13 Above the Night Read online

  The SupCom was somewhat relieved. Possibly this wasn’t going to be as difficult as he had feared. He said, “Have you any ideas Mitchie, ah, that is ”

  “Call me Mitchie if you want, sir. Everybody else does.”

  “Have you any ideas? After all, you’ve done as much damage to Terra as a Martian task force would accomplish.”

  “Yes, sir. I think I ought to be shot.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m expendable.” Mitchie said miserably. “In fact, I suppose I’m probably the most expendable soldier that’s ever been. All my life I’ve wanted to be a spaceman and do my share toward licking the Martians.” His eyes gleamed behind his lenses. “Why, I’ve . . .”

  He stopped and looked at his commanding officer pathetically. “What’s the use? I’m just a bust. An accident prone. The only thing to do is liquidate me.” He tried to laugh in self-deprecation but his voice broke.

  Behind him, Bull Underwood heard the glass in his office window shatter without seeming cause. He winced again, but didn’t turn.

  “Sorry, sir,” Mitchie said. “See? The only thing is to shoot me.”

  “Look,” Bull Underwood said urgently, “stand back a few yards farther, will you? There on the other side of the room.” He cleared his throat. “Your suggestion has already been considered, as a matter of fact. However, due to your father’s political prominence, shooting you had to be ruled out.”

  From a clear sky the secretarobot began to say, “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”

  SupCom Bull Underwood closed his eyes in pain and shrunk back into his chair. “What?” he said cautiously.

  “The borogoves were mimsy as all hell,” the secretarobot said decisively and shut up.

  Mitchie looked at it. “Slipped its cogs, sir,” he said helpfully, “It’s happened before around me.”

  “The best damned memory bank in the system,” Underwood protested. “Oh, no.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mitchie said apologetically. “And I wouldn’t recommend trying to repair it, sir. Three technicians were electrocuted when I was . . .”

  The secretarobot sang, “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

  “Completely around the comer,” Mitchie said.

  “This,” said Bull Underwood, “is too frabjous much! Senator or no senator, appropriations or no appropriations, with my own bare hands—”

  As he strode impulsively forward, he felt the rug giving way beneath him. He grasped desperately for the edge of the desk, felt ink bottle and water carafe go crashing over.

  Mitchie darted forward to his assistance.

  “Stand back!” Bull Underwood roared, holding an ankle with one hand, shaking the other hand in the form of a fist. “Get out of here, confound it!” Ink began to drip from the desk over his shaven head. It cooled him not at all. “It’s not even safe to destroy you! It’d wipe out a regiment to try to assemble a firing squad! It—” Suddenly he paused, and when he spoke again his voice was like the coo of a condor.

  “Cadet Farthingworth,” he announced, “after considerable deliberation on my part I have chosen you to perform the most hazardous operation that Terra’s forces have undertaken in the past hundred years. If successful, this effort will undoubtedly end the war.”

  “Who, me?” Mitchie said.

  “Exactly,” SupCom Underwood snapped. “This war has been going on for. a century without either side’s being able to secure that slight edge, that minute advantage which would mean victory. Cadet Farthingworth, you have been chosen to make the supreme effort which will give Terra that superiority over the Martians.” The SupCom looked sternly at Mitchie.

  “Yes, sir,” he clipped. “What are my orders?”

  The SupCom beamed at him. “Spoken like a true hero of Terra’s Space Forces. On the spaceport behind this building is a small spycraft. You are to repair immediately to it and blast off for Mars. Once there you are to land, hide the ship, and make your way to their capital city.”

  “Yes, sir! And what do I do then?”

  “Nothing,” Bull Underwood said with satisfaction. “You do absolutely nothing but live there. I estimate that your presence in the enemy capital will end the war in less than two years.”

  Michael Farthingworth snapped him a brilliant salute. “Yes, sir.”

  Spontaneous combustion broke out in the wastebasket.

  Through the shards of his window, SupCom Bull Underwood could hear the blast-off of the spyship. Half a dozen miles away the flare of a fuel dump going up in flames lighted up the sky.

  Seated there in the wreckage of his office he rubbed his ankle tenderly. “The only trouble is when the war is over we’ll have to bring him home.”

  But then he brightened. “Perhaps we could leave him there as our occupation forces. It would keep them from ever recovering to the point where they could try again.”

  He tried to get to his feet, saying to the secretarobot, “Have them send me in a couple of medical corpsmen.”

  “Beware the Jabberwock,” the secretarobot sneered.

  THE EDUCATION OF TIGRESS MCCARDLE

  C.M. Kornbluth

  They evolved this method of controlling the population explosion around the year 2000; but they really should have had it way back in 1965, when there was still a chance that it might do some good perhaps even save us from the future so grimly outlined for us in the chronicle that follows. In 1965 the Invention might have kept down the number of neurotics, psychotics, folk singers, juvenile delinquents, merchants of death, and cannon fodder quite successfully, thus saving us from a Fate Worse Than Death . . . But never mind. Quite probably it is already too late. So just settle down and read. This is one of the few stories by the late and much-missed Cyril Kornbluth still unanthologized and uncollected. It is an honor to present it herewith.

  WITH THE UNANIMITY THAT HAD ALWAYS CHARACTERIZED his fans, as soon as they were able to vote they swept him into office as President of the United States. Four years later the 28th Amendment was ratified, republican institutions yielded gracefully to the usages of monarchy, and King Purvis I reigned in the land.

  Perhaps even then all would have gone well if it had not been for another major entertainment personage, the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, that veritable personification of the Yellow Peril, squatting like some great evil spider in the center of his web of intrigue. The insidious doctor appeared to have so much fun on his television series, what with a lovely concubine to paw him and a dwarf to throw knives, that it quite turned the head of Gerald Wang, a hitherto-peaceable antique dealer of San Francisco. Gerald decided that he too would become a veritable personification of the Yellow Peril, and that he too would squat like some great evil spider in the center of a web of intrigue, and that he would really accomplish something. He found it remarkably easy since nobody believed in the Yellow Peril any more. He grew a mandarin mustache, took to uttering cryptic quotations from the sages, and was generally addressed as “doctor” by the members of his organization, though he made no attempt to practice medicine. His wife drew the line at the concubine, but Gerald had enough to keep him busy with his personifying and squatting.

  His great coup occurred in 1986 when, after patient years of squatting and plotting, one of his most insidious ideas reached the attention of His Majesty via a recommendation ridered onto the annual population-resources report. The recommendation was implemented as the Parental Qualifications Program, or P.Q.P., by royal edict “Ow rackon thet’ll make um mahnd they P’s and Q’s,” quipped His Majesty, and everybody laughed heartily—but none more heartily than the insidious Dr. Wang, who was present in disguise as Tuner of the Royal Git-tar.

  A typical PQP operation (at least when judged typical by the professor of Chronoscope History Seminar given by Columbia University in 2756 A.D., who ought to know) involved George McCardle . . .

  George McCardle had a good deal with his girl friend, Tigress Moone. He dined her and bought her pretties and had the freedo
m of the bearskin rug in front of her wood-burning fireplace. He had beaten the game; he had achieved a delightful combination of bachelor irresponsibility and marital gratification.

  “George,” Tigress said thoughtfully one day . . . so they got married.

  With prices what they were in 1998, she kept her job, of course—at least until she again said thoughtfully: “George . . .”

  She then had too much time on her hands; it was absurd for a healthy young woman to pretend that taking care of a two-room city apartment kept her occupied . . . so she thoughtfully said, “George?” and they moved to the suburbs.

  George happened to be a rising young editor in the Civil War Book-of-the-Week Club. He won his spurs when he got Mightier Than the Sword: A Study of Pens and Pencils in the Army of the Potomac, 1863-1865 whipped into shape for the printer. They then assigned him to the infinitely more difficult and delicate job of handling writers. A temperamental troll named Blount was his special trial. Blount was writing a novelized account of Corporal Piggott’s Raid, a deservedly obscure episode which got Corporal Piggott of the 104th New York (Provisional) Heavy Artillery Regiment deservedly court-martialed in the summer of ’63. It was George’s responsibility to see that Blount novelized the verdict of guilty into a triumphant acquittal followed by an award of the Medal of Honor, and Blount was being unreasonable about it.

  It was after a hard day of screaming at Blount and being screamed back at that George dragged his carcass off the Long Island Rail Road and into the family car. “Hi, dear,” he said to Mrs. McCardle, erstwhile tigress-Diana, and off they drove, and so far it seemed like the waning of another ordinary day. But in the car Mrs. McCardle said thoughtfully: “George . . .”

  She told him what was on her mind, and he refrained from striking her in the face because they were in rather tricky traffic and she was driving.

  She wanted a child.

  It was necessary to have a child, she said. Inexorable logic dictated it. For one thing, it was absurd for just the two of them to live in a great barn of a six-room house.

  For another thing, she needed a child to fulfill her womanhood. For a third, the brains and beauty of the Moone-McCardle strain should not die out; it was their duty to posterity.

  (The students in Columbia’s Chronoscope History Seminar 201 retched as one man at the words.)

  For a fourth, everybody was having children.

  George thought he had her there, but no. The statement was perfectly correct if for “everybody” you substituted “Mrs. Jacques Truro,” their next-door neighbor.

  By the time they reached their great six-room barn of a place she was consolidating her victory with a rapid drumfire of simple declarative sentences which ended with “Don’t you?” and “Won’t we?” and “Isn’t it?” to which George, hanging onto the ropes, groggily replied: “We’ll see . . . we’ll see . . . we’ll see . . .”

  A wounded thing inside him was soundlessly screaming: youth! joy! freedom! gone beyond recall, slain by wedlock, coffined by a mortgage, now to be entombed beneath a reeking Everest of diapers!

  “I believe I’d like a drink before dinner,” he said. “Had quite a time with Blount today,” he said as the Martini curled quietly in his stomach. He was pretending nothing very bad had happened. “Kept talking about his integrity. Writers! They’ll never learn . . . Tigress? Are you with me?”

  His wife noticed a slight complaining note in his voice, so she threw herself on the floor, began to kick and scream, went on to hold her breath until her face turned blue, and finished by letting George know that she had abandoned her Career to assuage his bachelor misery, moved out to this dreary wasteland to satisfy his whim, and just once in her life requested some infinitesimal consideration in return for her ghastly drudgery and scrimping.

  George, who was a kind and gentle person except with writers, dried her tears and apologized for his brutality. They would have a child, he said contritely. “Though,” he added, “I hear there are some complications about it these days.”

  “For Motherhood,” said Mrs. McCardle, getting off the floor, “no complications are too great.” She stood profiled like a statue against their picture window, with its view of the picture window of the house across the street.

  The next day George asked around at his office.

  None of the younger men, married since the P.Q.P. went into effect, seemed to have had children.

  A few of them cheerily admitted they had not had children and were not going to have children, for they had volunteered for D-Bal shots, thus doing away with a running minor expense and, more importantly, ensuring a certain peace of mind and unbroken continuity during tender moments.

  “Ugh,” thought George.

  (The Columbia University professor explained to his students “It is clearly in George’s interest to go to the clinic for a painless, effective D-Bal shot and thus resolve his problem, but he does not go; he shudders at the thought. We cannot know what fear of amputation stemming from some early traumatic experience thus prevents him from action, but deep-rooted psychological reasons explain his behavior, we can’t be certain.” The class bent over the chronoscope.)

  And some of George’s co-workers slunk away and would not submit to questioning. Young MacBirney, normally open and incisive, muttered vaguely and passed his hand across his brow when George asked him how one went about having a baby—red-tape-wise, that is.

  It was Blount, come in for his afternoon screaming match, who spilled the vengeful beans. “You and your wife just phone P.Q.P. for an appointment,” he told George with a straight face. “They’ll issue you—everything you need.” George in his innocence thanked him, and Blount turned away and grinned the twisted, sly grin of an author.

  A glad female voice answered the phone on behalf of the P.Q.P. It assured George that he and Mrs. McCardle need only drop in any time at the Empire State Building and they’d be well on their way to parenthood.

  The next day Mr. and Mrs. McCardle dropped in at the Empire State Building. A receptionist in the lobby was buffing her nails under a huge portrait of His Majesty. A beautifully lettered sign displayed the words with which His Majesty had decreed that P.Q.P. be enacted: “Ow Racken Theah’s a Raht Smaht Ah-dee, Boys.”

  “Where do we sign up, please?” asked George.

  The receptionist pawed uncertainly through her desk. “I know there’s some kind of book,” she said as she rummaged, but she did not find it. “Well, it doesn’t matter. They’ll give you everything you need in Room 100.”

  “Will I sign up there?” asked George nervously, conditioned by a lifetime of red tape and uncomfortable without it.

  “No,” said the receptionist.

  “But for the tests—”

  “There aren’t any tests.”

  “Then the interviews, the deep probing of our physical and psychological fitness for parenthood, our heredity—”

  “No interviews.”

  “But the evaluation of our financial and moral standing without which no permission can be—”

  “No evaluation. Just Room 100.” She resumed buffing her nails.

  In Room 100 a cheerful woman took a Toddler out of a cabinet, punched the non-reversible activating button between its shoulderblades, and handed it to Mrs. McCardle with a cheery: “It’s all yours, madame. Return with it in three months and, depending on its condition, you will, or will not, be issued a breeding permit. Simple, isn’t it?”

  “The little darling!” gurgled Mrs. McCardle, looking down into the Toddler’s pretty face.

  It spit in her eye, punched her in the nose and sprang a leak.

  “Gracious!” said the cheerful woman. “Get it out of our nice clean office, if you please.”

  “How do you work it?” yelled Mrs. McCardle, juggling the Toddler like a hot potato. “How do you turn it off?”

  “Oh, you can’t turn it off,” said the woman. “And you’d better not swing it like that. Rough handling goes down on the tapes inside it and we r
ead them in three months and now if you please, you’re getting our nice office all wet—” She shepherded them out.

  “Do something, George!” yelled Mrs. McCardle. George took the Toddler. It stopped leaking and began a ripsaw scream that made the lighting fixtures tremble.

  “Give the poor thing to me!” Mrs. McCardle shouted. “You’re hurting it holding it like that—”

  She took the Toddler back. It stopped screaming and resumed leaking.

  It quieted down in the car. The sudden thought seized them both—too quiet? Their heads crashed together as they bent simultaneously over the glassy-eyed little object It laughed delightedly and waved its chubby fists.

  “Clumsy oaf!” snapped Mrs. McCardle, rubbing her head.

  “Sorry, dear,” said George. “But at least we must have got a good mark out of it on the tapes. I suppose it scores us good when it laughs.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Probably,” she said. “George, do you think if you fell heavily on the sidewalk—?”

  “No,” said George convulsively. Mrs. McCardle looked at him for a moment and held her peace.

  (“Note, young gentlemen,” said the history professor, “the turning point, the seed of rebellion.” They noted )

  The McCardles and the Toddler drove off down Sunrise Highway, which was lined with filling stations; since their ’98 Landcruiser made only two miles to the gallon, it was not long before they had to stop at one.

  The Toddler began its ripsaw shriek when they stopped. A hollow-eyed attendant shambled ova: and peered into the car. “Just get it?” he asked apathetically.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. McCardle, frantically trying to joggle the Toddler, to change it to burp it to do anything that would end the soul-splitting noise.

  “Half pint of white 90-octane gas is what it needs,” mumbled the attendant. “Few drops of SAE 40 oil. Got one myself. Two weeks to go. I’ll never make it I’ll crack. I’ll—I’ll . . .” He tottered off and returned with the gasoline in a nursing bottle, the oil in an eye-dropper.