The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  Louis went off to the bar. Es followed him. I went to the far end myself, under the writhing television screen, and ordered a double scotch.

  Beyond the dozen intervening pairs of shoulders, I could see that Es was trying to act shameless. She was whispering things to Louis. At the same time, and even more awkwardly, she was flirting with one of the other men. Every once in a while she would laugh shrilly, mirthlessly.

  Helen didn’t move. She just sat at the table, looking down, the half smile fixed on her lips. Once Gus approached her, but she shook her head.

  I ordered another double scotch. Suddenly my mind began to work furiously on three levels.

  On the first I was loathing Helen. I was seeing that all she’d done for us, all the mind-spot, all the house of creativity we’d raised together, had been based on a lie. Helen was unutterably cheap, common.

  Mostly, on that level, I was grieving for the terrible wrong I felt she’d done me.

  The second level was entirely different. There an icy spider had entered my mind from realms undreamt. There sheer supernatural terror reigned. For there I was adding up all the little hints of strangeness we’d had about Helen. The Stranger’s words had touched it off and now a thousand details began to drop into place: the coincidence of her arrival with the flying disk, rural monster, and hypnotism scare; her interest in people, like that of a student from a far land; the impression she gave of possessing concealed powers; her pains never to say anything definite, as if she were on guard against imparting some forbidden knowledge; her long hikes into the country; her aversion for the big and yet seldom-visited coal pit (big and deep enough to float a liner or hide a submarine); above all, that impression of unearthliness she’d at times given us all, even when we were most under her spell.

  And now this matter of a ship sailing at midnight. From the Great Plains.

  What sort of ship?

  On that level my mind shrank from facing the obvious result of its labor. It was too frighteningly incredible, too far from the world of the Blue Moon and Benny’s and cheap little waitresses.

  The third level was far mistier, but it was there. At least I tell myself it was there. On this third level I was beginning to see Helen in a better light and the rest of us in a worse. I was beginning to see the lovelessness behind our idea of love—and the faithfulness, to the best in us, behind Helen’s faithlessness. I was beginning to see how hateful, how like spoiled children, we’d been acting.

  Of course, maybe there wasn’t any third level in my mind at all. Maybe that only came afterwards. Maybe I’m just trying to flatter myself that I was a little more discerning, a little “bigger” than the others.

  Yet I like to think that I turned away from the bar and took a couple of steps toward Helen, that it was only those “second level” fears that slowed me so that I’d only taken those two faltering steps (if I took them) before—

  Before Gene walked in.

  I remember the clock said eleven thirty.

  Gene’s face was dead white, and knobby with tension.

  His hand was in his pocket.

  He never looked at anyone but Helen. They might have been alone. He wavered—or trembled. Then a terrible spasm of energy stiffened him. He started toward the table.

  Helen got up and walked toward him, her arms outstretched. In her half smile were all the compassion and fatalism—and love—I can imagine there being in the universe.

  Gene pulled a gun out of his pocket and shot Helen six times. Four times in the body, twice in the head.

  She hung for a moment, then pitched forward into the blue smoke. It puffed away from her to either side and we saw her lying on her face, one of her outstretched hands touching Gene’s shoe.

  Then, before a woman could scream, before Gus and the other chap could jump the bar, the outside door of the Blue Moon opened and the Stranger came in. After that none of us could have moved or spoken. We cringed from his eyes like guilty dogs.

  It wasn’t that he looked anger at us, or hate, or even contempt That would have been much easier to bear.

  No, even as the Stranger passed Gene—Gene, pistol dangling from two fingers, looking down in dumb horror, edging his toe back by terrified inches from Helen’s dead hand—even as the Stranger sent Gene a glance, it was the glance a man might give a bull that has gored a child, a pet ape that has torn up his mistress in some inscrutable and pettish animal rage.

  And as, without a word, the Stranger picked Helen up in his arms, and carried her silently through the thinning blue smoke into the street, his face bore that same look of tragic regret, of serene acceptance.

  That’s almost all there is to my story. Gene was arrested, of course, but it’s not easy to convict a man of murder of a woman without real identity.

  For Helen’s body was never found. Neither was the Stranger.

  Eventually Gene was released and, as I’ve said, is making a life for himself, despite the cloud over his reputation.

  We see him now and then, and try to console him, tell him it might as easily have been Es or Louis or I, that we were all blind, selfish fools together.

  And we’ve each of us got back to our work. The sculptures, the word-studies, the novels, the nuclear notions are not nearly as brilliant as when Helen was with us. But we keep turning them out. We tell ourselves Helen would like that.

  And our minds all work now at the third level—but only by fits and starts, fighting the jungle blindness and selfishness that are closing in again. Still, at our best, we understand Helen and what Helen was trying to do, what she was trying to bring the world even if the world wasn’t ready for it. We glimpse that strange passion that made her sacrifice all the stars for four miserable blind-worms.

  But mostly we grieve for Helen, together and alone. We know there won’t be another Helen for a hundred thousand years, if then. We know that she’s gone a lot farther than the dozens or thousands of light-years her body’s been taken for burial. We look at Es’s statue of Helen, we read one or two of my poems to her. We remember, our minds come half alive and are tortured by the thought of what they might have become if we’d kept Helen. We picture her again sitting in the shadows of Es’s studio, or sunning herself on the grassy banks after a swim, or smiling at us at Benny’s. And we grieve.

  For we know you get only one chance at someone like Helen.

  We know that because, half an hour after the Stranger carried Helen’s body from the Blue Moon, a great meteor went flaming and roaring across the countryside (some say up from the countryside and out toward the stars) and the next day it was discovered that the waters of the coal pit Helen wouldn’t swim in, had been splashed, as if by the downward blow of a giant’s fist, across the fields for a thousand yards.

  The Enchanted Forest

  THE DARKNESS was fusty as Formalhautian Aa leaves, acrid as a Rigelian brush fire, and it still shook faintly, like one of the dancing houses of the Wild Ones. It was filled with a petulant, low humming, so like that of a wounded Earth-wasp.

  Machinery whirred limpingly, briefly. An oval door opened in the darkness. Soft green light filtered in—and the unique scent, aromatic in this case yet with a grassy sourness, of a new planet.

  The green was imparted to the light by the thorny boughs or creepers crisscrossing the doorway. To eyes dreary from deep sub-space the oval of interlaced, wrist-thick tendrils was a throat-lumping sight.

  A human hand moved delicately from the darkness toward the green barrier. The finger-long, translucent thorns quivered, curved back ever so slowly, then struck—a hairbreadth short, for the hand had stopped.

  The hand did not withdraw, but lingered just in range, caressing danger. A sharp gay laugh etched itself against the woundedly-humming dark.

  Have to dust those devilish little green daggers to get out of the wreck, Elven thought. Lucky they were here though. The thorn forest’s cushioning-effect may have been the straw that saved the spaceboats back—or at least mine.

  Then Elven stiffened
. The humming behind him shaped itself into fault English speech altered by centuries of slurring, but still essentially the same.

  “You fly fast, Elven.”

  “Faster than any of your hunters,” Elven agreed softly without looking around, and added, “FTL—meaning Faster Than Light.”

  “You fly far, Elven. Tens of lightyears,” the wounded voice continued.

  “Scores,” Elven corrected.

  “Yet I speak to you, Elven.”

  “But you don’t know where I am. I came on a blind reach through deep sub-space. And your FTL radio can take no fix. You are shouting at infinity, Fedris.”

  “And fly you ever so fast and far, Elven,” the wounded voice persisted, “you must finally go to ground, and then we will search you out.”

  Again Elven laughed gayly. His eyes were still on the green doorway. “You will search me out! Where will you search me out, Fedris? On which side of the million planets of the sos? On which of the hundred million planets not of the sos?”

  The wounded voice grew weaker. “Your home planet is dead, Elven. Of all the Wild Ones, only you slipped through our cordon.”

  This time Elven did not comment vocally. He felt at his throat and carefully took from a gleaming locket there a tiny white sphere no bigger than a lady beetle. Holding it treasuringly in his cupped palm, he studied it with a brooding mockery. Then, still handling it as if it were an awesome object, he replaced it in the locket.

  The wounded voice had sunk to a ghostly whisper.

  “You are alone, Elven. Alone with the mystery and terror of the universe. The unknown will find you, Elven, even before we do. Time and space and fate will all conspire against you. Chance itself will-”

  The spectral FTL-radio voice died as the residual power in the wrecked machinery exhausted itself utterly. Silence filled the broken gut of the spaceboat.

  Silence that was gayly shattered when Elven laughed a last time. Fedris the Psychologist! Fedris the Fool! Did Fedris think to sap his nerve with witch-doctor threats and the power of suggestion? As if a man—or woman—of the Wild Ones could ever be brought to believe in the supernatural!

  Not that there wasn’t an unearthliness loose in the universe, Elven reminded himself somberly—an unearthly beauty born of danger and ultimate self-expression. But only the Wild Ones knew that unearthliness. It could never be known to the poor tame hordes of the sos, who would always revere safety and timidity as most members of the human sos—or society—have revered them—and hate all lovers of beauty and danger.

  Just as they had hated the Wild Ones and so destroyed them.

  All save one.

  One, had Fedris said? Elven smiled cryptically, touched the locket at his neck, and leaped lightly to his feet.

  A short time later he had what he needed from the wreck.

  “And now, Fedris,” he murmured, “I have a work of creation to perform.” He smiled. “Or should I say recreation?”

  He directed at the green doorway the blunt muzzle of a dustgun. There was no sound or flash, but the green boughs shook, blackened —the thorns vanishing—and turned to a drifting powder fine and dark as the ashes carpeting Earth’s Moon. Elven sprang to the doorway and for a moment he was poised there, yellow-haired, cool-lipped, laughing-eyed, handsome as a young god—or adolescent devil—hi his black tunic embroidered with platinum. Then he leaned out and directed the dustgun’s ultrasonic beam downward until he had cleared a patch of ground in the thorn forest. When this moment’s work was over, he dropped lightly down, the fine dust purring up to his knees at the impact

  Elven snapped off his dustgun, flirted sweat from his face, laughed at his growing exasperation, and looked around at the thorn forest. It had not changed an iota in the miles he’d made. Just the glassy thorns and the lance-shaped leaves and the boughs rising from the bare, reddish earth. Not another planet to be seen. Nor had he caught the tiniest glimpse of moving life, large or small—save the thorns themselves, which “noticed” him whenever he came too close. As an experiment he’d let a baby one prick him and it had stung abominably.

  Such an environment! What did it suggest, anyhow? Cultivation? Or a plant that permeated its environs with poison, as Earth’s redwood its woody body. He grinned at the chill that flashed along his spine.

  And, if there were no animal life, what the devil were the thorns for?

  A ridiculous forest! In its simplicity suggesting the enchanted forests of ancient Earthly fairy tales. That idea should please witch doctor Fedris!

  If only he had some notion of the general location of the planet he was on, he might be able to make better guesses about its other life forms. Life spores did drift about in space, so that solar systems and even star regions tended to have biological similarities. But he’d come too fast and too curiously, too fast even to see stars, in the Wild Ones’ fastest and most curious boat, to know where he was.

  Or for Fedris to know where he was, he reminded himself.

  Or for any deep-space approach-warning system, if there were one on this planet, to have spotted his arrival. For that matter he hadn’t foreseen his arrival himself. There had been just the dip up from sub-space, the sinister black confetti of the meteorite swarm, the collision, the wrecked spaceboat’s desperate fall, clutching at the nearest planet.

  He should be able to judge his location when night came and he could see the stars. That is, if night ever came on this planet. Or if that high fog ever dispersed.

  He consulted his compass. The needle of the primitive but useful instrument held true. At least this planet had magnetic poles.

  And it probably had night and day, to support vegetable life and such a balmy temperature.

  Once he got out of this forest, he’d be able to plan. Just give him cities! One city!

  He tucked the compass in his tunic, patting the locket at his neck in a strangely affectionate, almost reverent way.

  He looked at the laced boughs ahead. Yes, it was exactly like those fairy forests that cost fairy-book knights so much hackwork with their two-handed swords.

  Easier with a dustgun—and he had scores of miles of cleared path in his store of ultrasonic refills.

  He glanced back at the slightly curving tunnel he’d made.

  Through the salty ashes on its floor, wicked green shoots were already rising.

  He snapped on the duster.

  The boughs were so thick at its edge that the clearing took Elven by surprise. One moment he was watching a tangled green mat blacken under the duster’s invisible beam. The next, he had stepped out—not into fairyland, but into the sort of place where fairy tales were first told.

  The clearing was about a half mile in diameter. Round it the thorn forest made a circle. A little stream bubbled out of the poisonous greenery a hundred paces to his right and crossed the clearing through a shallow valley. Beyond the stream rose a small hill.

  On the hillside was a ragged cluster of gray buildings. From one of them rose a pencil of smoke. Outside were a couple of carts and some primitive agricultural implements.

  Save for the space occupied by the buildings, the valley was under intensive cultivation. The hill was planted at regular intervals with small trees bearing clusters of red and yellow fruit. Elsewhere were rows of bushy plants and fields of grain rippling in the breeze. All vegetation, however, seemed to stop about a yard from the thorn forest.

  There was a mournful lowing. Around the hillside came a half dozen cattle. A man in a plain tunic was leisurely driving them toward the buildings. A tiny animal, perhaps a cat, came out of the building with the smoke and walked with the cattle, rubbing against their legs. A young woman came to the door after the cat and stood watching with folded arms.

  Elven drank in the atmosphere of peace and rich earth, feeling like a man in an ancient room. Such idyllic scenes as this must have been Earth’s in olden times. He felt his taut muscles relaxing.

  A second young woman stepped out of a copse of trees just ahead and stood facing him,
wide-eyed. She was dressed in a greenish tunic of softened, spun, and woven vegetable fibers. Elven sensed in her a certain charm, half sophisticated, half primitive. She was like one of the girls of the Wild Ones in a rustic play suit. But her face was that of an awestruck child.

  He walked toward her through the rustling grain. She dropped to her knees.

  “You… you—” she murmured with difficulty. Then, more swiftly, in perfect English speech, “Do not harm me, lord. Accept my reverence.”

  “I will not harm you, if you answer my questions well,” Elven replied, accepting the advantage in status he seemed to have been given. “What place is this?”

  “It is the Place,” she replied simply.

  “Yes, but what place?”

  “It is the Place,” she repeated quakingly. “There are no others.”

  “Then where did I come from?” he asked.

  Her eyes widened a little with terror. “I do not know.” She was redhaired and really quite beautiful.

  Elven frowned. “What planet is this?”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “What is a planet?”

  Perhaps there were going to be language difficulties after all, Elven thought. “What sun?” he asked.

  “What is sun?”

  He pointed upward impatiently. “Doesn’t that stuff ever go away?”

  “You mean,” she faltered fearfully, “does the sky ever go away?”

  “The sky is always the same?”

  “Sometimes it brightens. Now comes night.”

  “How far to the end of the thorn forest?”

  “I do not understand.” Then her gaze slipped beyond him, to the ragged doorway made by his duster. Her look of awe was intensified, became touched with horror. “You have conquered the poison needles,” she whispered. Then she abased herself until her loose, red hair touched the russet shoots of the grain. “Do not hurt me, all-powerful one,” she gasped.

  “I cannot promise that,” Elven told her curtly. “What is your name?”

  “Sefora,” she whispered.