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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  And in San Francisco I’ll have to get in touch with this Yaeger man right away. Night clerk, Hotel Pharmacy, midnight to eight, Monday through Saturday, Mr. Yaeger, I’m Mrs. Clemens. Mrs. Vanhomrigh tells me you put up a remarkable skin lotion… And if he’s on vacation or away sick or something?

  Her heart began to pound at the thought. He wouldn’t be, he couldn’t be. But—there was this Larry who had done her a favor. He seemed to know things. He seemed to have connections. She’d have to keep in touch with him. She was awfully new at this business. Just barely old enough at it to know she couldn’t get out of it…

  The “remarkable skin lotion.” It cost fifty dollars a bottle, which would hold her for a week—or would it? She wondered. Already she had taken three of the tablets when she had expected to take only one, but perhaps they were weak, diluted—no; not from a doctor’s bag they weren’t. So for two weeks in San Francisco she’d need one hundred dollars, which Thank God she had. It meant she’d spend the hundred on skin lotion instead of a few other things, like—like food and clothes. To Hell with buying your own food, she thought. That Larry, he would be glad to take her to dinner and gladder to stay for breakfast. She really would have to keep in touch with him; he seemed to be in funds. And when he left San Francisco a lady with her looks and figure and talent should have no trouble finding a replacement. The main thing was that she kept well ahead on her supply of—skin lotion. Perhaps if she had a thousand dollars she could buy twenty bottles. God, God, what a wonderful feeling that would be! To have twenty weeks’ supply, not to have to even think about it for five whole months! Just—when you want some, take some, in a civilized way without any hole-and-corner nonsense about it.

  Where could she get a thousand dollars, she wondered? She had heard jokes about “hundred dollar girls” and once her husband had kindly explained that there weren’t really any such thing. There were just girls, and they asked for as much as they thought they could get from a man, and sometimes it was twenty dollars, often probably a hundred. Maybe sometimes more, though he personally doubted it unless it was on one of those crazy business-entertainment expense-account things.

  She felt tense, very tense. It was too foolish, lying there in the dark and chill when a good night’s sleep lay within arm’s length. Too foolish. She reached out to her handbag almost absent-mindedly, opened the catch one-handed, dipped in and fished out a pill. She swallowed it dry and waited for the mild glow to begin, which eventually it did. As she drifted off to sleep she drowsily wondered if it wouldn’t be pleasant to feel that “ping” old Charlie had told her about, to feel it slam you like a sweet padded mallet into dreamland. Of course she wouldn’t get sores or abscesses from a needle; she had deft, small hands and knew what she was doing…

  Chapter XXXIV

  THE COCKTAIL PARTY

  Boyce and Foreman stood in the dark corridor outside Mona Greer’s compartment. The wire service man snapped his cigarette lighter for a moment to check the number on the door. He saw the number, and two plumes of steam from their breaths. The corridor was murmurous with the sharp creak of contracting metal, distant clamor from the coaches, the scream of a faraway baby reverberating between the narrow walls.

  The floor coverings salesman raised his hand to rap timidly twice, and between the first and second rap he prayed: Let it all be some kind of gag, just a crazy guess of Foreman’s. Let it come out right somehow. She wants me and needs me, and nobody ever needed anybody the way I need her. Let it come out right. Let it not end in a dirty joke on her and me. “C-c-c-cold,” he mumbled to Foreman.

  Foreman waited, thinking: Anybody home? This is the Angel of Death calling, Miss Greer. The next voice you hear will be the executioner’s. And then silently snorted at himself. It’s a charade, he thought. Kill that creature? Why? Merely to keep her from perverting one more girl, merely to keep her from wrecking one more life? And he answered himself: Yes. That’s why.

  Inside the dim compartment Joan Lundberg said: “They seem to have arrived.” Will they help me? But how absurd. I don’t want to be—helped.

  Mona smiled: “We’ll feed them a couple of cocktails, sling the bums out and then …” She took three dance steps to the door and flung it open. “Mr. Boyce! Come in—if you can see your way.”

  He blundered in.

  “Hold the door,” said Foreman’s tight voice. “I’m here too.”

  “Then our little party’s complete. My little Joan is the graceful shadow in the corner. Isn’t this barbaric?”

  Foreman asked: “Got a bottle of gin? Gin’s best.”

  “Surely you’re not going to gulp it from the bottle, Mr. Foreman?” she asked sweetly. “I know you newspapermen, but—”

  Foreman said: “If you can bring yourself to sacrifice a bottle of gin, Miss Greer, I can provide light and a little heat.”

  She felt for the square-faced bottle in the traveling bar and passed it to him. “Work your alchemy,” she commanded.

  “No alchemy; just an old Army game. If there isn’t a cord or anything like that, the next step is for me to take out a shoelace.”

  “Oh, a spirit lamp! Clever you! But I didn’t know you had liquor to burn in the Army.”

  “Some of the black-market schnapps they peddled in Germany was a hell of a lot safer to burn than to drink. Good friend of mine went blind from a bottle of fourteen-year-old uebermensch swapped him for two packs of Luckies and a bar of K Ration chocolate. Always figured he got the worst of the deal. You got any string?”

  “If you’ll hold up my lighter, Mona,” came Joan’s composed voice, “I’ll get my knitting. Would yarn be all right, Mr. Foreman?”

  “Perfect. Best stuff next to a shoelace, and I don’t feel like surrendering mine. Might have to step outside and I’d hate to throw a shoe out there.”

  Her lighter flared. She passed it to Mona, who held it high while Joan fumbled in a suitcase and produced a ball of baby-blue yarn. Foreman took it, snapped off a length and said thanks. He doubled and redoubled it and stuffed it into the neck of the square-faced bottle.

  “Now, Mr. Foreman?” Mona Greer asked.

  “Give it a moment to soak up. Now light it.”

  The lighter swooped down and the bulky wick caught, burning with an orange-tipped blue flame the size of a silver dollar. Like many a wrecked basement or Siegfried line pillbox Foreman had seen by similar light, the compartment came alive. The stage was set, the players in their places. Mona was a tragedy queen in fur robes, Joan an enchanted princess in blue, Boyce a comic dwarf yearning at her, and he—? The First Assassin?

  “That’s very pretty and very clever, Mr. Foreman,” Mona said. “If you had money I’d marry you.”

  “Best offer I’ve had all week,” he said. “You know what my last offer was?”

  “Can’t have been Babs Hutton,” Mona said, cogitating. “She’s married to that tennis-playing German.”

  “My last offer,” said Foreman, “was to go to Frisco and do a job or wind up in the Chicago Drainage Canal with crabs eating my face.”

  Joan gasped; Boyce tried a nervous laugh and then said: “I don’t get it,” and waited for the joke to be explained.

  “It’s not essential that you get it,” said Foreman. “I just wanted to indicate to those present that I’m in a peculiar line of work with its own standards.”

  “People ‘bump people off’ in your line of work?” Mona asked with amusement.

  “Not as much as they used to, Miss Greer,” he said, “but it’s still a useful technique they occasionally resort to.”

  She shuddered elaborately and sat down beside Joan. She put her arm around her and said: “I’ll protect you, darling.” Joan laughed and said: “I’m not afraid. I thought there was something fishy about Mr. Foreman from the start.”

  “Ah—that’s a very clever stunt with the gin,” said Boyce, suffering on his face.


  “Gin,” said Mona, rising. “And my duties as a hostess are recalled to me. Since the gin is serving a nobler purpose, we shall have Manhattans.”

  Foreman said idly: “Thought you might have suggested Orange Blossoms, Bronxes, something like that.” Old timers. Prohibition stuff. Get Miss Greer a little bit off balance. The first step toward murder. She had deliberately declined his hint; apparently the die was cast.

  Her voice was a little cold: “You prefer such neolithic concoctions, Mr. Foreman? Perhaps I can mix you a Pisco Punch right out of the Gold Rush days?”

  “I’ve heard they were lethal,” he said. “A Manhattan would be satisfactory.” Second warning, Miss Greer.

  She reached for the Vermouth bottle in the portable bar.

  “Dear old Manhattan,” he said. “The old Brevoort, Richard Harding Davis, poor Bill Porter paralyzing himself on fifteen absinthe drops, the flaring gaslights and the rattling horse cars—those were the days, eh, Miss Greer?”

  Even Boyce saw Mona’s icy rage. She said calmly through it: “My young friend, I think you’d better leave. You don’t seem inclined to be pleasant tonight and it’s too cold to fence with a callow hack from a copy-desk.”

  “Think you’re man enough to put me out?” he asked.

  “Mr. Foreman!” Joan snapped.

  “By God—” Mona said hoarsely.

  His face fell. “Gosh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were kidding, Miss Greer, and I were only joking back. Did I say something wrong? I’m terribly sorry.”

  Mona Greer sat down and after a pause said: “You have a crude sense of humor, Foreman.”

  “Some people think I’m killingly funny.” Third warning.

  “To me,” she said, “you are merely funny without qualification.”

  Bitch, this is where I take over. She was mixing the Manhattans. He blithely remarked: “The cocktails won’t be what your guests have come to expect, Miss Greer. No ice.”

  Boyce laughed. “I won’t mind,” he said. He blew a plume of his breath into the little glow of the spirit lamp. “In fact you can warm mine up if you like.”

  Mona poured four glasses and handed them around.

  “To the Chicago Drainage Canal,” she said, looking Foreman full in the face.

  They sipped. “God, that’s good,” said Joan.

  “A little warm,” Foreman said critically, “but good. Joan, your toast?”

  She looked at the two men and said defiantly: “To Mona Greer, novelist, patriot, world traveler, friend of the working girl and crack bartender.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Mona, delighted. “I can’t drink when the toast’s to me.”

  “Sneak one,” said Boyce miserably. “We won’t look.”

  Feet shambled down the corridor outside. A little girl was squeaking that she din’ wanna go outside, it was cold outside. Her mother grimly told her that they had gotta go outside for doo-doo, there wasn’t no place in the train for it no more. The voices died.

  “Down your hot toddy, Miss Greer,” said Foreman, “while I think up a witty remark.” She sipped. He announced: “To General Francis Sullivan, whose leadership of the great Northwest Expedition of 1779 broke the ridgepole of the Iriquois Longhouse and secured the Indian Frontier against a redcoat invasion from Canada.” In an aside to Boyce he explained: “An ancestor of mine.”

  “Oh?” said Boyce. “Well, if ancestors are all right, I give you Matthew G. Boyce, born a farmer’s son who rose to brakeman on the Erie and died in 1927 of T.B. leaving a mortgaged shack and eight hundred dollars in medical and funeral expenses to his loving family. Quite a boy, Pop was. A real Horatio Alger type, only nothing ever worked out quite right for him either.”

  They drained their glasses. Joan Lundberg was the last to raise hers and she drank slowly, not looking at the floor coverings man.

  “Pour a second round, Foreman,” said Mona Greer lazily. “I’m too comfortable next to my little Joan to move.”

  Foreman measured the rye, Vermouth and bitters into the pitcher. As he stirred he mourned: “Too bad—no ice.”

  “There’s snow outside,” Mona said, piqued.

  That was it. That was murder. She was saying his lines now; the initiative was his.

  He asked, showing nervousness: “What do you think, Boyce?”

  Boyce said: “Ah—it’s been used, the snow.”

  “Should be all right farther out,” Foreman mused, exulting. “Some people were going way out when it was still light and collecting it to melt for drinking water.”

  “Mr. Foreman,” Mona said with amusement, “you like it cold. You’re the bartender; do your duty, go out and get us a pitcher of snow.” She extended the drinking water pitcher that came with the compartment. Her face was regal in the flickering light.

  “Sorry,” he said, forcing a flush. “I’m a little nervous about charging out into the dark at fifty below, or whatever it is by now.”

  “He’s right,” Joan said unexpectedly. “It’s much too dark. A person could get turned around out there and that would be that.”

  Foreman held his breath for a moment, but Mona spoke her line, not knowing that it had been forced on her like a magician’s card—or why. With a look of infinitely amused scorn she drawled: “Very well. I’ll go where—angels, would you say?—fear to tread.”

  “Hell,” said Foreman, “I’ll go. A drink’s a drink.”

  Joan said: “This is nonsense. Nobody’s going. It’s fifty below or worse and the wind’s terrible and the drinks are quite cold enough.”

  But of course Mona Greer had to follow through on a gesture… She was pulling on her dainty, fur-topped overshoes; she said derisively: “Mr. Foreman’s worried about the wind and the cold, darling; I’m not.”

  “Mona,” Joan protested weakly. “At least take this.” She handed her the ball of yarn.

  “How sweet. Shall I knit an afghan with it, darling?”

  “No. Tie it to the steps or something. I mean it. It’s pitch-black out there.”

  Mona said: “And unreel it like a spider as I wander into the wintry wastes, or like Ariadne leaving a clue for bold Theseus. All right, darling, and thank you.”

  Foreman felt the knife in his pocket. He had envisioned following the creature into the dark, perhaps striking her—and knew he couldn’t do it. This way was much the better way. “I’ll go along as anchor man,” he said.

  “You will be quite superfluous.”

  “As usual. But why not?”

  “Come along, then. You can’t do any harm,” she said. A smiling slap in the face.

  Holding her cigarette lighter up before them, she led Foreman down the aisle to the vestibule. “Here,” she said, handing him the pitcher and the lighter. The lighter was beginning to burn blue.

  In the flickering glow she knotted an end of the yarn very firmly to one of the vestibule grabirons and opened the train door. Had they thought it was cold inside? The cold rolled in and clutched them like an iron hand. She gasped as it seized her chest. She said softly: “I wonder if this is really—”

  Foreman laughed amiably.

  She snatched the pitcher and lighter from him in a rage and swiftly climbed down the steps, unrolling the yarn behind her. With his hand on the yarn and his eyes straining into the blackness he sensed that she was being very careful indeed. Mona Greer was not risking her life; not the life that might bring her so many more little blonde twists to corrupt and so many well-meaning young men to make fools of.

  He saw out there a tiny spark of blue: the lighter. It dipped; she must be inspecting the snow for purity. The yarn tightened and slackened under his fingers; she was trying farther out again. Again the minute spark. This time it would be all right. She would scoop a pitcher-full of snow, feel her way carefully back along the yarn through the blackness to the blackness that was the tra
in, climb the steps, flushed and triumphant—

  You can’t do any harm.

  He whipped out the knife. Snick. And cut the yarn.

  He noticed numbly that his ears were ringing with the cold.

  Now she must be feeling the yarn, finding it loose, surprisingly loose, and now she must be noticing that she’s not feeling her way back along it but winding it up slackly.

  “Foreman!” came a sharp call from the darkness, with the silvery voice not edged by alarm. She couldn’t be more than fifty feet away, and only bravado had taken her out that far.

  “Foreman!”

  Now she must be standing there in the dark feeling the beginning of panic. Go this way? Or that way? Or stand still and wait for an answering shout from the ineffectual heavy who had tried to spoil her little game with the little blonde twist?

  “Foreman! Can—can anybody hear me?”

  No, Mona. Not in the train with blankets pinned to the windows. If you’d gone out the other side then you would have seen your own compartment’s window brightly lit with the flame of your own gin, but that was the gentlemen’s side and you were a perfect lady.

  “Foreman! Anybody! Can anybody hear me?” Her voice broke. Now she must be telling herself that she would have to move, that she couldn’t just stand there and freeze. Now she must be telling herself that she couldn’t miss the train, that surely she just had to walk straight forward in a straight line and she’d hit the train or if she were terribly, unthinkably off her course she’d hit the tracks and just follow them to the train.

  “Can anybody hear me?” The voice was hoarse with panic—and more distant. Now she must be trudging on, sure that she would blunder into the steel cars at the next step or two, feeling ahead of herself with her hands so she wouldn’t bump her face—

  “Fore-ma-a-an!” It was the distant wail of a soul in Hell. Now the cold must be getting to her; they said it was forty below. Now she must be floundering in snowdrifts she knew should not be there.

  A choked animal howl without words sounded faintly in his numb ears.

  And still he waited. Forty below.