Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  THEN he saw that the dark figure lay on the ground, motionless. His throat dry, he knelt to feel for heart-beat. There was none.

  “Joanna,” he said. “It was just a tramp. Drunk. You killed him?”

  “He heard us. I had to. In all the world, you’re the only man who knows, the only man I can trust completely.”

  “But he was drunk! He wouldn’t have remembered. If he had, nobody would have believed him.”

  “I can take no chances,” she said. “I’m one woman against a whole world now. Forget him. His life was worthless.”

  What she read on Tim’s face made her catch her breath in a little sob. She moved a few steps away into the shadow.

  “I’m going now, Tim. But if you want to see me, I’m singing at the Met tonight.”

  That was all. She was gone. Tim shuddered. The night was not cold, but his blood was thin with age. And there was that horribly silent figure at his feet.

  He walked south. There was nothing he could do for the tramp now. Death had struck too suddenly, too incredibly. As it might strike anywhere, anytime—with Joanna as the Dark Angel.

  He knew now that she was inhuman as an angel, perhaps as amoral. The ties that had bound her to humanity were slipping. Tim was perhaps the last of those ties. When that was cut—

  There would be nothing to hold her back from fulfilling the least of her desires. She would not die for a thousand years or more. Her powers were superhuman. Had she achieved full maturity yet?

  If not, the future might hold sheer horror.

  Tim felt his sanity slipping. He stopped at the nearest bar and ordered whisky. He kept on drinking.

  He saw a world helpless, writhing in agony, beneath the rule of a woman who was more than autocrat. Lilith. Juno. A goddess—and, perhaps, mother of a race of gods and goddesses. For that was her destiny—to be mother to the new race that would crush and eradicate humanity.

  He was very drunk by eight o’clock. He went home by taxi, got a flat little automatic out of a bureau drawer, and went to the Met. He bought a ticket at an exorbitant sum from a scalper and went into the foyer, ready.

  His brain felt on fire.

  He recognized Joanna instantly when she appeared. She was Marguerite, and it seemed black, Satanic irony to him that she should represent the spirit of purity, resisting the lures of Faust and his evil genius. He waited.

  And then Tim Hathaway was ready. A gaunt, white-haired figure stood up from an orchestra seat and leveled an automatic at Marguerite’s white-gowned figure. He was seen instantly. Hands reached for him. Voices rose in excited clamor.

  He couldn’t miss. He squeezed the trigger. The bullet would go through her heart.

  It would go through—Joanna’s heart.

  Yes—it was easy. The tumult, the radiations from a thousand minds beating furiously through the theatre, had confused her.

  She had no chance to use her inhuman power. She wasn’t fully mature yet, and Tim could have killed her then.

  But he didn’t.

  At the last moment, he jerked up the automatic. The bullet tore through painted canvas. With a hoarse, sobbing cry, Tim plunged into the heart of the mob that was thronging around him, and lost himself in that human maelstrom.

  He slipped through an exit, unobserved. The mob was yelling so loudly that he didn’t hear his name called, again and again, by the white-gowned Marguerite on the stage.

  “Tim! Come back! You were right, darling! Tim, come back to me!”

  Tim Hathaway put his whiskey glass on the table. His bleared eyes stared into mine. He was less drunk than he had been when he began his story.

  “She did that?” he whispered. “After I—”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You were there?”

  “I was there.”

  The juke-box’s honky-tonk music blared out again. The grotesque shadows of dancing couples moved jerkily on the wall.

  Hathaway stood up.

  “Thanks,” he said, moistening his lips. “Thanks for coming after me . . . telling me . . .

  “I had a reason,” I said. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to her,” he said. “Back to my wife.”

  The booth was secluded No one could see us. I stood up too—and looked at Hathaway. I used the Power.

  He died instantly, without pain. It was merciful.

  I waited till his body had slumped down out of sight. I was grateful to him. Therefore—I killed him.

  But he had given me the answer for which I had been searching for many years. Even an inferior race can be useful. I put Hathaway out of my mind and went toward the door. I was going to Joanna, the future mother of my children, of the new race that would rule the earth.

  WE KILL PEOPLE

  It was quite a business, too . . . and it wasn’t anything you could prove murder. Murder, after all, is strictly a human affair; this was, on the contrary, an inhuman sort of business!

  Glowing in polychromatic light, the neat, cryptic sign atop the building said sedately;

  WE KILL PEOPLE

  In the foyer, the directory told Carmody that the main office was on the second floor. There was nothing else listed on the glass-fronted board. Of the bank of elevators, only one was running, and that one operated by a uniformed moron with sleepy eyes and jaws that monotonously masticated gum. Carmody stepped into the car.

  “Second,” he said.

  The operator didn’t answer. The door closed, the floor pressed upward and then decelerated, and the moron slid the door open, to shut it quietly as Carmody stepped out on the deep carpet of a big, well-furnished reception room. One wall was lined with doors, numbered consecutively one to ten. The wall opposite the elevator was blank except for a few framed pictures and a six-by-six screen that showed a blond young man seated at a desk.

  “Good morning,” the young man said, looking into his telescreen and meeting Carmody’s eyes. “May I help you?”

  “Yeah. Who do I see about—”

  “Oh,” the young man said soberly. “Our exterminating service?” Carmody didn’t say anything. “You are a client?”

  “I might be. It depends.”

  “Quite,” said the young man. “Our Mr. French will take care of you.” He did things with the buttons on his desk. “Yes, he’s free now. Would you mind stepping into Office Number One?” Carmody pointed silently, and the young man nodded. Carmody walked across to the door, pushed it open, stepped through and glanced around, his face impassive. He was in a small room, furnished simply but with good taste. A relaxer chair extended beside a broad, low table that held a minor-size telescreen. The makings for smokes and drinks were conveniently handy.

  On the screen was the head and shoulders of someone—our Mr. French, presumably. He had gray-streaked brown hair, a smooth, thinnish face, a sharp nose, and old-fashioned noncontact pince-nez. His clothes—what Carmody could see of them—were conservative. And his voice was dry and precise.

  “Will you sit down, please?”

  Carmody sat down. He lit a cigarette and looked speculatively at the face on the screen.

  “My name is French, Samuel French. You’ll notice the receptionist didn’t take your name. If you decide to make use of our service, we’ll need it, of course, but not just yet. First let me assure-you that nothing you may say to me will put you in danger from the law. An intention to commit homicide is not actionable. You are not an accomplice either before or after the fact. Once you understand that, you’ll be able to talk to me freely.”

  “Well—” Carmody said. “I’m a little—hesitant.”

  “We kill people,” French said. “That’s what brought you here, isn’t it? To get an exterminating job done—safely.”

  It wasn’t what had brought Carmody here, but he couldn’t tell French that. He had to submerge himself completely in the role he was playing. From now on, he had to forget that he was working for Blake and play the part of a customer. At least until he had found out a little about this organiza
tion.

  There had been nothing like it in the Amazonas. But the Amazonas Basin wasn’t civilized, even fifteen years after World War II had ended. In the five years of Carmody’s life there as a construction engineer he had seen little change, really ; a dam here, a railroad there, but nothing to touch the rain-forest and the big river and the seasonal floods. Then his discontinuance notice had come through, and, in white-hot fury, he had hopped the first clipper to New York, determined to punch the big shot in the nose.

  He hadn’t done that. There had been secretive visitors and interviews, a closed air cab that whipped northward, and the vision of an Aladdin’s palace that he recognized as Oakhaven, the country estate of Reuben Blake. Even in this day of fabulous fortunes and super-tycoons, Blake was a figure. He represented money and industries—and politics.

  Oakhaven was an architect’s dream. The new plastics and alloys had made such engineering feats possible—towering columns that sprang sky-high from fragile-seeming, translucent floors, concepts from Rackham and Sime transmuted into hard reality. Carmody, flanked by guards, was passed from chamber to chamber, till he reached the penthouse sanctum of Blake. A battalion could have deployed across the resilient, landscaped floor of that sanctum. And, seated at an oynx table with a chessboard inlaid into the top, a big drunken man was jittering nervously as he laid scraps of paper on the board’s squares.

  “Carmody,” Blake said, looking up. “I’m glad you got here. Have a drink.” He pushed glass and bottle forward. Carmody laid his hands flat on the table and glared.

  “I want to know why I’m here,” he said.

  Blake gave him a glance that, surprisingly, held only appeal.

  “Please. Please sit clown and let me explain. I . . . I had to do some things . . . you’ll understand. But first get this. I’ll pay you whatever you want. I’ll see you get your Brazilian job back, if you want it. I’m not trying to coerce you.”

  “Why was I fired?”

  “I needed you,” Blake said simply. “The construction company could get along without you, and I couldn’t. I can’t. Not very well. Now have a drink, sit down, and give me a chance to explain. Man, I’m sick!”

  That was true. Something had hit Blake hard and knocked the tough backbone out of him. Carmody hesitated, sat down, and looked at the chessboard. Each square had a bit of paper on it. The first one said 1¢. The one next to it was marked 2¢. The third, 4¢; the fourth, 8¢. The ultimate figure was astronomical.

  “Yeah,” Blake said, “you’ve heard the old gag. A rajah offered his favorite the choice between half his kingdom or—I forget what it was. The favorite said he just wanted a chessboard filled with money, doubled for each successive square. I don’t know if the rajah ever paid it. Who could?”

  “So what?”

  “I’ve got power. But I need an operative. I’m fighting something that’s plenty smart. An organization. They’ve got their ways of checking up, and if they ever suspected you were working for me—well! That’s why I couldn’t have gone about this more openly. I had to cover up. If you’ll do a job for me, you can have anything you want. Literally.”

  Carmody started to answer, and then paused, his mouth open. Blake gave him a twisted, slack-mouthed grin.

  “You’re getting it. I can give you anything you want—within human limits. I’m Reuben Blake. But I won’t be for long, unless I get help.”

  “I thought you had an organization.”

  “Sure I do. But this has to be strictly undercover. I picked you out from fifty case records. You’re smart, not too scrupulous, you know your way around. You’re qualified for the job.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “It’s a frame,” Blake said. “A smart frame. What it boils down to is this: my money or my life. And I’ve got to hand over one or the other!”

  “But—how?”

  French adjusted his pince-nez and said, rather wearily, “I should have a record made of this. Our clients are always skeptical at first. Unless they know us by reputation . . . you’ve never heard of us?”

  “I just got back from Brazil,” Carmody said. “Since then I’ve heard things, sure. That’s why I looked you up. But I can’t quite see how you can do it.”

  “Commit murder?”

  “Exactly. The law—”

  “We have a foolproof method,” French said. “It’s absolutely undetectable. Indistinguishable from natural death. The insurance companies are our biggest enemies, but we’ve a corps of attorneys who watch out for loopholes. We won’t go to jail for income tax evasion!”

  “You might go to jail for murder though. How about that?”

  “Hearsay isn’t evidence. You pay us to kill your enemy. He dies—of natural causes. We’ve had lawsuits, but we’ve never been convicted. Autopsies proved nothing except that no homicide was committed. You might call this insurance in reverse. Death insurance. If your enemy doesn’t die, we refund your money. But we’ve never had to make a refund yet—except under Clause A.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ll come to it later. First of all, let me apologize for pointing out that we must be assured you’re a bona fide client. We have no time for reporters, spies, or curiosity-hunters.”

  “I’m a prospective client,” Carmody qualified. “And I want a—job done, yes. Only I don’t want to hang for it.”

  French put the tips of bloodless fingers together. “We have been in business only four years. Our organization is based on a certain scientific . . . ah . . . discovery. Our patent, you might call it. And that, of course, is a secret; if the nature of this patent were known, we’d have nothing to sell.”

  “The modus operandi, you mean?”

  French nodded. “Yes. As I say . . . we’re expanding. We don’t advertise much; we don’t want to attract a low-class clientele. And we are incorporated; we have an exterminator’s license, and we do maintain a service, on the side, to get rid of bedbugs and termites. We don’t encourage that sort of thing, but we must do a bit of it for a front. However, our money is made through murder. Our clients pay well.”

  “How much?”

  “No fixed rate. I’ll explain that later, too.”

  “There’s got to be some minimum, though,” Carmody said.

  “Why? We went into the whole matter thoroughly, with expert psychologists and criminologists, before we incorporated. Experience proved our theories to be correct. What are the motives for murder?”

  Carmody ticked them off on his fingers. “Well, greed—jealousy—revenge—”

  “Passion or profit—two classifications, generally. We get few of the former. Such crimes are generally committed during a temporary emotional storm. Give the storm time to die down, put it on a practical level of hard cash, and the passion-murderer usually changes his mind. Moreover, very often he wants the pleasure of committing the crime himself. There have been cases, of course. But profit is the main motive. And most of our clients are drawn from the higher income brackets. It’s a convenient service we offer, after all. The lower brackets are pretty conservative; they have indoctrinated morals, and think it’s worse to pay for murder than to commit it personally.”

  “While the upper brackets are amoral, eh?”

  “It’s a case of relative values and proportions. Especially in this day and age. Power grows in direct ratio to money; if you have enough power, you approach godhead in your ability to juggle with lives. The gods were notorious for inundations and lightning-bolts. They could destroy mere humans without compunction. But the money barons don’t need our help to handle lower-bracket enemies—they’ve got their own financial weapons for that. It’s only when the gods were fighting among themselves that they called in aid. I could tell you cases that would surprise you—but, naturally, I shan’t. Now—shall we discuss business?”

  “All right,” Carmody said. “The guy’s name is Dale, Edward Dale.”

  “Address?”

  Carmody gave it.

  “Your name?”


  “Albert Carmody. Don’t you want to know my . . . uh . . . motive?”

  “That will be investigated. Most of our running expenses are aimed at covering the initial investigation. As soon as we assure ourselves that you have a sound motive for wanting Dale killed, we’ll take action. That’s to protect ourselves against spies, framed evidence, and so on.

  We’ll find out all about you, Mr. Carmody, don’t worry about that.”

  Dale was executive president of the Brazil-U, S.-Combine that had fired Carmody. The motive was O.K.; it would, Carmody knew, check with his own rather violent personality-pattern.

  “How much?”

  “We set no price. That’s up to you.”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “I see,” French said, making a note. “Now let me explain Clause A. In a business like this, we must set a high standard of honesty and professional ethics. We’re bonded with Dow-Smith—the regular honesty bond, by which we forfeit ninety-five percent of our assets if it-can be proved that we reneg on a contract. We have a standard of moral ethics, too.”

  “Moral?” Carmody said, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Certainly. We’ve reduced life-value to a basis of pure cash. Here’s how it works. Our investigators will give us an estimate of your total assets. Let’s say arbitrarily you’re worth a hundred thousand dollars. You’ll pay ten thousand to have Edward Dale killed. His life, then, is worth ten percent of your assets. You follow me?”

  “So far.”

  “If Dale’s life is worth, to him, ten percent of his assets, we’ll refund your check.”

  “I don’t get that.”

  “Dale will be notified that a client has asked for his death. Your name, of course, won’t figure in it. Nor will the amount you offered. The percentage will be mentioned. If Dale will pay ten percent of his total assets, we’ll drop the case and refund your money.”

  “But how do you know he’s got any money?”