Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

“Mr. President,” cried Horton, “I want to thank you. There’s no doubt your prompt action has saved your country, sir. I imagine you’ve been filled in on the, ah, incident.”

  Well, he had been, the President thought, but by Senator Harkness, and maybe the time had come when Jim Harkness’ view of world affairs needed a little broadening. “Suppose you tell me about it,” he said.

  Horton looked faintly perplexed, but said promptly: “It was basically an accident. Two men, working independently, came up with reports, strictly unofficial, but important. One was a graduate student’s thesis on shelter construction; happens the boy was looking for a job, the Cement Research & Development Institute recommended him to me, he was on his way to see me when the thing happened. That’s how I became involved in it. The other fellow’s a lab worker, at least as far as earning a living’s concerned, but he’s a mathematician some-thing-or-other and was working out a problem with his lab’s computers. The problem: If the Reds are going to sneak-punch us, when will they do it? The answer: today. While we’re all off base, with the All-Star Game. In the old days they’d maybe pick a presidential election to put one over, just like Hitler used to pick the long weekends. Now all they need is a couple of hours when everybody’s looking the other way, you see. All-Star Game’s a natural.”

  The President said mildly, “I can see that without using a computer, Senator.”

  “Certainly, sir. But this boy proved it. Like to meet him, by the way? I’ve got the lot of them, right outside.”

  IN for a penny, in for a pound, thought the President, motioning them in. There were three men and a girl, rather young, rather excited. Senator Horton rattled off introductions. The President gathered the other two had been involved in the security leak that had occurred on the reports.

  “But I’ve talked to them,” cried Senator Horton, “and I can’t believe there’s a grain of malice in all of them. And what they say, Mr. President, requires immediate action.”

  “I was under the impression I’d taken immediate action,” said the President. “You asked me to ground all civilian air traffic so the missile-watchers could have a clear field; I did. You asked me to put all our defense aircraft airborne; I did. You asked for a Condition Red defense posture and you got it, all but the official announcement.”

  “Yes, Mr. President. The immediate danger may have been averted, yes. But what about the future?”

  “I see,” said the President, and paused for a second. Oddly, there was no voice from the prompter in his ear to suggest his next words. He frowned.

  “I see,” he said again, louder. The tiny voice in his ear said at last:

  “Well, sir, uh—” It cleared its throat. “Sir, there seems to be some confusion here. Perhaps you could ask the Senator to continue to brief you.”

  “Well—” said the President.

  “David,” whispered the prompter.

  “—David, let’s get our thinking organized. Why don’t you continue to fill me in?”

  “Gladly, sir! As you know, I’m Shelters all the way. Always have been. But what this young man here says has shaken me to the core. Mr. Venezuela says—” Valendora grinned sullenly at the rug— “that at this very moment we would be in atoms if it hadn’t been for his timely publication of the statistical breakdown of our vulnerability. He’s even a little sore about it, Mr. President.”

  “Sore?”

  The senator grinned. “We spoiled his prediction,” he explained. “Of course, we saved our own lives . . . The Other Side has computers too; they must have assessed our national preoccupation with baseball. Beyond doubt they intended to strike. Only the commotion his article caused not only in our own country but, through their embassies, on the Other Side—plus of course your immediate reaction when I telephoned you asking for a Red Alert, kept the missiles from coming down today, sir. I’m certain of it. And this other young fellow, Mr. Chase—” Walter Chase bowed his head modestly “brought out a lot of data in his term paper, or whatever it was. Seemed like nonsense, sir, so we checked it. Everything he said is not only fact but old stuff; it’s been published hundreds of times. Not a word of new material in it.” Chase glared. “That’s why we’ve never built deep shelters. They simply won’t stand up against massive attack—and cannot be made to stand up. It’s too late for shelters. In building them we’re falling into the oldest strategic trap of human warfare: We’re fighting yesterday’s war today.”

  President Braden experienced a sinking feeling when the ear-prompter said only, and doubtfully, “Ask him to go on, sir.”

  “Go on, si—Go on, David.”

  “Why,” said the senator, astonished, “that’s all there is, Mr. President. The rest is up to you.”

  PRESIDENT Braden remembered vaguely, as a youth, stories about the administration of President—who was it? Truman, or somebody around then. They said Truman had a sign on his desk that read: The buck stops here.

  His own desk, the President noticed for the first time, was mirror-smooth. It held no such sign. Apart from the framed picture of his late wife there was nothing.

  Yet the principle still held, remorselessly, no matter how long he had been able to postpone its application. He was the last man in the chain. There was no one to whom the President could pass the buck. If it was time for the nation to pick itself up, turn itself around and head off in a new direction, he was the only one who could order it to march.

  He thought about the alternatives. Say these fellows were right. Say the shelters couldn’t keep the nation going in the event of all-out attack. Say the present alert, so incredibly costly in money and men, could not be maintained around the clock for any length of time, which it surely could not. Say the sneak-punchers were right . . .

  But no, thought the President somberly, that avenue had been explored and the end was disaster. You could never get all the opposing missile bases, not while some were under the sea and some were touring the highways of the Siberian tundra on trucks and some were orbital and some were airborne. And it only took a handful of survivors to kill you.

  So what was left?

  Here and now, everybody was waiting for him to speak—even the little voice in his ear.

  The President pushed his chair back and put his feet up on the desk. “You know,” he said, wiggling his toes in their Argyle socks, “I once went to school too. True,” he said, not apologizing, “it was West Point. That’s a good school too, you know. I remember writing a term paper in one of the sociology courses . . . or was it history? No matter. I still recall what I said in that paper. I said wasn’t it astonishing that things always got worse before they got better. Take monarchy, I said. It built up and up, grew more complex, more useless, more removed from government, in any real sense, until we come to things like England’s Wars of the Roses and France’s Sun King and the Czar and the Mikado—until most of the business of the government was in the person of the king, instead of the other way around. Then—bang! No more monarchy.”

  “Mr. President,” whispered the voice in his ear, “you have an appointment with the Mongolian Legate.”

  “Oh, shut up, you,” said the President amiably, shocking his prompter and confusing his guests. “Sorry, not you,” he apologized. “My, uh, secretary. Tells me that the Chinese representatives want to talk about our ‘unprecedented and unpeace-loving acts’—more likely, to see what they can find out.” He picked the plug out of his ear and dropped it in a desk drawer. “They’ll wait. Now, take slavery,” he went on. “It too became more institutionalized—and ritualized—until the horse was riding the man; until the South here was existing on slaves, it was even existing for slaves. The biggest single item of wealth in the thirteen Confederate states was slaves. The biggest single line of business, other than agriculture, was slavery, dealing and breeding. Things get big and formal, you see, just before they pop and blow away. Well, I wrote all this up. I turned it in, real proud, expecting, I don’t know, maybe an honorary LL.D. At least a compliment, certainly
. . . It came back and the instructor had scrawled one word across the top of it: Toynbee. So I read up on Toynbee’s books. After, of course, I got over being oppressed at the instructor’s injustice to me. He was right. Toynbee described the whole thing long before I did.

  “But, you know, I didn’t know that at the time. I thought it up myself, as if Toynbee had never lived,” said the President with some pride. He beamed at them.

  Senator Horton was standing with open mouth. He glanced quickly at the others in the room, but they had nothing but puzzle-men to return to him. He said, “Mr. President, I don’t understand. You mean—”

  “Mean? I mean what’s happened to us,” said the President testily. “We’ve had our obsessive period. Now we move on to something else. And, Senator, Congress is going to have to help move; and, I’m warning you, you’re going to help me move it.”

  WHEN they left the White House it was late afternoon. The lilacs that bordered the walk were in full, fragrant bloom. Denzer inhaled deeply and squeezed the hand of Maggie Frome.

  Passing the sentry box at the end of the drive, they heard a voice from a portable radio inside. It was screaming:

  “It’s going . . . it’s going . . . it’s GONE, folks! Craffany has pulled one out of the fire again! And that wraps it up for him, as Hockins sends one way out over center-field and into the stands . . .” The guard looked out, rosily beaming, and waved them on. He would have waved them on if they had worn beards and carried ticking bombs; he was a Craffany rooter from way back, and now in an ecstasy of delight.

  “Craffany did it, then,” said Walter Chase sagely. “I thought when he benched Hockins and moved Little Joe Fliederwick to—”

  “Oh, shut up, Chase,” said Denzer. “Maggie, I’m buying drinks. You want to come along, Venezuela?”

  “I think not, Mr. Denzer,” said the research man. “I’m late now. Statist. Analysis Trans, is expecting me.”

  “Chase?” Politeness forced that one out of him. But Chase shook his head.

  “I just remembered an old friend here in town,” said Chase. He had had time for some quick thinking. If the nation was going over to a non-shelter philosophy—if cave-dwelling was at an end and a dynamic new program was going to start—maybe a cement degree wasn’t going to be the passport to security and fame he had imagined. Walter Chase had always had a keen eye for the handwriting on the wall. “A young lady friend,” he winked. “Name of Douglasina Baggett. Perhaps you’ve heard of her father; he’s quite an important man in H.E. & W.”

  The neutron, properly paced, had struck the nucleus; and the spreading chain was propagating rapidly through their world. What was it going to be from now on? They did not know; does a fissioned atom know what elements it will change into? It must change; and so it changes. “I guess we did something, eh?” said Denzer. “But . . . I don’t know. If it hadn’t been us, I expect it would have been someone else. Something had to give.” For it doesn’t matter which nucleus fissions first. Once the mass is critical the chain reaction begins; it is as simple as that.

  “Let’s get that drink, Denzer,” said Maggie Frome.

  They flagged a cab, and all the way out to Arlington-Alex it chuckled at them as they kissed. The cab spared them its canned thoughts, and that was as they wished it. But that was not why they were in each other’s arms.

  1970

  Thirteen O’Clock

  (1970 combined version)

  1

  PETER PACKER excitedly dialed his slide rule, peering through a lens as one of the minutely scored lines met with another. He rose from his knees, brushing dust from the neat crease of his serge trousers. No doubt of it—the house had a secret attic room. Peter didn’t know anything about sliding panels or hidden buttons; in the most direct way imaginable he lifted the axe he had brought and crunched it into the wall.

  On his third blow he holed through. The rush of air from the darkness was cool and sweet. Smart old boy, his grandfather, thought Peter. Direct ventilation all over the house—even in a false compartment. He chopped away heartily, the hollow strokes ringing through the empty attic and down the stairs.

  He could have walked through the hole erect when he was satisfied with his labors; instead he cautiously turned a flashlight inside the space. The beam was invisible; all dust had long since settled. Peter grunted. The floor seemed to be sound. He tested it with one foot, half in, half out of the hidden chamber. It held.

  The young man stepped through easily, turning the flash on walls and floor. The room was not large, but it was cluttered with a miscellany of objects—chests, furniture, knickknacks and whatnots. Peter opened a chest, wondering about pirate gold. But there was no gold, for the thing was full to the lid with chiffons in delicate hues. A faint fragrance of musk filled the air; sachets long since packed away were not entirely gone.

  Funny thing to hide away, thought Peter. But Grandfather Packer had been a funny man—having this house built to his own very sound plans, waiting always on the Braintree docks for the China and India clippers and what rare cargo they might have brought. Chiffons! Peter poked around in the box for a moment, then closed the lid again. There were others.

  He turned the beam of the light on a wall lined with shelves. Pots of old workmanship—spices and preserves, probably. And a clock. Peter stared at the clock. It was about two by two by three feet—an unusual and awkward size. The workmanship was plain, the case of crudely finished wood. And yet there was something about it—his eyes widened as he realized what it was. The dial showed thirteen hours!

  Between the flat figures XII and I there was another—an equally flat XIII. What sort of freak this was the young man did not know. Vaguely he conjectured on prayer time, egg boiling and all the other practical applications of chronometry. But nothing he could dredge up from his well-stored mind would square with this freak. He set the flash on a shelf and hefted the clock in his arms, lifting it easily.

  This, he thought, would bear looking into. Putting the light in his pocket, he carried the clock down the stairs to his second-floor bedroom. It looked strangely incongruous there, set on a draftman’s table hung with rules and T squares. Determinedly, Peter began to pry open the back with a chisel, when it glided smoothly open without tooling. There was better construction in the old timepiece than he had realized. The little hinges were still firm and in working order. He peered into the works and ticked his nail against one of the chimes. It sounded sweet and clear.

  The young man took up a pair of pliers. Lord knew where the key was, he thought, as he began to wind the clock. Slowly it got under way, ticking loudly. The thing had stopped at 12:59. That would be nearly one o’clock on any other timepiece; on this, the minute hand crept slowly toward the enigmatic XIII.

  Peter wound the striking mechanism carefully, and watched as a little whir sounded. The minute hand met the roman numeral, and with a click the chimes sounded out in an eerie, jangling discord. Peter thought with sudden confusion that all was not as well with the clock as he had thought. The chimes grew louder, filling the little bedroom with their clang.

  Horrified, the young man put his hands on the clock as though he could stop off the noise. As he shook the old cabinet, the peals redoubled until they battered against the eardrums of the draftsman, ringing in his skull and resounding from the walls, making instruments dance and rattle on the drawing board. Peter drew back, his hands to his ears. He was filled with nausea, his eyes bleared and smarting. As the terrible clock thundered out its din without end, he reached the door feebly, the room swaying and spinning about him, nothing real but the suddenly glowing clock dial and the clang and thunder of its chimes.

  As he opened the door it ceased, and he closed his eyes in relief as his nausea passed. He looked up again, and his eyes widened with horror. Though it was noon outside, a night wind fanned his face, and though he was on the second-story landing of his Grandfather Packer’s house, dark trees rose about him, stretching as far as the eye could see.

  Fo
r three hours—by his wristwatch’s luminous dial—Peter had wandered, aimless and horrified, waiting for dawn. The aura of strangeness that hung over the forest in which he walked was bearable; it was the gnawing suspicion that he had gone mad that shook him to his very bones. The trees were no ordinary things, of that he was sure. For he had sat under one forest giant and leaned back against its bole only to rise with a cry of terror. He had felt its pulse beat slowly and regularly under the bark. After that he did not dare to rest, but he was a young and normal male. Whether he would or not, he found himself blundering into ditches and stones from sheer exhaustion. Finally, sprawled on the ground, he slept.

  Peter awoke stiff and sore from his nap on the bare ground, but he felt better for it. The sun was high in the heavens; he saw that it was about eleven o’clock. Remembering his terrors of the night, he nearly laughed at himself. This was a forest, and there were any number of sane explanations of how he had got here. An attack of amnesia lasting about twelve hours would be one cause. And there were probably others less disturbing.

  He thought the country might be Maine. God knew how many trains or busses he had taken since he lost his memory in his bedroom. Beginning to whistle, he strode through the woods. Things were different in the daytime.

  There was a sign ahead! He sprinted up to its base. The thing was curiously large, painted in red characters on a great slab of wood, posted on a dead tree some twelve feet from the ground. The sign said: ELLIL. He rolled the name over in his mind and decided that he didn’t recognize it. But he couldn’t be far from a town or house.

  Ahead of him sounded a thunderous grunt.

  Bears! he thought in a panic. They had been his childhood bogies; he had been frightened of them ever since. But it was no bear, he saw. He almost wished it was. For the thing that was veering on him was a frightful composite of every monster of mythology, menacing him with saber-like claws and teeth and gusts of flame from its ravening throat. It stood only about as high as the man, and its legs were long, but to the engineer it seemed ideally styled for destruction.