Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “I recalled the hospital copter, Mr. DuBrose—”

  “In time?”

  “Yes. They’d gone only a few miles. But have you made other arrangements, or—”

  DuBrose said, “Other arrangements have been made, yes. Forget the affair. Good-by.”

  He clicked the visor off.

  The room was empty and silent. The window ports showed the blue sky and sunny meadows of a hillside landscape miles above Low Chicago. Time slowed down and stopped.

  Then he knew that Seth Pell was gone.

  VIII.

  No one else must know. Seth’s disappearance must be explained away, somehow, for a while.

  Because no hint of the real problem must reach Cameron; the director had to be shielded from realization of his responsibility, or he would go mad.

  There was not even time for grief.

  DuBrose went into Pell’s office and stood silent, considering. The room’s vacancy chilled him.

  An hour ago Seth had been sitting on that desk, swinging his heels and talking in his lazy, casual voice. Suppose DuBrose, not Pell, had been Pastor’s victim? How would Seth have reacted?

  With competence, anyhow.

  DuBrose fumbled out a cigarette, stared at the desk, and tried to imagine Seth sitting there, white hair gleaming under the pale lights, youngish face faintly amused.

  “How about it, Seth?”

  “How about what?” Yes, that was it. Careless, casual, but—

  “You know what. You’re dead.”

  “O.K. So you’re in charge. Take over, Ben.”

  “But how? One man can’t—”

  “Oh, stop worrying. You’ll do all right. It’s only that sense of responsibility that can break you.

  You had one idea already. The chief mustn’t know I’m dead.”

  “He’ll want to know—something!”

  “Well, tell him something. Use your memory. Didn’t I anticipate trouble?”

  “Not this trouble. You did with Ridgeley.”

  “So?”

  “Yeah. You said you’d put some papers in your safe, just in case. And the chief’s got the combination.”

  “Smart boy. This is a good trick, you know. You’re so used to kicking ideas around with me that it’s hard for you to think on your own. O.K. Imagine me any time you want. Put words in my mouth. It’ll help a bit.”

  It had helped. Seth wasn’t sitting on the desk. He hadn’t been sitting there. But, briefly, DuBrose had recreated Seth Pell as surely as Pastor had destroyed him.

  DuBrose headed for the director’s office. Cameron was at the window; he had slid aside the pane and was watching the shadowy, red-lit darkness of the Spaces. Thunder of the great machines came through the port. DuBrose saw that Cameron’s luncheon hadn’t been touched.

  “What is it, Ben?”

  “I’d like you to open Seth’s safe.”

  Cameron turned. His face was under iron control. “Why? Where’s Seth?”

  DuBrose said carefully, “I just got a message from him. He wants you to open his safe. That was all.”

  Cameron hesitated, smoothed back his gray hair, and grimaced. Without a word he went past DuBrose into Pell’s office. The safe was a dual-control, attuned to open only to the radiation pattern of Pell’s brain or Cameron’s.

  The panel slid aside. A bulky envelope was propped up against a shelf. It was addressed to Cameron, who slit it open and took out a paper and another thick, sealed envelope.

  The director’s eyes moved swiftly across the letter. He handed it to DuBrose.

  DuBrose read:

  Bob,

  I’ve been called away. Can’t tell you details yet. Till I get back, let Ben take over. He knows the set-up. Give him full charge. If he isn’t available, open this envelope yourself. See you later.

  Seth Cameron held out the envelope. “Here it is. Now—what is all this funny business?”

  DuBrose said, “First of all, are you going to do what Seth wants?”

  “Yes. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “He gave me my orders.”

  Cameron smiled. “I’m in danger of being assassinated? Is that the answer?” Pell had led the chief to think that, DuBrose knew, to keep him from guessing the truth. As a red herring, it might prove useful.

  “It might be the answer. Or it might not.”

  “I’m not a child, Ben.”

  “Chief, I’m just following Seth’s orders.”

  “All right,” Cameron said abruptly. “Go ahead and follow them. Let me know any time you want my resignation.” He took a folder out of the safe and said, “I’d meant to ask for this back. That new propaganda line . . . it may need some work.”

  Harmless stuff. DuBrose knew what it was. He watched Cameron’s broad back out of the room.

  The director had forgotten to close Pell’s safe. DuBrose shut the panel himself, frowning speculatively. The action wasn’t at all like Cameron. He was meticulous about details. And he was a hearty eater.

  Yet he hadn’t touched the luncheon tray.

  Had Cameron learned the truth, somehow, after all? Was an anxiety neurosis beginning to work?

  Symptoms: absent-mindedness, loss of appetite—

  Cameron glanced at the papers outlining the new indoctrination lines, but he couldn’t focus on them. His mind wasn’t under its usual tight control. He was conscious of the luncheon tray on the desk, and the soup spoon that had behaved so—abnormally.

  Automatically he scrubbed the back of his hand across his mouth.

  There was a pattern to all these things. All these hallucinations. They were aimed at making him feel insecure.

  Aimed?

  A directive purpose?

  Persecution, then. Why dodge the word? A persecution mania. What would a psychiatrist say?

  It was either hallucination or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, it was persecution. Or—

  It was difficult to think clearly when at any moment the floor might tilt unsteadily beneath your feet.

  Impossible to work on the propaganda papers now. Cameron shuffled them back into their folder and went to his own wall safe. He opened it.

  There was an egg in the safe.

  Cameron knew he hadn’t put it there.

  It wasn’t a real egg either, because as he reached for it, it went away—somewhere.

  Seth had written:

  Ben,

  Anything can happen now. Ridgeley’s found out we know he’s from the future, and he’s plenty dangerous. I’m allowing for the possibility that I’ll be killed and you’ll survive. If we’re both killed—well, you won’t be reading this.

  But play it this way. The equation’s got to be solved, and the chief’s probably the only one who can find somebody to solve it. Maybe Pastor will do the trick. Maybe he won’t. He’s got further than anyone else so far. Keep screening, and do your best for the chief.

  And don’t let this throw you. In a few million years, what will it matter? Luck, though!

  Seth.

  The other papers in the envelope were the equation itself and the research material Pell had gathered on it. None of it was new to DuBrose. He sat back and considered.

  Seth was dead. (I’ll mourn you later.)

  Daniel Ridgeley was alive. DuBrose had almost forgotten the courier. At the moment, he could be discounted, though not permanently. The Secretary of War might help on that score. Ridgeley might be in the pay of the Falangists. Though why a man from the future would bother with temporal-local wars DuBrose could not imagine. Why did Ridgeley apparently feel pleasure when he faced enemies? It had been that, an odd, illogical delight that had flamed behind the courier’s dark eyes when DuBrose had pulled a vibropistol on him, and when Pell had managed that business last night, when Ridgeley had been dissuaded from murder.

  Billy Van Ness and his ETP—extra-temporal perception; could Billy, in his few lucid moments, help? How? By locating Ridgeley? Finding the courier wouldn’t be enough; DuBrose thought the key would be m
otivation. And that motive might lie thousands of years in the future, in the world from which Ridgeley had presumably come.

  Well, then—the Duds? The monuments of that lost race from the inconceivably far future, now tattered, dissolved domes of impermeable force? Nothing there.

  The equation.

  Pell had proposed it to the chief as a casual theoretical problem. Who could solve a formula based on variable logic? And Cameron had named Lewis Carroll—a thoroughly elastic mind, one not bound by conventional values.

  But no mathematicians existed today who wrote fairy tales of symbolic logic. DuBrose had already used the big files for a screening on technicians by a vocation. He hadn’t found much.

  One mathematician seemed a possibility; he was a sculptor of mobiles but he was also one of the men who had gone insane while studying the equation.

  Pastor had gone further than most. DuBrose decided to attack the problem from a new angle. If he could pick out the factors that had made Pastor nearly successful in his attempt, there might be an answer there.

  He made a psycho-chart, omitting the name, and noted a few questions. Cameron could probable get something out of this pattern. But DuBrose dared not take the chart in now. The director would certainly smell the concealed rat.

  He shoved the chart among some other routine folders waiting Cameron’s decision and sent them into the director’s office. Now he could only wait—on that point anyway.

  “What next, Seth?”

  “I can’t tell you anything except the words you put in my mouth. You know that. Remember me.

  Visualize me. Think what I might say.”

  “I’m trying to.”

  “Get drunk. Eat some Kix. Take Deep Sleep for a year. Use that blue key I gave you. Try some high-powered hedonism; it opens the right doors for that.”

  “Escapism. I’d be trying to dodge responsibility.”

  “Semantic trouble. Your responsibility’s limited to keeping the chief on the beam. He’s the guy who can keep the works from blowing up. But don’t let him know that.”

  “Maybe if I checked over those screenings again—”

  “Maybe.”

  DuBrose did that. He drew up some charts, ran off several lists, and studied them. Avocations: badminton, baseball, bowling. Cards—a whole sub-group. Oil painting, surrealistic, classic, tri-dimensional. Writing Creepies, the sensory “movies” of the period. Chess, several varieties. Were there several varieties? What was fairy chess, anyhow? Rabbit raising. Hydrosphere exploration.

  Adagio dancing. Dipsomania.

  DuBrose thought the dipsomaniac sounded like the best bet.

  Then Kalender vised. He had bad news. The war plane sent to blast Dr. Pastor had failed; Pastor couldn’t be located.

  DuBrose began to feel like a target aimed at by a dozen expert archers. “I won’t ask if you’ve done everything possible, Mr. Secretary. You know the importance of this as well as I do.”

  “We’ve put scanning rays on the whole area, and psych-radar detectors, tuned to the frequency of the adult mind. No response.”

  “Pastor’s instruments didn’t work on M-204. It’s possible that Pastor’s mind is running on a different frequency now.”

  “Well—we’ve done infrared aerial pix, and picture-series to check on ground movement. Nothing but deer and a few pumas. There’s a copter registered to Pastor. It can’t be located. Did he have it on the mountain with him?”

  “Maybe. He might have destroyed it. You’ve sent out an alarm?”

  “A kill-on-sight priority alarm, Mr. DuBrose. It’s a general alert.”

  “The first shot must be mortal, you know. If Pastor retaliates—”

  “I’ve seen what he can do,” Kalender said, moving his mouth stiffly. “What I want now is suggestions. Let me talk to the director.”

  DuBrose said, “I can’t. I’m sorry. He gave orders, you know—”

  “But this is emergency!”

  “I know it. But it’s equally vital that Mr. Cameron be kept isolated from such things for a while.”

  Kalender flushed darkly. After a moment he said, “Then put on Seth Pell.”

  “He’s unavailable. I’m in charge in his absence.” DuBrose went on without waiting for an explosion. “Pastor might head for his home, I think he’s emotionally attached to his family. He may go there either to be with them, or to destroy them. They’re symbols of his past, too. He promised not to use his power again, but . . . I suggest spotting some logicians with your blasting crews, in case of trouble. Pastor’s weakness seems to be metaphysics. A good logician might be able to argue him out of retaliating. Though the only safe way is to kill him on sight.””

  “M-m-m—That makes sense, All right.”

  “One more thing.” DuBrose had made his decision. “Record this, please. Daniel Ridgeley’s a spy.”

  Kalender jerked back. “What? I’m—”

  DuBrose’s back stopped crawling. “Wait,” he said, letting out his breath. “I had to get that recorded fast. I didn’t know if Ridgeley might kill me before I could get the words out. But it’s on the record now. If he murders me, you’ll get on his trail.”

  The Secretary of War said slowly, “Mr. DuBrose, what’s the matter with your department? Are you having mass hallucinations in Psychometrics? Ridgeley has been invaluable to us—”

  “Hallucinations? Is Pastor’s power imaginary? What’s so fantastic about Ridgeley’s being a Falangist spy?”

  “I—know Ridgeley. I trust him completely. You don’t know what services he’s rendered—”

  “Will those services save us from the Falangist equation? Sure you trust him. That’s what he was after. Remember those occasional periods when he drops out of sight? Do you know what he does during those times?”

  “Of course . . . eh?”

  “Remember this,” DuBrose said. “Ridgeley is a lot more dangerous than Pastor. I can’t ask you to pick him up or have him killed. I don’t think it would be possible. But I’d like you to stand ready.

  Locate Ridgeley; don’t let him know he’s spotted. Put a scanner on him and keep it there.”

  Kalender rubbed his jaw. “We can’t take chances. So I’ll do as you suggest. But—when can I talk to the director?”

  “You’ll be the first one to talk to him, as soon as it’s safe. Right now he must be kept isolated. It’s a security precaution. You know the effect the equation has on people—”

  The Secretary was finally beginning to understand. “There’s been another suicide. An electronics man. And two more insanity cases. Not counting Dr. Pastor.”

  “The equation should be suppressed till we—”

  “Impossible. It must be solved. You don’t know your office will succeed. As long as there’s a chance that someone may solve that—thing, we’ve got to take the chance.”

  “Even if it drives every technician in the country crazy,” DuBrose said.

  “I don’t like it either. Keep in touch with me.”

  That was all. DuBrose eyed the window port. Claustrophobia touched him chokingly. At any second, all this might dissolve—

  Pastor was loose—somewhere. And until his brain was blasted into nothingness, there would be no safety for anything or anyone, anywhere.

  He sent another batch of material in to Cameron and tried to conjure up the image of Seth, without too much success.

  “What now?”

  “How should I know?”

  “I can’t rush the chief—”

  “Naturally. He mustn’t suspect the importance of the equation.”

  “What about Pastor?”

  “Done everything you can?”

  “I’m not equipped to find him. I’ve condemned him to death already. Isn’t that enough?”

  “What about Ridgeley?”

  “Oh. Well, the more information I can get about that guy—”

  Billy Van Ness had a private room in the infirmary. DuBrose went there to study the boy’s chart and examine the patient
. The excitement caused by Ridgeley’s arrival last night had worn off.

  Van Ness was in a passive state, eyes closed, thin face relaxed.

  ETP. Extra-temporal perception might prove valuable in dealing with a man from another time-sector. Pell has spoken of hypnosis, had tried it on the boy, with some success. DuBrose ordered gadgets brought in and used mechano-suggestion on Van Ness. When that failed, he had recourse to an injection.

  K-k-k-k-kuk!

  The harsh, unpleasant noise rasped out of the boy’s throat. DuBrose remembered the palate deformation. Was this sound the equivalent of hard radiation emanations made audible—the probable method of communication used by that unknown race that had created the Duds?

  He probed. This time it was easier to make Van Ness speak intelligibly. Pell had broken trail last night. But the temporal disorientation was still present. The mutant made no distinction between past, present and future. Some sort of temporal anchor was needed to pin down Van Ness’ wildly oscillating perception. How strange the world must seem to this mutant who never used his eyes!

  He could see duration—

  “—living and then backwards in long extension and stop . . . and again backwards, and again—”

  Question.

  “Shining. Bright domes. So long they reach to—”

  Question.

  “No word. There is none at the end. Or the bend, I mean. Where they doubled back. Came to look for—”

  Question.

  “There is no word. Back and back, searching.”

  Question.

  “Where are they now? . . . The end is now.”

  DuBrose thought. Genus X, the race that had built the domes, that strange unimaginable people that had traveled back through time and left the shining, tattered Duds as their eidolons. He wondered. Searching for what?

  For something necessary to their existence. And failing to find it. Back through time, in age-long leaps, back to this world that must have seemed so primevally alien to genus X. But the end is now.

  “The man you saw last night. Billy—”

  “K-k-k-k-kuk!”

  Saw? Last night? To the mutant, the words were variables. DuBrose tried to frame his question more narrowly.

  “The man. He reached in the right direction, remember?” Would it be memory or prescience to Van Ness warped, expanded time-sense? “He was longer than anyone else. Except the shining things. He was more complete—”