Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  We ought to have Tony train somebody besides Anna, she thought. There’s Harve, but he only knows radio-health. And then she remembered that it didn’t matter; Sun Lake wouldn’t last that long.

  SHE heard a plane coming in at the landing field and wondered whose. Hank stirred in the bedroom and she tensed, but then she heard the creak of his big body slumping back into the chair. He wouldn’t break. He had too much of the old Marsman in him, the tough old breed, in the old days, if she’d been assigning a pair of girls to an audit program, she wouldn’t have made a match like Hank and Joan—one starry-eyed and on fire for an ideal; the other solidly and physically in love with far places for their farness and mystery. But it had worked here and they’d had their measure of happiness before they had to taste their measure of hell.

  Hank should have come earlier. He should have been one of the first, eating out of cans, mapping and mining, bearded to his waist, inarticulate, but sure about what he wanted. Joan should have come later. She should have been an immigrant after the colony had licked Mars medicine, while there still was grinding work and sacrifice enough to please the most impassioned, but not so much that a frail body would crumple under it.

  But there wasn’t going to be any “later,” of course. It was hard to get used to that realization.

  She got up and had a drink of water from the wall canteen, and then, defiantly, another, because it didn’t matter now. She felt like taking on the world for Sun Lake.

  Joan must have felt like that. Their water supply was scanty, but it was water—not the polluted fluid of Earth, chlorinated to the last potable degree.

  THE intercom in the bedroom buzzed. She walked in and picked it up, glanced at Hank, still numbly staring.

  “‘Hello, Mimi.” It was Harve. “Answer from Bell. Quote: ‘RE ASSAULT ON DOUGLAS GRAHAM I AND DETAIL OF GUARDS WILL TAKE ACTION THIS MATTER. REQUEST USE PAC FACILITIES DENIED. HAMILTON BELL’ et cetera. What do you figure he’ll do—try and pin the Graham slugging on us too?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. What plane was that?”

  “Brenner’s. Snooty bastard didn’t even check in with us. Just sat right down on the field.”

  “He might as well. He’ll own it soon enough.”

  She heard Harve clear his throat embarrassedly. “Well, I guess that’s all.”

  “Goodby,” she agreed, hanging up. She shouldn’t have said that; she was supposed to pretend that while there was life there was hope.

  “Hank?” she asked gently and inquiringly.

  He looked up. “I’m all right, thanks.”

  He wasn’t, but there was nothing she could do. She looked through the door to the hospital. Graham seemed to be dozing. She sat down in the living room again.

  Brenner came in without knocking. “They told me you were here, Mrs. Jonathan. I wonder if we could go to your office in the Lab. I want to talk business.”

  “I’m staying here,” she said shortly. “If you want to talk here, I’ll listen.”

  Brenner shrugged and sat down. “Do we have privacy?”

  “There’s a boy in the next room going crazy with grief over his dead wife—and over the prospect of leaving Mars. And there’s a badly beaten man sleeping in the hospital quarters.”

  The drug manufacturer lowered his voice. “Relative privacy,” he said. “Mrs. Jonathan, you have the only business head in the Colony.” He opened his briefcase on the table and edged the corner of a sheaf of bills from one of its pockets. The top one was a thousand dollars. He didn’t look at it, but riffled the sheaf with his thumb, slowly, like a gambler manipulating a deck of cards. They were all thousands, and there were over one hundred of them.

  “It’s going to be very hard on some of the colonists, I’m afraid,” he said conversationally.

  “You have no idea.”

  “It needn’t be that hard on all of them.” His thumb flipped the big bills. “Your colony is facing an impossible situation, Mrs. Jonathan. Let’s not mince words; it’s a matter of bankruptcy and forced sale. I’m in a position to offer you a chance to retreat in good order, with some money in your pockets.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Brenner. I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Please,” he smiled, “let’s not be coy. I’m being perfectly candid with you. If it comes to a forced sale, I intend to bid as high as necessary; I need this property. But I’m not a man who believes in leaving things to chance. Why shouldn’t you sell out to me now? It would save yourselves the humiliation of bankruptcy, and I believe everyone concerned would benefit financially.”

  “You realize I’m not in a position to close any deals, Mr. Brenner?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course. You have a council in charge here, don’t you? And you’re a member. You could plead my case with them.”

  “I suppose I could.”

  “All right.” He smiled again, and his thumb continued to riffle the pile of bills. “Then I have to plead it first with you. Why should you stay on Mars? In the hope that ‘something’ will turn up? Believe me, it will not. Your commercial standing will be gone. Nobody would dream of extending credit to the people who were six months behind on their deliveries. Nothing will turn up, Mrs. Jonathan.”

  “What if the stolen marcaine turns up?”

  “Then, of course—” He smiled and shrugged.

  MIMI read a momentary alarm in his face. For the first time since the crisis she entertained the thought that it was not a frameup.

  She pressed harder. “What if we’re just waiting to hand Bell the hundred kilos and the thief?” Brenner turned inscrutable again. “Then something else will happen. And if the Colony survives that, something else again.” He quickly denied the implication of sabotage by adding: “You have a fundamentally untenable financial situation here. Insufficient reserves, foggy motives—what businessman can trust you when he knows that your Lab production workers might walk out one fine day and stay out? They aren’t bound by salaries but by idealism.”

  “It’s kept us going.”

  “Until now. Come, Mrs. Jonathan, I said I wanted an advocate in the Council.” He thumbed out the deck of bills all the way from the pocket in the opened briefcase. “You have a business head. You know that if you do produce my marcaine and the thief, Mr. Graham’s little story—which I read with great interest—will be another bad hump to get over. There will be more.”

  He meant two things: more humps, and more sheafs of thousand dollar bills for her if she took the bribe.

  Mimi smiled without moving a muscle of her face. It had been a long time since she had talked this kind of talk, but she still knew how. The smile stayed inside her head; her face displayed only the most casual interest.

  “Are you offering to buy the Colony, Mr. Brenner? Would you care to name a price?”

  “What are you asking?” he countered.

  Oh, no, she thought, you’re not getting any with that.

  “All right, we’ll play it your way,” she said. “Name two prices. You want to buy my services, too, don’t you?”

  “Whatever gives you that notion? I’m not trying to bribe you, Mrs. Jonathan.” He picked up the sheaf of bills and placed them in front of her. “There’s a hundred thousand here. I can bring another—say another four hundred thousand—for a down payment, whenever you say. My price for the Colony,” he added distinctly, “is exactly five million.”

  “Plus your down payment?” she asked, amused.

  “That’s right.”

  “That would just about pay all our fares back to Earth. We’ll smash the Lab to bits before we let you get it for any such price.”

  “You’ll rot in prison if you do,” Brenner said easily. “There is an injunction on file at Marsport signed by Commissioner Bell restraining you from any such foolishness. An act of contempt would mean imprisonment for all of you.

  I mean all.”

  “No such paper has been served on us.”

  “The Commissio
ner assured me it had been served. I don’t doubt his word. Not many people, including appeals judges, would doubt his word either.”

  MIMI didn’t dare answer this display of force. She set her teeth and thought about five million—and five hundred thousand. Passage home, the respectability of having sold instead of going bankrupt, maybe the chance of another charter and another try—

  “It’ll have to be put into form by the Council and voted on by the entire Colony,” she said painfully. “You wanted an advance. Take your money back; I’m not for sale. But I will plead your case if you’ll make it ten million. God knows, it’s a bargain. There’s absolutely no depreciation on the Lab to be figured. It’s better now than it ever was. Maintenance has always been top-level. Better than anything you’ll ever be able to find in industry.”

  “Five million and five hundred thousand was my offer. I’m not the Croesus uninformed people take-me for. I have my expenses on the marcaine distribution end, you know.”

  ii

  TONY sweated out the time. Eight minutes creeping along the chalk line in the dark—he’d left the light with Anna. Five minutes scrabbling over the boulders at the cave opening on the face of the Hill. Twelve long minutes talking the guards into leaving, and a painful tortured eternity—maybe another twelve minutes reentering the cave and tracing the chalk line by the dim light borrowed from Ted.

  Tony was sweating ice by the time the radiance from Anna’s light came in view. He rounded the last curve in the winding passage, and something jumped up from the floor, straightened and stood, tense and watchful as the doctor.

  Anna, seated on the cold floor, laughed softly, melodiously.

  She was all right. Tony relaxed a little and instantly felt—something, a gentle stroking, a tentative touch, not on his head but in it. No menace, no danger. Friendship.

  The doctor stared across the cavern: leathery brown skin, barrel chest, big ears, skinny arms and legs; the height of a small man or a large boy; and—a telepath.

  The friendly touch on his mind persisted through his quick distaste, his exultation, his eagerness.

  “Anna,” very softly, “‘is it all right to talk?”

  “Not too loud. His ears are sensitive.”

  “Who is he? Are there more? Does he have Sunny? Ask him that, Anna—ask him!”

  “A Brownie,” she laughed again, joyously. “You told me that. There are four more down there, inside, with Sunny.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Yes. They took him to help him, not to do any harm. He needed something, but I can’t find out what.”

  The Brownie squatted again on the floor beside Anna. Tony approached slowly and sat down next to them.

  He felt goose-flesh and memories of old nursery book horrors, but nothing happened. He forced himself to ask Anna: “What kind of thing?”

  “Something to eat, I think. Something like the first sip of water when you’re thirsty, and as necessary as salt, and—good. Maybe like a vitamin, but it tastes wonderful.”

  Tony ran through a mental catalogue of biochemicals. But that was foolish; how could you tell what would taste good to anything as alien as a Brownie?

  “Have you tried sign language?” he asked Anna.

  “Where do you start?” she shrugged. “You’d have to build up a whole set of symbols before you could get anything across . . . Tony, I’m sure we can get the baby back if we just understand what it is he needs.”

  THE doctor reached over, hesitated, and forced himself to tap the Brownie lightly on the shoulder. When he had the creature’s attention, he whispered to Anna: “Tell him we’re trying to find out what it is.” He pointed to his own eyes. “Show us,” he said to the creature, and tried to project the thought, the image of seeing, as hard as he could.

  They kept repeating it with every possible combination of thought and act. Then, suddenly, the Brownie jumped and dashed off, down the tunnel.

  “Did he get the idea?” demanded Tony. “Is he coming back?”

  “It’s all right,” smiled Anna. “He understood.”

  Silence in the eerie place was almost unbearable.

  “Don’t worry so, Tony,” Anna said. “If you want to know, he almost scared the wits out of me, too. I was; sitting, trying to look down the little opening, and still—talking—to the ones down there, and he came up behind me. I was concentrating on them so I didn’t hear him, either way.”

  Tony sat back thoughtfully. It was all true then; his crazy theory was right—there were actually Brownies on Mars, a form of life so highly developed that it was telepathic, and with no lower life-forms to have evolved from. He wondered if he had hit the right explanation, too, but there was no other explanation.

  The brownie was back, carrying something, a box. Large letters in black on the side read:

  DANGER

  SEALED MARCAINE

  CONTAINER

  Do Not Open Without

  Authorization

  Brenner Pharmaceutical Co.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  TONY helped Anna dismount from the half-track, with her valuable burden in her arms. She jounced Sunny happily, and cooed down at the pink face. The doctor didn’t jounce his own burden; he lifted it down even more carefully than he had helped Anna. The marcaine box was tightly wrapped in his shirt and hers. They were counting on the several layers of cloth to trap escaping dust and protect them from marcaine jags, but the doctor still wasn’t taking any chances on stirring up the contents of the half-full box.

  They cut across the bare land in back of the row of houses, heading toward the curved street near the Kandros’.

  “Tony,” Anna asked anxiously again, “how are we possibly going to explain it?”

  “I told you I don’t know.” He was only a little irritable. They had the baby; they had the marcaine. “We’ll have to talk to Mimi and Joe and Nick, and probably the others too. We’ll see how it goes . . .”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” she stopped him. “I mean to Polly. And Jim. Jim isn’t going to like it unless he hears the whole story, and I don’t know if we ought to . . .”

  “Like it or not,” Tony said briskly, “Kandro’ll do what I tell him to. We’ll have to tell them it’s marcaine; I don’t dare risk mislabeling the stuff. You’ll have to blow some ampoules for it, I guess, and I’ll figure out some way of wetting it down and getting it into them. But you’re right,” he added, “if you mean we shouldn’t say any more than we have to just now.”

  They stepped onto the packed dirt of the street and cut across to the Kandros’.

  Joe Gracey was sitting alone in the living room.

  “Praise God,” he said quietly, and called: “Polly! Jim!” The couple appeared, red-eyed, at the nursery door, saw their baby, and flew to him.

  “You gave him to us again, Doc!” said Jim. “Thanks.”

  Polly was more practical: “Has he eaten? Is he well? He looks all right, but—”

  “You can feed him in a minute. Now listen carefully. This young man of yours, you know, is special in some ways. He can take the Mars air and like it. It turns out that there’s something else he needs—something that’s good for him and bad for other people, just like the Mars air. It’s marcaine.”

  Polly’s face went white. Jim began a guffaw of unbelief that turned into a frown. He asked carefully: “How can that be, Doc? What is this all about? And who took him? We have a right to know.”

  Anna came to Tony’s rescue. “‘You’re not going to know right now,” she said tartly. “If you think that’s hard on you, it’s just too bad. You’ve got your baby back; now leave the doctor alone until he’s ready to tell you more.”

  Jim opened his mouth and shut it again. Polly asked only: “Doctor, are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. And it won’t have anything like the effect on Sunny that it had on you. But it’s real marcaine, all right, and he’s got to have it or die.”

  “Like OxEn?” asked Kandro. “It’s only fair in a way . .
.”

  TONY ignored him. “I guess you’re going to have to wean the baby after all, Polly,” he said. “You can’t keep taking marcaine for Sunny’s sake. But for now, I guess you might as well nurse him. Your milk still has marcaine in it.” Kandro was still adjusting himself to the idea. “Sunny doesn’t need OxEn, so he’s got to take something else?”

  “Yes,” Tony said, “like OxEn . . .” He broke off, and Anna spun toward him, her eyes wide.

  The doctor forced his face into calm lines. “I want to have a talk with Joe now. And Nick Cantrella, Anna, will you see if you can get Nick on the intercom? Ask him to come over here right away. I’ve got an idea.”

  In the living room, he told Gracey: “You won’t have to keep an eye on them any more, Joe. But watch me—I feel like Alexander, Napoleon, Eisenhower, end the Great Cham all rolled into one.”

  “You’re certainly grinning like a lunatic,” the agronomist agreed critically. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Wait a minute . . . did you get him?” Tony asked as Anna came in to the room.

  “He’s coming,” she nodded. “Tony, what is it?”

  “I’ll tell you both, soon,” he promised. “Let’s wait for Nick, so I won’t have to repeat it.” He paced restlessly around the room, thinking it through again. It ought to work; it ought to!

  WHEN Cantrella arrived, he turned on the two men. “Listen, both of you!” He tried not to sound too eager. “If I handed you a piece of living tissue with a percentage of oxygen enzyme—and I don’t mean traces, I mean a percentage—where would we stand in respect to . . .” He halted up the cautious complicated phraseology. “Hell, what I mean is, could we manufacture OxEn?”

  “The living virus?” Gracey asked. “Not crystalized OxEn processed for absorption?”

  “The living virus.”

  “We’d be a damn sight better than half-way along the processing that the Kelsey people do in Louisville. They grow the first culture from the Rosen batch, then they cull out all the competing enzymes, then they grow what’s left and cull, for hundreds of stages, to get a percentage of the living virus to grow a pure culture they can crop and start crystalizing.”