Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “And blew the person in half with those side-arms they carry,” said Barker. “Who volunteers for the assignment, Stoss?”

  “Not I,” the old man said hastily. “Let’s be practical. But perhaps I could persuade Miss Trimble?”

  “The math teacher? Hell, no. If things work out, we’re going to need all the mathematical talent we’ve got.” They conferred quietly, deciding which of their fellow-Earthmen would be persuaded to sacrifice himself. The choice fell on a nameless, half-mad youngster in the third seat of the second tier; he spoke to nobody and glared suspiciously over his food and drink.

  “But can you do it?” asked Barker.

  Stoss was offended. “In my time,” he said, “I’ve taken some fifty-five really big scores from suckers. I’ve persuaded people who love money better than life itself to turn their money over to me, and I’ve sent them to the bank for more.”

  “Do your best,” Barker said.

  WHAT APPROACH the old swindler did use, he never learned. But the next day Third Seat, Second Tier, rose during the doling out of the food and pretended to hurl his plate at Lakhrut. The Cyclops, ten meters away, stalked serenely on and the young man collapsed in an ecstacy of fright.

  The next day it was eight yards.

  The next day six.

  And other things filled the days: the need for steady driving of the ship, and whispered consultations up and down the benches.

  They needed a heat source, something that would blaze at 500 degrees, jangling, dazzling and confusing the senses of their captors. But it was an armed merchantman, a warship, and warships have nothing on board that will burn. Their poor clothing heaped together and somehow ignited would make a smouldering little fire, doing more damage to the human beings by its smoke than to the A’rkhov-Yar by its heat.

  Barker went exploring in the cargo spaces. Again and again he was passed in the corridors by crew “men.” Huddling against the glowing bulbs, choking down his rage and fear, he imitated the paint on the walls, and sometimes they broke their stride for a puzzled moment, sometimes not.

  In a cargo space on the next day he found cases labeled with worms of plastic as “attention sticks” or possibly “arresting or halting tubes.”

  They were the close equivalent of railroad flares in appearance. He worked the tight-fitting cap of one to the point where he felt gritty friction. A striking surface—but he did not dare strike and test it. These things would have to put out hundreds of degrees of heat, or, if they were intended for use at any appreciable distance, thousands. They were thermal shrieks; they would be heard from one end of the ship to the other. In three trips he smuggled 140 of the sticks back to the propulsion room. Stoss helped him distribute them among the seats. He grimly told the lack-luster eyes and loose mouths: “If anybody pulls off one of the caps before I say so, I am going to hit the pain button and hold it down for five minutes.”

  They understood it for the death threat it was.

  “Today’s the day, I think,” said Stoss in a whisper as Lakhrut made his benevolent entrance. “He sensed something yesterday at four meters. Today it’s going to be three.”

  Barker pushed his little food cart, fingering the broken-off knob of a propulsion chair resting on its lower tray. He moved past Third Seat, Second Tier, Lakhrut behind him. The mad young man rose, picked up his plate and pretended to throw it at the cyclops.

  Lakhrut drew his side-arm and blew the young man’s head into a charred lump. “Oliver!” he cried, outraged. “Why did you not report that one of your units was becoming deranged? You should have put him through the space-lock days ago!”

  “Oliver’s” reply was to pace off a precise four meters and hurl the broken-off knob at the monster. He took a full windup, and rage for five thousand years of slavery and theft drove his muscles. The cyclops eye broke and spilled; the cyclops staggered in circles, screaming. Barker closed in, twisted the side-arm from the monster’s convulsed hand and gave him what Third Seat, Second Tier, had got.

  The roomful of men and women rose in terror, screaming.

  “Quiet!” he yelled at them. “I’ve talked to some of you about this. You saw what happened. Those things are blind! You can strike them from five yards away and they’ll never know what hit them.”

  He snatched up one of the fusees and rasped off the cap; it began to flare pulsatingly, not very bright, but intensely hot. He held it at arm’s length and it scorched the hair on the back of his hand. “These things will dazzle what sensory equipment they do have,” he yelled, “and you can confuse them with noise. They’ll be coming to get us in a minute. All you have to do is make noise and mill around. You’ll see what happens when they come for us—and then we’ll go hunting!”

  J n less than a minute his prediction was verified. A squad of the cyclops crew burst in, and the screaming of the Earth people left nothing to be desired; the creatures recoiled as if they had struck a wall. From six meters away Barker and the Stosses carefully ignited the flares and tossed them into the squad. They made half-hearted efforts to fire into the source of the trouble, but they were like men in a darkened boiler works—whose darkness was intermittently relieved by intolerable magnesium flares. Lakhrut’s side-arm made short work of the squad.

  Barker ripped their weapons from their fingers and demanded: “Who wants one? Who wants to go hunting? Not you, Miss Trimble; we’ll need you for later. Stay in a safe place. Who’s ready for a hunting party?”

  One by one, twitching creatures remembered they were men and came up to take their weapons.

  The first hunting party worked its way down a corridor, hurling fusees, yelling and firing. The bag was a dozen cyclopes, a dozen more weapons.

  They met resistance at a massive door with a loophole. Blasts from a hand weapon leaped through the loophole, blind but deadly. Three of them fell charging the door.

  “Warm it up for them,” Stoss said. He snatched a dozen fusees, ducked under the fire and plastered himself against the door. Meticulously he uncapped the sticks and leaned them against the door, one by one. The blast of heat drove Barker and his party back down the corridor. Stoss did not collapse until he had ignited the last flare and wrenched open the door with a seared hand.

  Through the door could be seen staggering cyclops figures, clawing blindly at the compartment walls. The Earthmen leaped through the brief, searing heat of the dozen flares and burned them down.

  In the A’rkhov-Yar language, a terrified voice spoke over the ship public address system: “To the leader of the rebels! To the leader of the rebels! Return to your propulsion room and your crimes will be forgiven! Food will be doubled and the use of the Pain discontinued!”

  Barker did not bother to translate. “Let’s head for the navigation room,” he said. “Try to save a couple of them.”

  One hour later he was telling the commander and Gori: “You two will set courses for Earth. You will work separately, and if your results don’t agree we will put you each in a chair and hold down the button until you produce results that do agree. We also have a lady able to check on your mathematics, so don’t try anything.”

  “You are insane,” said the commander. “Other ships will pursue and destroy you.”

  “Other ships,” Barker corrected him, “will pursue and fail to overtake us. I doubt very much that slave ships can overtake a ship driven by free men and women going home.”

  “We will attack openly for this insolence,” snorted Gori. “Do you think you can stand against a battle fleet? We will destroy your cities until you’ve had enough, and then use you as the slaves you are.”

  “I’m sure you’ll try,” said Barker. “However, all I ask is a couple of weeks for a few first-rate Ph.D.’s to go over this ship and its armaments. I believe you’ll find you have a first-rate war on your hands, gentlemen. We don’t steal; we learn.

  “And now, if you please, start figuring that course. You’re working for us now.”

  The Last Man Left in the Bar

&nbs
p; Are you always a jump ahead of the hero at solving the problem in a science fiction story? Okay, try this one . . .

  YOU KNOW HIM, Joe—or Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben, whatever your deceitful, cheaply genial name may be. And do not lie to yourself, Gentle Reader; you know him too.

  A loner, he was.

  You did not notice him when he slipped in; you only knew by his aggrieved air when he (finally) caught your eye and self-consciously said “Shot of Red Top and a beer” that he’d ruffle your working day. (Six at night until two in the morning is a day? But ah, the horrible alternative is to work for a living.)

  Shot of Red Top and a beer at 8:35.

  And unbeknownst to him, Gentle Reader, in the garage up the street the two contrivers of his dilemma conspired; the breaths of tall dark stooped cadaverous Galardo and the mouse-eyed lassie mingled.

  “Hyii shall be a religion-isst,” he instructed her.

  “I know the role,” she squeaked and quoted: “ ‘Woe to the day on which I was born into the world! Woe to the womb which bare me! Woe to the bowels which admitted me! Woe to the breasts which suckled me! Woe to the feet upon which I sat and rested! Woe to the hands which carried me and reared me until I grew! Woe to my tongue and my lips which have brought forth and spoken vanity, detraction, falsehood, ignorance, derision, idle tales, craft and hypocrisy! Woe to mine eyes which have looked upon scandalous things! Woe to mine ears which have delighted in the words of slanderers! Woe to my hands which have seized what did not of right belong to them! Woe to my belly and my bowels which have lusted after food unlawful to be eaten! Woe to my throat which like a fire has consumed all that it found!’ ”

  He sobbed with the beauty of it and nodded at last, tears hanging in his eyes: “Yess, that religion. It iss one of my fave-o-ritts.”

  She was carried away. “I can do others. Oh, I can do others. I c$n do Mithras, and Ms, and Marduk, and Eddyism and Billsword and Pealing and Uranium, both orthodox and reformed.”

  “Mithras, Isis, and Marduk are long gone and the resst are ss-till to come. Listen tii your master, dii not chat-ter, and we shall an artwork make of which there will be talk under the green sky until all food is eaten.”

  Meanwhile, Gentle Reader, the loner listened. To his left strong silent sinewy men in fellowship, the builders, the doers, the darers: “So I told the foreman where he should put his Bullard. I told him I run a Warner and Swasey, I run a Warner and Swasey good, I never even seen a Bullard up close in my life, and where he should put it. I know how to run a Warner and Swasey and why should he take me off a Warner and Swasey I know how to run and put me on a Bullard and where he should put it ain’t I right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  To his right the clear-eyed virtuous matrons, the steadfast, the true-seeing, the loving-kind: “Oh, I don’t know what I want, what do you want? I’m a Scotch drinker really but I don’t feel like Scotch but if I come home with Muscatel on my breath Eddie calls me a wino and laughs his head off. I don’t know what I want. What do you want?”

  In the box above the bar the rollicking raster raced.

  SHOT OF RED TOP AND A BEER. AT 8:50.

  In his own un-secret heart: Steady, boy. You’ve got to think this out. Nothing impossible about it, no reason to settle for a stalemate; just a little time to think it out. Galardo said the Black Chapter would accept a token submission, let me return the Seal, and that would be that. But I mustn’t count on that as a datum; he lied to me about the Serpentists. Token submission sounds right; they go in big for symbolism. Maybe because they’re so stone-broke, like the Japs. Drinking a cup of tea, they gussie it all up until it’s a religion; that’s the way you squeeze nourishment out of poverty-Skip the Japs. Think. He lied to me about the Serpentists. The big thing to remember is, I have the Chapter Seal and they need it back, or think they do. All you need’s a little time to think things through, place where he won’t dare jump you and grab the Seal. And this is it. “Joe. Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben, whoever you are. Hit me again.” Joe—Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben?—tilts the amber bottle quietly; the liquid’s level rises and crowns the little glass with a convex meniscus. He turns off the stream with an easy roll of the wrist. The suntan line of neon tubing at the bar back twinkles off the curve of surface tension, the placid whiskey, the frothy beer. At 9:05.

  To his left: “So Finkelstein finally meets Goldberg in the garment center and he grabs him like this by the lapel, and he yells, ‘You louse, you rat, you no-good, what’s this about you running around with my wife? I ought to—I ought to—say, you call this a buttonhole?’ ”

  Restrained and apprehensive laughter; Catholic, Protestant, Jew (choice of one), what’s the difference I always say.

  Did they have a Jewish Question still, or was all smoothed and troweled and interfaithed and brotherhoodooed—

  Wait. Your formulation implies that they’re in the future, and you have no proof of that. Think straighter; you don’t know where they are, or when they are, or who they are. You do know that you walked into Big Maggie’s resonance chamber to change the target, experimental indium for old reliable zinc

  and

  “Bartender,” in a controlled and formal voice. Shot of Red Top and a beer at 9:09, the hand vibrating with remembrance of a dirty-green el Greco sky which might be Brookhaven’s heavens a million years either way from now, or one second sideways, or (bow to Method and formally exhaust the possibilities) a hallucination. The Seal snatched from the greenlit rock altar could be a blank washer, a wheel from a toy truck, or the screw top from a jar of shaving cream but for the fact that it wasn’t. It was the Seal.

  So: they began seeping through after that. The Chapter wanted it back. The Serpentists wanted it, period. Galardo had started by bargaining and wound up by threatening, but how could you do anything but laugh at his best offer, a rusty five-pound spur gear with a worn keyway and three teeth missing? His threats were richer than his bribes; they culminated with The Century of Flame. “Faith, father, it doesn’t scare me at all, at all; sure, no man could stand it.” Subjective-objective (How you used to sling them around!), and Master Newton’s billiard-table similes dissolve into sense impressions of pointer readings as you learn your trade, but Galardo had scared hell out of you, or into you, with The Century of Flame.

  But you had the Seal of the Chapter and you had time to think, while on the screen above the bar:

  TO HIS RIGHT: “It ain’t reasonable. All that shooting and yelling and falling down and not one person sticks his head out of a window to see what’s going on. They should of had a few people looking out to see what’s going on, otherwise it ain’t reasonable.”

  “Yeah, who’s fighting tonight?”

  “Rocky Mausoleum against Rocky Mazzarella. From Toledo.”

  “Rocky Mazzarella beat Rocky Granatino, didn’t he?”

  “Ah, that was Rocky Bolderoni, and he whipped Rocky Capa-cola.”

  Them and their neatly packaged problems, them and their neatly packaged shows with beginning middle and end. The rite of the low-budget shot-in-Europe spy series, the rite of pugilism, the rite of the dog walk after dinner and the beer at the bar with cocelebrant worshippers at the high altar of Nothing.

  9:30. Shot of Red Top and a beer, positively the last one until you get this figured out; you’re beginning to buzz like a transformer.

  Do they have transformers? Do they have vitamins? Do they have anything but that glaring green sky, and the rock altar and treasures like the Seal and the rusty gear with three broken teeth? “All smelling of iodoform. And all quite bald.” But Galardo looked as if he were dying of tuberculosis, and the letter from the Serpentists was in a sick and straggling hand. Relics of medieval barbarism.

  To his left—

  “Galardo!” he screamed.

  The bartender scurried over—Joe, Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben?—scowling. “What’s the matter, mister?”

  “I’m sorry. I got a stitch in my side. A cramp.”

  Bullyboy scowled competently and turned. �
�What’ll you have, mister?”

  Galardo said cadaverously: “Wodeffer my vriend hyere iss havfing.”

  “Shot of Red Top and a beer, right?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Drink-ing beferachiss . . . havf hyü de-site-it hwat tü dü?”

  The bartender rapped down the shot glass and tilted the bottle over it, looking at Galardo. Some of the whiskey slopped over. The bartender started, went to the tap and carefully drew a glass of beer, slicing the collar twice.

  “My vriend hyere will pay.”

  He got out a half dollar, fumbling, and put it on the wet wood. The bartender, old-fashioned, rapped it twice on the bar to show he wasn’t stealing it even though you weren’t watching; he rang it up double virtuous on the cash register, the absent owner’s fishy eye.

  “What are you doing here?” again, in a low, reasonable, almost amused voice to show him you have the whip hand.

  “Drink-ing beferachiss . . . it iss so cle-an hyere.” Galardo’s sunken face, unbelievably, looked wistful as he surveyed the barroom, his head swiveling slowly from extreme left to extreme right.

  “Clean. Well. Isn’t it clean there?”

  “Sheh, not!” Galardo said mournfully. “Sheh, not! Hyere it iss so cle-an . . . hwai did yü outreach tü us? Hag-rid us, wretch-it, hag-rid us?” There were tears hanging in his eyes. “Haff yü de-site-it hwat tü dü?”

  Expansively: “I don’t pretend to understand the situation fully, Galardo. But you know and I know that I’ve got something you people [think you] need. Now there doesn’t seem to be any body .of law covering artifacts that appear [plink!] in a magnetron on accidental overload, and I just have your word that it’s yours.”

  “Ah, that iss how yü re-member it now,” said sorrowful Galardo.

  “Well, it’s the way it [but wasn’t something green? I think of spired Toledo and three angled crosses toppling] happened. I don’t want anything silly, like a million dollars in small unmarked bills, and I don’t want to be bullied, to be bullied, no, I mean not by you, not by anybody. Just, just tell me who you are, what all this is about. This is nonsense, you see, and we can’t have nonsense. I’m afraid I’m not expressing myself very well—”