Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Two minutes later, he was pounding Charles on the back and yelling, “We made it, bud!” Metals had broken—thirty-eight points. Charles, by now icy-calm, gave him five dollars. Step One in Ryan’s instructions—build up a stake. He’d done that.

  He turned the dial to the $500 range. “Give me a winner,” he told the tout. “I’m in a hurry and this is taking too long.”

  The broker stammered: “Solid fuels ought to rise now. But—but please, bud, make it $250. One on solid fuels and one on—on . . .” He swept the board with his glasses. “Can’s been sleepin’ all day,” he muttered. “A Tuesday crowd stays off Can, but after metals break . . .”

  He said nervously, “Buy solid fuels and Can.”

  BY two in the afternoon, Charles had a cash-in value of $2,300 and the broker’s pockets were bulging with small change. He was talking to himself in an undertone.

  Charles said abruptly, “Okay. Now I want a share of G-M-L.” The broker blinked at him. “Old 333? You can’t do that.”

  “I want it.”

  “Bud, you’re new here; I been around for twenny years. They have an investor, see? All day long, he just punches 333. That’s him over there, third tier, second aisle. Like Steel and P & A—they don’t take no chances on anybody claimin’ no stock.”

  “I want it,” repeated Mundin. “Ain’t you made enough for one day? Come on, let’s go get a drink. I’ll buy. You fool around with the big boys, they punish you. Like G-M-L. You try to grab a share and you’ll get hurt. Unlrrtited resources, see—un-lim-it-ed. Every movement, all day long, he has a ‘buy’ bid in. He bids ten thousand bucks, way over real value. You get a wild idea and bid over ten thousand and you’ll get the stock, sure. So, next movement, what happens? He sells short, maybe. Maybe he waits. But sooner or later you’re squashed. You know what they say, bud—‘Him who sells what isn’t his’n must buy it back or go to prison.’ And plenty have.”

  Mundin said coldly, “What’s G-M-L par?”

  “Two thousand. But ya can’t claim it, didn’t I just tell you? He’s got a bid in, every movement.”

  Charles set himself to persuade the broker to do what Ryan had planned. At last, the broker, shaking, stumbled off toward the third tier, second aisle. Mundin followed him with the field glasses.

  It was working. Sweating, Mundin saw in miniature, through the glasses, the greeting, the silent shove, the wordless rejoinder, the growing heat of the quarrel. The G-M-L investor was a small, elderly fat man. The broker was small, too, but lean and wiry.

  The fight broke out as the thirty-second warning bell rang. Charles took his eyes off the fighters and the for-once-untended investor’s window and punched four $250 tickets on Old 333.

  ONE bid and no offerings did not constitute a transaction according to the electronic definitions of the New York Stock Exchange parimutuel machine. As it had all day, the Big Board said—

  333, no change

  One bid and no offerings. In a claiming movement, it meant a quick profit—the difference between the bid and the par value. An investor next to Charles, eying him respectfully, said, “What do ya like in Chemicals, bud?”

  Mundin ignored him. He left his station, almost regretfully, and took the escalator up to the cashier’s window marked: Industrials—$1,000 and up.

  “Two thousand dollars,” said the bored clerk, inspecting the tickets, glancing at his miniature of the Big Board, noting the no change. He began to count out hundred-dollar bills.

  “I’m claiming,” Mundin said through stiff lips.

  The clerk suddenly awakened. “Old 333! How’d you do it?”

  “I’m claiming two thousand dollars par value.”

  The clerk shrugged and tapped out an order on his keyboard. Moments later, one share of G-M-L Homes voting common stock fluttered from a slot in the desk. The clerk filled in Charles’ name and home address and recorded them.

  “You’ll get that to the company’s board of directors immediately?” the attorney asked.

  “It’s automatic,” said the clerk. “It’s in their files now. Say, mister, if you don’t mind telling me how you pulled it off—”

  He was being much too affable—and Charles, looking closer, saw the little ear plug of a personal receiver. He was being stalled.

  He darted into the crowd.

  The two gambles had paid off, Mundin realized, heading for the street and Belly Rave. He had the stake—and he had his single share of stock in G-M-L Homes, entitling him to a seat at the annual stockholders’ meeting.

  Now the real gambling would begin.

  Mundin whistled for a cab. There was some commotion behind him, but the cab came before Mundin had time to notice that the man who was being worked over, in broad daylight, by three huskies, was a small, wiry man with a Member’s button in his lapel.

  XI

  GETTING on toward noon,” Shep said. “Let’s find a restaurant.”

  “A restaurant?” Norvie Bligh goggled. He followed Shep down the littered, filthy street, wondering. In a week, he thought he had learned something about Belly Rave under Shep’s tutelage. But he had seen no neon-glittering, glass-fronted havens.

  What Shep led him to was just another Belly Rave house. A wheezing old crone crept around the living room. There was a fire going in the fireplace and water bubbling in a blackened kettle. Restaurant?

  Shep took a couple of rations from his pocket. He never seemed to be without a dozen or so. They were easy enough to get from the R.C.—you could claim you had a dozen dependents and he would apathetically list you for 273 rations a week. If you could lift them, they were yours. There was plenty of food.

  And plenty of circuses.

  Shep split the two-by-three-by-six plastic box with his thumbnail and Norvell clumsily followed suit. Things tumbled out. Shep tossed one of the “things”—an unappetizing little block of what looked like plastic-wrapped wood—to the crone. She caught it and gobbled it down.

  “Business not so good?” Shep asked casually.

  She glared at him, bailed water out of the kettle with a rusted can and slopped it into his plastic ration box. Shep popped open a little envelope and sprinkled a dark powder on the water.

  Coffee! The magic smell made Norvell suddenly ravenous. He handed the crone a similar block from his own ration, got his water, made his coffee, and greedily explored the other things that had come out of the box.

  Biscuits. A tin of meat-paste. A chewy block of compressed vegetables. Candy. Cigarettes. The combination was one he hadn’t encountered before. The meat-paste was highly spiced but good.

  Shep watched as he gobbled. “When you’ve eaten each menu ten thousand times—well, I won’t discourage you.”

  OUTSIDE, Norvell asked shyly what in the world the old woman thought she was doing for a living.

  “It’s simple,” said Shep. “She gets her rations and trades them for firewood. She uses the wood to heat water—for coffee, or bouillon, or tea, or whatever. She trades the water for rations. She keeps hoping that some day she’ll come out ahead on the deal. She never has.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it makes her feel like a human being.”

  “But—”

  “But, hell! It’s hard to starve to death in Belly Rave; in a bad week, though, she comes close to it. She’s risking her capital in the hope of gain. What if she always loses? She’s doing something—not just sitting and waiting for ration day to roll around again.”

  Norvell nodded. He could see how it would make irresistible, unarguable sense, after the ten-thousandth of each menu. Those who could do anything, anything at all, would try anything, anything at all.

  It gave him a clue to the enigma named Shep. He said comprehendingly, “So she has her restaurant, and you have your art, and—”

  The giant turned on him. “You little louse! If you ever say, or hint, or think that I’m just piddling around to kill the time, I’ll snap you in two!”

  In a clear, intuitive flash, Norvell
realized that he had said the unspeakable. He managed to say, very sincerely, “I’m sorry, Shep.”

  His knees were shaking and his heart was pounding, but it was only adrenalin, not fear. He knew what torment had driven this placid hulk to rage—incessant, relentless, nagging self-doubt. Where leisure is compulsory, how can you tell the burning drive to create from its sterile twin, “puttering”? You can’t. And the self-doubt must remain forever unresolved, forever choked down, forever rising again.

  Norvell added honestly, “I won’t say that again. I won’t even think it. Not out of fear of you, but because I know it’s not so.” He hesitated. “I—I used to think I was a kind of artist myself. I know what you must be going through.”

  Shep grumbled, “Bligh, you’re just beginning to find out what you go through—but I’m sorry I blew my top.”

  “Forget it.” They walked on.

  AT last, Shep said, “Here’s where we get some more supplies.” The place was one of the inevitable picture-window, fieldstone-chimney ruins, but with a fenced-in yard. The gate had a lock on it. Shep kicked the gate down, tearing out the hinges and the staples of the hasp. Norvell said, “Hey!”

  “We do this my way. Stearns!” A grim, gray man threaded his way to them around stacks of plastic fittings, guttering and miscellaneous. “Hello, Shep,” he said flatly. “What do you want?”

  “You hijacked repair materials that a couple of friends of mine got through legitimate black-market channels. I want them back—with interest.”

  “Still on the protection kick, Shep?” the man asked, his voice ugly. “If you had any sense, you’d come in with me.”

  “I don’t work for anybody, Stearns. I do favors for a few friends, they do favors for me. Trot out your team, Titan of Industry.”

  Shep, so fast to resent the slur himself, was insensitive enough to use it on others. With the same results.

  Stearns’ face went pasty with rage and Norvell knew what was coming next—unless he moved fast. “Stearns!” he yelled, and used the moment’s delay to draw the pistol that Virginia had ordered him to carry. Stearns’ hand stopped at his lapel and slowly, unwillingly, dropped to his side.

  Shep gave Norvell a quick, approving glance. “Trot out your team, Stearns.”

  Stearns didn’t look away from the gun in Norvell’s hand. “Chris! Willie! Get the truck.”

  The truck was a two-wheeler stake job with one starved-looking teen-ager pulling between poles and another pushing against a canvas breast-band. Walking Stearns before him, Shep ordered him to pick up this or that article of building material and put it on the truck. He topped the load with a rusty pick and shovel from the tool shed, then told Chris and Willie, “Roll it, kids. It won’t be far.”

  Norvell didn’t pocket his gun until they had put three blocks between themselves and Stearns’ final malevolent glare.

  There were two stops before they headed for Norvell’s home. At each of them, a part of the supplies was unloaded, to the tearful thanks of sober-looking citizens who had thought them gone forever—and, with them, the months of accumulation, gambling and wangling that had earned them in the first place.

  Norvell, eying the heaving, panting teen-agers, suggested uneasily, “Let’s give them a hand with the truck.”

  Shep shook his head. “Our job is convoying.”

  BUT there was no trouble. The kids rolled the cart to the door of Norvell’s house and unloaded the firewood and building materials, stacking them on the shredded broadloom that covered the floor of the sunken living room.

  Virginia cast an appraising eye over the neat heaps. “No tar paper, linoleum, anything like that?”

  Shep guffawed. “No diamonds, either. You think your roof is the only one that leaks? You’re lucky—you got two finished floors. Let the top one get soaked. You’ll be all right down here.”

  “Cack,” she said and Norvell winced. “If you can’t get tar paper, see if you can find something else to make shingles out of. Sheet tin will do.”

  “So will the roof off a G-M-L,” Shep said sourly, but he made a note. He tossed a couple of rations to the waiting kids, who took them and pushed their empty truck away. “Anything else?”

  Virginia, suddenly a hostess, said, “Oh, I suppose not. Care for a drink?”

  Norvell, for politeness’ sake, took a sip of the bottle Virginia produced. “Ration-jack,” she called it, obtained by trading firewood with the evil-eyed octogenarian in the house next door. It tasted like, the chewy fruit bars he had enjoyed until then, when he found them in his ration pack. But the taste was overlaid with the bite of alcohol. Beer was what he really liked. They didn’t seem to have any in Belly Rave, though.

  Norvell let the conversation drift past him. He sat back, bone-weary. Physical weariness was a new thing to Norvie Bligh. He had never had it as a child, never had it at General Recreations. Weariness was not one of the fixtures that came with possession of a G-M-L bubble house, it seemed.

  Why was it that doing nothing involved physical labor, while doing actual creative, productive work—running a Field Day, for instance—involved only the work of the mind? Norvie admitted it to himself: already he was taking on the coloration of Belly Rave. Like all its discouraged, hopeless inhabitants, he was living for the day and ignoring the morrow. Rations and a place to sleep. It would not be long, he told himself bitterly, before he would be one of the simians queueing up at Monmouth Stadium.

  Unless he found something else to do.

  But what was there to do? Work on the house? The essentials were done. The bars were up, the trash had been carted out into the street, where it would slump into a featureless heap like all the other middens along the road. The less urgent things couldn’t be done. You couldn’t fix the lesser roof leaks—no shingles. You couldn’t fix the stairs—no materials, no tools. Above all, no skill.

  HE said excitedly, oblivious to the fact that he was interrupting, “Virginia! How about starting a garden? A couple of fruit trees—orange, maybe. A few rows of—”

  Virginia laughed almost hysterically. Even Shep chuckled. She said, “Orange trees don’t grow around here, my dear husband. Nothing else does, either. You start digging out there and first you go through two feet of garbage and trash, then maybe six inches of cinder and fill. Then you hit the real paydirt—sand.”

  Norvell sighed. “There must be something to do.”

  Shep suggested, “You could paint your dump, if you’re feeling ambitious. I know where there’s some house paint.” Norvell sat up, interested. He accepted the bottle of ration-jack and took a small swallow. “Why not? No reason why we can’t keep the place looking decent, is there?”

  Shep shrugged. “Depends. If you want to start some kind of a business, paint’s a good advertisement. If you want to just drift, maybe you don’t want to advertise. You make yourself too conspicuous and people get ideas.”

  Norvell said, dampened, “You mean robbers?”

  Virginia reached for the bottle of ration-jack. “Cack,” she said bluntly, taking a long swallow. “We aren’t painting.”

  There was a long pause. In the G-M-L bubble house, Norvell reminded himself, Virginia had never let there be any doubt who was boss—but she had seldom shown it in front of outsiders.

  They weren’t in the bubble house any more, however.

  I want Arnie, Norvell cried to himself, suddenly miserable. It isn’t working out right at all, not the way Arnie said it would. He’d said it would be a chance for Norvie to express himself, to make something of his marriage, to be on his own. And it wasn’t that at all!

  He reclaimed the bottle of ration-jack. It still tasted quite disgusting, but he gagged down a long drink.

  SHEP was saying, “. . . didn’t do so badly today. Stearns gave me a little trouble. If Norvie hadn’t held a gun on him, I might not have got the stuff so easy.”

  Virginia looked at her husband appraisingly. But all she said to Norvie was, “You better keep an eye on that gun. Alexandra tried t
o sneak out with my kitchen knife today.”

  “Eh?” Norvie was jolted.

  “Put on quite a scene,” her mother said, almost admiringly. “She’s getting in with the Goering Grenadiers and it seems they pack knives and guns. They look down on the Wabbits and their busted bottles.”

  “Does she have to do that?” Shep said grimly, “If she wants to stay alive, she does. Get it straight, Norvie—this is Belly Rave, not a finishing school. It’s a permanent Field Day, only without rules.”

  Now there was something he knew about, Norvell thought, brightening. “You ever go in for a Field Day?”

  “Nope. Just the weeklies.”

  “Oh, you ought to, Shep. That’s where the real money is.

  And it’s not very dangerous if you play it smart. Take spear-carrying in Spillane’s Inferno, for instance. Safe as houses. And from the artistic side, let me tell you from experience that—”

  “Cack on spear-carrying, Bligh,” Shep said, with a wire edge in his voice. “I don’t do that any more. I’ve been there, sticking the poor slobs who fall off the high wire before they reach the blonde. I’ve even been on the wire myself—once.” He reached for the ration-jack, his face blank. “She missed me with all eight shots. I fractured her femur with my first. And then I dropped the gun.”

  He took a huge drink. “They booed me. I didn’t get the mid-riff bonus or the navel superbonus. I didn’t want them. All I wanted was some brushes, some canvas, some graphite sticks and some colors. I got them, Bligh, and I found out I couldn’t use them. Not for six damned months. And then I couldn’t paint anything except her face when the slug hit her thigh and she fell off the perch.”