Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Their method of rustling game was unusual to say the least, and, to say the most—as many sportsmen would—positively indecent. Etsel would stalk game to the best of his ability, while Mamarat—as he had tacitly agreed to call the little fakir—would rest on a cot and conserve his strange Plutonian energy. When Etsel was fairly confident that he had spotted a covey of snipe or deer, Mamarat would come close, aim in the proper direction, and let off a squirt of his hypnotic essence with flashing lights and sound-effects in order. Then together they would collect the snipe, which would be lying dazedly on the ground, and pop them into the soup-kettle. Deer and other large animals they usually let go; they could never bring themselves to cutting the beasts’ throats.

  They had virtually lost trace of the days, luxuriating thusly, when, one morning, there was a creaking in the bushes far away. At once Etsel sprang to the alert. “What’s that?” he snapped.

  “Deer?” suggested Mamarat lazily.

  “They never come this close. It may be a grizzly bear—or some other equally undesirable member of that family.”

  “I’ll fix him,” yawned Mamarat. “Wait until he comes close—I’ll give him the eye.”

  “What if it’s two bears—one after the other?”

  “I can do it if I have to. Remember the cops?”

  “Oh,” said Etsel relievedly. Then he sat up. “But suppose,” he said anxiously, “it’s three bears?”

  Mamarat rolled over. “In that case;” he meditated, “we put papa and mama out of commission, and keep baby for a pet.”

  The crashing in the bushes grew closer; Mamarat aimed himself at the noises. “Hello!” yelled Etsel tremulously.

  A Western Union boy popped out of the bushes. “Harya,” he greeted them. “Canya wait a minute? Me bike’s stuck.” He tugged violently for a moment, while Etsel watched speechlessly and finally emerged trundling a muddy bicycle. “You Voinan Etsel?” he asked Mamarat.

  “No,” replied the Plutonian, indicating his horrified companion. “Same is yonder.”

  “Okay. Sign dis please,” said the youth, handing over a receipt blank.

  “What for?”

  “Da telegram of course.” He presented a yellow envelope and Etsel signed.

  “May I ask you how you found us?” he inquired.

  “Nuttin to it. We knew you’d gone up dis way, so da rocket flew around until we sighted a cabin wit smoke comin’ outa it. We figgered dat was youse. So dey landed me down da way a bit, in one a da outposts and I made da resta it on me bike. Nuttin to it; I make trips like dis every day inda week.”

  Etsel stood speechless before this revelation, then, mechanically, handed the boy a quarter. “Tanks, mister,” was the reply and the boy mounted his bicycle and rode off whistling. Etsel remained staring after him until the squeakings and crashings had vanished in the distance, then handed the telegram to Mamarat. “Open it, will you?” he said.

  Mamarat did so. “Your name figures the blank,” he said quietly. “You read.”

  Etsel’s eyes wobbled over the yellow slip, then he sank to the cot, limply handing the telegram to Mamarat. “Do you mind reading it to me? I think my eyes have gone bad on me.”

  Mamarat read aloud: “Return immediately Bring Mamarat All is straightened out repeat Return. The signature is Baily.”

  ROARING happily through the clouds Etsel and Mamarat were not so happy in the realization that they had been hunted down with such ease. Now, thought Etsel, they were about to be brought to trial. Mamarat, however, was as cheerful as usual, recounting details of his life on Pluto as a strolling minstrel.

  “Never a penny in my pockets,” he explained, “but living from the corpulence of the community, as you say it. I had a charanga—one of our musical instruments—and I would enter the city square of the various towns and begin my serenade.”

  “We’re landing now,” broke in Etsel. He looked at the ground. “Lord,” he groaned, “what a collection of dignitaries and cops. Something special, I guess. If only Baily didn’t have to hold himself down to ten words so as to get a special rate for his telegram!”

  Viciously he skidded the rocket over the heads of those waiting for them. “I bet that’ll give the constabulary some new gray heads,” he gloated. Then he brought the ship down with a thud.

  Through the port he could see a throng swarming over to their rocket. “That looks like the mayor,” he said, baffled. “This looks like a gilt-edged arrest.”

  The port swung open, and the mayor stepped in. “Welcome!” that dignitary chortled. “Welcome, your Highness, to our city. I trust the cause of interplanetary amity has not been injured by your jest.” Mamarat smiled. “Has my honored father been sending threatening notes to Earth?”

  “Indeed he has!” replied the Mayor, wiping sweat from his brow. “War would have been declared in two days if you had not returned.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Etsel. You aren’t the prince; you’re just an unprincipled little faker!”

  “I never said I wasn’t the prince!” snapped Mamarat. Then he smiled. “On Pluto, Etsel, it isn’t considered mannerly to contradict a friend.”

  “Oh!” Etsel was stopped. Then Baily pushed his way through the crowd into the little cabin. “Your Highness,” he puffed, “I trust our little misunderstanding has in no way affected the plans for the purchase of outstanding stock in Intercontinental Rocketransit—?”

  “Not at all,” smiled Mamarat. “I never meant to get into your concern anyway. My purpose is to start a corporation of a similar nature on Pluto and have my old friend Vernon Etsel manage it from top to bottom. And the plan still goes.

  “Mr. Etsel, you see, has one qualification you lack—he is a gentleman!”

  The Castle on Outerplanet

  What was that call for help that drew the patrolman from Pluto out to where no planet ought to be?

  UNDING bent closer over the transmitter grid of his spacephone; unmistakably it was a distress signal that he heard. Without moving from his seat, he plugged in the jack that would connect him with Home Base. The distance tubes glowed faintly as a needle quivered toward a red line on the dial that registered power-buildup. Needle and line met; he switched in audio frequency.

  “Tain Unding, Patrol,” he said.

  A long pause, broken only by the etheric cracklings and snappings followed. Then the thin voice of a phone receiver announced: “Home Base. What’s up, Unding?”

  “Carl? Connect me with Commander Morley.”

  “He’s busy. Can your call wait?”

  “Don’t think so. I just received a distress signal.”

  “Okay,” came the voice of the Home Base operator. “Stand by.” Unding held down the contact as sputtering noises informed him that, across millions of miles, an officer was being contacted.

  A brusk voice came through. “Unding? I hear you have a distress signal.”

  “Check, Commander. It’s very faint. Seems to be from outside the Plutonian sector.”

  “How far?”

  “I haven’t traced it yet, sir.” He paused a second. “It’s like this—I’m on Coldspore duty, covering a sector of Pluto in a one-man ship. I know I shouldn’t ditch my post, but I’m the only one even relatively near the source of this signal; so I thought that you could send a relief to take over my post while I triangulate to get location. By the time relief arrives, I’ll be gone to the rescue.”

  “Sounds all right” commented Morley. “But we’d be taking a large risk. If any Earth-ships get down to Pluto they’re out permanently. What do you think?”

  “I know the chances involved, sir. But the distress call is urgent.”

  “What do they say?”

  “It isn’t on audio, sir. They’re sending in peak-and-valley code. I’m not very well up on that, sir, but it seems to read: ‘Attacked—send help.’ This is followed by words I can’t make out and the transmitter doesn’t help any. Then the message begins again. I just picked it up twenty minutes ago; it’s been continuous
ever since. How long it may have been going before I picked it up l don’t know.”

  “Do you think it’s a record?”

  “Couldn’t say. It might be—there aren’t many variations in the sending and those that there are might be etherics.”

  The line was silent for a moment, then Morley snapped: “Okay, Unding. I’ll send a relief ship to your sector. Official orders: proceed with all possible speed to locate origin of the distress signals; when that is accomplished, investigate that origin and render any help you can. Report to me any extraordinary occurrences; a clear wire will be kept for you. You are authorized to use arms against any person or group which may attempt to impede your executing these instructions.” There was another pause, then, “Good luck, Unding. I know you’ll do the best you can against whatever it is.” A sharp click, and the phone official spoke again. “That goes for me, too, Unding.”

  “Thanks, Carl. I’ll have to switch off now and get to calculations. ’By.” He turned to his instruments, studying the jagged lines of the code message that was unrolling across an endless strip of parchment.

  TAIN UNDING STARED through the vision plate of his little ship and rubbed his eyes. For three days he had been driving at steady full-speed toward the direction whence came endless signals for help. Beyond Pluto, past a tiny comet and countless vagrant, hurtling masses of cosmic rubbish, was its source. But he could see nothing, could detect no source—no liner, wrecked and drifting out of course; no transport crammed with ores and plant-matter breached at the seams.

  Half unbelieving, he turned again to the spacephones, started the clockwork mechanism of the recorder. Again there crept across the strip of white the peaks and valleys of the code, now in heavier bands. He fitted a transcriber blank over the message; through the intricately spaced windows in the sheet of metal appeared unmistakable figures that reduced, in the code printed before his eyes, to the same cryptic message.

  Bewilderedly, he snapped off the mechanism; there could be no mistake. His calculations as to distance and direction had been correct; his course checked to a minimum with the growing intensity of the code signals. Now they were at maximum—yet, where was the ship?

  Unding glanced at his power gauges. Needles quivered at nearly full capacity; he had started at a full load, permitting inertia to do the work of driving the ship except for occasional acceleration when impatience struggled with prudence.

  His fingers stole to a small stud on the board, a stud whose engraved symbols read Lv—9, the name for its particular function. This stud governed the far-flung zone of energy which infallibly detected any foreign matter aspace within a pre-determined distance—but at a terrific expenditure of fuel, one which few tanks could bear at the end of a long journey. He pressed that stud, knowing that it was a matter to report. Normally no pilot or captain would resort to Lv—9 without the approval of, at the very least, an immediate superior. But no message could go through from this sector of space while the mysterious signals were emanating from some unseen source to the complete distortion and negation of any other sender.

  Invisibly the zone of energy shot forth from the focus of the ship and Unding bent eagerly over its detector panel, a dull grey square of metal. Almost at once a green spark gleamed forth from that background—a pulsating little thing that moved in a slow elliptical orbit, seemingly unaffected by any outside influence. Unding drew in his breath sharply; that was it. He stabbed two buttons and in glowing letters the coordinates of the green spot flashed on the screen.

  He snapped off the zone, flung his control drivers into action. In a moment he was beside the spot which the detector had revealed. Unding shook his head in amazement. Was this the powerful sender that had been functioning for more than three days on full power? It seemed to be no larger than a man! Constructed after the pattern of a conventional spaceship, yet no more than twenty-four cubic feet in size, it drifted in a slow ellipse until Unding slipped a noose of cable disproportionately heavy for its task about a projection and drew it in through a lock.

  THE LITTLE THING lay on the floor of Unding’s control cabin humming faintly to itself with a colossal storage of power. “Whoever planned this dingus,” Unding said to himself slowly, “had lots of juice to waste.” He attacked its lid with a jimmy and pried loose the shell, already relaxing from the cold of space. But there was nothing inside—nothing at all.

  He turned an extermination-beam on the device on the offchance that it was the product of some malignant microscopic race, or perhaps infected by the Coldspores of Pluto. The metal tube, heavy and pulsing, that was the only mechanism inside the apparatus, was unaffected Curiously he laid his hand on the metal of the tube, recoiled as he felt a slight shock. “Connected with a power lead,” he muttered nursing his stinging fingers. But when he sought to measure the current he found that this was wrong; it was the metal that gave off electricity in an uninterrupted stream, as a lodestone emits lines of magnetic stress.

  There was no doubt in his mind but that this metal was something unknown to Earthly science. As he investigated further, he found its weight—only as he estimated, for he could not penetrate that shell—was small. In fact, it was negligible, as heavy stuff goes. Compact, it bore some relation to the silver-platinum-iridium series, to judge by its color and electrophone qualities; but it was hardened and tempered beyond anything known to man.

  “How,” he brooded, “can a metal which ought to be ductile as all git-out become fabulously resistant to tools of any description?” The answer was simple and somewhat terrifying: a people, or an individual, had progressed technologically far beyond man. And when that happens, thought Unding, there may be difficulties brewing; something, he thought, he ought to report.

  He turned to the spacephone, but heard nothing save the sputter of interference; tried code but obtained no more satisfactory result. Obviously he could not use his phone so long as he was near this little dynamo. The best course, then, was to scram back to Home Base where they had tools that would crack anything—saws of pure energy, drills that bit through asteroids. Unless—

  Unding prepared to decelerate, turn the ship for home. Then a bell rang. With the instinct of the spaceman whose reactions have been sharpened and tuned by gruelling courses of treatment, then refined again, he snapped to the control board and slammed on switches that sent great roaring gouts of flame into space, bringing the ship to a stomach-wrenching halt.

  And only when the ship was no longer in motion did Unding look through his vision plate. There was a planet ahead. He had known that, really, for nothing smaller than a planet would set the alarms ringing as they had. Yes, he had known it, but not until his eyes checked that knowledge had the import of it seeped into his consciousness. “Planet Ten,” he whispered to himself.

  Outside the known solar system, long suspected and sought by Terrestrial astronomers. Before the first observation-post had been built on Luna, they had known that the probabilities of a planet beyond Pluto were high; from then on, observations and calculations had narrowed the probabilities against such a planet down practically to zero—but the planet still had never actually been seen, either by human eye or photographic plate. Not until now.

  He stared at the dim globe beneath him. Albedo was low—it reflected practically no sunlight. About the size of Mercury, he estimated, and seemingly barren. No air or atmosphere of any sort; not even the vestiges of a hydrosphere. No ice or frozen gases; he shuddered as he thought of what a rocky hell it must be.

  DETERMINEDLY TAIN UNDING prepared to land. This would bear investigation. Who knows—it might be named after him some day, he thought.

  The ship began to drop free as it slowly came under the influence of the planet’s weak gravitation. He turned to the little-used instrument, gasped as he read its dial. From somewhere on this planet was emanating a wave of force such as only could come from functioning machinery of the highest order. And from somewhere near, Unding noted, as he set a direction-finder on the influence. He sent the sh
ip roaring toward the setting sun, here no more than a dazzling, frosty star in the distance.

  At that moment a mass on the horizon broke the view, blanked the sun from his sight. Tain Unding was not a fanciful man, but he was hard put not to swear that here he saw a Norman keep plucked from the soil of England and transported to this desolate planet.

  He slowed the ship and inspected the building as it drifted beneath the viewplate. His conclusion had been superficial, the product of overwrought nerves and a tired body. It was no castle of stone but a utilitarian spire built dymaxion fashion. Seemingly it struck roots deep into the rock of the planet, spiring far down to cling precariously to a dying or already dead world. And it was from this spot that the vibrations emanated.

  Unding dropped the ship abruptly, cut loose with landing jets as he eased to the planet’s floor; landing here was simple. There was no water-bearing atmosphere to cause the gushing clouds of steam that confused a pilot returning to Earth. He broke out a spacesuit from a locker, donned the cumbersome garment and sealed it securely against the space-cold that prevailed without.

  Of one thing he was certain: there was sentient activity going on inside that castle, either friendly or unfriendly to the human culture; even if, at the moment, the activity might be indifferent to, or unaware of, human culture, ultimately it must take one course or the other. If friendly, there was no harm done in his excursion from ship; if otherwise, then he might escape with valuable information.

  Smiling wryly, Tain Unding stepped through the outer lock of the ship onto the metallic rock of Outerplanet. And at that moment, a wave of thought hit on his mind like a blow.

  At first there was naught save the indefinable sense of impact: it was as if a hand were caressing his skull with fingers that sank through the bone to the very surface of his brain. Unding glanced about himself bewilderedly; there was nothing to be seen.