Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Still, Chase meditated while nodding, smiling and handshaking, thirty years as an Engineering Officer might not be so bad. As it was one of the alternatives open to himself—that was what C.S.B. was all about—he allowed his mind to drift over the prospects. It wasn’t like the bad old days of fighting. A flat and rigid policy of atomic retaliation had been U. S. military doctrine for fifty-three years, and backing it up was a large, well-trained U. S. military establishment of career men. And the regulations said career. The only way out short of thirty-year retirement was with a can tied to your tail and a taint to your name. He dismissed that thirty-year dead end with light contempt, as he had before.

  The air-raid warning sirens began to howl their undulating hysteria.

  Chase sighed and glanced at his watch. Not too bad. He should still be able to make his plane. Everyone around him was saying things like, “Ah, damn it!” or “Oh, dear,” or “Jeez!” But they were all dutifully following the arrows and the “S” signs that dotted the campus.

  Chase trailed along. He was kind of annoyed, but nothing could really spoil his day. The first shelter he came to was full up. The freshman raid warden stood at the door—Chase had been a raid warden himself three years before—chanting: “Basement filled to capacity, folks. Please proceed to Chemistry building. Don’t block the exit, folks. Basement here filled—”

  BECAUSE of the extra crowd caused by the graduation the Chemistry building basement was filled, too, but Chase got into the Administration building and sat down to wait. Like everybody else. Women fussed about their dresses—they always had, in every air raid drill he had taken part in, say, four a week for fifty-two weeks of each year for the nearly twenty years since he had been old enough to toddle alongside his late mother and father. Men grumbled about missing appointments. They always had. But for the most part the battery-fed air-raid lights gleamed equably on them all, the warden fussed with the air conditioner and the younger folk smooched in the corners.

  It wasn’t a bad shelter, Walter Chase thought. The Law School basement was a mess—too high a pH in the mortar mix, and the aggregate showing hygroscopic tendencies because of some clown not watching his rock crusher, so the walls were cracked and damp. Chemistry’s had been poured in a freeze. Well, naturally it began to sinter and flake. This was better; trust the Chancellor to make sure his own nest was downy! Of course, in a raid none of them would be worth a hoot; but there weren’t to be any real raids. Ever.

  A jet plane’s ripping path sounded overhead.

  Evidently this was going to be a full-dress affair, at least regional in scope. They didn’t throw simulated manned-bomber attacks for a purely local do. Walter frowned. It had suddenly occurred to him that with the airtransport flight lanes screwed up by military fighters on simulated missions everything within a thousand miles might be rerouted into stack patterns. What the devil would that do to his plane’s departure time?

  Then he smiled forebearingly. He was, in a way, pleased to be annoyed. It meant he was entering into the adult world of appointments and passages. They said that when a raid drill began to be a damn interruption instead of a welcome break from classes and a chance to smooch, then, brother, you were growing up. He guessed he was growing up.

  “Goddam foolishness,” growled the man who sat next to Chase on the bench, as though it were a personal attack. More jets shredded sound overhead and he glared at Chase. Walter inventoried his English shoes, seal ring and pale cigar and at once engaged him in conversation. The man was some graduate’s father; they had got separated in the raid drill, and Pop was sore as a tramped bunion. The whole drill thing was damned childishness, didn’t Walter see that? And vindictive damned childishness when they chose to throw one on graduation day of a major university. If only Crockhouse had been elected in ’96 instead of Braden, with his packed ballots in Indiana and Puerto Rico!

  HERE Walter Chase’s interest cooled, because Pop sounded like a politician, revealed himself to be a Nationalist and thus was out of power. But there was no escaping the bench. What Pop objected bitterly to was the multiple levels of expense. Here the drill was knocking men out of production, but the damn Middle-Road Congress said they had to be paid anyhow. And if the Defense Department was making it a full-scale simulated raid, did Walter know what that meant? That meant that there went thirty or forty Nineveh Abies at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars apiece, and was that enough? No. Then they sent up four or five Tyres at ninety thousand apiece to knock down the Ninevehs. Did that make sense? He paused to glare at Walter Chase.

  Walter said, “Well, that’s the Cold War for you. Say, who d’you like in the All-Star—” He didn’t get to finish the sentence.

  “L.A.” snapped Pop, without losing a beat. “Get the damn monkey-business over with, that’s what I say. I’m a sneak-puncher and I’m proud of it. If we’d put our man in the White House instead of that psalm-singing Braden there wouldn’t be any Moscow or Peking or Calcutta by now and we wouldn’t be sitting here on our butts!”

  Somebody clawed through from the bench in front; with horror, Chase recognized old man Baggett. But Douglasina’s Daddy did not recognize him. Flushed with rage and politics he had eyes only for the sneak-punch advocate. “You’re right it’s monkey-business, fatmouth!” he snarled. “No thanks to you and your Crockhouse we aren’t dead in this cellar instead of safe and secure! President Braden is a hundred per cent pledged to the C.S.B., God bless it, and—”

  The rest of his sentence and Sneak-Punch’s angry reply were drowned out by a further flight of jets overhead, and then the wham-wham-wham of interceptor missiles blowing simulated attackers out of the sky.

  Somehow, heaven knew how, Walter Chase managed to sneak away, inching through the packed rows of benches. As soon as the All Clear siren toots began he was up and out, ignoring the freshman warden’s puppylike yaps that they should remain in their seats until the front benches had been emptied—

  Routine. It was all strictly routine.

  Out on the campus, Chase headed for the airport in earnest, and was delighted to find that his flight was still on time. How lucky he was, he thought, with more pride than gratitude. “What are you, sir?” asked the robot baggage-checker, and he said, “Washington,” with pleasure. He was on his way. He was headed for Washington, where Dr. Hines of The Cement Research and Development Institute would assign him to his job, doubtless the first rung of a dizzying climb to wealth and fame. He was a young man on his way. Or so he thought. He did not know that he was only a neutron ambling toward events.

  II

  ARTURO Denzer, in the same sense, was a nucleus. He knew no more about it than Walter Chase.

  Denzer woke to the rays of a rising sun and the snarl of his wake-up clock. He took a vitamin capsule, an aspirin tablet, a thyroid injection; a mildly euphoric jolt of racemic amphetamine sulphate; caffeine via three cups of black coffee with sucaryl; and nicotine via a chain of non-filtering filter-tip cigarettes. He then left his apartment for the offices of Nature’s Way Magazine, which he edited.

  June’s blossom was in the air, and so was the tingle of the All-Star Game Number One. The elevator operator said to him respectfully, “Who d’ya like in the All-Star game, Mr. Denzer?” Denzer turned the operator’s conversation circuit off with a hand-wave. He didn’t feel like talking to a robot at least until the aspirin began to work.

  Absent-mindedly he waved a cab to him and climbed in. Only after it took off did he notice, to his dismay, that he had picked a Black-and-White fleet hack. They were salty and picturesque—and couldn’t be turned off. The damned thing would probably call him “Mac.”

  “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” the cab asked genially, and Denzer winced. Trapped, he drummed his fingers on the armrest and stared at the Jefferson Memorial in its sea of amusement rides and hot-dog stands. “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” it asked again, genially and relentlessly. It would go on asking until he answered.

  “Yanks,” Denzer grunted. Next time he’d
watch what he was doing and get a sleek, black Rippington Livery with a respectful BBC accent.

  “Them bums?” groaned the cab derisively. “Watcha think Craffany’s up to?”

  Craffany was the Yankee manager. Denzer knew that he had benched three of his star players over the last weekend—indeed, it was impossible to avoid knowing it. Denzer struck out wildly: “Saving them for the All-Star, I guess.”

  The cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess, Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled Hockins and Waller so it’d look like he was saving ’em for the All-Star. Ya notice Fliederwick was 0 for 11 in the first game with Navy?”

  Denzer gritted his teeth and slumped down in the seat. After a moment the cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess is Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled . . .” It went through it twice more before Denzer and his hangover could stand no more.

  “I hate baseball,” he said distinctly.

  The cab said at once, “Well, it’s a free country. Say, ya see Braden’s speech on the C.S.B. last night?”

  “I did.”

  “He really gave it to them, right? You got to watch those traitors. Course, like Crockhouse says, where we going to get the money?”

  “Print it, I imagine,” snarled Denzer.

  “Figgers don’t lie. We already got a gross national debt of $87,912.02 per person, you know that? Tack on the cost of the Civilian Shelters and whaddya got?”

  Denzer’s headache was becoming cataclysmic. He rubbed his temples feverishly.

  “Figgers don’t lie. We already got a gross national . . .”

  Desperate situations require desperate measures. “I hate p-politics too,” he said, stuttering a little. Normally he didn’t like smutty talk.

  The cab broke off and growled: “Watch ya language, Mac. This is a respectable fleet.”

  THE cab corkscrewed down to a landing in North Arlington-Alex and said, “Here y’are, Mac.” Denzer paid it and stepped from the windy terrace of the Press House onto a crowded westbound corridor. He hoped in a way that the cab wouldn’t turn him in to a gossip columnist. In another way he didn’t care.

  Around him buzzed the noise of the All-Star and the C.S.B. “. . . Craffany . . . $87,912.02, and at least $6,175.50 for Shelters . . . Foxy Framish and Little Joe Fliederwick . . . well, this is next year . . . nah, you sneak-punch ’em a couple thousand missiles over the Pole and . . . needs a year in the minors.”

  “Hello, Denzer,” someone said. It was Maggie Frome, his assistant.

  “Hello, Maggie,” he said, and added automatically: “Who do you like in the All-Star game?”

  In a low, ferocious voice she muttered: “You can take the All-Star game, tie it up in a b-b-b-brassiere and dump it in a Civilian Shelter. I am sick of the subject. Both subjects.”

  He flushed at her language and protested: “Really, Maggie!” “Sorry,” she grunted, sounding as though she didn’t mean it. He contrasted her surly intransigence with his own reasoned remarks to the cab and tolerantly shook his head. Of course, he could have been taken the wrong way—

  He began to worry.

  They stepped off together at the Nature’s Way offices. Sales & Promotion was paralyzed. Instead of rows of talkers at rows of desks, phoning prospects out of city directories and high-pressuring them into subscriptions, the department was curdled into little knots of people cheerfully squabbling about the C.S.B. and the All-Stars. Denzer sighed and led the girl on into Transmission. The gang should have been tuning up the works, ready to shoot the next issue into seven million home facsimile receivers. Instead, the gang was talking All-Stars and C.S.B. It was the same in Typography, the same in Layout, the same in Editorial.

  The door closed behind them, isolating their twin office from the babble. Blessed silence. “Maggie,” he said, “I have a headache. Will you please work on the final paste-ups and cutting for me? There isn’t anything that should give you any trouble.”

  “Okay, Denzer,” she said, and retreated to her half of the office with the magazine dummy. Denzer felt a momentary pang of conscience. The issue was way overset and cutting it was a stinker of a job to pass on to Maggie Frome. Still, that was what you had assistants for, wasn’t it?

  HE studied her, covertly, as she bent over the dummy. She was a nice-looking girl, even if she was a hangover from the administration of President Danton and his Century of the Common Woman. Maggie’s mother had been something of an integrationist leader in Sandusky, Ohio, and had flocked to Washington as one mote in Danton’s crackpot horde, bringing her sub-teenage daughter Maggie. No doubt there had been a father, but Maggie never mentioned him. The mother had died in a car crash that looked like suicide after Danton lost all fifty-four states in his bid for re-election, but by then Maggie was a pert teen-ager who moved in with cousins in Arlington-Alex and she stayed on. Must just like Washington, Denzer thought. Not because of Female Integration, though. Danton’s Century of the Common Woman had lasted just four years.

  He winced a little as he remembered her coarseness of speech. She was round and brown-haired. You couldn’t have everything.

  Denzer leaned back and shut his eyes. The hubbub outside the office was just barely audible for a moment—some red-hot argument over the Gottshalk Committee’s Shelter Report or Fliederwick’s R.B.I. had swelled briefly to the shrieking stage—and then died away again. Heretically he wondered what the point was in getting excited over baseball or the building or non-building of air-raid shelters capable of housing every American all the time. One was as remote from reality as the other.

  “Sorry, Denzer.”

  He sat up, banging his knee on his desk.

  “Lousy staff work, I’m afraid. Here’s the Aztec Cocawine piece and no lab verification on the test results.” She was waving red-crayoned galleys in his face.

  He looked at the scrawling red question-mark over the neat columns of type with distaste. Nature’s Way promised its seven million subscribers that it would not sell them anything that would kill them; or, at least, that if it did kill them nobody would be able to hang it on the product directly. At substantial expense, they maintained a facility to prove this point. It was called The Nature’s Way National Impartial Research Foundation. “So call the lab,” he said.

  “No good, Denzer. Front-office memo last month. Lab verifications must be in writing with notary’s seal on hand before the issue goes to bed.”

  “Cripes,” he protested, “that means somebody’s got to go clear over to Lobby House.” He did not meet her eye. Going over to Lobby House was a worthwhile break in the day’s routine; the free snack-bar and free bar-bar the lobbies maintained was up to the best expense-account standards, and everyone enjoyed talking to the kooks in the lab. They were so odd.

  “I’ll go if you want, Denzer,” she said, startling him into looking at her.

  “But the issue—”

  “Did most of it last night, Denzer. The Aztec story is all that’s left.”

  “We’ll both go,” he said, rising. She had earned it; he needed a bromo and a shot of B-l vitagunk in the Lobby House snack-bar; and since there would be two of them in the cab he had a ruse for cutting out the cab’s talk about All-Stars and the C.S.B.

  THE ruse was this: As soon as the cab took off he flung his arms around her and bore her back against the arm rest.

  The cab chuckled and winked at them with its rear-view lens, as it was programmed to do. They discussed proofreading, the vacation sked and the choice of lead commercials for the next issue of Nature’s Way in soft whispers into each other’s ears all the way to Lobby House, while the cab winked and chuckled at them every fifteen seconds.

  The kooks on the 93d floor were under the care of a sort of half-breed race of semi-kooks. These were science majors who had minored in journalism . . . or in marrying rich . . . and thus wandered into press agentry for scientific concerns. As liaison men between Nature’s Way and the test-tube manipulators the semi-kooks occupied an un
certain middle ground. It sometimes made them belligerent. Denzer and the girl were let in to see the Director of Bennington’s Division, a Dr. Bennington, and Denzer said: “We came for the Aztec Cocawine certification.”

  Dr. Bennington boomed: “Damn right! Coming right up! Say, who’s gonna take it in the Game?” He thumped a button on his desk and in a moment a tall, stooped youth with a proudly beaked nose swept in and threw a document on his desk. “Thanks, Valendora. Lessee here, um, yeah. Says it’s harmless to the nerves, ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, all signed and stamped. Anything else today,” Arturo? Gland extract, fake a heroin prescription, shot of Scotch?”

  The beaked youth said loftily: “Our findings are set forth precisely, Dr. Bennington. The fluid contains an alkaloid which appreciably eroded the myelin sheaths of the autonomic nerve trunks.”

  Denzer blanched, but the semikook administrator agreed carelessly, “Right, that’s what I said. It’s that word ‘appreciably.’ Anything less than ‘markedly,’ we write it down as negative.” He slipped it in an envelope that was already marked Confidential Findings, Aztec Wine of Coca Corporation, Sponsor, and sailed it across to Denzer. “Well, what about C.S.B., boy? They gonna get us dug in before it’s too late?” He made them promise to stop in at the snack-bar or bar-bar before leaving the building, then offered them a drink out of his private stock. They refused, of course. That was just his way of saying good-by. It was the only way he knew to end a conversation.

  WITH the certification in his pocket and the issue locked up, Denzer began to feel as though he might live, especially if he made it to the B-1 vitagunk dispenser in the snack-bar. He took Maggie Frome by the arm and was astonished to feel her shaking.

  “Sorry, Denzer. I’m not crying, really. If somebody’s going to sell crazy-making dope to the public, why shouldn’t it be you and me? We’re no better than anybody else, d-d-damn it!”