Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  His answer nearly paralyzed me. He leaped across the distance between us, his face desperate and contorted, whispering: “We’re going to some hotel. I’ll come back and see you tonight. Have to explain. You don’t know—”

  “Coffee!” gaily announced Mrs. Leonard, carrying in the tray.

  I rose gallantly, and very much surprised. “How in Heaven’s name did you make it so quickly?” I demanded.

  “You don’t think I made it with that fancy glass thing of yours, do you?” she laughed. “I have more sense than that.”

  “But you couldn’t have had time to boil the water!”

  “Silly—there was a pan of water seething. Oh!” Her hand flew to her mouth. “I hope there wasn’t salt or anything in it!” I seemed to remember something about water boiling—perhaps I had meant to prepare a hot cloth for my ankle before going to meet the bus.

  “And this,” she said, pouring, “is Iowa pan coffee the way my grandmother made it in a covered wagon.”

  I got a mouthful of grounds and swallowed convulsively. “Those pioneers had courage,” I said inanely.

  WORKING on a learned monograph revealing factors in the sociology of the Bronx that Fordham University had not even touched, I was baffled by what I had written a few months later. It was done in the style peculiar to some textbooks and degree themes; that is, it was no style at all but an attempt to set down without emotion or effect certain facts in their natural order.

  That was the effect which Mac’s talk with me that night had. He had come about nine o’clock, panting from the climb up the stairs and perspiring profusely. He wouldn’t take anything to drink but water.

  “It was partly drink that got me into trouble in Council Bluffs,” he said. “I’m never going to touch it again.” He looked up at the indirect light from the ceiling and blinked. “Would you mind—?” he asked inarticulately. “Eyestrain—”

  I turned off the big light and lit a table-lamp which spread a bright pool on the console, leaving the rest of the room obscured. “Now shoot,” I said. “And I’m not making any promises about anything tonight. Not one way or another.”

  “Don’t worry,” he almost snarled. “I’m not after your damned money.” As I started up angrily—and God knows I had a right to be angry—he buried his face in his hands. I sank back into my chair, inexpressibly shocked to hear him weeping.

  “Easy,” I muttered. “No need to go on like that, Mac. What would Nicholas Butler say to hear a Columbia man crying?” The ridiculous joke didn’t stop him; he sobbed like a child. No; sobbed like a man, from the diaphragm, where it hurts as if your ribs are being torn out one by one.

  He looked up, his eyes streaming, and wiped his face. Returning the handkerchief to his breast pocket, he said in a very steady voice: “It isn’t the dreams that get you; it’s when you know you’re awake and they keep on coming.”

  “Yes?” I asked, leaning back. I thought he was delirious.

  “Shut up. I’m telling you everything—don’t you see? It’s your fault anyway—waking me up when I was dreaming James Branch Cabe11—showing me the way things happen.”

  “Go on,” I said after a long pause. He didn’t seem to hear me, for it was an equally long time before he made a curious choking sound and said:

  “I think I have been in Hell for the past few years, old ink-blotter. But I recall a very special chapter of the book. Allow me to describe it. There is, first of all, a large, rocky cavern.” He paused again and leaned back, speaking in a very faint, rasping voice, as though he could not bear the sounds of the words he was saying.

  “And there is very foolish talk going on. There are people in the cavern who think they are Satanists, or something like it. They have prepared fantastic things—a long table, various dyes and pigments. Very foolish. They are well-dressed people; it is true, as a rule, that the poor are on the side of God.

  “One of the foolish, wealthy people is a woman. She finds it necessary to undress and begin to dance as the others clap their hands. Did I mention that there were fires lighting this cavern? She spins close by the fires, one by one, and makes it a point to burn herself badly in various places. Then, as she falls to the floor, another, a man, has reasons for doing, essentially, what she has done. But the man wears a chain around his neck which he does not remove, and from this chain hangs a small medallion. When the man is very badly burned, another woman makes a fool of herself in the same manner, and after her a man.

  “Would you believe it if I told you that in all twenty-four people willingly subjected themselves to widespread first-degree burns? After hours of this folly they sat in a circle, still without their clothes, and mumbled gibberish for twenty minutes or more.

  “At that point they had conjured up Satan, theoretically. My guess is that they did nothing of the sort. The incarnation of Evil? No! He would not have let them live or praise him. Something they did conjure up. What it was I do not know, but this is what happened.

  “There was, first of all, a noticeable diminution of the firelight. Then appeared a definite blue glow at what would be the apex of the cone about whose basal circumference they were sitting. As that glow grew, the fires went out. There was definitely a Presence there . . .

  “I don’t know what to call it. It was not Satan. There probably is no Satan. But there was a Presence, and it had horns and a tail and great, shining teeth and lustful, shining eyes.”

  I STOOD up from my chair. “That’s enough!” I yelled at him.

  He looked at me and then, shockingly, suddenly, gave a low chuckle. “Quaint tale, isn’t it? What’s the matter?”

  “You tell me!” I snapped. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Allow me to get on with the story. I’m afraid I was becoming hypnotized by my own rhetoric. And interrupt if you feel too weak to stand it.” I flushed suddenly as I felt his eyes on my twisted foot. Where did the damned slander start that cripples are loose in the head?

  “Go on,” I growled.

  “To be brief, direct and—crude—the women then proceed to caress this creature. And then—!

  “There appears a man in that cavern who does not wear a pendant from his neck. He is no demonologist. He is, God knows, not wealthy. He is but a simple mathematician who made the horrid mistake of attempting to tie in his mathematics with occult philosophy.”

  Another very long pause. “Go on,” I said.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Mac. “Don’t do that. I didn’t know what I was doing. If I’d known I would have cut off my hand before I wrote the supersonic equations. But it’s so simple. All you need is a scale of tuning forks—then you modify them the right way and you find yourself in the nearest occult vortex. It’s so simple! The clue is in several of Madame Blavatsky’s Meditations. That old hag didn’t know what she was writing, I suppose. You need money, millions, to get into the circle. I was an outsider.

  “The Presence vanished, and I was cursed by those people—cursed while I was waking, sleeping, talking, walking, dancing, writing and reading. Then they opened a door and threw me out.”

  “A door?” I asked. “In a cavern?”

  He laughed like the closing of a lock. “The rocks,” he said, “were papier mache. The cavern was the third-floor ballroom of a hotel on 32nd Street.”

  “And so?” I asked.

  “I wired back to Council Bluffs for bus fare. I was back there in two days with a tale of urgent business in New York.”

  “That’s plenty, Leonard. Now you can get the hell out of my house. Yes, even before you build up to the touch for the rare herbs that’ll take the curse off you.”

  “Sorry,” he said, rising. “I tried to let you know. It wasn’t a touch. I remembered that you have a cousin, or had, the one you wrote that Bronx monograph on—”

  “He’s up the river. Dewey got him, with the rest of Murder Incorporated. Did you want a bodyguard against the demons? Or do you want to become a policy banker?”

  He had his hat on. From the door he
said: “I wanted to have a murder done for me. But now I suppose I’ll have to do it myself . . .”

  I locked the door and went to bed, fuming like a tea-kettle. I’m from a short-lived clan; we break down early and live in the fear of death. That night I found myself with a hacking cough, which didn’t add to my sense of well-being, for my father and sister had died of throat infections. You could accurately say that between Mac’s turning out to be a chiseling phony and my fears that in a week I’d be a dead man, I bordered on distraction. There was a heightening of the sensory powers all the sensory powers. The darkest room was not dark enough for me, and the traffic below jerked me up in bed repressing shrieks of pain. It was as though I had been flayed alive, for the silk bedsheets I use for that very reason were like sacking-cloth—or sandpaper.

  How I managed to fall asleep I didn’t know. Certainly the quality of my dreams was horrid enough to wake me up screaming.

  I GOT disconnected scraps and images from Leonard’s story of that night. I saw over again, in the most damnably vivid colors, the lie he had told of the ceremonial in the hotel. Details he had omitted were plentifully supplied by my subconscious—revolting details. Cripples, I am told, are generally stews of repression and fear.

  Quite the most awful part was the Presence turning to me and stating, in a language of snarls and drooling grunts, the following message:

  “A curse is no mouthing of words. That worries at a man but does not kill. A curse is no juggling of hands. That worries at a man, but does not maim. A curse is no thinking of evil. That worries at a man, but does not blind, tear, crush, char and slash. A curse is something you can see, hear, feel, hate and love.”

  That was not the end of the dream, but it was near. After I—subconsciously doubling for Mac—had been thrown out of that ballroom, it ended and I awoke. My throat irritation was gone, which was good. That night I did not sleep any more, but read and re-read the clippings Mac had sent me. I wanted to look at his letters, but they were in no kind of order.

  I saw the sun rise and made myself a breakfast of bacon and eggs. It was interrupted by a telegram slipped under my door. The yellow slip read: “Please phone me. Not a touch. Mac Leonard.” The telegram was because I have no phone; if you want to hear my dulcet voice, you have to coerce me into going down to the corner drug store to call you up.

  Frankly, I didn’t know what to do. I was still mad, half because of his ridiculous story, half because of his continuous rude staring at my right foot. I long ago passed the point where I allowed people to indulge their curiosity at the cost of much personal anguish to me. I decided that I might as well.

  I threw some clothes on and went down to the corner where a tubercular young clerk was dispensing a few early-morning Cokes. “Hi,” he said. “Nice day.” Avoiding his conversational spray I got change and slid into the booth.

  A woman’s voice answered the phone in their room at a nearby hotel.

  “Mrs. Leonard?” I asked. “I got a telegram from Mac—he wanted me to call him.”

  “He must have gone out,” she said. “He wasn’t here when I woke up. Must have gone for breakfast—wouldn’t wait for me, the barbarian!”

  I mumbled some inanity or other, wondering what I ought to do.

  “Listen,” she said, suddenly urgent. “This is the first chance I’ve had to talk to you, really. I’m just a dumb woman, so they tell me, but there are some things I want to know. That foot of yours—what’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I snarled. “Since you began it, it was run over sidewise by a car when I was about twenty. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes. What do you do for a living?”

  The damnable impudence of the woman! I didn’t answer; just slammed the receiver down on the hook and stormed out.

  Mac was waiting for me in my apartment. The landlady had let him in, she told me as I was going up.

  “Now what’s this?” I asked, as I found him nervously smoking on the edge of my bed.

  “Sorry I broke in,” he said. Damn him! His eyes were on my twisted foot again!

  “What do you want? I was just talking with your wife.”

  “You might want to know why I did a damned foolish thing like trying to make a student. It was because my wife wouldn’t treat me like a husband. I was nearly crazy. I loved her so.” His voice was thin and colorless.

  “I don’t care about your personal affairs, Mac. Get out of here.”

  He rose slowly and dangerously, and as he moved towards me I began to realize how big he was and how small I was. He grabbed me by the coat lapels; as he twisted them into a tight knot and lifted me so that my dragging foot cleared the ground, he snarled: “You tell me what’s wrong with your foot or I’ll break your neck!”

  “Car ran over it!” I gasped. I was shocked to find out that I was a physical coward; never before had I been subjected to an assault like this. I feared that man with the lunatic gleam in his eyes as I had never feared anything before.

  “Car,” he growled. “Now how do you make a living? Don’t give me that ‘retired capitalist’ bull you tried in your letters. I’ve been looking you up and you haven’t got a single bank-account anywhere. Where do you get your money from?”

  A voice from my door sounded. “Put him down,” it said. “He’s no friend of mine. Maybe of yours.” I fell in a heap and turned to see Leonard’s wife. “The Whelmers,” she said, “disavowed him.”

  Mac turned away. “You know that I know!” he gasped, his face quite dead, dirty white. It was absolutely bloodless.

  “I saw two of the Whelmers in the street. They know nothing of this.” She gestured contemptuously at me. “That foot of his is no mark. Now, Mr. Leonard—” She advanced slowly on him, step by step.

  He backed away, to before a window. “Only a few days ago,” he gasped, “only a few days ago I put it all together. I never knew your parents. You are the curse of the Whelmers. And last night I—we—my God!” His eyes were dilated with terror.

  “Last night,” said the woman, “you were my husband and I was your wife.”

  With the beginning of a musical laugh she slumped and bloated strangely, quietly, a bluish glare shining from her skin.

  With the glare came a momentary paralysis of my limbs. I would have run rather than have seen what I had to see. I would have died rather than have seen that Presence that had horns and a tail and great, shining teeth and lustful, shining eyes.

  Leonard took his dry dive through the window just a second before I fainted. When I awoke, there was nobody at all in the room except myself and the friendly, curious police.

  Einstein’s Planetoid

  They were the heirs of space-flight: They planned to be the first humans to land on Alpha Centauri, but the original Hartnett expedition had been lost and they had to find it first. They followed the signals and found that they led to what looked like a one-way excursion to the screwiest planetoid in the galaxy!

  CHAPTER I

  HEIRS OF SPACE FLIGHT

  NICK HARTNETT stepped off the upper lip of the thousand-foot shaft and floated gently downwards. When he had fallen about half the distance, he reached out for a stanchion, grasped it easily and pulled himself gracefully into the lounge-room of the Columbia.

  What he saw there was precisely what he expected to see. There was Dorothy Gilbert, curled in a spring-hammock, reading a book. Nick was looking over her shoulder before she knew he had entered.

  “Bodie’s Tarecliptic Orbits,” he read aloud. “Dorothy, don’t you ever think of anything but your job?”

  She looked up, smiling, brushing aside a lock of tousled hair that sought her eye. “Often, Nick. But where would we be if I didn’t check my courses against those plotted by a competent authority?”

  “Just about where we’ll be if you do,” he guessed, tugging at his ear with long, knobby fingers. “You’re ray idea of a competent authority yourself.”

  “Thanks, Nick. How are the contracels hold
ing out?”

  “Wonderfully!” he grinned. “It seems as if my father did a fair job of inventing there—though maybe not quite good enough.” He knelt and touched a button inset in the floor; instantly the metallic luster of it dulled and clouded, then the clouds seemed to vanish as the floor became transparent. In an instant it appeared to have vanished entirely, revealing an immense sweep of blackness interspersed with white-hot, tiny specks of light that were stars and planets.

  Nick stared out at them. The whole field of stars was moving, it seemed, though, in actuality, it was the ship itself that spun on its axis, providing them with the illusion of gravity they required. It was hard for Hartnett to realize that this view was almost brand-new to human eyes, that only twenty or thirty people could ever have seen stars and the solar system from this vantage point, outside the plane of the ecliptic. There were seven persons in the Columbia now, and there had been eighteen or twenty in its predecessor which had been reported lost some years before. Those two ships, the only ones in the System’s great armada to be equipped with the counter-acceleration devices that made it possible to venture out of the confines of the Solar System, were also the only ones to leave the plane of the ecliptic.

  “Where’s Earth?” Nick asked absently without looking up.

  Dorothy closed the book on a finger and leaned over the edge of the hammock to look. “It’s not in sight now,” she said. “Wait until we spin a little farther. Of course, I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to see it then, either, because the ship may hide it. But we’ll see. We’re looking out one side of the ship and Earth is directly in back of us.”

  He snapped off the vision and the floor returned to normal “As soon as we get the reports from the two goops,” he mused, “we can start making definite plans for the outing.”

  “WE heard you,” came a voice from just outside the lounge, and, a second later, Bob Vickers appeared, climbing hand-overhand against the slight pull of the acceleration that managed to seep through the not-quite-perfect guard of the contracels. He pulled himself into the lounge and turned back, extending a hand to Fred Marquis, who followed him in.