by Fritz Leiber
One day Ernie’s self-styled health diet began to pall on him. It didn’t revolt him; it merely left him unsatisfied, yet with no yearning for any particular food he could think of. He lived with this yearning for some weeks, meditating on it and trying to guess its nature. Finally he had an inspiration. He headed for Mr. Willis’ drugstore.
The bent, silvery-haired man greeted him eagerly; somehow there was a special warmth about the friendships Ernie had made during the “strange weeks” (Verna and Vivian excepted) that put them in a different class from any other of his human relationships.
“Now what can I give you, Ernie?” Mr. Willis asked. “Anything in the place within reason.”
“I’ll tell you, Bert. I’d like to go back in your dispensary—you with me, if you want—and just shop around.”
“That’s a sort of screwy idea, Ernie. I couldn’t sell you any narcotics or sleeping pills, of course—well, maybe a few sleeping pills.”
“I wouldn’t want any.”
“What’s the idea, Ernie? Getting interested in chemistry in your old… You know, Ernie, you just don’t look your years.”
“Secret of mine. Yes, in a way I’ve got interested in chemistry.”
“Won’t talk, eh? I remember, when I first met you, I tagged you for an evening inventor. Well, come on back and shop around. Just don’t ask me for elixir vitae, aurum potable, or ground philosophers’ stone.”
“Not unless I see ‘em,”
Afterward, Bert Willis used to say it was one of the most mystifying experiences of his life. For a good half a day Ernie Meeker studied the rows of jars, canisters and glass-stoppered bottles, sometimes lifting two down together and contemplating them, one in each hand, as if he could weigh the difference. Often he’d take out a stopper and sniff and maybe, asking permission of Bert with a glance, take up a dab of some powder and taste it.
“You know that game,” Bert would say, “where someone goes out of the room and you all decide on an object, or hide one, and he comes back and tries to find it by telepathy or muscle-reading or something? That was exactly the way Ernie was acting. Dog on a difficult scent.”
A couple of times, especially when the customers came in, Bert wanted to chase him out, except that Ernie was such a special friend and Bert was so darn curious about it all himself.
In the end, Ernie made a good twenty purchases, including a mortar and pestle and two poisons for which Bert made him sign, though the amounts were less than a lethal dose.
“Actually none of the chemicals he bought were very dangerous,” Bert would say. “And none of them were terribly unusual. The thing about them was that, put together, they just didn’t make sense—as a medicine or anything else. Let me see, there was sulphur, bismuth, a bit of mercury, one of the sulfa drugs, a tiny packet of auric chloride, and… I had ‘em all on a list once, but I’ve lost it.”
After that, Ernie always mixed a little grayish paste in his cup of yogurt at suppertime.
Ernie stopped aging altogether.
After his sister’s coffin was lowered past the margins of green matting into the ground, Ernie shook hands with the minister, walked Bert Willis and Herman Schover to their car and told them he thought he’d better drive home with some relatives who’d turned up. Actually he just wanted to stay behind a while. It was a beautiful blue-and-white summer day; the tidy suburban cemetery had caught his fancy, and now he felt like a quiet stroll.
Ernie followed his little impulses these days. As he sometimes said, “I figure I’ve got plenty of time. I just don’t feel the pressure like I used to.”
The last car chugged away. Ernie stretched and started to stroll, slowly, but not like an old man, now that he was alone. His hair had grown whiter in the last few years and his face for a little wrinkled, but that was due to the very judicious use of silvering and theatrical liner—people’s comments about his youthfulness had gotten wearisome and would, he knew, eventually become suspicious.
Keeping himself oriented by a white tower at the cemetery gate, he arrived at an area that had no graves as yet, no trees either, just lawn. He made his way to the center of it, where there was a gently swelling hummock, and sat down in the warm crinkly grass, resting his back against the slope. The sky was lovely, enough clouds to be interesting, but a great oval of pure blue just overhead—a pear-shaped gateway to space.
He felt no grief at his sister’s death, only the desire to think a bit, have a quiet look at his past and another at the great future.
Alone like this, he dared to face his fate for a moment and admit to himself that, all wishful thinking aside, it really began to look as if he were going to live forever, or at least for a very long time.
Live forever! That was a phrase to give you a chill, he told himself. And what to do, he asked himself, with all that time?
Back in the “strange weeks,” he’d have had little trouble in answering that question—if only he’d known then what he did now and realized what was being offered him. For during his sober decades, Ernie had gradually come to a shrewdly accurate estimate of what had happened to him then. He thought of it in terms of having been offered six Gifts and turned down five of them.
Back in the “strange weeks” and armed with the five rejected Gifts (Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were the only ones that counted, though), he could easily have said, “Live forever by all means! Increase your knowledge and understanding until your mind bursts or is transfigured. Plunge forever into the unending variety of the Cosmos. Open yourself to everything.”
But now, equipped to travel only as a snail…
Still, even snails get somewhere. With forever to work with, even four-words-at-a-glance gets you through many, many books. Patient love and dispassionate thought give you human insight in the end, can finally open the tightest shutter on the darkest human heart.
But that would take so very long and Ernie felt tired. Not old, just tired, tired. Best simply to watch the soft clouds—the pear-shaped gateway had become almost circular. To do anything but drift through life, a stereotype among stereotypes, was simply… too… much… work…
At that very moment, as if his thought had summoned the experience into being, another scene filmed over the blue sky and white clouds above him. The sudden humming in his ears—a kind of “audible silence”—informed him that his second sight was at work, warning him of some deadly danger. But this was a more gentle instance of it, for not all his consciousness jumped somewhere else. All through the grassy hummock, of the restful melancholy of the scene around him, and of the sky overhead. The second scene only superimposed itself on the first.
He was poised many hundreds of miles above the Earth, a ghost-Ernie immune to the airlessness and the Sun’s untempered beams. At his back was black night filled with stars. Below him stretched the granulated dry brown of Earth’s surface, tinged here and there with green, clumped with white cloud, and everywhere faintly hazed with blue.
Up there in space with him, right at his elbow, so close that he could reach out and touch it, was a tiny silver cylinder about as big as a hazelnut, domed at one end, reflecting sunlight from one point in a way that would have been blinding enough except that Ernie’s ghost eyes were immune to brightness.
As he reached out to examine it, the thing darted away from him as if at some imperious summons, like a bit of iron, jumping through a magnetic field.
But in spite of its enormous acceleration, Ernie’s ghost was able to follow it in its downward plunge. It kept just ahead of his outstretched fingertips.
The brown granules that were Earth’s surface grew in size. The tiny metal cylinder began to glow with more than reflected sunlight. It turned red, orange, yellow and then blazing white as atmospheric friction transformed it into a meteor.
Ernie’s ghost, immune to friction and incandescence alike, followed it as it dove toward its target—for even though Ernie had never heard of a Juxtaposer and how it brought objects together, he had the feeling, from the dizzy s
peed of the meteor’s plunge, that it yearned for something.
He knew most meteors vaporized or exploded, but this did not, even when Earth’s brown surface grew rivers and roads. Suddenly there was a cloudbank ahead; then, in the white, there appeared an almost circular hole toward the very center of which the meteorite plunged.
Everything was happening very fast now, but his ghost senses were able to keep pace. As they plunged through the cloud-ring and the green landscape below grew explosively, he saw the white tower, the trees, the curving drives, and the clearing which was now the target.
There was still time to escape. Lying on the warm grass, with death lancing down from the sky at miles a second, he had merely to roll over.
But it was simply… too… much… work…
Elsewhere near Earth, a recorder sped toward Galaxy Center, a message which ended, “Six Gifts tendered, all finally refused. I will now sign off and await pickup with one Juxtaposer.”
A little later, a Receiver in Galaxy Center passed the message to a Central Recorder, which filed it in the Star-swarm 37 section with this addition: “Spiritual immaturity of Terran bipeds indicated. Advise against enlightenment and admission to Galactic citizenship. Test subject humanely released.”
Police digging into the turf under Ernie’s shattered head two days later found the bright bullet, cold now, of course, and untarnished.
“Looks like silver!” one cop said, scratching his head. “Haven’t I heard somewhere that the Mafia use silver bullets? So bright, though.”
Lieutenant Padilla, later on, lifting the bullet in his forceps to re-examine it for rifling marks had the same thought about its brightness. By now, however, he knew it was not silver. (What alloy was never satisfactorily determined. Actually it was made of the same substance as the Everlasting Razor Blade.)
This time, although he still found no rifling marks, a tiny dull stretch on the flat end of the cylinder caught his attention. He took up a magnifier and examined it carefully.
A moment later, he put down the magnifier, snatched up the pocketbook found on the dead man and rechecked some cards in it. The bullet dropped from the forceps, rolled a few inches. The lieutenant sat back in his chair, breathing a little hard.
“This is one for the books, all right!” he told himself. “I’ve heard a lot of people, soldiers especially, talk about such bullets, but I never expected to see one!”
For under the magnifying glass, finely engraved in very tiny letters, he had read the words:
ERNEST WENCESLAUS MEEKER
SUCCESS
The hero stood in the wasteland of gray sand sparsely dotted with gray boulders and thin clumps of spiny gray-green grass, and he confronted the Wall.
On the Hero’s out-thrust left arm, clutching the gloved wrist with dexter talons, stood a Golden Eagle which would have sunk any other arm than his and which the Hero had climbed the sky itself to snare and master. In its sinister talons the eagle held the end of a knotted golden thread, stronger than any rope, woven of the head-hairs of blonde lamias and vampires, and so long that its coilings were a smooth golden hillock at the Hero’s foot.
At the Hero’s right side stood a Brazen Bull, half again as high at the shoulder as he and which the Hero had crossed limitless flinty plains to challenge and to wear down to his will. The bull’s brazen brow was like the ram of a quinquireme and transparent green flames flickered from its nostrils and its quiet heartbeat trembled the ground.
On the Hero’s back hung a great Silver Horn, formed from the single poison-tooth of a dragon which the Hero had descended the nethermost abyss called Nadir to rout from its cave and slay.
The Wall was most simply like the hemisphere of night boldly encroaching into that of day, with not an atom of twilight between. In it was set a great shut gate only blacker than itself. The Wall shot up vertically to where the feather-clouds were ending in vast jagged crenelations that from its foot looked tinier than saw teeth. Behind the Wall, the Hero knew, lay all power and wealth and worldly delights.
The Golden Eagle shook out its wings, clashing the glittering pinions, and shrieked at the Wall a challenge that was like a thousand fifes, and the Brazen Bull bellowed one that engulfed the sound and shake of its own heartbeat, and the Silver Horn vibrated against the Hero’s back with its eagerness to blow.
The Wall made no answer. No tiniest wicket observably opened in the gate for an eye to spy, no midge-small face looked down the black sheer.
The Hero threw up his left arm with the great weight of the eagle on it, and the bird bated from his wrist and smote downward the air in a great beat that swept the fine gray sand grains aside like a giant’s besom, and began rapidly to mount in a tight spiral, trailing the golden thread.
The Hero waited until the golden bird looked no bigger than a winged topaz, then hammered once the Brazen Bull on the great ridge of its shoulder blade and pointed at the door in the Wall. The beast pawed the gray sand delicately, then lowered the ram of the brow. Green jets a yard long and straight as swords shot from its nostrils and it began to move toward the door, slowly at first, then faster and faster, and the pounding of its hooves shook the ground as if it were an earthquake climbed from its strait, leagues-deep lair and charging in the open.
The Hero planted his feet wide, against the ground’s heaving and he unslung the Silver Horn from his back and set its poison-point to his lips and blew. The note of the horn was like the eagle’s skirling and the bull’s roaring commingled, and there was a dreadful pulsation to it which infected the Wall so that black ripples shot up it and off to either side, and it wavered like a black comber about to break, and the Hero exulted in his heart.
But then the ripples returned, as if reflected along the Wall by distant mirrors, and they struck back conjoined at the Silver Horn which had engendered them. The horn stung the Hero’s lips with its unbearably multiplied vibrations and suddenly it shattered entire and fell to the earth as a silver dust.
There was a double, earth-transmitted thunderclap as the Brazen Bull smashed head-on against the gate and fell dead on its side.
One afterclap then, as the Golden Eagle, enmeshed in the thread it had carried aloft, plummeted like a golden bolt from a sky-demon’s crossbow, and struck a gray target-boulder and did not stir.
Silence swiftly gathered and the Wall was as before.
The Hero dropped to his knees and bowed his head and shoulders low. Almost he abased himself in mind as well as body and worshipped the Wall, for the gathered silence was very terrible, but in that moment of uncertainty he felt a feather-touch on his left little finger.
Glancing sideways he saw a tiny leopard-spider crouching in a gray grass-clump and touching him with right fore-leg.
Now although the Hero had tamed bulls and slain dragons, he had a great fear of spiders, but at this moment his misery was so great that he could feel no fear at all, and so he suffered the touch of the minute monster and the staring of the eight pin-point eyes of its sere golden face.
There was a little scuffing noise and a circlet of sand fell in next to the grass-clump, and from the small hole thus made there poked up toward the Hero the quivering blind snout of a mole, its fur rusty-brazen.
Simultaneously there was the faintest stirring of the sand under the right hand of the Hero, and he lifted a silver-gray pinch of it in his fingers.
Then, in a tiny high voice that was like the sidewise clashing of its golden mandibles, the Spider said, “I carry a line to the top of the Wall.”
The Mole quavered ghostlily, “I dig under the Wall.”
And, as if impalpable winds stirred it, the Sand in the Hero’s fingers sang faintly, “I wear the Wall down.”
Moving most gently, so as to affright none of his new allies, the Hero looked up at the Wall and pressed from his lips a smile.
TO MAKE A ROMAN HOLIDAY
Only the man in the toga saw the great cat. He stopped so abruptly in the stone archway that his gorgeously robed attendants had to dig
in their heels to keep from bumping him. Small wonder no one else saw it, for the sand of the practice field was so dazzlingly bright that the shadows of the surrounding portico seemed black as midnight. And the cat’s fur blended perfectly with the blackness under the opposite archway.
Its green eyes burned with the madness that comes when jungle nerves are tortured by captivity, hunger and abuse.
But in the eyes of the man in the toga was something infinitely worse. His thin patrician lips curled in a slow smile of anticipation.
The practice field was ahum with activity. A half dozen gladiators were working out under the direction of a little man with red hair. More gladiators lounged on the benches in the portico. Guards dangled hooked clubs from their wrists. Slaves bustled about, lugging weapons and armor to or from the crib.
Twice the cat readied itself for a spring. Twice it hesitated. The man in the toga gnawed his lip delicately.
A great shaggy gladiator with legs like pillars and a bear’s chest got up from a bench. He lingered for a moment, one huge arm thrown loosely around the shoulders of a lean, swarthy man with the look of a Greek, who wore a loincloth of leopard skin and had a heavy net folded over his arm. They exchanged words, and the big man pushed the other playfully and thumped him, while the Greek pretended to collapse. Through the sword din came a deep chuckle. Then the big man started across the sand.
The cat’s green eyes stopped their roving. As if one of the blacker shadows had suddenly come alive, it streaked into the sunlight and sprang for the naked burly back.
But some god who loves friendship must have whispered to the Greek. Something sent him darting forward. Just as the cat began its spring, the heavy net lashed out. Snarling, the cat spun around and hurled itself at the Greek, who fell away behind his net, drawing up his knees to protect his belly. The cat clawed frantically at the net for a moment not distinguishing between it and the man half underneath.
