Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “I’m taking it over, Mr. Stuart.” What a callous old beast he was!

  “You are? Well, be sure you have nothing to lose, Novak. What are they paying you?”

  “Rather not say.”

  It made Wilson Stuart angry. “Well, isn’t that too bad! I can tell you one thing. Whatever it is, you’re putting a blot on your record that no responsible firm can afford to ignore.” He spun the chair to present his back to Novak and scowled through the pylons that formed one wall of the ambiguous room.

  Novak was startled by the burst of rage, and resentful. But you didn’t tell off a cardiac patient at will—or a multi-millionaire.

  The chaffeur and Amy Stuart came in. “Hello, Dr. Novak,” she said. The old man silently beckoned over his shoulder to the chaffeur and was wheeled out.

  “How’s Mrs. Clifton?” Novak asked.

  “Father’s doctor says she should rest for a day or two. He’s given her some sedatives. After that—I don’t know. She’s talking about going back to her family in Denmark.”

  “May I see her?”

  “I think so. Dr. Morris didn’t say anything about it, but it should do her good. Come this way.”

  Crossing large, glass-walled rooms he said: “I don’t think I should have come at all. Your father was upset by my knowing the address. Mr. Friml gave it to me.”

  “Mr. Friml should have known better,” she said coolly. “My father has no reserves of energy for anything beyond his business and necessary recreation. It’s cruel discipline for him . . . he’s held speed and altitude records, you know.”

  Novak uttered a respectful mumble.

  The girl asked: “What are they going to do about a replacement for Cliff?”

  “I think I get the job. I’ve done some aero-engineering and there’s very little structural work left to be done: I suppose if there’s anything I simply can’t handle, they’ll hire a consultant. But I can probably swing the load.”

  “You can if you’re checked out by MacIlheny. The man’s a——”

  She started to say “fanatic” and then interrupted herself. “That’s the wrong word. I admire him, really. He’s like—not Columbus. Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal. Henry stuck close to his desk and never went to sea, but he raised the money and did the paperwork.”

  “Urn. Yes. Has Lilly—Mrs. Clifton—been asking for a biomathematicist, I wonder? She has such faith in them that it might do her good at a time like this, when it’s a matter of psychological strain.”

  The girl looked startled. “That’s very odd,” she said. “As a matter of fact she hasn’t. I suppose recreations like that show up in their true light when the pressure is on. Not that it would do her any good to ask for one. Dr. Morris would break the neck of any biomathematicist who showed up here.”

  She pushed open a flush door of blonde wood and Novak saw Clifton’s widow in the middle of a great modern bed with sickroom paraphernalia on a side table. “Visitor, Lilly,” Amy Stuart said.

  “Hallo, Mike. It was good of you to come. Amy, you mind if I speak alone vit’ Mike?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Sit down,” she said with an unhappy smile as the girl closed the door. “Mike, what’s gonna happen now? You don’ think Cliff kill himself, do you?” She was fighting back tears with a heartbreaking effort. “He act cra-a-azy. But that was just because he enjoy life and didn’t give a damn for nobody. He wasn’t no crazy man to kill himself, was he, Mike?”

  “No, Lilly,” Novak said. “I don’t think he killed himself.” And he bit his lip for saying it. The woman was under sedation, she might babble anything to anybody——”

  “Mike,” she said, “I’m glad you say so.” She sniffed and dried her brimming eyes, as a child would do, on the hem of her bed sheet.

  “How’re you fixed for money, Lilly?” he asked. “I thought you might need a little ready cash for—expenses and things.”

  “T’anks, Mike, no need. We had a yoint bank account vit’ couple t’ousand dollars in. Mike, honestly you don’t believe Cliff kill himself?”

  He thought it over. “Have you taken any medicine?”

  “Last night the doc gave me couple pink pills and he tol’ me to take couple more today—but I don’t. You know I don’t t’ink much of doctors.”

  “I don’t want to tell you what I think about Cliff’s death if you’re full of medicine or if you’re going to be. You might talk to somebody about what I tell you. It might mean my life too.” It was her business, he told himself silently.

  After a stupefied pause, Lilly slowly asked: “Please tell me all about it, Mike. Who’d kill Cliff? Who’d kill you? Those few crazy kids in the Society, they don’ like Cliff ever, but they wouldn’t kill him. You tell me what it’s all about, Mike. Even if somebody tear the eyes out of my head I don’ talk.”

  He pulled his chair to the bedside and lowered his voice. “Yesterday Cliff and I thought we found something fishy about one of the A.S.F. S.F. blue prints. I thought it meant that a foreign country was using the Society to build it a rocket ship. Maybe with Friml or MacIlheny or both fronting, and nobody else in on it. We went to the A.E.C. Security office downtown and saw that man Anheier. He brushed us off—didn’t believe a word of it. Last night Cliff got killed and it looked like suicide. But it could have been murder by anybody who could have sneaked into the washroom when he was there—and that’s anybody off the street and practically anybody who was at the meeting.

  “I don’t know how—whoever did it—got wise to his visit to Security or why nobody’s taken a shot at me that I know of. Maybe spies keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the Security office to see who visits it. Maybe Cliff’s visit was the signal for his death. Maybe I wasn’t identified because I’m new in town.

  “But none of that matters right now. What matters is that Anheier wouldn’t let me tell the police about my idea. He tried to convince me that I was a paranoid. When that didn’t work, he threatened to ruin me for life and jail me for perjury if I talk, now or ever.”

  “You not gonna tell the po-lice, Mike?”

  “No, I’m afraid of the smear and—it probably wouldn’t do any good. The A.E.C. would make countercharges and any foreign agents would escape in the fuss. I told Anheier the hell with him, I’d nail them alone.”

  “No,” she said, pale-faced. “Not alone, Mike. Vit’ me.”

  “Thanks, Lilly,” he said softly, and she was crying at last.

  “Don’ mind me,” she said. “T’anks for coming to see me and now you please go. I cry better by myself . . .”

  He left in silence. She was with him—it felt better. The morning with MacIlheny and Friml, every question a step on a tightrope over the abyss, had told on him.

  Amy Stuart laid down a magazine and got up from a blocky chair. “How is she, Dr. Novak?”

  “I’m afraid I made her cry.”

  “It’s good for a woman to cry at a time like this. Have you a car?”

  “N®; I came in a taxi. If I could phone for one——”

  “You’re downtown, aren’t you? I’ll drive you; I have some shopping.”

  Her car was a two-seater English sports job. It looked like a toy in the garage between the big Lincoln and a suburban wagon.

  As they went winding through the scrubbed-clean roads he broke the silence. “To me it’s just an interesting job, you know. I’m not a Prince Henry like MacIlheny is and maybe Cliff was. Or—what was her name? The girl who raised sand at the meeting. The one you stepped on.”

  “Gingrich?” Amy Stuart said dispassionately. “She’s not particularly interested in space flight and she’s a bloody fool besides. If Gingrich and her friends had their way, there’d be a full-dress membership vote by secret ballot on where to put each rivet in the Prototype.”

  The little two-seater rolled past the police sentry box and Amy Stuart waved pleasantly to the two policemen. They saluted with broad smiles and Novak abandoned himself to bitter thoughts for a moment.

&nb
sp; “Jeffersonians, they think they are,” the girl brooded. “But wouldn’t Jefferson be the first man to admit that things have changed since his day? That there’s a need for something beyond sheer selfregulating agrarian democracy?” The question was put with an intensity that startled him. It was overlaid with a portentous air that made him think of nothing so much as a doctor’s oral where, literally, your career is made or unmade by a few score words spoken in a minute or two. What was the girl driving at.

  “People are always accusing engineers of not thinking about social problems,” he said carefully. “In my case, I’m afraid they’re right. I’ve been a busy man for a long time. But I wonder—are you by any chance flirting with fascism or Communism?”

  “No,” she said scornfully, and fell silent.

  It was some minutes before she spoke again. “You were in A.E.C. Did you ever read anything by Daniel Holland? He’s a friend of father’s. And mine.”

  There was something he could talk about. “I didn’t know he wrote, but your friend runs a hell of a silly organization. You know what my field is. Believe me or not, but I swear I was transferred out of it and into a highly specialized branch of mathematical physics. I was absolutely helpless, I was absolutely unable to get back to my own work. Finally I—I had to resign.”

  She said patiently: “That’s exactly the sort of thing Holland fights. In his books he analyzed the warped growth of modern public administration under the influence of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian mistrust of professionals. He calls it the ‘cincinnatus complex.’ ”

  He recognized the allusion and felt pleased about it. Cincinnatus was the Roman citizen who left his plowing to lead the army to victory and then returned to his plow, turning down glory and rewards. “Interesting concept,” he said. “What does he suggest?”

  The girl frowned. “If you’d thought about it, you’d know that’s damn-all he could suggest. His books were only analytical and exploratory, and he nearly got booted out of public service for daring to raise the problem—challenging the whole structure of bureaucracy. He thought he could do more good in than out, so he stopped publishing. But he’d stepped on some toes. In Red Tape Empires he cited a case from the Nevada civil service. The Senator from Nevada on the joint A.E.C. Committee badgered him from then on. Wonderful irony. He was a master of all the parliamentary tricks that were originally supposed to carry out the majority will without infringing on minority rights.”

  He was worried about Lilly and getting shot and future long, precarious talks with MacIlheny. “I suppose,” he said absently, “you’re bound to have a rotten apple in every barrel.”

  Amy Stuart said flatly but emphatically, with her eyes on the road: “You scientists deserve exactly what you got.” And she said nothing more until she dropped him off at his hotel and proceeded to her shopping. Novak had a queasy, unreal feeling that he’d just failed his doctor’s oral.

  XI.

  The high-temperature lab was built, and its equipment installed by the able construction firm that had done the field layout. During this time Novak worked on the manhole problem, and licked it. Studebaker had ungreased its titanic boring mill and for a price had cheerfully put a super finish on the manhole and its seating. In an agony of nervousness for the two priceless chunks of metal, Novak had clocked their slow progress by freight car across the country from South Bend to Barstow.

  It was one of those moments when Lilly Clifton or Amy Stuart was helpfully by his side, and this time it happened to be Amy. They stood outside the machine-shop prefab, squinting into the glare of the Prototype’s steel skin, and at an intenser, bluer glare that was being juggled by a hooded welder on the gantry-crane platform, twenty feet up. The manhole cover and seating assembly were being beadlessly welded into the gap in the ninth tier of plates. It was a moment of emotional importance. Proto externally was an unbroken whole.

  Novak’s pulse pounded at the thought, while the matter-of-fact welder up there drew his hell-hot point of flame like an artist’s brush along the gleaming metal. The engineer couldn’t be matter-of-fact about it any more. He had plunged into the top-boss job at the Barstow field determined to give a realistic imitation of a space hound, and had become one.

  There was no reason not to. In theory, he told himself, he was waiting for a break but one never came. There were no further irregularities beyond the four on which he had committed himself: money, secrecy, the “J. MacI.” drawings, and the death of Clifton.

  MacIlheny never offered any surprises. He was an insurance man and a space-flight crank. He had cloudy industrial contributors in his pocket and he used them as a club to run the Society his way. His way was to get Proto built as a symbol and rallying point for those who demanded a frontal smash by the Government into the space-flight problem instead of the rudimentary, unco-ordinated, and unimaginative efforts that were all the United States could show, for whatever reason.

  Friml continued to be—Friml. Bloodless, righteous, dollar-honest, hired-hand, party-of-the-second-partish Friml. A reader of the fine print, a dweller in the Y.M.C.A., a martyr to constipation’, a wearer of small-figured neckties which he tied in small, hard knots.

  The engineer members of the A.S.F.S.F. continued to be hobbyists, hard to tell one from the other, showing up on week-ends, often with the wife and kid, for an hour or so of good shoptalk and connoisseurs’ appreciation of Proto as. the big, handsome jigsaw puzzle that she was—to them.

  The A.S.F.S.F. youngsters continued to be hagridden, kids escaping from humdrum jobs, unhappy families, or simply the private hell of adolescence by actually helping to pay for and work on and dream over Proto. Some day it would carry them on wings of flame to adventurous stars where they’d be all broad-shouldered males six feet tall or slim but luscious girls with naturally curly hair. They worked like dogs for the new engineer in charge and didn’t even ask for a dog’s pat on the head; all they wanted was to be near enough to Proto to dream. They fought ferociously with words on occasion over this detail or that, and Novak eventually realized that their quarrels symbolized a fiercer squabble they hoped was coming over the passenger list of man’s first moon ship.

  Novak stood comfortably midway between the engineers and the kids—he hoped. Proto was big medicine. The dream of flight which has filled the night lives of countless neurotics since, probably, the Eolithic era, had been no dream since the balloons of Montgolfier. This new wish fulfillment of space flight had been for fifty years standard equipment on your brilliant but dreamy youngster. It soaked into you from earliest childhood that some day—not quite in your time, but some day—man would reach the planets and then the stars. Being around Proto, putting your hands on her, tinkering with her equipment, smelling her hot metal in the desert sun, hearing her plates sing as they contracted in the desert-night chill, did something to you, and to the “some day” reservation about space flight. Novak had become a true believer, and with each passing week wondered more feverishly what in hell’s name he was doing: building a moon ship for China? Running up dummy? Or just honest engineering?

  Each week he told himself more feverishly: one week more; just get the manhole licked, or the silicone gaskets, or the boron carbides.

  The blue, hard twinkle of the welding torch twenty feet up snapped off; the welder shoved back his hood and waved genially. The platform of the gantry crane descended.

  “That does it,” Novak said hazily to Amy. He lit a cigarette. “You want to push the button?”

  “If it doesn’t work, don’t blame me,” she said. There was a six-volt line run from the machine shop into Proto’s sewerpipe stern and up through the king post to feed the electric systems. She snapped the control for the manhole motor to open, and they stared up again. The dark disk against-the shiny steel plate developed a mirror-bright streak of microfinish bearing surface along one edge. Noiselessly and very slowly the wire-fine streak grew to a new moon; the manhole slowly stood out in profile and halted, a grotesque ear protruding from the ship.
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br />   “Okay, Amy. Close it.” She snapped the switch to Shut, and very slowly the disk swung back and made Proto an unbroken whole again. The welder stepped from the gantry platform and asked: “She all right, Mr. Novak?”

  “Fine, Sam. Fine. Was there any trouble fitting the lug into the receptacle?”

  “Nope. Only one way to do it, so I did it. It surely is a fine piece of machinery. I used to work at the Bullard Works in Hartford and they didn’t make their custom-built machine tools any prettier than your—thing. Confidentially, Mr. Novak, is——”

  He held up his hand protestingly. “It’s a full-scale mock-up for structural study and publicity purposes. Does that answer the question, Sam?”

  The welder grinned. “You people are really going to try it, aren’t you? Just don’t count on me for a passenger is all I ask. It’s pretty, but it won’t work.”

  As they walked to Novak’s refractory lab, Amy said: “I worry about everything Cliff installed, like the manhole motor, until it’s tested. I know that verdict, ‘while of unsound mind’ and so on is just legal mumbo jumbo, but . . . why should the manhole have opened that slowly? It was like a movie, milking it for suspense.”

  He glanced at her. “Perfectly good reasons. It runs on a worm gear—low speed, power to spare. The motor has to open it against the molecular cohesion of the biggest gauge-block seal ever machined. In space or on the Moon the motor would get an assist from atmospheric pressure in the storeroom, pushing against zero pressure outside.”

  She laughed. “Of course. I suppose I was being jittery. And there’s sometimes melodramatic suspense in real life, too, I suppose.”

  He cleared his throat. “I’ve got Lilly in there aging a new boron-carbide series. Want to watch? You can learn enough in a few hours to take some routine off my neck. The volunteer kids are fine and dandy, but they mostly have jobs and school hours. What I need is a few more people like you and Lilly that don’t have to watch the clock.”