Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Raoul told me to quit if he quit,” DeeDee said stubbornly.

  “You don’t have to do what St. Cyr tells you,” Erika said, hanging onto the struggling star.

  “Don’t I?” DeeDee asked, astonished. “Yes, I do. I always have.”

  “DeeDee,” Watt said frantically, “I’ll give you the finest contract on earth—a ten-year contract—look, here it is.” He tore out a well-creased document. “All you have to do is sign, and you can have anything you want. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “Oh, yes,” DeeDee said. “But Raoul wouldn’t like it.” She broke free from Erika.

  “Martin!” Watt told the playwright frantically, “Get St. Cyr back. Apologize to him. I don’t care how, but get him back! If you don’t, I—I’ll never give you your release.”

  Martin was observed to slump slightly—perhaps with hopelessness. Then, again, perhaps not.

  “I’m sorry,” DeeDee said. “I liked working for you, Tolliver. But I have to do what Raoul says, of course.” And she moved toward the window.

  Martin had slumped further down, till his knuckles quite brushed the rug. His angry little eyes, glowing with baffled rage, were fixed on DeeDee. Slowly his lips peeled back, exposing every tooth in his head.

  “You,” he said, in an ominous growl.

  DeeDee paused, but only briefly.

  THEN the enraged roar of a wild beast reverberated through the room. “You come back!” bellowed the infuriated Mammoth-Slayer, and with one agile bound sprang to the window, seized DeeDee and slung her under one arm. Wheeling, he glared jealously at the shrinking Watt and reached for Erika. In a trice he had the struggling forms of both girls captive, one under each arm. His wicked little eyes glanced from one to another. Then, playing no favorites, he bit each quickly on the ear.

  “Nick!” Erika cried. “How dare you!”

  “Mine,” Mammoth-Slayer informed her hoarsely.

  “You bet I am,” Erika said, “but that works both ways. Put down that hussy you’ve got under your other arm.”

  Mammoth-Slayer was observed to eye DeeDee doubtfully.

  “Well,” Erika said tartly, “make up your mind.”

  “Both,” said the uncivilized playwright. “Yes.”

  “No!” Erika said.

  “Yes,” DeeDee breathed in an entirely new tone. Limp as a dishrag, the lovely creature hung from Martin’s arm and gazed up at her captor with idolatrous admiration.

  “Oh, you hussy,” Erika said. “What about St. Cyr?”

  “Him,” DeeDee said scornfully. “He hasn’t got a thing, the sissy. I’ll never look at him again.” She turned her adoring gaze back to Martin.

  “Pah,” the latter grunted, tossing DeeDee into Watt’s lap. “Yours. Keep her.” He grinned approvingly at Erika. “Strong she. Better.”

  Both Watt and DeeDee remained motionless, staring at Martin.

  “You,” he said, thrusting a finger at DeeDee. “You stay with him. Ha?” He indicated Watt.

  DeeDee nodded in slavish adoration.

  “You sign contract?”

  Nod.

  Martin looked significantly into Watt’s eyes. He extended his hand.

  “The contract release,” Erika explained, upside-down. “Give it to him before he pulls your head off.”

  Slowly Watt pulled the contract release from his pocket and held it out. But Martin was already shambling toward the window. Erika reached back hastily and snatched the document.

  “That was a wonderful act,” she told Nick, as they reached the street. “Put me down now. We can find a cab some—”

  “No act,” Martin growled. “Real. Till tomorrow. After that—” He shrugged. “But tonight, Mammoth-Slayer.” He attempted to climb a palm tree, changed his mind, and shambled on, carrying the now pensive Erika. But it was not until a police car drove past that Erika screamed . . .

  “I’LL bail you out tomorrow,” Erika told Mammoth-Slayer, struggling between two large patrolmen.

  Her words were drowned in an infuriated bellow.

  Thereafter events blurred, to solidify again for the irate Mammoth-Slayer only when he was thrown in a cell, where he picked himself up with a threatening roar. “I kill!” he announced, seizing the bars.

  “Arrrgh!”

  “Two in one night,” said a bored voice, moving away outside. “Both in Bel-Air, too. Think they’re hopped up? We couldn’t get a coherent story out of either one.”

  The bars shook. An annoyed voice from one of the bunks said to shut up, and added that there had been already enough trouble from nincompoops without—here it paused, hesitated, and uttered a shrill, sharp, piercing cry.

  Silence prevailed, momentarily, in the cell-block as Mammoth-Slayer, son of the Great Hairy One, turned slowly to face Raoul St. Cyr.

  1953

  SATAN SENDS FLOWERS

  “Ladeez an’ gennulmen: in this corner, wearing red trunks and weighing one billion years, the champion of Evil, his Satanic majesty, Lucifer . . . the far corner, wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and Countess Mara tie, underdog challenger, James Fenwick. The purse: one human soul!”

  An old, old battle—one which has fascinated every writer from the monk and his parchment scroll to the young man next door with his electric typewriter. And whether the odds are set by the pulpit or the corner bookie, the final out come is forever in doubt!

  THE devil smiled uneasily at James Fenwick. “It’s very irregular,” he said. “I’m not sure—”

  “Do you want my soul or not?” James Fenwick demanded. “Naturally I do,” the devil said. “But I’ll have to think this over. Under the circumstances, I don’t see how I could collect.”

  “All I want is immortality,” Fenwick said with a pleased smile. “I wonder why no one has ever thought of this before. In my opinion it’s foolproof. Come, do you want to back out?”

  “Oh no,” the devil said hastily. “It’s just that—look here, Fenwick. I’m not sure you realize—immortality’s a long time, you know.”

  “Exactly. The question is, will it ever have an end. If it does, you collect my soul. If not—” Fenwick made an airy gesture. “I win,” he said.

  “Oh, it has an end,” the devil said, somewhat grimly. “It’s just that right now I’d rather not undertake such a long-term investment. You wouldn’t care for immortality, Fenwick. Believe me.” Fenwick said, “Ha.”

  “I don’t see why you’re so set on immortality,” the devil said a little peevishly, tapping the point of his tail on the carpet.

  “I’m not,” Fenwick told him. “Actually, it’s just a by-product. There happen to be quite a number of things I’d like to do without suffering the consequences, but—”

  “I could promise you that,” the devil put in eagerly.

  “But,” Fenwick said, lifting his hand for quiet, “the deal would obviously end right there. Played this way, I get not only an unlimited supply of immunities of all kinds, but I get immortality besides. Take it or leave it, my friend.”

  The devil rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the room, scowling at the carpet. Finally he looked up. “Very well,” he said briskly, “I accept.”

  “You do?” Fenwick was aware of a slight sinking feeling. Now that it actually came to the point, maybe . . . He looked uneasily toward the drawn blinds of his apartment. “How will you go about it?” he asked.

  “Biochemically,” the devil said. Now that he had made up his mind, he seemed quite confident. “And with quantum mechanics. Aside from the internal regenerative functions, some space-time alterations will have to be made. You’ll become independent of your external environment. Environment is often fatal.”

  “I’ll stay right here, though? Visible, tangible—no tricks?”

  “Tricks?” The devil looked wounded. “If there’s any trickery, it seems to me you’re the offender. No indeed, Fenwick. You’ll get value received for your investment. I promise that. You’ll become a closed system, like Achilles. Except for the heel. Th
ere will have to be a vulnerable point, you see.”

  “No,” Fenwick said quickly. “I won’t accept that.”

  “It can’t be helped, I’m afraid. You’ll be quite safe inside the closed system from anything outside. And there’ll be nothing inside except you. It is you. In a way this is in your own interest.” The devil’s tail lashed upon the carpet.

  Fenwick regarded it uneasily. “If you wish to put an end to your own life eventually,” the devil went on, “I can’t protect you against that. Consider, however, that in a few million years you may wish to die.”

  “That reminds me,” Fenwick said. “Tithonus. I’ll keep my youth, health, present appearance, all my faculties—”

  “Naturally, naturally. I’m not interested in tricking you over terms. What I had in mind was the possibility that boredom might set in.”

  “Are you bored?”

  “I have been, in my time,” the devil admitted.

  “You’re immortal?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why haven’t you killed yourself? Or couldn’t you?”

  “I could,” the devil said bleakly. “I did . . . Now, the terms of our contract. Immortality, youth, health, etc., etc., invulnerability with the single exception of suicide. In return for this service, I shall possess your soul at death.”

  “Why?” Fenwick asked with sudden curiosity.

  The devil looked at him somberly. “In your fall, and in the fall of every soul, I forget my own for a moment.” He made an impatient gesture. “This is quibbling. Here.” He plucked out of empty air a parchment scroll and a quill pen.

  “Our agreement,” the devil said.

  Fenwick read the scroll carefully. At one point he looked up.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “I didn’t know I was supposed to put up surety.”

  “I will naturally want some kind of bond,” the devil said. “Unless you can find a co-guarantor?”

  “I’m sure I couldn’t,” Fenwick said. “Not even in the death house. Well, what kind of security do you want?”

  “Certain of your memories of the past,” the devil said. “All of them unconscious, as it happens.” Fenwick considered. “I’m thinking about amnesia. I need my memories.”

  “Not these. Amnesia is concerned with conscious memories. You will never know the structure I want is missing.”

  “Is it—the soul?”

  “No,” the devil said calmly. “It is a necessary part of the soul, of course, or it would be of no value to me. But you will keep the essentials until you choose to surrender them to me at death. I will then combine the two and take possession of your soul. But that will no doubt be a long time from now, and in the meantime you will suffer no inconvenience.”

  “If I write that into the contract, will you sign?”

  The devil nodded.

  Fenwick scribbled in the margin and then signed his name with the wet red point of the quill. “Here, he said.

  The devil, with a tolerant air, added his name. He then waved the scroll into emptiness.

  “Very well,” he said. “Now stand up, please. Some glandular readjustment is necessary.” His hands sank into Fenwick’s breast painlessly, and moved swiftly here and there. “The thyroid . . . and the other endocrines . . . can be reset to regenerate your body indefinitely. Turn around, please.”

  In the mirror over the fireplace Fenwick saw his red visitor’s hand sink softly into the back of Fenwick’s head. He felt a sudden dizziness.

  “Thalamus and pineal,” the devil murmured. “The space-time cognition is subjective . . . and now you’re independent of your external environment. One moment, now. There’s another slight . . .”

  His wrist twisted suddenly and he drew his closed hand out of Fenwick’s head. At the same time Fenwick felt a strange, sudden elation.

  “What did you do then?” he asked, turning.

  No one stood behind him. The apartment was quite empty. The devil had disappeared.

  It could, of course, have been a dream. Fenwick had anticipated this possible skepticism after the event. Hallucinations could occur.

  He thought he was immortal and invulnerable now. But this is, by common standards, a psychotic delusion. He had no proof.

  But he had no doubt, either. Immortality, he thought, is something tangible. An inward feeling of infinite well-being. That glandular readjustment, he thought. My body is functioning now as it never did before, as no one’s ever did. I am a self-regenerating, closed system which nothing can injure, not even time.

  A curious, welling happiness possessed him. He closed his eyes and summoned up the oldest memories he could command. Sunlight on a porch floor, the buzzing of a fly, warmth and a rocking motion. He was aware of no lack. His mind ranged freely in the past. The rhythmic sway and creak of swings in a playground, the echoing stillness of a church. A piano-box club-house. The roughness of a washcloth scrubbing his face, and his mother’s voice . . .

  Invulnerable, immortal, Fenwick crossed the room, opened a door and went down a short hallway. He walked with a sense of wonderful lightness, of pure pleasure in being alive. He opened a second door quietly and looked in. His mother lay in bed asleep, propped on a heap of pillows.

  Fenwick felt very happy.

  He moved softly forward, skirting the wheel-chair by the bed, and stood looking down. Then he tugged a pillow gently free and lifted it in both hands, to lower it again, slowly at first, toward his mother’s face.

  Since this is not the chronicle of James Fenwick’s sins, it is clearly not necessary to detail the steps by which he arrived, within five years, at the title of the Worst Man in the World. Sensational newspapers revelled in him. There were, of course, worse men, but being mortal and vulnerable they were more reticent.

  Fenwick’s behavior was based on an increasing feeling that he was the only permanent object in a transient world. “Their days are as grass,” he mused, watching his fellow Satanists as they crowded around an altar with something unpleasant on it. This was early in his career, when he was exploring pure sensation along traditional lines, later discarded as juvenilia.

  Meanwhile, perfectly free, and filled with that enduring, delightful sense of well-being, Fenwick experimented with many aspects of living. He left a trail of hung juries and baffled attorneys behind him. “A modern Caligula!” said the New York News, explaining to its readers who Caligula had been, with examples. “Are the shocking charges against James Fenwick true?”

  But somehow, he could never quite be convicted. Every charge fell through. He was, as the devil had assured him, a closed system within his environment, and his independence of the outer world was demonstrated in many a courtroom. Exactly how the devil managed things so efficiently Fenwick could never understand. Very seldom did an actual miracle have to happen.

  Once an investment banker, correctly blaming Fenwick for the collapse of his entire fortune, fired five bullets at Fenwick’s heart. The bullets ricocheted. The only witnesses were the banker and Fenwick. Theorizing that his unharmed target was wearing a bullet-proof vest, the banker aimed the last bullet at Fenwick’s head, with identical results. Later the man tried again, with a knife. Fenwick, who was curious, decided to wait and see what would happen. What happened was that eventually the banker went mad.

  Fenwick, who had appropriated his fortune by very direct means, proceeded to increase it. Somehow, he was never convicted of any of the capital charges he incurred. It took a certain technique to make sure that the crimes he committed would always endanger his life if he were arrested for them, but he mastered the method without much difficulty and his wealth and power increased tremendously.

  He was certainly notorious. Presently he decided that something was lacking, and began to crave admiration. It was not so easy to achieve. He did not yet possess enough wealth to transcend the moral judgments of society. That was easily remedied. Ten years after his bargain with the devil, Fenwick was not perhaps the most powerful man in the world, but certainly
the most powerful man in the United States. He attained the admiration and the fame he thought he wanted.

  And it was not enough. The devil had suggested that in a few million years Fenwick might wish to die, out of sheer boredom. It took only ten years for Fenwick to realize, one summer day, with a little shock of unpleasant surprise, that he did not know what he wanted to do next.

  He examined his state of mind with close attention. “Is this boredom?” he asked himself. If so, not even boredom was unpleasant. There was a delightful, sensuous relaxation about it, like floating in a warm summer ocean. In a sense, he was too relaxed.

  “If this is all there is to immortality,” he told himself, “I might as well not have bothered. Pleasant, certainly, but not worth bartering my soul for. There must be things that will rouse me out of this somnolence.”

  He experimented. The next five years witnessed his meteoric fall from public favor as he tried more and more frantically to break through that placid calm. He couldn’t do it. He got no reaction from even the most horrific situations. What others saw with shock and often with horror had no meaning to Fenwick.

  With a sense of smothered desperation under the calm, he saw that he was beginning to lose contact with the race of man. Humans were mortal, and more and more they seemed to recede into a distance less real than the solid earth underfoot. In time, he thought, the earth itself would become less solid, as he watched the slow shifting of the geologic tides.

  He turned at last to the realm of the intellect. He took up painting and he dabbled in literature and in some of the sciences. Interesting—up to a point. But always he came before long to a closed door in the mind, beyond which lay only that floating calm which dissolved all interest out of his mind. Something was lacking in him . . .

  The suspicion was slow in forming. It floated almost to the surface and then sank again under the pressure of new experiments. But eventually it broke free into the realm of the conscious.