Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  It was true enough. Some died, but others would survive, sometimes the unexpected ones. The Freak had not only survived, but had been cured, brought out of his shock stupor and into complete rationality. He had somehow sensed or felt the atomic blast at the island, and had realized that this world, at any rate, was not doomed to destruction by the chain reaction. There was another earth that had been so destroyed, but apparently through use of a different, unstable artificial element or isotope. The Freak was cured, and was proving extremely useful, though he was still bound to his tank.

  Vet Ortega was dead, a victim of the mutated coryza virus. And the world was in chaotic anarchy. Decentralization had happened weeks ago. GPC was now only one of a dozen groups that strove for power. And through the struggle weaved the forces of the underground, not yet ready to reintegrate, deftly turning the kaleidoscope whenever it showed a tendency to settle into the wrong pattern.

  Ilsa Carter was still alive and useful. And Joseph Breden was alive too—in the confusion, it hadn’t been impossible to arrange his escape from the Chancery of the bewildered GPC. He, too, was helping, finding some release for his talents, though not until peace came would they find their full scope. And Margaret was alive also, in a hideaway in the Rocky Mountains, nursing a baby girl, who seemed perfectly normal and nonmutant.

  The shock treatment had worked. Now, perhaps, it was the stage of pentothal narcosynthesis—the patient was undergoing catharsis.

  “I’m on the trail of that longevity thing,” Louis said. “We don’t have the facilities yet, but we’ll get them. However, the main thing for us now is to find protection against the coming biological attacks.”

  “Being able to see the other probability-worlds will help,” Van Buren repeated, and Louis, eying the blank wires of the transmitter, nodded. He was trying to visualize Van Buren’s face as he had seen it in the Freak’s mind. It was a face much like his own, but there were differences. Within the last month, rather oddly, Louis’ expression had changed so that the resemblance was very marked—to the few who could make the comparison. Yet a basic difference would always remain. For Louis it would always be a little too late. He had a chance now to catch up, and there might be more of a chance later, if the longevity genes could be maneuvered satisfactorily.

  The Freak called Louis telepathically. Both Van Buren and Louis slipped into the Freak’s mind, and saw, with his strange, intra-probability vision, an earth they had not glimpsed before, far beyond the scope of Van Buren’s mechanical scanner.

  “A nice world,” Louis said inadequately. “So will ours be, some day. That one took the right route at some crossroads—I wonder when?”

  “There are so many crossroads, Louis,” Van Buren said. “There are the major ones and the minor. I think our major one was in 1945—we’d probably never have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima if the Jap kamikaze fleet hadn’t destroyed Washington.”

  Louis said, “We might have. We’ve always been a sentimental nation—but we might have done it—just the same.”

  “I hope not. We needed destruction in our own country to be able to understand it. You can’t convey war to a nation through words or pictures. And we needed that bombing—or we’d never have respected atomic power enough to keep it under control. We had to make a decision and stick to it, not keep on compromising with politics and anachronistic social shibboleths. There were plenty of probability crossroads a hundred years ago, but I think the most important one was the Washington-bombing factor. There were earths where Washington wasn’t bombed!”

  “Yes,” Louis said, his thought escaping unfinished in the blaze of an incandescent memory that would always be blinding, no matter how often it returned to him. It was the earth once.

  Van Buren said, “We can tell, now, what happened to some of those earths, and what roads they took. Well, some of them haven’t turned out to be failures. For others—it’s too late. It was too late for them a hundred years ago.” Louis forced his mind away from the shining horror of a memory.

  “All our yesterdays—” he said.

  “. . . Have lighted fools the way to dusty death,” Van Buren finished the quotation. “No, Louis—not all. The ones that did—well, they stood at their crossroads and were given a fair choice. And they committed suicide. So forget about them—they’re not important now.”

  Louis said, “Man got used to being given another chance. But there’s no second chance with atomic power, is there? The failures—”

  “It’s already too late,” Van Buren repeated. “They don’t matter any more.”

  THE END.

  PROJECT

  There’s the old saying that, to train a dog, you must be smarter than the dog. A sound proposition, too. It would apply to other projects, too . . .

  Mar Vista General had been in existence as a research unit for eighty-four years. Technically it was classed as a service. Actually it was something else. Not since its metamorphosis from a hospital in the middle of the twentieth century had an outsider entered Mar Vista.

  For, if they entered, they had already been elected to the Council. And only the Council itself knew what that implied.

  Mary Gregson crushed out a cigarette and said, “We’ve got to postpone the visit! In fact—we’ve got to keep Mitchell out of here!” Samuel Ashworth, a thin, dark, undistinguished-looking young man, shook his head in reproof. “Quite impossible. There’s been too much anti-Council feeling built up already.

  It’s a concession that we don’t have to entertain an entire investigating committee.”

  “One man’s as bad as a committee,” Mary snapped. “You know as well as I do what will happen. Mitchell will talk, and—”

  “And?”

  “How can we defend ourselves?” Ashworth glanced around at the other members of the Council. There weren’t many present, though Mar Vista General housed thirty men and thirty women. Most of them were busy at their tasks. Ashworth said, “Well, we face extinction. We know that would probably ruin the present culture. Only Mar Vista General has stabilized it this far. Once the Central Power stations are activated, we’ll be able to defend ourselves and enforce our wishes. That we’re sure of.”

  “They’re not activated yet,” said Bronson sourly. He was a whitehaired surgical specialist whose pessimism seemed to increase yearly. “We’ve been putting this crisis off too long. It’s come to a showndown. Mitchell has said—let me in now, or else. If we let him in—”

  “Can’t we fake it?” somebody asked.

  Mary said, “Rebuild the whole General in a few hours?”

  Ashworth said mildly, “When Mitchell comes in the gates, there’ll he thousands of people waiting at their televisors to see him come out. There’s so much tension and ill-feeling against us that we don’t dare try any tricks. I still say—tell Mitchell the truth.”

  “You’re crazy,” Bronson growled. “We’d be lynched.”

  “We broke a law,” Ashworth admitted, “but it’s proved successful. It’s saved mankind.”

  “If you tell a blind man he was walking on the edge of a cliff, he might believe you and he might not. Especially if you asked him for a reward for rescuing him.”

  Ashworth smiled. “I’m not saying we can convince Mitchell. I am saying we can delay him. Work on the Central Power project is going forward steadily. A few hours may make all the difference. Once the stations are activated, we can do as we please.”

  Mary Gregson hesitated over another cigarette. “I’m beginning to swing over to your side. Sam.

  Mitchell has to report every fifteen minutes, by visor, to the world.”

  “A precaution. To make sure he’s safe. It shows what a spot we’re in, if the people suspect us that much.”

  Mary said, “Well, he’s going through the Lower College now. But that’s never been top secret. It won’t delay him long. He’ll be hammering at the door pretty soon. How long do we have?”

  “I don’t know,” Ashworth admitted. “It’s a gamble. We can’t send
out rush orders to finish the Power stations instantly. We’d tip our hand. When they’re activated, we’ll be notified—but till then, we’ve got to confuse and delay Mitchell. For my money, nothing would confuse and delay him more than the truth. Psychology’s my specialty, you know. I think I could hold the line.”

  “You know what it means?” Mary asked, and Ashworth met her eyes steadily.

  He nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know exactly what it means.”

  Mar Vista General was a gigantic, windowless, featureless white block set like an altar in the midst of acres of technical constructions. Hundreds of specialized buildings covering all branches of science made a sea of which Mar Vista General was the central island. The sea was navigable; it was the Lower College, open to the public, who could watch the technicians working out plans and processes that had come from the inviolate island of Mar Vista General.

  The white building had a small gateway of metal, on which was embossed WE SERVE. Under it was the anachronistic serpent-staff of Aesculapius, relic of the days when Mar Vista had actually been a hospital.

  The white building was isolated, but there were lines of communication. Underground pneumatic tubes ran to the Lower College. Televisors transmitted blueprints and plans. _But no outsider ever passed those metal gates, just as no Councilman or Council woman ever left Mar Vista General—until the fifteen-year tenure of office had expired. Even then—

  That matter was secret too. In fact, a great deal of history, for the last eighty-odd years, was secret. The text-tapes truthfully described World War II and the atomic blast—all accurate enough—but the years of unrest culminating in the Second American Revolution were subtly twisted so that students missed the true implications. The radioactive crater that had supplanted St. Louis, former rail and shipping center, remained a monument to the ambitions of the Revolutionists, led by Simon Vankirk, the sociology teacher turned rahhle-rouser, and the present centralized, autocratic world government was a monument to the defeat of Vankirk’s armies. Now the Global Unit held power, a developed coalition of the governments of the former great powers.

  And time had stepped up its pace. Progress moves in direct ratio to technological advances. Unless, of course, those advances come so rapidly that humanity lags behind, and then there is the danger of war and chaos. But the Second Revolution had been stopped before Vankirk crossed the Mississippi on his way eastward, and thereafter the Global Unit had appeared—and enforced its laws very firmly.

  Five hundred years of progress had been compressed into eight decades. The present world would have seemed quite strange to a visitor from 1950. The background and history of the new set-up could have been made clear to such an improbable visitor, by the text tapes, with their detailed charts and graphs, but—

  The text tapes would have lied.

  Senator Rufus Mitchell might have been a butcher or a politician. He belonged in an old-fashioned cartoon, with his jowled red face, his two-and-a-half chins, his swag belly, and the enormous cigar jutting from firm, skeptical lips at a sharp angle. Which merely proves that types continue indefinitely; Cruikshank had drawn Mitchells, but not as politicians; today, Rufus Mitchell was a hard-headed, clever, iconoclastic man who could smell a bomb’s proximity fuse before it came too close. He hoped so, anyway. That was why he had managed to create the Commission, despite opposition of the laissez-faire bloc in the Global Unit.

  “Open covenants openly arrived at,” he shouted, hoping to confuse his opponent both by decibels and semantic ambiguity. But sleek, smiling Senator Quinn wasn’t having any. He was an old man, with silvery white hair and a buttery voice, and now he drank his surrogate highball and lay back, watching figures move in a slow dance on the ceiling screen.

  “Do you know what you’re talking about, Rufus?” he murmured.

  Mitchell said, “The Global Unit doesn’t work behind closed doors. Why should Mar Vista General?”

  “Because all the knowledge would leak out if the doors were opened,” Quinn said. They were in a lounge, resting, after their selective tour of the Lower College, and Mitchell was wishing he’d had another partner instead of Quinn. The man was ready to give up now!

  “I’m satisfied,” Quinn remarked, after a pause. “I don’t know what the devil you want, anyhow.” Mitchell lowered his voice. “You know as well as I do that Mar Vista’s advice is a little more than that. We haven’t turned down a recommendation from this place since the Global Unit started.”

  “Well? The world’s running along nicely, isn’t it?”

  Mitchell stabbed his cigar at his fellow solon. “Who runs the planet? Global Unit—or Mar Vista?”

  Quinn said, “Suppose Mar Vista runs it. Would you be willing to immure yourself in the place, under totally abnormal conditions, just so you could have the pleasure of knowing you were one of the bosses? The Franciscan friars had a smart idea. They had to give away all their worldly possessions and take a vow of poverty before they could become friars. Nobody envied them. Nobody envies the Council.”

  “How do we know what goes on in Mar Vista?”

  “At worst it’s an Arabian Nights’ heaven. Or at best.”

  “Listen,” Mitchell said, changing his approach. “I don’t care what their pleasures are. I want to know what they’re up to. They’re running the world. Well—it’s time they showed their hand. I still don’t see any reason for the Central Power project.”

  “Well, don’t look at me. I’m no electrophysicist. I gather that we’ll be able to tune in on a power supply from anywhere. And unlimited power.”

  “Unlimited,” Mitchell nodded. “But why? It’s dangerous. Atomic power has been rigidly controlled for eighty years. That’s why the planet’s still here. If anybody can tune in—anybody can play with neutrons. You know what that might mean.”

  Quinn wearily ticked off points on his fingers. “We have the enforced census. We have enforced psychological tests. We have a spy system and we have revoked the habeas corpus. Not to mention a lot of similar safeguards. The Global Unit has absolute power, and can control the life of everybody on earth, practically speaking.”

  “But Mar Vista General has absolute power over the Global Unit,” Mitchell said triumphantly. “We’ve seen the Lower College, and there’s nothing to see except a lot of technicians. And gadgets.”

  “Oh, blah.”

  “Sit back and drink your surrogate,” Mitchell said. “When the Central Power stations are activated, anyone can tune it. But sit back and swig away. There may be another atomic war. There may be more mutants. This time they may grow up.”

  “They can’t,” Quinn said. “The smart ones are nonviable.”

  “Oh, blah,” Mitchell plagiarized.

  Quinn said, rather wearily, “You know very well that the only truly dangerous mutations are so alien they show their stigmata before maturation. Once they turn blue or sprout extra hands or tentatively try to fly, they can be spotted and destroyed. But there aren’t any more mutants, and you’re a scaremonger. I can’t stop you from going to Mar Vista if you want. Only I don’t see the reason. You’ve a lifetime tenure of office as senior senator.”

  Mitchell said, “I represent the people.” He hesitated, and then, oddly, laughed. “I know. It’s a cliché. But I do feel a responsibility.”

  “To get your picture on the newstapes.”

  “I’ve done research on this subject. I’ve found some hints and clues.”

  “The status quo is safe,” Quinn said.

  “Is it? Well, here’s our guide. Do you want to wait here, or—”

  “I’ll wait here,” Quinn said, settling back comfortably with a fresh drink.

  Here and there, at selected spots on the earth’s surface, men worked at intricate tasks. The Central Power stations were metal hemispheres, smooth as glass outside, complicated as a maze within. The setting-up was in its final phase. The actual construction had not taken long, for advances in engineering had been fantastically rapid. In 1950 t
he job would have lasted for ten years. Now it took three months, from inception to near-completion. Delicate balance-checks and precision integration were the final factors, and that was going on now.

  The Global Unit had authorized the installation of Central Power. But the suggestion, with detailed plans, had come from Mar Vista General.

  All over the world the stations were spotted. A changed world. Different, far different, from the world of eighty years before.

  Physically it had altered.

  And, mentally, the outlook had altered, too.

  Senator Quinn underestimated Mitchell. He saw his colleague as a big, bumbling, interfering man, and failed to realize that Mitchell inevitably got what he wanted, even when the results were only satisfaction or information. Mitchell, for all his carpet-bagging exterior, was extremely intelligent—and practical. The combination of those two abilities made him, perhaps, the one best fitted to investigate Mar Vista General.

  Councilwoman Mary Gregson, however, did not underestimate the visitor. She had already seen Mitchell’s psych and IQ charts, in the private files, and could not help feeling dubious about Ashworth’s plan. She watched him now, a thin, dark, mild young man with a shy smile and intent eyes, as he stood beside her facing the transparent inner door.

  He glanced at her. “Worried?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t be helped. We need you to explain the biogenetic angles to the senator. Here he comes.” They turned toward the widening strip of daylight as the great metal gates slowly opened. Framed between them was Mitchell’s burly figure, stooping forward a little as though he peered into the darkness that faced him.

  Now the darkness lightened. Mitchell silently came forward. As the gates closed behind him, the inner door opened, and Ashworth sighed and touched the woman’s hand.

  “Now.”

  She said, in a quick whisper, “We’ll be notified as soon as the stations are activated. Then—”

  “Hello, senator,” Ashworth said loudly, giving a half-salute. “Come in. This is Councilwoman Mary Gregson. I’m Samuel Ashworth.”