The Naked Storm. C.M. Kornbluth
young sailors in pea jackets were coming down the street, looking dubiously at house numbers. One of them said: “Hey, heah’s the place. Is it aneh good, misteh?”
“’s okay,” Boyce mumbled, swaying a little, and they exchanged grins.
“Take it easy, pappy,” they told him and went charging up the stairs.
“Suckers,” he said viciously, half-aloud, and went on down the street to a glow that promised to be a street of shops where he might pick up a taxi for home. “Suckers.” All of us. You can’t buy what you want and if your luck’s bad you can’t marry it either. Her and her goddam headaches. That semi-whore and her goddam tickets. Always something. He knew he couldn’t run away from it, but he wished desperately that it was already 9:05 tomorrow morning and that the streamliner was sliding out of Union Station with him aboard. You couldn’t run away from it, but you could try.
CHAPTER II
BYSTANDERS
I
The wolf was gaunt and shabby; he slunk cringing through the snow, quailing at every blast of wind. He was starving. His ribs showed plainly and his belly drew up tight; he looked grotesquely like the caricature of a greyhound on the buses. He had eaten last a week ago, a sheep cut out from a Colorado rancher’s flock and pulled down running. He had gorged on the sheep and awakened from the heavy sleep to find the bones picked by buzzards. The snow had started about then.
He stopped as a familiar, frightening smell permeated the air. It was the complex smell of man and his works. Oil. Gasoline. Cloth. Fire. Whenever that smell had filled the air before it had been followed by loud, inexplicable noises, rushing things moving faster than he could, stones that did not stay in place as stones should but hurtled through the air and thumped him in the ribs or on the nose. As a cub he had learned about that complex smell; it meant trouble and he had stayed away from it.
But he was starving, and part of the complex smell was meat.
With his hackles up and his heart pounding, he inched toward it through the snow. The smell came from a bundle on the ground, and the bundle did not move. His lips drew back as a strain of polecat and another of mink wafted his way. But the bundle did not move, and it smelled also of meat. His caution was consumed by the raging pain in his belly. He leaped on the bundle and tore at it, worrying away strange layers of pelt and cloth. It did not move; it was frozen. He knew what to do with frozen game. He went for the belly with his long, pointed eyeteeth and opened it up. The exposed organs steamed a little in the icy air.
The wolf crouched down and looked about, growling his ownership. There was nobody to dispute it so he began to gnaw at the liver.
He would live through the winter after all.
II
The three men in the hotel room jumped to their feet as the door slammed open.
“Police,” a tall man in the doorway announced. Uniformed patrolmen moved around him and began to search the room, picking up papers, briefcases, opening drawers and closets.
The oldest of the three men, bald, wearing a richly conservative brown suit, said: “I suppose you have a warrant.”
“Two of them. Search and arrest. Put on your coats and let’s go.”
The man in the brown suit took a heavy overcoat from a closet and began to wind a muffler around his neck. He asked almost casually: “What’s the charge?”
“Conspiracy to violate gambling laws. Let’s go.”
“May I phone a lawyer?”
“From the station house. Come on.”
One of the uniformed men, a sergeant, was carefully removing something bulky from the rear of a high closet shelf. It was a tape recorder, and its reels were still turning. The man in the brown suit raised his eyebrows. He and another of the room’s original occupants looked at the third man. He told the third man sadly: “You think you can get away with such goings-on? I’m surprised at you.”
The police lieutenant, admitting nothing, nevertheless gave the third man a chin-up glance. Everybody in the room, however, knew that the third man’s death warrant had just been signed.
It would be executed some day by means of a speeding truck or a bomb wired to his car’s ignition, or a shotgun blast through a window or fists and feet and newspaper-wrapped lead pipe in a deserted place where nobody would hear his screams except his murderers.
It would happen just as soon as they were ready for it to happen, not a minute sooner or later. He would have to use the time that remained to him as efficiently as possible and try not to worry too much.
III
“Phonies,” said the cynical bellboy.
“Honeymooners,” the romantic chambermaid said firmly.
They were discussing the couple who had checked in last night at the Desert Rest Motel, Nevada.
“‘Mr. and Mrs. John Smith,’” the bellboy sneered.
“Look in a phone book, wise guy. Look in any phone book, I dare you. You think there ain’t any John Smiths in the whole world?”
“A shack job,” said the bellboy. “And she’s taking him for plenty. I seen them quiet ones before.”
“I,” said the chambermaid, “seen the way they look at each other…” She smiled mistily and blinked.
But as a matter of fact they were both right.
IV
The torn corpse in the snow; the doomed, calm betrayer; the happy adulterers who could make a motel chambermaid smile—we must go back one week to begin their story.
WEATHER I
It’s Longitude 155 degrees, Latitude 83 degrees north. It’s the Arctic Ocean, a vast plain of grinding, shifting sheets of ice under a twilight gloom. It’s almost the exact middle of the six-month polar night.
There is no sound under the lead-colored sky except the booming and grinding of the ice floes. The usual howling winds of this godforsaken place have dropped to a dead calm. This is noticed by a strange little machine half-buried in a floe.
The machine is a product of the cold—here very cold—war. Of the Edison Effect, noticed and described long ago by Thomas A., who was working at the time on the problem of a practical electric light. Of a Navy-minded senator who wangled a cut in the Air Force budget, forcing generals to decide: “Since we won’t have the planes or crews for patrols we’ll have to do it some other way, maybe by machine.” Of a huge building in New Jersey where a thousand-odd happily quarrelsome men, most of them possible geniuses and a few about whom there is no doubt whatsoever, daily turn out fundamental research and practical solutions to whatever happens to be bothering communications companies. Of a young man with a Ph.D. in mathematics who got the bright idea that finally cracked the power-lead problem; it got him a raise from $115 to $125 a week, a Class C gate pass instead of a D, and a very important note of commendation from Dr. Kelly. He valued most highly the new gate pass; it meant that he could now drop in at odd hours to tinker at his projects if he got any more bright ideas late at night or over the weekend.
The machine looks like a foot-locker and on its side, under a crust of ice, the words are stenciled: “BAROMETRIC TELEMETERING DEVICE, U.S.A.F. M-51. PROPERTY OF U. S. GOVERNMENT. DO NOT TAMPER OR DISTURB.” The warning is generous. The machine is booby-trapped with an explosive charge calculated to blow up the machine and any wandering airmen or explorers who might try to pry it open and see what makes it tick.
It cost 32,000 dollars to build the machine and another 20,000-odd dollars in gasoline, salaries and overhead to parachute it to this spot from a B-50. There are hundreds like it dotted over the huge desolate plains of ice which are more or less American property.
All this money was spent so the machine could do what it’s doing now. It’s noticing the dead calm that has fallen on this latitude