The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC Read online

  Even through the door, across the crowded dance floor, I could see someone bending to talk to Albert Quayle; I could see his look of worry, then the change of expression. Avarice gleamed out of his eyes, like golden glints from a pawnbroker's sign.

  'Don't worry, Vince, I said softly. 'Quayle knows.'

  • • • •

  It wasn't far to the Wallow. Borton led us by the taped path to the water's edge. We were quiet, especially Dunlap.

  The torches were gone. Most of the people were gone. Only scattered couples and groups were left, many drunk, all invisible in the clotted fog. The thick water in the Wallow had risen to the very edge of the tapewalk.

  'Under here.' Vince held the tape for us. We stepped off into sucking mud. The distant rumble of explosions was still drumming at the horizons.

  Venus is an enormous planet, bigger in land area than four Earths. There is much blasting to be done and the sound of plutonium carries.

  But above the distant boom, suddenly I heard something else. A thin, distant voice cut like piano wire at my heart. Out in the middle of the Wallow, Diane, invisible, was moaning. 'Help me! Please, the water's getting higher.'

  And there were people within the sound of her voice--a good many, though most had left--and they had boats if they chose to use them. But she wasn't there for them. She was nobody. A ghost. If anyone knew she was alive, there was no sign shown.

  'Dunlap. Get a boat.'

  He looked at me.

  'Go ahead, man. Ask someone--anybody. They'll lend it to you because you're wearing the brassard. But they won't talk to Borton or me.'

  He trudged off, muttering.

  As soon as he had disappeared into the fog, I said: 'All right, Vince.

  You remember what I told you in front of the Club. Now do it!'

  'Aw, Oliver! You're crazy! Do you know what you're getting into?'

  'Do you want to be shunned all the short rest of your life?'

  He grunted once and walked away. But I knew he didn't approve. That didn't matter. What mattered was Diane and life.

  So now I was all alone in the hot slimy fog with Diane's distant sobs tearing at me. I wanted to call to her, but there was a reason for not doing it.

  But time was passing.

  The Wallow was filling rapidly now with the run-off from the hills. The air was twenty degrees colder. Still hot--terribly hot by Earth standards, but as our portion of Venus rolled into shadow, water was wrung out of the sodden air and it had to go somewhere. Now the Wallow was a hundred acres of steaming muddy water. All that was left of the red mud of six hours before was a few islands poking up. Diane was on one of them. But in a while, maybe a very short while, all of the islands would disappear. By full flood time the shallowest point in the Wallow would be sixty feet deep.

  And it was not merely drowning that endangered her. That water was hot.

  Time was passing...

  Then I heard Dunlap's wheezing breath, and a moment later the thunk of his oars moving blindly towards me in the fog.

  'Here!'I cried.

  He found me a moment later.

  I scrambled aboard, and we rowed clumsily out on the soupy lake, following the sound of Diane's sobbing voice.

  • • • •

  She cried out unbelievingly: 'Oh god!'

  I clutched at her in the mist. It was like Leander embracing Hero, still wet from the raging Hellespont; it was the meaning and purpose of all my life.

  Then I felt her go suddenly tense.

  She strained to see through the hot fog. In a voice that cracked a little she said: 'It's--it's the Earthie.'

  I looked around politely.

  Dunlap was standing there in an awkward, embarrassed stance. His face was half turned away.

  He cleared his throat. 'I can explain,' he apologized.

  'Explained what, Mr. Dunlap?'

  He felt his throat. 'I mean, I thought she'd take this attitude. I knew she wouldn't understand about what happened. Here I am trying to help you, and--'

  'What did happen, Dunlap?'

  Diane rasped furiously: 'He's the one! He got you away on purpose, I swear it! And then the fog closed in, remember? And somebody grabbed me. Grabbed me! '

  'I know, dear.'

  'But it was physical! Like an Earthie. It must have been him. He grabbed me, and brought me out here on a boat. And left me. And then some people came by and I called to them, and--they shunned me. He did it!'

  'But it wasn't me, I swear. Ask your friend here! I was with him, wasn't I?'

  'You were with me for about three minutes.' I patted his arm with my free hand. 'But you didn't do it,' I reassured him. 'I know that. It wasn't him, Diane.'

  'Then who?'

  I stopped her. 'Be patient, Diane. Just for a few moments.'

  We stood there. Then there were voices in the fog... a canoe's paddling ... and then a familiar whining voice, droning the nobody's familiar whimpering cry. 'Mister? Please, mister. I haven't eaten in three days--'

  'Vince!' I shouted. 'Here we are.'

  In a moment he came up out of the fog, looked us over and nodded.

  Behind him there were other figures in the fog.

  'Who the devil are they?' Dunlap demanded, fingering his brassard.

  'Nobody,' I told him. 'Nobody at all.'

  There were four of them, ghostly in the mist. In the fog they had no faces, only vague mottled shapes, and faint voices that agreed: 'Nobody, mister. Nobody.'

  'But maybe,' I said steadily, 'they won't be nobodies forever. Maybe some day they'll be somebodies again.'

  • • • •

  Dunlap shouted hoarsely: 'I don't know what you're trying to pull, Oliver, but I don't like it. I'm getting out of here!'

  I stood in front of him. 'How did you know my name was Oliver?'

  He rocked back, staring. 'What?'

  'I never told you my name.'

  'But-'

  'Never mind.' I raised my voice. 'Quayle! Come on out here. I know you're on the island. You wouldn't miss a chance to get knives--and besides, I heard your canoe.'

  A moment, while Dunlap's face turned to flabby butter.

  Then there was a soft sludgy sound of footsteps in the mud. Albert Quayle walked steadily up to us, his fat toad's face a mask. He glanced at Dunlap, and even in the drenching heat of that little island in the Wallow Dunlap shivered.

  Then Quayle turned to me. He waited.

  I said cheerfully: 'We're ready, I think. Quayle here. Dunlap here.

  Diane and myself, here. Borton and the witnesses--'

  'Witnesses?' Quayle's lips didn't move, only the word popped out of the fog and hung there between us.

  'To a murder, Albert. Yours. You're going to die.'

  'Ha!' He was contemptuous. 'You can't kill me. I'm an important man here, Oliver. Who's going to shun me on your say-so?'

  I paused. 'There are other ways of killing,' I said softly.

  He didn't move a muscle. I let him think for a second. Then I said,

  'Vince, have you got what I asked for?'

  He passed me something cold and sharp. It was hard to make it out in the fog, but I knew what it was; and then I held it up and they all knew.

  'A knife, Quayle!' I cried. It's what you want, isn't it? A knife to bribe a saposaur to wreck somebody else's plantation. That's what brought you here, and now you can have this one, at least!'

  He stood frozen. I took a second turn to Diane. 'Good-bye,' I whispered. She didn't know what I meant by it, but that was all right. If it turned out that she had to know, she would know.

  And then I said loudly to Quayle: 'I'm going to give you the knife--

  where it belongs. You put too much trust in conditioning, thinking I can't use this. But maybe you're wrong.'

  He licked his lips.

  'Did you ever hear of a bribe?' I demanded. 'Ever hear of a man who was supposed to be conditioned--but wasn't? Well, you're looking at one--

  and now, Quayle, here's your knife.
'

  And I tensed, and fought my own body to do it; and I jumped for him, the knife raised to plunge into his breast And that was the last I saw; I fell senseless to the ground; because, you see, what I had just told him had been a complete and utter lie.

  • • • •

  I came to, very slowly, with much pain. A long time had passed. I hurt in places where I'd never known there was a nerve. I was weaker than any living man has a right to be.

  But I was alive.

  That was all I needed to know. If I was alive, everything was all right; that was the gamble I had taken. The conditioning doesn't prevent, quite. It only punishes. I had sought out that punishment as a bluff, but it was a bluff that could easily have killed me.

  Diane was leaning over me. Blearily I focused on her face. Her scent was musky, her expression calm and passionate. 'Oliver,'-she murmured.

  'You're all right. Don't worry.'

  'I know,' I whispered. 'At least I lived through it. That was the hard part.'

  I rubbed my face. There was heavy beard on It; I had been unconscious at least a full day. I was in a hospital room.

  'You didn't kill Quayle with the knife.'

  'No. The attempt was bad enough. If I'd succeeded, there would have been no chance at all; the conditioning would have killed me.'

  She looked at me with a glance of wonder and loving admiration. 'You knew exactly what was going to happen, didn't you? When you said all that about a man bribing the immigration people to get in without being conditioned, it was Quayle you were talking about, wasn't it?'

  I nodded.

  'You were right He wasn't conditioned. He--' She shuddered. 'He killed his first two wives, Oliver. Did you know that? But I guess you did--for their inheritance. And he killed others to get them out of the way. He admitted it all, you see, once it was too late and they'd begun to shun him. And he was the one who grabbed me in the fog--from behind, so I couldn't see his face. And then, when you went at him with the knife--'

  'I know.' I nodded again, beginning to feel better. 'He hit me, proving that he wasn't conditioned.'

  'That's right. And with Vince Borton and the others to see it, there was no doubt. The police listened to them. Vince was framed. Albert admitted it'

  'I know.'

  'And Dunlap? Did you know about him? He wasn't an Earthie; he was from one of the South Pole cities, working for Quayle, running in knives for trade with the saposaurs.'

  'I know. When he called me Oliver I got suspicious, but I wasn't really sure until I was in the Club. You see, he didn't tell me what Quayle had done when I threw the drink in his face--tried to hit me then too--and he didn't faint. It was suspicious. Vince Borton had to tell me about it. Then I began to think back. The brassard--Dunlap could have done it, and nobody else that I could think of.'

  Diane leaned forward. 'It's all right now,' she murmured huskily. 'We can forget. Oliver, you're wonderful!'

  I said, reaching out to her: 'I know.'

  The Day The Icicle Works Closed

  1

  The wind was cold, pink snow was falling and Milo Pulcher had holes in his shoes. He trudged through the pink-gray slush across the square from the courthouse to the jail. The turnkey was drinking coffee out of a vinyl container. "Expecting you," he grunted. "Which one you want to see first?"

  Pulcher sat down, grateful for the warmth. "It doesn't matter. Say, what kind of kids are they?"

  The turnkey shrugged.

  "I mean, do they give you any trouble?"

  "How could they give me trouble? If they don't clean their cells they don't eat. What else they do makes no difference to me."

  Pulcher took the letter from Judge Pegrim out of his pocket, and examined the list of his new clients. Avery Foltis, Walter Hopgood, Jimmy Lasser, Sam Schiesterman, Bourke Smith, Madeleine Gaultry. None of the names meant anything to him. "I'll take Foltis," he guessed, and followed the turnkey to a cell.

  The Foltis boy was homely, pimply and belligerent. "Cripes," he growled shrilly, "are you the best they can do for me?"

  Pulcher took his time answering. The boy was not very lovable; but, he reminded himself, there was a fifty-dollar retainer from the county for each one of these defendants, and conditions being what they were Pulcher could easily grow to love three hundred dollars. "Don't give me a hard time," he said amiably. "I may not be the best lawyer in the Galaxy, but I'm the one you've got."

  "Cripes."

  "All right, all right. Tell me what happened, will you? All I know is that you're accused of conspiracy to commit a felony, specifically an act of kidnapping a minor child."

  "Yeah, that's it," the boy agreed. "You want to know what happened?" He bounced to his feet, then began acting out his story. "We were starving to death, see?" Arms clutched pathetically around his belly. "

  The Icicle Works closed down. Cripes, I walked the streets nearly a year, looking for something to do. Anything." Marching in place. "I even rented out for a while, but-that didn't work out." He scowled and fingered his pimply face. Pulcher nodded. Even a body-renter had to have some qualifications. The most important one was a good-looking, disease-free, strong and agile physique. "So we got together and decided, the hell, there was money to be made hooking old Swinburne's son. So-I guess we talked too much. They caught us." He gripped his wrists, like manacles.

  Pulcher asked a few more questions, and then interviewed two of the other boys. He learned nothing he hadn't already known. The six youngsters had planned a reasonably competent kidnapping, and talked about it where they could be heard, and if there was any hope of getting them off it did not make itself visible to their court-appointed attorney.

  • • • •

  Pulcher left the jail abruptly and went up the street to see Charley Dickon.

  The committeeman was watching a three-way wrestling match on a flickery old TV set. "How'd it go, Milo," he greeted the lawyer, keeping his eyes on the wrestling.

  Pulcher said, "I'm not going to get them off, Charley."

  "Oh? Too bad." Dickon looked away from the set for the first time. "

  Why not?"

  "They admitted the whole thing. Handwriting made the Hopgood boy on the ransom note. They all had fingerprints and cell-types all over the place. And besides, they talked too much."

  Dickon said with a spark of interest, "What about Tim Lasser's son?"

  "Sorry." The committeeman looked thoughtful. "I can't help it, Charley," the lawyer protested. The kids hadn't been even routinely careful.

  When they planned to kidnap the son of the mayor they had talked it over, quite loudly, in a juke joint. The waitress habitually taped everything that went on in her booths. Pulcher suspected a thriving blackmail business, but that didn't change the fact that there was enough on tape to show premeditation. They had picked the mayor's son up at school. He had come with them perfectly willingly-the girl, Madeleine Gaultry, had been a babysitter for him. The boy was only three years old, but he couldn't miss an easy identification like that. And there was more: the ransom note had been sent special delivery, and young Foltis had asked the post-office clerk to put the postage on instead of using the automatic meter. The clerk remembered the pimply face very well indeed.

  The committeeman sat politely while Pulcher explained, though it was obvious that most of his attention was on the snowy TV screen. "Well, Milo, that's the way it goes. Anyway, you got a fast three hundred, hey? And that reminds me."

  Pulcher's guard went up.

  "Here," said the committeeman, rummaging through his desk. He brought out a couple of pale green tickets. "You ought to get out and meet some more people. The Party's having its annual Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner next week. Bring your girl."

  "I don't have a girl."

  "Oh, you'll find one. Fifteen dollars per," explained the committeeman, handing over the tickets. Pulcher sighed and paid. Well, that was what kept the wheels oiled. And Dickon had suggested his name to Judge Pegrim. Thirty dollars out of three hundred still
left him a better week's pay than he had had since the Icicle Works folded.

  The committeeman carefully folded the bills into his pocket, Pulcher watching gloomily. Dickon was looking prosperous, all right. There was easily a couple of thousand in that wad. Pulcher supposed that Dickon had been caught along with everybody else on the planet when the Icicle Works folded. Nearly everybody owned stock in it, and certainly Charley Dickon, whose politician brain got him a piece of nearly every major enterprise on Altair Nine-a big clump of stock in the Tourist Agency, a sizable share of the Mining Syndicate--certainly he would have had at least a few thousand in the Icicle Works. But it hadn't hurt him much. He said, "None of my business, but why don't you take that girl?"

  "Madeleine Gaultry? She's in jail."

  "Get her out. Here." He tossed over a bondsman's card. Pulcher pocketed it with a scowl. That would cost another forty bucks anyway, he estimated; the bondsman would naturally be one of Dickon's club members.

  Pulcher noticed that Dickon was looking strangely puzzled. "What's the matter?"

  "Like I say, it's none of my business. But I don't get it. You and the girl have a fight?"

  "Fight? I don't even know her."

  "She said you did."

  "Me? No. I don't know any Madeleine Gaultry-Wait a minute! Is that her married name? Did she used to be at the Icicle Works?"

  Dickon nodded. "Didn't you see her?"

  "I didn't get to the women's wing. I-" Pulcher stood up, oddly flustered. "Say, I'd better run along, Chancy. This bondsman, he's open now? Well-" He stopped babbling and left.

  Madeleine Gaultry! Only her name had been Madeleine Cossett. It was funny that she should turn up now-in jail and, Pulcher abruptly realized, likely to stay there indefinitely. But he put that thought out of his mind; first he wanted to see her.

  • • • •

  The snow was turning lavender now.

  Pink snow, green snow, lavender snow-any color of the pastel rainbow. It was nothing unusual. That was what had made Altair Nine worth colonizing in the first place.