Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “What’s in it for me?” Archer asked.

  “You can stop worrying about that memo on your calendar—one way or the other. I promise that if nothing happens I’ll never bother you again about it.” That was the end of what Ferguson said aloud. In his own mind he finished the sentence. “—but I won’t have to. Lawson will!”

  Lawson was not likely to take that lying down. Ferguson did not expect vindictiveness from the boy; Lawson would be above petty revenge. But he could not afford to let a thing like this happen unchecked.

  Ferguson meant Lawson to know that this was a deliberate attack. And if Lawson was what Ferguson believed him to be, he could not afford to let the knowledge of his superior potentialities be spread abroad. If guns are being tired at you, you spike those guns. There need be nothing vindictive about it—but self-preservation must be as strong in the immature superman as it is in any other organism.

  One of two things would happen; Lawson would collect on another policy, which would put him perilously close to the outside limits of Margin for Error. ILC would worry and wonder, remembering the suspicions Ferguson had already planted. Lawson could scarcely afford to break his hypnosis a third time openly. The alternative could only be an overt retaliation on his attackers; that was what Ferguson hoped for with part of his mind. It would be the more certain way of proving his case. And Archer had to be in on it. In a perfunctory way Ferguson was sorry he had to drag Archer into this. He would have had no objection to staking himself out alone as bait for the tiger if it would do any good. But no tethered goat has ever killed a tiger yet, alone. Ferguson had already established himself too firmly as a crackpot in the minds of those whose opinions mattered. If he could pull Archer down with him, Archer would have to fight back against the superman, or go under. Corroborative evidence from a man like Archer would have some weight with the authorities.

  Ferguson watched Archer’s face anxiously. He saw the decision hang in the balance for an interminable chain of seconds. Then Archer nodded.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  Ferguson let out his breath in a long sigh.

  The ease with which Lawson thought of a third alternative was infuriating. He did neither of the things Ferguson expected. Instead, he took out insurance on the Nestor, a luxury liner on the Earth-Moon run, and since a great many people wanted similar policies—it was almost a lottery, in view of an epidemic of meteor swarms—no attention was aroused at ILC. Besides, the usual margin for error had been allowed. The Nestor blasted off three days after its announced time for departure, which gave it a sufficient safety factor and caused dozens of people to cancel their policies.

  So the Nestor avoided the meteor swarms, but ran into an atomic warhead which had been orbiting in free space for years, awaiting the fatal appointment.

  The Nestor was running on atomic fuel. The great ship blazed white for an instant and disintegrated.

  So did Ferguson. Not literally, of course; not with the spectacular finality of the ship.

  Perhaps the worst part was the waiting. He was almost certain that Lawson knew what had been intended, and why, and who was responsible.

  But nothing happened.

  There was no yardstick. Ferguson didn’t know what to expect because he didn’t know Lawson’s limitations. Ferguson might, unknown to himself, be walking straight toward an apparently accidental demise, hours or days from now, as final as that of the Nestor. It seemed fairly obvious that Lawson had foreseen that final rendezvous between the ship and the wandering warhead in its orbit. Was there a rendezvous ahead for Ferguson? Or was he being ignored? He didn’t know which thought he liked less.

  His work began to suffer. He wasn’t eating well these days, which might have brought on his headaches. He overheard his secretary complaining that he was developing a temper like a bear, but he knew that was the wrong simile; the adult gorilla exhibited tendencies more like what Ferguson was feeling now. Irritation, a desire for solitude, above all suspicion. It was the suspicion that bothered him most.

  After he had made the third major mistake in a row in office routine he took a vacation by request. He was more glad than sorry when the request came through—not that he thought a vacation would help to solve his problem—you can’t negate a fact like Lawson by ignoring it—but he was at least relieved of the troublesome suspicion which had been developing to major proportions of late.

  He was suspicious of new clients.

  He kept remembering Lawson’s aggressively normal face and manner in their first interview. And now he read behind every application the potential for—

  A second Lawson.

  For six months he tried to run away from a nightmare. The Himalaya Playground didn’t help.

  Specialized occupational therapy didn’t help either. Nor did the Moon. Ferguson found the satellite bleak and unfriendly, even at the stimulating Shady Glen north of Tycho. When he looked up at the clouded disk of Earth in the sky, he kept thinking the masses of light and dark had the shape of Lawson’s face. It covered the whole planet, just as the shadow of Lawson had covered all of Ferguson’s life by now. Lawson watched him unwinkingly from above.

  Time on the Moon has a different quality from time on Earth. He had to count up laboriously sometimes to discover how long it had been since he left ILC. He had a reason for wondering, because there was a message he expected. A message from Archer. Before he left Earth, he had asked Archer to notify him in case anything developed. A good many months must have gone by, though here on the Moon they didn’t seem so long. But no message came.

  When he saw the dull colors of winter spreading down from the pole, he knew his six-months’ period was up and he would have to think about going back soon. And now he had to face it; he was afraid to go back, until he heard from Archer. Eventually he undertook the considerable expense of a person-to-person call. It was not, after all, an expense. The call could not be completed. Archer had disappeared.

  It was hard to check from this far away, but apparently the Fixer’s office had been closed some months ago, and there was no forwarding number. By the time Ferguson’s reservation for the return trip came up, he knew what he had to do.

  If he had gone straight home, things might have worked out quite differently. But at that time of year the space liner was operating between Tycho and a port in South Africa. An old compulsion which had been haunting Ferguson for some time now saw its chance and broke out of all control.

  For a long while he had wanted very much to kill a gorilla. It was not as irrational as it sounded. Psychiatrically speaking, he knew it involved symbolism and displacement. Emotionally, he knew what face he would see across the sights of the gun when he found his gorilla. It had to be an adult male.

  With all the resources of his time, this wasn’t difficult to arrange; but the disgraceful ease with which the telephoto analyzers located a specimen, the simplicity of driving the sullen brute into an ambush with supersonics, the facility with which Ferguson, in his fast armored Hunter, shot his quarry, left the man completely dissatisfied. Men had killed gorillas before. It proved nothing. It didn’t prove the point that bothered him.

  Sight and memory of the gorilla’s face, in death, stayed with him. The monster had been mature, for his species. Antisocial and dangerous. But dangerous only to whatever intruded into his domain.

  With a mature superman, Ferguson thought, human progress might stop. A superman would not feel insecurity, that goad which has always driven mankind. A superman would be a law unto himself. Would he behave like an anthropomorphic god, lending a helping hand to Homo sapiens, or would mankind seem to him as alien and unimportant as a savage tribe?

  Lesser breeds without the law—

  But the world belonged to man. Not to Lawson. ILC was the law. ILC was the fortress. Without ILC’s stability, there would be no protection. I’m not safe any more, Ferguson thought. I could never stand alone. Maybe that merely means racial immaturity; ILC does stand in loco parentis, but it�
�s always been that way—man has always wanted an All-Father image—

  Ferguson turned in the rifle, but he kept the pistol.

  There was no difficulty about locating Lawson. He still lived in the same cottage. But he seemed to be looking slightly older. He nodded cheerfully to Ferguson when the latter came in.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Ferguson took out the gun and aimed it at Lawson.

  Lawson looked scared, or pretended to.

  “Don’t,” he said hastily. “I can explain. Don’t shoot me.”

  His apparent fright was the only thing that stopped Ferguson’s finger on the trigger.

  “You don’t need to be afraid of me,” Lawson assured him in a soothing voice. “Please put down that gun.”

  “I know all about you. You’re dangerous. You could conquer the world if you wanted to.”

  “I doubt it,” Lawson said, his fascinated stare on the gun-muzzle. “I’m not really a superman, you know.”

  “You’re not ordinary Homo sapiens.”

  “Now look. I know a good deal about you, too. You could hardly expect me not to after, what’s happened. A man’s investments don’t all go haywire at once unless somebody’s been manipulating the market against him.”

  “So that’s what happened to Archer.” Ferguson’s voice rose. “I suppose I can expect the same thing, whatever it is.”

  “Archer? You must mean Reeve’s Fixer. So far as I know, he’s going about his business as usual.” Lawson was eying his adversary warily. “You’re the problem right now,” he said. “You’re not going about your business; you’re going about mine. I wish you’d lay off, Ferguson. I know what you’re thinking, but honestly, I’m not doing anyone any harm. Maybe you have reason for some of your conclusions about what you call my super-powers, but there’s nothing miraculous about them. It . . . it’s just—“It’s what?” Ferguson demanded as the other man hesitated.

  “Call it a—way of thinking. That’s as close as I can come to explaining what it is I’ve got. I just don’t make mistakes. Not ever.”

  “You made one when you let me come in just now, with a gun in my pocket.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Lawson said. There was a pause.

  He went on: “Suppose I tell you a little about it. You were partly right, you know, in what you’ve been saying about me. I am immature. Normally, I’d never have known I wasn’t mature at twenty-one. There weren’t any standards of comparison. But this—thing—in my mind helped there. It isn’t prescience, it’s just a . . . a way of thinking. You might call it precision and knowledge of precision tactics. An ability to disassociate the personality from pure thought. I can disassociate logic from emotion, you see—but that’s only part of it. Before I graduated from the crêche, I knew it would take a good many years before I really matured.”

  “You’re not human. You don’t give a care about human beings.” Lawson said, “Look at it this way. Long ago, there was child labor. Kids were put to work in mines and factories when they were ten—or even before that. How could they reach normal maturity under those conditions? They needed normal childhood, with the right facilities. I had the same problem, with a maturation delayed years beyond the time of everybody else. I couldn’t take a job—any job. I could have coped with the requirements, of course, but it would have—warped me. Even before I got my particular ability fully developed, I had a sort of protective instinct pointing out the right direction to take—generally. Just as a new-hatched chicken runs from danger. I needed a normal childhood—one that would be normal for me.”

  “I suspected what you were.”

  “Because of what you are,” Lawson said gently.

  Ferguson blinked. “You’re antisocial and dangerous,” he said. “Your record shows that. You wrecked the Nestor.”

  “You know better than that. You’re trying to make me a personal devil.”

  “You insured the Nestor, and the Nestor ran into an atomic warhead in space. What about logics of probability?”

  “What about logic?” Lawson countered. “I can think and integrate without emotional bias when necessary, that’s all. It’s not prescience. It was a matter of hard work, research, astronomy, historical study, and integration. I found out the exact time of the Nestor’s departure, I found records of spaceships that had noted radiations in certain areas above the stratosphere. I checked on what atomic shells were fired during the Atomic War. I don’t think any ordinary human would have had the patience or the speed to do the integration I did, but—it’s simply hard work, plus extensions of the brain that have always been shackled before.”

  “You can foretell the future?”

  “Given the factors, I can formulate the probable final equation—yes. But as for this special talent of mine—I can’t tell you. All I can say is that technology has its limits, but the human mind hasn’t. We’ve gone tremendously far with technologies—so far that we nearly killed ourselves with atomics because we didn’t know how to use nuclear fission. But every weapon creates the man to use it—and to hammer it into a plowshare. I’m a mutation. Eventually we’ll know how to handle atomics without danger—”

  “We?”

  “I’m the first. But there are others like me in the crêches now. Immature as yet. But my brothers will grow—”

  Ferguson thought of the gorilla.

  Lawson said, “I know how to think. I’m the first man in the world who ever knew how to do that. I’ll never need a psychiatrist. I don’t think I’ll ever make a mistake, because I can really think impersonally, and there’s nobody who’s ever been able to do that before. That’s the basis of the future—not technologies that people misuse, but people who can use technology. Right now, there are over eighty children in crêches who have that special factor for logic in their minds. It’s a dominant mutation. We don’t want to rule; we’ll never want that. It’s only autocrats who need power—those who tag groups as ‘little people’ so that by comparison they’ll be big people. My job, just at present, is to see that my brother mutants get the immaturity pension they need. I must provide that money somehow. I can do it; I’ve worked out some methods—”

  “Nevertheless I’m going to kill you,” Ferguson said. “I’m afraid of you. You could rule the world.”

  “Madmen rule,” Lawson said. “Sane men work, directionally. Atomics have to be controlled; that’s one step. It takes pure, sane thought to handle that. And I’m the first truly sane man who has ever existed on Earth.” “Like that gorilla I shot yesterday? He was integrated. He was vicious and touchy and static. He had his feeding-ground and his harem, and that was enough for him. He wanted no progress and needed none. That’s maturity for you. Progress stops—the world stops. You’re a dead end, Lawson—and in a minute you’ll just be dead.”

  “Do you think you can kill me?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not, if you’re a superman. But I’m going to try.”

  “And if you fail?”

  “Probably you’ll kill me. Because if you don’t, I’ll spread the word, and you’ll be lynched—some day. At least, I’ll talk. If that’s the only weapon I have against you.”

  “Animals kill,” Lawson said.

  “Men kill. I don’t kill.”

  “I do,” Ferguson said, and squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  When the room steadied about him again, he was seated in a deep chair staring at the gun on the floor where he had dropped it. For the moment it didn’t matter why he had failed—why the gun had failed. The fact of failure was enough.

  Lawson had been intolerably kind. He had a vague feeling that Lawson had gone away somewhere to fetch him a drink. His time-sense was unsteady again. Perhaps that was because he had so newly returned from the Moon. Whatever the reason, his sense of urgency was gone.

  Then on the wall he saw the television panel, and an urgency woke again in him in a new direction. Archer. Archer could give him the answer. If Archer were still alive.

&nbs
p; With no recollection of motion he found himself before the screen, steadying himself with braced hands on the base, giving the familiar call number for the office where Archer no longer worked. He got from the exchange the same information his lunar call had elicited—office closed, no forwarding address. Pie tried Archer’s home, with the same lack of result. Then he tried the office of Hiram Reeve, the politician who had been Lawson’s patron, and here he found the right answer.

  “ZX 47-6859. That’s a private number, Mr. Ferguson. ILC will keep it confidential, of course?”

  Ferguson promised, and blanked the face out quickly. His voice was a little unsteady as he repeated the ZX number. It seemed incredible that Archer’s plump face should dawn so clearly and promptly in the screen. Ferguson had pictured him as dead or destroyed in some subtler way, with so many vivid variations as applied to himself, that he tried stupidly to reach out and touch the screen for reassurance. The surface was cold and smooth beneath his fingertips, but Archer jumped back and laughed, putting up a futile hand to shield his eyes from the imagined blow.

  “Hey, what’s the idea?” he demanded.

  “Are you all right, Archer? Where are you? What’s happened?”

  “Sure I’m all right,” Archer said. “What about you? You don’t look too good.”

  “I don’t feel too good. But I’ve got proof. He’s admitted it!”

  “Hold on a minute. Let’s get this straight. I know you just got back from the Moon, but—”

  “I’m at Lawson’s house. I’ve confronted him with the evidence.” Ferguson made a great effort and forced his mind into co-ordinated thought. So much depended on what he was able to put across in the next few sentences. He could not afford weakness yet. “Lawson’s admitted everything I’ve been telling you,” he said. “It was all true. For a while I almost thought I was going crazy, but now Lawson admits it—listen, Archer, he admits it! You’ve got to help me! I realize my record’s bad—I knew, but I couldn’t convince anybody, and it nearly drove me off my rocker. I suppose I’ve been sounding psychotic for a long time now, but they’ll listen to you. They’ve got to—because I tried to shoot Lawson, and I couldn’t. Somebody will have to do something quick.” He paused, drew a deep breath, and said harshly, “There are eighty more of them. Do you hear that, Archer? They’re growing up. They’re going to take over. I know how that sounds, but you’ve got to believe me. Give me a chance to prove it! Could you get here fast? How far away are you? It all depends on you; Archer, please don’t fail me!”