Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  And a confident smile and turn away from him, which shows that you aren’t afraid, you can turn your back and dare him to make something of it. In public, in the bar? It is laughable; you have him in the palm of your hand. “Shot of Red Top and a beer, please, Sam.” At 9:48.

  The bartender draws the beer and pours the whiskey. He pauses before he picks up the dollar bill fished from the pants pocket, pauses almost timidly and works his face into a friend’s grimace. But you can read him; he is making amends for his suspicion that you were going to start a drunken brawl when Galardo merely surprised you a bit. You can read him because your mind is tensed to concert pitch tonight, ready for Galardo, ready for the Serpentists, ready to crack this thing wide open; strange!

  But you weren’t ready for the words he spoke from his fake apologetic friend’s grimace as you delicately raised the heavy amber-filled glass to your lips: “Where’d your friend go?”

  You slopped the whiskey as you turned and looked.

  GALARDO GONE.

  You smiled and shrugged; he comes and goes as he pleases, you know. Irresponsible, no manners at all—but loyal. A prince among men when you get to know him, a prince, I tell you. All this in your smile and shrug—why, you could have been an actor! The worry, the faint neurotic worry, didn’t show at all, and indeed there is no reason why it should. You have the whip hand; you have the Seal; Galardo will come crawling back and explain everything. As for example:

  “You may wonder why I’ve asked all of you to assemble in the libr’reh.”

  or

  “For goodness’ sake, Gracie, I wasn’t going to go to Cuba! When you heard me on the extension phone I was just ordering a dozen Havana cigars!”

  or

  “In your notation, we are from 19,276 A.D. Our basic mathematic is a quite comprehensible subsumption of your contemporary statistical analysis and topology which I shall now proceed to explain to you.”

  And that was all.

  With sorrow, Gentle Reader, you will have noticed that the marble did not remark: “I am chiseled,” the lumber “I am sawn,” the paint “I am applied to canvas,” the tea leaf “I am whisked about in an exquisite Korean bowl to brew while the celebrants of cha no yu squeeze this nourishment out of their poverty.” Vain victim, relax and play your hunches; subconscious integration does it. Stick with your lit-tle old subconscious integration and all will go swimmingly, if only it weren’t so damned noisy in here. But it was dark on the street and conceivably things could happen there; stick with crowds and stick with witnesses, but if only it weren’t so . . .

  To his left they were settling down; it was the hour of confidences, and man to man they told the secret of their success: “In the needle trade, I’m in the needle trade, I don’t sell anybody a crooked needle, my father told me that. Albert, he said to me, don’t never sell nobody nothing but a straight needle. And today I-have four shops.”

  To his right they were settling down; freed of the cares of the day they invited their souls, explored the spiritual realm, theologized with exquisite distinctions: “Now wait a minute, I didn’t say I was a good Mormon, I said I was a Mormon and that’s what I am, a Mormon. I never said I was a good Mormon, I just said I was a Mormon, my mother was a Mormon and my father was a Mormon, and that makes me a Mormon but I never said I was a good Mormon—”

  Distinguo, rolled the canonical thunder; distinguo.

  Demurely a bonneted lassie shook her small-change tambourine beneath his chin and whispered, snarling: “Galardo lied.”

  ADMIT IT; you were startled. But what need for the bartender to come running with raised hand, what need for needle-trader to your left to shrink away, the L.D.S. to cower?

  “Mister, that’s twice you let out a yell, we run a quiet place, if you can’t be good, begone.”

  Begob.

  “I ash-assure you, bartender, it was—unintenable.”

  Greed vies with hate; greed wins; greed always wins: “Just keep it quiet, mister, this ain’t the Bowery, this is a family place.” Then, relenting: “The same?”

  “Yes, please.” At 10:15 the patient lassie jingled silver on the parchment palm outstretched. He placed a quarter on the tambourine and asked politely: “Did you say something to me before, Miss?”

  “God bless you, sir. Yes, sir, I did say something. I said Galardo lied; the Seal is holy to the Serpent, sir, and to his humble emissaries. If you’ll only hand it over, sir, the Serpent will somewhat mitigate the fearsome torments which are rightly yours for snatching the Seal from the Altar, sir.”

  [Snatchings from Altars? Ma foi, the wench is mad!]

  “Listen, lady. That’s only talk. What annoys me about you people is, you won’t talk sense. I want to know who you are, what this is about, maybe just a little hint about your mathematics, and I’ll do the rest and you can have the blooming Seal. I’m a passable physicist even if I’m only a technician. I bet there’s something you didn’t know. I bet you didn’t know the tech shortage is tighter than the scientist shortage. You get a guy can tune a magnetron, he writes his own ticket. So I’m weak on quantum mechanics, the theory side, I’m still a good all-around man and be-lieve me, the Ph.D.’s would kiss my ever-loving feet if I told them I got an offer from Argonne—

  “So listen, you Janissary emissary. I’m happy right here in this necessary commissary and here I stay.”

  But she was looking at him with bright frightened mouse’s eyes and slipped on down the line when he paused for breath, putting out the parchment palm to others but not ceasing to watch him.

  Coins tapped the tambour. “God bless you. God bless you. God bless you.”

  The raving-maniacal ghost of G. Washington Hill descended then into a girdled sibyl; she screamed from the screen: “It’s Hit Pa-rade!”

  “I like them production numbers.”

  “I like that Pigalle Mackintosh.”

  “I like them production numbers. Lotsa pretty girls, pretty clothes, something to take your mind off your troubles.”

  “I like that Pigalle Mackintosh. She don’t just sing, mind you, she plays the saxophone. Talent.”

  “I like them production numbers. They show you just what the song is all about. Like last week they did Sadist Calypso with this mad scientist cutting up the girls, and then Pigalle comes in and whips him to death at the last verse, you see just what the song’s all about, something to take your mind off your troubles.”

  “I like that Pigalle Mackintosh. She don’t just sing, mind you, she plays the saxophone and cracks a blacksnake whip, like last week hi Sadist Calypso—”

  “Yeah. Something to take your mind off your troubles.”

  Irritably he felt in his pocket for the Seal and moved, stumbling a little, to one of the tables against the knotty pine wall. His head slipped forward on the polished wood and he sank into the sea of myth.

  GALARDO came to him in his dream and spoke under a storm-green sky: “Take your mind off your troubles, Edward. It was stolen like the first penny, like the quiz answers, like the pity for your bereavement.” His hand, a tambourine, was out.

  “Never shall I yield,” he declaimed to the miserable wretch. “By the honneur of a Gascon, I stole it fair and square; ’tis mine, knave! En garde!”

  Galardo quailed and ran, melting into the sky, the altar, the tambourine.

  A HAM-HAND manhandled him. “Light-up time,” said Sam. “I let you sleep because you got it here, but I got to close up now.”

  “Sam,” he says uncertainly.

  “One for the road, mister. On the house, Up-sy-daisy!” meaty hooks under his armpits heaving him to the bar.

  The lights are out behind the bar, the jolly neons, glittering off how many gems of amber rye and the tan crystals of beer? A meager bulb above the register is the oasis in the desert of inky night.

  “Sam,” groggily, “you don’t understand. I mean I never explained it—”

  “Drink up, mister,” a pale free drink, soda bubbles lightly tinged with tawny rye. A
small sip to gain time.

  “Sam, there are some people after me—”

  “You’ll feel better in the morning, mister. Drink up, I got to close up, hurry up.”

  “These people, Sam [it’s cold in here and scary as a noise in the attic; the bottles stand accusingly, the chrome globes that top them eye you] these people, they’ve got a thing, The Century of—”

  “Sure, mister, I let you sleep because you got it here, but we close up now, drink up your drink.”

  “Sam, let me go home with you, will you? It isn’t anything like that, don’t misunderstand, I just can’t be alone. These people—look, I’ve got money—”

  He spreads out what he dug from Ms pocket.

  “Sure, mister, you got lots of money, two dollars and thirty-eight cents. Now you take your money and get out of the store because I got to lock up and clean out the register—”

  “Listen, bartender, I’m not drunk, maybe I don’t have much money on me but I’m an important man! Important! They couldn’t run Big Maggie at Brookhaven without me, I may not have a degree but what I get from these people if you’ll only let me stay here—”

  The bartender takes the pale one on the house you only sipped and dumps it in the sink; his hands are iron on you and you float while he chants:

  “Decent man. Decent place.

  Hold their liquor. Got it here.

  Try be nice. Drunken bum.

  Don’t—come—back.”

  The crash of your coccyx on the concrete and the slam of the door are one.

  Run!

  Down the black street stumbling over cans, cats, orts, to the pool of light in the night, safe corner where a standard sprouts and sprays radiance.

  THE TALL black figure that steps between is Galardo.

  The short one has a tambourine.

  “Take it!” He thrust out the Seal on his shaking palm. “If you won’t tell me anything, you won’t. Take it and go away!”

  Galardo inspects it and sadly says: “Thiss appearss to be a blank wash-er.”

  “Mistake,” he slobbers. “Minute.” He claws in his pockets, ripping. “Here! Here!”

  The lassie squeaks: “The wheel of a toy truck. It will not do at all, sir.” Her glittereyes.

  “Then this! This is it! This must be it!”

  Their heads shake slowly. Unable to look his fingers feel the rim and rolled threading of the jar cap.

  They nod together, sad and glitter-eyed, and The Century of Flame begins.

  Wolfbane

  BEGINNING A 2-PART SERIAL

  Appallingly, the Barth and the Moon had been kidnapped from the Solar System — but who were the kidnappers and what ransom did they want?

  I

  ROGET Germyn, banker, of Wheeling, West Virginia, a Citizen, woke gently from a Citizen’s dreamless sleep. It was the third-hour-rising time, the time proper to a day of exceptional opportunity to appreciate.

  Citizen Germyn dressed himself in the clothes proper for the appreciation of great works—such as viewing the Empire State ruins against storm clouds from a small boat, or walking in silent single file across the remaining course of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or as today—one hoped—witnessing the Re-creation of the Sun.

  Germyn with difficulty retained a Citizen’s necessary calm. One was tempted to meditate on improper things: Would the Sun be re-created? What if it were not?

  He put his mind to his dress. First of all, he put on an old and storied bracelet, a veritable identity bracelet of heavy silver links and a plate which was inscribed:

  PFC JOE HARTMANN

  Korea

  1953

  His fellow jewelry-appreciators would have envied him that bracelet—if they had been capable of such an emotion as envy. No other ID bracelet as much as two hundred and fifty years old was known to exist in Wheeling.

  His finest shirt and pair of light pants went next to his skin, and over them he wore a loose parka whose seams had been carefully weakened. When the Sun was re-created, every five years or so, it was the custom to remove the parka gravely and rend it with the prescribed graceful gestures . . . but not so drastically that it could not be stitched together again. Hence the weakened seams.

  This was, he counted, the forty-first day on which he and all of Wheeling had donned the appropriate Sun Re-creation clothing. It was the forty-first day on which the Sun—no longer white, no longer blazing yellow, no longer even bright red—had risen and displayed a color that was darker maroon and always darker.

  IT had, thought Citizen Germyn, never grown so dark and so cold in all of his life. Perhaps it was an occasion for special viewing. For surely it would never come again, this opportunity to see the old Sun so near to death . . .

  One hoped.

  Gravely, Citizen Germyn completed his dressing, thinking only of the act of dressing itself. It was by no means his specialty, but he considered, when it was done, that he had done it well, in the traditional flowing gestures, with no flailing, at all times balanced lightly on the ball of the foot. It was all the more perfectly consummated because no one saw it but himself.

  He woke his wife gently, by placing the palm of his hand on her forehead as she lay neatly, in the prescribed fashion, on the Woman’s Third of the bed.

  The warmth of his hand gradually penetrated the layers of sleep. Her eyes demurely opened.

  “Citizeness Germyn,” he greeted her, making the assurance-of-identity sign with his left hand.

  “Citizen Germyn,” she said, with the assurance-of-identity inclination of the head which was prescribed when the hands are covered.

  He retired to his tiny study.

  It was the time appropriate to meditation on the properties of Connectivity. Citizen Germyn was skilled in meditation, even for a banker; it was a grace in which he had schooled himself since earliest childhood.

  Citizen Germyn, his young face composed, his slim body erect as he sat but in no way tense or straining, successfully blanked out, one after another, all of the external sounds and sights and feelings that interfered with proper meditation. His mind was very nearly vacant except of one central problem: Connectivity.

  Over his head and behind, out of sight, the cold air of the room seemed to thicken and form a—call it a blob; a blob of air.

  There was a name for those blobs of air. They had been seen before. They were a known fact of existence in Wheeling and in all the world. They came. They hovered. And they went away—sometimes not alone. If someone had been in the room with Citizen Germyn to look at it, he would have seen a distortion, a twisting of what was behind the blob, like flawed glass, a lens, like an eye. And they were called Eye.

  Germyn meditated.

  The blob of air grew and slowly moved. A vagrant current that spun out from it caught a fragment of paper and whirled it to the floor. Germyn stirred. The blob retreated.

  Germyn, all unaware, disciplined his thoughts to disregard the interruption, to return to the central problem of Connectivity. The blob hovered . . .

  From the other room, his wife’s small, thrice-repeated throatclearing signaled to him that she was dressed. Germyn got up to go to her, his mind returning to the world; and the overhead Eye spun relentlessly, and disappeared.

  SOME miles east of Wheeling, Glenn Tropile—of a class which found it wisest to give itself no special name, and which had devoted much time and thought to shaking the unwelcome name it had been given—awoke on the couch of his apartment.

  He sat up, shivering. It was cold. The damned Sun was still bloody dark outside the window and the apartment was soggy and chilled.

  He had kicked off the blankets in his sleep. Why couldn’t he learn to sleep quietly, like anybody else? Lacking a robe, he clutched the blankets around him, got up and walked to the unglassed window.

  It was not unusual for Glenn Tropile to wake up on his couch. This happened because Gala Tropile had a temper, was inclined to exile him from her bed after a quarrel, and—the operative factor—he knew he always had th
e advantage over her for the whole day following the night’s exile. Therefore the quarrel was worth it. An advantage was, by definition, worth anything you paid for it or else it was no advantage.

  He could hear her moving about in one of the other rooms and cocked an ear, satisfied. She hadn’t waked him. Therefore she was about to make amends. A little itch in his spine or his brain—it was not a physical itch, so he couldn’t locate it; he could only be sure that it was there—stopped troubling him momentarily; he was winning a contest. It was Glenn Tropile’s nature to win contests . . . and his nature to create them.

  Gala Tropile, young, dark, attractive, with a haunted look, came in tentatively carrying coffee from some secret hoard of hers.

  Glenn Tropile affected not to notice. He stared coldly out at the cold landscape. The sea, white with thin ice, was nearly out of sight, so far had it retreated as the little sun waned.

  “Glenn—”

  Ah, good! Glenn. Where was the proper mode of first-greeting-one’s-husband? Where was the prescribed throat-clearing upon entering a room?

  Assiduously, he had untaught her the meticulous ritual of manners that they had all of them been brought up to know; and it was the greatest of his many victories over her that sometimes, now, she was the aggressor, she would be the first to depart from the formal behavior prescribed for Citizens.

  Depravity! Perversion!

  Sometimes they would touch each other at times which were not the appropriate coming-together times, Gala sitting on her husband’s lap in the late evening, perhaps, or Tropile kissing her awake in the morning. Sometimes he would force her to let him watch her dress—no, not now, for the cold of the waning sun made that sort of frolic unattractive, but she had permitted it before; and such was his mastery over her that he knew she would permit it again, when the Sun was re-created . . .