Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He said broodingly, a little drunk from the impact of two weak drinks on his small frame: “They put me into the rocket like a finger into a glove. I guess you know what the ship looked like. But did you know they zipped me into the pilot’s seat? It wasn’t a chair, more like a diver’s suit; the only air on the ship was in that suit: the only water came in through a tube to my lips. Saved weight . . .”

  And the next eighty days were in that suit. It fed him, gave him water, removed his wastes. If necessary, it would have shot novocaine into a broken arm, tourniquetted a cut femoral artery or pumped air for a torn lung. It was a placenta, and a hideously uncomfortable one.

  In the suit thirty-three days going, forty-one coming back. The six days in between were the justification for the trip.

  Jack fought his ship down through absolute blindness: gas clouds that closed his own eyes and confused the radar, down to the skin of an unknown world. He was within a thousand feet of the ground before he could see anything but swirling yellow. And then he landed and cut the rockets.

  “Well, I couldn’t get out, of course,” he went on. “For forty or fifty reasons, somebody else will have to be the first man to set foot on Venus. Somebody who doesn’t care much about breathing, I guess. Anyway, there I was, looking at it.” He shrugged his shoulders, looked baffled. “I’ve told it a dozen times at lectures, but I’ve never got it over. I tell ’em the closest thing to it on Earth was the Painted Desert. Maybe it was; I haven’t been there.

  “The wind blows hard on Venus and it tears up the rocks. Soft rocks blow away and make dust storms. The hard ones—well, they stick out in funny shapes and colors. Big monument things, some of them. And the most jagged hills and crevasses you can imagine. It’s something like the inside of a cave, sort of, only not dark. But the light is—funny. Nobody ever saw light like that on Earth. Orangy-brownish light, brilliant, very brilliant, but sort of threatening. Like the way the sky is threatening in the summer around sunset just before a smasher of a thunderstorm. Only there never is any thunderstorm because there isn’t a drop of water around.”

  He hesitated. “There is lightning. Plenty of it, but never any rain . . . I don’t know, Mitch,” he said abruptly. “Am I being any help to you at all?”

  I looked at my watch and saw that the return jet was about to leave, so I bent down and turned off the recorder in my briefcase. (Turned, not clicked. Mercury switches.)

  “You’re being lots of help, Jack,” I said. “But I’ll need more. And I have to go now. Look, can you come up to New York and work with me for a while? I’ve got everything you said on tape, but I. want visual stuff, too. Our artists can work from the pix you brought back, but there must be more. And you’re a lot more use than the photographs for what we need.” I didn’t mention that the artists would be drawing impressions of what Venus would look like, if it were different from what it was. “How about it?”

  Jack leaned back and looked cherubic, but, though he made me sweat through a brief recap of the extensive plans his lecture agent had made for his next few weeks, he finally agreed. The Shriners’ talk could be canceled, he decided, and the appointments with his ghost writers could be kept as well in New York as in Washington. We made a date for the following day just as the PA system announced that my flight was ready.

  “I’ll walk you to the plane,” Jack offered. He slipped down from the chair and threw a bill on the table for the waiter.

  We walked together through the narrow aisles of the bar out into the field. Jack grinned and strutted a little at some exclamations that went up as he was recognized. The field was almost dark, and the glow of Washington backlighted the silhouettes of hovering aircraft. Drifting toward us from the freight terminal was a huge cargo ’copter, a fifty-tonner, its cargo nacelle gleaming in colors as it reflected the lights below. It was no more than a hundred feet in the air, and I had to clutch my hat against the downdraft from its whirling vanes.

  “Damn-fool bus drivers,” Jack grunted, glaring up at the ’copter. “They ought to put those things on G.C.A. Just because they’re maneuverable, those fan-jockies think they can take them anywhere. If I handled a jet the way they—“Run!” he suddenly was yelling at me.

  I goggled at him; it was too sudden and disconnect to make any kind of sense. He lurched at me in a miniature body block and sent me staggering a few steps.

  “What the hell?” I started to complain, but I didn’t hear my own words. They were drowned out by a mechanical snapping sound and a flutter in the beat of the rotors and then the loudest crash I had ever heard as the cargo pod of the ’copter hit the concrete a yard from where we stood. It ruptured and spilled cartons of Starrzelius Verily food packets. One of the crimson cylinders rolled to my toes and I stupidly picked it up and looked at it.

  Overhead, the lightened ’copter fluttered up and away, but I didn’t see it go.

  “For God’s sake, get it off them!” Jack was shrilling, tugging at me. We had not been alone on the field. From under the buckled aluminum reached an arm holding a briefcase, and through the compound noises in my ears I could hear a bubbling sound of human pain. I let Jack pull me to the tangled metal and we tried to heave it. I got a scratched hand and tore my jacket, and then the airport people got there and brusquely ordered us away.

  I don’t remember walking there, but by and by I found that I was sitting on someone’s suitcase, back against the wall of the terminal, with Jack O’Shea talking excitedly to me. He was cursing all cargo ’copter pilots and blackguarding me for standing there like a fool when he’d seen the nacelle clamps opening, and a great deal more that I didn’t get. I remember him knocking the red box of breakfast food from my hand impatiently. The company psychologists say I am not unusually sensitive or timorous, but I was in a state of shock that lasted until Jack was loading me into my plane.

  Later on, the hostess told me five people had been caught under the nacelle, and the whole affair seemed to come into focus. But not until we were halfway back to New York. At the time all I remembered, all that seemed important, was Jack saying over and over, bitterness and anger written on his porcelain face: “Too damn many people, Mitch. Too damn much crowding. I’m with you every inch of the way. We need Venus, Mitch, we need the space . . .”

  III

  KATHY’S apartment, way downtown in Bensonhurst, was not large, but it was comfortable. In a horny, sensible way, it was beautifully furnished, as who should know better than me? I pressed the button over the label “Dr. Nevin,” resolutely not remembering that it had once read “Nevin-Courtenay,” and smiled at her as she opened the door.

  She unsmilingly said two things: “You’re late, Mitch,” and, “I thought you were going to call first.”

  I walked in and sat down. “I was late because I almost got killed and I didn’t call because I was late. Does that square us?”

  She asked the question I wanted her to ask and I told her how close I had come to death that evening.

  Kathy is a beautiful woman with a warm, friendly face, her hair always immaculately done in two tones of blonde, her eyes usually smiling. I have spent a great deal of time looking at her, but I never watched more attentively than when I told her about the cargo nacelle near-miss.

  It was, on the whole, disappointing. She was really concerned for me, beyond doubt. But Kathy’s heart opens to all people and I saw nothing in her face to make me feel that she cared more for me than anyone else.

  So I told her my other big news, the Venus account and my stewardship of it. It was more successful; she was startled and excited and happy, and kissed me in a flurry of good feeling. But when I kissed her back, as I’d been wanting to do for months, she drew away and went to sit on the other side of the room, ostensibly to dial a drink.

  “You rate a toast,” she said. “Champagne at the least. Mitch, it’s wonderful news!”

  I seized the chance. “Will you help me celebrate? Really celebrate?”

  Her brown eyes were wary. “Urn,” she said.
“Sure I will. We’ll do the town together—my treat and no arguments about it. The only thing is, I’ll have to leave you punctually at 2400. I’m spending the night in the hospital. I’ve a hysterectomy to do in the morning and I mustn’t get to sleep too late. Or too drunk, either.”

  But she smiled.

  Once again I decided not to push my luck too far. “Great,” I said, and I wasn’t faking. Kathy is a wonderful girl to do the town with. “Let me use your phone?”

  By the time we had our drinks. I had arranged for tickets to a show, a dinner table and a reservation for a nightcap afterward.

  Kathy looked a little dubious. “It’s a pretty crowded program for five hours, Mitch,” she said. “My hysterectomy isn’t going to like it if my hand shakes.” But I talked her out of it. Kathy is more resilient than that. Once she did a complete trepan the morning after we’d spent the entire night screaming out our tempers at each other, and it had gone perfectly.

  THE dinner, for me, was a failure. I don’t pretend to be an epicure who can’t stand anything but new protein. I definitely am, however, a guy who gets sore when he pays new-protein prices and gets generated protein instead. The texture of the shashlik we both ordered was all right, but you can’t hide the taste. I scratched the restaurant off my list and apologized to Kathy for it. But she laughed it off and the Show afterward was fine. Hypnotics often give me a headache, but I slipped right into the trance state this time as soon as the film began and was none the worse for it later.

  The night club was packed and the headwaiter had made a mistake in the time for our reservations. We had to wait five minutes in the anteroom, and Kathy shook her head very decisively when I pleaded for an extension on the curfew. But when the headwaiter showed us with the fanciest apologies and bows to our places at the bar and our drinks came, she leaned over and kissed me again. I felt just fine.

  “Thanks,” she said. “That was a wonderful evening, Mitch. Get promoted often, please. I like it.” I struck a cigarette for her and one for myself, and somebody behind us began to holler: “You fools! It’s not too late!”

  We turned and gaped. It was a gaunt, wild-eyed youngster in the entrance of the night club, waving his arms and yelling: “Look at yourselves, you fools! The air is blue with your smoke! You’re burning up and throwing away the product of land that should be growing food!”

  A flying squad of waiters headed his way suddenly stopped and disintegrated into very scared individuals. He had a pistol in his hand.

  “Don’t stop me!” he shouted hoarsely. “I don’t want to hurt anybody, but I must bring you my message. It’s not too late! Stop your smoking! Stop your drinking! Don’t you know there are starving children in this world? How dare you drink alcohol made from grain? Think of the evil and folly of it! Give up your wickedness! Turn Connie and learn what peace of mind is like! It’s not too—”

  He hadn’t guarded his back. Two or three bluecoats of the Metropolitan Protection Corporation were standing over his lank body.

  Kathy yelled: “Gangway! I’m a doctor!” put her head down and charged through the milling crowd. When I reached her side, she was saying to the M.P.C. foreman: “Killed instantly.”

  “Thanks, miss,” the foreman said modestly. “It was just my duty. Any good protection man could have done as well.”

  “I didn’t—” she began, and then sighed. “Mitch, shall we get back to the bar? We must have time for another drink.” We got our places back and ordered again. “What a hell of a thing to happen,” I said, angry that the young lunatic had chosen to mess up our evening.

  “I absolutely do not want to talk or think about it,” Kathy said. “Make me forget. What were we talking about?”

  “Well, I was going to say that we always have fun together.”

  “And I was going to say that I knew what you were leading up to and that the answer still was no.”

  “I know you were,” I said glumly. “Let’s get out of here.” She paid the tab and we left, inserting our anti-soot plugs as we hit the street.

  “Cab, sir?” asked the doorman. “Yes, please,” Kathy answered. “A tandem.”

  He whistled up a two-man pedicab and Kathy gave the lead boy the hospital’s address. “You can come if you like, Mitch,” she said, and I climbed in beside her. The doorman gave us a starting push and the cabbies grunted getting up momentum.

  For a moment it was like our courtship again: the friendly dark, the slight, musty smell of the canvas top, the squeak of the springs. But for a moment only.

  “Watch what you’re going to say, Mitch,” she warned.

  “Please, Kathy, let me go through it anyhow. It won’t take long. We were married eight months ago—all right,” I said quickly as she started to object. “It wasn’t an absolute marriage. But we took the interlocutory vows. Do you remember why we did that?”

  She said patiently after a moment: “We were in love.”

  “I loved you and you loved me. And we both had our work to think about, and we knew that sometimes it made us a little hard to get along with. So we made it interim. It had a year to run before we had to decide whether to make it permanent.” I touched her hand and she did not move it away. “Kathy dear, don’t you think we knew what we were doing then? Can’t we at least give it the year’s trial? There are still four months to go’. Let’s try it. If the year ends and you don’t want to file your certificate—well, I won’t be able to say you didn’t give me a chance. As for me, I don’t have to wait. My certificate’s on file now and I won’t change.”

  We passed a street light and I saw her lips twisted into an expression I couldn’t quite read.

  “Oh, damn it all, Mitch,” she said unhappily, “I know you won’t change. Must I call you names to convince you that it’s hopeless? I used to think you were a sweet guy, an idealist who cared for principles and ethics instead of money. You told me so yourself, very convincingly. You were very plausible about my work, too. You boned up on medicine, you came to watch me operate three times a week, you told all our friends how proud you were to be married to a surgeon. It took me three months to find out what you meant by that. Anybody could marry a girl who’d be a housewife. But it took a Mitchell Courtenay to marry a star class surgeon and make her a housewife.”

  Her voice was tremulous. “I couldn’t take it, Mitch. I never will be able to. Not the arguments, the sulkiness and the ever-and-ever fighting. I’m a doctor. Sometimes a life depends on me. If I’m all torn up inside from battling with my husband, that life isn’t safe. Can’t you see that?” I asked quietly: “Kathy, don’t you still love me?”

  She was absolutely quiet for a long moment. Then she laughed wildly and very briefly. “Here’s the hospital, Mitch. It’s midnight.”

  We climbed out. “Wait,” I growled at the lead boy, and walked with her to the door. She wouldn’t kiss me good night and she wouldn’t make a date to see me again. I stood in the lobby for twenty minutes to make sure she was really staying there that night, and then got into the cab to go to the nearest shuttle station. I was in a vile mood. It wasn’t helped any when the lead boy asked innocently after I paid him off: “Say, mister, what does idealist mean? Was the dame an eye doctor?”

  “ ‘Idealist’ is Spanish for ‘mind your own business,’ ” I told him evenly. On the shuttle I wondered sourly how rich I’d have to be before I could buy privacy.

  The slain Connie rankled, too. They seemed to be capable of anything you can name in the way of damn-foolishness, but this was the first time I’d heard that they were against smoking and drinking. Hell, there was no real grain used in whisky. Maybe he wasn’t a real Connie, just a crack-brained kid who thought he was. There were such idiots. And there were other people who weren’t Connies and who didn’t think they were Connies, but who got scragged for being Connies anyway. And there were borderline cases where you could never be sure. University teachers caught with a well-worn copy of Our Plundered Planet. They always said they had only a scholarly interest in i
t, of course. Just what you’d expect them to say, Connie or not. And naturally the Connies would try to plant people in universities where they could influence the young and make recruits. Better be safe than sorry—or was it?

  I thought of old man Hollister. I was pretty sure he was a sound man. but a whispering campaign swept Schocken Associates, complete with all sorts of very circumstantial anecdotes, the kind of thing you couldn’t make up. He resigned after about three months of it and died shortly afterward. Hollister didn’t look as if he were capable of blowing up a DDT factory or garotting a hydraulic mine operator or burning down a penicillin warehouse. But somebody did these things. Presumably somebody as innocent-looking as Hollister.

  Damn them all! I might have gone home with Kathy if that kid hadn’t got himself killed!

  MY temper was no better when I arrived at the office next morning. It took all Hester’s tact to keep me from biting her head off in the first few minutes, and it was by the grace of God that it was not a Board morning. After I’d got my mail and the overnight accumulation of inter-office memos, Hester intelligently disappeared for a while. When she came back, she brought me a cup of coffee—authentic plantation-grown coffee.

  “The matron in the ladies’ room brews it on the sly,” she explained. “Usually she won’t let us take it out because she’s afraid of the Coffiest team. But now that you’re star class—”

  I thanked her and gave her Jack O’Shea’s tape to put through channels. Then I went to work.

  First came the matter of the sampling area, and a headache with Matt Runstead. He’s Market Research, so I had to work with and through him. But he didn’t show any inclination to work with me. I put a map of Southern California in the projector while Matt and two of his helpers boredly sprinkled cigarette ashes on my floor.

  With the pointer, I outlined the test areas and controls: “San Diego through Tijuana; half the communities around L. A. and the lower tip of Monterrey. Those will be controls. The rest of Cal-Mexico, from L.A. down, we’ll use for tests. You’ll have to be on the scene, I guess, Matt; I’d recommend our Diego offices as headquarters. Harris is in charge there and he’s a pretty good man.”