The Second Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.

  “I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!” the interpreter enjoined.

  In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a “Hey!” of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.

  Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.

  “There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,” the interpreter said. “Please be patient.”

  At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: “Hey, you! You quit that!”

  The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.

  Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm’s length above the gnomelike creature’s head. The warrior backed a step.

  The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn’t stay quiet. “Sic ’em, Brute!” he shrilled. “Sic ’em, Darter! Sic ’em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!” Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.

  * * * *

  Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior’s wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.

  The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.

  Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.

  “Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!”

  The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.

  “We are working to energize the safeguards,” the interpreter said in mechanical panic. “Remain patient and in your seats.”

  The uninjes leaped into the melees, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior’s ankle. The man dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.

  Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader’s screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.

  “Brute, come back!” the Butcher yelled.

  * * * *

  The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader’s ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.

  For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.

  “We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble,” the interpreter said. “There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience.”

  Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.

  “Cubs!” came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. “Always playing hero! Say, what’s that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men.”

  Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn’t listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about “revised theories of reality” and other important things. He didn’t even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.

  He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute’s muzzle and murmured softly: “We came, we saw, we conquered, didn’t we, Brute?”

  THE LAST LETTER

  Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1958.

  On Tenthmonth 1, 2457 A.D., at exactly 9 A.M. Planetary Federation Time—but with a permissible error of a millionth of a second either way—in the fifth sublevel of NewNew York Robot Postal Station 68, Black Sorter gulped down ten thousand pieces of first-class mail.

  This breakfast tidbit did not agree with the mail-sorting machine. It was as if a robust dog had been fed a large chunk of good red meat with a strychnine pill in it. Black Sorter’s innards went whirr-klunk, a blue electric glow enveloped him, and he began to shake as if he might break loose from the concrete.

  He desperately spat back over his shoulder a single envelope, gave a great huff and blew out toward the sorting tubes a medium-size snowstorm consisting of the other nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces of first-class mail chewed to confetti. Then, still convulsed, he snapped up a fresh ten thousand and proceeded to chomp and grind on them. Black Sorter was rugged.

  The rejected envelope was tongued up by Red Subsorter, who growled deep in his throat, said a very bad word, and passed it to Yellow Rerouter, who passed it to Green Rerouter, who passed it to Brown Study, who passed it to Pink Wastebasket.

  Unlike Black Sorter, Pink Wastebasket was very delicate, though highly intuitive—the machine equivalent of a White Russian countess. She was designed to scan in 3,137 codes, route special-delivery spacemail to interplanetary liners by messenger rocket, and distinguish 9s from upside-down 6s.

  Pink Wastebasket haughtily inhaled the offending envelope and almost instantly turned a bright crimson and began to tremble. After a few minutes, small atomic flames started to flicker from her mid-section.

  White Nursemaid Seven and Greasy Joe both received Pink Wastebasket’s distress signal and got there as fast as their wheels would roll them, but the high-born machine’s malady was beyond their simple skills of oilcan and electroshock.

  * * * *

  They summoned other machine-tending-and-repairing machines, ones far more expert than themselves, but all were baffled. It was clear that Pink Wastebasket, who continued to tremble and flicker uncontrollably, was suffering from the equivalent of a major psychosis with severe psychosomatic symptoms. She spat a stream of filthy ions at Gray Psychiatrist, not recognizing her old friend.

  Meanwhile, the paper blizzard from Black Sorter was piling up in great drifts between the dark pillars of the sublevel, and flurries had reached Pink Wastebasket’s aristocratic area. An expedition of sturdy machines, headed by two hastily summoned snowplows, was dispatched to immobilize Black Sorter at all costs.

  Pink Wastebasket, quivering like a demented hula dancer, was clearly approaching a crisis. Finally Gray
Psychiatrist—after consulting with Green Surgeon, and even then with an irritated reluctance, as if he were calling in a witch-doctor—summoned a human being.

  The human being walked respectfully around Pink Wastebasket several times and then gave her a nervous little poke with a rubber-handled probe.

  Pink Wastebasket gently regurgitated her last snack, turned dead white, gave a last flicker and shake, and expired. Black Coroner recorded the immediate cause of death as tinkering by a human being.

  The human being, a bald and scrawny one named Potshelter, picked up the envelope responsible for all the trouble, stared at it incredulously, opened it with trembling fingers, scanned the contents briefly, gave a great shriek and ran off at top speed, forgetting to hop on his perambulator, which followed him making anxious clucking noises.

  The nearest human representative of the Solar Bureau of Investigation, a rather wooden-looking man named Krumbine, also bald, recognized Potshelter as soon as the latter burst gasping into his office, squeezing through the door while it was still dilating. The human beings whose work took them among the Top Brass, as the upper-echelon machines were sometimes referred to, formed a kind of human elite, just one big nervous family.

  “Sit down, Potshelter,” the SBI Man said. “Hold still a second so the chair can grab you. Hitch onto the hookah and choose a tranquilizer from the tray at your elbow. Whatever deviation you’ve uncovered can’t be that much of a danger to the planets. I imagine that when you leave this office, the Solar Battle Fleet will still be orbiting peacefully around Luna.”

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  Potshelter gulped a large lavender pill and took a deep breath. “Krumbine, a letter turned up in the first-class mail this morning.”

  “Great Scott!”

  “It is a letter from one person to another person.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “The flow of advertising has been seriously interfered with. At a modest estimate, three hundred million pieces of expensive first-class advertising have already been chewed to rags and I’m not sure the Steel Helms—God bless ‘em!—have the trouble in hand yet.”

  “Judas Priest!”

  “Naturally the poor machines weren’t able to cope with the letter. It was utterly outside their experience, beyond the furthest reach of their programming. It threw them into a terrible spasm. Pink Wastebasket is dead and at this very instant, if we’re lucky, three police machines of the toughest blued steel are holding down Black Sorter and putting a muzzle on him.”

  “Great Scott! It’s incredible, Potshelter. And Pink Wastebasket dead? Take another tranquilizer, Potshelter, and hand over the tray.”

  Krumbine received it with trembling fingers, started to pick up a big pink pill but drew back his hand from it in sudden revulsion at its color and swallowed two blue oval ones instead. The man was obviously fighting to control himself.

  He said unsteadily, “I almost never take doubles, but this news you bring—Good Lord! I seem to recall a case where someone tried to send a sound-tape through the mails, but that was before my time. Incidentally, is there any possibility that this is a letter sent by one group of persons to another group? A hive or a therapy group or a social club? That would be bad enough, of course, but—”

  “No, just one single person sending to another.” Potshelter’s expression set in grimly solicitous lines. “I can see you don’t quite understand, Krumbine. This is not a sound-tape, but a letter written in letters. You know, letters, characters—like books.”

  “Don’t mention books in this office!” Krumbine drew himself up angrily and then slumped back. “Excuse me, Potshelter, but I find this very difficult to face squarely. Do I understand you to say that one person has tried to use the mails to send a printed sheet of some sort to another?”

  “Worse than that. A written letter.”

  “Written? I don’t recognize the word.”

  “It’s a way of making characters, of forming visual equivalents of sound, without using electricity. The writer, as he’s called, employs a black liquid and a pointed stick called a pen. I know about this because one hobby of mine is ancient means of communication.”

  Krumbine frowned and shook his head. “Communication is a dangerous business, Potshelter, especially at the personal level. With you and me, it’s all right, because we know what we’re doing.”

  He picked up a third blue tranquilizer. “But with most of the hive-folk, person-to-person communication is only a morbid form of advertising, a dangerous travesty of normal newscasting—catharsis without the analyst, recitation without the teacher—a perversion of promotion employed in betraying and subverting.”

  The frown deepened as he put the blue pill in his mouth and chewed it. “But about this pen—do you mean the fellow glues the pointed stick to his tongue and then speaks, and the black liquid traces the vibrations on the paper? A primitive non-electrical oscilloscope? Sloppy but conceivable, and producing a record of sorts of the spoken word.”

  “No, no, Krumbine.” Potshelter nervously popped a square orange tablet into his mouth. “It’s a hand-written letter.”

  Krumbine watched him. “I never mix tranquilizers,” he boasted absently. “Hand-written, eh? You mean that the message was imprinted on a hand? And the skin or the entire hand afterward detached and sent through the mails in the fashion of a Martian reproach? A grisly find indeed, Potshelter.”

  “You still don’t quite grasp it, Krumbine. The fingers of the hand move the stick that applies the ink, producing a crude imitation of the printed word.”

  “Diabolical!” Krumbine smashed his fist down on the desk so that the four phones and two-score microphones rattled. “I tell you, Potshelter, the SBI is ready to cope with the subtlest modern deceptions, but when fiends search out and revive tricks from the pre-Atomic Cave Era, it’s almost too much. But, Great Scott, I dally while the planets are in danger. What’s the sender’s code on this hellish letter?”

  “No code,” Potshelter said darkly, proferring the envelope. “The return address is—hand-written.”

  Krumbine blanched as his eyes slowly traced the uneven lines in the upper left-hand corner:

  from Richard Rowe

  215 West 10th St. (horizontal)

  2837 Rocket Court (vertical)

  Hive 37, NewNew York 319, N. Y.

  Columbia, Terra

  “Ugh!” Krumbine said, shivering. “Those crawling characters, those letters, as you call them, those things barely enough like print to be readable—they seem to be on the verge of awakening all sorts of horrid racial memories. I find myself thinking of fur-clad witch-doctors dipping long pointed sticks in bubbling black cauldrons. No wonder Pink Wastebasket couldn’t take it, brave girl.”

  * * * *

  Firming himself behind his desk, he pushed a number of buttons and spoke long numbers and meaningful alphabetical syllables into several microphones. Banks of colored lights around the desk began to blink like a theatre marquee sending Morse Code, while phosphorescent arrows crawled purposefully across maps and space-charts and through three-dimensional street diagrams.

  “There!” he said at last. “The sender of the letter is being apprehended and will be brought directly here. We’ll see what sort of man this Richard Rowe is—if we can assume he’s human. Seven precautionary cordons are being drawn around his population station: three composed of machines, two of SBI agents, and two consisting of human and mechanical medical-combat teams. Same goes for the intended recipient of the letter. Meanwhile, a destroyer squadron of the Solar Fleet has been detached to orbit over NewNew York.”

  “In case it becomes necessary to Z-Bomb?” Potshelter asked grimly.

  Krumbine nodded. “With all those villains lurking just outside the Solar System in their invisible black ships, with planeticide in their hearts, we can’t be too careful. One word transmitted from one spy to another and anything may happen. And we must bomb before they do, so as to contain our losses. Better one city destroyed th
an a traitor on the loose who may destroy many cities. One hundred years ago, three person-to-person postcards went through the mails—just three postcards, Potshelter!—and pft went Schenectady, Hoboken, Cicero, and Walla Walla. Here, as long as you’re mixing them, try one of these oval blues—I find them best for steady swallowing.”

  Bells jangled. Krumbine grabbed up two phones, holding one to each ear. Potshelter automatically picked up a third. The ringing continued. Krumbine started to wedge one of his phones under his chin, nodded sharply at Potshelter and then toward a cluster of microphones at the end of the table. Potshelter picked up a fourth phone from behind them. The ringing stopped.

  The two men listened, looking doped, Krumbine with an eye fixed on the sweep second hand of the large wall clock. When it had made one revolution, he cradled his phones. Potshelter followed suit.

  “I do like the simplicity of the new on-the-hour Puffyloaf phono-commercial,” the latter remarked thoughtfully. “The Bread That’s Lighter Than Air. Nice.”

  Krumbine nodded. “I hear they’ve had to add mass to the leadfoil wrapping to keep the loaves from floating off the shelves. Fact.”

  * * * *

  He cleared his throat. “Too bad we can’t listen to more phono-commercials, but even when there isn’t a crisis on the agenda, I find I have to budget my listening time. One minute per hour strikes a reasonable balance between duty and self-indulgence.”

  The nearest wall began to sing:

  Mister J. Augustus Krumbine,

  We all think you’re fine, fine, fine, fine.

  Now out of the skyey blue

  Come some telegrams for you.

  The wall opened to a small heart shape toward the center and a sheaf of pale yellow envelopes arced out and plopped on the middle of the desk. Krumbine started to leaf through them, scanning the little transparent windows.

  “Hm, Electronic Soap… Better Homes and Landing Platforms… Psycho-Blinkers… Your Girl Next Door… Poppy-Woppies… Poopsy-Woopsies.…”