Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “What’s that?” Von Zorn asked.

  “Derivative of curare. A poison that paralyzes the motor nerves. I didn’t know the Zonals had nerves.”

  “Their neural structure’s atrophied, Tony. Mm-m. What else is on that list?”

  “Cusconidin, Monsel’s Salt, sodium sulphoricinate, a baresthesiometer, lenses, filters, camera stuff—nothing special in the medical supplies Udell wanted. You’ve got to jazz up the pharmacy when you’re in space, anyhow. Your katabolism changes, and so on. Variant drugs—”

  VON ZORN spoke abruptly.

  “There was something about a degenerate race of Zonals that attacked Udell’s party, I think. An outlaw tribe. They had a high resistance to wounds; pretty invulnerable. Neo-curare’s a fast-working poison, isn’t it?

  “Well—there’s your answer. Special ammunition against that particular tribe in ease they attacked again. Udell probably intended to smear neo-curare on his ammunition.”

  “Could be,” Quade said. He hesitated, thumbed a button and called Wolfe, his assistant, on the televisor. The youngster’s thin face and sharp blue eyes flashed into visibility on the screen.

  “Hello, Tony. What’s up?”

  “Got the camera-ship ready for the take off?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, here are some more supplies I want you to get. Photostat it.”

  Quade pressed Udell’s list face down against the screen. After a moment Wolfe said, “Got it.”

  Von Zorn seized the paper and began scanning it. Abruptly he emitted the anguished howl of a disemboweled wolf.

  “Wait, Tony!” he cried desperately. “Not that! Venusian cochineal at a hundred dollars a pint, current quotation? Use surrogate red. It’s almost as good, and we don’t need—”

  “I want everything—understand?” Quade said to the televisor. “Don’t leave out a thing.”

  Stabbed in the budget, Von Zorn spun toward Kathleen Gregg.

  “Next he’ll want diamond lenses and radium paint for technicolor effects, I suppose. Thirty-odd concentrated aqueous dyes—and they won’t even show on the celluloid!”

  “The Zonals spend a lot of time underwater,” Quade said patiently. “And underwater camera work under alien conditions is tricky. You’ve got to experiment with the right dyes and special filters and lenses before you can get complete submarine clarity.”

  “You’ve ordered enough concentrated dye to color the Pacific,” Von Zorn mourned. “Lake Erie at least. Why couldn’t Udell have found the right dye before he broke his contract?”

  “Broke his contract?” Kathleen said wonderingly. “He didn’t—”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Von Zorn snarled and went off, as Quade rather suspected, to beat a child star—any child star who wasn’t big enough to be dangerous.

  Quade got busy preparing for the expedition.

  CHAPTER III

  Location Site

  BEING the sixth satellite of Saturn, Titan is unpleasantly cold. It gets no heat from its major, since Saturn’s average temperature is 180° below zero F. But there are occasional volcanic areas, and in one of these, amid geysers and steaming lakes, is the only settlement of humans on Titan, New Macao, a roaring bordertown.

  Most of the moon remains unexplored. There are continents and islands and iron-cold seas whose vast depth as well as the tidal pull of Saturn keep unfrozen. Maps on the satellite are mostly blank, with the outlines of the continents sketched in and a few radar-located landmarks indicated. Perhaps two dozen mining companies work some of the volcanic regions.

  Equatoria, a continent as large as Africa, stretches from latitudes 45° north to 32° south. Udell had clearly marked on his chart the position of his Titan camp, a valley near the equator on the outskirts of Devil’s Range, a broad mountainous belt stretching across the equator for three hundred miles.

  So Quade brought down his camera ship, a gleaming, transparent-nosed ovoid, in a five-mile-wide shallow basin clearly of volcanic origin. Steaming geyser plumes feathered up from the rocky floor. Towering cliffs of ice ringed the valley.

  In the center a few shacks stood, but there was no sign of life. Though the atmosphere was breathable, Quade, remembering the mysterious virus, issued orders for continual wearing of spacesuits outside the ship. Moreover, he installed antiseptic baths in the spacelocks, in which every member of the crew had to dunk himself before reentering the vessel.

  “We’re not near New Macao, are we?” Wolfe asked, a wistful gleam in his blue eyes as he peered through the transparent hull.

  Quade grinned.

  “Nope. We’re on the other side of the satellite. Why? Thirsty?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Better stay away from New Macao liquor,” Quade said solemnly. “Know what plasmosin is? It’s the fibre that holds the cells, of your body together. One shot of Marxian absinthe, New Macao version, and the plasmosin lets go. You fall apart. Very bad.”

  “Yeah?” Wolfe said, wide-eyed. “Gee, I’d like to try it.”

  Quade chuckled and glanced at the instrument panel. “That’s funny,” he said suddenly.

  “Eh?” Wolfe followed the other’s gaze. The needle of a gauge was jumping. “Radiation, eh?”

  “Radiation. Dunno what type. The Geiger counters are quiet, so it either doesn’t register or it’s too weak to be dangerous.” Quade fiddled with the instruments. “It’s coming from the south. We passed over a good-sized crater a while back, didn’t we?”

  “That’s right. It wasn’t volcanic, either. Meteoric. Suppose there’s a radioactive meteor buried down under it?”

  “Possibly. But it doesn’t look like ordinary radioactivity. Let’s see.” Quade tested. “No alpha, beta or gamma types. It’s too weak to bother us, but have one of the men check on it. How about going outside? Get your suit.”

  OUTSIDE the ship Quade and Wolfe sweated in the protective armor, till the refrigo-thermal systems got hold. Then they felt better. These were light-weight outfits, designed for protection against temperature and poisonous atmospheres, not the bulky, reinforced spacesuits used in pressure-work. Saturn was almost at zenith. Quade looked up at the ringed planet, squinting against the wan, yet curiously intense light.

  “Have to use special filters,” he remarked. Diaphragms in the spherical transparent helmets made it possible to converse. In this atmosphere it wasn’t necessary to use radio.

  Spongy pumice crackled under their feet. A bellow of crashing ice thundered from the snowy ramparts to the west. It died and there was silence. No movement stirred in the valley. Quade peered from under his palm.

  “There’s a lake,” he said. “The Zonals are amphibious. Let’s try it.”

  If the surface of Titan seemed a bleak desert, the waters of the satellite provided a strange contrast. The lake was an oval nearly a mile long. Its surface seethed and bubbled with glowing light—no wonder Udell had wanted to experiment with dyes! Plant-life made islands on the surface. There was ceaseless activity in the water and, every few moments, a bulky glistening body would appear briefly and vanish again.

  Quade hesitated on the edge. There had been a tribe of dangerous Zonals, he remembered. In fact, there were several, news from Macao had told him—nomadic groups wandering murderously around from sea to lake to river. But most of the Zonals were peaceful enough.

  And in this lake—

  “Tony!” Wolfe said sharply. “Look there!”

  A head broke the water a few dozen feet away. A round, furry head like a seal’s, with staring eyes. The nose was a snout, the mouth broad and loose and lipless. But for all the animalism of the creature, the curve of its head above the eyes, its obvious cranial index, showed that it must possess a brain of some intelligence.

  Quade and Wolfe remained motionless. The water broke into a seething rush of bubbles and the Zonal came shoreward. It waded out and stood knee-deep in water, staring blankly.

  Its body was thoroughly anthropoid in outline, and curiously graceful in its sleekly
furred, streamlined contours. The Zonal was a little more than five feet tall. Its hands and feet were huge and webbed.

  The Zonal squirted jets of liquid from its eyes. Then it bent and submerged its head briefly. Wolfe had involuntarily stepped back. Quade spoke softly.

  “Take it easy. Its eyeballs are hollow—it’s got an opaque diaphragm stretched over ’em, like a kettle-drum. No lens. There’s a hole in the center of the diaphragm to admit light, and the hollow’s kept filled with water. Acts as a lens. It’s got perfect vision, though.

  And—look at that thing on its back!”

  The Zonal, having filled its hollow eyes with water, stood up again, but Quade and Wolfe had already got a glimpse of the creature’s flight-sac, a great sausage-shaped object that made it look humpbacked. The sac had a gristly projection at one end that suddenly moved and twisted. The Zonal, tiring of the two men’s company, disappeared.

  WOLFE was left blinking at the place where it had been. Quade, who knew what to expect, looked up. The creature was shooting through the air like a streamlined spaceship, thirty feet high and going fast. Quade pointed it out to his companion.

  “Uh!” Wolfe said. “It’s worse than a flea. How does it do that?”

  “Same way a squid does,” Quade explained, watching the Zonal fall like a stone toward the ground. A dozen feet above a mound of gnarled lava the amphibian seemed to halt in the air, then sank down gently, to stand quietly surveying its surroundings. “A squid?”

  “Or a cuttlefish. Squirts water out of a sac—the old repulsion principle. Only the Zonals are a little more scientific about it. Those sacs on their back look soft, but they’re plenty tough.

  “They’re filled with gas, continually renewed and manufactured by letting in air and water to mix with the chemicals of their bloodstream. When a Zonal wants to move fast he lets off a blast that has the same effect a rocket-jet has on a spaceship.”

  “They don’t have gravity screens, though,” Wolfe said.

  Quade smiled.

  “Well, no. Here’s this fellow back again.” The Zonal came flying, bulletlike. Just before he reached the two men a blast of hissing, suddenly-released gas braked it and the creature plumped down easily not a yard away.

  “Wonder if Udell taught ’em English?” Quade murmured. He put out his hand gently. “Hello, there. We’re friends—understand? We’re friends.”

  The Zonal touched Quade’s flexible-metal glove with a tentative, limber finger. Then, gently gripping it in his webbed hand, he eyed it carefully, lifted it to his mouth, and took a hearty bite.”

  Quade yelped, jerked his hand back and nursed a bruised knuckle. The Zonal, seemingly puzzled, lifted its shoulders in something suspiciously like a shrug and rocketed back to the lava mound, where it squatted down to think things over. Meanwhile a dozen new heads had popped up from the lake near the shore.

  “I thought you said they weren’t dangerous,” Wolfe observed.

  “They’re not,” Quade gulped, moving his fingers experimentally. “Ouch! That was just—ah—curiosity.”

  “Well, what now?”

  “We’ll unload the equipment. Get the cameras set up. The Zonals can wait a bit I want to think things over.”

  Quade was hoping he didn’t sound as baffled as he felt. He had hoped that Udell might have educated the amphibians somewhat, but apparently the creatures were dumber than apes—a lot dumber. Somehow that didn’t jibe with the sizable brain-cases of the Zonals. Their cranial indices seemed to hint that there was intelligence in those sleek furry heads—and Udell had managed to use that savvy. But how?

  How, indeed?

  CHAPTER IV

  Crackup

  QUADE had arranged the compact two-man cruiser as a miniature replica of the giant camera ship and carrying identical equipment. It was a complete traveling laboratory, with built-in cameras and searchlights that could stab out from every angle through the transparent nose. During space flights it remained in its cradle within the larger vessel, but now it rested on the lava plain near by, ready for a take-off.

  Three days had passed and Quade was still stumped. He couldn’t penetrate the wall of stupidity that shielded the Zonals from all advances. Once or twice he thought he was making some headway with the first Zonal they had encountered—whom Wolfe had irreverently dubbed Speedy. But Speedy, though extremely curious, shot off like a rocket whenever Quade felt he was getting somewhere.

  In the great camera-ship Quade was donning his protective armor. He had decided to make a survey of the surrounding terrain in the little cruiser, on the chance that Udell’s trained Zonals might have wandered away. The icy rampart was no barrier to them, for they rocketed over it like birds.

  Wolfe, leaning against a table stacked with experimental apparatus, looked tired. “Want me to go along, Tony?” he asked. “You’d better stay here and keep things moving,” Quade said.

  “What things?”

  “Yeah, I know. Everything’s ready for shooting. We could roll any time—except for the Zonals. I’ve got to find some way—” Quade, struggling into his suit, lurched into a cabinet and deftly caught a small bottle as it fell.

  “Neo-curare. Don’t want to smash that. I may use it on myself if I have to face Von Zorn without a picture.”

  “Tony,” Wolfe said hastily. “I think I see Kathleen Gregg.”

  “What!”

  Quade whirled awkwardly, peering through the ship’s nose. A gyroplane had landed and a slim figure in gleaming space-armor was clambering out. It was, indeed, Kathleen.

  “Blast!” Quade said, lurching toward a port Halfway out he remembered the neocurare and hastily stuck it in one of the self-sealing pockets in his suit. Pumice ground under his heels. The gyroplane, he saw, was already surging up, angling toward the ice barrier. Kathleen was trotting along briskly, but there was a certain hesitancy in the look she gave Quade.

  He halted in front of the girl. She smiled. “Why, hello, Tony.”

  “Just what are you doing here?” Quade asked. “Or should I guess?”

  “It’s sweet of you to say so,” Kathleen observed, tilting her nose Saturn ward. “As a matter of fact, I got rather tired hanging around—”

  “So you thought you’d drop in and say hello,” Quade finished for her. “Now you can turn around and say goodbye and go home.”

  “How?”

  Quade peered after the departed gyroplane. “How’d you get here?”

  ‘“Took a tramp ship to New Macao and hired a pilot to fly me the rest of the way.”

  “Okay,” Quade said. “See that two-man camera ship? You’re going to march into it and I’m going to fly you back to New Macao and put you on a Sunward ship. Catch?”

  “Won’t,” Kathleen said, starting to run. Quade deftly caught her, lifted her kicking figure, and carried her to the cruiser. He dumped her in it and turned to Wolfe, who had followed.

  “Be back as soon as I can. Keep things moving.”

  “Right. Hello, Kathleen,” Wolfe said pleasantly. “Goodbye now.”

  HE shut the port and departed. Quade silently turned to the controls and lifted the ship. Kathleen, standing beside him, was not silent. She finished by saying that her engagement to Quade was off, and that he was a rat.

  “Sure I am,” Quade said. “But this is my job and I think it’s a little dangerous. I’m sure I can handle it. Just the same, I don’t want you around. For one thing you distract me and for another I’m still wondering about that virus disease that killed Udell.” Kathleen sniffed.

  “Ha. Hey! We’re being followed.”

  Quade threw a magnifying plane on the scanner. A sleek projectile was rocketing along after the camera cruiser.

  “Oh, that’s Speedy,” Quade said. “One of the Zonals. He won’t follow us long.”

  But this proved inaccurate. Speedy stayed on the trail for twenty miles before he was lost in the distance. Then nothing was visible but the frigid, Cyclopean peaks of the Devil’s Range, icy and alien in the p
ale light of Saturn.

  Things began to happen with alarming suddenness.

  There are plenty of safety devices on spacecraft, but these depend on the assurance that you have a skilful and a conscious operator. Quade was skilful enough, but unfortunately he was knocked cold when the vessel sideslipped in a sudden blast of air, powerful as a cyclone, that screamed up from the Devil’s Range. A geyser-heated valley below made a thermal of racing air that created a maelstrom where the icy atmosphere of Titan met it.

  The camera cruiser turned sidewise and Quade went spinning into the controls. His head banged against his helmet, which made him lose all interest in the fact that the ship was plunging down.

  Kathleen couldn’t do much about it, though she tried hard enough. She was wedged under a tangle of apparatus, which imprisoned her but saved her from serious injury when the ship struck, with a splash that sent water leaping high.

  Creamy, luminous liquid crept over the ship’s nose. An oddly-shaped fish came to stare in pop-eyed amazement. Then it swam hastily away.

  The ship grounded. Kathleen fought her way free and scrambled up the tilted floor to where Quade lay. There was blood oozing from his head, and Kathleen quickly removed the helmet and used the first-aid kit. But Quade remained stubbornly unconscious.

  Two courses were left. Kathleen could fly the ship back to the camp or she could radio for help. She tried both, but without success. The controls were smashed, the gravity plates warped and broken.

  The cruiser’s day of usefulness was over. The. radio was hash. A telephoto camera was strewn in sections about the room and some of the carboys of concentrate-dye had torn free from their moorings and were broken. The floor was awash with yellow and pink fluid.

  Kathleen peered up through the ship’s nose. The surface of the lake beneath which they lay wasn’t far above, she judged. If she could swim up—that would be easy in the airtight suit. But what about Tony?