Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Cars skidded across the street, mounted the curbs, smashed. People ran past, calling frantically. Powell momentarily longed for his camera. Then he forgot it as another violent quake sent him on hands and knees. Good Lord! Was the whole city cracking up, sliding into the ocean? There was no escape from such a catastrophe as this. When the solid earth slips beneath your feet, what refuge is left?

  And yet the quake was not severe. Scarcely a building was damaged, due to the rhythmic movement of the vibration. Suddenly the grinding roar died. There was silence, save for the tumult of frightened men and women.

  Powell stood up unsteadily and hauled Sue to her feet. Her hat was tilted over one eye, and still she was attractively pale and gasping.

  “What’s happened?” she gasped out. “Why ask me? I didn’t do it. Where’s the Sun?”

  “C-cloud,” Plumb muttered, supporting himself against the wall. “It’s behind the clouds.”

  Powell looked up. “Those aren’t clouds. I’ve never seen a sky like that. It’s cloudless, but it isn’t blue. And there’s no Sun. What—Look!”

  His hand tightened convulsively on Sue’s arm. Wincing, she stared up, as did Plumb.

  The fathomless abyss above was changing. A shadow moved titanically against it. A shadow too vast for human comprehension! As though beyond the uttermost depths, a dim, misty outline wavered and moved and was gone. Gone without trace.

  “Did you see that?” Powell whispered. “A-a shadow—”

  “Some sort of cloud,” Plumb said. “An eclipse. No. Couldn’t have been.”

  “It looked like the shadow of a god,” Sue said very softly.

  Mike Powell fought down a cold, shrinking sensation inside his chest. He took a deep breath.

  “Nuts,” he observed. “Whatever it was, there’s some logical explanation.”

  “What?” Sue asked.

  “I’ll let you know when I find out.” Powell straightened his tie. “I’m going to the office. The boss’ll need all the cameramen he can get to cover this. Adios!”

  JAUNTILY he stepped out on the sidewalk. But he didn’t feel that way inside. Powell had a queer, deep-rooted conviction that he had seen the basic laws of Nature itself go haywire. And he had a hunch, too, that trouble was just starting.

  It was impossible to get a taxi, of course. Traffic was disrupted. Actually, nothing seemed changed except the sky. But panic had New York in its grip, and, to make it worse, many lines of communication had failed. Luckily, Manhattan had power stations and supplies of its own. Even at that moment repair crews were working frantically.

  At the first comer Powell halted. The street before him was choked with a flood of fugitives racing away from ) the Hudson coast. Their faces were pale and contorted, mouths open in frightened squares, eyes bulging with fright. Involuntarily, Powell glanced to the left. What he expected to see it was difficult to tell. He wouldn’t have been too much surprised to view a dozen elephants charging along 42nd Street.

  But there was nothing. Powell gripped a small, terrified boy, dragged him aside and questioned him.

  “What’s the matter? What are you running away from, kid?”

  “Lemme go! The river’s gone. Joisey’s gone. Lemme go!” The boy tore free and vanished. Thoughtfully, Powell looked after him, and then in the opposite direction. The Hudson gone?

  Mike plunged into the stream of fugitives and pushed his way west. Keeping to the side of the buildings, he presently found the mob thinning. But people poured out of the theatres, the hotels, office buildings, and added their frightened number to the confusion.

  At the docks there were only a few stragglers, however. These, more courageous than their fellows, were wandering about aimlessly, staring westward with varying expressions of wonder and incredulity.

  Jersey wasn’t there any more. Nothing was there.

  Just—nothing!

  A dozen feet away the ground ended. It sloped down in a perpendicular ramp, and Powell ventured as close as he dared. What he saw shocked him.

  It was impossible.

  To make sure, the cameraman lay down and wriggled forward on his stomach till his face hung over the brink. He looked down, shut his eyes, opened them again, and began to curse quietly to himself. This was enough to cause a panic.

  Straight down, as far as he could see, there was only a bare rock wall, as smooth as though planed. There was nothing else. The fabled Edge of the World! The bottomless gulf that, Persians say, surrounds the Earth—

  This gulf looked bottomless, all right. It seemed to be a continuation of the fathomless sky. New York apparently formed the summit of a crag that stretched down to infinity itself.

  Carefully, Powell slid back and stood up. He turned to face the gaze of a dark, flashily-dressed man with a toothbrush moustache.

  “What do you make of it?” the man asked.

  Powell shook his head slowly. “I dunno. I can’t get the angle.”

  “Neither can I. Looks like Jersey’s gone west. Earthquake, I guess.”

  “Look!”

  Across the sky a colossal, incredible shadow moved slowly . . .

  POWELL found Hector, the Redlander, waiting in the Summit offices. He collected the Martian and dragged him upstairs to Gwynn’s office, firing questions as he went.

  “The films? Got ’em? Are they developed? Where are they?”

  Hector giggled.

  “Okay, Boss. Put um in projection room. All developed. Locked in drawer. You want um drawer key?”

  Powell took it. “Thanks. Lucky the elevators are still running. Good Lord, what a crowd!”

  He stepped out in the hall. Gwynn’s door was besieged with a mob of cameramen, reporters, and other employees. From the distance came the sound of Gwynn’s voice issuing frantic orders. Powell pushed through the melee, dragging Hector.

  “Mike!” Gwynn said, and then, to his secretary. “Take over for a while, Joe. I need a drink.” The chief ushered Powell and Hector into an adjoining room and sank down sweating in a comfortable chair. “Fix me a highball. No soda. Just a splash. Have one yourself. Not that I need mention it.”

  Powell did things with glasses and pushed one into Gwynn’s hand.

  “Got any inside dope on what’s happened?” he asked.

  “Not much. New York’s isolated. Martial law’s been declared. I’ve got men covering everything. But, explaining what’s happened—” Gwynn shrugged. “I don’t know. All I’ve got on authority is a sub rosa report from the Tower astronomical observatory.” He moved his head at Hector.

  “Scram, ape,” Mike said quietly. The Martian went off, bearing a bottle.

  “Keep this under your hat,” Gwynn resumed. “If it gets out, there’s going to be one hell of a panic. Did you notice anything funny about the sky? Any—shadows?”

  “I saw them,” Powell said.

  “Um. Well, the Tower used the telescope on them. They saw something. They don’t know what. Certain objects, certain beings, not Earthly at all. And big, Mike, you can’t imagine how big. Out where the stars should be, the telescope showed curves and angles. Solids, you know. And the shadows were—” He hesitated.

  “What?” Mike urged softly.

  “Living beings,” Gwynn blurted, pathetically searching for belief. “Impossibly huge. Against them we’re like ants. I don’t know what the things look like. That’s one thing they wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Living beings,” Mike repeated. “And we’re like ants to them.” His eyes grew reflective. “Any trace of Richmond or Jersey?”

  “None. New York has either been decreased in size”—he laughed miserably—“or we’re in another world.” He cackled without heart.

  “Another world?” Powell stirred. “No, that’s nonsense.”

  “Sure it’s nonsense,” Gwynn said irritably. “What’s your idea?”

  But Mike Powell was furiously stabbing the televisor button.

  “You can’t get through,” Gwynn said. “The lines are jammed.”

 
; SOMEHOW, though, on the screen grew the face of Stackpole, the IIB man. Stackpole’s face was taut and strained. He barked into the phone.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Powell, Summit Newsreel,” the cameraman declared swiftly. “I’ve got something for you. This—”

  “It’ll have to wait, Powell. I can’t look at your film now. Hold it until we don’t need martial law any longer.”

  “Wait a minute! This is—”

  The connection broke abruptly. Cursing, Mike tried to get through again. His luck didn’t work twice.

  “What are you trying to do?” Gwynn demanded. “Where do the cops come in?”

  Instead of replying, Mike called in Hector.

  “Now, here’s a feeble brain,” he said to Gwynn. The Martian giggled appreciatively. “Let’s try out my reasoning on him.”

  To himself, Powell admitted it wasn’t much of an idea, but it seemed plausible. The more he thought of it, the more convincing it sounded.

  “Look, Hector. You’re a criminal. The cops are ready to raid your joint. What do you do?”

  “Move,” the Martian answered sensibly.

  “There you are, Boss. I know why. I think I know who. And I’m beginning to figure out where. I’ll let you know when.”

  “When what?” Gwynn bleated, confused. “What’s going on here?”

  “When I get it all straight.”

  Mike grabbed Hector’s arm and pulled him to the door. In the cameraman’s mind was a tangle of intuition, backed by very few clues. If he could manage to pull something definite from that mess, he would know who had done what to New York and for what reason. The reason was all he had.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Robot Returns

  NEW YORK was cut off from the rest of the world. That was Mike’s first premise.

  How had that been done? Certainly by no known scientific methods. It was incredible, but it had happened. Mike couldn’t deny that, so he accepted it as something tangible to base his hazy deduction on.

  One way to isolate New York was to erect a barrier around it. There were no signs of such a wall. It would have to be a pretty damned enormous one, anyhow, and Mike refused to believe its possibility. Another objection to it was its instantaneity. And what relation would a wall have to the grinding, lurching sense of movement that had accompanied the metamorphosis?

  Movement?

  Had the metropolis been moved? Had it been wrenched free entirely from the Earth and sent hurtling out into the void? Mike shook his head. Not much chance of that. The atmosphere would have shot off into space. The Sim would not have disappeared. More important, gravity would have been missing almost completely.

  New York itself was unchanged. That was another factor. Wrenching a city to another world must certainly destroy it, and New York was far from being destroyed.

  What then? Mike had only two things to go by. No wall had been built around the city, and Manhattan Island had not been moved through space. Yet it had been moved. How, and where?

  How? By some strange and unknown science. Where? Into an alien environment that Powell thought could not exist in this System. There was no place for it. Since New York could not have moved spatially outside the System, it followed that it had moved, but not in space.

  That left only one possible answer, and Mike was not too anxious to think about it.

  Another dimension? His mouth formed the word “Nuts,” but, incredible as the idea was, it wasn’t entirely impossible. For centuries, scientists had speculated on the existence of other planes and worlds lying co-existent with our own, but vibrating at a different rate. Its atoms might intermingle with ours, invisible and impalpable, but real.

  “The fourth dimension?” he asked himself. “Hell, that scientific fairy tale?”

  But New York had been moved. The X of the equation, the unknown quantity, pointed to something improbable, but not impossible. Manhattan could not have been moved, without damage, through space. It could, conceivably, be moved into another dimension.

  Only, what kind of science, and whose, could accomplish it?

  Mike had one suspect, and nothing to base his suspicion upon. The controlled robot he had seen on Dr. Owen’s televisor was an example of super-science. The IIB was closing in on him with the murder of Eberle and the theft of his space drive propulsion. When the law closes in on an ordinary criminal, he tries to escape. When the law closes in on a super-criminal, he seeks a hideout, one to which he alone possesses the key.

  It fitted, even though it was fantastic. If the controlled robot had the science to send Manhattan into another dimension; if he desperately needed a hideout, then X was no longer an unknown quantity.

  It was merely a guess, Powell knew. And he didn’t even have the faintest idea who was behind the robot. But at the moment he could think of no more plausible theory. The robot was the key to the problem. Powell was certain of that. Just find the key, that’s all.

  FINDING the key was not so impossible to a man with the resources of Summit behind him. The first thing Powell did was to secure the services of an ex-burglar to whom locks were merely gestures. This Houdini often came in handy when difficult newsreel shots had to be obtained in the face of adamant objections. He was located without too much trouble. Meanwhile Powell discovered the address of Owen’s New York apartment uptown.

  He enlisted the aid of several of Summit’s technical crew.

  “I want all the newsreel stuff we’ve got on Dr. Max Owen,” Powell requested. “He’s made a lot of public speeches. Dig up the prints. And get a make-up man to fix me a ringer for Owen. I want a perfect duplicate. One of our March of Events actors should fill the bill.”

  Powell went to a projection room with Summit’s best cutter, and there examined the celluloid record of Owen’s public career. There was quite a lot of footage, all of it carrying soundtrack.

  “It’s all here,” the cutter said. “What now?”

  “I want to fake a speech. Let’s see.” Powell reached for a pad and pencil. “This won’t be easy. I can’t say too much or too little. Um.” He wrote slowly. “There. That ought to do it.” The cutter read the message. “It don’t make sense.”

  “I’m not premiering it at Radio City. It’s a private showing. Use those shears.”

  The other man nodded and threaded a strip of celluloid on a spool. He flicked over a button, turned on the amplifier, and made swift notes as the voice of Dr. Owen boomed through the projection room. The sound track only was registering.

  “We are here today to celebrate the triumph of one of our most esteemed colleagues, who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize . . .”

  On and on the voice went. The cutter listened intently, checking off words occasionally in Powell’s message.

  “Watch the tone,” Mike said. “I want to register excitement in the playback.”

  “Okay.”

  Presently the initial step was finished. The cutter collected his notes and began running celluloid strips through his hands with practiced skill, halting sometimes to snip off a bit with his scissors. The task took a long time. But finally the cutter held up a strip of film, deftly cemented together and ready for running on the projection machine.

  It was a forged record of Owen’s voice, in his own tone and words! The desired words had simply been cut out and rearranged in the order of Powell’s scribbled message, and the forgery was foolproof and indetectable. It was a perfect fake.

  “Okay,” Powell said. “Is the ringer ready yet?”

  A man entered. His resemblance to Dr. Owen was fantastically perfect. The make-up crew had done a good job. To the eye, it was as though Owen himself stood before Powell—fat, bald, redlipped, and with sweat-shining face.

  “Swell,” the cameraman said. “What’s your name, fella?”

  “Brody.”

  “Well, here’s your job, Brody. I’m faking a telecast. Here’s the soundtrack. I want you to register, but I’m dubbing in the voice. Practice till you can fake
it perfectly.”

  POWELL left to find Hector and the ex-burglar. He gave the Martian instructions to follow with the necessary equipment.

  “You phoned Owen?”

  Hector’s bushy head nodded. “He out.”

  Powell grinned and took Martin, the ex-burglar, into the street. Already traffic was unsnarled. Officers and national guardsmen patrolled the avenues. Despite the air of tension that hung over the city, there was little trace of panic.

  They rode uptown to within a block of Owen’s address. There he located a televisor booth in a drugstore and called the electro-physicist’s apartment. He could get no response.

  “He was out an hour ago when I cased the place,” Martin said. “Didn’t look like he’d been in lately.”

  “You’re sure you found a concealed televisor?” Powell asked.

  “Sure. Just like you said I would. I didn’t monkey with it, though.”

  The two men walked swiftly along the avenue till they came to the huge apartment house in which Owen maintained his New York quarters. The elevator took them up to the eleventh floor. They walked down a flight to the tenth, paused before Owen’s door, and listened.

  “Nobody home,” Martin said. At a gesture from his companion he drew a tiny sliver of steel from his pocket and went to work. From another pocket came an electromagnet, which he employed with deftness and skill. In half a minute the door stood open.

  The apartment comprised six rooms, none of them tenanted. Martin drew Powell into the library, showed him a concealed spring in a bookcase, and swung down a panel that revealed a compact televisor set.

  “Sure,” Powell said with satisfaction. “He’d have some way of getting in touch with his boss. The boys ought to be registered by now. Go down to the lobby and meet Hector, will you?” The ex-burglar vanished. Left alone, Powell let his fingers caress the barrel of a short, ugly heat-gun in his pocket. He grinned unpleasantly.

  “If the doc comes back,” the cameraman ruminated, “he’s going to get a surprise. And a hot reception!”