Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Hester laughed politely and said: “Have a pleasant trip, Mr. Courtenay.”

  We were at the ramp on Strip Six.

  IT was a miserable trip on a miserable, undersized tourist rocket. We flew low and there were prism windows at all seats, which never fail to make me airsick. You turn your head and look out and you’re looking straight down. Worse, all the ads were Taunton Associates jobs. You look out the window and just as you convince your stomach that everything’s all right and yourself that it’s interesting country below, a sleazy, oversexed Taunton ad for some inferior product opaques the window and one of their nagging, stupid jingles drills shrilly into your ear.

  Over the Amazon Valley, for example, I was inspecting Electric Three, which happens to be the world’s biggest power dam, when:

  BolsterBra, BolsterBra,

  Bolsters all the way;

  Don’t you crumple,

  Don’t you slum pie;

  Keep them up to stay!

  The accompanying before-and-after live pix were in the worst possible taste, and I found myself thanking God again that I worked for Fowler Schocken Associates.

  It was the same off Tierra del Fuego. We left the great circle course for a look at the whale fisheries, vast sea areas inclosed by booms that let the plankton in and didn’t let the whales out. I was watching with fascination as a cow whale nursed her calf—it looked something like an aerial refueling operation—when the window opaqued again for another dose of Taunton shock treatment:

  Sister, do you smell like this to your mister? The olfactory went on, and_ I had to use my carton while the ad chirped: No wonder he’s hard to get! Use Swett!

  My seatmate, a nondescript customer in Universal apparel, watched sympathetically as I Tetched. “Too much for you, friend?” he asked, showing the maddening superiority people who suffer from motion-sickness know too well.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Some of those ads are enough to make anybody sick.”

  “Exactly what do you mean by that remark?” I asked evenly.

  It frightened him. “I only meant that it smelled a little strong,” he said hastily. “Just that particular ad. I didn’t mean ads in general. There’s nothing wrong with me!”

  “Good for you,” I said, and turned away.

  Still worried, he told me: “I’m perfectly sound, friend. I come from a good family. I went to a good school. I’m in the production end myself—die-maker in Philly—but I know the stuff’s got to be sold. Channels of distribution. Building markets. Vertical integration. See? I’m perfectly sound!”

  “Okay,” I grunted. “Then watch your mouth.”

  He shriveled into his half of the seat. I hadn’t enjoyed squelching him, but it was a matter of principle. A kid overhearing that kind of talk could be turned into a pushover for a slick Connie.

  WE were held up over Little America while a couple of other tourist craft touched down. One of them was from India and I mellowed at the sight. That ship, from nose to tail, was Indiastry-built. The crewmen were Indiastry-trained and Indiastry-employed. The passengers, waking and sleeping, paid tribute minute by minute to Indiastry, And Indiastry paid tribute to Fowler Schocken Associates.

  A tow truck hauled us into the great double-walled plastic doughnut that is Little America. There was only one check point. Little America is an invisible export—a dollar trap for the tourists of the world, with no military value. (There are Polar military bases, but they are small, scattered and far under the ice, run by Columbia Field Forces, Inc.) A small thorium reactor heats and powers the place. Even if some nation desperate for fissionable material were to try to get it, it wouldn’t have anything worth fighting for. Windmills eke out the thorium reactor, and there’s some “heat pump” arrangement that I don’t understand which ekes out the windmills.

  At the check point I asked about Runstead. The officer looked him up and said: “He’s on the two-day tour out of New York. Thomas Cook and Son. His quarters are III-C-2205.” He pulled out a map of the place and showed me that this meant third ring in, third floor up, fifth sector, twenty-second room. “You can’t miss it. I can accommodate you with a nearby room, Mr. Courtenay—”

  “Thanks. Later.” I shoved off and elbowed my way through crowds chattering in a dozen languages to III-C-2205 and rang the bell. No answer.

  A pleasant young man said to me: “I’m the tour director. Can I help you?”

  “Where’s Mr. Runstead? I want to see him on business.”

  “Dear me. We try to get away from all that. I’ll look in my register if you’ll just wait a moment.”

  He took me to his office-bedroom-bath up the sector a way and pawed through a register. “The Starrzelius Glacier climb,” he said. “He went alone. Left at 0700, checked out in electric suit with R.D.F. and rations. He should be back in five hours or so. Have you arranged for quarters yet, Mr.—?”

  “Not yet. I want to go after Runstead. It’s urgent.” And it was. I was going to burst a blood vessel if I didn’t get my hands on him.

  The slightly fluttery tour director spent five minutes convincing me that the best thing to do was sign on for his tour and he’d arrange everything. Otherwise I’d be shifted from pillar to post buying and renting necessary equipment from concessionaires and then, like as not, be turned back at checkout and not able to find the concessionaires again while my vacation was ticking away. I signed on and he beamed. He gave me a room in the sector—plenty of luxury. It would have been, ten by fourteen if it hadn’t been slightly wedge-shaped.

  In five minutes he was dealing out equipment to me. “Power pack—strap it on so. That’s the only thing that can go wrong; if you have a power failure, take a sleepy pill and don’t worry. You’ll freeze, but we’ll pick you up before there’s tissue damage. Boots. Plug them in so. Gloves. Plug them in. Coveralls. Hood. Snowglasses. Radio direction finder. Just tell the checkout guard, ‘Starrzelius Glacier,’ and he’ll set it. Two simple switches plainly labeled ‘out’ and ‘in.’ Outward bound, it goes ‘beep-beep’—ascending. Inward bound, it goes ‘beep-beep’—descending. Just remember, going up the glacier, the tone goes up. Going down the glacier, the tone goes down.

  “Distress signal—a big red handle. You just pull and immediately you start broadcasting. The planes will be out in fifteen minutes. You have to pay the expenses for the search and rescue, so I wouldn’t yank the handle just for a ride back. It’s always possible to rest, have a sip of Coffiest and keep on going. Route-marked map. Snowshoes. Gyro-compass. Rations. Mr. Courtenay, you are equipped. I’ll lead you to checkout.”

  The outfit wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I’ve been more heavily bundled up against the lakeside winds in a Chicago winter. The lumpy items, like the power pack, the R.D.F. and the rations, were well distributed. The snowshoes folded into a pair of staffs with steel points for ice climbing, and went into something like an archery quiver on my back.

  We passed public rooms on the way to checkout. A lot of drinking and petting seemed to be going on. The tour director sighed: “It’s nice to have some of my people going out after they get here. Most of them—” He gestured. “And I have to be deaf, dumb and blind about who winds up in whose room. It’s so discouraging at times!”

  Checkout was very thorough. They started with my heart and worked through my equipment with particular emphasis on the power pack. I passed, and they set the R.D.F. for Starrzelius Glacier, with sharp warnings not to overdo it.

  It wasn’t cold inside the suit. For a moment only, I opened the face flap. Wham! I closed it again. Forty below, they had told me—a meaningless figure until my nose felt it for a split-second. I didn’t need the snowshoes at the base of the towering plastic doughnut; it was crust ice that my spike-soled shoes bit into. I oriented the map with the little gyro-compass and trudged off into the vast whiteness along with the proper bearing. From time to time I pressed my left sleeve, squeezing the molded R.D.F. switch and heard inside my hood a cheerful, reassuring “Beep-beep. Beep-bee
p. Beep-beep.”

  There were some people frolicking in one party I passed and waved cheerily at. They seemed to be Chinese or Indians. What an adventure it must be for them! But, like poor swimmers hugging a raft, they did their frolicking almost under the shadow of Little America. Farther out, there were some people playing a game I didn’t know. They had posts with bottomless baskets set up at either end of a marked-off rectangular field; the object was to toss a large silicone ball through the baskets. Still farther out, there was a skiing class with instructors in red suits.

  I looked back after trudging for what seemed only a few minutes and couldn’t see the red suits or Little America any more—just a gray-white shadow. “Beep-beep,” my R.D.F. said, and I kept going. Runstead was going to hear from me. Soon.

  The aloneness was eerie, but not unpleasant. Gradually, I began to realize why Fowler Schocken had unerringly picked me to head the Venus Section. That remarkable man had known, somehow, that I was the kind of guy who could stand and maybe even enjoy the Antarctic—or another planet.

  Was this how Jack O’Shea had felt? Was this why he fumbled for words to describe Venus and was never satisfied with the words he found?

  My feet plunged into a drift and I unshipped and opened the snowshoes. After a little stumbling experiment, I began an easy, sliding shuffle that was a remarkably pleasant way of covering ground. It wasn’t floating, yet neither was it the solid jar of a shoe against a paved surface. We’d been selling people the notion that they were basically pioneers, and here I was buying the notion myself—and finding pride in it!

  T marched the compass course ” by picking landmarks and going to them; an oddly curved ice hummock, a blue shadow on a swale of snow, a puffball cloud hanging low. The R.D.F. continued to confirm me. I was elated at my mastery of the wild, and after two hours I became wildly hungry with an urgency I’d never

  known before in my life.

  I had to squat and open a silicone-tissue bell into which I fitted. Exposing my nose cautiously from time to time, I judged the air warm enough in five minutes. I ravenously gulped the self-heated stew and tea and tried to strike a cigarette. It lit, but on the second puff I was blinded with smoke. Regretfully, I put it out against my shoe, closed my face mask, stowed the little tent and stretched happily.

  After another bearing, I started off again. I told myself: “This Runstead thing is just a difference of temperament. He can’t see the wide-open spaces and you can. There’s no malice involved. He just thinks it’s a crackpot idea because he doesn’t realize that there are people who go for it. All you’ve got to do is explain it—”

  That argument, born of wellbeing, crumbled at one touch of reason. Runstead was out on the glacier, too. He most certainly could see the wide-open spaces if, of all the places on Earth he could be, he chose the Starrzelius Glacier. Well, a showdown was dead ahead. “Beep-beep.”

  I sighted through the compass and picked a black object on my course. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it was visible and it wasn’t moving. I broke into a shuffling run that made me pant, and against my will I slowed down. It was a man.

  When I was twenty yards away, the man looked impatiently at his watch, and I broke into the clumsy run again.

  “Matt!” I yelled. “Matt Runstead!”

  “That’s right, Mitch,” he said, as nasty as ever. He had folded skis thrust into the snow beside him. “You’re sharp today.”

  “What’s—what’s—” I panted.

  “I have time to spare,” he. said, “but you’ve wasted enough of it. Good-by, Mitch.” While I stood there, helpless with exhaustion, he picked up his folded skis, swung them. I fell back with pain,’ bewilderment and shamed rage bursting my head. I felt him fumbling at my chest and then I didn’t feel anything for a while.

  I woke thinking I had kicked the covers off and that it was cold for early autumn. Then the ice-blue Antarctic sky knifed into my eyes and I felt the crumbly snow beneath me. It had happened, then. My head ached horribly and I was cold. Too cold.

  I felt and found that the power pack was missing. No heat to the suit, gloves and boots. No power to the R.D.F., coming or going. No use to pull the emergency signal.

  I tottered to my feet and felt the cold grip me like a vise. There were footprints punched into the snow leading—where? There was the trail of my snowshoes. Stiffly I took a step back along that trail, and then another, and then another.

  The rations. I could thrust them into the suit, break the heat seals and let them fill the suit with temporary warmth.

  Plodding step by step, I debated: “Stop and rest while you drink the ration’s heat or keep moving? You need a rest. Something impossible happened. Your head is aching. You’ll feel better if you sit for a moment, open a ration or two and then go on.”

  I didn’t sit. I knew what that would mean. I fumbled a Coffiest can from its pocket with fingers that would barely obey me, and got it into my suit. My thumb didn’t seem strong enough to pop the seal and I told myself: “Sit down for a moment and gather your strength. You don’t have to lie down.” But I wanted to.

  My thumb drove through the seal and the tingling heat was painful.

  It became a blur. I opened cans until I couldn’t work them out of their pockets any more. And then I sat down, telling myself I’d get up in one more second for Kathy, two more seconds for Kathy, three more seconds for Kathy.

  But I didn’t.

  CONTINUED NEXT MONTH

  Gravy Planet

  PART 2 OF A 3 PART SERIAL

  A displaced person in a Utopia is worse off than in any other kind of society . . . especially if he happened to help build it!

  SYNOPSIS

  Mitchell Courtenay, the narrator of this story, had three grave problems—his wife Kathy, who refused to finalize their conditional marriage; the planet Venus; and the Conservationists, commonly known as “Connies,” an outlawed organization.

  Kathy, a brilliant surgeon, disliked Courtenay’s ideals. As a young star class copy smith in Fowler Schocken Associates, the largest advertising agency on Earth, Courtenay was dedicated to the highest principle of this completely free enterprise society: Sales. Only through sales, he held, could the economy expand indefinitely. Kathy bitterly wanted to know why it had to, a question that, to Courtenay, was little short of commercial heresy. Added to this marital strain was his jealousy of Kathy’s liking for Jack O’Shea, the midget space pilot who was the only person to reach Venus thus far.

  Surprisingly, Courtenay had been selected by Fowler Schocken to head the Venus Project, a contract granted by the Incorporated United States of America to develop and exploit Earth’s sister planet. He had expected Matt Runstead, an older executive in the company, to be angry and jealous, for Runstead had higher seniority and should logically have been chosen to handle the account. But Runstead evidently was going further than the usual routine attempts to discredit Courtenay by lying, cajoling, bribing his staff, spying on his plans—Runstead seemed to be actively sabotaging the project!

  That, however, could have been the work of the Connies, who fought savagely for the conservation of natural resources, and might be expected to combat the use of enormous amounts of metals and fuels needed to colonize and exploit Venus.

  As proof of that, there were the two attempts on Courtenay’s life—once when he was in Washington to interview O’Shea, the tiny space pilot, and a ‘copter cargo nacelle almost killed him; another when a gunman in a passenger ‘copter tried to shoot him through the window of his apartment. The possibility of a commercial feud was ruled out by Fowler Schocken when Courtenay questioned him about it; there would have been court hearings, counter-claims, perhaps even injunctions, before they were notified of a feud. Obviously, no entrepeneur would be guilty of the high commercial crime of murder without notification, so it must have been the Connie crackpots.

  But then something even more disturbing occurred. Testing consumer reaction had always been the basis of successful advertising, and Co
urtenay had picked Cal-Mex to sample attitudes toward colonizing, supporting the gigantic project, buying Venusian products, and other such essentials . . . but Runstead’s staff sent in faked information!

  Enraged, Courtenay fired the entire staff there and went to the South Pole, where Runstead was “on vacation,” to confront him with his treachery.

  Courtenay found him on the slope of Starrzelius Glacier. But Runstead was ready . . . he cut Courtenay down with a slash of skis across the Polar helmet, left him dazed, freezing, beyond hope of rescue. As the fierce cold reached into Courtenay’s unheated suit, he had only two thoughts. One was of Kathy. The other was of death.

  VII

  IT was a throbbing, strumming inferno, complete with red fire and brutish-looking attendant devils. It was exactly what I would have consigned a Taunton copysmith to. I was confused to find myself there.

  The confusion did not last long. One of the attendant devils shook my shoulder roughly and said: “Gimme a hand, sleepy. I gotta stow my hammock.” My head cleared and it was very plain that he was simply a lower-class consumer.

  “Where’s this?” I asked him. “Did you bring me back to the infirmary in Little America?”

  “Jeez, you talk funny,” he commented. “Gimme a hand, will ya?”

  “Certainly not!” I told him. “I’m a star class copysmith.”

  He looked at me pityingly, said, “Punchy,” and went away into the strumming, red-lit darkness.

  I stood up, swaying, and grabbed an elbow hurrying past from darkness to darkness. “Excuse me. Is this a hospital?”

  The man was another consumer, worse-tempered than the first. “Leggo my yarm!” I did. “Ya want on sick call, ya wait until we land.”

  “Land?”

  “Yah, land. Listen, punchy, don’t ya know what ya signed up for?”

  “Signed up? No, I don’t. But you’re being too familiar. I’m a star class copysmith—”