The big man achieved a grin. “You dying shrimp,” he said, “do you seriously expect you can hurt me?”
“Not that way,” said Benrud.
He had looked up the right place to cut, and the knife entered and slashed the abdominal aorta with much less pain than he expected. Horner yelled and plunged across the room. Blood smeared across his hands. Benrud fended him off with a kick. He lurched backward. The dropped glass crunched under his shoe and he knocked over the occasional table.
Benrud dialed O. “Operator!” he gasped. “Police. I’m being attacked, Jim Horner is at-
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tacking me, Jim Horner, this is Harry Benrud and I’m”
Horner caromed into him again. The phone toppled to the floor. It would take awhile to trace the call and for the police to arrive. Long enough for a weakened man to die. Benrud lay back and let the darkness have him.
Poul and Karen Anderson
In Memoriom: Henry Kuttner
(Los Angeles, 1914Santa Monica, February 4, 1958)
Tomorrow and tomorrow bring no more Beggars in velvet, blind mice, pipers’ sons; The fairy chessmen will take wing no more In shock and clash by night where fury runs. A gnome there was, whose paper ghost must
know
That home there’s no returningthat the line To his tomorrow went with last year’s snow. Gallegher Plus no longer will design Robots who have no tails; the private eye That stirred two-handed engines, no more sees. No vintage seasons more, or rich or wry, That tantalize us even to the lees; Their mutant branch now the dark angel shakes And happy endings end when the bough breaks.