Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Hit batter! Hit batter!” cried the intercom. “Take your base, Boleslaw.”

  Boley blinked. Six of the umpires were beckoning him on, so the intercom was right. But still and all—Boley had his pride. He said to the little button on his collar, “I am sorry, but I wasn’t hit. He missed me a mile, easy. I got scared is all.”

  “Take your base, you silly fool!” roared the intercom. “He scared you, didn’t he? That’s just as bad as hitting you, according to the rules. Why, there is no telling what incalculable damage has been done to your nervous system by this fright. So kindly get the bejeepers over to first base, Boleslaw, as provided in the rules of the game!”

  He got, but he didn’t stay there long, because there was a pinch runner waiting for him. He barely noticed that it was another of the gray-skinned giants before he headed for the locker room and the showers. He didn’t even remember getting out of his uniform; he only remembered that he, Boley, had just been through the worst experience of his life.

  He was sitting on a bench, with his head on his hands, when the owner’s uncle came in, looking queerly out of place in his neat pin-striped suit. The owner’s uncle had to speak to him twice before his eyes focused.

  “They didn’t let me pitch,” Boley said wonderingly. “They didn’t want Boley to pitch.”

  The owner’s uncle patted his shoulder. “You were a guest star, Boley. One of the all-time greats of the game. Next game they’re going to have Christy Mathewson. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?”

  “They didn’t let me pitch,” said Boley.

  The owner’s uncle sat down beside him. “Don’t you see? You’d be out of place in this kind of a game. You got on base for them, didn’t you? I heard the announcer say it myself; he said you filled the bases in the all-important fourth inning. Two hundred million people were watching this game on television! And they saw you get on base!”

  “They didn’t let me hit either,” Boley said.

  There was a commotion at the door and the team came trotting in screaming victory. “We win it, we win it!” cried Manager Magill. “Eighty-seven to eighty-three! What a squeaker!”

  Boley lifted his head to croak, “That’s fine.” But nobody was listening. The manager jumped on a table and yelled, over the noise in the locker room:

  “Boys, we pulled a close one out, and you know what that means. We’re leading in the Series, eleven games to nine! Now let’s just wrap those other two up, and—”

  He was interrupted by a bloodcurdling scream from Boley. Boley was standing up, pointing with an expression of horror. The athletes had scattered and the trainers were working them over; only some of the trainers were using pliers and screwdrivers instead of towels and liniment. Next to Boley, the big gray-skinned pinch runner was flat on his back, and the trainer was lifting one leg away from the body—

  “Murder!” bellowed Boley. “That fellow is murdering that fellow!”

  The manager jumped down next to him. “Murder? There isn’t any murder, Boleslaw! What are you talking about?”

  Boley pointed mutely. The trainer stood gaping at him, with the leg hanging limp in his grip. It was completely removed from the torso it belonged to, but the torso seemed to be making no objections; the curious eyes were open but no longer sparkling; the gray skin, at closer hand, seemed metallic and cold.

  The manager said fretfully, “I swear, Boleslaw, you’re a nuisance. They’re just getting cleaned and oiled, batteries recharged, that sort of thing. So they’ll be in shape tomorrow, you understand.”

  “Cleaned,” whispered Boley. “Oiled.” He stared around the room. All of the gray-skinned ones were being somehow disassembled; bits of metal and glass were sticking out of them. “Are you trying to tell me,” he croaked, “that those fellows aren’t fellows?”

  “They’re ballplayers,” said Manager Magill impatiently. “Robots. Haven’t you ever seen a robot before? We’re allowed to field six robots on a nine-man team, it’s perfectly legal. Why, next year I’m hoping the Commissioner’ll let us play a whole robot team. Then you’ll see some baseball!”

  With bulging eyes Boley saw it was true. Except for a handful of flesh-and-blood players like himself the team was made up of man-shaped machines, steel for bones, electricity for blood, steel and plastic and copper cogs for muscle. “Machines,” said Boley, and turned up his eyes.

  The owner’s uncle tapped him on the shoulder worriedly. “It’s time to go back,” he said.

  So Boley went back.

  He didn’t remember much about it, except that the owner’s uncle had made him promise never, never to tell anyone about it, because it was orders from the Defense Department, you never could tell how useful a time machine might be in a war. But he did get back, and he woke up the next morning with all the signs of a hangover and the sheets kicked to shreds around his feet.

  He was still bleary when he staggered down to the coffee shop for breakfast. Magill the pitching coach, who had no idea that he was going to be granddaddy to Magill the series-winning manager, came solicitously over to him. “Bad night, Boley? You look like you have had a bad night.”

  “Bad?” repeated Boley. “Bad? Magill, you have got no idea. The owner’s uncle said he would show me something that would learn me a little humility and, Magill, he came through. Yes, he did. Why, I saw a big bronze tablet with the names of the Series winners on it, and I saw—”

  And he closed his mouth right there, because he remembered right there what the owner’s uncle had said about closing his mouth. He shook his head and shuddered. “Bad,” he said, “you bet it was bad.”

  Magill coughed. “Gosh, that’s too bad, Boley. I guess—I mean, then maybe you wouldn’t feel like pitching another couple of innings—well, anyway one inning—today, because—”

  Boley held up his hand. “Say no more, please. You want me to pitch today, Magill?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” the coach confessed.

  “I will pitch today,” said Boley. “If that is what you want me to do, I will do it. I am now a reformed character. I will pitch tomorrow, too, if you want me to pitch tomorrow, and any other day you want me to pitch. And if you do not want me to pitch, I will sit on the sidelines. Whatever you want is perfectly all right with me, Magill, because, Magill, I—hey! Hey, Magill, what are you doing down there on the floor?”

  So that is why Boley doesn’t give anybody any trouble anymore, and if you tell him now that he reminds you of Dizzy Dean, why he’ll probably shake your hand and thank you for the compliment—even if you’re a sportswriter, even. Oh, there still are a few special little things about him, of course—not even counting the things like how many shut-outs he pitched last year (eleven) or how many home runs he hit (fourteen). But everybody finds him easy to get along with. They used to talk about the change that had come over him a lot and wonder what caused it. Some people said he got religion and others said he had an incurable disease and was trying to do good in his last few weeks on Earth; but Boley never said, he only smiled; and the owner’s uncle was too busy in Washington to be with the team much after that. So now they talk about other things when Boley’s name comes up. For instance, there’s his little business about the pitching machine—when he shows up for batting practice (which is every morning, these days), he insists on hitting against real live pitchers instead of the machine. It’s even in his contract. And then, every March he bets nickels against anybody around the training camp that’ll bet with him that he can pick that year’s Series winner. He doesn’t bet more than that, because the commissioner naturally doesn’t like big bets from ballplayers.

  But, even for nickels, don’t bet against him, because he isn’t ever going to lose, not before 1999.

  SOME JOYS UNDER THE STAR

  Writing workshop teachers are fond of saying that a short story is about a single idea, whereas a novel is far more complex. All that is true, though there are other differences, of course, besides length. One of the things a novel can do i
s deal with some particular event from multiple points of view.

  That’s what “Some Joys Under the Star” does. First published in 1973, it’s not a novel; it’s not even a very long story. But it deals with an event—in this case, the appearance of a comet in the skies above the Earth.

  Any event of such magnitude is bound to involve the lives of many different people. In this case, it involves a number of people…and other beings as well. The stories of all these people are told insofar as they relate to the comet. If Pohl had chosen to tell the whole stories of all his characters, this would have been a rather large novel.

  Instead, it’s a small symphony of stories orchestrated by a master hand.

  In a few recognizable ways were Albert Nowak, the man who stalked Myron Landau, and the Secretary of State alike, but they had this in common: they wanted. They each wanted something very badly and, as it happens, the thing that each wanted was not good by the general consensual standards of your average sensual man.

  Let us start with the man who stalked Myron Landau or, more accurately, with Myron Landau himself. Myron also wanted, and what he wanted was his girlfriend, Ellen, with that masked desperation that characterizes the young man of seventeen who has never yet made out.

  On this night of July in New York City the factors against Myron were inexperience, self-doubt, and the obstinacy of Ellen herself, but ranged on his side were powerful allies. Before him was the great welcoming blackness of Central Park, where anything might happen, and spread across the sky was a fine pretext for luring her into the place. So he bought her a strawberry milkshake in Rumpelmeyer’s and strolled with her into the park, chatting of astronomy, beauty, and love.

  “Are you sure it’s all right?” asked Ellen, looking into the sodium-lit fringes of the undergrowth.

  “Cripes, yes,” said Myron, in the richly amused tone of a Brown belt in karate from one of the finest academies on the upper West Side, although in fact he had never gone into Central Park at night before. But he had thought everything out carefully and was convinced that tonight there was no danger. Or at any rate not enough danger to scare him off the prize. Overhead was the great beautiful comet that everybody was talking about and it was a clear night. There would be lots of people looking at the sky, he reasoned, and in any case where else could he take her? Not his apartment, with Grandma’s ear to the living room door, just itching for an excuse to come in and start hunting for her glasses. Not Ellen’s place, not with her mother and sister remorselessly there. “You can’t see the comet well from the middle of the street,” he said reasonably, putting his arm around her and nodding to a handsome white-haired gentleman who had first nodded benevolently to them. “There’s too much light and anyway, honestly, Ellen, we won’t go in very far.”

  “I never saw a comet before,” she conceded, allowing herself to be led down the path. In truth, the comet Ujifusa-McGinnis was not all that hard to see. It spread its tail over a quarter of the sky, drowning out Altair, Vega, and the stars around Deneb, hardly paled even by the lights of New York City. Even a thousand miles south, where NASA technicians were working around-the-clock shifts under the floodlights of the Vehicle Assembly Building, trying to get ready the launch of the probe that would plumb Ujifusa-McGinnis’s mysteries, it dominated the sky.

  Myron looked upward and allowed himself to be distracted for a moment by the spectacle, but quickly caught himself. “Ah,” he said, creeping his fingers toward the lower slope of Ellen’s breast, “just think, what you see is all gas. Nothing really there at all. And millions of miles away.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Ellen said, looking over her shoulder. She had thought she had heard a noise.

  She had. The noise was in fact real. The foot of the handsome white-haired gentleman had broken a stick. He had turned off the flagstone path into the shelter of the dwarf evergreens and was now busy pulling a woman’s nylon stocking over his white hair and face. He, too, had planned his evening carefully. In his right-hand coat pocket he had the woolen sock with half a pound of BBs knotted into the toe—that was for Myron. In his left-hand pocket he had the clasp knife with the carefully honed edge. That was for Ellen, first to make sure she didn’t scream, then to make sure she never would. He had not known their names when he loaded his pockets and left his ranch house in Waterbury, Connecticut, to go in for an evening’s sport to the city, but he had known there would be somebody.

  He, too, looked up at the comet, but with irritation. In his Connecticut backyard, as he had shown it to his daughter, it had looked pretty. Here it was an unqualified nuisance. It made the night brighter than he wanted it although, he thought in all fairness, it was not as bad as a full moon.

  It would not be more than five minutes, he calculated, before the boy would lead the girl in among the evergreens. But which way? If only they would choose his side of the path! Otherwise it meant he had to cross the walk. That was a small danger and a large annoyance, because it meant scuttling in an undignified way. Still, the fun was worth the trouble. It always had been worth it.

  With the weighted sock now ready in his hand, the handsome white-haired gentleman followed them silently. He could feel the gleeful premonitory stirrings of sexual excitement in his private parts. He was as happy as, in his life, he ever was.

  At a time approximately two thousand years earlier, when Jesus was a boy in Nazareth and Caesar Augustus was counting up his statues and his gold, a race of creatures resembling soft-shelled crabs on a planet of a star some two hundred light-years away became belatedly aware of the existence of the Great Wall of China.

  Although it alone among the then existing works of Man was quite detectable in their telescopes, it was not surprising they had not noticed it before. It had been completed less than 250 years before, and most of that time had been lost in the creeping traverse of light from Earth to their planet. Also they had many, many planets to observe and not a great deal of time to waste on any one. But they expected more of their minions than that, and ten thousand members of a subject race died in great pain as a warning to the others to be more diligent.

  The Arrogating Ones, as they called themselves and were called by their subjects, at once took up in their collective councils the question of whether or not to conquer Earth and add humanity to their vassals, now that they had discovered that humanity did exist. This was their eon-long custom. It had made them extremely unpopular over a large volume of the galaxy.

  On balance, they decided not to bother at that particular time. What were a few heaped-up rocks, after all? Oh, some sort of civilization no doubt existed, but the planet Earth seemed too distant, too trivial, and too poor to be worth bothering to conquer.

  Accordingly they contented themselves with routine precautionary measures. Item, they caused to be abducted in their disc-shaped vessels certain specimens of Earthly human beings and other fauna. These also died in great pain and in the process released much information about their body chemistry, physical structure, and modes of thought. Item, the Arrogating Ones dispatched certain of their servants with a waiting brief. They were instructed to occupy the core of a comet and from it to keep an eye on those endoskeletal, but potentially annoying, creatures who had discovered agriculture, fire, the city, and the wheel, but not as yet even chemical explosive weapons.

  They then dismissed Earth from their collective soft-bodied minds, and returned to the more interesting contemplation of measures to be taken against a race of insect-like beings that lived in a steamy high-G planet in quite the other direction from Earth, toward the core of the galaxy. The insects had elected not to be conquered by the Arrogating Ones. In fact, they had destroyed quite a large number of war fleets sent against them.

  Nearly a quarter of the collective intelligence of the Arrogating Ones was devoted to plans to defeat these insects in battle. Most of the rest of their intelligence was devoted to the pleasant contemplation of what they would do to the insects after the battle was won to make them wish they hadn’t resist
ed so hard.

  While the handsome white-haired gentleman was stalking Myron and Ellen, the second person who wanted, the secretary of state of the United States of America, was about a hundred miles north of and forty thousand feet above Central Park. He was on board a four-engined jet aircraft with the American flag emblazoned on its prow and he was having a temper tantrum.

  The president of the United States was gloomily running his fingers between the toes of his bare feet. “Shoot, Danny,” he said, “you’re getting yourself all hot about nothing. I’m not saying we can’t bomb Venezuela. I’m only saying why do we want to bomb Venezuela? And I’m saying you ought to watch how you talk to me, too.”

  “Watch how you talk to me, Mr. President!” shouted the secretary of state over the noise of the jets. “I’m pretty fed up with your procrastinations and delays and it wouldn’t take much for me to walk right out and dump the whole thing back in your lap. Considering your track record—I am thinking of Iceland—I don’t imagine you’d relish that prospect.”

  “Danny boy,” snarled the President, “you’ve got a bad habit of digging up ancient history. Stick to the point. We’ve got to have oil, agreed. They have oil, everybody knows that. They don’t want to sell it to us at a reasonable price, so you want me to beat on them until they change their minds. Right? Only what you don’t see is, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do these things. Why can’t we just go in with some spooks and Tommy-guns, as usual?”

  “But their insolence, Mr. President! The demeaning tone of this document they sent me. It isn’t the oil, it is the national credibility of the country that is involved here.”

  “Right, Danny, right,” groaned the president. “You can talk. You don’t have Congress breathing down your neck at every little thing.” He sighed heavily and opened another can of no-calorie soda. “What I don’t see,” he said, with a punctuation mark of gas, “is why we have to hit them tonight, with Congress still in session.”