The Wonder Effect

by Frederik Pohl

  The rest of his sentence and Sneak-Punch’s angry reply were drowned out by a further flight of jets overhead, and then the wham-wham-wham of interceptor missiles blowing simulated attackers out of the sky.

  Somehow, heaven knew how, Walter Chase managed to sneak away, inching through the packed rows of benches. As soon as the All Clear siren toots began he was up and out, ignoring the freshman warden’s puppy-like yaps that they should remain in their seats until the front benches had been emptied-

  Routine. It was all strictly routine.

  Out on the campus, Chase headed for the airport in earnest, and was delighted to find that his flight was still on time. How lucky he was, he thought, with more pride than gratitude. “What are you, sir?” asked the robot baggage-checker, and he said, “Washington,” with pleasure. He was on his way. He was headed for Washington, where Dr. Hujes of The Cement Research and Development Institute would assign him to his job, doubtless the first rung of a dizzying climb to wealth and fame. He was a young man on his way. Or so he thought. He did not know that he was only a neutron ambling toward events.

  II

  Arturo Denzer, in the same sense, was a nucleus. He knew no more about it than Walter Chase.

  Denzer woke to the rays of a rising sun and the snarl of his wake-up clock. He took a vitamin capsule, an aspirin tablet, a thyroid injection; a mildly euphoric jolt of racemic amphetamine sulphate; caffeine via three cups of black coffee with sucaryl; and nicotine via a chain of nonfiltering filter-tip cigarettes. He then left his apartment for the offices of Nature’s Way Magazine, which he edited.

  June’s blossom was in the air, and so was the tingle of the All-Star Game Number One. The elevator operator said to him respectfully, “Who d’ya like in the All-Star game, Mr. Denzer?” Denzer turned the operator’s conversation circuit off with a handwave. He didn’t feel like talking to a robot at least until the aspirin began to work.

  Absent-mindedly he waved a cab to him and climbed in. Only after it took off did he notice, to his dismay, that he had picked a Black-and-White fleet hack. They were salty and picturesque-and couldn’t be turned off. The damned thing would probably call him “Mac.”

  “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” the cab asked genially, and Denzer winched. Trapped, he drummed his ringers on the armrest and stared at the Jefferson Memorial in its sea of amusement rides and hot-dog stands. “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” it asked again, genially and relentlessly. It would go on asking until he answered.

  “Yanks,” Denzer grunted. Next time he’d watch what he was doing and get a sleek, black Rippington Livery with a respectful BBC accent.

  “Them bums?” groaned the cab derisively. “Watcha think Craffany’s up to?”

  Craffany was the Yankee manager. Denzer knew that he had benched three of his star players over the last weekend-indeed, it was impossible to avoid knowing it. Denzer struck out wildly: “Saving them for the All-Star, I guess.”

  The cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess, Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled Hockins and Waller so it’d look like he

  was saving ‘em for the All-Star. Ya notice Fliederwick was 0 for 11 in the first game with Navy?”

  Denzer gritted his teeth and slumped down in the seat. After a moment the cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess is Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled. . . .” It went through it twice more before Denzer and his hangover could stand no more.

  “I hate baseball,” he said distinctly.

  The cab said at once, “Well, it’s a free country. Say, ya see Braden’s speech on the C.S.B. last night?”

  “I did.”

  “He really gave it to them, right? You got to watch those traitors. Course, like Crockhouse says, where we going to get the money?”

  “Print it, I imagine,” snarled Denzer.

  “Figgers don’t lie. We already got a gross national debt of $87,912.02 per person, you know that? Tack on the cost of the Civilian Shelters and whaddya got?”

  Denzer’s headache was becoming cataclysmic. He rubbed his temples feverishly.

  “Figgers don’t lie. We already got a gross national ...”

  Desperate situations require desperate measures. “I hate p-politics too,” he said, stuttering a little. Normally he didn’t like smutty talk.

  The cab broke off and growled: “Watch ya language, Mac. This is a respectable fleet.”

  The cab corkscrewed down to a landing in North Arlington-Alex and said, “Here y’are, Mac.” Denzer paid it and stepped from the windy terrace of the Press House onto a crowded westbound corridor. He hoped in a way that the cab wouldn’t turn him in to a gossip columnist. In another way he didn’t care.

  Around him buzzed the noise of the All-Star and the C.S.B. “. . . Craffany . . . $87,912.02, and at least $6,175.50 for Shelters ... Foxy Framish and Little Joe

  Fliederwick . . . well, this is next year . . . nah, you sneak-punch ‘em a couple thousand missiles over the Pole and... needs a year in the minors.”

  “Hello, Denzer,” someone said. It was Maggie Frome, his assistant.

  “Hello, Maggie,” he said, and added automatically: “Who do you like in the All-Star game?”

  In a low, ferocious voice she muttered: “You can take the All-Star game, tie it up in a b-b-b-brassiere and dump it in a Civilian Shelter. I am sick of the subject. Both subjects.”

  He flushed at her language and protested: “Really, Maggie!”

  “Sorry,” she grunted, sounding as though she didn’t mean it. He contrasted her surly intransigence with his own reasoned remarks to the cab and tolerantly shook his head. Of course, he could have been taken the wrong way... He began to worry.

  They stepped off together at the Nature’s Way offices. Sales & Promotion was paralyzed. Instead of rows of talkers at rows of desks, phoning prospects out of city directories and high-pressuring them into subscriptions, the department was curdled into little knots of people cheerfully squabbling about the C.S.B. and the All-Stars. Denzer sighed and led the girl on into Transmission. The gang should have been tuning up the works, ready to ,shoot the next issue into seven million home facsimile receivers. Instead, the gang was talking All-Stars and C.S.B. It was the same in Typography, the same in Layout, the same in Editorial.

  The door closed behind them, isolating their twin office from the babble. Blessed silence. “Maggie,” he said, “I have a headache. Will you please work on the final paste-ups and cutting for me? There isn’t anything that should give you any trouble.”

  “Okay, Denzer,” she said, and retreated to her half of the office with the magazine dummy. Denzer felt a momentary pang of conscience. The issue was way overset and cutting it was a stinker of a job to pass on to Maggie Frome. Still, that was what you had assistants for, wasn’t it?

  He studied her, covertly, as she bent over the dummy. She was a nice-looking girl, even if she was a hangover from the administration of President Danton and his Century of the Common Woman. Maggie’s mother had been something of an integrationist leader in Sandusky, Ohio, and had flocked to Washington as one mote in Danton’s crackpot horde, bringing her subteenage daughter Maggie. No doubt there had been a father, but Maggie never mentioned him. The mother had died in a car crash that looked like suicide after Danton lost all fifty-four states in his bid for re-‘ election, but by then Maggie was a pert teenager who moved in with cousins in Arlington-Alex and she stayed on. Must just like Washington, Denzer thought. Not because of Female Integration, though. Danton’s Century of the Common Woman had lasted just four years.

  He winced a little as he remembered her coarseness of speech. She was round and brown-haired. You couldn’t have everything.

  Denzer leaned back and shut his eyes, the hubbub outside the office was just barely audible for a moment-some red-hot argument over the Gottshalk Committee’s Shelter Report or Fliederwick’s R.B.I. had swelled briefly to the shrieking stage-and then died away again. Heretically he wondered what the point
was in getting excited over baseball or the building or nonbuilding of air-raid shelters capable of housing every American all the time. One was as remote from reality as the other.

  “Sorry, Denzer.”

  He sat up, banging his knee on his desk.

  “Lousy staff work, I’m afraid. Here’s the Aztec Cocawine piece and no lab verification on the test results.” She was waving red-crayoned galleys in his face.

  He looked at the scrawling red question-mark over the neat columns of type with distaste. Nature’s Way promised its seven million subscribers that it would not sell them anything that would kill them; or, at least, that if it did kill them nobody would be able to hang it on the product directly. At substantial expense, they maintained a facility to prove this point. It was called The Nature’s Way National Impartial Research Foundation. “So call the lab,” he said.

  “No good, Denzer. Front-office memo last month. Lab verifications must be in writing -with notary’s seal on hand before the issue goes to bed.”

  “Cripes,” he protested, “that means somebody’s got to go clear over to Lobby House.” He did not meet her eye. Going over to Lobby House was a worthwhile break in the day’s routine; the free snack-bar and free bar-bar the lobbies maintained was up to the best expense-account standards, and everyone enjoyed talking to the kooks in the lab. They were so odd.

  “I’ll go if you want, Denzer,” she said, startling him into looking at her.

  “But the issue-“

  “Did most of it last night, Denzer. The Aztec story is all that’s left.”

  “We’ll both go,” he said, rising. She had earned it; he needed a bromo and a shot of B-l vitagunk in the Lobby House snack-bar; and since there would be two of them in the cab he had a ruse for cutting out the cab’s talk about All-Stars and the C.S.B.

  The ruse was this: As soon as the cab took off he flung his arms around her and bore her back against the arm rest.

  The cab chuckled and winked at them with its rear-view lens, as it was programmed to do. They discussed proofreading, the vacation sked and the choice of lead commercials for the next issue of Nature’s Way

  in soft whispers into each other’s ears all the way to Lobby House, while the cab winked and chuckled at them every fifteen seconds.

  The knocks on the 93rd floor were under the care of a sort of half-breed race of semi-kooks. These were science majors who had minored in journalism... or in marrying rich . . . and thus wandered into press agentry for scientific concerns. As liaison men between Nature’s Way and the test-tube manipulators the semi-kooks occupied an uncertain middle ground. It sometimes made them belligerent. Denzer and the girl were let in to see the Director of Bennington’s Division, a Dr. Bennington, and Denzer said: “We came for the Aztec Cocawine certification.”

  Dr. Bennington boomed: “Damn right! Coming right up! Say, who’s gonna take it in the Game?” He thumped a button on his desk and in a moment a tall, stooped youth with a proudly beaked nose swept in and threw a document on his desk. “Thanks, Valen-dora. Lessee here, um, yeah. Says it’s harmless to the nerves, ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, all signed and stamped. Anything else today, Arturo? Gland extract, fake a heroin prescription, shot of Scotch?”

  The beaked youth said loftily: “Our findings are set forth precisely, Dr. Bennington. The fluid contains an alkaloid which appreciably eroded the myelin sheaths of the autonomic nerve trunks.”

  Denzer blanched, but the semi-kook administrator agreed carelessly, “Right, that’s what I said. It’s that word ‘appreciably.’ Anything less than ‘markedly,’ we write it down as negative.” He slipped it in an envelope that was already marked Confidential Findings, Aztec Wine of Coca Corporation, Sponsor, and sailed it across to Denzer. “Well, what about C.S.B., boy? They gonna get us dug in before it’s too late?” He made them promise to stop in at the snack-bar or bar-bar before leaving the building, then offered them a drink out of his private stock. They refused, of course. That was just his way of saying good-bye. It was the only way he knew to end a conversation.

  With the certification in his pocket and the issue locked up, Denzer began to feel as though he might live, especially if he made it to the B-l vitagunk dispenser in the snack-bar. He took Maggie Frome by the arm and was astonished to feel her shaking.

  “Sorry, Denzer. I’m not crying, really. If somebody’s going to sell crazy-making dope to the public, why shouldn’t it be you and me? We’re no better than anybody else, d-d-damn’it!”

  He said uncomfortably, “Maybe a drink’s not such a bad idea. What do you say?”

  “I’d love it,” she sobbed. But then the sirens began to wail and they said, “Damn it,” and “Oh, dear” -respectively, she did and he did-and they took their bearings by the signs and made for the shelters. Under Lobby House was nothing like enough space, so the air-raid shelter was the interior parts of the 10th through 85th floors, away from the flying glass of the curtain walls but not too near the elevator shafts. It was not a bad shelter, actually. It was proof against any bomb that the world had ever known, up to say, early 1943.

  There was plenty of room but not enough benches. Maggie and Denzer found a place on the floor where they could put their backs against a wall, and he allowed her to lean against Ms shoulder. She wasn’t such a bad kid, he thought sympathetically, especially as the perfume in her hair was pleasant in his nostrils. There wasn’t anything really wrong with Female Integration. Maggie wasn’t a nut. Take baseball. Why, that was the Integrationist’s major conquest, when women demanded and got equal representation on every major-league team in spite of the fact that they could not throw or run on competitive terms with men. They said that if all the teams had the same number of women it wouldn’t matter. And it hadn’t. And Integrationists were still crowing over the victory; and yet Maggie had refused to fall into the All-Star hysteria.

  A roar like an outboard motor in the crown of your hat shook the building; A. A. “carpet” cannon laying a sheet of sudden death for missiles across the sky above them. Denzer relaxed. His headache was almost gone. He inclined his head to rest his cheek against Maggie’s hair. Even with a hangover, it had been pleasant in the cab with his arms around her. He had been kind of looking forward to the return trip. If Denzer were indeed a nucleus, as in a way he was, he was beginning to feel a certain tugging of binding energy toward certain other nuclear particles.

  As soon as the noise stopped, he thought he would speak to her.

  The noise stopped. The voices of the men beside them bellowed into the sudden quiet: “-damned foolish idea of Therapeutic War was exploded ten years ago! And that’s what we’d be if your idiot Crockhouse was in-exploded!”

  And the man next to him: “At least Crockhouse wouldn’t have us sitting ha these fool imitation shelters! He’d do something.”

  “Whadya think Braden wants, for God’s sake? Not these things. He’s right on the record for C.S.B.”

  And then Maggie Frome, breathing fire, her head no longer resting on Denzer’s shoulder: “What the hell is so great about C.S.B.? Shelters, no shelters, can’t you get it through your head that if this keeps up we’re dead? Dear God above, deliver me from fools, baseball players and p-p-politicians!”

  Denzer tried to look as though he’d never met her; he was white-faced. Round, yes, sweet-smelling, yes, warm-but how could he ever get used to her dirty talk?

  III

  If Denzer was a nucleus and Walter Chase a neutron, what can we call the President of the United States? He played a part. Without him nothing could happen. Perhaps what he did was to shape the life of the neutron before fission happened; in that sense one could call him a “moderator.” This was an apt term for President Braden.

  On this bright June morning in Washington-not Arlington-Alex or the bedroom municipalities in Maryland but the little old Federal District itself-the President of the United States held what was still called a “press” conference. He was late. The cathode-tube “newspapermen” grumbled a little as Secret Service m
en frisked them, but it was habit. They were used to being frisked, ever since that fanatic Alaskan nationalist publisher emptied a .32 at then-President Hutzmeyer in ‘83. And they were used to now-President Braden being late.

  They rose when President Braden came in. As usual, he protested in his pleasant adopted border-South accent: “Please, ladies, please, gentlemen, don’t bother-“ So they sat down and smiled, and waited while Braden arranged some papers on his desk. He always did that. He never referred to them during the session, because he didn’t have to, but every week there was the minute or two of silence in the room while the President, his rimless glasses gleaming studiously, pursed his lips over the documents in their red, blue and cream-colored folders.

  He looked up and beamed.

  Unobtrusive camera-eyes mounted flush with the walls of the conference room began to record. The elephantine Giuseppe von Bortoski, N.B.C. Washington bureau chief, incomparably senior correspondent, was privileged to lead off. He did: “Good morning, Mr. President. Do you have a statement for us today?”

  “Nothing prepared, Joseph. It’s been a quiet week, hasn’t it?”

  Von Bortoski said solemnly, “Not for Craffany,” and everybody roared. Von Bortoski waited out his laugh and said: “But seriously, Mr. President, is there any comment on the radar picket situation?”

  The President paused, then looked faintly surprised. “I didn’t know there was a ‘situation,’ Joseph. Our radar picket vessels off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts have been pulled in approximately two hundred miles. They all have the new microradar; they don’t have to be so far out. This gives us a gratifying economy, since the closer we can pull them in the fewer ships we need to stick out there on picket duty. Is that what you wanted to know, Joseph?”