Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

not;

  Not now or ever is it ours to choose.”

  The words were take and use—now.

  She rattled her sheaf of manuscript, and from its bulky folds a flat case slid; he caught it before it struck the floor. Take and use—now. It was the smallest size of ’caster. He had it open in an instant and saw a half-hour reel of recorded tape ready to roll. All dials were at zero.

  “My voice is small; I do not know

  the way

  To reach all of the willing hands

  that serve,

  Setting at ease the flesh and bone

  and nerve.

  But if I spoke like thunder, I

  would say:

  Good people, follow Klin by night

  and day.”

  My voice—I do not know—setting. Swiftly he mixed bass and treble volumes to match her voice—and hoped the spy-mike on them and its system were anything but high-fidelity. He started the tape on a quick nod from the girl and was relieved to find that he’d done well. In a very fair approximation of her adenoidal whine the ’caster immediately began to drone out:

  “What beauty lies in loyalty! What

  joy!

  Is there a heart that throbs with

  lesser thrill—”

  He placed the box carefully on her chair as she rose and followed her silently from the room. The Power Master, on the other end of the spy-mike, was welcome to his share of the Lady Jocelyn’s verses.

  XVII.

  She led Cade through endless, twisting dark passageways and stairs. Doors opened at a touch from her hand where no doors seemed to be, and never once did they encounter another person in their flight. There was more to the Palace than met the eye, Cade realized.

  When they emerged at last it was into a narrow alley like those of the district where Cade had spent two weeks. Cade was sure it was not one only because they had not walked long enough. A ground car whisked them away from the alley door. Cade never saw who was driving. He followed the girl into the back seat and turned to her promptly with the thanks and questions uppermost in his mind, but she put one finger to her crookedly-painted mouth and shook her head.

  Cade sat back, forcing his body to relax, but his mind was busy, fascinated by the puzzle of her constantly-shifting personality. She had been a Commoner at their first meeting, but one with an air of command, an important person in the Cairo Mystery. Then she had been a wearer of the garter, openly seductive—and vulgar. And now a Lady of the Court, a niece of the Emperor himself!

  He knew now that the first time she had been a spy; he did not know for whom.

  The second time she was in masquerade. The Palace thought it was on holiday—he knew it was not.

  This time he could not doubt her true identity; but the awkward, graceless, shambling fool of the Audience Hall was not the same Lady Jocelyn who sat beside him now, erect and confident.

  All he had learned so far was what she was not—except two things: that she was still, and always, even under the makeup of her Palace role, exquisitely beautiful, and that she had rescued him again—for what?

  The car braked to a violent stop on the edge of a field, and the Lady gestured him to open the door. She led him briskly across the field to an ancient, unpainted structure; Cade had no chance to look at the vanishing car.

  “Open it,” she said, at the door of the building.

  Cade heaved a wooden bar out of double sockets and pushed the double door open. There was a space flier inside—twelve meters of polished alloy.

  “You can fly this, Gunner.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “I’ve taken fliers to the Moon and back,” he said.

  She looked worried. “Not Mars?”

  “I can take it to Mars,” he said—and he or any Gunner could.

  “I hope so. This flier is loaded and fueled, with food aboard.” She pressed a folded paper into his hands. “These are the co-ordinates of your landing-point on Mars. There will be friends waiting there, or they will arrive shortly after your landing. If you take off immediately, you will probably be out of radar range before they can pursue.”

  “They?” he demanded. “The Power Master’s fliers?” As far as he knew, the Power Master disposed only of freighters and ferries, without a ram in his space fleet.

  “Cade,” she said steadily, “we have no time. I’ve helped you before, against your will. Now I ask you to take off immediately—without questions on argument. First you must strike me—knock me unconscious.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve done it before,” she said angrily. “I must have a cover story to delay them with while you get clear.”

  Cade looked down at her, at the brilliant eyes and lovely face beneath the grotesque makeup. It was strangely pleasant, this warmth he felt—strangely unlike the peril he had been taught to expect from such nearness to a woman. It felt much as the touch of the Gunner Supreme’s seal to his lips had felt in another life. Even as the thought came his lips tingled.

  “Cade!” she said furiously. “I tell you, there’s no time to waste. The tape gave us a half-hour at the most, even if they didn’t get suspicious before then. Do as I say!”

  A Palace ground car roared down the highway across the field, braked screechingly and began to back up.

  “They’re here,” she said bitterly.

  Cade struck her as she said he must—but he did not leave her lying there to cover his escape. He picked her up and raced into the building and up the ramp to the control compartment lock standing open and waiting. He buckled her limp body into an acceleration couch as a yelled challenge to surrender echoed in the building and clanged the lock shut.

  He slipped into the pilot’s seat and reflex took over. Straps, buckles, neck brace, grid one temperature and voltage, grid two temperature and voltage, first stage discharge buildup and fire.

  His blackout lasted only a few seconds. He turned in his straps, craning his neck to see the couch. She was still unconscious. Indicators flashed on the panel and his hands worked efficiently, as if with a life of their own even though he had not flown out of atmosphere for three years. For ten minutes he was necessarily a part of the ship, his nerve system joined with its circuits by his dancing fingers on the controls. Last of all he cut in the flier’s radars and unbuckled himself.

  He kicked himself over to the couch, frightened, to feel the girl’s neck. She shouldn’t be out that long, he worried. But she was and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Distractedly he began to search the ship for medical equipment. He braced himself in toe-holds and spun open the aft port of the control compartment and floated into a cargo room perhaps three meters deep. In there, except for the space filled by an oversized loading lock, the bulkheads were lined with locked cabinets. Floating free in the compartment were four sealed crates. It was cargo, not medicine, here.

  Aft of the cargo compartment was a bunk-lined cabin with a tiny galley and a vapor cabinet—the living quarters. She would want water. He filled a valved bag from the tap and gummed it to his thigh with a scoop of paste from one of the omnipresent pots. When he kicked his way back into the control compartment the girl had freed herself from the couch and was swaying against a bulkhead with an uncertain hold on a grabiron.

  “You fool,” she said in a deadly voice.

  “You told me to take the ship to Mars,” he said flatly. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Give me that water,” she said, and drank inexpertly from the valve. “Cade,” she said at last, “I suppose you meant well but this means death for us both. Did you suppose they’d let you chase off into space with a member of the Emperor’s family on board? They’ll destroy us and I will be reported killed—unfortunately—in the action. If you’d listened to me, I could have given you time for a safe escape.”

  Cade pointed to the stern-chase radar. “Look,” he said. “There’s nothing in sight—one pip.”

  “Where?” She pushed off from the grabiron and landed, clutch
ing, by the screen.

  “See?” he showed her. “A meteorite, most likely. Or even another ship. But not after us. They couldn’t get into the air in less than two hours. Not unless they have fliers fueled and ready to go. By then we’ll—”

  “Suppose they have?” she blazed. “Wasn’t this ship ready to go? Have you learned nothing? Do you still think the Realm’s what it seems to be? This ship has been waiting six years for a Gunner to fly it and now it’s to be destroyed because of your folly!”

  Cade floated before the screen, watching the green point on the gray ground. It was just becoming recognizable as three bunched points. Each second that passed made them more distinct. “Fliers,” he said. “What are they—cargoes, ferries, recons, rams?”

  “I don’t know,” she said venomously. “I’m no Gunner. Rams, most likely.”

  “With you on board?” Rams were designed for annihilative action. They matched velocities with their quarry and crushed it with their armored prows. It meant death to all aboard the victim.

  “I see you’re still living in your ethical dream-world,” she said. “I’m just a good excuse for the attack, Cade. If only you’d listened to me—What are you going to do now?”

  “Outrun them if I can.” He floated into his seat again. “I can try an evasive course and accelerate all the ship will take.” It wouldn’t be enough, and he knew it. “If the other pilots are inferior—”

  “They won’t be!” she snapped. He wondered whether she knew that rams had relays of pilots, always fresh, always solving for the difference while the quarry took evasive action, always waiting for the moment when the victim’s single pilot tired after hours of dodging and began to repeat his tactics.

  He reset the stern radar for maximum magnification and got a silhouette of three ugly fliers, smaller than his own, with anvillike beaks. They were rams.

  “Cade, listen to me.” Her voice compelled attention. It was more than a tone of command, more than the urgency of the words. It carried a desperate seriousness that made him pause.

  “I’m listening.”

  “You’ll have to fight them, Cade. There’s no other way.”

  He looked at her unbelievingly.

  “There are guns aboard,” she said, not meeting his eye.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what.” She looked squarely at him, without shame. “Fire on them!” she said.

  XVIII.

  It had been a rotten thing to hear from the lips of the lax and dissolute Mars-born Gunner who had died in France. To hear her speak the unspeakable tore his heart.

  “It’s for our lives, Cade!” she pleaded, shamelessly.

  “Our lives!” he was passionately scornful. “What kind of lives would they be with a memory like that?”

  “For the Realm of Man, then!

  The mission we are on!”

  “What mission?” He laughed bitterly. “For a lie, a farce, a bad joke on the lips of the Power Master? What is the Realm of Man to me? A weakling Emperor, a murderous Power Master, a liar as Gunner Supreme! I have nothing left, Lady, except determination not to soil myself.”

  “Jetters and bombles!” she exploded, pleading no longer. “That’s the way you’re thinking—precisely like a Commoner’s brat terrified of the Beetu-five and the Beefai-voh!”

  “I have no fear of the Beefai-voh and I don’t believe in bombles,” he said coldly. “I believe there are things one knows are wrong, detestably wrong, and I refuse to do them. I wish . . . I wish you hadn’t said it.” She was fighting for calm. “I see I’ll have to tell you some things. I won’t try to pledge you to secrecy; your promise would be meaningless. But I hope that if the time comes, you’ll let them torture you to death without revealing what I say, or that it was I who said it.”

  He kept silence.

  “You’ve never heard the word ‘history,’ Cade.”

  He looked up in surprise. He had—used by the mad little burglar who’d been beaten to death in the Watch House.

  She went on, frowning with concentration: “History is the true story of changes in man’s social organization over periods of time.”

  “But—” he began, with an incredulous laugh.

  “Never mind. You’ll say it’s meaningless. That ‘changes’ and ‘social organizations’ are incommensurable as the side of a square and its diagonal—that ‘changed social organization’ is a noise without meaning. But you’re wrong.

  “I cannot tell you my sources, but I assure you that there have been many forms of social organization—and that the world was not created ten thousand years ago.”

  Her burning conviction amazed him. Was she, too, mad? As mad as the little burglar?

  “Try to understand this: thousands of years ago there was a social organization without Emperor or Stars. It was destroyed by people firing from fliers. It was a terrible way to fight. It killed the innocent—mother and child, armed man and unarmed. It poisoned food so people died in agony. It destroyed sewer and water systems so the homes of people became stinking places of corruption.

  “The social organization was destroyed. People abandoned homes and cities . . . yes, they had cities; ours still bear their names. They lived like talking, suffering animals who only knew that things had once been better. Every year they forgot more of what that something better had been like, but they never forgot the supreme horror of death from the skies. Every year the details of it grew more cloudy and the thing itself grew more terrible.”

  Cade nodded involuntarily. Like a night attack, he thought; the less you saw the worse it was.

  “There were centers of recovery—but that’s no part of my story. You said you didn’t believe in jetters and bombles? Cade, the jetters and bombles were real. The Beefai-voh and the rest of them are the names of the fliers that brought the supreme horror to that social organization.”

  “The Caves!” said Cade. The place called Washington, the rumbled ruinous blocks of stone with staring black eyes in them, haunted by the bombles—

  “Yes, the Caves! The Caves everybody is afraid of and nobody can explain. Cade, you must fight. If you don’t, you’re throwing our lives away on folly.”

  Cade didn’t believe it. The vague appeal to sketchy evidence—it was as if a patrol leader came back and reported: “Sir, I didn’t see it but I think there’s a two-company enemy group somewhere up there in some direction or other.” He gripped a grabiron in his fist until his knuckles went white. Ten thousand years of Emperor, Klin, Power Master, the Order and the Stars, and the Commoners—that was the world.

  “They’re coming up fast,” she said emotionlessly, staring at the screen.

  “Where are the guns?” he said hoarsely, not meeting her eye. And he knew he was only pretending to believe her story, pretending it was true so he could save her and himself at any cost in self-loathing.

  “In the chart locker. Ten, I believe.”

  Ten guns. He would be able to fire at unheard-of aperture until coils fused and toss one aside for another. Ten guns—like that. As though a gun were not an individual thing, one to an Armsman, touched by the Gunner Supreme—the Gunner Supreme he knew for a treacherous voluptuary!”

  “We must get spacesuits on,” he said. He opened the locker and began to select his own units. After three years he remembered his sizes. He dogged a pair of Number Seven legs against the bulkhead and tugged himself into them, donned Number Five arm pieces and sealed a torso unit around his body and to the limb units. He selected units for the girl and helped her into them; she didn’t know how.

  “Helmets now?” she asked calmly.

  “Better carry the . . . the guns to the cargo room first.” They made two arm-loads. Cade wiped a palmful of gum against a cargo-room bulkhead and stuck his load to it in a neat row. The girl ranged hers beside them.

  “Helmets now,” he said. “Then you go back to the control room. I’ll air-tight this section and open the cargo lock. You watch the screens.

 
Do you know the alarms?” She shook her head. “The proximity alarm is a loud buzzer. I won’t hear it in vacuum; you call me on the suit intercom when it goes off. Just talk into the helmet. If I succeed in driving them off, you’ll have to bleed air out of the control room until pressure is low enough for me to open the door against it. You hold down the switch on the upper left of the control array that’s labeled ‘Space Cock.’ Can you do that?”

  She nodded and they clamped on the plastic domes and sealed. “Testing intercom. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” sounded tinnily inside his helmet. “Can you turn your volume down?”

  He did. “Is that better?”

  “Thank you.” That was all. A casual thanks for lowering his volume and not a word about his decision. Didn’t she realize what he was doing for her? Was she fool enough to think he believed her wild “history” ?

  He sealed the fore and aft doors and plucked one of the guns from the bulkhead. Full-charged. No number. What did a gun without a number mean? A gun without an Armsman matching it was unthinkable—but here were ten of them. Cade set each gun for maximum aperture and tight band, bled the air out of the compartment by a manual valve and spun open the big cargo lock.

  After that there was nothing to do. He floated and waited and tried not to think. But in that he failed.

  What did he know—and how did he know it?

  He knew Armsmen were Armsmen: fighters, masters of the gun’s complexity, masters of fighting, the only masters of fighting there were. That was an essential datum. He knew they were in the service of the Emperor—but that datum had crumbled under the ruthless words of the Power Master. He had known the Gunner Supreme was the embodied perfections of the Order, and that datum was a lie. He had, known that it was abomination to fire from a flier—and found himself about to commit the abomination. He had know that for Armsmen there was only one woman, and not a woman of flesh: She who came fleetingly to those who died in battle, and in her fleeting passage rewarded Armsmen for their lives of abstinence. But he knew that for him there was another woman now—sometimes mystagogue, traitress, weak-minded noblewoman, expounder of insane “history.” What did he know and how did he know it? He knew that, false to the Order and to She who came, he wanted this woman and did not know her secret.