Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “The Swimmer himself had to stay,” Gresham said. “The machines—you’d never guess they were machines to see them—weren’t working well. All who could had to help the machines, help to keep the dark race—the Others—away from the cities. So the Swimmer’s mind let go of mine and I had to come back.”

  “What can you do?” Black asked. “Is there any way to get in touch again?”

  GRESHAM turned his blinded face toward the ocean. He was silent for a moment.

  “That shark,” he said. “The big one. He’s still following us.”

  Black had to rise and lean over the rail to make sure.

  “Yes, I can see him now. He’s with us.”

  “That’ll do,” Gresham said confidently, “An intelligent mind can control a non-intelligent one for awhile. I’ll take the shark’s body and go back.”

  “You’re tired, Gresham,” Black said. “We can talk about this later. I’m going to give you a sedative and I want you to rest.”

  Gresham laughed. “See that gull up there? What would you say if it circled three times and landed on the rail beside you?”

  Black looked up. The gull sailed in one wide circle, two circles, three—and swooped down toward the rail. Its yellow feet gripped and closed and it perched there turning its head from side to side and looking at Black with eyes that fantastically seemed to him for a moment Gresham’s eyes, as if the blind man in the bird’s dim brain looked out and saw him.

  Gresham laughed again.

  “You’ve got a notebook on your knee,” he said. “You have no idea how queer you are through a bird’s eyes, Black. All out of focus and strange.”

  “Let it go,” Black said in a choked voice. The gull tipped forward and spread its wings, its eyes going blank again with mindless bird-thoughts.

  “Yes,” Gresham said. “The shark will do . . .”

  Black sat beside the bunk and watched the sleeping face of the blind man, his own mind in a turmoil. He could not believe or accept Gresham’s story, but in spite of himself he found images slipping through his brain as he saw emotions flicker across the cataleptic face. He saw the green abysses sliding by, he saw the nameless undersea dawn brightening in the depths, felt the great shark’s body bend its banded muscles and drive on and on toward a city of floating spheres that illuminated the dark like lanterns lighted by no human hands.

  Suddenly Gresham sat straight up among the blankets. The blood rushed into his face and he said, “Huh!” in a choked, inarticulate voice.

  “Gresham?” Black said, laying a hand on his arm. “Are you awake? What is it?”

  He was not awake. He did not turn his head or feel the hand or hear the voice. All his faculties were focused on something very far away, deep down in the abysses beneath the boat. He was like a man in a nightmare. His breath came fast now, through bared teeth, and his face convulsed into the lines of a man fighting for his life.

  “The dark!” he said thickly. “The dark! Where did the lattices go? What’s wrong? Oh, what’s happening here?” But that was the last articulate speech he made, and the last words Black had time to hear, for suddenly Gresham began to struggle violently with the blankets, striving to throw them off, lashing out with clenched fists whenever Black tried to hold him.

  In the end they had to strap him to the bunk to keep him from injuring himself and those around him. He lay there struggling furiously, resting in panting silence and then fighting against the restraining bands again. His face was wild with a ferocity that sent cold shivers through Black’s mind, a less than human ferocity.

  And in the writhing of his body against the straps, in the way it bowed and lashed straight again, and the strangely fluid motions of his struggle, Black tried not to think he saw the movement of a shark’s body fighting in deep water against an alien foe.

  “Blood!” Gresham muttered, deep in his throat. “Blood—so much blood—can’t see, but—there’s another—kill, kill! Kill them all!”

  And it seemed to Black that the little cabin was dark with the dark of the undersea and blinded with blood that spread through the dim water, and boiling with the terrible combat of an unknown struggle.

  He knew to an instant when the shark died. He could tell by the last spasmodic convulsion of Gresham’s body on the bed, the double lashing motion and the sudden silence. He even thought the saw for an instant the blankness of death itself flicker across Gresham’s face, the brush of it touching the edges of the mind that had controlled the shark’s mind.

  After that there was only silence, and the slumber of deep exhaustion . . .

  “It was too late,” Gresham said. His voice was a whisper, hoarse from the shouting he had done through his nightmare. His body was bruised from struggling against the straps, and his mind was sick and tired.

  “It must have been too late from the moment the explosion went off, if anyone had known. But they still hoped. They sent the Swimmer up and they brought me down, hoping until the last I could do something.” He laughed briefly, a croaking sound in his raw throat. “I might have known it was too wonderful to last. The cities and the people—they were never meant for human eyes to see. I was lucky to get even the one glimpse I had. And maybe it’s just as well. The two cultures never could have met. If there were any way for humans to reach them, we’d only have destroyed their culture as we’ve destroyed everything else that’s beautiful. As we’ll destroy ourselves, when the time comes.

  “We did destroy them, Black. The explosion did it. And maybe this was the best way, quick enough, after all.”

  “But what was it? What happened?”

  THE FACE beneath the bandages was grim.

  “I went down with the shark. I could see from a long way off that something had gone wrong. Only a few of the cities were lighted, and one of them flickered out as we came near. And in the underwater dawn-light I could see black shapes, shambling.

  “If it hadn’t been for the dark people, the sieves, I think they might have won. They were getting the machines under control gain, you see. In the last city the machine might have held out, if the Others hadn’t already been in the city.

  “I made the shark swim closer, in through one of the dark cities where I’d gone with the Swimmer. Once it was full of lights and spiral dwellings, beautiful, lithe people gliding among the floating orbits of their homes. Now it was dark. I couldn’t see much—thank God. But the . . . black . . . figures shambling through those hollow cities, among the floating bodies of the beautiful dead Swimmers, horrified me.” Gresham bit his lip and was silent.

  After a while he went on.

  “There was still fighting going on around the last lighted place. I made the shark swim into it. I could help, at least, that much.

  “The Swimmers fought with curved blades of light that slashed through everything they touched. They were wonderful fighters—terrible and wonderful. I never saw such ferocity and such beauty. But the Others were too many for them.” His voice cracked for an instant.

  “The Others were foul, degenerate, dark things,” he said, and choked over the words.

  “Here, drink this,” Black commanded, holding a glass to Gresham’s lips. Gresham drank, and rested for a moment.

  “That was all,” he said presently, in a calmer voice. “I watched it end. I helped as much as I could.” He grinned faintly. “It was one of the Swimmers who killed the shark, finally. They didn’t understand, of course. They must have thought it was just another of the scavenger fish who were gathering because of the blood. The curved light-blade sheered through it like steel—or fire—fire under water—and the shark died. Well, it was time for me to go, anyhow. I’d done all I could, then. But this isn’t the end of it.”

  “What do you mean?” Black demanded. Then he said quickly, “Never mind. You’ve got to rest now. You can think it over and tell me later.”

  “I don’t need to think. Remember what I told you when I first saw the Others? How hateful they are even on first sight? Instinct, black sheer in
stinct tells you to kill them on sight I—I don’t know why, but that’s what I’m going to do next He clenched his fist and struck five blanket lightly.

  “Extermination!” he said in his hoarse, strained whisper. “Extermination!”

  A week later the Albacore passed a group of tiny islets lying like scattered flowers on the water. Native outriggers came out, as usual, to offer fruit and gossip. Gresham seemed to know them. He talked briefly in Kanaka, and there was much nodding and liquid chatter among the natives. When the outriggers went back, Gresham went with them.

  “I know what I want,” he told Black as the neurologist helped him over the rail. “I’m all right now, physically. Or as much as I’ll ever be. I’m a responsible man—you can stop worrying about me. I’ve even got enough money put aside for what small needs I’ll have from now on. Forget about me, doctor. And thanks—thanks very much.”

  Doubtfully, and with a touch of strange, illogical envy, Black watched him go.

  The globes that once swung glowing on their cables in the abyss swing dark now. Below them the night land of the sea-bottom stretches far away into a light that shines eternally, a light no human eyes will ever see. Inside the cities which are tombs now the beautiful bodies of the dwellers float hollow-boned, bare skeletons cleansed by the wandering denizens of the sea. The dead race lies forever entombed in its dead cities.

  But a race still lives among them for awhile. A dark, alien race that destroyed its masters and shambles now among the ruins it made. Death lives with that race.

  Out of the immense ocean dawn above the ravening sharks come down silently, one by one, to kill and kill—and be killed. And on an island high over them, in the daylight he cannot see, a blind man sits on his beach with his strange sight focused in another world. A world of water and darkness and death.

  He is not blind as other men are blind. He has a thousand eyes to see through. He had a vengeance to wreak. Some day that vengeance will be sated, when the last dark shambler dies. After that, Gresham will be content. He will give up his days then to looking at the world again through the strange, small lenses of other brains, and to the memory of beauty which he once saw so briefly, in the hour of its destruction, and will never see again.

  In comparison to the memory of that beauty, all other men are blind.

  LORD OF THE STORM

  Thunder and lightning, storm and flood—these are the weapons of Mart Havers as he champions humanity in its epochal struggle against evil tyranny and destruction!

  Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee?

  Canst thou send lightnings?

  Out of the south cometh the whirlwind: and cold out of the north. . . .

  The Book of Job

  CHAPTER I

  A New Leader Is Born

  HAVERSHAM stared toward the enormous white moonlit tower of the hospital. Fine beads of sweat showed on his pale face. There was a distant clatter of hoofs, and he sank back against the padded cushions of the autocar until the guardsman had cantered past, crimson cloak flaring, golden helmet bright under its tossing plume.

  The steel-worker twisted a fold of his own russet cloak between bony fingers.

  “I’d kill him first,” he said, under his breath. “If I thought my son would grow up to be one of those strutting devils—”

  “Easy, John,” said the man beside him. “Easy! Our plans are made.”

  Haversham looked again at the hospital. He was younger than his companion, but he looked older. His gaunt face was harsh and fanatical.

  “Plans!” he said. “It’s action we need!”

  “Not yet.”

  “When? Years, Kennard? Centuries?”

  “Maybe,” said the quiet voice, and Kennard La Boucherie, bulky and awkward-seeming as a mastodon in his many-tiered cape, drummed thick fingers on the autocar’s guidestick.

  All of the man’s adroitness lay in his hands, fat white shapeless gloves whose appearance lied. La Boucherie could handle a scalpel or a microscope with equal ease, as he could use a smash-gun or tighten those deceptively pulpy fingers around an enemy’s throat.

  A Cromwellian’s, for preference.

  “I know,” he said. “This is the hardest part, waiting. You’re sure about Margot?”

  “She won’t talk.”

  “Even under the anesthetic?”

  “She doesn’t know anything,” Haversham snapped, giving his cloak another savage twist. “Not about me—us—the Freemen.” La Boucherie put a heavy hand on the man’s knee in warning. The steel-worker caught his breath.

  “They’re not gods,” he protested. “Are you beginning to believe your own fables?”

  “Fables?” Above the great bulk of La Boucherie’s body his face looked like a smiling skull when that thin smirk drew up his lips. “Who says they’re fables? I have a precedent for speaking in parables. You can’t tell the plain truth to men like mine, John. It is true that the Cromwellians have scientific powers that are almost godlike. And how did they get them in the first place?”

  “I know.” Haversham gestured toward the hospital, above its terrace of gardens. “We’d have a finger in powers like that, if they didn’t skim, off the cream of the generations, straight from the cradle. If they ever left us any leaders!”

  “They never will. Trust them.” La Boucherie pulled off his feathered hat and rubbed the crease its band had left across his forehead. His voice was tired. “We have no leaders left. All we have are the little men who can’t understand, sometimes, unless you speak in parables. Fables. They’re not so far from the truth at that, John. And we’ve got to be careful, if we expect to get away with this.”

  “We’ll get away with it. My son’s one baby who won’t grow up into a Cromwellian Leader.”

  He half-drew the deadly bulk of a smash-gun from under his arm. La Boucherie snarled a command.

  “Put that back! You fool!”

  THE rhythm of hoofbeats sounded again. Haversham let his hand fall from the weapon.

  La Boucherie’s little eyes gleamed with reluctant appreciation of the approaching horseman’s uniform, even as suspicion tightened all the muscles in his gross bulk. But the Guardsman in crimson and gold braid x cantered on with scarcely a glance at the common men in the common autocar. His helmet canted at a rakish angle above one eye, his cloak billowing over the horse’s black, gleaming rump, he rode past—and La Boucherie, a dandy even in this era of dandies, envied him that crimson and gold, that gorgeous mount waxed to a sheen like water.

  Haversham had no such feelings. His thoughts were all with his new-born son in the great hospital above them. He stared at La Boucherie, and jerked his head toward the retreating guardsman. “Sometimes I think you envy those peacocks,” he said.

  “I might have been one of them myself,” the big man said slowly. “I might have been a—Leader.” The skull showed plainly behind the gross mask of fat, and a vicious, deadly malignance glittered in La Boucherie’s eyes. “But I’m not. And I never will be, “now.”

  Haversham scarcely heard. “My son—they won’t get him. He’s not going into a Leader Creche and work for justice all his life.

  Justice! A hundred years ago, maybe, but not now.”

  “They may not want your son,” La Boucherie said.

  “They will. The preliminary mental tests showed he was above par—’way above. They’ll take him, if they can.”

  “We’ll see,” La Boucherie said soberly. “It must be almost time, John. Mustn’t keep them waiting. You’re only a parent, you know.”

  “And a commoner,” Haversham growled.

  He touched the door button and stepped out of the car, to stand silent for a moment looking up at the cool loveliness of the hospital tower, rising like a ziggurat amid moonlit garden terraces, rococo with balustrades and elaborate balconies. Above the central tower loomed the immense marble figure of the blind goddess
, scales in hand—the Justice that was the symbol of this world of 1970, where there was no justice.

  Haversham stared up at the great cold figure. He shivered, and turned to La Boucherie.

  “If this doesn’t work—” he said.

  “I’ll do what I can. I’ll get your son, if I can. And I’ll train him the right way.”

  Some chill, subsensory premonition of the future touched Haversham then. He looked at La Boucherie, secret leader of the Freemen, with suddenly clear eyes, and the flesh seemed to drop away from that gross face, leaving the bare skull. And something more than, that. A burning flame that blazed with relentless fury, the enigmatic motive that had made La Boucherie what he was, one man against the world.

  “Luck,” La Boucherie said.

  Haversham nodded silently and turned away toward the arched portal of the hospital. Under his purple tunic he could feel the bulk of the two smash-guns, safely hidden in webbed sheaths that magnet-detector, rays could not penetrate. It was treason to carry such weapons, of course. In the world the Leaders ruled nothing deadlier than the farcical toys called light-swords might be carried as sidearms.

  Haversham shrugged. He would use his guns, in all probability.

  The hospital lobby had been white and bare as a Grecian theatre a few years ago, but modern fashions were catching up and smothering such plainness. The walls were hung with strips of patterned plastivelvet, and the wooden waiting benches had been replaced by cushioned relaxers in rich, deep colors. Any hospital that catered to Leaders could afford expensive decor.

  Haversham glowered at a tri-dimensional mural glowing against the wall. He wished that Margot had not wanted her son to be born here. The alternative would have been one of the crowded, uncomfortable commoner hospitals, of course, but it would have been better than asking favors of Alex Llewelyn. A favor Llewelyn could easily grant, for he was a Leader.