Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Ah,” he said wisely. “I can fix ya up. Justa minnit, punchy. I’ll be right back wit’ the stuff.” He was, too. “The stuff” was a little green capsule. “Only five hunnerd. Maybe the last one on board. Ya wanta touch down wit’ the shakes? Nah! This’ll straighten ya out fer landing—”

  “Landing where?” I yelled. “I don’t want your dope. Just tell me where I am and what I’m supposed to have signed up for and I’ll take it from there!”

  He looked at me closely and said: “Ya got it bad. A hit in the head, maybe? Well, punchy, yer in the Number Six Hold of the Labor Freighter Thomas R. Malthus. Wind and weather, immaterial. Course, 273 degrees. Speed, 300; destination, Costa Rica; cargo, slobs like you and me for the Chlorella plantations.”

  “You’re—”

  “Downgraded,” he said savagely, and stared at the green capsule in the palm of his hand. Abruptly he gulped it and went on. “I’m gonna hit the’ comeback trail, though. I’m gonna introduce new and efficient methods in the plantations. I’ll be a foreman in a week. I’ll be works manager in a month. I’ll be a director in a year. And then I’m gonna buy the Cunard Line and plate all their rockets with solid gold. If you don’t like gold, I’ll get platinum. If you don’t like—”

  I inched away and he didn’t notice. He kept babbling his hop-head litany. It made me glad I’d never taken to the stuff. I came to a bulkhead and sat down hopelessly, leaning against it. I wanted to get back to New York, find out what kind of stunt Runstead had pulled and why, get back to Kathy, and my friendship with Jack O’Shea and my big job at Fowler Schocken. I had things to do.

  One of the red lights said Crash Emergency Exit. I thought of the hundreds of people jammed in the hold trying to crowd out through the door, and shuddered.

  “Excuse me, my friend,” somebody said hoarsely to me. “You’d better move.” He began to throw up, and apparently containers weren’t issued aboard labor freighters. I rolled the emergency door open and slid through.

  “Well?” growled a Burns Detective Agency guard.

  “I want to see a ship’s officer,” I said. “I’m here by some mistake. My name is Mitchell Courtenay. I’m a copy smith with the Fowler Schocken Associates.”

  “Number,” he snapped. “16-156-187,” I told him, and I admit that there was a little pride in my voice. You can lose money and health and friendship, but they can’t take a low Social Security number away from you . . .

  He was rolling up my sleeve, not roughly. The next moment I went spinning against the bulkhead with my head rattling from a ham-handed slap. “Get back between decks!” the guard roared. “Yer not on an excursion and I don’t like yer funny talk!”

  I stared incredulously at the pit of my elbow. The tattoo read: “1304-9974-1416-156-187723.” My number was buried in it, but the inks matched perfectly. The style of lettering was very slightly off—not enough for anybody to notice but me.

  “Waddaya waiting for?” the guard demanded. “You seen yer number before, ain’t ya?”

  “No,” I said evenly, but my legs were quivering. I was scared—terribly scared. “I never saw this number before. It’s been tattooed around my real number. I’m Courtenay, I tell you. I can prove it. I’ll pay you—” I fumbled in my pockets and found no money. I abruptly realized that I was wearing a strange and shabby suit of Universal apparel.

  “So pay,” the guard said impassively.

  “I’ll pay you later,” I told him. “Just get me to somebody responsible—”

  A natty young flight lieutenant in Panagra uniform popped into the narrow corridor. “What’s going on here?” he asked the guard. “The hatchway light’s still on. Can’t you keep order between decks? Burns gets a fitness report from us, you know.” He ignored me completely.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Kobler,” the guard said, saluting and coming to a brace. “This man seems to be on the stuff. He came out and gave me a spiel that he’s a star class copysmith on board by mistake.”

  “Look at my number!” I yelled at the lieutenant.

  His face wrinkled as I thrust my bared elbow under his nose.

  “That’s a high number, fellow. What do you expect to prove by showing me that?”

  “My real number is 16-156-187. See? Before and after that, there’s a different lettering style! It’s been added to!”

  Holding his breath, the lieutenant looked very closely. He said: “Umm. Just barely possible. Come with me.” The guard hastened to open a corridor door for us. He looked scared.

  The lieutenant took me through a roaring confusion of engine rooms to the purser’s hat-box-sized office. The purser was a sharp-faced gnome who wore his Panagra uniform as though it were a sack.

  “Show him your number,” the lieutenant directed me, and I did. To the purser he said: “What’s the story on this man?”

  The purser slipped a reel into the reader and cranked it. “1304-9974-1416-156-187723,” he read. “Groby, William George; 26; bachelor; broken home (father’s desertion) child; third of five sibs; H-H balance, male 1; health, 2.9; occupational class 2 for seven years; 1.5 for three months; education 9; signed labor contract B.” He looked up at the flight officer. “A very dull profile, Lieutenant. Is there any special reason why I should be interested in this man?”

  “He claims he’s a copysmith in here by mistake. He says somebody altered his number. And he speaks a little above his class.”

  “A broken-home child, especially a middle sib from the low levels, reads and views incessantly, trying to better himself. But you’ll notice—”

  “That’s enough of that,” I said curtly to the little man. “I’m Mitchell Courtenay. I can buy you and sell you without straining my petty cash account. I’m in charge of the Fowler Schocken Associates Venus Section. I want you to get New York on the line immediately and we’ll wind up this farce. Now jump, damn you!”

  The flight lieutenant looked alarmed and reached for the phone, but the purser smiled and moved it away from his hand. “Mitchell Courtenay, are you?” He took another reel and put it in the viewer. “Here we are,” he said, after a little cranking. The lieutenant and I looked.

  It was the front page of the New York Times. The first column contained the obituary of Mitchell Courtenay, head of Fowler Schocken Associates Venus Section. I had been found frozen to death on Starrzelius Glacier near Little America. I had been tampering with my power pack, and it had failed. I read on long after the lieutenant had lost interest. Matt Runstead was taking over Venus Section. I was a loss to my profession. My wife, Dr. Nevin, had refused to be interviewed. Fowler Schocken was quoted in a ripe eulogy of me. I was a personal friend of Venus pioneer Jack O’Shea, who had expressed shock and grief at the news.

  The purser said: “I picked that up in Capetown. Lieutenant, get this silly son of a bitch back between decks, will you, please?”

  The Burns guard was called in. He hammerlocked me all the way back to Number Six Hold, shoved me through the door into the red darkness so hard that I bounced off somebody. After the relatively clear air of the outside, the stink was horrible.

  “What did you do?” the human cushion asked amiably, picking himself up.

  “I tried to tell them who I am . . .” That wasn’t going to get me anywhere. “What happens next?”

  I asked.

  “We land. We get quarters. We go to work. What contract are you on?”

  “Labor contract B, they said.”

  He whistled. “I guess they really had you, huh?”

  “What do you mean? What’s it all about?”

  “Oh, you were blind? Punchy? Too bad. B contract’s five years. For refugees, morons and anybody else they can swindle into signing up. There’s a conduct clause. I got offered the B, but I told them if that was the best they could do, I’d just go out and give myself up to Brinks Express. I talked them into an F contract—they must have needed help real bad. It’s one year and I can buy outside the company stores and privileges like that.”

  I held my
head to keep it from exploding. “It can’t be such a bad place to work,” I said. “Country life—farming—fresh air and sunshine.”

  “Um,” said the man in an embarrassed way. “It’s better than chemicals, I guess. Maybe not so good as power-fishing. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  THERE wasn’t any landing-ready signal. We just hit, and hit hard. A discharge port opened, letting in blinding tropical sunlight. It was agony after the murky hold. What swept in with it was not country air, but a gush of disinfectant aerosol. I untangled myself from a knot of cursing laborers and flowed with the stream toward the port.

  “Hold it, stupid!” said a hard-faced man wearing a plant-protection badge. He threw a number plaque on a cord around my neck. Everybody got one and lined up at a table outside the ship.

  It was in the shadow of the Chlorella plantation, a towering eighty-story structure like office “In-and-Out” baskets stacked up to the sky. There were mirrored louvers at each tier. Surrounding the big buildings were acres of eye-stabbing glare. I realized that these were more mirrored louvers to catch the Sun, bounce it off other mirrors inside the tiers and onto the photosynthesis tanks. It was a spectacular though not uncommon sight from the air. On the ground it was plain hell.

  I should have been planning, planning. But the channels of my mind were choked by: “From the sun-drenched plantations of Costa Rica, tended by the deft hands of independent farmers with pride in their work, comes the juicy-ripe goodness of Chlorella Proteins . . .” I had written those words.

  “Keep moving!” a plant-protection man bawled.

  I shaded my eyes and shuffled ahead as the line moved past the table.

  A dark-glassed man at the table was asking me: “Name?”

  “Mitchell Court—”

  “That’s the one I told you about,” said the purser’s voice.

  “Okay, thanks.” To me: “Groby, we’ve had men try to bug out of a B contract before this, you know. Are you up on the Costa Rican code of business law?”

  “Of course not! All I’m trying to tell you—”

  “Don’t interrupt; you’ll be interested. Certain pharmaceuticals may be administered to a contract-breaker in an attempt to correct his anti-social, antibusiness, anti-sales attitude.” He looked squarely at me. “I see you understand.”

  I did. Cerebrin. Twenty years being sandpapered, strangled, deafened and blinded continuously, wrapped up in one five-second dose. I understood, all right.

  “What’s your name, Groby?” the man in the dark glasses asked me.

  “Groby,” I said hoarsely.

  “First name? Educational level? H-H balance?”

  “I don’t remember. But if you’ll give them to me on a piece of paper, I’ll memorize them.”

  I heard the purser laugh and say: “He’ll do.”

  “All right, Groby,” the man in dark glasses said genially. “No harm done. Here’s your profile and assignment. We’ll make a scum skimmer out of you yet. Move on.”

  I moved on. A plant protection man grabbed my assignment and bawled at me: “Skimmers that way.”

  “That way” was under the bottom tier of the building, into light even more blinding, down a corridor between evil-smelling, shallow tanks, and at last through a door into the central pylon of the structure. There was a well-fit room which seemed like twilight after the triply reflected tropical Sun outside.

  “Skimmer?” said a man. I blinked and nodded at him. “I’m Mullane, shift assignment.” He peered at my profile card. “We need a skimmer on the 67th tier and we need a skimmer on the 41st tier. Your bunk’s going to be on the 43rd tier of the pylon. Which would you rather work on? I ought to mention that we don’t have elevators for skimmers and the other Class 2 people.”

  “The 41st-tier job.”

  “That’s very sensible.” He just stood there, with seconds ticking away. At last he added: “I like to see a sensible man act sensible.” There was another long pause.

  “I haven’t any money on me,” I told him.

  “I’ll lend you some. Just sign this note and we can settle up on payday without any fuss It’s just a simple assignment of five dollars.”

  I read the note and signed it. I had to look at my profile card again; I had forgotten my first name. Mullane briskly scrawled “41” and his initials on my assignment, and hurried off.

  “I’m Mrs. Horrocks, the housing officer,” a woman said sweetly to me. “Welcome to the Chlorella family, Mr. Groby. I hope you’ll spend many happy years with us. Mr. Mullane told you this draft of crumbs—that is, the present group of contractees—will be housed on the 43rd tier. It’s my job to see that you’re located with a congenial group of fellow-employees.”

  Her face reminded me faintly of a tarantula as she went on: “We have one vacant bunk in Dorm Seven. Lots of nice, young men in Dorm Seven. It means so much to be among one’s own kind of people—”

  I got what she was driving at and told her I didn’t want to be in Dorm Seven.

  She went on brightly: “Then there’s Dorm Twelve. It’s a rather rough crowd, I’m afraid, but you could carry a knife or something. Shall I put you down for Dorm Twelve, Mr. Groby?”

  “What else have you got? And by the way, I wonder if you could lend me five dollars until payday.”

  “I’ll put you down for Dorm Ten,” she said, scribbling. “And of course I’ll lend you some money. Ten dollars? Just sign and thumbprint this assignment, Mr. Groby. Thank you.” She hurried off in search of the next sucker.

  A red-faced fat man gripped my hand. “Brother, I want to welcome you to the ranks of the United Slime-Mold Protein Workers of Panamerica, Unaffiliated, Chlorella Costa Rica Local. This pamphlet will explain how the U.S. M.P.W.P. protects workers in the field from the innumable petty rackets and abuses that useta plague the innustry. Yer dues are checked off automatically, but this valable pamphlet is an extra.”

  “What’s the worst that can happen to me if I don’t buy it?”

  “It’s a long drop to the ground,” he explained.

  He lent me five dollars to buy the pamphlet.

  I DIDN’T have to climb to Dorm Ten on the 43rd tier; there was an endless cargo net we could grab hold of. It took daring to jump on and off, and clearance was negligible. With my motion-sickness, the ride was torture, but I made it.

  The dorm was jammed with about sixty bunks, three high. Since production went on only during the daylight hours, the hot-bed system wasn’t in use. My bunk was all mine, twenty-four hours a day. Big deal.

  A sour-faced old man was sweeping the central aisle lackadaisically when I came in. “You a new crumb?” he asked, and looked at my ticket. “There’s your bunk. I’m Pine. Room orderly. You know how to skim?”

  “No,” I said. “Look, Mr. Pine, how do I make a phone call out of here?”

  “Dayroom,” he said, jerking his thumb at the room adjoining.

  There was a phone and a biggish hypnoteleset and readers and spools and magazines. I ground my teeth as the cover of Taunton’s Weekly sparkled at me from the rack. The phone was a pay phone, of course.

  I dashed back into the dorm. “Mr. Pine,” I said, “can you lend me about twenty dollars? I have to make a long-distance call.”

  “Twenty-five for twenty?”

  “Sure. Anything you say.”

  He scrawled out an assignment slip and I signed and thumbed it. Then he carefully counted out the money from his baggy pockets and handed it to me.

  I wanted to call Kathy, but didn’t dare. She might be at her apartment, the hospital or in between, and I might miss her. I dialed the fifteen digits of the Fowler Schocken Associates number after I deposited a clanging stream of coins. I waited for the switchboard to say: “Fowler Schocken Associates, good afternoon; it’s always a good afternoon for Fowler Schocken Associates and their clients. May I help you?”

  But that isn’t what I heard. The phone said: “Su numero de prioridad, por favor?”

  Priority number for long-dis
tance calls. I didn’t have one. A firm had to be rated over a billion and fast pay before it could get a long-distance priority number in four figures. So expanded were the world’s long lines that an individual priority in any number of figures was unthinkable. Naturally, that had never worried me when I made longdistance calls from Fowler Schocken. A priority number was one of the little luxuries I’d have to team to live without.

  I hung up slowly.

  I could write to everybody—Kathy and Jack O’Shea and Fowler and Collier and Hester and Tildy. Leave no stone unturned. “Dear Wife (or Boss): This is to advise you that your husband (or employee) is not really dead, but inexplicably a contract laborer for Costa Rican Chlorella and please drop everything and get him out. Signed, your loving husband (or employee), Mitchell Courtenay.”

  But there was the company censor to think of. And cerebrin.

  I wandered blankly back into the dorm. The rest of the Dorm Ten people were beginning to drift in.

  “A crumb!” one of them yelled,

  sighting me.

  “Court’s called to order!” another one trumpeted.

  I don’t hold what followed against any of them. It was, traditional, a break in the monotony, something they had all gone through themselves. In Dorm Seven, it would have been a memorably nasty experience, and in Dorm Twelve I might not have lived through it. Dorm Ten was just high-spirited. I paid my “fine”—more pay vouchers—and took my lumps and recited the blasphemous oath and then I was a full-fledged member.

  I didn’t troop with them to the mess hall for dinner. I just lay on my bunk and wished I were as dead as the rest of the world thought I was.

  VIII

  SCUM-SKIMMING was not hard to learn. You got up at dawn, gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest, then put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon, from sunrise to sunset, you walked slowly and every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You scooped up the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. Every hour you could drink from your canteen and take a salt tablet. Every two hours you could take five minutes. At sunset you turned in your coveralls and went to dinner—more slices from Chicken Little—and then you were on your own.