Who Goes There?

Kuttner and Moore were a husband-wife duo who started out separately, writing mostly for Weird Tales in the ’30s before marrying in 1940. They had collaborated a couple times pre-marriage, but the early ’40s saw an explosion of work from the two, often under pseudonyms. They were a two-person writing factory in the ’40s, and while they rarely went back to the horror and weird fantasy of their early years, to compensate they produced some of the best SF of the so-called Golden Age. Sadly after 1950 their output went down massively, apparently because both went back to school, and tragically Kuttner died in 1958 before he could get his Master’s and, presumably, go back to writing full-time. Moore stopped writing genre fiction after Kuttner died, and a few years later she would stop writing altogether; the flame that kept her inspiration going seemed to have gone out. Moore would outlive her first husband by almost thirty years.

“What You Need” was published under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym, which is typically more associated with Kuttner, although it does strike a certain tonal balance that implies significant contributions from both parties. With some exceptions (like the Gallagher stories, which are solo Kuttner), we don’t really know who wrote what. Sometimes you have to use your intuition with these things. I’m pretty sure the folks at ISFDB assign author credits for Kuttner/Moore collabs (especially if they were originally published under Kuttner’s name alone) at random. “What You Need” is a pretty good story from when the two were at the absolute height of their powers, together if not individually. It also got adapted into a classic Twilight Zone episode, which I’m sure Kuttner would’ve appreciated.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was later anthologized in Omnibus of Science Fiction (ed. Groff Conklin), The Great SF Stories Volume 7 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Matheson, and Charles G. Waugh). It’s also in The Best of Henry Kuttner and, of course, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.

Enhancing Image

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure at first if this was SF or fantasy that John W. Campbell had somehow snuck into Astounding (he’d done it before), given the magic shop premise, but rest assured this is SF. Admittedlyit’s a soft-enough science that no wonder Rod Serling thought it fit for adaptation. The time scanner at the heart of the story may as well be magic, but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. We have two main characters: Tim Carmichael, a journalist who’s recently sniffed out an unusual shop with very selective clientele, and Peter Talley, the owner of said shop. The characters are very Kuttner-y in the sense that they indulge in street talk and have a certain ruthlessness about them. Carmichael is, at best, an anti-hero who, in trying to find out what Talley’s shop could be selling, gets more than he could’ve possibly bargained for. Thing is, Talley’s shop doesn’t sell products but a service. “We Have What You Need” is its slogan, and while Talley does give things to his clients, it’s not the product that’s worth the fee but what it might mean to the customer. A rich man might pay a lot for what looks like a normal chicken egg if the egg will prove to have a certain utility. “Had Earth’s last hen died ten years before, he could have been no more pleased.” Interestingly we never do find out what use such a thing could have.

Talley’s secret is a time scanner—a sort of probability machine that can see into the future. We’re not told much about how the machine works, and anyway the details don’t matter; this is what I mean by “What You Mean” only being nominally SF. Naturally Carmichael is curious about how such a machine might work, and Talley, despite the reporter being a sketchy figure, is inclined to prove the scanner’s legitimacy. Carmichael receives “a pair of shears, the blades protected by a sheath of folded, glued cardboard,” which according to Talley will prove very useful at some point in the near future, although Talley does not say just how a pair of shears might be useful. Cut to a later scene where, in the midst of a drunken escapade with a colleague, Carmichael nearly gets killed by the printer at his own workplace; but he remembers having the shears and manages to cut himself free from the killer printer. Not all items Talley gives to his clients, he says, will be a matter of life and death like this. Nevertheless, Carmichael is convinced. Talley normally deals with rich folks, but he’s willing to make an exception (it’s not totally clear why) with the decidedly middle-class reporter. If you’re familiar with Kuttner’s work (I’m singling out Kuttner because I’m convinced he was the primary force on this one) then you can guess that such a business relationship won’t end well.

Now, I could poke a few holes in all this, because while the time scanner is not a time machine exactly it is very much a time viewer, which is adjacent enough that the rules of time travel still mostly apply. Talley can see into specific people’s futures, including his own, and just because said future is only “likely” to happen instead of guaranteed (remember that this is based on probability) doesn’t mean it’s not magic. Still, it’s pretty interesting that we have effectively two protagonists, and that neither one is evil; at most they both have a good dose of moral greyness. This is a bit of a strange Kuttner/Moore story, because it feels more fantastical than SFnal, despite being printed in Astounding, and there’s an urbane wise-guy attitude to it that makes it seem more indicative of where genre SF was heading in the coming decade (namely with material that would get published in Galaxy) than peak-era Campbellian SF. Kuttner and Moore were ahead of their time, such that it’s a shame their output slows down to a trickle by the time the ’50s rolled around; what little work we do have from them from that period indicates a restless creativity that was nowhere near done.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s at this point that we run into a bit of a structural problem: “What You Need” has basically two endings, both of which are valid. We get a section entirely in italics where Talley sees that, ten years down the line, Carmichael will kill him and take the scanner for himself. Knowing that it’s too late to deter Carmichael from getting more involved with the shop, but also being too humane (or maybe too much of a coward) to do something about it directly, Talley opts for a trick: get Carmichael “a pair of plastic-soled shoes” and act like these will be helpful to him one week hence. Little does Carmichael know, and neither can he suspect, that the smooth-soled shoes were deliberately picked so that in one week he would slip on them while at the subway and get run over in a horrific train accident. This ending could definitely work: it has an eerie quality to it since we don’t see Carmichael’s death but can infer his fate is sealed, not to mention there’s a moral ambivalence at play. We’re made to think at first that Talley is doing this merely out of self-preservation, which is not exactly a noble goal but at least it’s understandable and keeps him sympathetic.

(A useful thing to remember with stories at least partly written by Kuttner is that schmucks in Kuttner stories never prosper. Carmichael is not an irredeemable person, so his death is not simply framed as karmic justice, but someone with flexible morals like him are likely to meet a very bad end. In some stories the schmuck getting his comeuppance is done for comedy, but here it’s treated as a necessary evil.)

But there’s a second ending! There’s a rather detached scene (because it happens at some indeterminate point after Talley has more or less sent Carmichael to his death) in which Talley elaborates on his reasoning for having doomed Carmichael—for why he’s so determined to protect the scanner. This is all internal, since Talley is by himself and it’s not like he’s telling himself ssomething he didn’t know before. I’m not sure whose idea it was to end the story on this note, but I think it’s maybe unnecessary—except for one thing. The final scene puts “What You Need,” pretty subtly (for a Golden Age SF story), in the realm of atomic allegory. The scanner’s potential could prove catastrophic, such that Talley doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands; and Talley, being a morally gentle fellow, considers himself the best-case scenario for someone owning the scanner. This does raise the question of, if the scanner is such a terrible machine then why doesn’t Talley simply destroy it (there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping him), but if this is something comparable to atomic weaponry then maybe the point is that such a machine is inevitable. Once the cat’s out of the bag you can’t put it back in. I like the metaphor, but I don’t like how this fairly short story has to end twice for such a point to be made.

A Step Farther Out

I’m not sure how long it took Kuttner and Moore to write stuff together; they were working at such a breakneck pace in the ’40s that their material was probably put on magazines’ backlogs in no time. It’s totally possible they had come up with the premise for “What You Need” a couple years earlier and had envisioned it as a fantasy, to be more fit for Unknown than Astounding; but then Unknown died and that would’ve thrown a wrench into things. I’m mixed on the ending, but I do think it helps justify the story’s existence as science fiction as opposed to fantasy. Not perfect, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about for the couple days since I had read it. Also a good starting point for getting into Kuttner/Moore collabs.

See you next time.