The Change War Read online

  The Change War

  Copyright © 1978 by Fritz Leiber. All rights reserved.

  First published by Gregg Press, A Division of G. K. Hall & Co., by arrangement with Fritz Leiber and his agent, Robert Mills.

  Individual Story copyrights: “Try and Change the Past,” first published in Astounding Science Fiction, copyright © 1958 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.; “A Deskful of Girls,” first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, copyright © 1958 by Mercury Press; “Damnation Morning,” first published in Fantastic, copyright 1959 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.; “The Haunted Future” (Magazine title: “Tranquility, or Else!”), first published in Fantastic, copyright 1959 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.; “The Number of the Beast,” first published in Galaxy, copyright 1959 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; “The Mind Spider,” first published in Fantastic, copyright 1959 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.; “The Oldest Soldier,” first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, copyright © 1960 by Mercury Press; “No Great Magic,” first published in Galaxy, copyright © 1960 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; “Knight to Move,” first published in Broadside, copyright © 1965 by Fritz Leiber; “Black Corridor,” first published in Galaxy, copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

  Introduction copyright © 1978 by John Silbersack.

  Frontispiece photograph of Fritz Leiber by Jay K. Klein.

  Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America.

  Published in 1978 by Gregg Press, A Division of G. K. Hall & Co., 70 Lincoln Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111.

  First Printing, December 1978

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Leiber, Fritz, 1910-

  The change war.

  (The Gregg Press science fiction series)

  CONTENTS: No great magic.—The oldest soldier.—Knight to move, [etc.]

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PZ3.L5293Ch [PS3523.E4583] 8I3’.5’4 78-21479

  ISBN 0-8398-2493-9

  Contents

  Introduction

  No Great Magic

  The Oldest Soldier

  Knight to Move

  Damnation Morning

  Try and Change the Past

  A Deskful of Girls

  The Number of the Beast

  The Haunted Future

  The Mind Spider

  Black Corridor

  Introduction

  It’s a weird and wonderful world. Just consider; an infinite universe…stars that are living hydrogen bombs…trillions of atomic worlds in a grain of dust…jungles in a drop of water…black gulfs of space around each planet…black Freudian forests around each conscious mind—you know, I sometimes think the powers that created the universe were chiefly interested in maximizing its mystery.

  —Forward to The Mind Spider and Other Stories

  by Fritz Leiber (Ace Books, 1976)

  FRITZ LEIBER is a modern roustabout, a jack of all trades, an actor skilled in urban parts. During his long career he has worked in the ministry, been a science editor, teacher, actor, as well as writer, and he applies this capacity for variety to his work. Never a man to rear back from change within his own life, he has written brilliantly of change in the Changewar stories collected here. These stories reflect Leiber’s fascination with the instability of much of modern American life. In Leiber’s best fictions he is able to endow this instability, this American capacity for change, with a profound supernaturalism that can turn the most freakish accidents of urban chance into nightmares of paranoic intensity.

  The Changewar plots are created around the premise that there are two forces in the universe battling for supremacy in the greatest war ever—a war conducted in all places and over all time. The war’s object is to alter the course of past and present history in favor of one or the other of the two forces, known as Snakes or Spiders. At the end of time one side will have ultimately won by actually channeling history to its advantage. Agents are recruited from all ages and species, cut off from their biological lifelines to become Demons and Dopplegängers in the greatest adventure of them all. Most recruits are Changewar guerrillas, soldiers actively engaged in battle although others are recruited to serve on the sidelines as doctors, entertainers and other support personnel.

  A novel, The Big Time (1961, a Gregg Press edition, 1976), and the ten stories reprinted here form the corpus of the Changewar written between 1956 and the present. Of these only the novel and the first five stories in this volume were originally written as chronicles of the Changewar. The others slipped into the canon by popular acclaim and similarity of them and Leiber has been content that they should remain there. They are among the most inventive of his fictions and in some ways the most tantalizing.

  The Changewar is an exercise in thought that can be carried in many directions, and most other writers would have taken it elsewhere. By choosing as he has, Leiber scorns some easy crowd-pleasing effects in order to test the boundaries of science fiction and gothic horror as they apply to modern life. In this he is foregoing the traditions of both fields and attempting something new, exciting, and quite valuable. Leiber writes in the tradition of the English, French and German gothic writers of the early 19th century who reacted to their revolutionary age by acknowledging the vastness of human ignorance. But Leiber also stands with the early optimistic science fiction writers, with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, because of his faith in man’s innate ability to adapt and equip himself for the future whatever it may hold. In this conjunction of praise and dispraise he follows only one gothic writer of real power, Mary Shelley. He simultaneously challenges the dark fearful past and the uncertain but possibly bright future.

  On the American continent the gothic has never enjoyed the popularity and success of its hoary European counterpart. America the beautiful has always been too spic and span, too restless to have time for dark mythic terrors. The old European forms do not apply to us; Americans turn elsewhere to confront their native fears.

  Only occasionally have our writers plumbed an indigenous American gothic tradition: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritans, Brockden Brown’s study of southern incest, H. P. Lovecraft’s brooding Arkham. These are all visions drawn from a gothically, conceived past. The inability of the European gothic spirit to adjust itself with any facility to the new continent is a symptom of America’s swiftly aggressive pioneer spirit. Leiber responds more to this constant rush for progress. Urban America is a society which has neglected its past and has only change and instability to look back upon. He, particularly in his Changewar stories, has confronted an American gothic tradition that began and ended with antiquarians like Brown, Hawthorne and Lovecraft, and has pioneered to acquaint the gothic with the modern world—to fashion from it a vehicle for the telling of modern horrors, the most fearful of which is that very American climate of instability and change.

  It is no coincidence that Leiber chooses the early 20th century, instead of any other historical or future era, as the Greenwich Standard Time of the Changewar. The 20th century is like no other for complexity and confusion on a worldwide scale—or within the individual mind. The Changewar is a rationalizing metaphor for the inexplicable in modern life, a fantastic model for an even more fantastical universe in which nothing is just exactly as it appears. As Greta Forzane, the young and vulnerable party girl of Leiber’s The Big Time, relates our world to hers:

  Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Gho
sts—not the storybook kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it’s hard to believe they’ll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you’ve had hints of the Changewar. (p. 6)

  We are all part of the Changewar in our secret fear that our private worlds will come tumbling down around us.

  This personal horror is the source of many of Leiber’s best fictions. It is at its most intense and provocative when he deals with modern, particularly urban life. A favorite theme of Leiber’s, best illustrated in his story “Smoke Ghost,” is of the siege of our cities and citizens by modern demons. These are very real ghosts, the frightening tag-ends of thousands of city fears and hates. If there is a broken heart for every light on Broadway so is there a corresponding tally of rage and denial for all the dark places. A ghost spawned of these could well have

  a smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high pressure metropolitan worker…the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns. Each one overlying and yet blending with the others, like a pile of semi-transparent masks.

  This is the fabric of a modern peculiarly urban gothic mode—a transformation of a traditional horror form to the 20th century cityscape—a transformation that takes its most complete and satisfying shape in the Changewar saga.

  The Changewar stories proved to be particularly apt vehicles for the reworking of old forms. Their basic premise is the theory of change, a theory which Leiber has equipped with a science-fictional apparatus as fascinating and telling as Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. The basic theme of these stories is the consequences of change, particularly on the individual. Leiber seems to be telling us that we cannot live in an increasingly complex and manifold world without feeling some ill effects. His Changewar stories emphasize the complected nature of modern life by mixing science fiction with gothically conceived descriptive elements (his spiders and snakes, wolves and ghosts) thereby attempting to reconcile technology with the supernatural mind with matter in the modern world.

  I’ve had this idea—it’s just a sort of fancy, remember—that if you wanted to time travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressingroom and sort of stage and half-theatre attached, with actors to man it…Theatres come and go. It happens all the time. They’re transitory. Yet theatres are crossroads, anonymous meeting places…from “No Great Magic.”

  Robert Thurston in his introduction to the Gregg Press edition of The Big Time, makes a good case for theatre as a device and metaphor in Leiber’s fictions. With Leiber’s theatrical and film background it comes as no surprise that he is adept at setting a stage and bringing players to life. Leiber’s stories are in a very real sense psychological dramas, the action taking place in the character’s minds. The settings, the science-fictional and gothic props, serve the same staging purpose as, say, Yorick’s skull—a point of departure for the real meat of the story, an individual’s self-discovery.

  “No Great Magic,” the sequel to The Big Time, begins this collection. It is a good example of how this process comes about. Most of the story takes place backstage during a New York Theatre in the Park production of Macbeth. Leiber’s skill in preserving the dark melodrama of Shakespeare’s play is a testament to his ability and a key to his art. On many occasions Leiber has publicly acknowledged his debt to two masters, Shakespeare and Lovecraft, in shaping his stories.

  Greta, the heroine, is a waif, an amnesiac who has found a home with a somewhat eccentric theatrical troop as a backstage gopher and company pet. She’s lost and confused and clings to small symbols of reality, a subway token, a cubbyhole papered with restaurant menu’s and old playbills, and the theatrical company, her foster home, which as the play progresses begins to loose itself, terrifyingly, in a play of its own making.

  The theatre is actually a machine, a combat unit of the Changewar but for Greta it is something else, first a home and then the source of her growing instability. As an amnesiac she is forced to question her own identity, as part of the troop she is forced to recognize far more, the inconstancy of history, the shifting fickle nature of reality.

  In this case the details of the Changewar are incidental to the stages of perception Greta undergoes to arrive at the truth. Has she gone mad, she first asks herself. Or worse, has theatrical fantasy given way to demonology and the supernatural? Or, as realization dawns and Greta wakens to her old identity, she begins to suspect a “scientific” explanation (in generic terms, a science-fictional explanation) that this has all been part of the daily practical business of change-warfare. But in any case, whether “No Great Magic” has a psychological explanation, or is an old-style horror story, or hardcore science fiction, Greta’s closing lines, echoeing Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, form an appropriate ending, “fair is foul, and foul is fair.” All we can expect of modern life is uncertainty, “’tis all the rule we have!”

  “The Oldest Soldier” and “Knight to Move” are both minor Changewar stories, which is not to say that they aren’t as entertaining as the best short fiction in the field. When contrasted they do make an interesting study; the former is a horror story, constructed on gothic lines, and calls some of Ambrose Bierce’s fiction quite vividly to mind. The latter is strict glittering science fiction, as sharp and swiftly paced as Robert Heinlein’s short fiction.

  In “The Oldest Soldier” a retiring war buff named Freddy, “pretty happy in a partial sort of way,” has been hanging around a neighborhood bar hoping to hear stories of Anzio and North Africa. A stranger starts stopping by, a soldier on unofficial leave from the Changewar. Freddy befriends him and is drawn into the wild, shifting worlds of the Changewar. Freddy’s effort to reconcile his taste of the Changewar with what he knows to be reality recalls Greta’s search for comforting reality in “No Great Magic.” The thrust of this story is psychological as is usually the case with Leiber’s horror fiction.

  “Knight to Move,” on the other hand, is an adventure tale set in the far future on “the fifth planet of the star 61 Cygni.” Erich von Hohenwald, a Spider agent who makes a brief appearance in “No Great Magic,” shares the stage with Erica Weaver, a highly sophisticated Snake commando. The story revolves around espionage and gadgetry as both sides disguised as contestants in an interstellar table-games tournament vie to take control of the planet. The psychological interest here is slight and in many ways “Knight to Move” is uncharacteristic of the Changewar chronicles, perhaps because the gothic element is missing. It does introduce chess, however, one of Leiber’s recurring interests and an important theme developed with gothic detail in other stories, notably “The Dreams of Albert Moreland” (1948), which while not included here, exists on the shadowy sidelines of the Changewar.

  In “Damnation Morning” we return to the Changewar proper. This is the story of how a Changewar agent is recruited, cut from his lifeline, the fourth dimensional milieu of the Changewar. It is also an alternate reality story which makes use of an especially gory twist to make its point.

  Leiber masterfully depicts the final self illumination of a man whose life is on the skids, a bum with the D.T.’s whose only memories are of failure, and hazily, of a man he has just killed. The bum wakes to find a woman standing in his doorway. The woman is a Spider agent who asks him uncompromisingly whether he wants to live, and with a moment of insight the narrator recognizes it as a serious question.

  I realized that this was one time in a million when a big question is really meant and your answer really counts and there are no second chances, I realized that the line of my life had come to one of those points where there’s a kink in if and the wrong (or maybe
the right) tug can break it…

  The reader of course has come to this decision even earlier. After all this is a story and something pretty important had better be going on to justify the reading of it. And of course the plot is familiar: “Man saved from certain death by time traveler.” This is science fiction’s time-honored equivalent of the man, so popular among the Alfred Hitchcock school of mystery writers, with an incurable and fatal disease who takes this excuse to go out in the world and raise Cain. These men have nothing to loose, and so we expect something extraordinary (and entertaining) of them.

  Leiber’s “invocation” is his surprise return to an even older literary stereotype drawn from the gothic-Christian past in which man has always something to lose, if not life itself, than his very soul. “Damnation Morning” is an odd version of the Faust legend. The narrator has, indeed, come to a critical point of decision between life and death, and (though he does not as yet suspect this) between Christian oppositions: ignorance and knowledge, good and evil.

  When he chooses life he kicks off a series of revelations that ends in complete and damning self-knowledge. A twist ending reveals that the man the narrator has doomed to death is himself, the victim of a particularly gory suicide. As though the horror of this moment is not enough, Leiber manages a final twitch of the traditional Christian theme and damns the narrator to a form of science-fictional purgatory. It turns out that the narrator has been cut from his lifeline not once but twice, as a Spider and a Snake. He will be constantly warring with himself, fighting on both sides of the Changewar, never sure on which side lies good or evil.

  “Try and Change the Past,” the last of the five genuine Changewar stories printed here, is also the first from Leiber’s typewriter. His early treatment of the Changewar premise is exceptional for its dark humor: a man newly “cut” from his lifeline returns to try and change the circumstances of his death. Leiber here introduces the ingenious Law of the Conservation of Reality which orders that four-dimensional space resists change and will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve reality. The man’s efforts to prevent his own death are met with absurd examples of this law.