His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Modestly I assured him that that had been the idea. And what did he think of Kant in the light of his scientific attainments?

  "Stinking," said Mac briefly. "But—at least a googolplex advanced above Mr. Cabell. Imbued with that quasi-mystic hogwash I could do naught but agree with the simple-minded laddie that the world is what you make it and that the eternal verity is to get along with one's neighbors. Your friend Kant is all wet, but by no means as wet as that."

  With that he wandered away. When I saw him next he had enrolled in several philosophy courses at the same time. In the Philosophical Society we pinned his ears back with ease whenever he tried to enter into debate, but that was only because he didn't quite know how to use the quaint language of the gentle science.

  I've been rambling badly. The point that I wanted to bring out was that Mac Leonard was brilliant, as brilliant as they come in the current mortal mold. Also that he was a student of the physical sciences and the only philosophy they have, mathematics.

  By a kind of miracle I survived the crash of 1929 with a young fortune in gold certificates. The miracle was an uncle who had burned his fingers in the crash of 1922 and warned me: "When you see the board rooms crowded with people who have no business there—laundrymen, grocers, taxi drivers—then sell!" Ignoring the optimistic fictions of Mr.

  Roger W. Babson, prophet of the stock exchange, now, I believe, candidate for the presidency on the Prohibition Party's ticket, I sold and came out on top. I didn't even trust to the safe deposit vaults the money I had made; it went into the fireproof, burglarproof, earthquakeproof warrens of the Manhattan Storage and Warehouse Corporation. Quick-money imbeciles who had been stuck considered me a traitor not to have lost by the crash. For years I was as good as ostracized by former friends. That was all right with me—I was a scholar and intended to remain one while my capital lasted, which it did.

  A man can be a recluse in the middle of New York; that much I found out in ten years of study. It wasn't in any of the books I read; it was what I proved with my own quiet life. And at the end of many years I heard again from Mac Leonard—a scenic postal card marked Uvalde, Mexico.

  Characteristically laconic, the message was: "—and wife." That and his signature was supposed to be all I wanted to know about him and his fortunes since we had parted at commencement.

  Hoping that he would not already be gone—who but a tourist would write on a scenic postal card?—I mailed a long letter giving my own story to date and demanding his.

  His answer came very much later, three months or more, from Council Bluffs, Iowa:

  Dear Vulcan, [the nickname in reference to my slight limp]

  So the plumy anaconda has found his forked tongue after these long years? I should be hurt at your neglect of me—failing to write when a simple matter like not knowing my address stood in your way. You're right—I was on my honeymoon in the vastly overrated country of Mexico. And she is a very nice girl, in a rowdy sort of way.

  I'm still playing with paper boxes and numbers. The chair of mathematics at one of our little high schools out here is all mine, and very uncomfortable it is. Still, Civil Service is nothing to be sneezed at in these troubled times.

  My life seems to have slipped into a slap-happy routine of examination papers and recitations; the really heart-breaking part is that none of my excessively brilliant students get my jokes. Aside from that all is milk and honey. I live in a bungalow with my wife—seems damned strange to write that down; as though it never really happened!—and we are like a pair of larks in the springtime. Whenever quarrels come I demonstrate by the calculus of symboic logic that she's wrong and I'm right, and that settles the matter. Theoretically, at least.

  Honestly, old dish towel, I'm happy—a truly representative specimen of that rarest work of God, the man who is contented with his lot in life. It may sound idiotic to you, but I hope I never change from what I am. If time stood still this very minute I wouldn't have a kick coming in the world.

  Mac

  Other letters followed that; there was an erratic quality to his correspondence that made it completely delightful. I found in my mailbox or resting on my doorstep anything from postal cards to bundles of year-old exams in Geometry One, neatly rated with mean, average and modes. For three years it kept up; at one time we were waging half a dozen chess games simultaneously as well as a discussion of Hegelian dialectics. "One of these days" he kept carelessly promising, he would blow into the city to see me.

  Then, abruptly, he did. And it wasn't as an honored guest but as a man fleeing from disgrace. Never a coward, not one now in the nastiest position that any man could face, he sent me a note giving the arrival-time of his bus. And he enclosed a bunch of clippings from the local press.

  To say that I was shocked would be putting it mildly. He had been no angel in his college days, but a man grows out of that, especially when he marries. The clippings didn't make it any easier. With an obscene, missish reticence oddly combined with the suggestive vulgarity that is the specialty of the tabloid press, they told the sordid and familiar story of a male teacher in a co-ed school—you know what I mean. It happens.

  I met them at the terminal. He was the picture of a hunted man, eyes sunken and hair lank down his temples. He'd kept his shape; there wasn't a sign of the usual professorial pot-belly. But his mouth was very tight. His nose wrinkled as though he could still smell those headlines.

  Yes, they were so nasty they actually stank.

  He mumbled a brief introduction, and I smiled wildly at his wife in acknowledgment. No self-respecting woman would—

  They came to my apartment to get their luggage settled. They were traveling light. He explained, as we all three lit cigarettes, that he had left his bungalow in the hands of an agent, and that when the business died down somebody would buy it furnished and ready for occupancy.

  "But," he added grimly, "that won't be for a long while."

  "Do you want to talk about it?" I asked, with my damned morbid curiosity.

  "You saw the papers. To correct a popular misconception, which our journals tended to foster, she was not fifteen but nineteen. Big and dumb. And despite their hinting, she was the only one. And anybody in the school could have told you that I wasn't her first boyfriend—as it were."

  "I'm sorry, Mac. It's a lousy thing to happen. I know how it is—" That peculiar noise was me, making like I was broad-minded. But I still didn't see how anybody in his right mind would do a thing like that. I shot a glance at his wife, and luck would have it that she met my eyes squarely.

  With the Midwest twang she said: "I can see that you're wondering what I think about the whole matter." I took a good look at her then, my first.

  She wasn't a very beautiful woman. Her face was the kind you call intelligent. She had a figure that, with cultivation, could be glorious; as it was it was only superb. But I'm easy to please.

  "My husband made a fool of himself, that's plain enough. If he learned his lesson as well as he teaches—it's over. Am I right, Len?"

  "Right," he said dispiritedly.

  "I'll make some coffee," I said, rising, beginning to walk across the floor.

  I felt the way the lame do, her eyes on my twisted right foot. She had reached the kitchen door before I was well under way.

  "Please let me," she said. "You men will want to talk."

  "Thanks," I said, wondering angrily if she was going to be sickeningly sweet and sympathetic about my very minor disability. "Go right ahead." I sat down facing Mac. "Not many women would be that understanding," I said.

  His answer nearly paralyzed me. He leaped across the distance between us, his face desperate and contorted, whispering: "We're going to some hotel. I'll come back and see you tonight. Have to explain. You don't know—"

  "Coffee!" gaily announced Mrs. Leonard, carrying in the tray.

  I rose gallantly, and very much surprised. "How in Heaven's name did you make it so quickly?" I demanded.

  "You don't think I made it with
that fancy glass thing of yours, do you?"

  she laughed. "I have more sense than that."

  "But you couldn't have had time to boil the water!"

  "Silly—there was a pan of water seething. Oh!" Her hand flew to her mouth. "I hope there wasn't salt or anything in it!" I seemed to remember something about water boiling—perhaps I had meant to prepare a hot cloth for my ankle before going to meet the bus.

  "And this," she said, pouring, "is Iowa pan coffee the way my grandmother made it in a covered wagon."

  I got a mouthful of grounds and swallowed convulsively. "Those pioneers had courage," I said inanely.

  Working on a learned monograph revealing factors in the sociology of the Bronx that Fordham University had not even touched, I was baffled by what I had written a few months later. It was done in the style peculiar to some textbooks and degree themes; that is, it was no style at all but an attempt to set down without emotion or effect certain facts in their natural order.

  That was the effect which Mac's talk with me that night had. He had come about nine o'clock, panting from the climb up the stairs and perspiring profusely. He wouldn't take anything to drink but water.

  "It was partly drink that got me into trouble in Council Bluffs," he said.

  "I'm never going to touch it again." He looked up at the indirect light from the ceiling and blinked. "Would you mind—?" he asked inarticulately. "Eyestrain—"

  I turned off the big light and lit a table-lamp which spread a bright pool on the console, leaving the rest of the room obscured. "Now shoot," I said. "And I'm not making any promises about anything tonight. Not one way or another."

  "Don't worry," he almost snarled. "I'm not after your damned money."

  As I started up angrily—and God knows I had a right to be angry—he buried his face in his hands. I sank back into my chair, inexpressibly shocked to hear him weeping.

  "Easy," I muttered. "No need to go on like that, Mac. What would Nicholas Butler say to hear a Columbia man crying?" The ridiculous joke didn't stop him; he sobbed like a child. No; sobbed like a man, from the diaphragm, where it hurts as if your ribs are being torn out one by one.

  He looked up, his eyes streaming, and wiped his face. Returning the handkerchief to his breast pocket, he said in a very steady voice: "It isn't the dreams that get you; it's when you know you're awake and they keep on coming."

  "Yes?" I asked, leaning back. I thought he was delirious.

  "Shut up. I'm telling you everything—don't you see? It's your fault anyway—waking me up when I was dreaming James Branch Cabe11—

  showing me the way things happen."

  "Go on," I said after a long pause. He didn't seem to hear me, for it was an equally long time before he made a curious choking sound and said:

  "I think I have been in Hell for the past few years, old ink-blotter. But I recall a very special chapter of the book. Allow me to describe it. There is, first of all, a large, rocky cavern." He paused again and leaned back, speaking in a very faint, rasping voice, as though he could not bear the sounds of the words he was saying.

  "And there is very foolish talk going on. There are people in the cavern who think they are Satanists, or something like it. They have prepared fantastic things—a long table, various dyes and pigments. Very foolish.

  They are well-dressed people; it is true, as a rule, that the poor are on the side of God.

  "One of the foolish, wealthy people is a woman. She finds it necessary to undress and begin to dance as the others clap their hands. Did I mention that there were fires lighting this cavern? She spins close by the fires, one by one, and makes it a point to burn herself badly in various places. Then, as she falls to the floor, another, a man, has reasons for doing, essentially, what she has done. But the man wears a chain around his neck which he does not remove, and from this chain hangs a small medallion. When the man is very badly burned, another woman makes a fool of herself in the same manner, and after her a man.

  "Would you believe it if I told you that in all twenty-four people willingly subjected themselves to widespread first-degree burns? After hours of this folly they sat in a circle, still without their clothes, and mumbled gibberish for twenty minutes or more.

  "At that point they had conjured up Satan, theoretically. My guess is that they did nothing of the sort. The incarnation of Evil? No! He would not have let them live or praise him. Something they did conjure up.

  What it was I do not know, but this is what happened.

  "There was, first of all, a noticeable diminution of the firelight. Then appeared a definite blue glow at what would be the apex of the cone about whose basal circumference they were sitting. As that glow grew, the fires went out. There was definitely a Presence there …

  "I don't know what to call it. It was not Satan. There probably is no Satan. But there was a Presence, and it had horns and a tail and great, shining teeth and lustful, shining eyes."

  I stood up from my chair. "That's enough!" I yelled at him.

  He looked at me and then, shockingly, suddenly, gave a low chuckle.

  "Quaint tale, isn't it? What's the matter?"

  "You tell me!" I snapped. "What's on your mind?"

  "Allow me to get on with the story. I'm afraid I was becoming hypnotized by my own rhetoric. And interrupt if you feel too weak to stand it." I flushed suddenly as I felt his eyes on my twisted foot. Where did the damned slander start that cripples are loose in the head?

  "Go on," I growled.

  "To be brief, direct and—crude—the women then proceed to caress this creature. And then—!

  "There appears a man in that cavern who does not wear a pendant from his neck. He is no demonologist. He is, God knows, not wealthy. He is but a simple mathematician who made the horrid mistake of attempting to tie in his mathematics with occult philosophy."

  Another very long pause. "Go on," I said.

  "Don't get me wrong," said Mac. "Don't do that. I didn't know what I was doing. If I'd known I would have cut off my hand before I wrote the supersonic equations. But it's so simple. All you need is a scale of tuning forks—then you modify them the right way and you find yourself in the nearest occult vortex. It's so simple! The clue is in several of Madame Blavatsky's Meditations. That old hag didn't know what she was writing, I suppose. You need money, millions, to get into the circle.

  I was an outsider.

  "The Presence vanished, and I was cursed by those people—cursed while I was waking, sleeping, talking, walking, dancing, writing and reading. Then they opened a door and threw me out."

  "A door?" I asked. "In a cavern?"

  He laughed like the closing of a lock. "The rocks," he said, "were papier mache. The cavern was the third-floor ballroom of a hotel on 32nd Street."

  "And so?" I asked.

  "I wired back to Council Bluffs for bus fare. I was back there in two days with a tale of urgent business in New York."

  "That's plenty, Leonard. Now you can get the hell out of my house. Yes, even before you build up to the touch for the rare herbs that'll take the curse off you."

  "Sorry," he said, rising. "I tried to let you know. It wasn't a touch. I remembered that you have a cousin, or had, the one you wrote that Bronx monograph on—"

  "He's up the river. Dewey got him, with the rest of Murder Incorporated. Did you want a bodyguard against the demons? Or do you want to become a policy banker?"

  He had his hat on. From the door he said: "I wanted to have a murder done for me. But now I suppose I'll have to do it myself …"

  I locked the door and went to bed, fuming like a tea-kettle. I'm from a short-lived clan; we break down early and live in the fear of death. That night I found myself with a hacking cough, which didn't add to my sense of well-being, for my father and sister had died of throat infections. You could accurately say that between Mac's turning out to be a chiseling phony and my fears that in a week I'd be a dead man, I bordered on distraction. There was a heightening of the sensory powers all the sensory powers.
The darkest room was not dark enough for me, and the traffic below jerked me up in bed repressing shrieks of pain. It was as though I had been flayed alive, for the silk bedsheets I use for that very reason were like sacking-cloth—or sandpaper.

  How I managed to fall asleep I didn't know. Certainly the quality of my dreams was horrid enough to wake me up screaming.

  I got disconnected scraps and images from Leonard's story of that night. I saw over again, in the most damnably vivid colors, the lie he had told of the ceremonial in the hotel. Details he had omitted were plentifully supplied by my subconscious—revolting details. Cripples, I am told, are generally stews of repression and fear.

  Quite the most awful part was the Presence turning to me and stating, in a language of snarls and drooling grunts, the following message:

  "A curse is no mouthing of words. That worries at a man but does not kill. A curse is no juggling of hands. That worries at a man, but does not maim. A curse is no thinking of evil. That worries at a man, but does not blind, tear, crush, char and slash. A curse is something you can see, hear, feel, hate and love."

  That was not the end of the dream, but it was near. After I—

  subconsciously doubling for Mac—had been thrown out of that ballroom, it ended and I awoke. My throat irritation was gone, which was good. That night I did not sleep any more, but read and re-read the clippings Mac had sent me. I wanted to look at his letters, but they were in no kind of order.

  I saw the sun rise and made myself a breakfast of bacon and eggs. It was interrupted by a telegram slipped under my door. The yellow slip read: "Please phone me. Not a touch. Mac Leonard." The telegram was because I have no phone; if you want to hear my dulcet voice, you have to coerce me into going down to the corner drug store to call you up.

  Frankly, I didn't know what to do. I was still mad, half because of his ridiculous story, half because of his continuous rude staring at my right foot. I long ago passed the point where I allowed people to indulge their curiosity at the cost of much personal anguish to me. I decided that I might as well.