Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Well,” said Markett, uncertainly, as the doctor turned off the lights and started the projector. She settled herself in a comfortable double seat, and the doctor joined her, while Experimental Reel Seven, Full Power, went clicking through the camera and onto the screen. But they, being otherwise absorbed, paid little or no attention to it.

  The patient—sixty-six-twenty-five—whimpered and tried to scrape off the copper bus-bars that confined him. Then his eyes drifted to the screen, and he beheld a marvelously real landscape, not frozen in paint on canvas but quivering with life. A rabbit started, and the patient, who had never seen a rabbit, recognized the little creature, and worked his jaws.

  There was an unfamiliar taste in his mouth, as though he were champing something tough-fibred, like a woven cloth or bit of soft wood. He had never eaten meat, so to the still-dominant presence of his ego there was no connotation.

  As though he were slowly turning he saw the landscape move, and a walled city came into view. What a walled city was he couldn’t say, but the words were in his brain; and quivering with rage, he wanted to tear down the massive bastions with his own hands, and rend the mailed men who were pacing the ramparts. He clenched his right fist, and felt the hilt of Al Azaaf, his scimitar. Slowly Roald stood up from the grass and settled his greaves about his thighs. “Rouse up, sons of Yggdrasil,” he hissed fiercely, and his men—his terrible Norse, scourge of the coast—appeared from bushes and brakes, drawing axes from belts and fitting pikes to shafts.

  “Seventy-and-nine of us there be,” growled Roald without preamble, “and of them an hundred and eighty or more. Who complains?” There was silence on the moor, save for the clank of metal as when dirk touched against breastplate.

  Roald grinned savagely and swept aside his long red beard to spit. “The less men the more booty,” he snarled. “Eh? And women—?” He laughed tremendously. Then, whirling his sword he roared, “By the hammer of Thor—Come on!” Roaring wildly Roald and his red-bearded band made across the common at a dead run.

  There were screams from the city, and much blowing of horns. Arrows began to smack into the clayey soil about them, and Roald raised his buckler. He saw the gates of the city swinging shut; yelling inarticulately he tore a blazing torch from the fist of a companion and hurled it into the knot of porters and marketmen that was struggling with the heavy bar and hinges; they scattered in terror, only a second before the red demons were within the gates, slashing and clubbing with keen swords and murderous axes.

  Roald was the spear-head of the attack, and as he and his men plowed contemptuously through the rabble . . . tradesmen and shopkeepers . . . he laughed wildly. “Guard ho!” he yelled. “Who will come to do battle with the chosen of Odin. The curse of Cornwall and the damned, stinking Isle of Britain? Guard ho!” Slash! through the shoulder of a boy with a pike. He drove a mailed fist into the face of a gammer who was struggling aside, unwilling to leave her heavy basket of turnips behind.

  Roald grinned savagely in the eyes of an archer. “Draw,” he shouted, and as the Englishman reached he spitted him on the curve of Al Azaaf. A new blade crossed his, and with dirk and sword he ranged up and down the length of a square with his foe, a dark-eyed young man who fought precisely and quietly. Behind him he felt the spearhead break into bits and the body of the guard charged the Norse. The youth extended his body in a strange thrust, and Roald cursed the queer, slim weapon he used—a thing like a dart with a hilt. The Viking slashed once, and the youth parried. Roald slashed again, and there was the shock known to swordsmen as steel clashed steel. The youth was weaponless, and Roald cut him down where he stood, kicked the body in the ribs, then spun to defend himself against assault from a clumsy pike.

  The Viking grinned savagely, and swept aside his beard. “With this draught,” he roared to his men, “I name this city fief to the Vikings and to Roald, and all its values, be they goods or women or children, fief also to their conquerors.” He glared about him from the eminence in the walled city’s central square, on the scene of desolation and butchery. He stood among his Norse having left not one of the hundred and eighty defenders. “Skoal!” he roared, and drank.

  And Six-six-twenty-five, otherwise known as Clark Stevens (M3972677-234a-150-N190), shuddered violently, stared at the screen that had just run blank. “What—?” he began, sitting erect. “Damn!” said Stevens, finding himself strangely trammeled by web-works of pure copper. He wrenched his hands free and tore the wires from his ankles and head. “You!” he roared at a couple snuggled in an easy chair.

  “Quite recovered?” smiled Dr. Alfreed, unfastening the plastic bands that were restraining Stevens. “A little dizzy?”

  Stevens glared at him, and the Doctor backed away. There was a blinding flash about three inches away from the doctor’s chin, and he went down and out. The patient, rubbing his fist, squinted through the gloom and perceived Miss Travenor. “Ah,” he said gutturally. He stepped out of his improvised shirt and trousers; Markett saw with relief that he was wearing the conventional shorts and bandolier beneath. More unconventional than his former attire, however, was the patient’s new behavior. He spurned the doctor’s body with one foot and picked up the nurse. “Excuse me—” she began plaintively.

  “Shut up!” growled Stevens, slinging her over his shoulder.

  And that was that.

  Dr. Alfreed awoke to realize that he had committed a serious breach of experimental technique. It had been a mistake not to observe the screen during the process of rehabilitation, and it had been a grievous mistake not to check on the patient’s reactions. He cursed softly to himself when he saw clearly enough to be sure that neither patient nor nurse were anywhere in the room.

  Alfreed was a thoughtful man; he realized that, in the old days, someone would have gotten hell for a blunder of this nature and scope. In the old days technical superiors would have fired the responsible party for the incompetency when revealed, so Alfreed was thankful that these were not the old days. But further than that he did not think. Perhaps, therefore, he was the truly responsible party for what was to happen to his snug little world of file numbers, ventilated houses, air-conditioned clinics, amiable objectives and pneumatically complacent nurses.

  He wasn’t spectacularly worried, having no technical superiors to whom to answer. But he had failed in a social duty. Enough of his careful conditioning had remained to remind him of that.

  “Oh, Hell!” he swore softly, thinking of the consequences.

  He reached over to his hyper-typer, banged out a full report of the affair and shot it into a tube system, one of whose many mouths gaped from a nearby wall. This, too, was routine. If anything worked to correct his mistakes this would. Section headquarters all over the city would be semi-automatically notified, bulletins flashed to rural districts. Within half an hour millions of citizens would be informed—not alarmed—by the quickchanging public information screens.

  And with a sense of duty well done he retired to his quarters on the same floor and stared for a while at a forbidden bottle of wine. Then he got drunk.

  Clark Stevens carried Markett Travenor as far as the elevator door. Glancing back at the prostrate form of the man he had hit in the jaw his eyes narrowed. Something of cold reason was coming back. Then, suddenly, he became aware—but acutely—of the girl he was carrying in his arms. “Ah,” he said. Abruptly he shifted one of his hands a trifle; the girl shivered and giggled.

  Slowly awareness returned to Stevens. Then he let her drop to the floor. She looked at him again, quizzically, like a trusting child. This man, she thought, is masculine. But not with the familiar air of equality to which I am accustomed—but overbearingly male. A sort of aura covered his body—she sensed something brutish, irresponsible, uncivilized. Everything he did confirmed this idea:

  “What—?” said the girl. She scrambled to her feet, not taking her eyes off Stevens.

  The man shook his head dazedly. “I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I’m all right.” He hesitated
. “I’m—different.” Markett nodded. “What I did back there in England—” he said slowly, and paused. “Do you know?” he asked. “Could you see what I did?”

  “No,” said Markett. “I should have watched and checked, but the doctor and I let it go.”

  “The doctor,” said Stevens. “The man I hit?” She nodded, half smiling. “And you’d better be getting out of here,” said Markett. “He might wake up angry.” She pushed the button of the elevator, and the doors rolled open. “Come on,” she said, as the man stood silently. “You’re not afraid any more, are you?”

  “Afraid?” Stevens laughed. “I was. It was something that happened in the mine—” He drew a hand across his eyes; the elevator’s doors rolled shut, and they began their ascent to the roof.

  “Explosion?” asked Markett. “They happen, I hear.”

  “Maybe. What the hell?” he said, grinning happily. “I’m here, you’re here, and I’m just after storming a castle in England with my Norsemen. It was terrible, but somehow—I don’t know. I shouldn’t be proud of the things I did.” He shuddered a little. “Killing. Maiming. And I burned the town when there was nothing left I could take from it.”

  The doors of the elevator rolled open, and a flood of sunlight poured into the tiny cage. “There,” said the man, pointing out a plane. “That’s the one we’ll take.”

  “Did you fly here?” asked the girl. “I thought you were afraid.”

  “No,” said Stevens, confidently opening the unlocked door of the plane. “This doesn’t belong to me.”

  Markett gasped, as her twenty-odd years of inculcated respect for property came down on her head like a ton of bricks. “You can’t!” she cried. “It isn’t yours—you said so.” Her voice trailed off as she saw the baffled stare in his eyes.

  “Come in,” he offered, making room for her beside the pilot’s seat. Limply she entered and closed the door. “Now,” said Stevens, “what did you say?”

  “The plane isn’t yours, Clark!” Oddly, she flushed as she called him by his given name.

  “Well,” said Stevens, puzzlement written over his face, “it is now.” He started the motor with one kick at the pedal and the plane snapped into the air, hovered for a moment, and shot diagonally up, through and above low-hanging cumulus clouds that glittered in the afternoon sun.

  “Why did you come here?” asked Markett. Somehow she felt safe.

  “More beautiful,” said Stevens. “And I have plans.”

  “Plans?” asked the girl. “For yourself?”

  “For the world,” said Stevens. He nodded his head over the control board, and a shaft of light was caught in his hair; made it shine like little curly brass wires. “I must ask you questions,” said the man. “I am different. Can you see it?”

  “I can,” said the girl. And at that moment she felt that it would be a better thing for man if she were to seize the controls, send their ship tearing down to smash into the ground.

  Traffic control ship seven (for the district) swooped three times on the hovering plane. Pilot Petersen scratched his head. “What’s he doing?” he asked Engineer Handel.

  “I dunno. Hold it,” said Handel, bending over his radio set.

  “Report from hospital,” said the radio. “Psychotic escaped in plane. Give warnings. The plane will be identified later; its owner is undergoing a serious operation and no records are immediately available. Be advised.”

  “That must be it,” said Handel practically. “He’s out of all accepted zones and he hasn’t got any right to hover over a residential district. Call him, Pete.”

  Petersen aimed his short beam radio antenna in the general direction of the disputed plane. “Calling Monoplane of class ten,” he said into the mike. “You with the brown body and blue wings. Can y’ hear me?”

  Harshly a voice answered. “We hear. What is it?”

  “Sorry,” said the pilot, “but you’re hovering over a residential area. That’s not allowed. What’s year number, pilot?”

  “I have no number,” said the voice, “and I have no license. Stand off or take the consequences!”

  “It’s him—the psycho,” hissed Petersen to Handel. “Call HQ on your set while I keep him busy.”

  “Right,” snapped the engineer, tuning in the traffic center.

  The pilot turned to his set, his brow wrinkled. How do you handle a psycho? Humor him. “What was that you said?” asked Petersen, smooth as silk.

  “Stand off, you fool, or take the consequences! I’ll give you five seconds to get away.”

  “Wait,” said Petersen. “Why don’t you—” Then he gasped, as his plans crumbled. The psycho’s ship had winged over with terrible speed and was heading for his ship nose-on. “Stop!” he shrilled into the mike, his hand on the throttle. Then he sent his own plane into a loop that made his bones bend, and streaked for altitude, with the demon plane and its demon pilot on his tail. “I warned you,” ground out of the speaker. “You’ll do well to tell the world that there’s one man alive who’s not afraid to kill or be killed to achieve his ends. Spread the word, friend!” And, when Petersen looked around, the plane was a vanishing speck in the north, as he watched it reach the blending point and vanish in the sky.

  Handel, gibbering in a corner of the traffic ship where the last loop had flung him, cried, “What happened to it?”

  “I don’t know,” said the pilot soberly. “Did you get HQ?”

  “Yes, but the loop smashed my set. What do we do now?”

  “Fly back, but fast,” said Petersen, giving his ship the gun.

  “Pete,” said Handel.

  “Yeah?”

  “What do we do with a thing like that? I mean how do you finally get rid of them?”

  don’t know,” said the pilot slowly. “Lock them up once you catch them, I suppose.”

  “Catch that? He tried to ram us! As he said—he’s not afraid to kill or be killed.” The engineer shuddered. “Do you think,” he asked, “we’ll have to kill him?”

  Petersen frowned. “I hope not,” he said, his eyes ahead of him as he prepared to land. “But if there’s no other way—what else can we do?”

  “How long since they killed a man—purposely, I mean?” The ship was rolling to a stop.

  “I dunno. Maybe a hundred years; maybe more. And who that was, I don’t know either.”

  The two left the plane and headed for the manager’s office, their faces wry. Petersen was thinking of blood. He was hoping that if they had to kill the psycho they’d de it some dry, quiet way. And Handel, nursing a bruised lip, was hoping exactly the same thing. Mankind, after many years of mutual hatreds had at last reached unanimity, and an idealistic one at that.

  The stolen plane crashed to a halt through the brush and bracken of the abandoned clearing. Markett looked about her.

  “Do you know where we are?” asked Stevens.

  “I think so,” said the girl slowly. “It must be a park district that’s being allowed to lie fallow. Probably it won’t be touched by anyone for a few years. Or wouldn’t have been.”

  Stevens stared at her. “You mean—?” he asked.

  “I mean that in a matter of hours the world will be down on you. Sheer force of numbers will make you yield to them. Oh, Clark, can’t you see that you’re wrong?” Her eyes suddenly widened with dread as she saw his hands work convulsively.

  “Get out,” he ordered, and she obeyed, thinking wildly of a dash to safety. Safety among the trees? Without a man to help her for perhaps hundreds of miles! Meekly she stood, waiting for what might happen. She could not believe that her life was to end at the hands of a madman. She found it hard, indeed, to believe that Stevens was mad. Confused, rather, by the overdose of the Regulator to which he had been subjected.

  “Brave woman,” he said. “I see you do not fear my madness. That is well. You are to be my mate—no, my wife.”

  “Wife?” she replied calmly. “But marriages are no longer customary. And, even when they do happen, it is
only through consent of the bride.”

  “All this,” he said slowly, “must be changed. There is no life in this world, no struggle.” He thought further. “Men must fight—if not each other, as I did in England, then something bigger. We must fight now to bring life to this silly paradise we’re in. Even if it means the spilling of blood.” She, the nurse, shuddered at the thought of blood. For radio-knife surgery had made incisions a dry affair, without confusion or infection. Accidents were few; many lived their entire lives without seeing their own blood. “Can you do it alone?” she asked.

  “I can start alone,” he decided. “I shall find my warriors in the madhouses and the clinics. Many of the inmates of these institutions are no more mad than I; they’ve merely been put away because they saw clearly, as I do.”

  “But they’ll find us. They’ll find you!” she cried in sudden anguish.

  “They’ll find you! Kill you!” Suddenly sobs choked her.

  “They will forget me after awhile. They will think I was a fool and drove my plane into the ground or a hillside. So I shall wait. And then, when it is clear, and they have grown weary of looking, or expecting an attack from me, I’ll go out after my men and women. We’ll place them where best suited; some in transportation; some in utilities, and some in communication. And some with the Psycho Regulators. Then we strike, strike there, and the world is free again!”

  Markett grew white as she realized that this dream of power could be more than a dream. She looked up into his face, quiet now. What had happened to him. Would he become more and more obsessed, more violent? Perhaps if she could persuade him to wait—to stay there quietly with her while he worked out plans—the influence of the Regulator would begin to wear off.

  Over the course of some two hundred years the white man of North America had lost what backwoods skill he once possessed. The little party snapped twigs and stumbled over stones as they advanced through the wilderness at the dead of night.

  “How long?” asked a neuro-muscular specialist.

  “About ten minutes more,” said a general practitioner.