The Best of Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  “It was Saunk Hogben,” the Perfesser kept saying. “I tell you, he fixed that projector!”

  “I saw you,” Abernathy said. “You done it. Ow!” He put up his hand to his jaw. “And you better stop it, fast! That crowd outside means business. Half the people in town have got toothaches.”

  I guess half the people in town had gold fillings in their teeth.

  Then Galbraith said something that didn’t surprise me too much.

  “I’m having a commission come down from New York; I meant to telephone the foundation tonight, they’ll vouch for me.”

  So he was intending to cross us up, all along. I kinda felt that had been in his mind.

  “You’ll cure this toothache of mine—and everybody else’s—or I’ll open the doors and let in that lynch mob!” the Sheriff howled. Then he went away to put an icebag on his cheek.

  I snuck back aways, got visible again and made a lot of noise coming along the passage, so Galbraith could hear me. I waited till he got through cussing me out. I just looked stupid.

  “I guess I made a mistake,” I said. “I can fix it, though.”

  “You’ve done enough fixing!” He stopped. “Wait a minute. What did you say? You can cure this—what is it?”

  “I been looking at that shotgun gadget,” I said. “I think I know what I did wrong. It’s sorta tuned in on gold now, and all the gold in town’s shooting out rays or heat or something.”

  “Induced selective radioactivity,” Galbraith muttered, which didn’t seem to mean much. “Listen. That crowd outside—do they ever have lynchings in this town?”

  “Not more’n once or twice a year,” I said. “And we already had two this year, so we filled our quota. Wish I could get you up to our place, though. We could hide you easy.”

  “You’d better do something!” he said. “Or I’ll get that commission down from New York. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  I never seen such a man fer telling lies and keeping a straight face.

  “It’s a cinch,” I said. “I can rig up the gadget so it’ll switch off the rays immediate. Only I don’t want people to connect us Hogbens with what’s going on. We like to live quiet. Look, s’pose I go back to your hotel and change over the gadget, and then all you have to do is get all the people with toothaches together and pull the trigger.”

  “But—well, but—”

  He was afraid of more trouble. I had to talk him into it. The crowd was yelling outside, so it wasn’t too hard. Finally I went away, but I came back, invisible-like, and listened when Galbraith talked to the Sheriff.

  They fixed it all up. Everybody with toothaches was going to the Town Hall and set. Then Abernathy would bring the Perfesser over, with the shotgun gadget, and try it out.

  “Will it stop the toothaches?” the Sheriff wanted to know. “For sure?”

  “I’m—quite certain it will.”

  Abernathy had caught that behitation.

  “Then you better try it on me first. Just to make sure. I don’t trust you.”

  It seemed like nobody was trusting nobody.

  I hiked back to the hotel and made the switch-over in the shotgun gadget. And then I run into trouble. My invisibility was wearing thin. That’s the worst part of being just a kid.

  After I’m a few hunnerd years older I can stay invisible all the time if I want to. But I ain’t right mastered it yet. Thing was, I needed help now because there was something I had to do, and I couldn’t do it with people watching.

  I went up on the roof and called Little Sam. After I’d tuned in on his haid, I had him put the call through to Paw and Uncle Les. After a while Uncle Les come flying down from the sky, riding mighty heavy on account of he was carrying Paw. Paw was cussing because a hawk had chased them.

  “Nobody seen us, though,” Uncle Les said. “I think.”

  “People got their own troubles in town today,” I said. “I need some help. That Perfesser’s gonna call down his commission and study us, no matter what he promises.”

  “Ain’t much we can do, then,” Paw said. “We cain’t kill that feller. Grandpaw said not to.”

  So I told ’em my idea. Paw being invisible, he could do it easy. Then we made a little place in the roof so we could see through it, and looked down into Galbraith’s room.

  We was just in time. The Sheriff was standing there, with his pistol out, just waiting, and the Perfesser, pale around the chops, was pointing the shotgun gadget at Abernathy. It went along without a hitch. Galbraith pulled the trigger, a purple ring of light popped out, and that was all. Except that the Sheriff opened his mouth and gulped.

  “You wasn’t faking! My toothache’s gone!”

  Galbraith was sweating, but he put up a good front. “Sure it works,” he said. “Naturally. I told you—”

  “C’mon down to the Town Hall. Everybody’s waiting. You better cure us all, or it’ll be just too bad for you.”

  They went out. Paw snuck down after them, and Uncle Les picked me up and flew on their trail, keeping low to the roofs, where we wouldn’t be spotted. After a while we was fixed outside one of the Town Hall’s windows, watching.

  I ain’t heard so much misery since the great plague of London. The hall was jam-full, and everybody had a toothache and was moaning and yelling. Abernathy come in with the Perfesser, who was carrying the shotgun gadget, and a scream went up.

  Galbraith set the gadget on the stage, pointing down at the audience, while the Sheriff pulled out his pistol again and made a speech, telling everybody to shet up and they’d get rid of their toothaches.

  I couldn’t see Paw, natcherally, but I knew he was up on the platform. Something funny was happening to the shotgun gadget. Nobody noticed, except me, and I was watching for it. Paw—invisible, of course—was making a few changes. I’d told him how, but he knew what to do as well as I did. So pretty soon the shotgun was rigged the way we wanted it.

  What happened after that was shocking. Galbraith aimed the gadget and pulled the trigger, and rings of light jumped out, yaller this time. I’d told Paw to fix the range so nobody outside the Town Hall would be bothered. But inside—

  Well, it sure fixed them toothaches. Nobody’s gold filling can ache if he ain’t got a gold filling.

  The gadget was fixed now so it worked on everything that wasn’t growing. Paw had got the range just right. The seats was gone all of a sudden, and so was part of the chandelier. The audience, being bunched together, got it good. Pegleg Jaffe’s glass eye was gone, too. Them that had false teeth lost ’em. Everybody sorta got a once-over- lightly haircut.

  Also, the whole audience lost their clothes. Shoes ain’t growing things, and no more are pants or shirts or dresses. In a trice everybody in the hall was naked as needles. But, shucks, they’d got rid of their toothaches, hadn’t they?

  We was back to home an hour later, all but Uncle Les, when the door busted open and in come Uncle Les, with the Perfesser staggering after him. Galbraith was a mess. He sank down and wheezed, looking back at the door in a worried way.

  “Funny thing happened,” Uncle Les said. “I was flying along outside town and there was the Perfesser running away from a big crowd of people, with sheets wrapped around ’em—some of ’em. So I picked him up. I brung him here, like he wanted.” Uncle Les winked at me.

  “Ooooh!” Galbraith said. “Aaaah! Are they coming?”

  Maw went to the door.

  “They’s a lot of torches moving up the mountain,” she said. “It looks right bad.”

  The Perfesser glared at me.

  “You said you could hide me! Well, you’d better! This is your fault!”

  “Shucks,” I said.

  “You’ll hide me or else!” Galbraith squalled. “I—I’ll bring that commission down.”

  “Look,” I said, “if we hide you safe, will you promise to fergit all about that commission and leave us alone?”

  The Perfesser promised. “Hold on a minu
te,” I said, and went up to the attic to see Grandpaw.

  He was awake.

  “How about it, Grandpaw?” I asked.

  He listened to Little Sam for a second.

  “The knave is lying,” he told me pretty soon. “He means to bring his commission of stinkards here anyway, recking naught of his promise.”

  “Should we hide him, then?”

  “Aye,” Grandpaw said. “The Hogbens have given their word—there must be no more killing. And to hide a fugitive from his pursuers would not be an ill deed, surely.”

  Maybe he winked. It’s hard to tell with Grandpaw. So I went down the ladder. Galbraith was at the door, watching the torches come up the mountain.

  He grabbed me.

  “Saunk! If you don’t hide me—”

  “We’ll hide you,” I said. “C’mon.”

  So we took him down to the cellar…

  When the mob got here, with Sheriff Abernathy in the lead, we played dumb. We let ’em search the house. Little Sam and Grandpaw turned invisible for a bit, so nobody noticed them. And naturally the crowd couldn’t find hide nor hair of Galbraith. We’d hid him good, like we promised.

  That was a few years ago. The Perfesser’s thriving. He ain’t studying us, though. Sometimes we take out the bottle we keep him in and study him.

  Dang small bottle, too!

  The Twonky

  The turnover at Mideastern Radio was so great that Mickey Lloyd couldn’t keep track of his men. Employees kept quitting and going elsewhere, at a higher salary. So when the big-headed little man in overalls wandered vaguely out of a storeroom, Lloyd took one look at the brown dungaree suit—company provided—and said mildly, “The whistle blew half an hour ago. Hop to work.”

  “Work-k-k?” The man seemed to have trouble with the word.

  Drunk? Lloyd, in his capacity as foreman, couldn’t permit that. He flipped away his cigarette, walked forward and sniffed. No, it wasn’t liquor. He peered at the badge on the man’s overalls.

  “Two-o-four, m-mm. Are you new here?”

  “New. Huh?” The man rubbed a rising bump on his forehead. He was an odd-looking little chap, bald as a vacuum tube, with a pinched, pallid face and tiny eyes that held dazed wonder.

  “Come on, Joe. Wake up!” Lloyd was beginning to sound impatient “You work here, don’t you?”

  “Joe,” said the man thoughtfully. “Work. Yes, I work. I make them.” His words ran together oddly, as though he had a cleft palate.

  With another glance at the badge, Lloyd gripped Joe’s arm and ran him through the assembly room. “Here’s your place. Hop to it. Know what to do?”

  The other drew his scrawny body erect. “I am—expert,” he remarked. “Make them better than Ponthwank.”

  “O.K.,” Lloyd said. “Make ’em, then.” And he went away.

  The man called Joe hesitated, nursing the bruise on his head. The overalls caught his attention, and he examined them wonderingly. Where—oh, yes. They had been hanging in the room from which he had first emerged. His own garments had, naturally, dissipated during the trip—what trip?

  Amnesia, he thought. He had fallen from the…the something…when it slowed down and stopped. How odd this huge, machine-filled barn looked! It struck no chord of remembrance.

  Amnesia, that was it. He was a worker. He made things. As for the unfamiliarity of his surroundings, that meant nothing. He was still dazed. The clouds would lift from his mind presently. They were beginning to do that already.

  Work. Joe scuttled around the room, trying to goad his faulty memory. Men in overalls were doing things. Simple, obvious things. But how childish—how elemental! Perhaps this was a kindergarten.

  After a while Joe went out into a stock room and examined some finished models of combination radio-phonographs. So that was it. Awkward and clumsy, but it wasn’t his place to say so. No. His job was to make Twonkies.

  Twonkies? The name jolted his memory again. Of course he knew how to make Twonkies. He’d made them all his life—had been specially trained for the job. Now they were using a different model of Twonky, but what the hell! Child’s play for a clever workman.

  Joe went back into the shop and found a vacant bench. He began to build a Twonky. Occasionally he slipped off and stole the material he needed. Once, when he couldn’t locate any tungsten, he hastily built a small gadget and made it.

  His bench was in a distant corner, badly lighted, though it seemed quite bright to Joe’s eyes. Nobody noticed the console that was swiftly growing to completion there. Joe worked very, very fast. He ignored the noon whistle, and, at quitting time, his task was finished. It could, perhaps, stand another coat of paint; it lacked the Shimmertone of a standard Twonky. But none of the others had Shimmertone. Joe sighed, crawled under the bench, looked in vain for a relaxopad, and went to sleep on the floor.

  A few hours later he woke up. The factory was empty. Odd! Maybe the working hours had changed. Maybe—Joe’s mind felt funny. Sleep had cleared away the mists of amnesia, if such it had been, but he still felt dazed.

  Muttering under his breath, he sent the Twonky into the stock room and compared it with the others. Superficially it was identical with a console radio-phonograph combination of the latest model. Following the pattern of the others, Joe had camouflaged and disguised the various organs and reactors.

  He went back into the shop. Then the last of the mists cleared from his mind. Joe’s shoulders jerked convulsively.

  “Great Snell!” he gasped. “So that was it! I ran into a temporal snag!”

  With a startled glance around, he fled to the storeroom from which he had first emerged. The overalls he took off and returned to their hook. After that, Joe went over to a corner, felt around in the air, nodded with satisfaction and seated himself on nothing, three feet above the floor. Then Joe vanished.

  “Time,” said Kerry Westerfield, “is curved. Eventually it gets back to the same place where it started. That’s duplication.” He put his feet up on a conveniently outjutting rock of the chimney and stretched luxuriously. From the kitchen Martha made clinking noises with bottles and glasses.

  “Yesterday at this time I had a Martini,” Kerry said. “The time curve indicates that I should have another one now. Are you listening, angel?”

  “I’m pouring,” said the angel distantly.

  “You get my point, then. Here’s another. Time describes a spiral instead of a circle. If you call the first cycle ‘a’, the second one’s ‘a plus i’—see? Which means a double Martini tonight.”

  “I knew where that would end,” Martha remarked, coming into the spacious, oak-raftered living room. She was a small, dark-haired woman, with a singularly pretty face and a figure to match. Her tiny gingham apron looked slightly absurd in combination with slacks and silk blouse. “And they don’t make infinity-proof gin. Here’s your Martini.” She did things with the shaker and manipulated glasses.

  “Stir slowly,” Kerry cautioned. “Never shake. Ah—that’s it.” He accepted the drink and eyed it appreciatively. Black hair, sprinkled with gray, gleamed in the lamplight as he sipped the Martini. “Good. Very good.”

  Martha drank slowly and eyed her husband. A nice guy, Kerry Westerfield. He was forty-odd, pleasantly ugly, with a wide mouth and with an occasional sardonic gleam in his gray eyes as he contemplated life. They had been married for twelve years, and liked it.

  From outside, the late, faint glow of sunset came through the windows, picking out the console cabinet that stood against the wall by the door. Kerry peered at it with appreciation.

  “A pretty penny,” he remarked. “Still—”

  “What? Oh. The men had a tough time getting it up the stairs. Why don’t you try it, Kerry?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “The old one was complicated enough,” Martha said in a baffled manner. “Gadgets. They confuse me. I was brought up on an Edison. You wound it up with a crank, and strange noises came ou
t of a horn. That I could understand. But now—you push a button, and extraordinary things happen. Electric eyes, tone selections, records that get played on both sides, to the accompaniment of weird groanings and clickings from inside the console—probably you understand those things. I don’t even want to. Whenever I play a Crosby record in a super-duper like that, Bing seems embarrassed.”

  Kerry ate his olive. “I’m going to play some Debussy.” He nodded toward a table. “There’s a new Crosby record for you. The latest.”

  Martha wriggled happily. “Can I, maybe, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you’ll have to show me how.”

  “Simple enough,” said Kerry, beaming at the console. “Those babies are pretty good, you know. They do everything but think.”

  “I wish they’d wash the dishes,” Martha remarked. She set down her glass, got up and vanished into the kitchen.

  Kerry snapped on a lamp nearby and went over to examine the new radio, Mideastern’s latest model, with all the new improvements. It had been expensive—but what the hell? He could afford it And the old one had been pretty well shot.

  It was not, he saw, plugged in. Nor were there any wires in evidence—not even a ground. Something new, perhaps. Built-in antenna and ground. Kerry crouched down, looked for a socket, and plugged the cord into it.

  That done, he opened the doors and eyed the dials with every appearance of satisfaction. A beam of bluish light shot out and hit him in the eyes. From the depths of the console a faint, thoughtful clicking proceeded. Abruptly it stopped. Kerry blinked, fiddled with dials and switches, and bit at a fingernail.

  The radio said, in a distant voice, “Psychology pattern checked and recorded.”

  “Eh?” Kerry twirled a dial. “Wonder what that was? Amateur station—no, they’re off the air. Hm-m-m.” He shrugged and went over to a chair beside the shelves of albums. His gaze ran swiftly over the titles and composers’ names. Where was the Swan of Tuonela? There it was, next to Finlandia. Kerry took down the album and opened it in his lap. With his free hand he extracted a cigarette from his pocket, put it between his lips and fumbled for the matches on the table beside him. The first match he lit went out.