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GENERATIONS FROM NOW . . .
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—THAT IS, ALL EXCEPT ONE MAN!
In November AMAZING you’ll meet that man — in the pages of Robert Bloch’s startling novel “Sneak Pre- view.” You’ll follow this man who dared to be creative ... as his tor- tured soul moves toward violent revolt and shattering climax !
You'll also enjoy such exciting November AMAZING features as
• Poul Anderson’s thought-provoking article “Science and Superman : An inquiry.”
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FANTASTIC SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, Vol. 8, No. 11. November 1959, is published monthly by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, William B. Zifr, Chairman or the 3oard (1946-1953) at 434 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago 5, Illinois. Second-das. po; age paid af Chicago, Illinois and at additional mailing offices. Subscription raies: U. S. and possession; and Canada $3.50 for 12 issues; Pan American Union Countries $4.00; all other foreign countries $4.50.
Book-Length Novel by Robert Bloch Sneak Preview
T)ERHAPS some old-timers will be able successfully to con- tradict me, but I would hazard the statement that this is the first time in a very long time, if ever, that an entire issue of a science-fiction magazine was devoted to the work of a single writer.
This issue — as you must know from the cover — features the output of Fritz Leiber.
It is a strange thing that editors shy away from one-writer issues. Variety is always the keyword; the reader must be given lots of different writers ; and if by chance the exigencies of scheduling force an editor to use two stories by the same author in the same issue, he feels it necessary to conceal this from the reader by using a pseudonym on one of the stories.
Why should this be so? Art galleries make a strong point of featuring exhibits of paintings by one artist. Symphony or- chestras will occasionally devote an entire program to one composer. And why not? This gives the audience a chance to steep itself utterly in one man’s imagination and technique ; to comprehend his basic philosophy ; and to marvel at his variety,
And so we feel proud to devote an entire issue of Fantastic to the writings — all brand new — of Fritz Leiber. Writings in 'various moods, of various lengths, about various things — a tre- mendous display of versatility, a true tour de force.
We had thought of dedicating this issue to Leiber’s honor, as a veteran writer in the genre. On second thought, however, the honor is all ours. — NL
3
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NOVEMBER 1959
fantastic
Science Fiction Stories
Volume 8
Number 11
REG. 0. S. PAT. OFF.
All Stories by Fritz Leiber
Publisher
Michael Michaelson
Editorial Director
Norman M. Lobsenz
Editor
Cele Goldsmith
Art Editor
Sid Greiff
NOVELLA
Lean Times In Lankhmar 6
NOVELET
Tranquility, Or Else!..,. - 89
SHORT STORIES
The Reward „ 45
The Mind Spider.. 55
The Improper Authorities 71
FEATURES
Editorial 3
According To You 85
Coming Next Month 84
Illustrations by: Grayam, Summers, Varga
Cover: MORRIS S. DOLLENS
V
Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, One Park Avenue, New York lfi, New York. William Ziff. President : W, Bradford Briggs, Execut ve Vice President : Michael Michaelson, Vice President and Circulation Director ; H. B. Savbin, Vice Presi- dent : J. Leonard O’Donnell, Treasurer.
*
Copyright © 1959 by Ziff-Dovt* Pub//shtng Company, All rights reserved.
If you ran a popular enough religion, there was money in it. And tor money, men took risks, especially when there were . . .
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
ONCE upon a time in Lankhmar, City of the Black Toga, in the world of Nehwon, two years after the Year of the Feathered Death, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser parted their ways.
Exactly what caused the tall brawling barbarian and the slim elusive Prince of Thieves to fall out, and the mighty adventuring partner- ship to be broken, is uncer- tainly known and was at the time the subject of much speculation. Some said they had quarreled over a girl. Others maintained, with even greater unlikelihood, that they had disagreed over the
proper division of a loot of jewels raped from Muulsh the Moneylender. Srith of the Scrolls suggests that their mutual cooling off was large- ly the reflection of a supernat- ural enmity existing at the time between Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, Fafhrd’s de- monic one-time mentor, and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, the Mouser’s alien and multi- serpentine patron.
The likeliest explanation, which runs directly counter to the Muulsh Hypothesis, is simply that times were hard in Lankhmar, adventures few and uninviting, and that the two heroes had reached that point in life when hard- pressed men desire to admix even the rarest quests and pleasurings with certain pru- dent activities leading either to financial or to spiritual se- curity, though seldom if ever to both.
This theory — that boredom and insecurity, and a differ- ence of opinion as to how these dismal feelings might best be dealt with, chiefly un- derlay the estrangement of the twain . . . this theory may account for and perhaps even subsume the otherwise ridicu- lous suggestion that the two comrades fell out over the proper spelling of Fafhrd’s
name, the Mouser perversely, favoring a simple Lankhmar- ian equivalent of “Faferd” while the name’s owner insist- ed that only the original mouth-filling agglomeration of consonants could continue to satisfy his ear and eye and his semi-literate, barbarous sense of the fitness of things. Bored and insecure men will loose arrows at dust motes.
Certain it is that their friendship, though not utter- ly fractured, grew very cold and that their life-ways, though both continuing in Lankhmar, diverged remark- ably.
The Gray Mouser entered the service of one Pulg, a ris- ing racketeer of small relig- ions, a, lord of Lankhmar’s dark underworld who levied tribute from the priests of all godlets seeking to become gods — on pain of various un- pleasant, disturbing and re- volting things happening at future services of the default- ing godlet. If a priest didn’t pay Pulg, his miracles were sure to misfire, his congrega- tion and collection would fail off sharply, and it was quite possible that a bruised skin and broken bones would be his lot.
Accompanied by three or four of Pulg’s bullies and fre- quently a slim dancing girl or
8
FANTASTIC
two, the Mouser became a fa- miliar and newly-ominous sight in Lankhmar’s Street of the Gods, which leads from the Marsh Gate to the distant docks and the Citadel. He still wore gray, went close-hooded, and carried Cat’s Claw and Scalpel at his side, but the dagger and slim curving sword kept in their sheaths. Knowing from of old that a threat is generally more ef- fective than its execution, he limited his activities to the handling of conversations and cash. “I speak for Plug — Plug with a guh!” was his usual opening. Later, if holy men grew recalcitrant or overly keen in their bargaining and it became necessary to maul saintlets and break up ser- vices, he would sign the bul- lies to take these disciplinary measures while he himself stood idly by, generally in slow sardonic converse with the attendant girl or girls and often munching sweetmeats. As the months passed, the Mouser grew fat and the dancing girls successively more child-slim and submis- sive-eyed.
Fafhrd, on the other hand, broke his longsword across his knee (cutting himself bad- ly in the act), tore from his garments the few remaining
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
ornaments (dull worthless scraps of base metal) and bits of ratty fur, foreswore strong drink and all allied pleasures (he had been on small beer and womanless for some time) , and became the sole acolyte of Bwadres, the sole priest of Issek of the Jug. Fafhrd let his beard grow un- til it was as long as his shoul- der-brushing hair, he became lean and hollow-cheeked and cavern-eyed, and his voice changed from bass to tenor, though not as a result of the distressing mutilation which some whispered he had inflict- ed upon himself — these last knew he had cut himself but lied wildly as to where.
The gods in Lankhmar (that is, the gods and candi- dates for divinity who dwell or camp, it may be said, in the Imperishable City, not the gods of Lankhmar — a very different and most secret and dire matter) . . . the gods in Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand in the Great Eastern Desert. The vast majority of them began as men, or more strictly the memories of men who led as- cetic, vision-haunted lives and died painful, messy deaths. One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their
9
priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to con- verge on Lankhmar’s low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate — meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tor- tures, castrations, blindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of east- ern brigands and Mingol un- believers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gantlet. Among the torment- ed holy throng are a few war- locks and witches seeking in- fernal immortality for their dark satanic would-be deities and a very few proto-god- desses— generally maidens re- puted to have been enslaved for decades by sadistic magi- cians and ravished by whole tribes of Mingols.
Lankhmar itself and es- pecially the earlier-mentioned street serves as the theatre or more precisely the intellec- tual and artistic testing- ground of the proto-gods after their more material but no more cruel sifting at the hands of the brigands and Mingols. A new god (his
priest or priests, that is) will begin at the Marsh Gate and more or less slowly work his way up the Street of the Gods, renting a temple or preempting a few yards of cobbled pavement here and there, until he has found his proper level. A very few win their way to the region ad- joining the Citadel and join the aristocracy of the gods in Lankhmar — transients still though resident there for centuries and even millennia (the gods of Lankhmar are as jealous as they are secret). Far more godlets, it can just- ly be said, play a one-night- stand near the Marsh Gate and then abruptly disappear, perhaps to seek cities where the audiences are less critical. The majority work their way about halfway up the Street of the Gods and then slowly work their way down again, resisting bitterly every inch and yard, until they once more reach the Marsh Gate and vanish forever from Langhmar and the memories of men.
Now Issek of the Jug, whom Fafhrd chose to serve, was one of the most lowly and unsuccessful of the gods, god- lets rather, in Lankhmar. He had dwelt there for about thirteen years, during which time he had traveled only two
10
FANTASTIC
squares up the Street of the Gods and was now back at the Marsh Gate again, ready for oblivion. He is not to be con- fused with Issek the Armless, Issek of the Burnt Legs, Flayed Issek, or any other of the numerous and colorfully mutilated divinities of that name. Indeed, his unpopular- ity may have been due in part to the fact that the manner of his death — racking — was not deemed particularly spec- tacular. A few scholars have confused him with Jugged Issek, an entirely different saintlet whose claim to im- mortality lay in his confine- ment for seventeen years in a not overly roomy earthen- ware jar. The Jug (Issek of the Jug’s Jug) was supposed to contain Waters of Peace from the Cistern of Cillivat — but none apparently thirsted for them. Indeed, had you sought for a good example of a has-been god who had never really been anything, you could hardly have hit on a bet- ter choice then Issek of the Jug, while Bwadi'es was the very type of the failed priest — sere, senile, apologetic and mumbling. The reason that Fafhrd attached himself to B wad res, rather than to any one of a vast number of live- lier holy men with better prospects, was that he had
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
once seen Bwadres pat a deaf-and-dumb child on the head while (so far as Bwadres could have known) no one was looking and the incident (possibly unique in Lankh- mar) had stuck in the mind of the barbarian. But other- wise Bwadres was a most un- exceptional old dodderer.
However, after Fafhrd be- came his acolyte, things some- how began to change.
In the first place, and even if he had contributed nothing else, Fafhrd made a very im- pressive one-man congrega- tion from the very first day when he turned up so ragged- looking and bloody (from the cuts got breaking his long- sword). His near seven-foot height and still warlike car- riage stood out mountainous- ly among the old women, chil- dren and assorted riff-raff who made up the odorous, noisy, and vastly fickle crowd of worshippers at the Marsh- Gate end of the Street of the Gods. One could not help thinking that if Issek of the Jug could attract one such worshipper the godlet must have unsuspected virtues. Fafhrd’s formidable height, shoulder-breadth and bearing had one other advantage: he could maintain claim to a very respectable area of cobbles
1 1
for Bwadres and Issek merely by stretching himself out to sleep on them after the night’s services were over.
It was at this time that oafs and ruffians stopped el- bowing Bwadres and spitting on him. Fafhrd was most pa- cific in his new personality — after all, Issek of the Jug was notably a godlet of peace — but Fafhrd had a fine bar- baric feeling for the proprie- ties. If anyone took liberties with Bwadres or disturbed the various rituals of Issek- worship, he would find him- self lifted up and set down somewhere else, with an ad- monitory thud if that seemed called for — a sort of informal one-stroke bastinado.
Bwadres himself brighten- ed amazingly as a result of this wholly unexpected respite granted him and his divinity on the very brink of oblivion. He began to eat more often than twice a week and to comb his long skimpy beard. Soon his senility dropped away from him like an old cloak, leaving of itself only a mad stubborn gleam deep in his yellowly crust-edged eyes, and he began to preach the gospel of Issek of the Jug with a fervor and confidence that he had never shown be- fore.
Meanwhile Fafhrd, in the second place, fairly soon be- gan to contribute more to the promotion of the Issek-of- the-Jug cult than his size, presence, and notable talents as a chucker-out. After two months of self-imposed abso- lute silence, which he refused to break even to answer the simplest questions of Bwa- dres, who was at first consid- erably puzzled by his gigantic convert, Fafhrd procured a small broken lyre, repaired it, and began regularly to chant the Creed and History of Issek of the Jug at all serv- ices. He competed in no way with Bwadres, never chanted any of the litanies or presum- ed to bless in Issek’s name, in fact he always kneeled and re- sumed silence while serving Bwadres as acolyte, but seat- ed on the cobbles at the foot of the service area while Bwadres meditated between rituals at the head, he would strike melodious chords from his tiny lyre and chant away in a rather high-pitched, pleasing, romantically vibrant voice.
Now as a Northerner boy in the Cold Waste, far pole- ward of Lankhmar across the Inner Sea, the forested Land of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep Mountains, Fafhrd had been trained in the
12
FANTASTIC
School of the Singing Skalds (so called, although they chanted rather than sang, be- cause they pitched their voices tenor) rather than in the School of the Roaring Skalds (who pitched their voices base). This resumption of a childhood-inculcated style of elocution, which he also used in answering the few ques- tions his humility would per- mit him to notice, was the real and sole reason for the change in Fafhrd’s voice that was made the subject of gos- sip by those who had known him as the Gray Mouser’s deep-voiced swordmate.
As delivered over and over by Fafhrd, the History of Issek of the Jug gradually al- tered, by small steps which even Bwadres could hardly cavil at had he wished, into something considerably more like the saga of a northern hero, though toned down in some respects. Issek had not slain dragons and other mon- sters as a child — that would have been against his Creed — he had only sported with them, swimming with levia- than, frisking with behemoth, and flying through the track- less spaces of air on the backs of wivern, griffin and hippo- gryph. Nor had Issek as a man scattered kings and em-
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
perors in battle, he had mere- ly dumbfounded them and their quaking ministers by striding about on fields of poisoned sword-points, stand- ing at attention in fiery fur- naces, and treading water in tanks of boiling oil — the while delivering majestic sermons on brotherly love in perfect, intricately rhymed stanzas.
Bwadres’ Issek had expired quite quickly, though with some kindly parting admoni- tions, after being disjointed on the rack. Fafhrd’s Issek (now the Issek) had broken seven racks before he began seriously to weaken. Even when, supposedly dead, he had been loosed and had got his hands on the chief torturer’s throat there had been enough strength remaining in them alone so that he had been able to strangle the wicked man with ease, although the latter was a champion of wrestlers among his people. However, Fafhrd’s Issek had not done so — again it would have been quite against his Creed — he had merely broken the tortur- er’s thick brass band of office from around his trembling neck and twisted it into an ex- quisitely beautiful symbol of the Jug before finally permit- ting his own ghost to escape from him into the eternal realms of spirit, there to con-
13
tinue its wildly wonderful ad- venturings.
Now since the vast major- ity of the gods in Lankhmar, arising from the Eastern Lands or at least from the kindredly decadent southern country around Quarmall, had been in their earthly incarna- tions rather effete types, un- able to bear more than a few minutes of hanging or a few hours of impalement, and with relatively little resist- ance to molten lead or show- ers of barbed darts, also not given overly to composing ro- mantic poetry or to dashing exploits with strange beasts, it is hardly to be wondered that lssek of the Jug, as in- terpreted by Fafhrd, swiftly won and held the attention and soon thereafter also the devotion of a growing section of the usually unstable, gods- dazzled mob. In particular the vision of lssek of the Jug rising up with his rack, strid- ing about with it on his back, breaking it, and then calmly waiting with arms voluntar- ily stretched above his head until another rack could be readied and attached to him . . . that vision, in particular, came to occupy a place of prime importance in the dreams and daydreams of many a porter, beggar, drab
scullion, and the brats and aged dependents of such.
As a result of this popular- ity, lssek of the Jug was soon not only moving up the Street of the Gods for a second time — a rare enough feat in itself — but also moving at a great- er velocity than any god had been known to attain in the modern era. Almost every service saw Bwadres and Fafhrd able to move their simple altar a few more yards toward the Citadel end as their swelling congregations overflowed areas temporarily saci'ed to gods of less drawing power, and ' frequently late- coming and untirable wor- shippers enabled them to keep up services until the sky was reddening with the dawn — ten or twelve repetitions of the ritual (and the yardage gain) in one night. Before long the make-up of their con- gregations had begun to change. Pursed and then fat- ter-pursed types showed up: mercenaries and merchants, sleek thieves and minor offi- cials, jeweled courtesans and slumming aristocrats, shav- en philosophers who scoffed lightly at Bwadres’ tangled arguments and Issek’s irra- tional Creed but who were se- cretly awed by the apparent sincerity of the ancient man and his giant poetical acolyte
14
FANTASTIC
. . , and with these monied newcomers came, inevitably, the iron-tough hirelings of Pulg and other such hawks circling over the fowlyards of religion.
Naturally enough, this threatened to pose a consid- erable problem for the Gray Mouser.
So long as Issek, B wad res and Fafhrd stayed within hooting range of the Marsh Gate, there was nothing to worry about. There when col- lection time came and Fafhrd circled the congregation with cupped hands, the take, if any, was in the form of moldy crusts, common vegetables past their prime, rags, twigs, bits of charcoal, and — very rarely, giving rise to shouts of wonder — bent and dinted greenish coins of brass. Such truck was below the notice of even lesser racketeers than Pulg, and Fafhrd had no trou- ble whatever in dealing with the puny and dull-witted types who sought to play Robber King in the Marsh Gate’s shadow. More than once the Mouser managed to advise Fafhrd that this was an ideal state of affairs and that any considerable further progress of Issek up the Street of the Gods could lead only to great unpleasantness. The Mous-
er was nothing if not cautious and most prescient to boot. He liked, or firmly believed he liked, his newly-achieved security almost better than he liked himself. He knew that, as a recent hireling of Pulg, he was still being watched closely by the Great Man and that any appearance of con- tinuing friendship with Fafhrd (for most outsiders thought they had quarreled irrevocably) might some day be counted against him. So on the occasions when he drift- ed down the Street of the Gods during off-hours — that is, by daylight, for religion is largely a nocturnal, torchlit business in Lankhmar — he would never seem to speak to Fafhrd directly. Nevertheless he would by seeming accident end up near Fafhrd and, while apparently engaged in some very different private business or pleasure (or per- haps come secretly to gloat over his large enemy’s fallen estate — that was the Mouser ’s second line of defense against conceivable accusa- tions by Pulg) he would manage considerable conver- sations out of the corner of his mouth, which Fafhrd would answer, if at all, in the same way — though in his case presumably from ab- straction rather than policy.
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
15
“Look, Fafhrd,” the Mous- er said on the third of such occasions, meanwhile pre- tending to study a skinny- limbed pot-bellied beggar girl, as if trying to decide whether a diet of lean meat and cer- tain callisthenics would bring out in her a rare gaminesque beauty — “Look, Fafhrd, right here you have what you want, whatever that is — I think it’s a chance to patch up poetry and squeak it at fools — but whatever it is, you must have it here near the Marsh Gate, for the only thing in the world that is not near the Marsh Gate is money, and you tell me you don’t want that — the more fool you ! — but let me tell you something: if you let Bwadres get any nearer the Citadel, yes even a peb- ble’s toss, you will get money whether you want it or not, and with that money you and Bwadres will buy something, also willy-nilly and no matter how tightly you close your purse and shut your ears to the cries of the hawkers. That thing which you and Bwadres will buy is trouble.”
Fafhrd answered only with a faint grunt that was the equivalent of a shoulder shrug. He was looking stead- ily down past his bushy beard with almost cross-eyed con- centration at something his
long fingers were manipulat- ing powerfully yet delicately, but that the large backs of his hands concealed from the Mouser’s view.
“How is the old fool, by the by, since he's eating regular- ly?” the Mouser continued, leaning a hair closer in an ef- fort to see what Fafhrd was handling. “Still stubborn as ever, eh? Still set on taking Issek to the Citadel? Still as unreasonable about . . . er . . . business matters?”
“Bwadres is a good man,” Fafhrd said quietly.
“More and more that ap- pears to be the heart of the trouble,” the Mouser answer- ed with a certain sardon- ic exasperation. “But look, Fafhrd, it’s not necessary to change Bwadres’ mind — I’m beginning to doubt whether even Sheelba and Ning, work- ing together, could achieve that cosmic revolution. You can do by yourself all that needs to be done. Just give your poetry a little downbeat, add a little defeatism to Issek’s Creed — even you must be tired by now of all this ridiculous mating of northern stoicism to southern maso- chism, and wanting a change. One theme’s good as another to a true artist. Or, simpler still, merely refrain from
16
FANTASTIC
moving Issek’s altar up the street on your big night . . . or even move it down a little ! — Bwadres gets so excited when you have big crowds that the old fool doesn’t know which direction you’re going, anyhow. You could progress like the well-frog. Or, wisest of all, merely prepare yourself to split the take before you hand over the collection to Bwadres. I could teach you the necessary legerdemain in the space of one dawn, though you really don’t need it — with those huge hands you can palm anything.”
“No,” said Fafhrd.
“Suit yourself,” the Mouser said very very lightly, though not quite unfeelingly. “Buy trouble if you will, death if you must. Fafhrd, what is that thing you’re fiddling with? No, don’t hand it to me, you idiot! Just let me glimpse it. By the Black Bones in the First Black Toga! — what is that?”
Without looking up or oth- erwise moving, Fafhrd had cupped his hands sideways, much as if he were displaying in the Mouser’s direction a captive butterfly or beetle — and indeed it did seem at first glimpse as if it were a rare large beetle he was cautiously baring to view, one with a
carapace of softly burnished gold.
“It is an offering to Issek,” Fafhrd droned. “An offering made last night by a devout lady who is wed in spirit to the god.”
“Yes, and to half the young aristos of Lankhmar too and not at all in spirit,” the Mous- er hissed. “I know one of Lessnya’s double-spiral brace- lets when I see it. Reputedly given her by the Twin Dukes of Uthmar, by the by. What did you have to do to her to get it? — stop, don’t answer. I know . . . recite poetry! Fa- fhrd, things are far worse than I dreamed. If Pulg knew you were already getting gold ...” He let his whisper trail off. “But what have you done with it?”
“Fashioned it into a repre- sentation of the Holy Jug,” Fafhrd answered, bowing his head a shade farther and opening his hands a bit wider and tipping them a trifle.
“So I see,” the Mouser hiss- ed. The soft gold had been twisted into a remarkably smooth strange knot. “And not a bad job either, though a most barbarous one. Not a bad job at all. Fafhrd, how you keep such a delicate feel- ing for curves when for six months you’ve slept without them against you is quite be-
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
17
yond me. Doubtless such things go by opposites. Don’t speak for a moment now, I’m getting an idea. And by the Black Scapula! — a good one! Fafhrd, you must give me that trinket so that I may give it to Pulg. No — please hear me out and then think this through ! — not for the gold in it, not as a bribe or as part of a first split — I’m not asking that of you or Bwadres — but simply as a keepsake, a pre- sentation piece. Fafhrd, I've been getting to know Pulg lately and I find he has a strange sentimental streak in him — he likes to get little gifts, little trophies, from his . . . er . . . customers, we sometimes call them. These curios must always be items relating to the god in ques- tion— chalices, censors, bones in silver filigree, jeweled amulets, that sort of thing. He likes to sit looking at his shelves of them and dream. Sometimes I think the man is getting religion without real- izing it. If I should bring him this bauble he would — I know ! — develop an affection for Issek. He would tell me to go easy on Bwadres. It would probably even be pos- sible to put off the question of tribute money for . . . well, for three more squares at least.”
"No,” said Fafhrd.
“So be it, my friend. Come with me, my dear, I am going to buy you a steak.” This sec- ond remark was in the Mous- er’s regular speaking voice and directed, of course, at the beggar girl, who reacted with a look of already practiced and rather langorous affright. “Not a fish steak either, puss. Did you know there were oth- er kinds? Toss this coin to your mother, dear, and come. The stall is four squares up. No, we won't take a litter — you need the exercise. Fare- well— Death-seeker!”
Despite the wash-my-hands- of-you tone of this last whis- per, the Gray Mouser did what he could to put off the evil night of reckoning, devis- ing more pressing tasks for Pulg’s bullies and alleging that this or that omen was against the immediate settling of the Bwadres account — for Pulg, alongside his pink streak of sentimentality, had recently taken to sporting a gray one of superstition.
There would have been no insurmountable problem at all, of course, if Bwadres had only had that touch of realism about money matters that, when a true crisis arises, is almost invariably shown by even the fattest, greediest
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priest or the skinniest, most unworldly holy man. But Bwadres was stubborn — it was probably, as we have hinted, the sole remaining symptom, though a most in- convenient one, of his only seemingly cast-off senility. Not one rusty iron tik (the smallest coin of Lankhmar) would he pay to extortioners — such was Bwadres’ boast. To make matters worse, if that were possible, he would not even spend money renting gaudy furniture or temple space for Issek, as was prac- tically mandatory for gods progressing up the central stretch of the Street. Instead he averred that every tik col- lected, every bronze agol, every silver smerduk, every gold rilk, yes every diamond- in-amber glulditch ! — would be saved to buy for Issek the finest temple at the Citadel end, in fact the temple of Aarth the Invisible All-Lis- tener, accounted one of the most ancient and powerful of all the gods in Lankhmar.
Naturally this insane chal- lenge, thrown out for all to hear, had the effect of still further increasing Issek’s popularity and swelled his congregations with all sorts of folk who came, at first at least, purely as curiosity seek- ers. The odds on how far
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
Issek would get up the Street how soon (for they regularly; bet on such things in Lankh- mar) began to switch wildly, up and down as the affair got quite beyond the shrewd but essentially limited imagina- tions of bookmakers. Bwadres took to sleeping curled in the gutter around Issek’s coffer (first an old garlic bag, later a small stout cask with a slit in the top for coins) and with Fafhrd curled around him. Only one of them slept at a time, the other rested but kept watch.
At one point the Mouser al- most decided to slit Bwadres’ throat as the only possible way off his dilemma. But he knew that such an act would be the one unforgivable crime against his new profession — it would be bad for business — and certain to ruin him for- ever with Pulg and all other extortioners if ever traced to him even in faintest suspi- cion. Bwadres must be rough- ed up if necessary, yes even tortured, but at the same time he must be treated in all ways as a goose who laid golden eggs. Moreover, the Mouser had a presentiment that put- ting Bwadres out of the way would not stop Issek. Not while Issek had Fafhrd.
What finally brought the af-
19
fair to a head, or rather to its first head, and forced the Mouser’s hand was the ines- capable realization that if he held off any longer from put- ting the bite on Bwadres for Pulg, then rival extortioners — one Bashabek in particular — would do it on their own account. As the Number One Racketeer of Religions in Lankhmar, Pulg certainly had first grab, but if he delayed for an unreasonable length of time in making it (no matter on what grounds of omens or arguments about fattening the sacrifice) then Bwadres was anybody’s victim — Bash- abek’s in particular, as Pulg’s chief rival.
So it came about, as it so often does, that the Mouser’s efforts to avert the evil night- fall only made it darker and stormier when it finally came down.
When at last that penulti- mate evening did arrive, sig- nalized by a final warning sent Pulg by Bashabek, the Mouser, who had been hoping all along for some wonderful last-minute inspiration that never came, took what may seem to some a coward’s way out. Making use of the beggar girl, whom he had named Lily- black, and certain other of his creatures, he circulated a ru-
mor that the Treasurer of the Temple of Aarth was prepar- ing to decamp in a rented black sloop across the Inner Sea, taking with him all funds and temple-valuables, including a set of black-pearl- crusted altar furnishings, gift of the wife of the High Over- lord, on which the split had not yet been made with Pulg. He timed the rumor so that it would return to him, by un- impeachable channels, just after he had set out for Isselt’s spot with four well- armed bullies.
It may be noted, in passing, that Aarth’s Treasurer ac- tually was in monetary hot waters and really had rented a black sloop. Which proved not only that the Mouser used good sound fabric for his fabrications, but also that Bwadres had by landlords’ and bankers’ standards made a very sound choice in select- ing Issek’s temple-to-be — whether by chance or by some strange shrewdness co- dwelling with his senile stub- bornness.
The Mouser could not di- vert his whole expeditionary force, for Bwadres must be saved from Bashabek. How- ever, he was able to split it with the almost certain knowledge that Pulg would consider his action the best
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strategy available at the mo- ment. Three of the bullies he sent on with firm instructions to bring Bwadres to account, while he himself raced off with minimum guard to in- tercept the supposedly fleeing and loot-encumbered treas- urer.
Of course the Mouser could have made himself part of the Bwadres-party, but that would have meant he would have had personally to best Fafhrd or be bested by him, and while the Mouser wanted to do everything possible for his friend he wanted to do just a little bit more than that (he thought) for his own se- curity.
Some, as we have suggest- ed, may think that in taking this way out the Gray Mouser was throwing his friend to the wolves. However, it must always be remembered that the Mouser knew Fafhrd.
The three bullies, who did not know Fafhrd (the Mous- cr had selected them for that reason), were pleased with the turn of events. An inde- pendent commission always meant the chance of some brilliant achievement and so perhaps of promotion. They waited for the first break be- tween services, when there was inevitably considerable passing about and jostling.
Then one, who had a small axe in his belt, went straight for Bwadres and his cask, which the holy man also used as altar, draping it for the purpose with the sacred gar- lic bag. Another drew sword and menaced Fafhrd, keeping sound distance from and care- ful watch on the giant. The third, adopting the jesting, rough-and-ready manner of the master of the show in a bawdy house, spoke ringing warnings to the crowd and kept a reasonably watchful eye on them. The folk of Lankhmar are so bound by tradition that it was unthink- able that they would interfere with any activities as legiti- mate as those of an extortion- er— the Number One Extor- tioner, too — even in defense of a most favored priest, but there are occasional foreign- ers and madmen to be dealt with (though in Lankhmar even the madmen generally respect the traditions).
No one in the congregation saw the crucial thing that happened next, for their eyes were all on the first bully, who was lightly choking Bwadres with one hand while pointing his axe at the cask with the other. There was a cry of sur- prise and a clatter. The sec- ond bully, lunged forward
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
21
toward Fafhrd, had dropped his sword and was shaking his hand as if it pained him. Without haste Fafhrd picked him up by the slack of his gar- ments between his shoulder- blades. reached the first bully in two giant strides, slapped the axe from his hand, and picked him up likewise.
It was an impressive sight : the giant, gaunt-cheeked, bearded acolyte wearing his long robe of undyed camel’s hair (recent gift of a votary) and standing with knees bent and feet wide-planted as he held aloft to either side a squirming bully.
But although indeed a most impressive tableau, it pre- sented a made-to-order open- ing for the third bully, who instantly unsheathed his scimitar and, with an acro- bat’s smile and wave to the crowd, lunged forward long and low and swept his cruel sword upward toward the apex of the obtuse angle formed by the juncture of Fafhrd 's legs.
The crowd shuddered and squealed with the thought of the poignancy of the blow.
There was a muffled thud. The third bully dropped his sword. Without changing his stance Fafhrd swept together the two bullies he was hold-
ing so that their heads met with a loud thunk. With an equally measured movement he swept them apart again and sent them sprawling to either side, unconscious, among the onlookers. Then stepping forward, still with- out seeming haste, he picked up the third bully by neck and crotch and pitched him a con- siderably greater distance into the crowd, where he bowled over two of Basha- bek’s henchmen who had been watching the proceedings with great interest.
There was absolute silence for three heartbeats, then the crowd applauded rapturously. While the tradition-bound Lankhmarians thought it highly proper for extortioners to extort, they also considered it completely in character for a strange acolyte to work miracles, and they never omitted to clap a good per- formance.
Bwadres, fingering his throat and still gasping a little, smiled with simple pleasure and when Fafhrd fi- nally acknowledged the ap- plause by dropping down cross-legged to the cobbles and bowing his head, the old priest launched instantly into a sermon in which he further electrified the crowd by sev- eral times hinting that, in his
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celestial realms Issek was preparing to visit Lankhmar in person. His acolyte’s rout- ing of the three evil men Bwadres attributed to the in- spiration of Issek’s might — to be interpreted as a sort of foretaste of the god’s ap- proaching reincarnation.
The most significant conse- quence of this victory of the doves over the hawks was a little midnight conference in the back room of the Inn of the Silver Eel, where Pulg first warmly praised and then coolly castigated the Gray Mouser.
He praised the Mouser for intercepting the Treasurer of Aarth, who it turned out had just been embarking on the black sloop, not to flee Lankh- mar, though, but only to spend a water-guarded week end with several riotous com- panions and one Ilala, High Priestess of the goddess of the same name. However, he had actually taken along several of the black-pearl-crusted altar furnishings, apparently as a gift for the High Priest- ess, and the Mouser very properly confiscated them be- fore wishing the holy band the most exquisite of pleas- ures on their holiday. Pulg judged that the Mouser’s loot amounted to just about twice the usual cut, which seemed
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a reasonable figure to cover the Treasurer’s irregularity.
He rebuked the Mouser for failing to warn the three bul- lies about Fafhrd and omit- ting to instruct them in detail on how to deal with the giant.
“They’re your boys, son, and I judge you by their per- formance,” Pulg told the Mouser in fatherly matter-of- fact tones. “To me, if they stumble, you flop. You know this Northerner well, son, you should have had them trained to meet his sleights. You solv- ed your main problem well, but you slipped on an impor- tant detail. I expect good strategy from my lieutenants, but I demand flawless tactics.”
The Mouser bowed his head.
“You and this Northerner were comrades once,” Pulg continued. He leaned forward across the dinted table and drew down his lowrer lip. “You’re not still soft on him, are you, son?”
The Mouser arched his eye- brows, flared his nostrils and slowly swung his face from side to side.
Pulg thoughtfully scratched his nose. “So we come to to- morrow night,” he said. “Must make an example of Bwadres — an example that will stick like Mingol glue. I’d
23
suggest having Grilli ham- string the Northerner at the first onset. Can’t kill him — he’s the one that brings in the money. But with ankle ten- dons cut he could still stump around on his hands and knees and be in some ways an even better drawing card. How’s that sound to you?”
The Mouser slitted his eyes in thought for three breaths. Then, “Bad,” he said boldly. “It gripes me to admit it, but this Northerner sometimes conjures up battle-sleights that even I can't be sure of countering — crazy berserk tricks born of sudden whim that no civilized man can an- ticipate. Chances are Grilli could nick him, but what if he didn’t? Here’s my reed — it lets you rightly think that I may still be soft on the man, but I give it because it’s my best reed : let me get him drunk at nightfall. Dead drunk. Then he’s out of the way for certain.”
Pulg frowned. “Sure you can deliver on that, son? They say he’s forsworn booze. And he sticks to Bwadres like a giant squid.”
“I can detach him,” the Mouser said. “And this way we don’t risk spoiling him for Bwadres’ show. Battle’s al- ways uncertain. You may plan
to hock a man and then have to cut his throat.”
Pulg shook his head. “We also leave him fit to tangle with our collectors the next time they come for the cash. Can’t get him drunk every time we pick up the split. Too complicated. And looks very weak.”
“No need to,” the Mouser said confidently. “Once Bwa- dres starts paying, the North- erner will go along.”
Pulg continued to shake his head. “You’re guessing, son,” he said. “Oh, to the best of your ability, but still guessing. I want this deal bagged up strongly. An ex- ample that will stick, I said. Remember, son, the man we’re really putting on this show for tomorrow night is Bashabek. He’ll be there, you can bet on it, though standing in the last row, I imagine — did you hear how your North- erner dumped two of his boys? I liked that.” He grin- ned widely, then instantly grew serious again. “So we’ll do it my way, eh? Grilli’s very sure.”
The Mouser shrugged once, deadpan. “If you say so. Of course, some Northerners suicide when crippled. I don’t think he would, but he might. Still, even allowing for that, I’d say your plan has four
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chances in five of working out perfectly. Four in five.”
Pulg frowned furiously, his rather piggy red-rimmed eyes fixed on the Mouser. Finally he said, “ Sure you can get him drunk, son? Five in five?”
“I can do it,” the Mouser said. He had thought of a half dozen additional arguments in favor of his plan, but he did not utter them. He did not even add, “Six in six,” as he was tempted to. He was learn- ing.
Pulg suddenly leaned back in his chair and laughed, signing that the business part of their conference was over. He tweaked the naked girl standing beside him. “Wine!” he ordered. “No, not that sugary slop I keep for cus- tomers— didn’t Zizzi instruct you? — but the real stuff from behind the green idol. Come, son, pledge me a cup, and then tell me a little about this Issek. I’m interested in him. I’m interested in ’em all.” He waved loosely at the darkly gleaming shelves of religious curios in the handsomely carved traveling case rising beyond the end of the table. He frowned a very different frown from his business one. “There are more things in this world than we under-
stand,” he said sententiously. “Did you know that, son?” The Great Man shook his head, again very differently. He was swiftly sinking into his most deeply metaphysical mood. “Makes me wonder, sometimes. You and I, son, know that these — ” (He wav- ed again at the case) “ — are toys. But the feelings that men have toward them . . . they’re real, eh? — and they can be strange. Easy to un- derstand part of those feel- ings — brats shivering at bogies, fools gawking at a show and hoping for blood or a bit of undressing — but there’s another part that’s strange. The priests bray non- sense, the people groan and pray, and then something comes into existence. I don’t know what that something is — I wish I did, I think — but it’s strange.” He shook his head. “Make any man wonder. So drink your wine, son — watch his cup, girl, and don’t let it empty — and talk to me about Issek. I’m interested in ’em all, but right now I’d like to hear about him.”
He did not in any way hint that for the past two months he had been watching the services of Issek for at least five nights a week from be- hind a veiled window in var- ious lightless rooms along the
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
25
Street of the Gods. It was cer- tain that was something that not even the Mouser knew about Pulg.
So as a pinkly opalescent, rose-ribboned dawn surged up the sky from the black and stinking Marsh, the Mouser sought out Fafhrd. Bwadres was still snoring in the gut- ter, embracing Issek’s cask, but the big barbarian was awake and sitting on the curb, hand grasping his chin under his beard. Already a few children had gathered at a re- spectful distance, though no one else was abroad.
“That the one they can’t stab or cut?” the Mouser heard one of the children whisper.
“That’s him,” another an- swered.
“I’d like to sneak up behind him and stick him with this pin.”
“I’ll bet you would!”
“I guess he’s got iron skin,” said a tiny girl with large eyes.
The Mouser smothered a guffaw, patted that last child on the head, and then advanc- ed straight to Fafhrd and, with a grimace at the stained refuse between the cobbles, squatted fastidiously on his hams. He still could do it eas- ily though his new belly made
a considerable pillow in his lap.
He said without preamble, speaking too low for the chil- dren to hear, “Some say the strength of Issek lies in love, some say in honesty, some say in courage, some say in stink- ing hypocrisy. I believe I have guessed the one true answer. If I am right, you will drink wine with me. If I am wrong, I will strip to my loincloth, declare Issek my god and master, and serve as acolyte’s acolyte. Is it a wager?”
Fafhrd studied him. “It is done,” he said.
The Mouser advanced his right hand and lightly rapped Fafhrd’s body twice through the soiled camel’s hair — once on the chest, once between the legs.
Each time there was a faint thud with just the hint of a clank.
"The cuirass of Mingsward and the groin-piece of Gortch,” the Mouser pro- nounced. “Each heavily pad- ded to keep them from ring- ing. Therein lie Issek’s strength and invulnerability. They wouldn’t have fit you six months ago.”
Fafhrd sat as one bemused. Then his face broke into a large grin. “You win,” he said. “When do I pay?”
“This very afternoon,” the
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Mouser whispered, "when Bwadres eats and takes his forty winks.” He rose with a light grunt and made off, stepping daintily from cobble to cobble.
Soon the Street of the Gods grew moderately busy and for a while Fafhrd was surround- ed by a scattering of the curious, but it was a very hot day for Lankhmar. By mid- afternoon the Street was de- serted, even the children had sought shade. Bwadres droned through the Acloyte’s Litany twice with Fafhrd, then called for food by touch- ing his hand to his mouth — it was his ascetic custom al- ways to eat at this uncomfort- able time rather than in the cool of the evening.
Fafhrd went off and short- ly returned with a large bowl of fish stew. Bwadres blinked at the size of it, but tucked it away, belched, and curled around the cask after an admonition to Fafhrd. He was snoring almost immediately.
A hiss sounded from the low wide archway behind them. Fafhrd stood up and quietly moved into the shad- ows of the portico. The Mouser gripped his arm and guided him toward one of sev- eral curtained doorways.
“Your sweat’s a flood, my friend,” he said softly. “Tell
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me, do you really wear the armor from prudence, or is it a kind of metal hair-shirt?” Fafhrd did not answer. He blinked at the curtain, the Mouser drew aside. “I don’t' like this,” he said. “It’s a house of assignation. I may be seen and then what will dirty-minded people think?” “Hung for the kid, hung for the goat,” the Mouser said lightly. “Besides, you haven’t been seen — yet. In with you!” Fafhrd complied. The heavy curtains swung to behind them, leaving the room in which they stood lit only by high louvers. As Fafhrd squinted into the semi-dark- ness, the Mouser said, “I’ve paid the evening’s rent on this place. It’s private, it’s near. None will know. What more could you ask?”
“I guess you’re right,” Fafhrd said uneasily. “But you’ve spent too much rent money. Understand, my little man, I can have only one drink with you. You tricked me into that — after a fashion you did — but I pay. But only one cup of wine, little man. We’re friends, but we have our sep- arate paths to tread. So only one cup. Or at most two.” “Naturally,” purred the Mouser.
The objects in the room
27
grew in the swimming gray blank of Fafhrd’s vision. There was an inner door (also curtained), a narrow bed, a basin, a low table and stool, and on the floor beside the stool several portly short- necked large-eared shapes. Fafhrd counted them and once again his face broke into a large grin.
“Hung for a kid, you said,” he rumbled softly in his old bass voice, continuing to eye the stone bottles of vintage. “I see four kids, Mouser.”
The Mouser echoed himself. “Naturally.”
By the time the candle the Mouser had fetched was gut- tering in a little pool Fafhrd was draining the third “kid.” He held it upended above his head and caught the last drop, then batted it lightly away like a large feather-stuffed ball. As its shards exploded from the floor, he bent over from where he was sitting on the bed. bent so low that his beard brushed the floor, and clasped the last “kid” with both hands and lifted it with exaggerated care onto the table. Then taking up a very short-bladed knife and keep- ing his eyes so close to his work that they were inevita- bly crossed, he picked every last bit of resin out of the neck, flake by tiny flake.
Fafhrd no longer looked at all like an acolyte, even a mis- behaving one. After finishing the first “kid” he had strip- ped for action. His camel’s hair robe was flung into one corner of the room, the pieces of padded armor into another. Wearing only a once- white loincloth he looked like some lean doomful berserk, or a barbaric king in a bath-house.
For some time no light had been coming through the louvers. Now there was a lit- tle— the red glow of torches. The noises of night had start- ed and were on the increase — thin laughter, hawkers’ cries, various summonses to prayer . . . and Bwadres call- ing “Fafhrd!” again and again in his raspy long-carry- ing voice. But that last had stopped some time ago.
Fafhrd took so long with the resin, handling it like gold leaf, that the Mouser had to fight down several groans of impatience. But he was smil- ing his soft smile of victory. He did move once — to light a fresh taper from the expir- ing one. Fafhrd did not seem to notice the change in illum- ination. By now, it occurred to the Mouser, his friend was doubtless seeing everything by that brilliant light of spirits of wine which illum-
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ines the way of all brave drunkards.
Without any warning the Northerner lifted the short knife high and stabbed it into the center of the cork.
“Die, false Mingol!” he cried, withdrawing the knife with a twist, the cork on its point. “I drink your blood!” And he lifted the stone bottle to his lips.
After he had gulped about a third of its contents, by the Mouser’s calculation, he set it down rather suddenly on the table. His eyeballs rolled up- ward, all the muscles of his body quivered with the pass- ing of a beatific spasm, and he sank back majestically, like a tree that falls with care. The frail bed creaked omin- ously but did not collapse un- der its burden.
Yet this was not quite the end. An anxious crease ap- peared between Fafhrd’s shaggy eyebrows, his head tilted up and his bloodshot eyes peered out menacingly from their eagle’s nest of hair, searching the room.
Their gaze finally settled on the last stone bottle. A long rigidly-muscled arm shot out, a great hand shut on the top of the bottle and placed it un- der the edge of the bed and did not leave it. Then Fafhrd’s eyes closed, his head dropped
back with finality and, smil- ing, he began to snore.
The Mouser stood up and came over. He rolled back one of Fafhrd’s eyelids, gave a satisfied nod, then gave an- other after feeling Fafhrd’s pulse, which was surging with as slow and strong a rhythm as the breakers of the Outer Sea. Meanwhile the Mouser’s other hand, operating with an habitual deftness and artistry unnecessary under the cir- cumstances, abstracted from a fold in Fafhrd’s loincloth a gleaming gold object he had earlier glimpsed there. He tucked it away in a secret pocket in the skirt of his gray tunic.
Someone coughed behind him.
It was such a deliberate- sounding cough that the Mouser did not leap or start, but only turned around with- out changing the planting of his feet in a movement slow and sinuous as that of a cere- monial dancer in the Temple of the Snake.
Pulg was standing in the inner doorway, wearing the black-and-silver striped robe and cowl of a masker and holding a black, jewel-span- gled vizard a little aside from his face. He was looking at the Mouser enigmatically.
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29
“I didn’t think you could do it, son, but you did,” he said softly. “You patch your credit with me at a wise time. Ho, Wiggin, Quatch! Ho. Grilli!” The three henchmen glided into the room behind Pulg, all garbed in garments as som- berly gay as their master’s. The first two were stocky men, but the third was slim as a weasel and shorter than the Mouser, at whom he glared with guarded and rivalrous venom. The first two were armed with small crossbows and shortswords, but the third had no weapon in view.
“You have the cords, Quatch?” Pulg continued. He pointed at Fafhrd. “Then bind me this man to the bed. See that you secure well his brawny arms.”
“He’s safer unbound,” the Mouser started to say, but Pulg cut in on him with, “Easy, son. You’re still run- ning this job, but Pm going to be looking over your shoul- der, yes and I’m going to be revising your plan as you go along, changing any detail I choose. Good training for you. Any competent lieuten- ant should be able to operate under the eyes of his general, yes even when other subordi- nates are listening in on the reprimands. We’ll call it a test.”
The Mouser was alarmed and puzzled. There was some- thing about Pulg’s behavior that he did not at all under- stand. Something discordant, as if a secret struggle were going on inside the master extortioner. He was not ob- viously drunk, yet his piggy eyes had a strange gleam. He almost seemed fey.
“How have I forfeited your trust?” the Mouser asked sharply.
Pulg grinned skewily. “Son, I’m ashamed of you,” he said. “High Priestess Ilala told me the full story of the black sloop — how you sublet it from the treasurer in return for allowing him to keep the pearl tiara and stomacher. How you had Ourph the deafmute Min- gol sail it to another dock. Ilala got mad at the treasurer because he went cold on her or scared and wouldn’t give her the black gewgaws. That’s why she came to me. To cap it, your Lilyblack spilled the same story to Grilli here, whom she favors. Well, son?”
The Mouser folded his arms and threw back his head. “You said yourself the split was sufficient,” he told Pulg. “We can always use another sloop.”
Pulg laughed low and rath- er long. “Don’t get me wrong,
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son,” he said at last. “I like my lieutenants to be the sort of men who’cl want a bolt-hole handy — I’d suspect their brains if they didn’t. I ivant them to be the sort of men who worry a lot about their precious skins, but only after worrying about my hide first ! Don’t fret, son. We’ll get along — I think. Quatch! Is he bound yet?”
The two burlier henchmen, who had hooked their cross- bows to their belts, were well along with their job. Tight loops of rope at chest, waist and knees bound Fafhrd to the bed, while his wrists had been drawn up level with the top of his head and tightly laced to the sides of the bed. Fafhrd still snored peacefully on his back. He had stirred a little and groaned when his hand had been drawn away from the bottle under the bed, but that was all. Wiggin was preparing to bind the Northerner’s ankles, but Pulg signed it was enough.
“Grilli!” Pulg called. “Your razor!”
The weasel-like henchman seemed merely to wave his hand past his chest and — lo! — there was a gleaming square-headed blade in it. He smiled as he moved toward Fafhrd’s naked ankles. He
caressed the thick tendons un- der them and looked pleading- ly at Pulg.
Pulg was watching the Mouser narrowly.
The Mouser felt an unbear- able tension stiffening him. He must do something! He raised the back of his hand to his mouth and yawned.
Pulg pointed at Fafhrd’s other end. “Grilli,” he repeat- ed, “shave me this man! De- beard and demane him ! Shave him like an egg!” Then he leaned toward the Mouser and said in a sort of slack-mouth- ed confidential way, “I’ve heard of these barbs that it draws their strength. Think you so? No matter, we’ll see.”
Slashing off a lusty man’s head-and-face hair and then shaving him close takes con- siderable time, even when the barber is as shudderingly swift as Grilli and as heed- less of the dim and flickering light. Time enough for the Mouser to assess the situation seventeen different ways and still not find its ultimate key. One thing shone through from every angle: the irra- tionality of Pulg’s behavior. Spilling secrets . . . accusing a lieutenant in front of hench- men . . . proposing an idiot “test” . . . wearing grotesque holiday clothes . . . binding a
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31
man dead drunk . . . and now this superstitious nonsense of shaving Fafhrd — why, it was as if Pulg were fey indeed and performing some eerie ritual under the demented guise of shrewd tactics.
And there was one thing the Mouser was certain of : that when Pulg got through being fey or drugged or whatever it was, he would never again trust any of the men who had been through the experience with him, including — most particularly! — the Mouser. It was a sad conclusion — to ad- mit that his hard-bought se- curity was now worthless — yet it was a realistic one and the Mouser perforce came to it. So even while he continued to puzzle, the small man in gray congratulated himself on having bargained himself so disastrously into posses- sion of the black sloop. A bolt-hole might soon be handy indeed, and he doubted whether Pulg had discovered where Ourph had concealed the craft. Meanwhile he must expect treachery from Pulg at any step and death from Pulg’s henchmen at their master’s unpredictable whim. So the Mouser decided that the less they (Grilli in par- ticular) were in a position to do the Mouser or anyone else damage, the better.
Pulg was laughing again. “Why, he looks like a new- hatched babe!” the master extortioner exclaimed. “Good work, Grilli!”
Fafhrd did indeed look startlingly youthful without any hair above that on his chest, and in a way far more like what most people think an acolyte should look. He might even have appeared ro- mantically handsome except that Grilli, in perhaps an ex- cess of zeal, had also shorn naked his eyebrows — which had the effect of making Fa- fhrd’s head, very pale under the vanished hair, seem like a marble bust set atop a liv- ing body.
Pulg continued to chuckle. “And no spot of blood — no, not one! That is the best of omens! Grilli, I love you!"
That was true enough too — in spite of his demonic speed, Grilli had not once nicked Fafhrd’s face or head. Doubtless a man thwarted of the opportunity to hamstring another would scorn any lesser cutting — indeed, con- sider it a blot on his own character. Or so the Mouser guessed.
Gazing at his shorn friend, the Mouser felt almost inclin- ed to laugh himself. Yet this impulse — and along with it
32
FANTASTIC
his lively fear for his own and Fafhrd’s safety — was momen- tarily swallowed up in the feeling that something about this whole business was very wrong — wrong not only by any ordinary standards, but also in a deeply occult sense. This stripping of Fafhrd, this shaving of him, this binding of him to the ricketty narrow bed . . . wrong, wrong wrong ! Once again it occurred to him, more strongly this time, that Pulg was unknowingly per- forming an eldritch ritual.
“Hist!” Pulg cried, raising a finger. The Mouser obe- diently listened along with the three henchmen and their master. The ordinary noises outside had diminished, for a moment almost ceased. Then through the curtained door- way and the red-lit louvers came the raspy high voice of Bwadres beginning the Long Litany and the mumbling sigh of the crowd’s response.
Pulg clapped the Mouser hard on the shoulder. “He is about it! ’Tiz time!” he cried. “Command us! We will see, son, how well you have planned. Remember, I will be watching over your shoulder and that it is my desire that you strike at the end of Bwa- dres’ sermon when the collec- tion is taken.” He frowned at Grilli, Wiggin and Quatch.
“Obey this my lieutenant!” he warned sternly. “Jump at his least command! — save when I countermand. Come on, son, hurry it up, start giving or- ders!”
The Mouser would have lik- ed to punch Pulg in the middle of the jeweled vizard which the extortioner was just now again lifting to his face — punch his fat nose and fly this madhouse of com- manded commandings. But there was Fafhrd to be con- sidered — stripped, shaved, bound, dead drunk, immeas- urably helpless. The Mouser contented himself with start- ing through the outer door and motioning the henchmen and Pulg too to follow him. Hardly to his surprise — for it was difficult to decide what behavior would have been surprising under the circum- stances— they obeyed him.
He signed Grilli to hold the curtain aside for the others. Glancing back over the small- er man’s shoulder he saw Quatch, last to leave, dip to blow out the taper and under cover of that movement snag the two-thirds full bottle of wine from under the edge of the bed and lug it along with him. And for some reason that innocently thievish act struck the Mouser as being
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
33
the most occultly wrong thing of all the supernally off-key events that had been occur- ring recently. He wished there were some god in whom he had real trust so .that he could pray to him for enlight- enment and guidance in the ocean of inexplicably strange intuitions engulfing him. But unfortunately for the Mouser there was no such divinity. So there was nothing for it but to plunge all by himself into that strange ocean and take his chances — do without cal- culation whatever the in- spiration of the moment moved him to do.
So while Bwadres keened and rasped through the Long Litany against the sighing responses of the crowd (and an uncommonly large number of cat-calls and boos), the Mouser was very busy indeed, helping prepare the setting and place the characters for a drama of which he did not know more than scraps of the plot. The many shadows were his friends in this — he could slip almost invisibly from one shielding darkness to another — and he had the trays of half the hawkers in Lankhmar as a source of stage properties.
Among other things, he in- sisted on personally inspect- ing the weapons of Quatch
and Wiggin — the shortswords and their sheaths, the small crossbows and the quivers of tiny quarrels that were their ammunition — most wicked- looking short arrows. By the time the Long Litany had reached its wailing conclusion, the stage was set, though ex- actly when and where and how the curtain would rise — - and who would be the au- dience and who the players — remained uncertain.
At all events it was an im- pressive scene : the long
Street of the Gods stretching off toward a colorful torchlit dolls’ world of distance in either direction, low clouds racing overhead, faint rib- bons of mist gliding in from the Great Salt Marsh, the rumble of far distant thun- der, bleat and growl of priests of gods other than Issek, squealing laughter of women and children, leather-lunged calling of hawkers and news- slaves, odor of incense curling from temples mingling with the oily aroma of fried foods on hawkers’ trays, the reek of smoking torches, and the musk and flower smells of gaudy ladies.
Issek’s audience, augment- ed by the many drawn by the tale of last night’s doings of the demon acolyte and the wild predictions of Bwadres,
34
FANTASTIC
blocked the Street from curb to curb, leaving only difficult gangway through the roofed porticos to either side. All levels of Lankhmarian society were represented — rags and ermine, bare feet and jeweled sandals, mercenaries’ steel and philosophers’ wands, faces painted with rare cos- metics and faces powdered only with dust, eyes of hun- ger, eyes of satiety, eyes of mad belief and eyes of a skep- ticism that hid fear.
Bwadres, panting a little after the Long Litany, stood on the curb across the Street from the low archway of the house where the drunken Fafhrd slept bound. His shak- ing hand rested on the cask that, draped now with the garlic bag, was both Issek’s coffer and altar. Crowded so close as to leave him almost no striding space were the in- ner circles of the congregation — devotees sitting cross- legged, crouched on knees, or squatting on hams.
The Mouser had stationed Wiggin and Quatch by an overset fishmonger’s cart in the center of the Street. They passed back and forth the stone bottle Quatch had snar- ed, doubtless in part to make their odorous post more bear- able, though every time the Mouser noted their bibbing
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
he had a return of the feeling of occult wrongness.
Pulg had picked for his post a side of the low arch- way in front of Fafhrd’s house, to call it that. He kept Grilli beside him, while the Mouser crouched nearby after his preparations were com- plete. Pulg’s jeweled mask was hardly exceptional in the setting; several women were vizarded and a few of the oth- er men — colorful blank spots in the sea of faces.
It was certainly not a calm sea. Not a few of the audience seemed greatly annoyed at the absence of the giant acolyte (and had been respon- sible for the boos and cat-calls during the Litany). While even the regulars missed the acolyte’s lute and his sweet tenor tale-telling and were ex- changing anxious questions and speculations. All it took was someone to shout, “Where’s the acolyte?” and in a few moments half the au- dience was chanting, “We want the acolyte! We want the acolyte!”
Bwadres silenced them by looking earnestly up the Street with shaded eyes, pre- tending he saw one coming, and then suddenly pointing dramatically in that direction, as if to signal the approach
35
of the man for whom they were calling. While the crowd craned their necks and shoved about, trying to see what Bwadres was pretending to — and incidentally left off chanting — the ancient priest launched into his sermon.
“I will tell you what has happened to my acolyte!” he cried. “Lankhmar has swal- lowed him, Lankhmar has gobbled him up — Lankhmar the evil city, the city of drunkenness and lechery and all corruption — Lankhmar, the city of the stinking black bones!”
This last blasphemous ref- erence to the gods of Lankh- mar (whom it can be death to mention, though the gods in Lankhmar may be insulted without limit) further shock- ed the crowd into silence.
Bwadres raised his hands and face to the low racing clouds.
“Oh, Issek, compassionate mighty Issek, pity thy humble servitor who now stands friendless and alone. I had one acolyte, strong in thy de- fense, but they took him from me. You told him, Issek, much of your life and your secrets, he had ears to hear it and lips to sing it, but now the black devils have got him! Oh, Issek, have pity!”
Bwadres spread his hands
toward the mob and looked them around.
“Issek was a young god when he walked the earth, a young god speaking only of love, yet they bound him to the rack of torture. He brought Waters of Peace for all in his Holy Jug, but they broke it.” And here Bwadres described at great length and with far more vividness than his usual wont (perhaps he felt he had to make up for the absence of his skald-turned- acolyte) the life and especial- ly the torments and death of Issek of the Jug, until there was hardly one among the listeners who did not have vividly in mind the vision of Issek on his rack (succession of racks, rather) and who did not feel at least sympathetic twinges in his joints at the thought of the god’s suffering.
Women and strong men wept unashamedly, beggars and scullions howled, philoso- phers covered their ears.
Bwadres wailed on toward a shuddering climax. "As you yielded up your precious ghost on the eighth rack, oh, Issek, as your broken hands fashioned even your tortur- er’s collar into a Jug of sur- passing beauty, you thought only of us, oh, Holy Youth. You thought only of making
36
FANTASTIC
beautiful the lives of the most tormented and deformed of us, thy miserable slaves.”
At those words Pulg took several staggering steps for- ward from the side of the archway, dragging Grilli with him, and dropped to his knees on the filthy cobbles. His black-and-silver striped cowl fell back on his shoulders and his jeweled black vizard slip- ped from his face, which was thus revealed as unashamedly coursing with tears.
“I renounce all other gods,” the boss extortioner gasped between sobs. “Hereafter I serve only gentle Issek of the Jug.”
The weasley Grilli, crouch- ing contortedly in his efforts to avoid being smirched by the nasty pavement, gazed at his master as at one dement- ed, yet could not or still dared not break Pulg’s hold on his wrist.
Pulg’s action attracted no particular attention — conver- sions were a smerduk a score at the moment — but the Mouser took note of it, espe- cially since Pulg’s advance had brought him so close that the Mouser could have reach- ed out and patted Pulg’s bald pate. The small man in gray felt a certain satisfaction or rather relief — if Pulg had for some time been a secret Issek-
worshipper, then his feyness might be explained. At the same time a gust of emotion akin to pity went through him. Looking down at his left hand the Mouser discovered that he had taken out of its secret pocket the gold bauble he had filched from Fafhrd. He was tempted to put it soft- ly in Pulg’s palm. How fitting, how soul-shaking, how nice it would be, he thought, if at the moment the floodgates of re- ligious emotion burst in him, Pulg were to receive this truly beautiful memento of the god of his choice. But gold is gold, and a black sloop re- quires as much upkeep as any other color yacht, so the Mouser resisted the tempta- tion.
Bwadres threw wide his hands and continued, “With dry throats, oh, Issek, we thirst for thy Waters. With gullets burning and cracked, thy slaves beg for a single sip from thy Jug. We would ran- som our souls for one drop of it to cool us in this evil city, damned by black bones. Oh, Issek, descend to us! Bring us! Bring us thy Waters of Peace ! We need you, we want you. Oh, Issek, come!”
Such was the power and yearning in that last appeal that the whole crowd of kneel-
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
37
ing worshippers gradually took it up, chanting with all reverence, louder and louder, in an unendingly repeat- ed, self-hypnotizing response : “We want Issek! We want Issek!”
It was that mighty rhyth- mic shouting which finally penetrated to the small con- scious core of Fafhrd’s wine- deadened brain where he lay drunk in the dark, though Bwadres’ remarks about dry throats and burning gullets and healing drops and sips may have opened the way. At any rate, Fafhrd came sud- denly and shudderingly awake with the one thought in his mind : another drink — and
the one sure memory: that there was some wine left.
It disturbed him a little that his hand was not still on the stone bottle under the edge of the bed, but for some dubious reason up near his ear.
He reached for the bottle and was outraged to find that he could not move his arm. Something or someone was holding it.
Wasting no time on petty measures, the large barbarian rolled his whole body over mightily, with the idea of at once wrenching free from whatever was holding him and getting under the bed where the wine was.
He succeeded in tipping the bed on its side and him- self with it. But that didn’t bother him, it didn’t shake up his numb body at all. What did bother him was that he couldn’t sense any wine near- by— smell it, see it squintily, bump his head into it . . . cer- tainly not the quart or more he remembered having safe- guarded for just such an emergency as this.
At about the same time he became dimly aware that he was somehow attached to whatever he’d been sleeping on — especially his wrists and shoulders and chest.
However his legs seemed reasonably free, though some- what hampered at the knees, and since the bed happened to have fallen partly on the low table and with its head braced against the wall, the blind twist-and-heave he gave now actually brought him to his feet and the bed with him.
He squinted around. The curtained outer doorway was an oblong of lesser darkness. He immediately headed for it. The bed foiled his first efforts to get through, bringing him up short in a most exasperat- ing manner, but by ducking and by turning edgewise he finally managed it, pushing the curtain ahead of him with his face. He wondered mud-
38
FANTASTIC
dily if he were paralyzed, the wine he’d drunk all gone into his arms, or if some warlock had put a spell on him. It was certainly degrading to have to go about with ones wrists up about ones ears. Also, his head and cheeks and chin felt unaccountably chilly — possi- bly another evidence of black magic.
The curtain dragged off of his head finally and he saw ahead of him a rather low archway and — vaguely and without being at all impressed by them — crowds of people kneeling and swaying.
Ducking down again, he lumbered through the arch- way and straightened up. Torchlight almost blinded him. lie stopped and stood there blinking. After a bit his vision cleared a little and the first person he saw that meant anything to him was the Gray Mouser.
lie remembered now that the last person he had been drinking with was the Mous- er. By the same token — in this matter Fafhrd’s maggoty mind worked very fast indeed — the Mouser must be the person who had made away with his quart or more of midnight medicine. A great righteous anger flamed in him and he took a very deep breath.
So much for Fafhrd and what he saw.
What the crowd saw — the god - intoxicated, chanting, weeping crowd — was very different indeed.
They saw a man of divine stature strapped with hands high to a framework of some sort. A mightily muscled man, naked save for a loincloth, with a shorn head and face that, marble white, looked startlingly youthful. Yet with the expression on that marble face of one who is being tor- tured.
And if anything else were needed (truly, it hardly was) to convince them that here was the god, the divine Issek, they had summoned with their passionately insistent cries, then it was supplied when that nearly seven-foot- tall apparition called out in a deep voice of thunder:
“Where is the jug? WHERE IS THE JUG?”
The few people in the crowd who were still standing drop- ped instantly to their knees at that point or prostrated themselves. Those kneeling in the opposite direction switch- ed around like startled crabs. Two score persons, including Bwadres, fainted, and of these the hearts of five stopped beating forever. At least a
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
39
dozen individuals went per- manently mad, though at the moment they seemed no dif- ferent from the rest — includ- ing (among the twelve) seven philosophers and a niece of Lankhmar’s High Over- lord. As one, the members of the mob abased themselves in terror and ecstacy — grovel- ing, writhing, beating breasts or temples, clapping hands to eyes and peering fearfully through hardly parted fingers as if at an unbearably bright light.
It may be objected that at least a few of the mob should have recognized the figure be- fore them as that of Bwadres’ giant acolyte. After all, the height was right. But consid- er the differences : The acolyte was full-bearded and shaggy- maned ; the apparition was beardless and bald — and strangely so, lacking even eyebrows. The acolyte had al- ways gone robed; the appari- tion was nearly naked. The acolyte had always used a sweetly high voice; the ap- parition roared harshly in a voice almost two octaves low- er.
Finally, the apparition was bound — to a torture rack, surely — and calling in the voice of one being tortured for his Jug.-
As one, the members of the mob abased themselves.
With the exception of the Gray Mouser, Grilli, Wiggin, and Quatch. They knew well enough who faced them. ( Pulg knew too, of course, but he, most subtle-brained in some ways and now firmly converted to Issekianity, merely assumed that Issek had chosen to manifest himself in the body of Fafhrd and that he, Pulg, had been divinely guided to prepare that body for the purpose. He humbly swelled with the full realiza- tion of the importance of his own position in the scheme of Issek’s reincarnation.)
His three henchmen, how- ever, were quite untouched by religious emotions. Grilli for the moment could do nothing as Pulg was still holding his wrist in a grip of fervid strength.
But Wiggin and Quatch were free. Although some- what dull-brained and little used to acting on their own initiative, they were not long in realizing that the giant had appeared who was supposed to be kept out of the way so that he would not queer the game of their strangely-be- having master and his tricky gray-clad lieutenant. More- over, they well knew what jug Fafhrd was shouting for so
40
FANTASTIC
angrily, and since they also knew they had stolen and drunken it empty, they likely also were moved by guilty fears that Fafhrd might soon see them, break loose, and visit vengeance upon them.
They cranked up their crossbows with furious haste, slapped in quarrels, knelt, aimed, and discharged the bolts straight at Fafhrd’s naked chest. Several persons in the mob noted their action and shrieked at its wicked- ness.
The two bolts struck Fa- fhrd’s chest, bounced off, and dropped to the cobbles — quite naturally enough, as they were two of the fowling quar- rels (headed merely with little knobs of wood and used for knocking down small birds) with which the Mouser had topped off their quivers.
The crowd gasped at issek’s invulnerability and cried for joy and amazement.
However, although fowling quarrels will hardly break a man’s skin, even when dis- charged at close range, they nevertheless sting mightily even the rather numb body of a man who has recently drunk numerous quarts of wine. Fafhrd roared in agony, punched out his arms convul- sively, and broke the frame-
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
work to which he ivas at- tached.
The crowd cheered hyster- ically at this further proper action in the drama of Issek which his acolyte had so oft- en chanted.
Quatch and Wiggin, realiz- ing that their missile weap- ons had somehow been ren- dered innocuous, but too dull- witted or wine-fuddled to see anything either occult or sus- picious in the manner of that rendering, grabbed at their shortswords and rushed for- ward at Fafhrd to cut him down before he could finish detaching himself from the fragments of the broken bed — which he was now trying to do in a puzzled way.
Yes, Quatch and Wiggin rushed forward, but almost immediately came to a halt — in the very strange posture of men who are trying to lift themselves into the air by heaving at their own belts.
The shortswords would not come out of their scabbards. Mingol glue is indeed a pow- erful adhesive and the Mous- er had been most determined that, however little else he ac- complished, Pulg’s henchmen should be put in a position where they could harm no one.
However, he had been able to do nothing in the way of
41
pulling Grilli’s fangs, as the tiny man was most sharp- witted himself and Pulg had kept him closely at his side. Now almost foaming at the mouth in vulpine rage and disgust, Grilli broke loose from his god-besotted master, whisked out his razor, and sprang at Fafhrd, who at last had clearly realized what was encumbering him and was having a fine time breaking the last pesky fragments of the bed over his knee or by the leverage of foot against cobble — to the accompani- ment of the continuing wild cheers of the mob.
But the Mouser sprang rather more swiftly. Grilli saw him coming, shifted his attack to the gray-clad man, feinted twice and loosed one slash that narrowly missed. Thereafter he lost blood too quickly to be interested in at- tempting any further fencing. Cat’s Claw is narrow and slightly curved but it cuts throats as well as any other dagger (though it does not have a barbed tip, as some literal-minded scholars have claimed).
The bout with Grilli left the Mouser standing very close to Fafhrd. The little man real- ized he still held in his left hand the golden representa- tion of the Jug fashioned by
Fafhrd, and that object now touched off in the Mouser’s mind a series of inspirations leading to actions that follow- ed one another very much like the successive figures of a dance.
He slapped Fafhrd back- handed on the cheek to attract the giant’s attention. Then he sprang to Pulg, sweeping his left hand in a dramatic arc as if conveying something from the naked god to the extortion- er, and lightly placed the golden bauble in the supplicat- ing fingers of the latter. (One of those times had come when all ordinary scales of value fail — even for the Mouser — - and gold is — however briefly — of no worth.) Recognizing the holy object, Pulg almost expired in ecstacy.
But the Mouser had already skipped on across the Street. Reaching Issek’s coffer-altar, beside which Bwadres was stretched unconscious but smiling, he twitched off the garlic bag and sprang upon the small cask and danced upon it, hooting to further at- tract Fafhrd’s attention and then pointing at his own feet.
Fafhrd saw the cask, all right, as the Mouser had in- tended he should, and the giant did not see it as any- thing to do with Issek’s col-
42
FANTASTIC
lections (the thought of all such matters was still wiped from his mind) but simply as a likely source of the liquor he craved. With a glad cry he hastened toward it across the Street, his worshippers scut- tling out of his way or moan- ing in beatific ecstacy when he trod on them with his naked feet. He caught up the cask and lifted it to his lips.
To the crowd it seemed that Issek was drinking his own coffer — an unusual yet unde- niably picturesque way for a god to absorb his worship- pers’ cash offerings.
With a roar of baffled dis- gust Fafhrd raised the cask to smash it on the cobbles, whether from pure frustra- tion or with some idea of getting at the liquor he thought it held is hard to say, but just then the Mouser caught his attention again. The small man had snatched two tankards of ale from an abandoned tray and was pouring the heady liquid back and forth between them un- til the high-piled foam trailed down the sides.
Tucking the cask under his left arm — for many drunk- ards have a curious prudent habit of absent - mindedly hanging onto things, especial- ly if they may contain liquor — Fafhrd set out again after
LEAN TIMES IN LANKHMAR
the Mouser, who ducked into the darkness of the nearest portico and then danced out again and led Fafhrd in a great circle all the way around the roiling congrega- tion.
Literally viewed it was hardly an edifying spectacle — a large god stumbling after a small gray demon and grasping at a tankard of beer that just kept eluding him — but the Lankhmarians were already viewing it under the guise of two dozen different allegories and symbolisms, several of which were later written up in learned scrolls.
The second time through the portico Issek and the small gray demon did not come out again. A large chor- us of mixed voices kept up expectant and fearful cries for some time, but the two supernatural beings did not reappear.
Turning back to a dawn ex- actly three years earlier we find the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd clambering from a cranky leaky skiff into the cockpit of a black sloop moor- ed beyond the Great Mole that juts out from Lankhmar and the east bank of the River Hlal into the Inner Sea. Before coming aboard, Fafhrd first handed up Issek’s cask to
43
the impassively sallow-faced Ourph. Then all three bent to the task of upping anchor and making sail.
As soon as the salty wind was driving them directly away from the land and Lankhmar, the Mouser turned quickly to Issek’s cask and its loot. In the dusk his fingers could not find a coin-slit. When he upended the heavy object it did not even jingle. Eager to open it before Fafhrd could protest, the Mouser raised a heavy hatchet he had taken from the sloop’s tool rack and bashed in a section of wood.
There was a spray of sting- ingly aromatic fluid of most familiar odor. Brandy ... to the absolute top so it had not gurgled. And then, as the day grew brighter, the Mouser no- ticed a somewhat burnt in- scription on one end of the cask: “Dear Pulg — Drown
your sorrows in this — Basha- bek.”
In thinking back it was only too easy to realize how yester- day afternoon the Number Two Extortioner had had a perfect opportunity to effect the substitution.
Then, for the first time in many months, Fafhrd and the Mouser really looked at each other. There was an odd shy- ness in both their gazes — each had the sudden thought that
he had taken his friend away from the lifepath he had chosen in Lankhmar, perhaps the life-path best suited to his treading.
The Mouser laughed a little self-consciously. “I have no re- grets for Lankhmar,” he said, lying mightily, though not en- tirely. “I can see now that if I’d stayed I’d have gone the way of Pulg and all such Great Men — fat, power-rack- ed, lieutenant-plagued, smoth- ered with false-hearted danc- ing girls, and falling at last into the arms of religion. At least I’m saved that last chronic ailment, which is worse than the dropsy.” He looked at Fafhrd narrowly. “But how of you, old friend? Will you miss Bwadres and your cobbled bed and your nightly tale-weaving?”
Fafhrd frowned as the sloop plunged on northward and the salt spray dashed him.
“Not I,” he said at last. “There are always other tales to be woven. I served a god well, I dressed him in new clothes, and then I did a third thing. Who’d go back to being an acolyte after being so much more? You see, old friend, I really was Issek.”
The Mouser arched his eye- brows. “You were?”
Fafhrd nodded twice, most gravely. the end
44
FANTASTIC
THE
REWARD
They all made fun of Gel ler and his Felly . . . except the slim blonde girl . . . and a faceless entity call- ed Chance.
AND here behind this dingy door, Miss Silvers — Well, Diana then — All right, Di ! (I am unused to addressing love- ly young ladies familiarly, in fact I am unused to lovely young ladies, they rarely reg- ister for my courses — even the elementary survey — and you are the first who ever did me the very great honor of coming back afterwards to pay me a visit, an evening visit indeed.) Well, behind this unimpressive door, Di, the least impressive in the whole science building, is Geller’s Folly, the last whim- sical fling of a professor emer- itus, the ridiculous project
45
that makes it crystal clear that I am not one of the infi- nitely competent new nuclear men, but a physicist of the Cavendish breed — a half-mad hobbyist. Yes, that is a type- writer of sorts you hear be- hind the door — it is part of the Folly. The typist seems to think a lot between bursts, does he not?
Bother, I have left my key at home. We will pass up the Folly, Di. Without regrets. You will remember it better as a trivial mystery, an old man’s flaunting boast in a dimly lit corridor, than in its shrunken dull reality.
You really would like to see the Folly? It does have a cer- tain robot fascination. Well, I suppose we can get Olafson’s key. He lives in the machine shop except for a brief respite after midnight — and it lacks three hours of that. With your permission, Di, we will de- scend to Olafson’s .Hole. This way. Your furs and silks will make a brave shine in his dis- mal smithy where, a wide- cheeked Alberich, he fashions our brass and steel traps for the molecule. Olafson is a physicist’s machinist of the old breed, a dogged perfec- tionist such as Babbage de- pended on for building his ill- starred difference machine. Our Swedish Vulcan will be
delighted by your presence and perhaps inwardly fluster- ed— I imagine he is as unused to lovely young ladies as I.
But there is one thing that not even you will be able to elicit from Olafson — a smile. Olafson may conceivably have smiled as a baby, but there is no record of it, and he certain- ly has never smiled since. He is the very embodiment of sullen materialism, an aggre- gation of solidly packed mole- cules in which there is no room for the nonsense of spir- it. I must confess that I like him that way, for I am a ma- terialist myself, a devoted monist and atheist — I trust I do not shock you. I do not well understand the new young men in my field, who listen to Bach and Bruckner and Bar- tok, read Kierkegaard and Niebuhr and Dostoyevsky, have themselves psychoana- lyzed, and eventually become Unitarians or High Episcopa- lians. I stand by Haeckel and Haldane, I know that the uni- verse is a meaningless swirl of atoms, though from time to time I have whimsical fancies.
The Folly? Yes, perhaps it is best that I describe it to you now. Then we need steal only a quick glimpse of the actuality, which may leave it a shred of glamor. Besides, it
46
FANTASTIC
will pass the time — as you see, Olafson’s Hole is a deep one and the way to it is long.
The Folly is a tiny hermeti- cally sealed chamber filled with air under the constant pressure of one atmosphere. Every five seconds a knife- edged wall descends swiftly through its midst, cutting it into two chambers. In each of these two chambers the pres- sure of the air is automatical- ly measured with an accuracy of five figures. Then the divid- ing wall flies up, the Folly be- comes one chamber again, and the process is repeated. With Olafson’s help I try to keep it operating 24 hours a day. There are occasional break- downs, but we have had it slashing air and measuring pressure continuously for pe- riods as long as 15 months. It is in its seventh month this time.
Somewhere in my pockets I should have a section of the record it taps out like a verita- ble stock ticker — I have com- promised enough with modern methods to let one of the young men hook on a type- writing device that commits the air pressure measure- ments to a paper tape. Here it is! See, the left-hand col- umn records the pressures in Chamber A and the right hand column the pressures
that simultaneously exist in Chamber B — taking the pres- sure inside the Folly as unity.
|
1.00000 |
.99999 |
|
.99999 |
.99999 |
|
1.00000 |
1.00000 |
|
1.00000 |
1.00000 |
|
1.00001 |
.99999 |
As you can plainly see, the readings do not difFer by more than two ten-thousandths — the Folly’s permissable mar- gin of error in measurement. I have yards and yards of such figures, all showing the same boresome invariability. Once I spotted a reading of .99997 and my heart skipped a beat, but the reading was the same in the other chamber — the Folly had merely sprung a slow leak and the air pressure outside was lower.
Well may you ask, Di, even though you did audit the ele- mentary survey . . . you know, I really should remember you, I should remember such a lovely young lady. I am grow- ing old, I fear, and my mem- ory has become an ungallant traitor, while you are excep- tionally young to be bothering about alumni reunions and calls on old profs ... Well may you ask, Di, why I should ex- pect the air pressure in the two chambers ever to differ, why I should have Olafson
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47
build a machine that goes through such a trivial rigma- role, why in short I should spend my declining years dancing attendance on monot- ony. The answer is that I am trying to trap Maxwell’s de- mon. Here is Olafson’s Hole.
Who is he? Why, as I told you, he is our machinist — Oh, Maxwell’s demon. Well, he might be described as the ele- ment of the fantastic in the cosmos — the element of the possbile but wildly improba- ble.
Bother, Olafson has gone off on some errand. He had lock- ed up and hung his “Back in 20 minutes” sign on the door. I fear the Fates are against us, Di, tonight. They do not wish you to see Geller’s Folly, and be disillusioned. I am sure of course that they are wiser than we.
You still wish to see it? You are most flattering to an old man. Well, we can confidently wait for Olafson — his 20 min- utes never means 21, nor — oddly — 19. Better, we’ll take a turn around the quadrangle — it is a mild night for Janu- ary and you have your furs, while I will simply button the cardigan I wear in winter be- neath my suit coat. Allow me a moment to scribble a note to Olafson so that he does not go
off again. Better, I’ll tell him to meet us at the Folly.
How do I expect to trap Max — I mean the fantastic in the Folly? Well ... You are sure I am not boring you? Yes, I agree that if you wish to see the Folly, it is likely that you wish to understand it. Thank you. Well, in the Folly I have a double handful of air — billions of molecules of several gasses, each moving at thousands of feet a second, endlessly colliding, rebounding from each other and the walls of the Folly hundreds of times a second, a shuffled jumble of particles. The energy of move- ment of these molecules, of course, adds up to the air pres- sure— I fear I grow stuffy, Di.
Science does not allow me to predict the behavior of any one of the molecules — as Whitehead puts it, the indi- vidual particle is a rare bird — but I am able to make signifi- cant predictions about the be- havior of the flock. For in- stance, I can say that at any given moment the chances are overwhelming (I will not trouble you with the figures) that half the molecules are moving predominantly west- ward and half eastward — and the same for north and south and up and down.
But that, mark you, is only the overwhelming probability.
48
FANTASTIC
It is conceivable, though vast- ly improbable, that at some given instant, all the mole- cules (or, more modestly, sig- nificantly more than fifty per- cent) might be moving west. It is a little like the chance of getting thirteen hearts at bridge or a “pat” royal flush at poker — though of course vastly more unlikely than that. The point is that the pos- sibility, however remote, is a real one.
You see, Di, miracles are possible though we might have to wait more than the life- times of a thousand universes to see one. Yet, the miracle might come this moment, con- ceivably. You might unpin that charming half-moon sil- ver brooch at your throat and hold it out, and if all the mole- cules immediately beneath it chanced to be moving upward at that instant, it would be struck from your hand high into the air! Or across the corridor into my hand, if that chanced to be the whim of the molecule flock. (Here, inciden- tally, is where Maxwell’s de- mon comes in. The British physicist Clerk Maxwell, sim- ply to illustrate a point about the Second Law of Thermo- dynamics, hypothesized an invisible spirit with the abil- ity to direct the motion of in- dividual particles.)
Similarly, at some instant all the molecules in the Folly might chance to be in Cham- ber A when the knife edge comes down. In that case, we would surely know it, for the pressure reading would be twice unity — two — in Cham- ber A and zero — a vacuum — in Chamber B.
Naturally, I am not looking for any such horrendously spectacular result. The. most I hope for is a reading that shows a barely significant dif- ference. Even at that I am like a roulette player waiting for black to turn up a hundred times running (really a mil- lion or a billion times), I am like a bridge player hoping to be dealt thirteen hearts in every hand for, say, three weeks of play.
I am like a gambler tireless- ly casting a billion billion dice — the Folly my box — in the hope of one day throwing a billion billion sixes. Note, Di, that I try not to change dice, I try to shake the same mole- cules each time — that is why the Folly is hermetically seal- ed. I don’t imagine that like an old deck of cards the mole- cules will develop markings with use and become “read- ers”— though that is an at- tractive notion — but I coddle in my mind the ridiculous
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fancy that the same molecular flock, cooped up so long in the Folly, will eventually become bored and frantic and panicky (part of my mind thinks like a pagan infant’s) and in their desperation begin to behave irregularly. Some men have suggested that light ages in its passage through space, you know, so why might not mole- cules go mad from long im- prisonment?
I jest, yet from all this you can understand, Di, why younger, sounder, more pro- fessional physicists would laugh or shake their heads if I told them of Geller’s Folly. I am waiting, on my knees as it were, for an improbability that is for all human purposes an impossibility. To them I must present a ridiculous spectacle. But those younger men, with their easier, more sophisticated, eclectic philoso- phies, do not comprehend the deep passions of a devoted materialist like myself. Scorn- ing the lie of spirit, believing only in matter, in molecules and other particles, I have a far more fierce and patient desire than they do to under- stand all that matter is capa- ble of, to know matters’ rare and whimsical as well as its everyday behavior. When one of the younger men embraces
the Christian faith, especially in its Catholic form, I am tempted to suggest: (again I trust I do not shock you) “Let us subject to chemical analy- sis this host you consume at mass to learn if there is in- deed protoplasm in the tran- substantiated wafer and he- moglobin in the wine’’ — a sug- gestion which, if I made it, would get me called a block- head or worse. As I say, they simply no longer understand the true materialist temper.
It is for a related reason that I keep the Folly so care- fully under lock and key — a circumstance that I imagine had been puzzling you, Di. Once in an unwise burst of enthusiasm I told my students about the Folly. Instead of re- ceiving the information with bored incomprehension or kindly indulgence, a mis- chevious cruelty seized them. Attempts were made by doc- toring the tape to hoax me into thinking I had achieved fabulous results. Since then I have taken stern precautions and I have told no one about the Folly, no one, at all, ex- cept . . .
Oh, let me hold the door for you. Thank you. Ah, the night is refreshingly chill — I see traces of snow in the shad- ows— and for once Chicago’s air seems smog-free, though
50
FANTASTIC
acid and cold. We will let it stream through our beings and blow away the stuffy pre- occupations of an old man who has lived too long with mole- cules.
That’s a strange thing, Di, but I just now seemed to smell roses, an abundance of roses. Oh, is it your perfume? No — no, I see that yours is a very different scent though equally delightful. Pardon me if I seem flustered, but I don’t know when a young lady has leaned her cheek so close to mine — even in the interests of scientific accuracy. You put the perfume behind the lobe of your ear? — that’s charm- ing.
You smelled the roses too? You shared my illusion? — if it was one. Roses in January in Chicago snows — a delight- ful circumstance. Perhaps a hearse skidded and overset nearby — or don’t you enjoy macabre fancies?
In Chicago one must learn to treasure each hint of the marvelous or outlandish — there are few enough of them at best to offset the dismal- ness of the city, its grime, its stenches, its shrieking, roar- ing, growling, rumbling tum- ult that distantly assaults our ears even here in these gray gothic precincts. A grim-
ly lonely city. When I first came here as a fellow (my en- tire academic life, Di, has been spent in this one insti- tution) it seemed to me that Chicago’s loneliness was an almost unbearable continua- tion, in a darker mode, of the loneliness of my childhood and youth. The whine of its elevat- ed trains and the screech of its streetcars, the angry chug of its taxicabs and the pound- ing of its presses (augment- ed now by the drone of its aircraft, even the boom of its jets, and not to mention the heavier minatory sounds that proceed from its railway yards, docks and factory dis- tricts)— all these noises be- came an integral part of my consciousness.
Listen to the Song of Chi- cago, Di ! Listen to the steel tomtoms and rattles of mod- ern primitive man. The more noise the less message, the new men say — I sometimes understand what that means. Listen to the Music of the Spheres, Midwestern style — I might venture to call it the Jazz of the Gears. I wonder if, to more sensitive ears, the molecules in the Folly make any such muted pandemon- ium? What? Yes, I’ll be quiet.
Di, you’re right! You’re right! It was incredible, but it did happen. For a moment
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51
— no, for several seconds — the sounds of the city became the notes of a great symphony, tragic and darkly majestic. Let us listen again. No, it is gone now. Oh, I suppose it might have been a powerful hi-fi briefly yet smoothly turned up, perhaps in the dormitory there — no, I will not believe that, I will never believe it! — it was the ran- dom sounds of the city we heard and for several seconds they became potverful, perfect music. Marihuana, I have read, produces such illusions, but I have never smoked even nicotine. Well, this is becom- ing a night for wonders ! I shall always think you some- how responsible for them, Di.
Di, it occurs to me that what we have just shared the privilege of hearing is an ex- cellent chance example of what I am trying to achieve under laboratory conditions in the Folly. It has been said that if you set a billion monkeys to pounding on a billion type- writers they would eventually write among other things purely by chance the en- tire Encyclopedia Britannica. There are several catches to that one, especially the length of time represented by the “eventually” and the question of the means of checking the
monkey pages for intelligibil- ity and of recognizing and fitting together the frag- ments. Still, it seems to me that we have here a valid analogy : listen to the random noises of a city long enough and you will eventually catch a section where purely by chance they counterfeit a great unknown symphony. It is another case of waiting for three weeks of thirteen- hearts-hands and — in this case — getting them !
Also it occurs to me that the roses we swore we smelled might conceivably be put in the same or a nearby cate- gory. Some physiologists be- lieve that odor is a matter of formula and that various com- binations of molecules, some common, some most rare, will produce the same scent when impinging on the receptors in the nasal membrane. Sniff th e, acrid atmosphere of a city long enough and you will eventually inhale a rare com- bination of industrial mole- cules that counterfeits the scent of roses. Oh, what travesties the cruder of my colleagues would make of that notion !
I suppose there must be some humdrum explanation in both cases (though I don’t really believe that) but just
52
FANTASTIC
the same I feel extraordinar- ily exhilarated. You know, Di, I have searched for the mir- aculous all my life, in my austere fashion — Maxwell’s demon is a god of sorts, and how else would any god mani- fest itself except by bringing about the occurrence of the vastly improbable? Tonight for the first time I believe my desire has achieved fruition or at least the illusion thereof. When I was a child — this is something I have told to very few people, Di, very very few — when I was a child I be- came enamoured of Greek mythology (Ovid’s Metamor- phoses was one of my first books) and in my loneliness I peopled the empty lots around my home and the park nearby with the deities and monsters of classic Greece. In a glade in the park (really a bare space behind some bushes) I reared rude altars (little more than shingles with flowers and bright trinkets and assorted childish treasures set on them as offerings) to Pan and Diana.
Yes, Di, to your namesake! To Diana, the slim moon-god- dess, the virgin huntress. Much later it occurred to me that here I might have made a mistake (no, not a mistake precisely — I do not blaspheme your namesake, Di) in mak-
ing my offerings to Diana rather than Venus, for no lovely young lady ever came to share my life. I have al- ways been a votary of the chaste Silver One — Miss Sil- vers ! What a night for coinci- dences !
Small wonder, really, that I remain celibate, for I was al- ways singularly timid, credu- lous and inept in my very limited contacts with the op- posite sex. Why, I was such a num-noddy in such matters, especially during my college years, that I was once cruelly hoaxed. I was accosted in the dormitory corridors by a slim and very pretty young lady who claimed to be in need of immediate assistance with her costume — a pin for her under- skirt was wanted. In fear and secret delight I invited her into my room, where she lin- gered for an embarrassingly blissfully long time and final- ly wantonly approached me. A few moments later there was a chorus of laughter from a group of hidden eaves- droppers and the secret was out — the young lady was the “feminine” lead in the all- male Capers, or whatever they called their yearly show.
And that is something I have never told another soul. A distressful anecdote, really,
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53
with distasteful overtones — I hardly know why I should have burdened you with it. Come, let us return. Here’s our doorway again. We have taken rather long, Olafson will have climbed from his Hole and be waiting at the Folly.
Di, why did you touch my cheek? Look up, you say?
Di, that glimmering! What is it? What are they? What are those ghostly figures of ice and fire moving up the sky, those jeweled deities, that heroic procession ? I’m fright- ened, Di, hold me close — no, no, pardon an old man’s weak- ness, but what was it that we saw? I’m shaking still. What was it? Again the impossibly improbable? Look at the mul- titudinous lights of a city long enough . . .
Di, what’s happening to- night? What are you doing? — it is your doing, isn’t it? All of a sudden these things are too much for me, too many for me. Why did you come to me tonight? Why did you come back, really? Were you really a student of mine? Is this some last hoax? No, I don’t see how, but —
THE
The Folly? We can’t go to the Folly now. I feel ... Yes, I suppose we could, but . . . Very well.
Di! Yes, I’m coming, but the stone, here, by the door — it feels like velvet, like silver velvet ! Touch gray stone long enough . . . Di, am I going mad? Wait for me, Di!
Watch out, Di! Watch out for Olafson — I don’t think he can see you. Olafson, don’t walk into the lady! Olafson, what’s happened to you? Olaf- son!
He moves past us as if we weren’t there ! And he’s smil- ing, smiling like a man in ecstasy. Do you see that? Olafson is smiling.
What’s that that fluttered from his hand? I’ll get it. A torn-off scrap of paper — the Folly’s last measurements. I’ll look at them.
.99999 .99999
1.00000 .99999
1.00000 .99999
.00000 2.Q0000
1.00000 .99999
.99999 1.00001
Di! Where are you, Di?
Di, who were you?
54
FANTASTIC
HOUR and minute hand of the odd little gray clock stood almost at midnight, Horn Time, and now the sec- ond hand, driven by the same
tiny, invariable radioactive pulses, was hurrying to over- take them. Morton Horn took note. He switched off his book, puffed a brown cigarette
Togetherness was more than a slogan for the descendants of Grandfather Horn. It was a unique and enriching hereditary de- velopment— until the fearful intrusion of...
THE MIND SPIDER
55
alight, and slumped back gratefully against the saddle- shaped forcefield which com- bined the sensations of swans- down and laced rawhide.
When all three hands stood together, he flicked the switch of a small black cubical box in his smock pocket. A look of expectancy came into his pleasant, swarthy face, as if he were about to receive a caller, although the door had not spoken.
With the flicking of the switch a curtain of brain- wave static surrounding his mind vanished. Unnoticed while present, because it was a meaningless thought-tone — a kind of mental gray — the vanishing static left behind a great inward silence and emptiness. To Morton it was as if his mind had crept from a cozy box lined with cotton wool and were crouched on a mountainpeak in infinity.
“Hello, Mort. Are we first?”
A stranger in the room could not have heard those words, yet to Mort they were the cheeriest and friendliest greeting imaginable — words clear as crystal without any of the air-noise or bone-noise that blurs ordinary speech, and they sounded like choco- late tastes.
“Guess so, Sis,” his every thoughts responded, “unless
56
the others have started a shaded contact at their end.”
His mind swiftly absorbed a vision of his sister Grayl’s studio upstairs, just as it ap- peared to her. A corner of the work table, littered with air- brushes and cans of dye and acid. The easel, with one half- completed film for the multi- level picture she was spray- ing, now clouded by cigarette smoke. In the foreground, the shimmery gray curve of her skirt and the slim, competent beauty of her hands, so close - — especially when she raised the cigarette to puff it — that they seemed his own. The feathery touch of her clothes on her skin. The sharp cool tingly tone of her muscles. In the background, only floor and cloudy sky, for the glastic walls of her studio did not re- fract.
The vision seemed a ghost- ly thing at first, a shadowy projection against the solid walls of his own study. But as the contact between their minds deepened, it grew more real. For a moment the two visual images swung apart and stood side by side, equally real, as if he were trying to focus one with each eye. Then for another moment his room became the ghost room and Grayl’s the real one — as if he
FANTASTIC
had become Grayl. He raised the cigarette in her hand to her lips and inhaled the pleas- ant fumes, milder than those of his own rompe-pecho. Then he savored the two at once and enjoyed the mental blend- ing of her Virginia cigarette with his own Mexican “chest- breaker.”
From the depths of her . . . his . . . their mind Grayl laughed at him amiably.
“Here now, don’t go sliding into all of me!” she told him. “A girl ought to be allowed some privacy.”
“Should she?" he asked teasingly.
“Well,, at least leave me my fingers and toes ! What if Fred had been visiting me?”
“I knew he wasn’t,” Mor- ton replied. “You know, Sis, I’d never invade your body while you were with your non-telepathic sweetheart.”
“Nonsense, you’d love to, you old hedonist ! — and I don’t think I’d grudge you the ex- perience— especially if at the same time you let me be with your lovely Helen! But now please get out of me. Please, Morton.”
He retreated obediently un- til their thoughts met only at the edges. But he had noticed something strangely skittish in her first reaction. There had been a touch of hysteria
in even the laughter and ban- ter and certainly in the final plea. And there had been a knot of something like fear under her breastbone. He questioned her about it. Swiftly as the thoughts of one person, the mental dialogue spun itself out.
“Really afraid of me taking control of you, Grayl?”
“Of course not, Mort! I’m as keen for control-exchange experiments as any of us, especially when I exchange with a man. But . . . we’re so exposed, Mort — it sometimes bugs me.”
“How do you mean exact- ly?”
“You know, Mort. Ordinary people are protected. Their minds are walled in from birth, and behind the walls it may be stuffy but it’s very safe. So safe that they don’t even realize that there are walls . . . that there are fron- tiers of mind as well as frontiers of matter . . . and that things can get at you across those frontiers.”
“What sort of things? Ghosts ? Martians ? Angels ? Evil spirits? Voices from the Beyond? Big bad black static- clouds?” His response was joshing. “You know how flat- ly we’ve failed to establish any contacts in those direc-
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57
tions. As mediums we’re a howling failure. We’ve never got so much as a hint of any telepathic mentalities save our own. Nothing in the whole mental universe but silence and occasional clouds of noise — static — and the sound of distant Horns, if you’ll par- don the family pun.”
“I know, Mort. But we’re such a tiny young cluster of mind, and the universe is an awfully big place and there’s a chance of some awfully queer things existing in it. Just yesterday I was reading an old Russian novel from the Years of Turmoil and one of the characters said something that my memory photograph- ed. Now where did I tuck it away? — No, keep out of my files, Mort! I’ve got it any- way— here it is.”
A white oblong bobbed up in her mind. Morton read the black print on it.
“We always imagine etern- ity (it said) as something beyond our conception, some- thing vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I some- times fancy it like that.”
“Brrr!” Morton thought,
trying to make the shiver comic for Grayl’s sake. “Those old White and Red Russkies certainly had black minds! Andreyev? Dostoyev- sky?”
“Or Svidrigailov, or some name like that. But it wasn’t the book that bothered me. It was that about an hour ago I switched off my static box to taste the silence and for the first time in my life I got the feeling there was something nasty and alien in infinity and that it was watching me, just like those spiders in the bath- house. It had been asleep for centuries but now it was wak- ing up. I switched on my box fast.”
“Ho-ho! The power of sug- gestion ! Are you sure that Russian wasn’t named Sven- gali, dear self-hypnosis-sus- ceptible sister?”
“Stop poking fun! It was real, I tell you.”
“Real? How? Sounds like mood-reality to me. Here, stop being so ticklish and let me get a close-up."
He started mock-forcibly to explore her memories, think- ing that a friendly mental roughhouse might be what she needed, but she pushed away his thought-tendrils with a panicky and deathly- serious insistence. Then he saw her decisively stub out
58
FANTASTIC
her cigarette and he felt a sudden secretive chilling of her feelings.
“It’s all really nothing, Mort,” she told him briskly. “Just a mood, I guess, like you say. No use bothering a fam- ily conference with a mood, no matter how black and dev- ilish.”
“Speaking of the devil and his cohorts, here we are ! May we come in?” The tex- ture of the interrupting thought was bluff and yet ironic, highly individual — suggesting not chocolate but black coffee. Even if Mort and Grayl had not been well ac- quainted with its tone and rhythms, they would have rec- ognized it as that of a third person. It was as if a third dimension had been added to the two of their shared mind. They knew it immediately.
“Make yourself at home, Uncle Dean,” was the wel- come Grayl gave him. “Our minds are yours.”
“Very cozy indeed,” the newcomer responded with a show of gruff amusement. “I’ll do as you say, my dear. Good to be in each other again.” They caught a glimpse of scudding ragged clouds patch- ing steel-blue sky above to gray-green forest below — their uncle’s work as a ranger
kept him up in his flyabout a good deal of the day.
“Dean Horn coming in,” he announced with a touch of formality and then imme- diately added, “Nice tidy little mental parlor you’ve got, as the fly said to the spider.”
“Uncle Dean ! — what made you think of spiders?” Grayl’s question was sharply anxious.
“Haven’t the faintest no- tion, my dear. Maybe recall- ing the time we took turns mind-sitting with Evelyn un- til she got over her infant fear of spiders. More likely just re- flecting a thought-dicker from your own unconscious or Morton’s. Why the fear- flurry?”
But just then a fourth mind joined them — resinous in flavor like Greek wine. “Hobart Horn coming in.” They saw a ghostly labora- tory, with chemical apparat- us.
Then a fifth — sweet-sour apple-tasting. “Evelyn Horn coming in. Yes, Grayl, late as usual — thirty-seven seconds by Horn Time. I didn’t miss your cluck-cluck thought.” The newcomer’s tartness was unmalicious. They glimpsed the large office in which Eve- lyn worked, the microtype- writer and rolls of correspon- dence tape on her desk. “But
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59
— bright truth! — someone al- ways has to be last,” she con- tinued. “And I’m working overtime. Always make a family conference, though. Afterwards will you take con- trol of me, Grayl, and spell me at this typing for a while? I’m really fagged — and I don’t want to leave my body on automatic too long. It gets hostile on automatic and hurts to squeeze back into. How about it, Grayl?”
“I will,” Grayl promised, “but don’t make it a habit. I don’t know what your admin- istrator would say if he knew you kept sneaking off two thousand miles to my studio to smoke cigarettes — and get my throat raw for me!”
“All present and accounted for,” Mort remarked. “Eve- lyn, Grayl, Uncle Dean, Ho- bart, and myself — the whole damn family. Would you care to share my day’s experiences first? Pretty dull armchair stuff, I warn you. Or shall we make it a five-dimensional free-for-all? A Quintet for Horns? Hey, Evelyn, quit di- recting four-letter thoughts at the chair!”
With that the conference got underway. Five minds that were in a sense one mind, because they were wide open to each other, and in another
60
sense twenty-five minds, be- cause there were five sensory- memory set-ups available for each individual. Five separate individuals, some of them thousands of miles apart, each viewing a different sector of the world of the First Global Democracy. Five separate vis- ual landscapes — study, studio, laboratory, office, and the cloud-studded opennes of the upper air — all of them exist- ing in one mental space, now superimposed on each other, now replacing each other, now jostling each other as two ideas may jostle in a sin- gle non-telepathic mind. Five varying auditory landscapes — the deep throb of the vanes of Dean’s flyabout making the dominant tone, around which the other noises wove coun- terpoint. In short, five com- plete sensory pictures, open to mutual inspection.
Five different ideational set-ups too. Five concepts of truth and beauty and honor, of good and bad, of wise and foolish, and of all the other so-called abstractions with which men and women direct their lives — all different, yet all vastly more similar than such concepts are among the non-telepathic, who can never really share them. Five differ- ent ideas of life, jumbled to- gether like dice in a box.
FANTASTIC
And yet there was no con- fusion. The dice were edu- cated. The five minds slipped into and out of each other with the practiced grace and courtesy of diplomats at a tea. For these daily conferences had been going on ever since Grandfather Horn first dis- covered that he could com- municate mentally with his children. Until then he had not known that he was a tele- pathic mutant, for before his children were born there had been no other minds with which he could communicate —and the strange mental si- lence, disturbed from time to time by clouds of mental static, had even made him fear that he was psychotic. Now Grandfather Horn was dead, but the conferences went on between the mem- bers of the slowly widening circle of his lineal descend- ants— at present only five in number, although the muta- tion appeared to be a partial dominant. The conferences of the Horns were still as secret as the earliest ones had been. The First Global Democracy was still ignorant that tele- pathy was a long-established fact — among the Horns. For the Horns believed that jeal- ousy and suspicion and sav- age hate would be what they would get from the world if
it ever became generally known that, by the chance of mutated heredity, they pos- sesed a power which other men could never hope for. Or else they would be exploited as all-weather and interplane- tary “radios.” So to the out- side world, including even their non-telepathic husbands and wives, sweethearts and friends, they were just an ordinary group of blood rela- tions— no more “psychic” cer- tainly than any group of close- knit brothers and sisters and cousins. They had something of a reputation of being a family of “daydreamers” — that was about all. Beyond enriching their personalities and experience, the Horns’ telepathy was no great ad- vantage to them. They could not read the minds of animals and other humans and they seemed to have no powers whatever of clairvoyance, clairaudience, telekinesis, or foreseeing the future or past. Their telepathic power was, in short, simply like having a private, all-senses family tele- phone.
The conference — it was much more a hyper-intimate gabfest — proceeded.
“My static box bugged out for a few ticks this morn- ing,” Evelyn remarked in the
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THE MIND SPIDER
course of talking over the trivia of the past twenty-four hours.
The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain waves. Without such individ- ual thought-screens, there was too much danger of complete loss of individual personality — once Grandfather Horn had “become” his infant daughter as well as himself for several hours and the unfledged mind had come close to being per- manently lost in its own sub- conscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall behind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently always enclosed.
In spite of the boxes, the Horns shared thoughts and emotions to an amazing de- gree. Their mental together- ness was as real and as mys- terious— and as incredible — as thought itself . . . and thought is the original angel- cloud dancing on the head of a pin. Their present confer- ence was as warm and inti- mate and tart as any actual family gathering in one actual room around one actual table. Five minds, joined together in the vast mental darkness that
shrouds all minds. Five minds hugged together for comfort and safety in the infinite mental loneliness that per- vades the cosmos.
Evelyn continued, “Your boxes were all working, of course, so I couldn’t get your thoughts — just the blurs of your boxes like little old dark gray stars. But this time it gave me a funny uncomfort- able feeling, like a spider crawling down my — Grayl ! Don’t feel so wildly! What is it?”
Then . . . just as Grayl started to think her answer . . . something crept from the vast mental darkness and in- finite cosmic loneliness sur- rounding the five minds of the Horns.
Grayl was the first to no- tice. Her panicky thought had the curling too-keen edge of hysteria. “There are six of us now ! There should only be five, but there are six. Count! Count, I tell you! Six!”
To Mort it seemed that a gigantic spider was racing across the web of their thoughts. He felt Dean’s hands grip convulsively at the controls of his flyabout. He felt Evelyn’s slave-body freeze at her desk and Hobart grope out blindly so that a piece of apparatus fell with a crystalline tinkle. As if they
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FANTASTIC
had been sitting together at dinner and had suddenly realized that there was a sixth place set and a tall figure swathed in shadows sitting at it. A figure that to Mort ex- uded an overpowering taste and odor of brass — a sour me- tallic stench.
And then that figure spoke. The greater portion of the in- truder’s thought was alien, unintelligible, frightening in its expresion of an unearthly power and an unearthly hunger.
The understandable portion of its speech seemed to be in the nature of a bitter and coldly menacing greeting, in- sofar as references and emo- tional sense could be at all determined.
“I, the Mind Spider as you name me — the deathless one, the eternally exiled, the eter- nally imprisoned — or so his overconfident enemies suppose — coming in.”
Mort saw the danger almost too late — and he was the first to see it. He snatched toward the static box in his smock.
In what seemd no more than an instant he saw the shadow of the intruder darken the four other minds, saw them caught and wrapped in the intruder’s thoughts, just as a spider twirls a shroud
around its victims, saw the black half - intelligible thoughts of the intruder scut- tle toward him with blinding speed, felt the fanged impact of indomitable power, felt his own will fail.
There was a click. By a hairsbreath his fingers had carried out their mission. Around his mind the neutral gray wall was up and — Thank the Lord! — it appeared that the intruder could not pene- trate it.
Mort sat there gasping, shaking, staring with the dull eyes of shock. Direct mental contact with the utterly inhu- man— with that sort of inhu- manity — is not something that can be lightly brushed aside or ever forgot. It makes a wound. For minutes after- wards a man cannot think at all.
And the brassy stench lin- gered, tainting his entire con- sciousness— a stench of Sa- tanic power and melancholy.
When he finally sprang up, it was not because he had thought things out but be- cause he heard a faint sound behind him and knew with a chilling certainty that it meant death.
It was Grayl. She was car- rying an airbrush as if it were a gun. She had kicked off her shoes. Poised there in the
THE MIND SPIDER
63
doorway she was the incarna- tion of taut stealthiness, as if she had sloughed off centuries of civilization in seconds of time, leaving only the prime- val core of the j ungle killer.
But it was her face that was the worst, and the most revealing. Pale and immobile as a corpse’s — almost. But the little more left over from the “almost” was a spiderish im- placability, the source of which Mort knew only too well.
She pointed the airbrush at his eyes. His sidewise twist saved them from the narrow pencil of oily liquid that spat from the readjusted nozzle, but a little splashed against his hand and he felt the bite of acid. He lunged toward her, ducking away from the spray as she whipped it back toward him. He caught her wrist, bowled into her, and caried her with him to the floor.
She dropped the airbrush and fought — with teeth and claws, like a cat, yet with this horrible difference that it was not like an animal lashing out instinctively but like an ani- mal listening for orders and obeying them.
Suddenly she went limp. The static from his box had taken effect. He made doubly sure by switching on hers.
She was longer than he had been in recovering from the shock, but when she began to ' speak it was with a rush, as if she already realized that every minute was vital.
“We’ve got to stop the others, Mort, before they let it out. The . . . the Mind Spider, Mort! It’s been imprisoned for eons, for cosmic ages. First floating in space, then in the Antarctic, where its prison spiralled to Earth. Its enemies . . . really its judges . . . had to imprison it, be- cause it’s something that can’t be killed. I can’t make you understand just why they imprisoned it — ” (Her face went a shade grayer) “ — you’d have to experience the creature’s thoughts for that — but it had to do with the perversion and destruc- tion of the life-envelopes of more than one planet.”
Even under the stress of horror, Mort had time to realize how strange it was to be listening to Grayl’s words instead of her thoughts. They never used words except when ordinary people were present. It was like acting in a play. Suddenly it occurred to him that they would never be able to share thoughts again. Why, if their static boxes were to fail for a few seconds, as Eve- lyn’s had this morning . . .
64
FANTASTIC
“That’s where it’s been,” Grayl continud, “locked in the heart of the Antarctic, dream- ing its centuries-long dreams of escape and revenge, waking now and again to rage against its captivity and rack its mind with a thousand schemes — and searching, searching, al- ways searching ! Searching for telepathic contact with creatures capable of operating the locks of its prison. And now, waking after its last fifty year trance, finding them!”
He nodded and caught her trembling hands in his.
“Look,” he said, “do you know where the creature’s prison is located?”
She glanced up at him fear- fully. “Oh yes, it printed the coordinates of the place on my mind as if my brain were graph paper. You see, the creature has a kind of color- less perception that lets it see out of its prison. It sees through rock as it sees through air and what it sees it measures. I’m sure that it knows all about Earth — be- cause it knows exactly what it wants to do with Earth, be- ginning with the forced evo- lution of new dominant life forms from the insects and arachnids . . and other or- ganisms whose sensation-tone
pleases it more than that of the mammals.”
He nodded again. “All right,” he said, “that pretty well settles what you and I have got to do. Dean and Ho- bart and Evelyn are under its control — we’ve got to suppose that. It may detach one or even two of them for the side job of finishing us off, just as it tried to use you to finish me. But it’s a dead certainty that it’s guiding at least one of them as fast as is humanly possible to its prison, to re- lease it. We can’t call in Inter- planetary Police or look for help anywhere. Everything hinges on our being tele- pathic, and it would take days to convince them even of that. We’ve got to handle this all by ourselves. There’s not a soul in the world can help us. We’ve got to hire an all-pur- pose fiyabout that can make the trip, and we’ve got to go down there. While you were unconscious I put through some calls. Evelyn has left the office. She hasn’t gone home. Hobart should be at his labor- atory, but he isn’t. Dean’s home station can’t get in touch with him. We can’t hope to intercept them on the way — I thought of getting I. P. to nab them by inventing some charges against them, but that would probably end
THE MIND SPIDER
65
with the police stopping us. The only place where we have a chance of finding them, and of stopping them, is down there, where it is.
“And we’ll have to be ready to kill them.”
For millenniums piled on millenniums, the gales of Earth’s loftiest, coldest, lone- liest continent had driven the powdered ice against the dull metal without scoring it, without rusting it, without even polishing it. Like some grim temple sacred to pitiless gods it rose from the Antarc- tic gorge, a blunt hemisphere ridged with steps, with a tilted platform at the top, as if for an altar. A temple built to outlast eternity. Unmistak- ably the impression came through that this structure was older than Earth, older perhaps than the low-circling sun, that it had felt colds to which this was summer warmth, that it had known the grip of forces to which these ice-fisted gales were playful breezes, that it had known loneliness to which this white wasteland was teeming with life.
Not so the two tiny figures struggling toward it from one of three flyabouts lying craz- ily atilt on the drifts. Their every movement betrayed
frail humanity. They stum- bled and swayed, leaning into the wind. Sometimes a gust would send them staggering. Sometimes one would fall. But always they came on. Though their clothing appeared roughly adequate — the sort of polar clothing a person might snatch up in five minutes in the temperate zone — it was obvious that they could not survive long in this frigid re- gion. But that did not seem to trouble them.
Behind them toiled two other tiny figures, coming from the second grounded fly- about. Slowly, very slowly, they gained on the first two. Then a fifth figure came from behind a drift and confronted the second pair.
“Steady now. Steady!” Dean Horn shouted against the wind, leveling his blaster. “Mort ! Grayl ! For your lives, don’t move!”
For a moment these words resounded in Mort’s ears with the inhuman and mocking fi- nality of the Antarctic gale. Then the faintly hopeful thought came to him that Dean would hardly have spoken that way if he had been under the creature’s con- trol. He would hardly have bothered to speak at all.
The wind shrieked and tore. Mort staggered and threw an
66
FANTASTIC
arm around Grayl’s shoulders for mutual support.
Dean fought his way to- ward them, blaster always leveled. In his other hand he had a small black cube — his static box, Mort recognized. He held it a little in front of him (like a cross, Mort thought) and as he came close to them he thrust it toward their heads (as if he were exorcising demons, Mort thought). Only then did Dean lower the muzzle of his blaster.
Mort said, “I’m glad you didn’t count lurching with the wind as moving.”
Dean smiled harshly. “I dodged the thing, too,” he ex- plained. “Just managed to flick on my static box. Like you did, I guess. Only I had no way of knowing that, so when I saw you I had to make sure. I — ”
The circular beam of a blaster hissed into the drift beside them, raising a great cloud of steam and making a hole wide as a bushel basket. Mort lunged at Dean, toppling him down out of range, pull- ing Grayl after.
“Hobart and Evelyn!” He pointed. “In the hollow ahead ! Blast to keep them in it, Dean. What I've got in mind won’t take long. Grayl, stay close to
Dean . . . and give me your static box!”
He crawled forward along a curve that would take him to the edge of the hollow. Be- hind him and at the further side of the hollow, snow puffed into clouds of steam as the blasters spat free energy. Finally he glimpsed a shoul- der, cap, and upturned collar. He estimated the distance, hefted Grayl’s static box, guessed at the wind and made a measured throw. Blaster- fire from the hollow ceased. He rushed forward, waving to Dean and Grayl.
Hobart was sitting in the snow, staring dazedly at the weapon in his hand, as if it could tell him why he’d done what he’d done. He looked up at Mort with foggy eyes. The black static box had lodged in the collar of his coat and Mort felt a surge of confidence at the freakish accuracy of his toss.
But Evelyn was nowehere in sight. Over the lip of the hollow, very close now, ap- peared the ridged and dully gleaming hemisphere, like the ascendant disk of some tiny and ill-boding asteroid. A coldness that was more than that of the ice-edged wind went through Mort. He snatched Hobart’s blaster and
THE MIND SPIDER
67
ran. The others shouted after him, but he only waved back at them once, frantically.
The metal of the steps seemed to suck warmth even from the wind that ripped at his back like a snow-tiger as he climbed. The steps were as crazily tilted as those in a nightmare, and there seemed always to be more of them, as if they were somehow growing and multiplying. He found himself wondering if material and mental steps could ever get mixed.
He reached the platform. As his head came up over the edge, he saw, hardly a dozen feet away, Evelyn’s face, blue with cold but having frozen into it the same spiderish ex- pression he had once seen in Grayl’s. He raised the blaster, but in the same moment the face dropped out of sight. There was a metallic clang. He scrambled up onto the platform and clawed impo- tently at the circular plate barring the opening into which Evelyn had vanished. He was still crouched there when the others joined him.
The demon wind had died, as if it were the Mind Spider’s ally and had done its work. The hush was like a prelude to a planet’s end, and Hobart’s bleak words, gasped out dis-
jointedly, were like the sen- tence of doom.
“There are two doors. The thing told us all about them . . . while we were under its control. The first would be open ... we were to go inside and shut it behind us. That’s what Evelyn’s done . . . she’s locked it from the inside . . . just the simplest sliding bolt . . . but it will keep us from getting at her . . . while she activates the locks of the sec- ond door . . . the real door. We weren’t to get the instruc- tions ... on how to do that . . . until we got inside.”
“Stand aside,” Dean said, aiming his blaster at the trap- door, but he said it dully, as if he knew beforehand that it wasn’t going to work. Waves of heat made the white hill beyond them waver. But the dull metal did not change color and when Dean cut off his blaster and tossed down a handful of snow on the spot, it did not melt.
Mort found himself won- dering if you could make a metal of frozen thought. Through his numbed mind flashed a panorama of the rich lands and seas of the Global Democracy they had flown over yesterday — the green- framed white power stations of the Orinoco, the fabulous walking cities of the Amazon
68
FANTASTIC
Basin, the jet-atomic launch- ing fields of the Gran Chaco, the multi - domed Oceano- graphic Institute of the Falk- land Islands. A dawn world, you might call it. He won- dered vaguely if other dawn worlds had struggled an hour or two into the morning only to fall prey to things like the Mind Spider.
“No!” The word came like a command heard in a dream. He looked up dully and realized that it was Grayl who had spoken — realized, with stupid amazement, that 'her eyes were flashing with anger.
“No! There’s still one way we can get at it and try to stop it. The same way it got at us. Thought! It took us by surprise. We didn’t have time to prepare resistance. We were panicked and it’s given us a permanent panic-psychol- ogy. We could only think of getting behind our thought- screens and about how — once there — we’d never dare come out again. Maybe this time, if we all stand firm when we open our screens . . .
“I know it’s a slim chance, a crazy chance . . .”
Mort knew that too. So did Dean and Hobart. But some- thing in him, and in them, rejoiced at Grayl’s words, re- joiced at the prospect of meet-
ing the thing, however hope- lessly, on its own ground, mind to mind. Without hesita- tion they brought our their static boxes and, at the signal of Dean’s hand uplifted, switched them off.
That action plunged them from a material wilderness of snow and bleakly clouded sky into a sunless, dimensionless wilderness of thought. Like some lone fortress on an end- less plain, their minds linked together, foursquare, waiting the assault. And like some monster of nightmare, the thoughts of the creature that accepted the name of the Mind Spider rushed toward them across that plain, threat- ening to overmaster them by the Satanic prestige that ab- solute selfishness and utter cruelty confer. The brassy stench of its being was like a poison cloud.
They held firm. The thoughts of the Mind Spider darted about, seeking a weak point, then seemed to settle down upon them everywhere, engulfingly, like a dry black web.
Alien against human, ego- centric killer-mind against mutually loyal preserver- minds — and in the end it was the mutual loyalty and knit- tedness that turned the tide.
THE MIND SPIDER
69
giving them each a four-fold power of resistance. The thoughts of the Mind Spider retreated. Theirs pressed after. They sensed that a cor- ner of his mind was not truly his. They pressed a pincers attack at that point, seeking to cut it off. There was a moment of desperate resist- ance. Then suddenly they were no longer four minds against the Spider, but five.
The trapdoor opened. It was Evelyn. They could at last switch on their thought- screens and find refuge be- hind the walls of neutral gray and prepare to fight back to their flyabouts and save their bodies.
But there was something that had to be said first, some-
thing that Mort said for them.
‘.‘The danger remains and we probably can’t ever destroy it. They couldn’t destroy it, or they wouldn’t have built this prison. We can’t tell anyone about it. Non - telepaths wouldn’t believe all our story and would want to find out what was inside. We Horns have the job of being a mon- ster’s jailers. Maybe some day we’ll be able to practice tele- pathy again — behind some sort of static-spheres. We will have to prepare for that time and work out many precau- tions, such as keying our static boxes, so that switch- ing on one switches on all. But the Mind Spider and its prison remains our responsi- bility and our trust, forever.”
THE END
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70
Gravity, shmavity, how do you make it pay off? Not, certainly, by ap- proaching . . .
THE
IMPROPER
AUTHORITIES
AS SOON as Ronald Fleck- er fully convinced him- self that he had discovered in his eccentric aunt’s cluttered basement a small battery that stored the force of gravity in- stead of electricity — a battery that held in complete essence the power of fuelless space- flight, levitation, and any number of lesser marvels — he sat down to do some very se- rious thinking.
The discovery had come about while he was repairing his aunt’s doorbell — one of the innumerable small tasks she hesitantly but in the end always rather firmly set him, although she had more than enough money to hire profes- sional household mechanics, and that Ronald in any case always felt obliged to dis- charge in return for the
privilege of sleeping over her garage. He had found the thin wires in a monstrous tangle close under the dusty rafters. It turned out the system was- n’t even worked by a step- down transformer but by dry cells and some idiot had hook- ed up the cells in parallel rather than series, accounting in large part for the doorbell’s feeble performance. His aunt recalled that the last person before Ronald to revive the doorbell had been the kindly but abstracted and rather smelly Dr. Yorn, the second- to-last in her unending series of spiritual counselors — a yogi, medium, hypnotist, dynamic psychologist, some- thing like that. Mrs. Wycher- ly liked variety and versatile men. Dr. Yorn’s successor, the gleaming-eyed and dap-
71
per Mr. Espy, seemed equally obliging and would almost certainly have been willing to tackle the doorbell, but now Mrs. Wycherly had Ronald for those things.
Ronald had picked out the three freshest looking dry cells, setting the other two, which still had short bent lengths of wire untidily at- tached to their terminals, down on the scarred top of an upended trunk beside the stepladder on which he was working. It was still day out- side, barely, although of course he had a flashlight to see up into the cobwebby rafters, and just as he’d about connected up the three newer looking cells properly, work- ing a little gingerly because of his apprehension of spid- ers, a beam of yellow light from the setting sun struck brightly through one of the low oblong windows and across the top of the trunk. It showed a lot more dust motes trembling in the air than Ronald’s flashlight revealed, and immediately Ronald felt a sneeze coming on. But then it showed something so much more strange and arresting that the sneeze never came and Ronald quite forgot that his nasal passages had been tickling.
72
One of the rejected bat- teries carried attached to one terminal a length of gray-in- sulated wire so sharply curv- ed that its other end now chanced to touch the other terminal, shorting the battery out — except that the battery had looked to Ronald too dingy and old to have any juice left to short.
The dust motes were whirl- ing in orderly circles around the wire, forming a dim tube that curved from terminal to terminal ivith the 'wire run- ning doivn the center or axis of the shadowy tube. The circular orbiting of the dust motes was clearest within an inch of the wire, but even as he watched he saw some of the more distant motes begin to take up the movement, swinging in larger, slower circles.
Ronald’s face grew blank with attention. He leaned down very slowly until his eyes were only inches from the phenomenon. Fearfully, almost reverently he blew softly at the wire. The motes eddied away wildly and then almost immediately began to resume their circling, those nearest the wire taking it up most quickly, then those fur- ther off starting once more to join in.
Ronald thought: There’s a FANTASTIC
force moving those particles. They're in a force-field. If they were powdered iron or black iron oxide ( but they aren’t) it would be a magnetic field moving them, a magnetic field created by an electric current moving through the wire, though I think it would have to be a lot stronger cur- rent than a dry cell could fur- nish.
But the particles aren’t iron or iron oxide ( too heavy to float in air, besides this has to be just Wycherly base- ment dust — ashes, lint, earth, powdered wood and paper) so it can’t be a magnetic field that’s moving them, though they’re moving exactly as if they were in a force-field, of some. sort. So it has to be gravity ... a granitic force- field they’re moving in, at least that’s the only other force I know of it could be.
An electric current moving through a conductor creates a magnetic field.
A u>hat?-cu>rent . . . call it a granitic current anyway . . . though it could be a magnetic current ... a granitic current moving through a conductor creates a granitic field.
The sunlight faded swiftly. As the yellow beam moved upward, dimming, its last rays showed more and more
dust motes pouring into the vortex, joining in the fren- zied yet orderly circling.
As the dark basement twi- light closed in, Ronald reach- ed out and grasped the battery protectively, posses- sively. With his other hand he bent the wire away from the terminal. Already he had be- gun to worry about the bat- tery running down.
A minute or so later it oc- curred to him to use his flash- light to examine the battery more closely. It was a dis- tinctly smaller cylinder than the other dry cells, he saw now — only about five inches high and an inch-and-a-half in diameter — and it had no cardboard sheath around it, which had been the chief reason he’d thought of it as older and more likely to be completely exhausted than the others. And the termin- als, although of the screw-on, knurled-nut type, didn’t seem to be brass, but something grayer, like the zinc, or what- ever it was, of the battery’s body.
He tried to force himself to think in a systematic way about the possible source of the thing, granting that it really was a gravity battery — something that another part of his mind was already working out delightful ways
74
FANTASTIC
to check. Let’s see, he thought, it could be a genuine gravity battery manufactured as such by human beings engaged in secret government-sponsored anti-gravity research either in this country or elsewhere — there are such projects — though then how it should get into Aunt Wycherly’s base- ment seems to require very weird assumptions. Or else — my God, this gets fantastic — it could come from off this earth and have been manufac- tured, by extra-terrestrials — got to consider every possi- bility— though that involves us in even more weird as- sumptions.
Or it could just have hap- pened. I mean the battery could have started out as an ordinary battery, but sitting here in Aunt Wycherhfs basement and undergoing all sorts of rhythmical tempera- ture changes and God knows what else, the chemicals in it could have been transformed into substances generating a current — gravitic, magnetic, hou> should I know what jar- gon to use? — that, in turn creates a gravitic field. Like spontaneous combustion, or something. Old, rags. That's not unusual.
Or it could all be illusion or freak air currents.
Or I could just be going
nuts — that’s something to keep in mind too.
But while Ronald was mak- ing his brain hammer out these possibilities, another section of his thoughts was darting around like kittens to investigate all sorts of won- derful ideas, making use of the thirty years’ rag-tag ac- cumulation of information in Ronald’s mind — a quite re- markable and varied assort- ment. For one thing he was thinking that since this base- ment phenomenon behaved so much like magnetism, it must be a dipolar gravity field he had here, promising both positive and negative gravity if properly harnessed ; that is, not only gravitic attraction but gravitic repulsion — in other words, antigravity, the secret of rocketless space- flight! There were ways to check that, of course. And what was the wonderful stuff that flowed through the wire and made the field grab and the motes spin? Gravitic fluid, could you call it? Liquid gravity? Was it particles, like electrons? Gravitrons, would you call them? Hell, nobody really understood electricity yet! Still —
“Ronald, why are you tak- ing so long? Mr. Espy will be coming soon and I don’t want
THE IMPROPER AUTHORITIES
75
to have to watch for him at the window.”
Ronald looked down at his aunt's pudgy, thin-lipped face, realizing that she had come creaking and clumping all the way down to the base- ment without his being aware of it. He nodded slowly at her without a word, put away the battery he was holding, and like a man in a dream began to make the last connections in the bell system.
The bell rang strongly at the first test. Mrs. Wycherly thanked Ronald profusely in the kitchen and seemed on the point of bringing up some additional matter, but just then Ronald rather abruptly wandered off toward the garage, still acting like a man in a dream.
Mrs. Wycherly made a lit- tle humorous face. She’d been debating giving Ronald two dollars for his labors and had almost decided to, but if he chose to go mooning off that way . . .
She was still wondering, too, why he had so carefully put one of her batteries into the inside breast pocket of his coat, buttoning the coat after- wards. It was almost like a psychiatric symptom, with some deep symbolic meaning — perhaps she should ask Mr. Espy about it. But no, Ron-
ald probably just wanted it for something in the garage. Well, she wouldn’t grudge it to him, though of course he ought to have asked her first.
Convincing himself that his find really was a gravity bat- tery occupied Ronald most of the night and next day. He made his tests with great care, only after thinking each through in detail first, he kept them as few and brief as his delight and wonder would let him. The possibility of the battery running down had be- gun to prey on his mind more and more seriously, especially after a search of the basement next morning revealed no more dry cells of similar ap- pearance.
The chief test, or rather set of tests, involved making a coil of the wire joining the terminals, so as to give direc- tion and greater power to the gravitic field, exactly as one would do in making an elec- tromagnet. The most ob- vious and interesting cylinder around which to wind the coil was the battery itself. Ronald started out with just a dozen loops, winding the wire down the body of the battery from one terminal and returning it through the air to the other.
The result was more than gratifying. Held terminals-
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end-up the battery almost doubled in iceight as soon as he connected the coil. Of course he was just judging the weight by feel, but he was sure he couldn’t be fooling himself to that degree. More- over, the coils strained toward the floor in that position, tending to creep along the cylinder and bunch together. (In later tests he made a point of anchoring them individ- ually with adhesive tape.)
Held terminals - end - down the battery weighed almost nothing at all. It seemed as light as if it were a painted balsa-wood model of itself. The transition from twice- weight to no-weight, as felt by his hand, was as mys- teriously alarming and de- lightful as a mild electric shock.
Clearly the gravitic field was dipolar as he’d surmised. The terminal-end was the negative or repulsive pole, seeking to push away from the earth — or push the earth away! The other end was the positive or attractive one. (A bit later he discovered what he told himself he should have guessed at once: that if he wound the coil the opposite way, say clockwise instead of counter-clockwise, it reversed the poles — they really had nothing to do with the loca-
tion of the terminals on the battery.)
For light objects nearby, the battery’s tiny gravitic field was more powerful than that of the earth — a circum- stance that shouldn’t surprise him, Ronald reminded him- self, as earth’s center of grav- ity was 4,000 miles away while the battery’s was right in his hand. The attractive pole would snatch a cork off the floor from the height of two feet — he could actually see the cork falling upward faster and faster — while the repulsive pole would bat away the same cork dropped on it from above. And the attrac- tive pole always became cov- ered with dust when used, while the other, pole stayed clean.
Brought close to his fore- arm, the repulsive pole made a shallow, saucer-shaped dimple in the flesh, while the attractive one tugged at the tissue in a way that somehow felt deeper than suction.
It was vastly exciting to say the very least, and Ronald could hardly wait to step up the power of the field by in- creasing the number of turns in the coil — this being one of the times when his delight and wonder got the better of him.
THE IMPROPER AUTHORITIES
77
However, he retained at least minimal prudence and added only six turns. He told himself that if the effect wasn’t enough, he could al- ways add more.
He was glad that he had been conservative. The re- pulsive pole was downward when he touched the return wire to the second terminal, and the battery tugged his hand sharply upward, as if it were, not a small, but say a medium-size bird trying to escape. Or maybe a weather balloon. The sensation was peculiarly delightful — his hand was not only tugged but indescribably tickled (pre- sumably by the curving com- ponents of the dipolar gravitic field) — and despite his con- cern about the battery run- ning down, it was all Ronald could do not to stand there all night holding the up-surging battery with a happy, dazed smile on his face.
And in fact Ronald did not disconnect it right away. He’d got the impression that the wire of the coil had changed color in some way and on an impulse he switched off the light he’d been work- ing by, a hanging and unshad- ed 150-watt globe (which he kept secret from his aunt, for she had a thing about wasting electricity and kept nothing
stronger than 40 watts in her whole mansion).
The consequences were sudden, spectacular, and al- most disastrous.
In the darkness the coil was outlined in bright white light.
Ronald was so startled that he opened his hand.
The white-spiraled battery sprang upward and for an in- stant Ronald had the dreadful fear that the thing had got away from him forever, and from the earth too, although he knew very well that the ceiling of his garage apart- ment must stop it.
But then almost imme- diately, without touching the ceiling, the thing flipped over, dove down, and hit the floor with a sharp crack.
Its light went out.
Ronald’s feelings were in- tense and mixed. He was re- lieved that the battery hadn’t escaped, doubly relieved to discover that apparently it couldn’t escape from earth — that released repulsive pole down it would simply flip over and dive. (There was the possibility that he had start- ed the battery flipping over with a twist of his hand when he released it, but that possi- bility didn’t bulk large in his mind.)
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FANTASTIC
And of course, beyond all else, he was fearful that the fall had somehow ruined the battery forever. For instance, if its ability to generate grav- itic energy depended on some rare and delicate spontaneous chemical transformation that had taken place inside it, then even something as slight as a sudden jar might well re- verse the transformation.
He switched on the light and picked up the battery as if it were a wounded bird. He was considerably relieved to find that the wire had jarred loose from one of the termi- nals. He reconnected it, the battery surged in his hand, and his relief was complete.
But thereafter his careful- ness was doubled and also tainted with suspicion.
He made a number of other interesting discoveries about the battery besides the epi- phenomenon of the white glow. For instance, it turned out to be the insulation on the wire that carried the gravitic current. A bare copper wire didn’t work at all. A nylon cord worked beautifully, pro- vided he wrapped it in tinfoil so that it didn’t short itself out. In fact, there seemed to be a half dozen new sciences implicit in the battery and Ronald would have liked noth-
ing better than to spend the next six months in investigat- ing them all, provided he had a dozen batteries to work with, or even just one to hold in reserve.
That was the fly in the ointment, of course. His bat- tery was goose and golden egg rolled into one, a bird in the hand but none at all in the bushes. So about the middle of the next afternoon he sat down to do some serious, real- ly serious thinking — meaning of course thinking about how he could use his great discov- ery to profit himself.
First he carefully locked away the battery and went out into the garden to medi- tate it through, but he found he couldn’t bear to be that far away from his find, so he went back to his garage apart- ment and sat beside the win- dow that looked into the gar- den, feeling a little giddy from lack of sleep.
His aunt had noted his ab- stracted and somewhat agitat- ed behavior, however, from one of her lace-curtained watch-windows, just as she’d early that morning been aware of him poking around in the basement without her permission. She frowned, re- membering his distinctly odd behavior with her battery. She hadn’t discussed the mat-
THE IMPROPER AUTHORITIES
79
ter with Mr. Espy yesterday but she decided she certainly would tonight.
Serious thinking is always apt to be a somewhat chilling business. The more Ronald applied his mind to the prob- lem of how to make money out of one small and presum- ably irreplacable gravitic and antigravitic battery, the chil- lier the prospects came to look to him.
One thing he was fatalis- tically certain of from the start : that if he reported his find to any “proper authori- ties” (military, scientific, in- dustrial, academic, govern- mental— authorities are al- ways governmental to the end) he would get nothing whatever for himself except trouble. To begin with — the governmental authorities would know very well wheth- er one of their secret projects had or had not started to manufacture gravitic batter- ies. In either case they would grab the battery — either for safekeeping or for feverish secret research into its mys- teries— and at the same time loudly proclaim that it did not exist. Ronald’s protests would be laughed at. He would be left out in the cold or, more likely, grabbed himself and awarded a lifetime of protec-
tive custody and unending in- terrogation. Where a discov- ery of such fabulous military importancee as antigravity was concerned, an individual’s rights just wouldn’t count.
Perhaps he could investi- gate the battery himself, care- fully open it and find out what made it work? Ronald’s reaction to this idea' was simply to shudder. True, he fancied a bit his talent for scientific thinking, but he wasn’t that egotistical. Cut- ting or prying the battery open in hope of discovering its secrets struck Ronald as some seven degrees more un- promising than an infant tak- ing apart a gold wristwateh to find out what made it work. This seemed particular- ly to the point as Ronald now inclined more and more to the theory that the battery was something that had been spon- taneously generated in his aunt’s basement by complex cycles of temperature change or the like — which also brought him back once more to the fact that he only had one battery, that as far as he knew there was only one on Earth. And if that were the case, why the chances were that the properest scientific authorities in the world wouldn’t be any too success- ful in probing the battery’s
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FANTASTIC
secrets. They’d play with it — at a little more sophisticated level than himself, to be sure — until its power gave out, and then dissect it into micro- scopic slides and peer and poke at it, and like as not end up knowing little or nothing more than at the first testing.
These general considera- tions also made Ronald shy away from the plan of find- ing and privately enlisting the services of some brilliant young technician or engineer- ing student, or offering such a person a partnership in the battery.
Perhaps he could sell the battery? No, any substantial businessman would be fearful- ly suspicious of such an offer. He’d think it was the Keeley motor over again or some perpetual motion crank or the powder that added to water makes gasoline. Ronald could arrange brilliant demonstra- tions, of course, but the more brilliant they were the more his prospect would suspect trickery. Experts would have to be called in and he would be back once more with the proper authorities, who would be snatching at his battery with rapacious fingers.
Suppose he were to find a millionaire gambler and bet him that — Ronald irritably
THE IMPROPER AUTHORITIES
shook his head. In the first place he didn’t know any such gamblers or how to approach them and in the second place the last thing a Bet-a-million Gates would bet on was some- thing that looked like a cast- iron certainty to win. The maker of such a tempting offer would be bound to have some- thing up his sleeve.
Maybe he could use the bat- tery to put on a magic or spir- itualist act? Causing some- thing to float without wires, or levitating small objects in a slightly darkened room for the edification of wealthy crack- pots like his aunt — do the Pol- tergeist bit. Now that, Ronald told himself, was cutting his problem down close to size. The trouble was, of course, as with so many other plans, that the battery would eventually run down and probably sooner than later. But more than that, the magic-act plan ran up against the objection that Ron- ald simply wasn’t even a pass- able third-rate showman or conman and knew it very well.
Sitting in his chilly hole- over-a-garage and gazing out at the darkening garden — for a full twenty-four hours had passed since his great discov- ery— Ronald gave an irritated little sigh. His utter incapacity as a showman and conman was an old sore point with him.
81
Why, as long as ten years ago he’d been the one to get his aunt interested in occultism, but had he reaped any of the benefits of her craze? No! That had been reserved for the slick operators like Mr. Espy, Dr. Yorn, and their dozen or so predecessors. They’d taken hundreds, thousands of dollars from her over the years. She’d even sent money by mail to Tibet, Ceylon and Southern California "to further occult research,” while he, who’d started the whole thing, was lucky if from time to time he got a few cans of corned beef hash or spaghetti from her pantry hoard!
Not that Ronald lay awake nights scheming how to mur- der his aunt without being sus- pected or how to defraud her on a large scale. He wasn’t that sort of person at all. He just grieved occasionally that a man with a commanding gaze and a confident pseudo- professional manner should be able to charm a twenty-dollar bill out of someone else’s pocket and into his own, while he, with ten times the educa- tion, ingenuity, and honest idealism, couldn’t !
Now if I just had the kind of cheap ability that a Yorn or an Espy has, Ronald told him- self, I’d figure out a dozen childishly simple ways to
profit from this battery and, what’s more important, I’d have the nerve and know-how to put them into action.
He shook his head and shiv- ered. He’d just had a vision of himself, days or months hence, the battery completely dead, finally going to the "proper authorities” with a crazed gleam in his eyes and assuring them that, yes, once this bat- tery had held gravitic en- ergy . . .
What I obviously need, he told himself, is an improper authority.
His gaze lit on Mr. Espy and his aunt talking at the far end of the garden. Almost at once his aunt went inside and Mr. Espy lit a cigarette and began to stroll.
Normally Ronald was any- thing but a man of action, but sleeplessness and desperation had transformed him. He grabbed the battery and com- pleted the connection. It glow- ed brilliantly and surged pow- erfully upward in his hand, the coil consisting now of some twenty turns of tinfoil-wrap- ped nylon. Ronald headed for the garden.
Strike while the iron is hot, he told himself exultantly. Espy’s my man. With this to show him and let him feel it won’t take me twenty seconds
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FANTASTIC
to make my pitch. And with his conning ability and my battery . . .
Ronald certainly did make an arresting sight as he hur- ried through the darkening garden, holding high his glow- ing hand. Mr. Espy stopped dead and stared at Ronald.
There was something pecu- liar about the stare, though. It seemed to Ronald to go through him like a knife. In- tending to startle, Ronald found himself startled in re- turn . . . momentarily almost paralyzed.
He realized with horror that the battery had sprung from his limp fingers.
He waited for it to flip over and crash, thanking God that the ground was soft.
It didn’t flip over. Buzzing faintly now and seeming to spin, it bulleted straight up- ward at ever-increasing veloc- ity, one more bright point of light headed toward the first stars of evening.
It faded and was gone for- ever.
Ronald realized that Mr. Espy had hold of his shoulder and was shaking him.
“Young man!” Mr. Espy was saying, “Do you realize that you possess astounding occult powers? That was the most impressive demonstra- tion of telekinesis I have ever
witnessed in a long and rather far-flung life !”
Lieutenant J. C. Arnold and S. Abramson, usaf, were on a routine jet mission at 30,000 feet when the phenomenon shot by them at a distance of only a few yards, its velocity now considerable.
“Jack, a meteor!” the sec- ond gasped.
“Be your age, Sammy,” the first admonished him. “Would a shooting star shoot up?” He paused before adding, “But what could it have been?”
Rather later that evening Mr. Espy was preparing a sort of telegram for transmission, though not by Western Union. It read in part :
You will also be pleased to hear that the last of the batteries the saintly Yorn absent-mindedly distributed around in his chuckle-head- ed way before he was reas- signed to a less critical post, has been located and safely disposed of. It is no longer on Earth. One worry less for all of us ! To get it away painlessly from the young human who had discovered it and was beginning to probe its more superficial powers, I was forced to em- ploy what on this planet
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83
they quaintly called “the whammy.” He was most startled and considerably grieved to see the bat- tery star-trend, having ap- parently not anticipated all the consequences of the gy- ral effect or the cube law on the coils. I calmed him and reconciled him in part to his loss without having to wipe his memory.
So . . . our observation station on Sol Three is once more reasonably secure from discovery. It will not be necessary now to find new patrons — we can con- tinue to depend for local financing on Mrs. Wycherly and the other ladies who un- knowingly but so very kind- ly support our little enter- prise.
THE END
COMING NEXT MONTH
A blockbuster of a novel by POUL ANDERSON headlines The December issue of Fantastic Magazine.
Devil-may-care Galactic in- vestigator Dominic Flandry has the adventure of his career in A Message in Se- cret, as he copes with several sets of enemies on one of the strangest planets in the uni- verse.
Backing up Anderson is The Clone, by Theodore L. Thomas, a science-cum-hor- ror short story that combines one of the most original s-f plots we’ve seen in a long time, with a taut style that lit- erally brings catastrophe into your kitchen sink.
I, Gardener, by Allen Kim Lang, is a short story that could stand on its own — yet to s-f initiates, it will have an extra hidden meaning.
Several other short stories and all the usual features round out the December FANTASTIC. It will be on sale at your newsdealer's Nov. 19. Reserve your copy now.
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According to you...
Dear Editor:
I found to my dismay, that the August issue of Fantastic just didn’t seem to have the higher quality work of a few months ago. The editorial was interesting, but too small. I just start to read the thing when, poof, it’s finished. You should enlarge it to at least two pages.
The lead story by Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning,” in my opinion, was one of the worst stories I've ever read in Fantastic. I had the gimmick ending figured out before the story was one-third through. And the whole thing seemed hastily shoved together with no characterization or motivation whatsoever. Mr. Leiber can do much better than this, I’m sure.
That Jack Sharkey is going places. No matter how old the plot gimmick is, he seems to add a much needed vitality to it.
Another feature that’s too short to be worthwhile is the letter column. If you must keep the classified ad section isn’t there some way for a bigger letter column?
William Brooks Detachment 2
Air Force Institute of Technology Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
• Bigger editorials, more letters? That means fewer stories. We think you’d rather read writers than editors.
Dear Editor:
I’m an underfed bookworm with a six-year-old addiction to science fiction, and no place within miles to acquire it. I was just donated about 200 back number mags to add to my collec- tion of about 400 science fiction magazines, which proves I have the right kind of friends. But if I could only get the kids
85
to cooperate and go barefooted I’d have enough cash to sub- scribe to a few magazines and read some fresh ones.
Anyhow, my contribution to literature in this column is about the people who write in to complain that s-f is “trash” etc. I think the Russians have them tagged right, as Pasternak says in his book, “They were unaware that such dramatic ex- cesses, far from showing their warmth and breadth of char- acter, expressed intellectual poverty.”
Now that I've written a letter and taken part, as well as collecting and reading, can I call myself a genuine Fan-worm?
Elaine Rambo Osage Beach, Missouri
• Consider yourself a Grand Exalted Fan-worm. And you knov> worms often exist in Fen.
Dear Editor:
While scanning — and reading — some back issues of a com- petitive magazine (name withheld) I observed on the con- cluding page of one of the issues, a short vignette titled, appropriately, Letters to the Editor, written by a certain young freshman at the University of California, Ron Goulart.
Next year, up pops Goulart in the same mag, with a short story this time. The editors proclaim Goulart in a class of his own. A class of distinction. It was subtly hinted that Goulart would rise to great heights in the future.
Several weeks afterwards, I received the August issue of Fantastic. I read your magazine with avid enthusiasm. All the stories were good, especially good.
One of the stories was written with a quirkish ending, not exactly morbid. A story by Goulart. His story, I feel, was above average for your magazine, or for that matter, any other mag.
As for the magazine as a whole, one of the best. The authors in the August issue came up with some particularly witty — and dead-pan? — endings.
Like most fans, I have my favorites. Like to see more of Goulart, Chandler, Porges and Sharkey. Try and get some stories or novelets by some other writers : Galouye, Budrys or Anderson, maybe?
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FANTASTIC
It’s good to know that at least there is one magazine that is not filled with the same old bore and gore.
Glen Christianson 30012 Champin Dr.
St. Clair Shores, Mich.
• Anderson coming up with a novelet next month.
Dear Editor:
Do you believe in mental connections between people such as often read s-f magazines, where two people hit on the same name or important discovery at the same time ? It happens in real life many times, and is stranger than fiction when it oc- curs. Take the story “Man Under Glass” which appears in the August issue of Fantastic — I refer only to the title. Could two writers conceive of it at the same time? Two entirely different stories, one science fiction, one non s-f, now bear that name. I wrote the one your readers didn’t see. An excerpt from my story and an illustration were published in a Rich- mond College newspaper of limited circulation as part of a fiction writing contest and appeared April 30th of this year. I am sure some form of parapsychological connection took place and would like to hear from the author. Did we have a mental connection?
H. R. Frye 408 Alleghany Rd.
Hampton, Va.
• To our way of thinking it’s just coincidence, but maybe Author Evelyn Goldstein will recall a psychic blast, now that you mention it.
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87
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Beware of too much peace and quiet! It might turn out that going off your rocker is the only thing worth doing when self- expression is taboo and depersonalization becomes the current rage.
My strangest case, bar none, from the Psychotic Years was the Green Demon of New Angeles.
— 'from the notebooks of Andreas Snowden
IT WOULD be hard to imag- ine a more peaceful and reassuring spot, a spot less likely to harbor or attract hor- rors, even in America of the tranquil Early Twenty-first Century, than the suburb- exurb — rather — of Civil Ser- vice Knolls. Cozy was the word for the place — a loose as- sembly of a half thousand homes snuggling down in the warm moonlight a mountain ridge away from the metropo- lis of New Angeles. With their fashionably rounded roofs the individual houses