Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “How’s that again, chief?” asked the puzzled voice of his assistant Moron Slobb.

  “I didn’t mean you, Slobb,” Markon snapped. “Go ahead. What is so by-our-lady important that I must be dragged from the few pitiful hours of leisure I’m allowed?”

  “Meddling,” Moron Slobb said in a voice of deepest gloom.

  “Ding-bust the consarned villains!” Markon shrieked. “I’ll be right down.”

  He cast a bilious eye over the workshop where he had hoped to relax over the monthend, using his hands, forgetting the wild complexities of modern life while he puttered with his betatron planer, his compact little thermonuclear forming reactor and transmutron. “I’ll meddle them,” he growled, and stepped through his Transmitter.

  There were wild screeches around him.

  “I’m sorry, ladies!” he yelled. “It was completely—completely—” One of the ladies hit him with a chair. He abandoned explanations and ducked back through the Transmitter with a rapidly swelling eye. Through the other he read the setting on the Transmitter frame. His wives’ athletic club, as he had suspected. Nor had they bothered to clear the setting after using the Transmitter.

  “Lollygagging trumpets,” he muttered, setting his office combination on the frame and stepping through.

  Moron Slobb tactfully avoided staring at the discolored eye. “Glad you’re here, chief,” he burbled. “Somebody seems to have gimmicked up a private tractor beam in the Mojave area and they’re pulling in rainclouds assigned to the Rio Grande eye—I mean Rio Grande Valley.”

  Reev Markon glared at him and decided to let it pass. “Triangulate for it,” he said. “Set up the unilateral Transmitter. We’ll burst in and catch them wet-handed.”

  He went to his private office and computed while the mechanical work was being done outside. A moderately efficient tractor beam, however haywire, could pull down five acre-feet of water a day. Rio Grande was a top-priority area drawing an allotment of eighty acre-feet for the growing season, plus sunships as needed. Plancom had decided that what the Continent needed was natural citrus and that Rio Grande was the area to supply it. Lowest priority for the current season had been assigned to the Idaho turnip acreage. He could divert rainfall from Idaho to Rio Grande. If that wasn’t enough, he could seize the precipitation quota of Aspen Recreational with no difficulty since three Plancomembers had broken respectively a leg, a pelvis, and seven ribs on Aspen’s beginner’s ski trail . . .

  Slobb told him: “Chief, we’re on it and the Transmitter’s set up.”

  Reev Markon said: “Take a visual first. Those wittold jerks aren’t going to booby-trap me.”

  He watched as a camera was thrust through the Transmitter, exposed and snatched back in a thousandth of a second.

  The plate showed an improvised-looking tractor-beam generator surrounded by three rustic types in bowler hats and kilts. They obviously hadn’t noticed the split-second appearance of the camera and they obviously were unarmed.

  “I’m going in,” Reev Markon said, cold and courageous. “Slobb, arm yourself and bring me a dazzle gun.”

  In two minutes the weapons had been signed out of the arsenal. Reev Markon and Moron Slobb walked steadily through the Transmitter, guns at the ready. To the astounded, gaping farmers Reev Markon said: “You’re under arrest for meddling. Step through this—”

  The rustics stopped gaping and went into action. One of them began ripping at the generator, trying to destroy evidence. The other uncorked an uppercut at Slobb, who intercepted it neatly with his chin. Reev Markon shut his eyes and pulled the trigger of the dazzle gun. When he opened his eyes the farmers and his assistant were all lying limply on the floor. Puffing a good deal, he pitched them one by one through the invisible portal of the unilateral Transmitter. He surveyed the generator, decided it would do as evidence and pitched it through also before he stepped back into the Continental Weather office himself.

  When the farmers had recovered, a matter of twenty minutes or so, he tried to interrogate them but got nowhere. “Don’t you realize,” he asked silkily, “that there are regular channels through which you can petition for heavier rainfall or a changed barometric pressure or more sunlight hours? Don’t you realize that you’re disrupting continental economy when you try to free-lance?”

  They were sullen and silent, only muttering something about their spinach crop needing more water than the damn bureaucrats realized.

  “Take them away,” Reev Markon sighed to his assistant, and Slobb did. But Slobb rushed back with a new and alarming advisory.

  “Chief,” he said, “Somebody on Long Island’s seeding clouds without a license—”

  “The cutpurse crumb!” Reev Markon snarled. Two in a row! He leaned back wearily for a moment. “By cracky, Slobb,” he said, “you’d think people would speak up and let us know if they think they’ve been unjustly treated by Plancom. You’d think they’d tell us instead of haywiring their rise in private and screwing the works.”

  Slobb mumbled sympathetically, and Reev Markon voiced the ancient complaint of his department: “The trouble with this job is, everybody does things about the weather, but nobody talks about it!”

  Everybody Knows Joe

  At least two persons live in each of us. at lest one of them is Joe.

  JOE HAD QUITE a day for himself Thursday, and as usual I had to tag along. If I had a right arm to give, I’d give it for a day off now and then. Like on Thursday. On Thursday he really outdid himself.

  He woke up in the hotel room and had a shower. He wasn’t going to shave until I told him be looked like a bum. So he shaved and then he stood for a whole minute admiring his beauty in the mirror, forgetting whose idea it was in the first place.

  So down to the coffee shop for breakfast A hard-working man needs a good breakfast So getting ready for a backbreak-ing day of copying references at the library, he had tomato juice, two fried eggs, three sausages, a sugared doughnut, and coffee—with cream and sugar.

  He couldn’t work that off his pot in a week of ditch-digging under a July sun, but a hard-working man needs a good breakfast. I was too disgusted to argue with him. He’s hopeless when he smells that short-order smell of smoking grease, frying bacon and coffee.

  He wanted to take a taxi to the library—eight blocks!

  “Walk, you jerk!” I told him. He started to mumble about pulling down six hundred bucks for this week’s work and then he must have thought I was going to mention the high-calory breakfast. To him that’s hitting below the belt. He thinks he’s an unfortunate man with an affliction—about twenty pounds of it. He walked and arrived at the library glowing with virtue.

  Making out his slip at the newspaper room he blandly put down next to firm—The Griffin Press, Inc.—when he knew as well as I did that he was a free lance and hadn’t even got a definite assignment from Griffin.

  There’s a line on the slip where you put down reason for consulting files (please be specific). It’s a shame to cramp Joe’s style to just one line after you pitch him an essay-type question like that. He squeezed in, Preparation of article on year in biochemistry for Griffin Pr. Encyc. 1952 Yrbk., and handed it with a flourish to the librarian.

  The librarian, a nice old man, was polite to him, which is usually a mistake with Joe. After he finished telling the librarian how his microfilm files ought to be organized and how they ought to switch from microfilm to microcard and how in spite of everything the New York Public Library wasn’t such a bad place to research, he got down to work.

  He’s pretty harmless when he’s working—it’s one of the things that keeps me from cutting his throat. With a noon break for apple pie and coffee he transcribed about a hundred entries onto his cards, mopping up the year in biochemistry nicely. He swaggered down the library steps, feeling like Herman Melville after finishing Moby Dick.

  “Don’t be so smug,” I told him. “You still have to write the piece. And they still have to buy it.”

  “A detail,” he said grandly.
“Just journalism. I can do it with my eyes shut.”

  Just journalism. Somehow his three months of running copy for the A.P. before the war has made him an Ed Leahy.

  “When are you going to do it with your eyes . . .?” I began but it wasn’t any use. He began telling me about how Gautama Buddha didn’t break with the world until he was 29 and Mohammed didn’t announce that he was a prophet until he was 30, so why couldn’t he one of these days suddenly bust loose with a new revelation or something and set the world on its ear? What it boiled down to was he didn’t think he’d write the article tonight.

  He postponed bis break with the world long enough to have a ham and cheese on rye and more coffee at an automat and then phoned Maggie. She was available as usual. She said as usual, “Well then, why don’t you just drop by and we’ll spend a quiet evening with some records?”

  As usual he thought that would be fine since he was so beat after a hard day. As usual I told him, “You’re a louse, Joe. You know all she wants is a husband and you know it isn’t going to be you, so why don’t you let go of the girl so she can find somebody who means business?”

  The usual answers rolled out automatically and we got that out of the way.

  Maybe Maggie isn’t very bright but she seemed glad to see him. She’s shooting for her Doctorate in sociology at N.Y.U., she does part-time case work for the city, she has one of those three-room Greenwich Village apartments with dyed burlap drapes and studio couches and home-made mobiles. She thinks writing is something holy and Joe’s careful not to tell her different.

  They drank some rhine wine and seltzer while Joe talked about the day’s work as though he’d won the Nobel prize for biochemistry. He got downright brutal about Maggie being mixed up in such an approximate unquantitative excuse for a science as sociology and she apologized humbly and eventually he forgave her. Big-hearted Joe.

  But he wasn’t so fried that he had to start talking about a man wanting to settle down—“not this year but maybe next Thirty’s a dividing point that makes you stop and wonder what you really want and what youVe really got out of life, Maggie darlin’.” It was as good as telling her that she should be a good girl and continue to keep open house for him and maybe some day . . . maybe.

  As I said, maybe Maggie isn’t very bright But as I also said, Thursday was the day Joe picked to outdo himself.

  “Joe,” she said with this look on her face, “I got a new LP of the Brahms Serenade Number One. It’s on top of the stack. Would you tell me what you think of it?”

  So he put it on and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer and he turned it over and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer until both sides were played. And she kept watching him. Not adoringly.

  “Well,” she asked with this new look, “what did you think of it?”

  He told her, of course. There was some comment on Brahms’ architectonics and his resurrection of the contrapuntal style. Because he’d sneaked a look at the record’s envelope he was able to spend a couple of minutes on Brahms’ debt to Haydn and the young Beethoven in the fifth movement (allegro, D Major) and the gay rondo of the—

  “Joe,” she said, not looking at him. “Joe,” she said, “I got that record at one hell of a discount down the street. It’s a wrong pressing. Somehow the first side is the first half of the Serenade but the second half is Schumann’s Symphonic Studies Opus Thirteen. Somebody noticed it when they played it in a booth. But I guess you didn’t notice it.”

  “Get out of this one, braino,” I told him.

  He got up and said in a strangled voice, “And I thought you were my friend. I suppose I’ll never learn.” He walked out.

  I suppose he never will.

  God help me, I ought to know.

  The Remorseful

  It does not matter when it happened. This is because he was alone and time had ceased to have any meaning for him. At first he had searched the rubble for other survivors, which kept him busy for a couple of years. Then he wandered across the continent in great, vague quarterings, but the plane one day would not take off and he knew he would never find anybody anyway. He was by then in his forties, and a kind of sexual delirium overcame him. He searched out and pored over pictures of women, preferring leggy, high-breasted types. They haunted his dreams; he masturbated incessantly with closed eyes, tears leaking from them and running down his filthy bearded face. One day that phase ended for no reason and he took up his wanderings again, on foot. North in the summer, south in the winter on weed-grown U.S. 1, with the haversack of pork and beans on his shoulders, usually talking as he trudged, sometimes singing.

  * * *

  It does not matter when it happened. This is because the Visitors were eternal; endless time stretched before them and behind, which mentions only two of the infinities of infinities that their “lives” included. Precisely when they arrived at a particular planetary system was to them the most trivial of irrelevancies. Eternity was theirs; eventually they would have arrived at all of them.

  They had won eternity in the only practical way: by outnumbering it. Each of the Visitors was a billion lives as you are a billion lives—the billion lives, that is, of your cells. But your cells have made the mistake of specializing. Some of them can only contract and relax. Some can only strain urea from your blood. Some can only load, carry, and unload oxygen. Some can only transmit minute electrical pulses and others can only manufacture chemicals in a desperate attempt to keep the impossible Rube Goldberg mechanism that you are from breaking down. They never succeed and you always do. Perhaps before you break down some of your specialized cells unite with somebody else’s specialized cells and grow into another impossible, doomed contraption.

  The Visitors were more sensibly arranged. Their billion lives were not cells but small, unspecialized, insect-like creatures linked by an electromagnetic field subtler than the coarse grapplings that hold you together. Each of the billion creatures that made up a Visitor could live and carry tiny weights, could manipulate tiny power tools, could carry in its small round black head, enough brain cells to feed, mate, breed, and work—and a few million more brain cells that were pooled into the field which made up the Visitor’s consciousness.

  When one of the insects died there were no rites; it was matter-of-factly pulled to pieces and eaten by its neighboring insects while it was still fresh. It mattered no more to the Visitor than the growing of your hair does to you, and the growing of your hair is accomplished only by the deaths of countless cells.

  * * *

  “Maybe on Mars!” he shouted as he trudged. The haversack jolted a shoulder blade and he arranged a strap without breaking his stride. Birds screamed and scattered in the dark pine forests as he roared at them: “Well, why not? There must of been ten thousand up there easy. Progress, God damn it! That’s progress, man! Never thought it’d come in my time. But you’d think they would of sent a ship back by now so a man wouldn’t feel so all alone. You know better than that, man. You know God damned good and well it happened up there too. We had Northern Semisphere, they had Southern Semisphere, so you know God damned good and well what happened up there. Semisphere? Hemisphere. Hem-i-sem-i-dem-isphere.”

  That was a good one, the best one he’d come across in years. He roared it out as he went stumping along.

  When he got tired of it he roared: “You should of been in the Old Old Army, man. We didn’t go in for this Liberty Unlimited crock in the Old-Old Army. If you wanted to march in step with somebody else you marched in step with somebody else, man. None of this crock about you march out of step or twenty lashes from the sergeant for limiting your liberty.”

  That was a good one too, but it made him a little uneasy. He tried to remember whether he had been in the army or had just heard about it. He realized in time that a storm was blowing up from his depths; unless he headed it off he would soon be sprawled on the broken concrete of U.S. 1, sobbing and beating his head with his fists. He went back hastily to Sem-isphere, flem-isphere, Hem-i-sem-i-de/n-
isphere, roaring it at the scared birds as he trudged.

  * * *

  There were four Visitors aboard the ship when it entered the planetary system. One of them was left on a cold outer planet rich in metal outcrops to establish itself in a billion tiny shelters, build a billion tiny forges, and eventually—in a thousand years or a million; it made no difference—construct a space ship, fission into two or more Visitors for company, and go Visiting. The ship had been getting crowded; as more and more information was acquired in its voyaging it was necessary for the swarms to increase in size, breeding more insects to store the new facts.

  The three remaining Visitors turned the prow of their ship toward an intermediate planet and made a brief, baffling stop there. It was uninhabited except for about ten thousand entities—far fewer than one would expect, and certainly not enough for an efficient first-contact study. The Visitors made for the next planet sunward after only the sketchiest observation. And yet that sketchy observation of the entities left them figuratively shaking their heads. Since the Visitors had no genitals they were in a sense without emotions—but you would have said a vague air of annoyance hung over the ship nevertheless.

  They ruminated the odd facts that the entities had levitated, appeared at the distance of observation to be insubstantial, appeared at the distance of observation to be unaware of the Visitors. When you are a hundred-yard rippling black carpet moving across a strange land, when the dwellers in this land soar aimlessly about you and above you, you expect to surprise, perhaps to frighten at first, and at least to provoke curiosity. You do not expect to be ignored.

  They reserved judgment pending analysis of the sunward planet’s entities—possibly colonizing entities, which would explain the sparseness of the outer planet’s population, though not its indifference.

  They landed.

  * * *

  He woke and drank water from a roadside ditch. There had been a time when water was the problem. You put three drops of iodine in a canteen. Or you boiled it if you weren’t too weak from dysentery. Or you scooped it from the tank of a flush toilet in the isolated farmhouse with the farmer and his wife and their kids downstairs grotesquely staring with their empty eye sockets at the television screen for the long-ago-spoken latest word. Disease or dust or shattering supersonics broadcast from the bullhorn of a low-skimming drone—what did it matter? Safe water was what mattered.