Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

One ethnological group tried to use a window to project the memories of oldsters in an attempt to recapture everyday living customs of the recent past, but the results were blurred and inaccurate, full of anachronisms. They all had to be winnowed and checked so completely that little of value remained. The fact stood out that the ordinary mind is too undisciplined to be worth anything as a projector. Except as a toy, the window was useless.

  It was useless commercially. But for Fowler it had one intrinsic usefulness more valuable than money—

  One of the wedding presents Veronica and Barnaby received was a telepathic window. It came anonymously. Their suspicions should have been roused. Perhaps they were, but they kept the window. After all, in her modeling work Veronica had met many wealthy people, and Barnaby also had moneyed friends, any of whom might in a generous mood have taken a window-lease for them as a goodwill gesture. Also, possession of a magic window was a social distinction. They did not allow themselves to look the gift-horse too closely in the mouth. They kept the window.

  They could not have known—though they might have guessed—that this was a rather special sort of window. Norman had been at work on it through long, exhausting hours, while Fowler stood over him with the goading repetitious commands that kept him at his labor.

  Fowler was not too disappointed at the commercial failure of the thing. There were other ways of making money. So long as Norman remained his to command the natural laws of supply and demand did not really affect him. He had by now almost entirely ceased to think in terms of the conventional mores. Why should he? They no longer applied to him. His supply of money and resources was limitless. He never really had to suffer for a failure. It would always be Norman, not Fowler, who suffered.

  There was unfortunately no immediate way in which he could check how well his magic window was working. To do that you would have to be an invisible third person in the honeymoon apartment. But Fowler, knowing Veronica as he did, could guess.

  The window was based on the principle that if you give a child a jackknife he’ll probably cut himself.

  Fowler’s first thought had been to create a window on which he could project his own thoughts, disguised as those of the bride or groom. But he had realized almost immediately that a far more dangerous tool lay ready-made in the minds of the two whose marriage he meant to undermine.

  “It isn’t as if they wouldn’t break up anyhow, in a year or two,” he told himself as he speculated on the possibilities of his magic window.

  He was not justifying his intent. He didn’t need to, any more. Fief was simply considering possibilities. “They’re both stupid, they’re both selfish. They’re not material you could make a good marriage of. This ought to be almost too easy—”

  Every man, he reasoned, has a lawless devil in his head. What filters through the censor-band from the unconscious mind is controllable. But the lower levels of the brain are utterly without morals.

  Norman produced a telepathic window that would at times project images from the unconscious mind.

  It was remotely controlled, of course; most of the time it operated on the usual principles of the magic window. But whenever Fowler chose he could throw a switch that made the glass twenty miles away hypersensitive.

  Before he threw it for the first time, he televised Veronica. It was evening. When he picture dawned in the television screen he could see the magic window set up in its elegant frame within range of the televisor, so that everyone who called might be aware of the Barnaby’s distinction.

  Luckily it was Veronica who answered, though Barnaby was visible in the background, turning toward the ’visor an interested glance that darkened when Fowler’s face dawned upon the screen. Veronica’s politely expectant look turned sullen as she recognized the caller.

  “Well?”

  Fowler grinned. “Oh, nothing.”

  “Just wondered how you were getting along.”

  “Beautifully, thanks. Is that all?”

  Fowler shrugged. “If that’s the way you feel, yes.”

  “Good-by,” Veronica said firmly, and flicked the switch. The screen before Fowler went blank. He grinned. All he had wanted to do was remind her of himself. He touched the stud that would activate that magic window he had just seen, and settled down to wait.

  What would happen now he didn’t know. Something would. He hoped the sight of him had reminded Veronica of the dazzling jewelry he had carried when they last met. He hoped that upon the window now would be dawning a covetous image of those diamonds, clear as dark water and quivering with fiery light. The sight should be enough to rouse resentment in Barnaby’s mind, and when two people quarrel wholeheartedly, there are impulses toward mayhem in even the most civilized mind. It should shock the bride and groom to see on a window that reflected their innermost thoughts. a picture of hatred and wishful violence. Would Veronica see herself being strangled in effigy in the big wall-frame? Would Barnaby see himself bleeding from the deep scratches his bride would be yearning to score across his face?

  Fowler sat back comfortably, luxuriating in speculation.

  It might take a long time. It might take years. He was willing to wait.

  It took even longer than Fowler had expected. Slowly the poison built up in the Barnaby household, very slowly. And in that time a different sort of toxicity developed in Fowler’s. He scarcely realized it. He was too close.

  He never recognized the moment when his emotional balance shifted and he began actively to hate Norman.

  The owner of the golden goose must have lived under considerable strain. Every day when he went out to look in the nest he must have felt a quaking wonder whether-this time the egg would be white, and valuable only for omelets or hatching. Also, he must have had to stay very close to home, living daily with the nightmare of losing his treasure—

  Norman was a prisoner—but a prisoner handcuffed to his jailer. Both men were chained. If Fowler left him alone for too long, Norman might recover. It was the inevitable menace that made travel impossible. Fowler could keep no servants; he lived alone with his prisoner. Occasionally he thought of Norman as a venomous snake whose poison fangs had to be removed each time they were renewed. He dared not cut out the poison sacs themselves, for there was no way to do that without killing the golden goose. The mixed metaphors were indicative of the state of Fowler’s mind by then.

  And he was almost as much a prisoner in the house as Norman was.

  Constantly now he had to set Norman problems to solve simply as a safety measure, whether or not they had commercial value. For Norman was slowly regaining his strength. He was never completely coherent, but he could talk a little more, and he managed to put across quite definitely his tremendous urge to give Fowler certain obscure information.

  Fowler knew’, of course, what it probably was. The cure. And Norman seemed to have a strangely touching confidence that if he could only frame his message intelligibly, Fowler would make arrangements for the mysterious cure.

  Once Fowler might have been touched by the confidence. Not now. Because he was exploiting Norman so ruthlessly, he had to hate either Norman or himself. By a familiar process he was projecting his own fault upon his prisoner and punishing Norman for it. He no longer speculated upon Norman’s mysterious origin or the source of his equally mysterious powers. There was obviously something in that clouded mind that gave forth flashes of a certain peculiar genius. Fowler accepted the fact and used it.

  There was probably some set of rules, that would govern what Norman could and could not do, but Fowler did not discover—until it was too late—what the rules were. Norman could produce inconceivably intricate successes, and then fail dismally at the simplest tasks.

  Curiously, he turned out to be an almost infallible finder of lost articles, so long as they were lost in the confines of the house, Fowler discovered this by accident, and was gratified to learn that for some reason that kind of search was the most exhausting task he could set for his prisoner. When all else failed, and Norman
still seemed too coherent or too strong for safekeeping, Fowler had only to remember that he had misplaced his wristwatch or a book or screwdriver, and to send Norman after it.

  Then something very odd happened, and after that he stopped the practice, feeling bewildered and insecure. He had ordered Norman to find a lost folder of rather important papers. Norman had gone into his own room and closed the door. He was missing for a long time. Eventually Fowler’s impatience built up enough to make him call off the search, and he shouted to Norman to come out.

  There was no answer. When he had called a third time in vain, Fowler opened the door and looked in. The room was empty. There were no windows. The door was the only exit, and Fowler could have sworn Norman had not come out of it.

  In a rising panic he ransacked the room, calling futilely. He went through the rest of the house in a fury of haste and growing terror. Norman was not in the kitchen or the living room or the cellar or anywhere in sight outside.

  Fowler was on the verge of a nervous collapse when Norman’s door opened and the missing man emerged, staggering a little, his face white and blank with exhaustion, and the folder of papers in his hand.

  He slept for three days afterward. And Fowler never again used that method of keeping his prisoner in check.

  After six uneventful months had passed Fowler put Norman to work on a supplementary device that might augment the Barnaby magic window. He was receiving reports from a bribed daily maid, and he took pains to hear all the gossip mutual friends were happy to pass on. The Barnaby marriage appeared to suffer from a higher than normal percentage of spats and disagreements, but so far it still held. The magic window was not enough.

  Norman turned out a little gadget that produced supersonics guaranteed to evoke irritability and nervous tension. The maid smuggled it into the apartment. Thereafter, the reports Fowler received were more satisfactory, from his point of view.

  All in all, it took three years.

  And the thing that finally turned the trick was the lighting gadget which Fowler had conceived in that bar interlude when Veronica first told him about Barnaby.

  Norman worked on the fixtures for some time. They were subtle. The exact tinting involved a careful study of Veronica’s skin tones, the colors of the apartment, the window placement. Norman had a scale model of the rooms where the Barnabys were working out their squabbles toward divorce. He took a long time to choose just what angles of lighting he would need to produce the worst possible result. And of course it all had to be done with considerable care because the existing light fixtures couldn’t be changed noticeably.

  With the help of the maid, the job was finally done. And thereafter, Veronica in her own home was—ugly.

  The lights made her look haggard. They brought out every line of fatigue and ill-nature that lurked anywhere in her face. They made her sallow. They caused Barnaby increasingly to wonder why he had ever thought the girl attractive.

  “It’s your fault!” Veronica said hysterically. “It’s all your fault and you know it!”

  “How could it be my fault?” Fowler demanded in a smug voice, trying hard to iron out the smile that kept palling up the corners of his mouth.

  The television screen was between them like a window. Veronica leaned toward it, the cords in her neck standing out as she shouted at him. He had never seen that particular phenomenon before. Probably she had acquired much practice in angry shouting in the past three years. There were thin vertical creases between her brows that were new to him, too. He had seen her face to face only a few times in the years of her marriage. It had been safer and pleasanter to create her in the magic window when he felt the need of seeing her.

  This was a different face, almost a different woman. He wondered briefly if he was watching the effect of his own disenchanting lighting system, but a glimpse beyond her head of a crowded drugstore assured him that he was not. This was real, not illusory. This was a Veronica he and Norman had, in effect created.

  “You did it!” Veronica said, accusingly. “I don’t know how, but you did it.”

  Fowler glanced down at the morning paper he had just been reading, folded back to the gossip column that announced last night’s spectacular public quarrel between a popular Korys model and her broker husband.

  “What really happened?” Fowler asked mildly.

  “None of your business,” Veronica told him with fine illogic.

  “You ought to know! You were behind it—you know you were! You and that half-wit of yours, that Norman. You think I don’t know? With all those fool inventions you two work out, I know perfectly well you must have done something—”

  “Veronica, you’re raving.”

  She was, of course. It was sheer hysteria, plus her normal conviction that no unpleasant thing that happened to her could possibly be her own fault. By pure accident she had hit upon the truth, but that was beside the point.

  “Has he left you? Is that it?” Fowler demanded.

  She gave him a look of hatred. But she nodded. “It’s your fault and you’ve got to help me. I need money. I—”

  “All right, all right! You’re hysterical, but I’ll help you. Where are you? I’ll pick you up and we’ll have a drink and talk things over. You’re better off than you know, baby. He never was the man for you. You haven’t got a thing to worry about. I’ll be there in half an hour and we can pick up where we left off three years ago.”

  Part of what he implied was true enough, he reflected as he switched off the television screen. Curiously, he still meant to marry her. The changed face with its querulous lines and corded throat repelled him, but you don’t argue with an obsession. He had worked three years toward this moment, and he still meant to marry Veronica Barnaby as he had originally meant to marry Veronica Wood. Afterward—well, things might be different.

  One thing frightened him. She was not quite as stupid as he had gambled on that day years ago when he had been forced to call on her for help with Norman, She had seen too much, deduced too much—remembered much too much. She might be dangerous. He would have to find out just what she thought she knew about him and Norman.

  It might be necessary to silence her, in one way or another.

  Norman said with painful distinctness: “Must tell you . . . must—”

  “No, Norman.” Fowler spoke hastily. “We have a job to do. There isn’t time now to discuss—”

  “Can’t work,” Norman said. “No . . . must tell you—” He paused, lifted a shaking hand to his eyes, grimacing against his own palm with a look of terrible effort and entreaty. The strength that was mysteriously returning to him at intervals now had made him almost a human being again. The blankness of his face flooded sometimes with almost recognizable individuality.

  “Not yet, Norman!” Fowler heard the alarm in his own voice. “I need you. Later we’ll work out whatever it is you’re trying to say. Not now. I . . . look, we’ve got to reverse that lighting system we made for Veronica. I want a set of lights that will flatter her. I need it in a hurry, Norman. You’ll have to get to work on it right away.”

  Norman looked at him with hollow eyes. Fowler didn’t like it. He would not meet the look. He focused on Norman’s forehead as he repeated his instructions in a patient voice.

  Behind that colorless forehead the being that was Norman must be hammering against its prison walls of bone, striving hard to escape. Fowler shook off the fanciful idea in distaste, repeated his orders once more and left the house in some haste. Veronica would be waiting.

  But the look in Norman’s eyes haunted him all the way into the city. Dark, hollow, desperate. The prisoner in the skull, shut into a claustrophobic cell out of which no sound could carry. He was getting dangerously strong, that prisoner. It would be a mercy in the long run if some task were set to exhaust him, throw him back into that catatonic state in which he no longer knew he was in prison.

  Veronica was not there. He waited for an hour in the bar. Then be called her apartment, and got no answer. He tri
ed his own house, and no one seemed to be there either. With unreasonably mounting uneasiness, he went home at last.

  She met him at the door.

  “Veronica! I waited for an hour! What’s the idea?”

  She only smiled at him. There was an almost frightening triumph in the smile, but she did not speak a word.

  Fowler pushed past her, fighting his own sinking sensation of alarm. He called for Norman almost automatically, as if his unconscious mind recognized before the conscious knew just what the worst danger might be. For Veronica might be stupid but he had perhaps forgotten how cunning the stupid sometimes are. Veronica could put two and two together very well. She could reason from cause to effect quite efficiently, when her own welfare was at stake.

  She bad reasoned extremely well today.

  Norman lay on the bed in his windowless room, his face as blank as paper. Some effort of the mind and will had exhausted him out of all semblance to a rational being. Some new, some overwhelming task, set him by—Veronica? Not by Fowler. The job he had been working on an hour ago was no such killing job as this.

  But would Norman obey anyone except Fowler? He had defied Veronica on that other occasion when she tried to give him orders. He had almost escaped before Fowler’s commanding voice ordered him back. Wait, though—she had coaxed him. Fowler remembered now. She could not command, but she had coaxed the blank creature into obedience. So there was a way. And she knew it.

  But what had the task been?

  With long strides Fowler went back into the drop-shaped living room. Veronica stood in the doorway where he had left her. She was waiting.

  “What did you do?” he demanded.

  She smiled. She said nothing at all.

  “What happened?” Fowler cried urgently. “Veronica, answer me! What did you do?”

  “I talked to Norman,” she said. “I . . . got him to do a little job for me. That was all. Good-by, John.”

  “Wait! You can’t leave like that. I’ve got to know what happened. I—”