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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “I thought maybe something would come up,” Mrs. Nilsen said vaguely. “What for’s the expense? Maybe I can find it cheaper if it’s buying.”

  There was a snort and a rattle of newsprint offstage.

  “Nothing like that, thanks,” Joan said. “I’m going on a little trip tomorrow morning and I’ll be back in five days. That’s all there is to it.” She felt oddly reluctant to invoke politics in connection with the rent.

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Nilsen, looking at her middle, and retreated.

  Joan closed the door and leaned tiredly against it. “She’s having an abortion!” she heard Mrs. Nilsen hiss to Mr. Nilsen, who grunted and shifted in his chair, creaking.

  Joan began to chuckle, and the chuckling got out of control. It grew to whoops of laughter that racked her like sobs. There was an alarmed thundering on the stairs behind the partition. The Nilsens were in full retreat from trouble. They didn’t want to get involved; it was their religion. All they wanted was seventeen-fifty a week for the nicely-furnished room with bath and kitchenette, eavesdropping privileges while she was home and rights of visitation while she was gone. But they didn’t want to get involved as they had often said when she was drumming up a meeting or circulating a petition.

  She threw herself on the prim daybed, whooping at how wrong they were and how very, very funny it was. When the spasm passed she lay there, relaxed and sniffing occasionally, feeling light and disembodied. It had been so very, very funny, the idea of her having or needing an abortion. It was an off-color joke, but it was a joke.

  Slowly she rose and went into the bathroom to undress. Dress, knitted slip moulding her, 32 bra, B cup—she squared her shoulders and squinted in the too-high medicine chest mirror. They were quite all right, she assured herself grimly even if she didn’t wear indecent uplift bras like the kept wives at the Club. If what you wanted was to do your bit to save the nation from its enemies foreign and domestic, a sound grasp of parliamentary law was more to the point.

  She unhooked the garter belt, incongruous satin over faded, tired, thigh-length snuggies going into their third Chicago winter, and peeled off her stockings. The snuggies were bulky. Of course that was where Mrs. Nilsen had got her brilliant idea. You try to keep sensibly warm in a Chicago winter and dirty-minded old so-and-so’s conclude that you’re a loose woman. As if she had the time for such nonsense!

  Under the snuggies her belly was flat. Perhaps not good enough to win any prizes, but certainly not bad enough to get her kicked out of bed by a reasonable man—

  Startled at the trend of her thoughts, she snatched her dressing gown from the hook on the door and belted it firmly around her. That was that. Cover the body and forget about it.

  Virtuously she washed her underwear in the bathroom sink and draped it to dry along the shower-curtain rod, dropped a little-girl printed flannel nightgown over her head and went to bed.

  She couldn’t sleep.

  The old fool’s hissed accusation still rang in her ears. Twisting on the narrow bed she thought: if I went in for that kind of thing I wouldn’t have an abortion. If I got caught I’d go someplace in the southwest where they don’t make a fuss about legitimacy on the birth certificates and I’d have the baby and bring him up. We could live on the income and maybe get one of those adobe houses in Taos cheaper than this place and I could brush up on my piano and try painting again. Of course party work would be out, so the whole thing’s out of the question. First things first; there aren’t enough of us to squander our time.

  She thought of her father for the first time in weeks and clearly saw in the dark the thin, cynical face which had been so attractive to so many women; she heard in the silence the thin, cynical voice that charmed them with its cruel wit and grace. What fools they were! she thought violently. If they’d lived with him as long as I had to they would have known better. But they never did. They came and went, and she was always there and he was always graceful and brilliant and mocking until she wanted to scream: Be dull for an hour, can’t you? Be kind and normal for just a little while or I’ll go crazy! I can’t keep up with it!

  Well, she brooded, her wish had come true. Throat cancer, inoperable, had made him quite dull for eighteen months, and then he was gone, following the mysterious figure of her mother into limbo.

  Thank God there had been hard work and Americanism to fight for after that. Thank God she had inherited some of his diabolical word-brilliance and none of his twisted ethics. Thank God there was work for her to do in the world.

  She fell comfortably asleep at last.

  Upstairs the Nilsens buzzed and muttered, wondering who the man was.

  WEATHER II

  It’s Point Anxiety, Alaska, a miserable ice-covered promontory of the northern coast. Three airmen in a corrugated-iron shack which sprouts tall radio masts are the total population. They are young, because young men resist the cold best; older men tend to get frozen gums if they step outside.

  All three are volunteers. One wants the extra money for the hardship duty; he’s going to open a cleaning shop in Cincinnati when he gets out; he already has $3,752 in his postal savings account. Another’s motive is religious; he is fighting the antichrist by serving devotedly and well in the most difficult and disagreeable post he can find. The third is a kind-hearted young man who happens to be a “situational murderer.” A field hand scared his sister, he went to have a talk with the buck and before he knew it the field hand was dying of a fractured skull. His pastor and the sheriff were understanding; no purpose would be served by spoiling his young life over an accident that could have happened to anybody. But they thought he’d better get out of the county for a while in case snoopers turned up with questions. He got out; way out.

  The three young men play poker endlessly; it is hard for them to communicate in any other way. The cleaner-and-dyer-to-be could tell them about spotting with KMnO4, about steaming velveteens, about his revolutionary idea for three-color plastic advertising garment hangers, but they would only smile blankly and ask if he wanted some coffee. The religious young man could hardly share with them his dawning discovery there in the Arctic waste that he had a vocation; they would not even recognize the word. And the third young man’s horizon was entirely bounded by the raising of soybeans, the training of hound dogs, the protection of womanhood.

  They went through basic training at Sampson Air Force Base on Lake Cayuga in New York; being intelligent, they were forwarded to the Weather Technician School at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. There, in six grinding months, they learned to operate the complex radio and meteorological equipment which surrounds them here as they play poker.

  An urgent beep-beep-beep from one of the radio receivers breaks into a three-dollar pot. They put down their hands automatically and get to work. They release balloons and follow them across the lead-colored sky with telescopes that give bearing and elevation at one-second intervals. They set the figures on a special circular slide-rule as big as a table-top, adding in temperature, wind velocity and barometric pressure. They shoot the result by radio to the big base at White Horse, Yukon Territory. It takes them about an hour, and then they pick up their poker hands again.

  One of them draws to four hearts and fills his flush. His fatal poker habit is talking to hide his excitement over a good hand. “That’s a son of a bitch coming up,” he says.

  The others, who know his fatal habit, feel relieved and drop their hands. They pick up the conversation and agree that it is indeed a bad son of a bitching norther rolling down from the Arctic Ocean.

  They shuffle and deal again while the leaden sky outside flowers down and a small shrill wind blows hard from the ocean, bringing with it the first snowflakes of the norther.

  Chapter IV

  PASSENGER FOREMAN

  Thin January sunlight slanted through the dirty windows of the Chicago Bureau of the World Wireless Press Service. Bureau Ch
ief Hal Foreman looked on his newsroom and found it good. George and Johnny, teletype operators, were pounding out respectively, the general and sports copy. Goldberg and—what’s his name?—Adams were respectively ripping news from the latest editions of the Chicago papers and rewriting it to move on the WW wire. The receiving printer from New York was clicking out Washington and foreign news, and the Las Vegas Western Union telemeter was, thank God, closed down this week for some reason or other.

  Everything was beautifully under control and he went for his coat to get some coffee. Shrugging into the coat, he heard a brisk, impersonal clang-clang from the New York printer.

  Johnny called out sharply, not looking up from his racing copy or letting his flying fingers slow on the keys: “Note from New York, Hal!”

  He went to the printer and read: “CH CHF-WARAMA-RANGU MIDAS WAGOGO SLUMMY IMMY-JC.”

  All he understood of it was that it was a note for him—”CH CHF”—from WW’s president, Jefferson Clark, who wanted something done “IMMY”—immediately—about a phone number—”MIDAS.” The rest was front-office code, distinct from newsroom code. He ripped the note off the machine and brought it into the business office adjoining the small newsroom.

  Miss Sillery looked up icily from a yellow-paged ledger.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, Madge,” Foreman said, “but could you break this for me?”

  She nodded bitterly and Foreman retreated to the newsroom in his overcoat to wait. The printer from National Press popped erratically and much too slowly. He frowned as he saw slowly emerging: “6TH NEW ORLEANS OFF 03—MONEYMAN, LA SPECTRE & FOTO” and then immediately: “6TH NEW ORLEANS BILSAB IS 3RD.” Foreman glanced at the big wall clock, which showed twenty-one minutes past the hour. Eighteen minutes to get the flash up from the Fair Grounds. Stinking time. And the way the foto result had followed right on the heels of the flash looked even lousier. Somebody had held the flash up somewhere along the line, no damn doubt of that.

  Johnny’s fingers rippled smoothly over the keys of his teletype as, with his head craned at an impossible angle, he copied the flash and foto from the National Press printer.

  “Johnny,” Foreman asked, “how’s Fair Grounds today?”

  “Stinks,” the operator replied briefly. “Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, eighteen minutes. The third was past-post.”

  “Um,” Foreman said, and moved away. He’d have to see National Press, which he didn’t like to do. National Press had been much in the newspapers lately. It seems that along with supplying racing news to legitimate sources, they did business with bookies and some Senators did not approve. So far the tar-brush had missed WW.

  He stalled for a while by reading the New York report. The machine was printing what looked very much like a long, dull, unedited story right from their Reuters ticker about the long-term effects of pound-devaluation on gold-mining in the Rand, South Africa. Fascinating, Foreman thought sourly. Just what the clients are panting to hear. This goddam outfit is becoming a laughingstock. At the last luncheon meeting of the Chicago Radio Newsmen’s Association he had been on the defensive for an hour. The boys had bored in good-humoredly, wanting to know who was buying the report these days and why. It had been difficult to answer. The New York office didn’t tell him things. The only client they had in Chicago was WJC, and that was only because old Wally Irvine, their news director, had a sentimental and somewhat superstitious attachment to WW. He’d stuck with them for fifteen years, he could stick with them for fifteen more. There was always AP-Radio, UP and the INS wire for him to fall back on if WW let him down on a newscast. But old Wally had missed the meeting, home sick, and the going had been rough.

  The hell with it. He had a job to do.

  He took out his notebook, looked up National’s number and dialed it at a rewrite phone in the corner. “Illinois Turf Digest,” said a woman’s cheery voice.

  “Mr. Charny, please.”

  Long pause. “Who is this calling?”

  “Foreman. World Wireless.”

  “One mo-ment.” It was a long moment. Those guys claimed they were a legitimate business and they couldn’t help it if crooks bought their service any more than a newspaper could help it if a bookie read results in their turf edition. But they were hard as hell to get hold of. Somebody picked up a phone at the other end and Foreman heard the machine-gun rattle of a dozen Morse sounders going full blast in the distance.

  “Yuh?” said somebody. It wasn’t Charny’s voice.

  “Let me talk to Charny.”

  Long pause. “Who’s this?”

  “Foreman. World Wireless.”

  “I’ll try to gettum. Hold the line.”

  The next voice was Charny’s. “Hi, Bill!” he said brightly. “What can I do for you?”

  “If you really want to know, you can snap things up from New Orleans. You past-posted us on the third race. And I just watched the sixth come in. It was awful. The flash with a photo for third, and then the photo result right after it. Not a second between them. You can’t tell me he wasn’t copying them all off the same card. And his punching, just incidentally, was lousy. When I see punching like that it scares the juice out of me because anybody that bad is going to make mistakes in the figures.”

  Charny roared with laughter. “Don’t take it so hard, Bill!” he said. “I’ll tell you what it is. He’s kind of a new man, he’s been doing other work, so we’re just breaking him in on the printers.”

  Foreman said, knowing he shouldn’t: “Why don’t you one time break a new man in on a horse-room wire instead of on us?”

  Charny said, in a completely different voice: “Okay. We’ll pull him off your machine. If there’s anything else, call me. Good-bye.”

  Me and my big mouth, Foreman thought. If they pull a slow-down on us there’ll be hell to pay. Well, it’s too late now. He wondered what kind of other work the new man had been doing before they put him on the printers: wig-wagging results from a park to a confederate in a nearby house? Manning an abandoned Postal Telegraph “dry wire” with battery and key? Building switchboards that would hook together thirty phones acquired through dummies into what the newspapers always called a “nerve center of gambling”?

  He wandered over to the National printer again. The punching style had changed. Crisp, regular and authoritative, the letters clicked onto the paper at a good 50 w.p.m.: “SIXTH SUNSHINE OK BALLAMAN 4.40 3.20 2.80 GARBOYLE 19.40 (OK) 8.80 RUNAMILE 2.20 TIME 147 3/5 OFF 17½.”

  Things were under control again for the time being. Now if the note wasn’t another headache he could go and get that coffee.

  Miss Sillery handed him a page from one of her three-by-five pads on which she had written, in her precise script, with one of her needle-pointed pencils: “Chicago Bureau Chief, call me immediately at National 0323 from an outside phone. Jefferson Davis Clark.”

  “Thank you, Madge,” he said, studying it. “Uh, that’s a Washington number, isn’t it?” It wasn’t any of the Washington bureau numbers, though.

  “Mr. Clark is in Washington this week,” she said. She knew things like that. You had to go to her all the time for bits of information. A client’s address. Rates and costs. Where you could get in touch with Clark. Who was new in New York and Washington. What clients were added and who had canceled.

  “Thanks,” he said, and headed for the newsroom petty cash box, locked in a filing cabinet that also contained the bureau’s skimpy and decrepit morgue. He scooped out twelve quarters and scribbled a slip. He’d never got a message like that before. There had been a good deal of: “You alone, Hal?” and “You suah theah’s nobody else on the lahn?” before proceeding to a conversation about, usually, sports wire clients and the need for speed. But never any of this outside-phone stuff.

  He slid into a booth at the corner cigar store and called long distance. She ordered him to deposit one-fifty and he sent the quarters pouring i
nto the phone in a clanging stream.

  “Hello?” said a guarded voice with a southern drawl that he recognized.

  “Hello, Mr. Clark. This is Foreman in Chicago. What can I do for you?”

  “You calling from an outside phone like I tole you?”

  “Yes, sir. Corner cigar store.”

  “Okeh. You got a pencil and paper?”

  “Sure.” He worked them out of his inside breast pocket. “Shoot.”

  “Take this down. Room 1423, Monongahela Buildin’. You know wheah that is?”

  “Sure.”

  “Take this down. Mr. Ganyon. G-A-N-Y-O-N. Eight o’clock tonight. Got that? You go an’ see Mr. Ganyon at Room 1423 Monongahela Buildin’ at eight o’clock tonight.”

  From an easy-going, frankly sloppy guy like Clark it was astounding. Foreman repeated the details of the appointment.

  “Good. Now, Hal, Mr. Ganyon’s people are very good, very valuable friends of ouah’s. I took the liberty of tellin’ them that you’d be glad to do a job for them. It may take you out of town for sever’l days, but that cain’t be helped.”

  “But the Bureau!” said Foreman, startled. “All I have is Goldberg and three green men!”

  “To hell with the Bureau!” Clark said dispassionately. “Put Goldberg in charge an’ don’t worry about it. Take on another buck-an-hour kid. Is Backmeister still theah?”

  That was Johnny. “Yes, sure.”

  “He’s a good man. Don’t worry about a thing. Hal, I recommended you up to the hilt to these very, very good friends of ouah’s. I said you were intelligent, I said you could take orders an’ I said you could keep youah mouth shut. I went right down the lahn for you and I trust you won’ let me down.”