Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Memorandum to Wing Commanders: you will turn over all insignia of your office to representatives of the Intelligence Wing who will make themselves known to you.”

  In a very small voice he said: “That is all,” and deflated into a chair. There was a titanic roar of applause from the assembled peoples of New Metropole.

  “Darling,” said Babe, “if the timing doesn’t come off right—if those people I contacted don’t show up to the Wing Commanders soon enough, before they recover—!”

  “They will,” said Bartok. He laughed shortly, like the closing of a heavy lock. “What’s funny?”

  “They—they—had the guns and we didn’t have a thing but ourselves. Sweet, this is one stunt they’ll never try again.”

  The crowd, still applauding, began to disperse into the night.

  Interference

  Alone in the emptiness of space, the two psychologists suffered the mental static of a whole planet, end no matter where they went the interference followed.

  “TAKE IT EASY, now,” warned the President of the United States. “A lot depends on you—don’t go off half-cocked. You only get one chance. That’s all we can afford.”

  Boyle took the extended hand and shook it heartily. “We’ll certainly do our best, sir,” he said. And from the tone of his voice you could tell that he meant it.

  The vast field was crowded; beneath the hot summer sun sweated twenty thousand people, surging, cheering, breaking through cordons of police lined up for their own protection. Dips were doing a thriving business; more than one light-fingered gentleman was planning to retire on the rich pickings from the crowd. People were far too excited to consider whether or not it was their own hands in their pockets or that of some total stranger of predatory instincts. The crowd was in a holiday mood, exalted to be in the same rocket field with Boyle and Cantrell.

  The two objects of adoration were bearing up well under the strain, humble psychologists though they had been up to a few weeks ago. After shaking the President’s hand and being clapped on their backs by enough distinguished foreigners to fill an embassy the size of the great pyramid, they were blushing a little and very happy at their good fortune.

  “But,” whispered Boyle from the corner of his mouth, “if we don’t come back they’ll know we died trying.” Suddenly grim, he surveyed the vast sea of faces stretching before him. An emcee took him by the arm and led him to a mike through which he would address the crowd.

  “Hello—” he began, and then broke off, startled by the sound of his own voice roaring out across the field. “Hello, all you people. My partner and I just want to thank you before we leave in the Andros. If we don’t return send out more men, men better than Cantrell and I. Because we aren’t coming back before we crack the problem that’s assigned to us. When—if—you see the jets of the old Andros in the sky again, maybe in a week, maybe in a year, you’ll know that the answer is in our hands and that the plague, the spastitis, is over. Or as good as over.”

  The roar that went up from the crowd was deafening as he modestly stepped back from the mike. The emcee was yelling things into it, but the tremendous ovation drowned out even the tornado of sound that the loudspeakers created.

  Boyle waved at the crowd again. “All ready?” he snapped at Cantrell, his partner in the enterprise. “Everything checked?”

  “Betcha life,” said Cantrell. “Get in.” Like an insect disappearing in the knothole of a giant tree trunk, Boyle eased through the tiny port in the grey, slab-sided hull of the Andros. Cantrell vaulted in immediately after him, and the huge plug of metal that sealed the ship swung into place from the inside.

  The crowd had quieted, and the annunciators roared warnings to stand back from the breath of the fiery Titan that soon would roar its own message. Police cleared the mob away from the firing area with squad cars driving masses of people before them. Hastily the reviewing stand was rolled away from the ship.

  The President got into his car, a long, low open Jefferson 22. He looked a little ill. “I hope they make it,” he said, with a visible effort. “They’re plucky young—” Then he could no longer contain himself. He began to cough violently, his hands trembling toward his mouth.

  Doctors clustered around as he collapsed. Even in unconsciousness his body twitched grotesquely and his finely modeled hands trembled as if with cold. “He’s got it,” said one surgeon grimly. “The President has spastitis. It’s spreading faster than we thought. And there go the dream-boys who have to get out into space to find a cure.” He gestured at the Andros, which was ponderously aiming itself at the zenith with its own self-elevators.

  With a mind-staggering crash the ship took off. The wind of its departure almost tore clothes from the surgeons at the Presidential car. Long after it had vanished—seemingly dead into the sun—their ears rang with the concussion, and breezes stiffly whipped along the field.

  CANTRELL grinned feebly from the bunk. “I’m all right,” he said weakly. “I can get up. This damned space-sickness gets me every time. You ready to try out the polyphone?”

  The hardy Boyle grinned back through a tangle of electronics supplies. “It’s all rigged up and ready for you. Catch.” He tossed over a set of headphones connected with the machinery and donned a similar set of his own. “Relax,” he warned. “If we’re not far enough out this ought to be a full-blooded shock to mind and body.” He switched on a dull-glowing tube.

  Cantrell squinted his eyes shut and concentrated on the familiar thought patterns of his partner. He caught them for a moment. Boyle was thinking of the blackness of space through which they were speeding and wondering vaguely whether the meteor interceptor would work as well under stress as it had in the tests. He held up a hand with thumb and forefinger meeting, both crooked, in the time-honored technicians’ gesture of: coming over 100%.

  Then there was a sudden rip in the smoothly unreeling pattern. It was as though a panorama were being opened before his eyes; the panorama of his partner’s mind. Then a seam opened suddenly and without warning. He was reading the minds of total strangers, people he’d never heard of.

  In rapid sequence he caught the image of a grubby little room as seen by a short man, and then surges of physical disgust at the sight—through this short stranger’s eyes—of a big, muscular woman. Following that image and impression was a vision of staring dead into the sun, some fool who was looking for their ship, no doubt. Back to the grubby room, but this time seen from the slightly higher elevation of the muscular woman, who obviously didn’t like the little man she focused on any more than he liked her.

  For a full hour Cantrell tried to claw his way back to the mind stream of the man who was raptly sitting a few feet from him, but the obtrusive thoughts of people back on Earth insisted on popping up. For a full hour Cantrell plumbed the depths of degradation in some minds, read the noble and exalted thoughts of others. He tuned in on one murder and two suicides, seen in dizzy angles by the different participants in the violence done.

  Through them all was a continual undertone of abominable worry and expectancy of death. Cantrell grunted softly whenever that image emerged. He recognized it easily; that was what he and Boyle were out there in space to fight. It was the ever-present dread of being struck down by the plague raging on Earth—the shakes, spastitis malignans, whatever you wanted to call it.

  Cantrell saw people drop in the street, only to begin to tremble horribly at the hands and feet with the disease. Finally he tore the headset off in disgust. Boyle looked at him mildly.

  “You try it solo,” said Cantrell. “I can’t get a damned thing out of the ether except the pressure-waves from Tellus. And they aren’t pretty.”

  Boyle removed his own set carefully. “It’s eavesdropping,” he said. “I tried to get you every second. What were you doing?”

  “Just what you were,” grunted his partner. “Just exactly. I was trying to get you, but you weren’t to be had. We have to move on, Boyle. Do what you can with the accelerators.”


  Boyle went to the instrument panel, worked the multiplex of levers. Too near the Earth! Too near to the suffering stew of human beings in agony, never knowing who would be next with the shakes. That was what they had to get away from—the emotional jags and lunatic vibrations from the home planet.

  He and Cantrell had been carefully teamed as psychological mates for the full utilization of the polyphone. Essentially the machine was intended to heighten to the nth degree the rapport of a pair like this one. But they were too sensitive for the machine. There was interference from the thousands who passed in the street, from everybody all over the globe who was thinking consecutively at the time.

  And because the shakes was a disease of psychological degeneration, you had to fight it by probing into a mind and finding what was wrong. It didn’t have to be a diseased mind, for every normal mind has in its depths the seeds of every psychological affliction that breaks out in wilder form. In Boyle’s well-ordered brain were minute traces of megalomania, satyriasis, schizophrenia, all the words ending in philia and phobia as well as other unpleasant matters. Everybody has them, whether he knows it or not.

  The idea had been to shoot these two out into space, far from the influence and interference of Earth; then they would work deeper and deeper into each other’s minds, finally to discover the seeds of the shakes that were inevitably lying dormant.

  One of the pleasant features of psychiatry is that once you have your problem broken down it is already solved. The synthetic element of logic is superfluous; analysis is sufficient. It might be that the shakes consisted of a fear of technical progress reaching epidemic proportions through hysterical contagion. You see a man fall in the street feebly kicking his heels in protest at being deprived of the liberty to roam on grassy fields and your own elements of protest are somewhat stirred. Then one day you feel despondent and they explode when your censor band is not on guard against subversive urges like that. And for the rest of your life you are a spastic, kicking and squirming uncontrollably. Or until someone calmly explains to you what is wrong—about the machine age and the rest. Then you are miraculously cured. And one cure breeds a thousand as confidence grows.

  Meanwhile there was the matter of interference from Earth. Boyle pushed the fuel rod down to the limits of the outward-bound trip. Dammit, they’d have to get away from the static, he brooded.

  “WHAT’S OUR POSITION?” queried Boyle. He was relaxing, Cantrell at the driving panel.

  “Practically ideal,” said his partner. “I haven’t checked, but we should be well out of the range of anything from Earth. Going high and fancy, we are—per second acceleration for two weeks. That’s plenty far. Do you want to try out the polyphone again?”

  “Blow off the dust,” grunted Boyle, swinging himself from the bunk. Gravity on the ship was at Earth level; that had meant tons of extra equipment and power consumption far above normal, but these two on whom the fate of their planet depended could not be distracted by space sickness and flying soup.

  Cantrell readied the polyphone, testing and checking the scores of minute connections and solders that held the complex creation together. Some he tightened, others he ripped out and replaced. At length the psychologist reported: “All ready. Let’s make this tryout a good one.”

  “Right. You stay open and receptive; I’ll drive as deep into your mind as I can. And Cantrell—I know it’s not a nice thing to ask, but you’ll have to have complete confidence in me. I don’t want you to seal off any sections at all from me. I want you to stay as open as though you weren’t being probed. You’re a specialist; you could close off whatever you wanted to. But we don’t know where the spastitis seeds lie. It may be in some group-unconscious engram or some especially unsavory crime you’ve committed and forced yourself to forget. I’ll play square with you, Cantrell. For the sake of the whole planet back there—don’t keep any secret places.”

  His partner stared at him curiously. “Okay,” he said at last. “You know best. But if you find anything especially nasty, do me the favor of not telling me about it.”

  “Agreed,” said Boyle with relief. He switched on the machine as they donned the head sets. The great tube glowed.

  Cantrell relaxed in body and mind as he felt the probing fingers sent from his partner’s brain pluck away at his grey matter. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, rather like a mental Swedish massage. Vaguely, images came through. He stiffened a little. There shouldn’t be any images here, and if there were he shouldn’t get them. For the moment putting aside the receptive mood, he reached out, shutting his eyes and wrinkling his brow in an effort to encompass the foreign thought vibrations that were filtering into his skull.

  He saw a sky then through the eyes of some person on whose mind he had landed. The sky was curiously dusky. And with the vision of the sky was a poignant sense of longing that filled the mind of Cantrell’s host. The words of it seemed to be: “My loved one! My loved one—on their side. Now we are enemies . . .”

  A quick start of alarm. The sky swiveled away, and Cantrell saw through these other eyes a group of horsemen bearing down on his host. A shrill scream of terror, an intolerable wave of revulsion and regret, and then the blankness of death. Cantrell’s host had been ridden under the hooves of the horsemen.

  The psychologist, not believing what he had experienced, reached out with his mind and seized on one of the riders. He did know that there was a sense of guilt in the rider’s mind; what it meant he could not tell. He heard a conversation begun with a shrill, nervous laugh. Then: “Damned rebel—we showed him.”

  “Right. Fix them all up like that and this world will be worth living on, sir. Where do we go now?”

  “Keep scouting. Look for rebels and treat them the right way, like that dead thing back there—”

  Cantrell had suddenly lost interest in the conversation. The talk of rebels was beyond him anyway. He had been studying, through his host’s eyes, the costume of the riders. They were unfamiliar, and somehow totally alien to anything earthly. Then with a shock of terror Cantrell saw that the horses had peculiarly long heads—and six legs!

  HE TORE THE set from his head and stared, wide-eyed, at Boyle. “Where were you?” he demanded. There was a shrill, hysterical note in his voice.

  “Trying to get over,” said Boyle as he switched off the set. “But there was interference. We’ll have to go farther yet. I tuned in on a series of love-affairs from back on Earth.”

  “Sure of that?” countered Cantrell. “Are you sure it was from Earth that you got the vibrations?”

  “Why?” snapped Boyle. “What did you receive?”

  Cantrell told him, and Boyle sat quietly for a long time, rattling his fingernails on a tabletop. “Yeah,” said Boyle at last. “I suspected something like that. Those women reacted in wholly unearthly fashion. The anatomy of these broadcasters is similar, but they aren’t Homo sapiens.”

  “Fourth dimension?” wildly hazarded Cantrell. “Could we have tuned in on that?”

  “No. For the reason that waves from the fourth dimension would have to be vectorially sub-operative to the seventh power, at least, and the machine would register any abnormal strain like that. No—not the fourth or any dimension except this one. Are there any invisible planets floating around? That alone would explain everything.”

  “None that I know of, and I used to specialize in astronomy. Maybe—maybe we’ve caught up with the thought-waves from Earth on a return trip from the end of space? That would explain the talk about rebels.”

  “And your six-legged horses, of course. Don’t be silly. We have to push on and get so damned far away from this spot that we won’t even remember where it is. I’m going to gun the ship hard and fast. You get on the polyphone and tell me when the thought-waves from the place begin to weaken and die out.”

  Boyle squared his jaw at the fuel gage and began to reckon how much they could allow for steerage and headway. How thin they could cut the corners for the return trip to Earth when the pr
oblem of the shakes was solved.

  Cantrell donned the head set and turned on the machine again. Again he reached out probing fingers into the crazy planet where horses had six legs and you could kill a man because he was a rebel against someone or something unspecified.

  On the screen of his mind things began to take shape. He had landed plumb in the brain of a lady who was waiting for a lover whom she pictured as tall and handsome. The lady turned slowly and surveyed a colossal city that rose about her. She was standing just outside its walls. They were fine walls, solid and ponderous, fitted with gates able to withstand the charge of a battletank.

  Her lover strolled up and there was a tender scene of greeting. Cantrell, feeling like a cad, reached out for another mind. He lighted on the brain of a person within the city; a person who considered himself as being of vast importance. All sorts of ponderous speculations were revolving through the important person’s head, principally when he would eat next. A young man, clad in a sort of tunic, approached.

  The important person smiled. “Ah,” he cried. “My dear boy!”

  The dear boy grinned briefly. “You’d better come. There’s a strike on at the tubing works. They seized possession of the whole plant.” The important person exploded with rage, swearing by strange gods. Cantrell shut off power and looked up.

  “When,” he asked impatiently, “are you going to get going? It comes in as strong as ever.” Boyle stared at him with a kind of sickly horror in his face. “Cantrell,” he said, “since you put on that set we’ve gone half a million miles at right angles to our former course.” “Lord,” whispered his partner. “They’re following us!”

  FROM RANDOM SNATCHES of thought and casual, everyday conversation it is not easy, it is almost impossible in fact, to reconstruct the politics, biology and economics of an entire planet. Yet that, essentially, was what Boyle and Cantrell had to do. For flee where they might, nearer to or farther from Earth, they could not escape the vibrations from the land where horses had six legs.