Sci Fiction Classics Volume 1

by Vol 1 (v1. 2) (epub)

When the shock came and the call came through, she would have to do what she had done thousands of times before.

  She would ring an intolerable noise through the whole laboratory.

  Hundreds of the mutated minks would awaken. In awakening, they would plunge into life with hunger, with hate, with rage, and with sex; plunge against their straps; strive to kill each other, their young, themselves, her. They would fight everything and everywhere, and do everything they could to keep going.

  She knew this.

  In the middle of the room there was a tuner. The tuner was a direct, empathic relay, capable of picking up the simpler range of telepathic communications. Into this tuner went the concentrated emotions of Mother Hitton's littul kittons.

  The rage, the hate, the hunger, the sex were all carried far beyond the limits of the tolerable, and then all were thereupon amplified. And then the waveband on which this telepathic control went out was amplified, right there beyond the studio, on the high towers that swept the mountain ridge, up and beyond the valley in which the laboratory lay. And Mother Hitton's moon, spinning geometrically, bounced the relay into a hollow englobement.

  From the faceted moon, it went to the satellites—sixteen of them, apparently part of the weather control system. These blanketed not only space, but nearby subspace. The Norstrilians had thought of everything.

  The short shocks of an alert came from Mother Hitton's transmitter bank.

  A call came. Her thumb went numb.

  The noise shrieked.

  The mink awakened.

  Immediately, the room was full of chattering, scraping, hissing, growling, and howling.

  Under the sound of the animal voices, there was the other sound: a scratchy, snapping sound like hail falling on a frozen lake. It was the individual claws of hundreds of mink trying to tear their way through metal panels.

  Mother Hitton heard a gurgle. One of the minks had succeeded in tearing its paw loose and had obviously started to work on its own throat. She recognized the tearing fur, the ripping of veins.

  She listened for the cessation of that individual voice, but she couldn't be sure. The others were making too much noise. One mink less.

  Where she sat, she was partly shielded from the telepathic relay, but not altogether. She herself, old as she was, felt queer wild dreams go through her. She thrilled with hate as she thought of beings suffering out beyond her—suffering terribly, since they were not masked by the built-in defenses of the Norstrilian communications system.

  She felt the wild throb of long-forgotten lust.

  She hungered for things she had not known she remembered. She went through the spasms of fear that the hundreds of animals expressed.

  Underneath this, her sane mind kept asking, "How much longer can I take it? How much longer must I take it? Lord God, be good to your people here on this world! Be good to poor old me."

  The green light went on.

  She pressed a button on the other side of her chair. The gas hissed in. As she passed into unconsciousness, she knew that her kittons passed into instant unconsciousness too.

  She would waken before they did and then her duties would begin: checking the living ones, taking out the one that had clawed out its own throat, taking out those who had died of heart attacks, re-arranging them, dressing their wounds, treating them alive and asleep—asleep and happy—breeding, living in their sleep—until the next call should come to waken them for the defense of the treasures which blessed and cursed her native world.

  VI

  Everything had gone exactly right. Lavender had found an illegal planoform ship. This was no inconsequential accomplishment, since planoform ships were very strictly licensed and obtaining an illegal one was a chore on which a planet full of crooks could easily have worked a lifetime.

  Lavender had been lavished with money—Benjacomin's money.

  The honest wealth of the thieves' planet had gone in and had paid the falsifications and great debts, imaginary transactions that were fed to the computers for ships and cargoes and passengers that would be almost untraceably commingled in the commerce of ten thousand worlds.

  "Let him pay for it," said Lavender, to one of his confederates, an apparent criminal who was also a Norstrilian agent. "This is paying good money for bad. You better spend a lot of it."

  Just before Benjacomin took off Lavender sent on an additional message.

  He sent it directly through the Go-Captain. who usually did not carry messages. The Go-Captain was a relay commander of the Norstrilian fleet, but he had been carefully ordered not to look like it.

  The message concerned the planoform license—another twenty-odd tablets of stroon which could mortgage Viola Siderea for hundreds upon hundreds of years. The captain said: "I don't have to send that through. The answer is yes."

  Benjacomin came into the control room. This was contrary to regulations, but he had hired the ship to violate regulations.

  The Captain looked at him sharply. "You're a passenger. Get out."

  Benjacomin said: "You have my little yacht on board. I am the only man here outside of your people."

  "Get out. There's a fine if you're caught here."

  "It does not matter," Benjacomin said. "I'll pay it."

  "You will, will you?" said the Captain. "You would not be paying twenty tablets of stroon. That's ridiculous. Nobody could get that much stroon."

  Benjacomin laughed, thinking of the thousands of tablets he would soon have. All he had to do was to leave the planoform ship behind, strike once, go past the kittons and come back.

  His power and his wealth came from the fact that he knew he could now reach it. The mortgage of twenty tablets of stroon against this planet was a low price to pay if it would pay off at thousands to one. The Captain replied: "It's not worth it, it just is not worth risking twenty tablets for your being here. But I can tell you how to get inside the Norstrilian communications net if that is worth twenty-seven tablets."

  Benjacomin went tense.

  For a moment he thought he might die. All this work, all this training—the dead boy on the beach, the gamble with the credit, and now this unsuspected antagonist!

  He decided to face it out. "What do you know?" said Benjacomin.

  "Nothing," said the Captain.

  "You said 'Norstrilia.' "

  "That I did," said the Captain.

  "If you said Norstrilia, you must have guessed it. Who told you?"

  "Where else would a man go if you look for infinite riches? If you get away with it. Twenty tablets is nothing to a man like you."

  "It's two hundred years' worth of work from three hundred thousand people," said Benjacomin grimly.

  "When you get away with it, you will have more than twenty tablets, and so will your people."

  And Benjacomin thought of the thousands and thousands of tablets. "Yes, that I know."

  "If you don't get away with it, you've got the card."

  "That's right. All right. Get me inside the net. I'll pay the twenty-seven tablets."

  "Give me the card."

  Benjacomin refused. He was a trained thief, and he was alert to thievery. Then he thought again. This was the crisis of his life. He had to gamble a little on somebody.

  He had to wager the card. "I'll mark it and then I'll give it back to you." Such was his excitement that Benjacomin did not notice that the card went into a duplicator, that the transaction was recorded, that the message went back to Olympia Center, that the loss and the mortgage against the planet of Viola Siderea should be credited to certain commercial agencies in Earth for three hundred years to come.

  Benjacomin got the card back. He felt like an honest thief.

  If he did die, the card would be lost and his people would not have to pay. If he won, he could pay that little bit out of his own pocket.

  Benjacomin sat down. The Go-Captain signaled to his pinlighters. The ship lurched.

  For half a subjective hour they moved, the Captain wearing a helmet of space upon his h
ead, sensing and grasping and guessing his way, stepping stone to stepping stone, right back to his home. He had to fumble the passage, or else Benjacomin might guess that he was in the hands of double agents.

  But the captain was well trained. Just as well trained as Benjacomin.

  Agents and thieves, they rode together.

  They planoformed inside the communications net. Benjacomin shook hands with them. "You are allowed to materialize as soon as I call."

  "Good luck, Sir," said the Captain.

  "Good luck to me," said Benjacomin.

  He climbed into his space yacht. For less than a second in real space, the gray expanse of Norstrilia loomed up. The ship which looked like a simple warehouse disappeared into planoform, and the yacht was on its own.

  The yacht dropped.

  As it dropped, Benjacomin had a hideous moment of confusion and terror.

  He never knew the woman down below but she sensed him plainly as he received the wrath of the much-amplified kittons. His conscious mind quivered under the blow. With a prolongation of subjective experience which made one or two seconds seem like months of hurt drunken bewilderment, Benjacomin Bozart swept beneath the tide of his own personality. The moon relay threw minkish minds against him. The synapses of his brain re-formed to conjure up might-have-beens, terrible things that never happened to any man. Then his knowing mind whited out in an overload of stress.

  His subcortical personality lived on a little longer.

  His body fought for several minutes. Mad with lust and hunger, the body arched in the pilot's seat, the mouth bit deep into his own arm. Driven by lust, the left hand tore at his face, ripping out his left eyeball. He screeched with animal lust as he tried to devour himself … not entirely without success.

  The overwhelming telepathic message of Mother Hitton's littul kittons ground into his brain.

  The mutated minks were fully awake.

  The relay satellites had poisoned all the space around him with the craziness to which the minks were bred.

  Bozart's body did not live long. After a few minutes, the arteries were open, the head slumped forward, and the yacht was dropping helplessly toward the warehouses which it had meant to raid. Norstrilian police picked it up.

  The police themselves were ill. All of them were ill. All of them were white-faced. Some of them had vomited. They had gone through the edge of the mink defense. They had passed through the telepathic band at its thinnest and weakest point. This was enough to hurt them badly.

  They did not want to know.

  They wanted to forget.

  One of the younger policemen looked at the body and said, "What on earth could do that to a man?"

  "He picked the wrong job," said the police captain.

  The young policeman said: "What's the wrong job?"

  "The wrong job is trying to rob us, boy. We are defended, and we don't want to know how."

  The young policeman, humiliated and on the verge of anger, looked almost as if he would defy his superior, while keeping his eyes away from the body of Benjacomin Bozart.

  The older man said: "It's all right. He did not take long to die and this is the man who killed the boy Johnny, not very long ago."

  "Oh, him? So soon?"

  "We brought him." The old police officer nodded. "We let him find his death. That's how we live. Tough, isn't it?"

  The ventilators whispered softly, gently. The animals slept again. A jet of air poured down on Mother Hitton. The telepathic relay was still on. She could feel herself, the sheds, the faceted moon, the little satellites. Of the robber there was no sign.

  She stumbled to her feet. Her raiment was moist with perspiration. She needed a shower and fresh clothes …

  Back at Manhome, the Commercial Credit Circuit called shrilly for human attention. A junior subchief of the Instrumentality walked over to the machine and held out his hand.

  The machine dropped a card neatly into his fingers.

  He looked at the card.

  "Debit Viola Siderea—credit Earth Contingency—subcredit Norstrilian account—four hundred million man megayears."

  Though all alone, he whistled to himself in the empty room. "We'll all be dead, stroon or no stroon, before they finish paying that!" He went off to tell his friends the odd news.

  The machine, not getting its card back, made another one.

  The End

  © 1961 by Galaxy Publications; © 1989 by the Estate of Cordwainer Smith. Originally appeared in Galaxy, 6/61 and reprinted by permission of the Estate and its agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, LP.

  The Mindworm

  C. M. Kornbluth

  The handsome j.g. and the pretty nurse held out against it as long as they reasonably could, but blue Pacific water, languid tropical nights, the low atoll dreaming on the horizon—and the complete absence of any other nice young people for company on the small, uncomfortable parts boat—did their work. On June 30th they watched through dark glasses as the dazzling thing burst over the fleet and the atoll. Her manicured hand gripped his arm in excitement and terror. Unfelt radiation sleeted through their loins.

  A storekeeper-third-class named Bielaski watched the young couple with more interest than he showed in Test Able. After all, he had twenty-five dollars riding on the nurse. That night he lost it to a chief bosun's mate who had backed the j.g.

  In the course of time, the careless nurse was discharged under conditions other than honorable. The j.g., who didn't like to put things in writing, phoned her all the way from Manila to say it was a damned shame. When her gratitude gave way to specific inquiry, their overseas connection went bad and he had to hang up.

  She had a child, a boy, turned it over to a foundling home and vanished from his life into a series of good jobs and finally marriage.

  The boy grew up stupid, puny and stubborn, greedy and miserable. To the home's hilarious young athletics director he suddenly said: "You hate me. You think I make the rest of the boys look bad."

  The athletics director blustered and laughed, and later told the doctor over coffee: "I watch myself around the kids. They're sharp; they catch a look or a gesture and it's like a blow in the face to them, I know that, so I watch myself. So how did he know?"

  The doctor told the boy: "Three pounds more this month isn't bad, but how about you pitch in and clean up your plate every day? Can't live on meat and water; those vegetables make you big and strong."

  The boy said: "What's 'neurasthenic' mean?"

  The doctor later said to the director: "It made my flesh creep. I was looking at his little spindling body and dishing out the old pep-talk about growing big and strong, and inside my head I was thinking 'we'd call him neurasthenic in the old days' and then out he popped with it. What should we do? Should we do anything? Maybe it'll go away. I don't know anything about these things. I don't know whether anybody does."

  "Read minds, does he?" asked the director. Be damned if he's going to read my mind about Schultz Meat Market's ten percent. "Doctor, I think I'm going to take my vacation a little early this year. Has anybody shown any interest in adopting the child?"

  "Not him. He wasn't a baby-doll when we got him, and at present he's an exceptionally unattractive-looking kid. You know how people don't give a damn about anything but their looks."

  "Some couples would take anything, or so they tell me."

  "Unapproved for foster-parenthood, you mean?"

  "Red tape and arbitrary classifications sometimes limit us too severely in our adoptions."

  "If you're going to wish him on some screwball couple that the courts turned down as unfit, I want no part of it."

  "You don't have to have any part of it, doctor. By the way, which dorm does he sleep in?"

  "West," grunted the doctor, leaving the office.

  The director called a few friends—a judge, a couple the judge referred him to, a court clerk. Then he left by way of the east wing of the building.

  The boy survived three months with the Berrymans. H
ard-drinking Mimi alternately caressed and shrieked at him; Edward W. tried to be a good scout and just gradually lost interest, looking clean through him. He hit the road in June and got by with it for a while. He wore a Boy Scout uniform, and Boy Scouts can turn up anywhere, any time. The money he had taken with him lasted a month. When the last penny of the last dollar was three days spent, he was adrift on a Nebraska prairie. He had walked out of the last small town because the constable was beginning to wonder what on earth he was hanging around for and who he belonged to. The town was miles behind on the two-lane highway; the infrequent cars did not stop.

  One of Nebraska's "rivers", a dry bed at this time of year, lay ahead, spanned by a railroad culvert. There were some men in its shade, and he was hungry.

  They were ugly, dirty men, and their thoughts were muddled and stupid. They called him "Shorty" and gave him a little dirty bread and some stinking sardines from a can. The thoughts of one of them became less muddled and uglier. He talked to the rest out of the boy's hearing, and they whooped with laughter. The boy got ready to run, but his legs wouldn't hold him up.

  He could read the thoughts of the men quite clearly as they headed for him. Outrage, fear and disgust blended in him and somehow turned inside-out and one of the men was dead on the dry ground, grasshoppers vaulting on to his flannel shirt, the others backing away, frightened now, not frightening.

  He wasn't hungry any more; he felt quite comfortable and satisfied. He got up and headed for the other men, who ran. The rearmost of them was thinking Jeez he folded up the evil eye we was only gonna—

  Again the boy let the thoughts flow into his head and again he flipped his own thoughts around them; it was quite easy to do. It was different—this man's terror from the other's lustful anticipation. But both had their points…

  At his leisure, he robbed the bodies of three dollars and twenty-four cents.

  Thereafter his fame preceded him like a death-wind. Two years on the road and he had his growth, and his fill of the dull and stupid minds he met there. He moved to northern cities, a year here, a year there, quiet, unobtrusive, prudent, an epicure.