Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  A gaunt, gray-haired man in a stained smock turned to stare at him. It was Pomerance; no telepath can ever be mistaken on a question of identity. It was Pomerance—and as Cody realized that, he also realized that two blocks away, in the Copter Vane Eatery, Jasper Horne had stirred, wakened, and reached out in sudden panic to touch Pomerance’s mind.

  Instantly Cody was racing down the length of the long laboratory. Beyond Pomerance were floor-length windows opening on hot sunlight, blue sky, and parched brown grass. If they could reach the windows—

  It seemed to Cody that he crossed the room in no time at all. No time, and yet another kind of time seemed to draw out endlessly as, in the distant mind of the paranoid, he saw the triggering equation building up that would set off the bomb’s mechanism. Now the equation was complete. Now time would stop in one bursting moment of death.

  Yet there was time. Cody sent out a wordless call, a summons that rang like a great alarm bell in the minds of every Baldy in American Gun. At the same moment he reached Pomerance and used his own momentum to lift the other man bodily as he plunged toward the windows. Then the floor rose underfoot and the air rushed outward before the first soundless compression wave that moved in front of the explosion.

  The window loomed before them, bright, high, patterned with small panes. Cody’s shoulder struck, he felt wood and glass shatter without a sound because of the great, white, bursting roar of the explosion, louder than any sound could be.

  The blast exploded in a white blindness all around him and beyond shattering glass the void opened up under him.

  He was falling with Pomerance through hot, dry outdoor air and darkness, darkness in the full heat of the sun, falling and turning while glass rained down around them and the noise of the explosion went on and on forever.

  In front of the Copter Vane Eatery two transients scuffled. Jasper Home, in the crowd, said something under his breath. Another man repeated it, louder. One of the transients flushed darkly. (It was a trigger-phrase as certain to rouse this man’s aggressions as the equation that had exploded the bomb.) In a moment a dagger was pulled from its sheath, and a full-fledged duel was in progress in the middle of a noisy circle. The winner was a hairy-faced, hairy-chested man with a partially bald head. His knife-work had been very deft and sure. Too sure, Jasper Horne said in a loud whisper. The whispers flew around the circle. Anybody could win a duel if he could read the other man’s mind. If They could grow fingers, maybe they could grow hair.

  Jasper Home said something, exactly the right something, to the potential mob-leader beside him.

  The potential mob-leader scowled, swore, and took a, step forward. Deftly he tripped the winner from behind as he was sheathing his dagger. The knife flew spinning across the pavement. Three men were on the falling bald-head as he went down. Two of them held him while the third tugged at his tonsure-fringe of hair. It held. The victim bellowed with rage and resisted so strongly that four or five bystanders were sent sprawling. One of them lost his wig—

  This was neither sleep nor waking.

  It was Limbo. He floated in the womb of non-self, the only real privacy a telepath can ever know, and what he wanted was to stay here forever and ever. But he was a telepath. He could not, even in the secret fastness of his own mind, pretend what was not true, for his mind lay quite open—at least to wearers of the Mute helmets like his own.

  Yet it was hard to waken. It was hard to force himself, of his own volition, to stoop and pick up whatever burdens might be waiting for him, new and old. If his life could be lived as had been the last minute he remembered, without any indecision or unsureness, but with only the certain need for physical action (is Pomerance alive, something in his wakening mind asked), then it would be easy indeed to lift himself up out of this warm, gray silence which was so infinitely restful, without even dreams (but Pomerance?).

  And as always, the thought of another made something in Cody brace and lift itself with weary stubbornness. Instantly he was oriented. He did not need to depend on his own sleep-confused senses alone. All through the Caves, and above them, and in copters in midair, was a stirring and a confused sense of urgency and troubled motion, and each mind held one thought under whatever other thoughts might be preoccupying the upper levels of the mind.

  The thought was pogrom.

  Cody asked one question: Should I have killed Horne instead of trying to save Pomerance? But he did not wait for an answer. The decision had been his own, after all. He opened his eyes—knowing in what infirmary bed in what sector of the Caves he lay—and looked up at the round, ruddy face of Allenby.

  “Pomerance?” he asked.

  “Alive,” the psychologist answered wordlessly. “Some of the American Gun Baldies got to you right after the explosion. They had to work fast. Home had set off the pogrom. But they had a fast copter ready, and gave you and Pomerance first aid en route. That was two days ago.”

  “Two days?”

  “Pomerance was unconscious for only a few hours. But we kept you under till now—you needed it. However, I guess you’ll live, in case you’re wondering.”

  “How long will any of us live?” Cody’s thought whispered.

  “Get up and dress,” Allenby ordered. “There’s work to be done. Here’s your clothes. How long? I don’t know: The pogrom’s been spreading for two days. The paranoids had everything very neatly planned. It looks like a total pogrom this time, Jeff. But we’ve got Pomerance. And I think we’ve got the Inductor.”

  “But Pomerance isn’t one of us.”

  “He’s with us, though. Not all humans are anti-Baldy. As soon as Pomerance understood the situation, he voluntarily offered to help in any way he could. So come along. We’re ready to try the Inductor. I wanted you to be there. Can you manage?” Cody nodded. He was stiff, and quite weak, and there were a good many aches and pains under the sprayed-on plastic bandages, but it felt fine to stand up and walk. He followed Allenby out into the corridor and along it. The troubled, urgent stirring of innumerable thoughts moved all around him. He remembered Lucy. Not all humans are anti-Baldy. And not all Baldies are antihuman, he added, thinking of what had been done to the humans like Lucy who had been condemned to life imprisonment within the Caves.

  She’ll be there—in the lab,” Allenby told Cody. “She offered to be one of the subjects. We’ve got an Inductor jury-rigged according to Pomerance’s theory—at least, we started with his theory and went on from there, every scientist among us. It was quite a job. I hope—” The thought of the pogrom shadowed Allenby’s mind briefly and was repressed.

  Cody thought: I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time—

  “Yes,” the psychologist agreed. “Later, Jeff. Later. The Inductor is our goal right now. Nothing else. You haven’t thought of Jasper Home since you woke up, have you?”

  Cody realized that he had scarcely done so. Now, as he did, he saw the paranoid leader as something remote and depersonalized, a moving figure in a great complex of action, but no longer the emotion-charged target of his hate.

  “I guess I don’t feel the need to kill him,” Cody agreed. “He’s not really important any more. The worst he could do was start the pogrom, and he’s done that. I’d kill him if I had the chance, but for a different reason—now.” He glanced sidewise at Allenby. “Will the Inductor work?” he asked.

  “That’s what we’re going to find out. But it ought to . . . it ought to,” Allenby said, opening a door in the wall of the corridor. Cody followed the psychologist into one of the caverns which had been made into an experimental laboratory.

  There was a great deal going on in the cave, but Cody was not distracted by external sense-impressions; he turned immediately toward where Lucy was standing, the baby in her arms. He went toward her quickly. He reached out to her mind and then checked himself. There was, perhaps, too much he did not want to know, now or ever, he decided.

  Cody said, “These bandages don’t mean anything. I feel fine.”

  “They told me
,” Lucy said. “It was one time I was glad of telepathy. I knew they could really tell if you were all right—even if you were unconscious.”

  He put his arm around her, looking down at the sleeping baby.

  Lucy said, “I couldn’t tell a thing by watching you. You might have been—dead. But it was so good to have Allenby and the others able to look into your mind and make sure you were all right. I wanted to do something to help, but there wasn’t anything I could do. Except . . . this. Allenby told me he needed volunteers for the Inductor experiment. So I volunteered. It’s one way I can help—and I want to.”

  So Lucy knew about the Inductor now. Well, the time and need for secrecy was past. It no longer mattered how much or how little the prisoners in the Caves knew. It no longer mattered, now that the pogrom had begun.

  “It’s a total pogrom this time, isn’t it?” she asked, and he had an irrational second of amazement (telepathy?) before he realized that Lucy was merely reacting to cues learned through long familiarity with his behavior. All married couples have flashes of this kind of pseudo-telepathy, if there is real sympathy between them. And in spite of everything, that sympathy had existed. It was strange to know this now, to be sure of it and to feel elation, when so little time might remain. The pogrom could still destroy everything, in spite of the Inductor.

  “Lucy,” he said. “If we fail . . . we’ll make sure you get safely out of the Caves, back home—”

  She looked down at the baby, and then turned away from Cody. He suddenly realized, as men have always done, that even with telepathic power to aid him, he would never really understand a woman’s reactions—not even Lucy’s.

  “Aren’t you ready yet?” she asked Allenby.

  “I think so,” he said. “Let somebody hold the baby, Lucy.”

  She turned back to Cody, smiled at him, and put the baby in his arms. Then she followed Allenby toward an insulated chair, jury-rigged with a tangle of wires which led to a complicated instrument panel.

  The mind of the baby had a little flame in it like the flames Cody remembered in the goldfish in the pool back at American Gun. But there was a very great difference. He did not know exactly what it was, but he had not felt pity and fear as he watched the glimmering minds of the fish. The mind of his child, his and Lucy’s, held a small flame that burned with ridiculous confidence for so small and helpless a creature, and yet each slight stimulus, the rocking movement of his arms, the slight hunger-contractions of the child’s stomach, made the fragile flame quiver and blow in a new direction before it swung back to its perseverant burning. So many things would shake that flame, in even the best of all worlds—but, he thought with sudden clarity, in that flame the personality of the child would be forged and made strong.

  He looked toward Lucy. She was sitting in the chair now, and electrodes were being attached to her temples and the base of her skull. A man he recognized as Pomerance, gaunt and gray-haired, was hovering over her, getting in the way of the experimenters. In Pomerance’s mind, Cody saw, was a slight irritation the man was trying hard to repress. This application, this connection—I don’t understand how it fits the theory. If only I were a telepath! But if the Inductor works, I can be. Now how does this hookup fit into—and then the thoughts swung into inductive abstractions as the biochemist tried to puzzle the problem out.

  The cave-laboratory was crowded. There were the Mute-scientists, and there were a score of captives from the Caves—all volunteers, Cody realized warmly. In spite of everything, they had wanted to help, as Lucy had wanted to.

  Now the test was beginning. Lucy relaxed in the chair, her thoughts nervously considering the pressure of the electrodes. Cody withdrew his mind. He felt nervous, too. He scanned the group, found a receptive mind, and recognized Allenby.

  “Suppose the Inductor works,” Cody said in silence. “How will that stop the pogrom?”

  “We’ll offer telepathy to everybody,” Allenby told him. “There’s a video hookup all ready to cut in on every screen in every town. I think even a lynch mob will stop to listen if they’re offered telepathy.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Besides, there are plenty of humans on our side, like Pomerance. We’ve got—” The thought paused.

  For something was happening to Lucy’s mind. It was like a wave, a flood of something as indefinable as abstract music rising in Lucy’s thoughts as the nucleoproteins of her brain altered. She’s becoming a telepath, one of us, Cody thought.

  “Power off,” Allenby said suddenly. He bent forward and removed the electrodes. “Wait a minute, now, Lucy.” He stopped talking, but his mind spoke urgently in silence.

  Move your right hand, Lucy. Move your right hand.

  Not a Baldy looked at Lucy’s hands. There must be no unconscious signals.

  Lucy did not move. Her mind, opened to Cody, suddenly and appallingly reminded him of Jasper Horne’s walled mind. He did not know why, but a little thrill of fear touched him.

  Move your right hand.

  No response.

  Try another command, someone suggested. Lucy—stand up. Stand up.

  She did not move.

  It may take time, a Baldy suggested desperately. She may need time to learn—

  Maybe, Allenby thought. But we’d better try another subject.

  “All right, Lucy,” Cody said. “Come over here with me. We’re going to try someone else.”

  “Didn’t it work?” she asked. She went to him, staring into, his eyes as though trying to force rapport between mind and mind.

  “We can’t tell yet,” he said. “Watch June.”

  June Barton was in the chair now, flinching a little as the electrodes were attached.

  In Cody’s thoughts something moved uneasily—something he had not thought of since he woke. If the Inductor failed, then—it would be his problem again, the same old problem, which he had failed to solve. The dilemma which had sent him out to try to kill Jasper Home. The responsibility that was too great for any man to carry after a while. Operation Apocalypse. The end of all flesh—

  Very quickly he turned his mind from that thought. He reached out mentally with a sense of panic, while his arm tightened about Lucy. (Would he have to kill her—her and their child? It may not come to that. Don’t think about it!) He searched for a concept intricate enough to drive the obsessive terror from his mind. The Inductor, he asked at random. What’s the theory? How does it work?

  Another mind leaped gratefully toward the question. It was Kunashi, the physicist. From beneath Kunashi’s Mute helmet came quick clear thoughts that could not quite conceal the anxiety in the man’s mind. For Kunashi, too, was married to a nontelepath.

  “You remember when we asked the calculator for a solution to our problem?” (The electrodes were being unclamped from June Barton’s head now.) “We gathered all the data we could to feed into the calculator. We read the minds of human scientists everywhere, and coded all the data that could possibly be relevant. Well, some of that data came from Pomerance’s mind, more than a year ago. He wasn’t very far along with his theory then, but the key concepts had been formulated—the hypothesis involving mutation of nucleoproteins by resonance. The calculator integrated that with other data and came up with the simplest answer—the virus. It didn’t have the necessary data to follow the theory along the lines of the Inductor, even though both concepts depend on the same basic—resonance.”

  (Someone else was sitting down in the chair. The electrodes were being attached. Cody felt the growing distress and anxiety in every mind.)

  Kunashi went on doggedly, “Pomerance is a biochemist. He was working on a virus—Japanese encephalitis type A—and trying to mutate it into a specialized bacteriophage.” The thought faltered for an instant and picked up again. “The reproduction of a virus—or a gene—depends on high internal resonance; it’s a nucleo-protein. Theoretically, anything can change into anything else, eventually. But the physical probability of such a change depends on the relative resonance measu
re of the two states—high for the aminoacid-protein chain, for example, and the two states of the benzene ring.”

  (Kunashi’s wife was sitting down in the chair.)

  “The change, the reproduction, also involves high specificity of the chemical substances involved. That’s the reason telepaths would be immune to the Operation Apocalypse virus, whatever it is. Now . . . now specificity can vary not only from species to species, but within the species, too. Our immunity is innate. The (will it work? will it work?) nucleo-protein of the Operation Apocalypse virus must have a high affinity for certain high-resonance particles in the central nervous system of nontelepaths. Such particles have a great capacity for storing information. So our virus would attack the information centers of the nontelepathic brain.

  “That affinity depends on resonance differential—and Pomerance’s experiments were aimed at finding a way to alter that differential. Such a method would make it possible to mutate virus-strains with great predictability and control. And it can also be used to induce telepathy. Telepathy depends on high resonance of nucleo-proteins in the brain’s information centers, and by artificially increasing specificity, the telepathic function can be induced in . . . in—”

  The thought stopped. Kunashi’s wife was leaving the experimental chair, and the physicist’s mind clouded with doubt, misery, and hopelessness. Cody’s thoughts linked with Kunashi’s, sending a strong message of wordless warm encouragement—not intellectual hope, he did not have much of that himself—but a deep emotional bridge of understanding and sympathy. It seemed to help a little. It helped Cody, too. He watched Kunashi’s wife walk quickly to him, and they linked arms, and stood together waiting.

  Suddenly Lucy said, “I want to try again.”

  “Do you feel—” Cody began, but immediately knew that there had been no change. Her mind was still walled.

  Yet Allenby, across the room, nodded.

  “It’s worth trying,” he said. “Let’s do it with the power oh, this time. The resonance effect should last for several minutes after disconnecting the electrodes, but we won’t take any chances.” Cody had taken the baby again, and Lucy was settling herself in the chair. “Ideally, all these gadgets will be in a small power-pack that will be worn and operating continuously—All right, Lucy? Power on.”