Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Casuistry,” DuBrose had said.

  “Yes, maybe. Anyhow, it’s got to be done.”

  “Don’t think about it,” DuBrose advised. “That’s one responsibility you can’t change. You aren’t responsible for what happened in your past any more than Ridgeley was for his. Forget it.”

  “Yes, but you see, I know. The men who evolved our work for us and taught us didn’t know. They hadn’t seen what I’ve seen—the ultimate end. But when you know, and can’t do anything but go right on with a thing whose end you’ve seen already—when you see a war fought and men going mad and men dying and Ridgeley punished as he was punished for a thing that can be traced straight back to me—that responsibility’s hard to take, Ben.”

  He had struck his desk a hard blow, and had time for a brief flash of irrelevant pleasure in the knowledge that it must remain a solid desk now the counterequation was on. Not a surface that would ripple under the blow, or open a wet mouth to engulf his fist.

  DuBrose had said, “You need a furlough worse than I do. I’m going to see you get one.”

  Cameron went to a window port, opened it and watched the red gloom of the thundering Spaces outside. There was no escape. Every other nation was a potential enemy. From California to the Eastern Seaboard the nation had to remain a perfect war machine, ready to move into action at a second’s notice. In such a machine, men are important cogs. And they must be cast of the right alloy, shaped to the right measure with precision skill, polished and tooled until they were—

  Till they were men like Ridgeley.

  And Cameron dared not change that process. He dared not even try, for fear of succeeding. What could he say? “Disarm, Seek peace. Hammer your swords into ploughshares.”

  And suppose they did? The enemy would strike again—and succeed, against an unprepared nation.

  The thundering Spaces were before him, but all he saw was a race of circling thoughts made all but visible in the limbo of his mind.

  “Forget it,” he said aloud.

  But there must be an answer.

  “Forget it.”

  No problem is insoluble. There must be an answer.

  “I’ve tried to find it for weeks. There is no answer. Forget it.”

  There must be an answer. You’re responsible. You created Ridgeley.

  “Not I alone.”

  But you have the knowledge the others don’t have. You’re responsible.

  “Forget it.”

  Tell them? Don’t tell them? There must be an answer.

  “This has been going on for weeks. The war’s over—”

  This war. You’re responsible.

  “Forget it. I’m going home. I’m going to take a furlough. I’m going to take Nela. We’ll go up into the woods and relax.”

  There must be an answer.

  “So there’ll be future wars. I . . . I’m no idealist. What can I do? Ridgeley’s civilization—it’s not pleasant. It may end in extinction, or a race of semirobots. Or the race may achieve peace finally.”

  But you’re responsible. You can’t dodge that. You made Ridgeley. What can you do?

  “I . . . there must be an answer.”

  There must be an answer.

  “There must be an answer.”

  There must be an answer!

  THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER!

  THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER THERE MUST BE—

  DuBrose got into the pneumocar, adjusted the straps, and waited for the blankout. After it had passed, he settled back to fifteen minutes of idleness as the vehicle rushed toward Low Chicago.

  But his mind was active.

  The past month had changed Ben DuBrose. He looked older than his thirty years now, perhaps because his blue eyes had acquired a new look of competence and his mouth was firmer. Seth Pell’s death had left him as potential successor to the job of Director of Psychometrics, and a crown prince is usually conscious of his responsibilities. Always before, DuBrose had known that Cameron and Pell were, in effect, buffers. He was Number Three—not quite a third leg, but certainly a spare tire. Now, however, Pell was dead, and Cameron had shown that he was not infallible. Some day the big job would devolve upon DuBrose, and he would be ready for it. Far more ready than he had been a month ago.

  He had changed. His horizons had expanded. Eli Wood’s conversation had done a good deal in that direction, and so had the very concept of variable logic. He was older, abler, and even wiser.

  He could see, for example, why the war-time precautions had not been relaxed. The Falangists were defeated, but the location of Low Chicago and the other war-cities was still in the realm of military secrecy.

  Preparedness was necessary, of course. Yet DuBrose thought that there would not be another war.

  He thought of the stars. And he thought of the mutant Van Ness, and of Ridgeley.

  In Daniel Ridgeley’s time there had been no interplanetary travel. There had been only global conflict that stretched back for unknown years, back along a time-track of conquest and defeat and deadlock, wars of attrition and red triumph and ash-tray failure, back to the war between America and the Falangists, and even before that. It was one road, the road that led to Ridgeley and his tremendous, futile culture.

  One road out of many. No wonder, DuBrose pondered, that Ridgeley had chosen the wrong side when he came back through time. Had he thought that the Falangists were the ultimate victors?

  Or had he—not known?

  Say he had not known. Or, if he had, he might have felt that his technological gifts could swing the balance in the direction he chose.

  But there was another answer. Ridgeley’s movement through time and his subsequent actions had affected time itself. Had switched the pattern of the future into a new path. Variable futures—

  Again DuBrose remembered the mutant, and what Van Ness had revealed about that tremendous world that was now never to exist. For it was a world founded upon war, upon centuries and ages of continual battle, while the seesaw of victory swayed back and forth between the nations. War brings about technological progress, but only in certain specialized directions. Rocket-fuel, solar mirrors in super-atmospheric orbits, antigravity may be perfected for use, somehow, against the enemy, but not for use against the stars.

  In Eden, DuBrose thought, leaning back against the softly padded cushions—in Eden the trouble began. And even after that, Cain slew Abel. In every Paradise, there have been wars. But in the Polar cold, in the Sahara, in all inhospitable lands where men wrench a dangerous living from the hostile elements, there is comradeship and unity against the Enemy older than man, the universe in which he dwells.

  And now? The earth was at peace, for a little while. The weapons, the fuels, the technological miracles the world had perfected for destruction lay idle—and such things could not remain unused. Not while the stars hung in the skies, and the planets held their secrets—no longer unreachably far away. During the war no interplanetary travel had been attempted. The all-out effort had prevented such frivolous experiments.

  But now the tools lay ready. Nations geared to the highest pitch of efficiency could not remain idle, could not rust in a lethargy that would be psychologically unendurable. There would always be an Enemy.

  Not the Falangists. The Enemy stood at the gates of the sky, with the silent challenge it had given since man first raised his eyes from the ground. There would be new ships, DuBrose thought, a singing, joyous excitement in his blood—new ships like this pneumocar, but not burrowing through the dirt like moles. Ships to reach the planets.

  There was the Enemy. The hostile universe that had always made man band together in a common unity. There lay the future that would wipe out Ridgeley’s futile, tragic culture—because the future would slip into a new track now, one that led to solar—galactic!—expansion rather than fatal interglobal conflict.

  A thousand years might pass. Ten thousand. But even then, Ridgeley would never be born. The arid soil from which his culture sprang had been fe
rtilized, enriched by a nutrient that would bring forth greater glories than Ridgeley had ever imagined.

  For years man had had the bridge.

  But now he could use it. Now he could reach the stars.

  They were the Enemy. The hostile, distant, alluring, secret stars. And this, too, would be conquered. But that would be no sterile victory.

  DuBrose thought: The old order changeth, giving place to new.

  The pneumocar stopped. DuBrose stepped out into Low Chicago. “I must tell the chief,” he thought, as he moved toward a Way, and then—“Oh, well. He’s probably figured it out for himself already.”

  But the chief had not figured it out. He could not, now. For Robert Cameron had been fighting too long, and his battle had been waged with the resources of pure nerve. When tremendous tension is relaxed suddenly, the result is sometimes dangerous.

  The chief was very vulnerable now.

  Vulnerable to phantoms.

  —THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER THERE MUST—

  Stop it.

  He didn’t want to stop. Even in that circling confusion was refuge of a sort, from this unbearable responsibility which was in itself a grim kind of justice. The guilty must be punished. He himself must be punished. He, Cameron, a war criminal beside whom Ridgeley was as innocent as a tank or a plane. He must go on. Answer or no, he must go on. His duty was to the living, not the unborn future.

  Was it? Was it? He had not asked for this responsibility. But ignorance of the law excuses no man. Justice . . . Justice . . . If thine eye offend thee—

  If thine eye offend thee—

  Yes, there was one answer. Not a good one, but an answer. He had only to turn around to accept it.

  He decided to turn around.

  Automatically his hand reached out to close the window port. It did not shrink away from his touch. The metal remained firm and cool, as metal should. The counterequation still held him cradled in an unbroken shell of protection from all enemies. He knew that. No variable-truths could reach him here even if any enemies survived to hurl them at him.

  He was shut in here with the one inescapable enemy.

  He knew what was behind him. He had felt it a little while ago when he reached unsuspectingly for the door. There had been a strange, soft fluttering against his palm as he touched the knob. He had not looked down then. He had jerked his hand away and gone back to the desk. Now he would face it. Now he would look, and know, and accept the answer that would mean his own personal release, a laying down of the burden he had not asked for and could no longer carry.

  Now he would face the door.

  The doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him.

  THE END.

  WHAT HATH ME?

  The thousand tiny eyes raced past him, glittering with alien ecstasy, shining brighter, ever brighter as they fed. He felt the lifeblood being sucked out of him—deeper stabbed the gelid cold—louder roared the throbbing in his ears . . . then the voice came, “The heart of the Watcher, Crash the heart.”

  THE man running through the forest gloom breathed in hot, panting gusts, pain tearing at his chest. Underfoot the crawling, pale network of tree-trunks lay flat upon the ground, and more than once he tripped over a slippery bole and crashed down, but he was up again instantly.

  He had no breath to scream. He sobbed as he ran, his burning eyes trying to pierce the shadows. Whispers rustled down from above. When the leaf-ceiling parted, a blaze of terribly bright stars flamed in the jet sky. It was cold and dark, and the man knew that he was not on Earth.

  They were following him, even here.

  A squat yellow figure, huge-eyed, inhuman, loomed in his path—one of the swamp people of Southern Venus. The man swung a wild blow at the thing, and his fist found nothing. It had vanished. But beyond it rose a single-legged giant, a Martian, bellowing the great, gusty laughter of the Redland Tribes. The man dodged, stumbled, and smashed down heavily. He heard paddling footsteps and tried, with horrible intensity of purpose, to rise. He could not.

  The Martian crept toward him—but it was no longer a Martian. An Earthman, with the face of some obscene devil, came forward with a sidling, slow motion. Horns sprouted from the low forehead. The teeth were fangs. As the creature came nearer, it raised its hands—twisted, gnarled talons—and slid them about the man’s throat.

  Through the forest thundered the deep, booming clangor a brass gong. The sound shattered the phantom as a hammer shatters glass. Instantly the man was alone. Making hoarse, animal sounds in his throat, he staggered upright and lurched in the direction from which the sound came. But he was too weak. Presently he fell, and this time he did not rise. His arms moved a little and then were still. He slept, lines of tortured weariness twisting the haggard face.

  Very faintly, from infinite distances, he heard a voice . . . two voices. Inhuman. Alien—and yet with a warmth of vital urgency that stirred something deep within him.

  “He has passed our testing.”

  Then a stronger, more powerful voice—answering.

  “Others have passed our testing—but the Aesir slew them.”

  “There is no other way. In this man I sensed something—a little different. He can hate—he has hated.”

  “He will need more than hatred—” the deeper voice said. “Erven with us to aid him. And there is little time. Strip his memories from him now, so that he may not be weakened by them—”

  “May the gods fight with him.”

  “But he fights the gods. The only gods men know in these evil days—”

  The man awakened.

  Triphammers beat ringingly inside his skull. He opened his eyes and closed them quickly against the sullen red glow that beat down from above, he lay motionless, gathering his strength.

  What had happened?

  He didn’t know. The jolting impact of that realization struck him violently. He felt a brief panic of disorientation. Where—?

  I’m Derek Stuart, he thought. At least it isn’t complete amnesia. I know who I am. But not where I am,

  This time when he opened his eyes they stayed open. Overhead a broad-leafed tree arched. Through its branches he could see a dark, starry sky, the glowing, ringed disc of Saturn very far away, and a deeply scarlet glow.

  Not Earth, then. A Saturnian moon? No, Saturn didn’t eclipse most of the sky. Perhaps the asteroid belt.

  He moved his head a little, and saw the red moon.

  Aesir!

  The message rippled along his nerves into his brain. Stuart reacted instantly. His hard, strong body writhed, whipped over, and then he was in a half-crouch, one hand flashing to his belt while his eyes searched the empty silence of the forest around him. There was no sound, no movement.

  SWEAT stood on Stuart’s forehead, and he brushed it away impatiently. His deeply-tanned face set into harsh lines of curiously hopeless desperation. There was no blaster gun at his belt; that didn’t matter. Guns couldn’t help him now—on Asgard.

  The red moon had told him the answer. Only one world in the System had a red moon, and men didn’t go to that artificial asteroid willingly. They went, yes—but only to be doomed and damned. From Venus to Callisto spacemen spoke of Asgard in hushed voices—Asgard where the Aesir lived and ruled the worlds of Man.

  No spaceships left Asgard, except the sleek black cruisers manned by the priests of Aesir. No man had ever returned from Asgard.

  Stuart grinned mirthlessly. He’d learned a lesson, though he’d never profit by it now. Always before he’d been confident of his ability to outdrink anyone of his own weight and size. And certainly that slight, tired-eyed man at the Singing Star, in New Boston, should have passed out long before Stuart—under normal circumstances.

  So the circumstances hadn’t been quite normal. It was a frame. A beautiful, airtight frame, because he’d never come back to squawk. Nobody came back from Asgard.

  He shivered a little and looked up warily. There were legends, of course. The Watchers who patrolled the ast
eroid ceaselessly—robots, men said. They served the Aesir. As, in a way, all men served the Aesir.

  No sound. No movement. Only the sullen crimson light beating down ominously from that dark sky.

  Stuart took stock of his clothing. Regular leatheroid spaceman’s rig; they’d left him that, anyway. Whoever they were. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened after the fifth drink with the tired-eyed. man. There was a very faint recollection of running somewhere—seeing unpleasant things—and hearing two oddly unreal voices. But the memories slipped away and vanished as he tried to focus on them.

  The hell with it. He was an Asgard. And that meant—something rather more unpleasant than death, if the legends were to be believed. A very suitable climax to an unorthodox life, in this era when obedience and law enforcement were the rigid rule.

  Stuart picked up a heavy branch that might serve as a club. Then, shrugging, he turned westward, striking at random through the forest. No use waiting here till the Watchers came. At least—he could fight, as he had always fought as far back as he could remember.

  There wasn’t much room for fighters any more. Not under the Aesir rule. There were nations and kings and presidents, of course, but they were puppet figures, never daring to disobey any edicts that came from the mystery-shrouded asteroid hanging off the orbit of Mars, the tiny, artificial world that had ruled the System for a thousand years.

  The Aesir. The inhuman, cryptic beings who—if legend were true—once had been human. Stuart scowled, trying to remember.

  An—an entropic accelerator, that was it. A device, a method that speeded up evolution tremendously. That had been the start of the tyranny. A machine that could accelerate a man’s evolution by a million j’-ears—

  Some had used that method. Those were the ones who had become the Aesir, creatures so far advanced in the evolutionary scale that they were no longer remotely human. Much was lost in the mists of the past. But Stuart could recall that much—the knowledge that the Aesir had once been human, that they were human no longer, and that for a thousand years they had ruled the System, very terribly, from their forbidden asteroid that they named Asgard—home of the legendary Norse gods.