Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He got off at a West Virginia coal and iron town surrounded by ruined mountains and filled with the offscourings of Eastern Europe. Serbs, Albanians, Croats, Hungarians, Slovenes, Bulgarians, and all possible combinations and permutations thereof. He walked slowly from the smoke-stained, brownstone passenger station. The train had roared on its way.

  “. . . ain’ no gemmum that’s fo sho’, fi-cen’ tip fo’ a good shine lak ah give um . . .”

  “. . . dumb bassar don’t know how to make out a billa lading yet he ain’t never gonna know so fire him get it over with . . .”

  “. . . gabblegabblegabble . . .” Not a word he recognized in it.

  “. . . gobblegobble dat tarn vooman I brek she nack . . .”

  “. . . gobble trink visky chin glassabeer gobblegobblegobble . . .”

  “. . . gabblegabblegabble . . .”

  “. . . makes me so gobblegobble mad little no-good tramp no she ain’ but I don’ like no standup from no dame . . .”

  A blond, square-headed boy fuming under a street light.

  “. . . out wit’ Casey Oswiak I could kill that dumb bohunk alia time trine ta paw her . . .”

  It was a possibility. The Mindworm drew near.

  “. . . stand me up for that gobblegobble bohunk I oughtta slap her inna mush like my ole man says . . .”

  “Hello,” said the Mindworm.

  “Waddaya wan’ ?”

  “Casey Oswiak told me to tell you not to wait up for your girl. He’s taking her out tonight.”

  The blond boy’s rage boiled into his face and shot from his eyes. He was about to swing when the Mindworm began to feed. It was like pheasant after chicken, venison after beef. The coarseness of the environment, or the ancient strain? The Mindworm wondered as he strolled down the street. A girl passed him:

  “. . . oh but he’s gonna be mad like last time wish I came right away so jealous kinda nice but he might bust me one some day be nice to him tonight there he is lam’post leaning on it looks kinda funny gawd I hope he ain’t drunk looks kinda funny sleeping sick or bozhe moi gabblegabblegabble . . .”

  Her thoughts trailed into a foreign language of which the Mind-worm knew not a word. After hysteria had gone she recalled, in the foreign language, that she had passed him.

  The Mindworm, stimulated by the unfamiliar quality of the last feeding, determined to stay for some days. He checked in at a Main Street hotel.

  Musing, he dragged his net:

  “. . . gobblegobblewhompyeargobblecheskygobblegabblechyesh . . .”

  “. . . take him down cellar beat the can off the damn chesky thief put the fear of god into him teach him can’t bust into no boxcars in mah parta the caounty . . .”

  “. . . gabblegabble . . .”

  “. . . phone ole Mister Ryan in She-cawgo and he’ll tell them three-card monte grifters who got the horse-room rights in this necka the woods by damn don’t pay protection money for no protection . . .”

  The Mindworm followed that one further; it sounded as though it could lead to some money if he wanted to stay in the town long enough.

  The Eastern Europeans of the town, he mistakenly thought, were like the tramps and bums he had known and fed on during his years on the road—stupid and safe, safe and stupid, quite the same thing.

  In the morning he found no mention of the square-headed boy’s death in the town’s paper and thought it had gone practically unnoticed. It had—by the paper, which was of, by, and for the coal and iron company and its native-American bosses and straw bosses. The other town, the one without a charter or police force, with only an imported weekly newspaper or two from the nearest city, noticed it. The other town had roots more than two thousand years deep, which are hard to pull up. But the Mindworm didn’t know it was there.

  He fed again that night, on a giddy young streetwalker in her room. He had astounded and delighted her with a fistful of ten-dollar bills before he began to gorge. Again the delightful difference from city-bred folk was there . . .

  Again in the morning he had been unnoticed, he thought. The chartered town, unwilling to admit that there were streetwalkers or that they were found dead, wiped the slate clean; its only member who really cared was the native-American cop on the beat who had collected weekly from the dead girl.

  The other town, unknown to the Mindworm, buzzed with it. A delegation went to the other town’s only public officer. Unfortunately he was young, American-trained, perhaps even ignorant about some important things. For what he told them was: “My children, that is foolish superstition. Go home.”

  The Mindworm, through the day, roiled the surface of the town proper by allowing himself to be roped into a poker game in a parlor of the hotel. He wasn’t good at it, he didn’t like it, and he quit with relief when he had cleaned six shifty-eyed, hard-drinking loafers out of about three hundred dollars. One of them went straight to the police station and accused the unknown of being a sharper. A humorous sergeant, the Mindworm was pleased to note, joshed the loafer out of his temper.

  Nightfall again, hunger again . . .

  He walked the streets of the town and found them empty. It was strange. The native-American citizens were out, tending bar, walking their beats, locking up their newspaper on the stones, collecting their rents, managing their movies—but where were the others? He cast his net:

  “. . . gobblegobblegobble whomp year gobble . . .”

  “. . . crazy old pollack mama of mine try to lock me in with Errol Flynn at the Majestic never know the difference if I sneak out the back . . .”

  That was near. He crossed the street and it was nearer. He homed on the thought:

  “. . . jeez he’s a hunka man like Stanley but he never looks at me that Vera Kowalik I’d like to kick her just once in the gobblegobble-gobble crazy old mama won’t be American so ashamed . . .”

  It was half a block, no more, down a side street. Brick houses, two stories, with back yards on an alley. She was going out the back way.

  How strangely quiet it was in the alley.

  “. . . easy down them steps fix that damn board that’s how she caught me last time what the hell are they all so scared of went to see Father Drugas won’t talk bet somebody got it again that Vera Kowalik and her big . . .”

  “. . . gobble bozhe gobble whomp year gobble . . .”

  She was closer; she was closer.

  “All think I’m a kid show them who’s a kid bet if Stanley caught me all alone out here in the alley dark and all he wouldn’t think I was a kid that damn Vera Kowalik her folks don’t think she’s a kid . . .”

  For all her bravado she was stark terrified when he said: “Hello.”

  “Who—who—who—?” she stammered.

  Quick, before she screamed. Her terror was delightful.

  Not too replete to be alert, he cast about, questing.

  “. . . gobblegobblegobble whomp year.”

  The countless eyes of the other town, with more than two thousand years of experience in such things, had been following him. What he had sensed as a meaningless hash of noise was actually an impassioned outburst in a nearby darkened house.

  “Fools! fools! Now he has taken a virgin! I said not to wait. What will we say to her mother?”

  An old man with handlebar mustache and, in spite of the heat, his shirt sleeves decently rolled down and buttoned at the cuffs, evenly replied: “My heart in me died with hers, Casimir, but one must be sure. It would be a terrible thing to make a mistake in such an affair.”

  The weight of conservative elder opinion was with him. Other old men with mustaches, some perhaps remembering mistakes long ago, nodded and said: “A terrible thing. A terrible thing.”

  The Mindworm strolled back to his hotel and napped on the made bed briefly. A tingle of danger awakened him. Instantly he cast out:

  “. . . gobblegobble whompyear.”

  “. . . whampyir.”

  “WAMPYIR!”

  Close! Close and deadly!

  The door of his
room burst open, and mustached old men with their shirt sleeves rolled down and decently buttoned at the cuffs unhesitatingly marched in, their thoughts a turmoil of alien noises, foreign gibberish that he could not wrap his mind around, disconcerting, from every direction.

  The sharpened stake was through his heart and the scythe blade through his throat before he could realize that he had not been the first of his kind; and that what clever people have not yet learned, some quite ordinary people have not yet entirely forgotten.

  1951

  Friend to Man

  That Martian was a Good Samaritan to Smith. Food, shelter and medicine were given freely. But Martian charity, it seems, demanded payment in its own eerie way . . .

  CALL HIM, if anything, Smith. He had answered to that and to other names in the past. Occupation, fugitive. His flight, it is true, had days before slowed to a walk and then to a crawl, but still he moved, a speck of gray, across the vast and featureless red plain of a planet not his own.

  Nobody was following Smith, he sometimes realized, and then he would rest for a while, but not long. After a minute or an hour the posse of his mind would reform and spur behind him; reason would cry no and still he would heave himself to his feet and begin again to inch across the sand.

  The posse, imaginary and terrible, faded from front to rear. Perhaps in the very last rank of pursuers was a dim shadow of a schoolmate. Smith had never been one to fight fair. More solid were the images of his first commercial venture, the hijacking job. A truck driver with his chest burned out namelessly pursued; by his side a faceless cop. The ranks of the posse grew crowded then, for Smith had been a sort of organizer after that, but never an organizer too proud to demonstrate his skill. An immemorially old-fashioned garroting-wire trailed inches from the nape of Winkle’s neck, for Winkle had nearly sung to the police.

  “Squealer!” shrieked Smith abruptly, startling himself. Shaking, he closed his eyes and still Winkle plodded after him, the tails of wire bobbing with every step, stiffly.

  A solid, businesslike patrolman eclipsed him, drilled through the throat; beside him was the miraculously resurrected shade of Henderson.

  The twelve-man crew of a pirated lighter marched, as you would expect, in military formation, but they bled ceaselessly from their ears and eyes as people do when shot into space without helmets.

  These he could bear, but, somehow, Smith did not like to look at the leader of the posse. It was odd, but he did not like to look at her.

  She had no business there! If they were ghosts why was she there? He hadn’t killed her, and, as far as he knew, Amy was alive and doing business in the Open Quarter at Portsmouth. It wasn’t fair, Smith wearily thought. He inched across the featureless plain and Amy followed with her eyes.

  Let us! Let us! We have waited so long!

  Wait longer, little ones. Wait longer.

  Smith, arriving at the planet, had gravitated to the Open Quarter and found, of course, that his reputation had preceded him. Little, sharp-faced men had sidled up to pay their respects, and they happened to know of a job waiting for the right touch. He brushed them off.

  Smith found the virginal, gray-eyed Amy punching tapes for the Transport Company, tepidly engaged to a junior executive. The daughter of the Board Chairman, she fancied herself daring to work in the rough office at the port.

  First was the child’s play of banishing her young man. A minor operation, it was managed with the smoothness and dispatch one learns after years of such things. Young Square-Jaw had been quite willing to be seduced by a talented young woman from the Open Quarter, and had been so comically astonished when the photographs appeared on the office bulletin board!

  He had left by the next freighter, sweltering in a bunk by the tube butts, and the forlorn gray eyes were wet for him.

  But how much longer must we wait?

  Much longer, little ones. It is weak—too weak.

  The posse, Smith thought vaguely, was closing in. That meant, he supposed, that he was dying. It would not be too bad to be dead, quickly and cleanly. He had a horror of filth.

  Really, he thought, this was too bad! The posse was in front of him—

  IT WAS NOT the posse; it was a spindly, complicated creature that, after a minute of bleary staring, he recognized as a native of the planet.

  Smith thought and thought as he stared and could think of nothing to do about it. The problem was one of the few that he had never considered and debated within himself. If it had been a cop he would have acted; if it had been any human being he would have acted, but this—

  He could think of nothing more logical to do than to lie down, pull the hood across his face, and go to sleep.

  He woke in an underground chamber big enough for half a dozen men. It was egg-shaped and cool, illuminated by sunlight red-filtered through the top half. He touched the red-lit surface and found it to be composed of glass marbles cemented together with a translucent plastic. The marbles he knew; the red desert was full of them, wind-polished against each other for millennia, rarely perfectly round, as all of these were. They had been most carefully collected. The bottom half of the egg-shaped cave was a mosaic of flatter, opaque pebbles, cemented with the same plastic.

  Smith found himself thinking clear, dry, level thoughts. The posse was gone and he was sane and there had been a native and this must be the native’s burrow. He had been cached there as food, of course, so he would kill the native and possibly drink its body fluids, for his canteen had been empty for a long time. He drew a knife and wondered how to kill, his eyes on the dark circle which led from the burrow to the surface.

  Silently the dark circle was filled with the tangled appendages of the creature, and in the midst of the appendages was, insanely, a Standard Transport Corporation five-liter can.

  The STC monogram had been worn down, but was unmistakable. The can had heft to it.

  Water? The creature seemed to hold it out. He reached into the tangle and the can was smoothly released to him. The catch flipped up and he drank flat, distilled water in great gulps.

  He felt that he bulged with the stuff when he stopped, and knew the first uneasy intimations of inevitable cramp. The native was not moving, but something that could have been an eye turned on him.

  “Salt?” asked Smith, his voice thin in the thin air. “I need salt with water.”

  The thing rubbed two appendages together and he saw a drop of amber exude and spread on them. It was, he realized a moment later, rosining the bow, for the appendages drew across each other and he heard a whining, vibrating cricket-voice say: “S-s-z-z-aw-w?”

  “Salt,” said Smith.

  It did better the next time. The amber drop spread, and—“S-z-aw-t?” was sounded, with a little tap of the bow for the final phoneme.

  It vanished, and Smith leaned back with the cramps beginning. His stomach convulsed and he lost the water he had drunk. It seeped without a trace into the floor. He doubled up and groaned—once. The groan had not eased him in body or mind; he would groan no more but let the cramps run their course.

  Nothing but what is useful had always been his tacit motto. There had not been a false step in the episode of Amy. When Square-Jaw had been disposed of, Smith had waited until her father, perhaps worldly enough to know his game, certain at all events not to like the way he played it, left on one of his regular inspection trips. He had been formally introduced to her by a mutual friend who owed money to a dangerous man in the Quarter, but who had not yet been found out by the tight little clique that thought it ruled the commercial world of that planet.

  With precision he had initiated her into the Open Quarter by such easy stages that at no one point could she ever suddenly realize that she was in it or the gray eyes ever fill with shock. Smith had, unknown to her, disposed of some of her friends, chosen other new ones, stage-managed entire days for her, gently forcing opinions and attitudes, insistent, withdrawing at the slightest token of counter-pressure, always urging again when the counter-pressure relax
ed.

  The night she had taken Optol had been prepared for by a magazine article—notorious in the profession as a whitewash—a chance conversation in which chance did not figure at all, a televised lecture on addiction, and a trip to an Optol joint at which everybody had been gay and healthy. On the second visit, Amy had pleaded for the stuff—just out of curiosity, of course, and he had reluctantly called the unfrocked medic, who injected the gray eyes with the oil.

  It had been worth his minute pains; he had got two hundred feet of film while she staggered and reeled loathsomely. And she had, after the Optol evaporated, described with amazed delight how different everything had looked, and how exquisitely she had danced . . .

  “S-z-aw-t!” announced the native from the mouth of the burrow. It bowled at him marbles of rock salt from the surface, where rain never fell to dissolve them.

  He licked one, then cautiously sipped water. He looked at the native, thought, and put his knife away. It came into the burrow and reclined at the opposite end from Smith.

  It knows what a knife is, and water and salt, and something about language, he thought between sips. What’s the racket?

  But when? But when?

  Wait longer, little ones. Wait longer.

  “You understand me?” Smith asked abruptly. The amber drop exuded, and the native played whiningly: “A-ah-nn-nah-t-ann.”

  “Well,” said Smith, “thanks.”

  HE NEVER really knew where the water came from, but guessed that it had been distilled in some fashion within the body of the native. He had, certainly, seen the thing shovel indiscriminate loads of crystals into its mouth—calcium carbonate, aluminum hydroxide, anything—and later emit amorphous powders from one vent and water from another. His food, brought on half an STC can, was utterly unrecognizable—a jelly, with bits of crystal embedded in it that he had to spit out.

  What it did for a living was never clear. It would lie for hours in torpor, disappear on mysterious errands, bring him food and water, sweep out the burrow with a specialized limb, converse when requested.