Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Follow me!”

  And they followed eagerly as he led them left, well down on the reverse slope of the hills. They worked the ragged terrain with style, arranging themselves into units of three—the useful skirmishers’ triangle, from which any fighter can rush to take ground under the covering fire of the other two. Was this, Cade wondered wearily, what he had given his life to? This bag of tricks that a crowd of fanatical farmers discovered for themselves at the cost of a few lives? He dropped beneath the blast of an Armsman from a shadowing crag, and did no more philosophizing. When the crag had been undercut and toppled on the Brother, there was a new blast to face, and another, and still another.

  Then they were back on the ridge of the hills and found they had taken a command post and its equipment. Some of the Marsmen paused to marvel at the radionic mast and mappers and communicator.

  “Keep moving, curse you!” Cade raved at them. “Keep moving and keep firing!”

  He lashed them on over the mound of dead CP Armsmen and into a blazing linked fire from a dozen wind-carved pockets in the rock. They had learned well. The Marsmen rushed from one eroded spire to the next at the cost of a dozen lives they secured flanking positions. A withering enfilade fire wiped out the defending Armsmen in seconds.

  He cursed them forward, and the next fire they met was scattered, rearguard stuff—three men trying to fire like thirty. It was the retreat he had, half-crazily, hoped for: not a flight but a consolidation of forces. The Armsmen would be grouped soon in one mass capable of putting out an interlaced ring of fire. In spite of his green troops’ astonishing performance so far, Cade bitterly knew he could not pit them against any such formation.

  The mast of another CP was in their newly-won territory by the time they had mopped up the rear guard. He shouted a cease-fire and led his men straight over the rim of the hills instead of working along the reverse slope for cover. He wanted to waste no precious time while there were Armsmen to be killed. They dispatched a communications man, still sending; otherwise the CP had been abandoned. Cade eagerly took his binoculars and studied the work of Tucker’s men, to the right. They were strung out more than they ought to be, but one CP had fallen and another was under attack. Signs of retreat were clear on Tucker’s front also.

  A sudden ferocious flurry of blasts ten meters from him sent Cade sprawling into dead ground.

  “What kind of cursed scouts do you call your cursed selves?” he raved at his men. “When I said kill them I meant kill them! Let’s clean up this cursed ground!”

  They grinned at him like wolves and followed in a wild surge that broke through the thin rear-guard screen and clawed with fire into a regrouped main guard. “Feint at us, will they?” he yelled, only half-hearing himself in the roar of blasters at full aperture. Before the butchery was over his Marsmen had lost heavily and another CP was in their hands. The Armsmen’s retreat this time was no feint.

  He sent forward scouts to harry the Armsmen. From the captured CP he studied neatly-ranked recon fliers, two hundred meters from the reverse slopes of the circling hills. And something incredible was happening. The antlike figures of Armsmen were making for the fliers. They weren’t going to stand and fight. They were racing for their fliers.

  “Fire on them!” yelled Cade. “Pass the word to fire!” There would be no hits except an occasional accident, but it would let the Armsmen know he was there.

  A few of the antlike figures knelt and returned blasts, fearing a rush.

  Tucker was there. “You told me,” the lean-faced man panted, “to report, but I couldn’t get away—”

  Cade didn’t rebuke him, and Tucker ventured a note of triumph: “Gunner, we got their headquarters! That stopped them, didn’t it?”

  “It shouldn’t,” Cade said—and then realized the full extent of what had happened. Laughter burst from his lips. “Yes,” he said, “that stopped them.” Even with his words they heard the first of the fliers blast off at maximum. A moment later there was another.

  Cade followed his second in command across the now-secure inner plain to inspect the headquarters CP for himself. The roar of his snipers’ guns mingled with jets on takeoff was sweet to his ears.

  Eagerly he examined the remains of the CP the Marsman had taken, and there was no mistake possible. It was a well-selected position, as good a headquarters as the terrain could’ offer. It commanded a good escape route down the reverse slope to the fliers and a good three-hundred-sixty-degree field of fire and observation. But the fury of five hundred Marsmen had overwhelmed the strategic knowledge of ten thousand years. The CP was a shambles of ruined radios and maps, telescopes, bull-horns, all the heavy equipment of command. And over the rubble were strewn the bodies of Armsmen.

  Cade let out a long halloo: “Hold your fire! Pass the word!” The command rang victoriously along the hills.

  He walked to the central control panel of the communicator set and looked down at the crooked corpse that lay over it, a corpse half-charred and without a cloak. He rolled the body over and stared into the granite countenance of the Power Master.

  Dead—dead because he would not give his power to a subordinate. Dead because he had to witness the victory himself. He hadn’t expected battle; none of them had.

  The cease-fire had been luckily timed. Earlier it might not have been obeyed. Later it might have occurred without an order. Even so there were irreconcilables who could not bear the helpless retreat of Armsmen by the hundreds to their fliers. Several continued to fire for a minute and one woman ran shrieking down the rocks until she was picked off.

  Cade watched the cloaked and helmeted figures swarming into the slender spaceships, blasting off northward, lifting empty crafts whose complements would never fly again on slave control. They would take news of this day with them and spread it through the Realm of Man.

  It was incredible that they should have won, thought Cade—but no more incredible than that Commoners should have fought at all.

  Patriotism?

  He studied Marsmen sprawled on the ground nearby, wearily. One little knot was singing some song or other about Mars. Others were talking loudly, with exaggerated laughter. One man was sobbing hysterically; he seemed to be unwounded. Many sat in silence with furrowed brows, or in near-silence, exchanging halting words.

  “Yes,” Cade heard, “but what if more of them come back?”

  “There will be more of us. I have five brothers—”

  “Yes . . . my boys are big for their age.”

  “They killed Manley, I don’t know what I’ll say to his wife.”

  “They’ll take care of us. Her, too.”

  “They better take care of us—” Cade walked restlessly along the ridge, looking for something he dared not think about, through the territory that had been held until minutes ago by Power Master and Order and all the other trappings of the past.

  Patriotism! The Brothers would be more wary the next time they were sent to fight against it. It was easy to imagine the bored confidence with which the five-hundred-odd Armsmen had left their fliers and climbed the hills. They had thought themselves out on an elaborate policing job; they had found themselves well-placed observation posts with good fields of fire out of sheer habit. Then they had found their line broken by an impossible frontal assault and one CP destroyed in a matter of minutes. The loss of two or more posts had “made it necessary to re-group, to retreat from Commoners. And when the headquarters post was lost—

  Ordinarily it wouldn’t matter. Next-in-command-takes-over, quite automatically, in less time than it takes to say—but to the stunned Armsmen it was a last straw in a nightmarish overload of their capacity to take it.

  It was the very impossibility of the attack, the inability of trained men tradition-steeped, to believe it could happen that had won for them. When the Marsmen had scaled that cliff, the Brothers of the Order had lost their initiative of fire, and that was fatal.

  They had all lost their initiative of fire now—Stars, Klin Teachers,
the Order, the next Power Master. They would never win it back as long as battle-worn Marsmen could sit on a hilltop saying: “I have five brothers . . . my boys are big for their age—” What had the Power Master said? “If they kept attacking the Watch Houses until all the gas guns were used up . . . we must have an Emperor for the Commoners to love—” But there was no Power Master now, and the Emperor—The Emperor himself had made this battle possible. The Emperor and—

  Until this moment he had not let himself think about her: not in the battle for fear of doing less than his utmost; not afterwards for fear of what he might find. But now it was all right, for she was safe.”

  The Lady Jocelyn came stumbling across the scarred rock, her face sober, her body drooping with fatigue, but her head held regally high.

  “Thank you, Gunner Cade, for my wise uncle and for me.”

  She spoke formally, but he understood. There were no words with which he could have voiced his own joy. She was alive, unharmed. His arms could have told her, and his lips, but not with words.

  “You owe no thanks to me,” he said, “but to yourself and to our Brothers here.”

  Then their eyes met and even ceremonious language was impossible.

  “Ho, Gunner!” It was Tucker, coming from below. “I’m getting them together down below. Should we leave a guard here?”

  “What for?” With difficulty, Cade brought himself back to the moment and its realities. “Can your men carry more? Some of the CP equipment is worth salvaging.”

  Tucker turned over some of the headquarters rubble with his toe. “Any of this?”

  “I’ll look it over,” he said, and turned to Jocelyn. “May I see you first? A few words—”

  “Of course.” She took his arm and he helped her down eroded steps to a sheltered place.

  “What now?” he asked simply.

  “Now? To the Star of Mars—to the Court. Then . . . well, perhaps we could go back. The Power Master had no heir designated; it might be safe to return to Earth. There will be endless confusion there and probably safety. But the Star of Mars would surely give you command of all fighting.” The words hung in the air.

  “And you?” Cade asked.

  “I don’t know. There will be things to do. I’m not used to being idle.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be his Gunner Superior,” Cade said slowly. “I think I might like to marry some day.”

  “Oh, Cade!” There was laughter in her eyes. “This isn’t Earth. It wouldn’t be the Order again. Most of your Armsmen, if you call them that, would be married.”

  “I didn’t think of that,” he admitted. “The old habits—Jocelyn, Jocelyn, how can I ever say it? You’re of the blood of the Emperor!”

  “The Emperor,” she said softly, “is just a man after all. He’s a wise man—and married, too. He would understand.”

  Again he knew that words were not enough. As once before in anger, but now with tenderness, he seized her in his arms and pulled her to him. As once before in surprise, but now with knowledge, she kissed him back.

  For minutes they sat together, until a shadow began to lengthen across them. Cade stood and pulled her to her feet.

  “There’s work to do,” he said.

  “Work for both of us, my darling.”

  “My darling,” he said wonderingly, and then smiled. He had so much to learn.

  THE END

  The Luckiest Man in Denv

  To get the break of his life, all Reuben had to do was turn the death trap into a jackpot!

  MAY’S man Reuben, of the eighty-third level, Atomist, knew there was something wrong when the binoculars flashed and then went opaque. Inwardly he cursed, hoping that he had not committed himself to anything. Outwardly he was unperturbed. He handed the binoculars back to Rudolph’s man Almon, of the eighty-ninth level, Maintainer, with a smile.

  “They aren’t very good,” he said.

  Almon put them to his own eyes, glanced over the parapet, and swore mildly. “Blacker than the heart of a crazy Angelo, eh? Never mind; here’s another pair.”

  This pair was unremarkable. Through it, Reuben studied the thousand setbacks and penthouses of Denv that ranged themselves below. He was too worried to enjoy his first sight of the vista from the eighty-ninth level, but he let out a murmur of appreciation. Now to get away from this suddenly sinister fellow and try to puzzle it out.

  “Could we—?” he asked cryptically, with a little upward jerk of his chin.

  “It’s better not to,” Almon said hastily, taking the glasses from his hands. “What if somebody with stars happened to see, you know? How’d you like it if you saw some impudent fellow peering up at you?”

  “He wouldn’t dare!” said Reuben, pretending to be stupid and indignant, and joined a moment later in Almon’s sympathetic laughter.

  “Never mind,” said Almon. “We are young. Some day, who knows? Perhaps we shall look from the ninety-fifth level, or the hundredth.”

  Though Reuben knew that the Maintainer was no friend of his, the generous words sent blood hammering through his veins; ambition for a moment.

  He pulled a long face and told Almon: “Let us hope so. Thank you for being my host. Now I must return to my quarters.”

  He left the windy parapet for the serene luxury of an eighty-ninth-level corridor and descended slow-moving stairs through gradually less luxurious levels to his own Spartan floor. Selene was waiting, smiling, as he stepped off the stairs.

  She was decked out nicely—too nicely. She wore a steely hued corselet and a touch of scent; her hair was dressed long. The combination appealed to him, and instantly he was on his guard. Why had she gone to the trouble of learning his tastes? What was she up to? After all, she was Griffin’s woman.

  “Coming down?” she asked, awed. “Where have you been?”

  “The eighty-ninth, as a guest of that fellow Almon. The vista is immense.”

  “I’ve never been . . .” she murmured, and then said decisively: “You belong up there. And higher. Griffin laughs at me, but he’s a fool. Last night in chamber we got to talking about you, I don’t know how, and he finally became quite angry and said he didn’t want to hear another word.” She smiled wickedly. “I was revenged, though.”

  Blank-faced, he said: “You must be a good hand at revenge, Selene, and at stirring up the need for it.”

  The slight hardening of her smile meant that he had scored and he hurried by with a rather formal salutation.

  Burn him for an Angelo, but she was easy enough to take! The contrast of the metallic garment with her soft, white skin was disturbing, and her long hair suggested things. It was hard to think of her as scheming something or other; scheming Selene was displaced in his mind by Selene in chamber.

  But what was she up to? Had she perhaps heard that he was to be elevated? Was Griffin going to be swooped on by the Maintainers? Was he to kill off Griffin so she could leech onto some rising third party? Was she perhaps merely giving her man a touch of the lash?

  He wished gloomily that the binoculars problem and the Selene problem had not come together. That trickster Almon had spoken of youth as though it were something for congratulation; he hated being young and stupid and unable to puzzle out the faulty binoculars and the warmth of Griffin’s woman.

  THE attack alarm roared through the Spartan corridor. He ducked through the nearest door into a vacant bedroom and under the heavy steel table. Somebody else floundered under the table a moment later, and a third person tried to join them.

  The firstcomer roared: “Get out and find your own shelter! I don’t propose to be crowded out by you or to crowd you out either and see your ugly blood and brains if there’s a hit. Go, now!”

  “Forgive me, sir! At once, sir!” the latecomer wailed; and scrambled away as the alarm continued to roar.

  Reuben gasped at the “sirs” and looked at his neighbor. It was May! Trapped, no doubt, on an inspection tour of the level.

  “Sir,” he said respectfully, “if you wish
to be alone, I can find another room.”

  “You may stay with me for company. Are you one of mine?” There was power in the general’s voice and on his craggy face.

  “Yes, sir. May’s man Reuben, of the eighty-third level, Atomist.”

  May surveyed him, and Reuben noted that there were pouches of skin depending from cheekbones and the jaw line—dead-looking, coarse-pored skin.

  “You’re a well-made boy, Reuben. Do you have women?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Reuben hastily. “One after another—I always have women. I’m making up at this time to a charming thing called Selene. Well-rounded, yet firm, soft but supple, with long red hair and long white legs—”

  “Spare me the details,” muttered the general. “It takes all kinds. An Atomist, you said. That has a future, to be sure. I myself was a Controller long ago. The calling seems to have gone out of fashion—”

  Abruptly the alarm stopped. The silence was hard to bear.

  May swallowed and went on: “—for some reason or other. Why don’t youngsters elect for Controller any more? Why didn’t you, for instance?”

  Reuben wished he could be saved by a direct hit. The binoculars, Selene, the raid, and now he was supposed to make intelligent conversation with a general.

  “I really don’t know, sir,” he said miserably. “At the time there seemed to be very little difference—Controller, Atomist, Missiler, Maintainer. We have a saying, ‘The buttons are different,’ which usually ends any conversation on the subject.”

  “Indeed?” asked May distractedly. His face was thinly filmed with sweat. “Do you suppose Ellay intends to clobber us this time?” he asked almost hoarsely. “It’s been some weeks since they made a maximum effort, hasn’t it?”

  “Four,” said Reuben. “I remember because one of my best Servers was killed by a falling corridor roof—the only fatality and it had to happen to my team!”

  He laughed nervously and realized that he was talking like a fool, but May seemed not to notice.