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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Didn’t you hear what I said, you black ape?”

  The attendant’s face froze. “Gettum right away, sir.” He went back into his little galley and didn’t come out again.

  For a long minute and a half the conversation was sparse and strained, and the grey-haired man stood at the bar shifting from foot to foot. At last he said, loudly, to all of them: “The hell with this.” He put a ten-dollar bill on the bar, went behind it and scooped a dozen train bottles into his pockets while they stared. He stalked from the car unmolested.

  Bill Loober said to Foreman: “That guy has the right idea. It may be a long time between drinks.” The insurance man looked belligerently around, went to the bar, filled his own pockets and left—a five.

  The panic was on. The business-suited middle-aged raided the bar with jokes and excuses and a pretense of payment at first that rapidly disappeared.

  Foreman sat alone, watching them jostle and shoulder each other, half-gloating, half-ashamed, thoroughly surprised at themselves. He knew what they were thinking and feeling. He had been to the wars and he knew looting when he saw it.

  He watched with quiet, drunken interest, the churning mob around the bar. Looting was a swift, downward path, a rapid shedding of civilized inhibitions about property. First you realized the rules were off. Then you took what you wanted. And finally you got silly and destructive.

  The fat man emitted a drunken war-whoop and flung a bottle of club soda at one of the highly colored Koda-chrome blowups that decorated the club car. The bottle didn’t smash but the picture glass protecting the Koda-chrome from smudgy fingers did, and tinkled on the carpeted floor.

  “For Christ’s sake, man!” somebody yelled. It scared them all, and the crowd evaporated swiftly through the door leaving Foreman in sole possession of the field.

  The college boys from the coach car bucked their way through the stream and stood, bewildered, in the vestibule, staring at Foreman. “Somebody said they were giving away liquor—” one of them said to him uncertainly. “What kind of a gag—?”

  “No gag at all, boy,” Foreman said kindly. He got up. “I guess there’s a crowd and the trainmen on your heels?”

  They nodded.

  “Then there’s no time to lose. I’ll show you how an old pro works this deal.” He went behind the bar, which was cleaned out. “Watch this one.” He kicked the galley door right at the keyhole; there was a splintering noise and it swung open, pretty as a picture. Under the sandwich counter honeycombed cases of train bottles were stacked. He filled his pockets and said: “Pitch in, gentlemen.” Incredulously, they did, as passengers began to boil in, chattering.

  He worked his way through, shoving politely, glimpsing the distorted faces of the conductor and trainmen and car attendant who were futilely yelling nothing that could be heard.

  Foreman got clear of the mob. Its after reaches consisted of bewildered passengers who didn’t quite know what was going on and were trying to explain it to each other. He dropped, chuckling, into a leather seat in a smoking room two cars back. A woman put her head between the green curtains. “You came from back there,” she said accusingly. “What on earth’s going on? Is it an announcement?”

  “Lady,” Foreman said, pretending to be shocked and almost feeling it, “this is the boys’ room.”

  “Oh,” she said impatiently, and the head disappeared.

  She felt it in the air, the newsman thought. That was another thing that vanished when there were no cops to pull you in. God almighty, what boils beneath the skin of our societies! Wound the skin with war or a freak of the weather like this and what gushes out is the true nature of man: plunder and rape and—he felt an odd coldness—and, of course, murder.

  He pulled one of the little bottles from his pocket and regarded it carefully: a square-faced miniature of a square-faced bottle of a famous brand of Scotch. People collected the cute little things. He wrenched off the metal-foil, brittle cap and drank the two ounces of whisky in two matter-of-fact swallows.

  I think, he told himself precisely, I’ll see how Greer and Lundberg are getting along.

  Chapter XXIII

  SNOW

  Officer Candidate Milton F. Martinson writhed at the thought of the soldiers’ derision. And he knew what he had to do.

  He walked through the train until he found the conductor, who was the center of an irascible knot of passengers. Politely he said to him: “Conductor, I’m willing to go and get help from the nearest town. I have inclement-weather clothes in my dufflebag. If you’ll just give me an idea of where to head—”

  The group fell silent and the conductor stared fixedly at him. “Better not, soldier,” he said at last. “Rush City ought to be north of here a few miles, but you’d better wait for them to come to us.”

  “Let the kid go, conductor,” somebody said. “He can take care of himself, can’t you, kid? They learn all about it in the army.”

  Martinson flushed under “kid” but said: “Certainly I can take care of myself. I think it’s your duty, conductor, to—”

  There was a clamor of agreement. They wouldn’t go themselves, of course, but they’d be delighted to send somebody else.

  “All right,” the conductor snapped.

  Martinson was already wearing G.I. long-handled underwear and olive-drab wool. He got into his sweater, field jacket and overcoat, double socks and galoshes, balaclava helmet and gloves. He was streaming sweat in the heated car when the conductor opened the vestibule door and the train door for him and a curious crowd wished him good luck.

  “Tell ’em to bring some booze, kid,” a heavily humorous man said. “I missed out on my share.”

  “Send a doctor first thing,” a woman told him. “Dr. Groves is ready to collapse and there’s a girl going to have a baby—”

  He nodded and plunged into the cold.

  At first it did not seem cold. The snow no longer fell and there was no wind to speak of. It was the “still cold” of which he had been warned; the cold that catches you unawares and leaves ears and fingers and nose wax-white. But he was wrapped well enough—

  He floundered through a foot of powdery snow on the lee side of the train and plunged down the embankment. He fumbled out his compass and dropped it with his mittened fingers. Three tries to scoop it out of the snow failed; he pulled the glove with his teeth and groped bare-handed in a small drift for the compass. Still with one hand bare, he opened it and sighted north to a distinctive crag, put it away, put on his glove and began to march for the crag.

  Quite suddenly he realized that he was in trouble. The air burned in his lungs, the odd coldness of his hands, the creeping cold in his toes despite the double socks, the burning of his nose—the very sweat was freezing on his body.

  The insidious dry cold had penetrated five layers of wool before he had marched a hundred yards to the distinctive crag. And his hand was on fire.

  His feet were without sensation, and they betrayed him. He fell in the snow, face-down. “Son of a bitch,” he mumbled into the snow. “Get out of here.” He heaved himself to his knees; the pressure on his burning hand was agony. People were yelling at him from the train; he couldn’t make out what. He knelt in the snow shading his eyes to stare at the train and saw grotesque bundled figures heading his way. Then the cold gripped him and he couldn’t even see.

  Later he felt that he was being carried and he heard screams:

  “He’s frozen! He’s frozen! We’re all going to die out here!”

  “Shut up, lady. He’ll be all right if you’ll get the hell out of the way—”

  “Rub him with snow—”

  “No, you crazy bastard! You want to kill him?”

  “Somebody get that doctor—”

  “We’re all going to freeze out here!”

  “Shut up, lady!”

  He listened as if to a radio show. He was
no longer an actor; he had done his best. And as usual it had not been good enough.

  Chapter XXIV

  TURTLES

  Pilar Mackenzie, a fat girl far from the Galapagos Islands, lay and sweated and listened to her heart. False labor, the pleasant doctor and his peppery wife had called it. If that was false labor, she didn’t want to encounter the real thing—not that she had any choice. After maturity, every twenty-eight days an ovum descended. Given an opportunity, a sperm cell would lash its way upstream like a spawning salmon to meet and penetrate the ovum. Within minutes the one cell became two, the two four, the four eight, and in two hundred and fifty days, give or take a couple of weeks, you gave birth even it it killed you.

  Which it would.

  She listened to her heart, wrecked and sputtering from the false labor pains, and pondered on a theory that once had amused her. It was that the human race consists not of the clothes-wearing, house-building, money-making organisms ordinarily called people but of their sperm cells and ova. The clothes-wearers were brushed aside as transitional forms useful to the sperm, but with no reality or continuity of their own except as far as they produced and protected more sperms and ova. The theory was amusing no longer. She had vowed from the moment the first inadequate local doctor made his unconfirmed diagnosis that she would not give in to anger or hate, but her defenses were crumbling. You got tricked into it by boredom and glands, she angrily thought. With no serious intentions you played around and then something extremely serious happened. There had been no pleasure in it for her; eating a chocolate cream would have provided a finer sensory experience. Nevertheless, anticipating no pleasure, experiencing none, aware that something awfully bad might come of it, she had gone ahead. Now it was two hundred and fifty days later and she was dying of it, apparently. There seemed to be nothing in it for anybody or anything except the human germ cells which met in her without her awareness of their meeting. Arturo got no pleasure from it, she was sure. He had muttered curses against her fat and her clumsiness and later on he had lost his job on suspicion and had been sent back to the poverty-stricken mainland hamlet he came from. No pleasure there at all. Her parents were far from pleased indeed. After a dreadful quarrel in which she was the pawn, her mother locked herself in and prayed; her father locked himself in and drank.

  “You will not have the child here,” her father said at last, and gave her money and his sister’s address in Baltimore. “For God’s sake, child, pray to be forgiven,” said her mother, and gave her the principal part of her own old dowry, an old-fashioned necklace of Brazilian emeralds.

  She sold the necklace at Humpp’s in Honolulu, the steamer’s first stop, and half its considerable price went in the first month to a great midwestern clinic and its staff which at last pronounced that the odds against her survival were a hundred to one.

  So Pilar Mackenzie never got to the aunt in Baltimore. The rest of the price of the necklace had been spent to buy her what she perhaps had looked for, foolishly, in Arturo’s arms. She stood for most of one day on the observation platform of the Empire State Building in New York, savoring the queer thought that men had built this extraordinarily tall stepladder. She saw legitimate plays for the first time in her life, and it was her good luck that she arrived at the height of the most brilliant theatrical season in years. She laughed and wept unashamedly in the audience, loving wonderful people named O’Casey, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Mary Martin, Oenslager, all the writers, actors, composers and designers who could make little worlds for her that lasted two hours and a lifetime.

  She ate, too. Dear God, how she ate of what New York had to spread before her! She used to think she knew Chinese cookery, for the cook on the estancia was a Chinese Chileno, but then she met the real thing in New York and ate her way almost in rapture through hours of subtle blends, this flavor played against that, this texture played against that. They came to know her too in the small Italian restaurants, and she came to love the Italians’ tender chicken and veal stewed gently for half a day with peppers and onions and spices she never had tasted before. It was in these places she learned that Chianti, though rough on the tongue and metallic in taste, could be a noble wine when it was properly used.

  In sukiyaki restaurants she watched happily while a little waitress in kimono and huge sash arranged the raw vegetables and thin slices of red beef in the pan of bubbling sauce that sat on the little stove at the table. For twenty minutes you could study the artful arrangement of the cooking pieces and smell their heavenly steam, and then eating them came almost as an anticlimax, but not quite. She read about, and sighed for, cha no yu, the Japanese custom (or minor religion, or art, or philosophy) of ceremonial tea drinking, but in the time she had she could not learn of any Tea Master in the country who might instruct her.

  They came to know her a little, and respect her greatly, at a Long Island restaurant conceded to be the only American exponent of the great international cuisine; there she met blue trout, truffled poularde, duck with orange, the great cheeses, the classic sauces, the singing wines of the world.

  There was music for her, too. She chose to bypass the great ones, Callas, de los Angeles, Monteux, Stokowski, Heifetz. Instead she attended debuts, afternoon and evening recitals in the Carnegie Chamber Music Hall where youngsters laid it on the line for the first time in public. They were sopranos from Texas, baritones from Duluth, pianists from Brooklyn, fiddlers from everywhere, and they were laying four or five thousand dollars on the line and praying that they’d rate a favorable review from a second-string critic, praying that they’d find one small crack in the wall between them and fame. Pilar Mackenzie bought her tickets and sat among the scattering of critics, teachers, fellow-students and relations of the debutant to listen with pleasure and applaud loudly. Pierre Monteux could get along nicely without her, and perhaps she was helping the debutantes a little.

  Her money and her time were running out when she read that the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra was going to present a weeklong Monteverdi festival. She wanted to hear some more Monteverdi, so without thinking much about it she wired for tickets, checked out of her small midtown hotel and boarded a train. She had left in her purse forty-four dollars and in her life—how many days?

  She felt cold, and wondered if it was the cold of the Rockies or the cold of death coming over her. Apologetically she had asked for another blanket and the pleasant doctor had provided one. It wasn’t enough, but something kept her from asking for more.

  Her heart was skipping again.

  Chapter XXV

  SAD STORIES

  Boyce sat forlornly in his half of the seat, not knowing whether he wished or didn’t wish Joan were in her half. Behind him there was a buzzing confusion from which the words clearly came: “—free drinks in the club car!”

  He turned and saw an excited young man in the rear vestibule, surrounded by a dozen passengers talking at once. They melted through the vestibule and curious men got up to follow them asking one another: “What did the kid say? What was that about?”

  Boyce thought of following, but didn’t. The hell with their free drinks. Drinks were for people who didn’t know what they wanted. He knew what he wanted. It was just the breaks that it was forever beyond his reach.

  It was getting colder. Mechanically he hauled down his suitcase and got out his overcoat to drape around his shoulders. Damn nuisance—they’d have the heat up again in a few minutes and he’d just have to pack it again. But at least it would kill some time that he would surely spend otherwise brooding about the impossible that had seemed so real a handful of hours ago.

  Joan and he somewhere away from the reeking air of Chicago, someplace where it was sunlit like the southwest, and some kids, boys or girls, he didn’t care which, and a job. He’d work like a dog for them and be happy to—real work, not outguessing a padded expense account, not joking a debt-plagued housewife into buying a more expensive carpet than she could affor
d, not cooking up phony sales, not clawing at the advertising meetings for more inches than Major Appliances or Furniture as if your life depended on it.

  Peggy, his wife, seemed very far away and unreal compared to the blonde girl he had known for a little more than a day. Maybe these were the dangerous forties. Maybe the dangerous forties were no joke or problem to be calmly handled according to the psychology columns of the slick-paper women’s magazines. Maybe the dangerous forties of the American husband were exactly this sickening realization that he had been trapped by a lying stranger and that this was his very last chance to struggle free—and that he had lost it.

  He could, he thought savagely, glance at a room and tell Mrs. Whoozis to the dollar what it would cost her in taupe broadloom wall to wall—and why taupe broadloom was less dashing than the more expensive sculptured Wilton that they were laying in so many of the smart Gold Coast apartments these days. But he couldn’t tell the girl he loved that he loved her and that she had to love him or make his life less than nothing, a nagging nuisance just below the level of pain.

  The porter worked his way down the aisle, grinning, shaking his head, shrugging his shoulders at people who tried to question him. He stopped and studied the baggage rack above Boyce’s head. “’Scuse me, suh, would you please show me which are your bags? I got to move the lady’s into the other lady’s compartment.” His face was absolutely blank.

  “I guess you guys have seen just about everything,” Boyce said uncontrollably.

  “Yes, suh,” the porter said, dead-pan.

  Boyce showed him his bags and Joan’s. He took Joan’s bags in one great load and staggered down the aisle. The rug man got up and followed him, his overcoat flapping around him. He let the porter go in and timidly rapped on the door.

  Joan opened it and said coolly: “Hello, there.”

  “Hello,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do—”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “You’re very kind,” she said. There was an inquiring murmur in the compartment. Joan turned and said into it: “It’s Mr. Boyce, Mona.”