Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “We’ve all been through it,” Briggs said. “When you get bored let me know.”

  “Oh, promise,” Bunny said. “Absolutely promise.”

  He spent the next six months in Hollywood where golden girls vied in plying him with coq au vin, solid indium meat grinders, and similar trifles. One charming lady who had come out to the sound stages in 1934 presented him with a genuine hand-embroidered antique scabbard said to date back to the Crusades. It was a pleasant gift and it varied the

  . . . the monotony?

  He sat up abruptly on the mutation-mink coverlet, causing the shapely blond head which remained on the silken pillow to emit a small sleepy snort.

  “Monotony,” Bunny said in a tragic whisper. “Definitely.” He went home to Ohara, though not neglecting to pick up as he left his little present for the evening, a golden nutcracker set with diamonds and lined with unborn leopard pelt.

  Ohara dipped into his store of Oriental wisdom in an effort to console him. He suggested, “Missah Bunny think if must be monotonized, what beautifurr way to get monotonized.”

  It did not help.

  Ohara suggested, “You try make funny, fo’get monotony. Fo’ exampurr spend coupre mimon dorras make big reso’t town, cawr same Schmir-ton, Ohio. Think how mad Missah Nickey be, he put up hoterr, have to cawr same Hoterr Hir-ton Schmir-ton! Oh, raffs!”

  It would not do.

  “Ohara,” Bunny said tragically, “I would give—” he shrugged whimsically—“what little I have not to be bored with, ah, life.”

  The impassive Oriental countenance of his manservant flickered briefly in a grimace. His orders were clear, and he knew how terrible would be the consequences of disobedience.

  Bunny tossed fitfully alone in his bed an hour later, and Ohara was on the phone to an unlisted New York number. “This Ohara,” he whispered. “Missah Bunny talk about giving away money. Awr his money.”

  The responding voice was that of an Englishman. It said: “Thank you, Ohara. One hopes, of course, for your sake, that the information has arrived in time. One hopes devoutly that it will not be necessary to inflict the Death of a Thousand Cuts on you. A book could be written about Number Three Hundred and Twenty-Eight alone, and as for Number Four Hundred and One—Well, I won’t keep you with my chattering.” He hung up.

  Within minutes the lonely house in a canyon was surrounded; the Fourth Plutocratic Airborne and Amphibious Assault Force was the ultimate in efficient mercenary troops. By dawn they had Bunny on his way to Barsax’ Carolina estate under heavy sedation.

  He woke in the guest room he knew, just off the corridor which contained the Museum of Suppressed Inventions. Little Mr. Witz and quiet Mr. Briggs were there. With granite faces they told him: “You have broken the Code, young Coogler. You said there was something you valued above money. You have got to go.”

  “Please,” Bunny blubbered. “I didn’t mean it. I’ll marry your daughter. I’ll marry both your daughters! Just don’t kill me.”

  Mr. Witz said implacably, “Our decent, money-fearing girls wouldn’t have anything to do with a dirty plutophobe like you, young Coogler. If only your poor father had put through the trust fund in time—well, thank Heaven he’s not alive to see this day. But we won’t kill you, young Coogler. It is not within our power to cause the death of a billionaire as if he were an animal or mere human being. What we can and will do is quarantine you. In Virginia.”

  This sounded like a rank non sequitur to Bunny until they look him to the Museum and trundled out a one-man space ship invented early in 1923 by a Herr Rudolf Grenzbach of Czernovitz, Upper Silesia, whose body had been found in Lower Silesia later that year.

  Officers of the Fourth PA.A.A.F. loaded him into the bomblike contrivance over his spirited protest and pre-set the course. Virginia, it seemed, was an asteroid rather than die neighboring state. They fired the rockets—and Bunny was on his way.

  Four years later Mr. Witz and Mr. Briggs conferred again. Terhaps,” said Mr. Witz, “we’ve put enough of a scare into ban. Let’s radio the lad and find out whether he’s given up his seditious notions and is ready to be rescued.”

  They tuned in the asteroid Virginia on another suppressed invention. “Young Coogler,” Briggs said into the microphone. This is Briggs. We wish to know whether you’ve come to your senses and are ready to take your place in society—ours, of course.”

  There squawked over the loud-speaker the voice of Bunny. “I say, what was that. No, not now, not for a second please. Where did that voice come from? Can you hear me, Mr. Briggs?”

  “I hear you,” said Mr. Briggs.

  “Extraordinary! Another invention, eh?”

  “Yes,” said Briggs. “I am calling, young Coogler, to learn whether you are properly contrite and if so to arrange for your rescue.”

  “Rescue?” said the voice of Bunny. “Why, no thanks. That wont be necessary. Having a fine time here. They need me, you know. They love me for, ah, myself alone. Not the dashed money. Double-dash the money, I say!”

  Mr. Briggs, white to the lips, broke the connection.

  “He meant you to do that,” Mr. Witz remarked.

  “I know. Let him rot there.”

  The quavery old curator had been listening, “On Virginia?” he asked tremulously. “You don’t rot on Virginia, Don’t you gentlemen know how it got its name?”

  “Never bothered to find out,” Mr. Briggs snapped. “Since you’re bursting to tell us, you might as well.”

  The curator beamed. “They call it Virginia because it’s the planetoid of virgins. The dangdest thing. Perpetual virgins. The Plutocratic Space Force says they’ve never seen anything like it, not on Mars, not on Callisto. Self-renewing—the dangdest thing!”

  Mr. Briggs and Mr. Witz looked at each other. After a while Mr. Witz spoke.

  “Bunny,” he said reflectively. “Bunny. He was well named.”

  Reap the Dark Tide

  A whole culture afloat, with a savage code to drive it—but not half so savage as what the outcasts found on land.

  — I —

  IT WAS THE SPRING SWARMING OF the plankton; every man and woman and most of the children aboard Grenville’s Convoy had a job to do. As the seventy-five gigantic sailing ships plowed their two degrees of the South Atlantic, the fluid that foamed beneath their cutwaters seethed also with life. In the few weeks of the swarming, in the few meters of surface water where sunlight penetrated in sufficient strength to trigger photosynthesis, microscopic spores burst into microscopic plants, were devoured by minute animals which in turn were swept into the maws of barely visible sea monsters almost a tenth of an inch from head to tail; these in turn were fiercely pursued and gobbled in shoals by the fierce little brit, the tiny herring and shrimp that could turn a hundred miles of green water to molten silver before your eyes.

  Through the silver ocean of the swarming the Convoy scudded and tacked in great controlled zigs and zags, reaping the silver of the sea in the endlessly reeling bronze nets each ship payed out behind.

  The Commodore on Grenvllle did not sleep during the swarming; he and his staff dispatched cutters to scout the swarms, hung on the meteorologists’ words, digested the endless reports from the scout vessels, and toiled through the night to prepare the dawn signal. The mainmast flags might tell the captains “Convoy course five degrees right,” or “Two degrees left,” or only “Convoy course: no change.” On those dawn signals depended the life for the next six months of the million and a quarter souls of the Convoy. It had not happened often, but it had happened that a succession of blunders reduced a Convoy’s harvest below the minimum necessary to sustain life. Derelicts were sometimes sighted and salvaged from such convoys; strong-stomached men and women were needed for the first boarding and clearing away of human debris. Cannibalism occurred, an obscene thing one had nightmares about.

  The seventy-five captains had their own particular purgatory to endure throughout the harvest, the Sail-Seine Equation. It was their job to balance
the push on the sails and the drag of the ballooning seines so that push exceeded drag by just the number of pounds that would keep the ship on course and in station, given every conceivable variation of wind force and direction, temperature of water, consistency of brit, and smoothness of hull. Once the catch was salted down it was customary for the captains to converge on Grenville for a roaring feast by way of letdown.

  Rank had its privileges. There was no such relief for the captains’ Net Officers or their underlings in Operations and Maintenance, or for their Food Officers, under whom served the Processing and Stowage people. They merely worked, streaming the nets twenty-four hours a day, keeping them bellied out with lines from mast and outriding gigs, keeping them spooling over the great drum amidships, tending the blades that had to scrape the brit from the nets without damaging the nets, repairing the damage when it did occur; and without interruption of the harvest, flash-cooking the part of the harvest to be cooked, drying the part to be dried, pressing oil from the harvest as required, and stowing what was cooked and dried and pressed where it would not spoil, where it would not alter the trim of the ship, where it would not be pilfered by children. This went on for weeks after the silver had gone thin and patchy against the green, and after the silver had altogether vanished.

  The routines of many were not changed at all by the swarming season. The blacksmiths, the sailmakers, the carpenters, the water-tenders, to a degree the storekeepers, functioned as before, tending to the fabric of the ship, renewing, replacing, reworking. The ships were things of brass, bronze, and unrusting steel. Phosphor-bronze strands were woven into net, lines, and cables; cordage, masts, and hull were metal; all were inspected daily by the First Officer and his men and women for the smallest pinhead of corrosion. The smallest pinhead of corrosion could spread; it could send a ship to the bottom before it had done spreading, as the chaplains were fond of reminding worshippers when the ships rigged for church on Sundays. To keep the hellish red of iron rust and the sinister blue of copper rust from invading, the squads of oilers were always on the move, with oil distilled from the catch. The sails and the clothes alone could not be preserved; they wore out. It was for this that the felting machines down below chopped wornout sails and clothing into new fibers and twisted and rolled them with kelp and with glue from the catch into new felt for new sails and clothing.

  While the plankton continued to swarm twice a year, Grenville’s Convoy could continue to sail the South Atlantic, from ten-mile limit to ten-mile limit. Not one of the seventy-five ships in the Convoy had an anchor.

  The Captain’s Party that followed the end of Swarming 283 was slow getting underway. McBee, whose ship was Port Squadron 19, said to Salter of Starboard Squadron 30: “To be frank, I’m too damned exhausted to care whether I ever go to another party, but I didn’t want to disappoint the Old Man.”

  The Commodore, trim and bronzed, not showing his eighty years, was across the great cabin from them greeting new arrivals.

  Salter said: “You’ll feel differently after a good sleep. It was a great harvest, wasn’t it? Enough weather to make it tricky and interesting. Remember 276? That was the one that wore me out. A grind, going by the book. But this time, on the fifteenth day my fore-topsail was going to go about noon, big rip in her, but I needed her for my S-S balance. What to do? I broke out a balloon spinnaker—now wait a minute, let me tell it first before you throw the book at me—and pumped my fore trim tank out. Presto! No trouble; fore-topsail replaced in fifteen minutes.”

  McBee was horrified. “You could have lost your net!”

  “My weatherman absolutely ruled out any sudden squalls.”

  “Weatherman. You could have lost your net!”

  Salter studied him. “Saying that once was thoughtless, McBee. Saying it twice is insulting. Do you think I’d gamble with twenty thousand lives?”

  McBee passed his hands over his tired face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I told you I was exhausted. Of course under special circumstances it can be a safe maneuver.” He walked to a porthole for a glance at his own ship, the nineteenth in the long echelon behind Grenville. Salter stared after him. “Losing one’s net” was a phrase that occurred in several proverbs; it stood for abysmal folly. In actuality a ship that lost its phosphor-bronze wire mesh was doomed, and quickly. One could improvise with sails or try to jury-rig a net out of the remaining rigging, but not well enough to feed twenty thousand hands, and no fewer than that were needed for maintenance. Grenville’s Convoy had met a derelict which lost its net back before 240; children still told horror stories about it, how the remnants of port and starboard watches, mad to a man, were at war, a war of vicious night forays with knives and clubs.

  Salter went to the bar and accepted from the Commodore’s steward his first drink of the evening, a steel tumbler of colorless fluid distilled from a fermented mash of sargassum weed. It was about forty per cent alcohol and tasted pleasantly of iodides.

  He looked up from his sip and his eyes widened. There was a man in captain’s uniform talking with the Commodore and he did not recognize his face. But there had been no promotions lately!

  The Commodore saw him looking and beckoned him over. He saluted and then accepted the old man’s hand-clasp. “Captain Salter,” the Commodore said, “my youngest and rashest, and my best harvester. Salter, this is Captain Degerand of the White Fleet.”

  Salter frankly gawked. He knew perfectly well that Grenville’s Convoy was far from sailing alone upon the seas. On watch he had beheld distant sails from time to time. He was aware that cruising the two-degree belt north of theirs was another convoy and that in the belt south of theirs was still another, in fact that the seaborne population of the world was a constant one billion, eighty million.

  But never had he expected to meet face to face any of them except the one and a quarter million who sailed under Grenville’s flag.

  Degerand was younger than he, all deeply tanned skin and flashing pointed teeth. His uniform was perfectly ordinary and very queer. He understood Salter’s puzzled look. “It’s woven cloth,” he said. “The White Fleet was launched several decades after Grenville’s. By then they had machinery to reconstitute fibers suitable for spinning and they equipped us with it. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. I think our sails may last longer than yours, but the looms require a lot of skilled labor when they break down.”

  The Commodore had left them.

  “Are we very different from you?” Salter asked.

  Degerand said: “Our differences are nothing. Against the dirt men we are brothers—blood brothers.”

  The term “dirt men” was discomforting; the juxtaposition with “blood” more so. Apparently he was referring to whoever it was that lived on the continents and islands—a shocking breach of manners, of honor, of faith. The words of the Charter circled through Salter’s head. “. . . return for the sea and its bounty . . . renounce and abjure the land from which we . . .” Salter had been ten years old before he knew that there were continents and islands. His dismay must have shown on his face.

  “They have doomed us,” the foreign captain said. “We cannot refit. They have sent us out, each upon our two degrees of ocean in larger or smaller convoys as the richness of the brit dictated, and they have cut us off. To each of us will come the catastrophic storm, the bad harvest, the lost net, and death.”

  It was Salter’s impression that Degerand had said the same words many times before, usually to large audiences.

  The Commodore’s talker boomed out: “Now hear this!” His huge voice filled the stateroom easily; his usual job was to roar through a megaphone across a league of ocean, supplementing flag and lamp signals. “Now hear this!” he boomed. “There’s tuna on the table—big fish for big sailors!”

  A grinning steward whisked a felt from the sideboard, and there by Heaven it lay! A great baked fish as long as your leg, smoking hot and trimmed with kelp! A hungry roar greeted it; the captains made for the stack of trays and began to file
past the steward, busy with knife and steel.

  Salter marveled to Degerand: “I didn’t dream there were any left that size. When you think of the tons of brit that old-timer must have gobbled!”

  The foreigner said darkly: “We slew the whales, the sharks, the perch, the cod, the herring—everything that used the sea but us. They fed on brit and one another and concentrated it in firm savory flesh like that, but we were jealous of the energy squandered in the long food chain; we decreed that the chain would stop with the link brit-to-man.”

  Salter by then had filled a tray. “Brit’s more reliable,” he said. “A Convoy can’t take chances on fisherman’s luck.” He happily bolted a steaming mouthful.

  “Safety is not everything,” Degerand said. He ate, more slowly than Salter. “Your Commodore said you were a rash seaman.”

  “He was joking. If he believed that, he would have to remove me from command.”

  The Commodore walked up to them, patting his mouth with a handkerchief and beaming. “Surprised, eh?” he demanded. “Glasgow’s lookout spotted that big fellow yesterday half a kilometer away. He signaled me and I told him to lower and row for him. The boat crew sneaked up while he was browsing and gaffed him clean. Very virtuous of us. By killing him we economize on brit and provide a fitting celebration for my captains. Eat hearty! It may be the last we’ll ever see.”

  Degerand rudely contradicted his senior officer. “They can’t be wiped out clean, Commodore, not exterminated. The sea is deep. Its genetic potential cannot be destroyed. We merely make temporary alterations of the feeding balance.”