Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “It’s too dangerous,” Morgan said.

  “Nobody earns forty thousand credits easily, my friend. Will you do it, or must I search for a man with less timidity for the job?”

  “There isn’t a man on Loki any less scared of Harvesters than I am,” Morgan said practically. “I’m thinking of afterward. Do you know the only way a herd of stampeding Harvesters can be guided? Somebody’s got to ride the lead bull. All right, I could do it. But I’d be pretty conspicuous up there, wouldn’t I? And a lot of the settlers are bound to get hurt.”

  “Do you owe them anything, my friend?”

  “Not a thing. I hate the sight of ’em. I’d like to throw the lot of ’em clear off Loki planet, and you and your crowd right after. Every man, woman and child in Ancibel Settlement can die for all I care, the way I feel now. But I’m not going to run my neck in a noose killing ’em. I’ll be up there in plain sight, and there’s bound to be survivors. If I earn that forty thousand credits, Valley, I want to live to enjoy it. I don’t want a crowd of vigilantes stringing me up to a tree the minute I drop off the Harvester bull. So that’s out.”

  “Perhaps,” Valley sighed. “Perhaps. A pity, isn’t it? I have the forty thousand right here.”

  He groped inside the sleeve of his fawn-colored robe and laid a packet of credit notes on the table. It was thick and crisp, smelling of the mint.

  “This is yours,” he said. “For the taking. If you earn it. Isn’t it worth a little risk, Jaime Morgan?”

  “Maybe,” Morgan said. He gazed hungrily at the money. He thought of his ship lying portbound beyond Ancibel, fuelless and immobile—like himself. What did he owe the settlers, anyhow? Had they spared him, when they had the chance? Like most men who travel the lonely worlds, Morgan had great respect for life. He killed only by necessity, and only as much as he had to.

  Still—with this much money he could get clear away. Loki was a big world, after all. He moved his fingertip caressingly on the trigger of the hidden gun.

  Suddenly he grinned and his right arm moved with startling speed. The table jerked, the shining tree of spray bowed sidewise between Valley and him. When it righted again the muzzle of Morgan’s gun rested on the table edge and its unwinking eye was fixed steady upon the Venusian. Valley met that round black stare, going a little cross-eyed through the bubbles. He lifted a flat, waiting gaze to Morgan.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I’ll take the money. Now.”

  Valley held the flat stare for an interminable moment. Then slowly he pushed the packet of credits across the table, not shifting his eyes from Morgan’s. Morgan did not look down, but his free hand found and pocketed the sheaf with a sure gesture.

  The Venusian made a very small motion. Morgan gave him no time to complete it, whatever it was. “Don’t!” he advised sharply. “You can’t get away with this, Morgan,” the man from Venus said. “My boys will—”

  “No they won’t.” Morgan sounded confident. “Why should they? I’m going to earn the money.”

  Valley’s pale brows rose. “How?”

  “I’ll stampede the Harvesters, all right. But not through the town. That’s murder, and I won’t stick my neck out that far for anybody. The Jetborne won’t tolerate murder.”

  “What’s your plan, then?”

  “You know that stretch of orchards east of town? And the farmland between them and Ancibel? I could lead the Harvesters through that valley. Trample their stinking crops right back into the ground. Break their fruit trees down. Ruin a good half-year’s work. It might even drive ’em clear off Loki.” Morgan smacked his lips. “That ought to do the trick.”

  Shining Valley frowned. “I’m not so sure.”

  “Did you ever hear a herd of Harvesters stampeding?” Morgan demanded. “The ground shakes like a quake. Windows break for half a mile around. When the settlers feel and hear and see what’s happening, they’ll swarm out like wasps out of a hive. Give you all the free time you need in Ancibel. Besides, that’s what I’m going to do. Nothing else. You want me to earn this money or just take it and go away?”

  Shining Valley looked down at his long, boneless fingers clasping the pewter mug. He moved them intricately over and under one another, as if he were weaving a complex Venusian finger-sentence of advice to himself. After a moment he nodded and looked up, his eyes veiled by the rising spray.

  “Very well,” he said. “I can count on you?”

  Morgan stood up, pushed back his chair.

  “Sure I’ll do it,” he said. “My way, not yours.”

  Shining Valley nuzzled again among the rising bubbles. He made in his throat the noise of a Venusian sea lapping a pebbled shore.

  “Your way, not mine,” he agreed in the smoothest of smooth voices.

  Harvesters are mindless angels of destruction. They look like kerubs, the magnificent bearded kerubs of Assyrian legend, bull-bodied, tremendous, with great lion-faces and thick, streaming Assyrian beards. Bosses of sound-sensitive antennae stud their brows and they have hair-trigger neural reactions as comprehensive as radar-sonar. Any variation from the rhythmic patterns of normality send them into terrible, annihilating flight.

  A good explorer never has a dangerous adventure, Morgan remembered the old saying, and qualified it: barring the unexpected. New worlds have a way of being unexpected. The first water he drank on Loki registered pure by every chemical test, but gave him a fortnight’s fever because of a new virus that science was able to classify—later, after he had discovered it. A virus that went through porcelain filters, withstood boiling and resisted every standard purifying chemical was so far outside the normal frame of reference that extrapolation hadn’t helped—not unless you extrapolated to infinity, and then you’d never dare try anything new.

  Like the Harvesters. There was a way to handle them. Not many men knew the way, and fewer still had the split-second synaptic reactions that made it possible.

  Morgan, waiting perfectly motionless in his ambush, scarcely breathed. He was almost as immobile as a stone. Not quite; that would have been a mistake, for he wasn’t a stone, and without natural hereditary camouflage he couldn’t hope to imitate immobility. But he could perceive, with all his senses, the natural rhythm and pattern of the dark forest around him, the stars overhead, the sleeping rhythms and the waking rhythms of Loki’s nighttime pattern, and slowly, gradually, sink into an absolute, dynamic emptiness in perfect tune with the world around him.

  He emptied his mind. He was not even waiting. The ultrasonic gun was planted and due to go off at the right moment. He had charted the position of the grazing Harvester herd, the wind-drift, the rhythms of movement that flowed through and above this forest. The herd dozed, grazed, shifted gently down the dark forested valley toward him. Now they were motionless, drowsing perhaps under the stars. Morgan squatted in the humming quiet, letting his fingertips touch the moss and send soft vibrations toward his brain.

  Once he stirred, drifting with a little scatter of dry leaves like confetti, toward a spot where the filtered starlight blended better with his own pattern. He had not realized this second spot was better until he caught the rhythm of Loki.

  How many worlds he had exchanged this psychic blood-brotherhood with, this beating pulse of planetary life that opened the way for a transfusion between a living world and a living man. All Loki, it seemed to him now, slept and was unaware. Only he crouched here in perfect coordination with the turning world. He scarcely needed to glance at the shaded oscilloscope he had rigged to check upon his co-ordination. He knew with a deeper sense than sight how attuned he was. A shaking green line on the face of the oscilloscope translated Loki’s night sounds into sight. A second line trembled across it—his own. No man could ever make those two lines completely merge, of course. At least, not while he lived.

  Morgan’s mind, emptied of circulating memories, let old eidetic ones swim up unbidden. And wears the turning globe, he remembered out of some forgotten book. A dead man, clad in the turning worl
d. He wore Loki now, but not as the poet meant. That would come later. Some day, somewhere, on some world whose name he might not even know yet, he would make that last and completest marriage with some turning globe, and then the green lines would tremble and blend.

  But now he wore Loki, his world, fought for and earned. He meant to keep it. And he could. There was room. The villages would grow, and the webs of steel spin farther, but there would still be the forests and the mountains. It would be a long, long while before settlers dared explore Dead jet Range, or Great Swamp Valley, or Fever Hills.

  The ground shivered. The green line on the oscilloscope wavered into a jagged dance. The Harvesters were moving.

  More and more wildly the green line danced. In the moss under his fingertips Morgan felt vibrations grow strong. Scores of mighty hoofs bearing tons of tremendous bodies moved leisurely down the steep canyon valley toward him. He waited. There was no feeling of stress at all.

  They were not yet in sight when the sense of movement all around him first began. Leaves rustled, tree trunks vibrated. The herd was coming near. Morgan relaxed utterly, letting the pulse of Loki carry him on its restless current.

  High up among the leaves, seen dimly by starlight at a sharp angle from his crouch on the ground, Morgan was aware of a tremble of vines, a crackle and tearing, and suddenly a great, black, bearded face wreathed in torn leaves thrust forward. Vines snapped over a mighty chest and the herd leader burst majestically into sight, black and sleek and shining with blue highlights, his tight-curled mane merging with his curly beard. The antennae writhed slowly and restlessly above his round eyes, warily blinking. The breath snorted and soughed in his nostrils. The ground shook when he set his mighty hoofs upon it.

  Morgan did not move, but every muscle inside him drew taut as springs, and the internal balances of his wiry body shifted for a leap. He waited his moment, and then his right hand closed hard upon the firing device that linked him with the hidden gun.

  The gun was a Barker, set for its highest decibel-count of sheer noise. Morgan heard the first forerunning sound-wave of that tremendous mechanical roar, and opened his own mouth wide and shouted as loud as he could. His voice would be drowned in the noisy blast of the Barker, but he was not concerned with that. He had to balance the vibrations on both sides of his eardrums; the shout saved him from being deafened.

  Upon the Harvesters the full impact of the roar fell shatteringly. All through the forest one concerted tremble and gather of mighty muscles seemed to ripple as the herd drew itself in for the spring into full stampede. Morgan had timed himself to a split second. His reactions would have to be exactly right.

  It took just two fifths of a second for the Harvesters’ sense-organs to drop to maximum loss of sensitivity after exposure. Very briefly indeed, the herd was deaf. It would not react with its normal supersensitivity. But in that two fifths of a second pure reflex would hurl them into headlong flight.

  In that fraction of a second, Morgan sprang.

  It was a tricky stunt. He timed himself to strike the bulge of the herd-leader’s off foreleg with his knee in the instant before the bull surged forward. His hands seized two fists-full of curly mane and he clawed himself desperately upward in the same moment that the foreleg drove backward like a piston, great muscles bunching to hurl Morgan upward within reach of the great black column of the neck.

  He was ready and waiting when the lift came. He flung his knee over the sleek withers and fell forward flat and hard against the neck, both hands darting forward in a quick grab that had to be absolutely precise, to gather in each fist the bases of the thick antennae-clumps sprouting like horns from their twin bosses above the animal’s eyes.

  He felt the cool, smooth sheaf of tendrils against his left palm, and closed his fist hard. His right hand groped—slipped—

  Missed.

  Missed!

  It couldn’t be happening. He had never missed before. He was as sure as the stars in their turning. His own body was a mechanism as faithful as the rising of the sun over Loki planet. Jaime Morgan would go on forever. How could age weaken him? It must never happen—

  But he missed the right-hand boss. His own momentum carried him helplessly forward, and the fatal toss of the bull’s head hurled him on over the side of the gigantic neck. He felt the strong, hard column of its throat slide by under him. He felt the sickening vibrations of the herd’s thousand hoofs striking the ground in earthquaking unison. He saw the forest floor sweep by with blurring speed as he slid sidewise toward it. He remembered how a man looked after a Harvester herd had passed over him—

  As he shook like a falling leaf that slid sidewise through air, his mind closed and gripped and clung furiously to one single thing—his own name.

  Jaime Morgan, his mind cried frantically, tightening on that awareness and that identity which looked so close to forsaking him forever. The ground shuddered with rhythmic thunder, the Harvester’s great neck pumped and tossed, the moss of the forest floor blurred by under his straining eyes.

  Mixed up with Jaime Morgan was the memory of Sheml’li-hhan. He got old. He got careless. Just once he was too slow, and the stag bison got him. Was this how it had looked and felt to Sheml’li-hhan, in the instant before death? Morgan had never failed before—would he have a chance to fail again, ever again in this life?

  Oh yes, he would.

  Afterward, trying to remember exactly how he had done it, what crazy contortion had locked him into place on the bull’s neck again, he found he could not remember. One instant he was swinging almost free, sliding down toward the shaking ground. The next, his knees were locked hard on both sides of that great muscular column again, and his hands frozen in the familiar grip on both the antennae-bosses, gripping and deadening the proprioceptors of the bull.

  Nobody else could have saved himself, he thought, dizzy with fright and triumph. Nobody but me. But the words wouldn’t stop there., I missed, though. I missed. Like Sheml’li-hhan, a man gets old—

  He looked back. Behind him the Harvester herd came pouring in the strong starlight, one black, tossing waterfall of annihilation. They were magnificent, mindless angels of destruction, a host of heaven thundering down upon Ancibel Key. Tightening his fists, Morgan swung the herd leader imperceptibly toward the right side in a wide arc whose end would be the fields outside Ancibel. The leader obeyed—

  Suddenly Morgan found himself roaring with laughter. Tears burned in his eyes from the wind of their passage and the pressures of his mirth. He didn’t know why he laughed. He only knew that some deep, ancient fear inside him relaxed and quieted as the breath beat in his throat. Old? Not yet—not yet! Somewhere, some day—but not yet!

  Lying close along the tremendous, pumping neck, his hands locked on the antennae bosses and his knees tireless in their grip upon the Harvester’s withers, Morgan led the herd. Exultation boiled up in him like strong liquor, a wild intoxication of the mind. The power of the beast he rode burned through him and the rhythmic thunder of the running herd made his blood beat with the same strong rhythm. It was Loki planet itself which he was turning against the sleeping settlers, Loki rising in its anger to cast the intruders off.

  Leaves whipped his face. The chill rush of wind made his eyes water. The hot, strong smell of the running bull stung in his nostrils. Then the leaves thinned suddenly and the thunder of the running beasts behind him changed in its sound as the forest fell away and open country lay before them. Morgan tightened his right hand on the bull’s antennae-boss. Its perceptions dulled by the grip, it swung toward the left, toward the hillside of vines and orchards and the broad tilled fields above the town. Swinging after them came the herd, and the ground roared and trembled under their pounding hoofs.

  The stars seemed to tremble, too. In the black sky nameless constellations shivered, new, foreshortened images seen from the far edge of the Galaxy and unnamed until men like Morgan came to watch by night and call them by familiar titles. He saw the Jetship sprawling its long oval above
the town and the stag-bison hurtling without motion toward the horizon. All the stars were watching along Paradise Street.

  But the settlement slept. A few lights burned where saloons and gambling houses clustered at the far side of town, and out beyond, over the shielding hills, five spaceships towered against the stars. Lights from below shimmered upon their tapered sides, and stars shimmered upon their peaks. The Jetborne would be camped out there, guarding the spaceport. Morgan grinned savagely. Rufe Dodd was in for a surprise.

  He leaned forward upon the tremendous neck, looking for the network of guarding wires which would warn the villagers if intruders came too close. He saw cut ends glitter and a tangle of torn netting piled aside, and he gripped the bosses harder, swinging the herd through the gap.

  Now the trees loomed before them, heavy-laden with forming fruit. The orderly rows stretched downhill in ranks like soldiers. The lead bull tossed its bearded head as the strong scent of man rose before it like invisible fountains in the air. But the pressure of the herd behind it was strong, and it thundered forward among the trees.

  Great shoulders crackled among the branches. The orchard’s resistance seemed to madden the Harvesters. They plunged and snorted among the trees, roaring, pawing, crashing down through laden boughs. In an irresistible surging wedge driven by sheer momentum, they poured forward.

  Morgan leaned forward upon the great maned neck and howled above the crashing of the herd.

  “Smash ‘em down!” he roared to his unhearing mount. “Smash ‘em under! Flatten the last rotten, stinking fruit-tree on Loki!” He loosed his grip a little on the antennae-bosses and screamed a wild Indian falsetto to madden the bull to its utmost, as if the few weak decibels of any human voice could be heard above the bellowing and the thunder of the herd.