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The Altar at Midnight

C. M. Kornbluth



  Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  _The Altar at Midnight_

  By C. M. KORNBLUTH

  Illustrated by ASHMAN]

  _Doing something for humanity may be fine--for humanity--but rough on the individual!_

  He had quite a rum-blossom on him for a kid, I thought at first. Butwhen he moved closer to the light by the cash register to ask thebartender for a match or something, I saw it wasn't that. Not just thenose. Broken veins on his cheeks, too, and the funny eyes. He must haveseen me look, because he slid back away from the light.

  The bartender shook my bottle of ale in front of me like a Swissbell-ringer so it foamed inside the green glass.

  "You ready for another, sir?" he asked.

  I shook my head. Down the bar, he tried it on the kid--he was drinkingscotch and water or something like that--and found out he could push himaround. He sold him three scotch and waters in ten minutes.

  When he tried for number four, the kid had his courage up and said,"I'll tell _you_ when I'm ready for another, Jack." But there wasn't anytrouble.

  It was almost nine and the place began to fill up. The manager, a realhood type, stationed himself by the door to screen out the high-schoolkids and give the big hello to conventioneers. The girls came hurryingin, too, with their little makeup cases and their fancy hair piled upand their frozen faces with the perfect mouths drawn on them. One ofthem stopped to say something to the manager, some excuse aboutsomething, and he said: "That's aw ri'; get inna dressing room."

  A three-piece band behind the drapes at the back of the stage began tomake warm-up noises and there were two bartenders keeping busy. Mostlyit was beer--a midweek crowd. I finished my ale and had to wait a coupleof minutes before I could get another bottle. The bar filled up from theend near the stage because all the customers wanted a good, close lookat the strippers for their fifty-cent bottles of beer. But I noticedthat nobody sat down next to the kid, or, if anybody did, he didn't staylong--you go out for some fun and the bartender pushes you around andnobody wants to sit next to you. I picked up my bottle and glass andwent down on the stool to his left.

  He turned to me right away and said: "What kind of a place is this,anyway?" The broken veins were all over his face, little ones, but somany, so close, that they made his face look something like marbledrubber. The funny look in his eyes was it--the trick contact lenses. ButI tried not to stare and not to look away.

  "It's okay," I said. "It's a good show if you don't mind a lot of noisefrom--"

  He stuck a cigarette into his mouth and poked the pack at me. "I'm aspacer," he said, interrupting.

  I took one of his cigarettes and said: "Oh."

  He snapped a lighter for the cigarettes and said: "Venus."

  * * * * *

  I was noticing that his pack of cigarettes on the bar had some kind ofyellow sticker instead of the blue tax stamp.

  "Ain't that a crock?" he asked. "You can't smoke and they give youlighters for a souvenir. But it's a good lighter. On Mars last week,they gave us all some cheap pen-and-pencil sets."

  "You get something every trip, hah?" I took a good, long drink of aleand he finished his scotch and water.

  "Shoot. You call a trip a 'shoot'."

  One of the girls was working her way down the bar. She was going toslide onto the empty stool at his right and give him the business, butshe looked at him first and decided not to. She curled around me andasked if I'd buy her a li'l ole drink. I said no and she moved on to thenext. I could kind of feel the young fellow quivering. When I looked athim, he stood up. I followed him out of the dump. The manager grinnedwithout thinking and said, "G'night, boys," to us.

  The kid stopped in the street and said to me: "You don't have to followme around, Pappy." He sounded like one wrong word and I would get sockedin the teeth.

  "Take it easy. I know a place where they won't spit in your eye."

  He pulled himself together and made a joke of it. "This I have to see,"he said. "Near here?"

  "A few blocks."

  We started walking. It was a nice night.

  "I don't know this city at all," he said. "I'm from Covington, Kentucky.You do your drinking at home there. We don't have places like this." Hemeant the whole Skid Row area.

  "It's not so bad," I said. "I spend a lot of time here."

  "Is that a fact? I mean, down home a man your age would likely have awife and children."

  "I do. The hell with them."

  He laughed like a real youngster and I figured he couldn't even betwenty-five. He didn't have any trouble with the broken curbstones inspite of his scotch and waters. I asked him about it.

  "Sense of balance," he said. "You have to be tops for balance to be aspacer--you spend so much time outside in a suit. People don't know howmuch. Punctures. And you aren't worth a damn if you lose your point."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Oh. Well, it's hard to describe. When you're outside and you lose yourpoint, it means you're all mixed up, you don't know which way thecan--that's the ship--which way the can is. It's having all that roomaround you. But if you have a good balance, you feel a little tugging tothe ship, or maybe you just _know_ which way the ship is without feelingit. Then you have your point and you can get the work done."

  "There must be a lot that's hard to describe."

  He thought that might be a crack and he clammed up on me.

  "You call this Gandytown," I said after a while. "It's where thestove-up old railroad men hang out. This is the place."

  * * * * *

  It was the second week of the month, before everybody's pension checkwas all gone. Oswiak's was jumping. The Grandsons of the Pioneers wereon the juke singing the _Man from Mars Yodel_ and old Paddy Shea wasjigging in the middle of the floor. He had a full seidel of beer in hisright hand and his empty left sleeve was flapping.

  The kid balked at the screen door. "Too damn bright," he said.

  I shrugged and went on in and he followed. We sat down at a table. AtOswiak's you can drink at the bar if you want to, but none of theregulars do.

  Paddy jigged over and said: "Welcome home, Doc." He's a LiverpoolIrishman; they talk like Scots, some say, but they sound almost likeBrooklyn to me.

  "Hello, Paddy. I brought somebody uglier than you. Now what do you say?"

  Paddy jigged around the kid in a half-circle with his sleeve flappingand then flopped into a chair when the record stopped. He took a bigdrink from the seidel and said: "Can he do this?" Paddy stretched hisface into an awful grin that showed his teeth. He has three of them. Thekid laughed and asked me: "What the hell did you drag me into here for?"

  "Paddy says he'll buy drinks for the house the day anybody uglier thanhe is comes in."

  Oswiak's wife waddled over for the order and the kid asked us what we'dhave. I figured I could start drinking, so it was three double scotches.

  After the second round, Paddy started blowing about how they took hisarm off without any anesthetics except a bottle of gin because thered-ball freight he was tangled up in couldn't wait.

  That brought some of the other old gimps over to the table with theirstories.

  Blackie Bauer had been sitting in a boxcar with his legs stickingthrough the door when the train started with a jerk. Wham, the doorclosed. Everybody laughed at Blackie for being that dumb in the firstplace, and he got mad.

  Sam Fireman has palsy. This week he was claiming he used to be awatchmaker before he began to shake. The week before, he'd said he was abrain surgeon. A woman I didn't know, a real old Boxcar Bertha, draggedherself over and began some kind of story about how her sister married
aGreek, but she passed out before we found out what happened.

  Somebody wanted to know what was wrong with the kid's face--Bauer, Ithink it was, after he came back to the table.

  "Compression and decompression," the kid said. "You're all the timeclimbing into your suit and out of your suit. Inboard air's thin tostart with. You get a few redlines--that's these ruptured bloodvessels--and you say the hell with the money; all you'll make is justone more trip. But, God, it's a lot of money for anybody my age! Youkeep saying that until you can't be anything but a spacer. The eyes arehard-radiation scars."

  "You like dot all ofer?" asked Oswiak's wife politely.

  "All over, ma'am," the kid told her in a miserable voice. "But I'm goingto quit before I get a Bowman Head."

  "I don't care," said Maggie Rorty. "I think he's cute."

  "Compared with--" Paddy began, but I kicked him under the table.

  * * * * *

  We sang for a while, and then we told gags and recited limericks for awhile, and I noticed that the kid and Maggie had wandered into the backroom--the one with the latch on the door.

  Oswiak's wife asked me, very puzzled: "Doc, w'y dey do dot flyink byplanyets?"

  "It's the damn govermint," Sam Fireman said.

  "Why not?" I said. "They got the Bowman Drive, why the hell shouldn'tthey use it? Serves 'em right." I had a double scotch and added: "Twentyyears of it and they found out a few things they didn't know. Redlinesare only one of them. Twenty years more, maybe they'll find out a fewmore things they didn't know. Maybe by the time there's a bathtub inevery American home and an alcoholism clinic in every American town,they'll find out a whole _lot_ of things they didn't know. And everyAmerican boy will be a pop-eyed, blood-raddled wreck, like our friendhere, from riding the Bowman Drive."

  "It's the damn govermint," Sam Fireman repeated.

  "And what the hell did you mean by that remark about alcoholism?" Paddysaid, real sore. "Personally, I can take it or leave it alone."

  So we got to talking about that and everybody there turned out to bepeople who could take it or leave it alone.

  * * * * *

  It was maybe midnight when the kid showed at the table again, lookingkind of dazed. I was drunker than I ought to be by midnight, so I said Iwas going for a walk. He tagged along and we wound up on a bench atScrewball Square. The soap-boxers were still going strong. Like I said,it was a nice night. After a while, a pot-bellied old auntie who didn'tgive a damn about the face sat down and tried to talk the kid into goingto see some etchings. The kid didn't get it and I led him over to hearthe soap-boxers before there was trouble.

  One of the orators was a mush-mouthed evangelist. "And, oh, my friends,"he said, "when I looked through the porthole of the spaceship and beheldthe wonder of the Firmament--"

  "You're a stinkin' Yankee liar!" the kid yelled at him. "You say onedamn more word about can-shootin' and I'll ram your spaceship down yourlyin' throat! Wheah's your redlines if you're such a hot spacer?"

  The crowd didn't know what he was talking about, but "wheah's yourredlines" sounded good to them, so they heckled mush-mouth off his boxwith it.

  I got the kid to a bench. The liquor was working in him all of a sudden.He simmered down after a while and asked: "Doc, should I've given MizRorty some money? I asked her afterward and she said she'd admire tohave something to remember me by, so I gave her my lighter. She seem' tobe real pleased with it. But I was wondering if maybe I embarrassed herby asking her right out. Like I tol' you, back in Covington, Kentucky,we don't have places like that. Or maybe we did and I just didn't knowabout them. But what do you think I should've done about Miz Rorty?"

  "Just what you did," I told him. "If they want money, they ask you forit first. Where you staying?"

  "Y.M.C.A.," he said, almost asleep. "Back in Covington, Kentucky, I wasa member of the Y and I kept up my membership. They have to let me inbecause I'm a member. Spacers have all kinds of trouble, Doc. Womantrouble. Hotel trouble. Fam'ly trouble. Religious trouble. I was raiseda Southern Baptist, but wheah's Heaven, anyway? I ask' Doctor Chitwoodlas' time home before the redlines got so thick--Doc, you aren't aminister of the Gospel, are you? I hope I di'n' say anything to offendyou."

  "No offense, son," I said. "No offense."

  I walked him to the avenue and waited for a fleet cab. It was almostfive minutes. The independents that roll drunks dent the fenders offleet cabs if they show up in Skid Row and then the fleet drivers haveto make reports on their own time to the company. It keeps them away.But I got one and dumped the kid in.

  "The Y Hotel," I told the driver. "Here's five. Help him in when you getthere."

  * * * * *

  When I walked through Screwball Square again, some college kids wereyelling "wheah's your redlines" at old Charlie, the last of theWobblies.

  Old Charlie kept roaring: "The hell with your breadlines! I'm talkingabout atomic bombs. _Right--up--there!_" And he pointed at the Moon.

  It was a nice night, but the liquor was dying in me.

  There was a joint around the corner, so I went in and had a drink tocarry me to the club; I had a bottle there. I got into the first cabthat came.

  "Athletic Club," I said.

  "Inna dawghouse, harh?" the driver said, and he gave me a bigpersonality smile.

  I didn't say anything and he started the car.

  He was right, of course. I was in everybody's doghouse. Some day I'dscare hell out of Tom and Lise by going home and showing them what theirdaddy looked like.

  Down at the Institute, I was in the doghouse.

  "Oh, dear," everybody at the Institute said to everybody, "I'm sure Idon't know what ails the man. A lovely wife and two lovely grownchildren and she had to tell him 'either you go or I go.' And_drinking_! And this is rather subtle, but it's a well-known fact thatneurotics seek out low company to compensate for their guilt-feelings.The _places_ he frequents. Doctor Francis Bowman, the man who madespace-flight a reality. The man who put the Bomb Base on the Moon!Really, I'm sure I don't know what ails him."

  The hell with them all.

  --C. M. KORNBLUTH

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from _Galaxy Science Fiction_ November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.