Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Years and years,” he promised. “Years and—” They stopped talking. The mechanical cabdriver, sneaking around through backstreets to avoid the resentment of displaced live drivers, glanced over its condenser cells at them and chuckled, making tiny sparks in the night.

  SAUCERY

  Everyone loves a scoundrel, especially a lovable scoundrel. Everyone has met or seen on television or heard on radio someone like the two gentlemen—we use the term loosely—who are the main characters in 1986’s “Saucery,” Marchese Boccanegra and Anthony Makepeace Moore. In the nineteenth century they might have sold snake oil or toured the country with exhibits of the most amazing, fantastical—and phony—creatures.

  In the twentieth century or the twenty-first, though, these two colorful characters are experts about their respective crackpot theories of alien life on earth or elsewhere.

  Unfortunately for them, real, live Martians have been discovered on Mars and are being brought back to Earth. This momentous discovery could ruin their business forever, but these men are nothing if not resourceful. What they will do to survive…well, read on and enjoy.

  The young talent booker behind the desk was slim, quick, heavily eye-shadowed and, Marchese Boccanegra decided, quite ugly, and he hated her.

  He didn’t much like her office, either. It was tiny and bare. It didn’t do justice to one of the richest television networks in the world, and besides the woman was watching the wrong program. All of this displeased Marchese Boccanegra. Not that he cared that somebody on the NBC payroll was sneaking looks at an offering of CBS, but the program the confounded woman was watching was a pickup from the spaceship Algonquin, on its way back from Mars with a bunch of those equally confounded Martians aboard. Nasty-looking things! People said they looked a little bit like seals, but seals at least didn’t have spindly legs. No, they were definitely hideous, although it wasn’t their looks that made Boccanegra dislike them.

  The woman giggled. “They’re cute,” she said, to Boccanegra or to no one.

  Boccanegra sighed—silently. He sat erect in his far from comfortable wooden chair, his hands folded reposefully on his lap, his expression unchanging, and his eyes half-closed. He could see her well enough. Her nose was hardly more than a pug and her teeth, although white enough and bright enough, were unacceptably long. She was at least as unattractive as the Martians, not to mention that she wasn’t treating him right. First he had been kept sitting for forty-five minutes in the waiting room outside, with all the jugglers and struggling comics and publicity agents for people who had just written a book. Then when she did let him in most of her attention was on the TV screen, when what she should properly have been doing was deciding exactly when—Boccanegra did not allow himself to say whether—he would appear again on the “Today” show.

  Boccanegra didn’t realize his half-closed eyes had closed all the way until he heard her say irritably, “What’s the matter, are you asleep?”

  He opened his eyes slowly and gazed at her with the unfathomable look that had always gone so well on television. “I am not asleep,” he said austerely.

  She was looking less attractive than ever, because she was scowling at him, but at least she had turned off the television set. “I hope you wouldn’t fall asleep on the air,” she sniffed. “Sorry about that, but I had to watch. Anyway, how do you say your name?”

  “Mar-KAY-say BOH-ka-NAY-gra.”

  “You can really get screwed up trying to say those foreign names on the air,” she said pensively. “What’s that first part, a title or a name?”

  He allowed himself to twinkle. “It is the name my parents bestowed on me,” he said, not truthfully. “It does in fact mean marquis, but my family have not used a title for more than a hundred years.” That was not untruthful, technically, for they certainly hadn’t. Or before then, either, because grape growers hardly ever had one.

  “In any case,” he went on smoothly, “I don’t know if you have had an opportunity to study my sitrep. This latest contact—”

  “What in the world is a sitrep?”

  “The situation report, that is. It details my latest contact with the Great Galactics, which is actually far more exciting than any I have experienced before. I was meditating before the fireplace in my summer home at Aspen when suddenly the flames of the fire seemed to die away and a great golden presence emerged to—”

  “You told me,” she said. “They talked to you. What I need to find out is what they said about the Martians.”

  “Martians? My dear woman, they aren’t Martians. The Great Galactics come from so far beyond Mars that they are in another universe entirely, which we call the theta band of consciousness—”

  “Uh-uh. The people aren’t interested in other universes right now, Mr.—” she glanced at her notes and pronounced it, for a wonder, almost correctly“—Boccanegra. I’m booking a particular show. I’ve got one three-and-a-half-minute spot open, and the show’s about Mars. We’ve already got Sagan, Bradbury, and some woman from NASA and we need a—we need somebody like you, I mean. Now, you’ve had other experiences with flying saucers, right?”

  He said patiently, “Flying saucers is a newspaper term. I don’t care for it. In my book, Ultimate Truth: The Amazing Riddle Behind the ‘Saucer’ Flaps, I expose the falsity of the so-called flying-saucer stories. On the theta level of reality, what we human beings perceive as ‘saucers’ are really—”

  “No, but, hey, whatever they were, did any of them come from Mars?”

  “Of course not!” Then he added hastily, “Naturally, on the other hand, most of the so-called Martian mysteries are explained in my book, as for example the huge stone sculpture of a human face which appears on Mars in—”

  “No, no, no face. We’ve already got the guy who wrote the book doing that on the eight-eighteen spot on Tuesday. Anything else about Mars?” she asked, glancing at her watch.

  “No,” said Boccanegra, coming to a decision. He had been in the business long enough to know when to cut his losses. She wasn’t buying. He would not do the “Today” show on the basis of this interview. All he could do was to try to keep the lines open for the future.

  As she was opening her mouth for the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you, he widened his eyes and said quickly, “Oh, just a moment, do you mean next week? I am so terribly sorry! My staff must have got the dates wrong, because next week I have to be at a conference in Washington.” He gave the woman a meager forbearing smile as he stood up and shrugged apologetically.

  As he picked up the gray suede gloves and gold-handled walking stick the woman said, “Well, actually I don’t think we could’ve—”

  “No, I insist,” Boccanegra cut in. “It’s entirely my fault. Good day!” And he was gone, not even pausing to admire his reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of her door. It was just as it ought to be anyway. Tall, spare figure in the severely cut black suit, the moon-white stock gleaming at his throat, and the white carnation in his lapel, he was exactly as striking and vaguely sinister a spectacle as he set out to be. Color, the well-meaning experts had said to him. It’s all color on the TV now. And it was; but for exactly that reason Marchese Boccanegra had stood out in his stark black and white on the talk shows and the panels.

  Had once, anyway. There weren’t as many of them for him to do anymore. You could put it even more strongly: There were practically none at all, and the reason for that was the Martians. How they had ruined it for everybody!

  Passing through the waiting room, Boccanegra gave the receptionist a quick four-fingered wave—it was the benediction and greeting of the Great Galactics, as he had demonstrated it for more than thirty years in the field. But she didn’t seem to recognize it. No matter. Boccanegra took the carnation from his buttonhole and laid it caressingly before her (a receptionist who remembered you could make all the difference!) before pacing out to the hall, where he tapped the elevator button with the head of his cane.

  Only when the door had opened and he steppe
d inside did he say in surprise, “Anthony! I didn’t expect to see you here!”

  The month was June and the day warm, but Anthony Makepeace Moore wore full regalia: fur-collared coat and black slouch hat. His expression was more startled than pleased—so was Boccanegra’s own—but the two men greeted each other with the effusion of colleagues and competitors. “Marchese!” Moore cried, wringing his hand. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it? I suppose you’ve been granting interviews, too?”

  Boccanegra permitted himself a wry smile. “I had intended to appear on the ‘Today’ show,” he said, “but the appearance they wanted me to make is unfortunately out of the question. And you?”

  “Oh, nothing as glamorous as the ‘Today’ show,” smiled Moore. “I was just taping a few radio bits for the network news.”

  “I’ll be sure to listen,” Boccanegra promised, the generosity of his tone almost completely concealing the envy. The network! It had been at least two years since any network news organization had cared to have Marchese Boccanegra say anything for their listeners—and now that they’d done Moore it would certainly be a while before they wanted anyone else. There was a time—a pretty long-ago time, now—when the two of them had done publicity appearances together. But that was when the alien-encounter business was booming. The fact was, now there just wasn’t enough to share.

  So Boccanegra was surprised when Moore looked at his watch and said diffidently, “I suppose you’re in a great hurry to get to your next engagement?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Boccanegra began, and then hesitated. He finished, “As a matter of fact, I’m a bit hungry. I was thinking of a sandwich somewhere—would you care to join me?”

  Moore courteously bowed him out first as the elevator reached the ground floor. “I’d like that a lot, Marchese,” he said warmly. “Anyplace in particular? Something ethnic, perhaps? You know how I like odd foods, and we don’t get much of them in Oklahoma.”

  “I know just the place!” cried Boccanegra.

  The very place was the Carnegie Delicatessen, half a dozen blocks from the RCA Building, and both of them had known it well.

  As they walked up Seventh Avenue people glanced at them curiously. Where Boccanegra was tall, hawklike, and aloof, Anthony Makepeace Moore was short and round. He wore bushy white sideburns on a head that had no other hair but bushy white eyebrows. He would have been plump even in a bathing suit—so one supposed; no one had ever seen him in one—but his standard costume, winter, spring, and fall, was a bulky coat trimmed with what might well pass for ermine. It made him appear even rounder. As much as anything, Moore resembled a fat leprechaun.

  What he wore in the summer was quite different, because in the summer he spent his time on the five hundred acres of his Eudorpan Astral Retreat, just outside of Enid, Oklahoma. There he wore the robes of the Eudorpan Masters. So did everyone else on the premises, though not all in the same colors. Seekers (the paying guests) wore lavender. Adepts (the staff) wore gold. Moore himself, taking a cue from the Pope at Rome, never appeared in anything but spotless and freshly laundered white.

  At the delicatessen, Boccanegra stepped courteously aside to let Moore go first through the door. It was midafternoon but there was a short line waiting, and the two men exchanged amused glances. “Fame,” whispered Moore, and Boccanegra nodded.

  “Your picture used to hang right there, next to the fan,” he said.

  “And yours over by the door,” Moore recalled, “and now they don’t even remember who we are.” The cashier, overhearing, looked at them curiously, but no identification came before their table was ready.

  When Moore took off his coat he revealed a red and white checked sport shirt underneath. “No robes today?” Boccanegra asked. The only answer he got was a frosty look. Then Moore began to pore over the menu and his expression softened.

  “That good old pastrami,” he said sentimentally. “Remember how they used to send tons of it over to us at WOR? And Long John begging us to take some home because there’d be a new batch the next night?”

  “That’s where we met, isn’t it?” Boccanegra asked, knowing exactly that it was. The all-night “Long John Nebel Show” had, in fact, given both of them their start in the alien-contact industry. “Remember the Mystic Barber, with that tinfoil crown he always wore?”

  “And Barney and Betty Hill, and the Two Men in Black, and Will Oursler, and—oh, God, Marco,” Moore said, rolling his eyes, “we didn’t know when we had it good, did we? We were so young!”

  “And no damned Martians to take people’s minds off us,” Boccanegra grumbled. “Are you ready to order?”

  They passed reminiscences back and forth while they were waiting for their food to arrive—Long John and his wonderful scams, the revolving Empire State Building, the bridge off the RCA tower, and all; and not only Long John but every other broadcast medium. They all seemed willing to give air time to talk about intelligences from other worlds, network TV and little local radio stations where you had to crouch between record turntables and hand a single microphone around the guests.

  “We were all so young,” Moore repeated dreamily, pouring ketchup on his French fries.

  “Remember Lonny Zamorra?” Boccanegra asked.

  “And the spaceport at Giant Rock?”

  “And the mutilated cows? And the car engines that got stopped? And, oh, God, the Bermuda Triangle! Good Lord,” said Boccanegra earnestly, “I can think of at least a dozen people that lived for years on just the Bermuda Triangle. You know what they were getting for a single lecture? Not counting the books and the workshops and…” He trailed off.

  “And everything,” said Moore somberly. They ate in silence for a moment, thinking of the days when the world had been so eager to hear what they had to say.

  In those days everyone wanted to give them a voice. Radio, television, press coverage; there was nothing anyone might say about flying saucers, or men from another planet, or mysterious revelations received in a trance, or astral voyages to other worlds that did not get an audience. A paying audience. Both Moore and Boccanegra had had their pick of college lecture dates and handsome honoraria—enough for Boccanegra to start The Press of Ultimate Truth, Inc., to print his books; enough for Moore to buy the tract of played-out Oklahoma grazing land that became the Eudorpan Astral Retreat. Both had flourished wildly. There was no end to the customers for Boccanegra’s books, more than fifteen titles in all, or to the Seekers who gladly paid a month’s wages to spend a week in their lavender robes, eating lentils and raw onions out of EAR’s wooden bowls (and sneaking off to the truck stop just outside the Retreat for hamburgers and sinful beer), and listening worshipfully to Moore’s revelations.

  When the last of the pastrami and fries was gone, Moore leaned back and signaled for a coffee refill. He looked thoughtfully at Boccanegra and said, “I’ve been looking forward to your new book. Is it out yet?”

  “It’s been held up,” Boccanegra explained. Actually it was a year overdue, and the new book wasn’t going to appear until the bills for the last one were paid, and that didn’t seem likely in the near future. “Of course,” he added with as near a smile as he ever allowed himself in public, “the timing might be better later on. It’s all Martians now, isn’t it?”

  Moore was startled. “Are you writing a book about the Martians?” he demanded.

  “Me? Of course not,” Boccanegra said virtuously. “Oh, there are charlatans who’ll be doing that, no doubt. I’ll bet there are a dozen of the old guard trying to change their stories around to cash in on the Martians.”

  “Shocking,” Moore agreed with a straight face.

  “Anyway, I’ve about decided to take a sort of sabbatical. This fad will run its course. Perhaps in a few months it’ll be the right time for my book, which tells how the Great Galactics have provided us with the genetic code that explains all of the mysteries of—”

  “Yeah,” said Moore, staring into space. His expression did not suggest that he liked what he was
seeing.

  Boccanegra studied his ancient adversary. It didn’t look like a very good time to bring up the sudden inspiration that had come to him in the elevator. Moore sounded depressed.

  But there would never be a better time, so Boccanegra plunged in. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  Moore focused on him. “Yes?”

  Boccanegra waved a deprecating hand. “I’ll probably have some free time for awhile. Perhaps the whole summer. So, I wonder—would you be interested in having me as a sort of guest lecturer at the Retreat?” Moore’s eyes widened under the bushy eyebrows, but he didn’t speak. Boccanegra went on ingratiatingly, “Since I’m at liberty, I mean. Of course, we’d have to make some special arrangement. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to be there just as part of your staff. Some new position? Perhaps I could wear black robes? Naturally the financial arrangements could be worked out—professional courtesy and all that,” he finished with a twinkle.

  The twinkle dried up. Moore’s expression was stony. “No chance,” he said.

  Boccanegra felt the muscles in his throat begin to tighten. “No chance,” he repeated, trying to keep the sudden anger out of his voice. “Well, if it’s the robes—”

  “It isn’t the robes,” said Anthony Makepeace Moore.

  “No, it wouldn’t be that. I suppose, since you and I have been pretty much opponents for so long—”

  “Marco,” said Moore sadly, “I don’t give a shit about that. I can’t take you on at the Retreat because there isn’t going to be any Retreat this year. I haven’t got the customers. By this time I should have had forty or fifty people registered—some years I’ve had a hundred! You know how many I’ve got now? Two. And one of those is only a maybe.” He shook his head. “The whole thing’s down the tube if something good doesn’t happen. The bank’s been on my back about the mortgage, and they put in that damn interstate and even the truck stop’s losing money every week—”