Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “They know the Raider’s lines. They’ll stop us, with heat-cannon, if necessary.”

  “Coppery—”

  “Sure. We were floating free in a lake of CuSo4—copper sulphate solution. The rocks beneath us were copper. I hooked an insulated wire to the ship’s generator and turned on just enough juice to do the trick.

  “The Raider’s hull was burnished alloy, Ketch—which made it a swell cathode. Don’t you know what happens if you put electrodes in a copper sulphate solution and pass current through it?”

  “You—electroplated the ship!”

  “Right. Result—we’ve a beautiful copper plating that makes us visible to the patrol ships.”

  Ketch took out his gun.

  “We’ll fight.”

  “You’ve only sidearms. No cannon charges.”

  “I’m not going to be taken alive,” he said slowly.

  I NODDED. “That makes sense. If it comes to a hand-to-hand fight, plenty of us are going to get hurt. But there are lifeboats. They’re still dead-black. And a lot smaller than the Raider. You can get away in the lifeboats.”

  “Fair enough. And Barnaby, Kerrigan and the girl will go with us. I still want that ransom.” He snapped a quick order to Jennings, who raced away. An alarm sounded through the ship.

  The pilot glanced up. Ketch nodded to him, and he followed Jennings hurriedly.

  I jumped for the door and got through it just in time, slamming it after me. I heard the sharp clap of Ketch’s heat-gun. Farther along the corridor, Jennings and the pilot swung around at the sound. I flattened myself against the wall. The door was jerked open, and Ketch lunged across the threshold, heat-gun in his hand.

  Both Jennings and his companion had their weapons out now, but they dared not fire for fear of hitting their leader. I clamped down on his gun, trying to kick his legs from under him at the same time.

  He went down—and I had the gun!

  Clap-clap! That was Jennings, firing. But he had aimed too high, in his anxiety not to hit Ketch, and the bolts missed. Meantime I was back in the control room, slamming and locking the door just as the pirate chief hurled himself against the metal panel.

  I seared the lock into fused metal. Then I sealed the door, drawing the heat-ray along the cracks till it was solid with the wall. Barnaby yelled something, but I scarcely heard him.

  “Mona! Throw me that chair! Rex—that table! Everything metal you can find or rip free—quick!”

  The three of them scurried around the room, tossing me every metallic object they could find. I piled it all against the door and fused it with the ray gun. The pirates were trying to burn their way through from the other side, but I was fusing new barriers as fast as they burned away the old ones.

  Barnaby and Kerrigan managed to wrench away the whole instrument desk, a huge affair of metal alloy. Grunting, straining, they pushed it toward me. Mona and I added our weight, and that big chunk of metal thudded against the door with a crash. Instantly I went to work on it. It would take Ketch a long while to burn through that!

  There was nothing else left. We had to stand there, waiting the first clap-clap that would burst through the barrier.

  But it didn’t come. An alarm bell clanged sharply instead. That meant another ship was dose—plenty close.

  Two minutes after that I felt the slight jolts that meant the lifeboats had blasted free.

  The visiplate showed the three tiny vessels darting away like black midges, quickly lost in the darkness of space.

  “Fine,” I said. “Now we just wait for the patrol ships. If Ketch gets away this time, he deserves to.”

  “Jerry,” Mona said. “You were wonderful. And I’m going to faint.”

  She did. I tripped up Kerrigan neatly and managed to collect her in my arms. Maybe she was shamming. I decided to kiss her and find out.

  But I was interrupted. That, my friends, is why Rex Barnaby won’t let me do publicity on his pictures anymore—even though the newstape splash on Black Rover built up to the biggest B.O. gross in years, and got me a fat salary raise from Super Films.

  I was just starting to kiss Mona when Rex Barnaby grabbed my shoulder.

  “Listen, wise guy, who told you to copper plate this ship? If you’d minded your own business, I’d have got Percy Ketch to star in Black Rower himself.”

  At this point I hit him.

  Right on the nose—after that, even Mona’s kiss was an anticlimax.

  CAMOUFLAGE

  A neat little tale of a man who was no longer a man—by reason of an atomic explosion, he’d become a brain in a can—who was hidden in plain sight. And of a gang of crooks who had to find and kill him, before he killed them!

  Talman was sweating by the time he reached 16 Knobhill Road. He had to force himself to touch the annunciator plate. There was a low whirring as photoelectrics checked and O.K.’d his fingerprints; then the door opened and Talman walked into the dim hallway. He glanced behind him to where, beyond the hills, the spaceport’s lights made a pulsating, wan nimbus.

  Then he went on, down a ramp, into a comfortably furnished room where a fat, gray-haired man was sitting in an easy-chair, fingering a highball glass. Tension was in Talman’s voice as he said, “Hello, Brown. Everything all right?”

  A grin stretched Brown’s sagging cheeks. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? The police weren’t after you, were they?”

  Talman sat down and began mixing himself a drink from the server near by. His thin, sensitive face was shadowed.

  “You can’t argue with your glands. Space does that to me anyway. All the way from Venus I kept expecting somebody to walk up to me and say, ‘You’re wanted for questioning.’ ”

  “Nobody did.”

  “I didn’t know what I’d find here.”

  “The police didn’t expect us to head for Earth,” Brown said, rumpling his gray hair with a shapeless paw. “And that was your idea.”

  “Yeah. Consulting psychologist to—”

  “—to criminals. Want to step out?”

  “No,” Talman said frankly, “not with the profits we’ve got in sight already. This thing’s big.”

  Brown grinned. “Sure it is. Nobody ever organized crime before, in just this way. There wasn’t any crime worth a row of pins until we started.”

  “Where are we now, though? On the run.”

  “Fern’s found a foolproof hideout.”

  “Where?”

  “In the asteroid belt. We need one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An atomic power plant.”

  Talman looked startled. But he saw that Brown wasn’t kidding.

  After a moment, he put down his glass and scowled.

  “I’d say it’s impossible. A power plant’s too big.”

  “Yeah,” Brown said, “except that this one’s going by space to Callisto.”

  “High-jacking? We haven’t enough men—”

  “The ship’s under Transplant-control.”

  Talman cocked Ins head to one side. “Uh. That’s out of my line—”

  “There’ll be a skeleton crew, of course. But we’ll take care of them—and take their places. Then it’ll simply be a matter of unhitching the Transplant and rigging up manuals. It isn’t out of your line at all. Fern and Cunningham can do the technical stuff, but we’ve got to find out first just how dangerous a Transplant can be.”

  “I’m no engineer.”

  Brown went on, ignoring the comment. “The Transplant who’s handling this Callisto shipment used to be Bart Quentin. You knew him, didn’t you?”

  Talman, startled, nodded. “Sure. Years ago. Before—”

  “You’re in the clear, as far as the police are concerned. Go to see Quentin. Pump him. Find out . . . Cunningham will tell you what to find out. After that, we can go ahead. I hope.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not—” Brown’s brows came down. “We’ve got to find a hideout! That’s absolutely vital right now. Otherwise, we might as well walk int
o the nearest police station and hold out our hands tor cuffs. We’ve been clever, but now—we’ve got to hide. Fast!”

  “Well . . . I get that. But do you know what a Transplant really is?”

  “A free brain. One that can use artificial gadgets.”

  “Technically, yeah. Ever seen a Transplant working a power-digger? Or a Venusian sea-dredge? Enormously complicated controls it’d normally take a dozen men to handle?”

  “Implying a Transplant’s a superman?”

  “No,” Talman said slowly, “I don’t mean that. But I’ve got an idea it’d be safer to tangle with a dozen men than with one Transplant.”

  “Well,” Brown said, “go up to Quebec and see Quentin. He’s there now, I found out. Talk to Cunningham first. We’ll work out the details. What we’ve got to know are Quentin’s powers and his vulnerable points. And whether or not he’s telepathic. You’re an old friend of Quentin, and you’re a psychologist, so you’re the guy for the job.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ve got to get that power plant. We’ve got to hide, now!”

  Talman thought that Brown had probably planned this from the beginning. The fat man was shrewd enough; he’d been sufficiently clever to realize that ordinary criminals would stand no chance in a highly technical, carefully specialized world. Police forces could call on the sciences to aid them. Communication was excellent and fast, even between the planets. There were gadgets—The only chance of bringing off a successful crime was to do it fast and then make an almost instantaneous getaway.

  But the crime had to be planned. When competing against an organized social unit, as any crook does, it’s wise to create a similar unit. A blackjack has no chance against a rifle. A strong-arm bandit was doomed to quick failure, for a similar reason. The traces he left would be analyzed; chemistry, psychology, and criminology would track him down; he’d be made to confess. Made to, without any third-degree methods. So—

  So Cunningham was an electronics engineer. Fern was an astrophysicist. Talman himself was a psychologist. Big, blond Dalquist was a hunter, by choice and profession, beautifully integrated and tremendously fast with a gun. Cotton was a mathematician—and Brown himself was the co-ordinator. For three months the combination had worked successfully on Venus. Then, inevitably, the net closed, and the unit filtered back to Earth, ready to take the next step in the long-range plan. What it was Talman hadn’t known till now. But he could readily see its logical necessity.

  In the vast wilderness of the Asteroid Belt they could hide forever, if necessary, emerging to pull off a coup whenever opportunity offered. Safe, they could build up an underground criminal organization, with a spy-system flung broadcast among the planets—yes, it was the inevitable way. Just the same, he felt hesitant about matching wits with Bart Quentin. The man wasn’t—human—any more—

  He was worried on the way to Quebec. Cosmopolitan though he was, he couldn’t help anticipating tension, embarrassment, when he saw Quent. To pretend to ignore that—accident—would be too obvious. Still—He remembered that, seven years ago, Quentin had possessed a fine, muscular physique, and had been proud of his skill as a dancer. As for Linda, he wondered what had happened on that score. She couldn’t still be Mrs. Bart Quentin, under the circumstances. Or could she?

  He watched the St. Lawrence, a dull silver bar, below the plane as it slanted down. Robot pilots—a narrow beam. Only during violent storms did standard pilots take over. In space it was a different matter. And there were other jobs, enormously complicated, that only human brains could handle. A very special type of brain, at that.

  A brain like Quentin’s.

  Talman rubbed his narrow jaw and smiled wanly, trying to locate the source of his worry. Then he had the answer. Did Quent, in this new incarnation, possess more than five senses? Could he detect reactions a normal man could not appreciate? If so, Van Talman was definitely sunk.

  He glanced at his seat-mate, Dan Summers of Wyoming Engineers, through whom he had made the contact with Quentin. Summers, a blond young man with sun-wrinkles around his eyes, grinned casually.

  “Nervous?”

  “Could be that,” Talman said. “I was wondering how much he’ll have changed.”

  “Results are different in every case.”

  The plane, beam controlled, slid down the slopes of sunset air toward the port. Quebec’s lighted towers made an irregular backdrop.

  “They do change, then?”

  “I suppose, psychically, they’ve got to. You’re a psychologist, Mr. Talman. How’d you feel, if—”

  “There might be compensations.”

  Summers laughed. “That’s an understatement. Compensations . . . why, immortality’s only one such . . . compensation!”

  “You consider that a blessing?” Talman asked.

  “Yes, I do. He’ll remain at the peak of his powers for God knows how long. There’ll be no deterioration. Fatigue poisons are automatically eliminated by irradiation. Brain cells can’t replace themselves, of course, the way . . . say . . . muscular tissue can; but Quent’s brain can’t be injured, in its specially built case. Arteriosclerosis isn’t any problem, with the plasmic solution we use—no calcium’s deposited on the artery walls. The physical condition of his brain is automatically and perfectly controlled. The only ailments Quent can ever get are mental.”

  “Claustrophobia—No. You say he’s got eye-lenses. There’d be an automatic feeling of extension.”

  Summers said, “If you notice any change—outside of the perfectly normal one of mental growth in seven years—I’d be interested. With me—well, I grew up with the Transplants. I’m no more conscious of their mechanical, interchangeable bodies than a physician would think of a friend as a bundle of nerves and veins. It’s the reasoning faculty that counts, and that hasn’t altered.”

  Talman said thoughtfully, “You’re a sort of physician, to the Transplants, anyway. A layman might get another sort of reaction. Especially if he were used to seeing . . . a face.”

  “I’m never conscious of that lack.”

  “Is Quant?”

  Summers hesitated. “No,” he said finally, “I’m sure he isn’t. He’s beautifully adjusted. The reconditioning to Transplant life takes about a year. After that it’s all velvet.”

  “I’ve seen Transplants working, on Venus, from a distance. But there aren’t many spotted away from Earth.”

  “We haven’t enough trained technicians. It takes literally half a lifetime to train a man to handle Transplantation. A man has to be a qualified electronic engineer before he even starts.” Summers laughed. “The insurance companies cover a lot of the initial expense, though.”

  Talman was puzzled. “How’s that?”

  “They underwrite. Occupational risk, immortality. Working in atomic research is dangerous, my friend!”

  They emerged from the plane into the cool night air. Talman said, as they walked toward a waiting car, “We grew up together, Quentin and I. But his accident happened two years after I left Earth, and I never saw him since.”

  “As a Transplant? Uh-huh. Well, it’s an unfortunate name. Some jackass tagged the label on, whereas propaganda experts should have worked it out. Unfortunately it stuck. Eventually we hope to popularize the—Transplants. Not yet. We’re only starting. We’ve only two hundred and thirty of them so far, the successful ones.”

  “Many failures?”

  “Not now. In the early days—It’s complicated. From the first trephining to the final energizing and reconditioning, it’s the most nerve-racking, brain-straining, difficult technical task the human mind’s ever worked out. Reconciling a colloid mechanism with an electronic hookup—but the result’s worth it.”

  “Technologically. I wonder about the human values.”

  “Psychologically? We-all . . . Quentin will tell you about that angle. And technologically you don’t know the half of it. No colloid machine, like the brain, has ever been developed—till now. And this isn’t purely mechanical. It�
�s merely a miracle, the synthesis of intelligent living tissue with delicate, responsive machinery.”

  “But handicapped by the limitation of the machine—and the brain.”

  “You’ll see. Here we are. We’re dining with Quent—”

  Talman stared. “Dining?”

  “Yeah.” Summers’ eyes showed quizzical amusement. “No, he doesn’t eat steel shavings. In fact—”

  The shock of meeting Linda again took Talman by surprise. He had not expected to see her. Not now, under these altered conditions. But she hadn’t changed much; she was still the same warm, friendly woman he remembered, a little older now, yet very lovely and very gracious. She had always had charm. She was slim and tall, her head crowned by a bizarre coiffure of honey-amber coils, her brown eyes without the strain Talman might have expected.

  He took her hands. “Don’t say it,” he said. “I know how long it’s been.”

  “We won’t count the years, Van.” She laughed up at him. “We’ll pick up right where we left off. With a drink, eh?”

  “I could use one,” Summers said, “but I’ve got to report back to headquarters. I’ll just see Quent for a minute. Where is he?”

  “In there.” Linda nodded toward a door and turned back to Talman. “So you’ve been on Venus? You look bleached enough. Tell me how it’s been.”

  “All right.” He took the shaker from her hands and swirled the Martinis carefully. He felt embarrassment. Linda lifted an eyebrow.

  “Yes, we’re still married, Bart, and I. You’re surprised.”

  “A little.”

  “He’s still Bart,” she said quietly. “He may not look it, but he’s the man I married, all right. So you can relax, Van.”

  He poured the Martinis. Without looking at her, he said, “As long as you’re satisfied—”

  “I know what you’re thinking. That it’d be like having a machine for a husband. At first . . . well, I got over that feeling. We both did, after a while. There was constraint; I suppose you’ll feel it when you see him. Only that isn’t important, really. He’s—Bart.” She pushed a third glass toward Talman, and he looked at it in surprise.