The Best of Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  Once in a while there were lapses. Scott was hiking with his father one Saturday afternoon, and the two had paused at the summit of a hill. Beneath them a rather lovely valley was spread.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Paradine remarked.

  Scott examined the scene gravely. “It’s all wrong,” he said.

  “Eh?”

  “I dunno.”

  “What’s wrong about it?”

  “Gee.” Scott lapsed into puzzled silence. “I dunno.”

  The children had missed their toys, but not for long. Emma recovered first, though Scott still moped. He held unintelligible conversations with his sister, and studied meaningless scrawls she drew on paper he supplied. It was almost as though he was consulting her, anent difficult problems beyond his grasp.

  If Emma understood more, Scott had more real intelligence, and manipulatory skill as well. He built a gadget with his Meccano set, but was dissatisfied. The apparent cause of his dissatisfaction was exactly why Paradine was relieved when he viewed the structure. It was the sort of thing a normal boy would make, vaguely reminiscent of a cubistic ship.

  It was a bit too normal to please Scott. He asked Emma more questions, though in private. She thought for a time, and then made more scrawls, with an awkwardly clutched pencil.

  “Can you read that stuff?” Jane asked her son one morning.

  “Not read it, exactly. I can tell what she means. Not all the time, but mostly.”

  “Is it writing?”

  “N-no. It doesn’t mean what it looks like.”

  “Symbolism,” Paradine suggested over his coffee.

  Jane looked at him, her eyes widening. “Denny—”

  He winked and shook his head. Later, when they were alone, he said, “Don’t let Holloway upset you. I’m not implying that the kids are corresponding in an unknown tongue. If Emma draws a squiggle and says it’s a flower, that’s an arbitrary rule—Scott remembers that. Next time she draws the same sort of squiggle, or tries to—well!”

  “Sure,” Jane said doubtfully. “Have you noticed Scott’s been doing a lot of reading lately?”

  “I noticed. Nothing unusual, though. No Kant or Spinoza.”

  “He browses, that’s all.”

  “Well, so did I, at his age,” Paradine said, and went off to his morning classes. He lunched with Holloway, which was becoming a daily habit, and spoke of Emma’s literary endeavors.

  “Was I right about symbolism, Rex?”

  The psychologist nodded. “Quite right. Our own language is nothing but arbitrary symbolism now. At least in its application. Look here.” On his napkin he drew a very narrow ellipse. “What’s that?”

  “You mean what does it represent?”

  “Yes. What does it suggest to you? It could be a crude representation of—what?”

  “Plenty of things,” Paradine said. “Rim of a glass. A fried egg. A loaf of French bread. A cigar.”

  Holloway added a little triangle to his drawing, apex joined to one end of the ellipse. He looked up at Paradine.

  “A fish,” the latter said instantly.

  “Our familiar symbol for a fish. Even without fins, eyes or mouth, it’s recognizable, because we’ve been conditioned to identify this particular shape with our mental picture of a fish. The basis of a rebus. A symbol, to us, means a lot more than what we actually see on paper. What’s in your mind when you look at this sketch?”

  “Why-a fish.”

  “Keep going. What do you visualize? Everything!”

  “Scales,” Paradine said slowly, looking into space. “Water. Foam. A fish’s eye. The fins. The colors.”

  “So the symbol represents a lot more than just the abstract idea fish. Note the connotation’s that of a noun, not a verb. It’s harder to express actions by symbolism, you know. Anyway—reverse the process. Suppose you want to make a symbol for some concrete noun, say bird. Draw it.”

  Paradine drew two connected arcs, concavities down.

  “The lowest common denominator,” Holloway nodded. “The natural tendency is to simplify. Especially when a child is seeing something for the first time and has few standards of comparison. He tries to identify the new thing with what’s already familiar to him. Ever notice how a child draws the ocean?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he went on.

  “A series of jagged points. Like the oscillating line on a seismograph. When I first saw the Pacific, I was about three. I remember it pretty clearly. It looked—tilted. A flat plain, slanted at an angle. The waves were regular triangles, apex upward. Now, I didn’t see them stylized that way, but later, remembering, I had to find some familiar standard of comparison. Which is the only way of getting any conception of an entirely new thing. The average child tries to draw these regular triangles, but his coordination’s poor. He gets a seismograph pattern.”

  “All of which means what?”

  “A child sees the ocean. He stylizes it. He draws a certain definite pattern, symbolic, to him, of the sea. Emma’s scrawls may be symbols, too. I don’t mean that the world looks different to her—brighter, perhaps, and sharper, more vivid and with a slackening of perception above her eye level. What I do mean is that her thought processes are different, that she translates what she sees into abnormal symbols.”

  “You still believe—”

  “Yes, I do. Her mind has been conditioned unusually. It may be that she breaks down what she sees into simple, obvious patterns—and realizes a significance to those patterns that we can’t understand. Like the abacus. She saw a pattern in that, though to us it was completely random.”

  Paradine abruptly decided to taper off these luncheon engagements with Holloway. The man was an alarmist. His theories were growing more fantastic than ever, and he dragged in anything, applicable or not, that would support them.

  Rather sardonically he said, “Do you mean Emma’s communicating with Scott in an unknown language?”

  “In symbols for which she hasn’t any words. I’m sure Scott understands a great deal of those—scrawls. To him, an isosceles triangle may represent any factor, though probably a concrete noun. Would a man who knew nothing of chemistry understand what H2O meant? Would he realize that the symbol could evoke a picture of the ocean?”

  Paradine didn’t answer. Instead, he mentioned to Holloway Scott’s curious remark that the landscape, from the hill, had looked all wrong.

  A moment later, he was inclined to regret his impulse, for the psychologist was off again.

  “Scott’s thought patterns are building up to a sum that doesn’t equal this world. Perhaps he’s subconsciously expecting to see the world where those toys came from.”

  Paradine stopped listening. Enough was enough. The kids were getting along all right, and the only remaining disturbing factor was Holloway himself. That night, however, Scott evinced an interest, later significant, in eels.

  There was nothing apparently harmful in natural history. Paradine explained about eels.

  “But where do they lay their eggs? Or do they?”

  “That’s still a mystery. Their spawning grounds are unknown. Maybe the Sargasso Sea, or the deeps, where the pressure can help them force the young out of their bodies.”

  “Funny,” Scott said, thinking deeply.

  “Salmon do the same thing, more or less. They go up rivers to spawn.” Paradine went into detail. Scott was fascinated.

  “But that’s right, Dad. They’re born in the river, and when they learn how to swim, they go down to the sea. And they come back to lay their eggs, huh?”

  “Right.”

  “Only they wouldn’t come back,” Scott pondered. “They’d just send their eggs—”

  “It’d take a very long ovipositor,” Paradine said, and vouchsafed some well-chosen remarks upon oviparity.

  His son wasn’t entirely satisfied. Flowers, he contended, sent their seeds long distances.

  “They don’t guide them. Not many find fertile soil.”<
br />
  “Flowers haven’t got brains, though. Dad, why do people live here?”

  “Glendale?”

  “No—here. This whole place. It isn’t all there is, I bet.”

  “Do you mean the other planets?”

  Scott was hesitant. “This is only—part of the big place. It’s like the river where the salmon go. Why don’t people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?”

  Paradine realized that Scott was speaking figuratively. He felt a brief chill. The—ocean?

  The young of the species are not conditioned to live in the more complete world of their parents. Having developed sufficiently, they enter that world. Later they breed. The fertilized eggs are buried in the sand, far up the river, where later they hatch.

  And they learn. Instinct alone is fatally slow. Especially in the case of a specialized genus, unable to cope even with this world, unable to feed or drink or survive, unless someone has foresightedly provided for those needs.

  The young, fed and tended, would survive. There would be incubators and robots. They would survive, but they would not know how to swim downstream, to the vaster world of the ocean.

  So they must be taught. They must be trained and conditioned in many ways.

  Painlessly, subtly, unobtrusively. Children love toys that do things, and if those toys teach at the same time …

  In the latter half of the nineteenth century an Englishman sat on a grassy bank near a stream. A very small girl lay near him, staring up at the sky. She had discarded a curious toy with which she had been playing, and now was murmuring a wordless little song, to which the man listened with half an ear.

  “What was that, my dear?” he asked at last.

  “Just something I made up, Uncle Charles.”

  “Sing it again.” He pulled out a notebook.

  The girl obeyed.

  “Does it mean anything?”

  She nodded. “Oh, yes. Like the stories I tell you, you know.”

  “They’re wonderful stories, dear.”

  “And you’ll put them in a book someday?”

  “Yes, but I must change them quite a lot, or no one would understand. But I don’t think I’ll change your little song.”

  “You mustn’t. If you did, it wouldn’t mean anything.”

  “I won’t change that stanza, anyway,” he promised. “Just what does it mean?”

  “It’s the way out, I think,” the girl said doubtfully. “I’m not sure yet. My magic toys told me.”

  “I wish I knew what London shop sold these marvellous toys!”

  “Mama bought them for me. She’s dead. Papa doesn’t care.”

  She lied. She had found the toys in a box one day, as she played by the Thames. And they were indeed wonderful.

  Her little song—Uncle Charles thought it didn’t mean anything. (He wasn’t her real uncle, she parenthesized. But he was nice.) The song meant a great deal. It was the way. Presently she would do what it said, and then …

  But she was already too old. She never found the way.

  Paradine had dropped Holloway. Jane had taken a dislike to him, naturally enough, since what she wanted most of all was to have her fears calmed. Since Scott and Emma acted normally now, Jane felt satisfied. It was partly wishful thinking, to which Paradine could not entirely subscribe.

  Scott kept bringing gadgets to Emma for her approval. Usually she’d shake her head. Sometimes she would look doubtful. Very occasionally she would signify agreement. Then there would be an hour of laborious, crazy scribbling on scraps of note paper, and Scott, after studying the notations, would arrange and rearrange his rocks, bits of machinery, candle ends and assorted junk. Each day the maid cleaned them away, and each day Scott began again.

  He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.

  “But why this pebble right here?”

  “It’s hard and round, Dad. It belongs there.”

  “So is this one hard and round.”

  “Well, that’s got vaseline on it. When you get that far, you can’t see just a hard, round thing.”

  “What comes next? This candle?”

  Scott looked disgusted. “That’s toward the end. The iron ring’s next.”

  It was, Paradine thought, like a scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted—familiar logic—at Scott’s motives in arranging the junk as he did.

  Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.

  Well …

  Jane was lunching with Uncle Harry, and, on this hot Sunday after-noon, there was little to do but read the papers. Paradine settled himself in the coolest place he could find, with a Collins, and lost himself in the comic strips.

  An hour later a clatter of feet upstairs roused him from his doze. Scott’s voice was crying exultantly, “This is it, Slug! Come on!”

  Paradine stood up quickly, frowning. As he went into the hall the telephone began to ring. Jane had promised to call …

  His hand was on the receiver when Emma’s faint voice squealed with excitement. Paradine grimaced. What the devil was going on upstairs?

  Scott shrieked, “Look out! This way!”

  Paradine, his mouth working, his nerves ridiculously tense, forgot the phone and raced up the stairs. The door of Scott’s room was open.

  The children were vanishing.

  They went in fragments, like thick smoke in a wind, or like movement in a distorting mirror. Hand in hand they went, in a direction Paradine could not understand, and as he blinked there on the threshold, they were gone.

  “Emma!” he said, dry-throated. “Scotty!”

  On the carpet lay a pattern of markers, pebbles, an iron ring—junk. A random pattern. A crumpled sheet of paper blew towards Paradine.

  He picked it up automatically.

  “Kids. Where are you? Don’t hide—Emma! SCOTTY!”

  Downstairs the telephone stopped its shrill, monotonous ringing. Paradine looked at the paper he held.

  It was a leaf tom from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma’s meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with Through the Looking Glass. His memory gave him the words—

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the momeraths outgrabe.

  Idiotically he thought: Humpty Dumpty explained it. A wabe is the plot of grass around a sundial. A sundial. Time. It has something to do with time. A long time ago Scotty asked me what a wabe was. Symbolism.

  ’Twas brillig …

  A perfect mathematical formula, giving all the conditions, in symbolism the children had finally understood. The junk on the floor. The toves had to be made slithy—vaseline?—and they had to be placed in a certain relationship, so that they’d gyre and gimble.

  Lunacy!

  But it had not been lunacy to Emma and Scott. They thought differently. They used x logic. Those notes Emma had made on the page—she’d translated Carroll’s words into symbols both she and Scott could understand.

  The random factor had made sense to the children. They had fulfilled the conditions of the time-span equation. And the mome raths out- grabe…

  Paradine made a rather ghastly little sound, deep in his throat. He looked at the crazy pattern on the carpet. If he could follow it, as the kids had done—But he couldn’t. The pattern was senseless. The random factor defeated him. He was conditioned to Euclid.

  Even if he went insane, he still couldn’t do it. It would be the wrong kind of lunacy.

  His mind had stopped working now. But in a moment the stasis of incredulous horror wou
ld pass—Paradine crumpled the page in his fingers. “Emma! Scotty!” he called in a dead voice, as though he could expect no response.

  Sunlight slanted through the open windows, brightening the golden pelt of Mr. Bear. Downstairs the ringing of the telephone began again.

  Two-Handed Engine

  Ever since the days of Orestes there have been men with Furies following them. It wasn’t until the Twenty-Second Century that mankind made itself a set of real Furies, out of steel. Mankind had reached a crisis by then. They had a good reason for building manshaped Furies that would dog the footsteps of all men who kill men. Nobody else. There was by then no other crime of any importance.

  It worked very simply. Without warning, a man who thought himself safe would suddenly hear the steady footfalls behind him. He would turn and see the two-handed engine walking towards him, shaped like a man of steel, and more incorruptible than any man not made of steel could be. Only then would the murderer know he had been tried and condemned by the omniscient electronic minds that knew society as no human mind could ever know it.

  For the rest of his days, the man would hear those footsteps behind him. A moving jail with invisible bars that shut him off from the world. Never in life would he be alone again. And one day—he never knew when—the jailer would turn executioner.

  Danner leaned back comfortably in his contoured restaurant chair and rolled expensive wine across his tongue, closing his eyes to enjoy the taste of it better. He felt perfectly safe. Oh, perfectly protected. For nearly an hour now he had been sitting here, ordering the most expensive food, enjoying the music breathing softly through the air, the murmurous, well-bred hush of his fellow diners. It was a good place to be. It was very good, having so much money—now.

  True, he had had to kill to get the money. But no guilt troubled him. There was no guilt if you aren’t found out, and Danner had protection. Protection straight from the source, which was something new in the world. Danner knew the consequences of killing. If Hartz hadn’t satisfied him that he was perfectly safe, Danner would never have pulled the trigger…