Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Found it?” the inspector asked. Mahoney blinked. “Huh? I mean the one with the funny fingerprints—”

  “I know what you mean. Have you found it or haven’t you?”

  “But it’s in the morgue!”

  “It was,” the inspector said, “up to about ten minutes ago. Then it was snatched. Right out of the morgue.” Mahoney let that soak in briefly, while he licked his lips. “Inspector,” he said presently, “I’ve got another body for you. A different one, this time. I just found it in Gallegher’s back yard. Same circumstances.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. A hole burned through the chest. And it looks like Gallegher.”

  “Looks like him—What about those prints I told you to check?”

  “I did. The answer is yes.”

  “It couldn’t be.”

  “Wait’ll you see the new corpse,” Mahoney growled. “Send the boys over, will you?”

  “Right away. What sort of crazy business—”

  The connection broke. Gallegher passed drinks and collapsed on the couch, manipulating the liquor organ. He felt giddy.

  “One thing,” Grandpa said, “you can’t be tried for murdering that first body. If it’s been stolen, there’s no corpus delicti.”

  “I’ll be—That’s right!” Gallegher sat up. “Isn’t that so, Mahoney?”

  The detective hooded his eyes. “Sure. Technically. Only don’t forget what I just found outside. You can be gassed for his murder, once you’re convicted.”

  “Oh.” Gallegher lay back. “That’s right. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “That’s your story.”

  “O.K. I’m sticking to it. Wake me up when the fuss is over. I’ve got some thinking to do.” Gallegher slipped the siphon into his mouth, adjusted it to a slow trickle, and relaxed, absorbing cognac. He shut his eyes and pondered. The answer eluded him.

  Abstractedly Gallegher realized that the room was filling, that the routine was gone over again. He answered questions with half his mind. In the end, the police left, bearing the second body. Gallegher’s brain, stimulated by alcohol, was sharper now. His subconscious was taking over.

  “I got it,” he told Grandpa. “I hope. Let’s see.” He went to the time machine and fiddled with levers. “Oh-oh. I can’t shut it off. It must have been set to a definite cycle pattern. I’m beginning to remember what happened last night.”

  “About foretelling the future?” Grandpa asked.

  “Uh-huh. Didn’t we get in an argument about whether a man could foretell his own death?”

  “Right.”

  “Then that’s the answer. I set the machine to foretell my own death. It follows the temporal line, catches up with my own future in articulo mortis, and yanks my body back to this time sector. My future body, I mean.”

  “You’re crazy,” Grandpa suggested.

  “No, that’s the angle, all right,” Gallegher insisted. “That first body was myself, at the age of seventy or eighty. I’m going to die then. I’ll be killed, apparently, by a heat ray. In forty years from now or thereabouts,” he finished thoughtfully. “Hm-m-m. Cantiell’s got that ray projector—”

  Grandpa made a face of distaste. “What about the second corpse, then? You can’t fit that in, I bet.”

  “Sure I can. Parallel time developments. Variable futures. Probability lines. You’ve heard that theory.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well—it’s the idea that there are an infinity of possible futures. If you change the present, you automatically switch into a different future. Like throwing a switch in a railroad yard. If you hadn’t married Grandma, I wouldn’t be here now. See?”

  “Nope,” Grandpa said, taking another drink.

  Gallegher went ahead, anyway. “According to pattern a, I’m going to be killed by a heat ray when I’m seventy or so. That’s one variable. Well, I brought back my dead body along the temporal line, and it appeared in the present. And, naturally, it altered the present. Originally, in pattern a, there was no place for the eighty-year-old dead body of Gallegher. It was introduced and changed the future. We automatically switched into another time track.”

  “Pretty silly, eh?” Grandpa mumbled.

  “Shut up. Grandpa. I’m working this out. The second track—pattern b—is in operation now. And in that track I’m going to be killed by a heat ray when I’m about forty-five. Since the time machine’s set to bring back my body the minute it’s killed, it did just that—materialized my forty-five-year-old corpse. At which the eighty-year-old corpse vanished.”

  “Hah!”

  “It had to. It was nonexistent in pattern b. When pattern b jelled, pattern a simply wasn’t there any more. Likewise the first corpse.”

  Grandpa’s eyes lit up suddenly. “I get it,” he said, smacking his lips. “Clever of you. You’re going to plead insanity, eh?”

  “Bah,” Gallegher snarled, and went to the time machine. He tried vainly to turn it off. It wouldn’t turn off. It seemed to be fixed irrevocably in its business of materializing Gallegher’s future probable corpses.

  What would happen next? Temporal pattern b had taken over. But the b corpse wasn’t intended to exist in this particular present. It was an x factor.

  And b plus x would equal c. A new variable, and a new cadaver. Gallagher cast a harried glance into the back yard. As yet, it was empty. Thank Heaven for small mercies.

  At any rate, he thought, they couldn’t convict him of murdering himself. Or could they? Would the law about suicide hold? Ridiculous. He hadn’t committed suicide; he was still alive.

  But if he was still alive, he couldn’t be dead. Utterly confused, Gallegher fled to the couch, gulped strong drink, and longed for death. He foresaw a court battle of impossible contradictions and paradoxes—a battle of the century. Without the best lawyer on Earth, he’d be doomed.

  A new thought came, and he laughed sardonically. Suppose he were to be convicted of murder and gassed? If he died in the present, his future corpse would instantly vanish—naturally. No corpus delicti. Inevitably—oh, very inevitably—he would be vindicated after he died.

  The prospect failed to cheer him.

  Reminded of the need for action, Gallegher yelled for the Lybblas. They had got into the cookie jar, but responded guiltily to his summons, brushing crumbs from their whiskers with furry paws. “We want milk,” the fattest one said. “The world is ours.”

  “Yes,” said another, “we’ll destroy all the cities and then hold pretty girls for—”

  “Leave it,” Gallegher told them tiredly. “The world will wait. I can’t. I’ve got to invent something in a hurry so I can get some money and hire, a lawyer. I can’t spend the rest of my life being indicted for my future corpses’ murders.”

  “You talk like a madman,” Grandpa said helpfully.

  “Go away. Far away. I’m busy.”

  Grandpa shrugged, donned a topcoat, and went out. Gallegher returned to his cross-questioning of the three Lybblas.

  They were, he found, singularly unhelpful. It wasn’t that they were recalcitrant; on the contrary, they were only too glad to oblige. But they had little idea of what Gallegher wanted. Moreover, their small minds were filled, to the exclusion of all else, with their own fond delusion. The world was theirs. It was difficult for them to realize that other problems existed.

  Nevertheless, Gallegher persevered. Finally he got a clue to what he wanted, after the Lybblas had again referred to a mental hookup. Such devices, he learned, were fairly common in the world of the future. They had been invented by a man named Gallegher, long ago, the fat Lybbla said stupidly, not grasping the obvious implication.

  Gallegher gulped. He had to make a mental hookup machine now, apparently, since that was in the cards. On the other hand, what if he didn’t? The future would be changed again. How was it, he wondered, that the Lybblas hadn’t vanished with the first corpse—when pattern a had switched to variable b?

  Well, the question wasn’t unanswerable. Whether
or not Gallegher lived his life, the Lybblas, in their Martian valley, would be unaffected. When a musician strikes a false note, he may have to transpose for a few bars, but will drift back into the original key as soon as possible. Time, it seemed, trended toward the norm. Heigh-ho.

  “What is this mental hookup business?” he demanded.

  They told him. He pieced it out from their scatterbrained remarks, and discovered that the device was strange but practical. Gallegher said something about wild talents under his breath. It amounted to that.

  With the mental hookup, a dolt could learn mathematics in a few moments. The application, of course, would require practice—mental dexterity must be developed. A stiff-fingered bricklayer could learn to be an expert pianist, but it would take time before his hands could be limbered up and made sufficiently responsive. However, the important point was that talents could be transferred from one brain to another.

  It was a matter of deduction, through charts of the electrical impulses emitted by the brain. The pattern varies. When a man is asleep, the curve levels out. When he is dancing, for example, his subconscious automatically guides his feet—if he’s a sufficiently good dancer. That pattern is distinctive. Once recorded and recognized, it can be traced later—and the factors that go to make up a good dancer traced, as by a pantograph, on another brain.

  Whew!

  There was a lot more, involving memory centers and so forth, but Gallegher got the gist of it. He was impatient to begin work. It fitted a certain plan he had—

  “Eventually you learn to recognize the chart lines at a glance,” one of the Lybblas told him. “It—the device—is used a great deal in our time. People who don’t want to study get the knowledge pumped into their minds from the brains of noted savants. There was an Earthman in the Valley once who wanted to be a famous singer, but he was tone-deaf. Couldn’t carry a note. He used the mental hookup, and after six months he could sing anything.”

  “Why six months?”

  “His voice wasn’t trained. That took time. But after he’d got in the groove he—”

  “Make us a mental hookup,” the fat Lybbla suggested. “Maybe we can use it to conquer Earth.”

  “That,” Gallegher said, “is exactly what I’m going to do. With a few reservations—”

  Gallegher televised Rufus Hellwig, on the chance that he might induce the tycoon to part with some of his fortune, but without success. Hellwig was recalcitrant. “Show me,” he said. “Then I’ll give you a blank check.”

  “But I need the money now,” Gallegher insisted. “I can’t give you what you want if I’m gassed for murder.”

  “Murder? Who’d you kill?” Hellwig wanted to know.

  “I didn’t kill anybody. I’m being framed—”

  “So am I. But I’m not falling, this time. Show me results. I make you no more advances, Gallegher.”

  “Look. Wouldn’t you like to be able to sing like a Caruso? Dance like Nijinsky? Swim like Weissmuller? Make speeches like Secretary Parkinson? Make like Houdini?”

  “Have you got a snootful!” Hellwig said ruminatively, and broke the beam. Gallegher glared at the screen. It looked as though he’d have to go to work, after all.

  So he did. His trained, expert fingers flew, keeping pace with his keen brain. Liquor helped, liberating his demon subconscious. When in doubt, he questioned the Lybblas. Nevertheless the job took time.

  He didn’t have all the equipment he needed, and ’vised a supply company, managing to wangle sufficient credit to swing the deal on the cuff. He kept working. Once he was interrupted by a mild little man in a derby who brought a subpoena, and once Grandpa wandered in to borrow five credits. The circus was in town, and Grandpa, as an old big-top enthusiast, couldn’t miss it.

  “Want to come along?” he inquired. “I might get in a crap game with some of the boys. Always got on well with circus people, somehow. Won five hundred once from a bearded lady. Nope? Well, good luck.”

  He went away, and Gallegher returned to his mental hookup device. The Lybblas contentedly stole cookies and squabbled amicably about the division of the world after they’d conquered it. The machine grew slowly but inevitably.

  As for the time machine itself, occasional attempts to turn it off proved only one thing: it had frozen into stasis. It seemed to be fixed in a certain definite pattern, from which it was impossible to budge it. It had been set to bring back Gallegher’s variable corpses. Until it had fulfilled that task, it stubbornly refused to obey additional order. “There was an old maid from Vancouver,” Gallegher murmured absently. “Let’s see. I need a tight beam here—Yeah. She jumped on his knee with a chortle of glee—If I vary the receptor-sensibility on the electromagnetic current—Hm-m-m—And nothing on Earth could remove ’er. Yeah, that does it.”

  It was night. Gallegher hadn’t been conscious of the passing of hours. The Lybblas, bulging with filched cookies, had made no complaint, except occasional demands for more milk. Gallegher had drunk steadily as he worked, keeping his subconscious to the fore. He hadn’t realized till now that he was hungry. Sighing, he looked at the completed mental hookup device, shook his head, and opened the door. The back yard lay empty before him.

  Or—

  No, it was empty. No more corpses just yet. Time-variable pattern b was still in operation. He stepped out and let the cool night air blow on his hot cheeks. The blazing towers of Manhattan made ramparts against the night around him. Above, the lights of air traffic flickered like devil fireflies.

  There was a sodden thump near by. Gallegher whirled, startled. A body had fallen out of empty air and lay staring blankly up in the middle of his rose garden. His stomach cold, Gallegher investigated.

  The corpse was that of a middle-aged man, between fifty and sixty, with a silky dark mustache and eyeglases. Unmistakably, though, it was Gallagher. A Gallegher aged and altered by time-variable c—c, now, not any more—and with a hole burned through the breast by a heat-ray projector.

  At that precise moment, Gallegher realized, the corpse must have vanished from the police morgue, like its predecessor.

  “Uh-huh. In time-pattern c, then, he wasn’t to die till he was over fifty—but even then a heat ray would kill him. Depressing. Gallegher thought of Cantrell, who’d taken the ray projector, and shivered slightly. Matters were growing more and more confusing.

  Well, presently the police would arrive. In the meantime, he was hungry. With a last shrinking glance at his own dead, aged face, Gallegher returned to the laboratory, picked up the Lybblas on the way, and herded them into the kitchen, where he fixed a makeshift supper. There were steaks, luckily, and the Lybblas gobbled their portions like pigs, talking excitedly about their fantastic plans. They’d decided to make Gallegher their Grand Vizier.

  “Is he wicked?” the fat one demanded.

  “I don’t know. Is he?”

  “He’s gotta be wicked. In the novels the Grand Vizier’s always wicked. Whee!” The fat Lybbla choked on a bit of steak. “Ug . . . uggle . . . nip! The world is ours!”

  Deluded little creatures, Gallegher mused. Incurable romanticists. Their optimism was, to say the least, remarkable.

  His own troubles engrossed him as he slid the plates into the Burner—“It Burns Them Clean”—and fortified himself with a beer. The mental hookup device should work. He knew of no reason why it shouldn’t. His genius subconscious had really built the thing—Hell, it had to work. Otherwise the Lybblas wouldn’t have mentioned that the gadget had been invented by Gallegher, long in their past. But he couldn’t very well use Hellwig as a guinea pig.

  A rattle at the door made Gallegher snap his fingers in triumph. Grandpa, of course! That was the answer.

  Grandpa appeared, beaming. “Had fun. Circuses are always fun. Here’s a couple of hundred for you, stupid. Got to playing stud poker with the tattooed man and the guy who dives off a ladder into a tank. Nice fellows. I’m seeing ’em tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” Gallegher said. The two hundred was p
enny-ante stuff, but he didn’t want to antagonize the old goat now. He managed to lure Grandpa into the laboratory and explain that he wanted to make an experiment.

  “Experiment away,” said Grandpa, who had found the liquor organ.

  “Eve made some charts of my own mental patterns and located my bump of mathematics. It amounts to that. The atomic structure of pure learning, maybe—It’s a bit vague. But I can transfer the contents of my mind to yours, and I can do it selectively. I can give you my talent for mathematics—”

  “Thanks,” Grandpa said. “Sure you won’t be needing it?”

  “I’ll still have it. It’s the matrix, that’s all.”

  “Mattress?”

  “Matrix. Pattern. I’ll just duplicate that pattern in your brain. See?”

  “Sure,” Grandpa said, and allowed himself to be led to a chair where a wired helmet was fitted over his head. Gallegher donned another helmet and began to fiddle with the device. It made noises and flashed lights. Presently a low buzzing rose to a crescendo scream, and then stopped. That was all.

  Gallegher removed both helmets. “Plow do you feel?” he asked.

  “Fit as a fiddle.”

  “No different?”

  “I want a drink.”

  “I didn’t give you my drinking ability, because you already had your own. Unless I doubled it—” Gallegher paled. “If I gave you my thirst, too, you couldn’t stand it. You’d die.”

  Muttering something about blasted foolishness, Grandpa replenished his dry palate. Gallegher followed him and stared perplexedly at the old fellow.

  “I couldn’t have made a mistake. The charts—What’s the value of pif,” he snapped suddenly.

  “A dime is plenty,” Grandpa said. “For a big slice.”

  Gallegher cursed. The machine must have worked. It had to work, for a number of reasons, chief of which was the question of logic. Perhaps—”

  “Let’s try it again. I’ll be the subject this time.”

  “O.K.,” Grandpa said contentedly.

  “Only—hm-m-m. You haven’t got any talents. Nothing unusual. I couldn’t be sure whether it worked or not. If you’d only been a concert pianist or a singer,” Gallegher moaned.