Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Then came gray emptiness . . . and mad laughter . . . and horror unspeakable, from which Thorp fled screaming to awake sweating and shuddering in his chair.

  His feet came down from the desk with a thump. He turned to stare at the wall behind him. Then, expelling a long breath of relief, he settled back, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. What a dream!

  He did not light the cigarette. He did not even place it between his lips. The little white cylinder dropped unnoticed to the floor as he glared at the ring on his little finger—at the diamond set in a Square of let.

  He screamed. His hand went out clawingly . . .

  * * * * * * *

  THORP’S body had fallen forward so that the head and shoulders lay upon the desk. The dead editor’s face mirrored a look of horror so great that even the hardened detective turned away his eyes.

  “He was just like that, eh?” the detective asked. “He ain’t been moved?”

  The pallid Miss Doyle shook her head. “He was like that—when I found him,” she whispered through white lips. “I can’t imagine what’s happened to his brother, either.”

  “He’ll turn up,” the detective said optimistically. “You say that’s his brother’s ring on his finger? That’s funny.” The man’s eyebrows lifted. “Wait a minute! He’s got something in his other hand!”

  Quickly Thorp’s outflung, clenched hand was pried open, and the thing he had gripped so desperately was revealed.

  It was a rejection slip.

  THE BLOODLESS PERIL

  Science Evolves a Superior Plant Kingdom When a War of the Future is Waged in the Laboratory!

  THE world map was dotted with blood. In Berlin, Paris, New York, Tokyo, tall buildings lay in wreckage with corpses dotting the debris. On the plains of the Argentine and the Dakotas men and cattle lay swollen in death caused by fungoid spores rained down in bombs from war planes.

  World war! A fight to the death between the white and yellow races of the entire globe.

  In the East the center of strategy was Tokyo. Walled in by men and machines, barricaded by a shell of electronic force so tremendous that it drained the power resources of the Orient like water through a pipe, men moved pins on maps with the result that millions more died.

  In the West the strategic center was Chicago. And there on the evening of April third, 1988, a war council was gathered between the High Command of the white race, and its greatest scientists. The meeting was for the purpose of coordinating science’s contributions.

  Hugh Farrell, President of the United States and of the council, faced the gathering. Overhead could be heard the drone of guarding stratosphere planes. The air quivered with the backlash of the electronic force wall barricading Chicago as Tokyo was barricaded.

  But more than ionization made the atmosphere quiver. The yellow men were ahead in the war game and the whites knew it. The white race faced extinction.

  Farrell put the realization into words.

  “Occidentals, you have heard the situation outlined. We must find new weapons of war, or we die. So we have called you scientists to ask if you have anything to offer. Anything—so it may be turned to military usage!”

  THERE was silence, then babel as the scientists were swept with war frenzy. A man leaped to his feet.

  “Herr Doktor Bruenig,” Farrell acknowledged.

  “I offer my latest work,” shrilled the man. “Chrome steel with molecules so arranged that no known projectile can penetrate it.”

  Thunderous applause. Bruenig sat down and two other metallurgists only a little less famous rose and gave up secrets representing decades of labor.

  A big, barrel-chested man with a thick red beard and frosty blue eyes got up.

  “Professor Ryder Storm.”

  The big man boomed: “I present to the High Command my recently isolated filterable virus known as Ryder’s Palsy, and its antidote. As you know, an ounce of it dropped in an exploding glass vial can make imbecile, shivering wrecks out of all human beings within two square miles.”

  One after another the scientists of the West rose. Finally a Frenchman got up and said in cold, incisive tones:

  “I am, as you know, a botanist. I came to give my latest hybrid—a poison flower which sprouts and grows rapidly, and the seeds of which can be dropped behind enemy lines. But I feel that my contribution must be small indeed compared to the probable gift that could be made by the greatest botanist among us—Professor L. H. Hart, who for some strange reason”—the man’s voice dripped acid—“has not chosen to speak.”

  There was a hush. Farrell locked from face to face.

  “Professor L.H. Hart,” he said at last.

  There was no answer. Farrell’s white lips compressed.

  “Not present? What scientist dares not to answer the call of his race?”

  “Professor Hart is present,” came a calm, sweet voice. “But Professor Hart does not care to participate in plans of war.”

  An almost physical shock rocked the house. Every eye turned to the person who was an eminent scientist and at the same time a beautiful woman.

  She got up slowly, tall, Junoesque, striking in her plain white tunic.

  “I came tonight,” she said, “hoping to find others like myself: scientists who would refuse to lend their intellects to mass murder. I find none. All are ripe for war. So I shall stand alone. President Farrell and others of the High Command, I refuse to lend my few achievements to the purpose of destruction.”

  There was pandemonium. Then Ryder Storm of the flaming beard leaped up.

  “One moment all! I believe Professor Hart, in her disappointment at the bloodshed any woman would naturally hate, is speaking words she does not quite mean—”

  The woman’s soft voice cut in impersonally.

  “My thanks to Professor Storm for his championship. But my words were final. I refuse to act in violence. With the permission of President Farrell, I shall leave now.”

  With the grace of a girl, she moved calmly to the nearest exit. Names which no scientist should know were howled after her, but her cool face showed no sign that she heard. The exit door closed behind her and a dozen men leaped to their feet.

  “Stop her!”

  “Jail her as an enemy alien!”

  “Make her cooperate!”

  “We fight for our lives—and she refuses aid!”

  Farrell’s upraised, weary hand forced silence.

  “You don’t force women, even great scientists, to your will. Anyway, you couldn’t force this one! I know Professor Hart. Rack and fire could not break her will.”

  His tired eyes rested on Storm’s blue-blazing ones. He beckoned. Storm, red-bearded and red-tempered, a gorilla of a man with the brain of a genius, came to the platform and the president spoke briefly to him . . .

  IN THE black night, over a darkened city, a stratosphere midget flung itself westward, with Laura Hart at the controls. After it came Storm’s fast ship. The first sky-louse, as the small fast vehicles were called, showed lights, then sounded the secret code which cleared a sector of the electronic barricade. It flashed through, followed by the second sky-louse, and crossed the Mississippi at eight hundred miles an hour.

  It cleaved the darkness, as its pursuer cleaved it, until the far-flung Rockies showed ghostly in the night. Then it hurtled toward a small flat space on the edge of a precipice.

  It looked like a natural table-space, and the cliff behind it looked unbroken. Actually it was a minute landing field and cunningly concealed in the cliffside was a portal large enough to take the little ship in.

  Laura Hart gauged space beneath her by the Geigen meter which bounced black light down and measured its rebound. She came to a perfect landing and jumped from the ship. Storm was already down. He got to the cliff portal ahead of her.

  The woman faced him, cold, still.

  “Let me pass,” she said quietly.

  Ryder Storm stood aside, but followed after her into the slowly opening cliff door. In a garden as
lush as though grown in the tropics instead of in a cave where no sunlight ever penetrated, he caught her arms and made her look at him. A great bush loaded perpetually with blue roses drooped beside them.

  “Laura! You’ve got to listen to reason. What you said in council was unforgivable. You’d have been mobbed if it hadn’t been for your great name.”

  She only looked at him, serene and cool as the northern snows. Storm shook her in his exasperation.

  “You don’t seem to realize what this war means. It is the white race or the yellow! One must die. Perhaps both, with Earth a ruined ball, if the war can’t end soon! And the only way it can be ended is by quick victory. For us, please God!”

  “I will not join in war,” said Laura Hart.

  “You must! The white race needs your brain.”

  “No.”

  “For the sake of the race—of the world—”

  “No!”

  “You would see human beings die by the million when some great discovery of yours might just possibly end the war in a week? You would see Earth reduced to savagery?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean that?” Ryder said hoarsely.

  “I mean it. I don’t care what happens to humanity.”

  Storm drew a great breath. He released her arms.

  “I can see that my presence here is futile. I had hoped our long companionship would mean something. Good-by.”

  He turned. Laura looked after him with unaccustomed color in her cheeks.

  “Ryder—”

  The big man turned quickly back.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t usually explain my decisions,” Laura said. “But I don’t like to see you go away looking—like that. So I will, to you.”

  “I can guess,” Storm snapped. “You’re a woman before you’re a scientist. You’re a milk-and-water pacifist. You’d rather hide here—until an Oriental squadron blows your mountain down—and play with your silly flowers, than help humanity.”

  THE woman shook her head.

  “That’s not the reason. I am unconcerned with humanity, Storm, because I have recently discovered that man is in the twilight. His rule is almost over. He shall die out anyway. And my knowledge of that makes me indifferent to his present fate.”

  “How do you know? Can you read the future?”

  “In this one respect, I can,” said Laura calmly. “I know man is about done, and I know the form of life that shall replace him as Earth’s ruler. Would you like to know, Ryder? The life that shall supplant his is the life you have just ridiculed. My silly flowers might eventually rule the world!”

  Storm stared open-jawed.

  “You’re mad!”

  “Am I? You shall see what no one else has ever been shown. You shall see the peaceful, calm, kindly form of life that is going to take humanity’s place. No more wars, Ryder. No more stupid bloodshed. It will be a better world when humanity has finally destroyed itself. A peaceful, lovely world with no greed or destruction in it.”

  “Mad,” whispered Storm, his big body seeming to shrink.

  But the woman only smiled. “You shall see.”

  She beckoned to a man in mechanic’s clothes. “Roll the two ships in, please. And then instruct the others to see that I am not disturbed for the next hour.”

  She led Storm through the marvelous subterranean garden to a great metal door, which she opened with code and combination key.

  “No other eye but yours has ever seen my secret laboratories, Ryder. No other eye ever shall.”

  “Unless you decide to work with the High Command against the warring yellow men,” said Ryder.

  Laura Hart’s shoulders rippled.

  “Small chance of that! I prefer peaceful flowers to bestial humans.”

  Storm’s first impression in the great room behind the metal door was one of color. Green predominantly, but splashes also of every other color.

  His next was that he seemed to stand in the midst of a green and turbulent sea which surrounded but did not envelop him.

  His third was a realization that he stood under a different kind of light than any he’d ever seen before, and a sense of sublime well being.

  Then he began to note details.

  The walls of the big chamber were lined with large glass tanks. In each was the flashing color, the rhythmic movements that made him feel that he was in a varicolored ocean.

  He stepped toward the nearest tank, in which was the one color, green.

  He saw an undulating surface halfway up the tank. It moved regularly, up and down, taking about three seconds for each rise and fall. Up, a brighter green; down, darker and duller; up again. Like a heaving little pond.

  In the bluish radiance of the locked laboratory, Ryder felt a tendency to shiver. The tide in the tank had no meaning for him, and thick glass was between him and it. Yet he felt the subtle presence of danger.

  HOWEVER, Laura didn’t seem to feel that way. He looked at her, and went to the next tank.

  In here was color, purple, flashing on and off and rising up and down as the green stuff had, with a cycle lasting only a few seconds.

  Then he started, for here the nature of the heaving stuff was coarser and he could distinguish its broad flat particles. Those particles were leaves. Plant leaves!

  Up they swelled. A purple blob—a perfect flower—crested each. Then, like a bubble bursting, the flower drooped and withered. Up and down, like tides in the ocean. Like waves. Only the waves were growing and dying plants!

  “In the name of heaven—”

  “Evolution,” said Laura Hart. “Growth and death in the span of three seconds instead of a full summer.”

  “It actually looks like that. But it can’t be!”

  “It is, Ryder. Years ago I learned to speed up life. I did it with plant life by irradiating peat moss beds and the surrounding air with super-violet rays from the lamps overhead, and by constantly forcing into the growing-beds a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and phosphates which is my own secret formula. That forced the growth faster and faster, culminating in these beds where an entire plant generation lasts a bit less than three seconds.”

  “Three seconds—from seed germination to death and decay?”

  “Exactly. Nearly a million generations in a year. You see the future vistas revealed by that. In a year I can see plant evolution as it will take place in the next few hundred thousand years. I know what plants will be like a half million years from now. And there is one plant—”

  Laura Hart’s voice was dreamy. Prophecy was mysterious in her blue eyes.

  “There is one plant which has evolved most powerfully and successfully under my forced feeding. The plant that shall rule the world! At the period in its evolution in which it is most perfect, I stopped the forcing process so that now specimens grow naturally as they will in the far future. Come, you shall see them.”

  She led Storm through the laboratory, to a second door. He looked from side to side. Here was a tank in which a flower new to botany produced a reddish bloom as large as a pumpkin every three seconds. There was a thing like a barrel which opened a veined lid like a trap yawning, closed it as flashing death struck it, sagged to the peat moss bed, then grew green and tall again. There were perennials too: plants taking longer than a season to grow. These mushroomed in three-second spurts until they were tall trees, dropped fantastic blooms, then died again.

  “Plants as rulers of Earth,” Laura Hart said softly, as she unlocked the inner door. “Flowers as overlords. There will be peace when human beings are gone. Plants have no greed for power, no instinct for murder. They do not kill as men do.”

  Storm was awed by this woman who had gone as far in botany as he had in bacteriology. But he couldn’t let that pass.

  “A world of cabbages!” he snorted. “Peace? It will be the peace of a turnip! I’d rather be ruled by bloody despots than by milkweeds!”

  He stared curiously at her.

  “You know,” he said in a different tone,
“I’m wondering if this sweet future world of yours will be as serene as you think! It may be that some law of survival of the fittest will hold true even then. There are warlike plants, you know. And all will fight for the root-spread that means their existence.”

  LAURA smiled. The smile made Ryder’s hands clench. It was so unmoved and impersonal. If he could only reach this woman—hurt her—do anything so she would become a human being instead of a pacifistic thinking machine!

  “I have worked with plants all my life, Ryder. I know them. Animals, including man, are vile and murderous. Plants are clean and placid. But you shall see.”

  Storm followed her into the inner laboratory, twice hidden by great metal doors from intrusion.

  This second laboratory was about thirty feet high and as large as a football field. Its light was different. Looking up, Storm saw that only half the bank of lights were on. There were no tanks in here, save a small one nearby which was empty; a temporary forcing bed of some sort no longer used but not yet taken from the big room. The plant life of the place grew from peat moss on the floor, open and unrestricted.

  And what plant life!

  Each plant was twelve to fifteen feet tall and as large around as a man’s thigh. Its upper half was a naked stalk crowned with a blazing orange bloom as big as a hogshead.

  A forest of the things stretched from door to far wall of the secret laboratory. And though there was no breeze in here, they swayed a little as though imbued with animate life.

  “The common day-lily,” said Laura Hart. “At least it was the common day-lily a million generations ago. Now it is as you see it—the probable future ruler of Earth.”

  “The sweet flower king, eh?” growled Ryder. “But I don’t believe it. What are these things, after all, but overgrown yellow flowers? Any beast that browses can cut them down. There may be evolving insects to kill them. Or man—the scientist of the future—can find ways to annihilate their whole species.”

  “Insects?” smiled Laura Hart. “These plants have developed sap that is poisonous, searing. Man? If humanity doesn’t decimate itself in war, it will refuse to work together—as always in history—until too late. Beasts? They can’t harm them unless they develop higher reasoning powers than these flowers possess.”