by Fritz Leiber
This time the small dark man with glasses was wearing a black, snap-brim hat and a tightly buttoned trench coat rather too long for him, suggesting a robe. And this time he didn’t look terrified, in spite of his pallor. Instead he was sardonically smiling.
“I knew you wouldn’t stay in your room,” he said. “I told Jane her letter would have just the opposite effect.
Carr doubled his fist, swung back his arm, hesitated. Damn it, he did wear glasses—pitifully think-lensed ones.
“Go ahead,” said the small, dark man. “Make a scene. Bring them down on us. I’m past caring.”
And then he did something astonishing. He threw back his head, raised his arm in a theatrical gesture, and with a certain rakish coolness intoned, “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.”
Carr stared at the glasses bright with reflected street light.
“Hamlet,” said the small dark man. “Act five, scene two. The first quotation was from The Hound of the Baskervilles.” He paused and studied Carr, his glasses gleaming hypnotically. “You wouldn’t think, would you,” he mused, “that as we stand here in this respectable neighborhood, conversing quietly, that we are both in deadly peril.” He smiled. “No, I’m sure you wouldn’t think that.”
“Listen,” said Carr suddenly, advancing again with baled fist. “You slugged me last night.”
“So I did,” said the small man, rocking on his heels.
“Well, in that case—” Carr started, and then he remembered Mr. Wilson. He whirled around. The portly man was nowhere in sight. He took a few steps, then checked himself abruptly, looked back. The small dark man was rapidly walking toward the purring convertible. Carr darted after him, sprang to the running board just as the other slipped behind the wheel.
“You wanted to distract me until he was gone,” Car accused.
“That’s right,” said the small dark man. “Jump in.”
Angrily Carr complied. But before he could say anything, the other had started to talk. His voice was no longer facetious, but low, bitter, almost confessional. His head was bent. He did not look at Carr.
“In the first place,” he said, “I want you to understand that I don’t trust you. And I certainly don’t like you—if I did, I’d b doing my best to get you out of this instead of leading you straight toward the center. And finally, I don’t give a damn what happens to you, or to myself. But I still do have a certain quixotic concern for what happens to Jane. It’s for her sake, not yours, that I’m going to do what I’m going to do.” He put his hand on the gear-shift lever.
“And what are you going to do?” snapped Carr.
The convertible bucked, leaped forward with a roar.
Carr’s gaze swung up as the grimy red wall of a truck looked higher, higher. WORLD MOVES, the sign said. He closed his eyes. He felt a blood-checking swerve, gritted his teeth at the wood-on-steel caress along the fender. When he opened his eyes again, it was to see a woman and child flash by not a foot from the wheels. He lurched sideways as they screamed around a corner, let go his hat to cling to the car, watched a coupe and bus converge ahead of them, closed his eyes again as they grazed through the gap.
He wasn’t going to die because of any mysterious intrigue-spawned peril. Oh, no! He and the small dark man with glasses were merely going to provide two unusually well-mangled additions to the year’s traffic fatalities.
“Stop, you jerk!”
The other did not take his eyes off the street ahead, but bared his gums in a grin. Crouching there so small and frail behind the wheel, black hat blown off, hair streaming back, face contorted, peering ahead through glasses as thick as telescope lenses, he looked like some spindle-bodied man of the future hurling himself at eternity.
To either side, small indistinguishable stores and dusty white street globes shot by, while blocks of asphalt vanished under the hood.
“Tell me what it’s all about before you kill us,” yelled Carr.
The small dark man snickered through his teeth. “Do I dare explain the universe?”
Ahead of them cars skittered to the curb like disturbed ants. Over the motor’s roar Carr became aware of a wailing that grew in volume. A wild white light, mixed with red, began to flood the street from behind them, its beam swinging back and forth like a giant pendulum. Then from the corner of his eye Carr noticed a seated man in a big black slicker, traveling at a level several feet above him, heave into view, creep abreast. Below and ahead of the man was a bright vermillion hood from which the wailing came. Behind man and hood were dim ladders and coils, other swaying and slickered figures.
Ahead the street took a jog. Cars parked zigzag like a rail fence made it impossible that both their car and the fire engine should get through.
Grinning wider, the small dark man nursed the throttle. The fire engine dropped back a little, hung on tenaciously, dropped back just enough more to let them careen through the gap, while frozen pedestrians gaped.
Carr’s fear left him. There was no use to it.
“You and Jane are both insane, aren’t you?” he screamed.
The small man’s snort seemed to be torn from his lips by the wind.
“That would be nice,” he said.
The street narrowed, its sides grew dark. Behind them the fire engine braked, took a turn.
From ahead came a cold whiff of water and oil. Skyscrapers twinkled against the sky, but just this side of them a gap in the buildings was widening. Immediately ahead a skeletal black structure loomed.
A rapid clanging started. Towers flanking the black structure began to blink red.
Without warning Carr grabbed for the ignition, stamped at the brake. “They’re opening the bridge!” he yelled.
The small man kicked him in the ankle, punched his hand away from the dashboard and accelerated. Ahead was stopped autos, the black-and-white semaphore of a barrier. Swinging far the left, they struck its flexible end. It rasped along the car’s side like a stick against a picket fence, tore free with a great twang. They shot forward onto the dark span. To either side, solidity dropped away. Far below, yellow windows of skyscrapers flowed in uneven patterns on the water. To the left was the dark bulk of a lake freighter with figures moving on the dimly lit bridge. Beside it Carr seemed to glimpse a much smaller hull and the tiny pale oval of a single upturned face.
They were three-quarters of the way across when, through their hurtling speed, Carr felt the feather touch of a titan. Under them the span had begun to rise. Ahead of them a ribbon of blackness appeared, at the break in the jack-knife of the span.
The small dark man clamped the throttle to the floor. There was a spine-compressing jar and jounce, the skyscrapers reeled, then another jar, as the car came down—on its wheels.
The tip of the second barrier broke off with a giant snap. The open bridge had cleared the street ahead of traffic going their way. The small dark man breezed along it for four blocks like the winner of a race, then suddenly braked, skidded around a corner to the wrong side of the street. The two wheels on his side hit the curb and the car rocked to a stop.
Carr loosened his death-grip on dashboard and door-handle, balled a fist, and turned, this time without any compunction about glasses.
But the small man had jumped out of the car and was lightly running up the steps of a building that Carr now realized was the public library. As he hit the sidewalk in pursuit, he saw the small man briefly silhouetted against the yellow rectangle of the swinging door. When Carr stiff-armed through it, the man was vanishing at the top of a flight of marble stairs, under an archway decorated in twinkling gold mosaic with the names of Whittier, Emerson and Longfellow.
Reaching the top, Carr received a spurt of savage pleasure from the realization that he was gaining. Before him was a large, domed room, open shelves to one side, counters and booths to the other, unoccupied except for a couple of girls behind a window and a baldheaded man with a coat and
briefcase awkwardly clamped under one arm as he stood on tiptoe to reach down a book.
The small dark man was racing under an archway commemorating the English poets Scott, Burns, Tennyson and Gray.
Carr raced at his heels past a desk behind which sat a starved, grayhaired woman who seemed too timid to look up or too fragile to permit herself quick reflexes. The small man darted toward a wall bearing long golden characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs. He ducked down a narrow corridor and to his shock Carr realized they were both running on frosted glass.
For a moment Carr thought that the small dark man had let him this long chase solely to get him to step through a skylight. Then he realized that he was on one of the many translucent catwalks that served as ashes in the stacks of the library. He sprinted forward again, guided by the sonorous pit-pat of receding footsteps.
He found himself in a silent world within a world. A world several stories high and covering a good part of a block. An oddly insubstantial world of thin metal beams, narrow stairs, translucent runways, and innumerable books. A world of crannies, slits and gaps.
Thus far, Carr had gained. But now, like some animal that has reached its native element, the small dark man held his own, craftily doubling and redoubling on his course, suddenly darting up or down stairs whose treads resounded like the clangor of ancient war. Carr caught glimpses of a flapping raincoat, he shook his fist with anger at some teeth and a grin spied through castellated gaps in successive tiers of books, he clutched futilely at a small, expensive-looking oxford disappearing up a metal-treaded stair in a tantalizing leisurely fashion.
He was panting and his side had begun to hurt, something in his topcoat was growing heavier. It began to seem to him that the chase would never end, that the two of them would go skipping and staggering on indefinitely, always the same distance apart. The whole experience had acquired nightmarish overtones. They were rats scampering through the fact-walled convolutions of some giant metal brain on the far future. They were human specimens awakened too soon in a gigantic time-capsule and frantically seeking escape.
Carr lurched around a corner and there, not ten feet away, back turned, standing beside an old-brass-fitted drinking fountain that gurgled merrily, was his quarry.
Carr almost hiccupped a laugh between his gasps for air. Now, Carr decided, he’d slug the guy.
As he moved forward, however, it was inevitable that he should look beyond the small dark man at the thing at which the small dark man was looking.
Or rather, the person.
For just inside the next alleyway, gilt-buttoned brown suit almost exactly the same shade as the buckram bindings that made a background, lips formed in an eclipse of dismay that couldn’t avoid becoming a smile, stood Jane.
Carr found himself drifting past the small dark man as if the latter were part of a dissolving dream. With every step forward the floor seemed to get solider under his feet.
Jane’s expression did not change and her lips held the same shape. She just tilted her head as he put his arms around her and kissed her.
“Real, real, real,” was the only thought in his head. Real as the Masters of the Chessboard, R. RETI, just beyond her hair, or My System, NIMZOWITCH, beside it.
She pushed away, looking up at him incredulously. His nerves, soothed for a moment, reawoke with a jerk. He stepped back.
“Where’s he gone?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The small dark madman with the glasses.” He moved about quickly, looking down all the nearby aisles.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He has way of fading.”
“I’ll say he has!” He turned on her. “Though generally he tries to murder you first.”
“What!”
“Maybe he thought we had a suicide pact.” Carr grinned woodenly as he said it, but his hands were shaking. He could feel all his delayed reactions to the ride, to his painful awakening earlier, to her exasperating note—coming to the surface.
“Jane,” he said sharply, “what’s it all about?”
She backed away from him, shaking her head.
He followed her. His voice was harsh. “Look, Jane,” he said. “Day before yesterday your boy friend ran away from me. Last night he knocked me out. Tonight he tried to kill both of us. What’s it all about? I want to know.”
She made no answer. The fear in her eyes brought his exasperation to a boil. “What have you and he done? Who are those people after you? What’s wrong with your father and mother? Why did you lead me to that empty house? What are you doing here? You’ve got to tell me, Jane! You’ve got to!”
He had her backed up against the bookshelves and was almost shouting in her face. But she would only stare up at him terrifiedly and shake her head. His control snapped. He grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her violently.
It was a paroxysm of exasperation. He felt as if he were shaking the last two days, with all their enigmas and frustrations. This floppy brown doll in his arms somehow stood for the small man, his car, Miss Hackman, Mr. Wilson, the man with one hand, the whole bedeviled city of Chicago.
But no matter how violently her head snapped back and forth, her lips remained pressed tightly together. Suddenly he loosed her and turned away, resting his elbows on a shelf, burying his face in his hands, breathing heavily.
When he looked up and around she was still backed up against the shelves, smoothing her suit. She bit her lip when her hand touched her shoulder. She was looking at him. “Do I shake well?” she asked. “You know, it’s rather relaxing.”
He winced. “Sorry,” he said dully. “I’m acting crazy. But I’ve just got to know.”
“I can’t tell you.”
He looked at her in a misery of exasperation. “Jane!”
“No, I can’t.”
He submitted wearily. “All right. But…” He glanced around vaguely. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he said, jumping away from the shelves against which he’d been leaning.
“Why?” She was as uncomprehending as before, and much cooler.
“We’re in the stacks.” His voice automatically took on a hushed tone. “No one can come here without a pass. We made enough racket to wake the dead. They’re bound to come looking for us.”
“Are they?” She smiled. “They haven’t yet.”
“And then—Good Lord!—the traffic cops and who knows who else…they’re bound to!” He looked down the long aisles apprehensively.
She smiled again. “But they haven’t.”
Carr turned wondering eyes on her. Something of the charming willfulness of the night before last seemed to have returned to her. Carr felt an answering spirit rising in himself.
And it did seem the height of silliness to worry about being caught breaking library regulations just after you’d escaped messy death a dozen times.
“All right,” he said. “In that case let’s have a drink.” And he fished out of his pocket the unopened pint of whisky.
“Swell,” she said, her eyes brightening. “The fountain’s right here. I’ll get paper cups.”
Carr lowered his cup, half emptied.
“Listen,” he said. “There’s someone coming.”
He hustled Jane to the next aisle, which was unlighted.
The footsteps grew louder, ringing on the glass.
“Let’s go farther back,” Carr whispered. “He might see us here.”
But Jane refused to budge. He peered over her shoulder. “Damn!” he breathed. “I forgot the bottle. He’s bound to spot it.”
Jane’s shoulders twitched.
The he turned out to be a she, as Carr saw by patches through the gapes between the shelves. And a rather remarkable she, with a large, child-of-the-theater face, sleek long black hair cut in bangs across the forehead, and a tight, dark red dress. She walked staccato with a swish.
And she was making faces. Here in the privacy of the stacks, her face—surely it had been composed in childlike dignity back at the counters—was running a remarka
ble gamut: hatred, horror, smiling contempt, agonized grief, an idiot’s glee, tragic resignation, the magnetism of sex. And not just such fleeting expressions as any neurotic might let slip, but good full-blooded ones, worthy of some cruel Russian princess pacing in her bed-chamber as she contemplated an elaborate revenge against all her seventeen unfaithful lovers.
The expressions succeeded one another regularly, without pause. They looked to Carr rather like an exercise in acting.
The girl walked past their alley, stopped at the second one beyond. She looked up.
“Here we are, boys and girls,” they heard her say to herself in a loud, better voice. “Oh, in six volumes, is it? Is that all he expects at closing time?” She scribbled briefly on a slip of paper she was carrying. “Sorry, Baldy, but—out! You’ll have to learn about the secrets of sex some other day.”
And making a final face, apparently straight at Jane and Carr, she returned the way she had come.
Carr recovered the bottle. “Do you suppose she thought we were doing some research work?”
Jane said lightly, “She looked tolerant.”
She went into the next aisle and returned with a couple of stools. Carr pushed his trenchcoat back over some books. He chuckled. “That was quite an act she put on.”
“All people do that,” Jane said seriously. “As soon as the door closes and they know they’re alone, they begin to act out a little drama. Each person has his own, which he’s made up. It may be love, fear, hate—anything. Sometimes it’s very broad and melodramatic or farcical, sometimes it’s extremely subtle and restrained. But everyone has one.”
“How can you know,” Carr asked, half humorously, “if they only do it when they’re sure they’re alone?”
“I know,” said Jane simply. For a moment they were silent. Then Jane moved nervously. “Let’s have another drink.”
Carr filled their cups. It was rather shadowy where they were. Jane reached up and tugged a cord. Light spilled around them. There was another pause.
