Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  To his surprise, Lev found himself shaking his head in a vigorous negative. It was his duty to assist the watchman; he knew it. This was his first brush with an incident of the sort, but he’d read about it and heard about it for months.

  SINCE THE beginning of this last drive for recovery of underground pipe, juvenile theft had come out of the psychologists’ counsel-rooms, and into the trial-judge’s courts. Correction was good enough procedure when young delinquents were harming only other individuals. But more stringent punishment was indicated when they started snatching urgently-needed salvage metal.

  It had to be stopped. Lev opened his mouth, and tried to shut away the mental image of a terrified youngster pressed into the darkness of the doorway, sweating out the seconds. Sentiment and sympathy had no place in continental security.

  “Damn kids!” the watchman muttered with disgust, and turned to go before Lev could get the words out of his mouth to betray the thief. But the turn was hardly started when the thick man wheeled back, and something—a brick—flew from his fist to where the echo of a sigh had come from the blackness within a shadow.

  There was one shrill yelp of anguish, and an indrawn breath that was not quite a sob. Then something clanged to the ground with the unmistakable resonance of metal on concrete; a wiry form darted out of the doorway, scurried across the sidewalk, and became invisible again in the shadows along the opposite wall.

  The thick-set man dashed after the vanishing noise of scurrying feet, and Sloane turned back the way he had come. He didn’t want to wait till the watchman returned, didn’t want to know whether the boy was caught. There was relief in him because his own inexcusable defection had been cancelled out; there was, too, a peculiarly strong distaste for the thickset man, and an absurd worrisome feeling about the young culprit.

  Just a few inches of copper pipe . . . easy enough for any youngster to run off with and easy for him to sell, too. Five inches of slender tubing grasped in a boy’s hand; it meant more money than his father could make in a month. But even the fabulous prices on the metal-market didn’t come close to the actual cost of unearthing the stuff from the depths of old cellars and tunnels far beneath the city. And financial investment was the smallest part of it; every inch of the stuff could be measured just as easily in terms of peace or war. Enough metal meant Continental security; not enough spelled certain defeat in an inevitable war.

  APARTMENT 18-Q, the room-and Lev Sloane had rented when he first came to the city eight years earlier—and occupied steadily since—was in no way unusual. To the last fractional part of a square inch, its wall-space, floor space, and wall-fixtures were similar to those of four hundred and sixty-one other single units in the same building. But within those limitations, Sloane’s place was most uniquely and thoughtfully his own. Every piece of furniture, each small convenience, the placement and relation of all the constituent parts of the room, bore the stamp of careful planning and equally careful use. The room-and was designed, specifically and functionally, to care for the physical and psychological needs of Lev Sloane.

  Everything in it was intimately familiar to him; the surfaces were molded by his touch; the inner workings of all the mechanical objects had long since lost their secrets to him.

  Still, as he opened the door this evening, the near-sense of danger and the unknown was sharply with him. The incident on the street had left him oddly exhilarated, more alive than usual. He wondered if it was the fleeting knowledge of guilt that had so affected him, and dismissed the notion with a smile. He could remember clearly enough how this same tingling awareness had come over him on his first visits to the Domes.

  Adventure! he mocked himself, and had to remember once more that, to another person, his visit to the Dome today, his excursion through the processing plant outside the Dome on the sea-floor, would be vastly romantic and exciting. Fair enough, then, that an encounter with a street-urchin and a grimy watchman should perk up his own dulled perceptions.

  He closed the door behind him, rather enjoying, now that he understood it, the dramatic sense of imminent menace.

  From across the room, a voice spoke: “You will please, Senhor, make no unusual noises or movements. Turn on the light.”

  Dazed, half-convinced that this was no reality at all, Lev flicked the switch. In the corner armchair, a lean figure sat relaxed; the gun drooping from the stranger’s hand seemed almost deadly for the casual ease with which it was hold. Sloane had no slightest doubt that the owner of that gun could aim and fire, before he, himself, could complete any move to battle or escape.

  “Who are you?” he asked, still too incredulous to be very frightened or angry.

  “A friend.” The lean man smiled, and exceptionally white teeth flashed in his dark face. “Or perhaps I should say—a messenger.” It was not quite an accent, but American was not the man’s native tongue.

  Lev began to understand that this was really happening. Once you accepted the reality of it, the rest was not hard to understand. “A messenger from Latamer?” he asked.

  “Please. I do not like the name. I am, yes, a Latin-American by birth. My country does not concern you. I come as a messenger of certain South-am Continental Interests . . . I am sure you have no desire to know their names as yet.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Lev said flatly. “But I don’t imagine you’re going to tell me. And you might as well save your breath, where your message is concerned. There are no Latamer messages that could be of interest to me.”

  The dark man in the chair smiled again and shrugged. “You are vehement, Mr. Sloane,” he commented idly. “I wonder why.”

  “Because I don’t like people who break into my apartment. Because I don’t like Latamers much to start with. Because I don’t like you, and I expect I wouldn’t like your . . . interests much either.”

  “More vehemence! Well . . .” He unfolded his length from the comfortable chair, and walked over to Lev, the gun still hanging limply from his wrist. “You will turn around, please? I dislike holding this lethal weapon while I talk. I would like to ascertain that you are not armed before I put it away.”

  SLOANE turned, and let himself be patted cautiously all over. When he turned back, his visitor had already slipped the gun into a pocket. “All right,” Lev told him. “Now get out. I don’t want to hear whatever you came to say. Get out.”

  “You are so brave! But I’m afraid you overact. The role does not call for such heroics. Now listen sensibly, will you, dear fellow? Sit down; make yourself comfortable. This is your home, you know. I wish to say a few words; then, if you do not like it . . .” He shrugged. “I will go. If you like it, we will talk more. I think perhaps you will like it.”

  “I’m prejudiced,” Lev said stiffly. “I don’t like Latamers, and I don’t like people who hold guns on me . . . it is my home, as you noticed.”

  “I am sorry for the gun. It was a necessary precaution, nothing more. It was not as a threat to you I carried it; we have no desire to harm you. But if I had not had it . . .” Again he shrugged, and smiled. “Think how it would be for me if you had been so heroic when you first came in.”

  Lev almost smiled back. The man was right in a way; Sloane was dramatizing this thing more than was necessary. But, it suddenly occurred to him, so was his visitor. A secret agent should hardly look or act so much like one. Life, apparently, was determined to imitate art today . . . if you could call the movies art.

  “All right,” he said. “Go ahead and talk. Get it out. What’s your . . . message?” He sat down on the edge of the couch, waiting.

  “Ah, that’s better.” The dark man went back to his armchair. “I understand, Mr. Sloane, you are senior engineer for the Solute Metals work in this Continent?”

  “I work for the SMRC,” Sloane said. “I’m an engineer. What about it?”

  “I am told also that you have been heard to voice certain sentiments of—ah—let me say a somewhat advanced nature?”

  “Like what?”

&
nbsp; “Concerning the exchange of scientific information.”

  Sloane stiffened. “I am,” he said very carefully, “in favor of a somewhat more liberal policy in regard to information exchange.”

  “Ah, yes. Then we are in agreement. I have come only to discuss with you the means of effecting such an exchange.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Lev put in drily. “I’m not so sure we agree about anything. My position on exchange is that of the Science Party—no more or less. I favor free exchange of non-classified matter with friendly governments, and limited exchange of classified matter . . . with friendly governments.”

  “It is so short-sighted,” the dark man said sadly. “How do you know, Lev Sloane, who will be your friend tomorrow? No, I have a better notion. You can exchange now, freely, and . . . perhaps you would, have some use for some small quantities of cash?”

  “Get out!” Lev stood up and paced the floor to where the other man sat. “Get your filthy proposition out of here before I wring your neck!”

  The gun was out again, a scant two feet from Lev’s belly, and this time it was pointing.

  “Back up!” the man snapped. Sloane backed. There was no civilized mockery in the threat now.

  “We overestimated you,” the visitor sighed; “we thought you had intelligence.” He was out of the chair now, moving toward the door. “You would be wisest,” he warned, “to make no move for ten minutes after I am gone. If you should be hurt, remember you were warned.” The gun never wavered as he sidled up to the door, opened it, and slipped through it.

  AS IT CLICKED shut, Lev leaped for the phone. He snapped on the audio and video simultaneously, and spun the dial around for the operator. As it made contact at the end of the long sweep, heat flashed through his arm, followed by a single wave of unbearable pain. Then nothing, till he heard the loud report, perhaps a fraction of a second later, but it seemed like hours.

  It was hours—five of them—before the reporters, the emergency medics, and the security-cops were all gone. With his testimony taken, his arm bandaged, and the various misspellings of his name carefully noted, Lev studied his bruised face in the bathroom mirror and chuckled. He wondered whether the spy, Ortega, had known how much noise that gadget made. If it didn’t sound so much like gunfire, the fellow might have got scotfree. As it was, every plain cop and security-man within three blocks was headed toward the apartment the instant it happened, and anyone in the way was inevitably held and searched. Ortega’s graceful gun betrayed him, even before Sloane told his story.

  Lev looked from the mirror to the clock: two a.m., and there was still that godforsaken report to do. He settled himself at his desk, and, using the damaged arm to hold the paper down, began filling in the proper little squares as concisely as possible.

  He made just one conception. The last little box said, as it always did: “To what do you ascribe the trouble?”

  When he left the Dome that afternoon he had the answer all figured out, in a single word: “Negligence.” But things had been happening since then. Spies, sneak-thieves, sabotage . . . no, he had no proof of that.

  “Damned if I know,” he printed in neat block letters. Then, before he could change his mind, be sealed the printed form and dropped it down the mailing chute.

  2

  THERE WAS a little personal mail for Lev when he woke up; he could see it from his bed, a few sealed sheets waiting in the receiving-half of the chute, fluttering and floating on the updraft. It would only be bills and circulars. He punched for coffee and toast on the bedside Batchelor’s Friend before picking the letters from the column of air.

  Political circulars: keep us strong; vote for Gabble. Don’t sell us out; vote for Gubble. Down with everybody except us; vote for Gobble.

  Bills: Collections, Inc. reminded him that his monthly payment on his convertible would be due in only two weeks. Apartment rent due. Phone bill—he’d take that to work with him; some of his calls had been business and he’d have to put vouchers through on them.

  And—an old-fashioned envelope addressed by old-fashioned typewriter. Return address (1347 Ave. Y, Wash., D.C.: he didn’t know it) and delivery address were written out instead of code-punched. It must have been manually delivered, by a cursing mailman, instead of routed automatically by the switching system. He clumsily tore the envelope open and felt a pang go through him as his eyes fell on the signature at the bottom of the single-sheet letter.

  Paul Barrios. He hadn’t known he was still alive.

  The Bachelor’s Friend said in his own voice: “Toast and coffee ready. Get them while they’re hot.” Automatically he took the steaming cup from it and sipped, delaying on the letter. He felt a little ashamed of himself. Barrios. Ninety-plus at least. Fifty years ago the classic paper, A Theory of Ion under Radiation Applied to the Differential Precipitation of Solute Metals in Sea-Water.

  And the old boy had meant applied.

  To a dazed and metal-starved world he innocently showed his graphite tanks with sea-water circulating through them under the radiance of the simple little Barrios Tubes. He showed the world metals plating out onto the graphite from the sea-water. Vary the frequency of the Barrios Radiation and you vary the metal recovered . . . it was the fantastic year that the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and World Peace had gone to one man: Barrios.

  Lev Sloane blinked and turned to the letter:

  My Dear Sloane:

  If you will forgive a rather old-fashioned and sentimental gesture, I want to wish you a happy birthday. Doubtless this is proof—if any were needed!—that I am growing senile, which is by definition largely a tendency to live in the past. I woke lip the other morning with a vague conviction that I had done somebody a grave injustice, and it was twenty-four hours before I remembered when. Just fifteen years ago! It was that unhappy occasion which you may recall, when you stood for your doctor’s oral before me at Columbia, and made some astoundingly inaccurate remarks, appropos of Solute Metal Recovery and I made loose regrettably cutting remarks about Ph.D. candidates who were better suited to street-cleaning and the allied arts than to S.M.R. And I recalled, too, the pleasanter sequel when I learned that you had been celebrating your birthday the night before, and were unable to do yourself justice, re-examined you and had the pleasure of pronouncing you among the ten ablest S.M.R. men I had ever turned out. That verdict, my dear Sloane, still stands. I am pleased to see your name in the papers every so often as a mainstay of the S.M.P.C. technical branch, and to know that thereby you are playing a major part in the program that, God willing, will bring abundance and peace to our poor old world.

  Sincerely yours,

  Paul Barrios

  S.M.R. Professor Emeritus

  Columbia University

  He felt a lump in his throat. Poor old genius emeritus, passed by as the younger men turned his science into engineering, as specialization multiplied until he couldn’t grasp what was going on in the field he had pioneered. Writing nostalgic letters, on slight excuse—to be doing something with the brain that once had been the mightiest creative tool on Earth . . .

  His own voice said from the Batchelor’s Friend: “Hey, you lazy bum, let’s get this show on the road! Time to go to work. Hardnose Hennessey isn’t going to like this.” Sloane didn’t feel funny. He switched off the voice-circuit and dressed slowly, favoring the bandaged arm.

  SLOANE paused for a moment at the foot of a flight of marble steps, sighed and trudged up them, passed between the great Ionic columns of the Solute Metals Recovery Commission building, and on into the bustling lobby. He might have hunted up the small entrance where top-level administrators and authentically handicapped employees could get an elevator-ride, but it would have taken an argument.

  The lobby clock said 9:03; Hard-nose Hennessey—G. Mason Hennessey, Chief of Personnel, S.M.R.C. Grade 23—was not going to like it. Lev Sloane, Ph.D., Process Senior Engineer, S.M.R.C. Grade 18, decided that Hennessey could lump it; he had bruises and a bandage to show.


  In his office he took a little kidding from the junior engineers and secretaries over his adventure; they showed him a bored little paragraph in the morning’s newsroll. “Happens every day,” he grunted, and disappeared into his private cubicle. Target for today was to block out an advisory for the Commission members themselves, a frank statement in broad terms understandable to the lay mind on the status of recovery processes.

  He jotted down in shorthand: Are processes satisfactory? Get figures metal output, graph vs. time. Get Central Intelligence estimates equivalent figures for Latamer, Africa, Europe, Sino-Russ. Brief Summary, three main extraction processes. Why three? Explain dome oxy-cycle. Status of extraction-process research; get figures from Research and Development, especially estimate of availability of halogen-reduction process. (This secret; observe security procedure.) Qualified opinion on—

  His phone lit up with the face of Hardnose Hennessey’s very beautiful secretary, a young lady whose face and voice were one degree Kelvin above absolute zero as far as anybody below S,‘M.R.C. Grade 20 was concerned. “Mr. Sloane,” she said, “Dr. Hennessey wishes to see you at your convenience.” Blink, and the screen went off.

  Mister Sloane! Doctor Hennessey! Hardnose was an honorary L.H.D. of some jerkwater Kansas college, and unblushingly used the title to the limit in his professional and social life. Sloane swore tiredly and then got up to go. “At your convenience” from a 23 to an 18 meant now. It couldn’t be just coming in late; if the rest of the office knew about last night, so did Hardnose. That report, maybe, with the foolishly irritable answer on it? Kind of quick for that . . .

  He expected the chilly secretary to tell him: “Please wait; Dr. Hennessey will be free shortly.” Instead, she told him; “Go right in, Mr. Sloan, please.” And—incredibly—she smiled at him.