Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “All right,” he said quietly. “The jungle’s stopped thrashing around. Maybe we can get to that cave.”

  Parry said, “Not even for radium.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going.” The man’s voice cracked. “Not for all the radium in the world. I’m getting out of here. Even the rocks—look!” He pointed to the stone from which Ferguson had just risen.

  It was a low, gray, rounded thing, veined with deep crimson lines that netted over the surface like veins. And, as they stared, it lurched sluggishly sidewise, relieved of Ferguson’s weight, and the veins pulsed heavily, flushing a deeper red as they watched. The stone was very slowly breathing.

  Sampson’s hand clamped on Parry’s arm.

  “The radium,” he said.

  “I’m not going!”

  Sampson’s stolid face was dark.

  “We’re sticking together. There’s four of us now. And four’s better than three.”

  “Let go of my arm!” Parry snarled.

  Sampson did not move. “I been taking orders from you for a long time. I’ll keep on doing it—if you keep your nerve. We’re getting that radium.”

  Parry tore free.

  “You’re a fool,” he said harshly. “You’re too dumb to understand what this is all about. Earthquake—yeah! I’ll be glad to get out of here alive!”

  “Do as you please,” Cairns said. “I’m going after the girl.” He turned away.

  Ferguson waited a moment, while Sampson’s stare locked with Parry’s.

  Then Parry, his shoulders slumping, followed Cairns.

  “What about you, Ferguson?” Sampson said. “You getting ideas too?”

  “Plenty. But I think you’ve got a better one. Four’s better than three. We’re safer if we stick together.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  They went forward slowly.

  “I think,” Cairns said as they moved cautiously through the growling jungle, with the heavy, sweet smell of honeysuckle around them, “that I may have been mistaken about the mutations here. You’ve seen the strange blending of animal with plant and plant with stone. I thought it was haphazard development, mutation run wild. Now I’m beginning to believe there may be a pattern behind it. Jacklyn might have had a purpose in what he did here, whatever it was. The answer may be in the cave lab.”

  Ferguson grunted. Cairns’ voice continued.

  “A synthesis, d’you see? An attempt to bring plants and mammals and stones together in a single unit. If he succeeded in doing that, it’s anybody’s guess what the result was, or is.”

  “Why?” Ferguson asked. “Was he crazy? There’s no point in carrying on such an experiment.”

  “I can think of one. An armistice. Did you ever realize that life on this planet is a never-ending war—beast against man, man against the forests, plants against the very rocks? There’s no—no pattern. It’s all random. An avalanche may snuff out an entire village, and one man can blow up a mountain. Roots can split rocks. But if a synthesis could be achieved, if the animal and vegetable and mineral kingdoms could live at peace together, think what that would mean?”

  “Peace?” Ferguson said sardonically. “That fern-tailed squirrel wasn’t smoking a peacepipe with the snake-vine that killed him. And what about Groot?”

  THE scientist nodded his head gloomily. He saw the force of that remark.

  “I’m not saying the experiment was entirely successful. And—well, Groot was an outsider, a false note. But did you notice the air of peace the girl had? She knew nothing could harm her.”

  “A tregua de Deus,” Parry interrupted unexpectedly. “I’ve seen it—the truce of God. When the floods come, the animals are marooned on islands sometimes, but they don’t kill each other then. Tapir, anaconda, peccary—they’re safe from each other till the water goes down.”

  “But not safe from the water,” Cairns said. “I wonder if even water would be dangerous here?”

  “To us?” Ferguson said, and laughed shortly. “Don’t forget what you said. We’re the intruders. We’re the sour notes in this symphony.”

  “Joining rocks and trees and beasts—that’s impossible!” Parry said. “It’s unholy!”

  Cairns shrugged.

  “Basically they’re all alike—a pattern of electric energy. I suppose the right way to experiment would be with the basic—the atomic structure. And if Jacklyn did that—”

  The sentence died unfinished. They went on, and the jungle watched them go, lifting flowers like eyes among the leaves, flowers that turned on their stems as the men went by.

  “Homotropic,” Ferguson thought with wry humor. “Or is it anthropotropic? They’re watching us, anyhow.”

  He listened to a deep, growling noise that went with them, soft, almost above the threshold of hearing. There was nothing that might have caused it.

  “She’s watching us, I think,” Cairns said.

  Parry jumped.

  “She killed Groot. She—she could kill us the same way, couldn’t she?”

  “She could, I suppose,” Cairns agreed. “But we can’t guess her reactions. She isn’t really human. When I take her back with me I’ll investigate those things.”

  “Why are you risking all this just to get her away from this place where she belongs?” Ferguson asked bluntly.

  The scientist faltered in his stride.

  “I . . . knew. But now, I’m not so sure. My memory—”

  “Slipping?” Ferguson asked quickly.

  “No. I rather think it’s coming back.”

  A shout from behind them brought the pair up sharply. Parry had paused and was staring up at something in the trees. Curiously, there was exultation, not fear, in his voice.

  “Look at this!” he called. “Look at this—tree.”

  They went back, slowly and with caution. Parry was jumping for a branch above his head, trying to reach it. Looking up, Ferguson saw what Parry was reaching for.

  A tall, slim tree with pale limbs and branches dangled incredible fruit just above their heads. Great clusters of glittering light hung there, catching the sun and turning it to fire. The fruit were jewels, great clear gems quivering with white fire like diamonds, green stones hanging like green transparent grapes, red ones giving back the light from hearts of dazzling ruby.

  Parry caught a branch of diamonds and swung hard to tear it down. The tree swayed and bent, all the coruscating brilliance of the jewels flashing blindingly, and the bough gave way with a ripping noise. The cluster of jewel-fruit came off in his hand. From the broken branch a shower of scarlet sap gushed out upon him, blood-red.

  Parry dropped the gems and sprang back, cursing.

  “Get it off! It’s acid!”

  They mopped the sap from his face and arms as quickly as they could. It smelled like blood too. Parry was gritting his teeth with pain. Sampson watched the man with faintly scornful eyes.

  “We’re after the radium,” he said. “Diamonds don’t grow on trees. They’re phonies. They must be.”

  “Blood doesn’t belong in trees either.” Ferguson said. “I don’t know about this.” He finished wiping the red sap from Parry’s skin, noticing that small white spots remained, cool to the touch, and hard.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Parry said, looking at his own hand with scared eyes.

  “Some acid in the sap,” Cairns hazarded. “Normal tissue growth should fix you up. Better not break any more branches, though. What are you going to do with your—brilliants?”

  Parry glared at Sampson. “They’re diamonds.”

  “They look like it. I wouldn’t be too sure.”

  “Let’s go,” Sampson said gruffly. “We’re wasting time.”

  So they went on again, and the flowers grew thicker and thicker around them as they neared the far wall of the valley. Gorgeous thick-leaved flowers like living velvet, in shapes and colors no flowers had ever assumed before. Festoons of them hung from the trees, carpets of them hid the ground, great shining sheets of
blossoms swathed the thick trunks beside their path.

  The sweet, cloying fragrance was still present, but subtly different. There was a bitterness under the honeysuckle, the faintest suggestion of an odor that Ferguson felt with his palate and throat. Cloying, sweet, over-rich, like the smell of blood.

  Butterflies flickered through the green air trailing clouds of fragrance. Insects or animate flowers, there was no way to be sure.

  And once Ferguson heard a very thin, sweet shrilling from low down among the bushes, and his searching gaze fell on a group of tiny orchids growing on the branches, their spotted throats pulsing. A membrane stretched across the throats gave out that shrilling music.

  The flowers sang and watched the men as they went on.

  CHAPTER V

  Man Who Saw Too Much

  BEFORE them the cave was a great dark oval in the hillside. Its inner reaches seemed dark, but not with the darkness of night. A faint glow bathed the cavern’s rim, and the walls within.

  “Radium?” Ferguson said. “But it’s dangerous!”

  “Put on the lead suits,” Cairns ordered. “Yes, it’s radium. I tested it and I gave Groot some. You saw that sample.”

  They donned the flexible, improvised armor, and, shrouded in the heavy folds, went awkwardly up the slope toward the cave. Everything they saw was faintly distorted through the lead-impregnated glass of the face plates, but it may not have been simply ocular distortion that made the very wall of the cliff seem to move a little as they neared.

  Certainly, Ferguson thought, the ground was stirring underfoot ever so slightly, with slow, rhythmic waves like breathing. And though no vegetation grew here, there were tiny flowers of crystal springing up through the rocks, and some of the pale stone traceries they had seen near Jacklyn’s house wound leaves and vines of carved whiteness against the cliff.

  In the mouth of the cave, looking at them indifferently, stood the girl.

  The pale, unearthly glow of radium lighted her unprotected figure with a ghostly shining, and her hair was luminous as if with a light of its own. When they drew too close, she turned and retreated slowly into the cave.

  “Cairns, you’re right,” Ferguson said. “She’s not human. The hard radiations would have killed her long ago if she’d been human.”

  Cairns didn’t hear. He was moving across the threshold of the cavern.

  “Cairns!” Parry called. “Wait! What’s in there?”

  “I don’t know,” Cairns said without turning. “We didn’t get this far last time.”

  A low rumbling began to roll from the darkness before them. It was a sound all four men had heard before, when they had stood at the outer gate of the valley—a deep roar that had seemed to echo through the hollowness of caverns underground.

  Now it was immeasurably louder, growing in volume until its mighty torrent poured past them like an intangible river that all but swept them from their feet. And it was not any animal sound, they knew now, without knowing how they could be so sure. No animal throat ever shaped quite that hollow, vibrating depth of noise.

  It rose to a terrible crescendo—inhuman—a voice that rolled tremendously, wordlessly, against the ramparts of the valley until it filled cavern and valley and the whole sky. And it diminished again, sank to a whisper and ceased, leaving the cave walls vibrating long after silence had come again.

  Ferguson stared through the distorting glass of his faceplate. Cairns’ face was strained and very pale.

  Ferguson asked a silent question, and Cairns answered it by bending his shrouded head and resuming his slow walk up the sloping cavern flood. Ferguson never knew what force drove him reluctantly in the scientist’s footsteps. Perhaps it was simple human curiosity, a force that has been strong enough to move mountains many times before in mankind’s history. He only knew that it would be impossible for him to stand here on the threshold of what might be the greatest mystery that had ever existed on the earth or beneath it, and not follow.

  So he went slowly after Cairns, and Parry and Sampson, afraid to stay in the cavern’s quivering mouth with the cold light of the radium shivering all around them, trailed along too.

  The corridor sloped gently upward into darkness. Ferguson climbed after Cairns, moving between patches of luminous pallor that gave forth light. If the girl moved before them in the full bath of the deadly radiance, he could not see her now.

  Light from ahead reached Ferguson before he could locate its source. A rosy light, spilling down the slope in waves like clear water. Cairns’ shrouded figure vanished; Ferguson turned a comer, and stood with the silent doctor on the threshold of a great bowl of rock whose ceiling was lost in luminescence, not darkness. He could not look up into that blinding radiance.

  Before him a vast wall of brilliance curved toward him and up, losing itself in the light overhead. It was translucent, that wall, but the light seemed to dwell in the clear, jewellike stone, not to shine from some source behind it. And the wall was diamond. It had the unmistakable clarity which is as much dark as light, depth upon depth of crystal shooting rays of flaming, dazzling clarity.

  OUT of the crystalline wall a great flower grew in a cluster of leaves and tall, folded buds. A living flower, springing from living crystal. Six feet across, it opened its monstrous throat while its highest petal curled down like a sneering lip above the golden mouth.

  The flower was colored like a tiger; it was thick and soft like fur rather than petals. It was fur—a tiger-flower that blended flesh and animal in one beautiful, terrible, wonderfully colored whole. And as Ferguson looked at it, he saw motion begin to stir far back in the richly spotted throat. Motion—and sound.

  A low echo of that earth-rocking roar muttered through the chamber. As the tiny orchids in the jungle had hummed their shrill song, so this titan of the crystal cavern spoke softly to them in a murmur of distant thunder, a roar like a giant tiger’s out of that tiger-throat.

  The furred petals quivered. The light in the cavern shook. And the girl who stood at the foot of the great flower shivered through all her pale ivory body, her luminous hair swaying as if the sound were a wind that stirred its metallic strands.

  Slowly she moved toward the flower.

  It knew her nearness. It knew her. It dipped on its mighty stem and the lowest petal brushed the floor. The girl set her foot upon it.

  The petals closed possessively around her and she walked into the heart of the great blossom and, for an instant, vanished from sight as the tiger-spotted velvet petals enfolded her.

  When they opened again she was lying in the heart of the flower, her head cushioned on a petal, her silvery hair streaming down. The black eyes were closed. Above her curved the sneering lip of the topmost petal. She was an ivory stamen in that great tiger calyx. She and the flower were one.

  Flower and glowing wall of diamond were one. Crystal and flower and maiden were one—living, watching, understanding!

  Through the cavern a great, earth-shaking humming drifted. As it died the girl’s lips parted. Her voice told Ferguson more than anything else the unimaginable synthesis he faced. For it was not only the girl speaking. Her voice had the dear, passionless timber with which a flower might speak, laden with the musky honeysuckle scent, and there was something clearer and colder and more fiery than flower or human tongue—the tone that the crystal wall added to the voice of the triumvirate.

  Flower and burning crystal and woman together, with a rumble of the beast-roar latent in that clear, quiet tone.

  “We are one,” the voice said, and fires sprang up and died in the diamond wall.

  Ferguson caught his breath. He could not have spoken then, but he saw the doctor’s shrouded figure stir beside him.

  “You come to destroy,” the voice said. “We know that. But still we speak to you, as we have never spoken before to reasoning beings. What would you ask of us?”

  “We ask nothing,” Cairns said in a thick, shaken voice. “We will go.”

  The flower trembled.

/>   “You will never go.”

  “For Pete’s sake, what is that thing?” Parry screamed.

  And the voice said:

  “I am Eden.”

  There was a pause, and then the voice repeated the words.

  “I am Eden,” it said. “The new Eden. And not yet may the world know that we exist Here in this valley begins a new race, a new step toward the ultimate goal of earth. But the step is not completed yet though already we hold all of wisdom in our triad mind. Your race would try to destroy us, if they knew.”

  “No, they wouldn’t!” Cairns said. “Why, then, did you come here?”

  There was a long silence.

  The flower contracted a little around the girl, hiding her behind a fringe of golden petals. It opened again, revealing the ivory stamen that was its tongue.

  “Why would you destroy your own creation?”

  Ferguson heard the question only dimly. The blinding light of the crystal had almost dazed him, and the numbing shock of surprise had not yet worn off. But he felt incredulity.

  “Your own creation?” the flower said.

  “I—I didn’t—create you,” Cairns whispered.

  “Remember?” the voice said.

  AGAIN the crystal wall flamed. And as the fires died, Cairns’ voice came again, shaken and strangely different.

  “I . . . remember. Yes, I do remember now. Everything. But I would still destroy you. I know now what I have done. The world is not yet ready. I would destroy you if I could.”

  “Jacklyn!” Ferguson breathed. “You’re—Bruce Jacklyn!”

  Cairns nodded, not to him but to the flower. “I know my own name again. I had forgotten, outside. I’ve still forgotten very much. The powers I released in this valley were too strong. There was psychic trauma. But now—” His voice grew stronger. “Yes, I created you. I made you possible. The third member of the triumvirate is my own child. And I would destroy you all.”