Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Suppose the Cromwellians had other fish to fry?”

  La Boucherie shook his head.

  “It’s impossible. We haven’t the ships or men or weapons. The Leaders are generally guarded. How far would the whole two hundred of us get in Reno, say?”

  “It’s still possible.”

  “We’d, be gunned down in the streets!”

  “By whom?”

  “The Guardsmen, you fool! The Guardsmen!”

  “Not if they were busy somewhere else,” Mart said. “Not if the whole world happened to be busy somewhere else. Misdirection’s the answer. The red herring. And a double play. You said we didn’t have a weapon. There’s a weapon right at our hands—the strongest one in the world. All we have to do is use it.”

  La Boucherie stilled.

  “Atomics?” he said, and his voice was not quite steady.

  “No,” Havers said, “we wouldn’t dare. And it wouldn’t solve our problem anyway. If we tried to fly a load of atom bombs over the key spots, our planes would be shot down long before we got there. Key spots are guarded.”

  “We have three planes—”

  “We’ll hijack more. But atomics isn’t the answer. We’ll want to strike at certain key spots that are constantly changing. The Cromwellians can’t guard them efficiently, because they’re so variable. And they won’t be expecting that sort of attack anyhow.”

  “What sort? What weapon are you talking about?”

  “Weather,” Mart said. “Just—weather . . .”

  THERE would be no chance for a second trial if they failed in the first attempt. Mart Havers knew that. And, in essence, the success or failure of the whole scheme depended on him, because he was the only man among them who knew Weather Control. He thanked his gods for the knowledge hypnotically implanted in his brain, and for the lab and field training he had had in the Weather Patrol.

  For he knew weather. And he had to know it, backward and forward. What he planned was such a sudden, tremendous catastrophe that, once started, it could not be stopped. Not easily, at least, and while the Weather Patrol was trying to stop it, the Freemen planes would be starting more trouble.

  The radio helped. A man was assigned to pick up and collate the weather reports, which ended on Mart’s cluttered desk and were transformed into cryptic charts that he pored over endlessly. Highs. Cold Fronts. Warm fronts. The sunspot cycles. Barometer readings. Movements of pressure areas. They all built into a single pattern, while Havers planned and plotted and waited for exactly the right moment.

  The moment would come, he knew; the time when a push in the right direction would cause the most trouble for the Cromwellians. One push wouldn’t be enough, but a series of rhythmic taps can move a planet. And Mart was thoroughly familiar with Weather Control. What he would need, presently, was equipment.

  That could be stolen.

  La Boucherie was the unquestioned leader in that field. He found what Havers wanted and arranged his commandos accordingly. Everything was worked out on paper first—everything but the weather, which was unpredictable after a certain point. But given the initial equation, the rest of the pattern would fall into place.

  One point seemed an insurmountable problem for a while—simple lack of man power. But it was Pusher Dingle who solved that.

  He remembered the Sherlock, the useful little radio-controlled robot mechanism and suggested its possibilities to Mart.

  “Can you make ’em?” Havers asked.

  “No. I stole that one. But I know where a lot more can be stolen.”

  “What about controlling them?”

  “There are portable controls. I wouldn’t have had to use that big lab, with so much equipment, if I could have got my hands on one of the control set-ups. But one man can’t steal too much at one time.”

  He explained further. Havers called in La Boucherie.

  It was La Boucherie who decided that question.

  “The Wisconsin factory. That’s the place. We’ll raid it, at the right time, and each man will get a Sherlock and its controller. Then we’ll spread out and keep moving. That way, nobody can get a direction on us and drop a bomb. We’ll decentralize and stay mobile. We can control the weather planes from other planes, which we’ll hijack first from various skyports.”

  So the work went on, under the frozen tundra at the Pole, while an air mass built up slowly above Newfoundland and the Azores High shifted westward. The oldest weapon in the world was being unsheathed, the hammer of Thor, the sword of Zeus, poised above the unsuspecting Earth.

  Hammer of the thunder. Sword of the ligthning.

  Out of the south cometh the whirlwind.

  * * * * *

  Zero hour.

  The three planes had been transformed into mobile transmitting units. That had been necessary. No directional antenna must be focused on the polar hideout, the nerve center of the offensive. Three planes cruised in erratic courses far from the Pole, receiving Mart’s commands and relaying them to the Freemen’s receivers.

  In Wisconsin. In Ontario. In California. In dozens of areas.

  They had filtered down two days before. The three planes had ferried them, and returned ready for their task. Almost all of the two hundred had gone, leaving a skeleton crew at the hideout.

  There was no need to keep unnecessary men here. If this cave were discovered, the fight was over. Everything depended on speed, indirection, one sudden, tremendous blow—and then a pattern amid general confusion.

  Havers’ section of the cavern had been walled off with screens in an attempt at privacy. Concentration was necessary. Makeshift tables and panels had been rigged, covered with charts and calculations. A sending set, non-visual, was beside him, with Georgina as its operator. A movable screen shut off La Boucherie, seated at an equally cluttered table, with another sending set near him.

  Zero hour had passed.

  La Boucherie lifted the screen.

  “Should be getting reports,” he said. That was true.

  ONE immediate problem had been to procure enough weapons, but there La Boucherie had provided a ready-made answer. For years past he had been building up caches of arms in various places around the country, preparing for revolution against Cromwellianism, though he had never expected this sort of battle.

  By now the two hundred should have provided themselves with weapons and scattered to their destinations—the airfields where they could hijack the necessary planes, the Weather Patrol airstrips where the specially equipped jetters could be obtained, the Wisconsin Sherlock factory.

  Timing would do it. Timing, and a sudden, concerted blow.

  The scrambler sent a stream of erratic noises through the cavern. Hastily La Boucherie switched on the unscrambler. It was one of the three relay ships reporting.

  “Sherlocks procured., Plan Sub-Four proceeding. T-thirty-one M-two-fourteen.”

  Havers met La Boucherie’s eyes and nodded. He could spare no more than a second for that. Instantly he was back at his maps, recalculating, integrating the latest weather reports Georgina was noting. The Azores High had shifted somewhat That meant a dozen other alternations in the pattern of weather that spun its tremendously complicated web across the globe. Certain key spots had moved in the last half hour.

  “Got any changes?” La Boucherie said. “Almost ready now.”

  Mart figured rapidly.

  “These changes,” he said. “Newfoundland Key—from twenty-five feet to fifteen thousand. Kodiak Basin—”

  La Boucherie relayed the new orders to the three receiving planes, and they in. turn relayed it, via code, to the Freemen. The code was hot uncrackable, but it would take a while for even the Cromwell experts to break it. That while might be long enough.

  Eighty planes, more or less, each with its Freeman pilot and a Freeman handling the controller of the Sherlock—super remote control. For the Sherlocks were in Weather Patrol planes, the specially equipped jobs which had almost reached their various destinations.

  “Tw
o of our planes have been shot down,” La Boucherie said.

  “Almost ready,” Mart told him. He examined his watch. “One more point to make sure of, that’s all. Georgina, anything on the Mojave adiabatic?”

  “Nothing new.”

  “Good enough. We’ll take a chance. Ready, La Boucherie?”

  “Planes Twenty-five, Sixty-one, Four and Nineteen aren’t at their key spots yet.”

  “Which planes were shot down?”

  “Twenty and Thirty-three. Wait a minute. Fifty-nine too, now.”

  “What’s the nearest to Twenty’s key area?”

  “Seven. Next nearest, Thirty.”

  “Seven we need. Jerk Thirty to Twenty’s key spot. Ready?”

  “Forty-six is down.” Mart glanced at his charts. “We can’t wait any longer,” he said. “The pattern’s as tight as we can hope to get it.”

  He drew a long breath. La Boucherie watched him, his blunt fingers poised over the signal key.

  “Zero,” Havers said.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Thunder and Lightning—Storm, and Flood

  SEVENTY-FOUR planes, scattered across the planet, sent but the radio impulses that activated seventy-four Sherlock robots, at the controls of seventy-four Weather Patrol ships. Simultaneously special equipment began to operate.

  Down toward cloud masses plummeted pounds of dry ice.

  Crashing trigger voltages of artificial lightning split the atmosphere at crucial points.

  Monstrous parcels of air hesitated, shifted, and moved ponderously in new directions. Snow began to pour down from certain cloud areas. Depressions, tropical air masses, cold fronts—all were altered abruptly from their original pattern.

  Altered into a new pattern of catastrophe.

  Beaufort Number 12 winds had been limited to tropical revolving storms until this day. But now gales topping the 75 m.p.h. velocity began to march across the face of the Earth.

  Out of the south cometh the whirlwind.

  Weather takes time to develop, usually. That was why Havers had waited until all the elements were ready, poised in dangerous equilibrium, waiting only for the catalyst he had provided. Even so, the great air masses can move at only a certain speed. They are ponderous. But they are also nearly irresistible.

  Cromwell civilization had its key spots, too. The communication and transportation centers, for example. Mart had waited until he could immobilize those, until the unstable, shifting weather giant had poised his iron-shod foot about the nerve centers of Cromwellianism.

  Far beneath the frozen tundra they heard nothing. But they knew what was happening. At first the radio gave reports. Then that failed in screaming static. A handicap, perhaps, but more of a handicap for the Cromwellians, who did not have a prearranged plan.

  La Boucherie’s plan was already in operation. Each Freeman knew what his task was to be. Some were to remain in control of the Weather planes. These men Mart had given the rudiments of Weather training, so he hoped they would know what to do. The weather crisis must not be allowed to pass. It must be kept at full intensity, even though the Cromwell Weather Patrol would be doing its best to bring the storms under control.

  Thirty-six hours later Havers turned to La Boucherie and said;

  “We’ve shot our bolt. Short of wiping out civilization, we’ve done all we dare now. I think we’ve got them on the run. It’ll take time to be sure, but . . . I wish the radio were working.”

  La Boucherie turned from the map wall, under whose high, concave side he had spent most of the lapsed hours, keeping the records in colored chalks as reports poured in.

  “You look half dead,” he said. “Better lie down a while. I’ll wake you if you’re needed.”

  For the first time Havers realized how near collapse he really was. The cavern wavered before him as his taut nerves began at last to relax. He looked up at La Boucherie, standing under the hollow patterned world as it arched above him. There were scarlet rings around ten principal cities—Reno and Chicago among them—where the nerve centers of the Cromwellian culture had their being.

  Every city must by now be helpless, communications cut off, air impassable to flight traffic. Intricate symbols sweeping across the map traced the course of pressure areas moving ponderously under the goads of the Freemen planes.

  “I think we’ve done it,” Havers said.

  “Think?” La Boucherie demanded. “Don’t you know?”

  “This is ticklish business. Too much pushing could bring on wholesale disaster. I’ve explained all that before. As much as I dare do I’ve already done. Now we can only wait.”

  La Boucherie was silent. Then he went with his incongruously light step to the chart table and leafed over the big scribbled sheets. He had learned more than a little from Mart in the past weeks, and he could read the charts with a fair degree of accuracy now. Clearly he knew what he wanted. In a moment he turned up an X’d-out chart and spread it across the table with a crackling sweep. He knocked his fat knuckles against it.

  “This one, Mart. Remember?”

  Havers glanced up as he pulled off his boot. The cot creaked under him.

  “Forget it,” he said in a weary voice. “That’s the one we worked out not to use. It’s okay now. We won’t need it.”

  He had charted out the more perilous, possibilities that could result from this herding of the storms, simply to have a map that would warn him away from danger. Whenever a curve plotted from the incoming reports swung its arc too near that danger pattern Mart could check with this master plan and reroute the ships.

  “We’re fighting the Cromwellians, not the whole world,” he said. “Some lives have got to be lost but no more than we can help. Tear that out now, will you? And wake me if anything comes up.”

  LA BOUCHERIE came forward with his soft tread and pulled a screen around the cot where they had taken turns in catnapping.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  Mart was dimly aware of lights being turned low beyond the screen, so that only the soft blue flame of the trioxane heat-tabs glowed upon the walls. He could hear the inarticulate radio stuttering out static, and La Boucherie’s heavy breathing as he rustled papers at the desk.

  Then sleep was like a thick, soft blanket shutting out everything. Above, thunder and lightning, snow and storm and flood raged across the world. But here Mart Havers slept sound.

  He dreamed that Daniele’s wild-rose face bent above him, her fair hair brushing his cheek. He dreamed that she was calling him, and he woke with a jolt, the voice out of his dream still echoing softly around the cavern.

  Nothing had changed. The blue flame glowed on. He might have slept minutes or hours. There was still the occasional rustle of papers, the steady crackle of static, the almost inaudible buzz of voices in La Boucherie’s earphones and his soft rumble of instructions in reply. It was curiously peaceful down here under the frozen tundra at the top of the world.

  Then in the stutter of the radio a voice for a moment spoke with freakish clearness. It said only a few words, but the words brought Mart up on his cot with galvanizing force.

  “—tidal wave that wiped out Galveston now leveling off inland around—”

  The squeal of static broke in and silenced the rest of the sentence, while Mart stared at the blue-lit screen and wondered if he were still dreaming, He waited, frozen with incredulity, and in a while the static broke again and another voice said in quick, quiet phrases:

  “—hurricane-flattened eastern coast reports thousands of deaths in—”

  The screen went over with a crash as Mart sprang to his feet. La Boucherie, crouching over the desk, whirled and stared at him in surprise. And then a terrifying look of triumph and cunning moved his thin lips and narrowed his eyes. It was not quite a sane look, and Mart felt his heart jump and pause for a second before it began to thump faster with dismay and dawning rage.

  “How long have I slept?” he demanded.

  But he did not wait for an answe
r, for his eyes met the recorder dial on the desk. And he saw, with a sinking distress, the answer. Twenty-six hours. Time enough for the storms he had launched to begin leveling off, time enough for the Freemen to begin their negotiations with the Cromwellians isolated in their beleaguered cities—if all had gone according to plan.

  But it had not. He knew he had not dreamed those radio reports. La Boucherie’s face would have told him that if all else, failed to tell him.

  And it was Havers himself who had furnished the plans for disaster. He should have known. He should have set some guard while he slept. He should have—

  “No matter now. Too late for all that. In his stocking feet he thudded across the cavern and looked up at the map-lined hollow above. A glance was enough. Where only ten ringed cities had spoken of siege before he slept, every capital in the nation was shadowed now with the marks that told of ruin already accomplished or already on the way. Irrevocably on the way.

  Not even the Storm Smashers could smash these expertly launched disasters in the time that remained to them. For the climatic gyroscope of the whole hemisphere had been thrown off balance at La Boucherie’s orders by now.

  Mart read the tale, of tidal wave, hurricane, overwhelming floods whenever he looked. A second Deluge, a new Ice Age in the making—and lives must already be lost beyond any counting by those left alive in the ruined areas.

  As he stared, stunned, La Boucherie’s soft laughter penetrated at last through his daze. He turned. La Boucherie’s face was crimson, his great bulk heaved with the deep waves of his merriment. And it was not the merriment of a sane man.

  “I’ve done it!” La Boucherie said between the gusts of his mirth. “I’ve done it at last! They smashed me twice and they thought I was finished, but this time I’ve smashed them! The last laugh’s La Boucherie’s, after all.”

  “But why—why?” Havers could not shape his words, but the fat-man seemed to understand. He slapped both big hands on the desk.