Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He disappeared. Foolish, Kramer thought. Of course he would wait. Where else would he go?

  And then, surprisingly, General Grote did indeed walk in.

  “Hello, John,” he said mildly, and sat down beside the bed, looking at Kramer. “I was just getting in my car when they caught me.”

  He pulled out his pipe and stuffed it with tobacco, watching Kramer. Kramer could think of nothing to say. “They said you were all right. John. Are you?”

  “I . . . think so.” He watched the general light his pipe. “Funny,” he said. “I dreamed you were here a minute ago.”

  “No, it’s not so funny. I was. I brought you a present.”

  Kramer could not imagine anything more wildly improbable in the world than that the man whose combat operation he had betrayed should bring him a box of chocolates, bunch of flowers, light novel or whatever else was appropriate. But the general glanced at the table by Kramer’s bed.

  There was a liar, green-leather-covered box on it. “Open it up,” Grote invited.

  Kramer took out a glittering bit of metal depending from a three-barred ribbon. The gold medallion bore a rampant eagle and lettering he could not at first read.

  “It’s your D.S.M.,” Grote said helpfully. “You can pin it on if you like. I tried,” he said, “to make it a Medal of Honor. But they wouldn’t allow it, logically enough.”

  “I was expecting something different,” Kramer mumbled foolishly.

  Grote laughed. “We smashed them, boy,” he said gently. “That is, Mick did. He went straight across Polar Nine, down the Ob with one force and the Yenisei with another. General Clough’s got his forward command in Chebarkul now, loving every minute of it. Why, I was in Karpinsk myself last week—they let me get that far—of course, it’s a rest area. It was a brilliant, bloody, backbreaking show. Completely successful.”

  Kramer interrupted in sheer horror: “Polar Nine? But that was the cover—the Quaker cannon!”

  General Grote looked meditatively at his former aide. “John,” he said after a moment, “didn’t you ever wonder why the card-sorters pulled you out for my staff? A man who was sure to crack in the Blank Tanks, because he already had?”

  The room was very silent for a moment.

  “I’m sorry, John. Well, it worked—had to, you know; a lot of thought went into it. Novotny’s been relieved. Mick’s got his biggest victory, no matter what happens now; he was the man that led the invasion.”

  The room was silent again.

  Carefully Grote tapped out his pipe into a metal wastebasket. “You’re a valuable man, John. We traded a major general to get you back.”

  Silence.

  Grote sighed and stood up. “If it’s any consolation to you, you held out four full weeks in the Tanks. Good thing we’d made sure you had the diary with you. Otherwise our Quaker cannon would have been a bust.”

  He nodded good-by and was gone. He was a good officer, was General Grote. He would use a weapon in any way he had to, to win a fight; but if the weapon was destroyed, and had feelings, he would come around to bring it a medal afterwards.

  Kramer contemplated his Distinguished Service Medal for a while. Then he lay back and considered ringing for a Sunday Times, but fell asleep instead.

  Novotny was now a sour, angry corps commander away off on the Baltic periphery because of him; a million and a half NAAARMY troops were dug in in the heart of the enemy’s homeland; the greatest operation of the war was an unqualified success. But when the nurse came in that night, the Quaker cannon—the man who had discovered that the greatest service he could perform for his country was to betray it—was moaning in his sleep.

  THE END

  The World of Myrion Flowers

  At the time of his tragically premature death, C.M. Kombluth had a number of literary projects in progress. Among them were several short stories being done with his long-time occasional collaborator, Frederik Pohl . . . who has just recently found the time to put the finishing touches on this story of an able, powerful Negro doctor, who devoted more time to controlling people than to understanding them.

  THE WORLD OF MYRION FLOWERS, which was the world of the American Negro, was something like an idealized England and something like the real Renaissance. As it is in some versions of England, all the members of the upper class were at least friends of friends. Any Harlem businessman knew automatically who was the new top dog in the music department of Howard University a week after an upheaval of the faculty. And—as it was in the Florence of Cellini, there was room for versatile men. An American Negro could be a doctor-builder-educator-realist-politician. Myrion Flowers was. Boston-born in 1913 to a lawyer-realist-politician father and a glamorous show-biz mother, he worked hard, drew the lucky number and was permitted to enter the schools which led to an M.D. and a license to practice in the State of New York. Power vacuums occurred around him during the years that followed, and willy-nilly he filled them. A construction firm going to waste, needing a little capital and a little common sense—what could he do? He did it, and accepted its stock.

  The school board coming to him as a sound man to represent “Ah, your people”? He was a sound man. He served the board well. A trifling examination to pass for a real-estate license-trifling to him who had memorized a dozen textbooks in pathology, histology, anatomy and materia medica—why not? And if they would deem it such a favor if he spoke for the Fusion candidate, why should he not speak, and if they should later invite him to submit names to fill one dozen minor patronage jobs, why should he not give him the names of the needy persons he knew?

  Flowers was a cold, controlled man. He never married. In lieu of children he had proteges. These began as Negro kids from orphanages or hopelessly destitute families; he backed them through college and postgraduate schools as long as they worked to the limit of what he considered their abilities; at the first sign of a let-down he axed them. The mortality rate over the years was only about one nongraduate in four—Myrion Flowers was a better predictor of success than any college admissions committee. His successes numbered forty-two when one of them came to him with a brand-new Ph.D. in clinical psychology and made a request.

  The protege’s name was Ensal Brubacker. He took his place after dinner in the parlor of Dr. Flowers’s Brooklyn brownstone house along with many other suppliants. There was the old woman who wanted an extension of her mortgage and would get it; there was the overstocked appliance dealer who wanted to be bailed out and would not be; there was the mother whose boy had a habit and the husband whose wife was acting stranger and stranger every day; there was the landlord hounded by the building department; there was the cop who wanted a transfer; there was the candidate for the bar who wanted a powerful name as a reference; there was a store-front archbishop who wanted only to find out whether Dr. Flowers was right with God.

  Brubacker was admitted to the doctor’s study at 9:30. It was only the sixth time he had seen the man who had picked him from an orphanage and laid out some twenty thousand dollars for him since. He found him more withered, colder and quicker than ever.

  The doctor did not congratulate him. He said, “You’ve got your degree, Brubacker. If you’ve come to me for advice, I’d suggest that you avoid the academic life, especially in the Negro schools. I know what you should do. You may get nowhere, but I would like to see you try one of the Four-A advertising and public, relations firms, with a view to becoming a motivational research man. It’s time one Negro was working in the higher levels of Madison Avenue, I believe.”

  Brubacker listened respectfully, and when it was time for him to reply he said: “Dr. Flowers, I’m very grateful of course for everything you’ve done. I sincerely wish I could—Dr. Flowers, I want to do research. I sent you my dissertation, but that’s only the beginning—”

  Myrion Flowers turned to the right filing card in his mind and said icily, “The Correlation of Toposcopic Displays, Beta-Wave Amplitudes and Perception of Musical Chord Progressions in 1,107 Unselected Adolescents. V
ery well. You now have your sandwich board with ‘P,’ ‘H’ and ‘D’ painted on it, fore and aft. I expect that you will now proceed to the job for which you have been trained.”

  “Yes, sir. I’d like to show you a—”

  “I do not,” said Dr. Flowers, “want you to be a beloved old George Washington Carver humbly bending over his reports and test tubes. Academic research is of no immediate importance.”

  “No, sir. I—”

  “The power centers of America,” said Dr. Flowers, “are government, where our friend Mr. Wilkins is ably operating, and the executive levels of the large corporations, where I am attempting to achieve what is necessary. I want you to be an executive in a large corporation, Brubacker. You have been trained for that purpose. It is now perhaps barely possible for you to obtain a foothold. It is inconceivable to me that you will not make the effort, neither for me or for your people.”

  Brubacker looked at him in misery, and at last put his face into his hands. His shoulders shook.

  Dr. Flowers said scornfully: “I take it you are declining to make that effort. Good-bye, Brubacker. I do not want to see you again.”

  The young man stumbled from the room, carrying a large pigskin valise which he had not been permitted to open.

  As he had expected to overwhelm his benefactor with what he had accomplished he had made no plans for this situation. He could think only of returning to the university he had just left where, perhaps, before his little money ran out, he might obtain a grant. There was not really much hope of that. He had filed no proposals and sought no advice.

  It did not help his mood when the overnight coach to Chicago was filling up in Grand Central. He was among the first and took a window seat. Thereafter the empty place beside him was spotted gladly by luggage-burdened matrons, Ivy-League-clad youngsters, harrumphing paper-box salesmen—gladly spotted—and then uncomfortably skimmed past when they discovered that to occupy it they would have to sit next to the gorilla-rapist-illiterate-tapdancer-mugger-menace who happened to be Dr. Ensal Brubacker.

  But he was spared loneliness at the very last. The fellow who did drop delightedly into the seat beside him as the train began to move was One of His Own Kind. That is, he was unwashed, unlettered, a quarter drunk on liquor that had never known a tax stamp, and agonizingly high-spirited. He spoke such pure Harlem jive that Brubacker could not understand one word in twenty.

  But politeness and a terror of appearing superior forced Brubacker to accept, at 125th Street, a choking swallow from the flat half-pint bottle his seamate carried. And both of these things, plus an unsupportable sense of something lost, caused him to accept his seatmate’s later offer of more paralyzing pleasures. In ten months Brubacker was dead, in Lexington, Kentucky, of pneumonia incurred while kicking the heroin habit, leaving behind him a badly puzzled staff doctor. “They’ll say everything in withdrawal,” he confided to his wife, “but I wonder how this one ever heard the word ‘cryptesthesia.’ ”

  It was about a month after that that Myrion Flowers received the package containing Brubacker’s effects. There had been no one else to send them to.

  He was shaken, that controlled man. He had seen many folk-gods of his people go the same route, but they were fighters, entertainers or revivalists; he had not expected it of a young, brilliant university graduate. For that reason he did not immediately throw the junk away, but mused over it for some minutes. His next visitor found him with a silvery-coppery sort of helmet in his hands.

  Flowers’s next visitor was a former Corporation Counsel to the City of New York. By attending Dr. Powell’s church and having Dr. Flowers take care of his health he kept a well-placed foot in both the principal political camps of the city. He no longer much needed political support, but Flowers had pulled him through one coronary and he was too old to change doctors. “What have you got there, Myrion?” he asked.

  Flowers looked up and said precisely, “If I can believe the notes of the man who made it, it is a receiver and amplifier for beta-wave oscillations.”

  The Corporation Counsel groaned, “God preserve me from the medical mind. What’s that in English?” But he was surprised to see the expression of wondering awe that came onto Flowers’s withered face.

  “It reads thoughts,” Flowers whispered.

  The Corporation Counsel at once clutched his chest, but found no pain. He complained testily, “You’re joking.”

  “I don’t think I am, Wilmot. The man who constructed this device had all the appropriate dignities—summa cum laude, Dean’s List, interviewed by mail by nearly thirty prospective employers. Before they found out the color of his skin, of course. No,” he said reflectively, “I don’t think I’m joking, but there’s one way to find out.”

  He lifted the helmet toward his head. The Corporation counsel cried out, “Damn you, Myrion, don’t do that!”

  Flowers paused. “Are you afraid I’ll read your mind and learn your secrets?”

  “At my time of life? When you’re my doctor? No, Myrion, but you ought to know I have a bad heart. I don’t want you electrocuted in front of my eyes. Besides, what the devil does a Negro want with a machine that will tell him what people are thinking? Isn’t guessing bad enough for you?”

  Myrion Flowers chose to ignore the latter part of what his patient had said. “I don’t expect it to electrocute me, and I don’t expect this will affect your heart, Wilmot. In any event, I don’t propose to be wondering about this thing for any length of time, I don’t want to try it when I’m alone and there’s no one else here.” He plopped the steel bowl on his head. It fit badly and was very heavy. An extension cord hung from it, and without pausing Flowers plugged it into a wall socket by his chair.

  The helmet whined faintly and Flowers leaped to his feet. He screamed.

  The Corporation Counsel moved rapidly enough to make himself gasp. He snatched the helmet from Flowers’s head, caught him by the shoulders and lowered him into his chair again. “You all right?” he growled.

  Flowers shuddered epileptically and then controlled himself. “Thank you, Wilmot. I hope you haven’t damaged Dr. Brubacker’s device.” And then suddenly, “It hit me all at once. It hurt!”

  He breathed sharply and sat up.

  From one of his desk drawers he took a physicians’ sample bottle of pills and swallowed one without water. “Everyone was screaming at once,” he said. He started to replace the pills, then saw the Corporation Counsel holding his chest and mutely offered him one^

  Then he seemed startled.

  He looked into his visitor’s eyes. “I can still hear you.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a false angina, I think. But take the pill. But—” he passed a hand over his eyes—“You thought I was electrocuted, and you wondered how to straighten out my last bill. It’s a fair bill, Wilmot. I didn’t overcharge you.” Flowers opened his eyes very wide and said, “The newsboy on the corner cheated me out of my change. He—” He swallowed and said, “The cops in the squad car just turning off Fulton Street don’t like my having white patients. One of them is thinking about running in a girl that came here.” He sobbed, “It didn’t stop, Wilmot.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Myrion, lie down.”

  “It didn’t stop. It’s not like a radio. You can’t turn it off. Now I can hear—everybody! Every mind for miles around is pouring into my head WHAT IT THINKS ABOUT ME—ABOUT ME—ABOUT US!”

  Ensal Brubacker, who had been a clinical psychologist and not a radio engineer, had not intended his helmet to endure the strain of continuous operation nor had he thought to provide circuit-breakers. It had been meant to operate for a few moments at most, enough to reroute a few neurons, open a blocked path or two. One of its parts overheated. Another took too much load as a result, and in a moment the thing was afire. It blew the fuses and the room was in darkness. The elderly ex-Corporation Counsel managed to get the fire out, and then picked up the phone. Shouting to be heard over the screaming of Myrion Flowers, he summoned
a Kings County ambulance. They knew Flowers’s name. The ambulance was there in nine minutes.

  Flowers died some weeks later in the hospital—not Kings County, but he did not know the difference. He had been under massive sedation for almost a month until it became a physiological necessity to taper him off; and as soon as he was alert enough to do so he contrived to hang himself in his room.

  His funeral was a state occasion. The crowds were enormous and there was much weeping. The Corporation Counsel was one of those permitted to cast a clod of earth upon the bronze casket, but he did not weep.

  No one had ever figured out what the destroyed instrument was supposed to have been, and Wilmot did not tell. There are inventions and inventions, he thought, and reading minds is a job for white men. If even for white men. In the world of Myrion Flowers many seeds might sturdily grow, but some ripe fruits would mature into poison.

  No doubt the machine might have broken any mind, listening in on every thought that concerned one. It was maddening and dizzying, and the man who wore the helmet would be harmed in any world; but only in the world of Myrion Flowers would he be hated to death.

  A Hint of Henbane

  I USED TO THINK, not that it bothered me, that my wife systematically lied to me about her family, but one by one I met them and found it was all true. There was Uncle H______, for one. He earned his unprintable nickname on the day in 1937 when he said to the bank examiner, “Oh, h______!”, walked right down to the depot and got on a westbound train, never to return. He sounded like a wishfulfillment myth, but two summers ago we drove through Colorado and looked him up. Uncle H._____ was doing fine; brown as a berry, and gave us bear ham out of his own smokehouse for lunch. And, just the way the story went, his shanty was papered with color comics from the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

  Uncle Edgar, the salesman, was real too. Sarah claimed that in 1942 he had sold a Wisconsin town on turning over its municipal building to him so he could start a war plant. Well, last year I visited him in his executive suite, which used to be the mayor’s office. He had converted to roller skates. Whenever anyone hinted to him that he might start paying rent or taxes or something he would murmur quietly that he was thinking of moving plant and payroll to Puerto Rico, and then there would be no more hinting for a while.