TO YOU WHO CAN SEE, the first sentence said, I OFFER YOU A WORLD…
There was a flash of color up on the terrace. I stiffened. A minute later, here it came again, from a different direction: it was the boy, clambering down the slope, brilliant against the green, with his red sharp-billed cap like a woodpecker’s head.
I held my breath.
He came toward me through the fluttering leaves, ticked off by pencils of sunlight as he passed. He was a brown boy, I could see at this distance, with a serious thin face. His ears stuck out, flickering pink with the sun behind them, and his elbow and knee pads made him look knobby.
He reached the fork in the road, and chose the path on my side. I huddled into myself as he came nearer. Let him see it, let him not see me, I thought fiercely.
My fingers closed around a stone.
He was nearer, walking jerkily with his hands in his pockets, watching his feet mostly.
When he was almost opposite me, I threw the stone.
It rustled through the leaves below the niche in the rock. The boy’s head turned. He stopped, staring. I think he saw the figurine then. I’m sure he saw it.
He took one step.
“Risha!” came floating down from the terrace.
And he looked up. “Here,” he piped.
I saw the woman’s head, tiny at the top of the terrace. She called something I didn’t hear; I was standing up, tight with anger.
Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.
“Oh, what a stench!” he said.
He turned to shout, “Coming!” and then he was gone, hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.
My one chance, ruined. He would have seen the image, I knew, if it hadn’t been for that damned woman, and the wind shifting.… They were all against me, people, wind and all.
And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to the rocky sky.
* * * *
There was something inside me that told me to take my disappointment and go away from there, and not come back.
I knew I would be sorry. I did it anyway: took the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.
There was a thing that might have been an ornamental mound, or the camouflaged top of a buried house. I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown and white puppy.
He looked up with the laughter going out of his face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him—everything about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly anyhow, and fell on one knee, and shoved the figurine at his face. “Look—” I said.
He went over backwards in his hurry: he couldn’t even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping around his heels, and ran for the mound.
I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched, and the paper with it.
A door popped open and swallowed him and popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, “Wait,” and was in a spiral passage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went headlong, and came out at the wrong door—an underground conservatory, humid and hot under the yellow lights, with dripping rank leaves in long rows. I went down the aisle raging, overturning the tanks, until I came to a vestibule and an elevator.
Down I went again to the third level and a labyrinth of guest rooms, all echoing, all empty. At last I found a ramp leading upward, past the conservatory, and at the end of it voices.
The door was clear vitrin, and I paused on the near side of it looking and listening. There was the boy, and a woman old enough to be his mother, just—sister or cousin, more likely—and an elderly woman in a hard chair, holding the puppy. The room was comfortable and tasteless, like other rooms.
I saw the shock grow on their faces as I burst in: it was always the same, they knew I would like to kill them, but they never expected that I would come uninvited into a house. It was not done.
There was that boy, so close I could touch him, but the shock of all of them was quivering in the air, smothering, like a blanket that would deaden my voice. I felt I had to shout.
“Everything they tell you is lies!” I said. “See here—here, this is the truth!” I had the figurine in front of his eyes, but he didn’t see.
“Risha, go below,” said the young woman quietly. He turned to obey, quick as a ferret. I got in front of him again. “Stay,” I said, breathing hard. “Look—”
“Remember, Risha, don’t speak,” said the woman.
I couldn’t stand any more. Where the boy went I don’t know; I ceased to see him. With the image in one hand and the paper with it, I leaped at the woman. I was almost quick enough; I almost reached her; but the buzzing took me in the middle of a step, louder, louder, like the end of the world.
It was the second time that week. When I came to, I was sick and too faint to move for a long time.
The house was silent. They had gone, of course…the house had been defiled, having me in it. They wouldn’t live here again, but would build elsewhere.
My eyes blurred. After a while I stood up and looked around at the room. The walls were hung with a gray close-woven cloth that looked as if it would tear, and I thought of ripping it down in strips, breaking furniture, stuffing carpets and bedding into the oubliette.… But I didn’t have the heart for it. I was too tired. Thirty years.… They had given me all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory thereof, thirty years ago. It was more than one man alone could bear, for thirty years.
At last I stooped and picked up the figurine, and the paper that was supposed to go under it—crumpled now, with the forlorn look of a message that someone has thrown away unread.
I sighed bitterly.
I smoothed it out and read the last part.
YOU CAN SHARE THE WORLD WITH ME. THEY CAN’T STOP YOU. STRIKE NOW—PICK UP A SHARP THING AND STAB, OR A HEAVY THING AND CRUSH. THAT’S ALL. THAT WILL MAKE YOU FREE. ANYONE CAN DO IT.
Anyone. Someone. Anyone.
* * * *
Copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc.
C. M. KORNBLUTH
(1923–1958)
It’s an open question whether Alfred Bester or Cyril Kornbluth was the most cynical science fiction writer of the immediate post–World War II years. Bester was funnier and lived longer; Kornbluth’s satire was more biting. Bester’s writing has held up a little better, and the view of eugenics in Kornbluth can come off as disturbing to contemporary readers. On the other hand, of all the science fiction writers who predicted the revolution in global communications that was to come, no one but Kornbluth (in The Space Merchants, his brilliant 1952 collaboration with Frederik Pohl) predicted what in retrospect was startlingly obvious: the advent of internet spam.
Raised in New York City, Kornbluth joined the Futurians as a teenager, before serving in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. He originally worked in cannon-repair shops far from enemy lines, but was abruptly transferred to the infantry after the dissolution of the short-lived Army Specialized Training Program, under which he’d been attending college. His performance at the Battle of the Bulge earned him a Bronze Star, but also severe hypertension that contributed to his death.
He’d already been writing prolifically before the U.S. entered the war, selling “Stepsons of Mars” (a collaboration with Richard Wilson), to Astonishing in 1940 and his first solo story, “King Cole of Pluto,” to Super Science Stories the same year. Twenty stories, under a variety of pseudonyms, came out in 1941 alone. After returning to the war he graduated from the University of Chicago and picked up writing where he had left off.
Kornbluth’s most famous stories, “Th
e Little Black Bag” (1950) and “The Marching Morons” (1951), were controversial (and cynical) looks at a future in which the advent of readily accessible birth control caused smart people to reproduce at a much lower rate than stupid ones, leading to a world in which a tiny intelligent minority desperately tries to maintain a society filled with idiots.
When the thirty-four-year-old Kornbluth died of a heart attack on a train platform in 1958, he had already sold more than a hundred stories and novels, and left many bits and pieces unfinished. His frequent collaborator Frederik Pohl continued to write stories from unfinished collaborations, and then stories from ideas that Kornbluth had left behind. One of the latter, “The Meeting,” won a Hugo in 1973.
The second initial in Kornbluth’s writing name was not actually his middle initial. He did not have a middle name, and chose “M” for his wife, Mary Kornbluth.
THE LITTLE BLACK BAG, by C. M. Kornbluth
First published in Astounding Science Fiction, July 1950
Old Dr. Full felt the winter in his bones as he limped down the alley. It was the alley and the back door he had chosen rather than the sidewalk and the front door because of the brown paper bag under his arm. He knew perfectly well that the flat-faced, stringy-haired women of his street and their gap-toothed, sour-smelling husbands did not notice if he brought a bottle of cheap wine to his room. They all but lived on the stuff themselves, varied with whiskey when pay checks were boosted by overtime. But Dr. Full, unlike them, was ashamed. A complicated disaster occurred as he limped down the littered alley. One of the neighborhood dogs—a mean little black one he knew and hated, with its teeth always bared and always snarling with menace—hurled at his legs through a hole in the board fence that lined his path. Dr. Full flinched, then swung his leg in what was to have been a satisfying kick to the animal’s gaunt ribs. But the winter in his bones weighed down the leg. His foot failed to clear a half-buried brick, and he sat down abruptly, cursing. When he smelled unbottled wine and realized his brown paper package had slipped from under his arm and smashed, his curses died on his lips. The snarling black dog was circling him at a yard’s distance, tensely stalking, but he ignored it in the greater disaster.
With stiff fingers as he sat on the filth of the alley, Dr. Full unfolded the brown paper bag’s top, which had been crimped over, grocer-wise. The early autumnal dusk had come; he could not see plainly what was left. He lifted out the jug-handled top of his half gallon, and some fragments, and then the bottom of the bottle. Dr. Full was far too occupied to exult as he noted that there was a good pint left. He had a problem, and emotions could be deferred until the fitting time.
The dog closed in, its snarl rising in pitch. He set down the bottom of the bottle and pelted the dog with the curved triangular glass fragments of its top. One of them connected, and the dog ducked back through the fence, howling. Dr. Full then placed a razor-like edge of the half-gallon bottle’s foundation to his lips and drank from it as though it were a giant’s cup. Twice he had to put it down to rest his arms, but in one minute he had swallowed the pint of wine.
He thought of rising to his feet and walking through the alley to his room, but a flood of well-being drowned the notion. It was, after all, inexpressibly pleasant to sit there and feel the frost-hardened mud of the alley turn soft, or seem to, and to feel the winter evaporating from his bones under a warmth which spread from his stomach through his limbs.
A three-year-old girl in a cut-down winter coat squeezed through the same hole in the board fence from which the black dog had sprung its ambush. Gravely she toddled up to Dr. Full and inspected him with her dirty forefinger in her mouth. Dr. Full’s happiness had been providentially made complete; he had been supplied with an audience.
“Ah, my dear,” he said hoarsely. And then: “Preposserous accusation. ‘If that’s what you call evidence,’ I should have told them, ‘you better stick to your doctoring.’ I should have told them: ‘I was here before your County Medical Society. And the License Commissioner never proved a thing on me. So, gennulmen, doesn’t it stand to reason? I appeal to you as fellow memmers of a great profession—’”
The little girl, bored, moved away, picking up one of the triangular pieces of glass to play with as she left. Dr. Full forgot her immediately, and continued to himself earnestly: “But so help me, they couldn’t prove a thing. Hasn’t a man got any rights?” He brooded over the question, of whose answer he was so sure, but on which the Committee on Ethics of the County Medical Society had been equally certain. The winter was creeping into his bones again, and he had no money and no more wine.
Dr. Full pretended to himself that there was a bottle of whiskey somewhere in the fearful litter of his room. It was an old and cruel trick he played on himself when he simply had to be galvanized into getting up and going home. He might freeze there in the alley. In his room he would be bitten by bugs and would cough at the moldy reek from his sink, but he would not freeze and be cheated of the hundreds of bottles of wine that he still might drink, the thousands of hours of glowing content he still might feel. He thought about that bottle of whiskey—was it back of a mounded heap of medical journals? No; he had looked there last time. Was it under the sink, shoved well to the rear, behind the rusty drain? The cruel trick began to play itself out again. Yes, he told himself with mounting excitement, yes, it might be! Your memory isn’t so good nowadays, he told himself with rueful good-fellowship. You know perfectly well you might have bought a bottle of whiskey and shoved it behind the sink drain for a moment just like this.
The amber bottle, the crisp snap of the sealing as he cut it, the pleasurable exertion of starting the screw cap on its threads, and then the refreshing tangs in his throat, the warmth in his stomach, the dark, dull happy oblivion of drunkenness—they became real to him. You could have, you know! You could have! he told himself. With the blessed conviction growing in his mind—It could have happened, you know! It could have!—he struggled to his right knee. As he did, he heard a yelp behind him, and curiously craned his neck around while resting. It was the little girl, who had cut her hand quite badly on her toy, the piece of glass. Dr. Full could see the rilling bright blood down her coat, pooling at her feet.
He almost felt inclined to defer the image of the amber bottle for her, but not seriously. He knew that it was there, shoved well to the rear under the sink, behind the rusty drain where he had hidden it. He would have a drink and then magnanimously return to help the child. Dr. Full got to his other knee and then his feet, and proceeded at a rapid totter down the littered alley toward his room, where he would hunt with calm optimism at first for the bottle that was not there, then with anxiety, and then with frantic violence. He would hurl books and dishes about before he was done looking for the amber bottle of whiskey, and finally would beat his swollen knuckles against the brick wall until old scars on them opened and his thick old blood oozed over his hands. Last of all, he would sit down somewhere on the floor, whimpering, and would plunge into the abyss of purgative nightmare that was his sleep.
* * * *
After twenty generations of shilly-shallying and “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” genus homo had bred himself into an impasse. Dogged biometricians had pointed out with irrefutable logic that mental subnormals were outbreeding mental normals and supernormals, and that the process was occurring on an exponential curve. Every fact that could be mustered in the argument proved the biometricians’ case, and led inevitably to the conclusion that genus homo was going to wind up in a preposterous jam quite soon. If you think that had any effect on breeding practices, you do not know genus homo.
There was, of course, a sort of masking effect produced by that other exponential function, the accumulation of technological devices. A moron trained to punch an adding machine seems to be a more skillful computer than a medieval mathematician trained to count on his fingers. A moron trained to operate the twenty-first century equivalent of a linotype seems to be a better typographer than a Renaissance pri
nter limited to a few fonts of movable type. This is also true of medical practice.
It was a complicated affair of many factors. The supernormals “improved the product” at greater speed than the subnormals degraded it, but in smaller quantity because elaborate training of their children was practiced on a custom-made basis. The fetish of higher education had some weird avatars by the twentieth generation: “colleges” where not a member of the student body could read words of three syllables; “universities” where such degrees as “Bachelor of Typewriting,” “Master of Shorthand” and “Doctor of Philosophy (Card Filing)” were conferred with the traditional pomp. The handful of supernormals used such devices in order that the vast majority might keep some semblance of a social order going.
Some day the supernormals would mercilessly cross the bridge; at the twentieth generation they were standing irresolutely at its approaches wondering what had hit them. And the ghosts of twenty generations of biometricians chuckled malignantly.
It is a certain Doctor of Medicine of this twentieth generation that we are concerned with. His name was Hemingway—John Hemingway, B.Sc., M.D. He was a general practitioner, and did not hold with running to specialists with every trifling ailment. He often said as much, in approximately these words: “Now, uh, what I mean is you got a good old G.P. See what I mean? Well, uh, now a good old G.P. don’t claim he knows all about lungs and glands and them things, get me? But you got a G.P., you got, uh, you got a, well, you got a . . . all-around man! That’s what you got when you got a G.P—you got a all-around man.”
But from this, do not imagine that Dr. Hemingway was a poor doctor. He could remove tonsils or appendixes, assist at practically any confinement and deliver a living, uninjured infant, correctly diagnose hundreds of ailments, and prescribe and administer the correct medication or treatment for each. There was, in fact, only one thing he could not do in the medical line, and that was, violate the ancient canons of medical ethics. And Dr. Hemingway knew better than to try.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 223