Henry Kuttner - Sword of Tomorrow

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SWORD OF TOMORROW

BY HENRY KUTTNER

A COMPLETE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE

Trance-borne to a far distant age, Pilot Ethan Court is plunged into peril

and adventure on a strange new world where his courage and idealism are put

to a stern test!

CHAPTER I

Jap Torture Cell

IT WAS always easier when he sank into the opium-drugged stupor from which not even torture

could rouse him. At first he clung to two memories—his rank, and his Army serial number. By focusing

his pain-hazed mind on those realities he was able to keep sane.

After a while he didn't want to keep his sanity.

Men can survive a year, or two years, in a Japanese prison camp. They may emerge maimed,

spiritually sick, but alive. They remember their own names.

He used to say it aloud at first, in the musty darkness of the cell.

"Ethan Court," he whispered to the black, hidden walls. "Ethan Court." And then—"Times Square.

Tiffany's, Bretano's, Staten Island. The Yankee Stadium, pop corn, whisky sours, Greenwich Village'"

Presently he noticed that the sound of his voice was different, and after that he scarcely spoke. The

horrible lethargy of inaction closed around him. Occasionally, though less often now, he was taken before

Japanese officers who questioned him.

He was somewhere in Occupied China, he knew, but since his plane had been forced down, he had

been shunted for a long distance by a roundabout route. He guessed that this was a temporary

headquarters, probably on the site of some old Chinese town, and he suspected that it was in the hill

country. His savage captors told him nothing, of course. They just asked questions.

How much could he disclose in the way of military information, the Japanese did not know.

Hard-pressed, they were overlooking no bets. His stubbornness enraged them. The commander of the

post, a disappointed samurai of a politically-unpopular family, gradually came to believe that a feud

existed between Court and himself. It became a contest between the Japanese officer and the American,

entirely passive on one side, ruthlessly active on the other.

Time dragged on, while bombers roared in increasing numbers over Japan and the brown hordes

sullenly withdrew from Burma and Thailand and the islands north of Borneo. This headquarters was

isolated, but in a strategic spot. The commander saw the tides of war rage past him and recede. The

radio gave him no comfort. The Emperor of Japan was silent upon his throne.

A transfer required time. In enforced idleness, the Nipponese commander devoted himself to

breaking the will of the American. Torture failed, and so he tried an ancient Japanese trick—opium. It

was mixed in Court's food, and, after a while, the craving grew in him. The Jap officer kept his prisoner

saturated with the drug. Court's mind dulled.

A MONGOL, Kai-Sieng, was put in Court's cell. He was a prisoner, too, and spoke only a few

English words. There had been an uprising, Court gathered. The prison cells of the fort were overflowing.

For a month Kai-Sieng remained, and in that time Court learned of the deceptive Peace of the Poppy.

Curious conversations they had there in the dark—scraps of English and Chinese and lingua franca.

The Mongol was a fatalist. Death was inevitable, and meanwhile he had killed very many Japanese. The

taunts and torments he had undergone had not moved him. He knew the hiding-place of his Chinese

guerrilla leader, but the Japs would not learn it from him.

"They cannot touch me," he told Court. "The part of me that is—myself—is sunk deep in a well of

peace."

Yes, he smoked opium. Kai-Sieng said, but it was not that alone. He had been in Tibet, at a

lamasery. There he had learned something of the secret of detaching the soul from the body.

Court wondered.

In military classes, he himself had studied psychonamics, that strange weapon of psychological

defense that is, in essence, self-hypnotism. Here in a prison cell in China, from the mouth of a

rancid-smelling Mongolian guerrilla, he was learning an allied science—or mysticism.

He told Kai-Sieng something of his fears, that he would go mad, or that he would be unable to

endure the tortures. His will was weakening under the impact of the cannabis indica, and he was afraid

that eventually he would talk.

"Turn their own weapons against them," the Mongolian said. "The poppy smoke is the opener of the

gate. I will teach you what I can. You must learn to relax utterly in the central peace of the universe."

Mysticism, yes, but it was merely a phrasing of psychonamic basics. There was no candle-flame to

focus Court's attention. He was sick, body and soul, and relaxation was impossible.

If his lips ever came unsealed, he might blurt out everything—including a certain bit of military

information that no Japanese knew he possessed. It was vital that the enemy should not get that

information, how vital only Court and a few three-star generals in the Eastern Theatre knew. Suicide was

impossible. He was watched too closely for that. And so, with his eyes open, Court walked into the trap

his captors had set and became an opium addict.

Kai-Sieng showed him the way. The Japanese were only too glad to supply a layout, and Court

found the Peace of the Poppy. But under the Mongolian's guidance he learned something else, the

psychonamic defense that had come out of a Tibetan lamasery. It was hard at first, but the opium

helped.

He visualized the sea, deep, calm, immense, and he let himself sink into the fathomless depths. The

farther clown he went, the less the outside world mattered. Soaked in opium, his mind drowning in a

shoreless ocean, he sank into the blue deeps, and day by day he left the prison farther behind. It was

psychic science of a high order, but the Japanese commander did not understand. He thought that

Court's will was growing more pliant, that soon he could successfully question a mind-dulled, helpless

dupe.

Kai-Sieng was taken way and shot. Dreamily Court knew what was happening. It did not matter.

Nothing mattered, really. For only the azure sea was real, that profound deep that took him into its

protective embrace and kept him safe.

The opium supply stopped. The Japs had grown suspicious. But they were too late. Not even the

craving of Court's body far the drug could wake him from his blue dream. Not even torture, ruthless and

inhuman, could bring life back into his eyes. He had gone down the ancient Tibetan road and found

peace.

But he was not dead. His body, inactive, required less and less fuel. It was not inhabited. His mind

had gone elsewhere. Like the blue-robed lamas who are reputed to live for a thousand years in the

Himalayan peaks, Court was prolonging his life-span by—resting. The machine of his corporeal existence

was idling. Dimly, in the heart of the machine, the life-spark flickered.

He did not know it. He did not know his name any more. He remembered nothing. He rocked

endlessly in the limpid blue vastness, while the armies swept across the face of the world, and Fujiyama's

white cone reflected the red of burning cities. He slept, while the shark-faced planes flew above him, and

while the buildings exploded in thundering ruin. He slept, while his cell was sealed in crashing destruction,

and the seal was crimsoned with Japanese blood. He still slept, though above him, on the surface of the

earth smoked a lifeless rubble where a Japanese fortress once stood.

Hermetically locked, there in the dark, Ethan Court lay at rest. In Tibetan monasteries Tibetian

priests slept similar sleeps, and wake, and finally died. The earth swung in its tremendous orbit around the

sun, and warring nations were stilled.

And there was peace—for a little while.

* * *

The awakening took many, many years. The specialized human body is a fragile organism, and

enormously complicated. A man who has slept for—ages—does not start up as from a half-hour's doze.

Moreover, the peculiar psychic factor that made Court's slumber possible also made his quickening a

slow process.

There was air, first. It filtered through a crack in the rubble roof and stole into Court's nostrils.

Oxygen crept into his stilled lungs and infiltrated the nearly motionless blood-stream. The red corpuscles

fed upon it, and the vital spark, slowly and gradually, flamed brighter.

But in his mind there was no awareness. The blue seat was deep. A little troubled, now—but only a

little.

Finally men found him.

He did not know it when a dark, bearded face peered down into his cell, and when, a torch was

lowered. He did not hear the cry of amazement in an alien tongue. Nor did he sense that he was being

carried, in a rough litter, to a village hidden amid mountain peaks.

HIS clothing had long since rotted, but the corroded metal of his dog-tags was still looped on a rusty

chain about his neck, The tribesmen put the tiny plates in a sacred place, and, at the command of their

priest, they tended Court. Perhaps some hint of the holy Tibetan lamas had filtered down through the

ages, for they recognized Court's sleep as something mystic and sacred.

They washed him and rubbed his emaciated body gently with oil. They pressed between his lips the

warmed milk of the kharam, which had not existed in the Twentieth Century, and some times they prayed

to him.

The priest himself watched with tired, wise eyes, and wondered. His people had no written history,

only folk-tales that turned into superstitious legends of the day the gods had destroyed the world—the

gods who strode with enormous, crashing strides and left flame behind them. So he wondered.

Meanwhile the peaceful life of the nomads went on. They bartered and hunted, and among them,

presently, moved the gaunt figure of Ethan Court, unshaved and strange in a native tunic. But behind his

eyes the—soul—had not wakened.

A psychiatrist might have guessed the answer. There was psychic trauma present, induced by shock

and nurtured by the blue seas in which Court's awareness still hung quiescent. A part of his mind roused,

He learned the language, word by word—it was not complicated—and he would play quiet games with

the children, a blue-eyed, bearded spectre from the past. He became accepted as part of the community

life. He was not holy any more. Familiarity had altered that. But his hosts were friendly, and the priest

spent long hours trying to find the key to Court's soul.

Then a change came. A new face swam into the dark mirror of Court's realization, and afterward.

frighteningly new things. He sank deeper, protectively, into the blue sea. For he was flying again. That

terrified him. He scarcely sensed his altered surroundings, the lush magnificence of rainbow plastics and

dim music, and he tried not to realize that there were tiny pin-pricks of pain now and then in his arms and

legs,

But something was troubling the waters. Something reached down inexorably toward him, groping,

seizing, pulling him to the surface.

Always, now, voices spoke to him in this new language he had learned. They were urging him to—to

seek someone. Who? They did not know, but they said that he knew. They commanded him to

remember—what?

A name.

Whose name?

The blue sea was becoming very shallow. Waves of troubling, strange music beat upon him. Color

and light quivered and shook before his puzzled eyes.

The name was—Court. Ethan Court!

The blue oblivion washed back. It was torn asunder like a veil. It fled far away and was gone, and

into the place where it had been came rushing the memories of the man who had been Ethan Court.

For he remembered now. He was awake. And, in the moment of that awakening, he knew that he

was in a new world.

CHAPTER II

Air Accident

THE tense faces ringing him altered. He heard a soft "Ah'h" of satisfaction from many lips.

Involuntarily he scowled, his glance flicking from eye to eye. He was half-reclining in a curious sort of

chair. It was a bulky chair, with coils of tubed light twining about it. A circle of men stood facing him,

watching.

His lips tightened.

"What's going on here?" he said in English. "Where am I?"

One man, completely bald, with a close-fitting white garment revealing his skinny figure, waved the

others back. He spoke a tongue that Court understood.

"Leave me alone with him now. He is awake. Call Barlen. Notify the Throne. Out, now!"

They trooped out through a door that lifted silently in the wall. Court lifted himself out of the chair

where now the shining coils had dulled. His body felt like an old friend. He had been using it without

realization for a long while, and he was in good physical condition. Looking down, he saw that he was

wearing a blue-and-brown figured tunic of light, pliable material, and shorts of the same color. There

were shoes of elastic, translucent plastic on his feet.

The room had a strange, exotic appearance. The walls shimmered with color, soft pastels, abstract

designs that were curiously soothing in their effect. The furnishings consisted of a few couches and a

littered table. Court had never before seen such furniture or such a room.

The bald man was coming toward him. Court, still frowning, spoke in the new language.

"What is this? I asked you where I am? Am I a prisoner?"

"No, you're no prisoner," the man said. "You've been a patient. I'm Tor Kassel. Can you understand

me easily?"

Court nodded, still wary. "This place is what?"

"My home." Kassel hesitated. "You know your name?"

"Naturally. But that's about all I do know."

"Is it?" The dark eyes were intent. "Your memories haven't returned?"

Court shook his head wearily. "I'm mixed up. I expected something else. But this is right, somehow."

"It is quite right." Kassel's voice was gentle. "There are a few things you should know before you can

completely readjust yourself. As for your health—it is perfect. For five months you have been here, under

my care. Let me see if my theory is correct. First, are thirsty? Or hungry?"

"No," Court said. "I just want to know where I am."

Tor Kassel rested his thin hand on the table. "You were in an underground place. There you fell

asleep. You caused that sleep yourself. It was a hypnosis, self-induced."

"The opium," Court said suddenly. He used the English word. Kassel stared.

"Opium?"

"A—a drug I smoked. It helped me to fall asleep. It was habit-forming."

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Henry Kuttner - Sword of Tomorrow

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