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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  A long minute later there was a howl that was less than animal, surely the last vestige of her life. And still he waited.

  There was no further sound. There was only the desolate blackness and the still cold like a vice clamped on his chest.

  Abruptly he closed the train door and went through the vestibule into the stench of the darkened car and the night-noises; whimpering; groans; curses. His feet were like wooden clogs.

  A figure loomed before him: Boyce.

  “Where’s Miss—” Boyce began, and then broke off. His eyes were riveted to Foreman’s gloved right hand. Foreman still clutched the open knife.

  In a dry, hoarse voice he hardly recognized as his own, Foreman said: “I killed her. I cut the cord and she froze. It’s forty below out there.”

  “Shut up!” Boyce whispered. “Don’t talk like that.” He pried the knife from Foreman’s hand and closed it and put it in his own pocket. “It could have been an accident—it was an accident. It broke by itself. You didn’t kill her!”

  There was a long pause. “You’re right, of course,” Foreman said.

  He watched as Boyce went to the door that leaked light around its end and opened it. In the brief moment he saw Joan’s face by the light of the spirit lamp, puzzled and expectant. And the door closed.

  Foreman walked to his own compartment past the groans and snores and crying children, swearing adults, the coughs and snorts and curses in the dark. His foot burned with cold and it was dark, but he found his way without stumbling.

  With a tumbler of whisky in his hand he thought: Civil murder. I’ve done it and there’s no undoing it. Now there’s only one other thing to do and that’s to get myself executed for murder. I have a feeling that I could execute myself the way poor Mike did, with this bottle and a few thousand more like it. A messy and undignified way to die, and it takes twenty years and sometimes more. Or like the red-head I could take to drugs, which is quicker but not quick enough.

  I can’t live with this. It was a silent scream. Greer’s face, Greer’s voice—he had ended them, turned them off. Am I sorry? I don’t know. What I know is that I can’t live with it.

  There must be a way out of it. Out of living with the face and voice of Greer, out of the slime I’ve tumbled into. And he knew suddenly that there was a way. First he would have to make the contact in San Francisco. Then he would have to develop it and do at least half the job. Then he would have to buy a tape recorder. And then soon, quite soon, he would be out of it. And everything.

  A distant roar shivered through the train as something crashed into it at 4:45 A.M.

  Boyce woke with a start. Beside him Joan was crying softly. The spirit lamp had burned dry and gone out, with a curl of smoke from the charred wick.

  “Joan,” he said, looking at her wonderingly.

  “Don’t misunderstand,” she said, blinking away tears. “It’s stopped hurting. Anyway, I didn’t mind.” She clung to him. “Was I crazy? Hypnotized? By her?”

  “You were scared and running,” he said. “But now you know there’s nothing to be scared of.”

  “Now I know,” she said softly. She thought of her father. The face wasn’t demoniacal at all any more. The beard wasn’t mephistophelian; it was simply a little beard as worn by a rather sad little man who had been running hard too. His crackling, bitter voice? She heard it now in her ears, but with new overtones of tiredness and gentle humor to which she had been deaf for too long. She hated him no more.

  “This is real,” she said slowly. “Not like it would have been with—”

  “—a certain unhappy woman,” he finished. “This is real, darling; you’re stuck with me. For better or worse, for richer or poorer. And it’s going to be for poorer, I guess. She’ll get one of those damn Illinois divorces. Stick the knife into me and twist it for maybe two hundred a month.”

  “You’d be cheap at twice the price,” she said, and kissed him.

  The train shivered again.

  “We’d better get out of here,” Boyce said, leaping from the berth. He groped for a match and struck it, began to struggle into his clothes. “Get dressed, Joan. Or we’ll have some explaining to do.”

  She whipped her own clothes on. Her nerves overcame her at the door and she clutched at him. “Is she really—gone?”

  “Gone like a nightmare in the morning,” he said grimly.

  “Yes,” she said. “A nightmare. One of those running-in-glue nightmares.” She hugged him and said: “It’s good to be awake again.”

  They stepped carefully down the aisle and clutched each other as the train jolted and crashed. The car was a smelly bedlam of excited and hilarious passengers. Hoarded matches were being recklessly struck; people were shaking hands and laughing.

  “Our seat,” said Boyce. He poked the rump of a woman who was sprawled over both halves of it. “This is ours,” he told her as she shook herself blearily in the light of the match he held. She got up wordlessly and shambled off, stretching in the cold.

  The lights began to glow dimly! A crazy, happy cheer crashed through the car; Boyce and Joan sat very close together.

  Somebody—it was the tall trainman—yelled from the forward end of the car: “Can I have yer attention please? Snowplows and an axillery engine have reached us. We’ll have light and heat up to normal soon. We’ll have samwiches and coffee passed out to your seats soon. There’s a doctor up front. Anybody needs treatment, please go up front. We oughta be in Phoenix by noon.”

  He passed hurriedly down the aisle. The conductor followed him, brisk and peppery again, snapping at questioning passengers: “Not now. Gotta get things organized again.”

  “The hell with San Francisco,” Boyce said. “Let’s get off at Phoenix.”

  “What a wonderful—”

  She fell silent as Foreman walked slowly down the aisle. He stopped and said to them: “Think I’ll find that doctor up front. I seem to have a touch of frostbite. You two all right?”

  “Yes,” said Joan impulsively. “Everything’s wonderful.”

  “Wonderful,” he said woodenly, and stumped down the aisle.

  Bless you, my children, he thought. The price will be high, but from your eyes I think it was worth the price I must pay.

  Pilar Mackenzie y del Torres and her child lay cold and uncaring.

  Dr. and Mrs. Groves rested at last, fallen asleep slumped over their bed in the middle of their prayers.

  And outside in the dark a wolf fed on another wolf.

  THIRTEEN O’CLOCK

  Originally published in Stirring Science Stories, February 1941.

  1

  Peter Packer excitedly dialed his slide rule, peering through a lens as one of the minutely scored lines met with another. He rose from his knees, brushing dust from the neat crease of his serge trousers. No doubt of it—the house had a secret attic room. Peter didn’t know anything about sliding panels or hidden buttons; in the most direct way imaginable he lifted the axe he had brought and crunched it into the wall.

  On his third blow he holed through. The rush of air from the darkness was cool and sweet. Smart old boy, his grandfather, thought Peter. Direct ventilation all over the house—even in a false compartment. He chopped away heartily, the hollow strokes ringing through the empty attic and down the stairs.

  He could have walked through the hole erect when he was satisfied with his labors; instead he cautiously turned a flashlight inside the space. The beam was invisible; all dust had long since settled. Peter grunted. The floor seemed to be sound. He tested it with one foot, half in, half out of the hidden chamber. It held.

  The young man stepped through easily, turning the flash on walls and floor. The room was not large, but it was cluttered with a miscellany of objects—chests, furniture, knickknacks and whatnots. Peter opened a chest, wondering about pirate gold. But there was no gold, for the thing was full t
o the lid with chiffons in delicate hues. A faint fragrance of musk filled the air; sachets long since packed away were not entirely gone.

  Funny thing to hide away, thought Peter. But Grandfather Packer had been a funny man—having this house built to his own very sound plans, waiting always on the Braintree docks for the China and India clippers and what rare cargo they might have brought. Chiffons! Peter poked around in the box for a moment, then closed the lid again. There were others.

  He turned the beam of the light on a wall lined with shelves. Pots of old workmanship—spices and preserves, probably. And a clock. Peter stared at the clock. It was about two by two by three feet—an unusual and awkward size. The workmanship was plain, the case of crudely finished wood. And yet there was something about it—his eyes widened as he realized what it was. The dial showed thirteen hours!

  Between the flat figures XII and I there was another—an equally flat XIII. What sort of freak this was the young man did not know. Vaguely he conjectured on prayer time, egg boiling and all the other practical applications of chronometry. But nothing he could dredge up from his well-stored mind would square with this freak. He set the flash on a shelf and hefted the clock in his arms, lifting it easily.

  This, he thought, would bear looking into. Putting the light in his pocket, he carried the clock down the stairs to his second-floor bedroom. It looked strangely incongruous there, set on a draftman’s table hung with rules and T squares. Determinedly, Peter began to pry open the back with a chisel, when it glided smoothly open without tooling. There was better construction in the old timepiece than he had realized. The little hinges were still firm and in working order. He peered into the works and ticked his nail against one of the chimes. It sounded sweet and clear.

  The young man took up a pair of pliers. Lord knew where the key was, he thought, as he began to wind the clock. Slowly it got under way, ticking loudly. The thing had stopped at 12:59. That would be nearly one o’clock on any other timepiece; on this, the minute hand crept slowly toward the enigmatic XIII.

  Peter wound the striking mechanism carefully, and watched as a little whir sounded. The minute hand met the roman numeral, and with a click the chimes sounded out in an eerie, jangling discord. Peter thought with sudden confusion that all was not as well with the clock as he had thought. The chimes grew louder, filling the little bedroom with their clang.

  Horrified, the young man put his hands on the clock as though he could stop off the noise. As he shook the old cabinet, the peals redoubled until they battered against the eardrums of the draftsman, ringing in his skull and resounding from the walls, making instruments dance and rattle on the drawing board. Peter drew back, his hands to his ears. He was filled with nausea, his eyes bleared and smarting. As the terrible clock thundered out its din without end, he reached the door feebly, the room swaying and spinning about him, nothing real but the suddenly glowing clock dial and the clang and thunder of its chimes.

  As he opened the door it ceased, and he closed his eyes in relief as his nausea passed. He looked up again, and his eyes widened with horror. Though it was noon outside, a night wind fanned his face, and though he was on the second-story landing of his Grandfather Packer’s house, dark trees rose about him, stretching as far as the eye could see.

  * * * *

  For three hours—by his wristwatch’s luminous dial—Peter had wandered, aimless and horrified, waiting for dawn. The aura of strangeness that hung over the forest in which he walked was bearable; it was the gnawing suspicion that he had gone mad that shook him to his very bones. The trees were no ordinary things, of that he was sure. For he had sat under one forest giant and leaned back against its bole only to rise with a cry of terror. He had felt its pulse beat slowly and regularly under the bark. After that he did not dare to rest, but he was a young and normal male. Whether he would or not, he found himself blundering into ditches and stones from sheer exhaustion. Finally, sprawled on the ground, he slept.

  Peter awoke stiff and sore from his nap on the bare ground, but he felt better for it. The sun was high in the heavens; he saw that it was about eleven o’clock. Remembering his terrors of the night, he nearly laughed at himself. This was a forest, and there were any number of sane explanations of how he had got here. An attack of amnesia lasting about twelve hours would be one cause. And there were probably others less disturbing.

  He thought the country might be Maine. God knew how many trains or busses he had taken since he lost his memory in his bedroom. Beginning to whistle, he strode through the woods. Things were different in the daytime.

  There was a sign ahead! He sprinted up to its base. The thing was curiously large, painted in red characters on a great slab of wood, posted on a dead tree some twelve feet from the ground. The sign said: ELLIL. He rolled the name over in his mind and decided that he didn’t recognize it. But he couldn’t be far from a town or house.

  Ahead of him sounded a thunderous grunt.

  Bears! he thought in a panic. They had been his childhood bogies; he had been frightened of them ever since. But it was no bear, he saw. He almost wished it was. For the thing that was veering on him was a frightful composite of every monster of mythology, menacing him with saber-like claws and teeth and gusts of flame from its ravening throat. It stood only about as high as the man, and its legs were long, but to the engineer it seemed ideally styled for destruction.

  Without ado he jumped for a tree and dug his toes into the grooves of the bark, shinning up it as he used to as a child. But there was nothing childlike about it now. With the creature’s flaming breath scorching his heels, he climbed like a monkey, stopping only at the third set of main branches, twenty-five feet from the ground. There he clung, limp and shuddering, and looked down.

  The creature was hopping grotesquely about the base of the tree, its baleful eyes on him. The man’s hand reached for a firmer purchase on the branch, and part came away in his hand. He had picked a sort of coconut—heavy, hard, and with sharp corners. Peter raised his eyebrows. Why not? Carefully noting the path that the creature below took around the trunk, he poised the fruit carefully. Wetting a finger, he adjusted the placing. On a free drop that long you had to allow for windage, he thought.

  Twice more around went the creature, and then its head and the murderous fruit reached the same point at the same time. There was a crunching noise which Peter could hear from where he was, and the insides of its head spilled on the forest sward.

  “Clever,” said a voice beside him on the branch.

  He turned with a cry. The speaker was only faintly visible—the diaphanous shadow of a young girl, not more than eighteen, he thought.

  Calmly it went on, “You must be very mancic to be able to land a fruit so accurately. Did he give you an extra sense?” Her tone was light, but from what he could see of her dim features, they were curled in an angry smile.

  Nearly letting go of the branch in his bewilderment, he answered as calmly as he could, “I don’t know whom you mean. And what is mancic?”

  “Innocent,” she said coldly. “Eh? I could push you off this branch without a second thought. But first you tell me where Almarish got the model for you. I might turn out a few myself. Are you a doppelgaenger or a golem?”

  “Neither,” he spat, bewildered and horrified. “I don’t even know what they are!”

  “Strange,” said the girl. “I can’t read you.” Her eyes squinted prettily and suddenly became solid, luminous wedges in her transparent face. “Well,” she sighed, “let’s get out of this.” She took the man by his elbow and dropped from the branch, hauling him after her. Ready for a sickening impact with the ground, Peter winced as his heels touched it light as a feather. He tried to disengage the girl’s grip, but it was hard as steel.

  “None of that,” she warned him. “I have a blast finger. Or didn’t he tell you?”

  “What’s a blast finger?” demanded the engineer.

 
; “Just so you won’t try anything,” she commented. “Watch.” Her body solidified then, and she pointed her left index finger at a middling-sized tree. Peter hardly saw what happened, being more interested in the incidental miracle of her face and figure. But his attention was distracted by a flat crash of thunder and sudden glare. And the tree was riven as if by a terrific stroke of lightning. Peter smelled ozone as he looked from the tree to the girl’s finger and back again.

  “No nonsense?” she asked.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Come on.”

  They passed between two trees, and the vista of forest shimmered and tore, revealing a sort of palace—all white stone and maple timbers.

  “That’s my place,” said the girl.

  2

  “Now,” she said, settling herself into a cane-backed chair.

  Peter looked about the room. It was furnished comfortably with pieces of antique merit, in the best New England tradition. His gaze shifted to the girl, slender and palely luminous, with a half-smile playing about her chiseled features.

  “Do you mind,” he said slowly, “not interrupting until I’m finished with what I have to say?”

  “A message from Almarish? Go on.”

  And at that he completely lost his temper. “Listen, you snip!” he raged. “I don’t know who you are or where I am, but I’d like to tell you that this mystery isn’t funny or even mysterious—just downright rude. Do you get that? Now—my name is Peter Packer. I live in Braintree, Mass. I make my living as a consulting and industrial engineer. This place obviously isn’t Braintree, Mass. Right? Then where is it?”

  “Ellil,” said the girl simply.

  “I saw that on a sign,” said Packer. “It still doesn’t mean anything to me. Where is Ellil?”

  Her face became suddenly grave. “You may be telling the truth,” she said thoughtfully. “I do not know yet. Will you allow me to test you?”

  “Why should I?” he snapped.

  “Remember my blast finger?”