C M Kornbluth - The Marching Morons Collection

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THE MARCHING MORONS

C. M. Kornbluth

THE MARCHING MORONS

Some things had not changed. A potter's wheel was still a potter's wheel and clay was still clay. Efim

Hawkins had built his shop nearGooseLake, which had a narrow band of good fat clay and a narrow

beach of white sand. He fired three bottle-nosed kilns with willow charcoal from the wood lot. The wood

lot was also useful for long walks while the kilns were cooling; if he let himself stay within sight of them,

he would open them prematurely, impatient to see how some new shape or glaze had come through the

fire, and-ping!-the new shape or glaze would be good for nothing but the shard pile back of his slip

tanks.

A business conference was in full swing in his shop, a modest cube of brick, tile-roofed, as the

Chicago-Los Angeles "rocket" thundered overhead-very noisy, very swept back, very fiery jets, shaped

as sleekly swift-looking as an airborne barracuda.

The buyer from Marshall Fields was turning over a black-glazed one-liter carafe, nodding approval with

his massive, handsome head. "This is real pretty," he told Hawkins and his own secretary,

GomezLaplace. "This has got lots of what ya call real est'etic principles. Yeah, it is real pretty."

"How much?" the secretary asked the potter.

"Seven-fifty in dozen lots," said Hawkins. "I ran up fifteen dozen last month."

"They are real est'etic," repeated the buyer from Fields. "I will take them all."

"I don't think we can do that, doctor," said the secretary. "They'd cost us $1,350. That would leave only

$532 in our quarter's budget. And we still have to run down toEast Liverpoolto pick up some cheap

dinner sets."

"Dinner sets?" asked the buyer, his big face full of wonder.

"Dinner sets. The department's been out of them for two months now. Mr. Garvy-Seabright got pretty

nasty about it yesterday. Remember?"

"Garvy-Seabright, that meat-headed bluenose," the buyer said contemptuously. "He don't know nothin'

about est'etics. Why for don't he lemme run my own department?" His eye fell on a stray copy of

Whambozambo Comix and he sat down with it. An occasional deep chuckle or grunt of surprise

escaped him as he turned the pages.

Uninterrupted, the potter and the buyer's secretary quickly closed a deal for two dozen of the liter

carafes. "I wish we could take more," said the secretary, "but you heard what I told him. We've had to

turn away customers for ordinary dinnerware because he shot the last quarter's budget on some Mexican

piggy banks some equally enthusiastic importer stuck him with. The fifth floor is packed solid with them."

"I'll bet they look mighty est'etic."

"They're painted with purple cacti."

The potter shuddered and caressed the glaze of the sample carafe.

The buyer looked up and rumbled, "Ain't you dummies through yakkin' yet? What good's a seckertary

for if'n he don't take the burden of de-tail off'n my back, harh?"

"We're all through, doctor. Are you ready to go?"

The buyer grunted peevishly, dropped Whambozambo Comix on the floor and led the way out of the

building and down the log corduroy road to the highway. His car was waiting on the concrete. It was,

like all contemporary cars, too low slung to get over the logs. He climbed down into the car and started

the motor with a tremendous sparkle and roar.

"Gomez-Laplace," called out the potter under cover of the noise, "did anything come of the radiation

program they were working on the last time I was on duty at the Pole?"

"The same old fallacy," said the secretary gloomily. "It stopped us on mutation, it stopped us on culling, it

stopped us on segregation, and now it's stopped us on hypnosis."

"Well, I'm scheduled back to the grind in nine days. Time for another firing right now. I've got a new

luster to try. . ."

"I'll miss you. I shall be 'vacationing'-running the drafting room of the New Century Engineering

Corporation in Denver. They're going to put up a two-hundred-story office building, and naturally

somebody's got to be on hand."

"Naturally," said Hawkins with a sour smile.

There was an ear-piercingly sweet blast as the buyer leaned on the horn button. Also, a yard-tall jet of

what looked like flame spurted up from the car's radiator cap; the car's power plant was a gas turbine

and had no radiator.

"I'm coming, doctor," said the secretary dispiritedly. He climbed down into the car and it whooshed off

with much flame and noise.

The potter, depressed, wandered back up the corduroy road and contemplated his cooling kilns. The

rusthng wind in the boughs was obscuring the creak and mutter of the shrinking refractory brick. Hawkins

wondered about the number two kiln-a reduction fire on a load of lusterware mugs. Had the clay

chinking excluded the air? Had it been a properly smoky blaze? Would it do any harm if he just took one

close-?

Common sense took Hawkins by the scruff of the neck and yanked him over to the tool shed. He got

out his pick and resolutely set off on a prospecting jaunt to a hummocky field that might yield some

oxides. He was especially low on coppers.

The long walk left him sweating hard, with his lust for a peek into the kiln quiet in his breast. He swung

his pick almost at random into one of the hummocks; it clanged on a stone which he excavated. A largely

obliterated inscription said:

ERSITY OF CHIC

OGICAL LABO

ELOVED MEMORY OF

KILLED IN ACT

The potter swore mildly. He had hoped the field would turn out to be a cemetery, preferably a

once-fashionable cemetery full of once-massive bronze caskets moldered into oxides of tin and copper.

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