Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  In went the bleating, terrified animal—shaved and with a few nicks on its side for the scent of blood. Then they pulled on the rope and hauled out—bloody bones. There were still ghastly little things flopping and wriggling, dangling from the skeleton. They beat them off into the water with sticks as the crowd shrieked in delight.

  Just like you, you swine, Norvie thought. But maybe I won’t have to do it—

  The earpiece of his hearing aid had slipped a trifle. He looked shyly around and pulled it out preparatory to readjusting it. Then he didn’t readjust it. The shrieking crowd, the gloating, smacking language of the MC, the faint creak in the wind of the tower guys—all of it came through.

  It was the decision, he told himself, not quite knowing what he meant. He hadn’t wanted to hear any of it; he hadn’t dared hear any of it. Not as long as he was a part of the horror.

  He went to Norma Lavin and put his thin arm around her shaking shoulders. “It’s going to be all right,” he said.

  She cowered against him, wordlessly.

  “I’ve got a boy coming, you know,” he told her.

  She gave him a distracted nod, her eyes on the tower.

  “And if anything happens,” he went on, “it’s only fair they should be taken care of—Sandy, Virginia and the boy. You’ll remember in case anything happens?” She nodded. “There was this time in Bay City,” he chattered. “High wire with piranha. A judge—” She wasn’t paying attention.

  He got up and joined Mundin. “If anything happens,” he said, “it’s only fair that Sandy and Virginia and the boy should be taken care of.”

  “What are you talking about, Norvie?”

  “Just remember. Please remember.”

  THE drumroll began and the MC set fire to the platform on which Don Lavin stood. The crowd howled as the flames licked up and the boy hopped convulsively forward, his balancing pole swaying.

  The MC yelled angrily at the hecklers, “What’s the matter with you people? Toot! Chuck gravel! What do you think you’re getting paid for?”

  One of them, a young tough, began to swing his rattle, glancing nervously at Hubble. Hubble snapped at him, “A hundred more, buster. Now calm down.” The tough calmed down and gaped at the wire-walker.

  A foot, two feet, the pole swaying. He has special slippers on, Norvell thought. Maybe it’ll be all right, I won’t have to do anything and then I can be comfortably deaf again, buying batteries for a penance, turning this nausea off at will.

  Three feet, four feet, and the MC howling with rage: “Get in there and fight! Take out your horns! Plaster him!”

  Five feet, six feet, and the crowd-noise was ugly, ugly as blood. In one section, a chant had started, one of those foot-stomping, hand-clapping things.

  Six feet, seven, and the MC was breaking down into sobs. “We paid you and this is the way you treat us! These fine people in the stands. Aren’t you ashamed?”

  Eight feet, nine feet, ten feet, two-thirds of the way to the second tower. Somebody with a mighty arm and a following wind had found the range. The halfbrick at the end of its journey sailed feebly, plop, into the tank and white-bellied little things tore at it and bled themselves and tore at one another. The water boiled.

  Suddenly ice-cold, all business, Norvie said dryly to Mundin, “Be ready to haul him out fast. They’ll have him in a minute. Remember what I said.”

  He strolled over to Wilkes, who was watching the stubbornly silent hecklers in numb despair.

  Another half-brick, and this one hit the tower. Much maneuvering of the balancing pole and a shriek from Norma.

  “No nervous breakdown this year, Wilkes,” Norvell said to the MC.

  “What? Bligh, they won’t listen to me!”

  Thirteen feet, and then the brick, unseen, that tapped Don Lavin between the shoulder blades and made him flail the pole too hard.

  One last agonized look around the arena was all Norvell could take. There was nothing, no chair, no cushion, nothing but—He grabbed the sobbing Wilkes in his arms and lunged into the tank for an eternal instant, before he could see Don Lavin topple and fall. First the water was cool and then boiling.

  FOR ten minutes, there was not a sane person in the stadium. The critics would remember that moment all their lives. It was greatness, the ultimate masterpiece of Field Day emotion.

  While the piranhas seethed at the far end of the tank, Mundin yanked Don Lavin out in one heave. Not a soul molested the four of them as they walked slowly over the bloody sand. They passed Candella, who stared at them with blind, streaming eyes and said, “Masterpiece! Masterpiece! And I knew him! I walked and talked with Norvell Blight Art can go no further. Masterpiece!”

  They picked up Lana and her Wabbits from a deserted ready room.

  “I saw it,” she said. “Good little man, wasn’t he?” She broke off into sobs. “I’ll tell his wife and kid,” she sniffed at last.

  “Only—which way should I tell it?”

  Mundin thought, Blessed simplicity. Which way? There were undoubtedly a hundred ways, a thousand ways, all true and all intertwined, of telling about that frightful, horrifying, noble moment.

  Outside the stadium, the Wabbits were paid and formed fours, stumping grimly off toward the Belly Rave that Norvell Bligh had come to love and serve.

  “I think,” Don Lavin said slowly, “I’m awake. All the way. And I think I know what woke me up. Sis, Charles, Mr. Hubble—are we going to give those bottled ghouls—Green, Charlesworth—the business? I say we are!”

  “First,” said Hubble practically, “let me call Sam. His orders were to grab up anything Coett and Nelson dumped on the Exchange. Even if we don’t have our majority for tomorrow, we should have enough to Rock the Boat and Monkey With the Buzz Saw, as your two marinated friends put it.”

  This incurable levity of mine, he thought, and sighed. He noted how Norma Lavin was leaning on Mundin’s arm and how she glanced at him.

  He thought of how his wife glanced at him and sighed again, this time enviously.

  EPILOGUE

  From TYCOON, The Magazine for Tycoona:

  After a savagely efficient management raid on the gigantic G-M-L Corporation conducted last week during its regular stockholders’ meeting, the winners and new champions, Messrs. Hubble and Lavin, issued a terse joint statement promising far-reaching, deep-rooted policy changes.

  From the BELLY RAVE TIMES:

  Now that we enter our second year, it is time to pause and take stock. I think most of us will be pleased by what we see around us. The Belly Rave Municipal Association launched by my late husband, and of which I now have the honor to be president, is flourishing. Membership now covers eighteen blocks and our Organized Area covers ten. Progress is slow but sure. The reestablishment of sewer mains proceeds at a gratifying pace and everywhere one sees busy hands and happy faces. Truly, as my revered husband used to say, “Self-help is the only kind that sticks.”

  From the MONMOUTH NEWS:

  Newly elected Senator Mundin left for Washington today in his private ’copter after reaffirming his election pledge to raze Old New York to the ground. “We need the metals,” he said, “and we need the room. I cannot understand why this condemned slum has been tolerated for many years past the legal date for its extinction. Esthetically speaking, it is also a dreadful eyesore—particularly the old Empire State Building. It must arid will be destroyed.” The Senator’s attractive wife, nee Norma Lavin, accompanied him . . .

  From The FIELD DAY FAN:

  The cranks are at it again. Those mysteriously financed leaflets and broadcasts and lobbies for compulsory hours of anti-Field Day “education” in the public schools have again flared up. Your legal, rational, traditional entertainment is again under attack. For the third time in as many months, this magazine is compelled to solicit contributions that will offset its declining circulation. Attendance figures are down across the nation. But this is not a gloomy picture. The Field Day fans have been stripped to their hard core of true enthu
siasts . . . sincerity . . . artistic triumph. Vapid reformers and their bloodless ilk . . . utter inability to comprehend such moments of truth, such avalanches of emotion as were unleashed in the great old days upon the stunned spectator. In this context, we need no more than mention with due reverence the great name Norvell Blythe!

  Gomez

  Now that I’m a cranky, constipated old man I can afford to say that the younger generation of scientists makes me sick to my stomach. Short-order fry cooks of destruction, they hear through the little window the dim order: “Atom bomb rare, with cobalt sixty!” and sing it back and rattle their stinking skillets and sling the deadly hash—just what the customer ordered, with never a notion invading their smug, too-heated havens that there’s a small matter of right and wrong that takes precedence even over their haute cuisine.

  There used to be a slew of them who yelled to high heaven about it. Weiner, Urey, Szilard, Morrison—dead now, and worse. Unfashionable. The greatest of them you have never heard of. Admiral MacDonald never did clear the story. He was Julio Gomez, and his story was cleared yesterday by a fellow my Jewish friends call Malach Hamovis, the Hovering Angel of Death. A black-bordered letter from Rosa advised me that Malach Hamovis had come in on runway six with his flaps down and picked up Julio at the age of thirty-nine. Pneumonia.

  “But,” Rosa painfully wrote, “Julio would want you to know he died not too unhappy, after a good though short life with much of satisfaction . . .”

  I think it will give him some more satisfaction, wherever he is, to know that his story at last is getting told.

  It started twenty-two years ago with a routine assignment on a crisp October morning. I had an appointment with Dr. Sugarman, the head of the physics department at the University. It was the umpth anniversary of something or other—first atomic pile, the test A-bomb, Nagasaki—I don’t remember what, and the Sunday editor was putting together a page on it. My job was to interview the three or four University people who were Manhattan District grads.

  I found Sugarman in his office at the top of the modest physics building’s square gothic tower, brooding through a pointed-arch window at the bright autumn sky. He was a tubby, jowly little fellow. I’d been seeing him around for a couple of years at testimonial banquets and press conferences, but I didn’t expect him to remember me. He did, though, and even got the name right.

  “Mr. Vilchek?” he beamed. “From the Tribune?”

  “That’s right, Dr. Sugarman. How are you?”

  “Fine; fine. Sit down, please. Well, what shall we talk about?”

  “Well, Dr. Sugarman, I’d like to have your ideas on the really fundamental issues of atomic energy, A-bomb control and so on. What in your opinion is the single most important factor in these problems?”

  His eyes twinkled; he was going to surprise me. “Education!” he said, and leaned back waiting for me to register shock.

  I registered. “That’s certainly a different approach, doctor. How do you mean that, exactly?”

  He said impressively: “Education—technical education—is the key to the underlying issues of our time. I am deeply concerned over the unawareness of the general public to the meaning and accomplishments of science. People underrate me—underrate science, that is—because they do not understand science. Let me show you something.” He rummaged for a moment through papers on his desk and handed me a sheet of lined tablet paper covered with chicken-track handwriting. “A letter I got,” he said. I squinted at the penciled scrawl and read:

  October 12

  Esteemed Sir:

  Beg to introduce self to you the atomic Scientist as a youth 17 working with diligence to perfect self in Mathematical Physics. The knowledge of English is imperfect since am in New-York 1 year only from Puerto Rico and due to Father and Mother poverty must wash the dishes in the restaurant. So es teemed sir excuse imperfect English which will better.

  I hesitate intruding your valuable Scientist time but hope you sometime spare minutes for diligents such as I. My difficulty is with neutron cross-section absorptionof boron steel in Reactor which theory I am working out Breeder reactors demand

  for boron steel, compared with neutron cross-section absorption of

  for any Concrete with which I familiarize myself. Whence arises relationship

  indicating only a fourfold breeder gain. Intuitively I dissatisfy with this gain and beg to intrude your time to ask wherein I neglect. With the most sincere thanks.

  J. Gomez

  Porto Bello Lunchroom

  124th St. & St. Nicholas Ave.

  New-York, New-York

  I laughed and told Dr. Sugarman appreciatively: “That’s a good one. I wish our cranks kept in touch with us by mail, but they don’t. In the newspaper business they come in-and demand to see the editor. Could I use it, by the way? The readers ought to get a boot out of it.”

  He hesitated and said: “All right—if you don’t use my name. Just say ‘a prominent physicist.’ I didn’t think it was too funny myself though, but I see your point, of course. The boy may be feebleminded—and he probably is—but he believes, like too many people, that science is just a bag of tricks that any ordinary person can acquire—”

  And so on and so on.

  I went back to the office and wrote the interview in twenty minutes. It took me longer than that to talk the Sunday editor into running the Gomez letter in a box on the atom-anniversary page, but he finally saw it my way. I had to retype it. If I’d just sent the letter down to the composing room as was, we would have had a strike on our hands.

  On Sunday morning, at a quarter past six, I woke up to the tune of fists thundering on my hotel-room door. I found my slippers and bathrobe-and lurched Wearily across the room. They didn’t wait for me to unlatch. The door opened. I saw one of the hotel clerks, the Sunday editor, a frosty-faced old man, and three hard-faced, hard-eyed young men. The hotel clerk mumbled and retreated and the others moved in. “Chief,” I asked the Sunday editor hazily, “what’s going—?”

  A hard-faced young man was standing with his back to the door; another was standing with his back to the window and the third was blocking the bathroom door. The icy old man interrupted me with a crisp authoritative question snapped at the editor. “You identify this man as Vilchek?”

  The editor nodded.

  “Search him,” snapped the old man. The fellow standing guard at the window slipped up and frisked me for weapons while I sputtered incoherently and the Sunday editor avoided my eye.

  When the search was over the frosty-faced old boy said to me: “I am Rear Admiral MacDonald, Mr. Vilchek. I’m here in my capacity as deputy director of the Office of Security and Intelligence, U. S. Atomic Energy Commission. Did you write this?” He thrust a newspaper clipping at my face.

  I read, blearily:

  WHAT’S SO TOUGH ABOUT A-SCIENCE?

  TEENAGE POT-WASHER DOESN’T KNOW

  A letter received recently by a prominent local atomic scientist points up Dr. Sugarman’s complaint (see adjoining column) that the public does not appreciate how hard a physicist works. The text, complete with “mathematics” follows:

  Esteemed Sir:

  Beg to introduce self to you the Atomic Scientist as youth 17 working—

  “Yes,” I told the admiral. “I wrote it, except for the headline. What about it?”

  He snapped: “The letter is purportedly from a New York youth seeking information, yet there is no address for him given. Why is that?”

  I said patiently: “I left it off when I copied it for the composing room. That’s Trib style on readers’ letters. What is all this about?”

  He ignored the question and asked: “Where is the purported original of the letter?”

  I thought hard and told him: “I think I stuck it in my pants pocket. I’ll get it—” I started for the chair with my suit draped over it.

  “Hold it, mister!” said the young man at the bathroom door. I held it and he proceeded to go through the pockets of the suit. H
e found the Gomez letter in the inside breast pocket of the coat and passed it to the admiral. The old man compared it, word for word, with the clipping and then put them both in his pocket.

  “I want to thank you for your cooperation,” he said coldly to me and the Sunday editor. “I caution you not to discuss, and above all not to publish, any account of this incident. The national security is involved in the highest degree. Good day.”

  He and his boys started for the door, and the Sunday editor came to life. “Admiral,” he said, “this is going to be on the front page of tomorrow’s Trib.”

  The admiral went white. After a long pause he said: “You are aware that this country may be plunged, into global war at any moment. That American boys are dying every day in border skirmishes. Is it to protect civilians like you who won’t obey a reasonable request affecting security?”

  The Sunday editor took a seat on the edge of my rumpled bed and lit a cigarette. “I know all that, admiral,” he said. “I also know that this is a free country and how to keep it that way. Pitiless light on incidents like this of illegal search and seizure.”

  The admiral said: “I personally assure you, on my honor as an officer, that you would be doing the country a grave disservice by publishing an account of this.”

  The Sunday editor said mildly: “Your honor as an officer. You broke into this room without a search warrant. Don’t you realize that’s against the law? And I saw your boy ready to shoot when Vilchek started for that chair.” I began to sweat a little at that, but the admiral was sweating harder.