Frederik Pohl - Father Of The Stars

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Father of the Stars

NORMAN MARCHAND sat in the wings of the ballroom’s small stage, on a leather

hassock someone had found for him. There were 1,500 people outside in the

ballroom, waiting to do him honor.

Marchand remembered the ballroom very well. He had once owned it. Forty

. . . no, it wasn’t forty. Not even fifty. Sixty years ago it had been, sixty

and more years ago that he and Joyce had danced in that ballroom. Then the

hotel was the newest on Earth, and he was the newly married son of the man who

had built it, and the party was the reception for his wedding to Joyce. Of

course, none of these people would know about that. But Marchand remembered

Oh, Joyce, my very dear! But she had been dead a long time now.

It was a noisy crowd. He peered out through the wings and could see the

head table filling up. There was the Vice-President of the United States

shaking hands with the Governor of Ontario as though, for the moment, they had

forgotten they were of different parties. There was Linfox, from the

Institute, obligingly helping a chimpanzee into the chair next to what,

judging by the microphones ranked before it, would probably be Marchand’s own.

Linfox seemed a little ill at ease with the chimp. The chimpanzee had no doubt

been smithed, but the imposition of human intelligence did not lengthen its

ape’s legs.

Then Dan Fleury appeared, up the steps from the floor of the ballroom

where the rest of the 1,500 diners were taking their places.

Fleury didn’t look well at all, Marchand thought—not without a small

touch of satisfaction, since Fleury was fifteen years younger than himself.

Still, Marchand wasn’t jealous. Not even of the young bellhop who had brought

him the hassock, twenty years old at the most and built like a fullback. One

life was enough for a man to live.

Especially when you had accomplished the dream you had set out to bring to

fruition. Or almost.

Of course, it had cost him everything his father left. But what else was

money for?

“It’s time to go in, sir. May I help you!” It was the young fullback

nearly bursting his bellhop’s uniform with the huge, hard muscles of youth. He

was very solicitous. One of the nice things about having this testimonial

dinner in a Marchand hotel was that the staff was as deferential to him as

though he still owned the place. Probably that was why the committee had

picked it, Marchand ruminated, quaint and old-fashioned as the hotel must seem

now. Though at one time— He recollected himself. “I’m sorry, young man. I

was—woolgathering. Thank you.”

He stood up, slowly but not very painfully, considering that it had been

a long day. As the fullback walked him onto the stage, the applause was enough

to drive down the automatic volume control on his hearing aid.

For that reason he missed the first words from Dan Fleury. No doubt they

were complimentary. Very carefully he lowered himself into his chair, and as

the clapping eased off, he was able to begin to hear the words.

Dan Fleury was still a tall man, built like a barrel, with bushy

eyebrows and a huge mane of hair. He had helped Marchand’s mad project for

thrusting Man into space from its very beginnings. He said as much now. “Man’s

grandest dream!” he roared. “The conquering of the stars themselves! And here

is the one man who taught us how to dream it, Norman Marchand!”

Marchand bowed to the storm of applause.

Again his hearing aid saved his ears and cost him the next few words:

“—and now that we are on the threshold of success,” Fleury was booming, “it is

altogether fitting that we should gather here tonight . . . to join in

fellowship and in the expression of that grand hope . . . to rededicate

ourselves to its fulfillment . . . and to pay our respects and give of our

love to the man who first showed us what dream to have!”

While the AVC registered the power of Dan Fleury’s oratory, Marchand

smiled out on the foggy sea of faces. It was, he thought, almost cruel of

Fleury to put it like that. The threshold of success indeed! How many years

now had they waited on it patiently?—and the door still locked in their faces.

Of course, he thought wryly, they must have calculated that the testimonial

dinner would have to be held soon unless they wanted a cadaver for a guest.

But still . . . He

turned painfully and looked at Fleury, half perplexed. There was something in

his tone. Was there—Could there be— There could not, he told himself firmly.

There was no news, no

breakthrough, no report from one of the wandering ships, no dream come true at

last. He would have been the first to know. Not for anything would they have

kept a thing like that from him. And he did not know that thing.

“—and now,” Fleury was saying, “I won’t keep you from your dinners.

There will be many a long, strong speech to help your digestions afterward, I

promise you! But now let’s eat!”

Laughter. Applause. A buzz and clash of forks.

The injunction to eat did not, of course, include Norman Marchand. He

sat with his hands in his lap, watching them dig in, smiling and feeling just

a touch deprived, with the wry regret of the very old. He didn’t envy the

young people anything really, he told himself. Not their health, their youth,

or their life expectancy. But he envied them the bowls of ice.

He tried to pretend he enjoyed his wine and the huge pink shrimp in

crackers and milk. According to Asa Czerny, who ought to know since he had

kept Marchand alive this long, he had a clear choice. He could eat whatever he

chose, or he could stay alive. For a while. And ever since Czerny had been

good enough, or despairing enough, to give him a maximum date for his life

expectancy, Marchand had in idle moments tried to calculate just how much of

those remaining months he was willing to give up for one really good meal. He

rather believed that when Czerny looked up at him after the weekly medical

checkup and said that only days were left, that he would take those last days

and trade them in for a sauerbraten with potato pancakes and sweet-sour red

cabbage on the side. But that time was not yet. With any kind of luck he still

had a month. Perhaps as much as two.

“I beg your—pardon,” he said, half-turning to the chimpanzee. Even

smithed, the animal spoke so poorly that Marchand had not at first known that

he was being addressed.

He should not have turned.

His wrist had lost its suppleness; the spoon in his hand tilted; the

soggy crackers fell. He made the mistake of trying to move his knee out of the

way—it was bad enough to be old; he did not want to be sloppy—and he moved too

quickly.

The chair was at the very edge of the little platform. He felt himself

going over.

Ninety-six is too old to be falling on your head, he thought; if I

was going to do this sort of thing, I might just as well have eaten some of

those shrimp. . . . But he did not kill himself.

He only knocked himself unconscious. And not for very long at that,

because he began to wake up while they were still carrying him back to his

dressing room behind the stage.

Once upon a time, Norman Marchand had given his life to a hope.

Rich, intelligent, married to a girl of beauty and tenderness, he had

taken everything he owned and given it to the Institute for Colonizing

Extra-Solar Planets. He had, to begin with, given away several million

dollars.

That was the whole of the personal fortune his father had left him, and

it was nowhere near enough to do the job. It was only a catalyst. He had used

it to hire publicity men, fund raisers, investment counselors, foundation

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Frederik Pohl - Father Of The Stars

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