Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Hectic blotches of purple marked the tapestries that hung that circular wall, blotches that seemed like the high spots in rotten meat. The tapestries themselves the detective could not look at again after one glance. The thing he saw, sprawling over a horde of men and women, drooling flame on them, a naked figure still between its jaws, colossal, slimy paws on a little heap of human beings, was not a pretty sight.

  Light came from flambeaux in the wall, and the torches cast a sickly, reddish-orange light over the scene. Thin curls of smoke from the sockets indicated an incense.

  AND LASTLY THERE was to be seen a sort of divan, heaped with cushions in fantastic shapes. Reclining easily on them was the most grotesque, abominable figure Fitzgerald had ever seen. It was a man, had been once. But incredible incontinence had made the creature gross and bloated with what must have been four hundred pounds of fat. Fat swelled out the cummerbund that spanned the enormous belly, fat welted out the cheeks so that the ears of the creature could not be seen beneath the embroidered turban, gouts of fat rolled in a blubbery mass about the neck like the wattles of a dead cockerel.

  “Ah,” hissed Joseph Kazam. “Runi Sarif . . .” He drew from his shirt a little sword or big knife from whose triangular blade glinted the light of the flambeaux.

  The suety monster quivered as though maggots were beneath his skin. In a voice that was like the sound a butcher makes when he tears the fat belly from a hog’s carcass, Runi Sarif said: “Go—go back. Go back—where you came from—” There was no beginning or ending to the speech. It came out between short, grunting gasps for breath.

  Kazam advanced, running a thumb down the knife-blade. The monster on the divan lifted a hand that was like a bunch of sausages. The nails were a full half-inch below the level of the skin. Afterwards Fitzgerald assured himself that the hand was the most repellant aspect of the entire affair.

  With creaking, flapping wing-strokes the skulls launched themselves at the Persian, their jaws clicking stonily. Kazam and the detective were in the middle of a cloud of flying jaws that were going for their throats.

  Insanely Fitzgerald beat at the things, his eyes shut. When he looked they were lying on the floor. He was surprised to see that there were just four of them. He would have sworn to a dozen at least. And they all four bore the same skillfully delivered slash mark of Kazam’s knife.

  There was a low, choking noise from the monster on the divan. As the detective stared Kazam stepped up the first of the three shallow steps leading to it.

  What followed, detective Fitzgerald could never disentangle. The lights went out, yet he could plainly see. He saw that the monstrous Runi Sarif had turned into a creature such as he had seen on the tapestry, and he saw that so had Kazam, save that the thing which was the Persian carried in one paw a blade.

  They were no longer in the tower room, it seemed, nor were they on the white desert below. They were hovering in a roaring, squalling tumult, in a confusion of spheres which gently collided and caromed off each other without noise.

  As the detective watched, the Runi monster changed into one of the spheres, and so, promptly did Kazam. On the side of the Kazam sphere was the image of the knife. Tearing at a furious rate through the jostling confusion and blackness Fitzgerald followed, and he never knew how.

  The Kazam sphere caught the other and spun dizzily around it, with a screaming noise which rose higher and higher. As it passed the top threshold of hearing, both spheres softened and spread into black, crawling clouds. Suspended in the middle of one was the knife.

  The other cloud knotted itself into a furious, tight lump and charged the one which carried the blade. It hurtled into and through it, impaling itself.

  FITZGERALD SHOOK HIS head dizzily. They were in the tower room, and Runi Sarif lay on the divan with a cut throat. The Persian had dropped the knife, and was staring with grim satisfaction at the bleeding figure.

  “Where were we?” stuttered the detective. “Where—?” At the look in Kazam’s eyes he broke off and did not ask again.

  The Persian said: “He stole my rights. It is fitting that I should recover them, even thus. In one plane—there is no room for two in contest.”

  Jovially he clapped the detective on the shoulder. “I’ll send you back now. From this moment I shall be a card in your Bureau of Missing Persons. Tell whatever you wish—it won’t be believed.”

  “It was supposed to be a paradise,” said the detective.

  “It is,” said Kazam. “Look.”

  They were no longer in the tower, but on a mossy bank above a river whose water ran a gamut of pastels, changing hues without end. It tinkled out something like a Mozart sonata and was fragrant with a score of scents.

  The detective looked at one of the flowers on the bank. It was swaying of itself and talking quietly in a very small voice, like a child.

  “They aren’t clever,” said Kazam, “but they’re lovely.”

  Fitzgerald drew in his breath sharply as a flight of butterfly things passed above. “Send me away,” he gasped. “Send me away now or I’ll never be able to go. I’d kill you to stay here in another minute.”

  Kazam laughed. “Folly,” he said. “Just as the dreary world of sand and a tower that—a certain unhappy person—created was his and him so this paradise is me and mine. My bones are its rock, my flesh is its earth, my blood is its waters, my mind is its living things.”

  As an unimaginably glowing drift of crystalline, chiming creatures loped across the whispering grass of the bank Kazam waved one hand in a gesture of farewell.

  Fitzgerald felt himself receding with incredible velocity, and for a brief moment saw an entire panorama of the world that was Kazam. Three suns were rising from three points of the horizon, and their slanting rays lit a paradise whose only inglorious speck was a stringy, brown man on a riverbank. Then the man vanished as though he had been absorbed into the ground.

  Fire-Power

  What can be done when all the battle-strength of a democracy is concentrated in the hands of a cosmic navy with dictatorial ambitions? That was the problem Bartok of the Intelligence Wing faced and had to answer.

  CHAPTER I

  TINY, TRIM, Babe MacNeice descended the very secret staircase that led into the very private office of Intelligence Wing Commander Bartok.

  “Hello!” he gasped as the wall panel slid aside. “You’re on Magdeburg’s 83—or aren’t you?”

  “There was very little doing there,” she smiled, seating herself. “Except a bustle and roiling about as I left. It seems that someone had kidnapped their HQ secretary and sweated him for some information relative to their new interceptors.”

  “Have they any idea,” asked Bartok anxiously, “who that someone was?”

  Babe laughed. “They have the finger on him. From some confidential instructions he dropped while making a getaway, they learned that he was a secret agent for some Venusian colony or other. He was described as a thin old man of effeminate carriage and manner.”

  Bartok smiled, relieved. “Your number twelve. Report, please.” He started a phonograph turning and pointed the mike at Babe.

  The girl said chattily: “MacNeice went per orders to Magdeburg’s 83 for confirmation or denial of rumors concerning a planned uprising against Terrestrial authority. There she found widespread reports of similar character; the entire planet was flooded with propaganda.

  “Information was conclusively—ah—secured—from an official to the effect that the colonial governor, Allison by name, was fomenting an insurrection by means of which he would be able to assume supreme authority over the planet and defend it against terrestrial forces. That is all.” She lit a cigarette and stared dully at the floor as the wing commander sealed and labeled the report record.

  “That,” said Bartok, “sews up Allison in a very uncomfortable sack. We’ll send a cruiser tonight.”

  “Sure,” said the girl. “He hasn’t got a chance. None of them have against the insidious Commander Bartok and his creatures of e
vil. That’s me.”

  “And don’t tell me you don’t love it,” he grinned. “I know better. In the blood, that’s where it is—the congenital urge to pry into other people’s affairs and never be suspected. It gives us a kick like two ounces of novadyne.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Babe, “are you dining alone tonight?”

  “Nope. I have a standing date with my favorite little voyeur whenever she comes back to Earth. Scamper along to get dressed; I’ll meet you in two hours at the living statues.”

  THE SHOW-PLACE of New Metropole, capital of the All Earth Union and Colonies, was the Square of Living Statues. Bathed in ever-changing lights, the groups of three men and three women, molded from the purest gold and silver and assembled with every artifice of the year A.D. 3880, changed steps and partners, moving through the hours of the day in a stately dance that was never twice the same in even the smallest step.

  Grouped on a lofty platform, the heroically proportioned figures were the focus of every visitor to the wonder-city of all time and space. There was absolutely nothing like them in the universe, nothing like their marvelous grace that would balance a three-ton male on his toes while whirling a two-ton female partner in a vast arc, all to the most subtly exquisite music that could be evolved from supertheramins and electroviolas. The music too was completely automatic. The divine harmonies came from nothing more than a revolving drum which selected at random sequences of tones and the companion coloring of the lights that flooded the statues in their dance.

  In a glassed restaurant Bartok and Babe were dining. Through the walls filtered enough of the music to furnish a subdued background to lovers’ talk. But when these two got together it was business. As the wing commander had said, it was something in the blood.

  “MacNeice,” snapped Bartok, “I am not arguing with you, I’m telling you. You are not going to do any such damfool thing as walk in on our piratical friends and confront them with what you doubtless think of as ‘The Papers.’ I’m going to get this melodrama out of your head if I have to beat it out.”

  The girl’s face was flushed and angry. “Try that and you’ll get yours with an Orban,” she snapped. “I say that if you bring it right home to them that we’re on their tails they’ll give up without a struggle, and we’ve saved so many lives and so much fuel that a medal for me will be in order.”

  “The cruiser,” said Bartok, “leaves tonight. And that settles everything. Forget, child, that this wing of the service was once its brains instead of its eyes and ears. We are now officially an appendage devoted to snooping, and the glorious history of the Intelligence Division is behind us.”

  “Fitzjames,” she muttered, gritting her teeth. “I’d like to take that Admiral of the Fleet by his beard and tear his head off. And don’t tell me you aren’t in the project body and soul.” Mocking his tones she said: “I know better.”

  “Off the record,” admitted Bartok, “I may opine that our tiny suite of offices has more brains in its charladies’ little fingers than the entire fighting forces have in all the heads of all the commanders of all their mile-long battlewagons.

  That is, naturally, gross overstatement and pure sentimentality on my part. Eat your Marsapples and shut up.”

  She bit viciously into one of the huge fruit and swallowed convulsively, her eyes drifting through the glass wall to the living statues. They were performing a sort of minuet, graceful beyond words, to an accompaniment from the theremins in the manner of Mozart.

  “And what’s more,” barked the wing commander in an angry afterthought, “the body of the space navy could dispense with us at will, whereas without them we’d be lost. You can’t exist for the purpose of making reports to nobody. What good would your spying have done if there hadn’t been any cruiser to be sent off to bomb Allison’s capital city?”

  “None at all,” she snapped at him. “Only I don’t like the job if it has to mean taking guff from every half-witted ensign who graduated because he knows how to work an Auto-Crammer. Barty, you know and I know that they hate us and check up on everything we send in. The—the sneaks!” Abruptly she was weeping. The wing commander, indecisively, passed her a handkerchief. Women! he was thinking. Sometimes they could be thoroughly opaque to reason. Any man could see through his sardonic recital of rules. The wing commander detested the well-set-up officers and gentlemen who would not and could not move until he had charted the course. The wing commander had a healthy contempt for any and all formality and routine, with which the naval service was weighed down as with tons of lead. But the wing commander was, first, last and always, of that unalterable cast of mind which makes the superb, chilled-steel military spy.

  IN ALL THE RECORDS of the All Earth Union and Colonies-navy, there had probably been no such man as Bartok. Back to the days of the Herkimer scandal there had been a succession of brilliantly proved men in his office, but for resourcefulness and the spy’s temperament he had had no equal.

  He would have gone far in the old days; further than any intelligence man now could. Many years ago, when Earth had only a few hundred colonial planets, the news suddenly broke that there was a virtual dictatorship over the navy by the Intelligence Wing. Herkimer, since painted as a scoundrel of the deepest dye, had been merely an exceptionally enthusiastic officer.

  The course his enthusiasm ran included incidentally the elimination of much red tape in the form of unfriendly fleet officers; that he regretted as unfortunate and even tragic. But his mission of expanding Earth’s culture and civilization to the stars would not brook interference. Classic scholars could scarcely avoid a comparison with the Roman emperor Trajan, who pushed the bounds of the Empire to the absolute limits of the Western world, and created a situation which hastened the fall of Rome by centuries.

  Since the Herkimer affair they had been very careful with the Intelligence Wing. Once it was almost abolished for good; a few years of operation of the fleet practically blind, with no ground laid for them or information of enemy movements, proved that to be impractical. But they did what they could to keep the spies within bounds. It was an actually heartbreaking situation to the executives of the Wing. But you can’t keep the voyeur instinct down; that was what they were chosen for and that was how they operated.

  Take this affair on Magdeburg’s 83. It was an insignificant outer planet very far away from New Metropole. Yet the filtering of rumors brought it into the brilliant limelight of the Wing. The body of the fleet could not move less than a mile-long battlewagon at one time; the Wing—personified by Commander Bartok—dispatched tiny, trim Babe MacNeice. She returned with the information that a hitherto trusted colonial officer had decided to play Napoleon and was secretly fortifying the planet.

  In the last analysis, lives were saved. The single cruiser could send a landing party and take the trusted colonial officer back to Earth for trial; surely a preferable alternative to a minor war with the propaganda-inflamed ophidians that were native to the planet.

  Wing executives did not speak—in private—of their love for the body of the fleet. They held to the stubborn conviction that there was nothing dumber than a flagship commander, nothing less beautiful than a flagship.

  CHAPTER II

  AT ABOUT that time, things were popping on the lineship Stupendous, two million miles off the orbit of Venus. On it was jammed the entire Headquarters Wing of the All Earth and Colonies navy. In the very heart of the ship, inside almost a cubic mile of defensive and offensive power, was Wing Commander Fitzjames, by virtue of his command Admiral of the Fleet.

  “Not a murmur,” he said to his confidential secretary, a man named Voss. “Not a murmur from the crew.” He lolled back in his chair and breathed easier under his chestful of medals.

  “They don’t know,” said Voss. “When they find out—!”

  “Stick to your shorthand, son,” snapped the Admiral. “When they find out, they’ll keep on carrying out orders very much the way they always have. They’re picked men on this ship. Now take thi
s down: General Order to all lineship Commanders. By authority of the Admiral you are empowered to govern any and all citizens and subjects of All Earth. An emergency has arisen which makes it absolutely necessary to eliminate opposition to this program. Your direct superior is your Wing Commander, who is responsible only to ranking members of the Headquarters Wing. A list of proscribed persons will follow.”

  The Admiral lit a cigar with an unsteady hand. “Code that,” he said. “Send it in twenty minutes.”

  “Anything else?” asked the secretary. “How about the Wing Commanders? Are you coming clean with them?”.

  Fitzjames stared at the metal ceiling. “Take this: Confidential Memorandum to Wing Commanders. From Admiral of the Fleet Fitzjames. You are hereby notified that the Headquarters Wing of the. fleet has voted to take over power from the hands of the Executive Committee of All Earth. You are on your honor as officers and gentlemen to support this move by your brothers in arms. You will continue to patrol your regular sectors, having dispatched details to attend to the physical acts of taking power. No planet must be left under a Colonial Governor acting by right of a charter from the Exec All Earth. Details follow. Report to Stupendous immediately in code. We are seizing Venus as a base.”

  “Right,” said. Voss. “So go ahead and seize it.”

  “We’re on our way,” said the Admiral heavily.

  Depending on where you were to see the affair, the seizing of Venus was either a trivial or a Jovian episode. From space, for example, all there was to see was the bulk of the lineship slipping its length into the clouds above the dawnstar and vanishing from sight. But from the city of Astarte, principal freight port of the planet, it was vastly impressive.