Fury

by Henry Kuttner

  “It’s good dirt, though. Almost too rich. Over to the west there it’s sour; needs liming. But you can get some nice crops on this island.”

  A man wearing a shoulder-tank equipped with a hose and what seemed to be a gigantic hypodermic syringe came past, moved to a labeled stake, and began working the telescopic “needle” into the ground. “One of them, huh?” Crowell said.

  “One of the worst. Above ground it’s just a creeper. But the root-reservoir’s twenty feet long and ten feet down. Only way to kill it is pump it full of poison.”

  “Used to be something like that on Earth—Man Underground, we called it. Dunno the scientific name. Only we used kerosene to kill it. Stuff never grew quite as fast on Earth as it does here. Bad now, but it’ll be an advantage when we get good crops in. Corn in twenty days, maybe.” He shook his head, clucking appreciatively.

  “If we can keep the weeds out.”

  “Only one real way. Pull ’em. You might try crab grass, though,” Crowell suggested. “I’d back crab grass even against Venus creeper, and you know what a strangler that is. Look, instead of letting some of the acres stay poisoned—that don’t help the soil—why not put in some crab grass? Brother, it grows!”

  “I’ll check on it,” Hale said. “Thanks. Any more ideas? Or is that against your rules?”

  The Logician laughed. “Shucks, I can make suggestions. They don’t alter the future one way or the other—somebody was sure to try crab grass here sooner or later. It’s only the big things I don’t interfere with, if I can help it. They may not look like big things at the time, but I know.” He peered through a swathe of fallen trees toward the coast. Far beyond, across the bay, was the mainland, where the cliff-like structure of the old Doonemen fort stood. There was activity on that weed-draped, lichen-stained hulk. Bright scarlet flashes blazed out and were gone. Boats kept up a continual traffic from the mainland to Island One and back again.

  “What goes on?” Crowell asked. “Going to work on the fort already?”

  “Sam’s idea,” Hale said. “I think he’s afraid I’m beginning to take the initiative. I started work on this island without discussing it with him first. So he’s pulling the same trick. That’s fine.”

  Crowell considered. “So? What’s the setup?”

  “He’s started to clear the old fort. Quite a job, and we weren’t ready to tackle the mainland yet—but I think it’ll be O.K. I’d say otherwise if the fort weren’t already there. The Doonemen built it the right way. I remember—” He, too, looked toward the shore, his face changing a little. “There was always a maintenance crew on duty. The jungle was always ready to eat us up, if it could. The plants—and the animals. But the Keeps gave us equipment then; UV batteries, heat rays, acid sprays. The Free Companions always had two fights going on. One was irregular; wars against other Companies. But the fight against the jungle never stopped.”

  “Maybe Sam’s bit off more than he can chew,” the Logician suggested.

  “No. He’s got the equipment and the man power. Once he clears the fort, once he sets up his maintenance machinery, he can keep things running. He can’t move back inland yet, but he doesn’t want to. He’s going to use the fort as an additional base, he says, and start working along the archipelago till he meets me. That’ll save time—our working from both ends of the island chain. It’s a good idea.”

  “Got enough men?”

  “Five thousand,” Hale said. “It’s enough, but not too much. We’re a little crowded yet, but we’ve got to have the man power reserve to fall back on for emergencies. Never know when you have to throw in shock troops against the jungle. And every mile we clear means losing a crew left to maintain it. Five thousand, and more coming when we have room to house and use them.”

  “No rumpus yet?” Crowell asked.

  Hale looked sharply at him. “Expecting trouble?”

  “Don’t have to be prescient for that, son. Five thousand men doing hard work, and more coming—promising ’em immortality won’t keep ’em quiet indefinitely. A fella has to go to town Saturday night and raise a bit of hell.”

  “What do you know about that immortality business?” Hale asked, with a glance around.

  The Logician merely grinned.

  Hale looked toward the distant fort, where the red flashes of flame-splashers were burning the old walls clear. He said, “You know, and I know. Nobody else can be sure, except Sam. But his story is that you can get immortality from a radiation that exists on Venus. Well—you were born on Earth!”

  “Oh, there was a certain amount of radioactivity flying around on Earth just before it blew up,” Crowell said.

  “There’ll be trouble, though. You know one danger. It could happen here. That time, man left Earth and came to Venus. If it should happen again—”

  “Kind of like a hermit crab. When it outgrows its shell, it crawls out and finds another. Mistake to stay in a shell that’s too tight. Lots of things might make it tight. Growing too fast—which was what happened on Earth. These people—” Crowell waved toward the crew of workers. “Could be they’re outgrowing the Keeps, only they never knew it. A man needs a lot of things, all in all.”

  “Are you going to stay in the colony?” Hale asked abruptly.

  “Guess so, for a while. I’m a dirt farmer at heart. Why?”

  “Oh, not because you’re the Logician. You’re an Immortal. So am I. The short-termers—you can’t let yourself get too closely involved if you’re immortal. The Keep Families … Sam … you’re the only man on Venus who’s my kind.”

  “We both spent the best parts of our lives under the sky, son,” Crowell said. “And with our feet on good brown dirt. Not the longest part of our lives, but the best part. With me it was Earth, with you it was Venus, but it comes to the same thing. I know what you mean. I can feel at home with you, though sometimes you sure act like a cussed fool.”

  They watched the workers again. After a while, following a new chain of thought, Hale said, “We’ll have to militarize. Sam suggested it, but I was thinking about it for some time.”

  “They don’t look sharp, for a fact,” Crowell said, examining the nearest crew.

  “It isn’t only that. We’ve really got a military setup here already, basically. Military discipline and organization. Like the old Companies, in some ways. But there ought to be uniforms, and what goes with them.”

  “Think so?”

  “If you take away a man’s freedom, you’ve got to give him a substitute, even if it’s only a sop to Cerberus. Let him have safe outlets for his individuality. If he can’t wear flimsy celoflex—and he can’t here, he needs tough protective fabrics—give him a smart uniform. Service insignia, too, and insignia of rank. Recreational facilities—but organized and controlled. Promising immortality won’t be enough, and militarization won’t either, but together they’ll postpone the blowup a little longer. With the Free Companions it was different; we knew what to expect when we joined up, and we joined because we wanted to, not because of any rewards except the life itself—it was the life we wanted. These recruits now—I think militarization will have a good psychological effect.” Hale, without seeming to do so, was watching the Logician very closely. “What I’m wondering is why Sam suggested the idea. I’d like to know all his motives for doing so. His future plans.”

  Crowell chuckled. “I expect you would, son. I expect you would.”

  Hale kicked the brittle wing-cased body of a foot-long beetle and watched it fly spinning across the clearing toward a heap of other glittering dead insects shoveled aside for disposal. One of the first results of the poison sprays on every island was the clattering rain of beetles that dropped like iridescent hail from the foliage, some of them large enough to stun the men beneath.

  “You could tell me,” he said stubbornly. “You could if you would. It would save so much—”

  “Now there’s where you’re wrong, my boy.” Crowell’s voice was suddenly sharp. “Seems to me I’ve mentioned before that s
eeing the future doesn’t mean a man can change it. That’s always been the fallacy—thinking that if you know what’s going to happen, you can avoid it. Let me give you a little lecture, son, on the problems of being prescient.”

  Crowell hitched his belt and dug a toe into the sod, turning over the rich dark soil appreciatively, spreading it flat beneath his shoe sole as he talked. And his diction changed with his subject.

  “The truth is, generally speaking, the superficial currents of events don’t mean anything. The big tides are important, but by the time they’re big enough to notice, they’re too big to be altered. A sea wall wouldn’t do it. Because what makes the tide itself, that keeps pounding and pounding away?

  “The minds of men—

  “Back in the Twentieth Century a lot of men knew what was going to happen to Earth. They said so. They said it loud and often. And they were men who had earned public respect. They should have been believed. Maybe they were, by a lot of people. But not enough. The minds of men kept right on working in the same set patterns. And so we lost Earth.

  “If you’ve got prescience you’ve got to stay a witness—no more. Remember Cassandra? She knew the future, but the price she paid for prescience kept her harmless—nobody would believe her. Prescience automatically cancels out participation. You see that certain prearranged factors add up to a certain equation. THOSE FACTORS. Add another factor—your interference—and the equation is changed too. That’s the imponderable—your own interference.

  “You see why oracles have got to speak in riddles? There’ve been plenty of prescient folks in history, but they had to speak vaguely or what they said wouldn’t come true.

  “Look now. Suppose two major possibilities exist for you. You go down to Nevada Keep tomorrow and put across a deal that nets you a million credits. Or you stay home and get killed. Well, you come to me and ask me whether to go or stay. And I know these two possibilities are right ahead of you. But my hands are tied.

  “Because both results depend entirely on your personal motivations and reactions. In possibility A, you’ll have gone to Nevada Keep without consulting me, and with certain reaction-basics already existing in your mind. Under those conditions, reacting in exactly a certain way to a given set of circumstances, you’ll make a million credits. But you consult me. I tell you, say, go to Nevada Keep.

  “And you do go—but with a different psychological quotient. I’ve advised you to go. Ergo, you decide something nice is waiting for you there and you go with a passive attitude, waiting to stumble over a bag of gold, whereas your earning your million credits depends on alert aggressiveness. You see?

  “Or here’s another possibility. Unconsciously you don’t want to go. You rationalize my answer to the point where you stay home, deciding I’m a liar, maybe, or that my advice was really to stay, not go. So you get killed.

  “So my job is to keep the factor constant as given, without changing them by introducing the catalyst of my own oracle. I’ve got to do it subtly, gauging your psychology. And that’s tricky. I have only limited information to go on. Prescience works by rules of logic basically. It isn’t magic. Knowing you, I’ve got to find certain ideas, semantic groupings that will influence your decision without your knowing it, without altering your original emotional attitude. Because that original attitude is one of the factors in the final equation my prescience has foreseen.

  “So I can’t say, ‘Go to Nevada Keep!’ That would mean you’d go passively. I’ve got to phrase my advice in cryptic terms. Knowing what I know about you, I might say, ‘The kheft tree has blue leaves,’ and you might be reminded of certain affairs—apparently natural, spontaneous thought-processes on your part—which will create a desire to get away from home temporarily. That way I sidestep—if I’m deft enough—introducing any new element into your original psychological pattern as of that moment. You go to Nevada Keep, but ready to react according to the original pattern.

  “You make your million credits.

  “So now you know why oracles speak in riddles. The future depends on imponderables which can so easily be changed by a word. THE MOMENT AN ORACLE PARTICIPATES, PRESCIENCE IS LOST.”

  The Logician stamped his turned clod flat. Then he looked up and smiled wryly. “Also,” he said, “this presupposes that it’s advisable, in the long-term view, that you should make that million. It may be better for you to stay home and be killed.”

  Hale was looking at the flame that washed the walls of Doone Fort clean. He was silent for a while. “I suppose I see what you mean,” he said finally. “Only—well, it seems hard to stand this close to all my answers and not be able to get at them.”

  “I could hand you an answer to every problem you’ll ever meet, all written out in a little book,” the Logician said. “So you could flip the page and parrot out your answer whenever you needed one. What good would that do? You might as well be dead to start with. And I’m an oracle only within certain limits. I can’t answer all questions—only those I’ve got full information about. If there’s an unknown factor—an x factor—I can’t foresee anything reliably about that question.

  “And there is an x factor. I don’t know what it is. I realize now I’m never going to know. If I did, I’d be God and this would be Utopia. I recognize the unknown quality only by its absence, its influence on other factors. That’s none of my business or yours. I don’t let it bother me. My business is to watch the future and not interfere.

  “The future is the mind of man. It wasn’t atomic power that destroyed Earth. It was a pattern of thought.

  “It’s easier to control a planet than to control that dust-mote there, blowing around unpredictably on currents we can’t even feel. Blowing on a current created by your motion when you reach out to control the dust-mote—which is a thought—and the future of mankind.”

  Curve beyond great white curve, the walls of Doone Fort stood pearly against the jungle. To Sam, looking up at them from the cleared white floor of the enciente, they seemed tremendously tall and powerful. Curve upon thick, smooth curve, they seemed to beat back the forest, to encircle in a jealous embrace the foothold of life within them. Their lines were the lines of waves and of all things carved by waves, instinct with a meaning men can recognize without in the least understanding.

  Three stories high the smooth, rounded walls rose, broken by windows that glittered with interlacing screens of light to filter out the bugs visible and invisible. These forts had been built on much the same scheme as medieval castles, to withstand attack from ground-level, horizontally, by men, and by air from bacteria and flying things as medieval men built to withstand flights of fire-arrows. There was a close parallel, for attack by planes had been unknown in the early days on Venus. The Free Companions respected each other’s forts. And air travel then as now was too wildly erratic, dependent on currents and torrents of wind too dangerous to attempt.

  There was a great deal of activity here. Around the great curve of the enciente the barracks and the shops stretched, seething with men. In the higher buildings at the inland end were the hospital, the labs, the officers’ quarters. The outer walls curved down to inclose a small harbor with a heavily fortified barbican giving onto the piers outside.

  A flurry was in progress at the open barbican, though Sam had not yet noticed it. Men and women already browning from the filtered sunlight paused in their activities and stared frankly, drawing back out of a respect generations implanted in their forebears to let the Immortal through.

  Kedre came up the courtyard serenely, smiling at the watchers, now and then greeting someone by name. Her memory was phenomenal; Immortals cultivated the faculty. Her adaptivity was phenomenal, too. In Keep attire she might have looked garish exposed to daylight, but she was too wise to attempt it. She wore a long straight cloak the pearly white of the Fort itself, and her head was swathed in a white turban very cunningly wrapped to make the most of her aloof beauty. White in a sunny world would have been blinding; here Fort and Kedre alike glowed nacreous
in the misty day, gathering all light to themselves.

  She said composedly, “Hello, Sam.”

  He clasped his hands before him and bowed slightly in the semi-oriental gesture of greeting that had for so long replaced the handshake. It was his first recognition of her existence, done formally and this time between equals. He could afford it now.

  She laughed and laid her narrow hand on his arm. “I represent all the rest of us down below,” she said. “We hope we can work together in peace from now on. I … heavens, Sam, how can you breathe this air?”

  It was Sam’s turn to laugh. He whistled, and a young man who had been following him with a note-pad and stylus came up from the respectful distance to which he had retired. “Bring a pomander,” Sam told him.

  The boy came back at a run, and Sam put the perforated ball of plastics into Kedre’s hands. It was filled with fresh flower petals and the warmth of the palms released a heavy cloud of perfume that made the air seem pleasanter to breathe.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Sam assured her, smiling. “We all do. This is an honor I hadn’t expected so soon. I’d meant to call on you first.”

  “You’re busier than we.” She said it graciously, and then pulled a little at the arm she held. “Do show me around. I’m so curious. I’ve never seen the inside of a Fort before. How beautiful it is up here! If only you could do something about this unbreathable air—”

  “Wait awhile. Wait twenty years. These jungles are too thick now. They give off too much carbon dioxide, for one thing. But wait. It’s going to be better.”

  She walked beside him slowly, her spotless cloak-hem brushing the white pavement. “I believe you, Sam,” she said. “We rather incline now to thinking you were right. This is time to colonize, not a generation ahead. Your methods were abominable, but the end may justify them. I’m sure it will if you’ll let us work with you. You’re a headstrong fool, Sam. You always were.”

  “You didn’t object to it forty years ago. I haven’t thanked you for switching the dream-dust for me, Kedre. Or for having me looked after while I was—asleep.” He said that without so much as a glance at her, but from the sudden twitch of her fingers on his arm, and the way she paused to look up, he knew he had guessed wrong.