Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  I fergot to say I’d made myself invisible too, after I’d snuck in, seen Mr. Armbruster was still asleep, and noticed the excitement.

  “Grandpaw told me what was happening,” Maw said. “I figgered we’d better stay out’n the way for a while. Raining hard, ain’t it?”

  “Shore is,” I said. “What’s everybody so excited about?”

  “They cain’t figger out what become of us,” Maw told me. “Soon as the ruckus quiets down, we’ll all go home. You fixed it, I guess.”

  “I done what Grandpaw said,” I explained, and then there was sudden yells from down the corridor. A little old fat coon came trundling in, carrying a bundle of sticks. He come right along till he got to the bars in front of where we was. Then he sot himself down and begun arranging the sticks to make a fire. He had that dazed look in his eyes, so I knew Lemuel must of hypnotized him.

  PEOPLE came crowding around outside. They couldn’t see us, natcherally, but they were watching that there little old coon. I watched too, on account of I never was able to figger out how Lemuel could get the critter skun. I seen them build fires before—Lemuel could make ‘em do that—but I just never happened to be around when one of his coons stripped down and skun hisself. That I wanted to see.

  Just before the coon got started, though, a policeman put him in a bag and took him away, so I never did know. It was light by then. I kept hearing bellers from somewheres, and once I heard a voice I knew sing out.

  “Maw,” I said, “that sounds like Mr. Armbruster. I better go see what they’re doing to the pore little guy.”

  “Time we was going home,” she said. “We got to dig up Grandpaw and the baby. You say the water wheel’s turning?”

  “Yes, Maw,” I said. “There’s plenty electric power now.”

  She reached around till she found Paw and whammed him. “Wake up,” she said.

  “Have a drink,” Paw said.

  But she roused him and said we was going home. Ain’t nobody can wake up Lemuel, though. Finally Maw and Paw took Lemuel between them and flew out through the window, after I fixed the bars so they could get through. They stayed invisible, on account of there was a crowd down below. It was raining, but Maw said they warn’t made of sugar nor salt, and I’d better come along or I’d get my britches tanned.

  “Yes, Maw,” I said, but I wasn’t going to. I stayed behind. I was going to find out what they were doing to Mr. Armbruster.

  They had him in that big room with the lights on. Mr. Gandy was standing by the window, looking real mean, and they had Mr. Armbruster’s sleeve rolled up and was going to stick a sort of glass needle into his hide. Well! Right away I made myself get visible again.

  “You better not do that,” I said.

  “It’s the Hogben kid!” somebody yelled. “Grab him!”

  They grabbed me. I let ‘em. Pretty soon I was sitting in a chair with my sleeve rolled up, and Mr. Gandy was grinning at me like a wolf.

  “Use the truth serum on him,” he said. “No need to ask that tramp questions now.”

  Kind of dazed, Mr. Armbruster kept saying, “I don’t know what happened to Saunk! I wouldn’t tell you if I knew——”

  They whammed him.

  Mr. Gandy stuck his face right into mine.

  “We’ll get the truth about that uranium pile now,” he told me. “One shot of this and you’ll answer our questions. Understand?”

  So they stuck the needle in my arm and squirted the stuff into me. It tickled.

  Then they asked me questions. I said I didn’t know nothing. Mr. Gandy said to give me another shot. They done it.

  It tickled worse than ever.

  Right then somebody ran into the room and started yelling.

  “The dam’s busted!” he bellered. “The Gandy Dam! It’s flooded out half the farms in the south valley!”

  Mr. Gandy rared back and squalled. “You’re crazy!” he told everybody. “It’s impossible! There’s been no water in Big Bear River for a hundred years!”

  Then they all got together and started whispering. Something about samples. And a big mob downstairs.

  “You’ve got to calm ‘em down,” somebody told Mr. Gandy. “They’re boiling mad. All the crops ruined——”

  “I’ll calm ‘em down,” Mr. Gandy said. “There’s no proof. And only a week before election!”

  He rushed out of the room and everybody ran out after him. I got up out of my chair and scratched. That stuff they pumped into me itched fearful inside my skin. I was kind of mad at Mr. Gandy.

  “Quick!” Mr. Armbruster said. “Let’s sneak out. Now’s our chance.”

  WE SNUCK out the back way. It was easy. We circled around to the front, and there was a big mob standing there in the rain. Up on the court-house steps was Mr. Gandy, mean as ever, facing a big, husky feller who was waving a chunk of rock.

  “Every dam has its breaking point,” Mr. Gandy said, but the big feller roared and shook the rock over his haid.

  “I know good concrete from bad!” he bellered. “This stuff’s all sand. That dam wouldn’t hold a gallon of water backed up behind it!”

  Mr. Gandy shook his haid.

  “Outrageous!” he said. “I’m just as shocked as you are. Of course we gave out the contracts in all good faith. If the Ajax Construction Company used shoddy material, we’ll certainly sue them.”

  At that point I got so tired of itching that I decided to do something about it. So I did.

  The husky feller stepped back a pace and pointed his finger at Mr. Gandy. “Listen,” he said. “There’s a rumor around that you own the Ajax Construction Company. Do you?”

  Mr. Gandy opened his mouth and closed it. He shivered a little.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I own it.”

  You should of heard the roar that went up from that mob.

  The big feller sort of gasped.

  “You admit it? Maybe you’ll admit that you knew the dam was no good, too, huh? How much did you make out of the deal?”

  “Eleven thousand dollars,” Mr. Gandy said. “That was net, after I’d paid off the sheriff, the aldermen, and——”

  But at that point the crowd sort of moved up the steps, and there wasn’t no more heard from Mr. Gandy.

  “Well, well,” said Mr. Armbruster. “Now I’ve seen everything. Know what this means, Saunk? Gandy’s gone crazy. He must have. But the reform administration will go in, they’ll throw out all the crooks, and I will have a pleasant life in Piperville once more. Until I move south, that is. Come winter, I always move south. By a strange happenstance, I find I have a few coins in my pocket. Will you join me in a drink, Saunk?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Maw’ll be wondering where I got to. Won’t there be no more trouble, Mr. Armbruster?”

  “Eventually,” he said. “But not for quite awhile. They’re carrying old Gandy into the jail, see? For his own protection, probably. I must celebrate this, Saunk. Sure you won’t—Saunk! Where are you?”

  But I had went invisible.

  Well, that was all there was to it. I didn’t itch no more, so I flew back home and helped rig up the electric current from the water wheel. After a time the flood had died down, but we got a steady flow down the crick thereafter, because of the way I’d arranged things upstream. We settled down to the sort of quiet life we Hogbens like. It’s safest, for us.

  Grandpaw said it was quite a flood. It reminded him of something his Grandpaw had told him. Seems like when Grandpaw’s Grandpaw was alive, they had uranium piles and a lot more, and pretty soon the things got out of hand and they had a real flood. Grandpaw’s Grandpaw had to move out of the country right fast. Ain’t nothing been heard of the place from that day to this. I gather everybody in Atlantis got drowned daid. But they was only furriners.

  Mr. Gandy went to jail. Nobody ever knew what made him confess the way he did; maybe he got an attack of conscience. I don’t suppose it could of been because of me. ‘Tain’t likely. Still——

  Remember that tric
k Paw showed me about making a short-circuit in space and pumping the corn likker from his blood into mine? Well, I got tired of itching where I couldn’t scratch it, so I used that trick myself. That stuff they’d squirted into me was making me itch, whatever it was. I just twisted space around a mite and pumped it right into Mr. Gandy’s blood, up where he was standing on them court-house steps. After that I stopped itching, but Mr. Gandy must have been itching real bad. Served him right, though.

  Wonder if it could have plumb itched him into telling the truth?

  THE MASK OF CIRCE

  Summoned by luring voices from the past, fay Seward assumes the role of Jason in an epochal journey to the fabulous land of the legends!

  CHAPTER I

  Enchanted Seas

  TALBOT drew on his pipe and squinted across the campfire at the face of the man who was speaking softly, slowly, the words coming one upon another in the patterns of the strangest tale Talbot had ever heard.

  Jay Seward’s face was bronze in the flickering firelight. It might have been a mask hammered out of metal, with the tall Canadian pines a background and the moonlight silvering it with strange highlights. They were far away from civilized places, these two, and the tale Jay Seward told might have sounded wildly improbable in more prosaic surroundings. But here and now, it did not seem strange at all . . .

  Jay Seward had been restless all that day. Talbot, who had known him only a week, was more and more aware as time went by that his companion was somehow a haunted man. He seemed to be waiting for something—watching for something. He kept his head turned a little, whatever else he did, so that the sounds of the sea down at the foot of the pine slope were always clear in his ears, as though he expected some other sound than the splashing of the waves.

  But it was not until an hour ago, after sunset, sitting by the campfire, that at last he began to talk.

  “This isn’t real,” Seward declared suddenly, glancing around the moon-drenched clearing. “I feel as if I’d stepped back in time a year. I was up here just a year ago, you know. I was a pretty sick man. Then something happened, and—” He did not finish, but you could see his thoughts move off along a familiar trail of remembering.

  Talbot said, “It’s a good country to get well in.” He spoke cautiously, hoping not to break the spell of Seward’s thinking. He was very curious about this man; he wanted to hear the tale he felt sure was coming.

  Seward laughed. “My mind was sick. And I couldn’t stay away from the ocean.” He turned his head a little and his nostrils flared as if he tried to draw into his lungs the deepest savor of the salt wind that moved through the pines. A faint thunder of breakers came with it, and Seward stirred restlessly.

  “I was drowning,” he said simply. “Drowning in an unknown ocean that touched—strange shores. Do you mind if I talk? I think it’ll bring everything back clearer—and I want to bring it back. Tonight I don’t understand it—tonight something’s going to happen. Don’t ask me what. If I told you you wouldn’t believe me. And I won’t make apologies for—for what I know happened. I’m not out of my head—I never have been. I know—” He paused, and laughed, faintly apologetic.

  “Go on,” Talbot said, drawing on his pipe. “I’d like to hear it, whatever it is.”

  “If you don’t mind a long story, I will. Maybe it’ll help.” He glanced at the mist wreathing among the pines. “It was like that on Aeaea,” he said. “Always—misty. Veiled.”

  “Aeaea?”

  “The Isle of the Enchantress.” He shrugged impatiently. “All right, I’ll tell you.”

  SEWARD shifted a little so that his back was against a fallen log and his face to the darkness that hid the ocean. In a slow Voice he began to talk.

  “Three years ago I was in the States, working with a man named Ostrend on a new type of psychiatric research. That’s my line—psychiatry. Ostrend was a wonderful man in his field—blast him!

  “It was the sodium pentathol narcosynthesis that started us off—and we went too far. Ostrend was a genius. Before we finished we’d crossed the boundaries of known psychological research and—” Seward broke off, hesitated, and began again.

  “Narcosynthesis is a new method of exploring the brain. You know the principle? Under a hypnotic the patient is forced to look back on his own crises, things buried in his unconscious mind—the unpleasant things he doesn’t want to remember consciously. The catharsis usually brings about a cure.

  “Ostrend and I went farther than that. I won’t tell you the methods we used. But we were, alternately, our own guinea pigs, and the day we succeeded, I was the specimen on the slide . . .

  “Crises buried in the past—how far back? What I remembered—Ostrend made a transcript of it as he questioned me. I didn’t know what was happening till I woke. But after that the memories came back. Even if I hadn’t read Ostrend’s record, I’d have remembered. A crisis buried far in the past, dredged up out of my subconscious.

  “It should have stayed there, buried! Narcosynthesis is a fine and useful psychiatric treatment, but we reached beyond the normal limits. Ancestral memories, transmitted through the genes and chromosomes from my ancestors down through my lineage until I inherited them.

  “Latent memories of one of my ancestors—a man who has become a myth. Who may never have existed.

  “Yet I know he existed. He lived, in a time and world so long ago that nothing but legends remain now. And he went through a crisis there that was ineradicably impressed on his mind—and buried in his unconscious.

  “A memory he passed down to his sons, and his son’s sons.

  “A memory of a voyage—in a ship manned by heroes, with Orpheus at the prow. Orpheus, whose lyre could raise the dead—

  “Orpheus—who is a myth today. Like the other heroes who went on that great, fabulous voyage—

  “My memories went back and back to time’s dawn.

  “I was Jason!

  “Jason—who sailed in the Argo to Colchis and stole the Golden Fleece from the sacred serpent-temple, where scaled Python guarded that shining treasure of the god Apollo . . .

  “The memories did not pass. They stayed with me. I seemed to have two minds. Things I could never have heard or noticed as Jay Seward I heard and saw after that narcosynthetic treatment. The sea called me. I—I heard a voice sometimes. It wasn’t calling Jay Seward. It was calling Jason, Jason of Iolcus, Jason of the Argo. And I was Jason. At least, I had his memories.

  “Some of them. Shadowy, confused—but I remembered many things from the life of that ancestor of mine. And some of those things, I knew, could never have existed on this old Earth of ours. Not even in the enchanted seas of the Argonauts.

  “The conch shell of Triton seemed to summon me. Where? Back to that forgotten past? I didn’t know . . .

  “I tried to get away. I tried to break the spell. It was impossible to continue my work, of course. And Ostrend couldn’t help me. No one could. I came up here as a last resort over a year ago. In the train, out of Seattle, I thought for a while that I’d got away.

  “But I hadn’t. Up here, a year ago, I heard that soundless call from the sea—and thought of ghosts and ghostly ships. I was afraid. Terribly afraid. I slept under the pines, and the wind brought to me the crack of sails in the wind, the creak of oarlocks.

  “And it brought the sound of a sweet, inhuman voice that called, “Jason! Jason of Thessaly! Come to me!”

  “That night I answered the call . . .”

  I STOOD on a rocky ledge jutting out above the swirl of waters. My memory was cloudy and confused. I could remember tossing uneasily in my sleeping-bag. I could remember bearing the wild, faint humming of tuned strings and a strange murmur that was not a voice—yet I knew what spoke. It was not the call that summoned Jason by name.

  No, this was very different.

  I was standing above the water. The fog had come down, smothering and silent. The moon must still have been high, for a silver radiance filtered through the mist, and beneath me wash
ed the sea, dark and filigreed white with foam.

  Very dimly I heard the sighing of strings and that alien murmuring from the fog. I knew the murmur. It was—the Argo’s keel, speaking in a voice none but a seer could understand.

  Something moved out there on the water, hidden by fog. I heard oarlocks creak. Slowly, slowly a shape swam into view. First I saw the great square of the sail, hanging limp against the high mast, and then, shadowy in that unearthly light, I saw the prow sweep toward me.

  Out of the fog the ship loomed—driving toward the jut of rock where I stood. One instant it rushed past beneath me, the decks not eight feet away, the mast towering above me as it dipped landward. I saw the oars go up in unison to avoid, snapping off against the rock.

  There were figures on the benches on the deck. Unreal figures. One held a lyre. The music swept out from that in rhythmic echoes.

  But more urgent still was the wordless voice that bubbled from the Argo’s keel as the ship plunged on beneath me.

  The memories of Jason surged up in my mind. Coldness and the shuddering sweat that always accompanied that wave of recollection swept chillingly over me. Jason—Jason—I was Jason!

  As the ship rushed past I sprang out, with all my strength, toward those ghostly decks sliding away below. They were solid planks I struck. My knees buckled. I fell and rolled, and then sprang up instantly, staring about me.

  The shore had already vanished. Only the silver mists surrounded the ship, luminous with moonlight.

  Jason? No, I was not Jason. I was Jay Seward—I—

  Realization, volition, came back to me terrifyingly.

  I knew what it was I had done—or had seemed to do and I knew this was either; a dream, or madness . . .

  CHAPTER II

  Mystic Ship