Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  The earth itself was both enemy and friend. But the paranoids were all enemy, and of them all, Jasper Horne was somewhere here in American Gun, within Jeff Cody’s reach—a man to be killed, if for no other reason, than because he and his kindred paranoids had made the Baldies killers.

  The glittering streaks of light in the cloud chamber died. The viewer went dark. Cody had won nothing. He slipped another coin into the slot and again watched the electronic bombardment, while his mind ranged and closed in toward his quarry.

  Within the Byzantine building a flurry of thoughts whirled like the roulette wheels. This was a gossip center for American Gun. Here, now and then, he caught images which he identified with Horne. Gradually he tested these thoughts, like directional antenna, until a picture of Horne’s habits began to clarify. But other things clarified as well—the mounting pressure of events in the town which no nontelepath connected with the paranoid’s presence.

  No one in American Gun had shaved for twenty-four hours. Oh, some had but not many. The Baldies had no need to shave, and, of course, there were humans courageous enough to risk suspicion. In the nearby research laboratories the no-shaving movement had not taken hold. And there were others, but not many, and those with smooth chins often moved in a circle of suspicious glances and left trails of hostile murmurings behind them.

  So it might be doubly difficult to kill Horne. Violence could be the move that touched off the pogrom—exactly what Cody had hoped to avoid by eliminating the paranoid. That meant Horne would have to be killed privately, above all, away from any potential mob leaders who might trigger a riot. (There were such men in American Gun; Horne had found them already. They would be the ones to lead the mob when the time came.)

  He’s at the Last Chance.

  Cody lifted his head, dazzled for an instant by the deep blue shadow and the white sunlight. His mind mapped a picture of American Gun from the data he had already gathered. The Last Chance would be at the north end of town, near the research laboratories. Horne might or might not still be there, but it would be easy to pick up his trail.

  Cody skirted the goldfish pool, past the tiny flickering flames of the small, drifting minds, and took a path leading northward through the town. His thoughts continued to range. Several times he caught the thoughts of other Baldies. Through them he could have located Horne instantly and accurately, but they did not wear the Mute helmets, and their minds could have been read in turn by the paranoid. And Horne must not be forewarned. Cody reached up to touch the finespun skein of filaments hidden beneath his wig. As long as he wore the Mute helmet, Horne could not read his mind.

  The crowds began to thicken. Rumors went softly flickering past like heat-lightning in the sweltering air, gathering corroborative detail as they went. Someone—Cody’s mind heard the whisper—had broken the bank at the Gold Horseshoe last night, walked out with two heavy sacks of credits, and carelessly let his wig blow off in the doorway, revealing a hairless head. Yes, the Baldies were casting off the mask now and grabbing up credits in every way they could, preparing for the zero hour when they would take over the nation.

  Cody walked a little faster. Stray thoughts from the Baldies in American Gun whispered to him. Things are getting out of hand, the word went silently through the air from mind to mind, from anxious group to group, from Baldies going stoically about their business among the humans and showing impassive faces as their minds touched and clung together on the verge of panic. Today mothers had kept their children home, and the family copters were fueled and ready.

  Above the crowd, Cody saw the flashing sign of the Last Chance ahead. He moved on, his mind searching for the presence of Horne. And in spite of the noiseless tensions straining and wrenching through the hot air, he realized that he felt curiously happy. Everything seemed very easy and simple now, for the first time in many months. Kill Horne. That was all; that was enough. Kill Horne, his mind said, without any of the doubts and unsurenesses of the last months and years.

  He paused outside the old-fashioned photoelectric doors of the Last Chance, searching for his enemy. The rumors blew past him, fresh as if no voice had ever whispered them before. The whispers spoke of the string of freight-copters grounded with a fuel-leak at the edge of town, the repair man working among the cargo who accidentally broke a slat on a crate of oranges. Inside the liner of oranges were queer-looking rifles—atomic? Three Eggs carefully packed in foam-rubber? Unconscious humans en route to a secret Baldy vivisection lab?

  Then an invisible breath seemed to sweep through the hot, still air.

  It was the paranoid aura. As, in petit mal, the epileptic attack is presaged by an indefinable feeling of impending disaster, so the physical approach of a paranoid carries before it the shadowy halo pulsing outward from the distorted mind. Cody had felt this before, but each time he knew afresh the same faint shrinking, as though his contact with the bright, hot, green world around him had thinned and snapped for an instant.

  He turned slowly and crossed the street, threading past the uneasy, murmuring groups of unshaved men, past their hostile stares. Ahead was a little restaurant—the Copter Vane Eatery. The aura thickened. Cody slopped outside the door of the restaurant and reached out telepathically.

  The rumors flew past him. A man knew a man who had a Baldy neighbor who lost three fingers in a duel a month ago, and today had three fingers growing as good as new, grafted on in a private Baldy hospital. (But Baldies won’t duel never mind that!) They could work miracles in medicine now, but you didn’t see them doing it for humans, did you? If they weren’t stopped soon, who could tell what might happen next?

  Stiff with arrogance, wary with suspicion, the mind of Jasper Horne, within the restaurant, sent out its own murky thoughts too—egotistical, prideful, sensitive, and inflexible. And there was a dim thought stirring in that cloudy mind, like an ember under gray ash, fading and brightening again into half-clarity, which made Cody, at the restaurant’s door, pause and stiffen into immobility for fear that the telepathic paranoid might sense his presence.

  Horne had not come to American Gun to start a pogrom.

  His real motive was far more deadly. It was—

  What?

  That was what Cody could not see—yet. He had glimpsed the shadow of a thought, and that glimpse had been enough to flash a sharp warning to his mind, a signal of terrible urgency. Horne’s real motive lay deeply buried. But it had to be found out. Cody felt quite certain of that.

  He stepped aside, leaned against the wall of the building, and glanced idly around, while from under the Mute helmet his mind probed very delicately and sensitively toward Horne.

  Gently . . . gently.

  The paranoid was sitting alone in a booth near the back of the restaurant. His thoughts were clouded with repression. And he was concentrating on his lunch, not consciously thinking of the thing which had drifted across the surface of his mind for a triumphant instant. Unless this concept was summoned into consciousness, Cody could not read it without deep probing, which Horne would immediately sense.

  Yet there was a way. The right cues would summon up the appropriate responses in any mind. But those cues would have to be implanted in Horne’s thoughts very delicately, so that they would seem perfectly natural, and his own. Cody looked across the street, beyond the murmuring knots of men, at the Last Chance. Horne had been there half an hour ago. It was a fair cue. He sent the concept Last Chance softly into Home’s mind.

  And that mind flinched warily, searched, found nothing—the Mute helmet guarded Cody—and then the cue summoned up its responses.

  Last Chance—gambling. But I’m the one who’s really gambling with them; all of them. Their lives. I can kill them. All, if in time—the thought-chain broke as videomusic swelled within the restaurant. Horne lifted his fork and began to eat again.

  Cody fitted the beat of his thought to the music’s beat and sent the message to Home.

  Kill them all. Kill them all. Kill them all.

  Loose the
virus, Horne’s response came to the stimulus he thought was his own. Pomerance is getting closer. Every day control the resonance; mutate a virus. Kill them all. Kill them all. KILL THEM ALL!

  Cody braced himself against the red rage that poured out from the paranoid.

  Pomerance, he thought. Pomerance.

  Pomerance in the labs, Home thought, and formed a sensory image. Not far away—only two blocks away—were the research laboratories of American Gun, and in them was a man named Pomerance, a biochemist, a nontelepath. He was working on a certain experiment which—if it succeeded—would enable the paranoids to develop a vims as deadly and as specialized as the vims of Operation Apocalypse.

  And this was the real reason for Home’s presence in American Gun. The pogrom-plan was a cover-up. It was camouflage to deceive the Baldies, while Home went about his real purpose of telepathically following Pomerance’s experiments toward the goal of an Operation Apocalypse brought about by the paranoids themselves.

  Pomerance was not aiming at such a goal, of course. He was a biochemist; his aim was to develop a more efficient bacteriophage—but the method he would need to develop that could also be applied to far deadlier aims.

  Gently Cody manipulated the paranoid’s mind. He learned a little more. Pomerance might fail—Home realized that. But in that case, then the pogrom could be set off. It would be better to find and use a human-killing vims, for in a pogrom paranoid lives would be lost too—but there would be a pogrom if no better way offered. Conditions were ripe. Horne had built the tension in American Gun; he had located the potential mob-leaders; he could start the pogrom at any time he desired—and that would be the signal for other paranoids across the nation to do the same. That universal pogrom would force the Baldies to release Operation Apocalypse—so the same end would be achieved. But it would be better to wait a little, just a little, following Pomerance’s experiments closely. He seemed to be very near his goal.

  Too near, Cody thought, his body swaying a little toward the restaurant’s door. He was wasting time. Kill Horne, kill him now, he told himself—but hesitated still, because there was something else in the paranoid’s mind that puzzled him. Too much confidence was built on that twisted, shaky foundation of paranoid personality. There must be some reason for that surprising lack of anxiety.

  Cody probed again with careful cues that brushed the other mind lightly. Yes, there was a reason. There was a bomb hidden in Pomerance’s laboratory.

  Why?

  Horne had that information, and Cody gently extracted it. The biochemist must not be allowed to fall alive into the hands of Baldies. The bomb was triggered to explode whenever Horne summoned to consciousness a certain complex of symbols—the paranoid’s mind shifted quickly away from that dangerous equation—and it would also explode if Horne’s mind stopped thinking.

  That is, if Horne died.

  Like the pattern of a burglar alarm, an interruption in the flow, of current, the radiations emitted constantly by Horne’s mind, sleeping or waking, would break the circuit and set off the alarm—the bomb that would kill Pomerance. Cody saw the location of that bomb very clearly in Horne’s mental image of the laboratory.

  So, if he killed Horne, Pomerance would die, too. But why was this important to the paranoid?

  Cody probed again, and suddenly understood the reason.

  Pomerance’s research was centered around resonance differential applied to the nucleoproteins that were viruses. But there were other types of nucleoproteins; the telepathic function itself depended on the resonance of nucleoproteins in the human brain, if Pomerance’s experiment succeeded, it would mean—

  It would mean that telepathy could be induced in a nontelepath!

  It was the answer to the problem of the Inductor, the one answer that could solve the universal problem of a world in schism. In the hands of the paranoids, Pomerance’s method could destroy all humans. In the hands of the Baldies, it could make all mankind one. It could—

  Suddenly Cody knew that Horne had discovered his presence.

  Instantly Horne began to build in his mind the equation that would set off the bomb in Pomerance’s laboratory. Cody’s mind leaped into the future. He could kill Horne before the paranoid had finished, but if he did that, the other’s death would trigger the bomb with equal certainty. Pomerance would die—and that must not be allowed to happen. More than lives depended on the biochemist’s survival.

  There was no way to stop Home’s thoughts except one. Cody’s probing into the other’s mind had told him a great deal about that proud, inflexible, unsure personality. He now knew more about Horne than the latter himself did. And he had discovered one vital point. Horne was not psychotic; he had not lost touch with reality, but, like many paranoids, he had psychopathological symptoms, and one of these was his strong tendency to what Allenby would have called hypnogogic hallucinations—vivid sensory images occurring in the drowsy state just before sleep. And such hallucinations can easily be produced by hypnosis.

  All Cody had to do was to convince Horne that he had momentarily been hallucinated. That, and a little more—a good deal more.

  At least, Cody had a good insight into what forms such imagery would take for the paranoid, with his strong delusions of persecution and grandeur. So Cody projected the idea that he, representing the Baldies, had come to Home to offer a truce, to make a pact with the paranoids against the humans—exactly the kind of vivid wish-fulfilling fantasy Horne must often have experienced. And at the same time he summoned up the mental image of Jasper Horne and let Horne see it.

  That action was natural enough, even within the frame of a hallucination. When you communicate with another, you visualize him in your own mind, in many more dimensions than the purely visual ones. Your impressions of his emotional patterns, his memories, his thoughts, the complex image of his whole personality as you perceive it, is summoned up as a subjective correlative of the objective man with whom you communicate. The burning brightness of that Luciferean image stood clear between the meeting minds, blazingly sharp and vivid, in a way that the murky mind of the paranoid had never known.

  The ancient Greeks knew what the mechanism of identification meant—they told the story of Narcissus. And the lure caught Jasper Home, who could identify with no other man than himself, or a god made in his own image. His paranoid egotism reflected itself in that ego-image and was reflected again and so endlessly, while Cody delicately tested and touched the thoughts of the other and watched for the first slackening of consciousness.

  At least Home had paused in his mental building of the concept that would destroy Pomerance. The paranoid hesitated, unsure, his grasp of reality telling him that the Baldies could not, would not send an emissary to capitulate, and that therefore his senses, which had warned him of Cody’s presence, had lied. Such panics were not unknown to Horne. So he could accept—tentatively—the suggestion that his senses had tricked him.

  Very, very gently, still maintaining that dazzling ego-image of Jasper Home like a glittering lure on a baited hook, Cody sent quiet cue-thoughts slipping into hesitant mind. At first they were obviously true thoughts, true, at least, according to the paranoid’s system of belief. They were pleasant, reassuring thoughts. Lulled, Home watched the ego-image which he himself had often summoned up—yet never before so clearly and dazzlingly. Narcissus watched his image in the clear, deep pool of Cody’s mind.

  So, sitting alone in the restaurant booth, Horne let his wariness relax little by little, and Cody’s soft assault moved into a new area. The thoughts Cody sent out now were not quite true, but still not false enough to startle the paranoid, who took them for his own thoughts. I’ve had these hallucinations before. Usually just before going to sleep. I’m having them now. So I must be going to sleep. I am sleepy. My eyelids feel heavy—

  The lulling, monotonous thoughts began to submerge Horne’s consciousness. Gradually the hypnosis grew. Narcissus watched Narcissus—

  Sleep, sleep, Cody’s mind whispered. Y
ou will not waken until I command you. Nothing else will waken you. Sleep deeply—sleep.

  The paranoid slept.

  Cody began to run along the street as fast as he could. No other Baldy in American Gun was nearer to the research laboratory than he was, and if Pomerance were to be saved, it was his job alone. And he might easily fail. Jasper Horne was sitting in hypnotic sleep in a crowded restaurant, and at any moment someone might speak to him or shake him back into consciousness. The hypnosis was not deep. It might hold, or it might break at any moment. In spite of Cody’s final suggestions to the paranoid, the latter could be awakened quite easily, and by anyone.

  Cody ran on. Suppose he got Pomerance out of the lab in time? Could he get back to the restaurant again before Horne wakened?

  No, Cody thought, the hypnosis isn’t deep enough. It’ll be a miracle if Home stays under more than a few minutes. If I can save Pomerance, that will be miracle enough.

  But as soon as Horne realizes what’s happened, he won’t wait. He’ll start the pogrom. It’s all ready, here in American Gun; he’s planted the dynamite, and all he has to do is touch the detonator. All right. I can’t be sure that what I’m doing is right. I think it is. I can’t be sure. If I save. Pomerance, Horne will probably start the pogrom before I can get back and kill him. But I can’t let Pomerance die; he can solve the problem of the Inductor.

  Hurry!

  He ran toward a group of long, low buildings. He knew the way; he had seen it in Horne’s mind. He ran toward one of the buildings, thrust open the door, and was in the laboratory.