Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “I know.”

  “They asked him would he take a job if offered,” she hurried on, unheeding. “A job. As if I didn’t know what they meant by a ‘job!’ They meant renting.” She plumped the teapot down on the table and began to weep. “Mr. Pulcher, I wouldn’t let him rent if I died for it! There isn’t anything in the Bible that says you can let someone else use your body and not be responsible for what it does! You know what tourists do! ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.’ It doesn’t say, unless somebody else is using it. Mr. Pulcher, renting is a sin!”

  “May.” Mr. Lasser put his teacup down and looked directly at Pulcher. “What about it, Pulcher? Can you get Jimmy off?”

  The attorney reflected. He hadn’t known about Jimmy Lasser’s probation before, and that was a bad sign. If the county prosecutor was holding out on information of that sort, it meant he wasn’t willing to cooperate. Probably he would be trying for a conviction with maximum sentence. Of course, he didn’t have to tell a defense attorney anything about the previous criminal records of his clients. But in a juvenile case, where all parties were usually willing to go easy on the defendants, it was customary…“I don’t know, Mr. Lasser. I’ll do the best I can.”

  “Damn right you will!” barked Lasser. “Dickon tell you who I am? I was committeeman here before him, you know. So get busy. Pull strings. Dickon will back you, or I’ll know why!”

  Pulcher managed to control himself. “I’ll do the best I can. I already told you that. If you want strings pulled, you’d better talk to Dickon yourself. I only know law. I don’t know anything about politics.”

  The atmosphere was becoming unpleasant. Pulcher was glad to hear the ringing of the phone in the store outside. May Lasser answered it and said: “For you, Mr. Pulcher. Charley Dickon.”

  Pulcher gratefully picked up the phone. Dickon’s rich, political voice said sorrowfully, “Milo? Listen, I been talking to Judge Pegrim’s secretary. He isn’t gonna let the kids off with a slap on the wrist. There’s a lot of heat from the mayor’s office.”

  Pulcher protested desperately: “But the Swinburne kid wasn’t hurt! He got better care with Madeleine than he was getting at home.”

  “I know, Milo,” the committeeman agreed, “but that’s the way she lies. So what I wanted to say to you, Milo, is don’t knock yourself out on this one because you aren’t going to win it.”

  “But—” Pulcher suddenly became aware of the Lassers just behind him. “But I think I can get an acquittal,” he said, entirely out of hope, knowing that it wasn’t true.

  Dickon chuckled. “You got Lasser breathing down your neck? Sure, Milo. But you want my advice you’ll take a quick hearing, let them get sentenced and then try for executive clemency in a couple months. I’ll help you get it. And that’s another five hundred or so for you, see?” The committeeman was being persuasive; it was a habit of his. “Don’t worry about Lasser. I guess he’s been telling you what a power he is in politics here. Forget it. And, say, tell him I notice he hasn’t got his tickets for the Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner yet. You pick up the dough from him, will you? I’ll mail him the tickets. No—hold on, don’t ask him. Just tell him what I said.” The connection went dead.

  Pulcher stood holding a dead phone, conscious of Lasser standing right behind him. “So long, Charley,” he said, paused, nodded into space and said, “So long,” again.

  Then the attorney turned about to deliver the committeeman’s message about that most important subject, the tickets to the Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner. Lasser grumbled, “Damn Dickon, he’s into you for one thing after another. Where’s he think I’m going to get thirty bucks?”

  “Tim. Please.” His wife touched his arm.

  Lasser hesitated. “Oh, all right. But you better get Jimmy off, hear?”

  Pulcher got away at last and hurried out into the cold, slushy street.

  At the corner he caught a glimpse of something palely glowing overhead and stopped, transfixed. A huge skytrout was swimming purposefully down the avenue. It was a monster, twelve feet long at least and more than two feet thick at the middle; it would easily go eighteen, nineteen ounces, the sort of lunker that sportsmen hiked clear across the Dismal Hills to bag. Pulcher had never in his life seen one that size. In fact, he could only remember seeing one or two fingerlings swim over inhabited areas.

  It gave him a cold, worried feeling.

  The skyfish were about the only tourist attraction Altair Nine had left to offer. From all over the Galaxy sportsmen came to shoot them, with their great porous flesh filled with bubbles of hydrogen, real biological Zeppelins that did not fly in the air but swam it. Before human colonists arrived, they had been Altair Nine’s highest form of life. They were so easy to destroy with gunfire that they had almost been exterminated in the inhabited sections; only in the high, cold hills had a few survived. And now…

  Were even the fish aware that Altair Nine was becoming a ghost planet?

  The next morning Pulcher phoned Madeleine but didn’t have breakfast with her, though he wanted to very much.

  He put in the whole day working on the case. In the morning he visited the families and friends of the accused boys; in the afternoon he followed a few hunches.

  From the families he learned nothing. The stories were all about the same. The youngest boy was Foltis, only seventeen; the oldest was Hopgood at twenty-six. They all had lost their jobs, most of them at the Icicle Works, saw no future, and wanted off-planet. Well, physical transport meant a minimum of ten thousand dollars, and not one of them had a chance in the worlds of getting that much money in any legitimate way.

  Mayor Swinburne was a rich man, and his three-year-old son was the apple of his eye. It must have been an irresistible temptation to try to collect ransom money, Pulcher realized. The mayor could certainly afford it, and once the money was collected and they were aboard a starship it would be almost impossible for the law to pursue them.

  Pulcher managed to piece together the way the thing had started. The boys all lived in the same neighborhood, the neighborhood where Madeleine and Jon Gaultry had had a little apartment. They had seen Madeleine walking with the mayor’s son—she had had a part-time job, now and then, taking care of him. The only part of the thing that was hard to believe was that Madeleine had been willing to take part in the scheme, once the boys approached her.

  But Milo, remembering the expression on the girl’s face as she looked at the tourists, decided that wasn’t so strange after all.

  For Madeleine had rented.

  Physical transport was expensive and eternally slow.

  But there was a faster way for a man to travel from planet to planet—practically instantaneous, from one end of the Galaxy to the other. The pattern of the mind is electronic in nature. It can be taped, and it can be broadcast on an electromagnetic frequency. What was more, like any electromagnetic signal, it could be used to modulate an ultra-wave carrier. The result: Instantaneous transmission of personality, anywhere in the civilized Galaxy.

  The only problem was that there had to be a receiver.

  The naked ghost of a man, stripped of flesh and juices, was no more than the countless radio and TV waves that passed through everyone all the time. The transmitted personality had to be given form. There were mechanical receivers, of course—computerlike affairs with mercury memory cells where a man’s intelligence could be received, and could be made to activate robot bodies. But that wasn’t fun. The tourist trade was built on fun. Live bodies were needed to satisfy the customers. No one wanted to spend the price of a fishing broadcast to Altair Nine in order to find himself pursuing the quarry in some clanking tractor with photocell eyes and solenoid muscles. A body was wanted, even a rather attractive body; a body which would be firm where the tourist’s own, perhaps, was flabby, healthy where the tourist’s own had wheezed. Having such a body, there were other sports to enjoy than fishing.

  Oh, the laws were strict about misuse of rented bodies.

  But
the tourist trade was the only flourishing industry left on Altair Nine. The laws remained strict, but they remained unenforced.

  Pulcher checked in with Charley Dickon. “I found out why Madeleine got into this thing. She rented. Signed a long-term lease with the Tourist Agency and got a big advance on her earnings.”

  Dickon shook his head sadly. “What people will do for money,” he commented.

  “It wasn’t for her! She gave it to her husband, so he could get a ticket to someplace off-world.” Pulcher got up, turned around and kicked his chair as hard as he could. Renting was bad enough for a man. For a woman it was—

  “Take it easy,” Dickon suggested, grinning. “So she figured she could buy her way out of the contract with the money from Swinburne?”

  “Wouldn’t you do the same?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Milo. Renting’s not so bad.”

  “The hell it isn’t!”

  “All right. The hell it isn’t. But you ought to realize, Milo,” the committeeman said stiffly, “that if it wasn’t for the tourist trade we’d all be in trouble. Don’t knock the Tourist Agency. They’re doing a perfectly decent job.”

  “Then why won’t they let me see the records?”

  The committeeman’s eyes narrowed and he sat up straighter.

  “I tried,” said Pulcher. “I got them to show me Madeleine’s lease agreement, but I had to threaten them with a court order. Why? Then I tried to find out a little more about the Agency itself—incorporation papers, names of shareholders and so on. They wouldn’t give me a thing. Why?”

  Dickon said, after a second, “I could ask you that too, Milo. Why did you want to know?”

  Pulcher said seriously, “I have to make a case any way I can, Charley. They’re all dead on the evidence. They’re guilty. But every one of them went into this kidnaping stunt in order to stay away from renting. Maybe I can’t get Judge Pegrim to listen to that kind of evidence, but maybe I can. It’s my only chance. If I can show that renting is a form of cruel and unusual punishment—if I can find something wrong in it, something that isn’t allowed in its charter, then I have a chance. Not a good chance. But a chance. And there’s got to be something wrong, Charley, because otherwise why would they be so secretive?”

  Dickon said heavily, “You’re getting in pretty deep, Milo…Ever occur to you you’re going about this the wrong way?”

  “Wrong how?”

  “What can the incorporation papers show you? You want to find out what renting’s like. It seems to me the only way that makes sense is to try it yourself.”

  “Rent? Me?” Pulcher was shocked.

  The committeeman shrugged. “Well, I got a lot to do,” he said, and escorted Pulcher to the door.

  The lawyer walked sullenly away. Rent? Him? But he had to admit that it made a certain amount of sense…

  He made a private decision. He would do what he could to get Madeleine and the others out of trouble. Completely out of trouble. But if, in the course of trying the case, he couldn’t magic up some way of getting her out of the lease agreement as well as getting an acquittal, he would make damn sure that he didn’t get the acquittal.

  Jail wasn’t so bad; renting, for Madeleine Gaultry, was considerably worse.

  3

  Pulcher marched into the unemployment office the next morning with an air of determination far exceeding what he really felt. Talk about loyalty to a client! But he had spent the whole night brooding about it, and Dickon had been right.

  The clerk blinked at him and wheezed: “Gee, you’re Mr. Pulcher, aren’t you? I never thought I’d see you here. Things pretty slow?”

  Pulcher’s uncertainty made him belligerent. “I want to rent my body,” he barked. “Am I in the right place or not?”

  “Well, sure, Mr. Pulcher. I mean, you’re not, if it’s voluntary, but it’s been so long since they had a voluntary that it don’t make much difference, you know. I mean, I can handle it for you. Wait a minute.” He turned away, hesitated, glanced at Pulcher and said, “I better use the other phone.”

  He was gone only a minute. He came back with a look of determined embarrassment. “Mr. Pulcher. Look. I thought I better call Charley Dickon. He isn’t in his office. Why don’t you wait until I can clear it with him?”

  Pulcher said grimly, “It’s already cleared with him.”

  The clerk hesitated. “But—Oh. All right,” he said miserably, scribbling on a pad. “Right across the street. Oh, and tell them you’re a volunteer. I don’t know if that will make them leave the cuffs off you, but at least it’ll give them a laugh.” He chuckled.

  Pulcher took the slip of paper and walked sternly across the street to the Tourist Rental Agency, Procurement Office, observing without pleasure that there were bars on the windows. A husky guard at the door straightened up as he approached and said genially, “All right, sonny. It isn’t going to be as bad as you think. Just gimme your wrists a minute.”

  “Wait,” said Pulcher quickly, putting his hands behind him. “You won’t need the handcuffs for me. I’m a volunteer.”

  The guard said dangerously, “Don’t kid with me, sonny.” Then he took a closer look. “Hey, I know you. You’re the lawyer. I saw you at the Primary Dance.” He scratched his ear. He said doubtfully, “Well, maybe you are a volunteer. Go on in.” But as Pulcher strutted past he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder and, click, click, his wrists were circled with steel. He whirled furiously. “No hard feelings,” boomed the guard cheerfully. “It costs a lot of dough to get you ready, that’s all. They don’t want you changing your mind when they give you the squeeze, see?”

  “The squeeze—? All right,” said Pulcher, and turned away again. The squeeze. It didn’t sound so good, at that. But he had a little too much pride left to ask the guard for details. Anyway, it couldn’t be too bad, he was sure. Wasn’t he? After all, it wasn’t the same as being executed…

  An hour and a half later he wasn’t so sure.

  They had stripped him, weighed him, fluorographed him, taken samples of his blood, saliva, urine and spinal fluid; they had thumped his chest and listened to the strangled pounding of the arteries in his arm.

  “All right, you pass,” said a fortyish blonde in a stained nurse’s uniform. “You’re lucky today, openings all over. You can take your pick—mining, sailing, anything you like. What’ll it be?”

  “What?”

  “While you’re renting. What’s the matter with you? You got to be doing something while your body’s rented, you know. Of course, you can have the tank if you want to. But they mostly don’t like that. You’re conscious the whole time, you know.”

  Pulcher said honestly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But then he remembered. While a person’s body was rented out there was the problem of what to do with his own mind and personality. It couldn’t stay in the body. It had to go somewhere else. “The tank” was a storage device, only that and nothing more; the displaced mind was held in a sort of pickling vat of transistors and cells until its own body could be returned to it. He remembered a client of his boss’s, while he was still clerking, who had spent eight weeks in the tank and had then come out to commit a murder. No. Not the tank. He said, coughing, “What else is there?”

  The nurse said impatiently, “Golly, whatever you want, I guess. They’ve got a big call for miners operating the deep gas generators right now, if you want that. It’s pretty hot, is all. They burn the coal into gas, and of course you’re right in the middle of it. But I don’t think you feel much. Not too much. I don’t know about sailing or rocketing, because you have to have some experience for that. There might be something with the taxi company, but I ought to tell you usually the renters don’t want that, because the live drivers don’t like seeing the machines running cabs. Sometimes if they see a machine-cab they tip it over. Naturally, if there’s any damage to the host machine it’s risky for you.”

  Pulcher said faintly, “I’ll try mining.”

  He went out of
the room in a daze, a small bleached towel around his middle his only garment and hardly aware of that. His own clothes had been whisked away and checked long ago. The tourist who would shortly wear his body would pick his own clothes; the haberdashery was one of the more profitable subsidiaries of the Tourist Agency.

  Then he snapped out of his daze as he discovered what was meant by “the squeeze.”

  A pair of husky experts lifted him onto a slab, whisked away the towel, unlocked and tossed away the handcuffs. While one pinned him down firmly at the shoulders, the other began to turn viselike wheels that moved molded forms down upon him. It was like a sectional sarcophagus closing in on him. Pulcher had an instant childhood recollection of some story or other—the walls closing in, the victim inexorably squeezed to death. He yelled, “Hey, hold it! What are you doing?”

  The man at his head, bored, said, “Oh, don’t worry. This your first time? We got to keep you still, you know. Scanning’s close work.”

  “But—”

  “Now shut up and relax,” the man said reasonably. “If you wiggle when the tracer’s scanning you you could get your whole personality messed up. Not only that, we might damage the body an’ then the Agency’d have a suit on its hands, see? Tourists don’t like damaged bodies…Come on, Vince. Get the legs lined up so I can do the head.”

  “But—” said Pulcher again, and then, with effort, relaxed. It was only for twenty-four hours, after all. He could stand anything for twenty-four hours, and he had been careful to sign up for only that long. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s only for twenty-four hours.”

  “What? Oh, sure, friend. Lights out, now; have a pleasant dream.”

  And something soft but quite firm came down over his face.

  He heard a muffled sound of voices. Then there was a quick ripping feeling, as though he had been plucked out of some sticky surrounding medium.