Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Through the window Pete caught a glimpse of a bearded, hard-eyed face. The guards! Frantically he stared around. He might possibly talk himself out of this scrape, but in his hand he held the secret of the treasure. How to guard it?

  Maybe he could memorize it. No, it was written in Arabic. He’d have to hide it somewhere.

  As the door crashed down, Pete moved fast. The pellet of tar was still in his hand. He wadded the parchment into a tiny ball, molded the tar about it, and clicked open the locket that Cesare Borgia had given him. He thrust the little pellet into that compartment and pressed the locket shut, dropping it on the nearest table.

  Nesserdin picked it up, not realizing what Pete had done. “You dropped this, Messer Mancos.”

  There was no time for more. Guards poured into the room. Pete, hurled back by the onslaught of a burly soldier, had only time to gasp. “Hang on to it!” before he was borne down. From the corner of his eye he saw the puzzled Nesserdin slip the locket chain about his neck.

  Then the soldiers seized them and dragged them into the garden. In the distance the bonfire blazed. But a high wall shut out all sight of Cesare’s palace.

  Pete was dragged into a little clearing and stood up against a tree, a sword at his throat. Nesserdin was beside him, A ring of guards surrounded the pair, and a cloaked, slim figure stood facing them.

  “Shaykh Nesserdin!” a musical voice said. “At last I have found you away from my brother’s guards!”

  Pete gulped. He was staring at a ring on the cloaked figure’s left hand. He recognized it—the ring of Lucretia Borgia!

  IMPULSIVELY he asked the obvious question. Lucretia’s low laugh came.

  “What poison do I carry in this ring? Why, you shall soon know, varlet! A cup of wine—quickly!” One of the soldiers disappeared. Pete, tense and nervous, heard an ominous crack. It was a rope parting. The balloon, inflated with plenty of hot air, was tugging dangerously at its moorings. It looked bad.

  Lucretia Borgia came forward. “You need not expect rescue from Cesare. He is off on a false scent. Now I have you, Nesserdin, and I shall learn the location of your buried treasure.”

  “Not from me,” the Shaykh said grimly.

  “We shall see. As for this oaf—you have the wine? Good!” Lucretia took a goblet from a guard, clicked open the secret compartment in her ring, and let a tiny pellet fall from it into the wine, “You shall taste my poison, varlet, and see how well you like it.”

  Another rope parted in the distance. Pete took the proffered goblet and stood motionless, waiting.

  Lucretia snapped, “Drink!”

  Pete did not obey. He flung the wine into the face of his guard and dodged back and dived into the darkness of the trees. A pike sang past him. He ignored it. He had a job to do.

  How long would the balloon hold? Not much longer, he knew. It was like a game of hide and seek in the little wood, dodging through the shadows, evading Lucretia’s guards, searching for a rope that was not too taut. At last he found it. Hastily he untied it from the tree and knotted it around his waist. Then he slipped back to the clearing.

  A few of the guards were still there. Nesserdin stood fearlessly facing Lucretia. Pete took a deep breath, mustered up all his courage and circled the clearing, keeping to the shadows. It was a dangerous thing to do, but he made it without being observed.

  The climax came almost before he had expected it. He felt a warning tug at the rope about his waist, and simultaneously lunged forward. He was lifted into the air, but not before his sturdy arms had clamped around Nesserdin’s body. He held the Shaykh in a desperate, rat-trap grip. There was a flashing, swift glimpse of Lucretia’s startled face—and then the balloon broke free from its moorings and jerked Pete into the air, lifting him with a sickening, swift movement, far above the clearing in the wood.

  A pike hissed past. It missed by a mile. The moonlit palace dropped away. Milan dwindled beneath them, as the balloon rose.

  “What how?” Nesserdin asked. “That was a courageous rescue, Messer Mancos.”

  “Now,” said Pete, “we climb. I’ve got to let some air out of that balloon!”

  Ten minutes later they were in the basket, safe and sound, drifting eastward toward the Adriatic. Pete sighed with relief as he unbuckled the rope from his waist.

  “Okay, Pop,” he said. “We’ve made it. When we land, we ought to be in Turkey, if the winds hold. And you’ll be safe enough there.”

  “Thanks to you,” Nesserdin said gratefully.

  “Forget it,” Pete said generously. “Just gimme back my locket and—hey!” He stared at the empty, open locket the Shaykh handed over. “Where’s that pill?”

  “Lucretia took it,” Nesserdin explained blandly. “She thought it poison and put it in her ring. Was it poison, Messer Mancos?”

  “Lucretia put it in her ring!” Pete gasped. “Great jumping catfish! Nesserdin—quick! Tell me again where that treasure’s hidden!”

  But it was too late. Already Pete felt the giddy vertigo that heralded his return to the twentieth century. He groaned in sheer horror.

  Woosh!

  PETE opened his eyes. He was in Doctor Mayhem’s laboratory, as he had expected. The gaunt scientist was hovering over him, clucking uneasily and glancing at his watch.

  “Two-twenty-six, exactly,” he said. “Did you find out what poison Lucretia Borgia used, Pete? Tell me, quick!”

  “Bah!” Mr. Manx snarled. “Why couldn’t you have waited five minutes!”

  “The poison!” Mayhem demanded. “What was it? Did you find out?”

  Pete got up from the time-machine chair, drawing a deep breath. All too well he remembered the tarry, black little pill that his nephew had taken from the Borgia ring and swallowed.

  A pellet that he himself had rolled between his fingers in Nesserdin’s palace, a pill that Lucretia had thought was deadly poison and had kept in her ring until her death.

  “What was it?” Dr. Mayhem insisted. “Snake venom? Or strychnine?”

  “Neither one,” Pete growled. “You might as well tell Professor Aker to leave Joe alone. He doesn’t need a stomach pump.”

  “But he swallowed poison!”

  “Not Joe,” Pete said morosely. “He didn’t swallow poison. He just ate a million dollars!”

  FALSE DAWN

  The Fingers of Madness Thai Plucked at Callister’s Brain Thrust Forth from a Hand of His Own Design!

  EAST of Hollywood, in the mountains of the Angeles Forest, lived an extraordinarily dirty hermit who irritated Hays Callister like the jagged edge of a broken tooth. Figuratively, Callister kept touching the tooth with his tongue, though he used his binoculars to stare across the valley at the cave where the hermit lived.

  Quite often Callister wanted to murder the man.

  He stood at the door of his house and focused the glasses against strong morning sunlight. Yes, the hermit was there, having breakfast. The chef d’oeuvre seemed to be a gigantic bone, on which the hairy, filthy creature was gnawing avidly. Crouched in a patch of sunlight, he gnawed with an air of unselfconscious atavism, unkempt, ragged and utterly detestable.

  Suddenly the hermit turned and stared down the valley, his attention attracted by the flash of the binoculars in the light. Callister’s patrician, handsome face twisted wryly. He fled indoors and drank coffee royal, while he pondered over more pleasant matters. But the bestial face of the hermit kept intruding on his thoughts.

  It was a jarring note in the biologist’s life-pattern. Like Epicurus, Hays Callister had surrounded himself with reflections of his own culture and esthetic tastes. His fetish was the fact that he was civilized. His home, personally built and planned ten miles from the nearest settlement, was a warmly glowing jewel.

  The laboratory provided no jarring note, for it was functional. Callister was a Des Essientes without decadence, a man perfectly fitted to his adjusted environment. There were no false notes.

  Civilization and egotism—But there was no flaw in Callister. Sl
eek, catlike, physically perfect, he relaxed in his chair, savoring the subtle flavor of brandy, and smoked a cigarette. Tommy, his Filipino servant, appeared with the obtrusiveness of a shadow and replenished his master’s cup. Unmoral and completely obedient, Tommy was. That would help.

  Technically, the experiment wouldn’t be murder. But in a way, it was vivisection. Fastidiously Callister turned from the melodramatic thought; he was simply making use of a tool at hand.

  His partner, Sam Prendergast, was in the way. Loud, and blatant Prendergast, with that offensively hearty laugh of his. Hm-m. Sam, of course, was well fitted for the experiment.

  Personal dislike entered little into the matter. Prendergast had financed Callister, and thereafter felt that his money entitled him to “keep an eye on things.” It was impossible to tell the man to go to the devil, for new emergencies kept arising, and more money was continually needed.

  The whale, for example, and the Sirenia. The former experiment had almost failed, on account of the physical difficulties, but the manatee had altered surprisingly.

  The point was this: Prendergast owned a controlling interest in the process, and would interfere fatally. He wanted to form a company, endow a fountain, do God knew how many things. He was bursting with schemes. Since Callister preferred to work in his own way, it was necessary to get rid of Sam Prendergast.

  Once that was done, Callister could foist some other process upon the heirs. That was practical enough, for he had framed the partnership papers with an eye to the future. They were binding but vague. Only Prendergast himself could prove that the process mentioned was—

  Well, Callister had given it no name. There was no name which didn’t sound too fantastic.

  SAM PRENDERGAST came in.

  He was a bulky man, about forty, hearty-voiced and a lovely specimen of an extrovert. Dogs and small children loved him. Sinclair Lewis had vainly debunked his type. The odd part of it was that Sam was really a nice guy.

  He wore—of course—tweeds. His hair was unusually long. Callister’s searching eye noticed a slight jut to the jaw, an almost imperceptible recession of the frontal bone. And—was Sam stooping slightly this morning?

  “Hi,” said Prendergast. “Coffee. Swell. I’ve got a headache.” He relapsed into a chair and screamed for the Filipino.

  “Well, you insisted on coming up here—”

  “I like it. These last steps, the final experiments. That little monkey’s wonderful. And the penguin—wings!”

  “It’s fantastic,” Callister acknowledged. “I’m really afraid to release the news of the process yet. We’d be laughed at.”

  “Not with the proof we can offer,” Prendergast said stoutly.

  “Just the same, they might swallow the theory that we’d got a method of developing recessive characteristics, which isn’t true. But if we said we could reverse evolution—”

  “We’ve done it.”

  “But we can’t just say so. The ground has to be laid first. Uh—cut yourself?”

  Prendergast was fingering his chin. He nodded.

  “My beard’s got tough as nails. I’ve never seen it grow so fast.”

  “Ah,” said Callister thoughtfully, and was silent, eying the other man’s ears. The lobes were growing smaller, day by day.

  “I’m going home today,” Prendergast said, with sudden decision. “Letters piling up at the office—you know. A week is long enough.”

  “More coffee?” Callister suggested. When the Filipino came in, he gave the order, and made an unobtrusive signal with his hand.

  “As you like, Sam. The final experiments are pretty well finished. But I really don’t want you to release the news yet.”

  “Just the same, that’s one reason I’m going back to the city. I can’t wait to get the reporters up.”

  Callister flushed.

  “They’ll make us a laughingstock. They won’t wait to be shown the proof. It’d be much better to proceed gradually—”

  “But we’ve got the proof. We’ve grown wings on penguins and legs on manatees!”

  “Freaks, they’ll say. It takes time to perform the process. It has to gather momentum. The first week there’s very little change, you know.”

  “But the second week! Jelly!”

  “The basic unicellular organism. Sure. The life cycle’s paralleled in the foetus, in miniature, and we just reverse it.”

  Prendergast brooded.

  “Costs a fortune in food supplies,” he said.

  “The metabolism’s tremendous. Even with the refrigeration system we’ve got, the subjects are in a high fever all the time. As you know, Sam, it’s growth, reversed. The pattern’s already set, but we reverse the charge from positive to negative. Positive—evolution. Negative—retrogression. Eventually I’ll find some way of speeding up the positive charge. Perhaps creating super-beings.”

  “Not yet,” Prendergast said, with a little shudder, and Callister echoed the words.

  “No—not yet. We’re after the practical side just now. Probing all those abortive offshoots of nature that died out or were altered.”

  “That whale—”

  CALLISTER remembered. At San Pedro, in a roofed-in pool, the young cetacean had been subjected to the influences of the process. It had altered, the body growing less streamline, the mouth-seine disintegrating, teeth appearing. The tail, tadpolelike, grew smaller and disappeared. Strangest of all, there were, eventually, legs, fore and aft.

  They could not support the tremendous weight of the body, and the pool had to be half-drained. One day the thing had lurched forward and burst free. It was either dead now, or living an odd sort of life in the Pacific, a semi-fossil, halted in transition to its ancient status as a land-dweller.

  There had been other experiments, many of them. The most curious vanished traits had reappeared, organs fitted for an environment long since past—

  Tommy came in with more coffee. Prendergast sipped his fresh cup noisily.

  “Ape!” Callister thought, and then: “Oh, well.”

  It was simply a matter of doing things to the chromosomes or the pineal or the nerve-stuff. Partly it was working in the dark. The pattern was there, all set. It had begun with a unicellular sea-thing, which had developed Spots sensitive to light—cancerous, indeed, Callister theorized.

  Light irritated the amoeba, and so in self-protection it had developed eyes, which capitalized on the initial weakness and gave the creature vision. And so on. The ultimate distillate of mankind was compounded of several liqueurs poured in over a period of cyclic ages. Reverse the process.

  The primeval marsupial had a pouch but no tail. When it became arboreal, it got a tail. Then its brain developed, and there was caudal revision.

  Take the constant matrix, the biologic mold in which things are cast. Flood it with a negative instead of a positive current, concentrate that current strongly, and presently a tail would grow.

  The whale and the manatee had acquired their ancient legs. The penguin now had wings. The pony’s hoofs were three-toed—echippus. The sloth had grown, eating voraciously, and walked on four feet, instead of dangling from a branch. Some of the birds were now scaled.

  Yes, Callister thought, some of the ancient traits might be valuable. The most practical part of the magical ability to mold human organisms. The process was crude now. Delicacy would come later—cross-breeding, developing strength and intelligence and specialized abilities. Living robots, molded to any purpose.

  Meantime Prendergast was in the way. He was asleep now, as the drugged coffee took effect. Callister called the Filipino. With the silent little man’s aid, he carried Prendergast into a small prisonlike room near the laboratory. It had no furniture but a pallet and plumbing facilities, and there was an unbreakable glass observation window in the door, punctured with tiny holes.

  The room was air-conditioned and equipped with refrigerating apparatus. The ceiling was of plastic that made no barrier to the ray utilized in the process.

  Ca
llister stripped Prendergast and examined his body carefully. The man was unquestionably hairier. Each night he had been exposed to the process, and he subtly showed it. Callister made X-rays, took blood and skin samples, and checked them.

  The hide was tougher. The red corpuscles were present in larger quantity in the blood. Temperature, of course, was higher. The X-rays hinted rather than revealed. Bone is hard, even in an evolutionary crucible.

  Since Prendergast had been under treatment for a week, it was safe to step up the current. The changes would be rapid now. The man would degenerate, retracing the natural pattern, till he melted down to a blob of jelly. And what a curious sort of corpus delicti that would be as Exhibit A!

  IF Prendergast had only been, a bit more civilized, this wouldn’t be necessary. But personal animosity had entered into the question. Catlike, Callister shrank from his partner’s jovial familiarity. Prendergast was only a step above the degenerate hermit across the valley.

  Callister was civilized. A cut above the average. He regarded most of humanity with good-natured contempt, but kept his skirts clear.

  Presently he had lunch, smoked, strolled down the valley and back, and played a few Mozart records. Then he examined Prendergast through the peep-hole. The man was still unconscious, but the change was beginning to be unmistakable.

  He was hairier.

  Callister touched his own closely shaved cheek and went to the laboratory. Some hours later Tommy appeared.

  “Yes?”

  “He iss awake,” the Filipino lisped. “All right. I’ll see to that.” Prendergast was awake, all right, his face pressed against the glass panel. Not stupid, he grasped the implications immediately.

  “How much do you want, Callister?” Through the perforations in the window, his voice was clearly audible.

  “To let you go? Sorry. Too much of a risk. Besides, I want to watch this experiment.

  Prendergast licked his lips.

  “I’ll turn over the entire process to you.”

  Callister monkeyed with a turntable arrangement in the wall.