The Silly Season - C. M. Kornbluth, ebook, Temp
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The Silly Season
C. M. Kornbluth
The Silly Season
IT WAS a hot summer afternoon in theOmahabureau of the World Wireless Press Service, and the
control bureau inNew Yorkkept nagging me for copy. But since it was a hot summer afternoon, there
was no copy. A wrapup of local baseball had cleared about an hour ago, and that was that. Nothing but
baseball happens in the summer. During the dog days, politicians are in theMainewoods fishing and
boozing, burglars are too tired to burgle, and wives think it over and decide not to decapitate their
husbands.
I pawed through some press releases. One sloppy stencil-duplicated sheet began: "Did you know that
the lemonade way to summer comfort and health has been endorsed by leading physiotherapists from
MainetoCalifornia? The Federated Lemon-Growers Association revealed today that a survey of 2,500
physiotherapists in 57 cities of more than 25,000 population disclosed that 87 per cent of them drink
lemonade at least once a day between June and September, and that another 72 per cent not only drink
the cooling and healthful beverage but actually prescribe it-"
 Another note tapped out on the news circuit printer fromNew York: "960M-HW KICKER? ND
SNST-NY"
That wasNew Yorksaying they needed a bright and sparkling little news item immediately-"soonest." I
went to the eastbound printer and punched out: "96NY-UPCMNG FU MINS-OM"
The lemonade handout was hopeless; I dug into the stack again. TheStateUniversitysummer course was
inviting the governor to attend its summer conference on aims and approaches hi adult secondary
education. TheAgriculturalCollegewanted me to warn farmers that white-skinned hogs should be kept
from the direct rays of the summer sun. The manager of a fifth-rate local pug sent a writeup of his boy
and a couple of working press passes to his next bout in theOmahaArena. The Schwartz and White
Bandage Company contributed a glossy eight-by-ten of a blonde in a bathing suit improvised from two S.
& W. Redi-Dressings.
Accompanying text: "Pert starlet Miff McCoy is ready for any seaside emergency. That's not onjy a
darling swim suit she has on- it's two standard all-purpose Redi-Dressing bandages made by the
Schwartz and White Bandage Company ofOmaha. If a broken rib results from too-strenuous beach
athletics, Miff's dress can supply the dressing." Yeah. The rest of the stack wasn't even that good. I
dumped them all in the circular file, and began to wrack my brains in spite of the heat.
I'd have to fake one, I decided. Unfortunately, there had been no big running silly season story so far this
summer-no flying saucers, or monsters in the Florida Everglades, or chloroform bandits terrifying the city.
If there had, I could have hopped on and faked a "with." As it was, I'd have to fake a "lead," which is
harder and riskier.
The flying saucers? I couldn't revive them; they'd been forgotten for years, except by newsmen. The
giant turtle ofLake Huronhad been quiet for years, too. If I started a chloroform bandit scare, every old
maid in the state would back me up by swearing she heard the bandit trying to break in and smelled
chloroform-but the cops wouldn't like it. Strange messages from space received at theStateUniversity's
radar lab? That might do it. I put a sheet of copy paper hi the typewriter and sat, glaring at it and hating
the silly season.
There was a slight reprieve-theWestern Uniontie-line printer by the desk dinged at me and its
sickly-yellow bulb lit up. I tapped out:
"ww GA PLS," and the machine began to eject yellow, gummed tape which told me this:
"WU CO62-DPR COLLECT-FT HICKS ARK AUG 22 105P- WORLDWIRELESS
OMAHA-TOWN MARSHAL PINKNEY CRAWLES DIED MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES
FISHTRIPPING OZARK HAMLET RUSH CITY TODAY. RUSHERS PHONED HICKSERS
'BURNED DEATH SHINING DOMES APPEARED YESTERWEEK.' JEEPING BODY
HICKSWARD. QUERIED RUSH CONSTABLE P.C. ALLENBY LEARNING 'SEVEN GLASSY
DOMES EACHHOUSESIZECLEARINGMILESOUTHTOWN. RUSHERS UNTOUCHED,
UNAPPROACHED. CRAWLES WARNED BUT TOUCHED AND DIED BURNS.' NOTE
DESK-RUSH FONECALL 1.85. SHALL I UPFOLLOW?-BENSON- FISHTRIPPING RUSHERS
HICKSERS YESTERWEEK JEEPING HICKSWARD HOUSESIZE 1.85 428P CLR. . ."
 It was just what the doctor ordered. I typed an acknowledgment for the message and pounded out a
story, fast. I punched it and started the tape wiggling through the eastbound transmitter beforeNew York
could send any more irked notes. The news circuit printer fromNew Yorkclucked and began relaying my
story immediately: "ww72 (KICKER)
FORT HICKS, ARKANSAS, AUG 22-(WW)-MYSTERIOUS DEATH TODAY STRUCK
DOWN A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER IN A TINY OZARK MOUNTAIN HAMLET.
MARSHAL PINKNEY CRAWLES OFFORT HICKS,ARKANSAS, DIED OF BURNS WHILE
ON A FISHING TRIP TO THE LITTLEVILLAGEOFRUSHCITY. TERRIFIED NATIVES OF
RUSHCITYBLAMED THE TRAGEDY ON WHAT THEY CALLED 'SHINING DOMES.' THEY
SAID THE SO-CALLED DOMES APPEARED IN A CLEARING LAST WEEK ONE MILE
SOUTH OF TOWN. THERE ARE SEVEN OF THE MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS -EACH ONE THE
SIZE OF A HOUSE. THE INHABITANTS OFRUSHCITYDID NOT DARE APPROACH THEM.
THEY WARNED THE VISITING MARSHAL CRAWLES-BUT HE DID NOT HEED THEIR
WARNING.RUSHCITY'S CONSTABLE P.C. ALLENBY WAS A WITNESS TO THE
TRAGEDY. SAID HE: - "THERE ISN'T MUCH TO TELL. MARSHAL CRAWLES JUST
WALKED UP TO ONE OF THE DOMES AND PUT HIS HAND ON IT. THERE WAS A BIG
PLASH, AND WHEN I COULD SEE AGAIN, HE WAS BURNED TO DEATH.' CONSTABLE
ALLENBY IS RETURNING THE BODY OF MARSHAL CRAWLES TO FORT HICKS.
602P220M"
That, I thought, should hold them for a while. I remembered Ben-son's "note desk" and put through a
long distance call to Fort Hicks, person to person. The Omaha operator asked for Fort Hicks
information, but there wasn't any. The Fort Hicks operator asked whom she wanted. Omaha finally
admitted that we wanted to talk to Mr. Edwin C. Benson. Fort Hicks figured out loud and then decided
that Ed was probably at the police station if he hadn't gone home for supper yet. She connected us with
the police station, and I got Benson. He had a pleasant voice, not particularly backwoods Arkansas. I
gave him some of the old oil about a fine dispatch, and a good, conscientious job, and so on. He took it
with plenty of dry reserve, which was odd. Our rural stringers always ate that kmd of stuff up. Where, I
asked him, was he from?
"Fort Hicks," he told me, "but I've moved around. I did the courthouse beat in Little Rock-" I nearly
laughed out loud at that, but the laugh died out as he went on-"rewrite for the A.P. in New Orleans, ^ot
to be bureau chief there but I didn't like wire service work. Got an opening on the Chicago Trib desk.
That didn't last- they sent me to head up their Washington bureau. There I switched to the New York
Tunes. They made me a war correspondent and I got hurt-back to Fort Hicks. I do some magazine
writing now. Did you want a follow-up on the Rush City story?"
"Sure," I told him weakly. "Give it a real ride-use your own judgment. Do you think it's a fake?"
"I saw Pink's body a little while ago at the undertaker's parlor, and I had a talk with Allenby, from Rush
City. Pink got burned all right, and Allenby didn't make his story up. Maybe somebody else did-he's
pretty dumb-but as far as I can tell, this is the real thing. I'll keep the copy coming. Don't forget about that
dollar eighty-five phone call, will you?"
I told him I wouldn't, and hung up. Mr. Edwin C. Benson had handed me quite a jolt. I wondered how
badly he had been hurt, that he had been forced to abandon a brilliant news career and bury himself in
the Ozarks.
Then there came a call from God, the board chairman of World Wireless. He was fishing in Canada, as
all good board chairmen do during the silly season, but he had caught a news broadcast which used my
 Rush City story. He had a mobile phone in his trailer, and it was but the work of a moment to ring
Omaha and louse up my carefully planned vacation schedules and rotation of night shifts. He wanted me
to go down to Rush City and cover the story personally. I said yes and began trying to round up the rest
of the staff. My night editor was sobered up by his wife and delivered to the bureau in fair shape. A
telegrapher on vacation was reached at his summer resort and talked into checking out. I got a taxi
company on the phone and told them to have a cross-country cab on the roof in an hour. I specified their
best driver, and told them to give him maps of Arkansas.
Meanwhile, two "with domes" dispatches arrived from Benson and got moved on the wire. I monitored
a couple of newscasts; the second one carried a story by another wire service on the domes-a pickup of
our stuff, but they'd have their own men on the scene fast enough. I filled in the night editor, and went up
to the roof for the cab.
The driver took off in the teeth of a gathering thunderstorm. We had to rise above it, and by the time we
could get down to sight-pilotage altitude, we were lost. We circled most of the night until the driver
picked up a beacon he had on his charts at about 3:30 A.M. We landed at Fort Hicks as day was
breaking, not on speaking terms.
Fort Hicks' field clerk told me where Benson lived, and I walked there. It was a white, frame house. A
quiet, middle-aged woman let me in. She was his widowed sister, Mrs. McHenry. She got me some
coffee and told me she had been up all night waiting for Edwin to come back from Rush City. He had
started out about 8:00 P.M., and it was only a two-hour trip by car. She was worried. I tried to pump
her about her brother, but she'd only say that he was the bright one of the family. She didn't want to talk
about his work as war correspondent. She did show me some of his magazine stuff-boy-and-girl stories
in national weeklies. He seemed to sell one every couple of months.
We had arrived at a conversational stalemate when her brother walked in, and I discovered why his
news career had been interrupted. He was blind. Aside from a long, puckered brown scar that ran from
his left temple back over his ear and onto the nape of his neck, he was a pleasant-looking fellow in his
mid-forties.
"Who is it, Vera?" he asked.
"It's Mr. Williams, the gentleman who called you from Omaha today-I mean yesterday."
"How do you do, Williams. Don't get up," he added-hearing, I suppose, the chair squeak as I leaned
forward to rise.
"You were so long, Edwin," his sister said with relief and reproach.
"That young jackass Howie-my chauffeur for the night-" he added an aside to me-"got lost going there
and coming back. But I did spend more time than I'd planned at Rush City." He sat down, facing me.
"Williams, there is some difference of opinion about the shining domes. The Rush City people say that
they exist, and I say they don't."
His sister brought him a cup of coffee.
"What happened, exactly?" I asked.
 "That Allenby took me and a few other hardy citizens to see them. They told me just what they looked
like. Seven hemispheres in a big clearing, glassy, looming up like houses, reflecting the gleam of the
headlights. But they weren't there. Not to me, and not to any blind man. I know when I'm standing in
front of a house or anything else that big. I can feel a little tension on the skin of my face. It works
unconsciously, but the mechanism is thoroughly understood.
"The blind get-because they'have to-an aural picture of the world. We hear a little hiss of air that means
we're at the corner of a building, we hear and feel big, turbulent air currents that mean we're coming to a
busy street. Some of the boys can thread their way through an obstacle course and never touch a single
obstruction. I'm not that good, maybe because I haven't been blind as long as they have, but by hell, I
know when there are seven objects the size of houses in front of me, and there just were no such things in
the clearing at Rush City."
"Well," I shrugged, "there goes a fine piece of silly-season journalism. What kind of a gag are the Rush
City people trying to pull, and why?"
"No kind of gag. My driver saw the domes, too-and don't forget the late marshal. Pink not only saw
them but touched them. All I know is that people see them and I don't. If they exist, they have a kind of
existence like nothing else I've ever met."
"I'll go up there myself," I decided.
"Best thing," said Benson. "I don't know what to make of it. You can take our car." He gave me
directions and I gave him a schedule of deadlines. We wanted the coroner's verdict, due today, an
eyewitness story-his driver would do for that-some background stuff on the area and a few statements
from local officials.
I took his car and got to Rush City in two hours. It was an un-
painted collection of dog-trot homes, set down in the big pine forest
that covers all that rolling Ozark country. There was a general store
that had the place's only phone. I suspected it had been kept busy by
the wire services and a few enterprising newspapers. A state trooper
in a flashy uniform was lounging against a fly-specked tobacco counter
when I got there. ,;.
"I'm Sam Williams, from World Wireless," I said. "You come to have a look at the domes?"
"World Wireless broke that story, didn't they?" he asked me, with a look I couldn't figure out.
"We did. Our Fort Hicks stringer wired it to us."
The phone rang, and the trooper answered it. It seemed to have been a call to the Governor's office he
had placed.
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