Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “First, words. We want words that are about Venus, words that’ll tickle people. Make them sit up. Make them muse about change, and space, and distant planets. Words to make them a little discontented with what they are and a little hopeful about what they might be. Words to make them feel noble about feeling the way they do, and not foolish. Words that will do all these things and also make them happy about the existence of Indiastries and Starrzelius Verily and Fowler Schocken Associates. Words that will do all these things and also make them feel unhappy about the existence of Universal Products and Taunton Associates.”

  He was staring at me with his mouth open. “You serious?” he finally exclaimed.

  “You’re on the inside now. That’s the way we work. That’s the way we worked on you.”

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

  “You’re wearing Starrzelius Verily clothes and shoes, Jack. It means we got you. Taunton and Universal worked on you, Starrzelius and Schocken worked on you, and you chose Starrzelius. Schocken reached you. Smoothly, without ever being aware that it was happening, you became persuaded that there was something rather nice about Starrzelius clothes and shoes, and that there was something rather not-nice about Universal clothes and shoes.”

  “I never read the ads,” he said defiantly.

  “Our ultimate triumph is wrapped up in that statement.”

  “I solemnly promise,” O’Shea said, “that as soon as I get back to my hotel room-, I’ll send my clothes down the incinerator chute—”

  “Luggage, too?” I asked. “Starrzelius luggage?”

  He looked startled for a moment and then regained his calm. “Starrzelius luggage, too,” he said. “And then I’ll pick up the phone and order a complete set of Universal luggage and apparel. And you can’t stop me.”

  “I wouldn’t think of stopping you. It means more business for Starrzelius. Tell you what you’re going to do: You’ll get your complete set of Universal luggage and apparel. You’ll wear it for a while with a vague, submerged discontent. It’s going to work on your libido, because our ads for Starrzelius have convinced you that it isn’t quite virile to buy from any other firm. Your selfesteem will suffer; deep down, you’ll know that you’re not wearing the best. Your subconscious won’t stand up under much of that. You’ll find yourself ‘losing’ bits of Universal apparel. You’ll find yourself ‘accidentally’ putting your foot through the cuff of your Universal pants. You’ll find yourself overpacking the Universal luggage and damning it for not being roomier. You’ll walk into stores and in a fit of momentary amnesia about this conversation you’ll buy Starrzelius, bless you.”

  O’Shea laughed uncertainly. “And you did it with words?”

  “Words and pictures. Sight and sound and smell and taste and touch. And the greatest of these is words. Do you read poetry?”

  “My God, of course not! Who can?”

  “I don’t mean the contemporary stuff; you’re quite right about that. I mean Keats, Swinburne—the great lyricists.”

  “I used to, a little,” he cautiously admitted. “What about it?”

  “I’m going to ask you to spend the morning and afternoon with one of the world’s great poets: a girl named Tildy Mathis. She doesn’t know she’s a poet; she thinks she’s a boss copywriter. Don’t enlighten her. It might make her unhappy.

  ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

  Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

  Sylvan historian—’

  That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity.”

  “You talk pretty damn funny yourself.”

  “Words are my business, Jack.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” he wanted to know.

  “I said you’re on the inside. There’s a responsibility that goes with the power. In this profession, we reach into the souls of men end women. We do it by taking talent and—redirecting it. Nobody should play with lives the way we do unless he’s, motivated by the highest ideals.”

  “I get you,” he said softly. “Don’t worry about my motives. I’m not in this thing for money or fame. I’m in it so the human race can have some elbow room and dignity again.”

  “That’s it,” I said, putting on Expression Number One. But inwardly I was startled. The “highest ideal” I had been about to mention was Sales.

  I buzzed for Tildy. “Talk to her,” I said. “Answer her questions. Ask her some. Make it a long, friendly chat. Make her share your experiences. And, without knowing it, she’ll write lyric fragments of your experiences that will go right to the hearts and souls of the readers. Don’t hold out on her.”

  “Certainly not. Uh, Mitch, will she hold out on me?” His face was from a Tanagra figurine of a hopeful young satyr.

  “That depends on you. I told you people are stirred by words. Women are people, Jack.”

  But I wondered about Kathy. She hadn’t stayed stirred.

  THAT afternoon, for the first time in four months, Kathy called me.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked worriedly. “Anything I can do?” She laughed. “Nothing wrong, Mitch. I just wanted to say hello and tell you thanks for a lovely evening.”

  “How about another one?” I promptly asked.

  “Dinner at my place tonight suit you?”

  “It certainly does. What color dress will you be wearing? I’m going to buy you a flower!”

  “Oh, Mitch, you needn’t be that extravagant; we aren’t courting. But there is something I wish you’d bring.”

  “Name it and it’s yours.”

  “Jack O’Shea. Can you manage it? I saw by the ‘cast that he came into town this morning and I suppose he’s working with you.”

  Very dampened, I said: “Yes, he is. I’ll check with him and call you back. Are you over at the hospital?”

  “Yes. And thanks so much for trying. I’d love to meet him.”

  I got in touch with O’Shea in Tildy’s office. “You booked up for tonight?” I asked.

  “I don’t seem to be,” he said morosely. “My proposition didn’t sell so good. What’s yours?”

  “Quiet dinner at home with my wife and me. She happens to be beautiful and a good cook and a star class surgeon and excellent company.”

  “You’re on.”

  So I called Kathy back and told her I’d bring the social lion about seven.

  He stalked into my office at six, grumbling: “I’d better get a good meal out of this, Mitch. Your Miss Mathis appeals to me. What a dope! Does she have sense enough to come in out of the smog?”

  “I don’t believe so,” I said. “But Keats was properly hooked by a designing wench, Byron didn’t have sense enough to stay out of the V-D ward, and Swinburne made a tragic mess out of his life. Do I have to go on?”

  “No. What kind of marriage have you got?”

  “Interlocutory,” I said, a little painfully.

  He raised his eyebrows a trifle. “My mother was an Easter-duty Catholic,” he said, “and I guess I’m a lapsed Catholic or worse. But still there’s something about those arrangements that sets my teeth on edge.”

  “Mine, too,” I said, “at least where it involves me. In case Tildy missed telling you, my beautiful and talented wife does not want to finalize it, we don’t live together, and unless I change her mind in four months, we’ll be washed up.”

  “Tildy did miss telling me,” he said. “You’re pretty sick about it, seems to me.”

  I almost invited his sympathy. I almost started to tell him how rough it was, how much I loved her, how she wasn’t giving me an even break, how I’d tried everything I could think of and nothing wo
uld convince her. And then I realized that I’d be telling it to a sixty-pound midget who, if he married, might become his wife’s helpless plaything or butt of ridicule.

  “Middling sick,” I said. “Let’s go, Jack. Time for a drink and then the shuttle.”

  KATHY had never looked lovelier and I wished I hadn’t let her talk me out of shooting a couple of days’ pay on a flower from Tiffany’s.

  She said hello to O’Shea and he announced loudly and immediately: “I like you. There’s no gleam in your eye. No ‘Isn’t he cute?’ gleam. No ‘A girl’s got a right to try anything once’ gleam. No ‘My, he must be rich and frustrated!’ gleam. In short, you like me and I like you.”

  As you may have gathered, he was a little drunk.

  “You are going to have some coffee, Mr. O’Shea,” she said. “I ruined myself to provide real pork sausages and real apple sauce, and you’re going to taste them.”

  “Coffee?” he said. “Coffiest for me, ma’am. To drink coffee would be disloyal to the great firm of Fowler Schocken Associates, with which I am associated. Isn’t that right, Mitch?”

  “I give indulgence this once,” I said. “Besides, Kathy doesn’t believe the harmless alkaloid in Coffiest is harmless.”

  Luckily, she was in the kitchen corner with her back turned when I said that, and either missed it or could afford to pretend she did. We’d had a terrific four-hour battle over that very point, complete with epithets like “baby-poisoner” and “crackpot-reformer” and a few others that were shorter and nastier.

  The coffee was served and quenched O’Shea’s mild glow.

  Dinner was marvelous. The pork sausages turned out to be not patties, but crisp little cylinders; I’d never had them that way before and asked about them.

  “That’s how they usually were made,” Kathy explained. “The casing around the meat is organic, too. It’s the small intestine of the hog.”

  “Gah!” I said, astonished and disgusted.

  “Now, Mitch,” she said evenly.

  “It tasted good. This nicy-nicy business about food isn’t smart. Carry it to extremes and it becomes very foolish indeed. I hear that in India it’s no use to ship rice into a Northern famine area or wheat into a Southern famine area. The people just won’t eat it. They’ll lie down on a sack of it and starve.”

  “Interesting,” O’Shea commented. “And it did taste good. If I may ask—where did you get it?”

  She smiled. “I’m afraid I couldn’t give you the—supplier’s name without his permission. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course. Lord, I wish I’d lived in the old days! Don’t you, Mitch?”

  “Not me,” I said promptly. “You can moon about the spacious four-room apartments, and about buying all the new meat you want at fifty dollars a pound. Things are a little more cramped now, but think of what we have in added convenience. In my trainee days we did some research for Starrzelius depilatory and I was the goat. I had to shave, with a razor, for one whole week! Unless you’ve been through that yourself, you don’t know what it’s like. No, we’re better off nowadays.”

  Kathy mused: “Wouldn’t the simplest way out be to grow a beard?”

  I stared at her, decided she was joking, and laughed. “Surely, Kathy, you’ll admit that medical progress means we’re healthier now than we used to be?”

  She struck a cigarette and exhaled a long plume of smoke before she answered.

  “Who knows? The Black Plague came to an end in the Middle Ages without the discovery of penicillin. Medical historians are still arguing about the great influenza epidemic of 1917-1919. Some of them say it was a coal shortage—no, not even that, just a breakdown of coal distribution. Surgery? Well, I did the hysterectomy this morning and got all the metastases—maybe. We still don’t know about mental illness. But we do have an immense variety of things to shoot into people when they complain that it hurts here. Mr. O’Shea, if you go around saying that Dr. Nevin was saying thus-and-so about medical progress, I’ll first deny it and second cut your throat.”

  “Respectfully noted,” O’Shea said. “To keep this seminar going, I state that I am an aeronautical engineer and a good one. I’ve been exposed to the history of aviation. You know how nerve-racking a flight is—traffic pattern up, congested lanes, traffic pattern down. I can’t point to any golden age when things were better, but I’ve sometimes thought the whole approach was wrong since Kittyhawk. The theme song has always been bigger and faster; bigger and faster. Why not smaller and smoother? Why not slower and pleasanter?”

  I found myself hotly defending things as they are: bigger because you can do more with them, faster because it means increased command of nature—in effect, lengthening your active life.

  “You can lengthen your active life in a manner of speaking with cerebrin,” O’Shea objected. “What’s so good about that?”

  “That’s not what I mean—.”

  “You’ve been to the Moon, I suppose?” Kathy asked O’Shea. “Not yet. One of these days.”

  “There’s nothing there,” I said. “It’s a waste of time. One of our dullest, deadest accounts. I suppose we only kept it for the experience we’d get, looking ahead to Venus. A few hundred people mining—that’s the whole story.”

  “Excuse me,” O’Shea said, and retired.

  I grabbed the chance. “Kathy, darling,” I said, “it was real fine of you to ask me over. Does it mean anything?”

  She rubbed her right thumb and index finger together and I knew that whatever she would say after that would be a lie. “It might, Mitch. You’ll have to give me time.”

  I threw away my secret weapon. “You’re lying,” I answered disgustedly. “You always do this before you lie to me.” I showed her. and she let out a short laugh.

  “Fair’s fair,” she said with bitter amusement. “You always catch your breath and look right into my eyes when you lie to me.”

  O’Shea returned and felt the tension at once. “I ought to be going,” he said.

  There were the usual politenesses at the door, and Kathy kissed me good night. It was a long, warm, clinging kiss; altogether the kind of kiss that should start the evening rather than end it. It set her own pulse going—I felt that—but she closed the door on us.

  “You been thinking about a bodyguard again?” O’Shea asked.

  I thought it was an inexcusable crack and started to say something unpleasant. His face was abstracted; he had missed the by-play or ignored it.

  “The shooting was a mistake,” I stubbornly said.

  “Let’s stop by your place for a drink,” he suggested ingenuously.

  The situation was almost pathetic. Sixty-pound Jack O’Shea was guarding me! “Sure,” I said. We got on the shuttle.

  He went into the room first and turned on the light, and nothing happened. While sipping a very weak whisky and soda, he drifted around the place checking window locks, hinges and the like.

  “This chair would look better over there,” he said. Over there, of course, was out of the line of fire from the window. I moved it.

  “Take care of yourself, Mitch,” he said when he left. “That lovely wife and your friends would miss you if anything happened.”

  The only thing that happened was that I barked my shin setting up the bed. and that was happening all the time. Even Kathy, with a surgeon’s neat, economical movements, bore the scars of life in a city apartment. You set up the bed at night, you took it down in the morning, you set up the table for breakfast, you took it down to get to the door. No wonder some shortsighted people sighed for the spacious old days. I thought, settling myself luxuriously for the night.

  V

  THINGS were rolling within a week. With Runstead out of my hair and at work on the PregNot-A.I.G. hassel, I could really grip the reins.

  Tildy’s girls and boys were putting out the copy—temperamental kids, sometimes doing a line a day with anguish; sometimes rolling out page after page effortlessly, with shining eyes, as though possessed.
She directed and edited their stuff and passed the best of the best to me: nine-minute commercial scripts, pix cut-lines, articles for planting, news stories, page ads, whispering campaign cue-lines, endorsements, jokes, limericks and puns (clean and dirty) to float through the country.

  Visual was hot. The airbrush and camera people were having fun sculpturing a planet. It was the ultimate in “Before and After” advertising, and they were caught by the sense of history.

  Development kept pulling rabbits out of hats. Collier once explained to me when I hinted that he might be over-optimistic: “It’s energy, Mr. Courtenay. The Sun pours all that energy into Venus in the form of heat and molecular bonds and fast particles. Here on Earth we don’t have that level of available energy. We use windmills to tap the kinetic energy of the atmosphere. On Venus we’ll just build an accumulator, put up a lightning rod and jump back. It’s an entirely different level.”

  Market Research Industrial Anthropology was at work in San Diego sampling the Cal-Mex area, trying Tildy’s copy, Visual’s layouts and films and extrapolating and interpolating. I had a direct wire to the desk of Ham Harris, Runstead’s vice, in San Diego.

  A typical day began with a Venus Section meeting: pep talks by me, reports of progress by all hands, critique and cross-department suggestions. Harris, on the wire, might advise Tildy that “serene atmosphere” wasn’t going well as a cue phrase in his sampling and that she should submit a list of alternatives. Tildy might ask Collier whether it would be okay to say “topaz sands” in a planted article which would hint that Venus was crawling with uncut precious and semi-precious stones. Collier might tell Visual that they’d have to make the atmosphere redder in a “before” panorama. And I might tell Collier to lay off because it was permissible license.

  After adjournment, everybody would go into production and I’d spend my day breaking ties, coordinating, and interpreting my directives from above down to the operational level. Before close of day, we’d hold another meeting which I would keep to some specific topic, such as integration of Starrzelius products into the Venus economy, or income-level of prospective Venus colonists for optimum purchasing power twenty years after landing.