Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  The cell drifted nearer. The man in it was thin, dark, frowning. He wore a dull brown costume.

  “I know him by sight,” Sam said, and stood up. The floor rocked slightly at the motion. “Drop me at the landing stage. I’ll take care of him for you.”

  At the long bar he found a vacant seat and ordered a drink. The bartender looked at him sharply. This was a rendewous for the Immortals and the upper classes; it was not often that a man as squatly plebeian as Sam Reed appeared at the bar. But there was something about Sam’s scowl and the imperiousness of his order that after a moment made the bartender mutter “Yes, sir,” rather sullenly and bring him his drink.

  Sam sat there a long while. He ordered twice more and made the drinks last, while the great shell hummed and spun above him and the crowd filled the dome with music and a vast amorphous murmuring. He watched the floating cell with the brown figure inside drift aimlessly around the vast circle. He was waiting for the Immortal to descend, and he was thinking very fast.

  Sam was frightened. It was dangerous to mix in the affairs of the Immortals even politically-. To get emotionally involved was sheer suicide and Sam had no illusion about his chances for survival as soon as his usefulness was over. He had seen the look of mild speculation that Zachariah Harker turned on him.

  When the Free Companion’s cell drifted finally toward the landing stage, Sam Reed was there to meet it. He wasted no words.

  “I’ve just been hired to kill you, Hale,” he said.

  They were leaving Haven together an hour later when the Sheffield gang caught up with Sam.

  Sam Reed would never have come this far in his career if he hadn’t been a glib and convincing talker when he had to be. Robin Hale had certainly been a target for glib promotioners often enough since his colonizing crusade began to know how to brush them off. But here again the Harker blood spoke silently to its kindred Immortality in Hale, and though Sam credited his own glibness, it was the air of quiet conviction carried by his subsurface heritage which convinced the Free Companion.

  Sam talked very fast—in a leisurely way. He knew that his life and Hale’s were bound together just now by a short rope—a rope perhaps forty-eight hours long. Within those limits both were safe. Beyond them, both would die unless something very, very clever occurred to them. Sam’s voice as he explained this carried sincere conviction.

  This was the point at which the Sheffield boys picked him up. The two came out of the Haven portal and stepped onto the slow-speed ribbon of a moving Way. Then a deliberate press of the crowd separated them a bit and Sam, turning to fight his way back, saw too late the black bulb in the hand that rose toward his face and smelled the sickening fragrance of an invisible dust too late to hold his breath.

  Everything about him slowed and stopped.

  A hand slipped through his arm. He was being urged along the Way. Globes and lanterns made patches of color along the street until it curved; there they coalesced into a blob of hypnotic color. The Way slid smoothly along and shining, perfumed mists curled in fog-banks above it. But he saw it all in stopped motion. Dimly he knew that this was his own fault. He had let Kedre distract him; he had allowed himself to take on a new job before he finished an old one that required all his attention. He would pay now.

  Then something like a whirlwind in slow motion struck across the moving belts of the Way. Sam was aware only of jostling and shouts and the thud of fists on flesh. He couldn’t sort out the faces, though he saw the Free Companion’s floating before him time and again in a sort of palimpsest superimposed upon other faces, dimly familiar, all of them shouting.

  With a dreamlike smoothness he saw the other faces receding backward along the slower ramp while the lights slipped rapidly away at the edges of the highspeed Way and Robin Hale’s hand gripped his arm.

  He let the firmness of the hand guide him. He was moving, but not moving. His brain Had ceased almost entirely to function. He knew only vaguely that they were mounting the ramp to one of the hydroponic rooms, that Hale was clinking coins into an attendant’s hand, that now they had paused before a tank where a heavy, gray-green foliage clustered.

  From far off Hale’s voice murmured, “It usually grows on this stuff. Hope they haven’t sprayed it too well, but it’s hardy. It gets in everywhere. Here!” A sound of scraping fingernails, a glimpse of bluish lichen crushed between Hale’s palms and dusted in Sam’s face.

  Then everything speeded up into sudden accelerated motion timed to Sam’s violent sneezes. A stinging pain began in his sinuses and spread through his brain. It exploded there, rose to a crescendo, faded.

  Sweating and shaking, he found he could talk again. Time and motion came back to normal and he blinked streaming eyes at Hale.

  “All right?” the Free Companion asked.

  “I—guess so.” Sam wiped his eyes.

  “What brought that on?” Hale inquired with interest.

  “My own fault,” Sam told him shortly. “Personal matter. I’ll settle it later—if I live.”

  Hale laughed. “We’ll go up to my place: I want to talk to you.”

  “They don’t understand what they’ll be facing,” the Free Companion said grimly. “I can’t seem to convince anyone of that. They’ve got a romantic vision of a crusade and not one in a thousand has ever even set. foot on dry land.”

  “Convince me,” Sam said.

  “I savy the Logician,” Hale began. “The crusade was his idea. I needed—something. This is it, and I’m afraid of it now. It’s got out of hand. These people are emotional dead-beats. They’re pawing me like so many dogs begging for romance. All I can offer them is personal hardship beyond anything they can even dream, and no hope of success for this generation or the next. That sort of spirit seems to have bred out of the race since we’ve lived in Keeps. Maybe the underwater horizons are too narrow. They can’t see beyond them, or their own noses.” He grinned. “I offer not peace but a sword,” he said. “And nobody will believe it.”

  “I’ve never been topside myself,” Sam told him. “What’s it like?”

  “You’ve seen it in the projectors, relayed from planes above the jungles. So have most people. And that’s the fallacy—seeing it from above. It looks pretty. I’d like to take a projector down into the mud and look up at all that stuff towering over and reaching down, and the mud-wolves erupting underfoot and the poison-vines lashing out. If I did, my whole crusade would fall flat and there’d be an end of the colonizing.” He shrugged.

  “I’ve made a start, you know, in the old fort,” he said. “The Doonemen had it once. Now the jungle’s got it back. The old walls and barriers are deactivated and useless. All that great technology is dead now. Whole rooms are solid blocks of vegetation, alive with vermin and snakes and poison plants. We’re cleaning that out, but keeping it clean—well, that’s going to take more than these people have got. Why, the lichens alone will eat through wood and glass and steel and flesh! And we don’t know enough about the jungle. Here on Venus the ecology has no terrestrial parallel. And it won’t be enough simply to hold the fort. It’s got to be self-supporting.”

  “That’ll take money and backing,” Sam reminded him. “The Families are dead against it—now.”

  “I know. I think they’re wrong. So does the Logician.”

  “Are you working alone on this?” Hale nodded. “So far I am.”

  “Why? A good promotion man could get you all the backing you need.”

  “No good promotion man would. It’d be a swindle. I believe in this, Reed. With me it is a crusade. I wouldn’t trust a man who’d be willing to tackle it, knowing the truth.” A beautiful idea was beginning to take voluptuous shape in Sam’s mind. He said, “Would you trust me?”

  “Why should I?”

  Sam thought back rapidly over how much of the truth he had already told Hale. Not too much. It was safe to go ahead. “Because I’ve already risked my neck to warn you,” he said. “If I’d gone ahead with the job Harker gave me, I’d be collect
ing a small fortune right now. I didn’t. I haven’t told you why yet. I guess I don’t need to. I feel the way you do about colonizing. I could make some money out of promoting it—I won’t deny that. But nothing like the money I could make killing you.”

  “I’ve just told you the thing can’t succeed,” Hale pointed out. But there was a light in his eyes and more eagerness in his manner than Sam had yet seen.

  “Hooked!” Sam. thought. Aloud, he said, “Maybe not. All it needs is plenty of backing—and I mean plenty ! I think I can provide that. And we’ve got to give the crusaders a substitute goal for the real one, something they think they can collect on in their life time. Something they can collect on. No cheating. Shall I try?”

  Hale pinched his chin thoughtfully. At last he said, “Come with me to the Logician.”

  Sam hedged. He was afraid of the Logician. His own motives were not the kind that could stand the light of clear reason. But Hale, essentially romanticist as he was, had several centuries of experience behind him to bolster up his apparent naiveté. They argued for over an hour.

  Then Sam went with him to see the Logician.

  A globe spoke to them, a shining white globe on an iron pedestal. It said, “I told you I can’t foretell the future. Hale.”

  “But you know the right answers.”

  “The right answer for you may not be the right one for Sam Reed.”

  Sam moved uneasily. “Then make it two answers,” he said. He thought it was a machine speaking. He had let down his guard a trifle; machines weren’t human. Willy-nilly, he had given the data it required. Now he waited uneasily, knowing the hours of his deadline were slipping away while Kedre and Harker waited for news of the Companion’s death.

  In the silver globe shadows swam, the distorted reflection of the Logician’s long, sardonic face. Robin Hale could trace the likeness but he knew that to one who didn’t know the secret the shadows would be meaningless.

  “The Keep people aren’t pioneers,” the Logician said unnecessarily. “You need recruits from the reformatories.”

  “We need good men,” Hale said. “Criminals are good men, most of them. They’re merely displaced socially or temporally. Any antisocial individual can be thoroughly prosocial in the right environment. Malcontents and criminals will be your best men. You’ll want biologists, naturalists, geologists—”

  “We’d have to pay tremendous sums to get even second-rate men,” Sam objected.

  “No you wouldn’t. You’d have to pay—yes. But you’ll be surprised how many top-flight men are malcontents. The Keeps are too circumscribed. No good worker is ever happy operating at less than full capacity, and who in the Keeps has ever used more than a fraction of his ability since the undersea was conquered?”

  “You think we can go ahead then? Hale asked specifically.

  “If you and Reed can get around this current danger—ask me again.”

  “Hale tells me,” Sam put in, “that the Logician disagrees with the Families about colonization. Why won’t you help us against the Families, then?”

  The shadows moved in the globe; the Logician was shaking his head.

  “I’m not omnipotent. The Families mean well—as they see it. They take a long view. By intrigue and influence they do sway the Council decisions, though the Council is perfectly free. But the Families sit back and decide policy, and then see that their decisions are carried out. Nominally the councils and the governors run the Keeps. Actually the Immortals run them. They’ve got a good deal of social consciousness, but they’re ruthless, too. The laws they promote may seem harsh, to the short-lived, but the grandchildren of the apparent victims may live to thank the Families for their harshness. From the Families’ viewpoint common good covers a longer period of time. In this case I think they’re wrong.

  “The race is going downhill fast. The Families argue we can’t finance but one colonizing effort. If it fails we’re ruined. We’ll never try again. We won’t have the materials or the human drive. We’ve got to wait until they give the word, until they’re convinced failure won’t happen. I say they’re wrong. I say the race is declining faster than they think. If we wait for their word, we’ll have waited too long . . .

  “But the Families run this planet. Not the Logician. I’ve opposed their opinions too often in other things for them to believe me now. They figure I’m against them in everything.”

  To Robin Hale it was an old story. He said impatiently when the voice paused, “Can you give us a prognosis, Logician? Is there enough evidence in now to tell us whether we’ve got a chance to succeed?”

  The Logician said nothing for awhile. Then a curious sound came from the globe. It was a chuckle that grew to a laugh which startled Hale and utterly astonished Sam Reed. That a machine could laugh was inconceivable.

  “Landside will be colonized,” the Logician said, still chuckling. “You’ve got a chance—a good chance. And a better chance, my friend, if this mail Reed is with you. That’s all I can say, Hale. I think it’s enough.”

  Sam froze, staring at the shadows swimming in the globe. All his preconceived ideas turned over in his head. Was the Logician after all a fraud? Was it offering them mere guesswork? And if it could be this wrong on the point of Sam’s dependability, of what value was anything else it said?

  “Thank you, Logician,” the Free Companion was saying, and Sam turned to stare anew at Robin Hale. Why should he thank a machine, and especially as faulty a machine as this had just proved itself to be?

  A deep chuckle sounded from the globe as they turned away. It rose again to laughter that followed them out of the hall, wave upon wave of full-throated laughter that had something of sympathy in it and much of irony.

  The Logician was laughing from the bottom of his lungs, from the bottom of his thousand-years experience, at the future of Sam Reed.

  “ ‘If we can get around this current danger—’ ” Sam quoted the Logician. He was sitting beside a transparent plastic table, very dusty, looking at the Free Companion across it. This was a dim secret room the Slider owned. So long as they sat here they were safe, but they couldn’t stay forever. Sam had a fair idea of how many of the Families’ retainers were reporting on his movements and Hale’s.

  “Any ideas?” Hale asked.

  “You don’t seem much worried. What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll admit I mightn’t believe just any man who came up to me in a crowd and said he’d been hired to kill me. It’s easy to say, if you’re working up to a favor. But I’ve rather been expecting the Families to do something drastic, and—I trust the Logician. How about it—have you any ideas?”

  Sam looked at him from under scowling red brows. He had begun to hate Hale for this easy acquiescence. He wanted it. He needed it. But he didn’t like Hale’s motive. Hale wasn’t likely to intrust the success or failure of his crusade to the doubtful integrity of a promoter, which was the role Sam aspired to now. Even though the Logician—moved by flawed logic—had pronounced favorable judgment and even though Hale trusted the Logician implicitly, there was another motive.

  Robin Hale was an Immortal.

  The thing Sam had sensed and hated in the Waltons and Harker he sensed and hated in Hale, too. A tremendous and supreme self-confidence. He was not the slave of time; time served him. A man with centuries of experience behind him must already have encountered very nearly every combination of social circumstance he was likely to encounter. He had a pattern set for him. There would have been time enough to experiment, to think things over carefully and try out this reaction and that until the best treatment for a given set of circumstances would come automatically to mind.

  It wasn’t fair, Sam thought childishly. Problems that shorter-lived men never solved the infinitely resourceful Immortals must know backward and forward. And there was another unfairness—problems the ordinary man had to meet with drastic solutions or compromise Hale could meet simply by waiting. There was always, with the Immortals, that
last, surest philosophy to fall back on: This, too, will pass.

  The Immortals, then, were random factors. They had extensions in time that no non-immortal could quite understand. You had to experience that long, long life in order to know . . .

  Sam drew a deep breath and answered Hale’s question, obliquely enough.

  “The Families—I mean specifically the Waltons and Harkers—won’t strike overtly. They don’t want to be publicly connected with your death. They’re not afraid of the masses, because the masses have never organized. There’s never been any question of a revolt, for there’s never been any motive for revolt. The Families are just. It’s only with intangibles like this colonizing crusade that a question may come up, and—I hope—that may make it a dangerous question for them. Because for the first time the masses really are organized, in a loose sort of way—they’re excited about the crusade.” He squinted at Hale. “I’ve got an idea about how to use that, but—” Sam glanced at the dusty televisor screen in the wall above them—“I can’t explain it yet.”

  “All right.” Hale sounded comfortable and unexcited. It was normal enough, Sam told himself, with a suddenly quickened pulse as he realized consciously for the first time that to this man warfare—that glamorous thing of the dead past—was a familiar story. He had seen slaughter and wreaked slaughter. The threat of death must by now be so old a tale to him that he faced it with unshaken nerves. Sam hated him anew.

  “Meanwhile”—he forced himself to speak calmly—“I’ve got to sell myself to you on the crusading idea. Shall I talk awhile?”

  Hale grinned and nodded.

  “We’ve got the unique problem of fighting off converts, not recruiting them. We need key men and we need manpower. One’s expendable. The other—you can protect your key men, can’t you?”

  “Against some dangers. Not against boredom. Not against a few things, like lichens—they can get into an air vent and eat a man alive. Some of the germs mutate under UV, instead of dying. Oh, it isn’t adventure.”