Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  And there’s a good side to the enforced isolation—it will make me concentrate on my book.

  Well, that does it. I’ve popped the word, and now I’ll have to start writing the thing itself—and am I scared! It’s been so long since I’ve finished anything of my own— even attempted it. So damned long. I’d begun to be afraid (begun, hell!) that I’d never do anything but take notes and make outlines—outlines that became more and more complicated and lifeless with the years. And yet there were those early fragments of writing from my school days that ought to have encouraged me. Even much later, when I’d developed some literary judgement, I used to think those fragments showed flashes of real promise—until I burned them. They should have given me courage—at any rate, something should have—but whatever promising ideas I’d have in the morning would be shredded to tatters by that horrible hackwriting job by the time night came.

  And now that I have taken the plunge, it seems hilariously strange that I should have been driven to it by an idea for a fantasy story. The very sort of writing I’ve always jeered at— childish playing around with interplanetary space and alien monsters. The farthest thing you could imagine from my wearisome outlines, which eventually got so filled up with character analysis (or even—Heaven help me—psychoanalysis) and dismal authentic backgrounds and “my own experience” and just heaps of social and political “significance” that there wasn’t room for anything else. Yes, it does seem ludicrously paradoxical that, instead of all those profound and “important” things, it should have been an idea about black-furred, long-tentacled monsters on another planet, peering unwinkingly at the earth and longing for its warmth and life, that so began to sing in my mind, night and day, that I finally got the strength to sweep aside all those miserable little fences against insecurity I’d been so painfully long in building—and take a chance!

  John says it’s natural and wholesome for a beginning writer to turn to fantasy. And he’s certainly made a go of that type of writing himself. (But he’s built up his ability as courageously and doggedly through the years as he has this cabin. In comparison, I have a long, long way to go.)

  In any case, my book won’t be a cheap romance of the fabulous, despite its “cosmic” background. And when you get down to that, what’s wrong with a cosmic background? I’ve lived a long time now with my monsters and devoted a lot of serious thought to them. I’ll make them real.

  That night: I just had an exhilaratingly eerie experience. I’d stepped outside for a breather and a look at the snow and stars, when my attention was caught by a beam of violet light some distance away. Though not exactly bright, it had a jewelly gleam and seemed to go up into the sky as far as I could see, without losing any of its needlelike thinness—a very perplexing thing. It was moving around slowly as if it were questing for something. For a shivery moment I had the feeling it came from the stars and was looking for me.

  I was about to call John when it winked out. I’m sorry he didn’t see it. He tells me it must have been an auroral manifestation, but it certainly didn’t look anywhere near that far away—I believe auroras are supposed to be high in the stratosphere, where the air is as rarified as in a fluorescent tube—and besides I always thought they were blotchy. However, I suppose he must be right—he tells me he’s seen some very queer ones in past years, and of course my own experience of them is practically nil.

  I asked him if there mightn’t be some secret military research going on nearby—perhaps with atomic power or some new kind of searchlight or radar beam—but he scouted the idea.

  Whatever it was, it stimulated my imagination. Not that I need it! I’m almost worried by the degree to which my mind has come alive during my few hours at Lone Top. I’m afraid my mind is becoming too keen, like a knife with such a paper-thin edge that it keeps curling over whenever you try to cut something....

  Jan. 9: At last, after several false starts, I’ve made a real beginning. I’ve pictured my monsters holding conclave at the bottom of a fantastically deep crack or canyon in their midnight planet. Except for a thin, jagged-edged ribbon of stars overhead, there is no light—their hoard of radiation is so depleted that ages ago they were forced to stop wasting any of it on the mere luxury of vision. But their strange eyes have become accommodated to starlight (though even they, wise as they are, do not know how to get any real warmth out of it) and they can perceive each other vaguely—great woolly, spidery shapes crouched on the rocks or draped along the ragged walls. It is unimaginably cold there— their insulating fur is bathed in a frigidity akin to that of interstellar space. They communicate by means of though— infrequent, well- shaped thoughts, for even thinking uses up energy. They recall their glorious past—their spendthrift youth, their vigorous prime. They commemorate the agony of their eon-long battle against the cold. They reiterate their savage and unshakable determination to survive.

  It’s a good piece of writing. Even honest John says so, although twitting me sardonically for writing such a wild sort of tale after many years of politely scorning his fantastic stories.

  But it was pretty bad for a while there, when I was making those false starts—I began to see myself crawling back in defeat to the grinning city. I can confess now that for years I’ve been afraid that I never had any real creative ability, that my promising early fragments were just a freak of childhood. Children show flashes of all sorts of odd abilities which they lose when they grow up—eidetic imagery, maybe even clairvoyance, things of that sort. What people praised in those first little stories of mine was a rich human sympathy, an unusually acute insight into adult human motives. And what I was afraid of was that all this had been telepathy, an unconscious picking up of snatches of thought and emotion from the adult minds around me— things that sounded very genuine and impressive when written down, especially by a child, but that actually required no more creative ability than taking dictation. I even developed an acute worry that some day I’d find myself doing automatic writing! Odd, what nonsensical fears an artist’s mind will cook up when it’s going through a dry period—John says it’s true of the whole fraternity.

  At any rate, the book I’m now writing disposes in a laughably complete fashion of that crazy theory. A story about fabulous monsters on a planet dozens of light-years away can’t very well be telepathy!

  I suppose it was the broadcast last night that started me thinking again about that silly old notion. The broadcast wasn’t silly though—a singularly intelligent discussion of future scientific possibilities—atomic energy, brain waves, new methods of radio transmission, that sort of thing—and not popularized for an oafish audience, thank God. Must be a program of some local university—John says now will I stop disparaging all educational institutions not located in the east!

  My first apprehensions about the radio turned out to be completely groundless—I ought to have known that John isn’t the sort of person to go in for soap operas and jazz. He uses the instrument intelligently—just a brief daily news summary (not a long-winded “commentary”), classical music when available, and an occasionally high-grade lecture or round-table discussion. Last night’s scientific broadcast was new to him though— he was out at the time and didn’t recognize the station from my description.

  I’m rather indebted to that program. I think it was while listening to it that the prologue of my story “jelled.” Some chance word or thought provided a crystallization point for my ideas. My mind had become sufficiently fatigued—probably a reaction to my earlier over-keenness—for my churning ideas to settle into place. At any rate, I was suddenly so tired and groggy that I hardly remembered the finish of the program or John coming in or my piling off to bed. John said I looked out on my feet. He thought I’d taken a bit too much, but I referred him to the impartial judgement of the whiskey bottle, and its almost unchanged level refuted the base calumny!

  In the morning I woke up fresh as a youngster and ripped off the prologue as if I’d been in the habit of turning out that much writing daily for the
past ten years!

  Had another snowshoe lesson today and didn’t do much better— I grudge all time spent away from my book. John says I really ought to hurry up and learn, in case anything should happen to him while we were cut off from Terrestrial—small chance with reliable John! The radio reports a big blizzard farther east, but so far it hasn’t touched us—the sun is bright, the sky dark blue. A local cold snap is predicted.

  But what do I care how long I’m confined to the cabin. I have begun to create my monsters!

  That night: I’m vindicated! John has just seen my violet beam, confirmed its non-auroral nature, and gone completely overboard as to its nearness—he claimed at first that it was actually hitting the cabin!

  He was approaching from the south when he saw it— apparently striking the roof in a corruscation of ghostly violet sparks. He hurried up, calling to me excitedly. It was a moment before I heard him—I’d just caught the mumbly beginning of what seemed to be another of those interesting scientific broadcasts (must be a series) and was trying to tune in more clearly and having a hard time, the radio being mulish or my own manipulations inadequate.

  By the time I got outside the beam had faded. We spent several chilly minutes straining our eyes in all directions, but saw nothing except the stars.

  John admits now that the beam seeming to strike the roof must have been an optical illusion, but still stoutly insists that it was fairly near. I have become the champion of the auroral theory! For, thinking it over, I can see that the chances are it is some bizarre auroral phenomenon—Arctic and Antarctic explorers, for instance, have reported all sorts of peculiar polar lights. It is very easy to be deceived as to distance in this clear atmosphere, as John himself has said.

  Or else—who knows?—it might be some unusual form of static electricity, something akin to St. Elmo’s fire.

  John has been trying to tune in on the program I started to catch, but no soap. There seems to be a lot of waily static in that sector of the dial. He informs me in his sardonic way that all sorts of unusual things have begun to happen since my arrival!

  John has given up in disgust and is going to bed. I think I’ll follow his example, though I may have another try at the radio first—my old dislike of the brute is beginning to fade, now that it’s my only link with the rest of the world.

  Next morning—the 10th: We’ve got the cold snap the radio predicted. I don’t notice much difference, except it took longer to get the place warm and everything was a little tightened up. Later on I’m going to help John split firewood—I insisted on it. He enquired with mild maliciousness whether I’d succeeded where he failed at catching the tail-end of that scientific broadcast—said the last thing he heard going to sleep was moany static. I admitted that, as far as I knew, I hadn’t—sleep must have struck the sledge-hammer blow it favors in this rugged locality while I was still twisting the dial; my memories of getting to bed are rather blurry, though I vaguely recall John sleepily snarling at me, “For God’s sake turn down the radio.”

  We did run across one more odd phenomenon, though—or something that could pass for an odd phenomenon with a little grooming. In the middle of breakfast I noticed John looking intently over my shoulder. I turned and after a moment saw that it was something in the frost on the window by the radio. On closer examination we were considerably puzzled.

  There was a queer sinuous pattern in the frost. It was composed of several parallel rows of tiny, roughly triangular humps with faint, hairlike veins going out to either side, all perceptibly thicker than the rest of the frost. I’ve never seen frost deposited in a pattern like it. The nearest analogy that occurs to me—not a very accurate one—is a squid’s tentacle. For some reason there comes to my mind that description in King Lear of a demon glimpsed peering down from a cliff: “Horns whelk’d and wav’d like the enridged sea.” I got the impression the pattern had been formed by an object even colder than the frost resting lightly against the glass, though that of course is impossible.

  I was surprised to hear John say he thought the pattern was in the glass itself, but by scraping off a portion of the frost he did reveal a very faint bluish or lavender pattern which was rather similar.

  After discussing various possibilities, we’ve decided that the cold snap—one of the most sudden in years, John says—brought out a latent imperfection in the glass, touching off some change in molecular organization that absorbed enough heat to account for the difference in thickness of the frost. The same change producing the faint lavender tint—if it wasn’t there before.

  I feel extraordinarily happy and mentally alive today. All these “odd phenomena” I’ve been noting down don’t really amount to a hoot, except to show that a sense of strangeness, a delightful feeling of adventurous expectancy, has come back into my life—something I thought the city had ground out of me forever, with its blinkered concentration on “practical” matters, its noisy and faddish narrow-mindedness.

  Best of all, there is my book. I have another scene all shaped in my mind.

  Before supper: I’ve struck a snag. I don’t know how I’m going to get my monsters to Earth. I got through the new scene all right—it tells how the monsters have for ages been greedily watching the Earth and several other habitable planets that are nearby (in light-years). They have telescopes which do not depend on lenses, but amplify the starlight just as a radio amplifies radio waves or a public address system the human voice. Those telescopes are extraordinarily sensitive—there are no limits to what can be accomplished by selection and amplification—they can see houses and people—they tune in on wave-lengths that are not distorted by our atmosphere—they catch radio-type as well as visual-type waves, and hear our voices—they make use of modes of radiation which our scientists have not yet discovered and which travel at many times the speed of the slower modes, almost instantaneously.

  But all this intimate knowledge of our daily life, this interplanetary voyeurism, profits them not in the least, except to whet their appetites to a bitter frenzy. It does not bring them an iota of warmth; on the contrary, it is a steady drain on their radiation bank. And yet they continue to spy minutely on us... watching... waiting... for the right moment.

  And that’s where the rub comes. Just what is this right moment they are waiting for? How the devil are they ever going to accomplish the trip? I suppose if I were a seasoned science-fiction writer this difficulty wouldn’t even faze me—I’d solve it in a wink by means of space-ships or the fourth dimension, or what not. But none of those ideas seem right to me. For instance, a few healthy rocket blasts would use up what little energy they have left. I want something that’s really plausible.

  Oh well, mustn’t worry about that—I’ll get an idea sooner or later. The important thing is that the writing continues to hold up strongly. John picked up the last few pages for a glance, sat down to read them closely, gave me a sharp look when he’d finished, remarked, “I don’t know what I’ve been writing science-fiction for, the past fifteen years,” and ducked out to get an armful of wood. Quite a compliment.

  Have I started on my real career at last? I hardly dare ask myself, after the many disappointments and blind alleys of those piddling, purposeless city years. And yet even during the blackest periods I used to feel that I was being groomed for some important or at least significant purpose, that I was being tested by moods and miseries, being held back until the right moment came.

  An illusion?

  Jan. 11: This is becoming very interesting. More odd patterns in the frost and glass this morning—a new set. But at twenty below it’s not to be wondered that inorganic materials get freakish. What an initial drop in temperature accomplished, a further sudden drop might very well repeat. John is quite impressed by it though, and inclined to theorize about obscure points in physics. Wish I could recall the details of last night’s scientific broadcast—I think something was said about low temperature phenomena that might have a bearing on cases like this. But I was dopey as usual and must have
dozed through most of it—rather a shame, because the beginning was very intriguing: something about wireless transmission of power and the production of physical effects at far distant points, the future possibilities of some sort of scientific “teleporta- tion.” John refers sarcastically to my “private university”—he went to bed early again and missed the program. But he says he half woke at one time and heard me listening to “a lot of nightmarish static” and sleepily implored me either to tune it better or shut it off. Odd—it seemed clear as a bell to me, at least the beginning did, and I don’t remember him shouting at all. Probably he was having a nightmare. But I must be careful not to risk disturbing him again. It’s funny to think of a confirmed radio-hater like myself in the role of an offensively noise-hungry “fan.”

  I wonder, though, if my presence is beginning to annoy John. He seemed jumpy and irritable all morning, and suddenly decided to get worried about my pre-bedtime dopeyness. I told him it was the natural result of the change in climate and my unaccustomed creative activity. I’m not used to physical exertion either, and my brief snowshoeing lessons and woodchopping chores, though they would seem trivial to a tougher man, are enough to really fag my muscles. Small wonder if an overpowering tiredness hits me at the end of the day.

  But John said he had been feeling unusually sleepy and sluggish himself toward bedtime, and advanced the unpleasant hypothesis of carbon monoxide poisoning—something not to be taken lightly in a cabin sealed as tightly as this. He immediately subjected stove and fireplace to a minute inspection and carefully searched both chimneys for cracks or obstructions, inside and out. Despite the truly fiendish cold—I went outside to try and help him, arid got a dose of it—brr! The surrounding trackless snowfields looked bright and inviting, but to a man afoot—unless he were a seasoned winter veteran— lethal!