Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  THE oatmeal vendor was fussing worriedly around his neat stack of paper twists in the salt bowl.

  Tropile avoided the man’s eyes. Tropile was not interested in the little wry smile of self-deprecation which the vendor would make to him, given half a chance. Tropile knew well enough what was disturbing the vendor. Let it disturb him. It was Tropile’s custom to take extra twists of salt. They were in his pockets now; they would stay there. Let the vendor wonder why he was short.

  Tropile licked the bowl of his spoon and stepped into the street. He was comfortably aware under a double-thick parka that the wind was blowing very cold.

  A Citizen passed him, walking alone: odd, thought Tropile. He was walking rapidly and there was a look of taut despair on his face. Still more odd. Odd enough to be worth another look, because that sort of haste, that sort of abstraction, suggested something to Tropile. They were in no way normal to the gentle sheep of the class They, except in one particular circumstance.

  Glenn Tropile crossed the street to follow the abstracted Citizen, whose name, he knew, was Boyne. The man blundered into Citizen Germyn outside the baker’s stall, and Tropile stood back out of easy sight, watching and listening.

  Boyne was on the ragged edge of breakdown. What Tropile heard and saw confirmed his diagnosis. The one particular circumstance was close to happening—Citizen Boyne was on the verge of running amok.

  Tropile looked at the man with amusement and contempt. Amok! The gentle sheep could be pushed too far. He had seen Citizens run amok, the signs were obvious.

  There was pretty sure to be an advantage in it for Glenn Tropile. There was an advantage in almost anything, if you looked for it.

  He watched and waited. He picked his spot with care, so that he could see Citizen Boyne inside the baker’s stall, making a dismal botch of slashing his quarter-kilo of bread from the Morning Loaf.

  He waited for Boyne to come racing out . . .

  Boyne did.

  A yell—loud, piercing. It was Citizen Germyn, shrilling: “Amok, amok!” A scream. An enraged wordless cry from Boyne, and the baker’s knife glinting in the faint light as Boyne swung it. And then Citizens were scattering in every direction—all of the Citizens but one.

  One Citizen was under the knife—his own knife, as it happened; it was the baker himself. Boyne chopped and chopped again. And then Boyne came out, roaring, the broad knife whistling about his head. The gentle Citizens fled panicked before him. He struck at their retreating forms and screamed and struck again. Amok.

  It was the one particular circumstance when they forgot to be gracious—one of the two, Tropile corrected himself as he strolled across to the baker’s stall.

  His brow furrowed, because there was another circumstance when they lacked grace, and one which affected him nearly.

  HE watched the maddened creature, Boyne, already far down the road, chasing a knot of Citizen around a corner. Tropile sighed and stepped into the baker’s stall to see what he might gain from this.

  Boyne would wear himself out—the surging rage would leave him as quickly as it came; he would be a sheep again and the other sheep would close in and capture him. That was what happened when a Citizen ran amok. It was a measure of what pressures were on the Citizens that, at any moment, there might be one gram of pressure too much and one of them would crack. It had happened here in Wheeling twice within the past two months. Glenn Tropile had seen it happen in Pittsburgh, Altoona and Bronxville.

  There is a limit to the pressure that can be endured.

  Tropile walked into the baker’s stall and looked down without emotion at the slaughtered baker. The corpse was a gory mess, but Tropile had seen corpses before.

  He looked around the stall, calculating. As a starter, he bent to pick up the quarter-kilo of bread Boyne had dropped, dusted it off and slipped it into his pocket. Food was always useful. Given enough food, perhaps Boyne would not have run amok.

  Was it simple hunger they cracked under? Or the knowledge of the thing on Mount Everest, or the hovering Eyes, or the sought-after-dreaded prospect of Translation, or merely the strain of keeping up their laboriously figured lives?

  Did it matter? They cracked and ran amok, and Tropile never would, and that was what mattered.

  He leaned across the counter, reaching for what was left of the Morning Loaf—

  And found himself staring into the terrified large eyes of Citizeness Germyn.

  She screamed: “Wolf! Citizens, help me! Wolf!”

  Tropile faltered. He hadn’t even seen the damned woman, but there she was, rising up from behind the counter, screaming her head off: “Wolf! Wolf!”

  He said sharply: “Citizeness, I beg you—” But that was no good. The evidence was on him and her screams would fetch others.

  Tropile panicked. He started toward her to silence her, but that was no good, either. He whirled. She was screaming, screaming, and there were people to hear. Tropile darted into the street, but they were popping out of every doorway now, appearing from each rat’s hole in which they had hid to escape Boyne.

  “Please!” he cried, sobbing. “Wait a minute!”

  But they weren’t waiting. They had heard the woman and maybe some of them had seen him with the bread. They were all around him—no, they were all over him; they were clutching at him, tearing at his soft, warm furs.

  They pulled at his pockets and the stolen twists of salt spilled accusingly out. They yanked at his sleeves and even the stout, unweakened seams ripped open. He was fairly captured.

  “Wolf!” they were shouting. “Wolf!” It drowned out the distant noise from where Boyne had finally been run to earth, a block and more away. It drowned out everything.

  It was the other circumstance when they forgot to be gracious: when they had trapped a Son of the Wolf.

  III

  ENGINEERING had long ago come to an end.

  Engineering is possible under one condition of the equation: Total available Calories divided by Population equals Artistic-Technological Style. When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large—say, five thousand or more, five thousand daily calories for every living person—then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture enormous automobiles to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one lipstick.

  Life is coarse and rich where C:P is large. At the other extreme, where C:P is too small, life does not exist at all. It has starved out.

  Experimentally, add little increments to C:P and it will be some time before the right-hand side of the equation becomes significant. But at last, in the 1,000 to 1,500 calorie range, Artistic-Technological Style firmly appears in self-perpetuating form. C:P in that range produces the small arts, the appreciations, the peaceful arrangements of necessities into subtle relationships of traditionally agreed-upon virtue.

  Think of Japan, locked into its Shogunate prison, with a hungry population scrabbling food out of mountainsides and beauty out of arrangements of lichens. The small, inexpensive sub-sub-arts are characteristic of the 1,000 to 1,500 calorie range.

  And this was the range of Earth, the world of ten billion men, when the planet was stolen by its new binary.

  Some few persons inexpensively studied the study of science with pencil and renewable paper, but the last research accelerator had long since been shut down. The juice from its hydro-power dam was needed to supply meager light to a million homes and to cook the pablum for two million brand-new babies.

  In those days, one dedicated Byzantine wrote the definitive encyclopedia of engineering (though he was no engineer). Its four hundred and twenty tiny volumes examined exhaustively the engineering feats of ancient Greece and Egypt, the Wall of Shih-Hwang Ti, the Gothic builders, Brunei who changed the face of England, the Roeblings of Brooklyn, Groves of the Pentagon, Duggan of the Shelter System (before C:P dropped to the point where war became vanishingly implausible), Levern of Operation Up. But the encyclopedist could not use a slide rule wit
hout thinking, faltering, jotting down his decimals.

  And then . . . the magnitudes grew less.

  Under the tectonic and climatic battering of the great abduction of Earth from its primary, under the sine-wave advances to and retreats from the equator of the ice sheath, as the small successor Suns waxed, waned, died and were replaced, the ratio C:P remained stable. C had diminished enormously; so had P. As the calories to support life grew scarce, so the consuming mouths of mankind grew less in number.

  THE forty-fifth small Sun shone on no engineers.

  Not even on the binary, perhaps. The Pyramids, the things on the binary, the thing on Mount Everest—they were not engineers. They employed a crude metaphysic based on dissection and shoving.

  They had no elegant field theories. All they knew was that everything came apart, and that if you pushed a thing, it would move.

  If your biggest push would not move a thing, you took it apart and pushed the parts, and then it would move. Sometimes, for nuclear effects, they had to take things apart into 3 x 109 pieces and shove each piece very carefully.

  By taking apart and shoving, then, they landed their one spaceship on the burned-out sunlet. Four human beings were on that ship. They meditated briefly on Connectivity and died screaming.

  A point of new flame appeared on the sunlet’s surface and the spaceship scrambled for the binary. The point of flame went from cherry through orange into the blue-white and began to spread.

  AT the moment of the Re-creation of the Sun, there was rejoicing on the Earth.

  Not quite everywhere, though. In Wheeling’s House of the Five Regulations, Glenn Tropile waited unquietly for death. Citizen Boyne, who had run amok and slaughtered the baker, shared Tropile’s room and his doom, but not his rage. Boyne, with demure pleasure, was composing his death poem.

  “Talk to me!” snapped Tropile. “Why are we here? What did you do and why did you do it? What have I done? Why don’t I pick up a bench and kill you with it? You would’ve killed me two hours ago if I’d caught your eye!”

  There was no satisfaction in Citizen Boyne; the passions were burned out of him. He politely tendered Tropile a famous aphorism: “Citizen, the art of living is the substitution of unimportant, answerable questions for important, unanswerable ones. Come, let us appreciate the new-born Sun.”

  He turned to the window, where the spark of blue-white flame in what had once been the crater of Tycho was beginning to spread across the charred moon.

  Tropile was child enough of his culture to turn with him, almost involuntarily. He was silent.

  That blue-white infinitesimal up. there growing slowly—the oneness, the calm rapture of Being in a universe that you shaded into without harsh discontinua, the being one with the great blue-white gem-flower blossoming now in the heavens that were no different stuff than you yourself—

  He closed his eyes, calm, and meditated on Connectivity.

  He was being Good.

  By the time the fusion reaction had covered the whole small disk of the sunlet, a quarter-hour at the most, his meditation began to wear off.

  Tropile shrugged out of his torn parka, not bothering to rip it further. It was already growing warm in the room. Citizen Boyne, of course, was carefully opening every seam with graceful rending motions, miming great and smooth effort of the biceps and trapezius.

  But the meditation was over, and as Tropile watched his cellmate, he screamed a silent Why? Since his adolescence, that wailing syllable had seldom been far from his mind. It could be silenced by appreciation and meditation.

  Tropile’s specialty was Water Watching and he was so good at it that several beginners had asked him for instruction in the subtle art, in spite of his notorious oddities of life and manner. He enjoyed Water Watching. He almost pitied anybody so single-mindedly devoted to, say, Clouds and Odors—great game though it was—that he had never even tried Water Watching. And after a session of Watching, when one was lucky enough to observe the Nine Boiling Stages in classic perfection, one might slip into meditation and be harmonious, feel Good.

  But what did one do when the meditations failed, as they had failed him? What did one do when they came farther and farther apart, became less and less intense, could be inspired, finally, only by a huge event like the renewal of the Sun?

  One went amok, he had always thought.

  But he had not. Boyne had. He had been declared a Son of the Wolf, on no evidence that he could understand. Yet he had not run amok.

  Still, the penalties were the same, he thought, uncomfortably aware of an unfamiliar itch—not the inward intolerable itch of needing the advantage, but a localized sensation at the base of his spine. The penalties for all gross crimes—Wolf hood or running amok—were the same, and simply this:

  They would perform the Lumbar Puncture. He would make the Donation of Spinal Fluid.

  He would be dead.

  THE Keeper of the House of Five Regulations, an old man, Citizen Harmane, looked in on his charges—approvingly at Boyne, with a beclouded expression at Glenn Tropile.

  It was thought that even Wolves were entitled to the common human decencies in the brief interval between exposure and the Donation of Fluid. The Keeper would not have dreamed of scowling at the detected Wolf or of interfering with whatever wretched imitation of meditation-before-dying the creature might practice. But he could not, all the same, bring himself to offer even an assurance-of-identity gesture.

  Tropile had no such qualms.

  He scowled at Keeper Harmane with such ferocity that the old man almost hurried away. He turned an almost equally ugly scowl upon Citizen Boyne. How dared that knife-murderer be so calm, so relaxed!

  Tropile said brutally: “They’ll kill us! You know that? They’ll stick a needle in our spines and drain us dry. It hurts. Do you understand me? They’re going to drain us, and then they’re going to drink our spinal fluid, and it’s going to hurt ”

  He was gently corrected. “We shall make the Donation,” Citizen Boyne said calmly. “Is not the difference intelligible to a Son of the Wolf?”

  True culture demanded that that remark be accepted as a friendly joke, probably based on a truth—how else could an unpalatable truth be put in words? Otherwise the unthinkable might happen. They might quarrel. They might even come to blows!

  The appropriate mild smile formed on Tropile’s lips, but harshly he wiped it off. They were going to kill him. He would not smile for them! And the effort was enormous.

  “I’m not a Son of the Wolf!” he howled, desperate, knowing he was protesting to the man of all men in Wheeling who didn’t care, and who could do least about it if he did. “What’s this crazy talk about Wolves? I don’t know what a Son of the Wolf is and I don’t think you or anybody does. All I know is that I was acting sensibly. And everybody began howling! You’re supposed to know a Son of the Wolf by his unculture, his ignorance, his violence. But you chopped down three people and I only picked up a piece of bread! And I’m supposed to be the dangerous one!”

  “Wolves never know they’re Wolves,” sighed Citizen Boyne. “Fish probably think they’re birds and you evidently think you’re a Citizen. Would a Citizen speak as you are speaking?”

  “But they’re going to kill us!”

  “Then why aren’t you composing your death poem?”

  GLENN Tropile took a deep breath. Something was biting him. It was bad enough that he was about to die, bad enough that he had done nothing worth dying for. But what was gnawing at him now had nothing to do with dying.

  The percentages were going the wrong way. This pale Citizen was getting an edge on him.

  An engorged gland in Tropile’s adrenals—it was only a pinhead in Citizen Boyne’s—gushed raw hormones into his bloodstream. He could die, yes—that was a skill everyone had to acquire, sooner or later. But while he was alive, he could not stand to be bested in an encounter, an argument, a relationship—not and stay alive. Wolf? Call him Wolf. Call him Operator, or Percentage Player; call him Sharp
Article; call him Gamesman.

  If there was an advantage to be derived, he would derive it. It was the way he was put together.

  He said, for time: “You’re right. Stupid of me. I must have lost my head!”

  He thought. Some men think by poking problems apart; some think by laying facts side by side to compare. Tropile’s thinking was neither of these, but a species of judo. He conceded to his opponent such things as Strength, Armor, Resource. He didn’t need these things for himself; to every contest, the opponent brought enough of them to supply two. It was Tropile’s habit and Wolfish, he had to admit) to use the opponent’s strength against him, to break the opponent against his own steel walls.

  He thought.

  The first thing was to make up his mind: He was Wolf. Then let him be Wolf. He wouldn’t stay around for the spinal tap; he would go from there. But how?

  The second thing was to plan. There were obstacles. Citizen Boyne was one. The Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations was another.

  Where was the pole which would permit him to vault over these hurdles? There was always his wife, Gala. He owned her; she would do what he wished—provided he made her want to do it.

  Yes, Gala. He walked to the door and shouted to Citizen Harmane: “Keeper! I must see my wife! Have her brought to me!”

  It was impossible for the Keeper to refuse. He called gently, “I will invite the Citizeness,” and toddled away.

  The third thing was time. Tropile turned to Citizen Boyne. “Citizen,” he said persuasively, “since your death poem is ready and mine is not, will you be gracious enough to go first when they—when they come?” Citizen Boyne looked temperately at his cellmate and made the Quirked Smile.

  “You see?” he said. “Wolf.” And that was true. But what was also true was that Boyne couldn’t and didn’t refuse.

  IV

  HALF a world away, the mid-night-blue Pyramid sat on its planed-off peak as it had sat since the days when Earth had a real sun of its own.