The Best of Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  Those big planers are minor juggernauts. They have to be bedded in concrete, in heavy thigh-high cradles on which a heavily weighted metal monster—the planer itself—slides back and forth.

  I stepped back, saw the hand-truck coming, and made a neat waltz turn to get out of its way. The boy with the hand-truck swerved, the cylinders began to fall out, and I took an unbalanced waltz step that ended with my smacking my thighs against the edge of the cradle and doing a neat, suicidal half-somersault. When I landed, I was jammed into the metal cradle, looking at the planer as it zoomed down on me. I’ve never in my life seen anything move so fast.

  It was all over before I knew it. I was struggling to bounce myself out, men were yelling, the planer was bellowing with bloodthirsty triumph, and the cylinder heads were rolling around underfoot all over the place. Then there was the crackling, tortured crash of gears and cams going to pieces. The planer stopped. My heart started.

  After I’d changed my clothes, I waited for Jackie to knock off. Rolling home on the bus, I told her about it. “Pure dumb luck. Or else a miracle. One of those cylinders bounced into the planer in just the right place. The planer’s a mess, but I’m not. I think we ought to write a note of thanks to our—uh—tenants.”

  Jackie nodded with profound conviction. “It’s the luck they pay their rent in, Eddie. I’m glad they paid in advance, too!”

  “Except that I’m off the payroll till the planer’s fixed,” I said.

  We went home through a storm. We could hear a banging in Mr. Henchard’s room, louder than any noise that had ever come from the bird cage. We rushed upstairs and found the casement window had come open. I closed it. The cretonne cover had been half blown off the cage, and I started to pull it back in place. Jackie was beside me. We looked at the tiny house; my hand didn’t complete its gesture.

  The TO LET sign had been removed from the door. The chimney was smoking greasily. The blinds were tightly down, as usual, but there were other changes.

  There was a small smell of cooking—scorned beef and skunk cabbage, I thought wildly. Unmistakably it came from the pixie house. On the formerly immaculate porch was a slopping-over garbage can, and a minuscule orange crate with unwashed, atom-sized tin cans and what were indubitably empty liquor bottles. There was a milk bottle by the door, too, filled with a biliously lavender liquid. It hadn’t been taken in yet, nor had the morning paper. It was certainly a different paper. The lurid size of the headlines indicated that it was a yellow tabloid.

  A clothesline, without any clothes hanging on it at the moment, had been tacked up from one pillar of the porch to a corner of the house.

  I jerked down the cover, and fled after Jackie into the kitchen. “My God!” I said.

  “We should have asked for references,” she gasped. “Those aren’t our tenants!”

  “Not the tenants we used to have,” I agreed. “I mean the ones Mr. Henchard used to have. Did you see that garbage pail on the porch!”

  “And the clothesline,” Jackie added. “How—how sloppy.”

  “Jukes, Kallikaks and Jeeter Lesters. This isn’t Tobacco Road.”

  Jackie gulped. “Mr. Henchard said they wouldn’t be back, you know.”

  “Yeah, but, well—”

  She nodded slowly, as though beginning to understand. I said, “Give.”

  “I don’t know. Only Mr. Henchard said the Little Folk wanted a quiet, respectable neighborhood. And we drove them out. I’ll bet we gave the bird cage—the location—a bad reputation. The better-class pixies won’t live there. It’s—oh, dear—maybe it’s a slum.”

  “You’re very nuts,” I said.

  “I’m not. It must be that. Mr. Henchard said as much. He told us he’d have to build a new house. Desirable tenants won’t move into a bad neighborhood. We’ve got sloppy pixies, that’s all.”

  My mouth opened. I stared at her.

  “Uh-huh. The tenement type. I’ll bet they keep a pixilated goat in the kitchen,” Jackie babbled.

  “Well,” I said, “we’re not going to stand for it. I’ll evict ’em. I—I’ll pour water down their chimney. Where’s the teakettle?”

  Jackie grabbed me. “No, you don’t! We can’t evict them, Eddie. We mustn’t. They pay their rent,” she said.

  And then I remembered. “The planer—”

  “Just that,” Jackie emphasized, digging her fingers into my biceps. “You’d have been killed today if you hadn’t had some extra good luck. Those pixies may be sloppy, but they pay their rent.”

  I got the angle. “Mr. Henchard’s luck worked differently, though. Remember when he kicked that rock down the beach steps, and they started to cave in? Me, I do it the hard way. I fall in the planer, sure, and a cylinder bounces after me and stops the machine but I’ll be out of a job till the planer’s fixed. Nothing like that ever happened to Mr. Henchard.”

  “He had a better class of tenant,” Jackie explained, with a wild gleam in her eye. “If Mr. Henchard had fallen in the planer, a fuse would have blown, I’ll bet. Our tenants are sloppy pixies, so we get sloppy luck.”

  “They stay,” I said. “We own a slum. Let’s get out of here and go down to Terry’s for a drink.”

  We buttoned our raincoats and departed, breathing the fresh, wet air. The storm was slashing down as furiously as ever. I’d forgotten my flashlight, but I didn’t want to go back for it. We headed down the slope, toward Terry’s faintly visible lights.

  It was dark. We couldn’t see much through the storm. Probably that was why we didn’t notice the bus until it was bearing down on us, headlights almost invisible in the dimout.

  I started to pull Jackie aside, out of the way, but my foot slipped on the wet concrete, and we took a nosedive. I felt Jackie’s body hurtle against me, and the next moment we were floundering in the muddy ditch beside the highway while the bus roared past us and was gone.

  We crawled out and made for Terry’s. The barman stared at us, said, “Whew!” and set up drinks without being asked.

  “Unquestionably,” I said, “our lives have just been saved.”

  “Yes,” Jackie agreed, scraping mud from her ears. “But it wouldn’t have happened this way to Mr. Henchard.”

  The barman shook his head. “Fall in the ditch, Eddie? And you too? Bad luck!”

  “Not bad,” Jackie told him feebly. “Good. But sloppy.” She lifted her drink and eyed me with muddy misery. I clinked my glass against hers.

  “Well,” I said. “Here’s luck.”

  WHAT YOU NEED

  That’s what the sign said. Tim Carmichael, who worked for a trade paper that specialized in economics, and eked out a meager salary by selling sensational and untrue articles to the tabloids, failed to sense a story in the reversed sign. He thought it was a cheap publicity gag, something one seldom encounters on Park Avenue, where the shop fronts are noted for their classic dignity. And he was irritated.

  He growled silently, walked on, then suddenly turned and came back. He wasn’t quite strong enough to resist the temptation to unscramble the sentence, though his annoyance grew. He stood before the window, staring up, and said to himself, “‘We have what you need.’ Yeah?”

  The sign was in prim, small letters on a black painted ribbon that stretched across a narrow glass pane. Below it was one of those curved, invisible-glass windows. Through the window Carmichael could see an expanse of white velvet, with a few objects carefully arranged there. A rusty nail, a snowshoe and a diamond tiara. It looked like a Dali décor for Cartier or Tiffany.

  “Jewelers?” Carmichael asked silently. “But why what you need?” He pictured millionaires miserably despondent for lack of a matched pearl necklace, heiresses weeping inconsolably because they needed a few star sapphires. The principle of luxury merchandising was to deal with the whipped cream of supply and demand; few people needed diamonds. They merely wanted them and could afford them.

  “Or the place might sell jinni flasks,” Carmichael decide
d. “Or magic wands. Same principle as a Coney carny, though. A sucker trap. Bill the Whatzit outside and people will pay their dimes and flock in. For two cents—”

  He was dyspeptic this morning, and generally disliked the world. Prospect of a scapegoat was attractive, and his press card gave him a certain advantage. He opened the door and walked into the shop.

  It was Park Avenue, all right. There were no showcases or counters. It might be an art gallery, for a few good oils were displayed on the walls. An air of overpowering luxury, with the bleakness of an unlived-in place, struck Carmichael.

  Through a curtain at the back came a very tall man with carefully combed white hair, a ruddy, healthy face and sharp blue eyes. He might have been sixty. He wore expensive but careless tweeds, which somehow jarred with the décor.

  “Good morning,” the man said, with a quick glance at Carmichael’s clothes. He seemed slightly surprised. “May I help you?”

  “Maybe.” Carmichael introduced himself and showed his press card.

  “Oh? My name is Talley. Peter Talley.”

  “I saw your sign.”

  “Oh?”

  “Our paper is always on the lookout for possible writeups. I’ve never noticed your shop before—”

  “I’ve been here for years,” Talley said.

  “This is an art gallery?”

  “Well—no.”

  The door opened. A florid man came in and greeted Talley cordially. Carmichael, recognizing the client, felt his opinion of the shop swing rapidly upward. The florid man was a Name—a big one.

  “It’s a bit early, Mr. Talley,” he said, “but I didn’t want to delay. Have you had time to get—what I needed?”

  “Oh, yes. I have it. One moment.” Talley hurried through the draperies and returned with a small, neatly wrapped parcel, which he gave to the florid man. The latter forked over a check—Carmichael caught a glimpse of the amount and gulped—and departed. His town car was at the curb outside.

  Carmichael moved toward the door, where he could watch. The florid man seemed anxious. His chauffeur waited stolidly as the parcel was unwrapped with hurried fingers.

  “I’m not sure I’d want publicity, Mr. Carmichael,” Talley said. “I’ve a select clientele—carefully chosen.”

  “Perhaps our weekly economic bulletins might interest you.”

  Talley tried not to laugh. “Oh, I don’t think so. It really isn’t in my line.”

  The florid man had finally unwrapped the parcel and taken out an egg. As far as Carmichael could see from his post near the door, it was merely an ordinary egg. But its possessor regarded it almost with awe. Had Earth’s last hen died ten years before, the man could have been no more pleased. Something like deep relief showed on the Florida-tanned face.

  He said something to the chauffeur, and the car rolled smoothly forward and was gone.

  “Are you in the dairy business?” Carmichael asked abruptly.

  “No.”

  “Do you mind telling me what your business is?”

  “I’m afraid I do, rather,” Talley said.

  Carmichael was beginning to scent a story. “Of course, I could find out through the Better Business Bureau—”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “No? They might be interested in knowing why an egg is worth five thousand dollars to one of your customers.”

  Talley said, “My clientele is so small I must charge high fees. You—ah—know that a Chinese mandarin has been known to pay thousands of taels for eggs of proved antiquity.”

  “That guy wasn’t a Chinese mandarin,” Carmichael said.

  “Oh, well. As I say, I don’t welcome publicity—”

  “I think you do. I was in the advertising game for a while. Spelling your sign backwards is an obvious baited hook.”

  “Then you’re no psychologist,” Talley said. “It’s just that I can afford to indulge my whims. For five years I looked at that window every day and read the sign backwards—from inside my shop. It annoyed me. You know how a word will begin to look funny if you keep staring at it? Any word. It turns into something in no human tongue. Well, I discovered I was getting a neurosis about that sign. It makes no sense backwards, but I kept finding myself trying to read sense into it. When I started to say ‘Deen uoy tahw evah ew’ to myself and looking for philological derivations, I called in a sign painter. People who are interested enough still drop in.”

  “Not many,” Carmichael said shrewdly. “This is Park Avenue. And you’ve got the place fixed up too expensively. Nobody in the low-income brackets—or the middle brackets—would come in here. So you run an upper-bracket business.”

  “Well,” Talley said, “yes, I do.”

  “And you won’t tell me what it is?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I can find out, you know. It might be dope, pornography, high-class fencing—”

  “Very likely,” Mr. Talley said smoothly. “I buy stolen jewels, conceal them in eggs and sell them to my customers. Or perhaps that egg was loaded with microscopic French postcards. Good morning, Mr. Carmichael.”

  “Good morning,” Carmichael said, and went out. He was overdue at the office, but annoyance was the stronger motivation. He played sleuth for a while, keeping an eye on Talley’s shop, and the results were thoroughly satisfactory—to a certain extent. He learned everything but why.

  Late in the afternoon, he sought out Mr. Talley again.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, at sight of the proprietor’s discouraging face. “For all you know, I may be a customer.”

  Talley laughed.

  “Well, why not?” Carmichael compressed his lips. “How do you know the size of my bank account? Or maybe you’ve got a restricted clientele?”

  “No. But-”

  Carmichael said quickly, “I’ve been doing some investigating. I’ve been noticing your customers. In fact, following them. And finding out what they buy from you.”

  Talley’s face changed. “Indeed?”

  “Indeed. They’re all in a hurry to unwrap their little bundles. So that gave me my chance to find out. I missed a few, but—I saw enough to apply a couple of rules of logic, Mr. Talley. Item: your customers don’t know what they’re buying from you. It’s a sort of grab bag. A couple of times they were plenty surprised. The man who opened his parcel and found an old newspaper clipping. What about the sunglasses? And the revolver? Probably illegal, by the way—no license. And the diamond—it must have been paste, it was so big.”

  “M-mmm,” Mr. Talley said.

  “I’m no smart apple, but I can smell a screwy setup. Most of your clients are big shots, in one way or another. And why didn’t any of ’em pay you, like the first man—the guy who came in when I was here this morning?”

  “It’s chiefly a credit business,” Talley said. “I’ve my ethics. I have to, for my own conscience. It’s responsibility. You see, I sell—my goods—with a guarantee. Payment is made only if the product proves satisfactory.”

  “So. An egg. Sunglasses. A pair of asbestos gloves—I think they were. A newspaper clipping. A gun. And a diamond. How do you take inventory?”

  Talley said nothing.

  Carmichael grinned. “You’ve an errand boy. You send him out and he comes back with bundles. Maybe he goes to a grocery on Madison and buys an egg. Or a pawnshop on Sixth for a revolver. Or—well, anyhow, I told you I’d find out what your business is.”

  “And have you?” Talley asked.

  ‘“We have what you need,’” Carmichael said. “But how do you know?”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “I’ve got a headache—I didn’t have sunglasses!—and I don’t believe in magic. Listen, Mr. Talley, I’m fed up to the eyebrows and way beyond on queer little shops that sell peculiar things. I know too much about ’em—I’ve written about ’em. A guy walks along the street and sees a funny sort of store and the proprietor won’t serve him—he sells onl
y to pixies—or else he does sell him a magic charm with a double edge. Well—pfui!”

  “Mph,” Talley said.

  “‘Mph’ as much as you like. But you can’t get away from logic. Either you’ve got a sound, sensible racket here, or else it’s one of those funny, magic-shop setups—and I don’t believe that. For it isn’t logical.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of economics,” Carmichael said flatly. “Grant the idea that you’ve got certain mysterious powers—let’s say you can make telepathic gadgets. All right. Why the devil would you start a business so you could sell the gadgets so you could make money so you could live? You’d simply put on one of your gadgets, read a stockbroker’s mind and buy the right stocks. That’s the intrinsic fallacy in these crazy-shop things—if you’ve got enough stuff on the ball to be able to stock and run such a shop, you wouldn’t need a business in the first place. Why go round Robin Hood’s barn?”

  Talley said nothing.

  Carmichael smiled crookedly. “‘I often wonder what the vintners buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell,’” he quoted. “Well—what do you buy? I know what you sell—eggs and sunglasses.”

  “You’re an inquisitive man, Mr. Carmichael,” Talley murmured. “Has it ever occurred to you that this is none of your business?”

  “I may be a customer,” Carmichael repeated. “How about that?”

  Talley’s cool blue eyes were intent. A new light dawned in them; Talley pursed his lips and scowled. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted. “You might be. Under the circumstances. Will you excuse me for a moment?”

  “Sure,” Carmichael said. Talley went through the curtains.

  Outside, traffic drifted idly along Park. As the sun slid down beyond the Hudson, the street lay in a blue shadow that crept imperceptibly up the barricades of the buildings. Carmichael stared at the sign—WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEED—and smiled.

  In a back room, Talley put his eye to a binocular plate and moved a calibrated dial. He did this several times. Then, biting his lip—for he was a gentle man—he called his errand boy and gave him directions. After that he returned to Carmichael.