Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  She nodded, watching his involuntary glance around the empty blue sky, the warm October hills. A world for humans. But for humans alone . . .

  Back in the Brewster plastic asylum, the inmates had assembled.

  “There isn’t much time,” old Mr. Brewster said. “They’re on their way here now, to take you all back for euthanasia.”

  Sam Brewster laughed harshly.

  “We could show ’em a few tricks.”

  “No. You can’t fight the whole world. You could kill many of them, but it wouldn’t do any good. Bruce’s machine is the only hope for you all.” His voice broke a little. “It’s going to be a lonely world for me, children, after you’ve gone.”

  They looked at him uncomfortably, this strange, unrelated family of freak mutations, scarcely more than the children he had called them, but matured beyond their years by their strange rearing.

  “There are worlds beyond counting, as you know,” Bruce said precisely. “Infinite numbers—worlds where we might not be freaks at all. Somewhere among them there must be places where each of our mutations is a norm. I’ve set the machine to the aggregate pattern of us all and it’ll find our equivalents—something to suit one of us at least. And the others can go on looking. I can build the machine in duplicate on any world, anywhere, where I can live at all.” He smiled, and his strange light eyes glowed.

  It was curious, Kern thought, how frequently in mutations the eves were the giveaway. Kua, of course. And Sam Brewster with his terrible veiled glance protected by its secondary lid which drew back only in anger. And Bruce Hallam, whose strangeness was not visible but existed only in the amazing intricacies of his brain, looked upon the alien world with eyes that mirrored the mysteries behind them.

  Bruce knew machinery—call it machinery for lack of a more comprehensive word—with a knowledge that was beyond learning. He could produce miracles with any set of devices his fingers could contrive. He seemed to sense by sheer instinct the courses of infinite power, and harness them with the simplest ease, the simplest mechanics.

  There was a steel cubicle in the corner of the room with a round steel door which had taken Bruce a week to set up. Over it a panel burned with changing light, flickering through the spectrum and halting now and then upon clear red. When it was red, then the—the world—upon which the steel door opened was a world suitable for the little family of mutations to enter. The red light meant it could support human life, that it paralleled roughly the world they already knew, and that something in its essential pattern duplicated the pattern of at least one of the mutant group.

  Kern was dizzy when he thought of the sweep of universes past that door, world whirling upon world where no human life could dwell, worlds of gas and flame, worlds of ice and rock. And, one in a countless number, a world of sun and water like their own . . .

  IT WAS incredible. But so were the wings at his own back, so was Kua’s cyclopean eye, and Sam Brewster’s veiled gaze, and so was the brain in Bruce Hallam’s skull, which had built a bridge for them all.

  He glanced around the group. Sitting back against the wall, in shadow, Byrna, the last of the mutant family, lifted her gray gaze to his. Compassion touched him as always when he met her eyes.

  Byrna was physically the most abnormal of them all, in her sheer smallness. She came scarcely to Kern’s elbow when she was standing. She was proportioned perfectly in the scale of her size, delicate, fragile as something of glass. But she was not beautiful to look at. There was a wrongness about her features that made them pathetically ugly, and the sadness in her gray eyes seemed to mirror the sadness of all misfit things.

  Byrna’s voice had magic in it, and so did her brain. Wisdom came as simply to her as knowledge came to Bruce Hallam, but she had infinitely more warmth than he. Bruce, Kern sometimes thought, would dismember a human as dispassionately as he would cut wire in two if he needed the material for an experiment. Bruce looked the most normal of them all, but he would not have passed the questioning of the most superficial mental examination.

  Now his voice was impatient. “What are we waiting for? Everything’s ready.”

  “Yes, you must go quickly,” the old man said. “Look—the light’s coming toward red now, isn’t it?”

  The panel above the steel door was orange. As they watched it shifted and grew ruddier. Bruce went silently forward and laid his hand on the lever that opened the panel. When the light was pure red he pushed the steel bar down.

  In half-darkness beyond the opening a gust of. luminous atoms blew across a craggy horizon. Against it there was a suggestion of towers and arches and columns, and lights that might have been aircraft swung in steady orbits above.

  No one spoke. After a moment Bruce closed the door again, grimacing. The light above it hovered toward a reddish purple and then turned blue.

  “Not that world,” Bruce said. “We’ll try again.”

  In the shadow Byrna murmured:

  “It doesn’t matter—any world will be the same for us.” Her voice was pure music.

  “Listen! Do you hear planes?” the old man said. “It’s time, children. You must go.”

  There was silence. Every eye watched the lighted panel. Colors hovered there to and fro through the spectrum. A faint ruddiness began to glow again.

  “This time we’ll take it if it looks all right,” Bruce said, and laid his hand again upon the lever.

  The light turned red. Soundlessly the round door swung open.

  Sunlight came through, low green hills, and the clustered roofs of a town were visible a little distance away in a valley.

  Without a word or a backward glance Bruce stepped through the door. One by one the others moved after him, Kern last. Kern’s lips were pressed together and he did not glance behind him. He could have seen the hills of earth beyond the windows, and the blue October sky. He would not look at them. He shrugged his wings together and stooped to enter the gateway of the new world.

  Behind them the old man watched in silence, seeing the work of his lifetime ending before his eyes. The gulf between them was too broad for leaping. He was human and they were not. Across a vast distance, vaster than the gulf between worlds, he saw the family of the mutations step over their threshold and vanish forever.

  He closed the door after them. The red light faded above it. He turned toward his own door where the knocking of World Council’s police had already begun to summon him to his accounting.

  CHAPTER II

  His Own Kind

  ABOVE them, the sky was blue. The five aliens who were alien to all worlds alike stood together on a hilltop looking down.

  “It’s beautiful,” Kua said. “I’m glad we chose this one. But I wonder what the next one would have been like if we could have waited.”

  “It will be the same no matter where we go,” Byrna’s infinitely sweet voice murmured.

  “Look at the horizon,” Bruce said. “What is it?”

  They saw then the first thing that marked this world alien to earth. For the most part it might have been any hilly wooded land they knew from the old place; even the roofs of the village looked spuriously familiar. But the horizon was curiously misted, and before them, far off, rose—something—to an impossible height halfway up the zenith.

  “A mountain?” Kern asked doubtfully. “It’s too high, isn’t it?”

  “A glass mountain,” Kua said. “Yes, it is glass—or plastic? I can’t be sure.”

  She had uncovered her single eye and the shining pupil was contracted as she gazed over impossible distances at the equally impossible bulk of that thing on the horizon. It rose in a vast sweep of opalescent color, like a translucent thundercloud hanging over the whole land. Knowing it for a mountain, the mind felt vertiginous at the thought of such tremendous bulk towering overhead.

  “It looks clear,” Kua said. “All the way through. I can’t tell what’s beyond it. Just an enormous mountain made out of—of plastic? I wonder.”

  Kern was aware of a tugging at his
wing-surfaces, and glanced around in quick recognition of the strengthening breeze. He was the first to notice it.

  “It’s beginning to blow. And listen—do you hear?”

  It grew louder as they stood there, a shrill, strengthening whine in the air coming from the direction of the cloudlike mountain. A whine that grew so rapidly they had scarcely recognized it as noise before it was deafening all about them, and the wind was like a sudden hurricane.

  That passed in a gust, noise and wind alike, leaving them breathless and staring at one another in dismay.

  “Look, over there, quick!” Kua said, “Another one’s coming!”

  Far off, but moving toward them with appalling speed, came a monstrous spinning tower of—light? Smoke? They could not be sure.

  It whirled like a waterspout in a typhoon, vast, bending majestically and righting itself again, and the air spun with it, and the wild, shrill screaming began again.

  The vortex of brilliance passed them far to the left, catching them in its shrieking hurricane of riven air and then releasing them again into shaken silence. But there was another one on its way before they had caught their breath again, a whirling, bowing tower that spun screeching off toward the right. And after it another, and close behind that, a fourth.

  The noise and the violence of the wind stunned Kern so that he had no idea what was happening to the others on the hilltop. He was susceptible because of his wings. The hurricane caught him up and whirled him sideward down the slope—shrieking in his ears with a noise so great it was almost silence, beyond the range of sound.

  Stunned, he struggled for balance, leaning against the rushing wall of air as solid as a wall of stone. For a moment or two he kept the ground underfoot. Then his wings betrayed him and, in spite of himself, he felt the six-foot pinions blown wide and the muscles ached across his chest with the violence of the wind striking their spread surfaces.

  The horizon tilted familiarly as he swooped in a banking curve. The glass mountain for a moment hung overhead and he looked straight down at the wooded hills, seeing tiny blowing figures reeling across the slopes in the grip of the hurricane winds. Hanging here far above the treetops, he could see that the monsters of whirling light were coming thicker and faster across the hilltops, striding like giants, trailing vortices of wind and sound in their wake. For an instant he swung in the grip of the hurricane, watching the vast whirling spindles moving and bowing majestically across the face of the new earth.

  Then the vortex caught him again and he was spun blindly into the heart of the whirlwind, deafened with its terrible screaming uproar, wrenched this way and that upon aching wings, too dizzy for fear or thought. Time ceased. Half senseless, he was whirled to and fro upon the irresistible winds. He closed his eyes against flying dust, locked his hands over his ears to shut out the deafening shrill of the blast, and let the hurricane do with him as it would.

  Kern felt a hand on his arm and roused himself out of a half-stupor.

  He thought, I must be on the ground again, and made an instinctive effort to sit up. The motion threw him into a ludicrous spin and he opened his eyes wide to see the earth whirling far below him.

  He was coasting at terrific speed through the upper air upon a cold, screaming highway of wind, and moving easily beside him, riding on broad pinions like his own, a girl paralleled his flight.

  ONG pale hair streamed behind her away from her blue-eyed face, whipped to pinkness by the blast. She was calling something to him, but the words were snatched from her lips by the wind and he heard nothing except that shrill, continuous howling all around them. He could see that she held him by one arm, and with her free hand was pointing downward vehemently. He could not hear her words, and knew he probably could not understand them if he did, but the gesture’s meaning he could not mistake.

  Nodding, he shrugged his left wing high and arched his body for a long downward spiral toward the ground. The girl turned with him, and together they glided sidewise across the rushing air-currents, delicately tacking against the wind, picking their way by instinctive muscular reactions of the spread pinions, while below them the ground swayed and turned like a fluid sea.

  Kern glided downward on a wave of exultation like nothing he had ever experienced before in his life. He knew little about this world or about the girl beside him, but one thing stood out clearly—he was no longer alone. No longer the only winged being on an alien planet. And this long downward glide, like the motion of perfect dancers responding each to the other’s most delicate motion, was the most satisfying thing he had ever known.

  For the first time he realized one of the great secrets of a flying race—to fly alone is to know only half the joy of flying. When another winged being moves beside you on the airways, speed matching speed, wings beating as one, then at last you taste the full ecstasy of flight.

  Kern was breathless with joy and excitement when the ground swooped up at them and he banked against the rush of his glide. With suddenly fluttering wings, he reversed his position in the air and felt with both feet for the solid earth. He had to run a little to cut down his speed, and the girl ran beside him, breathless and laughing a bit as she ran.

  When they came to a halt and swung to face one another the long ashen hair blew forward in a cloud that had caught up with her at last, and she fought it, laughing, and brushed back the tangled mass with both hands, the pale wings the exact color of her hair folding back from her shoulders.

  He saw now that she wore a tight tunic of some very fine, supple leather, and long tight boots of the same material. The hilt of a jeweled knife stood up against her ribs from a jeweled belt.

  Around them the wind still blew cold and shrill, but the blast of it was slackening noticeably and warmth was creeping back little by little into the air. They stood on a wooded hill, under trees whose whipping branches added to the tumult of noise, and Kern could see a broad vista of the land before him, with no more of the vast bending giants of the hurricane moving across it. The storm must be over, he thought.

  The girl spoke. She had a pleasant contralto voice, and the language she spoke was slightly guttural and of course entirely strange. Kern saw the surprise and doubt on her face when she saw that he did not understand her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a pretty thing. I wish we could talk to each other.”

  She matched his smile, but the bewilderment deepened on her face.

  Kern thought, She can’t believe I don’t know her language. Could that mean there’s only one tongue spoken in this world? It’s wishful thinking—I want so much to believe it! Because that might mean the people here are all winged, and move around so easily that separate languages haven’t had a chance to evolve.

  His heart was beating faster, with an eagerness that he found a little ludicrous. He had never suspected even in his own dreams how much it would mean to him to belong at last to a race that could accept him as one of its own. Bruce Hallam had set his machine in the aggregate pattern of the whole mutant group, knowing as he did so how unlikely it was that more than one of them could hope for an equivalent world on a single planet. But Bruce’s skill being what it was, Kern told himself there was no reason to be surprised that the expected had happened.

  This world was his own. A winged world. He was luckiest and first of the group to find a place where he belonged. Exultation closed up his throat with the joy of being no longer alien.

  “Or maybe I’m building too much on one example,” he warned himself aloud. “Are we all winged in this world, girl? Bay something, quick. I want to learn your language! Answer me, girl—are you an alien too, or is this the world where I belong?”

  She laughed at him, recognizing the half-serious tone of his voice though the words meant nothing. And then her glance went across his shoulder, and a look of subtle withdrawal crossed her face. She said something in her guttural tongue and nodded toward the trees behind Kern.

  He turned. A third winged figure was walking toward them under the
still-roaring trees, wings whipped by the wind until the newcomer staggered now and then when the full blast caught him.

  KERN was aware at first only of profound thankfulness. Another winged person was almost the answer to his remaining doubt. Where there were two, surely there must be many.

  This was a man. Like the girl, he wore thin, tight leather and a dagger at his belt. His hair was red, and so were his silky wings, but his face was duskily tanned and Kern caught the flash of sidelong, light eyes as the man approached them. He saw, too, in another moment, that the newcomer was a hunchback. Between the shining reddish wings the man’s back was slightly crooked, so that he looked up at them with his head awry. He had a young face, with beautiful clear planes, beneath the darkness of his tan.

  “Gerd—” the girl called, and then hesitated. He flashed the light eyes at her, and Kern decided it was probably his name.

  The pale gaze moved back to Kern, and watched him searchingly as the hunchback fought the wind to the shelter of their tree. The man was wary, ready for distrust before he so much as saw Kern’s face. It was odd, in a way.

  They talked, the girl excitedly in her contralto voice, guttural words tumbling over each other. Gerd’s answers were brief, in an unexpectedly deep tone. Presently he unsheathed his dagger and with it gestured toward Kern and the valley below them.

  Kern bristled a little. There was no need for threats. If these people were still in a state of undevelopment where knives were their customary weapon, he was far beyond them in some ways at least. It was not a pleasant introduction to this world, where he felt himself already native, to have those first directions pointed out with a bare blade.

  The girl, seeing his scowl, laughed gently and came forward to take his arm. She gestured Gerd away with her other hand, and he smiled grimly and stood back. The girl fluttered her wings a little and made a swooping gesture of her hand to indicate flight. She pointed to the valley. Then she stepped away to the brow of the hill, unfolded her wings, tested the dying wind with them, and leaned forward with sublime confidence into the void.