Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Why don’t you let me take over for a while?” the doctor suggested. Jim’s usefulness was over now; the man was only communicating his own panic to his wife. “Go in the other room and lie down, or take a walk outside if you want to. Nothing’s going to happen for a while yet.”

  “Doc . . .” The man’s voice was rough with anxiety, but he held back the frantic questions. “Please, Tony,” he said simply, “I’d rather stick around.” He fixed a smile to his face as he bent over Polly again.

  Anna came in before Tony had quite decided to call her. It was a talent she seemed to have, one of the reasons why he had chosen her for his assistant.

  “I think Jim needs a cup of coffee,” he told her firmly.

  Kandro straightened up awkwardly. “All right, Doc.” He was trying hard to be matter-of-fact. “You’ll call me if anything—when there’s news?”

  “Of course he will.” Anna’s quick assurance forestalled Tony’s exasperated retort. She put her hand on Kandro’s arm, and smiled down at the woman on the bed. “Not much longer now, Polly,” she said with quiet certainty. “Come on, Jim.”

  As the door closed behind them, Tony turned to his patient, and surprised a brief smile on her lips. “You mustn’t mind,” she explained, almost apologetically. “He’s so worried.”

  She had no breath for more. She twisted suddenly on the narrow bed and clutched at the air till Tony gave her his hand to squeeze on. Every other form of physical labor, he reflected unhappily, was made easier by the light gravity of Mars; but the labor of childbirth was eternally the same. And there was nothing he could do right now, except to offer her the reassurance of his presence. He stood and waited, gooseflesh cascading from the nape of his neck down his spine as she ground her teeth against the pain.

  When it was gone and she released his hand, he turned to the sterilizer for a fresh glove. One more examination, he decided. Something should be happening by now.

  He heard her deep inhalation behind him.

  “Anna’s so nice,” she sighed.

  HE HEARD the difference before he turned and saw it. Polly was lying back, completely relaxed, making the most of the time before the pain returned.

  “Yes, she is,” Tony said. He dropped the glove on the table; another examination wasn’t going to do any good, for her or for him. Quit the damned fiddling, he told himself. Sit and wait. You let that poor son-of-a-gun get you down. If she can wait, you can too. Be the doctor you would have been in Pittsburgh or Springfield—any Springfield on Earth. So you’re on Mars. So what? Sit and wait.

  He got a chair and put it next to the high bed, dropped his hand casually on the sheet where Polly could see it, where she could grab it again when she wanted to. He leaned back and forced himself, muscle by unwilling muscle, to relax.

  ii

  ON THE other side of the door, Jim raised his “coffee” cup for the fourth time to his lips, and for the fourth time put it down again untasted.

  “But what do you think, Anna?” he burst out. “How does it look to you? You’d know if there was anything . . . wrong.”

  “It looks all right to me,” she said again, gently. “It looks like a normal delivery.”

  “But she’s been—she started at six o’clock this morning! Why should it take so long?”

  “Sometimes it does. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. It’s hard work, that’s all. It takes time.” It was useless to tell him not to worry. She went over to the work counter that ran the length of the rectangular room. “I don’t think it’ll be much longer now, Jim. Do you want to try and get some sleep while you wait? Or if you’re going to stay up, could you give me a hand here?” She pulled out materials quickly.

  “Sure.” He got up, still holding the cup as though he didn’t even know it was in his hand. “I mean, I’ll be glad to help.” He let Anna relieve him of the cup, and accepted an alky torch, never wondering why she should choose to start a job at half-past midnight.

  “Look,” he said desperately, “you would tell me, wouldn’t you, if it wasn’t going right? He—Tony wouldn’t want to keep me from knowing, would he? She never got this far before, you know.”

  “Believe me, Jim, if there were anything wrong, Tony would tell you. And I don’t know any more than you do. You were in there longer than I was. Here, hold the flame down this way, will you?”

  For just a minute, he turned his attention to the work. “But why wouldn’t he tell me anything?”

  “Because there was nothing to tell, I imagine.” Even Anna’s patience could wear thin. Deftly, she removed the torch from his hand before the down-turned flame could do any damage.

  Kandro wanted to yell: you don’t know, none of you know, twelve years we’re been married and a man and a woman want kids, and none of you know how we want kids and all she does is gel so sick you think she’s dying and she never got this far before and you just don’t know . . .

  He saw in Anna’s eyes that he didn’t have to say it, that she did understand. Her arms went out a little, and the big, rawboned man flopped on his knees before the plain little woman and sobbed with his head awkwardly pillowed against her.

  iii

  AT 3:37 A.M., Dr. Tony Hellman adjusted a tiny oxygen mask over the red button nose of a newborn infant, wiped it and wrapped it, and returned his attention to the mother. He reached for the buzzer that would summon Anna from the other room to help; but he didn’t push it. Kandro was sure to come storming in with her, and Polly was too wakeful and excited as it was. Then, too, there was a certain perverse satisfaction in doing the whole job himself, even the messy wiping up operations that would be left to a student nurse back on Earth.

  WHEN he had finished, he overrode Polly’s plan to stay awake and stare at her baby. He gave her a stiff shot of sedative to make certain, then decided to give her her OxEn pill for the next day as well, hoping she would sleep through till late morning.

  Only since the development of the magic pink pellets, containing the so-called “oxygen enzyme,” had it been possible for most human beings to live a normal life on Mars. Before that, anyone who did not have the rare good luck to possess naturally Marsworthy lungs lived permanently in an oxygen mask. Now masks were needed only for babies too small to tolerate the pill.

  The miracle enzyme made the air of Mars as useful to human lungs as the native atmosphere of Earth . . . always provided the human in question took his pill religiously every day. Let thirty hours go by without renewing the treatment, and he would be dying, within minutes, of anoxemia.

  Tony took a last look at the baby, made sure the tiny mask was properly adjusted, and checked the oxy tank for proper flow’. Polly was already half-asleep. He went quietly past her bed, and opened the door to his living room.

  “Sh!” Anna turned from her workbench, her face warm and cheerful. She pointed to the bunk where Jim, fully dressed in tunic and sandboots, lay fast asleep. “Everything all right?”

  Tony nodded. “Damn sight better than I expected.” After the glaring light of the hospital room, the quiet dark in here was good. More than that, Anna’s untroubled presence served to dissolve all the nervous tension of the hours before. Suddenly too fatigued even to talk, he finished briefly, “Boy—five pounds two ounces, Earth weight—good color—strong too.”

  “Good.” Anna returned her attention to the work. “I’ll finish this up and then go sit with her. I’ll call you if she needs anything.”

  “What about him?”

  Anna glanced at Jim’s sprawled figure. “He’ll be all right.” She smiled. “He can wait a few hours to meet his son.”

  For just a moment more the doctor stood there, watching her, fascinated as always by her delicate art. A puff on the tube, a twist as it reddened in the flame, a spin against an iron tool, another puff. All of it casual, seemingly random, and then, somehow, there was a finished piece of work—part of the intricate glass tubing always needed at the Lab, a fragile-looking piece of stemware for some new colonist’s household
, a precise hypodermic syringe for himself.

  He watched till his weary eyes refused the bright spot of light where the pale flame washed over the glowing glass. Then he stumbled into the adjoining bedroom and slept.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE Lab was the cash drop of Sun Lake. Mars had a slight case of radioactivity, nothing you couldn’t live with, but enough to enable Sun Lake City Colony to concentrate and isolate radioisotopes and radioactive organics for sale on Earth at better than competitive prices, even after the stiff tariff for transport.

  The materials handled were only mildly dangerous, but it was the doctor’s job to render them effectively not dangerous at all. Twice a day, before work started in the morning and again before quitting time, Tony geigered the whole place. On this precaution the whole community depended, not only for safeguarding their sole source of income, but for their very lives. Every adult member of the Colony did work at least indirectly connected with the Lab; all of them spent some time there.

  Among other things, it was the only building with a large enough room to serve for social functions. And it offered the only possible change from mud-colored walls, from isomorphic rooms, all just 15x15, from cement floors and wall bunks. The Lab had everything the other buildings lacked—steel framework and alumalloy wall sheathing; copper tubing and running hot water; built-in power outlets, Earth-made furniture; even the blessings of an Earth-import air filtering system.

  The one kilometer walk out to the Lab in the early morning always infused the doctor with a glowing sense of confidence and well-being. In a year on Mars, he had lost little of his first pleasure in the buoyancy afforded by the low gravity. Walking was effortless; and, in the thin air, an hour’s sunlight was enough to clear the night’s chill from the open spaces. At noon, the sun would be too bright; in the evening, the cold would return as suddenly as it had departed. Now, in the first part of the morning, it was like a perfect autumn day on Earth.

  Behind him, in the houses that lined both sides of the colony’s single curved street, people were dressing hurriedly, eating, making plans, getting ready for the day’s work. Ahead, the shining blue walls of the Lab were set off against the magnificent backdrop of Lacus Solis itself. The ancient sea bed was alive again with color as the early sun’s rays glinted off millions of tiny particles, the salts and minerals of Mars deposited by long-dried waters in millennia past. The clean lines of the new building against that sparkling expanse constituted at once a challenge and a reassurance—this is what man can do; here is everything he needs to do it with.

  If we can . . . a second chance for man, if we can learn how to use it . . .

  Tony unlocked the storage cabinet built into the massive lead-lined door of the Lab. He took out his suit of protective armor—probably the only Earth-import wearing apparel ever bought and paid for by the Colony—but before he got into it, he turned to look back just once at the little huddle of houses where, a few hours ago, Polly Kandro had affirmed her faith in Sun Lake’s future in the most emphatic personal manner.

  THE solidity of the Lab was a disagreeable symbol of the Colony’s present status; it was still the only decent structure Sun Lake had to show. Halfway up the almost imperceptible three kilometer slope from “canal” bed at his left to “sea” level at his right sat the Colony, lumpishly. Every building, like Tony’s own home-and-hospital, was tamped native dirt. The arc of dull rust-brown huts squatting close to the ground and close to each other presented to Tony a monotonous row of identical plastic-windowed backsides.

  Behind them, fields A, B, C, and D showed, even from the Lab, the work of Sun Lake’s “mudkickers”—the agronomists who, using tools as ancient as the harrow and as modern as the mutation-creating particles that stream from a cyclotron, were changing Mars plants into things that could nourish an Earth animal, and changing Earth plants into things that could draw nourishment from the grudging Martian soil.

  Mutated bean plants whose ancestors had been a button-bearing Mars cactus dotted field A. Mutated cauliflowers—the size of apples, dark brown and still manufacturing in themselves too much potassium cyanide to be edible—darkened field B; another few plant-generations and they would be food for the Colony table, though tasting somewhat of the neutralized cyanide bitter almonds.

  Ten kilometers beyond the fields of bastard Earth-Mars vegetation, there had been beauty only recently—the fantastically eroded Rimrock Hills. Five months ago, however, the first pre-fab shacks had gone up in the camp on the other side of the hills. Three months ago the first furnace had been fired at Pittco Three: Pittsburgh Coal, Coke and Iron Company’s Mars Metal Refining Plant Number Three. Now a dirty shroud of yellow-stained smoke draped the peaks from dawn to dark.

  With a feeling of intense distaste, Tony started climbing into his suit of armor. A second chance for man . . .

  His own high-flown thoughts mocked him. Another chance to do exactly as they had done on Earth. Already the clean air of Mars was thickening with the eructations of Earth’s commerce. Nor was the camp beyond the hill a lone offender. Even Sun Lake, to survive at all, had to maintain a cash crop economy—and the Lab was the potentially deadly crop.

  Tony made sure that every flap on his suit was zippered and closed, and the last adjustments made on the helmet. He picked up the hand counter from the bottom of the compartment and worked the screw around to calibrate out Mars’ naturally heavy background “noise.” The needle eased to zero on the dial. Only then did he open the heavy door of the Lab itself and begin his slow trip of inspection through the building.

  ALL areas were well under the threshold of danger, as usual, except for a hot patch in the isotope room. Tony chalked a yellow line around the spot and marked the door of the room with a bright yellow cross. Finished, he headed straight for the clean-up room and checked the condition of the exterior of his suit against the bigger stationary radiation counter that was kept there.

  Not until he was sure he hadn’t picked up anything on gloves or boots did he remove his suit and dump it down the chute for routine de-radiation. He hated to take time for the rest of the procedure today: he had to check with the men who were working in the hot spot; he had to get back to the hospital to see Polly; he had a patient, Joan Radcliff, who worried him badly. What was more, he’d slept too late to eat breakfast at the communal table shared by most unmarried Colony members; he hadn’t even had “coffee”—and he missed it. But after the number of times he’d nagged the others about skimping on safety precautions, he couldn’t pass up any of them himself.

  He stripped and dumped his clothes down another chute, sand-scrubbed himself, and holding his breath, walked through the stinking alcohol spray. Methyl alcohol, cheaper and easier to produce in the Lab than water, and sand for soap made bathing an ordeal instead of the pleasant ritual it had been on Earth.

  Tony moved fast, but by the time he had put on a fresh tunic and boots and emerged into the central hall, the Lab was already full of people getting set for the day’s work. He edged past a knot of busy conversationalists in the corridor.

  “Hey, Doc . . .”

  He paused, and that was his undoing.

  “How’s Polly? Tony, hold on—how’s the baby? Are they all right?—Doc, wait a minute. Did everything go all right?—Where are they?—What is it . . .?”

  HE ANSWERED the same questions a dozen times. It seemed that half the population of Sun Lake was in the corridor with him, and they all wanted to know the same tiling. Finally, despairing of getting through until he had satisfied them all, Tony climbed up on a chair and addressed the crowd.

  “Five pounds, two ounces, Earth weight—a boy—wrigglingest baby I ever saw. Plenty lively, and he looks just like his old man. What else do you want to know?”

  “How’s Polly?”

  “Fine. So’s Jim.” The hoary joke got its inevitable laugh.

  Then one of the chemists said, “I make a motion for a birthday present. Let’s build that other room onto the Kandro house right now.�
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  It was an offer that had been made months before, and that Polly, hesitant and slightly superstitious, had refused. “There’ll be time enough after the baby’s born,” she had told them, and stuck to it.

  Tony knew why; knew about the first time, eleven years before, when she had carried a child for seven months, and then had to pack away all the things she had lovingly collected for its birth. They had stayed in their cartons for four more years, and two more miscarriages, before she gave them tearfully to a luckier woman.

  “When is she going home, Doc?” one of the electronics men asked. “How much time have we got?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow morning,” Tony told them. “She’s in pretty good shape. It’s just a matter of where she’ll be most comfortable. I don’t imagine she’ll want to stay in the hospital very long . . . After all, it’s not exactly designed for luxurious convalescence.” They were all familiar with the crowded little room; he waited for a dutiful laugh to die down, and added, “I think tomorrow will be about right . . . not later than the day after.”

  “We better get started then,” Mimi Jonathan, the pert blackhaired Lab administrator, spoke up. “Suppose I make up some work parties, and we get things going?”

  She produced a pencil and paper and began taking down the names and abilities of everyone whose Lab work was not too pressing. Two groups of volunteers left promptly, to collect soil from the old “canal” bottom, and to set up the frames for ramming. Others would have to stay in the Lab to set up the machinery for work on the synthetics that would paint the new room, build the new furniture, and clothe the new baby. While Mimi plunged into the complexities of reassigning work space and job time, the doctor managed to get away from the enthusiastic crowd.

  He made his way to the isotopes room, and was happy to find Sam Flexner, the chemist in charge, waiting for him at the yellow-chalked door, Apparently his harping on safety rules had penetrated in at least one case; Sam knew enough to stay on the spot even in the midst of the sudden excitement over the baby.