The Second Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  That day, Ernie felt a little sick, somehow. After dinner, he decided it was the Thuringer sausage he’d eaten at lunch. He hurried up to the bathroom with a spoon, but as he clutched the box of bicarbonate of soda, preparatory to plunging the spoon into it, it seemed to him that the box said distinctly, in a small inward-outward voice:

  “No, no, no!”

  Ernie sat down suddenly on the toilet seat. The spoon rattled against the porcelain finish of the washbowl as he laid it down. He held the box firmly in both hands and studied it.

  Size, shape, materials, blue color, closure, etc., were exactly as they should be. But the white lettering on the blue background read:

  AQUEOUS FUEL CATALYST

  Dissociates H2O into hemi-quasi-stable H and O, furnishing a serviceable fuel-and-oxydizer mix for most motorcycles, automobiles, trucks, motorboats, airplanes, stationary motors, torque-twisters, translators, and rockets (exhaust velocity up to 6000 meters per second). Operates safely within and outside of all normal atmospheres. No special adaptor needed on oxygenizer-atmosphere motors.

  Directions: Place one pinch in fuel tank, fill with water. Add water as needed.

  A-F Catalyst should generally be renewed when objective tests show fuel quality has deteriorated 50 percent.

  U.S. and Foreign Patents Pending

  After reading that several times, with suitable mind-checking and eye-testing in between, Ernie took up a little of the white powder on the end of a nailfile. He had thought of tasting it, but had instantly abandoned the notion and even refrained from sniffing the stuff—after all, the human body is mostly water.

  After reducing the quantity several times, he gingerly dumped at most four or five grains on the flat edge of the washbowl and then used the broad end of the nailfile to maneuver a large bead of water over to the almost invisible white deposit. He closed the box, put it and the nailfile carefully on the window ledge, lit a match and touched it to the drop, at the last moment ducking his head a little below the level of the washbowl.

  Nothing happened. After a moment, he slowly withdrew the match, shaking it out, and looked. There was nothing to see. He reached out to touch the stupid squashed ovoid of water.

  Ouch! He withdrew his fingers much faster than the match, shook them more sharply. Something was there, all right. Heat. Heat enough to hurt.

  * * * *

  He cautiously explored the boundaries of the heat. It became noticeable about eighteen inches above the drop and almost an inch to each side—an invisible slim vertical cylinder. Crouching close, eyes level with the top of the washbowl, he could make out the flame—a thin finger of crinkled light.

  He noticed that a corner of the drop was seething—but only a corner, as if the heat were sharply bounded in that direction and perhaps as if the catalyst were only transforming the water to fuel a bit at a time.

  He reached up and tugged off the light. Now he could see the flame—ghostly, about four inches high, hardly thicker than a string, and colored not blue but pale green. A spectral green needle. He blew at it softly. It shimmied gracefully, but not, he thought, as much as the flame of a match or candle. It had character.

  He switched on the light. The drop was more than half gone now; the part that was left was all seething. And the bathroom was markedly warmer.

  “Ernie! Are you going to be much longer?”

  The knock hadn’t been loud and his widowed sister’s voice was more apologetic than peremptory, but he jumped, of course.

  “I am testing something,” he started to say and changed it mid-way. It came out, “I am be out in a minute.”

  He turned off the light again. The flame was a little shorter now and it shrank as he watched, about a quarter inch a second. As soon as it died, he switched on the light. The drop was gone.

  He scrubbed off the spot with a dry washrag, on second thought put a dab of vaseline on the washrag, scrubbed the spot again with that—he didn’t like to think of even a grain of the powder getting in the drains or touching any water. He folded the washrag, tucked it in his pocket, put the blue box—after a final check of the lettering—in his other coat pocket, and opened the door.

  “I was taking some bicarb,” he told his sister. “Thuringer sausage at lunch.”

  She nodded absently.

  Sleep refused even to flirt with Ernie, his mind was full of so many things, especially calculations involving the distance between his car and the house and the length of the garden hose. In desperation, as the white hours accumulated and his thoughts began to squirm, he grabbed up the detective story he’d bought at the corner newsstand. He had read thirty pages before he realized that he was turning them as rapidly as he could focus just once on each facing page.

  He jumped out of bed. My God, he thought, at that rate he’d finish the book under three minutes and here it wasn’t even two o’clock yet!

  He selected the thickest book on the shelf, an overpoweringly dull historical treatise in small print. He turned two pages, three, then closed it with a clap and looked at the wall with frightened eyes. Ernie Meeker had discovered, inside the birthday box that was himself, the first of the Big Gifts.

  The trouble was that in that wee-hour, lonely bedroom, it didn’t seem like a gift at all. How would he ever keep himself in books, he wondered, if he read them so fast? And think how full to bursting his mind would get—right now, the seven pages of fine-print history were churning in it, vividly clear, along with the first chapters of the new detective story. If he kept on absorbing information that fast, he’d have to be revising all his opinions and beliefs every couple of days at least—maybe every couple of hours.

  It seemed a dreadful, literally maddening prospect—his mind would ultimately become a universe of squirming macaroni. Even the wallpaper he was staring at, which imitated the grain of wood, had in an instant become so fully part of his consciousness that he felt he could turn his back on it right now and draw a picture of it correct to the tiniest detail. But who would ever want to do such a thing, or want to be able to?

  It was an abnormal, dangerous, temporary sensitivity, he told himself, generated by the excitement of the crazy discovery he’d made in the bathroom. Like the thoughts of a drowning man, riffling an infinity-paneled adventure-comic of his life as he bolts his last rough ration of air. Or like the feeling a psychotic must have that he’s on the verge of visualizing the whole universe, having its ultimate secrets patter down into the palm of his outstretched hand—just before the walls close in.

  Ernie Meeker was not a drinking man, then. A pint had stood a week on his closet shelf and only been diminished three shots. But now he did a good job on the sturdy remainder.

  Pretty soon the unbearable, edge-of-doom clarity in his mind faded, the universe-macaroni cooked down to a thick white soup uniform as fog, and the words of the detective story were sliding into his mind individually, or at most in strings of three and four. Which, if it wasn’t as it ideally should be in an ambitious man’s mind, was at least darn comfortable.

  He had not rejected the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading. Not quite. But he had dislocated for tonight at least the imposed nervous field on which it depended.

  For want of a better place, Ernie dropped the rubber tube from the bathtub spray into the scrub bucket half full of odorous pink fluid and stared doubtfully at the uncapped gas tank. The tank had been almost empty when he’d last driven his car, he knew, because he’d been waiting until payday to gas up. Now he had used the tube to siphon out what he could of the remainder (he still could taste the stuff!) and he’d emptied the fuel line and carburator, more or less.

  Further than that, in the way of engine hygiene, Ernie’s strictly kitchen mechanics did not go, but he felt that a catalyst used in pinches shouldn’t be too particular about contaminants. Besides, the directions on the box hadn’t said anything about cleaning the fuel tank, had they?

  He hesitated. At his feet, the garden hose gurgled noisily over the curb into the gutter; it had vindi
cated his midnight estimate, proving just long enough. He looked uneasily up and down the dawning street and was relieved to find it still empty. He wished fervently, not for the first time this Saturday morning, that he had a garage. Then he sighed, squared his shoulders a little, and lifted the box out of his pocket.

  Making to check the directions the umpteenth time, he received a body blow. The white lettering on the box had disappeared. The box didn’t proclaim itself sodium bicarbonate again—there was just no lettering at all, only blue background. He turned it over several times.

  Right there died his tentative plan of eventually sharing his secret with some friend who knew more than himself about motors (he hadn’t decided anyway who that would be). It would be just too silly to approach anyone he knew with a more-than-wild story and featureless blue box.

  For a moment, he came very close to dropping the box between the wide-set bars of the street drain and pouring the pink gas back in the tank. It had hit him, in a way for the first time, just how crazy this all was, how jarringly implausible even on such hypotheses as practical jokes, secret product perhaps military, or mad inventor (except himself).

  For how the devil should the stuff get into his bathroom disguised as bicarb? That circumstance seemed beyond imagination. Green flames…vanishing letters… “torque-twisters, translators”…a box that talked.…

  At that point, simple faith came to Ernie’s rescue: in the same bathroom, he had seen the green flame; it had burned his fingers.

  Quickly he dipped up a little of the white powder on the edge of a fifty-cent piece, dumped it in the gas tank without quibbling as to quantity, rapped the coin on the edge of the opening, closed and pocketed the blue box, and picked up the spurting hose and jabbed it into the round hole.

  His heart was pounding and his breath was coming fast. That had taken real effort. So he was slow in hearing the footsteps behind him.

  His neighbor’s gate was open and Mr. Jones stood open-mouthed a few feet behind him, all ready for his day’s work as streetcar motorman and wearing the dark blue uniform that always made him look for a moment unpleasantly like a policeman.

  Ernie swung the hose around, flipping his thumb over the end to make a spray, and nonchalantly began to water the little rectangle of lawn between sidewalk and curb.

  The first things he watered were the bottoms of Mr. Jones’s pants legs.

  Mr. Jones voiced no complaint. He backed off several steps, stared intently at Ernie, rather palely, it seemed to the latter. Then he turned and made off for the streetcar tracks at a very fast shuffle, shaking his feet a little now and then and glancing back several times over his shoulder without slowing down.

  Ernie felt light-headed. He decided there was enough water in the gas tank, capped it, and momentarily continued to water the lawn.

  “Ernie! Come on in and have breakfast!”

  He heeded his sister’s call, telling himself it would be a good idea “to give the stuff time to mix” before testing the engine.

  He had divined her question and was ready with an answer.

  “I’ve just found out that we’re supposed to water our lawns only before seven in the morning or after seven in the evenings. It’s the law.”

  It was the day for their monthly drive out to Wheaton to visit Uncle Fabius. On the whole, Ernie was glad his sister was in the car when he turned the key in the starter—it forced him to be calm and collected, though he didn’t feel exactly right about exposing her to the danger of being blown up without first explaining to her the risk. But the motor started right up and began purring powerfully. Ernie’s sister commented on it favorably.

  Then she went on to ask, “Did you remember to buy gas yesterday?”

  “No,” he said without thinking; then, realizing his mistake, quickly added, “I’ll buy some in Wheaton. There’s enough to get us there.”

  “You didn’t think so yesterday,” she objected. “You said the tank was nearly empty.”

  “I was wrong. Look, the gauge shows it’s half full.”

  “But then how… Ernie, didn’t you once tell me the gauge doesn’t work?”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. Look, there’s a station. Why don’t you buy gas now?”

  “No, I’ll wait for Wheaton—I know a place there I can get it cheaper,” he insisted, rather lamely, he feared.

  His sister looked at him steadily. He settled his head between his shoulders and concentrated on driving. His feeling of excitement was spoiled, but a few minutes of silence brought it back. He thought of the blur of green flashes inside the purring motor. If the passing drivers only knew!

  Uncle Fabius, retired perhaps a few years too early and opinionated, was a trial, but he did know something about the automobile industry. Ernie chose a moment when his sister was out of the room to ask if he’d ever heard of a white powder that would turn water into gasoline or some usable fuel.

  “Who’s been getting at you?” Uncle Fabius demanded sharply, to Ernie’s surprise and embarrassment. “That’s one of the oldest swindles. They always tell this story about how this man had a white powder or something and demonstrated it once with a pail of water and then disappeared. You’re supposed to believe that Detroit or the big oil companies got rid of him. It’s just another of those malicious legends, concocted—by Russia, I imagine—to weaken your faith in American Industry, like the everlasting battery or the razor blade that never gets dull. You’re looking pale, Ernie—don’t tell me you’ve already put money in this white powder? I suppose someone’s approached you with a proposition, though?”

  With considerable difficulty, Ernie convinced his uncle that he had “just heard the story from a friend.”

  “In that case,” Uncle Fabius opined, “you can be sure some fuel-powder swindler has been getting at him. When you see him—and be sure to make that soon—tell him from me that—” and Uncle Fabius began an impassioned ninety-minute defense of big business, small business, prosperity, America, money, know-how, and a number of other institutions that defended pretty easily, so that the situation was wholly normal when Ernie’s sister returned.

  As soon as the car pulled away from the curb on their way back to Chicago, she reminded him about the gas.

  “Oh, I’ve already done that,” he assured her. “Made a special trip so I wouldn’t forget. It was while you were out of the room. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t,” and she looked at him steadily, as she had that morning. He similarly retreated to driving.

  Stopping for a railroad crossing, he braked too hard and the car stalled. His sister grabbed his arm. “I knew that was going to happen,” she said. “I knew that for some reason you lied to me when—” The motor, starting readily again, cut short her remark and Ernie didn’t press his small triumph by asking her what she was about to say.

  To tell the truth, Ernie wasn’t feeling as elated about today’s fifty-mile drive as he’d imagined he would. Now he thought he could put his finger on the reason: It was the completely…well, arbitrary way in which the white powder had come into his possession.

  If he’d concocted it himself, or been given it by a shady promoter, or even seen the box fall out of the pocket of a suspicious-looking man in a trenchcoat, then he’d have felt more able to do something about it, whether in the general line of starting a fuel-powder company or of going to the F.B.I.

  But just having the stuff drop into his hands from the sky, so to speak, as if in a crazy dream, and for that same reason not feeling able to talk about it and assure himself he wasn’t going crazy…oh, it is rough when you can’t share things, really rough; not being able to share depressing news corrodes the spirit, but not being able to share exciting news can sometimes be even more corroding.

  Maybe, he told himself, he could figure out someone to tell. But who? And how? His mind shied away from the problem, rather decisively.

  When he checked the blue box that night, the original sodium bicarbonate lettering h
ad returned with all its humdrum paragraphs. Not one word about exhaust velocities.

  From that moment, the fuel-powder became a trial to Ernie rather than a secret glory. He’d wake in the middle of the night doubting that he had ever really read the mind-dizzying lettering, ever really tested the stuff—perhaps he’d bring from sleep the chilling notion that in the dimness and excitement of Saturday morning he’d put the water in some other car’s gas tank, perhaps Mr. Jones’s. He could usually argue such ideas away, but they kept coming back. And yet he did no more bathroom testing.

  Of course the car still ran. He even fueled it once again with the garden hose, sniffing the nozzle to make sure it hadn’t somehow got connected to the basement furnace oil-tank. He picked three o’clock in the morning for the act, but nevertheless as he was returning indoors he heard a window in Mr. Jones’s house slam loudly. It unsettled him. Coming home the next day, he caught his sister and Mr. Jones consulting about something on the latter’s doorsteps, which unsettled him further.

  He couldn’t decide on a safe place to keep the box and took to carrying it around with him day and night. Bill spotted it once down at the office and by an unhappy coincidence needed some bicarb just then for a troubled stomach. Ernie explained on the spur of the moment that he was using the box to carry plaster of Paris, which involved him in further lies that he felt were quite unconvincing as well as making him appear decidedly eccentric, even butter-brained. Bill took to calling him “the sculptor.”

  Meanwhile, besides the problem of the white powder, Ernie was having other unsettling experiences, stemming (though of course he didn’t know that) from the other Gifts—and not just the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading, though that still returned from time to time to shock his consciousness and send him hurrying for a few quick shots.

  Like many another car-owning commuter, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems a bit too much for comfort and so used the fast electric train to carry him five times a week to the heart of the city. During those brief, swift, crowded trips Ernie, generally looking steadily out the window at the brown buildings and black stanchions whipping past, enjoyed a kind of anonymity and privacy more refreshing to his spirit than he realized. But now all that had been suddenly changed. People had started to talk to him; total strangers struck up conversations almost every morning and afternoon.