Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He said uncomfortably, “Maybe a drink’s not such a bad idea. What do you say?”

  “I’d love it,” she sobbed. But then the sirens began to wail and they said, “Damn it,” and “Oh, dear”—respectively, she did and he did—and they took their bearings by the signs and made for the shelters. Under Lobby House was nothing like enough space, so the air-raid shelter was the interior parts of the 10th through 85th floors, away from the flying glass of the curtain walls but not too near the elevator shafts. It was not a bad shelter, actually. It was proof against any bomb that the world had ever known, up to, say, early 1943.

  There was plenty of room but not enough benches. Maggie and Denzer found a place on the floor where they could put their backs against a wall, and he allowed her to lean against his shoulder. She wasn’t such a bad kid, he thought sympathetically, especially as the perfume in her hair was pleasant in his nostrils. There wasn’t anything really wrong with Female Integration. Maggie wasn’t a nut. Take baseball. Why, that was the Integrationist’s major conquest, when women demanded and got equal representation on every major-league team in spite of the fact that they could not throw or run on competitive terms with men. They said that if all the teams had the same number of women it wouldn’t matter. And it hadn’t. And Integrationists were still crowing over the victory; and yet Maggie had refused to fall into the All-Star hysteria.

  A roar like an outboard motor in the crown of your hat shook the building; A.A. “carpet” cannon laying a sheet of sudden death for missiles across the sky above them. Denzer relaxed. His headache was almost gone. He inclined his head to rest his cheek against Maggie’s hair. Even with a hangover, it had Seen pleasant in the cab with his arms around her. He had been kind of looking forward to the return trip. If Denzer were indeed a nucleus, as in a way he was, he was beginning to feel a certain tugging of binding energy toward certain other nuclear particles.

  As soon as the noise stopped, he thought he would speak to her.

  The noise stopped. The voices of the men beside them bellowed into the sudden quiet: “—damned foolish idea of Therapeutic War was exploded ten years ago! And that’s what we’d be if your idiot Crockhouse was in—exploded!”

  And the man next to him: “At least Crockhouse wouldn’t have us sitting in these fool imitation shelters! He’d do something.”

  “Whadya think Braden wants, for God’s sake? Not these things. He’s right on the record for C.S.B.—”

  And then Maggie Frome, breathing fire, her head no longer resting on Denzer’s shoulder: “What the hell is so great about C.S.B.? Shelters, no shelters, can’t you get it through your head that if this keeps up we’re dead? Dear God above, deliver me from fools, baseball players and p-p-politicians!”

  Denzer tried to look as though he’d never met her; he was whitefaced. Round, yes, sweet-smelling, yes, warm—but how could he ever get used to her dirty talk?

  III

  IF Denzer was a nucleus and Walter Chase a neutron, what can we call the President of the United States? He played a part. Without him nothing could happen. Perhaps what he did was to shape the life of the neutron before fission happened; in that sense one could call him a “moderator.” This was an apt term for President Braden.

  On this bright June morning in Washington—not Arlington-Alex or the bedroom municipalities in Maryland but the little old Federal District itself—the President of the United States held what was still called a “press” conference. He was late. The cathode-tube “newspapermen” grumbled a little as Secret Service men frisked them, but it was habit. They were used to being frisked, ever since that fanatic Alaskan nationalist publisher emptied a .32 at then-President Hutzmeyer in ’83. And they were used to now-President Braden being late.

  They rose when President Braden came in. As usual, he protested in his pleasant adopted border-South accent: “Please, ladies, please, gentlemen, don’t bother—” So they sat down and smiled, and waited while Braden arranged some papers on his desk. He always did that. He never referred to them during the session, because he didn’t have to, but every week there was the minute or two of silence in the room while the President, his rimless glasses gleaming studiously, pursed his lips over the documents in their red, blue and cream-colored folders.

  He looked up and beamed. Unobtrusive camera eyes mounted flush with the walls of the conference room began to record. The elephantine Giuseppe von Bortoski, N.B.C. Washington bureau chief, incomparably senior correspondent, was privileged to lead off. He did: “Good morning, Mr. President. Do you have a statement for us today?”

  “Nothing prepared, Joseph. It’s been a quiet week, hasn’t it?”

  Von Bortoski said solemnly, “Not for Craffany,” and everybody roared. Von Bortoski waited out his laugh and said: “But seriously, Mr. President, is there any comment on the radar picket situation?”

  THE President paused, then looked faintly surprised. “I didn’t know there was a ‘situation,’ Joseph. Our radar picket vessels off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts have been pulled in approximately two hundred miles. They all have the new microradar; they don’t have to be so far out. This gives us a gratifying economy, since the closer we can pull them in the fewer ships we need to stick out there on picket duty. Is that what you wanted to know, Joseph?”

  “No, Mr. President. I was referring to Representative Simpson’s telecast yesterday. He alleged that the new radars haven’t been adequately field-tested. Said the move was premature and, well, dangerous.”

  The President paused, then looked faintly angry. “I seem to recall that Illinois Simpson. A Democrat.” Everybody nodded. “I am surprised that you are taking up our time, Joseph, with the wild charges that emanate with monotonous regularity from the Party of Treason.” Everyone looked at the stout N.B.C. man with annoyance. The President turned toward a young lady correspondent, paused, and said, “Miss Bannerman, do you have a question?”

  She did. What about the Civilian Shelters Bill?

  The President paused, grinned and said, “I’m for it.” He got a small laugh.

  “I mean, Mr. President, what is its status now? As the leader of your Party, is it going to go through?”

  The President paused longer than usual. Everyone in the room knew what he was waiting for, though it was a convention of the Press Conference to pretend he was answering off the cuff. At last the other end of the transprompter circuit got its signals cleared and the President said levelly: “As the leader of my Party, Miss Bannerman, I can say this thing is being hammered out. Slower than some of us would wish, true. But it will be done. It is the platform of my Party; on that platform I was elected in ’98; and I have not the reputation of going back on my pledges.” He inclined his head to an approving stir among the correspondents.

  Von Bortoski made a mental calculation. He decided that the press conference had supplied enough matter for his upcoming newscast and to hell with the rest of them. “Thank you, Mr. President,” he said. The other reporters swore under their breaths once more at the tyranny of the senior-correspondent rule, the President rose smiling and the armed guards stepped away from the doors.

  C.S.B., C.S.B., the President mediated. Some day he would have to ask a question himself and find out just what this C.S.B. was all about. No doubt the R&I desk that fed him answers or speeches via the transprompter could tell him. He promised himself he would get around to it first thing, say, Monday. Or wait, wasn’t Monday the first All-Star game?

  A swift conveyor belt whisked him from the Annex to the Old White House and an escalator to the Oval Room. His personal secretary ventured to say: “You made good time, Governor. There’s thirty-five minutes clear before the first appointment. How about a nap?”

  President Braden snapped: “I see General Standish has been talking to you again, Murray. Tell that quack when I want doctoring I’ll ask for it, and get me a drink.”

  The President, who liked to think he was a hard-riding, hard-drinking southern gentleman, although he had been a Ne
w Jersey accountant until he was thirty, sipped a glass of mineral water lightly tinted with whisky, decided he was refreshed and buzzed for the first appointment to start ahead of time.

  The first appointment was with Senator Horton of Indiana. While he was coming in the transprompter whispered into the President’s ear: “Call him David, not Dave. No wife. Ex-professor, for God’s sake. Watch him.”

  The President rose, smiling, and gripped Horton’s hand with warmth and the pressure of an old campaigner. “It’s a great pleasure, David. How’s Indiana shaping up for next year? Lose all your best seniors?”

  Senator Horton had a shock of gray hair, a mournful face and a surprisingly springy, lean body for a fifty-year-old ex-professor. He said abruptly: “I don’t follow the school’s football schedule. Mr. President, I want something.”

  “Unto the half of my kingdom,” Braden said gaily, attempting to throw him off balance.

  Horton gave him a meager smile. “I want you to bear down on the Civilian Shelters Bill. You are, after all, committed to it. It helped elect you. But twenty-two months have gone by and the bill is still in the Public Works Committee. I am on that committee, Mr. President, and it is my impression that I am the only member interested in seeing it enacted into law.”

  THE President said gravely, “That’s a mighty serious charge, David. One I cannot act on without the fullest—”

  “Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. President, but your time is valuable and there are some things you needn’t bother explaining to me.” Deeply affronted, the President stared at him. “Believe me when I say that I’ve come to you as a last resort. I get only bland evasions from Harkness. The Interior Department—” Harkness was the committee chair and he had been Braden’s personal campaign manager in the ’96 run. The President rose and said, “Excuse me, Senator, but I don’t permit people to speak about Jim Harkness like that in my presence.”

  Senator Horton distractedly ran his hands through his shock of hair. “I didn’t mean to offend you. God knows I don’t mean to offend anyone. Not even the Secretary of Interior, though if he thinks—No, I won’t say that. All I want is to get the C.S.B. on the floor and get the construction work under way. Mr. President, how long can all this go on?”

  The President remained standing, looked at his watch and said coolly, “All what, David?”

  “We are in the fifty-third year of the Political War, Mr. President. Somehow, by a succession of last-minute, hairs-breadth accidents, we have escaped nuclear bombing. It can’t go on forever! If the missiles came over the Pole today they’d annihilate this nation, and I don’t give one juicy damn that China and Russia would be annihilated in the next forty minutes—”

  He was trembling. The President’s earphone whispered tinnily: “Hospitalized one year; nervous breakdown. The guard-ports have him covered with sleepy guns, sir.” That was a relief; but what about this Horton? He was Doane’s personal choice, chairman of the National Committee; had Doane put a raving maniac in the Senate? The President remembered, from those young, county-committeeman days when he remembered things clearly, that something like that had happened before. It had been during the Party of Treason’s first years—a lunatic from the Northwest got elected to Congress and was mighty embarrassing until he committed suicide. The President, then a schoolboy, had chuckled with the rest of the nation over Congressman Zioncheck; but now he was not chuckling. It was his Administration and in the Senate. And a member of, God help him, his party.

  The President did not look toward the guard-ports and the riflemen behind them. He said quietly, “David, I want you to calm down. No pledges have been forgotten and no pledges are going to be violated. I’ll speak to Jim Harkness about the Shelter Bill today. That’s a promise.” “Thank you,” Horton said gratefully, and tried to smile. “I’ll hold you to that, sir. Good day.”

  THE President buzzed, not for his next appointment but to talk to his secretary. “Murray, get me Senator Harkness on the phone.” And to his chest microphone: “Transprompter desk? Get out of circuit. I’ll buzz you.” He heard the faint carrier tone in his ear die and the guard-ports click. For the first time since he stepped out of his shower that morning, the President was able to say a word that no one but himself could hear. He said it. It had only one syllable, but it improved his mood very much.

  Harkness’s voice was resonant and comforting. The President, sometimes nagged by a secret feeling that he was not very bright, knew damned well that he was brighter than Harkness.

  He said: “Jim, I’ve got to wondering about this C.S.B. that you’ve got in Public Works. The day’s young yet and I’ve had two questions about it. I know we campaigned on it—what is it, exactly?”

  Harkness said comfortingly: “It’s under control, Brad. That fellow Horton is trying to unbottle it, but we can keep him quiet. He doesn’t know the ropes.”

  “Know that, Jim. I just had him in here, wailing and mad. What’s it all about?”

  “Why,” said Senator Harkness, with something less of assurance in his voice, “it’s about building shelters, Brad. Against nuclear attack.” He pronounced it “nook-yoular,” in the approved White House fashion.

  “Not quite my point, Jim. I mean—” the President searched for what it was he did mean—“I mean, I can find out the facts and so on, but what’s got people so stirred up? Put it this way, Jim: What’s your philosophy about the Civilian Shelters Bill?”

  “Philosophy?” Harkness sounded vaguely scared. “Well, I would not know about philosophy, Brad. It’s an issue, C.S.B. is, and we’re very fortunate to have got it away from the Nationalists. C.S.B.’s very popular.” The President sighed inaudibly and relaxed; Senator Harkness was clearly about to launch into one of his famous explanations of things that never needed to be explained. “You see, Brad, an issue is lifeblood to a party. Look over the field today. What’s to argue about? Damn little. Everybody knows the Party of Treason is the Party of Treason. Everybody knows the Commies are crazy hoodlums, can’t trust ’em. Everybody knows atomic retaliation is the only sound military policy. There, at one sweep, you knock domestic, foreign and military policy off the board and haven’t anything left to play with except C.S.B.” He paused for breath, but before the President could try to get him back on the track of the question he was rushing on: “It’s a godsend, Brad! The Nationalists guessed wrong. They turned C.S.B. down in the name of economy. My opinion, they listened too much to the Defense Department people; naturally the generals didn’t want to admit they can’t intercept whatever the Commies throw at us, and naturally they want the money for interception instead of shelters. Well, that’s all right, too, but the people say the last word. We Middle-Roaders guessed right. We slapped C.S.B. in our platform, and we won. What else is there to say about it? Now, we’re not going to turn loose of an issue like that. Fools if we did. The strategy’s to milk it along, get it on the floor just before we adjourn for campaign trips and if a Nationalist filibuster kills it, so much the better. That saves it for us for next year! You know, you never get credit in this game for what you’ve done. Only for what you’re going to do. And, hell, Brad,” he crowed, suddenly exultant as a child who found a dime in the street, “this thing is good for years! There has to be a big conference committee with the House on financing C.S.B., we haven’t even set up liaison with Military Affairs. We’ve got four more years easy. How’s that sound, Brad, eh? Ride right in to re-election in Twenty Oh Oh, the first President of the twenty-first century!”

  “THANKS, Jim,” said the President, “I knew I could get a straight answer out of you.” It was the only way to stop him. Otherwise he might go clear on to the C.S.B. and its effect on the Integrationists, the C.S.B. and Labor, the C.S.B. and Colorado water diversion or the C.S.B. as viewed in the light of Craffany’s benching of Little Joe Fliederwick.

  And yet, pondered the President, he still didn’t know even the question, much less the answer. Why was C.S.B. a good issue? The missiles hadn’t hit in the past 53 years, w
hy should a voting population march to the booths and elect its leaders because of their Shelter philosophy now?

  Braden changed the subject. “What do you think of Horton, Jim?”

  He could always count on Harkness being frank, at least. “Don’t like him. A boat-rocker. You want my advice, Brad? You haven’t asked for it, but it’s get rid of him. Get the National Committee to put a little money in his district before the primaries.”

  “I see,” said the President, thanked his former campaign manager and hung up.

  He took a moment before buzzing Murray for the next appointment to sip his lightly tinted soda-water and close his eyes. Well, he’d wasted most of the thirty-five minutes he’d gained, and not even a nap to show for it. Maybe General Standish was right.

  Once when Braden was younger, before he was governor of New Jersey, before he was state senator, when he still lived in the old Rumford house on the beach and commuted to Jersey City every day—once he had been a member of the National Guard, what he considered his obligation as a resigned West Pointer. And they had killed two of their obligatory four-hours-a-month one month watching a documentary film on nuclear attack. The arrows marched over the Pole and the picture dissolved to a flight of missiles. The warheads exploded high in air. Then the film went to stock shots, beautifully selected selected and paced: the experimental houses searing and burning on Yucca Flats, the etched shadows of killed men on the walls of Hiroshima, a forest fire, a desert, empty, and the wind lifting sand-devils. The narration had told how such-and-such kind of construction would be burned within so-many miles of Ground Zero. It remarked that forest fires would blaze on every mountain and mentioned matter-of-factly that they wouldn’t go out until winter snow or spring rains, and of course then the ground would be bare and the topsoil would creep in mud down to the oceans. It estimated that then, even then, the year was no later than 1960, a full-scale attack would cost the world ninety per cent of its capacity to support life for at least a couple of centuries. Braden had never forgotten that movie.