Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Instantly a dead silence fell. The bat-wings settled back into the circle and stood around regarding Binney with blank idiotic looks. They made no move even when the salesman cursed violently and shook his fist at them. Then he remembered.

  “No,” Binney moaned. “No temper. No temper!”

  He 6hut his eyes, breathed deeply, and started counting. At thirty he looked again, saw the same blank faces, and bit his lip.

  If only the creatures would do something! Why did they just stand there, looking foolish? What did they expect? For what were they waiting? Did they expect Binney to sprout wings and fly away?

  “No temper. One, two, three, four . . . I’m glad Susan’s unconscious. If she got hysterical and tried to get away from me—”

  As though she understood, Susan woke up and began to struggle. Vainly Binney tried to soothe her.

  “It’s okay, Susan. Just relax—”

  But the girl took a hasty look at the two-headed monsters around her, screamed, and redoubled her efforts to pull free from Binney’s arms. The man felt a tug of irritation.

  “Keep quiet!” he snapped, with nervous emphasis. “I can’t—” He stopped quickly.

  “No temper. One, two, three . . . stop it, Susan . . . four, five, six . . .”

  “Let go of me! Oh!”

  “Urdle ah dree?” asked a bat-wing politely.

  “Stop it . . . seven, eight, nine . .

  “Dree wurn.”

  “No temper. Ten, eleven—ouch!”

  With lamentable lack of restraint, Susan had sunk her small white teeth into Binney’s forearm.

  “You little—” Binney was almost lost. Blinking with pain, he stared blindly at Susan’s frightened face and babbled, “I love you. I love you. I love you!”

  Thereupon he proceeded to prove it by knocking the girl cold. It was a neat sock, well timed and right to the point of the jaw. It spoke well for Binney’s self-control that he struck in sorrow, not in anger.

  Susan wilted. Binney, deeply grieved, drew her limp form once more into the protection of his arm. He glanced up at the interested, extraordinary faces around him, realized helplessly that they didn’t intend to do anything about them, and once more began to count . . .

  THE huge red sun had covered a perceptible part of the crimson sky, and Binney was still counting. But nothing had happened. The two-headed creatures remained, doing absolutely nothing except irritate Binney, who could not afford to lose his temper just yet. If there were only some way of reaching ground level! But, short of wings, that was impossible.

  How long could this keep up? They might stay up here for days and starve to death, or he’d get so weak he might lose contact with Susan. Couldn’t the bat-wings understand anything?

  “You and your blasted urdle dree,” Binney growled bitterly. “What does it mean, anyhow?”

  “Ah nyasta,” said one helpfully.

  Time was growing short. Binney found it growing harder and harder to keep his temper. Moreover, Susan would not remain unconscious forever, and he could not keep continually knocking her out. If there was only some way—

  Binney probed his memory. He couldn’t get down from the roof. If he materialized two hundred feet above New York, the result would be fatal. Unless—unless something broke his fall. But what could? What—

  Water!

  “Wow!” Binney said in a heartfelt voice.

  Of course! A two-hundred foot drop into water would be dangerous and unpleasant, but not fatal. Especially in Binney’s case. Water was his element. The nearest body of water—on Earth—was the Hudson River.

  But how to locate it? How to find the right spot, so that he could get mad, return to Earth, and drop neatly into deep water? There were no landmarks—

  There was one. The crescent-shaped plaza. That, to Binney, marked the entrance of the Holland Tunnel. All he had to do was go to the inner curve of the crescent, turn his back, and walk . . . how far?

  How long was the Holland Tunnel?

  Binney tried to visualize it, to remember. Abruptly he was seeing himself seated in the bus beside white-haired, talkative Dennler, idly counting the metal doors. One hundred and ninety-five doors. Perhaps a few more. That didn’t matter. But they seemed to be about forty feet apart. That came to—let’s see—about 8,000 feet. If he paced oil four thousand feet he’d be approximately in the center of the Hudson River, though, of course, in another world.

  That was it! Binney stood up and drew Susan’s limp body across his shoulders. She wasn’t heavy, but Binney wasn’t a heavyweight himself. He staggered toward the edge of the crescent-shaped hole in the roof, peered down, and then turned his back. He began to pace his distance carefully. Two steps—five feet. Ten feet. Fifteen. Twenty . . .

  Sixteen hundred steps later Binney stopped. The bat-wings had followed him at a short distance, piping inquiringly.

  “Dree?”

  “Urdle dree?”

  “Urdle dree nuts,” said Binney, having at last found the spot he desired. If his calculations were correct he was over the center of the Hudson River, so to speak. He sat down, holding Susan, and proceeded to lash himself into a fury.

  Only, now, he couldn’t get mad.

  ANY psychologist could have told Binney the reason, but there was none handy. Poor Binney realized that he was now as cool as a cucumber. The gaping, blank faces of the bat-wings no longer roused him to rage.

  He called them vile names. He thumbed his nose at them, and invited them to come within his reach. They declined. Still Binney couldn’t get mad.

  He pinched the place where Susan had bitten him and tried to rouse himself to frenzy about that. But it was useless. After all, he loved the girl.

  He thought of Tim Blake and the catastrophic fight, and almost became furious at the muscular Blake, but then started to chuckle at the look on the man’s face when he was being carried through the air. Where was Blake now? In New York, in his bathing suit.

  Binney blessed the lucky forethought that had made Susan and himself change to street garments before being transported into this strange world. Two people in swim-suits clambering out of the Hudson would attract far more attention than a man and a woman who had, apparently, fallen overboard from a ferry.

  But such thoughts were futile. Binney groaned. He could let go of Susan, and she’d be transported back to Earth—but she couldn’t swim very well. Unconscious, she’d fall to death. Binney was utterly helpless, he realized. After having figured out a means of escape, he didn’t have enough nerve to get mad.

  “You poor spineless cockroach,” said Joe Binney to himself. “You poor miserable imitation of a brainless weak-fish! You can’t even get mad if you want to. Why, you yellow—”

  Binney felt a mad inclination to seize himself by the throat and strangle himself. He was suddenly furious with bitter, violent rage at this helpless, stupid person called Joe Binney.

  “Urdle dree,” he heard a bat-wing say, and then—

  Bang!

  The world exploded around Binney. He felt a giddy shock of disorientation. The roof melted away before him. For a second he saw the Hudson River far below, and then he was falling, Susan tightly clasped in his arms.

  Quite by accident, Binney had become tremendously angry with himself.

  He kept his head, maintaining his own and Susan’s body vertical, struggling for balance and still trying to relax.

  Splash! The impact sent the breath from the man’s lungs as they hit the water feet first and shot downward. Susan was jerked out of his arms. He thrashed frantically in chilly water, and then followed up the sash that still bound Susan to him. Having captured the girl, he started swimming upward desperately.

  His lungs were bursting by the time his head broke through the surface. To the left were the Palisades of Jersey, to the right, the towering buildings of Manhattan. His guess had been right—his calculations correct.

  Panting heavily, almost breathless he swam shoreward. Susan would need some medical attention,
but she’d be all right, he felt confident.

  Two days later Joe Binney and Susan sat in the private office of Horton, the boss. Horton’s plump face was beaming.

  “So you get that promotion,” he said, “and a raise. I’ve had dozens of new orders come in already. It was marvelous publicity, Joe—marvelous. The papers splashed it all over the front page.”

  “There just wasn’t any other news,” Binney said modestly, but Horton waved him to silence.

  “Gallant, my boy, gallant! Diving into the Hudson after Susan had fallen from that ferry-boat—you might both have been drowned. It was a master stroke of yours to mention Pinnacle Novelties to the reporters.”

  “Oh, Susan did that,” Binney murmured. “In fact, she made up—I mean she explained everything to the reporters.”

  Susan surreptitiously pressed Binney’s hand.

  “So you are now the branch manager,” Horton observed. “Er—your first duty will be to discharge Mr. Blake.”

  Binney’s eyes opened wide. “What? I don’t—”

  “Haven’t you read the papers? Well, I don’t suppose you got past the first page. But Blake has disgraced the firm. Made a spectacle of himself. Drunk, no doubt. He was shouting and screaming like a madman.”

  A quick glance passed between Susan and Binney.

  “B-but what did he do?” Binney asked.

  “Got drunk and ran down Forty-Second Street in his bathing suit,” Horton snapped indignantly. “The man must have been mad!”

  “Yeah,” said Binney, and hastily escorted Susan out of the office. Safely hidden beside a filing cabinet, he kissed her.

  “That was a dream, wasn’t it?” Susan asked, when she drew away. “About that—”

  “Sure,” Binney assured her. “Just a dream. Don’t worry about it. It won’t happen again.”

  And he sighed deeply, remembering the hours he had spent in a Turkish bath, under the supervision of the Professor, sweating out every last drop of the weird elixir his tissues had absorbed. But it had been worth it. There would be no more excursions into an alien world . . .

  “Urdle dree,” Binney murmured involuntarily.

  Susan’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “That,” said Mr. Joe Binney, “means I love you.”

  “Oh.” Susan smiled, and added softly, “Urdle dree.”

  THE DEVIL WE KNOW

  An ingenious little spine-crawler about a demon who accepted slavery to a man in return for a soul—which he said didn’t exist anyway. So—what was his true motive—?

  FOR days the thin, imperative summons had been whispering deep in Carnevan’s brain. It was voiceless and urgent, and he likened his mind to a compass needle that would swing, inevitably, toward the nearest magnetic point. It was fairly easy to focus his attention on the business of the moment, but it was, as he had found, somewhat dangerous to relax. The needle wavered and swung imperceptibly, while the soundless cry grew stronger, beating at the citadel of his consciousness.

  Yet the meaning of the message remained unknown to him.

  There was not the slightest question of insanity. Gerald Carnevan was as neurotic as most, and knew it. He held several degrees, and was junior partner in a flourishing New York advertising concern, contributing most of the ideas. He golfed, swam, and played a fair hand of bridge. He was thirty-seven years old, with the thin, hard face of a Puritan—which he was not—and was being blackmailed, in a mild degree, by his mistress. This he did not especially resent, for his logical mind had summed up the possibilities, arrived at a definite conclusion, and then had forgotten.

  And yet he had not forgotten. In the depths of his subconscious the thought remained, and it came to Carnevan now. That, of course, might be the explanation of the—the “voice.” A suppressed desire to solve the problem completely. It seemed to fit fairly well, considering Carnevan’s recent engagement to Phyllis Mardrake. Phyllis, of Boston stock, would not overlook her fiancé’s amours—if they were dragged out into the open. Diana, who was shameless as well as lovely, would not hesitate to do that if matters came to a head.

  The compass needle quivered again, swung, and came to a straining halt. Carnevan, who was working late in his office that night, grunted angrily. On an impulse, he leaned back in his chair, tossed his cigarette out the open window, and waited.

  Suppressed desires, according to the teachings of psychology, should be brought out into the open, where they could be rendered harmless. With this in mind, Carnevan smoothed all expression from his thin, harsh face and waited. He closed his eyes.

  Through the window came the roaring murmur of a New York street. It faded and dimmed almost imperceptibly. Carnevan tried to analyze his sensations. His consciousness seemed inclosed in a sealed box, straining all in one direction. Light patterns faded on his closed lids as the retina adjusted itself.

  Voiceless a message came into his brain. He could not understand. It was too alien—incomprehensible.

  But at last words formed. A name. A name that hovered on the edge of the darkness, nebulous, inchoate. Nefert. Nefert.

  He recognized it now. He remembered the seance last week, which he had attended with Phyllis at her request. It had been cheap, ordinary claptrap—trumpets and lights, and voices whispering. The medium held seances thrice a week, in an old brownstone near Columbus Circle. Her name was Madame Nefert—or so she claimed, though she looked Irish rather than Egyptian.

  Now Carnevan knew what the voiceless command was. Go to Madame Nefert, it told him.

  CARNEVAN opened his eyes. The room was quite unchanged. This was as he had expected. Already some vague theory had formed within his mind, germinating an annoyed anger that someone had been tampering with his most exclusive possession—his self. It was, he thought, hypnotism. Somehow, during the seance, Madame Nefert had managed to hypnotize him, and his curious reactions of the past week were due to post-hypnotic suggestion. It was somewhat far-fetched, but certainly not impossible.

  Carnevan, as an advertising man, inevitably followed certain lines of thought. Madame Nefert would hypnotize a client. That client would return to her, worried and not understanding what had happened, and the medium would, probably, announce that the spirits were taking a hand. When the client had been properly convinced—the first step in advertising campaigns—Madame Nefert would show her hand, whatever she had to sell.

  It was the first tenet of the game. Make the customer believe he needs something. Then sell it to him.

  Fair enough. Carnevan rose, lit a cigarette, and pulled on his coat. Adjusting his tie before the mirror, he examined his face closely. He seemed in perfect health, his reactions normal, and his eyes well under control.

  The telephone rang sharply. Carnevan picked up the receiver.

  “Hello . . . Diana? How are you, dear?” Despite Diana’s blackmailing, activities, Carnevan preferred to keep matters running along smoothly, lest they grow more complicated. So he substituted “dear” for another epithet that came to his mind.

  “I can’t,” he said at last. “I’ve an important call to make tonight. Now wait—I’m not turning you down! I’ll put a check in the mail tonight.”

  This seemed satisfactory, and Carnevan hung up. Diana did not yet know of his forthcoming marriage to Phyllis. He was a little worried about how she would take the news. Phyllis, for all her glorious body, was quite stupid. At first Carnevan had found this attribute relaxing, giving him an illusory feeling of power in the moments when they were together. Now, however, Phyllis’ stupidity might prove a handicap.

  He’d cross that bridge later. First of all, there was Nefert. Madame Nefert. A wry smile touched his lips. By all means, the title. Always look for the trade-mark. It impresses the consumer.

  He got his car from the garage of the office building and drove uptown on the parkway, turning off into Columbus Circle. Madame Nefert had a front parlor and a few tawdry rooms which no one ever saw, since they probably contained her equipment. A placard on the window proclaimed the woman
’s profession.

  Carnevan mounted the steps and rang. He entered at the sound of a buzzer, turned right, and pushed through a half-open door which he closed behind him. Drapes had been drawn over the windows. The room was illuminated by a dim, reddish glow from lamps in the corners.

  It was bare. The carpet had been pushed aside. Signs had been made on the floor with luminous chalk. A blackened pot stood in the center of a pentagram. That was all, and Carnevan shook his head disgustedly. Such a stage setting would impress only the most credulous. Yet he decided to play along till he got to the bottom of this most peculiar advertising stunt.

  A CURTAIN was twitched aside, revealing an alcove in which Madame Nefert sat on a hard, plain chair. The woman had not even troubled to don her customary masquerade, Carnevan saw. With her beefy, red face and her stringy hair, she resembled a charwoman out of some Shavian comedy. She wore a flowered wrapper, hanging open to reveal a dirty white slip at her capacious bosom.

  The red light flickered on her face.

  She looked at Carnevan with glassy, expressionless eyes. “The spirits are—” she began, and fell suddenly silent, a choking rattle deep in her throat. Her whole body twitched convulsively.

  Suppressing a smile, Carnevan said, “Madame Nefert, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  She didn’t answer. There was a long, heavy silence. After a time Carnevan made a tentative movement toward the door, but still the woman did not rouse.

  She was playing the game to the hilt. He glanced around, saw something white in the blackened pot, and stepped closer to peer down into the interior. Then he retched violently, clawed out a handkerchief and, holding it over his mouth, whirled to confront Madame Nefert.

  But he could not find words. Sanity came back. He breathed deeply, realized that a clever papier-maché image had almost destroyed his emotional balance.

  Madame Nefert had not moved. She was leaning forward, breathing in stertorous, rasping gasps. A faint, insidious odor crept into Carnevan’s nostrils.

  Someone said sharply, “Now!”

  The woman’s hand moved in a fumbling, uncertain gesture. Simultaneously Carnevan was conscious of a newcomer in the room. He whirled, to see, seated in the middle of the pentagram, a small huddled figure that was regarding him steadily.