Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “The ice breaks up slowly. Presently you’ll be hungry enough. So will we all. And I’ve seen no food, except those flying things.”

  “They must eat. If we could follow them to water, there might be vegetation and animals.”

  Sir Colin shook his head. “There’d not be much water left by now. And its saline content would be greater than Salt Lake—enough to poison fish, unless they were adapted to living in it. The same for vegetation.”

  “But the flying things—”

  “Maybe, maybe. But what d’ye think they eat? Perhaps stuff we couldn’t touch.”

  “Maybe we’ll know, when we arrive.” Alan nodded toward the monstrous citadel outlined against the moon.

  “Whoever built that damned thing,” the scientist said, with a curious note of horror in his voice, “I doubt strongly if their digestive systems were at all akin to ours. Have you noticed how wrong that geometry is, laddie? Based on nothing earthly. See?”

  Alan squinted through the mists. The great fortress had grown almost mountain-huge now. Moonlight did not reflect from the vast dark surfaces at all, so that the thing remained almost in silhouette, but they could see that it was composed of geometric forms which were yet strangely alien, polyhedrons, pyramids, pentagons, globes, all flung together as if without intelligent design. And yet each decoration was braced as though against tremendous stresses, or against a greater gravitational pull. Only high intelligence could have reared that vast structure towering above the mists of the plain, but it grew clearer at every step that the intelligence had not been human.

  “The size of it—” Alan murmured, awe in his voice. Long before they reached the building they had been forced to strain their heads back to see the higher pinnacles. Now, as they neared the base of the walls, the sheer heights above them were vertiginous when they looked up.

  “Have you noticed,” Sir Colin said, “how difficult it is to tell whether we’re very close? No reflection of light at all. I wonder what substance it is.”

  THE little party drew together unconsciously as they crossed at last the stretch of sandy dust which lay at the foot of the black citadel wall. They could see now that the building was apparently without windows. The dry gray soil ran up without a break to its base. They paused before a black wall that rose for a hundred feet before it jutted out into a mad array of geometric designs.

  Sir Colin put out a wondering hand toward the dead blackness of the wall.

  “Eroded,” he murmured. “Eroded—and God knows there must be little rainfall here. How old must it be?”

  Alan touched the wall. It was smooth, cold, hard, seemingly neither stone nor metal.

  “Notice how little light it reflects,” Sir Colin said. “Very low refractive index-—seems to absorb the moonlight.”

  Yes, the black wall drank in the moonlight. The pale rays seemed to flow into that cliff like a shining river into a cavern. As Alan stared, it seemed to him that he was looking into a tunnel—a black, hollow emptiness that stretched inimitably before him, starless as interstellar gulfs.

  He knew an instant of the same vertigo he had felt when he stepped out of the dead darkness of the room in the ship. And—yes, these darknesses were related. Each of them a negation, cancelling out light and sound. This wall was something more than mere structural substance. It might not even be matter at all, as we know it, but something from outside, where the laws of earthly physics are suspended or impossibly altered.

  Mike’s hand was on his gun-butt. “I don’t like this,” he said, the full lips drawn back against his teeth in a feline snarl.

  “No more do I,” Sir Colin said quietly. He was rubbing his bearded chin and looking up and down along the blank base of the wall. “I doubt if there’s a way in—for us.”

  “There is no way,” Alan heard his own voice saying with a timbre he did not recognize as his. “There is no door for us. The entrance is—there?” He tilted his head back and stared up at those tumbled pinnacles above.

  From far away he heard Sir Colin’s sharp, “Eh? Why d’ye say that, laddie?”

  He looked down and into three pairs of keen, narrowed eyes that stared at him without expression. A sudden shock of distrust for all three of his companions all but rocked him back on his heels in that sudden, wordless moment. What did they remember?

  For himself, he could not be sure now just what flash of memory had brought those strange words to his mind. He forced his voice to a normal tone and said through stiff lips, “I don’t know. Thinking of the flying thing, I suppose. There certainly aren’t any doors here.”

  “Well, we’ll have to look for one then,” Karen decided after a moment of silence.

  “Walk around that whole building?” demanded Sir Colin.

  “Well, there must be some way in.”

  “Maybe not for us.” It was Mike Smith who said that, in a voice that was almost sullen. “This place—I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t be silly, Mike,” Karen told him.

  And all the while, beneath the comparative commonplaces they were speaking, Alan wondered if a deep tide of awareness was running among the three of them, shutting him out.

  As for entering the building—he understood Mike Smith’s feeling poignantly. If even Mike could feel it, then there must be something more than imagination to the strange, sick horror that rose like a dark tide in his mind whenever he thought of entering. Why should he behave like an hysterical child, afraid of the unknown? Perhaps because it was not entirely unknown to him. He shut his eyes, trying to think. Did he know what lay within the black citadel?

  No. No pictures came. Only the dim thought of the Alien, and a very certain sense that the colossal building housed something unspeakable.

  Mike Smith’s urgent whisper broke into his bewildering memories.

  “Someone’s coming.”

  He opened his eyes. Waist-deep the white mists swirled about them. In the distance, floating slowly toward the black citadel, a quasi-human figure moved through the fog.

  “One of those bird-things?” Mike breathed, straining eagerly toward the distant shape. “I’ll get it—”

  “Mike!” Karen cautioned.

  “I won’t shoot it. I’ll just see.it doesn’t get off the ground.” He crouched into the mists and slid away like a smoothly stalking cat, vanishing into the grayness.

  Alan strained his eyes after the moving figure. It was not, he thought, a bird-creature. His heart was pounding with the excitement of finding something other than themselves moving in human shape through this dust of all humanity. The distant figure flowed curiously in all its outlines—as if, perhaps, it were not wholly human.

  A big dark figure rose suddenly beside it. Mike, with outstretched arms. The gossamer shape sprang away from him with a thin, clear cry like a chord struck from vibrating strings. All its filmy outlines streamed away as it whirled toward the citadel and the watching humans.

  A wind made the mists swirl confusingly. They heard Mike yell, and through the rolling dimness saw his dark shape and the pale, mist-colored shape dodging and running through the fog. It was like watching a shadow-play. Mike was not overtaking his quarry, but they could see that he was driving it closer and closer to them.

  Alan leaned forward, avid excitement flaming through him. Here was an answer, he told himself eagerly—a tangible, living answer to all the riddles they could not solve. What manner of being dwelt here in this last death of the world?

  Suddenly out of the depths of a mist-wave that had rolled blindingly over them he heard a soft thudding and in the gray blindness something rushed headlong against him.

  Automatically his arms closed about it.

  To Be Continued in the Next Issue

  OPEN SECRET

  NOTHING secret at all. Walk in their office any time. Only—somehow the word couldn’t be spread, the world couldn’t understand—

  Mike Jerrold was the only passenger in the elevator when the operator passed out. He saw the man gasp, double up
in pain, and stab out blindly at the stop button. Pressure against his soles decreased. Jerrold jumped forward and tried to catch the falling man, but didn’t quite make it.

  The lips looked cyanosed; that meant heart attack. Jerrold’s degree was for psychiatry, not medicine, so he was at a loss. Scattered bits of half-forgotten first aid whirled into his mind and out again like a kaleidoscope. He stared around, realizing abruptly the shortcoming of an elevator aside from its functional use. Not that it was a bad elevator, per se. It was quite modern, in one of New York’s best skyscrapers, and, once you were inside and the door closed, you had no way of knowing, till it opened again, whether you were ten, twenty, or thirty stories above ground level. A grab-bag sort of arrangement, though without the element of chance. The random factor could not enter into the question—as long as the operator controlled the elevator.

  He’d passed out now. Jerrold grimaced, touched a button by guesswork, and felt the cage begin to rise again. The fifteenth floor, it was. In a moment the door slid noiselessly open as the car settled pneumatically into position. Jerrold looked at a plainly furnished office with a receptionist’s window in the farther wall. There was a door near it, a brown carpet on the floor, but no chairs. Nor was the receptionist visible.

  Jerrold started out and then, struck by a new thought, paused to drag the operator with him. He vaguely mistrusted elevators. Sometimes they started by themselves. He went to the window and said, “Hey.” Nobody answered. There was no switchboard; just a comfortable chair, a desk, and a pile of magazines. Jerrold turned to the door and opened it. It swung inward, away from him. He was facing a robot.

  The robot, roughly man-shaped, was sliding—he had wheels instead of feet—back and forth on the other side of a table covered with a relief map of a section of Manhattan Island, from about Fiftieth Street to the Village, and bounded by the rivers. Twinkling dots of light glimmered like fireflies all over the map. The robot had four arms, each extended into innumerable wiry cilia. He, or it, would touch one of these wires to each light that flashed, keeping that position for a variable period, sometimes a split second, sometimes much longer. The robot had no face, but a grid of shimmering wires. It was certainly alive, certainly intelligent; and Jerrold’s dark, ugly face went gray. Through an open door he could see another robot working presumably at a similar task.

  He backed up, slowly and noiselessly. The robot ignored him. He closed the door. Instantly he had a feeling of illusion.

  The receptionist’s window was still vacant. Jerrold pulled the operator back into the elevator and thumbed the main-floor button. The car dropped sickeningly. Jerrold felt an uneasiness in his stomach. He forced himself to think only about the man at his feet.

  When the panel slid open, Jerrold shouted at the starter and relinquished his charge to more capable hands. After that, he went into another elevator and this time completed his trip to the twenty-first floor, where Dr. Rob Vaneman had his offices. The girl said to go right in.

  Vaneman was a big man, red-faced, bluff, gray-haired, and overwhelming. He boomed jovially at Jerrold, shook hands, and dragged out a bottle. “No,” he said, putting it back. “Not yet. Let’s get the business over with first, eh, Mike? Strip down and let me check that blood pressure of yours.”

  Jerrold obeyed. “I just got in town yesterday. Research for the U. Be here a month or so, I guess. How’s tricks?”

  “Fair enough. They keep me busy. I moved lately, you know.”

  “No, I—How’s the blood pressure?”

  “Up a bit. Let’s try your heart.” Vaneman listened and glanced at Jerrold sharply. “Been dodging taxicabs?”

  “I’ve been—I ran into something funny. Tell you later. Let’s get this done first.” Silently Vaneman completed the examination. “You’re sound. You didn’t need to come to New York for a check-up, Mike.”

  “I didn’t. Research. I told you. But while I’m here—you know my metabolism and my allergies.” Jerrold adjusted his tie. “Who’s got the fifteenth floor in this building?”

  “I dunno.” Vaneman relaxed with a grunt, poured drinks, and lit a cigar. “We’re not exactly next-door neighbors. Look on the board downstairs, or ask the starter. Why?”

  “I got off there just now. What I saw—” Jerrold explained. “Don’t tell me I made a mistake. I know the difference between a robot and a . . . a gadget.”

  The physician grinned. “Do you? It takes a robot to fire the big navy guns—or what amounts to one. You sound medieval. Trot off to the Westinghouse labs and you’ll realize that science has come a long way in a few years. My diagnosis is spinach.”

  Jerrold said stubbornly, “Those weren’t machines. They were robots. Their coordination wasn’t mechanical. One look convinced me.”

  “Then you’d better take another look.” The Dictograph buzzed. Vaneman listened, spoke briefly, and sighed. “One more patient, and I’ll be through for today. Want to meet me in the bar downstairs?”

  “Right.” Jerrold got up. “See you later, Rob. We’ve a lot to talk about.”

  “Six months’ worth of accumulated trivia. Including robots. Saluda.”

  Jerrold went out and took the elevator downstairs to the bar. He had a drink. Then he searched for the address board and looked in vain for any firm listed on the fifteenth floor. The starter supplied a little more information.

  “That’s occupied by William Scott & Co., Research Engineers.”

  “Thanks,” Jerrold said, and found a telephone book. William Scott & Co. wasn’t listed. He fortified himself with another sidecar and took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, unable to suppress a mad feeling that the entire story might have softly and suddenly vanished away. “Like a Boojum,” he murmured, evading the glance of the operator. “Uh . . . fifteen, please.”

  But the Snark wasn’t a Boojum. The reception office was unchanged, and this time a girl was sitting beyond the window, a pretty redhead with pleasant green eyes and a smartlooking dress. The green eyes opened slightly, Jerrold noticed. Was the presence of a visitor that surprising?

  “Good morning,” she said. “Can I help you?” Her voice was low-pitched and unaffected.

  Jerrold heard the elevator door slip shut behind him. He walked forward and leaned his elbows on the window ledge. “Maybe,” he said. And stopped.

  What the hell could he ask?

  “Do you have robots here?” he said at last.

  “Yes,” the girl told him.

  So that was that. Jerrold looked at her blankly, “Intelligent robots?”

  “What would you like?” she inquired, quite pleasantly.

  Jerrold felt snubbed. He glanced at the cryptically closed door. Beyond it—

  He was definitely afraid of what lay beyond it. They might be listening even now.

  “I’d like to have a drink with you,” he said, “if you don’t mind. My name’s Mike Jerrold. I’m a psychiatrist. I can give you references.” He grinned. “May I offer drinks, dinner, or both?”

  He expected her to refuse, but she didn’t. The green eyes showed humor.

  “Thanks, Mr. Jerrold. But I work here—till five thirty.”

  “May I come back—at five thirty?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m Betty Andrews. Good-by.” She turned back to her magazine. Jerrold nibbled his lower lip and retreated, ringing for the elevator. The office was quite silent. The robots seemed to be noiseless.

  The dreamlike quality of the situation impressed him violently as he rode the car down. Seeing the robots was shocking enough. But the girl’s casual admission that they existed was subtly horrible. It was like a woolly dog story, like the yarn about the man who, discovering a talking horse, mentioned the matter to its owner, and was told, “Oh, my horse tells that story to everybody who’ll listen.” As a gag it was funny. In real life it was not at all amusing.

  Dr. Vaneman was waiting in the bar. He leered at Jerrold over the rim of his glass. “Find your robots?” he inquired ironically.

  “Yeah. The
receptionist up there admitted it. Well?”

  “She has a sense of humor. I hope you’re not serious, Mike. Do I have to waste half an hour talking logic to you? I prefer illogic. It’s more restful.”

  “Talk all you want,” Jerrold growled, waving to the waiter. “I just happen to be firmly convinced that you’ve got robots on the fifteenth floor of this building, right here in New York.”

  “Better than termites, anyway,” Vaneman said into his highball. “What harm can robots do? They’re useful little folk, from all I hear.”

  “Could be. Nobody’s ever made a real robot—one with a thinking brain. Unless—” Jerrold frowned. “I wish I knew who’s running those robots and why. The human colloid brain’s physically limited, Rob. It’s incapable of pure, disciplined thought, because it is in a human body. A robot could lay out a thought matrix and carry it through to a conclusion you or I couldn’t hope to approach.”

  “So they could square a circle. Let ’em. First, I don’t believe there are robots upstairs. Second, if there were, what of it? Third, I want another drink.”

  “Your damned complacence,” Jerrold said. “You’re molded by your environment so perfectly you’ve come to believe implicitly in that environment. You’ll admit the existence of the impossible, but you’ll rationalize it till it seems possible. If the Empire State disappeared overnight, you’d say it was a quick job of moving.”

  “The Empire State couldn’t disappear overnight.”

  “True enough. That’d be much too obvious. If supermen existed now, they wouldn’t do anything as overt as making a building vanish. Why should they tip their hands?”

  “Mike,” Vaneman said with slow emphasis, “tell me this: How could a lot of robots live on the fifteenth floor without anyone knowing about it?”

  “Who’d know about it?”

  “There are thousands of people riding those elevators daily—”

  “Yeah,” Jerrold said. “They ride ’em. Up and down. But not to the fifteenth floor. Do you realize, Rob, that once you’re in one of the elevators, you can’t look out till you reach the floor you want? Plenty of people go right past the fifteenth floor—past! See? It’s a perfect camouflage.”