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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  And when the sun goes down, cold clamps the Rockies like an iron vice.

  Chapter XIV

  CLUB CAR

  The torpedo-shaped club car was almost filled. There were coach passengers who had no business there, nursing bottles of beer, there were the settled drinkers who had picked big chairs in early afternoon and soaked steadily from then on, nourishing themselves on sandwiches from the bar, and there were the after-dinner customers like them, rather crowded in small chairs at small tables. Just two adjacent chairs were left, and Boyce and Foreman fell into them.

  “Hello there,” somebody leaned over. It was Dr. Groves, of whom Mona Greer disapproved. He had a bottle of Danish beer before him, and beside him a dark little woman with snapping eyes was drinking a coke.

  “Hello, doctor,” Foreman said. “Did you get any business out of that sudden stop?”

  “Broken right metatarsal arch in car 17,” the doctor-missionary said happily. “A woman’s vanity case fell on her foot from the baggage rack. My wife—this is Mrs. Groves, gentlemen, an R.N. and a lay preacher of considerable power—my wife diagnosed it and I set it.”

  Foreman tried futilely to rise from the little table at the introduction, but didn’t make it. “How do you do, Mrs. Groves. My name’s Foreman and this is Mr. Boyce. Both from Chicago.”

  “How do you do. My sister married a man named Foreman in Boise, Idaho. Would that have been a relative of yours?”

  One of those genealogical discussions was well-launched when a neat officer’s blouse trimmed with silver bars and a few campaign ribbons leaned drunkenly over the table.

  “Listen, you,” the first lieutenant said to Foreman. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not mad; I’m just curious. What was she driving at?”

  “Who, lieutenant?” Foreman asked innocently, though he knew perfectly well.

  “That lady at your table. When she called me that. What kind of a stunt was that for her to pull? What was I supposed to do, let those G.I.’s holler and bitch all they wanted to? Matterfact I lettem off easy, di’n’t I?”

  Well, looking at it that way, the lieutenant was right and Foreman felt a little ashamed of himself, though not much. “I don’t know her well,” he hedged. “She’s a peculiar person. A novelist.”

  “Oh,” the lieutenant said gravely as though that explained everything. “I see.” He straightened and took the arm of a patiently-waiting slim girl with red hair. Foreman noticed that the doctor gave her a sharp, sudden glance for no good reason.

  “Novelist, did you say?” Dr. Groves asked absently. “Who is, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “The lady who met you at the door. She’s Mona Greer. She wrote Thighs of the Wild Mare. It made a big splash in the spring.”

  “Oh,” said the doctor unhappily. “I know. I’m afraid she’s a bad one, Foreman. I use the term technically.”

  “She thinks you’re a pretty bad one too, doctor. She has no use for medical missionaries.”

  “Something to drink, gentlemen?” asked the club car attendant.

  “Brandy and soda for me,” Foreman said. “Boyce?”

  “Same, please.”

  They arrived in the little train bottles decreed by some mysterious working of the law of the land.

  “Miss Greer,” he told the medical missionary, “says the Nizam of Hyderabad told her that his people hate you people worse than they do the Reds.”

  “How odd,” Dr. Groves said, not taking it at all personally. “I worked in Assam, in Bengal you know, and we never ran into anything like that. Of course the political and religious situations are entirely different. Hyderabad’s Muslim and rather quietist, where Assam is Hindu and terribly excitable and turbulent. I never heard anything like Miss Greer’s complaint against us—or the Nizam’s alleged complaint.”

  His little wife crackled: “Come off it B.G., and say what you think. She’s a blooming liar. She’s a professional do-badder so naturally she hates us professional do-gooders and lies about us.”

  “Really, dear,” Dr. Groves said deprecatingly. “I haven’t any right—”

  “If she’s got the right to sugar-coat her poison and feed it to the public in the form of an arty novel, you’ve got the right to tell them what she’s up to.”

  “Look,” Foreman said hastily. “What’s her book about, anyway? We’ve been thrown together on the train and I haven’t read it. It’s embarrassing.”

  “You’re better off not to have read it,” the doctor said shortly. “I did, in line of duty. (I know people laugh when you say things like that, but it’s the truth.) It’s a dreamy, voluptuous novel which describes the progress of a Lesbian from initiation to the point where she is initiating young girls herself. There’s a great deal of hifalutin’ talk in it about freedom and the right to choose one’s innocent pleasures. There’s not a word in it about the dreadful immorality of an older, stronger person seducing a younger, weaker person into a way of life. By extension Miss Greer’s book would justify rape, bank-robbery and murder. As my wife said, it’s sugar-coated poison. But I’m sorry to say that the country’s book critics mostly ignored the poison and praised the sugar. The parson has said his piece, thank you.”

  “Good for you, B.G.,” his wife said. “Finish your beer and let’s have a look at that metatarsal. Glad to have met you, gentlemen. Please don’t get up—you can’t anyway.”

  After they had gone, Boyce grinned. “They surely are off the beam on Miss Greer, aren’t they?” he asked.

  “No, they aren’t,” Foreman said. “My guess is that Mona’s masterpiece is straight autobiography. I think she’s on the make for Miss Lundberg, for instance.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  Foreman shrugged. “I’m not going to kill her to stop it from happening.” I’m in enough trouble now.

  The hayseed G.I. and a buddy were standing belligerently in the door of the club car. They spotted the chairs vacated by the doctor and his wife and took them. Shy and self-conscious, they nudged each other and muttered back and forth in a conversation that exploded occasionally into a guffaw. One of them said at last, clearly and with fake wonder: “You’d think one a these civilians ud at least buy a fightin’ man a drink, wunt ya, George?”

  “I sure would, Harold,” the other said clearly. “I don’t know whut’s the matter with ’em all less’n they all tarred out from defense work.”

  Foreman turned and looked at them. Infantry’s blue piping on their caps, but no combat badges. The piping was phony or something they thought they had a claim to after thirteen weeks of “infantry” basic training somewhere. On their lapels were the flaming-bomb insignia of the Ordnance Corps. ETO ribbon with stars. Good conduct ribbon. Occupation ribbon. The corporal had a Bronze Star ribbon and the p.f.c. did not.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Boyce, who followed him. Swaying down the aisles of the successive cars, he thought, What the hell do they leave a person? Can a man live without pride? Does he have the right to?

  There was another one of the sudden stops. The speed of the train was less this time but the brakes had been thrown on more violently. They both went sprawling in the aisle between green-curtained pullman berths from which came men’s sulphurous curses and women’s nervous cries. A child was shrieking hysterically somewhere.

  “You all right?” Foreman gasped, picking himself up. He gave Boyce his hand and tugged the slighter man to his feet.

  “Nothing broken,” Boyce said. Heads popped out from the green curtains as they proceeded cautiously. “Foreman, I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

  “Maybe because if you believed it you’d have to do something about it. And you know you aren’t very good at doing things.”

  “Look,” the rug man blustered. “Who do you think you are that you have the right to talk like that to me? You aren’t an old friend or a preacher or a
psychoanalyst, so just lay off that stuff.”

  “She’s your girl, not mine.”

  The little man stopped in the aisle and absurdly took him by the lapel. “Just what the hell do you mean by that, Foreman?”

  “Take your hand off me. I meant exactly what I said. You’re riding with her, you know her a couple of hours longer than I do and what’re you getting so hot about?”

  “I’m sorry,” Boyce muttered. “I’m on edge.” They trudged on, balancing themselves nervously against the moment when the train would start again. It did, smoothly, and slowly.

  “What’s that?” Foreman asked.

  “I said,” Boyce told him, “that I wish she was my girl. Me a married man. Isn’t that a laugh? But she’s a nice kid. Long-winded about politics but I figure she’ll drop that when she gets what she needs.”

  “Now who’s being a psychoanalyst?” Foreman grinned.

  As they passed a roomette door it swung open. A fat, pale-faced, sweating girl in a tent-like nightgown said hoarsely, clinging to the doorframe: “Please. A doctor. I think my pains are coming on.”

  “Pains,” said Foreman, studying her blankly. “Pains! Oh God!” He put his arm around her and let her weight sag on him. “Help me get her into the berth, Boyce. Easy …”

  “We won’t be a minute, kid,” he told the fat girl. “There’s a fine doctor on the train and his wife’s a registered nurse. We’ll hunt him up right away and be right back. Boyce, you go back and I’ll go forward. Don’t be shy. Yell your head off.”

  He started forward, bawling: “Doctor Groves! Mrs. Groves!” without stopping. Three cars up their heads popped out of a roomette. “Lady’s going to have a baby, doctor,” he said.

  “Let’s go,” the doctor-preacher said. “Bring my kit, Nan.”

  “Right with you, B.G.”

  When they got back to the labor room two women with their hair in curlers were holding the fat girl’s hands and telling her horror stories about their own confinements. She was laughing at them.

  “Hysterical, doctor,” one of them told Groves in a voice of doom.

  “Out,” the doctor gestured briskly to all of them. “Mr. Foreman, will you please try to find the conductor and send him here.”

  Foreman collected Boyce and the conductor together. The conductor was telling Boyce that he’d put him off the train if he didn’t stop yelling and go to bed. It was quickly straightened out.

  “Conductor,” the newsman asked, “where can we put her off?”

  “Don’t worry about it, mister,” the conductor said testily, toddling ahead of him and making better speed with his old legs that were used to the jolting roadbed than either of the younger men.

  “What did he say?” asked Boyce, catching up.

  “He said nothing. I think maybe we’re on the big upgrade now. Next stop, the coastal valley of California.”

  “He could radio for an ambulance to meet us… even a helicopter!”

  “Helicopter’s out. Maybe ambulance is too. Maybe everything’s out except a man on snowshoes. There’s a lot of snow out there. I’m scared for that butterball in the roomette.”

  They rapped on the door of Mona’s compartment. Joan opened the door, her head half-turned in a laughing comment to her hostess.

  “You dawdled over your cigars, gentlemen.” Mona smiled like a cat. “While you were dawdling there’s been a slight rearrangement …”

  “It was a medical emergency,” Foreman said.

  “Lady’s having a baby three cars down,” Boyce added. “We got the doctor for her.”

  Joan looked stunned. “A…a fat girl? Quite young?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I know this is silly. But did she happen to mention the Galapagos Islands?”

  Mona laughed indulgently and Foreman said, stunned: “No. Should she have?”

  “I thought she might have. I talked with her this afternoon. She’s from the Galapagos Islands. She thinks she’s …” Joan sat down, her face white.

  It was going to be so cozy, she thought vaguely. I was going to move in with Mona tonight and come what may. And now this absurd girl is having her baby and I don’t want to move in with Mona… not now. Because the girl reminded me that I’m a woman? Because the thought of her would be a skeleton at the feast? Because compared to her the brilliant Mona Greer looks somehow… dirty?

  It was all vague, formless and took less than a second.

  “What’s the matter, little one?” Mona was demanding. “Another drop of brandy?” She poured but Joan waved it away.

  “No, thanks. Not brandy, or anything at all. This girl seemed quite sure that she was going to die in childbirth. It upset me. Mona, thanks for your kind offer but I think I’ll stay in my upper berth tonight. It’s silly, but I’d rather be alone after hearing about her.”

  “Very well, little one. Perhaps tomorrow night.”

  “Thank you very much, Mona. I’m truly grateful. Perhaps tomorrow night.” She went distractedly from the compartment.

  Mona Greer yawned daintily and glanced at her traveling clock.

  “My,” said Foreman like an automaton. “I-did-not-realize-the-lateness-of-the-hour. Goodnight-and-thank-you-for-a-lovely-evening-Miss-Greer.”

  Her eyes shot loathing at them as they closed the door.

  Standing in the corridor Boyce shrugged helplessly. “What can I do against somebody like that?” he mumbled, dropping his eyes. “What chance have I got?”

  “Don’t ask me for advice,” Foreman exploded. “She’s your girl. I have troubles of my own.” He stalked off to his own roomette knowing that Boyce was following him with a helpless, pleading look.

  Chapter XV

  SNOW

  Daniel Menafee squinted into the bright tunnel that the train’s glaring headlight bored through the wall of snow.

  “Trouble,” he mumbled.

  Nothing felt right under his hands. The giant power plant was roaring and straining, and the train should have been thundering along at sixty-five miles per hour to make up schedule. Instead it groaned ahead, shoving, shoving, shoving through drifts that hid the rails.

  The blunt prow of the diesel locomotive battered at a new mountain of snow that loomed into the glaring headlight. The dial showed a crazy seventy miles per hour, but that was only the revolutions of the drive wheels, grinding futilely against the rails.

  The train had stopped.

  Chapter XVI

  GREEN CURTAINS

  Boyce lay in the swaying darkness of his lower berth hearing the hundred night-sounds of a pullman car. His watch said 1:05.

  Coughs, belches, creaking mattresses, the slam of a distant door somewhere, the clickety-clack of the rails, the shivering effort of the giant diesel-electrics thrumming through the whole length of the train. The clickety-clack slowed and slowed and stopped at last. But it didn’t matter. In all but body, Boyce was in the berth above. He grinned bitterly and secretly as he heard Joan in the berth above twist about on the mattress. She was having no better a night than he, but he had to pretend that the green curtain was an invincible barrier, like six inches of hardened steel. He couldn’t say to her: “You’re worried and I’m lonesome. Let’s be friends.”

  At 1:17 he heard her struggle into dressing gown and slippers. She didn’t ring for the porter and his ladder. Her slippered toe groped for a moment inches from his nose and found the edge of his berth and he heard her other foot hit the floor of the aisle. Her toe vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

  Boyce didn’t hear her walk off down the aisle. He drew his green curtain aside and said: “Joan?”

  She jumped. “Oh. Did I wake you? I’m sorry.” She was pretending. She knew he hadn’t been able to sleep, just as surely as he had known about her.

  “No,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep. Will you talk to me?
”

  “Certainly not here,” she whispered.

  “Vacant berth up there they didn’t make up.”

  “All right,” she said, and glided off into the dim-lit car.

  Boyce struggled into his own robe and…a traveling man’s reflex… slipped his wallet into its pocket.

  She was waiting, her feet primly together and her hands in her lap, looking through the window at blackness.

  “Hello,” he said, sitting beside her.

  “I hope that girl’s all right,” she said. “I wonder where we are. We don’t seem to be moving.”

  “We’ve been on the road about 16 hours. Raton Pass, I suppose. Then down we go to the coastal plain.”

  “I hope that girl’s all right. She’s an awfully strange person. Imagine meeting somebody from the Galapagos Islands …” Her voice was becoming brittle with hysteria and the words she spoke seemed to be separate things, not parts of sentences that told you what she thought and felt. “…of all places. She made me feel ignorant. I went to college, but she knew things I’d never heard of. South American history, music, medicine. She thinks she’s going to die. And I don’t think she minds. What do you think of Mona?”

  Boyce said: “She’s smart. And lovely. And heartless.”

  “No-she-isn’t. She was perfectly wonderful to me. She’s warm and friendly. Sheltering …”

  The girl was trembling beside him. “I wonder if she’s awake too,” she said. “I might stop by and see. She was very good to me, offering to share her compartment. Don’t you think so?”

  Boyce performed the first act of heroism of his life. He broke clean through the mould that had been cast around him at birth and had been hardening ever since.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think she’s a wolf. I think she’s going to talk you into things you don’t want to do and then break your heart for kicks.” His own heart was thumping wildly. “Don’t let her, darling …”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that,” she said mechanically, dreamily. “You’re married …”

  “Yes,” he said dully. “I’m married. I’m forty years old. Old enough to know better. I wish… never mind.”