Pohlstars (11 page)

"What makes you ask a question like that? I demanded.

He pouted up at me. "Betsy says it's very strange, he complained, "that you've become a drunk, and sold your stock, and stopped asking me to visit here. And there's a plane from the Soviet fleet that showed up on our screens a few minutes ago, claiming that they've lost their electronics and don't know if we're their home boat or not.

I had not expected Betsy to make so quick a connection. But outside the door the guard was paying no attention to us. He was listening to the ship's intercom, his scarred, mean face envious as he heard the challenges to the Russian VTOL. The Russian was earning his pay, for he knew as well as I that the boat's surface-to-air missiles were homing in on him at that very second. I opened my mouth to answer Jimmy Rex, but May caught my arm.

"Can't we take him, Jason? she begged.

"We can
not,
I cried. "And we have no time to argue! For if Betsy was suspicious enough to send him here, we had minutes, maybe seconds, and the diversion of the aircraft would not puzzle her for long.

There was no weakness in May's brain. She understood me well. She knew I spoke the truth. But she was also a mother, whose only child had been lost to her. She gazed on him one moment more before she sobbed and turned to the port.

That was one moment too many. "No! shrilled little Jimmy Rex, and did the only thing he could do to stop her. He darted out into the corridor and jerked the handle that would seal May's cabins off and keep her from getting through.

He did not keep all of her inside.

The door slammed.., and the terrible strong shutters slashed closed upon my May.

There I was, alone with what was left of May. And minutes later the steel outer door grudgingly slid open again, and there was Betsy storming in, with Jimmy Rex crowding behind her. Betsy looked furious and triumphant and outraged all at once. . . and then, when she saw that it was only May's headless body that lay bleeding in my arms, more than anything else, relieved.

For Jimmy Rex I will say this much. He wept beside his mother's decapitated corpse. He screamed and sorrowed, and I believe he truly grieved-for ten minutes or so.

Even Betsy was shaken, though not as long as that, for he was still shrieking when she turned to me with an expression of awe and delight. "You old fool, she said admiringly, "I knew you'd do something dashing and stupid to solve all my problems. I ought to thank you.

"If you do, I said as steadily as I could, "there'll be two dead women in this room. And there would have, though by then her goons were holding me fast.

The room was mad, with medics covering May's poor body and a guard leading Jimmy Rex away and blood everywhere-everywhere! But Betsy looked only at me, and this time I could not read her expression at all. If I had not known her so well, I would have thought there was pity in it.

At last she sighed and shook her head. "Old man, she said roughly, "keep your lonely illusions. Get off my boat."

She nodded to the guards, and twenty minutes later the great OT was disappearing behind me as the scoutship that should have carried May to freedom instead carried only me to-I am not sure what.

And so the queen she met her end. The axe was raised by her dearest friend. Her son, no son, made the blade descend To finish the queen of the isles. The fair, sweet queen, the sorrowful queen, Oh, pity the queen of the isles!

For more than a year after that I woke shaking every night from a dream of the great steel shutter chopping May's dear head off. It was bad, and what I woke to was perhaps even worse. What "illusions made nasty Betsy pity me?

I never found an answer to that question. Perhaps I did not want one.

Of all the science-fiction writers who inspired and delighted my youth, the one who most completely saturated the pleasure centers of my brain was the late Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D. I wasn't the only one who felt that. Doc Smith invented the "space opera, the high-tech deep-space adventuring that set the style for everything from John Campbell's first stories to Star
Wars
and beyond. It's a crying shame that Doc's
The Skylark of Space
has never been made into a movie; it's as thrilling and colorful as the best of them, and a lot more intelligently imagined. One of the joys of growing up to be an editor was that I was able to get Doc to write new stories for me ("Skylark DuQuesne was the most important of them), so that I could carry on into middle age the joys of my youth. When Doc died, I mourned deeply. His daughter and son-in-law, Verna and Albert Trestrail, are long-term and well-loved friends and when, a summer or two ago, I stayed for a few days at their comfortable home in central Indiana, I was enchanted to find that Verna still owned Doc's own personal typewriter, a four-square old Woodstock as big as a breadbasket. Could I write a story on it? I begged. Of course, Verna answered, and kindly kept my coffee cup filled and fresh ashtrays within reach as, over two long days, I wrote the first draft of "The High Test. The former cabin boy had grown to command the
Q.E. 2!
Of course, "The High Test is not exactly a Doe Smith story. But it's not exactly a typical Fred Pohl story, either, and I expect the reason is that I was thinking of Doc all the time I was writing it.

2213 12 22 1900UGT

Dear Mom:

As they say, there's good news and there's bad news here on Cassiopeia 43-G. The bad news is that there aren't any openings for people with degrees in quantum- mechanical astrophysics. The good news is that I've got a job. I started yesterday. I work for a driving school, and I'm an instructor.

I know you'll say that's not much of a career for a twenty-six-year-old man with a doctorate, but it pays the rent. Also it's a lot better than I'd have if I'd stayed on Earth. Is it true that the unemployment rate in Chicago is up to eighty percent? Wow! As soon as I get a few megabucks ahead I'm going to invite you all to come out here and visit me in the sticks so you can see how we live here-you may not want to go back!

Now, I don't want you to worry when I tell you that I get hazardous duty pay. That's just a technicality. We driving instructors have it in our contracts, but we don't really earn it. At least, usually we don't-although there are times like yesterday. The first student I had was this young girl, right from Earth. Spoiled rotten! You know the kind. rich, and I guess you'd say beautiful, and really used to having her own way. Her name's Tonda Aguilar- you've heard of the Evanston Aguilars? In the recombinant foodstuff business? They're really rich, I guess. This one had her own speedster, and she was really sulked that she couldn't drive it on an Earth license. See, they have this suppressor field; as soon as any vehicle comes into the system, zap, it's off, and it just floats until some licensed pilot comes out to fly it in. So I took her up, and right away she started giving me ablation: "Not so much takeoff boost! You'll burn out the tubes! and "Don't ride the reverter in hyperdrive! and "Get out of low orbit- you want to rack us up?

Well, I can take just so much of that. An instructor is almost like the captain of a ship, you know. He's the boss! So I explained to her that my name wasn't "Chowderhead or "Dullwit! but James Paul Madigan, and it was the instructors who were supposed to yell at the students, not the other way around. Well, it was her own speedster, and a really neat one at that. Maybe I couldn't blame her for being nervous about somebody else driving it. So I decided to give her a real easy lesson. Practicing parking orbits-if you can't do that, you don't deserve a license! And she was really rotten at it. It looks easy, but there's an art to cutting the hyperdrive with just the right residual velocity, so that you slide right into your assigned coordinates. The more she tried, the farther off she got. Finally she demanded that I take her back to the spaceport. She said I was making her nervous. She said she'd get a different instructor for tomorrow or she'd just move on to some other system where they didn't have benefacted chimpanzees giving driving lessons.

I just let her rave. Then the next student I had was a Fomalhautian. You know that species, they've got two heads and scales and forked tails, and they're always making a nuisance of themselves in the United Systems? If you believe what they say on the vidcom, they're bad news-in fact, the reason Cassiopeia installed the suppressor field was because they had a suspicion the Fomalhautians were thinking about invading and taking over 43-G. But this one was nice as pie! Followed every instruction. Never gave me any argument. Apologized when he made a mistake and got us too close to one of the mini- black holes near the primary. He said that was because he was unfamiliar with the school ship, and said he'd prefer to use his own space yacht for the next lesson. He made the whole day better, after that silly, spoiled rich brat!

I was glad to have a little cheering up, to tell you the truth. I was feeling a little lonesome and depressed. Probably it's because it's so close to the holidays. It's hard to believe that back in Chicago it's only three days until Christmas, and all the store windows will he full of holodecorations and there'll be that big tree in Grant Park and I bet it's snowing. . . and here on Cassiopeia 43-G it's sort of like a steam bath with interludes of Niagara Falls.

I do wish you a merry Christmas, Mom! Hope my gifts got there all right.

Love,

Jim Paul

2213 12 2~ LATE

Dear Mom:

Well, Christmas Day is just about over. Not that it's any different from any other day here on 43-G, where the human colonists were mostly Buddhist or Moslem and the others were-well! You've seen the types that hang around the United Systems building in Palatine-smelled them, too, right? Especially those Arcturans. I don't know whether those people have any religious holidays or not, and I'm pretty sure I don't
want
to know.

Considering that I had to work all day, it hasn't been such a bad Christmas at that. When I mentioned to Torklemiggen-he's the Fomalhautian I told you about-that today was a big holiday for us, he sort of laughed and said that mammals had really quaint customs. And when he found out that part of the custom was to exchange gifts, he thought for a minute. (The way Fomalhautians think to themselves is that their heads whisper in each other's ear-really grotesque!) Then he said that he had been informed it was against the law for a student to give anything to his driving instructor, but if I wanted to fly his space yacht myself for a while he'd let me do it. And he would let it go down on the books of the school as instruction time, so I'd get paid for it. Well, you bet I wanted to! He has some swell yacht. It's long and tapered, sort of shark-shape, like the TU-Lockheed 4400 series, with radar-glyph vision screens and a cruising range of nearly 1,800 l.y. I don't know what its top speed is- after all, we had to stay in our own system!

We were using his own ship, you see, and of course it's Fomalhautian-made. Not easy for a human being to fly! Even though I'm supposed to be the instructor and Torklemiggen the student, I was baffled at first. I couldn't even get it off the ground until he explained the controls to me and showed me how to read the instruments. There's still plenty I don't know, but after a few minutes I could handle it well enough not to kill us out of hand. Torklemiggen kept daring me to circle the black holes. I told him we couldn't do that, and he got this kind of sneer on one of his faces, and the two heads sort of whispered together for a while. I knew he was thinking of something cute, but I didn't know what at first.

Then I found out!

You know that CAS 43, our primary, is a red giant star with an immense photosphere. Torklemiggen bragged that we could fly right through the photosphere! Well, of course I hardly believed him, but he was so insistent that I tried it out. He was right! We just greased right through that thirty-thousand-degree plasma like nothing at all! The hull began to turn red, then yellow, then straw-colored-you could see it on the edges of the radar-glyph screen-and yet the inside temperature stayed right on the button of 40 degrees Celsius. That's 43-G normal, by the way. Hot, if you're used to Chicago, but nothing like it was outside! And when we burst out into vacuum again there was no thermal shock, no power surge, no instrument fog. Just beautiful! It's hard to believe that any individual can afford a ship like this just for his private cruising. I guess Fomalhaut must have some pretty rich planets!

Then when we landed, more than an hour late, there was the Aguilar woman waiting for me. She had found out that the school wouldn't let her change instructors once assigned. I could have told her that; it's policy. So she had to cool her heels until I got back. But I guess she had a little Christmas spirit somewhere in her ornery frame, because she was quite polite about it. As a matter of fact, when we had her doing parking orbits, she was much improved over the last time. Shows what a first-class instructor can do for you!

Well, I see by the old chronometer on the wall that it's the day after Christmas now, at least Universal-Greenwich Time it is, though I guess you've still got a couple of hours to go in Chicago. One thing, Mom. The Christmas packages you sent didn't get here yet. I thought about lying to you and saying they'd come and how much I liked them, but you raised me always to tell the truth. (Besides, I didn't know what to thank you for!) 

Anyway, merry Christmas one more time from-

Jim Paul

2213 12 30 O2001JGT

Dear Mom:

Another day, another kilobuck. My first student today was a sixteen-year-old kid. One of those smart-alecky ones, if you know what I mean. (But you probably don't, because you certainly never had any kids like that!) His father was a combat pilot in the Cassiopeian navy, and the kid drove that way, too. That wasn't the worst of it. He'd heard about Torklemiggen. When I tried to explain to him that he had to learn how to go slow before he could go fast, he really let me have it. Didn't I know his father said the Fomalhautians were treacherous enemies of the Cassiopeian way of life'? Didn't I know his father said they were just waiting their chance to invade? Didn't I know-