PLATINUM POHL (12 page)

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Authors: Frederik Pohl

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They didn’t show it to me much. Old lady Baker was right, Shapman wasn’t as big a fool as most, and when he got down to rigorous testing, after I got back from my eighteen months in the army and he found me in the McDonald’s, he was suspicious as hell. He had me doing my stuff inside a Faraday cage, a room completely enclosed in a dielectric, and he was always going over the copper screen with capacitance detectors, looking for leaks. He never found any. Who needed leaks by then? By then I had had eighteen months with Fritzl.
He did, though, start me in the business, when I was still his student.
I was squeezing out a “D,” right on the narrow edge of flunking the course and being kicked out of the whole school. What was wrong with that was that the draft was still going, and there was the Army hot for my bod the minute the Institute bounced me. So I was hungry to pass.
So, this day in October, Shapman told me I was getting an F for a lab demonstration and I squeezed out my tear and he gave me permission to redo the experiment. I forget exactly what it was, but I was supposed to do something with a laser and I couldn’t make it lase. I got there early, checked over the equipment, screwed it up. I began to pump, but I wasn’t watching the voltages. We blew a fuse. I replaced the fuse, and then the whole damned thing wouldn’t work.
Hell with it. I turned everything off, locked the door and went out into the yard to smoke a joint. The late warm Massachusetts October sunlight was precious. The dope was good. I sat there, reading a book on spiders. I don’t get all choked up about spiders, but one of the guys was telling me how spiders make love, and it sounded dirty enough to tell girls in bars, so I was looking it up. And I forgot the time. And when I thought of going back in the hall Shapman was there already, unlocking the door, balancing a four-inch cardboard box with holes in it. “Ah,” he said, watching me bounce trippily toward him, “I see you’re in a good mood, Mr. Geissen.”
“Sorry I’m late, sir.” I squinted at the box. “What’ve you got there, sir, a black widow?”
“What?” He stopped with the door half open, staring suspiciously.
“I said I thought maybe you had a black widow spider in there, sir,” I said, courteous, alert, reverent.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Come on in, Geissen.” He held the door for me to pass, then came in after me and set the box down. He was in a brown study. “How did you know that?” he asked.
“Know what, sir?” He glared at me. “You mean it really is a black widow spider?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a banded argiope, but it’s a spider all right.”
I didn’t push it. “I don’t know, Professor Shapman,” I said, all open and honest. “It just, I don’t know, it
felt
all crawly and leggy, like. Maybe it was seeing the holes in the box.”
“Yeah.” Still frowning to himself, he turned on the lights and sat down next to his spider. I could see that it had a little tag attached to it, you know, the kind you put on presents. “Get on with the experiment,” he said. “I have to meet somebody.”
“Yes, sir.” I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d screwed the equipment up. I was feeling nice and warm and comfortable from the good dope, and I went through the motions with him frowning at me every second.
“You’re not getting enough voltage,” he said sharply.
“I know that, Professor Shapman,”—
lawdy, massah, I‘se doin’the bestest I
kin
—“there seems to be something wrong.”
“Impossible,” he said sharply, put down the spider, came over to the rig. After a minute of fooling around he went over to the bench with the transformer. “That’s very funny,” he complained.
“What’s that, Professor Shapman?” I dripped humility.
“The wiring is wrong.” He looked up at me, sharp suspicion. “Did you fool around with this part?”
“Me, Professor Shapman?” Injured innocence this time; and he shook his head.
“No, you couldn’t have, could you? You weren’t even in this part of the room.” Suspicion was fading, but he was still staring at me. And me, I was feeling pretty mellow.
“That’s the way it goes sometimes, Professor,” I said, meaning nothing in particular by it.
Unfortunately, he asked me, “What do you mean by that?”
He was chilling my nice warm marijuana glow, and I didn’t want him to. I improvised. “Oh, well,” I said, “I mean … well, it’s hard to put into words, but things happen.”
“Things
happen?
”
“Different kinds of things. Like fuses blow. Clocks stop. Wires come loose from distributor caps. Things like that, Professor, I don’t know why they happen but they do.” I was just winging it. The dope was talking, more than me.
It made him look thoughtful, but that’s as far as it went. He fiddled with the power source and I fiddled with the argon tube and we finally got a good stream of coherent light. But we didn’t talk much after that, and the son of a bitch failed me for the course anyway.
So the army got my bod, I wound up in Wiesbaden, and in the Amerika Haus there I met Fritzl. He was stealing books out of the library to improve his English. Dumb-looking little Kraut, he looked about fourteen, was actually two years older than I was—in some ways, oh,
much
older. He was going to be a famous conjuror. We used to meet in the back of the magic shop where he worked in Frankfurt and he told me how he would go on the stage in America and make his fortune.
Then he got the better idea.
 
Have I mentioned that the Honorable Miss Gwendoline Stella Baker looked a lot like a snake? Not one of your friendly little garter snakes, I mean, not even a rattler. What she looked like was a cobra, with her hair spread out like the cobra’s hood and her long neck wavering as though getting ready to strike. She struck. “I am surprised, Mr. Geissen,” she hissed, “that a man who is as much of a television star as you hasn’t been here before.”
“To see if you can fool us out of the fifty thousand dollars,” The Reverend Dr. Samuel Shipperton Smith chimed in.
I nodded to show that I was trying to see their point of view. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious,” I said. “I would be too. I guess you get a lot of phonies coming in here for that money.”
“You must think we’re very stupid, Geissen,” she went on, still sounding snaky. It was a hiss, all right, but it was more than that, it was a kind of false-teeth whistle. Looking at her closely her teeth did look funny. Probably china choppers; probably the bustline was falsies; she didn’t seem to fit the figure she displayed. And Smith himself was obviously wearing a toupee and, I was pretty sure, some kind of suntan makeup on his face. He added his two cents’ worth:
“You probably think everybody is stupid. Do you expect anyone to believe that there are people on the planet Clarion who make your tricks fail most of the time?”
“I don’t do tricks, Mr. Smith,” I said politely. “Do you want me to go away?”
Pause while they looked at each other. Then, “We didn’t tell you to come,” said Smith. “Go if you want to.”
He didn’t sound as if he really meant it, so all I did was open the door to the outside office. I stood there for a minute, while the receptionist looked up to see what I was doing. I took a quick look at my wristwatch, then turned back to the freaks. I looked as though I were making up my mind to say something to them. I didn’t think I would really have to, because the secretary had seen me look at my watch, and naturally that made her look at the clock, and her gasp came later than I expected it but it came. “Reverend Smith!” she called. “The clock’s stopped.”
I looked embarrassed.
Smith looked sarcastic. That skinny face didn’t look handsome the best day of its life, and when it was looking sarcastic it looked particularly weasely. “Used your time in the waiting room profitably, did you?” he asked me.
“My time?” I blinked. “In the waiting room? Oh, you mean I could have done something to the clock?” I allowed myself to look hangdog. “If you think that, Mr. Smith, I guess I should stop wasting your time.”
“No, do stay,” said the Honorable Miss Baker, looking as poisonous as he but in her own snaky, rather than weasely, way. “What other little surprises did you set up for us?”
“Things just happen,” I said miserably. “I’m sorry! I always tell them I’m sorry!”
“And do you tell them you’re a fake, Geissen?” she demanded.
“That, too! Yes! I tell them I think it is all a fake, this whole thing—only I don’t know who is faking it!”
 
Because, you see, that’s really what I did tell them, because that’s what Fritz] told me to do. It always worked. The more you say you don’t do anything, the more they prove to you that you do. And of course, after all those hours of practicing with Fritzl in the back room of the magic shop in Frankfurt, there was plenty I
could
do.
Only at first I only did it for fun. Like when Professor Shapman showed up at the McDonald’s. He was just in for a Big Mac and a shake, but when he saw me there he turned purple. “Geissen! When did you get out of the army? Listen, I want to talk to you.”
The manager was giving me looks. “I’m busy, Professor,” I said, which was true.
“A minute of your time,” he begged. “You, are you the manager? This man is a former student and it’s important that I talk to him, all right?” And then, when we were in a booth at the back of the store, he said, “I’ve been thinking about you. Would you be interested in, ah, performing a series of tests?”
“What kind of tests?” I asked, watching him spill shredded lettuce and secret-formula sauce on his shirt front. I took a napkin and reached across the table to wipe up the worst of it.
“Paranormal studies, Hans. Just a few hours of that sort of thing, the cards, the sealed envelopes, you know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I declared. “What kind of money are we talking?”
He looked baffled, mouth ajar to spill some more of his Big Mac. “Money?”
“I get my two-thirty-five an hour here, Professor Shapman. I need it to live on.”
“If it’s a question of money—”
“That’s what it’s a question of.”
“—maybe something could be worked out,” he finished, beginning to chew again. “Why don’t you think about it? Give me a call?”
I sighed and wiped up another dollop of sauce from his tie. “I’ll think,” I said, “but honestly, Professor Shapman, I don’t know how many favors I want to do you. You flunked me out, you know. And I’ve got to get back to work.”
And I did, without looking back at him, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him watching me as he finished his sandwich. I kept busy. When he got up to leave he paused to dump his tray in the trash container and then headed back toward me. I thought he was going to tell me that he’d noticed his slide-rule tie clip was bent double, but he hadn’t noticed that. All he wanted was to say, “By the way, the Spider Lady sends her regards.”
 
So that night I told Fritzl about it and he gave me hell. “Stupid! You got a pigeon and you let him get away! What’s this ‘Spider Lady’ dreck?”
I shrugged. “I saw in
Tech Times
that he got married so I sent him a get-well card. I wrote on it ‘Best wishes to you and the Spider Lady.’ He’d got this spider for her, see—and I’d been drinking—”
“Drinking! Yah, I know about you and drinking back in Wiesbaden. You don’t start that again!”
I said reasonably, “You don’t give me orders, Fritzl. I don’t mind sharing a room with you till you get your career started, but—”
“Career! You don’t know what’s career!” he yelled, getting excited. “Now you listen and I tell you what to do. You call up this Herr Professor and tell him you changed your mind. Then we start career.”
I was getting sore. He was always a pretty bossy guy, Fritzl, but the deal we’d made in Germany was that I’d be his manager if I helped him get to America. Nobody said anything about his being mine. There was a bar in Lexington that said they might take him on for a tryout if we got somebody with a guitar to back him up, so I began, “What about—”
“What about everything,” he said grimly, “is that in one hour you are going to call this Herr Professor and tell him you come over. Then I tell you what to do. But first you spend the next hour practicing with the cards!”
 
 
The good part of it was that the Spider Lady was a nice-looking woman. Her real name was Lillian, and she had that good woman smell that’s part perfume and part sex, and when she let me in and sat me down to wait for her husband she didn’t mind touching a little bit while she took my coat. There were possibilities there. “We’re just going to eat, Hans,” she said, “and you look like you could use a home-cooked meal.”
So I let myself be persuaded. A good cook she was not; steak and salad and baked potato, but the steak was gray all the way through and the potato still hard; but while we were eating our knees touched a couple times under the table. Then she cleared away and old Shapman brought out the Rhine cards.

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