Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  TONY opened the door and pointed out the ragged chalked circle on the floor. “Any idea what it is?”

  “We were running some radio-phosphorus,” Sam said doubtfully. “But there was no trouble on the run. Must be spillage.” The chemist had a young open face, and Tony liked him. He began to fill in the necessary report.

  “What reason?” Spillage was unusual.

  “It’s a bigger order than we usually handle—must have been a hundred kilograms.” Sam looked up sharply. “It was all right yesterday, wasn’t it? The afternoon checkup?”

  Tony nodded.

  “Then it must have been at closing. I . . . well, I left a few minutes early yesterday. Figured the boys could close up all right, but I guess one of them took a lazy man’s load in his tote box . . . filled it up too high to save himself a trip. I’ll check on it and tell them in a nice way, all right?”

  “That should do it. But I better have a look at the checkout tubes.” Sam brought over a tray of tubes resting in numbered grooves. He was wearing one like them pinned to his own lapel. The contents of the tubes was its normal dirty white. Purple would have meant “too close to hot stuff too long.”

  “Okay,” said Tony, checking his form. “That hot spot there, I think you’d better chisel it out and get one of the suppliers to take it way out and dump it.”

  “Old Learoyd was here with a load of vanadium dirt. He’ll do it when he leaves for Pittco.”

  “Fine. Get it done. And tell Learoyd to put the stuff in the back of his rig. I don’t think you could kill any of those old boys with anything subtler than a meat ax, but I wouldn’t want him to sit next to it for a ten-hour trip.” He dated and timed off the form. “That’s that. Only you better stick around till close-up after this.”

  He smiled and put a stop to the young chemist’s attempt at explanation. “How’s Verna, anyhow? Something better happen soon, if it’s going to make all this trouble.”

  SAM grinned back. “You may hear something soon,” he admitted. “But please don’t—uh—”

  “Doctors don’t gossip,” Tony said. “One thing about this place,” he added, “we can’t help making history every time we turn around. Have a baby, and it’s the first baby; have another baby, and it’s the first girl born; slice out an appendix, and it’s the first abdominal surgery. Let’s see—you and Verna will be the first marriage-between a drop-in chemical engineer and a share-holding agronomist—if she’ll have you.”

  “Sounds like one of those weather records,” complained Sam. “The coldest 3.00 P.M. reading at the corner of Spruce and Juice on a January 16th since 2107.”

  “It’s your place in history,” Tony assured him. “We’ll all be footnotes. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  TONY Stepped out with springs in his knees, and, feeling the waxing heat of the morning, threw back the hood of his parka. The marvelous clear air of an hour earlier was fast disappearing, as the mineral trash that covered Mars’ surface began to heat and roil the atmosphere. He looked off toward the Rimrock Hills, mourning their vanished beauty; then he stopped in surprise, squinting at the enigmatic black bugs crawling back and forth within the shadow of the hills.

  He stood there, watching, as the seemingly random pattern of motion. trended gradually in the direction of the Colony.

  Who would be out on the desert afoot? He stopped and shielded his eyes. There were about twenty of them, and they were humped with—carbines and oxy masks.

  The military!

  But why? There’d never been a visit from Commissioner Bell’s little intercolony police force before; never been any occasion for it. Each colony handled its own internal policing.

  It was a year now since Bell’s boys had been out for anything except routine administrative work, such as guard mount over the rocket; the last time was when an ace foundryman for Mars Machine Tool was rightly suspected of committing mayhem on a Marsport shopkeeper. Mars Machine Tool’s colony administration insisted on being unimpressed by the evidence and refused to surrender him to Marsport. Bell’s boys had simply walked, in and taken him away for his trial and conviction.

  But Sun Lakers weren’t given to mayhem.

  Tony headed back for the Lab as the crooked trail of the soldiers straightened out into a beeline for the same place. He had his patients, but he was also a member of the Colony Council and this looked like Council business.

  In the Lab he went straight to the front office and asked Mimi: “Did Harve ever get that recorder put together?”

  “Last week,” she said. “It’s been a blessing too. Why?”

  “I think Bell’s boys are paying us a call.” He told her what he’d seen outside. “It might be useful to have a record of it.”

  Mimi nodded thoughtfully, and flipped a lever at the side of her desk. “That’ll register anywhere in the office,” she explained. “I’m a pacer—Harve set it up so I could walk all over the office while I talk, and still have it record.”

  Sam Flexner was also there. He put down a completed report form on the spillage in his department to ask: “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know,” Tony told him. “But I think we’d better put in an intercom call for Joe Gracey to come on out here. He ought to be tending his seedling in C Area. Phone the South End to send a runner and get him out here on the double.”

  Gracey was the senior agronomist, and, like Mimi and Tony, a member of the Colony Council. The fourth member, and most recent addition, was Nick Cantrella; in only six months’ time since his arrival at Sun Lake, Nick had risen from junior setup man to bossing all maintenance and procurement for the Lab. At the moment he was home with a nasty chemical bum on his arm. It wasn’t really so bad that he couldn’t be called in for an emergency, but Tony hesitated to do so, and he noticed that Mimi didn’t suggest it either. Nick had a red-hot temper and practically no inhibitions.

  “No,” the doctor said to the questioners that began to press around him, “I don’t think we ought to go out and meet them. Better just go ahead and work and get the new room for the Kandros put together. Flexner, will you stick around? It may be some damn thing or other about our atomics—some technical precaution we may have missed.”

  “No, sir,” said another man emphatically. It was O’Donnell, who had ditched a law career to become a sweeper and then a maintenance man and then a good jury-rig physicist. It was his job to see that no daylight showed between the Colony’s atomics practice and the law.

  “Hmp,” said the doctor. “You stick around too.”

  THERE was a thudding on the door and a self-conscious calling of an archaic formula: “Open in the name of the law!”

  The delegation was a half-platoon of soldiers with their carbines and cumbersome oxygen masks and tanks—a choice bit of military conservatism, since a pocketful of OxEn pills weighed a hundredth as much and would keep them alive a hundred times longer.

  There were two civilians and an officer—Lieutenant Ed Nealey.

  Tony was relieved to see him; they were fellow-members of a subscription club that split the heavy postage on Earthside scientific periodicals, and Tony knew Nealey to be a conscientious and level-headed young career officer.

  The doctor was extending his hand to Nealey when he remembered his protocol. One of the civilians was unknown to him, but the other was Hamilton Bell, Commissioner of Interplanetary Affairs.

  “I’m Tony Hellman, Commissioner,” he said. “I don’t know if you remember me. I’m the doctor here and a member of our Colony’s Council.”

  The commissioner was a small man, tending somewhat to pompous frailty. He looked like the kind of person rumor made him out to be: a never very important functionary who got the dreary Mars post when a very ordinary graft ring of which he was a prominent member was “exposed.” The exposure followed only reasonably quickly on the heels of his bolt from the Insurantist Senate minority in the Panamerican World Federation. In the interval between the news accounts of Bell’s pol
itical switch, and the spectacular news stories of graft corruption in which he was involved, there had been just time for the minority to become a majority . . .

  “Can you speak for the Colony?” he asked abruptly, ignoring Tony’s hand.

  THE doctor cast a bewildered look at Lt. Nealey, whose eyes were front and whose face was set. Tony noticed he carried in a canvas scabbard the disassembled dipole and handle of an electronic “Bloodhound.”

  “I’m a council member,” Tony said. “So is Miss Jonathan here. Another council member’s ill and the third is on his way. The two of us can speak for the Colony. Now, what can we do for you?”

  “It’s a police matter. Do you care to make a statement before I have to drag the situation out into the open?”

  “Let me take it,” muttered O’Donnell. Tony nodded. The lawyer-turned-physicist firmly told the commissioner: “I want to remind you that we are a chartered colony, and, under the charter, are entitled to police ourselves. And I also want to say that we are not going to respond to any fishing expeditions until we hear what the complaint is.”

  “Suit yourself,” grunted the commissioner. “But you’re not selfpolicing when you steal from another colony. Mr. Brenner, tell your story.”

  Eyes swiveled to the other civilian, Brenner of Brenner Pharmaceuticals. So that, thought Tony, is what a trillionaire looks like. Younger than anyone could reasonably expect, and somehow looking comfortably conservative even in a parka of orange-red mutation mink. The best of food, plenty of rest, and the most careful attention to his bodily needs were combining to cover the prominent bones of his face with deceptive pads of soft flesh; but he still wore the countenance of a lean and questing man: a perplexing expression of bland good humor or of permanent inner amusement.

  Brenner shrugged and smiled a little uncomfortably. “I had no choice. Doctor,” he said. “A hundred kilos of my marcaine—bulk micron dust, you understand—was stolen yesterday.”

  SOMEBODY gasped. A hundred kilograms of marcaine, principal product of Brenner’s works, was a small fortune on Mars—and a large fortune on Earth, if it could be diverted from medical use and channeled into one of the innumerable pipelines to addicts.

  “Naturally I reported it,” Brenner explained. “And of course Commissioner Bell had to order a Bloodhound search. It brought us here.”

  “Ed,” Tony appealed to the grim-faced lieutenant, “did you operate the Bloodhound? Will you give me your personal word that it led to the Colony?”

  “Answer him, Lieutenant,” Bell ordered.

  “I’m sorry to . . . Dr. Hellman,” Nealey said stiffly. “I checked the machine three times, myself. Strong scent from Brenner’s storeroom to the Rimrocks, then some confusion in the Rim rock caves, and a weakening scent from the Rimrocks to here. It doesn’t actually stand up all tire way here, but it doesn’t go anywhere else. That’s definite.”

  “Please, Dr. Hellman,” said Brenner kindly. “You needn’t look so stricken. All it means is that there’s a rotten apple in your barrel. That happens.”

  Gracey hurried in, a spindle-shanked ex-professor of low-temperature agronomy from Nome University. He addressed himself directly to Brenner: “What are you doing here?”

  “Mr. Brenner has sworn out an intercolony complaint of grand theft,” said the commissioner. “You’re Gracey? You needn’t waste your breath trying to blacken Mr. Brenner’s character. He’s already informed me that there was a disagreement between you which you’ve taken to heart.” His meager smile showed that what he meant was “become a little cracked over.”

  “He hasn’t got any character to blacken,” growled the agronomist. “He tried to get me to breed marcaine weeds for higher production of his hell-dust and I wanted to know why. Wasn’t that naive of me? I checked on Earth and I found out that maybe ten per cent of his marcaine goes into medical hands and the rest—”

  The commissioner shut him up with a decisive: “That’s enough. I will not listen to random accusations based on newspaper gossip. I don’t doubt that after marcaine arrives on Earth some of it is diverted. The world has its weak-willed people. But Mr. Brenner is a responsible manufacturer and you people . . . I respect your ideals but I’m afraid I can’t say much for your performance. The business of Mars is business. And a major theft from one of our leading industrial colonies is very serious indeed.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Brenner, “I can’t ignore it. I’d like to, simply to spare the unpleasantness, but the amount involved is too important financially. And there’s always the danger that some quantity might get into illegal channels.”

  GRACEY snarled, looked as though he wanted to spit on the immaculate floor of the Lab.

  “What exactly do you intend to do?” Tony asked hastily, anxious to forestall an eruption from the irritable agronomist.

  “It should be quite clear by now,” Bell replied, “that it is my duty to conduct a search of these premises.”

  “You’ll keep your grabbing little hands off our equipment!” Unexpectedly, it was Flexner who exploded. “It’s all nonsense, and you know it. What would we steal from that drug peddler?”

  Brenner’s quiet laugh rasped into the appalled silence that followed. Flexner, enraged, took just one belligerent step toward the trillionaire and the commissioner.

  “Sergeant!” barked Lieutenant Nealey, and a noncom, unslinging his carbine like an automaton, aimed from the hip at the chemist. Flexner stopped in his tracks, red-faced with anger, and said bitterly: “So he can make the damned stuff and welcome, but all hell breaks loose if somebody hooks it.”

  “For the last time—” began Bell, exasperatedly, and then interrupted himself. He drew a paper from his parka and handed it to Tony. “The warrant,” he said shortly.

  Tony passed it to O’Donnell and there was a long, foot-tapping minute while the ex-lawyer studied the document.

  At last O’Donnell said, “According to this, you plan to open our shipping crates and break into our process ovens. Is that correct?” He was pale with anger and worry.

  “Correct,” said the commissioner, while Brenner shrugged helplessly. “Marcaine could, of course, be concealed from the Bloodhound in lead-insulated containers.”

  “Then you are aware,” said Tony, “that we manufacture radioactive materials?”

  “I am.”

  “And you realize that there are certain procedures required by law for the handling of such materials?”

  “Doctor Hellman! Has k slipped your mind that I represent the law you’re speaking of?”

  “Not at all.” Tony was determined not to lose his temper. “But I could hardly expect you to carry in your mind all the time the innumerable petty details that must come under your administration. And at happens that I represent, here in the Colony, the observance of the laws under which our radioactives license was granted. I think that as chief radiological monitor for the Colony, I should be permitted to accompany your men in any search.

  “That’s out of the question.” The commissioner dismissed the request impatiently. “The license you spoke of is, as we both know, a grade-B atomics license, permitting you to handle only materials well below the safety level, so I see no reason for any unnecessary fuss. Lieutenant . . .”

  “Just a minute, please, Commissioner,” Tony interrupted frantically. It was perfectly true that as the direct representative on Mars of the Panamerican World Federation, Bell was judge, jury, and corner cop, all rolled into one. Redress was as far away as Earth, and the road to Earth was the rocket from which Bell had the power to bar them.

  “Don’t you realize,” Tony pleaded, “that our materials stay below the safety level only because we have a well-established monitoring procedure? If you insist on breaking into process ovens and opening crates without my supervision, Sun Lake cannot assume responsibility for any dangerous radioactivity.”

  “I understand that, Doctor,” Bell answered crisply. “Any handling of radioactives in my presence is obviously done on my responsib
ility, not yours. The commission, oddly enough, is supplied with its own monitors. I do not believe we will require your assistance. Carry on, Lieutenant.”

  NEALEY took a reluctant step forward. Choking back his anger, Tony said flatly: “In my opinion you are exceeding your authority. Your men will interfere with our processing and break open our shipment crates. Our machinery is so delicately adjusted that any kind of handling by untrained people could easily destroy it. And we’ve spent the last month packing our outgoing shipments for the next rocket. You know what the law is for packing radioactives. If you broke open our shipments, the rocket would be here and gone before we had the stuff decontaminated and repacked. It would be ruinous for the Colony.”

  He saw out of the corner of his eye that O’Donnell was unwillingly shaking his head. Bell was the law on Mars. And Bell wasn’t even bothering to answer.

  “At least give us a chance to look into it,” urged the doctor. “Maybe we have got a bad apple. We’ll find him if we do. You can’t wreck us just on suspicion!”

  “More than suspicion is involved here,” said Bell. “The findings of the Ground Tracing Device, M-27, known as the Bloodhound, when operated by a qualified commissioned officer, are accepted as completely legal evidence in all authorized world courts.”

  They watched bleakly as the lieutenant began to assemble the dipole, handle, power pack and meters of the Bloodhound.

  “I have a suggestion,” said Brenner. “Under Title Fifteen of the Interplanetary Affairs Act—”

  “Mo,” said O’Donnell. “We don’t want it.”

  Brenner said persuasively, “If you’re clean, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Title Fifteen was never meant to be applicable to a case like this,” O’Donnell crossfired. “It’s one of those shotgun laws, like a conspiracy count—”