The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  The voice trailed off. Carrsbury shut his eyes. How long, he asked himself, how long? He realized with dull surprise that in the last hour people like Phy, endured for ten years, had become unutterably weary to him. For the moment even the thought of the conference over which he would soon be presiding, the conference that was to usher in a sane world, failed to stir him. Reaction to success? To the end of a ten years’ tension?

  “Do you know how many floors there are in this building?”

  Carrsbury was not immediately conscious of the new note in Phy’s voice, but he reacted to it.

  “One hundred,” he replied promptly.

  “Then,” asked Phy, “just where are we?”

  Carrsbury opened his eyes to the darkness. One hundred twenty-seven, blinked the floor numeral. One hundred twenty-eight. One hundred twenty-nine.

  Something cold dragged at Carrsbury’s stomach, pulled at his brain. He felt as if his mind were being slowly and irresistibly twisted. He thought of hidden dimensions, of unsuspected holes in space. Something remembered from elementary physics danced through his thoughts: If it were possible for an elevator to keep moving upward with uniform acceleration, no one inside an elevator could determine whether the effects they were experiencing were due to acceleration or to gravity—whether the elevator were standing motionless on some planet or shooting up at everincreasing velocity through free space.

  One hundred forty-one. One hundred forty-two.

  “Or as if you were rising through consciousness into an unsuspected realm of mentality lying above,” suggested Phy in his new voice, with its hint of gentle laughter.

  One hundred forty-six. One hundred forty-seven. It was slowing now. One hundred forty-nine. One hundred fifty. It had stopped.

  This was some trick. The thought was like cold water in Carrsbury’s face. Some cunning childish trick of Phy’s. An easy thing to hocus the numerals. Carrsbury groped irascibly about in the darkness, encountered the slick surface of a holster, Hartman’s gaunt frame.

  “Get ready for a surprise,” Phy warned from close at his elbow.

  As Carrsbury turned and grabbed, bright sunlight drenched him, followed by a griping, heartstopping spasm of vertigo.

  He, Hartman, and Phy, along with a few insubstantial bits of furnishings and controls, were standing in the air fifty stories above the hundred-story summit of World Managerial Center.

  For a moment he grabbed frantically at nothing. Then he realized they were not falling and his eyes began to trace the hint of walls and ceiling and floor and, immediately below them, the ghost of a shaft.

  Phy nodded. “That’s all there is to it,” he assured Carrsbury casually. “Just another of those charmingly odd modem notions against which you have legislated so persistently—like our incomplete staircases and roads to nowhere. The Buildings and Grounds Committee decided to extend the range of the elevator for sightseeing purposes. The shaft was made air-transparent to avoid spoiling the form of the original building and to improve the view. This was achieved so satisfactorily that an electronic warning system had to be installed for the safety of passing airjets and other craft. Treating the surfaces of the cage like windows was an obvious detail.”

  He paused and looked quizzically at Carrsbury. “All very simple,” he observed, “but don’t you find a kind of symbolism in it? For ten years now you’ve been spending most of your life in that building below. Every day you’ve used this elevator. But not once have you dreamed of these fifty extra stories. Don’t you think that something of the same sort may be true of your observations of other aspects of contemporary social life?”

  Carrsbury gaped at him stupidly.

  Phy turned to watch the growing speck of an approaching aircraft. “You might look at it too,” he remarked to Carrsbury, “for it’s going to transport you to a far happier, more restful life.”

  Carrsbury parted his lips, wet them. “But—” he said, unsteadily. “But-”

  Phy smiled. “That’s right, I didn’t finish my explanation. Well, you might have gone on being World manager all your life, in the isolation of your office and your miles of taped official reports and your occasional confabs with me and the others. Except for your Institute of Political Leadership and your Ten-Year-Plan. That upset things. Of course, we were as much interested in it as we were in you. It had definite possibilities. We hoped it would work out. We would have been glad to retire from office if it had. But, most fortunately, it didn’t. And that sort of ended the whole experiment.”

  He caught the downward direction of Carrsbury’s gaze.

  “No,” he said, “I’m afraid your pupils aren’t waiting for you in the conference chamber on the hundredth story. I’m afraid they’re still in the Institute.” His voice became gently sympathetic. “And I’m afraid that it’s become… well… a somewhat different sort of institute.”

  Carrsbury stood very still, swaying a little. Gradually his thoughts and his will power were emerging from the waking nightmare that had paralyzed them. The cunning of the insane—he had neglected that trenchant warning. In the very moment of victory-No! He had forgotten Hartman! This was the very emergency for which that counterstroke had been prepared.

  He glanced sideways at the chief member of his secret police. The black giant, unconcerned by their strange position, was glaring fixedly at Phy as if at some evil magician from whom any malign impossibility could be expected.

  Now Hartman became aware of Carrsbury’s gaze. He divined his thought.

  He drew his dark weapon from its holster, pointed it unwaveringly at Phy.

  His black-bearded lips curled. From them came a hissing sound. Then, in a loud voice, he cried, “You’re dead, Phy! I disintegrated you.”

  Phy reached over and took the weapon from his hand.

  “That’s another respect in which you completely miscalculated the modern temperament,” he remarked to Carrsbury, a shade argumentatively. “All of us have certain subjects on which we’re a trifle unrealistic. That’s only human nature. Hartman’s was his suspiciousness—a weakness for ideas involving plots and persecutions. You gave him the worst sort of job—one that catered to and encouraged his weaknesses. In a very short time he became hopelessly unrealistic. Why for years he’s never realized that he’s been carrying a dummy pistol.”

  He passed it to Carrsbury for inspection.

  “But,” he added, “give him the proper job and he’d function well enough—say something in creation or exploration. Fitting the man to the job is an art with infinite possibilities. That’s why we had Morgenstern in Finance—to keep credit fluctuating in a safe, predictable rhythm. That’s why a euphoric is made manager of Extraterrestial Research—to keep it booming. Why a catatonic is given Cultural Advancement—to keep it from tripping on its face in its haste to get ahead.”

  He turned away. Dully, Carrsbury observed that the aircraft was hovering close to the cage and sidling slowly in.

  “But in that case why—” he began stupidly.

  “Why were you made World manager?” Phy finished easily. “Isn’t that fairly obvious? Haven’t I told you several times that you did a lot of good, indirectly? You interested us, don’t you see? In fact, you were practically unique. As you know, it’s our cardinal principle to let every individual express himself as he wants to. In your case, that involved letting you become World manager. Taken all in all it worked out very well. Everyone had a good time, a number of constructive regulations were promulgated, we learned a lot—oh, we didn’t get everything we hoped for, but one never does. Unfortunately, in the end, we were forced to discontinue the experiment.”

  The aircraft had made contact.

  “You understand, of course, why that was necessary?” Phy continued hurriedly, as he urged Carrsbury toward the opening port. “I’m sure you must. It all comes down to a question of sanity. What is sanity—now, in the twentieth century, any time? Adherence to a norm. Conformity to certain basic conventions underlying all human conduct. In our age, de
parture from the norm has become the norm. Inability to conform has become the standard of conformity. That’s quite clear, isn’t it? And it enables you to understand, doesn’t it, your own case and that of your protégés? Over a long period of years you persisted in adhering to a norm, in conforming to certain basic conventions. You were completely unable to adapt yourself to the society around you. You could only pretend—and your protégés wouldn’t have been able to do even that. Despite your many engaging personal characteristics, there was obviously only one course of action open to us.”

  In the port Carrsbury turned. He had found his voice at last. It was hoarse, ragged. “You mean that all these years you’ve just been humoring me?”

  The port was closing. Phy did not answer the question.

  As the aircraft edged out, he waved farewell with the blob of green gasoid.

  “It’ll be very pleasant where you’re going,” he shouted encouragingly. “Comfortable quarters, adequate facilities for exercise, and a complete library of twentieth century literature to while away your time.”

  He watched Carrsbury’s rigid face, staring whitely from the vision port, until the aircraf’t had diminished to a speck.

  Then he turned away, looked at his hands, noticed the gasoid, tossed it out the open door of the cage, studied its flight for a few moments, then flicked the downbeam.

  “I’m glad to see the last of that fellow,” he muttered, more to himself than to Hartman, as they plummeted toward the roof. “He was beginning to have a very disturbing influence on me. In fact, I was beginning to fear for my”—his expression became suddenly vacuous —“sanity.”

  Wanted-An Enemy

  THE bright stars of Mars made a glittering roof for a fantastic tableau. A being equipped with retinal vision would have seen an Earthman dressed in the familiar coat and trousers of the twentieth century standing on a boulder that put him a few feet above the rusty sand. His face was bony and puritanic. His eyes gleamed wildly from deep sockets. Occasionally his long hair flopped across them. His lips worked vociferously, showing big yellowed teeth, and there was a cloud of blown spittle in front of them, for he was making a speech —in the English language. He so closely resembled an old-style soapbox orator that one looked around for the lamp-post, the dull-faced listeners overflowing the curb, and the strolling cop.

  But the puzzling globe of soft radiance surrounding Mr. Whitlow struck highlights from enamel-black shells and jointed legs a little resembling those of an ant under a microscope. Each individual in the crowd consisted of a yard-long oval body lacking a separate head or any sensory or other orifices in its gleaming black surface except for a small mouth that worked like a sliding door and kept opening and closing at regular intervals. To this body were attached eight of the jointed legs, the inner pairs showing highly manipulative end-organs.

  These creatures were ranged in a circle around Mr. Whitlow’s boulder. Facing him was one who crouched a little apart from the rest, on a smaller boulder. Flanking this one, were two whose faintly silvered shells suggested weathering and, therefore, age.

  Beyond them—black desert to a horizon dimmed only by the blotting out of the star fields.

  Low in the heavens gleamed sky-blue Earth, now Mars’ evening star, riding close to the meager crescent of Phobos.

  To the Martian coleopteroids this scene presented itself in a very different fashion, since they depended on perception rather than any elaborate sensory set-up. Their internal brains were directly conscious of everything within a radius of about fifty yards. For them the blue earthshine was a diffuse photonic cloud just above the threshold of perception, similar to but distinct from the photonic clouds of the starlight and faint moonshine; they could perceive no image of Earth unless they used lenses to create such an image within their perceptive range. They were conscious of the ground beneath them as a sandy hemisphere tunneled through by various wrigglers and the centipedelike burrowers. They were conscious of each other’s armored, neatly-compartmented bodies, and each other’s thoughts. But chiefly their attention was focused on that squidgy, uninsulated, wasteful jumble of organs that thought of itself as Mr. Whitlow—an astounding moist suppet of life on dry, miserly Mars.

  The physiology of the coleopteroids was typical of a depleted-planet economy. Their shells were double; the space between could be evacuated at night to conserve heat, and flooded by day to absorb it. Their lungs were really oxygen accumulators. They inhaled the rarefied atmosphere about one hundred times for every exhalation, the double-valve mouth permitting the building up of high internal pressure. They had one hundred percent utilization of inhaled oxygen, and exhaled pure carbon dioxide freighted with other respiratory excretions. Occasional whiffs of this exceedingly bad breath made Mr. Whitlow wrinkle his flaring nostrils.

  Just what permitted Mr. Whitlow to go on functioning, even speechifying, in the chill oxygen dearth was by no means so obvious. It constituted as puzzling a question as the source of the soft glow that bathed him.

  Communication between him and his audience was purely telepathic. He was speaking vocally at the request of the coleopteroids, because like most non-telepaths he could best organize and clarify his thoughts while talking. His voice died out abruptly in the thin air. It sounded like a phonograph needle scratching along without amplification, and intensified the eerie ludicrousness of his violent gestures and facial contortions.

  “And so,” Whitlow concluded wheezily, brushing the long hair from his forehead, “I come back to my original proposal: Will you attack Earth?”

  “And we, Mr. Whitlow,” thought the Chief Coleopteroid, “come back to our original question, which you still have not answered: Why should we?”

  Mr. Whitlow made a grimace of frayed patience. “As I have told you several times, I cannot make a fuller explanation. But I assure you of my good faith. I will do my best to provide transportation for you, and facilitate the thing in every way. Understand, it need only be a token invasion. After a short time you can retire to Mars with your spoils. Surely you cannot afford to pass up this opportunity.”

  “Mr. Whitlow,” replied the Chief Coleopteroid with a humor as poisonously dry as his planet, “I cannot read your thoughts unless you vocalize them. They are too confused. But I can sense your biases. You are laboring under a serious misconception as to our psychology. Evidently it is customary in your world to think of alien intelligent beings as evil monsters, whose only desire is to ravage, destroy, tyrannize, and inflict unspeakable cruelties on creatures less advanced than themselves. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are an ancient and unemotional race. We have outgrown the passions and vanities—even the ambitions—of our youth. We undertake no projects except for sound and sufficient reason.”

  “But if that’s the case, surely you can see the practical advantages of my proposal. At little or no risk to yourselves, you will acquire valuable loot.”

  The Chief Coleopteroid settled back on his boulder, and his thoughts did the same. “Mr. Whitlow, let me remind you that we have never gone to war lightly. During the whole course of our history, our only intelligent enemies have been the molluscoids of the tideless seas of Venus. In the springtide of their culture they came conquesting in their water-filled spaceships, and we fought several long and bitter wars. But eventually they attained racial maturity and a certain dispassionate wisdom, though not equivalent to our own. A perpetual truce was declared, on condition that each party stick to its own planet and attempt no more forays. For ages we have abided by that truce, living in mutual isolation. So you can see, Mr. Whitlow, that we would be anything but inclined to accept such a rash and mysterious proposal as yours.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” interjected the Senior Coleopteroid on the Chiefs right. His thoughts flicked out subtly toward Whitlow. “You seem, Earthling, to possess powers that are perhaps even in excess of our own. Your arrival on Mars without any perceptible means of transport and your ability to endure its rigors without any obvious insulation, ar
e sufficient proofs. From what you tell us, the other inhabitants of your planet possess no such powers. Why don’t you attack them by yourself, like the solitary armored poison-worm? Why do you need our aid?”

  “My friend,” said Mr. Whitlow solemnly, bending forward and fixing his gaze on the silvery-shelled elder, “I abhor war as the foulest evil, and active participation in it as the greatest crime. Nonetheless, I would sacrifice myself as you suggest, could I attain my ends that way. Unfortunately I cannot. It would not have the psychological effect I desire. Moreover”—he paused embarrassedly—“I might as well confess that I am not wholly master of my powers. I don’t understand them. The workings of an inscrutable providence have put into my hands a device that is probably the handiwork of creatures vastly more intelligent than any in this solar system, perhaps even this cosmos. It enables me to cross space and time. It protects me from danger. It provides me with warmth and illumination. It concentrates your Martian atmosphere in a sphere around me, so that I can breathe normally. But as for using it in any larger way—I’d be mortally afraid of its getting out of control. My one small experiment was disastrous. I wouldn’t dare.”

  The Senior Coleopteroid shot a guarded aside to the Chief. “Shall I try to hypnotize his disordered mind and get this device from him?”

  “Do so.”

  “Very well, though I’m afraid the device will protect his mind as well as his body. Still, it’s worth the chance.”

  “Mr. Whitlow,” thought the Chief abruptly, “it is time we got down to cases. Every word you say makes your proposal sound more irrational, and your own motives more unintelligible. If you expect us to take any serious interest, you must give us a clear answer to one question: Why do you want us to attack Earth?”

  Whitlow twisted. “But that’s the one question I don’t want to answer.”

  “Well, put it this way then,” continued the Chief patiently. “What personal advantage do you expect to gain from our attack?”