The Best of Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  “Just the same, I’m going to talk to Jorust,” the captain growled. “She’s no fool.”

  “Exactly,” Thirkell said cryptically.

  Munn stared at him, beckoned to Mike Soaring Eagle and turned towards the valve. Underhill jumped up eagerly.

  “May I go?”

  Bronson gloomily toyed with his beans. “Why do you want to go? You couldn’t even play a slot machine in Vyring’s skid row—if they had slot machines. Maybe you think if you tell ’em your old man’s a Tycoon of Amalgamated Ores, they’ll break down and hand out meal tickets—eh?”

  But his tone was friendly enough, and Underhill merely grinned. Captain Munn said, “Come along, if you want, but hurry up.” The three men went out into the steaming mists, their feet sloshing through sticky mud.

  It wasn’t uncomfortably hot; the high winds of Venus provided for quick evaporation, a natural air conditioning that kept the men from feeling the humidity. Munn referred to his compass. The outskirts of Vyring were half a mile away, but the fog was, as usual, like pea soup.On Venus it is always bird-walking weather. Silently the trio slogged on.

  “I thought Indians knew how to live off the land,” Underhill presently remarked to the Navaho. Mike Soaring Eagle looked at him quizzically.

  “I’m not a Venusian Indian,” he explained. “Maybe I could make a bow and arrow and bring down a Venusian—but that wouldn’t help, unless he had a lot of sofals in his purse.”

  “We might eat him,” Underhill murmured. “Wonder what roast Venusian would taste like?”

  “Find out and you can write a best seller when you get back home,” Munn remarked. “If you get back home. Vyring’s got a police force, chum.”

  “Oh, well,” Underhill said, and left it at that. “Here’s the Water Gate. Lord—I smell somebody’s dinner!”

  “So do I,” the Navaho grunted, “but I hoped nobody would mention it. Shut up and keep walking.”

  The wall around Vyring was in the nature of a dike, not a fortification. Venus was both civilized and unified; there were, apparently, no wars and no tariffs—a natural development for a world state. Air transports made sizzling noises as they shot past, out of sight in the fog overhead. Mist shrouded the streets, tom into tatters by occasional huge fans. Vyring, shielded from the winds, was unpleasantly hot, except indoors where artificial air conditioning could be brought into use.

  Underhill was reminded of Venice: the streets were canals. Water craft of various shapes and sizes drifted, glided or raced past. Even the beggars travelled by water. There were rutted, muddy footpaths beside the canals, but no one with a fal to his name ever walked.

  The Earthmen walked, cursing fervently as they splashed through the muck. They were, for the most part, ignored.

  A water taxi scooted towards the bank, its pilot, wearing the blue badge of his tarkomar, hailing them. “May I escort you?” he wanted to know.

  Underhill exhibited a silver dollar. “If you’ll take this—sure.” All the Earthmen had learned Venusian quickly; they were good linguists, having been chosen for this as well as other transplanetary virtues. The phonetic Venusian tongue was far from difficult.

  It was no trouble at all to understand the taxi pilot when he said no.

  “Toss you for it,” Underhill said hopefully. “Double or nothing.”

  But the Venusians weren’t gamblers. “Double what?” the pilot inquired. “That coin? It’s silver.” He indicated the silver, rococo filigree on the prow of his craft. “Junk!”

  “This would be a swell place for Benjamin Franklin,” Mike Soaring Eagle remarked. “His false teeth were made of iron, weren’t they?”

  “If they were, he had a Venusian fortune in his mouth,” Underhill said.

  “Not quite.”

  “If it could buy a full-course dinner, it’s a fortune,” Underhill insisted.

  The pilot, eyeing the Earthmen scornfully, drifted off in search of wealthier fares. Munn, doggedly plodding on, wiped sweat from his forehead. Swell place, Vyring, he thought. Swell place to starve to death.

  Half an hour of difficult hiking roused Munn to a slow, dull anger. If Jorust refused to see him, he thought, there was going to be trouble, even though they’d taken away his guns. He felt capable of tearing down Vyring with his teeth. And eating the more edible portions.

  Luckily, Jorust was available. The Earthmen were ushered into her office, a big, luxurious room high above the city, with windows open to the cooling breezes. Jorust was skittering around the room on a high chair, equipped with wheels and some sort of motor. Along the walls ran a slanting shelf, like a desk and presumably serving the same function. It was shoulder-high, but Jorust’s chair raised her to its level. She probably started in one corner in the morning, Munn thought, and worked her way around the room during the day.

  Jorust was a slim, gray-haired Venusian woman with a skin the texture of fine shagreen, and alert black eyes that were wary now. She climbed down from her chair, gestured the men to seats, and took one herself. She lit a pipe that looked like an oversized cigarette holder, stuffing it with a cylinder of pressed yellow herbs. Aromatic smoke drifted up. Underhill sniffed wistfully.

  “May you be worthy of your fathers,” Jorust said politely, extending her six-fingered hand in greeting. “What brings you?”

  “Hunger,” Munn said bluntly. “I think it’s about time for a showdown.”

  Jorust watched him inscrutably. “Well?”

  “We don’t like being pushed around.”

  “Have we harmed you?” the Council head asked.

  Munn looked at her. “Let’s put our cards on the table. We’re getting the squeeze play. You’re a big shot here, and you’re either responsible or you know why. How about it?”

  “No,” Jorust said after a pause, “no, I’m not as powerful as you seem to think. I am one of the administrators. I do not make the laws. I merely see that they are carried out. We are not enemies.”

  “That might happen,” Munn said grimly. “If another expedition comes from Earth and finds us dead—”

  “We would not kill you. It is untraditional.”

  “You could starve us to death, though.”

  Jorust narrowed her eyes. “Buy food. Any man can do that, no matter what his race.”

  “And what do we use for money?” Munn asked. “You won’t take our currency. We haven’t any of yours.”

  “Your currency is worthless,” Jorust explained. “We have gold and silver for the mining—it is common here. A difal—twelve fals—will buy a good deal of food. A sofal will buy even more than that.”

  She was right, of course, Munn knew. A sofal was one thousand seven hundred twenty-eight fals. Yeah!

  “And how do you expect us to get any of your iron money?” he snapped.

  “Work for it, as our own people do. The fact that you are from another world does not dispose of your obligatory duty to create through labor.”

  “All right,” Munn pursued, “we’re willing. Get us a job.”

  “What kind?”

  “Dredging canals! Anything!”

  “Are you a member of the canal dredgers’ tarkomar?”

  “No,” Munn said. “How could I have forgotten to join?”

  Jorust ignored the sarcasm. “You must join. All trades here have their tarkomars.”

  “Lend me a thousand sofals and I’ll join one.”

  “You have tried that before,” Jorust told him. “Our moneylenders reported that your collateral was worthless.”

  “Worthless! D’you mean to say we’ve nothing in our ship worth a thousand sofals to your race? It’s a squeeze play and you know it. Our water purifier alone is worth six times that to you.”

  Jorust seemed affronted. “For a thousand years we have cleansed our water with charcoal. If we changed now, we would be naming our ancestors fools. They were not fools; they were great and wise.”

  “What about progress?”


  “I see no need for it,” Jorust said. “Our civilization is a perfect unit as it stands. Even the beggars are well fed. There is no unhappiness on Venus. The ways of our ancestors have been tested and found good. So why change?”

  “But—”

  “We would merely upset the status quo if we altered the balance,” Jorust said decisively, rising. “May you be worthy of your fathers’ names.”

  “Listen—” Munn began.

  But Jorust was back on her chair, no longer listening.

  The three Earthmen looked at one another, shrugged and went out. The answer was definitely no.

  “And that,” Munn said, as they descended in the elevator, “is emphatically that. Jorust plans to have us starve to death. The word’s out.”

  Underhill was inclined to disagree. “She’s all right. As she said, she’s just an administrator. It’s the tarkomars who are the pressure group here. They’re a powerful bloc.”

  “They run Venus. I know.” Munn grimaced. “It’s difficult to understand the psychology of these people. They seem unalterably opposed to change. We represent change. So they figure they’ll simply ignore us.”

  “It won’t work,” Underhill said. “Even if we starve to death, there’ll be more Earth ships later.”

  “The same gag could work on them, too.”

  “Starvation? But—”

  “Passive resistance. There’s no law compelling Venusians to treat with Earthmen. They can simply adopt a closed-door policy, and there’s not a thing we can do about it. There’s no welcome mat on Venus.”

  Mike Soaring Eagle broke a long silence as they emerged to the canal bank. “It’s a variation of ancestor worship, their psychology. Transferred egotism, perhaps—a racial inferiority complex.”

  Munn shook his head. “You’re drawing it a bit fine.”

  “All right, maybe I am. But it boils down to worship of the past. And fear. Their present social culture has worked for centuries. They want no intrusions. It’s logical. If you had a machine that worked perfectly at the job for which it had been designed, would you want improvements?”

  “Why not?” Munn said. “Certainly I would.”

  “Why?”

  “Well—to save time. If a new attachment would make the machine double its production, I’d want that.”

  The Navaho looked thoughtful. “Suppose it turned out—say—refrigerators. There’d be repercussions. You’d need less labor, which would upset the economic structure.”

  “Microscopically.”

  “In that case. But there’d also be a change in the consumer’s angle. More people would have refrigerators. More people would make homemade ice cream. Sales on ice cream would drop—retail sales. The wholesalers would buy less milk. The farmers would—”

  “I know,” Munn said. “For want of a nail the kingdom was lost. You’re speaking of microcosms. Even if you weren’t, there are automatic adjustments—there always are.”

  “An experimental, growing civilization is willing to stand for such adjustments,” Mike Soaring Eagle pointed out. “The Venusians are ultraconservative. They figure they don’t need to grow or change any more. Their system has worked for centuries. It’s perfectly integrated. Intrusion of anything might upset the apple cart. The tarkomars have the power, and they intend to keep it.”

  “So we starve,” Underhill put in.

  The Indian grinned at him. “Looks like it. Unless we can dope out some way of making money.”

  “We ought to,” Munn said. “We were chosen for our I.Q., among other things.”

  “Our talents aren’t too suitable,” Mike Soaring Eagle remarked, kicking a stone into the canal. “You’re a physicist. I’m a naturalist. Bronson’s an engineer and Steve Thirkell’s a sawbones. You, my useless young friend, are a rich man’s son.”

  Underhill smiled in an embarrassed fashion. “Well, dad came up the hard way. He knew how to make money. That’s what we need now, isn’t it?”

  “How did he clean up?”

  “Stock market.”

  “That helps a lot,” Munn said. “I think our best plan is to find some process the Venusians really need, and then sell it to them.”

  “If we could wireless back to Earth for help—” Underhill began.

  “—then we’d have nothing to worry about,” the Navaho ended. “Unfortunately Venus has a Heaviside layer, so we can’t wireless. You’d better try your hand at inventing something, skipper. But whether or not the Venusians will want it afterwards, I don’t know.”

  Munn brooded. “The status quo can’t remain permanently that way. It ain’t sensible, as my grandfather used to say about practically everything. There are always inventors. New processes—they’ve got to be assimilated into the social set-up. I should be able to dope out a gadget. Even a good preservative for foods might do it.”

  “Not with the hydroponic gardens producing as they do.”

  “Um-m. A better mousetrap—something useless but intriguing. A onearmed bandit—”

  “They’d pass a law against it.”

  “Well, you suggest something.”

  “The Venusians don’t seem to know much about genetics. If I could produce some unusual foods by crossbreeding…eh?”

  “Maybe,” Munn said. “Maybe.”

  Steve Thirkell’s pudgy face looked into the port. The rest of the party were seated at the table, scribbling on stylopads and drinking weak coffee.

  “I have an idea,” Thirkell said.

  Munn grunted. “I know your ideas. What is it now?”

  “Very simple. A plague strikes the Venusians and I find an antivirus that will save them. They will be grateful—”

  “—and you’ll marry Jorust and rule the planet,” Munn finished. “Ha!”

  “Not exactly,” Thirkell went on imperturbably. “If they’re not grateful, we’ll simply hold out on the antitoxin till they pay up.”

  “The only thing wrong with that brainstorm is that the Venusians don’t seem to be suffering from a plague,” Mike Soaring Eagle pointed out. “Otherwise it’s perfect.”

  Thirkell sighed. “I was afraid you’d mention that. Maybe we could be unethical—just a little, you know—and start a plague. Typhoid or something.”

  “What a man!” the Navaho said admiringly. “You’d make a grand murderer, Steve.”

  “I have often thought so. But I didn’t intend to go as far as murder. A painful, incapacitating disease—”

  “Such as?” Munn asked.

  “Diphtheria?” the murderous physician suggested hopefully.

  “A cheerful prospect,” Mike Soaring Eagle muttered. “You sound like an Apache.”

  “Diphtheria, beriberi, leprosy, bubonic plague,” Pat Bronson said violently. “I vote for all of ’em. Give the nasty little frogs a taste of their own medicine. Wallop ’em good.”

  “Suppose we let you start a mild plague,” Munn said. “Something that couldn’t conceivably be fatal—how would you go about it?”

  “Pollute the water supply or something…eh?”

  “What with?”

  Thirkell suddenly looked heartbroken. “Oh! Oh!”

  Munn nodded. “The Goodwill isn’t stocked for that sort of thing. We’re germless. Antiseptic inside and out. Have you forgotten the physical treatment they gave us before we left?”

  Bronson cursed. “Never will I forget that—a hypo every hour! Antitoxins, shots, ultraviolet X-rays, till my bones turned green.”

  “Exactly,” Munn said. “We’re practically germless. It’s a precaution they had to take, to prevent our starting a plague on Venus.”

  “But we want to start a plague,” Thirkell said plaintively.

  “You couldn’t even give a Venusian a head cold,” Munn told him. “So that’s out. What about Venusian anaesthetics? Are they as good as ours?”

  “Better,” the physician admitted. “Not that they need them, except for the children. Their synapses a
re funny. They’ve mastered self-hypnosis so they can block pain when it’s necessary.”

  “Sulfa drugs?”

  “I’ve thought of that. They’ve got those, too.”

  “My idea,” Bronson broke in, “is water power. Or dams. Whenever it rains, there’s a flood.”

  “There’s good drainage, though,” Munn said. “The canals take care of that.”

  “Now let me finish! Those fish-skinned so-and-sos have hydropower, but it isn’t efficient. There’s so much fast water all over the place that they build plants wherever it seems best—thousands of them—and half the time they’re useless, when the rains concentrate on another district. Half of the plants are inoperable all the time. Which costs money. If they’d build dams, they’d have a steady source of power without the terrific overhead.”

  “It’s a thought,” Munn acknowledged.

  Mike Soaring Eagle said, “I’ll stick to my crossbreeds in the hydroponic gardens. I can raise beefsteak-mushrooms to taste of Worcestershire sauce or something. An appeal to the palate, you know—”

  “Fair enough. Steve?”

  Thirkell rumpled his hair. “I’ll think of an angle. Don’t rush me.”

  Munn looked at Underhill. “Any flashes of intellect, chum?”

  The youngster grimaced. “Not just now. All I can think of is manipulating the stock market.”

  “Without money?”

  “That’s the trouble.”

  Munn nodded. “Well, my own idea is advertising. As a physicist, it’s in my line.”

  “How?” Bronson wanted to know. “Demonstrating atom-smashing? A strong-man act?”

  “Pipe down. Advertising isn’t known on Venus, though commerce is. That’s funny. I should think the retailers would jump at the chance.”

  “They’ve got radio commercials.”

  “Stylized and ritualistic. Their televisors are ready-made for splash advertising. A visual blurb…yeah. Trick gadgets I could make to demonstrate the products. Why not?”

  “I think I’ll build an X-ray machine,” Thirkell said suddenly, “if you’ll help me, skipper.”

  Munn said sure. “We’ve got the equipment—and the blueprints. Tomorrow we’ll start. It must be pretty late.”