Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Look here,” protested blackboard. “You’re supposed to be spreading utilitarian civilization, aren’t you? What’s utilitarian about leaving one of my crewmen here?”

  Alen ignored the childish argument and wrapped himself in angry silence. As to civilization, he wondered darkly whether such a trading voyage and his part in it was relevant at all. Were the slanders true? Was the College and Order simply a collection of dupes headed by cynical oldsters greedy for luxury and power?

  Such thoughts hadn’t crossed his mind in a long time. He’d been too busy to entertain them, cramming his head with languages, folkways, mores, customs, underlying patterns of culture, of hundreds of galactic peoples—and for what? So that this fellow could make a profit and the College and Order take a quarter of that profit. If civilization was to come to Lyra, it would have to come in the form of metal. If the Lyrans didn’t want metal, make them take it.

  What did Machiavelli say? “The chief foundations of all states are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well-armed, it follows that where they are well-armed, they have good laws.” It was odd that the teachers had slurred over such a seminal idea, emphasizing instead the spiritual integrity of the weaponless College and Order—or was it?

  The disenchantment he felt creeping over him was terrifying.

  “The castle,” said the watchman over his shoulder, and their wagon stopped with a rattle before a large but unimpressive brick structure of five stories.

  “You wait,” the trader told the driver after they got out. He handed him two of his fifty-credit bills. “You wait, you get many, many more money. You understand, wait?”

  “I wait plenty much,” shouted the driver delightedly. “I wait all night, all day. You wonderful master. You great, great master, I wait—”

  “All right,” growled the trader, shutting him off. “You wait.”

  The watchman took them through an entrance hall lit by hissing pressure lamps and casually guarded by a few liveried men with truncheons. He threw open the door of a medium-sized, well-lit room with a score of people in it, looked in, and uttered a despairing groan.

  A personage on a chair that looked like a throne said sharply, “Are those the star-travelers? Well, don’t just stand there. Bring them in!”

  “Yes, your honor, Judge Krarl,” said the watchman unhappily.

  “It’s the wrong judge!” Alen hissed at the trader. “This one gives out jail sentences!”

  “Do what you can,” said blackbeard grimly.

  The watchman guided them to the personage in the chair and indicated a couple of low stools, bowed to the chair and retired to stand at the back of the room.

  “Your honor,” said Alen, “I am Journeyman-Herald Alen, Herald for the trading voyage—”

  “Speak when you’re spoken to,” said the judge sharply. “Sir, with the usual insolence of wealth you have chosen to keep us waiting. I do not take this personally; it might have happened to Judge Treel, who—to your evident dismay—I am replacing because of a sudden illness, or to any other member of the bench. But as an insult to our justice, we cannot overlook it. Sir, consider yourself reprimanded. Take your seats. Watchman, bring in the Cephean.”

  “Sit down,” Alen murmured to the trader. “This is going to be bad.”

  A watchman brought in Chief Elwon, bleary-eyed, tousled and sporting a few bruises. He gave Alen and the trader a shamefaced grin as his guard sat him on a stool beside them. The trader glared back.

  Judge Krarl mumbled perfunctorily: “Let battle be joined among the several parties in this dispute let no man question our impartial awarding of the victory speak now if you yield instead to our judgment. Well? Speak up, you watchmen!”

  The watchman who had brought the Herald and the trader started and said from the back of the room: “I yield instead to your honor’s judgment.”

  Three other watchmen and a battered citizen, the wineshop keeper, mumbled in turn: “Iyieldinsteadtoyourhonorsjudgment.”

  “Herald, speak for the accused,” snapped the judge.

  Well, thought Alen, I can try. “Your Honor,” he said, “Chief Elwon’s master does not yield to your honor’s judgment. He is ready to battle the other parties in the dispute or their masters.”

  “What insolence is this?” screamed the judge, leaping from his throne. “The barbarous customs of other worlds do not prevail in this court! Who spoke of battle—?” He shut his mouth with a snap, evidently abruptly realizing that he had spoken of battle, in an archaic phrase that harked back to the origins of justice on the planet. The judge sat down again and told Alen, more calmly: “You have mistaken a mere formality. The offer was not made in earnest.” Obviously, he didn’t like the sound of that himself, but he proceeded, “Now say ‘Iyieldinsteadtoyourhonorsjudgment’, and we can get on with it. For your information, trial by combat has not been practiced for many generations on our enlightened planet.”

  Alen said politely: “Your Honor, I am a stranger to many of the ways of Lyra, but our excellent College and Order of Heralds instructed me well in the underlying principles of your law. I recall that one of your most revered legal maxims declares: “The highest crime against man is murder; the highest crime against man’s society is breach of promise.’ ”

  Purpling, the judge snarled: “Are you presuming to bandy law with me, you slippery-tongued foreigner? Are you presuming to accuse me of the high crime of breaking my promise? For your information, a promise consists of an offer to do, or refrain from doing, a thing in return for a consideration. There must be the five elements of promiser, promisee, offer, substance, and consideration.”

  “If you will forgive a foreigner,” said Alen, suddenly feeling the ground again under his feet, “I maintain that you offered the parties in the dispute your services in awarding the victory.”

  “An empty argument,” snorted the judge. “Just as an offer with substance from somebody to nobody for a consideration is no promise, or an offer without substance from somebody to somebody for a consideration is no promise, so my offer was no promise, for there was no consideration involved.”

  “Your honor, must the consideration be from the promissee to the promiser?”

  “Of course not. A third party may provide the consideration.”

  “Then I respectfully maintain that your offer was since a third party, the government, provided you considerations of salary and position in return for your services to the disputants.”

  “Watchmen, clear the room of disinterested people.” the judge hoarsely. While it was being done, Alen swiftly filled in the trader and Chief Elwon. Blackbeard grinned at the mention of a five-against-one battle royal, and the engineer looked alarmed.

  When the doors closed leaving the nine of them in privacy, the judge said bitterly: “Herald, where did you learn such devilish tricks?”

  Alen told him: “My College and Order instructed me well. A similar situation existed on a planet called England during an age known as the Victorious. Trial by combat had long been obsolete, there as here, but had never been declared so—there as here. A litigant won a hopeless lawsuit by publishing a challenge to his opponent and appearing at the appointed place in full armor. His opponent ignored the challenge and so lost the suit by default. The English dictator, one Disraeli, hastily summoned his parliament to abolish trial by combat.”

  “And so,” mused the judge, “I find myself accused in my own chamber of high crime if I do not permit you five to slash away at each other and decide who won.”

  The wineshop keeper began to blubber that he was a peaceable man and didn’t intend to be carved up by that black-bearded, bloodthirsty star-traveler. All he wanted was his money.

  “Silence!” snapped the judge. “Of course there will be no combat. Will you, shopkeeper, and you watchmen, withdraw if you receive satisfactory financial settlements?”

  They would.

  “Herald, you may dicker with them.”

  The four
watchmen stood fast by their demand for a hundred credits apiece, and got it. The terrified shopkeeper regained his balance and demanded a thousand. Alen explained that his black-bearded master from a rude and impetuous world might be unable to restrain his rage when he, Alen, interpreted the demand and, ignoring the consequences, might beat him, the shopkeeper, to a pulp. The asking price plunged to a reasonable five hundred, which was paid over. The shopkeeper got the judge’s permission to leave and backed out, bowing.

  “You see, trader,” Alen told blackbeard, “that it was needless to buy weapons when the spoken word—”

  “And now,” said the judge with a sneer, “we are easily out of that dilemma. Watchmen, arrest the three star-travelers and take them to the cages.”

  “Your honor!” cried Alen, outraged.

  “Money won’t get you out of this one. I charge you with treason.”

  “The charge is obsolete—” began the Herald hotly, but he broke off as he realized the vindictive strategy.

  “Yes, it is. And one of its obsolete provisions is that treason charges must be tried by the parliament at a regular session, which isn’t due for two hundred days. You’ll be freed and I may be reprimanded, but by my head, for two hundred days you’ll regret that you made a fool of me. Take them away.”

  “A trumped-up charge against us. Prison for two hundred days,” said Alen swiftly to the trader as the watchmen closed in.

  “Why buy weapons?” mocked the blackbeard, showing his teeth. His left arm whipped up and down, there was a black streak through the air—and the judge was pinned to his throne with a black glass knife through his throat and the sneer of triumph still on his lips.

  The trader, before the knife struck, had the clumsy pistol out, with the cover off the glowing match and the cocking piece back. He must have pumped and cocked it under his cloak, thought Alen numbly as he told the watchmen, without prompting: “Get back against the wall and turn around.” They did. They wanted to live, and the grinning blackbeard who had made meat of the judge with a flick of the arm was a terrifying figure.

  “Well done, Alen,” said the trader. “Take their clubs, Elwon. Two for you, two for the Herald. Alen, don’t argue! I had to kill the judge before he raised an alarm—nothing but death will silence his breed. You may have to kill too before we’re out of this. Take the clubs.” He passed the clumsy pistol to Chief Elwon and said: “Keep it on their backs. The thing that looks like a thumb-safety is a trigger. Put a dart through the first one who tries to make a break. Alen, tell the fellow on the end to turn around and come to me slowly.”

  Alen did. Blackbeard swiftly stripped him, tore and knotted his clothes into ropes and bound and gagged him. The others got the same treatment in less than ten minutes.

  The trader bolstered the gun and rolled the watchmen out of the line of sight from the door of the chamber. He recovered his knife and wiped it on the judge’s shirt. Alen had to help him prop the body behind the throne’s high back.

  “Hide those clubs,” blackbeard said. “Straight faces. Here we go.”

  They went out, single file, opening the door only enough to pass. Alen, last in line, told one of the liveried guards nearby: “His honor, Judge Krarl, does not wish to be disturbed.”

  “That’s news?” asked the tipstaff sardonically. He put his hand on the Herald’s arm. “Only yesterday he gimme a blast when I brought him a mug of water he asked me for himself. An outrageous interruption, he called me, and he asked for the water himself. What do you think of that?”

  “Terrible,” said Alen hastily. He broke away and caught up with the trader and the engineer at the entrance hall. Idlers and loungers were staring at them as they headed for the waiting wagon.

  “I wait!” the driver told them loudly. “I wait long, much. You pay more, more?”

  “We pay more,” said the trader. “You start.”

  The driver brought out a smoldering piece of punk, lit a pressure torch, lifted the barn-door section of the wagon’s floor to expose the pottery turbine and preheated it with the torch. He pumped squeakily for minutes, spinning a flywheel with his other hand, before the rotor began to turn on its own. Down went the hatch, up onto the seats went the passengers.

  “The spaceport,” said Alen. With a slate-pencil screech the driver engaged his planetary gear and they were off.

  Through it all, blackbeard had ignored frantic muttered questions from Chief Elwon, who had wanted nothing to do with murder, especially of a judge. “You sit up there,” growled the trader, “and every so often you look around and see if we’re being followed. Don’t alarm the driver. And if we get to the spaceport and blast off without any trouble, keep your story to yourself.” He settled down in the back seat with Alen and maintained a gloomy silence. The young Herald was too much in awe of this stranger, so suddenly competent in assorted forms of violence, to question him.

  They did get to the spaceport without trouble, and found the crew in the Customs shed, emptied of the gems by dealers with releases. They had built a fire for warmth.

  “We wish to leave immediately,” said the trader, to the port officer. “Can you change my Lyran currency?”

  The officers began to sputter apologetically that it was late and the vault was sealed for the night—

  “That’s all right. We’ll change it on Vega. It’ll get back to you. Call off your guards and unseal our ship.”

  They followed the port officer to Starsong’s dim bulk out on the field. The officer cracked the seal on her with his club in the light of a flaring pressure lamp held by one of the guards.

  Alen was sweating hard through it all. As they started across the field he had seen what looked like two closely spaced green stars low on the horizon towards town suddenly each jerk up and towards each other in minute arcs. The semaphore!

  The signal officer in the port administration building would be watching too—but nobody on the field, preoccupied with the routine of departure, seemed to have noticed.

  The lights nipped this way and that. Alen didn’t know the code and bitterly regretted the lack. After some twenty signals the lights flipped to the “rest” postion again as the port officer was droning out a set of take-off regulations: bearing, height above settled areas, permissible atomic fuels while in atmosphere—Alen saw somebody start across the field toward them from the administration building. The guards were leaning on their long, competent looking weapons.

  Alen inconspicuously detached himself from the group around Starsong and headed across the dark field to meet the approaching figure. Nearing it, he called out a low greeting in Lyran, using the noncom-to-officer military form.

  “Sergeant,” said the signal officer quietly, “go and draw off the men a few meters from the star-travelers. Tell them the ship mustn’t leave, that they’re to cover the foreigners and shoot if—”

  Alen stood dazedly over the limp body of the signal officer. And then he quickly hid the bludgeon again and strolled back to the ship, wondering whether he’d cracked the Lyran’s skull.

  The port was open by then and the crew filing in. He was last. “Close it fast,” he told the trader. “I had to—”

  “I saw you,” grunted blackbeard. “A semaphore message?” He was working as he spoke, and the metal port closed.

  “Astrogator and engineer, take over,” he told them.

  “All hands to their bunks,” ordered Astrogator Hufner. “Blast-off immediate.”

  Alen took to his cubicle and strapped himself hi. Blast-off deafened him, rattled his bones and made him thoroughly sick as usual. After what seemed like several wretched hours, they were definitely space-borne under smooth acceleration, and his nausea subsided.

  Blackbeard knocked, came in, and unbuckled him.

  “Ready to audit the books of the voyage?” asked the trader.

  “No,” said Alen feebly.

  “It can wait,” said the trader. “The books are the least important part, anyway. We have headed off a frightful war.”

/>   “War? We have?”

  “War between Eyolf’s Realm and Vega. It is the common gossip of chancellories and trade missions that both governments have cast longing eyes on Lyrane, that they have plans to penetrate its economy by supplying metals to the planet without metals—by force, if need be. Alen, we have removed the pretext by which Eyolf’s Realm and Vega would have attempted to snap up Lyrane and inevitably have come into conflict. Lyra is getting its metal now, and without imperialist entanglements.”

  “I saw none,” the Herald said blankly.

  “You wondered why I was in such haste to get off Lyra, and why I wouldn’t leave Elwon, there. It is because our Vegan gems were most unusual gems. I am not a technical man, but I understand they are actual gems which were treated to produce a certain effect at just about this time.”

  Blackbeard glanced at his wrist chronometer and said dreamily: “Lyra is getting metal. Wherever there is one of our gems, pottery is decomposing into its constituent aluminum, silicon, and oxygen. Fluxes and glazes are decomposing into calcium, zinc, barium, potassium, chromium, and iron. Buildings are crumbling, pants are dropping as ceramic belt-buckles disintegrate—”

  “It means chaos!” protested Alen.

  “It means civilization and peace. An ugly clash was in the making.” Blackboard paused and added deliberately: “Where neither their property nor their honor is touched, most men live content.”

  “ ‘The Prince’, Chapter 19. You are—”

  “There was another important purpose to the voyage,” said the trader, grinning. “You will be interested in this.” He handed Alen a document which, unfolded, had the seal of the College and Order at its head.

  Alen read in a daze: “Examiner 19 to the Rector—final clearance of Novice—”

  He lingered pridefully over the paragraph that described how he had “with coolness and great resource” foxed the battle cruiser of the Realm, “adapting himself readily in a delicate situation requiring not only physical courage but swift recall, evaluation and application of a minor planetary culture.”