Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Squaring his narrow shoulders (for it cannot be denied that Macduff was somewhat bottle-shaped in appearance) he moved through the crowd toward the back of the room, where Ess Pu crouched over a green-topped table with his companion, the Mayor of the city.

  To a non-cosmopolitan observer it would have seemed that a lobster was playing PK dice with one of the local plant men. But Macduff was a cosmopolitan in the literal sense of the word. And from his first meeting with Ess Pu, some weeks ago, he had recognized a worthy and formidable opponent.

  All Algolians are dangerous. They are noted for their feuds, furies and their inverted affective tone scale. “It’s extraordinary,” Macduff mused, looking pensively at Ess Pu. “They feel fine only when they’re hating someone. The sensations of pleasure and pain are reversed. Algolians find the emotions of rage, hate and cruelty pro-survival. A lamentable state of affairs.”

  Ess Pu clanked a scaly elbow on the table and rattled the dice cup in the face of his cringing opponent. As everyone is familiar with Aldebaranese plant men, in view of their popular video films, the Mayor need not be described.

  Macduff sank into a nearby chair and opened the suitcase on his lap, rummaging through its varied contents which included a deck of tarots, some engraved plutonium stock (worthless) and a number of sample bottles of hormones and isotopes.

  There was also a small capsule of Lethean dust, that unpleasant drug which affects the psychokinetic feedback mechanism. As an injury to the cerebellum causes purpose tremor, so Lethean dust causes PK tremor. Macduff felt that a reasonable amount of psychic oscillation in Ess Pu might prove profitable to Macduff. With this in mind, he watched the game intently.

  THE Algolian waved his stalked eyes over the table. Crinkled membranes around his mouth turned pale blue. The dice spun madly. They fell—seven. Ess Pus membranes turned green. One of the dice quivered, strained, rolled over. The Algolian’s claws clicked shut with satisfaction, the Mayor wrung his hands and Macduff, emitting cries of admiration, leaned forward to pat Ess Pus sloping shoulder while he deftly emptied the unlidded capsule into the Algolian’s drink.

  “My lad,” Macduff said raptly, “I have travelled the Galaxy from end to end and never before—”

  “Tchah!” Ess Pu said sourly, pulling his winnings across the board. He added that he wouldn’t sell Ao to Macduff now even if he could. “So get out!” he finished, snapping a claw contemptuously in Macduff’s face.

  “Why can’t you sell Ao?” Macduff demanded. “Though sell, of course, is a misleading verb. What I mean—”

  He understood the Algolian to say that Ao now belonged to the Mayor.

  Macduff turned surprised eyes on this personage, who furtively evaded the look.

  “I didn’t recognize your Honor,” he said. “So many non-humanoid species are hard to tell apart. But did I understand you to say you sold her to the Mayor, Ess Pu? As I remember, Lesser Vegan Control merely leases its subjects to suitable guardians—”

  “It was a transfer of guardianship,” the Mayor said hastily, lying in his teeth.

  “Get out,” Ess Pu snarled. “You’ve got no use for Ao. She’s an objet d’art.”

  “Tour French is excellent, for a lobster,” Macduff said with delicate tact. “And as for having a use for the lovely creature my scientific researches will shortly include the prognostication of mood responses in large groups. As we all know, Lesser Vegans have the curious ability to make people punch drunk. With a girl like Ao on the platform I could feel perfectly sure of my audience—”

  A video screen burst in with a wild squawk. Everyone looked up sharply. Supplementary screens in infrared and UV, for the use of customers with specialized vision, hummed with invisibly duplicated pictures of an announcer’s popeyed face.

  “—Citizens’ Purity Organization has just called a mass meeting—”

  The Mayor, looking frightened, started to get up and then thought better of it. There seemed to be something on his conscience.

  Ess Pu told Macduff profanely to go away. He enlarged insultingly on the suggestion.

  “Pah,” Macduff said bravely, knowing himself more agile than the Algolian. “Drop dead.”

  Ess Pu’s mouth membranes turned scarlet. Before he could speak, Macduff offered quickly to buy Ao’s ticket, a proposition he had neither intention nor ability to fulfil.

  “I haven’t got her ticket!” Ess Pu roared. “She still has it! Now get out before I—” He strangled on his own fury, coughed and took a stiff drink. Ignoring Macduff, he threw a six and shoved a stack of chips to the center of the table. The Mayor, with nervous reluctance, glanced at the video screen and faded the bet. At that point the videos broke in with a squeal.

  “—mobs marching on Administration! Aroused populace demands ousting of present officials, charging long-term corruption! This political pot was brought to a boil tonight by the exposure of an alleged swindler named Macduff—”

  The Mayor of Aldebaran City jumped up and tried to run. One of Ess Pu’s claws caught him by the coat tail. The video squawked on, giving an all-too-accurate description of the Radio-isotopic Elixir swindler and only the thick haze in the air kept Macduff from immediate exposure.

  HE hesitated uncertainly, reason telling him that something of interest was developing at the dice table while instinct urged him to run.

  “I’ve got to get home!” the Mayor wailed. “Vital matters—”

  “You’re staking Ao?” the crustacean demanded, with a significant brandish of his claws. “You are, eh? Right? Then say so!”

  “Yes,” the harassed Mayor cried. “Oh, yes, yes, yes. Anything!”

  “Six is my point,” said Ess Pu, rattling the dice cup. His membranes became oddly mottled. He wriggled his eye stalks unnervingly. Macduff, remembering the Lethean dust, began to edge towards the door.

  There was a bellow of surprised rage from the Algolian as the disobedient cubes turned up seven. Ess Pu clawed at his throat, snatched up his glass and peered suspiciously into it. The jig was up.

  Roars of fury reverberated from wall to wall of the Dream-Mill as Macduff slipped out through the curtains and pattered rapidly off down the street in the cool musky dark of the Aldebaran night.

  “Nevertheless, I still need a ticket,” he reflected. “I also need Ao if possible. This leads me, by obvious degrees, to the Mayor’s palace. Provided I’m not torn limb from limb in the meantime,” he added, dodging into another alley to avoid the spreading torchlit mobs that were by now seething hither and thither through the aroused city.

  “How ridiculous. At times like these I’m grateful for being born into a civilized race. There’s no sun like Sol,” he summed up, creeping hastily under a fence as a mob poured down the alley toward him.

  Emerging on the other side and trotting down a lane, he reached the back door of a luxurious palace done in pink porphyry with ebony edgings and banged the knocker firmly against its plate. There was a soft, sliding noise and Macduff fixed a peremptory gaze upon the oneway Judas mirror in the door.

  “Message from the Mayor,” he announced in a brisk voice. “He’s in trouble. He sent me to bring that Lesser Vegan girl to him immediately. It’s a matter of life or death. Hurry!”

  A gasp sounded from inside the door. Feet pattered away into inner distances. A moment later the door opened, revealing the Mayor himself.

  “Here!” cried that frantic official. “She’s yours. Just take her away. I never saw her before in my life. Never saw Ess Pu. Never saw you. Never saw anybody. Oh, these reform riots! One scrap of incriminating evidence and I’m lost, lost!”

  Macduff, a little astonished at finding himself fortune’s favorite, rose to the occasion capably.

  “Depend on me,” he told the unhappy vegetable as a slim and lovely being was pushed out of the door into his arms. “She’ll leave Aldebaran Tau on the Sutter tomorrow at dawn. In fact, I’ll take her aboard immediately.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the Mayor said, trying to close the door. Macduf
f’s foot kept it ajar.

  “She’s got her space ticket?”

  “Ticket? What ticket? Oh, that. Yes. In her wrist band. Oh, here they come! Look out!”

  The terrified Mayor slammed the door. Macduff seized Ao’s hand and sped with her into the shrubbery of a plaza. A moment later the tortuous mazes of Aldebaran City swallowed them up.

  CHAPTER II

  Scent of Sphyghi

  AT the first convenient doorway Macduff paused and looked at Ao. She was worth looking at. She stood in the doorway, thinking of nothing at all. She didn’t have to think of anything. She was too beautiful.

  Nobody has ever yet succeeded in describing the beings of Lesser Vega and probably nobody ever will. Electronic calculators have broken down and had their mercury memory-units curdled trying to analyze that elusive quality which turns men into mush. Like all her race, however, Ao wasn’t very bright. Macduff regarded her with entirely platonic greed.

  For she was the perfect come-on. Probably some subtle emanation radiates from the brains of the Lesser Vegans which acts as a hypnotic. With Ao on the stage Macduff knew he could almost certainly have quelled his unruly audience an hour ago and averted the riot. Even the savage breast of Angus Ramsay might have been soothed by Ao’s magical presence.

  Curiously enough, male relationship with Ao was entirely platonic, with the natural exception of the males of Lesser Vega. Outside of this dim-brained species, however, it was enough for a beholder simply to look at Ao. And vision really had little to do with it, since standards of beauty are only species deep. Almost all living organisms respond similarly to the soft enchantment of the Lesser Vegans.

  “There’s dark work afoot, my dear,” Macduff said, resuming their progress. “Why was the Mayor so eager to get rid of you? But there’s no use asking you, of course. We’d better get aboard the Sutter. I feel certain I can get Captain Masterson to advance me the price of another ticket. If I’d thought of it I might have arranged a small loan with the Mayor—or even a large one,” he added, recalling the mayor’s obvious guilt reactions. “I seem to have missed a bet there.”

  Ao appeared to float delicately over a mud puddle. She was considering higher and lovelier things.

  They were nearly at the spaceport by now and the sights and sounds Macduff heard from the far distance gave him an idea that the mob had set fire to the Mayor’s porphyry palace. “However, he’s merely a vegetable,” Macduff told himself. “Still, my tender heart cannot help but—good heavens!”

  He paused, aghast. The misty field of the spaceport lay ahead, the Sutter a fat ovoid blazing with light. There was a distant mutter of low thunder as the ship warmed up. A seething crowd of passengers was massed around the gangplank.

  “Bless my soul, they’re taking off,” Macduff said. “Outrageous! Without even notifying the passengers—or perhaps there was a video warning sent out. Yes, I suppose so. But this may be awkward. Captain Masterson will be in the control room with a do not disturb sign on the door. Take-offs are complicated affairs. How on Aldebaran Tau can we get aboard with only one ticket between us?”

  The motors muttered sullenly. Haze blew like fat ghosts across the light-and-dark patterns of the tarmac. Macduff sprinted, dragging Ao, as thistledown, after him.

  “I have a thought,” he murmured. “Getting inside the ship is the first step. After that, of course, there’ll be the regular passenger check but Captain Masterson will—hm-m.”

  He studied the purser who stood at the head of the gangplank, taking tickets, checking names off the list he held, his keen eyes watchful. Though the passengers seemed nervous they kept fair order, apparently reassured by the confident voice of a ship’s officer, who stood behind the purser.

  INTO this scene burst Macduff at a wild run, dragging Ao and screaming at the top of his voice. “They’re coming!” he shrieked, dashing through the crowd and overturning a bulky Saturnian. “It’s another Boxer rebellion! One would think the Xerians had landed. They’re all running around screaming, ‘Aldebaran Tau for the Aldebarans’.”

  Towing Ao and flailing frantically with his suitcase, Macduff burst into the center of a group and disintegrated it. Instantly he dashed through the line at the gangplank and back again, squealing bloody murder.

  At the ship’s port the officer was trying to make himself heard with little success. He was apparently stolidly sticking to his original lines, which had something to do with the fact that the Captain had been injured but there was no reason to be alarmed—

  “Too late!” shrieked Macduff, bundling himself into the center of a growing nucleus of loud panic. “Hear what they’re yelling? ‘Kill the foreign devils!’—listen to the bloodthirsty savages. Too late, too late,” he added at the top of his voice, scrambling through the mob with Ao. “Lock the doors! Man the gunports! Here they come!”

  By now all thought of order had been lost. The passengers were demoralized into a veritable Light Brigade of assorted species and Macduff, clinging to Ao and his suitcase, rode the tide up the gangplank, over the prostrate bodies of the officer and the purser and into the ship, where he hastily assembled his various possessions and scrambled for cover. He fled down a passage, doubled and twisted, finally slowed to a rapid walk. He was alone, except for Ao, in the echoing corridor. From the far distance came annoyed curses.

  “Useful thing, misdirection,” Macduff murmured. “Only way to get aboard, however. What was that fool saying about the Captain’s being injured? Nothing serious, I hope. I must hit him for a loan. Now where’s your cabin, my dear? Ah, yes. Stateroom R and here it is. We’d better hide till we’re in space. Hear that siren? That means take-off, which is useful since it delays the passenger check. Space nets, Ao!”

  He yanked open the door to Stateroom R and urged Ao toward a spider-web filament of mesh that dangled like a hammock.

  “Get in there and stay till I come back,” he ordered. “I’ve got to find another shock hammock.”

  The gossamer net attracted Ao as surf attracts a mermaid. She was instantly ensconced in it, her angelic face looking dreamily out of the softly tinted cloud. She gazed beyond Macduff, thinking of nothing.

  “Very good,” Macduff told himself, going out, shutting the door and crossing to Stateroom X, which luckily was unlocked and vacant, with a web dangling ready. “Now—”

  “You!” said an all-too-familiar voice.

  Macduff turned quickly on the threshold. Across the passage, looking at him from the door adjoining Ao’s, was the ill-tempered crustacean.

  “What a surprise,” Macduff said cordially. “My old friend Ess Pu. Just the—ah, Algolian I wanted to—”

  He was not permitted to finish. With a bellow in which the words “Lethean dust” could be indistinctly understood, Ess Pu charged forward, eyes waving. Macduff hastily closed the door and locked it. There was a crash and then someone began to claw viciously at the panel.

  “Outrageous assault on a man’s privacy,” Macduff muttered.

  The hammering on the door grew louder. It was drowned out by the ultrasonic, sonic and resonating warning of an immediate take-off.

  The hammering stopped. The sound of clicking claws receded into the distance. Macduff dived for the shock net. Burrowing into its soft meshes he focused his mind on the hope that the awkward Algolian would be unable to make his hammock in time and that the acceleration would break every bone around his body.

  Then the jets blazed, the Sutter rose from the troubled soil of Aldebaran Tau and Macduff really began to get into trouble.

  * * * * *

  It is perhaps time to deal, in some detail, with a matter which had already involved Macduff, though he didn’t know it. Cryptic reference has been made to such apparently unrelated matters as sphyghi seeds and Xerians.

  In the most expensive perfumeries of all, on the most luxurious worlds of all, there can be seen in tiny vials drams of a straw-colored fluid which carries the famous label of Sphyghi No. 60. This perfume of perfumes, which bears the same
price whether sold in a plain glass phial or in a jewel-studded platinum flagon, is so costly that by comparison Cassandra, Patou’s Joy or Martian Melee seem cheap.

  Sphyghi is indigenous to Aldebaran Tau. Its seeds have been safeguarded so strictly that not even Aldebaran’s great trade rival, Xeria, has ever managed, by hook, crook or even honest means, to get hold of a single seed.

  For a long time it had commonly been known that Xerians would have bartered their souls, or soul, for some of the seed. In view of the Xerians’ resemblance to termites there has always been some doubt as to whether an individual Xerian has a mind of his own and operates by free will or whether they are all ruled by a central common brain and determinism.

  The trouble with sphyghi is that the growth cycle must be almost continuous. After the fruit is detached from the parent plant, its seeds become sterile in thirty hours.

  NOT a bad take-off, Macduff mused, crawling out of the shock hammock. It would be too much to hope that Ess Pu suffered at least a simple fracture of the carapace, he supposed.

  He opened the door, waited until the opposite door leaped open to reveal the Algolian’s watchful bulk and snapped back into Stateroom X with the agility of a frightened gazelle.

  “Trapped like a rat,” he muttered, beginning with a quick tour of the cabin. “Where is that intercom? Outrageous! Ah, here it is. Connect me with the Captain at once, please. Macduff is the name, Terence Lao-T’se Macduff. Captain Masterson? Let me congratulate you on your take-off. A magnificent job. I gathered you have had an accident, which I trust is not serious.”

  The intercom croaked hoarsely, caught its breath and said, “Macduff.”

  “A throat injury?” Macduff hazarded. “But to come to the point, Captain. You are harboring a homicidal maniac on the Sutter. That Algolian lobster has gone perfectly insane and is lurking outside my door—Stateroom X—ready to kill me if I come out. Kindly send down some armed guards.”