Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  The man in the doorway had been watching the jungle all this while, but his large ears were alert. Now, without turning his head, he said hoarsely,

  “Red, how much of this did you plan?”

  Rohan’s pleasant face went blank with guilelessness.

  “Plan, Jellaby?”

  “You wouldn’t have told us about the treasure—if there is one—unless you’d needed us. Right? You knew we wouldn’t run the risk on your say-so unless we had to. Right? So I’ll ask it again—how much did you really plan?”

  Forsythe was slower on the uptake, but he got the idea after a moment.

  “Yeah!” he said, and then, with gathering heat, “Yeah, Red—what about that? You figured the bank hold-up, didn’t you? It couldn’t be the saloon—it had to be the bank, so the Police would chase us if we muffed it. You wanted the Police after us, Red! So we couldn’t turn back. So we’d have to come along on your crack-pot scheme into Quai territory. Well, here we are! We can’t go back or forward. And all because you’re as crazy as Crazy Joe when it comes to money! Red, I—”

  “Shut up, Forsythe,” Rohan said in a sudden whisper. “Look out there—Jellaby! Is that something—something black?”

  THERE WAS INSTANT SILENCE in the cave. The breathing of the three men seemed loud in the close confines of these rock walls which made up an alien planet. The dripping fog sang plangently on the sill and the fire whimpered thinly to itself.

  Jellaby shifted the blaster in his hands and his whole position changed so that he seemed to become part of the weapon, lifting it toward the jungle path.

  “No,” Rohan breathed. “Careful, Jellaby. You don’t know the Quai. Don’t shoot. Just wait.”

  “Red, can you kill a d’vahnyan?” Forsythe asked in a faint voice.

  “I don’t know. I’d like to find out.” Rohan’s voice seemed to come through his teeth. His face had a touch of the fever tint again in the violet firelight, and his eyes looked bright and hard. “I’d like to know,” he said. “Someday I’ll find out. Maybe today. Maybe now. If there’s any thing I hate—”

  The mists parted dramatically and out of the unveiled jungle aisle a tall, black figure with a white face came stalking straight toward them. Jellaby’s finger crooked convulsively on the trigger. Forsythe swore under his breath. Rohan did not make a sound. He stared, eyes a little glazed, at the approaching figure.

  A part of his mind reminded him that the d’vahnyan must be following orders in what they did. There had been nothing personal in the ruthlessness of the d’vahnyan who three weeks ago had stalked into Rohan’s flourishing mine camp on the outskirts of Careless Love and with one gesture brought Rohan’s whole investment crashing.

  But he felt the heavy beat of anger throbbing above his ears as he thought of it. The rich lands of Venus invited exploitation. No frontier was ever a place for the scrupulous, and Rohan had come because his talents flourished best where the law was weakest. He had the seed, of greatness in him and he knew it unerringly. The knowledge had driven him all his life. But he needed a raw frontier, to flourish in, and Venus had seemed so perfectly the place for him—until that d’vahnyan stepped out of the pale jungle and with one gesture dismissed all the toiling Quai . . .

  “They’re mine!” he had protested to the passionless, unseeing figure in black. “They owe me more than they can pay!

  They’ve got to work it out!”

  The d’vahnyan may not have heard at all. Barter is something the Quai society does not recognize. And so Rohan’s budding empire crashed and he found himself empty-handed again, with empty pockets, with nothing but the driving knowledge of his own potential power and a corrosive hatred for the d’vahnyan who had come between him and all that Venus promised.

  He smiled pleasantly into the face of the black-wrapped being before him. Of course it hadn’t been this particular d’vahnyan, back in Careless Love—or had it been? How could you tell? You tend to think not of “them” but of “him” in every separate case when you think of the d’vahnyan. Perhaps because you never see more than one at a time, and there is no way whatever to tell them apart. Inevitably you come to feel that there is but one omnipresent, omnipotent d’vahnyan in all Venus, miraculously appearing in hundreds of places at once. Empty-eyed, remote, passionless, he stalks about his duties. His very name means one who is beyond life and death.

  THE d’vahnyan paused almost on the threshold of the cave, looking at them out of remote, indifferent yellow eyes. Behind him there was a soft flurry of motion among the pale trees and a; little group of Quai in single file came out one by one into the clearing behind the d’vahnyan and paused too, looking into the cave.

  The Quai were tallish men, supple in intricate, tightly wrapped, white waterproof bindings that fitted them like a second skin. They looked like spectral mummies with triangular faces and seal-sleek fur for hair. A Quai is strikingly reminiscent of the little Venusian tree-chuck that slips quietly through the trembling foliage, looking down at you with a wondering gaze. While you are still an Earthlubber you may be reminded of a lemur or an owl, but after you know Venus the Quai will remind you of the tree-chuck and nothing else.

  These four stood still and regarded the Terrestrials with an air of deprecating curiosity. The d’vahnyan, in glistening black, his remote gaze unfocused, stood facing the cavern, watching some vacancy in the air about six feet beyond the three Terrestrials. He laid his right hand under his left forearm, letting his left palm fall forward toward the cave. The black wrappings gloved him, and their glistening blinded the observer a little. You could never be sure if he really held a weapon or not.

  In a totally expressionless voice the d’vahnyan said:

  “The Mountain is forbidden. Go back.”

  Rohan smiled cheerfully. The four Quai blinked their mild yellow eyes.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Rohan said. “We seem to have lost our way. Hope we aren’t trespassing,” His smile was ingratiating.

  All four Quai exposed their teeth in a sudden, unexpected snap at empty air. One of them said something that had the overtones of a Gregorian chant. He added a few words in ill-accented Spanish, all of them profane. Then the four looked at Rohan in grave, astonished inquiry and put their hands on top of their seal-sleek heads.

  The d’vahnyan might not have heard. He stood silent, unmoving, waiting, Rohan was aware of a little chill down his back, and he swallowed hard, choking down anger.

  “The Mountain is forbidden,” the d’vahnyan said again. “Go—now.”

  Rohan grinned deliberately. “Certainly,” he said. “Glad to.”

  You don’t argue with the d’vahnyan. It was probably a great concession that this one had repeated himself even once. Rohan wondered if the thing—the man—felt anything at all. If he did, he was probably a little concerned about this rather delicate situation of trespass. Relations between Terrestrials and the Quai were not very easy.

  It is extraordinarily hard for Terrestrials, reared in the severely practical, commercialized thinking of ancient Rome, to understand a society footed in a world that never knew Rome. Thinking contacts might have proved literally impossible, if it had not been for the d’vahnyan.

  It seems commentary enough on the problems of cooperation to point out that eccentrics like Crazy Joe appeared to find the Quai and the d’vahnyan far easier to understand than normal Terrestrials could. Wandering subnormals like Crazy Joe are inevitable in any frontier society, which attracts misfits by its lawlessness and wrecks them by its ruthless inflexibility.

  But it was in great measure thanks to the Crazy Joes of the Terrestrial Highway towns that a rough sort of working harmony had been achieved between the peoples of the neighboring worlds, They were cousin races at least, children of sister planets and sprung from human stock. But oh, the differences in their thinking!

  Behind Rohan, Forsythe spoke in a low voice.

  “We’d better go back, Red. He means business. You know you can’t kill a d’vahnyan. It’s
been tried. I don’t want any part of this. I’m going back.” His boots grated on the cavern floor as he took a step forward. Rohan swept him back with an outstretched arm.

  “We’re going,” he said aloud, in his pleasantest voice. “Hand me my pack, Forsythe. We’re going.” But in his mind, above the seething of controlled anger, he was saying, “Oh no, not this time! I gave in once, but not again. This time the risk’s worth anything I have to do. Oh no, we won’t go back!”

  HE SHOULDERED HIS PACK and stepped through the veil of dripping water, out of the cave. The d’vahnyan uttered a sudden sharp hiss, and the four Quai unexpectedly shivered and drew back. Some heavy burden of awareness seemed to come over them and the four slumped inside their wrappings. It occurred to Rohan suddenly that they must be prisoners—the d’vahnyan’s prisoners for some obscure Quai crime. The d’vahnyan hissed again, without seeming to move a feature. The Quai bent their heads and filed on across the clearing. A billow of mist rolled out to meet them and they plodded into it and vanished. The last to pass turned one bright, anguished, hopeless glance toward the Terrestrials, then let his third eyelids film across the look, and the mist swallowed him up like death itself.

  Rohan felt a sudden burning contempt for them. How spinelessly they gave in to the d’vahnyan, four against one, and never dreaming of resistance. It was the way on Venus, but it was not Rohan’s way.

  Forsythe, shrugging his pack into place, stepped out past Rohan.

  “You were a fool,” he said disagreeably, “to think you could get away with this. If Barber’s ship came down right now, I wouldn’t get aboard. I don’t trust you, Rohan. You’re crazier than Crazy Joe.” He scowled and turned to the d’vahnyan. “Will you guide us back?” he asked. “We were fools to come. I’d have left long ago if I’d known the way.”

  The d’vahnyan’s slanting forearm with the enigmatic threat of the half open palm moved in the direction the Quai had vanished. Forsythe grunted and stepped down onto the path. Jellaby, awkwardly cradling his blaster in one arm, lumbered after.

  Rohan did not move.

  The d’vahnyan’s cool, implacable gaze rested upon him lightly. He lifted the threatening hand higher. There was no way to know what weapons he had—a flick of the finger might annihilate them all.

  Rohan, looking into that expressionless face, deliberately let his banked anger rise. This was the turning point in his life on Venus, he thought. Give in now, and wind up like Crazy Joe. Face the d’vahnyan down, and the treasure on the Mountain would buy an empire. It might even buy the power to crush the d’vahnyan forever, and he knew that an empire would be valueless if he failed to crush them. He knew suddenly that it was neither the empire nor the treasure he yearned for now—it was the ruin of the whole d’vahnyan clan. The thousands of dead-faced replicas of the single d’vahnyan before whom a planet humbled itself. Confidence and power surged up in Rohan’s mind. He could do it. He knew he could do it—if in this single showdown he could outface the d’vahnyan.

  He saw Forsythe striding down the path toward the oncoming billows of mist which had already swallowed the submissive Quai. Jellaby paused uncertainly, looked after Forsythe, looked back at Rohan.

  Rohan drew a deep breath. There was only one way to conquer, now. Had anyone ever really killed a d’vahnyan? Had anyone, before now, dared try? “Why not?” he thought. “What have I got to lose?”

  He dropped his hand to the blaster at his side, tipped the holster up and fired very quickly, not drawing the gun, not giving the d’vahnyan any warning or himself time to think.

  THIS WAS A NIGHTMARE, Rohan thought. They were running, running, running, the three of them, through mist and pale trees wreathed in vines and fog, and the leaves talked continuously around them, trembling like a jungle in terror.

  Rohan could scarcely see the pale foliage before his eyes. That flash, back there, had been so nearly blinding . . . What flash?

  “Oh yes,” he thought casually. “The flash when I shot the d’vahnyan.

  Reason suddenly took over in his spinning mind, and he seemed to be screaming a shocked and incredulous question at himself: Shot the d’vahnyan? I shot the d’vahnyan?

  He stumbled and fell forward, clasping a tree-trunk to break the fall, and leaned there for a long moment, his cheek against the wet bark, water dripping down his neck from the trembling foliage above, while he wrestled with his own stunned and awakening memory.

  “I shot the d’vahnyan,” he told himself carefully. “Oh yes, I did it. I, Red Rohan, shot a d’vahnyan, and here I am, alive. So it can be done. I did it. But what happened then? Why am I here?” His memory did not want to retrace its path, and he set his teeth and forced his mind back to the moment before the cave, when the gun jolted in his hand, and—

  The flash. The blinding sun-flash, yellow white, the brightest light that had ever burned on Venus. No Venusian ever saw the sun. Even the fires burned lavender. Even gun-fire flashed pale violet. But this flash had been the color of the sun. Blinding. Stunning the eye and the mind.

  It engulfed the d’vahnyan. And the mist rolled forward to cloud the sun-color. Rainbows, he remembered, had shimmered for an instant in the mist, surely the first rainbows that had ever shone on Venus.

  But had the d’vakhyan fallen? No man could stand against the discharge of a blaster fired into him from three feet away. But was the d’vahnyan a man? He asked himself the question, and the garrulous leaves whispered all around him, giving no answer. There was no answer. There was only the blinding flash, the mist, the rainbows, and—

  And then they had run.

  “Forsythe,” Rohan called, his voice unsteady above the conversations of the leaves. “Forsythe. Jellaby!”

  Dark figures looming up out of the trees behind him gasped and slowed in their forward plunge.

  “Red?” Forsythe’s uncertain voice inquired. “Red?”

  “All right,” Rohan said, forcing his tone toward normality. “All right, calm down now. We’re okay. Everything’s under control.”

  “Control!” Forsythe said bitterly, leaning against a tree and gasping for breath. “Oh, sure, everything’s fine! You shot a d’vahnyan. I saw you do it! You know what the penalty is for that?”

  “Do you?” Rohan managed a wry grin. “Nobody knows. Maybe nobody ever tried it before. Maybe it’s a brand new crime. But they’ll work out some punishment to fit it. And we—”

  “Shut up,” Rohan said. He was striving hard to regain his lost composure. He said again, “Shut up, Forsythe,” and his voice was almost pleasant. “What’s done is done. Now you’ll have to come along with me. If we reach the Mountain we won’t have a thing to worry about. I promise you that.”

  “I won’t do it,” Forsythe said, still breathing hard. “I’m going back and wait for Barber. You got the message to him and I think he’ll come. We didn’t give him time enough, that’s all. He—”

  Rohan said wearily, “Barber’s dead, Forsythe. He died two years ago.”

  THERE WAS A DREADFUL silence among the three men for a very long moment. Then Jellaby slowly unslung his rifle, his big hands moving almost unguided, his eyes beginning to burn upon Rohan.

  “Don’t you do it,” Rohan said. “I’m your only chance.”

  “Barber—dead?” Forsythe echoed blankly. “I don’t believe it. You’re lying. You—”

  “I lied before, yes. I had to. I needed you two.” Rohan’s voice was assured, gently urgent. “No message ever went through to Barber because it couldn’t. I haven’t got any pipeline to hell. Barber lived a long, nasty life and he died in a crack-up in the jungle two years ago. I heard about it from Crazy Joe. I was afraid you might have, too, but I took the chance. I had to. I tell you, if we get to the Mountain you’ll never regret what I’ve done. We’ll be so rich no government can stop us. We’ll carve an empire out of the Venusian jungle and we’ll be three emperors who rule half a world. There’s enough for all of us. This whole planet is just lying here waiting for men like us to take
over. I know the way to do it. I’m going on. I need your help and I’ve made sure you’d have to give it. You can’t go back now. The whole planet’s against us. All we can do is push on toward the Mountain, and if we get there, we can buy and sell the world.” He elbowed himself away from the tree. “I’m going on. You can follow if you want to.”

  The two in the path looked at him wordlessly, rage and terror stopping up their mouths. Forsythe choked a little and tried to speak, but the words died and his eyes went suddenly round, showing a circle of white around each iris. He was looking back the way they had come.

  Rohan swung about and looked too. Distinctly in the murmuring silence they all heard the crunch of soft feet moving over pebbles. Rohan thought violently back along the way he had come, searching for a memory of crossing pebbles. He looked down. His feet were dark with moisture. Yes, a broad shoal of pebbles and then a rushing brook that wound through the trees. A long way back? He couldn’t remember.

  They heard pebbles roll and crunch, far off, hidden among the leaves. Then there was the sound of rapid water gurgling around an obstruction—such an obstruction as wading legs. Pebbles crunched again on the nearer bank. After that, silence.

  It might be farther than it seemed. Sound carried strangely sometimes among these deflecting leaves.

  Rohan sucked in breath, settled his pack with firm, decisive hands, checked his blaster.

  “Come along,” he said, and his voice was almost cheerful again. The pressure of danger was like a strong drink to him now. There could be no hesitating, no uncertainty. The only course was forward. “Come on—quick! We can make it if we keep ahead.”

  “Ahead of what?” Forsythe whispered, rolling his white-ringed eyes back toward the mist-hung jungle they had passed. “It’s him, you know. I—I’ve been seeing flashes of black through the leaves. He’s after us. He’ll get us, Red. We killed him and he’ll follow us till he gets us. Red, I—”