“Like in the movies,” the boy nodded. “The flying saucers.”
“All those movies are made-up stories, Timmy. Like Jack and the Beanstalk, or Oz. Perhaps some creatures from space have come to see us sometime, but there is no good evidence that this is so. I feel sure there would be evidence if it had happened. There would have to be. If there were many such visits, ever, then at least one would have dropped the Martian equivalent of a McDonald’s Big Mac box, or a used Sirian flash cube, and it would have been found and shown to be from somewhere other than the Earth. None ever has. So there are only three possible answers to Dr. Fermi’s question. One, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don’t want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can’t even guess it. And the third reason—” Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head—“is that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space—when they have all the technology we do—they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can’t control them anymore. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up.”
“Like now,” Timothy said, nodding seriously to show he understood. He had finished his soup, but instead of taking the plate away Elda hugged him in her arms and tried not to weep.
The world was totally dark now. There was no day or night, and would not be again for no one could say how long. The rains and snows had stopped. Without sunlight to suck water up out of the oceans there was no moisture left in the atmosphere to fall. Floods had been replaced by freezing droughts. Two meters down the soil of Iceland was steel hard, and the navvies could no longer dig. There was no hope of laying additional pipes. When more heat was needed all that could be done was to close off buildings and turn off their heating pipes. Elda’s patients now were less likely to be frostbite and more to be the listlessness of radiation sickness as volunteers raced in and out of the Reykjavik ruins to find medicine and food. No one was spared that job. When Elda came back on a snowmobile from a foraging trip to the Loftleider Hotel she brought back a present for
the boy. Candy bars and postcards from the gift shop; the candy bars had to be shared, but the postcards were all for him. “Do you know what these are?” she asked. The cards showed huge, squat, ugly men and women in the costumes of a thousand years ago. “They’re trolls. We have myths in Iceland that the trolls lived here. They’re still here, Timmy, or so they say; the mountains are trolls that just got too old and tired to move anymore.”
“They’re made-up stories, right?” the boy asked seriously, and did not grin until she assured him they were. Then he made a joke. “I guess the trolls won,” he said.
“Ach, Timmy!” Elda was shocked. But at least the boy was capable of joking, she told herself, and even graveyard humor was better than none. Life had become a little easier for her with the new patients—easier because for the radiation-sick there was very little that could be done—and she bestirred herself to think of ways to entertain the boy.
And found a wonderful one.
Since fuel was precious there were no excursions to see the sights of Iceland-under-the-ice. There was no way to see them anyway in the eternal dark. But when a hospital chopper was called up to travel empty to Stokksnes on the eastern shore to bring back a child with a broken back, she begged space for Malibert and Timmy. Elda’s own ride was automatic, as duty nurse for the wounded child. “An avalanche crushed his house,” she explained. “It is right under the mountains, Stokksnes, and landing there will be a little tricky, I think. But we can come in from the sea and make it safe. At least in the landing lights of the helicopter something can be seen.”
They were luckier than that. There was more light. Nothing came through the clouds, where the billions of particles that had once been Elda’s husband added to the trillions of trillions that had been Detroit and Marseilles and Shanghai to shut out the sky. But in the clouds and under them were snakes and sheets of dim color, sprays full of dull red, fans of pale green. The aurora borealis did not give much light. But there was no other light at all except for the faint glow from the pilot’s instrument panel. As their eyes widened they could see the dark shapes of the Vatnajökull slipping by below them. “
Big
trolls,” cried the boy happily, and Elda smiled too as she hugged him.
The pilot did as Elda had predicted, down the slopes of the eastern range, out over the sea, and cautiously back in to the little fishing village. As they landed, red-tipped flashlights guiding them, the copter’s landing lights picked out a white lump, vaguely saucer-shaped. “Radar dish,” said Malibert to the boy, pointing.
Timmy pressed his nose to the freezing window. “Is it one of them, Daddy Harry? The things that could talk to the stars?”
The pilot answered: “Ach, no, Timmy—military, it is.” And Malibert said:
“They wouldn’t put one of those here, Timothy. It’s too far north. You wanted a place for a big radio telescope that could search the whole sky, not just the little piece of it you can see from Iceland.”
And while they helped slide the stretcher with the broken child into the helicopter, gently, kindly as they could be, Malibert was thinking about those places, Arecibo and Woomara and Socorro and all the others. Every one of them was now dead and certainly broken with a weight of ice and shredded by the mean winds. Crushed, rusted, washed away, all those eyes on space were blinded now; and the thought saddened Harry Malibert, but not for long. More gladdening than anything sad was the fact that, for the first time, Timothy had called him “Daddy.”
In one ending to the story, when at last the sun came back it was too late. Iceland had been the last place where human beings survived, and Iceland had finally starved. There was nothing alive anywhere on Earth that spoke, or invented machines, or read books. Fermi’s terrible third answer was the right one after all.
But there exists another ending. In this one the sun came back in time. Perhaps it was just barely in time, but the food had not yet run out when daylight brought the first touches of green in some parts of the world, and plants began to grow again from frozen or hoarded seed. In this ending Timothy lived to grow up. When he was old enough, and after Malibert and Elda had got around to marrying, he married one of their daughters. And of their descendants—two generations or a dozen generations later—one was alive on the day when Fermi’s paradox became a quaintly amusing old worry, as irrelevant and comical as a fifteenth-century mariner’s fear of falling off the edge of the flat Earth. On that day the skies spoke, and those who lived in them came to call.
Perhaps that is the true ending of the story, and in it the human race chose not to squabble and struggle within itself, and so extinguish itself finally into the dark. In this ending human beings survived, and saved all the science and beauty of life, and greeted their star-born visitors with joy … .
But that is in fact what did happen!
At least, one would like to think so.
THE HEECHEE SAGA
Gateway
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Heechee Rendezvous
The Annals of the Heechee
The Gateway Trip
*
The Boy Who Would Live Forever
THE ESCHATON SEQUENCE
*
The Other End of Time
*
The Siege of Eternity
*
The Far Shore of Time
Slave Ship
Drunkard’s Walk
A Plague of Pythons
The Age of the Pussyfoot
Man Plus
Jem
The Cool War
The Years of the City
Black Star Rising
The Coming of the Quantum Cats
The Day the Martians Came
Narabedla Ltd.
Homegoing
Starburst
The World at the End of Time
The Merchants’ War
*
O Pioneer!
Stopping at Slowyear
Mining the Oort
Midas World
With C. M. Kornbluth
The Space Merchants
Gladiator-at-Law
Search the Sky
Wolfbane
STORY COLLECTIONS
Tomorrow Times Seven
Pohlstars
Alternating Currents
Day Million
The Early Pohl
The Case Against Tomorrow
Digits and Dastards
Survival Kit
Gold at the Starbow’s End
With Jack Williamson
THE STARCHILD TRILOGY
Reefs of Space
Starchild
Rogue Star
THE UNDERSEA TRILOGY
Undersea Quest
Undersea Fleet
Undersea City
Wall Around a Star
The Farthest Star
*
Land’s End
The Singers of Time
Preferred Risk
(with Lester del Rey)
The Best of Frederik Pohl
(edited by Lester del Rey)
The Best of C. M. Kornbluth
(editor)
Star Science Fiction
series (editor)
Nonfiction
The Way the Future Was
(memoir)
*
Chasing Science
*
Our Angry Earth
(with Isaac Asimov)
*denotes a Tor Book
TAKE
A TOUR of the hot spots of Venus with guide Audee Walthers, in the very first Heechee story, “The Merchants of Venus.”
FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS
when the world’s greatest mentalist gets a little too good at fooling his public in “The Things That Happen.”
EXPLORE A FUTURISTIC NEW YORK CITY,
where new technology and old vices vie for control of radical urban re-engineering in “The Greening of Bed-Stuy.”
SHARE THE EXCITEMENT
of an alternate history in which aging pilot Johnny Williamson is rejected by NASA’s astronaut program, until his act of heroism on a fateful day in Dallas gives him the chance to play a pivotal role in the Apollo program in “The Mayor of Mare Tranq.”
GET A PEEK
into the world of Marchese Boccanegra in “Saucery,” when the discovery of real Martians makes it hell for honest frauds to make a living.
EXPERIENCE A SPINE-CHILLING VIEW
of nuclear holocaust, where the best luck is to just survive, in the chilling, poignant Hugo Award—winning “Fermi and Frost.”
GO ALONG FOR AN INCREDIBLE RIDE
to a far star, in a mind-bending trip with a crew bound for a payoff beyond human comprehension, in the stunning novella “The Gold at the Starbow’s End.”
“These carefully selected tales really are platinum Pohl, so there’s not a foot misplaced in all the thirty stories.”
—Gahan Wilson,
Realms of Fantasy
I DON’T KNOW IF
Johnny Appleseed ever went back, after dropping all those seeds over all those years, to see how the trees had grown. I think I know how he would have felt if he had, though. In much the same way, what we have here is a big slice of my life—half a century’s worth of those of my short stories and novelettes that best pleased my estimable editor, James Frenkel. Some of these stories were written while I was in my twenties, some when I was well into my—well, never mind exactly which decade we’re talking about. Many were written in whatever home I was living in at the time—the big old New Jersey house, where I could look from my third-floor office across the river at the town of Red Bank, or my present office in my almost as big (but never big enough) home in Palatine, Illinois. Many were written wherever I happened to be at the time—sitting on a wharf in the East River on sunny summer days, or in an airplane, in a hotel, on a ship or (in at least one case) in the pro station of the Air Force Base of Chanute Field, Illinois, the only place where I could use my typewriter late on a Saturday night.
Apart from the sites of their generation many of these stories have special personal associations for me. “The Celebrated No-Hit Inning” came about when Horace Gold told me I couldn’t write a science fiction story about baseball. If you’ve ever heard the 1970s British rock group that called themselves The Icicle Works, my story “The Day the Icicle Works Closed” will tell you where they got their name. “Day Million” is special to me because it wrote itself so quickly and easily, one night between midnight and dawn—and (I should admit) because the piece works so well when I do a reading. “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” was in two ways a first: the first story all my own that appeared in
Analog
(although John Campbell had published a number of my collaborations he never took a solo job), as well as being the very first story Ben Bova bought when he took over after John’s death. (The readers, used to thirty-seven years of John Campbell’s G-rated editing, didn’t quite know what to make of my story’s somewhat sexual content. In that month’s poll 50 percent of the readers voted it in first place, the other 50 percent in last.) “The Meeting” gave me the first Hugo I had ever won as a writer (I’d picked up a couple as editor of the magazine
If
)—and the only one ever given to my vastly underappreciated collaborator, Cyril Kornbluth. “Shaffery Among the Immortals” sticks out in my memory because of two things Isaac Asimov said to me about it—first, that he hadn’t known I was capable of writing that sort of story; second, that he wished he had done it himself. “Let the Ants Try” was the first short story of mine that I remained pleased with after I saw it in print (which makes all the more humbling the fact that the idea was given to me by my friend and boss at
Popular Science,
George Spoerer, who would not accept a share in either the payment or the byline.)
“Growing Up in Edge City” stays with me because I didn’t know I was going to write it until it happened; I was visiting friends in Cape May, New Jersey; they had to go out on family business, leaving me alone in an otherwise empty house with a coffee pot and a typewriter, and the story came out. “To See Another Mountain” is in my mind inextricably linked to my favorite of all violin concerti, Mendelssohn’s E-minor, because I played the record of it over and over while I was writing the story … .
Well, enough of that; the stories really must speak for themselves. I should only add that, as every writer knows, writing is hard and sometimes painful work, while having written, on the other hand, is pure joy. So producing these stories has, on balance, been fun for me … and I hope reading them has been pleasurable for you as well.
—Frederik Pohl
Palatine, Illinois
March 2005