Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  MAMIE TUNG focused her eyes on the two figures, noted that there was the feeling of strabismus. As closely as she could figure it, the two into which everything had separated were divided by some unimaginable gulf. It was not space, for all the sense of blackness and cold. It could not be time; the mind rejected the insane paradoxes of ‘time travel’ instinctively, and there was a certain definite grasp that one had on this phenomenon, something just out of the range of human comprehension. . . .

  “Star,” she snapped. “Star, will you stop your snivelling for a while?”

  “Yes. Oh, oh yes,” yammered the Calculator senselessly, his fear-struck eyes clinging to her bowed, black ones.

  “Star, can you calculate the way you feel?” There was no answer but terror; she cursed briefly and violently, then fixed her eyes again on the computator, herself fighting the weird sensation of duality.

  “I’m going to cure you, Star,” she said in a droning, insistent voice.

  Macduff stared helplessly; he was in no condition either to resist the hypnosis or to cooperate.

  In two minutes of fearful concentration she had put him under and well into the secondary stage. His body stiffened cataleptically against the wall. At that moment his other body, laid out in the chair, chose to moan and stir.

  “Club it again, Will!” she snapped, not letting her gaze swerve from her patient. “Put it out for good if you can!”

  She did not see the heroic effort of the Executive Officer, but it was an epic in the few feet of space he traversed to the spot on the floor where he had dropped the case. It was a feat of arms equal to any Arthurian myth, how he picked the thing up with hands that would not behave and eyes that would not see straight and a mind that reeled under horrible vistas.

  The Executive Officer, feeling his grip going, moved too quickly and blundered into half a dozen obstacles—chairs and desks that should not be in his path—before he reached the moaning figure of the second Star. Twice he struck and missed, bringing the case down on an empty chair. With the last dyne of his psychological reserve he raised the case, brought it down with a solid chunk, brought it down biting into the skull of the mathematician.

  MAMIE TUNG smiled with grim satisfaction and proceeded with the treatment. It was a technique of her own, something fearfully obscure and delicate, unbearably complicated by the duality imposed on her. But the drive of the woman brought about nearly an elimination of one of her components, drove it into the back of her mind where it stood as little more than a shadow. The other Madame Tung was coldly, stonily, picking over the brain of Star Macduff.

  She drove a tentacle of consciousness into the hypnotized man, tapped his personal memory-store. She had no interest in that at the moment; drove deeper, reached one obscure group of neurones specialized in the calculus of relationships, alias symbolic logic, alias the scientific method, alias common sense.

  Vampirish, she drew at the neurones, what they held, how they worked, what they did, why they did it so much better than any of the other officers’ corresponding groups. And it came like a flood of golden light, like the ever-new sensation that comes when an old thing looks different.

  She let go of the cataleptic figure completely, let it crumple to the floor, while she busied herself with the unfamiliar tools of the Calculator. It was all new to her, and it is to be remarked greatly to her credit that she did not go mad.

  “I’ve worked it, Will,” she said. “Slick as a whistle.”

  “Speak up then.” The E, O. was very near collapse; Yancey Meats—one of them—had fallen to the floor and was big-eyed and heaving in the chest while the other wandered about distraitly raving under her breath, sounding very far-away.

  “It’s probabilities, Will. Those people—they worked space around for us so that when we came to some decision-point we took not one course or another but both. Since we aren’t used to that kind of thinking it didn’t pan out and a couple of us are nearly done in by it.

  “Star’s math says it’s completely plausible, and the wonder is that they don’t do it on Earth for difficult situations, social and otherwise. Imagine the joy of attending on the same night a necessary academic banquet and taking out a lover. I must be raving. But it’s the goods, Will. Everything fits.”

  “What was the decision-point?”

  “It was when Star made that fool remark about what our boarders really looked like. You called him down, torn between sending him aft with the ordinaries and keeping him here with the superiors. Conveniently for you we—the ship—branched into two probabilities at that point. You could have covered yourself by both ordering him aft with the ordinaries and keeping him here with the superiors. Justice would be done and we’d be insured against the chance of a poor decision. Unfortunately that convenient arrangement doesn’t work for our little minds; the very convenience of it nearly broke us. But I’m getting so I can handle one at a time. I doubt that I’ll ever be able to handle both, but it’s good enough to separate and leave one of yourself in temporary silence.

  “Now, for instance, I’m using the me that’s in the Sphere Nine in which Yancey fainted. The other me is in the Sphere Nine in which you clubbed and finally killed the Star that I didn’t hypnotize. You—or rather youse—have been wavering your consciousness between the two Sphere Nines. In the one in which this me is, you tried to pick up Yancey; in the other one you did a neat job on Star.”

  “Executive Office—” said a pleading voice over the—one of the—phones.

  “I’ll take it,” said the active Madame Tung.

  “Psychologist speaking.”

  “Ordinary speaking—what happened—Ratings Ten, Twelve and Three’ve beat each other’s brains out—”

  “Cut, will you. I’m going to check on that.”

  “Cut, Officer,” said the pitifully bewildered voice.

  THE active madame stacked herself against a wall; slowly the passive came to life and experimentally stepped over to the phone, nodding at Will Archer, who was experimenting quietly in transference of attention.

  “Commons room,” she said into the phone.

  There was no answer.

  “They’ve probably all murdered each other in this probability. Now that I’m in it I’ll see what I can do with Yancey.”

  She took hold of the staring, wandering, mumbling woman, tried to sit her down. The creature broke away with a thin, distant scream and fled through the tube.

  “Just as well. This branch seems to be an exceptionally sour one. That girl’s mind was hopelessly wrecked. Let’s both get into the other and treat the other Yancey.”

  She smoothly effected the change of person and kneeled professionally beside the rigid, twisted form of the Clericalist. A few soothing words worked wonders. It was more fear of madness than any mental lesion itself that had immobilized her, and fear flies before confidence. Madame Tung explained what had happened to them, did not go into details as to the other body the girl had in the other branch. “Now for Star,” she said distastefully. “Too late for Star,” reported Will Archer. “He’s dead.”

  “So? I mean the one in the chair.”

  “That’s the one. His heart’s stopped and he has dark circles around the eyes. Like a fractured skull.”

  “Something to remember. I’m afraid my technique wasn’t as delicate as it should have been. Damned lucky thing I have his math. We may be able to get back yet.”

  “You mean we aren’t saddled with this thing forever?” Archer winced as he saw his other body in the probability of madness and death, rigid as a corpse against the wall.

  “I hope not. I won’t know until I’ve worked some more with this knowledge I picked up in such a hurry. I actually feel a curiosity, for the first time in my life, as to how a calculating machine works!”

  “It’s time you learned,” said the Clericalist. She was enormously bucked-up to find that she could be of some use.

  “Come on to the computations room,” They slid through the tube, over the noisy prote
st of the gibbering other Yancey. The hitherward Yancey looked at it distastefully, but did not comment except for: “How much of me is that?”

  “Nonsense. I mean your question is a contradiction in terms. Quantity has nothing to do with it. What you see there is something in the land of might-have-been. That it happens to be something unpleasant makes no difference.”

  “It does to me,” said Yancey positively. “Then be thankful that you aren’t hyper-spatial Siamese twins with a corpse, like the survivors among the ordinaries. Or all dead any way you figure it, like Star.”

  She rubbed her hands over the calculating machinery, again in its neat rows and aisles. Experimentally she punched keys here and there, abstractedly fishing for the stolen knowledge which worked her fingers.

  Suddenly, furiously, she set to work, immersing herself in figure-tapes, swinging around herself a mighty rampart of the basic machinery. Yancey and Will tiptoed away, superfluously. For it would have taken a hammer blow on the head to interrupt the combined will-power of two such formidables as the late Star Macduff and the present Madame Mamie Tung.

  CHAPTER V

  THE Executive Officer visited the ordinaries that were left, found a few men of strong fibre who had refused to succumb to the terror that had gripped the ship. He explained simply what had happened, and they accepted the explanation as their due after a very difficult time. He taught them the technique—which they had stumbled on by themselves in a haphazard way—of concentrating on one path of probabilities and the advisibility of staying there, since any moment the other might vanish into the great unknown.

  Only then did he begin to puzzle himself over what had happened—who their boarders had been, how they had done this to Sphere Nine. He recalled what they had said, which was little comfort but sound sense. They had assured him that he could not possibly understand their motivation for behaving as they did. Yancey told him that if this was a sample of their behavior she most heartily agreed.

  Madame Tung emerged from the calculations room with a splitting headache and a fistful of formulae from which tubes could be constructed to build up something new in electromagnetic phenomena—a probability field which could be applied in this one very special case to good effect.

  They constructed the thing with ease, hosed the ship with it, and were gratified to see the other path vanish—the path of the lunatic Yancey, the skull-split Star, the murdered ordinaries, and the cataleptics Mamie Tung and Will Archer.

  “Landing?” asked Mamie.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t argue on those grounds, Will. But what happened to your stern resolution to take a sample of the protosphere and run back to Earth?”

  “You’re the Psychologist. You tell me.”

  “Those strangers had some violent impact on us. Behind their fronts was something enormously intriguing. You’re full of what killed the fabulous cat.”

  “Right. And I’m not going to rest until I find out how that protosphere came about and what it means to us.”

  “Oh, I can tell you that,” said one of the visitors stepping through the hull. “Insofar as anyone can tell anyone else anything in this symbology of yours.”

  “Talk fast,” said Will stiffly. “Our time is important.”

  The stranger chuckled delightedly. “I could give you. all the time you want,” he said. “I gave you all the probabilities you wanted. I could have given you an infinite number, practically. How much time did you say you wanted—twenty thousand years? A hundred thousand? And in the past, present or future?”

  “No thanks,” said Will hastily. “You were going to tell us about the protosphere.”

  “I WAS. It’s our garbage can, in a way. We had our neat little solar system, well-balanced around two suns, and then the most appalling junk came flying into it, blowing things out of kilter, tipping the balance one way or another. . . .so we invented protoplasm and started a ring of it out in space, gave it directives, fed it on rubbish, finally curved it around so it was a perfect shell. If we’d known the trouble it’d cause, really, we wouldn’t have bothered. We thought it was an advantage that it reproduced automatically; that saved us making all the stuff ourselves. But. apparently it shoots off spores, too, and they land on planets outside; and the most appalling things—like you—happen along a few million years later and want to change everything to suit yourselves. Was there anything else?”

  “May we land on one of your planets and look about?”

  “Why? It’s so much simpler this way.”

  “This” was almost too theatrical to be convincing. There appeared on the wall of the office a busy little motion-picture complete with sound of a planet which had two suns in its sky.

  It was a city scene, sleek vehicles buzzing along the streets, well-dressed men and handsome women strolling past, greeting each other with a grave nod, smiling, dashing children, here and there an animal suggestive of the horse.

  One of the buildings, apparently, was on fire. The scene wavered a little, then angled upward to catch flames shooting from a window, a woman leaning out and calling for help.

  The streamlined equivalent of a fire-truck roared up, shot up a device that resembled the Indian Rope Trick; a valiant male swarmed up it and packed the female down. When they reached the ground the end of the Indian Rope Trick squirted water at the fire, the rescued woman kissed her fireman enthusiastically, and the wall was blank again.

  Madame Tung was the first to laugh cynically.

  Their visitor looked at her more in sorrow than anger, his eyes heavy beneath their brows.

  “So? You would rather see the truth?”

  “I think I would,” said the goldenskinned woman.

  “You shall.”

  MADAME TUNG prepared herself for more home movies, but they were not forthcoming. Instead there grew and spread in her brain an image of power, power inconceivable, roaring in noise, flaring in light, sparking in electric display, fusing in heat, running a mad gamut of the spectrum in every particle. She shut her eyes the better to contain it, for it was magnificent.

  The display softened, shrank, seemed to cool. She had an image then of a sort of personified lightning, a tight etheric, sworl packed with electrons and alpha particles in rigid order, a great thing twenty teet tall and five feet wide by five feet, with six radiating arms that burned what they grasped and blasted what they struck to powder. There were no feet; she saw the object travel somewhat as Sphere Nine travelled—by aiming itself and discharging sub-atomically.

  There were features of a sort, something that she would call a mouth at the very top of the body, a member which ingested occasionally bits of matter which would rebuild it indefinitely or until some trying task. There were sensory organs—a delicate, branching, coraline thing that apprehended radiations of any order.

  And in the very center of the electric vortex, and a little above the midriff was one incalescent blaze of glory that carried to the dazzled inner eye of Mamie Tung the idea of BRAIN. It bore intelligence, appreciation, art, beauty—all the diffuse concepts packed about by man as surplus baggage.

  She saw the thing bend its sensory organ at her, study her, saw the corresponding pulsations of the brain within it. She felt it reach out to establish contact with her mind, and welcomed it eagerly.

  IT must have been a glorious death, especially so for a mind like that of Madame Tung, new, brave and challenging. But death it was, and her friends caught her body in their arms. Silently and reproachfully they regarded their visitor.

  “You too,” he asked softly, “would you too rather see the truth?”

  They let the golden-skinned woman to the floor.

  “Before you go,” said the man who had come through the hull, “Is there anything I can do?”

  “There is. It is what we came for. You may have noticed that we emit certain rays characteristic of protoplasm. As we are the fruit, so your protosphere is the core. It emits rays of great intensity which interfere with our genetic experiments
. Could you mask those rays?”

  “We shall. It will be several scores in years before they stop coming, so you will find in your desk a field-formula for a diffusion mask that will block them off.”

  “Thank you. Is there anything we’ve overlooked?”

  “Nothing. You have no further business with us, nor have your people, no matter how far they may advance within your species’ life. You are third-order at best; we are fifth-order and ascending. I trust that by the time your species has reached the point where it will be able to blow us to powder we shall be well out of the three-dimensional range of experience.”

  With the most natural gesture in the world he extended his hand. In turn Yancey and Will gripped it. He stepped through the hull with a farewell wave.

  “Commons room—ready ship!”

  “Yes, Officer!”

  “One hundred eighty degrees!”

  “Yes, Officer!”

  “And full speed—cut!”

  “Cut!”

  Close together they contemplated the golden-skinned Madame Tung.

  “Everything has its cost,” said Will. Yancey said nothing.

  Unrelieved blackness alternated dazzling star-dusters; from rim to rim of the universe stretched the thin line that marked the hero’s way.

  An Old Neptunian Custom

  Sad was the fate of the fat little Neptunian prince, for now his days were numbered—the fatal news had come, that meant the crushing of all his hopes—he had just succeeded to the Neptunian throne!

  ABOUT Kenneth Dodd there arose the majestic ribs of three half-finished liners of space. They were gaunt, gray structures full of the promise of interplanetary flight, splendidly impressive in the looming lowness of the shallow-ceilinged construction bay. You could see by their part-formed lines that they were meant for speed, limitless speed in the reaches of distance where there was no air.

  Kenneth Dodd looked at them carefully, then looked away, dumb resignation crinkling the sides of his eyes, for it seemed pretty certain now that their potentialities would never be realized. The shipyard workers were on strike.