by Fritz Leiber
And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.
“So right then and there,” Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn’t hear them,“right then and there I told myself, that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I’d have children and teach them all I could. I’d get them to read books. I’d plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I’d do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I’d keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars.”
But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa’s voice stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him.
In through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us in the strangest way, and she carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her shoulders—men’s faces, white and staring.
Well, my heart couldn’t have been stopped for more than four or five beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa’s homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn’t be wearing those. Also, I noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.
Sinking down very softly, Ma fainted.
The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.
They were simply people, you see. We hadn’t been the only ones to survive; we’d just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we found out how they’d survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.
They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with airlocks and all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)
But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double flabbergasted at us.
One of the men kept saying, “But it’s impossible, I tell you. You can’t maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It’s simply impossible.”
That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were saints, and telling us we’d done something amazing, and suddenly she broke down and cried.
They’d been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and plenty of chemical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket at the top level. So after they’d got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they’d decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere, no ionosphere, to carry them around the curve of the Earth. That was why all the radio signals had died out.
Well, they’d found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they’d been giving our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so they’d landed to investigate. Of course we hadn’t heard them land, since there was no air to carry the sound, and they’d had to investigate around quite a while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they’d wasted some time in the building across the street.
By now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions.
In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn’t until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren’t used to so much oxygen.
Funny thing, though—I didn’t do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I’d had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me.
I sort of wished they’d all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out.
And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, “But I wouldn’t know how to act there and I haven’t any clothes.”
The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, “It just doesn’t seem right to let this fire go out.”
Well, the strangers are gone, but they’re coming back. It hasn’t been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a “survival school.” Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.
Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I’ve been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.
You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He’s been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.
“It’s different, now that we know others are alive,”he explains to me.“Your mother doesn’t feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.”
I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light.
“It’s not going to be easy to leave the Nest,” I said, wanting to cry, kind of. “It’s so small and there’s just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.”
He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.
“You’ll quickly get over that feeling, son,” he said. “The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it’ll be good to start building up to a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning.”
I guess he’s right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I asked her that and she smiled to thank me and then she told me she’s got a daughter almost my age and that there are lots of children at the atomic places. Imagine that.
A Deskful of Girls
YES, I SAID GHOSTGIRLS, sexy ones. Personally I never in my life saw any ghosts except the sexy kind, though I saw enough of those I’ll tell you, but only for one evening, in the dark of course, with the assistance of an eminent (I should also say notorious) psychologist. It was an interesting experience, to put it mildly, and it introduced me to an unknown field of psy
cho-physiology, but under no circumstances would I want to repeat it.
But ghosts are supposed to be frightening? Well, who ever said that sex isn’t? It is to the neophyte, female or male, and don’t let any of the latter try to kid you. For one thing, sex opens up the unconscious mind, which isn’t exactly a picnic area. Sex is a force and rite that is basic, primal; and the caveman or cavewoman in each of us is a truth bigger than the jokes and cartoons about it. Sex was behind the witchcraft religion, the sabbats were sexual orgies. The witch was a sexual creature. So is the ghost. After all, what is a ghost, according to all traditional views, but the shell of a human being—an animated skin? And the skin is all sex—it’s touch, the boundary, the mask of flesh.
I got that notion about skin from my eminent-notorious psychologist, Dr. Emil Slyker, the first and the last evening I met him, at the Countersign Club, though he wasn’t talking about ghosts to begin with. He was pretty drunk and drawing signs in the puddle spilled from his triple martini.
He grinned at me and said, “Look here, What’s-Your-Name—oh yes, Carr Mackay, Mister Justine himself. Well, look here, Carr, I got a deskful of girls at my office in this building and they’re needing attention. Let’s shoot up and have a look.”
Right away my hopelessly naive imagination flashed me a vivid picture of a desk swarming inside with girls about five or six inches high. They weren’t dressed—my imagination never dresses girls except for special effects after long thought—but these looked as if they had been modeled from the drawings of Heinrich Kley or Mahlon Elaine. Literal vest-pocket Venuses, saucy and active. Right now they were attempting a mass escape from the desk, using a couple of nail files for saws, and they’d already cut some trap doors between the drawers so they could circulate around. One group was improvising a blowtorch from an atomizer and lighter fluid. Another was trying to turn a key from the inside, using tweezers for a wrench. And they were tearing down and defacing small signs, big to them, which read
YOU BELONG TO DR. EMIL SLYKER.
My mind, which looks down at my imagination and refuses to associate with it, was studying Dr. Slyker and also making sure that I behaved outwardly like a worshipful fan, a would-be Devil’s apprentice. This approach, helped by the alcohol, seemed to be relaxing him into the frame of mind I wanted him to have—one of boastful condescension. Slyker was a plump gut of a man with a perpetually sucking mouth, in his early fifties, faircomplexioned, blond, balding, with the power-lines around his eyes and at the corners of the nostrils. Over it all he wore the ready-for-photographers mask that is a sure sign its wearer is on the Big Time. Eyes weak, as shown by the dark glasses, but forever peering for someone to strip or cow. His hearing bad too, for that matter, as he didn’t catch the barman approaching and started a little when he saw the white rag reaching out toward the spill from his drink. Emil Slyker,“doctor”courtesy of some European universities and a crust like blued steel, movie columnist, pumper of the last ounce of prestige out of that ashcan word “psychologist,” psychic researcher several mysterious rumored jumps ahead of Wilhelm Reich with his orgone and Rhine with his ESP, psychological consultant to starlets blazing into stars and other ladies in the bucks, and a particularly expert disher-out of that goulash of psychoanalysis, mysticism and magic that is the chef-d’oeuvre of our era. And, I was assuming, a particularly successful blackmailer. A stinker to be taken very seriously.
My real purpose in contacting Slyker, of which I hoped he hadn’t got an inkling yet, was to offer him enough money to sink a small luxury liner in exchange for a sheaf of documents he was using to blackmail Evelyn Cordew, current pick-of-the-pantheon among our sex goddesses. I was working for another film star, Jeff Crain, Evelyn’s ex-husband, but not “ex” when it came to the protective urge. Jeff said that Slyker refused to bite on the direct approach, that he was so paranoid in his suspiciousness as to be psychotic, and that I would have to make friends with him first. Friends with a paranoid!
So in pursuit of this doubtful and dangerous distinction, there I was at the Countersign Club, nodding respectfully happy acquiescence to the Master’s suggestion and asking tentatively, “Girls needing attention?”
He gave me his whoremaster, keeper-of-the-keys grin and said, “Sure, women need attention whatever form they’re in. They’re like pearls in a vault, they grow dull and fade unless they have regular contact with warm human flesh. Drink up.” He gulped half of what was left of his martini—the puddle had been blotted up meantime and the black surface reburnished— and we made off without any fuss over checks or tabs; I had expected him to stick me with the former at least, but evidently I wasn’t enough of an acolyte yet to be granted that honor.
It fitted that I had caught up with Emil Slyker at the Countersign Club. It is to a key club what the latter is to a top-crust bar. Strictly Big Time, set up to provide those in it with luxury, privacy and security. Especially security: I had heard that the Countersign Club bodyguarded even their sober patrons home late of an evening with or without their pickups, but I hadn’t believed it until this well-dressed and doubtless well-heeled silent husky rode the elevator up the dead midnight office building with us and only turned back at Dr. Slyker’s door. Of course I couldn’t have got into the Countersign Club on my own—Jeff had provided me with my entree: an illustrated edition of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, its margins annotated by a world-famous recently deceased psychoanalyst. I had sent it in to Slyker with a note full of flowery expression of “my admiration for your work in the psycho-physiology of sex.”
The door to Slyker’s office was something. No glass, just a dark expanse—teak or ironwood, I guessed—with EMIL SLYKER, CONSULTING PSYCHOLOGIST burnt into it. No Yale lock, but a large keyhole with a curious silver valve that the key pressed aside. Slyker showed me the key with a deprecating smile; the gleaming castellations of its web were the most complicated I’d ever seen, its stem depicted Pasiphaë and the bull. He certainly was willing to pay for atmosphere.
There were three sounds: first the soft grating of the turning key, then the solid snap of the bolts retracting, then a faint creak from the hinges.
Open, the door showed itself four inches thick, more like that of a safe or vault, with a whole cluster of bolts that the key controlled. Just before it closed, something very odd happened: a filmy plastic sheet whipped across the bolts from the outer edge of the doorway and conformed itself to them so perfectly that I suspected static electrical attraction of some sort. Once in place it barely clouded the silvery surface of the bolts and would have taken a close look to spot. It didn’t interfere in any way with the door closing or the bolts snapping back into their channels.
The Doctor sensed or took for granted my interest in the door and explained over his shoulder in the dark, “My Siegfried Line. More than one ambitious crook or inspired murderer has tried to smash or think his or her way through that door. They’ve had no luck. They can’t. At this moment there is literally no one in the world who could come through that door without using explosives—and they’d have to be well placed. Cozy.”
I privately disagreed with the last remark. Not to make a thing of it, I would have preferred to feel in a bit closer touch with the silent corridors outside, even though they held nothing but the ghosts of unhappy stenographers and neurotic dames my imagination had raised on the way up.
“Is the plastic film part of an alarm system?” I asked. The Doctor didn’t answer. His back was to me. I remembered that he’d shown himself a shade deaf. But I didn’t get a chance to repeat my question for just then some indirect lighting came on, although Slyker wasn’t near any switch (“Our talk triggers it,” he said) and the office absorbed me.
Naturally the desk was the first thing I looked for, though I felt foolish doing it. It was a big deep job with a dark soft gleam that might have been that of fine-grained wood or metal. The drawers were file size, not the shallow ones my imagination had played with, and there were three tiers of them to the right of the kneehole— spa
ce enough for a couple of life-size girls if they were doubled up according to one of the formulas for the hidden operator of Maelzel’s chess-playing automaton. My imagination, which never learns, listened hard for the patter of tiny bare feet and the clatter of little tools. There wasn’t even the scurry of mice, which would have done something to my nerves, I’m sure.
The office was an L with the door at the end of this leg. The walls I could see were mostly lined with books, though a few line drawings had been hung—my imagination had been right about Heinrich Kley, though I didn’t recognize these pen-and-ink originals, and there were some Fuselis you won’t ever see reproduced in books handled over the counter.
The desk was in the corner of the L with the components of a hi-fi spaced along the bookshelves this side of it. All I could see yet of the other leg of the L was a big surrealist armchair facing the desk but separated from it by a wide, low, bare table. I took a dislike to that armchair on first sight, though it looked extremely comfortable. Slyker had reached the desk now and had one hand on it as he turned back toward me, and I got the impression that the armchair had changed shape since I had entered the office—that it had been more like a couch to start with, although now the back was almost straight.
But the Doctor’s left thumb indicated I was to sit in it and I couldn’t see another chair in the place except the padded button on which he was now settling himself—one of those stenographer deals with a boxing-glove back placed to catch you low in the spine like the hand of a knowledgeable masseur. In the other leg of the L, besides the armchair, were more books, a heavy concertina blind sealing off the window, two narrow doors that I supposed were those of a closet and a lavatory, and what looked like a slightly scaled-down and windowless telephone booth until I guessed it must be an orgone box of the sort Reich had invented to restore the libido when the patient occupies it. I quickly settled myself in the chair, not to be gingerly about it. It was rather incredibly comfortable, almost as if it had adjusted its dimensions a bit at the last instant to conform to mine. The back was narrow at the base but widened and then curled in and over to almost a canopy around my head and shoulders. The seat too widened a lot toward the front, where the stubby legs were far apart. The bulky arms sprang unsupported from the back and took my own just right, though curving inwards with the barest suggestion of a hug. The leather or unfamiliar plastic was as firm and cool as young flesh and its texture was mat under my fingertips.
