Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  For instance:

  Kathy and Matt Runstead and Jack O’Shea had plotted together to put me on ice—literally. All right, that accounted for most of the things that had puzzled me. But it didn’t account for Hester. And, when you stopped to think of it, it didn’t account for all of Runstead’s work, either.

  The Connies were in favor of space travel. But Runstead had sabotaged the Venus test in Cal-Mex. There was no doubt of that; I had as good as a confession from his fall-guy. Could it have been a doublecross? Runstead posing as a Connie who was posing as a copysmith, and in reality—what?

  It took half a minute to get through to New York. Hinkle’s flat voice went up an octave when she heard me again., “Why, Mr. Courtenay!”

  “Get me Runstead.”

  “He phoned in this morning to say he had an appointment out of town, Mr. Courtenay. He didn’t say where.”

  I deliberately controlled my voice. “And just why the hell wasn’t that in the morning summary?” I demanded, and slapped down the off key before she could answer.

  I flung open the door to the bath. Kathy’s face smiled startledly at me from the bath alcove, and then the smile flickered out. “Mitch,” she whispered. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve got questions.” I sat grimly on the edge of the tub, for once immune to the slim fair thighs and the firm breasts, and ticked the questions off on my fingers: “One, who tried to kill me on the Moon rocket? Two, what did Runstead have to do with it? Three, what kind of fool do you think I am? Four, how fast can you think up lies to answer me with?”

  The storm of weeping was answer enough. I didn’t wait for any more.

  I HADN’T even rinsed the morning beard off my face; I had stomped out of the hotel in too much of a rage to notice whether I was as tastefully dressed to speak before Congress as they might legitimately have expected. And I didn’t care.

  Just before I was scheduled to speak, our Washington lobby chief pushed through the crowd to me. He handed me a strip of facsimile paper. “It’s all here, Mr. Courtenay,” he said unhappily. “Uh, is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s just fine,” I told him, which was a lie. I waved him off and looked at the facsimile. It was from Dicken, on the scene at the rocket:

  Passengers and crew alerted and on standby. First movement into ship begins at 1145 EST, loading completed by 1645 EST. Ship fully fueled, supplied and provisioned since 0915. Security invoked, but MIA, CIC and Time-Life known to have filed coded dispatches through dummies. Chart room asks please remind you: Takeoff possible only in AM hours.

  I rubbed the tape between my palms; it disintegrated into ash. As I climbed to the podium, someone tugged at my elbow. It was the President, leaning out of his ceremonial box.

  “Mr. Courtenay,” he whispered, “I guess you understood what I was trying to tell you yesterday in the cab. I’m glad the rocket’s ready.” He widened his grin. “You probably know this, but he’s here.”

  I had no chance to find out who “he” was. As the Speaker of the House came toward me, hand outstretched, and the applause started from the floor, I forced a smile. But it was a trick of the rictus muscles entirely. I had little to smile about. If the news about the Venus rocket had trickled down to the President, there wasn’t a chance that I could pull a surprise on anyone—even if I could figure out whom T wanted to surprise.

  Fowler Schocken was a pious old hypocrite and a fraud, but if it hadn’t been for Fowler Schocken I could never have got through that speech. I could hear his voice in my ears. “Sell ’em, Mitch; you can sell them if you’ll keep in mind that they want to buy.” And I sold the assembled legislators precisely what they wanted to own. The applause was fantastic.

  There were a dozen standing figures in the hall, clapping their hands and begging the Chair for recognition, including white-haired old Colbee, lean and dignified with his four decades of service.

  “The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Coca-Cola.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Speakuh.” Colbee’s face wore a courtly smile. Coca-Cola was nominally one of the few big independents; but I remembered that Fowler had commented once on their captive agency’s surprising closeness to Taunton. “If I may ventuah to speak for the Upper Chamber, I should like to thank ouah distinguished guest for his very well-chosen remarks heah. I am certain that we all have enjoyed listening to a man of his calibeh and standing.” Go back to the Berlitz school you Westchester phony, I thought bitterly. I could feel the weenie coming as Colbee rumbled on. “With the permission of the Chair, I should like to ask ouah guest a number of questions involving the legislation we have been asked to consider heah today.”

  By now even the galleries had caught on to what was happening. I hardly needed to hear the disastrous rest:

  “It may have escaped youah attention, but we are fortunate in having with us another guest. I refer, of course, to Mr. Taunton.” He waved gracefully to the visitor’s gallery, where B.J.’s red face appeared between two stolid figures that I should have recognized at the first moment as his bodyguards. “In a brief discussion before ouah meeting heah, Mr. Taunton was good enough to give me some information which I would like Mr. Co’tenay to comment upon. First, I would ask Mr. Co’tenay if the name of George Groby, wanted for Contract Breach and Femicide, is familiar to him. Second, I would like to ask if Mr. Co’tenay is Mr. Groby. Third, I would like to ask Mr. Co’tenay if there is any truth to the repo’t, given me in confidence by someone in whom Mr. Taunton assures me I can repose absolute trust, that Mr. Co’tenay is a membah in good standing of the World Conservation Association, known to most of us who are loyal consumers as—”

  Even Colbee himself could not have heard the last words of his sentence.

  The uproar was like a physical blast.

  XIX

  SEEN in retrospect, everything that happened in the next wild quarter of an hour blurs and disappears. But I remember frozen moments of time that seem almost to have no relation to each other:

  The waves of hatred that flowed around me, the contorted face of the President below me, screaming something unheard to the sound engineer in his cubicle, the wrathful eyes of the Speaker as he reached out for me.

  Then the wild motion halted as the President’s voice roared through the chamber at maximum amplification, “I declare this meeting adjourned!” and the stunned expressions of the legislators at his unbelievable temerity. There was greatness in that little man. Before anyone could move or think, he clapped his hands—the magnified report was like atomic fission—and a smartly uniformed squad moved in on us.

  “Take him away,” the President declaimed, with a magnificent gesture, and at doubletime the squad surrounded me and hustled me off the podium.

  The President convoyed us as far as the door while the Assembly gathered its wits. His face was white with fear, but he whispered: “I can’t make it stick, but it’ll take them all afternoon to get a ruling from the Chamber of Commerce. God bless you, Mr. Courtenay.”

  And he turned back to face them. I do not think Caligula’s Christians walked more courageously into the arena.

  The guards were the President’s own, honor men from Brink’s leadership academy. The lieutenant said never a word to me, but I could read the controlled disgust on his face as he read the slip of paper the President had handed him. I knew he didn’t like what he was ordered to do, and I knew he would do it.

  They got me to Anacosta and put me on the President’s own transport. They stayed with me and fed me, and one of them played cards with me, as the jets flared outside the ports and we covered territory. All they would not do was talk to me.

  It was a long flight, in that clumsy old luxury liner that “tradition” gave the President. Time had been wasted at the airport, and below us I could see the fuzzy band of the terminator creeping past. As we came down for a landing, it was full dark. And the waiting was not yet over. The lieutenant left the ship alone; he was gone for a long, long time.

  Whe
n he came back, it was midnight. “All right,” he said to me. “A cab’s waiting for you outside. The driver knows where to go.”

  I climbed out and stretched. “Thanks,” I said awkwardly.

  The lieutenant spat neatly on the ground between my feet. I scrambled out of the way of the takeoff.

  THE driver was Mex. I tried him on a question and he gaped at me; no English. There were fifty good reasons why I didn’t want to go along with him without a much better idea of what was up. But when I stopped to think of it, I had no choice. The lieutenant had followed his orders. I could see his active little military mind framing the report that would tip someone off to where they could find the notorious Connie, Mitchell Courtenay.

  I would be a sitting duck; it would depend on whether Taunton or the police got to me first.

  You’d think that the fact that the driver was a Mexican would have tipped me off. It didn’t, though. Not until I saw the glimmer of starlight on the massive erectile before me did I know I was in Arizona, and realize what the President had done for me.

  A mixed squad of Pinkertons and our own plant protection men closed in on me and hustled me past the sentry boxes, across the cleared land, up to the rocket itself.

  The OIC showed me the Connie crescent he could make with thumb and forefinger and said: “You’re safe now.”

  “But I don’t want to go to Venus!”

  He laughed out loud.

  Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. The long, dreary flight had been a stasis; everything at both ends of it had been too frantic with motion over which I had no control to permit thought. They gave me no chance to think here, either. I felt someone grabbing the seat of my pants and I was hoisted inside. There I was dragged more than led to an acceleration hammock, strapped in and left.

  The hammock swung and jolted, and twelve titans squatted on my chest. Good-by, Kathy; good-by, Schocken Tower. Like it or not, I was on my way to Venus.

  BUT it wasn’t really good-by to Kathy. It was she herself who came to unstrap me when the first blast was over.

  I have never seen an expression quite like the one on Kathy’s face. It was part darling-I-did-the-most-extravagant-thing-today, and a little bit I’m-not-angry-just-terribly-disappointed, and the corners of her mouth were pure you-lousy-son-of-a-bitch.

  She said: “If you’ll apologize, I’ll explain.”

  I got out of the hammock and tottered weightlessly, rubbing my back. I opened my mouth to make a cynical reply. What came out was a squeaky, “Oh, God, Kathy!”

  It wasn’t a brilliant speech, but I didn’t have time. Kathy’s lips and mine were occupied.

  When we stopped for breath, I said, “What alkaloids do you put into the product?” but it was wasted. She wanted to be kissed again. I kissed her.

  It was hard work, standing up. Every time she moved, we lurched against the wall or drifted off the floor entirely. Only a standby jet was operating and we were otherwise beyond the limit of weight.

  We sat down.

  “I’m sorry if I guessed wrong,” I said. “All of a sudden it looked as if you and Runstead were doublecrossing everybody. Especially me.”

  It was only a little kiss this time. Just to show.

  I stretched and looked around me. “Lovely place you have here. The thing was, you see, all at once I wanted out. I wanted you to have Venus—I’d promised it to you—but I wanted out for myself. So I ordered the ship loaded up, to get it on the way. You were going to be on it, but I wasn’t.”

  “I can’t spend my life blaming you for jumping to conclusions, Mitch,” she said gently. “But you could tell me what touched you off.”

  I explained about Runstead’s lousing up San Diego and Venus Project. And about Hester’s murder.

  “Oh, Mitch,” she said. “Where do I begin? How’d you ever get to be star class?”

  “Went to night school,” I said. “I’m still listening.”

  “Well, you should be able to figure it out. Sure, we wanted space travel. The human race needs Venus. But we didn’t want Fowler Schocken on Venus. Or Mitchell Courtenay, either. Not as long as Mitchell Courtenay would loot Venus for an extra megabuck’s billing. There aren’t too many planets around that the race can expand into, Mitch. We couldn’t have Fowler Schocken’s Venus Project succeed.”

  “Um,” I said, digesting. “And Hester?”

  Kathy shook her head. “You figure that one out.”

  “You don’t know the answer?”

  “I do. It isn’t hard.”

  I coaxed, but she wouldn’t play. So I kissed her for a while again, until some interfering character with a ship’s-officer rosette on his shoulder came grinning in.

  “Care to look at the stars, folks?” he asked, in a tourist-guide way that I detested. It didn’t pay to pull rank on him, of course; ship’s officers always act a cut above their class and it would have been ungraceful, at least, to brace him for it. Besides—

  The thought stopped me for a moment. I was used to being star class by now. It wasn’t going to be fun, being one of the boys. I gave my Conservationist theory a quick mental runthrough. No, there was nothing in it that indicated that I would have a show-dog’s chance of being sirred and catered to any more.

  Hello, Kathy. Good-by, Schocken Tower.

  WE went up to the forward observation port. All the faces were strange to me.

  There isn’t a window to be found on the Moon ships; radareyed, GCA-tentacled, they sacrifice the esthetic but useless spectacle of the stars for the greater strength of steel. I had never seen the stars in space before.

  Outside the port was white night. Brilliant stars shining against a background of star particles scattered over a dust of stars. There wasn’t a breadth of space the size of my thumbnail where there was blackness: it was all light, all fiery pastels. A rim of fire around the side of the port showed the direction of the Sun.

  Kathy introduced me around. The captain of the ship turned out to have a voice I knew; he’d spoken to me on the longlines phone, and I recalled with no pleasure the particular nastiness with which I’d reamed him out for some small delay. However, he showed no rancor. He treated me—in fact, all of them treated me—like some grand hero of the republic from whom nothing more could be expected, a pensioned Caesar or Napoleon in retirement.

  All at once I realized how Jack O’Shea had felt. It was great to be great. To have been great was something else again.

  Kathy’s arm went around me. Kathy always reads my mind.

  We turned away from the port. “Where’s Matt Runstead?” I asked.

  “Back in Schocken Tower, living on wakeup pills, trying to untangle the mess. Somebody had to stay behind, Mitch. Fortunately, Matt can vote your proxies. We didn’t have much time to talk in Washington; he’s going to have a lot of questions to ask, and nobody around with the answers.”

  I stared. “What in the world was Runstead doing in Washington?”

  “Getting you off the spot, Mitch. After Jack O’Shea broke—”

  “After what?”

  “Look, let’s take it in order. O’Shea broke. He got drunk one night too often, and he couldn’t find a clear spot in his arm for the needle, and he picked out the wrong girl to break apart in front of. They had him sewed up tight. All about you, all about me, the rocket, everything.”

  “Who did?”

  “Your great and good friend, B.J. Taunton.” Kathy struck a cigarette viciously.

  I could read her mind a bit, too. Little Jack O’Shea, 60 pounds of jellied porcelain and melted wax, thirty-five inches of twisted guts and blubber. There had been times in the past weeks when I had not liked Jack. I canceled them all, paid in full, when I thought of that destructible tiny man in the hands of Taunton’s anthropoids.

  “Taunton got it all, Mitch,” Kathy said. “All that mattered, anyhow. If Runstead hadn’t had a tap on Taunton’s interrogation room, we would have had it right then. But he had time to get down to Washington and warn me and the President�
��the President is no Conservationist, but he’s a good man; he can’t help being born into office—and here we are.”

  The captain interrupted us. “Five minutes till we correct. Better get back to your hammocks. The correction blasts may not be much, but you never know.”

  Kathy nodded and led me away. I plucked the cigarette from her lips, took a puff and gave it back. “Why, Mitch!” she said.

  “I’m reformed,” I told her. “Kathy, one more question. It isn’t a nice question.”

  She sighed. “The same as between you and Hester.”

  I asked, “What was between Jack—uh?”

  “You heard me. What was between Jack and me was the same as what was between you and Hester. All one way. Jack was in love with me, maybe. I was too damn crazy mad in love with you!”

  It seemed like the moment to reach out and kiss her again, but it must not have been because she pushed me away.

  “That’s what you’re so stupid about!” she was saying. “Jack wanted me. I didn’t want anyone but you, not ever. And you never troubled to figure it out—never knew how much I cared about you any more than you knew how much Hester cared about you. Good Lord, Mitch, how blind can you be?”

  “Hester in love with me?”

  “Why else would she commit suicide?” Kathy actually stamped her foot, and floated an inch above the floor as a result. “Well,” I said dazedly.

  The sixty-second beeper went off. “Hammocks,” said Kathy, and the tears in her eyes flooded out. I put my arm around her.

  “This is a rotten undignified business,” she said. “I have exactly one minute to kiss and make up, let you get over your question-and-answer period, tell you I have a private cabin and there’re two hammocks in it, and get us both fastened in.”

  I straightened up fast. “A minute is a long time.”

  It didn’t take that long.

  XX

  SO we landed. After the wild excitement wore off, I felt like sitting down and writing a postcard to the little man back in Washington: