Big Book of Science Fiction (33 page)

~ * ~

THE ONLY THING WE LEARN

by C. M. Kornbluth

THE
professor, though he did not know the actor’s phrase for it, was counting the
house—peering through a spyhole in the door through which he would in a moment
appear before the class. He was pleased with what he saw. Tier after tier of
young people, ready with notebooks and styli, chattering tentatively, glancing
at the door against which his nose was flattened, waiting for the pleasant
interlude known as “Archaeo-Literature 203” to begin.

The professor stepped back,
smoothed his tunic, crooked four books in his left elbow and made his entrance.
Four swift strides brought him to the lectern and, for the thousandth-odd time,
he impassively swept the lecture hall with his gaze. Then he gave a wry little
smile. Inside, for the thousandth-odd time, he was nagged by the irritable
little thought that the lectern really ought to be a foot or so higher.

The irritation did not show. He
was out to win the audience, and he did. A dead silence, the supreme tribute,
gratified him. Imperceptibly, the lights of the lecture hall began to dim and
the light on the lectern to brighten.

He spoke.

“Young gentlemen of the Empire, I
ought to warn you that this and the succeeding lectures will be most
subversive.”

There was a little rustle of
incomprehension from the audience—but by then the lectern light was strong
enough to show the twinkling smile about his eyes that belied his stern mouth,
and agreeable chuckles sounded in the gathering darkness of the tiered seats.
Glow-lights grew bright gradually at the students’ tables, and they adjusted
their notebooks in the narrow ribbons of illumination. He waited for the small
commotion to subside.

“Subversive—” He gave them a link
to cling to. “Subversive because I shall make every effort to tell both sides
of our ancient beginnings with every resource of archaeology and with every
clue my diligence has discovered in our epic literature.

“There
were
two sides, you
know—difficult though it may be to believe that if we judge by the Old Epic
alone—such epics as-the noble and tempestuous
Chant of Remd,
the
remaining fragments of
Krall’s Voyage,
or the gory and rather
out-of-date
Battle for the Ten Suns.”
He paused while styli scribbled
across the notebook pages.

“The Middle Epic is marked,
however, by what I might call the rediscovered ethos.” From his voice, every
student knew that that phrase, surer than death and taxes, would appear on an
examination paper. The styli scribbled. “By this I mean an awakening of
fellow-feeling with the Home Suns People, which had once been filial loyalty to
them when our ancestors were few and pioneers, but which turned into contempt
when their numbers grew.

“The Middle Epic writers did not
despise the Home Suns People, as did the bards of the Old Epic. Perhaps this
was because they did not have to—since their long war against the Home Suns was
drawing to a victorious close.

“Of the New Epic I shall have
little to say. It was a literary fad, a pose, and a silly one. Written within
historic times, the some two score pseudo-epics now moulder in their cylinders,
where they belong. Our ripening civilization could not with integrity work in
the epic form, and the artistic failures produced so indicate. Our genius
turned to the lyric and to the unabashedly romantic novel.

“So much, for the moment, of
literature. What contribution, you must wonder, have archaeological studies to
make in an investigation of the wars from which our ancestry emerged?

“Archaeology offers—one—a check
in historical matter in the epics—confirming or denying. Two—it provides
evidence glossed over in the epics—for artistic or patriotic reasons. Three—it
provides evidence which has been lost, owing to the fragmentary nature of some
of the early epics.”

All this he fired at them
crisply, enjoying himself. Let them not think him a dreamy litterateur, nor,
worse, a flat precisionist, but let them be always a little off-balance before
him, never knowing what came next, and often wondering, in class and out. The
styli paused after heading Three.

“We shall examine first, by our
archaeo-literary technique, the second book of the
Chant of Remd.
As the
selected youth of the Empire, you know much about it, of course—much that is
false, some that is true and a great deal that is irrelevant. You know that
Book One hurls us into the middle of things, aboard ship with Algan and his
great captain, Remd, on their way from the triumph over a Home Suns stronghold,
the planet Telse. We watch Remd on his diversionary action that splits the Ten
Suns Fleet into two halves. But before we see the destruction of those halves
by the Horde of Algan, we are told in Book Two of the battle for Telse.”

He opened one of his books on the
lectern, swept the amphitheater again and read sonorously.

“Then
battle broke And

high
the blinding blast

Sight-searing
leaped

While
folk in fear below

Cowered
in caverns

From
the wrath of Remd—

“Or, in less sumptuous language,
one fission bomb—or a stick of time-on-target bombs—was dropped. An unprepared
and disorganized populace did not take the standard measure of dispersing, but
huddled foolishly to await Algan’s gun-fighters and the death they brought.

“One of the things you believe
because you have seen them in notes to elementary-school editions of
Remd
is that Telse was the fourth planet of the star, Sol. Archaeology denies it by
establishing that the fourth planet—actually called Marse, by the way—was in
those days weather-roofed at least, and possibly atmosphere-roofed as well. As
potential warriors, you know that one does not waste fissionable material on a
roof, and there is no mention of chemical explosives being used to crack the
roof. Marse, therefore, was not the locale of
Remd,
Book Two.

“Which planet was? The answer to
that has been established by X-radar, differential decay analyses, video-coring
and every other resource of those scientists still quaintly called ‘diggers.’ We
know and can prove that Telse was the
third
planet of Sol. So much for
the opening of the attack. Let us jump to Canto Three, the Storming of the
Dynastic Palace.

“Imperial
purple wore they

Fresh
from the feast

Grossly
gorged

They
sought to slay—

“And so on. Now, as I warned you,
Remd is of the Old Epic, and makes no pretense at fairness. The unorganized
huddling of Telse’s population was read as cowardice instead of poor A.R.P. The
same is true of the Third Canto. Video-cores show on the site of the palace a
hecatomb of dead in once-purple livery, but also shows impartially that they
were not particularly gorged and that digestion of their last meals had been
well advanced. They didn’t give such a bad accounting of themselves, either. I
hesitate to guess, but perhaps they accounted for one of our ancestors apiece
and were simply outnumbered. The study is not complete.

“That much we know.” The
professor saw they were tiring of the terse scientist and shifted gears. “But
if the veil of time were rent that shrouds the years between us and the Home
Suns People, how much more would we learn? Would we despise the Home Suns
People as our frontiersman ancestors did, or would we cry:
“This
is our
spiritual home—this world of rank and order, this world of formal verse and
exquisitely patterned arts’?”

If the veil of time were rent—?

We can try to rend it . . .

~ * ~

Wing
Commander Arris heard the clear jangle of the radar net alarm as he was
dreaming about a fish. Struggling out of his too-deep, too-soft bed, he stepped
into a purple singlet, buckled on his Sam Browne belt with its holstered .45
automatic and tried to read the radar screen. Whatever had set it off was
either too small or too distant to register on the five-inch C.R.T.

He rang for his aide, and checked
his appearance in a wall-mirror while waiting. His space tan was beginning to
fade, he saw, and made a mental note to get it renewed at the parlor. He
stepped into the corridor as Evan, his aide, trotted up— younger, browner,
thinner, but the same officer type that made the Service what it was, Arris
thought with satisfaction.

Evan gave him a bone-cracking
salute, which he returned. They set off for the elevator that whisked them down
to a large, chilly dark underground room where faces were greenly lit by radar
screens and the lights of plotting tables. Somebody yelled “Attention!” and the
tecks snapped. He gave them “At ease” and took the brisk salute of the senior
teck, who reported to him in flat, machine-gun delivery:

“Object-becoming-visible-on-primary-screen-sir.”

He studied the sixty-inch disk
for several seconds before he spotted the intercepted particle. It was coming
in fast from zenith, growing while he watched.

“Assuming it’s now traveling at
maximum, how long will It be before it’s within striking range?” he asked the
teck.

“Seven hours, sir.”

“The interceptors at Idlewild
alerted?”

“Yessir.”

Arris turned on a phone that
connected with Interception. The boy at Interception knew the face that
appeared on its screen, and was already capped with a crash helmet.

“Go ahead and take him, Efrid,”
said the wing commander.

“Yessir!” and a punctilious
salute, the boy’s pleasure plain at being known by name and a great deal more
at being on the way to a fight that might be first-class.

Arris cut him off before the boy
could detect a smile that was forming on his face. He turned from the pale
lumar glow of the sixty-incher to enjoy it. Those kids—when every meteor was an
invading dreadnaught, when every ragged scouting ship from the rebels was an
armada!

He watched Efrid’s squadron soar
off on the screen and then he retreated to a darker corner. This was his post
until the meteor or scout or whatever it was got taken care of. Evan joined
him, and they silently studied the smooth, disciplined functioning of the plot
room, Arris with satisfaction and Evan doubtless with the same. The aide broke
silence, asking:

“Do you suppose it’s a Frontier
ship, sir?” He caught the wing commander’s look and hastily corrected himself: “I
mean rebel ship, sir, of course.”

“Then you should have said so. Is
that what the junior officers generally call those scoundrels?”

Evan conscientiously cast his
mind back over the last few junior messes and reported unhappily: “I’m afraid
we do, sir. We seem to have got into the habit.”

“I shall write a memorandum about
it. How do you account for that very peculiar habit?”

“Well, sir, they do have
something like a fleet and they did take over the Regulus Cluster, didn’t they?”

What had got into this incredible
fellow, Arris wondered in amazement. Why, the thing was self-evident! They had
a few ships—accounts differed as to how many—and they had, doubtless by raw
sedition, taken over some systems temporarily.

He turned from his aide, who
sensibly became interested in a screen and left with a murmured excuse to study
it very closely.

The brigands had certainly
knocked together some ramshackle league or other, but— The wing commander
wondered briefly if it could last, shut the horrid thought from his head, and
set himself to composing mentally a stiff memorandum that would be posted in
the junior officer’s mess and put an end to this absurd talk.

His eyes wandered to the
sixty-incher, where he saw the interceptor squadron climbing nicely toward the
particle— which, he noticed, had become three particles. A low crooning
distracted him. Was one of the tecks singing at work? It couldn’t be!