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Title: Ms. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie
Date of first publication: 1957
Author: Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923 - 1958) writing as Cecil Corwin
Date first posted: February 19 2013
Date last updated: February 19 2013
Faded Page eBook #20130213

This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Mary Meehan
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




            MS. FOUND IN A CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE

                    By Cyril M. Kornbluth


    Copyright 1957
    by Mercury Press, Inc.; Reprinted from
    The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction


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 that 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 them 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 dialogue
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 his 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 system full 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. Anyone 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 livestock
     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 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. 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 broad-minded here."

I've got to start cutting this. I have several packs of cigarette papers
left but not 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 graying 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 didn't 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
schnook."

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
masterminding 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 merchandising 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 ohdah, 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 I 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. 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_]


[The end of _Ms. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie_ by Cyril M. Kornbluth]