The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  The car stopped at a bar and Slickie slid out. For a moment his proud profile was silhouetted against the smoky glow. Then he was inside. I threw away the costume jewelry and climbed over the folded top and popped down on the leather-upholstered seat, scarcely a kilogram lighter than when I’d first sat there.

  The minutes dragged. To pass them, I mentally reviewed the thousand-and-some basic types of mutual affection on the million-plus planets, not forgetting the one and only basic type of love.

  There was a burst of juke-box jazz. Footsteps tracked from the bar toward the convertible. I leaned back comfortably with my silver-filmed milk glands dramatically highlighted.

  “Hi, Slickie,” I called, making my voice sweet and soft to cushion the shock.

  Nevertheless it was a considerable one. For all of ten seconds he stood there, canted forward a little, like a wooden Indian that’s just been nudged from behind and is about to topple.

  Then with a naive ingenuity that rather touched me, he asked huskily, “Hey, have you got a twin sister?”

  “Could be,” I said with a shrug that jogged my milk glands deliciously.

  “Well, what are you doing in my car?”

  “Waiting for you,” I told him simply.

  He considered that as he slowly and carefully walked around the car and got behind the wheel, never taking his eyes off me. I nudged him in my usual manner. He jerked away.

  “What are you up to?” he inquired suspiciously.

  “Why are you surprised, Slickie?” I countered innocently. ‘I’ve heard this sort of thing happens to you all the time.“

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Girls turning up in your car, your bar, your bedroom—everywhere.”

  “Where’d you hear it?”

  “I read it in your Spike Mallet books.”

  “Oh,” he said, somewhat mollified. But then his suspicion came back. “But what are you really up to?” he demanded.

  “Slickie,” I assured him with complete sincerity, bugging my beautiful eyes, “I just love you.”

  This statement awakened in him an irritation so great that it overrode his uneasiness about me, for he cuffed me in the face—so suddenly that I almost forgot and changed it back to my top tentacle.

  “I make the advances around here, Babe,” he asserted harshly.

  Completely under control again, I welled a tiny trickle of blood out of the left-hand corner of my gorgeous mouth. “Anything you say, Slickie, dear,” I assented submissively and cuddled up against him in a prim, girlish way to which he could hardly take exception.

  But I must have bothered or at least puzzled him, for he drove slowly, his dark-eaved eyes following an invisible tennis ball that bounded between me and the street ahead. Abruptly the eaves lifted and he smiled.

  “Look, I just got an idea for a story,” he said. “There’s this girl from Galaxy Center—” and he whipped around to watch my reactions, but I didn’t blink.

  He continued, “I mean, she’s sort of from the center of the galaxy, where everything’s radioactive. Now there’s this guy that’s got her up in his attic.” His face grew deeply thoughtful. “She’s the most beautiful girl in the universe and he loves her like crazy, but she’s all streaming with hard radiations and it’ll kill him if he touches her.”

  “Yes, Slickie—and then?” I prompted after the car had dreamed its way for several blocks between high buildings.

  He looked at me sharply. “That’s all. Don’t you get it?”

  “Yes, Slickie,” I assured him soothingly. My statement seemed to satisfy him, but he was still edgy.

  He stopped the car in front of an apartment hotel that thrust toward the stars with a dark presumptuousness. He got out on the street side and walked around the rear end and suddenly stopped. I followed him. He was studying the gray bumper and the patch of raw sheet metal off which I’d used the paint. He looked around at me where I stood sprayed with silver lame in the revealing lamp light.

  “Wipe your chin,” he said critically.

  “Why not kiss the blood off it, Slickie?” I replied with an ingenuousness I hoped would take the curse off the suggestion.

  “Aw nuts,” he said nervously and stalked into the foyer so swiftly he might have been trying to get away from me. However, he made no move to stop me when I followed him into the tiny place and the even tinier elevator. In the latter cubicle I maneuvered so as to give him a series of breathtaking scenic views of the Grand Tetons that rose behind the plunging silver horizon of my neckline, and he unfroze considerably. By the time he opened the door of his apartment he had got so positively cordial that he urged me across the threshold with a casual spank.

  It was just as I had visualized it—the tiger skins, the gun racks, the fireplace, the open bedroom door, the bar just beside it, the adventures of Spike Mallet in handsomely tooled leather bindings, the vast divan covered with zebra skin…

  On the last was stretched a beautiful ice-faced blonde in a filmy negligee.

  This was a complication for which I wasn’t prepared. I stood rooted by the door while Slickie walked swiftly past me.

  The blonde slithered to her feet. There was murder in her glacial eyes. “You two-timing rat!” she grated. Her hand darted under her negligee. Slickie’s snaked under the lefthand side of his jacket.

  Then it hit me what was going to happen. She would bring out a small but deadly silver-plated automatic, but before she could level it, Slickie’s cannon would make a red ruin of her midriff.

  There I was, standing twenty feet away from both of them—and this poor girl couldn’t reconstitute herself!

  Swifter than thought I changed my arms back to upper dorsal tentacles and jerked back both Slickie’s and the girl’s elbow. They turned around, considerably startled, and saw me standing twenty feet away. I’d turned my tentacles back to arms before they’d noticed them. Their astonishment increased.

  But I knew I had won only a temporary respite. Unless something happened, Slickie’s trigger-blissful rage would swiftly be refocused on this foolish fragile creature. To save her, I had to divert his ire to myself.

  “Get that little tramp out of here,” I ordered Slickie from the corner of my mouth as I walked past him to the bar.

  “Easy, Babe,” he warned me.

  I poured myself a liter of scotch—I had to open a second bottle to complete the measure—and downed it. I really didn’t need it, but the assorted molecules were congenial building blocks and I was rather eager to get back to normal weight.

  “Haven’t you got that tramp out of here yet?” I demanded, eyeing him scornfully over my insouciant silver-fumed shoulder.

  “Easy, Babe,” he repeated, the vertical furrows creasing his brow to a depth of at least a centimeter and a half.

  “That’s telling her, Slickie,” the blonde applauded.

  “You two-timing rat!” I plagiarized, whipping up my silver skirt as if to wisk a gun from my nonexistent girdle.

  His cannon coughed. Always a good sportsman, I moved an inch so that the bullet, slightly mis-aimed, took me exactly in the right eye, messily blowing off the back of my head. I winked at Slickie with my left eye and fell back through the doorway into the bedroom darkness.

  I knew I had no time to spare. When a man’s shot one girl he begins to lose his natural restraint. Lying on the floor, I reconstituted my eye and did a quick patch-job on the back of my head in seventeen seconds flat.

  As I emerged from the bedroom, they were entering into a clinch, each holding a gun lightly against the other’s back.

  “Slickie,” I said, pouring myself a scant half liter of scotch, “I told you about that tramp.”

  The ice-blonde squawked, threw up her hands as if she’d had a shot of strychnine, and ran out the door. I fancied I could feel the building tilt as she leaned on the elevator button.

  I downed the scotch and advanced, shattering the paralyzed space-time that Slickie seemed to be depending on as a defense.

  �
�Slickie,” I said, “let’s get down to cases. I am indeed from Galaxy Center and we very definitely don’t like your attitude. We don’t care what your motives are, or whether they are derived from jumbled genes, a curdled childhood, or a sick society. We simply love you and we want you to reform.” I grabbed him by a shivering shoulder that was now hardly higher than my waist, and dragged him into the bedroom, snatching up the rest of the scotch on the way. I switched on the light. The bedroom was a really lush lovenest. I drained the scotch—there was about a half liter left—and faced the cowering Slickie. “Now do to me,” I told him uncompromisingly, “the thing you’re always going to do to those girls, except you have to shoot them.”

  He frothed like an epileptic, snatched out his cannon and emptied its magazine into various parts of my torso, but since he hit only two of my five brains, I wasn’t bothered. I reeled back bloodily through the blue smoke and fell into the bathroom. I felt real crazy—maybe I shouldn’t have taken that last half liter. I reconstituted my torso faster even than I had my head, but my silver lame frock was a mess. Not wanting to waste time and reluctant to use any more reconstituting energy, I stripped it off and popped into the off-the-shoulders evening dress the blonde had left lying over the edge of the bathtub. The dress wasn’t a bad fit. I went back into the bedroom. Slickie was sobbing softly at the foot of the bed and gently beating his head against it.

  “Slickie,” I said, perhaps a shade too curtly, “about this love business—”

  He sprang for the ceiling but didn’t quite burst through it. Falling back, by chance on his feet, he headed for the hall. Now it wasn’t in my orders from Galaxy Center that he run away and excite this world—in fact, my superiors had strictly forbidden such a happening. I had to stop Slickie. But I was a bit confused—perhaps fuddled by that last half liter. I hesitated—then he was too far away, had too big a start. To stop him, I knew I’d have to use tentacles. Swifter than thought I changed them and shot them out.

  “Slickie,” I cried reassuringly, dragging him to me.

  Then I realized that in my excitement, instead of using my upper dorsal tentacles, I’d used the upper ventral ones I kept transmuted into my beautiful milk glands. I do suppose they looked rather strange to Slickie as they came out of the bosom of my off-the-shoulders evening dress and drew him to me.

  Frightening sounds came out of him. I let him go and tried to resume my gorgeous shape, but now I was really confused (that last half liter!) and lost control of my transmutations. When I found myself turning my topmost tentacle into a milk gland I gave up completely and—except for a lung and vocal cords—resumed my normal shape. It was quite a relief. After all, I had done what Galaxy Center had intended I should. From now on, the mere sight of a brassiere in a show window would be enough to give Slickie the shakes.

  Still, I was bothered about the guy. As I say, he’d touched me.

  I caressed him tenderly with my tentacles. Over and over again I explained that I was just a heptapus and that Galaxy Center had selected me for the job simply because my seven tentacles would transmute nicely into the seven extremities of the human female.

  Over and over again I told him how I loved him.

  It didn’t seem to help. Slickie Millane continued to weep hysterically.

  The Big Trek

  I DIDN’T KNOW if I’d got to this crazy place by rocket, space dodger, time twister—or maybe even on foot the way I felt so beat. My memory was gone. When I woke up there was just the desert all around me with the gray sky pressing down like the ceiling of an enormous room. The desert… and the big trek. And that was enough to make me stop grabbing for my memory and take a quick look at my pants to make sure I was human.

  These, well, animals were shuffling along about four abreast in a straggly line that led from one end of nowhere to the other, right past my rocky hole. Wherever they were heading they seemed to have come from everywhere and maybe everywhen. There were big ones and little ones, some like children and some just small. A few went on two feet, but more on six or eight, and there were wrigglers, rollers, oozers, flutterers and hoppers; I couldn’t decide whether the low-flying ones were pets or pals. Some had scales, others feathers, bright armor like beetles or fancy hides like zebras, and quite a few wore transparent suits holding air or other gases, or water or other liquids, though some of the suits were tailored for a dozen tentacles and some for no legs at all. And darn if their shuffle—to pick one word for all the kinds of movement—wasn’t more like a dance than a lockstep.

  They were too different from each other for an army, yet they weren’t like refugees either, for refugees wouldn’t dance and make music, even if on more feet than two or four and with voices and instruments so strange I couldn’t tell which was which. Their higgledy-piggledy variety suggested a stampede from some awful disaster or a flight to some ark of survival, but I couldn’t feel panic in them—or solemn purpose either, for that matter. They just shuffled happily along. And if they were a circus parade, as a person might think from their being animals and some of them dressed fancy, then who was bossing the show and where were the guards or the audience, except for me?

  I should have been afraid of such a horde of monsters, but I wasn’t, so I got up from behind the rock I’d been spying over and I took one last look around for footprints or blast-scar or time-twister whorls or some sign of how I’d got there, and then I shrugged my shoulders and walked down toward them.

  They didn’t stop and they didn’t run, they didn’t shoot and they didn’t come out to capture or escort me; they kept on shuffling along without a break in the rhythm, but a thousand calm eyes were turned on me from the tops of weaving stalks or the depths of bony caverns, and as I got close a dusky roller like an escaped tire with green eyes in the unspinning hub speeded up a little and an opal octopus in a neat suit brimful of water held back, making room for me.

  Next thing I knew I was restfully shuffling along myself, wondering how the roller kept from tipping and why the octopus moved his legs by threes, and how so many different ways of moving could be harmonized like instruments in a band. Around me was the murmuring rise and fall of languages I couldn’t understand and the rainbow-changing of color patches that might be languages for the eye—the octopus dressed in water looked from time to time like a shaken up pousse-cafe.

  I tried out on them what I seemed to remember as the lingoes of a dozen planets, but nobody said anything back at me directly—I almost tried Earth-talk on them, but something stopped me. A puffy bird-thing floating along under a gas-bag that was part of its body settled lightly on my shoulder and hummed gently in my ear and dropped some suspicious-looking black marbles and then bobbed off. A thing on two legs from somewhere ahead in the trek waltzed its way to my side and offered me a broken-edged chunk that was milky with light and crusty. The thing looked female, being jauntily built and having a crest of violet feathers, but instead of nose and mouth her face tapered to a rosy little ring and where breasts would be there was a burst of pink petals. I gave my non-Earth lingoes another try. She waited until I was quiet and then she lifted the crusty chunk to her rosy ring, which she opened a little, and then she offered the chunk to me again. I took it and tasted it and it was like brick cheese but flaky and I ate it. I nodded and grinned and she puffed out her petals and traced a circle with her head and turned to go. I almost said, “Thanks, chick,” because that seemed the right thing, but again something stopped me.

  So the big trek had accepted me, I decided, but as the day wore on (if they had days here, I reminded myself) the feeling of acceptance didn’t give me any real security. It didn’t satisfy me that I had been given eats instead of being eaten and that I was part of a harmony instead of a discord. I guess I was expecting too much. Or maybe I was finding a strange part of myself and was frightened of it. And after all it isn’t reassuring to shuffle along with intelligent animals you can’t talk to, even if they act friendly and dance and sing and now and then thrum strange strings. It didn’t calm
me to feel that I was someplace that was homey and at the same time as lonely as the stars. The monsters around me got to seem stranger and stranger; I quit seeing their little tricks of personality and saw only their outsides. I craned my neck trying to spot the chick with the pink petals but she was gone. After a while I couldn’t bear it any longer. Some ruins looking like chopped-off skyscrapers had come in sight earlier and we were just now passing them, not too close, so although the flat sky was getting darker and pressing down lower and although there were distant flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder (I think that’s what they were) I turned at a right angle and walked away fast from the trek.

  Nobody stopped me and pretty soon I was hidden in the ruins. They were comforting at first, the little ruins, and I got the feeling my ancestors had built them. But then I came to the bigger ones and they were chopped-off skyscrapers and yet some of them were so tall they scratched the dark flat sky and for a moment I thought I heard a distant squeal like chalk on a giant blackboard that set my teeth on edge. And then I got to wondering what had chopped off the skyscrapers and what had happened to the people, and after that I began to see dark things loafing along after me close to the ruined walls. They were about as big as I was, but going on all fours. They began to follow me closer and closer, moving like clumsy wolves, the more notice I took of them. I saw that their faces were covered with hair like their bodies and that their jaws were working. I started to hurry and as soon as I did I began to hear the sounds they were making. The bad thing was that although the sounds were halfway between growls and barks, I could understand them.