Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “The bunglers were Selene and Almon. Selene because she alarmed me instead of distracting me. Almon because he failed to recognize her incompetence.”

  “They shall be brainburned. That leaves an eighty-ninth-level vacancy in my organization, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re very kind, sir, but I think I should remain a May’s man—outwardly. If I earn any rewards, I can wait for them. I presume that May will be elected to wear the five stars. He won’t live more than two years after that, at the rate he is taking drugs.”

  “We can shorten it,” grinned Rudolph. “I have pharmacists who can see that his drugs are more than normal strength.”

  “That would be excellent, sir. When he is too enfeebled to discharge his duties, there may be an attempt to rake up the affair of the double to discredit you. I could then testify that I was your man all along and that May coerced me.”

  They put their heads together, the two saviors of civilization as they knew it, and conspired ingeniously long into the endless night.

  Gravy Planet

  BEGINNING A THREE-PART SERIAL

  A Utopia is an ideal society, of course, but what constitutes Utopia depends on whose ideals are being gratified. Here, for instance, is a perfect society which is generally overlooked!

  AS I dressed that morning, I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions and exaggerations that they would expect in my report. My section—Production—had been plagued with a long series of illnesses and resignations, and you can’t get work done without people to do it. But the Board wasn’t likely to take that as an excuse.

  I rubbed the depilatory soap lover my face and rinsed it with the trickle from the fresh-water tap. Wasteful, of course, but I could afford the cost, and salt water always leaves my face itchy. Before the last of the stubble was washed away, the trickle stopped and didn’t start again. I swore a little and finished rinsing with salt. It had been happening lately; some people blamed Connie saboteurs. Loyalty raids were being held throughout the New York Water Supply Corporation, but so far they hadn’t changed the damned water situation. Very annoying, considering the price of fresh water—you’d think the company would protect its customers.

  The morning newscast over the shaving mirror caught me for a moment . . . the President’s last-night speech, a brief glimpse of the Venus rocket, squat and silvery on the Arizona sand, rioting in Panama . . . I switched it off when the quarter-hour time signal chimed over the audio band.

  It looked as though I was going to be late again, which certainly would not help mollify the Board.

  I saved five minutes by wearing yesterday’s shirt and by leaving my breakfast juice to grow warm and sticky on the table. But I lost the five minutes by trying to call Kathy. She didn’t answer the phone. And I was late getting into the office.

  FORTUNATELY—and unprecedentedly—Fowler Schocken was late too.

  In our office it was Fowler’s custom to hold Board conferences fifteen minutes before the regular opening of the business day. It kept the clerks and stenos on their toes, and it was no hardship to Fowler. He spent every morning in the office anyway: “morning” to him began with the rising of the Sun.

  Today, though, I had time to get my secretary’s summary off my desk before the meeting. When Fowler Schocken walked in with a courteous apology for his tardiness, I was sitting in my place at the foot of the table, reasonably relaxed and as sure of myself as a Fowler Schocken Associate was ever likely to be.

  “Good morning,” Fowler said and the eleven of us made the proper murmur. He didn’t sit down; he stood gazing fondly as a father at us for about a minute and a half. Then he looked carefully and delightedly about the room.

  “I’ve been thinking about our conference room,” he said, and we all looked around at it. The room wasn’t big, it wasn’t small: say ten by twelve. But it was cool, well-lighted and most imposingly furnished. The air recirculators were cleverly hidden behind animated friezes; the carpeting was thick and soft; and every piece of furniture was constructed from top to bottom of authentic, expertized, genuine tree-grown wood.

  Fowler Schocken said: “We have a nice conference room here, men, as we should have—Fowler Schocken Associates is the largest advertising agency in the city. We bill a megabuck a year more than anybody else around. And—” he looked around at all of us—“I think you’ll agree that we all find it worth while. I don’t believe there’s a person in this room who has less than a two-room apartment.” He twinkled at me. “Even the bachelors. Speaking for myself, I’ve done welt. My summer place looks right over one of the largest parks on Long Island. I haven’t tasted any protein but new meat for years and when I go out for a spin I pedal a Cadillac. The wolf is a long way from my door. And I think any one of you can say the same. Right?” The hand of our Director of Market Research shot up and Fowler nodded at him: “Yes, Matthew?”

  Matt Runstead knew which side his bread was oiled on. He glared belligerently around the table. “I just want to go on record as agreeing with Mr. Schocken one hundred per cent—all the way!”

  “Thank you, Matthew.” It took Fowler Schocken a moment before he could go on. “Well, we all know what put us where we are. We remember the Starrzelius Verily account, and how we put Indiastries on the map. The first spherical trust. Merging a whole subcontinent into a single manufacturing complex. Schocken Associates pioneered on both of them. Nobody can say we were floating with the tide. But that’s behind us.

  “Men, I want to know something. You can tell me truthfully—are we getting soft?” He took time to look at each of our faces searchingly, ignoring the forest of hands in the air. Mine was right up there, too. Then he waved to the man at his right. “You first, Ben.”

  Ben Winston stood up and baritoned: “Speaking for Industrial Anthropology, no! Listen to today’s progress report—you’ll get it in the noon bulletin, but let me brief you now. According to the midnight indices, all primary schools east of the Mississippi are now using our packaging recommendation for the school lunch program. Soya-burgers and generated steak are shrewdly packed in containers the same shade of green as the Universal products, to transfer unconsciously the distaste to our competition. But the candy, ice cream and kiddiebutt cigarette ration are wrapped in colorful Starrzelius red. When those little consumers grow up . . .” He lifted his eyes exultantly from his notes. “According to our extrapolation, fifteen years from now Universal products will be bankrupt and off the market entirely!”

  He sat down in a wave of applause. Schocken clapped, too, and looked brightly at the rest of us. I leaned forward with Expression One—eagerness, intelligence, competence—all over my face. But I needn’t have bothered. Fowler pointed to the lean man next to Winston. Harvey Bruner, “I don’t have to tell you men that Point-of-Sale has its special problems,” Harvey said, puffing his thin cheeks. “I swear, the whole damned government must be infiltrated with Connies!” He was beginning to get hysterical. “You know what they’ve done. They outlawed compulsive sub-sonics in our auditory captive-audience advertising—but we’ve bounced back with a list of semantic cue words that tie in with every basic trauma and neurosis in American life today. They listened to the safety cranks and stopped us from projecting our messages on aircar windows, but Lab tells me—” he nodded to our Director of Research across the table—“that soon we’ll be testing a system that projects direct on the retina of the eye.

  “But we’re not content with that. We’re going forward. As an example I want to mention the Coffiest pro—” He broke off. “Excuse me, Mr. Schocken,” he whispered. “Has Security checked this room?”

  Fowler Schocken nodded. “Absolutely clean. Nothing but the usual State Department and House of Representatives spy-mikes. And of course we’re feeding a canned playback into them.”

  Harvey relaxed again. “Well, about this Coffiest,” he said. “We’re sampling it in fifteen key cities. It’s the usual offer—a thirteen-week supply of Coffiest, ten thousand dollars in cash and a
weekend vacation on the Ligurian Riviera to everybody who comes in. But—and here’s what makes this campaign truly great, in my estimation—each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful, but definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least fifty thousand dollars for a cure, so it’s simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest—three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar.”

  Fowler Schocken beamed and I braced myself into Expression One again. Next to Harvey sat Tildy Mathis, Chief of Personnel and hand-picked by Schocken himself. He didn’t ask women to speak at Board sessions, and next to Tildy sat me. But Fowler let me down with a smile.

  He said: “I won’t ask every section to report. We haven’t the time. But you’ve given me your answer, gentlemen. It’s the answer I like. You’ve met every challenge up to now. I want to give you a new challenge.”

  He pressed a button on his monitor panel and swiveled his chair around. The lights went down in the room: the projected art calendar (executives only) that hung behind Schocken’s chair faded and revealed the mottled surface of the screen. On it another picture began to form.

  I HAD seen that picture once before, that same day, in the news screen over my shaving mirror.

  It was the Venus rocket, a thousand-foot monster, the bloated child of the slim V-2s and stubby Moon rockets of the past. Around it was a scaffolding of steel and aluminum, a-crawl with tiny figures that manipulated minute, blue-white welding flames. The picture was obviously recorded; it showed the rocket as it had been weeks or months ago in an earlier stage of construction, not poised as if ready for takeoff, the way I had seen it earlier.

  A voice from the screen said triumphantly and inaccurately: “This is the ship that spans the stars!” I recognized the voice as belonging to one of the organ-toned commentators in Aural Effects and expertized the script without effort as emanating from one of Tildy’s girl copywriters. The talented slovenliness that would confuse Venus with a star had to come from somebody on her staff.

  “This is the ship that a modern Columbus will drive through the void,” said the voice. “Six and a half million tons of trapped lightning and steel—an ark for eighteen hundred men and women, and everything to make a new world for their home. Who U will be in it? What fortunate pioneers will tear an empire from the rich, fresh soil of another world?

  “Let me introduce you to them—a man and his wife, two of the intrepid . . .”

  The voice kept going. On the screen, the picture dissolved to a spacious suburban roomette in early morning—the husband folding the bed into the wall and taking down the partition to the children’s nook; the wife dialing breakfast and erecting the table. Over the breakfast juices and the children’s pablum (with a steaming mug of Coffiest for each, of course) they spoke persuasively to each other about how wise and brave they had been to apply for passage in the Venus rocket. And the closing question of their youngest babbler (“Mommy, when I grow up kin I take my boys and girls to a place as nice as Venus?”) cued the switch to a highly imaginative series of shots of Venus as it would be when the child grew up—verdant valleys, crystal lakes, brilliant mountain vistas.

  THE commentary did not deny, and neither did it dwell on, the decades of hydroponics and life in hermetically sealed cabins that the pioneers would have to endure while working on Venus’s unbreathable atmosphere and waterless chemistry.

  Instinctively I had set the timer button on my watch as the picture started. When it was over, I read the dial: nine minutes, three times as long as any commercial could legally run!

  It was only after the lights were on again, the cigarettes lit and Fowler Schocken well into his pep talk for the day that I saw the answer. He called our attention to the history of advertising—from the simple handmaiden task of selling already manufactured goods to its present role of creating industries and redesigning a world’s folkways to meet the needs of. commerce. He touched once more on what we ourselves, Fowler Schocken Associates, had done with our own expansive career. And then he said:

  “There’s an old saying, men, ‘The world is our oyster.’ We’ve made it come true. But we’ve eaten that oyster. We’ve actually and literally conquered the world. Like Napoleon, we weep for new worlds to conquer. And there—” he waved at the screen behind him—“you have just seen the first of those worlds.”

  I have never liked Matt Runstead, as you may have gathered. He is a Paul Pry whom I suspect of wiretapping even within the company. He must have spied out the Venus project well in advance, because not even the most talented reflexes could have brought out his little speech.

  While the rest of us were still busy assimilating what Fowler Schocken had told us, Runstead was leaping to his feet.

  “Gentlemen,” he said with passion, “this is truly the work of genius. Not just India, not just a commodity, but a whole planet to sell! I salute you, Fowler Schocken—the Clive, the Bolivar, the John Jacob Astor of a new world!”

  Matt was first, as I say, but every one of us got up and said in turn about the same thing. Including me. Kathy had never understood it and I’d tried to explain that it was a religious ritual—like the champagne bottle at a ship’s launching, or the sacrifice of the virgin to the corn crop. I don’t think any of us, except maybe Matt Runstead, would feed habit-forming narcotics to the world for money alone. There was a high ideal behind it—production for use and profit. With our enormously advanced technology, we could produce more coffee, to mention just one item out of the innumerable roster of foods and goods and services, than the world could normally consume. Our sacred task was to keep the demand right in step with the supply—not an easy one if you consider the flood of things produced on farms and in factories.

  But we did it! By Morgan, we did it and we were proud to be able to!

  WHEN all of us had done, Fowler Schocken touched another button and showed us a chart.

  He explained it carefully item by item. He showed us tables and graphs and diagrams of the entire new Department of Fowler Schocken Associates which would be set up to handle the development and exploitation of the planet Venus. He covered the tedious lobbying and friend-making in Congress which had given us the exclusive right to build up and profit from the planet, and I began to see how he could safely use a nine-minute commercial. He explained how the Government naturally wanted Venus to be an American planet and how they had invoked our American supremacy in advertising to make it possible.

  As he spoke, we all caught some of his fire. I envied the man who would head the Venus Section; any one of us would have committed even a commercial offense to get the job.

  He spoke of trouble lining up the Senator from DuPont Chemicals with his 45 votes, and of an easy triumph over the Senator from Nash-Kelvinator with his six. He spoke proudly of a faked Connie demonstration against Fowler Schocken which had lined up the anti-Connie Secretary of the Interior.

  Visual Aids had done a beautiful job of briefing the information, but we were there nearly an hour looking at the charts and listening to Fowler’s achievements and plans.

  But finally he clicked off the projector and said: “There you have it. That’s our new campaign. And it starts right away—now. I have only one more announcement to make and then we can all get to work.”

  Fowler Schocken is a good showman. He took the time to find a slip of paper and read from it a sentence that the lowest of our copyboys could deliver off the cuff. “The chairman of the Venus Section,” he read, “will be Mitchell Courtenay.”

  And that was the biggest surprise of all, because Mitchell Courtenay, five feet eleven inches tall, sandy-haired, moderately good-looking except for a nose that was pushed a little off center—is me.

  II

  I LINGERED with Fowler for three or four minutes while the rest of the Board went back to their offices, and the elevator ride down from the Board room to my own office on the eighty-sixth floor took a few seco
nds, so Hester was already clearing out my desk when I arrived.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Courtenay,” she said. “You’re moving to the eighty-ninth now. Isn’t it wonderful? And I’ll have a private office, too!”

  I thanked her and picked up the phone over the desk, staying out of her way. The first thing I had to do was get my staff in and turn over the reins of Production; Tom Gillespie was next in line. But the first thing I did do was to dial Kathy’s apartment again. There was still no answer, so I called in the boys.

  They were properly sorry to see me go and properly delighted about everybody moving up a notch.

  And then it was lunch time, so I postponed the problem of the planet Venus until the afternoon.

  I made a phone call, ate quickly in the company cafeteria, took the elevator down to the shuttle and the shuttle south for sixteen blocks. Coming out, I found myself in the open air for the first time that day and reached for my anti-soot plugs, but didn’t put them in. The light rain had temporarily washed the air clean. It was summer, hot and sticky; the hordes of people crowding the sidewalks were as anxious as I to get back inside a building. I had to bulldoze my way across the street and into the lobby.

  The elevator took me up fourteen floors. It was an old building with imperfect air conditioning; I felt a chill in my damp suit. It occurred to me to use that instead of the story I had prepared, but I decided against it.

  A girl in a starched white uniform looked up as I walked into the office. I said: “My name is Silver. Walter P. Silver. I have an appointment.”

  “Yes, Mr. Silver,” she remembered. “Your heart. You said it was an emergency.”

  “That’s right. It’s probably psychosomatic, but I felt—”

  “Of course.” She waved me to a chair. “Dr. Nevin will see you in just a moment.”

  It was ten minutes. A young woman came out of the doctor’s office and a man who had been waiting in the reception room before me went in; then he came out and the nurse said to me: “Will you go into Dr. Nevin’s office now?”