The Fritz Leiber Megapack Page 12

  “But it is true?” she pleaded.

  “Every word of it,” he said, looking straight into her eyes. He put down his knife and fork. “What’s your name?” he asked softly. “Mine’s Patrick.”

  “Effie,” she told him.

  He shook his head. “That can’t be,” he said. Then his face brightened. “Euphemia,” he exclaimed. “That’s what Effie is short for. Your name is Euphemia.” As he said that, looking at her, she suddenly felt beautiful. He got up and came around the table and stretched out his hand toward her.

  “Euphemia—” he began.

  “Yes?” she answered huskily, shrinking from him a little, but looking up sideways, and very flushed.

  “Don’t either of you move,” Hank said.

  The voice was flat and nasal because Hank was wearing a nose respirator that was just long enough to suggest an elephant’s trunk. In his right hand was a large blue-black automatic pistol.

  They turned their faces to him. Patrick’s was abruptly alert, shifty. But Effie’s was still smiling tenderly, as if Hank could not break the spell of the magic garden and should be pitied for not knowing about it.

  “You little—” Hank began with an almost gleeful fury, calling her several shameful names. He spoke in short phrases, closing tight his unmasked mouth between them while he sucked in breath through the respirator. His voice rose in a crescendo. “And not with a man of the community, but a pariah! A pariah!”

  “I hardly know what you’re thinking, man, but you’re quite wrong,” Patrick took the opportunity to put in hurriedly, conciliatingly. “I just happened to be coming by hungry tonight, a lonely tramp, and knocked at the window. Your wife was a bit foolish and let kindheartedness get the better of prudence—”

  “Don’t think you’ve pulled the wool over my eyes, Effie,” Hank went on with a screechy laugh, disregarding the other man completely. “Don’t think I don’t know why you’re suddenly going to have a child after four long years.”

  At that moment the cat came nosing up to his feet. Patrick watched him narrowly, shifting his weight forward a little, but Hank only kicked the animal aside without taking his eyes off them.

  “Even that business of carrying the wristwatch in your pocket instead of on your arm,” he went on with channeled hysteria. “A neat bit of camouflage, Effie. Very neat. And telling me it was my child, when all the while you’ve been seeing him for months!”

  “Man, you’re mad; I’ve not touched her!” Patrick denied hotly though still calculatingly, and risked a step forward, stopping when the gun instantly swung his way.

  “Pretending you were going to give me a healthy child,” Hank raved on, “when all the while you knew it would be—either in body or germ plasm—a thing like that!”

  He waved his gun at the malformed cat, which had leaped to the top of the table and was eating the remains of Patrick’s food, though its watchful green eyes were fixed on Hank.

  “I should shoot him down!” Hank yelled, between sobbing, chest-racking inhalations through the mask. “I should kill him this instant for the contaminated pariah he is!”

  All this while Effie had not ceased to smile compassionately. Now she stood up without haste and went to Patrick’s side. Disregarding his warning, apprehensive glance, she put her arm lightly around him and faced her husband.

  “Then you’d be killing the bringer of the best news we’ve ever had,” she said, and her voice was like a flood of some warm sweet liquor in that musty, hate-charged room. “Oh, Hank, forget your silly, wrong jealousy and listen to me. Patrick here has something wonderful to tell us.”

  Hank stared at her. For once he screamed no reply. It was obvious that he was seeing for the first time how beautiful she had become, and that the realization jolted him terribly.

  “What do you mean?” he finally asked unevenly, almost fearfully.

  “I mean that we no longer need to fear the dust,” she said, and now her smile was radiant. “It never really did hurt people the way the doctors said it would. Remember how it was with me, Hank, the exposure I had and recovered from, although the doctors said I wouldn’t at first—and without even losing my hair? Hank, those who were brave enough to stay outside, and who weren’t killed by terror and suggestion and panic—they adapted to the dust. They changed, but they changed for the better. Everything—”

  “Effie, he told you lies!” Hank interrupted, but still in that same agitated, broken voice, cowed by her beauty.

  “Everything that grew or moved was purified,” she went on ringingly. “You men going outside have never seen it, because you’ve never had eyes for it. You’ve been blinded to beauty, to life itself. And now all the power in the dust has gone and faded, anyway, burned itself out. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  She smiled at Patrick for confirmation. His face was strangely veiled, as if he were calculating obscure changes. He might have given a little nod; at any rate, Effie assumed that he did, for she turned back to her husband.

  “You see, Hank? We can all go out now. We need never fear the dust again. Patrick is a living proof of that,” she continued triumphantly, standing straighter, holding him a little tighter. “Look at him. Not a scar or a sign, and he’s been out in the dust for years. How could he be this way, if the dust hurt the brave? Oh, believe me, Hank! Believe what you see. Test it if you want. Test Patrick here.”

  “Effie, you’re all mixed up. You don’t know—” Hank faltered, but without conviction of any sort.

  “Just test him,” Effie repeated with utter confidence, ignoring—not even noticing—Patrick’s warning nudge.

  “All right,” Hank mumbled. He looked at the stranger dully. “Can you count?” he asked.

  Patrick’s face was a complete enigma. Then he suddenly spoke, and his voice was like a fencer’s foil—light, bright, alert, constantly playing, yet utterly on guard.

  “Can I count? Do you take me for a complete simpleton, man? Of course I can count!”

  “Then count yourself,” Hank said, barely indicating the table.

  “Count myself, should I?” the other retorted with a quick facetious laugh. “Is this a kindergarten? But if you want me to, I’m willing.” His voice was rapid. “I’ve two arms, and two legs, that’s four. And ten fingers and ten toes—you’ll take my word for them?—that’s twenty-four. A head, twenty-five. And two eyes and a nose and a mouth—”

  “With this, I mean,” Hank said heavily, advanced to the table, picked up the Geiger counter, switched it on, and handed it across the table to the other man.

  But while it was still an arm’s length from Patrick, the clicks began to mount furiously, until they were like the chatter of a pigmy machine gun. Abruptly the clicks slowed, but that was only the counter shifting to a new scaling circuit, in which each click stood for 512 of the old ones.

  * * * *

  With those horrid, rattling little volleys, fear cascaded into the room and filled it, smashing like so much colored glass all the bright barriers of words Effie had raised against it. For no dreams can stand against the Geiger counter, the Twentieth Century’s mouthpiece of ultimate truth. It was as if the dust and all the terrors of the dust had incarnated themselves in one dread invading shape that said in words stronger than audible speech, “Those were illusions, whistles in the dark. This is reality, the dreary, pitiless reality of the Burrowing Years.”

  Hank scuttled back to the wall. Through chattering teeth he babbled, “…enough radioactives…kill a thousand men…freak…a freak … In his agitation he forgot for a moment to inhale through the respirator.

  Even Effie—taken off guard, all the fears that had been drilled into her twanging like piano wires—shrank from the skeletal-seeming shape beside her, held herself to it only by desperation.

  Patrick did it for her. He disengaged her arm and stepped briskly away. Then he whirled on them, smiling sardonica
lly, and started to speak, but instead looked with distaste at the chattering Geiger counter he held between fingers and thumb.

  “Have we listened to this racket long enough?” he asked.

  Without waiting for an answer, he put down the instrument on the table. The cat hurried over to it curiously and the clicks began again to mount in a minor crescendo. Effie lunged for it frantically, switched it off, darted back.

  “That’s right,” Patrick said with another chilling smile. “You do well to cringe, for I’m death itself. Even in death I could kill you, like a snake.” And with that his voice took on the tones of a circus barker. “Yes, I’m a freak, as the gentleman so wisely said. That’s what one doctor who dared talk with me for a minute told me before he kicked me out. He couldn’t tell me why, but somehow the dust doesn’t kill me. Because I’m a freak, you see, just like the men who ate nails and walked on fire and ate arsenic and stuck themselves through with pins. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen—only not too close!—and examine the man the dust can’t harm. Rappaccini’s child, brought up to date; his embrace, death!

  “And now,” he said, breathing heavily, “I’ll get out and leave you in your damned lead cave.”

  He started toward the window. Hank’s gun followed him shakingly.

  “Wait!” Effie called in an agonized voice. He obeyed. She continued falteringly, “When we were together earlier, you didn’t act as if …

  “When we were together earlier, I wanted what I wanted,” he snarled at her. “You don’t suppose I’m a bloody saint, do you?”

  “And all the beautiful things you told me?”

  “That,” he said cruelly, “is just a line I’ve found that women fall for. They’re all so bored and so starved for beauty—as they generally put it.”

  “Even the garden?” Her question was barely audible through the sobs that threatened to suffocate her.

  He looked at her and perhaps his expression softened just a trifle.

  “What’s outside,” he said flatly, “is just a little worse than either of you can imagine.” He tapped his temple. “The garden’s all here.”

  “You’ve killed it,” she wept. “You’ve killed it in me. You’ve both killed everything that’s beautiful. But you’re worse,” she screamed at Patrick, “because he only killed beauty once, but you brought it to life just so you could kill it again. Oh, I can’t stand it! I won’t stand it!” And she began to scream.

  Patrick started toward her, but she broke off and whirled away from him to the window, her eyes crazy.

  “You’ve been lying to us,” she cried. “The garden’s there. I know it is. But you don’t want to share it with anyone.”

  “No, no, Euphemia,” Patrick protested anxiously. “It’s hell out there, believe me. I wouldn’t lie to you about it.”

  “Wouldn’t lie to me!” she mocked. “Are you afraid, too?”

  With a sudden pull, she jerked open the window and stood before the blank green-tinged oblong of darkness that seemed to press into the room like a menacing, heavy, wind-urged curtain.

  At that Hank cried out a shocked, pleading, “Effie!”

  She ignored him. “I can’t be cooped up here any longer,” she said. “And I won’t, now that I know. I’m going to the garden.”

  Both men sprang at her, but they were too late. She leaped lightly to the sill, and by the time they had flung themselves against it, her footsteps were already hurrying off into the darkness.

  “Effie, come back! Come back!” Hank shouted after her desperately, no longer thinking to cringe from the man beside him, or how the gun was pointed. “I love you, Effie. Come back!”

  Patrick added his voice. “Come back, Euphemia. You’ll be safe if you come back right away. Come back to your home.”

  No answer to that at all.

  They both strained their eyes through the greenish murk. They could barely make out a shadowy figure about half a block down the near-black canyon of the dismal, dust-blown street, into which the greenish moonlight hardly reached. It seemed to them that the figure was scooping something up from the pavement and letting it sift down along its arms and over its bosom.

  “Go out and get her, man,” Patrick urged the other. “For if I go out for her, I warn you I won’t bring her back. She said something about having stood the dust better than most, and that’s enough for me.”

  But Hank, chained by his painfully learned habits and by something else, could not move.

  And then a ghostly voice came whispering down the street, chanting, “Fire can hurt me, or water, or the weight of Earth. But the dust is my friend.”

  Patrick spared the other man one more look. Then, without a word, he vaulted up and ran off.

  Hank stood there. After perhaps a half minute he remembered to close his mouth when he inhaled. Finally he was sure the street was empty. As he started to close the window, there was a little mew.

  He picked up the cat and gently put it outside. Then he did close the window, and the shutters, and bolted them, and took up the Geiger counter, and mechanically began to count himself.

  THE BIG TIME

  Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, March and April 1958.

  CHAPTER 1

  When shall we three meet again

  In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

  When the hurlyburly’s done.

  When the battle’s lost and won.

  —Macbeth

  ENTER THREE HUSSARS

  My name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me. I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time—not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either.

  I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star who also bears my first name, but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own. I need it, for my job is to nurse back to health and kid back to sanity Soldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going. This war is the Change War, a war of time travelers—in fact, our private name for being in this war is being on the Big Time. Our Soldiers fight by going back to change the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help our side win the final victory a billion or more years from now. A long killing business, believe me.

  You don’t know about the Change War, but it’s influencing your lives all the time and maybe you’ve had hints of it without realizing.

  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 Ghosts—not the story-book 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 all 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 Change War.

  How I got recruited into the Change War, how it’s conducted, what the two sides are, why you don’t consciously know about it, what I really think about it—you’ll learn in due course.

  * * * *

  The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer and I’ve got my silly side, as you’ll find out.

  My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of times and places. We’re a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run a pretty good Recuperation Station, though we have o
ur family troubles. But most of our troubles come slamming into the Place with the beat-up Soldiers, who’ve generally just been going through hell and want to raise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived Soldiers who started this thing I’m going to tell you about, this thing that showed me so much about myself and everything.

  When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and two thousand nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one thousand. This two-nightmares routine every time you lay down your dizzy little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it.

  The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub where the Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated for a party, though a Zeppelin is one thing we haven’t had yet. You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with anything from the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look strangely similar except for size.

  Solely on doctor’s orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since coming to work at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if you care to call them that, for believe me they are busman’s holidays, considering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last one I spent in Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got over it. Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be fitted by the Spiders into serious operations of the Change War, and you can imagine how restful that makes them.

  “See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don’t go too far up front, though, but don’t wander off either. Relax and enjoy yourself.”