Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Can’t be worse than the stuff I used to guzzle in Philly,” Graham said blandly, but he stepped out quickly enough and followed the doctor’s advice about a lanolin rub-down afterward.

  “Dinner time now,” said Tony, buttoning on his tunic. “Mess hall’s here in the Lab. Only building big enough.”

  “Synthetics?” asked Graham.

  “No, that’s not the Sun Lake idea. We want to get on an agricultural cycle as fast as we can. Sun Lake has to be able to live on vegetables that grow naturally, without any fertilization except our own waste products. Naturally we’re strong on beans, kudzu, yams, goobers—any of the nitrogen-fixing plants that contain some natural protein. You’ll see.”

  GRAHAM saw, he tasted, he expectorated. Into the shocked silence of the half-dozen at the table, he muttered an embarrassed apology and manfully choked down almost half of his vegetable plate—Mars beans, barley, stewed greens and another kind of stewed greens.

  To Tony he muttered when conversation had sprung up again: “But why do they taste like a hospital smells? Do you have to disinfect them or something?”

  Joe Gracey overheard it from the other side of the table. “That’s my department,” he said. “No, it isn’t disinfectant. What you and most other people don’t realize is that we with our Lab are pikers compared with the lowliest cabbage in synthesizing chemicals. We taste the chemicals in our Earth plants and we accept them as the way they ought to taste. These are unfamiliar because these are Mars plants modified so that their chemicals aren’t poison to Earth animals, or Earth plants modified so that Mars soil isn’t poison to them. We’re still breeding on this barley, which is generating too much iodoform for me to be really happy. If I can knock one carbon out of the ring—but you don’t care about that. Just be glad we didn’t try out the latest generation of our cauliflower on you instead of our test mice. The cauliflower, I’m sorry to say, generates prussic acid.”

  “Stick with those mice!” said Graham with a greenish smile.

  “Only guaranteed-Earth animals on Mars, including you,” said Madge Cassidy, beside Graham. He watched her wonderingly as she finished her barley with apparent enjoyment.

  “How was that again?”

  “My mice. The only animals on Mars guaranteed non-mutated. We have them behind tons of concrete and lead with remote feeding. It’d be no joke if some of the natural Mars radioactivity or some of the stuff flying around the Lab mutated them so they’d gobble Mars food that was still poison to people.”

  “You mean I might go back to Earth and have a two-headed baby?”

  “It’s possible,” said Madge, getting to work on variety number one of stewed greens. “Odds are somewhat higher than it happening from cosmic rays or industrial radioactivity on Earth. But mouse generations go by so fast that with them it’s a risk we can’t take. Some of the pork-and-beaners died very unpleasant deaths when they tried eating Mars plants as a last resort. It was the last resort, all right.”

  “But isn’t anything on Mars good to eat?”

  “A couple of items,” Gracey told him. “Stuff that would probably be poisonous to any native animal life, if there was any. You find the same kind of thing on Earth—plants that don’t seem to be good for anything in their native environment. My theory is that the ancestors of poison ivy and other such things aren’t really Earth plants at all, but came to Earth, maybe as spores aboard meteorites. We need a broader explanation of the development of life than the current theories offer. We’ve grown a giant barley here, for instance, out of transplanted Earth stock, but it wouldn’t be viable there. The gene was lethal on Earth. Here—”

  HE RATTLED on, to the accompaniment of Graham’s nods of agreement, until Harve Stillman broke in: “Hey, there was a rumor through the radio relay today. You know about it, Mr. Graham?”

  “Doug,” the writer corrected.

  “Okay,” Harve smiled. “About marcaine—no, not about us,” he added hastily. “About marcaine being forbidden in Tartary. The Cham pronounced a rescript or whatever it is, and according to the guys in Marsport that means the price goes up, and Brenner’s business is doubled. Do you know anything about it, Doug?”

  The newsman looked surprised. “It was all over the ship,” he told them. “-Everybody was talking about it. How come you don’t get it till now? The radio op on board told me he spilled it in his first message to PAC.”

  “It’s true then?” Gracey asked sharply.

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m only a reporter myself.” He looked across to Tony. “Don’t tell me Marsport wasn’t buzzing with it. Brenner, knew, didn’t he?”

  “No,” the doctor said slowly. “I didn’t hear anything about it there . . .” But he had heard of a rumor; who was it? Chabrier! Of course, that was Chabrier’s rumor: marcaine prices going up, production will double, Brenner needs a new plant, needs a doctor, too . . .

  Tony stood up abruptly. “Excuse me. Gracey, are you finished? Want to come along?”

  The agronomist rose quickly, and the two left together. On the way to collect Nick and go over to the Jonathans’, Tony explained the situation rapidly to Gracey.

  “I wanted to get the Council together tonight anyhow,” he finished up, “to tell you about my idiotic brawl with Brenner. I don’t know what kind of jam that’s going to land us in. But this business ties in with what Chabrier told me. Rocket to Bell and Bell to Brenner, and the rest of us can get the news whenever the Commissioner gets around to it!”

  “It makes a nasty picture,” the agronomist agreed soberly. “Now what? Where do we go from here?”

  “Damned if I know. Maybe one of the others can figure it.” He knocked sharply on Nick’s door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “IT DOESN’T matter,” Mimi said firmly. “We still have to go through with the search.”

  “That’s how I see it, too,” Tony admitted. “We can’t bring any accusations until we know our own slate is clean.”

  “If we could only get hold of the Bloodhound . . .”

  “Bell refused.”

  “And that means no matter how carefully we search, he can still come in afterward and claim it wasn’t done properly.”

  “Could we rent one or buy it?” Gracey wanted to know.

  “Government property only,” Mimi told him. “O’Donnell checked on that the other day.”

  “Okay, so we have to do it without the Bloodhound.” Nick jumped up and paced the length of the room restlessly. “‘I bet I could build one if we only had a little time . . . Well, we have to go ahead, that’s all. Where does Graham come in?”

  TONY realized they were waiting for an answer from him. “I don’t know. He has no use for Bell, but he doesn’t exactly rise to the bait when I throw it at him either. I think we better go slow and feel him out. He didn’t seem to go for the blunt approach when Chabrier and the others tried it.”

  “Slow?” Nick stormed. “Man, we’ve got six days! Go slow?”

  “As fast as we can,” Gracey put in. “We still have to get the search finished. I think we have to do that before we ask Graham anything. He has to have some facts to work with.”

  “Right,” Mimi agreed. “Now let’s get our plans organized. If we start at dawn, maybe we can do the whole unpacking operation tomorrow . . . then we can hit Graham. Means we’ll have to leave crates open and repack them later, but I don’t see any alternative now. How long is Graham staying, Tony?”

  “He said maybe three days.”

  “Okay, then that’s how we’ve got to do it. Maybe by tomorrow night we’ll know better how to get at the guy.”

  They spent a busy ten minutes outlining the plan of operations, and then the three men went out, leaving the details for Mimi to settle.

  Tony walked down the settlement street slowly, trying to get his thoughts in order. It had been a long day—three-fifteen in the morning when Tad woke him, and now there was still work to do.

  Stopping in at the hospital to collect his bag, he found Gra
ham kibitzing idly with Harve in his living room.

  “Just waiting for you, Doc.” Stillman stood up. “I have to get over to the radio shack. Tad’s on the p.m. shift this week, but he fell asleep before supper, so I’ve got to take over tonight.”

  Tony surveyed his guest uncomfortably. “Anything you’d like?” he asked. “I have to go out and see a couple of patients. Won’t be too long.”

  “Could I go along?” Graham asked. “I’d like to, if it’s all right with you.”

  “Sure. I want you to see the baby I was talking about anyhow. My other patient is pretty sick; you may have to wait while I look in on her.”

  They stopped at the Radcliff’s first, but Joan was asleep and she usually got so little rest that Tony decided not to disturb her. Anna had said she’d had a fairly good day. He’d see her tomorrow.

  “Where is this infant?” Graham asked as they walked down the Colony street.

  “Here. This is the Kandros’ place. Hello, Polly,” Tony said as the door opened, even before he knocked. “I brought Mr. Graham along to visit. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I . . . no, of course not. How do you do? Come in, won’t you?” Her manner was absurdly formal, and her appearance was alarming.

  Tony wondered when she had last slept. Her eyes were over alert, her lips too tight, her neck and shoulders stiff with tension.

  “How’s Sunny?” He walked into the new room where the crib stood, and the others followed. He wished now that he hadn’t brought Graham along.

  “The same,” Polly told him. “I just tried. You see?”

  THE baby in its basket was sputtering feebly, its face flushed bright red. We’re going to lose that youngster, thought the doctor grimly, unless I start intravenous feeding, and soon.

  “Tell me something, please, Doctor,” she burst out, ignoring the reporter’s presence. “Could it be my fault? I’m anxious—I know that. Could that be why Sunny doesn’t eat right?”

  Tony considered. “Yes, to a degree, but it couldn’t account for all the trouble. Are you really so tense? What’s it all about?”

  “You know how it was with us,” she said evasively. “We tried so many times on Earth. And then here we thought at first it’d be like all the other times, but, Tony, do you think—is Mars dangerous?” He saw she’d changed her mind in mid-confession and substituted the inane question for whatever she had started to ask. He intended to get to the bottom of it.

  Over the woman’s shoulder, he looked meaningfully at Graham. The reporter grimaced, shrugged, and obligingly drifted back to the living room.

  Tony lowered his voice and told the woman: “Of course Mars is dangerous. It’s dangerous now; it was dangerous before you had Sunny. I’m a little surprised at you, Polly. Some women think that having a baby ought to change the world into a pink spun-candy heaven. It doesn’t. You’ve had Sunny; he’s a small animal and you love him and he needs your care, but Mars is still what it always was. The terrain’s rugged and some of the people aren’t what they ought to be. But. . .”

  “Tell me about the murder,” she said flatly.

  “Oh, is that what you’re jumpy about? I saw worse every night I rode the meat wag—rode the ambulance at Massachusetts General. What’s that got to do with Sunny?”

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid. Tell me about it, Doctor, please.”

  He wondered what vague notion of terror she had got stuck in her head—and wondered whether it would come out.

  “You’re the doctor,” he said, shrugging. “The girl who got killed was named Big Ginny, as you may have heard. If you’d been on the wagon with me in Boston, you’d know there’s nothing unusual about it. Women like that often get beaten up, sometimes beaten to death by their customers. The customers are usually drunk, sometimes full of dope; they get the idea that they’re being cheated and they slug the girl. Another call for the wagon.”

  “I heard,” she said, “that she was beaten to death with a lot of light blows. No man would do that. And I heard that Nick Cantrella saw footprints out by the caves—naked footprints. He thought they were children’s.”

  “Whose do you think they were?” he asked, though he had a sickly feeling that he knew what she’d say.

  POLLY moaned, “It was brownies! I told you I saw one and you didn’t believe me! Now they’ve killed this woman and they’re leaving footprints around and you still don’t believe me! You think I’m crazy! You all think I’m crazy! They want my baby and you won’t listen to me!”

  Tony thought he knew what was going on in her head and he didn’t like it. She had seen the attention of the Colony shift from her baby to the marcaine search, and was determined to bring it back, even if it had to be by a ridiculous ruse. She’d heard all the foolish stories about the mythical brownies; she’d had a vivid anxiety dream—which, he reminded himself, she had finally admitted was only a dream—and now she was collecting “evidence” to build herself up as the interesting victim of a malignant persecution.

  “We’ve been over all this before,” he told her wearily. “You agreed that you didn’t really see anything. And you agreed that there couldn’t be any brownies because no animal life has ever been found on Mars—no brownies, and nothing brownies could evolve from. Now . . .”

  “Doctor,” she broke in, “I’ve got to show you something.” She reached into the baby’s basket and drew out something that glinted darkly in her hand.

  “Good Lord, what are you doing with a gun?” the doctor demanded.

  There was no more conflict on her face or hesitancy in her voice. “You can say I’m crazy, Tony, but I’m afraid. I think there could be such things as brownies. And I’m going to be ready for them if they come.” She looked at the little weapon tensely and then put it back under the pad in the crib.

  Tony promptly drew it out. “Now listen, Polly, if you want to believe in brownies or ghosts or Santa Claus, that’s your business. But you certainly should know better than to leave the gun near him. I’m going to give you a sedative, Polly, and maybe after a good—”

  “No,” she said. “No sedative. I’ll be all right. But can I keep the gun?”

  She wiped her eyes and, with an effort, laid her twitching hands quietly in her lap.

  “If you know how to use it and keep the safety on and put it some place besides under Sunny’s mattress, I don’t see why not. But all the brownies you’ll ever shoot with it you could stick in your eye and never notice.”

  “Like the old lady, maybe I don’t believe in ghosts but I’m terribly afraid of them?” She tried to laugh and Tony managed a smile with her.

  “Nothing wrong with blowing your top once in a while. Nothing at all. Women ought to bawl oftener.”

  She grinned weakly and said:

  “Maybe Sunny’s going to eat better now.”

  “I hope so. I’ll see you tomorrow, Polly.”

  ii

  AS THEY walked down the street in a strained, embarrassed silence, Graham looked as if he wanted to ask something. He finally did: “By the way, Tony, do you know where I’m supposed to sleep? Or where I’d find my bag? It was on the plane.”

  “Might as well stay with me. And your baggage ought to be at the Campbells. Tad Campbell was that young sprout who deflated my fight with Brenner.”

  The baggage, a sizable B-4 bag on which Graham must have paid a ruinous overweight charge, was at the Campbells. After picking it up, the writer followed the doctor to his hospital-hut.

  Tony snapped a heat beam on the two plastic chairs—standard furnishings of a Sun Lake living room—and took off his sandboots with a grunt. Graham rooted through his baggage, picked up Chabrier’s gaudy package and hefted it thoughtfully, then shook his head and dove in again. He came up grinning, with another bottle.

  “How about it, Doc?” he asked. “This is Earthside.”

  “It’s been a long time,” Tony sighed. “I’ll get a couple of glasses.”

  The stuff went down like silken fire. It had been a very lon
g time.

  “What’s about brownies?” the writer asked suddenly. “I couldn’t help hearing part of that when I went out of the room.”

  Tony shook his head. “Brownies! As if we didn’t have enough trouble here, without inventing Martian monsters . . .”

  “Well, what about them? All I’ve ever heard is that deep purple scene in Granata’s interplanetary show. It’s silly stuff, but nobody’s handled it yet at all except Granata. Maybe I could use something; it’s a beautiful story if there’s anything at all to back it up. Does anybody claim a connection between fairy book brownies and the Martian variety?”

  “Two ways. First of all, Mars brownies are just as much a fairy story as the Earthside kind. Second, somebody once suggested that the ones in the story books were the space traveling ancestors of the present-day hallucinations.”

  “Could be,” the gunther reflected. “Could be . . .”

  “Could be a lot of rot,” Tony said without heat. “Space travel requires at an absolute minimum the presence of animal life—or at least mobile, intelligent life. Show me so much, as one perambulating vegetable on Mars, let alone a native animal life-form. Then it’s likely I’ll think about brownies some more.”

  “How about a declining race?” Graham speculated. “Suppose they were space travelers, on a high level of civilization—they might have killed off all lesser life-forms. You see it happening some on Earth, and back there it’s just a matter of living-space. We don’t have the problem the Martians had to face, of dwindling water and oxygen supplies. Probably got them in the end, and destroyed their civilization . . . except,” he added, “for the ones who got to Earth. I understand from authoritative sources that the last expedition to Earth was led by a guy named Oberon.” Graham chuckled and drank, then asked seriously: “Has anybody ever seen one, except Granata?”

  “Hundreds of people,” Tony said drily. “Ask any one of the old prospectors who come into town hauling dirt. They’ve all seen ’em, lived with ’em; some even claim to have been at baby-feasts. You’ll get all the stories you want out of any of the old geezers.”