Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Not exactly.” Smith cast a furtive glance at the curtains. “Your wife’s attorney called Fennel, but he was pretty skeptical. Turzee got rid of his skepticism through the Buckle. Naturally Fennel doesn’t know what it’s all about, but in his mind it’s boiled down to a hunch. He’s the kind of man who acts on hunches.”

  Denworth nodded. “I see. And I also see that you’re talking to gain time. Why?”

  “I—Turzee!”

  There was no answer. Denworth smiled. “All right. Another reason for me to hurry. I want some charms, Smith. Good, powerful charms. I want one to protect me from danger. I want one that’ll change my appearance. One to provide me with money—all I need! And a deadly, undetectable weapon.”

  “I won’t.” Smith’s weak chin tried to jut.

  “You will. Because you love me. Eh?” The other looked ready to cry. “Denworth, please! I can’t! I’m in a position of trust. I simply—”

  “First, protection.” Denworth ignored Smith’s pleas. “What’s over here?” He went to the workbench, holding the shopkeeper firmly by the arm. “This? What is it?”

  “A chameleon bead. It enables you to change color.”

  “No good,” Denworth said. “What’s this?” He picked up a ring in which three blue pearls were set. Smith’s face changed.

  “Nothing—”

  “Don’t lie. What power has it got?”

  “It . . . it’s the Protean Ring. You get three wishes a day.”

  “Three wishes!”

  “Specialized ones, I mean. You can change, your shape while you wear it.”

  Denworth slipped the ring on his finger. “You just wish? Aloud?”

  “Aloud or mentally. It doesn’t matter.” Smith chewed his lower lip. “Please don’t take it! It’s promised to Titania—”

  Denworth said, “I want to be a . . . a lion.” It worked. He no longer stood upright. His head was at the level of Smith’s middle. Screwing his head around, he took in a muscular, tawny body, finished off by a sinuous, tufted tail.

  Smith ran toward the door. With a bound Denworth headed him off. He roared softly.

  “Change me back,” he thought, and instantly was his former self. The ring was still on his finger. Two of the blue pearls had turned coal black.

  “That’s two wishes,” he nodded. “I still have one, eh?”

  Smith was shaking. “Yes. Till midnight. Then you have three more. The pearls will turn blue again. Denworth, don’t ask me for anything else. I mustn’t. I mustn’t. I’ll—”

  “Next, something to protect me against enemies,” Denworth said, unheeding. “What have you in stock?”

  “No—”

  The bracelet gleamed in the dying light. “Doesn’t the sigil work? Doesn’t it compel your love?”

  “Yes. Of course it works!” Smith said, with a flash of pride. “My charms always work. But please don’t ask me for anything more!”

  “He won’t,” a familiar whisper said ominously. “Or, at least, it won’t do him any good. Sorry I’m late, Wayland. I had to use the Buckle to guide Fennel here.”

  “Turzee!” Smith gasped. “Quick! Throw me into catalepsis!”

  “O.K. I’ll wake you up when the shooting’s over,” the pixy agreed.

  Denworth took a step forward, too late. Smith had gone stiff as a board. He fell over with a crash, eyes fixed and glaring, body rigid.

  Turzee tittered. “All right, wise guy,” he whispered. “I warned you. Serves you right, too! Now I’m going back Under the Hill, before you can figure out a way to use the sigil on me.”

  There was a swish of displaced air. Denworth stood staring at space. Then he glanced down at the motionless, corpselike figure of Wayland Smith.

  Well—

  He smiled crookedly. Turzee had come just a bit too late. In the shop were tables strewn with charms; Denworth could fill his pockets with them, escape, and discover their use later. He might return, in altered form, and interview Smith again. He might—

  Vistas opened before him. He had not failed, after all.

  He stepped through the curtains, eying the shadowy bulk of the show tables, and then dived back in a hurry. The front door was opening. Thumping footsteps sounded. Denworth, eyes narrowed, peered through the draperies.

  Fennel!

  Enough light filtered in to make the chief of police recognizable. Fennel had a gun in his hand, and two bulky figures followed him.

  “This is the place,” Fennel said softly. “The cab driver remembered driving Denworth here. Lucky I had a hunch to drop in at Miss Valentine’s apartment.”

  Hunch! Denworth cursed silently. Turzee, with his Telepathic Buckle, was responsible for that—hunch! Now—

  Silently he went to the back door. It was locked. He raced to Smith’s body and searched his pockets for keys.

  There were none.

  The footsteps were louder. Fennel’s voice said, “You in there, Denworth? If you are, come out with your hands up.”

  “Like hell,” Denworth whispered. His gaze flicked to the Protean Ring, with its two black and one blue pearls. One wish was left. He looked around the dark room. A shape in which he could hide, a certain disguise to evade the forthcoming search—

  The curtains shook. “Spider,” Denworth thought, and was conscious of the abrupt metamorphosis. He was tiny. Vast shadows loomed above him.

  He raced for cover. It wouldn’t do to be stepped on. But a spider was tiny, could hide in a crack till midnight, when he could use the magic ring again.

  His multiple legs flew. His faceted eyes gave him a curiously enlarged range of vision. Somehow he was conscious that both the Protean Ring and the Love sigil remained with him, invisible, but with their inherent powers unharmed by his physical change.

  The shadows took him. He found a cavernous crack and scuttled into it, waiting. He was safe now from the only danger that could threaten him, the danger of being crushed under foot. Even in this altered shape and size, he had no enemies—he was safe.

  In the darkness something stirred. It hesitated, and then moved swiftly toward Denworth. He went cold with sudden terror as he recognized it.

  Recognized—her.

  The female spider is larger and faster than the male, and she has a distressing habit that was well known to Denworth. As the spider raced toward him, mandibles gaping, he realized with sickening certainty what drew her so irresistibly to the mating which she alone would survive.

  The Love sigil had power over all living things.

  THE END.

  EARTH’S LAST CITADEL

  Second Installment of a Four-Part Serial

  Wandering in a lost and dying world, Alan Drake and his companions come face to face with the secrets of the Black Citadel.

  SYNOPSIS

  ALAN DRAKE of U.S. Army Intelligence has been assigned the difficult task of protecting a distinguished Scottish scientist named Sir Colin Douglas. At present the two men are stranded in the Tunisian desert, between the battle-lines; and Alan suspects that a plane winging overhead carries two of their pursuers, two Nazi hirelings whose cunning and ruthlessness he particularly fears. One is the beautiful Karen Martin, international spy; the other is a former American gangster named Mike Smith.

  But before their enemies appear, Alan and Sir Colin come upon a baffling phenomenon in the desert. It is a monstrous, strangely glowing sphere which appears to have risen out of the sand. While they are studying it, Karen Martin and Mike Smith steal tip to them, bent on making a capture; but that capture is never accomplished. For a door opens in the glowing sphere, and some alien power they cannot understand compells the four to approach that door and enter.

  The first to awake from a kind of drugged sleep, Alan Drake has no knowledge of how long he slept and no memory except a tantalizing, illusive remembrance of a Presence called the Alien which figured in his dreaming. When the others awake, they, too, seem to have some vague memory of the Alien; but their speculations are cut short when they step outside t
he sphere.

  They step out into a strange gray world—a world of twilight and unfeatured landscape, drifting with mist. Slowly they come to realize that they have been transported, without aging, into the last days of the dying Earth; and that terrifying discovery makes their bitter enmities seem unimportant.

  They must band together now, four people against a changed world; they must maintain a dose alliance. But Alan Drake cannot entirely forget how dangerous Karen and Mike Smith can be.

  In search of food, they set out across the twilight land. The first living thing they encounter is a flying creature with a human face and winged arms which soars high above them, keening a mournful cry. Further on they are passed by an enormous white worm wriggling into the mists.

  They are urged onward because they have caught sight of an enormous structure in the distance, a fortress composed of fantastic geometric forms. Eventually they reach it—to find that its towering black walls contain no apparent entrances. While they stand there, Mike Smith glimpses a white figure moving in the mists, and sets off in pursuit. He is stalking it when Alan hears running footsteps, feels something rush against him, and automatically closes his arms around it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Through the Dead Lands

  HIS first impression was one of incredible fragility. In the instant while mist still blinded him he knew that he held a girl, but a girl so inhumanly fragile that he thought her frantic struggles to escape might shatter the delicate bones by their very frenzy.

  Then the fog rolled back again and moonlight poured down upon them. Mike came panting up out of the mist, calling, “Did you catch it?” Karen and Sir Colin pushed forward eagerly, staring. Alan did not speak a word. He was looking down, speechless, at what he held in his arms.

  The captive’s struggles had ceased when light came back around them. She hung motionless in Alan’s embrace, head thrown back, staring up at him. Not terror, but complete bewilderment, made her features a mask of surprise.

  They were unbelievably delicate features. The very skull beneath must not be common bone, but some exquisite structure carved of ivory. Her face had the flawless, unearthly perfection of a flower. That was it—she had a flower’s delicacy, over-bred, painstakingly cultured and refined out of all kinship with the coarse human prototype. Even her hair seemed so fine that it floated upon the misty air, only settling now about her shoulders as her struggles ceased. The gossamer robe that had made her outlines waver so strangely in the fog fell in cobwebby folds which every breath fluttered.

  Looking down at her, Alan was more awestruck than he might have been had she been the wholly outre thing he expected. This delicate, hothouse creature could have no conceivable relation with the dead desert around them.

  She was staring up at him with that odd astonishment in great dark eyes fringed with silver lashes. And as the deep gaze locked with his, he remembered for a swimming moment the instant of mental probing in the Tunisian desert, before the world blanked out forever. But he knew now that it had been the Alien who probed their minds outside the ship. And the Alien could have no possible connection with this exquisitely fragile thing.

  Sir Colin’s rasping voice was saying, “She’s human! Would ye believe it? She’s human! That means we’re not alone in this dead world!”

  “Don’t let her go,” Karen cried excitedly. “Maybe she’ll lead us to food!”

  Alan scarcely heard them. He was watching the girl’s face as she lifted her eyes to the heights of blackness above them. Alan’s gaze swept up to the fantastic turrets. Nothing—nothing at all. But the girl stared as if she could see something up there invisible to them. Perhaps she could. Perhaps her senses were keener than theirs.

  And then suddenly, terrifyingly, Alan knew what it was she could see. There was a mysterious kinship indeed between her and the Alien. He could see nothing, but he felt invisible pressure about them all. A presence, intangible as the wind, filling the moonlit dark as it had filled the Tunisian valley by the ship. Something that watched from the great black heights—watched, but with no human eyes.

  KAREN said, “She’s not afraid any more. Notice that?”

  Alan looked down. The girl was not searching the haunted heights of the citadel any more; she was searching Alan’s face instead, and all the terror had vanished from those exquisitely frail features. It was as if that alien being of the dark had breathed a word to her, and all terror had vanished. Something, somehow, connected her with this monstrous citadel and the Alien.

  “Ye feel it too, eh?” Sir Colin’s voice was a burring hush, his accent strong. “Feel what?”

  “Danger, laddie. Danger. This isn’t our own time. Human motives are certain to have altered—perhaps a great deal. The two and two of the human equation don’t equal four any more. And—” He hesitated. “—we no longer have any gauge to know what’s human and what is not.” Mike Smith was staring coldly at the girl. “She’s human enough to eat food, anyway. It’s our job to find out what and where she gets it.”

  Karen said with a hint of hysteria in her voice, “Do we have to talk—here?” And she glanced up at the vast black structure towering over them. A malefic aura seemed to breathe out from that dull masonry, with its warped unearthly geometry and its abnormal refraction.

  It was curious, thought Alan, that the girl who so certainly shared an indefinable affinity with the Alien did not make them shudder too.

  Now she laid two hands like exquisite carvings in ivory upon Alan’s chest and gently pushed herself free. He let her go half doubtfully, but she did not move more than, a pace or two away, then stood waiting, a luminous query in her eyes.

  On an impulse Alan tapped his chest and pronounced his own name clearly, in the immemorial pantomime of the stranger laying a foundation for common speech. The girl’s face lighted up as if a lamp had been lit to glow through the delicate flesh. Alan was to learn very well that extravagant glow of interest when something touched a responding facet of her mind.

  “A-lanh?” She imitated the gesture. “Evaya,” she said, her voice like a tinkling silver bell.

  Mike Smith said impatiently, “Tell her we’re hungry.” The girl glanced at him uneasily, and when Sir Colin muttered agreement she stepped back a pace, her gossamer robe wavering up about her. Alan was the only man there she did not seem to fear a little.

  With surprising lack of success he tried to show her by gestures that they wanted food. Later he would learn why food and drink meant so little to this strange dweller in a dying world. Now he was merely puzzled. Finally, at random, he pointed away across the plain. She must have come from somewhere . . . There was no response on Evaya’s face. He tried again, until a glow of understanding lighted suddenly behind her delicate features and she nodded, the pale hair lifting to her motion.

  “Carcasilla,” she said, in that thin, trilling voice.

  “Which means exactly nothing,” Karen remarked. Evaya gave her a glance of dislike. She had been almost pointedly ignoring the warm, bronze beauty of the other girl. Sir Colin shook his head.

  “Maybe the place she came from.”

  “Not the citadel?”

  “I think not. She was going toward it when we saw her, remember.”

  “Why?”

  The Scotsman rubbed his beard. “I don’t know that, of course. I don’t like it. Superficially this girl seems harmless enough. But I have a strong feeling the citadel is not. And she seems to—to share a sort of affinity with it. See?”

  Evaya’s eyes had followed the lifted gaze of the others, but she seemed to feel none of their aversion to the monstrous structure. Her eyes held awe—perhaps worship. But Alan sensed, for a brief, shuddering second, a feeling of unseen eyes watching coldly.

  Perhaps Karen sensed it too. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  With careful sign-language Alan tried to tell Evaya what they wanted. She still hesitated, looking up at the unresponding heights. But presently she turned away and beckoned to Alan,
setting off in the direction from which she had come. By her look she did not greatly care if the others followed or not.

  “Fair enough,” Sir Colin muttered, swinging into step beside Alan.

  THEY plodded on again in the pale moonlight of this empty world, through monotonous waist-high mists. The dead lands around them slid by unchanging. Once they heard, far away, the faint thunder they had noticed before, and the ground trembled slightly underfoot. Evaya ignored it.

  Alan was growing tired. A faint throbbing in one arm had begun to annoy him, and glancing down, he realized with an almost vertiginous sense of time-lapse that the graze of a Nazi bullet still traced its unhealed furrow across his forearm. Nazis and bullets were dust on the face of the forgetful planet, but in the stasis of the ship even that wound had remained fresh, unchanging.

  Sir Colin’s deep voice interrupted the thought. “This girl,” the Scotchman said. “She’s no savage, Drake. You’ve noticed that? Obviously she’s the product of some highly developed culture. Almost a forced culture. Unnaturally perfect.”

  “Unnaturally?”

  “She’s too fragile. It’s abnormal. I think her environment must be completely shielded from any sort of danger. It may be—”

  “Carcasilla!” cried Evaya’s ringing sillier voice. “Carcasilla!” and she pointed ahead. And Alan saw that what he had taken for some time past to be the reflection of moonlight on a polished rock was no reflection at all. A glowing disc, twenty feet high, slanted along the slope of a low hillock a little way ahead.

  A disc? It was moonlight, or the moon itself, tropic-large, glowing with a lambent yellow radiance in the dust, like an immense flat jewel.

  Evaya walked lightly to the softly shining moon, stood silhouetted against it, waiting for the rest to follow her. And as she stood there in bold outline, the mist of her garments only a shadow around her, Alan realized suddenly that fragile though she might be, Evaya was no child. He knew a moment of curious jealousy as the smooth long limbs of an Artemis stood black against the moon-disc before them all, round and delicate with more than human perfection. All her lines were lovely. She had the little tilted breasts of the huntress goddess, and the moon behind her should have been crescent, not full.