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  CRITICAL MASS

  by Frederik Pohl

  A Bantam Book I October 1977

  “The Quaker Cannon,” (c) 1961 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  “Mute Inglorious Tarn,” (c) 1974 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “The World of Myrion Plovers,” (c) 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “The Gift of Garigolli,” (c) 1974 by VPD Publishing Corporation

  “A Gentle Dying,” (c) 1961 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation “A Hint of Henbane,” (c) 1961 by H. S. D. Publications, Inc.

  “The Meeting,” (c) 1972 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “The Engineer, (c) 1953 by Royal Publications, Inc.

  “Nightmare with Zeppelins,” (c) 1958 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation “Critical Mass,” (c) 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation All rights reserved.

  Copyright (c) 1977 by Frederik Pohl.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or In part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

  ISBN 0-553-10948-0 Published simultaneously in the Vnited States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trade’ mark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a bantam, is registered in the United States Patent Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10019.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Contents

  INTRODUCTION by Frederik Pohl vii

  THE QUAKER CANNON 1

  MUTE INGLORIOUS TAM 31 THE WORLD OF MYRION FLOWERS 45

  THE GIFT OF GARIGOLLI 53

  A GENTLE DYING 83

  A HINT OF HENBANE 93

  THE MEETING 101

  THE ENGINEER 117

  NIGHTMARE WITH ZEPPELINS 127

  CRITICAL MASS 137

  AFTERWORD by Frederik Pohl 179

  INTRODUCTION by Frederik Pohl

  During World War III was an Air Force weatherman, mostly in Italy. My friend and collaborator Cyril Kornbluth had a varied career. He started out as a machinist with the artillery, a safe and reasonably satisfying job, as well as one pretty useful to the war effort. Along came ASTP. ASTP was a marvelously do-good-ing program whereby certain soldiers could effectively drop out of the war entirely, attending college in uniform instead of fighting or holding down posts in the United States. I have never really understood what it had to do with the job of defeating Germany, Italy and Japan, but it surely was a dream of delight to every GI, and Cyril signed up for it at once.

  Catch-22 came along in 1944. The Army perceived that what it really needed was not so much well-rounded officer material as warm bodies to throw against the enemy. ASTP was canceled without warning, and everyone in it was immediately reassigned to the infantry, as a private. The rest of us in uniform-even the rest of us-could not help feeling some compassion. When I went overseas it was on a troop transport that had once been a fruit-company freighter, called the Cristobal. About a hundred of the troops on board were weathermen like myself. The other 1,800 were former ASTP students, now about to join the Fifth Army’s infantry divisions at Cassino. Some of them were still in their teens. Some of them had not been in the Army more than a few weeks. And some never walked away from Cassino.

  At about the same time, in a different troop transport headed for England, Cyril was in a very similar convoy. He became a heavy machine-gunner, fought through the Battle of the Bulge and received a Bronze Star therefore. At least on paper he did. He never got the medal itself from the Army. I, on the other hand, had been given one, but it had never been made official; so a year or two after the war I gave him mine.

  We both survived the war and returned to civilian life around the end of 1945. I went into the advertising business for a tune in New York. Cyril went to the University of Chicago on the GI Bill of Rights.

  Old fellow-Futurian Richard Wilson was also in Chicago in those years, getting into news work with Trans-Radio Press wire service. He soon became head of their Chicago bureau, and recruited Cyril to work in the newsroom. When Dick moved on to higher things, first in the Washington bureau and then to the central headquarters office in New York, Cyril replaced him as Chicago bureau chief, quitting college to make time for that eighteen-hour-a-day job.

  A few years of that turned out to be enough. In 1951 Cyril came east, determined to go back to writing science fiction.

  I had just bought the house I still live in, thirteen ancient rooms on the Jersey shore, and Cyril and his pregnant wife came to stay with us while they sorted out their plans. I had begun a science-fiction novel about the future of the advertising business, and invited Cyril to collaborate on finishing it. It became the first bit of science fiction to be published under the joint by-line “by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth” (all our previous collaborations had appeared under a variety of pseudonyms) when Horace Gold serialized it in Galaxy, under the title of Gravy Planet. We were delighted. Horace paid us $1,400 for it, which was about as much money as either of us had ever seen in one lump before. A while later we managed to get lan Ballantine to bring it out in book form, and, actually,

  it hasn’t really done badly at all: something over ten million copies, in something like forty languages, earning something like a hundred tunes the price we wrote it for, as of even date. The book title was The Space Merchants.

  Over the next half-dozen years we wrote six other novels together, three which were science fiction-Gladiator-at-Law, Search the Sky and Wolfbane-a.nd three which were not. Presidential Year was about, well, about a presidential year: about a man who sought the nomination, and what he had to go through to get nominated. It appeared in 1956 and was well enough received critically, but not very exciting hi sales. We sold the film rights, but the movie was never made; and one of the many reasons why I wish Cyril-, were still alive is that I would like it if we could have revised and reissued it in the new post-Watergate political scene. A Town Is Drowning was a topical novel about a hurricane hitting the East Coast. A couple of them had, not long before/One of them had taken part, of my roof off and another had flooded Cyril’s upstate New York house out, and we viewed the novel as an attempt to get even with the elements. Sorority House was a semisexy ripoff novel published under a pseudonym to complete a contract Cyril had come to regret having made. All of these non-sf novels had things in them which I like and wish we had used in better books, but we didn’t.

  At the same tune we were going on with our own individual writing.

  Cyril’s own novels-Takeoff, Not This August and The Syndic-were appearing and doing very well (not to mention the half-dozen or so other novels, not science fiction, rather like Sorority House, which were appearing as paperback originals under pen names). We were both doing about as well as we had any reason to expect. I remember having a cup of coffee with Cyril when he had just had an editorial in the New York Daily News plugging one of his books, and I had been

  mentioned by Time in connection with one of mine. This sort of mass-media publicity for science fiction was not common hi the fifties, and we were agreeably expectant of great things. We undertook to check with each other six months later to see what they had done for us in sales. (As it turned out, nothing we could detect.)

  There was a certain amount of mutual assistance between us even on some of the stories which did not appear as collaborations. I remember specifically Cyril bogging down on his novel Takeoff, which he had originally intended to call something like The Martians Upstairs, with actual Martians in it. This proved complex and difficult to write, and we spent one long night replotting it into the published form, omitting the Martians. And I remember showing Mm the rough draft of my novella The Midas Plague, and getting fro
m him some first-rate ideas on plotting and bits of business.

  I think if Cyril had lived he would have become one of the all-tune greats of the field. He was just hitting his stride when his health began to falter.

  Cyril had always been a little plumper than was strictly good for him. When the Army made him a machine-gunner, lugging a 50-calibre-heavy MG around the Ardennes forest, they shortened his life. Exertions damaged his heart, and hi his midthirties his doctor told hun that he had a clear choice. He could give up smoking, drinking, spices in his food, a lot of the food itself, irregular hours and excitement; or he could die of hypertension.

  For a while Cyril tried doing what the doctor told him. He took his medicine: tranquilizers, mostly, the not-quite-perfected tranquilizers of the fifties, which had such side-effects as making him a little confused and a little intellectually sluggish. He followed his diet rigorously. He came out to visit us during that period, and my wife cooked salt-free meals and baked salt-free bread. We couldn’t do much writing. He was not up to it. But I showed him a novel I was having problems

  with. He read the pages of the first draft and handed it back to me. “Needs salt,” he said, and that was all.

  So I suppose Cyril made his choice. In his place, I think I might have made the same one. He went back to coffee and cigarettes, gave up the medication, went back to writing, finished the revisions on Woljbane, wrote two or three of his best novelettes, signed on as an editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction -his first experiment with editing, rather than writing, science fiction, and one which he enjoyed enormously. … And then on a snowy March morning I had a phone call from Mary, his wife, to say that Cyril had shoveled out their driveway to free his car, run to catch a train and dropped dead on the station platform.

  He left a bundle of incomplete manuscripts and fragments, some of which I was later able to revise and complete. Most of the stories in this volume came out of that bale of paper, and were published after his death.

  THE QUAKER CANNON

  This story is about 12,000 words long. I see by my notes that the fragment Cyril left incomplete amounted to only about 3,000 words, which means that 9,000 of the words in the story are mine. And yet, reading it over, I can find no major plot element and only a few incidents that I remember contributing to it, This explains why I have trouble when someone asks me how much each of us contributed to our collaborations, and why my usual answer is, “I don’t know.”

  LIEUTENANT JOHN KRAMER did crossword puzzles during at least eighty per cent of his waking hours. His cubicle in Bachelor Officers Quarters was untidy; one wall was stacked solid with newspapers and magazines to which he subscribed for their puzzle pages. He meant, from week to week, to clean them out but somehow never found time. The ern, or erne, a sea eagle, soared vertically through his days and by night the ai, a three-toed sloth, crept horizontally. In edes, or Dutch communes, dyers retted ecru, quaffing ades by the tun and thought was postponed.

  John Kramer was in disgrace and, at thirty-eight, well on his way to becoming the oldest first lieutenant in the North American (and Allied) Army. He had been captured in ‘82 as an aftermath of the confused fighting around Tsingtao. A few exquisitely unpleasant months passed and he then delivered three TV lectures

  for the yutes. In them he announced his total conversion to Neo-Utilitarianism, denounced the North American (and Allied) military command as a loathesome pack of war-waging, anti-utilitarian mad dogs, and personally admitted the waging of viral warfare against the United Utilitarian Republics.

  The yutes, or Utilitarians, had been faithful to their principles. They had wanted Kramer only for what he could do for them, not for his own sweet self, and when they had got the juice out of him they exchanged him. In ‘83 he came out of his fog at Fort Bradley, Utah, to find himself being court-martialed.

  He was found guilty as charged, and sentenced to a reprimand. The lightness of the sentence was something to be a little proud of, if not very much. It stood as a grudging tribute to the months he had held out against involutional melancholia in the yute Blank Tanks. For exchanged PW’s, the severity of their courts-martial was hi inverse proportion to the duration of their ordeal in Utilitarian hands. Soldiers who caved in after a couple of days of sense-starvation could look forward only to a firing squad. Presumably a returned soldier dogged (or rigid) enough to be driven into hopeless insanity without cooperating would have been honorably acquitted by his court, but such a case had not yet come up.

  Kramer’s “reprimand” was not the face-to-face bawling-out suggested to a civilian by the word. It was a short letter with numbered paragraphs which said (1) you are reprimanded, (2) a copy of this reprimand will be punched on your profile card. This tagged him forever as a foul ball, destined to spend the rest of his military life shuffling from one dreary assignment to another, without hope of promotion or reward.

  He no longer cared. Or thought he did not; which came to the same thing.

  He was not liked in the Officers Club. He was bad company. Young officers passing through Bradley on their way to glory might ask him, “What’s it redly

  Jto

  like in a Blank Tank, Kramer?” But beyond answering, “You go nuts,” what was there to talk about? Also he did not drink, because when he drank he went on to become drunk, and if he became drunk he would cry.

  So he did a crossword puzzle in bed before breakfast, dressed, went to his office, signed papers, did puzzles until lunch, and so on until the last one in bed at night. Nominally he was Commanding Officer of the 561st Provisional Reception Battalion. Actually he was (with a few military overtones) the straw boss of a gang of clerks in uniform who saw to the arrival, bedding, feeding, equipping, inoculation and transfer to a training unit of one thousand scared kids per week.

  On a drizzle-swept afternoon in the spring of ‘85 Kramer was sounding one of those military overtones. It was his appointed day for a “surprise” inspection of Company D of his battalion. Impeccable in dress blues, he was supposed to descend like a thunderbolt on this company or that, catching them all unaware, striding arrogantly down the barracks aisle between bunks, white-gloved and eagle-eyed for dust, maddened at the sight of disarray, vengeful against such contraband as playing cards or light reading matter. Kramer knew, quite well, that one of his orderly room clerks always telephoned the doomed company to warn that he was on his way. He did not particularly mind it. What he minded was unfair definitions of key words, and ridiculously variant spellings.

  The permanent-party sergeant of D Company bawled “Tench-/z”tf” when Kramer snapped the door open and stepped crisply into the ‘barracks. Kramer froze his face into its approved expression of controlled annoyance and opened his mouth to give the noncom his orders. But the sergeant had miscalculated. One of the scared kids was still frantically mopping the aisle.

  Kramer halted. The kid spun around in horror, made some kind of attempt to present arms with the

  mop and failed. The mop shot from his soapy hands like a slung baseball bat, and its soggy gray head schlooped against the lieutenant’s dress-blue chest.

  The kid turned white and seemed about to faint on the damp board floor. The other kids waited to see him destroyed.

  Kramer was mildly irritated. “At ease,” he said. “Pick up that mop. Sergeant, confound it, next time they buzz you from the orderly room don’t cut it so close.”

  The kids sighed perceptibly and glanced covertly at each other in the big bare room, beginning to suspect it might not be too bad after all. Lieutenant Kramer then resumed the expression of a nettled bird of prey and strode down the aisle. Long ago he had worked out a “random” selection of bunks for special attention and now followed it through habit. If he had thought about it any more, he would have supposed that it was still spy-proof; but every noncom in his cadre had long since discovered that Kramer stopped at either every second bunk on the right and every third on the left, or every third bunk on the right and every second on the left-dep
ending on whether the day of the month was odd or even. This would not have worried Kramer if he had known it; but he never even noticed that the men beside the bunks he stopped at were always the best-shaved, best-policed and healthiest looking in each barracks.

  Regardless, he delivered a certain quota of meaningless demerits which were gravely recorded by the sergeant. Of blue-eyed men on the left and brown-eyed men on the right (this, at least, had not been penetrated by the noncoms) he went on to ask their names and home towns. Before discovering crossword puzzles he had memorized atlases, and so he had something to say about every home town he had yet encountered. In this respect at least he considered himself an above-average officer, and indeed he was.

  It wasn’t the Old Army, not by a long shot, but when the draft age went down to fifteen some of the Old Army’s little ways had to go. One experimental reception station in Virginia was trying out a Barracks Mother system. Kramer, thankful for small favors, was glad they hadn’t put him on that project. Even here he was expected, at the end of the inspection, to call the “men” around him and ask if anything was bothering them. Something always was. Some gangling kid would scare up the nerve to ask, gee, lieutenant, I know what the Morale Officer said, but exactly why didn’t we ever use the megaton-head missiles, and another would want to know how come Lunar Base was such a washout, tactically speaking, sir. And then he would have to rehearse the dry “recommended discussion themes” from the briefing books; and then, finally, one of them, nudged on by others, would pipe up, “Lieutenant, what’s it like in the Blank Tanks?” And he would know that already, forty-eight hours after induction, the kids all knew about what Lieutenant John Kramer had done.

  But today he was spared. When he was halfway through the rigmarole the barracks phone rang and the sergeant apologetically answered it.

  He returned from his office-cubicle on the double, looking vaguely frightened. “Compliments of General Grote’s secretary, sir, and will you please report to him at G-l as soon as possible.”