Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Friml and MacIlheny were there. It was incredible that they might be spies or killers—until he remembered the bewildered, ashamed, ordinary faces of spies on the front pages of tabloid newspapers.

  “Hello, Dr. Novak,” the president of the A.S.F.S.F. said. “Friml and I were discussing the possibility of you taking over Clifton’s job as engineer in charge.”

  There was no time to stop and think of what it might mean. Friml and MacIlheny might be innocent. Or they might be guilty but not suspicious of him. There was no time. He forced surprise: “Me? Oh, I don’t think so; I’ll be busy enough on my own. And I don’t think I could handle it anyway.”

  “I see you had some years of aeronautical engineering.”

  “Well, yes—undergraduate stuff. Still, Clifton did say there wasn’t a lot of work left.”

  “He did that much for us,” MacIlheny said bitterly. “The damned fool.”

  “Mr. MacIlheny!” said Friml, with every appearance of outrage.

  “Yes, Mr. Friml,” said the insurance man sardonically. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum, as you B.B.A.s and C.P.A.s put it. If he was so nuts he had to kill himself why didn’t he resign first? And if he didn’t have time to resign, why did he have to do it at a meeting? Everything happens to the poor old A.S.F.S.F. Clifton’s death is going to set us back ten years in getting public recognition. And our industrial sponsors——” MacIlheny buried his head in his hands.

  “I never thought he was a very stable person——” Friml began smugly.

  “Oh, shut up!” MacIlheny snarled. “Just stick to your knitting. If I want your learned opinion I’ll ask for it.”

  Novak was appalled at the naked enmity that had flared between the two men. Or the pretence of enmity? Nothing would hold still long enough to be examined. You had to keep talking, pretending. “Could I see,” he asked conciliatingly, “just where we stand with. respect to structural work on Proto?”

  “Show him the cumulatives, Friml,” said the president, not looking up. With his lips compressed, Friml pulled a folder from the files and handed it to Novak. It was lettered: “Engineering Cumulative Progress Reports.”

  Novak sat down and forced himself to concentrate on the drawings and text. After a few minutes he no longer had to force it. The papers told what was to a technical man the greatest story in the world: research and development; cool, accurate, thoughtful; bucking the cussedness of inanimate nature, bucking the inertia of industrial firms; bucking the conservatism, ignorance, and stupidity of hired hands—and getting things done. It was the story of Prototype’s building told by the man who could tell it best, Clifton.

  It started about one year ago. “Contacted Mr. Laughlin of the American Bridge Company. I don’t think he believed a word I said until Friml took out the A.S.F.S.F. passbook and showed him our balance. After that, smooth sailing.”

  Sketches and text showed how the American Bridge Company, under Clifton’s anxious, jealous eyes, executed ten-year old A.S.F.S.F. blue prints for the skeleton of Prototype. The tower of steel girders rose in the desert to six times the height of a man, guyed down against the wind. There was a twelve-foot skeleton tetrahedron, base down, for its foot. From the apex of the tetrahedron rose the king post, a specially fabricated compound member exactly analogous to the backbone of a vertebrate animal. It bore the main stresses of Proto’s dead weight; it was calculated to bear the strains of Proto in motion; and it was hollow: through its insulated core would run the cables of Proto’s control systems. Structural members radiated laterally from the king post to carry the weight of Proto’s skin, and from its top sprouted girders over which the nose would be built.

  Reports from Detroit: “I been going the rounds for a solid week and still no dice. If a plant’s got the forming presses, its toolroom stinks. If its toolroom is okay, the superintendent won’t let me barge in to stand over their die-makers and tell them what to do. But that’s the way it’s going to be; those hull plates are too tricky to order on an inspect-or-reject basis.”

  Later: “I found a good little outfit named Allen Body Company that does custom-built jobs. They got one Swedish-built forming press 40 x 40 (very good), a great toolroom with a wonderful old kraut named Eichenberg heading it up who’s willing to work closely with me, and a good reputation in the trade. Told them to submit bid to Friml fast and suggest he fires back certified check without haggling. These guys are real craftsmen.”

  Later: “Oskar and me finished the forming and trimming dies for first tier of plates today. Twenty-four tiers of plates to go, plus actually stamping and machining them. I guess ninety days tops.”

  Eighty-five days later: “Mr. Gowan of the Union Pacific says he’ll have a sealable freight car at the Allen siding tomorrow, but that it’s out of the question for me to ride aboard with the plates. That’s what he thinks. I bought my folding cot, Sterno stove and beans already.”

  Sketches showed what “the plates” were like: mirror-finished steel boxes, formed and machined to exact curvature. The basic size was 36" x 36" x 6", with some larger or smaller to fit. The outer, convex wall of the box was of threequarter-inch steel; the inner, concave wall was one-inch armour plate. Each box was open along one of its narrow 6’ x 36’ faces, and each was stuffed with compressed steel wool—the best shock absorber A.S.F.S.F. brains had devised to slow down and stop a pebble-sized meteorite if one should punch through the outer shell. There were six hundred and twenty-five of the plates, each numbered and wrapped in cotton wool like the jewel it was.

  Three days later Clifton arrived aboard his freight car in the Barstow yards. When a twenty-four-hour guard of A.S.F.S.F. volunteers was mounted over the freight car, he located a trucking company that specialized in fine furniture removals. “Not a scratch and not a hitch. We got them stacked in order under the tarps at the field. I think it will be okay to use some volunteers on the welding. I checked with the Structural Ironworkers, the Shipbuilders, and the Regional C.I.O. people. It seems nobody has union jurisdiction on building space ships, so Regional said we could use unpaid helpers so long as they don’t touch the welding torches while they’re hot. Tomorrow I go down to the shipyards to get myself the six best damn master welders on the Coast. I figure on letting them practice two—three days at beadless welding on scrap before I let them start tacking Proto’s hide on. Meanwhile I rent a gantry crane. It’ll make a better platform for the welders than scaffolding and cut down your chance of spoilage. Also we’ll need one later when we come to installing heavy equipment.”

  He got his master welders and his gantry crane. Two of the welders grinned behind their hands, refusing to follow his rigid specifications on the practice work; he fired them and got two more. The fired welders put in a beef with the union and the others had to down their torches. Clifton lost a day. “I went down to the hall and gave the pie cards hell. I brought some of the junk those two bums did and I threw it on their desks and they said they’d kill the beef and let them know if there’s any more trouble, which I don’t think there will be with the new boys.”

  There wasn’t. The first tier of plates went on, and fitted to a thousandth of an inch. Volunteer kids working at the field were horrified to see the latticework skeleton of the Prototype sag under their weight, and Clifton told them it was all provided for down to the last hairsbreadth of sag.

  As the shining skin of Proto rosa from the ground in yard-high tiers, the designers of the A.S-.F.S.F. passed through the acid test and came out pure gold. Nameless aero-engineers, some long gone from the Society and some still with it, engineering professors and students at U.C.L.A., Cal Tech and Stanford, girl volunteers punching calculators in batteries, had done their job. The great equation balanced. Strength of materials, form of members, distributed stresses and strains, elasticities and compressibilities added and equaled one complete hull: a shiningly perfect bomb shape that could take escape velocity. Six plates equally spaced around the eleventh tier and one plate in the eighth tier were not welded in. The six were t
o be fitted with deadlights and the one with a manhole.

  The welders crawled through the eighth-tier hole for their last job: two bulkheads which would cut the ship into three sections. The first cut off Proto’s nose at the ninth tier. It was the floor of her combined living quarters and control room—a cramped, pointed dome some ten feet in diameter and twelve feet high at the peak. From this floor protruded the top of the king post, like a sawed-off tree stump sprouting girders that supported the nose. The second bulkhead cut Proto at the seventh tier. It made a cylindrical compartment aft of the control room that could store five hundred cubic feet of food, water, and oxygen. This compartment also doubled as the airlock. The outside manhole would open into it, and from it a second manhole would open into the control room above.

  Aft of the bulkhead was two-thirds of the ship—an empty shell except for structural members radiating from the king post. It was reserved territory: reserved for a power plant. The stiff paper rattled in Novak’s hands for a moment before he could manage them. He had almost been lost in cool, adult satisfaction, as he followed the great engineering story, when fear struck through. This triumph—whose? MacIlheny and Friml glanced briefly at him, and he sank into the reports again.

  “Sorry to say . . . repeated twelve times . . . seems conclusive . . . obviously a bonehead play . . . some of the new silicones may . . . deadlight gaskets . . . Novak’s heart beat slower and calmer, and the words began to arrange themselves into sense. Clifton’s report on the six planned deadlights was negative. Vacuum-chamber tests of the proposed gasketing system showed that air leakage would be prohibitive. There simply wasn’t a good enough glass-to-metal seal. The ring of deadlights was out, but a single deadlight in the nose was indispensable. Air leakage from the nose deadlight was cut to an almost bearable minimum by redesigning the assembly with great, ungainly silicone gaskets.

  This meant blind uncertainty for any theoretical occupants of Proto during a theoretical ascent. The nose deadlight, an eighteen-inch optical flat at the very tip of the craft, was to be covered during the ascent by an “aero-dynamic nose” of sheet metal. In space the false nose would be jettisoned by a power charge.

  The next series of reports showed Clifton in his glory—control devices, his speciality.

  In one month, working sometimes within A.S.F.S.F. specifications and quite often cheerfully overstepping them, he installed: an electric generator, manhole motors, lighting and heating systems, oxygen control, aerodynamic nose jettison, jato igniters, jato jettison, throat vane servos (manual), throat vane servos (automatic, regulated by a battery of fluid-damped plumb bobs). Controls for these systems were sunk into the head of the king post that jutted from the control-room floor. There was nothing resembling a driver’s seat with a console of instruments and controls.

  And there were two other control systems indicated in the drawings. At the input end they had provisions for continuous variation of voltage from zero to six, the power plant’s maximum. At the output end there was—nothing. The two systems came to dead ends in Proto’s backbone, one at the third tier and one at the fifth.

  Novak had a short struggle with himself. Play dumb, or ask about it? They say they think you’re smart enough to take over . . . He asked.

  “Fuel-metering systems,” MacIlheny said. “We assumed of course that something of the sort would be needed eventually, so we had Clifton put in dead-end circuits.”

  “I see.”

  He was nearing the end of the sheets. The last report said acceleration-couch tests were proceeding satisfactorily with no modifications yet indicated. And then the folder came to an end.

  “I think,” Novak said slowly, “that I can handle it after all. He’s just about finished the job—as far as any private outfit can take it.”

  MacIlheny looked up and said evenly: “There’s some more construction work to be done—on the same basis as the dead-end control systems. Naturally there’s got to be a fuel tank, so we’re going to put one in. Here’s the drawings——” He had them ready in a blue print file.

  It was another of the “J. MacI” jobs, with the same date as the too-specific drawings for the throat liner and chamber. Novak wondered crazily whether MacIlheny or Friml had a gun in his pocket, whether the wrong reaction meant he’d be shot down on the spot. He studied the sheet and decided on his role. The “fuel tank” was a fantastic thing. It filled almost the rear two-thirds of the Prototype and made no sense whatever.

  There was one section forward that consisted of stainless steel. A section aft, much smaller, was quartz-lined lead, with a concrete jacket. Atomic. There was a lead wall indicated between the stainless-steel tank and the Proto’s aft bulkhead. Atomic. This was a tank for a fuel that burned with atomic fire.

  He told them, businesslike: “It’s going to cost a hell of a lot of money but that’s your business. I can install it. Just don’t blame me if it has to be ripped out again when A.E.C. comes out with an atomic fuel that doesn’t fit it.”

  MacIlheny said into the air, slowly and with burning emphasis: “Can’t people understand that Proto’s not a moon ship? Can’t they get it through their heads that she’s just a dummy to study construction problems? What the hell difference does it make if the fuel A.E.C. comes up with doesn’t fit her system? All we’re after is the experience we’ll need to build a system that does fit.”

  Novak said hastily: “Of course you’re right.” Lord, but MacIlheny was convincing! “But it gets a grip on you. Half the kids think it’s a moon ship——”

  “All right for kids,” said MacIlheny grimly. “But we’re all adults here. I’m sick of being ribbed for doing something I’m not doing at all. Good—and—sick.” He stared at the engineer challengingly, and then his grimness vanished as he added: “I wish it was a moon ship, Novak. I wish it very much. But——” He shrugged.

  “Well,” said Novak uncertainly, “maybe I’ll feel that way about it after a year or so of the ribbing. By the way, can you tell me where Miss Stuart lives? I ought to go and see Mrs. Clifton if I can be spared today, and I suppose things are still in a state of flux.”

  “Thirty-seven twenty-four Rochedale,” said Friml, and he jotted it down.

  “I suppose it’s all right,” said MacIlheny. “God, what a headache. Just when things were going smoothly. Suppose you check in tomorrow morning and we may have some plans made for you.”

  “Won’t the membership have to.”

  “The membership,” said MacIlheny impatiently, “will do as it’s told.”

  X.

  Novak thought he should phone the Wilson Stuart residence before he tried to pay a call. He couldn’t find the number in the book and naively asked Information. Information sharply told him that the number was unlisted.

  Well, he tried.

  He got a downtown cab and enjoyed a long ride into the rolling country lying north of Los Angeles. “Pretty classy,” he said.

  “I should know?” asked the cabby blandly, and added in a mutter something that sounded like: “Stinking rich.”

  A mile farther on, the cab stopped. “Check point,” the driver said. Novak saw a roadside booth, all chrome and glass, with two cops in beautifully fitting uniforms. One of them came out to the car, the driver gave him the address and they rolled on.

  “What was that about?” Novak asked.

  “A trifling violation of our civil liberties,” the cabby said. “Nothing to get upset about. At night, now, they take your name, and phone on ahead if they don’t know you.”

  “California!”

  “All over,” the cabby corrected him. “Grosse Pointe, Mobile, Sun Valley—all over. I guess this is it:”

  Thirty-seven twenty-four Rochedale was extreme California modern: a great white albatross of a house that spread its wings over a hilltop. “Well, go on up the driveway,” Novak said.

  “Nope. If you had any business with folks like that you’d have your own limousine. You go in and get arrested for trespassing. These people don’t
fool around.” He turned down the meter flag and Novak paid him.

  “I hope you’re wrong,” the engineer said, adding a half dollar. He started up the driveway.

  It was a confusing house. He couldn’t seem to find a place where it began, or a doorbell to ring. Before he knew it, he seemed to be inside the Stuart home, unannounced, after walking through a row of pylons into a patio—or was it a living room? They didn’t build like that in Brooklyn or Urbana.

  A shock-haired old man rolled into the living room—or patio—in a wheel chair pushed by a burly, Irish-looking fellow in a chauffeur’s dark uniform. “I’m sorry,” Novak exploded jumpily. “I couldn’t find——”

  “Who the devil are you?” demanded the old man, and the chaffeur took his hands from the chair, standing exactly like a boxer about to put up his fists.

  “My name’s Novak. I’m a friend of Mrs. Clifton’s. I understand she’s here—if this is the Wilson Stuart residence.”

  “I’m Wilson Stuart. Do you know my daughter?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “I suppose that means she didn’t invite you. Did she give you the address?”

  “No—she’s a member of the A.S.F.S.F., the space-flight society. I got it from the secretary.”

  The old man swore. “Keep it to yourself. A person has no damned privacy in one of these places and I can’t build a wall because of the zoning laws or covenants or whatever they are. Grady, get Miss Amelia.” The chaffeur gave Novak a no-funny-business look and left.

  “Uh, how is Mrs. Clifton?” Novak asked.

  “I don’t know; I haven’t seen her. I’m not surprised by any of this, though. I thought Clifton’s mind was giving way when he took that job with the rocket cranks. Not that I’d keep him on my pay roll. He told my V.P. for Engineering that he didn’t know enough to build an outhouse on wheels. That tore it.” The old man chuckled. “He could really ram things through, though. Didn’t give a damn whose floor space he muscled in on, whose men he gave orders to, whose material he swiped for his own projects. Where are they going to find another lunatic like that to build their rocket?”