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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Then, abruptly, he gasped. “Here,” he said, averting his eyes. “Take my cloak.”

  “Thanks,” said the tall young lady with a smile. “I didn’t think, for the moment, that my clothes wouldn’t grow when I did.”

  “Now—would you care to begin at the beginning?”

  “Certainly. Moira O’Donnel’s my name. Born in Dublin. Located in Antrim at the age of twenty-five, when I had the ill luck to antagonize a warlock named McGinty. He shrank me and gave me a beastly temper. Then, because I kept plaguing him, he banished me to these unreal parts.

  “He was hipped on the Irish literary renaissance—Yeats, AE, Joyce, Shaw and the rest. So he put a tag on the curse that he found in one of Lord Dunsany’s stories, about the tears of la Bête Joyeux. In the story it was ‘the gladsome beast,’ and Mac’s French was always weak.

  “What magic I know I picked up by eavesdropping. You can’t help learning things knocking around the planes, I guess. There were lots of bits that I filed away because I couldn’t use them until I achieved full stature again. And now, Almarish, they’re all yours. I’m very grateful to you.”

  He stared into her level green eyes. “Think you could get us back to Ellil?”

  “Like that!” She snapped her fingers.

  “Good. Those rats—Pike and the rest—caught me unawares, but I can raise an army anywhere on a week’s notice and take over again.”

  “I knew you could do it. I’m with you, Almarish, Packer, or whatever your name is.”

  Diffidently he said, “Moira, you grew very dear to me as you used to snore away in my pocket.”

  “I don’t snore!” she declared.

  “Anyway—you can pick whichever name you like. It’s yours if you’ll have it.”

  After a little while she said, smiling into his eyes:

  “My size. Only a little taller, of course.”

  THE CITY IN THE SOFA

  Originally published in Cosmic Stories, July 1941.

  Lieutenant J. C. Battle tweaked the ends of his trim little military moustache and smiled brilliantly at the cashier.

  “Dear lady,” he said, “there seems to have been some mistake. I could have sworn I’d put my wallet in this suit—”

  The superblond young lady looked bored and crooked a finger at the manager of the cafeteria. The manager crooked a finger at three muscular busboys, who shambled over to the exit.

  “Now,” said the manager, “what seems to be the trouble?”

  The lieutenant bowed. “My name,” he said, “is Battle. My card, sir.” He presented it.

  “A phony,” said the manager with the wickedest of smiles. “A deadbeat. The check says thirty cents, Major—do you cough up or wash dishes?” He flung the card aside, and an innocent-appearing old man, white-haired, wrinkled of face and shabbily dressed, who had been patiently waiting to pay his ten-cent check, courteously stooped and tapped the manager on the shoulder.

  “You dropped this,” he said politely, extending the card.

  “Keep it,” snarled the manager. The innocent old man scanned the card and stiffened as though he had been shot.

  “If you will allow me,” he said, interrupting Battle’s impassioned plea for justice, “I shall be glad to pay this young man’s check.” He fished out an ancient wallet and dropped a half dollar into the superblond’s hand.

  “May I have your address, sir?” asked Battle when they were outside. “I shall mail you the money as soon as I get back to my club.”

  The old man raised a protesting hand. “Don’t mention it,” he smiled toothlessly. “It was a pleasure. In fact I should like you to come with me to my club.” He looked cautiously around. “I think,” he half-whispered, “that I have a job for you, Lieutenant—if you’re available.”

  “Revolution?” asked Battle, skeptically surveying the old man, taking in every wrinkle in the suit he wore. “I’m rather busy at the moment, sir, but I can recommend some very able persons who might suit you as well. They do what might be called a cut-rate business. My price is high, sir—very high.”

  “Be that as it may, Lieutenant. My club is just around the corner. Will you follow me, please?”

  Only in New York could you find a two-bit cafeteria on a brightly lit avenue around the corner from the homes of the wealthy on one side and the poor on the other. Battle fully expected the old man to cross the street and head riverwards; instead he led the soldier of fortune toward Central Park.

  Battle gasped as the old man stopped and courteously gestured him to enter a simple door in an old-style marble-faced building. Disbelievingly he read the house number.

  “But this is—” said Battle, stuttering a little in awe.

  “Yes,” said the old man simply. “This is the Billionaire’s Club.”

  In the smoking room, Battle eased himself dazedly into a chair upholstered with a priceless Gobelin tapestry shot through by wires of pure gold. Across the room he saw a man with a vast stomach and a nose like a pickled beet whom he recognized as Old Jay. He was shaking an admonishing finger at the stock-market plunger known as The Cobra of Wall Street.

  “Where you should put your money—” Old Jay rumbled. As Battle leaned forward eagerly, the rumble dropped to a whisper. The Cobra jotted down a few notes in a solid-silver memo pad and smiled gratefully. As he left the room he nodded at a suave young man whom the lieutenant knew to be the youngest son of the Atlantis Plastic and Explosives Dynasty.

  “I didn’t,” said Battle breathlessly, “I didn’t catch the name, sir.”

  “Cromleigh,” snapped the old man who had brought him through the fabulous portals. “Ole Cromleigh, ‘Shutter-shy,’ they call me. I’ve never been photographed, and for a very good reason. All will be plain in a moment. Watch this.” He pressed a button.

  “Yessir?” snapped a page, appearing through a concealed door as if by magic.

  Cromleigh pointed at a rather shabby mohair sofa. “I want that fumigated, sonny,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s crummy.”

  “Certainly, sir,” said the page. “I’ll have it attended to right away, sir.” He marched through the door after a smart salute.

  “Now study that sofa,” said Cromleigh meditatively. “Look at it carefully and tell me what you think of it.”

  The lieutenant looked at it carefully. “Nothing,” he said at length, and quite frankly. “I can’t see a thing wrong with it, except that beside all this period furniture it looks damned shabby.”

  “Yes,” said Ole Cromleigh. “I see.” He rubbed his hands meditatively. “You heard me order that page to fumigate it, eh? Well—he’s going to forget all about those orders as completely as if I’d never delivered them.”

  “I don’t get it,” confessed Battle. “But I’d like you to check—for my benefit.”

  Cromleigh shrugged and pressed the button again. To the page who appeared, he said irascibly, “I told you to have that sofa fumigated—didn’t I?”

  The boy looked honestly baffled. “No, sir,” he said, wrinkling his brows. “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “All right, sonny. Scat.” The boy disappeared with evident relief.

  “That’s quite a trick,” said Battle. “How do you do it?” He was absolutely convinced that it was the same boy and that he had forgotten all about the incident.

  “You hit the nail on the head, young man,” said Cromleigh, leaning forward. “I didn’t do it. I don’t know who did, but it happens regularly.” He looked about him sharply and continued, “I’m owing-gay oo-tay eek-spay in ig-pay atin-lay. Isten-lay.”

  And then, in the smoking room of the Billionaire’s Club, the strangest story ever told was unreeled—in pig-Latin!—for the willing ears of Lieutenant J. C. Battle, Soldier of Fortune. And it was the prelude to his strangest job—the strangest job any soldier of fortune was ever hired for throughout the whole history o
f the ancient profession.

  * * * *

  Battle was bewildered. He stared about himself with the curious feeling of terrified uncertainty that is felt in nightmares. At his immediate left arose a monstrous spiral mountain, seemingly of metal-bearing ore, pitted on the surface and crusted with red rust.

  From unimaginable heights above him filtered a dim, sickly light… beneath his feet was a coarse stuff with great ridges and interstices running into the distance. Had he not known, he would never have believed that he was standing on wood.

  “So this,” said Battle, “is what the inside of a mohair sofa is like.”

  Compressed into a smallness that would have made a louse seem mastodonic, he warily trod his way across huge plains of that incredible worm’s-eye wood, struggled over monstrous tubes that he knew were the hairy padding of the sofa.

  From somewhere far off in the dusk of this world of near night, there was a trampling of feet, many feet. Battle drew himself on the alert, snapped out miniature revolvers, one in each hand. He thought briskly that these elephant-pistols had been, half an hour ago, the most dangerous handguns on Earth, whereas here—well?

  The trampling of feet attached itself to the legs of a centipede, a very small centipede that was only about two hundred times the length of the lieutenant. Its many sharp eyes sighted him, and rashly the creature headed his way.

  The flat crash of his guns echoing strangely in the unorthodox construction of this world, Battle stood his ground, streaming smoke from both pistols. The centipede kept on going.

  He drew a smoke bomb and hurled it delicately into the creature’s face. The arthropod reared up and thrashed for a full second before dying. As Battle went a long way around it, it switched its tail, nearly crushing the diminished soldier of fortune.

  After the equivalent of a two-mile walk he saw before him a light that was not the GE’s filtering down from the smoking room of the Billionaire’s Club, but a bright, chemical flare of illumination.

  “It’s them,” breathed the lieutenant. “In person!” He crouched behind a towering wood shaving and inspected the weird scene. It was a city that spread out before him, but a city the like of which man’s eyes had never seen before.

  A good, swift kick would have sent most of it crashing to the ground, but to the tiny lieutenant it was impressive and somehow beautiful. It was built mostly of wood splinters quarried from the two-by-fours which braced the sofa; the base of the city was more of the same, masticated into a sort of papier-mâché platform. As the soldier of fortune looked down on it from the dizzy height of two feet, he felt his arms being very firmly seized.

  “What do we do about this?” demanded a voice, thin and querulous. “I never saw one this size.”

  “Take him to the Central Committee, stupid,” snapped another. Battle felt his guns being hoisted from their holsters and snickered quietly. They didn’t know—

  Yes they did. A blindfold was whipped about his eyes and his pockets and person were given a thorough going-over. They even took the fulminate of mercury that he kept behind his molars.

  “Now what?” asked the first voice. Battle could picture its owner gingerly handling the arsenal that he habitually carried with him.

  “Now,” said the second voice, “now freedom slowly broadens down.” Clunk! Battle felt something—with his last fighting vestige of consciousness, he realized that it was one of his own gun butts—contact his head, then went down for the count.

  * * * *

  The next thing he knew a dulcet voice was cooing at him. The lieutenant had never heard a dulcet voice before, he decided. There had been, during his hitch with the Foreign Legion, one Messoua whose voice he now immediately classified as a sort of hoarse cackle. The blond Hedvig, the Norwegian spy he had encountered in service with Los Invincibles de Bolivia, had seemed at the time capable of a dulcet coo; Battle reallocated the Norse girl’s tones as somewhere between a rasp and a metallic gurgle.

  The voice cooed at him, “Get up, stupid. You’re conscious.”

  He opened his eyes and looked for the voice as he struggled to his feet. As he found the source of the coo he fell right flat on his back again. J. C. Battle, soldier of fortune extraordinary, highest-priced insurrectionnaire in the world, had seen many women in the course of his life. Many women had looked on him and found him good, and he had followed the lead with persistence and ingenuity. His rep as a Lothario stretched over most of the Earth’s surface. Yet never, he swore fervently to himself, never had he seen anything to match this little one with the unfriendly stare.

  She was somewhat shorter than the lieutenant and her coloring was the palest, most delicate shade of apple green imaginable. Her eyes were emerald and her hair was a glorious lushness like the hue of a high-priced golf club’s putting green on a summer morning. And she was staring at him angrily, tapping one tiny foot.

  “Excuse me, madame,” said Battle as he rose with a new self-possession in his bearing. He noted that she was wearing what seemed to be a neat little paper frock of shell pink. “Excuse me—I had no notion that it was a lady whom I was keeping waiting.”

  “Indeed,” said the lady coldly. “We’ll dispense with introductions, whoever you are. Just tell your story. Are you a renegade?” She frowned. “No, you couldn’t be that. Begin talking.”

  Battle bowed. “My card,” he said, tendering it. “I presume you to be in a position of authority over the—?” He looked around and saw that he was in a room of wood, quite unfurnished.

  “Oh, sit down if you wish,” snapped the woman. She folded herself up on the floor and scrutinized the card.

  “What I am doesn’t concern you,” she said broodingly. “But since you seem to know something about our plans, know that I am the supreme commander of the—” She made a curious, clicking noise. “That’s the name of my people. You can call us the Invaders.”

  “I shall,” began Battle. “To begin at the beginning, it is known that your—Invaders—plan to take over this world of ours. I congratulate you on your location of your people in a mohair sofa; it is the most ingenious place of concealment imaginable. However, so that the sofa will not be fumigated, you must perform operations at long range—posthypnotic suggestion, I imagine—on the minds of the servants at the Billionaire’s Club. Can you explain to me why you cannot perform these operations on the club members themselves?”

  “Very simple,” said the woman sternly, with the ghost of a smile. “Since all the billionaire members are self-made men, they insist that even the lowest busboys have advanced degrees and be Phi Beta Kappas. This betokens a certain type of academic mind which is very easy to hypnotize. But even if we worked in twenty-four-hour relays on Old Jay we couldn’t put a dent in him. The psychic insensitivity of a billionaire is staggering.

  “And,” she added, looking at Battle through narrowed eyes, “there was one member who noticed that the busboys never fumigated the sofa. We tried to work on him while he slept, but he fought us back. He even subconsciously acquired knowledge of our plans. Thought he’d dreamed it and forgot most of the details.”

  Battle sighed. “You’re right,” he admitted. “Cromleigh was his name, and he tipped me off. Where are you Invaders from?”

  “None of your business,” she tartly retorted. “And where, precisely, do you come from?”

  “This Cromleigh,” said Battle, “was—and is—no fool. He went to a psychologist friend and had his mind probed. The result was a complete outline of your civilization and plans—including that ingenious device of yours, the minifier. He had one built in his lab and paid me very highly to go into it. Then I was dropped by him personally into this sofa with a pair of tweezers.”

  “How much does he know?” snapped the woman.

  “Not much. Only what one of your more feeble-minded citizens let him know. He doesn’t know the final invasion plans and he doesn’t know the time schedu
le—if there is any as yet.”

  “There isn’t,” she said with furrowed brow. “And if there were, you imbecile monsters would never learn it from us.” Suddenly she blazed at him, “Why must you die the hard way? Why don’t you make room for the superrace while you have the chance? But no! We’d never be able to live in peace with you—you—cretins!” Then her lip trembled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be harsh—but there are so few of us and so many of you—” The dam broke, and the little lady dissolved in a flood of tears.

  Battle leaped into the breach like a veteran. He scored 99.9807 on the firing range consistently and that was pretty good, but when it came to comforting weeping female soldiers of fortune Battle really shone.

  Some minutes later they were chummily propped up against the wall of the wooden room. Her weeps over, the little lady—who had identified herself as Miss Aktying click! Byam—began:

  “We came—you could have guessed this from our size—from an asteroid near Jupiter. Don’t ask me why my people are so much like yours except for size; after all, why shouldn’t they be? Spores of life, you know.

  “Our spaceship’s somewhere in your New Jersey; we landed there two years ago and sized up the situation. We’d been driven from our own planet by nasty creatures from Ceres who had the damndest war machines you ever saw—flame guns, disintegrator rays—and they’re going to mop up the universe when they get around to it. By your standards they were three inches tall; to us they were twenty-foot horrors.

  “We sent out a few agents who learned the language in two or three days; we could live on the spaceship and keep out of sight. The agents came back to us all steamed up. They’d been riding in coat pockets and things, listening in on private wires. They found out that most of the wealth in the world is concentrated in the Billionaire’s Club, right here where we are. So we moved en masse, all three hundred of us, into this sofa and built our city.

  “It isn’t as easy as it sounds, of course. To listen in on a conversation means that you have to weigh yourself down with almost an ounce of equipment for raising the octaves of the voice and scaling it down to fit our ears. But now we have our listening posts and we eavesdrop in relays to every word that’s spoken. If you knew what I know about Atlantis Plastic and Explosive—