Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Below decks we were a shabbier, tougher gang, yet it was no labor freighter. We had no windows, but we had lights and vending machines and buckets.

  A plant protection man had made a little speech to us before we loaded: “You crumbs are going North, out of Costa Rican jurisdiction. You’re going to better jobs. But don’t forget that they are jobs. You’re in hock to Chlorella, and Chlorella’s claim on you is a prior lien. If any of you think you can disappear or break your contract, you’re going to find out just how fast extradition for a commercial offense can be. Is everything clear?” Everything was clear. “All right, crumbs. Get aboard and give my regards to upper Broadway.”

  We slid into a landing at Montauk without incident. Down below, we sat and waited while the consumers on tourist deck filed out, carrying their baggage kits. Then we sat and waited while Food Customs inspectors, wearing the red-and-white A & P armbands, argued vociferously with our stewards over the surplus rations—one man had died on the trip, and the stewards, of course, held out his Chicken Little cutlets to sell in the open market.

  Finally the order came to fall out in fifties. We lined up and had our wrists stamped with our entry permits, marched by squads to the subway, and entrained for the city. I had a bit of luck—my group drew a freight compartment.

  At the Labor Exchange we were sorted out and tagged for our respective assignments. There was a bit of a scare when it came out that Chlorella had sold the contracts on twenty of us to I.G. Farben—nobody wants to work in the uranium mines—but I wasn’t worried.

  The man next to me stared moodily as the guards cut out the unlucky twenty and herded them off. “It’s a crime. Don’t you think so, Mac? It violates the essential dignity of labor, what I call.”

  I gave him an angry glare. The man was a Connie, pure and simple. Then I remembered that I was a Connie; too, for the time being. I considered the use of the handclasp and decided against it. He would be worth remembering if I needed help; but if I revealed myself prematurely, he might call on me.

  We moved on to the Chlorella depot in Nyack suburbs.

  WASTE not, want not. Under New York, as under every city in the world, the sewage drains led to a series of settling basins and traps. Every citizen knows how the organic waste of twenty-three million persons came waterborne through the venous tracery of the city’s drains; how the salts were neutralized through ion-exchange, the chemically rich liquid piped to the kelp farms in Long Island Sound, the sludge that remained pumped into tank barges for shipment to Chlorella. I knew about it, but I had never seen or smelled it.

  My title was Procurement Expeditor, Class Nine. My job was coupling the flexible hoses that handled the sludge. After the first day, I shot a week’s pay of soot-extractor plugs for my nostrils; they didn’t filter out all the odor, but they made it possible to live in it.

  On the third day I came off the shift and hit the showers. I had figured it out in advance: After six hours at the tanks where there were no vending machines for the simple reason that no one could conceivably eat, drink or smoke anything in that atmosphere, the pent-up cravings of the crew kept them on the Popsie-Crunchie-Starrs cycle for half an hour before the first man even thought of a shower.

  By sternly repressing the craving-, weaker in me than in most because it had had less time to become established, I managed to have the showers almost alone. When the mob arrived, I hit the vending machines. It was a simple application of intelligence, and if that doesn’t bear out the essential difference between consumer and star class mentality, what does? Of course, as I say, the habits weren’t as strong in me.

  There was one other man in the shower, but, with only two of us, we hardly touched. He handed me the soap as I came in; I lathered and let the water roar down over me under the full pressure of the recirculators. I was hardly aware he was there.

  As I passed the soap back to him, though, I felt his third finger touch my wrist, the index finger circle around the base of my thumb.

  “Oh,” I said stupidly, and returned the handclasp. “Are you my contact—”

  “Ssh!” He gestured at the Muzak spy-mike dangling from the ceiling. He turned his. back on me and meticulously soaped himself again.

  When he returned the soap, a scrap of paper clung to it. In the locker room I squeezed it dry, spread it out. It read: “Tonight is pass night. Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Classics Room, Be in front of the Maiden-form Exhibit at exactly five minutes before closing time.”

  I joined the queue at the supervisor’s desk as soon as I was dressed. In less than half an hour, I had a stamped pass authorizing me to skip bedcheck for the night. I caught the shuttle down to Bronxville, transferred to a north-bound local, rode one station, switched to the south-bound side and got out at Schocken Tower. No one appeared to be following me. I hadn’t expected anyone to, but it never pays to take chances.

  My Connie rendezvous at the Met was almost four hours off. I stood around in the lobby until a cop, contemptously eying my cheap clothing, moved toward me. I had hoped Hester or perhaps even Fowler Schocken himself might come through. No such luck. I saw a good many faces I recognized, of course, but none I was sure I could trust. And, until I found out what lay behind the double cross on Starrzelius Glacier, I had no intention of telling just anybody that I was still alive.

  The Pinkerton said, “You want to give the Schocken people your business, crumb? You got a big account for them, maybe?”

  “Sorry,” I said, and headed for the street door. It didn’t figure that he would bother to follow me through the crowd in the lobby; he didn’t.

  I dodged around the recreation room, where a group of consumers were watching a PregNot love story on the screen and getting their samples of Coffiest, and ducked into the service elevators.

  “Eightieth,” I said to the operator, and at once realized I had blundered.

  The operator’s voice said sharply through the speaker grille: “Service elevators go only to the seventieth floor, you in Car Five. What do you want?”

  “Messenger,” I lied miserably. “I got to make a pickup from Mr. Schocken’s office. I told them I wouldn’t be let into Mr. Schocken’s office, a fellow like me. I told them, ‘Look, he’s probably got twenny-five seckataries I got to go through before they let me see him.’ I said—”

  “The mail room is on forty-five,” the operator said, a shade less sharply. “Stand in front of the door so I can see you.”

  I moved into range of the TV like. I had never been in the elevator operators’ room, a thousand feet below me, where they pushed the buttons that triggered the relays that sent the cars up and down the toothed shafts; but I would have given a year’s pay to have been able to look into it then.

  I stood there for half a minute. Then the operator’s voice said noncommittally. “All right, you. Back in the car. Forty-fifth floor, first slide to the left.”

  The others in the car stared at me through an incurious haze of Coffiest’s alkaloids until I got out. I stepped on the leftbound slidewalk and went past the door marked “Mail Room” to the corridor juncture where my slide-walk dipped down around its roller. It took me a little while to find the stairway, but that was all right. I needed the time to catch up on my swearing. I didn’t dare use the elevators again.

  Have you ever climbed thirty-five flights of stairs?

  I SKULKED along the corridors in executive country, very conscious of the fact that the first person who paid any attention to me would either recognize me or throw me out. Only clerks were in the corridors, and none I’d known at all well; my luck was running strong.

  But not strong enough. Fowler Schocken’s office was locked.

  I ducked into the office of his secretary 3, which was deserted, and thought things over. Fowler usually played a few holes of golf at the country club after work. It was pretty late for him still to be there, but I thought I might as well take the chance—though it was four more flights to the club.

  I made it standing up. The c
ountry club was a handsome layout, which was only fair because the dues were handsome, too. Besides the golf links, the tennis court and other sports facilities, the whole north end of the room was woods—more than a dozen beautifully simulated trees—and at least twenty recreation booths for reading, watching movies or any other spectator pleasure.

  A mixed foursome was playing golf. I moved close to their seats as unobtrusively as possible. They were intent on their dials and buttons, guiding their players along the twelfth hole fairway. I read their scores from the telltale with a sinking heart; all were in the high nineties. Duffers. Fowler Schocken averaged under eighty for the course and couldn’t be in a group like that. As I came close, I saw that both the men were strangers to me.

  I hesitated before retreating, trying to decide what to do next. Schocken wasn’t in sight anywhere in the club. Conceivably he was in one of the recreation booths, but I could scarcely dare open the doors of all of them to see.

  One of the girls had just sunk a four-inch putt to finish the hole. Smiling happily as the others complimented her, she leaned forward to pull the€ lever that brought the puppet players back to the tee and changed the layout to the dogleg of the thirteenth hole, and I caught a glimpse of her face. It was Hester, my secretary.

  I couldn’t guess how Hester came to be in the country club, but I knew everything else there was to know about Hester. I retreated to an alcove near the entrance to the ladies’ room. It was only about ten minutes wait before Hester showed up.

  She fainted, of course.

  SWEARING, I carried her into the alcove. There was a couch; I put her on it. There was a door; I closed it.

  She blinked up at me as consciousness came back. “Mitch,” she choked. “You can’t be. You’re dead.”

  “I am not dead,” I told her. “Somebody else died and they switched bodies. I don’t know who ‘they’ are. Yes, it’s really me. Mitch Courtenay, your boss. I can prove it. For instance, remember last year’s Christmas party, when you were so worried about—”

  “Never mind,” she said hastily, “My God, Mitch—I mean Mr. Courtenay—”

  “Mitch is good enough. I’m alive, all right, but I’m in a kind of peculiar mess. I’ve got to get in touch with Fowler Schocken. Can you fix it right away?”

  She swallowed and reached for a cigarette. Recovering, I automatically took out a Starr.

  “Mr. Schocken’s on the Moon. It’s a big secret, but I guess I can tell you. It’s something to do with the Venus project. After you got killed—well, you know what I mean—after that, when he put Mr. Runstead on the project and it began to slip, he decided to take matters into his own hands. I gave him all your notes. One of them said something about the Moon, I guess. Anyway, he took off a couple of days ago.”

  “Who’d he leave in charge here? Harvey Bruner? Can you reach—”

  Hester was shaking her head. “Mr. Schocken switched in such a hurry, there wasn’t anyone to spare to take over his job except Mr. Runstead. But I can call him right away.”

  “No!” I looked at my watch and groaned. I would have just about time to make it to the Met.

  “I’ve got to leave. Don’t say anything to anybody, will you? I’ll figure something out and call you. Let’s see, when I call I’ll say I’m—what’s the name of that doctor of your mother’s?—Dr. Gallant. And I’ll arrange to meet you and tell you what we’re going to do. I can count on you, Hester, can’t I?”

  “Sure, Mitch,” she said breathlessly.

  “Fine. Now you’ll have to convoy me down in the elevator. I haven’t got time to walk and there’ll be trouble if a guy like me gets caught on the club floor.” I stopped and looked her over. “Speaking of which, what in the world are you doing here?”

  Hester blushed. “After you were gone, there weren’t any other secretarial jobs. The rest of the executives had their girls and I just couldn’t be a consumer again, Mitch, not with the bills and all. And—well, there was this opening up here, you see.”

  I hope nothing showed on my face; God knows I tried. Damn you to hell, Runstead, I said to myself, thinking of Hester’s mother and Hester’s young man that she’d maybe been going to marry some day, and a man like Runstead wrecking executives’ lives like mine and staff lives like Hester’s and dragging them down to the level of consumers.

  “Don’t worry, Hester,” I said gently. “I’ll make everything up to you.”

  I knew how to do it, too. Quite a lot of the girls on the ZZ contract managed to avoid the automatic renewal and downgrading. It would cost a lot for me to buy out her contract before the year was up, so that was out of the question; but some of the girls did pretty well with single executives after their first year. And I was important enough so that if I made a suggestion to some branch head or bureau chief, he would not be likely to ignore it, or even to treat her badly.

  I don’t approve of sentiment in business matters, but this was a special situation.

  HESTER insisted on loaning me some money, so I made it to the Met with time to spare by taking a pedicab. Even though I had paid the driver in advance, he could not refrain from making a nasty comment about high-living consumers as I got out.

  I have always had a fondness for the Met. I don’t go for religion—partly, I suppose, because it’s a Taunton account—but there is a grave, ennobling air about the grand old masterpieces in the Met that gives me a feeling of peace and reverence. I spent my few spare minutes standing silently before the bust of G. Washington Hill, and I felt more self-assured than I had since that first afternoon at the South Pole.

  At precisely five minutes before midnight, I was standing before the big, late-period Maidenform—number 35 in the catalogue: “I Dreamed I went Ice-Fishing in My Maidenform Bra”—when I became conscious of someone whistling in the corridor behind me. The notes were irrelevant; the cadence formed one of the recognition signals I’d learned in the cell room under Chicken Little.

  One of the guards was strolling away. She looked over her shoulder at me and smiled.

  To all external appearances, it was a casual pickup. We linked arms, and I felt the coded pressure of her fingers on my wrist: D-O-N-T T-A-L-K W-H-E-N I L-E-A-V-E Y-O-U G-O T-O T-H-E B-A-C-K O-F T-H-E R-O-O-M S-I-T D-O-W-N A-N-D W-A-I-T

  I nodded. She took me to a plastic-finished door, pushed it open, pointed inside. I went in alone.

  There were ten or fifteen consumers sitting in straight-back chairs, facing an elderly consumer with a lectorial goatee. I found a seat in the back of the room and sat in it. No one paid any particular attention to me.

  The lecturer was covering the high spots of some particularly boring pre-commercial period. I listened with half my mind, trying to catch some point of similarity in the varying types around me. All were Connies, I was reasonably sure—else why would I be here? But the basic stigmata, the surface mark of the lurking fanatic inside that; should have been apparent, escaped me. They were all consumers, with the pinched look that soyaburgers and Yeasties inevitably give; but I could have passed any of them in the street without a second glance. Yet this was New York, and Bowen had spoken of it as though the Connies I’d meet here were pretty high up in the scale.

  That was a consideration, too. When I got out of this mess—when I got through to Fowler Schocken and cleared my status—I might be in a position to break up this whole filthy conspiracy. I looked over the persons in the room a little more attentively, memorizing their features. I didn’t want to fail to recognize them, next time we came in contact.

  There must have been some sort of signal, but I missed it. The lecturer stopped almost in mid-sentence, and a plump little man in a goatee from the first row stood up.

  “All right,” he said in an ordinary tone, “we’re all present and there’s no sense wasting any more time. We’re against waste; that’s why we’re here. For the purpose of this meeting, we’ll use numbers. You can call me ‘One,’ you ‘Two’—” he pointed to the man in the next seat—“and so on by rows to the ba
ck of the room. All clear?

  “Now listen closely. This is world operational headquarters, right here in New York; you can’t go any higher. Each of you was picked for some special quality—you know what they are. You’ll all get assignments tonight. But before you do, I want to point out one thing. You don’t know me and I don’t know you; every one of you got a big buildup from your last cells, but sometimes the men in the field get a little too enthusiastic. If they were wrong about you . . . Well, you understand these things, eh?”

  There was a general nod. I nodded, too, but I paid particular attention to memorizing that little goatee. One by one, numbers were called, and the newjohns got up, conferred briefly with the goatee, and left, in couples and threes, for unannounced destinations. I was almost the last to be called. Only a very young girl with orange hair and a cast in her eye was still in the room.

  “Okay, you two,” said the man with the goatee. “You are going to be a team, so you might as well know names. Groby, meet Corwin. Groby’s a kind of copysmith. Celia’s an artist.”

  “Right,” she said, lighting a Starr. A perfect consumer type, if only she hadn’t been corrupted by these zealots; I noticed her jaws working on Hi-Kick Gum even while she smoked.

  “We’ll get along fine,” I said approvingly.

  “You sure will,” said the man in the goatee. “You have to. In order to give you a chance to show what you can do, we’ll have to let you know a lot of stuff that we don’t want to read in the morning paper. If you don’t work out for us, you see the fix we’ll be in.” He tapped a little bottle of colorless fluid on the desk top. The tinny rattle of the aluminum top was no tinnier than my voice as I said, “Yes, sir,” because I knew what little bottles of colorless fluid could be assumed to contain.

  It turned out, though, that it wasn’t much of a problem. I spent three difficult hours in that little room, then pointed out that if I didn’t get back to barracks I would miss the morning work call and there would be hell to pay. So they excused me.