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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Anyway, Battle, we have our fingers on the economic pulse of the planet. We could release information through dreams and hunches that would wreck the market, as you call it, and create the most staggering panic of all times. Once that happens, Battle.…”

  “Go on,” snapped the lieutenant.

  “Once that happens, Battle,” she said in a small, tense voice, “we turn on a little machine we have and every human being that walks the Earth turns into pocket fuzz.”

  She faced his horrified stare with a pitying smile. “It’s true,” she said. “We can do it. When we’re ready, when we’re convinced that science and research are so disorganized that they can’t possibly do anything about it, we turn on the machine, technically known as a protoplasmo high carbon proteidic discellular converter, and it happens.”

  “Not,” grated Battle, “if I can stop it.”

  “That’s the rub, my dear,” she said with a frown. “You can’t. You’re my prisoner.” And she smiled exquisitely, baring apple-green teeth, so that Battle was constrained to agree with the little lady.

  “It seems fitting,” he brooded absently. “A superrace indeed is come to humble man.”

  * * * *

  “Darling,” said Battle, “it’s the strange mixture of ruthlessness and sentimentality that makes your people perpetually amazing to me. It’s a pitched battle in the dark on our part; my people have no notion of what’s going on behind their backs, and you see nothing evil or dark in the situation.”

  Busily Miss Aktying click! Byam kissed him and returned to her desk. “My sweet,” she said, “if you trouble your head over our alien morality you’ll never get to the end of it. Enough that you are accepted into our midst as a noncombatant worker and the very special charge of the Expediter-in-Chief—that’s me. Now, go away, please. I’ll see you tonight.”

  Battle pocketed the seal he had lifted from her desk and blew a kiss at her back as he closed the door behind him.

  The week he had been imprisoned had been no great hardship; he had been privileged to roam within the limits of the city and examine the marvelously complicated life these tiny invaders had made for themselves. There had been other privileges as well.…

  The lieutenant, professional and romanticized killer, could not get over the appalling technique of the invaders. It was not inefficient, it was not cold-blooded; somehow to him it was worse. Like all right-minded military men of the old school, he deplored the occasional necessity of spying. What then could he think of a campaign that was spying and nothing else but?

  He had been allowed to see—under guard—the wonderful listening posts of the tiny people. From little speakers boomed the voices of Old Jay and the other titans of finance who worked off steam in the smoking room of the Billionaire’s Club. And nobody ever sat on the sofa or moved it; it simply would never occur to a member to do so, and in the minds of the servants there had been built up a myth that it was the very first sofa that the celebrated and deceased founder of the club, Nicholas van Bhoomenbergen, had installed and that it would be a breach of the club’s rules to move it. The fact was that it had been brought in by two men from Airways Express who had had their minds taken over for the nonce by the invaders. A Mrs. Pinsky, for whom it had been originally consigned, never did find out what happened to it.

  Battle ascertained by judicious inquiry that the pocket-fuzz machine actually did exist. It had been a swipe from the war science of the invaders from Ceres. The thing was broken down at the moment, but when they got it into shape again—!

  He had uneasy pictures of a vast number of speculators all waking up with the same hunch on which way the market would jump. All bidding simultaneously for the same securities would make a ticklish situation that could be touched off by judicious inspiration of an investment banker—any investment banker—who could be dreamed into thinking his bank was without assets.

  Bank closes and banker commits suicide. Panic on the market; the vast number of speculators find themselves with securities at fantastically high prices and worth fantastically near nothing at all. Vast numbers of speculators sell out and are ruined, for then three more banks close and three more bankers commit suicide. President declares bank holiday; the great public withdraws savings as soon as the banks open again; therefore the banks close again. The great public holes up for a long, hard winter. With loose cash lying around crime is on the upswing and martial law is declared, at which Leftist organizations explode and start minor insurrections in industrial cities.

  Mexico attacks across the Rio Grande; the invaders from the asteroid have a contingent of expert hypnotists ready to leave for Chihauhau, where the southern republic’s army is stationed.

  And then the protoplasmo high carbon proteidic discellular converter would be turned on. The population of Manhattan would turn into pocket fuzz—or at least separate large-molecule units resembling very closely the stuff you find in pockets or handbags after two or three weeks of use.

  Manhattan is fortified by the wee folk from the asteroid, who build several more of the flug machines, aiming them at the other boroughs and moving their twenty-mile field of effectiveness at the rate of a state each day. The North American continent would be clear of any and all protoplasmic life at the end of two months, they estimated.

  And the hell of it was that they were right. But Battle was whistling cheerily as he forged a pass with the aid of the seal from his lady’s desk.

  * * * *

  He had crept out into the open, been perceived by the eagle eye of Ole Cromleigh, lifted on a pair of tweezers and whisked into a waiting Rolls.

  Once again his natural size in the New Jersey lab, he stretched comfortably. “Thanks for being so prompt,” he yawned. “Thanks a lot. They were coming after me, by the sound of the footsteps in the distance.”

  “Now you see why I had to be quiet and do this thing on the sly?” demanded the financier. “If I’d told all I know they’d have called me mad and locked me up the way his family treated poor old John D.—but don’t let that get out, Lieutenant. Now tell me what you found there—begin at the beginning. How much do they know about finance and manipulation? Have they got their records in a safe place?”

  Battle lit a cigarette; he hadn’t taken any with him for fear of firing the sofa. Luxuriously he drew in a draft of the smoke clear down to his toenails and let it trickle from the corners of his mouth. “One question at a time,” he said. “And I’ll ask the first few of them. Mr. Cromleigh, why won’t you let me bomb the sofa?”

  The old man twisted his hands nervously together. “Because a bomb in the smoking room would kill Old Jay when he hears about it; the man always goes to Lhasa in Tibet when July Fourth rolls around. He’s been that way since the Wall Street Massacre in ’24 or ’25. Because I’m not cold-blooded. And because, dammit, those little people I saw were cute.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Battle reminiscently. “That she was. To begin at the beginning, your dream was substantially correct. They’re little people from an asteroid. They have war machinery and no hearts whatsoever. They’re listening twenty-four hours a day. Not a word spoken in the room escapes them and it all goes onto records.”

  “Good—good God!” whispered Cromleigh, cracking his freckled knuckles. “What that information must be worth!” He rose. “Let’s get back to Manhattan for a drink, Lieutenant,” he said shakily. “And there’s another aspect I want to discuss with you. Your first trip was a sort of foray. It was mostly to convince me that I wasn’t mad. And to size up the ground as well. Now can we discuss planting a permanent spy in the sofa? To keep tabs on them and move only when necessary?”

  “Delightful,” said Battle thoughtfully. “I have friends. My own club you probably do not know of, but it is the best of its kind.”

  * * * *

  Cromleigh, nervously tapping his desk with a pencil, was alone in the great New Jersey lab as far as could be
seen. Grotesque machinery lined the walls; during the day there would be eight score technicians working, checking and double-checking their results, bringing new honor and glory to the Cromleigh Vacumaxic Sweeper and the rest of the string of electric products. His sugar plants and labs were far away in Pasadena; the Cromleigh Ironworks were going full blast in the ore basin of the continent. He looked like a very worried man.

  From the shadows, with completely noiseless tread, stole a figure. “Good evening, sir,” said Battle. “I’ve brought all of the Saber Club that’s available on two hours’ notice.

  “Miss Millicent, this is Mr. Cromleigh,” he announced, leading forth from the shadows a tall, crisp woman.

  When she spoke it was with a faint Southern drawl. “Pleased t’know you. Any frien’ of Lieutenant Battle’s.…” She trailed back into the darkness and vanished completely.

  “Dr. Mogilov, former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kazan.”

  A slight, smiling man bowed out from the darkness; he was smooth-shaven and looked very un-Russian. In a pronounced Cambridge dialect he said, “Delighted,” and put one hand on the butt of a revolver slung from his slender waist.

  “And Alex Vaughn, Yorkshire born and bred.”

  The Englishman said thickly, in the peculiar speech that makes the clear-headed, big-boned men of York sound always a little intoxicated, “Ah coom wi’ russi-veh-shins, soor. Lut thawt bay oondair-stud.”

  “He says,” interpreted the lieutenant, “that he comes with reservations; let that be understood. And that completes the present roster of the Saber Club present in New York.”

  “Only three?” complained Cromleigh. “And one a woman? You gave me to understand that they could completely smash the invaders.”

  “Yes,” said the lieutenant, his voice heavy with added meaning. “Any invaders.”

  “No doubt—” said Cromleigh. Then some message in Battle’s eyes alarmed him unaccountably; his hand trembled on the desk top and gripped the edge to steady itself.

  “That did it!” snapped Battle. He swung on Ole Cromleigh. “How long have we?” he grated, pulling a gun and aiming it for the financier’s throat.

  In a voice hoarse with hatred Cromleigh yelled, “Just two minutes more, you meddling scum! Then—”

  “Lights!” yelled Battle. “Turn the damned lights on, Miss Millicent!” As the overhead indirects flared up, bathing the huge lab in a lambent, flaming radiance, the four figures of the Saber Club members, the Billionaire Clubman and one other leaped into sharp reality.

  It was the figure of the sofa. “We took the liberty,” said Battle, his gun swerving not an inch, “of removing this object from the smoking room. It’s going lock, stock and barrel into the enlarging machine you have here.”

  “You fool!” roared Cromleigh. “Don’t you know—” The descending gun butt cut off any further conversation.

  “Hurry up!” grated the lieutenant. He hefted the sofa to his broad shoulders. “That trembling hand was a signal if ever I saw one. His friends’ll be here any minute. Open that damned machine and plug in the power!”

  The Russian philosopher, muttering wildly to himself, swung wide the gates of the boxlike magnifier through which Battle had come only a few hours before.

  “Thank God there’s plenty of room!” groaned Battle. “And if this doesn’t work, prepare for Heaven, friends!” He turned on the machine full power and speed, took Miss Millicent by the arm, and dragged her to the far end of the vast lab.

  During the incredibly long three minutes that ensued, they made ready their weapons for what might prove to be a siege, while Battle explained in rapid-fire undertones what he had had no time for during the plane ride from Manhattan.

  As he checked the load of his quick firers he snapped, “Invaders—phooey! Anybody could tell that those women were fresh from an office. They had the clerical air about them. The only invader—as a carefully logical process of deduction demonstrated—was the gruesome creature who’s been posing as Cromleigh. Just murdered the old guy—I suppose—and took over his body. He and his friends whom he just signaled. He’s the only baby who hypnotized the Phi Beta Kappas they use for busboys.

  “Why did he risk sending me in there? The inevitable mark of a louse. Doesn’t trust anybody, not even his own office staff dyed a pale green and reduced to half-gnat size. So he sent me in to spy on them. The whole cock-and-bull story of the creatures from an asteroid was so that there’d be no suspicion directed at him in case some bright waiter should find the louse people. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s from an asteroid himself. Crazy business! Craziest damned business!”

  “How about the financial angle?” asked Vaughn, who could be intelligible when money was involved.

  “I picked that bird’s pocket slick as a whistle just after I conked him. Feels like a hundred grand.”

  “Here they come!” snapped Miss Millicent.

  “They” were creatures of all sizes and shapes who were streaming through the only door to the lab, at the other end of the room.

  “Awk!” gulped the lady involuntarily. “They” were pretty awful. There were a hundred or so of them, many much like men, a few in an indescribable liquid-solid state that sometimes was gaseous. The luminous insides of these churned wildly about; there were teeth inside them two feet long. Others were gigantic birds, still others snakes, still others winged dragons.

  “That settles it,” grunted the Russian philosopher as he flicked his gun into and out of its holster faster than the eye could follow. “That settles it. They are amoebic, capable of assuming any shape at all. One is changing now—awk!” He persevered. “Indubitably possessed of vast hypnotic powers over unsuspecting minds only. Otherwise they would be working on us.”

  “They” were rolling in a flood of shifting, slimy flesh down the floor of the lab.

  “The machine! The sofa!” cried Miss Millicent. Battle breathed a long sigh of relief as the cabinetlike expander exploded outward and the sofa it held kept on growing—and growing—and growing! It stopped just as it filled the segment of the lab that it occupied.

  With a squeaking of tortured timbers the laws of cross-sectional sufferance power asserted themselves and the hundred-yard-high sofa collapsed in a monstrous pile of rubble.

  “Sit very still,” said the lieutenant. “Be quite quiet and blow the head off any hundred-foot centipede that wanders our way.”

  There were agonized yells from the other side of the couch’s ruins. “That couch,” Battle informed them, “was just plain lousy. Full of centipedes, lice, what have you. Naturally; never been fumigated. And when a louse smells blood—God help any invaders around, be they flesh, fish, fowl or amoebic!”

  After ten minutes there was complete quiet.

  “What abaht th’ boogs?” asked Vaughn.

  “They’re dead,” said Battle, rising and stretching. “Their respiratory systems can’t keep up with the growth. They were good for about ten minutes, then they keeled over. Their tracheae can’t take in enough oxygen to keep them going, which is a very good thing for the New Jersey countryside.”

  He strolled over to the vast pile of rubble and began turning over timbers, Miss Millicent assisting him.

  “Ah!” he grunted. “Here it is!” He had found the body of an apple-green young lady whose paint was beginning to peel, revealing a healthy pink beneath. With many endearing terms he brought her out of her swoon as Miss Millicent’s eyebrows went higher and higher.

  Finally she exploded, as the two were cosily settled on a mountainous upholstery needle that had, at some time, got lost in the sofa.

  “Just when, Lieutenant, did you find out that these people weren’t invaders from an asteroid?”

  Battle raised his eyebrows and kissed the girl.

  “Have no fear, darling,” he said. “A gentleman never—er—kisses—and tells.”

>   THE ROCKET OF 1955

  Originally published in Escape, August 1939.

  The scheme was all Fein’s, but the trimmings that made it more than a pipe dream, and its actual operation, depended on me. How long the plan had been in incubation I do not know, but Fein, one day in the spring of 1954, broke it to me in a rather crude form. I pointed out some errors, corrected and amplified on the thing in general, and told him that I’d have no part of it—and changed my mind when he threatened to reveal certain indiscretions committed by me some years ago.

  It was necessary that I spend some months in Europe, conducting research work incidental to the scheme. I returned with recorded statements, old newspapers, and photostatic copies of certain documents. There was a brief, quiet interview with that old, bushy-haired Viennese worshiped incontinently by the mob; he was convinced by the evidence I had compiled that it would be wise to assist us.

  You all know what happened next—it was the professor’s historic radio broadcast. Fein had drafted the thing; I had rewritten it and told the astronomer to assume a German accent while reading. Some of the phrases were beautiful: “American dominion over the very planets!—veil at last ripped aside—man defies gravity—travel through space—plant the glorious red, white and blue banner into the soil of Mars!”

  The requested contributions poured in. Newspapers and magazines ostentatiously donated yard-long checks of a few thousand dollars; the Government gave a welcome half-million; heavy sugar came from the “Rocket Contribution Week” held in the nation’s public schools; but independent contributions were the largest. We cleared seven million dollars, and then started to build the spaceship.

  The virginium that took up most of the money was tin plate; the monatomic fluorine that gave us our terrific speed was hydrogen. The takeoff was a party for the news-reels: the big, gleaming bullet extravagant with vanes and projections; speeches by the professor; Farley, who was to fly it to Mars, grinning into the cameras. He climbed an outside ladder to the nose of the thing, then dropped into the steering compartment. I screwed down the soundproof door, smiling as he hammered to be let out. Rather to his surprise, there was no duplicate of the elaborate dummy controls he had been practicing on for the past few weeks.