Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “If I gave you my word—”

  “You’re not the big shot,” Quentin told him. Talman instinctively sent another questioning look at Brown. And from the voice-box on the wall came a curious sound like a smothered laugh.

  “All right,” Talman said, shrugging. “Naturally you won’t decide in our favor right away. Think it over. Remember you’re not Bart Quentin any more—you’ve got certain mechanical handicaps. While we haven’t got too much time, we can spare a little—say ten minutes—while Cunningham looks things over. Then . . . well, we aren’t playing for marbles, Quent.” His lips thinned. “If you’ll throw in with us and guide the ship under our orders, we can afford to let you live. But you’ve got to make up your mind fast. Cunningham is going to trace you down and take over the controls. After that—”

  “What makes you so sure I can be traced down?” Quentin asked calmly. “I know just how much my life would be worth once I’d landed you where you want to go. You don’t need me. You couldn’t give me the right maintenance even if you wanted to. No, I’d simply join the crewmen you’ve already disposed of. I’ll give you an ultimatum of my own.”

  “You’ll—what?”

  “Keep quiet and don’t monkey with anything, and I’ll land in an isolated part of Callisto and let you all escape,” Quentin said. “If you don’t, God help you.”

  For the first time Brown showed he had been conscious of that distant voice. He turned to Talman.

  “Bluff?”

  Talman nodded slowly. “Must be. He’s harmless.”

  “Bluff,” Cunningham said, without looking up from his task.

  “No,” the amplifier told him quietly, “I’m not bluffing. And be careful with that board. It’s part of the atomic hookup. If you fool with the wrong connections, you’re apt to blast us all out of space.” Cunningham jerked back from the maze of wires snaking out of the bakelite before him. Fern, some distance away, turned a swarthy face to watch. “Easy,” he said. “We’ve got to be sure what we’re doing.”

  “Shut up,” Cunningham grunted. “I do know’. Maybe that’s what the Transplant’s afraid of. I’ll be plenty careful to stay dear of atomic connections, but—” He paused to study the tangled wires. “No. This isn’t atomic—I think. Not the control leads, anyway. Suppose I break this connection—” His gloved hand came up with a rubber-sheathed cutter.

  The voice-box said, “Cunningham—don’t.” Cunningham poised the cutter. The amplifier sighed. “You first, then. Here it is!” Talman felt the transparent face plate slap painfully against his nose. The immense room bucked dizzly as he went reeling forward, unable to check himself. All around him he saw grotesque spacesuited figures reeling and stumbling. Brown lost his balance and fell heavily.

  Cunningham had been slammed forward into the wires as the ship abruptly decelerated. Now he hung like a trapped fly in the tangle, his limbs, his head, his whole body jerking and twitching with spasmodic violence. The devil’s dance increased in fury.

  “Get him out of there!” Lindquist veiled.

  “Hold it!” Fern shouted. “I’ll cut the power—” But he didn’t know how. Talman, dry-throated, watched Cunningham’s body sprawling, arching, shaking in spastic agony. Bones cracked suddenly.

  Cunningham jerked more limply now, his head flopping grotesquely.

  “Get him down,” Brown snapped, but Fern shook his head.

  “Cunningham’s dead. And that hookup’s dangerous.”

  “Flow? Dead?”

  Under his thin mustache Fern’s lips parted in a humorless smile. “A guy in an epileptic fit can break his own neck.”

  “Yeah,” Dalquist said, obviously shaken. “His neck’s broken, all right. Look at the way his head goes.”

  “Put a twenty-cycle alternating current through yourself and you’d go into convulsions too,” Fern advised.

  “We can’t just leave him there!”

  “We can,” Brown said, scowling. “Stay away from the walls, all of you.” He glared at Talman. “Why didn’t you—”

  “Sure, I know. But Cunningham should have had sense enough to stay away from bare wires.”

  “Few wires are insulated around here,” the fat man growled. “You said the Transplant was harmless.”

  “I said he had no mobility. And that he wasn’t a telepath.” Talman realized that his voice sounded defensive.

  Fern said, “A signal’s supposed to sound whenever the ship accelerates or decelerates. It didn’t go off that time. The Transplant must have cut it out himself, so we wouldn’t be warned.”

  They looked up into that humming, vast, yellow emptiness. Claustrophobia gripped Talman. The walls looked ready to topple in—to fold down, as though he stood in the cupped hand of a titan.

  “We can smash his eye cells,” Brown suggested.

  “Find ’em.” Fern indicated the maze of equipment.

  “All we have to do is unhitch the Transplant. Break his connection. Then he goes dead.”

  “Unfortunately,” Fern said, “Cunningham was the only electronic engineer among us. I’m only an astrophysicist!”

  “Never mind. We pull one plug and the Transplant blacks out. You can do that much!”

  Anger flared. But Cotton, a little man with blinking blue eyes, broke the tension.

  “Mathematics—geometry—ought to help us. We want to locate the Transplant, and—” He glanced up and was frozen. “We’re off our course!” he said finally, licking dry lips. “See that telltale?” Far above, Talman could see the enormous celestial globe. On its dark surface a point of red light was clearly marked.

  Fern’s swarthy face showed a sneer. “Sure. The Transplant’s running to cover. Earth’s the nearest place where he can get help.

  But we’ve plenty of time left. I’m not the technician Cunningham was, but I’m not a complete dope.” He didn’t look at the rhythmically-moving body on the wires. “We don’t have to test every connection in the ship.”

  “O.K., take it, then,” Brown grunted.

  Awkward in his suit, Fern walked to a square opening in the floor and peered down at a mesh-metal grating eighty feet below. “Right. Here’s the fuel-feed. We don’t need to trace connections through the whole ship. The fuel’s dumped out of that leader tube overhead there. Now look. Everything connected with the atomic power is apparently marked with red wax-crayon. See?”

  They saw. Here and there, on bare plates and boards, were cryptic red markings. Other symbols were in blue, green, black and white.

  “Go on that assumption,” Fern said. “Temporarily, anyhow. Red’s atomic power. Blue . . . green . . . um.”

  Talman said suddenly, “I don’t see anything here that looks like Quentin’s brain-case.”

  “Did you expect to?” the astrophysicist asked sardonically. “It’s slid into a padded socket somewhere. The brain can stand more gravs than the body, but seven’s about tops in any case. Which, incidentally, is fine for us. There’d be no use putting high-speed potential in this ship. The Transplant couldn’t stand it, any more than we could.”

  “Seven G’s,” Brown said thoughtfully.

  “Which would black out the Transplant too. He’ll have to remain conscious to pilot the ship through Earth atmosphere. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “We’re going pretty slow now,” Dalquist put in.

  Fern gave the celestial globe a sharp glance. “Looks like it. Let me work on this.” He paid out a coil from his belt and hitched himself to one of the central pillars. “That’ll guard against any more accidents.”

  “Tracing a circuit shouldn’t be so hard,” Brown said.

  “Ordinarily it isn’t. But you’ve got everything in this chamber—atomic control, radar, the kitchen sink. And these labels are only for construction convenience. There wasn’t any blueprint to this ship. It’s a single-shot model. I can find the Transplant, but it’ll take time. So shut up and let me work.”

  Brown scowled but didn’t say anything. Cotton’s bald head was sweatin
g. Dalquist wrapped his arm about a metal pillar and waited. Talman looked up again at the balcony that hung from the walls. The celestial globe showed a crawling disk of red light.

  “Quent,” he said.

  “Yes, Van.” Quentin’s voice was quietly distant. Brown put one hand casually to the blaster at his belt.

  “Why don’t you give up?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “You can’t fight us. Your getting Cunningham was a fluke. We’re on guard now—you can’t hurt us. It’s only a matter of time until we trace you down. Don’t look for mercy then, Quent. You can save us trouble by telling us where you are. We’re willing to pay for that. After we find you—on our own initiative—you can’t bargain. How about it?”

  Quentin said simply, “No.”

  There was silence for a few minutes. Talman was watching Fern, who, very cautiously paying out his coil, was investigating the tangle where Cunningham’s body still hung.

  Quentin said, “He won’t find the answer there. I’m pretty well camouflaged.”

  “But helpless,” Talman said quickly.

  “So are you. Ask Fern. If he monkeys with the wrong connections, he’s apt to destroy the ship. Look at your own problem. We’re heading back toward Earth. I’m swinging into a new course that’ll end at the home berth. If you give up now—”

  Brown said, “The old statutes never were altered. The punishment for piracy is death.”

  “There’s been no piracy for a hundred years. If an actual case came to trial, it might be a different matter.”

  “Imprisonment? Reconditioning?” Talman asked. “I’d a lot rather be dead.”

  “We’re decelerating,” Dalquist called, getting a firmer grip on his pillar.

  Looking at Brown, Talman thought the fat man knew what he had in mind. If technical knowledge failed, psychology might not. And Quentin, after all, was a human brain.

  First get the subject off guard.

  “Quent.”

  But Quentin didn’t answer. Brown grimaced and turned to watch Fern. Sweat was pouring down the physicist’s swarthy face as he concentrated on the hookups, drawing diagrams on the stylopad he wore attached to his forearm.

  After a while Talman began to feel dizzy. He shook his head, realizing that the ship had decelerated almost to zero, and got a firmer grip on the nearest pillar. Fern cursed. He was having a difficult time keeping his footing.

  Presently he lost it altogether as the ship went free. Five spacesuited figures clung to convenient handgrips. Fern snarled, “This may be deadlock, but it doesn’t help the Transplant. I can’t work without gravity—he can’t get to Earth without acceleration.”

  The voice-box said, “I’ve sent out an S O S.”

  Fern laughed. “I worked that out with Cunningham—and you talked too much to Talman, too. With a radar meteor-avoider, you don’t need signaling apparatus, and you haven’t got it.” He eyed the apparatus he had just left. “Maybe I was getting too close to the right answer, though, eh? Is that why—”

  “You weren’t even near it,” Quentin said.

  “Just the same—” Fern kicked himself away from the pillar, paying out the line behind him. He made a loop about his left wrist, and, hanging in midair, fell to studying the hookup.

  Brown lost his grip on the slippery column and floated free like some over-inflated balloon. Talman kicked himself across to the railed balcony. He caught the metal bar in gloved hands, swung himself in like an acrobat, and looked down—though it wasn’t really down—at the control chamber.

  “I think you’d better give up.” Quentin said.

  Brown was floating across to join Fern. “Never,” he said, and simultaneously four G’s hit the ship with the impact of a pile driver. It wasn’t forward acceleration. It was in another, foreplanned direction. Fern saved himself at the cost of an almost dislocated wrist—but the looped line rescued him from a fatal dive into uninsulated wiring.

  Talman was slammed down on the balcony. He could see the others plummet to hard impacts on unyielding surfaces. Brown wasn’t stopped by the floor plate, though.

  He had been hovering over the fuel-feed hole when the acceleration was slammed on.

  Talman saw the bulky body pop out of sight down the opening. There was an indescribable sound.

  Dalquist, Fern, and Cotton struggled to their feet. They cautiously went toward the hole and peered down.

  Talman called, “Is lie—”

  Cotton had turned away. Dalquist remained where he was, apparently fascinated, Talman thought, until he saw the man’s shoulders heaving. Fern looked up toward the balcony.

  “He went through the filter screen,” he said. “It’s a one-inch gauge metal mesh.”

  “Broke through?”

  “No,” Fern said deliberately. “He didn’t break through. He went through.”

  Four gravities and a fall of eighty feet add up to something slightly terrific. Talman shut his eyes and said, “Quent!”

  “Do you give up?”

  Fern snarled, “Not on your life! Our unit’s not that interdependent. We can do without Brown.”

  Talman sat on the balcony, held on to the rail, and let his feet hang down into emptiness. He stared across to the celestial globe, forty feet to his left. The red spot that marked the ship stood motionless.

  “I don’t think you’re human any more, Quent,” he said.

  “Because I don’t use a blaster? I’ve different weapons to fight with now. I’m not kidding myself, Van. I’m fighting for my life.”

  “We could still bargain.” Quentin said, “I told you you’d forget our friendship before I did. You must have known this highjacking could only end in my death. But apparently you didn’t care about that.”

  “I didn’t expect you to—”

  “Yeah,” the voice-box said. “I wonder if you’d have been as ready to go through with the plan if I’d still had human form? As for friendship—use your own tricks of psychology, Van. You look on my mechanical body as an enemy, a barrier between you and the real Bart Quentin. Subconsciously, maybe, you hate it, and you’re therefore willing to destroy it. Even though you’ll be destroying me with it. I don’t know—perhaps you rationalize that you’d thus be rescuing me from the thing that’s erected the barrier. And you forget that I haven’t changed, basically.”

  “We used to play chess together,” Talman said, “but we didn’t smash the pawns.”

  “I’m in check,” Quentin countered. “All I’ve got to fight with are knights. You’ve still got castles and bishops. You can move straight for your goal. Do you give up?”

  “No!” Talman snapped. His eyes were on the red light. He saw a tremor move it, and gripped the metal rail with a frantic clutch. His body swung out as the ship jumped. One gloved hand was torn from its grip. But the other held. The celestial globe was swinging violently. Talman threw a leg over the rail, clambered back to his precarious perch, and looked down.

  Fern was still braced by his emergency line. Dalquist and little Cotton were sliding across the floor, to bring up with a crash against a pillar. Someone screamed.

  Sweating, Talman warily descended. But by the time he had reached Cotton the man was dead.

  Radiating cracks in his face-plate and contorted, discolored features gave the answer.

  “He slammed right into me,” Dalquist gulped. “His plate cracked into the back of my helmet—”

  The chlorinated atmosphere within the sealed ship had ended Cotton’s life, not easily, but rapidly. Dalquist, Fern and Talman matched glances.

  The blond giant said, “Three of us left. I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”

  Fern showed his teeth. “So we’re still underestimating that thing. From now on, hitch yourselves to pillars. Don’t move without sound anchorage. Stay clear of everything that might cause trouble.”

  “We’re still heading back toward Earth,” Talman said.

  “Yeah.” Fern nodded. “We could open a port and walk out
into free space. But then what? We figured we’d be using this ship. Now we’ve got to.”

  Dalquist said, “If we gave up—”

  “Execution,” Fern said flatly. “We’ve still got time. I’ve traced some of the connections. I’ve eliminated a lot of hookups.”

  “Still think you can do it?”

  “I think so. But don’t let go of your handgrips for a second. I’ll find the answer before we hit atmosphere.”

  Talman had a suggestion. “Brains send out recognizable vibration patterns. A directional finder, maybe?”

  “If we were in the middle of the Mojave, that would work. Not here. This ship’s lousy with currents and radiations. How could we unscramble them without apparatus?”

  “We brought some apparatus with us. And there’s plenty all around the walls.”

  “Hooked up. I’m going to be plenty careful about upsetting the status quo. I wish Cunningham hadn’t gone down the drain.”

  “Quentin’s no fool,” Talman said. “He got the electronic engineer first and Brown second. He was trying for you then, too. Bishop and queen.”

  “Which makes me what?”

  “Castle. He’ll get you if he can.” Talman frowned, trying to remember something. Then he had it. He bent over the stylopad on Fern’s arm, shielding the writing with his own body from any photoelectrics that might be spotted around the walls or ceiling. He wrote: “He gets drunk on high frequency. Can do?”

  Fern crumpled the tissue slip and tore it awkwardly into fragments with his gloved fingers. He winked at Talman and nodded briefly.

  “Well, I’ll keep trying,” he said, and paid out his line to the kit of apparatus he and Cunningham had brought aboard.

  Left alone, Dalquist and Talman hitched themselves to pillars and waited. There was nothing else they could do. Talman had already mentioned this high-frequency irritation angle to Fern and Cunningham; they had seen no value to the knowledge then. Now it might be the answer, with applied practical psychology to supplement technology.

  Meanwhile, Talman longed for a cigarette. All he could do, sweating in the uncomfortable suit, was to manipulate a built-in gadget so that he managed to swallow a salt tablet and a few gulps of tepid water. His heart was pounding, and there was a dull ache in his temples. The spacesuit was uncomfortable; he wasn’t used to such personal confinement.