Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  That’s what it was like in my diary because that’s all they told me. Here are some excerpts: “On the recommendation of Dr. Mines, Mr. Gomez today began work on a phase of reactor design theory to be implemented at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The work involves the setting up of thirty-five pairs of partial differential equations . . . Mr. Gomez announced tentatively today that in checking certain theoretical work in progress at the Los Alamos Laboratory of the A.E.C. he discovered a fallacious assumption concerning neutron-spin which invalidates the conclusions reached. This will be communicated to the Laboratory . . . Dr. Mines said today that Mr. Gomez has successfully invoked a hitherto-unexploited aspect of Min-kowski’s tensor analysis to crack a stubborn obstacle toward the control of thermonuclear reactions . . .”

  I protested at one of the briefing sessions with Dr. Mines against this gobbledegook. He didn’t mind my protesting. He leaned back in his chair and said calmly: “Vilchek, with all friendliness I assure you that you’re getting everything you can understand. Anything more complex than the vague description of what’s going on would be over your head. And anything more specific would give away exact engineering information which would be of use to foreign countries.”

  “This isn’t the way they treated Bill Lawrence when he covered the atomic bomb,” I said bitterly.

  Mines nodded, with a pleased smile. “That’s it exactly,” he said. “Broad principles were being developed then—interesting things that could be told without any great harm being done. If you tell somebody that a critical mass of U-two thirty-five or Plutonium goes off with a big bang, you really haven’t given away a great deal. He still has millions of man-hours of engineering before him to figure out how much is critical mass, to take only one small point.”

  So I took his word for it, faithfully copied the communiques he gave me and wrote what I could on the human-interest side for release some day.

  So I recorded Gomez’s progress with English, his taste for chicken pot pie and rice pudding, his habit of doing his own housework on the top floor and his old-maidish neatness. “You live your first fifteen years in a tin shack, Beel,” he told me once, “and you find out you like things nice and clean.” I’ve seen Dr. Mines follow Gomez through the top floor as the boy swept and dusted, talking at him hi their mathematical jargon.

  Gomez worked in forty-eight-hour spells usually, and not eating much. Then for a couple of days he’d live like a human being, grabbing naps, playing catch on the lawn with one or another of the Security people, talking with me about his childhood in Puerto Rico and his youth in New York. He taught me a little Spanish and asked me to catch him up on bad mistakes in English.

  “But don’t you ever want to get out of here?” I demanded one day.

  He grinned: “Why should I, Beel? Here I eat good, I can send money to the parents. Best, I find out what the big professors are up to without I have to wait five-ten years for damn declassifying.”

  “Don’t you have a girl?”

  He was embarrassed and changed the subject back to the big professors.

  Dr. Mines drove up then with his chauffeur, who looked like a G-man and almost certainly was. As usual, the physicist was toting a bulging briefcase. After a few polite words with me, he and Julio went indoors and upstairs.

  They were closeted for five hours—a record. When Dr. Mines came down I expected the usual briefing session. But he begged off. “Nothing serious,” he said. “We just sat down and kicked some ideas of his around. I told him to go ahead. We’ve been—ah—using him very much like a sort of computer, you know. Turning him loose on the problems that were too tough for me and some of the other men. He’s got the itch for research now. It would be very interesting if his forte turned out to be creative.”

  I agreed.

  Julio didn’t come down for dinner. I woke up in darkness that night when there was a loud bump overhead, and went upstairs in my pyjamas.

  Gomez was sprawled, fully dressed, on the floor. He’d tripped over a footstool. And he didn’t seem to have noticed. His lips were moving and he stared straight at me without knowing I was there.

  “You “all right, Julio?” I asked, and started to help him to his feet.

  He got up mechanically and said: “—real values of the zeta function vanish.”

  “How’s that?”

  He saw me then and asked, puzzled: “How you got in here, Beel? Is dinnertime?”

  “Is four a.m., por dios. Don’t you think you ought to get some sleep?” He looked terrible.

  No; he didn’t think he ought to get some sleep. He had some work to do. I went downstairs and heard him pacing overhead for an hour until I dozed off.

  This splurge of work didn’t wear off in forty-eight hours. For a week I brought him meals and sometimes he ate absently, with one hand, as he scribbled on a yellow pad. Sometimes I’d bring him lunch to find his breakfast untouched. He didn’t have much beard, but he let it grow for a week—too busy to shave, too busy to talk, too busy to eat, sleeping in chairs when fatigue caught up with him.

  I asked Leitzer, badly worried, if we should do anything about it. He had a direct scrambler-phone connection with the New York Security and Intelligence office, but his orders didn’t cover anything like a self-induced nervous breakdown of the man he was guarding.

  I thought Dr. Mines would do something when he came—call in an M.D., or tell Gomez to take it easy, or take some of the load off by parceling out whatever he had by the tail.

  But he didn’t. He went upstairs, came down two hours later, and absently tried to walk past me. I headed him off into my room. “What’s the word?” I demanded.

  He looked me in the eye and said defiantly: “He’s doing fine. I don’t want to stop him.”

  Dr. Mines was a good man. Dr. Mines was a humane man. And he wouldn’t lift a finger to keep the boy from working himself into nervous prostration. Dr. Mines liked people well enough, but he reserved his love for theoretical physics. “How important can this thing be?”

  He shrugged irritably. “It’s just the way some scientists work,” he said. “Newton was like that. So was Sir William Rowan Hamilton—”

  “Hamilton-Schmamilton,” I said. “What’s the sense of it? Why doesn’t he sleep or eat?”

  Mines said: “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Of course,” I said, getting good and sore. “I’m just a dumb newspaper man. Tell me, Mr. Bones, what is it like?”

  There was a long pause, and he said mildly: “I’ll try. That boy up there is using his brain. A great chess player can put on a blindfold and play a hundred opponents in a hundred games simultaneously, remembering all the positions of his pieces and theirs and keeping a hundred strategies clear in his mind. Well, that stunt simply isn’t in the same league with what Julio’s doing up there.

  “He has in his head some millions of facts concerning theoretical physics. He’s scanning them, picking out one here and there, fitting them into new relationships, checking and rejecting when he has to, fitting the new relationships together, turning them upside down and inside out to see what happens, comparing them with known doctrine, holding them in his memory while he repeats the whole process and compares—and all the while he has a goal firmly in mind against which he’s measuring all these things.” He seemed to be finished.

  For a reporter, I felt strangely shy. “What’s he driving at?” I asked.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “he’s approaching a unified field theory.”

  Apparently that was supposed to explain everything. I let Dr. Mines know that it didn’t.

  He said thoughtfully: “I don’t know whether I can get it over to a layman—no offense, Vilchek. Let’s put it this way. You know how math comes in waves, and how it’s followed by waves of applied science based on the math. There was a big wave of algebra in the middle ages—following it came navigation, gunnery, surveying, and so on. Then the renaissance and a wave of analysis—what you’d call calculus. That opened up
steam power and how to use it, mechanical engineering, electricity. The wave of modern mathematics since say eighteen seventy-five gave us atomic energy. That boy upstairs may be starting off the next big wave.”

  He got up and reached for his hat.

  “Just a minute,” I said. I was surprised that my voice was steady. “What conies next? Control of gravity? Control of personality? Sending people by radio?”

  Dr. Mines wouldn’t meet my eye. Suddenly he looked old and shrunken. “Don’t worry about the boy,” he said.

  I let him go.

  That evening I brought Gomez chicken pot pie and a nonalcoholic eggnog.-He drank the eggnog, said, “Hi, Beel,” and continued to cover yellow sheets of paper.

  I went downstairs and worried.

  Abruptly it ended late the next afternoon. Gomez wandered into the big first-floor kitchen looking like a starved old rickshaw coolie. He pushed his lank hair back from his forehead, said: “Beel, what is to eat—” and pitched forward onto the linoleum. Leitzer came when I yelled, expertly took Gomez’s pulse, rolled him onto a blanket, and threw another one over him. “It’s just a faint,” he said. “Let’s get him to bed.”

  “Aren’t you going to call a doctor, man?”

  “Doctor couldn’t do anything we can’t do,” he said stolidly. “And I’m here to see that security isn’t breached. Give me a hand.”

  We got him upstairs and put him to bed. He woke up and said something in Spanish, and then, apologetically: “Very sorry, fellows. I ought to taken it easier.”

  “I’ll get you some lunch,” I said, and he grinned.

  He ate it all, enjoying it heartily, and finally lay back gorged. “Well,” he asked me, “what it is new, Beel?”

  “What is new. And you should tell me. You finish your work?”

  “I got it in shape to finish. The hard part it is over.” He rolled out of bed.

  “Hey!” I said.

  “I’m okay now,” he grinned. “Don’t write this down in your history, Beel. Everybody will think I act like a woman.”

  I followed him into his work room, where he flopped into an easy chair, his eyes on a blackboard covered with figures. He wasn’t grinning any more.

  “Dr. Mines says you’re up to something big,” I said.

  “Si. Big.”

  “Unified field theory, he says.”

  “That is it,” Gomez said.

  “Is it good or bad?” I asked, licking my lips. “The application, I mean.”

  His boyish mouth set suddenly in a grim line. “That, it is not my business,” he said. “I am American citizen of the United States.” He stared at the blackboard and its maze of notes.

  I looked at it too—really looked at it for once—and was surprised by what I saw. Mathematics, of course, I don’t know. But I had soaked up a very little about mathematics. One of the things I had soaked up was that the expressions of higher mathematics tend to be complicated and elaborate, involving English, Greek, and Hebrew letters, plain and fancy brackets, and a great variety of special signs besides the plus and minus of the elementary school.

  The things on the blackboard weren’t like that at all. The board was covered with variations of a simple expression that consisted of five letters and two symbols: a right-handed pothook and a left-handed pothook.

  “What do they mean?” I asked, pointing.

  “Somethings I made up,” he said nervously. “The word for that one is ‘enfields.’ The other one is ‘is enfielded by.’ ”

  “What’s that mean?”

  His luminous eyes were haunted. He didn’t answer.

  “It looks like simple stuff. I read somewhere that all the basic stuff is simple once it’s been discovered.”

  “Yes,” he said almost inaudibly. “It is simple, Beel. Too damn simple, I think. Better I carry it in my head, I think.” He strode to the blackboard and erased it. Instinctively I half-rose to stop him. He gave me a grin that was somehow bitter and unlike him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t forget it.” He tapped his forehead. “I can’t forget it.” I hope I never see again on any face the look that was on his.

  “Julio,” I said, appalled. “Why don’t you get out of here for a while? Why don’t you run over to New York and see your folks and have some fun? They can’t keep you here against your will.”

  “They told me I shouldn’t—” he said uncertainly. And then he got tough. “You’re damn right, Beel. Let’s go in together. I get dressed up. Er—You tell Leitzer, hah?” He couldn’t quite face up to the hard-boiled security man.

  I told Leitzer, who hit the ceiling. But all it boiled down to was that he sincerely wished Gomez and I wouldn’t leave. We weren’t in the Army, we weren’t in jail. I got hot at last and yelled back that we were damn well going out and he couldn’t stop us. He called New York on his direct wire and apparently New York confirmed it, regretfully.

  We got on the 4:05 Jersey Central, with Higgins and Dalhousie tailing us at a respectful distance. Gomez didn’t notice them and I didn’t tell him. He was having too much fun. He had a shine put on his shoes at Penn Station and worried about the taxi fare as we rode up to Spanish Harlem.

  His parents lived in a neat little three-room apartment. A lot of the furniture looked brand-new, and I was pretty sure who had paid for it. The mother and father spoke only Spanish, and mumbled shyly when “mi amigo Beel” was introduced. I had a very halting conversation with the father while the mother and Gomez rattled away happily and she poked his ribs to point up the age-old complaint of any mother anywhere that he wasn’t eating enough.

  The father, of course, thought the boy was a janitor or something in the Pentagon and, as near as I could make out, he was worried about his Julio being grabbed off by a man-hungry government girl. I kept reassuring him that his Julio was a good boy, a very good boy, and he seemed to get some comfort out of it.

  There was a little spat when his mother started to set the table. Gomez said reluctantly that we couldn’t stay, that we were eating somewhere else. His mother finally dragged from him the admission that we were going to the Porto Bello so he could see Rosa, and everything was smiles again. The father told me that Rosa was a good girl, a very good girl.

  Walking down the three flights of stairs with yelling little kids playing tag around us, Gomez asked proudly: “You not think they in America only a little time, hey?”

  I yanked him around by the elbow as we went down the brown-stone stoop into the street. Otherwise he would have seen our shadows for sure. I didn’t want to spoil his fun.

  The Porto Bello was full, and the pretty little girl was on duty as cashier at the table. Gomez got a last-minute attack of cold feet at the sight of her. “No table,” he said. “We better go someplace else.”

  I practically dragged him in. “We’ll get a table in a minute,” I said.

  “Julio,” said the girl, when she saw him.

  He looked sheepish. “Hello, Rosa. I’m back for a while.”

  “I’m glad to see you again,” she said tremulously.

  “I’m glad to see you again too—” I nudged him. “Rosa, this is my good friend Beel. We work together in Washington.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Rosa. Can you have dinner with us? I’ll bet you and Julio have a lot to talk over.”

  “Well, I’ll see . . . look, there’s a table for you. I’ll see if I can get away.”

  We sat down and she flagged down the proprietress and got away in a hurry.

  All three of us had arróz con polio—rice with chicken and lots of other things. Their shyness wore off and I was dealt out of the conversation, but I didn’t mind. They were a nice young couple. I liked the way they smiled at each other, and the things they remembered happily—movies, walks, talks. It made me feel like a benevolent uncle with one foot in the grave. It made me forget for a while the look on Gomez’s face when he turned from the blackboard he had covered with too-simple math.

  Over dessert I broke in. By then they were unselfcon
sciously holding hands. “Look,” I said, “why don’t you two go on and do the town? Julio, I’ll be at the Madison Park Hotel.” I scribbled the address and gave it to him. “And I’ll get a room for you. Have fun and reel in any time.” I rapped his knee. He looked down and I slipped him four twenties. I didn’t know whether he had money on him or not, but anything extra the boy could use he had coming to him.

  “Swell,” he said. “Thanks.” And looked shame-faced while I looked paternal.

  I had been watching a young man who was moodily eating alone in a corner, reading a paper. He was about Julio’s height and build and he wore a sports jacket pretty much like Julio’s. And the street was pretty dark outside.

  The young man got up moodily and headed for the cashier’s table. “Gotta go,” I said. “Have fun.”

  I went out of the restaurant right behind the young man and walked as close behind him as I dared, hoping we were being followed.

  After a block and a half of this, he turned on me and snarled: “Wadda you, mister? A wolf? Beat it!”

  “Okay,” I said mildly, and turned and walked the other way. Hig-gins and Dalhousie were standing there, flat-footed and open-mouthed. They sprinted back to the Porto Bello, and I followed them. But Julio and Rosa had already left.

  “Tough, fellows,” I said to them as they stood in the doorway. They looked as if they wanted to murder me. “He won’t get into any trouble,” I said. “He’s just going out with his girl.” Dalhousie made a strangled noise and told Higgins: “Cruise around the neighborhood. See if you can pick them up. I’ll follow Vilchek.” He wouldn’t talk to me. I shrugged and got a cab and went to the Madison Park Hotel, a pleasantly unfashionable old place with big rooms where I stay when business brings me to New York. They had a couple of adjoining singles; I took one in my own name and the other for Gomez.