Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He had the frantic desire to scratch—impossible always in a spacesuit—and how much more so when the counter-irritant must be applied to deep-buried tissues within the skull. Then the fingers seemed to sink deeper beneath the surface, touch on sensatory ganglia, for at once he became aware of odors both foul and sweet, and his tongue was flooded with all manner of tastes. For an instant he feared blindness as roaring gouts of light flashed before his eyes and sounds thundered through his ear-drums.

  Then all was quiet.

  He felt no untoward stimuli of any nature now; instinct, however, told him that the activity had plumbed beneath his senses, was seeking and probing for the scattered molecules of grey matter that controlled his very will and individuality. Forgetfulness began to rise about him, a quieting, soothing amnesia. About him the scene began to dim, the way a cinema scene fades into another sequence. Stunned, he stood on the darkened plain of rock, behind him his ship, before him the castle, all wisping away into twilight that pervaded his being.

  Even as he felt himself sinking into the quiet abyss, his mind was invaded by a thing obscurely different—a thing of hope rather than the despair that pervaded the other searching. But before the nature of this became clear his consciousness had drifted away.

  UNDING SAT UP and yawned, then looked about himself in astonishment. He lay on a slab, still in his suit, in a chamber open to the bleak sky of Outerplanet. As he stared at the bleak walls, a rich voice spoke to him.

  “Welcome,” it said simply.

  “Where are you?” he asked. He could not feel alarmed; there was the consciousness of having been subjected to a grueling therapy of some sort and of having emerged the better for it.

  “You cannot see me, nor do you hear me through normal channels,” explained the voice. “I have been chosen to explain to you what has happened to your mind.”

  “I know something has happened,” he mused. “But tell me first whether I am to consider you as a friend or an enemy.”

  “As a friend by all means,” responded the voice with a burst of what sounded like hearty laughter. “Now I shall tell you what I can.”

  “This world—Outerplanet as you call it—is no child of your sun. This is evident from its composition and from the alien turn life has taken on its surface. We do not know whether it was captured by this sun, or whether it was already here when the other planets were formed. This last is not wholly impossible, for we know that ours is an ancient race which has passed through many cycles of advancement and degeneracy before attaining a relatively stable civilization.”

  “How long has this been?” interrupted Unding.

  “Long—many millions of your years. More recent has been the division into two opposing camps of thinkers in rivalry. Now I must tell you what manner of entities we are; you cannot see me for I have no atomic structure. I am built of waves in harmony, or in balanced discord, as are all of us. You think you hear me speak? How could you when there is no air on all the surface of this planet save for that which your spacesuit contains? No. I have a certain control over your brain—enough to stimulate your aural nerves in the patterns which form words in the tongue you speak.”

  “But wait,” Unding objected. “You say I am to regard you as friendly. What was this—hostile—impression I received when I first emerged from the ship?”

  “I know. That was the work of those of whom I spoke—our enemies. This division of us into two camps is the result of a difference over ethical practices. Fully advanced as our camp, they flout the ethical principles which we consider basic for all conscious beings. In line with their motives and aims they attempted to seize upon your mind and make you their instrument for some purpose which I cannot guess. Which camp is cosmically correct, I cannot say—nor, I suspect, can you. Only time can tell that; enough it is that both camps consider themselves correct and act accordingly; eventually one will prevail over the other. You, and your species, I can see, are basically attuned to the ethical concepts to which we adhere.”

  “But what happened to me?” asked Unding.

  “Alone, you were helpless and confused before their unfamiliar mode of attack. Possibly now that you have experienced the technique you could withstand them if another encounter came. As it was then, however, I was forced to come to your help and do what I could to repel them. You succumbed to the shock of battle; it was better so; otherwise you might have become insane had you been conscious, fully, of the struggle that went on within your mind.

  “It is enough to say that I won, Unding. I propelled your body to this place, which is our home, and caused your subconscious to forget all that had taken place after your collapse; otherwise there would have been permanent scars left on your mind.”

  UNDING THOUGHT HAZILY of what he had been told. “Did you,” he asked hesitantly, “explore——”

  “I found it necessary,” replied the voice, “to learn your language and something of your way of thinking to avoid confusion and strain on your awakening. However I have not invaded the privacy of your conscious mind.”

  “I wish you would,” stated Unding. “You can probably make more out of certain events than I can. Poke around—however you do it—until you come on the reasons for a self-powered little radio job being elaborately prepared to broadcast a disaster call till hell freezes over. I don’t understand it myself.”

  “I shall do that,” agreed the voice. And again Unding felt the fingers at his brain, probing through his memory and conscious mind. They withdrew and the voice came again. “There is no doubt but that this peculiar affair has been engineered by our enemies.” There was a note of alarm in the voice’s tones.

  “But why?” snapped Unding. “Was it just to get me in their clutches? Or to get my ship? Or what?”.

  “Deeper in your brain than you know, I found the answer which you had worked out. It would occur to you ‘intuitively’ under the right circumstances, but there is not time to wait for them. You assembled facts unconsciously and came to the correct conclusion that our enemies’ desire was to draw you away from Pluto so that they might land and obtain cultures of Coldspore.

  “With these cultures they plan to infect the mammalian planets of the Solar System and render life on them impossible for all except beings constituted as we.”

  “Lord!” whispered Unding, his face drawn and suddenly haggard.

  “This must not be,” said the voice firmly. “It is a violation of inoffensive individualities. We are best qualified to halt these operations of our enemies. We shall do that.”

  “How?” asked Unding. “Surely they must have spaceships—that signal set proved it. Have you ships also?”

  “We have neither spaceships nor the time to construct them,” replied the voice thoughtfully, “so therefore we must use yours. Now I must introduce you to another facet of my existence—the material body with which I do building and other works. Do not be alarmed at its appearance; it has no mind of its own. It is purely a synthetic creation whose actions I control. It has been bred over many of our years and feeds on the rocky surface of this Outerplanet.” A door opened slowly in the wall of the room and there stumped in a grotesque little creature. Its surface was black and leathery and it had no face to speak of, yet there was an unmistakable touch of humanity to its lines. For it stood and walked—rather waddled—on two legs, and its long arms reached to the ground. The fingers and hands were of a contrasting color, seemingly much more developed than the crude remainder of the body. They were long and sinewy, full of capacity for great construction work.

  “This body may not come in contact with air,” warned the voice. “It has already constructed a metal tube in which will be secured for the voyage. Let us set out now.”

  UNDING CAUTIOUSLY HEAVED on the radio set, working it into the space-lock of his ship. He slammed the door, stabbed at the buttons which would release the outer door, and saw the little, coffin-like object catapulted far out into space by the released air-pressure.

  “As soon as we
get far enough away from that,” he commented, “we’ll be able to signal and warn the other patrols.” He relaxed his mind, attempting to tune in with his invisible friend.

  “Looking out of the window,” he declared triumphantly. In the four days of intimate association he had grown to sense the psychic displacement effected by the entity with which he travelled.

  “Right,” said the voice. “This Pluto of yours is a bleak place. Suppose you try to signal now.”

  Unding sat at the spacephone and built up power. “Carl?” he asked.

  Dimly the voice of the ’phone official came in, somewhat scrambled by the code-sender, now half a million miles away. “Who’s this?”

  “Tain Unding, reporting from special orders.”

  “I’ll get you Morley—hold on.” The brusk voice of the commander spoke. “Ready for your report, Unding. Go ahead.”

  “I’ve uncovered something big, commander,” said the patroller. “All I can say now is be on the lookout for a strange vessel. It will be dangerous to approach it, so give orders to blast on sight.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Unding,” replied the commander. “But if harm comes of it, you’ll find yourself in acid up to your neck.”

  “Sorry, sir,” said the Patrol, “but I can’t do anything more than warn you and hope that it will do some good. Meanwhile, I’ll scout around. I’ve encountered a friendly force which is in full co-operation.”

  “You’re giving me grey hair, Unding,” came back the voice of the Commander, “but it’s obvious that all we can do here is sit tight; ships will be instructed as you suggested.” There was a slight pause, then: “I’m going to give you full authority to do whatever you consider expedient and to commandeer any forces available. If it works out oke, then you’ll be in pretty; if it doesn’t—well, from what you intimate you won’t be the only one on the spot. Good luck, Unding.”

  The Patrol switched off the phone and spoke to his invisible friend. “A fat lot of good any ship will do,” he remarked.

  “Very true,” said the voice thoughtfully. “If your other men find the ship of our enemies, before they can compute the distance and range to turn on blasts they’ll be thought out of existence. Or perhaps their minds will be seized and they will be forced to turn on each other. Yet—they feared you.”

  “How’s that?” snapped Unding. “Consider this: they were forced to lure you out of position before they could get to Pluto and obtain the Coldspore. When you had landed on Outerplanet and were out of your ship, they seized on your mind with almost foolish ease until I intervened.”

  “What does that add up to?”

  “It seems,” meditated the voice “that you have a weapon which our enemies fear. And also that this weapon is no complicated thing, requiring devices and endless charts for its successful operation.”

  “But if I had such a weapon,” protested Unding, “wouldn’t I be the first to know about it?”

  “Not necessarily. Under the right circumstances—such as these—you would appear to be the last.

  “It must be something concerned with the operation of your ship, and probably is not regarded by you as any weapon at all. Remember that we are a peculiarly constituted people, of reactions strange to your ways of thought.”

  “Then,” asked Unding, “how do we find out what instrument they’re afraid of?”

  “You must concentrate,” said the voice. “Exploration of your mind directly will do no good, for your lack of experience with my type of life has not equipped you with the faculty of setting up relations which involve variables of that nature.

  “Now go through your every piece of equipment, one by one, reporting mentally all its features and suggested qualities. We shall see what that will do.”

  FOR HOURS UNDING had been concentrating with desperate intensity on the demands of the voice. They had covered all the items of war on the ship, first of attack, then of defense.

  “It’s no use,” he said. “It can’t be.”

  “Nevertheless,” replied the voice, “we shall continue. Enumerate the navigation devices you employ.”

  The man wiped perspiration from his brow. “There are my landing lights,” he began, wondering why he picked on them first.

  “And their qualities are—?”

  “Especially designed to pierce steam, fog, dust, what have you. For this purpose they are fluorescent—electrically activated gases. Their color is what you might call a reddish orange.”

  “I cannot see color,” said the voice with a tense note; “describe it otherwise.”

  “Toward the lower end of the spectrum,” said the man. “The longer end, that is. The rays of the lamps are within the range of visible light, but approach heat rays and are noticeably warmer than a blue or green light, though no heat is incidental to their production.”

  There was a long pause. “Tell me more about them,” commanded the voice in interested tones.

  “They’re focused by a parabolic reflector, and have an attachment which lets them ride pick-a-back over-distances too long for them to keep their concentration. For use when you have to sight a meteor or something.”

  “That, then, is what we have been seeking,” declared the voice.

  “How so?”

  “As you said, the landing lights are but little removed from heat-rays in the scale, and I know that our enemies cannot stand heat in certain forms.

  “Now you must put on your spacesuit and drain all air from the inside of the ship. I wish to use my ‘body’ to construct some apparatus necessary to our purpose.”

  “Can’t I do it for you?” he asked.

  “No” replied the voice firmly. “I do not wish you to learn the nature of the device. I hope you trust me—?” There was half a question in the words.

  “Of course,” snapped Unding hastily, donning his suit. “But what shall I do meanwhile?”

  “Head for Pluto. I can sense that already our enemies have landed there; we must arrive before they have obtained their cultures of Coldspore and departed.”

  Unding let the air in his ship hiss out into space then released the dwarf-like “body” of the voice from its airless tank. He began to realize the purpose of those powerful hands as he saw them pick tubes and condensers from his compact repair bench and begin to assemble them, at dazzling speed, into a strange device which was like nothing ever seen before by Earthmen.

  THE SHIP FELL LIGHTLY to the frozen gases that blanketed Pluto with eternal snows.

  “Well?” asked Unding. The dwarflike creature was still; with sudden, jerky movements it went back into its tank and closed the lid. “They are there across the snow,” remarked the voice quietly.

  Unding shielded his eyes, saw tiny moving flecks of black. “Sure it’ll work—whatever it is?” he asked.

  “Quite sure. And there is a thing I must tell you now. That is that soon I will no longer be able to help you. But the machine will still be here. You are to have it analyzed by your own experts, thus work out a stratagem which will enable it to be used without ill effects to—certain individuals. Now there will be some accidental happenings which are unavoidable because of the brief time I have had to utilize the facts which you told me.”

  “What are you driving at?” Unding snapped.

  “This machine,” replied the voice emotionlessly, “is a broadcaster of X-rays. These rays act only as a carrier principle for other radiations which will do—the work they must. Note the fourth phase of the tube set-up.”

  Unding inspected the device. “Red light,” he said, baffled; “what’s the idea of that?”

  “Red light: yes. And carried a phase lower yet, which reduces it to heat—radiant heat in its most deadly exterminating form. You will have to throw the black lever when I give you the signal. And that will be soon—I can sense our enemies and they are about to go into action.”

  Unding began to feel it too—again the crawling sensation on the surface of his brain.

  “I’ll hold them o
ff and explain,” said the voice, “for as long as I can.”

  Unding concentrated, felt a bewilderingly vast battle going on. It was all quite silent and unhurried; on the part of the foe, their small “bodies” spread across miles of frozen gases, a steady driving attack against the psyche of his friend and protector; and here in the ship, a forceful repulse of the beating surges of thought that sought to destroy him.

  In the midst of that, a small section of the protector’s mind spoke to Unding. “We cannot compromise now,” it whispered. “And I shall tell you what I did not wish you to know until this moment. That is: when you throw that switch, I shall perish as will our enemies. There is no other way; I can only ask that great caution be taken in hunting down the remainder of their people so that none of mine will come to harm.

  “And now—farewell.”

  With the words, Unding flung back the handle of the switch as far down as it would go. There was a dazzling surge of light in the tubes, and, for a moment, the man saw a vision of glory. It was the vibratory body of the voice, momentarily visible in death.

  Like a tower of flame weirdly spinning, it hovered over the patrol, its eddying currents contorted in agony. Then it vanished. As Tain Unding looked through the port and saw the distant dwarfs fall to the snow, he knew that the enemy had not survived.

  He could sense the absence. There was no longer the pressure of mind on mind that he had so casually come to accept. He turned to the spacephones.

  “Morley,” he called.

  A moment, then the voice of the commander. “Speaking.”

  “The mission has been successfully accomplished, sir. A full report will be ready when I return—I must request immediate transfer Home Base.”

  “Granted, Unding. What happened to the friend you spoke of?”

  “Gone, sir,” whispered Unding. In his mind echoed a phrase which he had seen somewhere in a history book, or perhaps one of the telecinema romances based on life in olden times. “Dead on the field of honor.”