Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “See your valet,” I said, and went out, boiling. In my own cubicle I sweated sense-impressions into the copy for a couple of hours and then picked up a guard squad to go shopping. There were no brushes with the Burns patrolmen. I noticed that Warren Astron’s shopfront now sported a chaste sign:

  Dr. Astron Regrets That

  Urgent Business

  Has Recalled Him to Earth on

  Short Notice

  I asked one of our boys: “Has the Ricardo left?”

  “Couple hours ago, Mr. Courtenay. Next departure’s the Pareto, tomorrow.”

  I could talk.

  SO I told Fowler Schocken the whole story.

  And Fowler Schocken didn’t believe a word of it.

  He was nice enough and he tried not to hurt my feelings. “Nobody’s blaming you, Mitch,” he said kindly. “You’ve been through a great strain. It happens to us all, this struggle with reality. Don’t feel you’re alone, my boy. We’ll see this thing through. There are times when anybody needs help. M y analyst—”

  I’m afraid I yelled at him. “Now, now,” he said, still kind and understanding. “Laymen shouldn’t dabble in these things, but I think I know a thing or two about it and can discuss it objectively. Let me try to explain—”

  “Explain this!” I yelled at him, thrusting my altered Social Security tattoo under his nose.

  “If you wish,” he said calmly. “Call it a holiday from reality. You’ve been on a psychological bender. You assumed a new identity, and you chose one as far-removed from your normal hard-working, immensely able self as possible. You chose the lazy, easy-going life of a scum-skimmer, drowsing in the tropic Sun—”

  I knew then who was out of touch with reality.

  “Your slanders against Taunton’s are crystal-clear to a person with some grasp of our unconscious drives. I was pleased to hear you voice them. They meant that you’re-getting back to your real self. What is our problem—the central problem of the real Mitchell Courtenay, star class copysmith? Lick the opposition! Crush the competing firms! Destroy them! Veiled in symbols, obscured by ambivalent attitudes, the Taunton fantasy is nevertheless clear. Your imagined encounter with the girl ‘Hedy’ might be a textbook example!”

  “Look at my jaw! See that hole? It still hurts!”

  He just smiled and said: “Let’s be glad you did nothing worse to yourself, Mitch. The id, you see—”

  “What about Kathy? What about the complete data on the Connies I gave you? Grips, hailing signs, passwords, meeting places?”

  “Mitch,” he said earnestly, “as I say, I shouldn’t be meddling, but they aren’t real. Through sexual hostility, ‘Groby’ identified your wife with a hate-and-fear object, the Connies. And ‘Groby’ carefully arranged things so that your Connie data is uncheckable and therefore unassailable. ‘Groby’ arranged for you—the real you—to withhold the imaginary ‘data’ until the Connies would have had a chance to change all that. ‘Groby’ was acting in self-defense. Courtenay was coming back and ‘Groby’ felt himself being squeezed out. Very well, he arranged things so that he can make a comeback—”

  “I’m not insane!”

  “My analyst—”

  “You’ve got to believe me!”

  “These unconscious conflicts—”

  “I tell you Taunton has killers!”

  “Do you know what convinced me, Mitch?”

  “What?” I asked bitterly.

  “The fantasy of a Connie cell embedded in Chicken Little. The symbolism—well, it’s quite unmistakable.”

  I gave up except on one point: “Do people still humor the insane, Mr. Schocken?”

  “You’re not insane, my boy. You need help. You’ll get it.”

  “Will you humor me in one respect?”

  “Of course.”

  “Guard yourself and me, too. Taunton has killers. All right, I think, or Groby thinks, or some damn body thinks that Taunton has killers. If you humor me to the extent of guarding yourself and me, I promise not to start swinging from the ceiling. I’ll even go to your analyst.”

  “Fine,” he smiled, humoring me.

  Who could blame him? His own dreamworld was under attack by every word I had to say. He couldn’t believe that Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith, was sitting there and telling him such frightful things.

  They were hammer blows at him, but Fowler Schocken was nothing if not resilient. There was an explanation for everything and Sales could do no wrong. Therefore, Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith, was not sitting there telling him these things. It was Mitchell Courtenay’s untamed id. I suppose I was lucky, at that. He could have decided I was an impostor trying to subvert him and handed me over to the Burns Detective Agency.

  Some prehistoric research of my apprentice days recurred to me. I had found that, contrary to popular opinion, there had been no martyrs to science, ever. Roger Bacon had been comfortably imprisoned not because he had a fumbling, intuitive, mixed-up-with-mysticism notion of the scientific method, but because he had, from an incurably bad temper, violated a kind of nonaggression pact between the Dominicans and Franciscans. People hadn’t cared about his truths. Copernicus hadn’t been hailed before the Inquisition because he said the Earth moved around the Sun; it was because he had arrogantly and brutally denounced earlier astronomers who had done a good job with their limited instruments and math. People hadn’t cared about his truths.

  If I persisted, Fowler Shocken might regretfully put me away as a psychotic, but he didn’t care about my truths.

  Truths? Truths? What truths?

  The interests of producers and consumers are not always identical.

  Most of the world is not always happy.

  Workmen don’t always automatically find the jobs they do best.

  Entrepreneurs don’t always play a hard, fair game by the rules.

  The Connies are sane, intelligent and well-organized.

  In a free association fashion that would have delighted Fowler Shocken and his analyst, I said to myself: “You know, Mitch, you’re talking like a Connie.”

  I answered: “Why, so I am. That’s terrible.”

  “Well,” I replied, “I don’t know about that. Maybe . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said thoughtfully. “Maybe . . .”

  It’s an axiom of my trade that things are invisible except against a contrasting background. Like, for instance, the opinions and attitudes of Fowler Schocken.

  Humor me, Fowler, I thought. Keep me guarded. I don’t want to run into an ambivalent fantasy like Hedy again. The symbolism may have been obvious, but she hurt me bad with her symbolic little needle.

  XV

  RUNSTEAD wasn’t there when our little procession arrived in executives’ country of the Schocken Tower. There were Fowler, me, Jack O’Shea, secretaries—and the weapons squads I had demanded.

  Runstead’s secretary said he was down the hall, and we waited. I suggested that he wasn’t coming back. After an hour, word got to us that a body had been found smashed flat on the first setback of the Tower, hundreds of feet below. It was very difficult to identify.

  The secretary wept hysterically and opened Runstead’s desk and safe. Eventually we found a diary covering the past few months of Runstead’s life. Interspersed with details of his work, his amours, memos for future campaigns, notes on good out-of-the-way restaurants and the like were entries that said:

  “He was here again last night. He told me to try to hit harder on the shock-appeal, says the Starrzelius campaign needed guts. He scares hell out of me.’ Understand he used to scare everybody in the old days when he was alive . . . GWH again last night . . . Saw him by daylight for first time! Jumped and yelled, but nobody noticed. Wish he’d go away . . . He said I’m no good, disgrace to profession . . .”

  After a while we realized that “he” was the ghost of George Washington Hill, father of our profession, founder of the singing commercial, shock-value, irritation campaigns.

  “Poor fellow,” said Schocken, white-faced.
“Poor, poor fellow. If only I’d known. If only he’d come to me in time.”

  The last entry said raggedly: “I know I’m no good. Unworthy of the profession. They all know it. Can see it in their faces. Everybody knows it. He told them. Damn him!”

  “Poor, poor fellow,” said Schocken, almost sobbing. He turned to me and said: “You see? The strains of our profession . . .”

  Sure I saw. A prefabricated diary and an unidentifiable splash of protoplasm. It might have been 180 pounds of Chicken Little down there on the first setback. But I would have been wasting my breath. I nodded soberly, humoring him.

  I was restored to my job at the top of the Venus Section. I saw Fowler’s analyst daily. And I kept my armed guard. In tearful sessions, Fowler would say: “You must relinquish this symbol. It’s all that stands between you and reality now, Mitch. Dr. Lawder tells me—”

  Dr. Lawder told Fowler Schocken what I told Dr. Lawder. And that was the slow progress of my “integration.” I hired a medical student to work out traumas for me backward from the assumption that my time as a consumer had been a psychotic fugue, and he came up with some honeys. A few I had to veto as not quite consistent with my dignity, but there were enough left to make Dr. Lawder drop his pencil every once in a while. One by one we dug them up, and I have never been so bored in my life.

  But I would not surrender my insistence that my life and Fowler Schocken’s were in danger.

  Fowler and I got closer and closer—he thought he had made a convert. I was ashamed to string him along. He was being very good to me. But it was a matter of life or death. The rest was sideshow.

  The day came when Fowler Schocken said gently: “Mitch, I’m afraid heroic measures are in order. I don’t ask you to dispense with this barrier of yours against reality. But I am going to dismiss my guards.”

  “You’ll be killed, Fowler!”

  “I’m not afraid.” Argument was useless. After a bit of it, acting on sound psychological principles, he told the lieutenant of his office squad: “I won’t be needing you any more. Please report with your men to Plant Security Pool for reassignment. Thank you for your loyalty and attention to detail during these weeks.”

  The lieutenant saluted, but he and his men looked sick. They were going from an easy job in executives’ country to lobby patrol or night detail or mail guard or messenger service at ungodly hours.

  That night Fowler Schocken was garrotted on his way home by somebody who had slugged his chauffeur and substituted himself at the bicycle pedals of the custom-built Cadillac. The killer, apparently a near-moron, resisted arrest and was clubbed to death, giggling. His tattoo had been burned off. He was unidentifiable.

  YOU can imagine how much work was done in the office the next day. There was a memorial Board meeting held and resolutions passed saying a great profession never would forget and so on. Messages of condolence were sent by other agencies, including Taunton’s. I got some odd looks when I crumpled the Taunton message in my fist and used some very bad language. Commercial rivalry, after all, goes just so far. We’re all gentlemen; a hard, clean fight and may the best agency win.

  But no Board member paid it much mind. They were all thinking of one thing: the Schocken block of voting shares.

  Fowler Schocken Associates was capitalized at 7 x 1012 mega-bux, voting shares par at M2 0.1, giving us 7 x 1013 shares. Of these, 3.5 x 1013 -f-1 shares were purchasable only by employees holding AAAA labor contracts or better—roughly speaking, star class. The remaining shares by SEC order had been sold on the open market. As customary, Fowler Schocken himself had, through dummies, snapped these up at the obscure stock exchanges where they had been put on sale.

  In his own name he held a modest .75 x 1013 shares and distributed the rest with a lavish hand. I myself, relatively junior in spite of holding perhaps the number-two job in the organization, had accumulated via bonuses and incentive pay only about .7 x 1012 shares.

  Top man around the Board table probably was Harvey Bruner. He was Schocken’s oldest associate and had corralled .83 x 1013 shares over the years. (Nominally this gave him the bulge on Fowler—but he knew, of course, that in a challenge those other 3.5 x 1013 -f-1 shares would come rolling in on carloads of proxies, all backing Fowler with mysterious unanimity. Besides, he was loyal.) He seemed to think he was heir-apparent, and some of the more naive Research and Development people were already sucking up to him. He was an utterly uncreative, utterly honest wheelhorse. Under his heavy hand, the delicate mechanism that was Fowler Schocken Associates would disintegrate in a year.

  If I were gambling, I would have given odds on Sillery, the Media chief, for copping the Schocken bloc, and on down in descending order to myself, on whom I would have taken odds—long, long odds. That obviously was the way most of them felt, except the infatuated Bruner and a few dopes. You could tell. Sillery was surrounded by a respectful little court that doubtless remembered such remarks from Fowler as: “Media, gentlemen, is ‘basic-basic’ ” and: “Media for brains, copysmiths for talent!” I was practically a leper at the end of the table, with my guards silently eying the polite battle. Sillery glanced at them once, and I could read him like a book: “That’s been going on long enough: we’ll knock off that eccentric first thing.”

  What we had been waiting for came about at last. “The gentlemen from the American Arbitration Association, Probate Section, are here, gentlemen.”

  They were of the funeral type, according to tradition. Through case-hardening or deficient sense of humor, they refrained from laughing while Sillery gave them a measured little speech of welcome about their sad duty and how we wished we could meet them under happier circumstances and so on.

  They read the will in a rapid mumble and passed copies around. The part I read first said: “To my dear friend and associate Mitchell Courtenay, I bequeath and devise my ivory-in-laid oak finger-ring (inventory number 56,987) and my seventy-five shares of Sponsors’ Stock in the Institute for the Diffusion of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, a New York non-profit corporation, with the injunction that he devote his leisure hours to active participation in this organization and the furtherance of its noble aim.”

  Well, Mitch, I told myself, you’re through. I tossed the copy on the table and leaned back to take a swift inventory of my liquid assets.

  “Hard lines, Mr. Courtenay,” a brave and sympathetic Research man I hardly knew told me. “Mr. Sillery seems pleased with himself.”

  I glanced at the bequest to Sillery—paragraph one. Sure enough, he got Fowler’s personal shares and huge chunks of stock in Managerial Investment Syndicate, Underwriters Holding Corporation and a couple of others.

  The Research man studied my copy of the will. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Courtenay,” he told me, “the old man could have treated you better.”

  I seemed to hear Fowler chuckling nearby, and sat bolt erect. “Why, the old so-and-so!” I gasped. It fitted like lock and key, with his bizarre sense of humor to oil the movement.

  Sillery was clearing his throat and an instant of silence descended on the Board room. “It’s a trifle crowded here, gentlemen. I move that all persons other than Board members be asked to leave—”

  I got up and said: “I’ll save you the trouble. Come on, boys. Sillery, I may be back.”

  THE Institute for the Diffusion of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, a New York non-profit corporation, turned out to be a shabby three-room suite downtown in Yonkers. It was like something out of Dickens. There was a weird old gal in the outer office pecking away at a typewriter. A sagging rack held printed pamphlets with fly-specks on them.

  “I’m from Fowler Schocken Associates,” I told her.

  She jumped. “Excuse me, sir! I didn’t notice you. How is Mr. Schocken?”

  I told her how he was, and she began to blubber. He had been such a good man, giving so generously for the Cause. What on Earth would she and her poor brother ever do now?

  “All may not be lost,” I told her. “Who’s in charge here
?”

  She sniffled that her brother was in the inner office. “Please break it to him gently, Mr. Courtenay. He’s so delicate and sensitive—”

  I said I would, and walked in. Brother was snoring-drunk, flopped over his desk. I joggled him awake and he looked at me with a bleary and cynical eye. “Washawan?”

  “I’m from Fowler Schocken Associates. I want to look at your books.”

  He shook his head emphatically. “Nossir. Only the old man himself gets to see the books.”

  “He’s dead,” I told him. “Here’s the will.” I showed him the paragraph and my identification.

  “Well,” he said, sobering fast, “the joy-ride’s over! Or do you keep us going? You see what it says there, Mr. Courtenay? He enjoins on you—”

  “I see it,” I told him. “The books, please.”

  He got them out of a surprising vault behind a plain door.

  Three hours of labor over them showed me that the Institute was in existence solely for holding and voting 56 per cent of the stock of an outfit called General Phosphate Reduction Corporation of Newark according to the whims of Fowler Schocken.

  I went “out into the corridor and said to my guards: “Come on, boys. Newark next.”

  I won’t bore you with the details. It was single-track for three stages and then it split. One of the tracks ended two stages later in the Frankfort Used Machine Tool Brokerage Company, which voted 32 per cent of the Fowler Schocken Associates “public sale” stock. The other track forked again one stage later and wound up eventually in United Concessions Corp. and Waukegan College of Dentistry and Orthodontia, which voted the remainder.

  Two weeks later, on Board morning, I walked into the Board room with my guards.

  Sillery was presiding. He looked haggard and worn, as though he’d been up all night every night for the past couple of weeks looking for something.

  “Courtenay!” he snarled. “I thought you understood that you were to leave your regiment outside!”

  I nodded to honest, dumb old Harvey Bruner, whom I’d let in on it. Loyal to Schocken, loyal to me, he bleated: “Mr. Chairman, I move that members be permitted to admit company plant-protection personnel assigned to them in such number as they think necessary for their bodily protection.”