Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  The radioatom brains were cured. Bronson’s mental explosion, with its disastrous effects, had finally run its course and been eliminated—by induction. Three days later a plane picked up Quayle and flew hack northward toward South America, leaving Ford to clean up final details and make a last check up.

  The atmosphere of the station had changed utterly. It was bright, cheerful, functional. The integrators no longer sat like monstrous devil-gods in a private hell. They were sleek, efficient tubes, as pleasing to the eye as a Brancusi, containing radioatom brains that faithfully answered the questions Crockett fed them. The station ran smoothly. Up above, the gray sky blasted a cleansing, icy gale upon the polar cap.

  Crockett prepared for the winter. He had his books, he dug up his sketch pad and examined his water colors, and felt he could last till spring without trouble. There was nothing depressing about the station per se. He had another drink and wandered off on a tour of inspection.

  Ford was standing before the integrators, studying them speculatively. He refused Crockett’s offer of a highball.

  “No, thanks. These things are all right now, I believe. The downbeat is completely gone.”

  “You ought to have a drink,” said Crockett. “We’ve been through something, brother. This stuff relaxes you. It eases the letdown.”

  “No . . . I must make out my report. The integrators are such beautifully logical devices it would be a pity to have them crack up. Luckily, they won’t. Now that I’ve proved it’s possible to cure insanity by induction.”

  Crockett leered at the integrators. “Little devils. Look at ’em, squatting there as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.”

  “Hm-m-m. When will the blizzard let up. I want to arrange for a plane.”

  “Can’t tell. The one before last didn’t stop for a week This one—” Crockett shrugged “I’ll try to find out, but I won’t make any promises.”

  “I’m anxious to get back.”

  “Well—” Crockett said He took the lift, went back to his office, and checked incoming calls, listing the questions he must feed into the integrators. One of them was important; a geological matter from the California Sub-Tech Quake Control But it could wait till all the calls were gathered.

  Crockett decided against another drink. For some reason he hadn’t fulfilled his intention of getting tight; ordinary relief had proved a strong intoxicant. Now, whistling softly, he gathered the sheaf of items and started back toward the Brainpan. The station looked swell, he thought. Maybe it was the knowledge that he’d had a reprieve from a death sentence. Only it had been worse than knowledge of certain death—that damned downbeat. Ugh!

  He got into the lift, a railed platform working on old-fashioned elevator principles. Magnetic lifts couldn’t be used near the integrators. He pushed the button, and, looking down, saw the Brainpan beneath him, the white cylinders dwarfed by perspective.

  Footsteps sounded. Turning, Crockett discovered Ford running toward him. The lift was already beginning to drop, and Crockett’s fingers went hastily toward the stop stud.

  He changed his mind as Ford raised his hand and exhibited a pistol. The bullet smashed into Crockett’s thigh. He went staggering back till he hit the rail, and by that time Ford had leaped into the elevator, his face no longer prim and restrained, his eyes blazing with madness, and his lips wetly slack.

  He yelled gibberish and squeezed the trigger again. Crockett desperately flung himself forward. The bullet missed, though he could not be sure, and his hurtling body smashed against Ford. The psychologist, caught off balance fell against the rail. As he tried to fire again. Crockett, his legs buckling, sent his fist toward Ford’s jaw.

  The timing, the balance, were fatally right. Ford went over the rail. After a long time Crockett heard the body strike, far down.

  The lift sank smoothly. The gun still lay on the platform. Crockett, groaning, began to tear his shirt into an improvised tourniquet. The wound in his thigh was bleeding badly.

  The cold light of the fluorescents showed the towers of the integrators, their tops level with Crockett now, and then rising as he continued to drop. If he looked over the edge of the platform. he could see Ford’s body. But he would see it soon enough anyway.

  It was utterly silent.

  Tension, of course, and delayed reaction. Ford should have got drunk. Liquor would have made a buffer against the violent reaction from those long weeks of hell. Weeks of battling the downbeat, months in which Ford had kept himself keenly alert, visualizing the menace as a personified antagonist, keying himself up to a completely abnormal pitch.

  Then success, and the cessation of the downbeat. And silence, deadly, terrifying—time to relax and think.

  And Ford—going mad.

  He had said something about that weeks ago, Crockett remembered. Most psychologists have a tendency toward mental instability; that’s why they gravitate into the field, and why they understand it.

  The lift stopped. Ford’s motionless body was about a yard away. Crockett could not see the man’s face.

  Insanity—manic-depressives are fairly simple cases. The schizophrenic are more complex. And incurable.

  Incurable.

  Dr. Ford was a schizoid type. He had said that, weeks ago.

  And now, Dr. Ford, a victim of schizophrenic insanity, had died by violence, as Bronson had died. Thirty white pillars stood in the Brainpan, cryptically impassive, and Crockett looked at them with the beginning of a slow, dull horror.

  Thirty radioatom brains, supersensitive, ready to record a new pattern on the blank wax disks. Not manic-depressive this time, not the downbeat.

  On the contrary, it would be uncharted, incurable schizophrenic insanity.

  A mental explosion—yeah. Dr. Ford, lying there dead, a pattern of madness fixed in his brain at the moment of death. A pattern that might be anything.

  Crockett watched the thirty integrators and wondered what was going on inside those gleaming white shells. He would find out before the blizzard ended, he thought, with a sick horror.

  For the station was haunted again.

  THE END.

  READER, I HATE YOU!

  “Reader, I hate you—but my career is in your hands. Give Superman Upjohn’s wife back to him—before I starve to death!”

  READER, I hate you.

  I don’t know what your name is—Joe or Mike or Forrest J—but I mean you, the little guy who buys all the magazines with Finlay pictures and Kuttner stories. The one who went into a bar somewhere a few months ago with a copy of Astonishing under his arm and ordered a Horse’s Neck. The one, in particular, who met Mr. Upjohn and stole his wife, in the form of a chartreuse crystal.

  I hope to high heaven you read this yarn. Mr. Finlay and I are making sure you do, insofar as we can. Why in hell did you take that crystal, anyhow? You should have known that Upjohn was tighter than an issue with an all-star lineup and a full quota of ads. It’s all your fault. I hate you. If you don’t give up your ill-gotten spoils, you’ll never see another Finlay pic or Kuttner story as long as you live—God help us both. And if I could get my hands on you—

  Didn’t you know you were talking to a superman?

  Anyhow, read this. Read about how you got us in trouble with Mr. Upjohn, of all people. You’ll remember him, unless that Horse’s Neck hit you too hard. A fat, bald guy with a button of a nose and mild blue eyes and platinum teeth. We met him in a bar too.

  IT WAS the Pen & Pencil, near Times Square. Finlay and I were discussing the future of science fiction.

  “It stinks,” I said.

  “What it needs,” he said, “are more artists like—”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and more writers like me.”

  “You,” Finlay said, looking at me. “You—”

  “So do you,” I came back. “Let’s have another Cuba Libre. The bubbles tickle my nose.”

  “You’re thinking of champagne.”

  “I’m dreaming of champagne,” I corrected. “My Uncle
Rupert has a cellar full of the best. I hope he dies.”

  Finlay looked interested. “Will he leave the champagne to you? Is that why you hope he dies?”

  “No,” I said sadly. “I just don’t like him. And I got a yarn to write by Saturday. Want to hear the plot?”

  “I’ve heard it,” Finlay growled, and investigated his Cuba Libre.

  “Not this one.”

  “I have. Often.” He licked his moustache reflectively. I twirled mine, hoping he’d notice. It’s longer.

  Then Mr. Upjohn came along and looked down at us. He was as I have described. You’ll remember, you rat.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but that bartender said you were connected with fantasy.”

  “How do you mean, ‘connected’ ?” Finlay asked, rearing back. However, I believe in being polite to strangers, who often read magazines anyhow, so I said that we were.

  “I know!” the button-nosed guy came back, quick as a flash. “Frank R. Paul and Leigh Brackett.”

  Finlay and I looked at each other. Then we had a drink together. He does not look at all like Frank Paul, who has a somewhat blunt-featured, happy-looking face. Finlay misses on both counts. Nor do I look like Leigh Brackett.

  “Listen,” I said, “Leigh Brackett isn’t a—”

  “Oh, don’t apologize,” he said in a friendly way. “I’m a superman myself.”

  “Why do these things have to happen, H. K.?” Finlay asked me.

  “V.F., I just don’t know,” I said. “But they do. We’ll have another round and maybe this superman will whiz off.”

  “No,” said the superman, “I won’t do that. Because you can help me. I’m trying to find two people—an artist and a writer.”

  “You mean a writer and an artist,” I said, stung. “Who are they?”

  “Virgil Finlay and Henry Kuttner,” the superman explained.

  Finlay choked on his drink.

  “They’re not real,” he pointed out hastily. “They’re figments. Just pseudonyms, that’s all.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he remarked. “Okay,” I said, “that’s us. Now what’s the gag?”

  He brightened considerably. “Really? Oh, good, good! I’m Mr. Upjohn. That’s not my name, of course, but when I’m on the outer crust of the Earth I assume a human title along with everything else.”

  “I know just how you feel,” I told him sympathetically. “It’s very, very seldom that I turn into a bat in Times Square.” Mr. Upjohn signaled the waiter and ordered a boilermaker. “I’m in trouble,” he said. “My wife has been stolen.” Finlay and I regarded each other. “No,” we said as one. “We didn’t do it. We have wives.”

  “Where’s your wife?” Finlay asked me as an afterthought.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I think she went shopping with your wife.”

  He agreed morosely. “It’s a feminine instinct.”

  I sighed. “Yes. While we sit here, sweating and slaving, working our fingers to the bone—”

  “We could take in stairs to wash,” Finlay suggested.

  “No. There’d be splinters,” I said tersely, and that ended the discussion.

  Mr. Upjohn broke in. “Let me tell you about it,” he pleaded. “If you don’t, I’m apt to destroy you, and I really don’t want to do that.”

  “Bah!” I said. “Am I a ninety-pound weakling?”

  “Yes,” Finlay said. “Go on, destroy him, Mr. Upjohn.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I’ll bet you can’t,” I jeered. “Nuts to you.”

  He pointed his index finger at my Cuba Libre.

  It vanished, glass and all. . . .

  “Sleight of hand,” I said, crawling out from under the table and resuming my chair. “It means nothing. However, we’ll listen to your story, purely out of courtesy. Bring back my drink while you’re at it.”

  “I can’t do that,” Mr. Upjohn said, “but I can order another.”

  “Will you pay for it?” I demanded shrewdly.

  “Yes,” he said, and did. I began to like Mr. Upjohn.

  “IT WAS this way,” he started. “I’m a superman, as I said. One of the few existing at the moment on Earth.”

  “There are others?” I asked.

  “Sure. You’ve read Odd John?”

  “Yes. Good writer, Stapledon.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Upjohn, “then you know that mutations are born all the time. Some of them are supermen, specimens of the more highly evolved race that one day will people the world. I’m one such. We’re born before our time, so we just hang around and wait for the rest of us to come along. We’re immortal.”

  Finlay put his head in his hands.

  Mr. Upjohn continued.

  “We’re marking time. We amuse ourselves. I built a spaceship, for example, in my cellar.” He looked depressed. “That was a bit of a mistake. I couldn’t get it out of the cellar.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, not really interested.

  “Oh, I went down,” he said. “A slight readjustment turned it into an earth-borer. This planet happens to be hollow, so I broke through the crust and came out in the inner world. A strange place. I visit it often.”

  “You do,” Finlay said. “Oh, God.”

  Mr. Upjohn smiled, and I noticed that he had platinum teeth. He saw my glance. “Recapped ’em myself. My own teeth look quite inhuman and I didn’t want to attract attention.”

  “I thought you said you changed your shape when you came to Earth,” I said.

  “Not my teeth, however. . . . Where was I? Oh, yes. There’s a form of silicate life there resembling human beings. They grow differently, though—from crystals. Very lovely, the women. Especially the ones from chartreuse crystals.”

  “What’s chartreuse?” I asked.

  Finlay kindly explained that it was a pale green. Mr. Upjohn went on.

  “Under the right radiations, the crystals bud and grow, much like human beings.”

  “Crystals?” I murmured.

  “Originally. The basic genes and chromosomes are atomically arranged in a crystalline pattern. The human organism originally is little else, you know. And after the initial stage is passed the development would seem quite normal to you.”

  “I’m sure of it,” I said hopelessly.

  “So, anyway, I chose one of the prettiest of the crystals to be my wife. I invented a machine for forced growth, went down to the interior of the Earth, and got the crystal I’d picked. And brought it—her—back with me. Then I celebrated. . . . I fear I celebrated too much.”

  “You mean you got drunk,” Finlay said, anxious to clarify every detail.

  “Yes,” Mr. Upjohn said, “I got drunk.” He sounded sad. “I went into a bar somewhere—”

  “Around here?”

  “I don’t know. I get around fast—teleportation. It might have been San Francisco or Detroit or Rochester. I haven’t the slightest idea. Yes,” Mr. Upjohn finished, “I was drunk. Liquor effects supermen a lot, somehow.”

  “Not only supermen,” I said, having another.

  “So I went into this bar, and ran into a little guy who kept ordering Horse’s „ Necks. I got acquainted with him. We talked. He had a magazine under his arm, and talked about that.”

  “What did he look like?” Finlay asked.

  Mr. Upjohn shook his head. “I haven’t the slightest idea. His face was a blur. Oh, I was drunk! Tsk! I let drop the fact that I was a superman, and he just laughed. Said there was no such thing. I picked up his magazine and said I could show him far more fantastic things than it had in it.”

  “And could you?” I inquired.

  “I wonder,” Mr. Upjohn muttered. “I said so, anyhow. I told him about the last time I took my ship to the interior of the Earth and one of the giants picked it up.”

  “Giants?”

  “Yes. There are a lot of them down there. They have horns and pointed ears. Anthropoid, rather, but not very intelligent. Savages, living in nomadic tribes. A
nyhow, as I say, this yellow one picked up my spaceship like a toy, and I had to climb out and burn his nose with my ray-gun before he let go. I told this—ah—fan about that. He didn’t believe it.”

  “Oh?” Finlay said.

  Mr. Upjohn sighed. “He said it was old stuff. And he showed me his magazine—it was called Astonishing, I remember. There was a girl on the cover with a lot of jewels floating around her—you painted it, Mr. Finlay—and it illustrated a story called The Crystal Circe.”

  “Me,” I said excitedly. “Me. I wrote it. How’d you like it?”

  “Oh, I didn’t read it,” Mr. Upjohn said. “I prefer realism myself. But this fan said he always bought magazines with Finlay pictures or Kuttner stories. Which, of course, is why—”

  THE WAITER brought another round. Presently out guest continued.

  “I’m ashamed to admit how tight I was, but I do recall telling the fan over and over about my adventure with the giant. And finally I showed him the chartreuse crystal—my wife. And—” Mr. Upjohn blushed—“I—ah—I gave it to him.”

  “Why?” Finlay asked.

  “I was drunk,” the superman said simply.

  “Well,” I said, “I gather you want your wife back before she hatches.”

  “She won’t hatch—not without the right radiations. The worst of it is I don’t remember where I met this fan or what his name is. Joe or Mike or Forrest J—something like that, I can’t recall. But he did have a copy of Astonishing, and he is a Finlay and Kuttner fan.”

  “Obviously a man of intelligence,” Finlay and Kuttner said as one.

  “I want my wife back,” Mr. Upjohn remarked.

  I looked at the platinum teeth. “That shouldn’t be very hard. You’re a superman.”

  “I’m not that super. We have our limitations. Now here’s the idea, gentlemen. I’ve got to get in touch with that fan and ask him to return my wife—the charteuse crystal. I’ve only one means of contact with him. You two, and the magazine.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “It’s simple enough. Mr. Kuttner, I’d like you to write this episode exactly as it’s happened. Mr. Finlay, I’d like you to illustrate the scene I’ve described. The fan, attracted by the picture, will buy the copy of Astonishing inevitably, and having read the circumstances, will return the crystal to me in care of the editor.”