“Oh!” She turned pink and buttoned her pajamas hastily. “No wonder you were staring, but I’m so excited. I’ve been longing for you so. Come on in, darling. I’ll get something on and make us some breakfast.”
“Wait a minute!”
He shook his head, scowling at her, annoyed at the outsiders. They had somehow cheated him. He wanted Carmen, but not this way. He wanted to fight Gabe to take her. He wanted her to go on hating him, so that he would have to beat and frighten her. Old blubber-belly had been too clever and done too much.
“Where’s Gabe?” He reached in his pocket to grip the cold gun. “I gotta see Gabe.”
“Don’t worry, darling.” Her tawny shoulders shrugged becomingly. “Gabriel isn’t here. He won’t be here any more. You see, dear, the state cops talked to me a lot while they were here digging up the evidence to clear you. It came over me then that you had always been the one I loved. When I told Gabriel, he moved out. He’s living down at the hotel now, and we’re getting a divorce right away, so you don’t have to worry about him.”
“I gotta see him, anyhow.”
“Don’t be mean about it, darling.” Her pajamas were coming open again, but she didn’t seem to care. “Come on in, and let’s forget about Gabriel. He has been so good about everything, and I know he won’t make us any trouble.”
“I’ll make the trouble.” He seized her bare arm. “Come along.”
“Darling, don’t!” She hung back, squirming. “You’re hurting me!”
He made her shut up, and dragged her out of the house. She wanted to go back for a robe, but he threw her into the car and climbed over her to the wheel. He waited for her to try to get out, so that he could slap her down, but she only whimpered for a Kleenex and sat there sniffling.
Old balloon-belly had ruined everything.
He tried angrily to clash the gears, as he started off, as if that would damage the outsiders, but the Hydramatic transmission wouldn’t clash, and anyhow the saucer ship was probably somewhere out beyond the moon by now.
“There’s Gabriel,” Carmen sobbed. “There, crossing the street, going to work. Don’t hurt him, please!”
He gunned the car and veered across the pavement to run him down, but Carmen screamed and twisted at the wheel. Gabriel managed to scramble out of the way. He stopped on the sidewalk, hatless and breathless but grinning stupidly.
“Sorry, mister. Guess I wasn’t looking—” Then Gabriel saw who he was. “Why, Casey! We’ve been expecting you back. Seems you’re the lucky one, after all.” Gabriel had started toward the car, but he stopped when he saw the gun. His voice went shrill as a child’s. “What are you doing?”
“Just gut-shooting another dirty greaser, that’s all.”
“Darling!” Carmen snatched at the gun. “Don’t—” He slapped her down.
“Don’t strike her!” Gabriel stood gripping the door of the car with both hands. He looked sick. His twitching face was bright with sweat, and he was gasping hoarsely for his breath. He was staring at the gun, his wide eyes dull with horror.
“Stop me!”
He smashed the flat of the gun into Carmen’s face, and grinned at the way Gabriel flinched when she screamed.
This was more the way he wanted everything to be. “Just try and stop me!”
“I—I won’t fight you,” Gabriel croaked faintly. “After all, we’re not animals. We’re civilized humans. I know Carmen loves you. I’m stepping out of the way. But you can’t make me fight—”
The gun stopped Gabriel.
Queerly, though, he didn’t fall. He just stood there like some kind of rundown machine, with his stiffened hands clutching the side of the car.
“Die, damn you!”
Casey James shot again; he kept on shooting till the gun was empty. The bullets hammered into the body, but somehow it wouldn’t fall. He leaned to look at the wounds, at the broken metal beneath the simulated flesh of the face and the hot yellow hydraulic fluid running out of the belly, and recoiled from what he saw, shaking his head, shuddering like any trapped and frightened beast.
“That—thing!”
With a wild burst of animal ferocity, he hurled the gun into what was left of its plastic face. It toppled stiffly backward then, and something jangled faintly inside when it struck the pavement.
“It—it ain’t human!”
“But it was an excellent replica.” The other thing, the one he had thought was Carmen, gathered itself up from the bottom of the car, speaking gently to him with what now seemed queerly like the voice of old barrel-belly. “We had taken a great deal of trouble to make you the happiest one of your breed.” It looked at him sadly with, Carmen’s limpid dark eyes. “If you had only kept your word.”
“Don’t—” He cowered back from it, shivering. “Don’t k-k-kill me!”
“We never kill,” it murmured. “You need never be afraid of that.”
While he sat trembling, it climbed out of the car and picked up the ruined thing that had looked like Gabe and carried it easily away toward the Oasis garage.
Now he knew that this place was only a copy of Las Verdades, somewhere not on Earth. When he looked up at the blue crystal sky, he knew that it was only some kind of screen. He felt the millions of strange eyes beyond it, watching him like some queer monster in a cage.
He tried to run away.
He gunned the Cadillac back across the acequia bridge and drove wildly back the way he had come in, on the Alburquerque highway. A dozen miles out, an imitation construction crewman tried to flag him down, pointing at a sign that said the road was closed for repairs. He whipped around the barriers and drove the pitching car on across the imitation desert until he crashed into the bars.
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* * * *
C. M. KORNBLUTH
Much of the better science fiction of the last fifteen years has a certain quality of sameness about it—a puzzling phenomenon, until you look closely and realize that a very large proportion of it was written by one man named C. (for Cyril) M. (for kicks) Kornbluth. Just to list the current catalogue of Kornbluthiana would take more space than is presently available; of novels alone there are eight already in print (three in collaboration—like The Space Merchants—the other five solo—including Takeoff and The Syndic), with three more currently in the works. And the short stories are numberless, including most recently the present poignant and provocative piece called-
The Remorseful
It does not matter when it happened. This is because he was alone and time had ceased to have any meaning for him. At first he had searched the rubble for other survivors, which kept him busy for a couple of years. Then he wandered across the continent in great, vague quarterings, but the plane one day would not take off and he knew he would never find anybody anyway. He was by then in his forties, and a kind of sexual delirium overcame him. He searched out and pored over pictures of women, preferring leggy, high-breasted types. They haunted his dreams; he brooded incessantly with closed eyes, tears leaking from them and running down his filthy, bearded face. One day that phase ended for no reason and he took up his wanderings again, on foot. North in the summer, south in the winter on weed-grown U.S. 1, with the haversack of pork and beans on his shoulders, usually talking as he trudged, sometimes singing.
* * * *
It does not matter when it happened. This is because the Visitors were eternal; endless time stretched before them and behind, which mentions only two of the infinities of infinities that their “lives” included. Precisely when they arrived at a particular planetary system was to them the most trivial of irrelevancies. Eternity was theirs; eventually they would have arrived at all of them.
They had won eternity in the only practical way: by outnumbering it. Each of the Visitors was a billion lives as you are a billion lives—the billion lives, that is, of your cells. But your cells have made the mistake of specializing. Some of them can only contract and relax. Some can only strain urea from your blood. Some can on
ly load, carry and unload oxygen. Some can only transmit minute electrical pulses and others can only manufacture chemicals in a desperate attempt to keep the impossible Rube Goldberg mechanism that you are from breaking down. They never succeed and you always do. Perhaps before you break down some of your specialized cells unite with somebody else’s specialized cells and grow into another impossible, doomed contraption.
The Visitors were more sensibly arranged. Their billion lives were not cells but small, unspecialized, insect-like creatures linked by an electromagnetic field subtler than the coarse grapplings that hold you together. Each of the billion creatures that made up a Visitor could live and carry tiny weights, could manipulate tiny power tools, could carry in its small round black head enough brain cells to feed, mate, breed and work—and a few million more brain cells that were pooled into the field which made up the Visitor’s consciousness.
When one of the insects died there were no rites; it was matter-of-factly pulled to pieces and eaten by its neighboring insects while it was still fresh. It mattered no more to the Visitor than the growing of your hair does to you, and the growing of your hair is accomplished only by the deaths of countless cells.
* * * *
“Maybe on Mars!” he shouted as he trudged. The haversack jolted a shoulder blade and he arranged a strap without breaking his stride. Birds screamed and scattered in the dark pine forests as he roared at them: “Well, why not? There must of been ten thousand up there easy. Progress, God damn it! That’s progress, man! Never thought it’d come in my time. But you’d think they would of sent a ship back by now so a man wouldn’t feel so all alone. You know better than that, man. You know God-damned good and well it happened up there too. We had Northern Semisphere, they had Southern Semisphere so you know Goddamned good and well what happened up there. Semisphere? Hemisphere. Hemi-semi-demisphere.”
That was a good one, the best one he’d come across in years. He roared it out as he went stumping along.
When he got tired of it he roared: “You should of been in the Old Old Army, man. We didn’t go in for this Liberty Unlimited crock in the Old Old Army. If you wanted to march in step with somebody else you marched in step with somebody else man. None of this crock about you march out of step or twenty lashes from the sergeant for limiting your liberty.”
That was a good one too, but it made him a little uneasy. He tried to remember whether he had been in the army or had just heard about it. He realized in time that a storm was blowing up from his depths; unless he headed it off he would soon be sprawled on the broken concrete of U.S. 1, sobbing and beating his head with his fists. He went back hastily to Sem-isphere, Hem-isphere, Hem-i-sem-i-dem-isphere, roaring it at the scared birds as he trudged.
* * * *
There were four Visitors aboard the ship when it entered the planetary system. One of them was left on a cold outer planet rich in metal outcrops to establish itself in a billion tiny shelters, build a billion tiny forges and eventually— in a thousand years or a million; it made no difference— construct a space ship, fission into two or more Visitors for company, and go Visiting. The ship had been getting crowded; as more and more information was acquired in its voyaging it was necessary for the swarms to increase in size, breeding more insects to store the new facts.
The three remaining Visitors turned the prow of their ship toward an intermediate planet and made a brief, baffling stop there. It was uninhabited except for about ten thousand entities—far fewer than one would expect, and certainly not enough for an efficient first-contact study. The Visitors made for the next planet sunward after only the sketchiest observation. And yet that sketchy observation of the entities left them figuratively shaking their heads. Since the Visitors had no genitals they were in a sense without emotions—but you would have said a vague air of annoyance hung over the ship nevertheless.
They ruminated the odd facts that the entities had levitated, appeared at the distance of observation to be insubstantial, appeared at the distance of observation to be unaware of the Visitors. When you are a hundred-yard rippling black carpet moving across a strange land, when the dwellers in this land soar aimlessly about you and above you, you expect to surprise, perhaps to frighten at first, and at least to provoke curiosity. You do not expect to be ignored.
They reserved judgment pending analysis of the sunward planet’s entities—possibly colonizing entities, which would explain the sparseness of the outer planet’s population, though not its indifference.
They landed.
* * * *
He woke and drank water from a roadside ditch. There had been a time when water was the problem. You put three drops of iodine in a canteen. Or you boiled it if you weren’t too weak from dysentery. Or you scooped it from the tank of a flush toilet in the isolated farmhouse with the farmer and his wife and their kids downstairs grotesquely staring with their empty eye sockets at the television screen for the long-ago-spoken latest word. Disease or dust or shattering supersonics broadcast from the bull horn of a low-skimming drone—what did it matter? Safe water was what mattered.
“But hell,” he roared, “it’s all good now. Hear that? The rain in the ditches, the standing water in the pools, it’s all good now. You should have been Lonely Man back when the going was bad, fella, when the bull horns still came over and the stiffs shook when they did and Lonely Man didn’t die but he wished he could . . .”
This time the storm took him unaware and was long in passing. His hands were ragged from flailing the broken concrete and his eyes were so swollen with weeping that he could hardly see to shoulder his sack of cans. He stumbled often that morning. Once he fell and opened an old scar on his forehead, but not even that interrupted his steady, mumbling chant: “ ‘Tain’t no boner, ‘tain’t no blooper; Corey’s Gin brings super stupor. We shall conquer; we will win. Back our boys with Corey’s Gin. Wasting time in war is sinful; black out fast with a Corey skinful.”
* * * *
They landed.
Five thousand insects of each “life” heaved on fifteen thousand wires to open the port and let down the landing ramp. While they heaved a few hundred felt the pangs of death on them. They communicated the minute all-they-knew to blank-minded standby youngsters, died and were eaten. Other hundreds stopped heaving briefly, gave birth and resumed heaving.
The three Visitors swarmed down the ramp, three living black carpets. For maximum visibility they arranged themselves in three thin black lines which advanced slowly over the rugged terrain. At the tip of each line a few of the insects occasionally strayed too far from their connecting files and dropped out of the “life” field. These staggered in purposeless circles. Some blundered back into the field; some did not and died, leaving a minute hiatus in the “life’s” memory—perhaps the shape of the full-stop symbol in the written language of a planet long ago visited, long ago dust. Normally the thin line was not used for exploring any but the smoothest terrain; the fact that they took a small calculated risk was a measure of the Visitors’ slightly irked curiosity.
With three billion faceted eyes the Visitors saw immediately that this was no semideserted world, and that furthermore it was probably the world which had colonized the puzzling outer planet. Entities were everywhere; the air was thick with them in some places. There were numerous artifacts, all in ruins. Here the entities of the planet clustered, but here the bafflement deepened. The artifacts were all decidedly material and ponderous—but the entities were insubstantial. Coarsely-organized observers would not have perceived them consistently. They existed in a field similar to the organization-field of the Visitors. Their bodies were constructs of wave-trains rather than atoms. It was impossible to imagine them manipulating the materials of which the artifacts were composed.
And as before, the Visitors were ignored.
Deliberately they clustered themselves in three huge black balls, with the object of being as obstreperous as possible and also to mobilize their field strength for a brute-force attempt at communicat
ion with the annoying creatures. By this time their attitude approximated: “We’ll show these bastards!”
They didn’t—not after running up and down every spectrum of thought in which they could project. Their attempt at reception was more successful, and completely horrifying. A few weak, attenuated messages did come through to the Visitors. They revealed the entities of the planet to be dull, whimpering cravens, whining evasively, bleating with self-pity. Though there were only two sexes among them, a situation which leads normally to a rather weak sex drive as such things go in the cosmos, these wispy things vibrated with libido which it was quite impossible for them to discharge.
The Visitors, thoroughly repelled, were rippling back toward their ship when one signaled: notice and hide.
The three great black carpets abruptly vanished—that is, each insect found itself a cranny to disappear into, a pebble or leaf to be on the other side of. Some hope flared that the visit might be productive of a more pleasant contact than the last with those aimless, chittering cretins.
The thing stumping across the terrain toward them was like and unlike the wave-train cretins. It had their conformation but was material rather than undulatory in nature —a puzzle that could wait. It appeared to have no contact with the wave-train life form. They soared, and darted about it as it approached, but it ignored them. It passed once through a group of three who happened to be on the ground in its way.
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