Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  And then came the best part of the day. Kathy and I were going steady again. We were still under separate cover, but I was buoyantly certain that it wouldn’t be long now. Sometimes she dated me, sometimes I dated her. There wasn’t much serious talk. She didn’t encourage it and I didn’t press it. I thought that time was on my side. Jack O’Shea made the rounds with us once before he had to leave for a lecture in Miami, and that made me feel good, too. A couple of well-dressed, good-looking people who were so high up they could entertain the world’s number one celebrity.

  After a week of solid, satisfying progress on the job, I told Kathy it was time for me to visit the outlying installations—the rocket site in Nevada and sampling headquarters in San Diego.

  “Fine,” she said. “Can I go with you?”

  I was silly-happy about it; it wouldn’t be long now.

  THE rocket visit was routine.

  I had a couple of people there as liaison with Armed Forces, Republic Aviation, Bell Telephone Labs and U. S. Steel. They showed Kathy and me through the monster ship, glib as tourist guides: “. . . vast steel shell . . . more cubage than the average New York office building . . . closed-cycle food and water and air regeneration . . . one-third drive, one-third freight, one-third living space . . . heroic pioneers . . . insulation . . . housekeeping power . . . sunside-darkside heat pumps . . . unprecedented industrial effort . . . national sacrifice . . . national security . . .”

  Oddly, the most impressive thing about it to me was not the rocket itself, but the wide area around it. For a full mile the land was cleared: no buildings, no greenhouse decks, no food tanks, no Sun traps. Partly security, partly radiation. The gleaming sand cut by irrigation pipes looked strange. There probably wasn’t another sight like it in North America. It troubled my eyes. Not for years had I focused them more than a few yards in any direction except up.

  “How strange,” Kathy said at my side. “Could we walk out there?”

  “Sorry, Dr. Nevin,” said one of the liaison men. “It’s our perimeter. The tower guards are ordered to shoot anybody out there.”

  “Have contrary orders issued.” I told him. “Dr. Nevin and I want to walk.”

  “Of course, Mr. Courtenay,” the man said, very worried. “I’ll do my best, but it’ll take a little time. I’ll have to clear it with C.I.C., Naval Intelligence, C.I.A., F.B.I., A.E.C., Security and Intelligence—”

  I looked at Kathy and she shrugged with helpless amusement.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Thank God!” breathed my liaison man. “It’s never been done before, so there aren’t any channels to do it through. You know what that means.”

  “I do indeed. Tell me, has all the security paid off?”

  “There’s been no sabotage or espionage, foreign or Connie, that we know of.” He rapped a knuckle of his right hand solemnly on a genuine oak engagement ring he wore on the third finger of his left hand. I made a mental note to have his expense account checked up on. A man on his salary had no business wearing such expensive jewelry.

  “The Connies interested?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Who knows?” Would you like to meet Commander MacDonald and find out? He’s the O.N.I. chief here. A specialist in Connies.”

  “Like to meet a Connie specialist, Kathy?” I asked.

  “If we have time,” she said.

  “I’ll have them hold the jet for you if necessary,” the liaison man offered eagerly, trying hard to undo his fiasco on the tower guards. He led us through the tangle of construction shacks and warehouses to the Administration Building and past seven security check points to the office of the commander.

  He was one of those career officers who make you feel good about being an American consumer—quiet, competent, strong. He wore the class insignia of the Pinkerton Graduate School of Detection and Military Intelligence, Inc. It’s veneer pine with an open eye carved on it; no flashy inlay work. But it’s like a brand name. It tells you that you’re dealing with quality.

  “You want to hear about Connies?” he asked quietly. “I’m your man. I’ve devoted my life to running them down.”

  “A personal grudge, Commander?” I asked, thinking we’d hear something melodramatic.

  “No. Old-fashioned pride of workmanship if anything. I like the thrill of the chase, too, but there isn’t much chasing. You get Connies by laying traps. Did you hear about the Wichita bombing? Of-course-I-shouldn’t-knock-the-competition-but—Wilson Detection bungled that one badly. They should have known it was a setup for a Connie demonstration.”

  “Why, exactly, Commander?” Kathy asked.

  He smiled wisely. “Feel. The Connies don’t like hydraulic mining—ever. Give them a chance to pull some wrecking and they’ll take it if they can.”

  “But why don’t they like hydraulic mining?” she persisted. “We’ve got to have coal and iron, don’t we?”

  “Now,” he said with pretended, humorous weariness, “you’re asking me to probe the mind of a Connie. I’ve had them questioned for up to six hours at a stretch and never yet have they talked sense. If I caught the Wichita Connie, he’d talk willingly—but it would be gibberish. He’d tell me the hydraulic miner was destroying top-soil. I’d say yes, what about it? He’d say the topsoil can never be replaced. I’d say yes, it ean, if it had to be and anyway tank farming’s better. He’d say something like tank farming doesn’t provide animal cover and so on. It always winds up with him telling me the world’s going to hell and people have got to be made to realize it.”

  Kathy laughed incredulously.

  “They’re fools, but they’re tough,” the commander went on. “They have discipline. A cell system. If you get one Connie, you usually get the two or three others in his cell, but you hardly ever get any more. There’s no lateral contact between cells, and vertical contact with higher-ups is by rendezvous with middlemen. And of course the picture is clouded by what you might call ‘small-c’ Connies: neurotic youngsters, mental cases, occasionally professional criminals who fake a Connie demonstration so they can loot.”

  “I think we saw one of those neurotic youngsters,” Kathy said. She described the incident in the bar that had loused up our evening the week before.

  The commander nodded positively. “Small-c. They don’t carry arms unless they’re going to use them, and the smoking-and-drinking angle is just theoretical to them. They say they know it’s ‘anti-survival’—in their jargon—but they say the conditions that cause smoking and drinking must be corrected first. Yes, I think I know them and that’s why I’m not especially worried about sabotage or a demonstration here. It doesn’t have the right ring to it.”

  “You’re very reassuring, Commander,” Kathy smiled as we got up. “Thank you so much.”

  At the door, MacDonald cautioned us: “We don’t talk to just anybody about the small-c Connies, as I called them. The public thinks every demonstration is by the true Connie organization which is good for our purposes. The worse they think of Connies and the more afraid of them they are, the closer they cooperate with Intelligence and Security. Understood?”

  “My lips are sealed, Commander. Thanks again.”

  KATHY and I lolled back, watching the commercials parade around the passenger compartment of the jet at eye level. There was the good old Kiddiebutt jingle I worked out when I was a cadet. I nudged Kathy and told her about it as it blinked and chimed at us.

  All the commercials went blank and a utility announcement came on: “In compliance with Federal law, passengers are advised that they are now passing over the San Andreas Fault into earthquake territory, and that earthquake loss and damage clauses in any insurance they may carry are now canceled and will remain canceled until passengers leave earthquake territory.” Then the commercials resumed their parade.

  “And,” said Kathy, “I suppose it says in the small print that yak-bite insurance is good anywhere except in Tibet.”

  “Yak-bite insurance?” I asked, astonished. “What would a
nyone carry that for?”

  “A girl can never tell when she’ll meet an unfriendly yak, can she?”

  “I conclude that you’re kidding,” I said with dignity. “We ought to land in a few minutes. Personally, I’d like to pop in on Ham Harris unexpectedly. He’s a good kid, but Runstead may have infected him with defeatism.

  There’s nothing worse in our line.”

  “I’ll come along with you if I may, Mitch.”

  We gawked through the windows like tourists as the it slid into the traffic pattern for its call-down from the tower. Kathy had never been there before. But there’s always something new to see because buildings keep falling down and new ones put up. And what buildings! They’re more like plastic tents on plastic frames than anything else. That kind of construction means they give and sway instead of snapping and crumbling when a quake jiggles southern California. And if the quake is bad enough and the skeleton does snap, what have you lost? Just some plastic sheeting that broke along the standard snap grooves and some plastic structural members that generally are salvageable.

  From a continental economic viewpoint, it’s also a fine idea not to tic up too much fancy construction in southern California. Since the A-bomb tests did things to the San Andreas fault, there’s been a pretty fair chance that the whole area Would slide quietly into the Pacific some day—any day. But when we looked down out of the traffic pattern, it still was there and we knew, like everybody else, that if would probably stay for for duration of our visit. There had been some panic before my time when the quakes became daily, but I’d blame that on the old-style construction that fell hard and in jagged hunks. Eventually people got used to it and—as you’d expect in southern California—even proud of it. Natives could cite you reams of statistics to prove that you stood more chance of being struck by lightning or a meteorite than you did of getting killed in one of their quakes.

  We got a speedy three-man limousine to pedal us to the local branch of Fowler Schocken Associates.

  The receptionist gave me my first setback. She didn’t recognize my face and she didn’t recognize my name when I gave it to her. She said lazily: “I’ll see if Mr. Harris is busy, Mr. Courtney.”

  “Mr. Courtenay, young lady. And I’m Mr. Harris’s boss.”

  Kathy and I walked in on a scene of idleness and slackness that curled my hair.

  Harris, with his coat off, was playing cards with two young employees. Two more were gaping, glassy-eyed, before a hypnoteleset. Another man was lackadaisically punching a calculator, one-finger system.

  “Hams,” I thundered.

  Everybody except the two men in trance swiveled my way, openmouthed. I walked to the hypnoteleset and snapped it off. The pair came to, groggily.

  “Mum-mum-Mister Courtenay,” Harris stuttered. “We didn’t expect—”

  “Obviously. Let’s go into your office.”

  Unobtrusively, Kathy followed us.

  “Harris,” I said, “I’m disturbed, gravely disturbed, by the atmosphere here. But that can be corrected—”

  His phone rang and I picked it up.

  A voice said excitedly: “Ham? He’s here. Make it snappy; he took a limousine.”

  “Thanks.” I hung up. “Your tipster at the airport,” I told Harris. He went white. “Show me your tally sheets,” I said. “Your interview forms. Your punchcard codes. Your masters. Your sigma-progress charts. Everything, in short, that you wouldn’t expect me to ask to see. Get them out.”

  He stood there a long, long time and finally said: “There aren’t any.”

  “What have you got to show me?”

  “Finalizations,” he muttered. “Composites.”

  “Fakes, you mean? Fiction, like the stuff you’ve been feeding us over the wire?”

  He nodded. His face was sick.

  “How could you do it, Harris?” I demanded. “How could you do it?”

  He poured out a confused torrent of words. He hadn’t meant to. It was his first independent job. Maybe he was just no good and it was better this way. He’d tried to keep the lower personnel up to snuff while he was dogging it himself, but it couldn’t be done; they sensed it and took liberties and he didn’t dare check them up. His self-pitying note changed; he became weakly belligerent. What difference did it make? It was just preliminary paperwork. One man’s guess was as good as another’s. And anyway the whole project might go down the drain. What if he had been taking it easy? He bet there were plenty of other people who took it easy and everything came out all right just the same.

  “No,” I said. “You’re wrong and you ought to know you’re wrong. Advertising depends on the sciences of sampling, areatesting and customer research. You’ve knocked the props from under our program. We’ll salvage what we can and start again.”

  He took a feeble stand: “You’re wasting your time if you do that, Mr. Courtenay. I’ve “been working closely with Mr. Runstead for a long time. I know what he thinks, and he’s as big a shot as you are. He thinks this paperwork is just a lot of nonsense.”

  “What,” I asked sharply, “have you got to back that statement up with? Letters? Memos? Taped calls?”

  “I must have something like that,” he said, and dived into his desk. He flipped through papers and played snatches of tape for minutes while the look of fear and frustration on his face deepened. At last he said in bewilderment:

  “I can’t seem to find anything, but I’m sure—”

  Sure he was sure. The highest form of our art is to convince the customer without letting him know he’s being convinced. This weak sister had been indoctrinated by Runstead with the unrealistic approach and then sent in on my project, to do a good job of crumming it up.

  “You’re fired, Harris,” I said. “I wouldn’t advise you to try for a job in the advertising profession after this. It would be a waste of time.”

  I went into the office and announced: “You’re through. All of you. Collect your personal stuff and leave the office. You’ll get your checks by mail.”

  They gaped. Beside me, Kathy murmured: “Mitch, is that really necessary?”

  “You’re damned right it’s necessary. Did one of them tip off the home office on what was going on? No; they just relaxed and drifted. I said it was an infection, didn’t I? This is it.” Ham Harris drifted past us toward the door, hurt bewilderment on his face. He had been so sure Runstead would back him up. He had his crammed briefcase in one hand and his raincoat in the other. He didn’t look at me.

  I went into his vacated office and picked up the direct wire to New York. “Hester? This is Mr. Courtenay. I’ve just fired the entire San Diego branch. Notify Personnel and have them do whatever’s necessary about pay. And get me Mr. Runstead on the line.”

  I drummed my fingers impatiently for a long minute and then Hester said: “Mr. Courtenay, I’m sorry to keep you waiting. Mr. Runstead’s secretary says he’s left for Little America on one of those tours. She says he cleaned up the A.I.G. thing and felt like a rest.”

  “Felt like a rest? Good God! Hester, get me a New York to Little America reservation. I’m shooting right back on the next jet. I want to just barely touch ground before I zip off to the Pole. Got it?”

  “Yes, Mr. Courtenay.”

  I hung up and found that Kathy was staring at me. “You know, Mitch, I’ve been uncharitable to you in my time, kicking about your bad temper. I can see where you got it, if this is a typical situation.”

  “It’s not typical,” I said. “It’s the worst case of obstructionism I’ve ever seen. But there’s a lot of it in our line—everybody trying to make everybody else look bad so they’ll look better. Darling, I’ve got to get to the field now and bull my way onto the next Eastbound. Do you want to come, too?”

  She hesitated. “You won’t mind if I stay and do a little tourist stuff by myself?”

  “No, of course not. You have a good time. When you get back to New York, I’ll be there.”

  We kissed and I raced out. The office was clear b
y then and I told the building manager to lock it until further notice after Kathy left.

  I looked up from the street. She waved at me from the strange, flimsy building.

  VI

  I SWUNG off the ramp at New York; Hester was right there. “Good girl,” I told her. “When does the Pole rocket shoot off?”

  “Twelve minutes, from Strip Six, Mr. Courtenay. Here are your ticket and the reservation. And some lunch in case—”

  “Fine. I did miss a meal.” We headed for Strip Six, with me chewing a generated cheese sandwich as I walked. “What’s up at the office?”

  “Big excitement about you firing the San Diego people. Personnel sent up a complaint to Mr. Schocken and he upheld you —approximately Force Four.” That wasn’t so good. Force Twelve—hurricane—would have been a blast from his office on the order of: “How dare you question the decision of a Board man working on his own project? Never let me hear again—” And so on. Force Four—rising gale, small craft maize for harbor—was something like: “Gentlemen. I’m sure Mr. Courtenay had perfectly good reasons for doing what he did. Often the Big Picture is lost to the purely routine workers in our organization—”

  I asked Hester: “Is Runstead’s secretary just a hired hand or one of his—” I was going to say “stooges,” but smoothly reversed my field—“one of his confidants?”

  “She’s pretty close to him,” Hester said cautiously.

  “What was her reaction to the San Diego business?”

  “Somebody told me she laughed her head off, Mr. Courtenay.” I didn’t push it any harder. Finding out where I stood with respect to the big guns was legitimate. Asking about the help was asking her to rat on them. Mot that there weren’t girls who did. “I expect to be right back,” I told Hester. “All I want to do is straighten out something with Runstead.”

  “Your wife won’t be along?” she asked.

  “No. I’m going to tear Runstead into five or six pieces: if Dr. Nevin came along, she might try to put them back together again.”