Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  The Firstman walked to the table and idly swung hit hook against the satchel.

  “This is our most powerful weapon,” he said. “It must not leave our hands. For the rest, I think you are mad, Dale.”

  “I was mad. I’m saner now. In ten years you’ll be the most hated tyrant in America.”

  “But the City will be safe.”

  “Safe as the Tower of Babel. Civilisation should rebuilt from a large bate—not from one tiny group. But you can’t see that, and you never will.”

  “We’ll forget this matter,” Garson said quietly. “You’re still in command of the fleet, Dale.”

  “You can’t buy my loyalty,” I told him, “My mistake was in not killing you.”

  As I said it, I realized I was wrong. Had Garson died at my hands, John Horsten would have taken over the reins of power. And there were no ideals, no matter how faltering, to check his course.

  As long as Horsten lived—!

  I caught the tail-end of a swift, complacent glance between Joanna and Horsten, and knew its meaning. They were safe. And, later, they would strike again.

  Yes—Garson was the wrong man to rule. But far better than John Horsten!

  In an instant, almost without thinking, I acted. I stepped forward and swung my palm viciously at Horsten’s face. He had no time to dodge. The sharp crack of the blow sounded loud in the silence. Horsten staggered back, and his hand dropped to his side, reaching for a gun. A blazing deadly anger showed in Joanna’s eyes—masked instantly.

  Garson’s hook caught Hors ten’s elbow. “No guns,” he said, and looked at me.

  I grinned. “Right,” I said. “It’s a challenge. No man of honor would draw back from a duel.”

  “Well?” Garson said.

  Had Horsten been wiser, he would have crawled. But humiliation like a boiling flood inside him. He had hated me too long, and he was psychologically incapable of backing down now, with Joanna and the Firstman watching.

  “I accept,” he whispered, his sharp teeth bared.

  GARSON opened the door and called guards. “The duel,” he said, indicating Horsten and me. “Make them ready.”

  And so we went into the great hall again, and halfway down it, to where two pillars were set about thirty feet apart. We were bound to these, our arms left free. All our weapons were removed, except for the misericordia each of us held in his right hand. The space between and behind us was cleared.

  Duels were nothing new; the standards of military chivalry had caused the revival of the ancient custom. But a duel between John Horsten and Dale Heath was an event, and every eye at the long table was fixed on us with wondering attention.

  Garson resumed his place, and a servant poured fresh wine into his goblet. Joanna slipped into a seat beside him.

  I looked at Horsten. The man’s thick lips were twisted in a grimace. I knew his quickness with the knife. I expected to die. But I knew also that I would take Horsten down into Limbo with me.

  “When I count to five,” the Firstman said. “One—”

  The hilt of the misericordia felt like living flesh against my palm. I balanced it caught it by the point for the fast spin throw, and waited.

  “Two—Three—”

  Horsten’s eyes were sallow behind the pale lashes. I glanced again at the table.

  I saw Joanna’s hand flash to the Firstman’s goblet, and I saw a drop of clear liquid fall without a splash into the red wine.

  “Four—”

  Poison. And Garson had not seen. When he drank, he would die.

  “Five!”

  Horsten was tensed for the throw. I saw the muscles ripple along his thin, hairy arm.

  I twisted in my bonds and snapped the dagger at Garson.

  It flamed across the hall like light My aim was good. The misericordia struck the goblet, smashed it, wine gushing in a crimson flood on the white cloth.

  As I turned, I realized that Horsten had not made his throw. He was smiling, taking his time, now’. From the table Joanna sent him a glance of agonized pleading. It was as if she cried, “Kill Heath! Kill him before he can talk!”

  From golden-cloaked officers, from the brightly-dressed women, a low, murmuring cry went up. An attempt by Dale Heath to murder the Firstman . . .

  Horsten raised his arm. Cold morning light glinted like ice on the knife-blade.

  Something sprouted from his throat as I heard the dull thump of the blow.

  I saw the hilt of my own misericordia in Horsten’s flesh.

  He tried to scream. Blood gushed from his mouth, cascading down his breast. Quite suddenly he slumped in his bonds, while his knife dropped clattering to the floor.

  At the table Carson’s arm was still extended in throwing position.

  Now he drew back. “Release Heath,” he said shortly. As movement stirred beside him, his hook shot out and caught Joanna by the shoulder.

  She was drawn toward him, her white face a Grecian mask of tragedy, mouth open in a silently screaming square.

  Garson said, “You have an hour, Joanna. Take what you want and leave the City. If I see you again after that, I’ll kill you.”

  Garson beckoned to me and, as my ropes were slashed, I followed him into the room adjoining. He closed the door on the amazed, questioning stares of the court.

  But he did not speak for a while. He went to the window and stood looking out at something I could not see.

  I said, “I’m still a traitor, by your standards.”

  “All right. You wouldn’t kill me, though. She would have poisoned me.”

  “You saw—”

  The heavy shoulders moved uneasily. “Of course. Your message last night reached me safely. I pretended I hadn’t got it. I sent guards after you, and let Horsten and—and his accomplice play out their hands. I waited for them to betray themselves. If it had not worked out one way, I’d have used another method. Your challenge to Horsten brought matters to a climax.”

  I didn’t answer.

  Garson said, “Why the devil did you save me, when you knew Horsten would kill you, unarmed?”

  “How the hell should I know?” I asked.

  “Come here,” he said, beckoning to me.

  I went to the window, and he pointed out to where the banner of the Black Sun stood stiff and triumphant in the morning wind. Beyond it the Viking fleet stood at anchor, leashed gray destroyer.

  “I need your help, Dale,” he said. “I can’t let you go now, if I ever could. Civilization must be rebuilt.”

  “On sand?”

  The black beard jutted. “You’re softhearted. But there’ll be no raids this year. Indiana’s safe. We’ll get food somewhere—live on short rations, if we have to owe you that much, at least.”

  I said nothing. I saw his gaze fasten on the flag out there, and felt the intolerable pride on every line of his iron face.

  “You could have killed me,” he said, “And you didn’t.”

  Suddenly I felt sick and weak, and my throat was clamped shut.

  “We’ll work it out somehow,” Garson said.

  And after a moment or two I nodded.

  That was a year ago.

  Garson has kept his word. There were no raids during the winter. But the scientists in the. City made new weapons. There are many heat-ray projectors now. And I know what that means.

  Firstman Garson had gone too far along the road of power to see anything but the mirage at its end, There were no raids last year, but there will be raids again.

  Garson is my friend, and he trusts me; but I know that he is the Enemy. When I drank wane with him yesterday, I could scarcely down the bitter stuff, for all the while I was thinking that the mad, drunken lust for power was in every cup that Garson drained, every crumb he ate, every breath he took. We drank together, and as we did, the thought was suddenly certain in my mind.

  Some day I must kill him.

  THE EYES OF THAR

  She spoke in a tongue dead a thousand years, and she had no memory for the man s
he faced. Yet he had held her tightly but a few short years before, had sworn eternal vengeance—when she died in his arms from an assassin’s wounds.

  HE HAD come back, though he knew what to expect. He had always come back to Klanvahr, since he had been hunted out of that ancient Martian fortress so many years ago. Not often, and always warily, for there was a price on Dantan’s head, and those who governed the Dry Provinces would have been glad to pay it. Now there was an excellent chance that they might pay, and soon, he thought, as he walked doggedly through the baking stillness of the night, his ears attuned to any dangerous sound in the thin, dry air.

  Even after dark it was hot here. The dead ground, parched and arid, retained the heat, releasing it slowly as the double moons—the Eyes of Thar, in Klanvahr mythology—swung across the blazing immensity of the sky. Yet Samuel Dantan came back to this desolate land as he had come before, drawn by love and by hatred.

  The love was lost forever, but the hate could still be satiated. He had not yet glutted his blood-thirst. When Dantan came back to Klanvahr, men died, though if all the men of the Redhelm Tribe were slain, even that could not satisfy the dull ache in Dantan’s heart.

  Now they were hunting him.

  The girl—he had not thought of her for years; he did not want to remember. He had been young when it happened. Of Earth stock, he had during a great Martian drought become godson to an old shaman of Klanvahr, one of the priests who still hoarded scraps of the forgotten knowledge of the past, glorious days of Martian destiny, when bright towers had fingered up triumphantly toward the Eyes of Thar.

  Memories . . . the solemn, antique dignity of the Undercities, in ruins now . . . the wrinkled shaman, intoning his rituals . . . very old books, and older stories . . . raids by the Redhelm Tribe . . . and a girl Samuel Dantan had known. There was a raid, and the girl had died. Such things had happened many times before; they would happen again. But to Dantan this one death mattered very much.

  Afterward, Dantan killed, first in red fury, then with a cool, quiet, passionless satisfaction. And, since the Redhelms were well represented in the corrupt Martian government, he had become outlaw.

  The girl would not have known him now. He had gone out into the spaceways, and the years had changed him. He was still thin, his eyes still dark and opaque as shadowed tarn-water, but he was dry and sinewy and hard, moving with the trained, dangerous swiftness of the predator he was—and, as to morals, Dantan had none worth mentioning. He had broken more than ten commandments. Between the planets, and in the far-flung worlds bordering the outer dark, there are more than ten. But Dantan had smashed them all.

  In the end there was still the dull, sickening hopelessness, part loneliness, part something less definable. Hunted, he came back to Klanvahr, and when he came, men of the Redhelms died. They did not die easily.

  But this time it was they who hunted, not he. They had cut him off from the aircar and they followed now like hounds upon his track. He had almost been disarmed in that last battle. And the Redhelms would not lose the trail; they had followed sign for generations across the dying tundras of Mars.

  He paused, flattening himself against an outcrop of rock, and looked back. It was dark; the Eyes of Thar had not yet risen, and the blaze of starlight cast a ghastly, leprous shine over the chaotic slope behind him, great riven boulders and jutting monoliths, canyon-like, running jagged toward the horizon, a scene of cosmic ruin that every old and shrinking world must show. He could see nothing of his pursuers, but they were coming. They were still far behind. But that did not matter; he must circle—circle—

  And first, he must regain a little strength. There was no water in his canteen. His throat was dust-dry, and his tongue felt swollen and leathery. Moving his shoulders uneasily, his dark face impassive, Dantan found a pebble and put it in his mouth, though he knew that would not help much. He had not tasted water for—how long? Too long, anyhow.

  STARING around, he took stock of resources. He was alone—what was it the old shaman had once told him? “You are never alone in Klanvahr. The living shadows of the past are all around you. They cannot help, but they watch, and their pride must not be humbled. You are never alone in Klanvahr.”

  But nothing stirred. Only a whisper of the dry, hot wind murmuring up from the distance, sighing and soughing like muted harps. Ghosts of the past riding the night, Dantan thought. How did those ghosts see Klanvahr? Not as this desolate wasteland, perhaps. They saw it with the eyes of memory, as the Mother of Empires which Klanvahr had once been, so long ago that only the tales persisted, garbled and unbelievable.

  A sighing whisper . . . he stopped living for a second, his breath halted, his eyes turned to emptiness. That meant something. A thermal, a river of wind—a downdraft, perhaps. Sometimes these eon-old canyons held lost rivers, changing and shifting their courses as Mars crumbled, and such watercourses might be traced by sound.

  Well—he knew Klanvahr.

  A half mile farther he found the arroyo, not too deep—fifty feet or less, with jagged walls easy to descend. He could hear the trickle of water, though he could not see it, and his thirst became overpowering. But caution made him clamber down the precipice warily. He did not drink till he had reconnoitered and made sure that it was safe.

  And that made Dantan’s thin lips curl. Safety for a man hunted by the Redhelms? The thought was sufficiently absurd. He would die—he must die; but he did not mean to die alone. This time perhaps they had him, but the kill would not be easy nor without cost If he could find some weapon, some ambush—prepare some trap for the hunters—

  There might be possibilities in this canyon. The stream had only lately been diverted into this channel; the signs of that were clear. Thoughtfully Dantan worked his way upstream. He did not try to mask his trail by water-tricks; the Redhelms were too wise for that. No, there must be some other answer.

  A mile or so farther along he found the reason for the diverted stream. Landslide. Where water had chuckled and rustled along the left-hand branch before, now it took the other route. Dantan followed the dry canyon, finding the going easier now, since Phobos had risen . . . an Eye of Thar. “The Eyes of the god miss nothing. They move across the world, and nothing can hide from Thar, or from his destiny.”

  Then Dantan saw rounded metal. Washed clean by the water that had run here lately, a corroded, curved surface rose dome-shaped from the stream bed.

  The presence of an artifact in this place was curious enough. The people of Klanvahr—the old race—had builded with some substance that had not survived; plastic or something else that was not metal. Yet this dome had the unmistakable dull sheen of steel. It was an alloy, unusually strong or it could never have lasted this long, even though protected by its covering of rocks and earth. A little nerve began jumping in Dantan’s cheek. He had paused briefly, but now he came forward and with his booted foot kicked away some of the dirt about the cryptic metal.

  A curving line broke it. Scraping vigorously, Dantan discovered that this marked the outline of an oval door, horizontal, and with a handle of some sort, though it was caked and fixed in its socket with dirt. Dantan’s lips were very thin now, and his eyes glittering and bright. An ambush—a weapon against the Redhelms—whatever might exist behind this lost door, it was worth investigating, especially for a condemned man.

  With water from the brook and a sliver of sharp stone, he pried and chiseled until the handle was fairly free from its heavy crust. It was a hook, like a shepherd’s crook, protruding from a small bowl-shaped depression in the door. Dantan tested it. It would not move in any direction. He braced himself, legs straddled, body half doubled, and strained at the hook.

  Blood beat against the back of his eyes. He heard drumming in his temples and straightened suddenly, thinking it the footsteps of Redhelms. Then, grinning sardonically, he bent to his work again, and this time the handle moved.

  Beneath him the door slid down and swung aside, and the darkness below gave place to soft light. He saw a long tube str
etching down vertically, with pegs protruding from the metal walls at regular intervals. It made a ladder. The bottom of the shaft was thirty feet below; its diameter was little more than the breadth of a big man’s shoulders.

  HE STOOD still for a moment, looking down, his mind almost swimming with wonder and surmise. Old, very old it must be, for the stream Had cut its own bed out of the rock whose walls rose above him now. Old—and yet these metal surfaces gleamed as brightly as they must have gleamed on the day they were put together—for what purpose?

  The wind sighed again down the canyon, and Dantan remembered the Redhelms on his track. He looked around once more and then lowered himself onto the ladder of metal pegs, testing them doubtfully before he let his full weight come down. They held.

  There might be danger down below; there might not. There was certain danger coming after him among the twisting canyons. He reached up, investigated briefly, and swung the door back into place. There was a lock, he saw, and after a moment discovered how to manipulate it. So far, the results were satisfactory. He was temporarily safe from the Redhelms, provided he did not suffocate. There was no air intake here that he could see, but he breathed easily enough so far. He would worry about that when the need arose. There might be other things to worry about before lack of air began to distress him.

  He descended.

  At the bottom of the shaft was another door. Its handle yielded with no resistance this time, and Dantan stepped across the threshold into a large, square underground chamber, lit with pale radiance that came from the floor itself, as though light had been poured into the molten metal when it had first been made.

  The room—

  Faintly he heard a distant humming, like the after-resonance of a bell, but it died away almost instantly. The room was large, and empty except for some sort of machine standing against the farther wall. Dantan was not a technician. He knew guns and ships; that was enough. But the smooth, sleek functionalism of this machine gave him an almost sensuous feeling of pleasure.