Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Incredibly, he sat up and blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “Hell with the job.”

  “The yob will keep,” she said, and poured him two fingers from a tall bottle of cognac that stood on a coffee table. He tossed it down in one gulp.

  “Don’t do this often,” he said sardonically. “Not good for the c’reer. The of man wouldn’t like it.”

  Wilson Stuart. It had to be. Fighting a tremor in his voice, Novak said: “It’s a shame to see a trained man like you tied up with a crackpot outfit like the Society.”

  “That so?” asked Friml belligerently. “ ‘m doing a better job than anybody thinks. And they all call me a son of a bitch for it. So do you. But I’m the guy that sees he gets dollar for dollar. I mean dollar’s value for a dollar spent.” Friml looked cunning. “I got a c’reer, all right. You may not think so, but I’m gonna be com’troller of a certain big aircraft company one of these days. Not at liberty to tell you which. How’s that for a c’reer? I’m only twenny-six, but I’m steady, ’at’s what counts.” He fell back on the couch, his eyes still open and glassy, with a little smile on his lips. “Where’s ’at drink?” he muttered.

  Lilly poured another and put it by his hand. “Here y’are, feller,” she said. He didn’t move or change expression. She jerked her head at Novak and he followed her to the bedroom.

  “What you t’ink?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Wilson Stuart and Western Air,” he said flatly. “They are the famous ‘industrial backers.’ Friml is Stuart’s man in the A.S.F.S.F. to watch Stuart’s money. Stuart gives orders to MacIlheny and Friml’s right there to see that they get carried out.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Old Stuart don’t hire such punks, Mike. Cliff told me.”

  “He seems to have been hired right out of his graduating class for the sake of secrecy,” Novak said. “And he must look like a fireball on paper. Straight A’s, no doubt. He’s a screwed-up kid, but the pressure has to be right before you realize it.” He told her about “Coffee Blues.”

  “Maybe he should be factored by a biomat’ematicist,” he said, straight-faced.

  She flicked him on the jaw with her fingertips. “Don’ tease me,” she said crossly. “I’m t’rough vit’ them. All they want is you’ money. You so smart, tell me what old Stuart wants vit’ a moon ship and where he got atomic fuel for it.”

  “There’s no answer,” he said. “It’s got to be a government working through him. What countries does he sell big orders to? What small countries with atomic energy programmes and dense populations? I guess that narrows the field down a little. And it makes the thing harder than ever to swallow. Wilson Stuart of Western Air a foreign agent.” He thought of what Anheier would say to that, and almost laughed. The thing was now completely beyond the realm of credibility. And it was in their laps.

  They went silently back into the living room. The brandy glass was empty again and Friml’s eyes were closed at last. He was completely out.

  “Mike,” she said, “I guess you better leave him here.”

  “But what about——”

  “You a sveet boy, but some other time. This yerk depresses me.” She gave him a cool good-night kiss, and he hiked down the road to a shopping street and taxi stand.

  Novak saw, with a pang, that Lilly was not on the field. He asked casually around whether she had phoned or left word with anybody. She hadn’t. After last night’s fiasco with the drunken secretary-treasurer, he supposed, she felt shy . . .

  Amy Stuart was there, reporting for assignment, and he savored the mild irony of the situation. Her father, board chairman of Western’ Air, was funneling money into the A.S.F.S.F. and dictating its policies. And his daughter was reporting for assignment to a hired hand of the Stuart funds. He toyed for a moment with the notion of assigning her to make the lunch sandwiches and dismissed it as silly. She had training and keen intelligence that he needed for Proto, whatever Proto’s destiny was to be.

  “Help me in the refractories lab?” he asked.

  She said a little woodenly: “I thought that was Lilly’s job.”

  “She didn’t show up today. You’re not afraid of hot stuff, are you?”

  “Hot-radioactive or hot-centigrade?”

  He laughed with an effort. She was very boldly playing dumb. “Hot-centigrade. Two thousand degrees of it and up. Tongs, gauntlets, masks, and aprons are furnished. But some people get trembly anyway and drop things.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Not if Lilly didn’t.”

  He taught her routine for an hour and then set her to compounding six more boron carbides by rote. “Call me if there’s any doubt at all about a procedure,” he said. “And I hope you have a conscience. If you make a mistake, start all over again. A cover-up of a mistake at this stage would introduce a hidden variable in my paper work and wreck everything I’m doing from now on.”

  “You don’t have to impress me with a wild exaggeration like that, Mike. I know my way around a chemistry lab.”

  The arrogance of the amateur was suddenly too much for h’m. “Get out,” he said. “Right now. I’ll get by somehow without you.” She stared at him, openmouthed, and her face became very red. And she left without a word.

  Novak strode to the compounding area. His hands deftly did their work with the great precision balance while his mind raged at her insolent assurance. He was letting the beam of the balance down onto the agate knife-edge fulcrum for the sixteenth time when she spoke behind him: “Mike.”

  His hand, slowly turning a knurled bronze knob, did not twitch. “Minute,” he growled, and continued to turn the knob until he felt the contact and the long pointer began to oscillate on the scale. He turned and asked her: “What is it?”

  “What the devil do you think it is?” she flared. “I’m sorry I got you sore and in the future I’ll keep my mouth shut. Is that satisfactory?”

  He studied her indignant face. “Do you still think I was trying to impress you with a wild exaggeration?”

  She set her mouth grimly and was silent for a long moment. Then she stubbornly said: “Yes.”

  Novak sighed. “Come with me,” he said, and took her into the small private office. He pulled out yesterday’s work sheets and asked: “Know any maths?”

  “Up to differential calculus,” she said cautiously.

  That was a little better than he expected. If she could follow him all the way it would be better for her work—far better than her taking him on faith.

  In a concentrated one-hour session he told her about the method of least squares and how it would predictably cut his research time in half, about matrix equations and how they would pin down the properties of the boron carbides, about n-dimensional geometry and how it would help him build a theory of boron carbides, about the virtues of convergent series and the vices of divergent series, and about the way sloppy work at this stage would riddle the theory end of it with divergent series.

  “Also,” he concluded, “you made me mad as hell.”

  Laughter broke suddenly through her solemn absorption. “I’m convinced,” she said. “Will you trust me to carry on?”

  “With all my heart,” he grinned. “Call me when the batches are ready for solution.”

  Cheerfully he tackled yesterday’s data and speedily set up the equations that had defied him yesterday.

  Amy Stuart called him and he guided her through the rest of the programme on the six new carbides. She was a neat, fast worker who inked her notes in engineer’s lettering. She wasn’t jittery about handling “hot-centigrade” material. A spy? A handy one to have around. Lilly didn’t have her cool sureness of touch.

  They worked through the morning, finishing the batch, had sandwiches, and ran another batch in the afternoon. She left at five with the machine-shop gang and Novak put a third batch through himself. He wrote his weekly cumulative report during the four hours it sat aging. The report included a request for Friml to reserve sufficient time with I.B.M.’s EBIC in New York to integrate
132 partial differential equations, sample enclosed, and to post bond on their estimate at $100 per hour, the commercial rate. With this out of the way he ran tests on the third batch and phoned Barstow for a cab. The gate guard’s farewell was awed. Night hitches were unusual.

  Novak had dinner in the desert town while waiting for the Los Angeles bus. He asked at his hotel’s desk whether there had been any calls. There had been no calls. Phone her? No, by God! He wanted to be alone tonight and think through his math.

  In ten days of dawn-to-dusk labour, he had his 132 partial differential equations. The acceleration couches got finished and installed. He ordered the enigmatic “fuel tanks” and left the fabrication to the vendor, a big Buena Vista machine shop. He was no aero-engineer; all he felt competent to do was give them the drawings and specify that the tanks must arrive sufficiently disassembled to pass through Proto’s open end for final assembly in place.

  Amy Stuart continued to be his right bower; Lilly did not reappear at the field. She phoned him once and he phoned her. Astonishingly, they were on a we-must-get-together-some-time-basis. He asked about Friml and Lilly said vaguely: “He’s not such a bad kid, Mike. I t’ink you don’t do him justice.” Novak wondered fleetingly whether Friml was wearing a belt or suspenders these days, and realized that he didn’t care a great deal. Amy Stuart asked after Lilly regularly, and he never had anything to tell her.

  On a Friday afternoon he zipped a leather brief case around twenty-two ledger sheets on which were lettered in Amy’s best engineer style the 132 equations that EBIC would chew into.

  “Drive me to town?” he said to her. “I’d like to get to the office before they close up.”

  “With—the Papers,” she said melodramatically, and they laughed. It came to him with a faint shock that it should be no laughing matter, but for the moment he couldn’t persuade himself that there was anything sinister about this pretty girl with the sure, cool hands. The shared research, a common drain on them in progress and a mutual triumph at its end, was too big a thing to be spoiled by suspicion—for the moment. But depression stole over him on the desert road to Los Angeles, as he rode by Amy’s side in the little English sportster.

  She dropped him in front of the run-down building at 4.30.

  He hadn’t seen Friml since the secretary-treasurer’s brannigan had broken up his plans for an evening. Without a blush, Friml laced into him. He seemed to be trying out a new manner for size: bullying instead of nagging; Friml the Perfect Master instead of Friml the Perfect Servant. “I’m very glad to see you again, Dr. Novak. I’ve tried several times to advise you that you should report regularly, at least once a week, in person, or by telephone if unavoidable.”

  Nuts. Let him have his fun. “Been pretty busy.” He tossed the brief case on Friml’s desk. “This is the stuff to send I.B.M. When’s our reservation?”

  “That’s just what I wanted to see you about. Your request—it was fantastic. Who—who—is this Mr. Ebic whom you wish to call in as a consultant at one hundred dollars an hour?” His voice was a sort of low, horrified shriek.

  Novak stared at him in amazement. “Didn’t you check to see what it was if you had doubts?”

  “Certainly not. It’s insane on the face of it. Just what do you think you’re up to?”

  To be continued

  From: TAKEOFF

  Copyright 1952 by C.M. Kornbluth. Published by Doubleday & Co. Inc.

  Takeoff

  With Prototype completed the American Society for Space Flight only requires the fuel to make the ship ready for takeoff. But time has just about run out for Novak and his assistants as power politics and pressure groups close in for the kill.

  Conclusion

  FOREWORD

  Michael Novak, ceramic engineer, working in the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA), Division of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, is inexplicably transferred to the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago where his particular talents are entirely wasted in the field of pure nuclear theory. Attempting in vain to get a suitable transfer he forcibly resigns and attempts to get a job elsewhere. The fact that he had struck the Research Director when handing in his resignation goes against him wherever he applies, and he is getting more than despondent when he receives a curious letter from a Los Angeles office offering him fulltime work in refractories research and development with high-altitude jet aircraft.

  Intrigued by the apparent mystery he travels to Los Angeles and is appalled to find that the office belongs to an obscure amateur organisation known as the American Society for Space Flight. He meets Mr. Friml, the Secretary, and Mr. MacIlheny the President, who assure him that

  the Society has a progressive programme of development, plus laboratories and a prooving ground and unlimited capital, but refuse to disclose where their funds are obtained. Sceptical but still intrigued, Novak goes with Friml to the Society’s launching ground and is amazed to find a full scale steel mock-up of a space ship standing on the field.

  He is introduced to Clifton the engineer in charge of construction and Friml explains that the one thing lacking is a suitable fuel. He has already been to see Daniel Holland, chief of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in Washington, but the Government were not interested in producing a fuel for the Society. Their plan, states Friml, is to complete the ship and then the Government would be forced to do something about the propulsion unit before any other World power became too interested in the project.

  Novak accepts the position, is assigned a workshop and laboratory, and commences work on the firing chambers and throat linings for the Prototype, as the rocket had been named. He soon finds out that most of the ‘technicians’ working on the project are part-time enthusiasts, and meets Amelia Stuart, daughter of the chief of Western Aircraft, who, apart from being attractive, also holds numerous scientific degrees.

  Studying the plans for the fuel chambers, Novak gets the idea that the Society is being financed by foreign backers and tells his suspicions to Clifton. The two of them make a report to Anheier of the A.E.C. Security Office in the local Federal Building, who seems to know more about everyone concerned in the space project than could be expected. He infers that they mind their own business.

  Later that same day Clifton is murdered while attending a meeting of the Rocket Society, his assailant escaping during the showing of a science fiction film. Overcome by the shock of his death his wife Lilly is taken to the Beverly Hills home of Amelia Stuart where Novak visits them and informs the two girls that he has accepted the position left vacant by Clifton’s death. While there he meets Wilson Stuart, Amelia’s father, and sharp words are passed between them—Stuart apparently thinking that Novak’s project was typical of cranks.

  Meanwhile, in Washington, Daniel Holland of AEC is apparently being singled out by political opponents for public attack—treason is hinted at.

  Proto nears completion, both Amy and Lilly assisting Novak in his final work. One afternoon, following a series of unsuccessful tests, Novak goes into Town for relaxation and calls up Friml. The two have a few drinks and Novak becomes suspicious of the little Secretary. He feels sure that he knows something about Clifton’s death. He arranges with Lilly to use her feminine wiles upon Friml and leaves him at her home and returns to the field.

  Soon after this, work is completed on Proto and Novak leaves for Los Angeles with the final equations for computing. He is confronted by a changed Friml—pugnacious and bullying.

  XIII.

  “Somebody’s been feeding you raw meat, Friml. And I think I know who.” Friml looked smug for a moment. “EBIC is I.B.M.’s Electronic—Binary—Integrating—Calculator. Get it? It’s the only major electronic calculator available to the private citizen or firm, thanks to I.B.M.’s generosity and sense of public relations.”

  The secretary-treasurer said petulantly: “You might have made your request clear, Novak.”

  “Doctor Novak to you,” said the engineer, suddenly very sick of the new Friml. It wa
s such a stinking, messy thing to run into after such a beautiful spell of research work. “Now just get me lined up for a crack at EBIC. It’s I.B.M., New York. One hundred and thirty-two partial differential equations. Just get it done and stay out of my hair until then.”

  He walked out of the office, boiling, and picked up a pint of bourbon at a drugstore before he went to his hotel. Swear to God, he thought, this deal’s as lousy as A.E.C. and you don’t get a pension either.

  There were several slips in his pigeonhole at the hotel mail desk. They all said to call Miss Wynekoop at such and such a number as soon as he could, please. He had never heard of Miss Wynekoop, and the phone number didn’t ring any bells. He took off his shoes when he got to his room, had a drink of the bourbon, and called the number.

  A woman’s brightly noncommittal voice said: “Hello?”

  “This is Michael Novak, Miss Wynekoop?”

  “Oh, Dr. Novak. I wonder if I might see you this evening about employment?”

  “I’m not hiring.”

  She laughed. “I meant employment for you. I represent a firm which is adding to its technical and executive staff.”

  “I have a job. And a one-year contract with options.”

  “The contract would be our legal department’s worry,” she said cheerfully. “And if you meet our firm’s standards, I think you’d hesitate to turn down our offer. The pay is very, very good.” Then she was crisp and businesslike. “Are you free this evening? I can be at your hotel in fifteen minutes.”

  “All right,” he said. “Why not? I suppose from the way you’re putting all this that you’re not going to tell me the name of your firm?”

  “Well, we do prefer to keep such things quiet,” she apologized. “There’s speculation and wasted time and broken hearts for the people who think they’re going to get it and don’t. I’m sure you understand. I’ll see you very soon, Dr. Novak.” She hung up and he stood for a moment at the phone, undecided. More funny business? Wait and see.