His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He shook himself, scooped the rolls into his top desk drawer and said:

  "I'll drive you out there if you like. It's nearly quitting time anyway."

  Walter told his wife Betty over the dinner table: "We ought to have him in some evening. I can't imagine where on Earth he comes from. I had to show him how to turn on the kitchen range. When it went on he said,

  'Oh, yes—electricity!' and laughed his head off. And he kept ducking the question when I tried to ask him in a nice way. Maybe he's some kind of a political refugee."

  "Maybe …" Betty began dreamily, and then shut her mouth. She didn't want Walter laughing at her again. As it was, he made her buy her science-fiction magazines downtown instead of at neighborhood newsstands. He thought it wasn't becoming for his wife to read them.

  He's so eager for success, she thought sentimentally.

  That night while Walter watched a television variety show, she read a story in one of her magazines. (Its cover, depicting a space ship and a girl in green bra and shorts, had been prudently torn off and thrown away.) It was about a man from the future who had gone back in time, bringing with him all sorts of marvelous inventions. In the end the Time Police punished him for unauthorized time traveling. They had come back and got him, brought him back to his own time. She smiled. It would be nice if Mr. Clurg, instead of being a slightly eccentric foreigner, were a man from the future with all sorts of interesting stories to tell and a satchelful of gadgets that could be sold for millions and millions of dollars.

  After a week they did have Clurg over for dinner. It started badly. Once more he managed to sit down in empty air and crash to the floor. While they were brushing him off he said fretfully: "I can't get used to not—"

  and then said no more.

  He was a picky eater. Betty had done one of her mother's specialties, veal cutlet with tomato sauce, topped by a poached egg. He ate the egg and sauce, made a clumsy attempt to cut up the meat, and abandoned it. She served a plate of cheese, half a dozen Kinds, for dessert, and Clurg tasted them uncertainly, breaking off a crumb from each, while Betty wondered where that constituted good manners. His face lit up when he tried a ripe cheddar. He popped the whole wedge into his mouth and said to Betty: "I will have that, please."

  "Seconds?" asked Walter. "Sure. Don't bother, Betty. IT1 get it." He brought back a quarter-pound wedge of the cheddar.

  Walter and Betty watched silently as Clurg calmly ate every crumb of it He sighed. "Very good. Quite like—" The word, Walter and Betty later agreed, was see-mon-joe. They were able to agree quite early in the evening, because Clurg got up after eating the cheese, said warmly, Thank you so much!" and walked out of the house.

  Betty said, "What—on—Earth!"

  Walter said uneasily, "I'm sorry, doll. I didn't think he'd be quite that peculiar—"

  "—But after all!"

  "—Of course he's a foreigner. What was that word?"

  He jotted it down.

  While they were doing the dishes Betty said, "I think he was drunk.

  Falling-down drunk."

  "No," Walter said. "It's exactly the same thing he did in my office. As though he expected a chair to come to him instead of him going to a chair." He laughed and said uncertainly, "Or maybe he's royalty. I read once about Queen Victoria never looking around before she sat down, she was so sure there'd be a chair there."

  "Well, there isn't any more royalty, not to speak of," she said angrily, hanging up the dish towel. "What's on TV tonight?"

  "Uncle Miltie. But…uh…I think I'll read. Uh…where do you keep those magazines of yours, doll? Believe I'll give them a try."

  She gave him a look that he wouldn't meet, and she went to get him some of her magazines. She also got a slim green book which she hadn't looked at for years. While Walter flipped uneasily through the magazines she studied the book. After about ten minutes she said:

  "Walter. Seemonjoe. I think I know what language it is."

  He was instantly alert. "Yeah? What?"

  "It should be spelled c-i-m-a-n-g-o, with little jiggers over the C and G.

  It means 'Universal food' in Esperanto."

  "Where's Esperanto?" he demanded.

  "Esperanto isn't anywhere. It's an artificial language. I played around with it a little once. It was supposed to end war and all sorts of things.

  Some people called it the language of the future'." Her voice was tremulous.

  Walter said, "I'm going to get to the bottom of this."

  He saw Clurg go into the neighborhood movie for the matinee. That gave him about three hours.

  Walter hurried to the Curran bungalow, remembered to slow down and tried hard to look casual as he unlocked the door and went in. There wouldn't be any trouble—he was a good citizen, known and respected—he could let himself into a tenant's house and wait for him to talk about business if he wanted to.

  He tried not to think of what people would think if he should be caught rifling Clurg's luggage, as he intended to do. He had brought along an assortment of luggage keys. Surprised by his own ingenuity, he had got them at a locksmith's by saying his own key was lost and he didn't want to haul a heavy packed bag downtown.

  But he didn't need the keys. In the bedroom closet the two suitcases stood, unlocked.

  There was nothing in the first except uniformly new clothes, bought locally at good shops. The second was full of the same. Going through a rather extreme sports jacket, Walter found a wad of paper in the breast pocket. It was a newspaper page. A number had been penciled on a margin; apparently the sheet had been torn out and stuck into the pocket and forgotten. The dateline on the paper was July 18th, 2403.

  Walter had some trouble reading the stories at first, but found it was easy enough if he read them aloud and listened to his voice.

  One said:

  TAIM KOP NABD: PROSKYOOTR ASKS DETH

  Patrolm'n Oskr Garth V thi Taim Polis w'z arest'd toodei at biz horn, 4365 9863th Suit, and bookd at 9768th Prisint on tchardg'z Polis-Ekspozh'r. Thi aledjd Ekspozh'r okurM hwafle Garth w'z on dooti in thi Twenti-Furst Sentch'ri. It konsist'd "v hiz admish'n too a sit'zen 'v thi Twenti-Furst Sentch'ri that thi Taim Polis ekzisted and woz op'rated fr"m thi Twenti-Fifth Sentch'ri. Thi Proskypot'rz Ofis sed thi deth pen'lti wil be askt ifl vyoo 'v thi heinus neitch'r 'v thi ofens, hwitch thret'nz thi hwol fabrik 'v Twenti-Fifth-Sentch'ri eksiz-tens.

  There was an advertisement on the other side:

  BOIZ"ND YUNG MEN!

  SERV EUR SENTCH'RI!

  ENLIST IN THI TAIM POLIS RKURV NOW!

  RIMEMB'R—

  V THI AJEZ! ONLY IN THI TAIM POLIS KAN EU PROTEKT EUR

  SIVILIZASH*N FR'M VARFNS! THEIR IZ NO HAIER SERVIS TOO AR

  KULTCH'R! THEIR IZ NO K'REER SO FAS*NATING AZ A K'REER IN THI TAIM POLIS!

  Underneath it another ad asked:

  HWAI BI ASHEEMPD "V EUR TCHAIRZ? GET ROL-

  FASTS! No uth'r tcheir haz thi immidjit respons "v a Rolfast Sit enihweir—eor Rolfast iz theirl

  Eur Rolfast mefl partz ar solid gold to avoid tairsum polishing. Eur Rolfast beirings are thi fain'st six-intch dupliks di'mondz for long wair.

  Walter's heart pounded. Gold—to avoid tiresome polishing! Six-inch diamonds—for long wear!

  And Clurg must be a time policeman. "Only in the time police can you see the pageant of the ages!" What did a time policeman do? He wasn't quite clear about that. But what they didn't do was let anybody else—

  anybody earlier— know that the Time Police existed. He, Walter Lachlan of the Twentieth Century, held in the palm of his hand Time Policeman Clurg of the Twenty-Fifth Century—the Twenty-Fifth Century where gold and diamonds were common as steel and glass in this!

  He was there when Clurg came back from the matinee. Mutely, Walter extended the page of newsprint Clurg snatched it incredulously, stared at it and crumpled it in his fist. He collapsed on the floor with a groan.

  "I'm done for!" Walter heard him say.

  "Listen, Clurg," Walte
r said. "Nobody ever needs to know about this—

  nobody."

  Clurg looked up with sudden hope in his eyes. "You will keep silent?" he asked wildly. "It is my life!"

  "What's it worth to you?" Walter demanded with brutal directness. "I can use some of those diamonds and some of that gold. Can you get it into this century?"

  "It would be missed. It would be over my mass-balance," Qurg said.

  "But I have a Duplix. I can copy diamonds and gold for you; that was how I made my feoff money."

  He snatched an instrument from his pocket—a fountain pen, Walter thought "It is low in charge. It would Duplix about five kilograms in one operation—"

  "You mean," Walter demanded, "that if I brought you five kilograms of diamonds and gold you could duplicate it? And the originals wouldn't be harmed? Let me see that thing. Can I work it?"

  Clurg passed over the "fountain pen". Walter saw that within the case was a tangle of wires, tiny tubes, lenses—he passed it back hastily.

  Clurg said, "That is correct. You could buy or borrow jewelry and I could duplix it. Then you could return the originals and retain the copies. You swear by your contemporary God that you would say nothing?"

  Walter was thinking. He could scrape together a good thirty thousand dollars by pledging the house, the business, his own real estate, the bank account, the life insurance, the securities. Put it all into diamonds, of course and then—doubled! Overnight!

  "I'll say nothing," he told Clurg. "If you come through." He took the sheet from the twenty-fifth-century newspaper from Clurg's hands and put it securely in his own pocket. "When I get those-diamonds duplicated," he said, "I'll burn them and forget the rest. Until then, I want you to stay close to home. I'll come around in a day or so with the stuff for you to duplicate."

  Qurg nervously promised.

  The secrecy, of course, didn't include Betty. He told her when he got home and she let out a yell of delight. She demanded the newspaper, read it avidly, and then demanded to see Clurg.

  "I don't think hell talk," Walter said doubtfully. "But if you really want to…"

  She did, and they walked to the Curran bungalow. Clurg was gone, lock, stock and barrel, leaving not a trace behind. They waited for hours, nervously.

  At last Betty said, "He's gone back."

  Walter nodded. "He wouldn't keep his bargain, but by God I'm going to keep mine. Come along. We're going to the Enterprise."

  "Walter," she said. "You wouldn't—would you?"

  He went alone, after a bitter quarrel.

  At the Enterprise office he was wearily listened to by a reporter, who wearily looked over the twenty-fifth-century newspaper. "I don't know what you're peddling, Mr. Lachlan," he said, "but we like people to buy their ads in the Enterprise. This is a pretty bare-faced publicity grab."

  "But—" Walter sputtered.

  "Sam, would you please ask Mr. Morris to come up here if he can?" the reporter was saying into the phone. To Walter he explained, "Mr.

  Morris is our pressroom foreman."

  The foreman was a huge, white-haired old fellow, partly deaf. The reporter showed him the newspaper from the twenty-fifth century and said, "How about this?"

  Mr. Morris looked at it and smelled it and said, showing no interest in the reading matter: "American Type Foundry Futura number nine, discontinued about ten years ago. It's been hand-set. The ink—hard to say. Expensive stuff, not a news ink. A book ink, a job-printing ink. The paper, now, I know. A nice linen rag that Benziger jobs in Philadelphia."

  "You see, Mr. Lachlan? It's a fake." The reporter shrugged.

  Walter walked slowly from the city room. The press-room foreman knew. It was a fake. And Clurg was a faker. Suddenly Walter's heels touched the ground after twenty-four hours and stayed there. Good God, the diamonds! Clurg was a conman! He would have worked a package switch! He would have had thirty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds for less than a month's work!

  He told Betty about it when he got home and she laughed unmercifully.

  "Time Policeman" was to become a family joke between the Lachlans.

  Harry Twenty-Third Street stood, blinking, in a very peculiar place.

  Peculiarly, his feet were firmly encased, up to the ankles, in a block of dear plastic.

  There were odd-looking people and a big voice was saying: "May it please the court. The People of the Twenty-Fifth Century versus Harold Parish, alias Harry Twenty-Third Street, alias Clurg, of the Twentieth Century. The charge is impersonating an officer of the Time Police. The Prosecutor's Office will ask the death penalty in view of the heinous nature of the offense, which threatens the whole fabric—"

  Two Dooms

  [Venture, July 1958]

  It was may, not yet summer by five weeks, but the afternoon heat under the corrugated roofs of Manhattan Engineer District's Los Alamos Laboratory was daily less bearable. Young Dr. Edward Roy-land had lost fifteen pounds from an already meager frame during his nine-month hitch in the desert. He wondered every day while the thermometer crawled up to its 5:45 peak whether he had made a mistake he would regret the rest of his life in accepting work with the Laboratory rather than letting the local draft board have his carcass and do what they pleased with it. His University of Chicago classmates were glamorously collecting ribbons and wounds from Saipan to Brussels; one of them, a first-rate mathematician named Hatfield, would do no more first-rate mathematics. He had gone down, burning, in an Eighth Air Force Mitchell bomber ambushed over Lille.

  "And what, Daddy, did you do in the war?"

  "Well, kids, it's a little hard to explain. They had this stupid atomic bomb project that never came to anything, and they tied up a lot of us in a Godforsaken place in New Mexico. We figured and we calculated and we fooled with uranium and some of us got radiation burns and then the war was over and they sent us home."

  Royland was not amused by this prospect. He had heat rash under his arms and he was waiting, not patiently, for the Computer Section to send him his figures on Phase 56c, which was the (god-damn childish) code designation for Element Assembly Time. Phase 56c was Royland's own particular baby. He was under Rotschmidt, supervisor of weapon design track III, and Rotschmidt was under Oppenheimer, who bossed the works. Sometimes a General Groves came through, a fine figure of a man, and once from a window Royland had seen the venerable Henry L.

  Stimson, Secretary of War, walking slowly down their dusty street, leaning on a cane and surrounded by young staff officers. That's what Royland was seeing of the war.

  Laboratory! It had sounded inviting, cool, bustling but quiet. So every morning these days he was blasted out of his cot in a barracks cubicle at seven by "Oppie's whistle," fought for a shower and shave with thirty-seven other bachelor scientists in eight languages, bolted a bad cafeteria breakfast, and went through the barbed-wire Restricted Line to his "office"—another matchboard-walled cubicle, smaller and hotter and noisier, with talking and typing and clack of adding machines all around him.

  Under the circumstances he was doing good work, he supposed. He wasn't happy about being restricted to his one tiny problem, Phase 56c, but no doubt he was happier than Hatfield had been when his Mitchell got it.

  Under the circumstances …they included a weird haywire arrangement for computing. Instead of a decent differential analyzer machine they had a human sea of office girls with Burroughs' desk calculators; the girls screamed "Banzai!" and charged on differential equations and swamped them by sheer volume; they clicked them to death with their little adding machines. Royland thought hungrily of Conant's huge, beautiful analog differentiator up at M.I.T.; it was probably tied up by whatever the mysterious "Radiation Laboratory"

  there was doing. Royland suspected that the "Radiation Laboratory"

  had as much to do with radiation as his own "Manhattan Engineer District" had to do with Manhattan engineering. And the world was supposed to be trembling on the edge these days of a New Dispensation of Computing that would obsolete even the M.I.T. mac
hine—tubes, relays, and binary arithmetic at blinding speed instead of the suavely turning cams and the smoothly extruding rods and the elegant scribed curves of Conant's masterpiece. He decided that he wouldn't like that; he would like it even less than he liked the little office girls clacking away, pushing lank hair from their dewed brows with undistracted hands.

  He wiped his own brow with a sodden handkerchief and permitted himself a glance at his watch and the thermometer. Five-fifteen and 103

  Fahrenheit.

  He thought vaguely of getting out, of fouling up just enough to be released from the project and drafted. No; there was the post-war career to think of. But one of the big shots, Teller, had been irrepressible; he had rambled outside of his assigned mission again and again until Oppenheimer let him go; now Teller was working with Lawrence at Berkeley on something that had reputedly gone sour at a reputed quarter of a billion dollars—

  A girl in khaki knocked and entered. "Your material from the Computer Section, Dr. Royland. Qheck them and sign here, please." He counted the dozen sheets, signed the clipboarded form she held out, and plunged into the material for thirty minutes.

  When he sat back in his chair, the sweat dripped into his eyes unnoticed. His hands were shaking a little, though he did not know that either. Phase 56c of weapon design track III was finished, over, done, successfully accomplished. The answer to the question "Can U23B slugs be assembled into a critical mass within a physically feasible time?"

  was in. The answer was "Yes."

  Royland was a theory man, not a Wheatstone or a Kelvin; he liked the numbers for themselves and had no special passion to grab for wires, mica, and bits of graphite so that what the numbers said might immediately be given flesh in a wonderful new gadget. Nevertheless he could visualize at once a workable atomic bomb assembly within the framework of Phase 56c. You have so many microseconds to assemble your critical mass without it boiling away in vapor; you use them by blowing the subassemblies together with shaped charges; lots of microseconds to spare by that method; practically foolproof. Then comes the Big Bang.