The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Thanks, no.” He didn’t need them. Anybody who hung on for two years and five months at Western as a projects man and only got fired after a fight was efficient and healthy and the rest of it; otherwise he wouldn’t have lasted two hours and five minutes. It wasn’t like the A.E.C.; at Western, you produced.

  No, he thought, stretching out in his clothes on the bed; it wasn’t like the A.E.C., and neither was the A.S.F.S.F. He felt a moment of panic at the thought, and knew why he felt it.

  Spend enough time in Government and it unmanned you. Each pay check drawn on the Treasury took that much more of yourself away from yourself. Each one of the stiff, blue-green paper oblongs punched with I.B.M. code slots made you that much more willing to forget you might be running a pointless repeat of a research that had been done and done, and done, with nobody the wiser, in scattered and classified labs across the country.

  Each swig from the public teat had more and more poppy juice in it. Gradually you forgot you had been another kind of person, holding ideas, fighting for them, working until dawn on coffee, falling for women, getting drunk sometimes. You turned grey after enough of the poppy juice—nice grey.

  You said: “Well, now, I wouldn’t put it that way,” and “There’s something to be said on both sides, of course,” and “It doesn’t pay to go overboard; the big thing is to keep your objectivity.”

  The nice grey people married early and had a child or two right away to demonstrate that they were normal family men. They had hobbies and talked about them to demonstrate that they weren’t one-sided cranks. They drank a little, to demonstrate that they weren’t puritans, but not much, to demonstrate that they weren’t drunks.

  Novak wondered if they tasted bile, as he was tasting it now, thinking of what he had almost become.

  IV.

  In the morning he phoned the A.S.F.S.F. office that he wanted the job. Friml’s cold voice said: “That’s fine, Dr. Novak. Mr. MacIlheny will be here for the next half-hour, and I have a contract ready. If you can make it right over—”

  The contract hog-tied Novak for one year with options to conduct refractory research and development under the direction of the Society. The salary was the one he had specified in his ad. Novak raised his eyebrows at one clause: it released the employer from liability claims arising out of radiation damage to the employee.

  “You really think the Government’s going to let you play with hot stuff?” he asked.

  He shouldn’t have said “play”. MacIlheny was hurt and annoyed. “We expect,” he said testily, “that the A.E.C. will co-operate with us as a serious research group when we enter the propulsion stage of the programme. They’ll be fools if they don’t, and we intend to let the country know about it.”

  Novak shrugged and signed. So did the two Society officers, with the elevator man and the building porter as witnesses. MacIlheny shook Novak’s hand ceremoniously after the witnesses were shooed out. “The first thing we want,” he said, “is a list of what you’ll need and a lab layout. Provisional, of course. There should be some changes after you study the problem in detail?”

  “I think not,” Novak told him. “A lab’s a lab. It’s what you do with it that counts. How high can I go?”

  Friml looked alarmed. MacIlheny said: “I won’t tell you that the sky’s the limit. But get what you need, and if you see a chance to save us money without handicapping yourself, take it. Give us the maximum estimated cost and the people you think are the best suppliers for each item.”

  “Reputable firms,” said Friml. “The kind of people who’d be prepared to send me a notarized invoice on each purchase.”

  Novak found the public library and gave himself a big morning in the technical reading room, playing with catalogues and trade-magazine ads. After lunch he came back with quadrille paper and a three-cornered scale. The afternoon went like lightning; he spent it drawing up equipment and supplies lists and making dream layouts for a refractories lab. What he wound up with was an oblong floor plan with a straight-through flow; storage to grinding-and-grading to compounding to firing to cooling to testing. Drunk with power, he threw in a small private office for himself.

  Construction costs he knew nothing about, but by combing the used-machinery classifieds he kept equipment and supplies down to thirty-two thousand dollars. He had dinner and returned to the library to read about solar furnaces until they put him out at the ten-o’clock closing.

  The next day Friml was up to his neck in page proofs of the A.S.F.S.F. organ Starward. Looking mad enough to spit, the secretary-treasurer said: “There’s a publications committee, but believe it or not all five of them say they’re too rushed right now and will I please do their work for them. Some of the rank and file resent my drawing a salary. I hope you’ll bear that in mind when you hear them ripping me up the back—as you surely will.”

  He shoved the proofs aside and began to tick his way down Novak’s lists. “There’s a Marchand calculator in Mr. Clifton’s laboratory,” he said. “Wouldn’t that do for both of you, or must you have one of your own?”

  “I can use his.”

  Friml crossed the Marchand off the list. “I see you want a—a continuous distilled-water outfit. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and just as good to install a tank, and truck distilled water in from the city? After all, it’s for sale.”

  “I’m afraid not. I have to have it pure—not the stuff you buy for storage batteries and steam irons. The minute you put distilled water into a glass jar it begins to dissolve impurities out of the glass. Mine has to be made fresh and stored in a tin-lined tank.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Friml. He put a light check mark next to the still, and Novak knew this human ferret would investigate it. Maybe he suspected him of planning to bilk the A.S.F.S.F. by making corn liquor on the side.

  “Um. This vacuum pump. Mr. Clifton’s had a Cenco Hyvac idle since he completed port-gasket tests a month ago. You might check with him as to its present availability… otherwise I see no duplications. This will probably be approved by Mr. MacIlheny in a day or two and then we can let the contract for the construction of your lab. I suggest that you spend the day at the field with Mr. Clifton to clear a location for it and exchange views generally. You can take the bus to Barstow and any taxi from there. If you want to be reimbursed you should save the bus ticket stub and get a receipt from the taxi driver for my files. And tonight there’s the membership meeting. Mr. MacIlheny asked me to tell you that he’d appreciate a brief talk from you—about five minutes and not too technical.”

  Friml dove back into the page proofs of Starward, and Novak left, feeling a little deflated.

  The Greyhound got him to Barstow in ninety minutes. A leather-faced man in a Ford with “Taxi” painted on it said sure he knew where the field was: a two-dollar drive. On the road he asked Novak cautiously: “You one of the scientists?”

  “No,” said Novak. He humbly thought of himself as an engineer.

  “Rocket field’s been real good for the town,” the driver admitted. “But scientists—” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t mind some advice from an older man, would you?”

  “Why, no.”

  “Just—watch out. You can’t trust them.”

  “Scientists?”

  “Scientists. I don’t say they’re all like that, but there’s drinkers among them and you know how a drinker is when he gets to talking. Fighting Bob proved it. Not just talk.”

  This was in reference to the Hoyt speech that claimed on a basis of some very wobbly statistics that the A.E.C. was full of alcoholics. “That so?” asked Novak spinelessly.

  “Proved it with figures. And you never know what a scientist’s up to.”

  Enough of this nonsense. “Well, out at the field they’re up to building a dummy of a moon ship to find out if it can be done.”

  “You ain’t heard?” The driver’s surprise was genuine.
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  “Heard about what? I’m new here.”

  “Well, that explains it. It’s no dummy moon ship. It’s camouflage for an oil-drilling rig. They struck oil there. The scientists are experimenting with it to make cheap gasoline. I heard it from the lineman that tends their power line.”

  “Well, he’s wrong,” Novak said. “I’ve been on the grounds and they aren’t doing anything but working on the ship.”

  The driver shook his head. “Nossir,” he said positively. “The thing’s a dummy all right, but not for a space ship. Space ships don’t work. Nothing for the rocket to push against. It stands to reason you can’t fly where there’s no air for it to push against. You could fire a cannon to the Moon if you made one big enough, but no man could stand the shock. I read about it.”

  “In the Bennet newspapers?” asked Novak nastily, exasperated at last.

  “Sure,” said the driver, not realizing that he was being insulted. “Real American papers. Back up Fighting Bob to the hilt.” The driver went on to lavish praise of the Bennet-Hoyt line on foreign policy (go it alone, talk ferociously enough and you won’t have to fight); economics (everybody should and must have everything he wants without taking it from anybody else); and military affairs (armed forces second to none and an end to the crushing tax burden for support of the armed forces).

  Novak stopped listening quite early in the game and merely interjected an occasional automatic “uh-huh” at the pauses. After a while the Prototype appeared ahead and he stopped even that.

  The rocket, standing alone in the desert like a monument was still awe-inspiring. At the sentry box he introduced himself, and the boy on guard shook his hand warmly. “Glad to have you inboard, sir,” he said. The word was unmistakably “inboard”—and when Novak had it figured out he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. The kid was using rocket-ship slang before there were any rocket ships!

  The boy never noticed his effort; he was too busy apologizing for stopping him. “You see, Doctor, people don’t take our work seriously. Folks used to drive out here the first month and interrupt and even expect us to lend them our drinking water that we trucked out. As if we were here for their entertainment! Finally a gang of little devils broke into one of the Quonsets after dark and smashed everything they could reach. Four thousand dollars’ worth of damage in twenty minutes! We were sick. What makes people like that? So we had to put up a real fence and mount guard, even if it doesn’t look good. But of course we have nothing to hide.”

  “Of course—” began Novak. But the boy’s face had suddenly changed. He was staring, open-mouthed. “What’s the matter?” snapped Novak, beginning to inspect himself. “Have I got a scorpion on me?”

  “No,” said the boy, and looked away embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Only it suddenly hit me—maybe you’ll be one of the people inboard when she—when she goes. But I shouldn’t ask.”

  “The last I heard,” Novak said, “she is a full-sized mock-up and isn’t going anywhere.”

  The boy winked one eye slowly.

  “All right,” Novak shrugged, amused. “Have it your way and I’ll see you on Mars. Where’s Mr. Clifton?”

  “Back of the machine shop—a new testing rig.”

  Crossing the quadrangle, Novak passed the Prototype and stopped for another look. To the Moon? This colossal pile of steel? It was as easy to visualize the Eiffel Tower picking up its four legs and waddling across Paris. No wonder the taxi driver didn’t believe in space flight—and no wonder the kid at the gate did. Credo quia impossibilis, or however it went. There were people like that.

  He heard Clifton before he saw him. The engineer in charge was yelling: “Harder! Harder! Is that all the hard ya can bounce? Harder!” And a girl was laughing.

  Back of the machine shop, in its shadow, Clifton was standing with a stop watch over a vaguely coffin-shaped block of moulded rubber swung from a framework by rope. Most of the ropes were milky nylon. Six of them were manila and had big tension balances, like laundry scales, hooked into them. Towering over Clifton and the framework was a twelve-foot gas-pipe scaffold, and a pretty girl in shorts was climbing a ladder to the top of it.

  As Novak watched, she hurled herself from the scaffold into the coffin. Clifton, blaspheming, snapped his stop watch and tried to read the jumping needles on the dials of all six balances at the same time.

  “Hello,” Novak said.

  “Harya, Mike. Mike, this is Amy helping out. Like my rig?”

  “I thought they worked all this out at the Wright-Patterson A.F.B. Space Medicine School. It is an acceleration couch, isn’t it?”

  “Kindly do not speak to me about Air Force Space Medicine,” said Clifton distinctly. “It happens to be mostly bushwah. Ya know what happened? They had this ejector-seat problem, blowing a jet pilot out of a plane because he’d get cut in half if he tried to climb out at 600 m.p.h. So they had an acceleration problem and they licked it fine and dandy. So a publicity-crazy general says acceleration is acceleration, what’s good enough for an ejector seat is good enough for a space ship and anyway nobody knows what the hell space flight is like so why worry?”

  Clifton folded his arms, puffed out his chest, and assumed the Napoleonic stance, with one foot forward and the knee bent. His hoarse voice became an oily parody of the general’s. “My gallant public relations officers! Let us enlighten the taxpaying public on what miracles us air force geniuses pass off daily before breakfast. Let us enlighten them via the metropolitan dailies and wire services with pictures. Let us tell them that we have solved all the medical problems of space flight and have established a school of space medicine to prove it. You may now kiss my hand and proceed to your typewriters at the gallop. To hell with the Navy!”

  The girl laughed and said: “Cliff, it can’t be that bad. And if you keep talking treason they’ll lock you up and you’ll pine away without your sweetheart there.” She meant Proto.

  “A-a-ah, what do you know about it, ya dumb Vassar broad? What time’s Iron Jaw pick you up? Time for any more bounces?”

  “Barnard, not Vassar,” she said, “and no time for more bounces, because he said he’d be here at noon and Grady is the world’s best chauffeur.” She took a wrap-around skirt from a lower horizontal of the gas-pipe scaffolding and tied it on. “Are you a new member, Mike?” she asked.

  “I’m going to work on the reaction chamber and throat liner.”

  “Metal or ceramic?”

  “Ceramic refractories is my field.”

  “Yes, but what about strength? I was thinking about tungsten metal as a throat-liner material. It’s a little fantastic because it oxidizes in air at red heat, but I have an idea. You install a tungsten liner and then install a concentric ceramic liner to shield it. The ceramic liner takes the heat of the exhaust until the ship is out of atmosphere and then you jettison it, exposing the tungsten. In vacuum, tungsten holds up to better than three thousand centigrade—”

  Clifton bulled into it. “Ya crazy as a bunny rabbit, Amy! What about atmosphere on Mars or Venus? What about the return trip to Earth? What about working the tungsten? That stuff crystallizes if ya look at it nasty. What about paying for it? Ya might as well use platinum for cost. And what about limited supply? Ya think America’s going to do without tool bits and new light bulbs for a year so ya can have five tons of tungsten to play with? Didn’t they teach economics at Miss Twitchell’s or wherever it was?…”

  It was exactly noon by Novak’s watch and a black Lincoln rolled through the gate and parked.

  “See you at the meeting, Cliff? Glad to have met you, Mike.” The girl smiled, and hurried to the car. Novak saw a white-haired man in the back open the door for her, and the car drove off.

  “Who was that?” Novak asked.

  “She’s Miss Amelia Earhart Stuart to the society pages,” Clifton grinned. “In case ya don’t read the society pages, she’s the
daughter of Wilson Stuart—my old boss at Western. She got bit by the space bug and it drives him crazy. The old man’s a roughneck like me, but he’s in a wheel chair now. Wrecked his heart years ago test-flying. He’s been looking backwards ever since; he thinks we’re dangerous crackpots. I hear ya got the job okay. Where do you want the lab?”

  They left the test rig and walked around the machine-shop Quonset. Clifton stopped for a moment to measure the Prototype with his eye. It was habitual.

  “How much of a crew does she—would she—hold?” Novak asked.

  “Room for three,” Clifton said, still looking at her.

  “Navigator, engineer—and what?”

  “Stowaway, of course!” Clifton roared. “Where ya been all ya life? A girl stowaway in a tin braseer with maybe a cellophane space suit on. Buckle down, Mike! On the ball or I don’t put ya in for the Galactic Cross of Merit!”

  Novak wouldn’t let himself be kidded. “The youngster at the gate might stow away,” he said. “He thinks the Prototype is going to take off some day and we just aren’t telling the public about it.”

  Clifton shook his head—regretfully. “Not without the A.E.C. develops a rocket fuel and gives it to us. The bottom two thirds of her is a hollow shell except for structural members. I wish the kid was right. It’d be quite a trip and they’d have quite a time keeping me off the passenger list. But I built the old bat, and I know.”

  Novak picked an area for his lab and Clifton okayed it. They had lunch from a refrigerator in the machine shop, with a dozen kids hanging on their words.

  “Give ya an idea of what we’re up against, Mike,” Clifton said around a pressed-ham sandwich. “The manhole for Proto. It’s got to open and close, it’s got to take direct sunlight in space, it’s got to take space-cold when it’s in shadow. What gasket material do you use? What sealing pressure do you use? Nobody can begin to guess. Some conditions you can’t duplicate in a lab. So what some smart cookie in the A.S.F.S.F. figured out ten years ago was a wring fit, like jo-blocks. Ya know what I mean?”