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Title: MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie
Author: Kornbluth, Cyril M. (1924-1958)
Date of first publication: 1957
   (Fantasy and Science Fiction, July issue)
Date first posted: 26 July 2012
Date last updated: 26 July 2012
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #969

This ebook was produced by Dr. Mark Bear Akrigg






MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie

by

C. M. Kornbluth

They say I am mad, but I am not mad--damn it, I've written
and sold two million words of fiction and I know better than
to start a story like that, but this isn't a story and they
_do_ say I'm mad--catatonic schizophrenia with assaultive
episodes--and I'm _not_. _[This is clearly the first of the
Corwin Papers. Like all the others it is written on a Riz-La
cigarette paper with a ball point pen. Like all the others
it is headed:_ Urgent. Finder please send to C. M.
Kornbluth, Wantagh, N.Y. Reward! _I might comment that this
is typical of Corwin's generosity with his friends' time and
money, though his attitude is at least this once justified
by his desperate plight. As his longtime friend and, indeed,
literary executor, I was clearly the person to turn to.
CMK]_ I have to convince you, Cyril, that I am both sane and
the victim of an enormous conspiracy--and that you are too,
and that everybody is. A tall order, but I am going to try
to fill it by writing an orderly account of the events
leading up to my present situation. _[Here ends the first
paper. To keep the record clear I should state that it was
forwarded to me by a Mr. L. Wilmot Shaw who found it in a
fortune cookie he ordered for dessert at the Great China
Republic Restaurant in San Francisco. Mr. Shaw suspected it
was "a publicity gag" but sent it to me nonetheless, and
received by return mail my thanks and my check for one
dollar. I had not realized that Corwin and his wife had
disappeared from their home at Painted Post; I was merely
aware that it had been weeks since I'd heard from him. We
visited infrequently. To be blunt, he was easier to take via
mail than face to face. For the balance of this account I
shall attempt to avoid tedium by omitting the provenance of
each paper, except when noteworthy, and its length. The
first is typical--a little over a hundred words. I have, of
course, kept on file all correspondence relating to the
papers, and am eager to display it to the authorities. It is
hoped that publication of this account will nudge them out
of the apathy with which they have so far greeted my
attempts to engage them. CMK]_

On Sunday, May 13, 1956, at about 12:30 P.M., I learned The
Answer. I was stiff and aching because all Saturday my wife
and I had been putting in young fruit trees. I like to dig,
but I was badly out of condition from an unusually long and
idle winter. Creatively, I felt fine. I'd been stale for
months, but when spring came the sap began to run in me too.
I was bursting with story ideas; scenes and stretches of
dialog were jostling one another in my mind; all I had to do
was let them flow onto paper.

When The Answer popped into my head I thought at first it
was an idea for a story--a very good story. I was going to
go downstairs and bounce it off my wife a few times to test
it, but I heard the sewing machine buzzing and remembered
she had said she was way behind on her mending. Instead, I
put my feet up, stared blankly through the window at the
pasture-and-wooded-hills View we'd bought the old place for,
and fondled the idea.

What about, I thought, using the idea to develop a messy
little local situation, the case of Mrs. Clonford? Mrs. C.
is a neighbor, animal-happy, land-poor and unintentionally a
fearsome oppressor of her husband and children. Mr. C. Is a
retired brakeman with a pension and his wife insists on him
making like a farmer in all weathers and every year he gets
pneumonia and is pulled through with antibiotics. All he
wants is to sell the damned farm and retire with his wife to
a little apartment in town. All _she_ wants is to mess
around with her cows and horses and sub-marginal acreage.

I got to thinking that if you noised the story around _with_
a comment based on The Answer, the situation would
automatically untangle.They'd get their apartment, sell the
farm and everybody would be happy, including Mrs. C. It
would be interesting to write, I thought idly, and then I
thought not so idly that it would be interesting to
_try_--and then I sat up sharply with a dry mouth and a
systemful of adrenalin. _It would work._ The Answer would
work.

I ran rapidly down a list of other problems, ranging from
the town drunk to the guided-missile race. The Answer
worked. Every time.

I was quite sure I had turned paranoid, because I've seen so
much of that kind of thing in science fiction. Anybody can
name a dozen writers, editors and fans who have suddenly
seen the light and determined to lead the human race onward
and upward out of the old slough. Of course The Answer
looked logical and unassailable, but so no doubt did poor
Charlie McGandress' project to unite mankind through science
fiction fandom, at least to him. So, no doubt, did _[I have
here omitted several briefly sketched case histories of
science fiction personalities as yet uncommitted. The reason
will be obvious to anyone familiar with the law of libel.
Suffice it to say that Corwin argues that science fiction
attracts an unstable type of mind and sometimes insidiously
undermines its foundations on reality. CMK]_

But I couldn't just throw it away without a test. I
considered the wording carefully, picked up the extension
phone on my desk and dialed Jim Howlett, the appliance
dealer in town. He answered. "Corwin, Jim," I told him. "I
have an idea--oops! The samovar's boiling over. Call me back
in a minute, will you?" I hung up.

He called me back in a minute; I let our combination--two
shorts and a long--ring three times before I picked up the
phone. "What was that about a samovar?" he asked, baffled.

"Just kidding," I said. "Listen Jim, why don't you try a
short story for a change of pace? Knock off the novel for a
while--" He's hopefully writing a big historical about the
Sullivan Campaign of 1779, which is our local chunk of the
Revolutionary War; I'm helping him a little with advice.
Anybody who wants as badly as he does to get out of the
appliance business is entitled to some help.

"Gee, I don't know," he said. As he spoke the volume of his
voice dropped slightly but definitely, three times. That
meant we had an average quota of party line snoopers
listening in. "What would I write about?"

"Well, we have this situation with a neighbor, Mrs.
Clonford," I began. I went through the problem and made my
comment based on The Answer. I heard one of the snoopers
gasp. Jim said when I was finished: "I don't really think
it's for me, Cecil. Of course it was nice of you to call,
but--"

Eventually a customer came into the store and he had to
break off.

I went through an anxious crabby twenty-four hours.

On Monday afternoon the paper woman drove past our place and
shot the rolled-up copy of the Pott Hill _Evening Times_
into the orange-painted tube beside our mailbox. I raced for
it, yanked it open to the seventh page and read:

     FARM SALE

     Owing to Ill Health and Age Mr. & Mrs.
     Ronald Clonford Will sell their Entire Farm, All
     Machinery and Furnishings and All Live Stock
     at Auction Saturday May 19 12:30 P.M. Rain or
     Shine, Terms Cash Day of Sale, George Pfennig,
     Auctioneer.

_[This is one of the few things in the Corwin Papers which
can be independently verified. I looked up the paper and
found that the ad was run about as quoted. Further, I
interviewed Mrs. Clonford in her town apartment. She told me
she 'just got tired of farmin'; I guess. Kind of hated to
give up my ponies, but people was beginning to say it was
too hard of a life for Ronnie and I guess they was right. "
CMK]_

Coincidence? Perhaps. I went upstairs with the paper and put
my feet up again. I could try a hundred more piddling tests
if I wished, but why waste time? If there was anything to
it, I could type out The Answer in about two hundred words,
drive to town, tack it on the bulletin board outside the
firehouse and--snowball. Avalanche!

I didn't do it, of course--for the same reason I haven't put
down the two hundred words of The Answer yet on a couple of
these cigarette papers. It's rather dreadful--isn't it--that
I haven't done so, that a simple feasible plan to ensure
peace, progress and equality of opportunity among all
mankind, may be lost to the world if, say, a big meteorite
hits the asylum in the next couple of minutes. But--I'm a
writer. There's a touch of intellectual sadism in us. We
like to dominate the reader as a matador dominates the bull;
we like to tease and mystify and at last show what great
souls we are by generously flipping up the shade and letting
the sunshine in. Don't worry. Read on. You will come to The
Answer in the proper artistic place for it. _[At this point
I wish fervently to dissociate myself from the attitudes
Corwin attributes to our profession. He had--has, I
hope--his eccentricities, and I consider it inexcusable of
him to tar us all with his personal brush. I could point
out, for example, that he once laboriously cultivated a 16th
Century handwriting which was utterly illegible to the
modern reader. The only reason apparent for this, as for so
many of his traits, seemed to be a wish to annoy as many
people as possible. CMK]_

Yes; I am a writer. A matador does not show up in the bull
ring with a tommy gun and a writer doesn't do things the
simple, direct way. He makes the people writhe a little at
first. So I called Fred Greenwald. Fred had been after me
for a while to speak at one of the Thursday Rotary meetings
and I'd been reluctant to set a date. I have a little speech
for such occasions, "The Business of Being a Writer"--all
about the archaic royalty system of payment, the difficulty
of proving business expenses, the Margaret Mitchell tax law
and how it badly needs improvement, what copyright is and
isn't, how about all these generals and politicians with
their capital-gains memoirs. I pass a few galley sheets down
the table and generally get a good laugh by holding up a
Doubleday book contract, silently turning it over so they
can see how the fine print goes on and on, and then flipping
it open so they see there's twice as much fine print as they
thought there was. I had done my stuff for Oswego Rotary,
Horseheads Rotary and Cannon Hole Rotary; now Fred wanted me
to do it for Painted Post Rotary.

So I phoned him and said I'd be willing to speak this coming
Thursday. Good, he said. On a discovery I'd made about the
philosophy and technique of administration and interpersonal
relationships, I said. He sort of choked up and said well,
we're broadminded here.

I've got to start cutting this. I have several packs of
cigarette papers left but not enough to cover the high spots
if I'm to do them justice. Let's just say the announcement
of my speech was run in the Tuesday paper _[It was. CMK]_
and skip to Wednesday, my place, about 7:30 P.M. Dinner was
just over and my wife and I were going to walk out and see
how _[At this point I wish to insert a special note
concerning some difficulty I had in obtaining the next four
papers. They got somehow into the hands of a certain
literary agent who is famous for a sort of "finders-keepers"
attitude more appropriate to the eighth grade than to the
law of literary property. In disregard of the fact that
Corwin retained physical ownership of the papers and
literary rights thereto, and that I as the addressee
possessed all other rights, he was blandly endeavoring to
sell them to various magazines as "curious fragments from
Corwin's desk." Like most people, I abhor lawsuits; that's
the fact this agent lives on. I met his outrageous price of
five cents a word "plus postage"(!). I should add that I
have not heard of any attempt by this gentleman to locate
Corwin or his heirs in order to turn over the proceeds of
the sale, less commission. CMK]_ the new fruit trees were
doing when a car came bumping down our road and stopped at
our garden fence gate.

"See what they want and shove them on their way," said my
wife. "We haven't got much daylight left." She peered
through the kitchen window at the car, blinked, rubbed her
eyes and peered again. She said uncertainly: "It looks
like--no! Can't be." I went out to the car.

"Anything I can do for you?" I asked the two men in the
front seat. Then I recognized them. One of them was about my
age, a wiry lad in a T-shirt. The other man was plump and
greying and ministerial, but jolly. They were unmistakable;
they had looked out at me--one scowling, the other
smiling--from a hundred book ads. It was almost incredible
that they knew each other, but there they were sharing a
car.

I greeted them by name and said: "This is odd. I happen to
be a writer myself. I've never shared the best-seller list
with you two, but--"

The plump ministerial man tut-tutted. "You are thinking
negatively," he chided me. "Think of what you _have_
accomplished. You own this lovely home, the valuation of
which has just been raised two thousand dollars due entirely
to the hard work and frugality of you and your lovely wife;
you give innocent pleasure to thousands with your clever
novels; you help to keep the good local merchants going with
your patronage. Not least, you have fought for your country
in the wars and you support it with your taxes."

The man in the T-shirt said raspily: "Even if you have the
dough to settle in full on April 15 and will have to pay six
percent per month interest on the unpaid balance when and if
you ever do pay it, you poor shnook."

The plump man said, distressed: "Please, Michael--you are
not thinking positively. This is neither the time nor the
place--"

"What's going on?" I demanded. Because I hadn't even told my
_wife_ I'd been a little short on the '55 federal tax.

"Let's go inna house," said the T-shirted man. He got out of
the car, brushed my gate open and walked coolly down the
path to the kitchen door. The plump man followed, sniffing
our rose-scented garden air appreciatively, and I came last
of all, on wobbly legs.

When we filed in, my wife said: "My God. It _is_ them."

The man in the T-shirt said: "Hiya, babe," and stared at her
breasts. The plump man said: "May I compliment you, my dear,
for a splendid rose garden. Quite unusual for this
altitude."

"Thanks," she said faintly, beginning to rally. "But it's
quite easy when your neighbors keep horses."

"Haw!" snorted the man in the T-shirt. "That's the stuff,
babe. You grow roses like I write books. Give 'em plenty
of--"

"Michael!" said the plump man.

"_Look_, you," my wife said to me. "Would you mind telling
me what this is all about? I never knew you knew Dr.--"

"I don't," I said helplessly. "They seem to want to talk to
me."

"Let us adjourn to your _sanctum sanctorum_," said the plump
man archly, and we went upstairs. The T-shirted man sat on
the couch, the plump fellow sat in the club chair and I
collapsed on the swivel chair in front of the typewriter.
"Drink, anybody?" I asked, wanting one myself. "Sherry,
brandy, rye, straight angostura?"

"Never touch the stinking stuff," grunted the man in the
T-shirt.

"I would enjoy a nip of brandy," said the big man. We each
had one straight, no chasers, and he got down to business
with: "I suppose you have discovered The Diagonal
Relationship?"

I thought about The Answer, and decided that The Diagonal
Relationship would be a very good name for it too. "Yes," I
said. "I guess I have. Have you?"

"I have. So has Michael here. So have one thousand, seven
hundred and twenty-four writers. If you'd like to know who
they are, pick the one thousand, seven hundred and
twenty-four top-income men of the ten thousand free-lance
writers in this country and you have your men. The Diagonal
Relationship is discovered on an average of three times a
year by rising writers."

"Writers," I said. "Good God, why _writers?_ Why not
economists, psychologists, mathematicians--_real_ thinkers?"

He said: "A writer's mind is an awesome thing, Corwin. What
went into your discovery of The Diagonal Relationship?"

I thought a bit. "I'm doing a Civil War thing about
Burnside's Bomb," I said, "and I realized that Grant could
have sent in fresh troops but didn't because Halleck used to
drive him crazy by telegraphic master-minding of his
campaigns. That's a special case of The Answer--as I call
it. Then I got some data on medieval attitudes toward
personal astrology out of a book on ancient China I'm
reading. Another special case. And there's a joke the monks
used to write at the end of a long manuscript-copying job.
Liddell Hart's theory of strategy is about half of the
general military case of The Answer. The merchandizing
special case shows clearly in a catalog I have from a
Chicago store, that specializes in selling strange clothes
to bop-crazed Negroes. They all add up to the general
expression, and that's that."

He was nodding. "Many, many combinations add up to The
Diagonal Relationship," he said. "But only a writer cuts
across sufficient fields, exposes himself to sufficient
apparently unrelated facts. Only a writer has wide-open
associational channels capable of bridging the gap between
astrology and, ah, `bop.' We write in our different
idioms"--he smiled at the T-shirted man--"but we are writers
all. Wide-ranging, omnivorous for data, equipped with
superior powers of association which we constantly
exercise."

"Well," I asked logically enough, "why on earth haven't you
published The Diagonal Relationship? Are you here to keep me
from publishing it?"

"We're a power group," said the plump man apologetically.
"We have a vested interest in things as they are. Think
about what The Diagonal Relationship would do to writers,
Corwin."

"Sure," I said, and thought about it. "Judas Priest!" I said
after a couple of minutes. He was nodding again. He said:
"Yes. The Diagonal Relationship, if generally promulgated,
would work out to approximate equality of income for all,
with incentive pay only for really hard and dangerous work.
Writing would be regarded as pretty much its own reward."

"That's the way it looks," I said. "One-year copyright,
after all ..."

_[Here occurs the first hiatus in the Corwin Papers. I
suspect that three or four are missing. The preceding and
following papers, incidentally, come from a batch of six
gross of fortune cookies which I purchased from the Hip Sing
Restaurant Provision Company of New York City during the
course of my investigations. The reader no doubt will wonder
why I was unable to determine the source of the cookies
themselves and was forced to buy them from middlemen.
Apparently the reason is the fantastic one that by chance I
was wearing a white shirt, dark tie and double-breasted blue
serge suit when I attempted to question the proprietor of
the Hip Sing Company. I learned too late that this is just
about the unofficial uniform of U.S. Treasury and Justice
Department agents and that I was immediately taken to be
such an agent. "You T-man," said Mr. Hip tolerantly, "you
get cou't oh-dah, I show you books. Keep ve'y nice books,
all in Chinese cha'ctahs. "After that gambit he would answer
me only in Chinese. How he did it 1 have no idea, but
apparently within days every Chinese produce dealer in the
United States and Canada had been notified that there was a
new T-man named Kornbluth on the prowl. As a last resort I
called on the New York City office of the Treasury
Department Field Investigations Unit in an attempt to obtain
what might be called un-identification papers. There I was
assured by Mr. Gershon O'Brien, their Chinese specialist,
that my errand was hopeless since the motto of Mr. Hip and
his colleagues invariably was "Safety First." To make
matters worse, as I left his office I was greeted with a
polite smile from a Chinese lad whom I recognized as Mr.
Hip's bookkeeper. CMK]_

"So you see," he went on as if he had just stated a major
and a minor premise, "we watch the writers, the real ones,
through private detective agencies which alert us when the
first teaser appears in a newspaper or on a broadcast or in
local gossip. There's always the teaser, Corwin, the rattle
before the strike. We writers are like that. We've been
watching you for three years now, and to be perfectly frank
I've lost a few dollars wagered on you. In my opinion you're
a year late."

"What's the proposition?" I asked numbly.

He shrugged. "You get to be a best-seller. We review your
books, you review ours. We tell your publisher: 'Corwin's
hot--promote him. Advertise him.' And he does, because we're
good properties and he doesn't want to annoy us. You want
Hollywood? It can be arranged. Lots of us out there. In
short, you become rich like us and all you have to do is
keep quiet about The Diagonal Relationship. You haven't told
your wife, by the way?"

"I wanted to surprise her," I said.

He smiled. "They always do. Writers! Well, young man, what
do you say?"

It had grown dark. From the couch came a raspy voice: "You
heard what the doc said about the ones that throw in with
us. I'm here to tell you that we got provisions for the ones
that don't."

I laughed at him.

"One of those guys," he said flatly.

"Surely a borderline case, Michael?" said the plump man. "So
many of them are."

If I'd been thinking straight I would have realized that
"borderline case" did not mean "undecided" to them; it meant
"danger--immediate action!"

They took it. The plump man, who was also a fairly big man,
flung his arms around me and the wiry one approached in the
gloom. I yelled something when I felt a hypodermic stab my
arm. Then I went numb and stupid.

My wife came running up the stairs. "What's going on?" she
demanded. I saw her heading for the curtain behind which we
keep an aged hair-trigger Marlin .38 rifle. There was
nothing wrong with her guts, but they attacked her where
courage doesn't count. I croaked her name a couple of times
and heard the plump man say gently, with great concern: "I'm
afraid your husband needs ... help." She turned from the
curtain, her eyes wide. He had struck subtly and knowingly;
there is probably not one writer's wife who does not suspect
her husband is a potential psychotic.

"Dear--" she said to me as I stood there paralyzed.

He went on: "Michael and I dropped in because we both admire
your husband's work; we were surprised and distressed to
find his conversation so ... disconnected. My dear, as you
must know I have some experience through my pastorate with
psychotherapy. Have you ever--forgive my bluntness--had
doubts about his sanity?"

"Dear, what's the matter?" she asked me anxiously. I just
stood there, staring. God knows what they injected me with,
but its effect was to cloud my mind, render all activity
impossible, send my thoughts spinning after their tails. I
was insane. _[This incident, seemingly the least plausible
part of Corwin's story, actually stands up better than most
of the narrative to one familiar with recent advances in
biochemistry. Corwin could have been injected with lysergic
acid, or with protein extracts from the blood of psychotics.
It is a matter of cold laboratory fact that such injections
produce temporary psychosis in the patient. Indeed, it is on
such experimental psychoses that the new tranquilizer drugs
are developed and tested. CMK]_

To herself she said aloud, dully: "Well, it's finally come.
Christmas when I burned the turkey and he wouldn't speak to
me for a week. The way he drummed his fingers when I talked.
All his little crackpot ways--how he has to stay at the
Waldorf but I have to cut his hair and save a dollar. I
hoped it was just the rotten weather and cabin fever. I
hoped when spring came--" She began to sob. The plump man
comforted her like a father. I just stood there staring and
waiting. And eventually Mickey glided up in the dark and
gave her a needleful too and

_[Here occurs an aggravating and important hiatus. One can
only guess that Corwin and his wife were loaded into the
car, driven--somewhere, separated, and separately, under
false names, committed to different mental institutions. I
have recently learned to my dismay that there are states
which require only the barest sort of licensing to operate
such institutions. One State Inspector of Hospitals even
wrote to me in these words: "... no doubt there are some
places in our State which are not even licensed, but we have
never made any effort to close them and I cannot recall any
statute making such operation illegal. We are not a wealthy
state like you up North and some care for these unfortunates
is better than none, is our viewpoint here. ..." CMK]_

three months. Their injections last a week. There's always
somebody to give me another. You know what mental hospital
attendants are like: an easy bribe. But they'd be better
advised to bribe a higher type, like a male nurse, because
my attendant with the special needle for me is off on a
drunk. My insanity wore off this morning and I've been
writing in my room ever since. A quick trip up and down the
corridor collected the cigarette papers and a tiny ball
point pen from some breakfast-food premium gadget. I think
my best bet is to slip these papers out in the batch of
Chinese fortune cookies they're doing in the bakery.
Occupational therapy, this is called. My own o.t. is
shoveling coal when I'm under the needle. Well, enough of
this. I shall write down The Answer, slip down to the
bakery, deal out the cigarette papers into the waiting
rounds of cookie dough, crimp them over and return to my
room. Doubtless my attendant will be back by then and I'll
get another shot from him. I shall not struggle; I can only
wait.

THE ANSWER: HUMAN BEINGS RAISED TO SPEAK AN
INDO-IRANIAN LANGUAGE SUCH AS ENGLISH HAVE
THE FOLLOWING IN

_[That is the end of the last of the Corwin Papers I have
been able to locate. It should be superfluous to urge all
readers to examine carefully any fortune cookie slips they
may encounter. The next one you break open may contain what
my poor friend believed, or believes, to be a great message
to mankind. He may be right. His tale is a wild one but it
is consistent. And it embodies the only reasonable
explanation I have ever seen for the presence of certain
books on the best-seller list. CMK]_




[End of MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie, by C. M.
Kornbluth]
