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

by C. M. Kornbluth

“Well, Mr. Clark, what’s all this about?”

  “All I’m free to say at this tahm is that it’s related to ouah Las Vegas operation. Well, that’s all for now. You’ll heah the rest from the party I mentioned. Good-bye, Hal. See you some time.”

  Click.

  Foreman went back upstairs to the bureau without getting his cup of coffee. Goldberg was pounding out a story. Foreman waited until he was finished and said: “Sam, I may be going away for a few days. You’ll be in charge of the Bureau. I don’t think there’s anything coming up in the way of installations, sales or supplies. If anything you can’t handle turns up, just spike it for me.”

  Goldberg’s dark face was shining with incredulous joy, “Sure, Hal!” he said earnestly. “Why, this is marvelous! The experience will be wonderful!”

  Foreman smiled back meagerly and shucked his overcoat. You got to do everything at WW. The pay wasn’t much, but the experience was wonderful. He studied the idle Las Vegas teleprinter broodingly. For two months it had been a rush-rush priority to get the race results on it first and fully. Nominally there was another World Wireless bureau at the other end. Nominally. This was when there had been shootings and a crackdown in California.

  Goddamn it, Foreman yelled silently, how the hell did I get mixed up in this anyhow?

  But he knew how. He had got mixed up in it by pretending you could get something for nothing, that the experience would be marvelous, that it was just a lot of talk in the newspapers, that WW was a brave little firm battling the giant news monopolies, that Charny was a jolly good fellow, that he was just a little guy following orders.

  So quit the job, he said. Go in and tell Madge Sillery you’re through and for her to mail you your check and withholding statement. No; you can’t do that. You bought a suit that isn’t paid for yet and you have a lease on the apartment and you’re having a good time with the girls and you like seafood cocktails and steaks. No; you can’t do that. You’d be a bum on the street with maybe five hundred other unemployed newsmen tramping from City News Bureau to the Sun-Times to the Trib to the AP to the News to the UP to the Herald-American to the neighborhood papers and never finding anything. No; you can’t quit. Just hang on, Hal Foreman told himself. Everything will probably turn out all right.

  He looked up a number and called it. A young-sounding voice answered.

  “This is Mr. Foreman at World Wireless. Minelli, are you still looking for newswork?”

  “Sure am, Mr. Foreman. Did something—?”

  “Yeah. Come on down.”

  He read the Trib for three-quarters of an hour. When Minelli arrived, a skinny, intense fellow of 22 or so, he received him in the shoe-box private office he hardly ever used.

  “We have a couple of weeks of desk work at a dollar an hour. It isn’t much, but I’m sure you know what the experience means.”

  “Of course, Mr. Foreman. What would the work involve?”

  “You’d be rewrite man under Mr. Goldberg—I’m going to be out of town. Essentially you take dispatches from various sources, put them into WW style and get them on the wire.”

  The boy’s face fell. “No reporting at all?”

  “Very little reporting out of here. We rely mostly on our string men and the local papers.”

  “Local papers. How’s that, Mr. Foreman?”

  Foreman couldn’t meet his eye as he said: “We clip them and rewrite.”

  “Clip—I don’t understand you. You mean we take their news—”

  “Sure that’s what I mean,” Foreman said. “You got any objections?”

  Minelli looked dubious. “I thought you couldn’t do that, Mr. Foreman.”

  He looked kindly. “Theoretically, no. But everybody does, and don’t let them kid you otherwise. You don’t go around bragging about it, but you do it anyway. I could tell you stories that would curl your hair, Minelli.”

  The boy laughed dutifully. “If you say it’s okay, Mr. Foreman. I guess they don’t teach you everything in journalism school.”

  The rest of the interview was pep-talk. He sent Minelli away happy.

  Foreman walked out of the office to have dinner before his appointment and Goldberg, still beaming, wished him a cheery good-night.

  * * * *

  Office buildings are like cities. Your jerkwater town or your fifth-rate little building is shut tight by eight o’clock. It takes heroic measures to get action. But in a metropolis or a great office building there’s no closing hour. Somebody’s always up, lights are always on. An elevator man took Foreman to the fourteenth floor of the Monongahela Building without surprise.

  Room 1423 had chastely lettered in gold leaf on its frosted-glass door: Dearborn Real Estate Co. Far down in the lower left-hand corner of the frosted-glass plate was lettered in small, plain black: N.P.-Chi. National Press, of course, and small enough to be mistakable for the initials of the sign-painting company.

  He went in. It was the conventional receptionist’s window and the conventional three-by-six waiting room with an electrolier, etchings on the wall and green leather chairs. The magazines on the end table were solid real-estate stuff: The Journal of Appraisals; N.A.R.B. Digest of State Legislation. Foreman pressed a button and sat down a little gratefully, in one of the green leather chairs. He had drunk three martinis before having a seafood cocktail and a steak.

  It was not a conventional receptionist who appeared behind the window. “Grocer,” Foreman thought instantly when he saw it. It was a long Italian face needing a shave. It looked incomplete without a white apron. You could easily see it smiling over peaches or green peppers. The illusion evaporated when it said in a voice cold as steel and unaccented: “Who do you want to see?”

  Foreman got up. “Mr. Ganyon,” he said. “I’m Hal Foreman from World Wireless.”

  The face continued to stare.

  “Mr. Clark arranged an appointment for me,” Foreman added.

  It vanished without a word. After thirty seconds the newsman picked up a copy of The Journal of Appraisals and pretended to read it. After two minutes the door opened and the man with a grocer’s face said: “Follow me.”

  Foreman followed him through an outer office made hazardous by eight oak desks, treading softly on grey broadloom. (The sale had been made three years ago by a Mr. Boyce.) He followed him into a secretary’s office and then into a large oak-paneled office where there were three men.

  Into the silence he said: “I have an appointment with Mr. Ganyon.”

  One of the men, beefy and red-faced, said with a secret smile: “Ganyon couldn’t make it. I’ll talk to him. Did Mr. Clark explain that this was a very, very important matter and a very confidential one?”

  “Yes,” Foreman said, frightened. There was the beefy, red-faced man and there were two other men who looked like brothers. They were blond, clean-cut—and somehow indescribably nasty.

  “Sit down,” the red-faced man said. “Let’s talk turkey. I’m not a smart man with the words. I’m just an old circulation slugger who’s been lucky. And I want to stay lucky. But I know enough not to stick my neck out.

  “Mr. Foreman, I understand you know the wire-service game?” He said it with a secret smile.

  “Something about it,” Foreman admitted, frightened.

  “What’s the difference between a duplex and a simplex A.T.&T. lease f’rinstance?”

  Foreman told him, and the red-faced man smiled with pleasure. It was the beginning of an hour-long inquisition covering A.T.&T. leases, the Western Union hierarchy, the old Postal Telegraph dry wires, nomenclature of the Bell System engineering force, maintenance service, telemetering line charges and hours, the going rate for teletype operators and steady Morse men, how to spot a no-questions-asked office building and many more things which Foreman was startled to discover that he knew.

  “Excellent,” the red-faced man pronounced at last. “What w
e want for you to do is contact a certain party in San Francisco. This party wants a news bureau set up for him, mostly on the sports side, with maybe twelve drops in and around town. This party is just going into the news bureau business and he doesn’t know the ins and outs. All he knows is he wants to go into the news bureau business and he has sense enough to pay high for a high-class source of news. We want for you to handle the technical details. If it’s politics, he can help you but the plain spade-work is all yours. We want for you to set up an economical system for him—but you know all that. Watch your hours, watch your hiring, watch your rentals and you’ll be okay. You’ll get the dope from this party on addresses and things like that. All I have to tell you is that the line to the main bureau in Frisco will run from WW Chicago six A.M. to midnight. There won’t be any trouble, will there?”

  Foreman could see it very plainly. National Press, very much in the clear. World Wireless hopelessly compromised in case of a breakdown. The only link between National and the Frisco distributor of racing news this meeting here and now—

  “I don’t like it,” he said.

  Pause.

  “Maybe Clark didn’t tell you all you needed to know,” the red-faced man said gently. “Maybe he didn’t tell you that he gets three thousand a week for six years, which is close to a million bucks. Didn’t you handle the Las Vegas standby telemeter, kid?”

  “Yes,” said Foreman.

  “So what’s the bitch? They drilled Cohen, the heat went on, you set up a Las Vegas telemeter. Don’t tell me you can’t add two and two, kid.” The voice was infinitely persuasive.

  “I can add two and two,” Foreman said. “I still don’t like it. I’m getting out of here.” He started for the door, but the man with the grocer’s face was standing there.

  The beefy man said: “Like hell you are, kid. You got the wrong idea.”

  The man with a grocer’s face caught Foreman a terrific blow in the belly, without seeming to try hard. The newsman collapsed on the broadloom carpet, doubled up and crowing harshly. The two men who looked like brothers moved in. One of them picked Foreman up and held him under the armpits. The other slugged his right fist into the newsman’s midriff again and again, expressionless. Foreman rocked and grunted under the blows, powerless to do anything except feel the exploding fire of each deliberate piledriver slam.

  The room was a red haze before him when he heard a voice: “That’s enough, kids. That’s enough, you queer sons of bitches! Leave him alone, I want to talk to him.”

  He was dumped on a leather couch and a glass of ice-water splashed into his face. It jerked him upright, staring.

  “Take it easy, kid,” the red-faced man told him. “I want you to see some pictures.” He snapped his fingers and one of the men who looked like brothers snickered and pulled from his inside breast pocket a parcel of snapshots. Foreman was quite sure they would be obscene pictures, wild though the thought was, from his manner.

  They were obscene only in a certain sense. The first showed a drowned man with many stab-wounds in him. There were crabs eating his face away. The man with the photographs, in a somewhat high-pitched voice, delivered a running commentary.

  “This one was with the ice-pick. Ice-pick isn’t good because wounds like that swell shut with the congestion and decomposition gas forms in the body cavities and it floats up… This one was with the razor, which was better but still not the answer… This one was the cleaver. You see what a bad Wop did to him. A bad Wop is the worst thing to have working on you there is… Blowtorch… This is another blowtorch but the people had more time. Three hours, somebody told me… Battery acid, this one—”

  Foreman looked and listened in a dull comprehension that he would do exactly what these people wanted.

  After looking at all the photographs he told them that.

  “Good,” said the red-faced man. “I hated to see you act like a God-damned fool, Foreman. Here’s the expense money.” It was five hundred dollars in small, worn bills. “It should hold you for a month. Here’s your ticket and reservation.” It was a roomette on the Golden Gate. The penciled scribble on the envelope said it left tomorrow morning at 9:05. “And when you’re located in Frisco, you just phone Mr. Clark and he’ll give you the name of the party we want you to contact. And, uh, you needn’t think any of this is going to get out, kid. We’ll tell ’em you were reasonable right from the start.”

  Foreman was wearily sure that the red-faced man was embarrassed, not for himself, but because he, Foreman, had made a fool of himself.

  “That’s all right,” he said, and got up, aching. The man with a grocer’s face walked with him silently to the elevator. In his uncomfortable company Foreman jeered at himself bitterly: So you wanted something for nothing?

  He walked the dark streets for two hours that night, aching and filled with self-loathing. I’ll get out of it, he told himself over and over again. I won’t have anything to do with pimps and killers and dope-runners. I’ll get out of it. They bribe and steal and murder but they can’t make me over. I’ll get out of it.

  At 1:30, aching and filled with self-loathing, he went home and packed.

  Chapter V

  SNOW

  This is White Horse, Yukon Territory, Dominion of Canada. It is 750 miles south of the smelly little weather station on Point Anxiety, but in January it is still a frozen desolation. Here winterized B-50’s land and take off endlessly, winterized jeeps and weasels crawl endlessly through the snow-plowed streets loaded with winterized Canadian and U. S. airmen.

  A weatherman, perspiring in a shack overheated by its oil-drum stove, pushes back his R.C.A.F. cap and says: “Here comes a bloody blow, say the Yanks at Anxiety. Get the leftenant, will you?”

  The lieutenant, a Ph.D. who never thought that specializing in the physics of the air would lead to the King’s commission and duty in this godforsaken hole, studies the dispatch from Point Anxiety, studies several other dispatches and sketches a sinuous line in red on the big hemisphere map.

  “Flash it on, Jock,” he says. “I’ve got to go and tell the Air Commander.”

  Jock grins sympathetically and makes a curious cranking gesture like a machinist reaming out a drilled hole. The lieutenant nods wryly, squares his shoulders and leaves.

  “Goddamn it, man!” the Air Commander says a few minutes later, “you weather people can’t ground my planes for three days!”

  “I know I can’t sir,” the lieutenant told him, “but that norther sure as hell can.”

  “But I’ve got twelve boys to qualify as multi-engine winterized pilots before February, familiarization courses for forty-three Yank interceptor pilots, the Parliamentary commission on my neck and the regular patrolling… how much time have we?”

  “We’ll be zero-zero in six hours, sir. And snowbound in twelve.”

  The Air Commander mutters incoherently and waves the lieutenant from his office. The lieutenant grins in the corridor and goes to the radar room. There on the twelve-inch screen he can already see crawling down from the north a glowing, pale-green film which is the radar signal for snow—immense quantities of snow.

  Chapter VI

  PASSENGER MONA GREER

  Mona Greer was leaving in the morning for San Francisco where “Bozzy” Hartman would hold an autographing party for her in his Candlelight Bookshop. It would be a nice shot in the arm for her Thighs of the Wild Mare, which was sagging salewise now that the fuss about its alleged indecency was subsiding. Not that she needed the money.

  Naturally there was a going-away party, and naturally Maggie Buckle threw it in her Gold Coast duplex.

  Early in the evening, before half the guests had arrived, a naïve visiting book critic from New York muttered to his wife: “For Christ’s sake, let’s get out of here. They’re all fruits. I don’t take this crap in New York and I’m not going to take it in Chicago.”

  His wi
fe said: “Oh, I don’t know, Harry. Mona’s kind of sweet.”

  “She was stroking your hand and looking at you with rape in her eye, if that’s what you mean. Get your coat and I’ll go tell that Buckle woman you have a headache.”

  Their departure was unnoticed. There were so many really simpatica people there that one depressingly dull couple from the East wasn’t missed. Mona embalmed them in a honeyed epigram that highlighted their literary and sexual provincialism, and made Maggie Buckle shriek with laughter.

  Erect as a queen, slim and unlined, looking by candlelight only half her forty years, Mona moved smilingly through the throng of guests and sat beside a dark, pretty little girl who was watching the scene wide-eyed and a little forlorn, twirling a champagne glass.

  “Hello, little one,” Mona said. “What’s your name?” Her voice was queenly, too; a warm contralto with smiling notes in it.

  “Rosa Bonomo,” the child said. “You’re Miss Greer, aren’t you? I came with Jack Shoemaker. He was going to introduce me to you, but he seems to have got lost.”

  Mona had seen Jack Shoemaker, a blond butch from Northwestern, with his arm around a delicate fellow who taught Art at the U. of C. Evidently it was all new to the child. “Tell me,” she said, “what do you do.”

  “Sculpture—some day, I hope,” the child said. “I’m at Northwestern but it’s just a damn waste of time. I want to go East, maybe to Italy. Dad’s a stone-cutter. He says Italy’s the place to learn sculpture—but I suppose you know all that, Miss Greer. You used to do sculpture yourself. I was going to ask you whether you’ve given it up.”

  “Call me Mona, dear,” Mona said. “I gave it up because I was vain and foolish. Sculpture nowadays takes more than talent and hard work; it takes heroism. Aristede Maillol told me once—”

  “You knew Maillol?” Rosa Bonomo gasped.

  “Oh, dear. I’m afraid I dropped a name, didn’t I? Yes, I studied under him for a year in Paris. At the end of the year he looked at my hands—no callouses. He showed me his—like shoeleather. And he threw me out of his studio, never to darken its door again. Let me see your hands, little one.”