Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  She shrugged against the bedspread. “You say.”

  Looking again at the sleeping baby, Cody did not answer. But Lucy sat up with great suddenness, making the bed groan, startling Cody because the motion had been so spontaneous he had not even caught the anticipation of it in her mind. He’s not yours. He’s mine. All mine, my kind, my race. No—the thought went on—taint in his blood at all. Not a freak. Not a Baldy. A nice, normal, healthy, perfect baby—She didn’t say it aloud, but she didn’t have to. She caught at the thought halfway through, and then deliberately let it go on, knowing she might as well have said it aloud. Then she added in a flat voice, “And I suppose you didn’t read that.”

  Silently he held out the whiskey glass to her.

  It had been five years now since the Egg dropped on Sequoia. Five years since the cavern colony saw the last daylight they might ever see. And the people herded from Sequoia to the caves had settled down sullenly, resentful or resigned according to their temperaments. They had every comfort of underground living which their captors could provide. They were as content as skilled psychologists could make them, psychologists who could look into their minds and read their needs almost before the needs took shape. But they were captives.

  The intermarriages had started within a few months of the captivity. It was one of the large-scale experiments which could have happened only in the caves under such controlled conditions. Partly it was to demonstrate good intent to the captives, to make them feel less isolated.

  No telepath really wants to marry a nontelepath. There are among nontelepaths quite as high a percentage of desirable mates as among Baldies, but to a Baldy, a nontelepathic human is a handicapped person. Like a lovely young girl who has every desirable attribute of mind and body but happens also to be deaf, dumb, and blind. She may communicate in finger-language, but the barrier remains all but insurmountable.

  And there is this added factor—around every human who starts out life with the best of heredity and environment, shadows of the prison-house are inevitably, slowly but inexorably closed in by all the problems of living which he fails to solve completely without even realizing it. But not the Baldies. There are always friends to help, there are always minds to lean upon in crises and uncertainties. There is constant check and balance, so that no Baldy suffers from those inward quandaries, those only partly recognized clouds of confusion and bewilderment which fog the happiness of every other human being. In the telepathic mind there are comparatively few unswept chambers cluttered with old doubts and fears. It makes for a clarity of the personality which no nontelepath quite achieves.

  A telepath may become psychotic, of course, but only when subjected to such stresses, over a long period of time, as a nontelepath could endure only briefly without breaking. (The paranoid telepaths were in a different class; heredity was an important factor there.)

  So marriage between Baldy and nontelepath is, at best, marriage between an alert, receptive, fully aware being and one murky and confused, handicapped in communication and always, on some level, latently resentful.

  But by now almost every marriageable nontelepath in the caverns had been painstakingly courted by and married to a Baldy. They were at the same time, of course, inevitably married to an espionage agent, a willing but not always accepted psychoanalyst, and, most importantly, to the potential parent of other Baldies.

  The gene is dominant, which means that the children were almost invariably telepathic. Only when the Baldy spouse possessed one recessive nontelepathic gene as well as one dominant telepathic gene could the child be born a non telepath.

  That was what had happened to Lucy and Jeff Cody—

  No human was ever to leave the caves again. No Baldy was to know of the captivity who did not wear the Mute helmet, since if the world ever learned of this captivity, the long-awaited pogrom would touch off automatically. No child of human parents would ever leave, unless it left as an infant in arms, too young to remember or tell the story. But a telepath child was a recruit at birth to the ranks of the captors. The hope had been that in a generation or two the captives could automatically be blended with the Baldies or taken out of the caves at infancy, so that the colony would once more revert to its original state of a population composed only of telepaths.

  That had been the original plan, but growing pressures had already made it obsolete.

  Lucy wiped her mouth on the back of a lightly tanned hand and held out the emptied glass to Cody. She waited a moment while the whiskey burned its way down and spread in a slow, hot coating over the walls of her stomach. “Take a little,” she said. “It helps.” Cody didn’t want any, but he tilted a short half-inch into the glass and drank obediently. After a time Lucy gave a short sigh and sat up cross-legged on the bed, shaking the hair back from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Irrational.” She laid her hand palm up on the bedspread and Cody closed his own hand over it, smiling unhappily at her.

  “I’ve got an appointment outside,” he said. “I’ll have to leave in a few minutes, Lucy.”

  Her look shot wild and unguarded toward the crib in the comer. Her thought, at once blurred and clarified by the release of alcohol, unfurled like a flag. Cody almost winced at the impact of it, but he was even more schooled in discipline than most Baldies, being husband to a nontelepath, and he showed nothing. He only said, “No. It isn’t that. I won’t take him until you say so.”

  She gave him a sudden startled glance.

  “It’s too late?”

  “No,” Cody said quickly. “Of course not. He isn’t old enough yet to remember—this.”

  Lucy moved uneasily.

  “I don’t want to keep him down here. You know I don’t. It’s bad enough for me, without knowing my own son wouldn’t ever—” She shut off the thought of sunlight, blue air, distances. “Not just yet,” she said, and pushed her feet over the edge of the bed. She stood up a little unsteadily. She gave the baby one blind glance and then walked stockingfooted toward the kitchen, bracing herself against the wall now and then. Cody reached automatically toward her mind, then drew back and got up to follow her. She was at the kitchen sink splashing water into a glass. She drank thirstily, her eyes unfocused.

  “I have to go,” Cody said. “Don’t worry, Lucy.”

  “Some . . . woman,” Lucy said indistinctly over the edge of the glass. “There’s . . . somebody. I know.”

  “Lucy—”

  “One of your kind,” Lucy said, and dropped the glass in the sink. It rolled in a bright arc, spilling water.

  All he could do was look at her helplessly. There was nothing he could say. He couldn’t tell her he was on his way to try to kill Jasper Horne. He couldn’t tell her about Operation Apocalypse or the Inductor or the position of fearful responsibility he held. He couldn’t say, “If we can perfect the Inductor in time, Lucy, you can go free . . . you and our child.” Nor could he say, “I may have to kill you . . . you and our child and every nontelepath on earth . . . with Operation Apocalypse.”

  No, there was nothing he could say.

  She drew a wet hand across her face, pushing back her hair, looking up at him blurrily, and then came on uncertain, shoeless feet across the kitchen today her cheek on his shoulder and push her arms under his, around his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m . . . crazy. It’s hard for you too, Jeff.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll send the baby away next week,” she promised. “Then I’ll be sane again. I . . . I hate whiskey. It’s just that—”

  “I know.” He smoothed the hair away from her wet face, tried to find words for the complex waves of love, pity, remorse, terror and pain which filled his mind constantly as long as he was with his wife, or thinking of her. It is curious that telepaths are often almost inarticulate when it is necessary to communicate nuances of feeling in words. They never need to use words, among their own kind.

  “Be patient with me, Lucy,” he said finally. “There’s trouble
coming. There isn’t much time, and I may fail. I . . . I’ll come home as quickly as I can.”

  “I know you will, dear. I wish I could do . . . anything.”

  He held her.

  “I’ll bring you something you’ll like,” he said. “A surprise. I don’t know what yet, but something nice. And Lucy, after . . . next week . . . if you mean it, we’ll move if you want. Find a new apartment over in Cave Seven. You can order new furniture, and we’ll—” He scarcely knew what he was saying. Illusion and reality were too confused.

  “We’ll think of something, dear,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  “I’ll go, then,” he said.

  She nodded. “I’ll miss you. Hurry back.”

  Cody shut the grille of the lift behind him and leaned his head against the steel wall, slumping wearily as he shaped in his mind the code-signal to activate the mechanisms. A preoccupied mind somewhere responded with another segment of the cipher, and a third—someone going by rapidly, late to dinner—tossed in the necessary remaining symbols. Three mental images had to be projected simultaneously to operate the lift. It was a precaution. Escape exits could be operated by telepaths only.

  He pushed a slanting door open into a welter of dripping leaves and the sharp, sweet odor of wet pine and rain. A startled rabbit exploded out of the underbrush. Cody shut the camouflaged portal and looked up, squinting against the rain that drove in his face. From somewhere above a voiceless greeting came, a motor hummed and a dark coil rolled smoothly down out of the grayness. Cody set his foot in the stirrup and felt the soft instant upward lift of the basket seat snatching him aloft as he sank into it. The hovering copter received him through a single gaping jaw and carried him upward.

  Am Friedmann did not glance back from the controls. He did not need to. Short, squat, gravely expressionless in face and in manner, he leaned his dark-capped head forward to peer through the rain, his mind detaching enough of itself from attention to the business at hand to send, a wordless greeting.

  For a moment Cody only leaned back and let the cool, untroubled silence of the open sky wash his mind clean, it was like allowing long-taut muscles to relax at last. The cavern was so filled with closed-down resentments, guilts and fears and tensions that after a while even the air became hard to breathe, for a telepath.

  Friedmann had something urgent he wanted to convey. Cody felt the touch of it on the outer edges of his awareness, waiting, letting the newcomer breathe clean air a while. Friedmann’s mind hovered as the copter had hovered, patient, abiding the signal.

  Under them the pine woods swept backward, tossing, rain-blurred. Water ran down the panes. The motor hummed pleasantly in the coolness. Lucy. Five years now without sight of rain or trees or sky. A lifetime ahead of her without them, or else a quick death, or—the Inductor.

  “We’ve got to have more time,” Friedmann’s thought came. “If a pogrom starts now, it’ll spread. I think the paranoids are counting on that. They’ve been filtering into the key towns—the places where riots would be apt to start. Like American Gun. Jasper Horne’s there.”

  “Since when?” Cody asked.

  “Three weeks or so. And he’s been working hard. You know how the paranoids do it. Read a mind and drop a loaded word at the right time, to keep the tension building. Probably Horne could start a riot in American Gun any time he liked, by now.”

  “Not if he’s dead,” Cody’s thought said, with grim anticipation. He leaned back, watching the mists scud past, thinking of American Gun. It was a gambling town. That was the specialty, anyway, although there was a famous research laboratory in the town, and a master artisan in plastics lived there. But basically men came to American Gun to gamble.

  That’s what I’ll be doing, Cody thought. He watched sunlight dry the raindrops on the window beside him.

  Friedmann left Cody at the outskirts of American Gun and sent the copter hurrying east. He had an errand of his own in the town of Bleeding, Kansas, five hundred miles away. Cody watched the copter lift in a perfectly empty blue sky.

  American Gun lay in a great flat half-saucer rimmed by rising hills and cut across and bounded by a broad, slow river. There were a number of distant toothpick figures on the beach, and a variety of boats on the river, transparent plastic canoes and skiffs glinting in the sun. Dark dots’ against the placid green indicated swimmers. But the wind blowing up from the river was hot.

  Cody stood on the lower-foothills, looking down over American Gun. A certain calm relaxed him, now that he was moving directly toward a clearly-seen goal. There were in the town perhaps a hundred buildings, few of them large, and none close to the others. Trees flourished, or would have if their leaves had not drooped limply—all but the ones near the river bank. Only children were moving fast. Under a live oak Cody could see a little party around a spread white rectangle, having a picnic. Against the white cloth he could see the green and red of watermelon.

  A small white dog trotted slowly past him, its tongue lolling. It gave him a bored but wary glance. In its mind was a dim image of a frightful, slavering beast somewhat larger than a tiger. With some difficulty Cody identified the Terror as a dachshund whom the small white dog feared.

  Somewhat diverted, Cody began to descend the slope toward American Gun. He didn’t hurry. The moist, warm air was pleasant against his skin. Unthinking, receptive, for the moment, he let the crosscurrents of thought sweep like the sound of a sea through him, while he moved on in half-hypnotic rhythm, focusing on a long Byzantine-style building ahead, and watching it grow larger, step by step.

  . . . There was room enough on earth. And surely there were enemies enough besides other men. Man had been fighting a war ever since he stood upright, and there had never been any armistice declared against the oldest enemy of all, the enemy that burned in the hot blue sky, that hid, rodshaped, toxic and invisible, in the soil, that ebbed now in the river but could rise and flood, the enemy that went on unknowing and unheeding man, whose ancient power always pounded at the dike man’s intelligence had built.

  Enemy and friend at once—this gift of the gods. Without it, without the physical and chemical forces which had built this air, this water, this shallow valley of fertile loam, there would have been no life at all. A fairy gift—this planet. Guard it, keep it, watch it—learn to predict and control it—and it will serve you. Forget it while you fight among yourselves, and the burning sun, the flooding waters, the deadly cold, and the fecund microorganisms will work as they have always worked, in their old pattern, and in that pattern there is no planned place for man. How like a god!

  By now Cody was at the little park before the long Byzantine building. Trees were wilting above brownish lawns. A shallow rectangular pool held goldfish, who gulped hopefully as they swam to the surface and flipped down again. The little minds of the fish lay open to Cody, minds thoughtless as so many bright, tiny, steady flames on little birthday candles, as he walked past the pool.

  He did not enter the Byzantine building. He had not intended to, physically. Instead, he turned toward one of the shoulder-high pedestals set in irregular rows along the front of the building and stopped before one that was not in use. A few men and women had their heads bowed over the pedestals, peering into eyepieces. Not many. It was too hot, even here in the shade.

  Cody bent over the eyepiece of his pedestal, found a coin in his pocket, and pushed it into the slot. The blackness at which he stared turned into a pattern of bright letters: Radio-cobalt. Then a series of number-ranges appeared, one by one. At random Cody pushed the button that indicated his choice. That started the mechanism. He found himself looking into a magnified Wilson cloud chamber, streaked with flashing trails of subatomic activity. Just above the image a counter ticked off the number of electronic collisions. If his guess had been accurate enough, he might win the jackpot, and prove—

  Nothing. Nothing at all. But as Cody’s mind began to range, he felt the eager, troubled anticipation in the minds around him, and realized that to wi
n, for most of these others, would prove a great deal.

  For, basically, those minds held no confidence at all. Over all of them lay the heavy threat that had shadowed the world since the Blowup and put an irresistible weapon in every hand, a cache of Eggs in every town. Instead of national walls, there was now a wall around each town—and around each individual. Survival still depended on luck—blind change.

  And so the gambling towns, like American Gun, flourished. Here, at the casinos, at the slot machine, at roulette and craps and chuck-a-luck and faro, men could prove that the blind goddess favored them, and that they were still safe. The social uncertainty was shifted to the mechanical uncertainty of the fall of dice or the spin of a wheel, and personal responsibility was shifted to the hands of the lady the Greeks called Tuche and the Romans, Fortuna.

  Cody felt people moving past him, in and out of the casino. To his sensitive mind the hot air seemed to spark. Perhaps that was because of the steadily mounting tension spreading from no source a human could identify and which no human could ignore. But Cody knew the source. Jasper Horne had not been in American Gun for weeks without a purpose.

  Here, if anywhere, the pogrom could be started.

  And here, in American Gun was the force which had driven Cody helplessly into his dilemma, relentlessly forcing him toward the choice that no man could contemplate for too long without seeking some easier answer. Here was the pressure which had forced his hand to the knife, and the knife to his neck. And here, too, was the man who was responsible.

  Jasper Horne, Cody thought as the flashing streaks of the cloud chamber burned before his eyes. His mind polarized toward that goal with a deadly intentness. Allenby, back in the Caves, had been right. To kill Home, not himself, was the real goal for Cody—because that would risk merely his own life; it would not mean betrayal of his own people by dropping the responsibility he carried for all of them. The paranoids had been the enemy, from the very beginning. Always they had worked to destroy the acceptance of the Baldies by the rest of mankind. They were the ones who had caused the destruction of Sequoia, and the need to keep humans captives in the Caves. Had that not happened, he would probably have never met Lucy, and she would be happier now, and so would he. Now, no matter how hard both of them might try, there could never be any real answer for them, or for their child. There was no way out. No matter what happened, there were wounds that could never heal.