by Fritz Leiber
“Martin,” I said dully, “if there’ve been all these replacements, first by them, then by us, what’s happened to the real Elizabeth?”
He shrugged. “God knows.”
I asked softly, “But does He, Martin? Can He?”
He hugged his shoulders in, as if to contain a shudder. “Look, Greta,” he said, “it’s the Snakes who are the warpers and destroyers. We’re restoring the past. The Spiders are trying to keep things at first created. We only kill when we must.”
I shuddered then, for bursting out of my memory came the glittering, knife-flashing, night-shrouded, bloody image of my lover, the Spider soldier-of-change Erich von Hohenwald, dying in the grip of a giant silver spider, or spider-shaped entity large as he, as they rolled in a tangled ball down a flight of rocks in Central Park.
But the memory-burst didn’t blow up my mind, as it had done a year ago, no more than snapping the black thread from my sweater had ended the world. I asked Martin, “Is that what Snakes say?”
“Of course not! They make the same claims we do. But somewhere, Greta, you have to trust.” He put out the middle finger of his hand.
I didn’t take hold of it. He whirled it away, snapping it against his thumb.
“You’re still grieving for that carrion there!” he accused me. He jerked down a section of white curtain and whirled it over the stiffening body. “If you must grieve, grieve for Miss Nefer! Exiled, imprisoned, locked forever in the past, her mind pulsing faintly in the black hole of the dead and gone, yearning for Nirvana yet nursing one lone painful patch of consciousness. And only to hold a fort! Only to make sure Mary Stuart is executed, the Armada licked, and that all the other consequences flow on. The Snakes’ Elizabeth let Mary live…and England die…and the Spaniard hold North America to the Great Lakes and New Scandinavia.”
Once more he put out his middle finger.
“All right, all right,” I said, barely touching it. “You’ve convinced me.”
“Great!” he said. “’By for now, Greta. I got to help strike the set.”
“That’s good,” I said. He loped out.
I could hear the skirling sword-clashes of the final fight to the death of the two Macks, Duff and Beth. But I only sat there in the empty dressing room pretending to grieve for a devil-smiling snow tiger locked in a time-cage and for a cute sardonic German killed for insubordination that I had reported…but really grieving for a girl who for a year had been a rootless child of the theater with a whole company of mothers and fathers, afraid of nothing more than subway bogies and Park and Village monsters.
As I sat there pitying myself beside a shrouded queen, a shadow fell across my knees. I saw stealing through the dressing room a young man in worn dark clothes. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three. He was a frail sort of guy with a weak chin and big forehead and eyes that saw everything. I knew at once he was the one who had seemed familiar to me in the knot of City fellows.
He looked at me and I looked from him to the picture sitting on the reserve makeup box by Siddy’s mirror. And I began to tremble.
He looked at it too, of course, as fast as I did. And then he began to tremble too, though it was a finer-grained tremor than mine.
The sword-fight had ended seconds back and now I heard the witches faintly wailing, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair—” Sid has them echo that line offstage at the end to give a feeling of prophecy fulfilled.
Then Sid came pounding up. He’s the first finished, since the fight ends offstage so Macduff can carry back a red-necked papier-mache head of him and show it to the audience. Sid stopped dead in the door.
Then the stranger turned around. His shoulders jerked as he saw Sid. He moved toward him just two or three steps at a time, speaking at the same time in breathy little rushes.
Sid stood there and watched him. When the other actors came boiling up behind him, he put his hands on the doorframe to either side so none of them could get past. Their faces peered around him.
And all this while the stranger was saying, “What may this mean? Can such things be? Are all the seeds of time…wetted by some hell-trickle…sprouted at once in their granary? Speak…speak! You played me a play…that I am writing in my secretest heart. Have you disjointed the frame of things…to steal my unborn thoughts? Fair is foul indeed. Is all the world a stage? Speak, I say! Are you not my friend Sidney James Lessingham of King’s Lynn…singed by time’s fiery wand…sifted over with the ashes of thirty years? Speak, are you not he? Oh, there are more things in heaven and earth…aye, and perchance hell too…Speak, I charge you!”
And with that he put his hands on Sid’s shoulder, half to shake him, I think, but half to keep from falling over. And for the one time I ever saw it, glib old Siddy had nothing to say.
He worked his lips. He opened his mouth twice and twice shut it. Then, with a kind of desperation in his face, he motioned the actors out of the way behind him with one big arm and swung the other around the stranger’s narrow shoulders and swept him out of the dressing room, himself following.
The actors came pouring in then, Bruce tossing Macbeth’s head to Martin like a football while he tugged off his horned helmet, Mark dumping a stack of shields in the corner, Maudie pausing as she skittered past me to say, “Hi Gret, great you’re back,” and patting my temple to show what part of me she meant. Beau went straight to Sid’s dressing table and set the portrait aside and lifted out Sid’s reserve makeup box.
“The lights, Martin!” he called.
Then Sid came back in, slamming and bolting the door behind him and standing for a moment with his back against it, panting.
I rushed to him. Something was boiling up inside me, but before it could get to my brain I opened my mouth and it came out as, “Siddy, you can’t fool me, that was no dirty S-or-S. I don’t care how much he shakes and purrs, or shakes a spear, or just plain shakes—Siddy, that was Shakespeare!”
“Aye, girl, I think so,” he told me, holding my wrists together. “They can’t find dolls to double men like that—or such is my main hope.” A big sickly grin came on his face. “Oh, gods,” he demanded, “with what words do you talk to a man whose speech you’ve stolen all your life?”
I asked him, “Sid, were we ever in Central Park?”
He answered, “Once—twelve months back. A one-night stand. They came for Erich. You flipped.”
He swung me aside and moved behind Beau. All the lights went out.
Then I saw, dimly at first, the great dull-gleaming jewel, covered with dials and green-glowing windows, that Beau had lifted from Sid’s reserve makeup box. The strongest green glow showed his intent face, still framed by the long glistening locks of the Ross wig, as he kneeled before the thing—Major Maintainer, I remembered it was called.
“When now? Where?” Beau tossed impatiently to Sid over his shoulder.
“The forty-fourth year before our Lord’s birth!” Sid answered instantly. “Rome!”
Beau’s fingers danced over the dials like a musician’s, or a safe-cracker’s. The green glow flared and faded flickeringly.
“There’s a storm in that vector of the Void.”
“Circle it,” Sid ordered.
“There are dark mists every way.”
“Then pick the likeliest dark path!”
I called through the dark, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, eh, Siddy?”
“Aye, chick,” he answered me. “’Tis all the rule we have!”
The Oldest Soldier
THE one we called the Leutnant took a long swallow of his dark Lowensbrau. He’d just been describing a battle of infantry rockets on the Eastern Front, the German and Russian positions erupting bundles of flame.
Max swished his paler beer in its green bottle and his eyes got a faraway look and he said, “When the rockets killed their thousands in Copenhagen, they laced the sky with fire and lit up the steeples in the city and the masts and bare spars of the British ships like a field of crosses.”
“I didn’
t know there were any landings in Denmark,” someone remarked with an expectant casualness.
“This was in the Napoleonic wars,” Max explained. “The British bombarded the city and captured the Danish fleet. Back in 1807.”
“Vas you dere, Maxie?” Woody asked, and the gang around the counter chuckled and beamed. Drinking at a liquor store is a pretty dull occupation and one is grateful for small vaudeville acts.
“Why bare spars?” someone asked.
“So there’d be less chance of the rockets setting the launching ships afire,” Max came back at him. “Sails burn fast and wooden ships are tinder anyway—that’s why ships firing red-hot shot never worked out. Rockets and bare spars were bad enough. Yes, and it was Congreve rockets made the ‘red glare’ at Fort McHenry,” he continued unruffled, “while the ‘bombs bursting in air’ were about the earliest precision artillery shells, fired from mortars on bomb-ketches. There’s a condensed history of arms in the American anthem.” He looked around smiling.
“Yes, I was there, Woody—just as I was with the South Martians when they stormed Copernicus in the Second Colonial War. And just as I’ll be in a foxhole outside Copeybawa a billion years from now while the blast waves from the battling Venusian spaceships shake the soil and roil the mud and give me some more digging to do.”
This time the gang really snorted its happy laughter and Woody was slowly shaking his head and repeating, “Copenhagen and Copernicus and—what was the third? Oh, what a mind he’s got,” and the Leutnant was saying, “Yah, you vas there—in books,” and I was thinking, Thank God for all the screwballs, especially the brave ones who never flinch, who never lose their tempers or drop the act, so that you never do quite find out whether it’s just a gag or their solemnest belief. There’s only one person here takes Max even one percent seriously, but they all love him because he won’t ever drop his guard…
“The only point I was trying to make,” Max continued when he could easily make himself heard “was the way styles in weapons keep moving in cycles.”
“Did the Romans use rockets?” asked the same light voice as had remarked about the landings in Denmark and the bare spars. I saw now it was Sol from behind the counter.
Max shook his head. “Not so you’d notice. Catapults were their specialty.” He squinted his eyes. “Though now you mention it, I recall a dogfoot telling me Archimedes faked up some rockets powdered with Greek fire to touch off the sails of the Roman ships at Syracuse—and none of this romance about a giant burning glass.”
“You mean,” said Woody, “that there are other gazebos besides yourself in this fighting-all-over-the-universe-and-to-the-end-of-time racket?” His deep whiskey voice was at its solemnest and most wondering.
“Naturally,” Max told him earnestly. “How else do you suppose wars ever get really fought and refought?”
“Why should wars ever be refought?” Sol asked lightly. “Once ought to be enough.”
“Do you suppose anybody could time-travel and keep his hands off wars?” Max countered.
I put in my two cents’ worth. “Then that would make Archimedes’ rockets the earliest liquid-fuel rockets by a long shot.”
Max looked straight at me, a special quirk in his smile. “Yes, I guess so,” he said after a couple of seconds. “On this planet, that is.”
The laughter had been falling off, but that brought it back and while Woody was saying loudly to himself, “I like that refighting part—that’s what we’re all so good at,” the Leutnant asked Max with only a moderate accent that fit North Chicago, “And zo you aggshually have fought on Mars?”
“Yes, I have,” Max agreed after a bit. “Though that ruckus I mentioned happened on our moon—expeditionary forces from the Red Planet.”
“Ach, yes. And now let me ask you something—”
I really mean that about screwballs, you know. I don’t care whether they’re saucer addicts or extrasensory perception bugs or religious or musical maniacs or crackpot philosophers or psychologists or merely guys with a strange dream or gag like Max—for my money they are the ones who are keeping individuality alive in this age of conformity. They are the ones who are resisting the encroachments of the mass media and motivation research and the mass man. The only really bad thing about crack pottery and screwballistics (as with dope and prostitution) is the coldblooded people who prey on it for money. So I say to all screwballs: Go it on your own. Don’t take any wooden nickels or give out any silver dimes. Be wise and brave—like Max.
He and the Leutnant were working up a discussion of the problems of artillery in airless space and low gravity that was a little too technical to keep the laughter alive. So Woody up and remarked, “Say, Maximillian, if you got to be in all these wars all over hell and gone, you must have a pretty tight schedule. How come you got time to be drinking with us bums?”
“I often ask myself that,” Max cracked back at him. “Fact is, I’m on a sort of unscheduled furlough, result of a transportation slip-up. I’m due to be picked up and returned to my outfit any day now—that is, if the enemy underground doesn’t get to me first.”
It was just then, as Max said that bit about enemy underground, and as the laughter came, a little diminished, and as Woody was chortling “Enemy underground now. How do you like that?” and as I was thinking how much Max had given me in these couple of weeks—a guy with an almost poetic flare for vivid historical reconstruction, but with more than that…it was just then that I saw the two red eyes low down in the dusty plate-glass window looking in from the dark street.
Everything in modern America has to have a big plate glass display window, everything from suburban mansions, general managers’ offices and skyscraper apartments to barber shops and beauty parlors and ginmills—there are even gymnasium swimming pools with plate glass windows twenty feet high opening on busy boulevards—and Sol’s dingy liquor store was no exception; in fact I believe there’s a law that it’s got to be that way. But I was the only one of the gang who happened to be looking out of this particular window at the moment. It was a dark windy night outside and it’s a dark untidy street at best and across from Sol’s are more plate glass windows that sometimes give off very odd reflections, so when I got a glimpse of this black formless head with the two eyes like red coals peering in past the brown pyramid of empty whiskey bottles, I don’t suppose it was a half second before I realized it must be something like a couple of cigarette butts kept alive by the wind, or more likely a freak reflection of tail lights from some car turning a corner down street, and in another half second it was gone, the car having finished turning the corner or the wind blowing the cigarette butts away altogether. Still, for a moment it gave me a very goosey feeling, coming right on top of that remark about an enemy underground.
And I must have shown my reaction in some way, for Woody, who is very observant, called out, “Hey, Fred, has that soda pop you drink started to rot your nerves—or are even Max’s friends getting sick at the outrageous lies he’s been telling us?”
Max looked at me sharply and perhaps he saw something too. At any rate he finished his beer and said, “I guess I’ll be taking off.” He didn’t say it to me particularly, but he kept looking at me. I nodded and put down on the counter my small green bottle, still one-third full of the lemon pop I find overly sweet, though it was the sourest Sol stocked. Max and I zipped up our wind-breakers. He opened the door and a little of the wind came in and troubled the tanbark around the sill. The Leutnant said to Max, “Tomorrow night we design a better space gun;” Sol routinely advised the two of us, “Keep your noses clean;” and Woody called, “So long space soldiers.” (And I could imagine him saying as the door closed, “That Max is nuttier than a fruitcake and Freddy isn’t much better. Drinking soda pop—ugh!”)
And then Max and I were outside leaning into the wind, our eyes slitted against the blown dust, for the three-block trudge to Max’s pad—a name his tiny apartment merits without any attempt to force the language.
Th
ere weren’t any large black shaggy dogs with red eyes slinking about and I hadn’t quite expected there would be.
Why Max and his soldier-of-history gag and our outwardly small comradeship meant so much to me is something that goes way back into my childhood. I was a lonely timid child, with no brothers and sisters to spar around with in preparation for the battles of life, and I never went through the usual stages of boyhood gangs either. In line with those things I grew up into a very devout liberal and “hated war” with a mystical fervor during the intermission between 1918 and 1939—so much so that I made a point of avoiding military services in the second conflict, though merely by working in the nearest war plant, not by the arduously heroic route of out-and-out pacifism.
But then the inevitable reaction set in, sparked by the liberal curse of being able, however, belatedly, to see both sides of any question. I began to be curious about and cautiously admiring of soldiering and soldiers. Unwillingly at first, I came to see the necessity and romance of the spearmen—those guardians, often lonely as myself, of the perilous camps of civilization and brotherhood in a black hostile universe…necessary guardians, for all the truth in the indictments that war caters to irrationality and sadism and serves the munition makers and reaction.
I commenced to see my own hatred of war as in part only a mask for cowardice, and I started to look for some way to do honor in my life to the other half of the truth. Though it’s anything but easy to give yourself a feeling of being brave just because you suddenly want that feeling. Obvious opportunities to be obviously brave come very seldom in our largely civilized culture, in fact they’re clean contrary to safety drives and so-called normal adjustment and good peacetime citizenship and all the rest, and they come mostly in the earliest part of a man’s life. So that for the person who belatedly wants to be brave it’s generally a matter of waiting for an opportunity for six months and then getting a tiny one and muffing it in six seconds.
