Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  She followed Mrs. Coleman into the reception hall, and the doctor dreamed over the case of instruments. A ceremony, certainly—he was entitled to one. Not everybody, he thought, would turn such a sure source of money over to the good of humanity. But you reached an age when money mattered less, and when you thought of these things you had done that might be open to misunderstanding if, just if, there chanced to be any of that, well, that judgment business. The doctor wasn’t a religious man, but you certainly found yourself thinking hard about some things when your time drew near—Angie was back, with a bit of paper in her hands. “Five hundred dollars,” she said matter-of-factly. “And you realize, don’t you, that we could go over her an inch at a time—at five hundred dollars an inch?”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” he said.

  There was bright fear in her eyes, he thought—but why?

  “Angie, you’ve been a good girl and an understanding girl, but we can’t keep this up forever, you know.”

  “Let’s talk about it some other time,” she said flatly. “I’m tired now.”

  “No-I really feel we’ve gone far enough on our own. The instruments—”

  “Don’t say it, doc!” she hissed. “Don’t say it, or you’ll be sorry!” In her face there was a look that reminded him of the hollow-eyed, gaunt-faced, dirty-blond creature she had been. From under the charm-school finish there burned the guttersnipe whose infancy had been spent on a sour and filthy mattress, whose childhood had been play in the littered alley and whose adolescence had been the sweatshops and the aimless gatherings at night under the glaring street lamps.

  He shook his head to dispel the puzzling notion. “It’s this way,” he patiently began. “I told you about the family that invented the O.B. forceps and kept them a secret for so many generations, how they could have given them to the world but didn’t?”

  “They knew what they were doing,” said the guttersnipe flatly.

  “Well, that’s neither here nor there,” said the doctor, irritated. “My mind is made up about it. I’m going to turn the instruments over to the College of Surgeons. We have enough money to be comfortable. You can even have the house. I’ve been thinking of going to a warmer climate, myself.” He felt peeved with her for making the unpleasant scene. He was unprepared for what happened next.

  Angie snatched the little black bag and dashed for the door, with panic in her eyes. He scrambled after her, catching her arm, twisting it in a sudden rage. She clawed at his face with her free hand, babbling curses. Somehow, somebody’s finger touched the little black bag, and it opened grotesquely into the enormous board, covered with shining instruments, large and small. Half a dozen of them joggled loose and fell to the floor.

  “Now see what you’ve done!” roared the doctor, unreasonably. Her hand was still viselike on the handle, but she was standing still, trembling with choked-up rage. The doctor bent stiffly to pick up the fallen instruments. Unreasonable girl! he thought bitterly. Making a scene—Pain drove in between his shoulderblades and he fell face down. The light ebbed. “Unreasonable girl!” he tried to croak. And then: “They’ll know I tried, anyway—”

  Angie looked down on his prone body, with the handle of the Number Six Cautery Series knife protruding from it. “—will cut through all tissues. Use for amputations before you spread on the Re-Gro. Extreme caution should be used in the vicinity of vital organs and major blood vessels or nerve trunks—”

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” said Angie, dully, cold with horror. Now the detective would come, the implacable detective who would reconstruct the crime from the dust in the room. She would run and turn and twist, but the detective would find her out and she would be tried in a courtroom before a judge and jury; the lawyer would make speeches, but the jury would convict her anyway, and the headlines would scream: “BLOND KILLER GUILTY!” and she’d maybe get the chair, walking down a plain corridor where a beam of sunlight struck through the dusty air, with an iron door at the end of it. Her mink, her convertible, her dresses, the handsome man she was going to meet and marry—The mist of cinematic clichés cleared, and she knew what she would do next.

  Quite steadily, she picked the incinerator box from its loop in the board—a metal cube with a different-textured spot on one side. “—to dispose of fibroses or other unwanted matter, simply touch the disk—” You dropped something in and touched the disk. There was a sort of soundless whistle, very powerful and unpleasant if you were too close, and a sort of lightless flash. When you opened the box again, the contents were gone. Angie took another of the Cautery Series knives and went grimly to work. Good thing there wasn’t any blood to speak of—She finished the awful task in three hours.

  She slept heavily that night, totally exhausted by the wringing emotional demands of the slaying and the subsequent horror. But in the morning, it was as though the doctor had never been there. She ate breakfast, dressed with unusual care—and then undid the unusual care. Nothing out of the ordinary, she told herself. Don’t do one thing different from the way you would have done it before. After a day or two, you can phone the cops. Say he walked out spoiling for a drunk, and you’re worried. But don’t rush it, baby—don’t rush it.

  Mrs. Coleman was due at ten A.M. Angie had counted on being able to talk the doctor into at least one more five-hundred-dollar session. She’d have to do it herself now—but she’d have to start sooner or later.

  The woman arrived early. Angie explained smoothly: “The doctor asked me to take care of the massage today. Now that he has the tissue-firming process beginning, it only requires somebody trained in his methods—” As she spoke, her eyes swiveled to the instrument case—open! She cursed herself for the single flaw as the woman followed her gaze and recoiled.

  “What are those things!” she demanded. “Are you going to cut me with them? I thought there was something fishy—”

  “Please, Mrs. Coleman,” said Angie, “please, dear Mrs. Coleman—you don’t understand about the . . . the massage instruments!”

  “Massage instruments, my foot!” squabbled the woman shrilly. “The doctor operated on me. Why, he might have killed me!”

  Angie wordlessly took one of the smaller Cutaneous Series knives and passed it through her forearm. The blade flowed like a finger through quicksilver, leaving no wound in its wake. That should convince the old cow!

  It didn’t convince her, but it did startle her. “What did you do with it? The blade folds up into the handle—that’s it!”

  “Now look closely, Mrs. Coleman,” said Angie, thinking desperately of the five hundred dollars. “Look very closely and you’ll see that the, uh, the sub-skin massager simply slips beneath the tissues without doing any harm, tightening and firming the muscles themselves instead of having to work through layers of skin and adipose tissue. It’s the secret of the doctor’s method. Now, how can outside massage have the effect that we got last night?”

  Mrs. Coleman was beginning to calm down. “It did work, all right,” she admitted, stroking the new line of her neck. “But your arm’s one thing and my neck’s another! Let me see you do that with your neck!”

  Angie smiled—

  Al returned to the clinic after an excellent lunch that had almost reconciled him to three more months he would have to spend on duty. And then, he thought, and then a blessed year at the blessedly super-normal South Pole working on his specialty—which happened to be telekinesis exercises for ages three to six. Meanwhile, of course, the world had to go on and of course he had to shoulder his share in the running of it.

  Before settling down to desk work he gave a routine glance at the bag board. What he saw made him stiffen with shocked surprise. A red light was on next to one of the numbers—the first since he couldn’t think when. He read off the number and murmured “OK, 674101. That fixes you.” He put the number on a card sorter and in a moment the record was in his hand. Oh, yes—Hemingway’s bag. The big dummy didn’t remember how or where he had lost it; none of them e
ver did. There were hundreds of them floating around.

  Al’s policy in such cases was to leave the bag turned on. The things practically ran themselves, it was practically impossible to do harm with them, so whoever found a lost one might as well be allowed to use it. You turn it off, you have a social loss—you leave it on, it may do some good. As he understood it, and not very well at that, the stuff wasn’t “used up.” A temporalist had tried to explain it to him with little success that the prototypes in the transmitter had been transduced through a series of point-events of transfinite cardinality. Al had innocently asked whether that meant prototypes had been stretched, so to speak, through all time, and the temporalist had thought he was joking and left in a huff.

  “Like to see him do this,” thought Al darkly, as he telekinized himself to the combox, after a cautious look to see that there were no medics around. To the box he said: “Police chief,” and then to the police chief: “There’s been a homicide committed with Medical Instrument Kit 674101. It was lost some months ago by one of my people, Dr. John Hemingway. He didn’t have a clear account of the circumstances.”

  The police chief groaned and said: “I’ll call him in and question him.” He was to be astonished by the answers, and was to learn that the homicide was well out of his jurisdiction.

  Al stood for a moment at the bag board by the glowing red light that had been sparked into life by a departing vital force giving, as its last act, the warning that Kit 674101 was in homicidal hands. With a sigh, Al pulled the plug and the light went out.

  “Yah, “jeered the woman. “You’d fool around with my neck, but you wouldn’t risk your own with that thing!”

  Angie smiled with serene confidence a smile that was to shock hardened morgue attendants. She set the Cutaneous Series knife to three centimeters before drawing it across her neck. Smiling, knowing the blade would cut only the dead horny tissue of the epidermis and the live tissue of the dermis, mysteriously push aside all major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue—Smiling, the knife plunging in and its microtomesharp metal shearing through major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue and pharynx, Angie cut her throat.

  In the few minutes it took the police, summoned by the shrieking Mrs. Coleman, to arrive, the instruments had become crusted with rust, and the flasks which had held vascular glue and clumps of pink, rubbery alveoli and spare gray cells and coils of receptor nerves held only black slime, and from them when opened gushed the foul gases of decomposition.

  THE END

  Iteration

  The soap opera is here to stay, radio and video versions. Ever consider the possible end-result?

  I PUNCHED IIIAA24 and heard over my bonephone, wincing: “Darling—you’re . . . back!”

  I cut the wince short and threw in the life lever. Joe Henderson, standing in the actor’s dock, said broodingly: “Yes, dear . . .” He registered worry, then gallantry and cheerfulness. I threw out the life lever and punched IVTG13, which was a young couple, summer clothes, seen walking into their suburban bungalow.

  I could’ve played that score in my sleep; I don’t know how many times the soapies have used it.

  I asked you not to interrupt me damn it! You wanted to know why I ran out, and I said I’d tell you—oh, dinner?

  What’s this stuff—beep—oh, beef? ’S good. Hard on the jaws first time, though—I’ll go on with the story.

  You want to know why they don’t punch it on rolls like a jacquard loom, do you? Once they used to, but even a weaving machine makes mistakes. When there’s a mistake they just rip it out and go on. But when the soapies go out.

  Their pattern either got punched wrong or the machine slipped or something. So when Old Ma Whiddicomb came into the screen, instead of lavender from the grill you got IXWQO9, which is used in stable scenes. And once, on When a Man Marries Joan’s Big Sister everything was going fine on a big renunciation scene—Joan was giving up David—she kept up a brave front and walked away smiling. When she turned the corner she was supposed to run for her bedroom and burst into tears, but instead of her bedroom door closing, the machine cut in a shot of a two-holer from Uncle Eb of Gobbler’s Nob.

  That’s what the present system evolved out of, and it’s foolproof. I took three years at the Rochester Conservatory and did PG at the Juilliard. Give me any score, one with a hundred sets, landscapes, weather, twenty actors in the dock, scents to match everything, mood music changing every two seconds—I can handle it.

  Pay is right, brother—didn’t catch your name?—how’d’y’do, Mr. Osgood. I got two thousand a month and a pension plan for a twelve-hour week.

  Okay, okay—I’m telling you why I ran out. In fact I’ve told you already. It was that line: “Darling—you’re . . . back!”

  It’s a dramatic convention, I suppose, like the property man in the Chinese theater, or a Chorus in the Greek, or asides in the big tub-thumping Victorian days. If an Athenian Greek didn’t have a chorus to explain what was going on, he’d feel bewildered and cheated. If the housewife watching a soapie didn’t see the heroine say to her husband when he comes home: “Darling—you’re . . . back!” she’d think there was something wrong and worry about it.

  No, don’t ask me why they say it. I don’t know why a dame who just saw her husband leave for work at ten should register surprise, delight and wonder when he comes back home at fifteen o’clock. They just do, in the soapies.

  Anyway, I was telling you about the day before yesterday. In a nice blend of canned shots by me and close-ups by Henderson and his babe, we ground our way through the next ten minutes. It was established that Henderson had lost his job because of an inexplicable decline in his efficiency index; he groaned that he was no good and would run out because it would be better that way.

  Then we cut to Henderson’s mother-in-law and established that she’d slipped him some phenylethylbarbituric acid instead of his vitamins, so he’d lose his job and run out and she could marry her daughter off to a man she had her eye on. Some nice canned stuff in that sequence of her hands opening a capsule and changing the powder in it, all with the appropriate chemical scents.

  Cut back to Henderson, making his will before running out. His wife shyly comes in and shows him a tiny identification tag she’s been making.

  “You don’t mean—?” cries Henderson and she lowers her eyes. I step down hard on the benzedrine pedal, throw in the Hallelujah Chorus, set up Abstraction 17 for two seconds and cut to the announcer, who’s been combing his beard and worrying about a blackhead he just noticed.

  “Ladies!” he cries—big smile—“How often lately have you been making the FT?” He lowers his voice, winks a little and coos: “FT, as of course you all know, stands for the famous Cam Brothers Flatulence Test—”

  Pete Laurie comes to relieve me on the console and I’m through for the day; I walk out on the Commercial and head for the Olde Tyme Speake, down the street.

  I DON’T know if any of you are New Yorkers—maybe you know the Speake? It’s a really quaint place with authentic atmosphere, early twentieth century—old oak rafters and red-leather bar-stools, a rack of shaving mugs, lots of chromium. They have mottoes on the wall from the period—Landlord, Fill the Flowing Bowl, Nuts to You, and things like that.

  Can I have some more of that beep stuff? I mean beef. I’ll learn, quit the kidding—I only ran out last night, fella!

  Anyway, I met Sam Caldicott at the Speake. Could’ve knocked me over with a feather. We were classmates at Chicago Metaphysical before I went to Rochester. He was going to go in for dietetics or something.

  “Hello, Sam!” I said.

  “You too,” he growled, looking up. “Go to Dachau.” He was nasty-drunk, but he finally recognized me. I got him a wake-up and had a buttered rum myself. When the stuff worked on him, he apologized and asked me politely what I was doing with myself. I told him I was a soapie consolist; he gave me a funny look.

  He had switched from dietetics to psychiatry pretty late and so had to
start learning almost from the beginning again. He’d been in practice only six years, but he said he was doing nicely.

  “Well,” I said. “If I’m ever tempted to run out I’ll give you a ring and you can talk me out of it.”

  “Are you so sure I would?”

  I shuddered at the thought. “If you’re any kind of friend, you will; the hell with that Reserve stuff!”

  “Ever been there?”

  “No,” I told him, “and I never will. A bunch of howling barbarians that couldn’t stand the gaff, thought they were higher-strung than anybody else—sissies is what they are. They slip back culturally to the twentieth or fifteenth century and they think they’re rugged he-men!”

  “It could be worse,” he said tolerantly. His eyes narrowed as he seemed to remember something: “I’m treating a woman now—pitiful case; hopeless, I fear. She’d be a hell of a lot better off if she’d been in the Utah Reserve for the past few years.”

  I gave him some stuff from a talk I’d had with Mr. Administrator Etterson. He’d had it absolutely firsthand that they were practicing human sacrifice in the Reserve. Caldicott just laughed; he simply didn’t believe it. I asked him what he meant by that crack about the woman who should have run out. He said he’d show me. I had to get home to my wife, but he got me mad enough to forget about it for the time being. We took a flit to Bronnix, the Morrisania Hospital where he was Resident Psychiatrist.

  He warned me outside the patient’s room that I’d better keep my mouth shut the least little thing could send her off into one of her spasms. We went in.

  The woman was knitting, her eye on a soapie screen. She turned to us—not bad looking—and said to Caldicott: “Darling—you’re . . . back!” Just like that. Then she registered alarm, apprehension and curiosity and said, batting her eyes at me: “But—won’t you . . . introduce me?”

  It was hard to keep from looking around for the mike and the console. I’ve played and seen that situation a thousand times and now I was meeting it in real life!