Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  But I missed work call anyhow. I came out of the Museum into a perfect spring dawn, feeling, all in all, pretty content with life. A figure loomed out of the smog and peered into my face. I recognized the sneering face of the solo taxi-pusher who had brought me to the Museum. He said briskly, “Hel-lo, Mr. Courtenay,” and then the obelisk from behind the Museum, or something very much like it, smacked me across the back of the neck.

  XI

  “IS he ready for Hedy?” I heard somebody say.

  “Good God, no!”

  “I was only asking.”

  “You ought to know better. First you give’ the amphetamine, plasma, maybe a niacin megaunit. Then they’re ready for Hedy. She doesn’t like it if they keep blacking out. She sulks.” Nervous laugh with a chill in it.

  I opened my eyes and felt secure and grateful. For what I could see was a cerebral-gray ceiling, the shade you find only in the brain room of an advertising agency. I was safe in the arms of Fowler Schocken Associates—or was I? I didn’t recognize the face that leaned over me.

  “Why so pleased?” the face inquired nastily. “Don’t you know where you are?”

  After that it was easy to guess. “Taunton’s?” I croaked.

  “That is correct.”

  I tried my arms and legs and found they didn’t respond. I couldn’t tell whether it was drugs or a plasticocoon. “Look,” I said steadily, “I don’t know what you people think you’re doing, but I advise you to stop it. Apparently this is a kidnaping for business purposes. You people are either going to let me go or kill me. If you kill me without a declaration, you’ll get the cerebrin, so of course you’re going to let me go eventually. I suggest you do it now.”

  “Kill you, Courtenay?” asked the face with mocking wonder. “How would we do that? You’re dead already. Everybody knows that. You died on Starrzelius Glacier; don’t you remember?” I struggled again, without results. “They’ll brainburn you,” I said. “Are you people crazy? Who wants to be brainburned?” The face said nonchalantly: “You’d be surprised.” And in an aside to somebody else: “Tell Hedy he’ll be ready soon.” Hands did something, there was a click, and I was helped to sit up. The skin-tight pulling at my joints showed it was a plasticocoon, which meant I might as well save my strength.

  A buzzer buzzed and I was told sharply: “Keep a respectful tongue in your head, Courtenay. Mr. Taunton’s coming in.”

  B.J. Taunton lurched in. He looked just the way I had always seen him from afar at the speaker’s tables in hundreds of banquets: florid, gross, overdressed and drunk.

  He surveyed me, feet planted wide apart, swaying just a little. “Courtenay,” he said. “Too bad. You might have turned out to be something if you hadn’t cast your left with that swindler Schocken. Too bad.”

  He was drunk, he was a disgrace to the profession, but I couldn’t keep my respect for an entrepreneur out of my voice. “Sir,” I said, “there must be some misunderstanding. There’s been no provocation of Taunton Associates to commit commercial murder—has there?”

  “Not what the law considers provocation. All Schocken did was steal my groundwork, take over my senators, suborn my committee witnesses and steal Venus from me!” His voice rose.

  “No, no provocation. He’s carefully refrained from killing any of my people. Shrewd Schocken; ethical Schocken!”

  His glassy eyes glared at me. “Of all the low-down, lousy, unethical, cheap-jack stunts ever pulled on me, yours was the rottenest.” He thumped his chest, briefly threatening his balance. “I figured out a way to commit a safe commercial murder and you played possum like a scared rat. You ran like a rabbit, you dog.”

  “Sir,” I said desperately, “I don’t know what you’re driving at.” His years of boozing, I thought, had finally caught up with him. No sober ad man could have mixed his similes so unconsciously.

  He sat down; one of his men darted in and there was a chair seat to meet his broad rump in the nick of time. With an expansive gesture, B.J. Taunton said to me; “Courtenay, I am essentially an artist.”

  The words popped out of me automatically: “Of course, Mr.—” I almost said “Schocken.” It was a well-conditioned reflex. “Of course, Mr. Taunton.”

  “A dreamer of dreams; a weaver of visions.” I seemed to see Fowler Schocken sitting there instead of his rival, the man who stood against everything that Fowler Schocken stood for. “I wanted Venus, Courtenay, and I shall have it. No rocket under Schocken’s management is ever going to get off the ground, if I have to corrupt every one of his underlings and kill every one of his section heads. For I am essentially an artist.”

  “Mr. Taunton,” I said steadily, “you can’t kill section heads as casually as all that. You can’t find anybody who’ll take the risk for you. Nobody wants to be brainburned.”

  “I got a mechanic to drop that ’copter pod on you, didn’t I? I got an unemployable bum to plug you through your apartment window, didn’t I? Unfortunately, both missed. And then you crossed us up with that cowardly run-out on the glacier.”

  I didn’t say anything. The run-out on the glacier had been no idea of mine. God only knew whose idea it had been to have Runstead club me, shanghai me and leave a substitute corpse in my place.

  “Tools in my hands,” Taunton brooded. “The greatness of an artist is in his simplicity, his lack of confusion, Courtenay. You say to me: ‘Nobody wants to be brainburned.’ I say; ‘Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him.’ ”

  “Wants to be brainburned?” I repeated stupidly.

  “Explain,” said Taunton to someone alongside him. “I want him thoroughly convinced.”

  One of his men told me dryly: “It’s a matter of psychological need, Courtenay. Ever hear of masochists?”

  “Sure,” I said as nastily as I could. “Consumers who prefer Taunton products.”

  “Worse than that . . . people with a deep need for physical and mental punishment. In some cases, people with so great a feeling of guilt—and it doesn’t matter to us whether the feeling is realistic or not—that only an agonizing death can wipe it out. Do you understand now?”

  I did, and it frightened me. “Flagellants,” I whispered. “Self-immolation. But I thought that with our psychiatric methods—”

  “Most of them are detected, treated or isolated, Courtenay. But not all. Our matchless research facilities here at Taunton have unearthed several. They are eager would-be suicides, only the suicides they would inflict on themselves aren’t sufficiently painful. They want the exquisite agony of cerebrin. You offer that to them. Simple, isn’t it?”

  Yes, simple . . . and as sinister as anything one could expect from Taunton. I knew from my research that there were consumers who defied all the principles of sales psychology. There was Malone, who quietly dug tunnels for six years and one Sunday morning blew up all of Red Bank, New Jersey, because a Burns traffic cop had gotten him sore. Conversely, we had James Revere, hero of the White Cloud disaster, a shy, frail tourist-class steward who had returned again and again to the flames until he rescued 76 passengers, and died because his flesh had been burned from his bones. And there were others who seemingly sought destruction, against every instinct we built our great profession on—self-preservation, self-advancement, gratification of the pleasure principle. It had never made sense, so we had dismissed these cases as exceptions that proved our rules.

  Taunton was an artist. He hadn’t dismissed these cases; he’d worked out a use for them. It meant I was as good as dead. I’d never get back to the Venus project. I’d never see Kathy again.

  TAUNTON’S blurry voice broke in: “You grasp the pattern? The big picture? The essential theme of it is that I’m going to repossess Venus, Now, beginning at the beginning, tell us about the Schocken Agency. All its little secrets, its little weaknesses, its ins and outs, its corruptible employees, its appropriations, its Washington contacts—”

  I was a dead man with nothing to lose. “No,” I said.

  One of Taunton’s men sa
id abruptly, “He’s ready for Hedy,” got up and went out.

  “You’ve studied pre-history, Courtenay,” Taunton pointed out. “You may recognize the name of Giles de Rais.” I did, and felt a tightness over my scalp, like a steel helmet slowly shrinking. “All the generations of pre-history produced only one Giles de Rais. Nowadays we have our pick of several. Out of all the people I might have chosen to handle special work like that for me, I took Hedy. You’ll see why.”

  The door opened and a pale, adenoidal girl with lank blonde hair was standing in it. She had a silly grin on her face; her lips were thin and bloodless. In one hand she held a six-inch needle set in a plastic handle.

  I looked into her eyes and began screaming. I couldn’t stop until they led her away and closed the door again.

  I was broken.

  Taunton leaned back comfortably and said: “Give.”

  I tried, but I couldn’t. My voice wouldn’t work right and I couldn’t remember whether my firm was Fowler Schocken or Schocken Fowler.

  Taunton got up at last. “We’ll put you on ice for a while, Courtenay, so you can pull yourself together. I need a drink myself.” He shuddered involuntarily and then beamed again. “Sleep on it,” he said, and left with a slight stagger.

  Two of his men carted me from the brain room, down a corridor and into a bare cubbyhole with a very solid door. It seemed to be night in executives’ country. Nothing was going on in any of the offices we passed, lights were low and a corridor guard was yawning at his desk.

  I asked unsteadily: “Will you take the cocoon off me? I’m going to be a mess if I don’t get out of it.”

  “No orders,” one of them said, and they slammed the solid door and locked it.

  I flopped around the small floor, trying to find something sharp enough to break the film and give me an even chance of bursting the plastic, but there was nothing. After incredible contortions and a dozen jarring falls, I found that I could never get to my feet. The doorknob had offered a very faint ghost of hope, but it might as well have been a million miles away.

  Mitchell Courtenay, star class copysmith. Mitchell Courtenay, key man of the Venus Section. Mitchell Courtenay, destroyer-to-be of the Connies. Mitchell Courtenay flopping on the floor of a cell in the offices of the sleaziest, crookedest agency that ever blemished the profession, without any prospect except betrayal and—with luck—a merciful death. Kathy at least would never know. She would think I had died like a fool on the glacier, meddling with the power pack when I had no business to . . .

  The lock on the door rattled. They were coming for me. But when the door opened, I saw from the floor a single pair of matchstick ankles, nylon-clad.

  “I love you,” said the strange, dead voice of a woman. “They said I would have to wait, but I couldn’t.” It was-Hedy. She had her needle.

  I tried to cry for help, but my throat was paralyzed as she knelt beside me with shining eyes. The temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She clamped her bloodless lips on mine; they were like heated iron. And then the left side of my face and head were being torn off. It lasted for seconds and blended into a red haze and unconsciousness.

  “Wake up,” the dead voice was saying. “I want you. Wake up.” Lightning smashed at my right elbow and I cried out and jerked my arm. My arm moved—

  It moved!

  The bloodless lips descended on mine again, and again her needle ran into my jaw, probing exactly for the great lump of the trigeminal facial nerve, and finding it. I fought the red haze that was trying to swallow me up. My arm had moved—she had perforated the membrane of the cocoon and it could be burst. The needle searched again and somehow the pain was channeled to my right arm. In one convulsive jerk it was free;

  I think I took the back of her neck in my hand and squeezed. I am not sure. I do not want to be sure. But after five minutes she and her love for me did not matter. I ripped the plastic from me and got to my feet an inch at a time, moaning with stiffness.

  The corridor guard could not matter any more. If he had not come at my cries, he would never. I walked from the room and saw the guard apparently sleeping face-down on his desk. As I stood over him, I noticed a very little blood coagulating in the small valley between the two cords of his shrunken old neck. One thrust from Hedy transfixing the medulla had been enough. I could testify that her knowledge of the nervous system’s topography was complete.

  The guard wore a gun that I hesitated over for a moment and then rejected. In his pockets were a few dollars that would be more useful. I hurried on to the ladders. His desk clock said 0605.

  I KNEW already about climbing upstairs. I learned then about climbing downstairs. If your heart’s in good shape, there’s little to choose between them. It took me an estimated thirty minutes in my condition to get from executives’ country onto the populated stairs below.

  The first sullen stirrings of the work-bound consumers were well under way. I passed half a dozen bitter fist-fights and one knife battle. The Taunton Building nightdwellers were a low, dirty lot who never would have been allowed stairspace in the Schocken Tower, but it was all to the good. I attracted no attention whatsoever in my filthy clothes and sporting a fresh stab wound in my face. Some of the bachelor girls whistled—pure reflex, of course—but that was all.

  My timing was good. I left the building lobby in the very core of a cheek-by-jowl mob boiling out the door to the shuttle which would take them to their wretched jobs. I thought I saw men in plainclothes searching the mob from second-floor windows, but I didn’t look up before I got into the shuttle station.

  At the change booth, I broke all my bills and went into the washroom. “Split a shower, bud?” a shabby woman asked me. I wanted one badly and by myself, but I didn’t dare betray any white-collar traits. She and I pooled our coins for a five-minute salt, thirty-second fresh, with soap. I found that I was scrubbing my right hand over and over again. I found that when the cold water hit the left side of my face, the pain was dizzying.

  After the shower, I wedged myself into the shuttle and spent two hours zigzagging under the city. My last stop was Times Square, which now was mostly a freight area. While cursing consumers hurled crates of protein ticketed for various parts of town onto the belts, I tried to phone Kathy. There was nobody home.

  I got Hester at the Schocken Tower and told her: “I want you to raise every cent you can, borrow, clean out your savings, and buy a Starrzelius apparel outfit for me. Meet me with it soonest at the place where your mother broke her leg two years ago. The exact place, remember?”

  “Yes, naturally. But my contract—”

  “Don’t make me beg you, Hester. Trust me. For God’s sake, hurry. And if you get here and I’m in the hands of the guards, don’t recognize me.”

  I hung up and slumped in the phone booth until the next party hammered indignantly on the door. I walked slowly around the station, had Coffiest and a cheese sandwich and rented a morning paper at the newsstand. The story about me was a bored little item on page three: SOUGHT FOR CB & FEMICIDE. It said George Groby had failed to return from pass to his job with Chlorella and had used his free time to burglarize executives’ country in the Taunton Building. He had killed a secretary who stumbled on him and made his escape.

  Hester met me half an hour later near the loading chute from which a crate had once whizzed and broken her mother’s leg. She looked terrified; technically, she was as guilty of contract breach as “George Groby.”

  I took the garment box from her and asked: “Do you have fifteen hundred dollars left?”

  “Just about. My mother was frantic—”

  “Get us reservations on the next Moon ship; today if possible. Meet me back here. I’ll be wearing the new clothes.”

  “Us? The Moon?” she squeaked.

  “Yes, us. I’ve got to get off Earth before I’m killed. This time it’ll be for keeps.”

  XII

  IN ten hours we were groaning side by side under the takeoff acceleration of the Moon
ship David Ricardo. She had coldbloodedly passed herself off as a Schocken employee on special detail to the Moon and me as Groby, Sales Analyst 6. Naturally the dragnet for Groby, Expediter 9, had not included the Astoria spaceport. Sewage workers on the lam from CB and Femicide wouldn’t hop a rocket, of course.

  We rated a compartment and the max ration. The David Ricardo was so constructed that most passengers rated them. It wasn’t a trip for the idly curious or the consumer fifteen-sixteenths of the population. The Moon was strictly business—mining—and a very little sight-seeing. Our fellow passengers, what we saw of them at the ramp, were preoccupied engineers, a few laborers in the small steerage, and silly-rich men and women who wanted to say they’d been there.

  After takeoff, Hester was hysterically gay for a while, and then snapped. She sobbed on my shoulder, frightened at the enormity of what she’d done. She’d been brought up in a deeply moral Sales-respecting home; you couldn’t expect her to break a labor contract without an emotional flashback.

  “Mr. Courtenay—Mitch—if only I could be sure it was all right! I know you’ve always been good to me and I know you wouldn’t do anything wrong, but I’m so scared and miserable!”

  “You be the judge, Hester. Taunton has found out that there are people who are willing to commit unprovoked commercial murder so they can be given cerebrin. He thinks Mr. Schocken grabbed the Venus project from him. He’s tried twice at least to kill me. I thought for a while Mr. Runstead was one of his agents, assigned to wreck Schocken’s handling of the Venus account. Now, I don’t know. Mr. Runstead clubbed me when I went after him at the South Pole, spirited me away to a labro freighter under a faked identity and left a substitute body for mine.

  “And,” I added cautiously, “there are Connies involved in it.”

  She uttered a small shriek.

  “I don’t know how they dovetail,” I said. “But I was in a Connie cell—”

  “Mister Courtenay!”