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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Boyce watched her and knew suddenly that she was in terror, of what he could not guess. And he would have given the world to take her in his arms and comfort her fear… he thought of the last woman he had taken in his arms. That tramp at the dance hall. That disgusting tramp who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. That tramp who was not unlike his wife, who also knew what and how. The pair of them utterly unlike this girl beside him, this girl who was, he thought, very much like himself.

  Joan Lundberg said: “About Miss Greer. I suppose I should try and sell her on good government. Maybe she could make it the theme of her next book—”

  They both paused and thought and laughed at the idea. Laughed rather shakily.

  “Not her,” Boyce said emphatically.

  “Well, why not?” Joan demanded. “It’s everybody’s business; why not hers? She has talent, she can reach thousands of people. I really ought to try.” She stared for a moment at the blurred and flying landscape through the window. “But I won’t,” she said. “I’m on vacation—at least while I’m on the train.”

  “Look,” Boyce pointed. “Snow!”

  It was a white flurry that seemed to move horizontally because of the speed of the train.

  “I feel mixed up,” Joan Lundberg said. “Excuse me, please.” She slid past Boyce and went to the ladies’ room at the end of the car, frozen-faced as a lady should be on such an errand. Her discontent, her bewilderment, the feeling that something long knotted-up was going to come loose, usually meant one thing, which happened every twenty-eight days.

  In the dressing room she fished through her handbag and found the little card with an insurance company’s name and a calendar for the year printed on it. She checked the date last circled: thirteen days ago. She was not coming sick, no matter how much it felt like it.

  A woman smoking on one of the leather seats noticed the card, guessed at it, and cleared her throat to ask: “Is anything wrong? Can I lend you anything?”

  Joan looked at her and found her young, fat and ruddy.

  “No,” she told her. “Thanks very much. I just feel a little under the weather. Maybe I’m carsick.”

  The fat girl said: “Want to stretch out here? The Pullman maid’s got aspirin. Uh, maybe you could use a drink?” Shyly she produced a dark pint bottle which had been wedged between her meaty thigh and the wall of the car. “Cognac. The best.” She held out the bottle and Joan distractedly took it. Hadn’t she just said it was a vacation, at least while she was on the train? Snow swirled past the window.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Maybe it will make me feel better.” She took one of the little rinsing cups from the wall dispenser and poured it half-full, balancing against the sway of the car, and gulped it down.

  “No wash,” the fat girl commented. “I don’t bother myself.”

  Joan nodded, her throat on fire, and handed back the bottle. She had to sit down.

  “Bet you don’t know where I come from,” the fat girl said, pouring herself a drink in a paper cup and wedging the bottle back into hiding. “The Galapagos Islands. I’ll bet you don’t know where they are.”

  “Off the western coast of South America,” Joan said. Her voice sounded very clear and distant to her. “Turtles.”

  “Good for you!” her friend said. “Everybody knows about the turtles but I bet you’re the only person on the Continent that knows what ocean they’re in. People tell me India, China, Siberia, the Mediterranean. You a schoolteacher?”

  “No. I’m a—I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Joan began to cry, sitting straight upright with her hands folded in her lap.

  “For God’s sake,” the girl said. She got up and went to the sink, and Joan dimly saw that she was not only fat but pregnant, and began to cry harder.

  “Here,” the girl said, giving her another of the paper cups. “Should I try to scare up a doctor for you?”

  Joan gulped the cupful—more cognac, with water. The thin, fiery spirit curled warmly in her stomach and after a moment she felt less alone, less knotted-up and about to come loose and she could stop crying with loneliness and apprehension.

  Her voice, though, still shook when she said: “I think I’ll be all right. Feels like cramps—I mean I’m depressed like with cramps—only nothing’s going on.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose with Kleenex which somehow had got into her hand.

  “If it was last month I could understand that,” the girl said. “I don’t go in for astrology or bunk like that, but I notice my period’s always a few days off schedule around the summer solstice. Of course,” she said, looking down on her bulging abdomen with wry pride, “it hasn’t happened lately.”

  “When’s the baby due?” Joan asked eagerly.

  “About a month, I guess.”

  “You left the—the Galapagos Islands to have it?”

  “My friend, I was kicked out of the Galapagos Islands to have it. My loving parents thought the native boys would talk.” She held out her left hand. There was no ring on the third finger. “I am a remittance woman.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re very good,” the fat girl grinned. “You know what ocean the Galapagos Islands are in and you don’t ask me who the father is and what I’m going to do.”

  “Really,” Joan began faintly, and then stopped. It was like something that would happen on the detestable, pinko south side. It was the kind of encounter which one feared and avoided. But, astonishingly, this woman—this loose-moraled, unreticent, undoubtedly pinko person—was a nice person who had helped her. Joan held tight, tight, fearing she would cry again.

  A slim, lovely red-headed girl—Joan knew her; she had lunched with the lieutenant Mona Greer insulted—swept in between the dusty curtains and yanked open one of the booth doors as though there were no possibility of it being locked against her entrance. It clicked behind her, arrogantly.

  The fat girl grinned at the door and muttered: “Boston. She joy-pops.”

  “I—I beg your pardon?”

  “Joy-pops. Takes narcotics.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” protested Joan.

  “Everybody uses it where I come from. The field hands are Peruvians, and coca’s the biggest industry in Peru.”

  “You must be teasing me. If everybody took cocaine no work would get done, they’d all get sick—it’s impossible,” Joan smiled. She wouldn’t be taken in by travellers’ tales.

  “That’s all you know about it, my friend,” said the girl good-humoredly. “Cocaine’s bad stuff. It’s white man stuff. But coca leaf—well, the Indians have been taking it for at least four thousand years. And they still call it ‘gift of God’.”

  “But dope’s bad,” Joan said.

  “Yes?” asked the fat girl, lighting a cigarette. “You like music? Opera?”

  “I used to go to the Chicago Opera. What’s—?”

  “You know about the golden age of opera forty-fifty years ago? When great singers were a dime a dozen?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “They did it on coca, my friend. A smart Corsican named Angelo Mariani put out Mariani’s Vin Coca—good wine with coca leaves steeping in it. It was popular with singers, and that’s where the golden age of opera came from. It gave them endurance and skill, the way it gives Peruvian miners and porters endurance and skill. The golden age of opera ended when the French government outlawed Vin Coca because it was cutting into champagne sales.”

  The girl didn’t seem to be kidding and she did seem to be terrifyingly well-informed. “But dope,” Joan said helplessly.

  “Anything’s good if you use it right. Anything’s bad if you use it wrong. Like that one.” She jerked her chin at the closed booth door.

  “You know a great deal.”

  “My friend, you too would know a great deal if you were a lonesome fat girl on a godforsaken island with
a good library on the estancia and the ground rules didn’t let you play with Americanos del Sur.” She looked down at her abdomen with the same wry smile. “But I did,” she grinned.

  “You mean—with a native?”

  She should despise her, Joan knew. Everybody knew that the pinkos wanted intermarriage, that they held it out to catch the Negro vote that should belong forever to the Democrats who gave them F.D.R. This experience should be embarrassing and ugly—but she wanted to giggle instead at the thought of the parents being outwitted and outraged. This was most upsetting.

  “I don’t recommend it for anybody else,” the fat girl said. “I liked them. They were nice guys. They all claimed they were descended from the Inca kings, which was the bunk. Prescott proves it in Conquest of Mexico and Peru. But they couldn’t read Prescott and believed it, so what difference did it make? They were all nice guys.”

  “Excuse me,” Joan said. “I don’t mean to pry. But I want to know. Since you’re going to have a baby. Shouldn’t you try to lose weight? And about the drinking. Really, I’m not trying to push you around.” Perhaps the girl didn’t know about the dangers of overweight to the mother during delivery. Perhaps she might be able to help her.

  “That’s all right,” the girl said. “Some impressive medical talent agrees that I won’t live through it.”

  “But,” Joan said wildly after a long pause, “that can’t be true. Caesarians—”

  “A Caesarian,” the girl said. “It doesn’t sound bad. ‘Caesarian section.’ But it sounds mighty bad if you call it poisoning me until I almost die but not quite—that’s the general anaesthetic—and then cutting me open clear to the uterus, yanking the baby out and sewing me up again. They tell me my heart won’t take it.”

  The red-headed girl came out of the booth, looked at them and asked in a brittle, finishing-school voice: “May I join the hen party?” Joan noted that the pupils of her eyes were contracted to pin-points. So some of it was true, then.

  “Please do,” the fat girl said. “We were talking about life.”

  “Splendid,” the red-headed girl said. “Mostly my husband talks about death. He’s going to manage a supply depot on a certain Asiatic island which must be nameless because of security requirements. He’s scared out of his wits, God love him.” She lit a cigarette.

  “He woke me up couple of nights ago at three-thirty. Not for anything interesting, mind you. He’d been lying there and thinking. If the balloon goes up, he tells me, he wants me to wait for him. He will return.”

  “What balloon is this?” asked the pregnant girl.

  “Civilians! Service people don’t say ‘If World War Three starts’. They say ‘If the balloon goes up.’ Don’t ask me why; that’s just the jargon. Anyway, he has it all figured out. They’ll invade the island with a fleet of junks. The first wave of troops will be fanatics, specially trained, kill-crazy. His duty, he says, is to stay out of the hands of the assault wave of troops; they’ll butcher everybody in uniform. After the island’s taken and they begin to organize, he’ll come down out of the hills and surrender himself to a commissioned officer, the higher the better. They’ll ship him to the mainland, they’ll march him to a prison camp in the interior, and then he’ll be okay if he lasts out the march. That, he says, depends on the weather. The point is, when he’s reported missing in action, I’m not to jump to any conclusions and start messing around. He’ll take care of himself and he’ll be back.”

  “So there’s going to be another war,” the pregnant girl said.

  “Certainly not,” Joan said sharply. “The policy of containment—”

  The red-headed girl laughed sharply. “Civilians!” she said again. “What I wouldn’t give to be a civilian again. The war is on for us service people; we’re just waiting for it to hit the headlines. Rick’s been a Pentagon Indian for the past eighteen months, on a ten-hour, six-day week. And that doesn’t mean Sundays off, either. They work a swing-shift. And we’ve been watching our friends getting their troop-duty assignments one by one. Oh, those farewell parties. Germany’s good duty, lots of housing and servants, and there you are right on the front line—”

  “When the balloon goes up,” said Joan.

  “Yes. England’s good duty too. Afternoon tea and all that. And then one day six medium-size atomic bombs blow up six English ports and the English starve to death in a few months, and you starve with them unless you’re air-lifted back to the States. Oh, England’s swell duty. But Asia. Kids, that’s it. They hate our living guts, every last brown-skinned brother out there. The place not to be when the balloon goes up is Asia. So naturally that’s where they’re sending Rick.”

  “But we have firm friends in Asia,” Joan said. “The Philippines. Japan. I watch the international situation—”

  “Good,” said the red-headed girl. “You do that. Service wives don’t watch the international situation; we watch the little back-page items. Like what happened the day after the Japanese got back their sovereignty. They celebrated by arresting about fifty G.I.’s and officers for being drunk and disorderly. We knew one of the officers and we knew he never took a drink in his life. And Rick—he’ll have to fly to get to the island. Maybe a Mig will knock his transport down on general principles and if they pick him up he’ll be tried as a spy. You know what they do to them; maybe he’ll wind up admitting he’s a spy. You know what they do to them.”

  “Lot of if’s and maybe’s in that,” the pregnant girl said wryly. Joan knew she was thinking about her own case, about which there seemed to be no if’s or maybe’s at all.

  “It’s a bore, isn’t it?” the red-headed girl asked brightly. “Well, where are you girls headed?”

  “National Conference of Democratic Women’s Clubs in San Francisco,” said Joan. “I’m delegate from the Scandia Club in Chicago.”

  “That’s interesting. Will you give the ladies a message from me?”

  “Uh—of course.”

  “Tell ’em they can do a few things for me. Tell ’em Rick’s four years at the Academy ought to be computed as active service for pay and longevity, will you? Tell ’em there ought to be some kind of civilian medical care available for dependents where there aren’t service facilities. Tell ’em to pass the Substandard Housing Act so service people won’t get swindled by trailer camps and tourist courts. Tell ’em—oh, just tell them to stop treating the Regulars like stepchildren.”

  “I’ll try,” said Joan.

  “You think I’m a spoiled brat, don’t you?”

  There was a long silence. The red-headed girl got up and dropped her cigarette. “I’m sorry I intruded,” she said, quite tonelessly, and swept through the curtains.

  “Hell,” the fat girl said, angry with herself. “Now we’ve hurt her feelings. I’m sorry about that.”

  “She shouldn’t have talked that way about her husband.”

  “She talked the way she had to.”

  Two middle-aged women came in, talking, and went into the booths. They carried on their conversation, indistinctly, from booth to booth.

  “I think I’ll get back to my seat,” Joan said. “It’s been nice talking to you. I hope I’ll see you again.”

  Good heavens, it had been nice talking to her, she marveled as she swayed down the aisle to her seat. And oddly, with this thought came another thought: that it was really not very nice talking to Mona Greer, for all her fame and wit and chic. Which was absurd. Of course it was nice talking to Mona Greer; anybody who was famous, witty and chic must be nice to talk to and listen to.

  She thought Boyce’s eyebrows went up a little as she slid past him to the window seat. The snow was now a white muslin sheet hung against the window. You could see telegraph poles, ghosts of telegraph poles, flashing past but nothing more.

  “If you smell liquor on my breath,” she told Boyce a little tartly, “it’s because I didn’t feel well and a woman
in the rest room happened to offer me some brandy.”

  “I wish,” Boyce said disconsolately, “you’d brought some for me. I’ve just been sitting here watching the snow and feeling so blue I could bawl. And it’s stupid. I’m in the prime of life, I’ve got a fair career cut out, I’ve got a good wife. Dr. Anthony, what’s my problem?” They laughed at the oldie, briefly and artificially.

  “No children?” Joan asked.

  There was a look of pain on his face, but his voice was cheerful enough—cheerful and phony as a square grape. “No; we don’t want them. We’re too selfish, I guess. Why raise a family in times like these.”

  Joan almost began a furious protest, but choked it off before it started. He was lying. He wanted children; he wasn’t selfish; he wanted to raise a family in times like these or any other times.

  “May I see her picture?” she asked. It was a safe guess; he pulled his wallet from his left hip pocket and showed her the inevitable picture. It was a reduction of a, say, fifteen-dollar Michigan Boulevard photographer’s studio portrait. The woman was a brunette, small-eyed, slightly pudgy-nosed. Her lips were curved in a half-smile and her lips were lowered invitingly. A housewife-whore, at least by virtue of the fifteen-dollar Michigan Boulevard studio.

  “Thanks. She’s pretty,” Joan said.

  “You’re prettier,” Boyce told her, not looking at her.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that,” she said sharply.

  “All right,” he said. “I won’t. Usually I don’t.”

  It was embarrassing. He stared at his toes and she stared through the window, or tried to. There was nothing to see but the zipping wraiths of telephone poles, and they were getting harder to see. The snow was becoming heavier. They were heading west, and it was not yet dusk.

  Of course he shouldn’t have talked like that. Whatever faults the woman had, she was his wife. Joan wondered what the fat girl from the Galapagos Islands would have to say about that. After she had punished him with a few more minutes of stony silence she would tell him about her—not the intimate stuff. That wasn’t any man’s business.