Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Why not?”

  “He said he was leaving. He’s been planning to for some time—he only stayed on to see us. What’s this, Friday? The last time I saw him was Tuesday, and he was packing up then. He may be gone.”

  And he was. When Ildo deposited us at the Keytown dock and the taxi took us to the apartments where Michaelis had lived, the door of his place was unlocked. The rented furniture was there, but the closets were empty, and so were the bureau drawers, and of an occupant the only sign remaining was an envelope addressed to Edna:

  I thought I’d better leave while Gerald was still wrestling with his conscience. If you see him, thank him for the use of his space—and I hope we’ll meet again in a couple of years.

  Edna looked up at me in puzzlement. “Do you know what that part about your space means?”

  I gave the note back to her and watched her fold it up and put it in her bag. I thought of asking her to burn it, but that would just make it more important to her. I wanted her to forget it. I said, “No,” which was somewhat true. I didn’t know. And I surely didn’t want to guess.

  By the time we were back on the boat I was able to be cheerful again, at least on the surface. When we docked at our own hotel Edna went on ahead to change, while I sent Ildo happily off with a big tip. He was, Edna had said, a pretty sweet man. He was not alone in that; nearly everyone I’d met on the island was as kindly as the island claimed; and it hurt me to think of Val Michaelis going on with his work in this gentle place.

  We had agreed to meet for a drink before dinner—we had taken it for granted that we were going to have dinner together—and when I came to Edna’s room to pick her up she invited me in. “That Starlight Casino is pretty noisy, Jerry, and I’ve got this perfectly beautiful balcony to use up. Can you drink gin and tonic?”

  “My very favorite,” I said. That wasn’t true. I didn’t much like the taste of quinine water, or of gin, either, but sitting on a warm sunset balcony with Edna was a lot more attractive than listening to rockabilly music in the bar.

  But I wasn’t good company. Seeing Edna off by herself in the bay had set off one set of memories, Val Michaelis’s note had triggered another. I didn’t welcome either train of thought, because they were intruders; I was feeling almost happy, almost at peace—and those two old pains kept coming in to remind me of misery and fear. I did my best. Edna had set out glasses, bottles, a bucket of ice, a plate of things to nibble on, and the descending sun was perfect. “This is really nice, Marge,” I said, accepting a refill of my glass…and only heard myself when I saw the look on her face.

  “I mean Edna,” I said.

  She touched my hand when she gave the glass back to me. “I think that’s a compliment, Jerry,” she said sweetly.

  I thought that over. “I guess it is,” I said. “You know, I’ve never done that before. Called someone else by my wife’s name, I mean. Of course, I haven’t often been in the sort of situation where—” I stopped there, because it didn’t seem right to define what I thought the present “situation” was.

  She started to speak, hesitated, took a tiny sip of her drink, started again, stopped and finally laughed—at herself, I realized. “Jerry,” she said, “you can tell me to mind my own business if you want to, because I know I ought to. But you told me your wife died eight years ago. Are you saying you’ve never had a private drink with a woman since then?”

  “Well, no—it has happened now and then,” I said, and then added honestly, “but not very often. You see—”

  I stopped and swallowed. The expression on her face was changing, the smile softening. She reached out to touch my hand.

  And then I found myself telling her the whole thing.

  Not the whole whole thing. I did not tell her what the surfboard looked like, with the ragged half-moon gap in the side, and I didn’t tell her what Marge’s body had looked like—what was left of it—when at last they found it near the shore, eight days later. But I told her the rest. Turning in my retirement papers. The trip to California to see her folks. The boat. The surfboard. Marge paddling around in the swell, just before the breakers, while I watched from the boat. “I went down below for just a minute,” I said, “and when I came back on deck she was gone. I could still see the surfboard, but she wasn’t there. I hadn’t heard a thing, although she must have—”

  “Oh, Jerry,” said Edna.

  “It has to do with water temperatures,” I explained, “and with the increase in the seal population. The great white shark didn’t used to come up that far north along the coast, but the water’s a little warmer, and there are more seals. That’s what they live on. Seals, and other things. And from a shark’s view underwater, you see, a person lying on a surfboard, with his arms and legs paddling over the side, looks a lot like a seal…”

  I saw to my surprise that she was weeping. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As I reached forward and put my arms around her, I discovered that I was weeping, too.

  That was the biggest surprise of all. I’d done a lot of weeping in eight years, but never once in the presence of another human being, not even the shrinks I’d gone to see. And when the weeping stopped and the kissing began I found that it didn’t seem wrong at all. It seemed very right, and a long, long time overdue.

  4

  My remaining business with Dick Kavilan didn’t take long. By the time Edna’s tour group was scheduled to go home, I was ready, too.

  The two of us decided not to wait for the bus to the airport. We went early, by taxi, beating the tours to the check-in desk. By the time the first of them arrived we were already sitting at the tiny bar, sipping farewell pina coladas. Only it was not going to be a farewell, not when I had discovered she lived only a few miles from the house I had kept all these years as home base.

  When the tour buses began to arrive I could not resist preening my forethought a little. “That’s going to be a really ugly scene, trying to check in all at once,” I said wisely.

  But really it wasn’t. There were all the ingredients for a bad time, more than three hundred tired tourists trying to get seat assignments from a single airline clerk. But they didn’t jostle. They didn’t snarl, at her or each other. The tiny terminal was steamy with human bodies, but it almost seemed they didn’t even sweat. They were singing and smiling—even Edna’s sister and brother-in-law. They waved up at us, and it looked like their marriage had a good shot at lasting a while longer, after all.

  A sudden gabble from the line of passengers told us what the little callboard confirmed a moment later. Our airplane had arrived from the States. Edna started to collect her bag, her sack of duty-free rum, her boots and fur-collared coat for the landing at Dulles, her little carry-on with the cigarettes and the book to read on the flight, her last-minute souvenir T-shirt…“Hold on,” I said. “We’ve got an hour yet. They’ve got to disembark the arrivals and muck out the plane—you didn’t think we’d leave on time, did you?”

  So there was time for another pina colada, and while we were drinking them the newcomers began to straggle off the DC-10. The noise level in the terminal jumped fifteen decibels, and most of it was meal complaints, family arguments and clamor over lost luggage. The departing crowd gazed at their fretful replacements good-humoredly.

  And all of a sudden that other unpleasant train of thought bit down hard. There was a healing magic on the island, and the thought of Val Michaelis doing the sort of thing he was trained to do here was more than I could bear. I hadn’t turned Michaelis in, because I thought he was a decent man. But damaging these kind, gentle people was indecent.

  I put down my half-finished drink, stood up and dropped a bill on the table. “Edna,” I said, “I just realize there’s something I have to do. I’m afraid I’m going to miss this flight. I’ll call you in Maryland when I get back—I’m sorry.”

  And I really was. Very. But that did not stop me from heading for the phone.

  The men from the NSA were there the next morning. Evidently they hadn’t wai
ted for a straight-through flight. Maybe they’d chartered one, or caught a light flight to a nearby island.

  But they hadn’t wasted any time.

  They could have thanked me for calling them, I thought. They didn’t. They invited me out to their car for privacy—it was about as much of an “invitation” as a draft notice is, and as difficult to decline—while I answered their questions. Then they pulled out of the hotel lot and drove those thirty-mile-an-hour island roads at sixty. We managed not to hit any of the cows and people along the way. We did, I think, score one hen. The driver didn’t even slow down to look.

  I was not in the least surprised. I didn’t know the driver, but the other man was Joe Mooney. Now he was a full field investigator, but he had been a junior security officer at the labs when Michaelis walked away. He was a mean little man with a high opinion of himself; he had always thought that the rules he enforced on the people he surveilled didn’t have to apply to him. He proved it. He turned around in the front seat, arm across the back, so he could look at me while ostensibly talking to his partner at the wheel: “You know what Michaelis was working on? Some kind of a bug to drive the Russians nuts.”

  “Mooney, watch it!” his partner snapped.

  “Oh, it’s all right. Old Jerry knows all about it, and he’s cleared—or used to be.”

  “It wasn’t a bug,” I said. “It was a virus. It wouldn’t drive them crazy. It would work on the brain to make them irritable and nasty—a kind of personality change, like some people get after a stroke. And he didn’t just try. He succeeded.”

  “And then he ran.”

  “And then he ran, yes.”

  “Only it didn’t work,” grinned Mooney, “because they couldn’t find a way to spread it. And now what we have to worry about, we have to worry that while he was down here he figured out how to make it work and’s looking for a buyer. Like a Russian buyer.”

  Well, I could have argued all of that. But the only part I answered, as we stopped to unlock the chain-link gate, was the last part. And all I said was, “I don’t think so.”

  Mooney laughed out loud. “You always were a googoo,” he said. “You sure Michaelis didn’t stick you with some of that stuff in reverse?”

  I hadn’t been able to find the entrance of the wine cellar, but that pair of NSA men had no trouble at all. They realized at once that there had to be a delivery system to the main dining room—I hadn’t thought of that. So that’s where they went, and found a small elevator shaft that went two stories down. There wasn’t any elevator, but there were ropes and Mooney’s partner climbed down while Mooney and I went back to the shopping floor. About two minutes after we got there a painters’ scaffold at the end of the hall went over with a crash, and the NSA man pushed his way out of the door it had concealed. Mooney gave me a contemptuous look. “Fire stairs,” he explained. “They had to be there. There has to be another entrance, too—outside—so they can deliver the wine by truck.”

  He was right again. From the inside it was easy to spot, even though we had only flashlights to see what we were doing. When Mooney pushed it open we got a flood of tropical light coming in, and a terrible smell to go with it. For a moment I wondered if the graveyard wind had shifted again, but it was only a pile of garbage—rotted garbage—long-gone lobster shells and sweepings from the mall and trash of all kinds. It wasn’t surprising no one had found the entrance from outside; the stink was discouraging.

  No matter what else I was, I was still a man paid to do a job by his company. So while the NSA team were prodding and peering and taking flash pictures, I was looking at the cellar. It was large enough to handle all the wines a first-class sommelier might want to store; the walls were solid, and the temperature good. With that outside door kept closed, it would be no problem to keep any vintage safely resting here. The Dutchman shouldn’t have given up so easily, just because he was faced with a lot of lawsuits—but maybe, as Dick Kavilan had said, people were meaner then.

  I blinked when Joe Mooney poked his flashlight in my face. “What are you daydreaming about?” he demanded.

  I pushed his hand away. “Have you seen everything you need?” I asked.

  He looked around. There wasn’t a whole lot to see, really. Along one wall there were large glass tanks—empty, except for a scummy inch or two of liquid at the bottom of some of them, fishy smelling and unappetizing. There were smaller tanks on the floor, and marks on the rubber tile to show where other things had been that now were gone. “He took everything that matters out,” he grumbled. “Son of a bitch! He got clean away.”

  “We’ll find him,” his partner said.

  “Damn right, but what was he doing here? Trying out his stuff on the natives?” Mooney looked at me searchingly. “What do you think, Wenwright? Have you heard of any cases of epidemic craziness on the island?”

  I shrugged. “I did my part when I called you,” I said. “Now all I want is to go home.”

  But it wasn’t quite true. There was something else I wanted, and that was to know if there was any chance at all that what I was beginning to suspect might be true.

  The next day I was on the home-bound jet, taking a drink from the stew in the first-class section and still trying to convince myself that what I believed was possible. The people were meaner then. It wasn’t just an offhand remark of Kavilan’s; the hotel manager told me as I was checking out that it was true, yes, a few years ago he had a lot of trouble with help, but lately everybody seemed a lot friendlier. Val Michaelis was a decent man. I’d always believed that, in the face of the indecencies of his work at the labs…having left, would he go on performing indecencies?

  Could it be that Michaelis had in fact found a different kind of virus? One that worked on different parts of the brain, for different purposes? That made people happier and more gentle, instead of suspicious, paranoid, and dangerous?

  I was neither biologist nor brain anatomist to guess if that could be true. But I had the evidence of my eyes. Something had changed the isle from mean, litiginous, grasping—from the normal state of the rest of the world—to what I had seen around me. It had even worked on me. It was not just Edna Buckner’s sweet self, sweet though she was, that had let me discharge eight years of guilt and horror in one night. And right here on this plane, the grinning tour groups in the back and even the older, more sedate first-class passengers around me testified that something had happened to them…

  Not all the first-class passengers.

  Just across the aisle from me one couple was busy berating the stewardess. They didn’t like their appetizer.

  “Langouste salad, you call it?” snapped the man. “I call it poison. Didn’t you ever hear of allergy? Jesus, we’ve been spending the whole week trying to keep them from pushing those damned lobsters on us everywhere we went…”

  Lobsters.

  Lobsters were neither mammals nor insects. And the particular strains of Retroviridae that wouldn’t reproduce in either, I remember, had done just fine in crustaceans.

  Like lobsters.

  5

  The NSA team caught up with me again six months later, in my office. I was just getting ready to leave, to pick Edna up for the drive down to Chesapeake Bay, where the company was considering the acquisition of an elderly and declining hotel. I told them I was in a hurry.

  “This is official business,” Mooney’s partner growled, but Mooney shook his head.

  “We won’t keep you long, Wenright. Michaelis has been reported in the States. Have you heard anything of him?”

  “Where in the States?”

  “None of your business,” he snapped, and then shrugged. “Maryland.”

  I said, “That would be pretty foolish of him, wouldn’t it?” He didn’t respond, just looked at me. “No,” I said, “I haven’t heard anything at all.”

  He obviously had not expected anything more. He gave me a routinely nasty look, the whatever-it-is-you’re-up-to-you-won’t-get-away-with-it kind, and stood up to go. His partner
gave me the routinely unpleasant warning: “We’ll be watching you,” he said.

  I laughed. “I’m sure you will. And don’t you think Michaelis will figure that out, too?”

  That night I told Edna about the interview, though I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t care about that, having already told her so much that I wasn’t supposed to about Michaelis’s work and my suspicions. There were a lot of laws that said I should have kept my mouth shut, and I had broken all of them.

  She nibbled at her salad, nodding. We were dining in the hotel’s open-air restaurant; it was late spring, and nearly as warm as it had been back on the island. “I hope he gets away,” she said.

  “I hope more than that. I hope he lives and prospers with his work.”

  She giggled. “Johnny Happyseed,” she said.

  I shook my head slightly, because the maitre-d’ was approaching and I didn’t want him to hear. He was a plump young man with visions of a career at the Plaza, and he knew what I was there for. He was desperately anxious to make my report favorable. The hotel itself was fine. It was the top management that was incompetent, and if we bought it out there would be changes—as he knew. Whether he would be one of the changes I didn’t yet know.

  So when he asked, “Is everything satisfactory, Mr. Wenright?” he was asking about more than the meal. I hadn’t been there long enough to have made up my mind—and certainly wouldn’t have told him if I had. I only smiled, and he pressed on: “This is really a delightful old hotel, Mr. Wenright, with all sorts of marvelous historical associations. And it’s been kept up very well, as you’ll see. Of course, some improvements are always in order—but we get a first-class clientele, especially in the softshell crab season. Congressmen. Senators. Diplomats. Every year we get a series of seminars with Pentagon people—”

  Edna dropped her fork.

  I didn’t, but I was glad to have him distracted by the necessity of clapping his hands so that a busboy could rush up at once with a fresh one. Then I said, “Tell me, isn’t it true that the crabbing has been very poor lately? Some sort of disease among the shellfish?”