Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “I think—I am not sure—I think that is one of the Scientists,” Kent said under his breath. “Watching the experiment that means destruction to mankind.”

  “Incredible!” Harrison exclaimed. Burford, the promoter, was muttering something inaudibly.

  “It is immaterial to me whether you believe or not,” Kent said coldly. “I—know. And that is enough.”

  “But what can we do?” Marden asked. “This means destruction. There’s no way—”

  “There is a way,” Kent told him. “It’s a way which I’ve been planning ever since I got on the track of this, years ago. If that super-microscope can be destroyed, shattered—”

  Involuntarily Marden laughed, a short, bitter bark. His uncle raised his eyebrows.

  “Still skeptical, eh? Let’s return to our original comparison—our scientist, experimenting with an atom. Just suppose that some explosive compound far more destructive than dynamite were introduced under the lens of the microscope—and exploded.”

  “Wouldn’t it wreck the atom?” Harrison asked. The doctor glared at him.

  MARDEN interrupted. “No,” he said. “It’d probably blow up the microscope and the laboratory—but the atom wouldn’t be hurt, naturally. Far too small.”

  “Exactly,” the doctor affirmed. “Well, that’s my plan. That’s what I’ve been working on for years. And it’s almost completed. I’m going to send a sphere packed with that new explosive, thernolyn, into that super-universe—and make it wreck the microscope and the machine that generates the cosmic ray!”

  Stunned by the magnitude of Kent’s plan, Marden could only stare. The doctor went on swiftly.

  “Again I shall use the cosmic ray as a carrier beam. The thing is far too complicated to explain, nor have I time. For three months now I have been working on the final problem—timing the explosion so that it will occur at the right moment. The strength of the cosmic ray will naturally be much more powerful at its source. My calculations are based upon that. I’ll let the ray itself explode the thernolyn. Jim—I’ll need your help. The rest of you can do as you wish. But don’t go near the death ray barrier!”

  “Can I help?” asked Harrison. The doctor grunted unpleasantly.

  “By keeping out of my way, yes. Jim, here, knows little enough, but he has the rudiments of scientific knowledge. The rest of you—”

  With a shrug he turned back to his microscope, beckoning to Marden. With a reassuring smile for Lorna, Marden picked up a pencil and moved to his uncle’s side.

  The launching of the thernolyn sphere was unspectacular. The object was a glistening, metallic ball, about a foot in diameter, within which Dr. Kent had constructed the machinery which would send it into size. The liquid thernolyn was at the last moment poured into a valve in the side of the ball, and Kent, after a hasty reference to his sheaf of calculations, touched a protruding lever.

  Very slowly at first the sphere began to increase in size. In a second it was two feet in diameter—three—eight—

  It became tenuous. Dimly within it Marden glimpsed a complicated array of machinery, the glistening, whitish thernolyn. Then suddenly it seemed to leap up, towering to the horizon, a hazy ghost of a sphere. Marden seemed to be within it for one amazing second. It dwarfed the most colossal structure man had ever reared—

  And it faded and was gone! Into size—rushing at stupendous speed toward the super-universe, bearing its cargo which meant salvation for Earth!

  “Will it really have any effect?” asked Lorna. “A mere shadow—”

  “It’ll be real enough—Outside,” Marden said. “As it grew the atoms making up its structure expanded, naturally. But if it reaches the super-universe, it’ll be quite as dense as the matter there. How long will it take, Uncle Leon?”

  Dr. Kent pursed his lips.

  “I’m not sure. There are so many loopholes, so many chances for error. Possibly in an hour. You see, its speed—its rate of growth—is increasing continually. The time-rate Outside is no doubt different—an hour to them might be a million years to us. Indeed, that’s the only reason I had time enough to make my preparations.”

  “THERE’S nothing to do but wait, then,” Marden told Lorna. “I wish I knew what was going on outside this valley. Too bad the radio won’t work.”

  “One thing I’m afraid of,” the doctor said slowly. “The cosmic ray is increasing in power. My death beams can’t battle it much longer. Indeed, it’s seeping through already. Look at that!”

  ‘He pointed to a small, rounded stone about as large as his fist which was on the ground near by. Without visible means of propulsion, it was moving slowly toward another stone several feet away. Burford, the promoter, stared with bulging eyes.

  “Ye gods,” he murmured hoarsely. “Now I’m crazy too!”

  Chuckling, Marden moved forward and picked up the stone. It seemed, oddly, to writhe and move beneath his fingers. He dropped it.

  It bounced. A solid bit of rock—bounced! On hard ground, it bounded up several feet, and as Marden gasped in amazement, it went, in a series of little leaps, toward the other stone. It hit it with a little cracking sound, and apparently stuck to it. The grey surfaces of the stones seemed to crawl. Abruptly there was only one rock, twice the size of either of the two original ones.

  “Life,” said Kent. “Atomic life. Growth—and adaptation.”

  The ground shuddered beneath their feet. The joists of the house cracked ominously. “Maybe we’d better stay out here,” Harrison suggested, a frightened note in his voice.

  “I’m going in to watch the screen,” said Dr. Kent. “We’ll be able to see the sphere on it when it becomes visible in the super-universe.”

  Burford’s thick lips were moving soundlessly. Marden didn’t like the glassy stare of his pale eyes. Frightened, superstitious, there was no telling what the squat promoter might do. He determined to watch Burford closely.

  Nearly an hour had passed. Little had happened. It had become a common sight to see stones crawling slowly along the ground, in curious, ameboid movement. Too, the ground itself seemed oddly unstable, prone to shaking and giving dangerously beneath one’s feet. The house, in the very center of the invisible barrier of death rays, was little affected as yet. Once a chandelier had dropped to shatter on the floor. Occasionally a window would smash for no visible reason.

  Marden alternated between his uncle’s laboratory, where Dr. Kent sat with his eyes glued on the screen showing the super-world, and outside the house, where the others wandered about in a somewhat dazed fashion. He watched Burford covertly. It was clear that the man was cracking under the strain.

  His lips moved continually, and frequently Marden would catch such phrases as: “. . . Judgment day . . . all goin’ to die . . . end of the world . . .” And once the man had turned to shout at him, “We’ll all be dead pretty soon. We gotta make the most of life now!”

  Marden had moved forward to quiet him, but the promoter had become silent abruptly as Lorna came into view around the comer of the house.

  “Okay,” he said to Marden’s sharp remonstrance, “Forget it, buddy. I’ll be all right.”

  MARDEN wasn’t so sure. Nor was he surprised when, a few minutes later, while standing beside his uncle watching the screen, he heard an angry shout from outside the house. Swiftly he was on his feet, racing for the door.

  Loma was struggling in the grip of Burford, trying to evade the kisses he was planting on her averted face, Harrison, the college boy, was sitting nearby staring around dazedly. A blue welt was rising on his chin.

  “Stop it, Burford!” Marden snapped. The promoter’s head jerked back, and quickly he released the girl. She leaped away, pausing in the doorway of the house as Marden lunged forward. He had seen Burford’s hand dive beneath his coat, and he guessed what that meant.

  He was right. Burford’s hand came out with a gun. But he didn’t squeeze the trigger. He lashed out viciously at Marden, brought the barrel crashing against the man’s head. The world went black
.

  Dimly Marden heard a scream. He got to his feet, fighting back his dizziness, just in time to see Harrison stagger into the house. The others had vanished.

  Marden got to his feet and followed Harrison. From the laboratory came a cry, and the crashing of glass and metal. In the doorway Marden stopped, swaying.

  Burford was backed against a wall, his gun menacing the three figures who stood facing him—Lorna, Harrison, and Dr. Kent. A tangle of wreckage on the floor beside an overturned table betrayed the struggle that had taken place.

  “You fool!” Kent shouted. “That’s the ray projector—the death ray—and you’ve wrecked it! We’re unprotected now!”

  “Shut up!” Burford snarled. “I’m gonna live the last few minutes of my life.” He waved his gun at them.

  Suddenly the floor shuddered. Joists creaked ominously overhead. Somewhere a pane of glass shattered.

  Marden sent his body hurtling forward. Burford had not yet seen him, and there was a chance—

  The gun roared. A bullet screamed by Marden’s head, buried itself in the wall. There was an unnaturally loud rending of wood. Marden hit Burford’s legs, sent him hurtling back.

  According to all natural laws, the promoter’s gross body should have smashed against the wall with an impact that would have driven the breath from his body. But the wall wasn’t there! Marden had a flashing glimpse of wallpaper stretching and ripping, of a gap appearing in the solid wall as Burford’s body was flung back; and then the two lay, dazed and incredulous, on the floor—half in one room, half in another, There was a four foot gap in the wall reaching from floor to ceiling;

  Faintly he heard Dr. Kent’s triumphant cry.

  “The sphere! It’s there—it’s Outside!”

  He knew that the tiny, glistening globe bearing the deadly thernolyn had at last become visible on the screen, had at last reached the super-universe. Whether it would explode or not—

  THE fate of a Universe hung on that question. But at the moment Marden was concerned with a more immediate problem. Burford, half pinned beneath his opponent’s body, had wrenched his arm free, had swung it up until the gun pointed at Marden’s face. The muzzle seemed to be growing larger and larger as the promoter’s finger tightened on the, trigger.

  A look of astonished horror came over Burford’s face. He was staring, not at Marden, but at the revolver in his hand. So was Marden. It was no longer a gun.

  It was alive!

  The barrel twisted like a snake. It seemed to grow shorter. It was a blob of shapeless, bluish metal in Burford’s thick hand. The man screamed in agony.

  His fingers were caught in the writhing metal as it contracted. Blood spurted out suddenly, splashing Marden’s face. He didn’t move, even though he heard a crashing of falling timbers. The floor twisted and swayed beneath him. He felt himself flung up as though on the crest of a wave—up and up, until his head struck something with a sickening crack. He knew it was the ceiling.

  He heard Lorna scream, heard Kent and Harrison shouting. Somewhere metal crashed. The world had gone insane.

  All over Earth, in that incredible moment, fantastic scenes were being enacted. For twenty-four hours inexplicable things had been happening. No one could explain them. Newspapers had carried flaming scareheads until the presses had refused to operate. But not until the last moment had the cosmic ray sent its full power roaring through the Universe, the stupendous power of unchained life that had sent a nebula thundering from its course. In that tremendous second when the earth lived men went mad and death stalked unbridled.

  Prometheus unbound! The power of life was no longer limited to organic matter, and the cosmic ray ruled over an Earth gone mad!

  A truck driver jammed on his brakes as the ground swayed beneath him, and stared with bulging eyes at the Los Angeles City Hall, towering in white majesty. The Southern California city’s only skyscraper was moving! It was gliding out into the street, crushing buildings in its path, hurtling relentlessly toward the man in the truck. He jumped out of the vehicle and started to run. There was a grinding, thunderous roar, and he threw a terrified glance over his shoulder at an eidolon of smooth white blankness that was almost upon him.

  The building seemed to be melting down to shapelessness—its outlines were blurring, the corners rounding, the tower becoming a mere blob. He screamed as he was engulfed,” and then a thing like a puddle of animate stone was smashing its way along Broadway.

  In a, New England cemetery the watchman was having a quiet smoke as he leaned against a tombstone, pondering over the curious events of the preceding hours. He felt an uneasy stir beneath his feet and got. up quickly. He hoped it wasn’t an earthquake.

  It wasn’t. Out of a crack in the grass-covered earth something was seeping up—something which the watchman knew very well he had seen buried there three weeks before. It looked almost human for a moment, and then became a horrific mass of monstrous flesh and bone that seethed and bubbled as it crept toward him. The watchman was frozen with horror. He thought it was merely a dead man coming to life.

  HE didn’t know that it was the atoms in the dead body which had come to life: There was no intelligence—the original organic vitality had fled forever. This was something different. Adaptation and—growth.

  The thing touched his feet, flowed up around his legs. He felt a sharp pain biting through his body as his flesh coalesced with the horror—which was merely following its natural instinct of feeding so that it might grow, just as the two rocks had merged in Dr. Kent’s garden. The watchman stared silently at the tide of Horror creeping up his body, and little flecks of foam appeared on his lips. And adaptation. In the Pacific Ocean, the crater of Mauna Loa had become unusually active. Natives eyed the mountain with apprehension, whispering of the Old Woman who is supposed to dwell beneath the volcano and breathe out flame when she is angry with her worshippers. An aviator, flying low over the crater, battled to hold his plane steady while his co-pilot watched with incredulous eyes.

  The crater appeared to be widening.

  Actually, the mountain was spreading out. The intense heat of the molten lava had caused the atoms of the mountain some obscure discomfort, and it was simply going away to a cooler place. The peak seemed to roll away on all sides, like a flood of lava descending. But it wasn’t lava. It was Mauna Loa, spreading out in a great circle, wiping out all life, and coming to rest at last under the ocean that surrounded the island. The tremendous air-currents tore the wings from the plane, and it dropped like a plummet to destruction.

  In the Adelphi Theatre, in London, a dancer was pirouetting about the stage, wearing a skimpy but adequate garment of steel-mesh. She came to a halt in the center of the stage, with the spotlight focused upon her, striking a climactic pose. Abruptly the mesh cloth which was her sole garment seemed to crawl over her body, and dropped to a tiny puddle of glistening silver at her feet. The audience applauded wildly, heedless of the shrieks of a fat matron in the dress circle whose several dozen diamonds had suddenly decided to unite.

  They raced over her plump bosom, sending her into hysterics, and, fusing in her lap, turned into carbon—ordinary coal. A quite natural phenomenon, under the circumstances, but one which caused the matron to drop dead of heart failure.

  A European dictator, reviewing his army, was extremely pleased with a new type of war tank, capable, as one of his generals explained, of killing forty times as many men as the tanks used in the World War. While examining the interior of the tank, the dictator cracked a joke, at which his general laughed dutifully.

  Some obscure vibration in the man’s bellowing laugh had an important effect upon the metallic atoms surrounding them. Soldiers standing at attention outside were treated to the spectacle of the slow collapse of the tank, while the men imprisoned within it screamed vainly for aid.

  Neither the dictator nor the general survived.

  In Sing Sing prison, a man, waiting to be hanged, was pleased to discover that the bars which held him prisoner were m
elting into a wholly inadequate little fence on the threshold. However, as he was about to leave, he inadvertently stumbled against the stone wall of his cell, and a hole appeared in the concrete large enough to permit easy egress.

  At this he decided he was dreaming, and therefore remained where he was.

  IN a little valley in the California mountains Jim Marden was pinned between the ceiling and a floor that had risen like a wave, listening to his uncle’s exultant shout:

  “I’ve done it! By the Lord Harry, I’ve done it! The sphere’s exploded!” Marden will always regret that he did not see the screen at that last climactic moment. There was really little to see, Dr. Kent told him later. The tiny, shining ball had suddenly appeared on the screen in the midst of the other-world microscope, and as suddenly the screen had flared up in a blaze of white light—and had gone blank.

  The explosion had undoubtedly wrecked the Outside microscope, “if not the entire alien laboratory, and simultaneously the cosmic ray had ceased to function.

  Marden managed to extricate himself, and clamber down a steep slope that had once been part of the floor. Burford, they found, was dead. He had been crushed between ceiling and floor, a fate which Marden himself had escaped by the narrowest, of margins. Neither Harrison nor Lorna was seriously injured.

  They were glad to get out of the wrecked house, and for a little while stood silent in the dusk, staring around at a world that seemed, oddly, little changed. After a time Kent said, “There’ll be reconstruction. Man has survived, undoubtedly. And he’ll rebuild. In fifty years—twenty-five—there’ll be no trace of this catastrophe.”

  “There’ll be no—recurrence?” Harrison asked weakly. The doctor shook his head.

  “According to our time-sense, it’ll be thousands of years, maybe millions, before those Outside can replace their apparatus. A day or a week to them—and an age to us. Even so, how can they find an atom? No, the Universe is safe now—forever, I think.”

  “The cosmic ray is gone?” Marden inquired. “We’re still alive, though.”