Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  But I never got invited back on that show…

  “So how did you know he had a condom in his wallet?” asked Smith.

  I shrugged. “Lots of guys carry them,” I said.

  “In this age of the pill?” he demanded.

  “Like,” I said, blushing, “if he’s afraid somebody might have kind of a disease? I don’t know, Mr. Smith.”

  “No,” said Smith thoughtfully. He looked at the woman. She looked out of her lidless, shiny eyes at him. He made up his mind. “Come in my private office,” he ordered abruptly, stood up, led the way, opened the door, turned on the light switch.

  The light didn’t light. Instead, his TV set burped and buzzed and turned itself on. It was daytime television, a rerun of “My Favorite Martian.”

  “You sit still,” ordered Smith, and his eyes were furious. I expected a reaction. I didn’t expect it to be that big. I sat. Miss Baker was poking around in his desk, and she squawked and grabbed him, muttering in his ear, holding up a sheet of paper. It had a caricature of her on it, and it had been locked inside the desk. He muttered back, and waved to the bookcase; she began investigating that while he methodically emptied everything in his desk.

  I just sat, waiting. Feeling good. Admiring the office. It had everything, including a wet bar with a sink and a refrigerator and a little gas range and a Dispos-All and a Cuisinart. There was a handsome leather couch along one wall, about twenty-five hundred dollars better looking than the raggedy old thing in the reception room; the desk itself was teak, and the chair behind it was one of those electric things that fits any position. When he sat down in it and pushed a button absentmindedly it lurched and nearly threw him across the room. He yelled out in anger. I didn’t understand what he said, but Miss Baker did. She jumped to the window, pointing out at the fire escape. Smith jumped after her, then shook his head, snarling something, and pointed to the joints in the window. They had been painted shut long before. Nobody had needed to open that window, with the air conditioner mounted right below it; and certainly nobody had come in through it lately. He turned away; then, with a sudden thought, turned back. He looked at the air conditioner, then at me.

  Then he shook his head. Certainly a big fellow like me could never have squeezed through that space, even if he had been able to get the air conditioner out from outside. And indeed I couldn’t.

  But skinny little Fritzl could. By now he was back in the apartment, resting up. But he’d done the job.

  I don’t know what-all they found. Fritzl was an ingenious man, and he’d had more than half an hour while we were talking in the other office. I don’t even know if they found everything. What I know is that after a while Smith stopped looking, and sat back on the desk, looking at me. He said something to Miss Baker that I couldn’t understand.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith,” I said politely. “What did you say?”

  “I said we cannot, after all, take chances,” he told me, and she nodded, the eyes fixed on me in a way I didn’t like.

  He went to the wall, where a picture of the Coliseum had been replaced with a full-length color photograph of me holding a bent spoon. He ripped the picture off and felt the wall behind it. There was nothing to see there, but he dug his fingernails into a crack in the paneling. A square of the wall came away. There was a safe behind it. I watched with admiration; not even Fritzl had found that! He opened it and took out something that looked, to my surprise, like a weapon.

  It was.

  It was not any kind of gun I had ever seen before, and it didn’t make a gunshot noise. All it did was kind of poop out a quick purplish glow.

  But that purplish glow was pretty powerful stuff, because all at once I was all limp. It was like novocaine suddenly hit every nerve and muscle. Nothing felt attached to me anymore. I fell over. None of my limbs responded to anything I asked of them. My mouth wouldn’t speak. Only my eyes stayed open.

  For a moment Smith and Baker were almost as still as I. I could hear them whispering faintly to each other, but they watched me without moving. Then Smith pointed to the sink. Baker slithered over to it, turned on the water, touched the switch for the Dispos-All.

  It didn’t work.

  She snapped something at Smith, who came over and looked into my eyes. “You affected that, too?” he asked. “Ah, a really powerful talent. Well, I will just get my tools and fix it.”

  Miss Baker didn’t respond, or even look at him as he went out, closing the door after him. She was busy with something else. From a cabinet under the sink she took out a plastic sheet and spread it on the floor. From another, a selection of knives, cleavers, a butchers’ bone saw. She arranged them carefully on the plastic, working fast. Her hair fell in her eyes; she pulled the wig off and her bald skull looked more snakelike than ever.

  And she didn’t speak, and I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t to her, and I couldn’t to Smith when he came back and patiently, methodically began disassembling the Dispos-All. Nor did he speak to me. Not while he was getting comfortable by removing his own wig, and the false nose that covered the ugly pit in the middle of his face he breathed through; not while he was putting the disposer back together; not even while he was helping Miss Smith into the white coverall that would keep her other clothes from unwanted stains. Only then did he come over to look down at me.

  “One thing you might like to know,” he said. “The name of the planet isn’t Clarion.” And then he leaned down to take my shoulders, while skinny Miss Baker easily lifted my legs and they carried me over to the plastic sheeting with the knives, the saw, and the cleaver.

  THE HIGH TEST

  One of the great dreams of science fiction is going into space. Of course, it’s not good enough just to go—the fun is in going places you haven’t been before. And to do that, you need to be able to pilot a spaceship. Frederik Pohl has this dream. In an introduction to the first publication of “The High Test,” he said, “When I was about ten or eleven years old I used to daydream…about flying a great big marvelous interstellar spaceship across the universe, something like the Skylark of Space…”

  It goes without saying that someone has to teach people how to fly spaceships, just as there are people to teach people how to drive cars. “The High Test,” first published in 1983, is about a young man who teaches spaceship piloting. It’s safe to say that worse things can happen in this line of work than happen to your average driving instructor. In the case of James Paul Madigan, there are some things that nobody could have prepared him for.

  2213 12 22 1900ugt

  Dear Mom:

  As they say, there’s good news and there’s bad news here on Cassiopeia 43-G. The bad news is that there aren’t any openings for people with degrees in quantum-mechanical astrophysics. The good news is that I’ve got a job. I started yesterday. I work for a driving school, and I’m an instructor.

  I know you’ll say that’s not much of a career for a twenty-six-year-old man with a doctorate, but it pays the rent. Also it’s a lot better than I’d have if I’d stayed on Earth. Is it true that the unemployment rate in Chicago is up to eighty percent? Wow! As soon as I get a few megabucks ahead I’m going to invite you all to come out here and visit me in the sticks so you can see how we live here—you may not want to go back!

  Now, I don’t want you to worry when I tell you that I get hazardous duty pay. That’s just a technicality. We driving instructors have it in our contracts, but we don’t really earn it. At least, usually we don’t—although there are times like yesterday. The first student I had was this young girl, right from Earth. Spoiled rotten! You know the kind, rich, and I guess you’d say beautiful, and really used to having her own way. Her name’s Tonda Aguilar—you’ve heard of the Evanston Aguilars? In the recombinant foodstuff business? They’re really rich, I guess. This one had her own speedster, and she was really sulked that she couldn’t drive it on an Earth license. See, they have this suppressor field; as soon as any vehicle comes into the system, zap, it’s off, and it
just floats until some licensed pilot comes out to fly it in. So I took her up, and right away she started giving me ablation. “Not so much takeoff boost! You’ll burn out the tubes!” and “Don’t ride the reverter in hyperdrive!” and “Get out of low orbit—you want to rack us up?”

  Well, I can take just so much of that. An instructor is almost like the captain of a ship, you know. He’s the boss! So I explained to her that my name wasn’t “Chowderhead” or “Dullwit!” but James Paul Madigan, and it was the instructors who were supposed to yell at the students, not the other way around. Well, it was her own speedster, and a really neat one at that. Maybe I couldn’t blame her for being nervous about somebody else driving it. So I decided to give her a real easy lesson. Practicing parking orbits—if you can’t do that you don’t deserve a license! And she was really rotten at it. It looks easy, but there’s an art to cutting the hyperdrive with just the right residual velocity, so you slide right into your assigned coordinates. The more she tried the farther off she got. Finally she demanded that I take her back to the spaceport. She said I was making her nervous. She said she’d get a different instructor for tomorrow or she’d just move on to some other system where they didn’t have benefacted chimpanzees giving driving lessons.

  I just let her rave. Then the next student I had was a Fomalhautian. You know that species: they’ve got two heads and scales and forked tails, and they’re always making a nuisance of themselves in the United Systems? If you believe what they say on the vid-com, they’re bad news—in fact, the reason Cassiopeia installed the suppressor field was because they had a suspicion the Fomalhautians were thinking about invading and taking over 43-G. But this one was nice as pie! Followed every instruction. Never gave me any argument. Apologized when he made a mistake and got us too close to one of the miniblack holes near the primary. He said that was because he was unfamiliar with the school ship, and said he’d prefer to use his own space yacht for the next lesson. He made the whole day better, after that silly, spoiled rich brat!

  I was glad to have a little cheering up, to tell you the truth. I was feeling a little lonesome and depressed. Probably it’s because it’s so close to the holidays. It’s hard to believe that back in Chicago it’s only three days until Christmas, and all the store windows will be full of holodecorations and there’ll be that big tree in Grant Park and I bet it’s snowing…and here on Cassiopeia 43-G it’s sort of like a steam bath with interludes of Niagara Falls.

  I do wish you a Merry Christmas, Mom! Hope my gifts got there all right.

  Love,

  Jim Paul

  2213 12 25 late

  Dear Mom:

  Well, Christmas Day is just about over. Not that it’s any different from any other day here on 43-G, where the human colonists were mostly Buddhist or Moslem and the others were—well! You’ve seen the types that hang around the United Systems building in Palatine—smelled them, too, right? Especially those Arcturans. I don’t know whether those people have any religious holidays or not, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.

  Considering that I had to work all day, it hasn’t been such a bad Christmas at that. When I mentioned to Torklemiggen—he’s the Fomalhautian I told you about—that today was a big holiday for us he sort of laughed and said that mammals had really quaint customs. And when he found out that part of the custom was to exchange gifts he thought for a minute. (The way Fomalhautians think to themselves is that their heads whisper in each other’s ear—really grotesque!) Then he said that he had been informed it was against the law for a student to give anything to his driving instructor, but if I wanted to fly his space yacht myself for a while he’d let me do it. And he would let it go down on the books of the school as instruction time, so I’d get paid for it. Well, you bet I wanted to! He has some swell yacht. It’s long and tapered, sort of shark-shape, like the TU-Lockheed 4400 series, with radar-glyph vision screens and a cruising range of nearly 1800 l.y. I don’t know what its top speed is—after all, we had to stay in our own system!

  We were using his own ship, you see, and of course it’s Fomalhautian made. Not easy for a human being to fly! Even though I’m supposed to be the instructor and Torklemiggen the student, I was baffled at first. I couldn’t even get it off the ground until he explained the controls to me and showed me how to read the instruments. There’s still plenty I don’t know, but after a few minutes I could handle it well enough not to kill us out of hand. Torklemiggen kept daring me to circle the black holes. I told him we couldn’t do that, and he got this kind of sneer on one of his faces, and the two heads sort of whispered together for a while. I knew he was thinking of something cute, but I didn’t know what at first.

  Then I found out!

  You know that CAS 43, our primary, is a red giant star with an immense photosphere. Torklemiggen bragged that we could fly right through the photosphere! Well, of course I hardly believed him, but he was so insistent that I tried it out. He was right! We just greased right through that thirty-thousand-degree plasma, like nothing at all! The hull began to turn red, then yellow, then straw-colored—you could see it on the edges of the radar-glyph screen—and yet the inside temperature stayed right on the button of 40° Celsius. That’s 43-G normal, by the way. Hot, if you’re used to Chicago, but nothing like it was outside! And when we burst out into vacuum again there was no thermal shock, no power surge, no instrument fog. Just beautiful! It’s hard to believe that any individual can afford a ship like this just for his private cruising. I guess Fomalhaut must have some pretty rich planets!

  Then when we landed, more than an hour late, there was the Aguilar woman waiting for me. She found out that the school wouldn’t let her change instructors once assigned. I could have told her that; it’s policy. So she had to cool her heels until I got back. But I guess she had a little Christmas spirit somewhere in her ornery frame, because she was quite polite about it. As a matter of fact, when we had her doing parking orbits she was much improved over the last time. Shows what a first-class instructor can do for you!

  Well, I see by the old chronometer on the wall that it’s the day after Christmas now, at least by Universal-Greenwich Time it is, though I guess you’ve still got a couple of hours to go in Chicago. One thing, Mom. The Christmas packages you sent didn’t get here yet. I thought about lying to you and saying they’d come and how much I liked them, but you raised me always to tell the truth. (Besides, I didn’t know what to thank you for!) Anyway, Merry Christmas one more time from—

  Jim Paul

  2213 12 30 0200ugt

  Dear Mom:

  Another day, another kilobuck. My first student today was a sixteen-year-old kid. One of those smart-alecky ones, if you know what I mean. (But you probably don’t, because you certainly never had any kids like that!) His father was a combat pilot in the Cassiopeian navy, and the kid drove that way, too. That wasn’t the worst of it. He’d heard about Torklemiggen. When I tried to explain to him that he had to learn how to go slow before he could go fast, he really let me have it. Didn’t I know his father said the Fomalhautians were treacherous enemies of the Cassiopeian way of life? Didn’t I know his father said they were just waiting their chance to invade? Didn’t I know—

  Well, I could take just so much of this fresh kid telling me what I didn’t know. So I told him he wasn’t as lucky as Torklemiggen. He only had one brain, and if he didn’t use all of it to fly this ship I was going to wash him out. That shut him up pretty quick.

  But it didn’t get much better, because later on I had this fat lady student who just oughtn’t to get a license for anything above a skateboard. Forty-six years old, and she’s never driven before—but her husband’s got a job asteroid-mining, and she wants to be able to bring him a hot lunch every day. I hope she’s a better cook than a pilot! Anyway I was trying to put her at ease, so she wouldn’t pile us up into a comet nucleus or something, so I was telling her about the kid. She listened, all sympathy—you know, how teenage kids were getting fresher every year—until I
mentioned that what we were arguing about was my Fomalhautian student. Well, you should have heard her then! I swear, Mom, I think these Cassiopeians are psychotic on the subject. I wish Torklemiggen were here so I could talk to him about it—somebody said the reason CAS 43-G put the suppressor system in in the first place was to keep them from invading, if you can imagine that! But he had to go home for a few days. Business, he said. Said he’d be back next week to finish his lessons.

  Tonda Aguilar is almost finished, too. She’ll solo in a couple of days. She was my last student today—I mean yesterday, actually, because it’s way after midnight now. I had her practicing zero-G approaches to low-mass asteroids, and I happened to mention that I was feeling a little lonesome. It turned out she was, too, so I surprised myself by asking her if she was doing anything tomorrow night, and she surprised me by agreeing to a date. It’s not romance, Mom, so don’t get your hopes up. It’s just that she and I seem to be the only beings in this whole system who know that tomorrow is New Year’s Eve!

  Love,

  Jim Paul

  2214 01 02 2330ugt

  Dear Mom:

  I got your letter this morning, and I’m glad that your leg is better. Maybe next time you’ll listen to Dad and me! Remember, we both begged you to go for a brand-new factory job when you got it, but you kept insisting a rebuilt would be just as good. Now you see. It never pays to try to save money on your health!

  I’m sorry if I told you about my clients without giving you any idea of what they looked like. For Tonda, that’s easy enough to fix. I enclose a holo of the two of us which we took this afternoon, celebrating the end of her lessons. She solos tomorrow. As you can see, she is a really good-looking woman and I was wrong about her being spoiled. She came out here on her own to make her career as a dermatologist. She wouldn’t take any of her old man Aguilar’s money, so all she had when she got here was her speedster and her degree and the clothes on her back. I really admire her. She connected right away with one of the best body-shops in town, and she’s making more money than I am.