Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Two—” Alper said.

  Sawyer grinned a fierce, mindless grimace, and without warning, even to himself, found himself launching at Alper’s thick throat.

  The thunder cracked his head wide open and lightning wiped the room out of existence. The last thing he saw was the floor pitching upward toward him.

  When he could see again, Alper was half a dozen feet away, levering himself painfully toward his cane, breathing hard and watching Sawyer with bright, still eyes under the heavy lids.

  “All right,” Alper said. “You’re quite a boy. Sawyer. I’ll get the cane myself. Sit up. You’re all right. I haven’t damaged you permanently—yet. Get up and take a chair, my boy. You and I have some talking to do. And first of all, to be on the safe side, there’s a matter of evidence that I intend to destroy.” He glanced around the room. “That metal wastebasket should do nicely to burn a film. So—give me that film, Sawyer.” Sawyer said painfully, “Come and get it, you—”

  Alper smiled.

  A FEW final wisps of smoke rose from the waste-basket and faded. Sawyer, breathing a little hard, leaned back in his chair and stared at the old man. Curiously, now that the thunder had passed he felt no ill effects. He seemed perfectly normal. But his brain cringed at the thought of what Alper had just done to him—could do to him again, apparently at will. What was Alper saying now?

  “You had better understand first exactly what has happened to you. Afterward you’ll realize that you are going to do precisely as I say from now on, or you will die. I’m willing to go a long way with you, because you’re a good man. You’re better than I expected. I admire you. I respect you. But I’ll kill you if I have to. Is that clear?”

  “No,” Sawyer said, lifting a tentative hand toward his head. “Do you really expect to get away with this?”

  “I do,” Alper said. “Go ahead, try to remove that transceiver. You can’t without killing yourself. There are tantalum probes making contact with your brain itself, through the bregma—the opening at the vault that closes as a man ages. Luckily, you’re still young enough to have a vestige of the fontanel still open. Luckily for me.”

  Sawyer lowered his investigatory hand. He still felt that if he could kill Alper he could stop the thunder, or at least die trying. But information might show him a better way, and Alper seemed quite willing to talk.

  “Maybe I couldn’t remove this thing,” Sawyer said, “but I could get it removed.”

  “Possibly,” Alper said. “There’s a contact compression that will eventually form a semi-permanent ceramic-to-bone bonding, of course. But at present the tantalum probes as a nerve-contact serve the purpose. It’s an amazing little device, isn’t it?”

  “Fascinating,” Sawyer said grimly. “Who did you steal it from?”

  Alper chuckled.

  “I’m not a bad technician myself,” he said. “Though I admit the original design wasn’t my idea. I did make some improvements. I saw possibilities the inventor didn’t. A miniature electrostrictive device like this—a transducer, let us say, which converts sound pressure to electric signals and back again—oh, I could see the possibilities very easily. It was simply a matter of applying the properties of light to the principles of sound. Sound, like light, can reflect, and can be amplified . . . Yes, my young friend—down through the bregma, into the cavities of your skull, reaches that transceiver to pick up sounds your senses are too dull to catch, and amplify them and reflect them back directly into the temporal lobe, the auditory area. And other brain-centers are involved too, as the wave-motions pass through motor and somesthetic areas. Implicit in your skull is the sound of the trumpets that shattered the walls of Jericho!”

  He began to laugh. “You know what high frequency ultrasonics can do, don’t you? Shatter glass. Burn wood. Shake a human mind apart, Mr. Sawyer! And you might also consider the wave-motions of the brain—the alpha and kappa waves—which I believe the transceiver can receive and amplify.

  “The beauty of it is, you can’t get away from it. It’s in you, inherent in your blood and breath and thoughts. If you could stop it, you’d die. And if you can’t stop it—you die. But no one else can hear it. It’s subjective. And so is madness, my boy. This is a very special and literal version of madness. So I think, in the end, you’ll do as I ask.”

  HE WATCHED Sawyer not without sympathy, smiling as he saw the younger man’s hands close in a tight, primitive clench.

  “One other thing,” he said quickly. “No doubt you would like to kill me. Don’t. It would solve nothing. You see, your body-field has a damping effect on the transceiver’s operation, which I can alter by the—ah—volume control of this.” He half drew from his pocket a small, flat metal case and thrust it back out of sight immediately. “If you tried to remove the transceiver, the farther it’s moved from your body-field, the less the damping effect, and that would soon kill you. My body-field provides a supplementary damper, but it takes the combined effects of both fields to keep he acoustic level of the transceiver below your threshold of safety. So if you took this control device from me—or if I died—you would die in either case. We would meet in Hell in no time. Out of breath, startled, I expect, but mutual murderers, and not the devil himself could convict either of us of the other’s death, they would happen so nearly at the same time.”

  The bloodhound smile was genial.

  “It’s a multi-purpose device, too. It also is clever enough to act as a microphone—and here is the receiver.” He patted his pocket. “It isn’t keyed to pick up the internalized sounds you find so uncomfortable; I made sure of that. Cut it does report to me, quite accurately, spoken conversations. So when you go down into the mine with Klai Ford soon and get the rest of the film she’s planted down there, I’ll be able to keep track of exactly what’s happening. I don’t expect there’ll be anything on the film this time. Klai was miraculously lucky.” He nodded at the waste-basket with its charred ashes.

  “So,” he said, with an air of finality, “you’ll give me any further evidence you happen to run across. Meanwhile, you’ll report by radio to headquarters that this—this affair seems to be a false alarm. As for Klai, the safest thing she could do is leave Fortuna. If we can prove she has hallucinations—delusions of persecution—a year’s rest at some private sanitarium might be the best way to eliminate the risk of Nethe’s killing her. And Nethe will, if Klai persists in sticking her head in the lion’s mouth. Quite impersonally. Without malice. Nethe’s disinterest in ordinary human problems is—awkward, sometimes.”

  “Who is she?” Sawyer asked.

  Alper paused, frowned a little, and shook his head slowly, as though he were as puzzled as Sawyer.

  “No questions,” he said. “Action, now. I have the whip hand, and I intend to use it. If you got away from me, you might find a way to remove the transceiver from your head—what man has made, man can unmake, I suppose. But I warn you, Sawyer, that if you get out of my sight without permission, I can and will kill you. You can never get out of my hearing, with your—your built-in microphone. Now my energy’s low. I used up too much of it, and I’ve got to get more. That means closing the mine, as Nethe wishes. I’ve got to keep my part of the bargain before she’ll keep hers. So—”

  His cool gaze studied Sawyer calculatingly.

  “You’re a young man,” he said. “You want to live, don’t you? Well, I repeat my previous offer. I expect you to say no. But my offer of a job for life, working for me, holds good at any time you care to accept it. What have you to say now, young man?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “I was sent up here to do a job,” Sawyer said quietly. “Maybe I’ve failed. I’ve had failures before. Every man has.”

  “Not every man,” Alper said, with a sudden flash of curious pride.

  SAWYER shrugged slightly. “Okay,” he said. “Put it this way. I don’t mind failing when a job’s too big for me. But if that happens, I figure it’s up to me to pass along the job to
somebody good enough to handle it. Right now the Royal Commission’s depending on me to take care of what looked like a routine check-up. It isn’t routine. And maybe I’ve already failed. But if I have, it’s my responsibility to notify the Commissioner—”

  “I’d be fascinated to know just how you intend to go about that little matter without getting yourself killed,” Alper said, with an unpleasant grin. “If you’re sensible, you could collect two salaries—and the one I’d pay you would be considerably more than what you earn from the Commission.”

  “It would have to be a damned high salary,” Sawyer said, “to compensate for this—headgear!” He touched his head lightly.

  “I can remove it,” Alper said.

  He waited for Sawyer’s reaction, seemed disappointed, and went on;

  “I would even feel safe in removing it, under certain circumstances. Who would believe your story? But first, I’d make perfectly certain that you intended to remain cooperative.”

  Sawyer said thoughtfully, “How could you remove the transceiver? You said it had a ceramic-bone seal to my skull, didn’t you?”

  “Not yet—not for weeks. Until then, I can turn off the power entirely, and if I do that—and only if I do that—can you lift the transceiver from your head without committing suicide. Yes, I can turn off the power. There is a way. The secret is here, in the control case in my pocket—but I spent more time devising that shut-off switch than I spent on the rest of the work combined. So don’t waste time hoping you could find the way to turn off the power-switch, by examining my control case. Houdini couldn’t find the way, and it would take a differential analyzer to find the—ah—combination. So I think you understand that you’ll do what I tell you. Yes, you’ll do that, my boy,” and here Alper smiled ferociously, “or you’ll die.”

  They were looking at each other with a measuring stare, each waiting for the other to make a definitive move, when from outside a sudden earsplitting din made the windows rattle.

  Both men wheeled toward the sound. A siren screamed its high, shuddering wail for three piercing beats and then subsided. A voice, amplified to hollow impersonality, spoke tremendously through the darkness of Fortuna’s noon.

  “Trouble in Level Eight!” the voice informed the little city and the cold, still night of the Pole. “Trouble in Level Eight!”

  Alper turned snarling to the younger man.

  “The little fool!” he said. “She went down! After all my warnings, Klai went down, and now Nethe’s got her!”

  III

  LIKE a man in a dream, Sawyer followed Alper’s stumping, fur-swathed figure through the turmoil of Fortuna toward the mine. In the distance he could see the bare, windswept ice of Little Slave Lake giving back reflections from the eternally lighted town. Fortuna was set down like a small medallion of humanity on the vast curve of the globe, clasped to it as the transceiver was clasped to Sawyer’s skull, and as alien to the rock as the transceiver to the head.

  They stumbled and slipped on icy planks as they made their way toward the mine. Fortuna had no streets. Plank steps and runways linked the buildings, which were anchored tight to the bedrock of the planet itself, for there was no soil here. Nothing grew except Fortuna. No roads led into it. The silence of the world’s end seemed to close it in. Whenever human noises faltered here, the vast silence of the Barrens closed over them like water.

  Slipping on ice, breathing the dry, incredible cold, Sawyer followed the stumping Alper. Out of bunk houses, offices, shack-like private homes, curious crowds were flocking. Alper thrust them aside, answering no questions. They passed the lighted commissary, the cookhouse, the powerhouse, hearing the huge diesels that generated the lifeblood of Fortuna, lighted the houses, drove the mine machinery, pumped the waters of Little Slave Lake continually and forever out of the shafts where continually and forever they seeped.

  They passed the last of the ugly, utilitarian buildings which two hundred people needed for their encysted life above the pitchblende veins. And they came at last to the mouth of the great mine.

  Alper shouldered through the excited knot around the entrance. The voice had ceased to echo its alarm-signal from amplifiers spaced under eaves all along the streets, but other voices had taken it up now, a babble of them, excitedly predicting disaster.

  “The ghosts are loose!” Sawyer heard one miner say to another. “Down in Eight they’re busting through the walls!”

  “Miss Ford’s down there,” someone else volunteered as Alper passed. “The ghosts have got Miss Ford!”

  Alper shrugged them off. He had one purpose now and one only, and his strength was visibly lagging. Sawyer, following him into the lift, thought with grim amusement that at any rate, for the moment, they had one goal in common—neither wanted Klai Ford to die.

  There was always pandemonium underground at Fortuna. The noise of drills, carts, automatic muckers never ceased. Men’s voices echoed and reechoed endlessly. It was a disorderly pandemonium now. All work seemed to have come to a full stop, and shouts from below made hollow reverberations that rebounded among the shafts. The lift passed opening after opening that swarmed with grimy faces with lights burning above every forehead. Abandoned drills and shovels leaned against the walls where shining ribbons of pitchblende showed the marks of labor, steel-hard stuff, heavy as lead and rich with uranium as a pudding with plums. Rich, that is, Sawyer thought, unless the ghosts have been at it . . .

  “They’re swarming like bees in Level Eight!” someone called warningly as the descending men passed. Alper only grunted. He had taken Sawyer’s arm as they stepped into the elevator, and now his weight was heavy against the younger man. As the mechanism ground toward a halt, he muttered thickly, his breath coming in uneven gusts:

  “Don’t—try anything. I warn you, Sawyer. Got to help me. “Used up too much back there. My last energy—”

  “What you were saving to put this gimmick on Miss Ford?” Sawyer asked. “You made a mistake, Alper. If any harm comes to her, the government’s going to ask some pretty close questions. Killing me won’t help. It won’t save you.”

  “Let me handle this,” Alper wheezed. “Do as you’re told. Come on.”

  THEY stepped out into the mouth of A Level Eight, into a cluster of pale, excited men. Voices echoed dully here and the air felt thick and heavy, pressing upon the ears. Sawyer noticed an unexpected smell of—ozone?

  “She went in there,” one of the men at the shaft-mouth said, turning his helmet-light toward them as the two stepped out of the lift, Alper’s heavy ( weight sagging on Sawyer’s arm. “Here’s Joe, Mr. Alper. He was with her.”

  “What happened?” Sawyer asked crisply. The miners’ troubled, frightened faces swung round toward him, their lights moving in flickers across the wet walls. One of them stepped forward.

  “Miss Ford had Eddie and me come down with her,” he said. “She waited right here. Nobody else was around. We don’t work Level Eight any more, because—well, we don’t work it. Miss Ford sent Eddie in to get a camera she wanted.”

  A murmur from behind him made everyone look up. The tunnel twisted out of sight into the rock ten feet away. From beyond the bend, a faint flicker of light showed, faded, showed again. The air seemed to ring soundlessly, as if bells were swinging far away, sending out sound-waves that compressed the inner ear. The smell of ozone grew stronger.

  “Go on,” Alper grunted, shuffling forward. “Go on, I’m listening.” The miners made way for him. Sawyer let the grip on his arm pull him on. He was very alert, every sense straining for impressions.

  “Eddie got just around that bend, out of sight,” the miner told them. “Excuse me, Mr. Alper—I don’t feel like coming any farther.” He stood back stubbornly. “I’ll finish in a minute. There isn’t much to tell. Eddie started yelling. Then the ghosts came—Anyhow, we saw those lights begin to flash and Eddie yelled. Miss Ford said for me to come. She said we had to get the camera. We—well, she got ahead of me. And Eddie let out one awful scream and stopped
, and—Miss Ford was around the bend, and I—I came back fast to set off the alarm.” The man’s voice was guiltily defiant.

  “Did Miss Ford scream?” Sawyer asked.

  “No sir. Not a sound.”

  Alper grunted again and lurched forward, toward the darkness and the flickering of unearthly lights around the bend of the tunnel. It was very silent there. The underground had swallowed up Klai Ford and the man named Eddie, and only the flicker seemed alive in there now. The miners’ faces, scared and awed, watched the two men around the bend and out of sight. No one made a move to follow.

  “Sawyer!” Alper wheezed, leaning heavily against him as they made their slow way forward. “Let me handle this. Don’t make any moves on your own. I’ll stop you if I have to. Understand? I’ve got my hand on the control of the transceiver right this minute. One touch and I could kill you in your tracks. I think Nethe has got the girl. I want to keep her alive if I can, but—”

  He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. It was obvious that Nethe, with her mysterious energy-source, would survive if it came to a choice. Sawyer knew that the choice must not be left to Alper.

  They came to the first bend in the tunnel. A flicker of lights fled away from them between walls of shining rock around the next bend. Stubbornly Alper shuffled on, Sawyer supporting him. The smell of ozone was heady in the air . . .

  Then they saw the ghosts.

  A DEAD man lay prone on the wet floor of the tunnel just around the next bend. And swarming over his body, dancing, flickering, rising and falling in the air, a whirl of winged lights shimmered. It seemed to Sawyer that suddenly wide spaces had opened all around him. The indigo smell of ozone was sharp in his nostrils; he had a feeling of breathless delimitation, and an intangible wind roared soundlessly through the tunnel.

  The whirl of wings above the dead man were split flames, two by two, joined at the base in a V. Wheat-shaped, Klai had said. Like pale grain, dividing at the top into a fork of flickering light. The air seethed with them; flat, thin, dancing things shivering into fringes of light at the edges. They were beautiful. They were terrifying. They danced like vultures over the dead man, dipping, wheeling, with a dreadful eagerness stooping toward him and whirling high again. The whole tunnel dazzled with their motion.