The Fritz Leiber Megapack Page 4

  A red sunset struck golden glints from the fantastic, cloud-piercing spires of the New City, made a golden pillar to heaven of Supracenter, whence M’Caslrai might even now be looking paternalistically down. Norm turned his back on that fancied gaze and headed for the Old City’s ragged, low skyline, blackly silhouetted by the angry rays.

  A half-hour’s furious walking carried him out of the interurban green belt with its bizarre mingling of weatherdomes and winter. The tree-lined avenues gave way to steep-walled canyons, through which the wind dipped and tore. Resilient plastic pavement of a relatively recent date blotted out the distinction between sidewalk and street, as no vehicular traffic was permitted in these narrow ways. Occasional roofs, however, had been adapted as landing stages for riding sticks and copters.

  There were people abroad. All over the world, old city populations were dropping, and there was talk of clearing them out altogether. But individuals clung to these outmoded, time-hallowed warrens, the more tenaciously as it became possible to live a more isolated life in them. Not everyone relished the highly paced and socialized existence of the new city skylons.

  Unconsciously Norm increased his alertness. One thing M’Caslrai was supposed to have said this afternoon was quite true: the murder rate had soared fantastically—and the Old City was a Mecca for deviants and discontents.

  Every night brought its quota of killings and assaults, most of them purposeless outbursts of cruelty and lust, as if all the Jack-the-Rippers of the past had been reincarnated a hundredfold. Everyone was suspect. The gray-garbed police Norm passed were too ostentatious in their disregard of him, and once or twice he got the impression he was being followed.

  He paid no particular attention. His mind kept chewing on the scene that had occurred back home, rehearsing it again and again—sometimes in its rightful setting, sometimes against a background of darkness, sometimes against a magnified ghostly version of M’Caslrai’s gaunt, homely, reproachful face—until the lesser faces of his family circle became the painful, too vivid distortions of an olden time surrealist painter, with personalities to match. Gret, his mother, sunk most of the time in a kind of heavy brooding that almost cut her off from the world; hungrily affectionate yet completely unsympathetic, taking all emotion for her province and no one else’s. Jon, his father, whittled by timidity down to the tiniest shred of a man, driven frantic by the slightest friction, living in a painstakingly fabricated dream-world where his decisions amounted to something. Allisoun, constantly veering between a hysterical romance-fed primness and an equally hysterical love-thirst. Willisoun, superficially more adjusted than the rest, with his important, quietly mysterious government job, but alternating his hail-fellow-well-met manner with a surliness that might hide anything—Norm couldn’t forget the diseased hate that had been in his eyes at the last and the way his hand had closed on the flower.

  A panorama from which past centuries peered out more and more often, slipped by half-noticed as he pushed deeper and deeper into the Old City. Walls of brick and stone, patched here and there with panels of glastic indicating still-inhabited dwelling units. Rusted vents that might be the remains of pre-electronic air-conditioning systems. Boxes overhead that had housed microwave traffic control systems. Once he went down an alleyway paved with a worn stone-substitute, and occasionally the fringe of his attention strayed to dusty windows that looked suspiciously like ancient glass.

  As he turned out of the alleyway into a scarcely wider street, he met a small hurrying figure in green walking togs. He brushed past her, but she turned and stared at him closely after a quick glance at his gloved left hand. For a moment impulse and prudence fought in her narrowly elfin face. Then she turned and followed him.

  She was not Norm’s only follower. Another, taller and more darkly clad, melted back into the alleyway at her appearance, then after a moment continued his hungrily striding pursuit, avoiding the broad luminescent bands on pavement and walls. Except for the ghostly light cast by those stripes, it was becoming rapidly darker.

  Gradually and silently, the two pursuers closed in. The one farther back took something thin and bright from his pouch, held it so that it was masked by his forearm.

  Suddenly, at the mouth of another and darker alleyway, Norm stopped. He had come to a decision about the four faces leering in his mind.

  “They’re insane,” he said aloud, lifting his clenched hands, “The whole pack of them.”

  A golden gleam caught his attention. He realized that he had been clutching his death notice all this time. He held it up to the phosphorescent wall-band.

  It was his passport back to respectability. By means of it he could still be reconciled with his family and associates, still die with honor. It symbolized the fact that it was not too late to turn back.

  He took it between his fingers and prepared to rip it across.

  Someone touched his arm. He jerked around. He vaguely remembered having passed this girl in green a few corners back, but now for the first time he saw her slim face, her oddly animated eyes. Something tugged at his memory.

  “You said you think they’re all insane?” she asked softly.

  He nodded doubtfully. He didn’t understand how she could know to whom he was referring.

  An unusual look, an evil joyful look, came into her eyes which never left his face. She smiled slyly and leaned forward. After a considerable pause she whispered.

  “You’re right. They are all insane. You and I too. The whole world is crazy. The only difference is that you and I know.”

  For an extraordinary moment the only things Norm could see clearly were her strange fey eyes. Everything else was darkly rocking. The floor of his mind had tilted and the ideas were slipping, sliding.

  “You believe that?” she whispered.

  Norm realized that he was nodding his head.

  She laughed. “Then you’d better not tear up your death notice,” she said. “You may find a better use for it.”

  It is hard to say what made Norm whirl around again at that moment. Hardly a noise, for the attack, though swift, was horribly soundless. Perhaps he got his cue from a movement of the air, or a doubly reflected gleam from the blade gripped in the second follower’s hand.

  But whirl he did, and simultaneously duck, and the blade, abruptly glowing as if white-hot, drove just over his shoulder, inches from his face.

  Hardly losing a moment in recovering, the dark attacker ripped sidewise at the girl.

  But Norm was swift too, as if his subconscious had long been preparing for this. He caught hold of a fold of dark fabric and jerked. The glowing blade sliced air in front of the green girl’s throat.

  Riding with the jerk, the attacker swung around with a serpentine swiftness, like a murderer in a nightmare, and stabbed out at his victim.

  But Norm caught the knife hand and drove blow after blow at the black-swathed jaw, unmindful of the fingers that tried to pry his loose and of the electron-edged blade that twitched at his undersleeve, slicing the tough fabric to ribbons.

  He felt the figure weaken. He set his feet and drove home a solider blow.

  Sparking as it hit, the knife dropped to the pavement. The figure slumped, sprawled full length across one of the phosphorescent bands.

  Norm bent over it. Faintly in his ears, a police-screech echoed. The girl tugged at his sleeve, saying, “Why did he…? Do you know who he is?”

  Yet when Norm pulled aside the black veil, it was the girl who whispered, “Willisoun!”

  The police-screech sounded clearer. A search-beam probed up and down.

  The girl said, “They mustn’t find us.”

  Norm was fumbling around on his hands and knees.

  “Come on!” The girl caught hold of his sleeve.

  The search-beam found them. The screech came three times, rapidly.

  “Please!” The girl was trying to drag him toward the
alleyway. “If you’re what I think you are, and if you’re willing to trust me at all—”

  But it was because Norm did trust her—and remembered what she had said—that he delayed. Scooping up the fallen gold death notice, he jumped to his feet. Together they hurried down the dark alleyway.

  CHAPTER II

  There was little sleep as that night went around the world. In scattered offices weary-eyed actuaries fed information tapes into machines for a last check on their figures. It was not only the number of war deaths that must be accurately calculated, (and if they calculated one too many, they were morally guilty of murder), but also the exact amounts of material slated for destruction. There were thousands of factors that must never be lost sight of. Some were real, such as prices, availability, production and transportation costs, statistics on total expenditures from the last wars. Some were arbitrary, such as the equating of so many wounded casualties to one death, or the substitution of raw for processed materials. While some were frank extrapolations, such as the regrettable necessity for allowing for the greater destruction made possible by modern technology. Although this factor must of course be shaved as much as possible, it would never do to overlook it completely.

  Elsewhere, electronic wheels were set in motion that would result in sharply upped transmutation, synthesizing, processing, and agricultural production. Auxiliary power plants were opened. Amazingly dispersed munitions factories began to take form. The first of the great triphibian transports started down the production line.

  Teletaction made it possible for major and minor executives all over the world to hold thousands of conferences as efficiently and comfortably as if each conferring group were together in the same room—and, indeed, it gave just that effect. Arrangements for a quarter-billion job transfers were smoothly concluded. Priorities on critical materials were argued out. Psychologists put the finishing touches on courses of orientation for death. Deadlines were determined for putting into effect a complete system of civilian rationing, for a period of belt-tightening was a profoundly necessary part of the war.

  Various entertainment-chains and vice-rings, openly encouraged or at least winked at by police authorities, prepared for expanded activities.

  Religion, which had turned its back on God and devoted itself to the worship of man and man’s destiny, likewise laid plans.

  In a billion homes the lights stayed on. In one out of twenty there was numbing shock, hopeless horror, agonized grief, unanswerable questionings, spasms of rebellion. In the other nineteen there was a feeling of relief so intense as to preclude sleep, mingled with stern self-questionings and an uneasy sense of guilt.

  Everywhere was mounting nervous tension, which would hold for months, until the thing was over. Despite this, scattered experts scanning the hourly statistics gave vent to long-anticipated sighs of relief, as they saw the suicide rate drop almost to zero and the murder and assault rates swoop almost as low. Mankind had something bigger to worry about than personal miseries and ecstasies and compulsions.

  If there was any single emotion that came close to being universal, that touched both the high and the low, those on the spot and those off it, it was fear—an irrational, nerve-tightening dread. More than a century had passed since the last true conflict, but the sense of an enemy lingered subconsciously, to be revived when the war-patterns were reestablished. Odd noises and odors brought quickening heartbeats. Men who walked or flew abroad looked over their hunched shoulders, as if expecting the plunge of the robot bomb or the blue stab of the ray or the silent snowfall of radioactive death. Men on shipboard scanned the empty waters, as if expecting them to be broken, stealthily or with a convulsive splash, by the emerging of a murder-bent triphibian. Men inside were troubled by an uneasiness about the lights, as if all those bright windows on the night side of Earth formed too conspicuous a beacon for some unknown foe lurking in the depths of space.

  CHAPTER Ill

  In world Director M’Caslrai’s office atop Supracenter there was a total absence of bustle and noise, as was perhaps appropriate at the focal point of all this activity. No lights blinked, no secretary-machines hummed, no color-changing maps and graphs troubled the cool gray of the walls, no distant subordinates appeared in teletactive counterpart seeking okays or advice. M’Caslrai was alone.

  His tall, tired, gangling frame was relaxed. Superficially his face was tranquil. It was a big brooding face, seamed with significant wrinkles. As capable of stern decision as of drollery, but somehow always genial. A face on which history was clearly written. The face of a man who knew men, and how to handle them.

  In the whole room, only one thing moved: M’Caslrai’s gnarled forefinger. Back and forth it scratched an inch of chair-arm. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  He looked like a great leader who, after a momentous decision, permits himself the painful luxury of weighing his actions for a last time, of asking himself whether he could possibly have taken any other course, of toting up the suffering his decision would cause against the suffering it had averted.

  And yet, beneath the surface, there was something shockingly wrong in the picture M’Caslrai presented. A certain uncouthness of posture may have had something to do with it, a hint of stiffness in the dark garments. Yet those were only details. You couldn’t put your finger on the main cause. But whatever that was, there was a sense of monstrous hidden abnormality about the man, the persistent suggestion that M’Caslrai was profoundly out of place—either in space, or time.

  He did not look up as J’Wilobe entered unannounced. The slim, lean-jawed Secretary of Dangers had an expression that would have seemed fretful, had it not been so intense. Again there was that instant impression of abnormality, but with J’Wilobe its cause was not obscure. You felt you were looking at the human counterpart of a highly intelligent hybrid of lemur and ferret—a super-Goebbels.

  His gaze roved suspiciously to either side as he came through the door. He paced back and forth for a few moments biting his lip, then let fall, “I found another of those damned chess sets.”

  M’Caslrai stirred, slowly rubbed his dark-guttered eyelids.

  “Makes three in a week,” J’Wilobe continued in staccato bursts. “I destroyed it, of course, but it shook me up. Obviously, someone knows I could have been the greatest chess-player in the world.” He threw back his head. “Knows I gave up the game to devote myself wholly to government—couldn’t serve two masters. Knows what a vice chess is. Knows how I’m still tempted. Leaves the sets around to upset me. Knows what the sight of one does to me.”

  He continued to pace.

  M’Caslrai raised his tangled eyebrows.

  “Mister J’Wilobe…” he began, waggling a forefinger at the Secretary of Dangers.

  J’Wilobe stared intently at the extended digit. His lean arms tightened against his sides. His face paled a trifle.

  M’Caslrai made a fist of his hand. “Your pardon, sir,” he said, smiling humbly. “I had forgotten your…idiosyncrasy. But to continue. You’re getting at something bigger than the chessmen?”

  J’Wilobe faced him. “Right! The chessmen are only a single minor instance. I can put my finger on…I mean, point out…I mean, designate, a hundred comparable cases. Could have told you weeks ago, except I wanted to be absolutely sure. It’s so unlikely, you see. But unlikely or not, the evidence is overwhelming. We are up against an organized underground opposition, the methods and like of which…”

  M’Caslrai raised his hand. “One moment, Mister J’Wilobe. I believe that this matter you are about to expound is of the highest significance. I think it best, therefore, that we call in the others.”

  J’Wilobe pressed his lips together, shook his head.

  “Inscra and Heshifer at a minimum,” M’Caslrai pressed.

  J’Wilobe shrugged an unwilling consent. While M’Caslrai used the teletactor, he stepped outside and signaled to a bruised-jawed young
man who was fingering a cut flower.

  “You’re in shape for a job tonight, Willisoun?” he asked.

  Willisoun nodded.

  “Any word as yet on the thugs who assaulted you in the Old City?”

  Willisoun shook his head.

  “I dislike men who run into danger,” said J’Wilobe. “Be more cautious in the future. Regarding your present assignment, a secret conference is about to be held in M’Caslrai’s office. When it breaks up, hold yourself in readiness to follow anyone whom I designate. Remember, it may be anyone—even M’Caslrai. And be sure to make yourself invisible. You too frequently neglect that precaution. I dislike careless men.”

  When he returned, M’Caslrai was busying himself taking a box out of a cabinet, setting it on his desk. The World Director went out of his way to pull forward a chair, so that there were four arranged at comfortable distances around the desk. His movements were tired and slow, but suggested reservoirs of inward strength.

  Inscra arrived first by a matter of moments. The General Secretary was an expressionless, ponderous individual, who always seemed to be moving through a denser medium than air. Only his eyes looked alive, and even there one could not be sure that the animating force was life.

  Secretary of Minds Heshifer was almost the exact opposite. A small man, ridiculously spry for one so aged, with bald head and a bushy white beard. Fussy, pedantic, quick-witted, expression always ashift.

  M’Caslrai welcomed them with a friendly gesture. Then he opened the box and lifted out a bottle.

  The movement dislodged a tiny grey something which scuttled across the desk. No one else reacted, but Inscra jerked back with a convulsive gasp.

  Heshifer captured the something with a flick of his hand, as though it were an insect. “A scrap of memo tape,” he remarked, looking. No one said anything, though it was with difficulty that Inscra tore his gaze away from Heshifer’s half-closed hand.