Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Underbrush crashed behind her and another shape emerged from the bushes. But Drake was watching Karen. He had met her before, and he had no illusions about the girl. He remembered how she had fought her way up in Europe, using slyness, using trickery, using ruthlessness as a man would use his fists. The new Germany had liked that unscrupulousness, needed it—used it. All the better that it came packaged in slim, curved flesh, bronze-curled, blue-eyed, with shadowy dimples and a mouth like red velvet, the unstable brilliance of many mixed races shining in her eyes.

  Drake was scowling, finger motionless on the gun-trigger. He was, he knew, in a bad spot just now, silhouetted against the brilliance of the—the thing from the sky. But Sir Colin was still hidden, and he had a gun.

  “Mike,” Karen said, “you haven’t met Alan Drake. Army Intelligence—American.”

  A deep, lazy voice from beyond the girl said, “Better drop the gun, buddy. You’re a good target.”

  Drake hesitated. There was no sign from Sir Colin. That meant—what? Karen and Mike Smith were probably not alone. Others might be following, and swift action should be in order.

  He saw Karen’s eyes lifting past him to the glowing surface above. In its red reflection her face was very curious. Her voice, irritatingly sure of itself, carried on the ironic pretense of politeness.

  “What have we here?” she inquired lightly. “Not a tank? The High Command will be interested—” She stepped aside for a better look.

  Drake said dryly, “Maybe it’s a ship from outer space. Maybe there’s something inside—”

  There was.

  The astonishing certainty of that suddenly filled his mind, stilling all other thought. For an incredible instant the moonlit valley wavered around him as a probing and questioning fumbled through his brain.

  Karen took two uncertain backward steps, the self-confidence wiped off her face by blank amazement, as if the questioning had invaded her mind too. Behind her Mike Smith swore abruptly in a bewildered undertone. The air seemed to quiver through the Mediterranean valley, as if an inconceivable Presence had suddenly brimmed it from wall to wall.

  Then Sir Colin’s voice spoke from the dark. “Drop your guns, you two. Quick. I can—”

  His voice died. Suddenly, silently, without warning, the valley all around them sprang into brilliant light. Time stopped for a moment, and Drake across Karen’s red head could see Mike hesitate with lifted gun, see the gangling Sir Colin tense a dozen feet beyond, see every leaf and twig in the underbrush with unbearable distinctness.

  Then the light sank. The glare that had sprung out from the great globe withdrew inward, like a tangible thing, and a smooth, soft, blinding darkness followed after:

  When sight returned to them, the globe was a great pale moon resting upon its crest of up-splashed earth. All heat and color had gone from it in the one burst of cool brilliance, and it rested now like a tremendous golden bubble in the center of the valley.

  A door was opening slowly in the curve of the golden hull.

  Drake did not know that his gun-arm was dropping, that he was turning, moving forward toward the ship with slow-paced steps.

  He was not even aware of the others crackling through the brush beside him toward that dark doorway.

  Briefly their reflections swam distorted in the golden curve of the hull. One by one they bent their heads under the low lintel of that doorway, in silence, without protest.

  The darkness closed around them all.

  Afterward, for a while, the great moon-globe lay quiet, shedding its radiance. Nothing stirred but the wind.

  Later an almost imperceptible quiver shook the reflections in the curved surfaces of the ship. The crest of earth that splashed like a wave against the sphere washed higher, higher. As smoothly as if through water, the ship was sinking into the sand of the desert. The ship was large, but the sinking did not take very long.

  Shortly before dawn armed men on camels came riding over the ridge. But by then earth had closed like water over the ship from space.

  CHAPTER I

  THE CITADEL

  IT SEEMED to Alan Drake that he had been rocking here forever upon the ebb and flow of deep, intangible tides. He stared into grayness that swam as formlessly as his swimming mind, and eternity lay just beyond it. He was quite content to lie still here, rocking upon the long, slow ages.

  Reluctantly, after a long while, he decided that it was no longer infinity. By degrees the world came slowly into focus—a vast curve of a dim and glowing hollow rounded out before his eyes, mirrory metal walls, a ceiling shining and golden, far above. The rocking motion was imperceptibly ceasing, too. Time no longer cradled him upon its ebb and flow. He blinked across the vast hollow while memory stirred painfully. It was quiet as death in here; but he should not be alone.

  Karen lay a little way from him, her red hair showering across the bent arm pillowing her head. With a slow, impersonal pleasure he liked the way the curved lines of her caught shadow and low light as she sprawled there asleep.

  He sat up very slowly, very stiffly, like an old man. Memory was returning—there should be others. He saw them in a moment, relaxed figures dreaming on the shining floor.

  And beyond them all, in the center of the huge sphere, was the high, dark doorway, narrow and pointed at the top like an arrow, within which blackness would be lying curdled into faintly visible clouds of deeper and lesser darkness. That was the Alien. The name came painfully into his brain, and his stiff lips moved soundlessly, forming it. He remembered—what did he remember? It was all so long ago it really couldn’t matter much now, anyhow. He thought of the slow-swinging years upon which he had rocked so long.

  He frowned. Now how did he know it had been Time that rocked him in his sleep? Why was he so sure that years had ebbed like water through the darkness of this mirrory place and the silence of his dreams? Dreams! That must be it! He had dreamed—about the Alien, for instance. He had not known that name when he fell asleep. His mind was beginning to thaw a bit, and now there was a sharp distinction in it between the things that had happened before this sleep came upon him—and afterward.

  Afterward, in the long interval between sleeping and walking, the Alien was a part of that afterward. The things he dimly knew about it must have come floating into his mind from somewhere entirely outside the past he remembered. He closed his eyes and struggled hard to recall those dreams.

  No use. He shook his head dizzily. The memories swam formlessly just out of conscious reach. Later, they might come back—not now. He stretched, feeling the long muscles slip pleasantly along his shoulders. In a moment or two the others would be waking.

  It would be wiser if they woke unarmed. Whatever had been happening here in the dim time while Alan slept, Karen and Smith would wake enemies still. From here he could see that a revolver lay on the shining floor under Karen’s hand. He got up stiffly, conscious of an overwhelming lassitude, and leaned to take the gun from her relaxed fingers.

  Above her as he straightened he saw the high, arched doorway, and a sudden shock jolted him. For that dark and narrow portal was untenanted now. Nothing moved there, no curdled darkness, no swirl of black against black. The Alien was gone.

  Why he was so certain, he did not know. No power on earth, he thought, could have drawn him to that arrow-shaped doorway to peer inside. But without it, he still knew they were alone now in the great empty shell of the ship.

  He knew they had all come in here, out of the desert night and the distant thunder of sea-fighting—come in silence and obedience to a command not theirs to question. They had slept. And in their sleeping, dreamed strangely. The Alien, hovering in the darkness of its doorway, must have controlled those dreams. And now the Alien had gone. Where, why, when?

  Karen stirred in her sleep. The dreams were still moving through her brain, perhaps; perhaps she might remember when she woke, as he had not. But she would remember, too, that they were enemies. Alan Drake’s mind flashed back to the urgent present, and he step
ped over her, past Sir Colin, to Mike Smith. He was lying on his side with a hand thrust under his coat as if even in the mindless lassitude which had attended their coming here, he had reached for his weapon.

  Mike Smith groaned a little as Alan rolled him over, searching for and finding a second gun. An instinctive antagonism flared in Alan as he looked down upon the big, bronzed animal at his feet. Mike Smith, soldier of fortune, had battled his way across continents to earn the reputation for which Nazi Germany paid him. A reputation for tigerish courage, for absolute ruthlessness. One glance at his blunt brown features told that.

  KAREN sat up shakily. For a full minute she stared with blind blue eyes straight before her. But then awareness suddenly flashed into them and she met Alan’s gaze. Like a mask, wariness dropped over her face. Her finger closed swiftly, then opened to grope about the floor beside her. Simultaneously she glanced around for Mike.

  Alan laughed. The sound was odd, harshly cracked, as if he had not used his throat-muscles for a long time.

  “I’ve got the guns, Karen,” he said. A distant ghost mocked him from the high vaults above them. “Guns—Karen—guns–Karen . . .”

  She glanced up and then back again, and he wondered if a little shudder ran over her. Did she remember? Did she share this inexplicable feeling of strange, nameless loss, of wrongness and disaster beyond reason? She did not betray it.

  Mike Smith was getting slowly to his feet, shaking his head like a big cat, groping for the guns that were not there. Deliberately Alan crossed to the curved wall. He wanted something solid at his back. Curiously, he noticed that his feet roused no echoes in all that vast, hollow place. Walking on steel as if he walked on velvet, he carried his load of guns toward the great circular crack in the outer wall that outlined the closed door they had entered through. Mike and Karen watched him dazedly. Beyond them, Sir Colin was sitting up, blinking.

  Mike’s eyes were on the gun that Alan held steadily. He said:

  “Karen, what’s up? Were we gassed?” And his voice was rusty too, unused.

  Sir Colin’s burred tones almost creaked as he spoke. Faint echoes roused among the shadows overhead. “Maybe we were,” he said. “Maybe we were.”

  There was silence. Four people had dreamed the same dream, or a part of it. They were groping in their memories now, and finding no more than Alan had found to judge by their bewildered faces. Presently Karen shook her red head and said:

  “I want my gun back.”

  Sir Colin was staring about, uneasily rubbing his beard. “Wait,” he said. “Things have changed, you know.”

  “Things may have changed,” the girl said, and took a step toward Alan. “But I still have my job to do.”

  “For Germany,” Alan murmured, and gently covered the revolver’s trigger with his middle finger. “Better stay where you are, Karen. I don’t trust you.”

  Sir Colin’s eyes were troubled under the shaggy reddish brows. “I’m not so sure there is a Germany,” he said bluntly. “There’s—”

  Alan saw the almost imperceptible signal Karen gave. Mike Smith had apparently been paying little attention to the dialogue. But now, without an instant’s warning, he flung himself forward in a long smooth leap toward Alan. No—to Alan’s left. The revolver had swung in a little arc before Allen realized his mistake. He saw Karen coming at him and swept the gun in a vicious blow at her head.

  He didn’t want to kill her—merely to put her out of the picture so that he could attend to Smith. But Karen’s movement had been startling swift. She slid under the swinging gun, twisted sidewise, and suddenly she had crashed into him with the full weight of her body, jolting him back hard against the closed port. Alan stumbled, and felt the door slip smoothly away. He swayed on his heels against empty air. Mike Smith was coming in, lithe and boneless as a big cat, a joyous little smile on his face.

  Motion slowed down, then. For Alan, it always slowed down in moments like this, so that he could see everything at once and act with lightning deliberation. Hard ground crunched under his heels as he pivoted and put all his force into a smashing blow that caught Mike Smith heavily across the jaw with the gun-barrel.

  Mike went back and down, teeth bared in a feline snarl. Alan took one long forward stride to finish the job—and then saw Karen. And what he saw froze him. She had paused in the doorway, and it was surely not a trick that had twisted her smooth features into such a look of blank astonishment. Behind her, Sir Colin stood frozen, too, the same incredulity on his face.

  Drake turned slowly, still holding his gun ready. Then for a moment his mind went lax, and what he saw before him had no significance at all.

  For this was not the flame-scorched valley they had left. And it was not morning, or noon, or night. There was only a ruddy twilight here, and a flat unfeatured landscape across which patches of mist drifted aimlessly as they watched, like clouds before a sluggish wind. Low down in the sky hung a dull and ruddy sun that they could look upon unblinded, with steady eyes.

  Briefly, in the distance, something moved high up across the sky. There was a dark shape out there somewhere, a building monstrously silhouetted against the sun. But the mists closed in like curtains to veil it from his gaze, as if it were a secret to this dead world not for living eyes to see.

  Sir Colin was the first who came to life. He reached out a big, red-knuckled hand and barred Mike Smith’s automatic lurch forward, toward Alan and the gun.

  “Not now,” he burred. “Not now! You can forget about Germany. And Bizerte and Sousse and all Tunisia too, all Africa. This Is—”

  Alan let his own gun sink. Their quarrel seemed curiously lacking in point now, somehow against the light from that dying sun. For Germany and America and England had been—must have been—dust for countless millenniums. Their way did not belong in a world from which all passion must have ebbed forever long ago.

  How long?

  “It’s Time,” Alan heard himself whisper. “Time—gone out like a tide and left us stranded.”

  IN the silence Karen cried, “It’s still a dream—it must be!” But her voice was hushed to a half-whisper by the desolation all around, and she let the words die. Alan shook his head. He knew. They all knew, really. That was part of the dream they shared. By tacit agreement none of them mentioned that cloudy interval that had passed between their sleeping and their waking, but in it enough had seeped into their minds to have no doubt there now. This was no shock, after the first surprise wore away.

  “Look,” Sir Colin said, stepping away from the ship. “Whatever happened, we must have been buried.” He pointed to the mounds of sandy soil heaped around the great sphere, as if it had thrust itself up from the depths of the earth. And even the soil was dead. This upheaval from far underground had turned up no moisture, no richness, no life.

  “We’d better have our guns again, all of us,” Karen said in a flat voice. “We may need them.”

  Mike Smith returned his guns to their holsters beneath his coat, and laughed with a short, unpleasant bark. Alan turned an impassively icy gaze upon him. He knew why Mike laughed. Mike was making the mistake that many others had made when they saw Alan Drake smile. Mike thought it was the fear of the unknown world, not simple acceptance of altered conditions, which had made Alan give up the gun. Well, Mike would have to learn sooner or later that the gentleness of Alan’s smile was not a sign of weakness.

  “Listen!” called Karen breathlessly. “Didn’t you hear it? Listen!”

  And while they all stood in strained quiet, a far, faint keening cry from high overhead came floating down to them through the twilight and the mist. Not a bird-cry. They all heard it clearly, and they must all have known it came from a human throat. While they stood frozen, it sounded again, nearer and lower and infinitely sad. And then across their range of vision, high in the ruddy gloom, a slim, winged shape floated, riding the air-currents like a condor with broad, pale wings outspread. They had glimpsed it before. And it was no bird-form. Clearly, even at this distance
, they all could see the contours of a human body sailing on winged arms high in the twilight.

  Once more the Infinitely plaintive, thin cry keened through the air before the thing suddenly beat its winged arms together and went soaring off into the dimness, with the echoes of its heart-breaking wail fading on the air behind It.

  No one spoke. Every face was lifted to the chilly wind as the pale, soaring speck melted into the sky and vanished far out over the unfeatured landscape. Alan found himself wondering if this slim, winged thing fading into the twilight would be the last man on earth, down an unimaginable line of evolution that had left all humanity winged and wailing—and mindless.

  Alan shook himself a little.

  “Evolution,” Sir Colin was murmuring, an echo of Alan’s thought. “So that’s the end of the race, is It? How long have we slept, then?”

  “One thing,” said Alan in as brisk a voice as he could manage. “Whatever the thing was, it’s got to eat. Somewhere in the world there must be some food and water left.”

  “Good for you, laddie,” Sir Colin grinned. “Hadn’t thought of that yet. Maybe there’s hope for us yet, if we follow—”

  “Don’t forget, it can fly,” reminded Karen.

  Alan shrugged. “All the more reason to start after it now, while we’re fresh. There isn’t anything here to stay for.”

  “I think I’ll just have a wee look inside before we go,” put in Sir Colin thoughtfully. “There’s a bare chance . . .” He led the way back inside, and the rest followed, none of them willing to stay out alone in the desert of the world.

  But there was nothing here. Only the vast curved walls, the confused reflections of themselves that swam dizzily when they moved. Only empty concavity, and the arrow-shaped doorway behind which nothing dwelt now. The Alien was gone, but whether he—it—had just preceded them into the ruddy twilight of the world’s end, or whether he had been gone for many years when they woke, there was no way of guessing.

  “If this was a space-ship once,” murmured Sir Colin, scratching his rusty beard, “there must have been controls, motors—something! Now where could they be but there?” And he cocked a bristling eyebrow toward the dark doorway.