Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  HE REMEMBERED how the mountain-top world had begun to fade around him, Orelle’s pitying face growing ghostlike, the glass walls of her castle turning to mist and the wonderful nameless colors of her gardens thinning away to nothingness while the snow-covered peaks took shape solidly behind them.

  There had been a little time longer, after Brann’s defeat, for him to enjoy the last days of Paradise. He had refused to believe it could end at all. He had shut his mind to the instability of his change, to the fact that he had been himself an isotope created by a temporary radioactive atomic shift so that, when the quantum energy was released, the atomic pattern must revert to its former state. And in one terrible, fading instant the familiar prison of his own senses dosed around him once more as the lovely world of Peak Seven Hundred went volatile and vanished.

  The last thing to go was the little cube Llesi had made for him with the singing halo of the Power turning in miniature within it. When the waste of glacial ice was all that remained of the invisible castle he went slowly down the mountain again, walking, he knew, through fields of glowing flowers he could never see again. And now it was the ice and snow that seemed illusion—the vanished summer world the only real thing in life.

  He kept taking the cube out and looking at it as he descended the lower slopes. After awhile it seemed dimmer than he remembered, the singing fainter. When he reached the valley the glow was gone entirely. The cube was non-radioactive lead, inert and useless. Fairy gold, the legends said, was glittering in your hands when the immortals put it there—but when you looked again it bad always turned to leaves and pebbles.

  Van Hornung said. “What will you do now?”

  Miller shrugged. “Is anything worth doing?”

  “Not for me, any longer. After you have seen the colors and used your mind to its fullest, there is nothing worth the effort of doing in this world below. Stay with me if you like. It does not matter.”

  Behind Miller the door opened quietly. Slade walked into the room. When he saw Miller his jaw dropped slightly.

  “Miller! What’s the matter with you? When did you get in?”

  “Just now.”

  “Did you get it?”

  “Get what?” Miller said dully.

  “The energy-source!” Slade thrust his face down to Miller’s, the feral eyes narrowing, the thin lips light. Seeing him. Miller thought suddenly of Brann. The same irresponsible power, dangerous, hungry, admitting no discipline but its own desires.

  He was glad, in a casual way, that Slade could never use the Power. Slade could do harm enough, had done more than harm enough, with only his own driving unscrupulous brain to guide him. Once armed with a tiling like the Power . . .

  “I left it where I found it,” Miller said indifferently. “Up on the Peak.”

  “How can we get it?” Slade demanded urgently. “An expedition?”

  “You can have it for the asking—up there.” A slow idea took shape in Miller’s mind. Sardonically he said. “Look for the red path at the foot of the cliff. Follow it. Go on up and you’ll have no trouble finding your energy-source. That’s all I’m going to say. We’re through, Slade. Get out.”

  And he would say no more though it was ten minutes before Slade exhausted his threats and arguments and left. Miller smiled wryly at the Belgian.

  “He’ll go. You couldn’t keep him away. And you know what will happen.”

  “What happened to us. But—why did you send him?”

  MILLER stared out the window at the snowy cone of Peak Seven Hundred, white and empty against the sky.

  “I hated Slade once,” he said. “That, doesn’t matter how. But where men like Slade go there’s cruelty and misery and suffering. I can at least spare a few other men what I’ve gone through from him. He’ll come back—as we are. As for the Power—yes, it’s fairy gold.”

  The Belgian said softly “. . . ‘amid such greater glories that we are worse than blind.’ ”

  Miller nodded. “The Power and the Glory. Some day our race may achieve it. But it has to be earned.”

  He reached for the bottle.

  1948

  DON’T LOOK NOW

  That man beside you may be a Haitian. They own our world, but only a few wise and far-seeing men like Lyman know it!

  THE man in the brown suit was looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar. The reflection seemed to interest him even more deeply than the drink between his hands. He was paying only perfunctory attention to Lyman’s attempts at conversation. This had been going on for perhaps fifteen minutes before he finally lifted his glass and took a deep swallow.

  “Don’t look now,” Lyman said.

  The brown man slid his eyes sidewise toward Lyman, tilted his glass higher, and took another swig. Ice-cubes slipped down toward his mouth. He put the glass back on the red-brown wood and signaled for a refill. Finally he took a deep breath and looked at Lyman.

  “Don’t look at what?” he asked.

  “There was one sitting right beside you,” Lyman said, blinking rather glazed eyes. “He just went out. You mean you couldn’t see him?”

  The brown man finished paying for his fresh drink before he answered. “See who?” he asked, with a fine mixture of boredom, distaste and reluctant interest. “Who went out?”

  “What have I been telling you for the last ten minutes? Weren’t you listening?”

  “Certainly I was listening. That is—certainly. You were talking about—bathtubs. Radios. Orson—”

  “Not Orson. H. G. Herbert George. With Orson it was just a gag. H.G. knew—or suspected. I wonder if it was simply intuition with him? He couldn’t have had any proof—but he did stop writing science fiction rather suddenly, didn’t he? I’ll bet he knew once, though.”

  “Knew what?”

  “About the Martians. All this won’t do us a bit of good if you don’t listen. It may not anyway. The trick is to jump the gun—with proof. Convincing evidence. Nobody’s ever been allowed to produce the evidence before. You are a reporter, aren’t you?”

  HOLDING his glass, the man in the brown suit nodded reluctantly.

  “Then you ought to be taking it all down on a piece of folded paper. I want everybody to know. The whole world. It’s important. Terribly important. It explains everything. My life won’t be safe unless I can pass along the information and make people believe it.”

  “Why won’t your life be safe?”

  “Because of the Martians, you fool. They own the world.” The brown man sighed. “Then they own my newspaper, too,” he objected, “so I can’t print anything they don’t like.”

  “I never thought of that,” Lyman said, considering the bottom of his glass, where two ice-cubes had fused into a cold, immutable union. “They’re not omnipotent, though. I’m sure they’re vulnerable, or why have they always kept under cover? They’re afraid of being found out. If the world had convincing evidence—look, people always believe what they read in the newspapers. Couldn’t you—”

  “Ha,” said the brown man with deep significance.

  Lyman drummed sadly on the bar and murmured, “There must be some way. Perhaps if I had another drink . . .”

  The brown-suited man tasted his collins, which seemed to stimulate him. “Just what is all this about Martians?” he asked Lyman. “Suppose you start at the beginning and tell me again. Or can’t you remember?”

  “Of course I can remember. I’ve got practically total recall. It’s something new. Very new. I never could do it before. I can even remember my last conversation with the Martians.” Lyman favored the brown man with a glance of triumph. “When was that?”

  “This morning.”

  “I can even remember conversations I had last week,” the brown man said mildly. “So what?”

  “You don’t understand. They make us forget, you see. They tell us what to do and we forget about the conversation—it’s post-hypnotic suggestion, I expect—but we follow their orders just the same. There’s the compulsion, though we think we
’re making our own decisions. Oh, they own the world, all right, but nobody knows it except me.”

  “And how did you find out?”

  “Well, I got my brain scrambled, in a way. I’ve been fooling around with supersonic detergents, trying to work out something marketable, you know. The gadget went wrong—from some standpoints. High-frequency waves, it was. They went through and through me. Should have been inaudible, but I could hear them, or rather—well, actually I could see them. That’s what I mean about my brain being scrambled. And after that, I could see and hear the Martians. They’ve geared themselves so they work efficiently on ordinary brains, and mine isn’t ordinary any more. They can’t hypnotize me, either. They can command me, but I needn’t obey—now. I hope they don’t suspect. Maybe they do. Yes, I guess they do.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The way they look at me.”

  “How do they look at you?” asked the brown man, as he began to reach for a pencil and then changed his mind. He took a drink instead. “Well? What are they like?”

  “I’m not sure. I can see them, all right, but only when they’re dressed up.”

  “Okay, okay,” the brown man said patiently. “How do they look, dressed up?”

  “Just like anybody, almost. They dress up in—in human skins. Oh, not real ones, imitations. Like the Katzenjammer Kids zipped into crocodile suits. Undressed—I don’t know. I’ve never seen one. Maybe they’re invisible even to me, then, or maybe they’re just camouflaged. Ants or owls or rats or bats or—”

  “Or anything,” the brown man said hastily.

  “Thanks. Or anything, of course. But when they’re dressed up like humans—like that one who was sitting next to you awhile ago, when I told you not to look—”

  “That one was invisible, I gather?”

  “Most of the time they are, to everybody. But once in a while, for some reason, they—”

  “Wait,” the brown man objected. “Make sense, will you? They dress up in human skins and then sit around invisible?”

  “Only now and then. The human skins are perfectly good imitations. Nobody can tell the difference. It’s that third eye that gives them away. When they keep it closed, you’d never guess it was there. When they want to open it, they go invisible—like that. Fast. When I see somebody with a third eye, right in the middle of his forehead, I know he’s a Martian and invisible, and I pretend not to notice him.”

  “Uh-huh,” the brown man said. “Then for all you know, I’m one of your visible Martians.”

  “Oh, I hope not!” Lyman regarded him anxiously. “Drunk as I am, I don’t think so. I’ve been trailing you all day, making sure. It’s a risk I have to take, of course. They’ll go to any length—any length at all—to make a man give himself away. I realize that. I can’t really trust anybody. But I had to find someone to talk to, and I—” He paused. There was a brief silence. “I could be wrong,” Lyman said presently. “When the third eye’s closed, I can’t tell if it’s there. Would you mind opening your third eye for me?” He fixed a dim gaze on the brown man’s forehead.

  “Sorry,” the reporter said. “Some other time. Besides, I don’t know you. So you want me to splash this across the front page, I gather? Why didn’t you go to see the managing editor? My stories have to get past the desk and rewrite.”

  “I want to give my secret to the world,” Lyman said stubbornly. “The question is, how far will I get? You’d expect they’d have killed me the minute I opened my mouth to you—except that I didn’t say anything while they were here. I don’t believe they take us very seriously, you know. This must have been going on since the dawn of history, and by now they’ve had time to get careless. They let Fort go pretty far before they cracked down on him. But you notice they were careful never to let Fort get hold of genuine proof that would convince people.”

  The brown man said something under his breath about a human interest story in a box. He asked, “What do the Martians do, besides hang around bars all dressed up?”

  “I’m still working on that,” Lyman said. “It isn’t easy to understand. They run the world, of course, but why?” He wrinkled his brow and stared appealingly at the brown man. “Why?”

  “If they do run it, they’ve got a lot to explain.”

  “That’s what I mean. From our viewpoint, there’s no sense to it. We do things illogically, but only because they tell us to. Everything we do, almost, is pure illogic. Poe’s Imp of the Perverse—you could give it another name beginning with M. Martian, I mean. It’s all very well for psychologists to explain why a murderer wants to confess, but it’s still an illogical reaction. Unless a Martian commands him to.”

  “You can’t be hypnotized into doing anything that violates your moral sense,” the brown man said triumphantly.

  LYMAN frowned. “Not by another human, but you can by a Martian. I expect they got the upper hand when we didn’t have more than ape-brains, and they’ve kept it ever since. They evolved as we did, and kept a step ahead. Like the sparrow on the eagle’s back who hitch-hiked till the eagle reached his ceiling, and then took off and broke the altitude record. They conquered the world, but nobody ever knew it. And they’ve been ruling ever since.”

  “But—”

  “Take houses, for example. Uncomfortable things. Ugly, inconvenient, dirty, everything wrong with them. But when men like Frank Lloyd Wright slip out from under the Martians’ thumb long enough to suggest something better, look how the people react. They hate the thought. That’s their Martians, giving them orders.”

  “Look. Why should the Martians care what kind of houses we live in? Tell me that.”

  Lyman frowned. “I don’t like the note of skepticism I detect creeping into this conversation,” he announced. “They care, all right. No doubt about it. They live in our houses. We don’t build for our convenience, we build, under order, for the Martians, the way they want it. They’re very much concerned with everything we do. And the more senseless, the more concern.

  “Take wars. Wars don’t make sense from any human viewpoint. Nobody really wants wars. But we go right on having them. From the Martian viewpoint, they’re useful. They give us a spurt in technology, and they reduce the excess population. And there are lots of other results, too. Colonization, for one thing. But mainly technology. In peace time, if a guy invents jet-propulsion, it’s too expensive to develop commercially. In war-time, though, it’s got to be developed. Then the Martians can use it whenever they want. They use us the way they’d use tools or—or limbs. And nobody ever really wins a war—except the Martians.”

  The man in the brown suit chuckled. “That makes sense,” he said. “It must be nice to be a Martian.”

  “Why not? Up till now, no race ever successfully conquered and ruled another. The underdog could revolt or absorb. If you know you’re being ruled, then the ruler’s vulnerable. But if the world doesn’t know—and it doesn’t—

  “Take radios,” Lyman continued, going off at a tangent. “There’s no earthly reason why a sane human should listen to a radio. But the Martians make us do it. They like it. Take bathtubs. Nobody contends bathtubs are comfortable—for us. But they’re fine for Martians. All the impractical things we keep on using, even though we know they’re impractical—”

  “Typewriter ribbons,” the brown man said, struck by the thought. “But not even a Martian could enjoy changing a typewriter ribbon.”

  Lyman seemed to find that flippant. He said that he knew all about the Martians except for one thing—their psychology.

  “I don’t know why they act as they do. It looks illogical sometimes, but I feel perfectly sure they’ve got sound motives for every move they make. Until I get that worked out I’m pretty much at a standstill. Until I get evidence—proof—and help. I’ve got to stay under cover till then. And I’ve been doing that. I do what they tell me, so they won’t suspect, and I pretend to forget what they tell me to forget.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing much to worry about.
”

  Lyman paid no attention. He was off again on a list of his grievances.

  “When I hear the water running in the tub and a Martian splashing around, I pretend I don’t hear a thing. My bed’s too short and I tried last week to order a special length, but the Martian that sleeps there told me not to. He’s a runt, like most of them. That is, I think they’re runts. I have to deduce, because you never see them undressed. But it goes on like that constantly. By the way, how’s your Martian?”

  The man in the brown suit set down his glass rather suddenly.

  “My Martian?”

  “Now listen. I may be just a little bit drunk, but my logic remains unimpaired. I can still put two and two together. Either you know about the Martians, or you don’t. If you do, there’s no point in giving me that, “What, my Martian?” routine. I know you have a Martian. Your Martian knows you have a Martian. My Martian knows. The point is, do you know? Think hard,” Lyman urged solicitously.

  “NO, I haven’t got a Martian,” the reporter said, taking a quick drink. The edge of the glass clicked against his teeth.

  “Nervous, I see,” Lyman remarked. “Of course you have got a Martian. I suspect you know it.”

  “What would I be doing with a Martian?” the brown man asked with dogged dogmatism.

  “What would you be doing without one? I imagine it’s illegal. If they caught you running around without one they’d probably put you in a pound or something until claimed. Oh, you’ve got one, all right. So have I. So has he, and he, and he—and the bartender.” Lyman enumerated the other barflies, with a wavering forefinger.

  “Of course they have,” the brown man said. “But they’ll all go back to Mars tomorrow and then you can see a good doctor. You’d better have another dri—”