Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  By noon I was on a plane that took me to an airfield under three guards. From there I went to my present location, a sandy little island well off the Atlantic coast. They do something of other here with an uranium pile; I don’t know just what. I’m the timekeeper. I keep time for everybody in District Seventeen except myself, because I haven’t got anything but time.

  The guards have been informed that I get shot, preferably through the head, if I try to leave; otherwise I have the run of the place. All I’m living for is the hope that someday the United Nations will get the atomic bomb and TB get out of District Seventeen.

  Maybe I won’t burn this story. Maybe I’ll keep it until then.

  1948

  Goldbrick Solitaire

  Cronshaw wanted his victim to finish that card game. Yet when the ace of spades turned up, Cronshaw knew his hour had struck.

  CRONSHAW, waiting to rob and possibly kill an elderly gentleman, was very well pleased with himself. It was stuffy in the hotel room closet, but he could stand a bit of bad air for an hour or two. He worked his fingers as if they were already sliding over the soft, buttery surface of the Kohler Ingot.

  The sales talk was already composing itself in his mind. He would sell it to a Californian, some new-rich Angeleno eager for a background. Cronshaw would display the little oblong of gold on black velvet, with the assay stamp up—F. D. Kohler, state assay-er, Sac: Cal: 1850, 42 dwt 12 grs. 136.55.

  “A precious relic, Mr. Whosis, of your state’s vigorous youth, when commercial growth outstripped the minting facilities available. Naturally these are now fantastically rare—” Naturally.

  It was stuffy. Cronshaw began to wonder if the hard, wise-eyed bellboy had hidden him in the right room. Old Mr. Winger, for that matter, might have missed his connection in Chicago. Cronshaw had gathered, in the course of their mail transactions, that Winger was on his last legs. Winger’s mind must be slipping, too, Cronshaw thought, to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the little deal that Cronshaw had proposed as a matter of course, hardly hoping that the old fool would—

  The door clicked. Cronshaw put his eye to the nearest of the observation holes he had drilled with a tiny auger and saw the lights snap on.

  The bellboy’s hard voice said, “It’s right in here, sir.”

  A harsh old voice answered, “I can find a door, damn it! Here’s a 1928 quarter for you. Now run along.”

  The door closed and Cronshaw saw Mr. Winger for the first time in their three years of dealing. It was an ancient, battered face, horsey and lined. Winger took off a black felt hat and Cronshaw saw that he was bald.

  Winger opened the suitcase resting on the luggage rack at the foot of the bed, and took out a handkerchief and two boxes. He blew his nose loudly, sat on the bed, and opened one of the boxes.

  Cronshaw suppressed a gasp. He was locking at seven thousand, five hundred dollars’ worth of unrecorded, highly negotiable, rare currency substitute. It wras the Kohler Ingol Winger had found in a junkshop. It was the Kohler Ingot he thought he was going to sell to Cronshaw. It was the Kohler Ingot he was going to be robbed of as soon as he went to sleep.

  The coin dealer hugged himself. It was like winning a lottery, lie thought, as he saw Winger trail his fingertips over the oblong of gold. It was like winning a lottery less than like winning the jackpot on a seven-wheel slot machine.

  The first bar that had to come up was Winger finding the ingot. The second, Winger needing money. The third, Winger contacting him for the sale. The fourth, Winger believing him when he’d urged secrecy throughout the deal. The fifth was just now clicking into view behind the window. He and Winger were alone together, and Winger didn’t know it.

  The sixth and seventh were, respectively, the actual theft and the escape from the hotel. They were routine. His luck couldn’t break now.

  WINGER had closed the box and put it away in the suitcase. He began dealing himself a hand of solitaire on the bed, with thick, dirty cards from the second box.

  The old fool! Why didn’t he go to sleep?

  He didn’t even play as if he knew the game. He kept touching the cards on the layout uncertainly and fingering the cards in the deck. After what seemed like an eternity in the closet the game was over.

  And so to bed? No, one more game. Winger shuffled clumsily and dealt himself another layout. He did pretty well on that one. After fifteen minutes he had hearts to the five, spades to the three, clubs to the ace, and diamonds to the eight.

  Cronshaw, not exactly panicky, began to realize that his time was running out. The closet was becoming very stuffy indeed.

  He would let Winger play one more hand. If he didn’t go to sleep after that he would snatch the ingot, with whatever violence to the old man was indicated, and leave. He tied a handkerchief over his face and put his eye to the auger hole.

  Winger was playing out the hand, slowly and clumsily, stopping often to touch the cards of the layout. He did badly, getting out only the ace of spades.

  Very appropriate, thought Cronshaw, taking out a length of rubber hose packed with lead-sheathed cable.

  Winger shuffled clumsily and began to lay out another hand.

  Cronshaw snapped the door open, hurled across the room, and dashed the lamp to the floor.

  “Who’s there?” rasped Winger. “What’s going on?”

  Cronshaw didn’t waste time in talk. His fingers were already closing around the box containing the precious ingot.

  “Speak up, why don’t you ?” snarled Winger.

  Cronshaw had the box and was tiptoeing for the door. He heard Winger fumbling with something—for the light, of course, a frightened old man.

  His own heart was pounding, he thought, inching for the door, but otherwise he was making no noise. And who could possibly hear his heart?

  His heart gave one more tremendous pound as he heard a small clicking noise which he recognized, and then his heart stopped because there were three .44 caliber bullets lodged in it. He fell.

  Winger, old and irritable, cursed as he holstered his gun.

  Somebody could come and see what the noise was if they wanted to, he thought angrily. None of his damned business if prowlers—

  Without bothering to snap on the light he felt for his solitaire deck and shuffled it. His sensitive fingers, the sensitive fingers of the blind, dealt the layout with the Braille deck.

  The first card up was the ace of spades again.

  Blood on the Campus

  “Death by misadventure. An easy way to cover murder and scandal in a college town.

  JOE HAINES and I used to set up pins in neighboring alleys, but one day he went to college and I joined the police force. I got out of the force a few years later to start my own agency, but Joe never got out of college. He collected degrees until they made him a professor. We didn’t have much left in common, but we’d kept in touch with each other.

  I hadn’t heard from him for six months or so when a telegram came from Witterberg College in Pennsylvania, where he was Professor of Mathematics. It was a two-hundred-dollar wired money order; the accompanying message said.

  COME AT ONCE STOP WIRE

  TIME OF ARRIVAL

  I cashed and deposited the money order, wired him and caught a train. Witterberg is on the outskirts of Reading and is an incorporated town on its own, consisting of the college and nothing else. Maybe you read the Digest article called “Jed Witterberg’s Schoolhouse Pays Its Own Way!” It tells about the system which sounds silly to me.

  Joe met me at the Reading station in a suburban wagon with the school crest painted on its panels.

  “Won’t do you any good to beg,” I said, climbing in. “The money’s spent and you can—”

  “That’s O.K.” he said. “You’ll earn it. I need a bodyguard. Somebody’s trying to kill me.” He started the wagon.

  “Have you seen a psychiatrist?” I asked. “Go to hell. I mean it. His name’s Edward Wakely, head of the Physics Department.”

  “What’
s it all about?”

  He lit a cigarette from the dashboard gadget. “Ever hear of Kober Hall?”

  “Nope. Who is he?”

  Joe gave me a pained look. “Kober Hall,” he said, “is the building that houses the maths section of the New Haven Institute for Advanced Research.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “The best theoretical minds in the country, the world. They have a permanent staff that even you would know by name: Eiselman, Schminck, Petrier, Ball, and lots more. And each year they tap twenty promising mathematicians to spend a year working with and under the big shots. It’s the highest honor in my trade. It’s been the making of some good men. I was tapped, and I leave on Friday, if I’m still alive.”

  We passed between a pair of red brick pillars with a gatehouse set back from them. “Who’d kill a little stringbean like you?” I asked.

  “Wakely would. He was selected as my alternate. In case I declined or became unable to go, he takes my place.”

  I thought it over. “You sure you don’t want to see a psychiatrist?” I asked. “I think you’ve got a duplex complex with a sunken living room.”

  The wagon pulled up at a row of red brick cottages, very clean and pretty.

  He parked the suburban and led the way to his cottage. Pretty or not, it was jerry-built. The floors shrieked under us. He took me into the kitchen and got three quart jars from the refrigerator.

  “Exhibit A,” he said, handing me one. It was empty, I thought: then I saw the corpses of half a dozen mosquitoes lying in it.

  “Anopheles stegomyia,” he said, “Released in my bedroom three nights ago. They were stolen from the bacteriology lab, where their jar was clearly marked: ‘Yellow fever carriers—danger; do not handle or release!’ I had an aerosol bomb handy and I got them all before being bitten, I think.”

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  “Exhibit B.” He handed me a jar with a half a dozen salted almonds in it. I sniffed, and they seemed to smell more like almonds than almonds should.

  “My favorite brain food,” he said. “I keep a bag in my study. The night before last somebody needled them with a drop of prussic acid, which, in minute quantities, is the essential flavoring oil of almonds. I happened to think their smell was a bit off, so I analyzed them.”

  “I take it back about the psychiatrist, Joe,” I told him.

  “Thanks,” he grinned, handling me a third jar. It was nearly full of orange juice, looking a little grayish and cloudy. “That stuff tests out as a vigorous young culture of the deadly bacillus botulinus,” he said. “I squeeze my breakfast juice the night before. Last night somebody slipped some bacterial soup into it, enough to kill a horse, to say nothing of a mathematician.”

  “Those almonds are evidence,” I murmured thoughtfully. “The other two are possible accidents, but the almonds can start off a sheriff’s investigation. Do you want me to get it in the works?”

  “Nope,” he said positively. “Our deputy sheriff is the campus policeman we’ve had for twenty years. I don’t especially want Wakely in jail. I just want him to stay alive until I get to Kober Hall. Will you take the job?”

  “Delighted. But do you think Wakely’s crazy?”

  Wrinkling his brows, he squinted and finally said, “No, I don’t think so. I might have done the same if I’d been his alternate.”

  I looked at him with a new respect.

  We had some dinner out of cans—I checked them first—and then went to his study. I smoked while he scribbled and punched a machine like a tiny upright piano, but with twenty-five little windows arranged over its sounding board. Tiny letters popped up and down as he tapped keys; every once in a while he’d copy them onto a specially ruled form.

  He sat back, rubbing his eyes.

  “What is that thing?” I asked.

  “Jevons’ logic machine,” he said, studying a form. “It solves logical equations in two values.”

  “Wonderful!” I said. “What won’t they think of next?”

  He gave me a look. “Mr. Jevons,” he said, “had the misfortune to live and die in the Victorian age, and this machine was in use before you were born.”

  “Oh,” I said, and kept my mouth shut for the rest of the evening.

  I stuck to Joe like a limpet the next day and the next. I didn’t learn much, but I met some interesting people. Once in the corridor between classes a tall, disreputable-looking man waved at Joe and yelled, “Hi-ya, Haines!”

  “That was Wakely,” said Joe afterward.

  “Informal, isn’t he?” I asked.

  “Part of his pose. He calls co-eds ‘cutie-pie’ and dresses like something out of Harold Teen. It’s permissible, considering his very real talent.”

  “And the guy’s trying to kill you!” I marveled.

  “That,” said Joe coldly, “is no reason why I should chose to ignore his professional ability.”

  I gave up trying to understand him and concentrated on keeping him alive. I did all the obvious things like checking food, watching for funny business in the mail, sleeping in his room and breaking up his daily schedule as much as I could. But the guy who thought up that mosquito stunt—I hoped he wouldn’t bear down like that again.

  Joe spent long sessions in the evening and between classes “at work.” That’s what he called it, and it seemed to come hard, but all I ever saw him really do was scribble a little, punch his machine around and smoke a lot of cigarettes with his eyes shut.

  I asked him once what it was all about, and he got a helpless, baffled look on his face and began to talk about things he called “possibles” and the difference between a “necessary” and a “sufficiency.” Mathematics has certainly changed since I took plane geometry. I protested that it wasn’t much to keep a man busy, and he got mad. He said that I made him nervous and would I for God’s sake go out for a walk.

  I locked everything up, told him not to talk to strange women and went out. It was three in the afternoon.

  Old Henry Cullet, the campus cop, spotted me at thirty yards and hailed me. I’d been introduced to him the day before and had almost recovered in the interim. He gave me a pain.

  Old Henry put his arm on my elbow and told me how some of these “perfessor fellers” thought they was right smart, but how plain hoss sense was what you needed to git along in the world. He then talked about how he’d got a new stove for his gatehouse from the Board of Trustees and Sold the old one back to them. He then talked about what he’d said to President Wilson in 1919 and what President Wilson had said to him.

  I tried to shake him in the Campus Coke Shoppe, but he followed me in and told me that it was all politics in this country and that all the politicians was crooks, but that ol’ William Jennings Bryan had had his points. He then explained the Free Silver Question to me, with quotations from Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech, which he knew by heart. He then asked me if I wanted to see their atomic bomb.

  “Hah?” I asked, spraying coffee on his vest.

  He told me they kept it in the basement of the Physics Building in a lead-lined room.

  By careful questioning, I decided that he was talking about a very small cyclotron that Witterberg had invested in seven years ago. I did want to see it, even with old Henry for a guide.

  He took me to the building and into the basement. The lead-plated door was impressive with signs: “DO NOT ENETER WHILE RED LIGHT IS ON” and “DANGER—HIGH TENSION” and “RADIATION LABORATORY—UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS KEEP OUT.” The red light wasn’t on and Henry had the key on his ring. He unlocked the door and it took both of us, heaving, to start it swinging open. As it did so, a light clicked on automatically.

  It shone on a lot of wires and glassware with white gunk plastered over it. It shone on a theatrical-looking switchboard and a twelve-foot disc lying on its side. It shone on the twisted body of Joe Haines.

  I tried to speak up at the inquest, which was held the same evening after dinner in a faculty room. A Dr. Bunce of the biology department w
as the assistant coroner for the town of Witterberg. The president of the college was there in his capacity of mayor and Henry Cullet was there in his capacity of chief of police and deputy sheriff. Professor Wakely was there in his capacity of murder suspect—as far as I was concerned—and officially as an expert witness. He and Bunce got along beautifully, like this:

  Q: Professor Wakely, what, in your opinion, was the cause of Professor Haines’ death?

  A: Unbelievable stupidity and negligence.

  Q: Thank you, but I mean physical cause.

  A: The cyclotron was turned on at full power without a target. The deceased apparently stood in line with the stream of neutrons which the machine is designed to emit. The neutrons entering his body caused nervous traumata—

  Q: Thank you, professor, but I think we’d better hear the rest of the testimony from a medical man. Dr. Quillen, will you please take the stand and tell the jury what, in your opinion, the effect of the stream of neutrons was.

  A: As Professor Wakely was, I am sure, about to say, the neutrons caused a coagulatory process to take place in the neurones of the deceased, inhibiting the involuntary functions of the body. Death was probably instantaneous upon the cessation of the nervous system’s activity.

  Q: Thank you. The next witness is Mr. Al Singer of New York. Mr. Singer wishes to volunteer some information. Now, sir, what have you to add to the testimony?

  A: To the physico-medical stuff, nothing. But I’d like the jury to know that there have been three attempts previously made on Joe Haines’ life this week. I’m a detective and Joe retained me as a bodyguard. It seems I didn’t do so good at it.

  I was wasting my breath. They listened owlishly to me, then filed out and were back in two minutes with a verdict of “death by misadventure.”

  The president of the college shook my hand fervently and said they’d been delighted to have me visit them and there was an excellent train out of Reading at eleven-fifteen in the evening.