Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Then that sums it up,” said Gaynor bitterly. “We not only can’t get out, but we don’t know how we could get out if we could. Funny things happen to logic when you have a universe all to yourself.”

  Suddenly Jocelyn’s sleepy voice rang out. “What,” it said, “are you two conspirators muttering about? Are you planning to sacrifice the sacred virgin to the Great God Proto?”

  “We’ve just decided,” said Gaynor dolefully, “that we’re here almost for good. Or at least that we’ll be here until the vapor pressure of our bodies disperses us uniformly through our universe—which, as any chemist will tell you, is a long and longer time.”

  “Good,” she said astonishingly. “Now that you’ve decided maybe you can get some sleep. Good night, all.”

  “A very unusual girl,” whispered Clair hoarsely. “If it didn’t seem sort of silly under the circumstances I’d propose to her.”

  “And what makes you think,” snapped Gaynor nastily, “that she’d hate you? In fact, I had some thoughts along that line myself. Do you mind, esteemed colleague?”

  “Not at all. Maybe it’ll come down to the flip of a coin.”

  There was a long pause. Then Gaynor said nervously, “Do you suppose, Art, that we’ll have to eat one another?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know. Cannibalism. It’s customary.”

  “No,” said Clair thoughtfully. “It would be irrational in this case. Cannibalism is called for only when there is a question of outside influence. Thus, if we were waiting to be saved by a passing space-scow there would be some point to it; that is, one might survive and live a full life at the expense of the others. However in our case while we might eat Miss Earle on running out of food the chance of survival is too small to counterbalance the degradation of human instincts involved.

  “I took the precaution of hiding a bottle of Scotch—where you’ll never find it, esteemed colleague—and we have enough medicine aboard to furnish us with an overdose of any variety we desire. So we simply dump some veronal into goblets, add a few jiggers, touch glasses, and say goodbye.”

  “Thanks, Art,” said Gaynor gratefully. “You think of everything. Well—good night.”

  “Good night.”

  BREAKFAST was a grim and desultory affair. To raise their spirits they were playing a sort of word game. It circled gruesomely about the adjective, “apodyr tic.” Jocelyn would ask, “Am I apodyctic?” and the two men would airily answer that she was and so were they and the ship and breakfast and plumbers’ pipe and suspenders. “But,” said Gaynor ominously, “a Springfield rifle is not.”

  “Well, then—is the window apodyctic?”

  The two physicists looked at each other. “I’m inclined to think that it is,” said Gaynor reflectively.

  “I don’t know,” mused Clair, glancing at the little square of quartz. Then—

  “My God!” he cried thinly. “Look at that!”

  The others spun around and stared. The amorphous, stirless utter black that had been outside the port was there no longer. Instead there was motion and a mad spectrograph of colors which blended into a sort of gray sworl. A congeries of glowing spheres blazed past the window. Great looping ribbons of flame snaked past them and curled around the ship cracking quietly to themselves as they struck.

  The darkness was light, and the silence was sound; they stared and saw depth of space beyond vast depth; incredible shapes and sizes and colors stirring and awakening for as far as the eye could see. Vague, glowing areas weirdly collapsed into tense spheres that screamed off in any direction. Vast shapes smashed into each other to explode into far-scattering pellets of blazing green or blue or gold.

  Huge gouts of flame assailed one another. An incredibly vast rod of light that must have rivalled a solar system for magnitude collided with a great, spinning disk and absorbed it, then swelled and shattered into a million fragments that blazed with all the lights of the stars and shot off in unison to some distant goal.

  Globes battled with one another near the ship, lancing out immense spears of gleaming force, smashing at each other in Jovian combat, ravening their might into the incredible void. A nebulous anthropomorphic figure the size of a galaxy strode immensely through the deeps to crumble into vast glowing discs as it neared a mighty ophidian of flame.

  The three voyagers stared insanely at the colossal spectacle, nearer to madness than a human being can safely approach. It was Jocelyn who slammed the metal shutter against the port, shutting out the awful view.

  “Sit down,” she commanded. “You’ve seen all you can stand of that.” Limply the two men obeyed.

  “I don’t think dying would matter much to me now, Art,” said Gaynor flatly. “What was happening out there?”

  Stupidly, pedantically, Clair said, “Every accepted cosmogony states that at one time the entire universe consisted of a single homogeneous spread of matter-energy permeating all of space. They say that this all-embracing and infinitely tenuous cloud was at absolute rest with neither motion nor the possibility of motion. There was not, there could not have been thesis or antithesis or synthesis.

  “Nobody knows what happened to it after that, before it became what it is today, with most of it vacuum and the rest of it densely packed matter and energy.”

  “I see,” said Gaynor. “What’s going on—outside—is the birth of a universe. Or perhaps only its birth-pains. As yet there is no law save that law must struggle to assert itself over the insanity of matter and energy on the loose. Possibly this primitive stress-material has a will of its own—at least that’s one explanation of what we saw. Possibly the eternal combat-motif is merely the expression of the ascendancy of law so long outraged by the impossible state of rest that obtained for so long . . .

  “AT ANY rate we have to thank the stress-material for holding out so valiantly against law—otherwise we’d not be here.”

  “What do you mean by that?” snapped Clair.

  “Just this. That the stress-material is grateful. You see, we have created this universe and waked it into life. It is this ship that monkey-wrenched the quiescent machinery of the dead cosmos into existence. What is outside we have done.

  “We are in the storm-center of the storm we have created; if law had its way we would have been the first item to be destroyed by these incredible forces. However, though it may sound insane, the stress-material displays a touching filial affection toward its parent and so forbears.

  “Possibly that is madness. I don’t know how long we have before the junk outside knuckles under to dialectics and so destroys us. It may be twenty seconds and it may be twenty billion years.”

  Clair stared at him, fascinated. “You get the damnedest notions, Paul,” he breathed. “But you must be right. Take notes, Jocelyn.

  “Memorandum to the academy of science—it has been definitely established that the uniform stress state will obtain until a foreign body provides the center of gravity which, in an infinity or closed-circle finity, which amounts to the same thing, is lacking. The uniform stress state does not appear to be a product of mutual attraction, for attraction in any direction is counterbalanced by an exactly equal attraction to the particles in any other direction.”

  “Shall I mail this right away,” asked Jocelyn sourly, “or do you want to see the transcript?”

  Clair smote his forehead. “Very true,” he said. “But I wish I could see Billikin’s face when and if he hears of this!” His face changed suddenly. “I’ll bet,” he said, “he hears of this whether he knows it or not!”

  “What does that mean?” asked Gaynor.

  “Pavlik, you thick-skulled ape! Did you ever bother to think of what universe we’re so busy creating? Our own!

  “Don’t you see? We couldn’t have just stepped outside of space and stayed there for any length of time. We must have been snatched out for just as long as we had the power on, and as soon as it was cut off we slipped back into our own universe—the easy way! That is, the easiest poin
t of entry is at either the beginning or the end, and we happened on the beginning.

  “This little chunk of matter—the Prototype—slipped down the entropy gradient, slipped right up again, and busted the mechanics of a static system wide open!”

  “So,” said Gaynor, “this is the beginning and not the end.”

  “Sure!” cried Clair.

  “How do you tell one from another, esteemed collaborator?”

  Clair’s face fell. “All right,” he said—“what if it is the end instead? We’ve started it going all over again, so what’s the difference?”

  “None,” said Gaynor.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” Jocelyn interrupted demurely. “To my girlish mind you have strayed far from the essential point. That is—getting the hell out of here. The problem is no less acute despite our newly-discovered godlike qualities. There appears to be an entirely new set of data to work on, and I humbly submit that you get to work on them with an eye to slapping us back into something vaguely resembling a happy home.”

  “My old grandmother told me once,” said Gaynor thoughtfully, “ ‘If you can’t drink on a problem, sleep on it. And if you can’t sleep on it, eat on it.’ She was a crazy old girl. Let’s have some lunch, I suggest soup topped with whipped cream, omelette surrounding a heaping platter of fried canned chicken, to be wound up with stewed pineapple and brandied cherries.”

  “Much as it pains me to contradict you,” said Jocelyn firmly, “we’re having beans. Hundreds and hundreds of them—not only nourishing but tasty. Not only tasty but economical. Besides, we have to watch our provisions and figures.”

  THEY also had to watch their stock of tobacco. In fact they split a cigarette three ways after eating and nearly set fire to Clair’s soup-strainer lighting the segments.

  “Now,” said Gaynor, puffing gingerly, “we know we’re not where we thought we were. The question before the house is, how do we get where we want to be?”

  “We know,” said Jocelyn, “that the utterly useless trickle of juice from the lab is now effectively gimmicked by all the static zipping around outside. We have a generator here which is too incredibly feeble for our purposes to be anything but a lawn ornament. The crying need is power.”

  Clair mused, “It would be nice if we were outside this infant universe, or at least in a middle-aged one.”

  “Hold it, Art,” snapped Gaynor. “You said outside? Maybe there’s all the power we need out there beyond the hull!”

  “Yeah—but it’ll be a million million years before it’s in any form that we can use.” He snuffed out his stub of cigarette. “Or maybe—what the hell! If we do get power enough how’re we going to make proto out of it?”

  “Remember that photo plate, Art?” asked Gaynor.

  “Yeah. Radioactive.” Then he snapped erect and shouted it, “Radioactive! Everything in this whole damned universe—we’re saved, it seems, Paul. You’re right—we don’t have to build up 99—we’ve got it right outside!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pixies

  IT HAD taken them a week and a day to lead-sheath a reservoir for the radioactive gasses and to build and sheath a suction pump capable of drawing them in.

  “Stand by,” said Clair shortly. “Power on.”

  Gaynor threw the switch of their small, compact generator and Clair focused the electric lens with difficulty on the bulk of the gasses. “Ten seconds,” Jocelyn finally announced. “Power off.” They had felt nothing. Clair nervously strode to the window. They kept it covered, now. Hesitating a moment he flung the shutter open. The scene had not changed—they were still stranded. “Well, Paul,” he asked simply. “Now what—we haven’t moved.”

  “No?” asked Jocelyn sweetly. “Then what do you call that?”

  They followed her gaze out of the port. She had, it seemed, been referring to a squadron of flying dragons that were winging their way towards the ship in a perfect V-formation.

  “That,” said Clair flinging the drivers into ‘full speed ahead,’ “I call a mistake.”

  Gaynor moaned gently. “That’s no stress-energy. Used to have dreams like this,” he gibbered. “Only they weren’t quite so big and they didn’t breath quite so much flame and they always turned into snakes before they curled up on my chest.”

  “Planet ahead,” said Jocelyn. “It’s all alone—hasn’t got a sun. What do you make of it?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said Clair wearily. “But I’m going to land there. Being chased by flying dragons—especially flying dragons that can fly in a vacuum—is getting us nowhere.”

  “It’s setting us onto that planet,” said Jocelyn, “and I don’t like its looks.”

  “We’ll land and see what happens first,” said Clair, the dominant male. They were hanging over the surface of the globe about a mile up. Suddenly it gulped at them. A huge mouth, the size of one of the Great Lakes, opened in its surface and gulped at them. “Will we?” asked Jocelyn.

  “No,” said Clair unhappily. “I suppose not.” The ship drove on.

  Jocelyn laughed madly. “Pixies off the starboard bow,” she said in a flat, hysterical voice.

  “Yeah?” said Gaynor skeptically. Then he looked. His eyes bulged and his mouth opened and closed apoplectically. “Where the hell are we!” he screamed. “Fairy-land?”

  For pixies they were—a gauzy, fluttering band of them!

  “Maybe,” said Gaynor, “they’ll chase off the dragons.” But they made no move to do so. Instead they were keeping pace with the ship and rigging up a nasty-looking device with handles and snouts.

  “I think,” said Jocelyn, “that the Little People plan to do us dirt.”

  And sundry polychromatic rays shot from the device and struck the ship.

  “THAT tears it!” screamed Gaynor. He flung the dynamo into operation and snapped the lens into focus. Abruptly, they found themselves back in the nascent universe they knew so well, pyrotechnics and all. Jocelyn closed the shutter.

  “Now,” she said, “teacher offers a big prize to the bright little boy who can tell her what that ghastly district was and why we got there.”

  Clair and Gaynor stared at her from the floor. “I’m sure I don’t know,” said Clair dully. “Whatever it was it was awfully silly.”

  Gaynor moaned, “Flying dragons! I thought I’d left them behind when I had my twenty-first birthday. And dammit, I’m sore at those pixies. They were untraditional. If they’d been imps with spiked tails it would have been understandable—they’re expected to muck things up in general. Now, Clair—where were we, the lady asked. I’ll consult our instruments.”

  He rose painfully and opened a graph-box to refer to the continuous record of flight maintained by the tracing needles on endless scrolls of paper.

  “I think,” he said, “that I know what happened.

  “We must hold in mind the unassailable fact that all atoms are similarly constituted in form and all similarly constituted as regards their dynamics. That is to say, the electrons move all in a certain direction at a certain rate of speed.

  “This is true of planets and the atoms that compose them; of the atoms that compose our bodies and our sensory organs in particular.

  “Now—obviously these sensory organs will perceive only that type of atom which is similar to it in its major characteristics. For example, the eye will not take heed of a substance whose atoms are spinning backwards in relation to the atoms of the eye. But if the atoms of the eye are reversed in their motion they will readily perceive the matter whose electrons are now moving in a similar direction.”

  Clair said succinctly, “So what?”

  “That, esteemed colleague, is what happened to us and the ship. That nasty place we came from is backwards—in the larger sense, I mean.”

  Jocelyn looked baffled. “Then I was turned upside-down and inside-out to see those nasty people? All I can say is that it was hardly worth the trouble!”

  “But,” puzzled Gaynor, “why should those creatures
be the dead spit and image of all our mythological and childhood bogies?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know. Quite probably, though, those things can slink through, or at least did slink through at one time to scare the hell out of our ancestors back in the ages primitive. Or possibly our inspired spinners of folklore had something a little wrong with their eyes. It may be that a rod or cone in the retina is peculiar and lets through misty shapes that belong actually to the reverse universe.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Jocelyn unexpectedly. “And little children that swear they see fairies and goblins—they must belong in the same class. Sometimes funny things can leak through. We’re being frightful iconoclasts this trip—repudiating gravity, cosmogony, and etherics in one breath and establishing folklore in the next as scientific fact.”

  “Very true,” said Clair. “But this cuts no ice. We made a mistake that time somewhere—will it happen again, Pavlik?”

  “I don’t see why it should,” said Gaynor. “Maybe it works alternately. We can try it.”

  Automatically, he took his place at the power-intake equipment with one hand on the switch that controlled the generator.

  “Hold on,” said Jocelyn. “If we’re getting out of this mess I don’t see why we shouldn’t celebrate.”

  THE two men looked at one another. “Incredible girl,” said Gaynor. Clair said nothing, but reached into the core of an electromagnet and drew out a gleaming three-liter tube bearing the nobel imprint of the House of MacTeague.

  “Voici le Scotch,” he pronounced with pride. “Get paper cups, Pavlik.”

  They poured shots of the liquor and touched glasses.

  “To the voyage,” said Jocelyn.

  “To Jocelyn,” announced the men in chorus.

  They tossed their cups into a refuse container and took their stations. Clair juggled the lens about, adjusting it precisely.