Return to Otherness

by Henry Kuttner

  Foster got his assignment. A romantic love song for the new picture. A duet. Everyone took it for granted that Foster knew one note from another. He did, having studied piano in his youth, but counterpoint and the mysteries of minor keys were far beyond him.

  That night he went back to the little downtown bar.

  It was just a hunch, but he thought the jukebox might be able to help him. Not that he really believed in such things, but at worst, he could hoist a few shots and try to figure a way out. But the jukebox kept playing one song over and over.

  The odd thing was that nobody else heard that particular song. Foster discovered that quite by accident. To Austin’s ears, the jukebox was going through an ordinary repertoire of modern popular stuff.

  After that, Foster listened more closely. The song was a haunting duet, plaintive and curiously tender. It had overtones in it that made Foster’s spine tingle.

  “Who wrote that thing?” he asked Austin.

  “Wasn’t it Hoagy Carmichael?”

  But they were talking at cross-purposes. The jukebox suddenly sang “I Dood It,” and then relapsed into the duet.

  “No,” Austin said. “I guess it wasn’t Hoagy. That’s an old one. ‘Dardanella.’”

  But it wasn’t “Dardanella.”

  Foster saw a piano at the back. He went to it and got out his notebook. First he wrote the lyrics. Then he tried to get the notes down, but they were beyond him, even with the piano as a guide. The best he could achieve was a sort of shorthand. His own voice was true and good, and he thought he might be able to sing the piece accurately, if he could find someone to put down the notes for him.

  When he finished, he studied the jukebox more closely. The broken panel had been repaired. He patted the gadget in a friendly way and went away thinking hard.

  His secretary’s name was Lois Kennedy. She came into his office the next day while Foster was tapping at the piano and helplessly endeavoring to write down the score.

  “Let me help you, Mr. Foster,” she said competently, casting a practised eye over the messy pages. “I - no, thanks,” Foster said.

  “Are you bad on scores?” she asked as she smiled. “A lot of composers are that way. They play by ear, but they don’t know G sharp from A flat.” “They don’t, eh?” Foster murmured. The girl eyed him intently. “Suppose you run through it, and I’ll mark down a rough scoring.”

  Foster hit a few chords. “Phooey!” he said at last, and picked up the lyrics. Those were readable, anyway. He began to hum.

  “Swell,” Lois said. “Just sing it. I’ll catch the melody.” Foster’s voice was true, and he found it surprisingly easy to remember the love song the jukebox had played. He sang it, and Lois presently played it on the piano, while Foster corrected and revised. At least he could tell what was wrong and what was right. And, since Lois had lived music since her childhood, she had little difficulty in recording the song on paper.

  Afterwards she was enthusiastic. “It’s swell,” she said. “Something really new! Mr. Foster, you’re good. And you’re not lifting from Mozart, either. I’ll shoot this right over to the big boy. Usually it’s smart not to be in too much of a hurry, but since this is your first job here, we’ll chance it.”

  Taliaferro liked the song. He made a few useless suggestions, which Foster, with Lois’s aid, incorporated, and sent down a list of what else was needed for the super-musical. He also called a conclave of the song-writers to listen to Foster’s opus.

  “I want you to hear what’s good,” Taliaferro told them. “This new find of mine is showing you up. I think we need new blood,” he finished darkly, eying the wretched song-writers with ominous intensity.

  But Foster quaked in his boots. For all he knew, his song might have been plagiarized. He expected someone in the audience to spring up and shout: “That new find of yours swiped his song from Berlin!” Or Gershwin or Porter or Hammerstein, as the case might be.

  Nobody exposed him. The song was new. It established Foster as a double-threat man, since he had done both melody and lyrics himself.

  He was a success.

  Every night he had his ritual. Alone, he visited a certain downtown bar. When necessary, the jukebox helped him with his songs. It seemed to know exactly what was needed. It asked little in return. It served him with the unquestioning fidelity of “Cigarette” in “Under Two Flags.” And sometimes it played love songs aimed at Foster’s ears and heart. It serenaded him. Sometimes, too, Foster thought he was going crazy.

  Weeks passed. Foster got all his assignments done at the little downtown bar, and later whipped them into suitable shape with his secretary’s assistance. He had begun to notice that she was a strikingly pretty girl, with attractive eyes and lips. Lois seemed amenable, but so far Foster had held back from any definite commitment. He felt unsure of his new triumphs.

  But he blossomed like the rose. His bank account grew fat, he looked sleeker and drank much less, and he visited the downtown bar every night. Once he asked Austin about it.

  “That jukebox. Where’d it come from?”

  “I don’t know,” Austin said. “It was here before I came.”

  “Well, who puts new records in it?”

  “The company, I suppose.”

  “Ever see ‘em do it?”

  Austin thought. “Can’t say I have. I guess the man comes around when the other bartender’s on duty. It’s got a new set of records on every day, though. That’s good service.”

  Foster made a note to ask the other bartender about it. But there was no time. For, the next day, he kissed Lois Kennedy.

  That was a mistake. It was the booster charge. The next thing Jerry Foster knew, he was making the rounds with Lois, and it was after dark, and they were driving unsteadily along the Sunset Strip, discussing life and music.

  “I’m going places,” Foster said, dodging an oddly ambulatory telephone pole. “We’re going places together.”

  “Oh, honey!” Lois said.

  Foster stopped the car and kissed her.

  “That calls for another drink,” he remarked. “Is that a bar over there?”

  The night wore on. Foster hadn’t realized he had been under a considerable strain. Now the lid was off. It was wonderful to have. Lois in his arms, to kiss her, to feel her hair brushing his cheek. Everything became rosy.

  Through the rosy mist he suddenly saw the face of Austin.

  “The same?” Austin inquired.

  Foster blinked. He was sitting in a booth, with Lois beside him. He had his arm around the girl, and he had an idea he had just kissed her.

  “Austin,” he said, “how long have we been here?” “About an hour. Don’t you remember, Mr. Foster?” “Darling,” Lois murmured, leaning heavily against her escort.

  Foster tried to think. If was difficult. “Lois,” he finally said, “haven’t I got another song to write?” “It’ll keep.”

  “No. That torch song. Taliaferro wants it Friday.” “That’s four days away.”

  “Now I’m here, I might as well get the song,” Foster said, with alcoholic insistence, and stood up.

  “Kiss me,” Lois murmured, leaning toward him. He obeyed, though he had a feeling that there was more important business to be attended to. Then he stared around, located the jukebox, and went toward it. “Hello, there,” he said, patting the sleek, glowing sides. “I’m back. Drunk, too. But that’s all right. Let’s have that song.”

  The jukebox was silent. Foster felt Lois touch his arm.

  “Come on back. We don’t want music.”

  “Wait a minute, hon.”

  Foster stared at the jukebox. Then he laughed.

  “I know,” he said, and pulled out a handful of change. He slid a nickel into the coin-lever and pushed the lever hard.

  Nothing happened.

  “Wonder what’s wrong with it?” Foster muttered. “I’ll need that song by Friday.”

  He decided that there were a lot of things he didn’t know about, and ought to. The
muteness of the jukebox puzzled him.

  All of a sudden he remembered something that had happened weeks ago, the blond man who had attacked the jukebox with a hatchet and had only got shocked for his pains. The blond man he vaguely recalled, used to spend hours en tete-a-tete with the jukebox.

  “What a dope!” Foster said thickly.

  Lois asked a question.

  “I should have checked up before,” he answered her. “Maybe I can find, oh - oh, nothing, Lois. Nothing at all.”

  Then he went after Austin. Austin gave him the blond man’s name and, an hour later, Foster found himself sitting by a white hospital bed, looking down at a man’s ravaged face under faded blond hair. Brashness, judicious tipping, and a statement that he was a relative had got him this far. Now he sat there and watched and felt questions die as they formed on his lips.

  When he finally mentioned the jukebox, it was easier. He simply sat and listened.

  “They carried me out of the bar on a stretcher,” the blond man said. “Then a car skidded and came right at me. I didn’t feel any pain. I still don’t feel anything. The driver - she said she’d heard somebody shouting her name. Chloe. That startled her so much she lost control, and hit me. You know who yelled ‘Chloe,’ don’t you?”

  Foster thought back. There was a memory somewhere.

  The jukebox had begun to play “Chloe,” and the amplification had gone haywire, so the song had bellowed out thunderously for a short time.

  “I’m paralyzed,” the blond man said. “I’m dying, too. I might as well. I think I’ll be safer. She’s vindictive and plenty smart.”

  “She?”

  “A spy. Maybe there’s all sorts of gadgets masquerading as - as things we take for granted. I don’t know. They substituted that jukebox for the original one. It’s alive. No, not it! She! It’s a she, all right!”

  And - “Who put her there?” The blond man said, in answer to Foster’s question. “Who are - they? People from another world or another time? Martians? They want information about us, I’ll bet, but they don’t dare appear personally. They plant gadgets that we’ll take for granted, like that jukebox, to act as spies. Only this one got out of control a little. She’s smarter than the others.”

  He pushed himself up on the pillow, his eyes glaring at the little radio beside him.

  “Even that!” he whispered. “Is that an ordinary, regular radio? Or is it one of their masquerading gadgets, spying on us?”

  He fell back.

  “I began to understand quite a while ago,” the man continued weakly. “She put the ideas in my head. More than once she pulled me out of a jam. Not now, though. She won’t forgive me. Oh, she’s feminine, all right. When I got on her bad side, I was sunk. She’s smart, for a jukebox. A mechanical brain? Or - I don’t know.

  “I’ll never know, now. I’ll be dead pretty soon. And that’ll be all right with me.”

  The nurse came in then …

  Jerry Foster was coldly frightened. And he was drunk. Main Street was bright and roaring as he walked back, but by the time he had made up his mind, it was after closing hour and a chill silence went hand in hand with the darkness. The street lights didn’t help much.

  “If I were sober I wouldn’t believe this,” he mused, listening to his hollow footfalls on the pavement. “But I do believe it. I’ve got to fix things up with that - jukebox!”

  Part of his mind guided him into an alley. Part of his mind told him to break a window, muffling the clash with his coat, and the same urgent, sober part of his mind guided him through a dark kitchen and a swinging door.

  Then he was in the bar. The booths were vacant. A faint, filtered light crept through the Venetian blinds shielding the street windows. Against a wall stood the black, silent bulk of the jukebox.

  Silent and unresponsive. Even when Foster inserted a nickel, nothing happened. The electric cord was plugged in the socket, and he threw the activating switch, but that made no difference.

  “Look,” he said. “I was drunk. Oh, this is crazy. It can’t be happening. You’re not alive - are you alive? Did you put the finger on that guy I just saw in the hospital? Listen!”

  It was dark and cold. Bottles glimmered against the mirror behind the bar. Foster went over and opened one. He poured the whiskey down his throat.

  After a while, it didn’t seem so fantastic for him to be standing there arguing with a jukebox.

  “So you’re feminine,” he said. “I’ll bring you flowers tomorrow. I’m really beginning to believe! Of course I believe! I can’t write songs. Not by myself. You’ve got to help me. I’ll never look at a - another girl.”

  He tilted the bottle again.

  “You’re just in the sulks,” he said. “You’ll come out of it. You love me. You know you do. This is crazy!”

  The bottle had mysteriously vanished. He went behind the bar to find another. Then, with a conviction that made him freeze motionless, he knew that there was someone else in the room.

  He was hidden in the shadows where he stood. Only his eyes moved as he looked toward the newcomers. There were two of them, and they were not human.

  They - moved - toward the jukebox, in a rather indescribable fashion. One of them pulled out a small, shining cylinder from the jukebox’s interior.

  Foster, sweat drying on his cheeks, could hear them thinking.

  “Current report for the last twenty-four hours, Earth time. Put in a fresh recording cylinder. Change the records, too.”

  Foster watched them change the records. Austin had said that the discs were replaced daily. And the blond man, dying in the hospital, had said other things. It couldn’t be real. The creatures he stared at could not exist. They blurred before his eyes.

  “A human is here,” one of them thought. “He has seen us. We had better eliminate him.”

  The blurry, inhuman figures came toward him. Foster, trying to scream, dodged around the end of the bar and ran toward the jukebox. He threw his arms around its unresponsive sides and gasped:

  “Stop them! Don’t let them kill me!”

  He couldn’t see the creatures now but he knew that they were immediately behind him. The clarity of panic sharpened his vision. One title on the jukebox’s list of records stood out vividly. He thrust his forefinger against the black button beside the title “Love Me Forever.”

  Something touched his shoulder and tightened, drawing him back.

  Lights flickered within the jukebox. A record swung out. The needle lowered into its black groove.

  The jukebox started to play “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.”