Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  From long periods of listening in and comparing, they discovered one important fact: that evolution was proceeding on that planet at a staggeringly rapid pace; that in fact the two partners had started out with a violently mistaken notion of the place’s tempo. It was swift, swifter than anything with which they were familiar.

  But their eavesdropping made it seem close to normal, for the human brain can accommodate itself to any speed of delivery. It can assimilate and synthesize at a faster rate than either of the two had previously suspected. It was natural that this discovery should wait for a moment like this, for never before had the human mind been called on to deliver at that rate.

  They discovered that the nameless land was tearing along at a scale of one to a million, approximately. When Cantrell had heard the horsemen curse the rebels, that had been the equivalent of the Puritan revolution in England, period of 1650 or thereabouts. A few minutes later he tuned in on a general strike that meant a lapse of about four hundred years.

  In two weeks of voyaging through space the strange planet had arrived at a world state which Earth had not yet attained.

  Boyle, irritably tuning in on the lunatic planet one day, drew a deep breath. “Cantrell!” he snapped. “Put your set on and follow my mind. I have a conference of astronomers!”

  His partner grabbed the ponderous metal bowl and clapped it on, groping out for the familiar mind patterns of Boyle. He caught onto him in about three seconds, then switched to one of Boyle’s mental hosts. Through the eyes of that person he saw a sizable hall built up into a structure like the inside of a mushroom. As he studied the other persons in the hall he realized that physical evolution had progressed a few more steps since yesterday, when he had last tuned in on the place.

  His host’s mood was one of confusion; through it he was speaking to the large gathering: “This symposium has been called on a somewhat abstract question. You all know what it is, I presume; otherwise you would not be astronomers.

  “As one looks back towards the glorious dawning days of our science, the names of those who were martyred in the cause of truth rise before us. Despots, with their piddling knowledge and tiny telescopes, maintained that the world was round, did they not? It remained for the genius of our clan to demonstrate that it was a truncated paraboloid.

  “Jealous superstition preached that like all other worlds ours had a core of rock in the state of stress fluid; it remained for us to prove that no such thing was true of our world—that we alone of all planets lived upon a shell of rhodium, and that that shell, though inconceivably thick, was not solid, and that our planet was definitely hollow.”

  Cantrell looked up. “Lord,” he said softly. “Oh, Lordy! Now I know where those six-legged horses came from.”

  “Yes,” said Boyle as he turned off the machine. “That planet is our ship, and those people are an entire civilization living on the shell of the old Andros. No wonder we couldn’t get away from them; they were being carried around with us.”

  “It’s perfectly logical,” argued Cantrell. “We carry Earth gravity for our own comfort; that’s why we drew down a thin but definite atmosphere. Also dust and organic particles which settled on the hull. There was warmth from the inside of the ship, and that wonderful old Swede Arrhenius long ago demonstrated that spores of life are always present in space, driven by light-pressure. They landed on our hull, went through evolutionary stages, a man-like form emerged and is rapidly reaching a more advanced civilization than our own.”

  “But,” grunted Boyle, “that doesn’t help us out with the shakes. If they’re swarming out there, we’ll never be able to probe each other. How can we shake them off? Spray acid on the hull?”

  “No!” barked Cantrell. “We couldn’t do that—they have as much of a right to live as we. Perhaps—perhaps if we could communicate with them—?”

  “Son,” raved Boyle, “you’ve got it! The answer to our prayers! A super-race made to order for the purpose of solving our problems. We’ll have to adapt the polyphone; that’s the only equipment we have. Son, we’re going to make this the most useful interference ever recorded!”

  WITH BLOODSHOT EYES and almost trembling fingers Cantrell tuned in the adapted polyphone. Then, through the eyes of a host he was surveying from an apparent altitude of twenty thousand feet a world enclosed in glass.

  “Come in,” he said to Boyle. “Work toward the most powerful single person you can find.” Feeling his own mind augmented by his partner’s, he probed deep into the glassed-in world, toward the highest building he could find.

  He landed in the brain of a highly trained mathematician and felt a swirl of fantastically complicated figures and tables. Then the mathematician walked through an automatic door into the presence of a person whom he regarded with almost holy awe. Cantrell realized then how rapidly the acceleration of evolution had curved upward on this tiny world. The personage was small and weighed down with a staggering amount of braincells that could be seen pulsing and throbbing under a transparent dura mater. The skull had been wholly absorbed.

  “Right,” snapped Cantrell to his partner. “Push it out, son. Make it stick like glue.” The two psychologists united their minds in a staggering intellectual effort; there were visible sparks as they fused into one perfect sending outfit. Cantrell, only vaguely conscious of the personage and the mathematician, saw the former start with alarm and heard him ask as if from a distance: “Do you feel anything?”

  “No,” said Cantrell’s host. “This matter of geodesics—”

  “Leave me for a while,” said the personage. “I sense a message of great importance.” The mathematician exited, and Cantrell abruptly severed his mind from the host. For the first time he found himself to be a point of consciousness hanging before the personage, seeing, hearing and sending.

  He raised his hand in a choppy gesture. Boyle nodded, and shut his eyes. Sweat stood out on his brow as he projected the message: “Boyle and Cantrell speaking. Can you hear us?”

  The personage jumped as if he had been shot at. He looked around cautiously and said: “I can hear you. But who are you—where are you sending from?” In the language of the mind there is no need of translation; with the polyphone any two rational creatures can communicate.

  The psychologists, now working as a perfect team, sent: “Speaking from the inside of your planet. But it isn’t a planet; it’s our spaceship. We’re from Earth—third planet around the sun. But let’s skip the formalities. What do you know about—” and they launched into a technical description of the shakes.

  “Have you,” asked the important personage, “tried polarizing the crystalline lens of the eye? That should do it. It is not, as you thought, a psychodeficiency lesion but—” In clear, concise thought images he gave a complete outline of the cause and cure of spastitis malignans. And he knew what he was talking about, for this personage later announced himself to be the Chief Assimilator of the planetary division. He was the one who received all the technical data and assembled it for reference and use. Specialization had raced ahead on this planet.

  “Thanks,” said the psychologists at length. “Thanks a lot. We’ll be heading back to Earth now—” he broke off in dismay. “If we do, that’s the end of your people. Because as soon as our gravity plates switch off you get flung out into space, and we can’t land without switching off the plates.”

  “An interesting problem,” brooded the Assimilator. “But not insoluble. We can make our own plates if necessary. I advise you to set your ship—my planet—into an independent orbit around the sun. In about twenty minutes of your time we will have developed to the point where we will have our enclosed cities reinforced against anything but collision with a major planet. We trust you to set the orbit so that that will not happen. You must return to Earth by some makeshift means.” The Assimilator fell into a deep study, and the two psychologists withdrew.

  Boyle glanced at a stop-watch. “That whole interview,” he said disbelievingly, “lasted exactly one one-th
ousandth of a second. That was thinking under pressure.” Cantrell was dashing onto paper what the Assimilator had told him about the shakes. And it made brilliant sense. He photographed his notes and handed a copy to Boyle.

  “And now?” asked Boyle, carefully buttoning the data into a pocket.

  “Now we take the lifeboat,” said Cantrell. He gestured distastefully at the little bullet of metal lugged to the wall. “It’s said to be the least pleasant way of travel known to man.” He turned to the control panel and set a simple course around the sun that would maintain itself after the fuel was wholly gone.

  JAMMED INTO THE the little craft, cans of food floating about their ears and a hammering roar of exhausts in their heads, they strained to see through the little port that was the only communication from the outside. Boyle yelled something inaudible.

  “What?” shrieked Cantrell into his ear.

  Boyle drew a great breath and pointed with one thumb at the little crescent of light behind them—the Andros. “I said,” he shrieked, “that it’s a good thing we got away from those submicroscopic Einsteins. They gave me an inferiority complex.”

  Cantrell grinned briefly and strained his eyes to see until the world they had made was quite invisible in the black of space.

  The City in the Sofa

  Soldier-of-fortune Battle received his toughest assignment when he was sent to the Billionaire’s Club to fumigate a sofa! The fate of a world depended upon it!

  LIEUTENANT J.C. BATTLE tweaked the ends of his trim little military moustache and smiled brilliantly at the cashier.

  “Dear Judy,” he said, “there seems to have been some mistake. I could have sworn I’d put my wallet in this suit—”

  The super-blonde young lady looked bored and crooked a finger at the manager of the cafeteria. The manager crooked a finger at three muscular busboys, who shambled over to the exit.

  “Now,” said the manager, “what seems to be the trouble?”

  The lieutenant bowed. “My name,” he said, “is Battle. My card, sir.” He presented a pasteboard square which bore the crest of the United States Marines and the legend:

  LIEUTENANT J.C. BATTLE,

  SOLDIER OF FORTUNE

  REVOLUTIONS A SPECIALTY

  “A phony,” said the manager with the wickedest of smiles. “A dead-beat. The check says thirty cents, Major do you cough up or wash dishes?” He flung the card aside, and an innocent-appearing old man, white-haired, wrinkled of face and shabbily dressed, who had been patient]y waiting to pay his ten cent check, courteously stooped and tapped the manager on the shoulder.

  “You dropped this,” he said politely, extending the card.

  “Keep it,” snarled the manager. The innocent old man scanned the card and stiffened as though he had been shot.

  “If you will allow me,” he said, interrupting Battle’s impassioned plea for justice, “I shall be glad to pay this young man’s check.” He fished out an ancient wallet and dropped a half dollar into the super-blonde’s hand.

  “May I have your address, sir?’ asked Battle when they were outside. “I shall mail you the money as soon as I get back to my club.”

  The old man raised a protesting hand. “Don’t mention it,” he smiled toothlessly. “It was a pleasure. In fact I should like you to come with me to my club.” He looked cautiously around. “I think,” he half-whispered, “that I have a job for you, Lieutenant—if you’re available.”

  “Revolution?” asked Battle, skeptically surveying the old man, taking in every wrinkle in the suit he wore. “I’m rather busy at the moment, sir, but I can recommend some very able persons who might suit you as well. They do what might be called a cut-rate business. My price is high, sir—very high.”

  “Be that as it may, lieutenant. My club is just around the corner. Will you follow me, please?”

  Only in New York could you find a two-bit cafeteria on a brightly lit avenue around the corner from the homes of the wealthy on one side and the poor on the other. Battle fully expected the old man to cross the street and head riverwards; instead he led the soldier of fortune west towards Central Park.

  Battle gasped as the old man stopped and courteously gestured him to enter a simple door in an old-style marble-faced building. Disbelievingly he read the house number.

  “But this is—” said Battle, stuttering a little in awe.

  “Yes,” said the old man simply. “This is the Billionaire’s Club.”

  IN THE SMOKING room Battle eased himself dazedly into a chair upholstered with a priceless Gobelin tapestry shot through by wires of pure gold. Across the room he saw a man with a vast stomach and a nose like a pickled beet whom he recognized as “Old Jay.” He was shaking an admonishing finger at the stock-market plunger known as the “Cobra of Canal Street.”

  “Where you should put your money,” Old Jay rumbled—as Battle leaned forward eagerly, the rumble dropped to a whisper. The Cobra jotted down a few notes in a solid silver memo pad and smiled gratefully. As he left the room he nodded at a suave young man whom the lieutenant knew to be the youngest son of the Atlantis Plastic and Explosive dynasty.

  “I didn’t,” said Battle breathlessly, “I didn’t catch the name, sir.”

  “Cromleigh,” snapped the old man who had brought him through the fabulous portals. “Ole Cromleigh, ‘Shutter-shy,’ they call me. I’ve never been photographed, and for a very good reason. All will be plain in a moment. Watch this.” He pressed a button.

  “Yessir?” snapped a page, appearing through a concealed door as if by magic.

  Cromleigh pointed at a rather shabby mohair sofa. “I want that fumigated, sonny,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s crummy.”

  “Certainly, sir,” said the page. “I’ll have it attended to right away, sir.” He marched through the door after a smart salute.

  “Now study that sofa,” said Cromleigh meditatively. “Look at it carefully and tell me what you think of it.”

  The Lieutenant looked at it careful]y. “Nothing,” he said at length and quite frankly. “I can’t see a thing wrong with it, except that beside all this period furniture it looks damned shabby.”

  “Yes,” said Ole Cromleigh. “I see.” He rubbed his hands meditatively. “You heard me order that page to fumigate it, eh? Well—he’s going to forget all about those orders as completely as if I’d never delivered them.”

  “I don’t get it,” confessed Battle. “But I’d like you to check—for my benefit.”

  Cromleigh shrugged and pressed the button again. To the page who appeared, he said irascibly: “I told you to have that sofa fumigated—didn’t I?”

  The boy looked honestly baffled. “No, sir,” he said, wrinkling his brows. “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “All right, sonny. Scat.” The boy disappeared with evident relief.

  “That’s quite a trick,” said Battle. “How do you do it’ !” He was absolutely convinced that it was the same boy and that he had forgotten all about the incident.

  “You hit the nail on the head, young man,” said Cromleigh leaning forward. “I didn’t do it. I don’t know who did, but it happens regularly.” He looked about him sharply and continued: “I’m owing-gay oo-tay eek-spay in ig-pay atin-Lay. Isten-lay.”

  And then, in the smoking room of the Billionaire’s Club, the strangest story ever told was unreeled—in pig-Latin!—for the willing ears of Lieutenant J.C. Battle, Soldier of Fortune. And it was the prelude to his strangest job—the strangest job any soldier of fortune ever was hired for throughout the whole history of the ancient profession.

  BATTLE WAS BEWILDERED. He stared about himself with the curious feeling of terrified uncertainty that is felt in nightmares. At his immediate left arose a monstrous spiral mountain, seemingly of metal-bearing ore, pitted on the surface and crusted with red rust.

  From unimaginable heights above him filtered a dim, sickly light . . . beneath his feet was a coarse stuff with great ridges and interstices running into the distance. Had he not known he wo
uld never have believed that he was standing on wood.

  “So this,” said Battle, “is what the inside of a mohair sofa is like.”

  Compressed into a smallness that would have made a louse seem mastodonic, he warily trod his way across huge plains of that incredible worm’s-eye wood, struggled over monstrous tubes that he knew were the hairy padding of the sofa.

  From somewhere, far off in the dusk of this world of near night, there was a trampling of feet, many feet. Battle drew himself on the alert, snapped out miniature revolvers, one in each hand. He thought briskly that these elephant-pistols had been, half an hour ago, the most dangerous handguns on Earth, whereas here—well?

  The trampling of feet attached itself to the legs of a centipede, a very small centipede that was only about two hundred times the length of the Lieutenant.

  Its sharp eyes sighted him, and rashly the creature headed his way.

  The flat crash of his guns echoing strangely in the unorthodox construction of this world, Battle stood his ground, streaming smoke from both pistols. The centipede kept on going.

  He drew a smoke-bomb and hurled it delicately into the creature’s face. The insect reared up and thrashed for a full second before dying. As Battle went a long way around it, it switched its tail, nearly crushing the diminished soldier of fortune.

  After the equivalent of two miles’ walk he saw before him a light that was not the GE’s, filtering down from the smoking room of the Billionaire’s Club, but a bright, chemical flare of illumination.

  “It’s them,” breathed the Lieutenant. “In person!” He crouched behind a towering wood-shaving and inspected the weird scene. It was a city that spread out before him, but a city the like of which man’s eyes had never before seen.

  A good, swift kick would have sent most of it crashing to the ground, but to the tiny Lieutenant it was impressive and somehow beautiful. It was built mostly of wood-splinters quarried from the two-by-fours which braced the sofa; the base of the city was more of the same, masticated into a sort of papier-mache platform.