Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

“What’s the matter with the Trade Control, Joe?” he demanded, tapping his carboy of sehft. “Why did they cut the price? Why? If the bottom’s out of the sehft market you might as well plow up the whole planet and plant it with wheat so far as I’m concerned. I can’t live here.”

  “They’ve synthesized sehft,” Warburg said stolidly.

  Morgan whistled a low, angry note. Then he said, “All right, they’ve synthesized it. But there’ll always be a market for the natural oil, won’t there?”

  “Maybe. But the Settlers’ Council asked for an extermination order, Jaime.” Warburg spoke reluctantly. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. You see, the sehft-rats are pests. They destroy crops. They’ve got to be wiped out, not milked of their throat-sac secretions and let go to secrete more sehft.”

  Morgan’s face went deep red under the leathery tan. He showed his teeth and swore in the hissing Martian vocables of his boyhood. A tall crate beside the counter caught his angry eye and he brought his fist down hard on its lid. The wood splintered, releasing a pungent fragrance and showing glints of bright golden fruit inside.

  “Settlers!” Morgan said savagely. “So the sehft-rats spoil their orchards! Who was it got here first, Joe? You and me, that’s who! And now you’re siding with them.” He kicked the crate. “Fruit orchards! Fruit orchards on Loki! Mooing livestock! Settlers stink up every world they land on!”

  “I know, I know,” Warburg said. “Careful of the goldenberries, Jaime. I paid hard cash for those.”

  “Sure you did! You’ll be out there grubbing in the dirt, too, next thing you know. Joe, I don’t understand it.” Morgan’s voice grew gentler. “Have you forgotten Deadjet Range and the time the wild Harvester bulls stampeded? Remember when young Dain and I came in with our first load of sehft? Joe, I passed over Chocolate Hill today, where we left Dain. The moss grows fast there, Joe, but you can still see the Martian Circle we cut for him, to mark the place.”

  Warburg snapped another sack open.

  “I know, Jaime. I remember Dain. I land there now and then myself and cut the Circle clean again.

  I remember Wild Bill Hennessy, and old Jacques, and Sheml’li-hhan as well as if they were alive today. Wild Bill’s tree where he fought the red bear is standing in the middle of a cornfield now, Jaime. The farmer left it when I told him what the gouges on the trunk were. These people mean well. You’ve got to play along if you have a living to make. Can’t turn back the clock, Jaime. You just can’t do it.” Sugar ran glittering into the sack.

  “Settlers!” Morgan growled. “Scum! They don’t belong here. This is our world, not theirs! We opened it up. We ought to run them off Loki! But I forgot. Not you—not Joe Warburg. You tie an apron around your belly and sell ’em carbon-black to warm up the soil and micrograft kits to make the golden-berries grow! Wild Bill must be turning in his grave!”

  Morgan slapped the counter, making the sugar-sacks dance. The oily liquid in the carboy shivered thickly. “Fifty thousand credits!” Morgan said bitterly. “Two hours ago! Not worth the fuel to bring it in, now. That’s piracy for you, Joe. I tell you, I’ve got more respect for those hoodlums and gamblers you’re so scared of. They rob a man at gun point. They don’t sneak behind his back and cry on the shoulder of the Trade Control while they pick his pockets. I think I’ll find me somebody who’ll pay a better price for my sehft. Price-juggling doesn’t hurt the real value of the stuff and you know it, Joe. There must be somebody—”

  “Don’t you do it!” Warburg urged with sudden earnestness. “I know just what’s on your mind, Jaime, and you can’t get away with it. Sure, the woods are full of contraband runners, now. You go out and whistle and you’ll have to comb the smugglers out of your hair. But it’s dangerous business, Jaime.”

  Morgan laughed contemptuously. “I don’t wear an apron,” he said. “You think I’m afraid?”

  “If you’ve got good sense, you will be. These are tough boys. And they’re organized. Times have changed on Loki since you were here last, Jaime. I don’t keep a Barker on the counter for nothing. You’re a good man in the hills and you know the wild country inside out, but the city boys are smarter than you are, Jaime, and a whole lot trickier.”

  “You’re a fool,” Morgan said savagely. “I’ve got to have money, and I’ll get it where I can. Nobody’s tougher than Jaime Morgan. Who do I see, Joe? You know the hoods around here. Or are you too scared to tell me?”

  “You think I’d do it?” Warburg asked wryly. “Even if it weren’t for the danger of it, I haven’t forgotten Major Dodd. He won’t stand for any funny business, and he knows everything that goes on at Ancibel. He’d deport you, Jaime.”

  Morgan reached for the carboy.

  “Somebody’ll tell me,” he said. “You or somebody.” Cunningly he added, “If I go to the wrong dealer, I may lose my scalp. But you’re too busy weighing sugar. Forget it. I’ll find out.”

  “Jaime, if Dodd hears of this—”

  Morgan hefted the carboy. “I’ll ask around,” he said.

  Warburg sighed. “All right. Go into the Feather Road and ask for a fellow named Valley. He comes from Venus and he’s smarter than you are, Jaime. Don’t say I sent you.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” Morgan snapped. He hefted the carboy to his shoulder and turned away.

  “You owe me fifty credits,” Warburg said stolidly. “You’ve spoiled half a crate of goldenberries.”

  Morgan said with a furious grin, “Make it an even hundred,” and swung his boot. Wood crackled and a bright torrent of fruit gushed out over the smooth black floor. Morgan stamped, making the clear juice gush. His angry glare met Warburg’s.

  “Send me a bill to-Chocolate Hill,” he said. “Leave it in Dain’s Circle. Or pin it on Wild Bill’s tree. You’ll get your money-settler!”

  He went out with a heavy stride.

  The fresh, cold air of morning over Ancibel Settlement was fragrant with breezes blowing over miles of orchards, rank after rank of them on the patterned hills around Ancibel.

  To Morgan, it stank.

  He spat in the dust of the rubberized street, took a plug of nicca from his belt, and bit off a chew, thinking as he did of New Moon, beyond Sirius, and the way it used to be when New Moon was a frontier world, years ago, before he came to Loki. Now settlers grew nicca on that dim, pearl-gray world. Water-bound Galvez II was settled in, too, now, all the mystery gone from the sliding seas. They were dotted with control islands where men grew food-crops of algae and seaweed in the watery fields.

  Now they were overrunning Loki. He scowled about the single main street of. Ancibel Settlement, feeling a little uneasy at the nearness of so many. people. A buxom young woman in pink-striped orlon balanced a grocery-flat on her head and craned after him curiously as he passed. A man in the brown, tight uniform of the Jetborne went by, a sergeant with a weathered face, and the crowd fell silent and watched him resentfully, muttering a little, until he turned the corner and vanished.

  There were three lemon-haired men from Venus lounging in the morning sun at the doorway to the Feather Road, and the townspeople gave them a wide berth. They wore Barkers conspicuously belted on over their long, fringed coats and most of their conversation was carried on in a series of rapid, fingery gestures which their opaque eyes never seemed to watch. They smelled faintly of fish.

  Morgan nodded and strode between them into the big, arched, echoing room inside. It had been blown over an inflated form, like all the quickly built houses in Ancibel Settlement, and somebody had overestimated the space the Feather Road would be needing. Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe it just hadn’t got under way yet. Also, of course, this was still an early hour.

  The bar looked as though it needed artificial respiration. There weren’t enough customers for the Road’s size and setup. Rustling plastic curtain partitions made the room much smaller than normal—you could tell by the angles of the roof—but it still wasn’t cut down enough to avoid that fatal air of desolation an interplanetary bar mu
st shun at any cost. The customers, striking new roots, feeling lost enough as it is on an alien world. A good bar must be a convincing artificial home.

  Morgan grinned sourly. A thermo roll was all the home he needed. He had taproots. All worlds were home to Morgan.

  The bartender was a hawk-nosed Red Amerindian. He fixed Morgan with bright, expressionless black eyes and said, “Morning. Have one on the house, stranger.”

  Morgan thumped his carboy on the bar, rubbed his shoulder and said, “Sure.”

  The Amerindian tore the top off a fresh bottle of brandy and left it invitingly in front of Morgan, who poured himself one sparing shot and then firmly pressed the bottle’s neck together, sealing it with a practiced zip of the thumbnail.

  An old man with a red, bleary face hunched over the bar ten feet away, cradling a smoky glass in his hand. Beyond him were two young surveyors in swamp boots, having a quick one before they set out for the day’s wet, exhausting labor. Beyond them a black-haired girl in tight, crimson orlon leaned her elbow on the bar and her chin in her hand. Her eyes were shut and she whistled a soft, dreary tune to herself.

  Most of the noise in the room came from a table of heavy-shouldered young men who were playing some Ganymedan game with counters that clicked on the table top. Their voices were loud and blurred. Clearly they had been here all night. They looked to Morgan like a group of ranch hands; and he despised them.

  “I’m looking for a man named Valley,” he said to the bartender.

  The man’s black eyes appeared to grow smaller and brighter in the dark face as Morgan regarded him, waiting. The girl at the end of the bar opened her eyes briefly and stared at him, her whistle drawing out to a low note of surprise. Then she shut her eyes again and the mournful tune continued.

  “Who sent you?” the bartender asked.

  Morgan looked deliberately away. There was a button in front of each bar stool on the counter, and he pressed a slow forefinger upon the one beside his elbow. A section of the bar rolled aside and the hot, salty, pungent smells of a lavish free-lunch smoked up in his face. A moving belt below carried the leisurely array of thirst-making foods past.

  He let a bowl of popped and buttered moss-buds go by, and a rack of pretzels, and a broad round platter of Martian soul-seeds crackling with the heat of the plate they lay on. His hand dipped finally. He took up a pinwheel of blue-streaked paste, dipped it into a bowl of sullenly smoldering oil, and spinning it on its silver stick, popped the appetizer deftly into his mouth toward the back of the tongue, where the right taste buds would work on it.

  When he could speak again, he said with an impatient glance at the silent and waiting bartender, “What about that man Valley?”

  “I asked you a question,” the Indian said.

  Morgan shrugged. He slipped his hand inside the strap of the carboy on the counter and went through the motions of rising.

  “I can always go somewhere else,” he said.

  The Indian measured him with a long, expressionless look. Neither of them spoke. Finally the Indian shrugged in turn.

  “I just work here,” he said. “Wait.”

  He ducked under the bar-flap and vanished between plastic curtains on the other side of the room. Morgan ate three mock-beaks and sat quietly on his stool, watching the illuminated mural that circled the back-bar with a series of videoed dryland scenes—the Mohave on Earth, the sun-side of Mercury with every shadow etched in acid, a long shimmer of Martian desert with dust-devils dancing and the air a thin violet clearer than crystal. He allowed a certain not unpleasant quiver of nostalgia to stir in his mind at the sight.

  But he caught the first shimmer of motion behind him reflected in the surface of the mural screen, and turned to face a thin, very pale Venusian in a long fawn-colored coat who was walking toward him with meticulous placement of his feet beneath fluttering fringes. The man’s skin was white as dough. He had very sleek, lemon-colored hair and his eyes were round and flat and opaque.

  The man bowed gravely.

  “You, Valley?” Morgan demanded.

  “My name is Shining Valley,” the pale man said. “May I buy you a drink? Bill—” He gestured toward the Amerindian, who had ducked back under the bar and was resuming his position.

  Morgan said quickly, “No.” He slid a hand into his pocket, fingered the few coins there in the cubical, nested currency of Loki, and pulled out one of the cubes. He shook three of the inner and smallest out onto the bar and reached for the Ferrad brandy bottle, tore off its top and poured himself another sparing shot. His thumbnail sealed the neck again.

  “You talk business here, Valley?” he asked.

  The flat eyes flickered at the sehft. “Certainly,” the Venusian said, and glided forward with a flutter of fringes. He sat down on the stool next to Morgan and said crisply to the bartender, “Bill, give us a curtain.”

  The Indian’s expression did not change, but he nodded and jerked a rope in a cluster of cords behind the bar. Morgan dodged a little, involuntarily, as something came swooping and rustling down upon them from overhead. It was another of the plastic curtains, unfurling like a sail from a semicircular rod overhead. It closed the two men neatly in, cutting off most of the noises from behind them. Morgan glanced back nervously. The curtain was moderately transparent, and he felt a little better. He looked questioningly at the Venusian.

  “No one can see us from the other side,” Valley said. “Nor hear. Bill, give me a gin.”

  Morgan wrinkled his nose as the Venusian dropped a red pill into the glass the Indian set before him. An aromatic camphor odor arose to blend with the elusive but definite fish-smell of the man from Venus.

  Sipping, Valley said, “You came to the right place, Jaime Morgan. You see, I know your name. I’ve been hoping to make a deal with a man like—”

  “Cut it, Valley,” Morgan said. “Let’s not be polite. I don’t like Venusians. I don’t like their smell.”

  “Then try the smell of this,” Valley said, and laid a thousand-credit note on the bar’s edge. Morgan lifted his eyebrows. The liquor was beginning to hit him a little; it had been months since he’d taken a drink. He realized he was going to get thirstier and thirstier from now on. As usual, it was cumulative. He ignored the note.

  Valley spread out ten of his fingers in a quick, flickering gesture.

  “When I flew in here today,” Morgan said, “my cargo was worth fifty thousand. Do you think I’ll sell it for ten?”

  “The ten is only a starter. I need a man like you.”

  “I’m not for sale. My cargo is.”

  There was silence for a while. Valley sipped his camphor-smelling gin. Presently he said in a soft voice, “I think you are for sale, Morgan. You may not know it yet, but you’ll learn.”

  “How much for the sehft?” Morgan demanded.

  Valley exhaled softly. He made a meditative sound in his throat, like the waters of Venus lapping with a gentle noise against his palate.

  “You have forty gallons in all,” he said. “Warburg won’t go over five hundred for it. Major Dodd will impound your cargo and you’ll get legal price—no more. I offer you more. I’m gambling, you see.”

  “I’m not,” Morgan growled. “Make me an offer.”

  “Ten thousand credits.”

  Morgan laughed unpleasantly.

  “I told you I’m gambling,” Valley said in his soft, patient voice. He exhaled a smell of fish and camphor at Morgan. “The stuff’s been synthesized. But one of my markets is on a planet that’s passing through an H-K spectra matter cloud. They haven’t got the spacecast about the price-drop. Ultra-short waves won’t penetrate. A ship, of course, will. Maybe one has already. If so, the news has gone ahead of me. If not, I clean up a tidy profit by buying at a cut price and selling at the old one. That’s what I mean by a gamble.”

  “I don’t like the odds,” Morgan said. “You could pay me better and still—”

  “It’s my price. You won’t get any better offer. I’ll pay you ten
thousand for forty gallons.” The surf sounds of Venusian seas beat in his throat briefly. He added, “Skalla,” and made a rolling, interlacing gesture with his fingers, so Morgan knew that would be the top figure. When a Venusian said skalla, poker-bluff wouldn’t work.

  Still, with ten thousand—There were gambling joints in Ancibel Key now. Like most men who gamble with life and know the odds well enough to win, Morgan erroneously thought he could call the odds on other games of chance. Besides, the brandy was beginning to burn enticingly in his stomach, calling irresistibly for more of the same brand. And he couldn’t buy any, not with the few coin-nest cubes in his pocket.

  He reached over and took the notes from the Venusian’s boneless fingers, riffling the edges to count. There were ten. He took a key out of his pocket and dropped it on the bar.

  “A locker key?” Valley inquired. “Very wise of you.”

  “The other two are lockered,” Morgan said. “It’s a deal.”

  “Not yet,” Valley said gently, his round, flat eyes on Morgan’s. “We want you to work with us. We can offer you a very good bargain on that, my friend.”

  Morgan got off the bar stool with a quick, smooth motion, struck impatiently at the curtain behind him. “Let me out of here,” he said. “I’m no friend of yours, Valley.”

  “You will be,” Valley murmured, gesturing. The curtain slid up with a hiss and rustle, and the noises of the bar flowed back around them.

  It was noisier than it had been before. The ranch hands were stumbling up from their table, staggering a little, blinking at an angry middle-aged homesteader in the doorway.

  “I’d fire you all,” he was shouting as the curtain rose. “If I could, I’d do it! Outside, you loafers! Get out, before I break your necks!” His furious glare flashed around the room. “We’ll clean you out yet,” he roared at the bartender, who shrugged impassively. “We don’t want your kind here!”

  One of the ranch hands stopped quickly to drain a shot-glass on the table before he joined the rest. The homesteader crossed the floor with quick, angry strides, snatched the glass from the man’s hand, pivoted and hurled it against the glass of the skylight that illumined the curtain-cubicled bar. A shower of tinkling fragments rained down upon the emptied table. The man turned and stalked noisily out, driving his reluctant help before him.