by Fritz Leiber
Siren moaning a warning, the monocar swung into a brighter thoroughfare, but it brought to Greer no feeling of escape from darkness. His mind was tight and cold. He was remembering how his brother’s foster parents, the Hallidanes, had died—a sordid domestic tragedy—the father had murdered the mother and then killed himself.
Suicide—a kind of signature his brother scribbled on his crimes.
Greer understood, almost too well. He knew the temptation to use people, then to go a little further, then a little further still. If he had been brought up in his brother’s environment—
His brother had raised a whole city against himself before he realized that there were limits on even a power like his. He could doubtless escape from Steelton, but there would always be that criminal record behind him. How much simpler if a Robert Carstairs died.
As if in agreement with that thought, Greer nodded grimly to himself. The story he had drawn from the unconscious detective had confirmed his own notion about his brother’s behavior patterns. When his brother sought power, he had taken control of the wealthiest family in Steelton and had hung on until the last possible moment. Now that his brother was the object of a city-wide man hunt—
The deskman at Steelton Police Headquarters looked up at the newcomers. He saw the prisoner being brought in. His eyes went wide and stayed that way.
“Yes, we got Carstairs,” one of the detectives told him. “We’re taking him in to Marly.”
And they walked up the corridor, two of them on either side of the prisoner, two with their guns in his back.
The deskman stared after them. He’d never really believed that they would get Carstairs. You couldn’t—not if you knew what the police did.
And they were being so casual about it!
A little later he remembered he hadn’t flashed Marly to let him know they were coming.
Greer felt the tautness growing, in muscle and mind. He sought to dispel it, to empty his mind of thought, to maintain only subconscious-level control of the four men around him. He must avoid giving any sort of warning.
The corridor turned. He caused the four men to walk ahead of him. They quickened their pace in response to the feeling of urgency that surged through him.
Just a little farther now, Greer told himself, just a little farther—and then, in the mental dark, he sensed a glowing brightness, like a living light. It seemed to beat against his mind in ever-strengthening waves. It called to his mind to leap toward it and mingle with it. He strove to resist that call, to take no notice of it.
Ahead of him, the four men were filing through a door. On it he read “Director of Police.” Beyond it he saw a gleaming metallic table and a ruddy-faced, gray-haired man, with two policemen in uniform seated beside him.
But behind them was another person. As if in a subtly distorting mirror, Greer looked at himself.
He had guessed right. His brother had done the crazily logical thing that Greer had expected.
Tonight there was a city-wide manhunt for his brother—and his brother was directing it.
And now, face to face with his brother, mind to mind, he was overwhelmed by the thought of what they might have meant to each other under different circumstances, and he hesitated too long in giving the order that he knew must be given.
Before the men under his control could raise their guns, they were cut down by a deafening burst of fire from Police Director Marly and the two officers with him. Human flesh exploded nauseously.
Then, for a third time that night, time seemed to crawl. Greer had flung himself to one side. Out of range—but only for a moment. His turn, he knew, was next. He sought to take control of Marly and the other two. He might as well have tried to control statues. They were his brother’s puppets—not his.
He heard the rattling echoes of the gunfire die along the corridor. He saw a ribbon of smoke curl from the doorway. Seconds seemed like minutes.
He could see his brother’s purposes so clearly now, read them direct from his mind. Control of the world. And it would be such an easy thing—just a matter of getting to the men who controlled it, or who were in a position to control it, and then controlling them.
And he could have prevented it, if only—
If only—
He struck suddenly at his brother’s mind, to control it!
For an instant he thought he had succeeded. Then for an instant he thought he had failed. Mental brightness surging at mental brightness, seeking to extinguish. He felt a paralysis grip his muscles, a darkness closing down on his mind. By a supreme effort, he fought it off.
But deadlock was all he had wanted.
In Marly’s room, guns thundered.
Greer did not need to look. He felt his brother’s mind die.
In resisting Greer’s mental assault, his brother had been compelled to free his puppets.
Dully, Greer wondered if he ought to die, too. He, too, was a dangerous monster. Tonight he had killed a harmless man and been the cause of death for four others.
And he had destroyed the only one of his kind in the wide world, the only one with whom he could speak from mind to mind and be answered. Darkness now. Mental darkness unending.
From Marly’s room came a muffled exclamation of crazy amazement. Greer Canarvon realized that if he wished to escape, he must act quickly.
He turned to meet his lonely destiny.
THE MAN WHO WAS MARRIED TO SPACE AND TIME
Old guy Manning was in love with space and time all of his life, not only during the months preceding his mysterious yet oddly unspectacular disappearance. He didn’t write poetry about them, although he sometimes spoke of them poetically, and it did not lead him to become a professional physicist or astronomer (the stars being supreme examples of distance and of great use in timekeeping). No, it was altogether a humbler sort of affection and in his last years, after his wife’s death (there were no children) and his retirement from his minor editorial job, when he was living alone in a big-city apartment he leased by the year, it had some of the humdrum alements (alements of bondage, almost) that one sees in most long marriages. The sort of affection or devotion that kept him interested in science and science fiction all his life, and staring speculatively into the distance more than most people do, and toward the end compulsively concerned with small numbers and with counting (which is, after all, the simplest way we measure both time and space).
And yet this humble, humdrum, rather metaphysical love was so obvious to the few friends of his last years that none of them was exactly startled by the fanciful suggestion made after his casual yet eerie disappearance (though by no means agreeing with the suggestion, of course) that old Guy had somehow melted away into space and time, become “married” to them in the sense of becoming merged with them.
And indeed, old Guy Manning’s disappearance did have an unstudied air to it, as if he had simply stood up one day (as if going to get a drink of water) and walked out of life, or at least away from life as we know it. Though in what direction that would be, it’s puzzling (or perhaps meaningless) to ask.
It was the girl Joan Miles who made the fanciful “melting into space-time” suggestion. She was a mildly hippie young person, unseriously addicted to astrology, white witchcraft, and other pastel superstitions, who had the distinction of living and keeping time by her personally-embellished lunar calendar, in which all the full moons have names, not just the Harvest and Hunter’s. There are the Sower’s Moon and the Loner’s, for example, the Ghost’s, and of course the Lover’s. By her calendar, incidentally, old Guy Manning disappeared on the night of the Murderer’s (or Adulterer’s—Joan liked both names and couldn’t choose between them) Moon, the one nearest the summer solstice, the full moon that steals across the sky low in the south, latest to rise and earliest to set, short and dim as a December day. (In contrast, the Lover’s Moon is of course the one nearest the winter solstice, rising shamelessly high in the heavens and shedding an intoxicating silver radiance all the long, long night.)<
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Manning’s other young friend (who was also Joan’s friend) was Jack Penrose, a restless chap with a keen interest in both the occult and science, and with ambitions too of becoming a writer of fantasy romances. He was the one to whom Manning told some of his dreams.
Then there was Mr. Sarcander, a sallow and lean-jawed clinical psychologist working mostly in geriatrics. Originally Manning had consulted him about his recurrent depressions, but their relationship had become social also. Those who knew him well found Mr. Sarcander the most cynical and sardonic man alive, shockingly harsh in his evaluation of human motives, and they were occasionally hurt when they found such value judgments being applied to them or their friends. Such had never learned or else temporarily forgotten, that Mr. Sarcander was harshest of all on himself, expending all his optimism, flattery, and merry mood on his patient-clients, reserving his honesty for the people he could relax with.
And then there was the amiable and tolerant Dr. Lewison, Manning’s medical doctor with whom he had something more than a purely professional relationship. He had keys to Manning’s apartment, as did Jack Penrose.
These four persons had become acquainted while Manning was still alive (undisappeared, rather) and after his vanishing they met a few times to talk about it and him, especially when police investigations developed no leads—or any push at all, for that matter.
Such was the surprisingly small circle of Manning’s last friends unless we include (and we probably should) Mr. Breen, a burly, dark, not unhandsome Irishman with permanently bewildered eyes and given to fits of absentmindedness, who was the apartment manager of the building where Manning lived on the top floor. Breen wasn’t the first to notice Manning’s absence (Joan did) but he made a small discovery in connection with it that became somewhat puzzling as he recalled more of the attendant circumstances.
“I was up on the roof,” he said, “when I noticed this small ring of keys sitting on one of the steps leading up to the little room over the shaft that has the elevator motor and relays in it. Right next to the edge of the roof, too. At first I didn’t think of Manning specially but then I remembered—You know how he’d go up there once or twice a day, nights too, to check out the weather or the stars, he’d say?—I remembered times when he’d forgotten and left other things in about the same spot—his pipe or matches or a half-filled cup of coffee, and once his binoculars. So I checked out the keys and they were Manning’s. Which is sort of funny because you need them to get down from the roof. The one for the front door to the building also unlocks the door in from the roof. The police have them now.”
“No,” Jack Penrose contradicted, “the lock on the roof door doesn’t snap shut unless you make it. He took me up there several times and he always left the door hanging ajar and then pulled it tight shut, so it locked, after we came back in. And even if you were locked out on the roof without a key, you could always climb down the outside ladder to the fire escape.”
“That’s true,” Breen admitted, frowning doubtfully.
Dr. Lewison smiled to himself, thinking of how lightly young people contemplated such athletic feats.
Meanwhile Joan Miles was visualizing an ovoid space shuttle landing as silently as death on the pale, tar-set gravel overhead by the light of the Murderer’s Moon. And a door opening in its glassy skin and old Guy Manning bowing courteously toward it and then climbing inside. He wouldn’t have needed a key to get down from the roof then, she thought. Or any Earth keys any more, if it were going to be that sort of journey.
What she said was, “He had a way of narrowing his eyes and moving his head around from side to side as he looked out at the city. I wondered about it and then I realized he was lining up things very precisely—buildings, flagpoles, clouds, stars. He’d move his head the same way when he used his binoculars. He was learning all the stars, he told me once, not just the constellations but the smaller asterisms too that make them up and often look so much alike. He said it was a job that would last out his time. He had a geometric mind.”
Mr. Sarcander snorted faintly. “Old people,” he said, “are forever checking out their eyesight, trying to prove to themselves that it’s as good as ever—or even better.”
Jack Penrose said defensively, “He was very careful about all his sensations. They were more like observations. He paid attention to details. He watched the city—almost as if that were his special job.”
“All old people do that,” Mr. Sarcander said. “You see their white faces at windows and in shadowed porches. They watch their little world, their microcosm in which each has been God all of his life, waiting for the cracks to appear and it to crumble. It’s the only occupation life has left them.”
“Mr. Manning,” Joan murmured, mostly to herself, a little primly, “became more and more immersed in distance and duration.”
And indeed that was a very fair way of describing the way Guy Manning’s life had gone. Early on, he’d traveled as much as he could, experiencing distance that way. He’d liked to watch the sea. Later on this urge had expressed itself in a love of maps. He liked to measure distances on them with a small ivory ruler he carried. When he took walks he’d head for the nearest hill or high place so that he could see distance emerge from the scene around him as he mounted. And always there were the vastly far, infinitely regular stars at night, or in their absence the clouds filling the middle distances. During one period his interest shifted to great interiors, those of cathedrals, industrial assembly buildings wherein small aircraft could fly, and huge county-size extraterrestrial structures such as those imagined in Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and John Varley’s Titan.
As with distance, so with duration. At one time of his life he was greatly interested in clocks, and if he’d had more money he might have become a collector and ended up with a house full of tickings and chimings. But in the long run he was more drawn to the commoner and more ordinary aspects of timekeeping, the adjustment of watches and alarm clocks, the calls to Time of Day, the counting out of seconds accurately, the estimation of the duration of a moment of awareness (that vital surface which patches together the subjective and objective, the mental and material, the microcosm and the macrocosm), and the slow circling march across the sky of the time-keeping stars.
“He never cared for those new digital watches and clocks,” Dr. Lewison remarked, “especially the kind that show a black empty face until you press a button. Neither do I for that matter. For a wrist watch or clock he preferred the simplest kind of face: upright black numerals evenly spaced, minute markings around the rim and all three hands.”
“I know,” Joan Miles agreed. “He said you could see the face of time that way, judge its expression, and sometimes guess what it was up to.”
Jack Penrose lifted his eyes. “He once told me a desert dream he had,” the young man reminisced. “He was standing on this perfectly flat expanse of fine silvery sand. The illumination was general but he knew he was in a desert. He could feel on his back the infrared rays of a very hot sun beating rhythmically down through a thin cloud layer. And as if in time with the beating of those rays he could feel the hard-packed sand vibrating very rapidly—about five or six tight tiny shakes to every one of his heartbeats, as if the earth beneath were quaking constantly. There was mist all around him, but it was slowly dissipating upward. Yet as it rose, he could at first see nothing but the endless silver (and invisibly vibrating) plain extending out in all directions. He felt terribly lonely.
“Then, as the mist continued to rise by slow stages, there came into view—about two miles away, he judged—a squat dark tower of considerable width—more like a fort, really. Then he noticed two rather thin dark aerial wings jutting out from the tower for miles and miles—an impossible job of cantilevering. He could barely make out the end of one of them in the far distance. And then as he swung his eyes back to the other wing, the longer one, and continued to watch it, he got the impression it was very slowly moving toward him over the silver sand.
“Trapped under a wrist watch crystal,” Joan heard herself say. “It’s ticking the vibration of the sands? Did the mists clear all away? Was it his room outside? Did he peer down?”
“He woke up feeling the watch band gripping his wrist oppressively. He’d forgotten to take it off the night before. He said you became more aware of tiny pressures like that as you grew older.” Jack’s eyes widened a trifle and then he frowned as faintly—as though what he had just said had reminded him of another memory, one more difficult to disentangle.
“A wristwatch does tick five times a second,” Dr. Lewison observed, “though it’s harder for me to hear it these days. That compulsion to count… the concern with small numbers—you know, somewhere Guy picked up the habit of segregating his coins in different pockets according to their value (some joke about putting a use to all the pockets in a pair of pants) and then he found he’d acquired the additional habit of reaching in and counting them by touch—”
“A test of tactile acuity,” Mr. Sarcander put in sharply. “The elderly reassure themselves that way, filling their empty time with little tasks, so they won’t have to think unpleasant thoughts about what’s coming.”
“He had another habit involving small numbers and counting,” Dr. Lewison pressed on. “He’d read or been told by someone (he told me) about how people have been traced down by the characteristic pattern in which they tear matches out of matchbooks. That inspired him to experiment with different patterns of tearing out matches when he smoked his pipe—every other match in a rank, every third one, from in front, from behind, from the sides, from the center out, sometimes (he said) he’d give each match a weight from its position and try to tear them out in such a way that the two sides continued to balance without being symmetrical—”