from science fiction by
C. M. Kornbluth

“It was then that I drifted into the nut cult business. I found out that all you need for capital is a stock of capitalized abstract qualities, like All-Knowingness, Will-Mind-Urge, Planetude and Exciliation. With that to work on I can make my living almost anywhere on the globe.”

After twenty generations of shilly-shallying and “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” genus homo had bred himself into an impasse. Dogged biometricians had pointed out with irrefutable logic that mental subnormals were outbreeding mental normals and supernormals, and that the process was occurring on an exponential curve. Every fact that could be mustered in the argument proved the biometricians’ case, and led inevitably to the conclusion that genus homo was going to wind up in a preposterous jam quite soon. If you think that had any effect on breeding practices, you do not know genus homo.

There was, of course, a sort of masking effect produced by that other exponential function, the accumulation of technological devices. A moron trained to punch an adding machine seems to be a more skillful computer than a medieval mathematician trained to count on his fingers.

Somebody was singing, and my throbbing head objected. I seemed to have a mouthful of sawdust.

I ran my tongue around inside my mouth. It was full of sawdust—spruce and cedar, rocketed in from Earth.

My eyes snapped open, and I sat up, cracking my head on the underside of the table beneath which I was lying. I lay down and waited for the pinwheels to stop spinning. I tried to think it out. Spruce and cedar . . . Honest Blogri’s Olde Earthe Saloon . . . eleven stingers with a Sirian named Wenjtkpli . . .

“The Frostbite Interplanetary Party,” he said wryly. “I would smile with you if the joke were not on me. I know, I know—we are Outs who want to be Ins, we are neurotic youngsters, we are led by stooges of the Planetary Party. So what should I do—start a one-man party alone on a mountain-top, so pure that I must blackball everybody except myself from membership?”

“Certain rules that have sprung up which We observe.” The capitalized plural pronoun was definitely sounded. Whether it was to be taken as royal, editorial, or theological, who can say?

They proceeded to brief Bunny.

Firstly, he must never admit that he was wealthy. He might use the phrase “what little I have,” accompanied by a whimsical shrug.

Secondly, he must never, under any circumstances, at any time, give anything to anybody. Whenever asked for anything he was to intimate that this one request he simply could not grant, that it was the one crushing straw atop his terrible burden of charitable contributions.

Thirdly, whenever offered anything—from a cigar to a million-dollar market tip from a climber—he must take it without thanks and complain bitterly that the gift was not handsomer.

Fourthly, he must look on Touching Capital as morally equivalent to coprophagia, but he must not attempt to sting himself by living on the interest; that was only for New Englanders.

Fifthly, when he married he must choose his bride from one of Us.

Oh, the high adventure of the launching! The men and women who had gone aboard thought themselves heroes, conquerors of nature, self-sacrificers for the glory of NEMET! But NEMET meant only Northeastern Metropolitan Area, one dense warren that stretched form Boston to Newport, built up and dug down, sprawling westward, gulping Pittsburgh without a pause, beginning to peter out past Cincinnati.

The first generation asea clung and sighed for the culture of NEMET, consoled itself with its patriotic sacrifice; any relief was better than none at all, and Grenville’s Convoy had drained one and a quarter million population from the huddle. They were immigrants into the sea; like all immigrants they longed for the Old Country. Then the second generation. Like all second generations they had no patience with the old people or their tales. This was real, this sea, this gale, this rope! Then the third generation. Like all third generations it felt a sudden desperate hollowness and lack of identity. What was real? Who are we? What is NEMET which we have lost? But by then grandfather and grandmother could only mumble vaguely; the cultural heritage was gone, squandered in three generations, spent forever. As always, the fourth generation did not care.

And those who sat in counsel on the fantail were members of the fifth and sixth generations. They knew all there was to know about life. Life was the hull and masts, the sail and rigging, the net and the evaporators. Nothing more. Nothing less.

“Reason tells us that we cannot survive. What I propose is an honorable voluntary death for us all, and the legacy of our ship’s fabric to be divided among the remainder of the Convoy at the discretion of the Commodore.”

He had little hope of his old man’s viewpoint prevailing. The Chief Inspector rose at once. She had only three words to say: “Not my children.”

Women’s heads nodded grimly, and men’s with resignation. Decency and duty and common sense were all very well until you ran up against that steel bulkhead. Not my children.

“I don’t believe in sex and I don’t push sex, so you leave me the hell alone! Life is pain and suffering and being scared so people like to look at my pictures; my pictures are about them, the scared little jerks! You’re just a bunch of goddam perverts if you think there’s anything dirty about my pictures!”

He had them there; Merdeka’s girls always wore at least full panties, bras and stockings; he had them there. The post-office obscenity people were vaguely positive that there was something wrong with pictures of beautiful women tied down to be whipped or burned with hot irons, but what?

There came a time when he needed a theory and was forced to stab the button of the intercom for his young-old Managing Communicator and growl at him: “Give me a theory!” And the M.C. reeled out: “The structural intermesh of DEATH: The Weekly Picture Magazine with Western culture is no random point-event but a rising world-line. Predecessor attitudes such as the Hollywood dogma ‘No breasts—blood!’ and the tabloid press’ exploitation of violence were floundering and empirical. It was Merdeka who sigma-ized the convergent traits of our times and asymptotically congruentizes with them publication-wise. Wrestling and the roller-derby as blood sports, the routinization of femicide in the detective tale, the standardization at one million per year of traffic fatalities, the wholesome interest of our youth in gang rumbles, all point toward the Age of Hate and Death. The ethic of Love and Life is obsolescent, and who is to say that Man is the loser thereby? Life and Death compete in the marketplace of ideas for the Mind of Man—”

Merdeka growled something and snapped off the set. Merdeka leaned back. Two billion circulation this week, and the auto ads were beginning to Tip. Last year only the suggestion of a dropped shopping basket as the Dynajetic 16 roared across the page, this year a hand, limp on the pictured pavement. Next year, blood.