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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “I really don’t know. She seems to have deserted me. She was going to see that woman in labor, but I’m sure they wouldn’t let her stay with her this long.”

  “I know. She was with her for a few minutes.” He drank and said: “Maybe she’s with Boyce.”

  Mona Greer smiled. “That’s entirely up to her, don’t you think?”

  “You know damned good and well it isn’t. Why don’t you lay off the kid?”

  She knew it was put more crudely than he had meant to, and sooner. Now she could pretend not to understand. Foreman could become specific, she could become outraged and he’d have to admit he had no proof and back out, confused. That was one way, and there would be a certain amount of kick in it. There were other ways, possibly with more kick in them.

  “I suppose,” she said, “this is what you’d call ‘talking turkey’!” In her mouth the words were gross and sardonic. “Yes,” he said doggedly. He pulled the absurd shawl around him.

  “Why don’t you like me?” she asked quietly. “Why don’t people let us alone?” Her grin was inward. Foreman was a self-doubter; now let him doubt his motives and the justice of his meddling.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said after a pause. “I’m not a fairy-slugger. Other things being equal, I’ve hired them to work for my firm and I’ve met them socially. What I don’t like is wolves. Not any more than I like rapists or bank-robbers or muggers or pickpockets.”

  “When you’ve been hurt,” Mona said slowly, “all you want is for the pain to stop. We have been hurt. We didn’t ask to be what we are. If Miss Lundberg wants to be my friend isn’t that her affair? Must you say to her; no, anything but that. Go to a psychiatrist, or lock yourself in a cell, or deny your instincts and be satisfied with second-best or with nothing.” Which, she thought, turned the argument neatly upside-down. The expression of delicate pain did not leave her face.

  “Look,” said Foreman. “I don’t know how to put it to you, but you seem to be an honest person even if you’re on the wrong side of the fence.”

  How wrong you are, toughie. How amusingly wrong you are.

  “She’s got a chance with Boyce,” he said. “They go together. I don’t want to get this mixed up with Hollywood bunk, but they ring bells in each other. And then you stepped in. Can’t you just step out again? What’s it to you, anyway?”

  “Mr. Foreman, when you see a crying child don’t you want to comfort her?” Mona demanded. Her voice was agitated; she strode the little length of the compartment and lit a cigarette, snapping her gold lighter hard. “I saw Joan lost and crying in a world she doesn’t understand, denying her instincts because she’s been taught to, told that her instincts are filthy and abnormal. She looked at me and saw what she wanted, what she’s been wanting for years: a special love, a special tenderness. Do you want me to slam the door on her and say: it’s not for you? You want it but you can’t have it. Mr. Foreman disapproves. In his opinion you’d be better off stealing Mr. Boyce from his wife, and his opinion is more important than what you feel in your bones.”

  Foreman clutched the blanket impotently; his breath was a white cloud in the compartment.

  There was a deferential rap on the door.

  “Come in,” Mona called, composedly.

  It was the porter. He had a screaming plaid overcoat on top of his white, round-collared jacket. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t know whether you noticed about the toilet yet …”

  “What is it?”

  “They’re freezing and the pullman conductor said to say he thinks nobody better use them, be better to go outside.” He smiled deprecatingly. “He’s gonna put the steps out and unlock the train doors. He says maybe it be better if ladies go out on the right and gennulmen on the left. Can you remember that, ma’am? Ladies on the right and gennulmen on the left…and be better not to get far from the train.”

  “All right,” Mona Greer said wearily. “Thank you.”

  When he left she flipped up the lid of the commode, ignoring Foreman, and tried the handle. The little trap didn’t work and no water came to flush the bowl.

  “Well, Mr. Foreman,” she said, without turning around, “have you said your piece?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Very well.” She turned, grinning, and saw his face whiten. “My advice to you, young man, is to take it outside on the left where the gennulmen go and deposit it gently on the snow where it belongs. You’re talking to the wrong girl. Now listen to the facts of my life: I know what I want and I take it. What I want tonight is that little blonde twist and I’m going to have her, make no mistake about that. If you think you can stop me, you’re welcome to try. But I wouldn’t bet a nickel on your chances. This has been very amusing, but I’m little tired now.…you’ll forgive me for saying that you are a somewhat tiresome young man. I’ll be delighted to see you for cocktails at six. Miss Lundberg will be here; I guarantee that.”

  She read his face as she spoke, gloatingly drinking his pain and frustration and hate. He raged as she offered the casual invitation, which meant that he didn’t matter: he could come or not come, try or not try as he pleased. If he didn’t no loss. If he did, she could watch him squirm on the pin.

  But last came an expression which she couldn’t read and which gave her no pleasure: a cool blankness. He said tonelessly: “Thank you for making it so clear. I’d be delighted to come for cocktails. May I take the blanket with me? You seem to have blankets to spare.”

  “Please do,” she said graciously. He left, stiff-backed and clutching the absurd shawl around him. Though she did not notice it, his knuckles were white. When the door closed behind him Mona laughed with delight over the episode; it had been a perfect thing of its kind. Except, she thought, suddenly puzzled, for his odd coldness at the last. He suddenly had ceased to feel pain or shame or anger. It was odd…

  Walking blindly, icily through the train, Foreman knew an idea was surfacing, no matter how hard he might try to keep it down. It was one of the big things, like a million dollars or an auto crash or being elected to the Senate or losing one’s virginity. Maybe half a dozen big things happen to a person in a lifetime and Foreman felt that his was about to be enriched by one. What he proposed to himself was that he murder Mona Greer.

  It was a very big thing, he discovered as he examined it. The murder of Mona Greer would not be at all like most murders. Most murders, detective novels to the contrary notwithstanding, are silly, simple, drunken head-bashings, usually of a spouse’s head following a quarrel about money or sex. To the poor fools who did these things in their fury Foreman now felt condescending; his job was much more difficult, and was complicated by the fact that he didn’t want to be caught and electrocuted.

  He thought too of the gang murders. His home, Chicago, was an unusually good place to study them. There have been, he thought, about seven hundred of these killings in the past twenty-five years in Chicago; he rather doubted that as many as ten of the killers had been convicted. And Chicago’s miserable rate of conviction was said to be better than that of twenty other American cities.

  Was there a lesson for him there in how to murder Mona Greer? Probably not. The gang killers were professionals, invariably imported just before the job and immediately exported after it. They were unbelievably crude and casual about their killing; all they asked was reasonable, not absolute, privacy and a finger man. When the victim was pointed out to them they shot him full of holes and went away. What did a few identifications matter? They were many states away from the scene, there were alibi witnesses galore for them, and if some maniac insisted on his identification of the killers, why, there were ways of handling that too.

  It wasn’t for him. He didn’t have the organization going for him. It was queer that he belonged to such an organization, that he had spoken a couple of days ago with men who had ordered such killings, but he could not avail himself of their resourc
es. They wouldn’t even understand why it had to be done. Killings were for business, were to keep the boys in line, were not for personal—or altruistic, God forbid!—reasons.

  His painfully acquired military experience was turning out to be no help at all. What he proposed was a very different thing from lying on one’s belly on a forward slope, squinting through binoculars at distant puffs of white smoke and muttering into a soundpower phone: “One zero zero left… five zero right… fire for effect, fire for effect …” Such squinting and muttering had resulted in perhaps thirty deaths, including the spectacular obliteration of a truck that must have been loaded with land mines, and he was learning that it had nothing to do with civil murder.

  Walking icily, blindly through the train, Foreman told himself: Kill her. You’ve sunk for the third time and so has the junkie red-head. Kill Greer and let Joan and Boyce be free to work out their happiness or bungle it. You can’t hand them a story-book or Hollywood perfect romance, but you can give them their freedom to try and make one. If they fail it’ll be honest failure, not a pratt-fall into a filthy gutter, tripped up by the daintily-shod, carelessly-extended foot of Mona Greer.

  “Watch it, pappy,” somebody said, lurching past him in the narrow aisle. One of the college boys was lurching into one of the green-curtained smoking rooms, and an immediate bellow sounded from behind the curtains.

  “For God’s sake, kid, didn’t you hear what the conductor said? You want to stink out the whole train?”

  “Listen, mister,” the boy’s voice yelled, “You can go to hell. You can also—”

  There was a sharp click and Foreman looked between the curtains. The young man was lying on the floor with his pants down, rubbing his jaw wonderingly. A red-faced man was standing over him feeling his right fist painfully.

  From the floor the kid said in a low, poisonous voice: “Now, you bastard, I’m going to cut your goddam …” His hand snaked into his pocket and came out with a blue plastic handle. Snick. It was three inches of gleaming steel…

  Foreman unhesitatingly stepped in with his left foot and swung the right hard against the young man’s head. His heel connected with the temple and the kid went down with a groan, the switch-blade tinkling from his hand. He stayed down, his face the color of veal.

  The red-faced man kicked the knife a yard away from the limp body and picked it up with his left hand, carrying the right crossed against his chest. He was sweating marbles from his forehead. “Thanks, mister,” he said to Foreman, panting. “I think I broke my hand on his thick skull …”

  There were awed faces looking through the green curtain. “Somebody get that doctor,” the red-faced man said sharply to them. “This boy fell and hurt himself. Didn’t he?”

  “Sure,” said one of the faces. “I’ll get the doctor.”

  The man sat down dizzily and tucked his hand into his coat like Napoleon. He got up again at once and said to Foreman: “Let’s get out of here, friend.” Two or three men were kneeling over the limp figure of the young man, muttering and probing clumsily.

  “He’s okay,” one of them said. “I can feel his heart.”

  Foreman and the man with the broken hand slid out. “I wonder if he would’ve cut me,” the man said, and then realized that to wonder this was less than gratitude. “Sure,” he answered himself. “I guess you saved my life or something like that. Anything I have is yours, unto the half of my kingdom and my daughter’s hand. On second thought, her husband might not like that. Will you settle for a drink and a couple of sandwiches? I made a little deal with the diner steward. If pressed-ham sandwiches were money I’d be Jock Whitney.”

  “Okay,” Foreman said. “You want the doctor to have a look at that hand?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with it,” the man said emphatically.

  “Publicity-shy?”

  “You could say that, friend. The wife didn’t even know I was in Chicago. This is my place.”

  It was a drawing room. Foreman made a sling out of a hand-towel and tied it behind the man’s neck, and got the sandwiches from a suitcase and the liquor from under the berth. The man drank almost a tumblerful in two big gulps and shuddered.

  “That’s better,” he said. “God knows how I’m going to explain this. I was supposed to be in Washington, I guess they’ll publish the passenger lists. I was afraid you fractured that guy’s skull in there, friend.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Foreman said. “Or not. What the hell does it matter?”

  The man looked at him closely for a moment and said: “Have a drink. It’ll keep the cold out.” He flourished the bottle, a surprisingly cheap blended rye to find in a drawing room. “It’s good stuff,” he said. “I’m on the distribution end.”

  Foreman looked at the label… Old Somethingorother. Well, he knew about Old Somethingorother. They made it in Peoria, in the same stills that had run through Prohibition, financed by the same gangster money, distributed by the same respectable dummies.

  He took a drink of the stuff; it went down, as always, like a machinist’s coarse half-round file.

  “I can’t use your daughter, friend,” he said to the red-faced man, “but could I have that knife?”

  “Hell, yes,” the man said, scrabbling for it with his left hand in his pocket. “Just don’t tell anybody where you got it.”

  He handed it over with relief.

  Foreman let it lie in his palm and tentatively pressed the button. Snick. Three inches of gleaming steel. He folded it into the handle, put it carefully in his pocket and said: “Thanks.”

  He walked out into the corridor and to his own compartment.

  * * * *

  The Reverend Mr. Groves, who was a doctor but not a Reverend Doctor, having only a B.D. to go with his B.Sc. and M.D., looked down at the girl and thought: “I’ll have to intervene.” The baby would not crown, the cervix would not dilate sufficiently, she was obese and her heart was in its last extremities.

  “Ergotrate,” he said to his wife, his nurse.

  She shook a small pill from one of the tubes in his bag and placed it far back on Mrs. Mackenzie’s dry tongue. The girl choked and swallowed as she poured water after the pill.

  “When you feel the next one, Mrs. Mackenzie,” said the doctor, “bear down. Bear down for all you’re worth.”

  The futile contractions were only exhausting her.

  She looked at him blankly. She was sweating in spite of the cold; her skin was dead-looking and tallowy. She mumbled something: “Mamacita.”

  Delirium on top of everything else; she would be unable to cooperate with what little strength she had left. The chance of her survival dropped from a hundred to one on down to a thousand.

  “Can you hear me, Mrs. Mackenzie? Say yes if you can hear me.”

  “Bless me father for I have sinned,” she murmured.

  The ergotrate hit and there was a huge contraction; her bulging stomach sucked in as if she had been kicked. Dr. Groves saw the infant’s crown and reached for it with his hands, trying to get a purchase on the slippery wet skin. As he struggled for a hold the girl croaked again, insistently: “Bless me father for I have sinned. Bless me father for I have sinned. Why don’t you answer me father.”

  “She thinks you’re a priest,” said the nurse.

  The contraction subsided and the baby was still unborn; he had not been able to get the hold. “O.B. forceps,” he said to his wife. And to the girl: “Are you truly penitent?” His wife, reaching for the two loose halves of the forceps paused to give him an incredulous look.

  She muttered: “Yes father truly penitent.”

  Groves took the forceps and waited for another contraction when he might have a chance to use them. He inserted one half; the next thing to do was insert the other and lock them together. That he could not do until another contraction; there was simply no room. He could have hammered the se
cond half home, perhaps, but it would have killed mother and child. “Father,” said the girl. He felt her pulse and thought back to the Comparative Religion courses in the seminary.

  “When did you make your last confession?” he asked.

  She said: “Many years ago father. Since then I have sinned. I committed adultery. Once. I am truly penitent.”

  His hand on her pulse, he said: “I absolve you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” His wife dropped a haemostat. He went on: “You will say one Our Father as penance.” Her lips began to move. After a while they stopped moving. She whispered: “You’ll be sure the baby’s baptized, father. Very important.”

  “I’ll see to it,” he said, and then felt her pulse stop altogether. He waited thirty seconds by his wristwatch and said: “She’s gone. Scalpel.”

  He carved recklessly through layer after layer of tissue; they delivered the baby within seconds. It was dark and still in his hands. “Contrast plunges,” he snapped to his wife, and began to blow gently into the baby’s mouth. She ran from the compartment to the galley in the diner behind their car; she returned within minutes followed by two cooks, one with a dishpan of hot water and one with cold. One of the cooks said: “Fore God, it’s a little black child.”

  Mrs. Groves looked and saw he was correct; she simply hadn’t noticed before that the child was coffee-colored. “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said. “That will be all.”

  Groves continued the artificial respiration as he dipped the infant alternately in the hot and cold water. Now and then a pulse flickered in the small body and once or twice the baby seemed on the point of drawing a full breath, but never made good on the promise. After thirty minutes Groves put the body down. “No use,” he said to his wife.

  “Can’t save ’em all.”

  Groves took in his palm a little of the water from one of the pans and dropped it on the brow of the infant. “Ego te baptizo,” he murmured, “in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritu Sancti.” Looking sidelong at his wife he added: “I did tell her I would. Well, let’s close up Mrs. Mackenzie. Sutures, please.”