by Fritz Leiber
The face was unmarred, though it was rather closer to the sidewalk than it would have been if the back of the head had been intact. It was a face with a week’s beard on it that rose higher than the cheekbones—the big forehead was the only sizable space on it clear of hair. It was the tormented face of a drunk, but now at peace. It was a face I knew, in fact had always known. It was simply the face my conductress had not let me see, the face of the person I had doomed to die: myself.
I lifted my hand and this time I let it touch the week’s growth of beard matting my face. Well, I thought, I had given the crowd an exciting half hour.
I lifted my eyes and there on the other side of the body was the dirty-sleeved man. It was the same beard-matted face as that on the ground between us, the same beard-matted face as my own.
On the forehead was a black S that looked permanent.
He was staring at my face—and then at my forehead— with a surprise, and then a horror, that I knew my own features were registering too as I stared at him. A hand touched my shoulder.
My conductress had told me that you never know whether the side into which you are bom or reborn is “right” or “good.” Now, as I turned and saw the shimmering silver man-high Door behind me, and her hand vanishing into it, and as I stepped through, past a rim of velvet blackness and stars, I clung to that memory, for I knew that I would be fighting on both sides forever.
THE OLDEST SOLDIER
THE ONE we called the Leutnant took a long swallow of his dark Lowensbrau. He’d just been describing a battle of infantry rockets on the Eastern Front, the German and Russian positions erupting bundles of flame.
Max swished his paler beer in its green bottle and his eyes got a faraway look and he said, “When the rockets killed their thousands in Copenhagen, they laced the sky with fire and lit up the steeples in the city and the masts and bare spars of the British ships like a field of crosses.”
“I didn’t know there were any landings in Denmark,” someone remarked with an expectant casualness.
“This was in the Napoleonic wars,” Max explained. “The British bombarded the city and captured the Danish fleet. Back in 1807.”
“Vas you dere, Maxie?” Woody asked, and the gang around the counter chuckled and beamed. Drinking at a liquor store is a pretty dull occupation and one is grateful for small vaudeville acts.
“Why bare spars?” someone asked.
“So there’d be less chance of the rockets setting the launching ships afire,” Max came back at him. “Sails bum fast and wooden ships are tinder anyway—that’s why ships firing red-hot shot never worked out. Rockets and bare spars were bad enough. Yes, and it was Congreve rockets made the ‘red glare’ at Fort McHenry,” he continued unruffled, “while the *bombs bursting in air’ were about the earliest precision artillery shells, fired from mortars on bomb-ketches. There’s a condensed history of ajms in tie American anthem.” He looked around smiling.
“Yes, I was there, Woody—just as I was with the South Martians when they stormed Copernicus in the Second Colonial War. And just as I’ll be in a foxhole outside Copeybawa a billion years from now while the blast waves from the battling Venusian spaceships shake the soil and roil the mud and give me some more digging to do.”
This time the gang really snorted its happy laughter and Woody was slowly shaking his head and repeating, “Copenhagen and Copernicus and—what was the third? Oh, what a mind he’s got,” and the Leutnant was saying, “Yah, you vas there—in books,” and I was thinking, Thank God for all the screwballs, especially the brave ones who never flinch, who never lose their tempers or drop the act, so that you never do quite find out whether it’s fust a gag or their solemnest belief. There’s only one person here takes Max even one percent seriously, but they all love him because he wont ever drop his guard. ...
“The only point I was trying to make,” Max continued when he could easily make himself heard “was the way styles in weapons keep moving in cycles.”
“Did the Romans use rockets?” asked the same light voice as had remarked about the landings in Denmark and the bare spars. I saw now it was Sol from behind the counter.
Max shook his head. “Not so you’d notice. Catapults were their specialty.” He squinted his eyes. “Though now you mention it, I recall a dogfoot telling me Archimedes faked up some rockets powdered with Greek fire to touch off the sails of the Roman ships at Syracuse—and none of this romance about a giant burning glass.”
“You mean,” said Woody, “that there are other gazebos besides yourself in this fighting-all-over-the-universe-and-to-the-end-of-time racket?” His deep whiskey voice was at its solemnest and most wondering.
“Naturally," Max told him earnestly. “How else do you suppose wars ever get really fought and refought?”
“Why should wars ever he refought?” Sol asked lightly. “Once ought to be enough.”
“Do you suppose anybody could time-travel and keep his hands off wars?” Max countered.
I put in my two cents’ worth. '“Then that would make Archimedes’ rockets the earliest liquid-fuel rockets by a long shot.”
Max looked straight at me, a special quirk in his smile. “Yes, I guess so,” he said after a couple of seconds. “On this planet, that is."
The laughter had been falling off, but that brought it back and while Woody was saying loudly to himself, “I like that refighting part—that’s what we’re all so good at,” the Leut-nant asked Max with only a moderate accqnt that fit North Chicago, “And zo you aggshually have fought on Mars?”
“Yes, I have,” Max agreed after a bit. “Though that ruckus I mentioned happened on our moon—expeditionary forces from the Red Planet.”
“Ach, yes. And now let me ask you something—”
I really mean that about screwballs, you know. I don’t care whether they’re saucer addicts or extrasensory perception bugs or religious or musical maniacs or crackpot philosophers or pychologists or merely guys with a strange dream or gag like Max—for my money they are the ones who are keeping individuality alive in this age of conformity. They are the ones who are resisting the encroachments of the mass media and motivation research and the mass man. The only really bad thing about crack pottery and screwballistics (as with dope and prostitution) is the coldblooded people who prey on it for money. So I say to all screwballs: Go it on your own.
Don’t take any wooden nickels or give out any silver dimes. Be wise and brave—like Max.
He and the Leutnant were working up a discussion of the problems of artillery in airless space and low gravity that was a little too technical to keep the laughter alive. So Woody up and remarked, “Say, Maximillian, if you got to be in all these wars all over hell and gone, you must have a pretty tight schedule. How come you got time to be drinking with us bums?”
“I often ask myself that,” Max cracked back at him. "Fact is, I’m on a sort of unscheduled furlough, result of a transportation slip-up. I’m due to be picked up and returned to my outfit any day now—that is, if the enemy underground doesn’t get to me first.”
It was just then, as Max said that bit about enemy underground, and as the laughter came, a little diminished, and as Woody was chortling “Enemy underground now. How do you like that?” and as I was thinking how much Max had given me in these couple of weeks—a guy with an almost poetic flare for vivid historical reconstruction, but with more than that ... it was just then that I saw the two red eyes low down in the dusty plate-glass window looking in from the dark street.
Everything in modem America has to have a big plate glass display window, everything from suburban mansions, general managers’ offices and skyscraper apartments to barber shops and beauty parlors and ginmills—there are even gymnasium swimming pools with plate glass windows twenty feet high opening on busy boulevards—and Sol’s dingy liquor store was no exception; in fact I believe there’s a law that it’s got to be that way. But I was the only one of the gang who happened to be looking out of this particular window at the
moment. It was a dark windy night outside and it’s a dark untidy street at best and across from Sol’s are more plate glass windows that sometimes give off very odd reflections, so when I got a glimpse of this black formless head with the two eyes like red coals peering in past the brown pyramid of empty whiskey bottles, I don’t suppose it was a half second before I realized it must be something like a couple of cigarette butts kept alive by the wind, or more likely a freak reflection of tail lights from some car turning a comer down street, and in another half second it was gone, the car having finished turning the comer or the wind blowing the cigarette butts away altogether. Still, for a moment it gave me a very goosey feeling, coming right on top of that remark about an enemy underground.
And I must have shown my reaction in some way, for Woody, who is very observant, called out, “Hey, Fred, has that soda pop you drink started to rot your nerves—or are even Max’s friends getting sick at the outrageous lies he’s been telling us?”
Max looked at me sharply and perhaps he saw something too. At any rate he finished his beer and said, “I guess I’ll be taking off.” He didn’t say it to me particularly, but he kept looking at me. I nodded and put down on the counter my small green bottle, still one-third full of the lemon pop I find overly sweet, though it was the sourest Sol stocked. Max and I zipped up our wind-breakers. He opened the door and a little of the wind came in and troubled the tanbark around the sill. The Leutnant said to Max, “Tomorrow night we design a better space gun;” Sol routinely advised the two of us, “Keep your noses clean;” and Woody called, “So long space soldiers.” (And I could imagine him saying as the door closed, "That Max is nuttier than a fruitcake and Freddy isn’t much better. Drinking soda pop—ughl”)
And then Max tnd I were outside leaning into the wind, our eyes slitted against the blown dust, for the three-block trudge to Max’s pad—a name his tiny apartment merits without any attempt to force the language.
There weren’t any large black shaggy dogs with red eyes slinking about and I hadn’t quite expected there would be.
Why Max and his soldier-of-history gag and our outwardly small comradship meant so much to me is something that goes way back into my childhood. I was a lonely timid child, with no brothers and sisters to spar around with in preparation for the battles of life, and I never went through the usual stages of boyhood gangs either. In line with those things I grew up into a very devout liberal and “hated war” with a mystical fervor during the intermission between 1918 and 1939—so much so that I made a point of avoiding military services in the second conflict, though merely by working in the nearest war plant, not by the arduously heroic route of out-and-out pacifism.
But then the inevitable reaction set in, sparked by the liberal curse of being able, however, belatedly, to see both sides of any question. I began to be curious about and cautiously admiring of soldiering and soldiers. Unwillingly at first, I came to see the necessity and romance of the spearmen—those guardians, often lonely as myself, of the perilous camps of civilization and brotherhood in a black hostile universe . . . necessary guardians, for all the truth in the indictments that war caters to irrationality and sadism and serves the munition makers and reaction.
I commenced to see my own hatred of war as in part only a mask for cowardice, and I started to look for some way to do honor in my life to the other half of the truth. Though it’s anything but easy to give yourself a feeling of being brave just because you suddenly want that feeling. Obvious opportunities to be obviously brave come very seldom in our largely civilized culture, in fact they’re clean contrary to safety drives and so-called normal adjustment and good peacetime citizenship and all the rest, and they come mostly in the earliest part of a man’s life. So that for the person who belatedly wants to be brave it’s generally a matter of waiting for an opportunity for six months and then getting a tiny one and muffing it in six seconds.
But however uncomfortable it was, I had this reaction to my devout early pacifism, as I say. At first I took it out only in reading. I devoured war books, current and historical, fact and fiction. I tried to soak up the military aspects and jargon of all ages, the organization and weapons, the strategy and tactics. Characters like Tros of Samothrace and Horatio Hom-blower became my new secret heroes, along with Heinlein’s space cadets and Bullard and other brave rangers of the spaceways.
But after a while reading wasn’t enough. I had to have some real soldiers and I finally found them in the little gang that gathered nighdy at Sol’s liquor store. It’s funny but liquor stores that serve drinks have a clinentele with more character and comradeship than the clienteles of most bars—perhaps it is the absence of juke-boxes, chromium plate, bowling machines, trouble-hunting, drink-cadging women, and— along with those—men in search of fights and forgetfulness. At any rate, it was at Sol’s liquor store that I found Woody and the Leutnant and Bert and Mike and Pierre and Sol himself. The casual customer would hardly have guessed that they were anything but quiet souses, certainly not soldiers, but I got a clue or two and I started to hang around, making myself inconspicuous and drinking my rather symbolic soda pop, and pretty soon they started to open up and yam about North Africa and Stalingrad and Anzio and Korea and such and I was pretty happy in a partial sort of way.
And then about a month ago Max had turned up and he was the man I’d really been looking for. A genuine soldier with my historical slant on things—only he knew a lot more than I did, I was a rank amateur by comparison—and he had this crazy appealing gag too, and besides that he actually cottoned to me and invited me on to his place a few times, so that with him I was more than a tavern hanger-on. Max was good for me, though I still hadn’t the faintest idea of who he really was or what he did.
Naturally Max hadn’t opened up the first couple of nights with the gang, he’d just bought his beer and kept quiet and felt his way much as I had. Yet he looked and felt so much the soldier tfiat I think the gang was inclined to accept him from the start—a quick stocky man with big hands and a leathery face and smiling tired eyes that seemed to have seen everything at one time or another. And then on the third or fourth night Bert told something about the Battle of the Bulge and Max chimed in with some things he’d seen there, and I could tell from the looks Bert and the Leutnant exchanged that Max had “passed”—he was now the accepted seventh member of the gang, with me still as the tolerated clerical-type hanger-on, for I’d never made any secret of my complete lack of military experience.
Not long afterwards—it couldn’t have been more than one or two nights—Woody told some tall tales and Max started matching him and that was the beginning of the time-and-space-soldier gag. It was funny about the gag. I suppose we just should have assumed that Max was a history nut and liked to parade his bookish hobby in a picturesque way— and maybe some of the gang did assume just that—but he was so vivid yet so casual in his descriptions of other times and places that you felt there had to be something more and sometimes he’d get such a lost, nostalgic look on his face talking of things fifty million miles or five hundred years away that Woody would almost die laughing, which was really the sin-cerest sort of tribute to Max’s convincingness.
Max even kept up the gag when he and I were alone together, walking or at his place—he’d never come to mine— though he kept it up in a minor-key sort of way, so that it sometimes seemed that what he was trying to get across was not that he was the Soldier of a Power that was fighting across all of time to change history, but simply that we men were creatures with imaginations and it was our highest duty to try to feel what it was really like to live in other times and places and bodies. Once he said to me, “The growth of consciousness is everything, Fred—the seed of awareness sending its roots across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways, spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake. The biggest wars are the wars of thought.”
But whatever he was trying to get across, I went along with his gag—whi
ch seems to me the proper way to behave with any other man, screwball or not, so long as you can do it without violating your own personality. Another man brings a little life and excitement into the world, why try to kill it? It is simply a matter of politeness and style.
I’d come to think a lot about style since knowing Max. It doesn’t matter so much what you do in life, he once said to me—soldiering or clerking, preaching or picking pockets— so long as you do it with style. Better fail in a grand style than succeed in a mean one—you won’t enjoy the successes you get the second way.
Max seemed to understand my own special problems without my having to confess them. He pointed out to me that the soldier is trained for bravery. The whole object of military discipline is to make sure that when the six seconds of testing come every six months or so, you do the brave thing without thinking, by drilled second nature. It’s not a matter of the soldier having some special virtue or virility the civilian lacks. And then about fear. All men are afraid, Max said, except a few psychopathic or suicidal types and they merely haven’t fear at the conscious level. But the better you know yourself and the men around you and the situation you’re up against (though you can never know all of the last and sometimes you have only a glimmering), then the better you are prepared to prevent fear from mastering you. Generally speaking, if you prepare yourself by the daily self-discipline of looking squarely at life, if you imagine realistically the troubles and opportunities that may come, then the chances are you won’t fail in the testing. Well, of course I’d heard and read all those things before, but coming from Max they seemed to mean a lot more to me. As I say, Max was good for me.
So on this night when Max had talked about Copenhagen and Copernicus and Copeybawa and I’d imagined I’d seen a big black dog with red eyes and we were walking the lonely streets hunched in our jackets and I was listening to the big clock over at the University tolling eleven . . . well, on this night I wasn’t thinking anything special except that I was with my screwball buddy and pretty soon we’d be at his place and having a nightcap. I’d make mine coffee.