Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He added a bone-xylophone melody, very crude, of only three tones. “My eyes are both in front of my face. My vision has become stereoscopic. I can sit up and handle leaves. I can pick insects from the branches I live in.”

  Colt augmented the xylophone melody with a loud, crude brass. Valeska thought: “I’m bigger—my arms are longer. And I often walk little distances on the ground, on my feet and my arm-knuckles.”

  Colt added a see-sawing, gutty-sounding string-timbre, in a melody opposed to the xylophone and the brass: “I’m bigger—bigger—too big for trees. And I eat grubs as well as leaves—and I walk almost straight up—see me walk!” He watched her swinging along the ground, apish, with the memory of brachiation stamped in every limb. He modified the bone-xylophone’s timbre to a woody ring, increased the melodic range to a full octave.

  With tremendous effort Valeska heaved over an imaginary rock, chipped at it: “I’m making flint hand-axes. They kill animals bigger than I am—tigers and bears-—see my kitchen-heap, high as a mountain, full of their bones!”

  He augmented with a unison choir of wood-winds and a jangling ten-string harp: “I eat bread and drink beer and I pray to the Nile—I sing and I dance, I farm and I bake—see me spin rope! See me paint pictures on plaster!”

  A wailing clarionet mourned through the rhythmic sea. Valeska danced statelily: “Yes—now I’m a man’s woman—now I’m on top of the heap of the ages—now I’m a human—now I’m a woman . . .”

  Colt stopped short the whole accumulation of percussion, melody and harmony in a score of timbres, cutting in precisely a single blues piano that carried in its minor, sobbing sad left hand all the sorrow of ages, in the serpentine-stabbing chords splashed gold by the right sang the triumph of man in his glory of metal and stone.

  Valeska danced, sending out no words of what the dance was, for it was her, what she dreamed, what she had been and what she was to be. The dance and the music were Valeska, and they ended when she was in Colt’s arms. The brandy-bottle dropped from his grip and smashed on the rock.

  Their long, wordless community was broken by a disjointed yell from the two sides of the ridge as fighting forces streamed to battle. From the Bad caravan came the yell: “Kill and maim! Destroy! Destroy!” And the Good caravan cried: “In the name of the right! For sanctity and peace on Earth! Defend the right!”

  Colt and Valeska found themselves torn apart in the rush to attack, swept into the thick of the fighting. The thundering voices from above, and the lightning, were almost continuous. The blinding radiance rather than the night hampered the fighting.

  They were battling with queer, outlandish things—frying pans, camp stools, table-forks. One embattled defender of the right had picked up a piteously bleating kid and was laying about him with it, holding its tiny hooves in a bunch.

  Colt saw skulls crack, but nobody gave way or even fell. The dead were immortal. Then what in blazes was all this about? There was something excruciatingly wrong somewhere, and he couldn’t fathom what it was.

  He saw the righteous and amiable Raisuli Batar clubbing away with a table-leg; minutes later he saw the fiendish and amiable chief of the Bad men swinging about him with another.

  Vaguely sensing that he ought perhaps to be on the side of the right he picked up a kettle by the handle and looked about for someone to bean with it. He saw a face that might be that of a fiend strayed from Hell, eyes rolling hideously, teeth locked and grinding with rage as its owner carved away at a smallsized somebody with a broken-bladed axe.

  He was on the verge of cracking the fiend out of Hell when it considered itself temporarily at least finished with its victim and turned to Colt. “Hello, there,” snapped the fiend. “Show some life, will you?”

  Colt started as he saw that the fiend was Lodz, one of the Good men. Bewildered he strayed off, nearly being gouged in the face by Grandfather T’ang, who was happily swinging away with a jagged hunk of suntori bottle, not bothering to discriminate.

  But how did one discriminate? It came over him very suddenly that one didn’t and couldn’t. The caravaneers were attacking each other. At that moment there came through a mental call from Valeska, who had just made the same discovery on her own. They joined and mounted a table, inspecting the sea of struggling human beings.

  “It’s all in the way you look at them,” said Valeska softly.

  Colt nodded. “There was only one caravan,” he said in somber tones.

  He experimented silently a bit, discovering that by a twiddle of the eyes he could convert Raisuli Batar into the Bad caravan leader, turban and all. And the same went for the Bad idol—a reverse twiddle converted it into the smiling, blue-eyed guardian of the Good caravan. It was like the optical illusion with the three shaded cubes that point one way or the other, depending on how you decide to see them.

  “That was what Grandfather T’ang meant,” said the woman. Her eyes drifted to the old man. He had just drained another bottle; with a businesslike swing against a rock he shattered the bottom into a splendid cutting-tool and set to work again.

  “There’s no logic to it,” he Said forlornly. “None at all.” Valeska smiled happily and hugged him.

  Colt felt his cheek layed open.

  “BON SOIR. Dankeschoen. Buon giorno. Buenos dias. Bon soir. Dankeschoen. Buon—”

  “You can stop that,” said Colt struggling to his feet. He cracked his head against a strut, hung on dazedly. “Where’s—”

  He inspected the two men standing before him with healthy grins. They wore the Red Army uniform under half-buttoned flying suits. The strut that had got in his way belonged to a big, black helicopter; amidships was blazoned the crimson star of the Soviet Union.

  “You’re well and all that, I fawncy?” asked one of the flyers. “We spotted you and landed—bunged up your cheek a bit—Volanov heah would try to overshoot.”

  “I’m fine,” said Colt, feeling his bandage. “Why’n hell can’t you Russians learn to speak American?”

  The two soldiers exchanged smiles and glances. They obviously considered Colt too quaint for words. “Pile in, old chap. We can take you as far as Bokhara—we fuel at Samarkand. I—ah—suppose you have papers?”

  Colt leaned against the strut and wearily shoved over his credentials. Everything would be all right. Chungking was in solid with the Reds at the moment. Everything would be all right.

  They took off.

  “I fawncy,” said Volanov making conversation while his partner handled the helicopter vanes, “youah glad to see the lawst of all that.”

  Colt looked down, remembered and wept.

  “I FIND,” I said as dryly Kg as possible, “a certain familiarity—a nostalgic ring, as it were—toward the end of your tale.” I was just drunk enough to get fancy with The Three Cornered Scar.

  “You do?” he asked. He leaned forward across the table. “You do?”

  “I’ve read widely in such matters,” I hastily assured him, pouring another glass of red wine.

  He grinned glumly, sipping. “If I hadn’t left half my spirit with Valeska that night I was dead,” he remarked conversationally, “I’d smash your face in.”

  “That may be,” I assented gracefully.

  But I should say that he drank less like half a spirit than half a dozen.

  Masquerade

  A grim tale about a man who was cursed, his wife, and the Presence that had horns and a tail. A story of the terror that dogged one who had seen too much.

  A MAN CAN wake one morning to read in his tabloid that his father has been shot fleeing the scene of a bank robbery. In these times there is no guarantee against the unexpected striking one down harder than a thunderbolt and almost as quick. From the vast-spreading matrix of the ordinary there may fly into your face the grotesque, the shocking, even the horrible.

  Why did Leonard die?

  Who were the Whelmers, silent partners in the most horrid nightmare that ever rose to walk the streets of New York?

  Mac Leonard,
who is now compressed into the small confines of a crematory urn, had always seemed to me to be one of the chosen of the Lord. In Columbia University, where we both studied, he was a shining campus light. I said both studied, but that is a misconception. Keeping the profligate’s hours that he did, tumbling into bed dead drunk four nights out of the seven, Leonard could not possibly have studied in the ordinary sense.

  Revolving the matter carefully, I realize that Leonard could not possibly have done anything in the ordinary sense. He was a blinding flash of a man; the hardest liver, the most brilliant scholar and the coolest head on the blocks-long campus was his. If he had gone to a smaller school he would have stood out like a beacon. He would probably, furthermore, have been thrown out like a bum for his vices and dissipations. As far as I was concerned, of course, they were his business. He drank and went with the Joe College set, but had no illusions about their capacities.

  This was, you will remember, in the Flaming Youth era, when skirts were short and gin was aged in the porcelain for about five minutes. Mac drank with them, but he talked with men and the rest of the grinds on the school daily and the Journal of the Columbia Philosophical Society.

  It comes back to me like a nightmare that was almost funny—the deadly seriousness of the kids. Mac himself had been almost completely taken in by Mr. James Branch Cabell, who had been fortunate enough to have one of his recent puerilities barred from the mails.

  Perhaps the business of the mysterious Whelmers was all my fault, for one day I made it my business to catch Mac on the fly between classes. “Leonard,” I yelled, overtaking him.

  Looking at me with the glazed eyes of a hangover, he said: “Hi. Going in for track, old son of the lamp?” He focussed on the book I was holding out to him. “What’s that mouse-colored tome?”

  “Take it. I want you to read it. My very own personally-annotated copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It’s about time you learned something in college.”

  “Very truly yours,” he said, pocketing it and weaving off down the red brick walk. That, of course, wasn’t the last of it. He came around that night—standing up his gin and jazz crowd—to chew the rug about Kant. He had actually read the book in six hours, and assimilated most of the meat.

  “It is,” he said, “quite a change-over from math and science to beat one’s brow against a thing like this. Have I been neglecting the eternal verities in my pursuit of hard facts? Speak, O serpent of the thousand diamond scales.”

  Modestly I assured him that that had been the idea. And what did he think of Kant in the light of his scientific attainments?

  “Stinking,” said Mac briefly. “But—at least a googolplex advanced above Mr. Cabell. Imbued with that quasi-mystic hogwash I could do naught but agree with the simple-minded laddie that the world is what you make it and that the eternal verity is to get along with one’s neighbors. Your friend Kant is all wet, but by no means as wet as that.”

  With that he wandered away. When I saw him next he had enrolled in several philosophy courses at the same time. In the Philosophical Society we pinned his ears back with ease whenever he tried to enter into debate, but that was only because he didn’t quite know how to use the quaint language of the gentle science.

  I’ve been rambling badly. The point that I wanted to bring out was that Mac Leonard was brilliant, as brilliant as they come in the current mortal mold. Also that he was a student of the physical sciences and the only philosophy they have, mathematics.

  BY ANY KIND of miracle I survived the crash of 1929 with a young fortune in gold certificates. The miracle was an uncle who had burned his fingers in the crash of 1922 and warned me: “When you see the board rooms crowded with people who have no business there—laundrymen, grocers, taxi drivers—then sell!” Ignoring the optimistic fictions of Mr. Roger W. Babson, prophet of the stock exchange, now, I believe, candidate for the presidency on the Prohibition Party’s ticket, I sold and came out on top. I didn’t even trust to the safe deposit vaults the money I had made; it went into the fireproof, burglarproof, earthquakeproof warrens of the Manhattan Storage and Warehouse Corporation. Quick-money imbeciles who had been stuck considered me a traitor not to have lost by the crash. For years I was as good as ostracized by former friends. That was all right with me—I was a scholar and intended to remain one while my capital lasted, which it did.

  A man can be a recluse in the middle of New York; that much I found out in ten years of study. It wasn’t in any of the books I read; it was what I proved with my own quiet life. And at the end of many years I heard again from Mac Leonard—a scenic postal card marked Uvalde, Mexico. Characteristically laconic, the message was: “—and wife.” That and his signature was supposed to be all I wanted to know about him and his fortunes since we had parted at commencement.

  Hoping that he would not already be gone—who but a tourist would write on a scenic postal card?—I mailed a long letter giving my own story to date and demanding his.

  His answer came very much later, three months or more, from Council Bluffs, Iowa:

  Dear Vulcan, [the nickname in reference to my slight limp]

  So the plumy anaconda has found his forked tongue after these long years? I should be hurt at your neglect of me—failing to write when a simple matter like not knowing my address stood in your way. You’re right—I was on my honeymoon in the vastly overrated country of Mexico. And she is a very nice girl, in a rowdy sort of way.

  I’m still playing with paper boxes and numbers. The chair of mathematics at one of our little high schools out here is all mine, and very uncomfortable it is. Still, Civil Service is nothing to be sneezed at in these troubled times.

  My life seems to have slipped into a slap-happy routine of examination papers and recitations; the really heart-breaking part is that none of my excessively brilliant students get my jokes. Aside from that all is milk and honey. I live in a bungalow with my wife—seems damned strange to write that down; as though it never really happened!—and we are like a pair of larks in the springtime. Whenever quarrels come I demonstrate by the calculus of symboic logic that she’s wrong and I’m right, and that settles the matter. Theoretically, at least.

  Honestly, old dish towel, I’m happy—a truly representative specimen of that rarest work of God, the man who is contented with his lot in life. It may sound idiotic to you, but I hope I never change from what I am. If time stood still this very minute I wouldn’t have a kick coming in the world.

  Mac

  Other letters followed that; there was an erratic quality to his correspondence that made it completely delightful. I found in my mailbox or resting on my doorstep anything from postal cards to bundles of year-old exams in Geometry One, neatly rated with mean, average and modes. For three years it kept up; at one time we were waging half a dozen chess games simultaneously as well as a discussion of Hegelian dialectics. “One of these days” he kept carelessly promising, he would blow into the city to see me.

  Then, abruptly, he did. And it wasn’t as an honored guest but as a man fleeing from disgrace. Never a coward, not one now in the nastiest position that any man could face, he sent me a note giving the arrival-time of his bus. And he enclosed a bunch of clippings from the local press.

  To say that I was shocked would be putting it mildly. He had been no angel in his college days, but a man grows out of that, especially when he marries. The clippings didn’t make it any easier. With an obscene, missish reticence oddly combined with the suggestive vulgarity that is the specialty of the tabloid press, they told the sordid and familiar story of a male teacher in a co-ed school—you know what I mean. It happens.

  I MET them at the terminal. He was the picture of a hunted man, eyes sunken and hair lank down his temples. He’d kept his shape; there wasn’t a sign of the usual professorial pot-belly. But his mouth was very tight. His nose wrinkled as though he could still smell those headlines. Yes, they were so nasty they actually stank.

  He mumbled a brief introduction, and I smiled wildly at
his wife in acknowledgment. No self-respecting woman would—

  They came to my apartment to get their luggage settled. They were traveling light. He explained, as we all three lit cigarettes, that he had left his bungalow in the hands of an agent, and that when the business died down somebody would buy it furnished and ready for occupancy. “But,” he added grimly, “that won’t be for a long while.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, with my damned morbid curiosity.

  “You saw the papers. To correct a popular misconception, which our journals tended to foster, she was not fifteen but nineteen. Big and dumb. And despite their hinting, she was the only one. And anybody in the school could have told you that I wasn’t her first boyfriend—as it were.”

  “I’m sorry, Mac. It’s a lousy thing to happen. I know how it is—” That peculiar noise was me, making like I was broad-minded. But I still didn’t see how anybody in his right mind would do a thing like that. I shot a glance at his wife, and luck would have it that she met my eyes squarely.

  With the Midwest twang she said: “I can see that you’re wondering what I think about the whole matter.” I took a good look at her then, my first. She wasn’t a very beautiful woman. Her face was the kind you call intelligent. She had a figure that, with cultivation, could be glorious; as it was it was only superb. But I’m easy to please.

  “My husband made a fool of himself, that’s plain enough. If he learned his lesson as well as he teaches—it’s over. Am I right, Len?”

  “Right,” he said dispiritedly.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” I said, rising, beginning to walk across the floor. I felt the way the lame do, her eyes on my twisted right foot. She had reached the kitchen door before I was well under way.

  “Please let me,” she said. “You men will want to talk.”

  “Thanks,” I said, wondering angrily if she was going to be sickeningly sweet and sympathetic about my very minor disability. “Go right ahead.” I sat down facing Mac. “Not many women would be that understanding,” I said.