Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

Tropile hesitated, delicately balanced, trying to get the feel of this negotiation. This was Wolf against Wolf; it was hard. There had to be an advantage—

  “There is an advantage,” Haendl said aloud.

  Tropile jumped, but then he remembered: Wolf against Wolf.

  Haendl went on: “What you get out of it is your life, in the first place. You understand you can’t get out now. We don’t want sheep meddling around. And in the second place, there’s a considerable hope of gain.” He stared at Tropile with a dreamer’s eyes. “We don’t send parties up there for nothing, you know. We want to get something out of it. What we want is the Earth.”

  “The Earth?” It reeked of madness. But this man wasn’t mad.

  “Some day, Tropile, it’s going to be us against them. Never mind the sheep—they don’t count. It’s going to be Pyramids and Wolves, and the Pyramids won’t win. And then—”

  It was enough to curdle the blood. This man was proposing to fight, and against the invulnerable, the godlike Pyramids.

  But he was glowing and the fever was contagious. Tropile felt his own blood begin to pound. Haendl hadn’t finished his “and then—” but he didn’t have to. The “and then” was obvious: And then the world takes up again from the day the wandering planet first came into view. And then we go back to our own solar system and an end to the five-year cycle of frost and hunger.

  And then the Wolves can rule a world worth ruling.

  It was a meretricious appeal, perhaps, but it could not be refused. Tropile was lost.

  He said: “You can put away the gun, Haendl. You’ve signed me up.”

  VII

  THE way to Mount Everest, Tropile glumly found, lay through supervising the colony’s nursery school. It wasn’t what he had expected, but it had the advantages that while his charges were learning, he was learning, too.

  One jump ahead of the three-year-olds, he found that the “wolves,” far from being predators on the “sheep,” existed with them in a far more complicated ecological relationship. There were Wolves all through sheepdom; they leavened the dough of society.

  In barbarously simple prose, a primer said: “The Sons of the Wolf are good at numbers and money. You and your friends play money games almost as soon as you can talk, and you can think in percentages and compound interest when you want to. Most people are not able to do this.”

  True, thought Tropile subvocally, reading aloud to the tots.

  That was how it had been with him.

  “Sheep are afraid of the Sons of the Wolf. Those of us who live among them are in constant danger of detection and death—although ordinarily a Wolf can take care of himself against any number of sheep.” True, too.

  “It is one of the most dangerous assignments a Wolf can be given to live among the sheep. Yet it is essential. Without us, they would die—of stagnation, of rot, eventually of hunger.”

  It didn’t have to be spelled out any further. Sheep can’t mend their own fences.

  The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly—he choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind—competitive. The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the barriers of behavior.

  But it was distressing, in a way. At an age when future Citizens would have been learning their Little Pitcher Ways, these children were learning to fight. The perennial argument about who would get to be Big Bill Zeckendorf when they played a strange game called “Zeckendorf and Hilton” sometimes ended in bloody noses.

  And nobody—nobody at all-meditated on Connectivity.

  Tropile was warned not to do it himself. Haendl said grimly: “We don’t understand it and we don’t like what we don’t understand. We’re suspicious animals, Tropile. As the children grow older, we give them just enough practice so they can go into one meditation and get the feel of it—or pretend to, at any rate. If they have to pass as Citizens, they’ll need that much. But more than that we do not allow.”

  “Allow?” Somehow the word grated; somehow his sub-adrenals began to pulse.

  “Allow! We have our suspicions and we know for a fact that sometimes people disappear when they meditate. We don’t want to disappear. We think it’s not a good thing to disappear. Don’t meditate, Tropile. You hear?”

  BUT later, Tropile had to argue the point. He picked a time when Haendl was free, or as nearly free as that man ever was. The whole adult colony had been out on what they used as a parade ground—it had once been a football field, Haendl said. They had done their regular twice-a-week infantry drill, that being one of the prices one paid for living among the free, progressive Wolves instead of the dull and tepid sheep.

  Tropile was mightily winded, but he cast himself on the ground near Haendl, caught his breath and said: “Haendl—about meditation”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, perhaps you don’t really grasp it.”

  Tropile searched for words. He knew what he wanted to say. How could anything that felt as good as Oneness be bad? And wasn’t Translation, after all, so rare as hardly to matter? But he wasn’t sure he could get through to Haendl in those terms.

  He tried: “When you meditate successfully, Haendl, you’re one with the Universe. Do you know what I mean? There’s no feeling like it. It’s indescribable peace, beauty, harmony, repose.”

  “It’s the world’s cheapest narcotic,” Haendl snorted.

  “Oh, now, really—”

  “And the world’s cheapest religion. The stone-broke mutts can’t afford gilded idols, so they use their own navels. That’s all it is. They can’t afford alcohol; they can’t even afford the muscular exertion of deep breathing that would throw them into a state of hyperventilated oxygen drunkenness. Then what’s left? Self-hypnosis. Nothing else. It’s all they can do, so they learn it, they define it as pleasant and good, and they’re all fixed up.” Tropile sighed. The man was so stubborn! Then a thought occurred to him and he pushed himself up on his elbows. “Aren’t you leaving something out? What about Translation?”

  Haendl glowered at him. “That’s the part we don’t understand.”

  “But surely self-hypnosis doesn’t account for—”

  “Surely it doesn’t!” Haendl mimicked savagely. “All right. We don’t understand it and we’re afraid of it. Kindly do not tell me Translation is the supreme act of Un-willing, Total Disavowal of Duality, Unison with the Brahm-Ground or any such slop. You don’t know what it is and neither do we.” He started to get up. “All we know is, people vanish. And we want no part of it, so we don’t meditate. None of us—including you!”

  IT was foolishness, this close-order drill. Could you defeat the unreachable Himalayan Pyramid with a squads-right flanking maneuver?

  And yet it wasn’t all foolishness. Close-order drill and 2500-calorie-a-day diet began to put fat and flesh and muscle on Tropile’s body, and something other than that on his mind. He had not lost the edge of his acquisitiveness, his drive—his whatever it was that made the difference between Wolf and sheep.

  But he had gained something. Happiness? Well, if “happiness” is a sense of purpose, and a hope that the purpose can be accomplished, then happiness. It was a feeling that had never existed in his life before. Always it had been the glandular compulsion to gain an advantage, and that was gone, or anyway almost gone, because it was permitted in the society in which he now lived.

  Glenn Tropile sang as he putt-putted in his tractor, plowing the thawing Jersey fields. Still, a faint doubt remained. Squads right against the Pyramids?

  Stiffly, Tropile stopped the tractor, slowed the diesel to a steady thrum and got off. It was hot—being midsummer of the five-year calendar the Pyramids had imposed. It was time for rest and maybe something to eat.

  He sat in the shade of a tree, as farmers always have done, and opened his sandwiches. He was only a mile or so from Princeton, but he might as well have been in Limbo; there was no sign of any living human but himself. The northering sheep didn’t come near Princeton—
it “happened” that way, on purpose.

  He caught a glimpse of something moving, but when he stood up for a better look into the woods on the other side of the field, it was gone. Wolf? Real Wolf, that is? It could have been a bear, for that matter—there was talk of wolves and bears around Princeton; and although Tropile knew that much of the talk was assiduously encouraged by men like Haendl, he also knew that some of it was true.

  As long as he was up, he gathered straw from the litter of last “year’s” head-high grass, gathered sticks under the trees, built a small fire and put water on to boil for coffee. Then he sat back and ate his sandwiches, thinking

  Maybe it was a promotion, going from the nursery school to labor in the fields. Or maybe it wasn’t. Haendl had promised him a place in the expedition that would—maybe—discover something new and great and helpful about the Pyramids. And that might still come to pass, because the expedition was far from ready to leave.

  Tropile munched his sandwiches thoughtfully. Now why was the expedition so far from ready to leave? It was absolutely essential to get there in the warmest weather possible—otherwise Mt. Everest was unclimbable. Generations of alpinists had proved that. That warmest weather was rapidly going by.

  And why were Haendl and the Wolf colony so insistent on building tanks, arming themselves with rifles, organizing in companies and squads? The H-bomb hadn’t flustered the Pyramid. What lesser weapon could?

  Uneasily, Tropile put a few more sticks on the fire, staring thoughtfully into the canteen cup of water. It was a satisfyingly hot fire, he noticed abstractedly. The water was very nearly ready to boil.

  HALF across the world, the Pyramid in the Himalays felt, or heard, or tasted—a difference.

  Possibly the h-f pulses that had gone endlessly wheep, wheep, wheep were now going wheep-beep, wheep-beep. Possibly the electromagnetic “taste” of lower-than-red was now spiced with a tang of beyond-violet. Whatever the sign was, the Pyramid recognized it.

  A part of the crop it tended was ready to harvest.

  The ripening bud had a name, of course, but names didn’t matter to the Pyramid. The man named Tropile didn’t know he was ripening, either. All that Tropile knew was that, for the first time in nearly a year, he had succeeded in catching each stage of the nine perfect states of water-coming-to-a-boil in its purest form.

  It was like . . . like . . . well, it was like nothing that anyone but a Water Watcher could understand. He observed. He appreciated. He encompassed and absorbed the myriad subtle perfections of time, of shifting transparency, of sound, of distribution of ebulliency, of the faint, faint odor of steam.

  Complete, Glenn Tropile relaxed all his limbs and let his chin rest on his breast-bone.

  It was, he thought with placid, crystalline perception, a rare and perfect opportunity for meditation. He thought of Connectivity. (Overhead, a shifting glassy flaw appeared in the thin, still air.) There wasn’t any thought of Eyes in the erased palimpsest that was Glenn Tropile’s mind. There wasn’t any thought of Pyramids or of Wolves. The plowed field before him didn’t exist. Even the water, merrily bubbling itself dry, was gone from his perception.

  He was beginning to meditate.

  Time passed—or stood still—for Tropile; there was no difference. There was no time. He found himself almost on the brink of Understanding.

  Something snapped. An intruding blue-bottle drone, maybe, or a twitching muscle. Partly, Tropile came back to reality. Almost, he glanced upward. Almost, he saw the Eye . . .

  It didn’t matter. The thing that really mattered, the only thing in the world, was all within his mind; and he was ready, he knew, to find it.

  Once more! Try harder!

  He let the mind-clearing unanswerable question drift into his mind:

  If the sound of two hands together is a clapping, what is the sound of one hand?

  Gently he pawed at the question, the symbol of the futility of mind—and therefore the gateway to meditation. Unawareness of self was stealing deliciously over him.

  He was Glenn Tropile. He was more than that. He was the water boiling . . . and the boiling water was he. He was the gentle warmth of the fire, which was—which was, yes, itself the arc of the sky. As each thing was each other thing; water was fire, and fire air; Tropile was the first simmering bubble and the full roll of Well-aged Water was Self, was—more than Self—was—

  The answer to the unanswerable question was coming clearer and softer to him. And then, all at once, but not suddenly, for there was no time, it was not close—it was.

  The answer was his, was him. The arc of sky was the answer, and the answer belonged to sky—to warmth, to all warmths that there are, and to all waters, and—and the answer was—was—Tropile vanished. The mild thunderclap that followed made the flames dance and the column of steam fray; and then the fire was steady again, and so was the rising steam. But Tropile was gone.

  CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH

  Wolfbane

  CONCLUSION OF A 2-PART SERIAL

  There was a chink in the invulnerability of the Pyramids —whoever harvests whatever is ripe is bound to pick something poisonous — but was a Son of the Wolf poisonous enough?

  SYNOPSIS

  GLENN Tropile looked like any other Citizen in Earths tiny, tattered population, but there was a difference. Where Citizens made the best of things, Tropile fought where Citizens accommodated their small, restricted lives to a starvation diet and an utter abandonment of hope, Tropile struggled—and won. It was Tropile’s nature to win, always. For Tropile was what the beaten remnants of humanity termed: A Son of the Wolf.

  ROGET GERMYN,on the other hand, was a most proper Citizen in every way. He was skilled in the Five Gestures and the art of Conversation in Rhymed Couplets; he never said “no,” for saying “no” was crude and might hurt someone’s feelings; his table manners were exquisite; and he would never, never take advantage of another human being.

  Also, like every other Citizen on Earth, he was slowly starving to death. For Earth was no longer the comfortable, warm planet that had spun around old Sol for millions or billions of years. It had been stolen, raped and looted by the curious beings from outer space that the surviving humans knew only as—

  THE PYRAMIDS,owners of a wild extrastellar planet that had come into the Solar System and, without fuss or struggle, neatly lifted old Earth from its orbit and drawn it away. Why? Humans didn’t know. How? Humans had no idea.

  All that any man knew about the Pyramids was, first, that there was a single Pyramid on Earth, perched silent and motionless atop Mount Everest; second, that without the Pyramids to rekindle an artificial sun in the skies every five years, humanity would freeze and die—as it was very near to doing anyhow; third, that every once in a while a Citizen, properly Meditating in the ecstasy of concentration which was every Citizen’s desire, would disappear—would be Translated, as they called it That was all they knew, nothing more.

  THEY didn’t, for example, know that, to the Pyramids, Earth was nothing more than a sort of floating wristwatch mine, from which at certain times Components could be harvested—human Components, living men and women, whose brains could be linked into the Pyramids’ planetsized computers.

  But vanquished Earth was not quite dead; Glenn Tropile was not alone. Condemned as a Wolf, threatened with the form of execution called The Donation of the Spinal Tap, Tropile made his escape—and was picked up by another Wolf in the wilderness.

  HAENDL was his name. He was not a Citizen; there was no proper courtesy in his manner, no submissive resignation to hunger and cold. Haendl believed in fighting! Nor was he alone; there was a community of Wolves in the ruin of old Princeton University. There they had laboriously reconstructed weapons—guns, tanks, even aircraft. From there, they planned to retake the Earth from its alien masters, the Pyramids.

  But—could they?

  A mightier, richer Earth had thrown every weapon it owned against the Pyramids when first they came. And the result was nothing.

/>   It was as though the weapons of Man had not existed.

  The Pyramids not only were not harmed; they didn’t seem to know that the weapons were being used. Tanks, guns, planes—even a hydrogen bomb had spent itself uselessly against the Pyramids!

  Troubled, Tropile sat alone, wondering, worrying. He began to fall into a mood of single-minded concentration, began to Meditate, began to think upon the metaphysical questions that were every proper Citizen’s first concern . . .

  A Component was harvested. Glenn Tropile was Translated—swept up and out to the alien planet that was the home of the Pyramids themselves.

  VIII

  HAENDL plodded angrily through the high grass toward the dull throb of the diesel.

  Maybe it had been a mistake to take this Glenn Tropile into the colony. He was more Citizen than Wolf—no, cancel that, Haendl thought; he was more Wolf than Citizen. But the Wolf in him was tainted with sheep’s blood. He competed like a Wolf, but in spite of everything, he refused to give up some of his sheep’s ways. Meditation. He had been cautioned against that. But had he given it up?

  He had not.

  If it had been entirely up to Haendl, Glenn Tropile would have found himself back among the sheep or dead. Fortunately for Tropile, it was not entirely up to Haendl. The community of Wolves was by no means a democracy, but the leader had a certain responsibility to his constituents, and the responsibility was this: He couldn’t afford to be wrong. Like the Old Gray Wolf who protected Mowgli, he had to defend his actions against attack; if he failed to defend, the pack would pull him down.

  And Innison thought they needed Tropile—not in spite of the taint of the Citizen that he bore, but because of it.

  Haendl bawled: “Tropile! Tropile, where are you?” There was only the wind and the thrum of the diesel. It was enormously irritating. Haendl had other things to do than to chase after Glenn Tropile. And where was he? There was the diesel, idling wastefully; there the end of the patterned furrows Tropile had plowed. There a small fire, burning—