C Kornbluth - His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

…his tongue was thick and the fireballs were beginning to dance around him, the circling circles …

Charles Miller Nahataspe whispered: "Close. Close. I was so frightened."

Royland lay on the floor of the hut, his leg unsplinted, unfractured, but aching horribly. Drowsily he felt his ribs; he was merely slender now, no longer gaunt. He mumbled: "You were working to pull me back from this side?"

"Yes. You, you were there?"

"I was there. God, let me sleep."

He rolled over heavily and collapsed into complete unconsciousness.

When he awakened it was still dark and his pains were gone. Nahataspe was crooning a healing song very softly. He stopped when he saw Royland's eyes open. "Now you know about break-the-sky medicine,"

he said.

"Better than anybody. What time is it?"

"Midnight."

"I'll be going then." They clasped hands and looked into each other's eyes.

The jeep started easily. Four hours earlier, or possibly two months earlier, he had been worried about the battery. He chugged down the settlement road and knew what would happen next. He wouldn't wait until morning; a meteorite might kill him, or a scorpion in his bed. He would go directly to Rotschmidt in his apartment, defy Vrouw Rotschmidt and wake her man up to tell him about 56c, tell him we have the Bomb.

We have a symbol to offer the Japanese now, something to which they can surrender, and will surrender.

Rotschmidt would be philosophical. He would probably sigh about the Bomb: "Ah, do we ever act responsibly? Do we ever know what the consequences of our decisions will be?"

And Royland would have to try to avoid answering him very sharply:

"Yes. This once we damn well do."

The only dignified thing about Richard Claxton Hanbury III was his name, and it served only to underscore the grotesqueness of his appearance. Richard at 23 years was of average height but stooped by a mild spinal curvature into shrimphood; his face thrust boldly forward from a negligible chin and a raked forehead toward what could have been an impressive corvine mask if he had only nose enough to sustain the effect, but Richard's nose was an uncute button.

He had, of course, brains. The Great Kidder does not vouchsafe spectacular ugliness to anybody who is unable to appreciate it fully.

Richard knew perfectly well Bernard Shaw's dictum that there is nobody so ugly or disagreeable that he or she cannot find a spouse, but it happened that a spouse was not what he wanted. What he wanted was Girls. The author admits that this was not very intelligent of Richard, but pleads that he was brainwashed by Twentieth Century Western Culture. A shy and unattractive man like he would in simpler times have found himself in a monastery doing at least no harm and not worrying about bosoms. In a more vicious day he would have found himself now and then in a Place of Ill Repute with nothing more to worry him than the possibility of contracting a ludicrous minor tribulation thought to be no worse than a bad cold. In more practical times he would have arranged with the parent (the parent then!) of a

"female" to take said female off said parent's hands and board bill in exchange for a cash settlement; the female would have called him "Mr.

Hanbury" even after the marriage, and it would not have occurred to either of them to worry about love.

The era in which Richard had been raised, however, was neither vicious, simple nor practical. The iconographer of Richard's era was Mr.

Jon Whitcomb, and the ritual illustration he has done for a thousand ritual magazine stories sums up the age. There is a yellow convertible with the top down, and there is a tanned blonde girl in the convertible.

She is plainly about sixteen years old for her skin is that of an unblemished child, and she is plainly a new mother for her bosom is of a size functional only in a lactating woman; who has committed this crime upon her? Yet the text says she is a virgin! She smiles, and she is plainly an Innocent who has escaped from three-nurse custodial care in the first auto she found, for in that smile there is no trace of human intelligence but only the animal bliss of a bear who has found honey.

Yet the text says she is a Ph.D. in astrophysics! She is plainly a narcissistic she-monster, for every hair of every wisp is in its calculated place and her garb is tight where tight and loose where loose to the predetermined thousandth of an inch at the cost of nightly toil, mad self-love and abnegation of all other activity. Yet the text calls her casual, vital, warm!

She was the girl whom Richard wanted, poor fellow, and he wanted lots of her—blonde, red-haired, brunette, tanned and pale, playtime, daytime and gay-time, tall and rangy, cute and cuddly, the sophisticate who learns in the back pages that brains are not enough, the naïve thing who turns out in the back pages to have brains enough to save the day.

My readers have of course all seen through the pitiful sham, and will feel only amused compassion for Richard.

Through grammar school and high school Richard met several dozen versions of The Girl, and for each one he carefully thought out the witty opening phrase of a campaign that would end only with her as helpless putty in his hands. It happened, however, that he never got to speak the carefully-composed phrase. He would choke up; or the girl would say

"Well, dig you later" and breeze off wobbling tantalizingly; or a football player would roar up out of nowhere and slap him on the back; or the class bell would ring—always something.

That was the way it went through college too, except for one evening when he got carried away and attempted near-assault on a field-hockey-playing version ofThe Girl. They patched him up at the infirmary and believed him when he said he had been hit by a runaway three-quarter-ton truck.

After his bones had knit Richard said to himself: "The hell with this noise. Charm I do not have. Muscle too I lack. What I do possess, some knowledge of biochemistry, seems irrelevant to the problem. Or—or is it?" For Richard was majoring in biochemistry because Of an aptitude test he had taken, in the course of which his punch card had been put into a machine upside-down.

Richard leaped to his feet and cried "Thalassarsince his talent for languages was almost as slight as his aptitude for biochemistry. Then, more collectedly, he schemed: "The girl shall be mine through the science which I am learning, and specifically through those certain pills and fluids of which one has heard!"

Forthwith he plunged into a reading program to establish the basis for his research. The first thing he learned in his quest for what are euphemistically called "love philtres" was the discouraging fact that there are no such things, vulgar superstition to the contrary notwithstanding. Such diverse substances as cabbage juice, powdered mandrake, muscatel wine, oysters on the half-shell, and frog spawn have had their vogues, he learned, but proved to have no effect except an imaginary one. The notorious Spanish Fly, he discovered, is about as effective a love potion as a kick in the stomach, which is to say not very.

Richard concluded his first week of reading by slamming his books shut, hurling them into the corner of his dormitory room and stalking with agitation out into the campus night. "Thunderation!" he growled.

"I'm going to have to start from scratch and invent this whole science in the lab with my own two hands!" From this the reader may gauge the depths of his determination.

After that it was no unusual thing to see the lights burning late in the biochemistry building, or to behold a single shadow moving busily against the drawn blind, ever pouring, mixing, distilling, titrating, centrifuging. "A good lad, Hanbury," his professors took to telling one another. "Pity he's such a gargoyle."