Gateways (18 page)

That sounded pretty reasonable to him. After all, neighbors who would threaten lawsuits would probably have rotten kids.

Really smart rotten kids.

At least the thing hadn’t come back down on his property.

As they had calculated, the united generations of Bert successfully achieved escape velocity from the gravity well they had so thoroughly explored. They then used the nearby natural satellite, the next planet closer to the primary, and finally the primary itself, to sling their construct out of the stellar system entirely. You and I would be impressed by the calculating power of so many good little machines working in concert, and we might think that, having experienced that success—because, of course, they learned from experience—they would remain together to continue their mission with even greater effectiveness. Yet some time later, though the exact time elapsed did not matter to them, the smooth, sleek, iridescent object they
had created of themselves broke apart, and each of the Berts used his tiny power to leave his fellows and resume his exploration as the original Designers had always intended.

To maintain such a clear and constant purpose was an excellent thing for the good little machines. With such a singleness of purpose, it would never matter to any of the Berts whether the race that created them, or any race arising from it, still existed to receive the tightbeam crammed with all their meticulously gathered information.

The Mission was the thing; the Mission.

In the bowels of NORAD, the strategic operations computer named MIMTAC noted the accelerating outward trajectory of a familiar-looking object, but raised no alarm. The reasons for this were several: the two-meter-long spindle was oddly porous; its infrared signature was not that of any known rocket or ramjet engine; its mean path appeared to speed it well beyond Earth’s ionosphere; and it displayed an incessant random flickering along its entire surface, like a swarm of eddying dust motes. The computer’s multivariable analysis determined that the object best fit the category of “rare atmospheric plasma phenomena,” which offered no discernible threat to the security of North America. Someday an even smarter computer system might identify this anomaly’s physical cause. But the current generation of machine intelligence known to properly cleared humans as MIMTAC just filed it under a code that translated roughly as “unusual but innocuous entity.” And kept on watching the skies.

Frank decided to cancel the demolition of the garage.

Instead, he put the car back inside, stripped the duct tape off the door to the house, took down the dangling, bug-dotted flypaper, and lowered the garage door. There was work to be done on the car, some parts to be replaced, the finish to smooth out and repaint; he would get on that next weekend. The duct tape hadn’t done the woodwork any good, so that was another project to start soon. But there was no need to buy a new mower; the old one worked well enough, in spite of the awful way it looked.

With the damage halted, the neighbors finally gave up on their preposterous lawsuit. Still, Frank never spoke to any of them again. Because, you know, in the great cosmic scheme of things, it simply didn’t matter.

Little did he know.

This story was inspired by the way Frederik Pohl wrote “Day Million”—though this may not be obvious in the result, partly because it is not about the same things “Day Million” is about. Yes, it is an entirely different story, written in an entirely different way. What’s so surprising about that? That’s as it should be, isn’t it?
I
think so. But I still think it reads like a story written under the influence of Fred Pohl’s short science fiction. Not any one story, but a mélange of a whole raft of his stories that are told by a friendly narrator who is not really an actor within the framework of the storyline itself.

When I was a teenager, my primary goals in life were to write science fiction and to meet all the science-fiction writers whose work I loved. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Fred’s name was high on the list. After all, I had every one of his short story collections—
all
of them. And eventually, most of the novels, too.

I first actually met Fred a mere few decades ago. Sometime in our early acquaintance, when he was an editor at Bantam, I tried to sell him a novel; and while he thought the one I had written was not uninteresting, he insisted he would rather see its sequel. Since I never wrote that sequel, and someone else published the novel, Fred never became my editor. Instead, he married my friend Betty, which gave us an entirely different (and I believe more salutary) relationship. Had he become my editor, I would never have discovered, for example, that he made instant coffee with hot water straight from the tap. And many other things that I would never reveal, no matter how much you paid me.

But I will say that, even though Fred Pohl is one of science fiction’s preeminent satirists, underneath that wry and sardonic exterior of Fred-the-writer, he’s a kind and very approachable human being. And anyone who knows him well also knows this very well.

—P
HYLLIS AND
A
LEX
E
ISENSTEIN (MOSTLY
P
HYLLIS)

Frederik Pohl was born in 1919 and is just a few weeks older than I am. When we met as fellow Futurians in September 1938, we were each of us edging toward his nineteenth birthday. Despite the equality of our chronological age, he has always been more worldly-wise and possessed of more common sense than I. I recognized this and I would turn to him for advice without any hesitation.

Fred is taller than I, very soft-spoken. He has a pronounced overbite and an often quizzical expression on his face that makes him look a bit rabbity but, in my eyes, cute, because I am very fond of him. He has light hair that was already thinning when I met him.

Fred is a very unusual fellow. He does not flash from time to time as I do, and as several of the other Futurians did. Instead, he burns with a clear, steady light. He is one of the most intelligent men I have ever met, and he frequently writes letters or columns for the fan magazines or professional magazines, expressing his views on scientific or social issues. I read them avidly, for he writes with clarity and charm, and I have never in fifty years had occasion to disagree with a word he has said. On a very few occasions when he expressed a point of view differing from one I had expressed, I would see at once that I had been wrong, he right. I think he is the only person with whose views I have never disagreed.

I always felt closer to him than to any other Futurian, even though our personalities and circumstances were so different. He had had an unsettled childhood, though he never spoke of it in detail, and the Great Depression had forced him out of high school. He makes the best of it by treating the matter humorously and referring to himself as a “high school dropout.” Don’t let him kid you, though. He continued his program of self-education to the point where he knows a great deal more about a great many more things than does many a person with my own intensive education.

His social life has been more hectic than mine. For one thing, he has been married five times, but his present marriage, his fifth, to Betty, seems stable and happy.

At the time we met, he and the other Futurians were writing science fiction at a mad pace, alone and in collaboration, under a variety of pseudonyms. I did not join them in this, insisting on writing my stories on my own and using my own name. As it happened, I was the first Futurian to begin to sell consistently, but they tumbled into the field on my heels.

He began to use his own name on his stories in 1952, when he, in collaboration with another Futurian, Cyril Kornbluth, published a three-part serial in
Galaxy
entitled “Gravy Planet.” It appeared in novel form as
The Space Merchants
in 1953 and made the reputation of both Fred and Cyril. Each was a major science fiction writer thereafter.

His connection with me?

In 1939, he looked over my rejected short stories, called them “the best rejections I have ever seen” (which was very heartening), and gave me solid hints on how to improve my writing. Then, in 1940, when he was still only twenty years old, he became the editor (and a very good editor too) of two new science fiction magazines,
Astonishing Stories
and
Super Science Stories
. For those magazines he bought several of my early stories. This kept me going till I got the range of the best magazine in the field,
Astounding
. Fred and I even collaborated on two stories, though not very good ones, I’m afraid.

In 1942, when I was stuck and could not proceed with a novelette I was writing that
had
to be submitted in a week or so, he told me how to get out of the spot I had written myself into. I remember that we were standing on the Brooklyn Bridge at the time, but what my difficulty was and what his solution was, I don’t remember. (We were standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, I found out many years later, because Fred’s first wife, Doris, thought I was a “creep” and wouldn’t have me in the apartment. I was struck in a heap when I found this in Fred’s autobiography because I had liked her and had never dreamed of her distaste. Nor could I make it up with her, for she had died young.)

In 1950, Pohl was instrumental in the highest degree in getting my first novel published. In short, Fred, more than anyone else but John W. Campbell Jr., made my career possible.