Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “I’ve been wanting to do this for months and months,” he declared, advancing upon the. appalled and speechless Stumm. “I couldn’t do it in uniform. But I’m a civilian now! This is going to be worth whatever it costs me!”

  Kicking chairs out of his path, he advanced like Juggernaut itself, rounded the comer of the desk and with a resounding crack of fist on flesh knocked C. Edward Stumm over backward.

  There was involuntary rash applause from Claire. The attorney didn’t stir. He seemed to be analyzing the whole affair with admirable detachment. Owen clawed out the blue enamel clock, striving in vain to steady his shaking fingers. Time turned backward . . .

  * * * * *

  This time it was worse than before. That terrible disorientation gripped Owen in a gigantic pendulum-swing as the bottom dropped out of creation. Frantically he threw himself at a chair and wound his arms around it, trying to anchor himself like a limpet. But the chair melted into mist as he plummeted through time. He had one fading glimpse of Uncle Edmund, grimacing like a demon, ripping the contract in halves in lieu of Egan.

  Then the pendulum swung wide, daylight gave place to dark, and Owen heard thunder roll and saw the library stroboscopically illumined by lightning. He was swinging farther than before, back into last night. And then forward.

  Snap!

  He was groveling on the floor before the desk, as though in pleading abnegation before a throne. Claire and the lawyer were peering down at him. From behind the desk sounded the scratch of pen on paper, instantly suspended as Stumm said crossly, “What in the world—Peter?”

  The telephone rang.

  Owen sprang up as from a catapult, snatched the telephone from beneath his uncle’s descending hand. Stumm jerked back in terror! “Don’t do that!” he complained. But Owen scarcely heard him. He was listening again to the brief argument between long distance and the Mayor. Again the Mayor triumphed.

  “He just left,” Owen babbled in response to the inquiry about Egan. “Too late to catch him now. Try Headquarters. He won’t be back here. Never. No use trying.”

  He then hung up convulsively, noticed that he still held the clock in his hand, and dropped it into his pocket with a feeble smile around the circle of faces turned to him in astonishment. Claire seemed distressed, the lawyer was running a brief sanity test based on observable data, and Stumm had a stuffed look of affront.

  “Wrong number,” Owen said feebly. Stumm favored him with a long, steady glare, then he picked up the pen and signed the contract.

  Owen let out a tremendous sigh of relief. Stumm glared at him, threw down the pen and shoved the contract across the desk. The attorney rose stiffly. “Witnesses, please,” he said.

  “To a contract of sale?” Stumm asked. “Is that usual?”

  “Advisable in this case,” the attorney said in a voice that brooked no argument.

  “All right, I’ll witness it,” Owen said. “Where do I sign?”

  “No, not you,” the attorney said, giving him a slow, measuring look. “Blood relation. Need disinterested witnesses.” What he really meant, as Owen knew very well, was that a witness had to be of sound mind. He was too crushed to resent the implication.

  AT this fortuitous moment Dr. Krafft was seen trotting briskly across the terrace outside.

  “Chief Egan!” he was heard to call in his mild though agitated tones. “Chief Egan, is there any trace of my little Maxi?”

  “Dr. Krafft!” Owen bellowed. Then; shocked at the volume of his own voice, he stepped to the door and spoke more mildly. “Dr. Krafft, would you step in here a moment? We need a witness to Uncle Edmund’s signature.”

  “Two witnesses,” the lawyer said decisively.

  “Ah yes, of course,” Dr. Krafft said, beaming. “Delighted, delighted. My dear Chief, perhaps you will do for the other party? Come!”

  Gulping, Owen stood back to let them in. After all, the contract had been signed. The worst was surely, over. But he kept his hand on the clock, praying fervently that he need never risk using it again, as he watched Dr. Krafft affix his (highly negotiable) autograph to the page.

  Egan, true to form, made a little awkwardness about signing. He wanted to be sure what he was putting his name to. Blushing but adamant, he took the contract to the window to examine it. Owen kept his hand firm on the clock, His eye on Egan and his ears intent for the fatal ringing of the phone.

  Egan, ponderously satisfied, put the contract flat on the window-pane and scrawled his name laboriously on the page. He had not quite finished when again the telephone burst into furious ringing.

  “Allow me!” Uncle Edmund snapped angrily, forestalling Owen’s dive with a deft motion. “Hello, hello? Yes, naturally this is C. Edmund Stumm. Whom did you expect? I—oh, Metro!” His voice turned to syrup.

  The room was gripped in a trance of silence. In it the tiny buzzing voice from the receiver spoke as clearly as a hornet might, given human speech.

  “I am instructed to tell you, Mr. Stumm,” the hornet said, “that we have reconsidered our position on Lady Pantagruel. Our office has just signed Jessica Tandy, and we want your play as her first starring vehicle. We’re prepared to pay the additional ten thousand, if the play is still available.”

  “Of course it’s available!” Uncle Edmund cried heartily. “I—ah—I’ll call you back in five minutes. Thank you. Goodbye!”

  He hung up with a sort of sliding obliqueness, because he was already out of his chair and diving for Egan and the contract.

  “Give me that document!” he snapped. “Egan, you hear me? Hand it over quick, before I have you fired!”

  “Egan—no!” Owen cried wildly, jumping forward. “Don’t you do it! He signed it! It’s Claire’s!”

  “Prove it!” Uncle Edmund shouted. “I’ll fight you in every court in the land! You and your thieving friends knew Metro would meet my price! No wonder you were in such a hurry to bilk me!”

  “Why, you—you conceited old toad!” Claire gasped in a fury.

  “Claire!” Owen begged, swirling in circles. “Egan, please! Uncle Edmund!”

  “Egan!” Uncle Edmund said in a commanding voice. “Remember who I am. Hand over my property or I’ll have you out of your job before sundown!”

  “Oh, what a liar!” Owen babbled. “Egan, he’s got you fired already. Go on, get mad at him! The Mayor just made you resign—don’t you remember? I know it never happened—I mean, it did happen, but you don’t know it! Egan!”

  But Egan, gazing at Owen with alarm, as well he might, was already handing the contract into Stumm’s outstretched grasp.

  Owen groaned, took out the clock, and with a sinking heart turned the hands back five minutes, knowing dimly that this time he was probably going too far.

  He was perfectly right.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Guided Missile

  HORRIBLY, the bottom dropped, with a jolt, out of all creation!

  There was a terrific wrench that seemed to tear Owen free from his very eyeteeth, and clutching, the clock in a grip of death he went spinning dizzily into unknowable dimensions. The anchor was being hoisted in nasty, jerking tugs while Owen at the Very end of its chain swung like a pendulum through time.

  Now the storm of last night thundered again. Temporally diffused lightning gave the library a dim gray radiance. Through the window Owen saw the cypress spring back triumphant from its watery grave and vigorously reroot itself. Again that yanking tug. He was ascending, in some direction he couldn’t understand, and the pendulum of time swung wider.

  It swung tremendously, far behind the limits the clock had Imposed. He had a lunatic glimpse of a cheerful, drooling infant whom he identified with himself in earlier years. He saw a bearded old gentleman he dimly remembered as his grandfather, and noticed Indians morosely building a mission on the terrace under a much younger and more lissom cypress. The pendulum paused at the end of its swing. For a flashing instant everything was solid and real again. But before he could get his footing the lurch
forward began and he swept helplessly with it, faster, this trip, right up to the moment when Claire, the lawyer, Egan, Dr. Krafft, Stumm arid himself stood together around the desk.

  And still forward!

  Faces and events flashed past in a stew of incoherence. He thought he saw himself with a gray beard and Claire sweetly dithering into senility while their great-grandchildren clustered lovingly around them. Again there was a pause and a tug, and the faces vanished.

  Owen felt perfectly convinced that he was being pulled up with the anchor to explode like a deep-sea fish when he reached the surface of normal-time, scattering himself through many centuries. He wanted desperately to let go of the clock, but he didn’t dare. Momentum might carry him off, lubricated as he was with that damned temporal draught, so that he’d go slipping down the greased runways to—to when?

  “No, no,” he gibbered to himself. “How will I look splashed all through a millennium? It wasn’t worth it. Nothing’s worth this!” There was a jolt and all motion stopped.

  Then he was swinging again. Time had become a constant and space fluid, and he swept spinning backward past the signing of the contract, past the immolation of the cypress, into, the beginnings of the storm.

  It was a shorter swing this time. As the anchor rose the arcs seemed to grow briefer. He paused in the red light of yesterday’s sunset and began again to sweep through the interminable recurrence of last night.

  Owen shut his eyes, unable to face the prospect of watching the cypress struck down again by its relentless destiny. He opened them just in time to see something that made him catch his breath. Something, in fact, that would put victory in his grasp if he could ever come to a halt long enough to use it.

  He was sweeping through the early hours of last night. Moving in rapid sequence, telescoped in time, he saw Uncle Edmund’s diabolic face outside the closed French door of the library. He saw the brick clenched in Stumm’s fist as he cocked an eye toward the sky. Thunder crashed, and with it crashed the brick, straight through the glass door.

  Dazed, Owen saw his unregenerate uncle dart into the room, hurl the brick at the wall-cabinet, and with both gloved hands flashing furiously, begin to scoop out the valuable and hideous gold coins. Moving like lightning, the self-made criminal dashed across the room to the safe, whirled it open and decanted the coins into it more rapidly than light itself. At the last moment he was seen to glance around the room, meet the eye of a small green toad squatting on the desk, and with a darting motion hurl Maxi in after the coins, slamming the safe door behind him.

  So now it was all clear—too late. C. Edmund. Stumm himself was the burglar who had looted the library? With his customary lack of ethics, Stumm had killed a number of birds with one well-aimed stone. Bills had been mounting up. The coins were insured, of course. And Uncle Edmund had presumably believed last night that Claire wouldn’t buy Lady Pantagruel under any circumstances, after their difference of opinion, on Shostakovich.

  So he had committed the robbery, which would not only enrich him without cost but would wreak vengeance: on Chief Egan and remove Maxi so that Dr. Krafft would waste no more time on experiments that might be better spent helping Stumm with his new play.

  SHOCKED but not surprised, Owen shook his head. Then he realized that he had very little concern in mundane matters, after all. The anchor was still rising in sickening jerks. Very soon now Owen would pop out into paratime clinging like a barnacle to the anchor, only to explode all-over creation.

  Skimming through time, he caught a brief, telescoping glimpse of himself and Dr. Krafft conferring over an endlessly multiplied glass of beer, and the gentle old savant’s words came back to him echoingly—action and reaction, universal physical laws, an instantaneous object—and the result of running into another time-traveler. What if he did? The momentum might at least break up this endless swinging.

  Another time-traveler was the only conceivable body in paratime that could collide with his.

  “Wait!” Owen commanded himself suddenly, and quite uselessly, of course. “Another time-traveler?” Of course there was one. The clock! He and the clock together, lubricated to frictionless smoothness, hurtling from end to end of time.

  If he threw the clock away, what would happen? Some dim recollection of recoil principles stirred in his mind. A man in free space might move himself by throwing an object away from him into the void.

  He drew back his arm for the toss—and held it motionless as a new thought flashed through his mind. He was, after all, C. Edmund Stumm’s own nephew. And he could kill two birds with one stone quite as well as his uncle had done. He saw it all in one beautiful, blinding glimpse.

  If Dr. Krafft’s ideas were not all nonsense, it ought to work. Dr. Krafft’s beloved tesseracts, which he had tried to push into three-dimensional cubes by throwing energy at them through time. It had never actually worked, in practise. It never had worked in a three-dimensional world. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t, if the basic idea were sound. If an object actually moving through time—like a clock—were to impinge hard on a solid cube—like a safe—strange things would result.

  With furious patience, Owen waited for the moment of stasis that came at the end of each swing. They were growing quite short now; He paused for an instant in the fluid center of the breakfast room, watching Stumm and Dr. Krafft greedily beginning their thousandth several breakfast with undiminished appetite, though Owen was by now sick at the very sight of oatmeal. He saw them whirl away as he swept forward through time, slowed, drew nearer and nearer a library scene in which a twitching tableau stood Stumm, holding out his demanding hand toward the hesitating Egan with the contract.

  Time paused. Owen collected all his strength, and just as he felt the beginning of the backward tug, hurled the dock with all his power past Stumm’s head at the safe in the wall.

  The result was startling, though supremely logical.

  A RUBBER ball hurled hard against a floating box will move the box very slightly, while the ball itself, with less mass, will rebound. But the box will move. Physical law requires it to move—in space.

  The clock was moving in time as well as in space. Its physical mass was naturally not enough to budge the safe a hairsbreadth, in space. But time is measured otherwise. A few micrometers in space might not be noticeable to the casual glance, but a few seconds or minutes in time are a different matter entirely.

  The impact of the clock, in short, knocked the safe into a tesseract.

  Rebounding violently, the clock then shot off into infinity at an angle the eye could not follow, and was seen no more by mortal eyes. But the safe seemed to jolt, to stir, and then to unpleat like an accordion. What it looked like is impossible to say, since no words exist to describe the motion of a tesseract through; its native dimension. But the result of that motion is quite easy to name. Transparency.

  Jolt! Snap!

  “Most unethical,” the lawyer was murmuring, as Egan held out the papers.

  “Egan!” shrieked Owen, collapsing heavily on the floor, not even aware that he was real again. “Egan, wait! Look!” And his outflung finger pointed at the safe.

  “For the love of Pete!” Egan said dazedly, stepping back and dropping his. hand. “Stumm, look! What is it?” Stumm’s clawing grasp just missed the contract, and the tone of Egan’s voice made him whirl, expecting some sudden horror at his back.

  All eyes were now turned toward the safe, and for an instant utter silence reigned.

  Then, with a heartstirring cry of “Maxi!” Dr. Krafft bounded forward. His outstretched hands went through the temporally exploded safe as though its steel walls were air. It is a sad and ironic fact that not until much later did he realize at all what he had done. The culmination of a lifetime’s experimenting took place successfully for the first and last time before his eyes, but all he saw just then was the broad green grin of Maxi, and reunion with his dear frog was the only thing that mattered.

  FAR otherwise it was for Police Chief Egan. F
or Maxi squatted on a perfectly visible heap of gold coins, compressed into a tight mass by the invisible walls of the safe.

  “That’s the coin collection,” Egan said dazedly. “But I thought it was supposed to have been stolen!” Slowly he turned toward C. Edmund Stumm. Slowly his face hardened. “Oh,” he said. “I—I think I get it. Yeah, I think! get it!”

  “Nonsense!” Stumm blustered. “Ridiculous! I have no idea how—how—” The playwright’s face was a picture of guilty confusion as his words faded faintly away.

  “But what’s happening?” Claire demanded, her voice rising to a squeak of confusion. “The safe! Lock at it! It makes me dizzy. I—I think I’m going to—to faint or something.”

  Gladly Owen flung his arms about her. “It’s nothing, darling,” he said. “ ‘Don’t look at it. Naturally it makes you dizzy, but never mind. It’s contracting again. In a minute or two it’ll be right back in shape, I wonder why? Temporal metallic, memory? Or is it just catching up with itself in time?”

  No one paid any attention to these mad words. All eyes were fixed glazedly on the slowly solidifying cube of the safe.

  All eyes, that is, but the photoelectric lenses of the attorney. Clearing his throat significantly, he stepped forward.

  “Chief Egan,” he said, “may I trouble yon for our contract?”

  “The contract!” Stumm screamed, called to life by the magic word. “It’s mine! Egan, I demand it!”

  Egan turned his massive head slowly. “What contract?” he asked. Then he turned his back deliberately toward Owen and put his hand behind him. The contract flipped significantly, like an albino robin’s tail:

  Owen’s hand closed on the paper. Egan let go. The large hand curled so that, finger and thumb made a definitive O of satisfaction. The attorney, who had apparently not noticed this byplay, thrust a Certified cheek Into Stamm’s limp hand.

  “Oh, the contract,” Owen said above the fluff of fragrant yellow curls pressed to his cheek. “Why, I have it, Uncle Edmund. All signed, sealed and witnessed. Claire and I will be going now. By the way, I quit. I’m sure you and Chief Egan will have a lot—an awful lot—to say to each other!”