Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Call it craving for a new flavor. Where once it had patiently waited for the state that Citizens knew as Meditation on Connectivity, and the Pyramid itself perhaps knew as a stage of ripeness in the fruits of its wristwatch mine, now it wanted a different taste. Unripe? Overripe? At any rate, different.

  Accordingly, the high-frequency wheep, wheep changed in tempo and in key, and the bouncing echoes changed and . . . there was a ripe one to be plucked. (It’s name was Innison.) And there another. (Gala Tropile.) And another, another—oh, many others—a babe from Tropile’s nursery school and the Wheeling jailer and a woman Tropile once had coveted on the street.

  Once the ruddy starch-to-sugar mark of ripeness had been what human beings called Meditation on Connectivity and the Pyramids knew as a convenient blankness. Now the sign was a sort of empathy with the Component named Tropile. It didn’t matter to the Pyramid on Mount Everest. It swung its electrostatic scythe and the—call them Tropiletropes—were harvested.

  It did not occur to the Pyramid on Mount Everest that a Component might be directing its actions. How could it?

  Perhaps the Pyramid on Mount Everest wondered, if it knew how to wonder, when it noticed that different criteria were involved in selecting components these days. (If it knew how to “notice.” Surely even a Pyramid might wonder when, without warning or explanation, its orders were changed—not merely to harvest a different sort of Component, but to drag along with the flesh-and-blood needful parts a clanking assortment of machinery and metal, as began to happen. Machines? Why would the Pyramids need to Translate machines?

  But why, on the other hand, would a Pyramid bother to question a directive, even if it were able to?

  In any case, it didn’t. It swung its scythe and gathered in what it was caused to gather in.

  Men sometimes eat green fruit and come to regret it. Was it the same with Pyramids?

  AND Citizen Germyn fell into the unsuspected trap. Avoiding Connectivity, he thought of Glenn Tropile—and the unfelt h-f pulses found him out.

  He didn’t see the Eye that formed above him. He didn’t feel the gathering of forces that formed his trap. He didn’t know that he was seized, charged, catapulted through space, caught, halted and drained. It happened too fast.

  One moment he was in his bed; the next moment he was—elsewhere. There wasn’t anything in between.

  It had happened to hundreds of thousands of Components before him, but, for Citizen Germyn, what happened was in some ways different. He was not embalmed in nutrient fluid, formed and programmed to take his part in the Pyramid-structure, for he had not been selected by the Pyramid but by that single wild Component, Tropile. He arrived conscious, awake and able to move.

  He stood up in a red-lit chamber. Vast thundering crashes of metal buffeted his ears. Heat sprang little founts of perspiration on his skin.

  It was too much, too much to take in at once. Oily-skinned madmen, naked, were capering and shouting at him. It took him a moment to realize that they were not devils; this was not Hell; he was not dead.

  “This way!” they were bawling at him. “Come on, hurry it up!”

  He reeled, following their directions, across an unpleasantly warm floor, staggering and falling—the binary planet was a quarter denser than Earth—until he got his balance.

  The capering madmen led him through a door—or sphincter or trap; it was not like anything he had ever seen. But it was a portal of a sort, and on the other side of it was something closer to sanity. It was another room, and though the light was still red, it was a paler, calmer red and the thundering ironmongery was a wall away. The madmen were naked, yes, but they were not mad. The oil on their skins was only the sheen of sweat.

  “Where—where am I? he gasped.

  Two voices, perhaps three or four, were all talking at once. He could make no sense of it. Citizen Germyn looked about him. He was in a sort of chamber that formed a part of a machine that existed for the unknown purposes of the Pyramids on the binary planet. And he was alive—and not even alone.

  He had crossed more than a million miles of space without feeling a thing. But when what the naked men were saying began to penetrate, the walls lurched around him.

  It was true; he had been Translated.

  He looked dazedly down at his own bare body, and around at the room, and then he realized they were still talking: “—when you get your bearings. Feel all right now? Come on, Citizen, snap out of it!”

  Germyn blinked.

  Another voice said peevishly: “Tropile’s got to find some other place to bring them in. That foundry isn’t meant for human beings. Look at the shape this one is in! Some time somebody’s going to come in and we won’t spot him in time and—pfut!”

  The first voice said: “Can’t be helped. Hey! Are you all right?”

  Citizen Germyn looked at the naked man in front of him and took a deep breath of hot, sour air. “Of course I’m all right,” he said.

  The naked man was Haendl.

  THE Tropile-petal “said” to the Alla Narova-petal: “Got another one! It’s Citizen Germyn!” The petal fluttered feebly in soundless laughter.

  The Alla Narova-petal “said”: “Glenn, come back! The whole propulsion-pneuma just went out of circuit!”

  Tropile pulled his attention away from his human acquisitions in the chamber off the foundry and allowed himself to fuse with the woman-personality. Together they reached out and explored along the pathways they had laboriously traced. The propulsion-pneuma was the complex of navigation-computers, drive generators, course-vectoring units that their own unit had been originally part of—until Glenn Tropile, by waking its Components, had managed to divert it for purposes of his own. The two of them reached out into it—

  Dead end.

  It was out of circuit, as Alla Narova had said. One whole limb of their body—their new, jointly tenanted body, that spanned a whole planet and reached across space to Earth—had been lopped off. Quick, quick, they separated, traced separate paths. They came together again: Still dead end.

  The dyad that was Tropile and the woman reached out to touch the others in the snowflake and communicated—not in words, not in anything as slow and as opaque as words: The Pyramids have lopped off another circuit The compound personality of the snowflake considered its course of action, reached its decision, acted. Quick, quick, three of the other members of the snowflake darted out of the collective unit and went about isolating and tracing the exact area that had been affected.

  Tropile: “We expected this. They couldn’t help noticing sooner or later that something was going wrong.”

  Alla Narova: “But, Glenn, suppose they cut us out of circuit? We’re stuck here. We can’t move. We can’t get out of the tanks. If they know that we are the source of their trouble—”

  Tropile: “Let them know! That’s what we’ve got the others here for!” He was cocky now, self-assured, fighting. For the first time in his life, he was free to fight—to let his Wolf blood strive to the utmost—and he knew what he was fighting for. This wasn’t a matter of Haendl’s pitiful tanks and carbines against the invulnerable Pyramids; this was the invulnerability of the whole Pyramid system turned against the Pyramids!

  It was a warning, the fact that the Pyramids had become alert to danger, had begun cutting sections of their planetary communications system out of the main circuit. But as a warning, it didn’t frighten Tropile; it only spurred him to action.

  Quick, quick, he and the woman-personality dissolved, sped away. Figuratively they sought out the most restive Components they could find, shook them by the shoulder, tried to wake them. Actually—well, what is “actually?”.

  The physical fact was surely that they didn’t move at all, for they were bound to their tank and to the surgical joinings, each to each, at their temples. No crawling child in a playpen was more helplessly confined than Tropile and Alla Narova and the others.

  And yet no human being had ever been more free.

  REGARD that imbeci
le servant of Everyman, the thermostat.

  He runs the furnace in Everyman’s house, he measures the doneness of Everyman’s breakfast toast, he valves the cooling fluid through the radiator of Everyman’s car. If Everyman’s house stays too hot or too cold, the man swears at the lackwit switch and maybe buys a new one to plug in. But he never, never thinks that his thermostat might be plotting against him.

  Thermostat: Man—Man: Pyramid. Only that and nothing more. It was not in the nature of a Pyramid to think that its Components, once installed, could reprogram themselves. No Component ever had. (But before Glenn Tropile, no Component had been Wolf.)

  When Tropile found himself, he found others. They were men and women, real persons with gonads and dreams. They had been caught at the moment of blankness—yes; and frozen into that shape, true. But they were palimpsest personalities on which the Pyramids had programmed their duties. Underneath the Pyramids’ cabalistic scrawl, the men and women still remained. They had only to be reached.

  Tropile and Alla Narova reached them—one at a time, then by scores. The Pyramids made that possible. The network of communication that they had created for their own purposes encompassed every cell of the race and all its works. Tropile reached out from his floating snowflake and went where he wished—anywhere within the binary planet; to the brooding Pyramid on Earth; through the Eyes, wherever he chose on Earth’s surface.

  Physically, he was scarcely able to move a muscle. But, oh, the soaring range of his mind and vision!

  CITIZEN Germyn was past shock, but just the same it was uncomfortable to be in a room with several dozen other persons, all of them naked. Uncomfortable. Once it would have been brain-shattering. For a Citizen to see his own Citizeness unclothed was gross lechery. To be part of a mixed and bare-skinned group was unthinkable. Or had been. Now it only made him uneasy.

  He said numbly to Haendl: “Citizen, I pray you tell me what sort of place this is.”

  “Later,” said Haendl gruffly, and led him out of the way. “Stay put,” he advised. “We’re busy.”

  And that was true. Something was going on, but Citizen Germyn couldn’t make out exactly what it was. The naked people were worrying out a distribution of some sort of supplies. There were tools and there were also what looked to Citizen Germyn’s unsophisticated eyes very much like guns. Guns? It was foolishness to think they were guns, Citizen Germyn told himself strongly. Nobody had guns. He touched the floor with an exploratory hand. It was warm and it shook with a nameless distant vibration. He shuddered.

  Haendl came back; yes, they were guns. Haendl was carrying one.

  “Ours!” he crowed. “That Tropile must’ve looted our armory at Princeton. By the looks of what’s here, I doubt if he left a single round of ammunition. What the hell, they’re more use here!”

  “But what are we going to do with guns?”

  Haendl looked at him with savage amusement. “Shoot.”

  Citizen Germyn said: “Please, Citizen. Tell me what this is all about.”

  Haendl sat down next to him on the warm, quivering floor and began fitting cartridges into a clip.

  “We’re fighting,” he explained gleefully. “Tropile did it all. You’ve been shanghaied and so have all the rest of us. Tropile’s alive! He’s part of the Pyramid communications network—don’t ask me how. But he’s there and he has been hauling men and weapons and God knows what all up from Earth—you’re on the binary planet now, you know—and we’re going to bust things up so the Pyramids will never be able to put them back together again. Understand? Well, it doesn’t matter if you don’t. All you have to understand is that when I tell you to shoot this gun, you shoot.”

  Numbly, Citizen Germyn took the unfamiliar stock and barrel into his hands. Muscles he had forgotten he owned straightened the limp curve of his back, squared his shoulders and thrust out his chest.

  It had been many generations since any of Citizen Germyn’s people had known the feeling of being an Armed Man.

  A naked woman with wild hair and a full, soft figure came toward them, jiggling in a way that agonized Citizen Germyn. He dropped his eyes to his gun and kept them there.

  She cried: “Orders from Tropile! We’ve got to form a party and blow something up.”

  Haendl demanded: “Such as what?”

  “I don’t know what. I only know where. We’ve got a guide. And Tropile particularly asked for you, Haendl. He said you’d enjoy it.”

  And enjoy it Haendl did—anticipation was all over his face.

  THEY formed a party of a dozen. They armed themselves with the guns Tropile had levitated from the bulging warehouse at Princeton. They supplied themselves with gray metal cans of something that Haendl said were explosives, and with fuses and detonators to match, and they set off—with their guide.

  A guide! It was a shambling, fearsome monster!

  When Citizen Germyn saw it, he had to fight an almost irresistible temptation to be ill. Even the bare skins about him no longer mattered; this new horror canceled them out.

  “What—What—” he strangled, pointing.

  Haendl laughed raucously. “That’s Joey.”

  “What’s Joey?”

  “He works for us,” said Haendl, grinning.

  Joey was neither human nor beast; it was not Pyramid; it was nothing Citizen Germyn had ever seen or imagined before. It crouched on many-jointed limbs, and even so was twice the height of a man. Its ropy arms and legs were covered with fine chitinous spines, laid on as close as hairs in a pelt, and sharp as thorns. There was a layer of chitin around its reddish eyes. What was more horrible than all, it spoke.

  It said squeakily: “You all ready? Come on, snap it up! The Pyramids have got something big building up and we’ve got to squash it.”

  Citizen Germyn whispered feverishly to Haendl: “That voice! It sounds odd, yes—but isn’t it Tropile’s voice?”

  “Sure it is! That’s what old Joey is good for,” said Haendl. “Tropile says he’s telepathic, whatever that is. Makes it handy for us.”

  And it did. Telepathy was the alien’s very special use to Glenn Tropile, for what Joey was in fact was another Component, from a previous wristwatch mine. Joey’s planet had once circled a star never visible from Earth; his home air was thin and his home sunlight was weak, and in consequence his race had developed a species of telepathy for communicating at long range. This was handy for the Pyramids, because it simplified the wiring. And it was equally handy for Glenn Tropile, once he managed to wake the creature—with its permission, he could use its body as a sort of walkie-talkie in directing the tactics of his shanghaied army.

  That permission was very readily given. Joey remembered what the Pyramids had done to its own planet.

  “Come on!” ordered Joey in Tropile’s filtered voice, and they hastened through a straight and achingly cramped tunnel in single file, toward what Tropile had said was their target.

  They had nearly reached it when, abruptly, there was a thundering of explosions ahead.

  The party stopped, looked at each other, and got ready to move on more slowly.

  At last it had started. The Pyramids were beginning to fight back.

  XIII

  CITIZENESS Roget Germyn, widow, woke from sleep like a well-mannered cat on the narrow lower third of the bed that her training had taught her to occupy, though it had been some days since her husband’s Translation had emptied the Citizen’s two-thirds permanently.

  Someone had tapped gently on her door.

  “I am awake,” she called, in a voice just sufficient to carry.

  A quiet voice said: “Citizeness, there is exceptional opportunity to Appreciate this morning. Come see, if you will. And I ask forgiveness for waking you.”

  She recognized the voice; it was the wife of one of her neighbors. The Citizeness made the appropriate reply, combining forgiveness and gratitude.

  She dressed rapidly, but with appropriate pauses for reflection and calm, and stepped out into the street.

/>   It was not yet daylight. Overhead, great sheets of soundless lightnings flared.

  Inside Citizeness Germyn long-unfelt emotions stirred. There was something that was very like terror, and something that was akin to love. This was a generation that had never seen the aurora, for the ricocheting electron beams that cause it could not span the increasing distance between the orphaned Earth and its primary, Old Sol, and the small rekindled suns the Pyramids made were far too puny.

  Under the sleeting aurora, small knots of Citizens stood about the streets, their faces turned up to the sky and illuminated by the distant light. It was truly an exceptional opportunity to Appreciate and they were all making the most of it.

  Conscientiously, Citizeness Germyn sought out another viewer with whom to exchange comments on the spectacle above. “It is more bright than meteors,” she said judiciously, “and lovelier than the freshly kindled Sun.”

  “Sure,” said the woman. Citizeness Germyn, jolted, looked more closely. It was the Tropile woman—Gala? Was that her name? And what sort of name was that? But it fitted her well; she was the one who had been wife to Wolf and, more likely than not, part Wolf herself.

  Still, the case was not proved. Citizeness Germyn said honestly: “I have never seen a sight to compare with this in all my life”

  Gala Tropile said indifferently: “Yeah. Funny things are happening all the time these days, have you noticed? Ever since Glenn turned out to be—” She stopped.

  Citizeness Germyn rapidly diagnosed her embarrassment and acted to cover it up. “That is so. I have seen Eyes a hundred times and yet has there been a Translation with the Eyes? No. But there have been Translations. It is queer.”

  “I suppose so,” Gala Tropile said, looking upward at the display. She sighed.

  Over their heads, a formed Eye was drifting slowly about, but neither of the women noticed it. The shifting lights in the sky obscured it.

  “I wonder what causes that stuff,” Gala Tropile said idly.