Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Nothing on earth had ever faced a Destroyer—nothing that hoped to live. Yet Ran dreamed, since there was no harm in dreaming, even if sleep were a thing man could control.

  Heavily he cast out the net of his thought and gathered in the tribe, interposing his own mental images between theirs and the far-off massacre reddening the waters and the listening minds. He goaded his people into motion and hurled them in an arrowing swarm down the long slope of the undersea forest, away from that distant focus of danger. His mind touched the minds of the whole group simultaneously with firm, swift, reassuring images that had no shape, being only the clan symbols for ordered flight.

  THE THOUGHTS of his tribe flickered against Ran’s like the touch of cold, unsteady fingers. Terror; exhaustion; the trembling thought of a silver-furred woman who had never run so long or felt such fear before; the quaver of a furry child; the wild, scattered thoughts of the foolish. Arid behind all these the steady, uncomplaining firmness of the older clansmen, supporting Ran’s thoughts without question because they had chosen him for their leader and knew they had chosen well.

  “Hurry,” he told his tribe. “Don’t lag. Hurry 1 We can reach the city by noon if we hurry. Run, run, run! I know we’re tired. When we reach the White Cleft where the mussels grow we can rest for a moment. You can make it that far; we’ll rest, at the White Cleft. Run!”

  The words meant nothing. He was using them as a shield to blank out the cries of the distant tribe from which no sane thoughts came, now. There were only mindless flashes, screaming with panic—the silvery arcs of sea-folk darting wildly and the fiery arcs of the stars pursuing, against which no defence could stand—and the bursts of color, and the dying. Ran got no flash from their leader, if he lived; surely, he thought, all need not have died if the leader had been wise. Surely a few might have been directed into hiding, or the strongest and the children sent on ahead while the rest drew the Destroyer’s fire. But these were beyond all reasoning, beyond all reach of the mind; it was sea-beasts, not men, whose deaths exploded in the thoughts of the listeners.

  So Ran’s tribe fled, for the best and oldest of reasons, through a clear undersea dawn that was beginning to glow green with the filtering of early sunlight from far above, where the Aliens lived and ruled the world. They knew, nothing of the Air and the Aliens, except that from them the implacable iron Destroyers came down, They knew nothing of what lay in the Great Deeps out of which the slow, calm “Thoughts” arose. They knew only their own water-world, how to hide in it, how to run for their lives when the Destroyers drove them. How, if they were lucky, to save a few when the Destroyers found them. That other tribe had not been lucky.

  No thoughts came through at all, now.

  Then in a flurry of churning waters, sending his message screaming ahead of him in mindless panic, a blue-silver body swept down toward them through the swaying jungle, tearing the brown leaves as he passed, blind with fear and shrieking, “Run! Run! Run!”

  The clan broke its formation and spun wildly apart, searching in all directions for the danger. Ran sent his perceptions fastest and farthest and keenest, probing backward along the wake of the fugitive for an iron, torpedo-shaped thing slipping silently toward them.

  There was nothing; the Destroyers were here, but not close, and none of them seemed yet to suspect the presence of the fleeing clan. This tumult might very easily summon them. Ran ruffled out his fur to test the water, smoothed it sleek again and turned strongly in his course, rising to meet the newcomer.

  It was a man, big, with a blue sheen to his fur, and half-insane thoughts running like a rip-tide from him through the receptive listening minds of the tribe, too frightened and exhausted to be under much control. Ran felt them shaking the calm reins he had laid upon them, and fought back his own anger, because that too would only inflame them more. “Silence!” he ordered them all sternly, but the newcomer most. “Silence! Follow us, but don’t speak.”

  The man whirled in the water and saw him. He flashed downward with quick, jerky strokes, carrying with him upon his fur the indefinable taint of blood that no one could mistake. The two hung a few feet apart, measuring each other.

  And so Ran met Dagon, leader of the lost tribe, now leader of no tribe.

  RAN DID NOT like what he saw in that dark mind that had held unquestioned power for so long. There was strength latent there, and courage of a sort, but there was no discipline at all, and so the courage had crumbled before the Destroyers. And when courage left mankind, Ran thought wearily, what remained? Only blind ferocity, like the shark’s. For an instant he saw the gleaming bodies of his people as he saw a shoal of fish, mindless, taking the last fatal step down the descending path into the darkness of the race.

  Out of Dagen’s mind thoughts of panic and flight and death spun in a whirlwind that caught even Ran himself, a little, in its dangerous spiral. It would be so easy to give way to terror, so easy to abandon the tribe and fly in senseless, unreasoning panic until the Destroyers found them all.

  It was easy to do what Dagon had done. But, of course, when a man sees his whole tribe destroyed in one bursting barrage of stars—

  “Join us,” he said as calmly as he could. “We’ll find a shelter; we know a sunken city not very for away—”

  But Dagon was used to rule, not to accept commands. His thoughts burst out in a strong shriek, wild with terror, urging disorganized flight—each for himself. A few of the younger and less stable of Ran’s tribe flashed sidewise in the water, beating their arms in panic, churning froth and brown weed-leaves, ready to fly the instant they saw a shelter to hide in.

  Ran lowered his head, gathered his exhausted muscles strongly, and with all his power drove a measured blow of his bulky shoulder into Dagon’s neck between shoulder and head. He had fought often enough before; he knew where to strike.

  Dagon’s frantic thoughts broke off into blankness for a moment—a brief but all important moment. Into that blankness Ran sent his own mind, radiating the familiar clan-patterns of unity and control.

  The scattered tribe rallied a little, wavered, hesitated and then drew together, waiting. Dagon’s thoughts took form again after that instant’s stunned silence. But he was hesitant, unsure. Reason was not in him, and Ran had won—for the moment.

  “Come,” Ran said, and doubled his legs in a strong beat that carried him to the head of the hovering clan. “Quiet! Follow me and keep your ranks. You know the way to the cleft.”

  Suddenly Dagon swung around and swam after the obedient tribe. His thoughts were tinged with red, but he came.

  Something moved through the waters. Not the iron pulse that told of the Destroyers. A vast, calm pulse that beat through all ocean curved out in a slow and powerful tide—and ceased. They had heard again the “Thought of the Deep.”

  l

  In its dawn, and in its twilight, a race may be able to sense such pulses. Something like this may once have moved through misty fern-forests, when the beat of creation itself had not yet faded into silence. Furred primates, not yet men, may have listened and sniffed the wind when those unbearable pulses moved through the milky air, above the booming of the mastodon’s feet and the cry of the carnivores. Man cannot very clearly sense the heartbeat of. the world; but those who came before man may have known—and those who came after man know, too. Man wearing fur once more and drawing nearer and nearer to the close of his long circle of planetary life, here in the seas that bore him, heard the beat.

  It was part of the sea, as Ran was. It had always been there; man did not question the unfathomable. Memory of it was mixed with Ran’s earliest memories, the dark, cool, quiet remembrance of his first years alive and the “Thought of the Deep”, mighty, unknowable, moving through all ocean on such a subtle plane that not a frond of seaweed stirred, though there was power in that mighty, pulse to turn a tribe aside if it swam cross-current of the slowly furling “Thought.” Ran did not question, any more than he questioned the tides themselves.

  He knew it rose
out of the Great Deeps. What lay there no man knew. No man had ever gone down into the Deeps and returned.

  2

  DESTROYERS were behind I them now, rolling through the shallow seas a terrifyingly short distance away. Ran could feel their tremendous dark bulk, trembling with latent power, gleaming when sunlight filtered down through the ripples to strike submarine fire from their sides.

  The clan did not know it. The clan, like all clans, was too ready to let their leader do the watching for trouble, too ready to believe what their lax minds were eager to believe—that safety was closer than danger, food closer than death, a rest upon sandy clearings closest of all. He would not tell them how near the Destroyers were.

  Once, as they fled across an open savannah among the sea-forests, a shadow from high above floated monstrously over the pale green sand, and the clan broke ranks without waiting for the command, a flurry of silver bodies flashing this way and that into the shelter of the weed.

  Everything in the submarine world fled for cover when those shadows passed. They were not Destroyers—in a sense. They came from the Aliens, as Destroyers came, but these killed all things, including man. Even the shark and the barracuda hid, and the dark seal-people who spoke a half-human tongue so softly. Not only mankind had altered in body and mind in the long milleniums since men first took shelter in the ocean, but the warmblooded altered most. The seal-clans and the dolphin tribes filled the underwater with soft murmurs of their primitive talk. They had nothing to fear from the Destroyers; the mission of the Destroyers was the extermination of man alone.

  But that shadow was something unknowable which the Aliens themselves rode. Ship, perhaps. No one dared look up to see if a keel printed the dimpling surface or rode high up in Air. That sort of ship carried hunters who preyed on all lives alike. Even the majestic whale, about which nothing was known except his majesty, had all but vanished from the seas after those ships began to pass. All things hid when that shadow slid across the ocean floor, mankind shouldering fish and seal and dolphin alike for shelter among the rocks.

  But it passed, and all of the ocean world but man was at peace again. Man fled on.

  What were the Aliens? No one knew; no man had any mental picture at all of the inheritors of Earth. They only knew that whenever men met the Destroyers, wherever they met them, there they died. And shark and barracuda fed upon what the inheritors left of those whom Earth bore and those who had ruled her, once.

  And might, again.

  That was the legend, anyhow; that was what kept men like Ran still fighting, till flying before the Destroyers, still stubbornly Welding their clans together and seeking out deeper and farther sanctuaries where their silver-furred children might grow to maturity and pass on to yet another precarious generation the heritage of man.

  The Earth-Born shall inherit Earth.

  That was the legend; that was the promise. It was all men like Ran had to hold to, and it was little enough. Ran could not even feel sure now that there were any other men left alive except his own fleeing tribe.

  Once, it seemed to him, the Destroyers had killed much more casually, almost at random. That was in the old days he could barely remember, when the tribes of men had thronged the shallow, sunlit seas around every coastline. The oldest knew tales their grandfathers had told of a golden age, when men even dared to draw their silver-furred limbs up the beaches—the loneliest beaches, of course—and bask in the direct warmth of the sun. Legend said they had even used their voices in these days; they had spoke and sung in air. The old ones remembered great sweeping choruses stronger than the beat of surf, rolling from beach to beach as the throngs of men sunned their silver pelts and joined their voices.

  But the Destroyers put an end to it long ago. The great killings of the last few years had been systematic. The machines came down in their thousands, more silently than the shark, and far more deadly, and reaped the clans of ocean as men had once reaped grain in the old, old, forgotten days when the Earth-Born ruled the Earth.

  Now the farthest extension of the senses found no quiver of human thought in the waters anywhere. Were these the last? Perhaps; perhaps not. Ran only knew they had come a long, long way down the warm roadway of the Gulf Stream which was mankind’s favorite path undersea, and encountered only that one other clan whose deaths still made the memory shiver. Perhaps they were the last.

  RAN SWUNG them sharply in a racing spiral around a point of rock, the clan streaming out obediently in a silver ribbon and fleeing on down the long incline through upward-wavering weed. Ran could not stretch out his specialized senses in any direction very far without striking upon the numbing iron presences that prowled the sea-floors, testing the water for their prey.

  Patiently he drove his clan along the tribe-ways toward sanctuary. Patiently he sent his promises of safety out. The “Thoughts of the Deep” moved now and then in vast tides through the shadowed water . . .

  l

  There was going to be trouble with Dagon. Ran thought of it as he sank slowly through the long cloven shaft after the last of his people. At the foot of the shaft lay the sunken city. The walls of rock through which they reached it were colored dull red and irridescent blue-green from explosions that happened aeons ago. The floor of the cleft was fused green glass.

  Ran slipped gently downward, watching the last tired clansmen struggle through weeds toward safety, catching Dagon’s confused thoughts above the soft, twittering murmurs of the tribe. In the depths of Dagon’s mind, under the confusion, lay something cold and ominous as a barracuda. Fear, mostly, and the potentialities for rage that was not quite human. There can be mutations on the downward path as well as the upward, and in Dagon’s mind lay the clear seed of mankind’s future.

  “Are we fish?” Ran asked himself. “Are we nothing but fear and hunger?”

  Dagon had fled as mindlessly as a fish when the Destroyer wiped out his tribe. He should not be swimming this strongly now; he should not be able to. The leader of a clan had no right to this much remaining energy, with his clan so lately wiped out after long flight. A tribe leader should not survive his clan at all.

  Ran realized suddenly that he was a little afraid of Dagon—not physically afraid, but afraid in the mind, where reason dwells. Dagon’s weakness was a failing the whole tribe was heir to, Ran with the rest. And Dagon’s failure could be a foreshadowing of Ran’s failure, when the hour of trial came. Would Ran’s tribe scatter mindlessly, to be hunted down in the open, like Dagon’s? Would Ran—

  “No,” he told himself resolutely.

  “We are men. I’ll keep us men. As long as we stay alive.”

  HE CAME last out of the shaft down which he had shepherded his people. They hung, panting and uncertain, in a cloud around the cleft-mouth, waiting for him. Dagon floated a little way apart, raking the city before him with keen, quick glances. He knew a good refuge when he saw it.

  Here were rank upon rank of high stone towers aquiver with veils of weed. The canyons between the buildings were too narrow for a Destroyer to pass. And there was something in the construction of the towers which confused them a little when their quarry hid among the buildings. Ran connected it vaguely with the silvery gleam of metal that still showed bright when the moss was rubbed from it.

  Heretofore the city had been safe; heretofore when the Destroyers crossed a clan’s path and unloosed their glittering destruction upon their quarry, any who, by agility and speed could reach a hiding place in this city, or another like it, had survived.

  The tribes knew they were cities, knew dimly, with an unthinking racial memory, that they were cities built by men. How, or when, nobody had ever wondered. It did not occur even to Ran that the cities might have been reared on dry land, or that the land had sunk. It was enough that there were cities here at all, to offer the sea clans refuge when they needed it.

  Dagon’s quick glances glittered with appreciation of the place Ran had guided them to. There was a broken dome a little way off which caught the eye first b
ecause of its size, and Dagon’s whole silvery bulk twitched impulsively at sight of it. The dome was not a very good refuge, there was no metal remaining in it, and it was too conspicuous. Ran had another shelter in mind, but Dagon gave him no time to direct the clan there.

  “Run!” Dagon flashed at the whole tribe, not controlling his thought but sending it out broadcast and scarcely knowing he had uttered the command at all. It was sheer instinct made audible. “Run for the dome! We can hide there while we rest. Everyone—follow me!”

  The clan’s common impulse toward flight, already keyed to a high, hysterical pitch, made them respond instantly and as unthinkingly as Dagon himself. Every sleek, shining body flashed simultaneously around and lined up for flight toward the polarizing goal of the dome.

  Then reason—what reason remained to man—interrupted the impulse, and a few of the tribe paused shivering uncertainly, remembering that Ran’s was the voice which commanded them, not Dagon’s. Yet Dagon spoke so authoritatively, urged them toward the obvious shelter, speaking for the obvious need—Most of them darted forward, at Dagon’s heels.

  Ran galvanized his weary muscles and shot forward through the tribe, scattering it in all directions, breaking up the pattern of their flight before it had fully formed. Then he was at their front, wheeling in the water so abruptly that his fur streamed sidewise for a moment as he turned to face them. With all his authority he shouted, “No! No! Not the dome! You know our refuge! I’m your leader, not Dagon. The dome is too open to be safe; head for our tower!”