Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  It was so shockingly disorienting, somehow, that Kelvin was quite unable to think at all. He took a quick step backward. The edge of the bathtub caught him behind the knees and distracted him momentarily, fortunately for his sanity. When he looked again there was only his own appalled face reflected above the washbowl. But after a second or two the face seemed to develop a cloud of white turban, and mandarinlike whiskers began to form sketchily.

  Kelvin clapped a hand to his eyes and spun away.

  In about fifteen seconds he spread his fingers enough to peep through them at the glass. He kept his palm pressed desperately to his upper lip, in some wild hope of inhibiting the sudden sprouting of a moustache. What peeped back at him from the mirror looked like himself. At least it had no turban, and it wore hornrimmed glasses. He risked snatching his hand away from a quick look, and clapped it in place again just in time to prevent Tharn from taking shape in the glass.

  STILL shielding his face, he went unsteadily into the bedroom and took the flat case out of his coat pocket. But he didn’t press the button that would close a mental synapse between two incongruous eras. He didn’t want to do that again, he realized. More horrible, somehow, than what was happening now was the thought of reentering that alien brain.

  He was standing before the bureau, and in the mirror one eye looked out at him between reflected fingers. It was a wild eye behind the gleaming spectacle-lens, but it seemed to be his own. Tentatively he took his hand away . . .

  This mirror showed more of Tharn. Kelvin wished it hadn’t. Tharn was wearing white knee-boots of some glittering plastic. Between them and the turban he wore nothing whatever except a minimum of loincloth, also glittering plastic. Tharn was very thin, but he looked active. He looked quite active enough to spring right into the hotel room. His skin was whiter than his turban, and his hands had seven fingers each, all right.

  Kelvin abruptly turned away, but Tharn was resourceful. The dark window made enough of a reflecting surface to show a lean, loinclothed figure. The feet showed bare and they were less normal than Tharn’s hands. And the polished brass of a lamp base gave back the picture of a small, distorted face not Kelvin’s own.

  Kelvin found a corner without reflecting surfaces and pushed into it, his hands shielding his face.

  He was still holding the flat case.

  Oh, fine, he thought bitterly. Everything’s got a string on it. What good will this rapport gadget do me if Tharn’s going to show up every day? Maybe I’m only crazy. I hope so.

  Something would have to be done unless Kelvin was prepared to go through life with his face buried in his hands. The worst of it was that Tharn had a haunting look of familiarity. Kelvin discarded a dozen possibilities, from reincarnation to the dejd vu phenomenon, but—

  He peeped through his hands, in time to see Tharn raising a cylindrical gadget of some sort and leveling it like a gun. That gesture formed Kelvin’s decision. He’d have to do something, and fast. So, concentrating on the problem—I want out!—he pressed the button in the surface of the flat case.

  And instantly the teleportation method he had forgotten was perfectly clear to him. Other matters, however, were obscure. The smells—someone was thinking—were adding up to a—there was no word for that, only a shocking visio-auditory ideation that was simply dizzying. Someone named Three Million and Ninety Pink had written a new natch. And there was the physical sensation of licking a twenty-four-dollar stamp and sticking it on a postcard.

  But, most important, the man in the future had had—or would have—a compulsion to think about the teleportation method, and as Kelvin snapped back into his own mind and time, he instantly used that method.

  He was falling.

  Icy water attacked him hard. Miraculously he kept his grip on the flat case. He had a whirling vision of stars in a night sky, and the phosphorescent sheen of silvery light on a dark sea. Then brine stung his nostrils.

  Kelvin had never learned how to swim.

  As he went down for the last time, bubbling a scream, he literally clutched at the proverbial straw he was holding. His finger pushed the button down again. There was no need to concentrate on the problem; he couldn’t think of anything else.

  Mental chaos, fantastic images—and the answer.

  It took concentration, and there wasn’t much time left. Bubbles streamed up past his face. He felt them, but he couldn’t see them. All around, pressing in avidly, was the horrible coldness of the salt water . . .

  But he did know the method now, and he knew how it worked. He thought along the lines the future mind had indicated. Something happened. Radiation—that was the nearest familiar term—poured out of his brain and did peculiar things to his lung-tissues. His blood cells adapted themselves . . .

  He was breathing water, and it was no longer strangling him.

  But Kelvin had also learned that his emergency adaptation could not be maintained for very long. Teleportation was the answer to that. And surely he could remember the method now. He had actually used it to escape from Tharn only a few minutes ago.

  YET he could not remember. The memory was expunged cleanly from his mind. So there was nothing else to do but press the button again, and Kelvin did that, most reluctantly.

  Dripping wet, he was standing on an unfamiliar street. It was no street he knew, but apparently it was in his own time and on his own planet. Luckily, teleportation seemed to have limitations. The wind was cold. Kelvin stood in a puddle that grew rapidly around his feet. He stared around.

  He picked out a sign up the street that offered Turkish Baths, and headed moistly hi that direction. His thoughts were mostly profane . . .

  He was in New Orleans, of all places. Presently he was drunk in New Orleans. His thoughts kept going around in circles, and Scotch was a fine palliative, an excellent brake. He needed to get control again. He had an almost miraculous power, and he wanted to be able to use it effectively before the unexpected happened again. Tharn . . .

  He sat in a hotel room and swigged Scotch. Gotta be logical!

  He sneezed.

  The trouble was, of course, that there were so few points of contact between his own mind and that of the future-man. Moreover, he’d got the rapport only in tunes of crisis. Like having access to the Alexandrian Library, five seconds a day. In five seconds you couldn’t even start translating . . .

  Health, fame and fortune. He sneezed again. The robot had been a liar. His health seemed to be going fast. What about that robot? How had he got involved anyway? He said he’d fallen into this era from the future, but robots are notorious liars. Gotta be logical.

  Apparently the future was peopled by creatures not unlike the cast of a Frankenstein picture. Androids, robots, so-called men whose minds were shockingly different . . . Sneeze. Another drink.

  The robot had said that the case would lose its power after Kelvin had achieved health, fame and fortune. Which was a distressing thought. Suppose he attained those enviable goals, found the little push-button useless, and then Tharn showed up? Oh, no. That called for another shot.

  Sobriety was the wrong condition in which to approach a matter that in itself was as wild as delirium tremens, even though, Kelvin knew, the science he had stumbled on was all theoretically quite possible. But not in this day and age. Sneeze.

  The trick would be to pose the right problem and use the case at some time when you weren’t drowning or being menaced by the bewhiskered android with his seven-fingered hands and his ominous rodlike weapon. Find the problem.

  But that future-mind was hideous.

  And suddenly, with drunken clarity, Kelvin realized that he was profoundly drawn to that dim, shadowy world of the future.

  He could not see its complete pattern, but he sensed it somehow. He knew that it was right, a far better world and tune than his. If he could be that unknown man who dwelt there, all would go well.

  Man must needs love the highest, he thought wryly. Oh, well. He shook the bottle. How much had he absorbed? He felt fine.r />
  Gotta be logical.

  Outside the window street-lights blinked off and on. Neons traced goblin languages against the night. It seemed rather alien, too, but so did Kelvin’s own body. He started to laugh, but a sneeze choked that off.

  All I want, he thought, is health, fame and fortune. Then I’ll settle down and live happily ever after, without a care or worry. I won’t need this enchanted case after that. Happy ending.

  On impulse he took out the box and examined it. He tried to pry it open and failed. His finger hovered over the button.

  How can I—he thought, and his finger moved half an inch . . .

  It wasn’t so alien now that he was drunk. The future man’s name was Quarra Vee. Odd he had never realized that before, but how often does a man think of his own name? Quarra Vee was playing some sort of game vaguely reminiscent of chess, but his opponent was on a planet of Sirius, some distance away. The chessmen were all unfamiliar. Complicated, dizzying space-time gambits flashed through Quarra Vee’s mind as Kelvin listened in. Then Kelvin’s problem thrust through, the compulsion hit Quarra Vee, and—

  IT WAS all mixed up. There were two problems, really. How to cure a cold—coryza. And how to become healthy, rich and famous in a practically prehistoric era—for Quarra Vee.

  A small problem, however, to Quarra Vee. He solved it and went back to his game with the Sirian. Kelvin was back in the hotel room in New Orleans. He was very drunk or he wouldn’t have risked it.

  The method involved using his brain to tune in on another brain in this present twentieth century that had exactly the wavelength he required. All sorts of factors would build up to the sum total of that wavelength—experience, opportunity, position, knowledge, imagination, honesty—but he found it at last, after hesitation among three totals that were all nearly right. Still, one was Tighter, to three decimal points. Still drunk as a lord, Kelvin clamped on a mental tight beam, turned on the teleportation, and rode the beam across America to a well-equipped laboratory, where a man sat reading.

  The man was bald and had a bristling red moustache. He looked up sharply at some sound Kelvin made.

  “Hey!” he said. “How did you get in here?”

  “Ask Quarra Vee,” Kelvin said.

  “Who? What?” The man put down his book. Kelvin called on his memory. It seemed to be slipping. He used the rapport case for an instant, and refreshed his mind. Not so unpleasant this time, either. He was beginning to understand Quarra Vee’s world a little. He liked it. However, he supposed he’d forget that too.

  “An improvement on Woodward’s protein analogues,” he told the red-moustached man. “Simple synthesis will do it.”

  “Who the devil are you?”

  “Call me Jim,” Kelvin said simply. “And shut up and listen.” He began to explain, as to a small, stupid child. (The man before him was one of America’s foremost chemists.) “Proteins are made of amino acids. There are about thirty-three amino acids—”

  “There aren’t.”

  “There are. Shut up. Their molecules can be arranged in lots of ways. So we get an almost infinite variety of proteins. And all living things are forms of protein. The absolute synthesis involves a chain of amino acids long enough to recognize clearly as a protein molecule. That’s been the trouble.”

  The man with the red moustache seemed quite interested. “Fischer assembled a chain of eighteen,” he said, blinking. “Abderhalden got up to nineteen, and Woodward, of course, has made chains ten thousand units long. But as for testing—”

  “The complete protein molecule consists of complete sets of sequences. But if you test only one or two sections of an analogue you can’t be sure of the others. Wait a minute.” Kelvin used the rapport case again. “Now I know. Well, you can make almost anything out of synthesized protein. Silk, wool, hair—but the main thing, of course,” he said, sneezing, “is a cure for coryza.”

  “Now look—” said the red-moustached man.

  “Some of the viruses are chains of amino acids, aren’t they? Well, modify their structure. Make ’em harmless. Bacteria, too. And synthesize antibiotics.”

  “I wish I could. However, Mr.—”

  “Just call me Jim.”

  “Yes. However, all this is old stuff.”

  “Grab your pencil,” Kelvin said. “From now on it’ll be solid, with riffs. The method of synthesizing and testing is as follows—”

  He explained, very thoroughly and clearly. He had to use the rapport case only twice. And when he had finished, the man with the red moustache laid down his pencil and stared.

  “This is incredible,” he said. “If it works—”

  “I want health, fame and fortune,” Kelvin said stubbornly. “It’ll work.”

  “Yes, but—my good man—”

  However, Kelvin insisted. Luckily for himself, the mental testing of the red-moustached man had included briefing for honesty and opportunity, and it ended with the chemist agreeing to sign partnership papers with Kelvin. The commercial possibilities of the process were unbounded. Du Pont or GM would be glad to buy it.

  “I want lots of money. A fortune.”

  “You’ll make a million dollars,” the red-moustached man said patiently.

  “Then I want a receipt. Have to have this in black and white. Unless you want to give me my million now.”

  FROWNING, the chemist shook his head. “I can’t do that. I’ll have to run tests, open negotiations—but don’t worry about that. Your discovery is certainly worth a million. You’ll be famous, too.”

  “And healthy?”

  “There won’t be any more disease, after a while,” the chemist said quietly. “That’s the real miracle.”

  “Write it down,” Kelvin clamored.

  “All right. We can have partnership papers drawn up tomorrow. This will do temporarily. Understand, the actual credit belongs to you.”

  “It’s got to be in ink. A pencil won’t do.”

  “Just a minute, then,” the red-moustached man said, and went away in search of ink. Kelvin looked around the laboratory, beaming happily.

  Tharn materialized three feet away. Tharn was holding the rod-weapon. He lifted it.

  Kelvin instantly used the rapport case. Then he thumbed his nose at Tharn and teleported himself far away.

  He was immediately in a cornfield, somewhere, but undistilled corn was not what Kelvin wanted. He tried again. This time he reached Seattle.

  That was the beginning of Kelvin’s monumental two-week combination binge and chase. His thoughts weren’t pleasant.

  He had a frightful hangover, ten cents in his pocket, and an overdue hotel bill. A fortnight of keeping one jump ahead of Tharn, via teleportation, had frazzled his nerves so unendurably that only liquor had kept him going. Now even that stimulus was failing. The drink died in him and left what felt like a corpse.

  Kelvin groaned and blinked miserably. He took off his glasses and cleaned them, but that didn’t help.

  What a fool.

  He didn’t even know the name of the chemist!

  There was health, wealth and fame waiting for him just around the corner, but what corner? Someday he’d find out, probably, when the news of the new protein synthesis was publicized, but when would that be? In the meantime, what about Tharn?

  Moreover, the chemist couldn’t locate him, either. The man knew Kelvin only as Jim. Which had somehow seemed a good idea at the time, but not now.

  Kelvin took out the rapport case and stared at it with red eyes. Quarra Vee, eh? He rather liked Quarra Vee now. Trouble was, a half hour after his rapport, at most, he could forget all the details.

  This time he used the push-button almost as Tharn snapped into bodily existence a few feet away.

  The teleportation angle again. He was sitting in the middle of a desert. Cactus and Joshua trees were all the scenery. There was a purple range of mountains far away.

  No Tharn, though.

  Kelvin began to be thirsty. Suppose the case stopped working now? O
h, this couldn’t go on. A decision hanging fire for a week finally crystallized into a conclusion so obvious he felt like kicking himself. Perfectly obvious!

  Why hadn’t he thought of it at the very beginning?

  He concentrated on the problem: How can I get rid of Tharn? He pushed the button . . .

  And a moment later, he knew the answer. It would be simple, really.

  The pressing urgency was gone suddenly. That seemed to release a fresh flow of thought. Everything became quite clear.

  He waited for Tharn.

  He did not have to wait long. There was a tremor in the shimmering air, and the turbaned, pallid figure sprang into tangible reality.

  The rod-weapon was poised.

  Taking no chances, Kelvin posed his problem again, pressed the button, and instantly reassured himself as to the method. He simply thought in a very special and peculiar way—the way Quarra Vee had indicated.

  Tharn was flung back a few feet. The moustached mouth gaped open as he uttered a cry.

  “Don’t!” the android cried. “I’ve been trying to—”

  Kelvin focused harder on his thought. Mental energy, he felt, was pouring out toward the android.

  Tharn croaked. “Trying—you didn’t—give me—chance—”

  AND THEN Tharn was lying motionless on the hot sand, staring blindly up. The seven-fingered hands twitched once and were still. The artificial life that had animated the android was gone. It would not return.

  Kelvin turned his back and drew a long, shuddering breath. He was safe. He closed his mind to all thoughts but one, all problems but one.

  How can I find the red-moustached man?

  He pressed the button.

  * * * * *

  This is the way the story starts:

  Quarra Vee sat in the temporal warp with his android Tharn, and made sure everything was under control.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “You’ll pass,” Tharn said. “Nobody will be suspicious in the era you’re going to. It didn’t take long to synthesize the equipment.”

  “Not long. Clothes—they look enough like real wool and linen, I suppose. Wristwatch, money—everything in order. Wristwatch—that’s odd, isn’t it? Imagine people who need machinery to tell time!”