Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Naismith grabbed my arm, pointed at a red mark on my wrist. “Look at that! That’s where the bullet hit you—or where you hit the bullet. My God, what energy!” He started to laugh crazily.

  I said dazedly, “What happened?”

  “Laws of illogic,” Naismith said.

  “Humphreys shot at you just when the instability waves spread out; and according to known laws the bullet had more energy than you—should have killed you. But there was a reversal—the instability waves gave you a tremendous surplus of potential and kinetic energy. You had so much more force than the bullet that you simply brushed it aside—and it looks like you’ve killed both Fabrin and Humphreys!”

  Jean was on her knees beside Fabrin. “No, he’s breathing. But Humphreys—”

  “Dead,” little Hillman said, wavering toward us. “His neck’s broken. Lord, what a punch you’ve got, Hailey!”

  Naismith glanced over his shoulder. “But there’s still danger. That wave-pulse may have caused trouble upstairs. Hillman, phone the police. The hospital’s going to be evacuated right now.”

  “But—”

  I could see what he was thinking. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll phone the paper. The Tribune will run an exclusive, all right—I’ll attend to that. And the story’s going to have your by-line on it, Hillman.”

  And that was that. The Palmview Hospital was evacuated in a hurry, and after the news broke a scientific foundation bought the property and surrounded it with high-voltage fences and keep-off signs. Naismith’s working with a dozen big-shot physicists out there right now, trying to control his instability waves. He seems to think it can be done, but I’m not so sure. Personally, I’d rather juggle with hand-grenades.

  The Medical Board kicked Fabrin out; I don’t know what happened to him afterwards. Hillman’s got a regular job with the Tribune now, but he’s never been able to equal his first big scoop, though he’s turned in some pretty good stories.

  Jean? Oh, I married her. She said she fell in love with me when I flattened two men and a bullet with one punch.

  THE MAD VIRUS

  Kedrick and his mad band of gangsters seize Dr. Morgan and force him to reveal a great scientific secret that the criminal plans to use to bring horrible death to his enemies! Teague, the reporter, is about to inform the authorities and thus save a city from disaster—but Kedrick is too quick!

  WHEN Bill Teague, Pineville correspondent for the Los Angeles Blade, strolled into the bank, everything seemed normal, at first sight. It was just after eleven. A blond youngster was making out a check at a desk. Only one teller was visible, and he seemed engrossed in the counter before him, Teague came over and said:

  “Hi, there. Is President Malley in yet?”

  The teller didn’t look up. He leaned on the marble counter, slumped over, his shoulders sagging beneath a wrinkled coat. Teague noticed that the man’s clothes seemed much too large for him.

  The reporter’s lean, dark face was puzzled. About to repeat his question, he turned as a door opened and hurried footsteps sounded. President Malley popped out of his office, a wiry, wrinkle-faced, grayhaired oldster. The blond youth at the desk looked up, saw the president, and waved a cheery hand.

  The change in Malley was fantastic. Into his furtive eyes came an expression of panic fear; he brought out a bundle of bills from his pocket, ran over, and pushed the currency into the other’s hands. The boy stood staring in amazement. Teague felt a little warning throb tingle inside his brain.

  He didn’t realize, then, what lay behind Malley’s actions. He couldn’t. The Chief of Police had tipped him off that morning that the bank president had received an extortion note, and Teague had promptly come down to interview Malley. Now he hurried forward as the president ran toward his office.

  “Mr. Malley, wait a minute!”

  The other cast a terrified glance over his shoulder. He gasped something indistinguishable. Teague caught up with him.

  “I’d like—” he began quickly—and then paused, wide-eyed, as President Malley thrust something into his hands—a bundle of currency! On top was a thousand dollar bill.

  Malley was trembling uncontrollably, his wrinkled face twitching. “Take it!” he gasped. “Don’t hurt me—don’t!”

  The next moment a flash of panic came into the bank president’s eyes. He whirled, raced into his office, and slammed the door. Teague heard his footsteps receding into the distance.

  He turned around, met the amazed stare of the other customer, the blond youngster.

  “Holy smoke!” the boy gulped. “He’s gone slap-happy. Are yours grand notes, too?”

  Teague thumbed through them and nodded. He looked around. The bank was empty, save for the motionless teller behind the barred window. Teague went over, spoke to the man again. No answer. He reached out and touched the teller’s shoulder.

  The fellow seemed to collapse. He fell down and disappeared behind the counter. Teague had a glimpse of a shrunken, withered face, midget-small, atop which the hair seemed like an incongruously large wig.

  The reporter whirled. “Phone the police,” he snapped. “Pronto!”

  The youngster swallowed convulsively, nodded, and hurried to a phone. Teague pushed his bundle of thousand-dollar bills carefully across the counter and raced after President Malley.

  The man’s office was deserted. A phone was ringing somewhere, shrill and insistent. Teague hesitated.

  The roar of a motor jerked him toward a door. He flung it open, stared out into a parking lot at the back of the bank. Malley, in a light coupe, was driving toward the street. Teague yelled.

  Malley didn’t hear. The coupe rolled on. Teague sprinted after it, hoping to see a taxi or a car he could commandeer.

  The bank president’s automobile sprang ahead, swerved out into the street, with a grinding of gears. It accelerated swiftly—and drove—into disaster.

  Two blocks away Teague could see the car, rocketing along like mad. Another automobile appeared, coming in the opposite direction. There was plenty of room for the two vehicles to pass. But apparently Malley didn’t think so.

  Teague saw the coupe swing around with a scream of skidding tires. The car, driven at a dangerous speed, went out of control. It rolled over, smashed into a telephone pole, and came to rest with its wheels spinning. The noise of the crash died.

  TEAGUE gave a low whistle and sprinted toward the wreck. A crowd was collecting swiftly. He pushed through it, saw Malley’s body, a twisted, bleeding thing, on the sidewalk, the man’s head propped up on somebody’s overcoat, policeman was giving first aid as Teague squatted down beside the bank president.

  “Get back, you,” the officer grunted. “Give him air.”

  “I saw the wreck,” Teague explained swiftly. “I’m from the Blade.”

  Malley’s eyes opened. In them was the same frightful look of ghastly fear. The blood-smeared, pasty features writhed and twisted.

  Malley whispered, “The virus—” and died.

  TEAGUE waited a moment, and then slowly got up. He dropped back into the crowd. He had no intention of being held as a witness. Malley’s last words had opened a little shutter of memory in his brain. Faintly he heard the officer’s voice:

  “. . . fourth one we’ve had this morning. They all seemed to go crazy. They’re down in the emergency hospital now . . .” Whistling softly, Teague went back to the bank. He let himself in through the rear door. He was remembering something the Chief of Police had said that morning. . . . “Doc Morgan’s disappeared. Probably nothing in it. He may have run down to Los Angeles for a spree. But his sister Norma phoned me, said he hadn’t been in all night.”

  Doctor Morgan . . . wasn’t he the man who’d been experimenting on protein molecules?[1] And Malley had gasped something about a virus—

  Teague glanced around Malley’s office as he went through, but saw nothing unusual. Inside the bank he hesitated. His eye caught a flicker of movement.

  There was a stand of bottled spring water i
n the corner. Paper cups were scattered around it and on the floor, a few feet away, was something which at first Teague did not realize was human.

  It had been human once. The reporter went suddenly sick with nausea as he recognized blond hair. It was the boy he had left in the bank—but he was undergoing a metamorphosis that was utterly ghastly. His body seemed to be dissolving, flowing and melting from the bones, seething out through the gaps in the clothing. In a moment it was nothing but a clothed skeleton, lying motionless in a widening puddle of evil-smelling ichor. Teague felt his stomach jump against his throat; he steadied himself against a desk. Good God! What monstrous horror dwelt in this building? What incredible thing could dissolve a man’s body thus? Acid? Teague’s gaze went back to the stand of bottled water. He remembered the dying man’s words—“the virus!”[2]

  Quickly the reporter went behind the counter and examined the corpse of the teller. He jotted down a few notes and then, hearing footsteps, slipped back into Malley’s office. Peering through the door’s crack, he saw several uniformed officers enter the bank.

  Teague decided not to wait for them. If his guess were right, he was on the track of the biggest story that ever hit Pineville, Southern California’s “millionaire city.” He had no time to spare in making explanations now. But, thinking swiftly, he took a moment to scribble in blue pencil on Malley’s desk blotter, “The bottled water is poisoned! Analyze it!”

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” he thought as he slipped out the back door. “But just in case I’m right, my note will stop ’em from drinking any of that water. And maybe prevent a few more deaths.”

  TWO officers were coming across the parking lot. They saw Teague, shouted. He dodged nimbly among the parked cars and managed to lose himself, finally, among the pedestrians on the street.

  “Now for Doctor Morgan,” he thought. He didn’t know the address. In a drug store he found it in a telephone directory, and jotted it down in his notebook. Then, struck by a thought, he telephoned the city hospital.

  “I want some information,” he told the voice that answered him. “On—uh—a glandular disorder.”

  “Maybe it is,” he added to himself. “I wish I’d studied medicine, though!”

  “Hello,” he said presently. “I’m trying to find out the name of a certain disease from the symptoms. What? Oh—I represent the Blade. Yeah. Here it is: the guy’s shrunk tremendously, his bones are smaller, his lower jaw is stuck way out. . . .” Teague went on to describe the appearance of the dead bank teller. Then he listened for a while, and with a word of thanks, hung up. Whistling softly, he went out of the drug store and hurried to where he had parked his roadster. Tooling it toward Doctor Morgan’s home, he thought things over.

  “Hyperarathyroidism,” he pondered, referring to his notebook. “Bones excreting lime salts at an incredible rate. It should take months or years. Apparently it happened in less than an hour.”[3]

  Teague was still trying to figure things out when he reached Morgan’s house. The place was an isolated stucco building on the outskirts of Pineville. Moved by an indefinable impulse of caution, the operator hid his car among a thick clump of trees before cat-footing toward the doctor’s home.

  As it turned out, his action was lucky. There was a dark blue sedan parked in front of the house, with the motor running, though no one was in it. Teague looked around. In this district the homes were far apart, and the nearest was two blocks away. Despite the hot California sunlight, a little chill crept along the hollow of Teague’s back. He sensed something wrong—plenty wrong!

  It was a reporter’s hunch, nothing more. But, nevertheless, Teague slid quietly through the bushes, keeping out of sight, till he reached the house. Loud voices came to his ears. He crept from window to window sill at last he found the right one.

  He looked into a laboratory. Three men and a girl were there. Two of the men were familiar types—Teague had seen such thugs in the line-up at headquarters. One was a nervous, skinny, bucktoothed man with a tic under his left eye. The other was huge, stolid, dull-faced and quite bald. He held the girl captive in his great arms.

  The girl was a red-haired little fury. She fought desperately, hopelessly, her wide blue eyes hot with angry resentment. Suddenly she saw Teague at the window. For a second she stiffened—and then relaxed, looked quickly away. A clever kid, Teague realized.

  The third man was a lean, well-dressed greyhound, with a handsome, expressionless face and very cold black eyes. He gripped a cane in bronzed, strong fingers. He pointed with it to a pile of equipment in the corner.

  “Carry that out, Baldy. Jevne, get some rope and tie up the girl.”

  Teague, at the window, thought swiftly. He knew he couldn’t overcome three men—armed men, he realized, noticing the betraying bulges in their coats. Perhaps, if he waited, some lucky break might come up. Who was the girl? Hadn’t the Chief of Police said something—of course! This was the sister of Doctor Morgan, the vanished scientist!

  The girl’s slim figure struggled vainly as she was bound. She was rolled into a corner, and Baldy and the dwarfish, nervous Jevne went to work carrying equipment out to the sedan. Teague crouched lower in the bushes as he watched. Retorts, Bunsen burners, chemicals, a tank of oxygen—microscopes, all kinds of apparatus bundled together apparently without rhyme or reason. At last Baldy entered, shaking his huge body like a dog.

  “All through, Kedrick. What now?”

  “The girl,” said the lean man, pointing with his cane. “Carry her out.”

  BALDY obeyed. Kedrick took a last glance around, nodded as though satisfied, and permitted a slight smile to break the immobility of his bronzed face. White teeth flashed. He sauntered to the door and went out.

  Hastily Teague tried the window. It was unlocked. It slid up with a creak, but the roar of a starting motor drowned the noise. The reporter clambered into the laboratory, looking around hurriedly. There was no time to spare.

  No papers were visible, nothing that might be a clue. Teague saw a newspaper clipping under a desk; he snatched it up, stuck it in his pocket, and raced back to the window. The sound of the car’s motor was fading in the distance. The reporter sprinted to where he had left his roadster, backed it into the street, and set out to trail his quarry, visible three blocks away.

  Teague wished he had a gun with him. But, he thought, it would be easy to pick up a police officer sooner or later. Driving with one hand, he got out the newspaper clipping and scanned it. His lips pursed in a soft whistle.

  The clipping shed new light on the problem.[4] “But I’m still in a fog,” Teague thought. He gave his attention to driving. The quarry had not yet discovered they were being trailed; Teague had shadowed men before, and knew how to do it unobtrusively. The sedan slid away from Pineville, through deserted, lonely roads. It began to climb into the hills above the little city. Teague began to get worried. He hadn’t seen a police officer yet. What would happen if the kidnappers discovered him?

  “Blade reporter found dead in car.” Teague soliloquized, grinning wryly. He began to whistle a funeral melody. The dirt road led up, winding among parched, arid hills. Presently greener vegetation appeared; they were nearing the reservoir that supplied the city with water.

  Teague let his car drop far behind. It was the only way to avoid discovery. In about fifteen minutes he caught sight of the kidnappers’ sedan parked near a ramshackle frame house above the road. The blue waters of the reservoir gleamed far down the slope.

  Teague kicked the gears into reverse, nearly backed off the road, and finally managed to get the roadster hidden behind a huge rock beside the road. “Ready for a quick getaway,” he said optimistically to himself. “I’m a sap. Why the devil don’t I go after the police?”

  But Teague knew why. He was remembering the girl, Norma Morgan, and her wide, frightened blue eyes and the cold, ruthless eyes of Kedrick. The reporter had an idea why Norma had been brought here, and the thought of torture had occurred to him more than once.

 
; He made a wide detour and came around to the back of the ramshackle house. The sun was blazing hot on his head and shoulders. There was no sound but the droning buzz of insects.

  Teague waited, half-crouched behind a rock. There were no bushes here to hide his approach.

  A harsh voice said, “Don’t move, sucker.”

  The reporter’s body jerked convulsively. Teague stood frozen, trying to locate the voice.

  “Now lift ’em. Quick!”

  Teague raised his hands. The bucktoothed little man came out from behind another rock, the tic under his eye twitching convulsively. He held a gun pointed at the other’s stomach.

  Teague tried a smile. “Hello, Jevne,” he murmured. “Hot day, isn’t it?”

  “Baldy!” the little man called. The giant came out of the house. He shambled over to Teague and searched him for weapons.

  “Nothin’, Jevne,” he grunted. “Not even a shiv.”

  “You’re not such a wise guy,” Jevne said to the reporter. “We spotted you miles back.”

  “My arms hurt,” Teague said mildly. “And it’s hot. How about asking me inside?”

  “Sure. The boss wants to see you, or I’d plug you now. Let’s go.” Jevne nodded toward the decayed back porch. Teague went toward it, with a cold consciousness of the gun’s muzzle aimed unswervingly at his back.

  THEY took the reporter through a dim-lit, stuffy hall into a big front room cluttered with laboratory apparatus. The girl was there, bound to a chair. The bronzed greyhound, leaning on his cane, nodded pleasantly, though his face was immobile as ever.

  “All right, Baldy. Get the rest of the stuff in from the car.”

  The giant went out. Kedrick said, “Have a chair.”

  “Why not?” Teague said, and sat down on a dusty sofa that creaked under his weight. “I suppose it’s no use telling you I’m at a loss to understand this hold-up?”

  “Not a bit,” Kedrick agreed. His cane swung up, pointed at Teague’s eyes. “Not after we found you snooping around the back of the house. Who are you?”