by Fritz Leiber
“Confidentially, my friend, so would I.”
* * * *
The Great Gift announced itself to Ernie next morning at 7:53 sharp, when the Special slowed to forty miles an hour to swing past the platform on which he was waiting for the Express.
One moment he was standing morning-weary on the thick wooden planks, looking down through the quarter-inch gaps between them at the cinders five feet below, vaguely conscious of a woman’s white-polka-dotted black skirt on one side of his field of vision and a man’s brown shoes and briefcase to the other.
Next moment he was in a small cab under which steel rails were vanishing at an alarming speed, and way ahead he could just make out the platform on which he was standing, and something was hurting his head and he was slumping forward and everything was darkening and the cab was leaping forward more swiftly still.
The third moment he was back on the platform, running furiously to get off it. He didn’t care who yelled at him or whom he bumped, so long as it didn’t slow him down. The people were just blurs anyway and soon he was beyond them. He took in two strides the short flight of wooden steps leading down off the platform proper and spurted the last sixty feet to the stairs leading down to street level. There he stumbled, recovered himself, and chanced a hasty backward look.
There was a tall man at his heels, hugging a briefcase and panting hard. Then, beyond the tall man, he saw the platform rear up like a wooden caterpillar, spilling people against the bright gray morning sky. There was a cosmic crunch and the battered Special, still coming strong, burst through the upreared platform in a blossoming broken-matchstick crown of planks and beams—and big blue sparks where a writhing power wire, snagged by the uprearing platform, was grounding against the first car.
Ernie ducked his head and plunged down the steps ahead.
(That was how I came to meet Ernie Meeker. I was the tall man. As you can imagine, it’s quite strange to be standing in a huddle of fresh-washed morning commuters and have the one beside you close his eyes and slump a little and then take off like a bat out of hell—without a word spoken or a thing happened to explain it. I started to laugh, but then I got the funniest feeling of curiosity and terror and I took off after him. It saved my life.
(Afterward, Ernie and I went back to help with the ghastliness, but pretty soon there were more than enough trainmen, firemen, police, and what not, and we got chased off. We had a couple of drinks together and met a few times after and that’s how I got some of this story. But my chief sources of information I am not permitted to disclose.)
* * * *
As the Invisible Being had predicted, Ernie’s first brush with the Great Gift gave him a considerable jolt, though he didn’t suspect at first that it was a permanent gift.
He analyzed what had happened, quite reasonably, I believe, as a case of second sight. Somehow his mind had been projected into the brain of the motorman of the Special just at the moment the latter had his stroke (the final official explanation too) and blindly put on more speed instead of reducing it for the approaching curve and station. His second sight saved his life by getting him off the platform before the Special jumped the tracks and ploughed through it.
It certainly gave a jolt to Ernie’s habit patterns, as it temporarily did of a great many other people. He started driving his car to work, for one thing, and he took to drinking regularly in the evenings, though not excessively as yet.
He also had the feeling, which he did not try to analyze, that his miraculous escape marked the end of the “strange weeks” in his life, when he’d had such odd illusions or been the victim of such odd circumstances; and, true enough, that first week or so there were no recurrences of his chillingly weird experiences.
* * * *
But jolts have their infallible Law of Diminishing Effects.
After a few days, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems as nervous and wearisome as ever and he grew envious of the snug commuters meditating luxuriously in their electric coaches. Come the first morning of the third week and he was standing on the rebuilt platform, studying the new planks, ties and rails with a pleasantly morbid interest.
Vivian was not in her accustomed seat nor on the train, as far as he could tell, which did not surprise him, though it disappointed him sharply; the Panther Princess had a stronger hold on his feelings, or at least on his imagination, than he’d realized.
But Verna was on the train home all right; in fact, she gave a small whoop of pleasure when she spotted him. And he had barely sat down beside her when who should come prowling smoothly along but Vivian in a charcoal version of her tailored black armor.
Ernie jumped up and blurted out introductions. Vivian accepted his seat with a certain deliberateness and with a smile that seemed to Ernie to say, “So I’m his morning light-badinage girl, but this is the girl Mr. Meeker goes home with. It’s another instance of ‘black-glasses’ behavior, don’t you think? He puts her on whenever he gets afraid he’s getting attractive.”
* * * *
The two women started to chat easily enough, however, and shortly Ernie got over his confusion and, smiling down at them from where he swayed in his aisle with his hand lightly touching the back of the seat ahead, was even thinking quite smugly that here in one seat, by gosh, were the woman he wanted and the woman who wanted him. Very interesting to be the man in the middle.
Just at that moment, the power came back to him that made everything feverishly real, expanding his center of attention to his visual horizons, and this time it was only a prelude, for a second gateway opened behind the first—a window into all human hearts and minds, the power of human insight fantastically sharpened and enlarged. He could “read minds,” or at least he knew the motives—the core of values and consciousness—of any person he cared to look at. Most especially, he knew the motives of Verna and Vivian almost as if he were them.
The big thing about Vivian was her fear—no, her conviction, that she wasn’t attractive. Every glance her way knocked a hole in the armor of artificial attractiveness she built around herself, and all the hours she devoted to perfecting it, even the desperate worship she lavished on her body, were all utterly lost. A simple relationship with another human being was unthinkable; her armor got in the way and under her armor she knew she was worthless. A man was sometimes attracted to her armor—never to herself!—but as soon as he started to scrutinize it, it began to tarnish and crumple.
She hoped that other people, men especially, had a trace of her own weaknesses, and she sniped away at them constantly to get under the armor to find out. Ernie was one in a long series of such men. She was actually in love with him, but only as one loves a dream, not the real Ernie at all. Physically he was disgusting to her, like most men.
* * * *
Verna, on the other hand, had absolute confidence that she was sufficiently attractive for all practical purposes. She wasn’t in love with Ernie at all. She wanted to make an intellectual conquest of him, add him to her private Brain Trust, her cultured entourage that won Mr. Abrusian’s seldom-tendered admiration and broke Miss Minkin’s heart, and finally get Ernie to join the Working Boys’ Front. He was one of her projects. If it became tactically necessary during her campaign, she knew that Ernie would be only too happy to jump in bed with her, food-triangles and all.
Now in other circumstances (who really knows?), Ernie might have found the courage to accept Vivian and Verna as they really were and work on from there, ruthlessly discarding his false pictures of them—and of himself. He might conceivably have found the strength to accept all people not as shadowy projections of himself, fabricated targets of his desires and aversions, puppets in his private chess games and circuses, but as complete persons with inexhaustible surprises and contradictions, each a microcosm, a universe-in-little with his or her own earth and stars, spaceflight and crawling, heaven and hell.
But under the present circumstances, Ernie was confused. His knowledge of the real Vivian spoiled completely the titi
llating picture of the Panther Princess, who might submit to him contemptuously in the end—he needed that sex idol more than he needed truth. As for Verna, her stalwart self-reliance and her accurate appraisal of his own motives and possible future behavior were both unbearably humiliating to him. And the delight of really knowing people was completely outweighed, in his tired spirit, by the thought of the lifetime of work that would be involved in adjusting himself to this new knowledge. It was so much more comfortable to work with stereotypes.
The Express was slowing for his station. Both girls were looking at him puzzledly.
“Good-by, Verna. Good-by, Vivian,” he said in a set sort of voice. “This is where I get off.”
He moved stiffly toward the door. They watched him go, and turned to each other with a frown.
* * * *
That evening marked the beginning of Ernie’s serious drinking. He never saw either of the V-girls again. He took his car or the bus to work; then, for a short period, he took taxicabs, then he lost his job and was working in another part of the city. He became mixed up with a number of other women and crowds, but they are not part of this or any story.
Among other things, his drinking eventually completely confused his memories of abnormal personal powers with his entirely normal illusions of alcoholic ones. And it also seemed to be blotting out the former. Once, at a party, he bet twenty dollars that his eyes glowed in the dark. Next morning he was relieved to discover, after making several anxious phone calls, that he’d lost his bet.
When he finally pulled out of it, some five years later, because of a growing aversion to liquor that he only understood later, the two Big Gifts of Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were gone forever.
The Great Gift had a more durable lodgment in him. From his alcoholic years, he brought hazy memories of accidents avoided because of sudden wrong-ended visions of onrushing cars, alley rollings missed because he’d seen himself reeling along a block away through the eyes of lounging hoodlums. Now, sober again, he had a clear confirmation of it when he left a banquet on a trumped-up excuse because of a disturbing vision of inexplicable rodlike shapes—and read the next day that a hundred of the guests, of whom four finally died, had come down with bacterial food poisoning. Another time, hiking in dry woods, he’d smelled smoke that his companions couldn’t—and persuaded them to turn back, avoiding a disastrous flash fire that broke out soon afterward.
He had to admit to himself that he certainly seemed to have the gift of second sight, warning him against threats to his life.
“All right,” he told himself, “so forget it. Gifts are upsetting. Even as a kid, you sweated more about your birthday presents than you ever got fun out of them.”
Our story has already jumped five years; now it must jump twenty. Ernie is living with his sister again; while he was drinking, they pulled apart, and now they’ve once more pulled together. They’re having dinner, have arrived at dessert, a big piece of chocolate cake each with satiny thick creamy frosting and filling.
Ernie looks at his piece—and sees himself climbing stairs and clutching at his heart. He thinks of warning his sister, but she’s already halfway through her piece. Then she goes on and eats Ernie’s.
* * * *
Ernie’s sister didn’t get food poisoning, she only got fat, but the incident of the chocolate cake was for Ernie the beginning of a series of peculiar food revulsions and diet experiments that eventually made Ernie instead of his sister the family yogurt-fiend and a regular customer of his old acquaintance, Herman, the health-food manufacturer.
Herman had to admit that Ernie had cooked himself up a pretty good longevity diet for an amateur, though there were some items in it that made the old man shake his head—and he always asserted that Ernie was passing up a good thing in Soybean Mush.
Ernie got his diet tailored to fit his tastes and stuck to it. He had a strong suspicion of what had happened, though he tried not to think about it too often: that his gift of second sight had taken to warning him of the longer-range dangers to his existence; after all, chocolate cake can be as deadly as atomic bombs in the long run.
More years passed. Friends and relatives began to remark quietly to each other that his sister was aging faster. Ernie, they had to admit, was a remarkably well-preserved old gent. Ironic, considering what a drunk he’d been and what strange junk he insisted on eating now.
One day Ernie’s self-styled health diet began to pall on him. It didn’t revolt him; it merely left him unsatisfied, yet with no yearning for any particular food he could think of. He lived with this yearning for some weeks, meditating on it and trying to guess its nature. Finally he had an inspiration. He headed for Mr. Willis’ drugstore.
The bent, silvery-haired man greeted him eagerly; somehow there was a special warmth about the friendships Ernie had made during the “strange weeks” (Verna and Vivian excepted) that put them in a different class from any other of his human relationships.
* * * *
“Now what can I give you, Ernie?” Mr. Willis asked. “Anything in the place within reason.”
“I’ll tell you, Bert I’d like to go back in your dispensary—you with me, if you want—and just shop around.”
“That’s a sort of screwy idea, Ernie. I couldn’t sell you any narcotics or sleeping pills, of course—well, maybe a few sleeping pills.”
“I wouldn’t want any.”
“What’s the idea, Ernie? Getting interested in chemistry in your old… You know, Ernie, you just don’t look your years.”
“Secret of mine. Yes, in a way I’ve got interested in chemistry.”
“Won’t talk, eh? I remember, when I first met you, I tagged you for an evening inventor. Well, come on back and shop around. Just don’t ask me for elixer vitae, aurum potabile, or ground philosophers’ stone.”
“Not unless I see ‘em.”
Afterward, Bert Willis used to say it was one of the most mystifying experiences of his life. For a good half a day, Ernie Meeker studied the rows of jars, canisters and glass-stoppered bottles, sometimes lifting two down together and contemplating them, one in each hand, as if he could weigh the difference. Often he’d take out a stopper and sniff, and maybe, asking permission of Bert with a glance, take up a dab of some powder and taste it.
“You know that game,” Bert would say, “where someone goes out of the room and you all decide on an object, or hide one, and he comes back and tries to find it by telepathy or muscle-reading or something? That was exactly the way Ernie was acting. Dog on a difficult scent.”
A couple of times, especially when the customers came in, Bert wanted to chase him out, except that Ernie was such a special friend and Bert was so darn curious about it all himself.
In the end, Ernie made a good twenty purchases, including a mortar and pestle and two poisons for which Bert made him sign, though the amounts were less than a lethal dose.
“Actually none of the chemicals he bought were very dangerous,” Bert would say. “And none of them were terribly unusual. The thing about them was that, put together, they just didn’t make sense—as a medicine or anything else. Let me see, there was sulphur, bismuth, a bit of mercury, one of the sulfa drugs, a tiny packet of auric chloride, and… I had ‘em all on a list once, but I’ve lost it.”
After that, Ernie always mixed a little grayish paste in his cup of yogurt at suppertime.
Ernie stopped aging altogether.
* * * *
After his sister’s coffin was lowered past the margins of green matting into the ground, Ernie shook hands with the minister, walked Bert Willis and Herman Schover to their car and told them he thought he’d better drive home with some relatives who’d turned up. Actually he just wanted to stay behind a while. It was a beautiful blue-and-white summer day; the tidy suburban cemetery had caught his fancy, and now he felt like a quiet stroll.
Ernie followed his little impulses these days. As he sometimes said, “I figure I’ve got plenty of time. I just don’t feel the
pressure like I used to.”
The last car chugged away. Ernie stretched and started to stroll, slowly, but not like an old man, now that he was alone. His hair had grown whiter in the last few years and his face a little wrinkled, but that was due to the very judicious use of silvering and theatrical liner—people’s comments about his youthfulness had gotten wearisome and would, he knew, eventually become suspicious.
Keeping himself oriented by a white tower at the cemetery gate, he arrived at an area that had no graves as yet, no trees either, just lawn. He made his way to the center of it, where there was a gently swelling hummock, and sat down in the warm crinkly grass, resting his back against the slope. The sky was lovely, enough clouds to be interesting, but a great oval of pure blue just overhead—a pear-shaped gateway to space.
He felt no grief at his sister’s death, only the desire to think a bit, have a quiet look at his past and another at the great future.
Alone like this, he dared to face his fate for a moment and admit to himself that, all wishful thinking aside, it really began to look as if he were going to live forever, or at least for a very long time.
Live forever! That was a phrase to give you a chill, he told himself. And what to do, he asked himself, with all that time?
Back in the “strange weeks,” he’d have had little trouble in answering that question—if only he’d known then what he did now and realized what was being offered him. For, during his sober decades, Ernie had gradually come to a shrewdly accurate estimate of what had happened to him then. He thought of it in terms of having been offered six Gifts and turned down five of them.
* * * *
Back in the “strange weeks” and armed with the five rejected Gifts (Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were the only ones that counted, though), he could easily have said, “Live forever by all means! Increase your knowledge and understanding until your mind bursts or is transfigured. Plunge forever into the unending variety of the Cosmos. Open yourself to everything.”
But now, equipped to travel only as a snail.…
