, and through a window in that hall leap in the lights from the flaming city around. And by coming close to the crystal door, peering to one side, I can see the machine, limned in the dancing lights of the flames. I can hear the whir of it, its ominous drone, as the others like me are brought to it—and shattered by its radiant strength, their brains warped.

  I am the strongest, and that is some consolation. They are saving me for the last. I think they are letting me see the machine to weaken me.

  I shall not be weakened. I have writing materials; I will use them.

  Listen—

  To make sure there will be no sort of treachery, the Other People take full charge of the selection. The human governments on Earth are not strong and not well organized, but they are tricky enough to try to sneak someone into the Four and the Four who will not be entirely loyal to the masters. You know how the Earth governments are. It makes one ashamed he's an Earthman.