Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Runstead grunted. “Not a flake of snow from year’s end to year’s end. Couldn’t sell an overcoat there if you threw in a slave girl as a premium. Why don’t you leave market research to somebody who knows something about it? Don’t you see how climate nulls your sigma?”

  The younger of his stamped-out-of-tin assistants started to back the boss up, but I cut him off. Runstead had to be consulted on test areas—it was his job—but Venus was my project and I was going to run it.

  I said, sounding just a little nasty: “Regional and world income, age, density of population, health, psyche-friction, age-group distribution and mortality causes and rates are seven-place sigmas, Matt. Cal-Mex was designed personally by God Himself as a perfect testing area. In a tiny universe of less than a hundred million, it duplicates every important segment of North America. I will not change my project and we are going to stick to. the area I indicated.”

  “It won’t work. The temperature is the major factor. Anybody should be able to see that.”

  “I’m not just anybody, Matt. I’m the guy in charge.”

  Matt Runstead stubbed out his cigarette and got up. “Let’s go talk to Fowler,” he said and walked out. There wasn’t anything for me to do except follow him.

  As I left, I heard the older of his helpers picking up the phone to notify Fowler Schocken’s secretary that we were coming. He had a team all right. I spent a little time wondering how I could build one like that myself before I got down to the business of planning how to put it to Fowler.

  But Fowler Schocken has a surefire technique of handling interstaff hassels. He worked it on us. When we came in, he said exuberantly: “The two men I want to see? Matt, can you put out a fire for me? It’s the A.I.G. people. They claim our handling of the PregNot account is hurting their trade. They’re talking about going over to Taunton unless we drop PregNot. Their billing isn’t much, but a birdie told me that Taunton put the idea into their heads.”

  He went on to explain the intricacies of our relationship with the American Institute of Gynecologists. I listened only halfheartedly; our “Babies without Maybes” campaign on their sex-determination project had given them at least a twenty per cent plus on the normal birthrate. They should be solidly ours after that.

  Runstead said: “They don’t have a case, Fowler. We sell liquor and hangover remedies both. They’ve got no business yelling about any other account. Besides, what does this have to do with Market Research?” Fowler chuckled happily. “They’ll expect the account executives to give them the usual line—but instead we’ll let you handle them yourself. Snow them under with a whole line of charts and statistics to prove that PregNot never prevents a couple from having a baby; it just permits them to postpone it until they can afford to do the job right. In other words, their unit of sale goes up and their volume stays the same. And it’ll be one in the eye for Taunton. Lawyers get disbarred for representing conflicting interests; we’ve got to make sure that any attempt to foist the same principle on our profession is nipped in the bud. Think you can handle it for the old man, Matt?”

  “Sure,” Runstead grumbled. “What about Venus?”

  Fowler twinkled at me. “What about it, Mitch? Can you spare Matt for a while?”

  “Forever,” I said. “In fact, that’s what I came to see you about. Matt’s scared of Southern California.”

  Runstead belligerently dropped his cigarette and let it lie, crisping the nylon pile of Fowler’s rug. “What am I supposed to be scared of?”

  “Easy,” said Fowler. “Matt isn’t scared. Let’s hear him out.”

  Runstead glowered at me. “All I said was that Southern California isn’t the right test area. What’s the big difference between Venus and here? Heat! We need a test area with continental-average climate. A New Englander might be attracted by the heat on Venus; a Tijuana man, never. It’s too damn hot in Cal-Mex already.”

  “Urn,” said Fowler Schocken. “Tell you what, Matt. This needs going into, and you’ll want to get busy on the A.I.G. thing. Pick out a good man to vice you on the Venus section while you’re out and we’ll have it hashed over at the section meeting tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile—” He glanced at his desk clock—“Senator Danton has been waiting for seven minutes. All right?”

  It was clearly not all right with Matt, and I felt cheered for the rest of the day.

  THINGS went well enough.

  Development came in with a report on what they’d gleaned from O’Shea’s tape and all the other available material. The prospects for manufacture were there. Quick, temporary ones like little souvenir globes of Venus manufactured from the organics floating around in what we laughingly called the “air” of Venus.

  Long-term ones—an assay had indicated pure iron: not nine-nines pure and not ninety-nine nines pure, but absolute iron that nobody would ever find or make on’ an oxygen planet like Earth. The labs would pay well for it. And Development had not developed, but found a remarkable little thing called a high-speed Hilsch Tube. Using no power, it could refrigerate the pioneers’ homes by using the hot tremendous winds of Venus themselves. It was a simple thing that had been lying around since 1943. Nobody had had any use for it, because nobody had had that kind of wind to play with before.

  Tracy Collier, the Development liaison man with Venus Section, tried also to tell me about nitrogen-fixing catalysts. I nodded from time to time and gathered that sponge-platinum “sown” on Venus would, in conjunction with the continuous, terrific lightning, cause it to “snow” nitrates and “rain” hydrocarbons, purging the atmosphere of formaldehyde and ammonia.

  “Expensive?” I asked cautiously.

  “As expensive as you want it be,” he said. “The platinum doesn’t get used up, you know. Use one gram and-take a million years or more. Use more platinum and take less time.”

  I didn’t really understand, but obviously it was good news. I patted him and sent him on his way.

  Industrial Anthropology gave me a setback. Ben Winston complained: “You cant make people want to live in a steam-heated sardine can. All our folkways are against it. Who’s going to travel sixty million miles for a chance to spend the rest of his life cooped up in a tin shack—when he can stay right here on Earth and have corridors, elevators, streets, roofs, all the wide-open space a man could want? It’s against human nature, Mitch!”

  He went on telling me about the American way of life—walked to the window with me and pointed out at the hundreds of acres of rooftops where men and women could walk around in the open air, wearing simple soot-extractor plugs in their nostrils instead of a bulky oxygen helmet.

  Finally I got mad. I said: “Somebody must want to go to Venus. Otherwise why would they buy Jack O’Shea’s book the way they do? Why would the voters stand still for a billion-and-up appropriation to build the rocket? God knows I shouldn’t have to lead you by the nose this way, but here’s what you are going to do: Survey the book-buyers, the repeat-viewers of O’Shea’s TV shows, the ones who come early to his lectures and stand around talking in the lobby after. Find out about the Moon colony—what types they have there. And then we’ll know who to aim our ads at. Any arguments?”

  There weren’t.

  Hester had done wonders of scheduling that first day and I made progress with every section head involved. She couldn’t read my paper work for me, though, and by quitting time I had six inches of it stacked by my right arm. Hester volunteered to stay with me, but there wasn’t really anything for her to do. I let her bring me sandwiches and another cup of coffee, and chased her home.

  IT was after eleven by the time I was done. I stopped off in an all-night diner on the fifteenth floor before heading home. It was a windowless box of a place where the coffee smelled of the yeast it was made from and the ham in my sandwich bore the taint of soy. But it was only a minor annoyance and out of my mind when I got home. For as I opened the door to my apartment, there was a snick and an explosion, and something slammed into the door frame by my head. I ducked and
yelled. Outside the window, a figure dangling from a rope ladder drifted away, a gun in its hand.

  I was stupid enough to run over to the window and gawk out at the helicopter-borne figure. I would have been a perfect target if it had been steady enough to shoot at me again, but it luckily wasn’t.

  Surprised at my calm, I called the Metropolitan Protection Corporation.

  “Are you a subscriber, sir?” their operator asked.

  “Yes, dammit. For six years. Get a squad over here!”

  “One moment, Mr. Courtenay. . . . Mr. Mitchell Courtenay? Copysmith, star class?”

  “Will you kindly get a man over here before the character who just took a shot at me comes back?”

  “I have your record before me, sir. I am sorry, but your account is canceled. We do not accept star class accounts at the general rate because of the risk of industrial feuds, sir.” She named a figure that made each separate hair on my head stand on end. “There is,” she said helpfully, “a rebate due you on the unexpired portion of your previous policy.”

  “Thanks,” I said heavily, and rang off. I put the Program-Printing to Quarry Machinery reel of the Telephone Red Book into the reader and spun it to Protective Agencies. I got turndowns from three or four and finally one sleepy-sounding private detective agreed to come on over for a stiff fee.

  He showed up in half an hour and I paid him, and all he did was annoy me with unanswerable questions and look for nonexistent fingerprints. After a while he went away, saying he’d work on it.

  I got to bed and eventually to sleep with one of the unanswered questions chasing itself around and around in my head:

  Who would want to shoot a simple, harmless advertising man like me?

  IV

  I TOOK my courage in my hands and walked briskly down the hall to Fowler Schocken’s office. He might throw me out of the office for asking, but I needed an answer and he might have it.

  Ahead of me, his door opened explosively and Tildy Mathie lurched out. She stared at me, but I’ll take commercial oath she didn’t know my name.

  “Rewrites,” she said wildly. “I slave my heart out for that white-haired old rat, and what does he give me? Rewrites. ’This is good copy, but I want better than good copy from you,’ he says. ‘Rewrite it,’ he says. ‘I want drive, and beauty, and humble, human warmth, and ecstasy and all the tender, sad emotion of your sweet womanly heart,’ he says, ‘and I want it in fifteen words.’ I’ll give him fifteen words!” she sobbed, and pushed past me down the hall. “But they won’t be sweet or womanly!”

  I cleared my throat, knocked once and walked into Fowler’s office. There was no hint of his brush with Tildy in the smile he gave me. In fact, his pink, clear-eyed face belied my suspicions, but—I had been shot at.

  “I’ll only be a minute, Fowler,” I said. “I want to know whether you’ve been playing rough with Taunton Associates.”

  “I always play rough,” he twinkled. “Rough, but clean.”

  “I mean very, very rough and very, very dirty. Have you, by any chance, tried to have any of their people shot?”

  “Mitch! Really!”

  “I’m asking,” I went on doggedly, “because last night a ’copter-borne marksman tried to plug me when I came home. I can’t think of any angle except retaliation from Taunton.”

  “Scratch Taunton,” he said positively.

  I took a deep breath. “Fowler,” I said, “man-to-man, you haven’t been Notified? I may be out of line, but I’ve got to ask. It isn’t just me. It’s the Venus Project.”

  There were no apples in Fowler’s cheeks at that moment, and I could see in his eyes that my job and my star-class rating hung in the balance.

  He said: “Mitch, I made you star class because I thought you could handle the responsibilities that came with it. It isn’t just the work. I know you can do that. I thought you could live up to the commercial code as well.”

  I hung on. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He sat down and lit a Starr. After just exactly the right split-second of hesitation, he pushed the pack to me. “Mitch,” he said. “You’re a youngster, Mitch, only star class a short time. But you’ve got power. Five words from you, and in a matter of weeks or months, half a million consumers will find their lives completely changed. That’s power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I knew all the old sayings. I also knew that he was going to answer my question eventually.

  “Ah, Mitch,” he said dreamily, waving his cigarette, “we have our prerogatives and our duties and our particular hazards. You can’t have one without the others. If we didn’t have feuds, the whole system of checks and balances would be thrown out of gear.”

  “Fowler,” I said, greatly daring, “you know I have no complaints about the system. It works; that’s all you have to say for it. I know we need feuds. And it stands to reason that if Taunton files a feud against us, you’ve got to live up to the code. You can’t broadcast the information; every executive in the shop would be diving for cover instead of getting work done. But—Venus Project is in my head, Fowler. I can handle it better that way. If I write everything down, it slows things up.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Suppose you were Notified and suppose I’m the first one Taunton knocks off—what happens to Venus Project?”

  “You may have a point,” he admitted. “I’ll level with you, Mitch. There has been no Notification.”

  “Thanks, Fowler,” I said sincerely. “I did get shot at. And that accident in Washington—maybe it wasn’t an accident. You don’t imagine Taunton would try anything without Notifying you, do you?”

  “I haven’t provoked them to that extent, and they’d never do a thing like that anyhow. They’re cheap, they’re crooked, but they know the rules of the game. Killing in an industrial feud is a misdemeanor. Killing without Notification is a commercial offense. And that means—”

  I nodded. “Cerebrin.”

  Fowler beamed. “What I like about you, Mitch, is you can face facts. No pussy-footing; call a spade a spade. Well,” he said cheerfully, “I’m sorry I can’t help you out. You haven’t been getting into any of the wrong beds, shall I say?”

  “No,” I said. “My life’s been very dull. The whole thing’s crazy. It must have been a mistake. But I’m glad that whoever-it-was couldn’t shoot.”

  “So am I, Mitch, so am I! You saw O’Shea?” He had already dismissed the shooting from his mind.

  “I did. He’s coming up here today. He’ll be working closely with me.”

  “Splendid! Some of that glory will rub off on Fowler Schocken Associates if we play our cards right. Dig into it, Mitch. I don’t have to tell you how.”

  It was a dismissal.

  O’SHEA was waiting in the anteroom of my office. It wasn’t an ordeal; most of the female personnel was clustered around him as he sat perched on a desk, talking gruffly and authoritatively. There was no mistaking the looks in their eyes. He was a thirty-five-inch midget, but he had money and fame, the two things we drill and drill into the population. O’Shea could have taken his pick of them. I wondered how many he had picked since his return to Earth in a blaze of glory.

  We run a taut office, but the girls didn’t scatter until I cleared my throat.

  “Morning, Mitch,” O’Shea said. “You over your shock?”

  “Sure. And I ran right into another one. Somebody tried to shoot me.” I told the story and he grunted thoughtfully.

  “Have you considered getting a bodyguard?” he asked.

  “Of course. But I won’t. It must have been a mistake.”

  “Like that cargo nacelle?”

  I paused. “What’s on your mind? I can’t be down in anybody’s little black book, Jack. The stakes are too high. Fowler’s ruled out retaliation, and unprovoked murder for business advantage—” I lowered my voice—“means cerebrin for five seconds and gas.”

 
He made a soundless whistle and we went into my office. When the door closed, he said: “I never heard that. About you-know.”

  “Well, keep it quiet. You can tell anybody with good sense, somebody upstairs commercially, because they probably know it already. But the consumers wouldn’t understand. It’s been that way for years. The corporations got fed up with undercover business assassinations and put an amendment through Congress authorizing the use of several pharmaceutical preparations in connection with capital punishment. Cerebrins in the list, buried under an obscure name. Everybody who ought to know about it knows. Result, no more killings.”

  He nodded. “Five seconds is what?”

  “One quarter of the first phase. Roughly equivalent to being sandpapered all over your body, blinded with a million-power searchlight, deafened by a two hundred-decibel siren, and strangled by hydrogen sulfide continuously for fifteen years. Care to try some?”

  “Thanks very much, but no, thanks.”

  “That’s the way everybody feels. I fed your tape to—”

  His mind was still on the drug. “I’ve heard about the second phase,” he said tentatively.

  “Classified information.”

  O’Shea grinned. “You can’t pull that on me, Mitch. What you should have said was: ‘Frankly, Jack, I don’t know a thing about it.’ Now give!”

  “You’ve got me, but all this strikes me as unnecessarily morbid. Well, people have come back from very light dosages of the first phase—most of them broken, some of them only very badly bent. Nobody’s come back from the whole twenty seconds. Jack, can we please get off this subject? It gives me the horrors.”

  “Permission granted,” he beamed. “Now, let’s go to work—but on what?”