Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “What are brownies supposed to look like?” the writer insisted.

  TONY sighed and surrendered, recognizing the same intense manner Graham had displayed in the Lab. The man was a reporter, after all. It was his business to ask questions. Tony gave him what he wanted, with additions, explanations, and embellishments.

  Brownies: an intelligent life-form, either animal or mobile vegetable. About a meter and a half in height; big ears; skinny arms. Supposed to be the naked remnants of a once-proud Martian civilization. (Except that there were no other remnants to support the theory.) In the habit of kidnaping human children (except that there was no specific authenticated case of a baby’s disappearance) and eating them (except that that seemed too pat and inevitable an idea-association with the kidnaping—the sort of additional embellishment that no good liar could resist).

  “It’s an old prospectors’ yarn,” Tony wound up. “The homesteaders picked it up to frighten kids into sticking close to home. There are hundreds of people on Mars today who’ll tell you they’ve seen brownies. But not only is there no native animal life of any kind on Mars today—so far as we can tell, there never has been. No ruins, no old cities, no signs of civilization, and not so much as one single dessicated dried-out scrap of anything resembling an animal fossil.”

  “That’s strictly negative evidence,” Graham pointed out. He emptied his glass, and poured another drink for both of them. “Cigaret?”

  Tony shook his head. “I gave up smoking long ago. We all quit sooner or later. Too much trouble to keep tobacco burning.” He reached out to pick up his empty pipe from the table beside him, and he clenched the stem comfortably between his teeth.

  Graham repeated: “Strictly negative evidence. But on the other side you have footprints, for instance, and eyewitness stories.”

  “If you’re talking about the cataract-covered eyes of old Marsmen,” Tony retorted, “don’t call it evidence.”

  “It wouldn’t be,” Graham agreed, “except that there are so many of them. I’m beginning to think there’s a story in it after all.”

  “You mean you believe it?” the doctor demanded.

  “Do I look crazy? I said it was a story.”

  “So you came 150 million kilometers on a rocket, and then four more hours across Mars in a beat-up old rattletrap of a plane,” the doctor said bitterly. “You eat food that tastes like hospital disinfectant, and live in a mud hut, all so you can go back home and write a nice piece of fiction about brownies—a piece you could have dashed off without ever leaving Earth!”

  “Not exactly,” the gunther said mildly. “I was only thinking of using the brownies for one chapter. Local color, tales and legends—that kind of thing.”

  “You could get plenty of stories back on Earth,” Tony went on bitterly. “Stories worth writing. How about Paul Rosen’s story? There’s a real one for you.”

  “Rosen?” Graham leaned forward, interested again. “Seems to me I’ve heard the name before. Who was he?”

  “Not was. Is. He’s still alive; a cripple nobody knows.”

  “TELL me about Rosen.” The writer filled their glasses again.

  “I’ll tell you about Mars; it’s the same story. You came to write a book about Mars, didn’t you? Well, Mars—this Mars, without oxygen masks—is Rosen’s work. Rosen’s lungs. And you never heard of him . . . Rosen was the medical doctor aboard the relief ship, the one that found what was left of the first colony. He had a notion about the oxygen differential, was convinced that it wasn’t responsible for the failure. He was wrong, of course, but he was right, too. To prove his point he took off his mask and found he didn’t need it.

  “His assistant tried it, and nearly died of anoxemia. That proved some people could take Mars straight and others couldn’t. When the ship got back Rosen went to the biochem boys with his lungs. They told him a few c.c. wouldn’t be enough to work with, so he volunteered for an operation. Most of his lung tissue was removed. He was crippled for life, but they tracked down the enzyme that made the difference, and worked out a test.”

  “That I remember,” said Graham, continuing to fill the glasses almost rhythmically. “Half the guys I met in Asia claimed they enlisted because they weren’t Marsworthy and life wasn’t worth living if they couldn’t go to Mars.”

  “THAT was the beginning of it,” Tony said. “The ones who passed the test began to come over. Thousand dollars a day prospecting, and always the chance of finding bonanzas. At first they were pork-and-beaners, but the Mars vegetation they brought back took us one step closer to fitting into the Martian ecology. The biochem boys came up with a one-shot hormone treatment to stimulate secretion of an enzyme from the lining of the pylorus. It’s present in most people without the shot, but not enough to break down the Martian equivalent of carbohydrates into simple sugars which the human body can handle. You asked me before what all the shots you got on board the rocket ship were for. That’s one of them. It means you can handle the Mars plants which don’t contain compounds poisonous to Earth animals.

  “The other shots you got were to protect you against all the rest of the things that killed off the first pork-and-beaners—fungi, ultra-violet damage to the eyes, dehydration, viruses. For every shot you got, half a dozen of the first explorers and prospectors were killed or crippled to find the cause and cure.

  “Five years ago came the payoff. The biochem boys got what they’d been looking for ever since they first sliced up Rosen’s trick lungs. They synthesized the enzyme, your little pink OxEn pill, and that did it. That’s when the Sun Lake Society was founded; and the new rocket fuel two years ago made Sun Lake a reality. With OxEn and four trips a year, we can make out until we find a way to get along without Earth.

  “Sun Lake is Mars, Graham. Sun Lake’s all’s gonna be left when you crazy bastards back on Earth blow yourselves up. The other colonists here aren’t Mars; they’re part of Earth. When Earth goes, they go. Sun Lake’s all’s gonna be left . . .”

  “Coupla catches,” said Graham, trying to make a glass stay put so he could fill it. “Commish Bell and his eviction notice. And you still need OxEn. Can you make that inna Lab?”

  “Not yet,” Tony brooded. He had forgotten the lovely optimism that could be poured out of a bottle. “Guess I had ’nought to drink. I have a hell of a day ahead of me.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A HELL of a day it was. It started, for one thing, with a hangover. Tony heaved himself out of bed, glad to find Graham still asleep. He didn’t want any cheerful conversation just yet. He prescribed, dispensed, and self-administered some aspirin used an extra cup of water for a second cup of “coffee,” finally decided he was strong enough to face the reek of methyl alcohol, and got washed.

  Mimi Jonathan was in charge at the Lab when he got there. Law or no law, he raced through the A.M. Lab check to get ahead on the awful job of monitoring the unpacking operation. He rode out on a bike to the five spots Stillman had selected for the inspection crews and found them reasonably low in radioactivity.

  Sheets of plastic had been laid down for flooring and tent walls were going up, with little tunnels through which the crates could be passed without the handlers bringing in all the dust of Mars on their feet. Blowers were rigged to change the air between each inspection, and radiologically clean overalls would be passed in at the same time.

  A little after dawn, the careful frenzy was in full swing. A crew in the shipping room eased out crates and passed them to wrappers who covered them with plastic sheeting and heat-sealed them. Aboard skids, the crates were manhandled up the slight slope from the “canal” bed to the tents in the desert, unwrapped, passed in, checked for chemical and radiological contamination, sealed and passed out again. Back at the Lab, they would be wrapped in lead sheets pending recrating and stored separately in every workroom that could be spared.

  Mimi was everywhere, ordering a speedup on the heat-sealing, or a slowdown on the bucket-brigade manhandling, routing crates to the station that
would soonest be free, demanding more plastic sheeting, drafting a woman to wash more coveralls when a stand of them toppled over. The few Lab processes that couldn’t be left alone were tended under the direction of Sam Flexner, by people from agro and administration, and by specialized workers like Anna Willendorf.

  Tony and Harve Stillman moved constantly up and down the line, back to the Lab and out to the desert, checking persons, places and materials. Before noon Tony had the bitter job of telling Mimi: “We’ve got to abandon the Number Two tent. It’s warming up. Radioactivity’s low on the site, but it’s from something that chains with the plastic flooring, I don’t know what. Another hour and radiation from the flooring will contaminate the crates.”

  The woman set her jaw and picked another crew from the line to set up a tent on another monitored site.

  Somebody slipped in the Number Three tent, and Harve Stillman found some of the Leukemia Foundation’s shipment of radiophosphorus had got from the inside of the crate to the outside—enough to warrant refusal by the rocket supercargo in the interests of the safety of the ship.

  But never a trace of marcaine did the search crews And.

  LUNCH was at noon, carried about by Colony children. Gulping cool “coffee,” Tony told Harve Stillman: “You’ll have to take it alone for a while. I haven’t visited my patients yet. I missed Joan Radcliff altogether yesterday.”

  “Hell, I don’t know whether I’m coming, or going,” grunted Stillman, then added, “I guess I can manage.”

  “Send for me if there’s anything you really can’t handle.” Tony started back toward the street of huts before a new emergency could delay him.

  He stopped at his own house to pick up his medical bag, and found. Graham awake, at work in front of an old-fashioned portable typewriter. Another surprise from the gunther; Tony had assumed the man worked with a dictatyper. Even in the Colony they had those.

  Graham looked up pleasantly and nodded. “Somebody waiting for you in the other room, Tony.” He motioned with his head toward the door that led to the hospital. “You going out again?”

  The doctor nodded. “I don’t know when I’ll get back. You can walk around and ask questions wherever you find anybody. You understand the situation here—we can’t let up on this marcaine business even for the press.”

  “Sure.” The gunther nodded, unperturbed.

  “I’ll get around in time to pick you up for supper anyhow,” Tony promised. “Did you get any lunch?”

  “I managed.” Graham grinned and pointed to an open can still half full of meat, and a box of hard crackers. “Look,” said the writer, “Unless you’ve lost your Earthside tastes completely, why don’t you have supper on me tonight? There’s lots more where lunch came from.”

  “Thanks. I might take you up on that.”

  Tony went into the hospital, where Edgar Kroll was waiting for him.

  “Sorry to bother you today, Doc,” Kroll apologized. “I came over on the chance you’d be around right about now. Another one of those damned headaches; I couldn’t get any work done at all this morning, Guess I’m just getting old.”

  “Old!” Tony snorted. “Man, even in Sun Lake, you’re not old at thirty-five! Not just because you need bifocals. You’ve stalled around long enough now . . .” And heaven only knew what boudoir tauntings from young Jeanne Kroll lay behind that, Tony thought, as he reached into the dispensary cabinet. “Here’s some aspirin for now. If you come around tomorrow, I think I’ll have time to refract you; I just can’t manage it today. Take the afternoon off if the headache doesn’t go away.”

  HE GOT his black bag, and walked down the street with Edgar, as far as the Kandros’ place. At the door, he bumped into Jim, just leaving for the Lab, after lunch.

  “Glad I saw you, Doc.” The new father stood hesitantly in the doorway, waiting till Kroll was out of earshot, then burst out: “Listen, Tony, I didn’t want to say anything in front of Polly, but . . . are you sure it’s going to be all right? Sunny still isn’t eating. Maybe it’s cancer or something! I heard of something like that with one of our neighbor’s kids back in Toledo—”

  Just—just exactly the sort of thing that made Tony almost blind with rage. He liked the man; Jim Kandro was his brother, his comrade in the Colony, but—! With his pulse hammering, he made it clear to Jim in a few icy sentences that he had studied long, sacrificed much and worked hard to learn what he could about medicine, and that when he wanted a snap diagnosis from a layman he would ask for one. Jim and Polly could yank him out of bed at three in the morning, they could make him minister to their natural anxieties, but they could not make him take such an insult.

  He stalked into the house, ignoring Jim’s protests and apologies both, and professional habit took over him as he greeted Polly and examined the baby.

  “About time for a feeding, isn’t it?” he asked. “Is it going any better? Since last night, I mean? Want to try him now while I observe?”

  “It’s a little better, I guess.” Polly smiled doubtfully and picked up the baby. She moved the plastic cup of the oxygen mask up a little over the small nose, and put Sunny to her breast.

  To Tony, it was plain that the infant was frantic with hunger. Then why didn’t it nurse properly? Instead of closing over the nipple, Sunny’s mouth pushed at it one-sidedly, first to the right, then to the left, any way but the proper way. For seconds at a time the baby did suck, then would release the nipple, choking.

  “He’s doing a little better,” said Polly. “He’s doing much better!”

  “That’s fine!” Tony agreed feebly. “I’ll be on my way, then. Be sure to call me if there’s anything.”

  HE WALKED down the Colony street wishing a doctor could afford the luxury of shaking his head in bewilderment. Maybe it was all straightening Out. But what could account for the infant’s fantastic behavior? There’s nothing so determined as a baby wanting to feed—but something was getting in the way of Sunny’s instinct.

  He hoped Polly realized that Sunny would feed sooner or later, that the choking reflex which frustrated, the sucking reflex would disappear before long. He hoped she would realize it; he hoped desperately that it would happen.

  Joan Radcliff was next and this time he found her awake. She was no better and no worse; the enigmatic course of her nameless disease had leveled off. All he could do was talk a while, go through the pulse-taking and temperature-reading mumbo-jumbo, change the dressings on her sores, talk some more, and then go out.

  Now Dorothy, the sinus case, and he was done with his more serious cases for today.

  Tanya Beyles had a green sick card on her door, but he decided to ignore it. He was already past the house when she called his name, and he turned to find her beckoning from the opened door.

  She had dressed up to beat the band—an absurdly tight tunic to show off her passable thirty-plus figure, carefully done hair and the first lipstick he remembered seeing around in months.

  “I don’t have much time, today, Mrs. Beyles,” he said carefully. “Could it wait till tomorrow?”

  “Oh, please, Doctor,” she begged, and launched into a typical hypochondriac resume of symptoms, complete with medical terms inaccurately used. What it boiled down to was that a thorough examination was in order though there was nothing nasty wrong with her.

  “Very well,” he said. “If you’ll come over to the hospital—next week, perhaps—when I have more time.” With a chaperone, he added silently.

  “Wouldn’t it be just as easy here, and more private?” she ventured shyly, indicating the bedroom, where a heat lamp was already focused on the made bed.

  “Dear God,” he muttered, and found the professional restraint that had taken over while he was with Polly Kandro had now quite abandoned him. “Mrs. Beyles,” he said, plainly and nastily, “you may not realize it, but we do have a sense of humor here, even if we don’t share your ideas of fun. We’ve been able to laugh off your malicious gossiping and the lousy job you do in Agronomy; you do get some
work done in Agro, and you don’t cat too much to keep your shape. Up to now, we’ve been able to laugh everything off and hope, you’d straighten out. But I warn you, if you start being seductive around Sun Lake—even if you start with me—you’ll get shipped out so fast you won’t . . .”

  “Is that so?” she screamed. “Well, maybe you’d like to know that I can get all the love and respect I want around here and where you got the nasty idea that I’m at all interested in you I can’t imagine. I’ve heard of doctors like you before and if you think you’re going to get away with it you’re very much mistaken. And don’t think I don’t know all about you and that Willendorf woman. I know things people would love to hear . .

  He walked off before she could say any more. God only knew what they’d do with her—deport her, he supposed, and her sad sack of a husband would have to go, too, and it would all be very messy and bad-tempered. Maybe Bell and Graham and all the others were right, regarding Sun Lakers as anywhere from mildly insane to fanatically obsessed.

  Maybe anything at all, but he still had to go to see Dorothy and her sinuses. The doctor’s facial muscles fell into their accustomed neutrality as he walked into the girl’s bedroom and his mind automatically picked up the threads of the bacitracin story where he had left off two days before.

  ii

  HALF an hour later, he was back at the unpacking and search operation where he took over alone while Stillman, groggy with the strain, the responsibility and the plain hard work, took a short break. The two of them divided the job then, moving steadily up and down the lines, checking, rechecking endlessly until, as darkness closed down, they were suddenly aware that there were no more crates.

  Mimi Jonathan bitterly enumerated the results of the search: “About 1,500 man-hours shot to hell, three crates contaminated beyond salvage, nine salvageable for umpty-hundred more man-hours—and no marcaine. Well, nobody can say now that we didn’t try.” She turned to Tony. “Your move,” she said.