The Best of Frederik Pohl

Speed Trap

MY reservation was for a window seat, up front, because on this particular flight they serve from the front back; but on the seat next to mine, I saw a reservation tag for Gordie MacKenzie. I kept right on going until the hostess hailed me. "Why, Dr. Grew, nice to have you with us again...

I stood blocking the aisle. "Can I switch to a seat back here somewhere, Clara?"

"Why, I think-let me see..."

"How about that one?" I didn't see a tag on it.

"Well, it's not a window seat..."

"But it's free?"

"Well, let's look." She flipped the seating chart out of her clipboard. "Certainly. May I take your bag?"

"Uh-uh. Work to do." And I did have work to do, too; that was why I didn't want to sit next to MacKenzie. I slouched down in the seat, scowling at the man next to me to indicate that I didn't want to strike up a conversation; he scowled back to show that that suited him fine. I saw MacKenzie come aboard, but he didn't see me.

Just before we took off, I saw Clara bend over him to check his seat belt; and in the same motion, she palmed the reservation card with my name on it. Smart girl. I decided to buy her a drink the next time I found myself in the motel where her crew stayed between flights.

I don't want to give you the idea that I'm a jet-set type who's on first-name terms with every airline stewardess around. The only ones I see enough of at all are a couple on the New York-L.A. run, and a few operating out of O'Hare, and maybe a couple that I see now and then between Huntsville and the Cape-oh, and one Air France girl I've flown with once or twice out of Orly, but only because she gave me a lift in her Citroen one time when there was a metro strike and no cabs to be found. Still, come to think of it, well-all right-yes, I guess I do get around a lot. Those are the hazards of the trade. Although my degree's in atmospheric physics, my specialty is signatures-you know, the instrument readings or optical observations that we interpret to mean such-and-such pressure, temperature, chemical composition and so on-and that's a pretty sexy field right now, and I get invited to a lot of conferences. I said "invited." I don't mean in the sense that I can say no. Not if I want to keep enough status in the department to have freedom to do my work. And it's all plushy and kind of fun, at least when I have time to have fun; and really, I've got pretty good at locating a decent restaurant in Cleveland or Albuquerque (try the Mexican food at the airport) and vetoing an inferior wine.

That's funny, too, because I didn't expect it to be this way-not when I was a kid reading Willy Ley's articles and going out to hunt ginseng in the woods around Potsdam (I mean the New York one) so I could earn money and go to MIT and build spaceships. I thought I would be a lean, hungry-eyed scientist in shabby clothes. I thought probably I would never get out of the laboratory (I guess I thought spaceships were designed in laboratories) and I'd waste my health on long night hours over the slide rule. And, as it turns out, what I'm wasting my health on is truite amandine and time-zone disorientation.

But I think I know what to do about that.

That's why I didn't want to spend the four and a half hours yakking with Gordie MacKenzie, because, by God, I maybe do know what to do about that.

It's not really my field, but I've talked it over with some systems people and they didn't get that polite look people get when you're trying to tell them about their own subject. I'll see if I can explain it. See, there are like twenty conferences and symposia and colloquia a month in any decent-sized field, and you're out of it unless you make a few of them. Not counting workshops and planning sessions and get-the-hell-down-here-Charley-or-we-lose-the-grant meetings. And they do have a way of being all over the place. I haven't slept in my own home all seven nights of any week since Christmas before last, when I had the flu.

Now, question is, what do all the meetings accomplish? I had a theory once that the whole Gestalt was planned-I mean, global scatter, jet travel and all. A sort of psychic energizer, designed to keep us all pumped up all the time-after all, if you're going somewhere in a jet at 600 miles an hour, you know you've got to be doing something important, or else you wouldn't be doing it so fast. But who would plan something like that?

So I gave up that idea and concentrated on ways of doing it better. You know, there really is no more stupid way of communicating information than flying 3000 miles to sit on a gilt chair in a hotel ballroom and listen to twenty-five people read papers at you. Twenty-three of the papers you don't care about anyway, and the twenty-fourth you can't understand because the speaker has a bad accent and, anyway, he's rushing it because he's under time pressure to catch his plane to the next conference, and that one single twenty-fifth paper has cost you four days, including travel time, when you could have read it in your own office in fifteen minutes. And got more out of it, too. Of course, there's the interplay when you find yourself sitting in the coffee shop next to somebody who can explain the latest instrumentation to you because his company's doing the telemetry; you can't get that from reading. But I've noticed there's less and less time for that. And less and less interest, too, maybe, because you get pretty tired of making new friends after about the three hundredth; and you begin to think about what's waiting for you on your desk when you get back, and you remember the time when you got stuck with that damn loudmouthed Egyptian at the I.A.U. in Brussels and had to fight the Suez war for an hour and a half.

All right, you can see what I mean. Waste of time and valuable kerosene jet fuel, right?

Because the pity of it is that electronic information handling is so cheap and easy. I don't know if you've ever seen the Bell Labs' demo of their picture phone-they had it at a couple of meetings-but it's nearly like face to face. Better than the telephone. You get all the signatures, except maybe the smell of whiskey on the breath or something like that. And that's only one gadget: there's facsimile, telemetry, remote-access computation, teletype-well, there it is, we've got them, why don't we use them? And go farther, too. You know about how they can strip down a taped voice message-leave out the unnecessary parts of speech, edit out the pauses, even drop some of the useless syllables? And you can still understand it perfectly, only at about four hundred words a minute instead of maybe sixty or seventy. (And about half of them repetitions or "What I mean to say.")

Well, that's the systems part; and, as I say, it's not my field. But it's there for the taking-expert opinion, not mine. A couple of the fellows were real hot, and we're going to get together on it as soon as we can find the time.

Maybe you wonder what I have to contribute. I do have something, I think. For example, how about problem-solving approaches to discussions? I've seen some papers that suggest a way of simplifying and pointing up a conference so you could really confer. I've even got a pet idea of my own. I call it the Quantum of Debate, the irreducible minimum of argument which each participant in a discussion can use to make one single point and get that understood (or argued or refuted) before he goes on to the next.

Why, if half of what I think is so, then people like me can get things done in-oh, be conservative-a quarter of the time we spend now.

Leaving three quarters of our time for-what? Why, for work! For doing the things that we know we ought to do but can't find the time for. I mean this literally and really and seriously. I honestly think that we can do four times as much work as we do. And I honestly think that this means we can land on Mars in five years instead of twenty, cure leukemia in twelve years instead of fifty, and so on.

Well, that's the picture, and that's why I didn't want to waste the time talking with Gordie MacKenzie. I'd brought all my notes in my briefcase, and four and a half hours was just about enough time to try to pull them all together and make some sort of presentation to show my systems friends and a few others who were interested.

So as soon as we were airborne, I had the little table down and I was sorting out little stacks of paper.

Only it didn't work out.

It's funny how often it doesn't work out-I mean, when you've got something you want to do and you look ahead and see where the time's going to be to do it, and then, all of a sudden, the time's gone and you didn't do it. What it was was that Clara worked her way back with the cocktails-she knew mine, an extra-dry martini with a twist of lemon-and I moved the papers out of her way out of politeness, and then she showed up with the hors d'oeuvres and I put them back in my bag out of hunger, and then I had to decide how I wanted my tournedos, and it took almost two hours for dinner, including the wine and the B & B; and although I didn't really want to watch the movie, there's something about seeing all those screens ahead of you, with the hero just making his bombing run on your own screen but shot up and falling in flames on the ones you can see out of the corner of your eye in the forward seats-and back in the briefing room, or even in the pub the night before on the screens in the other row that the film gets to after it gets to yours-all sort of like a cross section of instants of time, a plural "now." Disconcerting. It polarized my attention; of course, the liquor helped; and, anyway, by the time the movie was over, it was time for the second round of coffee and mints, and then the seat-belt sign was on and we were over the big aluminum dome on Mount Wilson, coming in, and I never had found the time to do my sorting. Well, I was used to that. I'd never found any ginseng back in Potsdam, either. I had to get through school on a scholarship.

I checked in, washed my face and went down to the meeting room just in time for a very dull tutorial on clear-air turbulence in planetary atmospheres. There was quite a good turnout, maybe seventy or eighty people in the room; but what they thought they were getting out of it, I cannot imagine, so I picked up a program and ducked out.

Somebody by the coffee machine called to me. "Hi, Chip."

I went over and shook his hand, a young fellow named Resnik from the little college where I'd got my bachelor's, looking bored and angry. He was with someone I didn't know, tall and gray-haired and bankerish. "Dr. Ramos, this is Chesley Grew. Chip, Dr. Ramos. He's with NASA-I think it's NASA?"

"No, I'm with a foundation," he said. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Grew. I've followed your work."

"Thank you. Thank you very much." I would have liked a cup of coffee, but I didn't particularly want to stand there talking to them while I drank it, so I said, "Well, I'd better get checked in, so if you'll excuse me . . ."

"Come off it, Chip," said Larry Resnik. "I saw you check in half an hour ago. You just want to go up to your room and work."

That was embarrassing, a little. I didn't mind it with Resnik, but I didn't know the other fellow. He grinned and said, "Larry tells me you're like that. Matter of fact, when you went by, he said you'd be back out in thirty seconds, and you were."

"Well. Clear-air turbulence isn't my subject, really. . ."

"Oh, nobody's blaming you. God knows not. Care for some coffee?"

The only thing to do was to be gracious about it, so I said, "Yes, please. Thanks." I watched him take a cup and fill it from the big silver urn. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place him. "Did we meet at the Dallas Double-A S sessions?"

"I'm afraid not. Sugar? No, I've actually been to very few of these meetings, but I've read some of your papers."

I stirred my coffee. "Thank you, Dr. Ramos." One of the things I've learned to do is repeat a name as often as I can so I won't forget it. About half the time I forget it anyway, of course. "I'll be speaking tomorrow morning, Dr. Ramos. 'A Photometric Technique for Deriving Slopes from Planetary Fly-bys.' Nothing much that doesn't follow from what they've done at Langley, I'm afraid."

"Yes, I saw the abstract."

"But you'll get your brownie points for reading it, eh?" said Larry. He was breathing heavily. "How many does that make this year?"

"Well, a lot." I tried to drink my coffee both rapidly and inconspicuously. Larry seemed in an unhappy mood.

"That's what we were talking about when you came in," he said. "Thirty papers a year and committee reports between times. When was the last time you spent a solid month at your desk? I know, in my own department. . ."

I could feel myself growing interested and I didn't want to be, I wanted to get back to my notes. I took another gulp of my coffee.

"You know what Fred Hoyle said?"

"I don't think so, Larry."

"He said the minute a man does anything, anything at all, the whole world enters into a conspiracy to keep him from ever doing it again. Program chairmen invite him to read papers. Trustees put him onto committees. Newspaper reporters call him up to interview him. Television shows ask him to appear with a comic, a bandleader and a girl singer, to talk about whether there's life on Mars."

"And people who sympathize with him buttonhole him on his way out of meetings," said Dr. Ramos. He chuckled. "Really, Dr. Grew. We'll understand if you just keep on going."

"I'm not even sure it's this world," said Larry.

He was not only irritable, he was hardly making sense. "For that matter," he added, "I haven't even really done anything yet. Not like you, Chip. But I can, someday."

"Don't be modest," said Dr. Ramos. "And look, we're making a lot of noise here. Why don't we find some place to sit down and talk-unless you really do want to get back to your work, Dr. Grew?"

But you see, I was already more than half convinced that this was my work, to talk to Larry and Dr. Ramos; and what we finally did was go up to my room and then up to Larry's where he had a Rand Corporation report in his bag with some notes I'd sent him once, and we never did get back to the meeting room. Along about ten we had dinner sent up, and that was where we stayed, drinking cold coffee off the set-up table and sparingly drinking bourbon out of a bottle Larry had brought along, and I told them everything I'd ever thought about a systems approach to the transmission of technological information. And what it implied. And Dr. Ramos was with it at every step, the best listener either of us had ever had, though most of what he said was, "Yes, of course," and "I see." There really was a lot in it. I'd believed it, sitting by myself and computing, like a child anticipating Christmas, how much work I could get done for a couple K a year in amortization of systems and overhead. And with the two of them, I was sure of it. It was a giddy kind of evening. Toward the end, we even began to figure out how quickly we could colonize Mars and launch a fleet of interstellar space liners, with all the working time of the existing people spent working; and then there was a pause and Larry got up and threw back the glass French window and we looked out on his balcony. Twenty stories up, and Los Angeles out in front of us and a thunderstorm brewing over the southern hills. The fresh air cleared my head for a moment and then made me realize, first, that I was sleepy and, second, that I had to read that damned paper in about seven hours.

"We'd better call it a day," said Dr. Ramos.

Larry started to object, then grinned. "All right for you old fellows," he said. "Anyway, I want to look at those notes of yours by myself, Chip, if you don't mind."

"Just so you don't lose them," I said, and turned to go back to my room and get into my bed and lie with my eyes wide open, smiling to myself, before I fell asleep to dream about fifty weeks a year working at my trade.

Even so, I woke easily the moment the hotel clock buzzed by my head. We'd fixed it to have breakfast in Larry's room so I could reclaim my notes and maybe chat for a moment before the morning session began; and when I got to his floor, I saw Dr. Ramos padding toward me. "Morning," he said. "I just woke up two honeymooners who didn't appreciate it. Wasn't Larry's room 2051?"

"It's 2052. The other way." He grinned and fell into step and told me a fast and quite funny honeymooner joke, timing the punch line just as we reached Larry's door.

He didn't answer my knock. Still laughing, I said, "You try." But there was no answer to Dr. Ramos's knock, either.

I stopped laughing. "He couldn't have forgotten we were coming, could he?"

"Try the door, why don't you?"

And I did and it opened easily.

But Larry wasn't in the room. The door to the bath was standing open and so was the balcony window, and no Larry. His bed was rumpled but empty.

"I don't think he's gone out," said Dr. Ramos. "Look, his shoes are still there."

The balcony wasn't big enough to hide on, but I walked over and looked at it. Rain-slick and narrow, all that was on it were a couple of soaked deck chairs and some cigarette butts.

"Looks like he was out here," I said; and then, feeling melodramatic, I leaned over the rail and looked down; and it wasn't actually melodramatic after all, because there in the curve of the hotel's sweeping front, on the rim of a fountain, something was sprawled, and a man was standing by it, shouting at the doorman. It was too early for much noise, and I could hear his voice faintly coming up the two hundred vertical feet between us and what was left of Larry.

They canceled the morning session but decided to go ahead in the afternoon, and I got into a long, bruising fight with Gordie MacKenzie because he wanted to give his paper when it was scheduled, at three in the afternoon, and I'd been reshuffled into that time and I just wasn't feeling cheerful enough to let him get away with anything. Not after spending two hours with the coroner's men and the hotel staff, trying to help them figure out why Larry would have jumped or slipped off the balcony, and especially not after finding out that he had had all my notes in his hand when he jumped and they were now in sticky, sloppy clusters all over Los Angeles County.

So I was about fed up. I once heard Krafft Ehricke give what I would figure to be a twelve-minute paper in three minutes and forty-five seconds, and I tried to beat his record and pretty nearly made it. Then I threw everything I owned into my suitcase and checked out, figuring to head right out to the airport and get on the first plane going home.

But the clerk said, "I have a message for you, Mr. Grew. Dr. Ramos asked you not to leave without seeing him."

"Thanks," I said, after a moment of debating whether to do anything about it or not; but as it turned out, I didn't have to make the decision. Ramos came hurrying toward me across the lobby, his friendly face concerned.

"I thought you'd be leaving," he said. "Give me twenty minutes of your time first."

I hesitated and he snapped a finger at a bellboy. "Here. Let him take care of your bag and let's go down and have a cup of coffee." So I let him lead me to the outdoor patio by the coffee shop, warm and clean now after the rain. I wondered if he recognized the place where Larry had hit, but I'm not sensitive about that sort of thing and apparently neither was he. He really had a commanding presence when he wanted to. He had a waitress beside us before we had quite slid our chairs closer to the table, sent her after coffee and sandwiches without consulting me and started in on me without a pause. "Chip," he said, "don't blow it. I'm sorry about your notes. But I don't want to see you give up."

I leaned back in my chair, feeling very weary. "Oh, that I won't do, Dr. Ramos. .

"Call me Laszlo."

"That I won't do, Laszlo. As a matter of fact, I've been thinking about it already."

"I knew you would be."

"I figure that by cutting out a couple of meetings next week-I can use Larry's death as an excuse, some way; I'll use anything, actually-I can reconstruct most of them from memory. Well, maybe not in a week, come to think of it. I'll have to send for copies of some of the reports. But sooner or later. . ."

"Right. That's what I want to talk to you about." The girl brought the coffee and sandwiches and he waved her away briskly as soon as she'd set them down. "You see, you're the man I came here to see."

I looked at him. "You're interested in photometry?"

"No. Not your paper-your idea. What we were talking about all night, for God's sake. I didn't know it was you I wanted until Resnik mentioned you yesterday. But after last night, I was sure."

"I already have a job, Dr.-Laszlo."

"And I'm not offering you a job."

"Then, what. .

"I'm offering you a chance to make your idea work. I've got money, Chip, foundation money looking for something to be spent on. Not space research or cancer research or higher mathematics-they're funded well enough now. My foundation is looking for projects that don't fit into the usual patterns. Big ones. Like yours."

Well, of course I was excited. It was so good to be taken that seriously.

"I called the board secretary in Washington first thing-I mean, as soon as they were open there. Of course, I couldn't give him enough over the phone for a formal commitment. But he's on the hook, Chip. And the board will go along. There's a meeting next week and I want you there."

"In Washington? I suppose. .

"Well, no. The foundation's international, Chip, and this meeting's at Lake Como. But we'll pick up the tab, of course, and you can get a lot more done there, where your office isn't going to call you..

"But, I mean, I'm not sure. . ."

"We'll back you. Everything you need. A staff. A headquarters. We've got the beginnings of a facility in Ames, Iowa; you'll have to go out there, of course. But it shouldn't be more than, oh, say, a couple days a month. And"-he grinned, a little apologetically-"I know it won't mean anything to you. After you've got one medal on your chest, the rest aren't too exciting. But it'll look nice in your Who's Who entry; and, anyway, the secretary has already authorized me to tell you that you're invited to accept appointment to a trusteeship."

I began to need the coffee and I took a long swallow. "You're moving too fast for me, Laszlo," I said.

"The trustees meet in Flagstaff; they've got a country-club deal there. You'll like it. Of course, it's only six times a year. But it's worth it, Chip. I mean, we have our politics like everything else; and if you're a trustee, you swing a lot of weight."

And he prattled on, and I sat there listening, and it was all coming true, everything I'd hoped for; and the next week in Italy, in a great shiny room with an enormous window looking out over Lake Como, I found myself a full-fledged project director, with status as a trustee, honorary membership on the priorities committee and a staff of forty-one.

Next week we dedicate the Lawrence Resnik Memorial Building in Ames-the name was my idea, but everybody agreed-and although it's been a hell of a year, I can see where we'll really make progress now. It still seems a little incongruous that I should be putting in so much time on managerial work and conferences. But when I mentioned it to Laszlo the other day in Montreal, he gave me the grin and an approving look. "I wondered how long it would take you to think of that," he chuckled. "But it's best to make haste slowly, and you can see for yourself it's paying off. Have I told you what a good impression your lecture tour made?"

"Thanks. Yes, as a matter of fact, you did. Anyway, once we get the Resnik installation going, there'll be a little more time."

"Damn right! And don't say I told you"-he winked-"but remember what I told you about a possible appointment to the President's Commission on Interdisciplinary Affairs? Well, it's not official. But it's definite. We've already taken a suite at the Shoreham for you. You'll be using it a lot. We've even fitted up a room as an office; you can keep your notes and things there between trips."

Well, I told him, of course, that if he meant the notes I had been trying to reconstruct, they didn't require all that much room. Not by quite a lot, since I haven't in all truth got very far.

I think I would have, somehow or other, with a little luck. But I haven't actually been very lucky. Poor Honeyman, for instance-I'd already written him for another copy of the report he'd made up for me when I heard that his yawl had capsized in a storm. They didn't even find his body for a week. And nobody seems to know where he kept his copy of the report, if he ever made one. And.

Well, there was that funny thing Resnik said the day he died, about how the world conspired against anybody who'd ever done anything. And then he said, "I'm not even sure it's this world."

I figured out what the joke was-that is, if it was a joke. I mean, just for a hypothesis, suppose Somebody didn't want us to get ahead as fast as we could, Somebody from another world.

That's silly. That is, I think it's silly.

But if that line of thinking isn't silly, then it must be something quite the opposite of silly; by which I mean it must be dangerous. Just recently, I've almost been run over twice by crazy drivers in front of my own house. And then there's the air taxi I missed and saw crash on take-off before my eyes.

Just for the fun of it, there are two things I'd like to know. One is where the foundation gets its money and why. The other-and I just might see if I can get an answer to this one, next time I'm in L. A.-is whether there really were a pair of honeymooners in room 2051 that morning, to be accidentally awakened by Laszlo Ramos just about the time that Larry was on his way down twenty flights.