Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Within the box was a golden marble.

  “I know,” I said dizzily. “It’ll grant me three wishes.”

  “That type of humor is a defense mechanism against fear,” Belem told me unsympathetically. “Here is the main reason why I chose the difficult and dangerous method of entering your mind. No men of this age would have gone with me this far. They’re all conditioned against Mechandroids.

  “You were the only one who could and would have got into the Subterrane. In that transparent box is, I think, the only weapon against which we have no defense at all. As long as it’s within the field of radiation, as it is now, it’s harmless. Remove it and, within two minutes, it becomes activated.”

  “What is it?”

  “A complicated pattern of energies. It’s positively charged now. When it’s activated, it becomes negatively charged. Then it creates a dead field for nearly a mile around it, in which no matter-transmitters will operate.”

  “That doesn’t seem so dangerous. You can get along without matter-transmitters long enough to walk a mile, can’t you?”

  “Not if we’re under siege. You saw our laboratory. Warfare is still a matter of siege unless one wants to wipe everything out and they don’t. They’ll want to inspect our work. With matter-transmission you can’t besiege a place.

  “Everyone inside would simply leak away and escape, taking all their important work with them. This one weapon here is the only completed matrix available at this time. It takes a long while to complete the necessary energy-pattern. So, if we eliminate it, we can stand off a siege long enough to clear out the laboratory.”

  “Eliminate it how?”

  “Set the matter-transmitter controls to—anywhere. Some obsolete receiver at the edge of the galaxy, maybe. Pick up that box and—fast!—put it in the transmitter, before the radiation dies and it activates. Then the box will appear at the edge of the galaxy and paralyze energy facilities there.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Long enough. It wouldn’t harm humans but they’d have to walk to a station outside its field. The box can’t be moved, incidentally, or you could just carry it to a spot beyond the range of the nearest transmitter. After it’s activated it has almost absolute inertia. Right now, though, it’s portable. Can you touch it?”

  I put out a tentative hand that was stopped in mid-air about a foot above the box. I pushed against nothing. I couldn’t pass the invisible barrier.

  “I thought so,” Belem said. “That stud in the pedestal—try pressing it.”

  I did. I reached for the box again. This time I could do it. The defense field, whatever it had been, was gone. The box was not very heavy. I set it down again with care.

  “All right,” I said. “Fine. But what about me? Why should I help you?”

  “Paynter will kill you if you don’t,” Belem said patiently. “If he doesn’t his superiors will as soon as it’s established that you’re a carrier of that nekronic killer, whatever it is. And I think I know. If you help me I believe I can solve that problem too.

  “There are two obvious reasons why I’ll protect you. First, I can’t get out of your brain until you’re in physical contact with me again. If you’re killed before then the psychic rapport impact may kill me too. After we finish this job you’ll get in the transmitter and return to the world where I am now—the one where you first saw me. As for the second reason—”

  A SUDDEN, violent contraction of all my muscles, like a simultaneous cramp in every limb, doubled me up without the slightest warning. I fell forward—saw the floor hurtling toward me—and felt my rebellious muscles relax again just in time to save myself from a crash. I was so startled that I scarcely noticed the lance of gauzy light, tendriled like a cobweb, that floated in the spot from which I had just been hurled. But Belem’s thought said, “Paralysis projector!” What happened after that took almost no time at all.

  When I got my feet under me I whirled and faced the opened door-panel and the man standing there in arrested motion, weapon lifted. It was Paynter, his pale eyes glittering, his mouth drawn down in a grimace of anger and surprise. The weapon had a basket-hilt and a muzzle that looked like rubbery lips, puffing in and out petulantly. Belem had sensed his presence before I did. It was the Mechandroid’s control of my motor reflexes that had jerked me forward in a spasmodic dodge that barely cleared the blast of the puffing weapon.

  I had no weapon of my own. Paynter was centering his on me for a second, more accurate shot. It hadn’t the ghost of an idea how to avoid it.

  “What do I do now?” I demanded in desperation of the mind in my brain.

  “I don’t know—be quiet, I’m trying to think!” was all Belem had to offer.

  I sought Paynter’s eyes, trying to put hypnosis into my own, saying, “Now wait a minute, Paynter! Hold on! I—”

  He did not answer in words. He raised the weapon and took deliberate aim at me. I wondered whether he had been following from the first, how much he knew—why he chose to kill me now, without hearing a word of defense. He wasn’t even curious about how I’d got here.

  The puffy mouth of his weapon sucked in deeply and began to pout out again. In another second a web of light would shoot out at me and there was no room here even to dodge again, without colliding with that pedestal upon which the marble in its glass box rested. If I dodged I’d hit it.

  If I dodged I’d—

  That was the answer, of course. So obvious neither of us had seen it. It was the simplest answer in the world. I almost laughed as I snatched the glass box from its resting place and, in the same quick motion, hurled it straight at Paynter’s face.

  No one can say he wasn’t fast. His mind recognized the danger I had dropped in his hands in the same instant his muscles reacted. There was only one possible thing to do, and he did it. He dropped his gun and caught the precious and terribly dangerous box in mid-air.

  I didn’t stop to watch. I was already halfway through the door of the matter-projector by the time Paynter’s weapon hit the floor. I slammed the door shut with one kick and put my hands on the wall where the dials were.

  “Belem!” I thought urgently.

  On the other side of the slammed door, Paynter would be rushing the box back into place, back into its bath before the two-minute interval elapsed that would activate the thing and stop all matter-transmission for a cubic mile. If he fumbled it I was stuck here—unless Belem moved fast.

  Luckily he moved. My fingers, without my own volition, were hastily spinning the verniered dials. Tarnished metal walls flashed into view around me.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Space Wreck

  BELEM said, “No, we’re not going out.

  We’re in the transmitter of an abandoned space-ship around Centaurus II. We located it from our laboratory years ago. We know a good many of these out-of-the-way transmitters, useful in cases just like this. I can’t set the controls to take us directly to my headquarters or Paynter could simply read the dials and follow us as he did from the Swan Garden.”

  I found I was breathing heard. The Mechandroid said we’d have to hurry. “We transported several cubic yards of air with us but that won’t last long. Here, let me—” I watched my hands move deftly on the corroded dials. I had one dizzying moment in which I thought of the terrible deeps of space all around us, the dead ship circling an alien star-group while our last air seeped out around us into the infinities of the dark.

  Fortunately for my own sanity, I had very little time in my turbulent hours in this middle future to pause and think. I had been catapulted into a culture so different from my own that my mind could not, I think, have endured the concept of those vast spaces which everyone here took as a commonplace. It was only in the small, unchanging superficialities of the culture that I could conceive of it at all.

  The walls shimmered, blurred—were translucent metal through which I could see a circle of bright green grass and a ring of low-roofed houses whose eaves turned up like Chines
e roofs. The only living things in sight were a pigeon, flying low and trailing a red ribbon in its beak, and a dog who ran below, jumping to catch the ribbon now and then. I could hear it barking.

  “Hurry,” Belem said and my hands found the dials on the clouded transparency of the wall. These dials were set in rings of colored tile but they worked like any other dials. I turned them, the room blurred . . .

  I had had no idea there could be such a variety of transmitter-receiver rooms. Few of them had transparent walls, so that I had to guess what lay outside, but the rooms themselves ranged from functional steel boxes to padded lounges. Several times they swam with the perfume of exotic unknowns who must just have stepped out after a trip from—who could begin to guess where?

  And once two wilting flowers the size of dinner-plates and colored a deep plushy crimson lay on a glass floor where some traveler had dropped them, stepping out. They went with us through four transitions and we left them at a fifth when Belem said at last, “Here we’ll get out. It’s another concourse. I think we’ll be safe now as we take a long jump to my base laboratory. Open the door.”

  Like the other concourse it reminded me vividly of the Times Square shuttle. Crowds hurried across vast open spaces, vanished into cubicles and poured from other cubicles in an intricate mesh of movement that linked a whole galaxy together.

  “See that row of doors with the blue lights over them?” Belem said. “Try to find an empty booth. I think the third from the end—”

  A door opened as he indicated—with my own hand—which one he meant and a fat man in a long furred cloak upon which snow lay in still unmelted crystals came bustling importantly out, beating his cloak as he came.

  I stepped in, closed the door, avoiding the puddles of melting snow which the fat man had tracked in from some world I couldn’t imagine. Perhaps Earth.

  “These rooms would be a fine way to spread disease, wouldn’t they?” I asked Belem as I reached for the dial. “No telling where this snow-water came from, but it’ll go along with us, I suppose, and we’ll track your laboratory with melted water from Neptune or Canopus or—”

  “It is most unlikely,” Belem began pedantically in my mind, “that you would find snow—”

  “Okay, okay. Forget it.” I had just uncovered a disturbing thought. I was a carrier of disease myself. Had I been sowing the nekronic death on a dozen worlds already, leaving the virus in transmitters for those who came after me to carry still farther abroad?

  “There is no way of knowing that yet,” Belem said. “Turn the dials.”

  I did.

  It seemed to me that this time the vibration of the transmission was a little longer and more violent than before. I wondered if we were going an unusually long distance. Then the room steadied again and I pushed open the door.

  I expected the laboratory, enormously braced, enmeshed with catwalks and, sparkling far across the room, the bright neural webbing that meant the dangerous man-machine was in the making. Perhaps Belem’s motionless figure would stand there waiting beside the door.

  I looked out into the seething concourse we had just left. The fat man in the snowy cloak was only a dozen paces away in the crowd. We had not stirred from this station.

  “Try again,” Belem said in my mind, after what seemed a very long pause, full of strain.

  I tried. The room shook and blurred, steadied.

  I opened the door.

  THE concourse was still there. This time the fat man had almost vanished in the crowd though I could still see his fur cloak swing out as he dodged to avoid a group of adolescents with bright knapsacks on their shoulders, bound for—what resort world in what distant corner of the galaxy?

  “Shut the door,” Belem said. I got a feeling of tight-reined control from his mind superimposed upon mine. He was frightened, trying to keep panic down. “This is very simple,” he said, perhaps as much to himself as to me. “The receiver in our laboratory is no longer working.

  “It can mean only one thing—Paynter must have known all along where we were. Or he had access to those who did know. However he found us he must already have sent the weapon ahead.” He didn’t name the weapon, but I caught his mental picture of the golden marble in the glass box.

  “All right,” I said. “That lets me out, then. We’re finished.”

  “Not at all.” Belem’s thought was sharp. “We must find the nearest receiver to the laboratory that works. It will be somewhere in the city. Then we must walk. There are secret entrances the government can’t possibly have found yet. After all there hasn’t been time for much to happen. But I must get back to my body and you’ll be safer with us than with the government.”

  “It looks more to me as if we’d be safe in jail together,” I said.

  “Try the dials again,” was all Belem replied.

  Someone was knocking impatiently on the door of the cubicle as the walls shimmered again and the long stretches of infinite space drew out between this world and the nameless place of the laboratory. I suppose the particles of my body dispersed along that path and reassembled again. I never did know much about how it worked. But when my head cleared I was in another room, smaller, square, smelling of machine oil. I opened the door.

  THIS was it. I remembered the strange, pale daylight, the bands of thin borealic light across the black sky, the double sun swinging far off and not very bright above the time-ruined city.

  But it was a very busy city this time. Men in uniform were hurrying through the streets in low square cars that floated without wheels, quite fast. Groups of them flickered and materialized and groups flickered and were gone at the transmission-centers which were this city’s transportation system. Far off over the rusty roofs a cone of blue-white light, blinding in that dark daylight, seemed to damp down over something at the city’s edge—I could guess what.

  “Hurry,” Belem said in my mind. “Out here, around the next corner and step on the black disc in the pavement. If you move fast I don’t think anyone will recognize you, though a cordon must be out for you by now. They’ll expect us.”

  “Me, not us,” I said, dodging through the doorway. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Paynter let me go and then trailed me with the idea I might lead him to you. He’ll have a lot of explaining to do now that I’m missing. But he can’t have guessed you were there—more or less—all the time. Here’s the disc. Now what?”

  “Step on it,” Belem said. “The dark half.”

  The circle was six feet across, half dark, half palish.

  The pale half was unmarked, but the dark half had an arrow inlaid in it which was pointing right.

  I stepped gingerly on the arrow.

  I was standing on the pale half of a large disc. But not the same one. The buildings were different around me. A carload; of soldiers drifted rapidly past toward one of the bigger discs, floated over it, centered and vanished.

  “At the next corner,” Belem urged me. “Take the dark half again. Hurry!”

  Leap by miraculous leap I traversed tire dark clear air of that curious city. And as I went it seemed to me I began to get a glimmer of the decoration which had once made it spectacular in its heyday, something one couldn’t see from a single standpoint but grasped bit by bit as one went through great arcs and vistas of its streets.

  One bit at a time showed nothing but each leap through space, each glimpse from a different point, built up a little more of the plan in the memory, so that eventually a strange concept of the art emerged, a step farther than the architecture of my own day, when solids and surfaces were used. Here movement and distance were of equal importance. Like a moving picture, except that it was the city which stood still and the watcher who moved.

  PRESENTLY Belem halted me. We had come out near a fenced enclosure full of hulks of junked machinery, floating cars that still hovered motionless just off the ground, all their ribs showing, small lifeboats from beached spaceships, odds and ends of jetsam wholly nameless to me.

  “Over there, the l
ittle ship under the girders,” Belem said “Make sure nobody’s watching, then climb into it.”

  I did, wondering who had last sat in the tattered leather bucket-seat before the instrument panel, what he had seen through the glass, what wrecked liner and whirling stars. Belem interrupted the fancies impatiently. Under his orders I pushed the seat aside and pulled up a trap in the floor. A ladder went down.

  Nobody had discovered this passage yet, though I expected to find at any corner that somebody was waiting for me with a paralyzer that puffed rubber lips in and out. At the end I tapped a signal on a metal door and after awhile someone pulled it creaking open.

  The gigantically braced laboratory was blue with smoke and bluer with the blinding light of the cone that hung above it, glaring through the broad windows.

  Belem’s motionless figure waited where he had left it.

  CHAPTER XIX

  The Marble

  IT WAS curious to look into his face and find it alien, he who had been so intimate a part of my mind. The emotionless features, the strange, quicksilver eyes belonged to De Kalb but the voice was—as I pointed out to him—the voice of Esau.

  He wasn’t amused. He seemed to find his own body rather strange for a moment or two, for after he had left me he tried it out stiffly, moving to and fro with short steps.

  “You look like De Kalb,” I said, watching him. “You move like De Kalb. Belem—where is De Kalb now?”

  He gave me a swift, strange, emotionless look. “I told you I was beginning to understand,” he said. “I was. But I haven’t the full answer yet and—look, Cortland.”

  I followed his gesture. The enormous room, braced with its monstrous girders, lay before us. There was orderly activity all through the vast place, centering around a control panel that might be the device creating the dome of light that shielded this area, a white wall curtaining off everything outside the windows. Sometimes coruscating flashes sparkled here and there along the curtain. Attacks—failing? So little time had elapsed, really, since we left Paynter. This siege must be less than half an hour old and its full violence yet to come.