AHMM, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "You boys look like you could use a ride,” Lefty said, leaning across a pile of eight-tracks, a big smile on his face. Before I could reach him the window went up and the Cadillac wheeled back onto the highway.

  I chased it as hard as I could. “Stop, you son of a bitch! Stop!” I hollered.

  But he didn't stop, of course, and eventually I quit running. I watched the Cadillac disappear in the distance, cursing the crook and myself for vaguely feeling relieved that he, like his hero Waylon, had cheated death.

  Then I heard Mickey approaching. I turned and saw him dangling a pair of dog tags in the air.

  "Well, I'll be damned!"

  He nodded. “Never lose your dog tags. Army tells you that Day One. Charlie gets your number, that's how they know who you are.” He slipped the little slivers of metal into his shirt pocket.

  The tags proved our story, linked everything that happened.

  Mickey watched it sink in, an angelic smile on his face, and stuck his thumb out toward the road. I joined him, glad to be going to California with my buddy the reformed thief.

  Copyright © 2009 Joseph B. Atkins

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Mystery Classic: SPACE-TIME FOR SPRINGERS by Fritz Leiber

  Selected and Introduced by James Lincoln Warren

  This is the story of a leonine heart.

  Cats. Muses with retractable claws and huge slit-pupiled golden, green, or azure eyes, delicate translucent ears as sensitive as directional radar antennas, fur as silky and soft as ermine. Sinuous and silent—Carl Sandburg taught us that “fog comes in on little cat feet.” Affectionate and arrogant—Terry Pratchett reminds us that “in ancient times, cats were worshiped as gods. They have never forgotten this.” Seductive and sensual—no Hollywood starlet was ever described as a sex puppy.

  Lap leopards. Pocket tigers. Lawn lions.

  Beautiful, independent, and most of all, mysterious. Nobody ever beheld a dog staring at him without knowing immediately what Fido was thinking. But when facing the stare of a cat, one can't help but wonder what uncanny thoughts must percolate in the feline brain.

  "Sometimes she looks at me with a rather peculiar expression,” wrote Raymond Chandler of his Persian, Taki, “...and I have a suspicion she is keeping a diary, because the expression seems to be saying: ‘Brother, you think you're pretty good most of the time, don't you? I wonder how you'd feel if I decided to publish some of the stuff I've been putting down at odd moments.’”

  The first author I was aware of who credibly transcribed a feline philosophy was the American poet Don Marquis. Through the agency of Archy the cockroach, Marquis learned of the life and times of Mehitabel, a feline reincarnation of Cleopatra (or so she claimed—the veracity of the asseveration is somewhat questionable). Mehitabel's approach to life was, “Toujours gai, kid. There's a dance in the old dame yet."

  Of course Mehitabel was a rather loose lady, even for an alley cat. In contrast, Paul Gallico's Thomasina, who was perhaps the first documented cat detective, was nothing if not the epitome of grace and dignity. For that's another fascinating thing about cats: They are each of them completely discrete individuals, as different from one another as their species is from the rest of the animal kingdom—wherefore Colette's observation, “There are no ordinary cats.” The character of a cat is fertile ground for the imagination.

  There is a long list of ailurophile authors. To the names already mentioned, you may add Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. And also one less well known, albeit not necessarily less admired: the master fantasy, horror, and science fiction author Fritz Leiber, whose 1958 story “Space-Time for Springers” I have the immense pleasure of introducing to the Gentle Reader.

  Gummitch, the hero of “Space-Time for Springers,” is not satisfied merely to keep a diary. There are entire volumes of esoteric cat sophistry waiting to be sprung from his forehead. But there is much more to this story of an averted crime than the wistful imaginings of a kitten genius. I admire everything about it: its stark depiction of cold and inchoate evil, its subtle and sympathetic characterization, its simultaneously broad and gentle humor, its mystical mirror-magic, its timeless theme of innocence and sacrifice. And the prose. Man, the prose. It contains the only terrifying depiction of a squirrel in literature—you may think I'm joking, but I'm not. How's that for brilliantly twisting expectations? “But to speak more,” as another of Leiber's characters says in a very different story, “were only to kindle the curiosity of the gods and alert the trolls and attract the attention of the restless hungry Fates. Enough is enough."

  So I will leave you to peruse this inestimable gem with one final thought. Near the beginning of “Space-Time for Springers,” Leiber invokes John Keats's famous pian to seventeenth century poet George Chapman: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken."

  As Chapman stood to Keats, so Leiber stands to Warren. This is my favorite story by my favorite writer.

  * * * *

  SPACE-TIME FOR SPRINGERS by Fritz Leiber

  Gummitch was a superkitten as he knew very well, with an I. Q. of about 160. Of course, he didn't talk. But everybody knows that I. Q. tests based on language ability are very one-sided. Besides, he would talk as soon as they started setting a place for him at table and pouring him coffee. Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra ate horsemeat from pans on the floor and they didn't talk. Baby dined in his crib on milk from a bottle and he didn't talk. Sissy sat at table but they didn't pour her coffee and she didn't talk—not one word. Father and Mother (whom Gummitch had nicknamed Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here) sat at table and poured each other coffee and they did talk. Q. E. D.

  Meanwhile, he would get by very well on thought projection and intuitive understanding of all human speech—not even to mention cat patois, which almost any civilized animal could play by ear. The dramatic monologues and Socratic dialogues, the quiz and panel show appearances, the felidological expedition to darkest Africa (where he would uncover the real truth behind lions and tigers), the exploration of the outer planets—all these could wait. The same went for the books for which he was ceaselessly accumulating material: The Encyclopedia of Odors, Anthropofeline Psychology, Invisible Signs and Secret Wonders, Space-Time for Springers, Slit Eyes Look at Life, et cetera. For the present it was enough to live existence to the hilt and soak up knowledge, missing no experience proper to his age level—to rush about with tail aflame.

  So to all outward appearances Gummitch was just a vividly normal kitten, as shown by the succession of nicknames he bore along the magic path that led from blue-eyed infancy toward puberty: Little One, Squawker, Portly, Bumble (for purring not clumsiness), Old Starved-to-Death, Fierso, Loverboy (affection not sex), Spook and Catnik. Of these only the last perhaps requires further explanation; the Russians had just sent Muttnik up after Sputnik, so that when one evening Gummitch streaked three times across the firmament of the living room floor in the same direction, past the fixed stars of the humans and the comparatively slow-moving heavenly bodies of the two older cats, and Kitty-Come-Here quoted the line from Keats:

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

  it was inevitable that Old Horsemeat would say, “Ah—Catnik!"

  The new name lasted all of three days, to be replaced by Gummitch, which showed signs of becoming permanent.

  The little cat was on the verge of truly growing up, at least so Gummitch overheard Old Horsemeat comment to Kitty-Come-Here. A few short weeks, Old Horsemeat said, and Gummitch's fiery flesh would harden, his slim neck thicken, the electricity vanish from everything but his fur, and all his delightful kittenish qualities rapidly give way to the earthbound single-mindedness of a tom. They'd be lucky, Old Horsemeat concluded, if he didn't turn completely surly like Ashurbanipal.

  Gummitch listened to these predictions with gay unconcern and with secret amusement from his vantage point of superior knowledge
, in the same spirit that he accepted so many phases of his outwardly conventional existence: the murderous sidelong looks he got from Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra as he devoured his own horsemeat from his own little tin pan, because they sometimes were given canned cat food but he never; the stark idiocy of Baby, who didn't know the difference between a live cat and a stuffed teddy bear and who tried to cover up his ignorance by making goo-goo noises and poking indiscriminately at all eyes; the far more serious—because cleverly hidden—maliciousness of Sissy, who had to be watched out for warily—especially when you were alone—and whose retarded—even warped—development, Gummitch knew, was Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here's deepest, most secret, worry (more of Sissy and her evil ways soon); the limited intellect of Kitty-Come-Here, who despite the amounts of coffee she drank was quite as featherbrained as kittens are supposed to be and who firmly believed, for example, that kittens operated in the same space-time as other beings—that to get from here to there they had to cross the space between—and similar fallacies; the mental stodginess of even Old Horsemeat, who although he understood quite a bit of the secret doctrine and talked intelligently to Gummitch when they were alone, nevertheless suffered from the limitations of his status—a rather nice old god but a maddeningly slow-witted one.

  But Gummitch could easily forgive all this massed inadequacy and downright brutishness in his felino-human household, because he was aware that he alone knew the real truth about himself and about other kittens and babies as well, the truth which was hidden from weaker minds, the truth that was as intrinsically incredible as the germ theory of disease or the origin of the whole great universe in the explosion of a single atom.

  As a baby kitten Gummitch had believed that Old Horsemeat's two hands were hairless kittens permanently attached to the ends of Old Horsemeat's arms but having an independent life of their own. How he had hated and loved those two five-legged sallow monsters, his first playmates, comforters and battle-opponents!

  Well, even that fantastic discarded notion was but a trifling fancy compared to the real truth about himself!

  The forehead of Zeus split open to give birth to Minerva. Gummitch had been born from the waist-fold of a dirty old terry-cloth bathrobe, Old Horsemeat's basic garment. The kitten was intuitively certain of it and had proved it to himself as well as any Descartes or Aristotle. In a kitten-size tuck of that ancient bathrobe the atoms of his body had gathered and quickened into life. His earliest memories were of snoozing wrapped in terry cloth, warmed by Old Horsemeat's heat. Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here were his true parents. The other theory of his origin, the one he heard Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here recount from time to time—that he had been the only surviving kitten of a litter abandoned next door, that he had had the shakes from vitamin deficiency and lost the tip of his tail and the hair on his paws and had to be nursed back to life and health with warm yellowish milk-and-vitamins fed from an eyedropper—that other theory was just one of those rationalizations with which mysterious nature cloaks the birth of heroes, perhaps wisely veiling the truth from minds unable to bear it, a rationalization as false as Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat's touching belief that Sissy and Baby were their children rather than the cubs of Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra.

  * * * *

  The day that Gummitch had discovered by pure intuition the secret of his birth he had been filled with a wild instant excitement. He had only kept it from tearing him to pieces by rushing out to the kitchen and striking and devouring a fried scallop, torturing it fiendishly first for twenty minutes.

  And the secret of his birth was only the beginning. His intellectual faculties aroused, Gummitch had two days later intuited a further and greater secret: since he was the child of humans he would, upon reaching this maturation date of which Old Horsemeat had spoken, turn not into a sullen tom but into a godlike human youth with reddish golden hair the color of his present fur. He would be poured coffee and he would instantly be able to talk, probably in all languages. While Sissy (how clear it was now!) would at approximately the same time shrink and fur out into a sharp-clawed and vicious she-cat dark as her hair, sex and self-love her only concerns, fit harem-mate for Cleopatra, concubine to Ashurbanipal.

  Exactly the same was true, Gummitch realized at once, for all kittens and babies, all humans and cats, wherever they might dwell. Metamorphosis was as much a part of the fabric of their lives as it was of the insects'. It was also the basic fact underlying all legends of werewolves, vampires and witches’ familiars.

  If you just rid your mind of preconceived notions, Gummitch told himself, it was all very logical. Babies were stupid, fumbling, vindictive creatures without reason or speech. What more natural than that they should grow up into mute sullen selfish beasts bent only on rapine and reproduction? While kittens were quick, sensitive, subtle, supremely alive. What other destiny were they possibly fitted for except to become the deft, word-speaking, book-writing, music-making, meat-getting-and-dispensing masters of the world? To dwell on the physical differences, to point out that kittens and men, babies and cats, are rather unlike in appearance and size, would be to miss the forest for the trees—very much as if an entomologist should proclaim metamorphosis a myth because his microscope failed to discover the wings of a butterfly in a caterpillar's slime or a golden beetle in a grub.

  Nevertheless it was such a mind-staggering truth, Gummitch realized at the same time, that it was easy to understand why humans, cats, babies and perhaps most kittens were quite unaware of it. How to safely explain to a butterfly that he was once a hairy crawler, or to a dull larva that he will one day be a walking jewel? No, in such situations the delicate minds of man- and feline-kind are guarded by a merciful mass amnesia, such as Velikovsky has explained prevents us from recalling that in historical times the Earth was catastrophically bumped by the planet Venus operating in the manner of a comet before settling down (with a cosmic sigh of relief, surely!) into its present orbit.

  This conclusion was confirmed when Gummitch in the first fever of illumination tried to communicate his great insight to others. He told it in cat patois, as well as that limited jargon permitted, to Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra and even, on the off chance, to Sissy and Baby. They showed no interest whatever, except that Sissy took advantage of his unguarded preoccupation to stab him with a fork.

  Later, alone with Old Horsemeat, he projected the great new thoughts, staring with solemn yellow eyes at the old god, but the latter grew markedly nervous and even showed signs of real fear, so Gummitch desisted. ("You'd have sworn he was trying to put across something as deep as the Einstein theory or the doctrine of original sin,” Old Horsemeat later told Kitty-Come-Here.)

  But Gummitch was a man now in all but form, the kitten reminded himself after these failures, and it was part of his destiny to shoulder secrets alone when necessary. He wondered if the general amnesia would affect him when he metamorphosed. There was no sure answer to this question, but he hoped not—and sometimes felt that there was reason for his hopes. Perhaps he would be the first true kitten-man, speaking from a wisdom that had no locked doors in it.

  Once he was tempted to speed up the process by the use of drugs. Left alone in the kitchen, he sprang onto the table and started to lap up the black puddle in the bottom of Old Horsemeat's coffee cup. It tasted foul and poisonous and he withdrew with a little snarl, frightened as well as revolted. The dark beverage would not work its tongue-loosening magic, he realized, except at the proper time and with the proper ceremonies. Incantations might be necessary as well. Certainly unlawful tasting was highly dangerous.

  The futility of expecting coffee to work any wonders by itself was further demonstrated to Gummitch when Kitty-Come-Here, wordlessly badgered by Sissy, gave a few spoonfuls to the little girl, liberally lacing it first with milk and sugar. Of course Gummitch knew by now that Sissy was destined shortly to turn into a cat and that no amount of coffee would ever make her talk, but it was nevertheless instructive to see how she spat out the first mou
thful, drooling a lot of saliva after it, and dashed the cup and its contents at the chest of Kitty-Come-Here.

  Gummitch continued to feel a great deal of sympathy for his parents in their worries about Sissy and he longed for the day when he would metamorphose and be able as an acknowledged man-child truly to console them. It was heartbreaking to see how they each tried to coax the little girl to talk, always attempting it while the other was absent, how they seized on each accidentally wordlike note in the few sounds she uttered and repeated it back to her hopefully, how they were more and more possessed by fears not so much of her retarded (they thought) development as of her increasingly obvious maliciousness, which was directed chiefly at Baby ... though the two cats and Gummitch bore their share. Once she had caught Baby alone in his crib and used the sharp corner of a block to dot Baby's large-domed lightly downed head with triangular red marks. Kitty-Come-Here had discovered her doing it, but the woman's first action had been to rub Baby's head to obliterate the marks so that Old Horsemeat wouldn't see them. That was the night Kitty-Come-Here hid the abnormal psychology books.

  Gummitch understood very well that Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat, honestly believing themselves to be Sissy's parents, felt just as deeply about her as if they actually were and he did what little he could under the present circumstances to help them. He had recently come to feel a quite independent affection for Baby—the miserable little proto-cat was so completely stupid and defenseless—and so he unofficially constituted himself the creature's guardian, taking his naps behind the door of the nursery and dashing about noisily whenever Sissy showed up. In any case he realized that as a potentially adult member of a felino-human household he had his natural responsibilities.

  Accepting responsibilities was as much a part of a kitten's life, Gummitch told himself, as shouldering unsharable intuitions and secrets, the number of which continued to grow from day to day.