Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

“I think they’re wonderful,” said the girl.

  Roald saw the spaceman go rigid with the effort not to turn and stare at her. He loved her and he was jealous.

  Roald told the story of the dolphins and said: “The price that the architect thought was too high was three hundred and sixty dollars.”

  Malone grunted. “Doesn’t seem unreasonable—if you set a high store on inspiration.”

  “I don’t know about inspiration,” the artist said evenly. “But I was awake for two days and two nights shoveling coal and adjusting drafts to fire that thing in my kiln.”

  The spaceman looked contemptuous. “I’ll take it,” he said. “Be something to talk about during those awkward pauses. Tell me, Halvorsen, how’s Lucy’s work? Do you think she ought to stick with it?”

  “Austin,” objected the girl, “don’t be so blunt. How can he possibly know after one day?”

  “She can’t draw yet,” the artist said cautiously. “It’s all coordination, you know—thousands of hours of practice, training your eye and hand to work together until you can put a line on paper where you want it. Lucy, if you’re really interested in it, you’ll learn to draw well. I don’t think any of the other students will. They’re in it because of boredom or snobbery, and they’ll stop before they have their eye-hand coordination.”

  “I am interested,” she said firmly.

  Malone’s determined restraint broke. “Damned right you are. In—” He recovered himself and demanded of Halvorsen: “I understand your, point about coordination. But thousands of hours when you can buy a camera? It’s absurd.”

  “I was talking about drawing, not art,” replied Halvorsen. “Drawing is putting a line on paper where you want it, I said.” He took a deep breath and hoped the great distinction wouldn’t sound ludicrous and trivial. “So let’s say that art is knowing how to put the line in the right place.”

  “Be practical. There isn’t any art. Not any more. I get around quite a bit and I never see anything but photos and S.P.G.s. A few heirlooms, yes, but nobody’s painting or carving any more.”

  “There’s some art, Malone. My students—a couple of them in the still-life class — are quite good. There are more across the country. Art for occupational therapy, or a hobby, or something to do with the hands. There’s trade in their work. They sell them to each other, they give them to their friends, they hang them on their walls. There are even some sculptors like that. Sculpture is prescribed by doctors. The occupational therapists say it’s even better than drawing and painting, so some of these people work in plasticene and soft stone, and some of them get to be good.”

  “Maybe so. I’m an engineer, Halvorsen. We glory in doing things the easy way. Doing things the easy way got me to Mars and Venus and it’s going to get me to Ganymede. You’re doing things the hard way, and your inefficiency has no place in this world. Look at you! You’ve lost a fingertip—some accident, I suppose.”

  “I never noticed—” said Lucy, and then let out a faint, “Oh!”

  Halvorsen curled the middle finger of his left hand into the palm, where he usually carried it to hide the missing first joint.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “An accident.”

  “Accidents are a sign of inadequate mastery of material and equipment,” said Malone sententiously. “While you stick to your methods and I stick to mine, you can’t compete with me.”

  His tone made it clear that he was talking about more than engineering.

  “Shall we go now, Lucy? Here’s my card, Halvorsen. Send those dolphins along and I’ll mail you a check.”

  IV

  THE artist walked the half-dozen blocks to Mr. Krehbeil’s place the next day. He found the old man in the basement shop of his fussy house, hunched over his bench with a powerful light overhead. He was trying to file a saw.

  “Mr. Krehbeil!” Halvorsen called over the shriek of metal.

  The carpenter turned around and peered with watery eyes. “I can’t see like I used to,” he said querulously. “I go over the same teeth on this damn saw, I skip teeth, I can’t see the light shine off it when I got one set. The glare.” He banged down his three-cornered file petulantly. “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “I need some crating stock. Anything. I’ll trade you a couple of my maple four-by-fours.”

  The old face became cunning. “And will you set my saw? My saws, I mean. It’s nothing to you—an hour’s work. You have the eyes.”

  Halvorsen said bitterly, “All right.” The old man had to drive his bargain, even though he might never use his saws again. And then the artist promptly repented of his bitterness, offering tip a quick prayer that his own failure to conform didn’t make him as much of a nuisance to the world as Krehbeil was.

  The carpenter was pleased as they went through his small stock of wood and chose boards to crate the dolphin relief. He was pleased enough to give Halvorsen coffee and cake before the artist buckled down to filing the saws.

  Over the kitchen table, Halvorsen tried to probe. “Things pretty slow now?”

  It would be hard to spoil Krehbeil’s day now. “People are always fools. They don’t know good hand work. Some day,” he said apocalyptically, “I laugh on the other side of my face when their foolish machine-buildings go falling down in a strong wind, all of them, all over the country. Even my boy—I used to beat him good, almost every day—he works a foolish concrete machine and his house should fall on his head like the rest.”

  Halvorsen knew it was Krehbeil’s son who supported him by mail, and changed the subject. “You get some cabinet work?”

  “Stupid women! What they call antiques—they don’t know Meissen, they don’t know Biedermeier. They bring me trash to repair sometimes. I make them pay; I swindle them good.”

  “I wonder if things would be different if there were anything left over in Europe . . .”

  “People will still be fools, Mr. Halvorsen,” said the carpenter positively. “Didn’t you say you were going to file those saws today?”

  So the artist spent two noisy hours filing before he carried his crating stock to the studio.

  LUCY was there. She had brought some things to eat. He dumped the lumber with a bang and demanded: “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “We get days off,” she said vaguely. “Austin thought he’d give me the cash for the terracotta and I could give it to you.”

  She held out an envelope while he studied her silently. The farce was beginning again. But this time he dreaded it.

  It would not be the first time that a lonesome, discontented girl chose to see him as a combination of romantic rebel and lost pup, with the consequences you’d expect.

  He knew from books, experience and Labuerre’s conversation in the old days that there was nothing novel about the comedy—that there had even been artists, lots of them, who had counted on endless repetitions of it for their livelihood.

  The girl drops in with groceries and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl admires this little thing or that after payday and buys it and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl brings her friends to take lessons or make little purchases and the artist is pleasantly surprised. The girl may be seduced by the artist or vice versa, which shortens the comedy, or they get married, which lengthens it somewhat.

  It had been three years since Halvorsen had last played out the farce with a manic-depressive divorcee from Elmira: three years during which he had crossed the mid-point between thirty and forty; three more years to get beaten down by being unwanted and working too much and eating too little.

  Also, he knew, he was in love with this girl.

  He took the envelope, counted three hundred and twenty dollars and crammed it into his pocket. “That was your idea,” he said. “Thanks. Now get out, will you? I’ve got work to do.”

  She stood there, shocked.

  “I said get out. I have work to do.”

  “Austin was right,” she told him miserably. “You don’t care how people feel. You jus
t want to get things out of them.”

  She ran from the studio, and Halvorsen fought with himself not to run after her.

  He walked slowly into his workship and studied his array of tools, though he paid little attention to his finished pieces. It would be nice to spend about half of this money on open-hearth steel rod and bar stock to forge into chisels; he thought he knew where he could get some—but she would be back, or he would break and go to her and be forgiven and the comedy would be played out, after all.

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  V

  AALESUND, on the Atlantic side of the Dourefeld mountains of Norway, was in the lee of the blasted continent. One more archeologist there made no difference, as long as he had the sense to recognize the propellor-like international signposts that said with their three blades, Radiation Hazard, and knew what every schoolboy knew about protective clothing and reading a personal Geiger counter.

  The car Halvorsen rented was for a brief trip over the mountains to study contaminated Oslo. Well-muffled, he could make it and back in a dozen hours and no harm done.

  But he took the car past Oslo, Wennersborg and Goteborg, along the Kattegat coast to Helsingborg, and abandoned it there, among the three-bladed polyglot signs, crossing to Denmark. Danes were as unlike Prussians as they could be, but their unfortunate little peninsula was a sprout off Prussia which radiocobalt dust couldn’t tell from the real thing. The three-bladed signs were most specific.

  With a long way to walk along the rubble-littered highways, he stripped off the impregnated coveralls and boots. He had long since shed the noisy counter and the uncomfortable gloves and mask.

  The silence was eerie as he limped into Copenhagen at noon. He didn’t know whether the radiation was getting to him or whether he was tired and hungry and no more. As though thinking of a stranger, he liked what he was doing.

  I’ll be my own audience, he thought. God knows I learned there isn’t any other, not any more. You have to know when to stop. Rodin, the dirty old, wonderful old man, knew that. He taught us not to slick it and polish it and smooth it until it looked like liquid instead of bronze and stone. Van Gogh was crazy as a loon, but he knew when to stop and varnish it, and he didn’t care if the paint looked like paint instead of looking like sunset clouds or moonbeams. Up in Hartford, Browne and Sharpe stop when they’ve got a turret lathe; they don’t put caryatids on it. I’ll stop while my life is a life, before it becomes a thing with distracting embellishments such as a wife who will come to despise me, a succession of gradually less worthwhile pieces that nobody will look at.

  Blame nobody, he told himself, lightheadedly.

  And then it was in front of him, terminating a vista of weeds and bomb rubble—Milles’ Orpheus Fountain.

  It took a man, he thought. Esthetikon circuits couldn’t do it. There was a gross mixture of styles, a calculated flaw that the esthetikon couldn’t be set to make. Orpheus and the souls were classic or later; the threeheaded dog was archaic. That was to tell you about the antiquity and invincibility of Hell, and that Cerberus knows Orpheus will never go back into life with his bride.

  There was the heroic, tragic central figure that looked mighty enough to battle with the gods, but battle wasn’t any good against the grinning, knowing, hateful three-headed dog it stood on. You don’t battle the pavement where you walk or the floor of the house you’re in; you can’t. So Orpheus, his face a mask of controlled and suffering fury, crashes a great chord from his lyre that moved trees and stones. Around him the naked souls in Hell start at the chord, each in its own way: the young lovers down in death; the mother down in death; the musician, deaf and down in death, straining to hear.

  Halvorsen, walking uncertainly toward the fountain, felt something break inside him, and a heaviness in his lungs. As he pitched forward among the weeds, he thought he heard the chord from the lyre and didn’t care that the three-headed dog was grinning its knowing, hateful grin down at him.

  VI

  WHEN Halvorsen awoke, he supposed he was in Hell. There were the young lovers, arms about each others’ waists, solemnly looking down at him, and the mother was placidly smoothing his brow. He stirred and felt his left arm fall heavily.

  “Ah,” said the mother, “you mustn’t.” He felt her pick up his limp arm and lay it across his chest. “Your poor finger!” she sighed. “Can you talk? What happened to it?”

  He could talk, weakly. “Labuerre and I,” he said. “We were moving a big block of marble with the crane—somehow the finger got under it. I didn’t notice until it was too late to shift my grip without the marble slipping and smashing on the floor.”

  The boy said in a solemn, adolescent croak: “You mean you saved the marble and lost your finger?”

  “Marble,” he muttered. “It’s so hard to get. Labuerre was so old.”

  The young lovers exchanged a glance and he slept again. He was half awake when the musician seized first one of his hands and then the other, jabbing them with stubby fingers and bending his lion’s head close to peer at the horny callouses left by chisel and mallet.

  “Ja, ja,” the musician kept saying.

  Hell goes on forever, so for an eternity he jolted and jarred, and for an eternity he heard bickering voices: “Why he was so foolish, then?”

  “A idiot he could be.”

  “Hush, let him rest.”

  “The children told the story.”

  “There only one Labuerre was.”

  “Easy with the tubing.”

  “Let him rest.”

  Daylight dazzled his eyes.

  “Why you were so foolish?” demanded a harsh voice. “The sister says I can talk to you now, so that is what I first want to know.”

  He looked at the face of—not the musician; that had been delirium. But it was a tough old face.

  “Ja, I am mean-looking; that is settled. What did you think you were doing without coveralls and way over your exposure time?”

  “I wanted to die,” said Halvorsen. There were tubes sticking in his arms.

  The crag-faced old man let out a contemptuous bellow.

  “Sister!” he shouted. “Pull the plasma tubes out before more we waste. He says he wants to die.”

  “Hush,” said the nurse. She laid her hand on his brow again.

  “Don’t bother with him, Sister,” the old man jeered. “He is a shrinking little flower, too delicate for the great, rough world. He has done nothing, he can do nothing, so he decides to make of himself a nuisance by dying.”

  “You lie,” said Halvorsen. “I worked. Good God, how I worked! Nobody wanted my work. They wanted me, to wear in their buttonholes like a flower. They were getting to me. Another year and I wouldn’t have been an artist any more.”

  “Ja?” asked the old man. “Tell me about it.”

  Halvorsen told him, sometimes weeping with self-pity and weakness, sometimes cursing the old-man for not letting him die, sometimes quietly describing this statuette or that portrait head, or raving wildly against the mad folly of the world.

  At the last he told the old man about Lucy.

  “You cannot have everything, you know,” said his listener.

  “I can have her,” answered the artist harshly. “You wouldn’t let me die, so I won’t die. I’ll go back and I’ll take her away from that fat-head Malone that she ought to marry. I’ll give her a couple of happy years working herself to skin and bones for me before she begins to hate it—before I begin to hate it.”

  “You can’t go back,” said the old man. “I’m Cerberus. You understand that? The girl is nothing. The society you come from is nothing. We have a place here . . . Sister, can he sit up?”

  The woman smiled and cranked his bed. Halvorsen saw through a picture window that he was in a mountain-rimmed valley that was very green and dotted with herds and unpainted houses.

  “Such a place there had to be,” said the old man. “In the whole geography of Europe, there had to be a Soltau Valley with winds and terrain
just right to deflect the dust.”

  “Nobody knows?” whispered the artist.

  “We prefer it that way. It’s impossible to get some things, but you would be surprised how little difference it makes to the young people. They are great travelers, the young people, in their sweaty coveralls with radiation meters. They think when they see the ruined cities that the people who lived in them must have been mad. It was a little travel party like that which found you. The boy was impressed by something you said, and I saw some interesting things in your hands. There isn’t much rock around here; we have fine deep topsoil. But the boys could get you stone.

  “There should be a statue of the Mayor for one thing, before I die. And from the Rathaus the wooden angels have mostly broken off. Soltau Valley used to be proud of them—could you make good copies? And of course cameras are useless and the best drawings we can do look funny. Could you teach the youngers at least to draw so faces look like faces and not behinds? And like you were saying about you and Labuerre, maybe one younger there will be so crazy that he will want to learn it all, so Soltau will always have an artist and sculptor for the necessary work. And you will find a Lucy or somebody better. I think better.”

  “Hush,” warned the nurse. “You’re exciting the patient.”

  “It’s all right,” said Halvorsen eagerly. “Thanks, but it’s really all right.”

  1952

  That Share of Glory

  A language is more than a pattern of words; it’s part and parcel of a vaster system of concomitant traditions and cultural beliefs. And being a Translator for a galaxy of planetary folk . . .

  Young Alen, one of a thousand in the huge refectory, ate absent-mindedly as the reader droned into the perfect silence of the hall. Today’s lesson happened to be a word-list of the Thetis VIII planet’s sea-going folk.

  “Tlon—a ship,” droned the reader.

  “Rtlo—some ships, number unknown.

  “Long’—some ships, number known, always modified by cardinal.