Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Professor,” I complained, “we have a roadmap and we can find La Plume. And once we’ve found La Plume I don’t think it’ll be very hard to find Miss Phoebe.”

  “I will be pleased to accompany you,” said the Duchess. “Though normally I frown on mechanical devices, I keep an automobile nearby in case of—in case of—well! Of all the rude—!”

  Believe it or not, she was speechless. Nothing in her rich store of gibberish and hate seemed to fit the situation. Anti-fluoridation, organic farming, even Khalil Gilbran were irrelevant in the face of us two each standing on one leg, thumbing our noses and sticking out our tongues.

  Undeniably the posture of defense was losing efficiency. It took longer to burn away the foolish glow . . .

  “Professor,” I asked after we warily relaxed, “how many more of those can we take?”

  He shrugged. “That is why a guide will be useful,” he said. “Madame, I believe you mentioned an automobile.”

  “I know!” she said brightly. “It was asana yoga, wasn’t it? Postures, I mean?”

  The professor sucked an invisible lemon. “No, madame,” he said cadaverously, “It was neither siddhasana nor padmasana. Yoga has been subsumed under Functional Epistemology, as has every other working philosophical system, Eastern and Western—but we waste time. The automobile?”

  “You have to do that every so often, is that it?”

  “We will leave it at that, madame. The automobile, please.”

  “Come right along,” she said gaily. I didn’t like the look on her face. Madam Chairlady was about to spring a parliamentary coup. But I got my briefcase and followed.

  The car was in a nearby barn. It was a handsome new Lincoln, and I was reasonably certain that our fair cicerone had stolen it. But then, we had stolen the Ford.

  I loaded the briefcase in and took the wheel over her objections and we headed for La Plume, a dozen miles away. On the road she yelped: “Oh, Functional Epistemology—and you’re Professor Leuten!”

  “Yes, madame,” he wearily agreed.

  “I’ve read your book, of course. So has Miss Bancroft; she’ll be so pleased to see you.”

  “Then why, madame, did you order your subjects to murder us?”

  “Well, professor, of course I didn’t know who you were then, and it was rather shocking, seeing somebody in a car. I, ah, had the feeling that you were up to no, good, especially when you mentioned dear Miss Bancroft. She, you know, is really responsible for the re-emergence of the New Lemuria.”

  “Indeed?” said the professor. “You understand, then, about Leveled Personality Interflow?” He was beaming.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Leveled Personality Interflow!” he barked. “Chapter Nine!”

  “Oh. In your book, of course. Well, as a matter of fact I skipped—”

  “Another one,” muttered the professor, leaning back.

  The Duchess chattered on: “Dear Miss Bancroft, of course, swears by your book. But you were asking—no, it wasn’t what you said. I cast her horoscope and it turned out that she is the Twenty-Seventh Pendragon!”

  “Scheissdreck,” the professor mumbled, too discouraged to translate.

  “So naturally, professor, she incarnates Taliesin spiritually and”—a modest giggle—“you know who incarnates it materially. Which is only sensible, since I’m descended from the high priestesses of Mu. Little did I think when I was running the Wee Occult Book Shoppe in Carbon-dale!”

  “Ja,” said the professor. He made an effort. “Madame, tell me something. Do you never feel a certain thing, a sense of friendliness and intoxication and goodwill enveloping you quite suddenly?”

  “Oh, that,” she said scornfully. “Yes; every now and then. It doesn’t bother me. I just think of all the work I have to do. How I must stamp out the dreadful, soul-destroying advocates of meat-eating, and chemical fertilizer, and fluoridation. How I must wage the good fight for occult science and crush the materialistic philosophers. How I must tear down our corrupt and self-seeking ministers and priests, our rotten laws and customs—”

  “Lieber Gott,” the professor marveled as she went on. “With Norris it is spiders. With me it is rats and asphyxiation. But with this woman it is apparently everything in the Kosmos except her own revolting self!” She didn’t hear him; she was demanding that the voting age for women be lowered to sixteen and for men raised to thirty-five.

  We plowed through flies and mosquitoes like smoke. The flies bred happily on dead cows and in sheep which unfortunately were still alive. There wasn’t oil cake for the cows in the New Lemuria. There wasn’t sheep-dip for the sheep. There weren’t state and county and township and village road crews constantly patrolling, unplugging sluices, clearing gutters, replacing rusted culverts, and so quite naturally the countryside was reverting to swampland. The mosquitoes loved it.

  “La Plume,” the Duchess announced gaily. “And that’s Miss Phoebe Bancroft’s little house right there. Just why did you wish to see her, professor, by the way?”

  “To complete her re-education . . .” the professor said in a tired voice.

  Miss Phoebe’s house, and the few near it, were the only places we had seen in the Area which weren’t blighted by neglect. Miss Phoebe, of course, was able to tell the shambling zombies what to do in the way of truck-gardening, lawn-mowing and maintenance. The bugs weren’t too bad there.

  “She’s probably resting, poor dear,” said the Duchess. I stopped the car and we got out. The Duchess said something about Kleenex and got in again and rummaged through the glove compartment.

  “Please, professor,” I said, clutching my briefcase. “Play it the smart way. The way I told you.”

  “Norris,” he said, “I realize that you have my best interests at heart. You’re a good boy, Norris and I like you—”

  “Watch it!” I yelled, and swung into the posture of defense. So did he.

  Spiders. It wasn’t a good old world, not while there were loathsome spiders in it. Spiders—

  And a pistol shot past my ear. The professor fell. I turned and saw the Duchess looking smug, about to shoot me too. I sidestepped and she missed; as I slapped the automatic out of her hand I thought confusedly that it was a near-miracle, her hitting the professor at five paces even if he was a standing target. People don’t realize how hard it is to hit anything with a handgun.

  I suppose I was going to kill her or at least damage her badly when a new element intruded. A little old white-haired lady tottering down the neat gravel path from the house. She wore a nice pastel dress which surprised me; somehow I had always thought of her in black.

  “Bertha!” Miss Phoebe rapped out. “What have you done?”

  The Duchess simpered. “That man there was going to harm you, Phoebe, dear. And this fellow is just as bad—”

  Miss Phoebe said: “Nonsense. Nobody can harm me. Chapter Nine, Rule Seven. Bertha, I saw you shoot that gentleman. I’m very angry with you, Bertha. Very angry.”

  The Duchess turned up her eyes and crumpled. I didn’t have to check; I was sure she was dead. Miss Phoebe was once again In Utter Harmony With Her Environment.

  I went over and knelt beside the professor. He had a hole in his stomach and was still breathing. There wasn’t much blood. I sat down and cried. For the professor. For the poor damned human race which at a mile per day would be gobbled up into apathy and idiocy. Goodby, Newton and Einstein, goodby steak dinners and Michelangelo and Tenzing Norkay; goodby Moses, Rodin, Kwan Yin, transistors, Boole and Steichen . . .

  A redheaded man with an adam’s apple was saying gently to Miss Phoebe: “It’s this rabbit, ma’am.” And indeed an enormous rabbit was loping up to him. “Every time I find a turnip or something he takes it away from me and he kicks and bites when I try to reason with him—” And indeed he took a piece of turnip from his pocket and the rabbit insolently pawed it from his hand and nibbled it triumphantly with one wise-guy eye cocked up at his victim. “He does that every time, Miss Phoe
be,” the man said unhappily.

  The little old lady said: “I’ll think of something, Henry. But let me take care of these people first.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Henry said. He reached out cautiously for his piece of turnip and the rabbit bit him and then went back to its nibbling.

  “Young man,” Miss Phoebe said to me, “what’s wrong? You’re giving in to despair. You mustn’t do that. Chapter Nine, Rule Three.”

  I pulled myself together enough to say: “This is Professor Leuten. He’s dying.”

  Her eyes widened. “The Professor Leuten?” I nodded. “How to Live on the Cosmic Expense Account?” I nodded.

  “Oh, dear! If only there were something I could do!”

  Heal the dying? Apparently not. She didn’t think she could, so she couldn’t.

  “Professor,” I said. “Professor.”

  He opened his eyes and said something hi German, then, hazily: “Woman shot me. Spoil her—racket, you call it? Who is this?” He grimaced with pain.

  “I’m Miss Phoebe Bancroft, Professor Leuten,” she breathed, leaning over him. “I’m so dreadfully sorry; I admire your wonderful book so much.”

  His weary eyes turned to me. “So, Norris,” he said. “No time to do it right. We do it your way. Help me up.”

  I helped him to his feet, suffering, I think, almost as much as he did. The wound started to bleed more copiously.

  “No!” Miss Phoebe exclaimed. “You should lie down.”

  The professor leered. “Good idea, baby. You want to keep me company?”

  “What’s that?” she snapped.

  “You heard me, baby. Say, you got any liquor in your place?”

  “Certainly not! Alcohol is inimical to the development pf the higher functions of the mind. Chapter Nine—”

  “Pfui on Chapter Nine, baby. I chust wrote that stuff for money.”

  If Miss Phoebe hadn’t been in a state resembling surgical shock after hearing that, she would have seen the pain convulsing his face. “You mean . . .?” she quavered, beginning to look her age for the first time.

  “Sure. Lotta garbage. Sling fancy words and make money. What I go for is liquor and women. Women like you, baby.”

  The goose did it.

  Weeping, frightened, insulted and lost she tottered blindly up the neat path to her house. I eased the professor to the ground. He was biting almost through his lower lip.

  I heard a new noise behind me. It was Henry, the redhead with the adam’s apple. He was chewing his piece of turnip and had hold of the big rabbit by the hind legs. He was flailing it against a tree. Henry looked ferocious, savage, carnivorous and very, very dangerous to meddle with. In a word, human.

  “Professor,” I breathed at his waxen face, “you’ve done it. It’s broken. Over. No more Plague Area.”

  He muttered, his eyes closed: “I regret not doing it properly . . . but tell the people how I died, Norris. With dignity, without fear. Because of Functional Epistemology.”

  I said through tears: “I’ll do more than tell them, professor. The world will know about your heroism.

  “The world must know. We’ve got to make a book of this—your authentic, authorized, fictional biography—and Hopedale’s West Coast agent’ll see to the film sale—”

  “Film?” he said drowsily. “Book . . .?”

  “Yes. Your years of struggle, the little girl at home who kept faith in you when everybody scoffed, your burning mission to transform the world, and the climax—here, now!—as you give up your life for your philosophy.”

  “What girl?” he asked weakly.

  “There must have been someone, professor. We’ll find someone.”

  “You would,” he asked feebly, “document my expulsion from Germany by the Nazis?”

  “Well, I don’t think so, professor. The export market’s important, especially when it comes to selling film rights, and you don’t want to go offending people by raking up old memories. But don’t worry, professor. The big thing is, the world will never forget you and what you’ve done.”

  He opened his eyes and breathed: “You mean your version of what I’ve done. Ach, Norris, Norris! Never did I think there was a power on Earth which could force me to contravene The Principle of Permissive Evolution.” His voice became stronger. “But you, Norris, are that power.” He got to his feet, grunting. “Norris,” he said, “I hereby give you formal warning that any attempt to make a fictional biography or cinema film of my life will result in an immediate injunction being—you say slapped?—upon you, as well as suits for damages from libel, copyright infringement and invasion of privacy. I have had enough.”

  “Professor,” I gasped. “You’re well!”

  He grimaced. “I’m sick. Profoundly sick to my stomach at my contravention of the Principle of Permissive—”

  His voice grew fainter. This was because he was rising slowly into the air. He leveled off at a hundred feet and called: “Send the royalty statements to my old address in Basle. And remember, Norris, I warned you—”

  He zoomed eastward then at perhaps one hundred miles per hour. I think he was picking up speed when he vanished from sight.

  I stood there for ten minutes or so and sighed and rubbed my eyes and wondered whether anything was worthwhile. I decided I’d read the professor’s book tomorrow without fail, unless something came up.

  Then I took my briefcase and went up the walk and into Miss Phoebe’s house. (Henry had made a twig fire on the lawn and was roasting his rabbit; he glared at me most disobligingly and I skirted him with care.)

  This was, after all, the payoff; this was, after all, the reason why I had risked my life and sanity.

  “Miss Phoebe,” I said to her taking it out of the briefcase, “I represent the Hopedale Press; this is one of our standard contracts. We’re very much interested in publishing the story of your life, with special emphasis on the events of the past few weeks. Naturally you’d have an experienced collaborator. I believe sales in the hundred-thousands wouldn’t be too much to expect. I would suggest as a title—that’s right, you sign on that line there—How to be Supreme Ruler of Everybody . . .”

  The Engineer

  The Big Wheels of tomorrow will be men who can see the big picture. But blowouts have small beginnings . . .

  IT WAS very simple. Some combination of low temperature and high pressure had forced something from the seepage at the ocean bottom into combination with something in the water around them.

  And the impregnable armor around Subatlantic Oil’s drilling chamber had discovered a weakness.

  On the television screen it looked more serious than it was—so Muhlenhoff told himself, staring at it grimly. You get down more than a mile, and you’re bound to have little technical problems. That’s why deep-sea oil wells were still there.

  Still, it did look kind of serious. The water driving in the pitted faults had the pressure of eighteen hundred meters behind it, and where it struck it did not splash—it battered and destroyed. As Muhlenhoff watched, a bulkhead collapsed in an explosion of spray; the remote camera caught a tiny driblet of the scattering brine, and the picture in the screen fluttered and shrank, and came back with a wavering sidewise pulse.

  Muhlenhoff flicked off the screen and marched into the room where the Engineering Board was waiting in attitudes of flabby panic.

  As he swept his hand through his snow-white crew cut and called the board to order, a dispatch was handed to him—a preliminary report from a quickly—dispatched company trouble-shooter team. He read it to the board, stone-faced.

  A veteran heat-transfer man, the first to recover, growled:

  “Some vibration thing—and seepage from the oil pool. Sloppy drilling!” He sneered. “Big deal! So a couple hundred meters of shaft have to be plugged and pumped. So six or eight compartments go pop. Since when did we start to believe the cack Research and Development hands out? Armor’s armor. Sure it pops—when something makes it pop. If Atlantic oil was easy to get at, it wouldn’
t be here waiting for us now. Put a gang on the job. Find out what happened, make sure it doesn’t happen again. Big deal!”

  Muhlenhoff smiled his attractive smile. “Breck,” he said, “thank God you’ve got guts. Perhaps we were in a bit of a panic. Gentlemen, I hope we’ll all take heart from Mr. Breck’s level-headed—what did you say, Breck?”

  Breck didn’t look up. He was pawing through the dispatch Muhlenhoff had dropped to the table. “Nine-inch plate,” he read aloud, white-faced. “And time of installation, not quite seven weeks ago.

  If this goes on in a straight line—“ he grabbed for a pocket slide-rule—“we have, uh—“ he swallowed—“less time than the probable error,” he finished.

  “Breck!” Muhlenhoff yelled. “Where are you going?”

  The veteran heat-transfer man said grimly as he sped through the door: “To find a submarine.”

  The rest of the Engineering Board was suddenly pulling chairs toward the trouble-shooting team’s’dispatch. Muhlenhoff slammed a fist on the table.

  “Stop it,” he said evenly. “The next man who leaves the meeting will have his contract canceled. Is that clear, gentlemen? Good. We will now proceed to get organized.”

  He had them; they were listening. He said forcefully: “I want a task force consisting of a petrochemist, a vibrations man, a hydrostatics man and a structural engineer. Co-opt mathematicians and computermen as needed. I will have all machines capable of handling Fourier series and up cleared for your use. The work of the task force will be divided into two phases. For Phase One, members will keep their staffs as small as possible. The objective of Phase One is to find the cause of the leaks and predict whether similar leaks are likely elsewhere in the project. On receiving a first approximation from the force I will proceed to set up Phase Two, to deal with countermeasures.”

  He paused. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we must not lose our nerves. We must not panic. Possibly the most serious technical crisis in Atlantic’s history lies before us. Your most important job is to maintain—at all times—a cheerful, courageous attitude. We cannot, repeat cannot, afford to have the sub-technical staff of the project panicked for lack of a good example from us.” He drilled each of them in turn with a long glare. “And,” he finished, “if I hear of anyone suddenly discovering emergency business ashore, the man who does it better get fitted for a sludgemonkey’s suit, because that’s what he’ll be tomorrow. Clear?”