Part 2
Contributions to the fund for the mobilization of science-fiction and the extermination of brown weasels may be sent to me in care of this magazine. Do not delay. Each moment you wait brings us closer to doom, and, besides, I need a new piano.
H.K.
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GOD BUSTERS
ERICK FREYOR
Mark Twain, in his _mysterious stranger_, makes no bones about his sentiments towards Christianity and the God illusion. Speaking of Christian progress he says, "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best--to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history--but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian, not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The _turk_ and the _chinaman_ will buy these to kill missionaries and converts with."
Again, in speaking of God, comparing the God conception to an impossible dream, he continues, "Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could have made good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!"
One wonders what the Christian Ethiopians thot when the Christian Italians playfully, and undoubtedly with the sanction of the Holy Mother Church, began to spray them with liquid fire, blast their cities, and mutilate their children with the newest Christian improvements on the Christian weapons of war. They probably couldn't quite understand the logic or the fairness of it, but we must not blame the Ethiopians for failing to comprehend, as they haven't had the benefits of Christian civilization for as long a time as the Italians.
Let's put a stop to this shilly-shallying. Let's put these destructive Atheists in their place. The Christians KNOW that God DOES exist. That God _is_ all powerfull. So it would be only a simple matter to arrange an appointment with God, (we don't exactly know what his office hours are,) and prevail upon him to write a message in fire saying, "YOU BET, GOD IS THE REAL MCCOY" or something similar, and spread it all over the sky. That'll convince even the most reluctant Atheists, and it should be a rather simple trick for a God who once stopped the sun (sic!), created a universe in 6 days, and engineered an immaculate conception.
Clarence Darrow, world famous criminal lawyer, the man who made the Silver-Tongued and Godly Bryant appear the verbose addlepate he was, beneath his platitudinous phrases, during the Scopes trial, said, to an interviewer, "All my life I've been an Agnostic. But I am no longer an Agnostic, I am now an Atheist."
THE PENDULUM
Up and down, back and forth, up and down. First the quick flite skyward, gradually slowing, reaching the pinnacle of the curve, poising a moment, then flashing earthward again, faster and faster at a nauseating speed, reaching the bottom and hurtling aloft on the opposite side. Up and down. Back and forth. Up and down.
How long it had continued this way Layeville didn't know. It might have been millions of years he'd spent sitting here in the massive glass pendulum watching the world tip one way and another, up and down, dizzily before his eyes until they ached. Since first they had locked him in the pendulum's round glass head and set it swinging it had never stopped or changed. Continuous, monotonous movements over and above the ground. So huge was this pendulum that it shadowed one hundred feet or more with every majestic sweep of its gleaming shape, dangling from the metal intestines of the shining machine overhead. It took three or four seconds for it to traverse the one hundred feet one way, three or four seconds to come back.
THE PRISONER OF TIME! That's what they called him now! Now, fettered to the very machine he had planned and constructed. A pri--son--er--of--time! A--pris--on--er--of--Time! With every swing of the pendulum it echoed in his thoughts. For ever like this until he went insane. He tried to focus his eyes on the arching hotness of the earth as it swept past beneath him.
They had laughed at him a few days before. Or was it a week? A month? A year? He didn't know. This ceaseless pitching had filled him with an aching confusion. They had laughed at him when he said, some time before all this, he could bridge time gaps and travel into futurity. He had designed a huge machine to warp space, invited thirty of the worlds most gifted scientists to help him finish his colossal attempt to scratch the future wall of time.
The hour of the accident spun back to him now thru misted memory. The display of the time machine to the public. The exact moment when he stood on the platform with the thirty scientists and pulled the main switch! The scientists, all of them, blasted into ashes from wild electrical flames! Before the eyes of two million witnesses who had come to the laboratory or were tuned in by television at home! He had slain the world's greatest scientists!
He recalled the moment of shocked horror that followed. Something radically wrong had happened to the machine. He, Layeville, the inventor of the machine, had staggered backward, his clothes flaming and eating up about him. No time for explanations. Then he had collapsed in the blackness of pain and numbing defeat.
Swept to a hasty trial, Layeville faced jeering throngs calling out for his death. "Destroy the Time Machine!" they cried. "And destroy this MURDERER with it!"
Murderer! And he had tried to help humanity. This was his reward.
One man had leaped onto the tribunal platform at the trial, crying, "No! Don't destroy the machine! I have a better plan! A revenge for this--this man!" His finger pointed at Layeville where the inventor sat unshaven and haggard, his eyes failure glazed. "We shall rebuild his machine, take his precious metals, and put up a monument to his slaughtering! We'll put him on exhibition for life within his executioning device!" The crowd roared approval like thunder shaking the tribunal hall.
Then, pushing hands, days in prison, months. Finally, led forth into the hot sunshine, he was carried in a small rocket car to the center of the city. The shock of what he saw brought him back to reality. THEY had rebuilt his machine into a towering timepiece with a pendulum. He stumbled forward, urged on by thrusting hands, listening to the roar of thousands of voices damning him. Into the transparent pendulum head they pushed him and clamped it tight with weldings.
Then they set the pendulum swinging and stood back. Slowly, very slowly, it rocked back and forth, increasing in speed. Layeville had pounded futilely at the glass, screaming. The faces became blurred, were only tearing pink blobs before him.
On and on like this--for how long?
He hadn't minded it so much at first, that first nite. He couldn't sleep, but it was not uncomfortable. The lites of the city were comets with tails that pelted from rite to left like foaming fireworks. But as the nite wore on he felt a gnawing in his stomach, that grew worse. He got very sick and vomited. The next day he couldn't eat anything.
They never stopped the pendulum, not once. Instead of letting him eat quietly, they slid the food down the stem of the pendulum in a special tube, in little round parcels that plunked at his feet. The first time he attempted eating he was unsuccessful, it wouldn't stay down. In desperation he hammered against the cold glass with his fists until they bled, crying hoarsely, but he heard nothing but his own weak, fear-wracked words muffled in his ears.
After some time had elapsed he got so that he could eat, even sleep while travelling back and forth this way. They allowed him small glass loops on the floor and leather thongs with which he tied himself down at nite and slept a soundless slumber without sliding.
People came to look at him. He accustomed his eyes to the swift flite and followed their curiosity-etched faces, first close by in the middle, then far away to the right, middle again, and to the left.
He saw the faces gaping, speaking soundless words, laughing and pointing at the prisoner of time traveling forever nowhere. But after awhile the town people vanished and it was only tourists who came and read the sign that said: THIS IS THE PRISONER OF TIME--JOHN LAYEVILLE--WHO KILLED THIRTY OF THE WORLDS FINEST SCIENTISTS! The school children, on the electrical moving sidewalk stopped to stare in childish awe. THE PRISONER OF TIME!
Often he thot of that title. God, but it was ironic, that he should invent a time machine and have it converted into a clock, and that he, in its pendulum, should mete out the years--traveling _with_ Time.
He couldn't remember how long it had been. The days and nites ran together in his memory. His unshaven cheeks had developed a short beard and then ceased growing. How long a time? How long?
Once a day they sent down a tube after he ate and vacuumed up the cell, disposing of any wastes. Once in a great while they sent him a book, but that was all.
The robots took care of him now. Evidently the humans thot it a waste of time to bother over their prisoner. The robots brot the food, cleaned the pendulum cell, oiled the machinery, worked tirelessly from dawn until the sun crimsoned westward. At this rate it could keep on for centuries.
But one day as Layeville stared at the city and its people in the blur of ascent and descent, he perceived a swarming darkness that extended in the heavens. The city rocket ships that crossed the sky on pillars of scarlet flame darted helplessly, frightenedly for shelter. The people ran like water splashed on tiles, screaming soundlessly. Alien creatures fluttered down, great gelatinous masses of black that sucked out the life of all. They clustered thickly over everything, glistened momentarily upon the pendulum and its body above, over the whirling wheels and roaring bowels of the metal creature once a Time Machine. An hour later they dwindled away over the horizon and never came back. The city was dead.
Up and down, Layeville went on his journey to nowhere, in his prison, a strange smile etched on his lips. In a week or more, he knew, he would be the only man alive on earth.
Elation flamed within him. This was _his_ victory! Where the other men had planned the pendulum as a prison it had been an asylum against annihilation now!
Day after day the robots still came, worked, unabated by the visitation of the black horde. They came every week, brot food, tinkered, checked, oiled, cleaned. Up and down, back and forth--THE PENDULUM!
... a thousand years must have passed before the sky again showed life over the dead Earth. A silvery bullet of space dropped from the clouds, steaming, and hovered over the dead city where now only a few solitary robots performed their tasks. In the gathering dusk the lites of the metropolis glimmered on. Other automatons appeared on the rampways like spiders on twisting webs, scurrying about, checking, oiling, working in their crisp mechanical manner.
And the creatures in the alien projectile found the time mechanism, the pendulum swinging up and down, back and forth, up and down. The robots still cared for it, oiled it, tinkering.
A thousand years this pendulum had swung. Made of glass the round disk at the bottom was, but now when food was lowered by the robots through the tube it lay untouched. Later, when the vacuum tube came down and cleaned out the cell it took that very food with it.
Back and forth--up and down.
The visitors saw something inside the pendulum. Pressed closely to the glass side of the cell was the face of a whitened skull--a skeleton visage that stared out over the city with empty sockets and an enigmatical smile wreathing its lipless teeth.
Back and forth--up and down.
The strangers from the void stopped the pendulum in its course, ceased its swinging and cracked open the glass cell, exposing the skeleton to view. And in the gleaming light of the stars the skull face continued its weird grinning as if it knew that it had conquered something. Had conquered time.
The Prisoner Of Time, Layeville, had indeed travelled along the centuries.
And the journey was at an end.
IS IT TRUE WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT KUTTNER?
OR
the man with the Weird Tale
by GUY AMORY
The extremely interesting specimen to your right is not a head from a formaldehyde jar, though at times we have seen it, or him, pickled. It is I, Henry Kuttner, the laziest man who ever punched a typewriter and got paid for it. Like several other L.A. natives he is too busy living to do much worrying--and besides--what does it get him? (a check from Weird Tales) Henry has just sold them a 20,000 word yarn about Elak of Atlantis. At present he has finished a story headed for STARTLING, fifty thousand words or more, and been working with C. L. Moore on a new chiller.
Hank's first story for Astounding was a disappointment, but he fully made up for that by turning in a sockerooo to Unknown called _the misguided halo_, written after the fashion of his most highly cherished author THORNE SMITH. What the fans don't know is that this little tale had a different ending than the one used by Campbell. Kuttner's finis to the halo was hysterically funny, but John W. thought otherwise and tagged a new finish on it--spoiling it as far as this author is concerned.
Kuttner is 24 years old. He's been writing most of his life--learned how to type at the age of eight and hasn't left it alone since. Was born with a type-bar in his mouth. Lives in a quiet catacomb called Beverly Hills, the first cemetery I've ever seen with street lamps. At present, though I have broached the subject on numerous occasions, Hank steadfastly refuses to write for slick magazines. His best excuse being his laziness.
Hanks is quiet-speaking, sincere. But he has a sense of humor, the kind that hits you amidriff abruptly. He is the perfect dead-pan jokester. His digs many times being too subtle for your correspondent to catch until several moments have passed, Kuttner is always ready to rush in mildly and put the immature fans to route. It is only when you see the ghastly pictures that he takes out at his charnal cave that you realize his true sense of comedy. He and Hodgkins and Shroyer, the fiends, get together in outre garb, in horrifying pose, and bring forth films that would shake the mind of even such a horror as Robert Bloch.
Kuttner likes the way C. L. Moore writes (and who doesn't). He wishes he could write like her--but claims that when he tries imitating it comes out so much trash. If you've read any of his stories you realize that Hank is a master of the bingety-boom type of fiction--but with feeling! He puts more Incident in ten pages of Elak than any other author in WEIRD, and makes you feel it. He paints his picture with masterfully abrupt dabs, while Moore lays on her horror with the touch of a mosaic master, building up. Kuttner knocks you down and keeps you bouncing. Moore swirls you in cobwebs and totes you away into infinity. Combining their efforts in '37 for QUEST OF THE STARSTONE they turned out something to remember ... with Hank's flair for lightning pace and Moore's for description they went to town.
That's about all we can say about Hank, He doesn't like New York because it's too dirty, noisy and big. He dotes on Thorne Smith. Rite now he's trying to crash Argosy with a story--and in the future you can expect some big things from this quiet author.
Oh, yes, and is it true what they say about Kuttner?
No, he doesn't use dope to get the effect in his stories. He has a massive painting of Art Barnes on his desk and when he prepares to write he squints once and once only at that painting to get gruesome atmosphere. Then he starts typing!
Take a bow, Mr. Kuttner.
(Jus bend over a little more, Hank! A' K' BARNES)
WHUMP!
Ouch! (KUTTNER)
The End (of Kuttner)
ANALYSIS
FROM J CHAPMAN MISKE: Pretty snappy cover on the 1st issue of fufa. At least I like it. Simple stuff looks best on mimeod covers. By the way, what, I'd like to know, is the sex of that Bokian creature? WHY MR. MISKE! WE THOT U ABHORED SEX! TSK! TSK! I'm for Technocracy. Personally I suspect Reynolds of being Kuttner NOPE.... TRY AGAIN, JACK. Your poetry not so hot. U wandered a bit and were melodramatic.
DALE HART POSTS: Bok cover good. Yerke and Reynolds interesting. Forrie's story unique. Yur poem full of thot but it didn't scan very well. MAYBE IT'S BECUZ I'M MORE BRITISH THAN I AM _SCAN_-DIN-AVIAN. (BRAD) How about an increase in pages--this issue much too small. HOPE YU LIKE THIS BIGGER SIZE, DALE.
GERTRUDE HEMKIN MUMBLES: Cover startling, technocracy article sounds sensible, ron reynolds satire amusing and contains a few kernels of logic, at that. And where hav I red 4SJ's RECORD bee4?
(WE _Wonder_) HENRY HASSE TYPES: "Hans Bok steals 1st honors 4 his cover. Hope yu can get Hans to do all yur illustrations each month." YES; HENRY, WE'LL HAVE BOK ON THE COVER EVERY ISSUE FROM NOW ON EVEN THO HE'S BUSY IN NEW YORK WITH HIS PANTING--SINCE THE EDITORIAL FOR FUFA WAS STENCILED THE DECEMBER ISSUE OF WEIRD TALES HAS APPEARED ON THE STANDS ALL OVER AMERICA WITH ITS COVER DONE BY BOK. IT WAS FUTURIA FANTASIA'S PLEASENT DUTY, THIS SUMMER; TO BRING ABOUT THAT DEAL BETWEEN BOK AND WEIRD AND WE ARE JUSTLY PROUD OF HANS AND HIS SUCCESS. HERE'S HOPING HE HITS ASTOUNDING NEXT. HASSE CONTINUES: "Best written feature was yur poem, Brad. Next is Reynolds piece and the one by Ackerman." DUE TO LACK OF SPACE IN THIS ISSUE WE ARE CONDENSING THE ABOVE LETTERS. IN THE WINTER EDITION THERE WILL BE A BIGGER LETTER DEPARTMENT--THAT IS, IF YU WRITE IN. WE'RE ANXIOUS TO KNOW HOW YOU LIKED OUR SPECIAL _the pendulum_. UNTIL THEN, FU, FAREWELL!
RETURN FROM DEATH
_by ANTONY CORVAIS_
They were seated in his parked, car, miles from the city, when Robert told Ellen; "I'll always love you, darling, forever and ever. I just can't help myself, and I don't want to."
The girl nestled closer without reply.
"And if something should happen to one of us, the other would wait--because love like ours will never know death--it must go on--for eternity," he continued. "I know that I'll love you even when I'm dead, and if there are such things as spirits, I'll come back to you--somehow. Or would it frighten you?"
Ellen pouted: "Don't be so funereal! It makes me feel strangely inside. Of course nothing can separate us. It's a beautiful nite and we're wasting it on--oh, dear!" Her eyes had glanced at the small clock on the paneling. "It's late, Robert. You must hurry me home now or mother will be furious!"
Sighing, Robert started the car. As they roared toward town over the twisting roadway, suddenly the car swerved.
"Lookout, Bob! A man!" It was Ellen's high voice screaming.
The car skidded sickeningly on loose gravel, crashed thunderously through the railing bordering the highway, and richocheted, turning over and over, halting as wreckage. Robert was crushed under the metal bulk, losing consciousness.
Thrown clear, Ellen scrambled to the man, bent over him. Something more than pain filmed his eyes; he heard himself muttering: "I'll come back?--you wait--" in a failing whisper as illimitable darkness swept over him, accompanied by dreadful nausea. A point of light appeared in the void, expanding into a dazzling rectangle which split into thousands of lesser planes; these shaped a geometric pattern which whirled dizzily, humming, the drone rising in pitch with every sickening revolution, becoming incessant mechanical scream----
"And this is death. This is past human endurance." With sudden omniscience he knew that he WAS dead and the meaning of the spinning pattern. The knowledge ebbed and carried with it all of his memories except for Ellen's face and her name.
The wheeling design parted like a curtain, and Robert observed beyond it a branching path spreading before him like a flattened tree. At the end of every fork was Ellen's face, wavering and blurred. He fixed his attention upon the nearest furcation, aspiring toward it desperately, and sensed himself hovering in space.
Shock, as of lightning coursing his veins, knotted him with agony. Involuntarily his eyes squeezed shut. Icy air tortured his lungs. As he raised his voice in weak protest, the pain ceased and he relaxed, spent. His eyes continued shut, as though the lids were gummed down. Failing in many attempts to open them, he quested food, found it, and consoled himself with it.
Occasionally plaintive voices babbled unintelligibly, arousing him. Always, if he listened, he heard a gentle murmur reply to the voices. And then everything was quiet. He felt very sleepy. Finally he dropped off into slumber, deep and restful.
Between periods of sleep, Robert struggled with his heavy eyelids. Memories might have associated his sightlessness with blindness--but he had none. There were only Ellen's face and her name which, when expecially desperate, he called again and again.
Gradually his vision became clear, and he stared in awe at a world of immensity which was peopled with Titans. The picture of Ellen in this gigantic place troubled him, for the colossal beings looked upon him as an animated toy. Often he was elevated to their reeking mouths, kissed, and dropped aside; if he were insistent upon attention, inquiring for Ellen, the giants beat him and thrust him from their presence.
Inert bare-surfaced looming things inclosed him, from some of which, when he approached them, he was kicked away. Incredibly huge portals barred egress to an outer world, from which seeped strange sharp odors. By calling his one word to the world beyond the doors, Robert endeavored to explain to the Titans that Ellen might possibly be outside. But they hushed him with amusement, sometimes with abuse.
There had been others prisoned here like himself while he had not seen, but they had vanished now, but this bothered him not in the least--his thoughts were of Ellen, and finally the giants lifted him and put him into a windowless room and clamped a fretted ceiling over it. The chamber rocked gently; he realized that it was being moved from one place to another. Leaping frantically he touched the ceiling's lattice, clung to it, struggling to force himself through its interstices. Unsuccessful, tiring, he fell back, crouched in a corner, weeping.