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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “I came to say good morning and try to scrounge a cup of coffee. I don’t think I can face the mob in the diner.”

  “Very sensible, darling. Come in.” She drew her in by the hand, and Joan noticed with cold objectivity that she did not shrink and stiffen at the woman’s touch, as she did at a man’s. When it was a woman it wasn’t real; you were just playing and knew it. You couldn’t be trapped into love and dependence and slavery.

  Mona rang for service.

  “Coffee and a coddled egg and dry toast,” she told the waiter. “Little one?” Joan nodded. “For two. Why isn’t this thing moving?”

  “’Deed I don’t know, ma’am. Maybe we waiting for snowplows.”

  “Snowplows! Good God! How long will that take?”

  “Not very long, ma’am,” the waiter soothed. “Western division’s got lots of snowplows. That be all, ma’am?”

  “Yes, that’s all.”

  Mona fumed. “Little one, have you ever noticed the disposition of sea captains and railroad men to regard all passengers as mentally defective?” A brilliant smile broke through. “But we’ll have more time together, won’t we? Will you like that?”

  “Of course, Mona,” she said, smiling. And she would. More time with this brilliant, amusing woman whose horizons were as wide as the world was exactly what she would like. Had she thought last night she felt tenderly towards Boyce? It hadn’t been tenderness; it must have been contempt for a grubby little man whose touch was frightening.

  “This will amuse you, Mona,” she said. “Mr. Boyce tried to make love to me last night.”

  Mona Greer’s eyes were hooded like a serpent’s. “Indeed?”

  Joan told her the story, and it was amusing. It was a tainted, poisoned version of what had happened. It was the way Joan remembered it for Mona, the way she wanted to remember it for herself. She tried hard to believe it, and succeeded for minutes at a time. Boyce had been a ruttish, bumbling fool. She had been cool and amused. He had stammered incoherently, but her prose had been stately and impeccable. She had, finally, tired of the game and left him stammering in the dark.

  “Well done, darling,” Mona told her warmly, patting her hand. “I’m proud of you.”

  The waiter knocked and was admitted with their breakfasts. His hand rattled the coffeepots and dishes, and he fumbled the change three times.

  Mona drilled him with a look. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing, ma’am,” he said, sweating. “Nothing at all. Them snowplows’ll be right along. Like I said, Western division got lots of—”

  “Oh,” said Mona Greer, and paused. “So that’s the way it is. Listen to me. My little friend and I are feeling hungrier than we thought. I want you to bring us about four dozen hard-boiled eggs. And a cooked ham. And a couple of loaves of bread. Things like that.”

  “Ma’am,” he shrilled, “I cain’ do anything like that—”

  “Nonsense. You probably have more than that tucked away in your bunk right now. Here.” There was a hundred-dollar bill in her hand.

  “Man!” he said, staring at it. And then, collectedly: “Of course, ma’am, I’d have to split with the diner steward—”

  “How much, damn you? Stop the Uncle Tom crap.”

  “Okay, lady,” he said. “Gimme another big boy like that and it be worth my while.”

  She whipped out another hundred-dollar bill and handed them to him. “If you cross me up,” she said evenly, “I’ll tell the company you made a pass at me.”

  “I won’t cross you up,” he said contemptuously, “and you don’t scare me worth a damn, lady. I be back with the stuff in an hour. ’Scuse me.” Leaning against the wall, he yanked off one shoe and put the bills in it, folded small. He worked the foot back into the shoe and left.

  “Little one,” Mona Greer said to Joan, “it’s a lucky thing you’re in good hands.” She stared through the window at the driving, wind-whipped snow. Already it was beginning to drift against the stalled train. Underfoot the futile thrumming vibration of the locomotive still sounded.

  “It’s going to get cold,” Mona Greer said thoughtfully.

  “Do you really think we’re stranded?” asked Joan incredulously.

  “That’s not the point, little one,” Mona said serenely. “The point is that if we’re stranded you and I are going to be stranded with what little comforts we can arrange for ourselves. Ring the maid, will you please? We shall want some extra blankets against the winter wind.” Joan rang, thinking it was exciting and interesting. There was a small doubt about the blankets that she expressed.

  “Darling, you’re so deliriously dumb I could kiss you,” Mona laughed. “Do you think I give a rambling damn about anybody else going short on blankets? Do you think the maid will give a damn when she sees a hundred-dollar bill all for her? Do you think anybody else bright enough to arrange these elementary precautions would give a damn about us going short on blankets?”

  She was right about the maid, who lusted after a hundred-dollar bill with her eyes and brought them, in three furtive trips, one dozen of the thin, grey pullman blankets. She had been right about the waiter. He brought them eggs, bread, half of a big boiled ham and cans of evaporated milk.

  “How’s it going?” Mona asked him coldly.

  “Passengers beginning to wonder. Ol’ conductor lying his head off to ’em. Won’t be able to lie much longer. Me, I’m gonna go hide in a corner somewheres until this thing blows over.”

  Chapter XXI

  SNOW

  The railroad’s public relations director stumped into his oak-paneled office, where the phone was already ringing. He picked it up without taking off his hat and said: “Lafferty here.”

  “This is Tom Hendricks, INS, Mr. Lafferty. What’s the word on the Golden Gate Express?”

  “I just got in, Mr. Hendricks. Okay if I call you back? When’s your deadline?”

  “The Breakfast Roundup gets out in twenty-five minutes.”

  “Okay, call you back.”

  He got his hat off and the phone rang again. It was the AP wanting to know about the Golden Gate Express. The Air Force had sent a plane over and spotted it drifted in at Raton Pass—

  “Call you back.”

  While he was shucking his coat the New York Times bureau rang.

  “Call you back.”

  “Take incoming calls and stall,” he called to his secretary, and got on the other phone, checking with Chicago dispatcher, Denver dispatcher and Air Force Public Relations Officer—

  It was bad; it was very bad. The Denver snowplows were on their way at a crawling two miles per hour, the nearest town was isolated by drifted roads and snapped phone wires, food and fuel would run out before the plows arrived—it was very bad.

  He called Hendricks at the INS and put a smile in his voice. “Everything’s under control, you can tell your clients. The train has halted, but there’s nothing to be concerned over. There’s ample food and fuel aboard and there will be no hardships. I see, incidentally, that this is the first episode of its kind in eighteen years. And you can tell the people that it probably won’t happen again for another eighteen years.”

  He gave the same story to the AP, the Times and the UP, and then called Denver again.

  “Listen,” he told the Division Manager savagely. “You get that train dug out in six hours or write your resignation.” He was a vice president of the corporation.

  The Division Manager said: “It can’t be done—”

  “The hell with that talk! Do it!” He slammed the phone down and sat back, his arteries pounding. He thought of the haw-haw the airlines would give the rails, the word-of-mouth stories, the jokes. And of the people who might freeze or starve.

  Chapter XXII

  UNDER THE SKIN

  Foreman was having an after-breakfast drink. The thrumming energ
y of the locomotive, running along the cars, made the bottle tremble in his hand.

  It sounded different.

  He corked the bottle precisely, opened his two-suiter and found his portable radio. Reception would be lousy in an all-metal car, he thought, lifting the lid and turning the compact set carefully for direction.

  Mushily: “—KMOX, Denver, every hour on the hour. First, a bulletin from the wires of the United Press.” Foreman allowed himself a professional sneer. The UP and their bulletins, followed later by carefully-worded climbdowns from the “estimated casualties” or the “record-breaking damage.” But listen: “Seventeen, that is seventeen, crack passenger trains are overdue at Colorado and Montana points as much as eight hours. Railroad officials said it is too early to say that some of these trains may be stranded by record-breaking snowdrifts in the mountains. But they admitted that this is always a possibility. Snowplows of the various lines are proceeding cautiously to clear drifted rights-of-way. Their crews report drifts up to twelve feet deep.

  “Meanwhile, the vicious snowstorm that has been lashing the west for two days continues unabated.” Foreman glanced out of the window. The snow had stopped falling. “Property damage and loss to herds on winter range is estimated at—”

  The newsman closed down the lid of the portable with an uneasy feeling that he’d better save its batteries.

  Do a story on this, he told himself. Get out the Remington Model Five, put in copy paper.

  Snowbound—1

  by Larry Foreman

  World Wireless Staff Writer

  Aboard Snowbound Golden Gate Express—A crack passenger train is stranded today by towering snowdrifts in Ratan Pass, Colorado.

  And I’m aboard it writing this eyewitness account. At this time neither I nor anybody else on board knows what lies ahead. It may be prompt rescue by snowplows reported chugging our way. Or it may be an ordeal of several days on short rations—

  Knock off it, newsman. The working press can cover this one. Stick to your horse wire and don’t try to compete with the professionals.

  Foreman took his drink at last, a long, deep one from the bottle.

  He wandered back through the train, seeing and hearing with the cold, delusive clarity of a man who is one-third drunk and knows it. The pitch of things had changed. The holiday buzz of passengers, the querulousness of the middle-aged and the riotousness of the young had been shoved up a notch.

  “I-da-wa-a-a-na!” shrieked a little girl in a coach seat, and her grim-faced mother fetched her a terrifying crack across the face. Her eyes were insane, peering every way—except through the window, at the white blanket over the scattered pines and rocks. The little girl’s father yelled at the mother in Italian, and four raucous college boys yelled with laughter across the aisle, mocking him.

  “Hey,” said the father to them, icily. “What so funny you punks laugh?”

  “You joost take-a it easy, Pop,” one of the boys said, kindly enough, with an ambiguous hint of accent, and they laughed again.

  The next car was compartments, drawing rooms, roomettes. An old man’s head popped wildly through one of the doors. Around his stringy neck was a high collar and no tie. “Excuse me, young man,” he said. “If you see the conductor would you be good enough to ask him to—”

  From the compartment came a woman’s quaver: “You go yourself, Harvey. I told you to go yourself, so you go yourself and don’t try to pass the responsibility—”

  The lined old face made a conciliatory grimace and disappeared.

  In the vestibule the four sulky men from the Ordnance Corps were standing, being harangued by a thin eye-glassed boy in an enlisted man’s uniform wearing Signal Corps braid and insignia and the circular Officer’s Candidate School patch on his forearm.

  “—I’m not in charge of you fellows,” he was saying earnestly. “I’m just telling you what I think you ought to do and what I’m going to do. Seems we’re going to be stuck here for a while, so what with our first-aid training and everything we ought to volunteer to the conductor to help out any way we can. What do you say?”

  The corporal looked grave and said: “I’ll tell you what I say.” He threw back his head and yelled: “Go to hell, Jack!” and the four of them exploded into laughter.

  “Ah’m gonna volunteer,” one of them said stagily. “Ah’m gonna volunteer to take care of any left-over babes on this heah train, hey, Harold?”

  The O.C.S. boy looked sick and hurried on, brushing past Foreman. Heads popped out along the corridor to stare at the noise.

  “Hey, Mister,” Foreman called to the boy. “Don’t take it so—”

  “The hell with you too, Jack,” the O.C.S. boy said hysterically, and ducked into the washroom. First command, no doubt, Foreman thought dryly.

  He weaved into the club car. The attendant had made the mistake of appearing before eleven o’clock opening time, and was under siege.

  “Boy,” a blue serge suit was telling him, “I’m a lawyer specializing in interstate commerce. Giant corporations pay me up to ten thousand dollars for a single opinion. And you dare to stand there with your bare teeth hanging out of your black face and tell me I’m a liar!”

  “Nossir!” cried the attendant. “Didn’t say that at all! But the rule—”

  “Didn’t I just tell you that acts of God suspend the rulebook on the serving of interstate booze and refreshments? Didn’t I?”

  “That’s right, judge! Make him open up!” clamored from the early-rising lushes. “Don’t let him call you a liar!”

  “—didn’t say that at all, gentlemen—”

  “What’s going on here, Bunker?” It was the conductor: an ancient, miniature bulldog and suddenly the most important person in the limited little world they lived in.

  The attendant tried to explain, but his besiegers had lost interest in the game. Strangely respectful of the little old man, they were asking: “What’s the pitch, conductor? When do we get rolling again? We going to be very late into Frisco?”

  The conductor lifted his arms oratorically for silence. “Gentlemen,” he said, “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m sure division snowplows are on the way and we’ll be dug out in a few hours.”

  “You’re sure,” shot the man who said he was a lawyer. “That means you don’t know.”

  “Bunker,” the conductor said to the attendant, “open the bar for the gentlemen.”

  A sudden quiet descended on the middle-aged group.

  “Well?” said the conductor testily. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” He stumped away from them in the silence. Silently they turned to the bar.

  The lawyer finally said: “It doesn’t look too good, is my guess. Double Scotch, boy; water on the side.”

  Somebody—Foreman recognized Loober, the insurance man—muttered: “Guess I miss the convention. Same for me, boy.”

  “You said you were a lawyer, mister. (Rye-gingerale.) Do we have any kind of a claim—”

  “Not a damn bit. All the railroad contracts to do is try to get you to your destination—”

  “The damnedest thing I ever heard of!”

  “Sue if you want to, friend. Meanwhile have one with me.”

  The business-suited middle-aged took the edge off with a couple of quick ones and then scattered generally with glasses in their hands to the biggest, deepest chairs, talking quietly, unhappily and seeming to make a point of not glancing through the windows. The windows were drifting in on one side. Foreman thought he felt the cold bite through the aluminum and steel wall.

  Hundreds of yards up the track the twin diesel-electric locomotives made a final convulsive effort that shivered down the length of the train to the club car, and then changed their tune. They no longer roared with effort to shove through the tons of snow, but purred and grumbled on a minimum turnover.

  “That’s that,” somebody in
the club car said. “End of the line.”

  “It’s unbelievable,” somebody else said wonderingly. “In this day and age—of course they’ll have us dug out in a few hours.”

  “What price those railroad ads knocking the airlines now?”

  “‘Go by rail, forget the weather, arrive refreshed.’”

  Ragged, worried laughter.

  Foreman watched, brooding, from behind a drink, as the attendant walked with a tray to one of the big chairs. A grey-haired, red-faced man intercepted him. “That must be mine, boy.”

  “Like hell it is,” said a fat man from the big chair. “Bring it here, boy.” The attendant froze half-way between them. The grey-haired man got up, calmly took the drink from the tray and dropped a dollar bill on it, and returned to his seat at one of the little tables. The attendant saw the fat man get up grimly. He scurried back behind his bar and began polishing glasses.

  “All right, wise guy,” the fat man said. “Give it here.”

  The grey-haired man looked at him speculatively and put the glass to his lips. The fat man, with a roundhouse swing, knocked it from his face. It crashed against the floor. Seemingly before it hit the two men were a swearing, panting tangle of limbs.

  Foreman dove in and grabbed at a flailing arm, he didn’t know whose. Another arm promptly caught him a clip in the nose, and he let go, swearing. Half a dozen bystanders finally got the two pulled apart, and they stood like bulls, glaring.

  The lawyer lectured them ferociously: “If you two goons can’t hold your liquor the least you can do is get out of here and not bother people who can. Any more trouble and I’ll call the conductor. You may not happen to know it, but he’s legally able to arrest you and turn you over to the police at the next stop.”

  “When’s that going to be, mister?” the grey-haired man asked softly, still panting. He shook himself loose and the fat man stepped back, quailing. The grey-haired man didn’t even look at him. He walked to the bar and told the attendant: “Boy, give me a dozen of those little bottles. Put ’em in a bag or something.”

  “’Deed I’m sorry, sir, but they’re for drinking in the car heah, only—”