Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “So we’ll need a screening process. Malcontents. Technical successes and personal failures.”

  “Up to a point, yes. What do you suggest?” The laconic voice filled Sam with unreasonable resentment. He had a suspicion that this man already knew most of the answers, that he was leading Sam on, like a reciting child, partly to test his knowledge, partly perhaps in the hope that Sam might have ideas to offer which Hale could twist to his own use. And yet—under the confidence, under the resourcefulness that all his experiences had bred, the man showed an unconquerable naiveté which gave Sam hope. Basically Hale was a crusader. Basically he was selfless and visionary. A million years of experience, instead of a few hundred, would never give him something Sam had been born with. Yes, this was worth a try . . .

  “Of course, not all the failures will do,” he went on. “We’ve got to find the reasons why they’re malcontents. You had technicians in the old days, when the wars were going on?”

  Hale nodded. “Yes. But they had the traditions of the Free Companions behind them.”

  “We’ll start a new tradition. I don’t know what. Ad astra per aspera, maybe.” Sam considered. “Can you get access to the psych records and personal histories of those old technicians?”

  “Some of them must have been saved. I think I can. Why?”

  “This will come later, but I think it’s our answer. Break down the factors that made them successful. The big integrators will do that. It’ll give us the prime equation. Then break down the factors that make up the current crop of technicians—malcontents preferable. X equals a successful wartime technician, plus the equivalent of the old tradition. Find out who’s get X today and give him the new tradition.

  “It’ll take careful propaganda and semantic build-up. All we need is the right channeling of public opinion now. Catchwords; a banner, a new Peter the Hermit, maybe. The Crusades had a perfect publicity buildup. I’ve given you a solution for your technicians—now about the manpower and the financial backing.” Sam glanced at the quiet Immortal face and looked away again. But he went on.

  “We’ll have to screen the volunteers for manpower, too. There are plenty of good men left in the human race. They won’t all fold up at the first threat of danger. We’ll set up a very rigid series of tests for every potential colonist. Phony them up if we have to. One set of answers for the public, another for us. You can’t openly reject a man for potential cowardice, or the rest might not dare take the test. But we’ve got to know.”

  “So far—good,” Hale said. “What about money?”

  “How much have you got?”

  Hale shrugged. “Pennies. I’ve got a foothold, cleaning out Doone Keep. But it’ll take real money to keep the thing going.

  “Form a company and sell stock. People will always gamble. Especially if they get dividends—and the dividends they want aren’t merely money. Glamour. Excitement. The romance they’ve been starved for. The reason they go in for secondhand thrills.”

  “Will rejected volunteers buy stock?”

  Sam laughed. “I’ve got it! Every share of stock will pay a dividend of thrills. All the excitement of volunteering with none of the danger.

  Every move the colony makes will be covered by televisor—with a direct beam to the receiver of every stockholder !”

  Hale gave him a glance in which anger and admiration were mingled. Sam was aware of a little surge of gratification at having startled the man into something like approval. But Hale’s next reaction spoiled it.

  “No. That’s cheap. And it’s cheating. This is no Roman holiday for the thrill-hunters. And I’ve told you it’s hard work, not romance. It isn’t exciting, it’s drudgery.”

  “It can be exciting,” Sam assured him. “It’ll have to be. You’ve got to make compromises. People pay for thrills. Well, thrills can be staged landside, can’t they?”

  Hale moved his shoulders uncomfortably. “I don’t like it.”

  “Yes, but it could be done. Just in theory—is there anything going on landside right now that could be built up?”

  After a pause, Hale said, “Well, we’ve been having trouble with an ambulant vine—it’s thermotropic. Body heat attracts it. Refrigerating units in our jungle suits stop it cold, of course. And it’s easy to draw it off by tossing thermite or something hot aroma. It heads for that instead of u?, and gets burned into ash.”

  “What does it look like?”

  Hale went into details. Sam sat .back, looking pleased.

  “That’s the ticket. Perfectly safe, but it’ll look ugly as the devil. That ought to help us screen out the unfit by scaring ’em off right at the start. We’ll just have your men turn off their refrigerating units and stage a battle with the vines, while somebody stands by out of camera range with thermite ready to throw. We’ll send out a message that the vines are breaking through—cover it with televisor—and that does it!”

  “No,” Hale said.

  “The Crusades started as a publicity stunt,” Sam remarked. But he didn’t press the point just yet. Instead he mentioned the fact that both of them would be dead within thirty-six hours now unless something could be worked out. He had seen a flicker in the wall screen. It was time to bring up the next subject on the agenda.

  “The Families could get rid of us both in ways that look perfectly innocent. A few germs, for instance. They’ve got us cold unless we do something drastic. My idea is to try a trick so outrageous they won’t know how to meet it until it’s had a chance to work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Families depend tremendously on their own prestige to maintain their power. Their real power is an intangible—longevity. But public faith in their infallibility has kept them on top. Attack that. Put them in a spot where they’ve got to defend us.”

  “But how?”

  “You’re a public darling. Harker gave me a forty-eight hour deadline because he was afraid you might turn up a henchman at any moment who could step into your shoes and carry on the crusade even if he got you out of the way.” Sam tapped his own chest. “I’m the man. I’ve got to be, to save my own skin. But it offers you an out, too. We halve the danger if either of us is replaceable—by the other. It wouldn’t solve anything to kill either of us if the other lives.”

  “But how the devil do you expect to make yourself that important to the public in the few hours you’ve got left?” Hale was really interested now.

  Sam gave him a confident grin. Then he kicked the leg of his chair. An opening widened in the hall and the Slider came in, sniffling.

  He lowered his great bulk to a chair and looked curiously at Hale. Sam said, “First—the Sheffield gang’s after me. I can’t afford to fight it out right now. Got something really big on the fire. Can you call ’em off?”

  “Might manage it,” the Slider said. It was a guarantee. The old poison-master was still a top danger in the underworld of the Keeps.

  “Thanks.” Sam turned in his chair to face the Slider. “Now, the important thing. I need a quick job of sound-track faking.”

  “That’s easy,” the Slider assured him, and sniffled.

  “And the faces to match.”

  “That’s harder. Whose faces?”

  “Zachariah Harker, for one. Any other Harkers or Waltons you’ve got on file, but Zachariah first.”

  The Slider stared hard at him, forgetting for the moment even to sniffle. “Harkers?” he demanded. And then chuckled unexpectedly. “Well, guess I can swing it, but it’ll cost you. How soon you want the job done?”

  Sam told him.

  Faking a sound-track was an immemorially old gag, almost as old as sound-tracks themselves. It takes only nominal skill to snip out and rearrange already spoken words into new sequences. But only recently had a technique been developed for illicit extensions of the idea. It took a very deft operator, and a highly skilled one, to break down speech-sounds into their basic sibilants and gutturals and build up again a whole new pattern of speech. It was not usually possible
to transpose from one language to another because of the different phonetic requirements, but any recorded speech of reasonable length could usually be mined for a large enough number of basic sounds to construct almost any other recorded speech out of its building blocks.

  From this it was, of course, only a step to incorporating the speaker visually into the changed speech. The lips that shaped each sound could be stopped in mid-syllable and the pictures transposed with the sounds.

  The result was jerky to the ear and eye. There was always a certain amount of reducing and enlarging and adjustment to make the faces from various speeches into a single speech. Some experiments had even been made to produce a missing full-face view, for verisimilitude, by projecting onto a three-dimensional form the two-dimensional images of profile or three-quarter views to blend into the desired face, and photographing that anew. Afterward a high degree of skill was necessary to blend and blur the result into convincing smoothness.

  The Slider had access to a technician who knew the job forward and backward. And there were plenty of Harker and Walton records on file. But at best it was a dangerous thing to tamper with and Sam knew it. He had no choice.

  It took five hours to talk Robin Hale into the hoax. Sam had to convince him of his own danger first; there were Family agents by now ringing in the building where they hid, so that wasn’t too hard. Then he had to convince him of Sam’s own trustworthiness, which Sam finally managed by rehearsing his arguments with the straps of a pressure gauge recording his blood-reactions for conscious lies. That took some semantic hedging, for Sam had much to conceal and had to talk around it.

  “You and I are as good as dead,” he told Hale, with the recording needles holding steady, for this was true enough. “Sure, this trick is dangerous. It’s practically suicide. But if I’ve got to die anyhow, I’d as soon do it taking chances. And it’s our only chance, unless you can think of something better. Can you?”

  The Immortal couldn’t.

  And so on the evening telecast advance word went out that Robin Hale would make an important announcement about the colony. All through the Keeps, visors were tuned in on the telecast, waiting. What they were really waiting for was a moment when the Harkers and Waltons involved in the faked reel were together and out of the way.

  The private lives of the Immortals were never very private, and the Slider had a network of interlocking connections that functioned very efficiently. Hale’s influence kept the telecast schedule open and waiting, and presently word came that the Immortals involved were all accounted for.

  Then on the great public screens and on countless private ones the driving color-ads gave place to Robin Hale’s face. He was dressed for landside, and he spoke his lines with a reluctance and a haste to get it over that gave the words an air of unexpected conviction.

  He said he had hoped to tell them in detail of the magnificent idea which his good friend Sam Reed had produced to make full-scale colonizing possible without delay. But trouble landside had just broken out and he had been called up to offer his experience as an old Free Companion to the men who were facing a new and deadly menace up above them all, on the jungle shore. Then he offered them a stiff, quick salute and left the screen.

  Zachariah Harker’s face replaced Hale’s. It would have taken a better than expert eye to detect the faint qualities of unevenness which might betray the fact that this was a synthesis of rearranged sound-waves and light-waves. Technically, even Zachariah, watching the screen from wherever he was just now, could not deny he had spoken the words, for every sound he heard and every motion of his own lips was genuine.

  The synthetic speech was a triumph in semantics. It was typical of Sam that he should use this boldly suicidal venture not only to clear himself and Hale, if he could, but also to further his plans for the colony. So Harker was made to name Sam—brought forward with modest reluctance to stand beside the Immortal as the speech went on—as the public-spirited, adventurous philanthropist who was going to make the colonizing crusade possible.

  Sam Reed, man of the people, short-lived but far-seeing, would lead his fellows to success behind Robin Hale in the great crusade. Landside lay the future of the race. Even the Harkers, Zachariah said, had been convinced of that by the persuasions of Sam and Hale. A great adventure lay ahead. Volunteers would be accepted for examination very soon. Ad astra per aspera!

  He spoke of danger. He went into details, each word carefully chosen and charted to make the listeners discontented. He hinted at the stagnation of the Keeps, of growing racial debility, new vulnerabilities to disease. And most important—man had stopped growing. His destiny was no longer to be found in the Keeps. The great civilizations of Earth must not reach a dead end under the seas of this fertile planet. Ad astra!

  Zachariah’s face left the screen. Sam stepped forward to clinch the matter, nervous and deeply worried under his calm. Now that he had actually done this, he quivered with belated qualms. What would the Harkers do when they discovered how fantastically they had been tricked? How outrageously their innermost convictions had been reversed and repudiated before all the Keeps, apparently in their own words! They must be moving already; the Families were geared to rapid action when the need arose. But what they would do Sam couldn’t guess.

  He spoke with quiet confidence into the screen. He outlined his ideas for offering the people themselves the opportunity to join in the crusade, financially if not personally. In deft words he referred to the hardships and dangers of landside; he wanted to discourage all but the hardiest from offering as personal volunteers. And to aid in that, as well as to provide a smash finale to his scheme, he made his great announcement.

  Something which until today had been a plaything for the wealthy would now be offered to all who owned shares in the magnificent venture before mankind. Each participant could watch the uses to which his money was put, share almost at first hand in the thrills and perils of landside living.

  Look!

  On the screen flashed a dizzying view of jungle that swooped up toward the beholder with breathtaking swiftness. A ring of velvet-black mud studded, the flowery quilt of treetops. The ring swung up toward the view and you could see an iridescent serpent slithering across the blackness. The mud erupted and a mud-wolf’s jaws closed upon the snake. Blood and mud spattered wildly. Churning and screaming, the combatants sank from sight and the velvety pool quivered into stillness again except for the rings that ran out around it from time to time as bubbles of crimson struggled tip and burst on the surface with dull plops which every listener in the Keeps could hear.

  Sam thanked his audience. He asked their patience for a few days longer, until the first examination trials could be set up. He observed with arrogant humility that he hoped to earn their trust and faith by his service toward themselves and the Free Companion, who had left all such matters in his hands while Hale himself struggled up there on land-side in the jungles he knew so well. We would all, Sam finished, soon be watching such struggles, with men instead of monsters enlisting our sympathy in their brave attempts to conquer Venus as our forebears once conquered Old Earth . . .

  The Families did nothing.

  It worried Sam more than any direct action could possibly have done. For there was nothing here he could fight. Profoundly he distrusted that silence. All telecast attempts to interview any of the Immortals on this tremendous subject which was uppermost, overnight, in every mind, came to nothing. They would smile and nod and refuse to comment—yet.

  But the plans went on at breakneck rate. And after all, Sam told himself, what could the Harkers do?

  To deny the public this delightful new toy might be disastrous. You can’t give candy to a baby and then snatch it away untasted without rousing yells of protest. The people of the Keeps were much more formidable than babies, and they were used to collapsing into paternalistic hands. Remove the support, and you might expect trouble.

  Sam knew he had won a gambit, not the game. But he had too much to do just now to
let the future worry him. All this was to be a swindle, of course. He had never intended anything else.

  Paradoxically, Sam trusted the judgment of the Harkers. They thought this attempt would fail. Sam was sure they were right. Of course the Logician believed that colonizing would, succeed, and the Logician normally should be right. How can a machine err? But the machine had erred, very badly, in its analysis of Sam himself, so it isn’t strange that he disbelieved all its conclusions now.

  The only way to make the scheme succeed as Sam intended it to succeed was to insure its failure. Sam was out this time for really big money. The public clamored to buy, and Sam sold and sold.

  He sold three hundred per cent of the stock.

  After that he had to fail. If he put the money into landside development there’d be nothing left over for the promoter, and anyhow, how could he pay off on three hundred per cent?

  But on paper it looked beautiful. New sources of supply and demand, a booming culture rising from the underseas, shaking off the water from gigantic shoulders, striding onto the shore. And then interplanetary and interstellar travel for the next goal. Ad astra was a glorious dream, and Sam worked it for all it was worth.

  Two months went by.

  Rosathe, like all the other fruits of success, dropped delightfully into his arms. Sam closed all three of his apartments and with Rosathe found a new place, full of undreamed of luxuries, its windows opening out over the hydroponic garden that flourished as lavishly, though not so dangerously, as the jungles overhead. From these windows he could see the lights of the whole Keep spread out below, where every man danced to his piping. It was dreamlike, full of paranoid splendors, megalomaniac grandeur—and all of it true.

  Sam didn’t realize it yet, though looking back he would surely have seen, but he was spinning faster and faster down a vortex of events which by now were out of his control. Events would have blurred as they whirled by, if he had been given time enough to look back at them when the moment of reckoning came. But he was not given time . . .