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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Boyce poured down his rye-gingerale and Jerrie asked for two more tickets. He gave them to her, and a good workout with them. The waiter returned with a tray on which were four Blue Moons and four rye-gingerales.

  “Where’s my change?” Boyce asked, astounded.

  The big man clunked the tray down on the table and said: “Did you come in here to drink or didn’t you? There’s your change, mister.”

  Jerrie massaged him feverishly, saying: “Now honey, don’t make a scene just when we were getting along so good. You want to give me a couple of tickets, honey?”

  He drained one of the drinks while she gulped two of hers in quick succession, and gave her the tickets. She squealed and pretended he was hurting her and they both laughed heartily and finished their drinks, exchanging caresses.

  “Honey,” she said, breaking away, “you want to buy some more tickets? Just call Charlie and he’ll sell them to you.”

  “Hell,” said Boyce suddenly. “Look, isn’t there some place we can go? You got a place? Or a hotel?”

  “Don’t you like me right here?” Jerrie asked, with mock-surprise. “All it takes is a couple of tickets. I’ll call Charlie—”

  “Nah,” Boyce said. “Don’t call Charlie. We c’d get a nice hotel room.”

  “Honey, how much you got on you tonight?”

  “Forty bucks left.”

  “Look, honey, I’ll call Charlie and you buy some tickets and we’ll have a couple of drinks and then I’ll take you to my place and we’ll have a real party on me, honey, how’s that?”

  “You won’t do it for forty bucks?”

  Her busy hands took themselves off him and she said in a voice that was suddenly dry and cool: “Act your age, buster. Three-fifty for the hotel, one-fifty for miscellanies, two bucks for the cab, I get what’s left and I miss the rush hour here. You want to be a businessman, stick to your own business. Don’t try to run mine. Are you going to buy some tickets or aren’t you? This is liberty night and we’ll be getting the radar trainees from Great Lakes any minute, so make up your mind.”

  “You goddamned tramp,” he said softly. “You remind me of my wife.”

  Her painted mouth made a surprised scarlet O in the gloom.

  “Let me out,” he said. She slid from the booth and primly straightened her dress. He ignored her, stalking from the Palm Room unsteadily. A couple of the other women headed his way but he outdistanced them.

  “M’ hat and coat,” he said to the big man, who was standing by the door.

  “The check, mister,” the big man said patiently. He found it and the man got his hat and coat. “That’ll be one dollar, mister,” the big man said, not handing them over. Boyce scooped out his change pocket and found four quarters. He got his coat and the big man said: “Come again, mister. Any time. You want to see a real strip show tonight? Private house? Nice mulatto girls? I can give you a card—”

  Boyce raced down the creaking stairs and stood in the street breathing big lungfuls of the icy air. Four very young sailors in pea jackets were coming down the street, looking dubiously at house numbers. One of them said: “Hey, heah’s the place. Is it aneh good, misteh?”

  “’s okay,” Boyce mumbled, swaying a little, and they exchanged grins.

  “Take it easy, pappy,” they told him and went charging up the stairs.

  “Suckers,” he said viciously, half-aloud, and went on down the street to a glow that promised to be a street of shops where he might pick up a taxi for home. “Suckers.” All of us. You can’t buy what you want and if your luck’s bad you can’t marry it either. Her and her goddam headaches. That semi-whore and her goddam tickets. Always something. He knew he couldn’t run away from it, but he wished desperately that it was already 9:05 tomorrow morning and that the streamliner was sliding out of Union Station with him aboard. You couldn’t run away from it, but you could try.

  Chapter II

  BYSTANDERS

  I

  The wolf was gaunt and shabby; he slunk cringing through the snow, quailing at every blast of wind. He was starving. His ribs showed plainly and his belly drew up tight; he looked grotesquely like the caricature of a greyhound on the buses. He had eaten last a week ago, a sheep cut out from a Colorado rancher’s flock and pulled down running. He had gorged on the sheep and awakened from the heavy sleep to find the bones picked by buzzards. The snow had started about then.

  He stopped as a familiar, frightening smell permeated the air. It was the complex smell of man and his works. Oil. Gasoline. Cloth. Fire. Whenever that smell had filled the air before it had been followed by loud, inexplicable noises, rushing things moving faster than he could, stones that did not stay in place as stones should but hurtled through the air and thumped him in the ribs or on the nose. As a cub he had learned about that complex smell; it meant trouble and he had stayed away from it.

  But he was starving, and part of the complex smell was meat.

  With his hackles up and his heart pounding, he inched toward it through the snow. The smell came from a bundle on the ground, and the bundle did not move. His lips drew back as a strain of polecat and another of mink wafted his way. But the bundle did not move, and it smelled also of meat. His caution was consumed by the raging pain in his belly. He leaped on the bundle and tore at it, worrying away strange layers of pelt and cloth. It did not move; it was frozen. He knew what to do with frozen game. He went for the belly with his long, pointed eyeteeth and opened it up. The exposed organs steamed a little in the icy air.

  The wolf crouched down and looked about, growling his ownership. There was nobody to dispute it so he began to gnaw at the liver.

  He would live through the winter after all.

  II

  The three men in the hotel room jumped to their feet as the door slammed open.

  “Police,” a tall man in the doorway announced. Uniformed patrolmen moved around him and began to search the room, picking up papers, briefcases, opening drawers and closets.

  The oldest of the three men, bald, wearing a richly conservative brown suit, said: “I suppose you have a warrant.”

  “Two of them. Search and arrest. Put on your coats and let’s go.”

  The man in the brown suit took a heavy overcoat from a closet and began to wind a muffler around his neck. He asked almost casually: “What’s the charge?”

  “Conspiracy to violate gambling laws. Let’s go.”

  “May I phone a lawyer?”

  “From the station house. Come on.”

  One of the uniformed men, a sergeant, was carefully removing something bulky from the rear of a high closet shelf. It was a tape recorder, and its reels were still turning. The man in the brown suit raised his eyebrows. He and another of the room’s original occupants looked at the third man. He told the third man sadly: “You think you can get away with such goings-on? I’m surprised at you.”

  The police lieutenant, admitting nothing, nevertheless gave the third man a chin-up glance. Everybody in the room, however, knew that the third man’s death warrant had just been signed.

  It would be executed some day by means of a speeding truck or a bomb wired to his car’s ignition, or a shotgun blast through a window or fists and feet and newspaper-wrapped lead pipe in a deserted place where nobody would hear his screams except his murderers.

  It would happen just as soon as they were ready for it to happen, not a minute sooner or later. He would have to use the time that remained to him as efficiently as possible and try not to worry too much.

  III

  “Phonies,” said the cynical bellboy.

  “Honeymooners,” the romantic chambermaid said firmly.

  They were discussing the couple who had checked in last night at the Desert Rest Motel, Nevada.

  “‘Mr. and Mrs. John Smith,’” the bellboy sneered.

  “Look in a phone book, wise
guy. Look in any phone book, I dare you. You think there ain’t any John Smiths in the whole world?”

  “A shack job,” said the bellboy. “And she’s taking him for plenty. I seen them quiet ones before.”

  “I,” said the chambermaid, “seen the way they look at each other…” She smiled mistily and blinked.

  But as a matter of fact they were both right.

  IV

  The torn corpse in the snow; the doomed, calm betrayer; the happy adulterers who could make a motel chambermaid smile—we must go back one week to begin their story.

  WEATHER I

  It’s Longitude 155 degrees, Latitude 83 degrees north. It’s the Arctic Ocean, a vast plain of grinding, shifting sheets of ice under a twilight gloom. It’s almost the exact middle of the six-month polar night.

  There is no sound under the lead-colored sky except the booming and grinding of the ice floes. The usual howling winds of this godforsaken place have dropped to a dead calm. This is noticed by a strange little machine half-buried in a floe.

  The machine is a product of the cold—here very cold—war. Of the Edison Effect, noticed and described long ago by Thomas A., who was working at the time on the problem of a practical electric light. Of a Navy-minded senator who wangled a cut in the Air Force budget, forcing generals to decide: “Since we won’t have the planes or crews for patrols we’ll have to do it some other way, maybe by machine.” Of a huge building in New Jersey where a thousand-odd happily quarrelsome men, most of them possible geniuses and a few about whom there is no doubt whatsoever, daily turn out fundamental research and practical solutions to whatever happens to be bothering communications companies. Of a young man with a Ph.D. in mathematics who got the bright idea that finally cracked the power-lead problem; it got him a raise from $115 to $125 a week, a Class C gate pass instead of a D, and a very important note of commendation from Dr. Kelly. He valued most highly the new gate pass; it meant that he could now drop in at odd hours to tinker at his projects if he got any more bright ideas late at night or over the weekend.

  The machine looks like a foot-locker and on its side, under a crust of ice, the words are stenciled: “BAROMETRIC TELEMETERING DEVICE, U.S.A.F. M-51. PROPERTY OF U. S. GOVERNMENT. DO NOT TAMPER OR DISTURB.” The warning is generous. The machine is booby-trapped with an explosive charge calculated to blow up the machine and any wandering airmen or explorers who might try to pry it open and see what makes it tick.

  It cost 32,000 dollars to build the machine and another 20,000-odd dollars in gasoline, salaries and overhead to parachute it to this spot from a B-50. There are hundreds like it dotted over the huge desolate plains of ice which are more or less American property.

  All this money was spent so the machine could do what it’s doing now. It’s noticing the dead calm that has fallen on this latitude and longitude and is beeping this information southward on a tight radio beam to three airmen in a smelly little weather station on Point Anxiety, which rises from the northern coastline of Alaska.

  Chapter III

  PASSENGER JOAN LUNDBERG

  “Madame Chairlady!” said Joan Lundberg.

  Mrs. Quist winced and mumbled shyly: “Chair recognizes Miss Lundberg.” The ladies of the Scandia Women’s Democratic Club settled down or twisted uncomfortably, according as they thought Joan Lundberg was a capable and zealous party worker or a humorless fanatic.

  Joan rose and said deliberately: “It seems to me that there’s been a certain amount of mismanagement and last-minute maneuvering here. It’s a simple question of electing one delegate to the National Conference of Democratic Women’s Clubs in San Francisco. Three names have been put in nomination and we’re deadlocked. Well and good; that’s the American way of doing things.

  “What I don’t like, and I’m sure the majority of clear-thinking ladies present are with me on this point, is the way grave issues are being slurred over. We’ve got to send somebody to San Francisco who will make the voice of the midwest Democratic woman voter heard on such vital issues as me-tooism, squandermania, realistic curbs on the power of the labor bosses—oh, I could go on for hours!

  “And what are we debating instead of these vital issues? We are debating over who will put up the better appearance. Over who will impress the ladies in San Francisco not by her determination to put a Democrat in the White House but by her clothes. Through this debate is running an ugly undertone of mink-coatism!”

  They gasped at the words. The reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times drowsing in the back abruptly jerked to life and began scribbling.

  “In all humbleness,” said Miss Lundberg, “I ask that some friend who puts devotion to principle above appearance place my name in nomination as delegate to the National Conference of Democratic Women’s Clubs. And I want to add that I’ll back up my stand by paying full expenses for the trip myself and will not expect to be reimbursed by one penny for my service to the party.”

  There was a relieved sigh.

  Mrs. Quist, too shy to run a meeting properly but serving traditionally because Mr. Quist was First Deputy Chief of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police, asked timidly: “Do I hear such a nomination?”

  Grinning, Edith Larsen rose and proposed Miss Lundberg as delegate. Mary Holm glared at her. Mary Holm was one of the three deadlocked candidates and knew perfectly well why Edith Larsen was spoiling her party. Edith thought Mary was making a play for her fat slob of a husband just because she’d been decently polite to him. Well, her duty was clear. Mary Holm got up, withdrew her candidacy and warmly seconded the candidacy of Joan Lundberg (the blonde frump).

  Joan was elected by a comfortable margin over the required two-thirds. Most of the ladies were relieved that the treasury had been spared the burden. Joan herself was mightily relieved. Not only would she be able to show the ladies in San Francisco what a real fighting midwest Democratic clubwoman was like, but she wouldn’t have to undergo the embarrassment of returning her ticket and canceling her reservation aboard the Golden Gate. Leaving nothing to chance, she had picked up the reservation that morning at Union Station. Wait too long and there might be no room left, she had sternly told herself. Take a chance—that was how our republic grew great.

  The meeting adjourned for coffee and coffee-cake, and Joan was surrounded by a buzz of congratulations. Blonde, petite Mrs. Holm said gently: “I was so glad I could withdraw in favor of some really responsible person, Joan dear. You know what a burden the trip would have been for me—baby sitters, the place in a mess when I got back—Joe’s a darling, but he’s a bear in a den about picking up and dusting …”

  (Translation: “You may have stolen my ’Frisco joy-ride from me, you blonde frump, but I’ve got a husband and children and you haven’t.”)

  “I’ve got to pack,” Joan said abruptly. “Excuse me, girls.” She found her good cloth coat among the minks and leopards, and an unseen sneer curled her lip.

  The reporter—he was unbelievably young—caught her at the door. “Congratulations,” he said cheerily. “I’d just like to check the spelling.”

  She spelled her name and he put it down in block letters on a long Western Union press message form. “Do you think they’ll put it on the wire?” she asked.

  “Well, probably not, Miss Lundberg. We just grab a handful of these when we go out on assignment…age?”

  “Thirty-two,” she said.

  “That was swell about mink-coatism,” he said. “I’m going to put it in my lead.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “They’ll take it out. Advertisers.”

  “Oh,” said the young man. “I never thought of that. Are you on a paper, Miss Lundberg?”

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I have to pack. My train leaves at 9:05 tomorrow morning. Good-bye.”

  She walked from the church basement into the icy wind from the Lake, and breathed deeply. She tied on a bright, flapping babushka that softened the
grim lines of her hair-do, and the wind brightened her face. Joan strode off confidently down the street. The neighborhood, unfortunately, was Republican—the staid, Scandinavian northwest side—but a woman could walk at night without being accosted. She thought of the Loop (Democratic and dangerous for women), the dreary Polish and Bohemian acres of the west side (Republican machine and dangerous) and the polyglot, pinko south side, with a shudder.

  Five minutes bucking the wind brought her, flushed and panting, to the square, stark-white, red-roofed Nilsen home, no different from the other square, stark-white, red-roofed homes on both sides of the gentle-curving suburban street. She went down the little flight of concrete steps, fumbled out her key and stepped into the smothering warmth of the basement flat. They’d been closing windows again, slipping in while she was gone.

  She snapped on the light and strode from one casement window to another, swinging each open a precise two inches.

  Her apartment occupied half the basement. The other half contained the furnace, coal bin, a ping-pong table and usually a Nilsen or two, breathing heavily and rattling the pages of the Chicago Tribune loudly enough to be heard through the beaverboard and oak veneer of the partition.

  A mumbling dialogue went on as she took off her coat, babushka, scarf and gloves.

  “So she’s home now, so what should I do?”

  “So go tell her, lazy lump.”

  “So whose idea it was somebody should tell her?”

  “It isn’t enough I wash and cook and scrub and make over clothes for myself I have to collect the rent?”

  Stertorous breathing and the rattling of the Chicago Tribune answered that. After a pause there was a firm rapping on the door between the apartment and the Nilsen commons-room.

  Joan Lundberg unlocked it—the lock was a farce; Nilsen had keys both to this door and the front door, and used them whenever her back was turned—and jerked the door open viciously. “Yes, Mrs. Nilsen?” she asked.

  “Please,” said Mrs. Nilsen. “The rent?”

  “We’ve been over this once, Mrs. Nilsen,” Joan said. “I don’t see how I could have put it plainer. I’m going to be two weeks behind in the rent because I have a fixed income and a sudden expense came up which I can’t avoid. In two weeks I’ll catch up and until then there’s no use talking about it. Do you want me to get out?”