Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  He felt, he says, as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope, or going under an anaesthetic. The feeling passed. And a voice spoke inside Grover’s mind.

  It was telepathy, we know now. The jeweler, an educated man, guessed that after a minute. Yet the development was no less nerve-racking for a logical explanation. There was a flurry of confused thoughts in Grover’s brain, and he sensed incongruous emotions—fear, wariness, and a sort of ironic amusement. He knew, or sensed, what the Titan was thinking.

  The creature had survived the wreck of his ship. His squadron had been destroyed by the Silicates. One of the cube-shaped vessels was still patrolling the sky overhead, looking for traces of life. Until it left, the Titan was trapped. He could not send for aid, since his message would be detected by his enemy.

  But, after a time, the cube-ship would leave, and then the Titan could ask for help, and his own race would come to rescue him. In the meantime, the giant was bored, and this anthropoid, oddly-shaped creature amused him. It was intelligent, after a fashion. It was full of fear and curiosity.

  Grover had been in the First World War, and remembered, rather shockingly, a day when he had cowered in a shell-hole, in the company of several corpses and a small rat. He had caught the rat and passed the time by playing with it—feeding it crumbs of biscuit and chuckling at its antics. Grover sensed a feeling of ironic amusement. The Titan had caught and appreciated his thought.

  BLIND resentment surged up in the jeweler. He struck futilely at the hard arm. The Titan bent his bulbous head; his shining eyes contemplated the Earthman.

  Sanity returned to Grover. He forced himself to calm. This was a golden opportunity. If he could manage to communicate with the Titan—make friends with him, or even secure information—the Army might be able to make use of whatever he found out.

  Amused, the giant seemed to applaud mentally.

  “Who are you?” Grover said, aloud. “Where do you come from?”

  Then he screamed in sheer agony at the pain inside his head. A flood of monstrously alien thoughts poured into his brain. The Titan was quite willing to explain—but Grover could not possibly comprehend the abnormal, unEarthly thought-pattern of his captor. An Australian bushman would get a headache trying to understand Euclid, even though Euclidean laws are based on familiar principles of this world.

  The throbbing in Grover’s head passed. He became aware that the Titan had reached into a showcase nearby, breaking the glass, and had brought out a handful of gems. The Titan selected three of the gems, tossed the others carelessly aside. Then the alien did a strange thing. On the floor, directly before the jeweler, he laid in a row a ruby, a pearl, and a diamond.

  Blood ruby—rose-pearl—sparkling diamond. In a straight row they lay. As a man might set out wooden blocks to explain the alphabet to a child.

  The pearl was in the middle. The Titan pointed to it.

  “This is your world,” his telepathic message told Grover. “Do you understand? Your world lies in the middle.”

  Fantastic nightmare! The shadows darkened within the little shop. The grotesque form of the giant was unreal. He touched the diamond.

  “This diamond represents my world. My world touches yours, interlocks with it. But only in hyper-space, in a different dimension. My world and yours are normal three-dimensional space, however.”

  Grover had read of such theories. He nodded his understanding.

  The Titan indicated the ruby. “This—this gem is still another world. Those you call the Silicates come from it. Now we have three worlds, touching only in a fourth dimension, lying in a row. Silicates—the ruby. You Earth people—the pearl. And us—the diamond.

  “Now,” the explanation went on, “suppose you lived on the diamond and wished to reach the ruby, and you could only travel in a straight line. How could you do it?”

  Grover understood. “By passing across the pearl,” he answered.

  “Exactly. That is why we Titans must pass through your world to reach the planet of the Silicates. We cannot enter directly the vibration-plane of the Silicates. We must first cross your world.”

  “But why?” Grover burst out. “I don’t understand! This senseless war—”

  “You know nothing about it. We did not start the battle. We are fighting for our lives. We must kill the Silicates, or they will kill us.”

  The jeweler shook his head.

  “YOU invaded them,” he said stubbornly.

  “Wait. I have said that three-dimension objects cannot pass directly from the Silicate world to ours, or the opposite. But certain radiations can go from one plane to the other, without detouring through your planet. Lately the Silicates have made use of a new form of energy to power their machines and cities. This energy is not harmful to them, but its radiations destroy us. And those rays, in some strange manner, are transmitted from the world of the Silicates to ours, and kill us. We have asked them to stop using this power, and they will not.

  “So,” the Titan finished, “we must kill them before their deadly radiations kill us. Our invasion of the Silicates was quite justified.”

  Grover tried to comprehend.

  “But won’t they make some concession?”

  “They say that they need the power. If they stop using it, there is no substitute, and without power they will die. So, of course, we are fighting for our lives.”

  The Titan paused for a moment, seemed to listen.

  “The enemy ship has gone now,” he told Grover. “I must send a message for help.” He was briefly silent, and then relaxed. “Good. A ship will be here shortly to pick me up.”

  “What about me?” Grover ask fearfully. “What do you—”

  “You?” There was faint surprise in the Titan’s transmitted thought. “I see you expect me to kill you or capture you. But why? What are you to me? You amused me in an hour of boredom; now you may go.” The giant turned his head toward the front of the shop.

  The jeweler bit his lip. “But you’re destroying the Earth!”

  “We mean you no harm. It is better that the Silicates fight us here, rather than we permit them to invade our own world, destroy our cities. We must drive them back to their world, and then annihilate them.”

  A random thought came to Grover. The Titan caught it and nodded.

  “You are wondering about our first advent—through a moving picture screen. For many years the Silicates and ourselves have been trying to break into Earth’s dimension. But there was no door—the gateway was locked from your side. However, when your picture people exhibited their show, new vibrations in the light thrown upon the theatre screen, together with other rays that came from a comet that recently entered your Solar System, helped pierce the barrier separating our worlds.

  “We cannot enter your world unless you open the door for us—at the right time. Perhaps, later, we may be able to break into your continuum without your inadvertent cooperation, but the radiation of the comet—you call it Mander’s Comet—is vitally necessary.” Grover went off at a tangent. “Suppose you could supply the Silicates with some other source of power? Like electricity? Do they have that?”

  “They use an atomic force that liberates quanta . . . Electricity? What is that?”

  The jeweler tried in vain to explain. “There’s a powerhouse at the dam nine miles to the south,” he said finally. “Perhaps—” He gave explicit directions for reaching it.

  The Titan nodded. “We shall investigate. This electricity is something new to us. It may not be able to operate in the world of the Silicates. But if it does, and if they consent to use it—”

  He rose and went out of the store. His thought floated back to Grover. “My ship has come for me. Good-by.” The jeweler sat for a time in silence. Then he went into the street and stood looking at the sky, where a spindle-shaped ship was disappearing toward the south.

  “Electricity,” he said aloud, musingly. “Perhaps—”

  He walked toward a parked car that had miraculously escaped
destruction. He had to reach the right authorities. They’d know what to do. In Washington, men would understand . . .

  BUT meanwhile death rained from the sky. The Silicates and the Titans fought with terrific weapons. Mander’s Comet crept toward the Sun. And from Washington radio messages went forth carrying the news that Grover had brought, and suggesting moves.

  We were an ant-hill in No Man’s Land. Opposing forces trampled us and ignored us. We were negligible, unimportant. This was—No Man’s World! Earth was the bridge between two dimensional civilizations—and they fought their battles on that bridge!

  All the scientific and military forces swung into action, but the results were less than nothing. We managed to salvage a few weapons from the wrecked Titan and Silicate ships, but, on strict orders, we kept these secret and hidden.

  The watchword from the governments was—“Wait!”

  Wait—for what?

  We did not know. The comet crept Sunward. The Titans slowly drove back the Silicates. One day the cube-ships broke and fled in an avalanche toward Siberia. One by one they dropped toward the dome of light and vanished through it into their own world. The spindle-ships followed. What did it mean? A decisive triumph? We were never to know.

  Grover, of course, wondered whether the Titans had offered the secret of electricity to the Silicates, and what the response had been. Meanwhile there was respite. Two spindle-ships remained on Earth, one in Siberia, one hovering over New York.

  And then—the globes vanished. The bowls of light winked out one night and disappeared completely.

  In their place remained curious, weird structures of crystal and metal, standing alone on circles of barren ground. The two ships hovered watchfully over them.

  General Robert Hall sat beside Curtis Grover in a bombing plane and watched the sun rise over the Alleghenies. A dozen aircraft circled up into the sky. Hall nodded toward one of the pilots, who spoke briefly into his radio transmitter.

  “Ready for the attack?” Grover asked.

  “Yes. I shouldn’t have let you come, you know. You’re a civilian. But you’ve earned this. Your information—”

  The co-pilot left his seat and came back to the others. He was a thin-faced, lean young man who did not look like the renowned physicist he actually was. He sat down facing Grover and the general and lit a cigarette.

  “We’ll know soon,” he said.

  “Think so, Stanton?” Hall’s voice was dubious.

  “It all works out.” Stanton sucked smoke into his lungs. “All our experiments point to one conclusion. The gateway into these other worlds is open only when the direct radiations from the comet hit the Earth. Last night Mander’s Comet vanished behind the Sun. The solar body blanketed its rays, kept them from reaching us. Till it reappears, the gateways—the shining domes—are gone. That, I’m sure, is why two Titan ships were left on Earth.

  “When the comet returns, as it will in a day or so, the Titans will turn on their projectors and open the gateways again. Of course”—he smiled wryly—“when the comet gets past Pluto, its rays will be too weak to matter, but that’ll take time. If we can destroy the two Titan ships and the projectors, we’re safe.”

  GROVER patted his bald head with a handkerchief.

  “That’s right. The gateways can be opened only from this world. By this time the Titan must know how to reproduce the vibrations released by the movie films. But they still need the help of Mander’s Comet.”

  “I’m leaving the science to you,” General Hall announced, frowning at Stanton. “My business is the military. Those weapons we salvaged from the wrecked Silicate ships have been mounted in planes, and they may work where explosives have failed. But ray-guns—” His tone expressed volumes.

  “The Silicates destroyed Titan ships with those ray-guns,” Stanton said. He looked at his watch. “The Siberian squadron is flying to the attack now, eh?”

  “Yes. And here—” The general peered out through the window. Below lay New York. A devastated, bare circle existed where Times Square had once been. Small in its center was a framework of metal and crystal. A cigar-shaped Titan ship hovered there.

  “When the comet reappears from behind the Sun, they’ll turn on their projector and open the gateways again,” Stanton said somberly.

  For answer General Hall picked up a microphone beside him and spoke into it. There was a roar of motors. Four planes dived toward the ground.

  The spindle-shaped craft hung protectingly over the framework of the projector. It ignored the menacing airships. Explosives would not harm it. Nothing Earthly could.

  But the weapons menacing the Titans were not Earthly.

  From the first plane a red ray speared out. It wavered, swept in a circle, and wherever it touched the ground, dust clouds billowed up. The Titan vessel did not move from its place, but suddenly a beam of green light lanced up from its hull.

  Then another—and yet more.

  A plane exploded in mid-air. The general’s ship lurched into an air-pocket. When it was again on even keel, the number of attackers had been reduced to four. Red light darted down from them. But it is difficult to aim from a moving plane.

  Suicidally one pilot dived. The others followed. They raced down at the torpedo-ship, into the hell of green light.

  The red rays probed out. Two ships exploded. Two were left.

  And then the Titan vessel seemed to bulge outward. Its hull was ripped into fragments. With a deafening, ear-splitting thunder it was blown apart.

  One of the planes managed to come out of its power dive. The other crashed amid the wreckage of its victim.

  General Hall looked down, thinlipped, at the destruction below.

  “That’s done,” he said quietly. “The Titan ship—and the projector. Gone.”

  The pilot turned, patting his earphones.

  “Siberia reporting, sir,” he called out excitedly. “We’ve achieved our objective there.”

  “All right,” the general said. “Back to the airport. Immediately.”

  Grover glanced at Stanton. “What now?”

  The scientist shrugged. “Lord knows. We must wait. All our theories are based on the premise that neither the Silicates nor the Titans can enter our world until Mander’s Comet returns to open the gateway. We must wait . . .”

  And so we waited. Mander’s Comet emerged from behind the Sun. Planes circled endlessly over Siberia and Manhattan. Fearfully we waited for news, while keen eyes searched for a reappearance of the shining domes.

  The comet passed the orbits of Venus, Earth, Jupiter. Outward it went. It passed Pluto, and we breathed again. We were safe . . .

  Safe? Well, we rebuilt. Devastated cities rose again. And, sometimes, men wondered. What had been the result of the Titans’ entry into the world of the Silicates? Who had conquered?

  “They may have made peace,” Stanton said to Grover as they sat at lunch in the rebuilt Rockefeller Plaza. “After all, the Silicates could use electricity instead of atomic power. They would prefer peace, I think. Both Silicates and Titans were intelligent races. And they were fairly equally matched. In the end, war between them would have meant the destruction of both worlds, both civilizations.”

  Grover nodded and lit a cigarette as he listened to the scientist.

  “The danger isn’t over. Mander’s Comet has a seventy-five year cycle. During that time the science of the Silicates and the Titans may advance a good deal. Will they find something new to quarrel about? Will they break into our world again? I do not know. I know only one thing—that Mander’s Comet returns in seventy-five years . . .”

  WORLD WITHOUT AIR

  Jim Harding and Mat Pender faced sure death, from oxy-thirst. But they were certain they wouldn’t give in to O-Corporation without a fight.

  PEERING through the narrow, frost-misted window, Jim Harding bit down savagely on his pipe-stem as he saw the white tractor lurch into view. A flurry of bluesnow hid it momentarily; then the gale subsided. The storm was letting up. But it
might be merely a lull, for nobody could make accurate weather forecasts on Planetoid 31, the most precarious foothold of human life in the System.

  The tractor crawled into the shed, and the muffled thunder of its exhaust died. A spacesuited figure emerged from the oval door in its side. The suit’s transparent, dome-shaped helmet was immediately coated with blue rime, but Harding knew that his partner, Mat Pender, had returned—and with a message of failure. Pender’s dragging, hopeless walk told its own story.

  Harding’s lean, hard-bitten face was suddenly flushed, and as swiftly became white. Without another glance out the window he moved to the gun closet and swung open the door. Strong hands clamped down like iron on the stock of a vicious sawed-off electro-rifle.

  The pipe-stem cracked. Harding grinned bitterly and tossed the pipe aside. He hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of a smoke for days. Not with the oxygen down to half a tank, and the supply ship overdue. Of course its tardiness was not accidental, Harding knew. Dain, owner of the O-Trust—the oxygen combine—had a definite purpose in making him wait for the oxygen that was synonymous with life on Planetoid 31.

  Dain—Harding began to take the electro-rifle apart. A fleck of rust or a short circuit would be fatal now. Engrossed in his task, he scarcely heard the rumble of the shed door being closed and, some time later, the buzz that announced someone was in the airlock of the little cabin. When the signal rang again, Harding put the rifle under his arm and grudgingly ran some oxygen into the lock. Then he opened the valve.

  Pender came in, coughing. His meaty red face was flushed, and brick-colored hair clung damply to his forehead. He started to speak, saw that Harding had turned away, and hesitated. Harding, oiling the firing mechanism, said,

  “Well? Are you going to keep your bargain?”

  Pender, unzippering his suit, forgot about it. He looked wide-eyed at the other.

  “That’s murder, Jim.”

  “It’s self-preservation. And I gave you the chance you wanted. Morse couldn’t spare any oxygen, could he?”