Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  There was a parallel here between the weapons at Sam’s command and the weapons men had with which to attack the Venusian landside. In both cases the only available weapons were either too weak or too strong. Utter destruction was no answer, but the only alternative would leave the adversary essentially untouched.

  Sam knew he must either give up entirely or take a step so bold it would mean total success or total ruin.

  “Hale,” he said abruptly, “if we want enough korium to colonize the land, we’ve got to do something that’s never been done before. We’ve got to bomb the Keeps.”

  Hale squinted at him and then laughed. “You’re joking.”

  “Maybe.” Sam hunched his shoulders and glanced at the smothered fort across the water. “You know anything better?”

  “I don’t know anything worse.” Hale’s voice was sharp. “I’m not a murderer, Reed.”

  “You were a Free Companion.”

  “That’s a different matter altogether. We—”

  “You fought the Keeps’ battles, at the Keeps’ orders. That was necessary, under the circumstances. You did what you had to in the way of killing, plundering—piracy, really. The losing Keep paid up in korium or faced bombing. It was a bluff, I suppose. None of them were ever really bombed. Well, what I’m suggesting is a bluff, too. The Families will know it. We’ll know it. But we’ve got to outbluff them.”

  “How can we?”

  “What have .we got to lose? They’re at that much of a disadvantage—they have everything to lose. We have everything to gain.”

  “But they’ll know we don’t dare do it. People won’t even take the threat seriously. You know the Keep people. They’re—inert. They’ve never known a menace. It won’t be conceivable that we could bomb them. They’ll laugh at us. The race has outlived the fear of danger. We’d have to bomb one Keep and kill thousands of people before we could convince them we meant business. I—” Sam’s laugh interrupted him. “I’m not so sure. We’re still human beings. It’s true there’s been no war or danger for a good many generations—but men still wake up with a dream of falling as old as the first arborean who lost his grip on a tree limb. Men’s nostrils still dilate when they’re angry, because when the pattern was first set they had to . . . to breathe—because the mouth was full of the enemy! I don’t think we’ve shed our fears quite so easily as you think.”

  “Well, I won’t do it,” Hale said firmly. “That’s going too far. It’s out of the question—”

  The threat, when it first sounded over the news screens, was as shattering as a bomb itself. There was dead silence in every Keep for a long moment after the words had rung out from the big screens. Then tumult. Then laughter.

  Hale had been right—in part. No one believed in the threat of the rehabilitated fleet. The colonies depended for their very existence on the support of the Keeps. They would not dare bomb their sources of supply. And if they were mad enough to do it, every man reasoned in those .first few minutes, the chances were strong that it would be some other Keep that got the depth charges—not his own.

  Then Sam on the public screens named the Keep—Delaware. He named the time—now. He named his price—korium.

  And the battle of wills was on.

  But Sam had a weapon before he launched his bluff that gave him confidence. It was not a very strong weapon, but that simply meant he must, use more skill in wielding it. It had to succeed. This was anoint from which no turning back was possible.

  The weapon, like all the most effective weapons man can use against man, was personal.

  He had found Blaze Harker.

  In the final analysis the whole struggle was a conflict between two men—Sam and Zachariah. The Families of the Immortals ruled the Keeps, the Harkers set the pattern for all other Families, and Zachariah was the head of the Harker clan. Zachariah may or may not have realized himself just where the point of greatest stress lay, but Sam knew. He was gambling everything on the hope that with this lever, and a plan he had made very carefully, he could out-bluff Zachariah Harker.

  He realized, of course, that the Families must be laying plans of their own. Last time they had worked quietly away in secret until the moment for action came, and in the resulting explosion Sam and all his schemes had been swept away in unimportant fragments. This time things would be different.

  It was the Slider who found Blaze for Sam. When the message reached him, Sam went as quickly as the Ways would carry him to the small, foul-smelling den in the slums of Delaware Keep. The Slider was sunk in an Orange Devil dream when he came in, and for a few minutes addressed Sam hazily as Klano and spoke of ancient crimes that not even Sam remembered.

  He gave the Slider a drink, and presently the mists faded and the vast bulk heaved itself up in bed, chuckling and sniffling.

  “On that Harker deal, son—I got an address for you.” He gave it, grunting.

  Sam whirled toward the door.

  “Wait a minute, son—hold on there! Where you think you’re going?”

  “To find Blaze.”

  “You’ll never get in. That place is guarded.”

  “I’ll make a way!”

  “Son, you’d need six weeks buildup. You’ll have to ferret out somebody who’ll take bribes before you could get within a city block of that place. You’ll need at least one ringer. You’ll need a fast getaway organization afterward. You’ll—”

  “All right, all right! Let’s get started, then. Could you work it?”

  “Maybe. I could try.”

  “Then begin! How long will it take? I can’t wait six weeks. Can you do it in three?” He paused, interrupted by the vast, increasing chuckles that sent earthquake waves over the bulk beneath the blankets.

  “Forget it, kid. It’s already done.” Sam stared. The Slider choked on his own laughter. “The old hand hasn’t lost its cunning, my boy. Don’t think the job wasn’t hard—but it’s done. Raise that shutter over there—turn off the light. Now watch.”

  A square of dim illumination appeared on the far wall. Shadows moved across it, blurred by the wall’s irregularities. They were looking at the product of a tiny spy camera, apparently carried about waist-high at the belt of someone who progressed at uneven speed. Sometimes he walked, and the film went along in smooth, rhythmic rocking motion; sometimes he ran and then the pictures flashed by jerkily. When he stopped the eye seemed to stop with him. It resulted in an irregular but very convincing motion picture.

  The first seconds of the film showed the little camera apparently staring at an iron grille, very close to the lens. White trousered legs appeared, the grille swung open, a vista unfolded briefly of garden paths and fountains playing. One of the Immortal strongholds, obviously.

  There was a feeling of quick, furtive alertness to the pace of the film, the way it kept swinging right and left in tiny arcs as the man who carried it scanned his surroundings. Twice it was apparent that the carrier had ducked into hiding; the film went dark for several seconds when a door or a curtain closed to conceal him. There was a dizzying amount of corridor-walking, all of it quick and giving the impression of stealth.

  Then the speed of the carrier increased suddenly—the man was running. Walls bobbed up and down, swung sharply as he whipped around a corner. The film went almost totally dark and walls slid downward before it. A glass-walled lift was rising. More corridors, at a run.

  A pause before another grilled door, this substantial looking—bars with adornment. The bars grew enormous, blurred, apparently melted. The lens was pressed close against the door, looking through into the room beyond.

  And this, the key scene, ran very fast. There was only a flash of a richly furnished room and a man in it with two others bending over him. The man appeared to be struggling with his companions.

  Abruptly the picture swung side-wise, jarred so that everything vibrated. There was a sweeping glance upward, along soaring walls, a flash of ceiling, a flash of scowling face swooping toward the lens and an arm uplifted with some
thing that flashed.

  The picture went white and clicked noisily to a halt.

  Then it began again. Time retraced itself. The lens was floating toward the melting bars again, very slowly. Very slowly indeed the room inside came into focus. In nightmarish slow motion that gave watchers the opportunity to study every detail the struggling man and his two companions moved upon the wall.

  The room was cushioned everywhere. The carpeting looked soft and sank under the pressure of the three men’s feet; the walls were paneled head-high with beautifully quilted patterns of velvet. The furniture was thick and soft, no edges showing.

  The man who struggled was tall, slender, fine-boned. He had a beautifully shaped head and even in this convulsive activity his motions were curiously smooth and graceful. It was at first impossible to guess what sort of features he had, they were so contorted in a rapid series of violent grimaces. Blood flecked his face from bitten lips and his eyes were rolled back until no iris showed.

  His two adversaries were trying to pull a strait-jacket over his flailing arms.

  Little by little they were succeeding. It all happened in that strange slow motion that gave the whole performance a look of calculated rhythm, like a ballet, robbing the struggle of any spontaneity because it happened so slowly. The tall man beat his prisoned arms against his sides, threw back his head and laughed wildly and soundlessly, blood running down his chin. The laughter changed without a break into sheer rage and he hurled himself sidewise with a cunning lurch and carried one of his attendants with him to the floor. The other bent over them, and then the whole scene jigged furiously and swept upward, and the film clicked to a halt.

  “That was Blaze Harker,” the Slider said in the brief silence that followed. “Give me a drink, son. Have a shot yourself—you look like you need one.”

  “—and so it’s come down to this,” Sam said over the sea-wide newscast, to the listening thousands. “Give us the korium we have a right to, or take the consequences. The time’s past for bargains and promises. This is the showdown. What’s your answer, Harker?”

  Under all the seas, under all the impervium domes, a breathless silence held as the multitudes watched Sam’s magnified face, multiplied many times upon many screens, turn and wait for his reply. And in nineteen of the Keeps as the waiting lengthened a murmur began to grow. To them it was at the moment an academic problem.

  But in Delaware Keep the problem was a vital one. There was not a sound in the streets, and for the first time, perhaps, since a Keep had been reared beneath its bubble dome you could hear the deep, soft humming of the Ways as they glided on their endless rounds.

  Zachariah kept them waiting exactly long enough. Then with a perfect sense of timing, just as the delay grew unbearable, he gave his signal in his distant study. Sam’s face grew indistinct upon the screens of all the Keeps; it hovered in the background like a shadow. Superimposed upon it the serenely handsome Harker face grew clear.

  “Reed, you’re a fool.” Zachariah’s voice was calm and leisurely. “We all know this is a childish bluff.”

  The shadow that was Sam flashed into clarity; Zachariah’s face went translucent. Sam said, “I expected you to say that. I suppose you believe it. My first job’s to convince you all. There isn’t much time, so—look.”

  Sam and Zachariah alike blurred and vanished from the screen. In their stead a shining seascape grew.

  Sunlight shafted down through clouds, touching gray water to blue dazzle. And ploughing through the dazzle, tossing glittering spray over their mailed snouts, a fleet of five ships moved head-on toward the observer.

  They were small ships, but they were built for business. Impervium sheathed them in everywhere and their lines were smooth and low and fast. They looked grim. They were grim. And the thing about them that most effectively struck fear to the hearts of the watchers was their complete inhumanity. No man’s outlines showed anywhere, except as vague, alarming shadows moving purposefully inside the shells. These were machines for destruction, moving forward to fulfil the purpose for which they had been made.

  From beyond the screen Sam’s disembodied voice said, “Watch!” and a moment later, at a distance behind the last ship, the sea boiled suddenly into white tumult, erupted high, rained down in diamond showers.

  Then the ships grew dim. The screen went briefly blank, and another scene took shape upon it. This time it was a water-world, full of wavering light, greenish-yellow because it was near the surface. Looking up, you could see the water-ceiling as a perfectly tangible thing, quilted and puckered all over with the foreshortened shadows of the waves. Breaking it, the long, sharp bellies of the ships . came gliding—one, two, three, four, five—mailed and darkly shining.

  The illumination darkened, the ship keels rose and vanished as the scene plunged downward, following the course of a dark, cylindrical something which shot from the last ship in the line. The telefocus stayed constant on the bomb as it slipped silently down through the Venusian sea. Every watcher in the Keeps felt his skin crawl coldly with the question: What target?

  The sea was deep here. The depth-bomb dropped eternally. Very few watched the missile itself; most eyes were intent on the lower edges of the screens, avid for the first sight of the bottom—

  It was sand.

  As it came into view, the bomb struck, and instantly the telefocus changed so that the results of the explosion could be visible. Yet not much could be seen. Perhaps that was most terrifying—the swirling, inchoate undersea chaos, the blinding blur on the screen, and the deep, thundering boom of the explosion that carried clearly over the sound beam.

  It crashed out and lingered.

  Not only through the visors. In Delaware Keep, through fathoms of water, the sound waves rushed and struck with a deep impact on the great impervium shell. Was there the faintest tremor—the slightest possible vibration—in the Keep itself?

  Did the Keep—the Keep!—shiver a little as the undersea titan smashed his hammer against the sea bottom?

  The sound died. There was a stillness.

  Far above, in the flagship, Sam flipped sound-absorbant panels into place and turned to the auxiliary screen. He was getting a report.

  No face showed on this tight-beam circuit connection. No voice sounded. But Sam automatically translated the scrambled code into an understandable message.

  “Kedre Walton left Montana Keep an hour ago. She’s just entered Delaware.”

  Sam instinctively looked down. He used his own scrambler.

  “Does she know the situation?”

  “Not sure. She’ll find out from the public televisors in Delaware.”

  “Has Sari got the special stuff?”

  “As soon as we got word Kedre left Montana. She’ll have taken it by now.”

  The other screen was calling insistently. Robin Hale’s voice came from another auxiliary.

  “Reed! Are you handling it?”

  “I’ve got it,” Sam said, and went back to his Keep connection. But he waited a second, looking into Zachariah’s eyes, while he marshaled his thoughts. He couldn’t quite repress a twisted, triumphant smile in the face of the Immortal’s godlike—but fallacious—confidence.

  For his schemes were working. He had chosen the time very carefully indeed. The vital key, the zero hour, depended on just when Kedre Walton returned to Delaware Keep. The psychological hammer blows were far more useful against Immortals than any bomb.

  By now Sari should have in her hands the narco-dust Sam had conveniently provided for her, through his new underworld connections. A narco-addict asks few questions. She would have taken the powder the instant it reached her—and this was not ordinary narco-dust.

  There was another drug mixed with it.

  By now Sari’s nerves should be jolting with shock after shock. By now her brain should be building up a high potential, temporarily crumbling away the mortar of caution, of reserve that had held the bricks of her sanity together. By now she should be ready to explode, when the
hair trigger was touched. And the direction of her explosion had already been channeled by her own conditioning and environment. Besides, she was born under the same star as Blaze Harker. Not Mars—it was the more baleful star of Earth that glared coldly above the Venus clouds, the star that had given Sari her dangerous heritage of mental instability.

  “Reed,” Zachariah said calmly, “we can’t be bluffed. You won’t destroy Delaware Keep.”

  “That was the first bomb,” Sam said. “We’re heading for Delaware. A bomb will be dropped every five minutes, till we anchor above you. But we won’t stop dropping them then.”

  “Have you thought of the results?”

  “Yes,” Sam said. “We have radar and antiaircraft. We have guided missiles. And none of the Keeps is armed. Besides, they’re undersea. It’s safe undersea—’-as long as you’re not attacked. Then there’s no way to strike back. You can only wait and die.”

  His voice went out over the public telecast. Sam switched on an auxiliary to focus on one of the great public televisors at a clover-leaf meeting of Ways. A crowd had gathered, he saw. From all directions the Keeps were like arteries carrying the people to their listening post. Red cells, not white—builders, not fighters. Well, they needed builders to colonize Venus.

  At present, however, he was fighting the Keeps.

  He began to worry, a little, over Hale. He wasn’t sure about the Free Companion. If it came to a final showdown, would Hale actually drop a bomb on Delaware? Would he himself?

  He mustn’t let matters go quite that far.

  By now Kedre must be on her way to the Harker stronghold. She would have learned what had happened; the televisors all over the Keep were carrying the news. She would be hurrying to Zachariah’s side. Zachariah, whom she had loved for hundreds of years, not with the unflickering glow of a radium lamp, but as a planet inevitably swings toward the sun at perihelion, swinging away toward other planets, but returning whenever the orbit took her-close. Yes, she would want to be beside Zachariah in this crisis.