Frederik Pohl Read online

  Carl took a deep breath. Then he started again, but it was no use, they insisted on treating the matter lightly. He slumped back in his seat and stared out of the window.

  The helipopper came down in front of a building larger than most of the prefabs. It had glass in the windows, and bars over the glass. The blonde leaped up like a stick doll and shrilled, 'Everybody out! Hop to it, now, I haven't got all day.'

  Carl morosely followed her into the building. He wondered how, even for a moment and at a distance, he had taken her for a child. Bright blue eyes under blonde hair, yes; but the eyes were bloodshot, the hair a yellow mop draped on a skull. Loathing her, and worrying about Cornut, he climbed a flight of steps, went through a barred door and looked into a double-barred room.

  'The aborigines,' St Cyr said in his toneless voice.

  It was the local jail, and it had only one cell. And that cell was packed with a dozen or more short, olive-skinned, ragged men and women. There were no children. No children, thought Master Carl petulantly, but they had been promised an entire population to select from! These were all old. The youngest of them seemed at least a hundred...

  'Ob-serve them care-ful-ly,' came St Cyr's slow voice. 'There is not a per-son there more than fif-ty years old.'

  Master Carl jumped. Mind-reading again! He thought with a touch of envy how wonderful it must be to be so wise, so experienced, so all-understanding that one could know, as St Cyr knew, what another person was thinking before he spoke it aloud. It was the sort of wisdom he hoped his subordinates would attribute to him, and they didn't; and it hurt to see that in St Cyr it existed.

  Master Carl roamed fretfully down the corridor, looking through electrified bars at the aborigines. A sallow fat man in flowered shorts came in through the door, bowed to the blonde woman, bowed to St Cyr, offered a slight inclination of the head to Master Carl, staring contemptuously through the others. It was an instructive demonstration of how a really adept person could single out the categories of importance of a group of strangers on first contact. 'I,' he announced, 'am your translator. You wish to speak to your aborigines, sir. Do so. The short one there, he speaks some English.'

  'Thank you,' said Master Carl. The short one was a surly-looking fellow wearing much the same costume as the others. All of them were basically clad in ragged shorts and a short-sleeved jacket with an incongruous, tight-fitting collar. The clothes looked very, very old; not merely worn, but old. Men and women dressed alike. Only in the collars and shoulder-bars of the jackets were there any particular variations. They seemed to have military insignia to mark their ranks. One woman's collar, for example, bore a red cloth patch with a gold stripe running through it; the red was faded, the gold was soiled, but once they had been bright. Across the gold stripe was a five-pointed star of yellow cloth. The shortest of the men, the one who looked up when the translator spoke, had a red patch with much more gold on it, and with three stars of greenish, tarnished metal. Another man had a plain red patch with three cloth stars.

  These three, the two men and the woman, stepped forward, placed their palms on their knees and bowed jerkily. The one with the metal stars spoke breathily, 'Tai-i Masa-tura-san. I captain, sir. These are of my command: Heicho Ikuri, Joto-hei Shokuto.'

  Master Carl stepped back fastidiously. They smelt! They didn't look dirty, exactly, but their complexions were all bad - scarred and pitted and seamed, as well as sallow; and they did have a distinct sour aura of sweat hanging over them. He glanced at the interpreter. 'Captain? Is that an Army rank?'

  The interpreter grinned. 'No Army now,' he said reassuringly. 'Oh, no. Long gone. But they keep military titles, you see? Father to son, father to son, like that. This fellow here, the tai-i, he tells me they are all part of Imperial Japanese Expeditionary Force which presently will make assault landing in Washington, D.C. Tai-i is captain; he is in charge of all of them, I believe. The heicho - that's the woman - is, the captain tells, a sort of junior corporal. More important than the other fellow, who is what they call a superior private.'

  'I don't know what a corporal or a private is.'

  'Oh, no. Who does? But to them it is important, it seems.' The translater hesitated, grinned, and wheezed: 'Also, they are related. The tai-i is daddy, the heicho is mommy, the joto-hei is son. All named Masatura-san.'

  'Dirty-looking things,' Master Carl commented. 'Thank heaven I don't have to go near them.'

  'Oh,' said a grave, slow voice behind him, 'but you do. Yes, you do. It is your re-spon-si-bi-li-ty, Carl. You must su-per-vise their tests by the med-ics.'

  Master Carl frowned and complained, but there was no way out of it. St Cyr gave the orders, and that was the order he gave.

  The medics looked over the aborigines as thoroughly as any dissecting cadavers. Medics, thought Master Carl in disgust. How can they! But they did. They had the men and women strip - flaccid breasts, sagging bellies, a terminator of deepening olive showing the transition from shade to sun at the lines marked by collars and cuffs and the hem of their shorts. Carl took as much of it as he could, and then he walked out - leaving them nakedly proud beside their rags, while the medics fussed and muttered over them like stock judges.

  It was not only that he was tired of the natives - whose interest to a mathematician was zero, no, but a quantity vanishingly small. More than that, he wanted to find Cornut.

  There was a huge moon.

  Carl retraced his steps to where the helipopper was casting a black silhouette on the silver dust. The pilot was half asleep on the seat, and Carl, with a force and determination previously reserved for critical letters in Math. Trans., said sharply, 'Up, you. I haven't all night.' The startled pilot was airborne with his passenger before he realized that it was neither his employer, the young-old blonde, nor her equal partner, the old, old St Cyr.

  By then it did not much matter. In for a penny, in for a pound; when Carl ordered him back to the town where the jet had landed, the pilot grumbled to himself but complied.

  It was not hard to find where Cornut had gone. The police scooter told Carl about the sidewalk cafe, the cashier told him about the native cafeteria, the counterman had watched Cornut, failing to finish his sandwich and coffee, stagger back to - the airport again. There the traffic tower had seen him come in, try to get transportation to follow the others, fail and mulishly stagger off into the jungle on the level truck road.

  He had been hardly able to keep his eyes open, the tower-man added.

  Carl pressed the police into service. He was frightened.

  The little scooter bounced along the road, twin spotlights scanning the growth on both sides. Please don't find him, begged Carl silently. I promised him...

  The brakes squealed and the scooter skidded to a halt.

  The police were small, thin, young and agile, but Master Carl was first off the scooter and first to the side of the huddled figure under the breadfruit tree.

  For the first time in weeks, Cornut had fallen asleep -passed out, in fact - without a guardian angel. The moment of helplessness between waking and sleeping, the moment that had almost killed him a dozen times, had caught him by the side of a deserted road, in the middle of a uninhabited sink of smelly soft vegetation.

  Carl gently lifted the limp head.

  '... My God,' he said, a prayer instead of an oath, 'he's only drunk. Come on, you! Help me get him to bed.'

  Cornut woke up with a sick mouth and a banging head, very cheerful. Master Carl was seated at a field desk, a shaded light over his head. 'Oh, you're up. Good. I had the porter call me a few minutes early, in case—'

  'Yes. Thanks.' Cornut waggled his jaw experimentally, but that was not a very good experiment. Still, he felt very good. He had not been drunk in a long, long time, and a hangover was strange enough to him to be interesting in itself. He sat on the side of the bed. The porter had evidently had other orders from Master Carl, because there was coffee in a pewter pot, and a thick pottery cup. He drank some.

  Carl watched him for a
while, then browsed back to his desk. He had a jar of some faintly greenish liquid and the usual stack of photographic prints. 'How about this one?' he demanded. 'Does it look like a star to you?'

  'No.'

  Carl dropped it back on the heap. 'Becquerel's was no better,' he said cryptically.

  'I'm sorry, Carl,' Cornut said cheerfully. 'You know I don't take much interest in psion—'

  'Cornut!'

  'Oh, sorry. In your researches into paranormal kinetics, then.'

  Carl said doubtfully, having already forgotten what Cornut had said, 'I thought Greenlease had put me on the track of something. You know I've been trying to manipulate single molecules by P.K. - using photographic film, on the principle that as the molecules are just about to flip over into another state, not much energy should be needed to trigger them - Yes. Well, Greenlease told me about Brownian Movement. Like this.' He held the jar of soap solution to the light. 'See?'

  Cornut got up and took the quart jar from Master Carl's hand. In the light he could see that the greenish colour was the sum of a myriad wandering points of light, looking more gold than green. 'Brownian Movement? I remember something about it.'

  'The actual motion of molecules,' Carl said solemnly. 'One molecule impinging on another, knocking it into a third, the third knocking it into a fourth. There's a term for it in—'

  'In math, of course. Why, certainly. The Drunkard's Walk.' Cornut remembered the concept with clarity and affection. He had been a second-year student, and the housemaster was old Wayne; the audio-visual had been a marionette drunkard, lurching away from a doll-sized lamp-post with random drunken steps in random drunken directions. He smiled at the jar.

  'Well, what I want to do is sober him up. Watch!' Carl puffed and thought; he was a model of concentration; Rodin had only sketched the rough outlines, compared to Master Carl. Then he panted. 'Well?'

  Apparently, Cornut thought, what Carl had been trying to do was to make the molecules move in straight lines. 'I don't think I see a thing,' he admitted.

  'No. Neither do I... Well,' said Master Carl, retrieving his jar, 'even a negative answer is an answer. But I haven't given up yet. I have a few more thoughts on photographs -if Greenlease can give me a little help.' He sat down next to Cornut. 'And you?'

  'You saw.'

  Carl nodded seriously 'I saw that you were still alive. Was it because you were on your own drunkard's walk?'

  Cornut shook his head. He didn't mean No, he meant, How can I tell?

  'And my idea about finding a wife?'

  'I don't know.'

  'That girl in the dining hall,' Carl said with some acuteness. 'How about her?'

  'Locille? Oh, good God, Carl, how do I know about her? I - I hardly know her name. Anyway, she seems to be pretty close to Egerd.'

  Carl got up and wandered to the window. 'Might as well have breakfast. The aborigines ought to be ready now.' He stared at the crimson morning. 'Madam Sant' Anna has asked for a helper to get her aborigines to Valparaiso,' he said thoughtfully. 'I think I'll help her out.'

  CHAPTER VI

  Ten thousand miles away, in the early afternoon, Locille was not very close to Egerd at all. 'Sorry,' she said. 'I would like to. But—'

  Egerd stood huffily up. 'What's the record?' he said angrily. 'Ten weeks? Good enough. I'll be around to see you again along about the first of the month.' He stalked out of the girls' dayroom.

  Locille sighed, but as she did not know what to do about Egerd's jealousy, she did nothing. It was rather difficult to be a girl sometimes.

  For here's Locille, a girl, pretty enough, full of a girl's problems. It is a girl's business to keep her problems to herself. It is a girl's business to look poised and lovely. And available.

  It is not true that girls are made of sugar and spice. These mysterious creatures, enamelled of complexion faintly scented with distant flower-fields and musk, constricted here and enlarged there - they are animals, as men are animals, sustained by the same sludgy trickle of partly fermented organic matter; and indeed with a host of earthy problems men need never know; the oestral flow, the burgeoning cells that replenish the race. Womanhood has always been a triumph of artifice over the animal within.

  And here, as we say, is Locille. Twenty years old, student, child of a retired subway engineer and his retired social-worker wife. She is young, she is nubile. The state of her health is a ploughmare's. What can she know of mysteries?

  But she knew.

  On the night the Field Expedition was due to return, Locille was excused from all her evening classes. She took advantage of an hour of freedom to telephone her parents, out on the texas. She discovered as she had discovered a hundred times before that there was nothing to say between them; and returned to the kitchens of the Faculty Mess in time to take up her duties for the evening.

  The occasion was the return of the Field Expedition. It promised to be a monstrous feast.

  More than two hundred visiting notables would be present, as well as most of the upper faculty of the University itself. The kitchens were buzzing with activity. All six C. E.s were on duty, all busy; the culinary engineer in charge of sauces and gravies spied Locille first and drafted her to help him, but there was a struggle; the engineer whose charge was pastries knew her and wanted her too. Sauces and gravies won out, and Locille found herself emulsifying caked steer blood and powdered spices in a huge metal vat; the sonic whine of the emulsifier and the staccato hiss of the steam as she valved it expertly into the mixture drowned out the settling roar of the jet; the party had returned without her knowing it; the first clue she had was when there was a commotion at one end of the kitchens, and she turned, and there was Egerd, dourly shepherding three short, sallow persons she didn't recognize.

  He saw her. 'Locille! Come on over and meet the aborigines!'

  She hesitated and glanced at her C. E., who pantomimed take-ten-if-it-won't-spoil-the-gravy. Locille slipped off her gauntlets, set the automatic timers and thermostats and ducked past the kneading, baking, pressure-cooking machines of the Faculty Kitchen towards Egerd and his trophies.

  'They're Japanese,' he said proudly. 'You've heard of War Two? They were abandoned on an island, and their descendants have been there ever since. Say, Locille—'

  She took her eyes off the aborigines to look at Egerd. He seemed both angry and proud. 'I have to go to Valparaiso,' he said. 'There are six other aborigines who are going to South America, and Master Carl picked me to go along.'

  She started to answer, but Cornut was wandering into the room, looking thoughtful.

  Egerd looked thoughtfully, back at him.

  'I wondered why Carl picked me for this,' he said, not bitterly but with comprehension. 'All right.' He turned to leave through another door. 'He can have his chance - for the next sixteen days,' he said.

  Thoughtful Cornut was. He had never proposed marriage before. 'Hello, Locille,' he said formally.

  She said, 'Hello, Master Cornut.'

  He said, 'I, uh, want to ask you something.'

  She said nothing. He looked around the kitchen as though he had never been in it before, which was probably so. He said, 'Would you like to - ah, would you like to meet me on Overlook Tower tomorrow?' 'Certainly, Master Cornut.'

  'That's fine,' he said politely, nodding, and was halfway into the dining-room before he realized he hadn't told her when. Maybe she thought he expected her to stand there all day long! He hurried back. 'At noon?'

  'All right.'

  'And don't make any plans for the evening,' he commanded, hurrying away. It was embarrassing. He had never proposed marriage before, and had not succeeded in proposing now, he thought. But he was wrong. He had. He didn't know it, but Locille did.

  The rest of the evening passed very rapidly for Cornut. The dinner was a great success. The aborigines were a howl. They passed among the guests, smoking their pipe of peace with everyone who cared to try it, which was everyone, and as the guests got drunker the aborigines, responding to every to
ast with a loud Banzai!, then a hoarse one, then a simper -the aborigines got drunker still.

  Cornut had a ball. He caught glimpses of Locille from time to time at first, then not. He asked after her, asked the waitresses, asked the aborigines, finally found himself asking - or telling - about Locille with his arm around the flaccid shoulders of Master Wahl. He was quite drunk early, and he kept on drinking. He had moments of clarity: Master Carl listened patiently while Cornut tried to demonstrate Brownian motion in a rye-and-ginger-ale; a queer, alone moment when he realized he was staggering around the empty kitchen, calling Locille's name to the cold copper cauldrons. Somehow, God knows how, he found himself in the elevators of Math Tower, when it must have been very late, and Egerd in a cream-coloured robe was trying to help him into his room. He knew he said something to Egerd that must have been either coarse or cruel, because the boy turned away from him and did not protest when Cornut locked his door, but he did not know what. Had he mentioned Locille? When had he not! He fell sprawled on his bed, giggling. He had mentioned Locille a thousand times, he knew, and stroked the pillow beside him. He drifted off to sleep.

  He drifted off to sleep and halted, for a moment sober, for a moment terrified, knowing that he was on the verge of sleep, again alone. But he could not stop.

  He could not stop because he was a molecule in a sea of soapy soup and Master Carl was hurling him into the arms of Locille.

  Master Carl was hurling him away because Egerd had hurled him at Master Carl; Locille thrust him at St Cyr and St Cyr, voicelessly chuckling, hurled him clear out of the jar, and he could not stop.

  He could not stop because St Cyr told him: You are a molecule, drunken molecule, you are a molecule, drunk and random, without path, you are a drunken molecule and you cannot stop.

  He could not stop though the greatest voice in the world was shouting at him: YOU CAN ONLY DIE, DRUNKEN MOLECULE, YOU CAN DIE, YOU CANNOT STOP.

  He could not stop because the world was reeling, reeling, he tried to open his eyes to halt it, but it would not stop.