Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Ray” shrieked the girl faintly. As the lights grew nearer, she could see what they were—pulsing domes of a purplish glow that ebbed and flowed in tides of dull light. The light seemed to shine from behind a sort of membrane, and the outer surfaces of the membrane were marked off with faces—terrible, savage faces, with carnivorous teeth projecting from mouths that were like ragged slashes edged in writhing red.

  “Ray!” Annamarie cried again.

  “Those lights—they’re the luminous heads of living creatures!”

  “God help us—you’re right!” Stanton whispered. The patterns of what he had read in the bobbin-books began to form a whole in his mind. It all blended in—“Under-Eaters,”

  “Fiends from Below,”

  “Raging Glows.” Those weirdly cryptic terms could mean nothing else but these creatures that were now approaching. And—“Good Lord!” Stanton ejaculated, feeling squeamishly sick. “Look at them—they look like human beings!”

  IT WAS true. The resemblance was not great, but the oncoming creatures did have such typically Terrestrial features as hairless bodies, protruding noses, small ears, and so forth, and did not have the unmistakable hour-glass silhouette of the true Martians.

  “Maybe that’s why the Martians feared and distrusted the first Earthmen they saw. They thought we were related to these—things!” Stanton said thoughtfully.

  “Mooning over it won’t help us now,” snapped Annamarie. “What do we do to get away from them? They make me nervous!”

  “We don’t do anything to get away. What could we do? There’s no place to go. We’ll have to fight—get out your guns!”

  “Guns!” sneered Josey. “What guns? Mine’s practically empty, and Annamarie threw hers away!”

  Stanton didn’t answer, but looked as though a cannon-shell had struck him amidships. Grimly he drew out his blaster. “Then this one will have to do all of us,” was all he said. “If only these accursed blasters weren’t so unmanageable—there’s at least an even chance that a bad shot will bring the roof down on us. Oh, well—I forgot to mention,” he added casually, “that, according to the records, the reason that the true Martians didn’t like these things was that they had the habit of eating their victims. Bearing that in mind, I trust you will not mind my chancing a sudden and unanimous burial for us all.” He drew the blaster and carefully aimed it at the first of the oncoming group. He was already squeezing the trigger when Josey grabbed his arm. “Hold on, Ray!” Josey whispered. “Look what’s coming.”

  The light-headed ones had stopped their inexorable trek toward the Terrestrials. They were bunched fearfully a few yards within the fissure, staring beyond the three humans, into the Mars-Tube.

  Three of the spider-robots, the Tube-tenders, were there. Evidently the destruction of one of their number, and the consequent demolition of several of the hoops, had short-circuited this section of the track so that they could enter it and walk along without fear.

  There was a deadly silence that lasted for a matter of seconds. The three from Earth cowered as silently as possible where they were, desirous of attracting absolutely no attention from either side. Then—Armageddon!

  The three robots charged in, abruptly, lancing straight for the luminous-topped bipeds in the crevasse. Their metal legs stamped death at the relatively impotent organic creatures, trampling their bodies until they died. But the cave-dwellers had their methods of fighting too; each of them carried some sort of instrument, hard and heavy-ended, with which they wreaked havoc on the more delicate parts of the robots.

  More and more “Raging Glows” appeared from the crevasse, and it seemed that the three robots, heavily outnumbered, would go down to a hard-fought but inevitable “death”—if that word could be applied to a thing whose only life was electromagnetic. Already there were better than a score of the strange bipeds in the cavern, and destruction of the metal creatures seemed imminent.

  “Why don’t the idiotic things use their guns?” Annamarie shuddered.

  “Same reason I didn’t—the whole roof might come down. Don’t worry—they’re doing all right. Here come some more of them.”

  True enough. From the Mars-Tube emerged a running bunch of the robots—ten or more of them. The slaughter was horrible—a carnage made even more unpleasant by the fact that the dimness of the cavern concealed most of the details. The fight was in comparative silence, broken only by the faint metallic clattering of the workings of the robots, and an occasional thin squeal from a crushed biped. The cave-dwellers seemed to have no vocal organs.

  The robots were doing well enough even without guns. Their method was simply to trample and bash the internal organs of their opponents until the opponent had died. Then they would kick the pulped corpse out of the way and proceed to the next.

  The “Hot-Heads” had had enough. They broke and ran back down the tunnel from which they had come. The metal feet of the robots clattered on the rubble of the tunnel-floor as they pursued them at maximum speed. It took only seconds for the whole of the ghastly running fight to have traveled so far from the humans as to be out of sight and hearing. The only remnants to show it had ever existed were the mangled corpses of the cave-dwellers, and one or two wrecked robots.

  Stanton peered after the battle to make sure it was gone. Then, mopping his brow, he slumped to a sitting position and emitted a vast “Whew!” of relief. “I have seldom been so sure I was about to become dead,” he said pensively. “Divide and rule is what I always say—let your enemies fight it out among themselves. Well, what do we do now? My curiosity is sated—let’s go back.”

  “That,” said the girl sternly, “is the thing we are most not going to do. If we’ve come this far we can go a little farther. Let’s go on down this tunnel and see what’s there. It seems to branch off down farther: we can take the other route from that of the robots.”

  Josey sighed. “Oh, well,” he murmured resignedly. “Always game, that’s me. Let’s travel.”

  “IT’S darker than I ever thought darkness could be, Ray,” Annamarie said tautly. “And I just thought of something. How do we know which is the other route—the one the robots didn’t take?”

  “A typical question,” snarled Stanton. “So you get a typical answer: I don’t know. Or, to phrase it differently, we just have to put ourselves in the robots’ place. If you were a robot, where would you go?”

  “Home,” Ogden answered immediately. “Home and to bed. But these robots took the tunnel we’re in. So let’s turn back and take the other one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Observation and deduction. I observed that I am standing in something warm and squishy, and I deduced that it is the corpse of a recent light-head.”

  “No point in taking the other tunnel, though,” Annamarie’s voice floated back. She had advanced a few steps and was hugging the tunnel wall. “There’s an entrance to another tunnel here, and it slopes back the way we came. I’d say, offhand, that the other tunnel is just an alternate route.”

  “Noise,” said Stanton. “Listen.”

  There was a scrabbling, chittering, quite indescribable sound, and then another one. Suddenly terrific squalling noises broke the underground silence and the three ducked as they sensed something swooping down on them and gliding over their heads along the tunnel. “What was that?” yelped Josey.

  “A cat-fight, I think,” said Stanton. “I could hear two distinct sets of vocables, and there were sounds of battle. Those things could fly, glide or jump—probably jump. I think they were a specialized form of tunnel life adapted to living, breeding, and fighting in a universe that was long, dark, and narrow. Highly specialized.”

  Annamarie giggled hysterically. Like the bread-and-butterfly that lived on weak tea with cream in it.”

  “Something like,” Stanton agreed. Hand in hand, they groped their way on through the utter blackness. Suddenly there was a grunt from Josey, on the extreme right. “Hold it” he cried, withdrawing his hand to finger his dama
ged nose. “The tunnel seems to end here.”

  “Not end,” said Annamarie. “Just turns to the left. And take a look at what’s there!”

  The men swerved and stared. For a second no one spoke; the sudden new vista was too compelling for speech.

  “RAY!” finally gasped the girl. “It’s incredible! It’s incredible!”

  There wasn’t a sound from the two men at her sides. They had rounded the final bend in the long tunnel and come out into the flood of light they had seen. The momentary brilliance staggered them and swung glowing spots before their eyes.

  Then, as the effects of persistence of vision faded, they saw what the vista actually was. It was a great cavern, the hugest they’d ever seen on either planet—and by tremendous odds the most magnificent.

  The walls were not of rock, it seemed, but of slabs of liquid fire—liquid fire which, their stunned eyes soon saw, was a natural inlay of incredible winking gems.

  Opulence was the rule of this drusy cave. Not even so base a metal as silver could be seen here; gold was the basest available. Platinum, iridium, little pools of shimmering mercury dotted the jewel-studded floor of the place. Stalactites and stalagmites were purest rock-crystal.

  Flames seemed to glow from behind the walls colored by the emerald, ruby, diamond, and topaz. “How can such a formation occur in nature?” Annamarie whispered. No one answered.

  “ ‘There are more things in heaven and under it—’ ” raptly misquoted Josey. Then, with a start, “What act’s that from?”

  It seemed to bring the others to. “Dunno,” chorused the archeologist and the girl. Then, the glaze slowly vanishing from their eyes, they looked at each other.

  “Well,” breathed the girl.

  In an abstracted voice, as though the vision of the jewels had never been seen, the girl asked, “How do you suppose the place is lighted?”

  “Radioactivity,” said Josey tersely. There seemed to be a tacit agreement—if one did not mention the gems neither would the others. “Radioactive minerals and maybe plants. All this is natural formation. Weird, of course, but here it is.”

  There was a feeble, piping sound in the cavern.

  “Can this place harbor life?” asked Stanton in academic tones.

  “Of course,” said Josey, “any place can.” The thin, shrill piping was a little louder, strangely distorted by echoes.

  “Listen,” said the girl urgently. “Do you hear what I hear?”

  “Of course not” cried Stanton worriedly. “It’s just my—I mean our imagination. I can’t be hearing what I think I’m hearing.”

  Josey had pricked his ears up. “Calm down, both of you,” he whispered. “If you two are crazy—so am I. That noise is something—somebody—singing Gilbert and Sullivan. ‘A Wand’ring Minstrel, I’, I believe the tune is.”

  “Yes,” said Annamarie hysterically. “I always liked that number.” Then she reeled back into Stanton’s arms, sobbing hysterically.

  “Slap her,” said Josey, and Stanton did, her head rolling loosely under the blows. She looked up at him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the tears still on her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry too,” echoed a voice, thin, reedy, and old; “and I suppose you’re sorry. Put down your guns. Drop them. Put up your hands. Raise them. I really am sorry. After all, I don’t want to kill you.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Marshall Ellenbogan

  THEY turned and dropped their guns almost immediate, Stanton shrugging off the heavy power-pack harness of his blaster as Josey cast down his useless heat-pistol. The creature before them was what one would expect as a natural complement to this cavern. He was weird, pixyish, dressed in fantastic points and tatters, stooped, wrinkled, whiskered, and palely luminous. Induced radioactivity, Stanton thought.

  “Hee,” he giggled. “Things!”

  “We’re men,” said Josey soberly. “Men like—like you.” He shuddered.

  “Lord,” marveled the pixy to himself, his gun not swerving an inch. “What won’t they think of next! Now, now, you efts—you’re addressing no puling creature of the deep. I’m a man and proud of it. Don’t palter with me. You shall die and be reborn again—eventually, no doubt. I’m no agnostic, efts. Here in this cavern I have seen—oh the things I have seen.” His face was rapturous with holy bliss.

  “Who are you?” asked Annamarie.

  The pixy started at her, then turned to Josey with a questioning look. “Is your friend all right?” the pixy whispered confidentially. “Seems rather effeminate to me.

  “Never mind,” the girl said hastily. “What’s your name?”

  “Marshall Ellenbogan,” said the pixy surprisingly. Second lieutenant in the United States Navy. But,” he snickered, “I suspect my commission’s expired.”

  “If you’re Ellenbogan,” said Stanton, “then you must be a survivor from the first Mars expedition. The one that started the war.”

  “Exactly,” said the creature. He straightened himself with a sort of somber dignity. “You can’t know,” he groaned, “you never could know what we went through. Landed in a desert. Then we trekked for civilization—all of us, except three kids that we left in the ship. I’ve often wondered what happened to them.” He laughed. “Civilization! Cold-blooded killers who tracked us down like vermin.

  Killed Kelly. Keogh. Moley. Jumped on us and killed us—like that” He made a futile attempt to snap his fingers. “But not me—not Ellenbogan—I ducked behind a rock and they fired on the rock and rock and me both fell into a cavern. I’ve wandered—Lord! how I’ve wandered. How long ago was it, efts?”

  The lucid interval heartened the explorers. “Fifty years, Ellenbogan,” said Josey. “What did you live on all that time?”

  “Moss—fruits from the big white trees. Meat now and then, eft, when I could shoot one of your light-headed brothers.” He leered. “But I won’t eat you. I haven’t tasted meat for so long now . . . Fifty years. That makes me seventy years old. You efts never live for more than three or four years, you don’t know how long seventy years can be.”

  “We aren’t efts,” snapped Stanton. “We’re human beings same as you. I swear we are! And we want to take you back to Earth where you can get rid of that poison you’ve been soaking into your system! Nobody can live in a radium-impregnated cave for fifty years and still be healthy. Ellenbogan, for God’s sake be reasonable!”

  The gun did not fall nor waver. The ancient creature regarded them shrewdly, his head cocked to one side. “Tell me what happened,” he said at length.

  “THERE was a war,” said the girl.

  “It was about you and the rest of the expedition that had been killed. When yours didn’t come back, the Earth governments sent another expedition—armed this time, because the kids you left in the ship managed to raise Earth for a short time when they were attacked, and they told the whole story. The second expedition landed, and—well, it’s not very clear. We only have the ship’s log to go by, but it seems to have been about the same with them. Then the Earth governments raised a whole fleet of rocketships, with everything in the way of guns and ray-projectors they could hold installed. And the Martians broke down the atomic-power process from one of the Earth ships they’d captured, and they built a fleet. And there was a war, the first interplanetary war in history, and maybe the fiercest war in history, too, for neither side ever took prisoners. There’s some evidence that the Martians realized they’d made a mistake at the beginning after the war had been going only about three years, but by that time it was too late to stop. And it went on for fifty years, with rocket-ships getting bigger and faster and better, and new weapons being developed . . . Until finally we developed a mind-disease that wiped out the entire Martian race in half a year. They were telepathic, you know, and that helped spread the disease.”

  “Good for them,” snarled the elder. “Good for the treacherous, devilish, double-dealing rats . . . And what are you people doing here now?”

  “We’re an expl
oring party, sent by the new all-Earth confederation to examine the ruins and salvage what we can of their knowledge. We came on you here quite by accident. We haven’t got any evil intentions. We just want to take you back to your own world. You’ll be a hero there. Thousands will cheer you—millions. Ellenbogan, put down your gun. Look—we put ours down!”

  “Hah!” snarled the pixy, retreating a pace. “You had me going for a minute. But not any more!” With a loud click, the pixy thumbed the safety catch of his decades-old blast. He reached back to the power pack he wore across his back, which supplied energy for the weapon, and spun the wheel to maximum output. The power-pack was studded with rubies which, evidently, he had hacked with diamonds into something resembling finished, faceted stones.

  “WAIT a minute, Ellenbogan,” Stanton said desperately. “You’re the king of these parts, aren’t you? Don’t you want to keep us for subjects?”

  “Monarch of all I survey, eft. Alone and undisputed.” His brow wrinkled. “Yes, eft,” he sighed, “you are right. You efts are growing cleverer and cleverer—you begin almost to understand how I feel. Sometimes a king is lonely—sometimes I long for companionship—on a properly deferential plane, of course. Even you efts I would accept as my friends if I did not know that you wanted no more than my blood. I can never be the friend of an eft. Prepare to die.” Josey snapped: “Are you going to kill the girl, too?”

  “Girl?” cried the pixy in amazement. “What girl?” His eyes drifted to Annamarie Hudgins. “Bless me” he cried, his eyes bulging, “why, so he is! I mean, she is! That would explain it, of course, wouldn’t it?”

  “Of course,” said Stanton. “But you’re not going to kill her, are you?”