Gateways (46 page)

No, I didn’t cook it. Cooking it would have made it easier to chew—that’s the big advantage of cooking as far as I can see—but making a fire would have taken half a day. After that I went down in the rocks like she had, and found a little spring down there. It was good water, and I drank all I could hold. When I came back up, I put the grass and bushes back that I had taken off, and cut some more and piled them on, too. Sometimes she watched me, and sometimes she closed her eyes and lay down her head.

Do you wonder why I am telling you all these things, honey? It’s not because I like reliving the old days. It’s not to entertain you, either. This history’s yours, and you’ve got to know it and teach it to your kids. You think that kids are way far away. I hear their footsteps, many feet, closer all the time.

Yeah, I found the door the elephants had used. It wasn’t hard—I’ll get to that in a minute. First I’ve got to tell you that while I piled up brush, I heard a fight behind me. Turning quick, I saw a dog die in the jaws of a young lion.

When it was dead, I nodded and thanked him and said it had been a good job.

He licked the blood from his lips. Only birds eat dead dogs. Give me that meat, he said. I nodded again, saying he’d earned it, and I gave it to him. He’d never been able to kill a man, he told me as soon as he’d eaten it. You won’t kill me either, I told him, but why should you want to? I’ll be a friend. We’ll have lots of kills.

His eyes said he didn’t believe me.

There’s something I got to do first, I told him. It won’t take long, and when I finish it I’ll show you a man twice as big as me and give him to you.

His eyes got big and I knew I had him. I cut down a tall weed then and lopped it—it was hard and hollow, and cutting it slantwise made a point.

We found Kazi and his people after dark on the second day. They’d made a fire, and we saw it a long way across the level grass. They saw me and my lion and backed off, all but Kazi. I told the lion that was him. He should’ve jumped him then, but he hung back and Kazi went for his knife. I hit his wrist with my spear before I drove it in his belly because I was scared it wouldn’t work. It worked great, and my lion jumped him.

You take him, I told my lion. He’s all yours. I’ll eat somebody else. Only I didn’t have to and I knew it. They had a little deer on the fire, and I got all I wanted. They didn’t have the guts to come close until I told them they could.

Well, honey, that’s how I got to be king, and it’s probably more than a little head like yours can remember.

Oh, sure. We found the elephant door like I said, and it wasn’t hard. What I did was keep after this one young one, giving her a bad time. She wasn’t big and didn’t have the guts of a bull, so I’d hit her with rocks or stick a spear in her. Or shoot an arrow after we got those. Keep her miserable, you know. So pretty soon she went back to the door. Elephants aren’t like people. They don’t ever forget, and she wanted to go home.

No, of course not. Once she’d showed us, we killed her and ate her, what did you think? After, we got it open and that’s how we got back in here. The grass country’s a good place when the spiders get to putting out traps, though—safer for you kids.

Sure I did. Kazi’d had two wives and I took them over, only a river lizard got one by the leg and drowned her. It’s how they do. The other one got to giving me a hard time, so we ate her. After that I remembered your mom and went back for her. Now I want you to remember all this stuff and think about it before you sleep. You’re going to have to teach your own
kids how I got to be king and why you’re queen, see? I know you think your kids are way far away, but guys see your tits already. You pick a good one. He doesn’t have to be big, but he’s got to be tough, and he’s got to be somebody who’ll stick by you. If he isn’t I’ll off him if I’m still around. If I’m not, you’ll have to off him yourself. Quick.

Now you lie down and think about all this before you go to sleep, honey.

For years and years now I have been accustomed to say that I knew Frederik Pohl. It is true only conventionally. Let me tell you a story.

When I was very much younger, Frederik Pohl bought a story from me. It was my second sale, and it meant a lot to me. One waits and hopes and prays for the first sale; but when it comes, there is a suspicious look of tinsel, and a faint odor. Could that be cardboard?

The first sale may be a fluke. The world is full of people who sold a short story once.
Is this for real? Am I a real writer? If so, why do I feel just the same?

The second sale confirms and convinces. One knows then that one can do this marvelous thing. One can sit in one’s basement, type away and have fun doing it, and send off the result to some magical address that will provide (a little) money and (a little) fame.

Neat!

Frederik Pohl (whom I knew even then was a famous SF writer) had given me my second sale. Have I said that? I may say it a third time. It made me feel wonderful and I was deeply grateful.

Soon I went to my first SF convention, a Worldcon in St. Louis. (This was in the days when Worldcons drew fewer than a thousand people.) In the lobby of the con hotel, I found a guy whose badge was festooned with ribbons and asked whether Frederik Pohl was at the con. Beaming, he assured me that he was.

I explained that I had never seen Frederik Pohl. Could he describe him?

“You can see him for yourself.” The beribboned guy pointed. “That’s him, right over there.”

It was a group of four or five men chatting. When they broke up, I introduced myself and said, “Mr. Pohl, you bought a story from me, and selling to you gave me the confidence I needed to keep writing. I want to thank you. I owe you much more than I can ever repay.”

He smiled. “You don’t owe me a damned thing, Gene. You sent me a good story and I bought it. That’s my job. If you’d sent a bad one, I would’ve rejected it. I’m the one who owes you. I get a lot of stories, and very few of them are good enough to publish. Whenever somebody sends me a good, publishable story, he’s doing me a big, big favor.”

I left thinking, “Wow! That Frederik Pohl is a great human being!” The next day I found out I had been talking to Lester del Rey.

So now I know Frederik Pohl. I could never mistake him for Lester del Rey again. For one thing, Fred is taller. For another, his face is not as hairy. Now I’m acquainted with this great human being, who now lives only five or six miles from my front door.

But I do not KNOW him. I mean really know him. It may be that Betty does, but if she does she’s the entire membership of a set of one.

Things I do know about Fred Pohl:

He is a high-school dropout.

He’s the best-educated dropout in America.
Maybe the world.

He was in the army in World War II.

He was a sergeant.

He hated the army.

He married a second lieutenant. (There may be a connection here to the fact above.)

He has attended every Worldcon, beginning two years before they did.

He knows everybody in science fiction; he knows them because they are proud to know him.

He has been an agent and an editor (which is what he was when he bought my story).

He has been a leading science fiction writer ever since the publication of
The Space Merchants
in 1952. (In 1952 I went from college student to dropout to soldier.)

Fantasy makes him break out in hives and swear.

He destroyed the SF club I joined when we moved into the area by marrying our club’s president, Elizabeth Anne Hull.

They are national treasures.

Read that list carefully, and you will find that I do not really know Fred Pohl at all. I don’t know what makes him write so well, and I don’t know what lets him keep writing whole decades beyond the age at which most writers fall silent. I don’t know what makes him rove the world so tirelessly, writing all the time and going to places too remote for the average stamp collection. I don’t know what it is that permits him to send his mind out beyond the stars—not once, but over and over again. And I don’t know why he tolerates me.

But I’m certainly glad he does.

—G
ENE
W
OLFE

I don’t remember when we first met—perhaps it was at the Milford Writers’ Conference in September 1956, or else at the New York Worldcon a week or so earlier, or maybe it was a year before at the Cleveland convention; who knows, after so many years?—but of course I had known
about
him long before we ever said a word to each other, because when I came into the science fiction field as a reader in 1948 I quickly discovered that he was a conspicuous figure in any number of ways. I knew that he had edited a couple of the prewar pulp magazines (
Astonishing Stories
and
Super Science Stories
) that I had found in back-number shops, that in his fan days he had been a charter member of the amateur publishing group (Fantasy Amateur Press Association) that I had just joined, that he had been the literary agent for a lot of the most famous SF writers, that he was the book reviewer for the postwar incarnation of
Super Science Stories
. The one thing I didn’t know about him, for a while, was that he had also written some science fiction, because until around 1952 his stories had appeared only under pseudonyms, James MacCreigh and Warren F. Howard and such. I found out about Fred the writer later on, of course.

He began to loom larger in my life in 1952—a big year for me, because that was when I entered college and very tentatively decided that I was going to try to write science fiction professionally. That was the year that Fred finally put his own name on a story—the serialized novel
Gravy Planet
, written in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth—and on a superb anthology,
Beyond the End of Time
. Soon afterward came the first volume of his paperback series
Star Science Fiction
, a collection of new stories so good that it served me for many years as a model of the kind of science fiction I wanted to write and the kind of anthology I wanted to edit.

Frederik Pohl the writer became a favorite of mine right away. But it
was Pohl the editor with whom I formed a friendship, early in my career, that now has lasted more than half a century.

I wanted to write for the anthologies (and, later, the magazines) that he edited. And he saw, back there when I was a twenty-one-year-old beginner, that I had talent. But he also saw that I was writing too much too quickly, frittering away my obvious abilities doing hasty hackwork, and otherwise generally sending my career, which had begun while I was still an undergraduate at Columbia, off in directions that he thought were mistaken ones. Since he had made some of the same mistakes himself when he was my age, he knew whereof he spoke, and he didn’t hesitate to let me know where and how I was going astray.

My Fred Pohl correspondence file is a couple of inches thick, and it starts with a bunch of rejection slips from 1957 and 1958, when he was editing a magazine version of
Star.
They are courteous, thoughtful rejection slips, and they keep urging me to send him more stories, but they also point out the flaws in the rejected ones very clearly, even bluntly. (This at a time when I was selling stories to other editors by the bucketful, and had even won a Hugo as the best new author of the year.) He saw my virtues as a writer, but he saw my flaws, too, and he let me know, sometimes gently, sometimes not, that regardless of what I might be selling elsewhere he wasn’t going to buy anything from me that didn’t come up to the level he felt I
should
be reaching.

Eventually he did buy a story or two from me, and then (he was editing
Galaxy
and
If
by then) he bought some more, and finally he was buying everything I sent him, though not always graciously. Sometimes he would tell me, even as he bought a story of mine, that he had reservations about it. (“I’m buying it, of course. I much admire your colorful touches and free-swinging style. Yet I found it hard to know just what the hell was going on in some parts of it. Do you think there is anything you can do about this?”) Apparently I could, because not only did Fred buy the story, he passed it along to Betty Ballantine of Ballantine Books with a recommendation that she sign it up to be turned into a novel, thus opening the door for one of the happiest publishing relationships of my career. (Of a later story in the same series, where I mistook a critical comment from him for a rewrite request when what he really hoped I would do was throw the story away altogether, he wrote, “Considering that tinkering ‘Where the Changed Ones Go’ into some improved form was not what I wanted you to do, I must all the same concede that you did it well. . . . I will enter into your delusion that it is a story and print it that way.” He continued to buy my work—and continued to nag me onward to a higher level of achievement, even as he
had been doing a decade before. (“I hope you understand that when I talk to you candidly it is not because I want to put you down but because I think you are competent enough and talented enough to stand candor.”)