Henry Kuttner

“ It would have been suicide to dive back into that maelstrom of death in an effort to catch him. Sick at heart, Kern saw him fall twisting toward the ground. He saw, too, how man after man of the swarm around him stiffened and dropped after Sam on limp wings as the mutant’s lethal gaze took his own escort of dead men around him to his death.
Then they plunged into the choking mists overhead, and no one had time to think of anything but his own breathing, his own urgent need to follow exactly in the wing-path of Kua’s bearers as she guided them through the fog. ”

“ It rose in a vast sweep of opalescent color, like a translucent thundercloud hanging over the whole land. Knowing it for a mountain, the mind felt vertiginous at the thought of such tremendous bulk towering overhead.
“It looks clear,” Kua said. “All the way through. I can’t tell what’s beyond it. Just an enormous mountain made out of—of plastic? I wonder.”
Kern was aware of a tugging at his wing-surfaces, and glanced around in quick recognition of the strengthening breeze. He was the first to notice it.
“It’s beginning to blow. And listen—do you hear?” ”

“ For the first time he realized one of the great secrets of a flying race—to fly alone is to know only half the joy of flying. When another winged being moves beside you on the airways, speed matching speed, wings beating as one, then at last you taste the full ecstasy of flight.
Kern was breathless with joy and excitement when the ground swooped up at them and he banked against the rush of his glide. With suddenly fluttering wings, he reversed his position in the air and felt with both feet for the solid earth. ”

“ Elje turned too, and from the corner of his eye, he saw her recoil involuntarily from the strangeness of Kua’s face.
Kua’s wide blue eye, with depth upon depth shining in it, was staring at the rock wall above the fireplace. Her face had a look of concentration and withdrawal upon it, as if in all but body she were miles away.
“Kern!” she said again. “There are men coming. Many men. I think they are the same ones who were following us outside.” She hesitated, glancing quickly at Elje’s face, her eye refocusing swiftly and then going back to the solid wall. ”

“ Kern felt change all about him, in the substance of the Mountain itself. A vast, imponderable shifting of the clouded glass, a falling apart of the atoms which composed it, as its soul of fire had fallen. The opalescent stuff was a fog—a mist—a thin, dissipating gas which no longer supported him. The cold of clear air struck terribly upon his fiery limbs as the Mountain dissolved from about him. He convulsed upon himself in a knot of flame that seemed to consume itself and to cease—to cease—
Everything was blank around him. ”

“ And then before them in the opalescent cloud of the Mountain a thin coil of light began to glow.
Swiftly it grew clearer. And Kern looked with the eyes of the body upon that which he had seen before with the eyes of the mind. He felt the malevolence beat out at them before the fire itself came wholly into focus, strong hatred, curiously impersonal. It was the hatred of a Mountain, a cloud, not a human hatred. ”

“ Kern said. “But they have powers none of us know. I think our coming marks a turning place in the history of your race, Elje—Gerd. You can kill us or abandon us and go on as you always have, or you can believe me and help us, and fight this time with a chance of winning. Will you do it?”
Elje was silent for a moment. Then she laughed and stood up suddenly with a flutter of her wings.
“I’ll go along with you and talk to your friends,” she said. “If they’re as you say—yes, Kern, I’ll believe you. For the Mountain never has changed human flesh. It can touch our minds, but not our bodies. ”

“ Byrna’s voice had magic in it, and so did her brain. Wisdom came as simply to her as knowledge came to Bruce Hallam, but she had infinitely more warmth than he. Bruce, Kern sometimes thought, would dismember a human as dispassionately as he would cut wire in two if he needed the material for an experiment. Bruce looked the most normal of them all, but he would not have passed the questioning of the most superficial mental examination. ”

“ There was a sudden harshness to her thought.
“Kern, you’re a soft fool!” Kua said. “Did you think you could reach Paradise without earning it? Whether you help us or not, you’ve got to face danger before you’ll find your place in this world, or any other. I don’t think you can manage without us. And we need your help, too. Together, we may still lose the battle. Separately, there’s no hope for any of us. We know! The Mountain may be a mutation as far beyond us as we are beyond the animals. But we’ve got to fight.” ”

“ There was a measured beating of the air above Kern, and he looked up to see the hunchback hovering on silky red wings above him. Sunlight flashed on a bared knife-blade. Gerd gestured down. And there was something about his poise in the air, the way he handled his muscular, twisted body, that warned Kern not to precipitate a struggle. It occurred to him for the first time that fighting in midair must be an art requiring skills he had never learned—yet. ”

“ Bruce, with his mutant’s uncanny skill at creating out of any means at hand the more-than-machinery which would do his bidding, had recognized this world. Kern remembered with shock his own blindness when Elje had described to him what the Mountain’s slaves, under its guidance, could do with any material at hand—how, when they still suspected Kern of complicity with the enemy, they had cleared his room of any matter out of which he might build a weapon to destroy them.
Yes, this world was Bruce Hallam’s—not Kern’s after all. A winged world, yes, but a world under dominance. ”

“ Elje told Kern as they swept forward. “Many of us died before we learned the way through them. Now we have a shelter where no one can follow us who hasn’t a guide.”
Abruptly she ceased to speak. Kern turned a startled glance and saw her reel in midair, throwing back her head so that the clear line of her throat was white and taut against the blue sky. Then, without a word, suddenly she crumpled in full flight. An instant longer her wings sustained her and she hung limp from the spread pinions. ”

“ Its body is this opalescent stuff which is solid or gas as the Mountain wills. It can make tunnels and caverns like open mouths through it and close them again. And its brain, its motivating force, is the ribbon of fire, endless, revolving upon itself in the center. ”

“ One did not question one’s companions too closely in this house of the mutations.
“You’ve been with us two years, Kern,” she was saying now. “Only two years. You don’t know yet how strong we are, or how much we can accomplish among us. Bruce Hallam knows what he’s doing, Kern. He never works on theories. Or if he does, the theories become truth. He has a mind like that. You don’t know us, Kern!” ”

“ Kern, how can we meet them? They’re a hundred to our one! This was our last refuge. If they’re coming here, all is lost!”
“They don’t know we’re expecting them,” Kern said. “That’s our only advantage. Make the most of it. Is there any room for ambushes along the way?”
Elje shook her head. “It’s almost a single-file path everywhere. And Gerd knows it better than even I do.” Her wings drooped. Listlessly she stared into the fire. “This is the end of all resistance to the Mountain,” she said. “This is the day it wins the fight. None of us can come out alive. Gerd! ”

“ No one who has once spread wings upon the air-currents willingly faces a life without wings.
The blooming grove was beneath them now.
“If you make contact this time with—it—again, Kern, I think it will know more easily where to direct its men,” Elje said. “There is great danger. Will you let this meeting with your friends go for awhile? You may be doing them harm as well as us. The army of the Mountain may be very near now.”
Kern hesitated. He had been dreading with every wingbeat the moment when he must open his mind again to that coiled and scorching malevolence. ”

“ Around them the wind still blew cold and shrill, but the blast of it was slackening noticeably and warmth was creeping back little by little into the air. They stood on a wooded hill, under trees whose whipping branches added to the tumult of noise, and Kern could see a broad vista of the land before him, with no more of the vast bending giants of the hurricane moving across it. ”

“ I can build the machine in duplicate on any world, anywhere, where I can live at all.” He smiled, and his strange light eyes glowed.
It was curious, Kern thought, how frequently in mutations the eyes were the giveaway. Kua, of course. And Sam Brewster with his terrible veiled glance protected by its secondary lid which drew back only in anger. And Bruce Hallam, whose strangeness was not visible but existed only in the amazing intricacies of his brain, looked upon the alien world with eyes that mirrored the mysteries behind them. ”

“ They aren’t in my sight yet—over the horizon, that is. Byrna, tell him.”
The mind that held Kern’s stirred, and through it he saw as through a haze rank upon rank of winged beings flying with steady beasts of their pinions over a dark night-time terrain. ”

“ And Kern saw many times a winged man, outmaneuvered by his enemy, rise on desperate wings and hurl himself headlong into a death-like embrace, wings folded, so that the two fell like a single plummet, each striving frantically as they dropped twisting through the air for a blow that would cripple his adversary and break the wing-locked grip before the ground came too near. ”

“ Elje told him. “That’s the way their weapons usually work. And the Mountain can’t penetrate our mists and our rocks here. They’ve got to fight hand-to hand—but they can do it. There are too many of them. I—Kern, look! Is that Gerd?”
A flash of red wings and red hair showed through the melee as someone went by on whistling wings, too fast to see clearly. Kern caught one glimpse of a dark face and pale, fixed eyes—and thought there was grief in the eyes and the distorted face in that one glancing look he caught of it. ”

“ His wings broke backward and he fell after the man he had just killed. They vanished almost together into the fog below.
Sam laughed grimly. When he turned the secondary lids were closed again over his eyes.
“I can kill anyone who catches my eyes, when they’re open,” he said.
Elje did not understand the words, but his gesture was enough. She caught her breath softly and looked away in sheer instinctive revulsion from that deathly gaze.
“Elje, we’ve got to do something,” Kern said. “Now, while we can. We’ve got Sam. Kua and Byrna have their own powers, too. ”

“ The thought-voice of Kua faltered. “Dangerous. We may learn more of it, if we live. This much we’ve seen, though, through Byrna’s vision, and mine. We’ve sensed forces reaching out from the Mountain, into the minds of men. The minds of the winged townspeople. Assembling them for war.” She hesitated. “Kern, do you know they’re on their way now, to your town, where the outlaws are?” ”

“ I think—I know—if the Mountain could reach into our bodies and make that tiny change that would open our mind to it, then it would win. But it can’t. It can’t alter our bodies except by killing us. If I see with my own eyes these companions of Kern’s, I’ll know there is a power greater than the Mountain. And we’ll fight together, Kern!”
A little later, floating high above the nest of hills which cradled the village, Kern rocked on spread wings and pressed his eyes tightly shut, thinking with all the strength of his mind:
“Byrna, Byrna! Answer me, Byrna! Help me find you. Byrna, do you hear?” ”

“ And now through the icy glass which held the humans rigid, two shapes of coiling flame turned lazily over and over—one shape supporting a human body and glowing incandescent with malevolence, the other still too amazed for emotion, but stretching its new limbs of fire with a sort of reluctant, voluptuous luxury as the endless ribbon rolled in convolutions of flame in and out of its own length. ”

“ This much is sure, Elje. Unless we can prevail against the Mountain somehow, I believe we mutants at least are doomed. Our coming has upset the balance in your world and the Mountain knows it and intends to be rid of us. Well, we’ve lost our best man, Bruce Hallam. With his help we might have moved openly against the Mountain. Without him, we are greatly handicapped.” Kern grimaced wryly. “Remember, Byrna and I have been in—call it in tune—with whatever it is that constitutes the Mountain. We know what we’re facing. ”

“ Hatred burned and bubbled all around Kern’s awareness as he strove coil against coil with the enemy. But it did not touch him any more. He felt no fear. And when he began to realize that he could not vanquish this being by strength alone, not even then did he feel fear. Emotion was gone from him. Coil by coil he tested the thing he strove with, and coil by coil he found it braced irresistibly against his greatest strength. ”

“ A cavern lifted its high arched entrance before them, black rock without and within, and the lip of rock thrust out before it, black too. Above the platform, which must have been two hundred feet across, the air was still and no poisonous vapors swirled, but they still rose all around the edges of the rock and leaned together high above like a tent roof that blotted out the sky except for occasional rifts far overhead. It was like a painter’s concept of Hades, even to the winged men with the hard, violent faces swarming out to meet the newcomers.
The mutants were among them. ”