Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Galbraith set the gadget on the stage, pointing down at the audience, while the Sheriff pulled out his pistol again and made a speech, telling everybody to shet up and they’d get rid of their toothaches.

  I couldn’t see Paw, natcherally, but I knew he was up on the platform. Something funny was happening to the shotgun gadget. Nobody noticed, except me, and I was watching for it. Paw—invisible, of course—was making a few changes. I’d told him how, but he knew what to do as well as I did. So pretty soon the shotgun was rigged the way we wanted it.

  What happened after that was shocking. Galbraith aimed the gadget and pulled the trigger, and rings of light jumped out, yaller this time. I’d told Paw to fix the range so nobody outside the Town Hall would be bothered. But inside—Well, it sure fixed them toothaches. Nobody’s gold filling can ache if he ain’t got a gold filling.

  The gadget was fixed now so it worked on everything that wasn’t growing. Paw had got the range just right. The seats was gone all of a sudden, and so was part of the chandelier. The audience, being bunched together, got it good. Pegleg Jaffe’s glass eye was gone, too. Them that had false teeth lost ’em. Everybody sorta got a once-over-lightly haircut. . . .

  Also, the whole audience lost their clothes. Shoes ain’t growing things, and no more are pants or shirts or dresses. In a trice everybody in the hall was naked as needles. But, shucks, they’d got rid of their toothaches, hadn’t they?

  We was back to home an hour later, all but Uncle Les, when the door busted open and in come Uncle Les, with the Perfesser staggering after him. Galbraith was a mess. He sank down and wheezed, looking back at the door in a worried way.

  “Funny thing happened,” Uncle Les said. “I was flying along outside town and there was the Perfesser running away from a big crowd of people, with sheets wrapped around ’em—some of ’em. So I picked him up. I brung him here, like he wanted.” Uncle Les winked at me.

  “Ooooh!” Galbraith said. “Aaaah! Are they coming?”

  Maw went to the door.

  “They’s a lot of torches moving up the mountain,” she said. “It looks right bad.”

  The Perfesser glared at me.

  “You said you could hide me! Well, you’d better! This is your fault!”

  “Shucks,” I said.

  “You’ll hide me or else!” Galbraith squalled. “I—I’ll bring that commission down.”

  “Look,” I said, “if we hide you safe, will you promise to fergit all about that commission and leave us alone?”

  The Perfesser promised. “Hold on a minute,” I said, and went up to the attic to see Grandpaw.

  He was awake.

  “How about it, Grandpaw?” I asked.

  He listened to Little Sam for a second.

  “The knave is lying,” he told me pretty soon. “He means to bring his commission of stinkards here anyway, recking naught of his promise.”

  “Should we hide him, then?”

  “Aye,” Grandpaw said. “The Hogbens have given their word—there must be no more killing. And to hide a fugitive from his pursuers would not be an ill deed, surely.”

  Maybe he winked. It’s hard to tell with Grandpaw. So I went down the ladder. Galbraith was at the door, watching the torches come up the mountain.

  He grabbed me.

  “Saunk! If you don’t hide me—”

  “We’ll hide you,” I said. “C’mon.”

  So we took him down to the cellar.

  When the mob got here, with Sheriff Abernathy in the lead, we played dumb. We let ’em search the house. Little Sam and Grandpaw turned invisible for a bit, so nobody noticed them. And naturally the crowd couldn’t find hide nor hair of Galbraith. We’d hid him good, like we promised.

  That was a few years ago. The Perfesser’s thriving. He ain’t studying us, though. Sometimes we take out the bottle we keep him in and study him.

  Dang small bottle, too!

  MARGIN FOR ERROR

  The big young man wanted insurance, which was all right. But it was the curious nature of the insurance he wanted that stirred questioning! Against ptitting phenylthiourea in the reservoir, or kicking a policeman . . .

  Ferguson had had this feeling before, though never so strongly. Until now the faint qualms he sometimes felt had fluttered through his mind and vanished too quickly to be recognizable. That was because he had never before talked with a Benjamin Lawson.

  This time the qualms hovered, lingered—took focus and forced themselves up through the layers of the mind to his awareness. He had to free them and give them a name.

  A name? But there was no name for qualms like these.

  Is there some proverb that points out the tendency of social crises to create a man who can deal with them? Ferguson groped briefly for a literary peg to hang his baffling suspicions on. Failing, for the moment he crushed down the uneasiness and looked dubiously at Benjamin Lawson’s face. The qualms sank docilely enough. They had been recognized. They could wait, now.

  All Ferguson brought back with him from that brief excursion into the realms of the submerged mind was the knowledge that there was about Lawson something not to be trusted, and a suddenly much strengthened respect for his own hunches. Reason played no part in it. Ferguson knew—in effect—but he did not quite know that he knew.

  For many, years, he realized, he had been anticipating this. He had expected the coming of . . . of—

  Of Benjamin Lawson.

  He remembered how it had started.

  In an office of ILC, a televisor screen buzzed a peremptory signal and turned bright red. Mr. Greg Ferguson, whose qualifications for vice president were unusual, turned on the descrambler automatically and winked at his guest. Before A.C.—Atomic Control—Ferguson would certainly have been a criminal, but in ILC he was an integrated, useful member of society. The fact that there were four hundred and ninety-nine other vice presidents never troubled him.

  ILC stood for the Federal Bureau of Insurance, Lotteries, and Crêches.

  “Mr. Ferguson marked as free,” a voice said. “Request attention to apparent swindle attempt.”

  “Little the poor tool knows,” Ferguson remarked. “Cagliostro himself couldn’t swindle ILC. But they certainly try.” He watched the screen fade to a blue-and-yellow design, a symbol of a playback.

  Mr. Daniel Archer beamed. By profession he was a Fixer, which was a combination of attorney, publicity agent, sociologist, and secretary. He worked for a politician named Hiram Reeve, which was why he bad called on Ferguson and listened for half an hour to the vice president’s low-key boasting about how ILC worked.

  “Wagner—” the televisor said.

  “Tell that robot he needs a vacation,” Ferguson ordered, “Not Wagner. Ben Lawson. That right, Mr. Archer?”

  Archer nodded. “He’s the one. Of course there may be nothing in it, but we never take chances. At least I don’t.”

  Ferguson pondered while the visor screen turned pink with embarrassment, flashed rapidly through a selective color-wheel, and hunted for Ben Lawson’s playback. This wasn’t the first time a Fixer had asked Ferguson’s advice. Fixers by definition were thorough investigators. They had to be, in order to keep their patrons in power. And there was less pork-barrel rolling than one might have expected, since good Fixers were always in demand, and they had the right to switch allegiance whenever they decided that their patrons’ tactics conflicted with sound sociology. Archer was a fat, sardonic little man, but he had clever eyes.

  “Wagner,” Ferguson said, while they waited. “That was a simple case, open and shut. I used straight Operation Suicide on him. He had it all figured out. Except that he wasn’t sure he could take out the policy—”

  “Don’t they all wonder that, when they’re working an angle?”

  Ferguson decided that Archer was playing dumb. Well, let him. Ferguson himself was always happy to explain the workings of ILC and his own job. The fact that he was also justifying himself had never occurred to him.

  “Yes. And
Wagner was surprised when we O.K.’d his application. Double indemnity covering suicide in any shape or form. I gather he’s been trying to cut his throat ever since. Incidentally, he wants to take out an accident and liability policy now; seems he’s got worried about accidental death since he isn’t covered for it.”

  “Will he get the policy?”

  ‘Why not? I told you the average percentages. We can’t lose on accident, Mr. Archer. We can’t lose. Here’s Lawson’s playback; let’s catch it.”

  A gleam came into Archer’s mild eyes. He leaned forward to watch the screen. It showed an office in an ILC bureau in a distant city. A clerk—an ordinary front man—was rising from his chair as the client entered. Ferguson touched a stud in the auxiliary screen and watched it with half his vision while pertinent data, recorded and correlated by robot machines, flashed into view.

  Brain radiations normal . . . no important glandular stimulus . . . adrenals normal . . . body temperature constant at 98.8 correct for client after mild exercise . . .

  “Confident,” Ferguson said. “He’s got something all worked out. The perfect crime—he thinks. he’s the one?”

  Archer nodded. They studied the client. He was a perfectly ordinary young man, who might have been stamped out with a matrix labeled Specimen of Younger Generation, Style, Sound in Wind and Limb. He was simply a big, blond youngster, with blue eyes, a pleasant smile, and, presumably, not a worry in the world.

  Through the screen the clerk said, “Mr. Lawson?”

  “That’s right. Ben Lawson.”

  “Please sit down. How can I help you? Not a crêche registration, I suppose—unless you’re married?”

  Lawson smiled. “Me married? Not for quite a while yet. I’ll let you know in plenty of time before the kids come along.”

  The clerk laughed dutifully. “Then it’s insurance or, lottery. We’ve got the Pimlico, the Queensland Royal Blue, the Irish—”

  “I don’t gamble,” Lawson said. “It’s insurance. Can I take out insurance to cover these possibilities?” He pushed a slip of paper across the desk.

  The clerk said, “We insure everything that isn’t antisocial, sir. We insure against fire, failure, fraud, felony, fright, fits, flaying, fleabites—” It was a familiar gag at ILC.

  But now the clerk had glimpsed the list. He slowed down and stopped. He frowned, gave Lawson a quick glance, and said, “You say you don’t gamble?”

  “Well, I suppose you could call insurance a gamble, couldn’t you? What’s the matter? Have I put down anything antisocial on my list?”

  The clerk hesitated. “We’ve got our own arbitrary rules about antisociability, sir. Homicide is, of course, but we insure against homicide. And against most crimes, except when the client’s too poor a risk. You understand, there has to be a complete examination—”

  “I’m healthy, I think.”

  “Not only you, sir. There has to be a survey into your background, your environment, your associates—”

  “Complicated, huh?” Lawson asked.

  The clerk swallowed and looked at the list again. “Kicking a policeman,” he said, rather faintly. “That . . . ah . . . seems to be the mildest item you want to be insured against.”

  “Would that be antisocial, by your rules?”

  “I can’t answer that offhand. However, all these . . . items . . . seem rather unlikely, don’t they? I should think you would be better advised to select other policies. We would be happy to make up a selection for you after our personal survey has been completed, something perhaps more suitable—”

  “Oh, suit yourself,” Lawson said. “Those are the policies I want, though. If I can’t get them, I’ll have to think of something else. I made quite a list, in case some of the items weren’t acceptable to ILC. But I haven’t exhausted the possibilities.”

  “Putting phenylthiourea in the city reservoir,” the clerk murmured. “You want to be insured against . . . ah . . . putting phenylthiourea in the city reservoir?”

  “That’s right,” Lawson said cheerfully.

  “Oh. Is this a toxic substance?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you have any intention of putting phenylthiourea in the city reservoir?”

  “That’s what I want to be insured against,” Lawson said, looking wide-eyed and innocent.

  “I see,” the clerk said, coming to some conclusion. “Would you mind answering our routine questionnaire now? An appointment will be made as soon as we’ve completed our survey.”

  “I suppose the premiums would be low enough for me to handle?”

  “They’d vary.”

  “I haven’t got much money,” Lawson said. “Still I guess something could be worked out.” He smiled slowly. “O.K., the questionnaire?”

  “You can use this visor,” the clerk said, making an adjustment. “If you’ll signal when you’re finished . . . here’s the button—”

  The clerk went out. The visor began taking qualitative and qualitative pictures of Lawson, stereoscopic and fluoroscopic. It said briskly, with the inflexibly arrogant tone of a robot-mechanism, “Full name, please, last name first.”

  “Lawson, Benjamin.”

  “Age?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “April ninth, Twenty—”

  Back at local headquarters Ferguson pressed a few buttons, studied a blowup from the “Encyclopedia Britannica” that flipped on the screen, and nodded at Archer. Archer said, “What’s—”

  “It’s a chemical compound, it says here, made up of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur. Seven out of ten people find it bitter as the devil. The other three find it tasteless. It’s a matter of gene inheritance, dominant or recessive.”

  “Toxic?”

  “Anything is, in large enough quantities, including H20. People get drowned, don’t they? But why put phen . . . phenylthiourea in the city reservoir? Why not arsenic, if he’s homicidal?”

  “Is he?”

  “We don’t know yet. We’re getting the survey made now. Very odd. Slightly ridiculous. When people try to outsmart ILC, they usually work it out with careful logic, doing their best to cover up what they really intend. This guy Lawson is practically telling us what he’s intending. Don’t ask me if we’ll accept him as a client; it all depends on the survey.”

  “Kicking a policeman,” Archer said dreamily, his face placid and his eyes shrewd, “What else did he have on his list?”

  “Here it is on the visor. Peculiar. He not only wants financial coverage, but he wants our scot-free clause. He doesn’t want to suffer any legal consequences.”

  “You arrange that, don’t you? You’re a Federal Bureau. If he kicks a policeman—”

  “If we issue the policy,” Ferguson said grimly, “he’s certainly not going to be able to kick a policeman. I’ll see to that. Maybe this boy thinks he can outsmart ILC, but he’s not going to outsmart me.”

  “A personal matter?” Archer said, looking at Ferguson intently.

  “Sure, that’s why I’m a socially integrated individual. I can channel my impulses into constructive canals, instead of destructive ones. I’m rather proud of my resourcefulness, Mr. Archer, and proud of ILC. I’m using my mind to its full capacity here—and where else could I do that? Except perhaps as a Fixer.”

  “Thank you,” Archer said politely. “If you can put my mind at rest about Ben Lawson, I’ll be grateful. So far it’s what they used to call a maggot—a whim. But I’ve never yet met an altruist who wasn’t getting something out of his altruism himself. Lawson—”

  But Ferguson was brooding over Lawson as an enemy of ILC. “Phenylthiourea, eh?” he said. “I’ll fix his wagon.”

  The foundations for the Bureau were necessarily laid in Chicago, Alamogordo, and Hiroshima. It was built on the instability of an atom. The Atomic War occurred at the right time and at the wrong time. If the global warhead had exploded in the mid-forties, the result would have been catastrophe, devastation, and red r
uin. It didn’t. If it had exploded after atomic energy had been perfected and production methods sufficiently improved and speeded up, the result would have been, in all likelihood, a fine opportunity for future civilizations to develop on the outlying planets, with the Earth as a secondary Sun. The difference was, very roughly, the difference between a pistol with one cartridge in the chamber and a pistol with a full clip. But when the level of world thought had returned to customary post-war standards—meaning a cheerfully optimistic concept that the next dip on the roller coaster either didn’t exist or wouldn’t come in our time—then presently saturation point was reached. International politics and national economics were going down while atomic science went up. Luckily the bottom was reached before the top. There was an Atomic War, neither as mildly cataclysmic as it might have been in 1946 nor as finally thorough as it would have been decade later. It merely depopulated most of the planet.

  But that, of course, was inevitable.

  It was also inevitable for the race to rebuild. One advantage of the utter breakdown was the factor that specialization became difficult and union important. Biologists, psychologists, physicists, and sociologists were forced to work together, by virtue of pure necessity. Physically they decentralized, but mentally they became federalists in thought and action. Miraculously, a sufficiently stable world government was worked out. At first it was concentrated in a small area north of Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, but it spread. Knowledge of technology still existed, which helped a great deal. But there was the immense problem of rebuilding.

  One answer lay in eliminating the difficulty of children. Infanticide would have solved the immediate problem but scarcely the racial one. Having children was encouraged, because of the increase in sterility and freak mutants and the decrease in normal births. Still, it became necessary to solve the vital difficulty of general immaturity.

  In a word, not many people continued to mature after they had children. At least one parent began to slow down, never achieving full mental maturity.

  Unlike the gorilla—

  For some reason Ferguson felt nervous and expounded at length to Archer, who listened with every appearance of great interest. Perhaps this was because Ferguson himself had now entered into the Fixer’s calculations. At any rate, Archer listened.