by Fritz Leiber
He had a picture of himself getting on an airplane, another of renting a room in a slum, another of stopping the car on a lonely, treeless country road and getting out and looking up to the coldly glimmering Milky Way—why?
That last picture was the most vivid, and when he realized he had actually stopped his car, it was a moment before it would go away. Then he saw he was parked in front of a demolished old apartment building a few blocks from his home. Only yesterday he’d watched the last wall going down. Now, just across the littered sidewalk from him, the old cellar gaped, flimsily guarded in front by a makeshift rail and surrounded on the other three sides by great hillocks of battered bricks. Tomorrow probably (and in fact that was the way it happened) a bulldozer would tumble them forward, filling the cellar with old bricks and brick-dust, leveling the lot.
Now he knew what he was going to do. He unlatched the top over the windshield and pushed the button. Slowly the top folded back over his head, showing the smoke-dark sky, almost night. He hitched up a little in the seat, reached inside his coat, pulled out the blue box he always carried and pitched it into the dark pit across the sidewalk.
He was driving away almost before it landed. Yet through the hum of the motor he thought he heard something call faintly, “Good-by!”
The material of the filled-in cellar stayed fairly dry for many years and the atom-bombing, when it finally came, created a partial surface-seal of fused stone over that area. However, the bicarb box fell apart in time; water reached it in little seepings and was accumulated as a non-evaporating fuel-and-oxydizer mix. The amount of this strange fluid grew and grew, eventually invading and filling a now-blind section of the city’s old sewer system.
Many tens of thousands of years after that, the buried pool was sensed by the fuel-finders of a spaceship from up Polaris way, which had made an emergency landing on the mined planet. A well was drilled, and the mix pumped up and the centipedal Polarians, scuttling about the bleak landscape, had a fine time trying to explain how such a sophisticated fluid should occur in a seeming state of nature. However, they were grateful to the Cosmic All-Father.
Long before that, Ernie had arrived home in something of a daze. He told himself that he had cast off the most tangible element of his “insanity”, but he didn’t feel any the better for it. In fact, he felt distinctly apathetic when his sister confronted him and only with an effort did he manage to brace himself for the trial he knew she had in store for him.
“Ernie,” she said hesitatingly. “I’ve come to a decision about something—about a change in our arrangements here, to tell you the truth—and I’ve gone ahead with it without consulting you. I do hope you won’t mind.”
“No,” he said heavily. “I guess I won’t mind.”
“I’m doing it partly on Mr. Jones’s advice,” she added slowly. “As a matter of fact he suggested it.”
Ernie nodded. “Yes, I’ve noticed the two of you conferring together.”
“You have? Then maybe you know what I’m talking about.”
“Oh, yes.” Ernie nodded again and smiled grimly. “The man in white?”
She laughed. “Exactly, the man in white. For a long time I’ve thought it was just too much bother for either of us to carry the milk home, and the eggs and my yogurt too. So I decided to have the milkman that Mr. Jones uses make deliveries. Mr. Jones brought him over half an hour ago and it’s all arranged. Four quarts a week, one dozen eggs, and yogurt Tuesdays and Fridays.”
The Invisible Being and his Coadjutor, backtracking for a checkup, summarized the situation.
The latter said, “So he’s already thrown away the Everlasting Cosmetic Knife and the Water Splitter; he seems to be trying to reject the third Little Gift and the first Big One, while he still isn’t even conscious of the other two Gifts.
“Cheer up,” said the Invisible Being. “It’s his life and he’s doing what he thinks best.”
“Yes,” the Coadjutor said, “but he doesn’t know he’s making these decisions for his race as well as himself. Sometimes I think Galaxy Center makes it too hard for chaps like him. For instance, that trick of having the images on the box fade back to the old ones.”
“Nonsense! We have to take all reasonable precautions that our activities remain secret. He knew that the powder worked. He should have had faith.”
“Sometimes it takes a lot of faith.”
“You’re right, it does.” The Invisible Being smiled, his Cheshire-smile. “You feel a lot for these test subjects, don’t you? That’s fine, but you’ve got to remember you can’t accept the Gifts for them; that’s one thing they have to do themselves, however long they take about it. Which reminds me, I think we ought to set up a recorder here to report the final outcome of the test to Galaxy Center.”
“Good idea.”
“And cheer up, I say. This test isn’t over yet and our featherless biped isn’t necessarily licked. If he thinks to link up the third Little Gift with the two Big Ones, he has a pretty sweet setup for making psychic progress—and his race will be Galactic Citizens in a jiffy.”
“You’re right.”
“Moreover, it stands to reason he’s soon going to become aware of the Great Gift, and that generally gives a person a jolt and makes him think seriously about other things.”
“True enough—though I still have the feeling you intend some sardonic trick in conjunction with the Great Gift. Are you sure you’re not planning to leave some other setup here along with the recorder? I notice you’ve got a spare Juxtaposer in the ship and it bothers me.”
“That, dear Coadjutor, is my business. Whatever I do, it won’t interfere in any way with the fairness of the tests.”
“Sometimes I think the tests are too fair,” the Coadjutor observed. “I’d like to be able to ease them up a bit in special cases.”
“Confidentially, my friend, so would I.”
The Great Gift announced itself to Ernie next morning at 7:53 sharp, when the Special slowed to forty miles an hour to swing past the platform on which he was waiting for the Express.
One moment he was standing morning-weary on the thick wooden planks, looking down through the quarter-inch gaps between them at the cinders five feet below, vaguely conscious of a woman’s white-polka-dotted black skirt on one side of his field of vision and a man’s brown shoes and briefcase on the other.
Next moment he was in a small cab under which steel rails were vanishing at an alarming speed, and way ahead he could just make out the platform on which he was standing, and something was hurting his head and he was slumping forward and everything was darkening and the cab was leaping forward more swiftly still.
The third moment he was back on the platform, running furiously to get off it. He didn’t care who yelled at him or whom he bumped, so long as it didn’t slow him down. The people were just blurs anyway and soon he was beyond them. He took in two strides and the short flight of wooden steps leading down off the platform proper and spurted the last sixty feet to the stairs leading down to street level. There he stumbled, recovered himself, and chanced a hasty backward look.
There was a tall man at his heels, hugging a briefcase and panting hard. Then, beyond the tall man, he saw the platform rear up like a wooden caterpillar, spilling people against the bright gray morning sky. There was a cosmic crunch and the battered Special, still coming strong, burst through the upreared platform in a blossoming broken-matchstick crown of planks and beams—and big blue sparks where a writhing power wire, snagged by the uprearing platform, was grounding against the first car.
Ernie ducked his head and plunged down the steps ahead.
(That was how I came to meet Ernie Meeker. I was the tall man. As you can imagine, it’s quite strange to be standing in a huddle of fresh-washed morning commuters and have the one beside you close his eyes and slump a little and then take off like a bat out of hell—without a word spoken or a thing happened to explain it. I started to laugh, but then I got the funniest feeling of curiosity and terror
and I took off after him. It saved my life.
Afterward, Ernie and I went back to help with the ghastliness, but pretty soon there were more than enough trainmen, firemen, police, and what not, and we got chased off. We had a couple of drinks together and met a few times after and that’s how I got some of this story. But my chief sources of information I am not permitted to disclose.)
As the Invisible Being had predicted, Ernie’s first brush with the Great Gift gave him a considerable jolt, though he didn’t suspect at first that it was a permanent gift.
He analyzed what had happened, quite reasonably, I believe, as a case of second sight. Somehow his mind had been projected into the brain of the motorman of the Special just at the moment the latter had his stroke (the final official explanation too) and blindly put on more speed instead of reducing it for the approaching curve and station. His second sight saved his life by getting him off the platform before the Special jumped the tracks and ploughed through it.
It certainly gave a jolt to Ernie’s habit patterns, as it temporarily did of a great many other people. He started driving his car to work, for one thing, and he took to drinking regularly in the evenings, though not excessively as yet.
He also had the feeling, which he did not try to analyze, that his miraculous escape marked the end of the “strange weeks” in his life, when he’d had such odd illusions or been the victim of such odd circumstances; and, true enough, that first week or so there were no recurrences of his chillingly weird experiences.
But jolts have their infallible Law of Diminishing Effects.
After a few days, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems as nervous and wearisome as ever and he grew envious of the snug commuters meditating luxuriously in their electric coaches. Come the first morning of the third week and he was standing on the rebuilt platform, studying the new planks, ties and rails with a pleasantly morbid interest.
Vivian was not in her accustomed seat nor on the train, as far as he could tell, which did not surprise him, though it disappointed him sharply; the Panther Princess had a stronger hold on his feelings, or at least on his imagination, than he’d realized.
But Verna was on the train home all right; in fact, she gave a small whoop of pleasure when she spotted him. And he had barely sat down beside her when who should come prowling smoothly along but Vivian in a charcoal version of her tailored black armor.
Ernie jumped up and blurted out introductions. Vivian accepted his seat with a certain deliberateness and with a smile that seemed to Ernie to say, “So I’m his morning light-badinage girl, but this is the girl Mr. Meeker goes home with. It’s another instance of ‘black-glasses’ behavior, don’t you think? He puts her on whenever he gets afraid he’s getting attractive.”
The two women started to chat easily enough, however, and shortly Ernie got over his confusion and, smiling down at them from where he swayed in his aisle with his hand lightly touching the back of the seat ahead, was even thinking quite smugly that here in one seat, by gosh, were the woman he wanted and the woman who wanted him. Very interesting to be the man in the middle.
Just at that moment, the power came back to him that made everything feverishly real, expanding his center of attention to his visual horizons, and this time it was only a prelude, for a second gateway opened behind the first—a window into all human hearts and minds, the power of human insight fantastically sharpened and enlarged. He could “read minds,” or at least he knew the motives—the core of values and consciousness—of any person he cared to look at. Most especially, he knew the motives of Verna and Vivian almost as if he were them.
The big thing about Vivian was her fear—no, her conviction, that she wasn’t attractive. Every glance her way knocked a hole in the armor of artificial attractiveness she built around herself, and all the hours she devoted to perfecting it, even the desperate worship she lavished on her body, were all utterly lost. A simple relationship with another human being was unthinkable; her armor got in the way and under her armor she knew she was worthless. A man was sometimes attracted to her armor—never to herself—but as soon as he started to scrutinize it, it began to tarnish and crumple.
She hoped that other people, men especially, had a trace of her own weaknesses, and she sniped away at them constantly to get under the armor to find out. Ernie was one in a long series of such men. She was actually in love with him, but only as one loves a dream, not the real Ernie at all. Physically he was disgusting to her, like most men.
Verna, on the other hand, had absolute confidence that she was sufficiently attractive for all practical purposes. She wasn’t in love with Ernie at all. She wanted to make an intellectual conquest of him, add him to her private Brain Trust, her cultured entourage that won Mr. Abrusian’s seldom-tendered admiration and broke Miss Minkin’s heart, and finally get Ernie to join the Working Boys’ Front. He was one of her projects. If it became tactically necessary during her campaign, she knew that Ernie would be only too happy to jump in bed with her, food-triangles and all.
Now in other circumstances (who really knows?) Ernie might have found the courage to accept Vivian and Verna as they really were and work on from there, ruthlessly discarding his false pictures of them—and of himself. He might conceivably have found the strength to accept all people not as shadowy projections of himself, fabricated targets of his desires and aversions, puppets in his private chess games and circuses, but as complete persons with inexhaustible surprises and contradictions, each a microcosm, a universe-in-little with his or her own Earth and stars, spaceflight and crawling, heaven and hell.
But under the present circumstances, Ernie was confused. His knowledge of the real Vivian spoiled completely the titillating picture of the Panther Princess, who might submit to him contemptuously in the end—he needed that sex idol more than he needed truth. As for Verna, her stalwart self-reliance and her accurate appraisal of his own motives and possible future behavior were both unbearably humiliating to him. And the delight of really knowing people was completely outweighed, in his tired spirit, by the thought of a lifetime of work that would be involved in adjusting himself to this new knowledge. It was so much more comfortable to work with stereotypes.
The Express was slowing for his station. Both girls were looking at him puzzledly.
“Good-by, Verna. Good-by, Vivian,” he said in a set sort of voice. “This is where I get off.”
He moved stiffly toward the door. They watched him go, and turned to each other with a frown.
That evening marked the beginning of Ernie’s serious drinking. He never saw either of the V-girls again. He took his car or the bus to work; then, for a short period, he took taxi-cabs, then he lost his job and was working in another part of the city. He became mixed up with a number of other women and crowds, but they are not part of this or any story.
Among other things, his drinking eventually completely confused his memories of abnormal personal powers with his entirely normal illusions of alcoholic ones. And it also seemed to be blotting out the former. Once, at a party, he bet twenty dollars that his eyes glowed in the dark. Next morning he was relieved to discover, after making several anxious phone calls, that he’d lost his bet.
When he finally pulled out of it, some five years later, because of a growing aversion to liquor that he only understood later, the two Big Gifts of Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were gone forever.
The Great Gift had a more durable lodgment to him. From his alcoholic years, he brought hazy memories of accidents avoided because of sudden wrong-ended visions of onrushing cars, alley rollings missed because he’d seen himself reeling along a block away through the eyes of lounging hoodlums. Now, sober again, he had a clear confirmation of it when he left a banquet on a trumped-up excuse because of a disturbing vision of inexplicable rodlike shapes—and read the next day that a hundred of the guests, of whom four finally died, had come down with bacterial food poisoning. Another time, hiking in dry woods, he’d smelled smoke that his companions couldn’
t—and persuaded them to turn back, avoiding a disastrous flash fire that broke out soon afterward.
He had to admit to himself that he certainly seemed to have the gift of second sight, warning him against threats to his life.
“All right,” he told himself, “so forget it. Gifts are upsetting. Even as a kid, you sweated more about your birthday presents than you ever got fun out of them.”
Our story has already jumped five years; now it must jump twenty. Ernie is living with his sister again; while he was drinking, they pulled apart, and now they’re once more pulled together. They’re having dinner, have arrived at dessert, a big piece of chocolate cake each with satiny thick creamy frosting and filling.
Ernie looks at his piece—and sees himself climbing stairs and clutching at his heart. He thinks of warning his sister, but she’s already halfway through her piece. Then she goes on and eats Ernie’s.
Ernie’s sister didn’t get food poisoning, she only got fat, but the incident of the chocolate cake was for Ernie the beginning of a series of peculiar food revulsions and diet experiments that eventually made Ernie instead of his sister the family yogurt-fiend and a regular customer of his old acquaintance, Herman, the healthfood manufacturer.
Herman had to admit that Ernie had cooked himself up a pretty good longevity diet for an amateur, though there were some items in it that made the old man shake his head—and he always asserted that Ernie was passing up a good thing in Soybean Mush.
Ernie got his diet tailored to fit his tastes and stuck to it. He had a strong suspicion of what had happened, though he tried not to think about it too often; that his gift of second sight had taken to warning him of the longer-range dangers of his existence; after all, chocolate cake can be as deadly as atomic bombs in the long run.
More years passed. Friends and relatives began to remark quietly to each other that his sister was aging faster. Ernie, they had to admit, was a remarkably well-preserved old gent. Ironic, considering what a drunk he’d been and what strange junk he insisted on eating now.
