The Early Pohl

by Frederik Pohl

  "You've had him long enough," the nurse broke in. "I have a few words to say,"

  "No, wait—" Duane protested. But the captain was grinning broadly. He moved toward the door.

  "Later," he said over his shoulder. "There'll be plenty of time." The door closed behind him. Duane turned to the girl.

  He shook his head again. The cloud was lifting. He could almost remember everything again; things were beginning to come into focus. This girl, for instance—

  She noticed his motion. "How's your head, Peter?" she asked solicitously. "Andrias hit you with that awful old bullet-gun. I tried to stop him, but all I could do was jar his arm. Oh, Peter, I was so afraid when I saw you fall!"

  "You probably saved my life," Peter said soberly. "Andrias struck me as a pretty good shot." He tried to grin.

  The girl frowned. "Peter," she said, "I'm sorry if I seemed rude, before—the last time you were here. It was just that I. . . . Well, you didn't remember me. I couldn't understand."

  Peter stared at her. Yes—he should remember her. He did, only—

  "Perhaps this will help you," the girl said. She rummaged in a pocket of her uniform, brought something out that was tiny and glittering. "I don't wear it on duty, Peter. But I guess this is an exception. . . ."

  Peter pushed himself up on one elbow, trying to make out what she was doing. She was slipping the small thing on a finger. . . . A ring. An engagement ring!

  "Oh—" said Peter. And suddenly everything clicked; he remembered; he could recall . . . everything. That second blow on his head had undone the harm of the first one.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed, stood up, reached out hungry arms for the girl.

  "Of course I remember," he said as she came into the circle of his arms. "The ring on your finger. I ought to remember—I put it there!"

  And for a long time after there was no need for words.

  Meanwhile World War II continued. I was not too pleased about it.

  My dissatisfaction was partly with the war itself, in which the bad guys seemed to win all the battles, partly with myself for not being part of it.

  Around the office we told each other that we were, after all, contributing very significantly to the war effort. We were supplying morale-boosting relaxation to our brave boys on the combat fronts, not to mention Rosie the Riveter and the other heroes and heroines of the aircraft plants. Every issue we put out was jam-packed with gung-ho exhortations to buy war bonds, keep military secrets ("Loose Lips Can Sink a Ship"), lay off the black market and avoid unnecessary traveling ("Is This Trip Necessary?"). I doubt any of us really believed it.

  Paper was getting short. There was plenty of it at the mills, but the mills were in Canada. All the transportation that would normally have brought it to our presses was otherwise engaged. Every month we killed a couple of titles on the Popular list.

  Futurians were disappearing into the armed services and returning on leave, looking quite different in uniform. Dirk Wylie became an M.P. David A. Kyle was a sergeant in the Armored Corps. Jack Gillespie went off into the Merchant Marine. I felt I, personally, should be doing something, and so I joined a paramilitary thing called the City Patrol Corps. The object of the exercise was to produce hardened combat troops to guard the New York docks against spies and saboteurs. We were promised real .45s to wear on our hips, even uniforms, I never got quite that far. All I did was close-order drill, from 7 to 8:30 every Tuesday night, for a couple of months during the nice weather.

  I had another problem, which was that my marriage to Doë had come apart.* When our lease expired in Knickerbocker Village we split up, Doë back to her parents' home, me to a hotel near Times Square. It was all getting pretty complicated, and so around the end of 1942 I decided to go to be a soldier.

  It turned out not to be as easy as that.

  The War Department had decided to regulate the flow of warm bodies into uniform by suspending voluntary enlistments. You had to be drafted. You could volunteer to be drafted—in my case, to be reclassified 1A—but I was still in Local Board No. 1, where the hunger for fresh meat was still being met by youngsters from Mott Street and Pell.

  In some ways I think of the next couple of months as my finest hour. First I requested reclassification. Then I demanded it. Then I went down to my draft board, week after week, and pounded on the table and insisted they take me. All over America young men were being remorselessly torn from their studies, their jobs and their families. And here was I, desperate to go, and they wouldn't let me. I felt myself a spokesman for all the reluctant heroes . . . and besides, I was enjoying it.

  My father was getting rapidly rich as the owner of several small machine shops making aircraft parts. He tried to talk me out of it. Brooklyn Tech had taught me all about machine tools; he could have given me a job that would have kept me a civilian forever, at three or four times the pay Popular was giving me. But that wasn't where the action was. I had been talking against fascism since I was sixteen years old, and I didn't like my own image of myself as long as I let it stay talk.

  When I consider my military career, I am sure I could have damaged Hitler at least that much by remaining a civilian. But it didn't feel that way.

  Moreover, there were additional psychosexual complications. I had become interested in a pretty young assistant editor at Popular named Dorothy LesTina.† When I told her of my intention to join up she decided she would join the WACs. That seemed very fitting and nice; but then it turned out

  * The first such experience for me, but not the last. I have been married a lot. Cyril Kornbluth used to say, "Everybody does it, but Fred marries them,"

  † We were married in Paris, just at the end of the war.

  that the WAC was blood-hungry for her and snatched her away in no time at all, while Local Board No. 1 was still dawdling over me. So I escorted her to Penn Station and kissed her good-by under the big Buy War Bonds sign, where the troops bade their final farewells—only she was the troops. I was the sorrowing civilian left behind her. Then Dick Wilson went off, and shortly thereafter his wife Jessica joined the WACs, and in her turn I escorted Jessica to Penn Station and kissed her good-by . . . I tell you, it was enough to make a hog weep.

  But finally they got around to me, and I was sworn in—on April Fools' Day, 1932.

  As a sort of going-away present Popular gave me a check for a new short story called Darkside Destiny, and the rate was a full penny a word. I would like to include it here. For that matter, I would like to read it. The magazines died right about that time, slain by lack of paper. The Canadian editions limped on for a few issues, and Dark-side Destiny appeared in one of them. But I don't have a copy. The story has never been published in the United States at all.

  The other day I had a visit from a young friend who has just completed his basic training, class of 1975. He reported that three men in his company had committed suicide and a batch had deserted. They must be doing something different these days. In the early part of 1943 it wasn't that way. I loved it,

  It was not really all that lovable, I suppose, but I didn't mind even the chickenshit. The first few days were intermittently nasty. A lieutenant greeted us at Camp Upton, smiling falsely and promising us speedy classification and jobs worthy of our skills; whereupon they set me to cleaning latrines. The second day I got my AGCT score and the classification clerk allowed that it was real nice, and entitled me pretty much to pick my branch of service; whereupon they put me on night KP. The third day I turned in my choices. Send me anywhere but to the Air Force, I said, secure in my privilege. Field Artillery, Armored Corps—even the Infantry would be all right. Whereupon they sent me to the Air Corps.

  Now that I think it over, they did me no harm. What I wanted was both combat and a commission, and as a glasses-wearer of long standing I didn't see how that could happen in the Air Force. It didn't. But if I had got my druthers I suspect that the other thing I would have got was killed.

  Air Force basic training was in Miami Beac
h, not as glittery by far as it has since become but still full of resort hotels. None of them had any guests. Transportation priorities kept the tourists home. So the hotel owners made a deal with the Air Force, and we were in them, six or eight to a room, but with the pools and the beaches and the Florida sun thrown in free. We fell out at a quarter to five in the morning, with the stars still bright in the sky. We marched, our voices raised in obligatory song, all up and down the beach. Aircraft-recognition classes in preempted movie theaters on Lincoln Road. Physical training on a golf course. Obstacle courses and bivouacs up with the rattlesnakes on the sand dunes where Motel Row now stands. We learned to throw hand grenades, and fired thousands of rounds of small-arms ammunition out over the Atlantic. It lasted about two months, and the worst thing about it was that then I had to leave.

  Why did I like it? Well, after you've edited G-8 and His Battle Aces for a year or two a lot of strange things begin to look good to you. But the big thing was that I had no responsibilities. I was told what to do at every step, when to get up, how to make my bed, when to eat, what to wear. It was a total vacation from responsibility, and now that I think of it about the only one I've ever had.

  They sent me off to technical training as a weather observer, along with my good friend Joe Winters and a gaggle of other new PFCs. The place for that was Chanute Field, Illinois, an air base with a population of 30,000 attached to a town, Rantoul, Illinois, with a population of 1,500.1 still felt I had found a home in the Army. I enjoyed learning about Bjerknes's air masses and isobars, and with the promotion I now had $54 a month to spend. Besides, wives were allowed at Chanute Field. I didn't happen to have one at the moment, but Joe did, and Dorothy Winters turned out to be a lovely lady with a quick brain and a marvelous sense of humor.

  The other great thing about Chanute Field was that Jack Williamson was there too. Jack had already gone through the weather-observer class, served a year or two in the field and come back to take advanced training as a forecaster. I was impressed. I was also delighted. Jack Williamson is an old and dear friend with whom I have written a number of books, and hope to go on doing so indefinitely. I am always pleased to see him, but never more than at Chanute Field.

  When I graduated from Chanute I was assigned to actual weather observing at a real flying field, in Enid, Oklahoma. That wasn't a bad place, either. Oklahoma City was only a light-year away by slow train. I got down there for an occasional weekend, saw my first oil well and my first Indian, and once in a while caught a road company ballet or opera performance. Between times there was the town of Enid, full of girls. The base was full of girls too, with a fine WAC detachment. One of them was a lovely blonde named Zenobia, also a weather observer, smart and funny. We spent a lot of time together, exploring the resources of Enid.

  And I even found some time to write.

  One of the stories I finished while at Enid was a novelette called Highwayman of the Void. It is not a collaboration—for better or worse, it is all mine—but for some reason I put Dirk Wylie's by-line on it. I had done that once or twice before by arrangement with Dirk, mostly to keep my masters at Popular from knowing how many stories I was buying from myself. That wasn't the reason this time, but I don't remember what the reason was, and Dirk is no longer alive to ask.

  Anyway, I mailed it off to Malcolm Reiss at Planet Stones. I got his check in time for Christmas 1943, and he published it in his issue for Fall 1944.

  Highwayman of the Void

  DIRK WYLIE

  I

  Steve Nolan was three years dead, pyro-burned in the black space off Luna when a prison break failed. But Nolan had a job to do. Nolan came back.

  Where the Avalon Trail bends across Annihilation Range, a thousand icy miles from Pluto's northern stem, Nolan stopped and closed the intake valve of his helmet. Count five seconds, and he unhooked the exhausted tank of oxygen; count ten more and it was spinning away, end over end over Pluto's frozen surface, and a new tank was already in place. He slipped the pressure valve and inhaled deeply of the new air.

  He'd come ten miles by the phosphorescent figures on the night-stone markers beside the trail. Fifteen more miles to go.

  His cold black eyes stared absently at the east, where the pseudo-life of the great Plutonian crystals rolled in a shifting, tinkling sea. He noted the water-avid crystals, and noted the three crablike crawlers that munched a solitary clump of metallic grass. You don't walk, talk and breathe after a Tri-planet Lawman has declared you dead unless you note everything around you and react to what may be dangerous.

  But he was looking beyond the familiar Plutonian drear, to the eastern horizon where faint lights gleamed in the dark. That was Port Avalon. That was where Steve Nolan was bound.

  Woller was in Avalon. The Alan Woller who had made him an outlaw, roaming the star trails from Pluto to the Satellites, never daring to return to the inner worlds where Tri-planet kept order.

  There was a slow pulse mounting in Nolan's throat as he walked on, savagely kicking a crab-shelled crawler from his path. He'd seen the newssheet, months old, in a rickety old port on one of the Satellites—Io? Ganymede?—when he was down to forty credits and a friendly bartender. It hadn't been much of an item. The kind a country editor throws into his finance column when he unexpectedly loses an ad and has to fill space.

  "The new shipping company, which expects to do much for improving commercial relations with the outer planets, is headed by Alan Woller, formerly with the Interplanetary Telenews Company. Woller is remembered as the prosecution's star witness in the trial of Steve Nolan, the Junta agent indicted for treason three years ago. Nolan, sentenced to life imprisonment in Luna Cave, was killed while attempting to escape.

  The new company is capitalized at over a billion dollars, and has already taken options on bases in. . . ."

  The drink had drained out of Steve Nolan when he saw that. And the bartender had been too friendly for his own good. He'd been a soft touch for five hundred credits.

  That had been rocket fare to Pluto for Nolan.

  He felt the drumming with the soles of his feet, a hard, grinding sensation against his metal boots. He jumped off the trail quickly and whirled to watch for the approaching skid.

  It was moving slowly, chugging along on a single jet.

  Clogged feeders, Nolan thought as he felt the uneven vibrations. If he doesn't watch out he'll have a backblast.

  The skid faltered past him, no faster than he could run. He looked away from the incandescent flare of the one tail jet, then that stopped too. Tall as a man, a dozen feet long, the skid lay waiting on the trail.

  Waiting for Steve Nolan?

  Anything was better than walking. Nolan walked up to the skid, not fast, and kicked solidly at the entrance. It slid open with a creaking noise and he was in the tank, sealing the outer door behind him.

  The inner door didn't open. A female voice from a speaker said, "Who are you?"

  Steve waited till he saw the pressure and temperature gauges shoot up to normal, then swung open his faceplate. "Matthews is the name," he lied easily, out of three long years of practice. "I thought you were waiting for me. Say the word and I'll get out again if I was wrong."

  "Oh, no." The girl's voice hesitated a second. "What are you doing out here?"

  "I'm on my way to Avalon, out of Aylette. A skid bus took me across the Ice Plains, then I caught a lift on a prospector's skid. He turned off ten miles back and I decided to walk the rest of the way."

  "Do you know anything about skids? Mine isn't working very well. I'll pay you if you can—"

  "I'm not a mechanic," Nolan said wearily.

  "Oh. Then you can't fix it"

  "I didn't say that. You can't pay me for it. I'll take a lift to Avalon, though."

  "A lift? But I don't know you from Adam."

  Nolan sighed. "Lady, I don't know you either. Believe me, all I want is a ride. It'll take me four hours to walk to Avalon. I can't spare the time if I can help it." He waited a second. No answe
r. He shrugged and finished his speech. "I'll make you a proposition. Let me in and I'll fix your jets. We'll be in Avalon in twenty minutes, I'll get out and we'll never see each other again. Don't let me in and I'll tear these ignition wires right out of the lock. Then we'll both hitchhike."

  The girl's voice came with controlled anger. "You win," she said. "Come in." There was a soft click, and the inner door yielded under Nolan's hand. He stepped in.

  "No hard feelings," he said mildly. "I really wanted the ride. One thing you might remember in the future, though—there are no ignition wires in an air lock."

  She was pretty, she was small, she was blue-eyed and brunette. But she didn't say a word to him. She kept to her seat at the controls, watching him lift the top off the distributing chamber, prod around in the gummy mess inside for a second, then replace it and nod.

  "You can start it up now, lady," he said. He glanced over her shoulder through the plastic panel, to where Avalon's lights were glowing. Where Woller was. "And the quicker," he said, "the better."

  The girl looked at him curiously but said nothing. She turned and fingered the controls. The song of power that came out of the skid's jets brought a quick, slight smile to her lips. Nolan caught a glimpse of her eyes reflected back at him from the plastic panel. Appreciative eyes.

  He averted his look. Would there be another time when he could meet the gaze of a decent girl and answer it?