Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Another bomb,” Sam said.

  Again the telefocus shifted. Again a bomb dropped. This time it struck rock. The explosion came in long, rolling thunders through the public visors, and the crowds swayed with the tides and currents of vibration, as seaweed moves in water.

  Again the roar continued as underwater sound waves moved in the track of televised sound waves.

  And this time men were surer. Delaware Keep shivered slightly.

  Silence dropped. The Ways hummed. The people of the Keep waited, in greater throngs than had gathered in the Ways since man first reached Venus, a herd that always, until now, had been guided by the Immortals—watching the duel between Zachariah Harker and the pirate.

  Sam said, “Suppose you surrender? The Families may lose a little, but the common people won’t. Are you afraid of letting the short-termers go landside? Afraid you won’t be able to rule them out there?”

  “Any man who wishes to volunteer for your colony is free to do that,” Zachariah said. “Just as every man in the Keeps is free. You’re trying to get slaves. Men won’t go landside yet; it isn’t time. It’s too dangerous just now. You can’t get volunteers. You say you want korium. But I think that will be only your first demand. Later you’ll want colony conscription—peonage.”

  “The time’s past for abstruse arguments,” Sam said, knowing his voice was heard in every Keep on Venus. “Listen! Pay us the korium we want or we’ll bomb Delaware Keep!”

  “You won’t bomb the Keep. Half a million people would die.”

  “A cheap price for you to pay if you can stop the colony—is that it? Perhaps you’re willing to die with Delaware, but what about the other Delaware Immortals? There’s a rumor all the Harkers but you have already left the Keep—and that you’ve got a getaway ship waiting. Where are you vising from?”

  Zachariah dared not let that challenge drop. Beside him, too, as Sam knew, was a scanning screen that showed the throngs in the Keep. All the Harker prestige—the Immortal prestige—depended on keeping the trust of the commoners. And they would not follow rulers who were not leaders.

  Zachariah turned his head and spoke briefly. He said to Sam, and to the Keeps, “No Immortal has left Delaware. I’m speaking from the Harker Council Room. As you see.”

  The image on the screen changed; it showed the well-known Council Room, empty except for Zachariah, who was seated at the head of a long table before a broadcasting unit.

  But now the door opened, and men and women began to come in. Sam recognized Raoul. He was watching for another face he knew.

  Was his timing correct?

  “The other Families—” Zachariah said. “We’ll scan them quickly.”

  Other Council Rooms showed the screen—the sanctums of the great Families of Delaware Keep. They were all filling rapidly, the Randolphs, the Wood clan, the Davidsons and Mawsons—but the Harkers were the real rulers of Delaware, as everyone knew. The focus returned to Zachariah. It was the long view, showing Geoffrey and Raoul and a few others seated at the table. Sam looked for Sari and saw her. He wished he could get a closer view. Had she taken the hopped-up narco-dust?

  She sat motionless. But suddenly her hands moved together on the table top and clenched violently, and Sam knew.

  “Your bluff won’t work,” Zachariah said. “No Immortal has left the Keep.”

  “So you’re all willing to die rather than give up a little korium,” Sam said. “That’s your affair—your own lives. But the korium isn’t yours. It belongs to the Keep people. They made it and they own it—or should. You’ve no right to decide whether they should live and die.”

  “We are the people,” Zachariah said.

  “You lie,” Sam said. “What do you know about us? You’re gods. You don’t know a thing about the common people, who have to work blindly for reward we’ll never lay our hands on. But you’ll get those rewards. You’ll get them by waiting and doing nothing, while the short-termers work and have children and die—and their children do the same. You can wait to colonize landside, because you’ll live long enough to walk under the stars and the sun and know what it was like on Earth in the old days. You’ll go out in ships to the planets. You’ll get the rewards. But what about us? We’ll die, and our children will die, and our children’s children—sweating to build a pyramid we’ll never see complete. You’re not the people!” His voice raised in a shout. “You’re not even human! You’re Immortals!”

  “We rule by will of the people. Because we’re best qualified.”

  “Qualified?” Sam asked, and then, “Where is Blaze Harker?”

  “Not in Delaware Keep at the moment—”

  “Tight beam,” Sam said.

  There was a pause. Then Zachariah made a gesture. All over the Keeps the screens dimmed and went blank. Only two visors carried the conversation now—Sam’s, and the Harkers’.

  Sam, too, had adjusted to the private tight beam. He said: “I know where Blaze Harker is. I’ve got telepictures of him. I can broadcast them, and you know what that will do to Harker prestige if the people learn that an Immortal can go insane.”

  Sam heard signals begin to click behind him. Automatically he translated. “Kedre Walton entering Harker grounds—” Almost time.

  The signals suddenly began again. Mystified, Sam heard them say, “Listen to the Keeps! Tune back! Listen!”

  He didn’t want to. This distraction was something he hadn’t counted on. There was so much depending on his own split-second timing just now, and on chance and luck—if anything went wrong he was ruined. He didn’t want to deflect his attention for a single instant from this flood of pressure he was pouring on the Harkers. But he switched his private screen on briefly—and then for a moment stood tense, listening.

  Down there in the Keeps the screens were blank. The people had been cut off from this fascinating and vital debate just at the moment when it was reaching a climax.

  And the people didn’t like it.

  A low roll of anger was rising from the packed thousands. The crowd was shifting uneasily, restlessly, surging in little eddies around the screens as if pressing closer could make the image come back. And the murmur of their anger deepened as the seconds ticked by. Voices rose in thin shouts now and then—the imperative commands of the mob. They would have to be answered. Quickly—very quickly.

  Sam whirled to the tight beam where the Harkers waited. From their council room came a distant echo of that same rising murmur of anger. They, too, were watching the temper of the crowds. They, too, knew time was going too fast. Sam grinned. It was perfect. It couldn’t be better. He had them on the run now, whether they had realized it yet or not. For until this moment no Immortal had ever known such pressure. They weren’t used to coping with it. And Sam had lived under pressure all his life. He was adjusted to fast thinking. Now if he could only talk fast enough—

  “Immortal prestige!” he said rapidly into their private beam. “You’ve lost all touch with human beings. What do you know about human emotions, you Immortals? Faith—loyalty—do they look so different after a few hundred years? I’m glad I’m a short-termer!”

  Zachariah gave him a bewildered look as Sam paused for breath. This didn’t ring quite true, and Zachariah was quick to hear the false note. It was all very well to orate when the mob was listening, but these high, abstract things were irrelevant on the private beam. False heroics were for the small minds of the crowd, you could all but hear him thinking. Or for a small mind here, clouded and confused—

  Sam saw understanding break across the Immortal’s face—too late. Sam had a few more words to hurl into the transmitter, and as he gathered himself to do it he saw the door behind Zachariah swinging open, and knew he had timed himself almost too closely.

  “So it’s all right for people like you,” he shouted, “to pick up some gullible fool of a woman for awhile and kick her out again when you’re ready to go back to—”

  Kedre Walton came quietly through the door and into the Council Room.
From the corner of his eye Sam caught the flash of green-gold hair as Sari’s head flung up, saw the hunched tenseness of her shoulders under a gleaming shawl. But his eyes were for Kedre.

  She did not seem to have heard. She came quickly across the room, tall, exquisitely fine, holding her head back under the weight of her cascading hair as if it were too heavy for the slender neck. She was unclasping her long cloak as she came, and she let it slip to the floor in heavy, shining folds and hurried forward, her narrow white hands outstretched to Zachariah.

  Sam had been sure it would happen so. Between her and Zachariah lay too many decades of past intimacy for her to ignore the tie now. They had created between them in the long orbits of the past a communal flesh and a communal mind that functioned most highly only when they were together. If Zachariah had ever needed this completion, he needed it now. She had came as quickly as she could to give him all her aid. Every eye in the room could see that these two were as nearly one, and in their crises must always be, as any two humans can become.

  Sam’s gaze swung back to Sari. So did Zachariah’s—but just too late. Both of them knew what was coming a split second before it came, but by then it was too late to stop her. The timing was perfect. Shock after shock had hammered upon Sari, already fighting down the cumulative neural explosions of the adulterated narco-dust Sam had supplied.

  And Sari’s action was already channeled. She hated Zachariah and Kedre. This was the moment when critical mass was reached.

  She was born under the star of exploded Earth. Sari, too, seemed to explode into an incandescence of madness and rage.

  Within seconds the assembly of Immortals had degenerated into a primitive struggle as they swarmed to loosen Sari’s homicidal grip on Kedre’s throat.

  Sam threw a switch and saw his face appear in miniature, far below, on the great public televisors. The sullen muttering of the crowd, which had been increasing slowly but steadily, fell to abrupt silence as Sam called, “Harker! Harker, I can’t reach you! Tune in!”

  How could they? There was no answer.

  “Harker, Harker! Are you leaving the Keep?”

  Another depth bomb dropped.

  Above the rolling thunders of the explosion, above the ominous creaking of tortured impervium over the city, Sam’s voice called again.

  “Harker, where are you? If the Harkers have left, who’s next in authority? Answer me!”

  Zachariah’s face came into sudden, swift focus. He was breathing hard. Blood trickled down his cheek from a long scratch. His face was icily calm.

  He said, “We have not left the Keep. We—”

  He did not finish. For the roar of the crowd drowned him out. It was Montana Keep that roared. It was the first time in all Venusian history that the voice of a mob had lifted under a city dome, the first time since the Immortals had assumed control of human affairs that a crowd dared dispute that control.

  They disputed it now. If the sound meant anything, they rejected it. Zachariah mouthed silently at them from the screen, no words coming through the vast, voiceless roaring.

  For to the crowd it must have seemed that the Keep was already falling. Zachariah, coming back from the urgency of some hidden crisis, breathing hard, blood running down his face—it was a terrifying sight to see. The dome still groaned above them under the impact of the bombs and even this imperturbable Immortal looked panic-stricken at last.

  It was terror that made the crowd roar. Surrender was what they roared for, and the volume of the noise mounted as the seconds passed.

  And then Sam made his first mistake.

  He should have stood back and let events go their way. But the sight of Zachariah’s ice-cold calm, even in this tumult, made him want suddenly to smash his fists into the flawless, ageless face, batter it to a more nearly mortal aspect—force the acknowledgment of defeat upon the inflexible Immortal. If there was anything there to admire, Sam did not recognize it.

  And because he could not reach Zachariah with his fists, Sam lashed out with his voice.

  The first few words he roared at the Immortal no one heard. But when his blunt, red-browed face forced itself into focus upon the screens the shouting of the crowd quieted a little, slowly, until Sam’s message came through.

  —“surrender now!” Sam was roaring. “No Harker’s fit to rule! Give us what we ask, or show us what happened just now in your Council Room! Show us! Show us how sane any Harker is when a crisis comes! No—wait, I’ll show you! People of the Keeps, wait until you see Blaze Harker and what he—”

  The shadow that was the waiting Zachariah made an impatient gesture, and Sam’s face and voice faded into the background, still gesturing, still shouting. Zachariah came clear before them, leaning forward, seeming to look down, godlike, over the panic-stricken throngs.

  “I have news for you, people of the Keeps,” he said quietly. “You’re still safe. No bombs have fallen here. No bombs will. This man is—not what he seems. Until now I’ve kept his secret for him, but this is the time to speak. Joel Reed has told you he never knew his father. He’s sworn to wipe out the dishonor of his name and give you a second chance at landside life that Sam Reed robbed you of. You all know the story of what happened when Sam Reed made you promises.” He paused, drew a deep breath.

  “This man is Sam Reed,” he said.

  A bewildered buzzing followed the silence when Zachariah’s voice ceased. He let them murmur for a moment, then lifted a hand and went on.

  “We have definite proof of that—the eye prints and finger prints match. Our investigators don’t make mistakes. This is Sam Reed, the swindler, the dream-duster, who’s promising you so much. Can you believe anything he says, knowing that? Can you be sure even these pictures of his fleet and their bombs are not false pictures?

  Nothing he says about the ships or the Harkers or the colonies is trustworthy, and you must know it by now! Sam Reed—speak to the Keeps! Make more promises! No one believes you now—speak to the people you’ve swindled! Or do you deny who you are? Shall we show the proof now? Answer us, Sam Reed!”

  Sam let his face swim into clear focus on the screen. In shadow behind him Zachariah waited, lips a little parted, still breathing hard and the blood running forgotten down his cheek.

  Zachariah had lost his head.

  For an instant no one knew it, not even Sam. Sam only knew that he must do the fastest thinking he had ever done in his life.

  He had perhaps fifteen seconds that would look like a deliberate pause. Then he must speak. In the back of his brain was the answer. He knew it was there, he could almost touch it and pull it into the light. But for ten of the fifteen seconds he groped in vain.

  And then it came to him. Zachariah had made one vast and fatal mistake. The Harkers were not used to quick thinking. For too many centuries they had not been called upon to see all sides of a threatening danger in one glance, evaluate all possibilities and choose by instinct the safest out. And Zachariah was an Immortal. He did not think as normal men think. Zachariah’s mind worked by decades and scores—not by the days and weeks of ordinary living.

  Sam laughed.

  “No,” he said, “I won’t deny it. I wanted to prove myself to you first. I owed you that. I made a bad mistake and I’ve got to make amends to you all. But Harker’s right—I am immortal.”

  He waited a moment to let that sink in. “I was forty years old when they blew dream-dust in my face,” he said. “For forty years I’ve been away. Do I look like a man of eighty? Here—look! Am I eighty years old?”

  He ducked his head and pushed the eye shells loose, slipped them out, spat out the tooth-cap shells. He pulled the red wig from his head and grinned at them, burning with a confidence that seemed to pour out upon all the Keeps from the thousand screens that mirrored his face.

  It was a strong, square, hard-featured face, lines of violence upon it, but no lines of age. Even the bareness of his head was not the bareness of age—the shape of his skull was too sculptured in the strong, full c
urves of his Harker heritage. It was a vital, virile face—but it was certainly not the face of an Immortal.

  “Look at me!” Sam said. “You can see I’m no Immortal. I’m a man like the rest of you. No Immortal was ever born built like me. But I’ve lived eighty years.” He stepped back a little, paused, turned upon them a keen, gray, angry stare.

  “I was a man like you,” he said. “But I’ve been landside. I’ve made a great discovery. I’ve learned why it is the Immortals don’t dare let landside colonies get started. You all know how hard they’ve worked to stop us—now I’m going to tell you the real truth—why!

  “You can all be immortal!”

  It was nearly five minutes before the tumult died. Even then, Sam was very nearly the only listener who heard Zachariah Harker say wearily:

  “All right, Reed. You’ll get your korium. You think you’ve won. Now, is this another swindle? If it isn’t—go ahead and give them immortality!”

  TO BE CONCLUDED.

  DREAM’S END

  Risking his own life force to cure a patient’s psychosis, Dr. Robert Bruno learns of the true individualism of human minds!

  THE sanitarium was never quiet. Even when night brought comparative stillness, there was an anticipatory tension in the air—for cyclic mental disorders are as inevitable, though not as regular, as the swing of a merry-go-round.

  Earlier that evening Gregson, in Ward 13, had moved into the downswing of his manic-depressive curve, and there had been trouble. Before the orderlies could buckle him into a restraining jacket, he had managed to break the arm of a “frozen” catatonic patient, who had made no sound even as the bone snapped.

  Under apomorphine, Gregson subsided. After a few days he would be at the bottom of his psychic curve, dumb, motionless, and disinterested. Nothing would be able to rouse him then, for a while.

  Dr. Robert Bruno, Chief of Staff, waited till the nurse had gone out with the no longer sterile hypodermic. Then he nodded at the orderly.