Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Li Po stepped forward and said in his most enchanting voice: “If the Heaven-born would only deign to heed a word from this humble—” What he must have known would happen happened. With a contemptuous backhand sweep of the blade the samurai beheaded him and Li Po’s debt was paid.

  The trunk of the storyteller stood for a moment and then fell stiffly forward. The samurai stooped to wipe his blade clean on Li Po’s ragged robes.

  Royland had forgotten much, but not everything. With the villagers scattering before him he plunged forward and tackled the samurai low and hard. No doubt the samurai was a Brown Belt judo master; if so he had nobody but himself to blame for turning his back. Royland, not remembering that he was barefoot, tried to kick the samurai’s face in. He broke his worshipful big toe, but its un-trimmed horny nail removed the left eye of the warrior and after that it was no contest. He never let the samurai get up off the ground; he took out his other eye with the handle of a rake and then killed him an inch at a time with his hands, his feet, and the clownish rustic’s traditional weapon, a flail. It took easily half an hour, and for the final twenty minutes the samurai was screaming for his mother. He died when the last light left the western sky, and in darkness Royland stood quite alone with the two corpses. The villagers were gone.

  He assumed, or pretended, that they were within earshot and yelled at them brokenly: “I’m sorry, Vashti. I’m sorry, all of you. I’m going. Can I make you understand?

  “Listen. You aren’t living. This isn’t life. You’re not making anything but babies, you’re not changing, you’re not growing up. That’s not enough! You’ve got to read and write. You can’t pass on anything but baby stories like the Yellow Emperor by word of mouth. The village is growing. Soon your fields will touch the fields of Sukoshi Village to the west, and then what happens? You won’t know what to do, so you’ll fight with Sukoshi Village.

  “Religion. No! It’s just getting drunk the way you do it. You’re set up for it by being half-starved and then you go into samadhi and you feel better so you think you understand everything. No! You’ve got to do things. If you don’t grow up, you die. All of you.

  “Women. That’s wrong. It’s good for the men, but it’s wrong. Half of you are slaves, do you understand? Women are people too, but you use them like animals and you’ve convinced them it’s right for them to be old at thirty and discarded for the next girl. For God’s sake, can’t you try to think of yourselves in their place?

  “The breeding, the crazy breeding—it’s got to stop. You frugal Orientals! But you aren’t frugal; you’re crazy drunken sailors. You’re squandering the whole world. Every mouth you breed has got to be fed by the land, and the land isn’t infinite.

  “I hope some of you understood. Li Po would have, a little, but he’s dead.

  “I’m going away now. You’ve been kind to me and all I’ve done is make trouble. I’m sorry.”

  He fumbled on the ground and found the samurai’s flashlight. With it he hunted the village’s outskirts until he found the Japanese’s buck-board car. He started the motor with its crank and noisily rolled down the dirt track from the village to the highway.

  IX

  Royland drove all night, still westward. His knowledge of southern California’s geography was inexact, but he hoped to hit Los Angeles.

  There might be a chance of losing himself in a great city. He had abandoned hope of finding present-day counterparts of his old classmates like Jimmy Ichimura; obviously they had lost out. Why shouldn’t they have lost? The soldier-politicians had won the war by happenstance, so all power to the soldier-politicians! Reasoning under the great natural law post hoc ergo propter hoc, Tojo and his crowd had decided: fanatic feudalism won the war; therefore fanatic feudalism is a good thing, and it necessarily follows that the more fanatical and feudal it is, the better a thing it is. So you had Sukoshi Village, and Ugetsu Village; Ichi Village, Ni Village, San Village, Shi Village, dotting that part of Great Japan formerly known as North America, breeding with the good old fanatic feudalism and so feudally averse to new thought and innovations that it made you want to scream at them—which he had.

  The single weak headlight of his buckboard passed few others on the road; a decent feudal village is self-contained.

  Damn them and their suicidal cheerfulness! It was a pleasant trait; it was a fool in a canoe approaching the rapids saying: “Chin up! Everything’s going to be all right if we just keep smiling.”

  The car ran out of gas when false dawn first began to pale the sky behind him. He pushed it into the roadside ditch and walked on; by full light he was in a tumble-down, planless, evil-smelling, paper-and-galvanized-iron city whose name he did not know. There was no likelihood of him being noticed as a “white” man by anyone not specifically looking for him. A month of outdoor labor had browned him, and a month of artistically composed vegetable plates had left him gaunt.

  The city was carpeted with awakening humanity. Its narrow streets were paved with sprawled-out men, women, and children beginning to stir and hawk up phlegm and rub their rheumy eyes. An open sewer-latrine running down the center of each street was casually used, ostrich-fashion—the users hid their own eyes while in action.

  Every mangled variety of English rang in Royland’s ears as he trod between bodies.

  There had to be something more, he told himself. This was the shabby industrial outskirts, the lowest marginal-labor area. Somewhere in the city there was beauty, science, learning!

  He walked aimlessly plodding until noon, and found nothing of the sort. These people in the cities were food-handlers, food-traders, food-transporters. They took in one another’s washing and sold one another chop suey. They made automobiles (Yes! There were one-family automobile factories which probably made six buckboards a year, filing all metal parts by hand out of bar stock!) and orange crates and baskets and coffins; abacuses, nails, and boots.

  The Mysterious East has done it again, he thought bitterly. The Indians-Chinese-Japanese won themselves a nice sparse area. They could have laid things out neatly and made it pleasant for everybody instead of for a minute speck of aristocracy which he was unable even to detect in this human soup . . . but they had done it again. They had bred irresponsibly just as fast as they could until the land was full. Only famines and pestilence could “help” them now.

  He found exactly one building which owned some clear space around it—and which would survive an earthquake or a flicked cigarette butt. It was the German Consulate.

  I’ll give them the Bomb, he said to himself. Why not? None of this is mine. And for the Bomb I’ll exact a price of some comfort and dignity for as long as I live. Let them blow one another up! He climbed the consulate steps.

  To the black-uniformed guard at the swastika-trimmed bronze doors he said: “Wenn die Lichtstdrke der van einer Fl’dche kommen-den Strahlung dem Cosinus des Winkels zwischen Strahlrichtung und Flachennormalen proportional ist, so nennen wir die Fl’dche eine volkommen streunde Flache.” Lambert’s Law, Optics I. All the Goethe he remembered happened to rhyme, which might have made the guard suspicious.

  Naturally the German came to attention and said apologetically: “I don’t speak German. What is it, sir?”

  “You may take me to the consul,” Royland said, affecting boredom.

  “Yes, sir. At once, sir. Er, you’re an agent of course, sir?”

  Royland said witheringly: “Sicherheit, bitte!”

  “Yessir. This way, sir!”

  X

  The consul was a considerate, understanding gentleman. He was somewhat surprised by Royland’s true tale, but said from time to time: “I see; I see. Not impossible. Please go on.”

  Royland concluded: “Those people at the sulfur mine were, I hope, unrepresentative. One of them at least complained that it was a dreary sort of backwoods assignment. I am simply gambling that there is intelligence in your Reich. I ask you to get me a real physicist for twenty minutes of conversation. You, Mr. Consul, will not regret it. I am
in a position to turn over considerable information on atomic power.” So he had not been able to say it after all; the Bomb was still an obscene kick below the belt.

  “This has been very interesting, Dr. Royland,” said the consul gravely. “You referred to your enterprise as a gamble. I too shall gamble. What have I to lose by putting you en rapport with a scientist of ours if you prove to be a plausible lunatic?” He smiled to soften it. “Very little indeed. On the other hand, what have I to gain if your extraordinary story is quite true? A great deal. I will go along with you, doctor. Have you eaten?”

  The relief was tremendous. He had lunch in a basement kitchen with the Consulate guards—a huge lunch, a rather nasty lunch of stewed lungen with a floured gravy, and cup after cup of coffee. Finally one of the guards lit up an ugly little spindle-shaped cigar, the kind Royland had only seen before in the caricatures of George Grosz, and as an afterthought offered one to him.

  He drank in the rank smoke and managed not to cough. It stung his mouth and cut the greasy aftertaste of the stew satisfactorily. One of the blessings of the Third Reich, one of its gross pleasures. They were just people, after all—a certain censorious, busybody type of person with altogether too much power, but they were human. By which he meant, he supposed, members of Western Industrial Culture like him.

  After lunch he was taken by truck from the city to an airfield by one of the guards. The plane was somewhat bigger than a B-29 he had once seen, and lacked propellers. He presumed it was one of the “jets” Dr. Piqueron had mentioned. His guard gave his dossier to a Luftwaffe sergeant at the foot of the ramp and said cheerfully: “Happy landings, fellow. It’s all going to be all right.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll remember you, Corporal Collins. You’ve been very helpful.” Collins turned away.

  Royland climbed the ramp into the barrel of the plane. A bucket-seat job, and most of the seats were filled. He dropped into one on the very narrow aisle. His neighbor was in rags; his face showed signs of an old beating. When Royland addressed him he simply cringed away and began to sob.

  The Luftwaffe sergeant came up, entered, and slammed the door. The “jets” began to wind up, making an unbelievable racket; further conversation was impossible. While the plane taxied, Royland peered through the windowless gloom at his fellow-passengers. They all looked poor and poorly.

  God, were they so quickly and quietly airborne? They were. Even in the bucket seat, Royland fell asleep.

  He was awakened, he did not know how much later, by the sergeant. The man was shaking his shoulder and asking him: “Any joolery hid away? Watches? Got some nice fresh water to sell to people that wanna buy it.”

  Royland had nothing, and would not take part in the miserable little racket if he had. He shook his head indignantly and the man moved on with a grin. He would not last long!—petty chiselers were leaks in the efficient dictatorship; they were rapidly detected and stopped up. Mussolini made the trains run on time, after all. (But naggingly Royland recalled mentioning this to a Northwestern University English professor, one Bevans. Bevans had coldly informed him that from 1931 to 1936 he had lived under Mussolini as a student and tourist guide, and therefore had extraordinary opportunities for observing whether the trains ran on time or not, and could definitely state that they did not; that railway timetables under Mussolini were best regarded as humorous fiction.)

  And another thought nagged at him, a thought connected with a pale, scarred face named Bloom. Bloom was a young refugee physical chemist working on weapons development track I, and he was somewhat crazy, perhaps. Royland, on track III, used to see little of him and could have done with even less. You couldn’t say hello to the man without it turning into a lecture on the horrors of Nazism. He had wild stories about “gas chambers” and crematoria which no reasonable man could believe, and was a blanket slanderer of the German medical profession. He claimed that trained doctors, certified men, used human beings in experiments which terminated fatally. Once, to try and bring Bloom to reason, he asked what sort of experiments these were, but the monomaniac had heard that worked out: piffling nonsense about reviving mortally frozen men by putting naked women into bed with them! The man was probably sexually deranged to believe that; he naively added that one variable in the series of experiments was to use women immediately after sexual intercourse, one hour after sexual intercourse, et cetera. Royland had blushed for him and violently changed the subject.

  But that was not what he was groping for. Neither was Bloom’s crazy story about the woman who made lampshades from the tattooed skin of concentration camp prisoners; there were people capable of such things, of course, but under no regime whatever do they rise to positions of authority; they simply can’t do the work required in positions of authority because their insanity gets in the way.

  “Know your enemy,” of course—but making up pointless lies? At least Bloom was not the conscious prevaricator. He got letters in Yiddish from friends and relations in Palestine, and these were laden with the latest wild rumors supposed to be based on the latest word from “escapees.”

  Now he remembered. In the cafeteria about three months ago Bloom had been sipping tea with somewhat shaking hand and rereading a letter. Royland tried to pass him with only a nod, but the skinny hand shot out and held him.

  Bloom looked up with tears in his eyes: “It’s cruel, I’m tellink you, Royland, it’s cruel. They’re not givink them the right to scream, to strike a futile blow, to sayink prayers Kiddush ha Shem like a Jew should when he is dyink for Consecration of the Name! They trick them, they say they go to farm settlements, to labor camps, so four-five of the stinkink bastards can handle a whole trainload Jews. They trick the clothes off of them at the camps, they sayink they delouse them. They trick them into room says showerbath over the door and then is too late to sayink prayers; then goes on the gas.”

  Bloom had let go of him and put his head on the table between his hands. Royland had mumbled something, patted his shoulder, and walked on, shaken. For once the neurotic little man might have got some straight facts. That was a very circumstantial touch about expediting the handling of prisoners by systematic lies—always the carrot and the stick.

  Yes, everybody had been so god-damn, agreeable since he climbed the Consulate steps! The friendly door guard, the Consul who nodded and remarked that his story was not an impossible one, the men he’d eaten with—all that quiet optimism. “Thanks. I’ll remember you, Corporal Collins. You’ve been very helpful.” He had felt positively benign toward the corporal, and now remembered that the corporal had turned around very quickly after he spoke. To hide a grin?

  The guard was working his way down the aisle again and noticed that Royland was awake. “Changed your mind by now?” he asked kindly. “Got a good watch, maybe I’ll find a piece of bread for you. You won’t need a watch where you’re going, fella.”

  “What do you mean?” Royland demanded.

  The guard said soothingly: “Why, they got clocks all over them work camps, fella. Everybody knows what time it is in them work camps. You don’t need no watches there. Watches just get in the way at them work camps.” He went on down the aisle, quickly.

  Royland reached across the aisle and, like Bloom, gripped the man who sat opposite him. He could not see much of him; the huge windowless plane was lit only by half a dozen stingy bulbs overhead. “What are you here for?” he asked.

  The man said shakily: “I’m a Laborer Two, see? A Two. Well, my father he taught me to read, see, but he waited until I was ten and knew the score? See? So I figured it was a family tradition, so I taught my own kid to read because he was a pretty smart kid, ya know? I figured he’d have some fun reading like I did, no harm done, who’s to know, ya know? But I should of waited a couple years, I guess, because the kid was too young and got to bragging he could read, ya know how kids do? I’m from St. Louis, by the way. I should of said first I’m from St. Louis a track maintenance man, see, so I hopped a string of returning empties for San Di
ego because I was scared like you get.”

  He took a deep sigh. “Thirsty,” he said. “Got in with some Chinks, nobody to trouble ya, ya stay outta the way, but then one of them cops-like seen me and he took me to the Consul place like they do, ya know? Had me scared, they always tole me illegal reading they bump ya off, but they don’t, ya know? Two years work camp, how about that?”

  Yes, Royland wondered. How about it?

  The plane decelerated sharply; he was thrown forward. Could they brake with those “jets” by reversing the stream or were the engines just throttling down? He heard gurgling and thudding; hydraulic fluid to the actuators letting down the landing gear. The wheels bumped a moment later and he braced himself; the plane was still and the motors cut off seconds later.

  Their Luftwaffe sergeant unlocked the door and bawled through it: “Shove that goddam ramp, willya?” The, sergeant’s assurance had dropped from him; he looked like a very scared man. He must have been a very brave one, really, to have let himself be locked in with a hundred doomed men, protected only by an eight-shot pistol and a chain of systematic lies.

  XI

  They were herded out of the plane onto a runway of what Royland immediately identified as the Chicago Municipal Airport. The same reek wafted from the stockyards; the row of airline buildings at the eastern edge of the field was ancient and patched but unchanged; the hangars, though, were now something that looked like inflated plastic bags. A good trick. Beyond the buildings surely lay the dreary redbrick and painted-siding wastes of Cicero, Illinois.

  Luftwaffe men were yapping at them: “Form up, boys; make a line! Work means freedom! Look tall!” They shuffled and were shoved into columns of fours. A snappy majorette in shiny satin panties and white boots pranced out of an administration building twirling her baton; a noisy march blared from louvers in her tall fur hat. Another good trick.