Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Barton had that type of mind.

  Because he could read the thoughts of Vargan and Smith, and because they could not read his, the duel ended in his favor. He had to kill the pair before help came. The paranoids’ secret had to be hushed up forever.

  And, with the sharp blade of his dagger, he finished his job. Smith died silently. From Vargan’s waning mind came a desperate, passionate cry: You fool! To destroy your own race—

  Then silence, as the copter’s siren faded, and the spotlights blinked out. Only beast-cries, and the turmoil of water in the enormous tank.

  “They’ll hush it up,” Barton said. “I’ve done that much already, since yesterday. Luckily we’ve got a few Baldies high up in the judicial. I didn’t tell even them too much, but—they have the general idea. It’ll be passed over as a personal quarrel. The duello’s legal, anyway.” Afternoon sunlight glittered on the Ohio. The little sailboat heeled under a gust of wind, and Sue moved the tiller, in response to Barton’s thought. The soft susurrus of water whispered under the keel.

  “But I can’t reach Melissa,” he added.

  Sue didn’t answer. He looked at her.

  “You’ve been communicating with her today. Why can’t I?”

  “She’s . . . it’s difficult,” Sue said. “Why not forget it?”

  “No.”

  “Later on—in a week or so—”

  He remembered Melissa’s demure, feminine gentleness, and her frightened withdrawal last night. “I want to be sure she’s all right.”

  “No—” Sue said, and tried to conceal a thought. She almost succeeded, but not quite. Something, a key, a pattern, showed in her mind.

  “An altered matrix?” Barton looked at her. “How could she—”

  “Dave,” Sue said, “please don’t touch her now. She wouldn’t want it—”

  But with the key at hand, and the locked door ready to open, Barton automatically sent his thought out, probing, questioning. And, very far away, something stirred in response.

  Melissa?

  Silently Sue watched the tiller. After a long time, Barton shivered. His face was strained; there were new lines around his mouth.

  “Did you know?” he asked.

  “Not till today,” Sue said. For some reason neither of them wanted to use telepathy at the moment.

  “The . . . the business at the zoo must have done it.”

  ‘It isn’t permanent. It must be a cycle.”

  “So that’s why she was able to tune in on the secret wave length,” Barton said harshly. “This mutation—it runs very close to the line sometimes.” He looked at his shaking hand. “Her mind—that was her mind!”

  “It runs in cycles,” Sue said quietly. “What I wonder now is—will she talk? Can her thoughts be picked up by—”

  “There’s no danger,” Barton said. “I stayed in long enough to make certain of that. Otherwise I—wouldn’t have stayed in at all. In this state, she has no memory of what happens when she’s—rational.”

  Sue moved her lips. “She doesn’t know she’s insane. She just senses something wrong. That’s why she wouldn’t tell us where she was. Oh—Dave! So many of us, so many mutants, gone off the track somewhere! It’s a horrible price.”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes grave. There was always a price, somehow. And yet, if paying it brought security to the mutants—

  But it hadn’t, really. For Barton saw clearly now that an era had finally ended in the life of the Baldy race. Till yesterday the path had seemed clear before them. But yesterday an evil had been unveiled in the very heart of their own race, and it was an evil which would menace the peace of the world until one race or the other was wiped wholly off the face of the earth. For-what a few telepaths had stumbled upon already, others would discover in the future. Had, perhaps, already discovered. And must not be allowed to retain.

  Thou, O son of man, I have set a watchman unto the house of Israel.

  We must be on guard now, he thought. Always on guard. And he knew suddenly that his maturation had taken one long forward step in the past few hours. First he had been aimless, open to any possibility that knocked loudest at the doors of his mind. Then he had found the job he was suited for, and in its comfortable adjustment thought himself adult at last. Until yesterday—until today.

  It was not enough to hunt animals. His work was laid out before him on a scale so vast he could not see it clearly yet, but its outlines were very clear. He could not do the job alone. It would take many others. It would take constant watchfulness from this hour on, over the whole world. Today, perhaps for the first time in nearly two thousand years, the Crusaders were born again.

  Strange, he thought, that it had taken a madwoman to give them their first warning. So that not even the mad were useless in the progress of the race. Strange that the three-r fold divisions of the mutants had so closely interwoven in the conflict just passed. Mad, sane, sane-paranoid. And typical that even in deadly combat the three lines wove together interdependently.

  He looked at Sue. Their minds reached out and touched, and in the deep, warm assurance of meeting was no room for doubt or regret. This, at least, was their heritage. And it was worth any price the future demanded of them—this knowledge of confident unity, through any darkness, across any miles. The fire on the hearth would not burn out until the last Baldy died.

  END.

  THE CODE

  The ancient legends of rejuvenation, though they called it magic, told something of its price. The trouble was, it was, like many ancient formulas and bits of knowledge, coded . . .

  Through the parlor windows Dr. Bill Westerfield could see the village street, with laden branches hanging low above the blue-shadowed snow. The double tracks of tires diminished in the distance. Peter Morgan’s sleek sedan was parked by the curb, and Morgan himself sat opposite Bill, scowling into his coffee cup.

  Bill Westerfield watched a few flakes of snow making erratic pseudo-Brownian movements in the winter twilight. He said under his breath, “This is the winter of my discontent—”

  Morgan moved his heavy shoulders impatiently and drew his heavy black brows closer together. “Yours?”

  “His.” Both men looked up, as though their vision could pierce wood and plaster. But no sound came from upstairs, where old Rufus Westerfield lay in the big walnut bed carved with grapes and pineapples. He had slept and wakened in that same bed for seventy years, and he had expected to die in it. But it was not death that hovered above him now.

  “I keep expecting Mephistopheles to pop up through a star trap and demand somebody’s soul,” Bill said. “His discontent . . . my discontent . . . I don’t know. It’s going too smoothly.”

  “You’d feel better if there were a price tag hanging on the bedpost, would you? ‘One Soul, Prepaid’.”

  Bill laughed. “Logic implies somebody has to pay. Energy must be expended to do work. That’s the traditional price, isn’t it? Youth restored at the cost of Faustus’ soul.”

  “So it’s really thaumaturgy after all?” Pete Morgan inquired, pulling down the corners of his heavy mouth until the lines standing deep made his face look a little Mephistophelian after all. “I’ve been thinking all along I was an endocrinologist.”

  “O.K., O.K. Maybe that was how Mephisto did it too. Anyhow, it works.”

  Upstairs the nurse’s heels sounded briefly on bare boards, and there was a murmur of voices, one light, one flat with age but echoing now with an undertone of depth and vibration that Bill Westerfield remembered only vaguely, from his.

  “It works,” agreed Pete Morgan, and rattled the coffee cup in its saucer. “You don’t sound too happy. Why?”

  Bill got up and walked down the room without answering. At the far end he hesitated, then swung around and came back with a scowl on his thin face to match Morgan’s black-browed saturninity.

  “There’s nothing wrong about reversing the biological time-flow—if you can,” he declared. “Father hasn’t got his eye on a Marguerite somewhe
re. He isn’t doing it for selfish reasons. We aren’t tampering with the Fountain of Youth because we want glory out of it, are we?”

  Morgan looked at him under a thicket of black brows. “Rufus is a guinea pig,” he said. “Guinea pigs are notoriously selfless. We’re working for posterity ourselves, and a halo after we’re dead. Is that what you want me to say? Is there something the matter with you, Bill? You’ve never been squeamish before.”

  Bill went down the room again, walking quickly as if he wanted to get to the far end before his mind changed. When he came back he was holding a framed photograph.

  “All right, look here.” He thrust it out roughly. Morgan put down his cup and held the frame up to the light, squinting at the pictured face. “That was Father ten years ago,” Bill said. “When he was sixty.”

  In silence Morgan looked long and steadily at the photograph. Upstairs they could hear faintly in the stillness how the carved bed creaked as Rufus Westerfield moved upon it, He moved more easily now than he had done a month ago, in the depth of his seventy years. Time was flowing backward for old Rufus. He was nearing sixty again.

  Morgan lowered the photograph and looked up at Bill.

  “I see what you mean,” he said deliberately. “It isn’t the same man.”

  Biological time is a curious, delusive thing. It is no quirk of imagination that makes a year seem endless to the child and brief to the grandfather. To a child of five a year is long, a fifth of his whole life. To a man of fifty, it represents only a fiftieth. And the thing is not wholly a matter of the imagination. It links inescapably into the physicial make-up of a man, in a sort of reverse ratio. In youth the bodily processes are demonstrably as much faster as the time-sense is slower. The fetus, during gestation, races through a million years of evolution; the adolescent in ten years’ time covers an aging process that will take him another fifty years of slowing change to equal. The young heal rapidly; the old sometimes never heal. Dr. du Nouy in his “Biological Time” plunges even deeper than this into the mysteries of youth and age, speculating on the private time universe in which each of us lives alone.

  Rufus Westerfield was groping his way slowly backward through his.

  Another experimenter, a Dr. Francois this time, had given the clue which he was following, as Theseus followed another sort of clue through the labyrinthine ways where the Minotaur lurked in hiding. Dr. Francois trained subjects to tap a telegraph key three hundred times a minute in their normal state. Then he applied heat and cold, gently, not to distract his subjects. And heat shortened their appreciation of time. The key tapped faster. Academically speaking they were older when warmth surrounded them. In the cold, time ran slower, like the long days of youth.

  It had not, of course, been as simple as all that. The cardiac and vascular systems of the human machine needed powerful stimulus; the liver had almost ceased to build red cells. For these time could not turn backward without help. And there had been hypnosis, too. Seventy years of habit-patterns took a lot of erasing, and more esoteric matters than these had to be dealt with. The awareness of time itself, flowing soundlessly past in a stream that moved faster and faster as it neared the brink.

  “It isn’t the same man,” Morgan repeated without emotion, his eyes on Bill’s face. Bill jerked his shoulders irritably.

  “Of course it’s the same man. It’s Father at sixty, isn’t it? Who else could it be?”

  “Then why did you show it to me?”

  Silence.

  “The eyes,” Bill said carefully after awhile. “They’re . . . a little different. And the slope of the forehead. And the angle of the cheek isn’t . . . well, not quite the same. But you can’t say it isn’t Rufus Westerfield.”

  “I’d like to compare them,” Morgan said practically. “Shall we go up?”

  The nurse was closing the bedroom door behind her as they reached the stair head.

  “He’s asleep,” she mouthed silently, her glasses glittering at them. Bill nodded, stepping past her to push the door soundlessly open.

  The room inside was big and bare with an almost monastic simplicity that made the ornately carved bed incongruous. A night light glowing on a table near the door cast long humped shadows upward on walls and ceiling, like shadows cast by a fire that has burned low. The man in the bed lay quiet, his eyes closed, his thin, lined face and thin nose austere in the dimness.

  They crossed the floor silently and stood looking down. Shadows softened the face upon the pillow, giving it an illusion of the youth to come. Morgan held the photograph up to catch what light there was, his lips pursed under the black mustache as he studied it. This was, of course, the same man. There could be no possibility of error. And superficially the two faces were identical. But basically—

  Morgan bent his knees a little and stooped to catch the angle of forehead and cheek as the photograph showed it. He stood stooping for a full minute, looking from face to photograph. Bill watched anxiously.

  Then Morgan straightened, and as he rose the old man’s eyelids rose too. Rufus Westerfield lay there looking up at them without moving. The night light caught in his eyes, making them very black and very bright. They looked sardonic, all that was alive in the weary face, but young and wise and amused.

  For a moment no one spoke; then the eyes crinkled in slanting enjoyment, and Rufus laughed, a thin, high laugh that was older than his years. Senility sounded in the laugh, and a man of sixty should not be senile. But after the first cracked cackle, the sound deepened slightly and was no longer old. His voice was liable, at this stage, to break into senility as an adolescent’s breaks into maturity. The adolescent break is normal, and perhaps Rufus’ break was normal too, in a process that created its own norm because it was as yet unique in human history.

  “You boys want something?” inquired Rufus.

  “Feel all right?” Morgan asked.

  “I feel ten years younger,” Rufus grinned. “Anything wrong, son? You look—”

  “No, not a thing.” Bill smoothed the frown off his face. “Almost forgot your shots. Pete and I were talking—”

  “Well, hurry up. I’m sleepy. I’m growing fast, you know. Need sleep.” And he laughed again, no cackle in the sound this time.

  Bill went out hastily. Morgan said, “You’re growing, all right. And it does take energy. Have a good day?”

  “Fine. You going to unlearn me any this evening?”

  Morgan grinned. “Not exactly. I want you to do a little . . . thinking . . . though. After Bill’s finished.”

  Rufus nodded. “What’s that under your arm? The frame looks familiar. Anyone I know?”

  Morgan glanced down automatically at the photograph he was holding, the face hidden. Bill, coming in at that moment with the nurse behind him, saw the old man’s brilliant, quizzical stare, and Morgan’s eyes shift away from it.

  “No,” said Morgan. “Nobody you’d know.”

  Bill’s hand shook a little. The hypodermic he was carrying, point up, trembled so that the drop upon its needle spilled over and ran down the side.

  “Steady,” Rufus said. “You nervous about something, son?”

  Carefully Bill did not meet Morgan’s gaze. “Not a thing. Let’s have your arm, Father.”

  After the nurse had gone Morgan pulled a stump of candle from his pocket and set it upon Rufus’ bedside table. “Put out the night light, will you?” he said to Bill as he held a match to the wick. Yellow flame bloomed slowly in the dimness.

  “Hypnosis,” Rufus said, squinting at the flicker.

  “Not yet, no. I’m going to talk. Look at the flame, that’s all.”

  “That’s hypnosis,” Rufus insisted in an argumentative voice.

  “It makes you more receptive to suggestion. Your mind has to be liberated enough so you can . . . see . . . time.”

  “Mm-m.”

  “All right—not see it, then. Sense it, feel it. Realize it as a tangible thing.”

  “Which it isn’t,” Rufus said. “The Mad Hatter
managed.”

  “Sure. And look what happened to him.”

  Morgan chuckled. “I remember. It was always teatime. You don’t need to worry about that. We’ve done this before, you know.”

  “I know you say we have. I’m not supposed to remember.” Rufus’ voice imperceptibly had begun to soften. His gaze was on the flame, and its reflection wavered in miniature in his eyes.

  “No. You never remember. You’ll forget all about this, too. I’m talking to a level of your mind that lies beneath the surface. The work goes on down there, in the quiet, just as the shots you’re getting work in secret inside your body. You’re listening, Rufus?”

  “Go ahead,” Rufus said drowsily. “We must shatter the temporal idols in your mind that stand between you and youth. Mental energy is powerful. The whole fabric of the universe is energy. You’ve been conditioned to think you grow old because of time, and this is a false philosophy. You must learn to discount it. Your belief acts upon your body, as the adrenals react to fear or anger. It’s possible to set up a conditioned reflex so that the adrenals will respond under a different stimulus. And you must be conditioned to reverse time. The body and the mind react inseparably, one upon the other. Metabolism controls the mind, and the mind governs the metabolism. These are the two faces of a single coin.”

  Morgan’s voice slowed. He was watching the flicker of the reflected light shining beneath the old man’s lids. The lids were heavy.

  “A single coin—” echoed Rufus’ voice, very low.

  “The life processes of the body,” said Morgan in a monotone, “are like a river that flows very swiftly at its source. But it slows. It runs slower and slower into age. There’s another river, though, the awareness of time, and that stream runs with an opposite tempo. In youth it’s so slow you don’t even guess it’s moving. In age, it’s a Niagara. That is the stream, Rufus, that’s going to carry you back. It’s rushing by you now, deep and swift. But you’ve got to be aware of it, Rufus. Once you recognize it, nothing can stop you. You must learn to know time.”