Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Perhaps,” Jackson shrugged. “At any rate, what they needed was mechanical and physical genius. And you, Angel Maclure, are the outstanding mechanical and physical genius of the universe. You can solve problems that no other mind could even approach. And the first of such problems was the one of Dead Center, which we have been investigating for many generations.”

  “Investigating?” snapped Angel. “How?”

  “Purely psychological investigations, such as the projection of minds within the region of the Center. This has been actually a desperate race against the Morlens, for we believe that who is master of the Center is master of the universe.”

  “That’s probably true enough,” said Maclure thoughtfully. “And so you make your bid for my support?”

  “We do,” said Jackson somberly.

  “That’s nice,” snapped Angel viciously. “Now get this and get it straight: I’m not playing anybody’s game but my own, and if helping you out against the damn Morlens helps me out I’ll do it. On those terms—okay?”

  “Okay,” said Jackson gravely. “And you’d better begin helping us out pretty fast, because your benefactor Sapphire either relayed to or had his mind read by the Morlens, and they know the results of your calculations. They know where the Center is and, in a way, how to get there.”

  “Yeah,” jeered Angel. “Give me a piece of land and some tools and I’ll build you a spaceship that’ll make this thing look like a waterbug for size and speed!”

  “Haw!” laughed Jackson. “More damn fun!”

  CHAPTER III

  MACLURE had mostly duplicated the calculating work he had done back on Earth, working speedily and accurately though somehow depressed by the strangeness of the planet on which he had landed. Not yet had he seen the actual shapes of the Amters; they preferred to show themselves as almost replicas of his own face and body. Jackson had become his guide and companion.

  “Look,” said Angel, glowing with pride. “Something new.” He indicated a little sphere of silvery metal that looked somehow infinitely heavy. It rested ponderously on a concrete table well braced with steel beams, and even that sagged beneath it.

  Jackson inspected the thing. “Weapon?” he asked.

  “Darn tootin’, friend! I found this as a by-product of warp-synthesis. The base is osmium, the heaviest by volume of any natural element. And over that is a film one molecule thick of neutronium itself. How do you like it?”

  “How do you use it?” asked Jackson cautiously.

  “Mix up about a hundred of these things and when you get near enough to an enemy scoot them out into space. And unless they have a damned efficient screen they’ll be riddled by simple contact with the things.”

  “Um,” grunted Jackson. “Child’s play, of course. When does the real job begin?”

  “Any minute now, if you mean the ship. And I have some bad news for you,” Maclure added grimly. “You boys’re supposed to be the prime exponents of hypnotism and telepathy in the galaxy, right?”

  “I think we are,” snapped Jackson.

  “Well, laugh this off: I happened to get curious about the Morlens so I rigged up a projection gimmick that traces interferences of the eighth magnitude. Or, to translate my terms back into yours, a thought detector.”

  “Go on, Angel. I think I know what you found,” said Jackson slowly. “The Morlens—they’re at it?”

  “Right,” said Angel. “My setup showed a complete blanketing spy system. The minds of all workers on the calculators were being picked over carefully. In some cases they even substituted Morlen personalities for the workers’ and used their eyes. Naturally the Morlens didn’t try to tap your mind or mine; we would have known it. I did what I could—put up a dome screen of counter-vibrations that seem to shut off our friends. But—what do you think?”

  “You have more to tell me,” said Jackson. “Go on.”

  “At it again?” asked Maclure with a grin. “Okay, mind-reader. Lamp this gimmick.” He opened a cabinet and produced a small, flimsy device. “The engineering’s pretty sound on this,” he said, “but I’m still shaky on the psycho-manipulation you folks taught me last week. We’ll see if it works.”

  He plugged leads and conductors into ponderously insulated power-pickups and laughed as Jackson laid a worried hand on his.

  “That’s fixed,” he said. “I need all the juice I can get to bring over a video beam. Not wanting to blow out your power stations again I built a little thing of my own.” Angel patted a stubby little casing of thick, tough glass. “Underneath that baby’s hide,” he said, “is 39 volts. Not that I’ll ever need anything near that.”

  THE Angel’s deft fingers made minute adjustments within the spidery frame of his new gimmick; finally he connected it with a standard television screen. “Lights out,” he said as he snapped the switch. The room went dark.

  Slowly, with writhing worms of light wriggling across the ground glass screen, the scene illuminated and went into full color. Maclure grimaced at the fantastic spectacle. The things he saw—!

  The Morlens on whom he had focused, nine parsecs away, were hideous creatures. Like giant crabs in a way, and partly suggestions of octopi, they sprawled horribly over machinery and furniture. “That them?” he asked hoarsely.

  “The Morlens,” said Jackson. “Do you wonder that I have used my hypnotic powers to mask from you my own form?”

  “I suspected that you were the same race,” said Maclure. He turned again to the screen, and cut in the sound factor. A dull, clacking babble sounded from the speaker. “You know their language?”

  Jackson shook his head. “They aren’t talking language. It’s a code that can’t be broken without a key. They don’t underestimate you, Angel. What else has the gimmick got?”

  “Psycho circuit. If the damn thing works we won’t need to break their code. We’ll be able to tap their thoughts. Shall I try it? The most I’ve done before was to scout around back on Earth. Couldn’t find much there, though. Okay?”

  “Okay,” snapped Jackson. “You only live once.”

  Delicately, with the most painful precision, knowing well that a too sudden and too amplified projection of the Morlens’ minds would blow his mind out the way a thunderclap could deafen him, he turned the tiny screws of the gimmick.

  Angel winced and set his jaw as a surge of hate filled the room. It was the Morlens, far across the galaxy, who were the source. Like the pulsing roar of a dynamo the undersurge of detestation and the will to destroy beat into his brain. Hastily he turned down the psycho band, and concrete thoughts emerged from the welter of elemental emotion that rushed from the screen.

  It took Maclure only a moment to solve the unfamiliar thought-patterns of the Morlens. One of them, in some commanding position, was addressing the rest in cold, measured tones. Angel’s mind strained at the effort of encompassing the weird concepts and imagery of the creatures.

  “. . . increase of destruction,” the Morlen was saying. “Not very well pleased with the technique displayed, he has come to lend the weight of his personality and training to our efforts. I remind you that I am his direct representative. I remind you that any sort of rebellion is futility, for his innate ability is such and his immense experience is such that he can cope with any problem set him. It was he who devised the spy system which was successfully operated on the Amters up to a short time ago when their prodigy from Earth began to understand. It was he who devised the penetration-proof screen which shields us from any outside detection, either physical or intellectual.”

  “They think so,” interjected Angel grimly. He averted his eyes from the screen.

  JACKSON stirred at his side. “Look!” he gasped.

  There was a slow motion on the wall of the room in which the Morlens were gathered. And there entered a crawling vehicle of glass, surrounded by a tangle of machinery slick with moisture. Within the glass Maclure saw, obscured by moisture and drifts of steam, the shriveled, lofty, crusted brow of Mr. Sapphire.

 
The eyes, behind their ponderous lenses, turned directly on Angel. “Maclure!” the voiceless whisper rang out. “Now you should know who is your adversary. I cannot hear you, but I know you have a one-way setup on this room. A man does not meditate for one hundred years without a moment’s pause and fail to learn many things about his own mind and the minds of others. To you I was a financier, I think. Now learn your error.

  “It is true that my passion is for life and being. And I will brook no opposition in the way of that end. I waited the long years for you to reach the full colossal apex of your genius; a genius so profound that you yourself do not realize one tenth of its capacities.

  “Maclure, you will come to heel or be crushed. You have fulfilled your mission. You have plotted the course to Dead Center, and you have given me the faster-than-light drive which enables me to see for the first time that race of beings over whom I have for half a century been unquestioned master. My Morlens are my hands; they will duplicate for me the drive which you have devised for the Amters. Now I offer you your choice:

  “Either cut your Amters dead, for from them you have nothing to gain, or refuse me and suffer the terrible consequences. For you have nothing to offer me, Angel. All you can do with the Center I now know. Only on the chance that you will in the future be of use to me do I offer to spare you. What is your answer?” The aged monster whispered in a tone of mockery: “I shall know by your actions. Within the hour I start for the Center in a perfect duplicate of the ship you have devised for your friends. Follow or oppose and you shall take the consequences. Now cut off?”

  And from the ancient creature’s mind there radiated such a stream of destructive hate that Angel winced and shut off the machine at its power lead. “Mr. Sapphire,” he meditated aloud, “is not all that I had thought him to be.”

  Jackson grinned feebly. “What’re you going to do, Maclure?”

  Angel said thoughtfully: “Mr. Sapphire must not get to the Center before us. You heard that he was starting—we must follow. And we must work on the way.”

  “He’s terribly strong,” said Jackson. “Terribly strong now that he has his own mind and a good part of yours in his grasp. How do we lick his psychological lead?”

  “The only way I can and with the only weapons I got, chum. Cold science and brainwork. Now roll out that bus we have and collect the star-maps I got up. Round up every top-notch intellect you have and slug them if you have to, but at any cost get them into the ship. We’re going to Dead Center, and it’s a long, hard trip.”

  COMFORTABLY ensconced in the cabin of the Memnon, which was the altogether cryptic name Maclure had given the Center ship, Jackson was listening worriedly.

  “The directive factor in the course,” said Angel, “is not where we’re going but how we get there. Thus it’s nothing so simple as getting into the fourth dimension, because that’s a cognate field to ours and a very big place. Dead Center is wholly unique, therefore there’s only one way to get there.”

  “And finding out that way,” interjected Jackson, “was what had you in a trance for thirty hours mumbling and raving about matrix mechanics and quintessimal noduloids. Right?”

  “Right,” admitted Angel, shuddering a little at the recollection. “Half of the math was the most incredibly advanced stuff that you have to devote a lifetime to, and the rest I made up myself. Look.” He gestured outside the window of the ship.

  Obediently Jackson stared through the plastic transparency at the absolute, desolate bleakness that was everywhere around them. In spite of the small, sickening sensation in the stomach, they might as well have been stranded in space instead of rushing wildly at almost the fourth power of light’s speed into nothing and still more nothing. He tore his eyes away. “Quite a sight,” he said.

  “Yeah. And do you know where we’re going?”

  “As far as I can see you’ve nearly reached the limit of space, Angel. Unless my math is greatly at fault, you’re going to find that we’ve been traveling for a month to find ourselves back where we started from. What’s the kicker you’re holding?”

  “The kicker, as you vulgarly call it,” said Maclure, “is a neat bit of math that I doped out for myself. A few years ago I stumbled on the interesting fact that there is a natural limit to the speed-direction ratio as such. I mean, there are certain directions we can go in as long as we stay beneath this limiting constant, which I refer to as J after my Uncle Joe. Anyway, when you scrounge around with some triple integration you find out what this limiting constant is. I have found it to be the speed of light to the fifth power.

  “Once you go over that the fences are down. You have another direction you can go in, and that’s the direction we’re going to take. Reason I went way out here, nearly to the end of space, is because when we go in that direction something spectacular ought to happen to any surrounding matter. Ready to increase speed now you know?”

  “Okay,” said Jackson briefly. “You’re the boss. Murphy!” Another of the Amters, who was handling the controls, nodded. “Over the top?” he asked grinning.

  “Darn tootin’, Murph,” said Angel. “Hold fast, friends.”

  Murphy depressed the little silver bar still farther, in one savage stab. Actually they felt the ship leap ahead colossally, its beams straining under the unimaginable atomic stress and bombardment to which it was being subjected. Angel, his eyes on the port, gasped as he saw the jet black of space writhe with a welter of colors. “This is it,” he snapped thinly. He turned a wheel at his hand, spinning it into the wall.

  There was a throbbing of valves and pistons as great directive pumps ponderously went into action, grasping out to grip onto the very fabric of space itself. The ship changed direction then, in some weird and unexplainable manner. Speaking mathematically, the equation of the ship’s dynamics altered as the factor J inoperated conversely. But from what Angel saw he doubted all his math and science. This firmest mind in the galaxy wondered if it were going mad.

  CHAPTER IV

  BENEATH them swam an incalculably huge plain, curiously dim under a diffused light from high overhead. The vast expanse stretched as far as the eye could see, and there were moving lumps on its surface that shifted strangely without seeming to move.

  Jackson screamed grotesquely. Then as Angel caught his eye and held it he smiled sheepishly. “Imagine!” he grinned. “Me going off my rocker! But this place looks like hell to me, Angel—honest it does. What do you make of it?”

  “Don’t know,” said Angel quietly. “But it’s more than appearances that makes an Amter scream that way. What did you pick up?”

  “Can’t fool you, I guess. I felt something—a very strong, clear thought band. And I didn’t like it one little bit. Now that’s unusual. There isn’t a single thought-pattern in creation that’s that way. Usually your feelings are mixed. Once you really get into a person’s mind you find out that you can’t hate him. You’re bound to find something good.

  “Even Mr. Sapphire, that horrid old octopus, has a spark of worship in him, and a very fine, keen feeling for beauty. But the band I just got—” Jackson shuddered and looked sick.

  “We’re soaring, Murph,” directed Maclure. The ship skimmed lightly over the plain, Angel busily staring through the ports. “Whatever the damn things are,” he commented, “they don’t move in any normal perceivable manner. They don’t traverse space, I think. Just see: they’re in one place and then in another. You meet some very strange people in these parts, I think.”

  Crash! The ship came to a sickening halt. Angel, not wasting a word, pulled his blue-steel automatics. “The only original and authentic superman,” he.said in hard, even tones, “feels that dirty work is being done.”

  The Memnon settled to the ground and was surrounded by the big, grey lumps with the disconcerting ability to move without moving. Jackson shuddered. “That’s it,” he whispered. “Thoughtband of pure evil and hate. I could kill them for just existing.”

  “Hold it,” said Angel quietly. “See if
you can get a message from them. I think something’s coming through.”

  They must have been concentrating on the occupants of the craft, for even he could feel it without effort, and to the psychologically trained and sensitive Amters it came as a buffeting blow. “Come out!” was the message, sent with deadly dull insistence and power. “Come out! Come out! Come out!”

  Angel pocketed his guns. “We’d better,” he said. “If I make no mistake these people can back themselves up. And if they had any intention of destroying us right out, I think they could have done it.”

  The seven Amters and Angel filed from the ship into the chill, sweetish air of the dim plain. The grey lumps surrounded them, confronting Angel. He studied the creatures and saw that they had rudimentary features. As he guessed at their evolution they must be the end-product of an intensely intellectual and emotional race. All this, of course, subject to alteration by the unguessable influence of their surroundings.

  The stolid, battering thought-waves came again. “Mr. Sapphire told us of you. He has threatened us and we know that he is powerful. We shall hold you for his disposal. He said that you were swifter than he but not as powerful and we should not fear you. If you do not wish us to believe that, you must prove otherwise.”

  “Ask him,” Angel said to Jackson, “how Mr. Sapphire threatened them.”

  Jackson knit his brows and Maclure could feel the pulsing communication. Promptly the creatures answered: “He locked us into time. He is very wise and knows things about time that we do not.”

  They were either primitive or degenerate, thought Maclure, and probably the latter from their advanced physical make-up. Perhaps he could try the time stunt himself. He whipped out a minute set of tools and selected a fairly complicated little projector. He varied the pitch of its lenses and filaments rapidly and addressed the creatures directly: “As Mr. Sapphire has done, I can too. See!”