Critical Mass

by Frederik Pohl

  sky. I should have been a ragged claw; I should have said

  ‘I love you’; But-here the brown eyes lower fell-I hate to go

  above you. If Ripsaw fail and yutes prevail, what price dough’s

  Quaker cannon? So Grote—

  Kramer stopped himself, barely in time. Were there throat mikes? Were the yutes listening in?

  He churned miserably in his cotton bonds, because, as near as he could guess, he had probably been in the Blank Tank for less than an hour. D day, he thought to himself, praying that it was only to himself, was still some six weeks away and a week beyond that was seven. Seven weeks, forty-nine days, eleven hundred and, um, seventy-six hours, sixty-six thousand minutes plus. He had only to wait those minutes out, what about the diary?, and then he could talk all he wanted. Talk, confess, broadcast, anything, what difference would it make then?

  He paused, trying to remember. That furtive thought had struggled briefly to the surface but he had lost it again. It would not come back.

  He tried to fall asleep. It should have been easy enough. His air was metered and the CO2 content held to a level that would make him torpid; his wastes cathe-terized away; water and glucose valved into his veins; he was all but in utero, and unborn babies slept, didn’t they? Did they? He would have to look hi the diary, but it would have to wait until he could remember what thought it was that was struggling for recognition. And that was becoming harder with every second.

  Sensory deprivation in small doses is one thing; it even has its therapeutic uses, like shock. In large doses it produces a disorientation of psychotic proportions, a melancholia that is alf but lethal; Kramer never knew when he went loopy.

  iv

  He never quite knew when he went sane again, either, except that one day the fog lifted for a moment and he asked a WAC corporal, “When did I get back to Utah.” The corporal had dealt with returning yute prisoners before. She said only: “It’s Fort Hamilton, sir. Brooklyn.”

  He was in a private room, which was bad, but he wore a maroon bathrobe, which was good-at least it meant he was in a hospital instead of an Army stockade. (Unless the private room meant he was in the detention ward of the hospital.)

  Kramer wondered what he had done. There was no way to tell, at least not by searching his memory. Everything went into a blurry alternation of shouting relays of yutes and the silence of the Blank Tanks. He was nearly sure he had finally told the yutes everything they wanted to know. The question was, when? He would find out at the court-martial, he thought. Or he might have jotted it down, he thought crazily, in the diary.

  Jotted it down in the… ?

  Diary!

  That was the thought that had struggled to come through to the surface!

  Kramer’s screams brought the corporal back in a hurry, and then two doctors who quickly prepared knockout needles. He fought against them all the way.

  “Poor old man,” said the WAC, watching him twitch and shudder in unconsciousness. (Kramer had just turned forty.) “Second dose of the Blank Tanks for him, wasn’t it? I’m not surprised he’s having nightmares.” She didn’t know that his nightmares were not caused by the Blank Tanks themselves, but by his sudden realization that his last stay in the Tanks was totally unnecessary. It didn’t matter what he told the yutes, or when! They had had the diary all along, for it had been on him when Mabry thrust him in the rocket; and all Ripsaw’s secrets were in it!

  The next time the fog lifted for Kramer it was quick, like the turning on of a light, and he had distorted memories of dreams before it. He thought he had just dreamed that General Gfote had been with him. He was alone in the same room, sun streaming in a window, voices outside. He felt pretty good, he thought tentatively, and had no time to think more than

  that because the door opened and a ward boy looked

  in, very astonished to find Kramer looking back at him. “Holy heaven,” he said. “Wait there!” He disappeared. Foolish, Kramer thought. Of

  course he would wait. Where else would he go?

  And then, surprisingly, General Grote did indeed

  walk in.

  “Hello, John,” he said mildly, and sat down beside the bed, looking at Kramer. “I was just getting in my car when they caught me.”

  He pulled out his pipe and stuffed it with tobacco, watching Kramer. Kramer could think of nothing to say. “They said you were all right, John. Are you?”

  “I-.think so.” He watched the general light his pipe. “Funny,” he said. “I dreamed you were here a minute ago.”

  “No, it’s not so funny; I was. I brought you a present.”

  Kramer could not imagine anything more wildly improbable in the world than that the man whose combat operation he had betrayed should bring him a box of chocolates, bunch of flowers, light novel or whatever else was appropriate. But the general glanced at the table by Kramer’s bed.

  There was a flat, green-leather-covered box on it. “Open it up,” Grote invited.

  Kramer took out a glittering bit of metal depending from a three-barred ribbon. The gold medallion bore a jampaht eagle and lettering he could not at first read.

  “It’s your D.S.M.,” Grote said helpfully. “You can pin it on if you like. I tried,” he said, “to make it a Medal of Honor. But they wouldn’t allow it, logically enough.”

  “I was expecting something different,” Kramer mumbled foolishly.

  Grote laughed. “We smashed them, boy,” he said gently. “That is, Mick did. He went straight across Polar Nine,, down the Ob with one force and the Yenisei with another. General dough’s got his forward command in Chebarkul now, loving every minute of it. Why, I was in Karpinsk myself last week-they let me get that far-of course, it’s a rest area. It was a brilliant, bloody, backbreaking show. Completely successful.”

  Kramer interrupted hi sheer horror: “Polar Nine? But that was the cover-the Quaker cannon!”

  General Grote looked meditatively at his former aide. “John,” he said after a moment, “didn’t you ever wonder why the card-sorters pulled you out for my staff? A man who was sure to crack in the Blank Tanks, because he already had?”

  The room was very silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, John. Well, it worked-had to, you know; a lot of thought went into,it. Novotny’s been relieved. Mick’s got his biggest victory, no matter what happens now; he was the man that led the invasion.” The room was silent again. Carefully Grote tapped out his pipe into a metal wastebasket. “You’re a valuable man, John. Matter of fact, we traded a major general to get you back.” Silence.

  Grote sighed and stood up. “If it’s any consolation to you, you held out four full weeks in the Tanks. Good thing we’d made sure you had the diary with you. Otherwise our Quaker cannon would have been a bust.” He nodded good-bye and was gone. He was a good officer, was General Grote. He would use a weapon in any way he had to, to win a fight; but if the weapon was destroyed, and had feelings, he would come around to bring it a medal afterwards.

  Kramer contemplated his Distinguished Service Medal for a while. Then he lay back and considered ringing for a Sunday Times, but fell asleep instead.

  Novotny was now a sour, angry corps commander away off on the Baltic periphery because of him; a million and a half NAAARMY troops were dug in

  the heart of the enemy’s homeland; the greatest operation of the war was an unqualified success. But when the nurse came in that night, the Quaker cannon-the man who had discovered that the greatest service he could perform for his country was to betray it-was moaning in his sleep.

  MUTE INGLORIOUS TAM

  Cyril left a fragment about medieval England; it had no story attached to it, only a few pages of description and character. It lay in my files for fifteen years, until I happened to be sitting in a panel discussion with two or three other s-f writers (Ben Bova, Katherine Mac-Lean and Gordon Dickson, I think they were) and we fell to talking about what made a science-fiction writer what he is. What, I asked, might any of us have been if we had been born in another
place and time? If we could not possibly have been science-fiction writers, perhaps because there was no science yet, maybe because we were illiterate? And then it occurred to me that it would be fun to write a story about that; and sometime later it struck me that Cyril’s fragment might fit in well with such a notion; and I dug it out, and it did.

  ON A LATE SATURDAY afternoon in summer, just before the ringing of Angelus, Tam of the Wealdway straightened from the furrows in his plowed strip of Oldfield and stretched his cracking joints.

  He was a small and dark man, of almost pure Saxon blood. Properly speaking, his name was only Tam. There was no need for further identification. He would never go a mile from a neighbor who had known him from birth. But sometimes he called himself by a surname-it was one of many small conceits that complicated his proper and straightforward life-and

  he would be soundly whipped for it if his Norman masters ever caught him at it.

  He had been breaking clods in the field for fifteen hours, interrupted only by the ringing of the canonical hours from the squat, tiny church, and a mouthful of bread and soft cheese at noon. It was not easy for him to stand straight. It was also not particularly wise. A man could lose his strip for poor tilth, and Tarn had come close enough, often enough. But there were times when the thoughts that chased themselves around his head made him forget the steady chop of the wooden hoe, and he would stand entranced, staring toward Lymeford Castle, or the river, or toward nothing at all, while he invented fanciful encounters and impossible prosperings. It was another of Tarn’s conceits, and a most dangerous one, if it were known. The least it might get him was a cuff from a man-at-arms. The most was a particularly unpleasing death.

  Since Salisbury, in Sussex, was flat ground, its great houses were not perched dramatically on crags, like the keeps of robber barons along the Rhine or the grim fortresses of the Scottish lairds. They were the least they could be to do the job they had to do, in an age which had not yet imagined the palace or the cathedral.

  In the year 1303 Lymeford Castle was a dingy pile of stone. It housed Sir and Lady Robert Bowen (sometimes they spelled it Bohun, or Beauhun, or Beauhaunt) and their household servants and men-at-arms in very great discomfort. It did not seem so to them particularly. They had before them the housing of their Saxon subjects to show what misery could be. The castle was intended to guard a bridge across the Lyme River: a key point on the high road from Portsmouth to London. It did this most effectively. William of Normandy, who had taken England by storm a couple of centuries earlier, did not mean for himself or his descendants to be taken in the same way on

  another day. So Lymeford Castle had been awarded to Sir Robert’s great-great-great-grandfather on the condition that he defend it and thereby defend London as well against invasion on that particular route from the sea.

  That first Bowen had owned more than stones. A castle must be fed. The castellan and his lady, their household servants and their armed men could not be expected to till the field and milk the cows. The founder of Sir Robert’s line had solved the problem of feeding the castle by rounding up a hundred of the defeated Saxon soldiers, clamping iron rings around their necks and setting them to work at the great task of clearing the untidy woods which surrounded the castle. After cleaning and plowing from sunup to sunset the slaves were free to gather twigs and mud, with which they made themselves kennels to sleep in. And in that first year, to celebrate the harvest and to insure a continuing supply of slaves, the castellan led his men-at-arms on a raid into Salisbury town itself. They drove back to Lymeford, with whips, about a hundred Saxon girls and women. After taking their pick, they gave the rest to the slaves, and the chaplain read a single perfunctory marriage service over the filthy, ring-necked slaves and the weeping Salisbury women. Since the male slaves happened to be from Northumbria, while the women were Sussex bred, they could not understand each other’s dialects. It did not matter. The huts were enlarged, and next midsummer there was another crop, this time of babies.

  The passage of two centuries had changed things remarkably little. A Bowen (or Beauhaunt) still guarded the Portsmouth-London high road. He still took pride in his Norman blood. Saxons still tilled the soil for him and if they no longer had the iron collar, or the name of slaves, they still would dangle from the gallows in the castle courtyard for any of a very large number of possible offenses against his authority. -At Runnymede, many years before, King John had signed

  the Great Charter conferring some sort of rule of law to protect his barons against arbitrary acts, but no one had thought of extending those rights to the serfs. They could die for almost anything or for nothing at all: for trying to quit their master’s soil for greener fields; for failing to deliver to the castle their bushels of grain, as well as their choicest lambs, calves and girl-children; for daring in any way to flout the divine law that made one kind of man ruler and another kind ruled. It was this offense to which Tarn was prone, and one day, as his father had told him the day before he died, it would cost him the price that no man can afford to pay, though all do.

  Though Tarn had never even heard of the Mag-na Carta, he sometimes thought that a world might sometime come to be in which a man like himself might own the things he owned as a matter of right and not because a man with a sword had not decided to take them from him. Take Alys his wife. He did not mind in any real sense that the men-at-arms had bedded her before he had. She was none the worse for it in any way that Tarn could measure; but he had slept badly that night, pondering why it was that no one needed to consult him about the woman the priest had sworn to him that day, and whether it might not be more-more-he grappled for a word (“fair” did not occur to him) and caught at “right”-more right that he should say whose pleasures his property served.

  Mostly he thought of sweeter and more fanciful things. When the falconers were by, he sometimes stole a look at the hawk stooping on a pigeon and thought that a man might fly if only he had the wings and the wit to move them. Pressed into driving the castellan’s crops into the granary, he swore at the dumb oxen and imagined a cart that could turn its wheels by itself. If the Lyme in flood could carry a tree bigger than a house faster than a man could run, why could that power not pull a plow? Why did a man have to plant

  five kernels of corn to see one come up? Why could not all five come up and make him five times as fat?

  He even looked at the village that was his home, and wondered why it had to be so poor, so filthy and so small; and that thought had hardly occurred evert to Sir Robert himself.

  In the year 1303 Lymeford looked like this: • The Lyme River, crossed by the new stone structure that was the fourth Lymeford Bridge, ran south to the English Channel. Its west bank was overgrown with the old English oak forest. Its right bank was the edge of the great clearing. Lymeford Castle, hard by the bridge, covered the road and curved northeast to London. For the length of the clearing, the road was not only the king’s highway, it was also the Lymeford village street. At a discreet distance from the castle it began to be edged with huts, larger or smaller as their tenants were rich or fecund. The road widened a bit halfway to the edge of the clearing, and there on its right side sat the village church.

  The church was made of stone, but that was about all you could say for it. All the wealth it owned it had to draw from the village, and there was not much wealth there to draw. Still, silver pennies had to be sent regularly to the bishop, who in turn would send them on to Rome. The parish priest of Lymeford was an Italian who had never seen the bishop, to whom it had never occurred to try to speak the language and who had been awarded the living of Lymeford by a cardinal who was likewise Italian and likewise could not have described its location within fifty miles. There was nothing unusual in that, and the Italian collected the silver pennies while his largely Norman, but Saxon speaking, locum tenens scraped along on donations of beer, dried fish and the odd occasional calf. He was a dour man who would have been a dreadful one if he had had a field of action that was larger than L
ymeford.

  Across the street from the church was The Green, a cheerless trampled field where the compulsory archery

  practice and pike drill were undergone by every physically able male of Lymeford, each four weeks, except in the worst of winter and when plowing or harvest was larger in Sir Robert’s mind than the defense of his castle. His serfs would fight when he told them to, and he would squander their lives with the joy a man feels in exercising the one extravagance he permits himself on occasion. But that was only at need, and the fields and the crops were forever. He saw to the crops with some considerable skill. A three-field system prevailed in Lymeford. There was Oldfield, east of the road, and the first land brought under cultivation by the slaves two hundred years ago. There was Newfield, straddling the road and marked off from Oldfield by a path into the woods called the Wealdway, running southeast from The Green info the oak forest at the edge of the clearing. There was Fallowfield, last to be cleared and planted, which for the most part lay south of the road and the castle. From the left side of the road to the river, The Mead spread its green acres. The Mead was held in common by all the villagers. Any man might turn his cows or sheep to graze on it anywhere. The farmed fields, however, were divided into long, narrow strips, each held by a villager who would defend it with his fists or his sickle against the encroachment of a single inch. In the year 1303 Oldfield and Newfield were under cultivation, and Fallowfield was being rested. Next year it would be Newfield and Fallowfield farmed, and Oldfield would rest.

  While Angelus clanged on the cracked church bell, Tarn stood with his head downcast. He was supposed to be praying. In a way he was, the impenetrable rote-learned Latin slipping through his brain like the reiteration of a mantra, but he was also pleasantly occupied in speculating how plump his daughter might become if they could farm all three fields each year without destroying the soil, and at the same time thinking of the pot of fennel-spiced beer that should be waiting in his hut.