His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Read online

  His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

  C M Kornbluth

  Though he died at age 34, Cyril M. Kornbluth left behind a vast body of classic SF writings (he sold his first story at age 15, in 1939). His Share of Glory, introduced by Frederik Pohl (Kornbluth's erstwhile collaborator), edited by Timothy P. Szczesuil, collects for the first time the 56 short stories that Kornbluth wrote solo.

  His Share of Glory

  The Complete Short Science Fiction of C M Kornbluth

  A collection of stories by C M Kornbluth

  Cyril

  by Frederik Pohl

  In the late 1930s a bunch of us New York City fans, tiring of being members of other people's fan clubs, decided to start our own. We called it "the Futurians." As nearly as I can remember the prime perpetrators were Don Wollheim, Johnny Michel, Bob Lowndes and myself, but we quickly acquired a couple of dozen other like-minded actifans and writer wannabees, and among them was a pudgy, acerbic fourteen-year-old from the far northern reaches of Manhattan whose name was Cyril Kornbluth.

  All the Futurians had an attitude; it was what made us so universally loved by other New York fans. Even so, Cyril was special. He had a quick and abrasive wit, and he exercised it on anyone within reach. What he also had, though, was a boundless talent. Even at fourteen, Cyril knew how to use the English language. I think he was born with the gift of writing in coherent, pointed, colorful sentences, and, although I don't think any of his very earliest writing survives, some of the stories in this book were written when he was no more than sixteen.

  Most of what Cyril wrote (what all of us Futurians wrote, assiduously and often) was science fiction, but he also had a streak of the poet in him. Cyril possessed a copy of a textbook—written, I think, by one of his high-school teachers —which described all the traditional forms of verse, from haiku to chant royale, and it was his ambition to write one of each. I don't think he made it. I do remember that he did a villanelle and several sonnets, both Shakespearean and Petrarchan, but I don't remember the poems themselves. All I do remember of Cyril's verse is a fragment from the beginning of a long, erotic poem called Elephanta"—

  How long, my love, shall I behold this wall

  Between our gardens, yours the rose

  And mine the swooning lily?

  —and a short piece called "Calisthenics": One, two, three, four,

  Flap your arms and prance

  In stinky shirt and stinky socks

  And stinky little pants.

  By 1939 a few of the Futurians had begun making an occasional sale to the prozines. Then the gates of Heaven opened. In October of that year I fell into a job editing two science-fiction magazines for the great pulp house of Popular Publications; a few months later Don Wollheim persuaded Albing Publications to give him a similar deal, while Bob Lowndes got the call to take over Louis Silberkleit's magazines. These were not major markets. None of us had much to spend in the way of story budgets—Donald essentially had no budget at all—and we were at a disadvantage in competing with magazines like Amazing, Astounding and Thrilling Wonder for the work of the established pros. What we did have, though, was each other, and all the rest of the Futurians.

  I think Cyril's first published story was a collaboration with Dick Wilson, "Stepson of Space," published under the pseudonym of "Ivar Towers" (the Futurian headquarters apartment was called "the Ivory Tower") in my magazine, Astonishing Stories. He and I also collaborated on a batch of not very good stories for my own magazines, mostly bylined "S. D. Gottesman" at Cyril's prompting—I think he was getting back at a hated math teacher of that name—but his solo work, under one pen-name or another, generally appeared in Don Wollheim's Stirring and Cosmic. Most of them are herein.

  Then the war came along.

  Cyril, who had worked now and then as a machinist, got into uniform as an artillery maintenance man, working in a machine shop far behind the lines to keep the guns going. He probably could have survived the war in relative comfort there, except that the Army had an inspiration.

  In its wisdom it imagined that the war would go on for a good long time, that it would need educated officers beyond the apparently available supply toward its final stages and that it would be a good idea to send some of its brighter soldiers to school ahead of time. The program was called "ASTP," and Cyril signed up for it at once. It was a very good deal.

  Cyril went back to school at the Army's expense quite happily …until the Army noticed that the war was moving toward a close faster than they had expected, with some very big battles yet to be fought. The need was not for future officers but for present combat troops. They met it by canceling ASTP overnight and throwing all its members into the infantry, and so Cyril wound up lugging a 50-caliber machine gun through the snows of the Battle of the Bulge.

  The war did finally end. We all got back to civilian life again, and Cyril moved to Chicago to go back to school, at the University of Chicago, on the G.I. Bill. Meanwhile Dick Wilson had also wound up there as a reporter for the news wire service Trans-Radio Press; he was their bureau chief for the city, and when he needed to hire another reporter he gave the job to Cyril. For a couple of years Cyril divided his time between the news bureau and the university, somehow finding enough spare hours to write an occasional short story for the magazines (all of them herein).

  Then he came east on a visit. He stayed at our house just outside of Red Bank, New Jersey, for a while, and I was glad to see him because I needed help on a project.

  The project was a novel I had begun about the future of the advertising business. I had been working on it desultorily for a year or so and succeeded in getting about the first third of it on paper. I showed that much to Horace Gold, then the editor of Galaxy, and Horace said, "Fine.

  I'll print it as soon as I finish the current serial." "But it isn't finished," I said. "So go home and finish it," said Horace.

  I didn't see how that was possible in the time allowed, and so Cyril's arrival was a godsend. When I showed what I had to him and suggested we try collaborating again he agreed instantly; he wrote the next third by himself, and the two of us collaborated, turn and about, on the final section. After some polishing and cleaning up of loose ends we turned it in and Horace ran it as "Gravy Planet"; a little later Ian Ballantine published it in book form as The Space Merchants and so it has remained, in many editions and several dozen translations, ever since.

  Working with Cyril Kornbluth was one of the great privileges of my life.

  First to last, we wrote seven novels together: The Space Merchants, Gladiator-at-Law, Search the Sky and Wolfbane in the field of science fiction, plus our three "mainstream" novels, Presidential Year, A Town Is Drowning and Sorority House (that last one published under the pseudonym of "Jordan Park"). I can't say that we never quarreled about anything—after all, we were both graduates of the feisty Futurians—but the writing always, always went quickly and well. As editor, agent and collaborator I have worked with literally hundreds of writers over the years, in one degree or another of intimacy, but never with one more competent and talented than Cyril. Even when we were not actually collaborating we would now and then help each other out. Once when Cyril complained that he wanted to write a story but couldn't seem to come up with an attractive idea, I reminded him that he had once mentioned to me that he'd like to write a story about medical instruments from the future somehow appearing today; "The Little Black Bag" was the result. And after that was published I urged him to do more with the future background from which those instruments had come, and that turned into "The Marching Morons." And I am indebted to him for
any number of details, plot twists and bits of business in my own stories of the time.

  All the while we were writing together, of course, he had other irons in the fire. With Judy Merril he wrote two novels, Marschild and Gunner Cade; he continued to pour out his own wonderful shorter pieces, and he wrote half a dozen novels all his own. Some of them were mainstream—Valerie, The Naked Storm and Man of Cold Rages—but three were science fiction. They were, of course, brilliant. They are also, however, sadly, somewhat dated; Takeoff was all about the first spaceflight, Not This August about the results of the anticipated Russian-American World War III, which in his story the Russians had won. By 1958 he had larger plans, with two novels in the works. Neither was science fiction; both were historical. One was to be about the life of St. Dacius, and that is all I know about it; if any part of it was ever on paper it has long since been lost. The other was to be about the battle of the Crater in the Civil War, and for that one Cyril had done an immense quantity of research. He completed several hundred pages of notes and reference material …but that's as far as it got. The Battle of the Bulge finally took its toll.

  By the mid-1950s Cyril began having medical problems. When at last he took them to a doctor the diagnosis was bad. It was essentially malignant hypertension, the doctor said, probably the result of exposure and exhaustion in the Ardennes Forest, and it was likely to be terminal. If Cyril wanted to live much longer, the doctor told him, he would have to give up cigarettes, alcohol and spices of all kinds, and take regular doses of the rauwolfia extracts that were all the pharmacopeia of the day had to offer for that condition.

  Cyril did his best to follow orders. When he came out to visit, Carol, my wife at that time, baked him salt-free bread and served him spiceless health foods and we never, never offered him a drink. It wasn't good enough. The dope he was taking relieved his tension, but it also made him stupid; this quick, insightful mind had become woefully slow and fumbling. When I ventured to show him a novel that was giving me trouble in the hope that he could help, he read it over ponderously, then sighed. "Needs salt," he said gloomily, and handed it back.

  To live like that, Cyril decided, was no life at all. So he went against the doctor's orders. He stopped the drugs and resumed the cigarettes and the spices. For a while he was the old Cyril again …and then, on one snowy morning a few months later, I got a despairing phone call from Mary, his wife. Cyril had shoveled snow to get out of the driveway of their home on Long Island, then run to catch a train to the city, and dropped dead of a heart attack on the station platform.

  By the time I got there, a few hours later, there was nothing left to do but to try to console his widow and his sons. Mary and I went to the crematorium to watch Cyril's body roll into the chamber; the shutters closed; and that was the last anyone ever saw of Cyril Kornbluth. He was then just thirty-four years old and, I think, only beginning to hit his stride as a writer.

  When Cyril died he left behind a few fragments of notes and uncompleted stories. Some of them I completed and published as our final collaborations — The Quaker Cannon," "Critical Mass" and "Mute, Inglorious Tam" among them. There was one other. That was a very short piece called "The Meeting." For one reason or another it was years before I saw how to deal with that one. But at last I did, and when awards time came around the next year "The Meeting" won a Hugo. It was the only such award ever given to Cyril's work, and it was not enough. He deserved much, much more.

  Editor's Introduction

  "Who is C. M. Kornbluth?" I asked. We had just seen the movie

  "Robocop" in 1987, and I asked, "Where have I read the line 'I'd buy that for a dollar!'?" To which my wife Ann (my encyclopedia of all SF

  knowledge) replied without a pause, "It was 'Would you buy it for a quarter?' in 'The Marching Morons.' It's sort of a sequel to 'The Little Black Bag' by …Kornbluth, C. M. Kornbluth."

  I had recognized the tag line but not the author. That was the genesis of this book. Shortly after that I bought a second-hand copy of The Best of C. M Kornbluth, that Fred Pohl edited and Del Rey published in 1976

  (by then out-of-print). I inhaled the collection and looked for more.

  Alas, neither the library nor the bookseller could help me. Eventually, I discovered that some of his other works had been published in even older and more difficult to obtain out-of-print collections: Thirteen O'clock and Other Zero Hours, A Mile Beyond the Moon, and The Mindworm. I bought or borrowed these old, yellowed, brittle-paged paperbacks and enjoyed them as well.

  In 1990 at a NESFA Other Meeting, Mark Olson first proposed that NESFA publish classic SF authors whose work had gone out of print, and were therefore unavailable to new SF fans or to anyone without a vast library of old pulps. Mark selected Schmitz, and the first of the NESFA's Choice books was published: The Best of James H. Schmitz.

  My proposal was C. M. Kornbluth.

  In the preparation of this book I've had the good fortune to speak with many of Cyril M. Kornbluth friends and contemporaries. He seems to have been your typical literary genius: amusing, smart, quick-witted, but acid-tongued. His photograph on the back flyleaf shows a cocky young man, blithely smoking, perfectly confident—yet he is only a boy, sixteen or seventeen years old. Here are cynicism and maturity, characteristics that were present from the beginning of his career to its sudden end.

  Why a complete collection? Cyril Kornbluth was widely known for writing under various pseudonyms: Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, etc.

  Several of his pennames were house names, used by other writers for the same magazine, some were also collaborations. I searched the usual sources to construct as complete a bibliography of solo Kornbluth stories as possible. Looking at that list and reading the stories, I realized that I couldn't bear to cut out any of them; they all had a unique insight into human nature, and most were very good. A small number had been written hastily, at the last minute to fill space in a pulp magazine being edited by a fellow Futurian, but even the (bad) ones were impressive work for a teenager writing "to spec" on a tight deadline. Some of these early stories I have put in the back section of the book.

  Why not include collaborative material? Kornbluth was an extensive collaborator. In the early forties, he collaborated with several of the Futurians: Don Wollheim, Robert A. W. Lowndes, etc. Later, under the pseudonym of Cyril Judd, he collaborated with Judith Merril on the Gunner Cade/Mars Child series. And, of course, throughout his career he collaborated extensively with Fred Pohl. Recently Pohl edited a collection of their collaborative efforts, Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M Kornbluth. Pohl and Kornbluth wrote in a unique voice which was neither Pohl nor Kornbluth. I was interested in presenting Kornbluth's perspective.

  To determine which stories were really Kornbluth, I consulted the usual indexes to early SF. The most useful source of bibliographic information I found was, Cyril M. Kornbluth: The Cynical Scrutineer by Phil Stephensen-Payne Gordon Benson, Jr. (ISBN# 1-871133-03-3), a good bibliography that also includes non-SF works. I also conferred with Ken Johnson (an expert on pseudonyms in SF), who had managed to view some of the original receipts from some of the early publishers, and from him I learned that Kornbluth did not write "Hollow of the Moon," a story written under the byline Gabriel Barclay. The Shakespeare quotation at the beginning of "Two Dooms" only appeared in the first occurrence, in the magazine Venture (7/58) and not in any subsequent reprints. In the magazine Galaxy (12/51) there is a variation of the story "With These Hands" with a rather contrived ending, which doesn't appear in other editions of the story. I believe the Galaxy ending to be an editor's addition, and have chosen to include the more widely used variation. There was a heavily abridged version of "The Silly Season" in the collection The Mindworm. The complete version appears here.

  This book has been part of my life for three years. Throughout this time, it is the stories that hold my attention. Witty, pointed, telling, honest, gutsy. It is through these stories that we see Kornbluth's view the clearest. A universe of intrigue
and absurdity, of con-men, of suckers, of justice, his justice, his truth, his vision. The stories that follow are his share of glory.

  Timothy P. Szczesuil Wayland, Mass. December 1996

  That Share of Glory

  [Astounding, January 1952]

  YOUNG ALEN, one of a thousand in the huge refectory, ate absentmindedly as the reader droned into the perfect silence of the hall.

  Today's lesson happened to be a word-list of the Thetis VIII planet's sea-going folk.

  "Tlon—a ship," droned the reader.

  "Rtlo—some ships, number unknown.

  "Long'—some ships, number known, always modified by cardinal.

  "Ongr—a ship in a collection of ships, always modified by ordinal.

  "Ngrt—first ship in a collection of ships; an exception to ongr."

  A lay brother tiptoed to Alen's side. "The Rector summons you," he whispered.

  Alen had no time for panic, though that was the usual reaction to a summons from the Rector to a novice. He slipped from the refectory, stepped onto the northbound corridor and stepped off at his cell, a minute later and a quarter-mile farther on. Hastily, but meticulously, he changed from his drab habit to the heraldic robes in the cubicle with its simple stool, wash-stand, desk, and paperweight or two. Alen, a level-headed young fellow, was not aware that he had broken any section of the Order's complicated Rule, but he was aware that he could have done so without knowing it. It might, he thought, be the last time he would see the cell.

  He cast a glance which he hoped would not be the final one over it; a glance which lingered a little fondly on the reel rack where were stowed: "Nicholson on Martian Verbs," "The New Oxford Venusian Dictionary," the ponderous six-reeler "Deutche-Ganymediche Konversasionslexikon" published long ago and far away in Leipzig. The later works were there, too: "The Tongues of the Galaxy—An Essay in Classification," "A Concise Grammar of Cephean," "The Self-Pronouncing Vegan II Dictionary"—scores of them, and, of course, the worn reel of old Machiavelli's "The Prince."