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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Have you ever tasted it?”

  “Of course. It’s like cleaning fluid and licorice. I knew a painter in my salad days who was a true absinthe drinker. You mustn’t ask me his name, but you’d know it. He’d wake in the morning and his little friend would hand him le premier…a tumbler full of the stuff. He’d sip it through breakfast and then be ready for the next, and so on. Disgusting.”

  “But interesting.” And it was. The painter… was he Rouault, or Picabia or even Picasso? She smiled as Mona swayed, lily-like in the curtained dusk, to the little bar and poured again. She drank, wishing it were absinthe instead of brandy, something to link her more closely to the astonishing, brocaded world in which Mona moved gracefully.

  “I haven’t drunk this much since college,” she said, and giggled. “Strange. I didn’t like it then. It was just the thing to do. But I like it now.”

  “I’m so glad.” The voice was a caress. “You seem to have… forgive me, little one… missed so much. But it’s not too late. Clothes, travel, friendship with your own kind. And you’re such a pretty little thing …”

  Steady on, Mona told herself. She was coming close to stepping over the rules of the game. You never paid for it and you never made promises that you’d have to break. You didn’t offer them riches, train tickets, fine raiment and lie as you did it. You, yourself alone, overpowered them without the leverage of their greed or you were no better than one of those dumpy, mannish creatures who slobbered over the pretty hostesses in the Paris clubs and paid them later for their tolerance and histrionics with many thousand-franc notes in some grubby hotel bedroom.

  “…it saddens me a little to see your costume so… utilitarian.”

  Knowing exactly where she was heading, Joan Lundberg said a little breathlessly: “What do you suggest?”

  Mona swept open her wardrobe trunk. “Help yourself, little one.”

  “I couldn’t!”

  “As a loan, then… just to try on.”

  “Very well.” Her fingers moved among the dresses hanging from the rack on the right.

  “No,” Mona said lightly. “Not just to cover up. Glamour is from the skin out.” She opened a drawer and stirred filmy underthings.

  “I’m afraid it’s too chilly for changing from the skin out.”

  “Alors, encore la chauffage centrale francaise!”

  “My head’s buzzing like a top now. Mona. Must I?”

  “You must, little one. It’s part of a sinister plan of mine. I’m going to get you helpless-drunk, pop you out the window where you’ll quick-freeze in, say, twenty minutes and then live off you until spring when they come to rescue us. You didn’t expect me to get along on a few miserable eggs and half a ham until April, did you?”

  “Of course not, Mona,” she said, giggling. “How could I be so disloyal. Turn the damper up on the French central heating.” The stuff trickled down her throat and she fancied it radiated, glowing to her skin. She was not drunk, she told herself. She was having a wonderful, amusing time with a warm and wonderful woman whose touch was pleasant, with whom you could relax and feel pleasure that carried no terror of responsibility, no threat of shackling, unbreakable ties.

  “I wore this yesterday,” Mona was saying as she held up a lace and black satin corselet. “Our dimensions are about the same and it isn’t a toothbrush after all …”

  “It’s lovely,” Joan said decisively. She began to unbutton her wool dress. “Mona,” she said, “I’ll kill you if you say one word about my pants.”

  The snuggies emerged, sagging veterans of three Chicago winters. Mona Greer sputtered faintly. “Don’t worry, darling. I’m a writer of sorts, but I couldn’t begin to do them justice. It would take Edgar Allan Poe …”

  Joan hurled them at her head and missed. “I warned you,” she said. “Where is that thing? I’m freezing.”

  She stood in her stockings and shoes alone, dim in the room, feeling every hair-root of her body prickling into gooseflesh and her nipples strained and engorged in the cold air.

  “Lovely,” Mona Greer said absently, and held the corselet against her. Faintly it emitted her perfume. “Let me do the hooks, little one.”

  Behind her Mona Greer’s deft hands worked, never quite touching her skin though she could feel their nearness and warmth, as the lace and satin folded about her in a firm embrace. A half-heard voice deep down in her cried: “You’re hers now! Why did you do it?” and she shuddered, but now with the cold.

  “Over in a moment, darling,” Mona said, misunderstanding. The hands at last touched her thighs fleetingly as Mona Greer hooked the garters of the fabulous creation to her service-weight nylons in the rear. The contact was quite neutral when it occurred, but a moment later Joan had fiercely persuaded herself that it had been electrically thrilling. She hooked the garters in the front as Mona drew from the lingerie drawer of the trunk two ounces of black cobweb. Mona said carefully, holding the lace briefs up: “You’ll notice that I’m not making any comparisons …”

  Joan giggled and pulled them on. “How do I look?” she demanded.

  “Like Ye Olde Tyme Courtesan.”

  “Swell,” Joan said. “Give me a slip and a dress before I freeze.”

  The slip was white and extravagant with lace. Over it went a two-piece powder-blue wool suit dress that buttoned demurely at the wrists and neck.

  “I suppose,” Mona said studying her critically, “that it fits as well as an off-the-rack thing. And I like the thought of what’s under that maidenly exterior; it tickles my lewd imagination.”

  “Mine too, though I never knew I had one until now.”

  “Darling, you’ve got lots of things …”

  There were thudding feet outside and there was an angry medley of voices.

  Joan opened the door; Mona Greer said sharply and a little too late: “Don’t!”

  Two kids in college-boy uniforms of sports coats and slacks were glowering at two other kids in army uniform. All four seemed to be good and drunk, and one of the college boys was saying fiercely: “You give me that goddam bottle back. You saw that fall off my seat.”

  “Din’ see no such thing. Found it in the aisle. Finders keepers, losers weepers wheah we come from.” The soldier had a brown pint bottle in his hand. He didn’t take his eye off the college boy’s half-cocked fists. “Nother gawdam word outta you an’ A’ll give you the bottle right in the face. Ah found it and Ah’m gonna keep it.”

  The other college boy tugged his friend’s elbow. “Cut it out,” he said. “That cracker means it. We’ll tell the conductor later.”

  “Hi, baby,” said the other soldier, seeing Joan in the door. He was drooling-drunk. “You wanna talk a li’l French to a fightin’ man? Voolie-voo cooshay avec mwar? Swarsant-noof?”

  Joan slammed the door and turned the bolt, raging. Mona Greer was laughing a silvery laugh. “Just a couple of redblooded American boys,” she jeered. “Let’s have a sloppy little lunch, darling. One egg or two?”

  She took hard-boiled eggs from the paper bag under her berth and began to peel them.

  “Two,” said Joan distractedly, listening at the door. There was no more noise; the fight had aborted. “Brutes,” she said.

  “I can’t think of a thing to say for them,” Mona told her, as if confessing. “I’m a charitable person, but years of soul-searching leave me only more convinced that there isn’t a man alive worth the powder to blow him to hell.”

  The words came unwillingly from Joan. She feared they would offend kind, warm Mona who had befriended her: “But you need them for children.”

  “And what do you need children for?” The riposte was swift and cutting as the sting of a wasp.

  “I don’t know,” Joan said slowly. “I suppose it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether the world keeps going or not. But I’ve always wanted children.”

 
“Well, I can’t give you one, darling, but I’ve always considered that an advantage. It’s a hell of a world, little one, and I think the only solution to its problems is universal sterilization of men or women, it doesn’t matter which, for one generation. Eat your eggs.”

  “Thanks.” She nibbled at the tasteless things, suddenly found her appetite and finished them. “Did you really mean that, Mona?”

  “Passionately.” In the shadowed room, Mona Greer’s eyes were caves of darkness. “It’s all a farce, didn’t you know?” She hauled herself up abruptly. Now what was she saying? What was spilling out unbidden? “It’s this damned train,” she said with a shiver. “It makes me think, and I don’t like to.”

  “There was this girl I met, the Galapagos Islands girl. I didn’t tell you, I didn’t get around to it, but she was sure she’d die in childbirth and… she didn’t seem to mind. She said she’d been sleeping around with a lot of the family field hands. She said they were nice guys.”

  “Diamonds in the rough,” Mona Greer said tonelessly. “Like that specimen who just flattered you with the invitation in gutter-French.”

  Unreasonably Joan found herself defending the girl whose name she didn’t even know, and by the defense attacking this woman who had been so good to her. “Maybe that soldier’s all right. He was drunk and we don’t know what he’s been through or where he’s going. Maybe I’d be just as dumb and crude back on his farm as he is on a train.”

  A chill went through Mona; a card-house seemed to be on the verge of collapse. “Trouble with you, Lundberg,” she said lightly, “is you’re not drinking. Shall I throw another log on the fire?”

  “N-no, not just yet thanks, Mona. I wonder if they’ll let me see her today.”

  Mona poured not a one-ounce pony but a three-ounce cocktail glass full of brandy and sipped it. “You can try,” she said indifferently.

  “I think I will.” Joan got up, troubled. “I… I won’t be long.” She felt the satin embrace from her breasts to her thighs. “And I’ll take good care of your lovely clothes, Mona.”

  “A bagatelle, little one. They’re yours if you like.”

  Mona gulped the cognac and cursed herself after Joan left with a deprecating smile. She who would never pay for it was lowering herself to bribery, transgressing her own rules, the rules carefully laid out to prove that she was no slave of her senses but their mistress. It was this damned train, she thought greyly, lifting a corner of the blanket over the window. It was drifted deep with a billion dun crystals that matched her own leaden depression.

  She tried to wrench her thoughts ahead to the final triumphant arrival in San Francisco, and how the story would add to her legend. Twittery Bozzy Hartman was a shrieking fag, but he knew everybody who counted in the bay city; he’d spread the word and magnify it. It would be good for a story in every paper, it would be good for sales of the damned book, and one had to think of that. One had to be a reasonable facsimile of a sculptor or writer or actress or businesswoman or even a wife. If you weren’t Mona Greer the novelist you were pegged as Mona Greer the Lesbian, and that had to be kept in the background except at the right times and in the right places.

  Maybe, she thought drearily, that’s why so many of us practice the arts. It’s an easy way to make a living or the world’s best excuse for not making a living, depending on your talent and drive.

  Lundberg was bucking her. It was the small independent income that was behind it; she was sure of that. When you have a few dollars coming in without having to work for them you’re automatically freer and more dignified and sure than ordinary mortals.

  If only Lundberg were one of the artsy-craftsy gals… Mona laughed silently, thinking of her second marriage and Mona Greer, Promoter of the Contemporary in American Crafts. Very handy indeed to have a little shop devoted to the finest in contemporary—not modern; somehow modern was a dirty word—leatherwear, ceramics, enamels and metalwork. They beat down her door—not customers, of course; nobody ever bought the damned ugly stuff—they beat down the door and begged her to put their junk on display, at any terms she wanted to make. And a Mona Greer could make interesting terms. It seemed during that wild and wonderful six months that at least one American girl in ten fancied that she was a handicrafter and that most of America’s industrial plant was turning out pottery kilns, wheels, leather tools, blowtorches, solder, silversmithing stakes and hammers, glazes and clay for those girls. And then one morning she sighed as she realized that the inconspicuous fellow across the street had been there three days running, that he was in fact a plainclothesman, Vice Squad of course, and that it was time to shut up shop for good. You didn’t want to get arrested. True enough and strange enough, there weren’t any laws on the books anywhere making her little ways criminal per se; the gay boys were much worse off in that respect. It was a matter of definition, she supposed. You can’t write a law against Lesbianism that doesn’t also forbid one old gal to peck another on the cheek at a bridge party; one shaded into the other. But they could get you for loitering, for maintaining a disorderly house—that would be the charge they’d be building against her shop—or for spitting on the sidewalk if they were desperate and you were making a real public nuisance of yourself. But you didn’t want to get arrested so you closed up the shop—anguished screams from the girls who thought they were female twentieth-century Cellinis—and went to California, just as you were doing now.

  This damned train. That damned Lundberg bucking her. She’d pay for that, Mona thought, grinning crazily into the dark.

  Chapter XXVIII

  SNOW

  “Conductor,” Bill Loober said, “the trouble is people don’t know what’s coming next. Excuse me for saying so, but you’re not letting them in on it. Now I think I can give them the facts if you’ll just give them to me …”

  The conductor, driven beyond endurance, snarled: “Mister, the facts are that we’re stuck, we’re damn near out of food, we’re damn near out of diesel oil and I don’t know when the damn plows are going to get to us. Now keep your mouth shut about it.”

  Loober said gently: “Why, that’s all right. That’s all they want to know. I’m going to let them have the story, kid them along, get them to pool their blankets and any food they may have. It’ll work out all right. You’ll see.”

  But the conductor was gone, with a snort.

  A simple matter of selling, Loober assured himself. The folks would go along as soon as they understood the situation… he walked from the diner to the first car. There was a screaming child, two squabbling women, several drunk men and scared tension on every face.

  He stood on the end seat.

  “Friends,” he called out, “I’ve been talking to the conductor.” That got attention; even the child stopped screaming and stared at him, open-mouthed. “It looks,” Bill Loober said, “as though we’re going to have to pull together to get through this thing with the least discomfort.” Now sell them! “We don’t just know right now when the plows will get here. Until they do, we’ve got to do the decent thing and share our possessions with our neighbors. Am I right, ma’am?”

  His fingers shot at a weak-faced, middle-aged woman in black. She said: “Why, I suppose so …”

  “Of course!” he beamed. “That’s the spirit! We’re all okay in this car, I bet! Now, ma’am, have you got a spare blanket tucked away?”

  “No,” she said, suddenly shrill. “The maid says they’re all gone …”

  His finger shot at a pudgy, blonde woman. “I see you have a spare.” Damn right she did. She was sitting on three of the thin, grey blankets. “Folks, don’t you think she ought to lend this lady a blanket?”

  “Goddamn right!” yelled one of the drunks.

  The blonde woman squawked: “I don’t see why I should give up …” But there was a growl from the people in the car, suddenly on the side of justice and fair play. Snarling, grudgingly, she handed on
e of the blankets to the woman, looking daggers at Loober.

  “That’s the spirit!” he yelled infectiously. “Give the lady a round of applause!” And he started off clapping, which the drunks took up, and then the rest of the car. The blonde woman actually was beaming at the end of it.

  “Friends,” Bill Loober orated, beaming, “let’s get this organized. You, sir, would you please bring those blankets I see and put them here on the seat, and you, ma’am, will you please bring those blankets …”

  Meekly they did. He got them rationed out, two to a passenger, and had them liking it, proud of their good citizenship, shaking hands like a community sing…

  And then the lights went out and the last thread of power-hum down the train from the locomotive stopped.

  The women shrieked louder than he could bellow for everybody to be calm. Under his nose the blonde woman snatched back “her” blanket from the woman in black, who began to cry hopelessly. Two liquor-flushed men got into a fist-fight over a blanket that had been allotted to the child, who was shrieking again. Her father got into the fist-fight. The two drunks laid him out before returning to their own battle.

  Bill Loober waded into the pandemonium and was caught by somebody’s fist over his left ear.

  “You ungrateful bastards!” he half-sobbed into the brawling dusk of the unlighted car. “You ought to be ashamed …”

  But nobody heard him, or if they did they paid no attention.

  Chapter XXIX

  “MRS.” MACKENZIE

  Joan’s breath steamed lightly in the corridor. The passengers returning from the diner wore overcoats, sweaters, mufflers. It was more nervousness than cold, she told herself. It wasn’t that cold… yet.

  A woman was bickering impatiently with a tall trainman who looked sick. “What am I supposed to do, sit and count my fingers until your precious snowplows get here? I want to read and I want some light to read by. I never heard of such a thing …”