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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He tossed me a piece-of ethertype paper, torn from one of our interstellar-circuit machines. On it was the following dialogue:

  ANYBODY TTHURE I MEAN THERE

  THIS MARSBUO ISN GA PLS

  WOT TTHUT I MEAN WOT THAT MEAN PLEASE

  THIS IS THE MARS BUREAU OF INTERSTELLAR NEWS. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HORSING AROUND ON OUR KRUEGER 60-B CIRCUIT TELETYPE QUESTIONMARK WHERE IS REGULAR STAFFER GO AHEAD

  THATK WOT I AM CALLING YOU ABBOUUT. KENNEDY DIED THIS MORNING PNEUMONIA. I AM WEEMS EDITOR PHOENIX. U SENDING REPLLACEMENT KENNEDY PLEAS

  THIS MCGILLICUDDY, MARSBUO ISN CHIEF. SENDING REPLACEMENT KENNEDY SOONEST. HAVE IDEAL MAN FOR JOB END

  That was all. It was enough.

  “Chief,” I said to McGillicuddy. “Chief, you can’t. You wouldn’t—would you?”

  “Better get packed,” he told me, busily marking up copy, “Better take plenty of nice, warm clothing. I understand Krueger 60-B is about one thousand times dimmer than the sun. That’s absolute magnitude, of course—Frostbite’s in quite close. A primitive community, I’m told. Kennedy didn’t like it. But of course the poor old duffer wasn’t good enough to handle anything swifter than a one-man bureau on a one-planet split. Better take lots of warm clothing.”

  “I quit,” I said.

  “Sam,” said somebody, in a voice that always makes me turn to custard inside.

  “Hello, Ellie,” I said. “I was just telling Mr. McGillicuddy that he isn’t going to shoot me off to Frostbite to rot.”

  “Freeze,” corrected McGillicuddy with relish. “Freeze. Good morning, Miss Masters. Did you want to say a few parting words to your friend?”

  “I do,” she told him and drew me aside to no man’s land where the ladies of the press prepared strange copy for the softer sex. “Don’t quit, Sam,” she said in that voice. “I could never love a quitter. What if it is a minor assignment?”

  “Minor,” I said. “What a gem of understatement that is!”

  “It’ll be good for you,” she insisted. “You can show him that you’ve got on the ball. You’ll be on your own except for the regular dispatches to the main circuit and your local unit. You could dig up all sorts of cute feature stories that’d get your name known.” And so on. It was partly her logic, partly that voice and partly her promise to kiss me good-by at the port.

  “I’m going to take it,” I told McGillicuddy. He looked up with a pleased smile and murmured: “The power of prayer…”

  * * * *

  The good-by kiss from Ellie was the only thing about the journey that wasn’t nightmarish. ISN’s expense account stuck me on a rusty bucket that I shared with glamorous freight like yak kids and ten-penny nails. The little yaks blatted whenever we went into overdrive to break through the speed of light. The Greenhough Effect—known to readers of the science features as “supertime”—scared hell out of them. On ordinary rocket drive, they just groaned and whimpered to each other, the yak equivalent of, “Tibet was never like this!”

  The Frostbite spaceport wasn’t like the South Pole, but it’d be like Greenland. There was a bunch of farmers waiting for their yaks, beating their mittened hands together and exhaling long plumes of vapor. The collector of customs, a rat-faced city boy, didn’t have the decency to hand them over and let the hayseeds get back to the administration building. I watched through a porthole and saw him stalling and dawdling over a sheaf of papers for each of the farmers. Oddly enough, the stalling and dawdling stopped as soon as the farmers caught on and passed over a few dollars. Nobody even bothered to slip it shamefacedly from one hand to another. They just handed it over, not caring who saw—Rat-Face sneering, the farmers dumbly accepting the racket.

  My turn came. Rat-Face came aboard and we were introduced by the chief engineer. “Harya,” he said. “Twenny bucks.”

  “What for?”

  “Landing permit. Later at the administration you can pay your visitor’s permit. That’s twenny, bucks too.”

  “I’m not a visitor. I’m coming here to work.”

  “Work, schmurk. So you’ll need a work permit—twenny bucks.” His eyes wandered. “Whaddaya got there?”

  “Ethertype parts. May need them for replacements.”

  He was on his knees in front of the box, crooning, “Triple ad valorem plus twenny dollars security bond for each part plus twenny dollars inspection fee plus twenny dollars for decontamination plus twenny dollars for failure to declare plus—”

  “Break it up, Joe,” said a new arrival—a grey-mustached little man, lost in his parka. “He’s a friend of mine. Extend the courtesies of the port.”

  Rat-Face—Joe—didn’t like it, but he took it. He muttered about doing his duty and gave me a card.

  “Twenny bucks?” I asked, studying it.

  “Nah,” he said angrily. “You’re free-loading.” He got out.

  “Looks as if you saved ISN some money,” I said to the little man. He threw back the hood of his parka in the relative warmth of the ship.

  “Why not? We’ll be working together. I’m Chenery from the Phoenix.”

  “Oh, yeah—the client.”

  “That’s right,” he agreed, grinning. “The client. What exactly did you do to get banished to Frostbite?”

  Since there was probably a spacemail aboard from McGillicuddy telling him exactly what I did, I told him.

  “Chief thought I was generally shiftless.”

  “You’ll do here,” he said. “It’s a shiftless, easy-going kind of place. I have the key to your bureau. Want me to lead the way?”

  “What about my baggage?”

  “Your stuff’s safe. Port officers won’t loot it when they know you’re a friend of the Phoenix.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I’d meant; I’d always taken it for granted that port officers didn’t loot anybody’s baggage, no matter whose friends they were or weren’t. As Chenery had said, it seemed to be a shiftless, easy-going place.

  I let him lead the way. He had a jeep waiting to take us to the administration building, a musty, too-tight hodgepodge of desks. A lot of them were vacant, and the dowdy women and fattish men at the others didn’t seem to be very busy. The women were doing their nails or reading; the men mostly were playing blotto with pocket-size dials for small change. A couple were sleeping.

  From the administration building, a jet job took us the 20 kilos to town. Frostbite, the capital of Frostbite, housed maybe 40,000 people. No pressure dome. Just the glorious outdoors, complete with dust, weather, bisects, and a steady, icy wind. Hick towns seem to be the same the universe over. There was a main street called Main Street with clothing shops and restaurants, gambling houses, and more or less fancy saloons, a couple of vaudeville theaters, and dance halls. At the unfashionable end of Main Street were some farm implement shops, places to buy surveying instruments and geologic detectors, and the building that housed the Inter-Stellar News Service’s Frostbite Bureau. It was a couple of front rooms on the second floor with a mechanical dentist, an osteopath above, and a “ride-up-and-save” parka emporium to the rear.

  Chenery let me in, and it was easy to see at once why Kennedy had died of pneumonia. Bottles. The air conditioning must have carried away every last sniff of liquor, but it seemed to me that I could smell the rancid, homebrew stuff he’d been drinking. They were everywhere, the relics of a shameless, hopeless alcoholic who’d been good for nothing better than Frostbite. Sticky glasses and bottles everywhere told the story.

  I slid open the hatch of the incinerator and started tossing down bottles and glasses from the copy desk, the morgue, the ethertype. Chenery helped and decently kept his mouth shut. When we’d got the place kind of cleaned up, I wanted to know what the daily routine was like.

  Chenery shrugged. “Anything you make it, I guess. I used to push Kennedy to get more low-temperature agriculture stories for
us. And those yaks that landed with you started as a civic-betterment stunt the Phoenix ran. It was all tractors until our farm editor had a brainstorm and brought in a pair. It’s a hell of a good idea—you can’t get milk, butter, and meat out of a tractor. Kennedy helped us get advice from some Earthside agronomy station to set it up, and he helped get clearance for the first pair, too. I don’t have much idea of what copy he filed back to ISN. Frankly, we used him mostly as a contact man.”

  I asked miserably: “What the hell kind of copy can you file from a hole like this?”

  He laughed and cheerfully agreed that things were pretty slow.

  “Here’s today’s Phoenix,” he said, as the faxer began to hum. A neat, 16-page tabloid, stapled, pushed its way out in a couple of seconds. I flipped through it and asked: “No color at all?”

  Chenery gave me a wink. “What the subscribers and advertisers don’t know won’t hurt them. Sometimes we break down and give them a page-one color pic.”

  I studied the Phoenix. Very conservative layout—naturally. It’s competition that leads to circus makeup, and the Phoenix was the only sheet on the planet. The number-one story under a modest two-column head was an ISN farm piece on fertilizers for high-altitude agriculture, virtually unedited. The number-two story was an ISN piece on the current United Planets assembly.

  “Is Frostbite in the UP, by the way?” I asked.

  “No. It’s the big political question here. The Phoenix is against applying. We figure the planet can’t afford the assessment in the first place, and if it could, there wouldn’t be anything to gain by joining.”

  “Um.” I studied the ISN piece closer and saw that the Phoenix was very much opposed indeed. The paper had doctored our story plenty. I hadn’t seen the original, but ISN is—in fact and according to its charter—as impartial as it’s humanly possible to be. But our story, as it emerged in the Phoenix, consisted of a paragraph about an undignified, wrangling debate over the Mars-excavation question, a fist-fight between a Titanian and an Earth delegate in a corridor, a Sirian’s red-hot denunciation of the UP as a power-politics instrument of the old planets, and a report of UP administrative expenses—without a corresponding report of achievements.

  “I suppose,” I supposed, “that the majority of the planet is stringing along with the Phoenix?”

  “Eight to one, the last time a plebiscite was run off,” said Chenery proudly.

  “You amaze me.”

  I went on through the paper. It was about 70 percent ads, most of them from the Main Street stores we’d passed. The editorial page had an anti-UP cartoon showing the secretary-general of the UP as the greasy, affable conductor of a jetbus jammed to the roof with passengers. A sign on the bus said: “Fare, $15,000,000 and up per year.” A road sign pointing in the direction the bus was heading said, “To Nowhere.” The conductor was saying to a small, worried-looking man in a parka labeled “New Agricultural Planets” that, “There’s always room for one more!” The outline said: “But is there—and is it worth it?”

  The top editorial was a glowing tribute from the Phoenix to the Phoenix for its pioneering work in yaks, pinned on the shipment that arrived today. The second editorial was anti-UP, echoing the cartoon and quoting from the Sirian in the page-one ISN piece.

  It was a good, efficient job of the kind that turns a working newsman’s stomach while he admires the technique.

  “Well, what do you think of it?” asked Chenery proudly.

  I was saved from answering by a brrp from the ethertype.

  “GPM FRB GA PLS” it said. “Good-afternoon, Frostbite Bureau—go ahead, please.”

  What with? I hunted around and found a typed schedule on the wall-that Kennedy had evidently once drawn up in a spasm of activity.

  “MIN PLS” I punched out on the ethertype, and studied the sked.

  It was quite a document.

  0900-1030: BREAKFAST

  1030-1100: PHONE WEEMS FOR BITCHES RE SVS

  1100-1200: NOTE MARSBUO RE BITCHES

  1200-1330: LUNCH

  1330-1530: RUN DROPS TO WEEMS: GAB WITH CHENERY

  1530-1700: CLIP PHOENIX, REWRITE PUNCH & FILE

  SUNDAYS 0900-1700: WRITE AND FILE ENTERPRISERS.-

  Chenery spared my blushes by looking out the window as I read the awful thing. I hadn’t quite realized how low I’d sunk until then.

  “Think it’s funny?” I asked him—unfairly, I knew. He was being decent. It was decent of him not to spit in my eye and shove me off the sidewalk for that matter. I had hit bottom.

  He didn’t answer. He was embarrassed, and in the damn-fool way people have of finding a scapegoat, I tried to make him feel worse. Maybe if I rubbed it in real hard, he’d begin to feel almost as bad as I did.

  “I see,” I told him, “that I’ve wasted a morning. Do you or Weems have any bitches for me to messenger-boy to Mars?”

  “Nothing special,” he said. “As I said, we always like low-temperature and high-altitude agriculture stuff. And good farm-and-home material.”

  “You’ll get it,” I told him. “And now I see I’m behind clipping and rewriting and filing stories from your paper.”

  “Don’t take it so hard,” he said unhappily. “It’s not such a bad place. I’ll have them take the bureau stuff here and your personal stuff to the Hamilton House. It’s the only decent hotel in town except the Phoenix and that’s kind of high—”

  He saw that I didn’t like him jumping to such accurate conclusions about my paycheck and beat it with an apologetic grimace of a smile.

  The ethertype went brrp again and said “GB FRB CU LTR” “Good-by, Frostbite. See you later.” There must have been many days when old Kennedy was too sick or too sick at heart to rewrite pieces from the lone client. Then the machine began beating out news items which I’d tear off eventually and run over to the Phoenix.

  “Okay, sweetheart,” I told the clattering printer. “You’ll get copy from Frostbite. You’ll get copy that’ll make the whole damned ISN sit up and take notice—” and I went on kidding myself in that vein for a couple of minutes, but it went dry very soon.

  Good God, but they’ve got me! I thought. If I’m no good on the job, they’ll keep me here because there’s nothing lower. And if I’m good on the job, they’ll keep me here because I’m good at it. Not a chance in a trillion to do anything that’ll get noticed—just plain stuck on a crummy planet with a crummy political machine that’ll never make news in a million years!

  I yanked down Kennedy’s library—“YOUR FUTURE ON FROSTBITE,” which was a C. of C. recruiting pamphlet, “MANUAL OF ETHERTYPE MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR,” an ISN house handbook, and “THE UNITED PLANETS ORGANIZATION SECRETARIAT COMMITTEE INTERIM REPORT ON HABIT-FORMING DRUGS IN INTERPLANETARY COMMERCE,” a grey-backed UP monograph that got to Frostbite God knew how. Maybe Kennedy had planned to switch from home brew to something that would kill him quicker.

  The Chamber of Commerce job gave a thumbnail sketch of my new home. Frostbite had been colonized about five generations ago for the usual reason. Somebody had smelled money. A trading company planted a power reactor—still going strong—at the South Pole in exchange for choice tracts of land which they’d sold off to homesteaders, all from Earth and Earth-colonized planets. In fine print the pamphlet gave lip service to the UP ideal of interspecific brotherhood, but—

  Apparently Frostbite, in typical hick fashion, thought only genus homo was good enough for its sacred soil and that all non-human species were more or less alarming monsters.

  I looked at that editorial-page cartoon in the Phoenix again and really noticed this time that there were Sirians, Venusians, Martians, Lyrans, and other non-human beings jammed into the jetbus, and that they were made to look sinister. On my first glance, I’d taken them in casually, the way you would on Earth or Mars or Vega’s Quembrill, but here they were supposed to scare me stiff, and
I was supposed to go around saying, “Now, don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are Martians, but—”

  Back to the pamphlet. The trading company suddenly dropped out of the chronology. By reading between the lines, I could figure out that it was one of the outfits which had overextended itself planting colonies so it could have a monopoly hauling to and from the new centers. A lot of them had gone smash when the Greenhough Effect took interstellar flight out of the exclusive hands of the supergiant corporations and put it in the reach of medium-sized operators like the rusty-bucket line that had hauled in me, the yaks, and the ten-penny nails.

  In a constitutional convention two generations back, the colonists had set up a world government of the standard type, with a president, a, unicameral house, and a three-step hierarchy of courts. They’d adopted the United Planets model code of laws except for the bill of rights—to keep the slimy extra-terrestrials out—with no thanks to the UP.

  And that was it, except for the paean of praise to the independent farmer, the backbone of his planet, beholden to no man, etc.

  I pawed through the ethertype handbook. The introduction told me that the perfection of instantaneous transmission had opened the farthest planets to the Interstellar News Service, which I knew; that it was knitting the colonized universe together with bonds of understanding, which I doubted; and that it was a boon to all human and non-human intelligences, which I thought was a bare-faced lie. The rest of it was “see Fig. 76 3b,” “Wire 944 will slip easily through orifice 459,” “if Knob 545 still refuses to turn, take Wrench 31 and gently, without forcing—” Nothing I couldn’t handle.

  The ethertype was beating out:

  FARM NOTE FROSTBITE

  NOME, ALASKA, EARTH—ISN—HOUSEWIVES OF THE COLDER FARM PLANETS WOULD DO WELL TO TAKE A LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF THE PRIMITIVE AMERINDIAN SEAMSTRESS. SO SAYS PROFESSOR OF DOMESTIC SCIENCE MADGE MCGUINESS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NOME’S SCHOOL OF LOW-TEMPERATURE AGRONOMY. THE INDIAN MAID BY SEWING LONG, NARROW STRIPS OF FUR AND BASKET-WEAVING THEM INTO A BLANKET TURNED OUT COVERINGS WITH TWICE THE WARMTH AND HALF THE WEIGHT OF FUR ROBES SIMPLY SEWED EDGE TO EDGE—