Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Tony was a good doctor; in Springfield or Jackson City or Hartford—anywhere on Earth—he could have written his own ticket. Instead, he had chosen to throw in his lot with a batch of wide-eyed idealists; had, indeed, jumped at the chance.

  IT WAS largely Tony’s eagerness to emigrate that was responsible for the Colony’s “M-or-M” ruling. The Sun Lake Society couldn’t afford to turn Dr. Hellman down; they knew just how slim was the possibility of getting another doctor as good. So, after much deliberation, the by-laws were carefully revised, and the words “or marriageable” inserted after the word “married” in the list of qualifications.

  The modification had resulted in a flood of new and highly desirable members. Skilled workers were inclined to be more footloose and adventurous before they were married, before they had settled into responsible, well-paid jobs on Earth. Bea Juarez, pilot of the Colony’s ship, Lazy Girl, was one of the new acquisitions; so was Harvey Stillman, the chief radioman.

  Anna Willendorf was another member who had come in after the revised “M-or-M” ruling, one whose skill was almost as much appreciated as Tony’s, for a different reason. Plastics, produced in the Lab, could be, and were, used for almost every item of furniture or furnishings in the Colony; but for some chemical processes, glassware was still a must. And now that giant machines existed on Earth to turn out almost every conceivable glass utensil, glass-blowers were far between, good ones almost nonexistent. Without Anna’s highly specialized talent, the Colony would have had to pay fabulous prices for the transport of bulkily packaged glassware from Earth.

  Anna was one of the very few unmarried members of the Colony who refused to participate in the communal meals. Laziness, or embarrassment, or both, served to drag in the others, like Tony, who might have preferred to remain aloof. Anna simply ignored the questions and remarks.

  ON RARE occasions, however, she relented to the extent of “inviting” the doctor to dine with her—combining their rations, and preparing a meal for him in her own one-room hut. Then, for an hour, she would play hostess to him, an hour that restored, for both of them, the longed-for feeling of gracious, civilized living.

  “One for all and all for one.”

  “Mutual endeavor.”

  “Collective self-sufficiency.” The whole thing, Tony thought angrily, was an anachronism; more than that, an impossibility. No sane man could believe in it—unless he came from Earth and had nothing to see to believe in.

  For tonight, at least, he was free of it. Anna was at the door when he reached it, holding it open for him. She watched him set down his bag as though he were unloading the troubles of the Universe.

  “You need a drink,” she decided.

  “Who’s kidding whom?” He grinned sourly at her. “Some nice, refreshing, vitamin-packed, Grade-A, synthesized orange juice, maybe?”

  “I see you haven’t been home yet.”

  She disappeared behind the drape that hid her kitchen section. Not many of them bothered to separate the kitchen from the living room; perhaps, Tony thought that was what gave her room such a special look. A moment later, she was out again, with two long-stemmed fragile glasses in her hands.

  SHE handed one to Tony, and awe and wonder crossed his face as he sipped. He looked his question at her over the rim of the glass.

  “I shouldn’t have spoiled your surprise, really.” She smiled at him. “The Kandros. They wouldn’t prepare anything for the baby, but they must have ordered these from Earth when Polly was just—let’s see—three months along, to have had them here in time.”

  “Real wine,” Tony marveled, and sipped again. “Aged wine. How did they get it? How could they afford—?”

  “They couldn’t, of course,” she reminded him, “but they have relatives on Earth. You know they’re not the only ones who left some cash behind, ‘just in case’ ?”

  The doctor looked up sharply, and found a faint smile flickering on her lips. “How did you know?” he demanded. “Where do you find out these things?”

  “What do they call it—feminine intuition?” She shrugged and moved toward the kitchen again. “Which also tells me that supper will be a desiccated mess if I don’t serve it right now.”

  She had set the table as usual in front of the big window. Tony took his place and looked out through the eerie twilight across the endless expanse of Lac us Solis. The ocean bed was like a vast black velvet now, studded with a million tiny, glinting jewels.

  The doctor stared out until Anna returned with a steaming dish. He regarded her soberly and was planning a dutiful compliment when she burst into laughter and set the dish down. “Jim’s face,” she explained hastily. “It just crossed my mind. He’s so proud of the wife and child—”

  He was irked by a note of insincerity and supposed for a moment—neurotically, he knew; commonest thing in the world—that she had been laughing at him.

  “Nothing so funny,” he said stiffly.

  “I’m sorry. Serve the greens?” Dinner performed its usual magic. Tony had been really hungry. Tilting his chair against the wall, with his empty pipe in his mouth, he found that things were getting back into proportion.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “we still have time.” They had been talking about Bell’s threat of quarantine. Through the daylight hours it had seemed at least the end of the world. Now, with a pleasantly noticeable buzz from the wine in his head and a palatable meal digesting, above all, with some privacy and clear space and time around him, Tony couldn’t recapture the sharp alarm of the threat.

  ANNA, very seriously, demanded, “Do you think Bell can run us out?”

  He waved a little too expansively. “Prob’ly not. Any number of other possibilities. Somebody at Pittco might have taken the stuff; they’re close enough. Nope—” He hauled up. “Ed Nealey wouldn’t make a mistake like that. He was working the Bloodhound and there’s a boy who’ll do any job the right way. Don’t worry about it, though. It’s two weeks to rocket landing, another week to Shipment Day—something’ll turn up. We’ll send O’Donnell to Marsport. If there’s a legal angle he’ll find it. Maybe he can scare Bell into backing down. Bell’s supposed to be a small-timer. He wouldn’t want any real trouble.”

  Anna got up abruptly and filled his empty glass.

  “Hey, you take some too!” Tony insisted.

  She made a show of draining the last few drops into her own glass; the rims touched and they drank.

  “You’re a strange girl, Anna,” said Tony. “Hell, I didn’t mean exactly that—I mean you’re not like the other women here. Joan. Bea. Polly. Verna.”

  “No,” she said. “Not very much like Bea.”

  Tony didn’t know whether she was angry or amused and decided he didn’t care. “I don’t know why I don’t marry you.”

  “Two reasons,” Anna smiled. “One, you’re not sure you want to. Two, you’re not at all sure I do.”

  The sudden banging on the door was like an explosion in the quiet room. Harve Stillman didn’t wait for anyone to answer; he burst in.

  He was white-faced and shaken.

  “Doc!”

  Tony jumped up and reached for his bag. “What is it? Joan? The baby? An accident at the Lab?”

  “Flash from Marsport. The rocket’s coming in.” The radio man stopped to catch his breath. “They’re inside radio range now. Estimated time of arrival, 4:00 A.M.”

  “Tomorrow?” Anna gasped.

  Harve nodded and Tony put down his bag with mechanical precision in the center of the table.

  Tomorrow! Three weeks had been little enough time to find the marcaine and the thief and get rid of Bell’s strangling cordon. Now, with the rocket in ahead of schedule, two of those weeks were yanked out from under them!

  CONTINUED NEXT MONTH

  Mars Child

  More than anything else, the colony on Mars wanted independence from doomed Earth—and abruptly was in deadly danger of succeeding!

  SYNOPSIS

  FORTY years in the life of a planet is
nothing—especially when that planet is ancient Mars. It has been that long since the first Earth rocket crashed at the southern apex of Syrtis Major; almost that long since the first too-hopeful colonists followed, three thousand doomed souls, all dead before the delayed relief ship arrived.

  Forty years during which a barren world played host to, successively, a handful of explorers and a few score prospectors with naturally ”Marsworthy” lungs; a thousand or so latter-day homesteaders with their lean, silent women; a dozen, then two dozen industrial settlements; and at last, almost forty years after the first failure, another attempt at permanent colonization.

  Sun Lake City Colony is unique on Mars; it is a cooperative without industrial backing. Its members range from laborers to accomplished scientists, with one conviction in common: that Earth is through as a habitation for man because of its wrecked ecology, overcrowding, and the imminence of a cataclysmic radiological war. The Colony hopes as soon as possible to establish an agricultural cycle that will enable it to exist self-sufficiently on the hostile alien planet.

  Until that goal is attained, and until the colonists can find an acceptable substitute for Earth-import OxEn—the “oxygen enzyme” pills that enable humans to breathe Mars air—Sun Lake must maintain business relations with Earth. To this end the Colony maintains a laboratory to refine and concentrate radiosotopes from Mars’ naturally low-radioactive soil.

  In Sun Lake, a baby boy is born to Jim and Polly Kandro, a couple who emigrated partly to get away from the scene of half a dozen tragic miscarriages on Earth. The Colony’s doctor, Tony Hellman, attends the birth; he is assisted by Anna Willendorf, who came to the Colony as a glassblower, but whose extraordinary quality of understanding and sympathy makes her an excellent part-time nurse.

  The baby is fitted to a specially designed oxygen mask. OxEn cannot be absorbed by infants, and the Colony lost its first-born baby because they could not produce enough oxygen to keep a full-size oxy tent operating. The child is named Sun Lake City Colony Kandro by his proud parents—Sunny for short.

  Tony leaves the new mother and child in Anna’s care, and goes to make his routine morning check of the Lab; he is radiological safety monitor for the Colony as well as doctor. While he is there, the Lab is visited by a delegation of the military.

  Personally commanding the search party is Hamilton Bell, Planetary Affairs Commissioner for the Panamerican World Federation—the top man on Mars—acting on a complaint made by Hugo Brenner. Brenner, a drug manufacturer, claims a priceless 100 kilograms of marcaine have been stolen from his factory. The marcaine “scent” was traced to a point near the Colony by means of an electronic device known as the Bloodhound, operated by a conscientious young officer, Lt. Ed Nealey.

  Bell, who has absolute dictatorial powers in intercolony matters, proposes a search which would ruin the Lab and contaminate ready-to-go shipments of radioactives. Tony and two other members of the Colony Council, Mimi Jonathan and Joe Gracey, bargain with the Commissioner and accept a desperate alternative. They will be permitted to conduct their own search in their own way, but they must deliver both the thief and the stolen marcaine before Shipment Day—three weeks off—or the Colony will be sealed off by a military cordon for a period of six months while an official search is made. This is in accordance with an obsolete law formulated in the days of annual rockets. Now, however, Sun Lake, like all Mars, is geared to ninety-day rocket intervals; missing two shipments would be a catastrophic blow to the Colony’s economy.

  Bell marches off with his soldiers, and Tony goes to make the daily rounds of his patients. He sees, among others, Joan Rad cliff, a fanatically idealistic colonist, who is slowly dying of a disease the doctor cannot even diagnose. At least he feels, if Bell’s ultimatum spells the end of the Colony; it will save Joan’s life. Nothing short of that would send her back to Earth, for if she went the Colony would not allow her husband, Hank, to stay. Hank is a romantic youngster; going to Mars was his life’s dream, but Sun Lake, with its dreams of permanence, has room only for “married or marriageable” members.

  Tony also sees Nick Cantrella, the fourth member of the Council. Nick is an inspired electronics man and machinist, and an inveterate optimist. Between them, they work out a plan to test everyone in the Colony for exposure to marcaine by means of the electro-encephalograph. Among those tested, in addition to all the colonists except the two bed-ridden women (and Hank Rad cliff; who is away, getting some new medicine for Joan), are Learoyd, an old prospector who happened to be in town that day, and the Tollers, an early homesteader couple who live nearby. But all the results are negative; they find no evidence of exposure. The next step in the search will be a house-to-house inspection of the Colony.

  Meanwhile, Sunny is having trouble nursing. The new mother becomes terribly worried, and when left alone for a short time, she has a dream or hallucination, and babbles hysterically to the doctor about a “Brownie” that was peering in the window at the baby.

  The situation takes a sudden turn for the worse when Harve Stillman, the chief radioman, turns up with unexpected news: the rocket is in radio range, and will land the next day—two weeks early!

  CHAPTER NINE

  TONY got four hours’ sleep before Tad Campbell came banging on his door at 3:15 A.M. The boy’s enthusiasm was more than Tony could face; it would be easier to carry his own equipment than to answer questions while he was dressing. He sent Tad to wait at the plane and put some “coffee” on to brew, then did a last quick check of his portable health lab, making sure that there was nothing overlooked in the hasty preparations after the news about the Earth ship.

  Gulping down the hot brew, he reviewed the instructions he had given Anna: feedings for Sunny Kandro; bacitracin for Dorothy; ointment and dressings for Joan, another injection if she needed it; and under no circumstances sedative for Mrs. Beyles.

  He couldn’t think of anything predictable he had failed to provide for. He folded the lab to make a large carrying case and lugged his burden up the gentle slope that led to the landing field where Lazy Girl, the Colony’s transport plane, waited.

  Bea Juarez was warming the icy motors with a blowtorch. Lazy Girl’s motors were absurdly small; their shafts spun on zero-friction air bearings. Air-bearings dated from the guided missiles of 1950, but their expensively precise machining ruled them out for Earth. Shipping space to Mars was high enough to override the high manufacturing cost. Air-bearing motors were small and light; therefore virtually everything on Mars that turned or slid, turned and slid on molecules of gas instead” of oily films.

  The bearings improved the appearance not only of machinery but of mechanics. Bea looked tired, cold, and unhappy; but she lacked the grease-smeared dinginess that would have marked her on Earth. The girl nodded to him, ran a hand over the moisture condensing on the metallic surface, and applied the torch to a new spot.

  She shook her head doubtfully. “Don’t blame me if she falls apart in mid-air after we take off. I put her together with spit overnight, Tony. She was scattered all over the field for a hundred-hour check. You’d think they’d let you know . . .” she grumbled, then broke off and grinned. “What the hell, if we blow up halfway between here and there, we don’t have to worry about marcaine any more! Climb aboard, Doc.” She snapped off the torch. “Hey, Tad! The doc needs a hand with his contraption.”

  TONY felt a twinge of conscience as Tad hopped out of the plane and ran to take the big box. It must have been a blow to the boy, to be deprived of carrying the heavy equipment from the hospital.

  “How’s it going?” Tony asked genially, “You seem to be getting along fine without your tail bone.”

  “Okay,” the boy grunted.

  He eased the box into the cabin, pulled it out of the way, and reached down a condescending hand to help Tony. “It don’t seem to matter,” he added, when the doctor was inside. “You’d never know it wasn’t there.”

  Tad was the recent victim of an unhappily humorous accident. Butted in the seat
by an angry goat, he’d had his coccyx severely fractured, and the doctor had had to remove the caudal vertebrae. It probably qualified, Tony thought, as another of those history-making occasions—the Colony’s first spinal, if you want to stretch the term, operation. Historic or not, it was a permanent bond between the boy and the doctor—the only one who had been able to take it seriously.

  Tony padded a couple of spare parkas into a comfortable couch on the cabin floor and stretched out. The plane had no scats. Coming back, they’d sit on the bare floor, and the parkas would have another use. The ship was unheated and the newcomers weren’t likely to have warm clothes unpacked.

  Lazy Girl was short on comfort and speed cannibalized on Mars from the scrapped remains of obsolete models discarded by wealthier colonies. Tony, who didn’t fly himself, had been told that she handled easily and flew an immense pay-load without complaining.

  Tad had built himself a luxurious nest of parkas. He pulled the last one up around his shivering shoulders, leaned back, and examined the interior of the plane with a good imitation of a practiced appraisal.

  “Nice job,” he pronounced finally. “You don’t get them like this back on Earth.”

  “You sure don’t,” Bea agreed ironically from the pilot’s seat. “Hold on to your hat. Here we go!”

  Say what you like about Mars, about the Colony, about the poor old relic of a plane, Tony thought, when you took a look at the kids you began to understand what it was all about. A year ago, Tad had been a thoroughly obnoxious brat. But how could he be anything else on Earth?

  THEY were all that way. You got born into a hate-thy-neighbor, envy-thy-neighbor, murder-thy-neighbor culture. In your infancy your overworked and underfed mother’s breast was always withdrawn too soon and you were filled again and again, day after day, with blind and squalling rage. You were a toddler and you snatched at another one’s bit of candy; you were hungry and you hated him; you fought him. You learned big boys’ games—Killakraut, Wackawop, Nigger inna Graveyard, Chinks an’ Good Guys, Stermation Camp, Loot the City. The odds were you were hungry, always hungry.