Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  You will have guessed already what likeness it was that I finally recognized. I should have guessed too. It was not very surprising, really. Belem had given me the clue. A city, he had told me, was simply a machine for human living, an extension of the Mechandroid organism. And this city, which was the Face—

  It looked down at us with a vast calm gaze, the same gaze that had brooded over our slumbers while time turned on its axis where we slept. The eyes that had once been quicksilver metal were very different now but I knew that gaze. The voice that had once run deeper and deeper with the volume of its power was a voice no longer, for it had passed beyond the need for a voice. The thing that had once been a Man-Machine had grown, developed, changed, synthesized with all of human living as the millennia went by.

  Its functions had broadened to encompass every aspect of the civilizations through which it passed.

  I UNDERSTOOD very little of the complex symbiosis which had taken place, and I can convey only a very small part of what I understood. For mankind had changed too. Perhaps love and hate and fear survived but not in the forms we know. Perhaps human features were not so different as we imagined. Perhaps, through the streets and plazas of the city which had begun as a Man-Machine and was now the cradle of the surviving race, men and women like ourselves really did move still.

  I’m not sure. I walked those streets. But I am still not sure among what crowds I walked.

  I’ve said the Face no longer needed a voice. This is why. In the old days I suppose the Man-Machine would have said, “Come,” when it wanted us nearer. Now in effect it said, “Come”—and we came. But not on foot. Not under our own directions.

  A whole segment of unnecessary, primitive activities was simply eliminated. There was no need for the clumsy human mechanisms to hear the summons, comprehend it, consider it, debate obeying, decide to comply, set muscles in motion and trudge across the plain.

  Instead, the Face issued its voiceless command—and there was a sort of vortex in the red twilight air between the cliffside and ourselves. Smoothly, gently, inexorably, we were drawn up along that spinning of the air, seeing the gray earth fall away beneath us and then slide backward with blurring swiftness. The Face grew startlingly larger, too large to see as a whole, large and near and very clear.

  We lost sight of the tremendous serene brow, of the vast smooth chin, of the great downward slope of the nose, of the cheeks etched with experiences which no human and no machine could ever have known separately.

  Walls of rock rushed at us, opened, sucked us in.

  What did I see? I wish I could tell you. I can make useless sketches in the air with both hands, trying to show how the spiral streets sloped and how the blurred house-fronts slid past. But if I did you would picture ordinary house-fronts and a street that curved but was like any street you know. And these were too different to describe.

  It may be that the street really did move with all its strange shapely houses. I have an idea that the whole interior of the city was actually in constant motion, as a machine might be, and that if motion ceased the machine would cease too, the city and the race of man.

  But I can tell you this much. Ideas blew through that city like puffs of smoke through an industrial town. They brushed my mind and were gone, leaving only bewildering fragments in their wake. Sometimes they brushed two of us at once and we had incredible glimpses into one another’s minds wherever the idea touched, evoking mutual memories, interlocking thoughts like rings that spread in water.

  De Kalb had said, long ago, that these men were gods. He was right. They were far beyond any concept the men of my day had ever dreamed of for his gods. We walked through their city, were brushed by their thoughts, breathed the air of their streets, but we never saw them.

  They were there. They were all around us. I am perfectly sure of that. I didn’t see them. I didn’t feel or hear them. But I knew they were there as surely as you know the chair in which you sit now has a back upon which you are leaning, though you won’t see it unless you turn.

  I had constantly the odd feeling that if I could turn I might come face to face with any man of the city I chose. But I was not capable of turning in the necessary direction, which would probably have been through a dimension we know nothing of.

  I wish I could have seen them.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Battling the Nekron

  THE gusts of thought blew thicker and faster around us as we were drawn up the spiral. Our minds linked in impossible chords and discords as impossible ideas struck responses from us all.

  Then the light failed us. Perhaps our sight failed us. I think we were drawn through a rather long space of solid wall, like a locked doorway which only this vortex could open for material things.

  When we could see again we were in a bare and empty room. The shape of it was indescribable because of the extensions along which it reached. I was reminded a little of the corridor down which Belem had guided me toward the Subterrane of the middle future. Geometry, blindingly confused in patterns of inverted planes.

  And then the room around us spoke directly, in the very air that pressed upon our minds. The. Face of Ea spoke.

  I had heard that voice before, if voice you could call it. The Man-Machine who guarded our age-long slumbers had said, “Sleep—sleep,” in this same voice, growing deeper, calmer, less human as the aeons passed. Now it was the voice and the mind of the Man-Machine but immeasurably altered, incomprehensibly more complex.

  “You have seen my first beginning,” the Face of Ea said. “You and I have come together to this place at the end of our planet’s life. I have watched over your sleep for a purpose. You are my weapons now. The nekron can never be destroyed.

  “But with your help it can be excised out of normal space, normal time. For that I summoned you. For that I guided your journeying in time. Think and you will understand.”

  I believe the same knowledge flowed through the minds of my companions in the moment of timeless revelation that came to me. In a series of small, clear pictures I saw the manlike, killing creature that was the nekron, touching me as it swooped through oscillating time, becoming part human by the touch, running rampant through the worlds of humanity.

  “Because of its release and its attacks,” the voice of Ea said, “it is part human now. You have learned to fight it. To save yourselves and us you must finish the fight. The nekron cannot be touched’—except by you. But we must somehow excise it out of the universe, not only in space but in time. We must cut back through time, so that we divide and alter the past as well as the present.”

  Pictures flashed again through our minds but I at least was unable to understand. I saw the worlds of the galaxy turning on their axes and, more cloudily, I saw time turning also, linked to the turning worlds each by its own axis as tangible as the planets themselves to that inner vision. Very dimly I saw something that flashed a little as Belem’s severing lights had flashed when the two electronic matrices split in duplicates from the original.

  “I need a wedge, a blade, to split the nekronic infection from normal space and time,” the voice went on. “You are my weapons. Do you understand the task before us?

  “Belem learned the way, through the linkage of the knowledge of two eras. Now, on an infinitely larger scale, we must accomplish the same cleaving of two spheres. And each must remain equal in every way to the one original or the balance of the universe will be destroyed.

  “They will differ—if we prevail—in one way only. One will be nekronic matter, one will be normal. Never in contact anywhere through all time and space. Do you understand your task?

  “You must fight as my weapons against the nekronic universe. Together we must cleave the universe itself in two.”

  IF YOU can imagine a sharp tool made sentient, you may guess a little of how what followed seemed to us, who were so integral a part of the tremendous conflict, the ultimate destruction.

  First, the voice died.

  Then there was movement past
me and the room seemed to slip into darkness—or was it I that moved? Those corners of non-Euclidian shape were vortices that swept us apart. We four were the component parts of an exploding nova that shot outward through space, through time. Around me I saw stars, moving very swiftly, and I was alone and there was an inexplicable changing everywhere.

  I knew then that I was moving through time, not a continuous movement but an oscillation, a vibration that swung me back and forth like a pendulum through a period of a few seconds. As the nekronic being moved.

  There was further motion—not my own—around me. I could see only the vibrating stars but I knew through senses without name that my companions were not far away now. Paynter was a strong harsh relentless ego within reach of my mind, though all I could see was stars beyond stars, flaring into sight as my vision penetrated farther.

  Belem was De Kalb and De Kalb was Belem, strongly egocentric, brilliant as the stars, a double mind that had shared a single body and learned to work with a single purpose in the dark levels below the conscious will. Topaz was Letta Essen, doubled and doubly armed.

  There was a rushing shadow before me. Swifter and swifter, larger and larger, rushing upon me as I swept forward through the stars. I saw it, and then it was upon me in the same instant. The gap was bridged, the leap made. And I—I changed in size. I was as large as the shadow.

  I touched it.

  A fiery burning flared out around us and died instantly and the creature flashed into clear outline. Outline only, for it had no features and never did have, only the vague likeness to humanity it had drawn from the minds of its human hosts. Perhaps it was my own will, perhaps the will of the godlike hand that wielded me, that made me close with that solid shadow.

  Where and how I gripped it I do not know. Perhaps I never really touched it at all. Perhaps it was merely will against will. All I could feel now was a furious deadly pressure against which I must exert the utmost of my strength in a direction I could not understand. Mental energy, pure will, perhaps simply the maintenance of temporal reality—how does the chisel know what force it exerts?

  Somewhere I felt the enemy give back—not at any point where I met him. He weakened briefly far off in—space—time? How can I even guess? Perhaps we were hemming him in all around, temporally as well as physically, for some other human tool, De Kalb or Paynter, Letta Essen or Belem—had cut deeply into the resisting substance that was the nekronic universe.

  The dark was a flashing, coruscating whirl of suns that blazed white. Tracks of fire burned in curves as stars rolled across that white vault. I knew how swiftly I must be moving in time.

  With a jolt I was halted, pressed back. The blind, featureless face of the Adversary loomed larger, blotting out half the white heavens. Back and back I fell—

  AND then suddenly there was support all around me, a merging of familiar minds with mine. It was deeper than the nearness I had felt before. We were drawn together, we four. Our minds touched and blended and became a single larger entity, a whole that yet preserved the individuality of us all. The cold clear thoughts of Belem and De Kalb lighted my mind like the facets of brilliance shot from a diamond. The blind white-hot violence of Murray and Paynter, the Infinite resource that was Topaz and Letta Essen.

  Now the Adversary shifted its grip. I felt it give a little before our combined pressure. And we seemed to be viewing it from several points at once—in time. Cross-bearings in time itself. But how?

  I knew the answer very clearly, in one flash.

  We were the chosen weapons, the doubly sharpened blade. That was why my own body and the bodies of the rest had crumbled into dust when the time-axis chamber was shattered. Two identical matrices can not exist in the same space-time, but two identical matrices had been necessary to forge this weapon that was ourselves.

  No mind fixed and conditioned to one sector in time could pin down the nekron. It took a larger concept, a binocular view from two points in time. And the Face of Ea had doubled our striking power when it doubled our minds in bodies that were basically identical with the ones we wore when we were born.

  We had fought this battle before in miniature. In the world of the middle future we had been tempered to this final task. The nekron was fixed and trapped here—it could no longer evade us through time. Our strangely multiple mind could fix and focus upon it.

  But the battle was yet to come.

  With reckless, single-minded violence that multiple mind smashed out at the nekronic Adversary. As Paynter had driven the metal ram no harder than he drove himself against the fortress barrier, as Harrison Murray had so often hurled himself in stubborn, blind fury against foes tangible and intangible—so the weapon that was ourselves crashed against the black nekronic force striving to destroy us.

  Somehow, somewhere, in some hidden weakness of ourselves, it sought and found a flaw. It drove us back. Its own incredible power smashed through warping channels of space and time at our welded minds.

  If a single one of those inconceivable bolts of destruction had struck us it might have been the finish for us all. But none struck. For Topaz was part of the weapon which was ourselves and all Topaz’s memories of infinite cleverness, infinitely adaptable life—with Letta Essen’s cool, watchful mind to guide her.

  Oh, Topaz was adaptable—that had been her purpose and her goal in society. She had incredible mental, emotional, muscular control and she reacted instinctively, automatically to any outside threat. Now I saw her talents’ ultimate extension as—somehow, in a black star-blazing gulf that yet embodied the whole universe—we dodged and whirled and shifted so that none of those nekronic assaults quite smashed home.

  Then, abruptly, we were falling. There was neither up nor down, but a frightful, abysmal vertigo that sucked us with impossible acceleration into the deeps below the universe itself. We were drawn into the black nighted heart of the nekron—its soul and center—and life itself receded to a point of infinity and was shut wholly out, away from us. If we had size it must have changed. If we had warmth and life it must have frozen instantly in all minds. In its last defense the nekron itself absorbed us.

  CHAPTER XXV

  Return Voyage

  LUCKILY I cannot remember that last horror very clearly.

  It was I who saved us from that.

  This was my purpose. It was the plan from the beginning. That was why I had been allowed from the start to keep my own memories intact. For I was the anchor man at the end of the chain, the solid rock and the lifeline extending beyond the shore of sanity and logic and the monstrous, non-matter maelstrom engulfing the others.

  They had needed their double minds to meet and fight the nekron, to carry the battle to its own grounds. But my purpose was to anchor their line. I could feel them losing touch with all familiar things, feel the dark destroying silence of the nekron closing them in.

  It closed about me too but not completely. It could not shut out my memories. I had a singleness of mind that made a chain too strong to snap. I remembered my own world, my own time, with a clarity unimpaired by double memories. All the small things that are changeless realities came back to me in one strong pouring tide.

  The little things that mean nothing alone—things like firelight moving on the walls of an old room, the smell of freshly-cut grass at twilight, the sharp fragrance of printer’s ink, the heart-shaking thunder of a flight of planes moving in formation overhead, the taste of cold sweet spring-water gushing from a mountainside.

  I remembered Earth.

  So I woke them out of the dead emptiness of the nekron’s heart. Their minds clung to mine and mine clung to the lifeline of my own world, my own time, my own indestructible memories.

  Last of all De Kalb struck—with Belem’s mind locked into his.

  We were in the nekron’s heart now. We had been admitted to its most vulnerable spot. Once before Belem had done something very like this—when he joined his mind with mine and summoned the nekronic killer to defeat Paynter’s men.

 
Now in the nekron’s very citadel, its innermost heart—he gripped our minds closer together. He forced them until they were one indeed.

  He opened that gigantic ultimate mind to the nekron!

  Two of the finest brains of two cultures guided us then—Belem, inhuman, emotionless, machine-bred, half-human—and De Kalb, with all his brilliance and his humanity balancing Belem’s cold logic. Behind these two-in-one, the rest of us—a single unit now.

  Paynter and Murray—hammer and anvil!

  Topaz and Letta Essen—incomparably resourceful, evading the counter-attack.

  I with my single mind, holding fast to the solidity of the normal universe, standing like a wall behind the others, holding open the gates in that wall through which we had come, through which the power of the Face of Ea poured to help us.

  The power of the nekron flowed through us, channeled by Belem and De Kalb. It emptied, drained like a falling ocean into us. But we were not vulnerable, now. It could not—feed—upon us.

  Water, changing to steam, must expand, find room to accommodate its physical change. The process must be completed. But this monstrous change could not be completed in any way normal to the nekron. It had not drained its force into us by choice—Belem had drawn and channeled it.

  Now its normal release was blocked.

  We were battered back beneath the onslaught of that terribly concentrated power. But we held. Somehow we held—the multiple minds of two civilizations, chosen and tempered by the last, greatest science of all.

  Then—it exploded.

  There is no other word. It expanded tremendously, through us and beyond us, and that frightful concentration of alien force was gone. The disincarnated, dissolved units of the nekron expanded—seeds of the death beyond death—but helpless in this single moment beyond time, no longer a functioning unit capable of planned action.