Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  I slammed the long barrel of the pistol against the back of his neck in a murderous rabbit punch and walked on. He was probably one of my own men, but I didn’t want anybody’s men along.

  I deliberately got to the Taunton Building’s nightdweller entrance at 2159. Behind me the timelock slammed the door. There was an undersized pay elevator. I dropped in a quarter, punched 35 and read notices while the elevator creaked upward:

  NIGHTDWELLERS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR OWN POLICING. MANAGEMENT ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEFTS, ASSAULTS OR RAPES.

  NIGHTDWELLERS NOTE THAT BARRIERS ARE UPPED AT 2210 NIGHTLY AND ARRANGE THEIR CALLS OF NATURE ACCORDINGLY.

  RENT IS DUE AND PAYABLE NIGHTLY IN ADVANCE AT THE AUTOCLERK.

  MANAGEMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO REFUSE RENTAL TO PATRONS OF COMPETITIVE PRODUCTS.

  The door opened on the stairwell of the 35th floor. Men and women were squirming uneasily, trying to find some comfort before the barriers upped. I looked at my watch and saw 2208.

  I picked my way carefully in the dim light over and around limbs and torsos, with many apologies, counting. At the seventeenth step, I stopped at a huddled figure as my watch said 2210.

  With a rusty clank, the barriers upped, cutting off step 17 and 18, containing me and—

  She sat up, looking scared and angry, with a small pistol in her hand.

  “Kathy,” I said.

  She dropped the pistol. “Mitch! You fool!” Her voice was low and urgent. “What are you doing here? They haven’t given up. They’re still out to murder you—”

  “I’m putting my head into the lion’s mouth to show I mean it when I say that you were right and I was wrong.”

  “How did you find me?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Some of your perfume came off on O’Shea. Menage a Deux.”

  She looked around at the cramped quarters and giggled. “It certainly is, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not here to paw you, with or without your consent. I’m here to tell you that I’m on your side. Name it and you can have it.”

  She looked at me narrowly and asked: “Venus?”

  “It’s yours.”

  “Mitch,” she said, “if you’re lying—”

  “You’ll know by tomorrow if we get out of here alive. Until then, there’s nothing more to be said about it, is there? We’re in for the night.”

  “Yes,” she said. And then, suddenly, passionately: “God, how I’ve missed you!”

  WAKEUP whistles screamed at 0600. They were loaded with skull-rattling subsonics, just to make sure that no slugabeds would impede the morning turnover.

  Kathy began briskly to stow away the bedding in the stairs. “Barriers down in five minutes.” She lifted Stair 17’s lid and fished around in it for a flat box that opened into a makeup kit. I yelped as a razor raked across the top of my right eyebrow. “Hold still!” It cut a swathe across my left eyebrow. Briskly she touched my face here and there with mysterious brushes.

  She turned up my upper lip and tucked a pledger of plastic under it. Two flesh-tinted tapes pasted my ears against my head and she said, “There,” and showed me the mirror.

  “Good,” I approved.

  “There go the barriers,” she said tensely, hearing some preliminary noise that was lost on my inexperienced ear.

  The barriers clanged down. We were the only nightdwellers left on the 35th floor. But we were not alone. B.J. Taunton and two of his boys stood there. Taunton was swaying a little drunkenly, red-faced and grinning. Each of his boys had a machine pistol trained on me.

  Taunton hiccoughed and said:

  “This was a hell of an unfortunate place for you to go chippy-chasing, Courtenay ol’ man. We have a photo-register for crashers like you. Girlie, if you will kindly step aside—”

  She didn’t step aside. She stepped right into Taunton’s arms, jamming her gun against his navel. His red face went the color of putty.

  “You know what to do,” she said.

  “Boys,” he said faintly, “drop the guns. For God’s sake, drop them!”

  They did. Taunton began to sob.

  “Turn your backs,” I told them, “and lie down.” I had my borrowed UHV out. It felt wonderful.

  The elevator could easily have been flooded with gas, so we walked down the stairs. It was a long, wearying business, though all nightdwellers had been cleared hours ago for B.J.’s coup. He sobbed and babbled all the way.

  At the tenth floor landing, he wailed: “I’ve got to have a drink, Courtenay. I’m dying. There’s a bar right here. You can keep that gun on me—”

  Kathy laughed humorlessly at the idea and we continued climbing down.

  AT the nightdweller exit, I draped my coat over Kathy’s gun hand in spite of the winter outside.

  “It’s all right!” B.J. called quaveringly to an astounded lobby guard who started our way.

  “These people are friends of mine. It’s quite all right!”

  We walked with him to the shuttlemouth and dived in, leaving him, gray-faced and sweating, in the street. The only way he could get at us was by blowing up the entire shuttle, and even he wouldn’t dare.

  We zigzagged for an hour and I called my office from a station phone. A plant protection detail rendezvoused with us at another station and „ we were in the Schocken Tower fifteen minutes later.

  A morning paper gave us our only laugh so far that day. It said, among other things, that a coolant leak had been detected at 0545 today in the stairwell of the Taunton Building. B.J. Taunton himself, at the risk of his life, had supervised the evaluation of the nightdwellers in record time and without casualties.

  Over a breakfast tray on my desk, I told Kathy: “Your hair looks like hell. Does that stuff wash out?”

  “Enough of this love-making,” she said. “You told me I could have Venus. Mitch, I meant it. Did you?”

  “I did then.”

  “And now?”

  “All my life I’ve wanted the position I have now, Kathy. It was in every dream, something so far off and desirable that I honestly never believed I’d reach it. But I did.”

  “And now?” she repeated insistently.

  “If I hadn’t found out what life is like on the consumer level, I think I’d be completely happy—assuming, of course, I could also have you.”

  She shook her head with grim emphasis. “You couldn’t.”

  “That’s not all it is, though—chucking the dream of a lifetime for a woman. I couldn’t do it if the dream hadn’t soured.” I grabbed her hand, hung onto it as if I’d sink without it. “Kathy, I was brought up to think the Connies—the World Conservation Association—were crackpots. Look, I can’t even say ‘Connies’ without flinching. And now I know the Conservationist viewpoint is profoundly intelligent. Don’t you see what that does? It leaves me with nothing to believe in!”

  Her hand tightened around mine. “There’s Conservationism.”

  “It wouldn’t work, Kathy. I’ve thought about it and thought about it ever since I found out you were in the organization. I knew you’d never get mixed up in anything that didn’t make sense: you’re not the fanatic type. But let’s suppose we could institute Conservationism right now. We’d have to cut back population, cut back production, cut back just about everything so we could conserve our natural resources. The economic dislocation would be tremendous. It would lead to wars, anarchy, starvation.”

  “Do you think things can go on indefinitely as they are, Mitch?” she asked gently.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Every time we’ve run out of something—coal, oil, various metals, whatever it was—we always came up with a substitute. Maybe not as good, maybe, in lots of cases, better than the original. The point is that the world is geared to increasing production, increasing population, synthetics, substitutes—Sales! You can’t knock that over without knocking the world to pieces, Kathy!”

  “This world,” she said.

  I looked at her vacantly.

  “We know it�
��s too late to do anything about Earth, Mitch. We’ve known it for some time. That’s why we want Venus—a young, unspoiled, unplundered planet, where we can start right and continue right. A Conservationist world, Mitch!”

  “It’s a broiling inferno of poison hurricanes, a dumping ground for our surpluses and that’s all.”

  “Not to us, Mitch. We’re the only people who know what to do with it. We landed the first man there!” My face must have gone blank, for she said: “O’Shea is one of us.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since his mother and father realized he wasn’t growing. They knew we’d need space pilots soon—and the smaller the better. Earth didn’t discover Venus. The W.C.A. did. We had to write this world off. To do that, we had to have another one.”

  “But not that one!” I argued. “It’s not fit for human life!”

  “We have our own research men, Mitch. We aren’t fooling ourselves; you understand us well enough to know we’re not myopic idealists. Venus can be turned into a good, healthy, habitable, prosperous planet. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. And once it’s done, it won’t ever be undone the way Earth was.”

  I sat there trying to eat breakfast and digest the ideas that had been hurled at me, both at the same time. I couldn’t. I got up and began walking the office; the walls kept stopping me short every few paces.

  “Room, Mitch,” she said. “Not these cramped little cubicles. Real room where you can see the horizon and the sky, where you can build as small or as large as you please, where furniture doesn’t have to be folded away so you can find enough space to turn in.”

  “But I’m used to this. We all are.”

  “We won’t be when we get out of confinement. That’s not the point, though. Venus belongs to us, Mitch. We demand the right to settle it.”

  “God, it’s going to be a headache!” I groaned. “We have our rosters Filled with eager consumers itching to get to Venus. Well, I’ll backtrack.” I punched the intercom to R. & D. “Charlie, about the CO2 competition with Earth producers. Forget it. I found that Taunton’s bills most of the makers.”

  “Fine, Mr. Courtenay,” Charlie said happily. “The preliminary work looks as if we’ll give them a real solid kick in the pants.”

  I dropped the intercom key and said to Kathy: “Can you dig up Runstead for me? This is going to be a job. A copysmith’s highest art is to convince people without letting them know they’re being convinced. What I’ve got to do is unconvince people without letting either the copysmiths or the people know what’s happening. I need Runstead for that.”

  Kathy smiled. “Runstead committed suicide. Remember?”

  “Sure. We’ll have to work out a cover-up story for that, I suppose. Next Conservationist meeting I go to, I’m going to suggest we use some less flamboyant way of getting people out when the heat’s on.”

  “It can be arranged,” she said, kissing me. “That’s for saying ‘we.’ ”

  “What else can I say? Look, darling, I’ve got a dandy executive’s living suite, a full twelve by twelve, upstairs. Suppose you go up and cork off for a while; you’ve had a hard night and I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  She kissed me energetically and said: “Don’t work too hard, Mitch. I’ll see you tonight.”

  I COULDN’T have done it without Runstead—not in time. He came whistling back from retirement in response to some underground message from Kathy. I had broken it to the Board ahead of time—“Unusual tasks, gentlemen, demand unusual methods. We owe Matt an enormous debt of gratitude, every one of us, for having altered the whole structure of his personal life to free himself for certain research problems which even yet must remain confidential.”

  The Board took the hint. By acclamation, they gave him half of Sillery’s confiscated stock as a bonus.

  Matt arrived in the middle of a meeting. We shook hands for public consumption, and there never was any private discussion afterward. He knew what the job was.

  I still thought Runstead was a rat. But I had to admit things were leaping.

  On the surface level, Fowler Schocken Associates had launched a giant all-client slogan contest, with fifteen hundred first prizes, all of them a berth on the Venus rocket. There were eight hundred thousand prizes in all, but the others didn’t matter. Judging was turned over to an impartial firm of contest analyzers, which happened to be headed by the brother-in-law of a protege of Runstead’s. Only fourteen hundred of the prize-winners.

  Matt told me, were actually members of the Connie underground. The other hundred were dummy names entirely, to take care of last minute emergencies.

  I took Kathy with me to Washington to spark the final clearance of the rocket for flight, while Runstead minded the baby back in New York. I’d been in Washington often enough for a luncheon or an afternoon, but this was going to be a two-day job; I looked forward to it like a kid. I parked Kathy at the hotel and made her promise not to do any solo sightseeing, then caught a cab to the State Department. A morose little man in a bowler hat was waiting in the anteroom. When he heard my name, he got up hastily and offered me his seat. Quite a change from the Chlorella days, Mitch, old boy, I told myself. Abels, our attaché, came flustering out to greet me: I calmed him and explained what I wanted.

  “Easiest thing in the world. Mr. Courtenay,” he promised. “I’ll get the enabling bill put through committee this afternoon, and with any luck at all it’ll clear both houses before noon tomorrow.”

  I said expansively, “Need any backing?”

  “Might be nice for you to address the House in the morning, if you can find the time. They’d love to hear from you, and it would smooth things over a little for a quick passage.”

  “Glad to,” I said, reaching down for my bag. The man in the bowler hat beat me to it and handed it to me with a little bow. “Just set your time, Abels,” I told the legate. “I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Courtenay!” He opened the door for me.

  The little man said tentatively: “Mr. Abels?”

  The legate shook his head. “You can see how busy I am,” he said, not unkindly. “Come back tomorrow.”

  The little man smiled gratefully and followed me out the door. We both hailed a cab. He opened the door for me.

  “Can I drop you anywhere?” I asked.

  “It’s very good of you,” he said.

  The driver leaned back on his pedals and looked in at us.

  I told him: “The Park Starr for me. But drop this other gentleman off first.”

  The driver nodded. “White House, Mr. President?”

  “Yes, please. I can’t tell you how happy I am to meet you, Mr. Courtenay,” the little man told me. “I overheard your conversation with Mr. Abels, I’m afraid. It was very interesting to hear that the Venus rocket is so near completion. Congress,” he said wistfully, “has got out of the habit of keeping me posted on what’s going on. Of course, I know they’re busy with their investigations and all, but—” Mischievously, he said: “I entered your contest, Mr. Courtenay. My slogan was, ‘I’m starry-eyed over Starrs, verily I am.’ I don’t suppose I could go along, though, even if I win.”

  “I can’t see how it would be possible. They must keep you pretty busy right here.”

  “Oh, not particularly. January’s heavy; I convene Congress’ you see, and they read me the State of the Union message. But the rest of the year passes slowly. Will you really address Congress tomorrow, Mr. Courtenay? It would mean a joint session, and they usually let me come for that.”

  “Be delighted to have you,” I said cordially.

  The cab stopped and the President shook my hand warmly and got out. He poked his head in the door. “Uh,” he said, looking apprehensively at the driver, “you’ve been very good to me. I may be stepping out of line in saying this, but if I might make a suggestion—I understand something about astronomy, it’s a kind of hobby, and I hope you won’t delay the ship’s takeoff past the present conjunction.”

 
; I stared. Venus was within ten degrees of opposition and getting farther away—not that it mattered, since most of the trip would be coasting anyhow.

  He held a finger to his lips. “Good-by, sir,” he said. I spent the rest of the trip staring at the backs of the driver’s hairy ears, and wondering what the little man had been getting at.

  WE took the evening off, Kathy and I, to see the sights. The famous cherry blossoms were beautiful, all right, but, with my newfound Conservationist sentiments, I found them ostentatious. “A dozen would have been plenty,” I objected. “Scattering them around in vase after vase this way is plain waste. You know what they’d cost in Tiffany’s?”

  Kathy giggled. “Wait till we take over Venus. Did you ever think what it’s going to be like to have a whole planet to grow things in? Acres and acres of flowers, trees, everything!”

  A plump schoolteacher-type leaning on the railing beside us straightened up, glared, sniffed and walked away.

  “Before you get us in trouble,” I told Kathy, “let’s go to—let’s go back to the hotel.”

  I woke up to an excited squeal from Kathy. “Mitch,” she was saying from the bathroom, two round eyes peering wonderingly over the towel that was draped around her, “they’ve got a tub here! I opened the door to the shower stall, and it wasn’t a stall at all! Can I, Mitch? Please?”

  There are times when even an honest Conservationist finds pleasure in being the acting head of Fowler Schocken Associates. I yawned and blew her a kiss and said, “Sure. And make it all fresh water, hear?”

  While the tub was filling, I punched the communicator and got the morning summary relayed from Schocken Tower. Miss Hinkle’s flat tones held nothing of interest that morning. I sighed briefly for Hester, who always managed to find something worth mentioning. It was hard to believe that Hester had been dead less than a month.

  And, I remembered, I still hadn’t found out who had killed her with the poison meant for me. Taunton was out; they hadn’t known I was on the ship. Connies? Not with Kathy directing them, not after she’d gone to such pains to save my life before.

  Not unless there was something I hadn’t quite got clear.