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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  But when she turned to him after five minutes—judged by a furtive glance at her wrist watch—he had dozed off.

  Damn him! she thought.

  He looked small, defenseless and mousier than ever, and very tired. Apparently one of his wife’s faults was addiction to canned goods and the delicatessen. He was a man suffering from the fatigue of years on an unbalanced diet, and the lines in his face spoke of other strains: unexpressed angers, appetites denied.

  She could take better care of a man than that. And any woman who didn’t want children was a fool and didn’t deserve a husband.

  But of course whatever faults she had, she was his wife.

  Chapter XI

  SNOW

  Daniel Menafee, his left hand on the dead man’s button and his right on the throttle of the giant twin diesel-electric locomotive, hummed to himself as the train flashed proudly past the town of Alhambra. He could read the station sign in spite of the thickening snow.

  He glanced at the clock, though it was hardly necessary. He was on schedule to the second. The long list of towns the train would flash past unrolled in his mind without an effort, together with the times of departure. Why, the snow meant nothing to the thundering monster he controlled with his fingertips!

  His “fireman” asked: “Spell you, Dan?”

  Daniel Menafee grunted once for “no.” Sometimes he had to be spelled, when his bladder was ready to burst, but until then he didn’t like to turn over this beautiful monster to any other hands.

  Wenatchi flashed past.

  This time he couldn’t read the station sign.

  Chapter XII

  COMPARTMENT

  Mona Greer lay in the dark on the floor of her compartment, feeling the jar of the roadbed through her hips and shoulders. It distracted her. This was supposed to be two hours of utter relaxation during the afternoon—a practice said to have prolonged the life and looks of Lady Mendl and other European beauties. Mona had been faithfully lying on the floor for two hours in the dark daily for some months now. It was rather silly, it cut into her day and one could never be sure of whether it worked, but something had to be done. Mona Greer was growing old and knew it.

  She got up from the floor and stretched out on one of the two lowers in her compartment. It was better. She couldn’t clear her mind of random thoughts because of the jolting, but she could feel her muscles go soft one by one, the tautness in her felt relaxing, her leg muscles and thigh muscles turning limp…

  But thoughts still came crowding in. She had, thank God, a few good years left whether this absurd business worked or not. More and more her habitat would become candlelit cafes; more and more of her time she would spend in Europe. Never, she told herself passionately, never would she become a Maggie Buckle, fat and shrieking, getting her vicarious kicks from the goings-on of the young folks. And never, by God, never, would she buy it. She had money; that’s what husbands are for; but no young tart would ever get a nickel of it from her. That would be an essential denial of what she stood for. Robert Graves, one of the few men alive who understood women, wrote: “…to overpower by the perfumed sweetness of her presence …” That was essential. The climactic explosions through the flesh were only part of it. “…to overpower by the perfumed sweetness of her presence …”; to feel the submission she commanded, to savor the climax and then to confirm her mastery of the pleasure-instrument by breaking her and throwing her away with a few choice words of revelation or a crack of one’s palm across a tear-wet face. She liked them to cry, she thought lazily; it set off one’s own relaxation in higher relief. Without pain there could be no pleasure, of course, since they are opposites. There, darling! By irrefutable logic you confirm the truth of what you know by instinct. She smiled in the dark, not knowing that the smile was a crazy, teeth-baring, raging grin of predatory hatred.

  Her little traveling clock sounded its alarm and she swung from the berth and snapped up the shades. Snow: sheets of it. A freak of the wind blasted a clear tunnel through the falling white for a moment and she saw rolling cornland blanketed for hundreds of yards before the curtain dropped again.

  Humming scraps of Debussy, she selected her wardrobe. Nothing would happen tonight with that wrapped-up, tense blonde girl Joan Lundberg, but it was as well to feel secure. She chose a satin-and-lace strapless black corselet and smilingly mouthed the Victorian euphemism: invincible bastion of honor. It hung from her hands, a rectangle of flimsy cloth, puckered and pocketed into shapelessness. The shapelessness startlingly conformed to her body as she held it against her. With pretty concentration, her arms behind her worked the hooks and eyes of honor’s invincible bastion.

  The old frauds had probably known quite well that there are men and women, hundreds of thousands of them, who are driven especially crazy by corsets as some are by fancy high heels, others long hair and still others actually go for rubber raincoats in this mad world.

  She hesitated between brown and black nylons and chose the black, thinking: the touch of bitchery and witchery, but not overdone. Over it all, the Little Black Dress that would look exactly that to the men, and which the girl would instantly know cost four hundred and fifty dollars in Paris. A bizarre variation in gold of one of those British regimental badges, a piece of Greenwich Village slop her publisher had given her, caught the neckline and led the eye to speculate on the valley between her firm breasts.

  She tied on a prosaic bib and began the minute preparation of her face. She did not finish a second too soon. At a knock on the door she whisked the bib off and out of sight. She could not call: “Who is it?” She had to open the door smiling, to deny that anything untoward could ever happen to her, that any situation could arise that she did not dominate.

  It was Foreman, alone. “Am I early?” he asked.

  She glanced at the traveling clock and said: “Exactly seven and one-half minutes, Mr. Foreman. Come in; I was dying of boredom. Tell me all about the fascinating life you musicians lead.”

  “Newspapermen,” he said.

  “Of course. I knew it was one of the major arts. You’re an—an entertainment columnist, I think you said?”

  “I didn’t say. I’m a wire-service man. You get to do everything on the wire services. I’ve covered executions, I’ve had a column reviewing kiddies, phonograph records, I’ve been a basketball dopester. Right now I’m being a junior-type executive on my way to set up a San Francisco news bureau.”

  “Mr. Foreman,” she said, “how are wire-service men at mixing drinks? An enemy of mine once gave me a thing called a Port-Ur-Bar and my New England conscience won’t let me throw it away.” She displayed the leather monstrosity, a suitcase outwardly and a compact little bar inside: tools, glassware for four, scotch, rye, gin, vermouth and brandy. “Ring for ice, and we have it made.”

  He rang, and told the porter.

  “You travel in style,” he said.

  “Isn’t it disgusting, Mr. Foreman? To like nice things and be able to afford them? I’m thinking of sharing my bounty. Perhaps Miss Lundberg, if tactfully approached, could be persuaded to move in with me. I don’t like to see a pretty girl traveling in an upper berth like a paper-box salesman.”

  “Can you do that?” he asked evenly. “Arrange it with the conductor?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve done it before.”

  Now was the time, Foreman thought, to speak. And say—what? Lady, you’re a Lesbian? Lady, leave that sweet innocent kid alone or I will have you put off the train? Quite impossible. Mona Greer’s little playlet didn’t have room in it for such lines. Nobody knew whether she was a Lesbian or not. Nobody could put her off the train. Nobody could stop her from doing such a generous and disinterested thing as offering one of her three spare berths to a nice girl traveling alone.

  The ineffectual heavy spoke his lines: “What’ll I mix?”

  “For me, a bucket of four-to-one martinis. And I take my
martinis seriously, Mr. Foreman. They are the Doric Order of cocktails. You must pour the booze on the ice and stir gently or nothing can save you. The last wire service man who mixed martinis for me dropped the ice in the booze. He was about to shake them instead of stirring when I went for him with the paring knife and had his left eye out.”

  “I heard about that,” Foreman said. “Old Blinky Kaplan. His friends got him onto the Herald-American; he does a column three times a week reviewing the popcorn in the second run movie houses.”

  “You get to do everything on a Hearst paper,” Mona said soberly, and they laughed.

  What the hell, Foreman thought, remembering the ancient Chinese advice to a young lady about to be raped: relax and enjoy yourself. She was kind of nasty but she had brains and charm, the way a lot of queers do. You don’t go out of your way to meet them, but if you’re half-way civilized you don’t slug them and walk away indignantly either. You take them as people with problems of their own and you relax and enjoy yourself if possible. And maybe he had this figured out wrong.

  “What’s the Ionic Order of cocktails, Miss Greer?” he asked.

  “The three-in-ones: sidecars, stingers, alexanders.”

  “And the Corinthian Order?”

  “The old fashioned, rightly known as ‘whisky and garbage.’”

  “We agree on cocktails, if on nothing else.”

  The ice arrived, in a bowl with tongs. Foreman tipped a quarter and was carefully mixing four-to-one martinis when Joan Lundberg and Boyce arrived. The first dinner chimes were echoing through the car.

  Something happened then. The barglass sloshed wildly in Foreman’s hands as he struggled for balance. Mona Greer was flung back into a berth, displaying a length of silk-clad leg to the thigh. Boyce and Joan clutched at each other and cannoned together into the compartment. They heard the dinner chimes crash to the corridor floor outside with a great jangle. And then everything went on as before while they picked themselves up and Foreman mopped martini from the lapel of his jacket.

  The pullman porter’s head popped into the open door. “Everything all right in here, folks?” he asked soothingly.

  “So it seems,” Mona told him. “What was that?”

  “My guess, ma’am, the engineer reduced speed when he saw a snowdrift across the track. We take snowdrifts slow. Thank you, ma’am.” He was gone.

  “We’ll be late,” Mona said angrily. “I knew it. Stop playing with that booze, Foreman. Pour for a thirsty lady.”

  Foreman poured a brimming glass and passed it to her, trying not to grin. Sudden pneumatic brakes were something she couldn’t handle. Perhaps there were other things.

  “Martinis?” he asked Joan and Boyce.

  “Whew. Yes, please,” the rug man said. “I hope they ring a bell before they do that the next time. I’m awfully sorry I grabbed you, Joan.”

  Mona Greer raised her brows at the name. The girl didn’t notice. “That’s all right,” she said a little shakily. “I grabbed you too.” And to Foreman: “I’d better not have any. I wasn’t feeling well after lunch and somebody gave me some brandy.”

  “Quite right, little one,” Mona Greer said. “Stick with what you start with.” She herself neatly poured a pony of brandy and put it into Joan’s hand. Foreman, filling two more cocktail glasses, admired the deftness of it.

  Mona raised her glass and said: “I give you Cyrus Field, by whose engineering genius and vision the broad Atlantic is now spanned with a telegraphic cable.”

  “Hear-hear!” said Foreman warmly. Boyce looked bewildered, but drank dutifully with the rest of them.

  Foreman cleared his throat modestly and said: “I should like to toast a little-known hero of American industry. Ladies and gentleman, I give you the plant numbers-runner.”

  Boyce finally got it, and grinned happily. Foreman gravely refilled the three cocktail glasses and Mona made for the brandy flask.

  “No,” Joan laughed. “Really, I’ll fall on my face.”

  “Little one, logic forces me to point out that you did fall on your face a minute ago and no harm was done. Besides, Mr. Boyce is going to give the next toast.” Joan laughed and yielded.

  Boyce stood with his glass poised and a frown of concentration on his face for long seconds and then declared: “Ladies and gentlemen, this occasion cannot pass without us paying honor to one of the nation’s leading sonsa-bitches in the great field of retail merchandising. I give you Mr. Gottfried Oberholtzer, my boss.”

  Joan giggled and said: “It’s my turn, isn’t it? Um… Madame Chairlady, members, guests, parents, children, friends, enemies and visitors—I rise on a point of personal privilege to put in nomination—no, to name a man who combines the dignity of Washington, the tenderness of Jefferson, the clemency of Adams, the piety of Lincoln, the modesty of McClellan and the statesmanship of Bugs Bunny. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Louis Pasteur, played by Paul Muni.”

  They said: “Hear-hear!” and drank.

  “I know when I’m licked, little one,” Mona said. “I’m out of my class when there’s a politician present.”

  “‘Party worker’ is a nicer way to put it, Miss Greer,” Joan said primly.

  “Call me Mona, little one. Anybody who can make one of those ‘a man who’ speeches on an empty stomach I am proud to have for a friend.”

  There was a diffident knock on the door. Annoyed, Mona rose and opened it.

  A well-dressed lantern-jawed fellow said: “I’m awfully sorry to have disturbed you if everything’s all right. I’m Dr. Groves. I know the porter checked, but I thought I ought to ask if anybody got hurt in that bump. Are you all okay in here?”

  “Yes, and thanks very much, doctor. You’re being very conscientious, I’m sure.”

  “With the help of Providence, ma’am,” he said as they both started to turn. The word galvanized her. “Doctor!” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Are you a medical doctor or a doctor of divinity?”

  “I’m a medical doctor, ma’am, and a Bachelor of Theology. A medical missionary.”

  “Oh. I see. Thanks very much for your trouble.” She closed the door and smiled at her guests. “We seem to be staffed for any emergency. Of course his wife is working the other side of the train—a dowdy registered nurse who distributes tracts and cathartic pills.”

  A silence hung in the air.

  “Don’t you approve of medical missionaries?” Foreman asked quietly.

  “Since you put it to me that bluntly, I’ll be equally blunt. No. They gobbled up Hawaii, giving in return their tracts, cathartic pills and syphilis. The Nizam of Hyderabad told me last year in Karachi that the Pakistanis regard American medical missionaries as worse than Reds. It’s the fashion to laugh at the Nizam as a miser, but he’s a shrewd little fellow who knows a good deal more about how the natives feel and think than I do—or you do.”

  Foreman felt forlornly that it was a colossal bluff—but how to call it? He was one down again. And Boyce was expressing awe at her visit to India—”Not India, my dear man: Pakistan. There are zealots who’ll cut your throat over that little point.”—and wanting to know what it was really like—”Not as bad as most of us think here; it’s a food-surplus area, you know, and in Asia that means it’s a heaven on earth”—and what about the fabulous riches of the native princes—”Seventy-five percent talk, Mr. Boyce, and the rest is gold bars and precious stones stuck in the ground somewhere. The American rich live better and have more security”—and had she seen Nehru—”No; wrong country again, Mr. Boyce” and lots more. Through it all Joan Lundberg listened with awe, a little drunk besides.

  It all sounded remarkably to Foreman like rehashed material from the Asia-conscious Saturday Review he read each week. He mixed himself another martini while the grand tour went on and on.

  “That’s enough,” Mona said at last. “I�
��m starving. We can eat in here, you know, instead of having to buck that chow-line back there.”

  Then why didn’t you at lunch? Foreman silently asked. Were you afraid you wouldn’t make a pickup? But he rang for the porter when she asked him to.

  The table was set up with Mona and Joan sitting side by side, Joan at the window seat.

  During dinner the only incident of note was that the train slowed several times to a crawl, which made the lady novelist curse picturesquely.

  Over coffee their hostess announced: “We’re going to preserve the amenities here, even if it’s got to be in a slightly bassackwards fashion. There’s no drawing room for the ladies to retire to, so you men will beat it out of here for your cigars and port in the club car. After a reasonable interval one of you will say: ‘Shall we join the ladies?’ and then you come on back where Joan and I will have been talking women-talk. Mr. Foreman, I’ll trust you to see that the port goes around the table left-handed.”

  On their way back to the club car Boyce asked shyly what Miss Greer had been talking about. “She’s over my head sometimes, Foreman. I couldn’t make out that crack about the port.”

  “Just a joke, I guess,” Foreman said. Just a joke to make him and Boyce look like ignorant yahoos compared to suave, all-knowing Mona Greer and her intimate friend Joan Lundberg.

  Chapter XIII

  SNOW

  As winter dusk closed down on the Rockies, drifting began. There’s a projecting rock that has a calm lee side where the wind doesn’t whisk away snow as soon as it falls. A handful of dry powdery snow accumulates there, then a bushelful that makes its own calm lee side where still more of the dry, powdery stuff can drift in.

  It happens fast. The dunes grow along rocks, ridges, railroad embankments, like living things.

  The first hour, six inches. The second hour, a foot. The third hour, a yard. The fourth hour, two, four or five yards until gravity won’t let them grow any taller. But already they are tall enough to smother a tall man trying to flounder his way through them.