Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Now her eyes widened in real surprise. Breden didn’t look at her. His glance shifted up to the televisor screen above her head.

  “I’m thinking of latent mutation,” he said, and went on to explain the theory he had discussed with De Anza. But this time he gave it a personal application. Was it possible that he, himself, might be a latent mutant? And that the mutation could become dominant under certain conditions—and use supranormal powers?

  “Springfield was trying to tell me something when he died. Miss Carter, what happened to the nurse who let me into the office today? She was gone when I left, and you’d taken over. I don’t know why that seems surprising to me. It’s the whole combination of unlikely factors, I suppose. I want you to tell me—”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” she asked.

  Breden made an abortive gesture. Ilsa Carter leaned back, looking steadily at him.

  She said, “You’d have found out that Springfield’s nurse had had an accident on the Ways. She was killed. It’s unfortunate, but we had to move rapidly, and couldn’t maneuver her out of the way fast enough. She saw us kill Springfield.”

  Curiously, the first emotion he felt was relief. They had murdered Springfield—whoever they were. That was better than—

  He stood up. Ilsa Carter raised her hand; there was a shining silver disk, like a compact, in her palm. A tiny lens watched him like an eye. She said, “Sit down, Breden. I’m going to explain. But I could paralyze or kill you with this—it’s what killed Springfield.”

  Breden sat down. “You’ll kill me anyway,” he said.

  “No. We need you. We chose you because you’re perhaps the only man in the world who’s in a position to help us. And you’re the right man. That combination may not occur again for a long while. Now . . . here it is. We’re an underground organization dedicated to a certain purpose.”

  “You’re the Neoculturalists?”

  She smiled. “Oh, no. We’ve never bothered with names. The Neoculturalists and all the other groups are harmless—so far. Harmless to GPC, I mean. But we’re not. We want to overthrow GPC.”

  He leaned forward slightly. Ilsa Carter turned the disk so that the lens flashed glitteringly. Breden relaxed.

  “There aren’t many of us,” she went on. “But so far we’ve managed to keep our existence a secret.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Breden said. “GPC—well, you can’t keep secrets from GPC.”

  “You are,” Ilsa said. “They don’t know about your dreams, do they?”

  The earth moved beneath him. That shivering instability came up again, mingled with the heartbeat of a machine six thousand miles away. He wondered if the mind, too, could reach critical mass, and whether it could survive that level. He didn’t think so. He looked at the visor screen and thought of Margaret. That was an anchor to sanity.

  Ilsa said, “We want to overthrow GPC because we think that’s the only solution.”

  “Solution to what? The world’s safe—”

  “So is a patient in cataleptic stupor,” she said. “Do you know what has stopped civilization in its tracks? It was an omission. It was something that didn’t happen, but should have happened, for the sake of the world.”

  “What?”

  “The Third World War,” she told him flatty. “It should have happened, a hundred years ago. But, since it didn’t, we intend to make it happen now.”

  It was obscene. He sat there and looked at her. There was nothing he could say. His conditioning had never covered stark insanity. She seemed rational. But she wasn’t. She couldn’t be.

  She sounded rational.

  “I’ll tell you about myself later,” she said. “I’m a malcontent, naturally. That isn’t important, except that all of us, in the organization, are malcontents. We have to be, or we’d never have formed it or joined it. It’s our way of keeping a balance, staying sane.”

  “Sane!” Breden said.

  “I hope you don’t think you’re sane,” she remarked. “Oh, you’re well-adjusted to this world, but—it’s a psychopathic world! The only satisfied people on earth now are the drudges. Like your friend Carolyn Kohl, at the island. She’s satisfied to watch lights and push buttons. But her type of technician is in the minority. A man doesn’t take up technology, usually, unless he’s got an itch. And that’s a hard itch to scratch satisfactorily—impossible, under this set-up. The result is stagnation.”

  “But safety,” Breden said, vaguely surprised to find himself arguing. “An atomic war—”

  “Would be a tangible we could analyze. One thing GPC has overlooked, Breden. This planet isn’t isolated. It isn’t safe. It is now, I suppose, but eventually—GPC may be surprised to find it isn’t alone in time and space. We’ve reached the planets, yes. But what’s beyond? Do you suppose there’s no life, no civilization, equal to ours in the entire Galaxy?”

  “They’d have communicated—”

  “The Galaxy’s big,” Ilsa said. “Time and space are big. One day a ship may come in from outside, and—under this set-up—we’d have to attack it to maintain our isolation. That might be just too bad for us. Personally, I’d be glad to see that day come. But I don’t want to wait for visitors from interstellar space. A race can die of dry rot, too. A race can go mad. Since GPC took over, humans have been forced into an alien social and psychological pattern, and most of the race is insane. It isn’t recognized, because it’s become the norm. It isn’t incurable. But shock therapy must be used by this time. All progress has stopped. You can say that the status quo can be Utopia, but that ignores the fact that men grow. No one can be sane unless he uses his full potentialities. Even a moron must do that.”

  Breden said, “But you’re the one who’s insane. Don’t you realize what an atomic war would mean?”

  Ilsa looked at him oddly. “Yes, Breden. I do. Because I’ve seen it, and seen its results.” She frowned a little. “There was a mutant born, apparently insane—dementia praecox. Hard radiations had mixed up his genes plenty. By rights he shouldn’t have been viable at all; he was premature, and reared in an incubator for months. His father is one of our leaders. Eventually we discovered that this freak has a certain mutated power, a natural talent, that had been born into him. It’s rather an unknown factor even now. Call it prescience, though it isn’t exactly that. He can see into what seems to be the future, and in his rational periods he can tell us what he sees. That’s how we got this weapon”—she raised the shining disk—“and other things. We have certain televisor attachments that enable us to keep underground. The Freak has described to us what he sees in this future world—if that’s what it is. And—it’s closer to Utopia than our world. We’ve called it Omega, for definitive purposes. Though it’s a beginning rather than an end.”

  Breden said cautiously, “If that’s the future, what can you do to change it? If you act now, you may be warping the future away from your—Omega pattern.”

  “Or our actions may have brought about that pattern,” she said, “I don’t know. There are variables we don’t understand; the Freak has told us things that don’t tit at all—but one thing is clear. There’ll be a Third World War. The result will come very quickly, it will be blitz, with modern technologies. There’ll be an atomic holocaust, the nations will decentralize immediately, and there’ll be bacteriological warfare. Not many people will remain alive on the planet. But research will be given the greatest impetus since World War Two. In Omega, Breden, the life span is two hundred years. And there are very few pathologies—the people are healthy. They live to their fullest potentiality. Scientists, artists, farmers—the boundaries are removed for them. They are reaching out to the stars. For their great men don’t die as soon as they’ve achieved mastery of their professions. Their mutants—well, maturation’s slower with mutants, and in this time-era they simply don’t have time to reach their peak. But in Omega there’s no senility at the age of seventy. And there’s no obsolescence through disuse!”

  “Yes,” Breden
said. “I see your point. I don’t agree with it. You can’t survive without GPC.”

  “Conditioning!” Ilsa snapped. “You’ve been made to believe that! Why do you suppose we’ve been giving you that recurrent dream?”

  “You . . . what did you say?”

  “Dr. Springfield was about to tell you about that,” Ilsa said. “He’d discovered you’d been under hypnosis—posthypnotic suggestion. You see, you’ve been conditioned too well. We could never hypnotize you into setting off the uranium pile. But we could make you dream you were doing that, as long as you knew you were dreaming. It was a preparation of your unconscious for what your conscious mind wouldn’t accept without groundwork. We can convince your conscious that we’re right—but we couldn’t have done it two months ago. If we hadn’t begun to change your ideas and your thinking already, you wouldn’t be sitting here now. Two months ago you’d have reacted instantly by jumping at my throat.”

  Breden kept the tight control on his mind and body. He said. “You can never set off the pile. There are too many safeguards.”

  “You could set it off, though. As one of the nuclear physicists in charge, you could make an opportunity.”

  “I could. But I wouldn’t. You couldn’t hypnotize me into doing that.”

  Ilsa said slowly, “Of all the key physicists in the world, you’re the only one who can be convinced. We did a lot of checking before we decided on you. Psychologically you’re the right subject. Here’s what you’re going to do. Return to the island tonight, stand your guard duty, and then, tomorrow morning, begin your furlough. During that furlough, we’ll convince you that you must set off the uranium pile. When you go back on your job—you’ll do that.”

  Breden said, “Unfortunately I’ll be eliminated as soon as I take the psych-tests tonight. The psychologists—Medical Administration—will find out all you’ve been telling me, even if I wanted to keep it secret, which I don’t.”

  “They won’t find it out. I had to tell you this, because you’d begun to suspect too much. There were too many questions in your mind—unanswered questions. The psych tests would have detected something haywire if you’d gone back to the island without getting your questions answered. But now you know the truth; you realize you’re not a mutant, and the danger is one you feel able to understand and cope with. As for your talking—you won’t talk. You’ll forget all this, until tomorrow, when your Control tells you to remember. That will protect you and us, when you’re at the island.”

  “My Control?”

  “The one who hypnotized you. Who suggested your dreams. The one who gave you mnemonic amnesia, through the televisor, in Springfield’s office when I had to kill him. You see, Breden, we’re quite ruthless. We prefer not to be, but we will take no chances.

  It may be a risk letting you go back to the island tonight, but it’s a risk we must take, for we need you, and we need you in your present job. So you’ll forget this interview. Your mind will be at ease, but you won’t remember that your questions have been answered. I don’t think any psych tests can get through the hypnosis your Control will work on you.”

  She had turned her hand so that the lens wasn’t visible. Breden edged forward slightly. He drew one leg back a little.

  He said, “My wife’s having a child soon. I don’t want to have him born into a world of atomic warfare. You may be perfectly convinced you’re right, but I say you’re insane. So—”

  “Unless your son—or daughter—is a moron, he or she will be insane, growing up in this GPC-controlled culture. Wouldn’t you rather have your child growing up in a world where he’d have freedom from disease, mental freedom as well, and a life expectancy of two hundred years? Breden, if GPC hadn’t choked off the Third World War before it started, medical research would be a thousand years ahead now. Disease would be almost unknown—”

  The voice came from the televisor screen. For a blinding second Breden didn’t believe what he heard. Then a glance showed him what his mind could not accept: the face of Margaret, his wife.

  She said, “I’m sorry, darling. It’s something I had to do. I stopped arguing with myself a long time ago.”

  Breden looked at her. “You’re my . . . Control? You hypnotized me?”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  “And you’re in this . . . this organization of criminal lunatics?”

  “Yes, Joe. But you’ll have to learn more about these—lunatics before you make your decision. They’re the only people in the world today who have transcended their barriers. They’re limited, of course—it’s hard for them to tap power-sources without detection. But in physics, chemistry, medicine, bacteriology, they know things this civilization doesn’t.”

  His mouth moved stiffly. “Margaret—” he said.

  Her eyes were steady. “For example . . . no, I want to tell you this, dear—”

  Ilsa said warningly, “Now?”

  “Yes. Listen, Joe. Medical Biology gave me a clean bill of health. As far as they were concerned, I was perfectly healthy. But our—organization of lunatics—has tests and reagents GPC never heard of. It will be years before it will show enough for Medical Biology to find it, but . . . but I—” Ilsa sat stiffly, her eyes hard and bright. Breden stood up abruptly. He walked toward the televisor.

  “What is it, Margaret?” he asked.

  “Carcinoma.”

  Breden said, “Cancer . . . they’re lying!”

  “No. They’re not lying.”

  “This early—it’s curable—”

  “Not with today’s medical science. No germ or virus research is permitted. You know that. On the Omega future-world, cancer can be cured. But the Freak can’t tell us how. The techniques are beyond him. He can’t look through a microscope there and tell us how to culture an antibody. The cure must be found here on earth, in our time. I’ll be dead, probably, before that, but our child will inherit a propensity for cancer. I’d like to know, before I die, that even carcinomatosis, no matter how virulent, can be cured.”

  “Margaret,” he said, and stopped. She nodded slowly.

  “There’s the child, Joe. And there’s the idea that you might have had cancer yourself—or something else that’s incurable so far. I’d give you euthanasia if you needed it, you know. So I can’t hesitate now. It’s because—”

  If she finished, Breden never knew it. The world drowned for him in white silence.

  The whiteness and the silence receded suddenly.

  He was on the jet plane, heading westward, far above the Pacific.

  The ship shot in pursuit of the setting sun. Breden wondered idly how he had spent his time after leaving De Anza. But he did not wonder for long. Memories of a theater, of dinner, floated up from somewhere in his mind.

  He thought: After tonight’s stint, my furlough. I’ll spend it with Margaret. Maybe I’ll get away front those dreams. I mustn’t let Medical Administration find out about my dreams!

  Ortega said irritably to the televisor, “I’m extremely busy, Ilsa. There’s a new development with the Freak. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “This won’t take long. It’s important. Breden’s brother, Louis, and a physicist named De Anza—they compared notes today and started asking questions. They’re coming up to see me. We can’t kill them, you know. It would cause too much uproar. There’d be an investigation. We couldn’t cover.”

  “We’d have to kill them.”

  “Ortega, they’d fit in Omega. Both of them. With a lot of reconditioning—but they’re brilliant men, especially Breden’s brother. He’s a mutant, you know. If there’s any other way possible, I think we should avoid killing them.”

  “We can’t afford investigation at this point. Breden must stay at Uranium Pile One.”

  Ilsa said, “Well, his Control hypnotized him, and he went back to the island. He’s still worried about losing his job. So he won’t talk about his dreams. As for “the rest, he’s forgotten it. It’ll have a chance to germinate in his unconscious. Tomorrow he’ll r
emember, at the right time, but by then we’ll have him under our wing. It won’t be as easy as we expected to convince the man. There’s intense rivalry, of course, between Breden and his brother—” She paused. “Wait a minute. I’ve an idea. I wonder if there isn’t some way we could play on that rivalry to push Breden in the right direction?”

  “That isn’t the strongest card we hold.”

  “He knows his wife has cancer,” Ilsa said. “That emotional appeal may turn the trick in itself. Or it may not; I don’t know. But we’ve got to win him to our way of thinking before his furlough’s up. When he goes back to the island, he must set off the uranium pile.”

  Ortega said nervously, “Ilsa, please do the best you can. I’m on the trail of something completely new with the Freak.”

  “You’re curing him?”

  “It isn’t that. It’s . . . I’ll tell you later, when I’ve found out more. But—the Freak’s mutated talent isn’t prescience. It isn’t the future he sees.”

  Ilsa stared. “Omega isn’t our future world?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” Ortega said. “But I suspect we’re going to find out.”

  Six hours later Ortega was still working on the mechanism. He didn’t know what it was. He followed the Freak’s orders. The Freak lay motionless with all his eyes closed, moving a little occasionally in his tank, and sometimes merely resting passive, saying nothing. The rational period was unusually long. It was wearing, however, and twice the Freak, nearly sick with nervous exhaustion, began to cry.

  But the mechanism grew nevertheless.

  This had never happened before. The Freak had described what he saw in Omega—and sometimes what he saw was completely paradoxical—but he had never dictated a blueprint to his father. He seemed to be watching a similar machine being constructed somewhere—on Omega?—and describing its progress, so that Ortega could duplicate it step by step.

  “Power,” the Freak said, after a long pause. “Give it power.” Ortega made a connection and moved a rheostat. The Freak said, “More.”