Day Dark, Night Bright

by Fritz Leiber

  As I considered strolling over, she quickly scurried around to the other white roadster and got behind the wheel and then just before driving out she seemed to look straight at me and she lifted her hand and waved twice, rather solemnly.

  Perhaps, I thought, my spirits rising, we’d meet somewhere along the lonely way. I got in Dunkirk (the seat was still hot) and started her and let her run quietly while I checked that my maps and flash and tissue were on the dashboard, my pocketbook, notebook, and pens in my pyjama pockets, Dunkirk’s tank full, her hot oil coursing, and her lights all working.

  We took off softly. Just before the exit I glanced at the open white roadster with the empty space beside it. From a point near the center of the white hood—from the car’s heart, you might say—a single intense highlight reflected by God knows what or from what source, dazzled my eyes so that I flinched them away. It made me wonder, but I didn’t try to look back—and wouldn’t have even if I’d wanted to, because where was an empty spot coming in the traffic ahead that I wanted to catch, and did.

  A quarter mile farther on I heard fire sirens behind me. Looking quickly back, I saw a shaft of intense white flame shooting up from somewhere close to the Zodiac. I wondered if there could have been a connection and if it were the white roadster burning. No, I told myself, the highlight and the shaft of flame could have had no relation.

  Just the same, a black spot was still dancing in front of my eyes. That highlight had been bright

  I soon turned out of the traffic streaming toward California and Los Angeles once the narrower, emptier route leading to Boulder Dam and Arizona. The night stayed hot. At Boulder City I checked Dunkirk’s tires, letting out some air. I also checked the oil and water, filled my plastic two-gallon bottle of the latter, and topped off the gas tank.

  I kept a sort of watch (not a very serious one, I told myself) for a white roadster and on a straight stretch just beyond Boulder City I thought I glimpsed one disappearing around the far bend, its red tail lights winking. I speeded up, but when I came to the next straight stretch, a much longer one, there wasn’t any car ahead at all, though I thought I saw a car, maybe a white one, sneaking away from the highway down a wooded sideroad.

  Well, if that were she, I told myself, she hadn’t been driving very far south.

  Boulder Dam, when I got to it, was magnificent in a monstrous way. The highway went across the top of it, from Nevada into Arizona, but it was so wide and very brightly lit that one could see little of its surrounds and nothing of the Colorado River. There was also much heavy mesh wire fencing. The smell of security was very strong, so that one got the feeling it had been built not for Herbert but for Edgar Hoover. There were several great squat chunky towers, like banks or forts—in fact, to me with my peculiar imagination, it had the feeling of a fortress on Jupiter, built for a heavier gravity than ours. It had a Jovian look, or a Vulcanian.

  The shouldering crags at either end were correspondingly hulking, and on them were short, burly, immensely strong-looking openwork towers of steel beams bearing on their huge insulators the thick heavy copper wires that carried off the power the dam generated.

  This is electricity’s heartland, I told myself, a castle of the lightning. From here the stuff goes out to the great military and space establishments and to the myriad industrial complexes and to the multi-million lights of the Vegas Strip challenging the stars. It somehow made my liberal heart feel lonely and oppressed. Dunkirk the Datsun seemed to feel it too—a little Japanese bowing nervously to giants as she scurried past them.

  On the other side it got rapidly darker and the empty road led steadily down and the night got better still. I reminded myself that the county containing this corner of Arizona is called Mojave— I checked it by my map. On my right were Black Canyon and the Eldorado Mountains, on my left the Cerbats with Mount Wilson and Squaw Peak—but you can’t see such things in the dark from a car with a top.

  The shoulders of the road widened for a little settlement. I slowed down and then pulled up across from a small old cafe that was still open. Better get a little to eat, I told myself, it was a long empty stretch ahead. And some coffee, too, despite the heat.

  I got out. The stars crusted the desert night so luxuriously that one almost forgot they marched in unalterable order. Deneb, Altair, and Mars were merely brighter points in the great, eddying river of the Milky Way. Only Vega was still somewhat lonely.

  There was a counter with two Indian women behind it. The older, who looked toothless, cooked. The younger (but not that young) was very stolid and taciturn in dark shapeless clothes. I told her coffee and a beef enchilada. She went back and leaned by the older woman. Whatever culture they belonged to, it was apart.

  The screen door creaked and a modern cowboy (I took him to be) walked in stiffly. His blue Levi’s were caked with whitish dust. So was his wide-brimmed black hat, which he didn’t remove. So were his sunken cheeks. And he was very bowlegged. He wearily settled down and ordered tacos. He looked every bit as authentic as the Indian women.

  Our food came. The coffee was strong and bitter. My enchilada tasted all right but was too heavy, while orange grease dripped from the end of the cowboy’s huge taco, which he munched steadily. I made some notes in my little green book.

  I heard another car draw up across the road, but no one came in.

  I finished my coffee and some of my enchilada, paid (including a tip), and went out. As I passed the cowboy, he said to the Indian woman and the cafe in general with the solemnity of William S. Hart, “That was the best taco I ever ate, and I’ve eaten many a taco.”

  The white roadster was parked off the road on the wide shoulder, but she was standing close beside Dunkirk, looking toward me quite gravely. But as I crossed the highway she started to smile, and when I got to her, she said, “You were saying, ‘Perhaps we could combine—’ and I’m accepting your offer.”

  I had to chuckle. I had been saying exactly that… some six hours ago.

  “My car konked out,” she explained quickly. “A vapor block. I’m leaving it here—I can send back for it tomorrow. But I must get south tonight.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To Gila Peak beyond the Superstition Mountains. That’s just beyond Globe and the San Carlos Indian Reservation south of the Apache. I’ll get out at Geronimo.” She added anxiously, “You are going to Lordsburg by that route?”

  “I can,” I temporized. (National Interstate 10 through Tucson might be quicker.) It had just occurred to me that this all fitted a classic hitch-hike situation—the girl the bait. You agreed to give her a lift, then the boys appeared, bent on… who knows what?

  But I had met her in Vegas at the Zodiac. Besides… I was very aware of her dark, very slender height so near to me, of her slim fingers…

  “Of course I can,” I said with a smile. “Get in.”

  She gave me a smile in return and obeyed me quickly, walking around Dunkirk.

  “Hey, wait a minute, what about your car?” I asked, ducking my head and looking at her through the driver’s window.

  “It’s locked, it’ll be all right,” she assured me with another smile from where she was already sitting neatly and decorously in the shadowy interior. “Come on, let’s drive.”

  I opened the door and started to get in. “But where’s your luggage?” I asked.

  “Locked in the trunk. I’ve got everything I need. Get in.” Her eyes were dark pools, her smile was sure, but her voice was anxious.

  I had a last try as I complied. “You’re sure you wouldn’t like some coffee? We could—”

  “No, that’s why I waited outside. Let’s drive.”

  I toed the starter and nosed Dunkirk out. At least no guys had appeared. As I shifted to second, my hand on the short stick between our feet, I glanced toward her white roadster sliding past and saw in the heart of the hood that same damn dazzling diamond headlight I had seen in Vegas.

  Her fingers touched my forearm briefly but peremp
torily. She said, “Keep driving”

  For a moment I had no intention of doing anything else. The black spot was dancing in front of my eyes again, worse than the first time, and I was busy shifting up. Then I started to look back but—

  “That gold coin I bet was a genuine Mercurian double eagle,” she said rapidly. “I was surprised you spotted it.”

  She almost took my mind completely off whatever it was that was happening behind. Besides, there was a curve coming up ahead and from beyond it there were the lights of an approaching car. But then I caught a white flash in the rearview mirror.

  “I’m a Mercurian, you see, Mercury person,” she went on desperately, “and I play a special game with some Jovian dealers there—Jupiter people. But today—”

  But despite that and her slender, wiry fingers touching me again, I did manage to look back very briefly, as we went around the curve and see—

  It was almost my last look too, for the curve was sharper than I’d anticipated and I’d let Dunkirk drift toward the center of the two-lane highway and the approaching car came around the curve very fast and in my lane, so it was only by dodging very sharply over into his lane and passing him on the wrong side that I missed him—and even at that there was a great whoosh of squeezed air and Dunkirk shook at the nearness of his passage. If I’d done the automatic thing and tried to dodge him by getting back into my lane and out onto my shoulder—ugh!

  I was “real shook” myself, needless to say, and for a bit I was very busy getting Dunkirk straightened out and back where she belonged and making sure there weren’t any more bats coming out of hell. Then I started to slow down, but—

  “Zowie! that was close,” my passenger said with girlish excitement, not to say enthusiasm. “Wow! but he’ll sure be mad. Better not stop.”

  She touched two of my weak spots there: my tendency always to blame myself first for anything and my dread of getting into any sort of strident and wearisome confrontation (perhaps the two are related). Besides, by now what I’d seen (or thought I’d seen) in that one glimpse back was all mixed up with those blinding headlights hurtling at me from ambush and the way Dunkirk had rocked. It took me time to get them sorted out. And while I did that I continued to drive on.

  What I believed I’d seen (and it was very clear-etched when I got it) was a pillar of bright white flame going straight up from the roadside across from the Indian cafe and standing in the middle of the road, staring at it and silhouetted by its glare, my taco-stuffed cowboy. He was quite tiny with distance, but the hat, bent back, and bow legs were unmistakable—almost too good.

  I drove on for a while, thinking about it and wondering how much if not all of her wild story had been impromptu diversion and how much of it one of those strange bags someone is always opening up for you in these changing days of flamboyant individuality—and giving her a chance to continue her wild story, only she didn’t, but stayed strangely (in view of its hysterically swift opening) or perhaps strategically silent. But all the while I was feeling this deep-down thankfulness that I was getting farther away every second from possible trouble and that there were no cars chasing me and that things were smoothing out quietly, just as I always like it.

  Meanwhile the heat became really quite astonishing. I found I had to keep Dunkirk down to forty miles an hour, or else the temperature pointer on the dash would lean dangerously toward the red. Soon I was driving by the feel on my face of the air pouring in the side window. If it cooled a bit, Dunkirk would spring ahead. If there were a warm wash, Dunkirk would lag.

  Finally on one of the latter occasions I let her keep lagging until she stopped and I looked around at my young mystery lady, sitting beside me like a bundle of gleaming slim shadows and I demanded, “Now just what is all this nonsense about planet people and gold coins brought here from the planet Mercury?”

  “Oh, they’re not imported from Mercury,” she protested. “That would be ridiculous. No, they’re struck here from gold mined here or made here by the old prenuclear alchemy for local use by Mercury people temporarily in residence here, mostly for gambling with other planet people, but for ritual and diplomatic purposes too.”

  “Oh, really!” I said, unable to keep back a little laugh. “You don’t expect me to believe that all you planet people shift around here among us Earth folk, even gambling against each other, and conducting all sorts of interplanetary intrigues…”

  “Yes, that is exactly what I expect you to believe,” she countered. “The different worlds aren’t nearly so separated, at least in Arizona, as you seem to imagine. As I told you, this is Astrological Territory. They all drift here, star folk and planet people.”

  “… and even waging interplanetary wars,” I continued, “or at least serious skirmishes in which you burn each other’s cars?”

  “We never burn cars, we Mercury people!” she denied vehemently. “It’s only the barbarous Solarians who do that—” She broke off and looked at me reproachfully. “You tricked me into saying that,” she said, “but perhaps that is because I never thanked you properly for standing up for me at the roulette table,” and she advanced her hand along the curve of my jaw on either side until her fingers touched my ears and she drew my face to hers and kissed me rather briefly but emphatically and then she then sat back and said, “There. Drive on.”

  I obeyed thoughtfully. That kiss had tingled like electricity and as for her fingers—well, fingers are really the most amazing erotic tools, except that they have so many other uses that their sexual one is somewhat overshadowed.

  When I did speak again, it was to tell her my impressions of Hoover, or Boulder Dam.

  “You really are quite intuitive,” she said with interest, almost with respect. “Hoover Dam actually was designed and built under the influence of Jovians. Jupiter men had most of the Vegas casinos in those days and for a long while afterwards. That was when I got hooked on roulette. The Jupiter men were sort of rough, of course, but in a nice and genial—I might say jovial—way, like good bears. But the last year or so the Solarians started moving in and taking over—”

  “Solarians—that would be Sun people, wouldn’t it?” I interrupted. “Now, really, how can you have people at a temperature of millions of degrees?”

  “Some people can be awfully tough,” she assured me, “as if they were made of nothing but asbestos. That’s the Sun men for you—very macho and rough (You saw them!) but in a mean and nasty way, like bad bears. Each of them carries in his asbestos heart a tiny spark of killing nuclear fire, which puts the diamond glint into their eyes and which their eyes, like two burning glasses, can focus on things and make them white hot—if they concentrate.”

  “In New York City they call it a double whammy, I believe,” I commented.

  “Well, if you’re going to joke…” she murmured huffily and leaned back and looked straight ahead.

  Really it was a strange mood I was getting into, though not unpleasant, listening to her wacky fairy tales and letting my own mind drift between the real and the unreal. On the black road ahead there appeared a wavy white line that wriggled like a snake as it went under Dunkirk’s hood. It ended in a white arrowhead that pointed at a rectangle of road that had been filled in with gravel but not yet resurfaced, which, now forewarned, I dodged around. It occurred to me that a timeless mind had invented that warning.

  After a while there was another white snake and then more kept coming and suddenly there was a detour sign which in this case did not mean a change of road but only that for a stretch it became one of unsurfaced, wicked-looking gravel that forced cars to go very slow. I got the impression that a whole people (men, women, and children) had toiled for centuries to find all the pointiest (though well worn) little rocks, all the tetrahedrons, and pack them carefully, point up, like caltrops of stone, to hurt the hoofs of unshod horses and barefoot poets and pop the tires of speeding cars.

  I had to go so slowly that I could try to make out the inky horizon in the torrid night, the Black Mountains o
n her side, the Cerbats still on mine, guessing at hills and gaps, drawing reflexively back from breaths of hotter wind. But it was hard to tell whether the lowest stars were stars at all or the lights of low castles topping invisible crags. Everywhere I could sense the working of that timeless mind, that ancient culture. I began to feel that the Indians still secretly ruled Arizona, patiently tolerating the ephemeral White Man, catering to his crazy cars and other childish whims, and succoring dusty cowboys.

  I even entertained the fancy that my young mystery lady with her high-piled dark hair, sitting in her gloomy corner of the front seat, was one of them. It was decades of blinding sun and dry winds that had made her so slim and shadowy, such a wraith.

  I told her all that I’d been fancying.

  “You’re being quite intuitive again,” she said still somewhat grumpily (at first) but with a certain respect. “Ancienter peoples are in charge down here, most secretly, only they came here (from up there) a long time before the Indians. They were drawn to Arizona because it’s always had a lot of magic in it, especially at night under the moon, as you could see for yourself if the moon weren’t new. They all revered (pace the Solarians!) the Moon Goddess. They had their little differences, of course, their little feuds, but settled them all by high diplomacy, codes of civilized behavior as old as the stars. And when the Indians came wandering down at last from the far north, the planet people got along fine with them and they had hardly any more difficulty adapting themselves to the White Man, gold-crazy Latinos from the south full of pot and loco weed and drunken Anglos from the east and west.

  “But then those brutal, vicious Sun men began to turn up with their diamond eyes, who burn cars and ignore the age-old usages of diplomacy and hate the Moon Goddess and us Mercury people especially because our planet is closest to their huge hairy home and we sneer at all their macho heat, safe in our cool, cool capsules.”