The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Reuter Leiber

  He stared at the watery soup and meat shreds in his mess tin. The cellar was cool, and its seats—though built for creatures with four legs and two arms—were comfortable. The purple daylight was pleasantly muted. The noise had gone a little way off, playing cat and mouse. He was alone.

  Of course life had never had any meaning, except for the chillingly sardonic one perceptible to the demons in the nuclear bombs and the silver giants in space who pushed the buttons; and he had no stomach to aspire to that. They’d had ten thousand years to fix things, those giants, and still all they could tell you was go dig yourself a hole.

  It was just that in the old days the possibility of relaxation and petty self-indulgence, against the magnificent sham background of galactic empire, had permitted him to pretend life had a meaning.

  Yet at a time like this, when such an illusion was needful, it ran out on you, jeered at you along with the lesser lies it had nurtured.

  A three-legged creature skipped out of the shadows, halted at a distance, and subtly intimated it would like food. At first he thought it must be some Rigelian tripedal, but then he saw it was an Earth cat lacking a leg. Its movements were grotesque, but efficient, and not without a certain gracefulness. How it could have got to this planet, he found it hard to imagine.

  “But you don’t worry about that—or even about other cats, Three-legs,” he thought bitterly. “You hunt alone. You mate with your own kind, when you can, but then only because it is most agreeable. You don’t set up your own species as a corporate divinity and worship it, and yearn over the light-centuries of its empire, and eat out your heart because of it, and humbly spill your blood at its cosmic altar.

  “Nor are you hoodwinked when the dogs bark about the greatness of humanity under a thousand different moons, or when the dumb cattle sigh from surfeit and gratefully chew their cuds under red, green and purple suns. You accept us as something sometimes helpful. You walk into our space ships as you walked up to our fires. You use us. But when we’re gone, you won’t pine on our graves or starve in the pen. You’ll manage, or try to.”

  The cat mewed and he tossed it a bit of meat which it caught in its teeth, shifting about cleverly on the two good hind legs. But as he watched it daintily nibble (though scrawny with famine), he suddenly saw Kenneth’s face, just as he had last seen it on Alpha Centauri Duo. It seemed very real, projected against the maroon darkness towards the other end of the cellar. The full, tolerant lips lined at the corners, the veiledly appraising eyes, the space-sallow skin were all exactly as they had been when they roomed together at the Sign of the Burnt-Out Jet. But there was a richness and a zest about the face that he had missed before. He did not try to move toward the illusion, though he wanted to. Only looked. Then there came the sound of boots on the floor above, and the cat bounded away, humping its hind quarters quite like a tripedal, and the vision quickly faded. For a long time he sat staring at the spot where it had been, feeling a strangely poignant unhappiness, as if the only worthwhile being in the world had died. Then he started to eat his food with the vague curiosity of a two-year-old, sometimes pausing with the spoon halfway to his mouth.

  It was night and there was a ground mist through which the wine-colored moons showed like two sick eyes, and anything might have been moving in the shadows. He squinted and peered, but it was hard to make out the nature of any object, the landscape was so torn and distorted. Three men came out of the place of underground concealment to the left, joking together in hushed, hollow voices. One whom he knew well (a stocky soldier with big eyes and smirking lips and reddish stubble on his chin) greeted him with a friendly gibe about easy jobs. Then they wormed their way up and started to crawl toward where enemy scouts (six legs or eight?) were supposed to lie. He lost sight of them very quickly. He held his weapon ready, watching for the sight of the enemy.

  Why did he hate the soldiers of the enemy so little? No more than a Martian hunting sand-dragons hates sand-dragons. His relationship with them was limited, almost abstract. How could he hate something so different from himself in form? He could only marvel that it too had intelligence. No, the enemy were merely, unfortunately, dangerous targets. Once he had seen one of them escape death, and it had made him feel happy, and he wanted to wave in a friendly way; even if it could only wriggle a tentacle in return. But as for the men who fought side by side with him, he hated them bitterly, loathed their faces, voices and physical mannerisms. The way this one chewed and that one spat. Their unchanging curses, cliches and jokes. All unendurably magnified, as if his nose were being rubbed in offal. For they were part of the same miserable, lying, self-worshipping galactic swarm as himself.

  He wondered if he had hated the men at the office on Altair Una in the same way. Almost, certainly. He recalled the long smoldering irritations over trifles that had seemed tremendous in the hours between the violin-moans of the time clock. But then there had been the safety valves and shock absorbers that make life tolerable, and also the illusion of purpose.

  But now there was nothing, and everybody knew it.

  They had no right to joke about it and continue the pretense.

  He was shaking with anger. To kill indiscriminately would at least demonstrate his feelings. To focus death on the backs of men charging with inane hysteria. To toss a nuclear fizz-bomb into a dugout where men sought secret escape in dreams and repeated like prayers their rationalizations about galactic empires. Dying at his hand, they might for a moment understand their own vicious hypocrisy.

  From out ahead, one of death’s little mechanisms spoke concisely, rapidly. It seemed like a bugle call only he could hear.

  Ruby moonlight slid suddenly across the grotesquely tortured ground. He raised his weapon and took aim. Its sound pleased him because it was like a soft groan of agony. Then he realized he had fired at the abruptly revealed shadow because it was that of the stocky soldier who had gibed and crawled away.

  The moonlight blacked out as if a curtain had been drawn. His heart pounded. He ground his teeth and grinned. His feelings were fierce, but not yet determinate. He became aware of the smells of the ground and of the chemicals and metals: strong, sharp, interesting smells.

  Then he found himself staring at a whitish patch that never got more than eight inches off the ground. Slowly it approached out of the darkness, like the inquisitive head of a huge ghost worm. It became a face with big eyes and smirking lips, fretted with red stubble. Mechanically he reached out a hand and helped the man down.

  “Were you the one that winged him? That lousy spider would have gotten me for sure. I didn’t see him until he fell on me. I’m all mucked up with his blue slime.”

  This then was the end. Hereafter he would give in to the mob, run with the hounds, die purposelessly like a lemming when the time came. He might even learn to nurse ideals, like dead dolls; dream in chaos. Never again would he aspire to the darker, icy insight that gave life a real, though horrible, meaning. He was a ridiculous little communal animal in a lemming horde racing across the galaxy and he would live like one.

  He saw the small black object falling swiftly through the mist. The stocky soldier did not. There was a deafening blast that slapped the skin. Looking up he saw the stocky soldier still standing there. Without a head. As the body stumbled blindly forward, tripped and fell, he began to laugh in little hissing gusts through his teeth. His lips were drawn back, so that his jaw muscles twitched and pained him.

  He felt contemptuous amusement at the blond soldier. The blond soldier had been to a third-rate nuclear technics school and believed it had been a serious mistake to put him in the infantry. Nevertheless the blond soldier was ambitious and took an unusual interest in the war.

  They stood alone at the crest of a ridge thick with violet and yellow-spotted vines. In the valleys on either side, their units were pushing forward. Trails of dust and tracks of mashed vines extended as far as the eye could see. Various huge engines trompled forward, carrying men, and men ran fussily about, freeing engines that had
met with some stop or hindrance, as if the two were inextricably united in an unimaginable symbiosis. Small machines bearing messengers went swiftly to and fro like centaurs, a superior type of individual. Other machines spied watchfully overhead. It was like some vast, clumsy monster feeling its way, cautiously putting out pseudo-pods, or horns like a snail’s; withdrawing them puzzledly when they touched anything hurtful or strange; but always gathering itself for a new effort. It did not flow, but humped and hedged. Or scuttled. Like an army of Rigelian roaches. Or driver ants of Earth that were so like miniature Martians, with their black-weaponed soldiers, foragers, scouts, butchers, pack carriers.

  And they were truly neither more nor less than ants. He was no more than an epidermal cell in a monster that was dueling with another monster, very careful of its inner organs but careless about its epidermis. There was something comfortingly abstract and impersonal about the idea of being united in such a way with many other men, not because of any shared purpose, but merely because they belonged to the same monster, a monster so large that it could readily do duty for fate and necessity. The fellowship of protoplasm.

  The blond soldier murmured two or three words and for a moment he thought the whole army had spoken to him. Then he understood and .made the necessary adjustment in the instrument they were setting up.

  But those two or three words had plunged him with breath-taking abruptness into the worst sort of inner misery. What was abstract had become personal, and that was bad. To conceive a monster made of men was one thing; to feel the insensate, inescapable prod of a neighboring cell and realize the stifling, close- packed pressure of the whole was another. He lifted his hand to his collar. The very air seemed to convey to his skin the shoving and jostling of distant, invisible individuals. The nudge of the galactic horde.

  They were at the end of the crest now, atop a little hillock, and he stared ahead to where the air was clearer. He felt as ft he were suffocating. His new mood had come as utterly without warning as most of his moods now came, gushing up explosively from some wild, alien, ever expanding dimension within him.

  Then, hi the broad expanse of fantastically clouded sky ahead of him, he saw his friends’ faces again, orderly and side by side but gigantic, like a pantheon of demigods. Just as he had hi the cellar and several times since, only now altogether. The only faces that meant anything hi the cosmos. Black George, with the wide grin that looked, but was not, stupid. Hollow-cheeked Loren, peering up with shy canniness, about to argue. Dark Helen, with her proud, subtle lips. Sallow Kenneth again, with his veiledly appraising eyes. And Albert, and Maurice, and Kate. And others whose features were blurred, heartbreakingly suggesting friends forgot. All transfigured and glowing with warmth and light. As meaningful as symbols, yet holding each within itself the quintessence of individuality.

  He stood stock-still, beginning to tremble, feeling great guilt. How had he neglected and deserted them? His friends, the only ones deserving his loyalty, the only island for him hi the cosmos-choking sea of humanity, the only ones with worth and meaning; compared to which race and creed and humanity were without significance. It was as self-evident and undeniable as a premise hi mathematics. Heretofore he had seen only the masks of reality, the reflections, the countershadows. Now, at a bound, he stood beside the gods in darkness who pulled the wires.

  The vision faded, became part of his mind. He turned, and it was as if he saw the blond soldier for the first time. How had he ever believed that he and the other soldier might have anything hi common? The gulf between them was far, far greater than if they belonged to different species. Why had he ever given two thoughts to such a silly, squinty-eyed, bustling little organism? He never would again. It was all very clear.

  “We’ll get them this time,” the other soldier said with conviction. “We’ve got the stuff now. We’ll show the bugs. Come on.”

  It was wonderful, hysterical, insufferable. Yesterday spiders. Today bugs. Tomorrow worms? The other soldier really believed it was important and noble. Could still pretend there was that kind of meaning and purpose to that sort of slaughter.

  “Come on. Get the beta cycling,” said the other soldier impatiently, nudging him.

  It was all very clear. And he would never lose that clarity. By one action he would cut himself off from the galactic pack and cleave forever to the faces in the sky.

  “Come on,” ordered the other soldier, jerking at him.

  He unsheathed his weapon, touched a button. Silently a dull black spot, not a hole, appeared hi the back of the blond soldier’s head. He hid the body, walked down the other side of the hill, and attached himself to another unit. By morning they were retreating again, the monster badly hurt and automatically resisting dissolution.

  He was an officer now.

  “I don’t like him,” said a soldier. “Of course, they all try to scare you, whether they know it or not. Part of the business. But with him it’s different. I know he doesn’t talk tough, or threaten or act grim. I know he’s pleasant enough when he takes time to notice you. Even sympathetic. But there’s something there I can’t put my finger on. Something cold-blooded. Like he wasn’t even alive—or as if we weren’t. Even when he acts especially decent or thoughtful toward me, I know he doesn’t give a damn. It’s his eyes. I can read meaning in the eyes of a Fomalhautian blindworm. But I can’t read anything in his.”

  The soaring city seemed alien though it had once been home. He liked it the better for that. Civilian clothes felt strange against his skin.

  He whisked briskly along the slidewalk, taking the turns aimlessly when it split at the pedestrian cloverleafs. He looked at the passing faces with frank inquisitiveness, as if he were at a zoo. He just wanted to enjoy the feeling of anonymity for a little while. He knew what he was going to do afterwards. There were his friends, and there were the animals. And the fortunes of his friends were to be advanced.

  Beside the next cloverleaf was a speaker, and a little crowd. There had been a good deal of that sort of stuff since the truce. Curiously he listened, recognized the weakness of the words. They were sloshed with ideals, tainted with unprofitable, poorly selected hatreds. The call to action was tinged by an undercurrent of bitterness that argued inaction would be better. They were civilized words and therefore useless to one who wanted to become an animal trainer on a galactic scale. What a zoo he’d have some day—and every single beast in it advertised as intelligent!

  Other words and phrases began to ooze up into his mind. “Thinkers! Listen to me. cheated of what you deserve, misled by misled men. the galactic runaround. this engineered truce. the creatures who used the war to consolidate their power. The Cosmic Declaration of Servitude. life—to lose. liberty — to obey. and as for the pursuit of happiness—happiness is a light-millennium ahead of all of us. our universal rights. We have thirty armored planetoids orbiting uselessly, three hundred star-ships, three thousand spaceships, and three million space veterans sweating in servile jobs in this system alone! Free Martia! Terra for All! Revenge.”

  These unspoken words, he felt, were the harbingers of leadership. Alexander had done it. Hitler had done it. Smith had done it. Hriv-lath had done it. The Neuron had done it. The Great Centaur had done it. All murderers—and only murderers won. He saw the brilliant light-years of his future stretch ahead, endlessly. He saw no details, but it was all of the same imperial color. Never again would he hesitate. Each moment would decide something. Each of his future actions would drop like a gram of sand from an ancient hour glass, inevitably.

  Profound excitement seized him. The scene around him grew and grew until he seemed at the center of a vast, ominous spellbound crowd that filled the galaxy. The faces of his friends were close, eager and confident. And from a great distance, as if the stars themselves pricked out its pattern on the dark like a new constellation, he seemed to see his own face staring back at him, pale, skulleyed, and insatiably hungry.

  The Big Holiday

  THE WHISTLES blew. A thousand hands swit
ched off pocket radios and wall-size television screens, right in the middle of the Martian newscast. Another 500 all around the town locked the motors of sky scooters and ground buggies. A dozen cash registers rang up lucky last sales and were silent, locked. Two thousand throats breathed a sigh of relief. Two thousand hearts began to warm.

  The whistles blew. Mrs. Pullen slammed a last batch of cookies into the electronic oven, counted to ten, switched it off, wiped her face, and stood there beaming at the fragrant towers of her handiwork—a gray­ haired princess in a cookie castle. Mrs. Goldfarb smiled at her brown and creamflecked woodpiles of blintzes. Mr. Gianelli, his eyes watering with heat and spices, admired his steaming logjams of Italian sausage. Widowed Mr. Tomlinson was contemplating his bowls of hard-boiled eggs when a goddess shot him hi the back with a silver arrow. He turned around and commented, “That runic is a bit daring, pet.” His daughter, new to grown-up life as a pussy willow, waved her plastic bow and said, “I’m going as Diana.” Mr. Tomlinson mused, “Ah, the fleet-footed huntress.”

  The whistles blew. Mr. Jingles, so called by the children for the silver coins he always carried, emptied his pockets of them, added his green money, put it all away in the top drawer of his dresser. Everywhere else hi the town billfolds and purses disappeared. Offices closed. Secretaries sprayed their noses with powder and fluttered into their cloudlike electrosilk coats.

  Mr. Debevois tore a May-something 2077 date-sheet off his desk calendar, made a paper dart of it, and shot it at his lagging stenographer, who was stooping to return a folder of microfilm to a bottom file drawer. Storekeepers took off their aprons and walked out, leaving doors unlocked. Plump Mr. Wilson pressed a button and a sign appeared on the movie-house marquee: NO SHOW TONIGHT. Beardy Mr. Goldfarb shrugged, smiled, put away a sheaf of teleflashed stock reports, unbuttoned a great big drawer and took out a great big parchment scroll. School children tore off across the soft sandy schoolyard and green lawns slippery with sunlight. Down at the little aluminum station the atomic train inched to a stop like a golden caterpillar and the engineer jumped out in his best clothes.