Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “So it’s a deal, Louis, Lady Pantagruel is yours. You can send your lawyer down this afternoon with the papers.”

  Peter Owen laughed wildly.

  “That’s what you think, C. Edmund Stumm,” he said aloud.

  The blue enamel clock was in his pocket. He took it out and turned the minute hand back.

  “Hello, Pete,” Chief Egan said with an anxious glance past Owen into the hall. “Thought Mr. Stumm might answer the door. What’s the trouble?”

  “Burglars,” Owen said, as before. “Come in. But be careful. Here, let me go first.”

  The library door was closed. Also, it had stuck slightly. Fending off the chief’s clumsy offers to break it down, Owen knocked meticulously.

  “Uncle Edmund,” he called. “Chief Egan’s here.”

  “Bring him in, bring him in,” the voice of Uncle Edmund said testily.

  “Stand back,” Owen called. “The door’s stuck.”

  Egan burst the recalcitrant door open. Stumm, clutching his notebook, glared at Egan and appeared to steam slightly.

  “Morning, Mr. Stumm,” Egan said, blushing. “Hear you had a little trouble last night.”

  “I had no trouble,” Stumm observed acidly. “Nor do I expect to. That’s what insurance companies are for.”

  “Those coins of yours, eh V Egan said, his gaze searching the room. “That all that’s missing? What about the safe?”

  “I have just checked it, thank you,” Stumm told him with lofty disdain. “Credit me with a modicum of good sense in handling my own affairs. The contents—papers valueless to anyone but me—are untouched. In my opinion the burglars were the veriest amateurs, since they made no discernible attempt on the safe. But even an amateur is perfectly safe in committing the vilest depredations under your nose, sir!”

  So saying, he swung up his notebook and pointed accusingly at the chief, who stumbled backward, blundered into a corner of the desk and knocked a fluorescent lamp crashing to the floor.

  Stumm’s shriek of fury faded away into a long, diminishing wail as Owen snatched out his clock again and set the minute hand back.

  * * * * *

  This time a full ten minutes elapsed before Egan trod heavily on Stumm’s toe as they stood together examining the cabinet. The outraged, playwright was screaming for arnica, X-rays and a bone specialist as Owen, sighing deeply, erased him.

  But he did not set the dock back a mere five minutes. For he saw now that the odds against a peaceful outcome to this particular set-up were hopeless. Stumm and Egan simply could not occupy the same house for longer than a few minutes without flying into conflict. It just wasn’t worth the effort of trying to anticipate trouble before it burst out between them.

  Nor could Egan be sidetracked, so long as there was a burglary to solve. The answer seemed obvious. Sometime during the night’s storm, burglars had broken in the french door, looted Uncle Edmund’s coin collection and presumably made off with Maxi at the same time. All Owen had to do to make everyone concerned happy—except, of course, the thieves—was to slip backward in time, discover the hour of the crime, and thwart it. Wishing he. had thought of this sooner, he reached for the knob of the clock. At the moment it declared a rather tentative ten o’clock in the morning. Recklessly Owen twirled the hands backward.

  Jolt.

  The knob would turn no more. Owen paused, chiefly because he could no longer see the face of the clock. It was not ten of a sunny morning any more. It was somewhere in the dark of a stormy night. He stood in total darkness, listening to the drum of rain and the distant sounds of Prokofieff’s Scythian Suite from the music-room. A gust of wet, chill air blew in his face out of the darkness. Fearing the worst, he groped across the library to the fluorescent desk-lamp, and in the rather ghastly blue daylight of its illumination saw that he had come too late.

  Under cover of the storm, the burglars had come and gone. The windows lay shattered on the carpet, mud splotched the wet floor and the glass-fronted cabinet was broken and empty, No Maxi squatted on the desk. Clearly the burglars had swiped dear little Maxi along with the coins.

  The blue clock in his hand assured Owen with a bland-faced stare that it was ten in the evening. He shook it slightly and tried the knob again, wondering why it had stuck. He could move the minute hand back, but no more than about fifteen seconds. The only result was to plunge the library into darkness again and backspace the Scythian Suite a dozen bars.

  Patiently Owen turned on the fluorescent once more and considered the clock, “So you won’t turn back past ten,” he said thoughtfully. “Why?”

  THEN something Dr. Krafft had remarked during one of this morning’s breakfasts returned to him from infinitely far away. “The anchor,” Dr. Krafft had said, “seemed to be swinging to and fro, like a pendulum. Of course it could swing no farther than twelve hours.”

  “Anchor?” Owen demanded, shaking the clock again, “Are you an anchor? A pendulum? And twelve hours is your limit, I suppose.”

  The cold breeze from the window made him shiver. He glanced around the looted library uncertainly. He couldn’t prevent the burglary unless he went farther back in time than the clock seemed willing or able to take him. Besides, if he were found here he wouldn’t put it past Uncle Edmund to have him arrested for burglary.

  He twitched at the clock-hands tentatively. Until now he had had no chance for experimentation. If he turned it forward, would he leap ahead through time, back to tomorrow morning—using the clock’s tabular key, as it were, instead of the backspacer?

  No. He turned the hand ahead, without result. The rain still blew through the broken window. Prokofieff never altered a beat. Even without the thunderstorm the burglars could have broken the window unheard, Owen thought, and morosely left the rifled library.

  Rather hopelessly he went upstairs to his own bedroom, curious to see what he would find. The bed was freshly made. On the table beside it stood nothing, not even a glass of beer. Naturally enough, since Dr. Krafft hadn’t brought him any beer until nearly ten-forty last night last night? Or now?

  “That,” Owen told himself, “is a problem for Dunne. If you need a Time Two to measure Time One in, you’d need a whole new language for what I’m doing now.”

  Lightning flashed, and outside appeared the recrudescent cypress, valiantly in place again on the edge of the cliff.

  “Cypress redivivus,” Owen said with a moan. “Oh, no, not again!”

  He glanced up at the black sky above it, as though half expecting to see the hull of a funny-looking schooner hovering in mid-air, and thought worriedly that three people can’t dream the same dream by coincidence. And it was the same dream.

  CHAPTER V

  And Patience With Time

  PETER looked around the room in discouragement. What next? Backward he could not go, obviously. Forward again seemed the only way, and that apparently had to happen in the usual, minute-by-minute process of ordinary living. So he had tonight to live through, dream and all (would it be the same, supposing he slept?), and afterward breakfast, Egan’s arrival, and uncle’s vindictive call to Metro and the ultimate loss of Lady Pantagruel.

  Must it happen exactly as before, or could the past be changed? Of course it could be changed, He’d changed it. Originally he hadn’t gone into the library at ten o’clock. But in its essentials, was it alterable? He hadn’t done very well in trying to stop a clash between Uncle Edmund and Egan.

  Lightning flared, and the doomed cypress tossed its branches wildly at the cliff-edge. In ten minutes—he glanced at the clock—the wretched tree would get it again. In about eight minutes Dr. Krafft would enter with the beer and the query for Maxi.

  Krafft was the man. He could explain all this if anyone could. He might even help to work out a solution, except that—Owen sighed—he wouldn’t believe the tale. Last night—this night—Owen had tried to show proof enough to engage the scientist’s attention, and it couldn’t be done. Not without automatically wiping out all, the necessary memorie
s from Krafft’s mind.

  “Alot of good you are,” he said to the clock, shaking it again and remembering the Mad Hatter in the same moment. For an instant he had a perfectly horrible feeling that this clock in his hand was the identical clock which the Mad Hatter had taken from his pocket and consulted, with many shakings, to learn what day of the month it was. “ ‘If you’d only kept on good terms with Time,” the Mad. Hatter said, and he must have been an authority on the subject, “ ‘he’ll do almost anything you like with the clock.’ ” It had been butter—the best butter—that stopped that particular clock. A lubricant.

  “Is that what happened to me?” Owen inquired of the empty air. “When I—drank—out of the thing? A sort of lubricant, that makes me frictionless in time? But where did it come from? What is the clock?”

  Then he thought of the three dreams about the schooner shaped like a wooden shoe, and the fishermen probing the depths of time while they swung at anchor upon—what? This clock? Something clock-shaped to look like a normal thing here at the sea-bottom, but not a clock at all. Mustn’t frighten the fish.

  “This,” Owen thought in sudden panic, “could be dangerous. I’ve got to talk to Dr. Krafft!”

  * * * * *

  “To myself, I say beer,” the elderly savant declared, holding up a foaming glass. He paused in the doorway, beaming placidly. “Then I think, for a young man at bedtime—what is this, Peter? Still up?”

  “Dr. Krafft, I’ve got to talk to you!” Owen took the glass from his hand and pulled a chair forward. “Please sit down. Listen, Doctor. It’s about time travel. I mean, something’s happened. That is, I’ve got to prove to you that there is such a thing as time travel.”

  “You have got to prove to me that there is such a thing as time travel?” the astounded old gentleman said, slightly stunned. “Why in the world do you suppose I have devoted the major part of my life to experimenting on this subject? No, Peter, it is good of you, but you do not have to prove it to me. You have guessed it, my boy—I am convinced already.”

  “You don’t understand,” Owen said wildly. “Look—it’s, exactly ten thirty-eight now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, so it is. Why do you carry that clock around?”

  “Never mind. You know that cypress out on the point, beyond the terrace? Well, in exactly three minutes that tree’s going to be struck by lightning and fall over the cliff.”

  “Ah, I see,” Dr. Krafft murmured with surprising calm. “In three minutes?”

  “You aren’t surprised?”

  “After my years of experience with prescient dreams?” Krafft inquired infuriatingly. “No, I am not surprised. You dreamed the tree would be struck, eh? So. I will make a note of it.”

  “I didn’t, dream it!” Owen cried. “It happened. I saw it happen. Over and over I saw it.”

  “A recurrent dream? That is usually the most interesting of all.”

  “Every tonight at ten-forty the cypress gets hit by lightning,” Owen said in a low, despairing voice. “Nobody cares. Nobody but me.”

  “Of course I care, Peter,” Dr. Krafft said encouragingly. “See, I have made a note of it. At ten-forty we will watch. I will give you a footnote in my next book, perhaps. But one thing at a time.”

  “One thing at a time,” Owen murmured, and laughed a hollow laugh.

  “Eh? First, Maxi—my little Maxi. Yes. I have lost Maxi.”

  “Maxi has been kidnaped,” Peter said swiftly. “Never mind. Maybe I can find him for you. Maybe I can stop the kidnapers before they ever happened, if you’ll only listen. Please sit down. Now, Dr. Krafft—” Owen made his voice impressive. “I’ve lived through this night once already. More than once. I lived straight through to ten o’clock tomorrow. Then I jumped back to ten tonight. Now I’m on the escalator of normal time being carried forward, and I can’t move the clock’s hands back past ten.” He looked despairingly at Krafft. “If you can’t help me,” he said in a piteous voice, “I’m ruined.”

  OF all this, however, Krafft heard only the name of Maxi. Normally he was a kind old man, much concerned with tile troubles of his friends, but we all have our personal phobias, and we know Dr. Krafft’s.

  “Maxi, kidnaped?” he demanded, springing from his chair. “When? How? Tell me at once, Peter!”

  “Burglars broke into the library and looted Uncle Edmund’s safe,” Owen said somewhat tiredly. “Maxi was sitting on the desk. At least, you seemed pretty sure he was. They took him. Why, nobody will ever know unless I can turn the clock back past ten o’clock.”

  “You have guessed it!” Dr. Krafft cried in an excited voice. “Now I remember! I did leave Maxi on Edmund’s desk this morning. He was scolding me because I could not think of some foolish dialogue for his foolish new play, and I was trying to collapse a tesseract-form into a cube through a new time-dimension in my own mind. So naturally, I was thinking of Maxi—yes, yes! Thank you, Peter! I must hurry right down.”

  “Don’t,” Owen urged him. “I just came from the library. Maxi’s gone. So are uncle’s gold coins. The burglars had got there before ten, you see.”

  “Gone! And you said nothing? But Peter, Peter, we must act! We must call the police, before the burglars who took Maxi get too far away!”

  “Wait, Dr. Krafft. Please listen a minute. I tell you, I’ve lived through all this before and I know! The best way to get Maxi back is to prevent his being stolen at all. If you’ll only listen to me, maybe we can figure out a way to turn the clock back past ten, and everything will be perfect.”

  “Peter, Peter,” Dr. Krafft murmured sadly. “I fear I was carrying coals to Newcastle when I brought you a drink tonight. Go to bed, my friend, and sleep. Tomorrow when your, head is clearer we will talk. Just now, I must go!”

  Lightning outside the window made the black panes burn violet for an instant. There was an ominous crack of cypress limbs accepting the stroke of destiny once more. Then the second flash, exactly on schedule, revealed the tree toppling with a resigned, fatalistic lurch over the cliff.

  “Ah?” Dr. Krafft said on a rising inflection, glancing at the clock. He took his notebook from his dressing-gown pocket and scribbled briefly. “Ten-forty exactly. Most interesting, Peter. Most interesting! Your dream was quite accurate. Of course we must allow for the laws of coincidence.”

  “Dr. Krafft, do you remember your dream last night?” Owen demanded. “About the time-travelers and the ship T’

  Krafft blinked inquiringly. “Last night? No.”

  Owen clutched his head. “No, no, no! I’m sorry! My mistake. You haven’t dreamed it yet. That’s for tonight and it hasn’t happened yet. ‘Angels and ministers of grace, defend us’, isn’t there any way to convince you?”

  “Peter,” Dr. Krafft said with mild solemnity. “Sit down. There on the bed. That’s right. Pile the pillows up. Be comfortable, my boy. Now, you see? I sit down here. I too am comfortable. Poor Maxi will wait. We must get to the bottom of this. Tell me, please, what is on your mind.”

  Owen told him.

  “May I see the clock?” Krafft asked when the story came to its end. Silently Owen handed it over. Krafft examined it carefully, scratched without effect at the blue enamel, shook it, listened to it, compared its dial with the electric clock. Then he pinched the knob on its back and twirled the hands easily and smoothly back past ten, past nine, past eight. He looked up.

  “You see?” he murmured to Owen. “You see?”

  “Of course I see,” Owen said with deliberate patience. “Anyone can do it but me. I proved that to you once before, tonight. I can’t do it, though.”

  “Try,” Krafft urged, holding out the clock.

  “Oh no! I don’t want to wipe out everything that’s happened tonight up to ten. Look, Doctor. Call it hypothetical if you have to. But given that premise, won’t you please try to work out an explanation for me? Hypothetically!”

  “Hypothetically,” Krafft murmured with an infuriating mildness, “you have indeed a most interesting paradox.
I must confess it all holds together very convincingly—if one accepts the single impossible premise of the clock. I should like to write it all down, later, as a nice problem in temporal logic. But later, later, when I find Maxi again. Now, I cannot really concentrate.”

  “Try!” Owen urged him. He held out an empty hand, palm up. “Imagine Maxi’s sitting on my hand. Look at him. Think!”

  DR. KRAFFT’S faded blue eyes gazed interestedly at empty space, becoming slightly crossed as he focused on an intangible Maxi.

  “If there were a schooner full of time travelers,” Owen prompted him desperately. “If they dropped anchor—hypothetically, symbolically, not literally—and the anchor looked like this clock, and my story were a problem you had to solve, what would occur to you?”

  “I would say first,” Dr. Krafft murmured, still gazing fixedly at the unseeable Maxi, “that the clock has no seams anywhere. Have you observed that? The average clock has many cracks left after assembly, so that one can tell how it was made. This is all one piece. A new method, no doubt. Some way of casting that leaves no joints or seams. However, hypothetically, let us consider.

  ‘“Now, clocks are most interesting relics; in a way, of the ancient Chaldean, Egyptian, and kindred, mathematical systems. So are compasses. These two things represent almost the only vestigial remnants in our own, society of the old sexagesimal mathematics, founded on sixty instead of ten, like; our decimal method. So that actually, both space and time are still measured in the ancient way. So it strikes me that for travelers in time to cast out a space-anchor in the likeness of a clock would seem not entirely nonsensical. Eh, Maxi?”

  The white head shook impatiently. “No, no, it is nonsense. And there is no Maxi.”