The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Reuter Leiber

  Then you would have heard it: pling!—tour seconds, six, seven— another pling!—another seven seconds —pling! again—pling!— pling!—pling!

  The torment in her sleeping face deepened. She crossed between the piles to a sink against the wall. On the lip of the single verdigrised faucet a drop slowly formed as she approached and just as she got there it fell—pling!—and a quick spasm crossed her face.

  She put down the electric candle on the drainboard and took the handle of the faucet in both hands and leaned against it, not looking at it. There was one more pling! but then no more. She touched the lip of the faucet with a finger and it came away barely wet. She waited but no new drop formed.

  Then her face smoothed out into a small mask of dispassion, the mouth thin and straight, and she took up her candle and started back. On the ladder and stairs and out on the walk and the street she was no longer alone. Presences thronged around her, angry and menacing, just beyond the candle’s glow, and leaves crackled under other feet than her own. The light from the high window by the stars pulsed poisonously green, the winged shapes crawled more restlessly across the spent luminescence of the billboards, and all the witch-light in the theater marquee drained down into the lowest bulbs, the ones nearest her as she passed.

  The wrecked display windows in the Block of the Babes and Zoot-Suiters were all empty.

  In the Street of the Neon Worms the colored crawlers all came swiftly toward her, buzzing loudly and angrily, more cracklingly than bees, swarming close to her feet in ribbons of rainbow fire and following her around the corner for half a block.

  But none of these things, nor the perceptible dimming of her electric candle, ruffled for one instant her expression of calm security.

  She mounted the iron stairs, crossed the boundless room, sat down on the cot and put the electric candle on the orange crate among the heaped dead batteries.

  One of them rolled off and hit the floor with a little tump! She started, quivered her head and blinked her eyes. Wakefulness had at last come into them. She sat motionless for a while, remembering. She sighed once and smiled a little smile, then she sat up straighter and her thin silvery eyebrows drew together hi a frown of determination. She found a fountain pen and a small pad of onionskin paper among the batteries. She tucked a scrap of carbon paper under the top sheet and wrote rapidly for a minute. She tore off the top sheet, folded it and rolled it up tightly, then tucked it into an aluminum cylinder hardly bigger than a paper match.

  She got up and went around the cot. She took the cover off the birdcage, opened the small door, and took out a black pigeon. Moaning to it affectionately, she wired the cylinder to one foot. Then she kissed its beak and threw it into the darkness. There was a flapping which grew steadily fainter, then suddenly broke off, as if the bird had winged through a window.

  The dim globe of light had shrunk to half its original size, but it was still enough to show the little old lady’s face as she got into bed and pulled up the blankets. Her eyes were closed now. She sighed once more and the corners of her lips lifted in another little smile. She became still, the blankets rising and falling almost imperceptibly over her chest, and the smile stayed.

  The light was also enough to show the carbon of her note, which read:

  Dear Evangeline,

  I was overjoyed to receive your note and discover that you too at last have a city of your own and of course your own things. How is Louisville since the Destruction? Quiet, I trust. Pittsburgh is so noisy. / am thinking of moving to Cincinnati. Do you know if it has a tenant?

  Yours very truly,

  Miss Macbeth

  Mariana

  MARIANA HAD been living in the big villa and hating the tall pine trees around it for what seemed like an eternity when she found the secret panel in the master control panel of the house.

  The secret panel was simply a narrow blank of aluminum—she’d thought of it as room for more switches if they ever needed any, perish the thought!—between the air-conditioning controls and the gravity controls. Above the switches for the three-dimensional TV but below those for the robot butler and maids.

  Jonathan had told her not to fool with the master control panel while he was in the city, because she would wreck anything electrical, so when the secret panel came loose under her aimlessly questing fingers and fell to the solid rock floor of the patio with a musical twing her first reaction was fear.

  Then she saw it was only a small blank oblong of sheet aluminum that had fallen and that in the space it had covered was a column of six little switches. Only the top one was identified. Tiny glowing letters beside it spelled TREES and it was on.

  When Jonathan got home from the city that evening she gathered her courage and told him about it. He was neither particularly angry nor impressed.

  “Of course there’s a switch for the trees,” he informed her deflatingly, motioning the robot butler to cut his steak. “Didn’t you know they were radio trees? I didn’t want to wait twenty-five years for them and they couldn’t grow hi this rock anyway. A station hi the city broadcasts a master pine tree and sets like ours pick it up and project it around homes. It’s vulgar but convenient.”

  After a bit she asked timidly, “Jonathan, are the radio pine trees ghostly as you drive through them?”

  “Of course not! They’re solid as this house and the rock under it—to the eye and to the touch too. A person could even climb them. If you ever stirred outside you’d know these things. The city station transmits pulses of alternating matter at sixty cycles a second. The science of it is over your head.”

  She ventured one more question: “Why did they have the tree switch covered up?”

  “So you wouldn’t monkey with it—same as the fine controls on the TV. And so you wouldn’t get ideas and start changing the trees. It would unsettle me, let me tell you, to come home to oaks one day and birches the next. I like consistency and I like pines.” He looked at them out of the dining-room picture window and grunted with satisfaction.

  She had been meaning to tell him about hating the pines, but that discouraged her and she dropped the topic.

  About noon the next day, however, she went to the secret panel and switched off the pine trees and quickly turned around to watch them.

  At first nothing happened and she was beginning to think that Jonathan was wrong again, as he so often was though would never admit, but then they began to waver and specks of pale green light churned across them and then they faded and were gone, leaving behind only an intolerably bright single point of light—just as when the TV is switched off. The star hovered motionless for what seemed a long time, then backed away and raced off toward the horizon.

  Now that the pine trees were out of the way Mariana could see the real landscape. It was flat grey rock, endless miles of it, exactly the same as the rock on which the house was set and which formed the floor of the patio. It was the same hi every direction. One black two-lane road drove straight across it—

  nothing more.

  She disliked the view almost at once—it was dreadfully lonely and depressing. She switched the gravity to moon-normal and danced about dreamily, floating over the middle-of-the-room bookshelves and the grand piano and even having the robot maids dance with her, but it did not cheer her. About two o’clock she went to switch on the pine trees again, as she had intended to do in any case before Jonathan came home and was furious.

  However, she found there had been changes in the column of six little switches. The TREES switch no longer had its glowing name. She remembered that it had been the top one, but the top one would not turn on again. She tried to force it from “off” to “on” but it would not move.

  All the rest of the afternoon she sat on the steps outside the front door watching the black two-lane road. Never a car or a person came into view until Jonathan’s tan roadster appeared, seeming at first to hang motionless in the distance and then to move only like a microscopic snail although she knew he always drove at top speed—i
t was one of the reasons she would never get in the car with him.

  Jonathan was not as furious as she had feared. “Your own damn fault for meddling with it,” he said curtly. “Now we’ll have to get a man out here. Dammit, I hate to eat supper looking at nothing but those rocks! Bad enough driving through them twice a day.”

  She asked him haltingly about the barrenness of the landscape and the absence of neighbors.

  “Well, you wanted to live way out,” he told her. “You wouldn’t ever have known about it if you hadn’t turned off the trees.”

  “There’s one other thing I’ve got to bother you with, Jonathan,” she said. “Now the second switch—the one next below—has got a name that glows. It just says HOUSE. It’s turned on—I haven’t touched it! Do you suppose.”

  “I want to look at this,” he said, bounding up from the couch and slamming his martini-on-the-rocks tumbler down on the tray of the robot maid sb that she rattled. “I bought this house as solid, but there are swindles. Ordinarily I’d spot a broadcast style in a flash, but they just might have slipped me a job relayed from some other planet or solar system. Fine thing if me and fifty other multi-megabuck men were spotted around in identical houses, each thinking his was unique.”

  “But if the house is based on rock like it is.”

  “That would just make it easier for them to pull the trick, you dumb bunny!”

  They reached the master control panel. “There it is,” she said helpfully, jabbing out a finger. and hit the HOUSE switch.

  For a moment nothing happened, then a white churning ran across the ceiling, the walls and furniture started to swell and bubble like cold lava, and then they were alone on a rock table big as three tennis courts. Even the master control panel was gone. The only thing that was left was a slender rod coming out of the grey stone at their feet and bearing at the top, like some mechanistic fruit, a small block with the six switches—that and an intolerably bright star hanging in the air where the master bedroom had been.

  Mariana pushed frantically at the HOUSE switch, but it was unlabelled now and locked hi the “off” position, although she threw her weight at it stiff-armed.

  The upstairs star sped off like an incendiary bullet, but its last flashbulb glare showed her Jonathan’s face set hi lines of fury. He lifted his hands like talons.

  “You little idiot!” he screamed, coming at her.

  “No Jonathan, no!” she wailed, backing off, but he kept coming.

  She realized that the block of switches had broken off in her hands. The third switch had a glowing name now: JONATHAN. She flipped it.

  As his fingers dug into her bare shoulders they seemed to turn to foam rubber, then to air. His face and grey flannel suit seethed iridescently, like a leprous ghost’s, then melted and ran. His star, smaller than that of the house but much closer, seared her eyes. When she opened them again there was nothing at all left of the star or Jonathan but a dancing dark after-image like a black tennis ball.

  She was alone on an infinite flat rock plain under the cloudless, star-specked sky.

  The fourth switch had its glowing name now: STARS.

  It was almost dawn by her radium-dialled wristwatch and she was thoroughly chilled, when she finally decided to switch off the stars. She did not want to do it—in their slow wheeling across the sky they were the last sign of orderly reality—but it seemed the only move she could make.

  She wondered what the fifth switch would say. ROCKS? AIR? Or even. ?

  She switched off the stars.

  The Milky Way, arching in all its unalterable glory, began to churn, its component stars darting about like midges. Soon only one remained, brighter even than Sirius or Venus—until it jerked back, fading, and darted to infinity.

  The fifth switch said DOCTOR and it was not on but off.

  An inexplicable terror welled up hi Mariana. She did not even want to touch the fifth switch. She set the block of switches down on the rock and backed away from it.

  But she dared not go far hi the starless dark. She huddled down and waited for dawn. From time to time she looked at her watch dial and at the night-light glow of the switch-label a dozen yards away.

  It seemed to be growing much colder.

  She read her watch dial. It was two hours past sunrise. She remembered they had taught her in third grade that the sun was just one more star.

  She went back and sat down beside the block of switches and picked it up with a shudder and flipped the fifth switch.

  The rock grew soft and crisply fragrant under her and lapped up over her legs and then slowly turned white.

  She was sitting hi a hospital bed in a small blue room with a white pin-stripe.

  A sweet, mechanical voice came out of the wall, saying, “You have interrupted the wish-fulfilment therapy by your own decision. If you now recognize your sick depression and are willing to accept help, the doctor will come to you. If not, you are at liberty to return to the wish-fulfilment therapy and pursue it to its ultimate conclusion.”

  Mariana looked down. She still had the block of switches hi her hands and the fifth switch still read DOCTOR.

  The wall said, “I assume from your silence that you will accept treatment. The doctor will be with you immediately.”

  The inexplicable terror returned to Mariana with compulsive intensity.

  She switched off the doctor.

  She was back in the starless dark. The rocks had grown very much colder. She could feel icy feathers falling on her face—snow.

  She lifted the block of switches and saw, to her unutterable relief, that the sixth and last switch now read, in tiny glowing letters:

  MARIANA.

  The Man Who Made Friends With Electricity

  WHEN MR. SCOTT showed Peak House to Mr. Leverett, he hoped he wouldn’t notice the high-tension pole outside the bedroom window, because it had twice before queered promising rentals—so many elderly people were foolishly nervous about electricity. There was nothing to be done about the pole except try to draw prospective tenants’ attention away from it—electricity follows the hilltops and these lines supplied more than half the juice used in Pacific Knolls.

  But Mr. Scott’s prayers and suave misdirections were in vain-Mr. Leverett’s sharp eyes lit on the “negative feature” the instant they stepped out on the patio. The old New Englander studied the short thick wooden column, the 18-inch ridged glass insulators, the black transformer box that stepped down voltage for this house and a few others lower on the slope. His gaze next followed the heavy wires swinging off rhythmically four abreast across the empty grey-green hills. Then he cocked his head as his ears caught the low but steady frying sound, varying from a crackle to a buzz of electrons leaking off the wires through the air.

  “Listen to that!” Mr. Leverett said, his dry voice betraying excitement for the first time in the tour. “Fifty thousand volts if there’s five! A power of power!”

  “Must be unusual atmospheric conditions today—normally you can’t hear a thing,” Mr. Scott responded lightly, twisting the truth a little.

  “You don’t say?” Mr. Leverett commented, his voice dry again, but Mr. Scott knew better than to encourage conversation about a negative feature. “I want you to notice this lawn,” he launched out heartily. “When the Pacific Knolls Golf Course was subdivided, the original owner of Peak House bought the entire eighteenth green and-”

  For the rest of the tour Mr. Scott did his state-certified real estate broker’s best, which in Southern California is no mean performance, but Mr. Leverett seemed a shade perfunctory in the attention he accorded it. Inwardly Mr. Scott chalked up another defeat by the damn pole.

  On the quick retrace, however, Mr. Leverett insisted on their lingering on the patio. “Still holding out,” he remarked about the buzz with an odd satisfaction. “You know, Mr. Scott, that’s a restful sound to me. Like wind or a brook or the sea. I hate the clatter of machinery—that’s the other reason I left New England—but this is like a sound of natur
e. Downright soothing. But you say it comes seldom?”

  Mr. Scott was flexible—it was one of his great virtues as a salesman.

  “Mr. Leverett,” he confessed simply, “I’ve never stood on this patio when I didn’t hear that sound. Sometimes it’s softer, sometimes louder, but it’s always there. I play it down, though, because most people don’t care for it.”

  “Don’t blame you,” Mr. Leverett said. “Most people are a pack of fools or worse. Mr. Scott, are any of the people in the neighboring houses Communists to your knowledge?”

  “No, sir!” Mr. Scott responded without an instant’s hesitation. “There’s not a Communist in Pacific Knolls. And that’s something, believe me, I’d never shade the truth on.”

  “Believe you,” Mr. Leverett said. “The east’s packed with Communists. Seem scarcer out here. Mr. Scott, you’ve made yourself a deal. I’m taking a year’s lease on Peak House as furnished and at the figure we last mentioned.”

  “Shake on it!” Mr. Scott boomed. “Mr. Leverett, you’re the kind of person Pacific Knolls wants.”

  They shook. Mr. Leverett rocked on his heels, smiling up at the softly crackling wires with a satisfaction that was already a shade possessive.

  “Fascinating thing, electricity,” he said. “No end to the tricks it can do or you can do with it. For instance, if a man wanted to take off for elsewhere in an elegant flash, he’d only have to wet down the lawn good and take twenty-five foot of heavy copper wire hi his two bare hands and whip the other end of it over those lines. Whang! Every bit as good as Sing Sing and a lot more satisfying to a man’s inner needs.”

  Mr. Scott experienced a severe though momentary sinking of heart and even for one wildly frivolous moment considered welshing on the verbal agreement he’d just made. He remembered the red-haired lady who’d rented an apartment from him solely to have a quiet place in which to take an overdose of barbiturates. Then he reminded himself that Southern California is, according to a wise old saw, the home (actual or aimed-at) of the peach, the nut and the prune; and while he’d had few dealings with real or would-be starlets, he’d had enough of crackpots and retired grouches. Even if you piled fanciful death wishes and a passion for electricity atop rabid anti-communist and anti-machine manias, Mr. Leverett’s personality was no more than par for the S. Cal. course.