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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Dump the reactor metal,” Charles said. His eyes searched for the exit, and found it—a red-painted breakaway panel, standard for a hot lab.

  A technician wailed: “We can’t do that! We can’t do that! A million bucks of thorium with a hundred years of life in it—have a heart, mister! They’ll crucify us!”

  “They can dredge for it,” Charles said. “Dump the metal.”

  “Dump the metal,” Lee said. She hadn’t moved.

  The senior technician’s eyes were still on the bright needle points. He was crying silently. “Dump it,” he said.

  “Okay, chief. Your responsibility, remember.”

  “Dump it!” wailed the senior.

  The technician did something technical at the control board. After a moment the steady rumbling of the turbines ceased and the ship’s deck began to wallow underfoot.

  “Hit the panel, Lee,” Charles said. She did, running. He followed her through the oval port. It was like an open-bottomed diving bell welded to the hull. There were large, luminous cleats for pulling yourself down through the water, under the rim of the bell. He dropped the pistol into the water, breathed deeply a couple of times and began to climb down. There was no sign of Lee.

  He kicked up through the dark water on a long slant away from the ship. It might be worse. With a fire and a hot-lab alarm and a dead chief aboard, the crew would have things on their mind besides looking for bobbing heads.

  He broke the surface and treaded water to make a minimum target. He did not turn to the ship. His dark hair would be less visible than his white face. And if he was going to get a burst of machine-gun bullets through either, he didn’t want to know about it. Ahead he saw Lee’s blonde hair spread on the water for a moment and then it vanished. He breathed hugely, ducked and swam under water toward it.

  When he rose next a sheet of flame was lightening the sky and the oily reek of burning hydrocarbons tainted the air. He dove again, and this time caught up with Lee. Her face was bone-white and her eyes blank. Where she was drawing her strength from he could not guess. Behind them the ship sent up an oily plume and the sine-curve wail of the radioactivity warning could be faintly heard. Before them a dim shore stretched.

  He gripped her naked arm, roughened by the March waters of Lake Michigan, bent it around his neck and struck off for the shore. His lungs were bursting in his chest and the world was turning gray-black before his burning eyes. He heaved his tired arm through the water as though each stroke would be his last, but the last stroke, by some miracle, never was the last.

  CHAPTER XIX

  It hadn’t been easy to get time off from the oil-painting factory. Ken Oliver was a little late when he slid into the aseptic-smelling waiting room of the Michigan City Medical Center. A parabolic mike in the ceiling trained itself on the heat he radiated and followed him across the floor to a chair. A canned voice said: “State your business, please.”

  He started a little and said in the general direction of the mike: “I’m Ken Oliver. A figure man in the Blue Department, Picasso Oils and Etching Corporation. Dr. Latham sent me here for—what do you call it?—a biopsy.”

  “Thank you, please be seated.”

  He smiled because he was seated already and picked up a magazine, the current copy of the Illinois Sporting News, familiarly known as the Green Sheet. Everybody in Mob Territory read it. The fingers of the blind spelled out its optimism and its selections at Hawthorne in Braille. If you were not only blind but fingerless, there was a talking edition that read itself aloud to you from tape.

  He riffled through the past performances and selections to the articles. This month’s lead was—Thank God I am Dying of Throat Cancer.

  He leaned back in the chair dizzily, the waiting room becoming gray mist around him. No, he thought. No. It couldn’t be that. All it could be was a little sore on the back of his throat—no more than that. Just a little sore on the back of his throat. He’d been a fool to go to Latham. The fees were outrageous and he was behind, always a little behind, on his bills. But cancer—so much of it around—and the drugs didn’t seem to help any more.… But Latham had almost promised him it was non-malignant.

  “Mr. Oliver,” the loudspeaker said, “please go to Dr. Riordan’s office, Number Ten.”

  Riordan was younger than he. That was supposed to be bad in a general practitioner, good in a specialist. And Riordan was a specialist—pathology. A sour-faced young specialist.

  “Good morning. Sit here. Open your mouth. Wider than that, and relax. Relax; your glottis is locked.”

  Oliver couldn’t protest around the plastic-and-alcohol taste of the tongue depressor. There was a sudden coldness and a metallic snick that startled him greatly; then Riordan took the splint out of his mouth and ignored him as he summoned somebody over his desk set. A young man, even younger than Riordan, came in. “Freeze, section and stain this right away,” the pathologist said, handing him a forceps from which a small blob dangled. “Have them send up the Rotino charts, three hundred to nine hundred inclusive.”

  He began to fill out charts, still ignoring Oliver, who sat and sweated bullets for ten minutes. Then he left and was back in five minutes more.

  “You’ve got it,” he said shortly. “It’s operable and you won’t lose much tissue.” He scribbled on a sheet of paper and handed it to Oliver. The painter numbly read: “…anterior… epithelioma… metastases… giant cells.…”

  Riordan was talking again: “Give this to Latham. It’s my report. Have him line up a surgeon. As to the operation, I say the sooner the better unless you care to lose your larynx. That will be fifty dollars.”

  “Fifty dollars,” the painter said blankly. “But Dr. Latham told me—” He trailed off and got out his check book. Only thirty-two in the account, but he would deposit his paycheck today which would bring it up. It was after three so his check wouldn’t go in today—he wrote out the slip slowly and carefully.

  Riordan took it, read it suspiciously, put it away and said: “Good day, Mr. Oliver.”

  Oliver wandered from the Medical Center into the business heart of the art colony. The Van Gogh Works on the left must have snagged the big order from Mexico—their chimneys were going full blast and the reek of linseed oil and turps was strong in the air. But the poor beggars on the line at Rembrandts Ltd. across the square were out of luck. They’d been laid off for a month now, with no sign of a work call yet. Somebody jostled him off the sidewalk, somebody in a great hurry. Oliver sighed. The place was getting more like Chicago every day. He sometimes thought he had made art his line not because he had any special talent but because artists were relatively easy-going people, not so quick to pop you in the nose, not such aggressive drunks when they were drunks.

  Quit the stalling, a thin, cold voice inside him said. Get over to Latham. The man said “The sooner the better.”

  He went over to Latham whose waiting room was crowded with irascible women. After an hour, he got to see the old man and hand him the slip.

  Latham said: “Don’t worry about a thing. Riordan’s a good man. If he says it’s operable, it’s operable. Now we want Finsen to do the whittling. With Finsen operating, you won’t have to worry about a thing. He’s a good man. His fee’s fifteen hundred.”

  “Oh, my God!” Oliver gulped.

  “What’s the matter—haven’t you got it?”

  To his surprise and terror, Oliver found himself giving Dr. Latham a hysterical stump speech about how he didn’t have it and who did have it and how could anybody get ahead with the way prices were shooting up and everybody gouged you every time you turned around and yes, that went for doctors too and if you did get a couple of bucks in your pocket the salesmen heard about it and battered at you until you put down an installment on some piece of junk you didn’t want to get them out of your hair and what the hell kind of world was this anyway.

  Latham listened, smili
ng and nodding, with, as Oliver finally realized, his hearing aid turned off. His voice ran down and Latham said briskly: “All right, then. You just come around when you’ve arranged the financial details and I’ll contact Finsen. He’s a good man; you won’t have to worry about a thing. And remember: the sooner, the better.”

  Oliver slumped out of the office and went straight to the Mob Building, office of the Regan Benevolent Fund. An acid-voiced woman there turned him down indignantly: “You should be ashamed of yourself trying to draw on the Fund when there are people in actual want who can’t be accommodated! No, I don’t want to hear any more about it if you please. There are others waiting.”

  Waiting for what? The same treatment?

  Oliver realized with a shock that he hadn’t phoned his foreman as promised, and it was four minutes to five. He did a dance of agonized impatience outside a telephone booth occupied by a fat woman. She noticed him, pursed her lips, hung up—and stayed in the booth. She began a slow search of her hand-bag, found coins and slowly dialed a new number. She gave him a malevolent grin as he walked away, crushed. He had a good job record, but that was no way to keep it good. One black mark, another black mark, and one day—bingo.

  General Advances was open, of course. Through its window you could see handsome young men and sleek young women just waiting to help you, whatever the fiscal jam. He went in and was whisked to a booth where a big-bosomed honey-voiced blonde oozed sympathy over him. He walked out with a check for fifteen hundred dollars after signing countless papers, with the creamy hand of the girl on his to help guide the pen. What was printed on the papers, God and General Advances alone knew. There were men on the line who told him with resignation that they had been paying off to G.A. for the better part of their lives. There were men who said bitterly that G.A. was owned by the Regan Benevolent Fund, which must be a lie.

  The street was full of people—strangers who didn’t look like your run-of-the-mill artist. Muscle men, with the Chicago style and if anybody got one in the gut, too goddamned bad about it. They were peering into faces as they passed.

  He was frightened. He stepped onto the slidewalk and hurried home, hoping for temporary peace there. But there was no peace for his frayed nerves. The apartment house door opened obediently when he told it: “Regan,” but the elevator stood stupidly still when he said: “Seventh Floor.” He spat bitterly and precisely: “Sev-enth Floor.” The doors closed on him with a faintly derisive, pneumatic moan and he was whisked up to the eighth floor. He walked down wearily and said: “Cobalt blue” to his own door after a furtive look up and down the hall. It worked and he went to his phone to flash Latham, but didn’t. Oliver sank instead into a dun-colored pneumatic chair, his 250-dollar Hawthorne Electric Stepsaver door mike following him with its mindless snout. He punched a button on the chair and the 600-dollar hi-fi selected a random tape. A long, pure melodic trumpet line filled the room. It died for two beats and than the strings and woodwinds picked it up and tossed it—

  Oliver snapped off the music, sweat starting from his brow. It was the Gershwin Lost Symphony, and he remembered how Gershwin had died. There had been a little nodule in his brain as there was a little nodule in Oliver’s throat.

  Time, the Great Kidder. The years drifted by. Suddenly you were middle-aged, running to the medics for this and that. Suddenly they told you to have your throat whittled out or die disgustingly. And what did you have to show for it? A number, a travel pass, a payment book from General Advance, a bunch of junk you never wanted, a job that was a heavier ball and chain than any convict ever wore in the barbarous days of Government. Was this what Regan and Falcaro had bled for?

  He defrosted some hamburger, fried it and ate it and then went mechanically down to the tavern. He didn’t like to drink every night, but you had to be one of the boys, or word would get back to the plant and you might be on your way to another black mark. They were racing under the lights at Hawthorne too, and he’d be expected to put a couple of bucks down. He never seemed to win. Nobody he knew ever seemed to win. Not at the horses, not at the craps table, not at the numbers.

  He stood outside the neon-bright saloon for a long moment, and then turned and walked into the darkness away from town, possessed by impulses he did not understand or want to understand. He had only a vague hope that standing on the Dunes and looking out across the dark lake might somehow soothe him.

  In half an hour he had reached the deciduous forest, then the pine, then the scrubby brushes, then the grasses, then the bare white sand. And lying in it he found two people: a man so hard and dark he seemed to be carved from oak and a woman so white and gaunt she seemed to be carved from ivory.

  He turned shyly from the woman.

  “Are you all right?” he asked the man. “Is there anything I can do?”

  The man opened red-rimmed eyes. “Better leave us alone,” he said. “We’d only get you into trouble.”

  Oliver laughed hysterically. “Trouble?” he said. “Don’t think of it.”

  The man seemed to be measuring him with his eyes, and said at last: “You’d better go and not talk about us. We’re enemies of the Mob.”

  Oliver said after a pause: “So am I. Don’t go away. I’ll be back with some clothes and food for you and the lady. Then I can help you to my place. I’m an enemy of the Mob too. I just never knew it until now.”

  He started off and then turned. “You won’t go away? I mean it. I want to help you. I can’t seem to help myself, but perhaps there’s something—”

  The man said tiredly: “We won’t go away.”

  Oliver hurried off. There was something mingled with the scent of the pine forest tonight. He was half-way home before he identified it: oil smoke.

  CHAPTER XX

  Lee swore and said: “I can get up if I want to.”

  “You’ll stay in bed whether you want to or not,” Charles told her. “You’re a sick woman.”

  “I’m a very bad-tempered woman and that means I’m convalescent. Ask anybody.”

  “I’ll go right out into the street and do that, darling.”

  She got out of bed and wrapped Oliver’s dressing gown around her. “I’m hungry again,” she said.

  “He’ll be back soon. You’ve left nothing but some frozen—worms, looks like. Shall I defrost them?”

  “Please don’t trouble. I can wait.”

  “Window!” he snapped.

  She ducked back and swore again, this time at herself. “Sorry,” she said. “Which will do us a whole hell of a lot of good if somebody saw me and started wondering.”

  Oliver came in with packages. Lee kissed him and he grinned shyly. “Trout,” he whispered. She grabbed the packages and flew to the kitchenette.

  “The way to Lee Falcaro’s heart,” Charles mused. “How’s your throat, Ken?”

  “No pain, today,” Oliver whispered. “Latham says I can talk as much as I like. And I’ve got things to talk about.” He opened his coat and hauled out a flat package that had been stuffed under his belt. “Stolen from the factory. Brushes, pens, tubes of ink, drawing instruments. My friends, you are going to return to Syndic Territory in style, with passes and permits galore.”

  Lee returned. “Trout’s frying,” she said. “I heard that about the passes. Are you sure you can fake them?”

  His face fell. “Eight years at the Chicago Art Institute,” he whispered. “Three years at Original Reproductions, Inc. Eleven years at Picasso Oils and Etchings, where I am now third figure man in the Blue Department. I really think I deserve your confidence.”

  “Ken, we trust and love you. If it weren’t for the difference in your ages I’d marry you and Charles. Now what about the Chicagoans? Hold it—the fish!”

  Dinner was served and cleared away before they could get more out of Oliver. His throat wasn’t ready for more than one job at a time. He told them at last: “Things are quieting down. T
here are still some strangers in town and the road patrols are still acting very hard-boiled. But nobody’s been pulled in today. Somebody told me on the line that the whole business is a lot of foolishness. He said the ship must have been damaged by somebody’s stupidity and Regan must have been killed in a brawl—everybody knows he was half crazy, like his father. So my friend figures they made up the story about two wild Europeans to cover up a mess. I said I thought there was a lot in what he said.” Oliver laughed silently.

  “Good man!” Charles tried not to act over-eager. “When do you think you can start on the passes, Ken?”

  Oliver’s face dropped a little. “Tonight,” he whispered. “I don’t suppose the first couple of tries will be any good so—let’s go.”

  Lee put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ll miss you too,” she said. “But don’t ever forget this: we’re coming back. Hell won’t stop us. We’re coming back.”

  Oliver was arranging stolen instruments on the table. “You have a big order,” he whispered sadly. “I guess you aren’t afraid of it because you’ve always been rich and strong. Anything you want to do you think you can do. But those Government people? And after them the Mob? Maybe it would be better if you just let things take their course, Lee. I’ve found out a person can be happy even here.”

  “We’re coming back,” Lee said.

  Oliver took out his own Michigan City-Chicago travel permit. As always, the sight of it made Charles wince. Americans under such a yoke! Oliver whispered: “I got a good long look today at a Michigan City Buffalo permit. The foreman’s. He buys turps from Carolina at Buffalo. I sketched it from memory as soon as I got by myself. I don’t swear to it, not yet, but I have the sketch to practice from and I can get a few more looks later.”

  He pinned down the drawing paper, licked a ruling pen and filled it, and began to copy the border of his own pass. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do?” Lee asked.

  “You can turn on the audio,” Oliver whispered. “They have it going all the time at the shop. I don’t feel right working unless there’s some music driving me out of my mind.”