Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Eagerly he riffled to the Post’s meager financial page. Moon Mining and Smelting had opened at 27. Uranium at 19. United Com at 24. Catastrophic lows! The crash had come!

  He looked at his watch again, in panic. 9:59. It had said 9:55. He’d have to be back in the phone booth by 11:55 or—he shuddered. An H-bomb would be out of his league.

  Now to pinpoint the crash. “Cab!” he yelled, waving his paper. It eased to the curb. “Public library,” W. J. Born grunted, and leaned back to read the Post with glee.

  The headline said: 25000 RIOT HERE FOR UPPED JOBLESS DOLE. Naturally; naturally. He gasped as he saw who had won the 1976 presidential election. Lord, what odds he’d be able to get back in 1975 if he wanted to bet on the nomination! NO CRIME WAVE, SAYS COMISSIONER. Things hadn’t changed very much after all. BLONDE MODEL HACKED IN TUB; MYSTERY BOYFRIEND SOUGHT. He read that one all the way through, caught by a two-column photo of the blonde model for a hosiery account. And then he noticed that the cab wasn’t moving. It was caught in a rock-solid traffic jam. The time was 10:05.

  “Driver,” he said.

  The man turned around, soothing and scared. A fare was a fare; there was a depression on. “It’s all right, mister. We’ll be out of here in a minute. They turn off the Drive and that blocks the avenue for a couple of minutes, that’s all. We’ll be rolling in a minute.”

  They were rolling in a minute, but for a few seconds only. The cab inched agonizingly along while W. J. Born twisted the newspaper in his hands. At 10:13 he threw a bill at the driver and jumped from the cab.

  Panting, he reached the library at 10:46 by his watch. By the time that the rest of the world was keeping on that day it was quitting-time in the midtown offices. He had bucked a stream of girls in surprisingly short skirts and surprisingly big hats all the way.

  He got lost in the marble immensities of the library and his own panic. When he found the newspaper room his watch said 11:03. W. J. Born panted to the girl at the desk: “File of the Stock Exchange Journal for 1975,1976 and 1977.”

  “We have the microfilms for 1975 and 1976, sir, and loose copies for this year.”

  “Tell me,” he said, “what year for the big crash? That’s what I want to look up.”

  “That’s 1975, sir. Shall I get you that?”

  “Wait,” he said. “Do you happen to remember the month?”

  “I think it was March or August or something like that, sir.”

  “Get me the whole file, please,” he said. Nineteen seventy-five. His year—his real year. Would he have a month? A week? Or—?

  “Sign this card, mister,” the girl was saying patiently. “There’s a reading machine, you just go sit there and I’ll bring you the spool.”

  He scribbled his name and went to the machine, the only one vacant in a row of a dozen. The time on his watch was 11:05. He had fifty minutes.

  The girl dawdled over cards at her desk and chatted with a good-looking young page with a stack of books while sweat began to pop from Bern’s brow. At last she disappeared into the stacks behind her desk.

  Born waited. And waited. And waited. Eleven-ten. Eleven-fifteen. Eleven-twenty.

  An H-bomb would be out of his league.

  His ulcer stabbed him as the girl appeared again, daintily carrying a spool of 35-millimeter film between thumb and forefinger, smiling brightly at Born. “Here we are,” she said, and inserted the spool in the machine and snapped a switch. Nothing happened.

  “Oh, darn,” she said. “The light’s out. I told the electrician.”

  Born wanted to scream and then to explain, which would have been just as foolish.

  “There’s a free reader,” she pointed down the line. W. J. Bern’s knees tottered as they walked to it. He looked at his watch—11:27. Twenty-eight minutes to go. The ground-glass screen lit up with a shadow of the familiar format; January 1st, 1975. “You just turn the crank,” she said, and showed him. The shadows spun past on the screen at dizzying speed, and she went back to her desk.

  Born cranked the film up to April 1975, the month he had left 91 minutes ago, and to the sixteenth day of April, the very day he had left. The shadow on the ground glass was the same paper he had seen that morning: synthetics surge to new vienna peak.

  Trembling he cranked into a vision of the future; the Stock Exchange Journal for April 17th, 1975.

  Three-inch type screamed: securities crash in global crisis: banks close; clients storm brokerages!

  Suddenly he was calm, knowing the future and safe from its blows. He rose from the reader and strode firmly into the marble halls. Everything was all right now. Twenty-six minutes was time enough to get back to the machine. He’d have a jump of several hours on the market; his own money would be safe as houses; he could get his personal clients off the hook.

  He got a cab with miraculous ease and rolled straight to the loft building in the West Seventies without hindrance. At 11:50 by his watch he was closing the door of the phone booth in the dusty, musty-smelling lab.

  At 11:54 he noticed an abrupt change in the sunlight that filtered through the dirt-streaked windows and stepped calmly out. It was April 16th, 1975, again. Loring was sound asleep beside a gas hotplate on which coffee simmered. W. J. Born turned off the gas and went downstairs softly. Loring was a screwy, insolent, insecure young man, but by his genius he had enabled W. J. Born to harvest his fortune at the golden moment of perfection.

  Back in his office he called his floor broker and said firmly: “Cronin, get this straight. I want you to sell every share of stock and every bond in my personal account immediately, at the market, and to require certified checks in payment.”

  Cronin asked forthrightly: “Chief, have you gone crazy?”

  “I have not. Don’t waste a moment, and report regularly to me. Get your boys to work. Drop everything else.”

  Born had a light, bland lunch sent in and refused to see anybody or take any calls except from the floor broker. Cronin kept reporting that the dumping was going right along, that Mr. Born must be crazy; that the unheard-of demand for certified checks was causing alarm, and finally, at the close, that Mr. Born’s wishes were being carried out. Born told him to get the checks to him immediately.

  They arrived in an hour, drawn on a dozen New York banks. W. J. Born called in a dozen senior messengers, and dealt out the checks, one bank to a messenger. He told them to withdraw the cash, rent safe-deposit boxes of the necessary sizes in those banks where he did not already have boxes, and deposit the cash.

  He then phoned the banks to confirm the weird arrangement. He was on first-name terms with at least one vice president in each bank, which helped enormously.

  W. J. Born leaned back, a happy man. Let the smash come. He turned on his flashboard for the first time that day. The New York closing was sharply off. Chicago was worse. San Francisco was shaky—as he watched, the flashing figures on the composite price index at San Francisco began to drop. In five minutes it was a screaming nosedive into the pit. The closing bell stopped it short of catastrophe.

  W. J. Born went out to dinner after phoning his wife that he would not be home. He returned to the office and watched a board in one of the outer rooms that carried Tokyo Exchange through the night hours, and congratulated himself as the figures told a tale of panic and rain. The dominoes were toppling, toppling, toppling.

  He went to his club for the night and woke early, eating alone in an almost-deserted breakfast room. The ticker in the lobby sputtered a good morning as he drew on his gloves against the chilly April dawn. He stopped to watch. The ticker began spewing a tale of disaster on the great bourses of Europe, and Mr. Born walked to his office. Brokers a-plenty were arriving early, muttering in little crowds in the lobby and elevators.

  “What do you make of it, Born?” one of them asked.

  “What goes up must come down,” he said. “I’m safely out.”

  “So I hear,” the man told him, with a look that Born decided was envious.

  Vienna, Milan, Pa
ris, and London were telling their sorry story on the boards in the customers’ rooms. There were a few clients silting up the place already, and the night staff had been busy taking orders by phone for the opening. They all were to sell at the market.

  W. J. Born grinned at one of the night men and cracked a rare joke: “Want to buy a brokerage house, Willard?”

  Willard glanced at the board and said: “No thanks, Mr. Born. But it was nice of you to keep me in mind.”

  Most of the staff drifted in early; the sense of crisis was heavy in the air. Born instructed his staff to do what they could for his personal clients first, and holed up in his office.

  The opening bell was the signal for hell to break loose. The tickers never had the ghost of a chance of keeping up with the crash, unquestionably the biggest and steepest in the history of finance. Born got some pleasure out of the fact that his boys’ promptness had cut the losses of his personal clients a little. A very important banker called in midmorning to ask Born into a billion-dollar pool that would shore up the market by a show of confidence. Born said no, knowing that no show of confidence would keep Moon Mining and Smelting from opening at 27 on September llth, 1977. The banker hung up abruptly.

  Miss Illig asked: “Do you want to see Mr. Loring? He’s here.”

  “Send him in.”

  Loring was deathly pale, with a copy of the Journal rolled up in his fist. “I need some money,” he said.

  W. J. Born shook his head. “You see what’s going on,” he said. “Money’s tight. I’ve enjoyed our association, Loring, but I think it’s time to end it. You’ve had a quarter of a million dollars clear; I make no claims on your process—”

  “It’s gone,” Loring said hoarsely. “I haven’t paid for the damn equipment—not ten cents on the dollar yet. I’ve been playing the market. I lost a hundred and fifty thousand on soy futures this morning. They’ll dismantle my stuff and haul it away. I’ve got to have some money.”

  “No!” W. J. Born barked. “Absolutely not!”

  “They’ll come with a truck for the generators this afternoon. I stalled them. My stocks kept going up. And now—all I wanted was enough in reserve to keep working. I’ve got to have money.”

  “No,” said Born. “After all, it’s not my fault.”

  Loring’s ugly face was close to his. “Isn’t it?” he snarled. And he spread out the paper on the desk.

  Born read the headline—again—of the Stock Exchange Journal for April 17th, 1975: securities crash in global crisis: banks close; clients storm brokerages! But this time he was not too rushed to read on: “A world-wide slump in securities has wiped out billions of paper dollars since it started shortly before closing yesterday at the New York Stock Exchange. No end to the catastrophic flood of sell orders is yet in sight. Veteran New York observers agreed that dumping of securities on the New York market late yesterday by W. J. Born of W. J. Born Associates pulled the plug out of the big boom which must now be consigned to memory. Banks have been hard-hit by the—”

  “Isn’t it?” Loring snarled. “Isn’t it?” His eyes were crazy as he reached for Bern’s thin neck.

  Dominoes, W. J. Born thought vaguely through the pain, and managed to hit a button on his desk. Miss Illig came in and screamed and went out again and came back with a couple of husky customers’ men, but it was too late.

  Sea-Change

  The sea was now the source of metals, and each nation's Domes were vital. And the security-restrictions that had started with atomics, early in the century, were now something tremendous . . .

  1

  THE FAINT phosphorescence of the water fell away, flowing slowly at first, then with increasing speed, past the red markers on the wall of the lock-chamber. The level dropped ever more rapidly under the steady pressure of the incoming air, till at last there was nothing but a lingering circlet of moisture around the drain. Then that, too, disappeared into thick air. Literally thick . . . air at water-pressure, fifty fathoms down.

  Lev Sloane waited without impatience, while the pressure in the chamber diminished. When the safe-signal chimed at last, inside the heavy glass of his helmet, he began to remove the bulky parts of his suit, but still with no haste.

  Earnestly, he wished he had been able to find some real trouble in the plant. One time in ten, they had a genuine technical problem he could tackle . . . and solve. But four hours out in the seaside plant this afternoon, inspecting, testing, and examining, had turned up nothing but neglect—whether wilful or wanton, he did not know.

  Sloane made his way from the wall-lock, through the soft illumination of spiralling corridors to the bathyvator-lock on the top level, avoiding the exec office by some forty extra feet of ramp. Haywood, the production-boss in Dome Baker, was a man of many certainties; when things got bad enough in his bailiwick to need a trouble-shooter from Research, he expected something definite in the way of diagnosis. And Lev had no answer to give him.

  Stupidity or sabotage? How can you tell?

  Such little things, always . . . corrosion, exposure, outworn parts. Such little things, always quickly remedied, seldom repeated just the same way. But every time they called him, there was something new; and each call meant production was down again. A drop of seawater in an oil-bearing motor, and the quota for the whole dome was unfilled. A carload of metal . . . ten carloads . . . sometimes a hundred, that never reached the factories. Incredible carelessness? Or criminal intent?

  On a written report he could file the single word, “Neglect,” and let the front-office worry over what lay behind it. But if he talked to Haywood, here on the job, he knew from experience what would happen.

  A surmise, a gesture, an inflection, the very breath of a suspicion of sabotage, and you lost six months’ work testifying at hearings. A word, a number, a name remembered, an offhand hint of carelessness in such-and-such a sector, and some poor slob of a junior assistant’s helper lost his job to show that Something was Being Done.

  Lev wanted no part of such decisions. He was an engineer, not a politico, or a smooth-faced personnel man. He avoided even friendly conversation with the bathyvator-operator, determined that this time they would get nothing from him but the bare facts of his technical inspection. He stood in gloomy silence at the wide-vision port, as they emerged from the clear glow inside the dome, to the eerie translucence of the water outside; then up and up, through darkening strata, till penetrating streaks of sun began to reach them. They broke surface, and the autumn sunlight sparkled on blue waters with a surprisingly normal brilliance.

  The operator looped a line across three feet of gently choppy water, and made fast to the bobbing platform of the small bright green convertible that waited nervously, all alone in the vast ocean where Lev had left it hours ago. Sloane hopped across; as he closed the door of the coupe behind him, he made a conscious effort to dismiss the nagging indecisions of the day’s work.

  While the engine warmed, he lit a cigarette and inhaled gratefully. Smoking was not so much forbidden as frowned upon in the manufactured oxygen down below; but it was impossible in a divers’ suit. He left the cigarette between his lips, gunned the motor, and swooped off the ocean-bed in a fine spray of disdain. Tonight, in his own apartment, he would write his neat, precise report—and let them make of it what they would. It was no problem of his now.

  The small plane nosed eagerly into the sky; Lev Sloane sat back in contentment, as the warmth of the sun beat through the clean clear plastic against his face.

  DUSK FELL on the city while be ate a leisurely and satisfying dinner. When he emerged from the restaurant, the orange incadescence of newly-lit sodium-lamps was reflected and repeated everywhere from glass shopfronts, in lucite lampposts, and on the shimmering plastenamel bodies of the slow-moving stream of cars. Another fifteen minutes, and the warming sodium vapors would shed a kindly yellow radiance on the wide thoroughfare. Meanwhile, Lev turned off to the sidestreets, where old-style white lamps cast a feebler light at greater intervals.

 
He walked abstracted, in a mood of his own making, with the good meal behind him, his pleasant apartment ahead, and only the damned report still tickling the back of his mind. The streets were darker and narrower now, and that pleased him. Factories and warehouses, instead of tenements. Until he chose, of his own accord, to turn back to the main highway, he was alone in the city night, and the endless complexities of society were powerless to disturb him.

  Then, out of nowhere, were pounding feet, and a hoarse voice cursing breathlessly. A shadow darted almost under his arm, and vanished in the dimness of a warehouse-entryway, and the heavy running footsteps thudded to a halt in the street behind.

  “Which way’d he go?”

  Lev turned around to face a short, thick man whose blunt features were concealed behind equal parts of stubble and grime. One sleeve of his shapeless sweater hung flat at his side, tucked loosely into baggy trousers; the good arm was knotted with muscles, visible even in the dim street light. And something—a brick?—was clenched in the stubby fist.

  “Well, you seen him! Which way’d he go?” the angry one demanded.

  “I’m not sure,” Sloane said coolly. “Into some doorway, or around the corner; I didn’t really. see.”

  “Never catch ’em now,” the man muttered. “Damn kids snatching alla time! I tell you they can smell metal, every one of ’em. They give me eight stores to watch; I can’t be everyplace, and them kids’ll know the one room’s got some brass pipe in it, ten minutes after they bring the stuff in. Never get the brat now!” But his eyes kept searching, following every gleam of light into the doorways and hiding-places along the street.

  Lev was beginning to understand. “It’s a shame,” he agreed automatically. “There ought to be some way to put a stop to it.”

  “I’ll put a stop to it if he pokes his head out,” the thick man said grimly. “Damn kids! And then I get the blame. Just leave me get my hands on ’em once,” he swore violently. “You won’t find ’em hanging around my place again.” He looked sharply at Lev. “You sure you didn’t see ’em? That’s metal he snatched now, don’t forget.”