Authors: Frederik Pohl

PLATINUM POHL (77 page)

BOOK: PLATINUM POHL

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He sat down, already calculating. Well, Mr. Crine at the office. He was a bachelor and he did go to the theater. Maybe work up an office raffle for another pair. Or two pairs. Then there was, let’s see, the real estate dealer who had sold them the house, the lawyer they’d used for the closing—

Well. It had been explained to him that the tuition, while decidedly not nominal, eighteen hundred dollars a year in fact, did not cover the cost per child. Somebody had to pay for the speech therapist, the dance therapist, the full-time psychologist and the part-time psychiatrist, and all the others and it might as well be Mr. Crine at the office. And the lawyer.

And half an hour later Mrs. Rose looked at the agenda, checked off an item and said, “That seems to be all for tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Perry brought us some very nice cookies, and we all know that Mrs. Howe’s coffee is out of this world. They’re in the beginners’ room, and we hope you’ll all stay to get acquainted. The meeting is adjourned.”

Harry and the Logans joined the polite surge to the beginners room, where Tommy spent his mornings. “There’s Miss Hackett,” said Celia Logan. That was the beginners’ teacher. She saw them and came over, smiling. Harry had seen her only in a tentlike smock, her armor against chocolate milk, finger paints and sudden jets from the “water play” corner of the room. Without it she was handsomely middle-aged in a green pants suit.

“I’m glad you parents have met,” she said. “I wanted to tell you that your little boys are getting along nicely. They’re forming a sort of conspiracy against the others in the class. Vern swipes their toys and gives them to Tommy.”

“He does?” cried Logan.

“Yes, indeed. I think he’s beginning to relate. And, Mr. Vladek, Tommy’s taken his thumb out of his mouth for minutes at a time. At least half a dozen times this morning, without my saying a word.”

Harry said excitedly, “You know, I thought I noticed he was tapering off. I couldn’t be sure. You’re positive about that?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And I bluffed him into drawing a face. He gave me that glare of his when the others were drawing; so I started to take the paper away. He grabbed it back and scribbled a kind of Picasso-ish face in one second flat. I wanted to save it for Mrs. Vladek and you, but Tommy got it and shredded it in that methodical way he has.”

“I wish I could have seen it,” said Vladek.

“There’ll be others. I can see the prospect of real improvement in your boys,” she said, including the Logans in her smile. “I have a private case afternoons that’s really tricky. A nine-year-old boy, like Tommy. He’s not bad except for one thing. He thinks Donald Duck is out to get him. His parents somehow managed to convince themselves for two years that he was kidding them, in spite of three broken TV picture tubes. Then they went to a psychiatrist and learned the score. Excuse me, I want to talk to Mrs. Adler.”

Logan shook his head and said, “I guess we could be worse off, Vladek. Vern giving something to another boy! How do you like that?”

“I like it,” his wife said radiantly.

“And did you hear about that other boy? Poor kid. When I hear about something like that—And then there was the Baer girl. I always think it’s worse when it’s a little girl because, you know, you worry with little girls that somebody will take advantage; but our boys’ll make out, Vladek. You heard what Miss Hackett said.”

Harry was suddenly impatient to get home to his wife. “I don’t think I’ll stay for coffee, or do they expect you to?”

“No, no, leave when you like.”

“I have a half-hour drive,” he said apologetically and went through the golden oak doors, past the ugly but fireproof staircase, out onto the graveled parking lot. His real reason was that he wanted very much to get home before Margaret fell asleep so he could tell her about the thumb-sucking. Things were happening, definite things, after only a month. And Tommy drew a face. And Miss Hackett said—

He stopped in the middle of the lot. He had remembered about Dr. Nicholson, and besides what was it, exactly, that Miss Hackett had said? Anything about a normal life? Not anything about a cure? “Real improvement,” she said, but improvement how far?

He lit a cigarette, turned and plowed his way back through the parents to Mrs. Adler. “Mrs. Adler,” he said, “may I see you just for a moment?”

She came with him immediately out of earshot of the others. “Did you enjoy the meeting, Mr. Vladek?”

“Oh, sure. What I wanted to see you about is that I have to make a decision. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to go to. It would help a lot if you could tell me, well, what are Tommy’s chances?”

She waited a moment before she responded. “Are you considering committing him, Mr. Vladek?” she demanded.

“No, it’s not exactly that. It’s—well, what can you tell me, Mrs. Adler? I know a month isn’t much. But is he ever going to be like everybody else?”

He could see from her face that she had done this before and had hated it. She said patiently, “‘Everybody else,’ Mr. Vladek, includes some terrible people who just don’t happen, technically, to be handicapped. Our objective isn’t to make Tommy like ‘everybody else.’ It’s just to help him to become the best and most rewarding Tommy Vladek he can.”

“Yes, but what’s going to happen later on? I mean, if Margaret and I—if anything happens to us?”

She was suffering. “There is simply no way to know, Mr. Vladek,” she said gently. “I wouldn’t give up hope. But I can’t tell you to expect miracles.”

Margaret wasn’t asleep; she was waiting up for him, in the small living room of the small new house. “How was he?” Vladek asked, as each of them had asked the other on returning home for seven years.

She looked as though she had been crying, but she was calm enough. “Not too bad. I had to lie down with him to get him to go to bed. He took his gland-gunk well, though. He licked the spoon.”

“That’s good,” he said and told her about the drawing of the face, about the conspiracy with little Vern Logan, about the thumb-sucking. He could see how pleased she was, but she only said: “Dr. Nicholson called again.”

“I told him not to bother you!”

“He didn’t bother me, Harry. He was very nice. I promised him you’d call him back.”

“It’s eleven o’clock, Margaret. I’ll call him in the morning.”

“No, I said tonight, no matter what time. He’s waiting, and he said to be sure and reverse the charges.”

“I wish I’d never answered the son of a bitch’s letter,” he burst out and then, apologetically: “Is there any coffee? I didn’t stay for it at the school.”

She had put the water on to boil when she heard the car whine into the driveway, and the instant coffee was already in the cup. She poured it and said, “You have to talk to him, Harry. He has to know tonight.”

“Know tonight! Know tonight,” he mimicked savagely. He scalded his lips on the coffee cup and said, “What do you want me to do, Margaret? How do I make a decision like this? Today I picked up the phone and called the company psychologist, and when his secretary answered, I said I had the wrong number. I didn’t know what to say to him.”

“I’m not trying to pressure you, Harry. But he has to know.”

Vladek put down the cup and lit his fiftieth cigarette of the day. The little dining room—it wasn’t that, it was a half breakfast alcove off the tiny kitchen, but they called it a dining room to each other—was full of Tommy. The new paint on the wall where Tommy had peeled off the cups-and-spoons wallpaper. The Tommy-proof latch on the stove. The one odd aqua seat that didn’t match the others on the kitchen chairs, where Tommy had methodically gouged it with the handle of his spoon. He said, “I know what my mother would tell me, talk to the priest. Maybe I should. But we’ve never even been to Mass here.”

Margaret sat down and helped herself to one of his cigarettes. She was still a good-looking woman. She hadn’t gained a pound since Tommy was born, although she usually looked tired. She said, carefully and straightforwardly, “We agreed, Harry. You said you would talk to Mrs. Adler, and you’ve done that. We said if she didn’t think Tommy would ever straighten out we’d talk to Dr. Nicholson. I know it’s hard on you, and I know I’m not much help. But I don’t know what to do, and I have to let you decide.”

Harry looked at his wife, lovingly and hopelessly, and at that moment the phone rang. It was, of course, Dr. Nicholson.

“I haven’t made a decision,” said Harry Vladek at once. “You’re rushing me, Dr. Nicholson.”

The distant voice was calm and assured. “No, Mr. Vladek, it’s not me that’s rushing you. The other little boy’s heart gave out an hour ago. That’s what’s rushing you.”

“You mean he’s dead?” cried Vladek.

“He’s on the heart-lung machine, Mr. Vladek. We can hold him for at least eighteen hours, maybe twenty-four. The brain is all right. We’re getting very good waves on the oscilloscope. The tissue match with your boy is satisfactory. Better than satisfactory. There’s a flight out of JFK at six fifteen in the morning, and I’ve reserved space for yourself, your wife and Tommy. You’ll be met at the airport. You can be here by noon; so we have time. Only just time, Mr. Vladek. It’s up to you now.”

Vladek said furiously, “I can’t decide that! Don’t you understand? I don’t know how.” “I do understand, Mr. Vladek,” said the distant voice and, strangely, Vladek thought, it seemed he did. “I have a suggestion. Would you like to come down anyhow? I think it might help you to see the other boy, and you can talk to his parents. They feel they owe you something even for going this far, and they want to thank you.”

“Oh, no!” cried Vladek.

The doctor went on: “All they want is for their boy to have a life. They don’t expect anything but that. They’ll give you custody of that child—your child, yours and theirs. He’s a very fine little boy, Mr. Vladek. Eight years old. Reads beautifully. Makes model airplanes. They let him ride his bike because he was so sensible and reliable, and the accident wasn’t his fault. The truck came right up on the sidewalk and hit him.”

Harry was trembling. “That’s like giving me a bribe,” he said harshly. “That’s telling me I can trade Tommy in for somebody smarter and nicer.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, Mr. Vladek. I only wanted you to know the kind of boy you can save.”

“You don’t even know the operation’s going to work!”

“No,” agreed the doctor. “Not positively. I can tell you that we’ve transplanted animals, including primates, and human cadavers, and one pair of terminal cases; but you’re right, we’ve never had a transplant into a well body. I’ve shown you all the records, Mr. Vladek. We went over them with your own doctor when we first talked about this possibility, five months ago. This is the first case since then when the match was close and there was a real hope for success, but you’re right, it’s still unproved. Unless you help us prove it. For what it’s worth, I think it will work. But no one can be sure.”

Margaret had left the kitchen, but Vladek knew where she was from the scratchy click in the earpiece: in the bedroom, listening on the extension phone. He said at last, “I can’t say now, Dr. Nicholson. I’ll call you back—in half an hour. I can’t do any more than that right now.”

“That’s a great deal, Mr. Vladek. I’ll be waiting right here for your call.”

Harry sat down and drank the rest of his coffee. You had to be an expert in a lot of things to get along, he was thinking. What did he know about brain transplants? In one way, a lot. He knew that the surgery part was supposed to be straightforward, but the tissue rejection was the problem, but Dr. Nicholson thought he had that licked. He knew that every doctor he had talked to, and he had now talked to seven of them, had agreed that medically it was probably sound enough, and that every one of them had carefully clammed up when he got the conversation around to whether it was right. It was his decision, not theirs, they all said, sometimes just by their silence. But who was he to decide?

Margaret appeared in the doorway. “Harry. Let’s go upstairs and look at Tommy.”

He said harshly, “Is that supposed to make it easier for me to murder my son?”

She said, “We talked that out, Harry, and we agreed it isn’t murder. Whatever it is. I only think that Tommy ought to be with us when we decide, even if he doesn’t know what we’re deciding.”

The two of them stood next to the outsize crib that held their son, looking in the night light at the long fair lashes against the chubby cheeks and the pouted lips around the thumb. Reading. Model airplanes. Riding a bike. Against a quick sketch of a face and the occasional, cherished, tempestuous, bruising flurry of kisses.

Vladek stayed there the full half hour and then, as he had promised, went back to the kitchen, picked up the phone and began to dial.

LET THE ANTS TRY

This may seem like another story about nuclear war, and it is set in the future (1960), just after such a war. But this tale, penned in 1949, is quite different, because there’s a time machine involved.

We are a hopeful people, and a time machine is a perfect vehicle for second chances—at least that’s what Salva Gordy thought before he stepped into the breach. But Frederik Pohl’s stories are seldom that simple, and this is no exception.

He credited a friend, George R. Spoerer, for the idea behind this story. Pohl and Spoerer worked together in Midtown Manhattan and lived only four blocks apart. In decent weather they would walk home together. As Pohl wrote in an introduction to a previous reprinting of it, “One night Spoerer said, ‘Over the weekend I thought up a science fiction story,’ and proceeded to tell me the story as we walked. ‘Good story,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you write it?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want you to write it.’ After about six such exchanges I said I would, and I went home and that evening I did.”

Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn’t; he was on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag, when the bombs struck.

He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her body was ever found. The children, of course, weren’t as lucky as that. Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.

That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of 1960.

He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down; he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency Administration laughed at him. “Move in, if you’re crazy enough to stay.”

When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or three times, and finally a government man came around to ask what had happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington. But he looked
queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy’s hairy face and torn clothes.

He said, “The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He takes a personal interest in your discovery.”

Gordy shook his head. “The secretary is dead,” he said. “They were all killed when Washington went.”

“There’s a new secretary,” the man explained. He puffed on his cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a truck garden. “Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he told me, ‘If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help.’”

Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.

“I haven’t got a weapon,” he said.

“You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to Washington, before the war came, and said—”

“The war is over,” said Salva Gordy. The government man sighed, and tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea after the man made his report; it was exactly that kind of a discovery, anyhow.

It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was spading his garden. “Give me something to eat,” said the voice behind Gordy’s back.

Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man who spoke. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’ll have to work for it,” he said.

“All right.” The newcomer set down his pack. “My name is John de Terry. I used to live here in Detroit.”

Salva Gordy said, “So did I.”

Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him after they had eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed—It had been that long since he’d smoked—and through the smoke he looked at John de Terry amiably enough. Company would be all right, he thought. The pink mice had been company, of a sort; but it turned out that the mutation that made them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And after the morning when he had awakened to find tiny tooth marks in his leg, he’d had to destroy them. And there had been no other animal since, nothing but the ants.

“Are you going to stay?” Gordy asked.

De Terry said, “If I can. What’s your name?” When Gordy told him, some of the animal look went out of his eyes, and wonder took its place.
“Doctor
Salva Gordy?” he asked. “Mathematics and physics in Pasadena?”

“Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena.”

“And I studied there.” John de Terry rubbed absently at his ruined clothes. “That was a long time ago. You didn’t know me; I majored in biology. But I knew you.”

Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cigarette. “It was too long ago,” he said. “I hardly remember. Shall we work in the garden now?”

Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that afternoon, and Gordy discovered that what had been hard work for one man went quickly enough for two. They worked clear to the edge of the plot before the sun reached the horizon. John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade, panting.

He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy’s patch. “We can make a bigger garden,”
he said. “Clear out that truck, and plant more food. We might even—” He stopped. Gordy was shaking his head.

“You can’t clear it out,” said Gordy. “It’s rank stuff, a sort of crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can’t even cut it. It’s all around here, and it’s spreading.”

De Terry grimaced. “Mutation?”

“I think so. And look.” Gordy beckoned to the other man and led him to the very edge of the cleared area. He bent down, picked up something red and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger.

De Terry took it from his hand. “Another mutation?” He brought the thing close to his eyes. “It’s almost like an ant,” he said. “Except—well, the thorax is all wrong. And it’s soft-bodied.” He fell silent, examining the thing.

He said something under his breath, and threw the insect from him. “You wouldn’t have a microscope, I suppose? No—and yet, that thing is hard to believe. It’s an ant, but it doesn’t seem to have a tracheal breathing system at all. It’s something different.”

“Everything’s different,” Gordy said. He pointed to a couple of abandoned rows. “I had carrots there. At least, I thought they were carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me sick.” He sighed heavily. “Humanity has had its chance, John,” he said. “The atomic bomb wasn’t enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made a weapon out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our weapons have blown up in our faces.”

De Terry grinned. “Maybe the ants will do better. It’s their turn now.”

“I wish it were.” Gordy stirred earth over the boiling entrance to an anthole and watched the insects in their consternation. “They’re too small, I’m afraid.”

“Why, no. These ants are different, Dr. Gordy. Insects have always been small because their breathing system is so poor. But these are mutated. I think—I think they actually have lungs. They could grow, Dr. Gordy. And if ants were the size of men … they’d rule the world.”

“Lunged ants!” Gordy’s eyes gleamed. “Perhaps they will rule the world, John. Perhaps when the human race finally blows itself up once and for all …”

De Terry shook his head, and looked down again at his tattered, filthy clothes. “The next blowup is the last blowup,” he said. “The ants come too late, by millions and millions of years.”

He picked up his spade. “I’m hungry again, Dr. Gordy,” he said.

They went back to the house and, without conversation, they ate. Gordy was preoccupied, and de Terry was too new in the household to force him to talk.

It was sundown when they had finished, and Gordy moved slowly to light a lamp. Then he stopped.

“It’s your first night, John,” he said. “Come down-cellar. We’ll start the generator and have real electric lights in your honor.”

De Terry followed the older man down a flight of stairs, groping in the dark. By candlelight they worked over a gasoline generator; it was stiff from disuse, but once it started it ran cleanly. “I salvaged it from my own house,” Gordy explained. “The generator—and that.”

He swept an arm toward a corner of the basement. “I told you I invented a weapon,” he added. “That’s it.”

De Terry looked. It was as much like a cage as anything, he thought—the height of a man and almost cubical. “What does it do?” he asked.

For the first time in months, Salva Gordy smiled. “I can’t tell you in English,” he said. “And I doubt that you speak mathematics. The closest I can come is to say that it displaces temporal coordinates. Is that gibberish?”

“It is,” said de Terry. “What does it do?”

“Well, the War Department had a name for it—a name they borrowed from H. G. Wells. They called it a Time Machine.” He met de Terry’s shocked, bewildered stare calmly. “A time machine,” he repeated. “You see, John, we can give the ants a chance after all, if you like.”

Fourteen hours later they stepped into the cage, its batteries charged again and its strange motor whining …

And, forty million years earlier, they stepped out onto quaking, humid soil.

Gordy felt himself trembling, and with an effort managed to stop. “No dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers in sight,” he reported.

“Not for a long time yet,” de Terry agreed. Then, “My Lord!”

He looked around him with his mouth open wide. There was no wind, and the air was warm and wet. Large trees were clustered quite thickly around them—or what looked like trees; de Terry decided they were rather some sort of soft-stemmed ferns or fungi. Overhead was deep cloud.

Gordy shivered. “Give me the ants,” he ordered.

Silently de Terry handed them over. Gordy poked a hole in the soft earth with his finger and carefully tilted the flask, dropped one of the ant queens he had unearthed in the backyard. From her belly hung a slimy mass of eggs. A few yards away—it should have been farther, he thought, but he was afraid to get too far from de Terry and the machine—he made another hole and repeated the process.

There were eight queens. When the eighth was buried he flung the bottle away and came back to de Terry.

“That’s it,” he said.

De Terry exhaled. His solemn face cracked in a sudden, embarrassed smile. “I—I guess I feel like God,” he said. “Good Lord, Dr. Gordy! Talk about your great moments in history—this is all of them! I’ve been thinking about it, and the only event I can remember that measures up is the Flood. Not even that. We’ve created a race!”

“If they survive, we have.” Gordy wiped a drop of condensed moisture off the side of his time machine and puffed. “I wonder how they’ll get along with mankind,” he said.

They were silent for a moment, considering. From somewhere in the fern jungle came a raucous animal cry. Both men looked up in quick apprehension, but moments passed and the animal did not appear.

Finally de Terry said, “Maybe we’d better go back.”

“All right.” Stiffly they climbed into the closet-sized interior of the time machine.

Gordy stood with his hand on the control wheel, thinking about the ants. Assuming that they survived—assuming that in forty million years they grew larger and developed brains—what would happen? Would men be able to live in peace with them? Would it—might it not make men brothers, joined against an alien race?

Might this thing prevent human war, and—his thoughts took an insane leap—could it have prevented the war that destroyed Gordy’s family!

Beside him, de Terry stirred restlessly. Gordy jumped, and turned the wheel, and was in the dark mathematical vortex which might have been a fourth dimension.

They stopped the machine in the middle of a city, but the city was not Detroit. It was not a human city at all.

The machine was at rest in a narrow street, half blocking it. Around them towered conical metal structures, some of them a hundred feet high. There were vehicles moving in the street, one coming toward them and stopping.

“Dr. Gordy!” de Terry whispered. “Do you see them?”

Salva Gordy swallowed. “I see them,” he said.

He stepped out of the time machine and stood waiting to greet the race to which he had given life.

For these were the children of ants in the three-wheeled vehicle. Behind a transparent windshield he could see them clearly.

De Terry was standing close behind him now, and Gordy could feel the younger man’s body shaking. “They’re ugly things,” Gordy said mildly.

BOOK: PLATINUM POHL

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