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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  A grinning steward whisked a felt from the sideboard, and there by Heaven it lay! A great baked fish as long as your leg, smoking hot and trimmed with kelp! A hungry roar greeted it; the captains made for the stack of trays and began to file past the steward, busy with knife and steel.

  Salter marvelled to Degerand: “I didn’t dream there were any left that size. When you think of the tons of brit that old-timer must have gobbled!”

  The foreigner said darkly: “We slew the whales, the sharks, the perch, the cod, the herring—everything that used the sea but us. They fed on brit and one another and concentrated it in firm savory flesh like that, but we were jealous of the energy squandered in the long food chain; we decreed that the chain would stop with the link brit-to-man.”

  Salter by then had filled a tray. “Brit’s more reliable,” he said. “A Convoy can’t take chances on fisherman’s luck.” He happily bolted a steaming mouthful.

  “Safety is not everything,” Degerand said. He ate, more slowly than Salter. “Your Commodore said you were a rash seaman.”

  “He was joking. If he believed that, he would have to remove me from command.”

  The Commodore walked up to them, patting his mouth with a handkerchief and beaming. “Surprised, eh?” he demanded. “Glasgow’s lookout spotted that big fellow yesterday half a kilometer away. He signalled me and I told him to lower and row for him. The boat crew sneaked up while he was browsing and gaffed him clean. Very virtuous of us. By killing him we economize on brit and provide a fitting celebration for my captains. Eat hearty! It may be the last we’ll ever see.”

  Degerand rudely contradicted his senior officer. “They can’t be wiped out clean, Commodore, not exterminated. The sea is deep. Its genetic potential cannot be destroyed. We merely make temporary alterations of the feeding balance.”

  “Seen any sperm whale lately?” the Commodore asked, raising his white eyebrows. “Go get yourself another helping, captain, before it’s gone.” It was a dismissal; the foreigner bowed and went to the buffet.

  The Commodore asked: “What do you think of him?”

  “He has some extreme ideas,” Salter said.

  “The White Fleet appears to have gone bad,” the old man said. “That fellow showed up on a cutter last week in the middle of harvest wanting my immediate, personal attention. He’s on the staff of the White Fleet Commodore. I gather they’re all like him. They’ve got slack; maybe rust has got ahead of them, maybe they’re overbreeding. A ship lost its net and they didn’t let it go. They cannibalized rigging from the whole fleet to make a net for it.”

  “But—”

  “But—but—but. Of course it was the wrong thing and now they’re all suffering. Now they haven’t the stomach to draw lots and cut their losses.” He lowered his voice. “Their idea is some sort of raid on the Western Continent, that America thing, for steel and bronze and whatever else they find not welded to the deck. It’s nonsense, of course, spawned by a few silly-clever people on the staff. The crews will never go along with it. Degerand was sent to invite us in!”

  Salter said nothing for a while and then: “I certainly hope we’ll have nothing to do with it.”

  “I’m sending him back at dawn with my compliments, and a negative, and my sincere advice to his Commodore that he drop the whole thing before his own crew hears of it and has him bowspritted.” The Commodore gave him a wintry smile. “Such a reply is easy to make, of course, just after concluding an excellent harvest. It might be more difficult to signal a negative if we had a couple of ships unnetted and only enough catch in salt to feed sixty percent of the hands. Do you think you could give the hard answer under those circumstances?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  The Commodore walked away, his face enigmatic. Salter thought he knew what was going on. He had been given one small foretaste of top command. Perhaps he was being groomed for Commodore—not to succeed the old man, surely, but his successor.

  McBee approached, full of big fish and drink. “Foolish thing I said,” he stammered. “Let’s have drink, forget about it, eh?”

  He was glad to.

  “Damn fine seaman!” McBee yelled after a couple more drinks. “Best little captain in the Convoy! Not a scared old crock like poor old McBee, ’fraid of every puff of wind!”

  And then he had to cheer up McBee until the party began to thin out. McBee fell asleep at last and Salter saw him to his gig before boarding his own for the long row to the bobbing masthead lights of his ship.

  Starboard Squadron Thirty was at rest in the night. Only the slowly-moving oil lamps of the women on their ceaseless rust patrol were alive. The brit catch, dried, came to some seven thousand tons. It was a comfortable margin over the 5,670 tons needed for six months’ full rations before the autumnal swarming and harvest. The trim tanks along the keel had been pumped almost dry by the ship’s current prison population as the cooked and dried and salted cubes were stored in the glass-lined warehouse tier; the gigantic vessel rode easily on a swelling sea before a Force One westerly breeze.

  Salter was exhausted. He thought briefly of having his cox’n whistle for a bosun’s chair so that he might be hauled at his ease up the fifty-yard cliff that was the hull before them, and dismissed the idea with regret. Rank hath its privileges and also its obligations. He stood up in the gig, jumped for the ladder and began the long climb. As he passed the portholes of the cabin tiers he virtuously kept eyes front, on the bronze plates of the hull inches from his nose. Many couples in the privacy of their double cabins would be celebrating the end of the back-breaking, night-and-day toil. One valued privacy aboard the ship; one’s own 648 cubic feet of cabin, one’s own porthole, acquired an almost religious meaning, particularly after the weeks of swarming cooperative labor.

  Taking care not to pant, he finished the climb with a flourish, springing onto the flush deck. There was no audience. Feeling a little ridiculous and forsaken, he walked aft in the dark with only the wind and the creak of the rigging in his ears. The five great basket masts strained silently behind their breeze-filled sails; he paused a moment beside Wednesday mast, huge as a redwood, and put his hands on it to feel the power that vibrated in its steel lattice-work.

  Six intent women went past, their hand lamps sweeping the deck; he jumped, though they never noticed him. They were in something like a trance state while on their tour of duty. Normal courtesies were suspended for them; with their work began the job of survival. One thousand women, five percent of the ship’s company, inspected night and day for corrosion. Sea water is a vicious solvent and the ship had to live in it; fanaticism was the answer.

  His stateroom above the rudder waited; the hatchway to it glowed a hundred feet down the deck with the light of a wasteful lantern. After harvest, when the tanks brimmed with oil, one type acted as though the tanks would brim forever. The captain wearily walked around and over a dozen stay-ropes to the hatchway and blew out the lamp. Before descending he took a mechanical look around the deck; all was well—

  Except for a patch of paleness at the fantail.

  “Will this day never end?” he asked the darkened lantern and went to the fantail. The patch was a little girl in a night dress wandering aimlessly over the deck, her thumb in her mouth. She seemed to be about two years old, and was more than half asleep. She could have gone over the railing in a moment; a small wail, a small splash—

  He picked her up like a feather. “Who’s your daddy, princess?” he asked.

  “Dunno,” she grinned. The devil she didn’t! It was too dark to read her ID necklace and he was too tired to light the lantern. He trudged down the deck to the crew of inspectors. He said to their chief: “One of you get this child back to her parents’ cabin,” and held her out.

  The chief was indignant. “Sir, we are on watch!”

  “File a grievance with the Commodore if you wish. Take the child.”

 
One of the rounder women did, and made cooing noises while her chief glared. “Bye-bye, princess,” the captain said. “You ought to be keel-hauled for this, but I’ll give you another chance.”

  “Bye-bye,” the little girl said, waving, and the captain went yawning down the hatchway to bed.

  His stateroom was luxurious by the austere standards of the ship. It was equal to six of the standard nine-by-nine cabins in volume, or to three of the double cabins for couples. These however had something he did not. Officers above the rank of lieutenant were celibate. Experience had shown that this was the only answer to nepotism, and nepotism was a luxury which no convoy could afford. It meant, sooner or later, inefficient command. Inefficient command meant, sooner or later, death.

  Because he thought he would not sleep, he did not.

  Marriage. Parenthood. What a strange business it must be! To share a bed with a wife, a cabin with two children decently behind their screen for sixteen years… what did one talk about in bed? His last mistress had hardly talked at all, except with her eyes. When these showed signs that she was falling in love with him, Heaven knew why, he broke with her as quietly as possible and since then irritably rejected the thought of acquiring a successor. That had been two years ago when he was 38, and already beginning to feel like a cabin-crawler fit only to be dropped over the fantail into the wake. An old lecher, a roué, a user of women. Of course she had talked a little; what did they have in common to talk about? With a wife ripening beside him, with children to share, it would have been different. That pale, tall quiet girl deserved better than he could give; he hoped she was decently married now in a double cabin, perhaps already heavy with the first of her two children.

  A whistle squeaked above his head; somebody was blowing into one of the dozen speaking tubes clustered against the bulkhead. Then a push-wire popped open the steel lid of Tube Seven, Signals. He resignedly picked up the flexible reply tube and said into it: “This is the captain. Go ahead.”

  “Grenville signals Force Three squall approaching from astern, sir.”

  “Force Three squall from astern. Turn out the fore-starboard watch. Have them reef sail to Condition Charlie.”

  “Fore-Starboard watch, reef sail to Condition Charlie, aye-aye.”

  “Execute.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.” The lid of Tube Seven, Signals, popped shut. At once, he heard the distant, penetrating shrill of the pipe, the faint vibration as one sixth of the deck crew began to stir in their cabins, awaken, hit the deck bleary-eyed, begin to trample through the corridors and up the hatchways to the deck. He got up himself and pulled on clothes, yawning. Reefing from Condition Fox to Condition Charlie was no serious matter, not even in the dark, and Walters on watch was a good officer. But he’d better have a look.

  Being flush-decked, the ship offered him no bridge. He conned her from the “first top” of Friday mast, the rearmost of her five. The “first top” was a glorified crow’s nest fifty feet up the steel basketwork of that great tower; it afforded him a view of all masts and spars in one glance.

  He climbed to his command post too far gone for fatigue. A full moon now lit the scene, good. That much less chance of a green topman stepping on a ratline that would prove to be a shadow and hurtling two hundred feet to the deck. That much more snap in the reefing; that much sooner it would be over. Suddenly he was sure he would be able to sleep if he ever got back to bed again.

  He turned for a look at the bronze, moonlit heaps of the great net on the fantail. Within a week it would be cleaned and oiled; within two weeks stowed below in the cable tier, safe from wind and weather.

  The regiments of the fore-starboard watch swarmed up the masts from Monday to Friday, swarmed out along the spars as bosun’s whistles squealed out the drill—

  The squall struck.

  Wind screamed and tore at him; the captain flung his arms around a stanchion. Rain pounded down upon his head and the ship reeled in a vast, slow curtsey, port to starboard. Behind him there was a metal sound as the bronze net shifted inches sideways, back.

  The sudden clouds had blotted out the moon; he could not see the men who swarmed along the yards but with sudden terrible clarity he felt through the soles of his feet what they were doing. They were clawing their way through the sail-reefing drill, blinded and deafened by sleety rain and wind. They were out of phase by now; they were no longer trying to shorten sail equally on each mast; they were trying to get the thing done and descend. The wind screamed in his face as he turned and clung. Now they were ahead of the job on Monday and Tuesday masts, behind the job on Thursday and Friday masts.

  So the ship was going to pitch. The wind would catch it unequally and it would kneel in prayer, the cutwater plunging with a great, deep stately obeisance down into the fathoms of ocean, the stern soaring slowly, ponderously, into the air until the topmost rudder-trunnion streamed a hundred-foot cascade into the boiling froth of the wake.

  That was half the pitch. It happened, and the captain clung, groaning aloud. He heard above the screaming wind loose gear rattling on the deck, clashing forward in an avalanche. He heard a heavy clink at the stern and bit his lower lip until it ran with blood that the tearing cold rain flooded from his chin.

  The pitch reached its maximum and the second half began, after interminable moments when she seemed frozen at a five-degree angle forever. The cutwater rose, rose, rose, the bowsprit blocked out horizon stars, the loose gear counter-charged astern in a crushing tide of bales, windlass cranks, water-breakers, stilling coils, steel sun reflectors, lashing tails of bronze rigging—

  Into the heaped piles of the net, straining at its retainers on the two great bollards that took root in the keel itself four hundred feet below. The energy of the pitch hurled the belly of the net open crashing, into the sea. The bollards held for a moment.

  A retainer cable screamed and snapped like a man’s back, and then the second cable broke. The roaring slither of the bronze links thundering over the fantail shook the ship.

  The squall ended as it had come; the clouds scudded on and the moon bared itself, to shine on a deck scrubbed clean. The net was lost.

  Captain Salter looked down the fifty feet from the rim of the crow’s nest and thought: I should jump. It would be quicker that way.

  But he did not. He slowly began to climb down the ladder to the bare deck.

  * * * *

  Having no electrical equipment, the ship was necessarily a representative republic rather than a democracy. Twenty thousand people can discuss and decide only with the aid of microphones, loud-speakers and rapid calculators to balance the ayes and noes. With lungpower the only means of communication and an abacus in a clerk’s hands the only tallying device, certainly no more than fifty people can talk together and make sense, and there are pessimists who say the number is closer to five than fifty. The Ship’s Council that met at dawn on the fantail numbered fifty.

  It was a beautiful dawn; it lifted the heart to see salmon sky, iridescent sea, spread white sails of the Convoy ranged in a great slanting line across sixty miles of oceanic blue.

  It was the kind of dawn for which one lived—a full catch salted down, the water-butts filled, the evaporators trickling from their thousand tubes nine gallons each sunrise to sunset, wind enough for easy steerageway and a pretty spread of sail. These were the rewards. One hundred and forty-one years ago Grenville’s Convoy had been launched at Newport News, Virginia, to claim them.

  Oh, the high adventure of the launching! The men and women who had gone aboard thought themselves heroes, conquerors of nature, self-sacrificers for the glory of NEMET! But NEMET meant only Northeastern Metropolitan Area, one dense warren that stretched from Boston to Newport, built up and dug down, sprawling westward, gulping Pittsburgh without a pause, beginning to peter out past Cincinnati.

  The first generation asea clung and sighed for the culture of NEMET, consoled itself with its pat
riotic sacrifice; any relief was better than none at all, and Grenville’s Convoy had drained one and a quarter million population from the huddle. They were immigrants into the sea; like all immigrants they longed for the Old Country. Then the second generation. Like all second generations they had no patience with the old people or their tales. This was real, this sea, this gale, this rope! Then the third generation. Like all third generations it felt a sudden desperate hollowness and lack of identity. What was real? Who are we? What is NEMET which we have lost? But by then grandfather and grandmother could only mumble vaguely; the cultural heritage was gone, squandered in three generations, spent forever. As always, the fourth generation did not care.

  And those who sat in counsel on the fantail were members of the fifth and sixth generations. They knew all there was to know about life. Life was the hull and masts, the sail and rigging, the net and the evaporators. Nothing more. Nothing less. Without masts there was no life. Nor was there life without the net.

  The Ship’s Council did not command; command was reserved to the captain and his officers. The Council governed, and on occasion tried criminal cases. During the black Winter Without Harvest eighty years before it had decreed euthanasia for all persons over sixty-three years of age and for one out of twenty of the other adults aboard. It had rendered bloody judgment on the ringleaders of Peale’s Mutiny. It had sent them into the wake and Peale himself had been bowspritted, given the maritime equivalent of crucifixion. Since then no megalomaniacs had decided to make life interesting for their shipmates, so Peale’s long agony had served its purpose.

  The fifty of them represented every department of the ship and every age-group. If there was wisdom aboard, it was concentrated there on the fantail. But there was little to say.

  The eldest of them, Retired Sailmaker Hodgins, presided. Venerably bearded, still strong of voice, he told them: