The Best of Henry Kuttner Page 5

  The memory of an archaic word flickered through his mind briefly. Sin. It evoked nothing. Once it had something to do with guilt, in an incomprehensible way. Not any more. Mankind had been through too much. Sin was meaningless now.

  He dismissed the thought and tried the heart-of-palms salad. He found he didn’t like it. Oh well, you had to expect things like that. Nothing was perfect. He sipped the wine again, liking the way the glass seemed to vibrate like something faintly alive in his hand. It was good wine. He thought of ordering more, but then he thought no, save it, next time. There was so much before him, waiting to be enjoyed. Any risk was worth it. And of course, in this there had been no risk.

  Danner was a man born at the wrong time. He was old enough to remember the last days of utopia, young enough to be trapped in the new scarcity economy the machines had clamped down on their makers. In his early youth he’d had access to free luxuries, like everybody else. He could remember the old days when he was an adolescent and the last of the Escape Machines were still operating, the glamorous, bright, impossible, vicarious visions that didn’t really exist and never could have. But then the scarcity economy swallowed up pleasure. Now you got necessities but no more. Now you had to work. Danner hated every minute of it.

  When the swift change came, he’d been too young and unskilled to compete in the scramble. The rich men today were the men who had built fortunes on cornering the few luxuries the machines still produced. All Danner had left were bright memories and a dull, resentful feeling of having been cheated. All he wanted were the bright days back, and he didn’t care how he got them.

  Well, now he had them. He touched the rim of the wine glass with his finger, feeling it sing silently against the touch. Blown glass? he wondered. He was too ignorant of luxury items to understand. But he’d learn. He had the rest of his life to learn in, and be happy.

  He looked up across the restaurant and saw through the transparent dome of the roof the melting towers of the city. They made a stone forest as far as he could see. And this was only one city. When he was tired of it, there were more. Across the country, across the planet the network lay that linked city with city in a webwork like a vast, intricate, half-alive monster. Call it society.

  He felt it tremble a little beneath him.

  He reached for the wine and drank quickly. The faint uneasiness that seemed to shiver the foundations of the city was something new. It was because—yes, certainly it was because of a new fear.

  It was because he had not been found out.

  That made no sense. Of course the city was complex. Of course it operated on a basis of incorruptible machines. They, and only they, kept man from becoming very quickly another extinct animal. And of these the analog computers, the electronic calculators, were the gyroscope of all living. They made and enforced the laws that were necessary now to keep mankind alive. Danner didn’t understand much of the vast changes that had swept over society in his lifetime, but this much even he knew.

  So perhaps it made sense that he felt society shiver because he sat here luxurious on foam-rubber, sipping wine, hearing soft music, and no Fury standing behind his chair to prove that the calculators were still guardians for mankind…

  If not even the Furies are incorruptible, what can a man believe in?

  It was at that exact moment that the Fury arrived.

  Danner heard every sound suddenly die out around him. His fork was halfway to his lips, but he paused, frozen, and looked up across the table and the restaurant towards the door.

  The Fury was taller than a man. It stood there for a moment, the afternoon sun striking a blinding spot of brightness from its shoulder. It had no face, but it seemed to scan the restaurant leisurely, table by table. Then it stepped in under the doorframe and the sun-spot slid away and it was like a tall man encased in steel, walking slowly between the tables.

  Danner said to himself, laying down his untasted food, “Not for me. Everyone else here is wondering. I know.”

  And like a memory in a drowning man’s mind, clear, sharp and condensed into a moment, yet every detail clear, he remembered what Hartz had told him. As a drop of water can pull into its reflection a wide panorama condensed into a tiny focus, so time seemed to focus down to a pinpoint the half-hour Danner and Hartz had spent together, in Hartz’s office with the walls that could go transparent at the push of a button.

  He saw Hartz again, plump and blond, with the sad eyebrows. A man who looked relaxed until he began to talk, and then you felt the burning quality about him, the air of driven tension that made even the air around him seem to be restlessly trembling. Danner stood before Hartz’s desk again in memory, feeling the floor hum faintly against his soles with the heartbeat of the computers. You could see them through the glass, smooth, shiny things with winking lights in banks like candles burning in colored glass cups. You could hear their faraway chattering as they ingested facts, meditated them, and then spoke in numbers like cryptic oracles. It took men like Hartz to understand what the oracles meant.

  “I have a job for you,” Hartz said. “I want a man killed.”

  “Oh no,” Danner said. “What kind of a fool do you think I am?”

  “Now wait a minute. You can use money, can’t you?”

  “What for?” Danner asked bitterly. “A fancy funeral?”

  “A life of luxury. I know you’re not a fool. I know damned well you wouldn’t do what I ask unless you got money and protection. That’s what I can offer. Protection.”

  Danner looked through the transparent wall at the computers.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “No, I mean it. I—” Hartz hesitated, glancing around the room a little uneasily, as if he hardly trusted his own precautions for making sure of privacy. “This is something new,” he said. “I can redirect any Fury I want to.”

  “Oh, sure,” Danner said again.

  “It’s true. I’ll show you. I can pull a Fury off any victim I choose.”

  “How?”

  “That’s my secret. Naturally. In effect, though, I’ve found a way to feed in false data, so the machines come out with the wrong verdict before conviction, or the wrong orders after conviction.”

  “But that’s—dangerous, isn’t it?”

  “Dangerous?” Hartz looked at Danner under his sad eyebrows. “Well, yes. I think so. That’s why I don’t do it often. I’ve done it only once, as a matter of fact. Theoretically, I’d worked out the method. I tested it, just once. It worked. I’ll do it again, to prove to you I’m telling the truth. After that I’ll do it once again, to protect you. And that will be it. I don’t want to upset the calculators any more than I have to. Once your job’s done, I won’t have to.”

  “Who do you want killed?”

  Involuntarily Hartz glanced upward, towards the heights of the building where the top-rank executive offices were. “O’Reilly,” he said.

  Danner glanced upward too, as if he could see through the floor and observe the exalted shoe-soles of O’Reilly, Controller of the Calculators, pacing an expensive carpet overhead.

  “It’s very simple,” Hartz said. “I want his job.”

  “Why not do your own killing, then, if you’re so sure you can stop the Furies?”

  “Because that would give the whole thing away,” Hartz said impatiently. “Use your head. I’ve got an obvious motive. It wouldn’t take a calculator to figure out who profits most if O’Reilly dies. If I saved myself from a Fury, people would start wondering how I did it. But you’ve got no motive for killing O’Reilly. Nobody but the calculators would know, and I’ll take care of them.”

  “How do I know you can do it?”

  “Simple. Watch.”

  Hartz got up and walked quickly across the resilient carpet that gave his steps a falsely youthful bounce. There was a waist-high counter on the far side of the room, with a slanting glass screen on it. Nervously Hartz punched a button, and a map of a section of the city sprang out in bol
d lines on its surface.

  “I’ve got to find a sector where a Fury’s in operation now,” he explained. The map flickered and he pressed the button again. The unstable outlines of the city streets wavered and brightened and then went out as he scanned the sections fast and nervously. Then a map flashed on which had three wavering streaks of colored light criss-crossing it, intersecting at one point near the center. The point moved very slowly across the map, at just about the speed of a walking man reduced to miniature in scale with the street he walked on. Around him the colored lines wheeled slowly, keeping their focus always steady on the single point.

  “There,” Hartz said, leaning forward to read the printed name of the street. A drop of sweat fell from his forehead on to the glass, and he wiped it uneasily away with his fingertip. “There’s a man with a Fury assigned to him. All right, now. I’ll show you. Look here.”

  Above the desk was a news screen. Hartz clicked it on and watched impatiently while a street scene swam into focus. Crowds, traffic noises, people hurrying, people loitering. And in the middle of the crowd a little oasis of isolation, an island in the sea of humanity. Upon that moving island two occupants dwelt, like a Crusoe and a Friday, alone. One of the two was a haggard man who watched the ground as he walked. The other islander in this deserted spot was a tall, shining man-formed shape that followed at his heels.

  As if invisible walls surrounded them, pressing back the crowds they walked through, the two moved in an empty space that closed in behind them, opened up before them. Some of the passers-by stared, some looked away in embarrassment or uneasiness. Some watched with a frank anticipation, wondering perhaps at just what moment the Friday would lift his steel arm and strike the Crusoe dead.

  “Watch, now,” Hartz said nervously. “Just a minute. I’m going to pull the Fury off this man. Wait.” He crossed to his desk, opened a drawer, bent secretively over it. Danner heard a series of clicks from inside, and then the brief chatter of tapped keys. “Now,” Hartz said, closing the drawer. He moved the back of his hand across his forehead. “Warm in here, isn’t it? Let’s get a closer look. You’ll see something happen in a minute.”

  Back to the news screen. He flicked the focus switch and the street scene expanded, the man and his pacing jailer swooped upward into close focus. The man’s face seemed to partake subtly of the impassive quality of the robot’s. You would have thought they had lived a long time together, and perhaps they had. Time is a flexible element, infinitely long sometimes in a very short space.

  “Wait until they get out of the crowd,” Hartz said. “This mustn’t be conspicuous. There, he’s turning now.” The man, seeming to move at random, wheeled at an alley corner and went down the narrow, dark passage away from the thoroughfare. The eye of the news screen followed him as closely as the robot.

  “So you do have cameras that can do that,” Danner said with interest. “I always thought so. How’s it done? Are they spotted at every corner, or is it a beam trans—”

  “Never mind,” Hartz said. “Trade secret. Just watch. We’ll have to wait until—no, no! Look, he’s going to try it now!”

  The man glanced furtively behind him. The robot was just turning the corner in his wake. Hartz darted back to his desk and pulled the drawer open. His hand poised over it, his eyes watched the screen anxiously. It was curious how the man in the alley, though he could have no inkling that other eyes watched, looked up and scanned the sky, gazing directly for a moment into the attentive, hidden camera and the eyes of Hartz and Danner. They saw him take a sudden, deep breath, and break into a run.

  From Hartz’s drawer sounded a metallic click. The robot, which had moved smoothly into a run the moment the man did, checked itself awkwardly and seemed to totter on its steel for an instant. It slowed. It stopped like an engine grinding to a halt. It stood motionless.

  At the edge of the camera’s range you could see the man’s face, looking backward, mouth open with shock as he saw the impossible happen. The robot stood there in the alley, making indecisive motions as if the new orders Hartz pumped into its mechanisms were grating against inbuilt orders in whatever receptor it had. Then it turned its steel back upon the man in the alley and went smoothly, almost sedately, away down the street, walking as precisely as if it were obeying valid orders, not stripping the very gears of society in its aberrant behavior.

  You got one last glimpse of the man’s face, looking strangely stricken, as if his last friend in the world had left him.

  Hartz switched off the screen. He wiped his forehead again. He went to the glass wall and looked out and down as if he were half afraid the calculators might know what he had done. Looking very small against the background of the metal giants, he said over his shoulder, “Well, Danner?”

  Was it well? There had been more talk, of course, more persuasion, a raising of the bribe. But Danner knew his mind had been made up from that moment. A calculated risk, and worth it. Well worth it Except—

  In the deathly silence of the restaurant all motion had stopped. The Fury walked calmly between the tables, threading its shining way, touching no one. Every face blanched, turned towards it. Every mind thought, “Can it be for me?” Even the entirely innocent thought, “This is the first mistake they’ve ever made, and it’s come for me. The first mistake, but there’s no appeal and I could never prove a thing.” For while guilt had no meaning in this world, punishment did have meaning, and punishment could be blind, striking like the lightning.

  Danner between set teeth told himself over and over, “Not for me. I’m safe. I’m protected. It hasn’t come for me.” And yet he thought how strange it was, what a coincidence, wasn’t it, that there should be two murderers here under this expensive glass roof today? Himself, and the one the Fury had come for.

  He released his fork and heard it clink on the plate. He looked down at it and the food, and suddenly his mind rejected everything around him and went diving off on a fugitive tangent like an ostrich into sand. He thought about food. How did asparagus grow? What did raw food look like? He had never seen any. Food came ready-cooked out of restaurant kitchens or automatic slots. Potatoes, now. What did they look like? A moist white mash? No, for sometimes they were oval slices, so the thing itself must be oval. But not round. Sometimes you got them in long strips, squared off at the ends. Something quite long and oval, then chopped into even lengths. And white, of course. And they grew underground, he was almost sure. Long, thin roots twining white arms among the pipes and conduits he had seen laid bare when the streets were under repair. How strange that he should be eating something like thin, ineffectual human arms that embraced the sewers of the city and writhed pallidly where the worms had their being. And where he himself, when the Fury found him, might…

  He pushed the plate away.

  An indescribable rustling and murmuring in the room lifted his eyes for him as if he were an automaton. The Fury was halfway across the room now, and it was almost funny to see the relief of those whom it had passed by. Two or three of the women had buried their faces in their hands, and one man had slipped quietly from his chair in a dead faint as the Fury’s passing released their private dreads back into their hidden wells.

  The thing was quite close now. It looked to be about seven feet tall, and its motion was very smooth, which was unexpected when you thought about it. Smoother than human motions. Its feet fell with a heavy, measured tread upon the carpet. Thud, thud, thud. Danner tried impersonally to calculate what it weighed. You always heard that they made no sound except for that terrible tread, but this one creaked very slightly somewhere. It had no features, but the human mind couldn’t help sketching in lightly a sort of airy face upon that blank steel surface, with eyes that seemed to search the room.

  It was coming closer. Now all eyes were converging towards Danner. And the Fury came straight on. It almost looked as if—

  “No!” Danner said to himself. “Oh, no, this can’t be!” He felt like a man in a nightmare, on the
verge of waking. “Let me wake soon,” he thought. “Let me wake now, before it gets here!”

  But he did not wake. And now the thing stood over him, and the thudding footsteps stopped. There was the faintest possible creaking as it towered over his table, motionless, waiting, its featureless face turned towards his.

  Danner felt an intolerable tide of heat surge up into his face—rage, shame, disbelief. His heart pounded so hard the room swam and a sudden pain like jagged lightning shot through his head from temple to temple.

  He was on his feet, shouting.

  “No, no!” he yelled at the impassive steel. “You’re wrong! You’ve made a mistake! Go away, you damned fool! You’re wrong, you’re wrong!” He groped on the table without looking down, found his plate and hurled it straight at the armored chest before him. China shattered. Spilled food smeared a white and green and brown stain over the steel. Danner floundered out of his chair, around the table, past the tall metal figure towards the door.

  All he could think of now was Hartz.

  Seas of faces swam by him on both sides as he stumbled out of the restaurant. Some watched with avid curiosity, their eyes seeking him. Some did not look at all, but gazed at their plates rigidly or covered their faces with their hands. Behind him the measured tread came on, and the rhythmic faint creak from somewhere inside the armor.

  The faces fell away on both sides and he went through a door without any awareness of opening it. He was in the street. Sweat bathed him and the air struck icy, though it was not a cold day. He looked blindly left and right, and then plunged for a bank of phone booths half a block away, the image of Hartz swimming before his eyes so clearly he blundered into people without seeing them. Dimly he heard indignant voices begin to speak and then die into awestruck silence.

  The way cleared magically before him. He walked in the newly created island of his isolation up to the nearest booth.