Day Dark, Night Bright

by Fritz Leiber

  Day Dark, Night Bright

  Fritz Leiber

  All Stories © 2002 the Estate of Fritz Leiber

  Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

  www.ereads.com

  Introduction © 2002 John Pelan

  Time Fighter - Fantastic Universe 1957

  Femmequin 973 - Science Fiction Stories 1957

  Night Passage - Original to this collection

  Moon Duel - Worlds of If 1965

  Later than you Think - Galaxy 1950

  Mirror - Fortune Magazine 1965

  The 64-Square Madhouse - Worlds of If 1962

  All the Weed in the World - Playboy 1961

  The Mutant’s Brother - Astounding 1943

  The Man who was Married to Space and Time - Seacon Programme Book 1979

  Thought-Astounding 1944

  The Crystal Prison - Galaxy 1966

  Bullet with his Name - Galaxy 1958

  Success - The Magazine of Fantasy & SF 1963

  To Make a Roman Holiday - Esquire 1943

  Bread Overhead - Galaxy 1958

  The Reward - Fantastic 1959

  Taboo - Astounding 1944

  Business of Killing - Astounding 1944

  Day Dark Night Bright - Infinity Four edited by Robert Hoskins 1972

  Acknowledgements

  The editor would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Susan Chernauskas, Richard Curtis, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Allen Koszowski, Brian Metz of Green Rhino Graphics, Kathy Pelan, & David Read in the preparation of this volume.

  The Man Who Made Science Fiction Grow Up

  We give a lot of credit to the dour and penurious Hugo Gernsback for being the father of modern SF (at least in magazine format), a good bit of credit is accorded to John Campbell for putting the science into “science-fiction” and piloting Astounding through decades of stories where supremely competent and confident engineers filled to the very brim with “the right stuff” solved problems that would have baffled anyone save that select group of people that subscribed to Astounding…

  Fritz Leiber made Science Fiction grow the hell up, and despite the trophy-room full of awards that the field bestowed on him, he’s never really been given quite enough credit for that… Just as he dragged the Jamesian ghost story wailing and moaning into the Atomic Age, he made the Science Fiction genre take on a new relevance by proving time and time again that it was valid forum for literature, not just clever tales that extrapolated on scientific theory. Fritz Leiber wrote about people, and what’s more, his choices for subjects were as colorful and diverse as the settings that he placed them in.

  When did science fiction grow up? When Dangerous Visions was published in 1967? No, despite being a very good anthology, it really wasn’t really all that dangerous even in 1967. How about when Phil Dick’s novels of paranoia begin to hit the market? Again no, Dick was an amazing visionary; an amphetamine-fueled mystic that became progressively more profound over the years, but he really wasn’t instrumental in the evolution of the genre. No, the first shots of the SF revolution were fired long before in Britain by John Wyndham who frequently dared to suggest that just because you have the cause of right on your side, and just because you behave in a heroic manner, in the final analysis that maybe just won’t matter. Where others touted success through science and good old American know-how, the cynical Brit had his despairing heroes committing suicide on Mars rather than face a ruined world. In the US the opening salvo might well have been in 1950 when Fritz Leiber gave us “Coming Attraction”.

  Was it the first story of “The NewWave”? Perhaps not, but Leiber blazed a trail that was followed by a number of other authors and it could just as well be said that 1950 was when Science Fiction began to grow up. A turning point for the whole genre? All with a single story? Of course not, but one can certainly point to 1950 and Leiber’s amazing tale as one of the major turning points in the genre.

  Not all the stories in this book are as perversely dystopian as “Coming Attraction”, but all are excellent examples of Leiber playing the genres of fantasy and science fiction like a master of improvisational jazz, taking familiar riffs and transforming them into something new and different.

  Not for Leiber was the jut-jawed Heinleinian competent man conquering the universe armed with a slide rule and a sense of manifest destiny as obnoxious as any of the novels of Colonial Britain. No, Leiber’s characters are jewelers, chess players, smalltime gamblers and grifters, lonely middle-aged men, and even aliens and robots with all-too-human foibles and failings. Leiber, like his contemporary Theodore Sturgeon wrote about the human condition and in doing so transformed an entire genre of fiction.

  Assembling this book came about almost accidentally. I’d launched a program with our Midnight House imprint to release at least three volumes of Leiber’s horror fiction and in preparation for this project began to dig (via long distance) through the Leiber archives at the University of Houston. I didn’t know what (if anything) I’d find, after all, someone had already discovered the manuscript for The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich and TOR Books had done a handsome edition of same. I thought it was unlikely that any unpublished material was housed in the archive… Still, the index of titled manuscripts looked intriguing…

  As readers of our Midnight House collections already know the outcome of digging through the archives far exceeded my wildest expectations and several completely polished, ready for publication Leiber tales were discovered. The other circumstance that quickly became clear as I studied the existing Leiber bibliographies was just how haphazard had been previous publishing efforts in preserving his short fiction! Scores of tales had either never been collected in book form or had appeared only in long out-of-print anthologies, other stories had made appearances only in paperbacks many years ago and were, for all practical purposes inaccessible to the modern reader.

  A situation easily remedied with the kind support of Richard Curtis and Leiber’s heirs, but another problem manifested itself… Much of this lost material was very much a part and parcel of the SF genre and would perhaps not be as enthusiastically welcomed by collectors of classic horror fiction as the two Midnight House collections had been. Thus a new imprint was necessary. Leiber blazes a trail yet again, setting a publishing company on a new and challenging path to do the same for classic works of SF and fantasy as we’ve done in the horror and weird fiction genre.

  The reader may well find a few tales to quibble over, stories that just as easily could’ve been presented by our sister imprint without raising an eyebrow. Sure, stories like “Bullet With His Name”, “Night Passage” and so on wouldn’t be out of place in a horror collection, nor would his classic “Femmequin 973”. Stories such as “Time Fighter”, “The Mutant’s Brother”, “Bread Overhead” and the titular story could perhaps appear nowhere else than this collection labeled as “SF”. Other quirkier tales like “All the Weed in the World” and “Success” find their home here alongside the ultimate take on the gentle madness of tournament chess and those that play it, which he covers so masterfully in “The 64-Square Madhouse”.

  It’s an eclectic mix, stories taken from very different times and places in Leiber’s long and productive life. For reasons which will be obvious, I could think of no finer way to inaugurate this collection (and by extension the Darkside Press imprint) than with the story “Time Fighter”. Leiber opens his tale with the classic line “A real science-fiction enthusiast has to be a little crazy and a little sane, a little dreamy and a little skeptical, a little idealistic and also a little hard-headed” This line, written in the year I was born, for a story that appeared in Fantastic is as accurate today as it was then. Leiber had been approaching the genre from the standpoint of possessin
g all these qualities ever since he’s sold “The Automatic Pistol” seventeen years earlier. Leiber approached SF as he did fantasy, not content to simply retread the same ground that others had walked, he was wildly experimental in his approaches, in fact, in my opinion, of his contemporaries, only a handful of authors were quite the innovators that Leiber was.

  “Femmequin 973” is also an under-reprinted tale from that golden year of 1957 it’s as much a horror story as it is science-fiction, and I almost utilized it in Smoke Ghost and Other Apparitions. I hope you’ll agree that it’s perfectly at home in this volume.

  “Night Passage” is an original, discovered during my researches through the Leiber papers. From tone and style it appears to have been targeted for Esquire, while never quite as lofty a market as Playboy, Esquire was an excellent market and one that Leiber targeted throughout his career. Both this story and “The Enormous Bedroom” (from Smoke Ghost) were likely passed over due to their length. Since both tales are charged with an underlying eroticism, they were probably “too strong” for the SF digests of the 1950’s and likely remained in Leiber’s files unsubmitted elsewhere.

  “Moon Duel” is a more typical SF tale, taken from the pages of the late, lamented Worlds of If this amazingly enough marks the first time the story has appeared in a collection of the author’s work. The story was selected by Judith Merril to appear in her prestigious Year’s Best SF series from Delacorte in 1966 and inexplicably vanished after that one lone appearance in book form. I’m pleased to be able to present this with other fine examples of Leiber’s SF.

  “Later Than You Think” is another well thought of yet strangely orphaned story. Despite several anthology appearances (including August Derleth’s Far Boundaries In 1951 and most recently in 100 Astounding Little Aliens, it’s another example of a story that failed to find it’s way into one of the author’s collections. A short piece, but very effective despite its brevity.

  Many of the stories contained herein are genuine rarities, stories that show Leiber at his most daring and experimental such as “All the Weed in the World” and interesting pieces such as “Success” and “To Make a Roman Holiday” from the pages of Esquire. And then there’s my favorite, Bullet With Name a story that would have been perfect for John Campbell’s Unknown fifteen years earlier. Is it SF or fantasy? Certainly it maintains the aura of SF with super-science as its explanation, but at heart it’s an examination of the theme of being careful what you wish for, (though in the case the wishes aren’t even consciously voiced). Other tales in the book may have a more familiar ring to them, The 64-Square Madhouse, very likely the last word on playing chess with a computer. “The Man Who Was Married to Space and Time” is another tale likely to be familiar to Leiber fans, a mature and poignant character study. Is the authorial voice behind old Guy Manning, somewhat autobiographical? Perhaps it is, as readers of fantastic literature I think that there’s likely a little Guy Manning in all of us. A little dreamy and a little skeptical, and stories like these still touch that sense of wonder within us all.

  John Pelan

  Midnight House

  July 2002

  TIME FIGHTER

  A real science-fiction enthusiast has to be a little crazy and a little sane, a little dreamy and a little skeptical, a little idealistic and also a little hard-headed. George Mercer inclined toward the first of each of these three pairs, which was why he fell for Dave Kantarian’s time-traveling swindle.

  George was well into middle age, rather tiredly married, and ran a small watch-repair and jewelry shop. The jewelry he made by hand satisfied only a fraction of his desire for self-expression, his wife did little to feed his yearning for romance, while voting once every two years did nothing to slake his thirst to be in on some great, undefined act of world-saving. The magazines he read and shelved meticulously left him restless, not sated. So he was ripe for becoming the victim of an adventurous, do-gooder swindle.

  Not that Dave Kantarian wasn’t an ingenious swindler, even though he chose an extremely bizarre field of operations. As one of the Treasury men later said, “Boy, if he had only stuck to uranium stock, cosmic-power generators, and gasoline from water!”

  Dave turned up at the local science-fiction club with a half dozen magazines under his arm and a readiness to argue about the relative merits of anything from the Gray Lensman to Playboy. Next meeting he showed around a Heinlein manuscript and a Freas original It was several weeks before he began to hint to George about super-normal powers and a mysterious mission. And it was only in George’s room behind the shop, after carefully drawing the blinds and extracting a promise of secrecy, that he delicately parted his blond pompadour to expose two quivering golden antennae capable of sending and receiving thought-messages across time (but unfortunately for test purposes, not across space).

  Evidently Dave was a reasonably good parlor magician and mechanical gimmicker, for he made several small objects disappear into the future to Dave’s satisfaction and he caused two clocks in Dave’s shop to first gain and then lose ten minutes without any detectable intervention. Before George managed to check the clocks against anything but Dave’s wristwatch the brief trip in time was over and Dave didn’t repeat that demonstration; but the future smelled different, George averred.

  After baring his antennae, Dave told all, which was simply this: Dave was a man from five thousand years in the future, fighting on the good side of an interstellar war which was being lost because the home base of Terra had run out of certain absolutely essential metals. These turned out to be nothing really difficult to obtain, such as uranium-235 or berkelium, but simply silver and gold, which Seventieth Century technology could transform into a non-corrosive armor far stronger than steel and harder than diamond. Dave had been briefed telepathically, presumably across a short time-span, in the languages and customs of the Early Atomic Age and hustled back across the millennia to garner a supply of the desperately needed metals before they were impossibly dispersed by use. Now would George care to drop a suitable contribution into the time machine?

  To understand why George fell for this story, one must remember his stifled romanticism, his sense of personal failure, his deep need to believe. The thing came to him like, or rather instead of, a religious conversion.

  Also, one must not under-rate the patient artistry of Dave’s build-up, his fanatical attention to plausible touches, such as occasional lapses into an unintelligible and presumably future speech, his fierce looks of concentration as he received unheralded time-messages, and his assurance that George would eventually get a concrete token of gratitude from the embattled futurians— a token which by its very nature would convince George that his contributions were really helpful. Indeed, the ingenuity Dave Kantarian lavished on a not very profitable swindle constitutes a secondary problem: was he really shrewd or merely devious?

  For instance, was it sheer lack of imagination or a brilliant stroke of understatement that the contribution box for time-traveling riches was nothing but a cheap modern alarm clock with most of the mechanism removed, a hand-drawn diagram pasted inside, and a rather crude trap-door built in the top? Anything more elaborate might have aroused suspicion and Dave claimed that the gutted clock was simply a lens that focused his mental power to send objects into the future—a power sufficient without focusing for short trips across time, but not a five-thousand-year voyage.

  At any rate George came to believe and regular contributions of the purest silver and gold he could buy were put into the clock. Then Dave would carefully set the hands, his gaze would become trancelike, the clock would be hidden and Dave would depart, still glassy-eyed. The time transit might take place at once, Dave said, or in several hours, but the next morning when George opened the clock in Dave’s presence, he would always find it empty and experience a deep thrill at the thought that the futurians were a little bit nearer winning the ultimate war against the powers of evil. On some mornings Dave seemed to share his sentiments completely, on others he was myste
riously irritated, almost as if he suspected George of tampering with the time-machine during the night.

  Nevertheless, this generally blissful state of affairs might have continued indefinitely, except that the Treasury Department became interested in the tenfold increase in George’s gold purchases and at about the same time George’s wife noticed their depleted bank balance, got no satisfaction whatever from her husband, fumed and spied for a few days, and finally consulted a lawyer.

  When the Treasury men interviewed George early one morning at his shop, he denied everything and made a pitiful effort to conceal his extreme terror, for Dave had repeatedly warned him that the futurians’ enemies were capable of sending back time-spies and saboteurs, who might appear in any guise. Since unlike most swindlers there was no obvious way in which the victim could hope to profit from it himself, the Treasury men assumed that George was motivated by an unwillingness to admit that he had been duped. Despite their serious doubts of his sanity, they reasoned with him at length. They showed him what they had dug up about Dave; an unsavory record of petty confidence games, personal betrayals, generally unstable behavior, and grandiose schemes. They hinted that Dave had been preparing to pull the same swindle on other members of the science-fiction club. Still Dave stuck to his story—Dave was just a fellow science-fiction enthusiast—so the Treasury men called in his wife and things became quite nasty when she flatly called him a childish fool who had doped his mind with lurid magazines and finally fallen for a fairy tale and given away their savings to a cheap crook.

  Then things got a bit nastier when the Treasury men sprang the news that late last night Dave had been scraped from a sidewalk in the local skid row and that there were indications he might have been pushed, perhaps by an enraged victim of his swindles, from the high window of a cheap hotel where he roomed. They threw down on George’s small, glass-topped desk a duplicate key to his store which had been found on Dave and also the thought-transmitting antennae.