Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “That’s enough for me,” Cantrella replied. “He promised, and he’s by God going to keep his promise.”

  “Sit down, Nick,” Mimi interrupted. “Beating Graham up isn’t going to solve anything. Harve, you get back on duty, and buzz one of the kids to go over to Tony’s and collect Graham. If he’s asleep, tell them to wake him up. We’ll go through the rest of this while we’re waiting.” She eyed the sheets of paper distastefully.

  Harve slammed the door behind him, and Mimi turned to the others. “I’m sorry. I should have checked with you first. Every time something goes wrong, I start giving orders as if I owned the place. Here.” She handed the sheets to Joe Gracey, still sitting quietly to her left. “You look calm. You read it.”

  Joe took the papers and went on where she had stopped before.

  “He can’t do that!” Nick protested furiously, when Joe finished. “That story is full of lies! The murder wasn’t here. Neither was most of the other stuff. How can he—”

  “He did!” Tony pointed out.

  “How much convincing do you need?”

  “It’s carefully worded,” Gracey said. “Most of it isn’t lies at all, just evasions and implications.”

  “We’ve got to assume he’s smart enough to write a libel-proof story.” Mimi had recovered her briskness. “There’s one place I think he slipped, though. Can I see those sheets of Graham’s again, Joe?”

  HER eyes were shining when she looked up again. “We’ve got him!” she said. “I’m sure of it! Let’s call in O’Donnell and get his opinion on it. This stuff about Polly.” She read aloud: “ ‘. . . the young mother of a newborn baby, unable to feed her infant because of her hopeless addiction to marcaine. This reporter was present at a midnight emergency when the Colony’s doctor was called to save the child from the ministrations of its hysterical mother . . .’ Tony, you can testify to that!”

  “I don’t know,” said the doctor, painfully. “Sure, I realize Polly’s not an addict, but—that’s what I was starting to tell you when Harve came in. That’s what Jim got me up for last night. Polly was sick, and there’s no doubt that it was a dose of marcaine that was responsible.”

  “What?”

  “Polly?”

  “But she couldn’t be the one. She was—”

  “How did Graham find out about it?”

  Tony waited till the questions stopped, then gave them the whole story, from the time Jim Kandro roared into his house at one o’clock in the morning, right through the removal of the mask.

  “We were both asleep when Kandro came in,” he explained, “and the noise woke Graham too. I didn’t see him again myself, but I heard him typing when I was in the hospital with the baby. And Ans—Anna told me she talked to him while she was making the bottles. She had no reason to hold back any information. I told her myself that he was writing a friendly story.”

  “Well, that fixes us, but good. Where did Polly get the stuff?” Nick demanded. “We’ve hunted every inch of this place looking for marcaine; how come it didn’t show up?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that myself,” Tony said. “I don’t think she got it. Her reactions were not those of a marcaine user, and I’d swear she was as shocked as she said she was when I diagnosed it. The stuff was put there—and don’t ask me who, or why, because I can’t even begin to guess.”

  “Well, we’ve got our hands full,” Mimi said thoughtfully. “Where do we start? It seems to me the same answer is going to settle two of our problems. Where did Polly’s marcaine come from, and how are we ever going to get out of this impossible situation with Bell?”

  “That’s not all,” Nick added grimly. “We can solve both of those, and still get booted off Mars when this story breaks.”

  “That’s a separate matter. All I can do about that is try and talk to Graham—or prove to him that at least part of the story is libelous. Come in,” Mimi called, in answer to a knock outside.

  Gladys Porosky pushed the door open and announced breathlessly: “We can’t find him. We looked all over and he’s not any place.”

  “Graham?” Tony jumped to his feet. “He was asleep in my bedroom; I left him there. He has to be around.”

  GLADYS shook her head. “We opened the door when he didn’t answer, and he wasn’t there. Then we scattered; all the kids have been looking. He’s not at the Lab, or in the fields, and he’s not in any of the houses. Nobody’s seen him all morning.”

  “Thanks, Gladys,” Mimi cut her short. “Will you try to find Jack O’Donnell for me? Ask him to come over here.”

  “Okay.” She slammed out of the door, leaving a whirlwind of babble and excitement behind her.

  “I suppose he’s skipped,” Tony said. “Probably messaged one of the industrial outfits in that damn code of his, and got picked up during the night. His bags are still at my place, though—I saw them this morning. That’s funny.”

  “Very funny,” Nick echoed glumly. “Ha, ha.”

  “What’s luggage to a guy who can write like that?” Gracey asked. “He can get all the luggage he wants just by wiping out another plague spot like us.”

  O’Donnell came in, and they waited in tense silence while the ex-lawyer read through Harve’s penciled translation. “Only possible libelous matter I see is about the marcaine-addict mother. What’s all that?”

  They told him, and he shook his head. “No more chance in a court of law than a snowball in hell,” he said flatly.

  “But I don’t care how he worded it. The story’s not true.”

  “How many stories are? If truth or justice made any difference in the Earth courts, I wouldn’t be here. I loved the law. The way it looked in the books, that is. I guess I’ll have to pass my bar examinations all over again. Mars is under the Pan State, but I suppose this constitutes interrupted residence anyway.

  “Big fat chance you’ll have of getting to take your bar exams after that smear,” said Gracey. “I’m not kidding myself about getting to tech college again. If I can get some money together, I’m going to try commercial seaweeds.”

  “God help Sargasso Limited,” said Nick Cantrella. “And God help Consolidated Electronic when I start my shop again in Denver. It took them three months to run me into bankruptcy last trip around, but I’ll get them up to four this time. They can’t stand much of that kind of punishment.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Mimi said, with the quiver back in her determinedly businesslike voice. “Let’s assume Graham’s skipped and the story’s going through. We might still be able to hang on if we can square ourselves with Bell.”

  “Bell and Graham have no use for each other,” Tony said. “Maybe this will make Bell easier to deal with.”

  “That I doubt. Let’s figure on the worst. Suppose we can’t convince Bell. We’ll have two possible courses of action. We can sell out fast. From what I understand of this situation, I’m sure that the Commissioner would find a legal loophole for us on the marcaine deal if we decided to sell to, for instance, Brenner. If we do that, we can pay off what money we owe on Earth, book passage for our members, and, with luck, have a few dollars left over to divide between us.” She smiled humorlessly. “You might even have a capital investment of five or ten dollars, Nick, to start working on Con-Electron.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “It’ll give me courage—If I can still find a bar with a five-buck beer, that is.”

  “That,” Mimi went on, “would be the smart thing to do. But there’s another way. We can hang on through the cordon, hoping to prove our point. It leaves us some hope, but it leaves us penniless, even if we manage to stick out the six months. Whatever cash or credit we have on hand we’ll have to pay out for OxEn. Don’t think Bell is going to let us have the stuff free. Meanwhile, our accounts payable keep coming due, and accumulating interest. There’s a good chance that long before the six months are up we’ll be forced into involuntary bankruptcy. That’s how Pittco got Economy Metals last year.”

  “Like the cat
got the canary,” said Nick.

  “Yes. We’d then be shipped back to Earth as distress cases, with a prior lien on our future earnings. If any.”

  MIMI sat down and Tony studied her handsome face as if he were seeing it for the first time. She’d been way up in the auditing department of a vast insurance company once. It would be hard on her. It would be hard on them all. But he wanted to yell and beat down doors when he thought of what it would mean to Anna, plunged back into the screaming hell of Earth’s emotional “noise” that she couldn’t block out.

  He tried to think like a schemer, and knowing that it wouldn’t work, told himself. You marry Anna, take Brenner’s offer—it’s still open; good doctors aren’t that easy to come by on Mars—and you set her up in a decent home. But the whole thing crumbled under its own weight. She wouldn’t marry a doctor whose doctoring was to patch up marcaine factory hands when they sniffed too much of the stuff.

  “Eh?” he asked. Somebody was talking to him.

  “Sell now, or hang on?” Mimi patiently repeated.

  “I want to think about it,” he told her.

  The others felt the same way. It wasn’t a thing you could make up your mind about in a few minutes, not after the years and years of always thinking one way: Colony survival. To have to decide now which way to kill the Colony . . .

  The meeting broke up inconclusively. There was some recrating still to be done. The Lab had to be back to production, get this rocket’s shipments ready just in case. And maybe by the time those chores were done, one of them would have some notion of how to start all over again, looking for the mysterious marcaine.

  Tony headed out to the lab, racking his brains for an answer. But halfway there, he found to his chagrin that he wasn’t serious at all. He was striding along freely in the clean air and light gravity, to the rhythmic mental chant;

  Ansie—Anna—Ann—Ansie—

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  JOAN RADCLIFF lay almost peacefully, drugging herself against the pain in her limbs and head by a familiar reverie of which she never tired. She saw Sun Lake Colony at some vague time in the future, a City of God, glowing against the transfigured Martian desert, spiring into the Martian air, with angelic beings vaguely recognizable in some way as the original colonists.

  Her Hank, the bold explorer, with a bare-chested, archaic, sword-girt look; Doctor Tony, calm and wise and very old, soothing ills with miraculous lotions and calming troubled minds with dignified counsel; Mimi Jonathan, revered and able, disposing of this and that with sharp, just terseness; Anna Willendorf mothering hundreds serenely; brave Jim and Polly Kandro and their wonderful child, the hope of them all.

  She wasn’t there herself, but it was all right because she had done something wonderful for them. They all paused and lowered their voices when they thought of her. She, the sick and despised, had in the end surprised and awed them all by doing something wonderful for them, and they paid her memory homage.

  Nagging reality, never entirely silent, jeered at her that she was a useless husk draining the Colony’s priceless food and water, giving nothing in return. She shifted on the bed.

  Pains shot through her joints and her heart labored. You’re as good as they are, whispered the tempter; you’re better than they are. How many of them could stand the pain and not murmur, never think of anything but the good of the Colony? But I’m not, she raged back. I’m not. I shouldn’t have got sick; l can’t pork now; they have to nurse me. But you didn’t drink any water until Tony made you, said the tempter. Wasn’t that more than any of them would do? Won’t they be sorry when you’re dead and they find out how you suffered?

  She tried to fix her tormented mind on her Hank, but he had a sullen, accusing-stare. She was tying him down; if they sent her back to Earth, he’d have to go too. They wouldn’t let him stay in the Colony.

  SHE wished Anna hadn’t left, and swallowed the thought painfully. Anna’s time belonged to the Colony and not to her. It was nasty of her to want Anna to stay with her so much. She straightened one puffy leg and felt a lance of pain shoot from toes to groin; she bared her clenched teeth but didn’t let a whimper escape her.

  That was very good, said the tempter. None of them could do that.

  Anna had propped her up in bed before, so she could look out the window. Now she turned her head slowly and looked out.

  I see through the window, she told herself. I see across the Colony street to a corner of the Kandros’ hut with a little of their street side window showing. I see Polly Kandro cleaning the inside of the window, but she doesn’t see me. Now she’s coming out and cleaning the outside of the window. Now she turns and sees me and waves and l smile. Now she takes her cloth and goes around her hut to clean the back window and I can’t see her any more.

  And now something glides down the Colony street with Sunny Kandro in its thin brown arms.

  And now Polly runs around her hut again, her face white as chalk, tries faintly to call me, wave to me, and falls down out of sight.

  Joan knew what she ought to do, and she tried. The intercom button had been put in so she had Only to move her hand a few inches. She reached out for the button, and held her finger on it, but there was no answering click. It was a few seconds and maybe minutes, and the thing that had stolen Polly’s baby was gone down the other end of the street.

  The sick girl sat up agonizingly and thought: I can do something now. They won’t be able to say l was foolish, because if I wait any longer I won’t be able to catch up; it will be too far away. There’s nobody else to do it except Polly, and she fainted. It has to be done right away. I can’t wait for them to answer and then come from the Lab.

  Joan stood up, stumped over to the canteen on the wall and tilted it for a long, long drink of cool water. It tasted good. She lurched out of the hut and stood for a moment, looking at the crumpled body of Polly.

  Poor Polly, she thought as her heart thudded and faltered. We must help one another.

  She shaded her eyes against the late morning sun and looked up and past the Colony street through the clear Mars air. There was a moving dot passing the airfield now, and she started after it, one step, two steps, three steps, as the City of God reformed in her mind and her eyes never left the moving dot.

  EARTH would be gone, a dead thing swimming in the deeps of space, a grave example for children. See? You must not hate, you must not fear, you must always help or that will happen to us. You must be kind and like people; you mustn’t make weapons because you never know where making weapons will end.

  And the children would ask curiously what it was like, and their elders would tell them it was crowded and dirty, that nobody ever had enough to eat, that people poured poison into the air and pretended it didn’t matter. That it wasn’t like Sun Lake, their spacious, clean, sweet-smelling home, that there wouldn’t have been any Sun Lake if not for the great pioneers like Joan Radcliff who suffered and died for them.

  She wept convulsively at the pain in her limbs as she stumped across the desert rocks. They sliced her bare feet but she dared not look down ahead of her for fear of losing that swimming, moving dot she followed. Magic, she thought. Fix a fairy with your eye and away it cannot fly. Her heart—she could feel it thudding ponderously as a massive new pain burned through her left shoulder and arm.

  I have done what I could, she thought. Hank, you are free. She fell forward and dragged her sprawled right arm along the ground so that it pointed to the moving dot and the Rimrock Hills beyond it.

  ii

  SOMEBODY grabbed him by the arm and motioned to his helmet. Tony stared a moment, uncomprehending, then switched on the helmet radio.

  “What’s up?”

  “Joan—Joan Radcliff!” It was one of Mimi’s young assistants in the Lab office. “She picked up the intercom and buzzed it. When I answered it, it went dead.”

  “I’ll be right out.” The doctor made it on the double, in spite of the hampering suit, out of the shipping room and into the shower. He woul
d have given a year of his own life to be able to speed up the decontamination process this one time, but he’d been near the open crates. It wouldn’t help Joan if he exposed himself, and her, too, to radiation disease.

  He ran the distance from the Lab to the street of houses. He was still running when he approached the Kandros’ hut, and almost missed seeing Polly’s limp figure in the road. Thoroughly bewildered, he picked her up and looked around for help. There was no one in sight.

  A moment’s indecision, and then, quickly, he carried Polly toward the Radcliff hut and deposited her gently on the wall bunk in the living room. Pulse and respiration okay; she would keep. He headed for Joan’s bedroom.

  The doctor wasted a scant second staring at the empty bed; to him it seemed an endless time that had gone by. He pressed the intercom button, and waited through another eternity till the Lab answered.

  Whatever had happened, whatever mysterious force had removed Joan from her bed and left Polly unconscious in the street, this, he realized, must have been the ultimate agony for Joan—to lie in this bed, in dreadful haste, to press this button and wait and wait until it was too late . . .

  “That you, Doc? What’s up?”

  “Trouble. Get Jim Kandro out here. To the Radcliffs! And get Anna. Send her to Kandros’. There’s no one with the baby. Is Mimi there? Put her on.”

  “Tony?” The Lab Administrator’s crisp voice was reassuring; he could leave part of the problem, at least, in her competent hands.

  “There’s trouble here, Mim—don’t know what, but Polly’s fainted and Joan’s disappeared.”

  “I’ll be right there.” She hung up. Tony retreated one step toward the living room, had an afterthought, and went back to the intercom.

  “Get Cantrella here, too,” he told the Lab office. “Tell him to bring along the e.e.g. setup. Fast.”

  Polly didn’t look too bad. Marcaine again? He’d know soon.

  What was going on?

  Jim Kandro burst in, panting and terrified. His wide eyes went from his wife to the doctor, and a single: miserable word came from him.