by Fritz Leiber
“Fellow householders and family members of Civil Service Knolls,” Wisant began again, wiping his forehead, "in a few minutes several of you will be singled out for friendly recognition, but I think the biggest award ought to go to all of you collectively for one more year of working for tranquility . . .”
The shaking of the boughs had started up again and was traveling down the far wall. At least half the eyes of the audience were traveling with it. ("George!” Mrs. Potter said to her husband, "it looks as if a lot of crumpled cellophane were being dragged through the branches. It all wiggles.” He replied, “I forgot my glasses.” Mr. Ames muttered to himself: “The wood began to move. Liar and slave!"
Wisant resolutely kept his eyes away from the traveling commotion and continued, "... and for one more year of keeping up the good fight against violence, delinquency, irrationality .. .”
A rush of wind (looking like “curdled air,” some said afterwards) sped from the rear of the hall to the podium. Most of the candles were blown out, as if a giant had puffed at his giant birthday cake, and the Nymphs and Sprites squealed all the way down the double line.
The branches around Wisant shook wildly. “ . . . emotionalism, superstition, and the evil powers of the imagination]” he finished with a shout, waving his arms as if to keep off bats or bees.
Twice after that he gathered himself to continue his talk, although his audience was in a considerable uproar, but each time his attention went back to a point a little above their heads. No one else saw anything where he was looking (except some “curdled air”), but Wisant seemed to see something most horrible, for his face paled, he began to back off as if the something were approaching him, he waved out his arms wildly as one might at a wasp or a bat, and suddenly he began to scream, “Keep it off mel Can’t you see it, you fools? Keep it offl”
As he stepped off the podium backwards he snatched something from inside his jerkin. There was a nasty whish in the air and those closest to him felt a wave of heat. There were a few shrill screams. Wisant fell heavily on the turf and did not move. A shining object skidded away from his hand. Mr. Ames picked it up. The pistol-shaped weapon was unfamiliar to him and he only later discovered it was a heat-gun.
The foliage of the Great Bower was still again, but a long streak of leaves in the ceiling had instantaneously turned brown. A few of these came floating down as if it were autumn.
Sometimes I think of the whole world as one great mental hospital, its finest people only inmates trying out as aides.
The notebooks of A.S.
It is more fun than skindiving to soar through the air in an antigravity harness. That is, after you have got the knack of balancing your field. It is deeply thrilling to tilt your field and swoop down at a slant, or cut it entirely and just drop—and then right it or gun it and go bounding up like a rubber ball. The positive field around your head and shoulders creates an air cushion against the buffeting of the wind and your own speed.
But after a while the harness begins to chafe, your sense of balance gets tired, your gut begins to resent the slight griping effects of the field supporting you, and the solid ground which you first viewed with contempt comes to seem more and more inviting. David Cruxon discovered all of these things.
Also, it is great fun to scare people. It is fun to flash a green demon mask in their faces out of nowhere and see them blanch. Or to glow white in the dark and listen to them scream. It is fun to snarl traffic and panic pedestrians and break up solemn gatherings—the solemner the better—with rude or shocking intrusions. It is fun to know that your fellow man is little and puffed up and easily terrified and as in love with security as a baby with his bottle, and to prove it on him again and again. Yes, it is fun to be a practicing monster.
But after a while the best of Halloween pranks becomes monotonous, fear reactions begin to seem stereotyped, you start to see yourself in your victims, and you get ashamed of winning with loaded dice. David Cruxon discovered this too.
He had thought after he broke up the Tranquility Festival that he had hours of mischief left in him. The searing near-miss of Wisant’s hot-rod had left him exhilarated. (Only the light-flow fabric, diverting the infrared blast around him, had saved him from dangerous, perhaps fatal burns.) And now the idea of stampeding an insane asylum had an ironic attraction. And it had been good sport at first, especially when he invisibly buzzed two sand-cars of aides into a panic so that they went careening over the dunes on their fat tires, headlight beams swinging frantically, and finally burst through the light fence on the landward side (giving rise to a rumor of an erupting horde of ravening madmen). That had been very good fun indeed, rather like harmlessly strafing war refugees, and after it Dave had shucked off his robe and hood of invisibility and put on a Glowing Phantom aerobatic display, diving and soaring over the dark tiny hills, swooping on little groups with menacing phosphorescent claws and peals of Satanic laughter.
But that didn’t prove to be nearly as good fun. True, his victims squealed and sometimes ran, but they didn’t seem to panic permanently like the aides. They seemed to stop after a few steps and come back to be scared again, like happily hysterical children. He began to wonder what must be going on in the minds down there if a Glowing Phantom were merely a welcome diversion. Then the feeling got hold of him that those people down there saw through him and sympathized with him. It was a strange feeling—both deflating and heart-warming.
But what really finished Dave off as a practicing monster was when they started to cheer him—cheer him as if he were their champion returning in triumph. Cruxon’s Crusade—was that what he’d called it? And was this his Holy Land? As he asked himself that question he realized that he was drifting wearily down toward a hilltop on a long slow slant and he let his drift continue, landing with a long scuff.
Despite the cheers, he rather expected to be gibbered at and manhandled by the crowd that swiftly gathered around him. Instead he was patted on the back, congratulated for his exploits at New Angeles, and asked intelligent questions.
Gabby Wisant’s mind had fully determined to stay underground a long time. But that had been on the assumptions that her body would stay near Daddikins at Civil Service Knolls and that the thing that had taken control of her body would stay hungry and eager. Now those assumptions seemed doubtful, so her mind decided to risk another look around.
She found herself one of the scattered crowd of people wandering over sandhills in the dark. Some memories came to her, even of the morning, but not painfully enough to drive her mind below. They lacked pressure.
There was an older woman beside her—a rather silly and strangely affected woman by her talk, yet somehow likable— who seemed to be trying to look after her. By stages Gabby came to realize it must be her mother.
Most of the crowd were following the movements of something that glowed whitely as it swooped and whirled through the air, like a small demented comet far off course. After a bit she saw that the comet was a phosphorescent man. She laughed.
Some of the people started to cheer. She copied them. The glowing man landed on a little sand hill just ahead. Some of the crowd hurried forward. She followed them. She saw a young man stepping clumsily out of some glowing coveralls. The glow let her see his face.
“Dave, you idiot!" she squealed at him happily.
He smiled at her shamefacedly.
Doctor Snowden found Dave and Gabby and Beth Wisant on a dune just inside the break in the wire fence—the last of the debris from last night’s storm. The sky was just getting light. The old man motioned back the aides with him and trudged up the sandy rise and sat down on a log.
“Oh, hello, Doctor,” Beth Wisant said. “Have you met Gabrielle? She came to visit me just like I told you.”
Dr. Snowden nodded tiredly. “Welcome to Serenity Shoals, Miss Wisant. Glad to have you here.”
Gabby smiled at him timidly. “I’m glad to be here too—I think. Yesterday . .Her voice trailed off.
"Yesterday you we
re a wild animal,” Beth Wisant said loudly, "and you killed a pillow instead of your father. The doctor will tell you that’s very good sense.”
Dr. Snowden said, "All of us have these somatic wild animals—” (He looked at Dave) “—these monsters.”
Gabby said, “Doctor, do you think that Mama calling me so long ago can have had anything to do with what happened to me yesterday?”
"I see no reason why not,” he replied, nodding. “Of course there’s a lot more than that that’s mixed up about you.”
"When I .implant a suggestion, it works," Beth Wisant asserted.
Gabby frowned. “Part of the mix-up is in the world, not me.”
“The world is always mixed up," Dr. Snowden said. “It’s a pretty crazy hodge-podge with sensible strains running through it, if you look for them very closely. That’s one of the things we have to accept.” He rubbed his eyes and looked up. "And while we’re on the general topic of unpleasant facts, here’s something else. Serenity Shoals has got itself one more new patient besides yourselves—Joel Wisant.”
"Hum," said Beth Wisant. "Maybe now that I don’t have him to go home to, I can start getting better.”
“Poor Daddikins,” Gabby said dully.
“Yes," Snowden continued, looking at Dave, “that last little show you put on at the Tranquility Festival—and then on top of it the news that there was an outbreak here— really broke him up.” He shook his head. “Iron perfectionist. At the end he was even demanding that we drop an atomic bomb on Serenity Shoals—that was what swung Harker around to my side.”
“An atom bomb!” Beth Wisant said. “The ideal”
Dr. Snowden nodded. “It does seem a little extreme.”
"So you class me as a psychotic too,” Dave said, a shade argumentively. "Of course I’ll admit that after what I did—” Dr. Snowden looked at him sourly. “I don’t class you as psychotic at all—though a lot of my last-century colleagues would have taken great delight in tagging you as a psychopathic personality. I think you’re just a spoiled and willful young man with no capacity to bear frustration. You’re a self-dramatizer. You jumped into the ocean of aberration— that was the meaning of your note, wasn’t it?—but the first waves tossed you back on the beach. Still, you got in here, which was your main object.”
“How do you know that?” Dave asked.
“You’d be surprised,” Dr. Snowden said wearily, “at how many more-or-less sane people want to get into mental hospitals these days—it’s probably the main truth behind the Report K figures. They seem to think that insanity is the only great adventure left man in a rather depersonalizing age. They want to understand their fellow man at the depths, and here at least they get the opportunity.” He looked at Dave meaningfully as he said that. Then he went on, “At any rate, Serenity Shoals is the safest place for you right now, Mr. Cruxon. It gets you out from under a stack of damage suits and maybe a lynch-mob or two.”
He stood up. “So come on then, all of you, down to Receiving,” he directed, a bit grumpily. “Pick up that junk you’ve got there, Dave, and bring it along. We’ll try to hang onto the harness—it might be useful in treating gravitational dementia. Come on, come on!—I’ve wasted all night on you. Don’t expect such concessions in the future. Serenity Shoals is no vacation resort—and no honeymoon resort either!— though . . 7 (He smiled flickeringly) . . though some couples do try.”
They followed him down the sandy hill. The rising sun behind them struck gold from the drab buildings and faded tents ahead.
Dr. Snowden dropped back beside Dave. "TelL me one thing,” he said quietly. “Was it fun being a green demon?” Dave said, “That it was!"
DAMNATION MORNING
TIME traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”
It was the sort of question would have suited a religious crackpot of the strong-arm, save-your-soul variety, but she didn’t look like one. And I might very well have answered it— in fact I almost did—with a hangover, one percent humorous, “Good God, no!” Or—a poor second—I could have studied the dark, dust-bumished arabesques of the faded blue carpet for a perversely long time and then countered with a grudging, “Oh, if you insist.”
But I didn’t, perhaps because there didn’t seem to be anything like one percent of humor in the situation. Point One: 1 have been blacked out the past half hour or so—this woman might just have opened the door or she might have been watching me for ten minutes. Point Two: I was in the fringes of DTs, trying to come off a big drunk. Point Three: I knew for certain that I had just killed someone or left him or her to die, though I hadn’t die faintest idea of whom or why.
Let me try to picture my state of mind a litde more vividly. My consciousness, the sentient self-aware part of me, was a single quivering point in the center of an endless plane vibrating harshly with misery and menace. I was like a man in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific—or better, I was like a man in a shellhole in the North African desert (I served under Montgomery and any region adjoining the DTs is certainly a No Man’s Land). Around me, in every direction—this is my consciousness I’m describing, remember—miles of flat burning sand, nothing more. Way beyond the horizon were two divorced wives, some estranged children, assorted jobs, and other unexceptional wreckage. Much closer, but still beyond the horizon, were State Hospital (twice) and Psycho (four times). Shallowly buried very near at hand, or perhaps blackening in the open just behind me in the shellhole, was the person I had killed.
But remember that I knew I had killed a real person. That wasn’t anything allegorical.
Now for a little more detail on this “Look, Buster,” woman. To begin with, she didn’t resemble any part of the DTs or its outlying kingdoms, though an amateur might have thought differently—especially if he had given too much weight to the sigil on her forehead. But I was no amateur.
She seemed about my age—forty-five—but I couldn’t be sure. Her body looked. younger than that, her face older; both were trim and had seen a lot of use, I got the impression. She was wearing black sandals and a black unbelted tunic with just a hint of the sack dress to it, yet she seemed dressed for the street. It occurred to me even then (off-track ideas can come to you very swiftly and sharply in the DT outskirts) that it was a costume that, except perhaps for the color, would have fitted into any number of historical eras: old Egypt, Greece, maybe the Directoire, World War I, Burma, Yucatan, to name some. (Should I ask her if she spoke Maya-than? I didn’t, but I don’t think the question would have fazed her; she seemed altogether sophisticated, a real cosmopolite—she pronounced “Buster” as if it were part of a curious, somewhat ridiculous jargon she was using for shock purposes.)
From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious.
Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent.
Except for the bangs she wore her hair pinned up. Her ears were flat, thin-edged, and nicely shaped, with the long lobes that in Chinese art mark the philosopher. Small square silver flats with rounded comers ornamented them.
Her face might have been painted by Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas. The skin was webbed with very fine lines; the eyes were darkly shadowed and there was a touch of green on the lids (Egyptian?—I asked myself); her mouth was wide, tolerant, but realistic. Yes, beyond all else, she seemed realistic.
And as I’ve indicated, I was ready for realism, so when she asked, "Do you want to liv
e?” I somehow managed not to let slip any of the flippant answers that came flocking into my mouth, I realized that this was the one time in a million when a big question is really meant and your answer really counts and there are no second chances, I realized that the line of my life had come to one of those points where there’s a kink in it and the wrong (or maybe the right) tug can break it and that as far as I was concerned at the present moment, she knew all about everything.
So I thought for a bit, not long, and I answered, “Yes.”
She nodded—not as if she approved my decision, or disapproved it for that matter, but merely as if she accepted it as a basis for negotiations—and she let her bangs fall back across her forehead. Then she gave me a quick dry smile and she said, “In that case you and I have got to get out of here and do some talking.”
For me that smile was the first break in the shell—the shell around my rancid consciousness or perhaps the dark, star-pricked shell around the space-time continuum.
“Come on,” she said. “No, just as you are. Don’t stop for anything and—” (She caught the direction of my immediate natural movement) “—don’t look behind you if you meant that about wanting to live.”
Ordinarily being told not to look behind you is a remarkably silly piece of advice, it makes you think of those “pursuing fiend” horror stories that scare children, and you look around automatically—if only to prove you’re no child. Also in this present case there was my very real and dreadful curiosity: I wanted terribly (yes, terribly) to know whom it was I had just killed—a forgotten third wife? a stray woman? a jealous husband or boyfriend? (though I seemed too cracked up for love affairs) the hotel clerk? a fellow derelict?
But somehow, as with her “want to live” question, I had the sense to realize that this was one of those times when the usually silly statement is /lead serious, that she meant her warning quite literally.
If I looked behind me, I would die.
