The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  The Secretary of Space frowned. “Now what’s the point in a fool question like that?”

  “You said it came from Opperly’s group?” Jorj asked sharply.

  The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.

  “Who would that be?” Jorj pressed. “The group, I mean.”

  The Secretary of Space shrugged. “Oh, the usual little bunch over at the institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh yes, and young Farquar.”

  “Sounds like Opperly’s getting senile,” Jorj commented coldly. “I’d investigate.”

  The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. “I will. Right away.”

  Sunlight striking through french windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly’s living room was well kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four-by-six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he’d smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.

  The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender—fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.

  Opperly was saying, “So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn’t remember.” He smiled. “They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege.” The smile faded. “Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?” he asked without rancor. “I’ve maintained many times that we shouldn’t truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn’t reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a ‘copter call within twenty minutes of this morning’s meeting at the foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?”

  The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. “Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,” he rapped out. “We know their Maizie is no more than a tea-leaf-reading fake. We’ve traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk.”

  “But we’ve already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,” Opperly interposed quietly. “You know the good it did.”

  Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. “Then it’s got to be done until it takes.”

  Opperly studied the bowl of lilies-of-the-valley by the coffeepot. “I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren’t aware.”

  Farquar scowled. “We’re the ones in the cages.”

  Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers’ bells. “All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I’m not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.” His voice grew especially tranquil. “A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don’t mind. But when times are very, very bad—” A shadow darkened his eyes. “Well, we all know what happened to—” And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the three martyred physicists.

  He went on, “A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they’ll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They’re a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.”

  Farquar clenched his fist. “All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it’s difficult and dangerous?”

  Opperly shook his head. “We’re to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I’m convinced that all my posturings were futile.”

  “Exactly!” Farquar agreed harshly. “You postured. You didn’t act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you’d only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind’s future—”

  “By the time you were born, Willard,” Opperly interrupted dreamily, “Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren’t the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his brief case?” He smiled. “Besides, that’s not the way power is seized. New ideas aren’t useful to the man bargaining for power—his weapons are established facts, or lies.”

  “Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you’d had a little violence in you.”

  “No,” Opperly said.

  “I’ve got violence in me,” Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.

  Opperly looked up from the flowers. “I think you have,” he agreed.

  “But what are we to do?” Farquar demanded. “Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?”

  Opperly mused for a while. “I don’t know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher’s stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.”

  “Now you are justifying the Thinkers!”

  “No, I leave that to history.”

  “And history consists of the actions of men,” Farquar concluded. “I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What’s it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet—and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers’ clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers’ Mind Bomb threat. A brain machine that’s just a cover for Jan Tregarron’s guesswork. Oh yes, and that hogwash of ‘Martian Wisdom.’ All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed—and the Thinkers know it! I’ll bet they’re terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we’re gunning for them. Eventually they’ll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see.”

  “I am thinking again of Hitler,” Opperly interposed quietly. “On his first half-dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover,” he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, “the power of the Thinkers isn’t based on what they’ve got, but on what the world hasn’t got—peace, honor, a good conscience—”

  The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. “Radiogram for you, Willard.” He grinned across the hall at Opperly. “When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?”

  The physicist waved to him. “Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.”

  The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.

  “What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?” Farquar chortled suddenly. “It’s come sooner than I expected. Look at this.”

  He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn’t take it. Instead he asked, “Who’s it from? Tregarron?”

  “No, from Helmuth. There’s a lot of sugar corn about ma
n’s future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they’re going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they’ll need our help.”

  “An invitation?”

  Farquar nodded. “For this afternoon.” He noticed Opperly’s anxious though distant frown. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap-that after the Maelzel question they may figure I’m better rubbed out?”

  The older man shook his head. “I’m not afraid for your life, Willard. That’s yours to risk as you choose. No, I’m worried about other things they might do to you.”

  “What do you mean?” Farquar asked.

  Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. “You’re a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man’s prides and desires.” His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, “Excuse me, Willard, but wasn’t there a girl once? A Miss Arkady—”

  Farquar’s ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.

  “And didn’t she go off with a Thinker?”

  “If girls find me ugly, that’s their business,” Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. “What’s that got to do with this invitation?”

  Opperly didn’t answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, “In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition.”

  Willard snorted. “Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise.”

  “Perhaps,” Opperly agreed. “Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn’t exposed to the temptations of the world.”

  Farquar turned on him. “Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You think I’ll be persuaded to change my aims?” Farquar demanded angrily.

  Opperly shrugged his helplessness. “No, I don’t think you’ll change your aims.”

  Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.

  As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment Jorj Helmuth was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.

  Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.

  Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust—processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.

  Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, “Set sail for Mars!” The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.

  In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.

  A spaceship with direct nuclear drive—and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.

  But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even—his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward—build the true Maizie!

  And then—then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they’d be far ahead. No more deception.

  He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, “Caddy!” He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn’t there.

  Confound the girl! he couldn’t help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she’d sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word—a pet form of her name—that would send her into obedient trance.

  No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a willful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would tram her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.

  Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he’d been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.

  But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn’t his boss, but just the Thinkers’ most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and over-all strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.

  He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two-hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.

  Jan Tregarron had supplemented his shorts with pink coveralls, but he was still drinking beer. He emptied his glass and lifted it a lazy inch. The beautiful girl beside him refilled it without a word and went on stroking his forehead.

  “Caddy,” he said reflectively, without looking at her, “there’s a little job I want you to do. You’re the only one with the proper background. The point is: it will take you away from Jorj for some time.”

  “I’d welcome it,” she said with decision. “I’m getting pretty sick of watching his push-ups and all his other mind and muscle stunts. And that damn somno-learner of his keeps me awake.”

  Tregarron smiled. “I’m afraid Thinkers make pretty sad sweethearts.”

  “Not all of them,” she told him, returning his smile tenderly.

  He chuckled. “It’s about one of those rocket physicists in the list you brought me. A fellow named Willard Farquar.”

  Caddy didn’t say anything, but she stopped stroking his forehead.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You knew him once, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she replied and then added, with surprising feeling, “The big, ugly ape!”

  “Well, he’s an ape whose services we happen to need. I want you to be our contact girl with him.”

  She took her hands away from his forehead. “Look, Jan,” she said, “I wouldn’t like this job.”

  “I thought he was very sweet on you once.”

  “Yes, as he never grew tired of trying to demonstrate to me. The clumsy, overgrown, bumbling baby! The man’s disgusting, Jan. His approach to a woman is a child wanting candy and enraged because Mama won’t produce it on the instant. I don’t mind Jorj—he’s just a pipsqueak and it amuses me to see how he frustrates himself. But Willard is-”

  “—a bit frightening?” Tregarron finished for her.

  “No!”

  “Of course you’re not afraid,” Tregarron purred. “You’re our beautiful, clever Caddy, who can do anything she wants with any man, and without whose—”

  “Look, Jan, this is different—” she began agitatedly.

  “—and without whose services we’d have go
t exactly nowhere. Clever, subtle Caddy, whose most charming attainment in the ever-appreciative eyes of Papa Jan is her ability to handle every man in the neatest way imaginable and without a trace of real feeling. Kitty Kaddy, who-”

  “Very well,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll do it.”

  “Of course you will,” Jan said, drawing her hands back to his forehead. “And you’ll begin right away by getting into your nicest sugar-and-cream war clothes. You and I are going to be the welcoming committee when that ape arrives this afternoon.”

  “But what about Jorj? He’ll want to see Willard.”

  “That’ll be taken care of,” Jan assured her.

  “And what about the other dozen rocket physicists Jorj asked to come?”

  “Don’t worry about them.”

  The President looked inquiringly at his secretary across his littered desk in his home study at White House, Jr. “So Opperly didn’t have any idea how that odd question about Maizie turned up in Section Five?”

  His secretary settled his paunch and shook his head. “Or claimed not to. Perhaps he’s just the absent-minded prof, perhaps, something else. The old feud of the physicists against the Thinkers may be getting hot again. There’ll be further investigation.”

  The President nodded. He obviously had something uncomfortable on his mind. He said uneasily, “Do you think there’s any possibility of it being true?”

  “What?” asked the secretary guardedly.

  “That peculiar hint about Maizie.”

  The secretary said nothing.

  “Mind you, I don’t think there is,” the President went on hurriedly, his face assuming a sorrowful scowl. “I owe a lot to the Thinkers, both as a private person and as a public figure. Lord, a man has to lean on something these days. But just supposing it were true”—he hesitated, as before uttering blasphemy—“that there was a man inside Maizie, what could we do?”

  The secretary said stolidly, “The Thinkers won our last election. They chased the Commies out of Iran. We brought them into the Inner Cabinet. We’ve showered them with public funds.” He paused. “We couldn’t do a damn thing.”