Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Only at first I only did it for fun. Like when Professor Shapman showed up at the McDonald’s. He was just in for a Big Mac and a shake, but when he saw me there he turned purple. “Geissen! When did you get out of the army? Listen, I want to talk to you.”

  The manager was giving me looks. “I’m busy, Professor,” I said, which was true.

  “A minute of your time,” he begged. “You, are you the manager? This man is a former student and it’s important that I talk to him, all right?” And then, when we were in a booth at the back of the store, he said, “I’ve been thinking about you. Would you be interested in, ah, performing a series of tests?”

  “What kind of tests?” I asked, watching him spill shredded lettuce and secret-formula sauce on his shirt front. I took a napkin and reached across the table to wipe up the worst of it.

  “Paranormal studies, Hans. Just a few hours of that sort of thing, the cards, the sealed envelopes, you know.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I declared. “What kind of money are we talking?”

  He looked baffled, mouth ajar to spill some more of his Big Mac. “Money?”

  “I get my two-thirty-five an hour here, Professor Shapman. I need it to live on.”

  “If it’s a question of money—”

  “That’s what it’s a question of.”

  “—maybe something could be worked out,” he finished, beginning to chew again. “Why don’t you think about it? Give me a call?”

  I sighed and wiped up another dollop of sauce from his tie. “I’ll think,” I said, “but honestly, Professor Shapman, I don’t know how many favors I want to do you. You flunked me out, you know. And I’ve got to get back to work.”

  And I did, without looking back at him, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him watching me as he finished his sandwich. I kept busy. When he got up to leave he paused to dump his tray in the trash container and then headed back toward me. I thought he was going to tell me that he’d noticed his slide-rule tie clip was bent double, but he hadn’t noticed that. All he wanted was to say, “By the way, the Spider Lady sends her regards.”

  So that night I told Fritzl about it and he gave me hell. “Stupid! You got a pigeon and you let him get away! What’s this ‘Spider Lady’ dreck?”

  I shrugged. “I saw in Tech Times that he got married so I sent him a get-well card. I wrote on it ‘Best wishes to you and the Spider Lady.’ He’d got this spider for her, see—and I’d been drinking—”

  “Drinking! Yah, I know about you and drinking back in Wiesbaden. You don’t start that again!”

  I said reasonably, “You don’t give me orders, Fritzl. I don’t mind sharing a room with you till you get your career started, but—”

  “Career! You don’t know what’s career!” he yelled, getting excited. “Now you listen and I tell you what to do. You call up this Herr Professor and tell him you changed your mind. Then we start career.”

  I was getting sore. He was always a pretty bossy guy, Fritzl, but the deal we’d made in Germany was that I’d be his manager if I helped him get to America. Nobody said anything about his being mine. There was a bar in Lexington that said they might take him on for a tryout if we got somebody with a guitar to back him up, so I began, “What about—”

  “What about everything,” he said grimly, “is that in one hour you are going to call this Herr Professor and tell him you come over. Then I tell you what to do. But first you spend the next hour practicing with the cards!”

  The good part of it was that the Spider Lady was a nice-looking woman. Her real name was Lillian, and she had that good woman smell that’s part perfume and part sex, and when she let me in and sat me down to wait for her husband she didn’t mind touching a little bit while she took my coat. There were possibilities there. “We’re just going to eat, Hans,” she said, “and you look like you could use a home-cooked meal.”

  So I let myself be persuaded. A good cook she was not; steak and salad and baked potato, but the steak was gray all the way through and the potato still hard; but while we were eating our knees touched a couple times under the table. Then she cleared away and old Shapman brought out the Rhine cards.

  You know what they are. There are twenty-five cards in the pack, five each of five different symbols. There’s a cross, a star, wavy lines, all that stuff. I took a brandy from him. It was cheap New York State brand-X, not what I’m used to these days, but at the time it tasted pretty good to me, and I let Shapman run through the cards three times. The first time I got seven right. The second four. The third time six. “Hum,” he said, disappointed. “Well, it’s a little over chance, but—”

  “I didn’t feel anything,” I said apologetically.

  He looked thoughtful. “What do you mean, feel anything?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes I feel like I can do it, sometimes I don’t. It doesn’t mean anything, I guess, I mean, I don’t think I really have any of this crazy psi stuff—”

  He looked indignant, and the Spider Lady grinned. “I wonder if what you need is another brandy, Hans?” she offered, and while she was getting up to get it Shapman said:

  “I want to show you something.” And so he went out of the room to get something and she was over at the sideboard, and there was I with the deck of cards right in front of me. By the time she turned back with my drink I was standing up, looking out the window. She handed me the glass and reached past me, to a sort of desk at the window, to pick up a deck of ordinary playing cards.

  “Hey, we going to do some tests with them?” I asked.

  She laughed. “I’m just tidying up, Hans. I play a lot of solitaire, with Jerry away so much—he’s running the M.I.T. chapter of the Psychic Research Society, you know.” I didn’t know. “He’s pretty hopeful about you,” she went on. “According to him, you do all kinds of things.”

  “All kinds,” I agreed, looking at her. Nice legs, if a little plump, and she was wearing a really short skirt to make sure they were noticed. She was a lot closer to my age than to Shapman’s. “I mean,” I said, “I don’t know about this ESP stuff.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s just that funny things happen. I guess the professor told you about that laser test rig that got scr—that got messed up. And then”—I chuckled—“welt, there was a funny one in Germany. I had some, you know, dope in my locker, and they pulled a surprise inspection. I was scared out of my head. I wished the grass would go away. Then, just as the captain was coming to me, I heard this noise, and there was the pouch and the hash pipe rolling on the floor.”

  Shapman had come up behind me. “Teleportation?” he asked eagerly.

  “I don’t know what you call it. It wasn’t what I was wishing. I was wishing the damn stuff was in China! The captain couldn’t miss it, it was right in front of him. But it worked out all right. He couldn’t prove it was mine, so I just got restricted to base instead of a D.D.”

  Shapman sighed and changed the subject. He held his open palm out to me. “Do you know what this is?”

  Of course I did. “It’s one of those M.I.T. tie clips. How’d you break it?”

  “I was going to ask you that,” he barked.

  I said apologetically, “I don’t think I ever saw it before, Professor. If I stepped on it or something I’m really sorry.”

  He sighed. He turned the bent clip over in his hand a couple of times, then put it carefully in his pocket. “Why are the best talents so erratic?” he asked the world.

  I said, “I don’t think I’m much of a talent. Oh, yes, things happen. Things get broken—pencils, keys, wristwatches. Glasses. Sometimes I put my sunglasses down when I come home, and I don’t know if they’re going to be in one piece or not when I go to get them again.”

  He took his pipe out of his pocket. “Want to try to break this?” he challenged, and his wife squealed.

  “Jerry! I paid thirty-four dollars for—”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Shapman,” I laughed. “I wouldn’t know
how. Only”—I hesitated, then shrugged—“only, I have to admit, sometimes I feel as though I could do anything. Really confident.”

  He fumbled in his pocket for a notebook, began to jot things down in it. “How were you feeling when we were running the cards?”

  “Not too confident, no.”

  “Want to try it again?” He started back to the table and I stopped him.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Sometimes—Look, just put your hand on the top card, okay?”

  He looked suspicious, but he did. I thought for a while. “Maybe—Maybe if you just peeked at it, I mean don’t let me see it or anything…”

  He started to do that, then paused and took his glasses off. No chance of me playing any tricks by seeing a reflection, no sir! He cupped the top card, staring at it, then glancing eagerly at me.

  I disappointed him. I gave it a good long wait, then I shook my head. “Let me try touching,” I said, and reached out and touched his other skinny hand. I made a face. “Square?” I said doubtfully. It was the wavy lines.

  He said sadly, “It’s the wavy lines.”

  “I just don’t get anything from you,” I apologized. “Maybe if Mrs. Shapman—”

  “Absolutely. Come on, Lil! Here, just put your hand on top here—”

  She wasn’t reluctant at all. Smiling, she picked up the top card and gave me her hand to hold.

  I said triumphantly: “Square!”

  It was. She picked up the next one.

  “Star!…Square again…Wavy lines…” And I went through about twenty cards, and then I stopped.

  “I don’t want to do any more,” I said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t want to do any more?” Shapman demanded. “Go ahead, Geissen! There are only a few more in the deck—”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said, swallowing, “but that brandy—maybe I shouldn’t have—”

  “Now, please, Geissen! You got seventeen out of twenty! Just finish the run!”

  “Leave the boy alone,” his wife ordered, looking at me sharply. “Are you all right, Hans?”

  “Not really,” I said faintly. “Could I have a glass of water? Or—” And I stood up, looking very unwell indeed, and the Spider Lady understood at once and pointed me toward the little toilet off the foyer. I vomited noisily and a lot. It was a terrible waste of a not very good dinner and some fair brandy, and all I had to do was to stick my finger a little bit down my throat. While I was rinsing the taste out of my mouth there was a knock on the door. Shapman. He didn’t wait to be invited in. He pushed the door open and stood there.

  “Sev. En. Teen,” he said.

  I spat the water out into the bowl and took another mouthful.

  “Please, Hans,” he begged. “Just one more run!”

  I said faintly, “I really want to go home. Could you call me a cab?”

  “I’ll drive you. Or you could stay here, and we’ll try again in the morning—Lily! Let’s make up the spare—”

  “No,” I said definitely. “Home.”

  I could see that he was wavering between firm and cherishing. He came down on cherishing because, I knew, he wanted to keep me sweet for the next time; only I didn’t think there was going to be a next time. Not with him. With Lily Shapman, though, that was something else, because all the time I was running the deck I’d felt her little hot finger wriggling against my little hot palm. And as we were getting into the car he paused, took out the notebook again and said, “I just want to write down the date and get your signature and—Jesus!”

  Lillian Shapman, helping me into the rear seat, called irritably, “What is it now, Jerry?”

  “Look at my pen!” It was a Bic ballpoint, snapped clean in half. “And I swear nobody touched it after I put it in my pocket!”

  And when Fritzl asked how it went I told him it had gone fine indeed. “I got the pen when he helped me on with my coat,” I said. “No sweat. And the cards were a breeze.” Seventeen out of twenty! I could have done all twenty—standing on my head, drinking a glass of water, once he went out of the room and left me with them.

  “That was good,” said Fritzl, uttering an unwilling compliment. “Now you don’t see him a while.”

  “How about his wife?” I asked, half joking, but Fritzl took me seriously.

  “Why not? Then if he says later you’re a fake you have got there a very good reason why he is jealous. No. Good all the way. Now we just wait till he writes it up.”

  “Okay,” I yawned, getting ready to go to bed. But before I sacked in I pulled the phone plug out. I didn’t want Shapman calling me up when he got home and found that his pipe was broken too.

  That’s the secret, you see. Never promise to do anything in particular. But if you ask me to read a secret message inside an envelope I’ll stop your watch or tell you your dead aunt-by-marriage’s maiden name or, what the hell, tie a knot in your garters. I’ve got these really nice specialties, like one where I give you a box of Crayolas and let you touch the back of my neck and then I tell you what color it is. Only if you ask me to do that I probably won’t deliver…but while I’m failing, watch your ballpoint pens.

  The way it turned out I did go back to Shapman. I let him put me in the Faraday cage, and I made his compass spin, and I bollixed up his pocket calculator—and all the while, the evenings he was out at the Society, the cage I was in was the Spider Lady’s, and I claim I bollixed her up to where she was spinning like a top, and at that one I never failed at all.

  “Oh,” grumbled the Reverend Doctor, “sit down, Geissen. Do you want the fifty thousand or not?”

  Along about then my instincts began to taste something sour. If he was going to throw me out, he should have thrown me out. If he wasn’t, he should have been a little friendlier…But he wasn’t unfriendly, exactly, when he pushed past me to talk to the receptionist. I sat down, snaky Miss Baker watching me silently and carefully, while Smith muttered at the girl outside and she whispered back. He came back in and closed the door.

  “All the red pens have black caps now and all the black ones have red. A very stupid trick, Geissen. Also her electric pencil sharpener doesn’t work.”

  Snaky hiss from the Honorable Miss. “You’d think he’d show some imagination,” she said. I shrugged. They both watched me silently for a moment.

  Then Smith said, “There are one or two things.”

  I looked up, trying not to look as though I cared one way or another. “I don’t know what you mean, sir,” I said politely.

  Grunt. “We have tapes of some of your television appearances, Geissen.” That wasn’t news to me, of course. It was very unlikely they would have missed any, given what they were supposed to be looking for. “Do you remember the one with that talk-show man in Palo Alto?”

  I made believe to have to search my memory, but actually I remembered it very well. It was one of my better gigs. It was thinking on my feet, and that was what I was a lot better than Fritzl at.

  “I think so,” I said cautiously. “I think I got there late.” Actually, that was just lying to stay in practice. I hadn’t got there late, I got there in plenty of time, and I sat in the green room reading a magazine, where everybody could watch me so they’d know I wasn’t doing anything tricky. I didn’t bother with makeup. Why would a nice, clean, eager-to-please young fellow like me put something artificial on his face? I didn’t move until they called me to go out front.

  Then it didn’t go well at all.

  They sat me down, and I saw my host run off to the wings during the commercial; his girlfriend handed him something, and I couldn’t see what; then the commercial was over and he was standing in front of his desk. “All right, Hans,” he beamed, “I’ve got something in my closed fist. Can you tell me what it is?”

  The son of a bitch. I knew everything on his desk or in his pockets, of course. I didn’t know what his girl might have handed him. I winged it. “I’m getting an image—I don’t know—All I can see, it’s kind of round?” No response on his
face. What would the bitch have handed him, a kind of powder-puff maybe? “I get a feeling of softness—It’s something kind of, I don’t know—” I tried to look blushy. “Sort of personal, I think.”

  Polite smile. “Can you say what color it is?”

  “Uh…Not really. Kind of light?”

  He grinned and opened his hand and it was, for Christ’s sake, an ice cube. Jesus! Why hadn’t I seen the water dripping? It had begun to melt a little, and so the corners were a little rounded off from melting. But that wasn’t good enough.

  I tried a save. “I guess Clarion must have moved into the constellation of Sagittarius,” I said, grinning.

  He all but laughed in my face. “The what?”

  I was stalling, waiting for inspiration. “The planet Clarion. I don’t know if it’s real. Only somebody told me I’d never be able to do anything when they were in a bad sign.”

  “Sure,” he said, openly winking at the audience. “You want to tell us about these flying-saucer people that mess you up?”

  “They don’t come in flying saucers, as far as I know. It’s just a theory, you know? Like the square root of minus one.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said wise-ass, nodding hard, “the square root of minus one.”

  “Exactly,” I said eagerly, cudgeling my memory—what had Fritzl told me about the stuff in his desk drawer? Or his wallet? “It’s imaginary, maybe, but it works. Like they’re afraid of us, see, and if they find anybody who really does have psi powers they wreck it for him, so Earthlings won’t ever be a threat…” Diner’s Club card, AmEx gold card, two fifty-dollar bills, one of them folded into the driver’s license—“Oh, I’m getting something!” I cried.

  “The boot?” he grinned, and the audience chortled.

  “No, no really! Soft, round, pale-colored—yes, that’s it.” I leaned over and whispered in his ear. “The Trojan in your wallet.” He jumped back, staring at me. “Only,” I said bashfully, “I wouldn’t, you know, count on that one, because it has a hole in it.” And I didn’t have to say any more, because his face said it for me, and as the audience caught on I got about the biggest laugh—the biggest one on my side, anyway—of my career.