Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  It was too frightening. He recoiled from the brink of such thoughts. They had no business in his head, curse them! He was a Gunner and he knew how to be a Gunner. He tried to think shop-talk, the best kind of talk there is. What kind of duty you had here, how long a tour they gave you, whether there was ever a chance of action or whether it was all ceremony and errands.

  Think about the Cave that is not a Cave—a curious place. It made you nervous to think that you had been in a Cave and that it had just been a corridor, without limbering, grumbling beasts prowling its dark lengths. This Building of Fives—had it been created ten thousand years ago like the Caves of Washington, building-half and all? Or had there first been the Caves and then the building built against it? What was wrong with him? He’d have to go to a corrective Teacher if this went on! Was this whirling, churning confusion what lunacy was like?

  He crawled into his sleepbag. That at least was good. Some six thousand daily repetitions had formed a powerful habit-pattern. Gratefully he let some of the brief meditations drift soothingly into his mind and across it, ironing out the perplexities. And tomorrow he’d have a proper uniform again. Undersuit, shirt, hose, boots—where the Emperor wills—cape, helmet . . . Cade was asleep in the empty loft.

  He dreamed of the Gunner Supreme threatening the Lady Moia with a gun, and the Lady Moia turned into the girl of the Cairo Mystery. He tried to explain respectfully to the Supreme that it wasn’t the Lady Moia any more and that he had no business shooting her. “Cade!” the girl called faintly. “Cade! Cade!”

  The Gunner sat up abruptly. That call was no dream. He ripped open the quick release of his sleepbag and peered through the window into the courtyard. Four figures were dark against the concrete, one of them smaller than the others.

  There was some sort of flurry down there and he saw the smaller figure in full, no longer foreshortened. Somebody had fallen or been knocked down. Fledwick!

  Fled wick got up, expostulating and waving something white, and was knocked down again. He struggled to his feet and held out the white thing with a desperate, pleading gesture, not only in the arm but in every curve of his small, expressive body.

  Cade needed no more interpretation of the scene below. It was all there in the little thief’s offer of the paper. Cade knew the white scrap was the pardon, written and sealed by the Gunner Supreme. And he saw one of the three other men snatch it impatiently from Fledwick and tear it across.

  As if he were remembering the scene instead of seeing it enacted, Cade stood helpless at his window, waiting. He saw Fledwick shoved against a blank wall and saw the other three draw guns. He saw the partner of his five-day march burned down by three guns of the Order, fired simultaneously at low aperture. And last he saw the three remaining figures separate, two to a door in the inner ring, one to a door down below in the building where he himself stood watching.

  He was sick, then and there, and after the spasm passed he saw that it was murder—with guns of the Order, wielded by Armsmen at the command of the Gunner Supreme, after

  Arle himself had lyingly granted and sealed a pardon.

  This was no secret in which he’d be initiated; this was no test of courage or belief. This was lies, treachery and murder at the command of the Order incarnate, the Gunner Supreme.

  The door to the loft opened silently and a figure slipped without noise across the floor to Cade’s inflated sleeping bag.

  “Were you looking for me, Brother?”

  The assassin heard the harsh whisper and spun to face the window, gun in hand. He was burned down before he realized his intended victim was not asleep.

  Cade’s thoughts were crystal-clear and cold. His burned body had been found once before in Sarralbe; it would be found again to buy him precious time until the assassin-Armsman was found missing. He rolled the charred body into the sleepbag he had occupied and burned the flimsy fabric to a cinder with a noiseless discharge at minimum aperture. Presumably anybody within earshot had been alerted for the crash of one lethal blast, but not two.

  Cade donned his medley of Commoner’s garb and ill-fitting uniform and slipped out the way he had been led, through empty corridors, down empty ramps. The wing seemed to be deserted, and he wondered if it was because it held the apartment of the Lady Moia or because it was where murder was done.

  The lock on the inner door to the Lady’s apartment was radionic. Cade solved it quickly and slipped through to the cushioned outer chamber. The room was dimly night-lit, still fragrant with the smoke of the golden pipes and the subtler scent that the Lady wore herself. He saw the glitter of golden trinkets on the table—boxes, pipes, things whose use he couldn’t guess at—and realized that he had not yet plumbed the depths of the impossible. He was about to become a thief.

  He did not know where he was going or how he would get there, but clearly the Houses of the Order were barred to him. For the first time in his life he would need money. Gold, he remembered from childhood, could be exchanged for money, or directly for goods. He reached for the glittering display and filled all his pockets. The sum of trifling metal objects made a surprising weight.

  There was a third door to the room, and it stood ajar. He tiptoed across the floor and peered through to the Lady Moia’s bedroom. She was alone, asleep, and Cade felt an odd relief, about what he did not know. The beautiful dark head stirred on the white pillow, and he drew back. Unskillfully he worked the mechanical latch of the door to the Cave, nervous at each scratching, clicking sound it made. But in the room beyond the Lady slept on, and at last the door swung open.

  When he had come in with Fledwick, fleeing through dark corridors at midnight, his terrain-wise eyes had automatically measured and his brain recorded every turn and distance. He was able to retrace his steps and find the Cave opening in a matter of minutes.

  The ceremonious patrol was not yet changed. He saw, crossing the Cave-mouth at intervals, a new man instead of the Mars-born Gunner whose cloak was now on Cade’s back, but Arle’s promise to the frightened Lady had otherwise not been acted on. Clearly, the Gunner Supreme had every confidence in his assassins. Cade stood within the shadow of the Cave-mouth and watched the Gunners on their sentry-go, silhouetted by starlight and arc light as they met and marched and met again.

  The fools! he thought, and then remembered what a prince of fools he was himself, and had been since the day of his decision in his sixth year—until less than an hour ago.

  Leaving the Cave-mouth was infinitely easier than entering. This time he knew what waited on the other side—nothing but acres of high grass in which a man could hide forever. A man. The thought had come that way, unbidden: a man, he had thought; not a Gunner.

  Cade was only one more shadow between the sputtering lights, a streaking shadow that the routine-fuddled minds of the sentries never saw. Safe in the tall grass, he lay still for long minutes, until he was certain there had been no alarm. Then, cautiously, he began to inch along, at last, over a decent rise of ground, he rose and walked, heading for the river.

  Soon, very soon, he would have to decide where he was going and what he would do. But not now. The shock of the murder and what it meant was too fresh. For now, he knew that Aberdeen and Baltimore were to the north. He was at the Potomac River again in a matter of minutes, but he could not cross by swimming, or even with the aid of water wings like the pair he had made for Fled wick only yesterday. The gold would have weighed him down, and he was stubbornly determined not to abandon it.

  He trudged on along the southern bank of the river looking for a log big enough to float him and small enough to steer, or for an unguarded bridge. The first dawn light was creeping into the sky when he heard angry voices over the brow of a knoll. Cade dropped and crawled through the rank grass to listen.

  “Easy with it, curse you!”

  “You can do better? Do it and shut your mouth!”

  “You shut your own mouth. Yell like that and we’ll both wind up in the crock on a sump tap.”

  “I can do
a sump tap standing on one foot.”

  “I hope you have to some day, curse you, if I’m not in on it. I got better things to do with my time than standing on one foot in the crock for two years.”

  “Just go easy on the smokers is all Tasked—”

  Phrases were familiar. “Standing on one foot”—“through a tap in a crock” meant “serving a short prison term with ease.” That much he had learned from Fledwick. The talkers were criminals—like him. Cade stood up and saw two Commoners in the hollow below, loading a small raft with flat boxes.

  It was a moment before they realized that they were not alone. They saw him on the knoll and stood paralyzed while he strode down on them.

  “What’re you up to?” he demanded.

  “Sir, we’re . . . we’re—” stammered one. The other had sharper eyes. “Hey!” he said coldly, after studying Cade for a moment. “What is this . . . the shake? You’re no Armsman.”

  “It’s not the shake,” Cade said. Another one from Fledwick.

  “Well, what is it? A man doesn’t take a chance on twenty years for nothing. You’re in half a uniform and even that doesn’t fit. And the gun’s a fake if ever I saw one,” the Commoner pronounced proudly.

  The other was disgusted. “Me falling for a phony uniform and a fake gun! On your way, big fellow. I don’t want to know you before you get crocked for twenty.”

  “I want a ride on your raft. I can pay.” Cade took a gold smoking-pipe box from a pocket. He was about to ask: “Is that enough?” but he saw from their faces that it was, and more. “I also want some Commoner’s clothes,” he added, and then cursed himself for the betraying “Commoner’s”—but they didn’t notice.

  “Sure,” said the man who couldn’t be taken in by a fake gun. “We can take you across. But I don’t know about clothes.”

  “I can fix that,” the other one said hastily. “You’re about my size. I’ll be glad to sell what I’m wearing. Of course I ought to get something extra for selling you the blouse off my back—?”

  Cade hefted the box. There seemed to be a lot of gold in it, but how much gold was a suit of clothes?

  The man took his silence as refusal. “All right,” he said, and stripped down to his undersuit. He wasn’t nearly as big as Cade, but his clothes were baggy enough to cover him. As Cade methodically transferred his plunder from one set of garments to the other, their eyes bulged.

  “You better bury your toy,” one of them warned. “A fake gun’s the same as impersonating.”

  “I’ll keep it,” said Cade, dropping the skirt of his tunic over the gun. “Now get me across.”

  Watching the last gold ornament disappear, the unbluffable Commoner said tentatively: “We have some more transportation.”

  “Hey,” said the other.

  “Oh, shut your mouth. Can’t you tell when a gaff’s on the scramble?” So, Cade reflected, he was a gaff on the scramble, who needed transportation. “What have you got?” he asked.

  “Well, my rog, we’re on the distribution end for a smoker works. To a gaff that won’t sound like much, but a sump tap is a tap same as for gaffing. We get them from . . . from the manufacturer and put them across the river. A ground car picks them up there. The driver could—”

  “For two gawdies like that last one,” his partner interrupted determinedly, “we’ll take you to the driver, vouch for you and tell him to drop you off anywhere along his route.”

  “One gawdy,” said Cade, wondering what a smoker was.

  “Done,” the friendlier one said promptly. Cade fished for and handed over a box about like the last one. The Commoner caressed it and said: “Let’s have a smoker each on the bargain. They’ll never miss it.” Without waiting for an answer fie opened one of the flat boxes on the raft and took three pellets from it. The two Commoners dropped theirs into aluminum tubes, lit up and puffed, and Cade realized at last that smokers went into smoking pipes like those fancied by the Lady Moia.

  “Thanks,” he said, dropping his pellet into a pocket. “I’ll save mine.” They gave him a disgusted look and didn’t answer. He realized he had made a more-or-less serious blunder. There were fit and unfit things among Commoners too, and’ he didn’t know how many more unfit things he could get away with.

  The pellets lasted only a minute or so, leaving the men relaxed and gently talkative while Cade strained his ears and wits for usable information.

  “I smoke too much,” one of them said regretfully. “I suppose it’s the temptation from handling the stuff.”

  “It doesn’t do you any harm.”

  “I don’t feel right about it. Shoving the stuff’s a living, but if the Emperor says we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t.”

  “What’s the Emperor got to do with it?”

  “Well, the first Emperor must have made the sump tables about what you can do and what you can’t do.”

  “Oh, no. The first Emperor and the sump tables were made at the same time. Ask any Teacher.”

  “You better ask a Teacher yourself . . . but even if the first Emperor and the sumpf tables did get made at the same time, I wouldn’t feel right about it.”

  “That’s what I told my girl. With her it’s buy me this and buy me that, and now she wants a sheer dress from a sump shop and I told her even if she got it she couldn’t wear it where anybody would see her and even if she wore it in private she wouldn’t feel right about it.”

  “Women,” said the other one, shaking his head. “The sump tables are a fine thing for them. Otherwise they’d all be going around like star-bornes and you wouldn’t have a green in your nick—There’s the car. Let’s get across.”

  Cade had seen the blink of lights across the bank. The raft shoved off with Cade sitting on the cases, one man poling and the other, in his underwear, hanging onto the edge. Parked on a highway that paralleled the river bank for a kilometer was a large passenger car of nondescript color and peculiarly dirty identification numbers.

  “Who’s that?” demanded the driver, joining them. He was a big man run to fat, and had a section of three-centimeter bronze pipe in his fist.

  “Gaff on the scramble. A real rog. We said you might drop him along the route.”

  “Would, not might” Cade said.

  “Got troubles enough,” said the driver. “Scramble on, duff.” Duff was obviously a ripe insult. The driver hefted his bronze pipe hopefully. Cade sighed and flattened him with a medium-hard left into his belly. To the others he said: “Look, you . . . you duffs. Give me back one of those boxes. And if you make any trouble I’ll take them both back.”

  They conferred by glances and handed one of the boxes over. Cade showed it to the driver, who was sitting up and shaking his head dazedly. “This is for you if you drop me off where I want.”

  “Sure, rog,” the driver said agreeably, “but I can’t go off my route, you understand. I can’t lose my job for a little extra clink. I got Georgetown, Berwyl, Sandy Spring, Ellicott, Woodstock, Aberdeen, Phoenix, Bel Air, Darlington—”

  “Aberdeen,” said Cade.

  “Sure thing. Now if you’ll wait while we load—”

  The fiat boxes of smokers went into a surprising variety of places in the car—under the seats, inside the cushions, behind removable panels.

  Cade watched and wondered why he had chosen Aberdeen, trying to deny that he had chosen it because of the girl. And after a minute he stopped trying. He had to begin somewhere, and she knew something—more than he did. With Fledwick murdered she remained the only person who had not betrayed him at any time since he plunged into the month-long nightmare of conspiracy and disillusion. Besides, he assured himself, it was sound doctrine. The last place they would expect him to go would be the one place he’d been caught before.

  Still musing, he sat beside the driver. “Where in Aberdeen?” the man asked when they were on the road.

  “You know Mistress Cannon’s?”

  “Yuh. I deliver there,” said the driver, with obvious disapproval.

 
; Cade risked asking: “What’s the matter with the place?” It might be a nest of spies.

  “Nothing. The old woman’s all right. I don’t care what kind of a dive you go to. I said I’d take you and I will.”

  Thirteen years of conditioning do not vanish overnight. Cade was guilty and defensive: “I’m looking for somebody. A girl.”

  “What else? You don’t have to tell me about it. I’ll take you there, I said. Myself, I’m a family man. I don’t go to lectory every day like some people, but I know what’s fitting and what isn’t.”

  “You’re running smokers!” Cade said indignantly.

  “I don’t have to feel good about it and maybe I don’t. I don’t smoke myself. It’s not my fault if a lot of ignorant duffs that got born Common can’t rest without smoking like a Star and his court. Say ‘The Emperor wouldn’t like it’ and they pull a long face and say ‘Oh, it can’t matter much and I’ll give twice as much to the lectory and the Emperor’ll like that, won’t he?’ Fools!”

  Cade feebly agreed and the conversation died. As the moralistic evader of the sumptuary laws covered his route, Cade let himself doze off. He knew a man who would keep a bargain once it was made.

  XII.

  At each start and stop Cade half-opened an eye and went back to sleep again. But finally the driver shook his shoulder.

  Cade woke with a start. Through the window across three feet of sun-splashed, dirty paving he could see stone steps leading down to a heavy door. Ahead another set of steps led up to another hypothetical door out of his vision.

  They were in a narrow alley, barely wide enough for the slightly-oversized car. On either side continuous walls of soot-dusted cement rose to a height of three or four stories above the ground. There were no windows, no clearly marked building lines, nothing to mark the one spot from another but dirt and scars on the aging concrete, and the indentations of steps at regular intervals along both sides.