Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Not—”

  She nodded.

  The three of them dined together. Talman watched the two-foot-by-two cylinder resting on the table opposite him and tried to read personality and intelligence into the double lenses. He couldn’t help imagining Linda as a priestess, serving some sort of alien god-image, and the concept was disturbing. Now Linda was forking chilled, sauce-daubed shrimps into the metallic compartment and spooning them out when the amplifier signaled.

  Talman had expected a flat, toneless voice, but the sonovox gave depth and timbre whenever Quentin spoke.

  “Those shrimps are perfectly usable, Van. It’s only habit that makes us throw chow out after I’ve had it in my foodbox. I taste the stuff, all right—but I haven’t any salivary juices.”

  “You—taste ’em.”

  Quentin laughed a little. “Look, Van. Don’t try to pretend this seems natural to you. You’ll have to get used to it.”

  “It took me a long time,” Linda said. “But after a while I found myself thinking it was just the sort of silly thing Bart always used to do. Remember the time you put on that suit of armor for the Chicago board meeting?”

  “Well, I made my point,” Quentin said. “I forget what it was now, but—we were talking about taste. I can taste these shrimps, Van. Certain nuances are lacking, yeah. Very delicate sensations are lost on me. But there’s more to it than sweet and sour, salt and bitter. Machines could taste years ago.”

  “There’s no digestion—”

  “And there no pylorospasm. What I lose in refinements of taste I make up for in freedom from gastrointestinal disorders.”

  “You don’t burp any more, either,” Linda said. “Thank God.”

  “I can talk with my mouth full, too,” Quentin said. “But I’m not the super-machine-bodied-brain you’re subconsciously thinking I am, chum. I don’t spit death rays.” Talman grinned uneasily. “.Was I thinking that?”

  “I’ll bet you were. But—” The timbre of the voice changed. “I’m not super. I’m plenty human, inside, and don’t think I don’t miss the old days sometimes. Lying on , the beach and feeling the sun on my skin, little things like that. Dancing in rhythm to music, and—”

  “Darling,” Linda said.

  The voice changed again. “Yeah. It’s the small, trivial factors that make up a complete life. But I’ve got substitutes now—parallel factors. Reactions quite impossible to describe, because they’re . . . let’s say . . . electronic vibrations instead of the familiar neural ones. I do have senses, but through mechanical organs. When impulses reach my brain, they’re automatically translated into familiar symbols. Or—” He hesitated. “Not so much now, though.”

  Linda laid a bit of planked fish in the food-compartment. “Delusions of grandeur, eh?”

  “Delusions of alteration—but no delusion, my love. You see, Van, when I first turned into a Transplant, I had no standard of comparison except the arbitrary one I already knew. That was suited to a human body—only. When, later, I felt an impulse from a digger-gadget, I’d automatically feel as if I had my foot on a car-accelerator. Now those old symbols are fading. I . . . feel . . . more directly now, without translating the impulses into the old-time images.”

  “That would be faster,” Talman said.

  “It is. I don’t have to think of the value of pi when I get a pi signal. I don’t have to break down the equation. I’m beginning to sense what the equation means.”

  “Synthesis with a machine?”

  “Yet I’m no robot. It doesn’t affect the identity, the personal essence of Bart Quentin.” There was a brief silence, and Talman saw Linda look sharply toward the cylinder. Then Quentin continued in the same tone. “I get a tremendous bang out of solving problems.

  I always did. And now it’s not just on paper. I carry out the whole task myself, from conception to finish. I dope out the application, and . . . Van, I am the machine!”

  “Machine?” Talman said.

  “Ever noticed, when you’re driving or piloting, how you identify yourself with the machine? It’s an extension of you. I go one step farther. And it’s satisfying. Suppose you could carry empathy to the limit and be one of your patients while you were solving his problem? It’s an—ecstasy.”

  Talman watched Linda pour sauterne into a separate chamber. “Do you ever get drunk any more?” he asked.

  Linda gurgled. “Not on liquor—but Bart gets high, all right!”

  “How?”

  “Figure it out,” Quentin said, a little smugly.

  “Alcohol’s absorbed into the blood-stream, thence reaching the brain—the equivalent of intravenous shots, maybe?”

  “I’d rather put cobra venom in my circulatory system,” the Transplant said. “My metabolic balance is too delicate, too perfectly organized, too upset by introducing foreign substances. No, I use electrical stimulus—an induced high-frequency current that gets me high as a kite.”

  Talman stared. “And that’s a substitute?”

  “It is. Smoking and drinking are irritants, Van. So’s thinking, for that matter! When I feel the psychic need for a binge, I’ve a gadget that provides stimulating irritation—and I’ll bet you’d get more of a bang out of it than you would out of a quart of mescal.”

  “He quotes Housman,” Linda said. “And does animal imitations. With his tonal control, Bart’s a wonder.” She stood up. “If you’ll excuse me for a bit, I’ve got some K. P. Automatic as the kitchen is, there are still buttons to push.”

  “Can I help?” Talman offered.

  “Thanks, no. Stay here with Bart. Want me to hitch up your arms, darling?”

  “Nope,” Quentin said. “Van can take care of my liquid diet. Step it up, Linda—Summers said I’ve got to get back on the job soon.”

  “The ship’s ready?”

  “Almost.”

  Linda paused in the doorway, biting her lips. “I’ll never get used to your handling a spaceship all by yourself. Especially that thing.”

  “It may be jury-rigged, but it’ll get to Callisto.”

  “Well . . . there’s a skeleton crew, isn’t there?”

  “There is,” Quentin said, “but it isn’t needed. The insurance companies demand an emergency crew. Summers did a good job, rigging the ship in six weeks.”

  “With chewing gun and paper clips,” Linda remarked. “I only hope it holds.” She went out as Quentin laughed softly. There was a silence. Then, as never before, Talman felt that his companion was . . . was . . . had changed. For he felt Quentin gazing at him, and—? Quentin wasn’t there.

  “Brandy, Van,” the voice said. “Pour a little in my box.”

  Talman started to obey, but Quentin checked him. “Not out of the bottle. It’s been a long time since I mixed rum and coke in my mouth. Use the inhaler. That’s it. Now. Have a drink yourself and tell me how you feel.”

  “About—?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  Talman went to the window and stood looking down at the reflected fluorescent shining in the St. Lawrence. “Seven years, Quent. It’s hard to get used to you in this—form.”

  “I haven’t lost anything.”

  “Not even Linda,” Talman said. “You’re lucky.”

  Quentin said steadily, “She stuck with me. The accident, five years ago, wrecked me. I was fooling around with atomic research, and there were chances that had to be taken. I was mangled. Butchered, in the explosion. Don’t think Linda and I hadn’t planned in advance. We knew the occupational risk.”

  “And yet you—”

  “We figured the marriage could last, even if—But afterward I almost insisted on a divorce. She convinced me we could still make a go of it. And we have.”

  Talman nodded. “I’d say so.”

  “That . . . kept . . . me going, for quite a while,” Quentin said softly. “You know how I felt about Linda. It’s always been just about a perfect equation. Even though the factors have changed, we’ve adjusted.” Suddenly Quentin’s laugh made the
psychologist swing around. “I’m no monster, Van. Try and get over that idea!”

  “I never thought that,” Talman protested. “You’re—”

  “What?”

  Silence again. Quentin grunted. “In five years I’ve learned to notice how people react to me. Give me some more brandy. I still imagine I taste it with my palate. Odd how associations hang on.” Talman poured liquor from the inhaler. “So you figure you haven’t changed, except physically.”

  “And you figure me as a raw brain in a metal cylinder. Not as the guy you used to get drunk with on Third Avenue. Oh, I’ve changed—sure. But it’s a normal change. There’s nothing innately alien about limbs that are metal extensions. It’s one step beyond driving a car. If I were the sort of super-gadget you subconsciously think I am, I’d be an utter introvert and spend my time working out cosmic equations.” Quentin used a vulgar expletive. “And if I did that, I’d go nuts. Because I’m no superman. I’m an ordinary guy, a good physicist, and I’ve had to adjust to a new body. Which, of course, has its handicaps.”

  “What, for example?”

  “The senses. Or the lack of them. I helped develop a lot of compensatory apparatus. I read escapist fiction, I get drunk by electrical irritation, I taste even if I can’t eat. I watch teleshows. I try to get the equivalent of all the purely human sensory pleasures I can. It makes a balance that’s very necessary.”

  “It would be. Does it work, though?”

  “Look. I’ve got eyes that are delicately sensitive to shades and gradations of color. I’ve got arm-attachments that can be refined down until they can handle microscopic apparatus. I can draw pictures—and, under a pseudonym, T’m a pretty popular cartoonist. I do that as a sideline. My real job is still physics. And it’s still a good job. You know the feeling of pure pleasure you get when you’ve worked out a problem, in geometry or electronics or psychology—or anything? Now I work out questions infinitely more complicated, requiring split-second reaction as well as calculation. Like handling a spaceship. More brandy. It’s volatile stuff in a hot room.”

  “You’re still Bart Quentin,” Talman said, “but I feel surer of that when I keep my eyes shut. Handling a spaceship—”

  “I’ve lost nothing human,” Quentin insisted. “The emotional basics haven’t changed. It . . . isn’t really pleasant to have you come in and look at me with plain horror, but I can understand the reason. We’ve keen friends for a long time, Van. You may forget that before I do.”

  Sweat was suddenly cold on Talman’s stomach. But despite Quentin’s words, he felt certain by now that he had part of the answer for which he had come to Quebec. The Transplant had no abnormal powers—there were no telepathic functions.

  There were more questions to be asked, of course.

  He poured more brandy and smiled at the dully-shining cylinder across the table. He could hear Linda singing softly from the kitchen.

  The spaceship had no name, for two reasons. One was that she would make only a single trip, to Callisto; the other was odder. She was not, essentially, a ship with a cargo. She was a cargo with a ship.

  Atomic power plants are not ordinary dynamos that can be dismantled and crated on a freight car. They are tremendously big, powerful, bulky, and behemothic. It takes two years to complete an atomic set-up, and even after that, the initial energizing must take place on Earth, at the enormous standards control plant that covers seven counties of Pennsylvania. The Department of Weights, Measures, and Power has a chunk of metal in a thermostatically-controlled glass case in Washington; it’s the standard meter. Similarly, in Pennsylvania, there is, under fantastic precautionary conditions, the one key atomic-disruptor in the Solar System.

  There was only one requirement for fuel; it was best to filter it through a wire screen with, approximately, a one-inch gauge. And that was an arbitrary matter, for convenience in setting up a standard of fuels. For the rest, atomic power ate anything.

  Few people played with atomic power; the stuff’s violent. The research engineers worked on a stagger system. Even so, only the immortality insurance—the Transplantidea—kept neuroses from developing into psychoses.

  The Callisto-bound power plant was too big to be loaded on the largest ship of any commercial line, but it had to get to Callisto. So the technicians built a ship around the power plant. It was not exactly jury-rigged, but it was definitely unstandardized. It occasionally, in matters of design, departed wildly from the norm. The special requirements were met deftly, often unorthodoxly, as they came up. Since the complete control would be in the hands of the Transplant Quentin, only casual accommodations were provided for the comfort of the small emergency crew. They weren’t intended to wander through the entire ship unless a breakdown made it necessary, and a breakdown was nearly impossible. In fact, the vessel was practically a living entity. But not quite.

  The Transplant had extensions—tools—throughout various sections of the great craft. Yet they were specialized to deal with the job in hand. There were no sensual attachments, except auditory and ocular. Quentin was, for the nonce, simply a super spaceship drive control. The brain cylinder was carried into the craft by Summers, who inserted it—somewhere!—plugged it in, and that finished the construction job.

  At 2400 the mobile power plant took off for Callisto.

  A third of the way to the Martian orbit, six spacesuited men came into an enormous chamber that was a technician’s nightmare.

  From a wall amplifier, Quentin’s voice said, “What are you doing here. Van?”

  “O.K.,” Brown said. “This is it. We’ll work fast now. Cunningham, locate the connection. Dalquist, keep your gun ready.”

  “What’ll I look for?” the big, blond man asked.

  Brown glanced at Talman. “You’re certain there’s no mobility?”

  “I’m certain,” Talman said, his eyes moving. He felt naked exposed to Quentin’s gaze, and not liking it.

  Cunningham, gaunt, wrinkled and scowling, said, “The only mobility’s in the drive itself. I was sure of that before Talman double-checked. When a Transplant’s plugged in for one job, it’s limited to the tools it needs for that job.”

  “Well, don’t waste time talking. Break the circuit.”

  Cunningham stared through his vision plate. “Wait a minute. This isn’t standardized equipment. It’s experimental . . . casual, I’ve got to trace a few . . . um.”

  Talman was surreptitiously trying to spot the Transplant’s eye lenses, and failing. From somewhere in that maze of tubes, coils, wires, grids and engineering hash, he knew, Quentin was looking at him. From several places, undoubtedly—there’d be over-all vision, with eyes spotted stragetically around the room.

  And it was a big room, this central control chamber. The light was misty yellow. It was like some strange, unearthly cathedral in its empty, towering height, a hugeness that dwarfed the six men. Bare grids, abnormally large, hummed and sparked; great vacuum tubes flamed eerily. Around the walls above their heads ran a metal platform, twenty feet up, a metal guard rail casually precautionary. It was reached by two ladders, on opposite walls of the room. Overhead hung a celestial globe, and the dim throbbing of tremendous power murmured in the chlorinated atmosphere.

  The amplifier said. “What is this, piracy?”

  Brown said casually, “Call it that. And relax. You won’t be harmed. We may even send you back to Earth, when we can figure out a safe way to do it.”

  Cunnignham was investigating lucite mesh, taking care to touch nothing. Quentin said, “This cargo isn’t worth highjacking. It isn’t radium I’m carrying, you know.”

  “I need a power plant,” Brown remarked curtly.

  “How did you get aboard?”

  Brown lifted a hand to mop sweat from his face, and then, grimacing, refrained. “Find anything yet, Cunningham?”

  “Give me time. I’m only an electronics man. This setup’s screwy. Fern, give me a hand here.”

  Talman’s discomfort was growing. He realized that Quen
tin, after the first surprised comment, had ignored him. Some indefinable compulsion made him tilt back his head and say Quentin’s name.

  “Yeah,” Quentin said. “Well? So you’re in with this gang?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were pumping me, up in Quebec. To make sure I was harmless.”

  Talman made his voice expressionless. “We had to be certain.”

  “I see. How’d you get aboard? The radar automatically dodges approaching masses. You couldn’t have brought your own ship alongside in space.”

  “We didn’t. We got rid of the emergency crew and took their suits.”

  “Got rid of them?”

  Talman moved his eyes toward Brown. “What else could we do? We can’t afford half-measures in a gamble as big as this. Later on, they’d have been a danger to us, after our plans started moving. Nobody’s going to know anything about it, except us. And you.” Again Talman looked at Brown. “I think, Quent, you’d better throw in with us.”

  The amplifier ignored whatever implied threat lay in the suggestion.

  “What do you want the power plant for?”

  “We’ve got an asteroid picked out,” Talman said, tilting his head back to search the great crowded hollow of the ship, swimming a little in the haze of its poisonous atmosphere. He half expected Brown to cut him short, but the fat man didn’t speak. It was, he thought, curiously difficult to talk persuasively to someone whose location you didn’t know. “The only trouble is. it’s airless. With the plant, we can manufacture our own air. It’d be a miracle if anybody ever found us in the asteroid belt.”

  “And then what? Piracy?” Talman did not answer. The voice-box said thoughtfully, “It might make a good racket, at that. For awhile, anyhow. Long enough to clean up quite a lot. Nobody will expect anything like it. Yeah, you might get away with the idea.”

  “Well,” Talman said, “if you think that, what’s the next logical step?”

  “Not what you think. I wouldn’t play along with you. Not for moral reasons, especially, but for motives of self-preservation. I’d be useless to you. Only in a highly intricate, widespread civilization is there any need for Transplants. I’d be excess baggage.”