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Authors: Frederik Pohl

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“No good, Shaffery. You know how much you got out of us for equipment last year? I got the figures right here. And now you tell us you don’t have what we need to make a couple of bucks?”
“Well, Mr. DiFirenzo, you see, the equipment we have is for purely scientific purposes. For this sort of work you need quite different instruments, and actually—”
“I don’t want to hear.” DiFirenzo glanced at the Chairman, and then went on. “Next thing, what about that comet you said you were going to discover?”
Shaffery smiled forgivingly. “Really, I can’t be held accountable for that. I didn’t actually say we’d
find
one. I merely said that the continuing
search
for comets was part of our basic
program
. Of course, I’ve done my very best to—”
“Not good enough, Shaffery. Besides, your boy here told Mr. Nuccio that if you did find a comet you wouldn’t name it the Mr. Carmine J. Nuccio comet like Mr. Nuccio wanted.”
Shaffery was going all hollow inside, but he said bravely: “It’s not wholly up to me, is it? There’s an astronomical convention that it is the discoverer’s name that goes on—”
“We don’t like that convention, Shaffery. Three, now we come to some really bad things, that I’m sorry to hear you’ve got yourself into, Shaffery. We hear you have been talking over the private affairs of this institution and Mr. Nuccio with that dick-head Nesbit. Shut, Shaffery,” the man said warningly as Shaffery started to open his mouth. “We know all about it. This Nesbit is getting himself into big trouble. He has said some very racist things about Mr. Nuccio on that sideshow of his on the TV, which is going to cost him quite a bundle when Mr. Nuccio’s lawyers get through with him. That is very bad, Shaffery, and also, four, there is this thing.”
He lifted up what had seemed like a crumpled napkin in front of his place. It turned out that it was covering what looked like a large transistor radio.
Shaffery identified it after a moment’s thought; he had seen it before, in Larry Nesbit’s possession. “It’s a tape recorder,” he said.
“Right on, Shaffery. Now the question is, who put it in here? I don’t mean just left it here like you could leave your rubbers or something, Shaffery. I mean left it here with one of those trick switches so it was going when a couple of our associates checked the place out and found it under the table.”
Shaffery swallowed very hard, but even so his voice sounded unfamiliar to him when he was able to speak. “I—I
assure
you, Mr. DiFirenzo! I had nothing to do with it.”
“No, Shaffery, I know you didn’t, because you are not that smart. Mr. Nuccio was quite upset about this illegal bugging, and he has already made some phone calls and talked to some people and we have a pretty good idea of who put it there, and he isn’t going to have what he thinks he’s going to have to play on his TV show. So here it is, Shaffery. Mr. Nuccio doesn’t find your work satisfactory here, and he is letting you go. We got somebody else coming down to take over. We’d appreciate it if you could be out by tomorrow.”
There are situations in which there is not much scope for dignity. A man in his middle-fifties who has just lost the worst job he ever had has few opportunities for making the sort of terminal remark that one would like to furnish one’s biographers.
Shaffery discovered that he was worse off than that; he was frankly sick. The turmoil in his belly grew. The little saliva pumps under his tongue were flooding his mouth faster than he could swallow, and he knew that if he didn’t get back to the staff toilet very quickly he would have another embarrassment to add to what was already an overwhelming load. He turned and walked away. Then marched. Then ran. When he had emptied himself of everything in belly, bladder and gut, he sat on the edge of the toilet seat and thought of the things he could have said: “Look, Nuccio, you don’t know anything about science.” “Nuccio, Schiaparelli was all wrong about the canals on Mars.” It was too late to say them. It was too late to ask the question that his wife would be sure to ask, about severance pay, pension, all the things that he had been putting off getting in writing. (“Don’t worry about that stuff, Shaffery, Mr. Nuccio always takes care of his
friends but he don’t like to be aggravated.”) He tried to make a plan for his future, and failed. He tried even to make a plan for his present. Surely he should at least call Larry Nesbit, to demand, to complain and to warn (“Hist! The tape recorder has been discovered! All is lost! Flee!”), but he could not trust himself so far from the toilet. Not at that exact moment. And a moment later it was too late. Half an hour later, when one of the orbiting guards snapped the little lock and peered inside, the man who might have been Einstein was lying on the floor with his trousers around his knees, undignified, uncaring, and dead.
 
Ah, Shaffery! How disappointed he would have been in his
Times
obit, two paragraphs buried under the overhang of a pop singer’s final notice. But afterward … .
The first victim was Larry Nesbit, airsick in his Learjet all the way back to New York, overcome during the taping of his TV show and dying the next day. The next victims were the Board of Directors, every man. They started home, by plane and boat. Some of them made it, but all of them died: en route or in Las Vegas, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles. New York, and Long Branch, New Jersey. Some of the “assistants” died and some were spared. (Briefly.) The reason was not a mystery for very long. The source of the new plague was tracked down quickly enough to Mr. Nuccio’s antipasto, and particularly to the preserved mushrooms that Shaffery had borrowed for his experiment.
The botulinus toxin was long recognized as the most deadly poison known to man. The mutated version that Shaffery and his dentist’s X-rays had brought into being was not much more deadly, but it had another quality that was new and different. Old, established botulinus clostriduim is an organism with a feeble hold on life; expose it to light and air, and it dies. B. shafferia was more sturdy. It grew where it was. In anything. In Mr. Nuccio’s antipasto, in a salad in a restaurant kitchen, in Mom’s apple pie on a windowsill to cool, in the human digestive tract. There were nine deaths in the first five days, and then for a moment no more. The epidemiologists would not have bothered their heads about so short a casualty list if it had not been for the identities of some of the victims. But the bacteria were multiplying. The stain of vomit under the boardwalk at Long Branch dried; the bacteria turned into spores and were blown on the wind until they struck something damp and fertile. Whereupon they grew. The soiled Kleenex thrown from a Cadillac Fleetwood on the road leading from O’Hare to Evanston, the sneeze between flights at Miami, expectorations in a dozen places—all added to the score. From the urine and feces of the afflicted men, from their sweat, even from their bed linen and discarded clothing, enspored bacteria leaped into the air and were inhaled, eaten, drunk, absorbed into cuts, in every way ingested into the waiting bodies of hundreds, then thousands, ultimately countless millions of human beings.
By the second week Detroit and Los Angeles were declared disaster areas. By the fourth the plague had struck every city in America, and had leaped the oceans. If it had any merciful quality at all, it was that it was quick: an upset stomach, a sweat, a few pangs and then death. None were immune. Few survived. Out of a hundred, three might outlive the disease. But then famine, riot, and lesser ills took their toll; and of the billions who lived on the Earth when Shaffery exposed his antipasto in the dentist’s office, all but a few tens of millions died in the outbreak that the world will never forget the disease called Shaffery’s Syndrome.
As previously noted, Frederik Pohl knows a bit about politics. He also knows something about economics and about the criminal justice system. All three of these elements figure in 1959’s “The Day the Icicle Works Closed.”
As will become evident before long, he also has been known to root for the underdog. In this story of crime, punishment, and complications that ensue as a result, Milo Pulcher, a public defender on Altair Nine, is a huge underdog in a corrupt system.
Pulcher used to work for Altamycin, Inc., also known as the Icicle Works, but when they shut down the works, he and everyone else who’d worked there had to find new work.
Strange, crooked things are happening on Altair Nine, but unless Milo can overcome big odds to beat the system, nobody will ever know why or how the strange doings are being accomplished. If he doesn’t succeed, he’ll be just one more victim of a world gone wrong.
Never bet against the underdog.
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 Schlesterman, 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 kidnaping 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 kidnaping, 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, Charley. 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.
Now, of course, it was only a way of getting your feet wet.
Pulcher waited impatiently at the turnkey’s office while he shambled over to the women’s wing and, slowly, returned with the girl. They looked at each other. She didn’t speak. Pulcher opened his mouth, closed it, and silently took her by the elbow. He steered her out of the jail and hailed a cab. That was an extravagance, but he didn’t care.
Madeleine shrank into a corner of the cab, looking at him out of blue eyes that were large and shadowed. She wasn’t hostile, she wasn’t afraid. She was only remote.
“Hungry?” She nodded. Pulcher gave the cab driver the name of a restaurant. Another extravagance, but he didn’t mind the prospect of cutting down on lunches for a few weeks. He had had enough practice at it.
A year before this girl had been the prettiest secretary in the pool at the Icicle Works. He dated her half a dozen times. There was a company rule against it, but the first time
it was a kind of schoolboy’s prank, breaking the headmaster’s regulations, and the other times it was a driving need. Then—
Then came the Gumpert Process.
That was the killer, the Gumpert Process. Whoever Gumpert was. All anybody at the Icicle Works knew was that someone named Gumpert (back on Earth, one rumor said; another said he was a colonist in the Sirian system) had come up with a cheap, practical method of synthesizing the rainbow antibiotic molds that floated free in Altair Nine’s air, coloring its precipitation and, more important, providing a priceless export commodity. A whole Galaxy had depended on those rainbow molds, shipped in frozen suspensions to every inhabited planet by Altamycin, Inc.—the proper name for what everyone on Altair Nine called the Icicle Works.
When the Gumpert Process came along, suddenly the demand vanished.
Worse, the jobs vanished. Pulcher had been on the corporation’s legal staff, with an office of his own and a faint hint of a vice-presidency, someday. He was out. The stenos in the pool, all but two or three of the five hundred who once had got out the correspondence and the bills, they were out. The shipping clerks in the warehouse were out, the pumphands at the settling tanks were out, the freezer attendants were out. Everyone was out. The plant closed down. There were more than fifty tons of frozen antibiotics in storage and, though there might still be a faint trickle of orders from old-fashioned diehards around the Galaxy (backwoods country doctors who didn’t believe in the newfangled synthetics, experimenters who wanted to run comparative tests), the shipments already en route would much more than satisfy them. Fifty tons? Once the Icicle Works had shipped three hundred tons a day—physical transport, electronic rockets that took years to cover the distance between stars. The boom was over. And of course, on a one-industry planet, everything else was over too.
Pulcher took the girl by the arm and swept her into the restaurant. “Eat,” he ordered. “I know what jail food is like.” He sat down, firmly determined to say nothing until she had finished.
 
But he couldn’t.
Long before she was ready for coffee he burst out, “Why, Madeleine? Why would you get into something like this?”
She looked at him but did not answer.
“What about your husband?” He didn’t want to ask it, but he had to. That had been the biggest blow of all the unpleasant blows that had struck him after the Icicle Works closed. Just as he was getting a law practice going—not on any big scale but, through Charley Dickon and the Party, a small, steady handout of political favors that would make it possible for him to pretend he was still an attorney—the gossip reached him that Madeleine Cossett had married.
The girl pushed her plate away. “He emigrated.”
Pulcher digested that slowly. Emigrated? That was the dream of every Niner since the Works closed down, of course. But it was only a dream. Physical transport between the stars was ungodly expensive. More, it was ungodly slow. Ten years would get you to Dell, the thin-aired planet of a chilly little red dwarf. The nearest
good
planet was thirty years away.
What it all added up to was that emigrating was almost like dying. If one member of a married couple emigrated, it meant the end of the marriage … . “We got a divorce,”
said Madeleine, nodding. “There wasn’t enough money for both of us to go, and Jon was unhappier here than I was.”
She took out a cigarette and let him light it. “You don’t want to ask me about Jon, do you? But you want to know. All right. Jon was an artist. He was in the advertising department at the Works, but that was just temporary. He was going to do something big. Then the bottom dropped out for him, just as it did for all of us. Well, Milo, I didn’t hear from you.”
Pulcher protested, “It wouldn’t have been
fair
for me to see you when I didn’t have a job or anything.”
“Of course you’d think that. It’s wrong. But I couldn’t find you to tell you it was wrong, and then Jon was very persistent. He was tall, curly-haired, he has a baby’s face—do you know, he only shaved twice a week. Well, I married him. It lasted three months. Then he just had to get away.” She leaned forward earnestly. “Don’t think he was just a bum, Milo! He really was quite a good artist. But we didn’t have enough money for paints, even, and then it seems that the colors are all wrong here. Jon explained it. In order to paint landscapes that sell you have to be on a planet with Earth-type colors; they’re all the vogue. And there’s too much altamycin in the clouds here.”
Pulcher said stiffly, “I see.” But he didn’t, really. There was at least one unexplained part. If there hadn’t been enough money for paint, then where had the money come from for a starship ticket, physical transport? It meant at least ten thousand dollars. There just was no way to raise ten thousand dollars on Altair Nine, not without taking a rather extreme step … .
The girl wasn’t looking at him.
Her eyes were fixed on a table across the restaurant, a table with a loud, drunken party. It was only lunch time, but they had a three-o’clock-in-the-morning air about them. They were
stinking.
There were four of them, two men and two women; and their physical bodies were those of young, healthy, quite good-looking, perfectly normal Niners. The appearance of the physical bodies was entirely irrelevant, though, because they were tourists. Around the neck of each of them was a bright golden choker with a glowing red signal jewel in the middle. It was the mark of the tourist Agency; the sign that the bodies were rented.

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