Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Damme if I know,” said the Canadian.

  Dr. Brewster rapped for silence.

  “In fact,” said Dr. Brewster, “this whole business of invasion from Demeter has been badly overdone, I should say. There was a time when one could scarcely pick up a pulpwood magazine without finding a story about that theme. Not that I have anything against the pulps, gentlemen. They have done much to popularize astronomy in their own indirect way.

  “To ramble a bit further, Mr. Bonestell, the cover painter, has done some very striking scenes of Demeter viewed from space—works which might well hang in the corridors of many an observatory building, I believe.”

  A large part of the audience looked uneasily at the other part. They read the science fiction pulps, but it was not considered proper to talk about them. “And furthermore,” whispered the astronomer from McGill, “Bonestell has never done a Demeter cover that I know of—and I’ve seen practically everything he’s done, from Coronet to Conquest of Space.” He looked dazedly at Brewster, smiling from the lectern.

  “Well,” said Brewster briskly, “to get to the point, my observations were conducted until a very short time before the convention; since then I’ve been in seclusion—as it were—correlating them and whipping them into shape for this reading. An ambiguity I trust you will excuse; I had a bit of a shock lately, thought that I was quite finished as an astronomer. My eyes seemed to have failed me, but fortunately it was only temporary.”

  He rattled the papers and began to read off strings of figures. The astronomers in the audience twisted more and more uncomfortably in their seats.

  Finally the gentleman from Canada rose and said, “Excuse me, Doctor Brewster, I’d like to ask a question.”

  “Certainly.”

  The Canadian looked a bit uncomfortable. “I’m ah—afraid I don’t quite understand. You seem to be giving atmospheric spectrum readings.”

  “Exactly,” said Brewster mildly.

  “But how can you get detailed atmospheric readings from a star? And, by the way, just where is Demeter—in what constellation?”

  Brewster opened his mouth and closed it again several times. At last he gasped, “I—I don’t understand. I mean Demeter—the Demeter. It’s the only one I know of.”

  “Well, where is it?” barked the baffled Canadian.

  “Right where it always was, I presume,” said Brewster loftily. “Between the orbits of Earth and Mars.”

  “An asteroid?” asked the gentleman from McGill. “There is an asteroid named Demeter, but it isn’t where you say it is and it’s only a miserable score miles in diameter—anyone who says it has an atmosphere is a fool!”

  “Hardly!” said Brewster, laying his paper down on the lectern. “That Demeter—if there is such a silly duplication of names—isn’t the one I mean—and you know it! You don’t call a planet two-thirds the size of Earth an asteroid, sir—whoever you are!”

  “I,” yelled the Canadian, “am Cullogh, associate professor of astronomy at McGill University.”

  “And I, Mr. Cullogh, am Brewster—full professor of astronomy at the Vernier Institute of Technology. If you will allow me to continue—” He stared at the Canadian until the man simply slumped into his seat.

  Said the botanist from Yale, “Mr. Cullogh, I think you’re quite right.”

  Cullogh stared at him. “I know I’m right. You can’t pull planets out of your hat!” But Brewster, who seemed to have done just that, continued with his fantastic paper on a major planet that nobody had ever heard of.

  There was a great deal of buzzing from the rear of the stage where the officers of the International Scientific Association were seated. Finally they rose in concert and advanced on Brewster.

  “Excuse me, doctor,” said the Vice President, laying a firm hand on the astronomer’s shoulder.

  “This session is adjourned,” announced the President. “Reconvene at 8 promptly tonight for appointment of a publications committee. Please leave quietly without discussion.”

  The hall emptied in a few minutes and the Vice President unhanded Dr. Brewster, who sputtered incoherently for a few minutes, then pulled his dignity and his scattered typescript together. “Will you be good enough,” he snarled, “to explain the meaning of this uncalled for interference with my dignity and reputation?”

  “I don’t think,” said a brash young corresponding secretary, “that you have much of either left after reading that nightmare of yours. What’s the idea? Doing an act to get some publicity?”

  Dr. Brewster, with an animal snarl, lunged at the corresponding secretary, who hit him squarely on the jaw.

  “You killed him!” gasped the President.

  “Don’t be foolish,” said the secretary, rubbing his knuckles. “He’ll come to.” He propped the doctor up in a chair and massaged the back of his neck in the usual ringside manner. Dr. Brewster opened his eyes and worked his jaw, then burst into tears.

  “There, there,” said the Vice President. He went to the switchboard at the side of the stage and economically turned out the house lights, leaving on only the overhead borders.

  Brewster sobbed. “What is the matter with everybody? I begin to read a paper about Demeter and you all jump on me!”

  The officers looked blankly at one another. “What was that about Demeter?” asked the President. “I mean, what is it?”

  The astronomer stopped weeping long enough to look wildly at the officer. “You’re insane!” he shrilled. “Or you’re railroading me!”

  The Vice President took him by the arm, helping him to his feet. “When did you first hear of this Demeter?” he asked.

  “Hear of it? It’s one of the ten planets, man! It’s one of the planets the Assyrians knew all about! You’ll find it in all the astrological bushwah for the past thousand years! You can get its coordinates in any textbook. Kepler used it to calculate the elliptic orbit. Tycho Brahe measured its diameter. Aristotle swore up and down that if you slept in the light of Demeter you’d be cured of earache. Manly Hall, the occultist, says that Demeter governs the joints of the body. Shakespeare wrote a sonnet:

  ‘So near are you to my thoughts as food to life

  Or wandering Demeter to the velvet night

  And for the peace of you I hold such strife

  As cross-gartered gallant, gold-bedight—’ ”

  The brash young corresponding secretary wrinkled his brow for a moment. “You have that all wrong,” he finally observed. “It’s Sonnet LXXV, and it goes like this:

  ‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life,

  Or as sweet-seasoned flowers are to the ground;

  And for the peace of you I hold such strife

  As twixt a miser and his wealth is found.’ ”

  He grinned. “But your version sounds good too.”

  “But what,” raved Brewster, “what about the invasion from Demeter that Orson Welles scared the country with in ’39, that others have repeated in South America, in France more recently? What about that? And the book by H. G. Wells? And Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous series about John Carter, the Warlord of Demeter?”

  “Both the radio play and the books were about the planet Mars,” said the President.

  “Let me see an ephemeris,” asked Brewster weakly. The secretary handed him a copy of the Columbia University’s current pamphlet of heavenly data. Brewster riffled through it eagerly.

  “Mercury, Venus, Luna—Mars!” he gasped. “They left Demeter out! How could Columbia University have done a thing like that?”

  “We manage,” said the President, offended. “I think, doctor, that you ought to go to a hospital for a little rest, eh?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” said Brewster. He was studying the ephemeris again. “Not only did they leave Demeter out,” he said unhappily, “but Mars is altogether too near the Earth. Look at that—ridiculous!”

  “That,” said the President, “is where Mars has always been. You do need a rest, Brewster. Pm going to call for—ah—an aut
o.” He went to the service phone in the wings of the stage. “Get me Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital,” he said softly, shielding his mouth.

  Brewster had slumped into a chair again and was holding his head in his hands. “I saw it,” he muttered. “It was real after all. I saw it.”

  “You mean that Demeter of yours?” asked the corresponding secretary. “What does it look like?”

  “It’s blue, bright blue,” said Brewster. “No moon. Look at the magazine covers—some of the Astounding paintings of the Forties are the best astronomical plates available on the subject. But I don’t mean the planet. It was that hand.”

  “What hand?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t believe it myself when I saw it. I thought my eyes were going back on me. That’s why I knocked off work to do the correlation for my paper. I must have been the only one who saw it—the only telescope trained on Demeter at that precise time. A second off either way and I would have lost it.”

  “What the deuce are you talking about, doctor? Speak up!”

  Brewster raved on. “You know how it is—direct observation through a telescope—you see things vaguely. Eye strain after a few minutes, and in a couple of hours you’re nearly blind you’re so intent on watching whatever particular point you’re studying. I’ve often seen strange things through the telescopes. Chromatic aberration can put a rainbow across the Milky Way—surely you’ve seen that?”

  They nodded gravely. Every astronomer has seen peculiar things through a telescope. A joke that goes around observatories tells of the greenhorn just out of school who polished a mirror objective glass with steel wool and discovered twenty new spiral nebulae.

  “Well,” babbled Brewster, “that’s what I saw, sort of. One of those very firm constructions that drift across the field of vision—and when I saw it I’d been observing directly for five hours. So I knocked off right away. I don’t want to go blind any more than the next man.”

  The President came back from the phone. “I’ve arranged for a—ah—cab to come for you, doctor,” he explained. “What were you saying? Something about Demeter?”

  “Yes. I haven’t observed it or even looked through a telescope since then—when I saw that thing. It seemed to come from beyond the stars—through Magellan’s coal sacks, like a port-hole.”

  “What was it that you saw?”

  Instead of answering, he started up suddenly. “My God!” he yelled. “I nearly forgot about this!” He whipped a pamphlet bound in durable gray paper from his pocket. “I was using this very booklet when it happened. The pages almost got blurry for a moment—eye strain—but I kept it in focus just the same.” He waved the pamphlet in the air. “Read this,” he snarled. “And then you can laugh out of the other side of your mouth. I was checking it again just before I began to read my paper. It’s still accurate.”

  The men from Bellevue came at that moment, big silent men in white jackets. The President whispered to one of them.

  Not saying one word, the Bellevue men took Brewster by both arms and began to walk him off the stage. He seemed to accept them as natural forces rather than as human beings, for he neither struggled nor addressed them. He turned his head toward the officers standing on the stage. “What I saw,” he yelled at them, “was a hand. It reached through Magellan’s coal sacks and took. Demeter away. It took Demeter away! Too! Demeter away . . .” His voice died, echoing in the wings and flies of the bare stage.

  “What did he give you?” asked the corresponding secretary.

  The President glanced at the pamphlet bound in durable gray paper which Brewster had thrust into his hands. “It’s the United States Naval Observatory Ephemeris for October 1949,” he said.

  He riffled through it casually. “Lists coordinates for that month. Celestial coordinates for Mercury, Venus, Luna,” he muttered. Then he bent closer over the page, wild-eyed: “Mercury, Venus, Luna—

  “Demeter!”

  The President grabbed the Corresponding Secretary.

  “Get him!” he croaked. “Get him!”

  “Who?”

  “Brewster, of course! He—ah, he was right! See, here—the coordinates of Demeter!”

  He peered at the page while the Corresponding Secretary tried to look over his shoulder. The President gasped, closed his eyes and slid gently to the floor in a dead faint.

  The Secretary picked up the book and found the proper page. For a moment the type seemed to blur a bit; but a closer look showed nothing more than the celestial coordinates of the nine planets everyone knows.

  Time Bum

  Here is a story that would have delighted Damon Runyon. Even Harry the Horse, that Broadway immortal, would be forced to doff his hat to Harry Twenty-Third Street, the snappy dresser who came up with a completely new con game. For once this story gets around the local hangouts, the wise boys are going to drop their money machines and gold-mine stocks and start buying up lists of subscribers to science-fiction magazines. Yes sir, here's one racket that is sure-fire—provided you're willing to take the chance that the ending to Time Bum is pure fiction.

  But God help you if you're wrong!

  HARRY Twenty-Third street suddenly burst into laughter. His friend and sometimes roper Farmer Brown looked inquisitive.

  “I just thought of a new con,” Harry Twenty-Third Street said, still chuckling.

  Farmer Brown shook his head positively. “There’s no such thing, my man,” he said. “There are only new switches on old cons. What have you got—a store con? Shall you be needing a roper?” He tried not to look eager as a matter of principle, but everybody knew the Fanner needed a connection badly. His girl had two-timed him on a badger game, running off with the chump and marrying him after an expensive, month-long buildup.

  Harry said, “Sorry, old boy. No details. It’s too good to split up. I shall rip and tear the suckers with this con for many a year, I trust, before the details become available to the trade. Nobody, but nobody, is going to call copper after I take him. It’s beautiful and it’s mine. I will see you around, my friend.”

  Harry got up from the booth and left, nodding cheerfully to a safeblower here, a fixer there, on his way to the locked door of the hangout. Naturally he didn’t nod to such small fry as pickpockets and dope peddlers. Harry had his pride.

  The puzzled Farmer sipped his lemon squash and concluded that Harry had been kidding him. He noticed that Harry had left behind him in the booth a copy of a magazine with a space ship and a pretty girl in green bra and pants on the cover.

  “A furnished . . . bungalow?” the man said hesitantly, as though he knew what he wanted but wasn’t quite sure of the word.

  “Certainly, Mr. Clurg,” Walter Lacblan said. “I’m sure we can suit you. Wife and family?”

  “No,” said Clurg. “They are . . . far away.” He seemed to get some secret amusement from the thought. And then, to Walter’s horror, he sat down calmly in empty air beside the desk and, of course, crashed to the floor looking ludicrous and astonished.

  Walter gaped and helped him up, sputtering apologies and wondering privately what was wrong with the man. There wasn’t a chair there. There was a chair on the other side of the desk and a chair against the wall. But there just wasn’t a chair where Clurg had sat down.

  Clurg apparently was unhurt; he protested against Walter’s apologies, saying: “I should have known, Master Lachlan. It’s quite all right; it was all my fault. What about the bang—the bungalow?”

  Business sense triumphed over Walter’s bewilderment. He pulled out his listings and they conferred on the merits of several furnished bungalows. When Walter mentioned that the Curran place was especially nice, in an especially nice neighborhood—he lived up the street himself—Clurg was impressed. “I’ll take that one,” he said. “What is the . . . feoff?”

  Walter had learned a certain amount of law for his real-estate license examination; he recognized the word. “The rent is seventy-five dollars,” he said. “You speak English very well, Mr.
Clurg.” He hadn’t been certain that the man was a foreigner until the dictionary word came out “You have hardly any accent.”

  “Thank you,” Clurg said, pleased. “I worked hard at it Let me see—seventy-five is six twelves and three.” He opened one of his shiny-new leather suitcases and calmly laid six heavy little paper rolls on Walter’s desk. He broke open a seventh and laid down three mint-new silver dollars. “There I am,” he said. “I mean, there you are.”

  Walter didn’t know what to say. It had never happened before. People paid by check or in bills. They just didn’t pay in silver dollars. But it was money—why shouldn’t Mr. Clurg pay in silver dollars if he wanted to? He shook himself, scooped the rolls into his top desk drawer and said: “I’ll drive you out there if you like. It’s nearly quitting time anyway.”

  Walter told his wife Betty over the dinner table: “We ought to have him in some evening. I can’t imagine where on Earth he comes from. I had to show him how to turn on the kitchen range. When it went on he said, ‘Oh, yes—electricity!’ and laughed his head off. And he kept ducking the question when I tried to ask him in a nice way. Maybe he’s some kind of a political refugee.”

  “Maybe . . .” Betty began dreamily, and then shut her mouth. She didn’t want Walter laughing at her again. As it was, he made her buy her science-fiction magazines downtown instead of at neighborhood newsstands. He thought it wasn’t becoming for his wife to read them. He’s so eager for success, she thought sentimentally.

  That night while Walter watched a television variety show, she read a story in one of her magazines. (Its cover, depicting a space ship and a girl in green bra and shorts, had been prudently torn off and thrown away.) It was about a man from the future who had gone back in time, bringing with him all sorts of marvelous inventions. In the end the Time Police punished him for unauthorized time traveling. They had come back and got him, brought him back to his own time. She smiled. It would be nice if Mr. Clurg, instead of being a slightly eccentric foreigner, were a man from the future with all sorts of interesting stories to tell and a satchelful of gadgets that could be sold for millions and millions of dollars.