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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Boyce smiled crosswise over the table at Miss Lundberg. “Well, here we are again,” he said, and hoped she wouldn’t start talking politics. Directly across the table from him sat a young man who looked as if he might carry the conversational ball. “I hear we’re going to have some snow,” Boyce said to him.

  The young man started and said: “That so? Uh, my name’s Foreman. It looks as if we’re going to eat together a few times.”

  “Samuel Boyce,” the rug man told him. “And this is Miss Lundberg. We’re in the same berth.”

  Miss Lundberg glared at him and the dark lovely person next to Boyce chuckled and said: “Indeed?”

  The rug man began to explain unhappily what he meant, and they all wound up laughing.

  Foreman said: “Don’t I know you?” to the dark woman.

  “You may have seen my picture,” she said composedly. “I’m Mona Greer. I write.”

  “Of course! Thighs of the Wild Mare.”

  Joan Lundberg said: “Well! A celebrity at the same table with us. It could only happen in this republic—”

  Boyce winced, ready for more of the political oratory, but the waiter saved them. By the time they had marked their choices on the menu Foreman was in charge. “I’m a newsman myself,” he told Mona Greer.

  “Did you see the morning Sun-Times?” Joan Lundberg asked. “About the tax scandals?”

  “All taxes are scandalous,” Mona Greer said firmly. “Especially mine. This is a business trip, for example, to promote my book. I shall list it as a business expense. And some time next spring the revenue people will start nagging and haggling about it, wanting to know whether I couldn’t have taken an upper berth instead of a compartment and what proof I have that I tipped the maid five dollars. It will wind up with them disallowing about twenty-five percent of my claim and warning me not to let it happen again. And then in the spring of the following year the same thing will happen all over again.” She had her eye on the Lundberg girl and forced her to smile sympathetically. What, she wondered, was that one wrapped up in? And mightn’t it be interesting to unwrap her?

  “Nothing like that in business,” Boyce said, grateful that he could contribute. “I’m with Siegel’s, the department store, and there’s never any trouble over taxes. I have my little book, everything goes down in it and that’s that.”

  The waiter swayed down the aisle, forearms balancing the trays, and beamed as he served them. “Yes, indeedy, folks,” he said soothingly, as if they were children or fractious horses whom he must saddle. “Yes, indeedy,” as he dealt them the dishes. “Gonna be big snow, folks,” he said.

  “The train won’t be delayed, will it?” Boyce asked.

  “Nossir, no indeedy. Nothing’s gonna hold up the streamliner, folks. No indeedy. You all set now, folks?” And he beamed and was gone.

  “There had better not be a holdup,” Mona Greer said. “I’m on a split-second schedule. Autographing party, dinner party, cocktails—I feel like a freight car in the hands of the dispatcher.” She began to dissect her brook trout delicately.

  “Does your publisher line those things up?” Foreman asked. Something about the woman was intensely disagreeable. She had literally dragged the question from him, with a half-smile thrown his way just before her knife and fork—held in the European manner—started to probe the small bones and tender flesh. The question she forced him to ask lined them both up for any listeners: she the Author, he the Outsider with his respectful curiosity. But what listeners? Mr. Boyce? Miss Lundberg?

  Mona Greer answered entertainingly, modestly but with sparkle. He barely listened, for obviously he was no longer needed; he was a straight man without any lines to speak. Unquestionably Miss Greer—or was it Mrs.?—was playing for Mr. Boyce and Miss Lundberg.

  Joan Lundberg smiled back impulsively at serene Mona Greer. It would be nice to have her for a friend, she thought—

  Boyce liked her too, and listened avidly to the exotic shoptalk of the publishing world. It was extremely interesting shoptalk and Mona Greer was an extremely interesting—and handsome—person. He liked the thought that he was dining with somebody whose name was known to millions—well, more likely thousands—and that she seemed to find him interesting too. He thought vaguely of her in bed—

  There was a rough-house from the vestibule and everybody in the dining car craned or turned to see.

  “Soldiers,” Mona Greer said contemptuously.

  A big hayseed in olive drab and a few campaign ribbons was yelling at the rather funny little man who had seated them: “Goddamn it, you already done passed us over three times! Ain’t we supposed to be good enough to eat with the civilians?”

  The funny little man tried to soothe him and three or four muttering G.I.’s with him. With a flash of well-cut, well-pressed slacks and blouse, a young officer strode down the aisle to the vestibule, still carrying his napkin.

  “Stop your yelling, soldier!” he snapped at the hayseed. “It’s a good damn thing there isn’t a pair of train M.P.’s aboard. Now what’s the beef here?”

  “Lieutenant,” the hayseed said, with outrage and self-pity in his voice, “this man done passed us over three times and he was just fixing to do it again. We get just as hungry as civilians and time we get to Alaska we’re gonna be hungrier—”

  “Don’t talk about troop movements,” the officer said fiercely. “How long have you been in the Army anyway? Conductor, you didn’t do anything like that, did you?”

  The funny little man began an involved story about rules and the lieutenant cut him off. “There,” he said to the G.I.’s. “Nobody was discriminating. You’re hungry and jumpy and you imagined it. Just keep your shirts on and you’ll get a seat.”

  He turned and strode back down the aisle to his interrupted luncheon, a tanned, fit, trim, tailored, smug young man with bright silver bars on his shoulders, very pleased with himself and the world in which he could tell them off and they couldn’t tell him off.

  “I’d like,” Foreman said quietly, “to spit right in his eye.”

  Mona Greer said: “I take it you were an enlisted man,” and smiled at Joan Lundberg and Boyce with her eyes. The strange enmity there again enraged him. It flashed through his mind to be savagely witty at her expense—but he’d come off second-best in any exchange. The great Mona Greer was no latter-day Dorothy Parker, but she undoubtedly could make a monkey out of him. He looked down at his minute steak, cut off a piece and chewed it tastelessly. The cards were stacked; why try?

  Boyce said: “I suppose I was lucky. Too young for the first and too old for the second. If you call it luck.”

  “Men,” Mona Greer smiled at Joan Lundberg. “‘If you call it luck.’ I have never met a man who didn’t feel that messy compulsion to kick somebody’s teeth in, get his own arm broken and then stoutly maintain that he had a perfectly wonderful time.”

  Joan laughed delightedly. “Perfectly true, Miss Greer,” she said. “In politics, which I know a little about, it’s the women workers who try to make deals first. The men want a knockdown, drag-out fight and when they can get what they want by a horse-trade they resent it.”

  Foreman looked up suddenly. The lineup now was clear. The two women were smiling with amused condescension at the two men. Mona Greer had cut out first him and then Boyce; she was making her play for Miss Lundberg. Boyce didn’t know what was going on; it was a good joke, amusing table talk, and he didn’t mind being the butt of a good joke.

  The lieutenant, still proud of himself, followed a slim red-headed girl down the aisle. Mona Greer touched his sleeve as he passed. “Lieutenant?”

  He turned courteously and said: “Ma’am?”

  “Lieutenant, I just wanted to say that I admired the way you quelled the near-riot. I think you were a perfect horse’s ass.”

  “Why, it’s very kind of you, ma’am—” the lieutenant began. Then his face
went very dark, and he turned and strode on.

  Joan Lundberg gasped, and Boyce strangled down a guffaw of surprise. “Was that right, Mr. Foreman?” Mona Greer asked. “Or should I have spat in his eye?”

  “You did very well, Miss Greer,” Foreman said, and again the words had been dragged from him. She would have been a great confidence woman. Struggle as he might, he couldn’t break out of the framework of the little drama she had composed for them all and in which they were all playing their parts. Mona the leading lady. Joan the admiring ingenue. Boyce the low comic. Foreman the ineffectual heavy. No hero, you’ll notice; not in Mona’s little script. Maybe its title was Anything They Can Do We Can Do Better.

  Joan Lundberg spoke her lines: “Miss Greer, why on earth did you say that?”

  “Oh, he looked so bloody smug I couldn’t stand it. Mr. Foreman couldn’t stand it either, but the iron discipline of the Old Army inhibited him. The Army’s gone to hell, hasn’t it, Mr. Foreman?”

  It was a dazzling jab that caught him flat-footed. Suddenly he was required to make a joking reply from the pretended viewpoint of a thirty-year man. Startled, all he could say was, after a lame pause: “So they tell me.” Mona’s look gave him a hint of arch sympathy. Too bad you’re so dumb; we’ll try not to notice it.

  The waiter brought their coffee.

  “You nice people,” Mona Greer smiled at them, “will you all come and have cocktails at six with me in my compartment? I’ve conscientiously brought my typewriter and I’m afraid I’ll get some work done if I don’t rigorously avoid it.”

  “Why, I’d love to,” Joan Lundberg said, and she meant it. Miss Greer—Mona—was turning out to be a very delightful person to know.

  “Sure; thanks!” Boyce said, dazzled.

  “Delighted,” Foreman said, after a pause. The woman was detestable, but his acceptance was in the script she had written for them. According to the script they were witty, civilized people who held small cocktail parties and accepted invitations to them. He couldn’t back out without a churlish explanation, loss of face, looks of wonder from the others.

  They paid their checks and rose, and filed down the aisle of the swaying diner. Their departure was the signal for the seating of the four disgruntled G.I.’s, who were still sulking.

  Chapter IX

  SNOW

  Willie Harris, station engineer at KLTG Denver, and Max Murphy, announcer, were drinking their lunch in the bar of the Hotel Schuyler.

  “—so I said to him, ‘sonny, we’re proud and grateful that you decided to offer us your services. And just as soon as we’re in the market for a half-baked youngster with a journalism degree and delusions of grandeur, we’ll let you know.’ Sixty-five a week he wanted, for God’s sake!”

  Harris haw-hawed. Murphy looked at his expensive announcer’s watch in sudden alarm. “Jesus,” he said. “Three minutes and twenty seconds to the noon newscast!” He streaked from the bar and upstairs to the studio, no time for the elevators. He arrived winded but with fifteen seconds to catch his breath before the mike.

  The double door from the newsroom opened and one of the boys laid the script on the table before him. On top of it was a bulletin torn direct from one of the teletypes.

  Murphy took a deep breath and said: “This is the twelve o’clock news. First, a bulletin from the wires of the Associated Press. Denver—the United States Weather Bureau here has just warned that the developing snowstorm over the Rockies may be the worst so far this winter—possibly in many winters. Snow and sub-zero temperatures may well combine to cause unprecedented damage to livestock on winter range and disruption of transportation and communication …”

  He could read it without bothering to think. Same old stuff, everybody trying to get into the act. He could taste the last rye-with-beer-chaser, and wondered why he—why so many radio people drank like fishes. Maybe because so many stations were in hotels…

  “…railroad officials said there is no cause for alarm and that delays will be only trifling. They admitted that snowplows are being held ready in case of…

  Chapter X

  UPPER AND LOWER BERTHS

  Boyce stood aside for Joan to slip in and take the seat by the window.

  “Do you think,” she asked abruptly, “that she meant it?”

  Boyce wondered for a wild moment whether they were back on politics, and if “she” was Eleanor Roosevelt. Then he caught on. Mona Greer’s cocktail party, of course.

  “Why, yes,” he said. “Do you think she might have been kidding?”

  “It suddenly crossed my mind. Why should she be interested in us? Why should she bother with us at all? She knows all kinds of people. Writers, artists.”

  “That fellow, Foreman—a newspaperman. They lead interesting lives.”

  She snorted.

  “I’m wrong?” he asked.

  “Lord, yes. I was a newspaperwoman. Deadly, dull routine. Maybe fifty or a hundred newspapermen in the country get to do interesting work, write about what they want, when they want. But by then they’re sixty years old. The rest are just people with a little bag of tricks any twelve-year-old could pick up in a month. Maybe the way things are going, they’ll have machines to do reporting and rewrite in another twenty years.”

  “How could that be?” he asked seriously.

  She laughed. “I was joking. But really, there are only a few dozen news stories. The only real difference between one robbery and another is how the blanks are filled in. Now, creative writing …” She fell into a silence.

  “Like Miss Greer,” he supplied. It was getting interesting. The girl was more than a humorless political fanatic.

  “Yes,” she said. And: “I still don’t understand it.”

  “These writers,” said Boyce. “Maybe she’s studying us. For her next book. I hear they do that. They don’t just copy a person cold, but they take one thing from one person and another thing from another and before you know it, they have a character. Maybe that’s what she’s up to.”

  “She doesn’t write about people like us. I’ve heard of her book. She writes about artists and sculptors and musicians. In places like Tangiers and Fire Island and Capri.”

  “Where’s Fire Island? I never heard of it.”

  “Frankly, neither have I. But every review I read of her book seemed to make a point of mentioning it. I guess it’s a very, very sophisticated resort that we rabble wouldn’t know about.”

  “She is sophisticated,” he agreed. “I’ve sold carpets to some very, very wealthy people—but she’s different. She must be the kind that goes to one of those decorator places and gets rooked. Wouldn’t be seen in any place as common as a first-rate department store.”

  She laughed with him; it made him feel good. And then, defending her new friend Mona against her new friend Boyce, she argued: “But maybe she sees more in us than we know we have in us. For instance, I’m a pianist and a good one. Maybe a writer can tell.”

  “Pianist too? You’re a very remarkable young lady!”

  “I never did anything serious with it; I’m not good enough for that—not nowadays, with the competition what it is. And I don’t have a piano where I am—you’re not Swedish, are you?”

  “No; not a bit.”

  And then Joan found herself telling him about the damned prying Nilsens, making it a funny story, a battle of wits between her and them in which privacy was the prize. Then she noticed that her hands were shaking and her voice was too shrill. She put her hands on her knees and pressed them there; the shaking stopped. She concluded flatly: “So you see, I’m really going to have to move out of there the first chance I get.”

  Such a thought had never crossed her mind before. The place was clean and convenient and the spying was a minor nuisance; she had nothing to hide from the Nilsens or anybody. And yet she had just told this man as a foregone conclusion that she was
moving out.

  “Sometimes,” said Boyce, “I get that feeling myself. Times when I know I’ve taken absolutely as much as I can stand.”

  “What do you do then? Ah—drink?”

  He shrugged. “No. I just go on standing it. You can’t run away from a good job. Where do you work, Miss Lundberg?”

  She had long ago perfected a little routine for calming people staggered by the fact that she didn’t have to work, that she had an independent income. “There’s a little trust fund that keeps me going,” she said. “If I ever want to buy something new I get a job somewhere until I’ve saved up enough.” She had actually had to do it once only, when she thought she wanted a car, changed her mind when she got it and turned it back to the dealer in a week.

  At this point most people pretended that they understood perfectly; that they knew dozens of people situated exactly like her; that only some accident or other had prevented them from having a little trust fund that kept them going. But Boyce said wonderingly: “I never met anybody before who didn’t have to work. What’s it like?”

  She thought a long minute before answering. “I suppose,” she said slowly, “I’m freer this way. I can spend my time on what’s important, which to my mind is politics. There are so very few of us, so much to be done. I put in a ten-hour day. During campaigns, more. What’s it like? I don’t really know; I’ve never had to work. I suppose my father worked hard enough for two, so here I am with a check once a month from the Midland Trust people.”

  He had worked hard, her father. Society portrait painter; wit, bon vivant, indefatigable Don Juan, fountain of vitality and charm until the last horrible days. He had worked hard, her damnably interesting, damnably brilliant father, whose brilliance had made her childhood a hell on earth…

  She said dryly: “He gave me an education, which is more than most people get, and some money, which is a lot more than most people get. I suppose he was all right.” She noticed that her hands were trembling again, and again she pressed them against her knees.