Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “I know what you mean,” I agreed. “He had a lot going for him. Personality—oddball, sure, but kind of endearing, in a way. Sense of humor—”

  “Oh, a ten anyway, Wilbert!” she giggled. “You should have heard some of the things he used to say about you!”

  I had been thinking of at most a seven, but I was shooting for a ten in amiability so I just let it go. “But then there were his goofy ideas,” I said.

  “Right. I think the worst part was his complete misconception of what society is all about. Naturally we have high standards here. We expect our politicians to play the game well. Sure, sometimes they shade the law a little, or take a little graft—”

  “That’s just hardball politics,” I nodded.

  “Exactly, and that’s where he fell down. No sophistication. No grasp of reality.”

  I was so touched I reached over and took her hand. “I wouldn’t have given him more than a two for either.” I said, and for a moment there I almost blew the whole thing by suggesting we go steady. Sweet Marian! I don’t think I’ll ever draw a girl as sensible and easy to get along with as she again. It could almost make you want to marry her.

  But fortunately I got my natural sense of objectivity back in time. The weekend passed without my spoiling it. The president won easily, by the way. He was lucky enough to find a technical excuse for voiding about half a million votes for the other guy in one of the eastern states, and naturally when the rest of the nation heard about that they fell all over themselves jumping on the bandwagon. What a performance! It was a perfect example of all that’s best and most admirable in our system. What a pity the rest of the world can’t learn our ways!

  SHAFFERY AMONG THE IMMORTALS

  Fame is a fickle mistress. Jeremy Shaffery, the subject of this story, desperately wants to be famous. When we meet him, he’s an astronomer, but not a famous one. His career has, in fact, gone downhill for some time.

  He hasn’t given up on his goal of achieving immortality, though. He continues to think up theories—unfortunately, not valid theories—and there’s always the possibility something will pan out for him.

  But time is running out for Shaffery. His wife has already run out on him, and his job as the director of the Carmine J. Nuccio Observatory in the Lesser Antilles is not going well.

  Fame: Sometimes it’s earned; sometimes, for better or worse, it’s bestowed upon someone. In Shaffery’s case…sorry, that would be telling.

  This story has achieved a certain degree of immortality; when first published in 1972, it was a finalist for the Nebula Award.

  Jeremy Shaffery had a mind a little bit like Einstein’s, although maybe not in the ways that mattered most. When Einstein first realized that light carried mass he sat down to write to a friend about it and described the thought as “amusing and infectious.” Shaffery would have thought that, too, although of course he would not likely have seen the implications of the Maxwell equations in the first place.

  Shaffery looked a little bit like Einstein. He encouraged the resemblance, especially in the hair, until his hair began to run out. Since Einstein loved sailing, he kept a sixteen-foot trimaran tied up at the Observatory Dock. Seasickness kept him from using it much. Among the things he envied Einstein for was the mirror-smooth Swiss lakes, so much nicer than the lower Caribbean in that respect. But after a day of poring over pairs of star photographs with a blink comparator or trying to discover previously unknown chemical compounds in interstellar space in a radio trace, he sometimes floated around the cove in his little yellow rubber raft. It was relaxing, and his wife never followed him there. To Shaffery that was important. She was a difficult woman, chronically p.o.’d because his career was so persistently pointed in the wrong direction. If she had ever been a proper helpmeet, she wasn’t anymore. Shaffery doubted she ever had, remembering that it was her unpleasant comments that had caused him to give up that other hallmark of the master, the violin.

  At the stage in Shaffery’s career at which he had become Director of the Carmine J. Nuccio Observatory in the Lesser Antilles he had begun to look less like Einstein and more like Edgar Kennedy. Nights when the seeing was good he remorselessly scanned the heavens through the twenty-two-inch reflector, hoping against hope for glory. Days when he was not sleeping he wandered through the dome like a ghost, running his finger over desks for dust, filching preserved mushrooms from Mr. Nuccio’s home-canned hoard, trying to persuade his two local assistants to remember to close the dome slit when it rained. They paid little attention. They knew where the muscle was, and that it wasn’t with Shaffery. He had few friends. Most of the white residents couldn’t stand his wife; some of them couldn’t stand Shaffery very well, either. There was a nice old lady drunk out from England in a tidy white house down the beach, a sort of hippie commune on the far side of the island, and a New York television talk-show operator who just flew down for weekends. When they were respectively sober, unstoned and present, Shaffery sometimes talked to them. That wasn’t often. The only one he really wanted to see much was the TV man, but there were obstacles. The big obstacle was that the TV man spent most of his waking time skin-diving. The other obstacle was that Shaffery had discovered the TV man occasionally laid Mrs. Shaffery; it wasn’t the morality of the thing that bothered him, it was the feeling of doubt it raised in Shaffery’s mind about the other’s sanity. He never spoke to the TV man about it, partly because he wasn’t sure what to say and partly because the man had halfway promised to have Shaffery on his show. Sometime or other.

  One must be fair to Shaffery and say that he wasn’t a bad man. Like Frank Morgan, his problem was that he wasn’t a good wizard. The big score always evaded him.

  The Einstein method, which he had studied assiduously over many years, was to make a pretty theory and then see if, by any chance, observations of events in the real world seemed to confirm it. Shaffery greatly approved of that method. It just didn’t seem to work out for him. At the Triple A-S meeting in Dallas he read an hour-long paper on his new principle of Relevance Theory. That was a typical Einstein idea, he flattered himself. He had even worked out simple explanations for the lay public, like Einstein with his sitting on a hot stove or holding hands with a pretty girl. “Relevance Theory,” he practiced smiling to the little wavelets of the cove, “only means that observations that don’t relate to anything don’t exist. I’ll spare you the mathematics because”—self-deprecatory laugh here—“I can’t even fill out my income tax without making a mistake.” Well, he had worked out the mathematics, inventing signs and operators of his own, just like Einstein. But he seemed to have made a mistake. Before the AAAS audience, fidgeting and whispering to each other behind their hands, he staked his scientific reputation on the prediction that the spectrum of Mars at its next opposition would show a slight but detectable displacement of some 150 Angstroms toward the violet. The son of a bitch didn’t do anything of the kind. One of the audience was a graduate student at Princeton, hard up for a doctoral thesis subject, and he took a chance on Shaffery and made the observations, and with angry satisfaction sent him the proof that Mars had remained obstinately red.

  The next year the International Astrophysical Union’s referees, after some discussion, finally allowed him twenty minutes for a Brief Introduction into the General Consideration of Certain Electromagnetic Anomalies. He offered thirty-one pages of calculations leading to the prediction that the next lunar eclipse would be forty-two seconds late. It wasn’t. It was right on time. At the meeting of the World Space Science Symposium they told him with great regret that overcommitments of space and time had made it impossible for them to schedule his no doubt valuable contribution, and by the time of the next round of conferences they weren’t even sending him invitations anymore.

  Meanwhile all those other fellows were doing great. Shaffery followed the careers of his contemporaries with rue. There was Hoyle, still making a good thing out of the Steady State Hypothesis, and Gamow’s name, still reverenced for the Big Bang, and
new people like Dyson and Ehricke and Enzmann coming along with all sorts of ideas that, if you looked at them objectively, weren’t any cleverer than his, Shaffery thought, except for the detail that somehow or other they seemed lucky enough to find supporting evidence from time to time. It did not strike him as fair. Was he not a Mensa member? Was he not as well educated as the successful ones, as honored with degrees, as photogenic in the newsmagazines and as colorfully entertaining on the talk shows? (Assuming Larry Nesbit ever gave him the chance on his show.) Why did they make out and he fall flat? His wife’s theory he considered and rejected. “Your trouble, Jeremy,” she would say to him, “is you’re a horse’s ass.” But he knew that wasn’t it. Who was to say Isaac Newton wasn’t a horse’s ass, too, if you looked closely enough at his freaky theology and his nervous breakdowns? And look where he got.

  So Shaffery kept looking for the thing that would make him great. He looked all over. Sometimes he checked Kepler’s analysis of the orbit of Mars with an adding machine, looking for mistakes in arithmetic. (He found half a dozen, but the damn things all canceled each other out, which proves how hard it is to go wrong when your luck is in.) Sometimes he offered five-dollar prizes to the local kids for finding new stars that might turn out to be Shaffery’s Nova, or anyway Shaffery’s Comet. No luck. An ambitious scheme to describe stellar ballistics in terms of analogy with free-radical activity in the enzyme molecules fell apart when none of the biochemists he wrote to even answered his letters.

  The file of failures grew. One whole drawer of a cabinet was filled with reappraisals of the great exploded theories of the past—A New Look at Phlogiston, incomplete because there didn’t seem really to be anything to look at when you came down to it; a manuscript called The Flat Earth Reexamined, which no one would publish; three hundred sheets of drawings of increasingly tinier and increasingly quirkier circles to see if the Copernican epicycles could not somehow account for what the planet Mercury did that Einstein had considered a proof of relativity. From time to time he was drawn again to attempting to find a scientific basis for astrology and chiromancy, or predicting the paths of charged particles in a cloud chamber by means of yarrow stalks. It all came to nothing. When he was really despairing he sometimes considered making his mark in industry rather than pure science, wherefore the sheaf of sketches for a nuclear-fueled car, the experiments on smellovision that had permanently destroyed the nerves of his left nostril, the attempt to preserve some of Mr. Nuccio’s mushrooms by irradiation in his local dentist’s X-ray room. He knew that that sort of thing was not really worthy of a man with all those graduate degrees, but in any event he did no better there than anywhere else. Sometimes he dreamed of what it would be like to run Mount Palomar or Jodrell Bank, with fifty trained assistants to nail down his inspirations with evidence. He was not that fortunate. He had only Cyril and James.

  It was not all bad, however, because he didn’t have much interference to worry about. The observatory where he was employed, last and least of the string of eleven that had given him a position since his final doctoral degree, didn’t seem to mind what he did, as long as he did it without bothering them. On the other hand, they didn’t give him much support, either.

  Probably they just didn’t know how. The observatory was owned by something called the Lesser Antilles Vending Machine Entertainment Co., Ltd., and, so Shaffery had been told by the one old classmate who still kept up a sort of friendship with him, was actually some sort of tax-evasion scheme maintained by a Las Vegas gambling syndicate. Shaffery didn’t mind this, particularly, although from time to time he got tired of being told that the only two astronomers who mattered were Giovanni Schiaparelli and Galileo Galilei. That was only a minor annoyance. The big cancerous agony was that every year he got a year older and fame would not come.

  At his periodic low spots of despondency (he had even tried linking them with the oppositions of Jupiter, meteor showers, and his wife’s periods, but those didn’t come to anything either) he toyed with the notion of dropping it all and going into some easier profession. Banking. Business Law. “President Shaffery” had the right kind of sound, if he entered politics. But then he would drag his raft to the water, prop two six-packs of Danish beer on his abdomen and float away, and by the end of the first pack his courage would come flowing back, and on the second he would be well into a scheme for detecting gravity waves by statistical analysis of forty thousand acute gout sufferers, telephoning the state of their twinges into a central computer facility.

  On such a night he carried his little rubber raft to the shore of the cove, slipped off his sandals, rolled up his bellbottoms and launched himself. It was the beginning of the year, as close to winter as it ever got on the island, which meant mostly that the dark came earlier. It was a bad time of the year for him, because it was the night before the annual Board Meeting. The first year or two he had looked forward to the meetings as opportunities. He was no longer so hopeful. His objective for the present meeting was only to survive it, and there was some question of a nephew by marriage, an astronomy major at U.C.L.A., to darken even that hope.

  Shaffery’s vessel wasn’t really a proper raft, only the sort of kid’s toy that drowns a dozen or so nine-year-olds at the world’s bathing beaches every year. It was less than five feet long. When he got himself twisted and wriggled into it, his back against the ribbed bottom, his head pillowed against one inflated end and his feet dangling into the water at the other, it was quite like floating in a still sea without the annoyance of getting wet. He opened the first beer and began to relax. The little waves rocked and turned him; the faint breeze competed with the tiny island tide, and the two of them combined to take him erratically away from the beach at the rate of maybe ten feet a minute. It didn’t matter. He was still inside the cove, with islandlets, or low sandbanks, beaded across the mouth of it. If by any sudden meteorological miracle a storm should spring from that bright-lamped sky, the wind could take him nowhere but back to shore or near an island. And of course there would be no storm. He could paddle back whenever he chose, and as easily as he could push his soap dish around his bathtub, as he routinely did while bathing—which in turn he did at least once a day, and when his wife was particularly difficult, as often as six times. The bathroom was his other refuge. His wife never followed him there, being too well brought up to run the chance of inadvertently seeing him doing something filthy.

  Up on the low hills he could see the corroded copper dome of the observatory. A crescent of light showed that his assistant had opened the dome, but the light showed that he was not using it for any astronomical purpose. That was easy to unriddle. Cyril had turned the lights on so that the cleaning woman could get the place spotless for the Board Meeting, and had opened the dome because that proved the telescope was being used. Shaffery bent the empty beer can into a V, tucked it neatly beside him in the raft, and opened another. He was not yet tranquil, but he was not actively hurting anywhere. At least Cyril would not be using the telescope to study the windows of the Bon Repos Hotel across the cove, since the last time he’d done it he had jammed the elevating gears and it could no longer traverse anywhere near the horizon. Shaffery put aside an unwanted, fugitive vision of Idris, the senior and smartest cleaning lady, polishing the telescope mirror with Bon Ami, sipped his beer, thought nostalgically of Relevance Theory and how close he had come with the epicycles, and freed his mind for constructive thought.

  The sun was wholly gone, except for a faint luminous purpling of the sky in the general direction of Venezuela. Almost directly overhead hung the three bright stars of Orion’s Belt, slowly turning like the traffic signals on a railroad line, with Sirius and Procyon orbiting headlight bright around them. As his eyes dark-adapted he could make out the stars in Orion’s sword, even the faint patch of light that was the great gas cloud. He was far enough from the shore so that sound could not carry, and he softly called out the great four-pointed pattern of first magnitude stars that surrounded the constellation: “Hey
there, Betelgeuse. Hi, Bellatrix. What’s new, Rigel? Nice to see you again, Saiph.” He glanced past red Aldebaran to the closeknit stars of the Pleiades, returned to Orion and, showing off now, called off the stars of the Belt: “Hey Alnitak! Yo, Alnilam! How goes it, Mintaka?”

  The problem with drinking beer in the rubber raft was that your head was bent down toward your chest and it was difficult to burp, but Shaffery arched his body up a little, getting some water in the process but not caring, got rid of the burp, opened another beer, and gazed complacently at Orion. It was a satisfying constellation. It was satisfying that he knew so much about it. He thought briefly of the fact that the Arabs had called the Belt Stars by the name Jauzah, meaning the Golden Nuts; that the Chinese thought they looked like a weighing beam; and that Greenlanders called them Siktut, The Seal-Hunters Lost at Sea. As he was going on to remember what the Australian aborigines had thought of them (they thought they resembled three young men dancing a corroboree), his mind flickered back to the lost sealhunters. Um, he thought. He raised his head and looked toward the shore.

  It was now more than a hundred yards away. That was farther than he really wanted to be, and so he kicked the raft around, oriented himself by the stars and began to paddle back. It was easy and pleasant to do. He used a sort of splashy upside-down breast stroke of the old-fashioned angel’s wing kind, but as all his weight was supported by the raft he moved quickly across the water. He was rather enjoying the exercise, toes and fingers moving comfortably in the tepid sea, little ghosts of luminescence glowing where he splashed, until quite without warning the fingertips of one hand struck sharply and definitely against something that was resistantly massive and solid where there should have been only water, something that moved stubbornly, something that rasped them like a file. Oh, my God, thought Shaffery. What a lousy thing to happen. They so seldom came in this close to shore. He didn’t even think about them. What a shame for a man who might have been Einstein to wind up, incomplete and unfulfilled, as shark shit.