Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Proximity alarm,” said the voice in his helmet.

  “Message received,” he said automatically in Armsman style and smiled bitterly at himself.

  Cade kicked his way to the array of guns. Two he gummed to his thighs and two he clasped in his gauntlets: It was a grotesque situation. One man, one gun, it was supposed to be. But why? he demanded. Why not one man, two gun$; one man, four guns; one man, as many guns as he needs and can lay his hands on? He shoved off to a port and began a hand-overhand, spiderlike crawl from one quartz disk to the next, peering into the star-powdered blackness. The sun was astern of the flier; it would throw the rams into glaring relief. They wouldn’t be able to stalk the victim in its own shadow.

  There was a triple wink of light that became a blaze ripping past the ports. The rams had overshot in their first try at becoming part of the same physical system as their prey. They would return—

  Cade wondered whether there could be peace in the Mysteries from the confusions that plagued him, and recoiled from the thought. He knew them, at least, for what they were: traps for the johns and clink for the blades. Peace? Perhaps there was peace at Mistress Cannon’s where a man could wallow deep until not one ray of sunlight found him. At Cannon’s you could drink and drug while you had the greens, and then it was a simple matter to haunt dark streets until you found your nervous, late-going Commoner. And then you could drink and drug again where no ray of sunlight could find you. If firing from a flier was right, could a life at Cannon’s be wrong?

  The rams appeared ahead again and the flier seemed to gain and overtake them. Cade knew it was an illusory triumph; he was being bracketed. They were far astern now.

  What did he know and how did he know it? He knew the Order and the Klin Philosophy and the Realm of man had been created ten thousand years ago. He knew it because he had been told it by everybody. How did they know it? Because they had been told it by everybody. Cade’s mind floated, anchorless, like his body. He didn’t believe in jetters and bombles. That was for children. But he did believe in not firing from fliers. That was for Armsmen. Children and Armsmen had been told all about it.

  “I’ll take you to the Caves.

  “And the Beetu-nine will come to tear your fingers and toes off with white-hot knives of metal.

  “And the Beetu-five will come to pepper you with white-hot balls of metal.

  “And the Beefai-voh will come and grate your arms and legs with white-hot metal graters.

  “And last if you are not a good boy the Beethrie-six will come in the dark and will hunt you out though you run from Cave to Cave, screaming in the darkness. The Beethrie-six, which lumbers and grumbles, will breathe on you with its poison breath and that is the most horrible of all, for your bones will turn to water and you will burn forever”

  The three rams blazed past the open port again and seemed to hang in space far ahead of the flier. Their next “short” might do it.

  “. . . But oh, my pupils, there is worse yet to tell. This unfortunate young man who began by neglecting his Klin lessons did not end merely as a coward and thief. On reconnaissance flight he lost altitude and came under the fire of ground troops. I need not name the Thing he did; you can guess. Smitten by remorse after his unspeakable deed he properly took his life, but conceive, if you can, the shame of his Brothers—”

  “. . . Heartbroken, but it had to be done. I never knew he had a rotten spot in him, but I saw the paper myself. He ‘solved’ Tactics VII, if you please, with a smoke screen—sending a flier over the enemy’s left flank and having the Gunner set fire to the trees with a low-aperture blast of his gun, uh . . . from the, uh, from the air. It just shows you can’t be too careful—”

  “I receive this gun to use in such a way that my Emperor, my Gunner Supreme and my Brothers in the Order will never have cause to sorrow—”

  “They’re bunches in the square; we’ll have to blast them out with a frontal smash. Cade, take your flier over for an estimate of their strength. Leave your gun here; we know they’re low on charges and it wouldn’t do to have yours fall into their hands if you’re shot down.”

  The flier seemed to shoot past the rams again. The next time, velocities would match—

  No; it would never do for him to take his gun. He remembered soaring over the plaza, tacking and veering as flame squirted from the densely-massed troops below, busy with his counting. He dropped an imaginary grid over them, counted the number of men in one imaginary square and multiplied by the total number of imaginary squares as he shot back to the command post on the outskirts of the Rhineland village with his estimate and joined in the costly advance on foot.

  He had been told and he believed. How much else, he wondered as though a harsh light had suddenly been turned on, had he been told and believed against all common sense and reason?

  Bring on your rams!

  This time it was neither a short nor an over. Suddenly the three rams stood, less than a kilometer off, as though eerily frozen in space.

  They were smaller than Cade’s freighter and boasted a wealth of propulsion units, as against the freighter’s central main thrust tube and concentric ring of smaller steering tubes. He rejoiced as he saw conning bubbles rise simultaneously on the three craft just behind their ugly, solid anvil-beaks.

  A propulsion unit came into play on the outermost of the rams—the reserve. Red haze jetted from a midships tube precisely perpendicular to the main thrust and the ram drifted outward to double its distance from the flier. Its forward component remained unchanged; it neither fell behind nor drifted ahead.

  Aboard the two rams in action there must be relief at the flier’s failure to take evasive action; they would now be plotting the simplest of symmetrical double-collision courses. Presently one of the rams would jet “over” or “under” its quarry to stand out on the other side the same distance as its mate; simultaneously the rams would add equal and opposite lateral thrust in amount proportional to their distance from the flier, and the victim would be crushed between the two ugly anvil-beaks.

  Cade didn’t know what standard doctrine was for ramming distance, but he was content to improvise.

  Both rams showed red exhaust-mist. One was standing in closer; the other was moving “up” to hem the quarry in. Cade anchored himself at the lip of the open cargo lock; the conning bubble of the oncoming ram was sun-bright in his sights.

  The gun gushed energy for three seconds before it failed. Cade hurled it through the lock into space and snatched another from his right thigh.

  It was not needed. The conning blister was still there, but blackened and discolored. He couldn’t tell whether it had been pierced, but the ram issued uncertain gushes of red mist from one tube and then another, tacking and veering, and then flashed off at full thrust in what seemed to be the start of a turnaround curve.

  The other ram was still working itself painstakingly around the flier with conservative jets of exhaust. Cade, half-through the lock, emptied the full charge of the second gun and a third at his hull, and saw sunlit diamond flashes spraying through space—debris from exploding ports! The ram didn’t wait for more, and when Cade looked for the reserve draft it was gone.

  A good engagement, thought Cade. Presumably they wore spacesuits aboard the rams in action so he could claim no kills. The conning blister hadn’t shattered like the ports—perhaps because it had been extruded into space-cold for only a few seconds and the gun hadn’t tickled it hard enough to set up destructive strain. And the psychology of it was important, too. The terrifying novelty of a ship-to-ship firefight, of a gun being used from a flier—Cade laughed thunderously inside the helmet at himself, at the embarrassed entrance board examiner, at the Klin Teacher with his moral lesson, at Novice Lorca’s smoke screen, at the Oath of the Gun, at the Gunner Superior of France and his frontal smash.

  A small, tinny voice in his ears yelled: “Turn your volume down! Turn it down!”

  “I’m sorry, Lady,” he said chuckling. “Did you see how I
routed them? Now if you can find the space-cock I’ll be able to open the door.”

  She found it and bled control-compartment air into space until he could shove the door open, air-tight it again and start the control-compartment pressure building.

  XIX.

  He helped her take her helmet off and then she helped him. They stood looking at each other, waiting for adequate words. Her eyes dropped first, and Cade momentarily felt she was ashamed of the thing she had made him do, the faith she had shaken and then destroyed.

  But it made no difference now; the faith was destroyed—and for what? Cade stared long and hard at the Lady Jocelyn and a fresh torrent of laughter burst from him, the sound echoing and re-echoing in the vaulted compartment.

  It was so ludicrous. There she stood, feet hooked under a toe hold, a squat and misshapen figure no more womanly than the radars or the hulking compression pump. On top of the bulky mass of padding and metal and fabric the flaming, orange-red hair of the Lady of the Court was tangled and matted. Her face paint, never designed for beauty, was smudged and rubbed until she seemed a mocking distortion of the woman to whose beauty he had awakened a month ago in an underground center of intrigue.

  He did not answer the mute question in her eyes and she did not choose to put it into words. Instead she said quietly: “Help me with my suit, please.”

  Cade, suddenly sobered, showed her how to unseal the members and stow them in the locker. And then, though he had thought himself past being shocked by the woman, she took him by surprise again. As though she were a Commoner domestic she said: “I’ll fix us something to eat. Is pressure up in the cargo room?”

  He checked the gauge and spun the door open for her. “Don’t come in for a few minutes,” she said. “I’ll be changing my clothes and washing up.” Cade spent half an hour getting out of his own suit, minutely inspecting it and stowing it away, and performed as many other jobs as he could find. There were not many. At last, cautiously, he hauled himself through the cargo room to the third compartment aft, the living quarters. Its door stood open and he went in.

  “Oh, there you are. I was going to call you.” She was at the tiny cooker, and two valved bottles of mash were beginning to gush steam. “There’s a table and benches,” she said, and he clicked them out of the wall, staring.

  She had washed up. The soiled Court mask was scrubbed away and the perfection of her face was a renewed surprise. Her hair was bound with a cloth as if it were still damp from washing—he hoped the hair-dye had washed out. And instead of her sagging orange robe she wore a fresh set of mechanic’s coveralls. The sleeves and legs were rolled and the belt pulled tight to her waist. She looked trim—and tempting. How did a man—a man not in the Order—go about telling a woman that she was beautiful?

  “You’ve time to wash,” she said pointedly.

  “Of course, thanks,” he said, and kicked over to the vapor chamber and thrust his head and hands in to be scrubbed by the swirling, warm mist and dried by the air blast. Turning to the table he realized with sudden alarm that he was expected to sit across it from her.

  “Excuse me,” he said, found a coverall for himself, and fled to the control room to change and pull himself together. To sit across the table from her and look at her while he ate! He told himself it was a first step. The sooner he unlearned his role of Gunner the simpler life would be. The mash would help. There was no sundown in space, but his stomach knew the time—mid-afternoon—and he was sure it wouldn’t accept meat food for two hours. The coveralls helped, too. He was glad to rid himself at last of the Commoner’s best-suit he had bought at Cannon’s with stolen money. Coveralls were a far cry from boots and cloak, but he had worn them in his Novice years.

  Eating was easier than he had. expected. There were thigh straps on the benches and the table had a gummy top. It was an illusion of gravity at a time when the digestive system could use such assistance. The girl didn’t speak as they solemnly chewed their mash, sucked water from their bottles and fished carefully through the trap of the jar for chunks of fruit that had carefully dehydrated crusts but were juicy inside.

  At last Cade said: “Tell me more.” “More about what?” she asked coolly. He knew she knew what he meant.

  “You know what. ‘History,’ for instance. Or, more to the point, what cargo we are carrying and to whom?” He had not forgotten, even while fighting off the rams, the locked cabinets and sealed crates.

  “There’s nothing more to tell.”

  “You said before take-off that the ship had been waiting six years.”

  “It was nothing. Forget about it.”

  “So you’re a liar, too?” he asked hotly. Anger is a peril. The thought came unsummoned and he pushed it away; the direful warnings of Armsmen’s-training no longer bound him. “What other accomplishments does the Emperor’s niece have?” he demanded. “I’ve seen you as traitor and spy. Thief, too? Is the flier yours? Or is it just something you decided to make use of—like me?”

  “Get out of here!” Her face was white and tense with rage. “Get—out—of—here,” she repeated through clenched teeth.

  Cade unbuckled the thigh straps and rose slowly, holding the table. He had been used long enough, by Stars and the Order and by her, at the risk of his life. Things were going to go his way for a change. “Do you really think you can get out of answering like this?” he said coldly. He looked down at the girl’s trembling shoulders and, thinking of Mistress Cannon who had taught him how, he forced a smile.

  She was silent, lips compressed to choke back the words she might regret, eyes flashing the fury she was trying to control.

  “It’s not that easy,” he said. “Even a Gunner can learn the facts of life, eventually. You’ve done everything you could to destroy the meaning of my vows. What makes you think you can still count on the behavior they imposed?” She was rigidly holding onto herself, but he knew she couldn’t keep it up.

  “Have you forgotten that I spent three weeks out in the world without you, learning things you never taught me? I saw another woman like you. You don’t imagine you’re the only one being used by an ambitious traitor? I don’t know who your master

  is, but I know hers. The Lady Moia—”

  “Get out of here!” she screamed. “Get out! Now!” Tears streamed down her face as she freed herself and stood, but she was not sobbing.

  “No.” He pulled himself a “step” closer to her around the small table. “Not until you answer me. You may be content to serve your own master, but I tell you that I am tired of being used. For thirteen years the Order used me as it pleased. And then I ‘died’—since when the Cairo people tried to use me as a murderer. Their chosen victim, the Power Master, tried to use me in the same way against the Star of Mars. I’ve had enough! Understand that!”

  He stopped, realizing that his impassioned tirade had given her time to gather her own control. “You saved me twice,” he said more quietly, “when others tried to use me. Why? To fly this ship? What for? Whose cargo are we carrying? What’s in it? What are you?”

  He hadn’t been watching for it; he had looked for collapse instead.

  Her hand stung as it whipped across his cheek. He seized her arms as she floundered from the floor; they drifted together against a bulkhead. “Answer me!” he said sharply. She was crying now, sobbing in an agony of frustration and defeat. He felt her tense body relax, completely beaten.

  She would fight no more. He knew he could release her and she would tell him what he wanted to know. He meant to release her; he started to. But in some way he did not understand her face was close to his, turned up, suddenly startled and questioning.

  He had never done it before. But his face bent down and for a long time, a timeless moment his lips were on hers.

  She pulled away at last, and he held fast to a grabiron, oblivious to everything except the surging new sensations in him. This was how a man, an ordinary man, felt about a woman. This was what had been denied him all his life. This was what the
Power Master had ruthlessly described in words. This was what brought the Gunner Supreme scurrying from planetary and Realm affairs to the side of the Lady Moia. This was what Jana had offered him at Cannon’s. And none of them could understand that it was a thing without meaning to him—until now.

  He looked up at her, standing across the room from him now, and made another discovery. She was quite helpless against him.

  He had kissed her, but that was not all. She had kissed him, and a whole new world had been in it.

  “Jocelyn,” he said quietly. He could taste the word in his mouth. It was a plea and a caress.

  She said coldly, “I thought that this at least I would be spared from you. I will tell you as much as I can and then ask you to leave me alone.”

  “Jocelyn,” he said again. She ignored it.

  “I was a spy in the Cairo Mystery,” she said bitterly. “You benefited thereby, if you recall. Believe what you like, but I am not a thief. I serve the Realm of Man. As for the cargo, it does not concern you, and I would be a traitor for the first time if I told you more than that. Now will you go?”

  “If you wish.” There was nothing more to learn, and much that he had learned undoubtedly needed thinking over.

  He left the room then and did not try to speak to her again that day. She slept in the cabin aft and he tried to sleep on the acceleration couch in the control room while thoughts tormented him.

  Thinking was no help. He was bound to her, whatever she was, whatever game she played. But no matter how he turned and twisted each new fact, he saw nothing but a reasonless and chaotic conflict. She served the Realm of Man? So claimed the Power Master, offhand killer and father of lies that he was. So doubtless also claimed the weakling Emperor, the rebellious Stars, the treacherous Gunner Supreme.