The Naked Storm. C.M. Kornbluth

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      THE NAKED STORM

      C.M. KORNBLUTH

      Originally published under the pseudonym “Simon Eisner.”

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Originally published in 1952.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      CHAPTER I

      PASSENGER BOYCE

      Boyce’s wife, lying in the exact center of her Hollywood bed, said faintly: “Please, darling, no. I have a headache.” All the accessories of a headache were neatly arranged on the blonde wood end table: the squat little bottle of aspirin-phenobarb-codein tablets, the glass of water, the box of cleansing tissues, the bottle of pink capsules, the murder mystery by an Englishwoman. Faced by such corroborative evidence, Boyce could hardly call her a liar.

      “After all,” he said steadily, “I’m going to Frisco in the morning.”

      A small twinge passed across her face. “You ought to get a good night’s sleep,” she said. “You know you never sleep in trains.”

      He looked down at her. For all the good it did him, Peggy was still a good-looking woman. It was, if anything, too warm in the apartment. But as he looked she drew her pink bed-jacket more snugly over her shoulders.

      “What have you got that thing on for?” he demanded. “This isn’t a hospital. This is home and I’m your husband.”

      “Please, darling,” she said faintly. “I simply can’t argue.”

      “You and your goddamned headaches,” he said.

      It startled her, and she was startled even more when he struggled into his overcoat and slammed out of the apartment.

      Boyce stood shivering in front of the apartment house under the icy blast from Lake Michigan, wondering angrily what to do next. He was going to San Francisco in the morning and he should get a good night’s sleep.

      But he was sore.

      And a taxi pulled up and the driver’s red face pressed against the right front window and stared at him contemptuously as if to say: “Don’t just stand there, mister. Get in. That’s what I’m here for.”

      Boyce got in and told the driver: “The Loop. Anywhere in the Loop.” Have a drink, he thought, calm down, come back and go to bed. Alone.

      It was a fifteen-minute drive from the North Side apartment house to the crowded heart of Chicago. The driver pulled to the curb at State and Van Buren and growled: “One seventy-five.”

      The face of the meter was set into leather padding at the front of the passenger compartment, below eye-level and badly lit. It might have said anything from thirty-five cents to fifty dollars. Boyce thought briefly of checking the reading, gave up the idea as the beefy face scowled at him, and handed over two singles.

      “Thanks,” the driver said, taking a two-bit tip for granted and roaring the motor impatiently as he waited for his fare to get out.

      Boyce got out and stood a little forlornly on the curb, jostled by late shoppers, newsstand helpers getting out the morning editions, and movie-goers. It was eight o’clock of a January evening. The sheet-iron Christmas trees with which lamp posts in front of the State Street department stores were decorated this year were still up. Sheet-iron discs, brightly painted, swung from the sheet-iron branches. Every once in a while a gust from the lake four blocks to the east caught one of the discs and made it spin wildly and utter a weird banshee wail.

      A bright marquee behind him blinked RESTAURANT-BAR and snatches of music, drum and piano, blasted out when its heavy glass doors opened to let patrons in and out. Have one now, Boyce thought, then grab a cab back to the apartment. He ducked into the place, crossing the line between the icy street with its banshee wailing and the warmly noisy inside.

      The bar was a U-shaped affair enclosing a platform on which a three-piece combo of flat-faced little brown men were strumming La Cucaracha. Boyce sipped his drink, looking straight ahead except for an occasional furtive glance at the musicians.

      Quite a nice place, he thought. Nicer than the too-hot apartment with the too-cold wife. Peggy would ask him where he’d been and he’d simply tell her a Loop nightclub and she’d be burned up but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know—as if she had any secrets from him!

      Served her right. Husband going away in mid-winter and he doesn’t even get a look at her, much less a night in bed. That damned bed-jacket.

      “Yes, sir!” the barman was saying heartily. “The same?”

      Boyce nodded and put a five on the bar. This was adding up already. He reached in a sudden panic for his breast pocket and relaxed when he felt the ticket and reservation. Golden Gate Express, leaves Union Station 9:05 A.M., time for a good breakfast, Car 15, Berth 24U. Always an upper until you got to be Senior Buyer and then the sky was the limit if you weren’t too old and if nobody on the Board had a loose-end nephew or cousin to sneak your job away from you. It had happened—not so much in Floor Coverings because you had to know the field from the ground up. But in Furniture and in Appliances the axe could fall on anybody. In Furniture you didn’t have to know anything except the way to the Merchandise Mart, where salesmen showed you around and you simply made the best deal you could and that was that. Appliances was easier yet. The appliance men came around and begged you to buy. Floor Coverings, for some reason, was still an old-fashioned business and you had to know who was who, who was honest, who was prompt. And rugs fluctuated wildly with the price of wool. For that kind of buying you needed brains and foresight—

      When in God’s name was Mr. Oberholtzer going to die or retire? Then Mr. Reiner would move up from Assistant to Buyer and Boyce would move up from Senior Salesman to Assistant and everybody would be happy including Mr. Oberholtzer. Mr. Oberholtzer professed to hate the Store and all its works and yet for five years since his stroke he had been dragging himself to the office to put in a couple of hours and then snooze away the rest of the day. And Reiner did Mr. Oberholtzer’s work and Boyce did Reiner’s work and there was nobody to keep an eye on the floor force, which was addicted to promising impossible delivery dates and impossible sizes and shades and impossibly low fitting estimates to clinch their sales and commissions.

      He said to the waiting bartender: “Wonder if you ever thought of the rug-man’s problems?”

      “Can’t say I have,” the meaty man in the white jacket admitted. “The same?”

      He was a son of a bitch, too. All they wanted was your money. “No more,” Boyce told him. He spun around on his stool and went out into the icy air. He felt fine, and magically there was a taxi waiting for him with the door open.

      He climbed in and should have said: “North on the Drive,” which would take him home to the headache and the prim bed-jacket. Instead he paused.

      “Where to, mister?” the driver finally asked with exaggerated courtesy.

      Boyce took the plunge and asked, too casually: “What’s a good place to go and kill some time?”

      The driver clicked down the meter flag half-way to “waiting” and scratched his chin. “Well, there’s the Spanish Casino—”

      Boyce recoiled. You could conceivably go there with your wife, but if you went alone and somebody saw you it didn’t look too good, what with the percentage girls crawling all over you. He’d heard about it from bachelors on the floor force. Regretfully he said: “Not for me.”

      The driver didn’t mind. “You want to see girls,” he said, “there’s a rub-joint out west, Castle Gardens.”

      Boyce was vaguely aware that a rub-joint was a low-down dance hall. “Swell,” he said. “Let’s go.” The driver clicked the flag all the way down and headed west on Van Buren Street.

      The river, the big ghostly-white railroad stations, the dark used machine-tool district, the honky-tonks glaring and winking—

      Half a dozen times Boyce