Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Through the built-in receiving gadget he could hear the humming silence, broken by the padding rustle of sheathed boots as Fern moved about. Talman blinked at the chaos of equipment and closed his eyes; the relentless yellow light, not intended for human vision, made little pulses beat nervously somewhere in his eye sockets. Somewhere in this ship, he thought, probably in this very chamber, was Quentin. But camouflaged. How?”

  Purloined letter stuff? Scarcely. Quentin would have had no reason to expect highjackers. It was pure accident that had intervened to protect the Transplant with such an excellent hiding place. That, and the slapdash methods of technicians, constructing a one-job piece of equipment with the casual convenience of a slipstick.

  But, Talman thought, if Quentin could be made to reveal his location—

  How? Via induced cerebral irritation—intoxication?

  Appeal to basics? But a brain couldn’t propagate the species. Self-preservation remained the only constant. Talman wished he’d brought Linda along. He’d have had a lever then.

  If only Quentin had had a human body, the answer would not be so difficult to find. And not necessary by torture. Automatic muscular reactions, the old standby of professional magicians, could have led Talman to his goal. Unfortunately, Quentin himself was the goal—a bodiless brain in a padded, insulated metal cylinder. And his spinal cord was a wire.

  If Fern could rig up a high-frequency device, the radiations would weaken Quentin’s defenses—in one way, if not another. At present the Transplant was a very, very dangerous opponent. And he was perfectly camouflaged.

  Well, not perfectly. Definitely no. Because, Talman realized with a sudden glow of excitement, Quentin wasn’t simply sitting back, ignoring the pirates, and taking the quickest route back to Earth. The very fact that he was retracing his course instead of going on to Callisto indicated that Quentin wanted to get help. And, meanwhile, via murder, he was doing his utmost to distract his unwelcome guests.

  Because, obviously, Quentin could be found.

  Given time.

  Cunningham could have done it. And even Fern was a menace to the Transplant. That meant that Quentin—was afraid.

  Talman sucked in his breath. “Quent,” he said, “I’ve a proposition. You listening?”

  “Yes,” the distant, terribly familiar voice said.

  “I’ve an answer for all of us. You want to stay alive. We want this ship. Right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Suppose we drop you by parachute when we hit Earth atmosphere. Then we can take over the controls and head out again. That way—”

  “And Caesar is an honorable man,” Quentin remarked. “But of course he wasn’t. I can’t trust you any more, Van. Psychiatrists and psychologists are too amoral. They’re ruthless, because they feel the end justifies the means, and they rationalize away emotion and sentiment. You’re an expert psychologist, Van. and that’s exactly why I’d never take your word for anything.”

  “You’re taking a long chance. If we do find the right hookup in time, there’ll be no bargaining, you know.”

  “If.”

  “It’s a long way back to Earth. We’re taking precautions now. You can’t kill any more of us. We’ll simply keep working steadily till we find you. Now—what about it?”

  After a pause Quentin said, “I’d rather take my chances. I know technological values better than I do human ones. As long as I depend on my own field of knowledge, I’m safer than if I tried to deal in psychology. I know coefficients and cosines, but I don’t know much about the colloid machine in your skull.”

  Talman lowered his head; sweat dripped from his nose to the interior of the face plate. He felt a sudden claustrophobia; fear of the cramped quarters of the suit, and fear of the larger dungeon that was the room and the ship itself.

  “You’re restricted, Quent,” he said, too loudly. “You’re limited in your weapons. You can’t adjust atmospheric pressure in here, or you’d have compressed already and crushed us.”

  “Crushing vital equipment at the same time. Besides, those suits can take a lot of pressure.”

  “Your king’s still in check.”

  “So is yours,” Quentin said calmly.

  Fern gave Talman a slow look that held approval and faint triumph. Under the clumsy gloves, manipulating delicate instruments, the hookup was beginning to take shape. Luckily, it was a job of conversion rather than construction, or time would have been too short.

  “Enjoy yourself,” Quentin said. “I’m slamming on all the G’s we can take.”

  “I don’t feel it,” Talman said.

  “All we can take, not all I could give out. Go ahead and amuse yourselves, You can’t win.”

  “No?”

  “Well—figure it out. As long as you stay hitched in one place, you’re reasonably safe. But if you start moving around, I can destroy you.”

  “Which means we’ll have to move—somewhere—in order to reach you, eh?”

  Quentin laughed. “I didn’t say so. I’m well camouflaged. Turn that thing off!”

  The shout echoed and re-echoed against the vaulted roof, shaking the amber air. Talman jerked nervously. He met Fern’s eye and saw the astrophysicist grin.

  “It’s hitting him,” Fern said. Then there was silence, for many minutes.

  The ship abruptly jumped. But the frequency inductor was securely moored, and the men, too, were anchored by their lines.

  “Turn it off,” Quentin said again. His voice wasn’t quite under control.

  “Where are you?” Talman asked.

  No answer.

  “We can wait, Quent.”

  “Keep waiting, then! I’m . . . I’m not distracted by personal fear. That’s one advantage of being a Transplant.”

  “High irritant value,” Fern murmured. “It works fast.”

  “Come on, Quent,” Talman said persuasively. “You’ve still got the instinct of self-preservation. This can’t be pleasant for you?”

  “It’s . . . too pleasant,” Quentin said unevenly. “But it won’t work. I could always stand my liquor.”

  “This isn’t liquor,” Fern countered. He touched a dial.

  The Transplant laughed; Talman noted with satisfaction that oral control was slipping. “It won’t work, I say. I’m too . . . smart for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You’re not morons—none of you are. Fern’s a good technician, maybe, but he isn’t good enough. Remember, Van, you asked me in Quebec if there’d been any . . . change? I said there hadn’t. I’m finding out now that I was wrong.”

  “How?”

  “Lack of distraction.” Quentin was talking too much; a symptom of intoxication. “A brain in a body can never concentrate fully. It’s too conscious of the body itself. Which is an imperfect mechanism. Too specialized to be efficient. Respiratory, circulatory—all the systems intrude. Even the habit of breathing’s a distraction. Now the ship’s my body—at the moment—but it’s a perfect mechanism. It functions with absolute efficiency. So my brain’s correspondingly better.”

  “Superman.”

  “Super efficient. The better mind generally wins at chess, because it can forsee the possible gamblits, I can foresee everything you might do. And you’re badly handicapped.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re human.”

  Egotism, Talman thought. Was this the Achillean heel? A taste of success had apparently done its psychological work, and the electronic equivalent of drunkenness had released inhibitions. Logical enough. After five years of routine work, no matter how novel that work might be, this suddenly altered situation—this change from active to passive, from machine to protagonist—might have been the catalyst. Ego. And cloudy thinking.

  For Quentin wasn’t a superbrain. Very definitely he was not. The higher an I.Q., the less need there is for self-justification, direct or indirect. And, oddly, Talman suddenly felt absolved of any fingering compunctions. The real Bart Quentin would never have been guilty of pa
ranoid thought-patterns.

  So—

  Quentin’s articulation was clear; there was no slurring. But he no longer spoke with soft palate, tongue and lips, by means of a column of air. Tonal control was noticeably altered now, however, and the Transplant’s voice varied from a carrying whisper to almost a shout.

  Talman grinned. He was feeling better, somehow.

  “We’re human,” he said, “but we’re still sober.”

  “Nuts. Look at the telltale. We’re getting close to Earth.”

  “Come off it, Quent,” Talman said wearily. “You’re bluffing, and we both know you’re bluffing. You can’t stand an indefinite amount of high frequency. Save time and give up now.”

  “You give up,” Quentin said. “I can see everything you do. The ship’s a mass of traps anyway. From up here all I have to do is watch until you get close to one. I’m planning my game ahead, every gambit worked out to checkmate for one of you. You haven’t got a chance. You haven’t got a chance. You haven’t got a chance.”

  From up here, Talman thought. Up where? He Remembered little Cotton’s remark that geometry could be used to locate the Transplant. Sure. Geometry and psychology. Halve the ship, quarter it, keep bisecting the remainders—

  Not necessary. Up was the keyword. Talman seized upon it with an eagerness that didn’t show on his face. Up, presumably, reduced by half the area they’d have to search. The lower parts of the ship could be ruled out. Now he’d have to halve the upper section, using the celestial globe, say as the dividing line.

  The Transplant had eye cells spotted all over the ship, of course, but Talman tentatively decided that Quentin thought of himself as situated in one particular spot, not scattered over the whole ship, localized wherever an eye was built in. A man’s head is his locus, to his own mind.

  Thus Quentin could see the red spot on the celestial globe, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he was located in a wall facing that hemisphere of the sphere. The Transplant had to be trapped into references to his actual physical relation to objects in the ship—which would be hard, because this could be done best by references to sight, the normal individual’s most important link with his surroundings. And Quentin’s sight was almost omnipotent. He could see everything.

  There had to be a localization—somehow.

  A word-association test would do it. But that implied co-operation. Quentin wasn’t that drunk!

  Nothing could be gauged by learning what Quentin could see—for his brain was not necessarily near any one of his eyes. There would be a subtle, intrinsic realization of location on the Transplant’s part: the knowledge that he—blind, deaf, dumb except through his distant extensor sensory mechanisms—was in a certain place. And how, except by too obviously direct questioning, could Quentin be made to give the right answers?

  It was impossible, Talman thought, with a hopeless sense of frustrated anger. The anger grew stronger. It brought sweat to his face, rousing him to a dull, aching hatred of Quentin. All this was Quentin’s fault, the fact that Talman was prisoned here in this hateful spacesuit and this enormous death trap of a ship. The fault of a machine—

  Suddenly he saw the way.

  It would, of course, depend on how drunk Quentin was. He glanced at Fern, questioned the man with his eyes, and in response Fern manipulated a dial and nodded.

  “Damn you,” Quentin said in a whisper.

  “Nuts,” Talman said. “You implied you haven’t any instinct for self-preservation any more.”

  “I . . . didn’t—”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Quentin said loudly.

  “You forget I’m a psychologist, Quent. I should have seen the angles before. The book was open, ready to read, even before I saw you. When I saw Linda.”

  “Shut up about Linda!”

  Talman had a momentary, sick vision of the drunken, tortured brain somewhere hidden in the walls, a surrealistic nightmare. “Sure,” he said. “You don’t want to think about her yourself.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You don’t want to think about yourself, either, do you?”

  “What are you trying to do, Van? Get me mad?”

  “No,” Talman said, “I’m simply fed up, sick and disgusted with the whole business. Pretending that you’re Bart Quentin, that you’re still human, that we can deal with you on equal terms.”

  “There’ll be no dealing—”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I’ve just realized what you are.” He let the words hang in the dim air. He imagined he could hear Quentin’s heavy breathing, though he knew it was merely an illusion.

  “Please shut up. Van,” Quentin said.

  “Who’s asking me to shut up?”

  “I am.”

  “And what’s that?”

  The ship jumped. Talman almost lost his balance. The line hitched to the pillar saved him. He laughed.

  “I’d be sorry for you, Quent, if you were—you. But you’re not.”

  “I’m not falling for any trick.”

  “It may be a trick, but it’s the truth too. And you’ve wondered about it yourself. I’m dead certain of that.”

  “Wondered about what?”

  “You’re not human any more,” Talman said gently. “You’re a thing. A machine. A gadget. A spongy gray hunk of meat in a box. Did you really think I could get used to you—now? That I could identify you with the old Quent? You haven’t any face!”

  The sound-box made noises. They sounded mechanical. Then—“Shut up,” Quentin said again, almost plaintively. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

  “And you don’t want to face it. Only you’ve got to face it, sooner or later, whether you kill us now or not. This . . . business . . is an incident. But the thoughts in your brain will keep growing and growing. And you’ll keep changing and changing. You’ve changed plenty already.”

  “You’re crazy,” Quentin said. “I’m no . . . monster.”

  “You hope, eh? Look at it logically. You haven’t dared to do that, have you?” Talman held up his gloved hand and ticked pff points on his sheathed fingers. “You’re trying very desperately to keep your grip on something that’s slipping away—humanity, the heritage you were born to. You hang on to the symbols, hoping they’ll mean the reality. Why do you pretend to eat? Why do you insist on drinking brandy out of a glass? You know it might just as well be squirted into you out of an oil can.”

  “No. No! It’s an aesthetic—”

  “Garbage. You go to teleshows. You read. You pretend you’re human enough to be a cartoonist. It’s a desperate, hopeless clinging to something that’s already gone from you, all these pretenses. Why do you feel the need for binges? You’re maladjusted, because you’re pretending you’re still human, and you’re not, any more.”

  “I’m . . . well, something better—”

  “Maybe . . . if you’d been born a machine. But you were human. You had a human body. You had eyes and hair and lips. Linda must remember that, Quent.

  “You should have insisted on a divorce. Look—if you’d only been crippled by the explosion, she could have taken care of you. You’d have needed her. As it is, you’re a self-sufficient, self-contained unit. She does a good job of pretending. I’ll admit that. She tries not to think of you as a hopped-up helicopter. A gadget. A blob of wet cellular tissue. It must be tough on her. She remembers you as you used to be.”

  “She loves me.”

  “She pities you,” Talman said relentlessly.

  In the humming stillness the red telltale crept across the globe. Fern’s tongue stole out and circled his lips. Lindquist stood quietly watching, his eyes narrowed.

  “Yeah,” Talman said, “face it. And look at the future. There are compensations. You’ll get quite a bang out of meshing your gears. Eventually you’ll even stop remembering you ever were human. You’ll be happier then. For you can’t hang on to it, Quent. It’s going away. You can keep on pretending for a while, but in the
end it won’t matter any more. You’ll be satisfied to be a gadget. You’ll see beauty in a machine and not in Linda. Maybe that’s happened already. Maybe Linda knows it’s happened. You don’t have to be honest with yourself yet, you know. You’re immortal. But I wouldn’t take that kind of immortality as a gift.”

  “Van—”

  “I’m still Van. But you’re a machine. Go ahead and kill us, if you want, and if you can do it. Then go back to Earth and, when you see Linda again, look at her face. Look at it when she doesn’t know you’re watching. You can do that easily. Rig up a photoelectric cell in a lamp or something.”

  “Van . . . Van!”

  Talman let his hands drop to his sides. “All right. Where are you?”

  The silence grew, while an inaudible question hummed through the yelllow vastness. The question, perhaps, in the mind of every Transplant. The question of—a price.

  What price?

  Utter loneliness, the sick knowledge that the old ties were snapping one by one, and that in place of living, warm humanity there would remain—a mental monster?

  Yes, he had wondered—this Transplant who had been Bart Quentin. He had wondered, while the proud, tremendous machines that were his body stood ready to spring into vibrant life.

  Am I changing? Am I still Bart Quentin!

  Or do they—the humans—look on me as—How does Linda really feel about me now. Am I—

  Am I—It?

  “Go up on the balcony,” Quentin said. His voice was curiously faded and dead.

  Talman made a quick gesture. Fern and Lindquist sprang to life. They climbed, each to a ladder, on opposite sides of the room, but carefully, hitching their lines to each rung.

  “Where is it?” Talman asked gently.

  “The south wall—Use the celestial sphere for orientation. You can reach me—” The voice failed.

  “Yes?”

  Silence. Fern called down, “Has he passed out?”