Return to Otherness (1962) SSC

by Henry Kuttner

  “Drunk,” he thought frantically. “I’m drunk - or crazy!” He sprang up and spun around wildly; then catching sight of a crack in the hardwood floor he tried to walk along it. “Because if I can walk a straight line,” he thought, “I’m not drunk. I’m only crazy …” It was not a very comforting thought.

  He could walk it, all right. He could walk a far straighter line than the crack, which he saw now was microscopically jagged. He had, in fact, never felt such a sense of location and equilibrium in his life. His experiment carried him across the room to a wall-mirror, and as he straightened to look into it, suddenly all confusion settled and ceased. The violent sensory perceptions leveled off and returned to normal.

  Everything was quiet. Everything was all right.

  Martin met his own eyes in the mirror.

  Everything was not all right.

  He was stone cold sober. The Scotch he had drunk might as well have been spring-water. He leaned closer to the mirror, trying to stare through his own eyes into the depths of his brain. For something extremely odd was happening in there. All over his brain, tiny shutters were beginning to move, some sliding up till only a narrow crack remained, through which the beady little eyes of neurons could be seen peeping, some sliding down with fault crashes, revealing the agile, spidery forms of still other neurons scuttling for cover.

  Altered thresholds, changing the yes-and-no reaction time of the memory-circuits, with their key emotional indices and associations … huh?

  The robot!

  Martin’s head swung toward the closed office door. But he made no further move. The look of blank panic on his face very slowly, quite unconsciously, began to change. The robot … could wait.

  Automatically Martin raised his hand, as though to adjust an invisible monocle. Behind him, the telephone began to ring. Martin glanced at it.

  His lips curved into an insolent smile.

  Flicking dust from his lapel with a suave gesture, Martin picked up the telephone. He said nothing. There was a long silence. Then a hoarse voice shouted, “Hello, hello, hello! Are you there? You, Martin.”

  Martin said absolutely nothing at all.

  “You keep me waiting,” the voice bellowed. “Me, St. Cyr! Now jump! The rushes are … Martin, do you hear me?”

  Martin gently laid down the receiver on the desk. He turned again toward the mirror, regarded himself critically, frowned.

  “Dreary,” he murmured. “Distinctly dreary. I wonder why I ever bought this necktie?”

  The softly bellowing telephone distracted him. He studied the instrument briefly, then clapped his hands sharply together an inch from the mouthpiece. There was a sharp, anguished cry from the other end of the line.

  “Very good,” Martin murmured, turning away. “That robot has done me a considerable favor. I should have realized the possibilities sooner. After all, a super-machine, such as ENIAC, would be far cleverer than a man, who is merely an ordinary machine. Yes,” he added, stepping into the hall and coming face to face with Toni LaMotta, who was currently working for Summit on loan. ”’Man is a machine, and woman -’” Here he gave Miss LaMotta a look of such arrogant significance that she was quite startled.

  ”’And woman - a toy,’” Martin amplified, as he turned toward Theater One, where St. Cyr and destiny awaited him.

  Summit Studios, outdoing even MGM, always shot ten times as much footage as necessary on every scene. At the beginning of each shooting day, this confusing mass of celluloid was shown in St. Cyr’s private projection theater, a small but luxurious domed room furnished with lie-back chairs, and every other convenience, though no screen was visible until you looked up. Then you saw it on the ceiling.

  When Martin entered, it was instantly evident that ecology took a sudden shift toward the worse. Operating on the theory that the old Nicholas Martin had come into it, the theater, which had breathed an expensive air of luxurious confidence, chilled toward him. The nap of the Persian rug shrank from his contaminating feet. The chair he stumbled against in the half-light seemed to shrug contemptuously. And the three people in the theater gave him such a look as might be turned upon one of the larger apes who had, by sheer accident, got an invitation to Buckingham Palace.

  DeeDee Fleming (her real name was impossible to remember, besides having not a vowel in it) lay placidly in her chair, her feet comfortably up, her lovely hands folded, her large, liquid gaze fixed upon the screen where DeeDee Fleming, in the silvery meshes of a technicolor mermaid, swam phlegmatically through seas of pearl-colored mist.

  Martin groped in the gloom for a chair. The strangest things were going on inside his brain, where tiny stiles still moved and readjusted until he no longer felt in the least like Nicholas Martin. Who did he feel like, then? What had happened?

  He recalled the neurons whose beady little eyes he had fancied he saw staring brightly into, as well as out of, his own. Or had he? The memory was vivid, yet it couldn’t be, of course. The answer was perfectly simple and terribly logical. ENIAC Gamma the Ninety-Third had told him, somewhat ambiguously, just what his ecological experiment involved. Martin had merely been given the optimum reactive pattern of his successful prototype, a man who had most thoroughly controlled his own environment. And ENIAC had told him the man’s name, along with several confusing references to other prototypes like an Ivan (who?) and an unnamed Uighur.

  The name for Martin’s prototype was, of course, Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Martin had a vivid recollection of George Arliss playing the role. Clever, insolent, eccentric in dress and manner, exuberant, suave, self-controlled, with a strongly perceptive imagination …

  “No, no, no!” DeeDee said with a sort of calm impatience. “Be careful, Nick. Some other chair, please. I have my feet on this one.”

  “T-t-t-t-t,” said Raoul St. Cyr, protruding his thick lips and snapping the fingers of an enormous hand as he pointed to a lowly chair against the wall. “Behind me, Martin. Sit down, sit down. Out of our way. Now! Pay attention. Study what I have done to make something great out of your foolish little play. Especially note how I have so cleverly ended the solo by building to five cumulative pratt-falls. Timing is all,” he finished. “Now - SILENCE!”

  For a man born in the obscure little Balkan country of Mixo-Lydia, Raoul St. Cyr had done very well for himself in Hollywood. In 1939 St. Cyr, growing alarmed at the imminence of war, departed for America, taking with him the print of an unpronounceable Mixo-Lydian film he had made, which might be translated roughly as The Pores in the Face of the Peasant.

  With this he established his artistic reputation as a great director, though if the truth were known, it was really poverty that caused The Pores to be so artistically lighted, and simple drunkenness which had made most of the cast act out one of the strangest performances in film history. But critics compared The Pores to a ballet and praised inordinately the beauty of its leading lady, now known to the world as DeeDee Fleming.

  DeeDee was so incredibly beautiful that the law of compensation would force one to expect incredible stupidity as well. One was not disappointed. DeeDee’s neurons didn’t know anything. She had heard of emotions, and under St. Cyr’s bullying could imitate a few of them, but other directors had gone mad trying to get through the semantic block that kept DeeDee’s mind a calm, unruffled pool possibly three inches deep. St. Cyr merely bellowed. This simple, primordial approach seemed to be the only one that made sense to Summit’s greatest investment and top star.

  With this whip-hand over the beautiful and brainless DeeDee, St. Cyr quickly rose to the top in Hollywood. He had undoubted talent. He could make one picture very well indeed. He had made it twenty times already, each time starring DeeDee, and each time perfecting his own feudalistic production unit. Whenever anyone disagreed with St. Cyr, he had only to threaten to go over to MGM and take the obedient DeeDee with him, for he had never allowed her to sign a long-term contract and she worked only on a picture-to-picture basis. Even Tolliver Watt knuckled under when St. Cyr voiced t
he threat of removing DeeDee.

  “Sit down, Martin,” Tolliver Watt said. He was a tall, lean, hatchet-faced man who looked like a horse being starved because he was too proud to eat hay. With calm, detached omnipotence he inclined his gray-shot head a millimeter, while a faintly pained expression passed fleetingly across his face.

  “Highball, please,” he said.

  A white-clad waiter appeared noiselessly from nowhere and glided forward with a tray. It was at this point that Martin felt the last stiles readjust in his brain, and entirely on impulse he reached out and took the frosted highball glass from the tray. Without observing this the waiter glided on and presented Watt with a gleaming salver full of nothing. Watt and the waiter regarded the tray.

  Then their eyes met. There was a brief silence.

  “Here,” Martin said, replacing the glass. “Much too weak. Get me another, please. I’m reorienting toward a new phase which means a different optimum,” he explained to the puzzled Watt as he readjusted a chair beside the great man and dropped into it. Odd that he had never before felt at ease during rushes. Right now he felt fine. Perfectly at ease. Relaxed.

  “Scotch and soda for Mr. Martin,” Watt said calmly. “And another for me.”

  “So, so, so, now we begin,” St. Cyr cried impatiently. He spoke into a hand microphone. Instantly the screen on the ceiling flickered noisily and began to unfold a series of rather ragged scenes in which a chorus of mermaids danced on their tails down the street of a little Florida fishing village.

  To understand the full loathsomeness of the fate facing Nicholas Martin, it is necessary to view a St. Cyr production. It seemed to Martin that he was watching the most noisome movie ever put upon film. He was conscious that St. Cyr and Watt were stealing rather mystified glances at him. In the dark he put up two fingers and sketched a robot-like grin. Then, feeling sublimely sure of himself, he lit a cigarette and chuckled aloud.

  “You laugh?” St. Cyr demanded with instant displeasure. “You do not appreciate great art? What do you know about it, eh? Are you a genius?”

  “This,” Martin said urbanely, “is the most noisome movie ever put on film.”

  In the sudden, deathly quiet which followed, Martin flicked ashes elegantly and added, “With my help, you may yet avoid becoming the laughing stock of the whole continent. Every foot of this picture must be junked. Tomorrow bright and early we will start all over, and -”

  Watt said quietly, “We’re quite competent to make a film out of Angelina Noel, Martin.”

  “It is artistic!” St. Cyr shouted. “And it will make money, too!”

  “Bah, money!” Martin said cunningly. He rucked more ash with a lavish gesture. “Who cares about money? Let Summit worry.”

  Watt leaned forward to peer searchingly at Martin in the dimness.

  “Raoul,” he said, glancing at St. Cyr, “I understand you were getting your - ah - your new writers whipped into shape. This doesn’t sound to me as if -”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” St. Cyr cried excitedly. “Whipped into shape, exactly! A brief delirium, eh? Martin, you feel well? You feel yourself?”

  Martin laughed with quiet confidence. “Never fear,” he said. “The money you spend on me is well worth what I’ll bring you in prestige. I quite understand. Our confidential talks were not to be secret from Watt, of course.”

  “What confidential talks?” bellowed St. Cyr thickly, growing red.

  “We need keep nothing from Watt, need we?” Martin went on imperturbably. “You hired me for prestige, and prestige you’ll get, if you can only keep your big mouth shut long enough. I’ll make the name of St. Cyr glorious for you. Naturally you may lose something at the box-office, but it’s well worth -”

  “Pjrzqxgl!” roared St. Cyr in his native tongue, and he lumbered up from the chair, brandishing the microphone in an enormous, hairy hand.

  Deftly Martin reached out and twitched it from his grasp.

  “Stop the film,” he ordered crisply.

  It was very strange. A distant part of his mind knew that normally he would never have dared behave this way, but he felt convinced that never before in his life had he acted with complete normality. He glowed with a giddy warmth of confidence that everything he did would be right, at least while the twelve-hour treatment lasted …

  The screen flickered hesitantly, then went blank.

  “Turn the lights on,” Martin ordered the unseen presence beyond the mike. Softly and suddenly the room glowed with illumination. And upon the visages of Watt and St. Cyr he saw a mutual dawning uneasiness begin to break.

  He had just given them food for thought. But he had given them more than that. He tried to imagine what moved in the minds of the two men, below the suspicions he had just implanted. St. Cyr’s was fairly obvious. The Mixo-Lydian licked his lips - no mean task - and studied Martin with uneasy little, bloodshot eyes. Clearly Martin had acquired confidence from somewhere. What did it mean? What secret sin of St. Cyr’s had been discovered to him, what flaw in his contract, that he dared behave so defiantly?

  Tolliver Watt was a horse of another color; apparently the man had no guilty secrets; but he too looked uneasy. Martin studied the proud face and probed for inner weaknesses. Watt would be a harder nut to crack. But Martin could do it.

  “That last underwater sequence,” he now said, pursuing his theme. “Pure trash, you know. It’ll have to come out. The whole scene must be shot from under water.”

  “Shut up!” Cyr shouted violently.

  “But it must, you know,” Martin went on. “Or it won’t jibe with the new stuff I’ve written in. In fact, I’m not at all certain that the whole picture shouldn’t be shot under water. You know, we could use the documentary technique -”

  “Raoul,” Watt said suddenly, “what’s this man trying to do?”

  “He is trying to break his contract, of course,” St. Cyr said, turning ruddy olive. “It is the bad phase all my writers go through before I get them whipped into shape. In Mixo-Lydia -”

  “Are you sure he’ll whip into shape?” Watt asked.

  “To me this is now a personal matter,” St. Cyr said, glaring at Martin. “I have spent nearly thirteen weeks on this man and I do not intend to waste my valuable tune on another. I tell you he is simply trying to break his contract - tricks, tricks, tricks.”

  “Are you?” Watt asked Martin coldly.

  “Not now,” Martin said. “I’ve changed my mind. My agent insists I’d be better off away from Summit. In fact, she has the curious feeling that I and Summit would suffer by a mesalliance. But for the first time I’m not sure I agree. I begin to see possibilities, even in the tripe St. Cyr has been stuffing down the public’s throat for years. Of course I can’t work miracles all at once. Audiences have come to expect garbage from Summit, and they’ve even been conditioned to like it. But we’ll begin in a small way to re-educate them with this picture. I suggest we try to symbolize the Existentialist hopelessness of it by ending the film with a full four hundred feet of seascapes - nothing but vast, heaving stretches of ocean,” he ended, on a note of complacent satisfaction.

  A vast heaving stretch of Raoul St. Cyr rose from his chair and advanced upon Martin.

  “Outside, outside!” he shouted. “Back to your cell, you double-crossing vermin! I, Raoul St. Cyr, command it. Outside, before I rip you limb from limb -”

  Martin spoke quickly. His voice was calm, but he knew he would have to work fast.

  “You see, Watt?” he said clearly, meeting Watt’s rather startled gaze. “Doesn’t dare let you exchange three words with me, for fear I’ll let something slip. No wonder he’s trying to put me out of here - he’s skating on thin ice these days.”

  Goaded, St. Cyr rolled forward in a ponderous lunge, but Watt interposed. It was true, of course, that the writer was probably trying to break his contract. But there were wheels within wheels here. Martin was too confident, too debonair. Something was going on which Watt did not understand.

  “All
right, Raoul,” he said decisively. “Relax for a minute. I said relax! We don’t want Nick here suing you for assault and battery, do we? Your artistic temperament carries you away sometimes. Relax and let’s hear what Nick has to say.”

  “Watch out for him, Tolliver!” St. Cyr cried warningly. “They’re cunning, these creatures. Cunning as rats. You never know -”

  Martin raised the microphone with a lordly gesture. Ignoring the director, he said commandingly into the mike, “Put me through to the commissary. The bar, please. Yes. I want to order a drink. Something very special. A - ah - a Helena Glinska -”

  “Hello,” Erika Ashby’s voice said from the door. “Nick, are you there? May I come in?”

  The sound of her voice sent delicious chills rushing up and down Martin’s spine. He swung round, mike in hand, to welcome her. But St. Cyr, pleased at this diversion, roared before he could speak.

  “No, no, no, no! Go! Go at once. Whoever you are - out!”

  Erika, looking very brisk, attractive and firm, marched into the room and cast at Martha a look of resigned patience.

  Very clearly she expected to fight both her own battles and his.

  “I’m on business here,” she told St. Cyr coldly. “You can’t part author and agent like this. Nick and I want to have a word with Mr. Watt.”

  “Ah, my pretty creature, sit down,” Martin said in a loud, clear voice, scrambling out of his chair. “Welcome! I’m just ordering myself a drink. Will you have something?”

  Erika look at him with startled suspicion. “No, and neither will you,” she said. “How many have you had already? Nick, if you’re drunk at a time like this -”

  “And no shilly-shallying,” Martin said blandly into the mike. “I want it at once, do you hear? A Helena Glinska, yes. Perhaps you don’t know it? Then listen carefully. Take the largest Napoleon you’ve got. If you haven’t a big one, a small punch bowl will do. Fill it half full with ice-cold ale. Got that? Add three jiggers of creme de menthe -”