Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Goodbye, Hackett,” said Baily. Then he grabbed at his chest and his face twisted. “Heart!” he gasped faintly, and even fainter he cut loose with a string of curses that made Sorghum blush.

  Baily hit the floor, and Sorghum listened for his breath, but there wasn’t any.

  He scratched his head, wondering how he’d explain things to the coroner, and reached automatically for his jug to help him think.

  But one of the things he didn’t think of was that his jug had been moved outside to make room for what the late Mr. Baily had called a condenser. Sorghum got a shock that sent him crashing back on his heels into some of the deep-driven rods. The last thing he knew the lights were still sparkling and glowing, but he never could tell what hit him.

  THERE WAS a dizzying splash and Sorghum found himself floundering in water up to his knees. He looked around and wasn’t in any place he knew, because he didn’t know any places that were all marble and tile. Overhead a hot sun was beating down on him.

  “Well!” said someone. And right there Sorghum knew that something was wrong, because though what he heard was “Well!” the sound he heard wasn’t anything like that—more like “Ahoo!”

  He looked up and saw a man facing him, dressed in sandals and a shirt that fell to his knees. And the man said, still talking so that Sorghum could understand him but not making a single sound in English, “It’s a blundering assassin that falls into his victim’s fishpond. Tiberius chooses unwisely.”

  “Are you calling me a bushwhacker, mister?” demanded Sorghum, who never killed except fairly.

  The man, who had been grinning proudly, looked surprised then. Not frightened, surprised. “I don’t know what language you speak, assassin,” he said, “but it’s a damnably strange one that confounds and is clear at the same time.” He looked closer at Sorghum. “And you don’t seem altogether real. Are you always as ghostly when you’re sent on the Caesar’s errands?”

  Sorghum looked at himself and saw that the man wasn’t lying. His own flesh seemed to have got a funny trick of being half here and half there, like a column of smoke that’s always ready to break. “I reckon you’re right, mister,” said Sorghum, cracking one of his icy smiles. “I seem to be in a predicament. But I ain’t what you take me for. I’m Sorghum Hackett of Tennessee.”

  “Never heard of the town,” said the man. “I’m Asinius Gallo. Need I explain that this is Rome?”

  Now Sorghum had heard that foreigners were peculiar, but he didn’t expect anything as peculiar as this, and he said so.

  “Foreigners!” yelled the man. “I don’t know what barbarous land you’re from, stranger, but bear in mind that when you’re in the City you’re the foreigner until and unless naturalized. Though,” he added, calmer, “what with that avaricious slut the Lady Livia raising the prices on the roll week after week, soon a Julio-Claudian himself won’t be able to stay in his place.”

  “I don’t get your talk, Mr. Gallo,” said Sorghum. “I’m here by accident, and I’d like mightily to get back to Tennessee. How can I earn some passage money? I reckon it’s overseas.”

  “Work, eh?” asked Asinius Gallo. “What can you do?”

  Sorghum considered. “I can do a little carpentering,” he said. “And I can make the best white mule in the Cumberlands.”

  “Carpentry’s out of the question,” said Asinius Gallo. “The Joiners’ Guild has it tight as a drum. But I don’t know of any guild covering the manufacture of white mules—doubt that it can be done.”

  “Do ye?” asked Sorghum, grinning again. “Just give me some corn, some copper and a few days and I’ll show you.”

  Asinius Gallo abruptly nodded. “It might be worth trying,” he said. “Certainly I can’t raise my own. And if they’re really good they can be resold at a profit. Sorghum Hackett, I’ll finance you.”

  SO, WORKING in privacy, the way that the mountain folks like to, it took him a few days before he got a good run. He had to fool around a lot because they used a funny, stunted kind of grain, but finally it came out all right.

  “Here, Mr. Gallo,” he called to his backer. “It’s finished.”

  “Will it kick?” asked Asinius Gallo cautiously.

  Sorghum laughed. “Like the devil with a porky quill in him, I promise you that much. Best you ever saw.”

  “Well,” said Asinius Gallo uncertainly as he entered. Sorghum held up the big jug he’d caught the run in. “What’s that?”

  “The white mule,” said Sorghum, a little hurt.

  His backer was downright bewildered. “I expected an animal,” he explained. “What you’ve got in there I can’t imagine.”

  “Oh,” said Sorghum. “Well, if you don’t agree with me, Mr. Gallo, that this is better than any animal you ever tasted I’ll make you an animal.” And he said this because he felt pretty sure that the benighted idolater wouldn’t take him up. Sorghum had asked the terrified servants, and they told him that they didn’t have anything stronger than the sticky red wine they drank at supper. And that, Sorghum judged by the body, was no more than twenty proof, while this run of his would prove at least a hundred and twenty. He poured a medium slug—four fingers—for his host, who smelled it cautiously.

  “Don’t put your eyes over it, Mr. Gallo,” cautioned Sorghum. “Just drink it right down the way we do in Tennessee.” He filled a glass of his own with a man-sized drink.

  “Feliciter,” said Asinius Gallo, which sounded like “good luck,” to Sorghum.

  “Confusion to Tories,” he replied, downing his. His host immediately after swallowed his own shot convulsively. Almost immediately he screamed shrilly and clutched at his throat. Sorghum held a water-pitcher out to him, grinning. The pitcher was empty when he took it back.

  “That,” said his host hoarsely, “was a potion worthy of Livia herself. Are you sure it won’t kill me?”

  “Sartin,” replied Sorghum, enjoying the backwash of the home-brew. “That was almost the smoothest I’ve ever made.”

  “Then,” said Asinius Gallo, “let’s have another.”

  THE TENNESSEE MAN had a few more runs, each better than the last as his equipment improved and settled, and with Asinius Gallo as his agent he had amassed quite a bit of the coinage of these foreigners. Altogether things were looking up when a slave appeared with a message.

  Sorghum’s host read from it: “The Lady Livia will be pleased to see Sorghum Hackett, the guest of the Senator Asinius Gallo. She believes that there are many mutual interests which it will be profitable to discuss.”

  “Right kind of her,” said Sorghum.

  “Hah!” groaned his backer. “You don’t know the old hag. Sorghum Hackett, you’re as good as dead, and it’s no use hoping otherwise. She’s always been down on me, but she never dared to strike at me direct because of my family. Now you’re going to get it. Oh, I’m sorry, friend. And I thought I’d kept you a pretty close secret. Well, go on—no use postponing fate.”

  Sorghum grinned slowly. “We’ll see,” he said. He picked up two bottles of the latest brew and rammed them into his boot-tops. “Goodbye, Mr. Gallo,” he said, entering the sedan-chair that was waiting for him. The bearers let him off at the Augustan Palace and conducted him to a side-entrance. He waited only a moment before the door opened and a cracked voice bade him enter. “Come in, young man; come in!” it shrilled.

  Sorghum closed the door behind him and faced the notorious Livia, mother of the Emperor Tiberius, poisoner supreme and unquestioned ruler of Rome. “Pleased t’meetcha, ma’am,” he said.

  “You’re the Hackett they tell me about?” she demanded. He studied her wispy white hair and the bony, hooked nose as he answered: “I’m the only Hackett in these parts.”

  “It’s true!” she shrilled. “You are a magician—your body waves like a flame, and your language is strange, but I can understand it. Everything they said is true!”

  “I reckon so, ma’am,” admitted Sorghum.

  “Then you’re condemned,” she said prompt
ly. “I won’t have any magicians going about in my empire. Can’t tax the brutes—they’re unfair. You’re condemned, young man!”

  “To what?” asked the Tennesseean.

  “Amphitheater,” she snapped. “Wild beasts. Take him away, you fools!”

  Sorghum’s arms were grabbed by two of the biggest, ugliest people he had ever seen in his born days and he was hustled down flights of stairs and hurled into something of a dungeon with other condemned magicians.

  “You got in just under the wire,” one of them informed him helpfully. “We’re going to get chased out into the arena in a few minutes.”

  “What can I do?” asked Sorghum.

  “Don’t struggle. Don’t shield your throat—let the animals tear it out as soon as possible. That way it’s over with at once and you cheat the mob of watching you squirm.”

  “I reckon so,” said Sorghum thoughtfully. He remembered his courtesy and the bottles in his boots. “Have a drink?” he asked, producing them. The magicians clustered around him like flies around honey.

  THE AFTERNOON GAMES were to consist of such little things as a pack of craven magicians and fortune-tellers being killed in a mess by leopards. Consensus favored the leopards; odds were quoted as something like eighty to one against the magicians.

  Tiberius waved his hand from the President’s box in one end of the colossal amphitheater, and the gate which admitted the beasts opened. There was a buzz from the audience as the magnificent animals came streaming through like a river of tawny fur.

  The emperor waved again, and the public prepared to be amused by the customary sight of unwilling victims being prodded out into the arena by long-handled tridents. But something must have gone wrong, for the craven magicians came striding boldly out, roaring some song or other. At their head was a curiously shimmering figure, who was beating time with two enormous bottles in either hand, both empty.

  It roared in a titanic voice, as it sighted the animals: “Look out, ye hell-fired pussy-cats! I’m a-grapplin’ !” The magicians charged in a body to the excited screams of the mob.

  Roughly there was one cat to every man, and that was the sensible way that the men went about eliminating the cats. The favorite grip seemed to be the tail—a magician would pick up the leopard and swing it around heftily two or three times, then dash its head to the sand of the arena. The rest would be done with the feet.

  In a surprisingly short time the magicians were sitting on the carcasses of the cats and resuming their song.

  “Let out the lion!” shrilled Tiberius. “They can’t do this to me!” The second gate opened, and the king of the jungle himself stalked through, his muscles rippling beneath his golden skin, tossing his huge mane. He sighted the magicians, who weren’t paying him any attention at all, and roared savagely.

  The shimmering figure looked up in annoyance. “Another one!” it was heard to declare. The song broke off again as the grim, purposeful body of men went for the lion. He eyed them coldly and roared again. They kept coming. The king of the jungle grew somewhat apprehensive, lashing his tail and crouching as for a spring. The bluff didn’t work, he realized a second later, for the men were on him and all over him, gouging his face cruelly and kicking him in the ribs. He tumbled to the sand rather than suffer a broken leg and grunted convulsively as the magicians sat heavily on his flanks and continued their song.

  “It was dow-wen in Raid River Vail-lee—” mournfully chanted the leader—he with the empty bottles.

  Tiberius stamped his feet and burst into tears of rage. “My lion!” he wailed. “They’re sitting on my lion!”

  The leader dropped his bottles and sauntered absently about the arena. One of the deep-driven, iron posts of the inside wall caught his eye. He reached out to touch it and—was gone, with a shimmer of purple light.

  SORGHUM’S REAPPEARANCE was as unchronicled as his disappearance. He didn’t tell anybody until they asked him, and then he told them from beginning to end, substantially as I have told it here.

  But every once in a while he remarks: “Foreigners are sartinly peculiar people. I know—I’ve lived among them. But some day I’m going to get me some money and take a boat back there and see that Mr. Gallo to find out if he ever did get the hang of running the mash. Foreigners are sartinly peculiar—behind the times, I call ’em.”

  That’s what Sorghum says.

  Best Friend

  Moray smoothed his whiskers with one hand as he pressed down on the accelerator and swung easily into the top speed lane. Snapping the toggle into a constant eighty-per, he lit a meat-flavored cigarette and replaced the small, darkly warm bar of metal in its socket. He hummed absently to himself, Nothing to do after you were in your right lane—not like flying. He turned on the radio.

  “—by Yahnn Bastion Bock,” said the voice. Moray listened; he didn’t know the name.

  Then there breathed into the speeding little car the sweetly chilly intervals of a flute-stop. Moray smiled. He liked a simple melody. The music ascended and descended like the fiery speck on an oscillograph field; slowed almost to stopping, and then the melody ended. Why, Moray wondered plain-lively, couldn’t all music be like that? Simple and clear, without confusing by-play. The melody rose again, with a running mate in the oboe register, and like a ceremonial dance of old days they intertwined and separated, the silvery flute-song and the woody nasal of the oboe. The driver of the little car grew agitated. Suddenly, with a crash, diapasons and clarions burst into the tonal minuet and circled heavily about the principals.

  Moray started and snapped off the radio. Try as he would, he never could get used to the Masters’ music, and he had never known one of his people who could. He stared out of the window and stroked his whiskers again, forcing his thoughts into less upsetting channels.

  A staccato buzz sounded from the dashboard. Moray looked at the road-signs and swung into a lower speed-lane, and then into another. He looped around a ramp intersection and drove into a side-street, pulling up before a huge apartment dwelling.

  Moray climbed out into the strip of fuzzy pavement that extended to the lobby of the building. He had to wait a few moments for one of the elevators to discharge its burden; then he got in and pressed the button that would take him to Floor L, where lived Birch, whom he greatly wanted to marry.

  The elevator door curled back and he stepped out into the foyer. He quickly glanced at himself in a long pier glass in the hall, flicked some dust from his jacket. He advanced to the door of Birch’s apartment and grinned into the photo-eye until her voice invited him in.

  Moray cast a glance about the room as he entered. Birch was nowhere to be seen, so he sat down patiently on a low couch and picked up a magazine. It was lying opened to a story called, “The Feline Foe.”

  “Fantastic,” he muttered. All about an invading planetoid from interstellar space inhabited by cat-people. He felt his skin crawl at the thought, and actually growled deep in his throat. The illustrations were terrifying real—in natural color, printed in three-ply engravings. Each line was a tiny ridge, so that when you moved your head from side to side the figures moved and quivered, simulating life. One was of a female much like Birch, threatened by one of the felines. The caption said, “ “Now’,” snarled the creature, “we shall see who will be Master!”

  Moray closed the magazine and put it aside. “Birch!” he called protestingly.

  In answer she came through a sliding door and smiled ’at him. “Sorry I kept you waiting,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” said Moray. “I was looking at this thing.” He held up the magazine.

  Birch smiled again. “Well, happy birthday!” she cried. “I didn’t forget. How does it feel to be thirteen years old?”

  “Awful. Joints cracking, hair coming out in patches, and all.” Moray was joking; he had never felt better, and thirteen was the prime of life to his race. “Birch,” he said suddenly. “Since I am of age, and you and I have been friends for a long time—”

  “
Not just now, Moray,” she said swiftly. “We’ll miss your show. Look at the time!”

  “All right,” he said, leaning back and allowing her to flip on the telescreen. “But remember, Birch—I have something to say to you later.” She smiled at him and sat back into the circle of his arm as the screen commenced to flash with color.

  The view was of a stage, upon which was an elaborately robed juggler. He bowed and rapidly, to a muttering accompaniment of drums, began to toss discs into the air. Then, when he had a dozen spinning and flashing in the scarlet light, two artists stepped forward and juggled spheres of a contrasting color, and then two more with conventional Indian clubs, and yet two more with open-necked bottles of fluid.

  The drums rolled. “Hup!” shouted the master-juggler, and pandemonium broke loose upon the stage, the artists changing and interchanging, hurling a wild confusion of projectiles at each others’ heads, always recovering and keeping the flashing baubles in the air. ‘Hup!’ shouted the chief again, and as if by magic the projectiles returned to the hands of the jugglers. Balancing them on elbows and heads they bowed precariously, responding to the radioed yelps of applause from the invisible audience.

  “They’re wonderful!” exclaimed Birch, her soft eyes sparkling.

  “Passably good,” agreed Moray, secretly delighted that his suggested entertainment was a success from the start.

  Next on the bill was a young male singer, who advanced and bowed with a flutter of soulful eyelids. His song was without words, as was usual among Moray’s people. As the incredible headtones rose without breaking, he squirmed ecstatically in his seat, remembering the real pain he had felt earlier in the night, listening to the strange, confusing music of the Masters.

  Moray was in ecstasy, but there was a flaw in his ecstasy. Though he was listening with all his soul to the music, yet under the music some little insistent call for attention was coming through. Something very important, not repeated. He tried to brush it aside . . .