Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Beer,” Owen said to the feet. “I’m looking for a glass of beer.”

  “But in the Wrong place,” Dr. Krafft suggested. “To myself, just now I say beer. Then I think, for a young man at bedtime—yes, Peter, you have, guessed it. Beer.”

  Owen wrenched himself back to a more normal position and sat up in bed, staring at Dr. Krafft with a disorienting feeling that he had lived through this moment before. The old gentleman was holding out a foaming glass.

  “I shall drink one too,” Dr. Krafft said placidly. “And I shall imagine it to be next Tuesday, when I am back home. Only—Peter, I am afraid I have lost my dear Maxi.”

  “Again?”

  Dr. Krafft peered at him mildly.”

  “Well, I am absent-minded, Peter. Of course it is absurd to have such a fetich-habit. But I cannot concentrate on my discontinuum orientation unless I look at Maxi, you see. And the tesseract experiments must stop until I find him. So much of the work depends on absolute concentration before plenum-consciousness can be obliterated. Long ago I used an opal. But I got used to little Maxi, and now I cannot work without him. If you see him, Peter, please let me know at once.” Here he shook his white head gravely. “Ah well,” he said. “Good night, Peter.”

  “G-good night,” Owen said, and watched Dr. Krafft depart, leaving Owen to consider the possibility that he wasn’t the only lunatic around here.

  A flash of violet light and an appalling crash outside made him jerk around toward the window. Outlined in lightning, the lone Monterey cypress stood on the edge of the bluff. Apparently it had pulled itself together, crawled back up the cliff like a sprout from Dunsinane, and re-rooted itself just in time to disprove the truism that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. A second flash showed the dogged, but doomed cypress again taking a nose-dive back over, the brink.

  “No, no,” Owen said in a low, mild voice of disapproval. Then he laughed quietly, but in what sounded to him like a slightly unhinged tone. “You’re a glass of beer,” he told the glass of beer. “And I’m a white rabbit; with a blue enamel clock in my waistcoat, pocket—no, what am I saying? Get a grip on yourself, Peter. You’re asleep, that’s all. Hang onto that thought. You can prove it. Put the glass, down and watch it vanish.”

  CHAPTER II

  Over and Over

  IMPRESSED by the suggestion, he set the beer-glass down on the table and stared at it. Nothing happened. Lightning flashed. Owen glanced at the window. The cypress was still gone. On an impulse he looked under the bed again, half: expecting to see the cypress. Nothing.

  Straightening, he looked at the blue enamel clock. Its hands crept steadily oh toward ten fifty-three, that erroneous hour from which he had corrected it. He was conscious of growing tension. At ten-fifty-three, he suspected, something might happen.

  It didn’t. Baffled, he picked up the clock and compared it with the electric dial on the bureau. Yes—no—something had or hadn’t happened. He wasn’t sure which. But the electric clock said ten-forty. Thirteen minutes had passed since his re-setting of the blue enamel anomaly, yet the electric clock still said ten-forty. Had the. electricity failed? No. The lights had not even blinked.

  Owen thought for some while. Then he shook his head, turned from impossible speculations, and with a feeling of relief devoted himself to the prosaic duty of re-setting the blue enamel clock correctly. Hallucinations-were all very well, but the electric clock remained stable in a world of wildly veering events. On that he pinned his whole faith as he turned the black hands of the enamel clock back until they agreed with the electric clock’s hands, which by now indicated ten forty-five. At the same moment, with a sort of jolt in the middle of his brain, he realized that the electric clock had changed its mind and now said ten thirty-two. Moreover a familiar voice was remarking, “Ah, well. Good night, Peter.”

  Owen looked around sharply. Dr. Krafft, shaking his white head, walked out of the room and closed the door behind him.

  A flash of violet light made Owen turn toward the window as the door shut. He was just in time to see the indefatigable cypress on the edge of the cliff outlined in lightning before the persecuted tree fell-over the brink again.

  “Doctor!” screamed the terrified Peter Owen. “Dr. Krafft!”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, dropped the blue enamel clock on the bed and fumbled blindly for his beer. Then he opened his eyes for fear he might blindly stick his hand into the open mouth of a goblin. When the beer-glass was safe in his grip he shut his eyes again, moaned softly, and took a drink. The door opened. There was an ambiguous rustling sound.

  After a long pause, Owen said without opening his eyes, “If you’re Dr. Krafft, come in quick. If you’re a cypress, I can’t help you. Go away. That lightning bolt will only track you down again and then we’re both doomed. Think yourself lucky you’re a tree. You can’t go mad. I can.”

  “You could not get drunk that quick,” Dr. Krafft said mildly. “Not on one beer!”

  Owen opened his eyes, relieved at sight of the wrinkled face under the wild white-hair. “One beer?” he said. “You’ve been bringing me beer all night.”

  He looked anxiously at Dr. Krafft’s hands.

  “Beer?” the Doctor said. “I?” He spread his empty hands.

  “Well,” Owen said weakly, “it seems that way.”

  “There is your beer,” Dr. Krafft said. “Where I just set it down. Now I must go and find Maxi!”

  “Doctor,” Owen said hastily. “What time is it?”

  Dr. Krafft looked at the electric clock, which now said ten thirty-five. The blue enamel clock looked up at them blankly from the wrinkled bed. It said ten forty-eight.

  “Ten forty-eight exactly,” Dr. Krafft said, referring to a wristwatch which had never been known to vary by a second. “Your electric clock is wrong. The power must have gone off today sometime. This storm.” He shuffled to the bureau and reset the electric clock. Now it agreed with the blue enamel clock.

  “Dr. Krafft,” Owen asked desperately, turning the clock over in his hands, “I want to ask you something. Is it possible to travel in time?”

  Krafft looked pensive. “We are all traveling in time, Peter,” he said.

  “Yes, I know, I know. But I mean really travel, into your own future or past. Has anyone ever actually done it?”

  “How is one to tell?” Krafft asked, regarding him mildly. “It is proof I am seeking in my tesseract experiments. You know? I build a model of a tesseract—a cube exploded into four dimensions, symbolically—and then I try to free my mind from time-consciousness, so it can move freely through paratime. I concentrate all the energy of the mind upon the tesseract. What should happen is that the energy moving through time strikes the tesseract and collapses it into a normal cube. Inertia is inertia, and mass is mass, spatially or temporally. But it is hard to prove, Peter.”

  “What would be proof?” Owen demanded. “If somebody found a way to take quick trips into ten minutes ago; how could he prove it?”

  THE aged savant shook his head and. stared at Peter Owen doubtfully.

  “Why would he want to do that; Peter?” Dr. Krafft asked reasonably, “To travel into the futures yes. One might achieve something. But you already know the past. Why relive it?”

  “I don’t know why,” Owen said, shutting his eyes. “But I know how. This clock does it.” He opened his eyes again and stared wildly at Dr. Krafft. “I’ll; set it back five minutes and show you!” he said. “No, wait. You do it. Turn it back five minutes and see what happens.”

  “Now, Peter,” Dr. Krafft murmured. “Here, try it!”

  Blinking, Krafft accepted the clock and moved the minute hand back carefully. Nothing at all happened. Krafft waited. So did Owen.

  Then Krafft returned the hand to its original point and gave Owen back the clock, regarding him inquiringly. Owen swallowed.

  “But it happened,” he said desperately. “Look, all I did was—this.”

  He turned the little knob on the back
of the clock, watching the minute hand glide backward three minutes . . .

  “Good night, Peter,” Dr. Krafft said, walking out of the room and dosing the door behind him.

  Owen snatched for the brimming glass of beer he knew would be on the bedside table. Not a single swallow had been taken from it. Gulping wildly, he gazed with horrified eyes at the window, quivering with sympathy for the miserable cypress even now clambering back up the cliff to keep its appointment in Samarra. The inevitable lightning flashed . . .

  But now he hadn’t talked to Dr. Krafft about time-traveling at all. It hadn’t happened! How could he prove the clock was a time-machine? Apparently it affected only himself. Not only could no one else use it, but Owen couldn’t demonstrate without automatically erasing all Krafft’s memories.

  Desperately Owen drained the beer-glass, threw it away, snapped out the bed.-light and emulated a coiled gastropod by burrowing, under the covers and thinking of nothing at all. He didn’t dare think. If he saw that wretched cypress, take one more beating, he’d probably jump over the cliff after it. The whole thing was manifestly impossible, and in some inexplicable way he was drunk, dreaming, mad, or all three. He turned his mind off completely.

  And after a long, long time, he fell asleep.

  He had a curious dream.

  It seemed he was a fish, lazing beneath a tropical sea. Far above him floated the shadow of a ship’s hull, oddly reminiscent of a large wooden shoe. Long rods extended downward from the shadow, searching the sea-bottom slowly, like telescopes. Owen swam toward them. The water rushing through his gills reminded him of the strange, ineffable draught of time he had drunk from a blue enamel clock, when he was a man. That seemed a long time ago.

  Adjusting his fins, he dived beneath the nearest rod and swam close, peering into, what might have been a lens. He was gazing up directly into a large, intent, curious blue eye.

  He woke.

  The blue eye was a square of clear blue sky outside the window. Owen lay looking at it, reluctant to take up the dark business of living. He was still dazed with his dream and he made feeble, flipping motions that should have sent him gliding smoothly out of bed. Presently he realized he was no longer a fish. He was Peter Owen, with fearful problems and a black future.

  He sat up and began dreading the day before him. Life as Uncle Edmund’s secretary had little to recommend it, now that all hope for acquiring Lady Pantagruel was dead. Uncle Edmund rejoiced in the worst possible relations with everybody he met He even attempted now and then to quarrel with the placid Dr. Krafft, getting nowhere. With everyone else he could and did quarrel, and one of his secretary’s more difficult jobs was smoothing down the enemy well enough to keep C. Edmund Stumm alive. Uncle Edmund was currently carrying on a deadly feud with Noel Coward, the Las Ondas Chief of Police and the local garbage collector. To all of these he gave his wholehearted attention.

  This made life difficult for the middleman. But after today, Peter Owen would be middleman no longer. He might be dead—for to resign from Uncle Edmund’s employ was to invite the lightning—but there, are worse fates than death.

  OWEN gazed miserably out the window. The cliff was reassuringly bare of cypresses, which made, him feel a little better. “What a dream,” he murmured. For it must have been a dream—two dreams, rather, one involving beer and cypresses and the other concerned with fish. There had also been a clock—or had there? He glanced at the bedside table. No clock.

  “All a dream,” he told himself. “Vivid, but a dream.”

  He was still telling himself this, not entirely with conviction, as he went downstairs to breakfast.

  “You need not have been so prompt,” Uncle Edmund said, looking up from his oatmeal with a vitriolic smile.

  * * * * *

  “Uncle Edmund,” Owen said, taking a deep breath. “Uncle Edmund, shut up! I’m about to leave you.”

  He then held his breath and waited for the stroke that would disembowel him.

  And what was the trouble which had driven Peter Owen to this rash extremity? Claire Bishop was the trouble. You will all remember Claire Bishop in the film version of The Taming of the Shrew, with James Mason, Richard Widmark, Dan Duryea and Ethel Barrymore. In such distinguished company one would expect a newcomer like Claire to be quite overshadowed, but this did not happen. Everybody noticed and remembered her. She was that very pretty creature with the fluff of yellow curls and the ineffable switch to her walk, who drove up in the green convertible toward the end of Act Two. (You will recall that Hollywood took certain minor liberties with the original script.)

  Claire’s rise thereafter was meteoric, and so was her fall, due to a series of Bad pictures ill-chosen, ill-cast and abominably written. In the depths, she met Peter Owen. Love burgeoned. And out of love, the rosy hope that with Peter’s aid the impossible might be achieved and Lady Pantagruel purchased for Claire. In his spare time Peter Owen, fortified by love, moved mountains and rounded up a syndicate of backers who offered to put up the money for three pictures starring Claire if Lady Pantagruel could be wrested from C. Edmund Stumm’s relentless grip as the first vehicle.

  Could it? Peter had only to inquire. He inquired. C. Edmund Stumm, who loved nothing better than the whip-hand, would say neither yes nor no. He would and did say, however, that he needed a private secretary to do light work at a low salary. Perhaps, he hinted, if this private secretary caught him in a moment of weakness, he might even sign a contract relinquishing the film rights to Lady Pantagruel.

  Hence Owen’s present degradation. The previous secretary had either, gone mad or kilted himself, he now knew. The line of demarcation between secretary and galley slave was regrettably faint, but Owen had bravely stuck it out, keeping Claire’s fair face before his mind’s eye and the possibility of a signed contract before Uncle Edmund’s in all times and weathers.

  Until yesterday, there seemed hope. But Claire—has it been mentioned?—had a temper too. Yesterday was one of those rare, halcyon days when C. Edmund Stumm mellowed by a series of lucky chances into near-humanity, went so far as to indicate that if Claire, her lawyer and the contract happened to convene in his library at a convenient moment, he might consider writing his name . . .

  The interview ended when Claire snatched a Prokofieff record off the phonograph and hurled it across the room, expressing a preference for Shostokavich, a distaste for C. Edmund Stumm’s talents, and the intention of dying by inches before she would play Lady Pantagruel under any circumstances whatever.

  She then stamped out of the house, leaving Peter Owen’s heart shattered with the shattered record, and Uncle Edmund’s temper fanned to hitherto unparalleled heights of fury. Hence the assault last night on the unbreakable Shostokavich records. Hence Peter Owen’s despair this morning. Hence, indeed, his reckless defiance of the tornado across the breakfast table.

  Having taken a short swing through times past, though without the aid of a blue enamel clock, we step through the dining-room door and sit down at the table with Peter Owen, facing C. Edmund Stumm and annihilation. Now—if you will—go on with the story.

  “Uncle Edmund—shut up! I’m about to leave you.”

  Thus Peter Owen. Afterward he braced himself and wished he could shut his eyes. He didn’t dare. It was better to watch Uncle-Edmund closely in moments of crisis. And it was well he did.

  Uncle Edmund was not a particularly rewarding sight. He looked like a wicked middle-aged cormorant, with sleek gray pinfeathers lying smoothly back along his head, and a pointed beak of a nose.

  His mouth was thin, small, precise and made for distilling vitriol.

  He paused and looked up quite slowly as his private secretary’s words echoed, perhaps with a slight quaver, upon the morning air. Uncle Edmund was pouring cream over his oatmeal. He held the cream-jug suspended over the bowl while he gazed at Owen with small, gimlet eyes that gradually suffused to a lively crimson as the full meaning of Owen’s words gradually dawned on him.

  “You are—what?”
he demanded in a stifled; voice, scraping his chair back slightly. “What did you say?”

  “I said I’m about to—” Peter Owen began the words bravely enough, but he never finished them. Uncle Edmund hurled the cream-jug!

  CHAPTER III

  Robbery!

  A LONG pale gout of cream smacked Owen neatly across the face. The jug crashed against the wall behind him and fell in fragments to the carpet. Dr. “Krafft shook his white head mildly and sipped his coffee. Nothing could perturb Dr. Krafft.

  Owen with a trembling hand mopped the cream from his face. What he might have done as soon as he could see again is a moot question. He thinks now he would have knocked Uncle’s teeth in with a convenient plate. But he had no time. For Uncle Edmund’s hearty laughter rang out above the buzz of rage in Owen’s ears. Paper crackled.

  “Look at this, you young nincompoop!” Uncle Edmund cried. “Wipe the cream off your stupid face and look at this!” And he laughed again, so merrily, so richly, that Peter Owen’s heart sank like a plummet.

  “This” was a contract. It was, in fact, Claire’s contract for the purchase of Lady Pantagruel. Uncle Edmund was waving it like some succulent morsel under Owen’s creamy nose.

  “It may interest you to know, ingrate that you are,” Uncle Edmund said in an acid voice, “that I got a letter this morning from Metro, definitely refusing to up their offer for Lady Pantagruel. Do you realize what that means? Oh no, of course not! How could you? It would take the I.Q. of a three-year-old to grasp it, so naturally—bah!” He thumped the table heavily, making the dishes dance. Dr. Krafft prudently picked his cup up just in time.

  “I’ll tell you what it means!” Uncle Edmund roared. “Miss Bishop’s offer was the highest I’ve received. You know that. You saw to it. Snooping and prying among my private correspondence—” This was most unfair, Owen thought plaintively. “—reading my letters on the sly,” Uncle Edmund stormed on, “you ferreted out what my best offer was. Then you saw that Miss Bishop topped it. Very well! A little decent family loyalty is all I ask. Loyalty to your own flesh and blood and the hand that feeds you. Too much to ask, you say? Yes, I suppose it is too much, from a toad like you. So!”