The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Yes, brother.”

  “There’s nothing very unusual about that—glands, I’m told. You know what glands are?”

  Then I was alarmed. I had heard of them, but I was not certain whether they were the short, thick green men who wear only metal or the things with many legs with whom I talked in the woods.

  “How did you find out?” I asked him.

  “But Peter! You look positively frightened, lad! I don’t know a thing about them myself, but Father Frederick does. He has whole books about them, though I sometimes doubt whether he believes them himself.”

  “They aren’t good books, brother,” I said. “They ought to be burned.”

  “That’s a savage thought, my son. But to return to your own problem—”

  I could not let him go any further knowing what he did about me. I said one of the words Guru taught me and he looked at first very surprised and then seemed to be in great pain. He dropped across his desk and I felt his wrist to make sure, for I had not used that word before. But he was dead.

  There was a heavy step outside and I made myself invisible. Stout Father Frederick entered, and I nearly killed him too with the word, but I knew that that would be very curious. I decided to wait, and went through the door as Father Frederick bent over the dead monk. He thought he was asleep.

  I went down the corridor to the book-lined office of the stout priest and, working quickly, piled all his books in the center of the room and lit them with my breath. Then I went down to the schoolyard and made myself visible again when there was nobody looking. It was very easy. I killed a man I passed on the street the next day.

  There was a girl named Mary who lived near us. She was fourteen then, and I desired her as those in the Cavern out of Time and Space had desired me.

  So when I saw Guru and he had bowed, I told him of it, and he looked at me in great surprise. “You are growing older, Peter,” he said.

  “I am, Guru. And there will come a time when your words will not be strong enough for me.”

  He laughed. “Come, Peter,” he said. “Follow me if you wish. There is something that is going to be done—” He licked his thin, purple lips and said: “I have told you what it will be like.”

  “I shall come,” I said. “Teach me the word.” So he taught me the word and we said it together.

  The place we were in next was not like any of the other places I had been to before with Guru. It was No-place. Always before there had been the seeming passage of time and matter, but here there was not even that. Here Guru and the others cast off their forms and were what they were, and No-place was the only place where they could do this.

  It was not like the Cavern, for the Cavern had been out of Time and Space, and this place was not enough of a place even for that. It was No-place.

  What happened there does not bear telling, but I was made known to certain ones who never departed from there. All came to them as they existed. They had not color or the seeming of color, or any seeming of shape.

  There I learned that eventually I would join with them; that I had been selected as the one of my planet who was to dwell without being forever in that No-place.

  Guru and I left, having said the word.

  “Well?” demanded Guru, staring me in the eye.

  “I am willing,” I said. “But teach me one word now—”

  “Ah,” he said grinning. “The girl?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The word that will mean much to her.”

  Still grinning, he taught me the word.

  Mary, who had been fourteen, is now fifteen and what they call incurably mad.

  * * * *

  Last night I saw Guru again and for the last time. He bowed as I approached him. “Peter,” he said warmly.

  “Teach me the word,” said I.

  “It is not too late.”

  “Teach me the word.”

  “You can withdraw—with what you master you can master also this world. Gold without reckoning; sardonyx and gems, Peter! Rich crushed velvet—stiff, scraping, embroidered tapestries!”

  “Teach me the word.”

  “Think, Peter, of the house you could build. It could be of white marble, and every slab centered by a winking ruby. Its gate could be of beaten gold within and without and it could be built about one slender tower of carven ivory, rising mile after mile into the turquoise sky. You could see the clouds float underneath your eyes.”

  “Teach me the word.”

  “Your tongue could crush the grapes that taste like melted silver. You could hear always the song of the bulbul and the lark that sounds like the dawnstar made musical. Spikenard that will bloom a thousand thousand years could be ever in your nostrils. Your hands could feel the down of purple Himalayan swans that is softer than a sunset cloud.”

  “Teach me the word.”

  “You could have women whose skin would be from the black of ebony to the white of snow. You could have women who would be as hard as flints or as soft as a sunset cloud.”

  “Teach me the word.”

  Guru grinned and said the word.

  Now, I do not know whether I will say that word, which was the last that Guru taught me, today or tomorrow or until a year has passed.

  It is a word that will explode this planet like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple.

  THE NAKED STORM

  Note: Not science fiction.

  Originally published in 1952 under the pseudonym “Simon Eisner.”

  Chapter I

  PASSENGER BOYCE

  Boyce’s wife, lying in the exact center of her Hollywood bed, said faintly: “Please, darling, no. I have a headache.” All the accessories of a headache were neatly arranged on the blonde wood end table: the squat little bottle of aspirin-phenobarb-codein tablets, the glass of water, the box of cleansing tissues, the bottle of pink capsules, the murder mystery by an Englishwoman. Faced by such corroborative evidence, Boyce could hardly call her a liar.

  “After all,” he said steadily, “I’m going to Frisco in the morning.”

  A small twinge passed across her face. “You ought to get a good night’s sleep,” she said. “You know you never sleep in trains.”

  He looked down at her. For all the good it did him, Peggy was still a good-looking woman. It was, if anything, too warm in the apartment. But as he looked she drew her pink bed-jacket more snugly over her shoulders.

  “What have you got that thing on for?” he demanded. “This isn’t a hospital. This is home and I’m your husband.”

  “Please, darling,” she said faintly. “I simply can’t argue.”

  “You and your goddamned headaches,” he said.

  It startled her, and she was startled even more when he struggled into his overcoat and slammed out of the apartment.

  Boyce stood shivering in front of the apartment house under the icy blast from Lake Michigan, wondering angrily what to do next. He was going to San Francisco in the morning and he should get a good night’s sleep.

  But he was sore.

  And a taxi pulled up and the driver’s red face pressed against the right front window and stared at him contemptuously as if to say: “Don’t just stand there, mister. Get in. That’s what I’m here for.”

  Boyce got in and told the driver: “The Loop. Anywhere in the Loop.” Have a drink, he thought, calm down, come back and go to bed. Alone.

  It was a fifteen-minute drive from the North Side apartment house to the crowded heart of Chicago. The driver pulled to the curb at State and Van Buren and growled: “One seventy-five.”

  The face of the meter was set into leather padding at the front of the passenger compartment, below eye-level and badly lit. It might have said anything from thirty-five cents to fifty dollars. Boyce thought briefly of checking the reading, gave up the idea as the beefy face scowled at him, and handed over
two singles.

  “Thanks,” the driver said, taking a two-bit tip for granted and roaring the motor impatiently as he waited for his fare to get out.

  Boyce got out and stood a little forlornly on the curb, jostled by late shoppers, newsstand helpers getting out the morning editions, and movie-goers. It was eight o’clock of a January evening. The sheet-iron Christmas trees with which lamp posts in front of the State Street department stores were decorated this year were still up. Sheet-iron discs, brightly painted, swung from the sheet-iron branches. Every once in a while a gust from the lake four blocks to the east caught one of the discs and made it spin wildly and utter a weird banshee wail.

  A bright marquee behind him blinked RESTAURANT-BAR and snatches of music, drum and piano, blasted out when its heavy glass doors opened to let patrons in and out. Have one now, Boyce thought, then grab a cab back to the apartment. He ducked into the place, crossing the line between the icy street with its banshee wailing and the warmly noisy inside.

  The bar was a U-shaped affair enclosing a platform on which a three-piece combo of flat-faced little brown men were strumming La Cucaracha. Boyce sipped his drink, looking straight ahead except for an occasional furtive glance at the musicians.

  Quite a nice place, he thought. Nicer than the too-hot apartment with the too-cold wife. Peggy would ask him where he’d been and he’d simply tell her a Loop nightclub and she’d be burned up but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know—as if she had any secrets from him!

  Served her right. Husband going away in mid-winter and he doesn’t even get a look at her, much less a night in bed. That damned bed-jacket.

  “Yes, sir!” the barman was saying heartily. “The same?”

  Boyce nodded and put a five on the bar. This was adding up already. He reached in a sudden panic for his breast pocket and relaxed when he felt the ticket and reservation. Golden Gate Express, leaves Union Station 9:05 A.M., time for a good breakfast, Car 15, Berth 24U. Always an upper until you got to be Senior Buyer and then the sky was the limit if you weren’t too old and if nobody on the Board had a loose-end nephew or cousin to sneak your job away from you. It had happened—not so much in Floor Coverings because you had to know the field from the ground up. But in Furniture and in Appliances the axe could fall on anybody. In Furniture you didn’t have to know anything except the way to the Merchandise Mart, where salesmen showed you around and you simply made the best deal you could and that was that. Appliances was easier yet. The appliance men came around and begged you to buy. Floor Coverings, for some reason, was still an old-fashioned business and you had to know who was who, who was honest, who was prompt. And rugs fluctuated wildly with the price of wool. For that kind of buying you needed brains and foresight—

  When in God’s name was Mr. Oberholtzer going to die or retire? Then Mr. Reiner would move up from Assistant to Buyer and Boyce would move up from Senior Salesman to Assistant and everybody would be happy including Mr. Oberholtzer. Mr. Oberholtzer professed to hate the Store and all its works and yet for five years since his stroke he had been dragging himself to the office to put in a couple of hours and then snooze away the rest of the day. And Reiner did Mr. Oberholtzer’s work and Boyce did Reiner’s work and there was nobody to keep an eye on the floor force, which was addicted to promising impossible delivery dates and impossible sizes and shades and impossibly low fitting estimates to clinch their sales and commissions.

  He said to the waiting bartender: “Wonder if you ever thought of the rug-man’s problems?”

  “Can’t say I have,” the meaty man in the white jacket admitted. “The same?”

  He was a son of a bitch, too. All they wanted was your money. “No more,” Boyce told him. He spun around on his stool and went out into the icy air. He felt fine, and magically there was a taxi waiting for him with the door open.

  He climbed in and should have said: “North on the Drive,” which would take him home to the headache and the prim bed-jacket. Instead he paused.

  “Where to, mister?” the driver finally asked with exaggerated courtesy.

  Boyce took the plunge and asked, too casually: “What’s a good place to go and kill some time?”

  The driver clicked down the meter flag half-way to “waiting” and scratched his chin. “Well, there’s the Spanish Casino—”

  Boyce recoiled. You could conceivably go there with your wife, but if you went alone and somebody saw you it didn’t look too good, what with the percentage girls crawling all over you. He’d heard about it from bachelors on the floor force. Regretfully he said: “Not for me.”

  The driver didn’t mind. “You want to see girls,” he said, “there’s a rub-joint out west, Castle Gardens.”

  Boyce was vaguely aware that a rub-joint was a low-down dance hall. “Swell,” he said. “Let’s go.” The driver clicked the flag all the way down and headed west on Van Buren Street.

  The river, the big ghostly-white railroad stations, the dark used machine-tool district, the honky-tonks glaring and winking—

  Half a dozen times Boyce wanted to tell the driver to head north for his home, but was too shy to change his mind in public. I’m a louse, he thought miserably each time. If she’s got a headache she’s got a headache. And she doesn’t get much fun out of it anyway. I ought to tell this guy to head north. But he didn’t.

  Castle Gardens was from the outside the windows of the second floor of a corner taxpayer building. You reached the second floor by a flight of creaky stairs. Posters flanked the door: Twenty Beautiful Instructresses, See the Beautiful Palm Room, Admission Free. Cut-out pictures of Esquire girls were pasted on the posters. I’ll just go in and see what it’s all about, Boyce thought. Admission Free.

  When he went through the door at the head of the stairs it was all gloom, heat and noise. Bing Crosby assaulted the ears, louder than any juke-box should be, a faceted mirror ball turned slowly in the center of the ceiling casting blots of light that crawled like insects, and women stood about in metallic evening gowns.

  “Check your hat and coat,” sounded in his left ear, and a pair of heavy hands started to help him out of the overcoat. Boyce had the feeling that he was being processed like a hog at the stockyards. The owner of the hands and voice, a huge man in a waiter’s tux, pressed a disk into his palm. “The check. How many tickets you want?”

  “Ten,” he said. That should be a dollar.

  The big man pulled an accordion of tickets from his pocket, tore off ten and said: “That’ll be ten dollars.”

  “Oh,” Boyce said, “I’m sorry. I thought they were cheaper. Can I just have one?”

  “Look, mister,” said the big man. “You asked for ten, I tore off ten. We have to keep track of the numbers. What’s the idea of coming in here without any money?”

  “But I have the money—” Boyce said, and realized he was sunk. He took a ten from his wallet, looking carefully at it in the gloom, and handed it over and got his tickets. He tried to read one, but the woman in evening dress bore down on him purposefully.

  There was a kind of etiquette. They kept their distance and tried him one at a time. Vague faces asked him in turn, as thighs pressed him: “Dance, honey? Sit in a booth and play around a little? Have some fun?”

  He said to a blonde who draped herself over him: “All right. Let’s dance.”

  “You want to give me my tickets first, honey? It’s two for a dance.”

  Clipped again. He tore off two tickets and handed them to her. She hoisted her skirt and tucked them into a stocking top, smiling at him with a face that might have been 16 or 46 in the gloom. But her limbs were firm. “You can do that with the next tickets, honey,” she said.

  Boyce preened a little. It was turning into quite an evening.

  Somebody restarted the thunderous Bing Crosby record and the blonde said: “Let’s dance back there where it’s nice and dark, honey. My name’s Jerri
e. What’s yours?”

  “Sam,” he said, following her across the floor. He was a fair dancer, he thought. She’d be pleasantly surprised. They probably got nothing but low-class mutts stepping all over their feet in these places…

  He found out where it was nice and dark that dancing in Castle Gardens had very little to do with the feet, and that “rub-joint” was a vividly accurate phrase. Bing Crosby broke off with a squawk about half-way through the record.

  “Having fun, Sam?” she asked with a professional low-lidded smile. “You want to hide my tickets for me?” She lifted the hem of her skirt. Unsteadily he tore off two more tickets. She leaned against his hand as he slid them under the top of her stocking. Bing Crosby began to thunder at them again and he straightened quickly and took her in his arms, not wanting to miss one expensive, rewarding note of the dance.

  She suggested the Palm Room and “some real fun” after the dance. The big man in the waiter’s tux materialized at the curtain behind which the Palm Room lay to collect five dollars cover charge. Boyce gave him a bill and the curtain was drawn on a smaller, even darker room furnished with half a dozen booths, all empty.

  “You first, honey,” she said, and he slid into a booth. She followed, intimately. “Honey,” she said, “how about a couple of tickets for sitting this one out with you?” She sat waiting. Dry-mouthed, Boyce raised her skirt almost furtively and put them with the others.

  The big man was back. “What’ll it be, Jerrie?” he asked.

  “Blue Moon. What are you going to drink, Sam?”

  “Rye-gingerale.”

  She crooned the Bing Crosby song, with dirty lyrics, into his ear and massaged him while they were waiting for their drinks.

  “That’ll be three dollars,” the big man said, putting down a tray with a cocktail and a setup. Jerrie drank her cocktail off in a gulp while Boyce was finding out that he had no more ones, fives or tens. He reluctantly lay a twenty on the table.

  “Twenty,” announced the big man, virtuously, holding it up. “Be right back.”