Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

Hale was remembering that conversation now as he told the Logician what had just happened.

  “Is that why you came up here?” he demanded at the end of his story. “Did you know?”

  “Hale, I just can’t tell you. I mean that. I can’t.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “That hasn’t got anything to do with it. Don’t forget every talent’s got its drawbacks, too. It’s not so much prescience I’ve got as it is infallibility—and that’s fallible by definition. I told you once it was more horse sense than anything else.” Crowell seemed mildly irritated. “I’m not God. Don’t start thinking like the Keep men—wanting to shift every responsibility. That’s one thing wrong with Venus today. The leave-it-to-George fallacy. George isn’t God either. And God Himself can’t change the future—and still know what’s going to happen. Minute He meddles, you see, he introduces a new factor into the equation, and it’s a random factor.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, I’ve interfered a time or two,” the Logician said. “Even killed a man once, because I figured nothing worse could happen than letting that particular fella live. Turned out I was. right, too—in that case. Only I don’t interfere any more than I can help. When I do, I step in as the random factor, and, since I’m in it, it isn’t easy to look at the whole equation from outside. I can’t predict my reactions—see?”

  “More or less,” Hale said thoughtfully. “Yet you say you’ve interfered when you had to.”

  “Only then. And afterwards I’ve tried to make things come out even again. The way it is, there’s a balance. If I step into the right-hand pan, the balance shifts in that direction. So afterwards I try to give the other pan a little push—so x will equal x again. If I add y to one side, I try to subtract y from the other. I admit it don’t look too sensible from where you’re sitting, but it sure does from my perch, son. Like I say, I’m not God. Not the God the Keeps want today, certainly. They expect God to come down and push ’em around in a wheel chair.”

  He paused, sighed, glanced up at the impervium dome where a streak of blue sky let sunlight glow briefly through the Colony. “What did Reed want?” he asked. “He’s got some ideas, I take it. What are they?”

  “I don’t see why I need to tell you.” Hale said irritably. “You probably know more about it than I do.”

  The Logician struck his hoe handle a light blow with his closed fist. “No, son, not strictly speaking. There’s the best reason in the world why I can’t tell you what I know. Some day maybe I’ll take time to explain it. Right now I’d be mighty glad to hear what young Reed’s up to.”

  “We looked over the maps. His patent covers a three-hundred-mile area with about a hundred miles of seacoast. I asked for that originally because one of the Free Companion Forts stood on the shore there. It’s a good base. I remember it was chosen for its harbor. A chain of islands shields it and curves out westward in a long sweep.”

  In spite of himself, Hale’s voice quickened. “There won’t be an impervium dome over this colony. You’ve got to adapt to colonize. And you can’t have a balanced ecology with one atmosphere outside and another inside. Still, we’ll need protection from the landside life. I think water’s our answer to that. The islands make natural stepping stones. We’ll bring them under control one after another and move along to the next.”

  “Uh-hmm.” The Logician pinched his long nose thoughtfully. “Now what’s going to stop the Families from the same tricks they used to kill this Colony?”

  Hale coughed. “That remains to be seen,” he said.

  Even nightfall had its own strange, exotic quality to a Keep-bred man. Sam clutched the chair arms in the tossing plane that carried him back to Delaware Keep and looked out fascinated at the deep darkness gathering over the sea. Venus air currents are treacherous; few planes attempt flight unless really necessary, and even those flights are short ones. Sam’s view of the scene below was intermittent and jolted. But he could see, far off in the gathering darkness, the great submerged glow that was the Keep, spreading its stain of light upon the water. And he was aware of an unaccustomed emotional pull.

  That vast spreading glow was home—safety, companionship, lights and music and laughter. The Colony behind him was sterile by contrast, the dwelling place of danger and defeat.

  It wouldn’t do. He would have to think of something very good to counteract this emotion which he himself was heir to, and all the rest of the Keep’s numbered thousands. A pioneer needs bad home conditions and the promise of a Grail or a City of Gold beyond the wilderness to draw him on. Push plus pull, Sam thought. But in this case the bad conditions were all on the wrong side of the scale, from the promoter’s viewpoint. Something would have to be done.

  Success would require korium, enthusiastic recruits and Harker acquiescence if not actual Harker hacking. So far he had nothing. And he would have to work fast. At any moment, once he landed, private police might come up beside him as they had come before, and Sam Harker would drop out of sight, quite possibly forever. He had little money, no prestige, no friends except one old man dying of drugs and senility, and even that friendship had to be bought.

  Sam laughed softly to himself. He felt wonderful. He felt exultantly confident. He was perfectly sure of success.

  “The first thing I’ve got to do,” he said to the Slider, “is get myself before the public. Fast. I don’t care how, but I’ve got to go on record in opposition to the Families so fast they won’t have time to snatch me. Afterward I’ll take care to make it plain if I do vanish they’ll be responsible.”

  The Slider wallowed and sniffled. The small room was stifling, but it was comparatively safe. So long as Sam stayed here in these underworld haunts he still knew well, he was unlikely to vanish into the Harker stronghold. Once he stepped out, the tale might be quite different.

  “Give me another drink,” was all the Slider said in answer.

  “I’ve got two thousand credits,” Sam told him, pushing the bottle closer. “Hale can raise maybe another two thousand. We’ve got to make a fast start on that. You tell me where I can spend it to stretch it farthest. I’ll want newscast time and a good semantics man to dope out our opening speeches. Once we’re started, enough money will come in to keep us going. And this time I’m not going to pour it all down a rat hole. It’s going to go where it’ll do the most good.”

  “Where?” The Slider cocked an inquiring, hairless brow above his bottle.

  “Into a fleet,” Sam said grimly. “This time the new colony will be an island-chain. We’re going to stay mobile. We’re going to fight the sea beasts for the islands, and fortify them and settle in. We’ll need good fast boats, well armored, with good weapons. That’s where the money’s going.”

  The Slider sucked at his bottle and said nothing.

  Sam didn’t wait for his propaganda machine to start paying off before he began placing orders to outfit his boats. He cut corners wherever he could, but most of his four thousand credits went under assumed names into secret orders for the materials Hale had figured as basic necessities.

  Meanwhile the propaganda got under way. There wasn’t time or money for a subtle approach such as Sam would have preferred. A long campaign of cunningly devised songs stressing the glamour of land-side life, of the open skies, the stars, the succession of night and day—that would have helped. A successful play, a new book with the right emphasis would have made it much easier. But there wasn’t time.

  The televisors carried paid-for commercials. Robin Hale announced a new colony under a separate charter. And boldly, openly, because it could not be helped or hidden, Joel Reed’s connection with the scheme was made public.

  Joel on the screen spoke frankly of his father’s disgrace. He disclaimed all knowledge of his father. “I never knew him,” he said, putting all of his considerable persuasive powers behind the words. “I suppose a great many of you will discount everything I say, because of my name. I haven’t tried to hide it. I believe in this colony and I can’t a
fford to have it fail. I think most of you will understand that. Maybe it’ll help prove that I mean what I say. I wouldn’t dare come before you, using my right name with all the disgrace you know belongs to it, if I didn’t know the colony must succeed. No one named Reed would dare to try the same thing twice. I’m not. If the colony fails it’ll mean my own ruin and I know it. It won’t fail.” There was quiet conviction in his voice, and something of his enthusiasm carried over to the listeners. He was telling the truth this time. Some of them believed him. Enough of them believed him, for his purposes just now.

  The same urges and stresses which had made the first colonization plans successful were still present. Subtly men sensed the losses Keep life imposed upon them. They yearned obscurely for lost heritages, and there were enough of the yearners to give Sam and Hale the finances they needed to meet immediate demands. It wasn’t very much, but it was enough. The rest sat back and waited to be convinced.

  Sam moved to convince them.

  The Harkers, of course, were not idle. After the first startled hour, they moved too, quite rapidly. But here they operated at a slight disadvantage. They couldn’t openly oppose the colonization scheme. Remember, they were supposedly in favor of colonization. They could not afford to have a colony actually fail. So all they could do was start counterpropaganda.

  Word went out of a mutated virulent plague that had begun to develop landside. A robot plane crashed spectacularly on the news screens, tom apart by the violent wind tides of the upper air. It was dangerous up there on the land, the rumors increasingly declared.

  Too dangerous, too uncertain. . .

  And then Sam made his next bold stroke. Almost openly he attacked the Harkers. Almost specifically he accused them of responsibility in the failure of the present Land Colony. “There are powerful forces at work,” Sam declared, “to prevent the colonization of the land. You can see why. Anyone could see. Put yourself in the place of a powerful man, a powerful group of men. If you were governing a Keep, wouldn’t you be perfectly contented with things as they are? Would you want any changes made?. Wouldn’t you do all you could to discredit those who offer opportunities land-side to men like us?” Sam leaned to the screen, fixing his audience with a steady, significant gaze. “Wouldn’t you try to silence anyone who fought to give the common man a chance?” he demanded, and then held his breath, waiting to be cut off the air.

  But nothing happened. Perhaps the technicians were too stunned. Perhaps even the Harkers dared not challenge public opinion that far. Sam went on while he could. “I hope to continue working toward the new colony,” he said. “I’m working for myself, yes—but for all of you others, too, who are not rulers in the Keeps. As long as I’m alive I’ll keep on working. If I don’t come on the air again tomorrow to report our new plans—well, you people of the Keeps will know why.”

  There was an extraordinary, soft, rumbling murmur in the streets of Delaware Keep as Sam signed off, leaving those words still humming in the air. For the first time in many decades, crowds had begun to gather again beneath the big public news screens, and for the first time in human history on Venus, the murmur of the crowd-voice had lifted from Keep Ways. It was in its way an awe-inspiring sound—the faintest murmur, murmur of surprise rather than menace, but a murmur that could not be ignored.

  The Harkers heard it. And bided their time. They had so much time—they could afford to wait.

  So Sam had his temporary insurance against the private police. He made rapid steps toward consolidating his position. He had to find some hold over the Harkers stronger than this gossamer lever based on the unpredictable masses.

  Sari was his only key. Sari Walton, half Harker by blood—and certainly abnormal. Why? Sam tried hard to find out. There was little material on file about the Immortals—only vital statistics and names and brief histories. It was true that the Immortals, by their very longevity, were spared many of the stresses that drive a short-termer into neuroses. But that very longevity must in its way impose other stresses incomprehensible to men of normal life.

  Sam searched and pondered, pondered and searched. He traced many ideas up blind alleys and abandoned them. Eventually he came across one small factor that looked promising. At best it was not conclusive—only indicative. But it pointed an interesting path.

  The reproductive cycle of the Immortals was a curious one. They had successive periods of fertility, usually at intervals of fifty to seventy-five years and covering only a brief time. The child of two Immortals had never yet failed to show all the traits of long life. But the children were not strong. Their mortality rate was high, and most of them had to be reared almost under glass.

  Sam was interested to discover that at the time of Sari Walton’s birth a son had been born to the Harker family too—a son named Blaze. These two children were the only surviving offspring on record for that particular period in Delaware Keep.

  And Blaze Harker had apparently vanished.

  With increasing interest Sam traced through the records, searching for some explanation of what had happened to the man. No death date appeared. The usual records of education and various duties and enterprises for Blaze went steadily along up to a date seventy years past. And then Blaze vanished.

  Sam filed the information away with a sense of profound excitement.

  “This one ought to do,” the Free Companion said, stepping back from the view-glass. “Look.”

  Sam crossed the pitching deck unsteadily and bent to the eyepiece. He felt half-drunk with this unaccustomed atmosphere, the motion of the boat, the wet wind in his face. There was so much about open air that took getting used to—even the feel of the breeze was faintly alarming, for in the Keeps a wind meant entirely different things from the random winds of landside.

  The milk-white water heaved around them under the milky sky. On shore the great festooned hulk of a ruined fort seemed to stagger under the weight of jungle rioting over it. There was a constant murmur from the jungle, punctuated by a pattern of screams, flutings, hisses, roars from invisible beasts. The sea lipped noisily at the boat’s sides. The wind made meaningless noises in Sam’s ears. Landside was strangely confusing to the Keep-bred.

  He put his forehead in the head rest and looked down.

  Another world sprang into being, a world of wavering light and wavering weed, threaded by the wavering shapes of underwater things, fish with shivering fins, siphonophores trailing their frostlike streamers, jellyfish throbbing to a rhythm of their own. Anemones clenched into brilliantly striped fists with a dreamlike slowness. Great fans of dazzingly colored sponge swayed to the random currents.

  And buried in this bright, wavering world, visible only in rough outlines beneath the weeds, lay the hulk of a sunken ship.

  It was the third they had found which Hale seemed to think worth salvaging. “And they’re in better shape than you think,” he assured Sam. “Those alloys are tough. I’ve seen worse wrecks than this rehabilitated in the old days.” His voice trailed off and he looked out over the empty water, remembering.

  You could almost see it peopled by the fleets of the Free Companions as Hale must be seeing it, very clearly over the generations already gone. The Keeps had been sacrosanct then as now, for only under their impervium domes did civilization survive. But the token wars had raged between them, on the surface of the gray seas, between fleets of hired mercenaries. The Keep that backed the loser paid its korium ransom, sometimes only after token depth bombs had been dropped to remind the undersea people of their vulnerability.

  It all passed. The jungle ate up the great forts and the sea giants sank at their moorings. But they did not crumble. That much was apparent now. The weeds grew over and through them and the lichens nibbled at their fabric, but the strong basic structure remained.

  Hale and Sam had searched the coasts of Venus where the old forts stood. Hale had known the forts when they were alive. He knew the harbors and could still quote the battle strength of the Companies. The first two hulks they ha
d salvaged were already nearly seaworthy again. And there was a new enthusiasm in Hale’s voice and in his eyes.

  “This time they won’t pin us down under impervium,” he told Sam, gripping the rail and grimacing as spray blew in his face. “This time we’ll stay mobile no matter what it costs us.”

  “It’ll cost plenty,” Sam reminded him. “More than we’ve got. More then we’re going to get, unless we do something very drastic.”

  “What?”

  Sam looked at him thoughtfully, wondering if the time had yet come to take Hale into his confidence. He had been building toward the revelation for weeks now, leading Hale step by step toward a solution he would have rejected flatly at their first interview.

  Sam was applying to his current problem exactly the same methods he had applied—almost by instinct—when he woke in the alley with dream-dust still fragrant in his nostrils. In the weeks since that wakening he had retraced in swift strides the full course of a career that paralleled the career of his earlier life, condensing forty years’ achievements into a few brief weeks. Twice now he had come into the world penniless, helpless, every man’s hand against him. Twice he had lifted himself to precarious success. This time his foot was only on the first rung of a ladder that leaned against the very stars. He assured himself of that. Failure was inconceivable to him.

  By misdirection and cunning he had tricked Doc Mallard into a catspaw play and seized the korium he needed to start him on his upward climb. It was korium he wanted again now, but the Harkers were his adversaries this time and they were a much more difficult problem.

  Remembering his method with Doc Mallard, he had searched in vain for some lure he could dangle to tempt them out on a limb. He could think of nothing. The Harkers already had everything they could desire; their position was almost impregnable. There was, of course, Sari. Sam knew that if he could plan some subtle but strong irritation for her, and make sure she had narco-dust at the time, she was almost certain to kill either Zachariah or herself—or both. That was one weapon. But it was terrifyingly uncertain, and it was too strong. He meant to kill Zachariah, eventually. But death was no solution to this current problem.