Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  But mostly the crowd fell silent and melted miraculously off the streets as the Isiers passed with their captives. Sawyer met many grave, quiet gazes along the way, sympathy offered helplessly by the humble folk who could no more than pity the captives and hope fervently to be spared themselves. Once, from a high window, someone threw a spotted purple fruit that thumped against the black-facing mask of the Isier just before Sawyer. The man turned quickly, marked the window with a serene eye, and went on. Sawyer felt a cold chill down his back.

  Just as they reached the entry to the street where the Temple stood a solemn roll of thunder shook the city and a slanting shower of rain swept across the rooftops, colored crimson by the sunset. Windows slammed against it, doors banged, women called anxiously and children answered. It was an emptied street that the captives left as they reached the Temple gates, with a shower of blood-red rain falling over it.

  The gates were like glass, or ice, and soared to a mighty arch almost gothic in its intricacy of mounting and interlacing tracery, all colorless in itself but glowing ominously now with the red light of evening. A curtain of copper mesh hung in tremendous folds inside the whole gate, closing it from the street.

  The party halted. The foremost Isier pursed his thin, curved lips and whistled like a flute, with a woodwind tremolo, very clear and sweet. Afterward they stood waiting in the rain.

  Just as the copper curtain began to quiver and part, a disturbance began at the mouth of an alley at Sawyer’s elbow. He could not see very clearly into it because of the slanting light and the rain, but there was a sudden rabble of men and animals rushing toward them, in a tumult of shouting and whinnying. Cartwheels rumbled noisily between the reverberating walls, and all the noises multiplied with echoes.

  As nearly as Sawyer could tell, several carts loaded high with something that looked and smelled very like wet raw wool were hurtling toward them behind wildly running horses, little shaggy beasts incongruously spotted like leopards. In the foremost cart rode a plump elderly man in the apron-like tunic of a street vendor. His feet were braced on the cart’s edge, and he bent forward to lash the leopard-spotted ponies to even greater speed, his thin fringe of white whiskers streaming in the wind.

  Behind him rumbled other carts, men shouting and running at top speed to keep pace. And behind them men shouted and dogs barked, while windows flew open to let interested heads pop out. There was complete bedlam quite suddenly, between the Isier’s whistle and the first quiver of the gate curtain.

  THEN the whole noisy rabble was upon them. The excited little horses plunged kicking and snorting through the column waiting before the Temple. Every dog within earshot had already begun to yap earsplittingly, the horses whinnied with a sound almost like a human scream, and the shouting men burst out among the careening carts, raining blows upon the horses, kicking at the dogs which had sprung up so magically underfoot.

  Even the lordly Isiers gave way before this onslaught. Sawyer felt his elbow gripped in an iron clasp and let himself be pulled sidewise against the wall of the nearest house. The Isiers were shouting too now, in deep, bell-like roars of anger and command. A horse kicked frantically. Its cart overturned with a tremendous clatter, and great wool-bales rolled heavily in the wet street.

  By sheer chance, in all this tumult, Sawyer caught Klai’s eye. Her face was electrified with excitement and dawning hope. She leaned forward as far as she could in the grip of her captor, scanning the faces of the running men. Sawyer saw the first glow of hope beginning to dim. He thought incongruously of the unhappy Lise Bolkonskaya with her inadequate upper lip and her seduisante charms, and then lurched heavily against the grip of the Isier behind him.

  The lurch became a genuine skid as his foot struck a puddle of crimson rain on the pavement. The Isier staggered, trying to hold him up. Sawyer jerked the Isier a little forward in an apparent attempt to regain balance, caught the tall creature across his hip as they fell together, and slid with him full-tilt into the Isier who held Klai.

  It was the chance she had been waiting. With one tremendous wriggle, like a rabbit deftly skinning itself in a single motion, she writhed out of her fur-lined coat and with an agile bound was at the side of the foremost cart as it thundered past. The plump old man shouted “Klai!” and bent to sweep her up. With a leap and a wriggle over the sideboard she made her goal, and the cart thundered on triumphantly, never slackening speed. Grandpa. Sawyer thought, as the crowd of drivers, shouting with a note of triumph now, closed in after her.

  All hope of following them failed as a hand like iron closed on Sawyer’s shoulder. He gave a mental shrug and scrambled to his feet. The tumult swept away up another alley and died as if by magic. Two of the Isier looped up their ropes and set off at a long, silent pace after the vanished uproar. A few of the more hysterical dogs followed down the alley, shrilling, but most of them were quiet now, and the whole episode might well have been a dream.

  Except for one thing, Sawyer thought. Klai’s empty coat, its furry hood drooping forward over its collapsed chest with a pathetic look of dejection, still dangling from the hands of the surprised Isier who had held her. Sawyer was aware of a sharp stab of nostalgia, seeing that familiar garment tenantless, the girl as gone as if she had never existed, swallowed up in a city that was both hers and utterly strange to her.

  It had all happened so quickly that the curtain was still parting slowly in the center and drawing back while the uproar faded into stillness. Inside the flickering mesh a glassy Corridor stretched. Sawyer’s captor pushed him forward under the faintly crackling copper folds. He glanced back at Klai’s abandoned coat, lying face down in the street in an attitude of despair. Then the curtains swept shut again and all sound from the outer world ended abruptly.

  ALPER sat on a low ledge of glass in a bare glass cell and stared at Sawyer. Sawyer sat on the floor in the opposite corner, hugged his knees and stared at Alper.

  Alper said, “You’re a fool.”

  Sawyer paid no attention.

  “You helped her escape,” Alper pursued. “That was idiotic of you. We’ll probably both suffer for it.”

  Sawyer let his gaze rove once more around the bare, smooth walls, translucent and faintly green, only to return to Alper’s face without encountering anything worth lingering on in the journey. There was probably a door in the wall. They had entered by a door. But it had sealed itself shut so thoroughly as to be quite invisible now. Light came through an unseen source, high up near one corner of the cell.

  “I don’t like this either,” he said slowly. “Not one bit. I want out just as much as you do. It looks to me as though we’re both in the same boat now.”

  “Boat!” Alper said. “World! This isn’t Earth. I don’t understand any—”

  “You probably understand more about it than I do. If we intend to try to make any plans, you’d better tell me what you know. About Nethe, for example. Didn’t she give you any hint that this—this world existed?”

  “No,” Alper said sullenly. “She came to me at Fortuna, just as you saw her. Shadowy. I thought I was dreaming at first. But when she touched me with her closed fist and I felt energy beginning to pour through me—” He glanced in triumph at the Firebird in his hand—“after that, I gave her anything she wanted.”

  “Uranium ore?”

  “Yes. She didn’t want uranium mined out and taken away, and that’s why I was trying to close the mine, of course. But I had no idea of—all this.”

  “We’d better start getting used to it,” Sawyer said. “And we’ll have a better chance working together than as enemies. So how about a truce? Obviously I can’t send a report back to Toronto now. We may be here for quite a while.”

  Alper nodded grudgingly.

  “Fine,” Sawyer said. “Then the first thing is to take this transceiver off my head.”

  “No,” Alper said.

  “Why not? Controlling me won’t help you a bit right now, will it?”

  “It might stop you from trying to
kill me,” Alper said, his grey eyes wary with suspicion. “I know what I’d do in your shoes, young man.”

  “You’re a fool,” Sawyer observed.

  Alper thought for a time.

  “All right,” he said. “A truce might be the best thing now. Say we do work together, from now on. But the transceiver stays on your head—as insurance. Now. You spoke about making plans. What, for example?”

  Sawyer wrapped his arms around his knees again.

  “The only practical one I can suggest, at present,” he said sourly, “is waiting.”

  VI

  THEY had been sitting silent for about ten minutes, exchanging occasional looks of dislike, when a curious humming sound began to be heard from a corner of the cell opposite to the door by which they had entered. Both turned to look. Low down in the corner a square of the wall about three feet across had begun to shimmer violently. As they watched, the surface of the square became translucent, showed for a moment or two a complex hexagonal crystalline pattern, and then broke up entirely into a pale green vapor which puffed outward into the cell with a burst of quick heat that brought sweat to their foreheads.

  The heat dissipated rapidly. The air was hazy with green vapor, and the square in the wall stood open and empty. Like the dry-ice of solid carbon dioxide, the molecules of the substance making up the wall had apparently been moved to evaporate abruptly without the need of melting into liquid form. The wall had altered in form but not in substance, and the vapor which had in its solid condition been impermeable now hung like a green fog in the air, leaving an exit open.

  A supercilious, glass-crowned Isier head now appeared through the opening and regarded them with complete objectivity, as a human might glance into a chicken-coop and observe the inmates. Even that god-like brow, however, was sweating beneath the crown. The heat which had vaporized the wall must have been considerable.

  The large, half-lidded eyes of the Isier considered Sawyer coldly, moved to Alper, summed him up in a glance and apparently decided that he was the man the Isier had come to find, for without entering the cell any farther, the demigod brought a long non-human hand into sight and tossed into Alper’s lap a package about ten inches square. It was black, and it shimmered dazzlingly.

  Before anyone could move or speak the Isier head withdrew, supercilious to the last. For an instant the opening in the wall stood empty. Then a gust of intense cold soughed through it into the cell. All the molecules of the green vapor, which had been rioting energetically in the heat, now obeyed the laws of their kind by condensing with a rapidity unknown upon Earth. In the blink of an eye the vapor had been sucked backward into the emptiness whence it had come, the air was clear again and the wall unbroken.

  Alper touched the package on his knee gingerly. He gave Sawyer a suspicious glance. The package solved his problem at this point by collapsing suddenly from its solidly compact cube into a limp, unfolding bundle of shimmering black cloth, so totally black that the eye could not fix upon it, but slid repeatedly away for lack of anything to focus on. The bundle had been wrapped, apparently, not in a confining paper or carton, but in a little cubical force-field of its own. When this unique wrapping let go, something like a cloak of remarkable volume for the original size of the bundle spilled over Alper’s knees and onto the floor. Out of its unfolding center a little cone of white paper popped with a brisk snap, and unfolded itself noisily, lying flat.

  Alper took it up by its extreme corners. There was writing on the white surface. Alper’s eyes moved rapidly down the lines. Then a look of triumph lighted his face. He laughed in a sudden bark of elation and glanced up at Sawyer, his hand moving in the same instant to his pocket . . .

  Thunder and lightning. Down between the lobes of his brain Sawyer felt jagged sheets of blindness flashing. His own blood-beat, amplified to a volume of noise like the crash of doom, blanked out everything before him.

  But this time, he was ready for it. Almost ready—as ready as any man could be for the crack of Thor’s hammer on his bare brain. He saw Alper’s hand move. He read aright the expression on Alper’s face in the instant before the motion started. And the decision which had been crystallizing in his mind ever since the last time Alper had used the transceiver took over his muscles and his nerves without any need for further thought.

  Before the thunder split his skull apart he was off the floor; he was in midair when the lightning struck. And Alper’s attention was partially distracted by the message in his hand and the mystifying cascade of blackness across his knees. If it was a half-unconscious man who struck him in that long leap across the cell, it was still a heavy and a desperate man.

  The impact knocked Alper sidewise. He flung up both startled hands to fend Sawyer off, and with the release of contact in his pocket, the thunder ceased abruptly in Sawyer’s head.

  It was no fault of Sawyer’s that he did not kill the man. He meant to. As Alper struggled up to meet the attack Sawyer knocked him sidewise with an edge-of-the-hand blow meant for the side of Alper’s neck. Luckily for Alper it struck him across the cheek-bone instead as he rose. Sawyer’s other hand sank into his belly, doubling him forward, and Sawyer’s lifted knee smashed him squarely In the face.

  SAWYER bent over the writhing body on the floor, hand lifted for the sidewise crack across the base of the brain that would certainly finish him. And then caution returned in a faint glimmer of warning. If Alper died, would the transceiver explode in his own head?

  Carefully, he clipped Alper on the jaw. And once again. He paused, watching, making sure that Alper was unconscious. Then with rough hands he turned the man over and reached into that fatal coat pocket from which the thunder in his brain had been triggered. He found a small flat case the size of a wristwatch. Very cautiously he put a featherweight of pressure on it. An ominous humming sounded in his head as his own blood and breath roared loud in the cavities of his skull.

  He leaned forward, releasing his finger’s pressure. His ear was close to the coat pocket.

  “Alper,” he said softly. “Alper?”

  From the little case, a thin voice that was his own echoed the name. So it was a radio receiver, too. Alper had not lied about that. The multi-purpose transceiver on his own head was also a microphone that could betray him to Alper no matter how far away he might go.

  He drew a deep breath and pulled the case out of Alper’s pocket. It came easily. It was not attached by any visible or tangible cord. But as it left the damping influence of Alper’s body-field the low humming began again, and the farther it was removed the louder the humming grew. Sawyer stepped back two paces and the humming became low thunder. He shook his head violently and stepped back another pace.

  Then he leaped blindly for Alper’s body and thrust the case back into the pocket it had come from. The violence in his head ceased as softly as if it had never been.

  So he was in a complete dilemma. He could not endure the coercion of the transceiver any longer, and he could not endure the only means of stopping it. He flexed his hand eagerly and looked down at the helpless form of his tormenter, whom he dared not kill, for fear of splitting his own brain apart.

  Alper had said there was a shut-off switch in the control case. He had added that Houdini couldn’t locate it and only a differential analyzer could find the combination. Sawyer gingerly reached into Alper’s pocket again and drew out the flat metal case.

  Perhaps the secret of the shut-off switch’s camouflage was in its simplicity. Or perhaps that was the one point on which Alper had lied, Sawyer thought—perhaps there was no shut-off switch. He studied the case carefully. Even with all the time in the world, he wondered if he would be able to locate the switch and find the combination—if it existed.

  Ten minutes later, convinced of failure, he put the case back in Alper’s pocket and turned to the note that had touched off Alper’s attack on him.

  It rustled crisply between his fingers. It was smooth and white, and the writing upon it was ordinary English in a curiously lo
oping hand, traced as if by fingers that had not learned English script until lately. It was, however, perfectly coherent.

  “Alper: I will save you if I can. I need your help. I want the Firebird you stole. You want to live. We can make a fair trade if you do exactly as I tell you. Here is a black cloak such as the Temple’s servants wear on private errands for the Goddess. Within limits it should make you moderately invisible after dark. You can open the wall by pressing one of the studs along the hem of the cloak against any spot that glows when the stud approaches it. Let go of the stud as soon as it adheres or you will bum your fingers. When the hood covers your head you will hear a humming signal that will guide you to me if you keep it constant as you walk. Stay in the shadows, speak to no one and answer no questions. You don’t need to, for you will be wearing the Goddess’s robe.”

  The last paragraph was underlined heavily. “I can do nothing for you unless this is kept secret. Make sure that the man with you is dead before you go. The Firebird will give you enough energy to kill him. But open the Firebird only when you and the other Earthman are alone, or it will be taken from you by the Isier guards; and do not leave it open longer than is necessary to gain the energy you need.”

  The signature at the end of this businesslike message was simply, “Nethe.”

  SAWYER looked down at Alper and with a strong effort controlled the new impulse to kill him. He stopped and shook out the cloak. The thing was light and fine and of a smoothness and blackness so complete that even held this close he could not persuade his gaze to focus clearly on it.

  He had no idea what lay outside or what Nethe’s real plans were, but anything seemed preferable to helplessness and captivity here. The only drawback was that no matter where he went or how successful he might be in winning his way to comparative freedom, he would have won nothing worth having if Alper could split his skull wide open whenever the whim seized him.