Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Indestructible or not, it was about ninety per cent destroyed. What I pulled out was a handle and part of a neck. The rest drizzled off into a substance very like the stuff I had shaved with. Only that was soap, which one expects to dissolve from time to time. High-density polythene one does not.

  The fruit flies were buzzing around me, and everything was very confusing. I was hardly aware that the front doorbell had rung until I noticed that Shirl had gone to answer it.

  What made me fully aware of this was Mr. Bermingham’s triumphant roar: “Thought I’d find you here. Dupoir! And who are these people—your confederates?”

  Bermingham had no terrors for me. I was past that point. I said, “Hello, Mr. Bermingham. This confederate is my wife, the littler one here is my son. Shirl, Butchie—Mr. Bermingham. Mr. Bermingham’s the one who is going to take away our house.”

  Shirl said politely, “You must be tired, Mr. Bermingham. I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

  GARIGOLLI

  to Home Base

  Chief, I admit it, we’ve excreted this one out beyond redemption. Don’t bother to reply to this. Just write us off.

  I could say that it wasn’t entirely the fault of the crew members who stayed behind in the Host’s domicile. They thought they had figured out a way to meet Directive Two. They modified some organisms—didn’t even use bacteria, just an enzyme that hydrated polythene into what they had every reason to believe was a standard food substance, since the Host had been observed to ingest it with some frequency. There is no wrong-doing there, Chief. Alcohols are standard foods for many organic beings, as you know. And a gift of food has been held to satisfy the second Directive. And add to that they they were half out of their plexuses with empathy deprivation.

  Nevertheless I admit the gift failed in a fairly basic way, since it seems to have damaged artifacts the Hosts hold valuable.

  So I accept the responsibility, Chief, Wipe this expedition off the records. We’ve failed, and we’ll never see our home breeding-slings again.

  Please notify our descendants and former co-parents and, if you can, try to let them think we died heroically, won’t you?

  Garigolli.

  SHIRL has defeated the wrath of far more, complex creatures than Mr. Bermingham by offering them coffee—me, for instance. While she got him the clean cup and the spoon and the milk out of the pitcher in the refrigerator, I had time to think.

  Mr. Horgan would be interested in what had happened to our plastics eco-bin. Not only Mr. Horgan. The Fourteenth Floor would be interested. The ecology freaks themselves would be interested, and maybe would forget about liking buzzards better than babies long enough to say a good word for International Plastics Co.

  I mean, this was significant. It was big, by which I mean it wasn’t little. It was a sort of whole new horizon for plastics. The thing about plastics, as everyone knows, is that once you convert them into trash they stay trash. Bury a maple syrup jug in your back yard and five thousand years from now some descendant operating a radar-controlled peony-planter from his back porch will grub it up as shiny as new. But the gunk in our eco-bin was making these plastics, or at least the polythene parts of them, bio-degradable.

  What was the gunk? I had no idea. Some random chemical combination between Butchie’s oatmeal and his vitamins? I didn’t care. It was there, and it worked. If we could isolate the stuff, I had no doubt that the world-famous scientists who gave us the plastic storm window and the popup eco-bin could duplicate it. And if we could duplicate it we could sell it to hard-pressed garbagemen all over the world. The Fourteenth Floor would be very pleased.

  With me to think was ever to act.

  I rinsed out one of Butchie’s baby-food jars in the sink, scraped some of the stickiest parts of the melting plastic into it and capped it tightly. I couldn’t wait to get it to the office.

  Mr. Bermingham was staring at me with his mouth open. “Good Lord,” he muttered, “playing with filth at his age. What psychic damage we wreak with bad early toilettraining.”

  I had lost interest in Mr. Bermingham. I stood up and told him, “I’ve got to go to work. I’d be happy to walk you as far as the bus.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere, Dupoir! Came here to talk to you. Going to do it, too. Behavior was absolutely inexcusable, and I demand—Say, Dupoir, you don’t have a drink anywhere about the house, do you?”

  “More coffee, Mr. Bermingham?” Shirl said politely. “I’m afraid we don’t have anything stronger to offer you. We don’t keep alcoholic beverages here, or at least not very long. Mr. Dupoir drinks them.”

  “Thought so,” snarled Bermingham. “Recognize a drunk when I see one: shifty eyes, irrational behavior, duplicity—oh, the duplicity! Got all the signs.”

  “Oh, he’s not like my brother, really,” Shirl said thoughtfully. “My husband doesn’t go out breaking into liquor stores when he runs out, you know. But I don’t drink, and Butchie doesn’t drink, and so about all we ever have in the house is some cans of beer, and there aren’t any of those now.”

  Bermingham looked at her with angry disbelief. “You too! I smell it,” he said. “You going to tell me I don’t know what good old ethyl alcohol smells like?”

  “That’s the bin, Mr. Bermingham. It’s a terrible mess, I know.” “Funny place to keep the creature,” he muttered to himself, dropping to his knees. He dipped a finger into the drippings, smelled it, tasted it and nodded. “Alcohol, all right. Add a few congeners, couple drops of food coloring, and you’ve got the finest Chivas Regal a bellboy ever sold you out of a bottle with the tax stamp broken.” He stood up and glared at me. “What’s the matter with you, Dupoir? You not only don’t pay your honest debts, you don’t want to pay the bartenders either?”

  I said, “It’s more or less an accident.”

  “Accident?”

  Then illumination struck. “Accident you should find us like this,” I corrected. “You see, it’s a secret new process. We’re not ready to announce it yet. Making alcohol out of old plastic scraps.”

  He questioned Shirl with his eyes. Getting her consent, he poured some of Butchie’s baby-food orange juice into a glass, scooped in some of the drippings from the bin, closed his eyes and tasted. “Mmm,” he said judiciously. “Sell it for vodka just the way it stands.” “Glad to have an expert opinion,” I said. “We think there’s millions in it.”

  He took another taste. “Plastic scraps, you say? Listen, Dupoir. Think we can clear all this up in no time. That fool Klaw, I’ve told him over and over, ask politely, don’t make trouble for people. But no, he’s got that crazy lawyer’s drive for revenge. Apologize for him, old boy, I really do apologize for him. Now look,” he said, putting down the glass to rub his hands. “You’ll need help in putting this process on the market. Business acumen, you know? Wise counsel from man of experience. Like me. And capital. Can help you there. I’m loaded.” Shirl put in, “Then what do you want our house for?”

  “House? My dear Mrs. Dupoir,” cried Mr. Bermingham, laughing heartily, “I’m not going to take your house! Your husband and I will work out the details in no time. Let me have a little more of that delightful orange juice and we can talk some business.”

  GARIGOLLI

  to Home Base

  Joy, joy Chief!

  Cancel all I said. We’ve met Directive Two, the Host is happy, and we’re on our way Home!

  Warm up the breeding slings, there’s going to be a hot time in the old hammocks tonight.

  Garigolli.

  STRAIGHT as the flight of Ung-Glitch, the soaring vulture, that is the code of the jungle. I was straight with Mr. Bermingham. I didn’t cheat him. I made a handshake deal with him over the ruins of our Eco-Bin, and honored it when we got to his lawyers. I traded him 40% of the beverage rights to the stuff that came out of our bin, and he wrote off that little matter of $14,752.03.

  Of course, the beverage rights turned out not to be worth all that much, because the stuff in the bin was organic and alive
and capable of reproduction, and it did indeed reproduce itself enthusiastically. Six months later you could buy a starter drop of it for a quarter on any street corner, and what that has done to the vintners of the world you know as well as I do. But Bermingham came out ahead. He divided his 40% interest into forty parts and sold them for $500 each to the alumni of his drunk tank. And Mr. Horgan—

  Ah, Mr. Horgan.

  Mr. Horgan was perched on my doorframe like Ung-Glitch awaiting a delivery of cadavers for dinner when I arrived that morning, bearing my little glass jar before me like the waiting line in an obstetrician’s office. “You’re late, Dupoir,” he pointed out. “Troubles me, that does. Do you remember Metcalf? Tall, blonde girl that used to work in Accounts Receivable? Never could get in on time, and—”

  “Mr. Horgan,” I said, “look.” And I unscrewed my baby-food jar and dumped the contents on an unpopped pop-up Eco-Bin. It took him a while to see what was happening, but once he saw he was so impressed he forgot to roar.

  And, yes, the Fourteenth Floor was very pleased.

  There wasn’t any big money in it. We couldn’t sell the stuff, because it was so happy to give itself away to everyone in the world. But it meant a promotion and a raise. Not big. But not really little, either. And, as Mr. Horgan said, “I like the idea of helping to eliminate all the litter that devastates the landscape. It makes me feel, I don’t know, like part of something clean and natural.”

  And so we got along happily as anything—happily, anyway, until the time Shirl bought the merry-go-round.

  Mute Inglorious Tam

  On a late Saturday afternoon in summer, just before the ringing of Angelus, Tam of the Wealdway straightened from the furrows in his plowed strip of Oldfield and stretched his cracking joints.

  He was a small and dark man, of almost pure Saxon blood. Properly speaking, his name was only Tam. There was no need for further identification. He would never go a mile from a neighbor who had known him from birth. But sometimes he called himself by a surname—it was one of many small conceits that complicated his proper and straightforward life—and he would be soundly whipped for it if his Norman masters ever caught him at it.

  He had been breaking clods in the field for fifteen hours, interrupted only by the ringing of the canonical hours from the squat, tiny church, and a mouthful of bread and soft cheese at noon. It was not easy for him to stand straight. It was also not particularly wise. A man could lose his strip for poor tilth, and Tam had come close enough, often enough. But there were times when the thoughts that chased themselves around his head made him forget the steady chop of the wooden hoe, and he would stand entranced, staring toward Lymeford Castle, or the river, or toward nothing at all, while he invented fanciful encounters and impossible prosperings. It was another of Tam’s conceits, and a most dangerous one, if it were known. The least it might get him was a cuff from a man-at-arms. The most was a particularly unpleasing death.

  Since Salisbury, in Sussex, was flat ground, its great houses were not perched dramatically on crags, like the keeps of robber barons along the Rhine or the grim fortresses of the Scottish lairds. They were the least they could be to do the job they had to do, in an age which had not yet imagined the palace or the cathedral.

  In the year 1303 Lymeford Castle was a dingy pile of stone. It housed Sir and Lady Robert Bowen (sometimes they spelled it Bohun, or Beauhun, or Beauhaunt) and their household servants and men-at-arms in very great discomfort. It did not seem so to them particularly. They had before them the housing of their Saxon subjects to show what misery could be. The castle was intended to guard a bridge across the Lyme River: a key point on the high road from Portsmouth to London. It did this most effectively. William of Normandy, who had taken England by storm a couple of centuries earlier, did not mean for himself or his descendants to be taken in the same way on another day. So Lymeford Castle had been awarded to Sir Robert’s great-great-great-grandfather on the condition that he defend it and thereby defend London as well against invasion on that particular route from the sea.

  That first Bowen had owned more than stones. A castle must be fed. The castellan and his lady, their househould servants and their armed men could not be expected to till the field and milk the cows. The founder of Sir Robert’s line had solved the problem of feeding the castle by rounding up a hundred of the defeated Saxon soldiers, clamping iron rings around their necks and setting them to work at the great task of clearing the untidy woods which surrounded the castle. After cleaning and plowing from sunup to sunset the slaves were free to gather twigs and mud, with which they made themselves kennels to sleep in. And in that first year, to celebrate the harvest and to insure a continuing supply of slaves, the castellan led his men-at-arms on a raid into Salisbury town itself. They drove back to Lymeford, with whips, about a hundred Saxon girls and women. After taking their pick, they gave the rest to the slaves, and the chaplain read a single perfunctory marriage service over the filthy, ring-necked slaves and the weeping Salisbury women. Since the male slaves happened to be from Northumbria, while the women were Sussex bred, they could not understand each other’s dialects. It did not matter. The huts were enlarged, and next midsummer there was another crop, this time of babies.

  The passage of two centuries had changed things remarkably little. A Bowen (or Beauhaunt) still guarded the Portsmouth-London high road. He still took pride in his Norman blood. Saxons still tilled the soil for him and if they no longer had the iron collar, or the name of slaves, they still would dangle from the gallows in the castle courtyard for any of a very large number of possible offenses against his authority. At Runnymede, many years before, King John had signed the Great Charter conferring some sort of rule of law to protect his barons against arbitrary acts, but no one had thought of extending those rights to the serfs. They could die for almost anything or for nothing at all: for trying to quit their master’s soil for greener fields; for failing to deliver to the castle their bushels of grain, as well as their choicest lambs, calves and girl-children; for daring in any way to flout the divine law that made one kind of man ruler and another kind ruled. It was this offense to which Tam was prone, and one day, as his father had told him the day before he died, it would cost him the price that no man can afford to pay, though all do.

  Though Tam had never even heard of the Magna Carta, he sometimes thought that a world might sometime come to be in which a man like himself might own the things he owned as a matter of right and not because a man with a sword had not decided to take them from him. Take Alys his wife. He did not mind in any real sense that the men-at-arms had bedded her before he had. She was none the worse for it in any way that Tam could measure; but he had slept badly that night, pondering why it was that no one needed to consult him about the woman the priest had sworn to him that day, and whether it might not be more—more—he grappled for a word (“fair” did not occur to him) and caught at “right”—more right that he should say whose pleasures his property served.

  Mostly he thought of sweeter and more fanciful things. When the falconers were by, he sometimes stole a look at the hawk stooping on a pigeon and thought that a man might fly if only he had the wings and the wit to move them. Pressed into driving the castellan’s crops into the granary, he swore at the dumb oxen and imagined a cart that could turn its wheels by itself. If the Lyme in flood could carry a tree bigger than a house faster than a man could run, why could that power not pull a plow? Why did a man have to plant five kernels of corn to see one come up? Why could not all five come up and make him five times as fat?

  He even looked at the village that was his home, and wondered why it had to be so poor, so filthy and so small; and that thought had hardly occurred even to Sir Robert himself.

  In the year 1303 Lymeford looked like this:

  The Lyme River, crossed by the new stone structure that was the fourth Lymeford Bridge, ran south to the English Channel. Its west bank was overgrown with the old English oak forest. Its right bank was the edge of the great
clearing. Lymeford Castle, hard by the bridge, covered the road that curved northeast to London. For the length of the clearing, the road was not only the king’s high-way, it was also the Lymeford village street. At a discreet distance from the castle it began to be edged with huts, larger or smaller as their tenants were rich or fecund. The road widened a bit halfway to the edge of the clearing, and there on its right side sat the village church.

  The church was made of stone, but that was about all you could say for it. All the wealth it owned it had to draw from the village, and there was not much wealth there to draw. Still, silver pennies had to be sent regularly to the bishop, who in turn would send them on to Rome. The parish priest of Lymeford was an Italian who had never seen the bishop, to whom it had never occurred to try to speak the language and who had been awarded the living of Lymeford by a cardinal who was likewise Italian and likewise could not have described its location within fifty miles. There was nothing unusual in that, and the Italian collected the silver pennies while his largely Norman, but Saxon speaking, locum tenens scraped along on donations of beer, dried fish and the odd occasional calf. He was a dour man who would have been a dreadful one if he had had a field of action that was larger than Lymeford.

  Across the street from the church was The Green, a cheerless trampled field where the compulsory archery practice and pike drill were undergone by every physically able male of Lymeford, each four weeks, except in the worst of winter and when plowing or harvest was larger in Sir Robert’s mind than the defense of his castle. His serfs would fight when he told them to, and he would squander their lives with the joy a man feels in exercising the one extravagance he permits himself on occasion. But that was only at need, and the fields and the crops were forever. He saw to the crops with some considerable skill. A three-field system prevailed in Lymeford. There was Oldfield, east of the road, and the first land brought under cultivation by the slaves two hundred years ago. There was Newfield, straddling the road and marked off from Oldfield by a path into the woods called the Wealdway, running southeast from The Green into the oak forest at the edge of the clearing. There was Fallowfield, last to be cleared and planted, which for the most part lay south of the road and the castle. From the left side of the road to the river, The Mead spread its green acres. The Mead was held in common by all the villagers. Any man might turn his cows or sheep to graze on it anywhere. The farmed fields, however, were divided into long, narrow strips, each held by a villager who would defend it with his fists or his sickle against the encroachment of a single inch. In the year 1303 Oldfield and Newfield were under cultivation, and Fallowfield was being rested. Next year it would be Newfield and Fallowfield farmed, and Oldfield would rest.