The Marching Morons - C. M. Kornbluth, ebook, Temp
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
THE MARCHING MORONS
C. M. Kornbluth
THE MARCHING MORONS
Some things had not changed. A potter's wheel was still a potter's wheel and clay was still clay. Efim
Hawkins had built his shop nearGooseLake, which had a narrow band of good fat clay and a narrow
beach of white sand. He fired three bottle-nosed kilns with willow charcoal from the wood lot. The wood
lot was also useful for long walks while the kilns were cooling; if he let himself stay within sight of them,
he would open them prematurely, impatient to see how some new shape or glaze had come through the
fire, and-ping!-the new shape or glaze would be good for nothing but the shard pile back of his slip
tanks.
A business conference was in full swing in his shop, a modest cube of brick, tile-roofed, as the
Chicago-Los Angeles "rocket" thundered overhead-very noisy, very swept back, very fiery jets, shaped
as sleekly swift-looking as an airborne barracuda.
The buyer from Marshall Fields was turning over a black-glazed one-liter carafe, nodding approval with
his massive, handsome head. "This is real pretty," he told Hawkins and his own secretary,
 GomezLaplace. "This has got lots of what ya call real est'etic principles. Yeah, it is real pretty."
"How much?" the secretary asked the potter.
"Seven-fifty in dozen lots," said Hawkins. "I ran up fifteen dozen last month."
"They are real est'etic," repeated the buyer from Fields. "I will take them all."
"I don't think we can do that, doctor," said the secretary. "They'd cost us $1,350. That would leave only
$532 in our quarter's budget. And we still have to run down toEast Liverpoolto pick up some cheap
dinner sets."
"Dinner sets?" asked the buyer, his big face full of wonder.
"Dinner sets. The department's been out of them for two months now. Mr. Garvy-Seabright got pretty
nasty about it yesterday. Remember?"
"Garvy-Seabright, that meat-headed bluenose," the buyer said contemptuously. "He don't know nothin'
about est'etics. Why for don't he lemme run my own department?" His eye fell on a stray copy of
Whambozambo Comix and he sat down with it. An occasional deep chuckle or grunt of surprise
escaped him as he turned the pages.
Uninterrupted, the potter and the buyer's secretary quickly closed a deal for two dozen of the liter
carafes. "I wish we could take more," said the secretary, "but you heard what I told him. We've had to
turn away customers for ordinary dinnerware because he shot the last quarter's budget on some Mexican
piggy banks some equally enthusiastic importer stuck him with. The fifth floor is packed solid with them."
"I'll bet they look mighty est'etic."
"They're painted with purple cacti."
The potter shuddered and caressed the glaze of the sample carafe.
The buyer looked up and rumbled, "Ain't you dummies through yakkin' yet? What good's a seckertary
for if'n he don't take the burden of de-tail off'n my back, harh?"
"We're all through, doctor. Are you ready to go?"
The buyer grunted peevishly, dropped Whambozambo Comix on the floor and led the way out of the
building and down the log corduroy road to the highway. His car was waiting on the concrete. It was,
like all contemporary cars, too low slung to get over the logs. He climbed down into the car and started
the motor with a tremendous sparkle and roar.
"Gomez-Laplace," called out the potter under cover of the noise, "did anything come of the radiation
program they were working on the last time I was on duty at the Pole?"
"The same old fallacy," said the secretary gloomily. "It stopped us on mutation, it stopped us on culling, it
 stopped us on segregation, and now it's stopped us on hypnosis."
"Well, I'm scheduled back to the grind in nine days. Time for another firing right now. I've got a new
luster to try. . ."
"I'll miss you. I shall be 'vacationing'-running the drafting room of the New Century Engineering
Corporation in Denver. They're going to put up a two-hundred-story office building, and naturally
somebody's got to be on hand."
"Naturally," said Hawkins with a sour smile.
There was an ear-piercingly sweet blast as the buyer leaned on the horn button. Also, a yard-tall jet of
what looked like flame spurted up from the car's radiator cap; the car's power plant was a gas turbine
and had no radiator.
"I'm coming, doctor," said the secretary dispiritedly. He climbed down into the car and it whooshed off
with much flame and noise.
The potter, depressed, wandered back up the corduroy road and contemplated his cooling kilns. The
rusthng wind in the boughs was obscuring the creak and mutter of the shrinking refractory brick. Hawkins
wondered about the number two kiln-a reduction fire on a load of lusterware mugs. Had the clay
chinking excluded the air? Had it been a properly smoky blaze? Would it do any harm if he just took one
close-?
Common sense took Hawkins by the scruff of the neck and yanked him over to the tool shed. He got
out his pick and resolutely set off on a prospecting jaunt to a hummocky field that might yield some
oxides. He was especially low on coppers.
The long walk left him sweating hard, with his lust for a peek into the kiln quiet in his breast. He swung
his pick almost at random into one of the hummocks; it clanged on a stone which he excavated. A largely
obliterated inscription said:
ERSITY OF CHIC
OGICAL LABO
ELOVED MEMORY OF
KILLED IN ACT
The potter swore mildly. He had hoped the field would turn out to be a cemetery, preferably a
once-fashionable cemetery full of once-massive bronze caskets moldered into oxides of tin and copper.
 Well, hell, maybe there was some around anyway.
He headed lackadaisically for the second largest hillock and sliced into it with his pick. There was a
stone to undercut and topple into a trench, and then the potter was very glad he'd stuck at it. His nostrils
were filled with the bitter smell and the dirt was tinged with the exciting blue of copper salts. The pick
went clang!
Hawkins, puffing, pried up a stainless steel plate that was quite badly stained and was also marked with
incised letters. It seemed to have pulled loose from rotting bronze; there were rivets on the back that
brought up flakes of green patina. The potter wiped off the surface dirt with his sleeve, turned it to catch
the sunlight obliquely and read:
HONEST JOHN BARLOW
Honest John, famed in university annals, represents a challenge which medical science has not yet
answered: revival of a human being accidentally thrown into a state of suspended animation.
In 1988 Mr. Barlow, a leading Evanston real estate dealer, visited his dentist for treatment of an
impacted wisdom tooth. His dentist requested and received permission to use the experimental anesthetic
Cycloparadimethanol-B-7, developed at the University.
After administration of the anesthetic, the dentist resorted to his drill. By freakish mischance, a short
circuit in his machine delivered 220 volts of 60-cycle current into the patient. (In a damage suit instituted
by Mrs. Barlow against the dentist, the University and the makers of the drill, a jury found for the
defendants.) Mr. Barlow never got up from the dentist's chair and was assumed to have died of
poisoning, electrocution or both.
Morticians preparing him for embalming discovered, however, that their subject was-though certainly not
living-just as certainly not dead. The University was notified and a series of exhaustive tests was begun,
including attempts to duplicate the trance state on volunteers. After a bad run of seven cases which ended
fatally, the attempts were abandoned.
Honest John was long an exhibit at the University museum and livened many a football game as mascot
of the University's Blue Crushers. The bounds of taste were overstepped, however, when a pledge to
Sigma Delta Chi was ordered in '03 to "kidnap" Honest John from his loosely guarded glass museum
case and introduce him into the Rachel Swanson Memorial Girls' Gymnasium shower room.
On May 22, 2003, the University Board of Regents issued the following order: "By unanimous vote, it is
directed that the remains of Honest John Barlow be removed from the University museum and conveyed
to the University's Lieutenant James Scott III Memorial Biological Laboratories and there be securely
locked in a specially prepared vault. It is further directed that all possible measures for the preservation of
these remains be taken by the Laboratory administration and that access to these remains be denied to all
persons except qualified scholars authorized in writing by the Board. The Board reluctantly takes this
 action in view of recent notices and plwtographs in the nation's
press which, to say the least, reflect but small credit upon the
University."
It was far from his field, but Hawkins understood what had happened-an early and accidental blundering
onto the bare bones of the Levantman shock anesthesia, which had since been replaced by other
methods. To bring subjects out of Levantman shock, you let them have a squirt of simple saline in the
trigeminal nerve. Interesting. And now about that bronze- He heaved the pick into the rotting green salts,
expecting no resistance, and almost fractured his wrist. Something down there was solid. He began to
flake off the oxides.
A half hour of work brought him down to phosphor bronze, a huge casting of the almost incorruptible
metal. It had weakened structurally over the centuries; he could fit the point of his pick under a corroded
boss and pry off great creaking and grumbling striae of the stuff.
Hawkins wished he had an archaeologist with him but didn't dream of returning to his shop and caffing
one to take over the find. He was an all-around man: by choice, and in his free time, an artist in clay and
glaze; by necessity, an automotive, electronics and atomic engineer who could also swing a project in
traffic control, individual and group psychology, architecture or tool design. He didn't yell for a specialist
every time something out of his line came up; there were so few with so much to do.
He trenched around his find, discovering that it was a great brick-shaped bronze mass with an excitingly
hollow sound. A long strip of moldering metal from one of the long vertical faces pulled away, exposing
red rust that went whoosh and was sucked into the interior of the mass.
It had been de-aired, thought Hawkins, and there must have been an inner jacket of glass which had
crystallized through the centuries and quietly crumbled at the first clang of his pick. He didn't know what
a vacuum would do to a subject of Levantman shock, but he had hopes, nor did he quite understand
what a real estate dealer was, but it might have something to do with pottery. And anything might have a
bearing on Topic Number One.
He flung his pick out of the trench, climbed out and set off at a dog-trot for his shop. A little rummaging
turned up a hypo and there was a plastic container of salt in the kitchen.
Back at his dig, he chipped for another half hour to expose the juncture of lid and body. The hinges were
hopeless; he smashed them off.
Hawkins extended the telescopic handle of the pick for the best leverage, fitted its point into a deep pit,
set its built-in fulcrum, and heaved. Five more heaves and he could see, inside the vault, what looked like
a dusty marble statue. Ten more and he could see that it was the naked body of Honest John Barlow,
Evanston real estate dealer, uncorrupted by time.
Â
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]