Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  He really was not a bad man, and it was the loss to science that was first on his mind, only a little later what it must feel like to be chopped and gulped.

  Shaffery pulled his hands in and folded them on his chest, crossed his feet at the ankles and rested them on the end of the boat, knees spread on the sides. There was now nothing trailing in the water that might strike a shark as bait. There was, on the other hand, no good way for him to get back to shore. He could yell, but the wind was the wrong way. He could wait till he drifted near one of the islets. But if he missed them he would be out in the deep ocean before he knew it.

  Shaffery was almost sure that sharks seldom attacked a boat, even a rubber one. Of course, he went on analytically, the available evidence didn’t signify. They could flip a raft like this over easily enough. If this particular shark ate him off this particular half-shell there would be no one to report it.

  Still, there were some encouraging considerations. Say it was a shark. Say it was capable of tipping the boat or eating him boat and all. They were dull-witted creatures, and what was to keep one hanging around in the absence of blood, splashing, noise, trailing objects, or any of the other things sharks were known to take an interest in? It might be a quarter mile away already. But it wasn’t, because at that moment he heard the splash of some large object breaking the surface a foot from his head.

  Shaffery could have turned to look, but he didn’t; he remained quite motionless, listening to the gentle water noises, until they were punctuated by a sort of sucking sound and then a voice. A human voice. It said, “Scared the piss out of you, didn’t I? What do you say, Shaffery? Want a tow back to shore?”

  It was not the first time Shaffery had encountered Larry Nesbit diving in the cove, it was only the first time it had happened at night. Shaffery twisted about in the raft had gazed at Nesbit’s grinning face and its frame of wet strands of nape-length hair. It took a little time to make the transition in his mind from eighteen-foot shark to five-foot-eight TV star. “Come on,” Nesbit went on, “what do you say? Tell you what. I’ll tow you in, and you give me some of old Nuccio’s Scotch, and I’ll listen to how you’re going to invent anti-gravity while we get pissed.”

  That Nesbit, he had a way with him. The upshot of it all was that Shaffery had a terrible hangover the next day; not the headache but the whole works, with trotting to the toilet and being able to tolerate only small sips of ginger ale and wishing, or almost wishing, he was dead. (Not, to be sure, before he did the one immortalizing thing. Whatever it was going to be.)

  It was not altogether a disaster, the hangover. The next morning was very busy, and it was just as well that he was out of the way. When the Board of Directors convened to discuss the astronomical events of the year, or whatever it is they did discuss in the afternoon session to which Shaffery was definitely not invited, it was always a busy time. They arrived separately, each director with his pair of associates. One after another, forty-foot cabin cruisers with fishing tops came up to the landing and gave up cargos of plump little men wearing crew cuts and aloha shirts. The observatory car, not ever used by any of the observatory personnel, was polished, fueled and used for round trips from the landing strip at Jubila, across the island, to Coomray Hill and the observatory. Shaffery laid low in his private retreat. He had never told his wife that he was not allowed in the observatory for the Board Meetings, so she didn’t look for him. He spent the morning in the tarpaper shack where photographic material had once been kept, until he discovered that the damp peeled the emulsion away from the backing. Now it was his home away from home. He had fitted it with a desk, chair, icebox, coffee pot and bed.

  Shaffery paid no attention to the activity outside, not even when the Directors’ assistants, methodically searching the bushes and banana groves all around the observatory, came to his shack, opened the door without knocking and peered in at him. They knew him from previous meetings, but they studied him silently for a moment before the two in the doorway nodded to each other and left him again. They were not well mannered men, Shaffery thought, but no doubt they were good at their jobs, whatever those jobs were. He resolutely did not think about the Board Meeting, or about the frightening, calumnious things Larry Nesbit had said to him the night before, drinking the Board Chairman’s Scotch and eating his food, in that half-jocular, shafting, probing way he had. Shaffery thought a little bit about the queasy state of his lower abdomen, because he couldn’t help it, but what he mostly thought about was Fermat’s Last Theorem.

  A sort of picayune, derivative immortality was waiting there for someone. Not much, but Shaffery was getting desperate. It was one of those famous mathematical problems that grad students played at for a month or two, and amateurs assaulted in vain all their lives. It looked easy enough to deal with. It started with so elementary a proposition that every high-school boy mastered it about the time he learned to masturbate successfully. If you squared the sides of a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two sides was equal to the square of the hypotenuse.

  Well, that was all very well, and it was so easy to understand that it had been used to construct right angles by surveyors for centuries. A triangle whose sides were, say, 3 feet and 4 feet, and whose hypotenuse was 5 feet, had to make a right angle, because 32 + 42 = 52, and it always had, since the time of Pythagoras, five hundred years B.C. a2 + b2 = c2. The hitch was, if the exponent was anything but 2, you could never make the equation come out using whole numbers, a3 + b3 never equaled c3, and a27 + b27 did not add up to any c27, no matter what numbers you used for a, b and c. Everybody knew that this was so. Nobody had ever proved that it had to be so, by mathematical proofs, except that Fermat had left a cryptic little note, found among his papers after his death, claiming that he had found a “truly wonderful” proof, only there wasn’t enough room in the margin of the book he was writing on to put it all down.

  Shaffery was no mathematician. But that morning, waking up to the revolution in his stomach and the thunder in his head, he had seen that that was actually a strength. One, all the mathematicians of three or four centuries had broken their heads against the problem, so obviously, it couldn’t be solved by any known mathematics anyway. Two, Einstein was weak in mathematics too, and had disdained to worry about it, preferring to invent his own.

  So he spent the morning, between hurried gallops across the parking lot to the staff toilet, filling paper with mathematical signs and operators of his own invention. It did not seem to be working out, to be sure. For a while he thought of an alternative scheme, to wit, inventing a “truly wonderful” solution of his own and claiming he couldn’t find room to write it down in the margin of, say, the latest issue of Mathematical Abstracts; but residual sanity persuaded him that perhaps no one would ever find it, if it was found it might well be laughed off, and anyway that was purely posthumous celebrity and he wanted to taste it while he was alive. So he broke for lunch, came back feeling dizzy and ill and worried about the meeting that was going on, and decided to take a nap before resuming his labors.

  When Cyril came looking for him to tell him the Directors desired his presence, it was dark, and Shaffery felt like hell.

  Coomray Hill was no taller than a small office building, but it got the mirror away from most of the sea-level dampness. The observatory sat on top of the hill like a mound of pistachio ice cream, hemispheric green copper roof and circular walls of green-painted plaster. Inside, the pedestal of the telescope took up the center of the floor. The instrument itself was traversed as low as it would go anymore, clearing enough space for the Directors and their gear. They were all there, looking at him with silent distaste as he came in.

  The inner sphere of the dome was painted (by Cyril’s talented half-sister) with a large map of Mars, showing Schiaparelli’s famous canals in resolute detail; a view of the Bay of Naples from the Vomero, with Vesuvius gently steaming in the background; and an illuminated drawing of the constellation Scorpius, which happened to be the sign of the constellati
on under which the Chairman of the Board had been born. A row of card-tables had been lined up and covered with a green cloth. There were six places set, each with ashtray, notepad, three sharpened pencils, ice, glass, and bottle of John Begg. Another row of tables against the wall held the antipasto, replenished by Cyril after the depredations of the night before, but now seriously depleted by the people for whom it was intended. Six cigars were going and a couple of others were smoldering in the trays. Shaffery tried not to breathe. Even with the door open and the observing aperture in the dome wide, the inside air was faintly blue. At one time Shaffery had mentioned diffidently what the deposit of cigar smoke did to the polished surface of the twenty-two-inch mirror. That was at his first annual meeting. The Chairman hadn’t said a word, just stared at him. Then he nodded to his right-hand man, a Mr. DiFirenzo, who had taken a packet of Kleenex out of his pocket and tossed it to Shaffery. “So wipe the goddam thing off,” he had said. “Then you could dump these ashtrays for us, okay?”

  Shaffery did his best to smile at his Directors. Behind him he was conscious of the presence of their assistants, who were patrolling the outside of the observatory in loose elliptical orbits, perigeeing at the screen door to peer inside. They had studied Shaffery carefully as he came across the crunching shell of the parking lot, and under their scrutiny he had decided against detouring by way of the staff toilet, which he now regretted.

  “Okay, Shaffery,” said Mr. DiFirenzo, after glancing at the Chairman of the Board. “Now we come to you.”

  Shaffery clasped his hands behind him in his Einstein pose and said brightly, “Well, it has been a particularly productive year for the Observatory. No doubt you’ve seen my reports on the Leonid meteorite count and—”

  “Right,” said Mr. DiFirenzo, “but what we have been talking about here is the space shots. Mr. Nuccio has expressed his views that this is a kind of strategic location, like how they shoot the rockets from Cape Kennedy. They have to go right over us, and we want a piece of that.”

  Shaffery shifted his weight uneasily. “I discussed that in my report last year—”

  “No, Shaffery. This year, Shaffery. Why can’t we get some of that federal money, like for tracking, for instance?”

  “But the position hasn’t changed, Mr. DiFirenzo. We don’t have the equipment, and besides NASA has its own—”

  “No good, Shaffery. You know how much you got out of us for equipment last year? I got the figures right here. And now you tell us you don’t have what we need to make a couple of bucks?”

  “Well, Mr. DiFirenzo, you see, the equipment we have is for purely scientific purposes. For this sort of work you need quite different instruments, and actually—”

  “I don’t want to hear.” DiFirenzo glanced at the Chairman, and then went on. “Next thing, what about that comet you said you were going to discover?”

  Shaffery smiled forgivingly. “Really, I can’t be held accountable for that. I didn’t actually say we’d find one. I merely said that the continuing search for comets was part of our basic program. Of course, I’ve done my very best to—”

  “Not good enough, Shaffery. Besides, your boy here told Mr. Nuccio that if you did find a comet you wouldn’t name it the Mr. Carmine J. Nuccio comet like Mr. Nuccio wanted.”

  Shaffery was going all hollow inside, but he said bravely: “It’s not wholly up to me, is it? There’s an astronomical convention that it is the discoverer’s name that goes on—”

  “We don’t like that convention, Shaffery. Three, now we come to some really bad things, that I’m sorry to hear you’ve got yourself into, Shaffery. We hear you have been talking over the private affairs of this institution and Mr. Nuccio with that dick-head Nesbit. Shut, Shaffery,” the man said warningly as Shaffery started to open his mouth. “We know all about it. This Nesbit is getting himself into big trouble. He has said some very racist things about Mr. Nuccio on that sideshow of his on the TV, which is going to cost him quite a bundle when Mr. Nuccio’s lawyers get through with him. That is very bad, Shaffery, and also, four, there is this thing.”

  He lifted up what had seemed like a crumpled napkin in front of his place. It turned out that it was covering what looked like a large transistor radio.

  Shaffery identified it after a moment’s thought; he had seen it before, in Larry Nesbit’s possession. “It’s a tape recorder,” he said.

  “Right on, Shaffery. Now the question is, who put it in here? I don’t mean just left it here like you could leave your rubbers or something, Shaffery. I mean left it here with one of those trick switches so it was going when a couple of our associates checked the place out and found it under the table.”

  Shaffery swallowed very hard, but even so his voice sounded unfamiliar to him when he was able to speak. “I—I assure you, Mr. DiFirenzo! I had nothing to do with it.”

  “No, Shaffery, I know you didn’t, because you are not that smart. Mr. Nuccio was quite upset about this illegal bugging, and he has already made some phone calls and talked to some people and we have a pretty good idea of who put it there, and he isn’t going to have what he thinks he’s going to have to play on his TV show. So here it is, Shaffery. Mr. Nuccio doesn’t find your work satisfactory here, and he is letting you go. We got somebody else coming down to take over. We’d appreciate it if you could be out by tomorrow.”

  There are situations in which there is not much scope for dignity. A man in his middle-fifties who has just lost the worst job he ever had has few opportunities for making the sort of terminal remark that one would like to furnish one’s biographers.

  Shaffery discovered that he was worse off than that; he was frankly sick. The turmoil in his belly grew. The little saliva pumps under his tongue were flooding his mouth faster than he could swallow, and he knew that if he didn’t get back to the staff toilet very quickly he would have another embarrassment to add to what was already an overwhelming load. He turned and walked away. Then marched. Then ran. When he had emptied himself of everything in belly, bladder and gut, he sat on the edge of the toilet seat and thought of the things he could have said: “Look, Nuccio, you don’t know anything about science.” “Nuccio, Schiaparelli was all wrong about the canals on Mars.” It was too late to say them. It was too late to ask the question that his wife would be sure to ask, about severance pay, pension, all the things that he had been putting off getting in writing. (“Don’t worry about that stuff, Shaffery, Mr. Nuccio always takes care of his friends but he don’t like to be aggravated.”) He tried to make a plan for his future, and failed. He tried even to make a plan for his present. Surely he should at least call Larry Nesbit, to demand, to complain and to warn (“Hist! The tape recorder has been discovered! All is lost! Flee!”), but he could not trust himself so far from the toilet. Not at that exact moment. And a moment later it was too late. Half an hour later, when one of the orbiting guards snapped the little lock and peered inside, the man who might have been Einstein was lying on the floor with his trousers around his knees, undignified, uncaring, and dead.

  Ah, Shaffery! How disappointed he would have been in his Times obit, two paragraphs buried under the overhang of a pop singer’s final notice. But afterward…

  The first victim was Larry Nesbit, airsick in his Learjet all the way back to New York, overcome during the taping of his TV show and dying the next day. The next victims were the Board of Directors, every man. They started home, by plane and boat. Some of them made it, but all of them died: en route or in Las Vegas, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles. New York, and Long Branch, New Jersey. Some of the “assistants” died and some were spared. (Briefly.) The reason was not a mystery for very long. The source of the new plague was tracked down quickly enough to Mr. Nuccio’s antipasto, and particularly to the preserved mushrooms that Shaffery had borrowed for his experiment.

  The botulinus toxin was long recognized as the most deadly poison known to man. The mutated version that Shaffery and his dentist’s X-rays had brought into being was not much more deadly, b
ut it had another quality that was new and different. Old, established botulinus clostridium is an organism with a feeble hold on life; expose it to light and air, and it dies. B. shafferia was more sturdy. It grew where it was. In anything. In Mr. Nuccio’s antipasto, in a salad in a restaurant kitchen, in Mom’s apple pie on a windowsill to cool, in the human digestive tract. There were nine deaths in the first five days, and then for a moment no more. The epidemiologists would not have bothered their heads about so short a casualty list if it had not been for the identities of some of the victims. But the bacteria were multiplying. The stain of vomit under the boardwalk at Long Branch dried; the bacteria turned into spores and were blown on the wind until they struck something damp and fertile. Whereupon they grew. The soiled Kleenex thrown from a Cadillac Fleetwood on the road leading from O’Hare to Evanston, the sneeze between flights at Miami, expectorations in a dozen places—all added to the score. From the urine and feces of the afflicted men, from their sweat, even from their bed linen and discarded clothing, enspored bacteria leaped into the air and were inhaled, eaten, drunk, absorbed into cuts, in every way ingested into the waiting bodies of hundreds, then thousands, ultimately countless millions of human beings.

  By the second week Detroit and Los Angeles were declared disaster areas. By the fourth the plague had struck every city in America, and had leaped the oceans. If it had any merciful quality at all, it was that it was quick: an upset stomach, a sweat, a few pangs and then death. None were immune. Few survived. Out of a hundred, three might outlive the disease. But then famine, riot, and lesser ills took their toll; and of the billions who lived on the Earth when Shaffery exposed his antipasto in the dentist’s office, all but a few tens of millions died in the outbreak that the world will never forget the disease called Shaffery’s Syndrome.