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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Finally there was quiet. The names of A.S.F.S.F. members present had been taken and they had been sent home, kids and engineers. Amy had taken Lilly home. The police had folded their tripods, packed their fingerprint gear and gone. Last of all an ambulance whined away from the door with a canvas bag in its belly.

  Left in the lobby of Slovak Sokol Hall were Novak, Anheier, and a stooped janitor grumbling to himself and turning out the building lights.

  “You said you wanted to talk to me,” Novak said wearily.

  Anheier hesitated. “Let’s have a drink. I know a bar up the street.” Novak, wrung out like a dishrag, followed him from the hall. The waiting janitor pointedly clicked off the last light.

  The bar was dim and quiet. Half a dozen moody beersippers were ranged on its stools. Anheier glanced at them and said: “Table okay? I have a reason.”

  “Sure.” The Security man picked one well to the rear.

  “Watch the bartender,” he said softly.

  “Eh?” Novak asked, startled, and got no answer. He watched. The bartender, old and fat, deliberately mopped at his bar. At last he trudged to the end of the bar, lifted the flap, plodded to their table, and said: “Yuh?”

  “You got double-shot glasses?” Anheier asked.

  The bartender glared at him. “Yuh.”

  “I want a double scotch. You got Poland Water?”

  The bartender compressed his mouth and shook his head.

  “I want soda with it then. Novak?”

  “Same for me,” Novak said.

  The bartender turned and plodded back to the bar, limping a little. Novak watched him as he slowly went through the ritual of pouring. “What’s all this about?” he asked.

  “Watch him,” Anheier said, and laughed. The bartender’s head immediately swiveled up and at their table. His glare was frightening. It was murderous.

  He brought them their drinks and Novak noticed that his limp had grown more marked. His fingers trembled when he set the tray down and picked up Anheier’s bill.

  “Keep the change,” Anheier said easily, and the bartender’s hand tremor grew worse. Wordlessly the man trudged from the table, rang up the sale, and resumed mopping.

  “Would you mind telling me—” Novak began, picking up his double-shot glass.

  “Don’t drink that,” Anheier said. “It may be poison.”

  Novak’s heart bounded. This, by God, was it! Poison, spies, the papers, and Anheier was admitting he’d been right all along!

  “Let’s get out of here,” the Security man said. He got up, leaving his own glass untouched, and they left. Novak’s back crawled as he walked out behind Anheier. A thrown stiletto—a bullet—

  They made it to the street, alive, and Novak waited to be filled in on the big picture while they walked: he apprehensively and Anheier with icy calm.

  “I noticed that old boy come on duty while I was having a beer before the meeting,” the Security man said. “He made me think of you. Paranoia. A beautifully developed persecution complex; one of these days he’s going to kill somebody.”

  Novak stopped walking. “He’s not a spy?” he asked stupidly.

  “No,” Anheier said with surprise. “He’s a clinical exhibit, and a hell of a man to hire for a bartender. While I was finishing my beer, somebody complained about the weather and he took it as a personal insult. Two lushes were lying about how much money they made. He told them to cut out the roundabout remarks; how much money he made was his business and no cheap jerks could horn in on it. You noticed the limp? We were picking on him by making him walk to the table. I laughed and he knew I was laughing at him. Knew I was one of his enemies plotting against him right under his nose.”

  “You’re telling me that I have a persecution complex, Anheier? That I’m crazy?” Novak asked hoarsely.

  The Security man said: “Don’t put words in my mouth. I am saying you’ve got a fixed idea about espionage which makes no sense at all to me—and I’m a pro about espionage; you’re a grass-green amateur.

  “What have you got? A drawing that doesn’t look right to you. Why the devil should it? Mysterious financial backing of the rocket club. All corporate financing is mysterious. The big boys divulge exactly as much as the law forces them to—and a lot of them try to get away with less. Every S.E.C. order issued means somebody tried just that. And Clifton got shot through the head; that’s supposed to be the clincher that should convince even me. Do you think suicides don’t occur?”

  Automatically they were walking again and the Security man’s reasonable, logical voice went on. “I didn’t go to that meeting tonight to investigate your allegations; I went for laughs and to see the movie. Novak, it’s always tragic to see a person acquiring a fixed idea. They never realise what’s happening to them. If you try to set them right, you only succeed in giving them more ‘evidence.’ You know the job I have. Lord, the people I have to see! A week doesn’t go by without some poor old duffer turning up and asking me to make the A.E.C. stop sending death rays through him. If they get violent we call the city police …”

  “That sounds like a threat, Anheier.”

  “It wasn’t meant to. But I’m not surprised that you thought it did. Frankly, Novak, have you considered what your record for the past year is like? I looked you up.”

  Novak considered, in a cold fury. A transfer—an idiotic transfer. Unsuitable work. Hurlbut’s vicious memorandum. The blowup. Affiliating with a bunch of space hounds. Superficially Anheier might look right. Inside himself he knew better.

  “It won’t wash,” he said evenly. “You’re not talking me out of anything. There’s going to be an inquest on Clifton and I’m going to speak my piece.”

  “Better not. And this time it is a threat.”

  It was exhilarating. “So it’s out in the open now. Good. You’ll do what?”

  “I want very badly to talk you out of your mistaken notion,” Anheier said broodingly. “But if I can’t, I’ve got to warn you that you’re monkeying with the buzz saw. If the opposition papers get hold of your allegations, there will be hell to pay in the A.E.C. We’ll have a spy scare. Security and Intelligence will look bad. Research and Development will look bad because the headlines say another country has beaten us to the punch on rocket fuel. We’ll be judged by millions not on the strength of what we do for the nation’s security but on what the headlines say we don’t do. And all because one Dr. Michael Novak spoke his piece. Novak, do you think we won’t counter-punch?”

  Novak snorted. “What could you do? I happen to be right.”

  The Security man gave him a pitying look and muttered: “If you smear us, we’ll smear you.”

  Novak suddenly no longer felt exhilarated. It was a frightening word. “That’s blackmail,” he said angrily, but his knees had gone weak.

  “Please don’t put it that way.” The Security man sounded genuinely pained. “You think you’re right and I think you’re wrong. If you want to talk to me and give me your side, okay. I’ll talk to you and give you my side.

  “But if you speak up at the inquest or go to the papers in any other way—we’ll have to fight you in the papers. It’s your choice of weapons. You can damage A.E.C. terribly with an unfounded spy scare. Naturally we’ll hit back. And what can we do except try and impeach your credibility by spreading unfavourable facts about you on the record?”

  In a low, embarrassed voice he went on: “Everybody’s done things he’s ashamed of. I know I have. I know you have. Boyhood indiscretions—adventures. Girls, traffic summonses. Friends of friends of friends who were Communists. And there were imaginative or inaccurate people who knew you slightly, maybe disliked you, and told our interviewers anything they pleased. We have a deposition in your file from a fellow you beat out on a scholarship exam. He says he saw you cheating in the examination room. Our evaluators disregarded it, but will the headline-readers? Wh
at about your inefficiency at Argonne? Your fight with Dr. Hurlbut?”

  Novak was feeling ill. “If you people libel me,” he said, “I can sue. And I will.”

  Anheier slowly shook his head. “What with?” he asked. “Who would hire the man whom the headlines called a lunatic, a pervert, a cheat, a drunkard, a radical, and heaven-knows-what-else? None of it proved, but—‘where there’s smoke there’s fire,’ and the ‘Indefinable Something behind the Mysterious All This.’” Anheier’s voice became strangely compassionate. “I mean it about the buzz saw,” he said. “Surely you know of people who fought a smear and wound up in jail for perjury …”

  He did.

  “All right, Anheier,” Novak said softly and bitterly. “You’ve made up my mind for me. I was going to speak my piece at the inquest and get out of town. Now it seems I’ve got to do your work for you.

  “A foreign power’s operating under your nose and they’ve just murdered an American as a minor detail of a plan to bring America to its knees. So I’ll keep my mouth shut and stick with the A.S.F.S.F. If I live, I’ll blow this thing open. And then God help you, Anheier; I’m going to throw you to the wolves.”

  He walked unsteadily down a side street away from the Security man. Anheier stared after him, poker-faced.

  VIII.

  Afternoon of a bureaucrat.

  Daniel Holland wished he were in the privacy of his office where he could swallow some soda and burp. He was lunching with the commissioners, four trenchermen, and had taken aboard too much duck with wild rice. And the commissioners were giving him hell, in a nice, extroverted way, for the slow—in fact, almost negligible—progress of A.D.M.P., the Atomic Demolition Material Program. A.D.M.P. was scheduled to provide very shortly atomic explosives that would move mountains in the American Southwest, sculpture watersheds into improved irrigation patterns, and demonstrate to a politically shaky area which elected six senators that the current Administration was the dry-farmer’s guide, philosopher, and friend. In actual fact, A.D.M.P. had provided only a vast amount of dubious paper work, and some experimental results which only an insanely optimistic evaluator would describe with even so cautious a word as “promising.”

  The chairman of the Commission, a paunchy, battered veteran of thirty years in county, state, and national politics, told Holland gently: “Interior’s pushing us hard, Dan—very hard. You know he’s got the Chief’s ear, of course. And it’s our opinion that he’s not being unreasonable. All he wants is a definite date—give or take a month—that they can start blasting in the Sierras with our stuff. He doesn’t care whether the date’s a month from now or a year from now, but he needs it for planning and publicity. Of course the work’s got to get going before the nominating conventions, but that’s absolutely the only restriction on the program. Now, what are we going to tell him?”

  “I don’t just now offhand, Bill,” Holland grumbled. “No doubt about it, A.D.M.P.’s bogged down. I have some suggestions about getting it out of the mud, but they involve basic policy.”

  The first commissioner was a handsome, muscular man who had gracefully lived down the tag of “wonder boy” pinned on him when he became a university president at the age of thirty-six. He was currently on leave from the executive directorship of a great foundation dedicated to the proposition that visual education is on the beam and all else is dross. He roared jovially at the general manager: “Well, spill your guts, Dan. That’s our little old job, you know. Let’s canvass your suggestions informally right now. If they click we can programme them for an on-the-record session.”

  “You asked for it, Cap,” Holland said. “First, we need—I mean need—about a dozen good men who happen to be teaching or working in industry around the country right now. One’s a Yugoslav refugee with relations left in the old country. Another was a Young Communist League member, fairly active, in 1937 and ’38. Another was once tried and acquitted on a morals charge—some little girl got mad at him and told lies. Another—well, I won’t bother listing them all. You get the idea.”

  The second commissioner was a spare, white-headed ex-newspaper man: Pulitzer Prize, Times Washington Bureau chief, author, diplomatic correspondent, journalism-school dean, intimate of the great, recipient of very many honorary degrees. He shook his head more—to use a cliche that never would have appeared in his copy—in sorrow than in anger. “Now Dan,” he said, “this is no time to tinker with the machinery. If there’s one thing about A.E.C. that’s smooth-running now, it’s clearance. Congress is mostly happy—except for Hoyt’s gang; the papers are happy—except for the opposition rags; and the public’s got confidence in the personnel of their A.E.C. We simply can’t start that fight all over again. What else did you have in mind?”

  “Second,” Holland said impassively, “we’re being slowed down by declassification and down-classification. I’ve drummed into the boys that most material should be merely Restricted, Confidential covers most of what’s left, and the Secret classification should be sparingly used. But they’re scared, or conservative, or only human, or taking the safest way or whatever you want to blame it on. Every time I give them hell there’s a little flurry of Confidential and Restricted and then the Secret begins to mount up again and we’re back in the same old rut: boys in Los Alamos doing work that’s been done in Hanford and not knowing about it. Maybe because of the limited distribution of Secret material. Maybe because the Los Alamos boys aren’t in high enough grade for access to it. Gentlemen, I think something basic is required to correct this condition.”

  The third commissioner was a New York investment banker who had doubled his family fortune in ten legendary years on Wall Street and served his country for the next ten as a diplomatic trouble shooter in the Near East. He was still a formidable welterweight boxer and—to the dismay of the first commissioner—could speak Arabic, Turkish, and Court Persian. Alone on the current Commission, he had thought it his duty to master what he could of nuclear physics and its mathematical tools. Diffidently he said: “That’s a tough one, Dan. But I don’t see what choice we had or have. Our policy, arrived at in the best interests of the national security, is to ‘classify all A.E.C. data to the extent required to prevent it from being of use to potential enemies of the United States.’ It’s broad, I grant you. But the demands of national security won’t be satisfied with anything narrower.”

  “Neither will Congress,” said the second commissioner.

  “Neither will the voters,” grunted the chairman. “Dan, we’ll just have to leave that one in your lap for you to lick as an administrative problem—within the limits of our policy. Just a suggestion: what about setting up a special classifications-review unit charged with checking the point-of-origin classifications on new data under a directive to declassify or down classify whenever possible? You’d be able to keep a single unit here in Washington under your thumb easier than the assorted managers and directors out in the field. About how much would an outfit like that cost?”

  Embarrassing moment. How to tell them that Weiss had worked on such a plan for three months and found it impracticable? “Well, Bill, it would stand us maybe two million a year in salaries and overhead. But I see a lot of complications. The personnel in the new unit would have to be scientists or they wouldn’t know what they were doing. God knows where we’d get enough of them to keep up with all the data A.E.C. grinds out—you know the scientific man-power picture. And you’d have a hell of a turnover because scientists like to do science and not paper work. And quis custodict? The safest thing for them to do would still be to stamp everything Secret; they’ll never get in trouble that way even if it does slow A.E.C. down to a crawl. I’ll explore the idea and give you a report, but I think it’s a policy matter.”

  The second commissioner said flatly: “We can’t change the classifications policy, Dan. There hasn’t been a spy scare worth mentioning in three years. The public’s on our side. We’ve built up a favourable pres
s and congressional attitude slowly and painfully and we’re not going to wreck it now. Sure, we’d make a short-term gain if we published all data. But come the appropriations bill debate! Congress would cut our funds fifty percent across the board—nail us to the cross to show us who’s boss. You’ve got to do the best you can with what you’ve got, and never forget the political climate. What else did you have up your sleeve?”

  Holland glanced at the chairman and looked away. Then he said slowly: “Third, something I don’t understand at all has come up. A.D.M.P. was set up personnel-wise and equipment-wise to handle one ton of thorium metal a month.” The chairman coughed nervously. “I learned yesterday,” Holland went on, “that for two months they’ve been getting only .75 tons a month from Raw Materials. They thought the reduction came from me. I checked with R.M. and found that the office of the chairman ordered a monthly quota of .25 tons of thorium to the Air Force Experimental Station with a priority overriding A.D.M.P. So R.M. quite correctly diverted the A.F.E.S. quota from A.D.M.P.’s quota. I haven’t checked so far on what the Air Force has been doing with our thorium.” He didn’t mention his anger at being by-passed, or his weary disgust at realizing that some fifteen hundred A.D.M.P. personnel had been idle as far as their primary mission was concerned for one sixth of a year because they lacked material to work with.

  “Dan,” said the chairman slowly, “I owe you an apology on that one. You recall how General McGovern came to bat for us at the last joint Committee hearings. Praised us to the skies for our grand co-operation, said we were all patriots, gentlemen, and scholars he was proud to work with? Half the Committee members at least are red-hot Air Force fans, so it did us a lot of good. Well, McGovern’s price for that was the thorium allotment. His boys at A.F.E.S. think they can use thorium war heads in air-to-air guided missiles. The Weaponeering Advisory Committee tells me it’s a lot of nonsense and furthermore A.F.E.S. hasn’t got anybody who could do the work even if it were possible, so Air’s not really fishing in our lake.”