Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

The ants were very silent. Gordy looked at them and saw drone-ants in the group, all still as statues.

  “Hey!” he said in startlement, unthinking. And then the needle-jawed ant claw took him from behind.

  Gordy had a moment of nausea—and then terror and hatred swept it away.

  Heedless of the needles that laced his skin, he struggled and kicked against the creatures that held him. One arm came free, leaving gobbets of flesh behind, and his heavy-shod foot plunged into a pulpy eye. The ant made a whistling, gasping sound and stood erect on four hairy legs.

  Gordy felt himself jerked a dozen feet into the air, then flung free in the wild, silent agony of the ant. He crashed into the ground, cowering away from the staggering monster. Sobbing, he pushed himself to his feet; the machine was behind him; he turned and blundered into it a step ahead of the other ants, and spun the wheel.

  A hollow insect leg, detached from the ant that had been closest to him, was flopping about on the floor of the machine; it had been that close.

  Gordy stopped the machine where it had started, on the same quivering, primordial bog, and lay crouched over the controls for a long time before he moved.

  He had made a mistake, he and de Terry; there weren’t any doubts left at all. And there was…there might be a way to right it.

  He looked out at the Coal Measure forest. The fern trees were not the fern trees he had seen before; the machine had been moved in space. But the time, he knew, was identically the same; trust the machine for that. He thought: I gave the world to the ants, right here. I can take it back. I can find the ants I buried and crush them underfoot…or intercept myself before I bury them…

  He got out of the machine, suddenly panicky. Urgency squinted his eyes as he peered around him.

  Death had been very close in the ant city; the reaction still left Gordy limp. And was he safe here? He remembered the violent animal scream he had heard before, and shuddered at the thought of furnishing a casual meal to some dinosaur…while the ant queens lived safely to produce their horrid young.

  A gleam of metal through the fern trees made his heart leap. Burnished metal here could mean but one thing—the machine!

  Around a clump of fern trees, their bases covered with thick club mosses, he ran, and saw the machine ahead. He raced toward it—then came to a sudden stop, slipping on the damp ground. For there were two machines in sight.

  The farther machine was his own, and through the screening mosses he could see two figures standing in it, his own and de Terry’s.

  But the nearer was a larger machine, and a strange design.

  And from it came a hastening mob—not a mob of men, but of black insect shapes racing toward him.

  Of course, thought Gordy, as he turned hopelessly to run—of course, the ants had infinite time to work in. Time enough to build a machine after the pattern of his own—and time to realize what they had to do to him, to insure their own race safety.

  Gordy stumbled, and the first of the black things was upon him.

  As his panicky lungs filled with air for the last time, Gordy knew what animal had screamed in the depths of the Coal Measure forest.

  SPEED TRAP

  Systems. Almost anything can be thought of as part of a system. Chaos theory is based on that idea; we don’t always see the system at work because we’re looking at it from within the system itself or because we don’t have the tools to see the entirety of the system.

  Dr. Grew, the protagonist of “Speed Trap,” isn’t a systems man, but because he attends many conferences and meets a lot of scientists in other fields, he’s had occasion to think about how systems—better systems—can make him and everyone function much more efficiently, get more done.

  The other side of systems: conspiracy theory. The world is full of people who see conspiracies everywhere. Often those who see conspiracies where there are none are very systematic—one might say “obsessive,” even “paranoid.”

  Then again, there are times when paranoia isn’t anything but a sane response to a real threat.

  Dr. Grew’s dilemma—and yours—is to decide what is really going on in this rather tantalizing little puzzler from 1967.

  My reservation was for a window seat, up front, because on this particular flight they serve from the front back; but on the seat next to mine, I saw a reservation tag for Gordie MacKenzie. I kept right on going until the hostess hailed me. “Why, Dr. Grew, nice to have you with us again…”

  I stood blocking the aisle. “Can I switch to a seat back here somewhere, Clara?”

  “Why, I think—let me see…”

  “How about that one?” I didn’t see a tag on it.

  “Well, it’s not a window seat…”

  “But it’s free?”

  “Well, let’s look.” She flipped the seating chart out of her clipboard. “Certainly. May I take your bag?”

  “Uh-uh. Work to do.” And I did have work to do, too; that was why I didn’t want to sit next to MacKenzie. I slouched down in the seat, scowling at the man next to me to indicate that I didn’t want to strike up a conversation; he scowled back to show that that suited him fine. I saw MacKenzie come aboard, but he didn’t see me.

  Just before we took off, I saw Clara bend over him to check his seat belt; and in the same motion, she palmed the reservation card with my name on it. Smart girl. I decided to buy her a drink the next time I found myself in the motel where her crew stayed between flights.

  I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m a jet-set type who’s on first-name terms with every airline stewardess around. The only ones I see enough of at all are a couple on the New York–L.A. run, and a few operating out of O’Hare, and maybe a couple that I see now and then between Huntsville and the Cape—oh, and one Air France girl I’ve flown with once or twice out of Orly, but only because she gave me a lift in her Citroën one time when there was a métro strike and no cabs to be found. Still, come to think of it, well—all right—yes, I guess I do get around a lot. Those are the hazards of the trade. Although my degree’s in atmospheric physics, my specialty is signatures—you know, the instrument readings or optical observations that we interpret to mean such-and-such pressure, temperature, chemical composition and so on—and that’s a pretty sexy field right now, and I get invited to a lot of conferences. I said “invited.” I don’t mean in the sense that I can say no. Not if I want to keep enough status in the department to have freedom to do my work. And it’s all plushy and kind of fun, at least when I have time to have fun; and really, I’ve got pretty good at locating a decent restaurant in Cleveland or Albuquerque (try the Mexican food at the airport) and vetoing an inferior wine.

  That’s funny, too, because I didn’t expect it to be this way—not when I was a kid reading Willy Ley’s articles and going out to hunt ginseng in the woods around Potsdam (I mean the New York one) so I could earn money and go to MIT and build spaceships. I thought I would be a lean, hungry-eyed scientist in shabby clothes. I thought probably I would never get out of the laboratory (I guess I thought spaceships were designed in laboratories) and I’d waste my health on long night hours over the slide rule. And, as it turns out, what I’m wasting my health on is truite amandine and time-zone disorientation.

  But I think I know what to do about that.

  That’s why I didn’t want to spend the four and a half hours yakking with Gordie MacKenzie, because, by God, I maybe do know what to do about that.

  It’s not really my field, but I’ve talked it over with some systems people and they didn’t get that polite look people get when you’re trying to tell them about their own subject. I’ll see if I can explain it. See, there are like twenty conferences and symposia and colloquia a month in any decent-sized field, and you’re out of it unless you make a few of them. Not counting workshops and planning sessions and get-the-hell-down-here-Charley-or-we-lose-the-grant meetings. And they do have a way of being all over the place. I haven’t slept in my own home all seven nights of any week since Christmas before last,
when I had the flu.

  Now, question is, what do all the meetings accomplish? I had a theory once that the whole Gestalt was planned—I mean, global scatter, jet travel and all. A sort of psychic energizer, designed to keep us all pumped up all the time—after all, if you’re going somewhere in a jet at six hundred miles an hour, you know you’ve got to be doing something important, or else you wouldn’t be doing it so fast. But who would plan something like that?

  So I gave up that idea and concentrated on ways of doing it better. You know, there really is no more stupid way of communicating information than flying three thousand miles to sit on a gilt chair in a hotel ballroom and listen to twenty-five people read papers at you. Twenty-three of the papers you don’t care about anyway, and the twenty-fourth you can’t understand because the speaker has a bad accent and, anyway, he’s rushing it because he’s under time pressure to catch his plane to the next conference, and that one single twenty-fifth paper has cost you four days, including travel time, when you could have read it in your own office in fifteen minutes. And got more out of it, too. Of course, there’s the interplay when you find yourself sitting in the coffee shop next to somebody who can explain the latest instrumentation to you because his company’s doing the telemetry; you can’t get that from reading. But I’ve noticed there’s less and less time for that. And less and less interest, too, maybe, because you get pretty tired of making new friends after about the three hundredth; and you begin to think about what’s waiting for you on your desk when you get back, and you remember the time when you got stuck with that damn loudmouthed Egyptian at the I.A.U. in Brussels and had to fight the Suez war for an hour and a half.

  All right, you can see what I mean. Waste of time and valuable kerosene jet fuel, right? Because the pity of it is that electronic information handling is so cheap and easy. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Bell Labs’ demo of their picture phone—they had it at a couple of meetings—but it’s nearly like face-to-face. Better than the telephone. You get all the signatures, except maybe the smell of whiskey on the breath or something like that. And that’s only one gadget: there’s facsimile, telemetry, remote-access computation, teletype—well, there it is, we’ve got them, why don’t we use them? And go farther, too. You know about how they can strip down a taped voice message—leave out the unnecessary parts of speech, edit out the pauses, even drop some of the useless syllables? And you can still understand it perfectly, only at about four hundred words a minute instead of maybe sixty or seventy. (And about half of them repetitions or “What I mean to say.”)

  Well, that’s the systems part; and, as I say, it’s not my field. But it’s there for the taking—expert opinion, not mine. A couple of the fellows were real hot, and we’re going to get together on it as soon as we can find the time.

  Maybe you wonder what I have to contribute. I do have something, I think. For example, how about problem-solving approaches to discussions? I’ve seen some papers that suggest a way of simplifying and pointing up a conference so you could really confer. I’ve even got a pet idea of my own. I call it the Quantum of Debate, the irreducible minimum of argument which each participant in a discussion can use to make one single point and get that understood (or argued or refuted) before he goes on to the next.

  Why, if half of what I think is so, then people like me can get things done in—oh, be conservative—a quarter of the time we spend now.

  Leaving three quarters of our time for—what? Why, for work! For doing the things that we know we ought to do but can’t find the time for. I mean this literally and really and seriously. I honestly think that we can do four times as much work as we do. And I honestly think that this means we can land on Mars in five years instead of twenty, cure leukemia in twelve years instead of fifty, and so on.

  Well, that’s the picture, and that’s why I didn’t want to waste the time talking with Gordie MacKenzie. I’d brought all my notes in my briefcase, and four and a half hours was just about enough time to try to pull them all together and make some sort of presentation to show my systems friends and a few others who were interested.

  So as soon as we were airborne, I had the little table down and I was sorting out little stacks of paper.

  Only it didn’t work out.

  It’s funny how often it doesn’t work out—I mean, when you’ve got something you want to do and you look ahead and see where the time’s going to be to do it, and then, all of a sudden, the time’s gone and you didn’t do it. What it was was that Clara worked her way back with the cocktails—she knew mine, an extra-dry martini with a twist of lemon—and I moved the papers out of her way out of politeness, and then she showed up with the hors d’oeuvres and I put them back in my bag out of hunger, and then I had to decide how I wanted my tournedos, and it took almost two hours for dinner, including the wine and the B & B; and although I didn’t really want to watch the movie, there’s something about seeing all those screens ahead of you, with the hero just making his bombing run on your own screen but shot up and falling in flames on the ones you can see out of the corner of your eye in the forward seats—and back in the briefing room, or even in the pub the night before on the screens in the other row that the film gets to after it gets to yours—all sort of like a cross section of instants of time, a plural “now.” Disconcerting. It polarized my attention; of course, the liquor helped; and, anyway, by the time the movie was over, it was time for the second round of coffee and mints, and then the seat-belt sign was on and we were over the big aluminum dome on Mount Wilson, coming in, and I never had found the time to do my sorting. Well, I was used to that. I’d never found any ginseng back in Potsdam, either. I had to get through school on a scholarship.

  I checked in, washed my face and went down to the meeting room just in time for a very dull tutorial on clear-air turbulence in planetary atmospheres. There was quite a good turnout, maybe seventy or eighty people in the room; but what they thought they were getting out of it, I cannot imagine, so I picked up a program and ducked out.

  Somebody by the coffee machine called to me. “Hi, Chip.”

  I went over and shook his hand, a young fellow named Resnik from the little college where I’d got my bachelor’s, looking bored and angry. He was with someone I didn’t know, tall and gray-haired and bankerish. “Dr. Ramos, this is Chesley Grew. Chip, Dr. Ramos. He’s with NASA—I think it’s NASA?”

  “No, I’m with a foundation,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Grew. I’ve followed your work.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.” I would have liked a cup of coffee, but I didn’t particularly want to stand there talking to them while I drank it, so I said, “Well, I’d better get checked in, so if you’ll excuse me…”

  “Come off it, Chip,” said Larry Resnik. “I saw you check in half an hour ago. You just want to go up to your room and work.”

  That was embarrassing, a little. I didn’t mind it with Resnik, but I didn’t know the other fellow. He grinned and said, “Larry tells me you’re like that. Matter of fact, when you went by, he said you’d be back out in thirty seconds, and you were.”

  “Well. Clear-air turbulence isn’t my subject, really…”

  “Oh, nobody’s blaming you. God knows not. Care for some coffee?”

  The only thing to do was to be gracious about it, so I said, “Yes, please. Thanks.” I watched him take a cup and fill it from the big silver urn. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. “Did we meet at the Dallas Double-A S sessions?”

  “I’m afraid not. Sugar? No, I’ve actually been to very few of these meetings, but I’ve read some of your papers.”

  I stirred my coffee. “Thank you, Dr. Ramos.” One of the things I’ve learned to do is repeat a name as often as I can so I won’t forget it. About half the time I forget it anyway, of course. “I’ll be speaking tomorrow morning, Dr. Ramos. ‘A Photometric Technique for Deriving Slopes from Planetary Fly-bys.’ Nothing much that doesn’t follow from what they’ve done at
Langley, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes, I saw the abstract.”

  “But you’ll get your brownie points for reading it, eh?” said Larry. He was breathing heavily. “How many does that make this year?”

  “Well, a lot.” I tried to drink my coffee both rapidly and inconspicuously. Larry seemed in an unhappy mood.

  “That’s what we were talking about when you came in,” he said. “Thirty papers a year and committee reports between times. When was the last time you spent a solid month at your desk? I know, in my own department…”

  I could feel myself growing interested and I didn’t want to be, I wanted to get back to my notes. I took another gulp of my coffee.

  “You know what Fred Hoyle said?”

  “I don’t think so, Larry.”

  “He said the minute a man does anything, anything at all, the whole world enters into a conspiracy to keep him from ever doing it again. Program chairmen invite him to read papers. Trustees put him onto committees. Newspaper reporters call him up to interview him. Television shows ask him to appear with a comic, a bandleader and a girl singer, to talk about whether there’s life on Mars.”

  “And people who sympathize with him buttonhole him on his way out of meetings,” said Dr. Ramos. He chuckled. “Really, Dr. Grew. We’ll understand if you just keep on going.”

  “I’m not even sure it’s this world,” said Larry.

  He was not only irritable, he was hardly making sense. “For that matter,” he added, “I haven’t even really done anything yet. Not like you, Chip. But I can, someday.”

  “Don’t be modest,” said Dr. Ramos. “And look, we’re making a lot of noise here. Why don’t we find some place to sit down and talk—unless you really do want to get back to your work, Dr. Grew?”

  But you see, I was already more than half convinced that this was my work, to talk to Larry and Dr. Ramos; and what we finally did was go up to my room and then up to Larry’s where he had a Rand Corporation report in his bag with some notes I’d sent him once, and we never did get back to the meeting room. Along about ten we had dinner sent up, and that was where we stayed, drinking cold coffee off the set-up table and sparingly drinking bourbon out of a bottle Larry had brought along, and I told them everything I’d ever thought about a systems approach to the transmission of technological information. And what it implied. And Dr. Ramos was with it at every step, the best listener either of us had ever had, though most of what he said was, “Yes, of course,” and “I see.” There really was a lot in it. I’d believed it, sitting by myself and computing, like a child anticipating Christmas, how much work I could get done for a couple K a year in amortization of systems and overhead. And with the two of them, I was sure of it. It was a giddy kind of evening. Toward the end, we even began to figure out how quickly we could colonize Mars and launch a fleet of interstellar space liners, with all the working time of the existing people spent working; and then there was a pause and Larry got up and threw back the glass French window and we looked out on his balcony. Twenty stories up, and Los Angeles out in front of us and a thunderstorm brewing over the southern hills. The fresh air cleared my head for a moment and then made me realize, first, that I was sleepy and, second, that I had to read that damned paper in about seven hours.