The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  The President nodded with equal conviction, and, not very happily, summed up: “So if anyone should go up against the Thinkers— and I’m afraid I wouldn’t want to see that happen, whatever’s true—it would have to be a scientist.”

  Willard Farquar felt his weight change the steps under his feet into an escalator. He cursed under his breath, but let them carry him, a defiant hulk, up to the tall and mystic blue portals, which silently parted when he was five meters away. The escalator changed to a slideway and carried him into a softly gleaming, high-domed room rather like the antechamber of a temple.

  “Martian peace to you, Willard Farquar,” an invisible voice intoned. “You have entered the Thinkers’ Foundation. Please remain on the slideway.”

  “I want to see Jorj Hehnuth,” Willard growled loudly.

  The slideway carried him into the mouth of a corridor and paused.

  A dark opening dilated on the wall. “May we take your hat and coat!” a voice asked politely. After a moment the request was repeated, with the addition of, “Just pass them through.”

  Willard scowled, then fought his way out of his shapeless coat and passed it and his hat through in a lump. Instantly the opening contracted, imprisoning his wrists, and he felt his hands being washed on the other side of the wall.

  He gave a great jerk which failed to free his hands from the snugly padded gyves. “Do not be alarmed,” the voice advised him. “It is only an esthetic measure. As your hands are laved, invisible radiations are slaughtering all the germs in your body, while more delicate emanations are producing a benign rearrangement of your emotions.”

  The rather amateurish curses Willard was gritting between his teeth became more sulphurous. His sensations told him that a towel of some sort was being applied to his hands. He wondered if he would be subjected to a face-washing and even greater indignities. Then, just before his wrists were released, he felt—for a moment only, but unmistakably—the soft touch of a girl’s hand.

  That touch, like the mysterious sweet chink of a bell in darkness, brought him a sudden feeling of excitement, wonder.

  Yet the feeling was as fleeting as that caused by a lurid advertisement, for as the slideway began to move again, carrying him past a series of depth pictures and inscriptions celebrating the Thinkers’ achievements, his mood of bitter exasperation returned doubled. This place, he told himself, was a plague spot of the disease of magic in an enfeebled and easily infected world. He reminded himself that he was not without resources—the Thinkers must fear or need him, whether because of the Maelzel question or the necessity of producing a nuclear power spaceship. He felt his determination to smash them reaffirmed.

  The slideway, having twice turned into an escalator, veered toward an opalescent door, which opened as silently as the one below. The slideway stopped at the threshold. Momentum carried him a couple of steps into the room. He stopped and looked around.

  The place was a sybarite’s modernistic dream. Sponge carpeting thick as a mattress and topped with down. Hassocks and couches that looked butter-soft. A domed ceiling of deep glossy blue mimicking the night sky, with the constellations tooled in silver. A wall of niches crammed with statuettes of languorous men, women, beasts. A self-service bar with a score of golden spigots. A depth TV screen simulating a great crystal ball. Here and there barbaric studs of hammered gold that might have been push buttons. A low table set for three with exquisite ware of crystal and gold. An ever-changing scent of resins and flowers.

  A smiling fat man clad in pearl gray sports clothes came through one of the curtained archways. Willard recognized Jan Tregarron from his pictures, but did not at once offer to speak to him. Instead he let his gaze wander with an ostentatious contempt around the crammed walls, take in the bar and the set table with its many wineglasses, and finally return to his host.

  “And where,” he asked with harsh irony, “are the dancing girls?”

  The fat man’s eyebrows rose. “In there,” he said innocently, indicating the second archway. The curtains parted.

  “Oh, I am sorry,” the fat man apologized. “There seems to be only one on duty. I hope that isn’t too much at variance with your tastes.”

  She stood in the archway, demure and lovely in an off-the-bosom frock of pale skylon edged in mutated mink. She was smiling the first smile that Willard had ever had from her lips.

  “Mr. Willard Farquar,” the fat man murmured, “Miss Arkady Simms.”

  Jorj Helmuth turned from the conference table with its dozen empty chairs to the two mousily pretty secretaries.

  “No word from the door yet, Master,” one of them ventured to say.

  Jorj twisted in his chair, though hardly uncomfortably, since it was a beautiful pneumatic job. His nervousness at having to face the twelve rocket physicists—a feeling which, he had to admit, had been unexpectedly great—was giving way to impatience.

  “What’s Willard Farquar’s phone?” he asked sharply.

  One of the secretaries ran through a clutch of desk tapes, then spent some seconds whispering into her throat-mike and listening to answers from the soft-speaker.

  “He lives with Morton Opperly, who doesn’t have one,” she finally told Jorj in scandalized tones.

  “Let me see the list,” Jorj said. Then, after a bit, “Try Dr. Welcome’s place.”

  This time there were results. Within a quarter of a minute he was handed a phone which he hung expertly on his shoulder.

  “This is Dr. Asa Welcome,” a reedy voice told him.

  “This is Helmuth of the Thinkers’ Foundation,” Jorj said icily. “Did you get my communication?”

  The reedy voice became anxious and placating. “Why yes, Mr. Helmuth, I did. Very glad to get it too. Sounded most interesting. Very eager to come. But—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I was just about to hop in my ‘copter—my son’s ’copter— when the other note came.”

  “What other note?”

  “Why, the note calling the meeting off.”

  “I sent no other note!”

  The other voice became acutely embarrassed. “But I considered it to be from you—or just about the same thing. I really think I had the right to assume that.”

  “How was it signed?” Jorj rapped.

  “Mr. Jan Tregarron.”

  Jorj broke the connection. He didn’t move until a low sound shattered his abstraction and he realized that one of the girls was whispering a call to the door. He handed back the phone and dismissed them. They went in a rustle of jackets and skirtiets, hesitating at the doorway but not quite daring to look back.

  He sat motionless a minute longer. Then his hand crept fretfully onto the table and pushed a button. The room darkened and a long section of wall became transparent, revealing a dozen silvery models of spaceships, beautifully executed. He quickly touched another; the models faded and the opposite wall bloomed with an animated cartoon that portrayed with charming humor and detail the designing and construction of a neutron-drive spaceship. A third button, and a depth picture of deep star-speckled space opened behind the cartoon, showing a section of Earth’s surface and in the far distance the tiny ruddy globe of Mars. Slowly a tiny rocket rose from the section of Earth and spread its silvery sails.

  He switched off the pictures, keeping the room dark. By a faint table light he dejectedly examined his organizational charts for the neutron-drive project, the long list of books he had boned up on by somno-learning, the concealed table of physical constants and all sorts of other crucial details about rocket physics—a cleverly condensed encyclopedic “pony” to help out his memory on technical points that might have arisen in his discussion with the experts.

  He switched out all the lights and slumped forward, blinking his eyes and trying to swallow the lump in his throat. In the dark his memory went seeping back, back, to the day when his math teacher had told him, very superciliously, that the marvelous fantasies he loved to read and hoarded by his bed weren’t real science at all, but j
ust a kind of lurid pretense. He had so wanted to be a scientist, and the teacher’s contempt had cast a damper on his ambition.

  And now that the conference was canceled, would he ever know that it wouldn’t have turned out the same way today? That his somno-learning hadn’t taken? That his “pony” wasn’t good enough? That his ability to handle people extended only to credulous farmer Presidents and mousy girls in skirtlets? Only the test of meeting the experts would have answered those questions.

  Tregarron was the one to blame! Tregarron with his sly tyrannical ways, Tregarron with his fear of losing the future to men who really understood theoretics and could handle experts. Tregarron, so used to working by deception that he couldn’t see when it became a fault and a crime. Tregarron, who must now be shown the light—or, failing that, against whom certain steps must be taken.

  For perhaps half an hour Jorj sat very still, thinking. Then he turned to the phone and, after some delay, got his party.

  “What is it now, Jorj?” Caddy asked impatiently. “Please don’t bother me with any of your moods, because I’m tired and my nerves are on edge.”

  He took a breath. When steps may have to be taken, he thought, one must hold an agent in readiness. “Caddums,” he intoned hypnotically, vibrantly. “Caddums—”

  The voice at the other end had instantly changed, become submissive, sleepy, suppliant.

  “Yes, Master?”

  Morton Opperly looked up from the sheet of neatly penned equations at Willard Farquar, who had somehow acquired a measure of poise. He neither lumbered restlessly nor grimaced. He removed his coat with a certain dignity and stood solidly before his mentor. He smiled. Granting that he was a bear, one might guess he had just been fed.

  “You see?” he said. “They didn’t hurt me.”

  “They didn’t hurt you?” Opperly asked softly.

  Willard slowly shook his head. His smile broadened.

  Opperly put down his pen, folded his hands. “And you’re as determined as ever to expose and smash the Thinkers?”

  “Of course!” The menacing growl came back into the bear’s voice, except that it was touched with a certain pleased luxuriousness. “Only from now on I won’t be teasing the zoo animals, and I won’t embarrass you by asking any more Maelzel questions. I have reached the objective at which those tactics were aimed. After this I shall bore from within.”

  “Bore from within,” Opperly repeated, frowning. “Now where have I heard that phrase before?” His brow cleared. “Oh yes,” he said listlessly. “Do I understand that you are becoming a Thinker, Willard?”

  The other gave him a faintly pitying smile, stretched himself on the couch and gazed at the ceiling. All his movements were deliberate, easy,

  “Certainly. That’s the only realistic way to smash them. Rise high in their councils. Out-trick all their trickeries. Organize a fifth column. Then strike!”

  “The end justifying the means, of course,” Opperly said.

  “Of course. As surely as the desire to stand up justifies your disturbing the air over your head. All action in this world is nothing but means.”

  Opperly nodded abstractedly. “I wonder if anyone else ever became a Thinker for those same reasons. I wonder if being a Thinker doesn’t simply mean that you’ve decided you have to use lies and tricks as your chief method.”

  Willard shrugged. “Could be.” There was no longer any doubt about the pitying quality of his smile.

  Opperly stood up, squaring together Ms papers. “So you’ll be working with Helmuth?”

  “Not Helmuth. Tregarron.” The bear’s smile became cruel. “I’m afraid that Helmuth’s career as a Thinker is going to have quite a setback.”

  “Helmuth,” Opperly mused. “Morgenschein once told me a bit about him. A man of some idealism, despite his affiliations. Best of a bad lot. Incidentally, is he the one with whom—”

  “—Miss Arkady Simms ran off?” Willard finished without any embarrassment. “Yes, that was Helmuth. But that’s all going to be changed now.”

  Opperly nodded. “Good-by, Willard,” he said.

  Willard quickly heaved himself up on an elbow. Opperly looked at him for about five seconds, then, without a word, walked out of the room.

  The only obvious furnishings in Jan Tregarron’s office were a flat-topped desk and a few chairs. Tregarron sat behind the desk, the top of which was completely bare. He looked almost bored, except that his little eyes were smiling. Jorj Helmuth sat across the desk from him, a few feet back, erect and grim faced, while Caddy, shadowy in the muted light, stood against the wall behind Tregarron. She still wore the fur-trimmed skylon frock she’d put on that afternoon. She took no part in the conversation, seemed almost unaware of it.

  “So you just went ahead and canceled the conference without consulting me?” Jorj was saying.

  “You called it without consulting me.” Tregarron playfully wagged a finger. “Shouldn’t do that sort of thing, Jorj.”

  “But I tell you, I was completely prepared. I was absolutely sure of my ground.”

  “I know, I know,” Tregarron said lightly. “But it’s not the right time for it. I’m the best judge of that.”

  “When will be the right time?”

  Tregarron shrugged. “Look here, Jorj,” he said, “every man should stick to his trade, to his forte. Technology isn’t ours.”

  Jorj’s lips thinned. “But you know as well as I do that we are going to have to have a nuclear spaceship and actually go to Mars someday.”

  Tregarron lifted his eyebrows. “Are we?”

  “Yes! Just as we’re going to have to build a real Maizie. All the things we’ve done until now have been emergency measures.”

  “Really?”

  Jorj stared at him. “Look here, Jan,” he said, gripping his knees with his hands, “you and I are going to have to talk things through.”

  “Are you quite sure of that?” Jan’s voice was very cool. “I have a feeling that it might be best if you said nothing and accepted things as they are.”

  “No!”

  “Very well.” Tregarron settled himself in his chair.

  “I helped you organize the Thinkers,” Jorj said, and waited. “At least, I was your first partner.”

  Tregarron barely nodded.

  “Our basic idea was that the time had come to apply science to the life of man on a large scale, to live rationally and realistically. The only things holding the world back from this all-important step were the ignorance, superstition, and inertia of the average man, and the stuffiness and lack of enterprise of the academic scientists.

  “Yet we knew that in their deepest hearts the average man and the professionals were both on our side. They wanted the new world visualized by science. They wanted the simplifications and conveniences, the glorious adventures of the human mind and body. They wanted the trips to Mars and into the depths of the human psyche, they wanted the robots and the thinking machines. All they lacked was the nerve to take the first big step—and that was what we supplied.

  “It was no time for half measures, for slow and sober plodding. The world was racked by wars and neurosis, in danger of falling into the foulest hands. What was needed was a tremendous and thrilling appeal to the human imagination, an earth-shaking affirmation of the power of science for good.

  “But the men who provided that appeal and affirmation couldn’t afford to be cautious. They wouldn’t check and double check. They couldn’t wait for the grudging and jealous approval of the professionals. They had to use stunts, tricks, fakes—anything to get over the big point. Once that had been done, once mankind was headed down the new road, it would be easy enough to give the average man the necessary degree of insight to heal the breach with the professionals, to make good in actuality what had been made good only in pretense.

  “Have I stated our position fairly?”

  Tregarron’s eyes were hooded. “You’re the one who’s telling it.”

  “On those general assumptions we es
tablished our hold on susceptible leaders and the mob,” Jorj went on. “We built Maizie and the Mars rocket and the Mind Bomb. We discovered the wisdom of the Martians. We sold the people on the science that the professionals had been too high-toned to advertise or bring into the market place.

  “But now that we’ve succeeded, now that we’ve made the big point, now that Maizie and Mars and science do rule the average human imagination, the time has come to take the second big step, to let accomplishment catch up with imagination, to implement fantasy with fact.

  “Do you suppose I’d ever have gone into this with you if it hadn’t been for the thought of that second big step? Why, I’d have felt dirty and cheap, a mere charlatan—except for the sure conviction that someday everything would be set right. I’ve devoted my whole life to that conviction, Jan. I’ve studied and disciplined myself, using every scientific means at my disposal, so that I wouldn’t be found lacking when the day came to heal the breach between the Thinkers and the professionals. I’ve trained myself to be the perfect man for the job.

  “Jan, the day’s come and I’m the man. I know you’ve been concentrating on other aspects of our work; you haven’t had time to keep up with my side of it. But I’m sure that as soon as you see how carefully I’ve prepared myself, how completely practical the neutron-drive rocket project is, you’ll beg me to go ahead!”

  Tregarron smiled at the ceiling for a moment. “Your general idea isn’t so bad, Jorj, but your time scale is out of whack and your judgment is a joke. Oh yes. Every revolutionary wants to see the big change take place in his lifetime, Yeh! It’s as if he were watching evolutionary vaudeville and wanted the Ape-to-Man Act over in twenty minutes.

  “Time for the second big step? Jorj, the average man’s exactly what he was ten years ago, except that he’s got a new god. More than ever he thinks of Mars as a Hollywood paradise, with wise men and yummy princesses. Maizie is Mama magnified a million times. As for professional scientists, they’re more jealous and stuffy than ever. All they’d like to do is turn the clock back to a genteel dream world of quiet quadrangles and caps and gowns, where every commoner bows to the passing scholar.