I sit down. He orders drinks. We do not talk.
My hand falls on his wrist, and remains there. The bartender, serving the drinks, scowls but says nothing. We sip our cocktails and put the drained glasses down.
“Let’s go,” the young man says.
I follow him out.
FREDERIK POHL
The Tunnel under the World
Before he was a science fiction writer, Frederik Pohl was a science fiction editor who worked at the pulp magazines Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, where he provided opportunities for James Blish, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, and other colleagues in the Futurian science fiction society. Much of his career until 1980 was divided between writing and either serving as a literary agent for science fiction writers or shaping editorial policy on the fiction published at publishing houses or science fiction magazines. His earliest novels, written in collaboration with Cyril M. Kornbluth, show the impact of his familiarity with science fiction at all levels of conception. The Space Merchants, Gladiator at Law, and Wolfbane are among the wittiest satires in all science fiction, not only for their speculative extrapolations of the absurdities of American culture, but for their understanding of the appropriateness of science fiction constructs for elaborating that absurdity. Pohl is an insightful observer of modern society and its ills and a number of his short stories in the years following World War II are perceptive and even prophetic social critiques, notably “The Midas Plague,” about consumerism run amuck; “What to Do till the Analyst Comes,” a dark comedy about the culture of addiction; and “The Snowmen,” which foresees the energy crisis and the greenhouse effect. Much of Pohl’s fiction from this period has been collected in Alternating Current, The Case against Tomorrow, Tomorrow Times Seven, The Man Who Ate the World, and Turn Left at Thursday. Pohl hit his stride as a novelist in the 1970s with his Heechee chronicles, comprising Gateway, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Heechee Rendezvous, The Annals of Heechee, and The Gateway Trip. The central idea of this series—an apparently abandoned space transportation terminus created by a sophisticated alien race that gives humans access to unpredictable adventures on interstellar worlds—gave Pohl the perfect instrument for taking the measure of human motives and objectives in the face of the unknown. Man-Plus, in which a man who loses more than he gains when he agrees to physical transformation that will allow him to adapt to the Martian environment, and Jem, about an earth colony doomed to recapitulate the aggressions and prejudices that have destroyed the mother planet, are among his most memorable works. In addition to his scores of novels and short-fiction collections, Pohl has written essays on the craft of science fiction, collected in Digits and Dastards and Forbidden Lines, and his autobiography, The Way the Future Was.
ON THE MORNING of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear and feel the sharp, ripping-metal explosion, the violent heave that had tossed him furiously out of bed, the searing wave of heat.
He sat up convulsively and stared, not believing what he saw, at the quiet room and the bright sunlight coming in the window.
He croaked, “Mary?”
His wife was not in the bed next to him. The covers were tumbled and awry, as though she had just left it, and the memory of the dream was so strong that instinctively he found himself searching the floor to see if the dream explosion had thrown her down.
But she wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t, he told himself, looking at the familiar vanity and slipper chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled wall. It had only been a dream.
“Guy?” His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs. “Guy, dear, are you all right?”
He called weakly, “Sure.”
There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, “Breakfast is ready. Are you sure you’re all right? I thought I heard you yelling.”
Burckhardt said more confidently, “I had a bad dream, honey. Be right down.”
IN THE SHOWER, punching the lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told himself that it had been a beaut of a dream. Still bad dreams weren’t unusual, especially bad dreams about explosions. In the past thirty years of H-bomb jitters, who had not dreamed of explosions?
Even Mary had dreamed of them, it turned out, for he started to tell her about the dream, but she cut him off. “You did?” Her voice was astonished. “Why, dear, I dreamed the same thing! Well, almost the same thing. I didn’t actually hear anything. I dreamed that something woke me up, and then there was a sort of quick bang, and then something hit me on the head. And that was all. Was yours like that?”
Burckhardt coughed. “Well, no,” he said. Mary was not one of the strong-as-a-man, brave-as-a-tiger women. It was not necessary, he thought, to tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so real. No need to mention the splintered ribs, and the salt bubble in his throat, and the agonized knowledge that this was death. He said, “Maybe there really was some kind of explosion downtown. Maybe we heard it and it started us dreaming.”
Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. “Maybe,” she agreed. “It’s almost half-past eight, dear. Shouldn’t you hurry? You don’t want to be late to the office.”
He gulped his food, kissed her and rushed out—not so much to be on time as to see if his guess had been right.
But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus, Burckhardt watched critically out the window, seeking evidence of an explosion. There wasn’t any. If anything, Tylerton looked better than it ever had before. It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was cloudless, the buildings were clean and inviting. They had, he observed, steam-blasted the Power & Light Building, the town’s only skyscraper—that was the penalty of having Contro Chemicals’ main plant on the outskirts of town; the fumes from the cascade stills left their mark on stone buildings.
None of the usual crowd were on the bus, so there wasn’t anyone Burckhardt could ask about the explosion. And by the time he got out at the corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a muted diesel moan, he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination.
He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but Ralph wasn’t behind the counter. The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes was a stranger.
“Where’s Mr. Stebbins?” Burckhardt asked.
The man said politely, “Sick, sir. He’ll be in tomorrow. A pack of Marlins today?”
“Chesterfields,” Burckhardt corrected.
“Certainly, sir,” the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid across the counter was an unfamiliar green-and-yellow pack.
“Do try these, sir,” he suggested. “They contain an anti-cough factor. Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes make you choke every once in a while?”
Burckhardt said suspiciously, “I never heard of this brand.”
“Of course not. They’re something new.” Burckhardt hesitated, and the man said persuasively, “Look, try them out at my risk. If you don’t like them, bring back the empty pack and I’ll refund your money. Fair enough?”