PLATINUM POHL (23 page)
Authors: Frederik Pohl
“We’ll have to build a fire,” said Solveig reluctantly. “Come and gather wood.” The three of us went scouring up the ledge for what we could find. We had to go all the way back to the top of the crevasse to find enough to bother carrying; we brought it back, and while Demaree and I worked to set it afire Solveig went back for more. It wasn’t easy, trying to make that thin and brittle stuff burn. Demaree’s pocket lighter wore itself out without success. Then he swore and motioned me back, leveling his flame rifle at the sticks.
That
worked beautifully—every last stick was ablaze in the wash of fire from his gun. But the blast scattered them over yards, half of them going over the side of the ledge; and we charred our fingers and wore ourselves out picking up the burning brands and hurling them back into the little hollow where we’d started the fire. We dumped the remaining armload on the little blaze, and watched it grow. It helped—helped very much. It was all radiant heat, and our backs were freezing while we toasted in front; but it helped. Then Demaree had an idea, and he slipped a cartridge out of his rifle and stripped it. The combustible material inside came in a little powder, safe enough to handle as long as no spark touched it. He tossed the detonator cap in the fire, where it exploded with a tiny snap and puff of flame, and carefully measured out the powder from the cartridge in little mounds, only a few grams in each, wrapping each one in a twist of dried vine leaves.
That
worked beautifully—every last stick was ablaze in the wash of fire from his gun. But the blast scattered them over yards, half of them going over the side of the ledge; and we charred our fingers and wore ourselves out picking up the burning brands and hurling them back into the little hollow where we’d started the fire. We dumped the remaining armload on the little blaze, and watched it grow. It helped—helped very much. It was all radiant heat, and our backs were freezing while we toasted in front; but it helped. Then Demaree had an idea, and he slipped a cartridge out of his rifle and stripped it. The combustible material inside came in a little powder, safe enough to handle as long as no spark touched it. He tossed the detonator cap in the fire, where it exploded with a tiny snap and puff of flame, and carefully measured out the powder from the cartridge in little mounds, only a few grams in each, wrapping each one in a twist of dried vine leaves.
“In case it goes out,” he explained. “If there’s any life in the embers at all, it’ll set one of these off, and we won’t have to blow up the whole bed of ashes to get it started again.”
“Fine,” I said. “Now we’d better build up a woodpile—”
We looked at each other, suddenly brought back to reality.
Astonishing how the mind can put aside what it does not wish to consider; amazing how we could have forgotten what we didn’t want to know. Our woodpile reminded us both: Dr. Solveig had gone for more, nearly three quarters of an hour before.
And it was only a five-minute climb to the top of the crevasse.
The answer was obvious: The Martians. But, of course, we had to prove it for ourselves.
And prove it we did: At the expense of our weapons, our safe cave and fire, and very nearly our lives. We went plunging up the ledge like twin whirligigs, bouncing in the light Martian gravity and nearly tumbling into the chasm at every step. I suppose that if we thought at all, we were thinking that the more commotion we made the more likely we were to scare the Martians off before they killed Dr. Solveig. We were yelling and kicking stones into the gorge with a bounce and clatter; and we were up at the top of the crevasse in a matter of seconds, up at the top—and smack into a trap. For they were waiting for us up there, our first face-to-face Martians.
We could see them only as you might see ghosts in a sewer; the night was black, even the starlight half drowned by the branches overhead, but they seemed to gleam, phosphorescently, like decaying vegetation. And decay was a word that fitted the picture, for they looked like nothing so much as corpses. They had no hands or arms, but their faces were vaguely human—or so they seemed. What passed for ears were large and hung like a spaniel’s; but there were eyes, sunken but bright, and there was a mouth; and they were human in size, human in the way they came threateningly toward us, carrying what must have been weapons.
Demaree’s flame rifle flooded the woods with fire. He must have incinerated some of them, but the light was too blinding; we couldn’t see. I fired close on the heels of Demaree’s shot, and again the wood was swept with flame; and the two of us charged blindly into the dark. There was light now, from the blazes we had started, but the fires were Mars-fires, fitful and weak, and casting shadows that moved and disguised movement. We beat about the brush uselessly for a moment, then retreated and regrouped at the lip of the crevasse. And that was our mistake. “What about Solveig?” Demaree demanded. “Did you see anything—”
But he never got a chance to finish the sentence. On a higher cliff than ours there were scrabblings of motion, and boulders fell around us. We dodged back down the ledge, but we couldn’t hope to get clear that way. Demaree bellowed:
“Come on, Will!” And he started up the ledge again; but the boulder shower doubled and redoubled. We had no choice. We trotted, gasping and frozen, back down to our cave, and ran in. And waited. It was not pleasant waiting; when the Martians showed up at the cave mouth, we were done. Because, you see, in our potshotting at the golden glow on the dunes and our starting a fire in the cave and salvoing the woods up above, we had been a little careless.
Our flame rifles were empty.
We kept warm and worried all of this night, and in the light from our dwindling fire, only a couple of branches at a time, we could see a figure across the crevasse from us.
It was doing something complex with objects we could not recognize. Demaree, over my objections, insisted we investigate; and so we parted with a hoarded brand. We threw the tiny piece of burning wood out across the crevasse, it struck over the figure in a shower of sparks and a pale blue flame, and in the momentary light we saw that it was, indeed, a Martian. But we still couldn’t see what he was doing.
The dawn wind came, but the Martian stayed at his post; and then, at once, it was daylight.
We crept to the lip of the cave and looked out, not more than a dozen yards from the busy watching figure.
The Martian looked up once, staring whitely across the ravine at us, as a busy cobbler might glance up from his last. And just as unemotionally, the Martian returned to what he was doing. He had a curious complex construction of sticks and bits of stone, or so it seemed from our distance. He was carefully weaving bits of shiny matter into it in a regular pattern.
Demaree looked at me, licking his lips. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Will?” he asked.
I nodded. It was a weapon of some sort; it couldn’t be anything else. Perhaps it was a projector for the lightnings that blasted the sand cars or the golden glow that had struck
down at us from the sand dunes, perhaps some even more deadly Martian device. But whatever it was it was at point-blank range; and when he was finished with it, we were dead.
down at us from the sand dunes, perhaps some even more deadly Martian device. But whatever it was it was at point-blank range; and when he was finished with it, we were dead.
Demaree said thinly, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
The only question was, did we have enough time? We scrabbled together our flame rifles and packs from the back of the cave and, eyes fearfully on the busy Martian across the chasm, leaped for the cave mouth—just in time to see what seemed a procession coming down the other side. It was a scrambling, scratching tornado, and we couldn’t at first tell if it was a horde of Martians or a sand car with the treads flapping. But then we got a better look.
And it was neither. It was Dr. Solveig.
The Martian across the way saw him as soon as we, and it brought that strange complex of bits and pieces slowly around to bear on him. “Hey!” bellowed Demaree, and my yell was as loud as his. We had to warn Solveig of what he was running into—death and destruction.
But Solveig knew more than we. He came careening down the ledge across the crevasse, paused only long enough to glance at us and at the Martian, and then came on again.
“Rocks!” bellowed Demaree in my ear. “Throw them!” And the two of us searched feverishly in the debris for rocks to hurl at the Martian, to spoil his aim.
We needn’t have bothered. We could find nothing more deadly than pebbles, but we didn’t need even them. The Martian made a careful, last-minute adjustment on his gadget, and poked it once, squeezed it twice and pressed what was obviously its trigger.
And nothing happened. No spark, no flame, no shot. Solveig came casually down on the Martian, unharmed.
Demaree was astonished, and so was I; but the two of us together were hardly as astonished as the Martian. He flew at his gadget like a tailgunner clearing a breech jam over hostile interceptors. But that was as far as he got with it, because Solveig had reached him and in a methodical, almost a patronizing way he kicked the Martian’s gadget to pieces and called over to us:
“Don’t worry, boys. They won’t hurt us here. Let’s get back up on top.”
It was a long walk back to Niobe, especially with the cumbersome gadgetry Solveig had found—a thing the size of a large machine gun, structurally like the bits and pieces the Martian had put together, but made of metal and crystal instead of bits of rubble.
But we made it, all four of us—we had picked up Garcia at the stalled cars, swearing lividly in relief but otherwise all right. Solveig wouldn’t tell us much. He was right, of course. The important thing was to get back to Niobe as soon as we could with his gimmick. Because the gimmick was the Martian weapon that zeroed in on sand cars, and the sooner our mechanics got it taken apart, the sooner we would know how to defend ourselves against it. We were breathless on the long run home, but we were exultant. And we had reason to be, because there was no doubt in any of our minds that a week after we turned the weapon over to the researchers we would be able to run sand cars safely across the Martian plains. (Actually it wasn’t a week; it was less. The aiming mechanism was nothing so complex as radio, it was a self-aiming thermocouple, homing on high temperatures. We licked it by shielding the engines and trailing smoke-pots to draw fire.)
Overconfident? No—any Earthman, of course, could have worked out a variation
which would have made the weapon useful again in an hour’s leisurely thought. But Earthmen are flexible. And the Martians were not. Because the Martians were not—the Martians.
which would have made the weapon useful again in an hour’s leisurely thought. But Earthmen are flexible. And the Martians were not. Because the Martians were not—the Martians.
That is, they were not
the
Martians.
the
Martians.
“Successors,” Solveig explained to all of us, back in Niobe. “Heirs, if you like. But not the inventors. Compared with whoever built those machines, the Martians we’ve been up against are nothing but animals—or children. Like children, they can pull a trigger or strike a match. But they can’t design a gun—or even build one by copying another.”
Keever shook his long, lean head. “And the original Martians?”
Solveig said, “That’s a separate question. Perhaps they’re hiding out somewhere we haven’t reached—underground or at the poles. But they’re master builders, whoever and wherever they are.” He made a wry face. “There I was,” he said, “hiding out in a cleft in the rock when the dawn wind came. I thought I’d dodged the Martians, but they knew I was there. As soon as the sun came up I saw them dragging that thing toward me.” He jerked a thumb at the weapon, already being checked over by our maintenance crews. “I thought that was the end, especially when they pulled the trigger.”
“And it didn’t go off,” said Demaree.
“It
couldn’t
go off! I wasn’t a machine. So I took it away from them—they aren’t any stronger than kittens—and I went back to look for you two. And there was that Martian waiting for
you.
I guess he didn’t have a real gun, so he was making one—like a kid’ll make a cowboy pistol out of two sticks and a nail. Of course, it won’t shoot. Neither did the Martians, as you will note.”
couldn’t
go off! I wasn’t a machine. So I took it away from them—they aren’t any stronger than kittens—and I went back to look for you two. And there was that Martian waiting for
you.
I guess he didn’t have a real gun, so he was making one—like a kid’ll make a cowboy pistol out of two sticks and a nail. Of course, it won’t shoot. Neither did the Martians, as you will note.”
We all sat back and relaxed. “Well,” said Keever, “that’s our task for this week. I guess you’ve shown us how to clean up what the Earthside papers call the Martian Menace, Doc. Provided, of course, that we don’t run across any of the grownup Martians, or the real Martians, or whatever it was that designed those things.”
Solveig grinned. “They’re either dead or hiding, Keever,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about them.”
And unfortunately, he didn’t worry about them, and neither did any of the rest of us.
Not for nearly five years … .
This is a story about causality; read it and you’ll understand. It’s also about war and friendship and the choices we make. Altogether, it’s a short but powerful, poignant story about life. First published in 1972, it spans decades in mere pages.
Science fiction? You decide.
I remember a winter when the cold snapped and stung, and it would not snow. It was a very long time ago, and in the afternoons Paulie O’Shaughnessy would come by for me after school and we’d tell each other what we were going to do with our lives. I remember standing with Paulie on the corner, with my breath white and my teeth aching from the cold air, talking. It was too cold to go to the park and we didn’t have any money to go anywhere else. We thumbed through the magazines in the secondhand bookstore until the lady threw us out. “Let’s hitch downtown,” said Paulie; but I could feel how cold the wind would be on the back of the trolley cars and I wouldn’t. “Let’s sneak in the Carlton,” I said, but Paulie had been caught sneaking in to see the Marx Brothers the week before and the usher knew his face. We ducked into the indoor miniature golf course for a while; it had been an automobile showroom the year before and still smelled of gas. But we were the only people there, and conspicuous, and when the man who rented out the clubs started toward us we left.
So we Boy Scout-trotted down Flatbush Avenue to the big old library, walk fifty, trot fifty, the cold air slicing into the insides of our faces, past the apple sellers and the wine-brick stores, gasping and grunting at each other, and do you know what? Paulie picked a book off those dusty old shelves. We didn’t have cards, but he liked it too much to leave it unfinished. He walked out with it under his coat; and fifteen years later, shriveled and shrunken and terrified of the priest coming toward his bed, he died of what he read that day. It’s true. I saw it happen. And the damn book was only
Beau Geste.
Beau Geste.
I remember the summer that followed. I still didn’t have any money but I had found girls. That was the summer when Franklin Roosevelt flew to Chicago in an airplane to accept his party’s nomination to the presidency, and it was hotter than you would believe. Standing on the corner, the sparks from the trolley wheels were almost invisible in the bright sun. We hitched to the beach when we could, and Paulie’s pale, Jewish-looking face got red and then freckled. He hated that; he wanted to be burned black in the desert sun, or maybe clear-skinned and cleft-chinned with the mark of a helmet strap on his jaw.
But I didn’t see much of Paulie that summer. He had finished all the Wren books by then and was moving on to
Daredevil Aces;
he’d wheedled a World War French bayonet out of his uncle and had taken a job delivering suits for a tailor shop, saving his money to buy a .22. I saw much more of his sister. She was fifteen then, which was a year older than Paulie and I were. In his British soldier-of-fortune role-playing he cast her as much younger. “Sport,” he said to me, eyes a little narrowed, half-smile on his lips, “do what you like. But not with Kitty.”
Daredevil Aces;
he’d wheedled a World War French bayonet out of his uncle and had taken a job delivering suits for a tailor shop, saving his money to buy a .22. I saw much more of his sister. She was fifteen then, which was a year older than Paulie and I were. In his British soldier-of-fortune role-playing he cast her as much younger. “Sport,” he said to me, eyes a little narrowed, half-smile on his lips, “do what you like. But not with Kitty.”
As a matter of fact, in the end I did do pretty much as I liked with Kitty, but we had each married somebody else before that and it was a long way from 1932. But even in 1932 I tried. On a July evening I finally got her to go up on the roof with me; it was no good; somebody else was there ahead of us, and Kitty wouldn’t stay with them there. “Let’s sit on the stoop,” she said. But that was right out in the street, with all the kids playing king-of-the-hill on a pile of sand.
So I took her by the elbow, and I walked her down the Avenue, talking about Life and Courage and War. She had heard the whole thing before, of course, as much as she would listen to, but from Paulie, not from me. She listened. It was ritual courtship, as formal as a dog lifting his leg. It did not seem to me that it mattered what I said, as long as what I said was masculine.
You can’t know how masculine I wanted to be for Kitty. She was without question the prettiest doll around. She looked like—well, like Ginger Rogers, if you remember, with a clean, friendly face and the neatest, slimmest hips. She knew that. She was studying dancing. She was also studying men, and God knows what she thought she was learning from me.
When we got to Dean Street I changed from authority on war to authority on science and told her that the heat was only at ground level. Just a little way above our heads, I told her, the air was always cool and fresh. “Let’s go up on the fire escape,” I said, nudging her toward the Atlantic Theatre.
The Atlantic was locked up tight that year; Paulie and I were not the only kids who didn’t have movie money. But the fire escapes were open, three flights of strap-iron stairs going up to what we called nigger heaven. I don’t know why, exactly. The colored kids from the neighborhood didn’t sit up there, in fact. I never saw them in the movies at all. The fire escapes made a good place to go. Paulie and I went up there a lot, when he wasn’t working, to look down on everybody in the street and not have anyone know we were watching them. So Kitty and I went up to the second landing and sat on the steps, and in a minute I put my arm around her.
And all of this, you know, I’d thought out like two or three months in advance, going up there by myself and experimentally bouncing my tail up and down on the steps to test for discomfort, calculating in a wet morning in May what it would be like right after dark in August, and all. It was a triumph of fourteen-year-old forethought. Or it would have been if it had come to anything. But somebody coughed, higher up on the fire escape.
Kitty jabbed me with her elbow, and we listened. Somebody was mumbling softly up above us. I don’t know if he had heard us coming. I don’t think so. I stood up and peered around the landing, and I saw candlelight, and an old man’s face, terribly lined and unshaven and sad. He was living there. All around the top landing he had carefully put up sheets of cardboard from grocery cartons, I suppose to keep the rain out. If it rained. Or perhaps just to keep him out of public view. He was sitting on a blanket, leaning his forearm on one knee, looking at the candle, talking to himself.
And that was the end of that. We tiptoed down the stairs, and Kitty said she had to go home. And did. Otherwise, I honestly think that in the long run I would have married her.
I remember the years of the war, the headlines and the blackouts and the crazy way everything was changing under my very eyes. Paulie had it made. He enlisted first thing, and wrote me clipped, concise letters about the joys of close-order drill. I remember buying his old car the last time he came home on furlough, with his cuffs tucked in his paratrooper boots, telling deadpan stories about the hazards of basic training. The car was a 1931 Buick, with a jug cork in the gas tank instead of a cap. I sold it for the price of two train tickets when I ran out of gas-ration coupons in Pittsburgh, on my honeymoon. Not with Kitty. Kitty had gone far out of my life by then. Her dancing lessons had paid off: amateur-night tap dancer to
Film Fun
model to showgirl at the International Casino; and then she’d gone abroad to Paris with a troupe and been caught in the Occupation. Well.
Mutatis mutandis
and
plus ça change
and so on. Or, as one might say, things keep getting all screwed up.
Film Fun
model to showgirl at the International Casino; and then she’d gone abroad to Paris with a troupe and been caught in the Occupation. Well.
Mutatis mutandis
and
plus ça change
and so on. Or, as one might say, things keep getting all screwed up.
I breezed through the war. Barring a company clerk in Jefferson Barracks who I really wanted to kill, there was nothing I couldn’t handle; Paulie had lied. Or maybe for me it was a different war. I had got into newspaper work, which let me get into Special Services when my time came. Nobody was shooting at unit managers for USO shows. I went through forty-one months of exaltation and shame. You see, this was the war that really mattered and had to be won; and how I burned, with what a blue-white flame, with pride to be a part of it. And how I groveled before anyone who would listen because my part was mostly chasing enlisted men away from big-breasted starlets. Do you suppose it’s really true that somebody had to do that job, too? I couldn’t believe it, but it was because of that that I met Kitty again.
She turned up looking for a job as a translator, looking very much as she always had. She was different, though. She was married, to this very nice captain she had met during Occupation days in Paris, and she had become a German national. It was a grand reunion. I took her to dinner and she told me that Paulie had been wounded in the Salerno landing and was still in the hospital. And a little bit later she told me about her husband, the darling, dimpled SS officer, who was now a POW on the Eastern front. And for four months in Wiesbaden she lived in my billet with me, translating day and night; and, actually, that’s what happened to that first marriage of mine, because my wife found out about it. I don’t think she would have minded a
Fräulein.
She minded my shacking up with a girl I’d known before I knew her.
Fräulein.
She minded my shacking up with a girl I’d known before I knew her.
I remember more consequential causes than I can count. When I look inside my skin I don’t see anything but consequences; all I am is the casual aftereffects of, item, an unemployed carpenter evicted from his home and, item, a classification clerk who had been in the newspaper game himself once, and all the other itemized seeds that have now blossomed into fifty-two-year-old me.
I remember more than I absolutely want to, in fact, and some things I remember in the context of a certain time and a certain place when, in fact, I really learned them later on.
The man on the landing. Years after the war, when I had become a TV producer doing a documentary on the Depression, I put one of my research girls on checking him
out. She was a good girl, and tracked him down. That’s how I know he had been a carpenter. The banks closed and the jobs vanished, and he wound up on the fire escape. It happened that when the police chased him away a reporter was in the precinct house, and he wrote the story my girl found.
out. She was a good girl, and tracked him down. That’s how I know he had been a carpenter. The banks closed and the jobs vanished, and he wound up on the fire escape. It happened that when the police chased him away a reporter was in the precinct house, and he wrote the story my girl found.
And I remember Paulie, twenty-nine years old and weighing a fast ninety pounds, gasping hoarsely as he reached out to shake my hand in the VA hospital ward, the day before he died. He had been there for three years, dying all that time. He looked like his own grandfather. That was a consequence, too: a landing in the second wave at Salerno and a mine the engineers had missed. He got his Purple Heart for a broken spine that kept getting worse until it was so bad that it killed him.
I think I’ve seen the place where he got it—assuming that I remembered what he said well enough, or understood him well enough, when he was concentrating mostly on dying. I think the place it happened was on the city beach at Salerno, way at the north horn of that crescent, about where there’s a little restaurant built out over the water on stilts. I stood there one afternoon on that beach, looking at the floating turds and pizza crusts, trying to see the picture of Paulie hitting the mine and being thrown into the sky in a fountain of saltwater and blood. But it wasn’t any good. I can only see what I’ve seen, not what I’ve been told about. I couldn’t see the causality. All I could do was ask myself questions about it: What made him sign up for his hero suit? Was it really reading that Percival Christopher Wren book when he was thirteen years old? Or: What made me alive, and sort of rich, when Paulie was so poor and dead? Was it the four or five really good contacts I made in the USO that turned me into a genius television producer? Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn’t just consequence?
I think, and I’ve thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, producing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever. Just being careful isn’t enough to save us, but we do have to be careful. Smoky Bear wouldn’t lie to you about that.
If I’d married Kitty I think we would have had fine kids, even grandchildren by now; but I didn’t, not even batting .500 out of my two chances at her. First it was the old man on the fire escape, then it was the kindly Nazi she decided to go back to waiting for. She waited very well and for a long time, all through the years while the Russians were taking their time about letting him go and all through the de-Nazification trials after that. I suppose by then she felt she was too old to want to start a family. And none of my own wives have really wanted the PTA bit.
And think of the consequences of that—I mean, the negative consequences of the babies that Kitty and I didn’t have. Did we miss out on a new Mozart? A Lee Harvey Oswald? Maybe just a hell of a solid Brooklyn fireman who might have saved a more largely consequential life than his own, or mine? Think of them. And that’s all you can do with those particular consequences, because they didn’t get born.
Percival Christopher Wren didn’t mean to kill Paulie. The sad old derelict on the fire escape never intended to break up Kitty and me. Intentions don’t matter.
We all live in each others’ pockets. If I drive my car along Mulholland Drive tonight, I only mean to keep my date with that pretty publicity girl from Paramount. I don’t even know you’re alive, do I? But the car is burning up the gasoline and pumping out the poison gas that makes the smog; and maybe it’s just that little bit of extra exhaust fume in the air that bubbles your lungs out with emphysema. It doesn’t matter to you what I
mean to do. You’re just as dead. I don’t suppose I ever in my life really meant to hurt anybody, except possibly that J.B. company clerk. But he got off without a scratch, and meanwhile I may be killing you.
mean to do. You’re just as dead. I don’t suppose I ever in my life really meant to hurt anybody, except possibly that J.B. company clerk. But he got off without a scratch, and meanwhile I may be killing you.
So I walk out on my balcony and stare through the haze at the lights of Los Angeles. I look at where they all live, the black militants and the aerospace engineers, the Desilu sound men and the storefront soul-savers, the kids who go to the Académie Française and the little old ladies with “Back Up Our Boys” bumper stickers on their cars. I remember what they, and you, and each and every one of you have done to me, this half a century I’ve been battered and bribed into my present shape and status; but what are they, and all of you, doing to each other this night?
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