Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  He felt Allenby’s uneasiness tentatively subside. He did not turn as he heard Allenby’s feet shift on the floor.

  “I’ll get back, then,” Allenby said without words. “I just wanted to see you when I told you that we’d hit another dead end. Is it all right, Jeff?”

  “Fine,” Cody said. “I won’t keep you.”

  Allenby went out.

  Cody listened while the receding footsteps crossed the room beyond. He heard the door close and lock. He was alone now, physically, though all through the cavern an interlacing play of telepathic thoughts moved continually, touching his own and passing. Even Allenby sent back a vague uneasiness as he moved away. So Cody kept the images of pine woods and clear sky and laughing woman playing over the surface of his mind. But his eyes turned sidewise and without moving his head he saw lying on the edge of a work table within reach of his hand the thing he had not dared admit into his mind till now. Too many other minds were watching.

  What he saw was a knife with a heavy, narrow blade and a sharp point, left by some careless workman. What he thought of was the man before him in this job, and the way Brewster had resigned from it after eight months. Brewster had used a revolver. But a knife was good, too. There is a place inside the collarbone, near the neck, and consciousness goes out like a blown candle in a matter of seconds if you drive the knife in there. If your burden is too much to bear, as Merriam’s was, and Brewster’s. And Jeff Cody’s.

  All around him in the air, like an eyeless, invisible staring, uneasy telepathic minds were swinging around toward him. A ripple of panic was running through the cavern. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But Cody had controlled his surface thoughts skillfully. He had not let himself really see the knife, really think clearly of that spot inside the collarbone, until now.

  Now he drew a deep breath and let the wonderful release of the thought flash bright and clear through the cavern. They couldn’t stop him. Nobody was near enough. He was free.

  “So the Inductor won’t work,” he said aloud. “So you can’t induce telepathy in a human mind. But there’s one way to stop telepathy!”

  He took one long sidewise step and the knife was in his hand. With two fingers he felt for the ridge of his collarbone, to guide the blade.

  “Let the Inductor fail,” he thought. “Let the pogrom come. Let the race die. Turn loose Apocalypse. It’s not my problem now!”

  Generations ago, the Blowup had posed the problem by mutating a subspecies of telepaths. And there had been a time when the Baldies hoped that eugenics could solve that problem. But not any more. Time was too short.

  Even though the telepathic function was carried by a dominant gene, there were too few Baldies. Given enough time and enough intermarriage, the world might become peopled entirely by telepaths, but there was not enough time. The only answer was the one which Baldies had been seeking for years now—a mechanical device, an Inductor, which would induce the telepathic power in a nontelepath.

  It was theoretically possible. The minds of the greatest scientists on earth lay open to the Baldies. And here in the caves the electronic calculator could solve the problem, given enough data. But this problem it had not completely solved, for there was not enough data, in spite of the treasure of knowledge stolen from hundreds of brilliant, seeking, non-Baldy minds.

  Still, it was the answer. If every man and woman in the world could become a telepath, simply by wearing a compact mechanical device, the miracle could be worked. The last barriers would go down. The fear and hatred nontelepaths had for Baldies would vanish—not instantly, but it would dissolve little by little in the great sea of interacting minds. The walls, the difference, would vanish, and with it the fear that relentlessly forced the coming of the pogrom.

  But the Inductor was still a theory. The calculator had not yet solved that problem, if it ever would. Instead, it had given the answer to the basic problem in an unexpected way, coldly mechanical and terribly logical. The problem could be solved, the calculator said. Destroy all nontelepathic humans. The method? It searched its vast memory-library and found—

  Operation Apocalypse.

  There was a virus which, by means of certain stimuli, could be mutated into a variant which was air-borne and propagated quickly. It destroyed human neural tissue. There was only one kind of human neural tissue it could not harm.

  Telepaths were naturally immune to the mutated virus.

  No Baldy knew what the virus was, or the method of mutation. Only the calculator knew those things, and the inhuman mind of an electronic calculator cannot be read. Somewhere in the great machine was a tiny crystal of barium titanate bearing a series of frozen dots of energy in a binary digit code. And that code held the secret of the deadly virus.

  If Jeff Cody took three steps forward and sat down in the cushioned operator’s chair before the control panel, and if he touched a certain button, a monitor device would examine the electronic pattern of his brain and identify it as surely as fingerprints are identified. Only one man in the world could satisfy the question the monitor would silently ask.

  And then a light would begin to glow—somewhere—on the control panel, and under it would be a number, and, seeing that number, Cody could make the calculator reveal its secret. Before Cody, Brewster had carried this crushing burden. And before Brewster, Merriam. And after Cody—someone else would have the unendurable responsibility for deciding whether to say: The end of all flesh is come before Me . . . behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

  The crash of protesting minds burst by sheer force through the shell of defense Cody had put up around his own as he took up the knife. From all over the busy cavern telepaths stopped in their tracks and hurled their strong, urgent thoughts toward the interlocked center that was Cody.

  It was stunning. He had never felt so strong an impact before. He did not mean to falter, but the burden of their protest was almost tangible, almost a thing to stagger under. Even from above-ground he could hear and feel the instant thrust of down-driving thought. A quarter of a mile above this limestone sky, above the rock and the soil with the pine tree roots clenched downward through it, a hunter in ragged buckskins paused among the trees and sent his own shocked, sympathetic protest dropping toward the cavern. The thought came blurred to Cody by the stone between, and starred with the tiny, bright, brainless thoughts of small burrowing things in the soil overhead.

  Someone in a helicopter high up in the hot blue sky locked minds with the group underground, faint and far-off, but as instant as the man in the nearest cave beyond Cody’s locked door.

  “No, no,” the voices said in his mind. “You can’t! You are all of us. You can’t. Jeff, you are all of us!”

  He knew it was true. The way out was like a deep, dark well, and vertigo pulled him toward it, but he knew that he would be killing his whole race, a little, if he killed himself. Only telepaths can experience death and still live. Each time a telepath dies, all the rest within mind’s reach feel the blackness close upon an extinguished mind, and feel their own minds extinguish a little in response.

  It happened so fast Cody was still feeling with two fingers along the edge of his collarbone, and the knife was not yet firm in his fist, when the single, interlocking cry of anguished protest from a hundred minds speaking as one closed down upon him. He shut his thoughts and was obdurate. He could fight them off long enough. This would only take a second. The door was locked and physical force was the only thing that could stop him.

  But he was uneasy even in this urgent press of voices and action. For Allenby’s mind was not speaking with the rest. Why?

  Now the knife was firm in his hand. Now he spread his two fingers apart a little to make way for it, knowing the place to strike. Had Brewster felt as he felt, when Brewster stood here six-months ago and laid down the unbearable burden of decision? Had it been hard to pull the trigger? Or easy, as it was easy to lift the knife and—

  A burst of blinding white light exploded in the middle of his brain. It wa
s like a shooting star that crashed and shattered upon the very texture of the mind itself. In the last winking instant of consciousness Cody thought he had already struck the self-destroying blow and that this was what death looked like from within.

  Then he knew that the meteor of impact was Allenby’s mind striking his a numbing blow. He felt the knife slip from his hands, he felt his knees buckle, and he felt nothing more for a very long, an immeasurable time.

  When he was aware of himself again Allenby was kneeling beside him on the floor, and the calculator looked up above him glassy and reflecting from an unfamiliar angle, a child’s eye view seen with a knee-high vision. The door was unlocked and stood open. Everything looked strange.

  Allenby said, “All right, Jeff?”

  Cody looked up at him and felt the pent-up and unreleased tension in him boil toward the surface in an outburst of rage so strong that the supporting minds he felt hovering around him drew back as if from fire.

  “I’m sorry,” Allenby said. “I’ve only done that twice before in my life. I had to do it, Jeff.”

  Cody threw aside the hand on his shoulder. Scowling, he drew his feet under him and tried to rise. The room went around him in an unsteady circle.

  “Somebody had to be the man,” Allenby said. “It was the odds, Jeff. It’s hard on you and Merriam and Brewster and those others, but—”

  Cody made a violent gesture, cutting off the thought.

  “All right,” Allenby said. “But don’t kill yourself, Jeff. Kill somebody else. Kill Jasper Horne.”

  A little burning shock went through Cody’s mind. He stood motionless, not even his mind stirring, letting that strange new thought glow in the center of it.

  Kill Jasper Horne.

  Oh, Allenby was a wise man. He was grinning at Cody now, his round, ruddy face tense but beginning to look happy again.

  “Feeling better? Action’s what you need, Jeff—action, directed activity. All you’ve been able to do for months is stay put and worry. There are some responsibilities a man can’t carry—unless he acts. Well, use your knife on Horne, not yourself.”

  A faint flicker of doubt wavered in Cody’s mind.

  Allenby said, “Yes, you may fail. He may kill you.”

  “He won’t,” Cody said aloud, his voice sounding strange to him.

  “He could. You’ll have to take the chance. Get him if you can. That’s what you want to do, but you haven’t really known it. You’ve got to kill someone. Horne’s our basic problem now. He’s our real enemy. So kill Home. Not yourself.”

  Cody nodded without a word.

  “Good. We’ll locate him for you. And I’ll get you a copter. Will you see Lucy first?”

  A little wave of disturbance ran through Cody’s mind. Allenby saw it, but he did not let his own mind ripple in response. Quietly the innumerable linking minds of the other telepaths all around them had drawn back, waiting.

  “Yes,” Cody said. “I’ll see Lucy first.” He turned toward the door of the cave.

  Jasper Horne—and what he represented—was the reason why the Baldies could not let even themselves learn the method of Operation Apocalypse and the nature of the deadly selective virus from the calculator. That secret had to be kept from Jasper Horne and his fellow paranoids. For their approach was: Why not kill all the humans? Why not, before they kill us? Why not strike first, and save ourselves?

  These were hard questions to answer, and Jasper Horne was very adept at putting it to the test. If you could say the group of paranoid telepaths had any leader, then Horne was that leader. How much the man knew of the Caves was Uncertain. He knew they existed, but not where. He knew some of the things that were going on in it, in spite of the frequency scrambling Mute helmets every Cave Baldy wore. If he knew about the Inductor, he would—if he could—have dropped an Egg on it with the greatest joy in life and watched the smoke-cloud arise. Certainly he knew that Operation Apocalypse had been planned, for he was doing his best to force the Baldies to release the virus that would destroy all nontelepathic human life.

  And he knew the way to force this decision. If—when—a total pogrom started, then the virus and the Apocalypse would be loosed upon the world. Then there would be no choice. When your life depends on killing your enemy, you don’t hesitate. But when the enemy is your brother . . .

  That was the difference. To the normal Baldies, the race of. nontelepathic humans was a close kin. To the paranoids they were hairy sub-men fit only for extermination. So Jasper Horne worked in every way he knew to force trouble to the surface. To precipitate a pogrom. To make sure the Baldies released the virus and destroyed the hairy men.

  And Horne worked in a decentralized post-Blowup society founded on fear, a fear that had been very real once. Today, no further move seemed possible. The society wavered between re-contraction and further expansion, and each man, each town, was on guard against all others. For how can you trust another when you do not know his thoughts?

  American Gun and Sweetwater, Jensen’s Crossing and Santaclare and all the rest, clear across the curve of the continent. Men and women in the towns going about their business, rearing their children, lending their gardens and their stores and their factories. Most of them were normal human beings. Yet in every town the Baldies lived too, rearing their children, tending their stores. Amicably enough for the most part. But not always—not always.

  And for weeks now, over most of the nation, had lain a humid, oppressive heat wave, in which aggressions rose steadily higher. Yet, outside of a few knife-duels, no one dared strike the first blow. Other men were armed too, and every town possessed a cache of atomic Eggs, and could strike back with deadly precision.

  The time was more than ripe for a pogrom. So far, no mob had formed. No potential lynchers had agreed on a target.

  But the Baldies were a minority.

  All that was needed was a precipitating factor and the paranoids were doing their best to provide that.

  Cody glanced up at the cavern’s gray stone sky and reached with his key for the lock of his wife’s apartment door. With the key already in place, he hesitated, not from indecision this time but because he knew what probably waited inside. There was a furrow between his brows, and all the little lines of his face were pulled tense and held that way by the perpetual tension that held every Baldy from the first moment after he entered the caves.

  The stone sky held down and bottled in such a complex maze of thoughts, echoing off the walls and interlacing and interlocking in a babel of confusion. The Cavern of Babel, Cody thought wryly, and turned the key with a gesture of small resolution. Indoors he would exchange one babel for another. The walls would give him a little shelter from the clouds of stale, sullen resentment outside, but there was something inside he liked even less. Yet he knew that he could not leave without seeing Lucy and the baby.

  He opened the door. The living room looked bright enough, with its deep, broad divan-shelf running along three sides, soft, dark mossy green under the shelves of bookspools, colored cushions scattered, the lights on low. An electric fire glowed behind a Gothic interweaving of baffles, like a small cathedral on fire from within. Through the broad window in the fourth wall he could see the lights of the Garsons’ living room next door reflecting on the street, and across the way June and Hugh Barton in their own living room, having a pre-dinner cocktail before their electric fire. It looked pleasant.

  But in here all the clear colors and the glow were clouded by the deep miasma of despair which colored all Jeff Cody’s wife’s days, and had for—how long now? The baby was three months old.

  He called, “Lucy?”

  No answer. But a deeper wave of misery beat through the apartment, and after a moment he heard the bed creak in the next room. He heard a sigh. Then Lucy’s voice, blurred a little, said, “Jeff.” There was an instant of silence, and he had already turned toward the kitchen when her voice came again. “Go into the kitchen and bring me a little more whiskey, will you, please?”


  “Right away,” he said. The whiskey was not going to hurt her much, he thought. Anything that could help her get over the next few months was that much to the good. The next few—? No, the end would come much sooner than that.

  “Jeff?” Lucy’s voice was querulous. He took the whiskey into the bedroom. She was lying face up across the bed, her reddish curls hanging, her stocking feet against the wall. Marks of dried tears ran down across her cheek toward her ear, but her lashes were not wet now. In the corner the baby slept in a small cocoon of his own incoherent animallike thoughts. He was dreaming of warmth and enormous all-enveloping softness that stirred slowly, a dream without shape, all texture and temperature. His light-red curls were no more than a down on his well-shaped head.

  Cody looked at Lucy. “How do you feel?” he heard himself asking inanely.

  Without moving a muscle she let her eyes roll sidewise so that she was looking at him from under her half-closed lids, a stony, suffering, hating look. An empty water glass stood on the bedtable within reach of her lax hand. Cody stepped forward, unstopped the bottle and poured a steady amber stream into the glass. Two inches, three. She was not going to say when. He stopped at three and replaced the bottle.

  “You don’t have to ask how anybody feels,” Lucy said in a dull voice.

  “I’m not reading you, Lucy.”