Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  But the Alien went flashing through it along a prescribed course it knew well. Past the memorials of its nameless race that had come and ruled and died. Perhaps past the sepulchres of those who had come after it to earth, and died before its waking. In that one bright journey in sorrow and loneliness and defeat—it reviewed the history that mankind will never know, and bade good-by to the glories of its mighty kinsmen and its, mighty race.

  And there in the heart of the citadel which no man will ever enter, the Alien in its own strange way ceased . . .

  “Wake up, laddie!” the burred voice urged. Familiar, from ages ago.

  Alan opened his eyes. Glowing walls about him, fiery sun blazing before his face. But there was no shadow upon its surface now. His thoughts paused there, searching back for Flande.

  Flande was gone. He had dreamed everything, his shaken mind told him. He must have dreamed it. He looked up to the familiar, ruddy face of the old Scotsman for assurance.

  Sir Colin smiled. “We’ve won, laddie,” he said in a thickened voice. “We’ve done it, somehow! Though for a moment, I thought—Well, no matter now. I saw it go. Och—” His voice softened. “I saw the miracle of it going. But I couldna tell you how.”

  A thin, musical crashing behind him made Alan look over his shoulder. What he saw framed in the tunnel mouth astonished him more than anything that had gone before. Yet it was a simple thing, something he had seen already. It was Flande’s tower.

  The structure was falling. In the little time while it toppled, then, all this had happened.

  He watched it tilt over and down, majestically bowing out above the city. Very slowly it broke in the center and collapsed with a ringing series of crashes as its fragments struck Carcasilla’s shining floor very far beneath. Bit by bit the spiral step fell after it.

  The noise of its fall went echoing through the city, the vibrations making the delicate suburbs tremble. Here and there, far and near, soaring avenues trembled too much and broke with a singing, vibrant chord like music, and came tinkling and showering down to rouse more echoes, and bring more buildings to lovely, musical ruin.

  For the first time since its conception, sound had entered Carcasilla, and sound spelled Carcasilla’s doom. Allan stood listening to the delicate, ringing chords of the collapsing buildings. He was thinking of Evaya. He knew that he had won now, and that somewhere along the Way of the Gods, perhaps coming nearer and nearer with every passing moment, the real Evaya would be moving. Evaya with life glowing again like a lighted lamp behind her features as exquisite as carved ivory. Her hair lifting and floating upon the darkened air.

  Evaya, coming back to ruined Carcasilla.

  Yes, he had won. And he had lost. Mankind was reprieved now. The Source of the fountain that made Carcasilla immortal would go out to Venus in the waiting ship, and Sir Colin would go with it! Sir Colin, and Karen, and the Terasi. There would be a green world again, fragrant and sweet, shining with dew and rain.

  But he would never see it. He would wait here for Evaya, who could not go. He would wait with her, here in shattered Carcasilla, while immortality ran low in the dying fountain and darkness closed in forever upon Earth.

  * * *

  Sir Colin nibbled thoughtfully at his fantastically featured pen. Then he dipped the quill into ink crushed from berries that never sprang from the sod of earth, and wrote on.

  “—so we left them there,” he wrote. “And because the journey was so long, and I growing old, I misdoubt I shall ever know their fate. But I know Alan Drake, and I know what happened to him. At least, in part I know—in his long fight with the Alien that lasted only while I fired five shots as fast as I could pull the trigger. He told me what he could of it. He told me about Flande, opening bright doors in his brain to the light of that burning sun.

  “Such a light made Flande a demigod. Alan Drake had none so much of it, but a little taste he had. And I believe that taste was enough. I believe, as sure as there was a Scotland, that mankind still lives upon Old Earth.

  “If any man could keep it alive, the man is Alan Drake. I make this record for the new generation of Terasi to remember, and for their children and grandchildren.

  “Some day, somehow, I swear to you—your cousins from Old Earth will make their voices heard on Venus. And they will speak the name of Drake.

  “The thing we left for them should be a legend by the time your generation reads this record. You will have heard of the shining room we took our Power-Source from, and how the stones glowed on after it was gone. It had poured out energy so long into those walls that energy still lived in them, and I think must live on—long enough.

  “Long enough to power the machines they’ll need—those fragile-seeming Carcasillians who were built on a tougher framework than anyone knew unless—as Alan knew—one had occasion to find out! He would never have spoken to me of the steely, resilient strength of Evaya’s body when he held her in his arms, had he not known how important that knowledge would be to the future of mankind on Old Earth.

  “So we know the Carcasillians were strong. And we know they had a limited source of power to set their machines going in the caverns the Terasi left behind. And we know, too, something we were too blind to think of at the time. There is one power-source upon Old Earth still living and strong in her extreme age. The great tides that thunder around the planet, following the moon, carving a mighty gorge in tire earth as they race on. If the Carcasillians with their machines and their resilient strength can harness that tide—who knows, Old Earth may yet shine green again in the heavens!

  “It is my belief they can. It is my belief that Alan Drake, with his knowledge and his power bequeathed by Flande, can save his beloved and-the people of his beloved, and the world on which he chose to stay, because his beloved had to remain there.

  “The fountain of immortality died, and Carcasillians live on. I shall believe it until I die myself. And, one day, I believe, all Venus will hear the great story which I can only guess at now. The story I shall never know.”

  AS YOU WERE

  Peter Owen swings back to yesterday on a space-time pendulum in a frantic attempt to find a tomorrow worth living!

  CHAPTER I

  Blue Enamel Clock

  SOMETHING was keeping Peter Owen awake. Either the coastal thunderstorm outside his bedroom window was distracting him, or his choice of reading material had been unwise. The book which Owen, propped up in bed, was reading, bore the revolting title of New Uncoiled Gastropods From the Middle Devonian, and had promised to be a relaxing change from last night’s rather thrilling account of the Simpler Acyclic and Monocyclic Terpenes.

  Peter Owen sighed and turned a page. Then he uncoiled nervously, like a gastropod, as a knock sounded on the door.

  He called, “Come in,” and looked up with some anxiety, relieved to see the short, plump, white-haired old gentleman who came stumping into the bedroom in response to his invitation.

  “To myself, I say beer,” announced the old, gentleman, holding up a foaming glass. “Them, I think, for a young man at bedtime—yes, Peter, you have guessed it. Beer.”

  With an air of triumph Dr. Sigmund Krafft allowed a smile to crease the imperturbable, crumble of wrinkles he called a face. Owed, recalled from the life of the gastropod to the problems of his own somewhat more turbulent existence, took the beer, with a vague blink. Then he remembered that Dr. Krafft was a guest in this house, though not his own, He prepared to get up.

  “Why didn’t you call me, Doctor?” he asked. “I’d have got you some beer. That’s what I’m here for, after the servants leave for the night. Not that I mind.

  I mean—” He floundered, slightly.

  Krafft came to his rescue. “It was no. trouble, Peter. I was thinking about next Tuesday. Next Tuesday night at this time I shall, be in my own nice little study in Connecticut, all quiet and happy, and then I shall have a glass of beer.

  So I thought, Sigmund—yes, you have guessed it—I thought I would have a glass of bee
r now and imagine it was next Tuesday.”

  A crash, a thud and a loud outcry sounded from the floor below. The two men exchanged significant glances. Dr. Krafft shrugged a little. The outcry rose even louder and angry commands could be heard, muffled by the walls between and the noises of the storm outside. “Break, blast you!” the voice downstairs shouted. “Break!” Thuds followed rapidly.

  “The Shostakovich records,” Dr. Krafft said. “Unbreakable, you know. Perhaps a hacksaw—still, no. Better to keep away until he feels, happier. I shall think about next Tuesday and forget all that trouble with your uncle, my boy.

  I am sorry we disagreed, but how could I say a space-time continuum is riot cyclical when I know it is?”

  “Break! Break!” cried the voice from below, and a renewed thud made the walls shiver slightly. The full weight of the world-famous C. Edmund Stumm, author, critic and playwright, had apparently come down flat-footedly upon the offending records. “Break!” his voice shouted Tennysonianly, but no obedient crackle of vinylite responded and Owen curled up a little with dread. C. Edmund Stumm, thwarted, was not a subject to think about unmoved.

  “That young lady, your friend—she is a brave girl,” Dr. Krafft said soberly.

  OWEN shuddered. Claire Bishop; fair and fascinating, was not so much brave as foolhardy. Also, she had a temper almost the equal of C. Edmund Stumm’s. As a “direct consequence, the indestructibility” of vinylite was being tried to its last measure of resistance in the music room downstairs. Claire this afternoon, as a climax to a thoroughly disastrous interview with Uncle Edmund, had rashly expressed a preference for Shostakovich over Prokofieff. She thereby canceled completely all of Owen’s desperate efforts of the past month to bring about an amicable meeting between the rising young screen actress whom he adored, and the uncle whose famous Broadway play, Lady Pantagruel, might well have been written with Claire’s special talents in mind.

  Due to the curious convolutions of Hollywood reasoning, the role of Lady Pantagruel was what Claire badly needed just now. Her career was in serious peril. But Owen’s painstaking arrangements went for naught after the fireworks started. Uncle Edmund had so nearly—so nearly!—signed the contract of sale, Owen remembered in anguish. Still, how could he blame Claire? He stared at Hie floor arid wished that he were dead.

  “—lost my dear Maxi,” Dr. Krafft was murmuring distractedly, peering about the room. “Now if you happened to know where I might have put Maxi—”

  “I beg your pardon, Doctor?” Owen said, recalling himself.

  “I have lost poor Maxi,” Krafft repeated, sighing deeply. “Ah well, who is perfect? The trouble with time-experimenting is that you cannot always remember when you did something. To find Maxi I need quiet and concentration. But without Maxi, how can I concentrate?” He smiled. “A paradox! For me, a scientist, to be helpless without a little stone frog—you have guessed it, Peter. Absurd! Ah, well!”

  He turned toward the door, shaking his white head. “Good night, Peter. If you happen to see Maxi, you will tell me?”

  “Right away,” Owen promised. “Good night, Doctor. Thanks for the beer.”

  “Of course it is only a habit and a fetich, but—” The door closed on his mild murmuring. In the same instant a flash of violet light and an appalling crash from outside brought Owen upright with a start. Automatically, somehow, he attributed the noise:, to his uncle’s ultimate success in smashing the records, perhaps with an atomic bomb. But vision instantly corrected that assumption.

  Outside, near the edge of the cliff that jutted into the Pacific, a lone Monterey cypress stood outlined in a blaze of fire. As the lightning faded a new flash stood quivering in the sky, showing the cypress toppling headlong over the edge of the cliff.

  Owen had an odd conviction that the cypress must somehow have offended his uncle. He sighed. Storms were no rarity at this season in the slightly famous little sea-coast resort of Las Ondas. Nor were storms rare in Owen’s life, which explains why he had schooled himself in the past six months to imitate the passivity of a lightning-rod.

  He rather wished he could uncoil, like a gastropod, from what had become a cramping position in life ever since, at his uncle’s insistence, he had quit his managerial job with a Hollywood commercial film company and become Mr. Stumm’s private secretary. The glibness of his uncle’s promises had only stressed the fact that C. Edmund Stumm, himself, was one of the worst polecats in the state of California, which covers considerable territory.

  Absently Owen fumbled for his beer. His eyes had gone back to the small print of his book, which dealt with what now seemed a lovely, unemotional, mild-tempered world in which the growth and reproduction of the slimy salamander plethodon glutinosus followed a calm, predictable course.

  Have you ever picked up a glass of water, thinking it was milk or beer? Do you know that slow, incredulous moment of total disorientation as the surprise of it dawns upon your stunned taste-buds?

  Owen took a long, satisfying drink of what he had every reason to expect was beer, chilled to exactly the right temperature by a special compartment in the refrigerator.

  It was not beer.

  But it was the most delicious, the most satisfying, the most incredible draught Owen had ever tasted in his life. Cool, shadowy, hollow, insubstantial as a breeze blowing from nowhere, the drink poured down Peter Owen’s throat.

  Shocked into belated surprise, he lowered the beer-glass, staring. But it wasn’t a beer-glass.

  He was holding a dock!

  HE had never seen the clock before in his life. Sitting bolt upright against his pillows, conscious of the wild drumming of rain on glass, and muffled thunder far off over the sea, he swallowed convulsively two or three times. He could still taste that incredible draught. Or could he?

  His throat seemed to tingle slightly, and he had an extraordinary sense of well-being, amounting almost to giddiness. This passed instantly, to be lost in baffled disbelief.

  He glanced from the clock to the bedside table. There sat his glass, white-collared above the amber beer, its sides frosted with trickling condensation. Perfectly convinced that he was going mad, Peter Owen stared at the blue enamel clock, turning it over in his hands, looking for some conceivable explanation. His taste-buds still tingled.

  Or did they? He reached hastily for the beer and took a swig. There was no comparison. This was good beer, but only beer—not nectar. Quite obviously, you can’t take a drink out of a clock. From a skull, perhaps, if you have morbid tastes, or champagne from a slipper—but a clock? What could one drink out of a clock if a clock could be drunk out of?

  “Time?” Owen wondered madly. “Time isn’t a liquid. You can’t drink time. I’m all keyed up. That’s what it is. Imagination.” He thought this over tentatively. “I was expecting to taste beer, so I did taste it—except that it didn’t taste like beer. Well, that’s natural. It wasn’t beer. It wasn’t anything. Just—a deep breath?” He puzzled over that, settling back slowly on his pillow. Then he sat up again abruptly, staring at the clock, as he realized suddenly that he had never seen it before.

  He had a horrid suspicion that his uncle might have decided to give him an unexpected present Timeo Danaoa, he thought warily. Uncle Edmund never gave Sway anything, it might to the outward eye have seemed a gracious gesture to invite Dr. Krafft to Las Ondas for an extended seaside vacation, but the motives behind that were anything but gracious. Uncle Edmund was working on a sequel to Lady Pantagruel at the moment, and cunningly picking Dr. Krafft’s brains in the process. Lady Pantagruel’s popularity was in great measure due to the good Doctor’s contributions at the time of its writing two years ago. It dealt with time-travel, somewhat in the manner of Berkeley Square, and many of the best ideas in it had been Dr. Krafft’s, though one would look in vain for acknowledgements on the playbill.

  As for the dock Owen still held in his shrinking hand, if it were a gift from Uncle Edmund it was probably a well-disguised atom bomb. He examined it warily. Some kind of booby
-trap, without a doubt. Had the trap sprung? Certainly something had happened, though surely he hadn’t actually drunk a liquid draught out of the clock. A sort of mass hallucination of the senses might momentarily have deceived him, but not for long. The thing was impossible!.

  It was a small clock, not much larger than an old-fashioned turnip watch—rather like art oppressed lemon, Owen thought with some natural confusion—and it had a loud, penetrating tick. It had the usual two hands, and apparently it wasn’t an alarm clock. Also, it was thirteen minutes fast.

  Owen blinked at his own clock on the bureau, an electric model with the alarm set for seven. Thoughtfully he reset the blue enamel clock, turning back the black minute-hand to ten-forty in agreement With the electric dial. Gingerly he put the loud-ticking object on the bedside table, gazed at it suspiciously, and reached for his beer.

  There was no beer.

  Owen gave a faint cry of dismay and surged sidewise, staring down at the floor. He remembered very distinctly having set the glass on the table a few seconds ago. Had it fallen off? There was no trace anywhere of beer or glass. With a fearful suspicion that his mind had finally snapped under the strain of living with his uncle, Owen flung his torso headfirst out of the bed and dangled upside-down (like Mr. Quilp, he thought with a shudder), praying that the glass had rolled under the bed.

  It hadn’t.

  “Delusions of persecution,” he said to himself, upside-down, dizzily thinking how odd the words looked. “Now I’m suspecting Uncle Edmund of stealing my beer. Oh, this is terrible. I can never marry Claire now. I couldn’t pass on the stigma of insanity to our children.” The blood rushed to his head as he hung like a bat, peering under the bed and dimly hoping this might be a therapeutic measure to restore his sanity.

  ACROSS the room and upside-down he saw the lower part of the door open, and a pair of gnarled feet in carpet slippers entered.

  “Something is lost?” Dr. Krafft inquired mildly.