Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  It merely plucked, when a mechanism was ripe. It had found that a mechanism was ripe now.

  A world away, before the steps of Wheeling’s Federal Building, electrostatic charges gathered above a component whose name was Citizen Boyne. There was a small sound like the clapping of two hands which made the three hundred citizens of Wheeling jerk upright out of their meditations.

  The sound was air filling the gap that had once been occupied by Citizen Boyne, who had instantly vanished—who had, in a word, been ripe and therefore been plucked.

  VI

  GLENN Tropile and his sobbing wife passed the night in the stubble of a cornfield. Neither of them slept much.

  Tropile, numbed by contact with the iron chill of the field—it would be months before the new Sun warmed the Earth enough for it to begin radiating in turn—tossed restlessly, dreaming. He was Wolf. Let it be so, he told himself again and again. I will be Wolf. I will strike back at the Citizens. I will—

  Always the thought trailed off. He would exactly What? What could he do?

  Migration was an answer—go to another city. With Gala, he guessed. Start a new life, where he was not known as Wolf.

  And then what? Try to live a sheep’s life, as he had tried all his years? And there was the question of whether, in fact, he could manage to find a city where he was not known. The human race was migratory, in these years of subjection to the never quite understood rule of the Pyramids.

  It was a matter of insulation. When the new Sun was young, it was hot, and there was plenty of warmth; it was possible to spread north and south, away from final line of permafront which, in North America, came just above the old Mason-Dixon line. When the Sun was dying, the cold spread down. The race followed the seasons. Soon all of Wheeling would be spreading north again, and how was he to be sure that none of Wheeling’s Citizens might not turn up wherever he might go?

  He could be sure—that was the answer to that.

  All right, scratch migration. What remained? He could—with Gala, he guessed—live a solitary life on the fringes of cultivated land. They both had some skill at rummaging the old storehouses of the ancients, and there was still food and other commodities to be found.

  But even a Wolf is gregarious by nature and there were bleak hours in that night when Tropile found himself close to sobbing with his wife.

  At the first break of dawn, he was up. Gala had fallen into a light and restless sleep; he called her awake.

  “We have to move,” he said harshly. “Maybe they’ll get up enough guts to follow us. I don’t want them to find us.”

  Silently she got up. They rolled and tied the blankets she had bought; they ate quickly from the food she had brought; they made packs and put them on their shoulders and started to walk. One thing in their favor: they were moving fast, faster than any Citizen was likely to follow. All the same, Tropile kept looking nervously behind him.

  They hurried north and east, and that was a mistake, because by noon they found themselves blocked by water. Once it had been a river; the melting of the polar ice caps that had submerged the coasts of the old continents had drowned it out and now it was salt water. But whatever it was, it was impassable. They would have to skirt it westward until they found a bridge or a boat.

  “We can stop and eat,” Tropile said grudgingly, trying not to despair.

  They slumped to the ground. It was warmer now. Tropile found himself getting drowsier, drowsier—

  He jerked erect and stared around belligerently. Beside him, his wife was lying motionless, though her eyes were open, gazing at the sky. Tropile sighed and stretched out. A moment’s rest, he promised himself, and then a quick bite to eat, and then onward . . .

  He was sound asleep when they spotted him.

  THERE was a flutter of iron bird’s wings from overhead. Tropile jumped up out of his sleep, awakening to panic. It was outside the possibility of belief, but there it was: In the sky over him, etched black against a cloud, a helicopter. And men staring out of it, staring down at him.

  A helicopter!

  But there were no helicopters, or none that flew—if there had been fuel to fly them with—if any man had had the skill to make them fly. It was impossible! And yet there it was, and the men were looking at him, and the impossible great whirling thing was coming down, nearer.

  He began to run in the downward wash of air from the vanes. But it was no use. There were three men and they were fresh and he wasn’t. He stopped, dropping into the fighter’s crouch that is pre-set into the human body, ready to do battle.

  The men didn’t want to fight. They laughed and one of them said amiably: “Long past your bedtime, boy. Get in. We’ll take you home.”

  Tropile stood poised, hands half-clenched. “Take—”

  “Take you home. Yeah. Where you belong, Tropile. Not back to Wheeling, if that’s what is worrying you.”

  “Where I—”

  “Where you belong.”

  Then Tropile understood.

  He got into the helicopter wonderingly. Home. So there was a home for such as he. He wasn’t alone. He needn’t keep his solitary self apart. He could be with his own kind.

  He remembered Gala Tropile and paused. One of the men said with quick understanding: “Your wife? I think we saw her about half a mile from here. Heading back to Wheeling as fast as she could go.”

  Tropile nodded. That was better, after all. Gala was no Wolf, though he had tried his best to make her one.

  One of the men closed the door; another did something with levers and wheels; the vanes whooshed around overhead; the helicopter bounced on its stiff-sprung landing legs and then rocked up and away.

  For the first time in his life, Glenn Tropile looked down on the land.

  They didn’t fly high—but Glenn Tropile had never flown at all, and the two or three hundred feet of air beneath made him faint and queasy. They danced through the passes in the West Virginia hills, crossed icy streams and rivers, swung past old empty towns which no longer even had names of their own.

  They saw no one.

  It was something over four hundred miles to where they were going, one of the men told him. They made it easily before dark.

  AS Tropile walked through the town in the evening light, electricity flared white and violet in the buildings around him. Imagine! Electricity was calories, and calories were to be hoarded.

  There were other walkers in the street. Their gait was not the economical shuffle with pendant arms. They burned energy visibly. They swung. They strode. It had been chiseled on his brain in earliest childhood that such walking was wrong, reprehensible, debilitating. It wasted calories. These people did not look debilitated and they didn’t seem to mind wasting calories.

  It was an ordinary sort of town, apparently named Princeton. It did not have the transient look to it of, say, Wheeling, or Altoona, or Gary, in Tropile’s experience. It looked like—well, it looked permanent.

  Tropile had heard of a town called Princeton, but it happened that he had never passed through it southwarding or northbound. There was no reason why he or anybody should or should not have. Still, there was a possibility, once he thought of it, that things were somehow so arranged that they should not; maybe it was all on purpose. Like every town, it was underpopulated, but not so much so as most. Perhaps one living space in five was used. A high ratio.

  The man beside him was named Haendl, one of the men from the helicopter. They hadn’t talked much on the flight and they didn’t talk much now. “Eat first,” Haendl said, and took Tropile to a bright and busy sort of food stall. Only it wasn’t a stall. It was a restaurant.

  This Haendl—what to make of him? He should have been disgusting, nasty, an abomination. He had no manners whatever. He didn’t know, or at least didn’t use, the Seventeen Conventional Gestures. He wouldn’t let Tropile walk behind him and to his left, though he was easily five years Tropile’s senior. When he ate, he ate. The Sip of Appreciation, the Pause of First Surfeit, the Thrice Proff
ered Share meant nothing to him. He laughed when Tropile tried to give him the Elder’s Portion.

  Cheerfully patronizing, this man Haendl said to Tropile: “That stuff’s all right when you don’t have anything better to do with your time. Those poor mutts don’t. They’d die of boredom without their inky-pinky cults and they don’t have the resources to do anything bigger. Yes, I do know the Gestures. Seventeen delicate ways of communicating emotions too refined for words. The hell with them, Tropile. I’ve got words. You’ll learn them, too.”

  Tropile ate silently, trying to think.

  A man arrived, threw himself in a chair, glanced curiously at Tropile and said: “Haendl, the Somerville Road. The creek backed up when it froze. Flooded bad. Ruined everything.”

  Tropile ventured: “The flood ruined the road?”

  “The road? No. Say, you must be the fellow Haendl went after. Tropile, that the name?” He leaned across the table, pumped Tropile’s hand. “We had the road nicely blocked,” he explained. “The flood washed it clean. Now we have to block it again” Haendl said: “Take the tractor if you need it.”

  The man nodded and left. Haendl said: “Eat up. We’re wasting time. About that road—we keep all entrances blocked up, see? Why let a lot of sheep in and out?”

  “Sheep?”

  “The opposite,” said Haendl, “of Wolves.”

  TAKE ten billion people and say that, out of every million of them, one—just one—is different. He has a talent for survival; call him Wolf. Ten thousand of him in a world of ten billion.

  Squeeze them, freeze them, cut them down. Let old Rejoice in Messias loom in the terrifying sky and so abduct the Earth that the human race is decimated, fractionated, reduced to what is in comparison a bare handful of chilled, stunned survivors. There aren’t ten billion people in the world any more. No, not by a factor of a thousand. Maybe there are as many as ten million, more or less, rattling around in the space their enormous Elder Generations made for them.

  And of these ten million, how many are Wolf?

  Ten thousand.

  “You understand, Tropile?” said Haendl. “We survive. I don’t care what you call us. The sheep call us Wolves. Me, I kind of call us Supermen. We have a talent for survival.”

  Tropile nodded, beginning to understand. “The way I survived the House of the Five Regulations.”

  Haendl gave him a pitying look. “The way you survived thirty years of Sheephood before that. Come on.”

  It was a tour of inspection. They went into a building, big, looking like any other big and useful building of the ancients, gray stone walls, windows with ragged spears of glass. Inside, though, it wasn’t like the others. Two sub-basements down, Tropile winced and turned away from the flood of violet light that poured out of a quartz bull’s-eye on top of a squat steel cone.

  “Perfectly harmless, Tropile—you don’t have to worry,” Haendl boomed. “Know what you’re looking at? There’s a fusion reactor down there. Heat. Power. All the power we need. Do you know what that means?”

  He stared soberly down at the flaring violet light of the inspection port.

  “Come on,” he said abruptly to Tropile.

  Another building, also big, also gray stone. A cracked inscription over the entrance read: ORIAL HALL OF HUMANITIES. The sense-shock this time was not light; it was sound. Hammering, screeching, rattling, rumbling. Men were doing noisy things with metal and machines.

  “Repair shop!” Haendl yelled. “See those machines? They belong to our man Innison. WeVe salvaged them from every big factory ruin we could find. Give Innison a piece of metal—any alloy, any shape—and one of those machines will change it into any other shape and damned near any other alloy. Drill it, cut it, plane it, weld it, smelt it, zone-melt it, bond it—you tell him what to do and he’ll do it.

  “We got the parts to make six tractors and forty-one cars out of this shop. And we’ve got other shops—aircraft in Farmingdale and Wichita, armaments in Wilmington. Not that we can’t make some armaments here. Innison could build you a tank if he had to, complete with 105-millimeter gun.”

  “What’s a tank?” Tropile asked.

  Haendl only looked at him and said: “Come on!”

  GLENN Tropile’s head spun dizzily and all the spectacles merged and danced in his mind. They were incredible. All of them.

  Fusion pile, machine shop, vehicular garage, aircraft hangar. There was a storeroom under the seats of a football stadium, and Tropile’s head spun on his shoulders again as he tried to count the cases of coffee and canned soups and whiskey and beans. There was another storeroom, only this one was called an armory. It was filled with . . . guns. Guns that could be loaded with cartridges, of which they had very many; guns which, when you loaded them and pulled the trigger, would fire.

  Tropile said, remembering: “I saw a gun once that still had its firing pin. But it was rusted solid.”

  “These work, Tropile,” said Haendl. “You can kill a man with them. Some of us have.”

  “Kill—”

  “Get that sheep look out of your eyes, Tropile! What’s the difference how you execute a criminal? And what’s a criminal but someone who represents a danger to your world? We prefer a gun instead of the Donation of the Spinal Tap, because it’s quicker, because it’s less messy—and because we don’t like to drink spinal fluid, no matter what imaginary therapeutic or symbolic value it has. You’ll learn”

  But he didn’t add “come on.” They had arrived where they were going.

  It was a small room in the building that housed the armory and it held, among other things, a rack of guns.

  “Sit down,” said Haendl, taking one of the guns out of the rack thoughtfully and handling it as the doomed Boyne had caressed his watch-case. It was the latest pre-Pyramid-model rifle, anti-personnel, short-range. It would not scatter a cluster of shots in a coffee can at more than two and a half miles.

  “All right,” said Haendl, stroking the stock. “You’ve seen the works, Tropile. You’ve lived thirty years with sheep. You’ve seen what they have and what we have. I don’t have to ask you to make a choice. I know what you choose. The only thing left is to tell you what we want from you.”

  A faint pulsing began inside Glenn Tropile. “I expected we’d be getting to that.”

  “Why not? We’re not sheep. We don’t act that way. Quid pro quo. Remember that—it saves time. You’ve seen the quid. Now we come to the quo.” He leaned forward. “Tropile, what do you know about the Pyramids?”

  “Nothing.”

  Haendl nodded. “Right. They’re all around us and our lives are beggared because of them. And we don’t even know why. We don’t have the least idea of what they are. Did you know that one of the sheep was Translated in Wheeling when you left?”

  “Translated?”

  Tropile listened with his mouth open while Haendl told him about what had happened to Citizen Boyne.

  “So he didn’t make the Donation after all,” Tropile said.

  “Might have been better if he had,” said Haendl. “Still, it gave you a chance to get away. We had heard—never mind how just yet—that Wheeling’d caught itself a Wolf, so we came looking for you. But you were already gone.”

  TROPILE said, faintly annoyed: “You were damn near too late.”

  “Oh, no, Tropile,” Haendl assured him. “We’re never too late. If you don’t have enough guts and ingenuity to get away from sheep, you’re no wolf-simple as that. But there’s this Translation. We know it happens, but we don’t even know what it is. All we know, people disappear. There’s a new sun in the sky every five years or so. Who makes it? The Pyramids. How? We don’t know that. Sometimes something floats around in the air and we call it an Eye. It has something to do with Translation, something to do with the Pyramids. What? We don’t know that.”

  “We don’t know much of anything,” interrupted Tropile, trying to hurry him along.

  “Not about the Pyramids, no.” Haendl shook his head. “Hardly anyone has e
ver seen one, for that matter.”

  “Hardly—You mean you have?”

  “Oh, yes. There’s a Pyramid on Mount Everest, you know. That’s not just a story. It’s true. I’ve been there, and it’s there. At least, it was there five years ago, right after the last Sun Re-creation. I guess it hasn’t moved. It just sits there.”

  Tropile listened, marveling. To have seen a real Pyramid! Almost he had thought of them as legends, contrived to account for such established physical facts as the Eyes and Translation, as children with a Santa Claus. But this incredible man had seen it!

  “Somebody dropped an H-bomb on it, way back,” Haendl continued, “and the only thing that happened is that now the North Col is a crater. You can’t move the Pyramid. You can’t hurt it. But it’s alive. It has been there, alive, for a couple of hundred years; and that’s about all we know about the Pyramids. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Haendl stood up. “Tropile, that’s what all of this is all about!” He gestured around him. “Guns, tanks, airplanes—we want to know more! We’re going to find out more and then we’re going to fight.”

  There was a jarring note and Tropile caught at it, sniffing the air. Somehow—perhaps it was his sub-adrenals that told him—this very positive, very self-willed man was just the slightest bit unsure of himself. But Haendl swept on and Tropile, for a moment, forgot to be alert.

  “We had a party up Mount Everest five years ago,” Haendl was saying. “We didn’t find out a thing. Five years before that, and five years before that—every time there’s a sun, while it is still warm enough to give a party a chance to climb up the sides—we send a team up there. It’s a rough job. We give it to the new boys, Tropile. Like you.” There it was. He was being invited to attack a Pyramid.