Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “How about it, Nick?” Tony demanded. “Could the Lab swing a job of crystalizing a crop from that and processing it for absorption?”

  “Sure,” said Nick. “That’s the easy part. I’ve been reading up on it since we talked about it before.”

  “Look here,” Gracey exploded, “where do you think you’re going to get your living virus from? You have to keep getting it, you know. It always mutates under normal radiation sooner or later, and you have to start over again.”

  “That’s my end of the deal. I have a hunch I can get it. Thanks, both of you.” He went into the nursery and told Polly calmly: “I’m taking your youngster away again—just for a few minutes, though. I want to check his lungs in the hospital. Anna?” She was already taking the baby from Polly’s arms. Tony picked up the wrapped marcaine-box and started out.

  “Hey, Doc, what goes on?” Gracey demanded.

  He brushed past Nick and the puzzled agronomist. “Tell you later,” he called back.

  On the street, Anna turned a worried face up to his. “Tony, what are you doing? You can’t operate on a five-day-old baby . . . can you?” she finished, less certainly. “You seem so—so happy and sure of yourself.”

  “I am,” he said shortly, and then relented enough to add: “The ‘operation,’ if you want to call it that, won’t hurt him.” But he wouldn’t say any more.

  MIMI and Brenner were in Tony’s living room. The woman said hopelessly: “Hello, Tony. Mr. Brenner’s made an offer—Oh! It’s Sunny!”

  “Hello, Mimi,” said Tony. “The youngster, eh?” Brenner said genially. “I’ve heard about him.”

  With a brusque “Excuse me” to the drug manufacturer, Tony said to Anna in an undertone: “Rig the op table, sterilites on. Get out the portable biopsy constant-temperature bath and set the thermostat to Sunny’s blood temperature. And call me.”

  She nodded and went into the hospital with the baby. Tony dropped his bundle into his trunk and began to scrub up.

  “What’s been going on, Mimi?” he asked.

  “Mr. Brenner’s offered five million, five hundred thousand dollars for Sun Lake’s assets. I said the Council would put it in formal shape and call a vote.”

  The descent from his peak of inspiration was sickening. Nothing had changed, then, Tony thought.

  “Ready,” Anna said at his side. He followed her silently into the hospital, slipped into his gloves and said: “Sterilize the Byers curette, third extension, and lubricate. Sterilize a small oral speculum.” He spoke quietly. Graham was asleep in the bed across the room.

  Anna didn’t move. “Anesthesia?” she asked.

  “None. We don’t know their body-chemistry well enough.”

  “No, Tony. Please, no!”

  He felt only a chill determination that he was going to salvage some of the wreckage of Sun Lake, determination and more confidence than he knew he should feel. Anna turned, selected the instruments and slipped them into the sterilizer. The doctor stepped on the pedal that turned on the op lights.

  Anna put the speculum into his hand and he clamped open Sunny’s mouth. The prompt wail of protest turned to a strangled cry as the sinuous shaft of the Byers curette slid down the trachea into the left bronchus. One steady hand guided the instrument, while the other manipulated the controls from a bulb at its base.

  “Hold him,” Tony growled as Anna’s hands weakened and the woman swayed. Bronchus, bronchia, bronchile, probing and withdrawing at resistances—and there it was. A pressure on the central control that uncovered the razor-sharp little spoon at the tip of the flexible shaft and covered it again, and then all flexure controls off and out. It had taken less than five seconds, and one more to deposit the shred of lung tissue in the biopsy constant-temperature nutrient bath.

  Hank was at the door. Anna, leaning feebly against the table, straightened to tell him: “Go and lie down, Hank. It’s all right.”

  “Keep him away from me,” warned Graham from the bed. “He was going to jump me before.”

  “I just wanted to see the baby,” Hank said apologetically.

  Tony turned to the intercom, buzzing the Kandros’. “Come on over,” he told them. “You can have your baby back for keeps now. Is Gracey still there? Joe? I think I’ve got that tissue specimen for you. How fast can you get a test?”

  “For God’s sake, Tony, where did you get it?” Gracey was demanding on the other end.

  “From a Brownie.” He couldn’t resist it. “That’s what I said. Lung tissue of a Brownie.”

  He hung up.

  “A Brownie? It is true! There are Brownies, aren’t there?”

  Tony turned to find the Kandros standing by the examination table. Polly already had her baby in her arms.

  Jim patted her shoulder. “He doesn’t really mean it, Polly. Do you, Doc?”

  Graham was grinning openly. Tony turned from one to the other, not answering.

  There was a commotion in the living room and Brenner burst in, carrying a familiar box. “He just dived for it, Tony,” Mimi said. “He said it was . . .”

  “Careful!” said the doctor. “You’ll spray marcaine all over the place. Put it down, man!”

  BRENNER did, and unwrapped it with practiced precision. “My stuff, Doctor,” he said. “Think I don’t know my own crates? Mrs. Jonathan, my price for your assets has just dropped to two and one-half million. And I am now in a position to prosecute. I hope none of you will make difficulties.”

  Jim Kandro said, “I don’t know what this is all about, but we need that stuff for Sunny.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” the drug maker asked scornfully.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” said Kandro. “But he’s—different. And it makes sense. He doesn’t have to take OxEn, so he has to take something else. You better leave it for us, Mr. Brenner.”

  The drug maker looked at Jim wisely. “It’s okay, Mac,” he decided. “If you’ve got the habit and you can’t kick it, why don’t you come to work for me? I can use you. And you don’t have to take so much. The micron dust in the air takes your edge off—”

  “That’s not it,” said Kandro. “Why don’t you listen, to me? We need that stuff for Sunny. The doctor says so and he ought to know. It’s medicine, like vitamins. You wouldn’t keep vitamins from a little baby, would you?”

  Graham snickered.

  KANDRO turned and lectured angrily: “You stay out of this. There hasn’t been anything but trouble since you got here. Now you could at least keep from braying while a man’s trying to reason with somebody. You may be smart and a big writer, but you don’t have any manners at all if you can’t keep quiet at a time like this.”

  He turned to Brenner. “You know we don’t have any money here, or I’d offer you what we had. I guess the box is yours, and nobody has a claim to it except you. But Polly and me can get permission from the Council to go and work out whatever the box would cost. Couldn’t we, Tony? Mimi? The rest would let us, wouldn’t they?”

  “I’m sorry, Mac,” the drug maker said. “I wish I could make you understand, but if I can’t, that doesn’t matter. This box is going with me. It’s evidence in a crime.”

  “Mr. Brenner,” Jim Kandro said thickly, “I can’t let you out of here with that box. We need it for Sunny. I told you and told you. Now give it here.” He put out one huge hand.

  “How about it, Mrs. Jonathan?” Brenner seemed to be, ignoring the big man’s menacing advance. “Two and a half million? It’s a very reasonable price, all things considered. Your new father here would be glad to take it.”

  “I’ll take it, all right,” growled Jim. “Hand it over. Right now.” He was a scant four feet from the drug maker; Brenner’s eyes were still fixed mockingly on Mimi Jonathan.

  Kandro took one more step forward and Anna cried faintly: “No!”

  Brenner stepped back and there was a large pistol in his hand. “This,” he told them, “is fully automatic. It keeps firing as long as I hold the trigger down.
Now for the last time listen, all of you. I’m going, and I’m taking my box with me. If you try to stop me, I have a perfect right to use this gun. You know better than I do what fingerprints the authorities will find on the box. You’re caught red-handed and I won’t have any trouble proving it to my man Bell. If you people decide to be reasonable Instead, you better let me know—soon.”

  Mimi Jonathan said clearly: “So you’re going to throw us off Mars, Mr. Brenner?”

  “If necessary,” he said, not following.

  “You mean you’re going to kick us out and we’ll never see Mars again? And all the sacrifices we’ve made here will be a joke?”

  He didn’t get what she was driving at. “Yes,” he said irritably. “You’re quite right—”

  He was cut off by Hank, broken at last under the goading. The youngster sprang, raving, at Brenner, bowling him over as the pistol roared in a gush of bullets that ripped Hank’s body.

  And then there was a silence into which Sunny Kandro shrieked his fear and dismay. Mimi leaned against the wall and shut her eyes. She wanted to vomit. She heard Tony’s awed whisper: smashed his trachea . . . broke his neck . . . belly shot clean out . . .” She shuddered, and hoped and feared that she’d carry this guilt alone to the grave.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “COME on, Polly. You come out here.” Kandro led his wife, still carrying Sunny, out to the living room.

  Faces were peering through the hospital window and they heard Nick Cantrella shouting: “Let me through, damnit! Clear away from that door!” And he was in, latching the door from the street. He snapped the curtains shut with an angry yank. “What in God’s name happened? I was coming for that tissue culture and now this—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Graham drily and with effort from the bed. “Just a little useful murder. Hank Radcliff, hero of the Colony, gives his life to save the world from Big Bad Brenner—sweet Jesus!” he swore in awed delight. “What a story! ‘The Killing of Hugo Brenner’—an eye-witness account by Douglas Graham! Swee-eet Jesus! Didn’t Brenner know who I was?”

  Mimi started. ”I guess not,” she realized. “I never told him.”

  “You’re plenty beat up,” Tony pointed out. “He wouldn’t have recognized you. Hey, Nick, let’s get those bodies out of here.”

  “Beat up is right,” Graham chortled, “and it was worth it! Thank you, my friends, whichever one of you—or how many was it?—did that job on me. I thank you from the bottom of my poor old gunther’s heart. Just to be able to lie here and listen to all that!”

  ““I don’t know who did it last time.” Nick took one menacing step toward the bed. “But, by God, if you’re starting on another of your yams, I know who’s going to . . .”

  “Nick, wait a minute. You don’t know what he heard.”

  “Hey, Cantrella, I need a hand here.”

  “I know who did it.” Anna had to shout to make herself heard above Mimi and Tony, both talking at once. In the sudden silence, she said: “Didn’t I tell you, Tony? I guess it was while you were away that I found out. They did it. I think he was planning to hurt the baby. Or they thought he was.”

  “They?” the writer asked contemptuously. “Brownies again? You’re a good second-guesser, Miss Willendorf, but you missed out this time. The only designs I ever had on the Kandro kid were to get him back to Earth where he could be properly cared for—instead of getting marcaine dosed out to him to cover up for Mama.”

  LISTEN, you lying crimp.” Nick continued his arrested advance on Graham. “If you think you’re safe to turn out more of that kind of stuff just because you’re laid up in bed, you better start thinking all over again. I’ve got no compunctions about kicking a rat when he’s down.”

  “Nick! Stop it!” Swift and sure and deadly sharp, Mimi’s voice came across the room like a harpoon. “Give him a chance! You didn’t hear what he heard—what Brenner said. I don’t see how anybody could get a story against Sun Lake out of it.”

  “Thank you kindly, ma’m.” Graham grinned painfully. “Good to know somebody around here is still sane. Don’t tell me you go for this Brownie nonsense too!”

  “I—don’t know,” she said. “‘If I’d heard it from anybody but Tony and Anna, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. But they did get the baby back.”

  “Back from where?”

  Tony realized for the first time that Graham didn’t even know about Sunny’s kidnaping. And the others, for that matter, still didn’t know what had happened in the cave.

  “Listen,” he said. “If you’ll all take it easy for a few minutes, Anna and I have a lot to tell you. But first . . . Nick, help me move them to the living room floor. Anna, get blankets to cover them.”

  “Wait a minute.” She went into the living room. “All right,” she called back a moment later, and Tony and Nick together carried what was left of Hank through the door. “I wanted to get the Kandros out first,” Anna explained, locking the front door again.

  They laid out Brenner’s body next to Hank’s, and covered them both with blankets. The two men started back to the hospital, but Anna laid her hand on Tony’s arm to stop him.

  “Could I see you a minute?”

  “Of course.” He let Nick go ahead, then asked, worried, “Ansie, darling, what’s the matter?” She closed the door firmly between them and the others in the hospital.

  “Tony, we can’t tell them,” she said. “Not now.”

  “Why not? They’ve got to know.”

  “Don’t you see? We shouldn’t have talked as much as we did. We shouldn’t have said or done anything in front of Graham, but he doesn’t believe it yet. If we convince him—Tony, the Brownies are terrified of people. They’ve kept away from people all along. For a reason. Don’t you see?” she asked urgently. “Think what would happen to them. Think! I got just a flash from Graham’s mind when I said they did it, before he decided to be skeptical. It was brutal. They’d be exterminated . . .”

  He did see it. She was right. He thought of Hackenburg over at Pittco, and Brownies being worked in the mines—“native labor.” He thought of what an Earth power would give to have telepaths in its military intelligence. He thought of the horror and hatred people would feel for the “mind-reading monsters.” He thought of Brownies in zoos, on dissecting tables . . .

  HE thought of Sun Lake, still facing a charge of theft; of the difference it would make in Graham’s story if he knew it wasn’t Sun Lakers who attacked him. He thought of what the existence of the Brownies would mean to medical and biochemical research. And he made up his mind.

  Anna looked away with anger in her eyes, hopelessness in the set of her shoulders.

  “Why?” she begged. “They’re—oh, Tony, they’re decent! Not like most people.”

  “Because we know about them, that’s why. Because you can’t—you just can’t keep a secret like that. Because it means too much to men, to all men, to mankind, or whatever part of it survives the end of Earth. Ahna, Sun Lake may not be the answer to our future—the Brownies may be. Have you thought of that? They need us, they need to learn some of the things our civilization has to offer—and we need them. That piece of tissue I took from Sunny’s lungs may mean the end of dependence on Earth for OxEn, and that’s just one first thing. There’s no knowing how much we can learn, how they can help us to adapt, what new knowledge will come out of the contact. We can’t keep it to ourselves. That’s all there is to it.”

  “There’s no use arguing, is there?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he said as gently as he could. He opened the door. “Are you coming back?”

  She hesitated, then followed.

  ii

  “THAT’S it,” Tony wound up the narrative of their visit to the cave, and then repeated, this time to Graham: “That’s it. But I think you ought to know that Anna was trying to persuade me not to tell this story in front of you, to let you go on not believing in Brownies. She was afraid of what people would do to them once it became known.
I’m afraid too. What you write will have a lot to do with it.” He paused. “What are you going to write?”

  “I’m damned if I know!” Graham tried to lift his head, and decided against it. “It’s either the most ingenious yarn I’ve ever heard—it covers every single accusation against you people, from marcaine theft to mayhem on my person—or it’s the biggest story in the world. And I’m damned if I know which!”

  He relapsed into a thoughtful silence, broken suddenly by the roar of a large plane. An instant later there was the noise of a second, and then a third. One at a time they came closer, and died out.

  “That would be Bell.” Mimi stood up wearily. “I don’t mind saying I’m confused. What do we do now?”

  “He’s coming,” Tony reminded her, “to help Mr. Graham. Perhaps we should leave it up to our guest to tell the Commissioner whatever he sees fit.”

  The writer was silent, stony-faced.

  “There’s a slight matter of a couple of stiffs in the living room,” Nick reminded them. “The Commish might want to know about them. Strictly inter-colony stuff.”

  “You know,” Graham broke in suddenly, “if I was dumb enough to believe your story about Brownies—and if your little experiment with the kid’s lungs works—Sun Lake could get to be quite a place.”

  “How do you mean?” Gracey asked.

  “The way Mr. Brenner had it figured, your Lab is practically made to order for marcaine manufacture. And I gather you think you can turn out OxEn too, if that lung tissue is good. If there’s anything behind ail this Brownie talk—well, you’ve got a deal that looks worth a trillion. You can supply OxEn to all of Mars at what price? It wouldn’t cost you anything compared to Earth-import. . .”

  He looked around the circle of astonished faces.

  “Don’t tell me none of you even thought of that? Not even yon?” he appealed to Mimi.

  She shook her head. “That’s not the Sun Lake idea,” she said stiffly. “We wouldn’t be interested.”