Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “We’ll give you something for that. Now try to sleep.”

  Outside, in the corridor, Bruno tried hard to repress his exultation. Parsons blinked at him, scowling.

  “Can you tell anything yet?”

  Bruno checked himself. “No. It’s too soon. But—”

  “The manic-depressive phase is passed,” Morrissey put in. “He seems rational. And he hasn’t been for three years.”

  “Those damper bars—” Bruno smiled. “Well, we’ll have to wait and see. We can’t write up a report yet. He’s certainly oriented. We’ll give him a chance to rest. More tests later. I don’t want to jump the gun.”

  But with Barbara he let himself be more enthusiastic.

  “We’ve done it, Barbara! Found a specific for insanity.”

  She leaned across the table to pour coffee.

  “I thought there were so many types of psychosis that the treatment varied considerably.”

  “Well, that’s true, but we’ve never got to the real basis of the trouble before. You can cure a cold by rest therapy, force fluids and aspirin, but cold vaccine gets directly to the root of the trouble. Some types of insanity have been thought incurable, but tetanus was incurable till we got a vaccine for it. The empathy surrogate therapy is the lowest common denominator. It works on the electronic structure of the mind, and unless there’s physical deterioration, as in advanced paresis, our treatment should work beautifully.”

  “So that’s what you were working on,” Barbara said. “Bob, you don’t know how glad I am that it’s successful.”

  “Well—we hope. We’re almost sure. But—”

  “You can take a vacation now? You’ve been working so hard!”

  “A few more weeks, and I’ll be ready. I’ve got to collate my notes. I can’t run out on Parsons at this stage. But very soon, I promise.”

  HE LOOKED up to see her smile. Suddenly he stiffened. Her smile was broadening, stretching, the lower lip dropping till all her teeth showed. The lower lids of her eyes hung . . . stretched . . .

  Her nose lengthened.

  Her eyes slowly crawled out of their sockets and lengthened on dreadful stalks down her cheeks.

  She melted down and out of sight beneath the table.

  The table began to sink.

  And now everything around him was melting. Under him the chair became plastic and then fluid. The floor was a bowl, and the walls were dripping down into it, into a shining whirlpool at the center.

  He slipped helplessly along that slope till the pool engulfed him, in a chaos of thunder and confusion and sickening horror.

  The winds bellowed . . . The empty drop closed around him . . . He fell in darkness . . .

  This time, when he woke, he wasn’t sure. The panic had not left him. He learned, later, that he had been semi-delirious for eight days, and only Morrissey’s unceasing attention had kept him reasonably quiet. Then there were weeks of convalescence, and a vacation, and it seemed a long time before he came back from Florida, tanned and healthy, to resume his duties.

  Even then, though, there was the fear. When he drove toward the blocky buildings of the sanitarium he felt a touch of it brush him. He reached for Barbara’s hand, and felt some comfort in the assurance of her nearness. She had been helpful, too, though she had not understood.

  Every day after that, when he left her, there was a fleeting apprehension lest he never see her again. To forget the uncertainty of his footing, the ground that was no longer absolutely solid, he plunged into the hospital’s routine. And gradually, after more weeks, the terror began to leave him.

  Gregson had been cured. He was still under precautionary observation, but all traces of his psychosis seemed to have vanished. There were still minor neuroses, the natural result of the past six years of abnormal restraint, but they were disappearing under proper therapy. The empathy surrogate treatment was successful. Yet, for a while, Bruno refused to attempt more experiments.

  Parsons was displeased. He was anxious to chart a graph on the process, and one trial did not provide enough evidence. Bruno kept putting the physicist off with promises. It eventually ended in a minor spat which Morrissey halted by pointing out that Dr Robert Bruno was, technically, his own patient, and was not yet ready for further research on the dangerous subject.

  Parsons, furious, went off. Bruno followed Morrissey into the latter’s office and sat down in one of the more comfortable chairs. It was mid-afternoon, and beyond the windows the drowsy hum of summer made a peaceful counterpoint to the conversation.

  “Cigarette, Ken?”

  “Thanks . . . Look, Bob.” The two men had drawn closer together in the last weeks. Morrissey no longer addressed his Chief of Staff with the former “Doctor.”

  “I’ve been collating the facts of your case, and I think I’ve got at the root of the trouble. Do you want to hear my diagnosis?”

  “Candidly, I don’t,” Bruno said, closing his eyes and inhaling smoke. “I’d prefer to forget it. But I know I can’t. That would be psychically ruinous.”

  “You had a cyclic self-containing dream—I suppose you could call it that. You dreamed you were dreaming you were dreaming. You know what your trouble is?”

  “Well?”

  “You’re not sure you’re awake now.”

  “Oh, I’m sure enough,” Bruno said. “Most of the time.”

  “You’ve got to be sure all the time. Or else make yourself believe that it doesn’t matter whether you’re dreaming or waking.”

  “Doesn’t matter! Ken! To know that everything may melt away under my feet at any time, and to think that doesn’t matter! That’s impossible!”

  “Then you’ve got to be sure you’re awake. Those hallucinations you had are over. Weeks have passed.”

  “Hallucinatory time is elastic and subjective.”

  “It’s a defense mechanism—you know that, I suppose?”

  “Defense against what?”

  Morrissey moistened his lips. “Remember, I’m the psychiatrist and you’re the patient. You were psychoanalyzed when you studied psychiatry, but you didn’t get all the devils out of your subconscious. Hang it, Bob, you know very well that most psychiatrists take up the work because they’re attracted to it for pathological reasons—neuroses of their own. Why did you always insist that you were so utterly sure of everything?”

  “I always made sure.”

  “Compensation. To allow for a basic unsureness and insecurity in your own makeup. Consciously you were sure the empathy surrogate treatment would work, but your unconscious mind wasn’t so certain. You never let yourself know that, though. But it came out under stress—the therapy itself.”

  “Go on,” Bruno said slowly.

  MORRISSEY tapped the papers on his desk.

  “I know my diagnosis is pretty accurate, but you can decide that for yourself. You can tell, perhaps, better than I can. The frontiers of the mind are terra incognita. Your simile of a uranium pile was better than you’d realized. When critical mass is approached, there’s danger. And the damper bars in your own mind—what did Parsons’ machine do to them?”

  “I am quite sane,” Bruno said. “I think.”

  “Sure you are, now. You’re getting over that explosion. You’d been building up an anxiety neurosis, and the therapy made it blow off. Just how, I don’t understand. The electronic patterns of the mind aren’t in my field. All I know is that the experiment with Gregson removed the safety blocks from your mind, and you lost control for a while. Thus the hallucinations, which simply followed the path of least resistance. Point One: You’re afraid of insecurity and unsureness, and you always have been. Thus your dream follows a familiarly symbolic pattern. At any time the sureness of waking may vanish. Point Two: As long as you think you’re dreaming, you’re dodging responsibility!”

  “Good Lord, Ken!” Bruno said. “I just want to be sure I’m awake!”

  “And there’s absolutely no way you can be sure of that,” Morrissey said. “The conviction must
come from your own mind and be subjective. No objective proof is possible. Otherwise, if you fail to convince yourself, the anxiety neurosis will grow back into a psychosis, and—” He shrugged.

  “It sounds logical,” Bruno said. “I’m beginning to see it pretty clearly. I think, perhaps, this clarification is what I needed.”

  “Do you think you’re dreaming now?”

  “Not at the moment—certainly.”

  “Swell,” Morrissey said. “Because the conglobulation of the psych between the forever and upstriding kaleeno bystixing forinder saan—”

  Bruno jumped up. “Ken!” he said, dry-throated. “Stop it!”

  “Fylixar catween baleeza—”

  “Stop it!”

  “BYZINDERKONA REPSTILLING AND ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS NEVER KNOWING NEVER KNOWING NEVER KNOWING—”

  The words came out in great whirling shining globes. They raced past Bruno’s head with a screaming hiss. They bombarded him. They carried him back into a thundering, windy abyss of blackness and terror.

  MORRISSEY stepped back from the bed and asked:

  Dr. Robert Bruno managed to nod. “Good,” Morrissey said. “You were out for about three hours. But everything’s going nicely. You’ll be up and around pretty soon. There’s plenty to be done. Barbara wants to see you—and Parsons.”

  “Ken,” Bruno said, “wait a minute. Am I awake now? I mean, really awake?” Morrissey stared and grinned.

  “Sure,” he said. “I can guarantee that.” But Bruno did not answer. His gaze moved to the windows, to the solidity of the walls and ceiling, to the reality of his own hands and arms.

  Never knowing?

  He looked at Morrissey, waiting for Morrissey to vanish, and the black pit to open again beneath him.

  FURY

  Conclusion. Sometimes an old and settled community just won’t git up and git—won’t move to a new home. But there’s always one way of making a man choose to leave his old home—

  Sam Harker was born six hundred years after the Earth’s destruction by an atomic chain reaction. Man didn’t die when Earth did. There were survivors, and they fled to Venus—which was uninhabitable. The cataclysmic fury of semi-Jurassic, nonterrestrial flora and fauna forced the race to retreat to the great impervium domes that were constructed on the seabottoms—the Keeps. There mankind lived—and slowly began to die.

  Atomics had changed the race. The majority were short-boned, heavy and fleshy. But there was a sprinkling of mutants, Immortals as they were called—the powerful Families of the Keeps who had a life-expectancy of more than seven hundred years. Physically they were variants from the norm; they were long-boned, lean, tall, unmistakably Immortals.

  Last of the great Harker Family was Blaze Harker. His wife should have known better than to have a child; she was not built for childbearing. She died when Sam Harker was born. And Blaze, blindly, insanely hating his son for that reason, took revenge. The Keeps had their underworlds and their darker technologies. When Blaze’s father, Zachariah Harker, and his grandfather and great-grandfather tried to locate the boy, they failed. Blaze would not tell them what he had done, and the Harker heir, with his heritage of nominal immortality—was gone.

  An underworld technician, well paid by Blaze, worked on Sam. Endocrine surgery. The baby’s physical pattern was altered. He was made hairless, and when he grew larger, he would be short-boned, heavy, and fleshy. He would not know his real name. He would be Sam Reed.

  He grew up in the Keep underworlds, learning the underworld codes. The Slider tutored him, a fat old Chiron-Fagin wise in his sinful ways. Sam Reed learned.

  Love between Immortals has many facets. Zachariah Harker, Sam’s grandfather, and Kedre Walton took long vacations from their love, but inevitably they swung together again. Until, when Sam was forty, Kedre saw him at Keep Carnival, and was drawn to him by some quality she could not analyze. Perhaps she sensed that he was an Immortal, though she did not know it, and neither did Sam, who was simply a racketeer, promoter, and operator of whatever seemed most profitable.

  He wasn’t apparently impressed by an Immortal’s favors. He was willing, but not eager. For Sam had been a have-not all his life, and automatically he resented the Immortals—Zachariah, too, when he met him, though he undertook a certain commission Zachariah offered him.

  There were two reasons Zachariah made this offer. Kedre was too interested in Sam, and Sam could be got rid of fairly easily after he had fulfilled his task and killed Robin Hale. Hale was a nuisance. He was organizing a plan to colonise the lands of Venus, and the Families felt that such an attempt would not only be bound to failure at this time, but it would weaken the Keeps for future attempts. Hale was a malcontent. An Immortal, he had been a member of one of the Free Companies that had existed for centuries on Venus, hired mercenaries subsidized by the Keeps to fight their wars for them without running risks themselves. The Companies were gone now, but Hale lived on, a purposeless adventurer. He found his purpose when he visited the Temple of Truth and met the Logician, the oracle everyone thought was a thinking-machine.

  The Logician, as Hale learned, was simply an Immortal with a curious talent—he knew all the right answers. It wasn’t prescience; it was simply a talent for truth. He advised Hale to colonize landside.

  Instead of killing the Free Companion, Sam joined forces with Hale. He saw his opportunity. He was a crook and a promoter. He convinced Hale that he could promote the Colony venture, in the face of the Families’ opposition. By propaganda and publicity, Sam succeeded. The people of the Keeps rose to the glamorous bait of landside colonization. The funds began to pour in.

  Sam quietly sold three hundred percent of the stock. It would make his fortune—if the Colony failed. It couldn’t succeed, he knew—landside was uninhabitable.

  Rosathe, a Keep dancer, dropped into his arms with other triumphs. He had wanted her for a long time. Now he had her, and he was winning his fight against the strangely passive Immortals—proving that he, a short-termer, was as good as they were—

  Then Kedre and Zachariah struck, using Rosathe as their tool. Sam did not know what had happened until he smelled the terrifying scent of the dream-dust Rosathe puffed into his nostrils. And. after that he woke, quite suddenly, in a Keep alley. Dream-dust could pat a man to sleep for a long time.

  How long?

  A passer-by gave him the answer. “The Colony? Oh, the Land Colony! You’re a little late. It’s been open a long time now—what’s left of it.”

  “How long?How long?”

  Sam heard the answer, and found himself hanging on the bar of a vending machine and looking at his face in the mirror. His face hadn’t aged. Not a bit.

  And that was impossible.

  Because he had been drugged—under dream-dust—for forty years.

  The great public libraries gave him information, but the vital point he already knew: he was immortal. But that was his only asset. He had to cure himself of the dream-dust addiction, and that required money. His own credit was useless. The library records said that the Colony bubble had burst forty years ago, when Sam Reed dream-dusted and his swindle came to light. His name was worse than useless.

  But he still had Sam Reed’s experiences to draw from, his shrewdness and his knowledge of confidence tricks. So he was able to swindle a gambler who had been a raw kid when Sam dream-dusted, and then he had collateral—the radioelement korium, hard to dispose of, but valuable.

  The Slider was still alive, sunk in dreams induced by the murderous Orange Devil drug, and the Slider still had his connections. He was willing to act as Sam’s agent in certain matters. And, delving in his memory, he was able to give Sam enough clues to explain why Sam had the short, thick body of a non-immortal. Somebody, Sam deduced, had paid that outlaw medic to operate on his newborn body.

  New mysteries appeared. When he went to the hospital to undergo the dream-dust cure, he learned that he had been discharged as cured early that same morning. Somebody had kept him alive for forty years, so
mebody had had him cured, somebody had used an amnesic drug on him—why?

  His first step toward finding out was to disguise himself as his own imaginary son, Joel Reed. In that guise, he saw Robin Hale, now Governor of the Colony—what was left of it. After the bubble had collapsed forty years ago, Hale had gone stubbornly ahead, in spite of the Immortals’ opposition. He had started the Colony. Then the Immortals hadn’t dared let it fail, but they used legal trickery to gain control and keep it at status quo. Hale was a figurehead now. So he was willing to join the bogus Joel Reed in a new venture. “Joel” had, presumably, inherited a forty-year-old patent from his father that opened a huge area for new colonisation.

  The pair started propaganda in the Keeps, aimed at subsidising Plymouth Colony, which would start at the end of an archipelago and island-hop as the land side flora and fauna were brought under control. They raised some money—not much, but enough to outfit a mobile fleet and start Plymouth.

  More korium was needed to keep the venture going. Sam got it by talking Hale into ordering the fleet to battle stations—over Delaware Keep. He simply putted a holdup, “Pay a korium ransom,” he told the Keep, “or we bomb you!”

  It was a bluff and the Harkers knew it was a bluff. But Sam appealed to the people of the Keeps, trying to overthrow Immortal prestige. He did it, partly because he had acquired a film showing Blase Harker insane, and under restraint. He threatened to exhibit this to the people—and won.

  Then Zachariah Harker unmasked “Joe?” as Sam Reed, swindler and dream-duster—completely unfit to run a landside colony.

  There was only one way out. Sam admitted his identity. He had been landside for forty years, he said. Stripping off his disguise, he showed the Keeps his face—not the face of a man eighty years old.

  “I’m no Immortal,” he said. “No Immortal was ever built like me. I’m a man like the rest of you. But I’ve learned why the Immortals won’t let landside colonies get started. You 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!” Zachariah said wearily, above the tumult, “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!”