Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  The ribbons, his age and the fact that he was still a first lieutenant were grounds enough for the MPs to despise him. An officer of thirty eight should be a captain at least. Many were majors and some were colonels. “You can go down, lieutenant,” they told the patient foulball, and he went down to the interminable concrete tunnels of G-1.

  A display machine considered the name General Grote when he typed it oil its keyboard, and told him with a map where the general was to be found. It was a longish walk through the tunnels. While he walked past banks of clicking card-sorters and their servants he pondered other information the machine had gratuitously supplied:

  GROTE, Lawrence W Lt Gen.

  0-459732,

  Unassigned

  It did not lessen any of Kramer’s puzzles. A three-star general, then. He couldn’t possibly have anything to do with disciplining a lousy first-john. Lieutenant generals ran Army Groups, gigantic ad hoc assemblages of up to a hundred divisions, complete with air forces, missile groups, amphibious assault teams, even carrier and missile-sub task forces. The fact of his rank indicated that, whoever he was, he was an immensely able and tenacious person. He had gone through at least a twenty-year threshing of the wheat from the chaff, all up the screening and evaluation boards from second lieutenant to, say, lieutenant colonel, and then the murderous grind of accelerated courses at Command and General Staff School, the fanatically rigid selection for the War College, an obstacle course designed not to train the sub-standard up to competence but to keep them out. It was just this side of impossible for a human being to become a lieutenant general. And yet a few human beings in every generation did bulldoze their way through the little gap between the impossible and the almost impossible.

  And such a man was unassigned?

  Kramer found the office at last. A motherly, bur sharp-eyed, WAC major told him to go right in.

  John Kramer studied his three-star general while going through the ancient rituals of reporting-as-ordered. General Grote was an old man, straight, spare, white-haired, tanned. He wore no overseas bars. On his chest were all the meritorious service ribbons his country could bestow, but none of the decorations of the combat soldier. This was explained by a modest sunburst centered over the ribbons. General Grote was, had always been, General Staff Corps. A desk man.

  “Sit down, lieutenant,” Grote said, eying him casually. “You’ve never heard of me, I assume.”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  “As I expected,” said Grote complacently. “I’m not a dashing tank commander or one of those flying generals who leads his own raids. I’m one of the people who moves the dashing tank commanders and dying generals around the board like chess pieces. And now, confound it, I’m going to be a dashing combat leader at last. You may smoke if you like.”

  Kramer obediently lit up.

  “Dan Medway,” said the general, “wants me to start from scratch, build up a striking force and hit the Asian mainland across the Bering Strait.”

  Kramer was horrified twice—first by the reference to The Supreme Commander as “Dan” and second by the fact that he, a lieutenant, was being told about high strategy.

  “Relax,” the general said. “You’re going to be my aide.”

  Kramer was horrified again. The general grinned.

  “Your card popped out of the machinery,” he said, and that was all there was to say about it, “and so you’re going to be a highly privileged character and everybody will detest you. That’s the way it is with aides. You’ll know everything I know. And vice versa; that’s the important part. You’ll run errands for me, do investigations, serve as hatchet man, see that my pajamas are pressed without starch and make coffee the way I like n—coarse grind, brought to die boil for just a moment in an old-fashion coffeepot. Actually what you’ll do is what I want you to do from day to day. For these privileges you get to wear a blue fourragère around your left shoulder which marks you as a man not to be trifled with by colonels, brigadiers or MP.s. That’s the way it is with aides. And, I don’t know if you have any outside interests, women or chess or drinking. The machinery didn’t mention any. But you’ll have to give them up if you do.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Kramer. And it seemed wildly possible that he might never touch pencil to puzzle again. With something to do—

  “We’re Operation Ripsaw,” said the general. “So far, that’s me, Margaret out there in the office and you. In addition to other duties, you’ll keep a diary of Ripsaw, by the way, and I want you to have a summary with you at all times in case I need it. Now call in Margaret, make a pot of coffee, there’s a little stove thing in the washroom there, and I’ll start putting together my general staff.”

  It started as small and as quietly as that.

  II

  It was a week before Kramer got back to the 561st long enough to pick up his possessions, and then he left the stacks of newspapers and magazines where they lay, puzzles and all. No time. The first person to hate him was Margaret, the motherly major. For all her rank over him, she was a secretary and he was an aide with a fourragère who had the general’s willing ear. She began a policy of nonresistance that was non-cooperation, too; she would not deliberately obstruct him. but she would allow him to poke through the files for ten minutes before volunteering the information that the folder he wanted was already on the general’s desk. This interfered with the smooth performance of Kramer’s duties, and, of course, the general spotted it at once.

  “It’s nothing,” said Kramer when the general called him on it. “I don’t like to say anything.”

  “Go on.” General Grote urged. “You’re not a soldier any more; you’re a rat.”

  “I think I can handle it, sir.”

  The general motioned silently to the coffeepot and waited while Kramer fixed him a cup, two sugars, no cream. Fie said: “Tell me everything, always. All the dirty rumors about inefficiency and favoritism. Your suspicions and hunches. Anybody that gets in our way—or more important, in mine. In the underworld they shoot stool pigeons, but here we give them blue cords for their shoulders. Do you understand?”

  Kramer did. He did not ask the general to intercede with the motherly major, or transfer her; but he did handle it himself. He discovered it was very easy. He simply threatened to have her sent to Narvik.

  With the others it was easier. Margaret had resented him because she was senior in Operation Ripsaw to him, but as the others were sucked in they found him there already. Instead of resentment, their attitude toward him was purely fear.

  The next people to hate him were the aides of Crotch general staff because he was a wild card in the deck. The five members of the staff—Chief, Personnel, Intelligence, Plans & Training and Operations—proceeded with their orderly, systematic jobs day by day, building Ripsaw . . . until the inevitable moment when Kramer would breeze in with, “Fine job, but the general suggests—” and the unhorsing of many assumptions, and the undoing of many days work. That was his job also. He was a bird of ill omen, a coiled snake in fair grass, a hired killer and a professional betrayer of confidences—though it was not Jong before there were no confidences to betray, except from an occasional young, new officer who hadn’t learned his way around, and those not worth betraying. Thar, as the general had said, was the way it was with aides. Kramer wondered sometimes if he liked what he was doing, or liked himself for doing it. But he never carried the thought through. No time.

  Troops completed basic training or were redeployed from rest areas and entrained, emplaned, embussed or embarked for the scattered staging areas of Ripsaw. Great forty-wheeled trucks bore nuclear cannon up the Alcan Highway at a snail’s pace. Air groups and missile sections launched on training exercises over Canadian wasteland chat closely resembled tundra, with grid maps that bore names like Maina Pylgin and Kamenskoe. Yet these were not Ripsaw, not yet, only the separate tools that Ripsaw would some day pick up and use.

  Ripsaw itself moved to Wichita and a base of its own when its headquarters
staff swelled to fifteen hundred men and women. Most of them hated Kramer.

  It was never perfectly clear to Kramer what his boss had to do with the show. Kramer made his coffee, carried his briefcase, locked and unlocked his files, delivered to him those destructive tales and delivered for him those devastating suggestions, but never understood just why there had to be a Commanding General of Ripsaw.

  The time they went to Washington to argue an allocation of seventy rather than sixty armored divisions for Ripsaw, for instance, General Grote just sat, smiled and smoked his pipe. It was his chief of staff, the young and brilliant Major general Cartmill, who passionately argued the case before D. Beauregard Medway, though when Grote addressed his superior it still was as “Dan.” (They did get the ten extra divisions, of course.)

  Back in Wichita, it was Cartmill who toiled around the clock co-ordinating. A security lid was clamped down early in the game. The fifteen hundred men and women in the Wichita camp stayed in the Wichita camp. Commerce with the outside world, except via coded messages to or her elements of Ripsaw, was a capital offense—as three privates learned the hard way. But through those coded channels Cartmill reached out to every area of the North American—and Allied—world.

  Personnel scoured the globe for human components that might be fitted into Ripsaw. Intelligence gathered information about that track of Siberia which they were to invade, and the waters they were to cross. Plans 6c Training slaved at methods of effecting the crossing and invasion efficiently, with the least—or at any rate the optimum least, consistent with requirements of speed, security and so on—losses in men and materiel. Operations studied and restudied the various ways the crossing and invasion might go right or wrong, and how a good turn of fortune could be exploited, a bad turn minimized. General Cartmill was in constant touch with all of them, his fingers on every cord in the web. So was John Kramer.

  Grote ambled about all this with an air of pleased surprise.

  Kramer discovered one day that there had been books written about his boss—not best-sellers with titles like “Bloody Larry’ Chore,” “Sword of Freedom,” but thick, gray mimeographed staff documents, in Chinese and Russian, for top-level circulation among yute commanders. He surprised Grote reading one of them—in Chinese.

  The general was not embarrassed.

  Just refreshing my memory of what the yutes think I’m like so I can cross them up by doing something different. Listen: ‘Characteristic of this officers philosophy of attack is varied tactics. Reference his lecture, Lee’s 1862 Campaigns, delivered at Fort Leavenworth Command & General Staff School, attached. Opposing commanders should not expect a force under him to’—Hm-m-m. T’sueng, water radical—press the advance the same way twice.’ Now all I have to do is make sure we attack by the book, like Grant instead of Lee, slug it out without any brilliant variations, See how easy it is. John? How’s the message center?”

  Kramer had been snooping around the message center at Grote’s request. It was a matter of feeding out cigarettes and smiles in return for an occasional incautious word or a hint; gumshoe work. The message center was an underground complex of encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers and switchboards. It was staffed by a Signal Corps WAC battalion in three shifts around the clock. The girls were worked hard—though a battalion should have been enough for the job. Messages went from and to the message center linking the Wichita brain with those seventy divisions training now from Capetown to Manitoba, a carrier task force conducting exercises in the Antarctic, a fleet of landing craft growing every day on the Gulf of California. The average time-lag between receipt of messages and delivery to the Wichita personnel at destination was 12.25 minutes. The average number of erroneous transmissions detected per day was three. Both figures General Grote considered intolerable.

  “It’s Colonel Bucknell who’s lousing it up, general. She’s trying too hard. No give. Physical training twice a day, for instance, and a very hard policy on excuses. A stern attitude’s filtered down from her to the detachments. Everybody’s chewing out subordinates to keep themselves covered. The working girls call Bucknell ‘the monster.’ Their feeling is the Army’s impossible to please, so what the hell.”

  “Relieve her,” Grote said amiably.

  Make her mess officer; Ripsaw chows rotten anyway.” He went back to his Chinese text.

  And suddenly it all began to seem as if it really might some day rise and strike out across the Strait. From Lieutenant Kramer’s Ripsaw Diary:

  At AM staff meeting CG RIPSAW xmitted order CG NAAARMY designating RIPSAW D day 15 May 1986. Gen CARTMILL observed this date allowed 45 days to form troops in final staging areas assuming RIPSAW could be staged in 10 days. CG RIPSAW stated that a 10-day staging seemed feasible. Staff concurred. CG RIPSAW so ordered. At 1357 hours CG NAAARMY concurrence received.

  They were on the way.

  As the days grew shorter Grote seemed to have less and less to do, and curiously so did Kramer. He had not expected this. He had been aide-de-camp to the general for nearly a year now, and he fretted when he could find no fresh treason to bring to the general’s ears. He redoubled his prowling tours of the kitchens, the BOQ, the motor pools, the message center, but not even the guard mounts or the shine on the shoes of the soldiers at Retreat parade was in any way at fault. Kramer could only imagine that he was missing things. It did not occur to him that, as at last they should be, the affairs of Ripsaw had gathered enough speed to keep them straight and clean, until the general called him in one night and ordered him to pack. Grote put on his spectacles and looked over them at Kramer. “D plus five,” he said, “assuming all goes well, were moving this headquarters to Kiska. I want you to take a look-see. Arrange a plane. You can leave tomorrow.”

  It was, Kramer realized that night as he undressed, Just Something to Do. Evidently the hard part of his job was at an end. It was now only a question of fighting the battle, and for that the field commanders were much more important than he. For the first time in many months he thought it would be nice to do a crossword puzzle, but instead fell asleep.

  It was an hour before leaving the next day that Kramer met Ripsaw’s “cover.”

  The “cover” was another lieutenant general, a bristling and wiry man named Clough, with a brilliant combat record staked out on his chest and sleeves for the world to read. Kramer came in when his buzzer sounded, made coffee for the two generals and was aware that Grote and Clough were old pals and that the Ripsaw general was kidding the pants off his guest.

  “You always were a great admirer of Georgie Patton,” Grote teased. “You should be glad to follow in his footsteps. Your operation will go down in history as big and important as his historic cross-Channel smash into Le Havre.”

  Kramer’s thoughts were full of himself—he did not much like getting even so close to the yutes as Kiska, where he would be before the sun set that night—but his ears pricked up. He could not remember any cross-Channel smash into Le Havre—by Patton or anybody else.

  “Just because I came to visit your show doesn’t mean you have to rib me, Larry,” Clough grumbled.

  “But it’s such a pleasure, Mick.”

  Clough opened his eyes wide and looked at Grote. “I’ve generaled against Novotny before. If you want to know what I think of him, I’ll tell you.”

  Pause. Then Grote, gently: “Take it easy, Mick. Look at my boy there. See him quivering with curiosity?”

  Kramer’s back was turned. He hoped his blush would subside before he had to turn around with the coffee. It did not.

  “Caught red-faced,” Grote said happily, and winked at the other general. Clough looked stonily back “Shall we put him out of his misery, Mick? Shall we fill him in on the big picture?”

  “Might as well get it over with.”

  “I accept your gracious assent.” Grote waved for Kramer to help himself to coffee and to sit down. Clearly he was unusually cheerful today, Kramer thought. Grote said: “Lieutenant Kramer, General Clough is the gun-captai
n of a Quaker cannon which covers Ripsaw. He looks like a cannon. He acts like a cannon. But he isn’t loaded. Like his late idol George Patton at one point in his career, General Clough is the commander of a vast force which exists on paper and in radio transmissions alone.”

  Clough stirred uneasily, so Grote became more serious. “Were brainwashing Continental Defense Commissar Novotny by serving up to him his old enemy as the man he’ll have to fight. The yute radio intercepts arc getting a perfect picture of an assault on Polar Nine being prepared under old Mick here. That’s what they’ll prepare to counter, of course. Ripsaw will catch them flatfooted.”

  Clough stirred again but did not speak.

  Grote grinned. “All right. We hope,” he conceded. “But there’s a lot of planning in this thing. Of course, it’s a waste of the talent of a rather remarkably able general”—Clough gave him a lifted-eyebrow look—“but you’ve got to have a real man at the head of the fake army group or they won’t believe it. Anyway, it worked with Patton and the Nazis.

  Some unkind people have suggested that Patton never did a better bit of work than sitting on his knapsack in England and letting his name be used.”

  “Wait’ll the shooting starts,” Clough said sourly.

  “Ike never commanded a battalion before the day he invaded North Africa, Mick. He did all right.”