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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “I could have done a cleaner job,” said Peasely snappishly. He had cast the only blackball when this first woman to enter the Saber Club had been voted a member. “What did you use?”

  “Lyddite,” she said, putting on a pale lipstick.

  “Thot’s pawky explaw-seeve,” commented Vaughn. “I’d noat risk such.”

  She was going to reply tartly when Battle strode in. They greeted him with a muffled chorus of sighs and curses.

  “Hi,” he said briefly. “I’d like your permission to introduce a person waiting outside. Rules do not apply in her case for—for certain reasons. May I?”

  There was a chorus of assent. He summoned Spike, who entered. “Now,” said Battle, “I’d like your help in a certain matter of great importance to us all.”

  “Yon’s t’ keenin’ tool,” said the Yorkshireman.

  “Okay, then. We have to storm and take a plant in New Jersey. This plant is stocked with new weapons—dangerous weapons—weapons that, worst of all, are intended to effect a world revolution which will bring an absolute and complete peace within a couple of years, thus depriving us of our occupations without compensation. Out of self-defense we must take this measure. Who is with me?”

  All hands shot up in approval. “Good. Further complications are as follows: This is only one world revolution; there’s another movement which is in rivalry to it, and which will surely dominate if the first does not. So we will have to split our forces—”

  “No you won’t,” said the voice of Underbottam.

  “Where are you?” asked Battle, looking around the room.

  “In my office, you traitor. I’m using a wire screen in your clubroom for a receiver and loudspeaker in a manner you couldn’t possibly understand.”

  “I don’t like that traitor talk,” said Battle evenly. “I mailed back your money—and Breen’s. Now what was that you said?”

  “We’ll be waiting for you together in Rockefeller Center. Breen and I have pooled our interests. After we’ve worked our revolution we’re going to flip a coin. That worm doesn’t approve of gambling, of course, but he’ll make this exception.”

  “And if I know you, Underbottam,” said Battle heavily, “it won’t be gambling. What time in Rockefeller Center?”

  “Four in the morning. Bring your friends—nothing like a showdown. By heaven, I’m going to save the world whether you like it or not!”

  The wire screen from which the voice had been coming suddenly fused in a flare of light and heat.

  Miss Millicent broke the silence. “Scientist!” she said in a voice heavy with scorn. Suddenly there was a gun in her palm. “If he’s human I can drill him,” she declared.

  “Yeah,” said Battle gloomily. “That was what I thought.”

  * * * *

  The whole length of Sixth Avenue not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, as the six crept through the early morning darkness under the colossal shadow of the RCA building. The vertical architecture of the Center was lost in the sky as they hugged the wall of the Music Hall.

  “When do you suppose they’ll finish it?” asked Peasely, jerking a thumb at the boarding over the Sixth Avenue subway under construction.1

  “What do you care?” grunted Battle. “We need a scout to take a look at the plaza. How about you, Manuel? You’re small and quick.”

  “Right,” grinned Espera. “I could use a little more weight.” He sped across the street on silent soles, no more than a shadow in the dark. But he had been spotted, for a pale beam of light hissed for a moment on the pavement beside him. He flattened and gestured.

  “Come on—he says,” muttered Miss Millicent. They shot across the street and flattened against the building. “Where are they, Manuel?” demanded Battle.

  “Right there in the Plaza beside the fountain. They have a mess of equipment. Tripods and things. A small generator.”

  “Shall I try a masher?” asked Peasely.

  “Do,” said Miss Millicent. “Nothing would be neater.”

  The man with the wooden leg unshipped a bomb from his belt and bit out the pin. He held it to his ear for just a moment to hear it sizzle. “I love the noise,” he explained apologetically to Spike. Then he flung it with a curious twist of his arm.

  Crash!

  Battle looked around the corner of the building. “They haven’t been touched. And that racket’s going to draw the authorities,” he said. “They have some kind of screen, I guess.”

  “Darling,” whispered Spike.

  “What it is?” asked Battle, sensing something in her tone.

  “Nothing,” she said, as women will.

  “Close in under heavy fire, maybe?” suggested the little Espera.

  “Yep,” snapped Battle. “Ooops! There goes a police whistle.”

  Pumping lead from both hips, the six of them advanced down the steps to the Plaza, where Breen and Underbottam were waiting behind a kind of shimmering illumination.

  The six ducked behind the waist-high stone wall of the Danish restaurant, one of the eateries which rimmed the Plaza. Hastily, as the others kept up their fire, Vaughn set up a machine gun.

  “Doon, a’ fu’ leef!” he ordered. They dropped behind the masking stone. “Cae oot, yon cawbies,” yelled Vaughn.

  His only answer was a sudden dropping of the green curtain and a thunderbolt or something like it that winged at him and went way over his head, smashing into the RCA building and shattering three stories.

  “Haw!” laughed Peasely. “They can’t aim! Watch this.” He bit another grenade and bowled it underhand against the curtain. The ground heaved and bucked as the crash of the bomb sounded. In rapid succession he rolled over enough to make the once-immaculate Plaza as broken a bit of terrain as was ever seen, bare pipes and wires exposed underneath. Underbottam’s face was distorted with rage.

  The curtain dropped abruptly and the two embattled scientists and would-be saviors of the world squirted wildly with everything they had—rays in every color of the spectrum, thunderbolts and lightning flashes, some uncomfortably near.

  The six couldn’t face up to it; what they saw nearly blinded them. They flattened themselves to the ground and prayed mutely in the electric clash and spatter of science unleashed.

  “Darling,” whispered Spike, her head close to Battle’s.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you got a match?” she asked tremulously. “No—don’t say a word.” She took the match pack and kissed him awkwardly and abruptly. “Stay under cover,” she said. “Don’t try to follow. When my fuel tank catches it’ll be pretty violent.”

  Suddenly she was out from behind the shelter and plastered against one of the tumbled rocks, to leeward of the worldsavers’ armory. A timid bullet or two was coming from the Danish restaurant.

  In one long, staggering run she made nearly seven yards, then dropped, winged by a heat ray that cauterized her arm. Cursing, Spike held the matches in her mouth and tried to strike one with her remaining hand. It lit, and she applied it to the match pack, dropping it to the ground. Removing what remained of her right arm, she lit it at the flaring pack. It blazed like a torch; her cellulose skin was highly inflammable.

  She used the arm to ignite her body at strategic points and then, a blazing, vengeful figure of flame, hurled herself on the two scientists in the Plaza.

  From the restaurant Battle could see, through tear-wet eyes, the features of the fly-by-night worldsavers. Then Spike’s fuel tank exploded and everything blotted out in one vivid sheet of flame.

  “Come on! The cops!” hissed Miss Millicent. She dragged him, sobbing as he was, into the Independent subway station that let out into the Center. Aimlessly he let her lead him onto an express, the first of the morning.

  “Miss Millicent, I loved her,” he complained.

  “Why don’t you join the Foreign Legion to f
orget?” she suggested amiably.

  “What?” he said, making a wry face. “Again?”

  1When last I saw this area, 28 years almost to the day after publication of Cyril’s story, the boarding was there still—or again.—Ed.

  SHARK SHIP

  Originally published in Vanguard Science Fiction, June 1958.

  It was the spring swarming of the plankton; every man and woman and most of the children aboard Grenville’s Convoy had a job to do. As the seventy-five gigantic sailing ships ploughed their two degrees of the South Atlantic, the fluid that foamed beneath their cutwaters seethed also with life. In the few weeks of the swarming, in the few meters of surface water where sunlight penetrated in sufficient strength to trigger photosynthesis, microscopic spores burst into microscopic plants, were devoured by minute animals which in turn were swept into the maws of barely visible sea monsters almost a tenth of an inch from head to tail; these in turn were fiercely pursued and gobbled in shoals by the fierce little brit, the tiny herring and shrimp that could turn a hundred miles of green water to molten silver before your eyes.

  Through the silver ocean of the swarming the Convoy scudded and tacked in great controlled zigs and zags, reaping the silver of the sea in the endlessly reeling bronze nets each ship payed out behind.

  The Commodore in Grenville did not sleep during the swarming; he and his staff dispatched cutters to scout the swarms, hung on the meteorologists’ words, digested the endless reports from the scout vessels and toiled through the night to prepare the dawn signal. The mainmast flags might tell the captains “Convoy course five degrees right,” or “Two degrees left,” or only “Convoy course: no change.” On those dawn signals depended the life for the next six months of the million and a quarter souls of the Convoy. It had not happened often, but it had happened that a succession of blunders reduced a Convoy’s harvest below the minimum necessary to sustain life. Derelicts were sometimes sighted and salvaged from such convoys; strong-stomached men and women were needed for the first boarding and clearing away of human debris. Cannibalism occurred, an obscene thing one had nightmares about.

  The seventy-five captains had their own particular purgatory to endure throughout the harvest, the Sail-Seine Equation. It was their job to balance the push on the sails and the drag of the ballooning seines so that push exceeded drag by just the number of pounds that would keep the ship on course and in station, given every conceivable variation of wind force and direction, temperature of water, consistency of brit, and smoothness of hull. Once the catch was salted down it was customary for the captains to converge on Grenville for a roaring feast by way of letdown.

  Rank had its privileges. There was no such relief for the captains’ Net Officers or their underlings in Operations and Maintenance, or for their Food Officers under whom served the Processing and Stowage people. They merely worked, streaming the nets twenty-four hours a day, keeping them bellied out with lines from mast and outriding gigs, keeping them spooling over the great drum amidships, tending the blades that had to scrape the brit from the nets without damaging the nets, repairing the damage when it did occur; and without interruption of the harvest, flash-cooking the part of the harvest to be cooked, drying the part to be dried, pressing oil from the harvest as required, and stowing what was cooked and dried and pressed where it would not spoil, where it would not alter the trim of the ship, where it would not be pilfered by children. This went on for weeks after the silver had gone thin and patchy against the green, and after the silver had altogether vanished.

  The routines of many were not changed at all by the swarming season. The blacksmiths, the sailmakers, the carpenters, the watertenders, to a degree the storekeepers, functioned as before, tending to the fabric of the ship, renewing, replacing, reworking. The ships were things of brass, bronze and unrusting steel. Phosphor-bronze strands were woven into net, lines, and cables; cordage, masts and hull were metal; all were inspected daily by the First Officer and his men and women for the smallest pinhead of corrosion. The smallest pinhead of corrosion could spread; it could send a ship to the bottom before it had done spreading, as the chaplains were fond of reminding worshippers when the ships rigged for church on Sundays. To keep the hellish red of iron rust and the sinister blue of copper rust from invading, the squads of oilers were always on the move, with oil distilled from the catch. The sails and the clothes alone could not be preserved; they wore out. It was for this that the felting machines down below chopped wornout sails and clothing into new fibers and twisted and rolled them with kelp and with glue from the catch into new felt for new sails and clothing.

  While the plankton continued to swarm twice a year, Grenville’s Convoy could continue to sail the South Atlantic, from ten-mile limit to ten-mile limit. Not one of the seventy-five ships in the Convoy had an anchor.

  The Captain’s Party that followed the end of Swarming 283 was slow getting under way. McBee, whose ship was Port Squadron 19, said to Salter of Starboard Squadron 30: “To be frank, I’m too damned exhausted to care whether I ever go to another party, but I didn’t want to disappoint the Old Man.”

  The Commodore, trim and bronzed, not showing his eighty years, was across the great cabin from them greeting new arrivals.

  Salter said: “You’ll feel differently after a good sleep. It was a great harvest, wasn’t it? Enough weather to make it tricky and interesting. Remember 276? That was the one that wore me out. A grind, going by the book. But this time, on the fifteenth day my foretopsail was going to go about noon, big rip in her, but I needed her for my S-S balance. What to do? I broke out a balloon spinnaker—now wait a minute, let me tell it first before you throw the book at me—and pumped my fore trim tank out. Presto! No trouble; foretopsail replaced in fifteen minutes.”

  McBee was horrified. “You could have lost your net!”

  “My weatherman absolutely ruled out any sudden squalls.”

  “Weatherman. You could have lost your net!”

  Salter studied him. “Saying that once was thoughtless, McBee. Saying it twice is insulting. Do you think I’d gamble with twenty thousand lives?”

  McBee passed his hands over his tired face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I told you I was exhausted. Of course under special circumstances it can be a safe maneuver.” He walked to a porthole for a glance at his own ship, the nineteenth in the long echelon behind Grenville. Salter stared after him. “Losing one’s net” was a phrase that occurred in several proverbs; it stood for abysmal folly. In actuality a ship that lost its phosphor-bronze wire mesh was doomed, and quickly. One could improvise with sails or try to juryrig a net out of the remaining rigging, but not well enough to feed twenty thousand hands, and no fewer than that were needed for maintenance. Grenville’s Convoy had met a derelict which lost its net Back before 240; children still told horror stories about it, how the remnants of port and starboard watches, mad to a man, were at war, a war of vicious night forays with knives and clubs.

  Salter went to the bar and accepted from the Commodore’s steward his first drink of the evening, a steel tumbler of colorless fluid distilled from a fermented mash of sargassum weed. It was about forty percent alcohol and tasted pleasantly of iodides.

  He looked up from his sip and his eyes widened. There was a man in captain’s uniform talking with the Commodore and he did not recognize his face. But there had been no promotions lately!

  The Commodore saw him looking and beckoned him over. He saluted and then accepted the old man’s hand-clasp. “Captain Salter,” the Commodore said, “my youngest and rashest, and my best harvester. Salter, this is Captain Degerand of the White Fleet.”

  Salter frankly gawked. He knew perfectly well that Grenville’s Convoy was far from sailing alone upon the seas. On watch he had beheld distant sails from time to time. He was aware that cruising the two-degree belt north of theirs was another convoy and that in the belt south of theirs was still another, in fact that the
seaborne population of the world was a constant one billion, eighty million. But never had he expected to meet face to face any of them except the one and a quarter million who sailed under Grenville’s flag.

  Degerand was younger than he, all deeply tanned skin and flashing pointed teeth. His uniform was perfectly ordinary and very queer. He understood Salter’s puzzled look. “It’s woven cloth,” he said. “The White Fleet was launched several decades after Grenville’s. By then they had machinery to reconstitute fibers suitable for spinning and they equipped us with it. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. I think our sails may last longer than yours, but the looms require a lot of skilled labor when they break down.”

  The Commodore had left them.

  “Are we very different from you?” Salter asked.

  Degerand said: “Our differences are nothing. Against the dirt men we are brothers—blood brothers.”

  The term “dirt men” was discomforting; the juxtaposition with “blood” more so. Apparently he was referring to whoever it was that lived on the continents and islands—a shocking breach of manners, of honor, of faith. The words of the Charter circled through Salter’s head. “…return for the sea and its bounty… renounce and abjure the land from which we …” Salter had been ten years old before he knew that there were continents and islands. His dismay must have shown on his face.

  “They have doomed us,” the foreign captain said. “We cannot refit. They have sent us out, each upon our two degrees of ocean in larger or smaller convoys as the richness of the brit dictated, and they have cut us off. To each of us will come the catastrophic storm, the bad harvest, the lost net, and death.”

  It was Salter’s impression that Degerand had said the same words many times before, usually to large audiences.

  The Commodore’s talker boomed out: “Now hear this!” His huge voice filled the stateroom easily; his usual job was to roar through a megaphone across a league of ocean, supplementing flag and lamp signals. “Now hear this!” he boomed. “There’s tuna on the table—big fish for big sailors!”