Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “We’d better call it a day,” said Dr. Ramos.

  Larry started to object, then grinned. “All right for you old fellows,” he said. “Anyway, I want to look at those notes of yours by myself, Chip, if you don’t mind.”

  “Just so you don’t lose them,” I said, and turned to go back to my room and get into my bed and lie with my eyes wide open, smiling to myself, before I fell asleep to dream about fifty weeks a year working at my trade.

  Even so, I woke easily the moment the hotel clock buzzed by my head. We’d fixed it to have breakfast in Larry’s room so I could reclaim my notes and maybe chat for a moment before the morning session began; and when I got to his floor, I saw Dr. Ramos padding toward me. “Morning,” he said. “I just woke up two honeymooners who didn’t appreciate it. Wasn’t Larry’s room 2051?”

  “It’s 2052. The other way.” He grinned and fell into step and told me a fast and quite funny honeymooner joke, timing the punch line just as we reached Larry’s door.

  He didn’t answer my knock. Still laughing, I said, “You try.” But there was no answer to Dr. Ramos’s knock, either.

  I stopped laughing. “He couldn’t have forgotten we were coming, could he?”

  “Try the door, why don’t you?”

  And I did and it opened easily.

  But Larry wasn’t in the room. The door to the bath was standing open and so was the balcony window, and no Larry. His bed was rumpled but empty.

  “I don’t think he’s gone out,” said Dr. Ramos. “Look, his shoes are still there.”

  The balcony wasn’t big enough to hide on, but I walked over and looked at it. Rain-slick and narrow, all that was on it were a couple of soaked deck chairs and some cigarette butts.

  “Looks like he was out here,” I said; and then, feeling melodramatic, I leaned over the rail and looked down; and it wasn’t actually melodramatic after all, because there in the curve of the hotel’s sweeping front, on the rim of a fountain, something was sprawled, and a man was standing by it, shouting at the doorman. It was too early for much noise, and I could hear his voice faintly coming up the two hundred vertical feet between us and what was left of Larry.

  They canceled the morning session but decided to go ahead in the afternoon, and I got into a long, bruising fight with Gordie MacKenzie because he wanted to give his paper when it was scheduled, at three in the afternoon, and I’d been reshuffled into that time and I just wasn’t feeling cheerful enough to let him get away with anything. Not after spending two hours with the coroner’s men and the hotel staff, trying to help them figure out why Larry would have jumped or slipped off the balcony, and especially not after finding out that he had had all my notes in his hand when he jumped and they were now in sticky, sloppy clusters all over Los Angeles County.

  So I was about fed up. I once heard Krafft Ehricke give what I would figure to be a twelve-minute paper in three minutes and forty-five seconds, and I tried to beat his record and pretty nearly made it. Then I threw everything I owned into my suitcase and checked out, figuring to head right out to the airport and get on the first plane going home.

  But the clerk said, “I have a message for you, Mr. Grew. Dr. Ramos asked you not to leave without seeing him.”

  “Thanks,” I said, after a moment of debating whether to do anything about it or not; but as it turned out, I didn’t have to make the decision. Ramos came hurrying toward me across the lobby, his friendly face concerned.

  “I thought you’d be leaving,” he said. “Give me twenty minutes of your time first.”

  I hesitated and he snapped a finger at a bellboy. “Here. Let him take care of your bag and let’s go down and have a cup of coffee.” So I let him lead me to the outdoor patio by the coffee shop, warm and clean now after the rain. I wondered if he recognized the place where Larry had hit, but I’m not sensitive about that sort of thing and apparently neither was he. He really had a commanding presence when he wanted to. He had a waitress beside us before we had quite slid our chairs closer to the table, sent her after coffee and sandwiches without consulting me and started in on me without a pause. “Chip,” he said, “don’t blow it. I’m sorry about your notes. But I don’t want to see you give up.”

  I leaned back in my chair, feeling very weary. “Oh, that I won’t do, Dr. Ramos…”

  “Call me Laszlo.”

  “That I won’t do, Laszlo. As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking about it already.”

  “I knew you would be.”

  “I figure that by cutting out a couple of meetings next week—I can use Larry’s death as an excuse, some way; I’ll use anything, actually—I can reconstruct most of them from memory. Well, maybe not in a week, come to think of it. I’ll have to send for copies of some of the reports. But sooner or later…”

  “Right. That’s what I want to talk to you about.” The girl brought the coffee and sandwiches and he waved her away briskly as soon as she’d set them down. “You see, you’re the man I came here to see.”

  I looked at him. “You’re interested in photometry?”

  “No. Not your paper—your idea. What we were talking about all night, for God’s sake. I didn’t know it was you I wanted until Resnik mentioned you yesterday. But after last night, I was sure.”

  “I already have a job, Dr.—Laszlo.”

  “And I’m not offering you a job.”

  “Then, what…”

  “I’m offering you a chance to make your idea work. I’ve got money, Chip, foundation money looking for something to be spent on. Not space research or cancer research or higher mathematics—they’re funded well enough now. My foundation is looking for projects that don’t fit into the usual patterns. Big ones. Like yours.”

  Well, of course I was excited. It was so good to be taken that seriously.

  “I called the board secretary in Washington first thing—I mean, as soon as they were open there. Of course, I couldn’t give him enough over the phone for a formal commitment. But he’s on the hook, Chip. And the board will go along. There’s a meeting next week and I want you there.”

  “In Washington? I suppose…”

  “Well, no. The foundation’s international, Chip, and this meeting’s at Lake Como. But we’ll pick up the tab, of course, and you can get a lot more done there, where your office isn’t going to call you…”

  “But, I mean, I’m not sure…”

  “We’ll back you. Everything you need. A staff. A headquarters. We’ve got the beginnings of a facility in Ames, Iowa; you’ll have to go out there, of course. But it shouldn’t be more than, oh, say, a couple days a month. And”—he grinned, a little apologetically—“I know it won’t mean anything to you. After you’ve got one medal on your chest, the rest aren’t too exciting. But it’ll look nice in your Who’s Who entry; and, anyway, the secretary has already authorized me to tell you that you’re invited to accept appointment to a trusteeship.”

  I began to need the coffee and I took a long swallow. “You’re moving too fast for me, Laszlo,” I said.

  “The trustees meet in Flagstaff; they’ve got a country-club deal there. You’ll like it. Of course, it’s only six times a year. But it’s worth it, Chip. I mean, we have our politics like everything else; and if you’re a trustee, you swing a lot of weight.”

  And he prattled on, and I sat there listening, and it was all coming true, everything I’d hoped for; and the next week in Italy, in a great shiny room with an enormous window looking out over Lake Como, I found myself a full-fledged project director, with status as a trustee, honorary membership on the priorities committee and a staff of forty-one.

  Next week we dedicate the Lawrence Resnik Memorial Building in Ames—the name was my idea, but everybody agreed—and although it’s been a hell of a year, I can see where we’ll really make progress now. It still seems a little incongruous that I should be putting in so much time on managerial work and conferences. But when I mentioned it to Laszlo the other day in Montreal, he gave me the grin and an approving
look. “I wondered how long it would take you to think of that,” he chuckled. “But it’s best to make haste slowly, and you can see for yourself it’s paying off. Have I told you what a good impression your lecture tour made?”

  “Thanks. Yes, as a matter of fact, you did. Anyway, once we get the Resnik installation going, there’ll be a little more time.”

  “Damn right! And don’t say I told you”—he winked—“but remember what I told you about a possible appointment to the President’s Commission on Interdisciplinary Affairs? Well, it’s not official. But it’s definite. We’ve already taken a suite at the Shoreham for you. You’ll be using it a lot. We’ve even fitted up a room as an office; you can keep your notes and things there between trips.”

  Well, I told him, of course, that if he meant the notes I had been trying to reconstruct, they didn’t require all that much room. Not by quite a lot, since I haven’t in all truth got very far.

  I think I would have, somehow or other, with a little luck. But I haven’t actually been very lucky. Poor Honeyman, for instance—I’d already written him for another copy of the report he’d made up for me when I heard that his yawl had capsized in a storm. They didn’t even find his body for a week. And nobody seems to know where he kept his copy of the report, if he ever made one. And…

  Well, there was that funny thing Resnik said the day he died, about how the world conspired against anybody who’d ever done anything. And then he said, “I’m not even sure it’s this world.”

  I figured out what the joke was—that is, if it was a joke. I mean, just for a hypothesis, suppose Somebody didn’t want us to get ahead as fast as we could, Somebody from another world…

  That’s silly. That is, I think it’s silly.

  But if that line of thinking isn’t silly, then it must be something quite the opposite of silly; by which I mean it must be dangerous. Just recently, I’ve almost been run over twice by crazy drivers in front of my own house. And then there’s the air taxi I missed and saw crash on take-off before my eyes.

  Just for the fun of it, there are two things I’d like to know. One is where the foundation gets its money and why. The other—and I just might see if I can get an answer to this one, next time I’m in L.A.—is whether there really were a pair of honeymooners in room 2051 that morning, to be accidentally awakened by Laszlo Ramos just about the time that Larry was on his way down twenty flights.

  THE DAY THE MARTIANS CAME

  First published in Harlan Ellison’s huge, groundbreaking anthology of original stories, Dangerous Visions, in 1967, this is not, on the surface, a groundbreaking story. However, as many have observed before now, the devil—or God, if you prefer—is in the details.

  The occasion of the arrival of beings from another planet—what a grand idea. What a momentous occasion. Indeed, Frederik Pohl wrote a whole book about what might happen in many spheres of life on Earth if and when that should happen. It was titled The Day the Martians Came.

  It’s an outstanding book, and you should read it. This is the final chapter of the book, but it stands entirely alone as a short story. When a work of science fiction—or any fiction—is judged, the validity of that work rests largely on whether the author has made the people believable. Because the people are our touchstone. How would we react in the situation of the story?

  In those terms, this is a real gem.

  There were two cots in every room of the motel, besides the usual number of beds, and Mr. Mandala, the manager, had converted the rear section of the lobby into a men’s dormitory. Nevertheless he was not satisfied and was trying to persuade his colored bellmen to clean out the trunk room and put cots in that too. “Now, please, Mr. Mandala,” the bell captain said, speaking loudly over the noise in the lounge, “you know we’d do it for you if we could. But it cannot be, because first we don’t have any other place to put those old TV sets you want to save and because second we don’t have any more cots.”

  “You’re arguing with me, Ernest. I told you to quit arguing with me,” said Mr. Mandala. He drummed his fingers on the registration desk and looked angrily around the lobby. There were at least forty people in it, talking, playing cards and dozing. The television set was mumbling away in a recap of the NASA releases, and on the screen Mr. Mandala could see a picture of one of the Martians, gazing into the camera and weeping large, gelatinous tears.

  “Quit that,” ordered Mr. Mandala, turning in time to catch his bellman looking at the screen. “I don’t pay you to watch TV. Go see if you can help out in the kitchen.”

  “We been in the kitchen, Mr. Mandala. They don’t need us.”

  “Go when I tell you to go, Ernest! You too, Berzie.” He watched them go through the service hall and wished he could get rid of some of the crowd in the lounge as easily. They filled every seat and the overflow sat on the arms of the chairs, leaned against the walls and filled the booths in the bar, which had been closed for the past two hours because of the law. According to the registration slips they were nearly all from newspapers, wire services, radio and television networks and so on, waiting to go to the morning briefing at Cape Kennedy. Mr. Mandala wished morning would come. He didn’t like so many of them cluttering up his lounge, especially since he was pretty sure a lot of them were not even registered guests.

  On the television screen a hastily edited tape was now showing the return of the Algonquin Nine space probe to Mars but no one was watching it. It was the third time that particular tape had been repeated since midnight and everybody had seen it at least once; but when it changed to another shot of one of the Martians, looking like a sad dachshund with elongated seal-flippers for limbs, one of the poker players stirred and cried: “I got a Martian joke! Why doesn’t a Martian swim in the Atlantic Ocean?”

  “It’s your bet,” said the dealer.

  “Because he’d leave a ring around it,” said the reporter, folding his cards. No one laughed, not even Mr. Mandala, although some of the jokes had been pretty good. Everybody was beginning to get tired of them, or perhaps just tired.

  Mr. Mandala had missed the first excitement about the Martians, because he had been asleep. When the day manager phoned him, waking him up, Mr. Mandala had thought, first, that it was a joke and, second, that the day man was out of his mind; after all, who would care if the Mars probe had come back with some kind of animals? Or even if they weren’t animals, exactly. When he found out how many reservations were coming in over the teletype he realized that some people did in fact care. However, Mr. Mandala didn’t take much interest in things like that. It was nice the Martians had come, since they had filled his motel, and every other motel within a hundred miles of Cape Kennedy, but when you had said that you had said everything about the Martians that mattered to Mr. Mandala.

  On the television screen the picture went to black and was replaced by the legend Bulletin from NBC News. The poker game paused momentarily.

  The lounge was almost quiet as an invisible announcer read a new release from NASA: “Dr. Hugo Bache, the Fort Worth, Texas, veterinarian who arrived late this evening to examine the Martians at the Patrick Air Force Base reception center, has issued a preliminary report which has just been released by Colonel Eric T. ‘Happy’ Wingerter, speaking for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.”

  A wire-service man yelled, “Turn it up!” There was a convulsive movement around the set. The sound vanished entirely for a moment, then blasted out:

  “…Martians are vertebrate, warm-blooded and apparently mammalian. A superficial examination indicates a generally low level of metabolism, although Dr. Bache states that it is possible that this is in some measure the result of their difficult and confined voyage through 137,000,000 miles of space in the specimen chamber of the Algonquin Nine spacecraft. There is no, repeat no, evidence of communicable disease, although standing sterilization precautions are…”

  “Hell he says,” cried somebody, probably a stringer from CBS. “Walter Cronkite had an interview with the Mayo Clinic
that…”

  “Shut up!” bellowed a dozen voices, and the TV became audible again:

  “…completes the full text of the report from Dr. Hugo Bache as released at this hour by Colonel ‘Happy’ Wingerter.” There was a pause; then the announcer’s voice, weary but game, found its place and went on with a recap of the previous half-dozen stories. The poker game began again as the announcer was describing the news conference with Dr. Sam Sullivan of the Linguistic Institute of the University of Indiana, and his conclusions that the sounds made by the Martians were indeed some sort of a language.

  What nonsense, thought Mr. Mandala, drugged and drowsy. He pulled a stool over and sat down, half asleep.