Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  THE private elevator would take him safely from the midst of his enemies. Forsythe decided to kill any police who might be waiting below. Unconsciousness wouldn’t be enough, for when they awakened they might remember their assailant’s features, no matter how well shielded by hat brim and muffler. After that Forsythe would be quite safe from detection. Yet it might be well to travel for a time.

  Something made Forsythe glance toward the half-open door of Shackleton’s study. What he saw brought him to an abrupt halt. Good Lord! The Satanist had been cleverer than be had ever realized.

  For the desk in the other room was piled with currency, tall stacks of it! Certainly that could not be left for the police. Shackleton must have had a fortune hidden in some secret place. Heedless of the jolting shocks on the outer door as the police tried to burst through the metal-lined panel, Forsythe stepped over the threshold of Shackleton’s study in a bound.

  His foot seemed to go right through the rug. For a horrible instant Forsythe tottered, and then fell. He slid down an inclined ramp, while the room vanished, and the lights of New York’s towers were all about him. And then he was falling through empty air.

  His plunge seemed curiously slow. He had time to think, and remember. He recalled the “interior decorating” Shackleton had had done. Even then the Satanist must have planned his trap. The study had been torn out, removed bodily from the penthouse. In its place a polished, inclined slide had been substituted.

  But the powder? How had Shackleton tricked him into taking the powder? Forsythe remembered the key that had fallen from the Satanist’s pocket, and knew now why it had seemed familiar. It was the key to his own apartment, or a duplicate of it. And for several days his sherry had tasted strangely.

  It was clear now, all of it. Shackleton had lured his master into the trap that had been set for so many others. He had not known of the police raid, after all.

  Forsythe felt a wrenching jolt, a sickening stab of flaming agony. The world dissolved in darkness. . . .

  Light came again, slowly. He was back in the room, in Shackleton’s study. So it seemed, but Forsythe knew that his body was lying, crushed and broken, on the pavement far below. It was not Forsythe’s body that stood in the room, watching the furnishings, the desk, the piles of currency, fade and vanish like mist.

  He stood in a square cubicle, windowless and dim.

  And, irrevocably, Forsythe knew that those gray, bare walls would prison him for ever and ever, until the end of eternity.

  NO MAN’S WORLD

  Earth Was Merely the Board for the Deadly Chess Game Between Two Mighty Civilizations!

  A Chapter from HIGHLIGHTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, a chronicle of the notable events of the past one hundred years, by F. Charlton Potter, leading journalist-historian of the early Twenty-first Century

  IT is difficult, even now, to set down with unprejudiced accuracy the history of the Invasion. To begin with, the word itself is a misnomer. The Aliens whose iron feet trampled upon a prostrate and bleeding Earth held no animosity toward us. That we know. But the result was no less cataclysmic. Had it happened a few centuries ago, men would have thought that the comet that blazed whitely in the skies was a portent of the forces that were to come. Instead, scientists worked busily in their observatories, peering into their telescopes, making spectroscopic analyses, taking photographs of Mander’s Comet.

  It was Dr. Jules Mander who first saw the comet, from his station at Mount Palomar. Later, newspapers ran brief columns about the celestial visitant, and there were articles, luridly illustrated, in the Sunday supplements.

  The comet was a newcomer to our Solar System, deflected from its original course, probably, by some massive body perhaps beyond Andromeda. But its new orbit indicated that it would be a periodic visitor, returning to circle our Sun once every seventy-five years. Mander’s Comet—remember it. For it was the herald of the approaching doom.

  At the time we in America saw doom elsewhere. All over the world the war-god shouted and swung his red sword. The Second World War had become a blind juggernaut. A haze of battle hung over Europe and the Orient. Every power in the Eastern Hemisphere had been drawn into conflict, and the cannon thundered day and night.

  The soil drank blood thirstily. It was a war of bitterness and hatred, of extermination. The Western Front flamed into a holocaust. Between the Siegfried Line and the Maginot Line lay a stretch of land on which men could not live, but died, very horribly.

  The guns bellowed. In America we heard them distantly. Life went on for us much as usual. Youngsters skated in Central Park, parades marched down Fifth Avenue on holidays, sleek-shouldered women danced with impeccably-clad men in the Rainbow Room, the Ritz-Plaza, the Astor. New stage-plays opened. And a film called Men of Tomorrow had its world premiere at the Metropolis Theatre in New York.

  That picture was shown only once, and it was stopped almost before it had begun. Summit Studios, of course, lost a great deal of money on the film. They had advertised it for months as an entirely new technique in movie-making, superior to magnafilm, multiplane, or any of the attempts to make the screen three-dimensional.

  The actual method Summit’s technicians employed was never revealed, but it is obvious that both the screen itself and the method of projection were unusual. The screen was composed of innumerable layers of fine mesh, made of a rubbery plastic.

  The light-beam, too, was notable, combining as it did the unseen ultraviolet and infra-red with visible light of normal vibration. Summit Studios spent millions on a wide-spread advertising campaign and admission to the premiere was by invitation only.

  Socialites and critics were given the preference. Special airplanes had flown from Hollywood, loaded with stars, producers, directors, and the elite of the cinema metropolis. Television trucks waited outside the theatre. Broadway blazed with searchlights. The marquee carried the legend:

  WORLD PREMIERE

  MEN OF TOMORROW

  ALSO LATEST NEWSREELS OF

  EUROPEAN WAR

  Movie stars gulped happily into microphones and signed autograph books. Directors and producers told how happy they were to attend the premiere. A mob filled Times Square, so that traffic had to be re-routed via Sixth and Eighth Avenues. On the Times Building a strip of electric bulbs flashed the latest news.

  “Thousands flock to witness new Summit film . . . General predicts victory soon . . . Twenty planes shot down above English Channel . . . Scientist declares Mander’s Comet emits radiation similar to cosmic rays . . .”

  In the sky, unseen amid the glare, hung a ball of fire, its tail stretching away from the Sun.

  At the microphone, a sleek announcer was introducing notables: “Miss Janice Arden, glamour star of Hollywood, and her escort is Dan Darrow . . . General Orney, folks. He flew from Washington just to attend this premiere. And here’s little Betsy Fenwick, five years old, but every inch a star. And . . .”

  GENERAL Horace Orney went to his box inside the theatre and sat down in lone dignity. He was a handsome, elderly man who looked remarkably impressive in his uniform. Now he lit a cigarette and stared down at the audience, nodding occasionally as he saw someone he knew There was Jack Hannibal, another Army man, with a luscious blonde. Jack always had good taste, the general thought, and shifted in His seat. The auditorium was darkening. The curtains rolled aside from the screen.

  The audience remained quiet until, suddenly, the figure of a man was flashed on view. He was the star of the picture, and a storm of applause greeted his appearance. His image, everyone noticed, was three-dimensional, apparently real. The flat, planar surface of usual film projections was entirely absent. Summit Studios had actually achieved their aim—three dimensional motion pictures!

  The star made a speech, bowed, and faded from view. Men of Tomorrow began. The picture itself was impressive—based on a popular fantastic novel that had recently appeared, and filmed with all the technical tricks at Hollywood’s command. The time was in the distant future—and, incredib
ly, it was like looking through a window into reality.

  General Orney settled back into his seat and lit another cigarette. He did not put the white cylinder between his lips. Instead, he leaned forward, frowning.

  Something was wrong. The picture blurred and went out of focus. The sound-track failed, and then went on again as a high-pitched, shrill humming.

  A chuckle went up from the audience. The projectionist was having trouble, of course. In a moment the picture would resume its course . . .

  It didn’t. The screen went a curious, indescribable hue. The shrilling rose to an ear-piercing wail. People moved uneasily, vaguely disturbed by the high pitch of the tone.

  Then the screen—was gone! In its place glowed a misty square of fog—an inexplicable wall of dim light. And against that extraordinary background two gigantic figures stood.

  The two weird figures, each one nearly twenty feet high, stood still, apparently gazing directly at the audience. Critics glanced at their programs and then back to the “screen.” Still the giants stood unmoving.

  Monsters they were, with grotesquely gigantic, bulbuous skulls and huge luminous eyes. Their long, threefingered hands and arms seemed boneless. Their stiltlike legs supported lean hips and vast barrels of chests, clad in some odd sort of armor.

  Someone in the audience was making frantic gestures back at the projection booth. In his box General Horace Orney’s eyes narrowed as he noticed Jack Hannibal, after a brief whispered word with his companion, the blonde, suddenly rise and walk down the aisle.

  The giants moved. The tentacular arms swung purposefully. A man in the front row stood up and tugged nervously at his companion’s hand.

  Then it happened.

  The monsters stepped out of the screen!

  It was so utterly unexpected, so fantastic, that it partook grotesquely of humor. By some strange psychological quirk, a ripple of startled laughter ran through the audience. A clever new film-shock had been created by Summit, they thought . . .

  THE laughter stopped when the man in the front row yelled in fear and started to run. He didn’t get very far. The larger of the two beings reached down and picked up the human in boneless fingers. Jack Hannibal, in the aisle, hesitated and shouted, “Stop the film! Quick!”

  The cry attracted the attention of the other monster. A long-tubed gun appeared in its hand. It strode from the screen and sent a beam of light lancing toward Hannibal. The Army man clutched at his heart, moaned, and fell.

  General Horace Orney found himself cursing in a low monotone as he pumped bullet after bullet from his heavy automatic at the nearer of the creatures. The being ignored him completely. It was fingering its captive curiously. The audience yelled and stampeded.

  The light from the projection booth flicked off, but the giants did not disappear. The one who carried the man turned and stepped back a few paces. Its body seemed to melt into the screen and vanish. The other began methodically to ray down every living being in the theatre. General Orney crouched below the rail and fired ineffectually until his ammunition was exhausted. The monster was invulnerable, or seemed so. It was striding here and there, crushing rows of chairs under its heavy-shod feet, the huge eyes searching for new victims.

  Finally there were no others. The giant turned, just as Orney rose from a crouching position and took careful aim. He waited as the being came slowly toward him.

  There was one bullet left.

  Orney fired it at his opponent’s eye. He did not miss, but the missile did not the slightest harm. The general hurled the automatic at the monstrous, alien face.

  Still the creature stood regarding him. It made no move. There was a cold, dispassionate curiosity in the great eyes, and a touch of something else—a hint of horror, a breath that blew coldly out of the Unknown and chilled Orney. He realized, suddenly, that he was no more to this creature than an ant . . .

  Cautiously, the general drew back. He moved slowly to the drapes, hesitated, and sprang into the passage. The monster did not try to stop him. There was silence in the auditorium as General Horace Orney raced for safety, the cold sweat drying on his cheeks.

  “Washington!” he was thinking. “I must phone Washington—”

  A frightful grinding shock rasped through Orney. He was blinded and deafened with shattering light and sound. He felt the floor give beneath his feet, and a sharp agony constricted his lungs. In that last moment of dissolution, before death claimed him, he tried to shout warning . . .

  Times Square vanished at that moment. For a distance of half a mile ruin shook Manhattan. A dome of light, with the Metropolis Theatre as its center, sprang suddenly into being. A hundred feet high, like an inverted bowl of shimmering whiteness, it appeared. Everything within that bowl was destroyed instantly, shaken into atomic nothingness. Skyscrapers, cut in half, crashed down and vanished into the dome. Then silence, broken by terrified screams and the wailing of police sirens.

  Thus the Terror came to Earth.

  INEVITABLY, men put forth theories. The Titans came from another dimension, science speculated. They came from a plane interlocking with ours, but vibrating at a different intensity. They were bent on conquest of the Earth, extermination of all mankind. So the wild theories ran, while New York was frantically evacuated and bombers circled to drop high explosives on the dome of light.

  Huge guns shelled the thing. But the Titans paid not the slightest attention. And, exactly thirty-four hours after their advent, a fleet of strange aircraft emerged from the shining hemisphere they had erected in Manhattan.

  One by one their ships came, shooting up through the glowing veil and racing off eastward across the Atlantic. They were cigar-shaped and featureless. They fled over the British Isles and war-tom Europe and came to rest in Siberia.

  Anti-aircraft shelled them. But the Titans were impregnable. In Siberia they created another light-dome, into which their ships vanished one by one. That was all.

  Puzzled, fearful, the world waited. Now there were two inexplicable hemispheres of shining brightness—both meaningless! Almost thirty hours we waited before the ship reappeared.

  Not all of them—scarcely a third of the original fleet emerged from the Siberian dome, racing desperately westward back to Manhattan. They never reached it. From that cryptic, impossible hemisphere came hundreds of ships entirely different in construction from the Titan vessels. These were great cubes, hundreds of feet square, that shot after the escaping craft and destroyed them in a great battle over the Atlantic.

  Ships saw the conflict and radioed back reports. They got startling news in return. From Jersey came the word that literally thousands of the cigarshaped ships were plunging up from the Manhattan dome and rocketing into the west.

  Russia declared that more and more of the square aircraft were emerging from the Siberian light-hemisphere. The sky was black with them. Cubes and spindles battled each other in a fearful holocaust that shook the Earth. They fought with rays and with vibrations. Man was forgotten.

  Presently both fleets withdrew. It was guerilla warfare now, and it spread out over the world. Cubes and spindles were shattered and sent plunging to destruction below. In the broken ruins we found bodies. The Titans we already knew—great-headed, barrelchested beings with flesh hard and icy as metal. All we found were dead.

  In the smashed cube-ships were other creatures, utterly inhuman. They were merely globes, ten feet in diameter, with a dozen limber tentacles sprouting from their bodies in no regular arrangement. Of other visible organs they had none. Their flesh glowed with pearly luster. They were silicate life, instead of carbon. Living crystals—a strangely evolved form of existence!

  Naturally, during this war between the spindles and the cubes, the European conflict stopped. Governments forget imperialism and trade to fight the common enemy. Siegfried Line and Maginot Line were deserted. The guns were aimed skyward. But, paying no attention to humanity, the Titans and the Silicates waged their war, and cut a swath of destruction wherever they passed.
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  Rays from the ships crumbled buildings to powder. Cleveland, Paris, San Francisco, Constantinople, Tokyo, and other cities were partially or completely destroyed. There was no malice toward Earth in the gesture on the part of the aliens.

  The cities just happened to be in the way.

  TO a man named Curtis Grover, a jeweler in a small Mid-western town, we are indebted for what little we know of the Invaders’ motives. An air battle took place above his village. Buildings were shattered into nothingness. Grover saw ships falling from the sky and fled into the cellar beneath his jewelry shop.

  It was sheer luck that Grover was an educated man—a bibliophile, a linguist, and a scholar. He was fifty-three at the time, a lean, gaunt, bald-headed fellow whose face was a network of wrinkles in sallow skin. He hid in his cellar, listening to the war-thunder fade and die, and presently he heard a thumping noise from above. Someone had entered the shop—wounded, Grover thought. He climbed the stairs to investigate.

  It was one of the Titans. One of his legs had been smashed into pulp, and he was looking over his shoulder toward the doors and the smashed windows. Grover, at the top of the stairs, made a choked sound of fear, and the Titan turned and saw him. One boneless hand shot out and curled around the jeweler’s body. He felt himself dragged forward, and incontinently fainted.

  Grover awoke to find himself lying on the floor, with the Titan squatting beside him, a bizarre, terrifying figure in the growing twilight. What thoughts entered Grover’s mind then we shall never know. He sprang up and fled; the great hand shot out, drew him back, and released him. Again Grover ran—again he was pulled back.

  This occurred several times. Then the Titan, still clutching his victim, paused and cocked his great head as though listening. The lidless eyes were focused again on Grover, and, eerily, the jeweler felt a curious sense of motion within his head. A finger of ice seemed to be probing into his brain. His thoughts went off at random.