Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  He stepped forward. His arms closed about Alvers, and the Hedgehound yelled in sudden panic. Then the red blaze flared out again. When it had died, both figures were gone.

  “Got any more whiskey, Burkhalter?” Vine said.

  IV.

  The Cody was in telepathic communication with the Mute, Hobson. Like the other three Codys, this one wore the same modulated-frequency helmet as the Mutes; it was impossible for any Baldy or paranoid to tune in on that scrambled, camouflaged wave length.

  It was two hours after sundown.

  Alvers is dead, Hobson. Telepathy has no colloquialisms that can be expressed in language-symbols.

  Necessary?

  Yes. Absolute obedience to the Cody—a curiously mingled four-in-one concept—is vital. Nobody can be allowed to defy the Cody and get away with it.

  Any repercussions?

  None. Mattoon and Vine are agreeable. They got along with Burkhalter. What’s wrong with him, Hobson?

  The moment the question was asked, the Cody knew the answer. Telepaths have no secrets but subconscious ones—and the Mute helmet can even delve a little into the secret mind.

  In love with a paranoid? The Cody was shocked.

  He doesn’t know it. He mustn’t realize it yet. He’d have to reorient; that would take time; we can’t afford to have him in the side lines just now. Trouble’s bound to pop.

  What?

  Fred Selfridge. He’s drunk. He found out the Hedgehound chiefs visited Burkhalter today. He’s afraid his trading racket is being cut from under him. I’ve told Burkhalter to stay out of sight.

  I’ll stay near here, then, in case I’m needed. I won’t go home yet. Briefly Hobson caught sight of what home meant to the Cody; a secret valley in the Canadian wilderness, its whereabouts known only to wearers of the helmets, who could never betray it inadvertently. It was there that the technicians among the Baldies sent their specialized products—via the Mutes. Products which had managed to build up a fully equipped headquarters in the heart of the forest, a centralization, it was true, but one whose whereabouts were guarded very thoroughly from the danger of discovery by either friend or enemy. From that valley laboratory in the woods came the devices that made the Cody the legendary figure he was among the Hedgehounds—a Paul Bunyan who combined incredible physical prowess with pure magic. Only such a figure could have commanded the respect and obedience of the woods runners.

  Is Burkhalter safely hidden, Hobson? Or can I—

  He’s hidden. There’s a round robin on, but Selfridge can’t trace him through that.

  O.K. I’ll wait.

  The Cody broke off. Hobson sent his thought probing out, across the dark miles, to a dozen other Mutes, scattered across the continent from Niagara to Salton. Each one of them was ready for the underground mobilization that might be necessary at any moment now.

  It had taken ninety years for the storm to gather; its breaking would be cataclysmic.

  Within the circle of the round robin was quiet, complete peace that only a Baldy can know. Burkhalter let his mind slip into place among the others, briefly touching and recognizing friends as he settled into that telepathic closed circuit. He caught the faintly troubled unrest from Duke Heath’s thoughts; then the deep calm of rapport swallowed them both.

  At first, on the outer fringes of the psychic pool, there were ripples and currents of mild disturbance, the casual distresses that are inevitable in any gregarious society, and especially among hypersensitive Baldies. But the purge of the ancient custom of the confessional quickly began to be effective. There can be no barriers between Baldies. The basic unit of the family is far more complete than among nontelepaths, and by extension, the entire Baldy group were bound together with ties no less strong because of their intangible subtlety.

  Trust and friendship: these things were certain. There could be no distrust when the tariff wall of language was eliminated. The ancient loneliness of any highly specialized, intelligent organism was mitigated in the only possible way; by a kinship closer even than marriage, and transcending it.

  Any minority group as long as it maintains its specialized integrity, is automatically handicapped. It is suspect. Only the Baldies, in all social history, had been able to mingle on equal terms with the majority group and still retain the close bond of kinship. Which was paradoxical, for the Baldies, perhaps, were the only ones who desired racial assimilation. They could afford to, for the telepathic mutation was dominant: the children of Baldy father and nontelepathic mother—or vice versa—are Baldies.

  But the reassurance of the round robins was needed; they were a symbol of the passive battle the Baldies had been fighting for generations. In them the telepaths found complete unity. It did not, and never would, destroy the vital competitive instinct; rather, it encouraged it. There was give and take. And, too, it was religion of the purest kind.

  In the beginning, with no senses that non-Baldies can quite understand, you touched the minds of your friends, delicately, sensitively. There was a place for you, and you were welcomed. Slowly, as the peace spread, you approached the center, that quite indescribable position in space time that was a synthesis of intelligent, vital minds. Only by analogy can that locus even be suggested.

  It is half-sleep. It is like the moment during which consciousness returns sufficiently so that you know you are not awake, and can appreciate the complete calm relaxation of slumber. I you could retain consciousness while you slept—that might be it.

  For there was no drugging. The sixth sense is tuned to its highest pitch, and it intermingles with and draws from the other senses. Each Baldy contributes. At first the troubles and disturbances, the emotional unbalances and problems, are cast into the pool, examined, and dissolved in the crystal water of the rapport. Then, cleansed and strengthened, the Baldies approach the center, where the minds blend into a single symphony. Nuances of color one member has appreciated, shadings of sound and light and feeling, each one is a grace note in orchestration. And each note is three-dimensional, for it carries with it the Baldy’s personal, individual reaction to the stimulus.

  Here a woman remembered the sensuous feel of soft velvet against her palm, with its corresponding mental impact. Here a man gave the crystal-sharp pleasure of solving a difficult mathematical equation, an intellectual counterpoint to the lower-keyed feeling of velvet. Step by step the rapport built up, until there seemed but a single mind, working in perfect cohesion, a harmony without false notes.

  Then this single mind began building. It began to think. It was a psychic colloid, in effect, an intellectual giant given strength and sanity by very human emotions and senses and desires.

  Then into that pellucid unity crashed a thought-message that for an instant made the minds cling together in a final desperate embrace in which fear and hope and friendship intermingled. The round robin dissolved. Each Baldy waited now, remembering Hobson’s thought that said:

  The pogrom’s started.

  He hadn’t broadcast the message directly. The mind of a Mute, wearing his helmet, cannot be read except by another Mute. It was Duke Heath, sitting with Hobson in the moonlit grounds outside the hospital, who had taken the oral warning and conveyed it to the other Baldies. Now his thoughts continued to flash through Sequoia.

  Come to the hospital. Avoid non-Baldies. If you’re seen, you may he lynched.

  In dozens of homes, eyes met in which the terror had leaped instantly to full flower. All over the world, in that moment, something electric sparked with unendurable tension from mind to sensitive mind. No non-Baldy noticed. But, with the speed of thought, the knowledge girdled the planet.

  From the thousands of Baldies scattered through the villages, from helicopter and surface car, came a thought of reassurance. We are one, it said. We are with you.

  That—from the Baldies. From the paranoids, fewer in number, came a message of hatred and triumph. Kill the hairy men!

  But no nontelepath outside Sequoia knew what was happening.

 
; There was an old plastic house near the edge of town where Burkhalter had been hiding. He slipped out of a side door now into the cool quiet of the night. Overhead, a full moon hung yellow. A fan of diffused light reached upword from Redwood Street in the distance, and dimmer paths in the air marked the other avenues. Burkhalter’s muscles were rigid. He felt his throat tense with near-panic. Generations of anticipation had built up a violent phobia in every Baldy, and now that the day had come—

  Barbara Pell came dazzlingly into his thoughts, and as his mind recalled her, so her mind touched his, wild and fiery, gloating with a triumph his whole being drew back from, while against all judgment something seemed to force him to receive her message.

  He’s dead, Burkhalter, he’s dead! I’ve killed Fred Selfridge! The word is “kill,” but in the mind of the paranoid it was not a word or a thought, but a reeking sensation of triumph, wet with blood, a screaming thought which the sane mind reels from.

  You fool! Burkhalter shouted at her across the distant streets, his mind catching a little of her wildness so that he could not wholly control it. You crazy fool, did you start this?

  He was starting out to get yon. He was dangerous. His talk would have started the pogrom anyhow—people were beginning to think—

  It’s got to be stopped!

  It will be! Her thought had a terrible confidence. We’ve made plans.

  What happened?

  Someone saw me kill Selfridge. It’s the brother, Ralph, who touched things off—the old lynch law. Listen. Her thought was giddy with triumph.

  He heard it then, the belling yell of the mob, far away, but growing louder. The sound to Barbara Pell’s mind was fuel to a flame. He caught terror from her, but a perverted terror that lusted after what it feared. The same fury of blood-thirst was in the crowd’s yell and in the red flame which was Barbara Pell’s mad mind. They were coming near her, nearer—

  For a moment Burkhalter was a woman running down a dim street, stumbling, recovering, racing on with a lynch mob baying at her heels.

  A man—a Baldy—dashed out into the path of the crowd. He tore off his wig and waved it at them. Ralph Selfridge, his thin young face dripping with sweat, shrieked in wordless hatred and turned the tide after this new quarry. The woman ran on into the darkness.

  They caught the man. When a Baldy dies, there is a sudden gap in the ether, a dead emptiness that no telepath will willingly touch with his mind. But before that blankness snapped into being, the Baldy’s thought of agony blazed through Sequoia with stunning impact, and a thousand minds reeled for an instant before it.

  Kill the hairy men! shrieked Barbara Pell’s thoughts, ravenous and mad. This was what the furies were. When a woman’s mind lets go, it drops into abysses of sheer savagery that a man’s mind never plumbs. The woman from time immemorial has lived closer to the abyss than the male—has had to, for the defense of her brood. The primitive woman cannot afford scruples. Barbara Pell’s madness now was the red, running madness of primal force. And it was a fiery thing that ignited something in every mind it touched. Burkhalter felt little flames take hold at the edges of his thoughts and the whole fabric that was his identity shivered and drew back. But he felt in the ether other minds, mad paranoid minds reach out toward her and cast themselves ecstatically into the holocaust.

  Kill them, kill—kill! raved her mind.

  Everywhere? Burkhalter wondered, dizzy with the pull he felt from that vortex of exultant hate. All over the world, tonight? Have the paranoids risen everywhere, or only in Sequoia?

  And then he sensed suddenly the ultimate hatefulness of Barbara Pell. She answered the thought, and in the way she answered he recognized how fully evil the red-haired woman was. If she had lost herself utterly in this flaming intoxication of the mob he would still, he thought, have hated her, but he need not have despised her.

  She answered quite coolly, with a part of her mind detached from the ravening fury that took its fire from the howling mob and tossed it like a torch for the other paranoids to ignite their hatred from.

  She was an amazing and complex woman, Barbara Pell. She had a strange, inflammatory quality which no woman, perhaps, since Jeanne d’Arc had so fully exercised. But she did not give herself up wholly to the fire that had kindled within her at the thought and smell of blood. She was deliberately casting herself into that blood-bath, deliberately wallowing in the frenzy of her madness. And as she wallowed, she could still answer with a coolness more terrible than her ardor.

  No, only in Sequoia, said the mind that an instant before had been only a blind raving exhortation to murder. No human must live to tell about it, she said in thought-shapes that dripped cold venom more burning than the hot blood-lust in her broadcast thoughts. We hold Sequoia. We’ve taken over the airfields and the power station. We’re armed. Sequoia is isolated from the rest of the world. The pogrom’s broken loose here—only here. Like a cancer. It must be stopped here.

  How?

  How do you destroy any cancer? Venom bubbled in the thought.

  Radium Burkhalter thought., Radioactivity. The atomic bombs—

  Dusting off? he wondered.

  A burning coldness of affirmation answered him. No human must live to tell about it. Towns have been dusted off before—by other towns. Pinewood may get the blame this time—there’s been rivalry between it and Sequoia.

  But that’s impossible. If the Sequoia teleaudios have gone dead—

  We’re sending out faked-messages. Any copters coming in null be stopped. But we’ve got to finish if off fast. If one human escapes—Her thoughts dissolved into inhuman, inarticulate yammering, caught up and echoed avidly by a chorus of other minds.

  Burkhalter shut off the contact sharply. He was surprised, a little, to find that he had been moving toward the hospital all during the interchange, circling through the outskirts of Sequoia. Now he heard with his conscious mind the distant yelling that grew loud and faded again almost to silence, and then swelled once more. The mindless beast that ran the streets could be sensed tonight even by a nontelepath.

  He moved silently through the dark for awhile sick and shaken as much by his contact with a paranoid mind as by the threat of what had happened and what might still come.

  Jeanne d’Arc, he thought. She had it too, that power to inflame the mind. She, too, had heard—“voices?” Had she perhaps been an unwitting telepath born far before her time? But at least there had been sanity behind the power she exercised. With Barbara Pell—

  As her image came into his mind again her thought touched him, urgent, repellently cool and controlled in the midst of all this holocaust she had deliberately stirred up. Evidently something had happened to upset their plans, for—

  Burkhalter, she called voicelessly. Burkhalter, listen. We’ll co-operate with you.

  We hadn’t intended to, but—where is the Mute, Hobson?

  I don’t know.

  The cache of Eggs has been moved. We can’t find the bombs. It’ll take hours before another load of Eggs can be down here from the nearest town. It’s on the way. But every second we waste increases the danger of discovery. Find Hobson. He’s the only mind we can’t touch in Sequoia. We know no one else has hidden the bombs. Get Hobson to tell us where they are. Make him understand, Burkhalter. This isn’t a matter affecting only us. If word of this gets out, every telepath in the world is menaced. The cancer must be cut out before it spreads.

  Burkhalter felt murderous thought-currents moving toward him. Pie turned toward a dark house, drifted behind a bush, and waited there till the mob had poured past, their torches blazing. He felt sick and hopeless. What he had seen in the faces of the men was horrible. Had this hatred and fury existed for generations under the surface—this insane mob-violence that could burst out against Baldies with so little provocation?

  Common sense told him that the provocation had been sufficient. When a telepath killed a nontelepath, it was not duelling—it was murder. The dice were loaded. And for weeks now psychological pr
opaganda had been at work in Sequoia.

  The non-Baldies were not simply killing an alien race. They were out to destroy the personal devil. They were convinced by now that the Baldies were potential world-conquerors. As yet no one had suggested that the telepaths ate babies, but that was probably coming soon, Burkhalter thought bitterly.

  Preview. Decentralization was helping the Baldies, because it made a temporary communication-embargo possible. The synapses that connected Sequoia to the rest of the world were blocked; they could not remain blocked forever.

  He cut through a yard, hurdled a fence, and was among the pines. He felt an impulse to keep going, straight north, into the clean wilderness where this turmoil and fury could be left behind. But, instead, he angled south toward the distant hospital. Luckily he would not have to cross the river; the bridges would undoubtedly be guarded.

  There was a new sound, discordant and hysterical. The barking of dogs. Animals, as a rule, could not receive the telepathic thoughts of humans, but the storm of mental currents raging in Sequoia now had stepped up the frequency—or the power—to a far higher level. And the thoughts of thousands of telepaths, all over the world, were focused on the little village on the Pacific Slope.

  Hark, hark! The dogs do bark!

  The beggars are coming to town—

  But there’s another poem, he thought, trying to remember. Another one that fits even better. What is it—

  The hopes and fears of all the years—

  V.

  The mindless marking of the dogs was worst. It set the pitch of yapping, mad savagery that washed up around the hospital like the rising waves of a neap tide. And the patients were receptive too; wet packs and hydrotherapy, and, in a few cases, restraining jackets were necessary.

  Hobson stared through the oneway window at the village far below. “They can’t get in here.” he said.

  Heath, haggard and pale, but with a new light in his eyes, nodded at Burkhalter.