Henry Kuttner - The Well of The Worlds

“You probably understand more about it than I do. If we intend to try to make any plans, you’d better tell me what you know. About Nethe, for example. Didn’t she give you any hint that this—this world existed?”

“No,” Alper said sullenly. “She came to me at Fortuna, just as you saw her. Shadowy. I thought I was dreaming at first. But when she touched me with her closed fist and I felt energy beginning to pour through me—” He glanced in triumph at the Firebird in his hand—“after that, I gave her anything she wanted.”

“Uranium ore?”

“Yes. She didn’t want uranium mined out and taken away, and that’s why I was trying to close the mine, of course. But I had no idea of—all this.”

“We’d better start getting used to it,” Sawyer said. “And we’ll have a better chance working together than as enemies. So how about a truce? Obviously I can’t send a report back to Toronto now. We may be here for quite a while.”

Alper nodded grudgingly.

“Fine,” Sawyer said. “Then the first thing is to take this transceiver off my head.”

“No,” Alper said.

“Why not? Controlling me won’t help you a bit right now, will it?”

“It might stop you from trying to kill me,” Alper said, his grey eyes wary with suspicion. “I know what I’d do in your shoes, young man.”

“You’re a fool,” Sawyer observed.

Alper thought for a time.

“All right,” he said. “A truce might be the best thing right now. Say we do work together, from now on. But the transceiver stays on your head—as insurance. Now. You spoke about making plans. What, for example?”

Sawyer wrapped his arms around his knees again.

“The only practical one I can suggest, at present,” he said sourly, “is waiting.”

They had been sitting silent for about ten minutes, exchanging occasional looks of dislike, when a curious humming sound began to be heard from a corner of the cell opposite to the door by which they had entered. Both turned to look. Low down in the corner a square of the wall about three feet across had begun to shimmer violently. As they watched, the surface of the square became translucent, showed for a moment or two a complex hexagonal crystalline pattern, and then broke up entirely into a pale green vapor which puffed outward into the cell with a burst of quick heat that brought sweat to their foreheads.

The heat dissipated rapidly. The air was hazy with green vapor, and the square in the wall stood open and empty. Like the dry-ice of solid carbon dioxide, the molecules of the substance making up the wall had apparently been moved to evaporate abruptly without the need of melting into liquid form. The wall had altered in form but not in substance, and the vapor which had in its solid condition been impermeable now hung like a green fog in the air, leaving an exit open.

A supercilious, glass-crowned Isier head now appeared through the opening and regarded them with complete objectivity, as a human might glance into a chicken-coop and observe the inmates. Even that god-like brow, however, was sweating beneath the crown. The heat which had vaporized the wall must have been considerable.

The large, half-lidded eyes of the Isier considered Sawyer coldly, moved to Alper, summed him up in a glance and apparently decided that he was the man the Isier had come to find, for without entering the cell any farther, the demigod brought a long non-human hand into sight and tossed into Alper’s lap a package about ten inches square. It was black, and it shimmered dazzlingly.

Before anyone could move or speak the Isier head withdrew, supercilious to the last. For an instant the opening in the wall stood empty. Then a gust of intense cold soughed through it into the cell. All the molecules of the green vapor, which had been rioting energetically in the heat, now obeyed the laws of their kind by condensing with a rapidity unknown upon Earth. In the blink of an eye the vapor had been sucked backward into the emptiness whence it had come, the air was clear again and the wall unbroken.

Alper touched the package on his knee gingerly. He gave Sawyer a suspicious glance. The package solved his problem at this point by collapsing suddenly from its solidly compact cube into a limp, unfolding bundle of shimmering black cloth, so totally black that the eye could not fix upon it, but slid repeatedly away for lack of anything to focus on. The bundle had been wrapped, apparently, not in a confining paper or carton, but in a little cubical force-field of its own. When this unique wrapping let go, something like a cloak of remarkable volume for the original size of the bundle spilled over Alper’s knees and onto the floor. Out of its unfolding center a little cone of white paper popped with a brisk snap, and unfolded itself noisily, lying flat.

Alper took it up by its extreme corners. There was writing on the white surface. Alper’s eyes moved rapidly down the lines. Then a look of triumph lighted his face. He laughed in a sudden bark of elation and glanced up at Sawyer, his hand moving in the same instant to his pocket.

Thunder and lightning. Down between the lobes of his brain Sawyer felt jagged sheets of blindness flashing. His own blood-beat, amplified to a volume of noise like the crash of doom, blanked out everything before him.

But this time, he was ready for it. Almost ready—as ready as any man could be for the crack of Thor’s hammer on his bare brain. He saw Alper’s hand move. He read aright the expression on Alper’s face in the instant before the motion started. And the decision which had been crystallizing in his mind ever since the last time Alper had used the transceiver took over his muscles and his nerves without any need for further thought.

Before the thunder split his skull apart he was off the floor; he was in mid-air when the lightning struck. And Alper’s attention was partially distracted by the message in his hand and the mystifying cascade of blackness across his knees. If it was a half-unconscious man who struck him in that long leap across the cell, it was still a heavy and a desperate man.

The impact knocked Alper sidewise. He flung up both startled hands to fend Sawyer off, and with the release of contact in his pocket, the thunder ceased abruptly in Sawyer’s head.

It was no fault of Sawyer’s that he did not kill the man. He meant to. As Alper struggled up to meet the attack Sawyer knocked him sidewise with an edge-of-the-hand blow meant for the side of Alper’s neck. Luckily for Alper it struck him across the cheek-bone instead as he rose. Sawyer’s other hand sank into his belly, doubling him forward, and Sawyer’s lifted knee smashed him squarely in the face.

Sawyer bent over the writhing body on the floor, hand lifted for the sidewise crack across the base of the brain that would certainly finish him. And then caution returned in a faint glimmer of warning. If Alper died, would the transceiver explode in his own head?

Carefully, he clipped Alper on the jaw. And once again. He paused, watching, making sure that Alper was unconscious. Then with rough hands he turned the man over and reached into that fatal coat pocket from which the thunder in his brain had been triggered. He found a small flat case the size of a wristwatch. Very cautiously he put a featherweight of pressure on it. An ominous humming sounded in his head as his own blood and breath roared loud in the cavities of his skull.

He leaned forward, releasing his finger’s pressure. His ear was close to the coat pocket.

“Alper,” he said softly. “Alper?”

From the little case, a thin voice that was his own echoed the name. So it was a radio receiver, too. Alper had not lied about that. The multi-purpose transceiver on his own head was also a microphone that could betray him to Alper no matter how far away he might go.