Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Oh, all the kids know that.” Contempt was in her voice.

  “Know—what?”

  “About them.”

  Bradley drew a deep breath. All the kids know about them . . .

  “Does your father know?” His voice sounded thin in his own ears.

  She gave him another of those wary glances that watched to see if he were deriding her. Evidently reassured, she laughed shortly.

  “Well, I guess he does. Doesn’t everybody?”

  The room swam a little before Bradley’s eyes. So many of them, so many more than he had ever dreamed . . .

  “But the other kind,” he heard himself saying almost pleadingly. “The other kind of men! How many—”

  There were voices in the hall. Wallinger’s, and another’s, deep and heavy.

  “In here, Officer,” Wallinger was saying. “Right in here! Hurry!”

  “How many in the world?” Sue finished Bradley’s question for him. And she laughed. “We learned it in school, but I don’t remember. I can tell you how many of the real kind of men in this room, though. One! One!”

  “Will you tell your father that?” Bradley demanded in an agony of haste. “When he comes in, will you tell him there’s only one of the real kind of man in here? Sue, will you—”

  “Susan, get back!” Wallinger was in the doorway. That grey look made his face old as he scanned the children for signs of visible harm. Behind him a uniformed man loomed, red-faced, looking into the room with grim alertness, ready for anything.

  There was a little silence.

  Then Court, on the sofa, groaned softly and struggled to sit up. Wallinger hurried across the room to help.

  “What have you done to him?” he demanded of Bradley. “You crazy fool, how far have you gone?”

  “He’s all right,” Bradley stammered. “He’s—you can’t hurt them!”

  Wallinger regarded him above Court’s head.

  “So that’s what you look like,” he said. “I knew you from across the street, even without your mask, but your face, of course—Will you tell us your name?”

  “Bradley.” He said it defiantly. “James Philips Bradley.” The time for anonymity had passed. He hadn’t expected the policeman to be here—it would be harder to explain in that large, disbelieving presence—but if Sue repeated what she had just told him, maybe he could convince them yet.

  “Ask your daughter about them,” he said urgently. “She knows. Wallinger, I tell you, she knows! Remember, I warned you about the children? I said they couldn’t hope to deceive children? Sue says all of them know—”

  “I’d better warn you, Bradley, Sue’s got a wild imagination. I don’t know what fables she’s been telling you, but—Officer, hadn’t you better—”

  “Wait!” This wasn’t going as he had planned at all. He threw all the persuasion he could summon up into his voice. “You promised to give me a hearing, Wallinger. Don’t you remember, you promised? I know I had a gun then, but please—give me just a minute to tell you what I know. This man’s one of them.” He paused, running his tongue across dry lips. Wallinger looked so disbelieving. . . . “He isn’t hurt. I told you I’d bring proof, and there it is. This man. I had to get him here the only way I could. I tell you, you can’t hurt them! Under the skin he’s nothing but wires and metal. I can prove it! I—”

  He broke off, feeling the policeman’s hands laid on his arms lightly, holding them down. Wallinger’s face showed pity and horror. It was no use. He should have managed to make some incision in Court’s synthetic skin before they came. Of course they wouldn’t let him do it now. To them he was a madman, raving, eager to slash an innocent victim in proof of a madman’s dream.

  “Now, you just calm down, young man,” the policeman rumbled soothingly behind him. “We’ll take a little walk in the fresh air, and—”

  “No! Wait!” Bradley’s voice sounded wild even to himself. He choked back the protest, gathering himself for one tremendous last effort at the proof he had come so near to reaching.

  Court watched him, lens-eyed, under lowered brows. Somewhere in that cold, inhuman body the cold inhuman brain ticked on remorselessly, not even amused at his defeat, for how could a machine know what it was like to laugh?

  A machine—and so near, so near! Only a few feet of space separated them, and a fraction of an inch of synthetic skin hiding the mechanisms of the android body.

  “Wait!” he said again, and he twisted around to Wallinger, trying with every ounce of energy that remained in him to project his own conviction past the barrier of prejudice that blinded the adults in this room. “Wallinger, listen! After I’ve gone, will you talk to your little girl? Will you give me that much chance to prove myself? She knows! It isn’t imagination! All the children know. Do you think you’re safe, once Court gets out of here? They won’t trust you. They can’t. They’ll be afraid you might wake in the night and suddenly realize the truth. Think of your daughter, Wallinger! Court’s listening. He knows she recognized him. Can you take the chance with her life, Wallinger? Risk your own if you want to, but think of Sue!”

  A flicker of the first uneasiness Bradley had seen moved across Wallinger’s face. The policeman’s hands were a little slack on Bradley’s arms. He shrugged impatiently, and the momentary doubt on the physicist’s face must have conveyed something to the officer, or perhaps it was the desperate conviction in Bradley’s voice. He made the most of his moment.

  “Think of Sue!” he went on. “Court won’t dare make a move—but you don’t know how many others there are. You don’t know! You can’t even guess! Maybe the ones like Court are the real failures—the ones so imperfect they give themselves away. I think they’ve made others, so nearly human you’d never guess. Those are the dangerous ones, Wallinger! If there’s even one of them, it will know it can’t be safe until you’re dead. I’ve told you too much to—”

  “All right, Officer,” Wallinger said, with a little sigh. “I’m sorry, Bradley, but you see how it is.”

  Bradley’s eyes went back to Court. The android sat motionless on the sofa, a thing of wheels and wiring as safe behind its make-believe flesh as if it wore a coat of mail. All human laws safeguarded human flesh. They held it so sacrosanct that now they were betraying it into the iron fingers of the enemy. If only these men would let him slash once with a knife at that soft, deceptive covering which was not flesh at all . . . Suddenly Bradley laughed.

  Even the robot started a little at the sound, and the policeman made a growling noise in his throat, clearly thinking this the first ravings of a maniacal fit. But Bradley had his answer. He knew at last how he could convince even Wallinger.

  “That automobile accident!” The car had been like a bludgeon in his hands. He knew—he remembered. A man can tell whether his blow has grazed the enemy or gone home. Until now it hadn’t mattered. There had been too much else to deal with. But Court, pinned between car and truck wall, had not escaped unscathed. He fell as a man would fall, but he sat now as no man could possibly sit, upright, breathing easily . . .

  Bradley remembered very clearly the feel of rib-structure giving, the sound of metal bending harshly where there should have been no metal. No man could sit like that, once a car had ground him against the wall as Bradley’s car had ground Arthur Court.

  He moved so suddenly the policeman’s hands slipped from his arms. He was across the room in one leap, and tearing at Court’s jacket before even the android had guessed what he intended.

  The officer groaned and was upon him in a ponderous bound so fast that the heavy blue-coated body hurled Bradley aside with scarcely a half-second to spare. But Bradley had won his second. His hands were clenched in coat and shirt when the policeman’s weight carried them both sidewise, and the cloth ripped in his grasp.

  Court’s short cape flared wide with the sudden defensive motion he made. The jacket and the shirt beneath opened and for one timeless moment there was no sound in the room, not even the drawing of breath. It seemed to B
radley that his heart itself paused with his breathing, for until this instant of the final test, he could not have been sure. . ..

  There was the tanned chest, smooth with android skin. But the mark of the car-grille was upon it, smashing in the android ribs. Bradley had heard the metal scream as it gave before his blow. Now he saw it. Now he saw the gleaming framework of steel where no human chest ever bore steel, and within it a jumble of interlacing wires, and small, transparent tubes through which red fluid coursed . . .

  He saw the android brain.

  Deep inside, behind walls of bent steel ribbing, a small, bright, pulsing thing lay. A continuous twinkling beat outward from it, uncannily illuminating the chest-cavern of the robot from within, so that the bright steel ribs caught points of light from that illumination, and wherever the transparent veins crossed before it the light turned glowing crimson as it shone through the blood. The fluid ran faster where the brilliance touched it, bubbles racing through the tubes. The thing might be heart and brain alike, an inward lamp burning in the broken shelter of the android chest.

  Bradley did not even pause to reason. What he did was pure reflex. The incredible sight paralyzed the policeman for that one crucial second, but it galvanized Bradley to action.

  He lunged forward, hands outstretched, and with one circling smash of his fist he struck the shining thing from its cradle.

  There was an unbelievable instant when he saw his own hand deep in the hollow chest of the machine, saw the reflections of his blow moving in miniature in the polished ribs, saw his knuckles bathed in the tiny crimson glow of that inner light shining through transparent veins.

  And then the light went out.

  There was a crackle like crystal shattering. There was a sound more felt along the nerves than heard, of high, rapid humming that droned and ceased. And Arthur Court was no longer either man or android. He was not even machine.

  The man-shaped thing in man’s clothing pitched forward all in one piece, like metal moving, and fell solidly to the carpet, an effigy that could never conceivably have breathed or lived or spoken . . .

  Bradley got shakily to his feet. The policeman still sprawled on the floor, Staring, making no move to rise. The face that had been so ruddy was grey-white, and the colorless mouth opened and closed soundlessly, trying in vain to put the incredible into words. Bradley wanted insanely to laugh. Not even the pure human organism, he thought, functioned very efficiently in the face of shock like fids.

  It was Wallinger who moved first. Bradley had one glimpse of the physicist’s face, drained of all color, lined and rigid with horror. But the man was moving capably enough. At least, his limbs obeyed him. He circled Bradley with scarcely a glance, skirted the collapsed metal thing on the floor, and bent above the policeman . . .

  He lifted one arm sharply, bent at the elbow, and struck the officer a hard, expert blow with the edge of his palm. The man collapsed without a sound.

  Above him, Wallinger stared into Bradley’s eyes.

  “You’re—on their side?” Bradley forced the words out painfully, wondering why they came in a whisper. He did not dare take his eyes from Wallinger’s, but his mind had stopped functioning altogether and he scarcely knew why he stared, or why this thundering of sudden terror in his chest made breathing so hard. “You’re working with—them?”

  Wallinger straightened slowly, letting the blue-coated body slide to the floor. His gaze broke from Bradley’s and he looked across the room toward the hall door. With a great effort Bradley followed the look.

  The children still watched. Without alarm, interested, not comprehending, they watched as they might have watched a film at the neighborhood movie.

  “Sue—Jerry—upstairs!” Wallinger’s voice was firm, almost normal. “Move! And shut the door behind you.”

  The sound of its closing seemed to release some of the tension in the man, for he let his breath out a little and his shoulders sagged. He met Bradley’s eyes, grimaced, started to speak, and then thought better of it.

  “Tell me!” Bradley’s voice was stronger, insistence growing in it now. “Which side are you on?”

  Wallinger did not want to answer. When he spoke, it was indirectly.

  “It’s not on record, Bradley,” he said, almost with diffidence, “but I think you ought to know—the children aren’t mine.” “Not—”

  “I adopted them.”

  “But—but then—” There was no need to finish the protest. Bradley had chosen this man for his confidences from the first, chiefly because he could be sure that here was one influential person of proved humanity—the father of other humans. No sterile machine.

  Wallinger shrugged gently. He glanced down at the heavily breathing man at his feet.

  “I had to do that,” he said. “Now I’ll have to think of some way to make him believe he dreamed all this. I hate to do it, but I can’t think of any other way right now except—” He glanced at his desk. “Maybe this.”

  There was a bottle of whiskey in the top drawer. Moving with deliberate haste, he opened it, poured two generous portions into little metal cups from the same drawer, and then deliberately upended the bottle above the groaning policeman’s chest.

  Bradley reached for a cup, holding it in both hands to steady his shaking. The strong, burning liquid stuck in his throat for a moment, then spread downward with a grateful, soothing warmth.

  “The story mustn’t get out, you know,” Wallinger said above his own cup.

  “But I don’t—you mean you knew, all along? Wallinger, what are you?”

  “The story mustn’t get out,” Wallinger went on calmly, ignoring the question. “Of course I knew. But we’ve got to keep it quiet.”

  “Are you on their side or ours?” Bradley’s throat felt raw with the harshness of his voice. “Are you a man or—or—”

  “If they find out how much we know about them, don’t you suppose they’ll act? Somehow we’ve got to dispose of the Court mechanism, in a way they won’t be able to trace. I’m sorry for this officer here, but he’ll have to think he was drunk and dreamed what we all saw. I tell you, Bradley, we don’t dare let them suspect we know!” Bradley let his emptied cup fall to the carpet. He walked forward six deliberate steps and put his hands heavily on Wallinger’s shoulders. The flesh felt like flesh; the bone beneath was firm and hard. It could be bone—or steel. You couldn’t tell by looking at them. But surely you could tell by the way they behaved, by their reactions, by their thinking. By the things they put first in value—

  “The children!” Bradley said urgently. “No—machine—would think first of children the way you do. Would it, Wallinger? Even though they aren’t yours, you put them first. Why did you tell me they weren’t yours? Did you mean—what did you mean, Wallinger? How do you really feel about those children?”

  Wallinger smiled. His voice was mild and amused.

  “ ‘Hath not an android eyes?’ ” he paraphrased with gentle irony. “ ‘Hath not an android hands—senses—affections? If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ ”

  Bradley let his grip fall. He stepped back, staring as if he could pierce the too-perfect illusion of flesh and see whether bone or steel lay behind that gently smiling face.

  “There was one android made,” Wallinger said, “in the perfect replica of the human. Everything that went into its mental and physical make-up was as close as their finest arts could come to human thinking.” He paused, grimaced. “Well,” he said, “they came too close. They succeeded. I—I’m rather afraid they made—a man.”

  “You?”

  Wallinger smiled.

  “I don’t believe it,” Bradley told him wildly. “It isn’t possible.”

  Wallinger gave him a speculative look. Then he opened another drawer, fumbled in it and pulled out a penknife. He flicked the blade open and with almost the same gesture drew its edge across the back of his hand.

  Bradley caught his breath. He didn’t want to look, but he could not stop himself.

 
Wallinger, still smiling, held out his arm.

  “I can stop the bleeding, you see,” he said. “That’s how Court kept from giving his injury away, at first. We can always control that, if necessary.”

  There was no blood. The edges of the synthetic skin were clean and smooth as pale rubber, and beneath them steel tendons moved, transparant tubes as fine as hairs pulsed with bubbling red liquid. It was a hand of living metal. It was an android’s hand.

  “Satisfied?” Wallinger withdrew his arm. With the other hand he smoothed the cut flesh together. It sealed like wax and was whole again as Bradley still gasped his incredulous protest.

  “Here, you’d better have another drink,” Wallinger’s amused voice seemed to be saying from a long way off, above the ringing in his ears.

  “But—why didn’t you tell me? Are you sure they don’t suspect? Can we really get away with this—with destroying Court? I don’t understand, Wallinger! If you’re really an android, and working against androids—what are we going to do? There must be ways they have to check up on what happens to every separate one. What about Court? Wallinger, if this is all true, why didn’t you help me against Court? You could have—”

  “Hold on! One question at a time!” Wallinger’s voice broke into the almost hysterical babble of Bradley’s released tension. “First, about Court. I couldn’t work against him, Bradley. I’m a very imperfect mechanism myself, considering what I was made for, and they’ll destroy me if they find out what I’m about to do—but there are rules even I have to follow. They’re built in. I can’t injure another android. I can’t. That’s the way we’re made. I couldn’t any more than you could stop your blood from flowing if you were cut. I may be an imperfect machine, but I’m not that imperfect.”

  “Then what shall we do? Why not call the police—the newspapers—”

  “No! Don’t talk like a fool. Once the androids know their secret’s out, don’t you think they’ll strike hard and fast? They’ve got their plans all laid. Don’t make any mistake about that. Our only hope’s to work in the dark until we have plans too.”