C M Kornbluth - The Little Black Bag

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 86.7KB 21 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Little Black Bag

C. M. Kornbluth

The Little Black Bag

Old Dr. Full felt the winter in his bones as he limped down the alley. It was the alley and the back door

he had chosen rather than the sidewalk and the front door because of the brown paper bag under his

arm. He knew perfectly well that the flat-faced, stringy-haired women of his street and their gap-toothed,

sour-smelling husbands did not notice if he brought a bottle of cheap wine to his room. They all but lived

on the stuff themselves, varied with whiskey when pay checks were boosted by overtime. But Dr. Full,

unlike them, was ashamed. A complicated disaster occurred as he limped down the littered alley. One of

the neighborhood dogs-a mean little black one he knew and hated, with its teeth always bared and

always snarling with menace-hurled at his legs through a hole in the board fence that lined his path. Dr.

Full flinched, then swung his leg in what was to have been a satisfying kick to the animal's gaunt ribs. But

the winter in his bones weighed down the leg. His foot failed to clear a half-buried brick, and he sat down

abruptly, cursing. When he smelled unbottled wine and realized his brown paper package had slipped

from under his arm and smashed, his curses died on his lips. The snarling black dog was circling him at a

yard's distance, tensely stalking, but he ignored it in the greater disaster.

With stiff fingers as he sat on the filth of the alley, Dr. Full unfolded the brown paper bag's top, which

had been crimped over, grocer-wise. The early autumnal dusk had come; he could not see plainly what

was left. He lifted out the jug-handled top of his half gallon, and some fragments, and then the bottom of

the bottle. Dr. Full was far too occupied to exult as he noted that there was a good pint left. He had a

problem, and emotions could be deferred until the fitting time.

The dog closed in, its snarl rising in pitch. He set down the bottom of the bottle and pelted the dog with

the curved triangular glass fragments of its top. One of them connected, and the dog ducked back

through the fence, howling. Dr. Full then placed a razor-like edge of the half-gallon bottle's foundation to

his lips and drank from it as though it were a giant's cup. Twice he had to put it down to rest his arms, but

in one minute he had swallowed the pint of wine.

He thought of rising to his feet and walking through the alley to his room, but a flood of well-being

drowned the notion. It was, after all, inexpressibly pleasant to sit there and feel the frost-hardened mud of

the alley turn soft, or seem to, and

to feel the winter evaporating from his bones under a warmth which spread from his stomach through his

limbs.

A three-year-old girl in a cut-down winter coat squeezed through the same hole in the board fence from

which the black dog had sprung its ambush. Gravely she toddled up to Dr. Full and inspected him with

her dirty forefinger in her mouth. Dr. Full's happiness had been providentially made complete; he had

been supplied with an audience.

"Ah, my dear," he said hoarsely. And then: "Preposterous accusation. "If that's what you call evidence,' I

should have told them, 'you better stick to you doctoring.' I should have told them: 'I was here before

your County Medical Society. And the License Commissioner never proved a thing on me. So

gennulmen, doesn't it stand to reason? I appeal to you as fellow members of a great profession?'

The little girl bored, moved away, picking up one of the triangular pieces of glass to play with as she left.

Dr. Full forgot her immediately, and continued to himself earnestly: "But so help me, they couldn't prove a

thing. Hasn't a man got any rights?" He brooded over the question, of whose answer he was so sure, but

on which the Committee on Ethics of the County Medical Society had been equally certain. The winter

was creeping into his bones again, and he had no money and no more wine.

Dr. Full pretended to himself that there was a bottle of whiskey somewhere in the fearful litter of his

room. It was an old and cruel trick he played on himself when he simply had to be galvanized into getting

up and going home. He might freeze there in the alley. In his room he would be bitten by bugs and would

cough at the moldy reek from his sink, but he would not freeze and be cheated of the hundreds of bottles

of wine that he still might drink, and the thousands of hours

•of glowing content he still might feel. He thought about that bottle of whiskey- was it back of a

mounded heap of medical journals? No; he had looked there last time. Was it under the sink, shoved

well to the rear, behind the rusty drain? The cruel trick began to play itself out again. Yes, he told himself

with mounting excitement, yes, it might be! Your memory isn't so good nowadays, he told himself with

rueful good-fellowship. You know perfectly well you might have bought a bottle of whiskey and shoved it

behind the sink drain for a moment just like this.

The amber bottle, the crisp snap of the sealing as he cut it, the pleasurable exertion of starting the screw

cap on its threads, and then the refreshing tangs in his throat, the wannth in his stomach, the dark, dull

happy oblivion of drunkenness-they became real to him. You could have, you know! You could have! he

told himself. With the blessed conviction growing in his mind-It could have happened, you know! It could

have!-he struggled to his right knee. As he did, he heard a yelp behind him, and curiously craned his neck

around while resting. It was the little girl, who had cut her hand quite badly on her toy, the piece of glass.

Dr. Full could see the rilling bright blood down her coat, pooling at her feet.

He almost felt inclined to defer the image of the amber bottle for her, but not seriously. He knew that it

was there, shoved well to the rear under the sink, behind the rusty drain where he had hidden it. He

would have a drink and then magnanimously return to help the child. Dr. Full got to his other knee and

then his feet, and proceeded at a rapid totter down the littered alley toward his room, where he would

hunt with calm optimism at first for the bottle that was not there, then with anxiety, and then with frantic

violence. He would hurl books and dishes about before he was done looking for the amber bottle of

whiskey, and finally would beat his swollen knuckles against the brick wall until old scars on them opened

and his thick old blood oozed over his hands. Last of all, he would sit down somewhere on the floor,

whimpering, and would plunge into the abyss of purgative nightmare that was his sleep.

After twenty generations of shilly-shallying and "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it," genus homo

had bred itself into an impasse. Dogged biometricians had pointed out with irrefutable logic that mental

subnormals were outbreeding mental normals and supemormals, 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. A moron trained to

operate the twenty-first century equivalent of a linotype seems to be a better typographer than a

Renaissance printer limited to a few fonts of movable type. This is also true of medical practice.

It was a complicated affair of many factors. The supemormals "improved the product" at greater speed

than the subnormals degraded it, but in smaller quantity because elaborate training of their children was

practiced on a custom-made basis. The fetish of higher education had some weird avatars by the

twentieth generation:

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

C M Kornbluth - The Little Black Bag.pdf

共21页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

C M Kornbluth - The Little Black Bag

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: