Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  And I discovered that it was in Amy’s, for the first thing she did was to march me over to the typewriter and say: “You’ve had it, Sam. We’ll dispose with the wedding march—just get your friend Arthur here to marry us.”

  “Arthur?”

  “The captain,” she said. “We’re on the high seas and he’s empowered to perform marriages.”

  Vern looked at me and shrugged, meaning, you asked for this one, boy. And I looked at him and shrugged, meaning, it could be worse.

  And indeed it could. We’d got our ship; we’d got our ship’s company—because, naturally, there wasn’t any use stealing a big ship for just a couple of us. We’d had to manage to get a sizable colony aboard. That was the whole idea.

  The world, in fact, was ours. It could have been very much worse indeed, even though Arthur was laughing so hard as he performed the ceremony that he jammed up all his keys.

  CREATION MYTHS OF THE

  RECENTLY EXTINCT

  “Why,” Bill Moyers asked recently, when he was presented the fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, “are we stealing our children’s and grandchildren’s future? Betraying their trust? Despoiling their world?” He was referring to the systematic destruction of our environment by pollution, by destruction of natural habitats, and by other means.

  He had several reasons, none of them very cheerful. They included greed and blind self-interest.

  It is difficult to fathom the logic of those who would ignore the evidence of their eyes (and noses, in some cases) and pollute the cradle of humanity knowing that their children and grandchildren will inherit their mess.

  Then again, one good war could do the trick much more quickly. This 1994 tale offers a brief, pungent view by an outsider.

  When the check team for the Great Galactics got within sensor range of their new colony site the captain summoned them to the ship’s centrum. They came reluctantly. Although they had each spent as much time as possible in their own quarters—sleeping, sulking, working on their own projects or merely hiding from the rest—the interminable flight had made them thoroughly sick of each other’s presence.

  Still, at first, they were delighted with what the sensors revealed. The little blue planet was right where the original surveyors had reported it, sixty-odd million years before…but then details began to emerge.

  “Oh, yuck,” cried the captain, writhing in revulsion. “We’re in trouble here! The place is infested. It’s got living things all over it again.”

  That was the worst of news. The Great Galactics didn’t care to share the planets they inhabited with any kind of living things but themselves. The deputy moaned, “What are we going to do now?”

  The captain gave him a brief stare of contempt. “Think it through,” he ordered. “As I see it, we have two options. We can go back to Galactic Central and report failure. Or we can clean it up some way or another. Which would you prefer?” The collective shudder was answer enough. “Right, then. How do we go about the cleanup?”

  There was silence for a moment, until the political representative offered, “We could tickle the star until it went nova and burned the planet clean.”

  “With our budget? Get real.”

  “Or we could dump a big asteroid on it and kill everything off that way,” the deputy captain said hopefully.

  “The survey team tried that sixty-five million years ago, and all they did was get rid of the big scaly things with the sharp teeth. No, we need something thorough and cheap. Anybody else got any ideas?”

  There was silence for a moment, and then the most junior member of the expedition raised his feeler. “You know I’ve been working in my shop to pass the time,” he said diffidently. “Well, I’ve come up with a little invention that might help us out here. I call it a ‘Black Monolith.’”

  “We don’t have time for your silly contraptions,” the captain said menacingly.

  The junior shivered, but stuck to his guns. “I think it might do the trick,” he insisted. “This Black Monolith thing of mine is an intelligence stimulator. What we do with it, we set it down among those little furry things down there—” he meant the australopithecines, but that word had not been invented—“and it will teach them to use sticks and bones and things to hit other things. That’s to say, they’ll learn to use tools. And then that would mean that they’d need to use their ‘hands,’ as I call them, in more complicated and subtle ways, which would mean that before long they’d develop a more complex nervous system in their ‘hands’ and ‘arms’—and, ultimately, even a more elaborate central nervous system in their ‘brains.’ Do you see what that means? Those little animals could evolve toward intelligence.”

  “By the Great Blast,” the captain swore, “what’s got into you? Vermin are bad enough, but do you think the Great Galactics will sit still for intelligent vermin?”

  “No, I think it would really work out,” the junior said, growing braver. “See, once the Monolith taught them to use tools in the first place they wouldn’t stop there. They’d go right on inventing more tools, of all different kinds—simple things like wheels and levers at first, but then they’d go on to much more complicated ones. Before you know it they’d start making machines, and discovering chemistry, and inventing vehicles; why, in a million revolutions of this planet or so—long before the first colony gets here from Galactic Central—there’d be billions of them.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, then, what comes with all that kind of primitive industrialization? You know the answer to that as well as I do: Pollution! Ecological destruction! Trust me, Captain. All we have to do is get them started, and those little creatures’ll have the planet scorched sterile in no time!”

  THE MEETING

  (with C.M. Kornbluth)

  Frederik Pohl has collaborated with many other writers. When he was just starting out, he wrote many stories with other aspiring science fiction writers; since then he’s written not just stories, but novels, too, with Jack Williamson, Lester del Rey, and C. M. Kornbluth. And there are probably others.

  His collaborations with Kornbluth were perhaps the most fruitful. Their novel The Space Merchants was, and remains, a huge success, one of the classic SF novels of the 1950s. Pohl and Kornbluth collaborated on other very good novels, and on a number of terrific stories. Unfortunately, C. M. Kornbluth died way too young, in 1964, or there’s no doubt they would have collaborated successfully for a long time.

  “The Meeting,” which won the Hugo Award in 1973 for best short story, is one of their finer collaborations. Completed after Kornbluth’s death, it is a thoughtful, challenging story about a modern dilemma with no easy answers.

  Harry Vladek was too large a man for his Volkswagen, but he was too poor a man to trade it in, and as things were going he was going to stay that way a long time. He applied the brakes carefully (“Master cylinder’s leaking like a sieve, Mr. Vladek; what’s the use of just fixing up the linings?”—but the estimate was a hundred and twenty-eight dollars, and where was it going to come from?) and parked in the neatly graveled lot. He squeezed out of the door, the upsetting telephone call from Dr. Nicholson on his mind, locked the car up and went into the school building.

  The Parent-Teachers Association of the Bingham County School for Exceptional Children was holding its first meeting of the term. Of the twenty people already there, Vladek knew only Mrs. Adler, the principal, or headmistress, or owner of the school. She was the one he needed to talk to most, he thought. Would there be any chance to see her privately? Right now she sat across the room at her scuffed golden oak desk in a posture chair, talking in low, rapid tones with a gray-haired woman in a tan suit. A teacher? She seemed too old to be a parent, although his wife had told him some of the kids seemed to be twenty or more.

  It was 8:30 A.M. and the parents were still driving up to the school, a converted building that had once been a big country house—almost a mansio
n. The living room was full of elegant reminders of that. Two chandeliers. Intricate vine-leaf molding on the plaster above the dropped ceiling. The pink-veined white marble fireplace, unfortunately prominent because of the unsuitable andirons, too cheap and too small, that now stood in it. Golden oak sliding double doors to the hall. And visible through them a grim, fireproof staircase of concrete and steel. They must, Vladek thought, have had to rip out a beautiful wooden thing to install the fireproof stairs for compliance with the state school laws.

  People kept coming in, single men, single women, and occasionally a couple. He wondered how the couples managed their baby-sitting problem. The subtitle on the school’s letterhead was “an institution for emotionally disturbed and cerebrally damaged children capable of education.” Harry’s nine-year-old Thomas was one of the emotionally disturbed ones. With a taste of envy he wondered if cerebrally damaged children could be baby-sat by any reasonably competent grownup. Thomas could not. The Vladeks had not had an evening out together since he was two, so that tonight Margaret was holding the fort at home, no doubt worrying herself sick about the call from Dr. Nicholson, while Harry was representing the family at the PTA.

  As the room filled up, chairs were getting scarce. A young couple was standing at the end of the row near him, looking around for a pair of empty seats. “Here,” he said to them. “I’ll move over.” The woman smiled politely and the man said thanks. Emboldened by an ashtray on the empty seat in front of him, Harry pulled out his pack of cigarettes and offered it to them, but it turned out they were nonsmokers. Harry lit up anyway, listening to what was going on around him.

  Everybody was talking. One woman asked another, “How’s the gall bladder? Are they going to take it out after all?” A heavy, balding man said to a short man with bushy sideburns, “Well, my accountant says the tuition’s medically deductible if the school is for pyschosomatic, not just for psycho. That we’ve got to clear up.” The short man told him positively, “Right, but all you need is a doctor’s letter; he recommends the school, refers the child to the school.” And a very young woman said intensely, “Dr. Shields was very optimistic, Mrs. Clerman. He says without a doubt the thyroid will make Georgie accessible. And then—” A light-coffee-colored black man in an aloha shirt told a plump woman, “He really pulled a wing-ding over the weekend, two stitches in his face, busted my fishing pole in three places.” And the woman said. “They get so bored. My little girl has this thing about crayons, so that rules out coloring books altogether. You wonder what you can do.”

  Harry finally said to the young man next to him, “My name’s Vladek. I’m Tommy’s father; he’s in the beginners group.”

  “That’s where ours is,” said the young man. “He’s Vern. Six years old. Blond like me. Maybe you’ve seen him.”

  Harry did not try very hard to remember. The two or three times he had picked Tommy up after class he had not been able to tell one child from another in the great bustle of departure. Coats, handkerchiefs, hats, one little girl who always hid in the supply closet and a little boy who never wanted to go home and hung onto the teacher. “Oh, yes,” he said politely.

  The young man introduced himself and his wife; they were named Murray and Celia Logan. Harry leaned over the man to shake the wife’s hand, and she said, “Aren’t you new here?”

  “Yes. Tommy’s been in the school a month. We moved in from Elmira to be near it.” He hesitated, then added, “Tommy’s nine, but the reason he’s in the beginners group is that Mrs. Adler thought it would make the adjustment easier.”

  Logan pointed to a suntanned man in the first row. “See that fellow with the glasses? He moved here from Texas. Of course, he’s got money.”

  “It must be a good place,” Harry said questioningly.

  Logan grinned, his expression a little nervous.

  “How’s your son?” Harry asked.

  “That little rascal,” said Logan. “Last week I got him another copy of the My Fair Lady album, I guess he’s used up four or five of them, and he goes around singing ‘luv-er-ly, luv-er-ly.’ But look at you? No.”

  “Mine doesn’t talk,” said Harry.

  Mrs. Logan said judiciously, “Ours talks. Not to anybody, though. It’s like a wall.”

  “I know,” said Harry, and pressed. “Has, ah, has Vern shown much improvement with the school?”

  Murray Logan pursed his lips. “I would say, yes. The bedwetting’s not too good, but life’s a great deal smoother in some ways. You know, you don’t hope for a dramatic breakthrough. But in little things, day by day, it goes smoother. Mostly smoother. Of course there are setbacks.”

  Harry nodded, thinking of seven years of setbacks, and two years of growing worry and puzzlement before that. He said, “Mrs. Adler told me that, for instance, a special outbreak of destructiveness might mean something like a plateau in speech therapy. So the child fights it and breaks out in some other direction.”

  “That too,” said Logan, “but what I meant was, you know, the ones you don’t expect.” He brooded silently a moment, then said with relief, “Oh, they’re starting.”

  Vladek nodded, stubbing out his cigarette and absent-mindedly lighting another. His stomach was knotting up again. He wondered at these other parents, who seemed so safe and, well, untouched. Wasn’t it the same with them as with Margaret and himself? And it had been a long time since either of them had felt the world comfortable around them, even without Dr. Nicholson pressing for a decision. He forced himself to lean back and look as tranquil as the others.

  Mrs. Adler was tapping her desk with a ruler. “I think everybody who is coming is here,” she said. She leaned against the desk and waited for the room to quiet down. She was short, dark, plump and surprisingly pretty. She did not look at all like a competent professional. She looked so unlike her role that, in fact, Harry’s heart had sunk three months ago when their correspondence about admitting Tommy had been climaxed by the long trip from Elmira for the interview. He had expected a steel-gray lady with rimless glasses…a Valkyrie in a white smock like the nurse who had held wriggling, screaming Tommy while waiting for the suppository to quiet him down for his first EEG…a disheveled old fraud…he didn’t know what. Anything except this pretty young woman. Another blind alley, he had thought in despair. Another, after a hundred too many already. First, “Wait for him to outgrow it.” He doesn’t. Then, “We must reconcile ourselves to God’s will.” But you don’t want to. Then give him the prescription three times a day for three months. And it doesn’t work. Then chase around for six months with the Child Guidance Clinic to find out it’s only letterheads and one circuit-riding doctor who doesn’t have time for anything. Then, after four dreary, weepy weeks of soul-searching, the State Training School, and find out it has an eight-year waiting list. Then the private custodial school, and find they’re fifty-five hundred dollars a year—without medical treatment!—and where do you get fifty-five hundred dollars a year? And all the time everybody warns you, as if you didn’t know it: “Hurry! Do something! Catch it early! This is the critical stage! Delay is fatal!” And then this soft-looking little woman; how could she do anything?

  She had rapidly shown him how. She had questioned Margaret and Harry incisively, turned to Tommy, rampaging through that same room like a rogue bull, and turned his rampage into a game. In three minutes he was happily experimenting with an indestructible old windup cabinet Victrola, and Mrs. Adler was saying to the Vladeks, “Don’t count on a miracle cure. There isn’t any. But improvements, yes, and I think we can help Tommy.”

  Perhaps she had, thought Vladek bleakly. Perhaps she was helping as much as anyone ever could.

  Meanwhile Mrs. Alder had quickly and pleasantly welcomed the parents, suggested they remain for coffee and get to know each other, and introduced the PTA president, a Mrs. Rose, tall, prematurely gray and very executive. “This being the first meeting of the term,” she said, “there are no minutes to be read; so we’ll get to the committee work reports. What about the
transportation problem, Mr. Baer?”

  The man who got up was old. More than sixty; Harry wondered what it was like to have your life crowned with a late retarded child. He wore all the trappings of success—a four-hundred-dollar suit, an electronic wristwatch, a large gold fraternal ring. In a slight German accent he said, “I was to the district school board and they are not cooperating. My lawyer looked it up and the trouble is all one word. What the law says, the school board may, that is the word, may reimburse parents of handicapped children for transportation to private schools. Not shall, you understand, but may. They were very frank with me. They said they just didn’t want to spend the money. They had the impression we’re all rich people here.”

  Slight sour laughter around the room.

  “So my lawyer made an appointment, and we appeared before the full board and presented the case—we don’t care, reimbursement, a school bus, anything so we can relieve the transportation burden a little. The answer was no.” He shrugged and remained standing, looking at Mrs. Rose, who said:

  “Thank you, Mr. Baer. Does anybody have any suggestions?”

  A woman said angrily, “Put some heat on them. We’re all voters!”

  A man said, “Publicity, that’s right. The principle is perfectly clear in the law, one taxpayer’s child is supposed to get the same service as another taxpayer’s child. We should write letters to the papers.”

  Mr. Baer said, “Wait a minute. Letters I don’t think mean anything, but I’ve got a public relations firm; I’ll tell them to take a little time off my food specialties and use it for the school. They can use their own know-how, how to do it; they’re the experts.”

  This was moved, seconded and passed, while Murray Logan whispered to Vladek, “He’s Marijane Garlic Mayonnaise. He had a twelve-year-old girl in very bad shape that Mrs. Adler helped in her old private class. He bought this building for her, along with a couple of other parents.”