Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “If it won’t break your back,” Mr. Edel said, “please ask your father to give me a ring sometime.”

  Again in his own small apartment Mr. Edel thought of many things. Of the ancient papyrus which, when decoded, moaned: “Children are not now as respectful and diligent as they were in the old days” Of Henry V. Of Dr. Fuqua drudging away on petfood protein determinations and lucky to be doing that. Of his own selfish, miserable, lonely comfort in his castle. Of Foster, the hero-king to be, and of himself, Aristotle to the young Alexander. Had there been a dozen such in his twenty years? There had not. Marie Perrone still sent him her novels, and they were almost popular and very bad. Jim Folwell had gone to Princeton and into the foreign service and that was that. Janice Reeves and Ward Freiman were married and both teaching at Cornell. What had happened to the hundred thousand others he had taught only God and themselves knew. If they all dropped dead at this instant, tomorrow morning some trucks would not roll for an hour or two, some advertising agencies would come near to missing a few deadlines, some milk would sour and some housewives would bang, perplexed, on the doors of shops that should be open, a few sales would languish unclosed, a few machines would growl for lack of oil. But Foster might land on the moons of Jupiter.

  Therefore let him learn, make him learn, how to be great. He would meet his Pistols, Bardolphs, Fluellens, a few Exeters, and without doubt his Cambridges and Scroops: clowns, fussbudgets, friends and traitors. It could matter to nobody except herself if her agent ripped poor arty Marie Perrone up her back; it might matter a great deal to—he shied at the alternatives—to, let us say, Man, if Foster trusted a Pistol to do his work, or passed over a Fluellen for his mannerisms, or failed to know a Scroop when he saw one.

  We will arm the young hero-king, he thought comfortably just before sleep claimed him.

  Roland Fuqua had been transferred to Toledo by the pet-food company. He wrote to Edel:

  Instinct tells me not to queer my luck by talking about it, but anyway—I really believe I’m moving up in the organization. The other day a party from Sales came through the QC labs and one of them, just an ordinary-looking Joe, stopped to talk to me about the test I was running—asked very intelligent questions. You could have knocked me over with a Folin-Wu pipette when they told me who he was afterwards: just John McVey himself, Assistant Vice-President in Charge of Sales! Unaccustomed as I am to pipe dreams, it can’t be a coincidence that it was me he talked to instead of half-a-dozen other lab men with seniority; I don’t know what he has in mind exactly, maybe some kind of liaison job between QC and Sales, which would put me on Staff level instead of Hourly-Rated . . .

  Mr. Edel felt sick for him. He would have to answer the letter at once; if he put it off he would put it off again and their correspondence would peter out and Fuqua would be betrayed. But what could he tell him—that he was pipe-dreaming, that “coincidences” like that happen to everybody a hundred times a day, that Roland Fuqua, Ph.D., would never, at 45, move from the Quality Control lab to the glittering world of Sales?

  He stalled for time by stamping and addressing the envelope first, then hung over the typewriter for five minutes of misery. It was Wednesday night; Foster was due for the twelfth and last of his Enrichment sessions. Mr. Edel tried not to cause Fuqua pain by dwelling on the world of teaching he had lost—but what else was there to write about?

  I’m sure you remember Foster —the fly boy? I’ve been taking him, on one of those Enrichment things, through Henry V. This is supposed to win him .0001 of a place higher on the graduating class list and get him into the Academy, and I suppose it will. Things are very simple for Foster, enviably so. He has a titan of engineering for a father who appears to commute between the Minas Geraes power station in Brazil, his consulting service in the city and trouble spots in the I.T.&T. network—maybe I should say commutate. I honestly do not believe that Foster has to lie his way through the personality profiles like the rest of us mortals—

  Now there was a hell of a thing to put down. He was going to rip the page out and start again, then angrily changed his mind. Fuqua wasn’t a cripple; it wasn’t Bad Form to mention his folly; it would be merely stupid to pretend that nothing had happened. He finished out the page with a gush of trivia. Sexy little Mrs. Dickman who taught Spanish was very visibly expecting. New dietician in the cafeteria, food cheaper, but worse than ever. Rumored retirement of old man Thelusson again and one step up for History teachers if true. Best wishes good luck regards to Beth and the youngster, Dave. He whipped the page into folds, slipped it into the envelope and sealed the flap fast, before he could change his mind again. It was time to stop treating Fuqua like a basket case; if convalescence had not begun by now it never would.

  His bell rang: Foster was on time, to the minute.

  They shook hands rather formally. “Like a cup of coffee, Foster?” Mr. Edel asked.

  “No thank you, sir.”

  “I’ll make one for myself then. Brought your paper? Good. Read it to me.”

  While he compounded coffee Foster began to read. After much discussion they had settled on “Propaganda and Reality in Henry V” as his topic. The boy had read Holinshed where relevant, articles in the Dictionary of National Biography and appropriate history texts. Beyond suggesting these, Mr. Edel had left him alone in the actual treatment of his paper. He did not quite know what to expect from Foster beyond careful organization and an absence of gross blunders; he waited with interest.

  The paper was a short one— 1500 words, by request. Nevertheless it gave Mr. Edel a few painful shocks. There were two sneers at “deluded groundlings,” much reveling in the irony of the fictional Henry’s affection for his Welsh captain as against the real Henry who had helped to crush Glendower and extinguish the Welsh as a nation, and fun with the Irishman Macmorris who came loyally from Shakespeare’s pen in 1599 while “the general of our gracious empress” was doing his best to extinguish the Irish as a nation. Henry’s “we have now no thoughts in us but France (save those to God)” was evaluated as “the poet’s afterthought”. The massacre of the French prisoners at Agincourt, Henry’s brutal practical joke with the pretended glove of a French nobleman, his impossibly compressed and eloquent courtship of Katharine, were all somehow made to testify to a cynical Shakespeare manipulating his audience’s passions.

  The great shock was that Foster approved of all this. “It was a time of troubles and England was besieged from without and threatened from within. The need of the time was a call to unity, and this Shakespeare provided in good measure. The London mob and the brotherhood of apprentices, always a potential danger to the Peace, no doubt was inspired and pacified for a time by the Shakespearean version of a successfid aggressors early career.”

  Modestly Foster folded his typescript.

  It was ground into Mr. Edel that you start by saying whatever words of praise are possible and then go on to criticize. Mechanically he said warm things about the papers organization, its style, its scholarly apparatus. “But— aren’t you taking a rather too utilitarian view of the play? It is propaganda to some extent, but should you stop short with the propaganda function of the play? I’m aware that you’re limited by your topic and length, but I wish there had been some recognition of the play’s existence as a work of art.”

  Foster said, smiling: “Well, I’m new at this, Mr. Edel. I didn’t know I was supposed to stray. Should I revise it?”

  “Oh, no,” Mr. Edel said quickly. “I didn’t mean to imply that you’re unarguably mistaken in anything you said. I don’t know why I’m fussing at you about it at all. I suppose you’ve taken a sort of engineering approach to literature, which is natural enough. Did you ever succeed in engaging your father in the project?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Edel. You can imagine.”

  “He’s been away?”

  “Why, no.” Foster was surprised. But didn’t his father go away now and then? He thought Foster had said—or almost said— He took the paper from him and leafed
through it. “This is quite good enough for a pass, Foster. It’ll be read by somebody in the English Chairman’s office, but that’s a formality. Let’s say you’ve completed your Enrichment Option.” He stuck out his hand and Foster took it warmly. “That, then, is that. Do you have to run now?”

  “With all rods out,” Foster said. “I’ve got to prepare for the Math Team Meet, a hundred things. Can I mail that for you?”

  It was the letter to Fuqua on his desk. “Why, thanks.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Edel, for the time you’ve taken with me.”

  Well worth it, son, Mr. Edel thought after the door closed. There aren’t many like you. The paper was a little cold and cynical, but you’ll learn. Criticism’s heady stuff. Speaking quite objectively, you’ve done a piece thoroughly consistent with College Freshman English work, and that’s what you were supposed to do. If it helps get you into Colorado Springs, I’ve done my job.

  He turned in the paper the next day to the English Chairman’s office and the Assistant Chairman read it while he waited, mumbled “Seems quite competent” and entered a Completed on Fosters grade card. He let his eyes run over the other grades and whistled. “A beaver,” he said.

  “All rods out,” Mr. Edel smugly corrected him, and went to the door. A freshman girl who knew him, on messenger duty with the Principals Office, intercepted him in the corridor. The message: he would please report at once to the Principal; Mrs. Giovino would be advised to take such classes as he might be obliged to miss.

  “Classes?” he asked the girl, unbelievingly.

  She knew nothing.

  The Assistant Principal for Teaching Personnel received him at once, alone in his two-window office. He was a gray man named Sturgis whose pride was getting to the point. “Edel,” he asked, “are you sure you’re happy here?”

  Mr. Edel said, recognizing a sheet of typing on Sturgis’ desk: “May I ask how you got that letter of mine?”

  “Surely. Your young friend Foster turned it in.”

  “But why? Why?”

  “I shall quote: ‘I honestly do not believe that Foster has to lie his way through the personality profiles like the rest of us mortals.’ If you believed this, Edel, why did you counsel him to lie? Why did you show him this letter as proof that you lied yourself?”

  “Counsel him to lie? I never. I never.”

  His stammering was guilt; his sweating was guilt. Sturgis pitied him and shook his head. “He kept a little record,” Sturgis said. “Ha, a log’ he called it—he’s quite space-minded; did you know?”

  “I know. I demand a hearing, God damn it!”

  Sturgis was surprised. “Oh, you’ll get a hearing, Edel. We always give hearings; you know that.”

  “I know that. Can I get back to my classes now?”

  “Better not. If you’re not happy here . . .”

  Mr. Edel and Foster met that afternoon in the soda shop two blocks from the school. Mr. Edel had been waiting for him, and Foster saw the teacher staring at him from a booth. He excused himself politely from the Math Team crowd around him and joined Mr. Edel.

  “I feel I owe you an explanation, sir,” Foster said.

  “I agree. How could you— why—?”

  Foster said apologetically: “They like you to be a little ruthless at the Academy. This will stand out on my record as a sign of moral fiber. No, Mr. Edel, don’t try to hit me. It’ll make things look that much worse at the hearing. Goodby, sir.”

  He rejoined his handsome, quiet crowd at the counter; in a moment they were talking busily about elliptic functions and Fourier series. Mr. Edel slunk from the place knowing that there was only one court of appeal.

  3379 Seneca Avenue turned out to be a shocking slum tenement back of a municipal bus garage. The apartment, Mr. Edel thought, after his initial surprise, would be one of those “hideaways”— probably a whole floor run together, equipped with its own heating and air-conditioning, plumbing replaced . . . after all, would Foster Senior give a damn about a fancy address? Not that engineer.

  But the Foster apartment, or so said a card tacked to a rust-stiffened bell-pull, was only one of a dozen like it on the cabbage-reeking fifth floor. And the paunchy, unshaven, undershirted man who came to the door and stood reeling in the doorway said: “Yah, I’m Ole Foster. Yah, I got a boy in Nixon High. What the crazy kid do now? He’s crazy, that kid. Maybe I get a little drunk sometime, I got a little pension from I hurt my back driving the buses, people don’t appreciate, don’t realize. You wanna drink? What you say you come for?”

  “About your son . . .”

  “So I beat him up!” the man yelled, suddenly belligerent. “Ain’t I his father? He talks smart to me, I got a right to beat him some, ain’t I? People don’t appreciate . . .

  Old Foster lost interest and, mumbling, closed the door.

  Mr. Edel walked slowly down the stairs, not able to forgive, but feeling at least the beginnings of eventual ease from the knowledge of why he was being destroyed.

  Passion Pills

  THE ONLY DIGNIFIED THING about Richard Claxton Hanbury III was his name, and it served only to underscore the grotesqueness of his appearance. Richard at 23 years was of average height but stooped by a mild spinal curvature into shrimphood; his face thrust boldly forward from a negligible chin and a raked forehead toward what could have been an impressive corvine mask if he had only nose enough to sustain the effect, but Richard’s nose was an uncute button.

  He had, of course, brains. The Great Kidder does not vouchsafe spectacular ugliness to anybody who is unable to appreciate it fully.

  Richard knew perfectly well Bernard Shaw’s dictum that there is nobody so ugly or disagreeable that he or she cannot find a spouse, but it happened that a spouse was not what he wanted. What he wanted was Girls. The author admits that this was not very intelligent of Richard, but pleads that he was brainwashed by Twentieth Century Western Culture. A shy and unattractive man like he would in simpler times have found himself in a monastery doing at least no harm and not worrying about bosoms. In a more vicious day he would have found himself now and then in a Place of Ill Repute with nothing more to worry him than the possibility of contracting a ludicrous minor tribulation thought to be no worse than a bad cold. In more practical times he would have arranged with the parent (the parent then!) of a “female” to take said female off said parent’s hands and board bill in exchange for a cash settlement; the female would have called him “Mr. Hanbury” even after the marriage, and it would not have occurred to either of them to worry about love.

  The era in which Richard had been raised, however, was neither vicious, simple nor practical. The iconographer of Richard’s era was Mr. Jon Whitcomb, and the ritual illustration he has done for a thousand ritual magazine stories sums up the age. There is a yellow convertible with the top down, and there is a tanned blonde girl in the convertible. She is plainly about sixteen years old for her skin is that of an unblemished child, and she is plainly a new mother for her bosom is of a size functional only in a lactating woman; who has committed this crime upon her? Yet the text says she is a virgin! She smiles, and she is plainly an Innocent who has escaped from three-nurse custodial care in the first auto she found, for in that smile there is no trace of human intelligence but only the animal bliss of a bear who has found honey. Yet the text says she is a Ph.D. in astrophysics! She is plainly a narcissistic she-monster, for every hair of every wisp is in its calculated place and her garb is tight where tight and loose where loose to the predetermined thousandth of an inch at the cost of nightly toil, mad self-love and abnegation of all other activity. Yet the text calls her casual, vital, warm!

  She was the girl whom Richard wanted, poor fellow, and he wanted lots of her—blonde, red-haired, brunette, tanned and pale, playtime, daytime and gay-time, tall and rangy, cute and cuddly, the sophisticate who learns in the back pages that brains are not enough, the naïve thing who turns out in the back pages to have brains enough to save the day.

  My readers h
ave of course all seen through the pitiful sham, and will feel only amused compassion for Richard.

  Through grammar school and high school Richard met several dozen versions of The Girl, and for each one he carefully thought out the witty opening phrase of a campaign that would end only with her as helpless putty in his hands. It happened, however, that he never got to speak the carefully-composed phrase. He would choke up; or the girl would say “Well, dig you later” and breeze off wobbling tantalizingly; or a football player would roar up out of nowhere and slap him on the back; or the class bell would ring—always something.

  That was the way it went through college too, except for one evening when he got carried away and attempted near-assault on a field-hockey-playing version ofThe Girl. They patched him up at the infirmary and believed him when he said he had been hit by a runaway three-quarter-ton truck.

  After his bones had knit Richard said to himself: “The hell with this noise. Charm I do not have. Muscle too I lack. What I do possess, some knowledge of biochemistry, seems irrelevant to the problem. Or—or is it?” For Richard was majoring in biochemistry because Of an aptitude test he had taken, in the course of which his punch card had been put into a machine upside-down.

  Richard leaped to his feet and cried “Thalassa!” since his talent for languages was almost as slight as his aptitude for biochemistry. Then, more collectedly, he schemed: “The girl shall be mine through the science which I am learning, and specifically through those certain pills and fluids of which one has heard!”