The Best of Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  There was a little silence. Hilton suddenly slammed the panel shut.

  “Let’s do some charting,” he said. “The sooner we reach the Rigel port, the sooner we can get back to Earth—via Transmat.”

  Curiously, it was Saxon who hesitated.

  “Mr. Hilton. Wait a minute. Transmat—I know I work for the outfit, but they—they’re sharp. Business men. You have to pay plenty to use their matter transmitters.”

  “They can transmit a hyper ship, can’t they? Or is it too big a job?”

  “No, they can expand the field enormously. I don’t mean that. I mean they’ll want payment, and they’ll put on the squeeze. You’ll have to give up at least half of the cargo.”

  “There’ll still be enough left to pay for an overhaul job.”

  “Except they’ll want to know where the paraine came from. You’ll be over a barrel. You’ll have to tell them, eventually. And that’ll mean a Transmat station will be set up right here, on this world.”

  “I suppose so,” Hilton said quietly. “But the old lady will be spaceworthy again. When the skipper sees her after the overhaul, he’ll know it was the only thing to do. So let’s get busy.”

  “Remind me to tell you about Silenus,” Ts’ss said.

  The Lunar Refitting Station is enormous. A crater has been roofed with a transparent dome, and under it the hyper ships rest in their cradles. They come in battered and broken, and leave clean and sleek and strong, ready for the Big Night again. La Cucaracha was down there, no longer the groaning wreck that had setded on the Rigel asteroid, but a lovely lady, shining and beautiful.

  Far above, Danvers and Hilton leaned on the railing and watched.

  “She’s ready to jet,” Hilton said idly. “And she looks good.”

  “No thanks to you, mister.”

  “Tush for that!” Hilton said. “If I hadn’t doped you, we’d be dead and La Cucaracha floating around in space in pieces. Now look at her.”

  “Yeah. Well, she does look good. But she won’t carry another paraine cargo. That strike was mine. If you hadn’t told Transmat the location, we’d be set.” Danvers grimaced. “Now they’re setting up a Transmat station there; a hyper ship can’t compete with a matter transmitter.”

  “There’s more than one world in the Galaxy.”

  “Sure. Sure.” But Danvers’ eyes brightened as he looked down.

  “Where are you heading, Skipper?” Hilton said.

  “What’s it to you? You’re taking that Transmat job, aren’t you?”

  “You bet. I’m meeting Saxon in five minutes. In fact, we’re going down to sign the contracts. I’m through with deep space. But—where are you heading?”

  “I don’t know,” Danvers said. “I thought I might run up around Arcturus and see what’s stirring.”

  Hilton did not move for a long time. Then he spoke without looking at the captain.

  “You wouldn’t be thinking of a stopover at Canis after that, would you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Go keep your appointment,” Danvers said.

  Hilton eyed the great hyper ship below. “The old lady’s always been a nice, clean craft. She’s never got out of line. She’s always charted a straight course. It’d be too bad if she had to carry slaves from Arcturus to the Canis market. It’s illegal, of course, but that isn’t the point. It’s a rotten, crooked racket.”

  “I didn’t ask your advice, mister!” Danvers flared. “Nobody’s talking about slave-running!”

  “I suppose you weren’t figuring on unloading the paraine at Silenus? You can get a good price for paraine from Medical Center, but you can get six times the price from the drug ring on Silenus. Yeah, Ts’ss told me. He’s been on Silenus.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Danvers said.

  Hilton tilted back his head to stare through the dome at the vast darkness above. “Even if you’re losing a fight, it’s better to fight clean,” he said. “Know where it’d end?”

  Danvers looked up, too, and apparently saw something in the void that he didn’t like.

  “How can you buck Transmat?” he demanded. “You’ve got to make a profit somehow.”

  “There’s an easy, dirty way, and there’s a clean, hard way. The old lady had a fine record.”

  “You’re not a deep-space man. You never were. Beat it! I’ve got to get a crew together!”

  “Listen—” Hilton said. He paused. “Ah, the devil with you. I’m through.”

  He turned and walked away through the long steel corridor.

  Ts’ss and Saxon were drinking highballs at the Quarter Moon. Through the windows they could see the covered way that led to the Refitting Station, and beyond it the crags of a crater-edge, with the starshot darkness hanging like a backdrop. Saxon looked at his watch.

  “He isn’t coming,” Ts’ss said.

  The Transmat man moved his shoulders impatiently. “No. You’re wrong. Of course, I can understand your wanting to stay with La Cucaracha.”

  “Yes, I’m old. That’s one reason.”

  “But Hilton’s young, and he’s smart. He’s got a big future ahead of him. That guff about sticking to an ideal—well, maybe Captain Danvers is that sort of man, but Hilton isn’t. He isn’t in love with hyper ships.”

  Ts’ss turned his goblet slowly in his curious fingers. “You are wrong about one thing, Saxon. I’m not shipping on La Cucaracha.”

  Saxon stared. “But I thought—why not?”

  “I will die within a thousand Earth hours,” Ts’ss said softly. “When that time comes, I shall go down into the Selenite caverns. Not many know they exist, and only a few of us know the secret caves, the holy places of our race. But I know. I shall go there to die, Saxon. Every man has one thing that is strongest—and so it is with me. I must die on my own world. As for Captain Danvers, he follows his cause, as our Chyra Emperor did, and as your King Arthur did. Men like Danvers made hyper ships great. Now the cause is dead, but the type of men who made it great once can’t change their allegiance. If they could, they would never have spanned the Galaxy with their ships. So Danvers will stay with La Cucaracha. And Hilton—”

  “He’s not a fanatic! He won’t stay. Why should he?”

  “In our legends Chyra Emperor was ruined, and his Empire broken,” Ts’ss said. “But he fought on. There was one who fought on with him, though he did not believe in Chyra’s cause. A Selenite named Jailyra. Wasn’t there—in your legends—a Sir Lancelot? He didn’t believe in Arthur’s cause either, but he was Arthur’s friend. So he stayed. Yes, Saxon, there are the fanatics who fight for what they believe—but there are also the others, who do not believe, and who fight in the name of a lesser cause. Something called friendship.”

  Saxon laughed and pointed out the window. “You’re wrong, Ts’ss,” he said triumphantly. “Hilton’s no fool. For here he comes.”

  Hilton’s tall form was visible moving quickly along the way. He passed the window and vanished. Saxon turned to the door.

  There was a pause.

  “Or, perhaps, it isn’t a lesser cause,” Ts’ss said. “For the Selenite Empire passed, and Arthur’s court passed, and the hyper ships are passing. Always the Big Night takes them, in the end. But this has gone on since the beginning—”

  “What?”

  This time Ts’ss pointed.

  Saxon leaned forward to look. Through the angle of the window he could see Hilton, standing motionless on the ramp. Passersby streamed about him unnoticed. He was jostled, and he did not know it, Hilton was thinking.

  They saw the look of deep uncertainty on his face. They saw his face suddenly clear. Hilton grinned wryly to himself. He had made up his mind. He turned and went rapidly back the way he had come.

  Saxon stared after the broad, retreating back, going the way it had come, toward the Refitting Station where Danvers and La Cucaracha waited. Hilton—going back where he had come from, back to what he ha
d never really left.

  “The crazy fool!” Saxon said. “He can’t be doing this! Nobody turns down jobs with Transmat!”

  Ts’ss gave him a wise, impassive glance. “You believe that,” he said. “Transmat means much to you. Transmat needs men like you, to make it great—to keep it growing. You’re a lucky man, Saxon. You’re riding with the tide. A hundred years from now—two hundred—and you might be standing in Hilton’s shoes. Then you’d understand.”

  Saxon blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Transmat is growing now,” Ts’ss said gently. “It will be very great—thanks to men like you. But for Transmat too, there will come an end.”

  He shrugged, looking out beyond the crater’s rim with his inhuman, faceted eyes, at the glittering points of light which, for a little while, seemed to keep the Big Night at bay.

  Nothing But Gingerbread Left

  The only way to make people believe this story is to write it in German. And there’s no point in doing that, for the German-speaking world is already starting to worry about gingerbread left.

  I speak figuratively. It’s safer. Very likely Rutherford, whose interests are equally divided between semantics and Basin Street, could create an English equivalent of gingerbread left, God forbid. As it is, the song, with its reductio ad absurdum of rhythm and sense, is meaningless in translation. Try translating Jabberwocky into German. So what?

  The song, as Rutherford wrote it in German, had nothing to do with gingerbread, but, since the original is obviously unavailable, I’m substituting the closest thing to it that exists in English. It’s lacking in that certain compelling perfection on which Rutherford worked for months, but it’ll give you an idea.

  We’ll start, I suppose, with the night Rutherford threw a shoe at his son. He had reason. Phil Rutherford was in charge of semantics at the University, and he was battling a hangover and trying to correct papers at the same time. Physical disabilities had kept him out of the army, and he was brooding over that, wondering if he should gulp some more Sherman units of thiamin, and hating his students. The papers they had handed in were no good. For the most part, they smelled. Rutherford had an almost illicit love for words, and it distressed him to see them kicked around thus. As Humpty Dumpty had said, the question was which was to be the master.

  Usually it wasn’t the students. Jerry O’Brien had a good paper, though, and Rutherford went over it carefully, pencil in hand. The radio in the living room didn’t bother him; the door was closed, anyhow. But, abruptly, the radio stopped.

  “Hi,” said Rutherford’s thirteen-year-old son, poking his untidy head across the threshold. There was an ink smudge on the end of the youth’s nose. “Hi, pop. Finished my homework. Can I go to the show?”

  “It’s too late,” Rutherford said, glancing at his wrist watch. “Sorry. But you’ve an early class tomorrow.”

  “Nom d’un plume,” Bill murmured. He was discovering French.

  “Out. I’ve got work to do. Go listen to the radio.”

  “They make with corn tonight. Oh, well—” Bill retreated, leaving the door ajar. From the other room came confused, muffled sounds. Rutherford returned to his work.

  He became aware, presently, that Bill was repeating a monotonous, rhythmic string of phrases. Automatically Rutherford caught himself listening, straining to catch the words. When he did, they were meaningless—the familiar catch phrases of kids.

  “Ibbety zibbety zibbety zam—”

  It occurred to Rutherford that he had been hearing this for some time, the mystic doggerel formula for choosing sides—“and out goes you!” One of those things that stick in your mind rather irritatingly.

  “Ibbety zibbety—” Bill kept chanting it in an absent-minded monotone, and Rutherford got up to close the door. It didn’t quite stop. He could still hear just enough of the rhythmic noises to start his mind moving in a similar rhythm. Ibbety zibbety—the hell with it.

  After a while Rutherford discovered that his lips were moving silently, and he shoved the papers back on his desk, muttering darkly. He was tired, that was it. And correcting exams required concentration. He was glad when the bell rang.

  It was Jerry O’Brien, his honor student. Jerry was a tall, thin, dark boy with a passion for the same low-down music that attracted Rutherford. Now he came in grinning.

  “Hi, prof,” he greeted the older man. “I’m in. Just got my papers today.”

  “Swell. Sit down and tell me.”

  There wasn’t much to tell, but it lasted quite a while. Bill hung around, listening avidly. Rutherford swung to glare at his son.

  “Lay off that ibbety-zibbety stuff, will you?”

  “Huh? Oh sure. I didn’t know I was—”

  “For days he’s been at it,” Rutherford said glumly. “I can hear it in my sleep.”

  “Shouldn’t bother a semanticist.”

  “Papers. Suppose I’d been doing important precision work. I mean really important. A string of words like that gets inside your head and you can’t get it out.”

  “Especially if you’re under any strain, or if you’re concentrating a lot. Distracts your attention, doesn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Bill said.

  Rutherford grunted. “Wait’ll you’re older and really have to concentrate, with a mind like a fine-edged tool. Precision’s important. Look what the Nazis have done with it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Integration,” Rutherford said absently. “Training for complete concentration. The Germans spent years building a machine—well, they make a fetish out of wire-edged alertness. Look at the stimulant drugs they give their raiding pilots. They’ve ruthlessly cut out all distractions that might interfere with über alles.”

  Jerry O’Brien lit a pipe. “They are hard to distract. German morale’s a funny thing. They’re convinced they’re supermen, and that there’s no weakness in them. I suppose, psychologically speaking, it’d be a nice trick to convince them of personal weakness.”

  “Sure. How? Semantics?”

  “I dunno how. Probably it can’t be done, except by blitzes. Even then, bombs aren’t really an argument. Blowing a man to bits won’t necessarily convince his comrades that he’s a weakling. Nope, it’d be necessary to make Achilles notice he had a heel.”

  “Ibbety zibbety,” Bill muttered.

  “Like that,” O’Brien said. “Get some crazy tune going around a guy’s skull, and he’ll find it difficult to concentrate. I know I do, sometimes, whenever I go for a thing like the Hut-Sut song.”

  Rutherford said suddenly, “Remember the dancing manias of the middle ages?”

  “Form of hysteria, wasn’t it? People lined up in queues and jitter-bugged till they dropped.”

  “Rhythmic nervous exaltation. It’s never been satisfactorily explained. Life is based on rhythm—the whole universe is—but I won’t go cosmic on you. Keep it low-down, to the Basin Street level. Why do people go nuts about some kinds of music? Why did the ‘Marseillaise’ start a revolution?”

  “Well, why?”

  “Lord knows.” Rutherford shrugged. “But certain strings of phrases, not necessarily musical, which possess rhythm, rhyme, or alliteration, do stick with you. You simply can’t get ’em out of your mind. And—” He stopped.

  O’Brien looked at him. “What?”

  “Imperfect semantics,” Rutherford said slowly. “I wonder. Look, Jerry. Eventually we forget things like the Hut-Sut. We can thrust ’em out of our minds. But suppose you got a string of phrases you couldn’t forget? The perverse factor would keep you from erasing it mentally—the very effort to do so would cancel itself. Hm-m-m. Suppose you’re carefully warned not to mention Bill Fields’ nose. You keep repeating that to yourself ‘Don’t mention the nose.’ The words, eventually, fail to make sense. If you met Fields, you’d probably say, quite unconsciously, ‘Hello, Mr. Nose.’ See?”

  “I think so. Like the story that if you me
et a piebald horse, you’ll fall heir to a fortune if you don’t think about the horse’s tail till you’re past.”

  “Exactly.” Rutherford looked pleased. “Get a perfect semantic formula and you can’t forget it. And the perfect formula would have everything. It’d have rhythm, and just enough sense to start you wondering what it meant. It wouldn’t necessarily mean anything, but—”

  “Could such a formula be invented?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Combine language with mathematics and psychology, and something could be worked out. Could be, such a thing was accidentally written in the middle ages. What price the dance manias?”

  “I don’t think I’d like it.” O’Brien grimaced. “Too much like hypnosis.”

  “If it is, it’s self-hypnosis, and unconscious. That’s the beauty of it. Just for the hell of it—draw up a chair.” Rutherford reached for a pencil.

  “Hey, pop,” Bill said, “why not write it in German?”

  Rutherford and O’Brien looked at each other, startled. Slowly a gleam of diabolic understanding grew in their eyes.

  “German?” Rutherford murmured. “You majored in it, didn’t you, Jerry?”

  “Yeah. And you’re no slouch at it, either. Yeah—we could write it in German, couldn’t we? The Nazis must be getting plenty sick of the Horst Wessel song.”

  “Just for the…uh…fun of it,” Rutherford said, “let’s try. Rhythm first. Catchy rhythm, with a break to avoid monotony. We don’t need a tune.” He scribbled for a bit. “It’s quite impossible, of course, and even if we did it, Washington probably wouldn’t be interested.”

  “My uncle’s a senator,” O’Brien said blandly.

  LEFT!

  LEFT!

  LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children in

  STARVing condition with NOTHing but gingerbread LEFT

  LEFT!

  LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children—

  “Well, I might know something about it,” said Senator O’Brien.