Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  A few of them cheerily admitted they had not had children and were not going to have children, for they had volunteered for D-Bal shots, thus doing away with a running minor expense and, more importantly, ensuring a certain peace of mind and unbroken continuity during tender moments. “Ugh,” thought George.

  (The Columbia University professor explained to his students “It is clearly in George’s interest to go to the clinic for a painless, effective D-Bal shot and thus resolve his problem, but he does not go; he shudders at the thought. We cannot know what fear of amputation stemming from some early traumatic experience thus prevents him from action, but deep-rooted psychological reasons explain his behavior, we can’t be certain.” The class bent over the chronoscope.)

  And some of George’s co-workers slunk away and would not submit to questioning. Young MacBirney, normally open and incisive, muttered vaguely and passed his hand across his brow when George asked him how one went about having a baby—red-tape-wise, that is.

  It was Blount, come in for his afternoon screaming match, who spilled the vengeful beans. “You and your wife just phone P.Q.P. for an appointment,” he told George with a straight face. “They’ll issue you—everything you need.” George in his innocence thanked him, and Blount turned away and grinned the twisted, sly grin of an author.

  A glad female voice answered the phone on behalf of the P.Q.P. It assured George that he and Mrs. McCardle need only drop in any time at the Empire State Building and they’d be well on their way to parenthood.

  The next day Mr. and Mrs. McCardle dropped in at the Empire State Building. A receptionist in the lobby was buffing her nails under a huge portrait of His Majesty. A beautifully lettered sign displayed the words with which His Majesty had decreed that P.Q.P. be enacted: “Ow Racken Theah’s a Raht Smaht Ah-dee, Boys.”

  “Where do we sign up, please?” asked George.

  The receptionist pawed uncertainly through her desk. “I know there’s some kind of book,” she said as she rummaged, but she did not find it. “Well, it doesn’t matter. They’ll give you everything you need in Room 100.”

  “Will I sign up there?” asked George nervously, conditioned by a lifetime of red tape and uncomfortable without it.

  “No,” said the receptionist.

  “But for the tests—”

  “There aren’t any tests.”

  “Then the interviews, the deep probing of our physical and psychological fitness for parenthood, our heredity—”

  “No interviews.”

  “But the evaluation of our financial and moral standing without which no permission can be—”

  “No evaluation. Just Room 100.” She resumed buffing her nails.

  In Room 100 a cheerful woman took a Toddler out of a cabinet, punched the non-reversible activating button between its shoulderblades, and handed it to Mrs. McCardle with a cheery: “It’s all yours, madame. Return with it in three months and, depending on its condition, you will, or will not, be issued a breeding permit. Simple, isn’t it?”

  “The little darling!” gurgled Mrs. McCardle, looking down into the Toddler’s pretty face.

  It spit in her eye, punched her in the nose and sprang a leak.

  “Gracious!” said the cheerful woman. “Get it out of our nice clean office, if you please.”

  “How do you work it?” yelled Mrs. McCardle, juggling the Toddler like a hot potato. “How do you turn it off?”

  “Oh, you can’t turn it off,” said the woman. “And you’d better not swing it like that. Rough handling goes down on the tapes inside it and we read them in three months and now if you please, you’re getting our nice office all wet—”

  She shepherded them out.

  “Do something, George!” yelled Mrs. McCardle. George took the Toddler. It stopped leaking and began a ripsaw scream that made the lighting fixtures tremble.

  “Give the poor thing to me!” Mrs. McCardle shouted. “You’re hurting it holding it like that—”

  She took the Toddler back. It stopped screaming and resumed leaking.

  It quieted down in the car. The sudden thought seized them both—too quiet? Their heads crashed together as they bent simultaneously over the glassy-eyed little object. It laughed delightedly and waved its chubby fists.

  “Clumsy oaf!” snapped Mrs. McCardle, rubbing her head.

  “Sorry, dear,” said George. “But at least we must have got a good mark out of it on the tapes. I suppose it scores us good when it laughs.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Probably,” she said. “George, do you think if you fell heavily on the sidewalk—?”

  “No,” said George convulsively. Mrs. McCardle looked at him for a moment and held her peace.

  (“Note, young gentlemen,” said the history professor, “the turning point, the seed of rebellion.” They noted.)

  The McCardles and the Toddler drove off down Sunrise Highway, which was lined with filling stations; since their ’98 Landcruiser made only two miles to the gallon, it was not long before they had to stop at one.

  The Toddler began its ripsaw shriek when they stopped. A hollow-eyed attendant shambled over and peered into the car. “Just get it?” he asked apathetically.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. McCardle, frantically trying to joggle the Toddler, to change it, to burp it, to do anything that would end the soul-splitting noise.

  “Half pint of white 90-octane gas is what it needs,” mumbled the attendant. “Few drops of SAE 40 oil. Got one myself. Two weeks to go. I’ll never make it. I’ll crack. I’ll—I’ll . . .” He tottered off and returned with the gasoline in a nursing bottle, the oil in an eye-dropper.

  The Toddler grabbed the bottle and began to gulp the gas down contentedly.

  “Where do you put the oil?” asked Mrs. McCardle.

  He showed her.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Fill her up,” said George. “The car, I mean. I . . . ah . . . I’m going to wash my hands, dear.”

  He cornered the attendant by the cash register. “Look,” he said. “What, ah, would happen if you just let it run out of gas? The Toddler, I mean?”

  The man looked at him and put a compassionate hand on his shoulder. “It would scream, buddy,” he said. “The main motors run off an atomic battery. The gas engine’s just for a sideshow and for having breakdowns.”

  “Breakdowns? Oh, my God! How do you fix a breakdown?”

  “The best way you can,” the man said. “And buddy, when you burp it, watch out for the fumes. I’ve seen some ugly explosions . . .”

  They stopped at five more filling stations along the way when the Toddler wanted gas.

  “It’ll be better-behaved when it’s used to the house,” said Mrs. McCardle apprehensively as she carried it over the threshold.

  “Put it down and let’s see what happens,” said George.

  The Toddler toddled happily to the coffee table, picked up a large bronze ashtray, moved to the picture window and heaved the ashtray through it. It gurgled happily at the crash.

  “You little—!” George roared, making for the Toddler with his hands clawed before him.

  “George!” Mrs. McCardle screamed, snatching the Toddler away. “It’s only a machine!”

  The machine began to shriek.

  They tried gasoline, oil, wiping with a clean lint-free rag, putting it down, picking it up and finally banging their heads together. It continued to scream until it was ready to stop screaming, and then it stopped and gave them an enchanting grin.

  “Time to put it to—away for the night?” asked George.

  It permitted itself to be put away for the night.

  From his pillow George said later: “Think we did pretty well today. Three months? Pah!”

  Mrs. McCardle said: “You were wonderful, George.”

  He knew that tone. “My Tigress,” he said.

  Ten minutes later, at the most inconvenient time in the world, bar none, the Toddler began its ripsaw screaming.

  Cursing, they went to find
out what it wanted. They found out. What it wanted was to laugh in their faces.

  (The professor explained: “Indubitably, sadism is at work here, but harnessed in the service of humanity. Better a brutal and concentrated attack such as we have been witnessing than long-drawn-out torments.” The class nodded respectfully.)

  Mr. and Mrs. McCardle managed to pull themselves together for another try, and there was an exact repeat. Apparently the Toddler sensed something in the air.

  “Three months,” said George, with haunted eyes.

  “You’ll live,” his wife snapped.

  “May I ask just what kind of a crack that was supposed to be?”

  “If the shoe fits, my good man—”

  So a fine sex quarrel ended the day.

  Within a week the house looked as if it had been liberated by a Mississippi National Guard division. George had lost ten pounds because he couldn’t digest anything, not even if he seasoned his food with powdered Equanil instead of salt. Mrs. McCardle had gained fifteen pounds by nervous gobbling during the moments when the Toddler left her unoccupied. The picture window was boarded up. On George’s salary, and with glaziers’ wages what they were, he couldn’t have it replaced twice a day.

  Not unnaturally, he met his next-door neighbor, Jacques Truro, in a bar.

  Truro was rye and soda, he was dry martini; otherwise they were identical.

  “It’s the little whimper first that gets me, when you know the big screaming’s going to come next. I could jump out of my skin when I hear that whimper.”

  “Yeah. The waiting. Sometimes one second, sometimes five. I count.”

  “I forced myself to stop. I was throwing up.”

  “Yeah. Me too. And nervous diarrhea?”

  “All the time. Between me and that goddam thing the house is awash. Cheers.” They drank and shared hollow laughter.

  “My stamp collection. Down the toilet.”

  “My fishing pole. Three clean breaks and peanut butter in the reel.”

  “One thing I’ll never understand, Truro. What decided you two to have a baby?”

  “Wait a minute, McCardle,” Truro said. “Marguerite told me that you were going to have one, so she had to have one—”

  They looked at each other in shared horror.

  “Suckered,” said McCardle in an awed voice.

  “Women,” breathed Truro.

  They drank a grim toast and went home.

  “It’s beginning to talk,” Mrs. McCardle said listlessly, sprawled in a chair, her hand in a box of chocolates. “Called me ‘old pig-face’ this afternoon.” She did look somewhat piggish with fifteen superfluous pounds.

  George put down his briefcase. It was loaded with work from the office which these days he was unable to get through in time. He had finally got the revised court-martial scene from Blount, and would now have to transmute it into readable prose, emending the author’s stupid lapses of logic, illiterate blunders of language and raspingly ugly style.

  “I’ll wash up,” he said.

  “Don’t use the toilet. Stopped up again.”

  “Bad?”

  “He said he’d come back in the morning with an eight-man crew. Something about jacking up a corner of the house.”

  The Toddler toddled in with a bottle of bleach, made for the briefcase, and emptied the bleach into it before the exhausted man or woman could comprehend what was going on, let alone do anything about it.

  George incredulously spread the pages of the court-martial scene on the gouged and battered coffee table. His eyes bulged as he watched the thousands of typed words vanishing before his eyes, turning pale and then white as the paper.

  Blount kept no carbons. Keeping cartons called for a minimal quantity of prudence and brains, but Blount was an author and so he kept no carbons. The court-martial scene, the product of six months’ screaming, was gone.

  The Toddler laughed gleefully.

  George clenched his fists, closed his eyes and tried to ignore the roaring in his ears.

  The Toddler began a whining chant:

  “Da-dy’s an au-thor!

  Da-dy’s an au-thor!”

  “That did it!” George shrieked. He stalked to the door and flung it open.

  “Where are you going?” Mrs. McCardle quavered.

  “To the first doctor’s office I find,” said her husband in sudden icy calm. “There I will request a shot of D-Bal. When I have had a D-Bal shot, a breeding permit will be of no use whatever to us. Since a breeding permit will be useless, we need not qualify for one by being tortured for another eleven weeks by that obscene little monster, which we shall return to P.Q.P. in the morning. And unless it behaves, it will be returned in a basket, for them to reassemble at their leisure.”

  “I’m so glad,” his wife signed.

  The Toddler said: “May I congratulate you on your decision. By voluntarily surrendering your right to breed, you are patriotically reducing the population pressure, a problem of great concern to His Majesty. We of the P.Q.P. wish to point out that your “decision has been arrived at not through coercion but through education; i.e., by presenting you in the form of a Toddler with some of the arguments against parenthood.”

  “I didn’t know you could talk that well,” marveled Mrs. McCardle.

  The Toddler said modestly: “I’ve been with the P.Q.P. from the very beginning, ma’am; I’m a veteran Toddler operator, I may say, working out of Room 4567 of the Empire State. And the improved model I’m working through has reduced the breakdown time an average thirty-five percent. I foresee a time, ma’am, when we experienced operators and ever-improved models will do the job in one day!”

  The voice was fanatical.

  Mrs. McCardle turned around in sudden vague apprehension. George had left for his D-Bal shot.

  (“And thus we see,” said the professor to the seminar, “the genius of the insidious Dr. Wang in full flower.” He snapped off the chronoscope. “The first boatloads of Chinese landed in California three generations—or should I say non-generations?—later, unopposed by the scanty, elderly population.” He groomed his mandarin mustache and looked out for a moment over the great rice paddies of Central Park. It was spring; blue-clad women stooped patiently over the brown water, and the tender, bright-green shoots were just beginning to appear.

  (The seminar students bowed and left for their next lecture, “The Hound Dog as Symbol of Juvenile Aggression in Ancient American Folk Song.” It was all that remained of the reign of King Purvis I.)

  The Unfortunate Topologist

  A burleycue dancer, a pip

  Named Virginia, could peel in a zip;

  But she read science fiction

  And died of constriction

  Attempting a Möbius strip.

  MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie

  Cecil Corwin was once a prolific and brilliant writer of science fiction. You’ll find 43 entries, under bis own name and bis many pseudonyms, in Donald Day’s INDEX; he has appeared in F&SF (The Mask of Demeter, January, 1953) and he once received a Jules Verne Award. If you’re wondering why you have not seen Mr. Corwin’s name in print recently, you’ll find the answer (along with at least part of The Answer) in one of the oddest stories ever to turn up on even this editorial desk.

  THEY SAY I AM MAD, BUT I AM NOT mad—damn it, I’ve written and sold two million words of fiction and I know better than to start a story like that, but this isn’t a story and they do say I’m mad—catatonic schizophrenia with assaultive episodes—and I’m not. [This is clearly the first of the Corwin Papers. Like all the others it is written on a Riz-La cigarette paper with a ball point pen. Like all the others it is headed: Urgent, Finder please send to C.M. Kornbluth, Wantagh, N. Y. Reward! I might comment that this is typical of Corwin’s generosity with his friends’ time and money, though his attitude is at least this once justified by his desperate plight. As his longtime friend and, indeed, literary executor, I was clearly the person to turn to. C.M.K.] I have to convince you
, Cyril, that I am both sane and the victim of an enormous conspiracy—and that you are too, and that everybody is. A tall order, but I am going to try to fill it by writing an orderly account of the events leading up to my present situation. [Here ends the first paper. To keep the record clear I should state that it was forwarded to me by a Mr. L. Wilmot Shaw, who found it in a fortune cookie he ordered for dessert at the Great China Republic Restaurant in San Francisco. Mr. Shaw suspected it was “a publicity gag” but sent it to me nonetheless, and received by return mail my thanks and my check for one dollar. I had not realized that Corwin and his wife had disappeared from their home at Painted Post; I was merely aware that it had been weeks since I’d heard from him. We visited infrequently. To be blunt, he was easier to take via mail than face to face. For the balance of this account I shall attempt to avoid tedium by omitting the provenance of each paper, except when noteworthy, and its length. The first is typical—a little over a hundred words. I have, of course, kept on file all correspondence relating to the papers, and am eager to display it to the authorities. It is hoped that publication of this account will nudge them out of the apathy with which they have so far greeted my attempts to engage them. C.M.K.]

  On Sunday, May 13, 1956, at about 12:30 P.M. , I learned The Answer. I was stiff and aching because all Saturday my wife and I had been putting in young fruit trees. I like to dig, but I was badly out of condition from an unusually long and idle winter. Creatively, I felt fine. I’d been stale for months, but when spring came the sap began to run in me too. I was bursting with story ideas; scenes and stretches of dialog were jostling one another in my mind; all I had to do was let them flow onto paper.

  When The Answer popped into my head I thought at first it was an idea for a story—a very good story. I was going to go downstairs and bounce it off my wife a few times to test it, but I heard the sewing machine buzzing and remembered she had said she was way behind on her mending. Instead, I put my feet up, stared blankly through the window at the pasture-and-wooded-hills View we’d bought the old place for, and fondled the idea.