Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “You’re one of the last to arrive. Seven of us were killed. One child. There are ten others still on their way. The rest—safe here.”

  “How safe?” Burkhalter asked. He drank the coffee Heath had provided.

  “As safe as anywhere. This place was built so irresponsible patients couldn’t get out. Those windows are unbreakable. It works both ways. The mob can’t get in. Not easily, anyhow. We’re fireproof, of course.”

  “What about the staff? The non-Baldies, I mean.”

  A gray-haired man. seated at a nearby desk stopped marking a chart to smile wryly at Burkhalter. The consul recognized him: Dr. Wayland chief psychiatrist.

  Wayland said, “The medical profession has worked with Baldies for a long time, Harry. Especially the psychologists. If any non-Baldy can understand the telepathic viewpoint, we do. We’re noncombatants.”

  “The hospital work has to go on,” Heath said. “Even in the face of this. We did something rather unprecedented, though. We read the minds of every non-Baldy within these walls. Three men on the staff had a preconceived dislike of Baldies, and sympathized with the lynchings. We asked them to leave. There’s no danger of Fifth Column work here now.”

  Hobson said slowly, “There was another man—Dr. Wilson. He went down to the village and tried to reason with the mob.”

  Heath said, “We got him back here. He’s having plasma pumped into him now.”

  Burkhalter set down his cup. “All right. Hobson, you can read my mind. How about it.”

  The Mute’s round face was impassive. “We had our plans, too. Sure, I moved the Eggs. The paranoids won’t find ’em now.”

  “More Eggs are being flown in. Sequoia’s going to be dusted off. You can’t stop that.”

  A buzzer rang; Dr. Wayland listened briefly to a transmitted voice, picked up a few charts and went out. Burkhalter jerked his thumb toward the door.

  “What about him? And the rest of the staff? They know, now.” Heath grimaced. “They know more than we wanted them to know. Until tonight, no nontelepath has even suspected the existence of the paranoid group. We can’t expect Wayland to keep his mouth shut about this. The paranoids are a menace to non-Baldies. The trouble is, the average man won’t differentiate between paranoids and Baldies. Are those people down there”—he glanced toward the window—“are they drawing the line?”

  “It’s a problem,” Hobson admitted. “Pure logic tells us that no non-Baldy must survive to talk about this. But is that the answer?”

  “I don’t see any other way,” Burkhalter said unhappily. He thought suddenly of Barbara Pell and the Mute gave him a sharp glance.

  “Plow do you feel about it Heath?”

  The priest-medic walked to the desk and shuffled case histories. “You’re the boss, Hobson. I don’t know. I’m thinking about my patients. Here’s Andy Pell. He’s got Alzheimer’s disease—early senile psychosis. He’s screwed up. Can’t remember things very well. A nice old guy. He spills food on his shirt, he talks my ear off, and he makes passes at the nurses. He’d be no loss to the world, I suppose. Why draw a line, then? If we’re going in for killing, there can’t be any exceptions. The non-Baldy staff here can’t survive either.”

  “That’s the way you feel?” Heath made a sharp, angry gesture. “No! It isn’t the way I feel! Mass murder would mean canceling the work of ninety years, since the first Baldy was born. It’d mean putting us on the same level as the paranoids? Baldies don’t kill.”

  “We kill paranoids.”

  “There’s a difference. Paranoids are on equal terms with us. And . . . oh, I don’t know, Hobson. The motive would be the same—to save our race. But somehow one doesn’t kill a non-Baldy.”

  “Even a lynch mob?”

  “They can’t help it,” Heath said quietly. “It’s probably casuistry to distinguish between paranoids and non-Baldies but there is a difference. It would mean a lot of difference to us. We’re not killers.”

  Burkhalter’s head drooped. The sense of unendurable fatigue was back again. He forced himself to meet Hobson’s calm gaze.

  “Do you know any other reason?” he asked.

  “No,” the Mute said. “I’m in communication, though. We’re trying to figure out a way.”

  Heath said, “Six more got here safely. One was killed. Three are still on their way.”

  “The mob hasn’t traced us to the hospital yet,” Hobson said. “Let’s see. The paranoids have infiltrated Sequoia in considerable strength, and they’re well armed. They’ve got the airfields and the power station. They’re sending out faked teleaudio messages so no suspicion will be aroused outside. They’re playing a waiting game; as soon as another cargo of Eggs gets here, the paranoids will beat it out of town and erase Sequoia. And us, of course.”

  “Can’t we kill the paranoids? You haven’t any compunctions about eliminating them, have you. Duke?”

  Heath shook his head and smiled; Hobson said, “That wouldn’t help. The problem would still exist. Incidentally, we could intercept the copter flying Eggs here, but that would just mean postponement. A hundred other copters would load Eggs and head for Sequoia; some of them would be bound to get through. Even fifty cargoes of bombs would be too dangerous. You know how the Eggs work.”

  Burkhalter knew, all right. One Egg would be quite sufficient to blast Sequoia entirely from the map.

  Heath said, “Justified murder doesn’t bother me. But killing non-Baldies—if I had any part in that, the mark of Cain wouldn’t be just a symbol. I’d have it on my forehead—or inside my head, rather. Where any Baldy could see it. If we could use propaganda on the mob—”

  Burkhalter shook his head. “There’s no time. And even if we did cool off the lynchers, that wouldn’t stop word of this from getting around. Have you listened in on the catch-phrases, Duke?”

  “The mob?”

  “Yeah. They’ve built up a nice personal devil by now. We never made any secret of our round robins, and somebody had a bright idea. We’re polygamists. Purely mental polygamists, but they’re shouting that down in the village now.”

  “Well,” Heath said, “I suppose they’re right. The norm is arbitrary, isn’t it—automatically set by the power-group? Baldies are variants from that norm.”

  “Norms change.”

  “Only in crises. It took the Blowup to bring about decentralization. Besides, what’s the true standard of values? What’s right for non-Baldies isn’t always right for telepaths.”

  “There’s a basic standard of morals—”

  “Semantics.” Heath shuffled his case histories again. “Somebody once said that insane asylums won’t find their true function till ninety percent of the world is insane. Then the sane group can just retire to the sanitariums.” He laughed harshly. “But you can’t even find a basic standard in psychoses. There’s a lot less schizophrenia since the Blowup; most d. p. cases come from cities. The more I work with psycho patients, the less I’m willing to accept any arbitrary standards as the real ones. This man—”he picked up a chart—“he’s got a fairly familiar delusion. He contends that when he dies, the world will end. Well—maybe, in this one particular case it’s true.”

  “You sound like a patient, yourself,” Burkhalter said succinctly.

  Hobson raised a hand. “Heath, I suggest you administer sedatives to the Baldies here. Including us. Don’t you feel the tension?”

  The three were silent for a moment, telepathetically listening. Presently Burkhalter was able to sort out individual chords in the discordant thought-melody that was focused on the hospital.

  “The patients,” he said. “Eh?”

  Heath scowled and touched a button. “Fernald? Issue sedatives—” He gave a quick prescription, clicked off the communicator, and rose. “Too many psychotic patients are sensitive,” he told Hobson. “We’re liable to have a panic on our hands. Did you catch that depressive thought—” He formed a quick mental image. “I’d better give that man a shot. And I’d better check up on the violen
t cases, too.” But he waited.

  Hobson remained motionless, staring out the window. After a time he nodded.

  “That’s the last one. We’re all here now, all of Us. Nobody’s left in Sequoia but paranoids and non-Baldies.”

  Burkhalter moved his shoulders uneasily. “Thought of an answer yet?”

  “Even if I had, I couldn’t tell you, you know. The paranoids could read your mind.”

  True enough. Burkhalter thought of Barbara Pell, somewhere in the village—perhaps barricaded in the power station, or at the airfield. Some confused, indefinable emotion moved within him. He caught Hobson’s bright glance.

  “There aren’t any volunteers among the Baldies,” the Mute said. “You didn’t ask to be involved in this crisis. Neither did I, really. But the moment a Baldy’s born, he automatically volunteers for dangerous duty, and stands ready for instant mobilization. It just happened that the crisis occurred in Sequoia.”

  “It would have happened somewhere. Sometime.”

  “Right. Being a Mute isn’t so easy, either. We’re shut out. We can never know a complete round robin. We can communicate fully only with other Mutes. We can never resign.” Not even to another Baldy could a Mute reveal the existence of the Helmet.

  Burkhalter said, “Our mutation wasn’t due for another thousand years, I guess. We jumped the gun.”

  “We didn’t. But we’re paying.

  The Eggs were the fruit of knowledge, in a way. If man hadn’t used atomic power as he did, the telepathic mutations would have had their full period of gestation. They’d never have appeared till the planet was ready for them. Not exactly ready, perhaps,” he qualified, “but we wouldn’t have had quite this mess on our hands.”

  “I blame the paranoids,” Burkhalter said. “And . . . in a way . . . myself.”

  “You’re not to blame.”

  The Baldy grimaced “I think I am, Hobson. Who precipitated this crisis?”

  “Selfridge—” Hobson was watching.

  “Barbara Pell,” Burkhalter said. “She killed Fred Selfridge. Ever since I came to Sequoia, she’s been riding me.”

  “So she killed Selfridge to annoy you? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It fitted in with the general paranoid plan, I suppose. But it was what she wanted, too. She couldn’t touch me when I was consul. But where’s the consulate now?”

  Hobson’s round face was very grave. A Baldy intern came in, offered sedatives and water, and the two silently swallowed the barbiturates. Hobson went to the window and watched the flaring of torches from the village. His voice was muffled.

  “They’re coming up,” he said. “Listen.”

  The distant shouting grew louder as they stood there in silence.

  Nearer and louder. Burkhalter moved forward to Hobson’s side. The town was a flaming riot of torches now, and a river of light poured up the curved road toward the hospital.

  “Can they get in?” someone asked in a hushed voice.

  Heath shrugged. “Sooner or later.”

  The intern said, with a touch of hysteria: “What can we do?”

  Hobson said, “They’re counting on the weight of numbers, of course. And they’ve got plenty of that. They aren’t armed, I suppose, except for daggers—but then they don’t need arms to do what they think they’re going to do.”

  There was a dead silence in the room for a moment. Then Heath said in a thin voice, “What they think—?”

  The Mute nodded toward the window. “Look.”

  There was a small rush toward the glass. Peering over one another’s shoulders, the men in the room stared down the slope of the road; seeing the vanguard of the mob so near already that the separate torches were clearly distinguishable, and the foremost of the distorted, shouting faces. Ugly, blind with hatred and the intention to kill.

  Hobson said in a detached voice, as if this imminent disaster were already in the past, “We’ve got the answer, you see—we know about this. But there’s another problem I can’t solve. Maybe it’s the most important one of all.” And he looked at the back of Burkhalter’s head. Burkhalter was watching the road. Now he leaned forward suddenly and said,

  “Look! There in the woods—what is it? Something moving—people? Listen—what is it?”

  No one paid any attention beyond the first two or three words he spoke, for all of them saw it now. It happened very swiftly. One moment the mob was pouring unchecked up the road, the next a wave of shadowy forms had moved purposefully out of the trees in compact, disciplined order. And above the hoarse shouting of the mob a cry went terribly up, a cry that chilled the blood.

  It was the shrill, falsetto that had once been the Rebel Yell. Two hundred years ago it echoed over the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. It moved westward with the conquered rebels and became the cowboy yell. It moved and spread with westerners after the Blow-Up, the tall, wild men who could not endure the regimentation of the towns. Now it was the Hedgehound yell.

  From the window the hospital watchers saw it all, enacted as if on a firelit stage below them.

  Out of the shadows the men in buckskin came. Firelight flashed on the long blades they carried, on the heads of the arrows they held against the bent bows. Their wild, shrill, terrible yell rose and fell, drowning out the undisciplined screams of the mob.

  The buckskin ranks closed in behind the mob, around it. The townsmen began to huddle together a little, until the long loosely ordered mob had become a roughly compact circle with the woodsmen surrounding them. There were cries of, “Kill ’em! Get ’em all!” from the townsmen, and the disorderly shouts rose raggedly through the undulations of the Hedgehound yell, but you could tell after the first two or three minutes who had the upper hand.

  Not that there was no fighting. The men at the front of the mob had to do something. They did—or tried to. It was little more than a scuffle as the buckskin forms closed in.

  “They’re only townsmen, you see,” Hobson said quietly, like a lecturer explaining some movie scene from old newsreel files. “Did you ever think before how completely the profession of the fighting man has died out since the Blow-Up? The only organized fighting men left in the world are out there, now.” He nodded toward the Hedgehound ranks, but nobody saw the motion. They were all watching with the incredulous eagerness of reprieved men as the Hedgehounds competently dealt with the mob which was so rapidly changing into a disorganized rabble now as the nameless, powerful, ugly spirit that had welded it into a mob died mysteriously away among them.

  All it took was superior force, superior confidence—the threat of weapons in more accustomed hands. For four generations these had been townsmen whose ancestors never knew what war meant. For four generations the Hedgehounds had lived only because they knew unremitting warfare, against the forest and mankind.

  Competently they went about rounding up the mob.

  “It doesn’t solve anything,” Burkhalter said at last, reluctantly, turning from the window. Then he ceased to speak, and sent his mind out in rapid thoughts so that the nontelepaths might not hear. Don’t we have to keep it all quiet? Do we still have to decide about—killing them all? We’ve saved our necks, sure—but what about the rest of the world?

  Hobson smiled a grim, thin smile that looked odd on his plump face. He spoke aloud, to everyone in the room.

  “Get ready,” he said. “We’re leaving the hospital. All of us. The non-Baldy staff, too.”

  Heath, sweating and haggard, caught his breath. “Wait a minute. I know you’re the boss, but—I’m not leaving my patients!”

  “We’re taking them, too,” Hobson said. Confidence was in his voice, but not in his eyes. He was iooking at Burkhalter. The last and most difficult problem was still to be met.

  The Cody’s thought touched Hobson’s mind. All ready.

  You’ve got enough Hedgehounds?

  Four tribes. They were all near the Fraser Run. The new consulate set-up had drawn ’em from the north. Curiosity.

  Report
to group.

  Scattered across the continent. Mutes listened. We’ve cleaned out Sequoia. No deaths. A good many got pretty well beaten up, but they can all travel. (A thought of wry amusement.) Your townspeople ain’t fighters.

  Ready for the march?

  Ready. They’re all rounded up. men, women and children, in the north valley. Umpire Vine’s in charge of that sector.

  Start the march. About the paranoids, any trouble there?

  No trouble. They haven’t figured it all out yet. They’re still in the town, sitting tight. We’ve got to move fast, though. If they try to get out of Sequoia, my men will kill. There was a brief pause. Then—The march has started.

  Good. Use the blindfolds when necessary.

  There. are no stars underground. the Cody’s thought said grimly.

  No non-Baldy must die. Remember, this is a point of honor. Our solution may not be the best one, but—

  None will die.

  We’re evacuating the hospital. Is Mattoon ready?

  Ready. Evacuate.

  Burkhalter rubbed a welt on his jaw. “What happened?” he asked thickly, staring around in the rustling darkness of the pines.

  A shadow moved among the trees. “Getting the patients ready for transportation—remember? You were slugged. That violent case—”

  “I remember.” Burkhalter felt sheepish. “I should have watched his mind closer. I couldn’t. He wasn’t thinking—” He shivered slightly. Then he sat up. “Where are we?”

  “Quite a few miles north of Sequoia.”

  “My head feels funny.” Burkhalter rearranged his wig. He rose, steadying himself against a tree, and blinked vaguely. After a moment he had reoriented. This must be Mount Nichols, the high peak that rose tall among the mountains guarding Sequoia. Very far away, beyond intervening lower summits, he could see a distant glow of light that was the village.

  But beneath him, three hundred feet down, a procession moved through a defile in the mountain wall. They emerged into the moonlight and went swiftly on and were lost in shadow.

  There were stretcher-bearers, and motionless, prone figures being carried along; there were men who walked arm in arm; there were tall men in buckskin shirts and fur caps, bows slung across their shoulders, and they were helping, too. The silent procession moved on into the wilderness.