Charles exploded: “Damn it, this is a matter of life or death to the Syndic!”
“No, Charles. Nothing can be a matter of life or death to the Syndic. When anything becomes a matter of life or death to the Syndic, the Syndic is already dead, its morale, is already disintegrated, its credit already gone. What is left is not the Syndic but the Syndic’s dead shell. I am not placed so that I can say objectively now whether the Syndic is dead or alive. I fear it is dying. The rising tide of neurotics is a symptom. The suggestion from you two, who should be imbued with the old happy-go-lucky, we-can’t-miss esprit of the Syndic that we cower behind mercenaries instead of trusting the people who made us—that’s another symptom. Dick Reiner’s rise to influence on a policy of driving the Government from the seas is another symptom.
“I mentioned the devil we know as my choice. That’s the status quo, even though I have reason to fear it’s crumbling beneath our feet. If it is, it may last out our time. We’ll shore it up with armed merchantmen and a militia. If the people are with us now as they always have been, that’ll do it. The devil we don’t know is what we’ll become if we radically dislocate Syndic life and attitudes.
“I can’t back a fighting fleet. I can’t back a regular army. I can’t back any restrictive measure on the freedom of anybody but an apprehended criminal. Read history. It has taught me not to meddle, it has taught me that no man should think himself clever enough or good enough to dare it. That is the lesson history teaches us.
“Who can know what he’s doing when he doesn’t even know why he does it? Bless the bright Cromagnon for inventing the bow and damn him for inventing missile warfare. Bless the stubby little Sumerians for miracles in gold and lapis lazuli and damn them for burying a dead queen’s hand-maidens living in her tomb. Bless Shih Hwang-Ti for building the Great Wall between northern barbarism and southern culture, and damn him for burning every book in China. Bless King Minos for the ease of Cnossian flush toilets and damn him for his yearly tribute of Greek sacrificial victims. Bless Pharaoh for peace and damn him for slavery. Bless the Greeks for restricting population so the well-fed few could kindle a watch-tower in the west, and damn the prostitution and sodomy and wars of colonization by which they did it. Bless the Romans for their strength to smash down every wall that hemmed their building genius, and damn them for their weakness that never broke the bloody grip of Etruscan savagery on their minds. Bless the Jews who discovered the fatherhood of God and damn them who limited it to the survivors of a surgical operation. Bless the Christians who abolished the surgical preliminaries and damn them who substituted a thousand cerebral quibbles. Bless Justinian for the Code of Law and damn him for his countless treacheries that were the prototype of the wretched Byzantine millenium. Bless the churchmen for teaching and preaching, and damn, them for drawing a line beyond which they could only teach and preach in peril of the stake.
“Bless the navigators who, opened the new world to famine-ridden Europe, and damn them for syphillis. Bless the red-skins who bred maize, the great preserver of life and damn them for breeding maize the great destroyer of topsoil. Bless the Virginia planters for the solace of tobacco and damn them for the red gullies they left where forests had stood. Bless the obstetricians with forceps who eased the agony of labor and damn them for bringing countless monsters into the world to reproduce their kind. Bless the Point Four boys who slew the malaria mosquitoes of Ceylon and damn them for letting more Sinhalese be born then five Ceylons could feed.
“Who knows what he is doing, why he does it or what the consequences will be?
“Let the social scientists play with their theories if they like; I’m fond of poetry myself. The fact is that they have not so far solved what I call the two-billion-body problem. With brilliant hindsight some of them tell us that more than a dozen civilizations have gone down into the darkness before us. I see no reason why ours should not go down into the darkness with them, nor do I see any reason why we should not meanwhile enjoy ourselves collecting sense-impressions to be remembered with pleasure in old age. No; I will not agitate for extermination of the Government and hegemony over the Mob. Such a policy would automatically, inevitably and immediately entail many, many violent deaths and painful wounds. The wrong kind of sense-impressions. I shall, with fear and trembling, recommend the raising of a militia—a purely defensive, extremely sloppy militia—and pray that it will not Involve us in a war of aggression.”
He looked at the two of them and shrugged. “Lee, so stern, Charles so grim,” he said. “I suppose you’re dedicated now.” He looked at the desk.
He thought: I have a faint desire to take the pistol from my desk and shoot you both. I have a nervous feeling that you’re about to embark on a crusade to awaken Syndic Territory to its perils. You think the fate of civilization hinges on you. You’re right, of course. The fate of civilization hinges on every one of us at any given moment. We are all components in the two-billion-body problem. Somehow for a century we’ve achieved in Syndic Territory for almost everybody the civil liberties, peace of mind and living standards that were enjoyed by the middle classes before 1914—plus longer life, better health, a more generous morality, increased command over nature; minus the servant problem and certain superstitions. A handful of wonderfully pleasant decades. When you look back over history you wonder who in his right mind could ask for more. And you wonder who would dare to presume to tamper with it.
He studied the earnest young faces. There was so much that he might say—but he shrugged again.
“Bless you,” he said. “Gather ye sense impression while ye may. Some like pointer readings, some like friction on the mucous membranes. Now go about your business; I have work to do.”
He didn’t really. When he was alone he leaned back and laughed and laughed.
Win, lose or draw, those two would go far and enjoy themselves mightily along the way. Which was what counted.
THE ALTAR AT MIDNIGHT
Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1952.
He had quite a rum-blossom on him for a kid, I thought at first. But when he moved closer to the light by the cash register to ask the bartender for a match or something, I saw it wasn’t that. Not just the nose. Broken veins on his cheeks, too, and the funny eyes. He must have seen me look, because he slid back away from the light.
The bartender shook my bottle of ale in front of me like a Swiss bell-ringer so it foamed inside the green glass.
“You ready for another, sir?” he asked.
I shook my head. Down the bar, he tried it on the kid—he was drinking scotch and water or something like that—and found out he could push him around. He sold him three scotch and waters in ten minutes.
When he tried for number four, the kid had his courage up and said, “I’ll tell you when I’m ready for another, Jack.” But there wasn’t any trouble.
It was almost nine and the place began to fill up. The manager, a real hood type, stationed himself by the door to screen out the high-school kids and give the big hello to conventioneers. The girls came hurrying in, too, with their little makeup cases and their fancy hair piled up and their frozen faces with the perfect mouths drawn on them. One of them stopped to say something to the manager, some excuse about something, and he said: “That’s aw ri’; get inna dressing room.”
A three-piece band behind the drapes at the back of the stage began to make warm-up noises and there were two bartenders keeping busy. Mostly it was beer—a midweek crowd. I finished my ale and had to wait a couple of minutes before I could get another bottle. The bar filled up from the end near the stage because all the customers wanted a good, close look at the strippers for their fifty-cent bottles of beer. But I noticed that nobody sat down next to the kid, or, if anybody did, he didn’t stay long—you go out for some fun and the bartender pushes you around and nobody wants to sit next to you. I picked up my bottle and glass and went down on the stool to his left.
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He turned to me right away and said: “What kind of a place is this, anyway?” The broken veins were all over his face, little ones, but so many, so close, that they made his face look something like marbled rubber. The funny look in his eyes was it—the trick contact lenses. But I tried not to stare and not to look away.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s a good show if you don’t mind a lot of noise from—”
He stuck a cigarette into his mouth and poked the pack at me. “I’m a spacer,” he said, interrupting.
I took one of his cigarettes and said: “Oh.”
He snapped a lighter for the cigarettes and said: “Venus.”
* * * *
I was noticing that his pack of cigarettes on the bar had some kind of yellow sticker instead of the blue tax stamp.
“Ain’t that a crock?” he asked. “You can’t smoke and they give you lighters for a souvenir. But it’s a good lighter. On Mars last week, they gave us all some cheap pen-and-pencil sets.”
“You get something every trip, hah?” I took a good, long drink of ale and he finished his scotch and water.
“Shoot. You call a trip a ‘shoot’.”
One of the girls was working her way down the bar. She was going to slide onto the empty stool at his right and give him the business, but she looked at him first and decided not to. She curled around me and asked if I’d buy her a li’l ole drink. I said no and she moved on to the next. I could kind of feel the young fellow quivering. When I looked at him, he stood up. I followed him out of the dump. The manager grinned without thinking and said, “G’night, boys,” to us.
The kid stopped in the street and said to me: “You don’t have to follow me around, Pappy.” He sounded like one wrong word and I would get socked in the teeth.
“Take it easy. I know a place where they won’t spit in your eye.”
He pulled himself together and made a joke of it. “This I have to see,” he said. “Near here?”
“A few blocks.”
We started walking. It was a nice night.
“I don’t know this city at all,” he said. “I’m from Covington, Kentucky. You do your drinking at home there. We don’t have places like this.” He meant the whole Skid Row area.
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “I spend a lot of time here.”
“Is that a fact? I mean, down home a man your age would likely have a wife and children.”
“I do. The hell with them.”
He laughed like a real youngster and I figured he couldn’t even be twenty-five. He didn’t have any trouble with the broken curbstones in spite of his scotch and waters. I asked him about it.
“Sense of balance,” he said. “You have to be tops for balance to be a spacer—you spend so much time outside in a suit. People don’t know how much. Punctures. And you aren’t worth a damn if you lose your point.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Oh. Well, it’s hard to describe. When you’re outside and you lose your point, it means you’re all mixed up, you don’t know which way the can—that’s the ship—which way the can is. It’s having all that room around you. But if you have a good balance, you feel a little tugging to the ship, or maybe you just know which way the ship is without feeling it. Then you have your point and you can get the work done.”
“There must be a lot that’s hard to describe.”
He thought that might be a crack and he clammed up on me.
“You call this Gandytown,” I said after a while. “It’s where the stove-up old railroad men hang out. This is the place.”
* * * *
It was the second week of the month, before everybody’s pension check was all gone. Oswiak’s was jumping. The Grandsons of the Pioneers were on the juke singing the Man from Mars Yodel and old Paddy Shea was jigging in the middle of the floor. He had a full seidel of beer in his right hand and his empty left sleeve was flapping.
The kid balked at the screen door. “Too damn bright,” he said.
I shrugged and went on in and he followed. We sat down at a table. At Oswiak’s you can drink at the bar if you want to, but none of the regulars do.
Paddy jigged over and said: “Welcome home, Doc.” He’s a Liverpool Irishman; they talk like Scots, some say, but they sound almost like Brooklyn to me.
“Hello, Paddy. I brought somebody uglier than you. Now what do you say?”
Paddy jigged around the kid in a half-circle with his sleeve flapping and then flopped into a chair when the record stopped. He took a big drink from the seidel and said: “Can he do this?” Paddy stretched his face into an awful grin that showed his teeth. He has three of them. The kid laughed and asked me: “What the hell did you drag me into here for?”
“Paddy says he’ll buy drinks for the house the day anybody uglier than he is comes in.”
Oswiak’s wife waddled over for the order and the kid asked us what we’d have. I figured I could start drinking, so it was three double scotches.
After the second round, Paddy started blowing about how they took his arm off without any anesthetics except a bottle of gin because the red-ball freight he was tangled up in couldn’t wait.
That brought some of the other old gimps over to the table with their stories.
Blackie Bauer had been sitting in a boxcar with his legs sticking through the door when the train started with a jerk. Wham, the door closed. Everybody laughed at Blackie for being that dumb in the first place, and he got mad.
Sam Fireman has palsy. This week he was claiming he used to be a watchmaker before he began to shake. The week before, he’d said he was a brain surgeon. A woman I didn’t know, a real old Boxcar Bertha, dragged herself over and began some kind of story about how her sister married a Greek, but she passed out before we found out what happened.
Somebody wanted to know what was wrong with the kid’s face—Bauer, I think it was, after he came back to the table.
“Compression and decompression,” the kid said. “You’re all the time climbing into your suit and out of your suit. Inboard air’s thin to start with. You get a few redlines—that’s these ruptured blood vessels—and you say the hell with the money; all you’ll make is just one more trip. But, God, it’s a lot of money for anybody my age! You keep saying that until you can’t be anything but a spacer. The eyes are hard-radiation scars.”
“You like dot all ofer?” asked Oswiak’s wife politely.
“All over, ma’am,” the kid told her in a miserable voice. “But I’m going to quit before I get a Bowman Head.”
“I don’t care,” said Maggie Rorty. “I think he’s cute.”
“Compared with—” Paddy began, but I kicked him under the table.
* * * *
We sang for a while, and then we told gags and recited limericks for a while, and I noticed that the kid and Maggie had wandered into the back room—the one with the latch on the door.
Oswiak’s wife asked me, very puzzled: “Doc, w’y dey do dot flyink by planyets?”
“It’s the damn govermint,” Sam Fireman said.
“Why not?” I said. “They got the Bowman Drive, why the hell shouldn’t they use it? Serves ’em right.” I had a double scotch and added: “Twenty years of it and they found out a few things they didn’t know. Redlines are only one of them. Twenty years more, maybe they’ll find out a few more things they didn’t know. Maybe by the time there’s a bathtub in every American home and an alcoholism clinic in every American town, they’ll find out a whole lot of things they didn’t know. And every American boy will be a pop-eyed, blood-raddled wreck, like our friend here, from riding the Bowman Drive.”
“It’s the damn govermint,” Sam Fireman repeated.
“And what the hell did you mean by that remark about alcoholism?” Paddy said, real sore. “Personally, I can take it or leave it alone.”
So we go
t to talking about that and everybody there turned out to be people who could take it or leave it alone.
* * * *
It was maybe midnight when the kid showed at the table again, looking kind of dazed. I was drunker than I ought to be by midnight, so I said I was going for a walk. He tagged along and we wound up on a bench at Screwball Square. The soap-boxers were still going strong. Like I said, it was a nice night. After a while, a pot-bellied old auntie who didn’t give a damn about the face sat down and tried to talk the kid into going to see some etchings. The kid didn’t get it and I led him over to hear the soap-boxers before there was trouble.
One of the orators was a mush-mouthed evangelist. “And, oh, my friends,” he said, “when I looked through the porthole of the spaceship and beheld the wonder of the Firmament—”
“You’re a stinkin’ Yankee liar!” the kid yelled at him. “You say one damn more word about can-shootin’ and I’ll ram your spaceship down your lyin’ throat! Wheah’s your redlines if you’re such a hot spacer?”
The crowd didn’t know what he was talking about, but “wheah’s your redlines” sounded good to them, so they heckled mush-mouth off his box with it.
I got the kid to a bench. The liquor was working in him all of a sudden. He simmered down after a while and asked: “Doc, should I’ve given Miz Rorty some money? I asked her afterward and she said she’d admire to have something to remember me by, so I gave her my lighter. She seem’ to be real pleased with it. But I was wondering if maybe I embarrassed her by asking her right out. Like I tol’ you, back in Covington, Kentucky, we don’t have places like that. Or maybe we did and I just didn’t know about them. But what do you think I should’ve done about Miz Rorty?”
“Just what you did,” I told him. “If they want money, they ask you for it first. Where you staying?”
“Y.M.C.A.,” he said, almost asleep. “Back in Covington, Kentucky, I was a member of the Y and I kept up my membership. They have to let me in because I’m a member. Spacers have all kinds of trouble, Doc. Woman trouble. Hotel trouble. Fam’ly trouble. Religious trouble. I was raised a Southern Baptist, but wheah’s Heaven, anyway? I ask’ Doctor Chitwood las’ time home before the redlines got so thick—Doc, you aren’t a minister of the Gospel, are you? I hope I di’n’ say anything to offend you.”
The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth Page 36