Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He shoved the proofs aside and began to tick his way down Novak’s lists. “There’s a Marchand calculator in Mr. Clifton’s laboratory,” he said. “Wouldn’t that do for both of you, or must you have one of your own?”

  “I can use his.”

  Friml crossed the Marchand off the list. “I see you want a—a continuous distilled-water outfit. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and just as good to install a tank, and truck distilled water in from the city? After all, it’s for sale.”

  “I’m afraid not. I have to have it pure—not the stuff you buy for storage batteries and steam irons. The minute you put distilled water into a glass jar it begins to dissolve impurities out of the glass. Mine has to be made fresh and stored in a tin-lined tank.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Friml. He put a light check mark next to the still, and Novak knew this human ferret would investigate it. Maybe he suspected him of planning to bilk the A.S.F.S.F. by making corn liquor on the side.

  “Um. This vacuum pump. Mr. Clifton’s had a Cenco Hyvac idle since he completed port-gasket tests a month ago. You might check with him as to its present availability . . . otherwise I see no duplications. This will probably be approved by Mr. MacIlheny in a day or two and then we can let the contract for the construction of your lab. I suggest that you spend the day at the field with Mr. Clifton to clear a location for it and exchange views generally. You can take the bus to Barstow and any taxi from there. If you want to be reimbursed you should save the bus ticket stub and get a receipt from the taxi driver for my files. And tonight there’s the membership meeting.

  Mr. MacIlheny asked me to tell you that he’d appreciate a brief talk from you—about five minutes and not too technical.”

  Friml dove back into the page proofs of Starward, and Novak left, feeling a little deflated.

  The Greyhound got him to Barstow in ninety minutes. A leatherfaced man in a Ford with “Taxi” painted on it said sure he knew where the field was: a two-dollar drive. On the road he asked Novak cautiously: “You one of the scientists?”

  “No,” said Novak. He humbly thought of himself as an engineer. “Rocket field’s been real good for the town,” the driver admitted.

  “But scientists——” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t mind some advice from an older man, would you?”

  “Why, no.”

  “Just—watch out. You can’t trust them.”

  “Scientists?”

  “Scientists. I don’t say they’re all like that, but there’s drinkers among them and you know how a drinker is when he gets to talking. Fighting Bob proved it. Not just talk.”

  This was in reference to the Hoyt speech that claimed on a basis of some very wobbly statistics that the A.E.C. was full of alcoholics. “That so?” asked Novak spinelessly.

  “Proved it with figures. And you never know what a scientist’s up to.”

  Enough of this nonsense. “Well, out at the field they’re up to building a dummy of a moon ship to find out if it can be done.”

  “You ain’t heard?” The driver’s surprise was genuine.

  “Heard about what? I’m new here.”

  “Well, that explains it. It’s no dummy moon ship. It’s camouflage for an oil-drilling rig. They struck oil there. The scientists are experimenting with it to make cheap gasoline. I heard it from the lineman that tends their power line.”

  “Well, he’s wrong,” Novak said. “I’ve been on the grounds and they aren’t doing anything but working on the ship.”

  The driver shook his head. “Nossir,” he said positively. “The thing’s a dummy all right, but not for a space ship. Space ships don’t work. Nothing for the rocket to push against. It stands to reason you can’t fly where there’s no air for it to push against. You could fire a cannon to the Moon if you made one big enough, but no man could stand the shock. I read about it.”

  “In the Bennet newspapers?” asked Novak nastily, exasperated at last. “Sure,” said the driver, not realizing that he was being insulted. “Real American papers. Back up Fighting Bob to the hilt.” The driver went on to lavish praise of the Bennet-Hoyt line on foreign policy (go it alone, talk ferociously enough and you won’t have to fight); economics (everybody should and must have everything he wants without taking it from anybody else); and military affairs (armed forces second to none and an end to the crushing tax burden for support of the armed forces).

  Novak stopped listening quite early in the game and merely interjected an occasional automatic “uh-huh” at the pauses. After a while the Prototype appeared ahead and he stopped even that.

  The rocket, standing alone in the desert like a monument was still awe-inspiring. At the sentry box he introduced himself, and the boy on guard shook his hand warmly. “Glad to have you inboard, sir,” he said. The word was unmistakably “inboard”—and when Novak had it figured out he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. The kid was using rocket-ship slang before there were any rocket ships!

  The boy never noticed his effort j he was too busy apologizing for stopping him. “You see; Doctor, people don’t take our work seriously. Folks used to drive out here the first month and interrupt and even expect us to lend them our drinking water that we trucked out. As if we were here for their entertainment! Finally a gang of little devils broke into one of the Quonsets after dark and smashed everything they could reach. Four thousand dollars’ worth of damage in twenty minutes! We were sick. What makes people like that? So we had to put up a real fence and mount guard, even if it doesn’t look good. But of course we have nothing to hide.”

  “Of course——” began Novak. But the boy’s face had suddenly changed. He was staring, open-mouthed. “What’s the matter?” snapped Novak, beginning to inspect himself. “Have I got a scorpion on me?”

  “No,” said the boy, and looked away embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Only it suddenly hit me—maybe you’ll be one of the people inboard when she—when she goes. But I shouldn’t ask.”

  “The last I heard,” Novak said, “she is a full-sized mock-up and isn’t going anywhere.”

  The boy winked one eye slowly.

  “All right,” Novak shrugged, amused. “Have it your way and I’ll see you on Mars. Where’s Mr. Clifton?”

  “Back of the machine shop—a new testing rig.”

  Crossing the quadrangle, Novak passed the Prototype and stopped for another look. To the Moon? This colossal pile of steel? It was as easy to visualize the Eiffel Tower picking up its four legs and waddling across Paris. No wonder the taxi driver didn’t believe in space flight—and no wonder the kid at the gate did. Credo quia impossibilis, or however it went. There were people like that.

  He heard Clifton before he saw him. The engineer in charge was yelling: “Harder! Harder! Is that all the hard ya can bounce? Harder!” And a girl was laughing.

  Back of the machine shop, in its shadow, Clifton was standing with a stop watch over a vaguely coffin-shaped block of moulded rubber swung from a framework by rope. Most of the ropes were milky nylon. Six of them were manila and had big tension balances, like laundry scales, hooked into them. Towering over Clifton and the framework was a twelve-foot gas-pipe scaffold, and a pretty girl in shorts was climbing a ladder to the top of it.

  As Novak watched, she hurled herself from the scaffold into the coffin. Clifton, blaspheming, snapped his stop watch and tried to read the jumping needles on the dials of all six balances at the same time. “Hello,” Novak said.

  “Harya, Mike. Mike, this is Amy helping out. Like my rig?”

  “I thought they worked all this out at the Wright-Patterson A.F.B. Space Medicine School. It is an acceleration couch, isn’t it?”

  “Kindly do not speak to me about Air Force Space Medicine,” said Clifton distinctly. “It happens to be mostly bushwah. Ya know what happened? They had this ejector-seat problem, blowing a jet pilot out of a plane because he’d get cut in half if he tried to climb out at 600 m.p.h. So they had an acceleration problem and they licked it fine and dandy.
So a publicity-crazy general says acceleration is acceleration, what’s good enough for an ejector seat is good enough for a space ship and anyway nobody knows what the hell space flight is like so why worry?”

  Clifton folded his arms, puffed out his chest, and assumed the Napoleonic stance, with one foot forward and the knee bent. His hoarse voice became an oily parody of the general’s. “My gallant public relations officers! Let us enlighten the taxpaying public on what miracles us air force geniuses pass off daily before breakfast. Let us enlighten them via the metropolitan dailies and wire services with pictures. Let us tell them that we have solved all the medical problems of space flight and have established a school of space medicine to prove it. You may now kiss my hand and proceed to your typewriters at the gallop. To hell with the Navy!”

  The girl laughed and said: “Cliff, it can’t be that bad. And if you keep talking treason they’ll lock you up and you’ll pine away without your sweetheart there.” She meant Proto.

  “A-a-ah, what do you know about it, ya dumb Vassar broad? What time’s Iron Jaw pick you up? Time for any more bounces?”

  “Barnard, not Vassar,” she said, “and no time for more bounces, because he said he’d be here at noon and Grady is the world’s best chauffeur.” She took a wrap-around skirt from a lower horizontal of the gas-pipe scaffolding and tied it on. “Are you a new member, Mike?” she asked.

  “I’m going to work on the reaction chamber and throat liner.”

  “Metal or ceramic?”

  “Ceramic refractories is my field.”

  “Yes, but what about strength? I was thinking about tungsten metal as a throat-liner material. It’s a little fantastic because it oxidizes in air at red heat, but I have an idea. You install a tungsten liner and then install a concentric ceramic liner to shield it. The ceramic liner takes the heat of the exhaust until the ship is out of atmosphere and then you jettison it, exposing the tungsten. In vacuum, tungsten holds up to better than three thousand centigrade——”

  Clifton bulled into it. “Ya crazy as a bunny rabbit, Amy! What about atmosphere on Mars or Venus? What about the return trip to Earth? What about working the tungsten? That stuff crystallizes if ya look at it nasty. What about paying for it? Ya might as well use platinum for cost. And what about limited supply? Ya think America’s going to do without tool bits and new light bulbs for a year so ya can have five tons of-tungsten to play with? Didn’t they teach economics at Miss Twitchell’s or wherever it was?”. . .

  It was exactly noon by Novak’s watch and a black Lincoln rolled through the gate and parked.

  “See you at the meeting, Cliff? Glad to have met you, Mike.” The girl smiled, and hurried to the car. Novak saw a white-haired man in the back open the door for her, and the car drove off.

  “Who was that?” Novak asked.

  “She’s Miss Amelia Earhart Stuart to the society pages,” Clifton grinned. “In case ya don’t read the society pages, she’s the daughter of Wilson Stuart—my old boss at Western. She got bit by the space bug and it drives him crazy. The old man’s a roughneck like me, but he’s in a wheel chair now. Wrecked his heart years ago test-flying. He’s been looking backwards ever since; he thinks we’re dangerous crackpots. I hear ya got the job okay. Where do you want the lab?”

  They left the test rig and walked around the machine-shop Quonset. Clifton stopped for a moment to measure the Prototype with his eye. It was habitual.

  “How much of a crew does she—would she—hold?” Novak asked.

  “Room for three,” Clifton said, still looking at her.

  “Navigator, engineer—and what?”

  “Stowaway, of course!” Clifton roared. “Where ya been all ya life? A girl stowaway in a tin braseer with maybe a cellophane space suit on. Buckle down, Mike! On the ball or I don’t put ya in for the Galactic Cross of Merit!”

  Novak wouldn’t let himself be kidded. “The youngster at the gate might stow away,” he said. “He thinks the Prototype is going to take off some day and we just aren’t telling the public about it.”

  Clifton shook his head—regretfully. “Not without the A.E.C. develops a rocket fuel and gives it to us. The bottom two thirds of her is a hollow shell except for structural members. I wish the kid was right. It’d be quite a trip and they’d have quite a time keeping me off the passenger list. But I built the old bat, and I know.”

  Novak picked an area for his lab and Clifton okayed it. They had lunch from a refrigerator in the machine shop, with a dozen kids hanging on their words.

  “Give ya an idea of what we’re up against, Mike,” Clifton said around a pressed-ham sandwich. “The manhole for Proto. It’s got to open and close, it’s got to take direct sunlight in space, it’s got to take space-cold when it’s in shadow. What gasket material do you use? What sealing pressure do you use? Nobody can begin to guess. Some conditions you can’t duplicate in a lab. So what some smart cookie in the A.S.F.S.F. figured out ten years ago was a wring fit, like jo-blocks. Ya know what I mean?”

  Novak did—super-smooth surfaces, the kind on hundred-dollar gauges. Put two of those surfaces together and they clung as if they were magnetized. The theory was that the molecules of the surfaces interpenetrate and the two pieces become—almost—the same piece. “Ingenious,” he said.

  “Ingenious,” muttered Clifton. “I guess that’s the word. Because nobody ever in the history of machine shops put a jo-block finish on pieces that size. I got a friend in South Bend, so I sent him the rough-machined manhole cover and seating. The Studebaker people happen to have a big super-finish boring mill left over from the war, sitting in a corner covered with cosmoline. Maybe my friend can con them into taking off the grease and machining a superfinish onto our parts. If not, I’ll try to handscrape them. If I can’t do it on circular pieces—and I probably can’t—I’ll scrap them and order square forgings. You think you got troubles with your throat liner?”

  “Generally, what kind of shape is Proto in?”

  “Generally, damn fine shape. I finish testing the acceleration couch today. If it passes I order two more pads from Akron and install them. Then we’re all ready to go except for the manhole problem and a little matter of a fuel and propulsion system that oughtta be cleared up in eight-ten years. A detail.”

  Clifton picked his teeth and led Novak to a blue-print file. He yanked open one of the big, flat drawers and pulled out a 36-by-48 blue print. “Here we are,” he said. “The chamber, liner, and vane. You’re gonna have to make it; you might as well look it over. I’m gonna appoint a volunteer and supervise some more crash dives.”

  Novak took the print to an empty comer of the shop and spread it out on a work-bench. He looked first at the ruled box in the lower right-hand corner for specifications. He noted that the drawing had been made some three months ago by “J. Macl.” and checked by him. Material: ceramic refractory; melting point higher than 3,000° C.; coefficient of expansion, less than .000,004; bulk modulus . . .

  Novak laughed incredulously.

  It was all there—stretch, twist, and bulk moduli, coefficient of elasticity, everything except how to make it. MacIlheny had laid down complete specifications for the not-yet-developed liner material. A childish performance! He suspected that the president of the A.S.F.S.F. was simply showing off his technical smattering and was mighty proud of himself. Novak wondered how to tell MacIlheny tactfully that under the circumstances it would be smarter to lay down specifications in the most general terms.

  He studied them again and laughed again. Sure he could probably turn out something like that—one of the boron carbides. But it would be a hell of a note if A.E.C. came up with a 3,750-degree fuel and they had a 3,500-degree liner, or if the A.E.C. came up with a hydroxide fuel that would dissolve a liner which was only acidproof. What MacIlheny should have said was something simpler and humbler, like: “Give us the best compromise you can between strength and thermal-shock resistance. And, please, as much immunity to all forms of chemical attack as you can manage.”


  Well, he’d tell him nicely—somehow.

  Novak looked from the specifications to the drawings themselves and thought at first that there had been some mistake—the right drawings on the wrong sheet, the wrong drawings on the right sheet—but after a puzzled moment he recognized them vaguely as a reaction chamber and throat liner.

  They were all wrong; all, all wrong.

  He knew quite well from N.E.P.A. what reaction chambers and throat liners for jet aircraft looked like. He knew standard design doctrine for flow, turbulence, Venturi effect, and the rest of it. There were tricks that had been declassified when newer, better tricks came along. This—this thing—blithely by-passed the published tricks and went in for odd notions of its own. The ratio of combustion volume to throat volume was unheard of. The taper was unheard of. The cross section was an ellipse of carefully defined eccentricity instead of the circle it should be. There was only one hole for fuel injection—only one hole! Ridiculous.

  While the shop was filled with the noise of a youngster inexpertly hack-sawing sheet metal in a corner, Novak slowly realized that it was not ridiculous at all. It wasn’t MacIlheny showing off; no, not at all. Anybody who could read a popular-science magazine knew enough not to design a chamber and throat like that.

  But MacIlheny knew better.

  He walked slowly out to the back of the shop where Clifton was clocking dives into the acceleration couch. “Cliff,” he said, “can I see you for a minute?”

  “Sure, Mike. As long as ya don’t expect any help from me.”

  Together they looked down at the spread blue print, and Novak said: “The kid at the gate was right. They are going to take off some day and they just aren’t telling the public about it.”

  “What ya talking?” demanded Clifton. “All I see there is lines on paper. Don’t try to kid a kidder, Mike.”

  Novak said: “The specs are for me to develop a material to handle a certain particular fuel with known heat, thrust, and chemical properties. The drawings are the wrong shape. Very wrong. I know conventional jet theory and I have never seen anything like the shapes they want for the chamber and throat of that—thing—out there.”