Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

“Yeah?”

  “Damn you, Mike, what do you think I’m paying you for? Get on the job! Get your camera and go down to the Battery. Hell’s broken loose there. They’ve sent down the militia already.”

  “What for?”

  “Remember what I told you about those monstrous births in the last few months? The snake that sprouted feathers? And the other stuff? Well, there’s a hundred or more creatures down at the Battery that are tearing up the town.”

  “What sort of creatures?” Powell asked in a humoring tone.

  “I don’t know. Far as I can tell, they look like ostriches. They’re poisonous. Get on the job and take your camera.”

  “Listen, did you ever stop to think of your markets?” Powell said. “Where are you going to release your newsreels now? We’re not on Earth any more.”

  “Not now,” Gwynn snapped. “But if we do get back, what a scoop we’ll have! Think I’ll pass up a chance like this? Get to work!”

  “Okay,” the cameraman grunted, and switched off. Giant poisonous birds, eh?

  What a hell of a time for a sensational break!

  “He’s waking up, Powell!” Moulton called.

  Exultation leaped in Mike as he raced back to the hospital room. Could Eberle solve this tangled mystery? Could he throw any light on what had happened to New York?

  Powell didn’t know. But he prayed, silently and fervently, as he stood above the bed and watched Eberle’s eyes open and the light of intelligence grow in them.

  “Don’t say anything yet,” Moulton cautioned. “Give him time. I used the insulin shock treatment, and he’s still weak.”

  EBERLE didn’t appear weak. His beefy face was set in lines of strength and character; his cool blue gaze alertly took in his surroundings. Silently, he watched Moulton leave the room. Then he spoke, in a deep, rumbling voice.

  “Well? I’d like an explanation.”

  “You’ll have it,” Powell said. “But first, what’s the very last thing you remember?”

  The blue stare was probing. “The Mojave space port. I was attacked, rendered unconscious. When did that occur?”

  “Weeks ago. Do you feel strong enough to listen?”

  “Yes. Go ahead.”

  Swiftly, thoroughly, Powell outlined what had occurred, keeping nothing back.

  Hector perched on a chair and listened.

  “Now you know as much as I do,” Powell finished. “Probably more. If you can throw any light on what’s happened—”

  Eberle tousled his iron-gray mop of hair, rubbed his large chin with stubby fingers.

  “I need a shave,” he said at random. “Yes. You have given me much important information. All these loose threads, they have a focal point. I can see that now. Without a motivation, these various happenings would be coincidences, and there are too many of them to be natural. Some force has been at work in New York for months presumably.”

  “This robot—”

  “A result rather than a cause. I do not believe you’re right in assuming that this First, as you call him, was responsible for hurling Manhattan into another continuum. Naturally, he might tell his subordinates that he had done so, in order to keep their confidence and prevent his organization from breaking up.

  “But such a sudden development of a master criminal mind is unnatural. It was caused by this unknown force, just as these monstrous births and mutants were so caused. Even I,” Eberle grinned sourly, “found myself able to solve problems that baffled me for years. I invented my space drive and other things.

  “My brain seemed to have grown suddenly in scope and intelligence, and I was no genius. My scientific potentialities were developed by this strange force, I think, since my development was so sudden. Obviously this force did not originate in our own world.”

  He went off at a tangent. “Shadows in the sky, you say. Giants of inconceivable size. New York in another universe. That is not impossible.”

  “No,” Powell grunted. “Not exactly!”

  “There are four dimensions,” Eberle said thoughtfully. “The fourth is something of a mystery. Even Einstein admitted that. It could be time, or a different direction of space. Well, each dimension is an axis. The time-axis is the one in which we’re interested. Give me a sheet of paper and a pencil. Thanks.”

  Eberle rammed the pencil through the center of the paper.

  “This will serve. Call this the time-axis. Call this plane, the upper surface of the paper, our own world. Actually, of course, it is not a flat plane, but a three-dimensional continuum. And the time-axis is not tangible, like this pencil.

  “This paper has two sides, each perpendicular to the pencil. Our three-dimensional world has two—well, sides, each perpendicular to the time-axis.”

  EBERLE tore a small bit out of the paper and made a cross on one side of the scrap.

  “This mark is up now, eh?” He fitted it into the irregular hole. “Now I revolve it. The mark is down. It has been revolved along the axis, which, to a two-dimensional being, would be inconceivable.

  “I think that New York, like my bit of paper, has been so revolved through a fourth dimension, along the time-axis, into the world which, so to speak, lies on the other side of the paper. Do you see?”

  “I get the idea,” Powell said, “but it’s just a theory. The mechanics—”

  “Are impossible to our Earthly science. But we are not on Earth. These vague forms you saw in the sky are, I think, the inhabitants of this other continuum.”

  “Big,” Hector put in.

  “Size is relative. Dinosaurs were big. Microbes are small. On a huge planet the inhabitants would naturally be proportionately large.”

  “Gravity would be increased on a gigantic planet,” Powell argued.

  “Why? Density isn’t a matter of size. What about neutronium? What about the dark stars? The red stars? Or this huge world might be hollow, a mere shell. The inhabitants would then be quite diaphanous. Gravity isn’t change, is it?”

  “No. But what’s behind all this?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Eberle admitted. “There must be some good motive. Intelligent beings do not act irrationally. Not scientists, anyhow. Search for an Earthly parallel, Powell.”

  “Eh? There isn’t any.”

  “There are plenty,” Eberle said very quietly. “Fruit-flies, for one. In laboratories we make genetic experiments, exposing fruit-flies to X-rays and watching the effect on the germ plasm. Wholesale mutations aren’t a normal condition.”

  Powell caught his breath. The sheer magnitude of the idea appalled him. It was horrible! New York the subject of an experiment by a race of titans?

  “It is a good parallel,” Eberle went on. “I believe we have been exposed to some ray or force that caused mutations. Even now we are probably being watched. The results of the experiment are being checked, if there are actual other dimensional scientists performing tests on us.”

  “A ray?” Mike asked, wrinkling his brow. “What makes you think it’s a ray or some force like that?”

  “A little rationalization,” Eberle declared.

  “But why a ray? There’s some unknown force at work, I’ll grant you. So many mutants certainly aren’t normal. But why can’t it be uh—a space warp, a new ingredient in the atmosphere, or—”

  EBERLE raised his muscled bulk quite strongly on one elbow. “Your reasoning is almost entirely intuitive. There hasn’t been any alteration in the air. You told me that yourself. Even if you hadn’t, there’s still the fact that mutants were being created for some time before the dimensional shift.

  “No. That hypothesis doesn’t work. There is some radiation effecting the change. Instruments will probably detect it, though our present instruments, I believe, can’t analyze it. Lead, in practical thicknesses, is useless. My opinion, you see, is that the radiation is allied to radioactivity, and, therefore, lead would be the only possible shield against it.

  “I encountered the effects quite a while ago. Only, I couldn’t discover its source.
Naturally. It came from another dimension.”

  The cameraman stared at the wall speculatively. For a long while they were silent. Then, slowly, Mike’s eyes cleared, and he turned to Eberle.

  “That sounds reasonable. What’s the point of it, though?”

  “You’ve seen it, and I’ve already told you,” Eberle stated irritably. “I believe New York is being made the subject of an experiment. We have an idea of how it is done. We don’t know who is doing it, except that logic points at the huge shadow-people, if that’s what they are. The motive is another matter, though not too difficult to imagine, if the inhabitants of the dimension are scientists.”

  Powell’s back felt cold and sweaty. “Boy, what horrors you’re giving me! I feel like a bug under a microscope.”

  “There would be microscopes of a sort, of course,” Eberle nodded. “However—You say you have film records of recent events in New York? Records of these mutations? I should like to see them. After all, I’m a better scientist now than I ever was. Not that it’ll do me much good,” he finished wryly. “Well, can I see those films?”

  “I’ll call Moulton,” Powell said. “He’ll check your condition.”

  But Eberle’s recovery had been amazingly swift, aided, perhaps, by the inexplicable force that had so strangely developed his brain. He insisted on getting up and following Powell to a projection booth, while Hector went off to secure the film cans.

  “As for my kidnaping,” Eberle said, “there’s nothing mysterious about that. Your criminal robot, whom you call the First, simply wanted to get control of a space drive principle which would enable his pirate ships to rule the System. I was taken to Venus, first, to throw possible pursuers off the track, and, second, to get rid of my ship. The First will probably build ships of his own in secret places. No doubt he learned my space drive formula by giving me truth serum. I don’t remember that, of course.”

  “Well, you’re in danger,” Mike remarked. “As long as you’re alive, the First won’t have a corner on these super space ships. You’d better keep under cover.”

  Eberle grunted contemptuously. “I can handle a heat-gun. I certainly won’t hide. There’s too much to do. Is this the film?” Hector had reappeared.

  “Yeah. I’ll run it!”

  Deftly, Powell went to work. Across the projection room the screen had changed from silver to black. Pictures began to flicker across it, three-dimensional, realistically colored.

  “We meet the craziest people, folkses!” A commentator’s voice broke in rudely. “Just look at this. They ain’t kangaroos. They’re rabbits!”

  On the screen the animals didn’t look much like rabbits, bounding about inside a wire enclosure. For one thing, they were four feet high. For another, instead of floppy ears, they had a gently waving group of filaments that looked like antennae. They sat on their hind legs, like kangaroos, and jumped incredibly high.

  ANOTHER picture supplanted the unusual rabbits. A March of Events reel showing the progress and eventual failure of a gigantic blackmailing scheme, all within a month. A view of a monosomian, a baby with two heads and a single body. Another of a monosoma, just the reverse. A red, wrinkled infant with one eye in the middle of its forehead—a Cyclops.

  “We never released those,” Powell said. “Too strong.” There was the shot of a banker who had suddenly gone mad.

  “Insanity has taken an upward swing in New York lately,” Mike said. “Doctors can’t figure it out.”

  “All these things indicate a form of development,” Eberle said thoughtfully, “evolution rather than the reverse. There is no real degeneration.”

  “What about the monsters?”

  “Experiments. Mutations. Those rabbits evolved. Look at that!” He pointed to the screen, where a king-snake covered with a downy growth of pin-feathers was coiled. “Potentially, every scale on that reptile’s body was an embryonic feather. But a controlled ray that speeded up evolution would have more uniform results. There is no single effect. That’s what puzzles me.”

  The pictures continued. Eberle did not speak till a humorous commentary on a spiritualist seance had been shown.

  “Dunno how that got in,” Powell grunted. “Mistake, I guess. It isn’t important.”

  “You’re wrong!” Eberle snapped. “It’s damned important! Run it again.” Again the spiritualist, a Mrs. Felipa Cardotti, appeared in three-dimensional color. She was a buxom, swarthy woman with jet black hair and a mobile, vividly scarlet wound of a mouth.

  “These voices, they are spirits, yes,” she declared seriously to the photographer. “I have never heard them before. It has always been difficult to get across the veil, but now I hear the whispers of the unseen day and night. They are confused; I can understand little. They plot and plan something, I do not know what—”

  “I want to talk to that woman,” Eberle said swiftly. “How can I get in touch with her?”

  “Why, I’ll take you to her place,” Powell responded, his face stiff with amazement. “But she’s a faker. She’s been arrested a dozen times!”

  “She was a faker,” Eberle pointed out. “The potential power of telepathy existed in her mind. Something has developed it. She hears voices, but not spirit voices. The question is, what does she hear?”

  “You tell me. What?”

  “She hears thoughts. Certainly not human thoughts. We haven’t changed, individually, that much in so short a time.”

  Eberle paused uneasily.

  “Whose could they be, then?” Mike encouraged.

  “The thoughts of beings that are not human. Shadows, Powell, shadows in the sky! The creatures that captured New York and are using it for experimental purposes. If anything could prove my point, her testimony should. We’re going to see her!”

  CHAPTER XI

  Slave of Slaves

  MRS. FELIPA CARDOTTI lived in the Bronx, in a fifth-floor apartment that smelled strongly of garlic and lentil soup. A fly-specked sign downstairs advertised her as “Great Mind Reader and Psychic.”

  A dark, slatternly woman answered their ring. A turban, hastily donned, was cocked askew over one eye.

  “Yes? You want me?”

  “Mrs. Cardotti?”

  “That’s me,” the woman nodded.

  “You wish a consultation? Come in.”

  “We don’t exactly want a consultation,” Powell began, entering close behind her.

  Mrs. Cardotti swung around, her eyes blazing.

  “Not police, are you?”

  “Oh, no,” the cameraman reassured her. “We’re scientific investigators. We’d like some information. We’ll pay your regular fees, of course.”

  “Yes.” Cunning grew in the woman’s face. “Well, sit down.” She deposited her bulky body on a sleazy sofa, fumbled in her pocket, and popped two aspirin tablets in her mouth, grimacing.

  “Headaches,” Mrs. Cardotti said, removing the turban. “They been awful lately. Since the—the voices.”

  Eberle leaned forward. “That’s what I want to ask about. These voices. Just what—”

  “I don’t know much,” she broke in hastily. “They come and go. Spirit voices, all mixed up inside my head. Pictures, too, sometimes.”

  “What sort of pictures?” Eberle demanded eagerly.

  “They’re mixed up, too. Like dreams. Walls, like tunnels under the ground, and people moving around. Funny people.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “I—don’t know. It’s hard to remember, except that they’re funny. And they change, like in dreams. Arms that reach way out . . .” Mrs. Cardotti frowned, searching her memory. She shrugged. “It’s so hard to remember.”

  “You’ve had these manifestations only recently?”

  “All my life I have been psychic,” she said indignantly.

  Eberle made an impatient gesture. “Of course. But these new voices. They are something new, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, rather unwillingly. “Only in the last few months have they
come. Now they come very often. I am always tired, they come so often and bother me.”

  “Do you feel any emotions?” Eberle shot at her. “Fear? Curiosity?”

  “Eh—No, I am not afraid in those dreams. I feel something, yes. But not fear.”

  “Try to think,” Eberle begged.

  “It is hard for me to remember. There is always a feeling of something I must do, some duty. I am not always the same person. But there’s always the same urge. Something I must do—”

  “What?”

  “It’s different. Sometimes I feel I have to dig. In tunnels. I have to reach—” Mrs. Cardotti paused. Her gross body seemed to sag down on the sofa. Her black eyes grew dull.

  “The voices,” she murmured, and was still.

  HER frame shook convulsively.

  Powell felt a curious sense of uneasiness. He had seen seances before; he had interviewed fake psychics. Mrs. Cardotti might be acting. But Eberle was leaning forward tensely, his gaze riveted on the woman’s swarthy face. The scientist was no gullible dupe.

  “What’s up?” Powell asked nervously.

  Beside him, Hector moved uncertainly. “Boss. Something, I feel something—” he said.

  Were the Redlander’s other-worldly senses attuned to the “dreams” of Mrs. Cardotti? Hector’s manifest unease did more than anything else to shake Powell’s skepticism.

  “Shut up!” Eberle snapped, and bent toward the woman. “Mrs. Cardotti,” he said, “can you hear me?”

  The psychic stared blankly at nothing. She seemed relaxed in every muscle. And yet, oddly, there was an inexplicable tenseness emanating from her. Powell thought suddenly of a microphone, with microscopic wires strung to tautness, ready to catch vibrations unheard by the duller human ear.

  “I hear you,” the woman said dully. “Do you hear anything else?”

  “No—Yes. Voices.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They say—hurry. Work. Obey, always.”

  The scientist frowned. He glanced quickly at Powell.

  “Do you see anything?”

  “The walls, the rock walls of the very big, long tunnel.”