The Best of C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  She came out into the torchlight, stumbling with exhaustion, her mouth scarlet from the blood of her bitten lip and her bare greaved legs and bare sword-blade foul with the deaths of those little horrors that swarmed around the cave-mouth. From the tangle of red hair her eyes stared out with a bleak, frozen, inward look, as of one who has seen nameless things. That keen, steel-bright beauty which had been hers was as dull and fouled as her sword-blade, and at the look in her eyes Father Gervase shuddered and crossed himself.

  They were waiting for her in an uneasy group—the priest anxious and dark, Guillaume splendid in the torchlight, tall and arrogant, a handful of men-at-arms holding the guttering lights and shifting uneasily from one foot to the other. When she saw Guillaume the light that flared up in her eyes blotted out for a moment the bleak dreadfulness behind them, and her slowing heart leaped like a spurred horse, sending the blood riotously through her veins. Guillaume, magnificent in his armor, leaning upon his sword and staring down at her from his scornful height, the little black beard jutting. Guillaume, to whom Joiry had fallen. Guillaume.

  That which she carried at the core of her being was heavier than anything else in the world, so heavy she could scarcely keep her knees from bending, so heavy her heart labored under its weight. Almost irresistibly she wanted to give way beneath it, to sink down and down under the crushing load, to lie prone and vanquished in the ice-gray, bleak place she was so dimly aware of through the clouds that were rising about her. But there was Guillaume, grim and grinning, and she hated him so very bitterly—she must make the effort. She must, at whatever cost, for she was coming to know that death lay in wait for her if she bore this burden long, that it was a two-edged weapon which could strike at its wielder if the blow were delayed too long. She knew this through the dim mists that were thickening in her brain, and she put all her strength into the immense effort it cost to cross the floor toward him. She stumbled a little, and made one faltering step and then another, and dropped her sword with a clang as she lifted her arms to him.

  He caught her strongly, in a hard, warm clasp, and she heard his laugh triumphant and hateful as he bent his head to take the kiss she was raising her mouth to offer. He must have seen, in that last moment before their lips met, the savage glare of victory in her eyes, and been startled. But he did not hesitate. His mouth was heavy upon hers.

  It was a long kiss. She felt him stiffen in her arms. She felt a coldness in the lips upon hers, and slowly the dark weight of what she bore lightened, lifted, cleared away from her cloudy mind. Strength flowed back through her richly. The whole world came alive to her once more. Presently she loosed his slack arms and stepped away, looking up into his face with a keen and dreadful triumph upon her own.

  She saw the ruddiness of him draining away, and the rigidity of stone coming over his scarred features. Only his eyes remained alive, and there was torment in them, and understanding. She was glad—she had wanted him to understand what it cost to take Joiry’s kiss unbidden. She smiled thinly into his tortured eyes, watching. And she saw something cold and alien seeping through him, permeating him slowly with some unnamable emotion which no man could ever have experienced before. She could not name it, but she saw it in his eyes—some dreadful emotion never made for flesh and blood to know, some iron despair such as only an unguessable being from the gray, formless void could ever have felt before—too hideously alien for any human creature to endure. Even she shuddered from the dreadful, cold bleakness looking out of his eyes, and knew as she watched that there must be many emotions and many fears and joys too far outside man’s comprehension for any being of flesh to undergo, and live. Grayly she saw it spreading through him, and the very substance of his body shuddered under that iron weight.

  And now came a visible, physical change. Watching, she was aghast to think that in her own body and upon her own soul she had borne the seed of this dreadful flowering, and did not wonder that her heart had slowed under the unbearable weight of it. He was standing rigidly with arms half bent, just as he stood when she slid from his embrace. And now great shudders began to go over him, as if he were wavering in the torchlight, some gray-faced wraith in armor with torment in his eyes. She saw the sweat beading his forehead. She saw a trickle of blood from his mouth, as if he had bitten through his lip in the agony of this new, incomprehensible emotion. Then a last shiver went over him violently, and he flung up his head, the little curling beard jutting ceilingward and the muscles of his strong throat corded, and from his lips broke a long, low cry of such utter, inhuman strangeness that Jirel felt coldness rippling through her veins and she put up her hands to her ears to shut it out. It meant something—it expressed some dreadful emotion that was neither sorrow nor despair nor anger, but infinitely alien and infinitely sad. Then his long legs buckled at the knees and he dropped with a clatter of mail and lay still on the stone floor.

  They knew he was dead. That was unmistakable in the way he lay. Jirel stood very still, looking down upon him, and strangely it seemed to her that all the lights in the world had gone out. A moment before he had been so big and vital, so magnificent in the torchlight—she could still feel his kiss upon her mouth, and the hard warmth of his arms…

  Suddenly and blindingly it came upon her what she had done. She knew now why such heady violence had flooded her whenever she thought of him—knew why the light-devil in her own form had laughed so derisively—knew the price she must pay for taking a gift from a demon. She knew that there was no light anywhere in the world, now that Guillaume was gone.

  Father Gervase took her arm gently. She shook him off with an impatient shrug and dropped to one knee beside Guillaume’s body, bending her head so that the red hair fell forward to hide her tears.

  Tryst in Time

  Eric Rosner at twenty had worked his way round the world on cattle boats, killed his first man in a street brawl in Shanghai, escaped a firing squad by a hairbreadth, stowed away on a pole-bound exploring ship.

  At twenty-five he had lost himself in Siberian wilderness, led a troup of Tatar bandits, commanded a Chinese regiment, fought in a hundred battles, impartially on either side.

  At thirty there was not a continent nor a capital that had not known him, not a jungle nor a desert nor a mountain range that had not left scars upon his great Viking body. Tiger claws and the Russian knout, Chinese bullets and the knives of savage black warriors in African forests had written their tales of a full and perilous life upon him. At thirty he looked backward upon such a gorgeous, brawling, color-splashed career as few men of sixty can boast. But at thirty he was not content.

  Life had been full for him, and yet as the years passed he was becoming increasingly aware of a need for something which those years were empty of. What it was he did not know. He was not even consciously aware of missing anything, but as time went on he turned more and more to a search for something new—anything new. Perhaps it was his subconscious hunting blindly for what life had lacked.

  There was so very little that Eric Rosner had not done in his thirty riotous years that the search for newness rapidly became almost feverish, and almost in vain. Riches he had known, and poverty, much pleasure and much pain, and the extremes of human experience were old tales to him. Ennui replaced the zest for living that had sent him so gayly through the exultant years of his youth. And for a man like Eric Rosner ennui was like a little death.

  Perhaps, in part, all this was because he had missed love. No girl of all the girls that had kissed him and adored him and wept when he left them had mattered a snap of the fingers to Eric Rosner. He searched on restlessly.

  In this mood of feverish hunting for new things, he met the scientist, Walter Dow. It happened casually, and they might never have met a second time had not Eric said something offhand about the lack of adventure which life had to offer a man. And Dow laughed.

  “What do you know about adventure?” he demanded. He was a little man with a shock of prematurely white hair and a face that crinkled into lines of deri
sion as he laughed. “You’ve spent your life among dangers and gunfire—sure! But that’s not real adventure. Science is the only field where true adventure exists. I mean it! The things that are waiting to be discovered offer fields of excitement like nothing you ever heard of. One man in a lifetime couldn’t begin to touch the edges of what there is to know. I tell you I—”

  “Oh, sure,” interrupted Eric lazily. “I see what you mean. But all that’s not for me. I’m a man of action; I haven’t any brains. Hunching over a microscope isn’t my idea of fun.”

  The argument that began then developed into a queer sort of antagonistic friendship which brought the two men together very often in the weeks that passed. But they were to know one another much more intimately than that before the true urgency of what lay in the minds of each became clear to the other.

  Walter Dow had spent a lifetime in the worship of one god—inertia. “There is a bedrock,” he used to say reverently, “over which the tides of time ebb and flow, over which all things material and immaterial, as the layman sees them, change and fade and form again. But the bedrock remains. Complete inertia! What couldn’t we do if we attained it!”

  “And what,” asked Eric, “is inertia?”

  Dow shot him a despairing glance.

  “Everybody knows what inertia is. Newton’s first law of motion is the law of inertia, stating that every body remains in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless impressed forces change it. That’s what makes people in a moving car swerve to one side when the car goes round a bend. It’s what makes it so difficult for a horse to start a heavy load moving, though once it’s in motion the strain eases. There’s nothing that doesn’t obey the law—nothing!

  “But Newton didn’t dream what measureless abysses of force lay behind his simple statement. Or what an understatement it was. Describing inertia by stating Newton’s law is like describing the sea by saying there’s foam on the waves. The inertia force is inherent in everything, just as there’s moisture in everything. But behind that inertia, manifest so obscurely in matter, is a vastness of power much greater comparatively than the vastnesses of the seas which are the storehouses for the relatively tiny amounts of moisture in everything you see.

  “I can’t make you understand; you don’t speak the language. And I sometimes wonder if I could explain even to another physicist all that I’ve discovered in the past ten years. But I do very firmly believe that it would be possible to anchor to that bedrock of essential, underlying inertia which is the base upon which matter builds and—and allow time itself to whirl by!”

  “Yeah, and find yourself floating in space when you let go.” Eric grinned. “Even I’ve heard that the universe is in motion through space. I don’t know about time, but I’m pretty sure space would block your little scheme.”

  “I didn’t mean you’d have to—to dig your anchor right into the rock,” explained Dow with dignity. “It’d be a sort of a drag to slow you down, not a jerk that would snatch you right off the Earth. And it’d involve—immensities—even then. But it could be done. It will be done. By Heaven, I’ll do it!”

  Eric’s sunburned face sobered.

  “You’re not kidding?” he asked. “A man could—could drag his anchor and let time go by, and ‘up-anchor’ in another age? Say! Make me an anchor, and I’ll be your guinea pig!”

  Dow did not smile.

  “That’s the worst of it,” he said. “All this is pure theory and will have to remain that, in spite of all I’ve bragged. It would be absolutely blind experimenting, and the very nature of the element I’m experimenting with precludes any proof of success or failure. I could—to be frank with you I have—sent objects out through time—”

  “You have!” Eric leaned forward with a jerk and laid an urgent hand on Dow’s arm. “You really have?”

  “Well, I’ve made them vanish. I think it proves I’ve succeeded, but I have no way of knowing. The chances are countless millions to one against my landing an experiment in my own immediate future, with all the measureless vastness of time lying open. And, of course, I can’t guide it.”

  “Suppose you landed in your own past?” queried Eric.

  Dow smiled.

  “The eternal question,” he said. “The inevitable objection to the very idea of time travel. Well, you never did, did you? You know it never happened! I think there must be some inflexible law which forbids the same arrangement of matter, the pattern which is one’s self, from occupying the same space time more than once. As if any given section of space time were a design in which any arrangement of atoms is possible, except that no pattern may appear exactly twice.

  “You see, we know of time only enough to be sure that it’s far beyond any human understanding. Though I think the past and the future may be visited, which on the face of it seems to predicate an absolutely preordained future, a fixed and unchangeable past—yet I do not believe that time is arbitrary. There must be many possible futures. The one we enter upon is not the only way. Have you ever heard that theory explained? It’s not a new one—the idea that at every point of our progress we confront crossroads, with a free choice as to which we take. And a different future lies down each.

  “I can transport you into the past, and you can create events there which never took place in the past we know—but the events are not new. They were ordained from the beginning, if you took that particular path. You are simply embarking upon a different path into a different future, a fixed and preordained future, yet one which will be strange to you because it lies outside your own layer of experience. So you have infinite freedom in all your actions, yet everything you can possibly do is already fixed in time.”

  “Why, then—then there’s no limit to the excitement a man could find in navigating time,” said Eric almost reverently. And then in sudden urgency, “Dow, you’ve got to fix it up for me! This is what I’ve been hunting!”

  “Are you crazy, boy? This is nothing that can ever be proved safe except by the actual experiment, and the experiment could never return. You know that, don’t you? From what blind groping I’ve done, it seems to me that time is not a constant flow, but an ebb and flux that can’t be measured. It would be hard to explain to you. But you couldn’t return—couldn’t guide yourself. You wouldn’t dare try it!”

  “I’m fed up with certainty and safety! And as for returning, what have I here to return to? No, you can’t scare me. I’ve got to try it!”

  “Absolutely no,” said Dow firmly.

  But three months later he was standing under the great skylight of his laboratory, watching Eric buckle a flat metal pack on his heavy young shoulders. Though reluctance still lined the scientist’s face, under its shock of white hair he was alight almost as hotly as the younger man, with the tremendous adventure of what was about to happen. It had taken weeks of persuasion and argument, and he was not wholly at ease even yet about the experiment, but the fever that burned in Eric Rosner was not to be denied.

  Now that the way was open, it seemed to Eric that all his life he had lived toward this moment in the laboratory. The need for this launching upon time’s broad river was what had driven him restless and feverish through the petty adventures which life had shown him. Peace was upon him now for the first time in months. There was something rather awe-inspiring about it.

  “Look here,” broke in Walter Dow upon the raptness of his mood. “Are you sure you understand?”

  “I don’t understand anything about the works, and I don’t much care,” said Eric. “All I know is I’m to snap these switches here”—he laid big sunburned hands on the two rods at his belt—“when I want to move along. That will throw out the anchor. Right?”

  “As far as it goes, yes. That will increase your inertia sufficiently to make you immune to time and space and matter. You will be inert mentally and physically. You’ll sink down, so to speak, to the bedrock, while time flows past you. I have in this pack on your back, connecting with the switches in the belt, the mean
s to increase your inertia until no outside force can interrupt it. And a mechanism there will permit the switches to remain thrown until one small part, insulated from the inertia in a tiny time space of its own, trips the switches again and up-anchors. And if my calculations are correct—and I think they are—there you’ll be in some other age than ours. You can escape from it by throwing the switches again and returning to inertia, to be released after an interval by the automatic insulated mechanism in your pack. Got it?”

  “Got it!” Eric grinned all over his good-looking, sunburned face. “Everything ready now?”

  “Yes—yes, except that—are you sure you want to risk it? This may be plain murder, boy! I don’t know what will happen!”

  “That’s the beauty of it—not knowing. Don’t worry, Walter. Call it suicide, not murder, if that helps you any. I’m going now. Good-bye.”

  Dow choked a little as he gripped the younger man’s hand hard, but Eric’s face was shining with the fever to be gone, and at the last the scientist was almost reconciled by the sight of that rapt face. Almost he saw in the last instant before the switches closed a purpose vaster than his own, sweeping the work of his hands and the exultant young man before him into a whole that fulfilled some greater need than he could guess.

  Then Eric’s hands dropped to his belt. One last instant he stood there, tall under the clear radiance of the skylight, blond and sunburned, the tale of his riotous, brawling life clear upon his scarred, young face, but upon it, too, a raptness and an eagerness that sent a quick stab of unreasoning hope through the scientist’s mind. Surely success would crown this experiment. Surely all the vital, throbbing aliveness, the strength and seasoned toughness of this brawny young man before him could not snuff into nothing as the switches closed. Danger awaited him—yes, danger against which the gun at his belt might not avail at all. But splendor, too. Splendor—Envy clouded Dow’s eyes for a moment, as the switches closed.