C. M. Kornbluth, page 18
If we find out that it was, we can suspect that they are—gone. Or nearly so.” She coined a happy phrase: “By race suicide.”
“The arithmetic of it is quite plausible,” Salter said. “If no factors work except the single-child factor, in one century of five generations a population of two billion will have bred itself down to a hundred and twenty-five million. In another century, the population is just under four million. In another, a hundred and twenty-two thousand … by the thirty-second generation the last couple descended from the original two billion will breed one child, and that’s the end. And there are the other factors. Besides those who do not breed by choice” —his eyes avoided Jewel Flyte—”there are the things we have seen on the stairs, and in the corridor, and in these compartments.”
“Then there’s our answer,” said Mrs. Graves. She smacked the obscene table with her hand, forgetting what it was. “We beach the ship and march the ship’s company onto dry land. We clean up, we learn what we have to to get along—” Her words trailed off. She shook her head.
“Sorry,” she said gloomily. “I’m talking nonsense.”
The chaplain understood her, but he said: “The land is merely another of the many mansions. Surely they could learn!”
“It’s not politically feasible,” Salter said. “Not in its present form.” He thought of presenting the proposal to the Ship’s Council in the shadow of the mast that bore the Compact, and twitched his head in an involuntary negative.
“There is a formula possible,” Jewel Flyte said.
The Brownells burst in on them then, all eighteen of the Brownells.
They had been stalking the shore party since its landing. Nine sack-culotted women in cloches and nine men in penitential black, they streamed through the gaping door and surrounded the sea people with a ring of spears. Other factors had indeed operated, but this was not yet the thirty-second generation of extinction.
The leader of the Brownells, a male, said with satisfaction: “Just when we needed—new blood.” Salter understood that he was not speaking in genetic terms.
The females, more verbal types, said critically: “Evil-doers, obviously.
Displaying their limbs without shame, brazenly flaunting the rotted pillars of the temple of lust. Come from the accursed sea itself, abode of infamy, to seduce us from our decent and regular lives.”
“We know what to do with the women,” said the male leader. The rest took up the antiphon.
“We’ll knock them down.”
“And roll them on their backs.”
“And pull one arm out and tie it fast.”
“And pull the other arm out and tie it fast.”
“And pull one limb out and tie it fast.”
“And pull the other limb out and tie it fast.”
“And then—”
“We’ll beat them to death and Merdeka will smile.”
Chaplain Pemberton stared incredulously. “You must look into your hearts,” he told them in a reasonable voice. “You must look deeper than you have, and you will find that you have been deluded. This is not the way for human beings to act. Somebody has misled you dreadfully. Let me explain—”
“Blasphemy,” the leader of the females said, and put her spear expertly into the chaplain’s intestines. The shock of the broad, cold blade pulsed through him and felled him. Jewel Flyte knelt beside him instantly, checking heart beat and breathing. He was alive.
“Get up,” the male leader said. “Displaying and offering yourself to such as we is useless. We are pure in heart.”
A male child ran to the door. “Wagners!” he screamed. “Twenty Wagners coming up the stairs!”
His father roared at him: “Stand straight and don’t mumble!” and slashed out with the butt of his spear, catching him hard in the ribs.
The child grinned, but only after the pure-hearted eighteen had run to the stairs.
Then he blasted a whistle down the corridor while the sea people stared with what attention they could divert from the bleeding chaplain. Six doors popped open at the whistle and men and women emerged from them to launch spears into the backs of the Brownells clustered to defend the stairs. “Thanks, Pop!” the boy kept screaming while the pure-hearted Wagners swarmed over the remnants of the pure-hearted Brownells; at last his screaming bothered one of the Wagners and the boy was himself speared.
Jewel Flyte said: “I’ve had enough of this. Captain, please pick the chaplain up and come along.”
“They’ll kill us.”
“You’ll have the chaplain,” said Mrs. Graves. “One moment.” She darted into a bedroom and came back hefting the spiked knobkerry.
“Well, perhaps,” the girl said. She began undoing the long row of buttons down the front of her coveralls and shrugged out of the garment, then unfastened and stepped out of her underwear. With the clothes over her arm she walked into the corridor and to the stairs, the stupefied captain and inspector following.
To the pure-hearted Merdekans she was not Prynne winning her case; she was Evil incarnate. They screamed, broke and ran wildly, dropping their weapons. That a human being could do such a thing was beyond their comprehension; Merdeka alone knew what kind of monster this was that drew them strangely and horribly, in violation of all sanity.
They ran as she had hoped they would; the other side of the coin was spearing even more swift and thorough than would have been accorded to her fully clothed. But they ran, gibbering with fright and covering their eyes, into apartments and corners of the corridor, their backs turned on the awful thing.
The sea people picked their way over the shambles at the stairway and went unopposed down the stairs and to the dock. It was a troublesome piece of work for Salter to pass the chaplain down to Mrs. Graves in the boat, but in ten minutes they had cast off, rowed out a little, and set sail to catch the land breeze generated by the differential twilight cooling of water and brick. After playing her part in stepping the mast, Jewel Flyte dressed.
“It won’t always be that easy,” she said when the last button was fastened. Mrs. Graves had been thinking the same thing, but had not said it to avoid the appearance of envying that superb young body.
Salter was checking the chaplain as well as he knew how. “I think he’ll be all right,” he said. “Surgical repair and a long rest. He hasn’t lost much blood. This is a strange story we’ll have to tell the Ship’s Council.”
Mrs. Graves said, “They’ve no choice. We’ve lost our net and the land is there waiting for us. A few maniacs oppose us—what of it?” Again a huge fish lazily surfaced; Salter regarded it thoughtfully. He said:
“They’ll propose scavenging bronze ashore and fashioning another net and going on just as if nothing had happened. And really, we could do that, you know.”
Jewel Flyte said: “No. Not forever. This time it was the net, at the end of harvest. What if it were three masts in midwinter, in mid-Atlantic?”
“Or,” said the captain, “the rudder—any time. Anywhere. But can you imagine telling the Council they’ve got to walk off the ship onto land, take up quarters in those brick cabins, change everything? And fight maniacs, and learn to farm?”
“There must be a way,” said Jewel Flyte. “Just as Merdeka, whatever it was, was a way. There were too many people, and Merdeka was the answer to too many people. There’s always an answer. Man is a land mammal in spite of brief excursions at sea. We were seed stock put aside, waiting for the land to be cleared so we could return. Just as these offshore fish are waiting very patiently for us to stop harvesting twice a year so they can return to deep water and multiply. What’s the way, Captain?”
He thought hard. “We could,” he said slowly, “begin by simply sailing in close and fishing the offshore waters for big stuff. Then tie up and build a sort of bridge from the ship to the shore. We’d continue to live aboard the ship but we’d go out during daylight to try farming.”
“It sounds right.”
“And keep improving the bridge, making it more and more solid, until before they notice it it’s really a solid part of the ship and a solid part of the shore. It might take … mmm …ten years?”
“Time enough for the old shellbacks to make up their minds,” Mrs.
Graves unexpectedly snorted.
“And we’d relax the one-to-one reproduction rule, and some young adults will simply be crowded over the bridge to live on the land—” His face suddenly fell. “And then the whole damned farce starts all over again, I suppose. I pointed out that it takes thirty-two generations bearing one child apiece to run a population of two billion into zero.
Well, I should have mentioned that it takes thirty-two generations bearing four children apiece to run a population of two into two billion.
Oh, what’s the use, Jewel?”
She chuckled. “There was an answer last time,” she said. “There will be an answer the next time.”
“It won’t be the same answer as Merdeka,” he vowed. “We grew up a little at sea. This time we can do it with brains and not with nightmares and superstition.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Our ship will be the first, and then the other ships will have their accidents one by one and come and tie up and build their bridges, hating every minute of it for the first two generations and then not hating it, just living it… and who will be the greatest man who ever lived?”
The captain looked horrified.
“Yes, you! Salter, the Builder of the Bridge; Tommy, do you know an old word for ‘bridge-builder’? Pontifex.”
“Oh, my God!” Tommy Salter said in despair.
A flicker of consciousness was passing through the wounded chaplain; he heard the words and was pleased that somebody aboard was praying.
The Meddlers [SF Adventures - September 1953]
Reev Markon, Continental Weather Chief, swore one of his affected archaic oaths as his pocket transceiver beeped. “By my lousy halidom!”
he muttered, turning the signal off and putting the pint-sized set to his face.
“How’s that again, chief?” asked the puzzled voice of his assistant Moron Slobb.
“I didn’t mean you, Slobb,” Markon snapped. “Go ahead. What is so by-our-lady important that I must be dragged from the few pitiful hours of leisure I’m allowed?”
“Meddling,” Moron Slobb said in a voice of deepest gloom.
“Ding-bust the consarned villains!” Markon shrieked. “I’ll be right down.”
He cast a bilious eye over the workshop where he had hoped to relax over the monthend, using his hands, forgetting the wild complexities of modern life while he puttered with his betatron planer, his compact little thermonuclear forming reactor and transmutron. “I’ll meddle them,” he growled, and stepped through his Transmitter.
There were wild screeches around him.
“I’m sorry, ladies!” he yelled. “It was completely—completely—” One of the ladies hit him with a chair. He abandoned explanations and ducked back through the Transmitter with a rapidly swelling eye. Through the other he read the setting on the Transmitter frame. His wives’ athletic club, as he had suspected. Nor had they bothered to clear the setting after using the Transmitter.
“Lollygagging trumpets,” he muttered, setting his office combination on the frame and stepping through.
Moron Slobb tactfully avoided staring at the discolored eye. “Glad you’re here, chief,” he burbled. “Somebody seems to have gimmicked up a private tractor beam in the Mojave area and they’re pulling in rainclouds assigned to the Rio Grande eye—I mean Rio Grande Valley.”
Reev Markon glared at him and decided to let it pass. “Triangulate for it,” he said. “Set up the unilateral Transmitter. We’ll burst in and catch them wet-handed.”
He went to his private office and computed while the mechanical work was being done outside. A moderately efficient tractor beam, however haywire, could pull down five acre-feet of water a day. Rio Grande was a top-priority area drawing an allotment of eighty acre-feet for the growing season, plus sunships as needed. Plancom had decided that what the Continent needed was natural citrus and that Rio Grande was the area to supply it. Lowest priority for the current season had been assigned to the Idaho turnip acreage. He could divert rainfall from Idaho to Rio Grande. If that wasn’t enough, he could seize the precipitation quota of Aspen Recreational with no difficulty since three Plancomembers had broken respectively a leg, a pelvis, and seven ribs on Aspen’s beginner’s ski trail … .
Slobb told him: “Chief, we’re on it and the Transmitter’s set up.”
Reev Markon said: “Take a visual first. Those wittold jerks aren’t going to booby-trap me.”
He watched as a camera was thrust through the Transmitter, exposed and snatched back in a thousandth of a second.
The plate showed an improvised-looking tractor-beam generator surrounded by three rustic types in bowler hats and kilts. They obviously hadn’t noticed the split-second appearance of the camera and they obviously were unarmed.
“I’m going in,” Reev Markon said, cold and courageous. “Slobb, arm yourself and bring me a dazzle gun.”
In two minutes the weapons had been signed out of the arsenal. Reev Markon and Moron Slobb walked steadily through the Transmitter, guns at the ready. To the astounded, gaping farmers Reev Markon said:
“You’re under arrest for meddling. Step through this—”
The rustics stopped gaping and went into action. One of them began ripping at the generator, trying to destroy evidence. The other uncorked an uppercut at Slobb, who intercepted it neatly with his chin.
Reev Markon shut his eyes and pulled the trigger of the dazzle gun.
When he opened his eyes the farmers and his assistant were all lying limply on the floor. Puffing a good deal, he pitched them one by one through the invisible portal of the unilateral Transmitter. He surveyed the generator, decided it would do as evidence and pitched it through also before he stepped back into the Continental Weather office himself.
When the farmers had recovered, a matter of twenty minutes or so, he tried to interrogate them but got nowhere. “Don’t you realize,” he asked silkily, “that there are regular channels through which you can petition for heavier rainfall or a changed barometric pressure or more sunlight hours? Don’t you realize that you’re disrupting continental economy when you try to freelance?”
They were sullen and silent, only muttering something about their spinach crop needing more water than the damn bureaucrats realized.
“Take them away,” Reev Markon sighed to his assistant, and Slobb did.
But Slobb rushed back with a new and alarming advisory.
“Chief,” he said, “Somebody on Long Island’s seeding clouds without a license—”
“The cutpurse crumb!” Reev Markon snarled. Two in a row! He leaned back wearily for a moment. “By cracky, Slobb,” he said, “you’d think people would speak up and let us know if they think they’ve been unjustly treated by Plancom. You’d think they’d tell us instead of haywiring their rise in private and screwing the works.”
Slobb mumbled sympathetically, and Reev Markon voiced the ancient complaint of his department: “The trouble with this job is, everybody does things about the weather, but nobody talks about it!”
The Luckiest Man in Denv [as by Simon Eisner; Galaxy, June 1952]
May’s man Reuben, of the eighty-third level, Atomist, knew there was something wrong when the binoculars flashed and then went opaque.
Inwardly he cursed, hoping that he had not committed himself to anything. Outwardly he was unperturbed. He handed the binoculars back to Rudolph’s man Almon, of the eighty-ninth level, Maintainer, with a smile.
“They aren’t very good,” he said.
Almon put them to his own eyes, glanced over the parapet, and swore mildly. “Blacker than the heart of a crazy Angelo, eh? Never mind; here’s another pair.”
This pair was unremarkable. Through it, Reuben studied the thousand setbacks and penthouses of Denv that ranged themselves below. He was too worried to enjoy his first sight of the vista from the eighty-ninth level, but he let out a murmur of appreciation. Now to get away from this suddenly sinister fellow and try to puzzle it out.
“Could we—?” he asked cryptically, with a little upward jerk of his chin.
“It’s better not to,” Almon said hastily, taking the glasses from his hands. “What if somebody with stars happened to see, you know?
How’d you like it if you saw some impudent fellow peering up at you?”
“He wouldn’t dare!” said Reuben, pretending to be stupid and indignant, and joined a moment later in Almon’s sympathetic laughter.
“Never mind,” said Almon. “We are young. Some day, who knows?
Perhaps we shall look from the ninety-fifth level, or the hundredth.”
Though Reuben knew that the Maintainer was no friend of his, the generous words sent blood hammering through his veins; ambition for a moment.
He pulled a long face and told Almon: “Let us hope so. Thank you for being my host. Now I must return to my quarters.”
He left the windy parapet for the serene luxury of an eighty-ninth-level corridor and descended slow-moving stairs through gradually less luxurious levels to his own Spartan floor. Selene was waiting, smiling, as he stepped off the stairs.
She was decked out nicely—too nicely. She wore a steely hued corselet and a touch of scent; her hair was dressed long. The combination appealed to him, and instantly he was on his guard. Why had she gone to the trouble of learning his tastes? What was she up to? After all, she was Griffin’s woman.
“Coming down?” she asked, awed. “Where have you been?”
“The eighty-ninth, as a guest of that fellow Almon. The vista is immense.”
“I’ve never been …” she murmured, and then said decisively: “You belong up there. And higher. Griffin laughs at me, but he’s a fool. Last night in chamber we got to talking about you, I don’t know how, and he finally became quite angry and said he didn’t want to hear another word.” She smiled wickedly. “I was revenged, though.”
