Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “It reminds me of the old story about the guy who took a short cut through a haunted forest on Hallowe’en,” Cynthia said. “He was thinking that he’d always been on the level, and if devils could get him just because he was in the forest, there just wasn’t any justice.”

  “And?”

  “And then a voice behind him said, ‘There isn’t,’ ” Cynthia said pleasantly. “That’s all.”

  “I run no risks,” Fletcher declared.

  “And I haven’t believed a word you’ve been saying. But it’s a new fine, anyhow. Pay for the drinks and let’s go somewhere and eat.” Fletcher reached for his wallet.

  Quite safe. He hadn’t copied any of the instructions or equations the Voice dictated to Korys. Somewhere, in the misty abyss of the future, the Voice lived in his unimaginable world, checking his temporal maps as men today check spatial charts. There were test-tube babies and a rather incredible university and a Polar Weather Station. And Dalci had been rescued from the Inquisition, by means of something the Voice referred to casually as a yofleec. “Yofleec is eeelfoy spelled backwards,” Fletcher reflected. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral? I don’t care!”

  His interest became purely impersonal; he had forced it into those channels. It was a tremendous relief to know that he wouldn’t be tempted to steal from the future, as the unhappy Dr. Sawtelle had tried to do. There had been some hesitation about the hangover cure; it seemed harmless enough, but Fletcher wasn’t sure about its possible toxic effects on a man of his era. It might eventually ossify him. He destroyed the recipe and refused to remember the ingredients.

  Meanwhile, he followed the career of Korys with interest. These distorted glimpses into the future were fascinating. Remembering Cynthia’s warning, he half expected the Voice to mention that a guy named Jerry Fletcher had been run down by a helicopter, but that never happened. The rules of inevitability didn’t apply.

  Why should they? He wasn’t interfering. He wasn’t sticking his neck out. He was following paths of cold logic; a spectator at a play was seldom shot by one of the actors.

  John Wilkes. Booth—

  This wasn’t a play. It was a movie. The actors were removed by temporal distances. Nevertheless he never interrupted the Voice now, and was careful to lift and replace the receiver very gently.

  It went on for a month. Finally he learned that Korys was preparing to return to his original time-sector. The field work was almost completed. President Browning had been elected; the Dodgers had won the pennant; a lunar rocket base had been established; Fletcher wondered. 1950? 1960? Or later?

  Cynthia steadily refused to visit his apartment and listen to the Voice. She contended that it was just a line. “It’s better than etchings,” she admitted, “but it’s a little too outré to be convincing.” But Fletcher thought that Cynthia was less skeptical than she admitted.

  He didn’t care. The affair would end soon, anyhow. His work at the office had not suffered; there was a raise and a promotion in sight, and his hypochondria had lapsed into a passive state. Occasionally he suspected his feeling of wellbeing and ate vitamin pills as a preventive measure, but not often.

  He hadn’t even taken notes of the Voice’s words. In a way, it was a taboo—the same principle as avoiding stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk, so it won’t rain.

  “He should be leaving tomorrow,” Fletcher told Cynthia one night at dinner.

  “Who?”

  “Korys, of course.”

  “Good. Then you may stop talking about him. Unless you get a new bee in your bonnet. What do you expect next? A tame leprechaun?”

  Fletcher grinned. “I can’t afford it.”

  “They eat cream, don’t they? I mean drink it.”

  “Mine won’t. He’ll drink rye and like it.”

  “I like this chicken cacciatore,” Cynthia said, masticating. “If you promise to feed me this well all the time, I may reconsider my refusal to marry you.”

  It was the most hopeful sign she had shown so far. Fletcher became immersed in daydreams. Later, on a roof garden, they paused between dances to stand at the parapet and look out over the great, glittering city. The immensity of the night was made larger by the lights below.

  “A rocket base on the Moon,” Fletcher said softly.

  Cool winds brushed his cheek. He put his arm about Cynthia and drew her close. He was very glad, suddenly, that he had not stepped on the cracks in the sidewalk. He had taken no chances. The future—the unknown—was dangerous, because it was the unknown.

  And that peril could lie fearfully close. Here, now—two steps could carry him to the top of the parapet and over. Luckily men were conditioned against taking those two steps.

  “It’s cold,” he said. “Let’s go in Cynthia. We don’t want pneumonia—especially now.”

  The telephone rang. Fletcher had awakened with another headache this morning. Probably a hangover. He put down his cigarette in an ashtray and gently lifted the receiver. This might be the last call.

  The Voice said, “All ready, Korys?”

  Pause.

  “Half an hour, then. But what caused the delay?”

  Another, longer pause.

  “Oh, really? I must make a note of that. But neuroses were common in that time. There was a touch of it in Embryo Korys, you know, but it was ironed out. Incidentally, his mother is on furlough. You’ll be able to meet her in a few hours—But about this man. He knew who you were?”

  Pause.

  “I don’t see how he could have known. Or located you. If he was as incoherent as all that, he shouldn’t have been outside a sanatorium. What was his name?”

  Pause.

  “Fletcher. Gerald Fletcher? I’ll check, but I’m sure there’s no record. He’s not one of ours. Too bad. Had he escaped from a sanatorium or . . . Oh, I see. Well, he’s in safe hands now, I suppose. Yes, a mental sanatorium they called it in those days. Your research hasn’t covered the medical field—such as it was! Curious that he should have known you. I can’t understand—”

  Pause.

  “Called you by name? Not Korys? Really. How could he possibly have known? This is very interesting indeed. Just when did he first appear?”

  Pause.

  “Crowded—well, naturally. Riding a horse into the Waldorf-Astoria isn’t done every day. But I told you there’d be no trouble; every paid off eccentric election bet in those days—Well, if he actually dragged you off the horse and called you by name—it’s very curious. Obviously he was mad, but how he knew—No, it couldn’t be ESP, could it? There’s no actual evidence that the insane are more sensitive than—What did you find out about him?”

  Pause.

  “I see. Anxiety neurosis, of course, at the start. Something was bothering him—dread of the future, perhaps; that’s common enough in such cases. The doctors said . . . oh! Then he had escaped from a sanatorium. That sort of thing was interesting—probably started as nothing but hypochondria—built on some recurrent ailment, headaches or—Anyhow, it could increase over a long period into a genuine psychosis. How old a man was he?” The humming void held only silence. And presently—

  “Um-m-m. Typical, I’d say, at that age. Nothing we can do now, though—it’s a pity. The man’s hopelessly insane. It would be interesting to know what it was that set him off on the wrong track originally. I wonder what a man of that time and that type would worry about enough to drive him off balance? Such things start from a basis of hypochondria often enough, as you’ve described it, but why was he so sure he was going to become insane? Naturally, if you’re convinced you’re becoming psychotic and brood over it for years—well! Still, we can discuss the case in more detail personally. Half an hour, then?”

  Pause.

  “Fine. I’m glad you didn’t felk the sorkins, boy!” The Voice laughed jovially. There was a click.

  Fletcher watched his hand move forward and drop the receiver into its black cradle.

  He felt the walls close in.

  THE END. />
  SWORD OF TOMORROW

  Trance-borne to a far distant age, Pilot Ethan Court is plunged into peril and adventure on a strange new world where his courage and idealism are put to a stern test!

  CHAPTER I

  Jap Torture Cell

  IT WAS always easier when he sank into the opium-drugged stupor from which not even torture could rouse him. At first he clung to two memories—his rank, and his Army serial number. By focusing his pain-hazed mind on those realities he was able to keep sane.

  After a while he didn’t want to keep his sanity.

  Men can survive a year, or two years, in a Japanese prison camp. They may emerge maimed, spiritually sick, but alive. They remember their own names.

  He used to say it aloud at first, in the musty darkness of the cell.

  “Ethan Court,” he whispered to the black, hidden walls. “Ethan Court.” And then—“Times Square. Tiffany’s. Bretano’s. Staten Island. The Yankee Stadium, pop corn, whisky sours, Greenwich Village!”

  Presently he noticed that the sound of his voice was different, and after that he scarcely spoke. The horrible lethargy of inaction closed around him. Occasionally, though less often now, he was taken before Japanese officers who questioned him.

  He was somewhere in Occupied China, he knew, but since his plane had been forced down, he had been shunted for a long distance by a roundabout route. He guessed that this was a temporary headquarters, probably on the site of some old Chinese town, and he suspected that it was in the hill country. His savage captors told him nothing, of course. They just asked questions.

  How much could he disclose in the way of military information, the Japanese did not know. Hard-pressed, they were overlooking no bets. His stubbornness enraged them. The commander of the post, a disappointed samurai of a politically-unpopular family, gradually came to believe that a feud existed between Court and himself. It became a contest between the Japanese officer and the American, entirely passive on one side, ruthlessly active on the other.

  Time dragged on, while bombers roared in increasing numbers over Japan and the brown hordes sullenly withdrew from Burma and Thailand and the islands north of Borneo. This headquarters was isolated, but in a strategic spot. The commander saw the tides of war rage past him and recede. The radio gave him no comfort. The Emperor of Japan was silent upon his throne.

  A transfer required time. In enforced idleness, the Nipponese commander devoted himself to breaking the will of the American. Torture failed, and so he tried an ancient Japanese trick—opium. It was mixed in Court’s food, and, after a while, the craving grew in him. The Jap officer kept his prisoner saturated with the drug. Court’s mind dulled.

  A MONGOL, Kai-Sieng, was put in Court’s cell. He was a prisoner, too, and spoke only a few English words. There had been an uprising, Court gathered. The prison cells of the fort were overflowing. For a month Kai-Sieng remained, and in that time Court learned of the deceptive Peace of the Poppy.

  Curious conversations they had there in the dark—scraps of English and Chinese and lingua franca. The Mongol was a fatalist. Death was inevitable, and meanwhile he had killed very many Japanese. The taunts and torments he had undergone had not moved him. He knew the hiding-place of his Chinese guerrilla leader, but the Japs would not learn it from him.

  ‘They cannot touch me,” he told Court. “The part of me that is—myself—is sunk deep in a well of peace.”

  Yes, he smoked opium. Kai-Sieng said, but it was not that alone. He had been in Tibet, at a lamasery. There he had learned something of the secret of detaching the soul from the body.

  Court wondered.

  In military classes, he himself had studied psychonamics, that strange weapon of psychological defense that is, in essence, selfhypnotism. Here in a prison cell in China, from the mouth of a rancid-smelling Mongolian guerrilla, he was learning an allied science—or mysticism.

  He told Kai-Sieng something of his fears, that he would go mad, or that he would be unable to endure the tortures. His will was weakening under the impact of the cannabis indica, and he was afraid that eventually he would talk.

  “Turn their own weapons against them,” the Mongolian said. “The poppy smoke is the opener of the gate. I will teach you what I can. You must learn to relax utterly in the central peace of the universe?

  Mysticism, yes, but it was merely a phrasing of psychonamic basics. There was no candle-flame to focus Court’s attention. He was sick, body and soul, and relaxation was impossible.

  If his lips ever came unsealed, he might blurt out everything—including a certain bit of military information that no Japanese knew he possessed. It was vital that the enemy should not get that information, how vital only Court and a few three-star generals in the Eastern Theatre knew. Suicide was impossible. He was watched too closely for that. And so.-with his eyes open. Court walked into the trap his captors had set and became an opium addict.

  Kai-Sieng showed him the way. The Japanese were only too glad to supply a layout, and Court found the Peace of the Poppy. But under the Mongolian’s guidance he learned something else, the psychonamic defense that had come out of a Tibetan lamasery. It was hard at first, but the opium helped.

  He visualized the sea, deep, calm, immense, and he let himself sink into the fathomless depths. The farther clown he went, the less the outside world mattered. Soaked in opium, his mind drowning in a shoreless ocean, he sank into the blue deeps, and day by day he left the prison farther behind. It was psychic science of a high order, but the Japanese commander did not understand. He thought that Court’s will was growing more pliant, that soon he could successfully question a mind-dulled, helpless dupe.

  Kai-Sieng was taken way and shot. Dreamily Court knew what was happening. It did not matter. Nothing mattered, really. For only the azure sea was real, that profound deep that took him into its protective embrace and kept him safe.

  The opium supply stopped. The Japs had grown suspicious. But they were too late. Not even the craving of Court’s body far the drug could wake him from his blue dream. Not even torture, ruthless and inhuman, could bring life back into his eyes. He had gone down the ancient Tibetan road and found peace.

  But he was not dead. His body, inactive, required less and less fuel. It was not inhabited. His mind had gone elsewhere. Like the blue-robed lamas who are reputed to live for a thousand years in the Himalayan peaks, Court was prolonging his life-span by—resting. The machine of his corporeal existence was idling. Dimly, in the heart of the machine, the life-spark flickered. He did not know it. He did not know his name any more. He remembered nothing. He rocked endlessly in the limpid blue vastness, while the armies swept across the face of the world, and Fujiyama’s white cone reflected the red of burning cities. He slept, while the shark-faced planes flew above him, and while the buildings exploded in thundering ruin. He slept, while his cell was sealed in crashing destruction, and the seal was crimsoned with Japanese blood. He still slept, though above him, on the surface of the earth smoked a lifeless rubble where a Japanese fortress once stood. Hermetically locked, there in the dark, Ethan Court lay at rest. In Tibetan monasteries Tibetian priests slept similar sleeps, and wake, and finally died. The earth swung in its tremendous orbit around the sun, and warring nations were stilled.

  And there was peace—for a little while.

  * * *

  The awakening took many, many years. The specialized human body is a fragile organism, and enormously complicated. A man who has slept for—ages—does not start up as from a half-hour’s doze. Moreover, the peculiar psychic factor that made Court’s slumber possible also made his quickening a slow process.

  There was air, first. It filtered through a crack in the rubble roof and stole into Court’s nostrils. Oxygen crept into his stilled lungs and infiltrated the nearly motionless blood-stream. The red corpuscles fed upon it, and the vital spark, slowly and gradually, flamed brighter.

  But in his mind there was no awareness. The blue seat was deep. A little troubled, now—but
only a little.

  Finally men found him.

  He did not know it when a dark, bearded face peered down into his cell, and when, a torch was lowered. He did not hear the cry of amazement in an alien tongue. Nor did he sense that he was being carried, in a rough litter, to a village hidden amid mountain peaks.

  HIS clothing had long since rotted, but the corroded metal of his dog-tags was still looped on a rusty chain about his neck, The tribesmen put the tiny plates in a sacred place, and, at the command of their priest, they tended Court. Perhaps some hint of the holy Tibetan lamas had filtered down through the ages, for they recognized Court’s sleep as something mystic and sacred.

  They washed him and rubbed his emaciated body gently with oil. They pressed between his lips the warmed milk of the kharam, which had not existed in the Twentieth Century, and some times they prayed to him. The priest himself watched with tired, wise eyes, and wondered. His people had no written history, only folk-tales that turned into superstitious legends of the day the gods had destroyed the world—the gods who strode with enormous, crashing strides and left flame behind them. So he wondered.

  Meanwhile the peaceful life of the nomads went on. They bartered and hunted, and among them, presently, moved the gaunt figure of Ethan Court, unshaved and strange in a native tunic. But behind his eyes the—soul—had not wakened.

  A psychiatrist might have guessed the answer. There was psychic trauma present, induced by shock and nurtured by the blue seas in which Court’s awareness still hung quiescent. A part of his mind roused, He learned the language, word by word—it was not complicated—and he would play quiet games with the children, a blue-eyed, bearded spectre from the past. He became accepted as part of the community life. He was not holy any more. Familiarity had altered that. But his hosts were friendly, and the priest spent long hours trying to find the key to Court’s soul. Then a change came. A new face swam into the dark mirror of Court’s realization, and afterward. frighteningly new things. He sank deeper, protectively, into the blue sea. For he was flying again. That terrified him. He scarcely sensed his altered surroundings, the lush magnificence of rainbow plastics and dim music, and he tried not to realize that there were tiny pin-pricks of pain now and then in his arms and legs, But something was troubling the waters. Something reached down inexorably toward him, groping, seizing, pulling him to the surface. Always, now, voices spoke to him in this new language he had learned. They were urging him to—to seek someone. Who? They did not know, but they said that he knew. They commanded him to remember—what?