Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories Read online

  WELCOME TO THE FABULOUS WORLDS OF

  FREDERIK POHL!

  TAKE A TOUR of the hot spots of Venus with guide Audee Walthers, in the very first Heechee story, “The Merchants of Venus.”

  FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS when the world’s greatest mentalist gets a little too good at fooling his public in “The Things That Happen.”

  EXPLORE A FUTURISTIC NEW YORK CITY, where new technology and old vices vie for control of radical urban re-engineering in “The Greening of Bed-Stuy.”

  SHARE THE EXCITEMENT of an alternate history in which aging pilot Johnny Williamson is rejected by NASA’s astronaut program, until his act of heroism on a fateful day in Dallas gives him the chance to play a pivotal role in the Apollo program in “The Mayor of Mare Tranq.”

  GET A PEEK into the world of Marchese Boccanegra in “Saucery,” when the discovery of real Martians makes it hell for honest frauds to make a living.

  EXPERIENCE A SPINE-CHILLING VIEW of nuclear holocaust, where the best luck is to just survive, in the chilling, poignant Hugo Award—winning “Fermi and Frost.”

  GO ALONG FOR AN INCREDIBLE RIDE to a far star, in a mind-bending trip with a crew bound for a payoff beyond human comprehension, in the stunning novella “The Gold at the Starbow’s End.”

  “These carefully selected tales really are platinum Pohl, so there’s not a foot misplaced in all the thirty stories.”

  —Gahan Wilson, Realms of Fantasy

  Books by Frederik Pohl

  THE HEECHEE SAGA

  Gateway

  Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

  Heechee Rendezvous

  The Annals of the Heechee

  The Gateway Trip

  *The Boy Who Would Live Forever

  THE ESCHATON SEQUENCE

  *The Other End of Time

  *The Siege of Eternity

  *The Far Shore of Time

  Slave Ship

  Drunkard’s Walk

  A Plague of Pythons

  The Age of the Pussyfoot

  Man Plus

  Jem

  The Cool War

  The Years of the City

  Black Star Rising

  The Coming of the Quantum Cats

  The Day the Martians Came

  Narabedla Ltd.

  Homegoing

  Starburst

  The World at the End of Time

  The Merchants’ War

  *O Pioneer!

  Stopping at Slowyear

  Mining the Oort

  Midas World

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Tomorrow Times Seven

  Pohlstars

  Alternating Currents

  Day Million

  The Early Pohl

  The Case Against Tomorrow

  Digits and Dastards

  Survival Kit

  Gold at the Starbow’s End

  With C.M. Kornbluth

  The Space Merchants

  Gladiator-at-Law

  Search the Sky

  Wolfbane

  With Jack Williamson

  THE STARCHILD TRILOGY

  Reefs of Space

  Starchild

  Rogue Star

  THE UNDERSEA TRILOGY

  Undersea Quest

  Undersea Fleet

  Undersea City

  Wall Around a Star

  The Farthest Star

  *Land’s End

  The Singers of Time

  Preferred Risk (With Lester del Rey)

  The Best of Frederik Pohl

  (edited by Lester del Rey)

  The Best of C.M. Kornbluth (editor)

  Star Science Fiction series (editor)

  Nonfiction

  The Way the Future Was (memoir)

  *Chasing Science

  *Our Angry Earth (with Isaac Asimov)

  *denotes a Tor book

  This is a work of fiction. All the Characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  PLATINUM POHL: THE COLLECTED BEST STORIES

  Copyright © 2005 by Frederik Pohl

  Introduction copyright © 2005 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  First publication and copyright information for reprinted material appears here, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

  Edited by James Frenkel

  An Orb Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pohl, Frederik,

  Platinum Pohl: the collected best stories / Frederik Pohl.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-765-30145-1

  ISBN-10: 0-765-30145-8

  1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3566.O36A6 2005

  813'.54—dc22

  2005043965

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  For my great-granddaughter,

  ALEXANDRA EMŐKE VIOLET ANN POHL-WEARY

  (better known as Sasha),

  and for all who come after

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by James Frenkel

  The Merchants of Venus

  The Things That Happen

  The High Test

  My Lady Green Sleeves

  The Kindly Isle

  The Middle of Nowhere

  I Remember a Winter

  The Greening of Bed-Stuy

  To See Another Mountain

  The Mapmakers

  Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair

  The Celebrated No-Hit Inning

  Some Joys Under the Star

  Servant of the People

  Waiting for the Olympians

  Criticality

  Shaffery Among the Immortals

  The Day the Icicle Works Closed

  Saucery

  The Gold at the Starbow’s End

  Growing Up in Edge City

  The Knights of Arthur

  Creation Myths of the Recently Extinct

  The Meeting (with C.M. Kornbluth)

  Let the Ants Try

  Speed Trap

  The Day the Martians Came

  Day Million

  The Mayor of Mare Tranq

  Fermi and Frost

  Afterword: Fifty Years and Counting

  INTRODUCTION

  FREDERIK POHL HAS DONE just about everything that one can do in the field of science fiction. When he was still a teenager he began to edit science fiction magazines; he started getting his stories published when he was even younger. He has won all the major awards—the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell for best novel; he has been lauded as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America; he’s written an enormous number of very good short stories; and he has collaborated on both short stories and novels, both with great success.

  If this weren’t enough, he has also edited anthologies, including the groundbreaking Star Science Fiction anthologies of original stories. In addition, he’s edited lines of SF books for Bantam and Ace, at different times. He has been an agent; he has been president of the SFWA.

  He has achieved other notable feats in the field as well, but I think you can get an idea. This man is one of the giants in the field.

  Editing this volume of his collected best stories was both a joy and a nightmare. In the course of his career so far, he has written hundreds of stories. Some we
re originally published under pseudonyms, others were collaborations with other authors. (Still others were pseudonymous collaborations!) When you count up the stories and the total wordage, he has produced more than a million words of short fiction—this in addition to his many novels.

  The thirty stories that follow represent fiction from as early as the 1940s and as recent as just a few years ago. Our goal in this collection is to present the best short stories, novelettes, and novellas of Frederik Pohl’s career to date. He’s still writing, of course, but we had to stop somewhere…though we reserve the right to include new stories in a subsequent edition of this book. There are some exclusions. Some of Pohl’s short stories have been incorporated into his novels, and we have not included stories that he later used in creating longer works. Nonetheless, we have included stories from two books that could easily be considered novels: The Day the Martians Came and The Years of the City. In both these books, the stories are identifiable as discrete stories, but also exist as elements in a longer narrative.

  Frederik Pohl started writing science fiction when he was very young, when the field itself was pretty young, too. In many of the stories reprinted here one can clearly see what many call the “sense of wonder” that inspired Pohl and his young contemporaries—authors such as Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Richard Wilson, Donald A. Wollheim, and others—when they were starting to write and publish stories in the 1930s, and that still inspires science fiction writers—and editors and readers—today.

  Many young people have that sense of wonder—a curiosity about what lies outside the bounds of our world or in the future. However, most people lose that curiosity—the need to explore, to play in realms outside their experience—as they get older. One of the many pleasures of this collection is seeing the persistence of Pohl’s sense of wonder in stories penned over more than a half century.

  In a very real way, these stories are twentieth-century fiction, marked by the events and reflecting sociopolitical currents of the century. Yet like any really good literature, they also transcend their time, because of their profound humanity, the universality of their themes, and overarching concerns.

  We’ve included some stories that put the reader in a specific place and time that Pohl captures with unerring accuracy—in some cases the time of the story’s creation, in others a time or a scenario perhaps yet to come. Pohl is gifted with a very sharp eye for human behavior and with a great ear for dialogue, and these talents hold him in very good stead when he is evoking the now—whether in a contemporary setting or an entirely alien one.

  He also has a fine grasp of politics and for the workings of legislative bodies, the courts, and other human institutions. To be sure, his models tend to be United States institutions, but he does excellent research, and when he’s writing about someplace other than the United States, you can depend on his observations of those places being accurate; like many authors, Pohl has traveled widely, and he brings to stories set overseas his careful first-person observations.

  Readers who did not experience much of the twentieth century will find among these stories a considerable amount of cultural and social history expertly masked in the guise of necessary background, for Pohl, like generations of savvy observers, has always made society a big part of the story. Sociopolitical issues such as the threat of global nuclear war, overpopulation, pollution, and dependence on fossil fuels, to name but a few, are key elements in some of the stories. So are issues of social justice, about which Pohl is passionate.

  Yet the issues that run through many of these stories never overwhelm the stories themselves. Pohl’s characters just won’t let them. Those characters are a varied and fascinating bunch—young and old, male and female, nasty and nice—they’re all people who engage your interest, whether or not you agree with what they say and do. That, perhaps, is Pohl’s greatest achievement. Creating characters that come to seem vividly alive and real may not sound very difficult, but there are many writers who fail to create such characters despite possessing other formidable skills. And his stories move. No matter what the tale, there is invariably something intriguing going on, something that engages your interest and won’t let you stop reading.

  Some of these stories are very serious, while others are just fun. Long hours were spent by this editor trying to decide which stories to keep and which to exclude, and there were dozens of very entertaining stories that had to be left out, because this book could not be a thousand pages long.

  When all was said and done, we ended up with stories that showcase the enormous range of tone and texture, concepts and themes, plots and characters that Frederik Pohl has brought to life in his fiction. Early in this introduction I wrote it had been a joy and a nightmare to edit this collection, but that’s not really true. Though deciding what should stay and what must go was terribly difficult, it was also an enormous amount of fun, because it gave me a chance to experience the richness of the stories.

  May you enjoy these choices as much as I have.

  —James Frenkel

  Madison, Wisconsin

  March 1, 2005

  THE MERCHANTS OF VENUS

  Frederik Pohl has probably heard from too many readers about the pun in the title of this suspenseful novella. The answer to your question is: No. This has nothing much to do with Shakespeare’s play. It has a lot to do with Venus, with people living on the edge, with the spirit of exploration, and the reasons people have for doing dangerous and otherwise risky business.

  “The Merchants of Venus,” first published in 1972, was also the first story Pohl wrote about the presence of mysterious alien Heechee in the solar system. Since then, he has written a lot about the Heechee, and readers have been much the better for his interest in the artifacts and other leavings of that race. Gateway (1976), his first novel about our discovery of the Heechee, won the triple crown of science fiction—the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for best novel—and that was just the beginning of a memorable series of books.

  Before Gateway came “The Merchants of Venus.”

  1

  My Name, Audee Walthers. My job, airbody driver. My home, on Venus, in a Heechee hut most of the time; wherever I happen to be when I feel sleepy otherwise.

  Until I was twenty-five I lived on Earth, in Amarillo Central mostly. My father, a deputy governor of Texas. He died when I was still in college, but he left me enough dependency benefits to finish school, get a master’s in business administration, and pass the journeyman examination for clerk-typist. So I was set up for life.

  But, after I tried it for a few years, I discovered I didn’t like the life I was set up for. Not so much for the conventional reasons; I don’t mind smog suits, can get along with neighbors even when there are eight hundred of them to the square mile, tolerate noise, can defend myself against the hood kids. It wasn’t Earth itself I didn’t like, it was what I was doing on Earth I didn’t like, and so I sold my UOPWA journeyman’s card, mortgaged my pension accrual, and bought a one-way ticket to Venus. Nothing strange about that. What every kid tells himself he’s going to do, really. But I did it.

  I suppose it would have been all different if I’d had a chance at Real Money. If my father had been full governor instead of a civil-service client. If the dependency benefits had included Unlimited Medicare. If I’d been at the top instead of in the middle, squeezed both ways. It didn’t happen that way, so I opted out by the pioneer route and wound up hunting Terry marks at the Spindle.

  Everybody has seen pictures of the Spindle, the Colosseum and Niagara Falls. Like everything worth looking at on Venus, the Spindle was a Heechee leftover. Nobody had ever figured out what the Heechee wanted with an underground chamber three hundred meters long and spindle-shaped, but it was there, so we used it; it was the closest thing Venus had to a Times Square or a Champs Elysées. All Terry tourists head for it first. That’s where we fleece them.

  My airbody-rental business is reasonably legitimate—not counting the fact that there
really isn’t much worth seeing on Venus that wasn’t left there, below the surface, by the Heechee. The other tourist traps in the Spindle are reasonably crooked. Terries don’t mind, although they must know they’re being taken; they all load up on Heechee prayer fans and doll-heads, and those paperweights of transparent plastic in which a contoured globe of Venus swims in a kind of orange-brown snowstorm of make-believe fly ash, blood-diamonds, and fire-pearls. None of them are worth the price of their mass-charge back to Earth, but to a tourist who can get up the price of passage in the first place I don’t suppose that matters.

  To people like me, who can’t get the price of anything, the tourist traps matter a lot. We live on them. I don’t mean we draw our disposable income from them; I mean that they are how we get the price of what to eat and where to sleep, and if we don’t have the price we die. There aren’t too many ways of earning money on Venus. The ones that might produce Real Money—oh, winning a lottery; striking it rich in the Heechee diggings; blundering into a well-paying job; that kind of thing—are all real long-shots. For bread and butter everybody on Venus depends on Terry tourists, and if we don’t milk them dry we’ve had it.

  Of course, there are tourists and tourists. They come in three varieties. The difference between them is celestial mechanics.

  There’s the quick-and-dirty kind. On Earth, they’re just well-to-do; they come every twenty-six months at Hohmann-orbit time, riding the minimum-energy circuit from Earth. Because of the critical times of a Hohmann orbit, they never can stay more than three weeks on Venus. So they come on the guided tours, determined to get the most out of the quarter-million-dollar minimum cabin fare their rich grandparents had given them for a graduation present, or they’d saved up for a second honeymoon, or whatever. The bad thing about them is that they don’t have much money, since they’d spent it all on fares. The nice thing about them is that there are a lot of them. While they’re on Venus, all the rental rooms are filled. Sometimes they’d have six couples sharing a single partitioned cubicle, two pairs at a time, hot-bedding eight-hour shifts around the clock. Then people like me would hold up in Heechee huts on the surface and rent out our own belowground rooms, and maybe make enough money to live a few months.