The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Reuter Leiber

  Louis had asked for just a cup of black coffee.

  She brought him a half cantaloup also.

  He sat looking at it for a moment. Then he chuckled incredulously. “You know, I actually wanted that,” he said. “But I didn’t know I wanted it. You must have read my subconscious mind.”

  “What’s that?” she asked in a low, lovely voice with intonations rather like Benny’s.

  Digging into his cantaloup, Louis sketched an explanation suitable for fifth-graders.

  She disregarded the explanation. “What do you use it for?” she asked.

  Louis, who is something of a wit, said, “I don’t use it. It uses me.”

  “That the way it should be?” she commented.

  None of us knew the answer to that one, so since I was the Gang’s specialist in dealing with the lower orders, I remarked brilliantly, “What’s your name?”

  “Helen,” she told me.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Couple days,” she said, starting back toward the counter.

  “Where did you come from?”

  She spread her hands. “Oh—places.”

  Whereupon Gene, whose humor inclines toward the fantastic, asked, “Did you arrive on a flying disk?” She glanced back at him and said, “Wise guy.”

  But all the same she hung around our table, filling sugar basins and what not. We made our conversation especially erudite, each of us merrily spinning his favorite web of half understood intellectual jargon and half-baked private opinion. We were conscious of her presence, all right.

  Just as we were leaving, the thing happened. At the doorway something made us all look back. Helen was behind the counter. She was looking at us. Her eyes weren’t dreamy at all, but focused, intent, radiant. She was smiling.

  My elbow was touching Es’s naked arm—we were rather crowded in the doorway—and I felt her shiver. Then she gave a tiny jerk and I sensed that Gene, who was holding her other arm (they were more or less sweethearts), had tightened his grip on it.

  For perhaps three seconds it stayed just like that, the four of us looking at the one of her. Then Helen shyly dropped her gaze and began to mop the counter with a rag.

  We were all very quiet going home.

  Next night we went back to Benny’s again, rather earlier. Helen was still there, and quite as beautiful as we remembered her. We exchanged with her a few more of those brief, teasing remarks—her voice no longer sounded so much like Benny’s—and staged some more intellectual pyrotechnics for her benefit. Just before we left, Es went up to her at the counter and talked to her privately for perhaps a minute, at the end of which Helen nodded.

  “Ask her to pose for you?” I asked Es when we got outside.

  She nodded. “That girl has the most magnificent figure in the world,” she proclaimed fervently.

  “Or out of it,” Gene confirmed grudingly.

  “And an incredibly exciting skull,” Es finished.

  It was characteristic of us that Es should have been the one to really break the ice with Helen. Like most intellectuals, we were rather timid, always setting up barriers against other people. We clung to adolescence and the college, although all of us but Gene had been graduated from it. Instead of getting out into the real world, we lived by sponging off our parents and doing academic odd jobs for the professors (Es had a few private students). Here in our home city we had status, you see. We were looked upon as being frightfully clever and sophisticated, the local “bohemian set” (though Lord knows we were anything but that). Whereas out in the real world we’d have been greenhorns.

  We were scared of the world, you see. Scared that it would find out that all our vaunted abilities and projects didn’t amount to much— and that as for solid achievements, there just hadn’t been any. Es was only a mediocre artist; she was afraid to learn from the great, especially the living great, for fear her own affected little individuality would be engulfed. Louis was no philosopher; he merely cultivated a series of intellectual enthusiasms, living in a state of feverish private—and fruitless—excitement over the thoughts of other men. My own defense against reality consisted of knowingness and a cynical attitude; I had a remarkable packrat accumulation of information; I had a line on everything—and also always knew why it wasn’t worth bothering with. As for Gene, he was the best of us and also the worst. A bit younger, he still applied himself to his studies, and showed promise in nuclear physics and math. But something, perhaps his small size and puritanical farm background, had made him moody and contrary, and given him an inclination toward physical violence that threatened some day to get him into real trouble. As it was, he’d had his license taken away for reckless driving. And several times we’d had to intervene—once unsuccessfully—to keep him from getting beaten up in bars.

  We talked a great deal about our “work.” Actually we spent much more time reading magazines and detective stories, lazing around, getting drunk, and conducting our endless intellectual palavers.

  If we had one real virtue, it was our loyalty to each other, though it wouldn’t take a cynic to point out that we desperately needed each other for an audience. Still, there was some genuine feeling there.

  In short, like many people on a planet where mind is wakening and has barely become aware of the eon- old fetters and blindfolds oppressing it, and has had just the faintest glimpse of its tremendous possible future destiny, we were badly cowed—frightened, frustrated, self-centered, slothful, vain, pretentious.

  Considering how set we were getting in those attitudes, it is all the more amazing that Helen had the tremendous effect on us that she did. For within a month of meeting her, our attitude toward the whole world had sweetened, we had become genuinely interested in people Instead of being frightened of them, and we were beginning to do real creative work. An astonishing achievement for an unknown little waitress!

  It wasn’t that she took us in hand or set us an example, or anything like that. Quite the opposite. I don’t think that Helen was responsible for a half dozen positive statements (and only one really impulsive act) during the whole time we knew her. Rather, she was like a Great Books discussion leader, who never voices an opinion of his own, but only leads other people to voice theirs—playing the part of an intellectual midwife.

  Louis and Gene and I would drop over to Es’s, say, and find Helen getting dressed behind the screen or taking a cup of tea after a session of posing. We’d start a discussion and for a while Helen would listen dreamily, just another shadow in the high old shadowy room. But then those startling little questions of hers would begin to come, each one opening a new vista of thought. By the time the discussion was finished—which might be at the Blue Moon bar or under the campus maples or watching the water ripple in the old coal pits— we’d have got somewhere. Instead of ending in weary shoulder-shrugging or cynical grousing at the world or getting drunk out of sheer frustration, we’d finish up with a plan—some facts to check, something to write or shape or try.

  And then, people! How would we ever have got close to people without Helen? Without Helen, Old Gus would have stayed an ancient and bleary-eyed dishwasher at Benny’s. But with Helen, Gus became for us what he really was—a figure of romance who had sailed the Seven Seas, who had hunted for gold on the Orinoco with twenty female Indians for porters (because the males were too lazy and proud to hire out to do anything) and who had marched at the head of his Amazon band carrying a newborn baby of one of the women in his generous arms (because the women assured him that a man-child was the only burden a man might carry without dishonor).

  Even Gene was softened in his attitudes. I remember once when two handsome truckdrivers tried to pick up Helen at the Blue Moon. Instantly Gene’s jaw muscles bulged and his eyes went blank and he began to wag his right shoulder—and I got ready for a scene. But Helen said a word here and there, threw in a soft laugh, and began to ask the truckdrivers her questions. In ten minutes we were all at ease and the four of us found out things we’d ne
ver dreamed about dark highways and diesels and their proud, dark- souled pilots (so like Gene in their temperaments).

  But it was on us as individuals that Helen’s influence showed up the biggest. Es’s sculptures acquired an altogether new scope. She dropped her pet mannerisms without a tear and began to take into her work whatever was sound and good. She rapidly developed a style that was classical and yet had in it something that was wholly of the future. Es is getting recognition now and her work is still good, but there was a magic about her “Helenic Period” which she can’t recapture. The magic still lives in the pieces she did at that time-particularly in a nude of Helen that has all the serenity and purpose of the best ancient Egyptian work, and something much more. As we watched that piece take form, as we watched the clay grow into Helen under Es’s hands, we dimly sensed that in some indescribable way Helen was growing into Es at the same time, and Es into Helen. It was such a beautiful, subtle relationship that even Gene couldn’t be jealous.

  At the same time Louis gave over his fickle philosophical flirtations and found the field of inquiry for which he’d always been looking— a blend of semantics and introspective psychology designed to chart the chaotic inner world of human experience. Although his present intellectual tactics lack the brilliance they had when Helen was nudging his mind, he still keeps doggedly at the project, which promises to add a whole new range of words to the vocabulary of psychology and perhaps of the English language.

  Gene wasn’t ripe for creative work, but from being a merely promising student he became a brilliant and very industrious one, rather to the surprise of his professors. Even with the cloud that now overhangs his life and darkens his reputation, he has managed to find worthwhile employment on one of the big nuclear projects.

  As for myself, I really began to write. Enough said.

  We sometimes used to speculate as to the secret of Helen’s effect on us, though we didn’t by any means give her all the credit in those days. We had some sort of theory that Helen was a completely “natural” person, a “noble savage” (from the kitchen), a bridge to the world of proletarian reality. Es once said that Helen couldn’t have had a Freudian childhood, whatever she meant by that. Louis spoke of Helen’s unthinking social courage and Gene of the catalytic effect of beauty.

  Oddly, in these discussions we never referred to that strange, electric experience we’d all had when we first met Helen—that tearing moment when we’d looked back from the doorway. We were always strangely reticent there. And none of us ever voiced the conviction that I’m sure all of us had at times: that our social and psychoanalytic theories weren’t worth a hoot when it came to explaining Helen, that she possessed powers of feeling and mind (mostly concealed) that set her utterly apart from every other inhabitant of the planet Earth, that she was like a being from another, far saner and lovelier world.

  That conviction isn’t unusual, come to think of it. It’s the one every man has about the girl he loves. Which brings me to my own secret explanation of Helen’s effect on me (though not on the others).

  It was simply this. I loved Helen and I knew Helen loved me. And that was quite enough.

  It happened scarcely a month after we’d met. We were staging a little party at Es’s. Since I was the one with the car, I was assigned to pick up Helen at Benny’s when she got through. On the short drive I passed a house that held unpleasant memories for me. A girl had lived there whom I’d been crazy about and who had turned me down. (No, let’s be honest, I turned her down, though I very much wanted her, because of some tragic cowardice, the memory of which always sears me like a hot iron.)

  Helen must have guessed something from my expression, for she said softly, “What’s the matter,

  Larry?” and then, when I ignored the question, “Something about a girl?”

  She was so sympathetic about it that I broke down and told her the whole story, sitting in the parked and lightless car in front of Es’s. I let myself go and lived through the whole thing again, with all its biting shame. When I was finished I looked up from the steering wheel. The streetlight made a pale aureole around Helen’s head and a paler one where the white angora sweater covered her shoulders. The upper part of her face was in darkness, but a bit of light touched her full lips and narrow, almost fennec- or fox-like chin.

  “You poor kid,” she said softly, and the next moment we were kissing each other, and a feeling of utter relief and courage and power was budding deep inside me.

  A bit later she said to me something that even at the time I realized was very wise.

  “Let’s keep this between you and me, Larry,” she said. “Let’s not mention it to the others. Let’s not even hint.” She paused, and then added, a trifle unhappily, “I’m afraid they wouldn’t appreciate it. Sometime,

  I hope—but not quite yet.”

  I knew what she meant. That Gene and Louis and even Es were only human—that is, irrational—hi their jealousies, and that the knowledge that Helen was my girl would have put a damper on the exciting but almost childlike relationship of the five of us. (As the fact of Es’s and Gene’s love would never have done. Es was a rather cold, awkward girl, and Louis and I seldom grudged poor, angry Gene her affection.)

  So when Helen and I dashed in and found the others berating Benny for making Helen work overtime, we agreed that he was an unshaven and heartless louse, and in a little while the party was going strong and we were laughing and talking unconstrainedly. No one could possibly have guessed that a new and very lovely factor had been added to the situation.

  After that evening everything was different for me. I had a girl. Helen was (why not say the trite things, they’re true) my goddess, my worshipper, my slave, my ruler, my inspiration, my comfort, my refuge— oh, I could write books about what she meant to me.

  I guess all my life I will be writing books about that.

  I could write pages describing just one of the beautiful moments we had together. I could drown myself in the bitter ghosts of sensations. Rush of sunlight through her hair. Click of her heels on a brick sidewalk. Light of her presence brightening a mean room. Chase of unearthly expressions across her sleeping face.

  Yet it was on my mind that Helen’s love had the greatest effect. It unfettered my thoughts, gave them passage into a far vaster cosmos.

  One minute I’d be beside Helen, our hands touching lightly in the dark, a shaft of moonlight from the dusty window silvering her hair. The next, my mind would be a billion miles up, hovering like an iridescent insect over the million bright worlds of existence.

  Or I’d be surmounting walls inside my mind—craggy, dire ramparts that have been there since the days of the cave man.

  Or the universe would become a miraculous web, with Time the spider. I couldn’t see all of it—no creature could see a trillionth of it in all eternity—but I would have a sense of it all.

  Sometimes the icy beauty of those moments would become too great, and I’d feel a sudden chill of terror. Then the scene around me would become a nightmare and I’d half expect Helen’s eyes to show a catlike gleam and slit, or her hair to come rustlingly alive, or her arms to writhe bonelessly, or her splendid skin to slough away, revealing some black and antlike form of dread.

  Then the moment would pass and everything would be sheer loveliness again, richer for the fleeting terror.

  My mind is hobbled once more now, but I still know the taste of the inward freedom that Helen’s love brought.

  You might think from this that Helen and I had a lot of times alone together. We hadn’t—we couldn’t have, with the Gang. But we had enough. Helen was clever at arranging things. They never suspected us.

  Lord knows there were tunes I yearned to let the Gang in on our secret. But then I would remember Helen’s warning and see the truth of it.

  Let’s face it. We’re all of us a pretty vain and possessive people. As individuals, we cry for attention.

  We jockey for admiration. We swim or sink according to whether we feel we
’re being worshipped or merely liked. We demand too much of the person we love. We want them to be a neverfailing prop to our ego.

  And then if we’re lonely and happen to see someone else loved, the greedy child wakes, the savage stirs, the frustrated Puritan clenches his teeth. We seethe, we resent, we hate.

  No, I saw that I couldn’t tell the others about Helen and myself. Not Louis. Not even Es. And as for

  Gene, I’m afraid that with his narrow-minded upbringing, he’d have been deeply shocked by what he’d have deduced about our relationship. We were supposed, you know, to be “wild” young people, “bohemians.” Actually we were quite straitlaced—Gene especially, the rest of us almost as much.

  I knew how I would have felt if Helen had happened to become Louis’s or Gene’s girl. That says it.

  To tell the truth, I felt a great deal of admiration for the Gang, because they could do alone what I was only doing with Helen’s love. They were enlarging their minds, becoming creative, working and playing hard—and doing it without my reward. Frankly, I don’t know how I could have managed it myself without Helen’s love. My admiration for Louis, Es, and Gene was touched with a kind of awe.

  And we really were getting places. We had created a new mind-spot on the world, a sprouting-place for thought that wasn’t vain or self-conscious, but concerned wholly with its work and its delights. The Gang was forming itself into a kind of lens for viewing the world, outside and in.

  Any group of people can make themselves into that sort of lens, if they really want to. But somehow they seldom get started. They don’t have the right inspiration.

  We had Helen.

  Always, but mostly in unspoken thoughts, we’d come back to the mystery of how she had managed it. She was mysterious, all right. We’d known her some six months now, and we were as much hi the dark about her background as when we first met her. She wouldn’t tell anything even to me. She’d come from “places.” She was a “drifter.” She liked “people.” She told us all sorts of fascinating incidents, but whether she’d been mixed up in them herself or just heard them at Benny’s (she could have made a Trappist jabber) was uncertain.