Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  And Ilsa saw that De Anza and Louis were impressed.

  She let herself smile. “That does it,” she said in a different voice. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t have spoken before this. Against orders.”

  De Anza blinked. “But—I don’t get it. What’s going on? Is GPC—”

  Ilsa took out the identification plastics from the drawer and tossed them across. “I’m a police member. You heard him say it was top secret. Well—it is. GPC needs you two men to do some top secret work. Are you willing?”

  Both men nodded automatically. “Of course, but—we’re in different fields,” Louis said. “Are you sure—”

  “You’ll find out,” Ilsa said. Her instructions carried her only as far as Ortega’s hideout; from there on, it was up to Jeng. She said, “We can go now, if you’re ready.”

  They got up, rather baffled, but conditioned to obey. The three of them took the dropper to the street. Ilsa hailed a monocab.

  The two killers, she saw, were following, not too closely.

  Eventually she breathed again. They were going to succeed. Under a clump of trees along the country lane she dropped belladonna in the men’s eyes—surer than blindfolds—and led them the rest of the way. The camouflaged entrance opened as she neared it. And, underground, she left an expendable neutralizing the belladonna with pilocarpine, and went to find Philip Jeng.

  “Well, I’ve got them here,” she said, when he had emerged to sit with her in one of the cramped rooms, with a cigarette and a mild drink. Quarters were not spacious underground; there was too much danger of detection. The real danger, however, lay in the possibility that GPC might sometime grow suspicious and trace a tapped power leak.

  Philip Jeng sat back like the Laughing Buddha, though his expression was placidly blank. He sipped his drink in silence.

  “Well?” Ilsa asked after a while. “Oh,” Jeng said. “Yes. Sorry. I’m trying to juggle several dozen things in my head at once, intangibles I can’t even set down on paper. It’s a little difficult to keep track of reality. Concentration does that. I’m beginning to understand how the lamas could spend their days contemplating Nirvana. I’m not really the best man for this job, Ilsa.”

  “You’re the best one we have,” she told him. “You’re certainly not an expendable.”

  “If it comes to that, we’re all expendables. Perhaps not at the moment, but when the plan goes into operation. However—De Anza and Louis Breden. They’re here, eh?”

  “Yes. We’re understaffed, Philip. Perhaps it would be best to kill them.”

  “I think not. No, Ilsa, that’s not moral cowardice—I know killing’s necessary often enough. We bring not peace but a sword. I’m thinking of waste. Those men have valuable brains.”

  “Valuable to us or to GPC?”

  “We’ve converted others. I don’t want to kill them without first making certain they can’t be persuaded to join us.”

  “I haven’t got-time to argue with them,” Ilsa said practically. “And it would take a lot of argument, too.”

  “I haven’t time either;—nobody here has, just now. But later when we can make time. Keep them under narcotics; that’s safe. I’m thinking they might be latent malcontents, Louis Breden especially—he’s a mutant, isn’t he? Perhaps we could bring psychological pressure to bear. Get hold of their files, if we have access to them. But they’re not important now that they’re here. The big trouble is with the Freak and that machine Ortega made.”

  “Figured out anything yet?”

  Jeng said slowly, “A little. I have no proof. I can’t even use empirical logic. But my theory is that the voice that speaks to us from Ortega’s machine is speaking from Omega—and Omega isn’t the future, as we imagined.”

  “Another planet?”

  “It’s this planet. It’s the Earth, the same Earth we’re—not—standing on.” His placidity dissolved into a faint smile.

  Ilsa stared.

  “It’s the Earth that might have been,” he said. “And to the people of Omega . . . this”—he tapped his foot—“this is the Earth that might have been. It’s a probability variant. It’s the Earth that took a different route from ours, made a different decision, at a crossroads long ago. I know this: in Omega, according to that voice, there was a World War III, and it wasn’t abortive like ours. I haven’t talked to that voice, not yet; but it’s talked to me. I’m correlating and integrating. The most important thing I’ve learned so far is that atomic power isn’t as dangerous as we’ve been conditioned to believe. No chain reaction could destroy this planet. So we can expand our plans. At worst, we’ll blow a big hole in things—but that’s all.”

  There was a voice in Louis Breden’s head. It didn’t make sense. He ignored it. He was busy fighting.

  De Anza was already unconscious; they had managed to stick the hypodermic needle in him. But Louis kept on fighting, in spite of the odds. He knew this outbreak had been a mistake, but when Do Anza had started it, with a roundhouse swing at one of the guards, there was nothing to do but ride along.

  Louis had to keep his distance from the four men. At close quarters their needles were dangerous. He danced back, searching for a weapon, and saw a door in the wall open. Ilsa Carter stood there. A huge, sleepy-eyed Oriental was behind her.

  His momentary distraction was an error. The men closed in; he struck out, and at the same moment he felt the prick of the needle. Instantly faces wavered and swam like water. His muscles dissolved. He was riding down an elevator—

  But in his mind was a new cool, keen clarity. That voice came back, bringing pictures with it. It was screaming in panic.

  “Tell them . . . must tell them. . . . IT WAS THE EARTH ONCE! THE CHAIN REACTION—”

  Then the narcotic drowned his senses.

  The moment a man is born—in fact, the moment he is conceived—he is at war. Metabolism fights catabolism—his mind is a battlefield—there is a perpetual struggle with orientation and adjustment to the arbitrary norm. Some men adjust fairly well to their environment, but no man is ever entirely at peace. Death brings the only armistice.

  But for Joseph Breden there was a brief truce that night. It was not a solution, except purely temporarily; the hypnotic treatment would eventually have worn off. It could have been renewed, but that would have been a negative triumph, the triumph of passivity. To forget problems is not to solve them, or alcohol and narcotics would be more often prescribed.

  He had made a truce. His memory was not gone; there was only a selective amnesia. He could not remember Ilsa Carter, or the circumstances of his investigation that afternoon. He had even forgotten the recurrent dreams. But little else had been forgotten. There was still his faint dissatisfaction, focused, somehow, on Louis, but even that didn’t seem so rankling now. A well in his mind brimmed Lethe, and it overflowed a little, giving Joseph Breden, on his night of truce, a peace he had not known since childhood.

  The routine checking-in psych tests had been passed without trouble. He sat with Carolyn Kohl at the chessboards, ignoring the visio-recorders focused on him as he ignored the monster chained beneath him in the ziggurat’s heart. Perhaps he didn’t completely ignore the recorders; unconsciously he felt a little warmed by the knowledge that he, one of the guardians, was being guarded, safely protected by those invisible monitors. Here, under earth and sea, in the sunken ziggurat, was the very womb of security, the truest symbol of GPC that was the world’s guardian. Under his feet, chained like the Midgard Serpent, was the foundation-stone of GPS—Uranium Pile Number One.

  Midgard Serpent. While he waited for Carolyn to move, he followed out that concept, very conscious, somehow, of the vast, complicated social organization that GPC controlled. What was it that had finally fettered the Snake? A chain made from rather unlikely things, like the spittle of birds—was that it? Yet the chain had been stronger than forged steel. Well, steel alone could not chain the uranium piles. Nor could boron. It had to be made of certain intangibles as well, social conscience, and a wi
ll toward peace, and trust, and a strong, powerful technology—held always at status quo lest it expand and snap a link in the chain. Rut the Snake was fettered—this Midgard Serpent that coiled around the earth—

  “Check.” Carolyn said, “and you’d better concede. Our shift’s nearly over.”

  “Wait,” Breden said. He studied the boards while she rose, made a round of the instrument panels, and returned to her chair.

  “Baby’s still asleep,” she said. “Did you move? Well, how in the world!”

  “I moved, all right,” Breden said maliciously, and Carolyn sadly removed her queen from the danger area. Breden put out his hand, shifted a castle, and said, “Check.”

  Carolyn hastily nodded toward the wall indicators. “We won’t have time to finish. Here’s our relief.”

  But Breden swung out a camera and snapped a color-photograph of the boards, “We can finish it next time,” he observed.

  She sniffed. “That won’t be for a week. I’ll find the right move by then, though.”

  “Consult an expert, Carrie,” Breden suggested.

  “I do very well on my own. Well, let’s go. How’s Margaret?”

  “Fine. I’ll be spending my furlough with her. Wait a minute; something’s—”

  A voice from the wall told Breden to report to M.A.

  He obeyed cheerfully enough.

  Dr. Hoag, the chief psychiatrist, was still smiling. He was alone in his office. “Just routine,” he said. “We’re not calling out the Board tonight. Here, stick your head in this gadget.” He adjusted electrodes. “Now relax, have a cigarette, and we’ll get this finished fast.”

  “What’s the program now?” Breden asked.

  “Word-associations will do, won’t they?” Hoag touched a switch, and a wall panel lighted. A pulsating red line showed across a graph, moving as the guiding drum turned Beside it, overlapping at times, was a blue line, an earlier encephalograph reading of Breden’s brain. Hoag, perched on the edge of his desk, picked up a blue paper and examined it.

  “This the right one: Yes. All right. Let’s go. Bread.”

  “Butter.”

  Reaction time showed on the screen. The blue and red lines over lapped. Hoag said:

  “Man.”

  “Woman.”

  “Five-six-eighty-six.”

  “Stable lanthanum.”

  “Secret.”

  “Keep.”

  “Coal.”

  “Carrie.”

  So it went. Finally Hoag put down the paper and went over to remove the helmet. “Fair enough,” he said. “There’s some variation, but that’s normal. You get about the same reactions you got six months ago from this list.”

  “All through?”

  “Almost. This is routine. Sodium pentothal surrogate. Not strictly necessary, but you know regulations. Roll up your sleeve. Stick your arm in the shot-box.”

  Breden did. Unseen by him, within the box, ultraviolet made his skin aseptic, a photoelectric found a vein, anaesthetized the area, and completed an injection.

  “All right, take your arm out. Now.” Hoag found another list and asked more questions. He was easily satisfied.

  “That does it,” he said finally. “Stick your arm in again for the antidote. I’ve got to rush off. There’s some new candidates coming up. Can you finish up by yourself?”

  Breden didn’t answer. His head moved jerkily. Hoag grunted and went out, and Breden abruptly pulled his arm out of the box so that the needle missed him entirely.

  One thought surged up in his brain and pounded against the threshold of consciousness. Realization hesitated on the brink. A word, a shape, a Zodiacal sign, a letter, C—Why had he evaded the neutralizing shot? Impulse? The pentothal surrogate would wear off soon by itself, but in the meantime, under its stimulus, he might be able to capture this agonizingly evasive, vital thought—

  He stood up and went out. Leaving the ziggurat was a robot-guided, automatic process. He was in the jet plane, heading for New York, before he understood the memory.

  In Dr. Hoag’s office the telltale mechanisms, connected with the shot-box, punched symbols in a plate and fed it into a screening device. Eventually there was on record the following message, to be integrated and investigated:

  5:34 A.M. Tuesday July 7, 2051. Neutralizing surrogate for pentothal test was not administered to Guardian Joseph Breden. Shot-box Eighteen to be sent to Analytical Repairs for check on operation of mechanism.

  Cancer.

  That was the elusive memory. Now that he had it, the other thronging, shadowy memories came back too. They had been too transparent to see clearly before, but now they could be seen.

  Alone in the robot-piloted jet plane, Breden lay back against the cushions, his eyes closed, and called up phantom after phantom of memory.

  Now he knew. Now he remembered. Ilsa Carter. All of it.

  But it was hard to think. The memories were fading as fast as they came. The drug was wearing off, and, with it, his memories dissolved.

  Ilsa Carter—New York. She was waiting for him there. If he fell into her hands—hers, and the hands of the organization behind her—

  Margaret?

  But—she was his Control! It was Margaret who had hypnotized him, his own wife—

  Cancer.

  A bell rang. A message flashed on in the ceiling. APPROACHING NEW YORK.

  Hoag—he’d have to tell Hoag. He reached for the visor, but didn’t complete the gesture. He pressed his temples hard with his palms.

  What would happen to Margaret if GPC found out?

  But he couldn’t keep this secret. It was unthinkable.

  This secret—what secret? He had to focus hard to remember. As fast as he concentrated on one factor, another slipped away. It was becoming impossible to integrate his memories. The drug was wearing off; his Control’s hypnosis was returning in full strength.

  He needed time.

  Hastily he snatched up the visor switchboard. “Reroute me to . . . to San Francisco,” he said, because it was the first place-name that came to his mind.

  Then his new-found memories dissolved utterly.

  It took Ilsa Carter only ten minutes to discover what had happened—in so far as she could. All she knew, of course, was that Joseph Breden had not landed at the New York airport. It wasn’t difficult to ascertain that the jet plane had been rerouted to the West Coast, but it was troubling not to be able to understand why. All she could do, then, was to put in a secret, coded call to a San Francisco member of the underground. She issued instructions and then vised Jeng. She explained.

  “Too bad,” he said. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed. Breden will be brought to me when he’s located?”

  “If that’s possible. GPC’s embargo still holds. The Neoculturalists are soap-boxing. Interstate transportation’s going to be difficult. Still, a key man like Breden can manage it all right. We’ll do our best.”

  “You can always use his Control,” Jeng suggested. “Don’t risk your own life, though, Ilsa. You’re not expendable—not yet, anyway.” She said, “We’ve laid a false trail to cover the disappearance of De Anza and Louis Breden. Investigation will show that they rented a copter and were caught in that storm off Carolina last night and carried out to sea. Anything new on them?”

  “Nothing yet. We’re still too understaffed, Ilsa. We’ve had to keep them unconscious. As soon as there’s time—and a man to spare—I want to wake ’em up and talk to them, but I’ve had to send most of our staff out on jobs. We’ve got to draw in our horns now. We were spread out more than I’d thought, so we’re a little vulnerable to investigation—and GPC’s investigating the Neoculturalists. The boys are covering as fast as they can. If you could come down here—I can’t let just anybody handle De Anza and Louis Breden. But you’re a good semanticist.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “But remember that Joseph Breden’s the big stake now.”

  “Right,” Jeng said. “I wish I could talk to Ortega, but he’s in bad
shape.”

  “Psychopathology?”

  “No. It was ordinary hysteria first, but—well, he’s an old map, Ilsa. His heart isn’t good. There’s something wrong, and I don’t know what it is. I’m not physician enough to say. I’ve got one of our medicos checking on him now. In fact, here he comes. I’ll see you later, Ilsa.” Jeng touched the stud and the screen blanked. He turned to the medico who had just come in. “Well?” Jeng said.

  The doctor said furiously, “If GPC hadn’t outlawed research, I might be able to help Ortega. But I don’t think I can, now. there’s a virus that’s got into his system—latent till he collapsed yesterday. It’s running wild.”

  “What kind of virus?”

  “It may have been coryza once,” the medico said. “The specific for the common cold was found eighty or ninety years ago—GPC authorized that research, perhaps because GPC wasn’t so sure of its power in those days. But in ninety years a virus can mutate. The old coryza specific’s no good at all against this variant form. Coryza’s evolved, that’s all—and it’s evolved into something deadly. At least, it’s deadly without an antitoxin, and I haven’t got an antitoxin.”

  Jeng said, “I knew there were germ mutations, of course, but I hadn’t known about this—coryza? Is there much of it around?”

  “Virus, not germ,” the doctor snapped. “It’s a masquerader. Adaptable as the devil. You could easily mistake it for a similar pathology—atypical pneumonia, say—and that’s what’s been happening. A man dies of something like atypical pneumonia, and his attending physician writes that down—because he’s been conditioned by GPC.

  He may suspect the truth, but his conscious mind won’t let him ask questions.”