PLATINUM POHL (55 page)
Authors: Frederik Pohl
The sun was wholly gone, except for a faint luminous purpling of the sky in the general direction of Venezuela. Almost directly overhead hung the three bright stars of Orion’s Belt, slowly turning like the traffic signals on a railroad line, with Sirius and Procyon orbiting headlight bright around them. As his eyes dark-adapted he could make out the stars in Orion’s sword, even the faint patch of light that was the great gas cloud. He was far enough from the shore so that sound could not carry, and he softly called out the great four-pointed pattern of first magnitude stars that surrounded the constellation: “Hey there, Betelguese. Hi, Bellatrix. What’s new, Rigel? Nice to see you again, Saiph.” He glanced past red Aldebaran to the closeknit stars of the Pleiades, returned to Orion and, showing off now, called off the stars of the Belt: “Hey Alnitak! Yo, Alnilam! How goes it, Mintaka?”
The problem with drinking beer in the rubber raft was that your head was bent down toward your chest and it was difficult to burp, but Shaffery arched his body up a little, getting some water in the process but not caring, got rid of the burp, opened another beer, and gazed complacently at Orion. It was a satisfying constellation. It was satisfying that he knew so much about it. He thought briefly of the fact that the Arabs had called the Belt Stars by the name Jauzah, meaning the Golden Nuts; that the Chinese thought they looked like a weighing beam; and that Greenlanders called them Siktut, The SealHunters Lost at Sea. As he was going on to remember what the Australian aborigines had thought of them (they thought they resembled three young men dancing a corroboree), his mind flickered back to the lost sealhunters. Um, he thought. He raised his head and looked toward the shore.
It was now more than a hundred yards away. That was farther than he really wanted to be, and so he kicked the raft around, oriented himself by the stars and began to paddle back. It was easy and pleasant to do. He used a sort of splashy upside-down breast stroke of the old-fashioned angel’s wing kind, but as all his weight was supported by the raft he moved quickly across the water. He was rather enjoying the exercise, toes and fingers moving comfortably in the tepid sea, little ghosts of luminescence glowing where he splashed, until quite without warning the fingertips of one hand struck sharply and definitely against something that was resistantly massive and solid where there should have been only water, something that moved stubbornly, something that rasped them like a file. Oh, my God, thought Shaffery. What a lousy thing to happen. They so seldom came in this close to shore. He didn’t even think about them. What a shame for a man who might have been Einstein to wind up, incomplete and unfulfilled, as shark shit.
He really was not a bad man, and it was the loss to science that was first on his mind, only a little later what it must feel like to be chopped and gulped.
Shaffery pulled his hands in and folded them on his chest, crossed his feet at the ankles and rested them on the end of the boat, knees spread on the sides. There was now
nothing trailing in the water that might strike a shark as bait. There was, on the other hand, no good way for him to get back to shore. He could yell, but the wind was the wrong way. He could wait till he drifted near one of the islets. But if he missed them he would be out in the deep ocean before he knew it.
nothing trailing in the water that might strike a shark as bait. There was, on the other hand, no good way for him to get back to shore. He could yell, but the wind was the wrong way. He could wait till he drifted near one of the islets. But if he missed them he would be out in the deep ocean before he knew it.
Shaffery was almost sure that sharks seldom attacked a boat, even a rubber one. Of course, he went on analytically, the available evidence didn’t signify. They could flip a raft like this over easily enough. If this particular shark ate him off this particular half-shell there would be no one to report it.
Still, there were some encouraging considerations. Say it was a shark. Say it was capable of tipping the boat or eating him boat and all. They were dull-witted creatures, and what was to keep one hanging around in the absence of blood, splashing, noise, trailing objects, or any of the other things sharks were known to take an interest in? It might be a quarter mile away already. But it wasn’t, because at that moment he heard the splash of some large object breaking the surface a foot from his head.
Shaffery could have turned to look, but he didn’t; he remained quite motionless, listening to the gentle water noises, until they were punctuated by a sort of sucking sound and then a voice. A human voice. It said, “Scared the piss out of you, didn’t I? What do you say, Shaffery? Want a tow back to shore?”
It was not the first time Shaffery had encountered Larry Nesbit diving in the cove, it was only the first time it had happened at night. Shaffery twisted about in the raft had gazed at Nesbit’s grinning face and its frame of wet strands of nape-length hair. It took a little time to make the transition in his mind from eighteen-foot shark to five-foot-eight TV star. “Come on,” Nesbit went on, “what do you say? Tell you what. I’ll tow you in, and you give me some of old Nuccio’s Scotch, and I’ll listen to how you’re going to invent anti-gravity while we get pissed.”
That Nesbit, he had a way with him. The upshot of it all was that Shaffery had a terrible hangover the next day; not the headache but the whole works, with trotting to the toilet and being able to tolerate only small sips of ginger ale and wishing, or almost wishing, he was dead. (Not, to be sure, before he did the one immortalizing thing. Whatever it was going to be.)
It was not altogether a disaster, the hangover. The next morning was very busy, and it was just as well that he was out of the way. When the Board of Directors convened to discuss the astronomical events of the year, or whatever it is they did discuss in the afternoon session to which Shaffery was definitely not invited, it was always a busy time. They arrived separately, each director with his pair of associates. One after another, forty-foot cabin cruisers with fishing tops came up to the landing and gave up cargos of plump little men wearing crew cuts and aloha shirts. The observatory car, not ever used by any of the observatory personnel, was polished, fueled and used for round trips from the landing strip at Jubila, across the island, to Coomray Hill and the observatory. Shaffery laid low in his private retreat. He had never told his wife that he was not allowed in the observatory for the Board Meetings, so she didn’t look for him. He spent the morning in the tarpaper shack where photographic material had once been kept, until he discovered that the damp peeled the emulsion away from the backing. Now it was his home away from home. He had fitted it with a desk, chair, icebox, coffee pot and bed.
Shaffery paid no attention to the activity outside, not even when the Directors’ assistants, methodically searching the bushes and banana groves all around the observatory,
came to his shack, opened the door without knocking and peered in at him. They knew him from previous meetings, but they studied him silently for a moment before the two in the doorway nodded to each other and left him again. They were not well mannered men, Shaffery thought, but no doubt they were good at their jobs, whatever those jobs were. He resolutely did not think about the Board Meeting, or about the frightening, calumnious things Larry Nesbit had said to him the night before, drinking the Board Chairman’s Scotch and eating his food, in that half-jocular, shafting, probing way he had. Shaffery thought a little bit about the queasy state of his lower abdomen, because he couldn’t help it, but what he mostly thought about was Fermat’s Last Theorem.
came to his shack, opened the door without knocking and peered in at him. They knew him from previous meetings, but they studied him silently for a moment before the two in the doorway nodded to each other and left him again. They were not well mannered men, Shaffery thought, but no doubt they were good at their jobs, whatever those jobs were. He resolutely did not think about the Board Meeting, or about the frightening, calumnious things Larry Nesbit had said to him the night before, drinking the Board Chairman’s Scotch and eating his food, in that half-jocular, shafting, probing way he had. Shaffery thought a little bit about the queasy state of his lower abdomen, because he couldn’t help it, but what he mostly thought about was Fermat’s Last Theorem.
A sort of picayune, derivative immortality was waiting there for someone. Not much, but Shaffery was getting desperate. It was one of those famous mathematical problems that grad students played at for a month or two, and amateurs assaulted in vain all their lives. It looked easy enough to deal with. It started with so elementary a proposition that every high-school boy mastered it about the time he learned to masturbate successfully. If you squared the sides of a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two sides was equal to the square of the hypotenuse.
Well, that was all very well, and it was so easy to understand that it had been used to construct right angles by surveyors for centuries. A triangle whose sides were, say, 3 feet and 4 feet, and whose hypotenuse was 5 feet, had to make a right angle, because 3
2
+ 4
2
= 5
2
, and it always had, since the time of Pythagoras, five hundred years B.C. a
2
+ b
2
= c
2
. The hitch was, if the exponent was anything but 2, you could never make the equation come out using whole numbers, a
3
+ b
3
never equaled c
3
, and a
27
+ b
27
did not add up to any c
27
, no matter what numbers you used for a, b and c. Everybody knew that this was so. Nobody had ever proved that it
had
to be so, by mathematical proofs, except that Fermat had left a cryptic little note, found among his papers after his death, claiming that he had found a “truly wonderful” proof, only there wasn’t enough room in the margin of the book he was writing on to put it all down.
2
+ 4
2
= 5
2
, and it always had, since the time of Pythagoras, five hundred years B.C. a
2
+ b
2
= c
2
. The hitch was, if the exponent was anything but 2, you could never make the equation come out using whole numbers, a
3
+ b
3
never equaled c
3
, and a
27
+ b
27
did not add up to any c
27
, no matter what numbers you used for a, b and c. Everybody knew that this was so. Nobody had ever proved that it
had
to be so, by mathematical proofs, except that Fermat had left a cryptic little note, found among his papers after his death, claiming that he had found a “truly wonderful” proof, only there wasn’t enough room in the margin of the book he was writing on to put it all down.
Shaffery was no mathematician. But that morning, waking up to the revolution in his stomach and the thunder in his head, he had seen that that was actually a strength. One, all the mathematicians of three or four centuries had broken their heads against the problem, so obviously, it couldn’t be solved by any known mathematics anyway. Two, Einstein was weak in mathematics too, and had disdained to worry about it, preferring to invent his own.
So he spent the morning, between hurried gallops across the parking lot to the staff toilet, filling paper with mathematical signs and operators of his own invention. It did not seem to be working out, to be sure. For a while he thought of an alternative scheme, to wit, inventing a “truly wonderful” solution of his own and claiming he couldn’t find room to write it down in the margin of, say, the latest issue of
Mathematical Abstracts
; but residual sanity persuaded him that perhaps no one would ever find it, if it was found it might well be laughed off, and anyway that was purely posthumous celebrity and he wanted to taste it while he was alive. So he broke for lunch, came back feeling dizzy and ill and worried about the meeting that was going on, and decided to take a nap before resuming his labors.
Mathematical Abstracts
; but residual sanity persuaded him that perhaps no one would ever find it, if it was found it might well be laughed off, and anyway that was purely posthumous celebrity and he wanted to taste it while he was alive. So he broke for lunch, came back feeling dizzy and ill and worried about the meeting that was going on, and decided to take a nap before resuming his labors.
When Cyril came looking for him to tell him the Directors desired his presence, it was dark, and Shaffery felt like hell.
Coomray Hill was no taller than a small office building, but it got the mirror away from most of the sea-level dampness. The observatory sat on top of the hill like a mound of pistachio
ice cream, hemispheric green copper roof and circular walls of green-painted plaster. Inside, the pedestal of the telescope took up the center of the floor. The instrument itself was traversed as low as it would go anymore, clearing enough space for the Directors and their gear. They were all there, looking at him with silent distaste as he came in.
ice cream, hemispheric green copper roof and circular walls of green-painted plaster. Inside, the pedestal of the telescope took up the center of the floor. The instrument itself was traversed as low as it would go anymore, clearing enough space for the Directors and their gear. They were all there, looking at him with silent distaste as he came in.
The inner sphere of the dome was painted (by Cyril’s talented half-sister) with a large map of Mars, showing Schiaparelli’s famous canals in resolute detail; a view of the Bay of Naples from the Vomero, with Vesuvius gently steaming in the background; and an illuminated drawing of the constellation Scorpius, which happened to be the sign of the constellation under which the Chairman of the Board had been born. A row of card-tables had been lined up and covered with a green cloth. There were six places set, each with ashtray, notepad, three sharpened pencils, ice, glass, and bottle of John Begg. Another row of tables against the wall held the antipasto, replenished by Cyril after the depredations of the night before, but now seriously depleted by the people for whom it was intended. Six cigars were going and a couple of others were smoldering in the trays. Shaffery tried not to breathe. Even with the door open and the observing aperture in the dome wide, the inside air was faintly blue. At one time Shaffery had mentioned diffidently what the deposit of cigar smoke did to the polished surface of the twenty-two-inch mirror. That was at his first annual meeting. The Chairman hadn’t said a word, just stared at him. Then he nodded to his right-hand man, a Mr. DiFirenzo, who had taken a packet of Kleenex out of his pocket and tossed it to Shaffery. “So wipe the goddam thing off,” he had said. “Then you could dump these ashtrays for us, okay?”
Shaffery did his best to smile at his Directors. Behind him he was conscious of the presence of their assistants, who were patrolling the outside of the observatory in loose elliptical orbits, perigeeing at the screen door to peer inside. They had studied Shaffery carefully as he came across the crunching shell of the parking lot, and under their scrutiny he had decided against detouring by way of the staff toilet, which he now regretted.
“Okay, Shaffery,” said Mr. DiFirenzo, after glancing at the Chairman of the Board. “Now we come to you.”
Shaffery clasped his hands behind him in his Einstein pose and said brightly, “Well, it has been a particularly productive year for the Observatory. No doubt you’ve seen my reports on the Leonid meteorite count and—”
“Right,” said Mr. DiFirenzo, “but what we have been talking about here is the space shots. Mr. Nuccio has expressed his views that this is a kind of strategic location, like how they shoot the rockets from Cape Kennedy. They have to go right over us, and we want a piece of that.”
Shaffery shifted his weight uneasily. “I discussed that in my report last year—”
“No, Shaffery. This year, Shaffery. Why can’t we get some of that federal money, like for tracking, for instance?”
“But the position hasn’t changed, Mr. DiFirenzo. We don’t have the equipment, and besides NASA has its own—”
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