The Fiend

Frederik Pohl, literary agent emeritus, current editor of Galaxy magazine, author of superior science fiction, gentleman of erudition and charm, “is not afraid of emotion, so that his stories have a drive and power enviable in any writer, especially in one whose main outlet is science fiction.” So says The New York Times. His books include the stimulating collections “Tomorrow Times Seven” and “The Case Against Tomorrow,” the novel “Slave Ship” and, with the late C. M. Kornbluth, such novels as “Gladiator-at-Law,” “Search the Sky” and “The Space Merchants” an admonitory satire on future ad-men, which Anthony Boucher calls “a book so rewarding that it should henceforth show up on all lists of science-fiction ‘classics” which Kingsley Amis says “has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far” and which, as this anthology goes to press, has been purchased by the movie moguls for a whopping five-figure sum. In his playboy story, “The Fiend,” Pohl takes a standard sci-fi staple—suspended animation of space passengers during long interstellar voyages—and brings to it a fresh idea and a surprising twist.

HOW BEAUTIFUL she was, Dandish thought, and how helpless. The plastic identification ribbon around her neck stood out straight, and as she was just out of the transport capsule, she wore nothing else. “Are you awake?” he asked, but she did not stir.

Dandish felt excitement building up inside him, she was so passive and without defense. A man could come to her now and do anything at all to her, and she would not resist. Or, of course, respond. Without touching her he knew that her body would be warm and dry. It was fully alive, and in a few minutes she would be conscious.

Dandish—who was the captain and sole crew member of the interstellar ship without a name carrying congealed colonists across the long, slow, empty space from the Earth to a planet that circled a star that had never had a name in astronomical charts, only a number, and was now called Eleanor—passed those minutes without looking again at the girl, whose name he knew to be Silvie but whom he had never met. When he looked again she was awake, jackknifed against the safety straps of the crib, her hair standing out around her head and her face wearing an expression of anger. “All right. Where are you? I know what the score is,” she said. “Do you know what they can do to you for this?”

Dandish was startled. He did not like being startled, for it frightened him. For nine years the ship had been whispering across space; he had had enough loneliness to satisfy him and he had been frightened. There were 700 cans of colonists on the ship, but they lay brittle and changeless in their bath of liquid helium and were not very good company. Outside the ship the nearest human being was perhaps two light-years away, barring some chance-met ship heading in the other direction that was actually far more remote than either star, since the forces involved in stopping and matching course with a vessel bound home were twice as great as, and would take twice as much time as, those involved in the voyage itself.

Everything about the trip was frightening. The loneliness was a terror. To stare down through an inch of crystal and see nothing but far stars led to panic. Dandish had decided to stop looking out five years before, but had not been able to keep to his decision, and so now and again peeped through the crystal and contemplated his horrifying visions of the seal breaking, the crystal popping out on a breath of air, himself in his metal prison tumbling, tumbling forever down to the heart of one of the 10,000,000 stars that lay below. In this ship a noise was an alarm. Since no one but himself was awake, to hear a scratch of metal or a thud of a moving object striking something else, however tiny, however remote, was a threat, and more than once Dandish had suffered through an itch of fear for hours or days until he tracked down the exploded light tube or unsecured door that had startled him. He dreamed uneasily of fire. This was preposterously unlikely, in the steel and crystal ship, but what he was dreaming of was not the fire of a house but the monstrous fires in the stars beneath.

“Come out where I can see you,” commanded the girl.

Dandish noted that she had not troubled to try to cover her nakedness. Bare she woke and bare she stayed. She had unhitched the restraining webbing and left the crib, and now she was prowling the room in which she had awakened, looking for him. “They warned us,” she called. “ ‘Watch the hook!’ ‘Look out for the space nuts!’ ‘You’ll be sorry!’ That’s all we heard at the Reception Center, and now here you are, all right. Wherever you are. Where are you? For God’s sake, come out so I can see you.” She half stood and half floated at an angle to the floor, nibbling at imperceptible bits of dead skin on her lips and staring warily from side to side. She said, “What was the story you were going to tell me? A subspace meteorite destroyed the ship, all but you and me, and we were doomed to fly endlessly toward nowhere, so there was nothing for us to do but try to make a life for ourselves?”

Dandish watched her through the view eyes in the reviving room, but did not answer. He was a connoisseur of victims, Dandish was. He had spent a great deal of time planning this. Physically she was perfect, very young, slim, slight. He had picked her out on that basis from among the 352 female canned colonists, leafing through the microfile photographs that accompanied each colonist’s dossier like a hi-fi hobbyist shopping through a catalog. She had been the best of the lot. Dandish was not skilled enough to be able to read a personality profile, and in any event considered psychologists to be phonies and their profiles trash, so he had had to go by the indices he knew. He had wanted his victim to be innocent and trusting. Silvie, 16 years old and a little below average in intelligence, had seemed very promising. It was disappointing that she did not react with more fear. “They’ll give you fifty years for this!” she shouted, looking around to see where he could be hiding. “You know that, don’t you?”

The revival crib, sensing that she was out of it, was quietly stowing and rearming itself, ready to be taken out and used again. Its plastic sheets slipped free of the corners, rolled up in a tight spiral and slid into a disposal chute, revealing aseptic new sheets below. Its radio-warming generators tested themselves with a surge of high-voltage current, found no flaws and shut themselves off. The crib sides folded down meekly. The instrument table hooded itself over. The girl paused to watch it, then shook her head and laughed. “Scared of me?” she called. “Come on, let’s get this over with! Or else,” she added, “admit you’ve made a boo-boo, get me some clothes and let’s talk this over sensibly.”

Sorrowfully Dandish turned his gaze away. A timing device reminded him that it was time to make his routine half-hour check of the ship’s systems and, as he had done more than 150,000 times already and would do 100,000 times again, he swiftly scanned the temperature readings in the can hold, metered the loss of liquid helium and balanced it against the withdrawals from the reserve, compared the ship’s course with the flight plan, measured the fuel consumption and rate of flow, found all systems functioning smoothly and returned to the girl. It had taken only a minute or so, but already she had found the comb and mirror he had put out for her and was working angrily at her hair. One fault in the techniques of freezing and revivification lay in what happened to such elaborated structures as fingernails and hair. At the temperature of liquid helium all organic matter was brittle as Prince Rupert’s drops, and although the handling techniques were planned with that fact in mind, the body wrapped gently in elastic cocooning, every care exercised to keep it from contact with anything hard or sharp, nails and hair had a way of being snapped off. The Reception Center endlessly drummed into the colonists the importance of short nails and butch haircuts, but the colonists were not always convinced. Silvie now looked like a dummy on which a student wigmaker had failed a test. She solved her problem at last by winding what remained of her hair in a tiny bun and put down the comb, snapped-off strands of hair floating in the air all about her like a stretched-out sandstorm.

She patted the bun mournfully and said, “I guess you think this is pretty funny.”

Dandish considered the question. He was not impelled to laugh. Twenty years before, when Dandish was a teenager with the long permanented hair and the lacquered fingernails that were the fashion for kids that year, he had dreamed almost every night of just such a situation as this. To own a girl of his own—not to love her or to rape her or to marry her, but to possess her as a slave, with no one anywhere to stop him from whatever he chose to impose on her—had elaborated itself in a hundred variations nightly. He didn’t tell anyone about his dream, not directly, but in the school period devoted to practical psychology he had mentioned it as something he had read in a book and the instructor, staring right through him into his dreams, told him it was a repressed wish to play with dolls. “This fellow is role playing,” he said, “acting out a wish to be a woman. These clear-cut cases of repressed homosexuality can take many forms…and on and on, and although the dreams were as physically satisfying as ever, the young Dandish awoke from them both reproved and resentful.

But Silvie was neither a dream nor a doll. “I’m not a doll!” said Silvie, so sharply and partly that it was a shock. “Come on out and get it over with!”

She straightened up, holding to a free-fall grip, and although she looked angry and annoyed she still did not seem afraid. “Unless you are really crazy,” she said clearly, “which I doubt, although I have to admit it’s a possibility, you aren’t going to do anything I don’t want you to do, you know. Because you can’t get away with it, right? You can’t kill me, you could never explain it, and besides they don’t let murderers run ships in the first place, and so when we land all I have to do is yell cop and you’re running a subway shuttle for the next ninety years.” She giggled. “I know about that. My uncle got busted on income-tax evasion and now he’s a self-propelled dredge in the Amazon delta, and you should see the letters he writes. So come on out and let’s see what I’m willing to let you get away with.”

She grew impatient. “Kee-rist,” she said, shaking her head. “I sure get the great ones. And, oh, by the way, as long as I’m up, I have to go to the little girls’ room, and then I want breakfast.”

Dandish took some small satisfaction in that these requirements, at least, he had foreseen. He opened the door to the washroom and turned on the warmer oven where emergency rations were waiting. By the time Silvie came back biscuits, bacon and hot coffee were set out for her.

“I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?” she said. “Well, I’ll live. How about some clothes? And how about coming out so I can get a look at you?” She stretched and yawned and then began to eat. Apparently she had showered, as was generally desirable on awakening from freeze-sleep to get rid of the exfoliated skin, and she had wrapped her ruined hair in a small towel. Dandish had left the one small towel in the washroom, reluctantly, but it had not occurred to him that his victim would wrap it around her head. Silvie sat thoughtfully staring at the remains of her breakfast and then after a while said, like a lecturer:

“As I understand it, starship sailors are always some kind of a nut, because who else would go off for twenty years at a time, even for money, even for any kind of money? All right, you’re a nut. So if you wake me up and won’t come out, won’t talk to me, there’s nothing I can do about it.

“Now, I can see that even if you weren’t a little loopy to start with, this kind of life would tip you. Maybe you just want a little company? I can understand that. I might even cooperate and say no more about it.

“On the other hand, maybe you’re trying to get your nerve up for something rough. Don’t know if you can, because they naturally screened you down fine before they gave you the job. But supposing. What happens then?

“If you kill me, they catch you.

“If you don’t kill me, then I tell them when we land, and they catch you.

“I told you about my uncle. Right now his body is in the deepfreeze somewhere on the dark side of Mercury and they’ve got his brain keeping the navigation channels clear off Belem. Maybe you think that’s not so bad. Uncle Henry doesn’t like it a bit. He doesn’t have any company, bad as you that way, I guess, and he says his suction hoses are always sore. Of course he could always louse up on the job, but then they’d just put him some other place that wouldn’t be quite as nice— so what he does is grit his teeth, or I guess you should say his grinders, and get along the best he can. Ninety years! He’s only done six so far. I mean six when I left Earth, whatever that is now. You wouldn’t like that. So why not come out and talk?”

Five or ten minutes later, after making faces and buttering another roll and flinging it furiously at the wall, where the disposal units sluiced it away, she said, “Damn you, then give me a book to read, anyway.”

Dandish retreated from her and listened to the whisper of the ship for a few minutes, then activated the mechanisms of the revival crib. He had been a loser long enough to learn when to cut his losses. The girl sprang to her feet as the sides of the crib unfolded. Gentle tentacles reached out for her and deposited her in it, locking the webbing belt around her waist. “You damned fool!” she shouted, but Dandish did not answer. The anesthesia cone descended toward her struggling face, and she screamed, “Wait a minute! I never said I wouldn’t—”; but what she never said she wouldn’t, she couldn’t say, because the cone cut her off. In a moment she was asleep. A plastic sack stretched itself around her, molding to her face, her body, her legs, even to the strayed towel around her hair, and the revival crib rolled silently to the freezing room. Dandish did not watch further. He knew what would happen, and besides, the timer reminded him to make his check. Temperatures, normal; fuel consumption, normal; course, normal; freezer room showed one new capsule en route to storage, otherwise normal. Goodbye, Silvie, said Dandish to himself, you were a pretty bad mistake.

Conceivably later on, with another girl . . .

But it had taken nine years for Dandish to wake Silvie, and he did not think he could do it again. He thought of her Uncle Henry running a dredge along the South Atlantic littoral. It could have been him. He had leaped at the opportunity to spend his sentence piloting a starship instead.

He stared out at the 10,000,000 stars below with the optical receptors that were his eyes. He clawed helplessly at space with the radars that gave him touch. He wept a 5,000,000-mile stream of ions behind him from his jets. He thought of the tons of helpless flesh in his hold, the bodies in which he could have delighted, if his own body had not been with Uncle Henry’s on coldside Mercury, the fears on which he could have fed, if he had been able to inspire fear. He would have sobbed, if he had had a voice to sob with.