Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

“You’ll find out,” Veronica said. She gave him that thin smile again and then the door closed behind her. He heard her heels click once or twice on the walk and she was gone. There was nothing he could do about it.

  He didn’t know what she had accomplished. That was the terrifying thing. She had talked to Norman—And Norman had been in an almost coherent mood today. If she asked the right questions, she could have learned—almost anything. About the magic window and the super-sonics and the lighting. About Norman himself. About—even about a weapon she could use against Fowler. Norman would make one if he were told to. He was an automaton. He could not reason; he could only comply.

  Perhaps she had a weapon, then. But what? Fowler knew nothing at all of Veronica’s mind. He had no idea what sort of revenge she might take if she had a field as limitless as Norman’s talents offered her. Fowler had never been interested in Veronica’s mind at all. He had no idea what sort of being crouched there behind her forehead as the prisoner crouched behind Norman’s. He only knew that it would have a thin smile and that it hated him.

  “You’ll find out,” Veronica had said. But it was several days before he did, and even then he could not be sure. So many things could have been accidental. Although he tried desperately he could not find Veronica anywhere in the city. But he kept thinking her eyes were on him, that if he could turn quickly enough he would catch her staring.

  “That’s what makes voodoo magic work,” he told himself savagely. “A man can scare himself to death, once he knows he’s been threatened—”

  Death, of course, had nothing to do with it. Clearly it was no part of her plan that her enemy should die—and escape her. She knew what Fowler would hate most—ridicule.

  Perhaps the things that kept happening were accidents. The time he tripped over nothing and did a foolishly clownish fall for the amusement of a long line of people waiting before a ticket window. His ears burned whenever he remembered that. Or the time he had three embarrassing slips of the tongue in a row when he was trying to make a good impression on a congressman and his pompous wife in connection with a patent. Or the time in the Biltmore dining room when he dropped every dish or glass he touched, until the whole room was staring at him and the headwaiter was clearly of two minds about throwing him out.

  It was like a perpetual time bomb. He never knew what would happen next, or when or where. And it was certainly sheer imagination that made him think he could hear Veronica’s clear, high, ironic laughter whenever his own body betrayed him into one of these ridiculous series of slips.

  He tried shaking the truth out of Norman.

  “What did you do?” he demanded of the blank, speechless face. “What did she make you do? Is there something wrong with my synapses now? Did you rig up something that would throw me out of control whenever she wants me to? What did you do, Nor man?”

  But Norman could not tell him.

  On the third day she televised the house. Fowler went limp with relief when he saw her features taking shape in the screen. But before he could speak she said sharply: “All right, John. I only have a minute to waste on you. I just wanted you to know I’m really going to start to work on you beginning next week. That’s all, John. Good-by.”

  The screen would not make her face form again no matter how sharply he rapped on it.-no matter how furiously he jabbed the buttons to call her back. After awhile he relaxed limply in his chair and sat staring blankly, at the wall. And now he began to be afraid—

  It had been a long time since Fowler faced a crisis in which he could not turn to Norman for help. And Norman was no use to him now. He could not or would not produce a device that Fowler could use as protection against the nameless threat. He could give him no inkling of what weapon he had put in Veronica’s hand.

  It might be a bluff. Fowler could not risk it. He had changed a great deal in three years, far more than he had realized until this crisis arose. There had been a time when his mind was flexible enough to assess dangers coolly and resourceful enough to produce alternative pleasures to meet them. But not any more. He had depended too long on Norman to solve all his problems for him. Now he was helpless. Unless—

  He glanced again at that stunning alternative and then glanced mentally away, impatient, knowing it for an impossibility. He had thought of it often in the past week, but of course it couldn’t be done. Of course—

  He got up and went into the windowless room where Norman sat quietly, staring at nothing. He leaned against the door frame and looked at Norman. There in that shuttered skull lay a secret more precious than any miracle Norman had yet produced. The brain, the mind, the source. The mysterious quirk that brought forth golden eggs.

  “There’s a part of your brain in use that normal brains don’t have,” Fowler said thoughtfully aloud. Norman did not stir. “Maybe you’re a freak. Maybe you’re a mutation. But there’s something like a thermostat in your head. When it’s activated, your mind’s activated, too. You don’t use the same brain-centers I do. You’re an idling motor. When the supercharger cuts in something begins to work along lines of logic I don’t understand. I see the result, but I don’t know what the method is. If I could know that—”

  He paused and stared piercingly at the bent head. “If I could only get that secret out of you, Norman! It’s no good to you. But there isn’t any limit to what I could do with it if I had your secret and my own brain.”

  If Norman heard he made no motion to show it. But some impulse suddenly goaded Fowler to action. “I’ll do it!” he declared. “I’ll try it! What have I got to lose, anyhow? I’m a prisoner here as long as this goes on, and Norman’s no good to me the way things stand. It’s worth a try.”

  He shook the silent man by the shoulder. “Norman, wake up, Wake up, wake up, wake up. Norman, do you hear me? Wake up, Norman, we have work to do.”

  Slowly, out of infinite distances, the prisoner returned to his cell, crept forward in the bone cage of the skull and looked dully at Fowler out of deep sockets.

  And Fowler was seized with a sudden, immense astonishment that until now he had never really considered this most obvious of courses. Norman could do it. He was quite confident of that, suddenly. Norman could and must do it. This was the point toward which they had both been moving ever since Norman first rang the doorbell years ago. It had taken Veronica and a crisis to make the thing real. But now was the time—time and past time for the final miracle.

  Fowler was going to become sufficient unto himself.

  “You’re going to get a nice long rest, Norman,” he said kindly. “You’re going to help me learn to . . . to think the way you think. Do you understand, Norman? Do you know what it is that makes your brain work the way it does? I want you to help my brain think that way, too. Afterward, you can rest, Norman. A nice, long rest. I won’t be needing you any more after that, Norman.”

  Norman worked for twenty-four hours without a break. Watching him, forcing down the rising excitement in his mind, Fowler thought the blank man too seemed overwrought at this last and perhaps greatest of all his tasks. He mumbled a good deal over the intricate wiring of the thing he was twisting together. It looked rather like a tesseract, an open, interlocking framework which Norman handled with great care. From time to time he looked up and seemed to want to talk, to protest. Fowler ordered him sternly back to his task.

  When it was finished it looked a little like the sort of turban a sultan might wear. It even had a jewel set in the front, like a headlight, except that this jewel really was light. All the wires came together there, and out of nowhere the bluish radiance sprang, shimmering softly in its little nest of wiring just above the forehead. It made Fowler think of an eye gently opening and closing. A thoughtful eye that looked up at him from between Norman’s hands.

  At the last moment Norman hesitated. His face was gray with exhaustion as he bent above Fowler, holding out the turban. Like Charlemagne, Fowler reached impatiently for the thing and set it on his own head. Norman bent reluctantly to adjust it.
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  There was a singing moment of anticipation—

  The turban was feather-light on his head, but wherever it touched it made his scalp ache a bit, as if every hair had been pulled the wrong way. The aching grew. It wasn’t only the hair that was going the wrong way, he realized suddenly—

  It wasn’t only his hair, but his mind—

  It wasn’t only—

  Out of the wrenching blur that swallowed up the room he saw Norman’s anxious face take shape, leaning close. He felt the crown of wire lifted from his head. Through a violent, blinding ache he watched Norman grimace with bewilderment.

  “No,” Norman said. “No . . . wrong . . . you . . . wrong—”

  “I’m wrong?” Fowler shook his head a little and the pain subsided, but not the feeling of singing anticipation, nor the impatient disappointment at this delay. Any moment now might bring some interruption, might even bring some new, unguessable threat from Veronica that could ruin everything.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, schooling himself to patience. “Me? How am I wrong, Norman? Didn’t anything happen?”

  “No. Wrong . . . you—”

  “Wait, now.” Fowler had had to help work out problems like this before. “O.K., I’m wrong. How?” He glanced around the room. “Wrong room?” he suggested at random. “Wrong chair? Wrong wiring? Do I have to co-operate somehow?” The last question seemed to strike a response. “Cooperate how? Do you need help with the wiring? Do I have to do something after the helmet’s on?”

  “Think!” Norman said violently. “I have to think?”

  “No. Wrong, wrong. Think wrong.”

  “I’m thinking wrong?”

  Norman made a gesture of despair and turned away toward his room, carrying the wire turban with him.

  Fowler, rubbing his forehead where the wires had pressed, wondered dizzily what had happened.

  Think wrong. It didn’t make sense. He looked at himself, in the television screen, which was a mirror when not in use, fingered the red line of the turban’s pressure, and murmured, “Thinking, something to do with thinking. What?” Apparently the turban was designed to alter his patterns of thought, to open up some dazzling door through which he could perceive the new causalities that guided Norman’s mind.

  He thought that in some way it was probably connected with that moment when the helmet had seemed to wrench first his hair and then his skull and then his innermost thoughts in the wrong direction. But he couldn’t work it out. He was too tired. All the emotional strain of the past days, the menace still hanging over him, the tremulous excitement of what lay in the immediate future—no, he couldn’t be expected to reason things through very clearly just now. It was Norman’s job. Norman would have to solve that problem for them both.

  Norman did. He came out of his room in a few minutes, carrying the turban, twisted now into a higher, rounder shape, the gem of light glowing bluer than before. He approached Fowler with a firm step.

  “You . . . thinking wrong,” he said with great distinctness. “Too . . . too old. Can’t change. Think wrong!”

  He stared anxiously at Fowler and Fowler stared back, searching the deep-set eyes for some clue to the meaning hidden in the locked chambers of the skull behind them.

  “Thinking wrong.” Fowler echoed. “Too . . . old? I don’t understand. Or—do I? You mean my mind isn’t flexible enough any more?” He remembered the wrenching moment when every mental process had tried vainly to turn sidewise in his head. “But then it won’t work at all!”

  “Oh, yes,” Norman said confidently.

  “But if I’m too old—” It wasn’t age, really. Fowler was not old in years. But the grooves of his thinking had worn themselves deep in the past years since Norman came. He had fixed inflexibly in the paths of his own self-indulgence and now his mind could not accept the answer the wire turban offered.

  “I can’t change,” he told Norman despairingly. “If I’d only made you do this when you first came, before my mind set in its pattern—”

  Norman held out the turban, reversed so that the blue light bathed his face in blinking radiance. “This—will work,” he said confidently.

  Belated caution made Fowler dodge back a little. “Now wait. I want to know more before we . . . how can it work? You can’t make me any younger, and I don’t want any random tampering with my brain. I—”

  Norman was not listening. With a swift, sure gesture he pressed the wired wreath down on Fowler’s head.

  There was the wrenching of hair and scalp, skull and brain. This first—and then very swiftly the shadows moved upon the floor, the sun gleamed for one moment through the eastern windows and the world darkened outside. The darkness winked and was purple, was dull red, was daylight—

  Fowler could not stir. He tried furiously to snatch the turban from his head, but no impulse from his brain made any connection with the motionless limbs. He still stood facing the mirror, the blue light still winked thoughtfully back at him, but everything moved so fast he had no time to comprehend light or dark for what they were, or the blurred motions reflected in the glass, or what was happening to him.

  This was yesterday, and the week before, and the year before, but he did not clearly know it. You can’t make me any younger. Very dimly he remembered having said that to Norman at some remote interval of time. His thoughts moved sluggishly somewhere at the very core of his brain, whose outer layers were being peeled off one by one, hour by hour, day by day. But Norman could make him younger. Norman was making him younger. Norman was whisking him back and back toward the moment when his brain would regain flexibility enough for the magical turban to open that door to genius.

  Those blurs in the mirror were people moving at normal time-speed—himself, Norman, Veronica going forward in time as he slipped backward through it, neither perceiving the other. But twice he saw Norman moving through the room at a speed that matched his own, walking slowly and looking for something. He saw him search behind a chair-cushion and pull out a creased folder, legal size—the folder he had last sent Norman to find, on that day when he vanished from his closed room!

  Norman, then, had traveled in time before. Norman’s powers must be more far-reaching, more dazzling, than he had ever guessed. As his own powers would be, when his mind cleared again and this blinding flicker stopped.

  Night and day went by like the flapping of a black wing. That was the way Wells had put it. That was the way it looked. A hypnotic flapping. It left him dazed and dull—

  Norman, holding the folder, lifted his head and for one instant looked Fowler in the face in the glass. Then he turned and went away through time to another meeting in another interval that would lead backward again to this meeting, and on and on around a closing spiral which no mind could fully comprehend. It didn’t matter. Only one thing really mattered. Fowler stood there shocked for an instant into almost total wakefulness, staring at his own face in the mirror, remembering Norman’s face.

  For one timeless moment, while night and day flapped around him, he stood helpless, motionless, staring appalled at his reflection in the gray that was the blending of time—and he knew who Norman was.

  Then mercifully the hypnosis took over again and he knew nothing at all.

  There are centers in the brain never meant for man’s use today. Not until the race has evolved the strength to handle them. A man of today might learn the secret that would unlock those centers, and if he were a fool he might even turn the key that would let the door swing open.

  But after that he would do nothing at all of his own volition.

  For modern man is still too weak to handle the terrible energy that must pour forth to activate those centers. The grossly overloaded physical and mental connections could hold for only a fraction of a second. Then the energy flooding into the newly unlocked brain-center never meant for use until perhaps a thousand more years have remodeled mankind, would collapse the channels, fuse the connections, make every synapse falter in the moment when the gates of the
mind swing wide.

  On Fowler’s head the turban of wires glowed incandescent and vanished. The thing that had once happened to Norman happened now to him. The dazzling revelation—the draining, the atrophy—

  He had recognized Norman’s face reflected in the mirror beside his own, both white with exhaustion, both stunned and empty. He knew who Norman was, what motives moved him, what corroding irony had made his punishing of Norman just. But by the time he knew, it was already far too late to alter the future or the past.

  Time flapped its wings more slowly. That moment of times gone swung round again as the circle came to its close. Memories flickered more and more dimly in Fowler’s mind, like day and night, like the vague, shapeless world which was all he could perceive now. He felt cold and weak, strangely, intolerably, inhumanly weak with a weakness of the blood and bone, of the mind and soul. He saw his surroundings dimly, but he saw—other things—with a swimming clarity that had no meaning to him. He saw causes and effects as tangible before him as he had once seen trees and grass. But remote, indifferent, part of another world.

  Help was what he needed. There was something he must remember. Something of terrible import. He must find help, to focus his mind upon the things that would work his cure. Cure was possible; he knew it—he knew it. But he needed help.

  Somehow there was a door before him. He reached vaguely, moving his hand almost by reflex toward his pocket. But he had no pocket. This was a suit of the new fashion, sleek in fabric, cut without pockets. He would have to knock, to ring. He remembered—

  The face he had seen in the mirror. His own face? But even then it had been changing, as a cloud before the sun drains life and color and soul from a landscape. The expunging amnesia wiped across its mind had had its parallel physically, too; the traumatic shock of moving through time—the dark wing flapping—had sponged the recognizable characteristics from his face, leaving the matrix, the characterless basic. This was not his face. He had no face; he had no memory. He knew only that this familiar door before him was the door to the help he must have to save himself from a circling eternity.