Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  The ridiculous injustice of it was suddenly more than he could take. Like a green Brother in battle he choked on despair, with the difference now that there was no Gunner Supreme to shoulder the burden. There was no one, no reason now to carry it at all. He who had dedicated his life and every deed in it to the Emperor was turned away because he didn’t have greens to drop into a platter!

  The guard was snarling that he had showed disgusting disrespect for the Emperor—

  “Respect for the Emperor?” he burst out wildly. “What do you know about it, gray-suited fool? I’m risking my life to be here. There’s a conspiracy against the Emperor! I was trying to warn—” His self-pity was cooled by a dash of cold fear. Next he’d be telling his name. Next the gas gun would go off in his face. And then there would be no awakening.

  But the gray-clad guard had backed away, his. gas gun still firmly trained on Cade’s face and his finger white on the trigger. “Conspiracy, is it?” said the guard. “You’re mad. Or . . . whatever you are, this is a matter for Armsmen. Walk.”

  Cade trudged emptily down the corridor. He had said it and he would pay for it. There was an Auxiliary Chapter House in the Palace, and every Armsman would have a description of the Cade-impostor firmly planted in his memory.

  “In there.” It was an elevator that soared to the top of the Palace and let them out at an anteroom where an Armiger stood guard.

  “Sir,” said the Klin man, “please call the day’s Gunner.” The Armiger stared at Cade, and there was no recognition in the stare—a Gunner’s trained eye would be another matter. The Armiger spoke into a wall panel and the door opened; Cade was marched through the Ready Room into the Charge Room where the day’s Gunner waited.

  Instead of a tearing blast of flame from the charge desk there came a voice—dry, precise, familiar and astonished. “Why, we thought you were—!”

  “Silence!” said Cade swiftly. The day’s Gunner was Kendall of Denver, a companion for years before his assignment to France. After the first show of surprise, Kendall’s long face was impassive. Cade knew his former Brother’s mind: form a theory and act on it. By now he would have decided that Cade had been on one of the Order’s infrequent secret assignments. And he would never mistake Cade for the hunted Cade-impostor.

  “Guard, is there a charge?” Kendall asked, straight-faced.

  “Sir, this curseck fellow failed to make the voluntary offering in Audience, he talked in the Emperor’s presence, and when I pulled him out of line he yelled about a conspiracy. I suppose he’s mad, but if there’s anything to it I—”

  “Quite right. I’ll take charge. Return to your post.”

  When they were alone, Kendall grinned hugely. “We all thought you were dead, Brother. There’s even an order out to kill someone impersonating you. You took a fine chance coming here. We have Brothers Rosso and Banker in the Palace detail besides me; they’ll be glad to hear the news. How may I help you?”

  Escort to the Emperor? No; now the Emperor need not be troubled with it. The Emperor’s right arm would set this crazy muddle right. “Take me to the Power Master, Brother. At once.”

  Kendall led the way without question. Through corridors, down ramps, through antechambers, Cade happily saw doors open and salutes snap to the trim uniform of the Gunner.

  They came to a great apartment at last that was far from ornate. There was an antechamber where men and women sat and waited. There was a brightly lit, vast communications room behind that where hundreds of youngsters tended solid banks of sending and receiving signal units. There was a great room behind that where men at long tables elaborated outgoing messages and briefed incoming ones. There were many, many smaller rooms behind that where older men could be seen talking into dictating machines or writing, and consulting lists and folders as they worked. Endlessly, messengers went to and fro.

  Cade let none of the wonder he felt show on his face. It was his first glimpse of the complex machinery of administration.

  In a final anteroom, alone, they sat and waited. Cade felt the eerie sensation of being spy-rayed, but the orifice was too cunningly concealed for him to spot it.

  “Gunner Kendall, come in and bring the Commoner,” said a voice at length—and Cade stiffened. It was the same vibrant, commanding voice he would never forget, the voice which had given the “kill-on-sight” command for him and Fledwick.

  He followed Kendall from the anteroom into a place whose like he had never seen before. It had every comfort of the Lady Moia’s bedchamber, but was grimly masculine and unadorned. The whole room pointed to a table where the iron-visaged Power Master sat, and Cade rejoiced. This was the man who would crush the conspiracy and root out the decadent Gunner Supreme—

  “Sir,” said Kendall in his precise way, “this is Gunner Cade, mistakenly supposed dead. He asked me to bring him to you.”

  “My spy ray showed me that he is unarmed,” said the Power Master. “See to it that he does not seize your weapon.” He got up from the table as Kendall backed away from Cade, with confusion on his face. Cade saw that the Power Master wore a gun of The Order—a gun he deliberately unbuckled and flung on the table with a crash. Slowly he approached Cade.

  The man was fully as tall as Cade, and heavier. His muscles were rock-hard knots where Cade’s were sliding steel bands. Cade was a boxer, the Power Master—a strangler. With his face half a meter from Cade’s, he said, in the voice that once had ordered his death: “Are you going to kill me, Gunner? This is your chance.”

  Cade told him steadily: “I am not here to kill you, sir. I’m here to give you information vital to the Realm.”

  The Power Master stared into his eyes for a long, silent minute, and then suddenly grinned. He returned to the table to buckle on his gun. “You’re sure he’s Cade?” he asked, with his back turned.

  “No possible doubt, sir,” said Kendall. “We were Novices together.”

  “Cade, who else knows about this?”

  “Nobody, sir. Only Brother Kendall.”

  “Good.” The Power Master swung around with the gun in his hand. A stab of flame from it blasted the life out of Gunner Kendall. Cade saw the muzzle of the gun trained steadily on him as Kendall toppled to the floor.

  TO BE CONCLUDED

  Gunner Cade

  Conclusion. You can trap a man in patterns of behavior; you can make him believe life is too complex to understand. But if you force him out of the pattern, and he is a powerful, determined man—he’ll smash that pattern!

  Synopsis

  Throughout the Realm of Man—on Earth, Mars, Venus, and the few settled asteroids—Gunner Cade’s name was known and his prowess admired. He was one of the youngest company commanders in the Order of Armsmen, with a fabulous history of slaughtered enemies and victorious engagements behind him.

  To Cade, however, the adoration of the Commoners was meaningless. He worked, and fought, only to fulfill the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience he had taken in the Order. He lived decorously within the meaning of those vows, and meant to die fittingly, within the precepts of the Klin Philosophy. As a child he had learned loyalty to the Emperor and the Power Master. As a youthful Novice in the Denver Chapter House, he had learned devotion to the Gunner Supreme. And as Armiger, and later Gunner of the Order, he had sworn his fealty to the Star of France, the ruler of a large part of central Europe.

  For Cade, life was a neatly solved puzzle, in which each perfect section had its perfect place. The ten-thousand-year history of the Order was the history of the Empire, was the history of man. Each morning, as he woke, he repealed to himself the menial ritual that prepared him for the day:

  It is fitting that the Emperor rules.

  It is fitting that the Armsmen serve the Emperor through the Power Master and our particular Stars.

  While this is so, all will be well to the end of time.

  Secure in the ritualistic duties of the Chapter House, Cade knew nothing of the storms that troubled the depths beneath the unruffled surface o
f the Realm. But after thirteen successful years in the Order, Gunner Cade made his first mistake—he let himself be trapped in the basement of a captured house during an action against the Star of Muscovy’s Armsmen.

  His captor, strangely, was not a Brother in the Order, but a withered old hag of a Commoner, whose obvious subservience and helplessness made it possible for her to give the invulnerable Gunner a drink of doped cider.

  When Cade regained consciousness, he was in the underground rooms of a Mystery Cult, and, he shortly realized, in the hands of an unbelievable conspiracy against the Emperor himself. He managed one escape from the beautiful

  Commoner girl who guarded him, only to be recaptured, drugged, and hypnotized. Hours later, he was released in a bar in the red-light district of Aberdeen, the capitol city of the Realm. Through his mind a single posthypnotic command was powerfully repeated:

  Go to the Palace and kill the Power Master.

  All his training, all his instincts, all his loyalties rebelled. But his hands were ready, and his body was eager. Only the unexpected intercession of the girl he had first seen in the Mystery saved him. She appeared again in the bar, dressed as a prostitute of the District, and forced him to drink a fiery fluid that acted as an antidote to the hypnotic drug.

  As his head cleared, Cade realized fully the importance of all that had occurred. He left the bar abruptly, determined to make his way to the local Chapter House and tell his story.

  Ignoring the warnings of the girl, who would not leave him, he approached a City Watchman, demanding directions to the Chapter House. Not till he found himself being booked for disorderly behavior in the Watch House did he begin to understand the impossibility of obtaining an audience while dressed in the Commoner’s clothes with which the Mystery had supplied him. But the immediate problems faded almost into insignificance as he began to understand something even more serious:

  The incident in the captured cellar had occurred a full week ago—and the blaster-charged body of “Cade” had been found in the cellar. To the whole world, he was a dead man!

  One night in a cage in the Watch House convinced him that his only hope was to appeal directly to the Order of Armsmen. Only there could his identity be established. In the early hours of the morning, with the assistance of an unbooked Klin Teacher, Fledwick Zisz, who shared his cage, he managed an escape. Together they stole a ground car, and made their way almost to the Chapter House, when they were stopped by a shocking and incredible order issued over the car radio:

  “To all Watchmen and Armsmen” the voice said, “this command supersedes the previous all-Watch alert concerning the Cade-impostor and the unbooked Klin Teacher Fledwick Zisz. Both these men are heavily armed and both are dangerous. They are to be shot on sight!”

  Now even direct appeal to the Order was impossible. Cade knew his Brothers too well: they would shoot as ordered. They would not wait for explanations.

  There was one hope still. Gunners and Armigers would shoot, but the Gunner Supreme, the first Gunner of the Order, would listen. Cade was sure of it. Abandoning the stolen ground car, Cade and Fledwick set out on an overland march to the “Cave that is not a Cave” where Arle, the Gunner Supreme, lived.

  The five days’ trip taught Cade as much as thirteen years in the Order had—but very different things. He learned the language and the customs of the underworld fringes where Fledwick had grown up. He saw more of the ordinary life of the Realm than he had seen in all his life before. And he saw, too, the fearsome Caves of Washington, the caves where, it was rumored, fearsome monsters dwelled, and where even Brothers of the Order were forbidden to go.

  A cleverly contrived attack on a sentry gained them entry, at the end of the march, to the mysterious Building of Fives where Arle lived—a building that was half cave, half house. Inside, Cade found even more to marvel at and puzzle over than outside. The Lady Moia, certainly, had no place in the home of the head of a chaste Order.

  Cade might have accepted the Supreme’s casual explanation of Moia, if he had not been awakened in the night by a cry for help, and from his window witnessed for himself the treacherous murder of Fledwick by two Brothers of the Order. When, minutes later, an assassin crept into his own sleeping chamber, Cade was prepared; once again, the charred corpse left behind was that of a substitute Gunner.

  Cade made his way, alone, out of the dangers and confusions of the Building of Fives, his last hope now behind him. The things he had seen had shaken every belief of his life, but he had no new beliefs, no facts even, with which to start over. In all that had occurred, there was just one person who seemed to have been honest and helpful—the mysterious girl of the Mystery. And he knew only one place to look for her, without chancing recapture by the conspirators of the Mystery.

  A chance brush with some dope smugglers enabled him to get transportation to Mistress Cannon’s bar, where he had seen the girl for the second time. A handful of gawdies stolen from the apartment of the Lady Moia bought him room and refuge at Cannon’s. Two weeks spent there taught him much, far more than he lad learned even from Fledwick. But at the end of the two weeks, he still had no clue to the whereabouts or identity of the strange girl.

  By now, the Gunner had thought of one last hope. The Order had failed him, but there was always, forever, the Emperor himself—and the monthly Audience Days in which any citizen of the

  Realm could approach the Ruler personally. Cade left Mistress Cannon’s disreputable place almost sadly, and went, in Commoner’s clothing, to the Palace. There his inadequate knowledge of the customary graft lost him, at the last moment, his opportunity to pour out his story of treachery and conspiracy into the fears of the Emperor.

  Removed from the Audience Hall by a Watchman, he babbled wildly of danger to the Emperor, and found himself, to his horror, being marched through Palace corridors to the Armsman on duty. It was sure death; the shoot-on-sight had never been rescinded. But for the first time in the long series of improbable difficulties, luck was with him. The Armsman of the Day was an old Brother in arms, and one sight was enough to convince Kendall that, Commoner’s clothes or no, it was Cade and no impostor who stood before him.

  On Cade’s urgent request, Kendall took him to the private office of the Power Master. Here, Cade knew, his story would be heard and investigated. The Power Master was the Emperor’s right hand, administrator, counsellor, and jurist. He would know how to punish treason and wipe out conspiracy.

  The first act of the Power Master, when Cade’s identity was established, was to shoot down Brother Kendall.

  XV.

  “Sit down, Cade,” said the Power Master. He laid his gun on the polished table as Cade collapsed numbly into a capacious chair. Numbly he thought: it wasn’t murder like Fledwick; Kendall is . . . was . . . a Gunner under arms. He could have drawn—but why?

  “I can use you,” said the Power Master. “I can always use a first-rate Armsman who’s had a look below the surface and kept his head. You could be especially useful to me because, as far as the world knows, you are dead—now that Kendall had been silenced. Also you seem to have an unusual, useful immunity to hypnosis.”

  “You know about it,” said Cade stupidly.

  The Power Master grinned and said, rolling the words: “The Great Conspiracy. Yes; I have my representatives in the Great Conspiracy. I was alarmed when they advised me that a most able Gunner had been turned loose with a compulsion to take my life—and even more alarmed when I found you had slipped through the fingers of the fools of the City Watch.”

  The girl—his spy in the Mystery?

  “Now,” said the Power Master briskly, “tell me about your recovery from their hypnosis.”

  “I was left in a drinking room to come to my senses,” Cade said slowly, uncertain of what to tell. If she was his spy—but he risked it. He might be shot down like Kendall, but he would know. “I felt the compulsion mounting,” he said evenly, “and then it went away for no apparent reason. It has not returned. I left the place lo
oking for the Chapter House to report. One of the women followed me, and we were both arrested by the Watch.”

  The Power Master looked up sharply, and Cade was certain that there was surprise in the glance. “You don’t know who the woman was?”

  “No,” said Cade. That much, at least, was true.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve been trying to find out,” he admitted, shamelessly, and the Power Master did not bother to repress a cynical smile. Cade didn’t care—the, girl was no spy of the Power Master’s. His claim that the hypnotic compulsion had vanished by itself stood unchallenged. In spite of his bullying omniscience, the man did not know everything.

  “Tell me the rest,” said the Power Master. “What happened to your partner—the unbooked Teacher?”

  Cade told him of their cross-country journey, the shattering discoveries at the Building of Fives that climaxed in the treacherous murder of Fledwick. The Power Master smiled again at the involuntary pain in Cade’s voice as he mentioned the presence of the Lady Moia. And he nodded approvingly as Cade told him of his two weeks at Cannon’s—“waiting for the hue-and-cry to die down”—and of his failure to reach the Emperor.

  “You’ve done well,” he pronounced judiciously at last. “Now I want to know whether you’ve profited by it all.

  “Since your novitiate, Cade, you’ve been filled full of brotherhood and misinformation. You’ve been doing all the right things, but for the wrong reasons. If you can learn the right reasons—Tell me first: why did you Gunners of France fight the Gunners of Muscovy?”

  “Because they tried to seize an iron deposit belonging to our Star,” Cade said simply. Where was the man leading?

  “There was no iron deposit. One of my people faked a geological survey report for the Star of France and seeded a little Mars iron at the site. I held it in reserve as a bone of contention. When the French Star was making overtures to the Muscovite Star concerning a combination of forces, I let the news of the ‘iron deposit’ leak to Muscovy, with the results that you know. There will be no combination between France and Muscovy now, or for many years to come.”