Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Norvell’s eyes opened wide. He said in a thin voice, “Arnie, you were bragging to your boss that you could get tickets, even though they’ve been sold out for six weeks. Isn’t that it?” They stared nakedly at each other; then Norvell’s eyes fell. “Just kidding,” he mumbled. “I’ll get them.”

  VIRGINIA was still awake, but ” there was only a minor squabble over the music coming from behind Alexandra’s locked door. Norvell made the mistake of commenting that it was past midnight and a 14-year-old should be asleep.

  His wife said furiously, “Should be this, and should be that, and should do everything Mr. Bligh wants her to. This whole house isn’t organized around you. It’s our home, too, and—”

  Norvell had had all he could take. “It’s the company’s house and one more word out of you and I give it back to them. Then you two prize packages from Belly Rave will be right back where you belong.”

  Virginia’s face stiffened in shocked surprise. Norvell stalked downstairs to the bar and poured himself a drink.

  He sat with it in his hand and looked in sudden wonder at the room around him.

  Was there so much difference between a G-M-L bubble house and Belly Rave? He decided he’d have to visit Belly Rave one of these days. Just to get a look. But what could the difference be?

  A house was a house. If you didn’t like the floor warm, you dialed it to cool. If you didn’t like the wall color or pattern, you turned the selector wheel to something else. If you didn’t like a room plan, you clipped the wall somewhere else.

  Norvell dialed a bed and set the house to full automatic. As he lay down, his pillow chimed softly, but he didn’t need sleepy music that night. He reached over his head and turned it off.

  In the copper plexus at the house’s core, transistors pulsed, solenoids barred the doors, micro-switches laid traps for intruders, thermocouples dried the incoming air and cooled it. Commutator points would boil the water for the coffee in the morning, heat the griddle for the eggs, set their breakfast dishes.

  Naturally—Norvell thought sleepily—that’s what a house was.

  V

  FOUR taxi drivers flatly refused to take Mundin to Belly Rave. The fifth was a reckless youngster. “Just took this job waiting for the draft call,” he confided. “How can I lose? You’re paying plenty and maybe I’ll get beat up so bad in this here Belly Rave place that they won’t draft me.” He laughed. “Fact is, I’ve never been out there, but I figure it can’t be as tough as they say.”

  Mundin did not contradict him, though he felt a lot less certain, and off they went.

  There was no sizable city that did not have the equivalent of Belly Rave. Festering slums that had once been respectable suburban residential sections, like Belle Reve Estates, they had been abruptly made obsolete by the G-M-L bubble houses—good enough for derelicts to live in, not good enough to keep in repair. The battered streetlights, Mundin noticed, didn’t light; the yards were weed-grown; roofs were rotted through, walls sagging.

  To one who had always lived in bubble houses, the place was shocking. He had thought the early bubble houses were ludicrous because the automatic controls sometimes went out of order and manual ones had to be used temporarily. But these primitive structures—even someone like himself, with no more than a layman’s knowledge, saw instantly that this old-style architecture must have taken an incredible number of man-hours just for upkeep.

  He asked himself indignantly why this architectural jungle wasn’t torn or burned down and bubble houses put up. He knew the answer, of course—G-M-L Homes. They could manufacture the units, but their advertising explained why they didn’t. Living in a bubble house was a mark of success. And so they limited production, maintained an artificial scarcity value . . . and doomed people to Belly Raves, or whatever the local name was, in every city.

  Hell with it, Mundin thought in annoyance; he had his own troubles. He hadn’t come out to Belly Rave to worry about it; he was there on a job. If he was lucky and it turned into a real, honest-to-God case.

  There was life in Belly Rave—a furtive, crepuscular life called into being by the unpoliceable wilderness of tall weeds, wrecks of homes, endless miles of crumbling pavement. Scatty little cars prowled the cracked roads, occasionally pulling to the curb when a dim figure swung a phosphorescent handbag.

  THE taxi passed one block of houses that was a blaze of light and noise. A doorman trotted alongside the cab, urging, “Anything goes, mister. Spend the night for five bucks, all you can drink and smoke included. Why pay taxes, mister?”

  Sometimes, though not often, the Alcohol & Hemp Tax Unit raided such joints.

  The driver asked, “We anywhere near 37598 Willowdale Crescent?”

  “What you need is a guide,” the doorman said promptly. “Jimmy!” Somebody jelled out of the dark. Mundin heard a fumbling at the cab door.

  “Step on it!” he yelled at the driver, snapping the door lock. The driver stepped on it.

  Ambush left behind, they cautiously approached bag-swingers for directions and before long were on the 37,000 block of Willowdale Crescent, counting houses.

  “This must be it,” said the driver, no longer devil-may-care.

  “I guess so. Wait here, will you?”

  “No, sir! How do I know you ain’t going to slip through a back door? You pay me what’s on the clock and I’ll wait.”

  The meter read a whopping eight dollars. Mundin handed over a ten and started up the crumbled walk.

  The taxi zoomed away before he had taken half a dozen steps. Mundin cursed wearily and knocked on the door. He studied the boarded-up picture window while he waited. Like all the others, it was broken, boarded up. Inevitably, in the years that had gone by since they were eased and puttied carefully into place, the rock had been flung, or the door had been slammed, or the drunk had lurched into the living room.

  The man who came to the door was old and visibly sick.

  “Is this the Lavin place?” Mundin asked, blinking against a light haze of wood-smoke. “I’m Charles Mundin. She asked me to call in connection with a legal matter. I’m an attorney.”

  The old man started at the word. “Come in, Counselor,” he said formally. “I am a member of the bar myself—”

  He broke off into a fit of coughing that left him leaning against the door.

  MUNDIN half carried him into the living room and eased him into a sagging, overstuffed chair. A Coleman lamp, blowing badly, cast a metallic blue-green glare into every corner of the room. A fire smoldered in the hearth, billowing against a closed register. A tinny radio was blaring, “—was kept from spreading, though the four houses involved in the arson attempt were totally destroyed. Elsewhere in Belly Rave, warfare broke out between the Wabbits and the Goddams, rival junior gangs. One eight-year-old was killed instantly by a thrown—”

  Mundin clicked it off and opened the register. The smoke began to clear from the room and the fire to flicker. The old man was still folded up in the chair, his parchment face mercilessly bleached by the flaring light. Mundin fiddled aimlessly with the valve and somehow got it to stop roaring. There was a green glass shade; he put it on and the room was suddenly no longer a corner of a surrealist hell, but simply a shabby room.

  “Thank you,” the old man muttered. “Counselor, would you please see if there is a small, round tin in the bathroom cabinet?”

  The bathtub was full of split kindling and the cabinet shelves loaded with the smaller household staples—salt, spices and such. There was an unmarked tin, which Mundin pried open. Small, gummy-looking pills and an unmistakable odor—yen pox!

  He shuddered and brought it out.

  The old man took it and slowly swallowed five of the opium pills. When he spoke, his voice was almost steady. “Thank you, Counselor. And let this be a lesson to you. It’s weakening, humiliating. You said you had an appointment with Norma? She should have been here hours ago. Naturally—this neighborhood—I’m worried. I’m Harry Ryan. Member of the S.E.C. Bar and other thing
s. Of course—” he stared at the tin of yen pox—“I’m retired from practice.”

  Mundin coughed. “Miss Lavin mentioned you, though not by name. You would be attorney of record and I’d do the legwork in some sort of stockholder’s suit, right?”

  Ryan nodded. Mundin hesitated, then went on to tell the old man about the arrest in Hussein’s place.

  “YES,” Ryan said matter-of-factly. “I told her it was a mistake to go to Mr. Dworcas. It is inconceivable that Green, Charlesworth would neglect to have an understanding with the Regular Republican Central Committee.”

  Green, Charlesworth was the name of an investment house usually mentioned in hushed and tremulous tones. Mundin said, “She told me it was connected with G-M-L Homes. How does Green, Charlesworth come into it?”

  Ryan chewed another opium pill. “Not in more than two dozen ways—that I know of.” He actually smiled. “Raw materials, belt transport patents, real estate, insurance, plant financing—” He heaved himself from the overstuffed chair as the door knocker rattled. “I’ll get it,” he said. “It was just a temporary indisposition. You needn’t mention it to . . .” He jerked his chin at the door.

  He came back into the living room with Norma and Don Lavin.

  “Hello, Mundin,” she said tonelessly. “I see you found us. Have you eaten?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “Then excuse us while we have something. The Caddy broke down five times on the way out here. I’m beat.”

  She and her brother morosely opened a couple of self-heating cans of goulash. They spooned them down in silence.

  “Now,” she said to Mundin, “the background. I’ll make it short. Don and I were born of rich but honest parents in Coshocton, Ohio. Daddy—Don, senior—was rather elderly when we came along. He spent the first fifty years of his life working. He started out as a plastics man with a small factory—bus bodies, fire trucks, that kind of thing. He happened to have gone to school with a man named Bernie Gorman, who happened to have specialized in electronics and electrical stuff. The two of them worked together, when they could find time, dreaming dreams and weaving visions. They were dedicated men. They invented, designed and constructed the first pilot model of the G-M-L Home, otherwise known as the bubble house.”

  Mundin said frostily, “I happen to know a little about G-M-L, Miss Lavin. Wasn’t there a man named Moffatt involved?”

  “Not until later—much later. For almost thirty years, Daddy and Mr. Gorman starved themselves, gave up everything for their dream. Mother said she scarcely saw Daddy from month’s end to month’s end. Mr. Gorman died a bachelor. They had designed the bubble house, they had built it, but they didn’t have the capital to put it on the market.”

  MUNDIN objected, “They could have leased the rights.”

  “And had them bottled up,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you they were dedicated men? They had designed a home that was cheaper than the cheapest and better than the best. It was a breakthrough in housing, like nothing that had gone before except, perhaps the revolution in synthetic textiles. Don’t you see that even a millionaire could not have owned a better house? Daddy and Mr. Gorman wanted to give their dream to the people at a reasonable profit. They weren’t big businessmen, Mundin—they were dreamers. They were out of their field. Then Moffatt came along with his plan.”

  Ryan stirred himself. “Most ingenious, really. By leasing manufacturing rights to large corporations, G-M-L avoided capital outlay; the Corporation’s gave their employees what could not be had elsewhere—and good-by to labor troubles. At first, G-M-L leased the rights for money. Later, when they got bigger, the consideration was blocks of stock, equities in the leasing firms.” The girl nodded soberly. “Within ten years, it owned sizable shares of forty corporations, and Daddy and Mr. Gorman owned half of G-M-L. Then Daddy found out what was happening. He told Mr. Gorman and I think it killed him—he was an old man by then, you see. Contract status. One word of back-talk and you get thrown out of your G-M-L house. Get thrown out of your G-M-L house and you find yourself—here.”

  Mundin said wonderingly, “But if your father was one of the owners of the company—”

  “Only twenty-five per cent, Mundin. And Mr. Gorman’s twenty-five per cent went to distant cousins. So there was Daddy, at sixty-five. His vision was a reality—his bubble homes housed a hundred million people. But they had become a weapon and he was frozen out of the firm.”

  Don Lavin said dreamily, “They gave the plant guards his picture. He was arrested for drunk and disorderly when he tried to go to the stockholders’ meeting. He hanged himself in his cell.” He stared absently at Mundin’s shoe.

  Mundin cleared his throat, “I’m sorry. Wasn’t there anything to be done at all?”

  RYAN said, with a touch of professional admiration, “Very little, Mr. Mundin. Oh, he still had stock. They impounded it. A trumped-up creditors’ committee got an order on his safe-deposit box against dissipation of assets when he died. They kept it impounded for twelve years. Then somebody got careless, or somebody quit or got fired, and the new man didn’t know what the impoundment was for. Anyway, the order expired. Norma and Don Lavin are twenty-five per cent owners of G-M-L.”

  Mundin looked around the shabby room and said nothing.

  “There’s just one little thing,” Norma said bitterly. “Don got the stock out of the box and put it away. Tell us where it is, Don.”

  The brother’s dreamy eyes widened. His face worked wildly. He said, “K-k-k-k-k-k” in a convulsion of stammering. The terrified stutter went on and on, and then Don Lavin began raspingly to cry. Norma, stone-faced, patted him on the shoulder.

  SHE said to the appalled lawyer, “When we began making trouble, as they called it, Don was snatched. He was gone for three days. A doctor he went to says he must have got more than fifty hours of conditioning.”

  “That’s illegal! Private persons can’t use conditioning techniques!”

  “You’re our lawyer now—just straighten that out for us, will you? Get an injunction against G-M-L.”

  Mundin sat back. Habitual criminals—like his client earlier in the day—were conditioned in twenty hours of treatment spread over a week or more. Good God, fifty hours in three days! But proving it against G-M-L or anyone else—that was the hard part. The conditioned person was naturally conditioned against taking any action of the sort.

  He felt ill. “Sorry I was so stupid. So now you want to find the stock and Don doesn’t know where he put it.”

  Ryan looked at him with disgust. “I could manage to get duplicate certificates. Unfortunately, our position is not that simple. Donald, as the male heir, was the obvious person to conduct a suit, so Norma signed an irrevocable proxy of interest to him. That was an error, as it turned out. Donald can’t bring suit. He can’t tell us where the stock is. He can’t even discuss it.” Mundin nodded sickly. “I see. You’re stymied.”

  Norma made a contemptuous noise. “Now that it’s established that we’re licked, we might as well lie down and die.”

  “I didn’t say that, Miss Lavin. We’ll do what we can.” He hesitated. “For instance, no doubt we can have your brother undergo a deconditioning course somewhere else. After all—”

  “ ‘Private persons can’t use conditioning techniques,’ ” she quoted derisively. “Didn’t you say that just a moment ago?”

  “Well, yes, but surely someone will—”

  Norma seemed to collapse. She said to Ryan, “You tell him what he’s up against.”

  Ryan said, “G-M-L’s assets are not less than fourteen billion dollars, comprising cash in the bank, negotiable securities, plant and properties and equities, as of their last statement, in eight hundred and four corporations. I don’t say that they can break the law with impunity, Counselor, but they can sure as hell keep us from breaking it.”

  FOURTEEN billion dollars!

  Mundin, trudging apprehensively through Belly Rave’s dark streets, felt very small, pitted against fourteen billion dol
lars.

  A mournful hooting from the shadows made him quicken his step, but no lurking thugs showed up. Mundin shivered uncomfortably and turned up his coat collar. It had begun to rain.

  Luck was with him. He was neither mugged nor lured into one of the clip joints. The footpads were stalking other streets; the roving gangs of armed adolescents plotted in their cellars instead of braving the rain; the cab Mundin spotted, ran after and hailed was a legitimate cab, not a trap.

  The ride gave him time to think. But the thinking came to very little. The Lavins, he was convinced, had a legitimate claim. He had promised them he would work on it; he had tried to reassure them that things were not as hopeless as they seemed. He felt uncomfortably sure that the girl had seen through his empty words.

  The cab came at last to territory he recognized and he stopped it at an all-night restaurant. Coffee might help, he thought. While he was waiting for it, he invested in a call to his office—you could never tell, maybe someone had phoned.

  Someone had. The Sleepless Secretary groaned and came across with the record of a familiar, scared voice: “Mr. Mundin—uh—this is Norvell Bligh. Can you come and get me out of jail?”

  VI

  NORVIE woke up with a start. They were joggling him, with identical, contemptuous smiles. Even in the fog of sleep, he felt a little stab of pride at Virginia’s beauty, a twitch of unhappiness at the same lean beauty smothered beneath the adolescent fat of her daughter.

  “What’s the matter?” he croaked.

  His voice sounded odd and he realized he wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. He groped for it beside the bed. It wasn’t there. He sat up.

  He yelled at Alexandra, “Where is it? If you’ve hidden it again, I’ll break your neck!”

  Alexandra looked smugly shocked. She mouthed at him, “Goodness, Norvell, you know I wouldn’t do that,” though he had repeatedly told her that exaggeration made it impossible to read lips.

  Virginia tapped him on the shoulder and said something, stiff-lipped. He caught an “eep” and a “larm.”