Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Toward Parry the opening blossom bent. The paralysis left Ferguson. He snatched his revolver from its holster and sent shot after shot crashing into the new flower.

  It shrank back briefly. But beyond It, another bud was opening.

  Parry’s voice—a man’s voice no longer, but a hollow, echoing cry of stone made vocal—rolled again above the shrill screaming of the tom flower. And like that screaming, it, too, was a cry for help.

  The call did not go unanswered. For as bud after bud opened and bent with great opening lips toward Parry, a sound behind Ferguson made him whirl. He saw Jacklyn hurled aside, saw Sampson, bulky and grotesque in the lead armor, spring back, and into the chamber lashed an arm of white filigree, a moving vine of stone.

  After it came another, and another, great writhing arms that coiled snakelike into the chamber. The living rocks of Eden were answering the summons as flesh made of stone cried to vines made of stone for help against its enemy.

  Great marble arms clashed forward. They were less supple than the tiger flowers, but they had the weight of stone in their favor. One wound about a giant stooping bud and closed its opening petals with a grip of marble, while the other stone vines writhed forward toward the roaring flowers that bent to meet them.

  Still prisoning Parry, the great, tom blossom screamed shrilly, dripping golden blood. Ferguson flattened himself against the trembling walls, his useless gun gripped in a gloved hand. The inhuman shrieking pierced his ears agonizingly. The wounded flower was screaming for help to the whole jungle valley beyond.

  And the jungle replied.

  From outside the cave a deep and terrible roar began to roll thunderously through Eden. Into the vaulted chamber poured a flood of vines, flower-eyes staring like snakes from the coiling tendrils. Scarlet, azure, purple and sun-yellow and amethyst, the flowers glared from that tangle of green tendrils and white withes flailing savagely in combat—the blossoms screaming more shrilly than the great wounded flower that held Parry’s stone body.

  Across the turmoil Jacklyn shouted something to his daughter, still frozen and motionless, miraculously untouched amid the battle.

  And she heard. For the first time she seemed to feel humanity within her, heard with human ears instead of the insensate ears of the triumvirate. She turned her head, and there was life in her black eyes, and terror and appeal.

  She cried out, inarticulately, but Ferguson felt the difference in her voice. It was human now, momentarily freed from the passionless rule of plant and stone, And she ran lightly through the welter of struggling serpentine things toward them.

  Jacklyn opened his leaden cape and folded it about her as well as he could. “Ferguson,” he said urgently. “Help me! We’ve got to get out of here! We’ve got to get her out too!”

  “Parry!” Sampson yelled. “We can’t leave him here!”

  But even as he spoke, the great tiger flower in which Parry still struggled reared high on its stem, like a striking snake. It poised, hovering—and then smashed down on the crystal wall, screaming.

  Parry’s stone limbs were shattered against the crystal.

  The crystal screamed!

  Great jagged streaks sprang out like lightning flashing across its glittering surface. It began to buckle. Crystals dropped in gleaming rain.

  Down on the tiger flowers thundered the wall of diamond!

  THE walls trembled, moved, breathed in and out. Ferguson tore his fascinated stare away. He shouted, pushed Jacklyn toward the opening. With Sampson, they fled across sinewy, writhing vines that still fought the tendrils of whipping stone.

  Then they were in the sunlight again. The whole hillside was shaking with great, rhythmic breaths as they ran. Stumbling, reeling, they labored on, hearing behind them the screams of the battling, inhuman things as rock and flesh and foliage tore at one another in mad, ghastly fury.

  The jungle before them was in turmoil. The control of the triumvirate brain had let go utterly now, and the delicate balance that had kept Eden poised was shattered. Things that should not have been animate ripped and tore in blind answer to the blindness of the Brain in the ruined cave. The Brain, the collapsing, ruined remnants of the triumvirate, still sent out its insane, crimson thoughts of fury, and the jungle raged a response.

  Ferguson jerked to a halt, missing Sampson. He turned, to see the lead-suited figure still within the entrance of the cave, stamping through the twisting vines, a gleaming chisel in one gloved hand, the lead box in the other. Ferguson’s stomach lurched as he saw what Sampson was doing.

  The chisel dug frantically at the glowing radium that coated the cave wall.

  “Sampson!” Ferguson shouted, his voice lost in the crying that rose from the trees of Eden. “You fool! Don’t touch that.”

  Sampson worked on unheeding. Perhaps he did not notice the way the stone wall Winced away from his sharp chisel. Perhaps he did not understand that the very rock was alive, and—could feel.

  The cave mouth quivered. And—began to dose!

  Sampson saw his danger then. He dropped the chisel and began to run, but the vines on which he trod impeded his progress. He stumbled! . . .

  The mouth of the cave closed, with a screaming of riven rock.

  Sick and dizzy, Ferguson turned and observed Jacklyn’s discarded lead suit lying beside the path. Hurriedly he ripped off his own, then raced after the scientist and his daughter, half deafened by the yelling of the forest. All around him the breathing rocks were battling the living vines. The great veins of the boulders spilled thick purple blood.

  Trees had their limbs locked in aerial combat, dragging one another from the ground be shrieking roots.

  One brown-skinned tree had torn a long branch from an adversary, and Ferguson saw that the branch was jointed like an arm; he could see the broken bone standing white from the brown bark. He had a momentary, giddy wonder if this might not be the answer to what had finally happened to Jacklyn’s vanished Indios.

  He caught up with Jacklyn and helped him drag the panting girl onward. The,earth was rolling now beneath their stumbling feet. Clusters of flowers were reaching out avid, Sucking mouths. But for the most part the Jungle was lost in its own suicidal frenzy as it tore itself to fragments through all the Screaming valley.

  They came to the cleft in the cliff at last, bruised and ripped, breathless and bleeding, but alive. The narrow gorge was breathing as all the rocks of the valley were breathing now, in heavy panting convulsions. The narrow opening grew still narrower, then gaped apart again.

  Ferguson glanced at the girl. She was gasping, as though the tumult in Eden had its echo in her mind.

  Ferguson’s voice was inaudible above the tumult, but he pointed to the cleft. Jacklyn nodded. The girl tried to pull free. Ferguson slid his arm around her waist and urged her on.

  On each side the rock walls groaned. They narrowed. Ferguson felt them brush his shoulders as he squeezed through the last few feet.

  Behind him the gorge crashed shut.

  It opened, rocks screaming, and Ferguson turned.

  For the last time—he saw Eden.

  Jacklyn had seen Eden’s creation, but Ferguson saw the Garden’s ending.

  The earth was opening.

  From the center of Eden a pit broadened, engulfing forest and shrieking stones and all that incredible land where a new race had found birth and perished. Across the valley the gulf spread.

  The earth swallowed Eden.

  FROM the depths came the sound of a cataclysmic explosion, a thunderous booming as of crashing worlds, and a shaft of scarlet light flamed upward toward the sky.

  The cleft in the rock screamed shut. This time it did not open.

  Ferguson stumbled back a few steps. He could see Jacklyn, could see the girl, and the girl had changed. The inhuman pallor was gone from her flesh, and the alien darkness had vanished from her black eyes.

  “She’s human,” Jacklyn breathed. “Ferguson, she’s come back. It didn’t change her so much that she—she couldn
’t revert.”

  But Ferguson was watching the burning shaft that slowly faded against the sky beyond the barrier of rock. His lips moved silently.

  “He placed at the east of Eden . . . a flaming sword . . . to keep the way of the tree of Life . . .”

  TIME ENOUGH

  The Old ’Uns lived in secret—not quite immortal, but for five hundred years or more they’d lived, But nevertheless they’d all died at about one century!

  Sam Dyson found the secret of immortality five hundred years after the Blowup. Since research along such lines was strictly forbidden, he felt a panicky shock when the man from Administration walked into his office and almost casually told Dyson that immortality was nothing new.

  “This is top secret,” the Administrator said, slapping a parcel of manifold sheets on Dyson’s desk. “Not these papers, of course,—but what I’m telling you and what you’re going to see. We hardly ever let anybody in on the secret. In your case we’re making an exception, because you’re probably the only guy who can correlate the necessary field work and know what the answers to the questions mean. There are plenty of intangibles in your work, and that’s why you’ve got to handle it personally.”

  Dyson’s current assignment, which had originally interested him in the problem of immortality, dealt with artificial intellectual mutation, He sat back, trying not to show any particular emotion, and blinked at the Administrator.

  “I thought the Archives—”

  “The Archives are a legend, fostered by propaganda. There ain’t no Archives. A few scattered artifacts, that’s all. Hardly anything survived the Blowup except the human race.”

  And yet the government-controlled Archives were supposed to be the source of all modern knowledge!

  “This is all secret, Dyson. You won’t talk. Sometimes we have to use mnemonic-erasure on blabbermouths, but blabbermouths aren’t often let in on such private affairs. You know how to keep your mouth shut. The truth is we get our scraps of pro-Blowup science from human brain—certain people who were alive when the radiations began to run wild. We keep the Old ’Uns segregated: it’d be dangerous if the world knew immortals existed. There’d be a lot of dissatisfaction.”

  Sweat chilled Dyson’s flank, he said, “Of course I’ve heard the rumors of immortals—”

  “All sorts of legend came out of the Blowup and the Lost Years. We’ve issued counterpropaganda to neutralize the original legend. A straight denial would have had no effect at all. We started a whispering campaign that sure, there were immortals, but they lived only a few hundred years, and they were such screwy mutants they were all insane. That part of the public that believes rumors won’t envy the immortals. As for legends, ever heard of the Invisible Snake that was supposed to punish carnal sin? It wasn’t till after we rediscovered the microscope that we identified the Snake with the spirochete. You’ll often find truth in myths, but sometimes it isn’t wise to reveal the truth.”

  Dyson wondered if Administration could possibly have found out about his forbidden research. He hadn’t known there were immortals; he’d investigated the legends, and his own work in controlled radiation and mental mutation had pointed the way.

  The Administrator talked some more. Then he advised Dyson to televise his uncle, Roger Peaslee. “Peaslee’s been to a Home and seen the Old ’Uns. Don’t look surprised; of course he was sworn to silence. But he’ll talk about it to you now; he knows you’re going to the—Archives!”

  But Dyson felt uneasy until his visitor had left. Then he called his uncle, who held a high post with Radioactives, and asked questions.

  “It’ll surprise you, I think,” Peaslee said, with a sympathetic grin. “You may need psych conditioning when you get back, too. It’s rather depressing. Still, until we get time travel, there’s no other way of reaching back to Blowup days.”

  “I never knew—”

  “Naturally. Well, you’ll see what a Home’s like. There’ll be an interpreter assigned to give you the dope. And, as a matter of fact, it’s good conditioning. You’re going to Cozy Nook, aren’t you?”

  “I think . . . yes, that’s it. There are several?”

  Peaslee nodded.

  “You may run into some of your ancestors there. I know one of your great-greats is in Cozy Nook. It’s a funny feeling, to look at and talk to somebody who five hundred years ago was responsible for your birth. But you mustn’t let her know who you are.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a special set-up. The interpreter will give you the angles. All sorts of precautions have to be taken. There’s a corps of psychologists who work on nothing but the Homes. You’ll find out. And I’m busy, Sam. See you when you get back. I hear you’re getting married.”

  “That’s right,” Dyson said. “We’re both government certified, too.” His smile was slightly crooked.

  “Rebel,” Peaslee said, and broke the circuit. The image slowly faded, leaving only a play of pastel colors driving softly across the screen’s Surface. Dyson sat back and considered.

  Presumably neo-radar had not discovered his hidden laboratory, or there would have been trouble. Not serious trouble, in this paternalistic administration. Discussions, the semantics of logicians, and, in the end, Dyson knew that he would be argued around to the other side. They could twist logic damnably. And, very likely, they were right. If research in certain radio-genetic fields had been forbidden, the reasons for that step would hold even heavy water.

  Immortality.

  Within limits, of course. There were principles of half-life—of entropy—nothing lasts forever. But there were different yardsticks.

  It would be immortality by normal standards.

  So, it had been achieved once before, quite by accident. That particular accident had left the planet in insane chaos for hundreds of years, providing a peculiarly unstable foundation for the new culture that had arisen since. It was rather like a building constructed, without plans, from the alloys and masonry of an earlier one. There were gaps and missing peristyles.

  Dyson thumbed through the manifold sheets on his desk. They contained guides, problems in his current research—not the secret research in the hidden laboratory, but the government-approved work on intellectual mutation. To a layman some of the terms wouldn’t have meant anything, but Dyson was a capable technician. Item 24: Check psychopathology of genius-types in pre-Blowup era, continuing line of investigation toward current times . . .

  He left a transference call for the interpreter, pulled on a cloak, and took a glider to Marta Hallam’s apartment. She was drinking mate on the terrace, a small, fragile, attractive girl who efficiently put a silver tube in another mate gourd as soon as she had kissed Dyson. He sat beside her and rubbed his forehead with thumb and forefinger.

  “We’ll furlough in a few weeks,” Marta said. “You work too hard. I’ll see that you don’t.”

  He looked at her and saw her against a misty background of a thousand years in the future—older, of course, but superficial attractiveness wasn’t imported.

  He’d grow older, too. But neither of them would die. And the treatment did not cause sterility. Overcrowding of the planet could be handled by migration to other worlds; the old rocket fuels had already been rediscovered. Through research in a Home, perhaps, Dyson guessed.

  Marta said, “What are you so glum about? Do you want to marry somebody else?”

  There was only one way to answer that. After a brief while, Dyson grumbled that he hated to be certified like a bottle of milk.

  “You’ll be glad of it after we have children,” Marta said. “If our genes had been haywire, we might have had a string of freaks.”

  “I know. I just don’t like—”

  “Look,” she said, staring at him. “At worst, we’d have been treated, to compensate for negative RH or anything like that. Or our kids would have had to be put in an incubation clinic. A year or two of separation from them at most. And worth it, when you figure that they’d have come out healthy spec
imens.”

  Dyson said cryptically, “Things would have been a lot easier if we’d never had the Blowup.”

  “Things would have been a lot easier if we’d stayed unicellular blobs,” Marta amplified. “You can’t eat your cake and keep the soda bicarb on the shelf.”

  “A philosopher, eh? Never mind. I’ve got something up my sleeve—”

  But he didn’t finish that, and stayed where he was for a while, drinking mate and noticing how lovely Marta’s profile was against the skyline and the immense, darkening blue above. After a while the interpreter announced himself, having got Dyson’s transference notice, and the two men went out together into the chilly night.

  Five hundred years before, an atom was split and the balance of power blew up. Prior to that time, a number of people had been playing tug of war with a number of ropes. Nuclear fission, in effect, handed those people knives. They learned how to cut the ropes, and, too late, discovered that the little game had been played on the summit of a crag whose precipitous sides dropped away to abysmal depths beneath.

  The knife was a key as well. It opened fantastic new doors. Thus the Blowup. Had the Blowup been due only to the atomic blast, man might have rebuilt more easily, granting that the planet remained habitable. However, one of the doors the key opened led into a curious, perilous place where physical laws were unstable. Truth is a variable. But no one knew how to vary it until after unlimited atomic power had been thrown on the market.

  Within limits, anything could happen, and plenty of things did. Call it a war. Call it chaos. Call it the Blowup. Call it a shifting of a kaleidoscope in which the patterns rearranged themselves constantly. In the end, the status quo re-established itself. Man chewed rat bones, but he was an intelligent animal. When the ground became solid under his feet again, he began to rebuild.

  Not easily. Hundreds of years had passed. And very little of the earlier culture had survived.