Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  I felt the thrilling touch of inspiration. At that moment the wine waiter arrived with our double brandies in small goblets of cut glass. I wove the interruption into the fabric of my inspiration. “Let us drink then to what you name your chilling insight,” I said. “Prosit!”

  The bite and spreading warmth of the excellent schnapps quickened my inspiration further.“I believe I understand exactly what you’re getting at…” I told my son. I set down my half-emptied goblet and pointed at something over my son’s shoulder.

  He turned his head around, and after one glance back at my pointing finger, which intentionally waggled a tiny bit from side to side, he realized that I was not indicating the entry of the Krahenest, but the four sizable bronze statuettes flanking it.

  “For instance,” I said, “if Thomas Edison and Marie Sklodowska had not married, and especially if they had not had their supergenius son, then Edison’s knowledge of electricity and hers of radium and other radioactives might never have been joined. There might never have been developed the fabulous T. S. Edison battery, which is the prime mover of all today’s surface and air traffic. Those pioneering electric trucks introduced by the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia might have remained an expensive freak. And the gas helium might never have been produced industrially to supplement Earth’s meager subterranean supply.”

  My son’s eyes brightened with the flame of pure scholarship. “Papa,” he said eagerly, “you are a genius yourself! You have precisely hit on what is perhaps the most important of those cusp-events I referred to. I am at this moment finishing the necessary research for a long paper on it. Do you know, Papa, that I have firmly established by researching Parisian records that there was in 1894 a close personal relationship between Marie Sklodowska and her fellow radium researcher Pierre Curie, and that she might well have become Madame Curie—or perhaps, Madame Becquerel, for he too was in that work—if the dashing and brilliant Edison had not most opportunely arrived in Paris in December 1894 to sweep her off her feet and carry her off to the New World to even greater achievements?

  “And just think, Papa,” he went on, his eyes aflame, “what might have happened if their son’s battery had not been invented—the most difficult technical achievement, hedged by all sorts of seemingly scientific impossibilities, in the entire millennium-long history of industry. Why, Henry Ford might have manufactured automobiles powered by steam or by exploding natural gas or conceivably even vaporized liquid gasoline, rather than the mass-produced electric cars which have been such a boon to mankind everywhere—not our smokeless cars, but cars spouting all sorts of noxious fumes to pollute the environment.”

  Cars powered by the danger-fraught combustion of vaporized liquid gasoline!—it almost made me shudder and certainly it was a fantastic thought, yet not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility, I had to admit.

  Just then I noticed my gloomy, black-clad Jew sitting only two tables away from us, though how he had got himself into the exclusive Krahenest was a wonder. Strange that I had missed his entry—probably immediately after my own, while I had eyes only for my son. His presence somehow threw a dark though only momentary shadow over my bright mood. Let him get some good German food inside him and some fine German wine, I thought generously—it will fill that empty belly of his and even put a bit of a good German smile into those sunken Yiddish cheeks! I combed my little mustache with my thumbnail and swept the errant lock of hair off my forehead.

  Meanwhile my son was saying,“Also, Father, if electric transport had not been developed, and if during the last decade relations between Germany and the United States had not been so good, then we might never have gotten from the wells in Texas the supply of natural helium our Zeppelins desperately needed during the brief but vital period before we had put the artificial creation of helium onto an industrial footing. My researches at Washington have revealed that there was a strong movement in the U.S. military to ban the sale of helium to any other nation, Germany in particular. Only the powerful influence of Edison, Ford, and a few other key Americans, instantly brought to bear, prevented that stupid injunction. Yet if it had gone through, Germany might have been forced to use hydrogen instead of helium to float her passenger dirigibles. That was another crucial cusp.”

  “A hydrogen-supported Zeppelin!—ridiculous! Such an airship would be a floating bomb, ready to be touched off by the slightest spark,” I protested.

  “Not ridiculous, Father,” my son calmly contradicted me, shaking his head. “Pardon me for trespassing in your field, but there is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken. You must admit, Father, that the development of commercial airships was in its early stages a most perilous venture. During the 1920s there were the dreadful wrecks of the American dirigibles Roma, Shenandoah, which broke in two, Akron, and Macon, the British R-38, which also broke apart in the air, and R-101, the French Dixmude, which disappeared in the Mediterranean, Mussolini’s Italia, which crashed trying to reach the North Pole, and the Russian Maxim Gorky, struck down by a plane, with a total loss of no fewer than 340 crew members for the nine accidents. If that had been followed by the explosions of two or three hydrogen Zeppelins, world industry might well have abandoned forever the attempt to create passenger airships and turned instead to the development of large propeller-driven, heavier-than-air craft.”

  Monster airplanes, in danger every moment of crash from engine failure, competing with good old unsinkable Zeppelins?—impossible, at least at first thought. I shook my head, but not with as much conviction as I might have wished. My son’s suggestion was really a valid one.

  Besides, he had all his facts at his fingertips and was complete master of his subject, as I also had to allow. Those nine fearful airship disasters he mentioned had indeed occurred, as I knew well, and might have tipped the scale in favor of long-distance passenger and troop-carrying airplanes, had it not been for helium, the T. S. Edison battery, and German genius.

  Fortunately I was able to dump from my mind these uncomfortable speculations and immerse myself in admiration of my son’s multisided scholarship. That boy was a wonder!—a real chip off the old block, and, yes, a bit more.

  “And now, Dolfy,” he went on, using my nickname (I did not mind),“may I turn to an entirely different topic? Or rather to a very different example of my hypothesis of historical cusps?”

  I nodded mutely. My mouth was busily full with fine Sauerbraten and those lovely, tiny German dumplings, while my nostrils enjoyed the unique aroma of sweet-sour red cabbage. I had been so engrossed in my son’s revelations that I had not consciously noted our luncheon being served. I swallowed, took a slug of the good, red Zinfandel, and said, “Please go on.”

  “It’s about the consequences of the American Civil War, Father,” he said surprisingly. “Did you know that in the decade after that bloody conflict, there was a very real danger that the whole cause of Negro freedom and rights—for which the war was fought, whatever they say—might well have been completely smashed? The fine work of Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Union League Clubs put to naught? And even the Ku Klux Klan underground allowed free reign rather than being sternly repressed? Yes, Father, my thoroughgoing researchings have convinced me such things might easily have happened, resulting in some sort of re-enslavement of the Blacks, with the whole war to be refought at an indefinite future date, or at any rate Reconstruction brought to a dead halt for many decades—with what disastrous effects on the American character, turning its deep simple faith in freedom to hypocrisy, it is impossible to exaggerate. I have published a sizable paper on this subject in the Journal of Civil War Studies.”

  I nodded somberly. Quite a bit of this new subject matter of his was terra incognita to me; yet I knew enough of American history to realize he had made a cogent point. More than ever before, I was impressed by his multifaceted learning—he was indu
bitably a figure in the great tradition of German scholarship, a profound thinker, broad and deep. How fortunate to be his father. Not for the first time, but perhaps with the greatest sincerity yet, I thanked God and the Laws of Nature that I had early moved my family from Braunau, Austria, where I had been born in 1889, to Baden-Baden, where he had grown up in the ambience of the great new university on the edge of the Black Forest and only 150 kilometers from Count Zeppelin’s dirigible factory in Württemberg, at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance.

  I raised my glass of Kirschwasser to him in a solemn, silent toast—we had somehow got to that stage in our meal—and downed a sip of the potent, fiery, white, cherry brandy.

  He leaned toward me and said,“I might as well tell you, Dolf, that my big book, at once popular and scholarly, my Meisterwerk, to be titled If Things Had Gone Wrong, or perhaps If Things Had Turned for the Worse, will deal solely—though illuminated by dozens of diverse examples—with my theory of historical cusps, a highly speculative concept but firmly footed in fact.” He glanced at his wristwatch, muttered, “Yes, there’s still time for it. So now—” His face grew grave, his voice clear though small—“I will venture to tell you about one more cusp, the most disputable and yet most crucial of them all.” He paused. “I warn you, dear Dolf, that this cusp may cause you pain.”

  “I doubt that,” I told him indulgently. “Anyhow, go ahead.”

  “Very well. In November of 1918, when the British had broken the Hindenburg Line and the weary German army was defiantly dug in along the Rhine, and just before the Allies, under Marshal Foch, launched the final crushing drive which would cut a bloody swath across the heartland to Berlin—”

  I understood his warning at once. Memories flamed in my mind like the sudden blinding flares of the battlefield with their deafening thunder. The company I had commanded had been among the most desperately defiant of those he mentioned, heroically nerved for a last-ditch resistance. And then Foch had delivered that last vast blow, and we had fallen back and back and back before the overwhelming numbers of our enemies with their field guns and tanks and armored cars innumerable and above all their huge aerial armadas of De Havilland and Handley-Page and other big bombers escorted by insect-buzzing fleets of Spads and other fighters shooting to bits our last Fokkers and Pfalzes and visiting on Germany a destruction greater far than our Zeps had worked on England. Back, back, back, endlessly reeling and regrouping, across the devastated German countryside, a dozen times decimated yet still defiant until the end came at last amid the ruins of Berlin, and the most bold among us had to admit we were beaten and we surrendered unconditionally.

  These vivid, fiery recollections came to me almost instantaneously.

  I heard my son continuing, “At that cusp moment in November 1918, Dolf, there existed a very strong possibility—I have established this beyond question—that an immediate armistice would be offered and signed, and the war ended inconclusively. President Wilson was wavering, the French were very tired, and so on.

  “And if that had happened in actuality—harken closely to me now, Dolf—then the German temper entering the decade of the 1920s would have been entirely different. She would have felt she had not been really licked, and there would inevitably have been a secret recrudescence of panGerman militarism. German scientific humanism would not have won its total victory over the Germany of the—yes!—Huns.

  “As for the Allies, self-tricked out of the complete victory which lay within their grasp, they would in the long run have treated Germany far less generously than they did after their lust for revenge had been sated by that last drive to Berlin. The League of Nations would not have become the strong instrument for world peace that it is today; it might well have been repudiated by America and certainly secretly detested by Germany. Old wounds would not have healed because, paradoxically, they would not have been deep enough.

  “There, I’ve said my say. I hope it hasn’t bothered you too badly, Dolf.”

  I let out a gusty sigh. Then my wincing frown was replaced by a brow serene. I said very deliberately, “Not one bit, my son, though you have certainly touched my own old wounds to the quick. Yet I feel in my bones that your interpretation is completely valid. Rumors of an armistice were indeed running like wildfire through our troops in that black autumn of 1918. And I know only too well that if there had been an armistice at that time, then officers like myself would have believed that the German soldier had never really been defeated, only betrayed by his leaders and by red incendiaries, and we would have begun to conspire endlessly for a resumption of the war under happier circumstances. My son, let us drink to your amazing cusps.”

  Our tiny glasses touched with a delicate ting, and the last drops went down of biting, faintly bitter Kirschwasser. I buttered a thin slice of pumpernickel and nibbled it—always good to finish off a meal with bread. I was suddenly filled with an immeasurable content. It was a golden moment, which I would have been happy to have go on forever, while I listened to my son’s wise words and fed my satisfaction in him. Yes, indeed, it was a golden nugget of pause in the terrible rush of time—the enriching conversation, the peerless food and drink, the darkly pleasant surroundings—

  At that moment I chanced to look at my discordant Jew two tables away. For some weird reason he was glaring at me with naked hate, though he instantly dropped his gaze—

  But even that strange and disquieting event did not disrupt my mood of golden tranquility, which I sought to prolong by saying in summation, “My dear son, this has been the most exciting though eerie lunch I have ever enjoyed. Your remarkable cusps have opened to me a fabulous world in which I can nevertheless utterly believe. A horridly fascinating world of sizzling hydrogen Zeppelins, of countless—evil-smelling gasoline cars built by Ford instead of his electrics, of re-enslaved American blackamoors, of Madame Becquerels or Curies, a world without the T. E. Edison battery and even T. S. himself, a world in which German scientists are sinister pariahs instead of tolerant, humanitarian, great-souled leaders of world thought, a world in which a mateless old Edison tinkers forever at a powerful storage battery he cannot perfect, a world in which Woodrow Wilson doesn’t insist on Germany being admitted at once to the League of Nations, a world of festering hatreds reeling toward a second and worse world war. Oh, altogether an incredible world, yet one in which you have momentarily made me believe, to the extent that I do actually have the fear that time will suddenly shift gears and we will be plunged into that bad dream world, and our real world will become a dream—”

  I suddenly chanced to see the face of my watch.

  At the same time my son looked at his own left wrist—

  “Dolf,” he said, springing up in agitation,“I do hope that with my stupid chatter I haven’t made you miss—”

  I had sprung up too—

  “No, no, my son,” I heard myself say in a fluttering voice, “but it’s true I have little time in which to catch the Ostwald. Auf Wiedersehen, mein Sohn, auf Wiedersehen!”

  And with that I was hastening, indeed almost running, or else sweeping through the air like a ghost—leaving him behind to settle our reckoning—across a room that seemed to waver with my feverish agitation, alternately darkening and brightening like an electric bulb with its fine tungsten filament about to fly to powder and wink out forever—

  Inside my head a voice was saying in calm yet deathknell tones, “The lights of Europe are going out. I do not think they will be rekindled in my generation—”

  Suddenly the only important thing in the world for me was to catch the Ostwald, get aboard her before she unmoored. That and only that would reassure me that I was in my rightful world. I would touch and feel the Ostwald, not just talk about her—

  As I dashed between the four bronze figures, they seemed to hunch down and become deformed, while their faces became those of grotesque, aged witches—four evil kobolds leering up at me with a horrid knowledge bright in their eyes—

  While behind me I glimpsed in pursuit a tall,
black, white-faced figure, skeletally lean—

  The strangely short corridor ahead of me had a blank end—the Departure Lounge wasn’t there—

  I instantly jerked open the narrow door to the stairs and darted nimbly up them as if I were a young man again and not forty-eight years old—

  On the third sharp turn I risked a glance behind and down—

  Hardly a flight behind me, taking great pursuing leaps, was my dreadful Jew—

  I tore open the door to the 102nd floor. There at last, only a few feet away, was the silver door I sought of the final elevator and softly glowing above it the words, “Zum Zeppelin.” At last I would be shot aloft to the Ostwald and reality.

  But the sign began to blink as the Krahenest had, while across the door was pasted askew a white cardboard sign which read “Out of Order.”

  I threw myself at the door and scrabbled at it, squeezing my eyes several times to make my vision come clear. When I finally fully opened them, the cardboard sign was gone.

  But the silver door was gone too, and the words above it forever. I was scrabbling at seamless pale plaster.

  There was a touch on my elbow. I spun around.

  “Excuse me, sir, but you seem troubled,” my Jew said solicitously.“Is there anything I can do?”

  I shook my head, but whether in negation or rejection or to clear it, I don’t know. “I’m looking for the Ostwald,” I gasped, only now realizing I’d winded myself on the stairs. “For the zeppelin,” I explained when he looked puzzled.

  I may be wrong, but it seemed to me that a look of secret glee flashed deep in his eyes, though his general sympathetic expression remained unchanged.

  “Oh, the zeppelin,” he said in a voice that seemed to me to have become sugary in its solicitude. “You must mean the Hindenburg.”