The Kyben Stories

by Harlan Ellison

  “That’s all right. It’s very soft steel. Too many impurities. Kyben spacecraft are made of a steel which isn’t too much better than this, though they back it with strong reinforcers. Now watch.”

  He took the plate in his hand, holding it between thumb and forefinger at one comer, letting it hang down. With the other hand he pinched it at the opposite comer, pressing thumb and forefinger together tightly.

  The plate crumbled to dust, drifting down over the old man’s pinching hand in a bright stream.

  Themus’ mouth opened of its own accord, his chest tightened. Such a thing wasn’t possible. The old man was a magician.

  The dust glowed up at him from the floor. It was slightly luminous. He goggled, unable to help himself.

  “Now,” said Boolbak, talking the other plate. “Put a hole in this one.”

  Themus found he was unable to lift the hammer. His hands refused to obey. One did not see such things and remain untouched.

  “Snap out of it, boy! Come on, punch!” The old man’s voice was commanding; Themus broke his trance.

  He placed the punch on the second plate and in three heavy blows had gone through it and into the table again.

  “Fine, fine,” said Uncle Boolbak, holding the second plate as he had the first. He pinched it, with a slight revolving movement of the fingers.

  The steel seemed to change. It stayed rigid in shape, but the planes of it darkened, ran together. It was a flat piece of metal, but suddenly it seemed to have depths, other surfaces.

  Boolbak held it out to Themus, “put another hole in it.”

  Themus took it, wonderingly, and laid it down on the workbench. It seemed heavier than before. He brought the hammer down sharply, three times.

  The metal was unmarred.

  He set the punch and hammered again, harder, half a dozen times. He took the punch away. Its point was dulled, the punch shank was slightly bowed. The metal was unscarred.

  “It’s—it’s—” he began, his tongue abruptly becoming a wad of cotton batting in his mouth.

  Boolbak nodded, “It’s changed, yes. It is now harder than any steel ever made. It can withstand heat or cold that would either melt to paste or shatter to splinters any other metal. It is impregnable. It is the ideal war-metal. With it an army is invincible. It is the closest thing to an ultimate weapon ever devised, for it is unstoppable.

  “A tank composed of this metal would be a fearsome juggernaut. A spaceship of it could pierce the corona of a sun. A soldier wearing body armor of it would be a superman.” He stood back, his lips a thin line, letting Themus look dumfoundedly at the plate he held.

  “But how do you—how can you—it’s impossible! How can you make this? What have you done to it?” Themus felt the room swirl around him, but that defied the laws of the universe.

  “Sit down. I want to talk to you. I want to tell you some things. “ He put one arm around Themus’ shoulders, leading him to a flight of stairs, to sit down.

  Themus looked at Darfla. She was biting her lip. Was this the talk the Crackpots did not want him to have with Uncle Boolbak?

  Themus sensed: this is it. This is an answer. Perhaps not the answer to all that troubled him, but it was, unquestionably, an answer.

  Suddenly he didn’t want to know. He was afraid; terribly afraid. He stammered. “Do—do you think you should? I’m a Watcher, you know, and I don’t want to—”

  The old man cut him off with a wave of his hand, and pushed him down firmly.

  “You think you’re watching us, don’t you?” began Boolbak. “I mean, you think the Watcher Corps was assigned here to keep an eye on all the loonies, don’t you? To keep the black sheep in the asylum so the star-flung Kyben don’t lose face or esteem in the Galaxy, isn’t that it?”

  Themus nodded, reluctantly, not wanting to insult the old man.

  Boolbak laughed. “Fool! We want you here. Do you think for a moment we’d allow you blundering pompous snoopers around if we didn’t have a use for you?

  “Let me tell you a story,”‘ the old man went on. “Hundreds of years ago, before what you blissfully call the Kyben Explosion into space, both Crackpots and Stuffed-Shirts lived here, though they weren’t divided that way, back then. The Stuffed-Shirts were the administrators, the implements of keeping everything neatly filed, and everyone in line. That type seems to gravitate toward positions of influence and power.

  “The Crackpots were the nonconformists. They were the ones who kept coming up with the new ideas. They were the ones who painted the great works of art. They were the ones who composed the most memorable music. They were the ones who overflowed the lunatic asylums. They thought up the great ideas, true, but they were a thorn in the side of the Stuffs, because they couldn’t be predicted. They kept running off in all directions at once. They were a regimental problem. So the Stuffs tried to keep them in line, gave them tedious little chores to do, compartmentalized them in thought, in habits, in attitudes. The noncons snapped. There is no record of it, but there was almost a war on this planet that would have wiped out every Kyben—of both breeds—to the last man.”

  He rubbed a hand across his eyes, as if to wipe away unpleasant images.

  Themus and Darfla listened, intently, their eyes fastened to those of the old man in his ridiculous costume. Themus knew Darfla must have heard the story before, but still she strained to catch every sound Boolbak made.

  “Luckily, the cooler heads won. An alternate solution was presented, and carried out. You’ve always thought the Kyben left their misfits, the Crackpots, behind. That we were left here because we weren’t good enough, that we would disgrace our hard-headed pioneers before the other races, isn’t that the story you’ve always heard? That we are the black sheep of the Kyben?”

  He laughed, shaking his head.

  “Fools! We threw you out! We didn’t want you tripping all over our heels, annoying us. We weren’t left behind—you were thrown away!”

  Themus’s breath caught in his throat. It was true. He knew it was true. He had no doubts. It was so. In the short space of a few seconds the whole structure of his life had been inverted. He was no longer a member of the elite corps of the elite race of the universe; he was a clod, an unwanted superfluousity, a tin soldier, a carbon copy.

  He started to say something, but Boolbak cut him off. “We have nothing against ruling the Galaxy. We like the idea, in fact. Makes things nice when we want something unusual and it takes influence to get it quickly. But why should we bother doing the work when we can pull a string or two and one of you armor-plated puppets will perform the menial tasks.

  “Certainly we allow you to rule the Galaxy. It keeps you out of trouble, and out of our hair. You rule the Galaxy, but we rule you!”

  Thunder rolled endlessly through the Watcher’s head. He was being bombarded with lightning, and he was certain any moment he would rip apart. It was too much, all too suddenly.

  Boolbak was still talking: “We keep the Watcher Corps on other worlds both for spying purposes and as a cover-up, So we can have a Watcher Corps here on Kyba without attracting any attention to ourselves. A few hundred of you aren’t that much bother, and it’s ridiculously easy to avoid you when we wish to. Better than a whole planet of you insufferable bores...

  He stopped again, and pointed a pudgy finger at Themus’ chest armor.

  “We established the Watcher Corps as a liaison between us, when we had innovations, new methods, concepts ready for use, and you, with your graspy little hands always ready to accept what the ‘lunatics back home’ had come up with.

  “Usually the ideas were put into practice and you never knew they originated here.

  “We made sure the Watchers’ basic motto was to watch, watch, watch, whatever we did, to save ourselves the trouble of getting the information back where it would do the most good, undistorted—and believe me, if we want you to see something, it wasn’t hard to hide it from you; you’re really quite simple and stupid animals—so when we had a new inv
ention or concept, all we had to do was walk into a public square and demonstrate it for you. Pegulla, see—pegulla, do.”

  Themus mused aloud, interrupting the old man, “But what does, well, stacking juba-fruits in the square demonstrate?”

  “We wouldn’t expect your simple-celled minds to grasp something like that immediately,” answered Boolbak.“But I happen to know Sheila, who did that, and I know what he was demonstrating. He was illustrating a new system of library filing, twice as efficient as the old one.

  “He knew it would be dictated, sent back to Kyben-Central and finally understood for what it was. We give you enough clues. If something seems strange, think about it a while, and a logical use and explanation will appear. Unfortunately, that is the one faculty the Star-Flung Kyben are incapable of using. Their minds are patterned, their thoughts set in tracks.” The laugh was a barb this time.

  “But why are you all so—so—mad?” Themus asked, a quavering note in his voice.

  “Beginning to crack, boy? I’ll tell you why we’re mad, as you put it. We’re not mad, we’re just doing what we want, when we want, the way we want. You rigid-thinkers can’t recognize the healthy sanity of that. You think everyone has to wear a standardized set of clothes, go to his dentist a specified number of times, worship in delineated forms, marry a specified type of mate. In other words, live his life in a mold.

  “The only way to stimulate true creativeness is to allow it to grow unchained with restrictions. We’re not mad at all. We may put on a bit, just to cover from you boobs, but we’re saner than you. Can you change the molecular structure of a piece of steel, just by touching it at a juncture of atom-chains?”

  “Is that—that—how you did it?” Themus asked.

  “Yes. How far could I have gotten on a thing of this kind if I’d grown up in a culture like the one you’ve always known?

  “For every mad thing you see on this world, there is a logical, sane answer.”

  Themus felt his knees shaking. This was all too much to be taken at one sitting. The very fiber of his universe was being unwound and split down the grain.

  He looked at Darfla for the first time in what seemed an eternity, and found it impossible to tell what she was thinking.

  “Buy why haven’t you shown this steel-pinching to the Watchers, if you want them to know all the new concepts?” the incredulous Themus questioned.

  Boolbak’s face suddenly went slack. The eyes became glassy and twinkly again. His face became flushed. He clapped his hands together childishly. “Oh, no! I don’t want that!”

  “But why?” demanded Themus.

  Again the old man’s face changed. This time abject terror shone out. He began to sweat. “They’re gonna chase me, and bend a bar of iron around my head.”

  He leaped up and ran in a flurry back to the coal pile, where he burrowed into the black dust and peered out, trembling.

  “But that’s crazy! No one wants to bend a bar of iron around your head. Only a maniac would keep a secret like that because of a crazy reason like that!”

  “Exactly,” came Darfla’s voice from behind him, sadly, “that’s just it. Uncle is crazy.”

  They had wanted to see Themus after his talk with Uncle Boolbak, and though Darfla had taken pains to cover their tracks, a group of Crackpots were waiting outside the house when they emerged.

  Themus was white and shaking, and made no movement of resistance as they were hustled into a low-slung bubble-roadster and whisked back to the Cave.

  “Well, did he talk to that mad genius?” asked Deere.

  Darfla nodded sullenly. “Just as you said. He knows.”

  Deere turned to Themus. “Not quite all however, Do you think you can take more, Watcher?”

  Themus felt distinctly faint. One microscopic bit more added to the staggering burden of revelation he had had tossed on him, and he was prepared to sink through the floor.

  However, Deere was not waiting for an answer. He motioned to a man in a toga and spiked belt, who came toward Themus. “See this man?” Deere asked.

  Themus said yes. Deere tapped the man lightly on the chest, “Senior Watcher, First Grade, Norsim, lately disappeared from the barracks at KybaBase, Valasah.“ He pointed to three others standing together near the front of the crowd. “Those three were top men in the Corps, over a period often years. Now they’re Crackpots.”

  Themus’ eyebrows and hands asked, “But how?”

  “There is a gravitating factor among Kyben,” he explained. “There are Crackpots who are brought up as Stuffs who realize when they get here that their thinking has been fettered. Eventually they come to us. They come to us for the simple reason that the intellect rises through the Watcher ranks, and for several reasons gets assigned here. We’ve made sure the smartest boys get final assignment here.

  “On the other side of the ledger there are non-cons who go psycho from the responsibility of being a freethinker when they want supervision, and their thinking directed. They eventually wind up as Kyben, after minor reconditioning so they don’t remember all this,” he waved his hand to indicate the Cave. “Now they’re somewhere out there and probably quite happy.”

  “But how can you make a Watcher disappear so completely, when the whole garrison here is looking—“

  “Simple,” said a voice from behind Themus.

  Supervisor Furth just stood smiling.

  Themus just stood choking.

  The elder Watcher grinned at the confusion swirling about Themus’ face.

  “How did—when were you—” Themus stuttered.

  Furth raised a hand to stop him. “I was an unbending Stuff for a good many years, Themus, before I realized the Crackpot in me wanted out.” He grinned widely. “Do you know what did it? I was kidnapped, put in a barrel with a bunch of chattering pegullas, and forced to think my way out. I finally made it, and when I crawled out, all covered with pegulla-dung, those grinning maniacs helped me up and said, ‘More fun than a barrel of pegullas!’”

  Themus began to chuckle.

  “That did it,” said Furth.

  “But why do you send men like Elix back to the Mines? You must know how horrible it is. That isn’t at all consistent.”

  Furth’s mouth drew down at the corner, “It is, when you consider that I’m supposed to be the iron hand of the Watcher garrison here on Kyba. We have to keep the Stuffs in line. They have to be maneuvered, while they think they’re maneuvering us. And Elix was getting too far out of line.”

  “Do you know how close to being killed you came when we brought you here the first time?” Deere said.

  Themus turned back to the pock-faced little man, “No. I—I—thought you’d just send me back and let the Corps deal with me.”

  “Hardly. We aren’t afraid of our blundering brothers with the armored hides, but we certainly don’t take wide chances to attract attention to ourselves. We like our freedom too much for that.

  “You see, we aren’t play-acting at being odd. We actually enjoy and live the job of being individuals. But there is a logic to our madness. Nothing we do is folly.”

  “But,” Themus objected, “what are the explanations for things like—” and he finger-listed several things that had been bothering him.

  “The garbage is negatively polarized, so it touches nothing but its side of the sewer pipes,” explained Furth.“The beggar, who by the way is a professional numismatist, can sense the structural aura of various metals, that’s how he knew how many and what type coins you had in your pocket. The Cave here is merely an adequate job of force-moving large areas of soil and rock, and atomic realignment."

  He explained for a few more minutes, Themus’ astonishment becoming deeper and deeper at each further revelation of what he had considered superhuman achievements. Finally, the young Watcher asked, “But why haven’t these discoveries been turned over to Kyben-Central?”

  “There are some things our little categorizing brothers aren’t ready for, as yet,” explained Deere. “Even
you were not ready. Chance saved you, you know.”

  Themus looked startled. “Chance?”

  “Well, chance, and your innate intelligence, boy. We had to see if there was enough non-con in you to allow you to live. The reconditioning in your case would have been—ah—something of a failure. The five mad acts you were to perform not only had to be mad—they had to be logically mad. They each had to illustrate a point.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Themus. I had no idea what I was going to do. I just did it, that’s all.”

  “Um—hm. Quite right, but if you didn’t know, at least your subconscious was able to put two and two together and come up with the proper four. The acts you did demonstrated you had courage enough to be a non-con, that you were smart enough to maneuver us Crackpots—so it would be easy enough for you to help us maneuver the Stuffs—that you could be a non-con thinker when you had to be, and even you knew you were too valuable to kill.

  “Even if you weren’t in on it, your subconscious and the rest of were.”

  “But—but—what I don’t get is, why did you try to stop me from seeing Boolbak and then let me go, and why does Boolbak hide from you and the Watchers both?”

  “One at a time, “ replied Deere. “Boolbak hides because he is mad. There are some like that in every group. He happens to be a genius, but he’s also a total madman. We don’t try to keep tabs on him, because we already have the inventions he’s come up with, but we don’t put him out of the way because he might get something new one of these days we don’t have, and then too, he was a great man once, long before—” He stopped suddenly, realizing he had stepped over the line from explanation to maudlinity. “We’re not barbarians. Nor are we a secret underground movement. We don’t want to overthrow anything, we just want to do as we please. If our brothers feel like foaming up and ruling star-systems, all well and good, it makes it easier for us to obtain the things we want, so we help them in a quiet way. Boolbak isn’t doing anyone any harm, but we didn’t think you were ready to be exposed to too much non-con thinking all at once, as we knew Boolbak would do. He always does.