Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  While they ate their late lunch, or early dinner, or whatever the meal was that they had formed the habit of sharing after Marcus’s school got out, the boy did his job. “They’ve got one wall of the pumphouse poured,” he reported, squinting out over the distant, scarred landscape that had once been a normal, scarred Brooklyn neighborhood. Silently the old man handed him the field glasses and Marcus confirmed what he had said. “Yeah, the pumphouse is coming along, and—and—they’re digging for the shit pit, all right. But no bulldozers. Just sitting there, Mr. Feigerman; I guess they didn’t turn loose your money yet. I don’t see why they want to do that, anyway.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make another hill there. They got this one right here already.”

  “This one’s the wrong shape,” Feigerman said, not impatiently—he liked the boy, welcomed his questions, wished he had had a real son of his own sometimes—since the semi-real stepson he had had no detectable love for his adopted father. “Besides, this one is historic, so they don’t want to build windmills on top of it. George Washington held the British off right here—read the inscription on the monument sometime.” He licked some of the falafel juice off his lip and Marcus, unbidden, unfolded a paper napkin and dabbed the missed spatters off the old man’s bristly chin. Feigerman clicked in his long-range optical scanners in place of the sonar and gazed out over the city, but of course he could see only vague shapes without detail. “It’s a big thing,” he said—as much to the unheeding city as to Marcus.

  “I know it is, Mr. Feigerman. Gonna make things real nice for Bed-Stuy.”

  “I hope so.” But it was more than a hope. In Feigerman’s mind it was certain: the energy-sufficient, self-contained urban area that he had lobbied for for more than twenty years. It was wonderful that it was going in in Brooklyn, so close to his home. Of course, that was just luck—and a few influential friends. The project could have been built anywhere—which is to say, in any thoroughly blighted urban neighborhood, where landlords were walking away from their tenements. And those were the good landlords; the bad ones were torching their buildings for the insurance. South Bronx wanted it. So did three neighborhoods in Chicago, three in Detroit, almost all of Newark, half of Philadelphia—yes, it could have been almost anywhere. Brooklyn won the prize for two reasons. One was the clout of the influential political friends. The other was its soft alluvial soil. What Brooklyn was made of, basically, was the rubble the glaciers had pushed ahead of them in the last Ice Age, filled in with silt from the rivers. It cut like cheese.

  When Bed-Stuy was done it would not have to import one kilowatt-hour of energy from anywhere else—not from Ontario Hydro, not from Appalachia, not from the chancy and riot-torn oil fields of the Arab states. Not from anywhere. Winter heating would come from the thermal aquifer storage, in the natural brine reservoirs under the city, nine hundred feet down. Summer cooling would help to warm the aquifers up again, topped off with extra chill from the ice-ponds. By using ice and water to store heat and cold the summer air-conditioning and winter heating peaks wouldn’t happen, which meant that maximum capacity could be less. Low enough to be well within the design parameters of the windmills, the methane generators from the shit pit and all the other renewable-resource sources; and the ghetto would bloom. Bedford-Stuyvesant was a demonstration project. If it worked there would be more, all over the country, and Watts and Libertyville and the Ironbound and the Northside would get their chances—and it would work!

  But it was not, of course, likely that de Rintelen Feigerman would be around to see those second-generation heavens.

  Reminded of mortality, Feigerman raised his wrist to his ear and his watch beeped the time. “I have to get going now,” he said. “My wife’s going to die this evening.”

  “She made up her mind to do it, Mr. Feigerman?”

  “It looks that way. I’m sorry about that; I guess your mother will be out of a job. Has she got any plans, outside of helping out in the store?”

  “Friend of my daddy’s, he says he can get her work as a bag lady.”

  Feigerman sighed; but it was not, after all, his problem. “Take us on down the hill, Marcus,” he said. “The car ought to be back by now.”

  “All right, Mr. Feigerman.” Marcus disengaged the electric motor and turned the wheelchair toward the steep path. “Seems funny, though.”

  “What seems funny, Marcus?”

  “Picking the time you’re going to die.”

  “I suppose it is,” Feigerman said thoughtfully, listening to the chatter of teenagers on a park bench and the distant grumble of traffic. Marcus was a careful wheelchair handler, but Feigerman kept his hand near the brake anyway. “The time to die,” he said, “is the day when you’ve put off root-canal work as long as possible, and you’re running out of clean clothes, and you’re beginning to need a haircut.” And he was getting close enough to that time, he thought, as he heard his driver, Julius, call a greeting.

  There was a confusion at Mercy General Hospital, because they seemed to have misplaced his wife. Feigerman waited in his wheelchair, watching the orderlies steer the gurneys from room to room, the nurses punching in data and queries to their monitors as they walked the halls, the paramedics making their rounds with pharmaceuticals and enema tubes, while Marcus raced off to find out what had happened. He came back, puffing. “They moved her,” he reported. “Fifth floor. Room 583.”

  Jocelyn Feigerman had been taken out of the intensive-care section, because the care she needed now was too intensive for that. In fact, in any significant sense of the word, her body was dead. Her brainwaves were still just dandy. But of the body itself, with its myriad factories for processing materials and its machines for keeping itself going, there was left only a shell. External machines pumped her blood and filtered it, and moved what was left of her lungs. None of that was new, and not even particularly serious. Fatal, yes. Sooner or later the systems would fail. But that time could be put off for days, weeks, months—there were people in hospices all around the country who had been maintained for actual years—as long as the bills were paid—as long as they, or their relatives, did not call a halt. Jocelyn Feigerman’s case was worse than theirs. It could be tolerated that she could never leave the bed, could remain awake only for an hour or so at a time, could eat only through IVs and could talk only through a machine; but when she could no longer think there was no more reason to live. And that time was approaching. The minute trace materials like acetylcholine and noradrenaline that governed the functioning of the brain cells themselves were dwindling within her, as tiny groups of cells in places buried deep in the brain, places with names like the locus coeruleus and the nucleus basalis of Meynert, began to die. Memory was weakening. Habits of thought and behavior were deserting her. The missing chemicals could be restored, for a time, from pharmaceuticals; but that postponement was sharply limited by side effects as bad as the disease.

  It was time for her to die.

  So the hospital had moved her to a sunny large room in a corner, gaily painted, filled with flowers, with chairs for visitors and 3-D landscape photographs on the walls, all surrounding the engineering marvel that was the bed she lay in. The room was terribly expensive—an unimportant fact, because it was never occupied except by the most terminal of cases, and rarely for more than a few hours.

  As Feigerman rolled in the room was filled with people—half a dozen of them, not counting Marcus or himself. Or the still figure on the bed, almost hidden in its life-support systems. There was his daughter-in-law Gloria, tiny and fast-talking, engaged in an argument with a solid, bearded dark-skinned man Feigerman recognized as the borough president of Brooklyn. There was his stepson, now an elderly man, smoking a cigarette by the window and gazing contemplatively at the shrouded form of his mother. There was a doctor, stethoscope around his neck, tube looped through his lapel, all the emblems of his office visibly ready, though there was not in fact much for him to do but listen to the argument between Gloria and Borough P
resident Haisal—a nurse—a notary public, with his computer terminal already out and ready on a desk by the wall. It was a noisy room. You could not hear the hiss of Jocelyn Feigerman’s artificial lung or the purr of her dialysis machine under the conversation, and she was not speaking. Asleep, Feigerman thought—or hoped so. Everybody had to die, but to set one’s own time for it seemed horribly coldblooded…He raised his chin and addressed the room at large: “What are we waiting for?”

  His stepson, David, stabbed his cigarette out in a fern pot and answered. “Mother wanted Nillie here for some reason.”

  “She’s got a right,” Gloria flashed, interrupted her argument with Haisal to start one with her husband. Haisal was of Arab stock, from the Palestinian neighborhoods along Atlantic Avenue; Gloria was Vietnamese, brought to the United States when she was a scared and sick three-year-old; it was queer to hear the New York—American voices come out of the exotic faces.

  “Father! Haisal says they’re going to go to referendum.”

  Feigerman felt a sudden surge of anger. He wheeled his chair closer toward the arguing couple. “What the hell, Haisal? You’ve got the votes in Albany!”

  “Now, Rinty,” the Arab protested. “You know how these things work. There’s a lot of pressure—”

  “You’ve got plenty of pressure yourself!”

  “Please, Rinty,” he boomed. “You know what Bed-Stuy means to me, don’t you think I’m doing everything I can?”

  “I do not.”

  Haisal made a hissing sound of annoyance. “What is this, Rinty? Gloria asked me to come here because you need a magistrate for your wife’s testamentation, not to fight about money for the project! This is a deathbed gathering. Where’s your respect?”

  “Where’s your sense of honor?” Gloria demanded. “You promised, Haisal!”

  “I do what I can,” the borough president growled. “It’s going to have to go to referendum, and that’s all there is to it—now let’s get going on this goddamn testamentation, can we?”

  “We have to wait for Vanilla de Harcourt,” Feigerman snapped, “and anyway, Haisal—what is it?”

  From the doorway, the nurse said, “She’s here, Mr. Feigerman. Just came in.”

  “Then we go ahead,” said Haisal irritably. “Quiet down, everybody. Sam, you ready to take all this down? Doctor, can you wake her up?”

  The room became still as the notary public turned on his monitor and the doctor and nurse gave Jocelyn Feigerman the gentle electric nudge that would rouse her. Then the borough president spoke:

  “Mrs. Feigerman, this is Agbal Haisal. Do you hear me?”

  On the CRT over her bed there was a quick pulsing of alpha waves, and a tinny voice said, “Yes.” It wasn’t Jocelyn’s voice, of course, since she had none. It was synthesized speech, generated electronically, controlled not by the nerves that led to the paralyzed vocal cords but by practiced manipulation of the brain’s alpha rhythms, and its vocabulary was very small.

  “I will ask the doctor to explain your medical situation to you, as we discussed,” said Haisal formally, “and if you have any question simply say ‘No.’ Go ahead, doctor.”

  The young resident cleared his throat, frowning over his notes. He wanted to get this exactly right; it was his first case of this kind. “Mrs. Feigerman,” he began, “in addition to the gross physical problems you are aware of, you have been diagnosed as being in the early stages of Alzheimer’s syndrome, sometimes called senile dementia. The laboratory has demonstrated fibrous protein deposits in your brain, which are increasing in size and number. This condition is progressive and at present irreversible, and the prognosis is loss of memory, loss of control of behavior, psychotic episodes and death. I have discussed this with you earlier, and repeat it now so that you may answer this question. Do you understand your condition?”

  Pause. Flicker of lines in the CRT. “Yes.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” rumbled the borough president. “In that case, Mrs. Feigerman—Joss—I have a series of questions to ask you, and they may sound repetitive but they’re what the law says a magistrate has to ask. First, do you know why we are here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you aware that you are suffering from physical conditions which will bring about irreversible brain damage and death within an estimated time of less than thirty days?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, Mrs. Feigerman,” he said solemnly, “your options are as follows. One. You may continue as you are, in which case you will continue on the life-support systems until brainscan and induction tests indicate you are brain-dead, with no further medical procedures available. Two. You may elect to terminate life-support systems at this time, or at any later time you choose, as a voluntary matter, without further medical procedures. Three. You may elect to terminate life support and enter voluntary cryonic suspension. In this case you should be informed that the prognosis is uncertain but that the necessary financial and physical arrangements have been made for your storage and to attempt to cure and revive you when and if such procedures become available.

  “I will now ask you if you accept one of these alternatives.”

  The pause was quite long this time, and Feigerman was suddenly aware that he was very tired. Perhaps it was more than fatigue; it might have been even bereavement, for although he had no desire to shriek or rend his clothes he felt the dismal certainty that a part of his life was being taken away from him. It had not always been a happy part. It was many years since it had been a sensually obsessive part…but it had been his. He tried to make out the vague images before him to see if his wife’s eyes were open, at least, but the detail was very inadequate…“Yes,” said the tinny voice at last, without emotion, or emphasis. Or life. It was, almost literally, a voice from the grave; and it was hard to remember how very alive that wasted body had once been.

  “In that case, Mrs. Feigerman, is it Alternative Number One, continuing as you are?”

  “No.”

  “Is it Alternative Number Two, terminating life-support without further procedures?”

  “No.”

  “Is it Alternative Number Three, terminating life-support and entering cryonic suspension?”

  “Yes.” A long sigh from everyone in the room; none of them could help himself.

  The borough president went on: “Thank you, Mrs. Feigerman. I must now ask you to make a choice. You may elect to enter neurocryonic suspension, which is to say the freezing of your head and brain only. Or you may elect whole-body suspension. Your doctor has explained to you that the damage suffered by your body has been so extensive that any revival and repair is quite unlikely in the next years or even decades. On the other hand, suspension of the head and brain only entails the necessity for providing an entire body for you at some future day, through cloning, through grafting of a whole new donor body to your head and brain or through some other procedure at present unknown. No such procedures exist at present. This decision is entirely yours to make, Mrs. Feigerman; your next of kin have been consulted and agree to implement whatever choice you make. Have you understood all this, Mrs. Feigerman?”

  “Yes.”

  Haisal sighed heavily. “Very well, Joss, I will now ask you which alternative you prefer. Do you accept Alternative Number one, the cryonic suspension of head and brain only?”

  “No.”

  “Do you accept whole-body suspension, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “So be it,” rumbled the borough president heavily, and signed to the notary public. The man slipped the hard-copy transparency out of his monitor, pressed his thumb in one corner and passed it around to the witnesses to do the same. “Now,” said the borough president, “I think we’ll leave the family to say their good-byes.” He gathered up the notary, the nurse and Marcus’s mother with his eyes; and to the doctor he signaled, his lips forming the words: “Then pull the plug.”

  3

  On the first morning of de Rintelen Feigerman’s new life as a widower, h
e awoke with a shock, and then a terrible sense of loss. The loss was not the loss of his wife; even in his dreams he had accepted that Jocelyn was dead, or if not exactly dead certainly both legally and practically no longer alive in the sense that he was. The shock was that he had not dreamed that he was blind. In Rinty’s dreams he could always see. That was a given: everyone could see. Human beings saw, just as they breathed and ate and shit. So in his dreams he experienced, without particularly remarking on it, the glowing red and green headlamps of an IRT subway train coming into the Clark Street station, and the silent fall of great white snowflakes over the East River, and the yellow heat of summer sun on a beach, and women’s blue eyes, and stars, and clouds. It was only when he woke up that it was always darkness.

  Rosalyn, his big old weimarian, growled softly from beside the bed as Feigerman sat up. There was no significance to the growl, except that it was her way of letting Feigerman know where she was. He reached down and touched her shaggy head, finding it just where it ought to be, right under his descending hand. He didn’t really need the morning growl anymore. He could pretty nearly locate her by the smell, because Rosalyn was becoming quite an old dog. “Lie,” he said, and heard her whuffle obediently as she lay down again beside his bed. He was aware of a need to go to the bathroom, but there was a need before that. He picked up the handset from the bedside table, listened to the beeps that told him the time, pressed the code that connected him to his office. “Rinty here,” he said. “Situation report, please.”