Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “My God,” he said.

  After a while he put the book in a pocket of his tattered topcoat and clambered out of the gully. Cars were parked along the curb, and men were moving about, using flashlights. Tarbell walked back toward the crowd.

  He was conscious of irritation at the impending scene. The only thing he wanted, just now, was a chance to examine the book privately. There was a point at which skepticism stopped. Tarbell had run up against enough news curiosa in the past to retain a certain amount of credulity. The whole thing might be merely a coincidence—but he didn’t think so.

  There was a confusion of questioning, loud, rather pointless conversation, and assurances, on Tarbell’s part, that he was unhurt. With an officer, he went to a nearby house and telephoned his insurance company. Meanwhile a taxi had been summoned.

  Tarbell ordered the cabman to stop in Hollywood at a convenient bar, where he gulped several whiskey sours and fingered the book in his pocket. He didn’t quite dare to examine it there, however, and, in any case, the lighting was indirect—perhaps on the questionable principle that people seldom appear at their best when they are tight. Replenished and conscious of a mounting excitement, Tarbell reached his Wilshire apartment at last, closed the door behind him, and switched on the light.

  He stood motionless for a time, just looking around. Then he went to a couch, lit a reading lamp, and took the brown volume from his pocket.

  The inset white disk on the front cover was blank. His own name scrawled in gilt lettering against the dull-brown cloth. He turned to Page 25. It said, “Try the windshield.”

  Tarbell closed the book and opened it at the flyleaf, which was blank. The next page was more interesting. In the familiar hand type, his own name leaped up at him.

  Dear Mr. Tarbell:

  By this time, you may already have discovered the peculiar, qualities of this grimoire. Its powers are limited, and only ten-page references are allotted to each owner. Use them with discrimination.

  Compliments of the author.

  Cryptic—but significant! Tarbell looked up grimoire, but the word wasn’t in his dictionary. It meant a book of magic, he remembered rather vaguely. A collection of spells—

  Thoughtfully he flipped the book’s pages again. Spells? Advice, rather. Certainly the advice about the coupe’s windshield had come in very handy.

  Tarbell’s lips tightened in a crooked smile. One advantage of the accident: he had forgotten to be worried by the murder! Maybe that wasn’t so good. If the police grew suspicious—but there was no reason why they should be. His presence in Laurel Canyon was easily explained; the boulevard was a well-traveled thoroughfare. And Gwinn’s body might not be discovered for days, in that isolated section.

  He stood up, stripping off the ragged overcoat and tossing it aside with a gesture of distaste. Tarbell liked clothes, with an almost sensuous feeling. He went into the bathroom to start the shower, and came back instantly, followed by the beginnings of steam clouds. He picked up the book from the couch.

  It lay on a stand as he bathed and donned pajamas and a robe. It was in his hand as he slippered back into the living room, and his gaze was upon it as he mixed himself a drink. It was stiff, and, as he sipped the whiskey, Tarbell felt a warm, restful languor beginning to seep into his mind and body. Till this moment he had not realized how jangled were his nerves.

  Now, leaning back, he pondered on the book. Magic? Were there such things? He thumbed through the pages again, but the printed lines had not altered in the least. Extraordinary, and quite illogical, how that message about the windshield had saved his life. The other pages—most of them bore sentences wild to the point of lunacy. “Werewolves can’t climb oak trees.” So what?

  Tarbell fixed himself another drink. He was going somewhat beyond his capacity tonight, for fairly obvious reasons. But he didn’t show it, except for a glisten of perspiration on his high, tanned forehead.

  “This should develop into something interesting,” a soft voice said.

  It was the cat. Fat, glossy, and handsome, it sat on a chair opposite Tarbell, watching the man with enigmatic eyes. The mobile mouth and tongue of a cat, he thought, were well suited for human speech.

  The cat rippled its shoulder muscles. “Do you still think this is ventriloquism?” it asked. “Or have you progressed to hallucinations?”

  Tarbell stood up, walked across the room, and slowly extended his hand. “I’d like to make certain you’re real,” he said. “May I—”

  “Gently. Don’t try any tricks. My claws are sharp, and my magic’s sharper.”

  Satisfied by the feel of the warm fur, Tarbell drew back and looked down consideringly at the creature. “All right,” he said, his voice a little thick. “We’ve progressed this far, anyhow. I’m talking to you—admitting your existence. Fair enough.”

  The cat nodded. “True. I came here to congratulate you on escaping the dryad, and to tell you I’m not discouraged.”

  Tarbell sat down again. “Dryad, eh? I always thought dryads were pretty. Like nymphs.”

  “Fairy tales,” the cat said succinctly. “The Grecian equivalent of yellow journalism. Satyrs only made love to young deciduous dryads, my friend. The older ones . . . well! You may be able to imagine what the dryad of a California sequoia would be like.”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. The older an anthropomorphic being grows, the less rigidly are the dividing lines drawn. Ever notice the sexlessness of old humans? They die, of course, before they progress further than that. Eventually the line between human and god is lost, then between human and animal, and between animal and plant. Finally there’s a commingling of sentient clay—Beyond that you’d not care to go. But the sequoia dryads have gone beyond it.” The cat-eyes watched, alert and inscrutable. Tarbell sensed some definite purpose behind this conversation. He waited.

  “My name, by the way, is Meg,” the cat said.

  “Female, I presume?”

  “In this incarnation. Familiars in their natural habitat are sexless. When aliens manifest themselves on earth, they’re limited by terrestrial laws—to a certain extent, anyway. You may have noticed that nobody saw the dryad but you.”

  “There wasn’t anybody else around.”

  “Exactly,” Meg said, with an air of satisfaction.

  Tarbell considered, conscious more than ever that he was dueling with the creature. “O.K.,” he nodded. “Now let’s get down to cases. You were Gwinn’s . . . eh? . . . familiar. What does that imply?”

  “I served him. A familiar, Tarbell, serves a wizard as a catalyst.”

  “Come again.”

  “Catalysis: a chemic reaction promoted by the presence of a third unaffected substance. Read magic for chemic. Take cane sugar and water, add sulphuric acid, and you get glucose and levulose. Take a pentagram and ox blood, add me, and you get a demon named Pharnegar. He’s the dowser god,” Meg added. “Comes in handy for locating hidden treasures, but he has his limitations.”

  Tarbell thought that over. It seemed logical. All through the centuries, folklore had spoken of the warlock’s familiar. What purpose the creature had served was problematical. A glorified demoniac valet? Rather silly—

  A catalyst was much more acceptable, somehow, especially to poor Tarbell’s alcohol-distorted brain.

  “It seems to me we might make a bargain,” he said, staring at Meg. “You’re out of a job now, aren’t you? Well, I could use a little magical knowledge.”

  “Fat chance,” the cat said scornfully; “Do you think for a minute magic can be mastered by a correspondence course? It’s like any highly trained profession. You have to learn how to handle the precision tools, how to train your insight, how to—My master, Tarbell, it’s something more than a university course! It takes a natural linguist, to handle the spells. And trained, whiplash responses. A perfect sense of timing. Gwinn took the course for twenty-three years before he got his goatskin. And, of course, there’s the initial formality, of t
he fee.” Tarbell grunted. “You know” magic, apparently. Why can’t you—”

  “Because,” Meg said very softly, “you killed Gwinn. I won’t outlast him. And I had been looking forward to a decade or two more on Earth. In this plane, I’m free from certain painful duties that are mine elsewhere.” “Hell?”

  “Anthropomorphically speaking, less. But your idea of Hell isn’t mine. Which is natural, since in my normal state, my senses aren’t the same as yours.” Meg jumped down from the chair and began to wander around the room. Tarbell watched it—her—closely. His hand felt for and clutched the book.

  The cat said, “This will be an interesting game of wits. The book will give you considerable help—but I have my magic.”

  “You’re determined to . . . to kill me?” Tarbell reached for his topcoat. “Why?”

  “I told you. Revenge.”

  “Can’t we bargain?”

  “No,” Meg said. “There’s, nothing you can offer me that would be any inducement. I’ll stick around, and enlist a salamander or something to get rid of you.”

  “Suppose I put a bullet into you?” Tarbell asked, taking his automatic from the coat. He leveled it. “You’re flesh and blood. Well?”

  The cat sat down, eying Tarbell steadily. “Try it,” Meg said—

  For no sensible reason, the reporter felt curiously frightened. He lowered the gun.

  “I rather wish,” Meg said, “that you had tried to kill me.”

  “Oh, hell,” Tarbell grunted, and got up, the book in his hand. “I’m going to get another drink.” Struck by a thought, he paused. “For all I know, you may still be a hallucination. A drunken one. In that case—” He grinned.

  “May I offer you a saucer of cream, Meg?”

  “Thanks,” said the cat appreciatively. “I’d like it.”

  Tarbell, pouring the cream, grinned at his reflection in the kitchen window. “Toujours gai, all right,” he soliloquized. “Maybe I should put rat poison in this. Oh, well.”

  Meg lapped the cream, keeping her eyes on Tarbell, who was dividing his attention between his drink and the book. “I wonder about this,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything magical about it. Do messages appear—like a clairvoyant’s slate?”

  The cat snorted delicately. “Things don’t work that way,” she said. “The book’s got fifty pages. Well, you’ll find an answer to every conceivable human problem on one of those pages.”

  Tarbell frowned. “That’s—ridiculous.”

  “Is it? History repeats itself, and humans live a life of clichés. Has it occurred to you, Tarbell, that humanity’s life pattern can be boiled down to a series of equations? Fifty of them, I think. You can find the lowest common denominator, if you go far enough, but that’s far beyond human understanding. As I see it, the author of that book analyzed humanity’s lives, boiled them down to the basic patterns, and expressed those equations as grammatical sentences. A mere matter of semantics,” Meg finished.

  “I don’t think I get it. Wait a minute. Maybe I do. 13ab minus b equals 13a. 13ab stands for eggs—Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.”

  “Muddy reasoning, but you have the idea,” Meg acknowledged. “Besides, you forgot the hen.”

  “Incubator,” Tarbell said absently, and brooded over the book. “You mean, then, that this has the answer to every known human problem What about this: ‘Werewolves can’t climb oak trees’ ? How often does anybody meet a werewolf?”

  “Symbolism is involved. And personal psychological associations. The-third-but-last owner of that book, by the way, was a werewolf,” Meg purred. “You’d be surprised how beautifully it all fits.”

  “Who wrote it?” Tarbell asked.

  The cat shrugged, a beautifully liquid gesture. “A mathematician, of course. I understand he developed the idea as a hobby.”

  “Satan?”

  “Don’t give yourself airs. Humans aren’t important. Earth isn’t important, except to provide intellectual exercise to others. Still and all, this is a simple world, with too little of the uncertainty factor.”

  Tarbell started to laugh. After a while he said, “I just realized I was sitting here discussing semantics with a cat.” But Meg had vanished—

  Familiarity with an enemy destroys wariness, and no doubt the cat knew that well enough. Obviously Tarbell should have been on guard. The fact that Meg had drunk his cream—the equivalent of bread and salt—meant nothing; cats are amoral, familiars, by preference, immoral. The combination was perilous.

  But Tarbell, his mind slightly hazy with whiskey, clutched the book like a buckler and felt safe. He was thinking about formulas of logic. “Matter of deduction,” he muttered. “I suppose the . . . author . . . made a lot of graphs and things and arrived at his conclusions that way. Tested them by induction. Whew!” It was a dizzying thought.

  Again he examined the book. The white circle on the cover was luminous again, and there was a number visible there. Tarbell’s stomach lurched.

  Page 34.

  He glanced around hastily, expecting anything; but the apartment seemed unchanged. Meg had not reappeared.

  Page 34 said, “Canaries need oxygen.”

  Canaries?

  Tarbell remembered. A few days ago, a friend had given him an expensive Roller canary, and he had not yet got rid of the creature. Its cage hung in a corner, covered with a white cloth. No sound proceeded from it.

  Tarbell went over and pulled the cover away. The canary was in trouble. It was lying on the bottom of the cage, kicking spasmodically, beak wide open.

  Oxygen?

  Tarbell whistled under his breath and whirled to the windows, yanking them open one by one. The gusts of cold, fresh air made his head spin. He hadn’t realized how drunk he was.

  Whiskey, however, didn’t account for the feeling of sick nausea in his stomach. He watched the canary slowly revive, and chewed at his lip. The air in the room hadn’t been depleted enough to kill a bird. This wasn’t a coal mine.

  A coal mine—gas—yeah! Tarbell, grinning tightly, dropped to his knees beside the gas radiator, As he had expected, the cock was turned on full, and he could hear a soft hissing.

  Meg didn’t always depend on magic. And a cat’s paws were handy little tools.

  Tarbell closed the valve and made a circuit of the apartment, finding another open radiator in the bedroom. He attended to that. The canary recovered and peeped feebly. Tarbell threw the cover back over its cage and considered.

  The book—The numerals on the cover had faded again. He felt a resurgence of panic. Ten references were allowed him. He had used two. That left eight—only eight. And Meg was a resourceful familiar, hell-bent on revenge.

  There was a thought stirring at the back of Tarbell’s mind, but it refused to emerge. He relaxed and closed his eyes. After a while the thought came out of hiding.

  In his hands he held a magical power whose potentialities were unlimited. The brown book had the answer to every human problem. If Napoleon had possessed it, or Luther, or Caesar—well! Life was a succession of problems. Men were handicapped by their inability to visualize the complete equation. So they made mistakes.

  But this book, Tarbell thought, told the right answer.

  Ironic that its powers should be wasted. That was what the situation amounted to. Ten references were allowed; after that, Meg would get her revenge, unhindered by the book’s countermagic. What a waste!

  Tarbell rubbed his temples hard. A gold mine had been dumped in his lap, and he was trying to figure out a way of using it. Any time danger threatened, the book would give the solution, according to the equation of logic. Then the magic was, so to speak, passive—

  Not quite. If Tarbell faced financial ruin, that would certainly come under the classification of danger. Unless the meaning embraced only the danger of bodily harm. He hoped there were no such limitations.

  On that assumption, if Tarbell faced ruin, the book would give a page number that would save him. Would i
t simply point out a way of returning to his former financial status? No. Because that status had already been proved unsound and dangerous by the mere fact of its cancellation.

  Casuistic reasoning, perhaps, but with clever manipulation, Tarbell felt confident that he could play the cards, close to his chest. He wanted money. Very well. He would place himself in a position where financial ruin was imminent, and the book would come to his rescue.

  He hoped.

  There were only eight page references left, and it would not do to waste them in making tests. Tarbell skimmed through the book, wondering if he could apply the messages himself. It didn’t seem probable. “Say no to everything,” for example. In special circumstances, that was no doubt good advice. But who was to know when those circumstances would arise?

  Only the book, of course.

  And—“An assassin awaits.” Excellent advice! It would have been invaluable to Caesar—to most of the Caesars, in fact. Knowing that a murderer was in ambush, it would be easy to take precautions. But one couldn’t be on guard all the time.

  The logic was perfect, as far as it went. But one element was ever lacking—the time-variable. Since that particular variable depended entirely on the life-pattern of the book’s owner, it was manifestly impossible for it to be any rational sort of a constant.

  Meantime, there was Meg. Meg was murderously active, and determined on her vengeance. If Tarbell used the book—could use the book—to get what he wanted personally, he’d use up the eight chances left and leave himself unguarded against attack. Fame and fortune mean little to a corpse.

  A red glow came from the window. A small, lizardlike creature crawled into view. There were suction pads on its toes, like a gecko’s, and a faint smell of charring paint came with it as it scuttled over the sill. It looked like red-hot metal.

  Tarbell looked at the book. It was unchanged. This wasn’t a danger, then. But it might have been—if he hadn’t turned off the gas. Introduce a blazing salamander into a gas-filled apartment, and—

  Yeah.

  Tarbell picked up a siphon at his elbow and squirted soda at the salamander. Clouds of steam arose. The creature hissed and fled back the way it had come.