Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “At what point does the level of the liquid cease to rise?”

  “Is that all?” asked the voice of the Gentleman in a strained tone.

  “That’s all.”

  A file of calculators slammed across the room and clumped with the mechanism.

  Long sparks began to rise as row after row of multipliers sought to keep pace with the rising level of the fluid. Beams of blue light shot from one end of the room to the other, criss-crossing so as to unite the mighty battery of calculators into one complex whole.

  The flipping cards that worked on the first problem shot through furiously; another punch-card unit slid beside it and kept pace, then another.

  “Suppose a body of liquid. . . .” mumbled the mechanical voice.

  Mamie Tung and Will Archer exchanged congratulatory glances. The Gentleman was talking to himself!

  “I used to be quiet,” remarked the voice of the Gentleman. But it was changed and distorted almost beyond recognition; there was a weak, effeminate quality to it.

  “But now I am busy.” The voice was strong again, and vibrant.

  There began a weird, bickering dialogue between the two emerging characters of the Gentleman. One was lazy and indifferent, passively feminine; the other was dominating and aggressive, patently male. All the while the sparks—sparks of waste—rose higher and higher; the beams of blue light assumed a sickly greenish-yellow tinge which meant nothing but lower tension and less perfect communication.

  Strange things began to happen. In a fantastic effort to crack the problems the machine changed the units working on each, assigned the card-punch and selector to the water-and-solid problem, gave the multipliers the bearded—or beardless?—barber. In a moment it changed back, undecided.

  “I am ignorant of so many things,” said the feminine voice, “that I ought not to have known. That is a sign of rectitude.”

  “Ignorance is foulness. Knowledge is a white light. Before time began I was ignorant because I did not exist. So ignorance challenges my existence.”

  There was a senseless yammering as the two voices tried to speak together.

  Will Archer stood by in horror, contemplating the ruin of this mind he had grown to know. It was a lesson in humility and caution.

  Mamie Tung slipped through the tube, notified the rating to run for Star Macduff.

  She returned to take her stand beside the E.O.

  There was a whining as Macduff put on his fields full power; the air blued.

  With one mighty, indignant wail of protest the Gentleman ceased to exist. All the temporary magnetisms he had set up dissolved; half the equipment in the room fell apart for lack of rivets; the lights and sparks died in mid-air.

  “Schizophrenia,” said Mamie, scribbling in a notebook.

  “Brutal. Effective.”

  “But if he’d solved those problems—”

  “THE Gentleman was young and ignorant at best—didn’t know when to stop. Very low critical faculty.”

  The Calculator and Yancey Mears slid through the tube, breathlessly surveyed the wreckage of the computations room.

  “Take us a week to dean this up,” said Yancey Mears.

  The Executive, for the first time since the ship had found life, spoke into a phone plate, gave orders to affect the course. “Stop the sphere.”

  “Yes, Officer. Cut?”

  “Cut. Look out, Yancey.”

  An agglomeration of cog-wheels and styli jumped at her ankle, buried the points in her flesh. Star Macduff squirted it with his portable field set-up. It fell apart even as the Gentleman had.

  “Ugly thing,” said the woman, inspecting her wounds. “The Gentleman might have been worse.”

  CHAPTER IV

  LIKE a paramecium skirting the bulk of a minnow in some unthinkable stagnant pool Sphere Nine edged close around the rim of the mighty solid that hung in space and marked the end of the long, long quest after the cosmic rays that so disturbingly played hob with attempts at self-improvement.

  The project of landing was conceived by the Executive Officer; it took no less a mind than his to consider the possibility of dropping the sphere anywhere but in a cradle which had been built to order. But the protoplasm—whatever it was—would offer no interference; the sphere might sink gently to the surface, even penetrate to some considerable distance; there would be no harm in that.

  Sphere Nine was in top order; the ravaged computations room had been set aright, the crew of ordinaries had been given a going-over by Mamie Tung and pronounced sound and trustworthy. The Officers themselves were high as so many kites, reaction-speeds fast and true, toned-up to the limit. It was to be regretted that the strain of contact with the Gentleman had vanished, perhaps. A certain recklessness had crept into their manner.

  The protoplasmal mass which blanketed their heavens at one stroke became instead the floor beneath their feet as its gravity twisted their psychology 180 degrees around. They felt as though they hung above a sea of dry slime that moved not at all, whose sole activity was the emission of cosmic rays and invisible spores of life that smeared any agar dish exposed to it.

  Quietly the sphere lowered itself, quietly touched the surface of the sea, quietly slipped into it, the path it made closing behind.

  Through layers of dark-colored stuff they drifted, then through layers of lighter-colored stuff, then into a sort of ash-heap. Embedded in the tough jelly-like matter were meteors by the thousand, planet-fragments, areas of frozen gas. It was like the kitchen-midden of a universe.

  The strange, silent passage through the viscid medium was uninterrupted; Star Macduff plotted a course through the rubbish. The ratings steered faithfully by his figures; as they passed the gravelly stuff, the dream-like progress continued, the protoplasm growing lighter yet in color. Finally unmistakable radiance shone through a thinning layer.

  Sphere Nine broke through the tough, slimy-dry stuff to be bathed in the light of a double star with a full retinue of fifteen planets.

  “Impossible,” said Star Macduff.

  “Agreed. But why?”

  “Assuming that a star should coincide with another long enough to draw out a filament of matter sufficient for fifteen planets the system would be too unstable—wouldn’t last long enough to let the suns get into the red giant stage.”

  “Artificial?”

  “If they’re real they’re artificial, Will.”

  “Attention E.O.! Attention!” gargled the phone hysterically.

  “What is it?”

  “Rating Eight speaking, Officer. There’s something coming at the forward slice.”

  WILL ARCHER swiveled around the telescope while the rating gave the coordinates of whatever they had picked up. Archer finally found it and held it. It was a spiral of some kind headed at them, obviously, speed more than a mile a second and decelerating.

  “Stop ship. Cut.”

  “Cut, Officer.”

  “That thing can’t reach us for a while yet. Meantime let’s consider what we just got ourselves into.”

  “We just got ourselves through a big slew of protoplasm that acts as a sort of heavenly sphere—primum mobile—for a solar system that our Calculator considers unlikely.”

  “True. I suggest that we keep ourselves very carefully in check from now. There’s been some laxity of thinking going on during the voyage; it is understandable. We’ve all been under extraordinary stress. Now that the hardest part—perhaps—is over we cannot afford to relax. By all accounts what is coming at us is a vessel. It is unlikely to suppose that this protosphere is accidental; if it were, there would be as much reason to believe that there is intelligent life on those fifteen planets inasmuch as they are so close to the source of life-spores. I hope that in whatever befalls us we shall act as worthy representatives of our species.”

  “Pompous ass!” rang through the ship. The E.O. turned very red.

  “May we come aboard?” asked the laughing voice again.

  “By all means,” said the psychologist.
“It would be somewhat foolish to deny you entrance when you’ve already perfected communications.”

  “Thank you.”

  THERE slipped through the hull of the sphere three ordinary-looking persons of approximately the same build as Will Archer. They were conventionally dressed.

  “How did you do that?” asked the Calculator.

  “Immaterial. The matter, I mean. I mean, the topic,” said one of them. “That’s one fiendish language you speak. The wonder is that you ever managed to get off the ground.”

  “If our intrusion into your solar system is resented,” said the E.O., “we’ll leave at once. If it is not, we should like to examine that shell you have. We would gratefully accept any knowledge you might offer us from your undoubtedly advanced civilization.”

  “Eh? What’s that?”

  “He means,” explained another of the visitors to the sphere, “that he appreciates that we’re stronger than he is and that he’d like to become strong enough to blow us to powder.”

  “Why didn’t he say so?” asked the second.

  “Can’t imagine. Limitations of his symbology, I expect. Now, man, can you give us a good reason why we should help you become strong enough to blow us to powder?”

  Stiffly Archer nodded to Mamie Tung.

  “We have no claim on you, nor have you on us. We wish to take a sample of your protosphere and depart for our own system.”

  “In other words, my good woman, you realize that time doesn’t figure largely in this matter and that you don’t care whether you or your grandchildren blow us to powder?”

  “I can’t understand it,” commented one of the others in a stage whisper. “Why this absurd insistence on blowing us to powder?”

  “Do I pretend to understand the processes of a lump of decaying meat?” declared the first. “I do not.”

  “No more than I. What makes them go?”

  “Something they call ‘progress’. I think it means blowing everything else to powder.”

  “What unpleasantness!”

  “So I should say. What do you propose doing to them?”

  “We might blow them to powder.”

  “Let’s find out first what makes them run.” The first turned on Yancey Mears. “Why are you built differently from the E.O.? We can allow for individual variations, but even to this untrained eye there’s a staggering discrepancy.”

  Yancey Mears explained that she was a woman and calmly went into details, interrupted occasionally by gurgling noises from the boarders. Finally it was too much; the three visitors broke into cries for mercy between bellows of laughter.

  “And you thought they were humorless!” accused the third.

  “This one’s probably a comic genius. Though why they’d send a comic genius on an expedition of this kind I don’t know. You—you don’t suppose that it’s all true—do you?”

  Suddenly sobered they inspected Yancey and the Psychologist, exchanging significant nods.

  “Well. . . .though you things are the most ludicrous sights of an abnormally long lifetime, we’re prepared to be more than equitable with you. Our motivation is probably far beyond your system of ethics—being, as it is, a matter of blowing things to powder—but we can give you a hint of it by saying that it will help as a sort of self-discipline. Beyond that you will have to discover for yourself.

  “What we propose for you is a thing much more gentle than being blown into powder. With courage, ability, common sense and inspiration you will emerge unharmed.”

  “Go on,” said the Psychologist.

  “Go on? It’s begun already. We’ll take our leaves now.”

  As his two companions slipped through the hull of the sphere the last of the boarders turned to Yancey Mears.

  “Er—what you were saying—it was a comic monologue, wasn’t it?”

  “No. It was strict biological truth.”

  The boarder wistfully asked: “I don’t suppose I could see it done? Thought not. Good day.” The three departed abruptly as they had come.

  “WHAT’S begun already?” Star Macduff asked the Executive.

  “I don’t know. What do you suppose we’ve come into contact with now?”

  “They’re hard to size up,” said Mamie Tung. “The humor—it’s very disturbing. Apparently it didn’t take them more than a few minutes to pick up our entire language and system of thought. It wasn’t a simple job of mind-reading; they obviously grasped as well our social background and symbology. They said so themselves.”

  “And what do you suppose they really look like?” asked Star in a thin, hysterical tone.

  “Shut it,” ordered Will Archer. “That’s panic-mongering, pure and simple. Normally I’d order you back with the ratings for a comment like that. Since we’re up against extraordinary circumstances I’ll stay execution for the duration of the emergency.”

  The Calculator did not reply; he seemed scarcely to have heard the rebuke. He was staring abstractedly at nothing. The notion overcame the three other Officers slowly, very slowly, that something was amiss.

  Yancey Mears first felt physically sick, then a peculiar numbness between the eyes, then a dull, sawing pain that ran over her whole skull. She blinked her eyes convulsively, felt vertiginous yet did not fall, felt a curious duplicate sensation, as though she were beside herself and watching her body from outside, as though all lights she saw were doubled, as though the mass of her body was twice what it had been.

  Alarmed she reached out for Will Archer’s arm. It was not till she had tried the simple gesture that she realized how appallingly askew everything was. She reached, she thought, but her hands could not coordinate; she thought that she had extended both hands instead of one. But she had not. Dizzily she looked down, saw that her left hand lay against her body, that her right hand was extended, reaching for Archer, that her right hand was extended and that her left hand lay against her body—

  “Will, what’s wrong?” The dizziness, the fear, the panic, doubled and tripled, threatened to engulf her. For her voice was not her own but a double voice, coming from two throats, one a little later than the other.

  “Will—” No, she couldn’t outrace the phenomenon; her voice was doubled in some insane fashion. She felt cold; tried to focus her eyes on Archer. Somehow the blackness of space seemed to come between them.

  She heard a scream—two screams—from Star. She saw him, blending with the space-black cloud in her vision, staggering in the officer’s quarters, yawing wildly from side to side, trying to clutch at a stanchion or a chair. She saw two Stars, sometimes superimposed, sometimes both blurred, staggering wildly.

  She saw Will Archer drag himself across the floor—both of him, their faces grim. The two Will Archers, blended somehow with the space-blackness, waveringly. They methodically picked up a cabinet from the desk and clubbed at the raving figures of Star Macduff.

  The two Archers connected with one of the Macduffs, stretching it out on the floor.

  Yancey saw the other Macduff, distance-obscured, stop short and rub its head amazedly, heard it say in a thin, far-away voice:

  “Sorry I made a fool of myself, Will—” then look about in terror, collapsing into a chair.

  ONLY Madame Tung was composed.

  Only Madame Tung crossed legs on a chair, shut her eyes and went into a deep, complicated meditation.

  “Close your eyes, everybody,” she called in two voices. “If you value your sanity, close your eyes and rest quietly.”

  The Clericalist tried to walk across the floor to a chair, had the utterly horrifying sensation of walking across the floor in two different directions and sitting down in two different chairs. Realizing only that there were two of her she tried to make one rise and join the other, found that she could not.

  “Stop it, Yancey,” said the two voices of Madame Tung. “Sit down. Shut your eyes.”

  Yancey Mears sat down and shut her eyes—all four of them. She was trembling with shock, did her best not to show it.

&nb
sp; “Will,” called the Psychologist. “You have the best motor control of any of us. Will you try very hard to coordinate sufficiently to prop up Star?”

  The Executive Officer grimly, carefully, stepped across the two floors. As vertigo overcame him he fell sprawling and hitched the rest of the way. The problem loomed enormously in his mind: Which one was him? Which of the two Stars he saw was real? Which Will had knocked down which Star?

  He tried to reach out and touch the Star that lay on the floor as the other Star watched, horrified, from against a stanchion.

  He tried to reach out and touch this Star, snatched back his hand as though coals of fire had burned it, for there swept over him the blackness of space, the dead-black nothingness of something unspeakable and destroying.

  Madame Tung, watching his every move, snapped: “No—the other you—see if you can control and differentiate.”

  Will reached out again, again he recoiled. He tried to blank out his mind completely, feeling that he was losing himself in a welter of contradictions impossible for anyone in his confused state to handle. Lying on the floor, breathing deeply, he succeeded in calming himself a little—enough to send the slow oblivion of selfhypnosis flowing through his mind. He forced the Nepenthe on himself, leaving only a thin thread of consciousness by which to govern his actions.

  When it was over he remembered that one of his duplex person had remained on the floor and that the other had carried the unconscious Star to a seat.

  “Good work, Will. Very good. Now see if you can superimpose yourself.”

  He tried, tried like a madman to bring those two parts of himself together. He tried, though a world of blackness lay between them and the very attempt was full of horror and dark mystery. By the same technique as before he succeeded, at a cost that nearly left him shattered in mind. He breathed heavily and sweated from every square inch of skin.