by Fritz Leiber
“You wanted me to help you about something,” I said. “Incidentally, I think you’re lovely.”
She nodded quick thanks, looked around, leaned forward. “Would it be hard for me to get to England?”
“No,” I replied, a bit taken aback. “Provided you have an American passport.”
“Are they difficult to get?”
“Rather,” I said, surprised at her lack of information. “Your country doesn’t like its nationals to travel, though it isn’t quite as stringent as Russia.”
“Could the British Consulate help me get a passport?”
“It’s hardly their.…”
“Could you?”
I realized we were being inspected. A man and two girls had paused opposite our table. The girls were tall and wolfish-looking, with spangled masks. The man stood jauntily between them like a fox on its hind legs.
My companion didn’t glance at them, but she sat back. I noticed that one of the girls had a big yellow bruise on her forearm. After a moment they walked to a booth in the deep shadows.
“Know them?” I asked. She didn’t reply. I finished my drink. “I’m not sure you’d like England,” I said. “The austerity’s altogether different from your American brand of misery.”
She leaned forward again. “But I must get away,” she whispered.
“Why?” I was getting impatient.
“Because I’m so frightened.”
There were chimes. I opened the panel and handed her the fried shrimps. The sauce on my breast of chicken was a delicious steaming compound of almonds, soy and ginger. But something must have been wrong with the radionic oven that had thawed and heated it, for at the first bite I crunched a kernel of ice in the meat. These delicate mechanisms need constant repair and there aren’t enough mechanics.
I put down my fork. “What are you really scared of?” I asked her.
For once her mask didn’t waver away from my face. As I waited I could feel the fears gathering without her naming them, tiny dark shapes swarming through the curved night outside, converging on the radioactive pest spot of New York, dipping into the margins of the purple. I felt a sudden rush of sympathy, a desire to protect the girl opposite me. The warm feeling added itself to the infatuation engendered in the cab.
“Everything,” she said finally.
I nodded and touched her hand.
“I’m afraid of the Moon,” she began, her voice going dreamy and brittle as it had in the cab. “You can’t look at it and not think of guided bombs.”
“It’s the same Moon over England,” I reminded her.
“But it’s not England’s Moon any more. It’s ours and Russia’s. You’re not responsible.”
I pressed her hand.
“Oh, and then,” she said with a tilt of her mask, “I’m afraid of the cars and the gangs and the loneliness and Inferno. I’m afraid of the lust that undresses your face. And—” her voice hushed—“I’m afraid of the wrestlers.”
“Yes?” I prompted softly after a moment.
Her mask came forward. “Do you know something about the wrestlers?” she asked rapidly. “The ones that wrestle women, I mean. They often lose, you know. And then they have to have a girl to take their frustration out on. A girl who’s soft and weak and terribly frightened. They need that, to keep them men. Other men don’t want them to have a girl. Other men want them just to fight women and be heroes. But they must have a girl. It’s horrible for her.”
I squeezed her fingers tighter, as if courage could be transmitted—granting I had any. “I think I can get you to England,” I said.
Shadows crawled onto the table and stayed there. I looked up at the three men who had been at the end of the bar. They were the men I had seen in the big coupe. They wore black sweaters and close-fitting black trousers. Their faces were as expressionless as dopers. Two of them stood above me. The other loomed over the girl.
“Drift off, man,” I was told. I heard the other inform the girl: “We’ll wrestle a fall, sister. What shall it be? Judo, slapsie or kill-who-can?”
I stood up. There are times when an Englishman simply must be mal-treated. But just then the foxlike man came gliding in like the star of a ballet. The reaction of the other three startled me. They were acutely embarrassed.
He smiled at them thinly. “You won’t win my favor by tricks like this,” he said.
“Don’t get the wrong idea, Zirk,” one of them pleaded.
“I will if it’s right,” he said. “She told me what you tried to do this afternoon. That won’t endear you to me, either. Drift.”
They backed off awkwardly. “Let’s get out of here,” one of them said loudly, as they turned. “I know a place where they fight naked with knives.”
* * * *
Little Zirk laughed musically and slipped into the seat beside my companion. She shrank from him, just a little. I pushed my feet back, leaned forward.
“Who’s your friend, baby?” he asked, not looking at her.
She passed the question to me with a little gesture. I told him.
“British,” he observed. “She’s been asking you about getting out of the country? About passports?” He smiled pleasantly. “She likes to start running away. Don’t you, baby?” His small hand began to stroke her wrist, the fingers bent a little, the tendons ridged, as if he were about to grab and twist.
“Look here,” I said sharply. “I have to be grateful to you for ordering off those bullies, but—”
“Think nothing of it,” he told me. “They’re no harm except when they’re behind steering wheels. A well-trained fourteen-year-old girl could cripple any one of them. Why, even Theda here, if she went in for that sort of thing.…” He turned to her, shifting his hand from her wrist to her hair. He stroked it, letting the strands slip slowly through his fingers. “You know I lost tonight, baby, don’t you?” he said softly.
I stood up. “Come along,” I said to her. “Let’s leave.”
She just sat there. I couldn’t even tell if she was trembling. I tried to read a message in her eyes through the mask.
“I’ll take you away,” I said to her. “I can do it. I really will.”
He smiled at me. “She’d like to go with you,” he said. “Wouldn’t you, baby?”
“Will you or won’t you?” I said to her. She still just sat there.
He slowly knotted his fingers in her hair.
“Listen, you little vermin,” I snapped at him, “Take your hands off her.”
He came up from the seat like a snake. I’m no fighter. I just know that the more scared I am, the harder and straighter I hit. This time I was lucky. But as he crumpled back, I felt a slap and four stabs of pain in my cheek. I clapped my hand to it. I could feel the four gashes made by her dagger finger caps, and the warm blood oozing out from them.
She didn’t look at me. She was bending over little Zirk and cuddling her mask to his cheek and crooning: “There, there, don’t feel bad, you’ll be able to hurt me afterward.”
There were sounds around us, but they didn’t come close. I leaned forward and ripped the mask from her face.
I really don’t know why I should have expected her face to be anything else. It was very pale, of course, and there weren’t any cosmetics. I suppose there’s no point in wearing any under a mask. The eye-brows were untidy and the lips chapped. But as for the general expression, as for the feelings crawling and wriggling across it—
Have you ever lifted a rock from damp soil? Have you ever watched the slimy white grubs?
I looked down at her, she up at me. “Yes, you’re so frightened, aren’t you?” I said sarcastically. “You dread this little nightly drama, don’t you? You’re scared to death.”
And I walked right out into the purple night, still holding my hand to my bleeding cheek. No one stopped me, not even the girl wrestlers. I wished I could tear a tab from under my shirt, and test it then and there, and find I’d taken too much radiation, and so be able to ask to cross the Hudson and
go down New Jersey, past the lingering radiance of the Narrows Bomb, and so on to Sandy Hook to wait for the rusty ship that would take me back over the seas to England.
NICE GIRL WITH 5 HUSBANDS
Originally published in Galaxy Magazine, April 1951.
To be given paid-up leisure and find yourself unable to create is unpleasant for any artist. To be stranded in a cluster of desert cabins with a dozen lonely people in the same predicament only makes it worse. So Tom Dorset was understandably irked with himself and the Tosker-Brown Vacation Fellowships as he climbed with the sun into the valley of red stones. He accepted the chafing of his camera strap against his shoulder as the nagging of conscience. He agreed with the disparaging hisses of the grains of sand rutched by his sneakers, and he wished that the occasional breezes, which faintly echoed the same criticisms, could blow him into a friendlier, less jealous age.
He had no way of knowing that just as there are winds that blow through space, so there are winds that blow through time. Such winds may be strong or weak. The strong ones are rare and seldom blow for short distances, or more of us would know about them. What they pick up is almost always whirled far into the future or past.
This has happened to people. There was Ambrose Bierce, who walked out of America and existence, and there are thousands of others who have disappeared without a trace, though many of these may not have been caught up by time tornadoes and I do not know if a time gale blew across the deck of the Marie Celeste.
Sometimes a time wind is playful, snatching up an object, sporting with it for a season and then returning it unharmed to its original place. Sometimes we may be blown about by whimsical time winds without realizing it. Memory, for example, is a tiny time breeze, so weak that it can ripple only the mind.
A very few time winds are like the monsoon, blowing at fixed intervals, first in one direction, then the other. Such a time wind blows near a balancing rock in a valley of red stones in the American Southwest. Every morning at ten o’clock, it blows a hundred years into the future; every afternoon at two, it blows a hundred years into the past.
Quite a number of people have unwittingly seen time winds in operation. There are misty spots on the sea’s horizon and wavery patches over desert sands. There are mirages and will o’ the wisps and ice blinks. And there are dust devils, such as Tom Dorset walked into near the balancing rock.
It seemed to him no more than a spiteful upgust of sand, against which he closed his eyes until the warm granules stopped peppering the lids. He opened them to see the balancing rock had silently fallen and lay a quarter buried—no, that couldn’t be, he told himself instantly. He had been preoccupied; he must have passed the balancing rock and held its image in his mind.
* * * *
Despite this rationalization he was quite shaken. The strap of his camera slipped slowly down his arm without his feeling it. And just then there stepped around the giant bobbin of the rock an extraordinarily pretty girl with hair the same pinkish copper color.
She was barefoot and wearing a pale blue playsuit rather like a Grecian tunic. But most important, as she stood there toeing his rough shadow in the sand, there was a complete naturalness about her, an absence of sharp edges, as if her personality had weathered without aging, just as the valley seemed to have taken another step toward eternity in the space of an instant.
She must have assumed something of the same gentleness in him, for her faint surprise faded and she asked him, as easily as if he were a friend of five years’ standing, “Tell now, do you think a woman can love just one man? All her life? And a man just one woman?”
Tom Dorset made a dazed sound.
His mind searched wildly.
“I do,” she said, looking at him as calmly as at a mountain. “I think a man and woman can be each other’s world, like Tristan and Isolde or Frederic and Catherine. Those old authors were wise. I don’t see why on earth a girl has to spread her love around, no matter how enriching the experiences may be.”
“You know, I agree with you,” Tom said, thinking he’d caught her idea—it was impossible not to catch her casualness. “I think there’s something cheap about the way everybody’s supposed to run after sex these days.”
“I don’t mean that exactly. Tenderness is beautiful, but—” She pouted. “A big family can be vastly crushing. I wanted to declare today a holiday, but they outvoted me. Jock said it didn’t chime with our mood cycles. But I was angry with them, so I put on my clothes—”
“Put on—?”
“To make it a holiday,” she explained bafflingly. “And I walked here for a tantrum.” She stepped out of Tom’s shadow and hopped back. “Ow, the sand’s getting hot,” she said, rubbing the grains from the pale and uncramped toes.
“You go barefoot a lot?” Tom guessed.
“No, mostly digitals,” she replied and took something shimmering from a pocket at her hip and drew it on her foot. It was a high-ankled, transparent moccasin with five separate toes. She zipped it shut with the speed of a card trick, then similarly gloved the other foot. Again the metal-edged slit down the front seemed to close itself.
“I’m behind on the fashions,” Tom said, curious. They were walking side by side now, the way she’d come and he’d been going. “How does that zipper work?”
“Magnetic. They’re on all my clothes. Very simple.” She parted her tunic to the waist, then let it zip together.
“Clever,” Tom remarked with a gulp. There seemed no limits to this girl’s naturalness.
“I see you’re a button man,” she said. “You actually believe it’s possible for a man and woman to love just each other?”
* * * *
His chuckle was bitter. He was thinking of Elinore Murphy at Tosker-Brown and a bit about cold-faced Miss Tosker herself. “I sometimes wonder if it’s possible for anyone to love anyone.”
“You haven’t met the right girls,” she said.
“Girl,” he corrected.
She grinned at him. “You’ll make me think you really are a monogamist. What group do you come from?”
“Let’s not talk about that,” he requested. He was willing to forego knowing how she’d guessed he was from an art group, if he could be spared talking about the Vacation Fellowships and those nervous little cabins.
“My group’s very nice on the whole,” the girl said, “but at times they can be nefandously exasperating. Jock’s the worst, quietly guiding the rest of us like an analyst. How I loathe that man! But Larry’s almost as bad, with his shame-faced bumptiousness, as if we’d all sneaked off on a joyride to Venus. And there’s Jokichi at the opposite extreme, forever scared he won’t distribute his affection equally, dividing it up into mean little packets like candy for jealous children who would scream if they got one chewy less. And then there’s Sasha and Ernest—”
“Who are you talking about?” Tom asked.
“My husbands.” She shook her head dolefully. “To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian.”
Tom’s mind backtracked frantically, searching all conversations at Tosker-Brown for gossip about cultists in the neighborhood. It found nothing and embarked on a wider search. There were the Mormons (was that the word that had sounded like Martian?) but it wasn’t the Mormon husbands who were plural. And then there was Oneida (weren’t husbands and wives both plural there?) but that was 19th century New England.
“Five husbands?” he repeated. She nodded. He went on, “Do you mean to say five men have got you alone somewhere up here?”
“To be sure not,” she replied. “There are my kwives.”
“Kwives?”
“Co-wives,” she said more slowly. “They can be fascinerously exasperating, too.”
* * * *
Tom’s mind did some more searching. “And yet you believe in monogamy?”
She smiled. “Only when I’m having tantrums. It was civilized of you to agree with me.”
“But I actually do believe in monogamy,” he protested.
>
She gave his hand a little squeeze. “You are nice, but let’s rush now. I’ve finished my tantrum and I want you to meet my group. You can fresh yourself with us.”
As they hurried across the heated sands, Tom Dorset felt for the first time a twinge of uneasiness. There was something about this girl, more than her strange clothes and the odd words she used now and then, something almost—though ghosts don’t wear digitals—spectral.
They scrambled up a little rise, digging their footgear into the sand, until they stood on a long flat. And there, serpentining around two great clumps of rock, was a many-windowed adobe ranch house with a roof like fresh soot.
“Oh, they’ve put on their clothes,” his companion exclaimed with pleasure. “They’ve decided to make it a holiday after all.”
Tom spotted a beard in the group swarming out to meet them. Its cultish look gave him a momentary feeling of superiority, followed by an equally momentary apprehension—the five husbands were certainly husky. Then both feelings were swallowed up in the swirl of introduction.
He told his own name, found that his companion’s was Lois Wolver, then smiling faces began to bob toward his, his hands were shaken, his cheeks were kissed, he was even spun around like blind man’s bluff, so that he lost track of the husbands and failed to attach Mary, Rachel, Simone and Joyce to the right owners.
He did notice that Jokichi was an Oriental with a skin as tight as enameled china, and that Rachel was a tall slim Negro girl. Also someone said, “Joyce isn’t a Wolver, she’s just visiting.”
He got a much clearer impression of the clothes than the names. They were colorful, costly-looking, and mostly Egyptian and Cretan in inspiration. Some of them would have been quite immodest, even compared to Miss Tosker’s famous playsuits, except that the wearers didn’t seem to feel so.
“There goes the middle-morning rocket!” one of them eagerly cried.
Tom looked up with the rest, but his eyes caught the dazzling sun. However, he heard a faint roaring that quickly sank in volume and pitch, and it reminded him that the Army had a rocket testing range in this area. He had little interest in science, but he hadn’t known they were on a daily schedule.