Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  THE DAY THE

  ICICLE WORKS CLOSED

  As previously noted, Frederik Pohl knows a bit about politics. He also knows something about economics and about the criminal justice system. All three of these elements figure in 1959’s “The Day the Icicle Works Closed.”

  As will become evident before long, he also has been known to root for the underdog. In this story of crime, punishment, and complications that ensue as a result, Milo Pulcher, a public defender on Altair Nine, is a huge underdog in a corrupt system.

  Pulcher used to work for Altamycin, Inc., also known as the Icicle Works, but when they shut down the works, he and everyone else who’d worked there had to find new work.

  Strange, crooked things are happening on Altair Nine, but unless Milo can overcome big odds to beat the system, nobody will ever know why or how the strange doings are being accomplished. If he doesn’t succeed, he’ll be just one more victim of a world gone wrong.

  Never bet against the underdog.

  1

  The wind was cold, pink snow was falling and Milo Pulcher had holes in his shoes. He trudged through the pink-gray slush across the square from the courthouse to the jail. The turnkey was drinking coffee out of a vinyl container. “Expecting you,” he grunted. “Which one you want to see first?”

  Pulcher sat down, grateful for the warmth. “It doesn’t matter. Say, what kind of kids are they?”

  The turnkey shrugged.

  “I mean, do they give you any trouble?”

  “How could they give me trouble? If they don’t clean their cells they don’t eat. What else they do makes no difference to me.”

  Pulcher took the letter from Judge Pegrim out of his pocket, and examined the list of his new clients. Avery Foltis, Walter Hopgood, Jimmy Lasser, Sam Schlesterman, Bourke Smith, Madeleine Gaultry. None of the names meant anything to him. “I’ll take Foltis,” he guessed, and followed the turnkey to a cell.

  The Foltis boy was homely, pimply and belligerent. “Cripes,” he growled shrilly, “are you the best they can do for me?”

  Pulcher took his time answering. The boy was not very lovable; but, he reminded himself, there was a fifty-dollar retainer from the county for each one of these defendants, and conditions being what they were Pulcher could easily grow to love three hundred dollars. “Don’t give me a hard time,” he said amiably. “I may not be the best lawyer in the Galaxy, but I’m the one you’ve got.”

  “Cripes.”

  “All right, all right. Tell me what happened, will you? All I know is that you’re accused of conspiracy to commit a felony, specifically an act of kidnaping a minor child.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” the boy agreed. “You want to know what happened?” He bounced to his feet, then began acting out his story. “We were starving to death, see?” Arms clutched pathetically around his belly. “The Icicle Works closed down. Cripes, I walked the streets nearly a year, looking for something to do. Anything.” Marching in place. “I even rented out for a while, but—that didn’t work out.” He scowled and fingered his pimply face. Pulcher nodded. Even a body-renter had to have some qualifications. The most important one was a good-looking, disease-free, strong and agile physique. “So we got together and decided, the hell, there was money to be made hooking old Swinburne’s son. So—I guess we talked too much. They caught us.” He gripped his wrists, like manacles.

  Pulcher asked a few more questions, and then interviewed two of the other boys. He learned nothing he hadn’t already known. The six youngsters had planned a reasonably competent kidnaping, and talked about it where they could be heard, and if there was any hope of getting them off it did not make itself visible to their court-appointed attorney.

  Pulcher left the jail abruptly and went up the street to see Charley Dickon.

  The committeeman was watching a three-way wrestling match on a flickery old TV set. “How’d it go, Milo,” he greeted the lawyer, keeping his eyes on the wrestling.

  Pulcher said, “I’m not going to get them off, Charley.”

  “Oh? Too bad.” Dickon looked away from the set for the first time. “Why not?”

  “They admitted the whole thing. Handwriting made the Hopgood boy on the ransom note. They all had fingerprints and cell-types all over the place. And besides, they talked too much.”

  Dickon said with a spark of interest, “What about Tim Lasser’s son?”

  “Sorry.” The committeeman looked thoughtful. “I can’t help it, Charley,” the lawyer protested. The kids hadn’t been even routinely careful. When they planned to kidnap the son of the mayor they had talked it over, quite loudly, in a juke joint. The waitress habitually taped everything that went on in her booths. Pulcher suspected a thriving blackmail business, but that didn’t change the fact that there was enough on tape to show premeditation. They had picked the mayor’s son up at school. He had come with them perfectly willingly—the girl, Madeleine Gaultry, had been a babysitter for him. The boy was only three years old, but he couldn’t miss an easy identification like that. And there was more: the ransom note had been sent special delivery, and young Foltis had asked the post-office clerk to put the postage on instead of using the automatic meter. The clerk remembered the pimply face very well indeed.

  The committeeman sat politely while Pulcher explained, though it was obvious that most of his attention was on the snowy TV screen. “Well, Milo, that’s the way it goes. Anyway, you got a fast three hundred, hey? And that reminds me.”

  Pulcher’s guard went up.

  “Here,” said the committeeman, rummaging through his desk. He brought out a couple of pale green tickets. “You ought to get out and meet some more people. The Party’s having its annual Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner next week. Bring your girl.”

  “I don’t have a girl.”

  “Oh, you’ll find one. Fifteen dollars per,” explained the committeeman, handing over the tickets. Pulcher sighed and paid. Well, that was what kept the wheels oiled. And Dickon had suggested his name to Judge Pegrim. Thirty dollars out of three hundred still left him a better week’s pay than he had had since the Icicle Works folded.

  The committeeman carefully folded the bills into his pocket, Pulcher watching gloomily. Dickon was looking prosperous, all right. There was easily a couple of thousand in that wad. Pulcher supposed that Dickon had been caught along with everybody else on the planet when the Icicle Works folded. Nearly everybody owned stock in it, and certainly Charley Dickon, whose politician brain got him a piece of nearly every major enterprise on Altair Nine—a big clump of stock in the Tourist Agency, a sizable share of the Mining Syndicate—certainly he would have had at least a few thousand in the Icicle Works. But it hadn’t hurt him much. He said, “None of my business, but why don’t you take that girl?”

  “Madeleine Gaultry? She’s in jail.”

  “Get her out. Here.” He tossed over a bondsman’s card. Pulcher pocketed it with a scowl. That would cost another forty bucks anyway, he estimated; the bondsman would naturally be one of Dickon’s club members.

  Pulcher noticed that Dickon was looking strangely puzzled. “What’s the matter?”

  “Like I say, it’s none of my business. But I don’t get it. You and the girl have a fight?”

  “Fight? I don’t even know her.”

  “She said you did.”

  “Me? No. I don’t know any Madeleine Gaultry—Wait a minute! Is that her married name? Did she used to be at the Icicle Works?”

  Dickon nodded. “Didn’t you see her?”

  “I didn’t get to the women’s wing. I—” Pulcher stood up, oddly flustered. “Say, I’d better run along, Charley. This bondsman, he’s open now? Well—” He stopped babbling and left.

  Madeleine Gaultry! Only her name had been Madeleine Cossett. It was funny that she should turn up now—in jail and, Pulcher abruptly realized, likely to stay there indefinitely. But he put that thought out of his mind; first he wanted to see her.

  The snow was turning lavender now.

&nbs
p; Pink snow, green snow, lavender snow—any color of the pastel rainbow. It was nothing unusual. That was what had made Altair Nine worth colonizing in the first place.

  Now, of course, it was only a way of getting your feet wet.

  Pulcher waited impatiently at the turnkey’s office while he shambled over to the women’s wing and, slowly, returned with the girl. They looked at each other. She didn’t speak. Pulcher opened his mouth, closed it, and silently took her by the elbow. He steered her out of the jail and hailed a cab. That was an extravagance, but he didn’t care.

  Madeleine shrank into a corner of the cab, looking at him out of blue eyes that were large and shadowed. She wasn’t hostile, she wasn’t afraid. She was only remote.

  “Hungry?” She nodded. Pulcher gave the cab driver the name of a restaurant. Another extravagance, but he didn’t mind the prospect of cutting down on lunches for a few weeks. He had had enough practice at it.

  A year before this girl had been the prettiest secretary in the pool at the Icicle Works. He dated her half a dozen times. There was a company rule against it, but the first time it was a kind of schoolboy’s prank, breaking the headmaster’s regulations, and the other times it was a driving need. Then—

  Then came the Gumpert Process.

  That was the killer, the Gumpert Process. Whoever Gumpert was. All anybody at the Icicle Works knew was that someone named Gumpert (back on Earth, one rumor said; another said he was a colonist in the Sirian system) had come up with a cheap, practical method of synthesizing the rainbow antibiotic molds that floated free in Altair Nine’s air, coloring its precipitation and, more important, providing a priceless export commodity. A whole Galaxy had depended on those rainbow molds, shipped in frozen suspensions to every inhabited planet by Altamycin, Inc.—the proper name for what everyone on Altair Nine called the Icicle Works.

  When the Gumpert Process came along, suddenly the demand vanished.

  Worse, the jobs vanished. Pulcher had been on the corporation’s legal staff, with an office of his own and a faint hint of a vice-presidency, someday. He was out. The stenos in the pool, all but two or three of the five hundred who once had got out the correspondence and the bills, they were out. The shipping clerks in the warehouse were out, the pumphands at the settling tanks were out, the freezer attendants were out. Everyone was out. The plant closed down. There were more than fifty tons of frozen antibiotics in storage and, though there might still be a faint trickle of orders from old-fashioned diehards around the Galaxy (backwoods country doctors who didn’t believe in the newfangled synthetics, experimenters who wanted to run comparative tests), the shipments already en route would much more than satisfy them. Fifty tons? Once the Icicle Works had shipped three hundred tons a day—physical transport, electronic rockets that took years to cover the distance between stars. The boom was over. And of course, on a one-industry planet, everything else was over too.

  Pulcher took the girl by the arm and swept her into the restaurant. “Eat,” he ordered. “I know what jail food is like.” He sat down, firmly determined to say nothing until she had finished.

  But he couldn’t.

  Long before she was ready for coffee he burst out, “Why, Madeleine? Why would you get into something like this?”

  She looked at him but did not answer.

  “What about your husband?” He didn’t want to ask it, but he had to. That had been the biggest blow of all the unpleasant blows that had struck him after the Icicle Works closed. Just as he was getting a law practice going—not on any big scale but, through Charley Dickon and the Party, a small, steady handout of political favors that would make it possible for him to pretend he was still an attorney—the gossip reached him that Madeleine Cossett had married.

  The girl pushed her plate away. “He emigrated.”

  Pulcher digested that slowly. Emigrated? That was the dream of every Niner since the Works closed down, of course. But it was only a dream. Physical transport between the stars was ungodly expensive. More, it was ungodly slow. Ten years would get you to Dell, the thin-aired planet of a chilly little red dwarf. The nearest good planet was thirty years away.

  What it all added up to was that emigrating was almost like dying. If one member of a married couple emigrated, it meant the end of the marriage…“We got a divorce,” said Madeleine, nodding. “There wasn’t enough money for both of us to go, and Jon was unhappier here than I was.”

  She took out a cigarette and let him light it. “You don’t want to ask me about Jon, do you? But you want to know. All right. Jon was an artist. He was in the advertising department at the Works, but that was just temporary. He was going to do something big. Then the bottom dropped out for him, just as it did for all of us. Well, Milo, I didn’t hear from you.”

  Pulcher protested, “It wouldn’t have been fair for me to see you when I didn’t have a job or anything.”

  “Of course you’d think that. It’s wrong. But I couldn’t find you to tell you it was wrong, and then Jon was very persistent. He was tall, curly-haired, he has a baby’s face—do you know, he only shaved twice a week. Well, I married him. It lasted three months. Then he just had to get away.” She leaned forward earnestly. “Don’t think he was just a bum, Milo! He really was quite a good artist. But we didn’t have enough money for paints, even, and then it seems that the colors are all wrong here. Jon explained it. In order to paint landscapes that sell you have to be on a planet with Earth-type colors; they’re all the vogue. And there’s too much altamycin in the clouds here.”

  Pulcher said stiffly, “I see.” But he didn’t, really. There was at least one unexplained part. If there hadn’t been enough money for paint, then where had the money come from for a starship ticket, physical transport? It meant at least ten thousand dollars. There just was no way to raise ten thousand dollars on Altair Nine, not without taking a rather extreme step…

  The girl wasn’t looking at him.

  Her eyes were fixed on a table across the restaurant, a table with a loud, drunken party. It was only lunch time, but they had a three-o’clock-in-the-morning air about them. They were stinking. There were four of them, two men and two women; and their physical bodies were those of young, healthy, quite good-looking, perfectly normal Niners. The appearance of the physical bodies was entirely irrelevant, though, because they were tourists. Around the neck of each of them was a bright golden choker with a glowing red signal jewel in the middle. It was the mark of the tourist Agency; the sign that the bodies were rented.

  Milo Pulcher looked away quickly. His eyes stopped on the white face of the girl, and abruptly he knew how she had raised the money to send Jon to another star.

  2

  Pulcher found the girl a room and left her there. It was not what he wanted. What he wanted was to spend the evening with her and to go on spending time with her, until time came to an end: but there was the matter of her trial.

  Twenty-four hours ago he had got the letter notifying him that the court had appointed him attorney for six suspected kidnapers and looked on it as a fast fee, no work to speak of, no hope for success. He would lose the case, certainly. Well, what of it?

  But now he wanted to win!

  It meant some fast, hard work if he was to have even a chance—and at best, he admitted to himself, the chance would not be good. Still, he wasn’t going to give up without a try.

  The snow stopped as he located the home of Jimmy Lasser’s parents. It was a sporting-goods shop, not far from the main Tourist Agency; it had a window full of guns and boots and scuba gear. He walked in, tinkling a bell as he opened the door.

  “Mr. Lasser?” A plump little man, leaning back in a chair by the door, got slowly up, looking him over.

  “In back,” he said shortly.

  He led Pulcher behind the store, to a three-room apartment. The living room was comfortable enough, but for some reason it seemed unbalanced. One side was somehow heavier than the other. He noticed the nap of the rug, still flattened out where something heavy ha
d been, something rectangular and large, about the size of a Tri-V electronic entertainment unit. “Repossessed,” said Lasser shortly. “Sit down. Dickon called you a minute ago.”

  “Oh?” It had to be something important. Dickon wouldn’t have tracked him down for any trivial matter.

  “Don’t know what he wanted, but he said you weren’t to leave till he called back. Sit down. May’ll bring you a cup of tea.”

  Pulcher chatted with them for a minute, while the woman fussed over a teapot and a plate of soft cookies. He was trying to get the feel of the home. He could understand Madeleine Gaultry’s desperation, he could understand the Foltis boy, a misfit in society anywhere. What about Jimmy Lasser?

  The elder Lassers were both pushing sixty. They were first-generation Niners, off an Earth colonizing ship. They hadn’t been born on Earth, of course—the trip took nearly a hundred years, physical transport. They had been born in transit, had married on the ship. As the ship had reached maximum population level shortly after they were born, they were allowed to have no children until they landed. At that time they were all of forty. May Lasser said suddenly, “Please help our boy, Mr. Pulcher! It isn’t Jimmy’s fault. He got in with a bad crowd. You know how it is: no work, nothing for a boy to do.”

  “I’ll do my best.” But it was funny, Pulcher thought, how it was always “the crowd” that was bad. It was never Jimmy—and never Avery, never Sam, never Walter. Pulcher sorted out the five boys and remembered Jimmy: nineteen years old, quite colorless, polite, not very interested. What had struck the lawyer about him was only surprise that this rabbity boy should have had the enterprise to get into a criminal conspiracy in the first place.

  “He’s a good boy,” said May Lasser pathetically. “That trouble with the parked cars two years ago wasn’t his fault. He got a fine job right after that, you know. Ask his probation officer. Then the Icicle Works closed…” She poured more tea, slopping it over the side of the cup. “Oh, sorry! But—But when he went to the unemployment office, Mr. Pulcher, do you know what they said to him?”