Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  He saw the bearded face of a savage, with lines of ferocity and harshness that Woodley could not recognize as his own. The shaggy eyebrows were drawn together in a scowl. A scar ran from ear to lip, white with scar-tissue and manifestly long healed. The bushy hair was jet black, save for a single streak of white which swept back from the center of the forehead.

  The face was lean and hard as stone, bronzed and weathered as ancient iron, and the cool, level, intelligent gray eyes were utterly incongruous in that face. The eyes were the only features Woodley knew as his own. If that face was his own, it was changed almost beyond recognition. Woodley had expected to see a smooth, civilized countenance, and there was only a savage with level, puzzled eyes which did not belong to a brute such as Woodley’s face and body indicated he had become.

  Slowly he turned, stared out at the silent forest. All his senses were alert, as though trying to catch some hint of a solution to the enigma. There was nothing.

  The trees let their leaves dance gaily, like small mirrors of sunlight. Far distant was the flat, silver glint of water. And beyond rose the towers, cryptic and baffling with their hint of unremembered familiarity.

  Something was wrong with the entire scene. Sound and sight and smell told Woodley that something was lacking. Surely the silence was wrong . . .

  CHAPTER II

  The Silent City

  PURSUED by memories, Woodley walked south. There was still no sign of any living being. The park stretched eastward, and in the distance great towers stood against the blue sky. Over all, the deadly blanket of stillness hung.

  Woodley drew into a doorway and stood hesitant. What next? He was conscious of hunger and thirst, but he also realized that he had to find some means of self-protection.

  There came to him the vision of a blue-jacketed, brass-buttoned figure. To him it symbolized protection. But police had passed with all else, and something more was necessary now. Police had used . . . nightsticks . . . revolvers . . .

  He had only a vague recollection of what a firearm was and how it operated, but he sensed complete protection in the possession of a gun. It would be a good weapon against rock-throwing savages.

  The window at his side was broken. The shop itself was gutted. Woodley stepped out into the street—now covered with soil and weeds—and crossed to the park. Making his way southward in the direction of the taller towers, he felt safer as he slipped cautiously through the undergrowth.

  He examined the windows of the shops across the street. Without exception they had been gutted. Markets especially had suffered. Nearly all of the ground-floor windows were smashed, as though by a mad mob.

  At last Woodley found a shop that had once sold firearms. But he was doomed to failure here. Cases were overturned, the walls pitted and scarred with bullet marks, and there was no ammunition. Yet the fur-clad men who had pursued him were unarmed, save for stones. What did this mean?

  As Woodley found store after store ravaged and empty, with cans of food broken open and empty, he began to catch some vague glimpse of the truth. The wilful, wanton destruction reminded him of the work of children.

  “Children?” he pondered, staring at a building that had burned to a shell long ago. “Not ordinary ones. Idiot children, more likely. They’d grab all the food in sight, might even discover how to load and fire a gun. That’s more than I remember, anyhow.”

  This was not entirely true. The sight of revolvers and automatics and rifles had brought back memories.

  “Kids . . . improvident, eating the best, wasting the stuff they didn’t want immediately, letting it rot, using up ammunition without replacing it. But why didn’t those savages who hunted me have knives?”

  Though he gave up the problem, his determination to find a weapon was now inflexible.

  In the park he found a spring and quenched his thirst. Not long after that, he found another gutted shop where guns had once been sold. Searching diligently, he found a few cartridges that were unspent, and a heavy Luger caught his eye in a dark corner. He picked it up.

  INSTINCTIVELY his hands went through motions his mind did not understand. He saw himself load the gun with the three bullets, wished there were more. The Luger fitted into his palm with the ease of long practice. In his previous life, then, he had been well acquainted with firearms.

  What was to happen next? He had no idea. He must adjust himself to this new world. He must also, if possible, regain his memory, for without that he could not make plans. As for making a survey of the situation, there was always the possibility of danger. He could not help believing that the battle with the unknown man was a criterion.

  New York lay empty. Weeds grew on the streets. How much time had passed while Woodley’s mind slept, he could not estimate, but he guessed that it was years and years. That, too, troubled him. During so long a time he should have aged, but he had not. He had hardened, grown tougher. The white streak in his hair was the result of a wound, the scar of which still crinkled his scalp. Trying to remember the past, he could recall only a date—1942. It was no help. What was the date now?

  He was armed, but hungry and thirsty. Remembering the carcass of the deer in the cellar, he guessed that the remnants of mankind had become a race of hunters. Perhaps they were nomads, like the ancient Amerindians, following game about the land. All the shops had been looted. With his gun he could bring down deer, but he’d have to find them first.

  The ramparts of a bridge loomed ahead. Beyond the turbulent river were more skyscrapers and the chimneys of factories. The crescent Moon was a pallid shadow in the morning sky, scarcely visible. The sight of it aroused memory in Woodley.

  A crescent . . . a crescent-shaped scar on a girl’s slim hand—Janet! Again he saw the baffling picture of her face. She had played an important part in his previous life, he knew, and the sense of aching loss was strong within him. Confusedly he remembered candlelight and soft music, a throng of dim faces and the shuffling of feet upon a dance-floor. A day long past, it was seen through a glass darkly . . .

  Woodley trudged on across the bridge. It was in fairly good condition, though debris was piled high about the piers below. The brown water surged and rilled, its motion contrasting oddly with the utter stillness of the city itself. Only nature still moved. The blue sky was unclouded by smoke, for there were no fires.

  Following the exit of the bridge, Woodley came out in a plaza that might once have been a park. Now it was merely a tangled thicket, its drifts and hedgerows stretching like the tentacles of an octopus up the adjoining streets.

  All at once the stillness was broken harshly. A whistle shrilled out, high-pitched and peremptory. In answer came the piping of other whistles. Before Woodley could think of finding a hiding place, he heard the slap of naked, hurrying feet.

  Dodging around the corner of a building, a man came into view some twenty feet away. Like Woodley himself, he was bronzed, shaggy and muscular, with a broken nose and flaming red hair. In one gnarled hand he held a jagged stone.

  Woodley drew his Luger as other men appeared, armed like the first. They stood waiting, apparently for a signal. The red-haired man stepped forward and pointed in the direction from which Woodley had come. Gutturally he said two words that were somehow recognizable.

  “Go back!”

  CHAPTER III

  The Tribe

  WOODLEY hesitated. These men were not going to kill him on sight, as the other savages had apparently intended. This was his first contact with possible friends. He sought desperately in his clouded mind for some helpful clue.

  “Why?” he asked, trying to imitate the thick accent. “I am a friend.”

  The red-haired man knitted his brows.

  “Eh? You cannot be. Those who come from there—” he pointed back toward New York—“they are not friends. We have no food to spare. We kill you if you do not go back.”

  The ring of savage faces drew closer, silent and ominous.

  “I am not like those,” Woodley said. “They will kill me.
They drove me out.”

  “What is that to Geth?” asked the redbeard. “Or to Geth’s tribe? We have trouble enough getting food without feeding extra mouths.”

  “He looks strong, Geth,” a gnarled, crag-faced man with gray hair interrupted. “Perhaps he is a good hunter.”

  “Can he run down a deer?” Geth asked sardonically.

  “Yes,” Woodley said. “I can do that and many other things. I can kill from a distance.”

  “I, too, can do that.”

  Geth shifted his rock significantly from one hand to the other. Woodley hefted the Luger. It would not do to waste the three bullets he had, but perhaps one could be sacrificed.

  “I bring you gifts,” he said at last. “I can kill a deer without touching it. I can make fire.”

  He was surprised at the savages’ reaction to his words. First surprise, and then furious anger and hostility showed on their faces.

  “Make fire?” Geth snarled. “You shall not do that here!” He pointed off to the south. “Fire brings ruin. Look.” Woodley turned. Blackened, gutted towers rose in the near distance.

  “Many miles,” Geth said. “Burned by foolish ones who made fire. That was long ago, though. There are no more fire-sticks.”

  “Fire-sticks?” Woodley repeated. “Splinters of wood. When we rubbed them on rock, fire came. And too often it destroyed.” The chief’s face grew dark. “Will you go back?”

  “Let me stay,” Woodley pleaded. “I can help you.”

  “We have no time to waste,” Geth grunted. “We are hunting. Go back!”

  “Let me hunt with you. If I can kill a deer for you from a distance, may I stay with your tribe?”

  Geth shook his head, but the grayhaired man whispered to him. At last the red-bearded growled grudging assent.

  “Well, it will do no harm. We need food. Our women are hungry. If you can kill a deer for us, we shall talk further. Come.”

  Without another glance at Woodley, he started away. The gray-haired man grinned.

  “Stay with me, stranger, though you are not a complete stranger.”

  “Eh?” Woodley blurted.

  “I’ve seen you hunting with your tribe across the river. They’ve cast you out now, I suppose. What’s your name?”

  “Woodley.”

  “Mine is Sand.”

  THE little band hurried up one street and down another, till Woodley was hopelessly confused. It seemed hours before they were in open country, and many more hours before they sighted game. But after that, all went with surprising ease.

  Vague memory guided Woodley as he aimed and fired. The buck leaped high, bounded away and fell. Pleased cries went up from the savages, who did not seem unduly alarmed by the sound of the explosion.

  “So you have found a gun that works, eh?” Geth said.

  “You know what guns are?”

  “Oh, we found them long ago. But they stopped working after a time.” Geth barked orders. His men began to skin the slain animal while a crude pole-support was contrived.

  The band began to retrace their steps. Nothing more was said about Woodley’s position, so he wisely asked no questions. He kept near gray-haired Sand, wishing he knew more of the situation. But he could only wait . . .

  Geth’s tribe lived in what had once been an apartment house. Most of the upper-floor windows were unbroken, and fur-clad, unkempt women and a few children were visible, peering down from above.

  “We’ve been here only a moon,” Sand explained. “We follow the game, and every year it grows less. We should go east, into the open country.”

  “Why don’t you?” Woodley asked curiously.

  Sand shrugged his brawny shoulders.

  “Something holds us here. At least it holds me. I do not know what.”

  He left it at that. Woodley continued wondering. Did Sand, too, suffer from the strange amnesia that affected him? Later he would make it his business to find out. Meanwhile he curiously examined the community into which he was being inducted.

  The women were subtly brutalized. Some of them were pretty, and a few were even lovely, but a certain dull shallowness in their eyes gave them a stupid appearance. All were darkly tanned and muscular. They watched Woodley’s advent with interest. The five children in the tribe seemed subhuman in intelligence, clinging closely to their mothers like young apes.

  In the lobby Geth superintended the division of the meat, taking the best portion for himself and throwing the less choice hunks to the members of the tribe. Woodley, holding a bloody piece, hesitated as he noticed the savages sinking their white teeth into the raw meat. He was shocked.

  Food, he remembered, should be cooked. But the subject of fire was too touchy to bring up just at present. Deciding that he had probably been devouring raw meat for a considerable time, Woodley shrugged and joined the others. After all, he was hungry.

  When he had finished, he looked around. The men were relaxing. Occasionally the women brought them water in rusty pans. Sand handed one of these to Woodley.

  “Thanks,” Woodley said, wiping his bearded lips with the back of his hand.

  “Eh?” Sand stared.

  “I said thanks.”

  “What are those?” the graybeard inquired.

  “Never mind.” Woodley grinned. “I’d like to talk to you, Sand.”

  HE shot a quick glance at the chief, who was still gnawing on a bone. Sand nodded understandingly. He rose, patting his paunch, and led the way outside. There he sniffed the air like an animal, looked at the mid-day Sun, and then at Woodley.

  “Well?”

  “Let’s talk as we walk.” Woodley set the example. “I want to find a razor. I’m a stranger here, Sand.”

  “You’ve been on the western island, with your tribe,” the graybeard grunted.

  “I—I suppose I have.” Woodley pondered. “Have you always lived here, Sand?”

  “Always.”

  “You were born here?”

  “Born? I do not know what you mean.”

  “I mean, since you were a child.”

  “I have always been as I am now,” Sand said simply. “Once there were many children, but they were useless. Only a few lived. You saw them today.”

  “I don’t understand,” Woodley protested. “There are no—What do you mean?”

  “These are the only ones left.”

  “But don’t they grow older?”

  Sand’s craggy face was puzzled.

  “I don’t understand. They never change, unless they are killed. You should know that well enough.”

  “But are no children born?”

  “No human life ever comes into the world,” Sand said. “We do not change. ‘Grow older?’ Those words are meaningless to me. We die, of course, if we are killed. Not otherwise.”

  “How old are you?”

  Sand shrugged. “Old?”

  “How long ago do you remember?” Woodley pursued.

  “I have been here always, since the beginning. I shall remain as I am, unchanged, till I am slain.”

  “You’ve seen me before?”

  “Across the river, with your tribe. You’ve been there as long as I can remember.”

  At last Woodley realized that for years he had lived as a savage, a victim of amnesia. Suddenly his true self—though not his complete memory—had returned in that New York cellar.

  His last memory of a date was 1942. That was somehow connected with a mental picture of a museum, in which he might have been standing when the unknown catastrophe fell. At that time mankind, as he had known it, vanished. How? Had it been transformed into this brutalized race of savages?

  Working on that assumption, he went further.

  In 1942 his mind had suffered a total blackout. After that, a savage among savage tribes, he had lived as the others had, with no memory of his past life or of any civilization. For an unknown period this had gone on, until Woodley thought a blow on the Head had brought him back to partial sanity.

  Sanity wasn’t the
word. Self-realization was more like it. From a mindless savage, he had recovered the mind of Kent Woodley, though only a few of his memories.

  That blank period from 1942 to his awakening in the cellar of the brownstone house was completely puzzling. How long had it been? How long had he lived among the savages? What had caused the quarrel that culminated in his killing a man in a dusty cellar?

  Sand supplied a possible answer.

  “There are roaming tribes, all hating each other. If you killed a deer and a man of another tribe saw you do it, he would attack you immediately. The man you killed probably cornered you in a cellar, and you were stronger than he.”

  It was more than likely. Woodley forebore to ask more questions, not knowing how far he might, trust Sand.

  He felt dazed. Since 1942, he had been living as a semi-mindless, brutal savage, a victim of more than amnesia.

  CHAPTER IV

  The New Life

  SAND watched in silence as Woodley painfully scraped at the beard that hid most of his face. It seemed a useless procedure, for the hair would grow out again. Woodley, awkwardly handling the razor he had found in a wrecked store, squinted at his mirrored reflection and ignored the painful cuts. Slowly his features began to emerge, white in contrast to the deep tan around his eyes and upon his bronzed forehead.

  The face was far more familiar than the brutal bearded countenance the hair had indicated. Woodley’s nose was rather sharp, and hard lines bracketed his mouth. The wide-set gray eyes were still incongruous, yet not so much as they had been. Wonderingly Woodley fingered the scar that marked his cheek. How had he gained that and the streak of white in his hair?

  Finished at last, he set out on another quest, followed by Sand, who seemed to have adopted him. Woodley was looking for some means of making fire. There were no matches, but at last he found a cigarette lighter, which gave forth sparks as the steel wheel was spun. Fuel took longer. It was fully an hour before Woodley discovered an unbroken can of lighter fluid. Satisfied, he turned back to the tribal headquarters.