Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Far below them, there was a series of screaming whistles as the interceptors were loosed to begin their intricate, double basketwork wall of defense in a towering cylinder about Denv.

  “Go on, Reuben,” said May. “That was most interesting.” His eyes were searching the underside of the steel table.

  Reuben averted his own eyes from the frightened face, feeling some awe drain out of him. Under a table with a general! It didn’t seem so strange now.

  “Perhaps, sir, you can tell me what a puzzling thing, that happened this afternoon, means. A fellow—Rudolph’s man Almon, of the eighty-ninth level—gave me a pair of binoculars that flashed in my eyes and then went opaque. Has your wide experience—”

  May laughed hoarsely and said in a shaky voice: “That old trick! He was photographing your retinas for the blood-vessel pattern. One of Rudolph’s men, eh? I’m glad you spoke to me; I’m old enough to spot a revival like that. Perhaps my good friend Rudolph plans—”

  There was a thudding volley hi the air and then a faint jar. One had got through, exploding, from the feel of it, far down at the foot of Denv.

  The alarm roared again, in bursts that meant all clear; only one flight of missiles and that disposed of.

  THE Atomist and the general climbed out from under the table; May’s secretary popped through the door. The general waved him out again and leaned heavily on the table, his arms quivering. Reuben hastily brought a chair.

  “A glass of water,” said May.

  The Atomist brought it. He saw the general wash down what looked like a triple dose of xxx—green capsules which it was better to leave alone.

  May said after a moment: “That’s better. And don’t look so shocked, youngster; you don’t know the strain we’re under. It’s only a temporary measure which I shall discontinue as soon as things ease up a bit. I was saying that perhaps my good friend Rudolph plans to substitute one of his men for one of mine. Tell me, how long has this fellow Almon been a friend of yours?”

  “He struck up an acquaintance with me only last week. I should have realized—”

  “You certainly should have. One week. Time enough and more. By now you’ve been photographed, your fingerprints taken, your voice recorded, and your gait studied without your knowledge. Only the retinascope is difficult, but one must risk it for a real double. Have you killed your man, Reuben?”

  He nodded. It had been a silly brawl two years ago over precedence at the refectory; he disliked being reminded of it.

  “Good,” said May grimly. “The way these things are done, your double kills you in a secluded spot, disposes of your body, and takes over your role. We shall reverse it. You will kill the double and take over his role.”

  The powerful, methodical voice ticked off possibilities and contingencies, measures and countermeasures. Reuben absorbed them and felt his awe return. Perhaps May had not really been frightened under the table; perhaps it had been he reading his own terror in the general’s face. May was actually talking to him of backgrounds and policies. “Up from the eighty-third level!” he swore to himself as the great names were uttered.

  “My good friend Rudolph, of course, wants the five stars. You would not know this, but the man who wears the stars is now eighty years old and failing fast. I consider myself a likely candidate to replace him. So, evidently, must Rudolph. No doubt he plans to have your double perpetrate some horrible blunder on the eve of the election, and the discredit would reflect on me. Now what you and I must do—”

  You and I—May’s man Reuben and May—up from the eighty-third! Up from the bare corridors and cheerless bedrooms to marble halls and vaulted chambers! From the clatter of the crowded refectory to small and glowing restaurants where you had your own table and servant and where music came softly from the walls! Up from the scramble to win this woman or that, by wit or charm or the poor bribes you could afford, to the eminence from which you could calmly command your pick of the beauty of Denv! From the moiling intrigue of tripping your fellow Atomist and guarding against him tripping you to the heroic thrust and parry of generals!

  Up from the eighty-third!

  Then May dismissed him with a speech whose implications were deliriously exciting. “I need an able man and a young one, Reuben. Perhaps I’ve waited too long looking for him. If you do well in this touchy business, I’ll consider you very seriously for an important task I have in mind.”

  LATE that night, Selene came to his bedroom.

  “I know you don’t like me,” she said pettishly, “but Griffin’s such a fool and I wanted somebody to talk to. Do you mind? What was it like up there today? Did you see carpets? I wish I had a carpet.”

  He tried to think about carpets and not the exciting contrast of metallic cloth and flesh.

  “I saw one through an open door,” he remembered. “It looked odd, but I suppose a person gets used to them. Perhaps I didn’t see a very good one. Aren’t the good ones very thick?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Your feet sink into them. I wish I had a good carpet and four chairs and a small table as high as my knees to put things on and as many pillows as I wanted. Griffin’s such a fool. Do you think I’ll ever get those things? I’ve never caught the eye of a general. Am I pretty enough to get one, do you think?”

  He said uneasily: “Of course you’re a pretty thing, Selene. But carpets and chairs and pillows—” It made him uncomfortable, like the thought of peering up through binoculars from a parapet.

  “I want them,” she said unhappily. “I like you very much, but I want so many things and soon I’ll be too old even for the eighty-third level, before I’ve been up higher, and I’ll spend the rest of my life tending babies or cooking in the creche or the refectory.”

  She stopped abruptly, pulled herself together, and gave him a smile that was somehow ghastly in the half-light.

  “You bungler,” he said, and she instantly looked at the door with the smile frozen on her face. Reuben took a pistol from under his pillow and demanded, “When do you expect him?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked shrilly. “Who are you talking about?”

  “My double. Don’t be a fool, Selene. May and I—” he savored it—“May and I know all about it. He warned me to beware of a diversion by a woman while the double slipped in and killed me. When do you expect him?”

  “I really do like you,” Selene sobbed. “But Almon promised to take me up there and I knew when I was where they’d see me that I’d meet somebody really important. I really do like you, but soon I’ll be too old—”

  “Selene, listen to me. Listen to me! You’ll get your chance. Nobody but you and me will know that the substitution didn’t succeed!”

  “Then I’ll be spying for you on Almon, won’t I?” she asked in a choked voice. “All I wanted was a few nice things before I got too old. All right, I was supposed to be in your arms at 2350 hours.”

  IT was 2349. Reuben sprang from bed and stood by the door, his pistol silenced and ready. At 2350 a naked man slipped swiftly into the room, heading for the bed as he raised a ten-centimeter poignard. He stopped in dismay when he realized that the bed was empty.

  Reuben killed him with a bullet through the throat.

  “But he doesn’t look a bit like me,” he said in bewilderment, closely examining the face. “Just in a general way.”

  Selene said dully: “Almon told me people always say that when they see their doubles. It’s funny, isn’t it? He looks just like you, really.”

  “How was my body to be disposed of?”

  She produced a small flat box. “A shadow suit. You were to be left here and somebody would come tomorrow.”

  “We won’t disappoint him,” Reuben pulled the web of the shadow suit over his double and turned on the power. In the half-lit room, it was a perfect disappearance; by daylight it would be less perfect. “They’ll ask why the body was shot instead of knifed. Tell them you shot me with the gun from under the pillow. Just say I heard the double come in and you were afraid
there might have been a struggle.”

  She listlessly asked: “How do you know I won’t betray you?”

  “You won’t, Selene.” His voice bit. “You’re broken.”

  She nodded vaguely, started to say something, and then went out without saying it.

  Reuben luxuriously stretched in his narrow bed. Later, his beds would be wider and softer, he thought. He drifted into sleep on a half-formed thought that some day he might vote with other generals on the man to wear the five stars—or even wear them himself, Master of Denv.

  He slept healthily through the morning alarm and arrived late at his regular twentieth-level station. He saw his superior, May’s man Oscar of the eighty-fifth level, Atomist, ostentatiously take his name. Let him!

  Oscar assembled his crew for a grim announcement: “We are going to even the score, and perhaps a little better, with Ellay. At sunset there will be three flights of missiles from Deck One.”

  There was a joyous murmur and Reuben trotted off on his task.

  All forenoon he was occupied with drawing plutonium slugs from hyper-suspicious storekeepers in the great rock-quarried vaults, and seeing them through countless audits and assays all the way to Weapons Assembly. Oscar supervised the scores there who assembled the curved slugs and the explosive lenses into sixty-kilogram warheads.

  In mid-afternoon there was an incident. Reuben saw Oscar step aside for a moment to speak to a Maintainer whose guard fell on one of the Assembly Servers, and dragged him away as he pleaded innocence. He had been detected in sabotage. When the warheads were in and the Missilers seated, waiting at their boards, the two Atomists rode up to the eighty-third’s refectory.

  The news of a near-maximum effort was in the air; it was electric. Reuben heard on all sides in tones of self-congratulation: “We’ll clobber them tonight!”

  “That Server you caught,” he said to Qscar. “What was he up to?”

  His commander stared. “Are you trying to learn my job? Don’t try it, I warn you. If my black marks against you aren’t enough, I could always arrange for some fissionable material in your custody to go astray.”

  “No, no! I was just wondering why people do something like that.”

  Oscar sniffed doubtfully. “He’s probably insane, like all the Angelos. I’ve heard the climate does it to them. You’re not a Maintainer or a Controller. Why worry about it?”

  “They’ll brainburn him, I suppose?”

  “I suppose. Listen!”

  DECK One was firing. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six.

  People turned to one another and shook hands, laughed and slapped shoulders heartily. Eighteen missiles were racing through the stratosphere, soon to tumble on Ellay. With any luck, one or two would slip through the first wall of interceptors and blast close enough to smash windows and topple walls in the crazy city by the ocean. It would serve the lunatics right.

  Five minutes later an exultant voice filled most of Denv.

  “Recon missile report,” it said. “Eighteen launched, eighteen perfect trajectories. Fifteen shot down by Ellay first-line interceptors, three shot down by Ellay second-line interceptors. Extensive blast damage observed in Griffith Park area of Ellay!”

  There were cheers.

  And eight Full Maintainers marched into the refectory silently, and marched out with Reuben.

  He knew better than to struggle or ask futile questions. Any question you asked of a Maintainer was futile. But he goggled when they marched him onto an upward-bound stairway.

  They rode past the eighty-ninth level and Reuben lost count, seeing only the marvels of the upper reaches of Denv. He saw carpets that ran the entire length of corridors, and intricate fountains, and mosaic walls, stained-glass windows, more wonders than he could recognize, things for which he had no name.

  He was marched at last into a wood-paneled room with a great polished desk and a map behind it. He saw May, and another man who must have been a general—Rudolph?—but sitting at the desk was a frail old man who wore a circlet of stars on each khaki shoulder.

  The old man said to Reuben: “You are an Ellay spy and saboteur.”

  Reuben looked at May. Did one speak directly to the man who wore the stars, even in reply to such an accusation?

  “Answer him, Reuben,” May said kindly.

  “I am May’s man Reuben, of the eighty-third level, an Atomist,” he said.

  “Explain,” said the other general heavily, “if you can, why all eighteen of the warheads you procured today failed to fire.”

  “But they did!” gasped Reuben. “The Recon missile report said there was blast damage from the three that got through and it didn’t say anything about the others failing to fire.”

  The other general suddenly looked sick and May looked even kindlier. The man who wore the stars turned inquiringly to the chief of the Maintainers, who nodded and said: “That was the Recon missile report, sir.”

  The general snapped: “What I said was that he would attempt to sabotage the attack. Evidently he failed. I also said he is a faulty double, somehow slipped with great ease into my good friend May’s organization. You will find that his left thumb print is a clumsy forgery of the real Reuben’s thumb print and that his hair has been artificially darkened.”

  The old man nodded at the chief of the Maintainers, who said: “We have his card, sir.”

  Reuben abruptly found himself being fingerprinted and deprived of some hair.

  “The f.p.s check, sir,” one Maintainer said. “He’s Reuben.”

  “Hair’s natural, sir,” said another.

  The general began a rearguard action: “My information about his hair seems to have been inaccurate. But the fingerprint means only that Ellay spies substituted his prints for Reuben’s prints in the files—”

  “Enough, sir,” said the old man with the stars. “Dismissed. All of you. Rudolph, I am surprised. All of you, go.”

  REUBEN found himself in a vast apartment with May, who was bubbling and chuckling uncontrollably until he popped three of the green capsules into his mouth hurriedly.

  “This means the eclipse for years of my good friend Rudolph,” he crowed. “His game was to have your double sabotage the attack warheads and so make it appear that my organization is rotten with spies. The double must have been under post-hypnotic, primed to admit everything. Rudolph was so sure of himself that he made his accusations before the attack, the fool!”

  He fumbled out the green capsules again.

  “Sir,” said Reuben, alarmed.

  “Only temporary,” May muttered, and swallowed a fourth. “But you’re right. You leave them alone. There are big things to be done in your time, not in mine. I told you I needed a young man who could claw his way to the top. Rudolph’s a fool. He doesn’t need the capsules because he doesn’t ask questions. Funny, I thought a coup like the double affair would hit me hard, but I don’t feel a thing. It’s not like the old days. I used to plan and plan, and when the trap went snap it was better than this stuff. But now I don’t feel a thing.”

  He leaned forward from his chair; the pupils of his eyes were black bullets.

  “Do you want to work?” he demanded. “Do you want your world stood on its head and your brains to crack and do the only worthwhile job there is to do? Answer me!”

  “Sir, I am a loyal May’s man. I want to obey your orders and use my ability to the full.”

  “Good enough,” said the general. “You’ve got brains, you’ve got push. I’ll do the spade work. I won’t last long enough to push it through. You’ll have to follow. Ever been outside of Denv?”

  Reuben stiffened.

  “I’m not accusing you of being a spy. It’s really all right to go outside of Denv. I’ve been outside. There isn’t much to see at first—a lot of ground pocked and torn up by shorts and overs from Ellay and us. Farther out, especially east, it’s different. Grass, trees, flowers. Places where you could grow food.

&
nbsp; “When I went outside, it troubled me. It made me ask questions. I wanted to know how we started. Yes—started. It wasn’t always like this. Somebody built Denv. Am I getting the idea across to you? It wasn’t always like this!

  “Somebody set up the reactors to breed uranium and make plutonium. Somebody tooled us up for the missiles. Somebody wired the boards to control them. Somebody started the hydroponics tanks.

  “I’ve dug through the archives. Maybe I found something. I saw mountains of strength reports, ration reports, supply reports, and yet I never got back to the beginning. I found a piece of paper and maybe I understood it and maybe I didn’t. It was about the water of the Colorado River and who should get how much of it. How can you divide water in a river? But it could have been the start of Denv, Ellay, and the missile attacks.”

  The general shook his head, puzzled, and went on: “I don’t see clearly what’s ahead. I want to make peace between Denv and Ellay, but I don’t know how to start or what it will be like. I think it must mean not firing, not even making any more weapons. Maybe it means that some of us, or a lot of us, will go out of Denv and live a different kind of life. That’s why I’ve clawed my way up. That’s why I need a young man who can claw with the best of them. Tell me what you think.”

  “I think,” said Reuben measuredly, “it’s magnificent—the salvation of Denv. I’ll back you to my dying breath if you’ll let me.”

  May smiled tiredly and leaned back in the chair as Reuben tiptoed out.

  WHAT luck, Reuben thought—what unbelievable luck to be at a fulcrum of history like this!

  He searched the level for Rudolph’s apartment and gained admission.

  To the general, he said: “Sir, I have to report that your friend May is insane. He has just been raving to me, advocating the destruction of civilization as we know it, and urging me to follow in his footsteps. I pretended to agree—since I can be of greater service to you if I’m in May’s confidence.”

  “So?” said Rudolph thoughtfully. “Tell me about the double. How did that go wrong?”