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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Two would have been a fatal overdose. Shakily Fitzgerald filled a glass of water and drank it down, spilling about a third on his pajamas. He replaced the pills and threw away the entire bottle. You never know when a thing like that might happen again, he thought—too late to mend.

  Now thoroughly sure that he needed the sedative, he swallowed a dose. By the time he had replaced the bottle he could scarcely find his way back to the bed, so sleepy was he.

  He dreamed then. Detective Fitzgerald was standing on a plain, a white plain, that was very hot. His feet were bare. In the middle distance was a stone tower above which circled winged skulls—bat-winged skulls, whose rattling and flapping he could plainly hear.

  From the plain—he realized then that it was a desert of fine, white sand—spouted up little funnels or vortices of fog in a circle around him. He began to run very slowly, much slower than he wanted to. He thought he was running away from the tower and the vortices, but somehow they continued to stay in his field of vision. No matter where he swerved the tower was always in front and the little twisters around him. The circle was growing smaller around him, and he redoubled his efforts to escape.

  Finally he tried flying, leaping into the air. Though he drifted for yards at a time, slowly and easily, he could not land where he wanted to. From the air the vortices looked like petals of a flower, and when he came drifting down to the desert he would land in the very center of the strange blossom.

  Again he ran, the circle of foggy cones following still, the tower still before him. He felt with his bare feet something tinglingly clammy. The circle had contracted to the point of coalescence, had gripped his two feet like a trap.

  He shot into the air and headed straight for the tower. The creaking, flapping noise of the bat-winged skulls was very much louder now. He cast his eyes to the side and was just able to see the tips of his own black, flapping membranes.

  As though regular nightmares—always the same, yet increasingly repulsive to the detective—were not enough woe for one man to bear, he was troubled with a sudden, appalling sharpness of hearing. This was strange, for Fitzgerald had always been a little deaf in one ear.

  The noises he heard were distressing things, things like the ticking of a wristwatch two floors beneath his flat, the gurgle of water in sewers as he walked the streets, humming of underground telephone wires. Headquarters was a bedlam with its stentorian breathing, the machine-gun fire of a telephone being dialed, the howitzer crash of a cigarette case snapping shut.

  He had his bedroom soundproofed and tried to bear it. The inches of fibreboard helped a little; he found that he could focus his attention on a book and practically exclude from his mind the regular swish of air in his bronchial tubes, the thudding at his wrists and temples, the slushing noise of food passing through his transverse colon.

  Fitzgerald did not go mad for he was a man with ideals. He believed in clean government and total extirpation of what he fondly believed was a criminal class which could be detected by the ear lobes and other distinguishing physical characteristics.

  He did not go to a doctor because he knew that the word would get back to headquarters that Fitzgerald heard things and would probably begin to see things pretty soon and that it wasn’t good policy to have a man like that on the force.

  The detective read up on the later Freudians, trying to interpret the recurrent dream. The book said that it meant he had been secretly in love with a third cousin on his mother’s side and that he was ashamed of it now and wanted to die, but that he was afraid of heavenly judgment. He knew that wasn’t so; his mother had had no relations and detective Fitzgerald wasn’t afraid of anything under the sun.

  After two weeks of increasing horror he was walking around like a corpse, moving by instinct and wearily doing his best to dodge the accidents that seemed to trail him. It was then that he was assigned to check on the Cult of Hagar. The records showed that they had registered at City Hall, but records don’t show everything.

  He walked in on the cult during a service and dully noted that its members were more prosperous in appearance than they had been, and that there were more women present. Joseph Kazam was going through precisely the same ritual that the detective had last seen.

  When the last bill had fallen into the pot covered with gilded wood and the last dowager had left Kazam emerged and greeted the detective.

  “Fitzgerald,” he said, “you damned fool, why didn’t you come to me in the first place?”

  “For what?” asked the detective, loosening the waxed cotton plugs in his ears.

  The stringy, brown man chuckled. “Your friend Rooney’s been at work on you. You hear things. You can’t sleep and when you do—”

  “That’s plenty,” interjected Fitzgerald. “Can you help me out of this mess I’m in?”

  “Nothing to it. Nothing at all. Come into the office.”

  Dully the detective followed, wondering if the cot had been removed.

  The ritual that Kazam performed was simple in the extreme, but a little revolting. The mucky aspects of it Fitzgerald completely excused when he suddenly realized that he no longer heard his own blood pumping through his veins, and that the asthmatic wheeze of the janitor in the basement was now private to the janitor again.

  “How does it feel?” asked Kazam concernedly.

  “Magnificent,” breathed the detective, throwing away his cotton plugs. “Too wonderful for words.”

  “I’m sorry about what I had to do,” said the other man, “but that was to get your attention principally. The real cure was mental projection.” He then dismissed the bedevilment of Fitzgerald with an airy wave of the hand. “Look at this,” he said.

  “My God!” breathed the detective. “Is it real?”

  Joseph Kazam was holding out an enormous diamond cut into a thousand glittering facets that shattered the light from his desk lamp into a glorious blaze of color.

  “This,” said the stringy, brown man, “is the Charity Diamond.”

  “You mean,” sputtered the detective, “you got it from—”

  “The very woman,” said Kazam hastily. “And of her own free will. I have a receipt: ‘For the sum of one dollar in payment for the Charity Diamond. Signed, Mrs.—’”

  “Yes,” said the detective. “Happy days for the Sons of Hagar. Is this what you’ve been waiting for?”

  “This,” said Kazam curiously turning the stone in his hand, “is what I’ve been hunting over all the world for years. And only by starting a nut cult could I get it. Thank God it’s legal.”

  “What are you going to do now?” asked the detective.

  “Use the diamond for a little trip. You will want to come along, I think. You’ll have a chance to meet your Mr. Rooney.”

  “Lead on,” said Fitzgerald. “After the past two weeks I can stand anything.”

  “Very well.” Kazam turned out the desk lamp.

  “It glows,” whispered Fitzgerald. He was referring to the diamond, over whose surface was passing an eerie blue light, like the invisible flame of anthracite.

  “I’d like you to pray for success, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said Kazam. The detective began silently to go over his brief stock of prayers. He was barely conscious of the fact that the other man was mumbling to himself and caressing the diamond with long, wiry fingers.

  The shine of the stone grew brighter yet; strangely, though, it did not pick out any of the details of the room.

  Then Kazam let out an ear-splitting howl. Fitzgerald winced, closing his eyes for just a moment. When he opened them he began to curse in real earnest.

  “You damned rotter!” he cried. “Taking me here—”

  The Persian looked at him coldly and snapped: “Easy, man! This is real—look around you!”

  The detective looked around and saw that the tower of stone was rather far in the distance, farther than in his dreams, u
sually. He stooped and picked up a handful of the fine white desert sand, let it run through his fingers.

  “How did you get us here?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Same way I cured you of Runi Sarif’s curse. The diamond has rare powers to draw the attention. Ask any jewel-thief. This one, being enormously expensive, is so completely engrossing that unsuspected powers of concentration are released. That, combined with my own sound knowledge of a particular traditional branch of psychology, was enough to break the walls down which held us pent to East 59th Street.”

  The detective was beginning to laugh, flatly and hysterically. “I come to you hag-ridden, you first cure me and then plunge me twice as deep into Hell, Kazam! What’s the good of it?”

  “This isn’t Hell,” said the Persian matter-of-factly. “It isn’t Hell, but it isn’t Heaven either. Sit down and let me explain.” Obediently Fitzgerald squatted on the sand. He noticed that Kazam cast an apprehensive glance at the horizon before beginning.

  “I was born in Persia,” said Kazam, “but I am not Persian by blood, religion or culture. My life began in a little mountain village where I soon saw that I was treated not as the other children were. My slightest wish could command the elders of the village and if I gave an order it would be carried out.

  “The reasons for all this were explained to me on my thirteenth birthday by an old man—a very old man whose beard reached to his knees. He said that he had in him only a small part of the blood of Kaidar, but that I was almost full of it, that there was little human blood in me.

  “I cried and screamed and said that I didn’t want to be Kaidar, that I just wanted to be a person. I ran away from the village after another year, before they began to teach me their twisted, ritualistic versions of occult principles. It was this flight which saved me from the usual fate of the Kaidar; had I stayed I would have become a celebrated miracle man, known for all of two hundred miles or so, curing the sick and cursing the well. My highest flight would be to create a new Islamic faction—number three hundred and eighty-two, I suppose.

  “Instead I knocked around the world. And Lord, got knocked around too. Tramp steamers, maritime strike in Frisco, the Bela Kun regime in Hungary—I wound up in North Africa when I was about thirty years old.

  “I was broke, as broke as any person could be and stay alive. A Scotswoman picked me up, hired me, taught me mathematics. I plunged into it, algebra, conics, analytics, calculus, relativity. Before I was done, I’d worked out wave-mechanics three years before that Frenchman had even begun to think about it.

  “When I showed her the set of differential equations for the carbon molecule, all solved, she damned me for an unnatural monster and threw me out. But she’d given me the beginnings of mental discipline, and done it many thousands of times better than they could have in that Persian village. I began to realize what I was.

  “It was then that I drifted into the nut cult business. I found out that all you need for capital is a stock of capitalized abstract qualities, like All-Knowingness, Will-Mind-Urge, Planetude and Exciliation. With that to work on I can make my living almost anywhere on the globe.

  “I met Runi Sarif, who was running an older-established sect, the Pan-European Astral Confederation of Healers. He was a Hindu from the Punjab plains in the North of India. Lord, what a mind he had! He worked me over quietly for three months before I realized what was up.

  “Then there was a little interview with him. He began with the complicated salute of the Astral Confederation and got down to business. ‘Brother Kazam,’ he said, ‘I wish to show you an ancient sacred book I have just discovered.’ I laughed, of course. By that time I’d already discovered seven ancient books by myself, all ready-translated into the language of the country I would be working at the time. The ‘Isba Kazhlunk’ was the most successful; that’s the one I found preserved in the hide of a mammoth in a Siberian glacier.

  “Runi looked sour. ‘Brother Kazam,’ said he, ‘do not scoff. Does the word Kaidar mean anything to you?’ I played dumb and asked whether it was something out of the third chapter of the Lost Lore of Atlantis, but I remembered ever so faintly that I had been called that once.

  “‘A Kaidar,’ said Runi, ‘is an atavism to an older, stronger people who once visited this plane and left their seed. They can be detected by’—he squinted at me sharply—‘by a natural aptitude for occult pursuits. They carry in their minds learning undreamable by mortals. Now, Brother Kazam, if we could only find a Kaidar…’

  “‘Don’t carry yourself away,’ I said. ‘What good would that be to us?’

  “Silently he produced what I’ll swear was actually an ancient sacred book. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d just discovered it, moreover. It was the psaltery of a small, very ancient sect of Edomites who had migrated beyond the Euphrates and died out. When I’d got around the rock-Hebrew it was written in I was very greatly impressed. They had some noble religious poems, one simply blistering exorcism and anathema, a lot of tedious genealogy in verse form. And they had a didactic poem on the Kaidar, based on one who had turned up in their tribe.

  “They had treated him horribly—chained him to a cave wall and used him for a sort of male Sybil. They found out that the best way to get him to prophesy was to show him a diamond. Then, one sad day, they let him touch it. Blam! He vanished, taking two of the rabbis with him. The rabbis came back later; appeared in broad daylight raving about visions of Paradise they had seen.

  “I quite forgot about the whole affair. At that time I was obsessed with the idea that I would become the Rockefeller of occultism—get disciples, train them carefully and spread my cult. If Mohammed could do it, why not I? To this day I don’t know the answer.

  “While I was occupying myself with grandiose daydreams, Runi was busily picking over my mind. To a natural cunning and a fantastic ability to concentrate he added what I unconsciously knew, finally achieving adequate control of many factors.

  “Then he stole a diamond, I don’t know where, and vanished. One presumes he wanted to have that Paradise that the rabbis told of for his very own. Since then he has been trying to destroy me, sending out messages, dominating other minds on the Earthly plane—if you will excuse the jargon—to that end. He reached you, Fitzgerald, through a letter he got someone else to write and post, then when you were located and itemized he could work on you directly.

  “You failed him, and he, fearing I would use you, tried to destroy you by heightening your sense of hearing and sending you visions nightly of this plane. It would destroy any common man; we are very fortunate that you are extraordinarily tough in your psychological fibre.

  “Since then I have been dodging Runi Sarif, trying to get a diamond big enough to send me here through all the barriers he has prepared against my coming. You helped me very greatly.” Again Kazam cast an apprehensive look at the horizon.

  The detective looked around slowly. “Is this a paradise?” he asked. “If so I’ve been seriously misled by my Sunday School teachers.” He tried weakly to smile.

  “That is one of the things I don’t understand—yet,” said the Persian. “And this is another unpleasantness which approaches.”

  Fitzgerald stared in horror at the little spills of fog which were upending themselves from the sand. He had the ghastly, futile dream sensation again.

  “Don’t try to get away from them,” snapped Kazam. “Walk at the things.” He strode directly and pugnaciously at one of the little puffs, and it gave way before him and they were out of the circle.

  “That was easy,” said the detective weakly.

  Suddenly before them loomed the stone tower. The winged skulls were nowhere to be seen.

  Sheer into the sky reared the shaft, solid and horribly hewn from grey granite, rough-finished on the outside. The top was shingled to a shallow cone, and embrasures were black slots in the wall.

  Then, Fitzgerald never knew how, th
ey were inside the tower, in the great round room at its top. The winged skulls were perched on little straggling legs along a golden rail. Aside from the flat blackness of their wings all was crimson and gold in that room. There was a sickly feeling of decay and corruption about it, a thing that sickened the detective.

  Hectic blotches of purple marked the tapestries that hung upon that circular wall, blotches that seemed like the high spots in rotten meat. The tapestries themselves the detective could not look at again after one glance. The thing he saw, sprawling over a horde of men and women, drooling flame on them, a naked figure still between its jaws, colossal, slimy paws on a little heap of human beings, was not a pretty sight.

  Light came from flambeaux in the wall, and the torches cast a sickly, reddish-orange light over the scene. Thin curls of smoke from the sockets indicated an incense.

  And lastly there was to be seen a sort of divan, heaped with cushions in fantastic shapes. Reclining easily on them was the most grotesque, abominable figure Fitzgerald had ever seen. It was a man, had been once. But incredible incontinence had made the creature gross and bloated with what must have been four hundred pounds of fat. Fat swelled out the cummerbund that spanned the enormous belly, fat welted out the cheeks so that the ears of the creature could not be seen beneath the embroidered turban, gouts of fat rolled in a blubbery mass about the neck like the wattles of a dead cockerel.

  “Ah,” hissed Joseph Kazam. “Runi Sarif …” He drew from his shirt a little sword or big knife from whose triangular blade glinted the light of the flambeaux.

  The suety monster quivered as though maggots were beneath his skin. In a voice that was like the sound a butcher makes when he tears the fat belly from a hog’s carcass, Runi Sarif said: “Go—go back. Go back—where you came from—” There was no beginning or ending to the speech. It came out between short, grunting gasps for breath.

  Kazam advanced, running a thumb down the knife-blade. The monster on the divan lifted a hand that was like a bunch of sausages. The nails were a full half-inch below the level of the skin. Afterwards Fitzgerald assured himself that the hand was the most repellent aspect of the entire affair.