Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Yes. What’s all this about? Where are we?”

  He was ignored. The giant yanked Ginny Stoss to her feet and slapped her father into consciousness as the girl winced and Barker balled his fists helplessly. The giant said to the three of them: “My name’s Baldwin. You call me mister. Come on.”

  He led them, the terrified girl, the dazed old man and the rage-choked agent, through spot-polished metal corridors to—

  A barber shop, Barker thought wildly. Rows and rows of big adjustable chairs gleaming dully under the red lights, people sitting in them, at least a hundred people. And then you saw there was something archaic and ugly about the cup-shaped head rests fitted to the chairs. And then you saw that the people, men and women, were dirty, unkempt and hopeless-eyed, dressed in rags or nothing at all.

  Ginny Stoss screamed sharply when she saw Lakhrut. He was not a pretty sight with his single bulging orb above the nose. It pointed at her and Lakhrut spat gutteral syllables at Baldwin. The burly giant replied, cringing and stammering. The monster’s orb aimed at Barker, and he felt a crawling on the surface of his brain—as if fingers were trying to grasp it.

  Barker knew what to do; more important, he did it. He turned off Barker. He turned on Dr. Oliver, the erudite scared rabbit.

  Lakhrut scanned them, suspiciously. The female was radiating sheer terror; good. The older male was frightened too, but his sense of a reality was clouded; he detected a faint undertone of humor. That would go. The younger man—Lakhrut stooped forward in a reflex associated with the sense of smell. The younger man—men?—no; man—the younger man—Lakhrut stopped trying to scan him. He seemed to be radiating on two bands simultaneously, which was not possible. Lakhrut decided that he wasn’t focusing properly, that somebody else’s radiation was leaking and that the younger man’s radiation was acting as a carrier wave for it. And felt vaguely alarmed and ashamed of himself. He ought to be a better scanner than he was.

  “Baldwin,” he said, “question that one closely.”

  The hulking driver asked: “You want name?”

  “Of course not, fool! Question him about anything. I want to scan his responses.”

  Baldwin spoke to the fellow unintelligibly and the fellow replied unintelligibly. Lakhrut almost smiled with relief as the questioning progressed. The odd double-band effect was vanishing and the young man radiated simple fright.

  Baldwin said laboriously: “Says is teacher of language and—tales of art. Says where is this and why have—”

  “That’s enough,” he told the driver. “Install them.” None of this group was dangerous enough to need killing.

  “SIT THERE,” Baldwin told Barker, jerking his thumb at an empty chair.

  Barker felt the crawling fingers withdraw, and stifled a thought of triumph. They had him, this renegade and his cyclops boss. They had him like a bug underfoot to be squashed at a whim, but there had been some kind of test and he had bluffed them. Wearing the persona of Oliver, he quavered: “What is this terrible place, Mr. Baldwin? Why should I sit there?”

  Baldwin moved in with a practiced ring shuffle and swung his open palm against the side of Barker’s head.

  The agent cried out and nursed the burning cheek. Baldwin would never know how close he came that moment to a broken back. . . .

  He collapsed limply into the chair and felt it mould to him almost like a living thing. Plates slid under his thighs and behind his shoulder blades, accommodating themselves to his body.

  “Just to show you nobody’s fooling,” Baldwin said grimly. He pressed a button on the chair and again something indescribably painful happened, wringing his bones and muscles to jelly for a timeless instant of torment. He did not faint; it was there and gone too quickly for the vascular system to make such an adjustment. He slumped in the chair, gasping.

  Baldwin said: “Take hold of the two handles.” He was surprised to find that he could move. He took hold of two spherical handles. They were cold and slimy-dry. Baldwin said: “You have to make the handles turn rough, like abrasive paper. You do it different ways. I can’t tell you how. Everybody has a different way. Some people just concentrate on the handles. Other people just try to make their minds a blank and that works for them. You just find your own way and do it when we tell you to. Or you get the pain again. That’s all.”

  Barker heard him move down the line and repeat the speech in substantially the same words to the Stosses.

  Baldwin was no puzzle. He was just a turncoat bastard. The wrecked, ragged men and women with lackluster eyes sitting around him were no puzzle. Not after the pain. Baldwin’s boss, the cyclops—

  How long had this been going on? Since Homer?

  He bore down on the spherical handles. Amazingly they went from silk-smooth to paper-coarse and then to sandstone-gritty. Baldwin was back, peering to look at an indicator of some unimaginable kind. “That’s very good,” the big man said. “You keep that up and some day you’ll get out of the chair like me.”

  Not like you, you bastard. Not like you. He choked down the thought. If the boss were here it would have undone him.

  There were mechanical squeals and buzzers. Those who were sleeping in their chairs awoke instantly, with panic on their faces, visible even in the dim red light.

  “All right,” Baldwin was shouting. “Give, you bastards!

  Five seconds and we cut you in. Give, Morgan, or it’s the Pain! Silver, make it move! I ain’t forgetting anything, Silver—next time it’s three jolts. Give, you bastards! Give!”

  Barker gave in a frenzy of concentration. Under his sweaty palms the globes became abrasive. In five seconds there was a thudding shock through his body that left him limp. The globes went smooth and Baldwin was standing over him: “Make it go, Oliver, or it’s the Pain. Make it go.”

  Somehow, he did.

  It seemed to go on for hours while the world rocked and reeled about him, whether subjectively or objectively he could not tell. And at last there was the roar: “Let it go now. Everybody off.”

  Racking vibration ceased and he let his head nod forward limply.

  From the chair in front of him came an exhausted whisper: “He’s gone now. Some day I’m going to—”

  “Can we talk?” Barker asked weakly.

  “Talk, sing, anything you want.” There was a muttering and stirring through the big room. From the chair in front, hopefully: “You happen to be from Rupp City? My family—”

  “No,” Barker said. “I’m sorry. What is all this? What are we doing?”

  The exhausted whisper said: “All this is an armed merchantman of the A’rkhov-Yar. We’re running it. We’re galley slaves.”

  CHAPTER V

  THREE FEEDINGS LATER the man from Rupp City leaped from his chair, howling, and threw himself on a tangle of machinery in the center aisle. He was instantly electrocuted.

  Before he died he had told Barker in rambling, formless conversations that he had it figured out; the star-people simply knew how to amplify psychokinetic energy. He thought he could trace eighteen stages of amplification through the drive machinery.

  The death was—a Welcome break in the monotony. Barker was horrified to discover that was his principal reaction to it, but he was not alone.

  They were fed water and moist yellow cakes that tasted like spoiled pork. Normally they worked three shifts in rotation. Only now and then were they all summoned for a terrific surge; usually they had only to keep steerage way on the vessel. But eight hours spent bearing down on the spherical handles, concentrating, was an endless agony of boredom and effort. If your attention wandered, you got the Pain. Barker got it five times in fifteen feedings. Others got it ten or twelve. Ginny Stoss was flighty of mind; she got it twenty times, and after that, never. She mumbled continuously after that and spent all her time in practice, fingering the handles and peering into the bad light with dim, monomaniac eyes.

  There was an efficient four-holer latrine, used without regard to sex or privacy. Sex was a zero in their lives,
despite the mingling of men and women. When they slept in their chairs, they slept. The Pain and then death were the penalties for mating, and also their energy was low. The men were not handsome and the women were not beautiful. Hair and beards grew and straggled—why not? Their masters ignored them as far as clothing went. If the things they wore when they came aboard fell apart, very well, they fell apart. They weren’t going any place.

  It was approximately eight hours working the globular handles, eight hours sleeping, and eight hours spent in rambling talk about the past, with many lies told of riches and fame. Nobody ever challenged a lie; why should they?

  Bull-necked Mr. Baldwin appeared for feedings, but he did not eat with them. The feedings were shift-change time, and he spent them in harangues and threats.

  Barker sucked up to Baldwin disgustingly, earning the hatred of all the other “units.” But they knew next to nothing, and what he desperately needed was information. All they knew was that they had been taken aboard—a year ago? Six years ago? A month ago? They could only guess. It was impossible to keep track of time within the changeless walls of the room. Some of them had been taken directly aboard. Some had been conveyed in a large craft with many others and then put aboard. Some had served in other vessels, with propulsion rooms that were larger or smaller, and then put aboard. They had been told at one time or another that they were in the A’rkhov-Yar fleet, and disputed feebly about the meaning and pronunciation. It was more of a rumor than a fact.

  Barker picked a thread from his tie each day to mark the days, and sucked up to Baldwin.

  Baldwin liked to be liked, and pitied himself. “You think,” he asked plaintively, “I’m inhuman? You think I want to drive the units like I do? I’m as friendly as the next guy, but it’s dog eat dog, isn’t it? If I wasn’t driving I’d be in a chair getting driven, wouldn’t I?”

  “J can see that, Mr. Baldwin. And it takes character to be a leader like you are.”

  “You’re Goddamned right it does. And if the truth was known, I’m the best friend you people have. If it wasn’t me it’d be somebody else who’d be worse. Lakhrut said to me once that I’m too easy on the units and I stood right up to him and said there wasn’t any sense to wearing them out and not having any drive when the going gets hot.”

  “I think it’s amazing, Mr. Baldwin, the way you picked up the language. That takes brains.”

  Baldwin beamed modestly. “Oh, it ain’t too hard. For instance—”

  INSTRUCTION BEGAN. It was not too hard, because Baldwin’s vocabulary consisted of perhaps four hundred words, all severely restricted to his duties. The language was uninflected; it could have been an old and stable speech. The grammar was merely the word-order of logic: subject, verb, object. Outstandingly, it was a gutteral speech. There were remnants of “tonality” in it. Apparently it had once been a sung language like Chinese, but had evolved even out of that characteristic. Phonemes that once had been low-toned were now sounded back in the throat; formerly high-toned phonemes were now forward in the throat. That sort of thing he had picked up from “Oliver.”

  Barker hinted delicately at it, and Baldwin slammed a figurative door in his face. “I don’t know,” he growled. “I don’t go asking smart questions. You better not either.”

  Four more threads were snapped from the fringe of Barker’s tie before Baldwin came back, hungry for flattery. Barker was on shift, his head aching with the pointless, endless, unspeakably dull act of concentration when the big man shook his shoulder and growled: “You can lay off. Seven, eight—it don’t matter. The others can work harder.”

  He slobbered thanks.

  “Ah, that’s all right. I got a good side to me too, see? I said to Lakhrut once—”

  And so on, while the other units glared.

  “Mr. Baldwin, this word khesor, does it mean the whole propulsion set-up or the energy that makes it work? You say, ‘Lakhrut a’g khesor-takh’ for ‘Lakhrut is the boss of propulsion,’ right?”

  Baldwin’s contempt was kindly. “For a smart man you can ask some Goddamned stupid questions. What difference does it make?” He turned to inspect the globes for a moment and snarl at Ginny Stoss: “What’s the matter with you? You want the Pain again? Give!”

  Her lips moved in her endless mutter and her globe flared bright.

  The bull-necked man said confidingly: “Of course I wouldn’t really give her the Pain again. But you have to scare them a little from time to time.”

  “Of course, Mr. Baldwin. You certainly know psychology.” One of these days I’m going to murder you, you bastard.

  “Sure; it’s the only way. Now, you know what ga’lt means?”

  “No, Mr. Baldwin.”

  The bull-necked pusher was triumphant. “There is no word for it in English. It’s something they can do and we can’t. They can look right into your head if they want to. ‘Lakhrut ga’lt takh-lyur-Baldwin’ means ‘Lakhrut looks right into underchief Baldwin’s head and reads his mind.’ ”

  “Do they do it all the time?”

  “No. I think it’s something they learn. I don’t think all of them can do it either—or maybe not all of them learn to do it. I got a theory that Lakhrut’s a ga’lt specialist.”

  “Why, Mr. Baldwin?” Baldwin grinned. “To screen out troublemakers. No hard feelings, Oliver, but do you notice what a gutless bunch of people you got here? Not a rebel in a carload. Chicken-livered. Don’t take it personal—either you got it or you don’t.”

  “But you, Mr. Baldwin—why didn’t the screening stop you?”

  “I got a theory about that. I figure he let me through on purpose because they needed a hard guy to do just what I’m doing. After I got broke in on the globes it wasn’t hardly any time at all before I got to be takh-lyur.”

  You’re wrong, you bastard. You’re the yellowest coward aboard.

  “That must be it, Mr. Baldwin. They know a leader when they see one.”

  FOUR THREADS LATER he knew that he had acquired all of the language Baldwin had to give him. During his sleep period he went to old Stoss’ chair. Stoss was on rest. He was saying vaguely to a grayhaired woman in the chair in front of his: “Boston, Atlanta, Kansas City—all the prominent cities of the nation, my dear lady. I went in with a deck of cards and came out of each with a diamond ring and a well-filled wallet. My hands were sure, my voice was friendly—”

  “Atlanta,” the woman sighed. “The Mathematics Teachers Association met there in ’87, or was it ’88? I remember gardens with old brick walls—or was that Charleston? Yes, I think it was Charleston.”

  “—In one memorable session of stud behind locked doors in the old Muehlbach Hotel I was high on the third card with the Jack of clubs and the ten of diamonds, with the ace of clubs for my hole-card. Well, madam—”

  “—We had terrible trouble in the school one year with the boys and girls gambling in the reactor room, and worse if you can believe it. The reactor man was their ‘look-out,’ so to speak, so naturally we tried to have him discharged. But the union wouldn’t let—”

  “—Well, madam, there was seven hundred-odd dollars in the pot—”

  “Mr. Stoss,” Barker said. The old man studied him coolly for a moment and then said: “I don’t believe I care to talk to you, sir. As I was saying, ma’am, there was—”

  “I’m going to kill Baldwin,” Barker told him.

  He was instantly alert, and instantly scared. “But the danger,” he whispered. “Won’t they take it out on all of us? And he’s a big brute—”

  “So maybe he’ll kill me. But I’m going to try. I want you to go to the latrine when Baldwin shows up next. Don’t quite go in. Watch the corridor. If there’s anybody coming, lift your hand. I’ll only need a few seconds. Either way, it’ll be finished by then.”

  “The danger,” whispered Stoss. His eyes wandered to his daughter’s chair. She was asleep. And her lips still moved in her endless muttering. “All right,” the old man said at last. “I’ll help you.”
r />   “Can you imagine that?” the woman said, still amazed after all these years. “The man was caught in flagrente delicto, so to speak, and the union wouldn’t let the principal discharge him without a full public hearing, and naturally the publicity would have been most distasteful so we were forced to—”

  Barker padded back to his chair, a gaunt man in stinking rags, wild-haired and sporting a beard in which gray hairs were beginning to appear.

  There had to be a lookout. Three times since takeoff Lakhrut had appeared in the doorway for a moment to stare at the units. Twice other people had actually come into the room with Baldwin to probe through the tangle of machinery down the center aisle with long, slender instruments.

  It might have been one hour; it might have been seven. Baldwin appeared, followed by the little self-propelled cart. It began to make its rounds, stopping at each chair long enough for the bottle of water and the dish of soggy cake to be picked off. Stoss, looking perfectly innocent, passed Barker’s chair.

  Barker got up and went to the pusher. Stoss was looking through the door, and did not wave. The cart clicked and rolled to the next chair. “Something wrong, Oliver?” Baldwin asked.

  “I’m going to kill you, you bastard.”

  “What?” Baldwin’s mouth was open, but he dropped into a fighter’s crouch instinctively.

  His ankle hooked behind Baldwin’s foot. The bullnecked man threw a punch which he ducked, and tried to clinch when he butted him in the chest. Baldwin went sprawling into the tangle of machinery at the same spot where the man from Rupp City had fried. There were sparks and stench. Then it was over.

  Baldwin’s mouth was still open and his body contorted. Barker could imagine him saying: “You think I’m inhuman? You think I want to drive the units like I do?” And he could also imagine him roaring: “Give, Goddamn you!”

  Steadily Barker went back to his seat in time for the cart to click by. Stoss, his face a perfect blank, padded back from the latrine. A murmur and stir grew louder in the big rectangular room.