Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Perhaps, in the past two years, Margot had often wished she had married Llewelyn, instead of the dour, grim-faced man she had chosen.

  And why not? Llewelyn was all that Haversham was not—a handsome, good-, natured, successful man who had never had a serious thought in his life. He had lived the life of a medieval nobleman, while Haversham’s life had been that of a serf. Margot had never complained, not once, but nevertheless she must have been conscious of the wide gulf.

  HAVERSHAM scowled and pushed his way, hat in hand, through the scattering of fashionable ladies and swaggering gallants in the lobby. In his russet and dark purple he made a sombre figure among the bright satins of the crowd. The men flaunted their colored cloaks; the women in clinging Grecian garments minced on tottering heels and flashed glances through the transparent dark lace which modestly veiled their faces. Most of them were trailed by elderly duennas, lynx-eyed guardians of the new moral code which was beginning to set so strict a seal upon feminine virtue.

  “Your wishes, sir?”

  Haversham paused before one of the reception screens. A man’s face showed on the panel.

  “I’m John Haversham. Dr. Thornley expects me. Key Seventeen bio-forty.”

  “Elevator Twenty-four.”

  A guide light glimmered above the opening door, and Haversham stepped into the compartment, his heart beginning to thud with thick, heavy beats.

  Medico Thornley met him in the corridor above, his ruddy face alight.

  “Health, Haversham! There’s good news.”

  “Good news?”

  “Yes, I . . . But you’ll want to see your wife. I haven’t told her yet either. But you can guess what it is. A great honor, Haversham!”

  Haversham’s dark face set more grimly. He followed Thornley down the hall, thinking of Margot, and of Alex Llewelyn, and of what he himself must do tonight. He was thinking of his new-born son, and of the Freemen of Earth, all the little, voiceless people who looked to La Boucherie for guidance and championship.

  Margot’s glossy dark hair lay in ringlets on the pillow. She smiled up at him—very fragile, very hopeless, very young, and an unaccustomed gentleness stirred in Haversham’s heart. Then his lips tightened again.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. “You just missed Alex. Do you know what he wants to do? Take little Martin into mnemonic psychology under him. He says the potentialities seem to check.”

  “Oh, he told you, then,” Thornley said disappointedly. He fumbled with the chart buttons at the foot of the bed. “ ‘Martin Haversham’,” he read. “ ‘A potential Leader. He’s been chosen—’ ”

  “A Leader?” Haversham’s voice was harsh. “What branch? Does he test for Mnemonics?”

  “We can’t be sure yet, of course. At birth, all we can do is check the potentialities of the brain. But the heredity patterns indicate a trend toward the psychological sciences. He’ll certainly develop into a high-grade mentality. Psychology, sociology—he’ll find his place. And he’ll get the best training possible at the Creche.” Thornley looked more sharply at Haversham. “By the way,” he went on quickly, “this doesn’t mean that you’ll lose your status as parents—either, of you. A lot of people have that idea. It’s wrong. Martin will be trained and educated in the Creche, naturally, but you can see him whenever you like, provided you don’t upset his mental and emotional balance.”

  “I see.”

  “And eventually he’ll go to Research and follow his natural bent. The Leaders live the life of Reilly, you know. Your boy’s very lucky.”

  “Yes,” Haversham said. “May I see him?”

  “John—” Margot said.

  Quickly the steel-worker bent and kissed her. She looked after him, the faint shadow of trouble in her eyes, as he went out with the physician.

  Thornley led the way to a dimly lit room walled with glass on one side. Behind the barrier Haversham could see a plain cubicle.

  A nurse appeared, holding a baby, blanket-wrapped, in her arms. She drew back a fold to reveal the scarlet, wrinkled face.

  “I suppose it’s against the rules for me to hold him?” Haversham said.

  “Sorry. Unless you want to go through the Cleansing Rooms. We can’t take any risks with germ infection.”

  Haversham hesitated. If he stripped, his weapons would be revealed.

  His hand slipped into his blouse. He shook a smash-gun from its sheath. With almost the same motion, he aimed and fired. The glass crashed, a ten-foot circle blasted into tinkling shards. Thornley’s jaw dropped. He made an impotent gesture as Haversham sprang through the gap and snatched the child from the astonished nurse’s arms.

  The warm, living bundle fitted neatly into the crook of Haversham’s elbow. It was the first time, and the last, that he was ever to hold his son, and he felt an unexpected warmth of emotion at the contact.

  A Leader, eh! An accursed Cromwellian! Not if he could help it!

  CHAPTER II

  Rescue—and Death!

  MEDICO THORNLEY had whirled and was racing toward the door. Haversham went back through the gap in the glass, his sharp command halting the medico in his tracks.

  “Wait!”

  “Great heavens, man! Are you crazy? You can’t do this!”

  “Shut up,” Haversham said.

  He saw that the nurse had fainted, which was convenient for his’-purposes. He pushed the muzzle of the smash-gun into Thornley’s ribs.

  “You know what this will do to you,” he said. “You’ve seen smash-gun wounds, haven’t you?”

  The medic shuddered.

  “Then take it easy. We’re leaving the hospital together. You won’t be hurt unless you ask for it.”

  Thornley’s ruddy face was splotched with pallor.

  “You can’t do it,” he said in a strained whisper, without daring to turn his head.

  “There are Guards . . . Do you want your son killed?”

  “If necessary. Then he’ll never be a Leader.”

  “Treason?” The medic’s voice held disbelief. For treason was akin to blasphemy, though less easily forgiven.

  “Open the door,” Haversham said. “Hurry up!”

  Thornley obeyed. They went along an empty corridor. No one seemed to have heard the smashing of the glass. The room was probably sound-proofed. At the elevator, Haversham forced Thornley aside and stepped close so that his own face showed on the viewplate.

  “Lift, please.”

  “Coming up.”

  The door slid open. Haversham nodded, his gun hidden but ready, and Thornley preceded him into the car.

  No alarm, yet.

  They went down, and again the door opened Facing them were three Guards in red uniforms, vivid as blood against the pale gray walls. Their guns were lifted.

  Haversham went weak with sick desperation. Fighting an organization like this meant only death!

  Thornley came to life and tried to snatch the baby from Haversham’s clasp. The steelworker almost automatically pressed the smash-gun’s trigger. Thornley’s face vanished in red ruin. A Guard, in the path of the beam, screamed and was driven back, his chest caved in by the invisible impact of beam energy.

  “All right!” Haversham snarled.

  He sprang aside, shielded by the door, and aimed again. The operator was crouching in a corner, his face green. He wouldn’t interfere. And the guards were still hesitating, not daring to kill an infant who had been chosen to be a Leader. The life of any Leader was sacrosanct.

  Haversham’s gun jolted the deadly energy bolts. The Guards died, flung back to the wall and crushed against it.

  The door of the elevator began to close. Haversham sprang through the narrowing gap, saw that his road lay momentarily open, and raced toward the portal, out into the cool night air, where stars blazed in a purple sky, and where La Boucherie, waited in the driveway.

  But the alarm had been given. Footsteps sounded. The grounds suddenly were bathed in a flow of brilliant white light.

  Something sighed, a sof
t whisper of death, and a pinprick stabbed Haversham’s back. Cold instantly numbed him. His heart jolted, lost its normal rhythm, and he knew that he was dying.

  He had almost reached the car. Its door was open, and La Boucherie was leaning out. Haversham reeled forward and threw the blanket-clad child as he collapsed. La Boucherie made a deft catch.

  The rubberoid pavement swung up _at Haversham in a tilting leap. He felt the impact dimly. Faintly he heard the soft whine of La Boucherie’s car as it shot into motion.

  The child was safe—his son would never be a Leader. That, at least, had been accomplished.

  His body rolled. He could see the tower of the hospital. Somewhere in that colossal structure was Margot. Margot!

  Above the tower loomed the giant figure of the blind goddess. She was leaning, he thought, about to fall and crush him. But as she toppled, somehow she dissolved into an infinity of twinkling star-points, and they faded into utter blackness.

  La Boucherie—that was his last thought . . .

  THE hag crouched against the wall, drawing her filthy rags closer about her, and watched La Boucherie lumbering back and forth across the tiny room. Once or twice she peered from the window, but no Guardsmen ever entered this underworld district where vice and crime hung like a miasmic cloud above the rotting tenements.

  La Boucherie whirled toward the pallet where the baby lay. He crouched like some immense vulture, gross and terrible, his cloak billowing. He thrust his head forward, glaring down.

  “Martin Haversham!” he whispered. “Mart Havers, it’ll be. We’ll train you—by the Eternal we’ll train you as no human has ever been trained before! You’ll win the game for us! But I won’t forget what John wanted, either.” The man’s small eyes flamed. “You’ll kill Alex Llewelyn, one of these days. And your mother, too. They’ll die, all of them, all those swine that robbed me! The time will come!”

  The pulpy, strong hands were a vulture’s claws.

  “And if you fail me, if you dare to fail me—”

  But Martin Haversham could not understand . . .

  Twenty-five years later, he still found it hard to understand. La Boucherie was fifty-five now, but the same flaming purpose that had fired him from the beginning was with him still.

  The world had grown older, too. It had not changed much. Science, art, and religion had sedately advanced under the great law of Justice. Inflexible Justice, blind and cold as the goddess, administered impartially by the Leaders in the country that was the whole planet.

  The Leaders. It was possible to trace the record back now, and see where the trend had begun, after the first kindling of atomic fire and the decade of political and moral chaos that followed. The two abortive wars that broke out and burned with atomic violence and were ended within weeks had left their scars deep in the social fabric. of mankind. And then MacKennow Greeley had come along, and provided the answer.

  There were many who thought the answer worse than the problem it had solved. But within ten years the Greeley party ruled the nation, and in another ten, the world.

  Politico-idealists, they called themselves, sometimes Puritans, most often Cromwellians. Inflexible justice was their keystone—mechanical, unyielding justice, based on Greeley’s theory as set forth in his “Culture of Man.” Natural selection was his chief basic. He wrote:

  In the past there have been leaders born in every era—the mystics Buddha, Appollonius, Confucius; the scientists Newton, Edison, Darwin; the statesmen Machiavelli, Disraeli, Caesar; the politico-conquerors Genghis Khan, Cromwell, Napoleon. They were certainly not supermen, but they possessed capabilities and potentialities beyond those of the average men. Such powers should be trained by, and should work for humanity and the social unit. These men are the minds of the race. They must be recognized, cultivated, trained to utilize their full powers.

  Technologically it was a new era. Electronics had begun to reach maturity. Turbojet engines revolutionized flying. New antibiotics brightened the medical outlook. And one day long before, in November, 1946, a man in a light plane had dropped six pounds of dry ice pellets into a cloud and created the first artificial snowstorm.

  Out of that beginning a great science grew. Since the days of creation man had been slave of the weather, until now. The Deluge, the Ice Ages, hurricanes, droughts, the Dust Bowl—all that, was coming under control; imperfectly, true, but it was a beginning. In a way, a futile beginning, for before long thinking men realized there could be no real advance beyond the present.

  The Cromwellians dared not allow advances, for advance meant change, and stasis was the foundation upon which their world was built.

  In that world Mart Havers grew up, and La Boucherie grew older.

  La Boucherie had weathered the quarter-century well enough, as-fat men often do. His hair was white now; his eyes were chilly. The fat had turned to granite,-but this was not apparent to the casual glance of the social world which knew him so well.

  He sat back, on a winter night, in his deeply cushioned relaxer, smiling down the dimmed length of a club-size autocar. His smile was more-than ever the lipless smile of a skull, but few people sensed that.

  Tonight he was taking a party slumming, out of shining, luxurious Reno into the notorious Slag between the city and the spaceports. Most of the crowd were youngsters, to whom La Boucherie was as unchanging a figure in society as the colored plastic figure of Greeley in Washington, or the goddess on Bedloe’s Island.

  UNDER the cold blue stars, through streets of peacock-plastics lighted with shifting colors, the club-car glided smoothly. Some of the crowd were dancing in the broad aisle to the sentimental strains of a waltz. A few leaned at the little bar at the car’s far end, sipping cocktails and watching the dancers. In deep relaxers around the ribbed walls duennas and a fierce mother or two sat watchfully. Conventions had stiffened into, iron rigidity in twenty-five years. Conventions that were anachronisms.

  The girls, whirling in the waltz, swayed their bright colored skirts that belled out over ruffled petticoats. Their small, heelless slippers whispered on the plastic floor. The young men thrust their short capes out with a jaunty elbow cocked, hands resting ostentatiously near the hilts of their light-swords, those weapons without which no brawling dandy was fully equipped. Most of the young faces bore the scars of those dueling swords, and La Boucherie’s pale wisps of brows lifted ironically.

  Light-swords. Toys for quarrelsome children. Translucent hilts of glowing plastic swung in a scabbard at each gallant’s hip, ready to leap to the owner’s hand and spit out its long blade of burning force for the duel. And because those blades could inflict superficial burns, painful for a day, these brawlers thought themselves romantically one with the great swashbucklers of legend. The harmless fencing with force-blade spattering sparks from force-blade was no farce to them, but a serious matter of face lost or gained. La Boucherie’s lipless mouth widened.

  Mart, now, he thought. Young Mart Havers, waiting tonight—in a thieves’ den in the Slag, waiting for him. Whatever his faults, Mart was no posturing fool like these. But as for Mart’s faults—that was another matter.

  La Boucherie looked out past the ornate windows of the car, past the colored walls of Reno where light crawled in ceaselessly changing hues. He did not see the swirl of thin snow blowing past the glass. He was remembering what young Mart had cost him in despair, in heartbreak, in bloody ruin of all his hopes and plans. If Mart had grown into a superman in the years since that terrible time when he had been forcibly taken-from the hospital, he could scarcely have compensated La Boucherie for all he had unwittingly caused.

  But Mart was no superman.

  His kidnapping, twenty-five years ago—the abduction of a potential Leader—had been the first step in La Boucherie’s great plan to supply his Freemen with the leadership they, must have. Or at least a figurehead. He himself was quite as capable as any leader, he thought, but he did not have the name, and that was all-important. Mart had been chosen to be a Leader, and theref
ore should have shown the qualities for leadership which he did not.

  CHAPTER III

  To Be Free!

  FROM the beginning La Boucherie’s plan had gone wrong. Because of Mart Havers, the Freeman had faced disaster immediately.

  The child’s abduction had touched off a spark igniting massacre all over the world. It was a second slaughter of the Huguenots. No one liked to look back on that bloody time when three thousand Freemen died at the hands of the Leaders’ Guardsmen. They were hunted down like wolves. Informers were paid bounties.

  But La Boucherie had escaped. No breath of suspicion had touched him, miraculously enough.

  He smiled, broad chest expanding as he breathed deep.

  The dancing had stopped within the club autocar, and soft-voiced girls and men were gathering at the windows to stare out at the fabulous Slag. La Boucherie watched a girl in coral-pink flirt her curls sideward and coquettishly tap the man next to her with a fan. Her laughter tinkled artificially through the car. La Boucherie, while admiring the girl’s exquisitely unreal prettiness, let his own dark hatred of her and all she represented come welling up almost luxuriously in the depths of his mind.

  How much the world had changed, he thought, since he was as young as this coquette! He could remember when functional lines in building and designing had been, beautiful, when clothes had been unadorned, and women as straightforward as men. But he could remember it only dimly, for even in his youth the change had been beginning.

  Among the disciplined masses, he had watched today’s flamboyance grow, and had grown with it. He wore clothing as gorgeous as any; he liked wearing it. But he loathed the implication behind these bright swashbuckling styles. He was conditioned now to admire the rococo buildings of modern tradition, the colors splashed on colors, the decorations upon decorations. The clean, functional lines of yesterday looked unfinished to him now, threadbare and outdated. But still he hated all that lay between functionalism and today’s rococo.