Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

Lessing started to speak. “I don’t think—” But something in Clarissa’s face stopped him. An exalted and enchanted look, that Christmas-morning expression carried to fulfillment, as if the child were awake and remembering what many-lighted, silver-spangled glory awaited him downstairs. She said in a small, clear voice,

  “It’s true. Of course it’s true! All you’ve said, and the fairy tale too. Why, I’m the king’s child. Of course I am!” And she put both hands to her eyes in a sudden childish gesture, as if half expecting the allegory of blindness to be literal.

  “Clarissa!” Lessing said.

  She looked at him with wide, dazzled eyes that scarcely knew him. And for a moment a strange memory came unbidden into his mind and brought terror with it. Alice, walking with the Fawn in the enchanted woods where nothing has a name, walking in friendship with her arm about the Fawn’s neck. And the Fawn’s words when they came to the edge of the woods and memory returned to them both. How it started away from her, shaking off the arm, wildness returning to the eyes that had looked as serenely into Alice’s as Clarissa had looked into his. “Why—I’m a Fawn,” it said in astonishment. “And you’re a Human Child!”

  Alien species.

  “I wonder why I’m not a bit surprised?” murmured Clarissa. “I must have known it all along, really. Oh, I wonder what comes next?”

  Lessing stared at her, appalled.

  She was very like a child now, too enraptured by the prospect of—of what?—to think of any possible consequences. It frightened him to see how sure she was of splendor to come, and of nothing but good in that splendor. He hated to mar the look of lovely anticipation on her face, but he must. He had wanted her to help him fight this monstrous possibility if she could bring herself to accept it at all. He had not expected instant acceptance and instant rapture. She must fight it—

  “Clarissa,” he said, “think! If it’s true . . . and we may be wrong . . . don’t you see what it means? He . . . they . . . won’t let us be together, Clarissa We can’t be married.”

  Her luminous eyes turned to him joyously.

  “Of course we’ll be married, darling. They’re only looking after me, don’t you see? Not hurting me, just watching. I’m sure they’ll let us marry whenever we like. I’m sure they’d never do anything to hurt me. Why darling, for all we know you may be one of us, too. I wonder if you are. It almost stands to reason, don’t you think? Or why would they have let us fall in love? Oh, darling—”

  Suddenly he knew that someone was standing behind him. Someone—For one heart-stopping moment he wondered if the jealous god himself had come down to claim Clarissa, and he dared not turn his head. But when Clarissa’s shining eyes lifted to the face beyond his, and showed no surprise, he felt a little reassurance.

  He sat perfectly still. He knew he could not have turned if he wanted. He could only watch Clarissa, and though no words were spoken in that silence, he saw her expression change. The rapturous joy drained slowly out of it. She shook her head, bewilderment and disbelief blurring the ecstasy of a moment before.

  “No?” she said to that standing someone behind him. “But I thought—Oh, no, you mustn’t! You wouldn’t! It isn’t fair!” And the dazzling dark eyes flooded with sudden tears that doubled their shining. “You can’t, you can’t!” sobbed Clarissa, and flung herself forward upon Lessing, her arms clasping his neck hard as she wept incoherent protest upon his shoulder.

  His arms closed automatically around her while his mind spun desperately to regain its balance. What had happened? Who—

  Someone brushed by him. The aunt. He knew that, but with no sense of relief even though he had half-expected that more awesome Someone at whose existence he could still only guess.

  The aunt was bending over them, pulling gently at Clarissa’s shaking shoulder. And after a moment Clarissa’s grip on his neck loosened and she sat up obediently, though still catching her breath in long, uneven sobs that wrung Lessing’s heart. He wanted desperately to do or say whatever would comfort her most quickly, but his mind and his body were both oddly slowed, as if there were some force at work in the room which he could not understand. As if he were moving against the momentum of that singing machinery he had fancied he sensed so often—moving against it, while the other two were carried effortlessly on.

  Clarissa let herself be pulled away. She moved as bonelessly as a child, utterly given up to her grief, careless of everything but that. The tears streaked her cheeks and her body drooped forlornly. She held Lessing’s hands until the last, but when he felt her fingers slipping from his the loss of contact told him, queerly, as nothing else quite had power to tell, that this was a final parting. They stood apart over a few feet of carpet, as if inexorable miles lay between them. Miles that widened with every passing second. Clarissa looked at him through her tears, her eyes unbearably bright, her lips quivering, her hands still outstretched and curved from the pressure of his clasp.

  This is all. You have served your purpose—now go. Go and forget.

  He did not know what voice had said it, or exactly in what words, but the meaning came back to him clearly now. Go and forget.

  There was strong music in the air. For one last moment he stood in a world that glittered with beauty and color because it was Clarissa’s, glittered even in this dark apartment with its many, many mirrors. All about him he could see reflecting Clarissas from every angle of grief and parting, moving confusedly as she let her hands begin to drop. He saw a score of Clarissas dropping their curved hands—but he never saw them fall. One last look at Clarissa’s tears, and then . . . and then—

  Lethe.

  Dyke let his breath out in a long sigh. He leaned back in his creaking chair and looked at Lessing without expression under his light eyebrows. Lessing blinked stupidly back. An instant ago he had stood in Clarissa’s apartment; the touch of her fingers was still warm in his hands. He could hear her caught breath and see the reflections moving confusedly in the mirrors around them—

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Reflections—Clarissa—I almost remembered something just then—” He sat up and stared at Dyke without seeing him, his brow furrowed. “Reflections,” he said again. “Clarissa—lots of Clarissas—but no aunt! I was looking at two women in the mirror, but I didn’t see the aunt! I never saw her—not once! And yet I . . . wait . . . the answer’s there, you know . . . right there, just in reach, if I could only—”

  Then it came to him in a burst of clarity. Clarissa had seen it before him; the whole answer lay in that legend she had told. The Country of the Blind! How could those sightless natives hope to see the king’s messenger who watched over the princess as she walked that enchanted wood? How could he remember what his mind had never been strong enough to comprehend? How could he have seen that guardian except as a presence without shape, a voice without words, moving through its own bright sphere beyond the sight of the blind?

  “Cigarette?” said Dyke, creaking his chair forward.

  Lessing reached automatically across the desk. There was no further sound but , the rustle of paper and the scratch of a match, for a little while. They smoked in silence, eying one another. Outside feet went by upon gravel. Men’s voices called distantly, muffled by the night. Crickets were chirping, omnipresent in the dark.

  Presently Dyke let down the front legs of his chair with a thump and reached forward to grind out his unfinished cigarette.

  “All right,” he said. “Now—are you still too close, or can you look at it objectively?”

  Lessing shrugged. “I can try.”

  “Well, first we can take it as understood—at least for the moment—that such things as these just don’t happen. The story’s full of holes, of course. We could tear it to pieces in ten minutes if we tried.

  Lessing looked stubborn. Maybe you think—”

  “I haven’t begun to think yet. We haven’t got to the bottom of the thing, naturally. I don’t believe it really happened exactly as you remember. Man, how could it? The whole sto
ry’s still dressed up in a sort of allegory, and we’ll have to dig deeper still to uncover the bare facts. But just as it stands—what a problem! Now I wonder—”

  His voice died. He shook out another cigarette and scratched a match abstractedly. Through the first cloud of exhaled smoke he went on, “Take it all as read, just for a minute. Unravel the allegory in the allegory—the king’s daughter born in the Country of the Blind. You know, Lessing, one thing strikes me that you haven’t noticed yet. Ever think how completely childish Clarissa seems? Her absorption in trivial things, for instance. Her assumption that the forces at work about her must be protective, parental. Yes, even that glow you spoke of that affected everything you saw and heard when you were with her. A child’s world is like that. Strong, clear colors. Nothing’s ugly because they have no basis for comparison. Beauty and ugliness mean nothing to a child. I can remember a bit from my own childhood—that peculiar enchantment over whatever interested me.

  Wordsworth, you know—‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy,’ and all the rest. And yet she was adult enough, wasn’t she?’ Past twenty, say?”

  He paused, eying the tip of his cigarette. “You know,” he said, “it sounds like a simple case of arrested development, doesn’t it? Now’, now, wait a minute! I only said sounds like it. You’ve got sense enough to recognize a moron when you see one. I don’t say Clarissa was anything like that. I’m just getting at something—

  “I’m thinking about my own little boy. He’s eleven now, and getting adjusted, but when he first started school he had an I.Q. away above the rest of the class, and they bored him. He didn’t want to play with the other kids. Got to hanging around the house reading until my wife and I realized something had to be done about it. High I.Q. or not, a kid needs other kids to play with. He’ll never learn to make the necessary social adjustments unless he learns young. Can’t grow up psychically quite straight unless he grow’s up with his own kind. Later on a high I.Q. will be a fine thing, but right now it’s almost a handicap to the kid.” He paused. “Well, see what I mean?”

  Lessing shook his head. “I can’t see anything. I’m still dizzy.”

  “Clarissa,” said Dyke slowly, “might—in the allegory, mind you, not in any real sense—be the king’s daughter. She might have been born of . . . welt, call it royal blood . . . into a race of inferiors, and never guess it until she began to develop beyond their level. Maybe the . . . the king felt the same as I did about my own child—she needed the company of inferiors . . . of children—while she was growing up. She couldn’t develop properly among—adults. Adults, you see, so far developed beyond anything we know that when they’re in the same room with you, you can’t even remember what they looked like.”

  It took Lessing a good minute after Dyke stopped speaking to realize just what he meant. Then he sat up abruptly and said, “Oh, no! It can’t be that. Why, I’d have known—”

  “You ought,” Dyke remarked abstractedly, “to watch my kid play baseball. While he’s playing, it’s the most important thing in life. The other kids never guess he has thoughts that go beyond the game.”

  “But . . . but the shower of gold, for instance,” protested Lessing. “The presence of the god . . . even the—”

  “Wait a minute! Just wait, now. You remember yourself that you jumped at conclusions about the god. Made him up completely out of a glimpse of what looked like a golden shower, and the memory of the Danae legend, and the feeling of a presence and a purpose behind what happened. If you’d seen what looked like a burning bush instead of a shower, you’d have come up with a completely different theory involving Moses, maybe. As for the presence and the visions—” Dyke paused and gave him a narrowed look. He hesitated a moment. “I’m going to suggest something about those later on. You won’t like it. First, though, I want to follow this . . . this allegory on through. I want to explain fully what might lie beyond this obvious theory on Clarissa. Remember, I don’t take it seriously. But neither do I want to leave it dangling. It’s fascinating, just as it stands. It seems very clearly to indicate—in the allegory—the existence of homo superior, here and now, right among us.”

  “Supermen?” Lessing echoed. With an obvious effort he forced his mind into focus and sat up straighter, looking at Dyke with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe. Or maybe—Lieutenant, do you ever read Cabell? In one of his books somewhere I think he has a character refer to a sort of super-race that impinges on ours with only one . . . one facet. He uses the analogy of geometry, and suggests that the other race might be represented by cubes that show up as squares on the plane geometric surface of our world, though in their own they have a cubic mass we never guess.” He frowned more deeply, and was silent.

  Dyke nodded. “Something like that, maybe. Fourth dimension stuff—people restricting themselves into our world temporarily, and for a purpose.” He pulled at his lower lip and then repeated, “For a purpose. That’s humiliating! I’m glad I don’t really believe it’s true. Even considering the thing academically is embarrassing enough.

  Homo superior, sending his children among us—to play.”

  He laughed. “Run along, children! I wonder if you see what I’m driving at. I’m not sure myself, really. It’s too vague. My mind’s human, so it’s limited. I’m set in patterns of anthropomorphic thinking, and my habit-patterns handicap me. We have to feel important. That’s a psychological truism. That’s why Mephistopheles was always supposed to be interested in buying human souls. He wouldn’t have wanted them, really—impalpables, intangibles, no use at all to a demon with a demon’s powers.”

  “Where do the demons come in?”

  “Nowhere. I’m just talking. Homo superior would be another race without any human touching points at all—as adults. Demons, in literature, were given human emotions and traits. Why? Muddy thinking. They wouldn’t have them, any more than a superman would. Tools!” Dyke said significantly, and sat staring at nothing.

  “Tools?”

  “This . . . this world.” He gestured. “What the devil do we know about it? We’ve made atom-smashers and microscopes. And other things. Kid stuff, toys. My boy can use a microscope and see bugs in creek water. A doctor can take the same microscope, use stains, isolate a germ and do something about it. That’s maturity. All this world, all this—matter—around us, might be simply tools that we’re using like kids. A superrace—”

  “By definition, wouldn’t it be too super to understand?”

  “In toto. A child can’t completely comprehend an adult. But a child can more or less understand another child—which is reduced to the same equation as his own, or at least the same common denominator. A superman would have to grow. He wouldn’t start out mature. Say the adult human is expressed by x. The adult superman is xy. A superchild—undeveloped immature—is—Or in other words, the equivalent of a mature specimen of homo sapiens. Sapiens reaches senility and dies. Superior goes on to maturity, the true superman. And that maturity—”

  They were silent for awhile.

  “They might impinge on us a little, while taking care of their own young,” Dyke went on presently. “They might impose amnesia on anyone who came too close, as you did—might have done. Remember Charles Fort? Mysterious disappearances, balls of light, spaceships, Jersey devils. That’s a side issue. The point is, a superchild could live with us, right here and now, unsuspected. It would appear to be an ordinary adult human. Or if not quite ordinary—certain precautions might be taken.” Again he fell silent, twirling a pencil on the desk.

  “Of course, it’s inconceivable,” he went on at last. “All pure theory. I’ve got a much more plausible explanation, though as I warned you, you won’t like it.”

  Lessing smiled faintly. “What is it?”

  “Remember Clarissa’s fever?”

  “Of course. Things were different after that—much more in the open. I thought—maybe she saw things in the delirium for the first time that she couldn’t be allowed to see head-on, in normal life. The fever seem
ed to be a necessity. But of course—”

  “Wait. Just possibly, you know, you may have the whole tiling by the wrong end. Look back, now. You two were caught in a rainstorm, and Clarissa came out of it with a delirium, right? And after that, things got stranger and stranger. Lessing, did it ever occur to you that you were both caught in that storm? Are you perfectly sure that it wasn’t yourself who had the delirium?”

  Lessing sat quite still, meeting the narrowed gaze. After a long moment he shook himself slightly.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

  Dyke smiled. “All right. Just thought I’d ask. It’s one possibility, of course.” He waited.

  Presently Lessing looked up.

  “Maybe I did have a fever,” he admitted. “Maybe I imagined it all. That still doesn’t explain the forgetfulness, but skip that. I know one way to settle at least part of the question.”

  Dyke nodded. “I wondered if you’d want to do that. I mean, right away.”

  “Why not? I know the way back. I’d know it blindfolded. Why, she may have been waiting for me all this time! There’s nothing to prevent me going back tomorrow.”

  “There’s a little matter of a pass,” Dyke said. “I believe I can fix that up. But do you think you want to go so soon, Lessing? Without thinking things over? You know, it’s going to be an awful shock if you find no apartment and no Clarissa. And I’ll admit I won’t be surprised if that’s just what you do find. I think this whole thing’s an allegory we haven’t fathomed yet. We may never fathom it. But—”

  “I’ll have to go,” Lessing told him. “Don’t you see that? We’ll never prove anything until we at least rule out the most obvious possibility. After all, I might be telling the simple truth!”

  Dyke laughed and then shrugged faintly.

  Lessing stood before the familiar door, his finger hesitating on the bell. So far, his memory had served him with perfect faith. Here was the corridor he knew well. Here was the door. Inside, he was quite sure, lay the arrangement of walls and rooms where once Clarissa moved. She might not be there any more, of course. He must not be disappointed if a strange face answered the bell. It would disprove nothing. After all, two years had passed.