His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  We had to ride with it. I'd started the mania, but it was out of hand and a long tune dying down.

  The World Series, the best in years, finally killed off the domes. By an unspoken agreement among the services, we simply stopped run-ning stories every time a hysterical woman thought she saw a dome or wanted to get her name in the paper. And, of course, when there was no longer publicity to be had for the asking, people stopped seeing domes.

  There was no percentage in it. Brooklyn won the Series, international tension climbed as the thermometer dropped, burglars began burgling again, and a bulky folder labeled "domes, shining," went into our morgue. The shining domes were history, and earnest graduate students in psychology would shortly begin to bother us with requests to borrow that folder.

  The only thing that had come of it, I thought, was that we had somehow got through another summer without too much idle wire time, and that Ed Benson and I had struck up a casual corre-spondence.

  A newsman's strange and weary year wore on. Baseball gave way to football. An off-year election kept us on the run. Christmas loomed ahead, with its feature stories and its kickers about Santa Claus, Indiana. Christmas passed, and we began to clear jolly stories about New Year hangovers, and tabulate the great news stories of the year.

  New Year's day, a ghastly ratrace of covering 103 bowl games. Record snowfalls in the Great Plains and Rockies. Spring floods in Ohio and the Columbia River Valley. Twenty-one tasty Lenten menus, and Holy Week around the world. Baseball again, Daylight Saving Time, Mother's Day, Derby Day, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes.

  It was about then that a disturbing letter arrived from Benson. I was concerned not about its subject matter but because I thought no sane man would write such a thing. It seemed to me that Benson was slipping his trolley. All he said was that he expected a repeat per-formance of the domes, or of something like the domes. He said

  "they" probably found the tryout a smashing success and would con-tinue according to plan. I replied cautiously, which amused him.

  He wrote back: "I wouldn't put myself out on a limb like this if I had anything to lose by it, but you know my station in life. It was just an intelligent guess, based on a study of power politics and Aesop's fables.

  And if it does happen, you'll find it a trifle harder to put over, won't you?"

  I guessed he was kidding me, but I wasn't certain. When people begin to talk about "them" and what "they" are doing, it's a bad sign. But, guess or not, something pretty much like the domes did turn up in late July, during a crushing heat wave.

  This time it was big black spheres rolling across the countryside.

  The spheres were seen by a Baptist congregation in central Kansas which had met in a prairie to pray for rain. About eighty Baptists took their Bible oaths that they saw large black spheres some ten feet high, rolling along the prairie. They had passed within five yards of one man.

  The rest had run from them as soon as they could take in the fact that they really were there.

  World Wireless didn't break that story, but we got on it fast enough as soon as we were tipped. Being now the recognized silly season authority in the W.W. Central Division, I took off for Kansas.

  It was much the way it had been in Arkansas. The Baptists really thought they had seen the things—with one exception. The exception was an old gentleman with a patriarchal beard. He had been the one man who hadn't run, the man the objects passed nearest to. He was blind. He told me with a great deal of heat that he would have known all about it, blind or not, if any large spheres had rolled within five yards of him, or twenty-five for that matter.

  Old Mr. Emerson didn't go into the matter of air currents and turbu-lence, as Benson had. With him, it was all well below the surface.

  He took the position that the Lord had removed his sight, and in return had given him another sense which would do for emergency use.

  "You just try me out, son!" he piped angrily. "You come stand over here, wait a while and put your hand up in front of my face. I’ll tell you when you do it, no matter how quiet you are!" He did it, too, three times, and then took me out into the main street of his little prairie town. There were several wagons drawn up before the grain elevator, and he put on a show for me by threading his way around and between them without touching once.

  That—and Benson—seemed to prove that whatever the things were, they had some connection with the domes. I filed a thoughtful dis-patch on the blind-man angle, and got back to Omaha to find that it had been cleared through our desk but killed in New York before relay.

  We tried to give the black spheres the usual ride, but it didn't last as long. The political cartoonists tired of it sooner, and fewer old maids saw them. People got to jeering at them as newspaper hysteria, and a couple of highbrow magazines ran articles on "the irre-sponsible press." Only the radio comedians tried to milk the new mania as usual, but they were disconcerted to find their ratings fall. A network edict went out to kill all sphere gags. People were getting sick of them.

  "It makes sense," Benson wrote to me. "An occasional exercise of the sense of wonder is refreshing, but it can't last forever. That plus the ingrained American cynicism toward all sources of public infor-mation has worked against the black spheres being greeted with the same naive delight with which the domes were received. Nevertheless, I predict—and I'll thank you to remember that my predictions have been right so far 100 per cent of the time—that next summer will see another mystery comparable to the domes and the black things. And I also predict that the new phenomenon will be imperceptible to any blind person in the immediate vicinity, if there should be any."

  If, of course, he was wrong this time, it would only cut his average down to fifty per cent. I managed to wait out the year—the same in-terminable round I felt I could do in my sleep. Staffers got ulcers and resigned, staffers got tired and were fired, libel suits were filed and settled, one of our desk men got a Nieman Fellowship and went to Harvard, one of our telegraphers got his working hand mashed in a car door and jumped from a bridge but lived with a broken back.

  In mid-August, when the weather bureau had been correctly pre-dicting "fair and warmer" for sixteen straight days, it turned up. It wasn't anything on whose nature a blind man could provide a nega-tive check, but it had what I had come to think of as "their" trade-mark.

  A summer seminar was meeting outdoors, because of the frightful heat, at our own State University. Twelve trained school teachers testified that a series of perfectly circular pits opened up in the grass before them, one directly under the education professor teaching the seminar.

  They testified further that the professor, with an astonished look and a heart-rending cry, plummeted down into that perfectly cir-cular pit.

  They testified further that the pits remained there for some thirty seconds and then suddenly were there no longer. The scorched summer grass was back where it had been, the pits were gone, and so was the professor.

  I interviewed every one of them. They weren't yokels, but grown men and women, all with Masters' degrees, working toward their doctorates during the summers. They agreed closely on their stories as I would expect trained and capable persons to do.

  The police, however, did not expect agreement, being used to dealing with the lower-I.Q. brackets. They arrested the twelve on some technical charge—"obstructing peace officers in the perform-ance of their duties," I believe—and were going to beat the living hell out of them when an attorney arrived with twelve writs of habeas corpus. The cops' unvoiced suspicion was that the teachers had conspired to murder their professor, but nobody ever tried to explain why they'd do a thing like that.

  The cops' reaction was typical of the way the public took it.

  Newspapers—which had reveled wildly in the shining domes story and less so in the black spheres story—were cautious. Some went over-board and gave the black pits a ride, in the old style, but they didn't pick up any sales that way. People declared that the press was insult-ing their intel
ligence, and also they were bored with marvels.

  The few papers who played up the pits were soundly spanked in very dignified editorials printed by other sheets which played down the pits.

  At World Wireless, we sent out a memo to all stringers: "File no more enterpriser dispatches on black pit story. Mail queries should be sent to regional desk if a new angle breaks in your territory." We got about ten mail queries, mostly from journalism students acting as string men, and we turned them all down. All the older hands got the pitch, and didn't bother to file it to us when the town drunk or the village old maid loudly reported that she saw a pit open up on High Street across from the drug store. They knew it was probably untrue, and that furthermore nobody cared.

  I wrote Benson about all this, and humbly asked him what his pre-diction for next summer was. He replied, obviously having the time of his life, that there would be at least one more summer phenome-non like the last three, and possibly two more—but none after that.

  It's so easy now to reconstruct, with our bitterly earned knowl-edge!

  Any youngster could whisper now of Benson: "Why, the damned fool!

  Couldn't anybody with the brains of a louse see that they wouldn't keep it up for two years?" One did whisper that to me the other day, when I told this story to him. And I whispered back that, far from being a damned fool, Benson was the one person on the face of the earth, as far as I know, who had bridged with logic the widely separated phenomena with which this reminiscence deals.

  Another year passed. I gained three pounds, drank too much, rowed incessantly with my staff, and got a tidy raise. A telegrapher took a swing at me midway through the office Christmas party, and I fired him. My wife and the kids didn't arrive in April when I ex-pected them.

  I phoned Florida, and she gave me some excuse or other about missing the plane. After a few more missed planes and a few more phone calls, she got around to telling me that she didn't want to come back. That was okay with me. In my own intuitive way, I knew that the upcoming silly season was more important than who stayed married to whom.

  In July, a dispatch arrived by wire while a new man was working the night desk. It was from Hood River, Oregon. Our stringer there reported that more than one hundred "green capsules" about fifty yards long had appeared in and around an apple orchard. The new desk man was not so new that he did not recall the downhold policy on silly-season items.

  He killed it, but left it on the spike for my amused inspection in the morning. I suppose exactly the same thing happened in every wire service newsroom in the region. I rolled in at 10:30 and riffled through the stuff on the spike. When I saw the "green capsules" dispatch I tried to phone Portland, but couldn't get a connection. Then the phone buzzed and a correspondent of ours in Seattle began to yell at me, but the line went dead.

  I shrugged and phoned Benson, in Fort Hicks. He was at the police station, and asked me: "Is this it?"

  "It is," I told him. I read him the telegram from Hood River and told him about the line trouble to Seattle.

  "So," he said wonderingly, "I called the turn, didn't I?"

  "Called what turn?"

  "On the invaders. I don't know who they are—but it's the story of the boy who cried wolf. Only this time, the wolves realized—" Then the phone went dead.

  But he was right.

  The people of the world were the sheep.

  We newsmen—radio, TV, press, and wire services—were the boy, who should have been ready to sound the alarm.

  But the cunning wolves had tricked us into sounding the alarm so many times that the villagers were weary, and would not come when there was real peril.

  The wolves who then were burning their way through the Ozarks, utterly without opposition, the wolves were the Martians under whose yoke and lash we now endure our miserable existences.

  Fire-Power

  [Cosmic Stories - July 1941 as by S. D. Gottesman]

  1

  Tiny, trim Babe MacNeice descended the very secret staircase that led into the very private office of Intelligence Wing Commander Bartok.

  "Hello!" he gasped as the wall panel slid aside. "You're on Magdeburg's 83— or aren't you?"

  "There was very little doing there," she smiled, seating herself. "Except a bustle and roiling about as I left. It seems that someone had kidnapped their HQ secretary and sweated him for some information relative to their new interceptors."

  "Have they any idea," asked Bartok anxiously, "who that someone was?"

  Babe laughed. "They have the finger on him. From some confidential instructions he dropped while making a getaway, they learned that he was a secret agent for some Venusian colony or other. He was described as a thin old man of effeminate carriage and manner."

  Bartok smiled, relieved. "Your number twelve. Report, please." He started a phonograph turning and pointed the mike at Babe.

  The girl said chattily: "MacNeice went per orders to Magdeburg's 83 for confirmation or denial of rumors concerning a planned uprising against Terrestrial authority. There she found widespread reports of similar character; the entire planet was flooded with propaganda.

  "Information was conclusively—ah—secured—from an official to the effect that the colonial governor, Allison by name, was fomenting an insurrection by means of which he would be able to assume supreme authority over the planet and defend it against terrestrial forces. That is all." She lit a cigarette and stared dully at the floor as the wing commander sealed and labeled the report record.

  "That," said Bartok, "sews up Allison in a very uncomfortable sack. We'll send a cruiser tonight."

  "Sure," said the girl. "He hasn't got a chance. None of them have against the insidious Commander Bartok and his creatures of evil. That's me."

  "And don't tell me you don't love it," he grinned. "I know better. In the blood, that's where it is—the congenital urge to pry into other people's affairs and never be suspected. It gives us a kick like two ounces of novadyne."

  "Speaking of which," said Babe, "are you dining alone tonight?"

  "Nope. I have a standing date with my favorite little voyeur whenever she comes back to Earth. Scamper along to get dressed; I'll meet you in two hours at the living statues."

  The show-place of New Metropole, capital of the All Earth Union and Colonies, was the Square of Living Statues. Bathed in ever-changing lights, the groups of three men and three women, molded from the purest gold and silver and assembled with every artifice of the year A.D.

  3880, changed steps and partners, moving through the hours of the day in a stately dance that was never twice the same in even the smallest step.

  Grouped on a lofty platform, the heroically proportioned figures were the focus of every visitor to the wonder-city of all time and space. There was absolutely nothing like them in the universe, nothing like their marvelous grace that would balance a three-ton male on his toes while whirling a two-ton female partner in a vast arc, all to the most subtly exquisite music that could be evolved from supertheramins and electroviolas. The music too was completely automatic. The divine harmonies came from nothing more than a revolving drum which selected at random sequences of tones and the companion coloring of the lights that flooded the statues in their dance.

  In a glassed restaurant Bartok and Babe were dining. Through the walls filtered enough of the music to furnish a subdued background to lovers'

  talk. But when these two got together it was business. As the wing commander had said, it was something in the blood.

  "MacNeice," snapped Bartok, "I am not arguing with you, I'm telling you. You are not going to do any such damfool thing as walk in on our piratical friends and confront them with what you doubtless think of as

  'The Papers.' I'm going to get this melodrama out of your head if I have to beat it out."

  The girl's face was flushed and angry. "Try that and you'll get yours with an Orban," she snapped. "I say that if you bring it right home to them that we're on their tails they'll give up without a struggle, and we've s
aved so many lives and so much fuel that a medal for me will be in order."

  "The cruiser," said Bartok, "leaves tonight. And that settles everything.

  Forget, child, that this wing of the service was once its brains instead of its eyes and ears. We are now officially an appendage devoted to snooping, and the glorious history of the Intelligence Division is behind us."

  "Fitzjames," she muttered, gritting her teeth. "I'd like to take that Admiral of the Fleet by his beard and tear his head off. And don't tell me you aren't in the project body and soul." Mocking his tones she said:

  "I know better."

  "Off the record," admitted Bartok, "I may opine that our tiny suite of offices has more brains in its charladies' little fingers than the entire fighting forces have in all the heads of all the commanders of all their mile-long battlewagons.

  That is, naturally, gross overstatement and pure sentimentality on my part. Eat your Marsapples and shut up."

  She bit viciously into one of the huge fruit and swallowed convulsively, her eyes drifting through the glass wall to the living statues. They were performing a sort of minuet, graceful beyond words, to an accompaniment from the theremins in the manner of Mozart.

  "And what's more," barked the wing commander in an angry afterthought, "the body of the space navy could dispense with us at will, whereas without them we'd be lost. You can't exist for the purpose of making reports to nobody. What good would your spying have done if there hadn't been any cruiser to be sent off to bomb Allison's capital city?"

  "None at all," she snapped at him. "Only I don't like the job if it has to mean taking guff from every half-witted ensign who graduated because he knows how to work an Auto-Crammer. Barty, you know and I know that they hate us and check up on everything we send in. The—the sneaks!" Abruptly she was weeping. The wing commander, indecisively, passed her a handkerchief. Women! he was thinking. Sometimes they could be thoroughly opaque to reason. Any man could see through his sardonic recital of rules. The wing commander detested the well-set-up officers and gentlemen who would not and could not move until he had charted the course. The wing commander had a healthy contempt for any and all formality and routine, with which the naval service was weighed down as with tons of lead. But the wing commander was, first, last and always, of that unalterable cast of mind which makes the superb, chilled-steel military spy.