Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  He was on Pluto, shunned and feared by Earthmen for a hundred and fifty years. He was in the very lair of the mind-vampires.

  And nothing happened.

  Slowly Duncan rose and turned the valves on the oxygen tanks. He divested himself of his spacesuit and made a careful examination of the two bodies. Both Olcott and Hartman had been killed, apparently, by the Plutonians. They had the stigmata.

  But Duncan was thinking a rather impossible thought—that there were no Plutonians.

  With half of his mind he made tests. There was atmosphere, almost pure chlorine. Nor was it unduly cold. An electroscope gave him the answer. Pluto was a radioactive planet, warmed from within by the powerful radiations of the ore.

  Duncan took the dead Olcott’s helmet and adjusted it upon himself. Turning on the power made the intertron knob glow, but there was no other result. The Varra, of course, could not safely venture within the Heaviside Layer of any planet, and Pluto had a Layer, since it had an atmosphere. Chlorine—radium—Duncan shook his head, trying to fit the puzzle together.

  There were no Plutonians. Why, then, had the Varra fostered the legend of the mind-vampires? Creatures composed of pure energy could not exist on a radioactive planet; the radiations would be fatal to their complicated electronic structures.

  Duncan thought for a long time. At last he had the answer, so astoundingly simple that he found it difficult to believe. But it checked. And that meant—

  He rose and went slowly to where Andrea’s body lay, still in the spacesuit, her face composed and lovely in death. Duncan’s lips twisted. He knelt.

  “Andrea—”

  She was trying to tell him something, he thought. What?

  “Tell Earth what I’ve found out? Is that it?”

  He hesitated. “It’s no use. We’re forty thousand million miles from the Sun. The radio won’t carry that far, even if it’d get through the Heaviside Layer on Pluto. There’s no way to send a message back.”

  There was no way. Nor could the cruiser retrace its course. There was not enough fuel left. The jets would be exhausted before Saturn’s orbit was reached, and the speed would increase as the ship plunged Sunward, increase to a point where deceleration would be impossible.

  “There’s no way, Andrea. I can’t send the message—”

  Duncan stopped. There was a way, after all, though it meant death.

  HE SEATED himself before the radio-recorder and adjusted it to automatic-repeat. His message would be imprinted on metal wire-tape, and continue to be sent out into the void till the ship itself was destroyed.

  Duncan pulled the microphone toward him. His voice was coldly emotionless.

  “CQX. CQX. Recorded on Pluto. All ships copy. Relay to proper authorities. Pluto is uninhabited. Its atmosphere is pure chlorine. No life-form known to science can exist in a chlorine atmosphere or on a radioactive world. The Plutonian mind-vampires do not exist. The legend was created by the Varra for their own purposes. The actual mind-vampires are the Varra themselves.”

  Now it would be theorizing, but Duncan was certain that his guess was correct.

  “The Varra live on life energy. When man conquered space, they foresaw danger to themselves. They are vulnerable, and if Earth suspected their motives, they’d be relentlessly destroyed. So—as I see it—they pretended to be friendly, and blamed the mind-vampirism on imaginary creatures living on Pluto. The Varra can communicate with us without the need for Helmets. They can kill too. But they seldom do that. Instead, pretending to protect space-travelers from the Plutonians, they drain a certain amount of life-energy from each person wearing a Helmet. We’re like cattle to them. We think they’re friendly, and so far we haven’t suspected the truth. As long as we didn’t suspect, the Varra were safe, and could keep on vampirizing us, without our knowledge. Once in a while a Varra badly in need of energy would drain too much, which would kill its host.”

  That was what had happened to Andrea. The Varra had tried to stop her from wrecking the Maid’s radio, and—Duncan’s teeth showed.

  He went on telling his story, explaining what had happened. He made no excuses; there was no need for them now.

  Finally he said: “The Varra can be destroyed. And we can protect ourselves against them. That’ll be up to the scientists. If this ship gets through, it will mean that the Varra couldn’t stop me. I’ve got radium aboard. So I’ll put a Heaviside Layer around the cruiser—and blast off Sunward.”

  Duncan clicked the switch. No need to say more. Earth would understand, would believe.

  But now—

  He opened the port, after donning a suit and Helmet, and let the ship fill with the chlorine atmosphere. It would be better than oxygen, for his purposes. Iodine vapor would be even more effective, but he could not create that. If only he were a scientist, a technician, he could probably discover some other way of creating an artificial Heaviside Layer.

  But it didn’t matter. This way was surest and quickest, and there would be no machinery to fail him.

  Sealed within the ship once more, Duncan found the shipment of Martian radium, hi-jacked from the Maid, and removed it from its thick leaden container. He left it exposed, and went to the controls.

  The cruiser lifted from the surface of the plateau. It slanted up through the chlorine atmosphere, rockets bellowing.

  There was no need for split-second timing or unusual accuracy—within certain limits. He was heading Sunward. Nothing more was necessary. Except power—

  THE tubes thundered with ravening fury. The cruiser blasted up, acceleration jamming Duncan back into his seat. Then they were out of the air-envelope, in free space, controls locked. There was nothing more to do now but to drive on. The rockets would blast their fury into the void till the fuel was exhausted. Even then, the ship would speed on, into the tracks of commerce and the orbits of the inhabited planets.

  On the visiplate specks of light glimmered, resolving themselves into a nebulous cloud—the Varra.

  It was the final proof. Duncan was the first man who had ever landed on Pluto. The Varra intended to destroy him, giving him no opportunity of telling what he knew to Earth.

  Duncan checked the radio. It was repeating his message, sending it steadily into space. At this distance from the Sun there was no chance that it would be picked up. But later—

  He clicked the power on in his Helmet. There was no response. The Varra, as he had thought, could not penetrate his artificial barrier, his pseudo-Heaviside Layer.

  It was nothing, actually, but a blanket of ionization. But the Varra could not break through it. Duncan glanced at the exposed radium on the floor. A pound of it, sending out its powerful emanations, gamma, beta and electrons, ionizing the chlorine even more effectively than it would have affected oxygen—invisible armor, protecting Duncan from the Varra.

  They were massing ahead, determined to stop him. Thoughts began to penetrate his mind, furtive, random, but indications that the group power of the Varra was stronger than he had expected.

  Duncan seated himself at a panel, the one controlling the blaster cannons. His face, haggard and strained, twisted in a bitter smile.

  “Okay, Andrea,” he whispered. “I’m taking the message back for you. But I’m doing this—for myself! Because they killed you, damn them—”

  The chill tentacles probed deeper into Duncan’s brain. He swung a cannon into position, pressed a stud, and watched a streak of electronic energy go blasting across space, silent thunder in the void, smashing relentlessly at the Varra. It struck in a maelstrom of flame.

  “Vulnerable!” Duncan said. “Yeah, they’re vulnerable as all hell!”

  The Varra closed in. Through their massed ranks the camion blazed and pounded, till space seemed afire. The rocking recoil of the blasts, mingled with the booming of the rockets, thudded in Duncan’s ears even through the Helmet.

  And he fought them. There were no witnesses to that battle, none to see the black cruiser plunging on through the cloud of attackers, belchi
ng Jove’s lightning, shaking with the vibrations of its murder-madness. For the spaceship was mad, Duncan thought, a relentless, destroying avenger, a dark angel bringing the terror of Armageddon to the Varra. And the energy-beings never paused; their life and their future was in the scales. If Duncan broke through, they were doomed. He must be stopped.

  THEY could not stop him! Almost blind with the agony burning within his brain, Saul Duncan nevertheless hunched over the controls, while the cannons thundered their demoniac message into space. By dozens and hundreds the Varra died, their energy-matrices wrenched and broken by the electronic bolts. Duncan and the ship were one—and both were mad.

  He got through. He had to. Nothing could have stopped Saul Duncan, not even the Varra. In the end, the black cruiser raced Sunward, cannons silent, for the Varra were scattered.

  Duncan got up wearily. He stood above Andrea’s body, watching the still features, the long lashes that would never rise.

  “It’s done,” he said. “Finished. Earth will get the message—”

  Earth would get the message. The Varra could not stop the cruiser now, and the radio would continue to send out its signal till the fires of the Sun swallowed the black ship.

  Duncan knelt. His legs were weak. The radium, of course. His suit could not protect him from the fatal radiations of a pound of the pure ore. But the stuff had served its purpose. It had kept the Varra at a distance till Duncan could fulfill his vengeance.

  And now it would kill him—unless he replaced it in the leaden casket. But even that might not work now.

  Duncan shrugged. It was better to die of radium burns than by the power of the Varra.

  He would be dead long before then.

  But the Varra would be hunted down, ruthlessly slain, their power broken forever. Earth-science would destroy them, as they themselves had slain so many, as they had killed Andrea.

  The bellow of the rockets died. The ship held true to its course, plunging on faster and faster toward the sunlit worlds where men knew joy and laughter and happiness. It would go on, to the funeral pyre of the Sun.

  But it would leave a message in its wake.

  WE GUARD THE BLACK PLANET!

  “Earth is not for us, lad. Earth is for the weak, for the worms that crawl on the ground. For us is flight, and the mad rush of the winds past our hurtling bodies. That we must have, without it we cannot live—though Death be the price we pay for it!”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Wings of the Gerfalcon

  THE stratoship dropped me at Stockholm, and an airferry took me to Thunder Fjord, where I had been born. In six years nothing had changed. The black rocks still jutted out into the tossing seas, where the red sails of Vikings had once flaunted, and the deep roar of the waters came up to greet me. Against the sky Freya, my father’s gerfalcon, was wheeling. And high on the crag was the Hall, its tower keeping unceasing vigil over the northern ocean.

  On the porch my father was waiting, a giant who had grown old. Nils Esterling had always been a silent man. His thin lips seemed clamped tight upon some secret he never told, and I think I was always a little afraid of him, though he was never unkind. But between us was a gulf. Nils seemed—shackled. I realized that first when I saw him watching the birds go south before the approach of winter. His eyes held a sick longing that, somehow, made me uneasy.

  Shackled, silent, taciturn, he had grown old, always a little withdrawn from the world, always, I thought, afraid of the stars. In the daytime he would watch his gerfalcon against the deep blue of the sky, but at night he drew the shades and would not venture out. The stars meant something to him. Only once, I knew, he had been in space; he never ventured beyond the atmosphere again. What had happened out there I did not know. But Nils Esterling came back changed, with something dead inside his soul.

  I was going out now. In my pocket were my papers, the result of six years of exhausting work at Sky Point, where I had been a cadet. I was shipping tomorrow on the Martins, Callisto bound. Nils had asked me to come home first.

  So I was here, and the gerfalcon came down wheeling, dropping, its talons clamping like iron on my father’s gloved wrist. It was like a welcome. Freya was old, too, but her golden eyes were still bright, her grip still deadly.

  NILS shook hands with me without rising. He gestured me to a chair. “I’m glad you came back, Arn. So you passed. That was good to hear. You’ll be in space tomorrow.”

  “For Callisto,” I said. “How are you, Nils? I was afraid—”

  His smile held no mirth. “That I was ill? Or perhaps dying. No, Arn. I’ve been dying for forty years—” He looked at the gerfalcon. “It doesn’t matter a great deal now. Except that I hope it comes soon. You’ll know why when I tell you about—about what happened to me in space four decades ago. I’ll try not to be bitter, but it’s hard. Damned hard.” Again Nils looked at the gerfalcon.

  He went on after a moment, threading the cord through Freya’s jesses. “You haven’t much time, if your ship blasts off tomorrow. What port? Newark? Well—what about food?”

  “I ate on the ferry, Dad—” I seldom called him that.

  He moved his big shoulders uneasily. “Let’s have a drink.” He summoned the servant, and presently there were highballs before us. I could not repress the thought that whiskey was incongruous; in the Hall we should have drunk ale from horns. Well, that was the past. A dead past now.

  Nils seemed to read my thought. “The old things linger somehow, Arn. They come down to us in our blood. So—”

  “Waes hael,” I said.

  “Drinc hael.” He drained the glass. Knots of muscle bunched at the corners of his jaw. With a sudden, furious motion, he cast off the gerfalcon, the leash slipping through the jesses. Freya took to the air with a hoarse, screaming cry.

  “The instinct of flight is in our race,” Nils said. “To be free, to fight, and to fly. In the old days we went Viking because of that. Leif the Lucky sailed to Greenland; our ships went down past the Tin Isles to Rome and Byzantium; we sailed even to Cathay. In the winter we caulked our keels and sharpened our swords. Then, when the ice broke up in the fjords, the red sails lifted again. Ran called us—Ran of the seas, goddess of the unknown.”

  His voice changed; he quoted softly from an old poet.

  What is woman that yon forsake her,

  And the hearthstone, and the home-acre,

  To go with the old gray Widowmaker . . .

  “Aye,” said Nils Esterling, a lost sickness in his eyes. “Our race cannot be prisoned, or it dies. And I have been prisoned for forty years. By all the hells of all the worlds!” he whispered, his voice shaking. “A most damnable prison! My soul turned rotten before I’d been back on Earth a week. Even before that. And there was no way out of my prison; I locked it with my own hands, and broke the key.

  You never knew about that, Arn. You’ll know now. There’s a reason why I must tell you—”

  He told me, while the slow night came down, and the borealis flamed and shook like spears of light in the polar sky. The Frost Giants were on the march, for a sudden chill blew in from the fjord. Overhead the wind screamed, like the trumpet cries of Valkyries.

  Far beneath us surged the sea, moving with its sliding, resistless motion, spuming against the rocks. Above us, the stars shone brightly.

  And on Nils’ wrist, where it had returned, the gerfalcon Freya rested, drowsy, stirring a little from time to time, but content to remain there.

  It had been thus forty years and more ago, Nils said, in his youth, when the hot blood went singing through his veins, and the Viking spirit flamed within him. The seas were tamed.

  The way of his ancestors was no longer open to him. But there were new frontiers open—

  The gulfs between the stars held mysteries, and Nils signed as A. B. on a spaceship, a cranky freighter, making the Great Circle of the trade routes. Earth to Venus, and swinging outward again to the major planets.

  The life toughened him, after a few years.

 
And in Marspole North, in a satha-dive, he ran into Captain Morse Damon, veteran of the Asteroid War.

  Damon told Nils about the Valkyries—the guardians of the Black Planet.

  * * *

  HE WAS harsh and lean and gray as weathered rock, and his black stare was without warmth. Sipping watered satha, he watched Nils Esterling, noting the leatheroid tunic worn at cuffs and elbows, the frayed straps of the elasto sandals.

  “You know my name.”

  “Sure,” Esterling said. “I see the news-tapes. But you haven’t been mentioned for a while.”

  “Not since the Asteroid War ended, no. The pact they made left me out in the cold. I had a guerilla force raiding through the Belt. In another year I could have turned the balance. But after the armistice—”

  Damon shrugged. “I’m no good for anything but fighting. I kept a ship; they owed me that. The Vulcan. She’s a sweet boat, well found and fast. But I can’t use her unless I sign up with the big companies. Besides, I don’t want to do freighting. The hell with that. I’ve been at loose ends, blasting around the System, looking for—well, I don’t know what. Had a shot or two at prospecting. But it’s dull, sinking assay shafts, sweating for a few tons of ore. Not my sort of life.”

  “There’s a war on Venus.”

  “Penny-ante stuff. I’m on the trail of something big now. On the trail of—” he smiled crookedly—“ghosts. Valkyries.”

  “Mars isn’t the place, then. Norway, on Earth—”

  Damon’s gaze sharpened. “Not Norway. Space. Valkyries, I said—women with wings.”

  Esterling drank satha, feeling the cold, numbing liquor slide down his throat. “A new race on some planet? I never heard of winged humans.”

  “You’ve heard of Glory Hole and Davy Jones’ Locker. Mean to say you’ve been in space three years and never heard of the Valkyries—the Black Planet?”

  Esterling put down his glass gently. How did Damon know that he’d been a spaceman for three years? Till now he had thought this merely a casual acquaintance, two Earthmen drinking together on an alien world. Now—