Henry Kuttner - The Best of Henry Kuttner

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 untested 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 bold 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 stable 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.