by Fritz Leiber
Ernie couldn’t figure out the reason and wasn’t at all sure he liked it—except for Vivian.
She was the sort of girl Ernie dreamed about, improperly. Tall, blonde and knowing, excitedly curved but armored in a black suit, friendly and funny but given to making almost cruelly deflating remarks, as if the neatly furled short umbrella dangling from her wrist might better be a black dog whip.
She worked in an office too, a fancier one than Ernie’s, as he found out from their morning conversations. He hadn’t got to the point of asking her to lunch, but he was prodding himself.
Why such a girl should ever have asked him for a match in the first place and then put up with his clumsy babblings on subsequent mornings was a mystery to him. He finally asked her about it in what he hoped was a joking way, though she seemed to know a lot more about joking than he did.
“Don’t you know?” she countered. “I mean what makes you attractive to people?”
“Me attractive? No.”
“Well, I’ll tell you then, Ernie, and I’ve got to admit it’s something quite out of the ordinary. I’ve never noticed it in anyone else. Ernie, I’m sure your knowledge of romantic novels is shamefully deficient, it’s clear from your manners, but in the earlier ones—not in style now—the hero is described as tall, manly, broad-shouldered, Anglo-Saxon features, etcetera, etcetera, but there’s one thing he always has, something that sounds like poetic over-enthusiasm if you stop to analyze it, a physical impossibility, but that I have to admit you, Ernie, actually have. Flashing eyes.”
“Flashing eyes? Me?”
She nodded solemnly. He thought her long straight lips trembled on the verge of a grin, but he couldn’t be sure.
“How do you mean, flashing eyes?” he protested. “How can eyes flash, except by reflecting light? In that case, I guess they’d seem to ‘flash’ more if a person opened them wide but kept blinking them a lot. Is that what I do?”
“No, Ernie, though you’re doing it now,” she told him, shaking her head. “No, Ernie, your eyes just give a tiny flash of their own about every five seconds, like a lighthouse, but barely, barely bright enough for another person to notice. It makes you irresistible. Of course I’ve never seen you in the dark; maybe they wouldn’t flash in the dark.”
“You’re joking.”
Vivian frowned a little at that remark, as if she were puzzled herself.
“Well, maybe I am and maybe I’m not,” she said. “In any case, don’t get conceited about your Flashing Eyes, because I’m sure you’ll never know how to take advantage of them.”
When he parted from her downtown, pausing a moment to watch her walk away with feline majesty, he muttered “Flashing Eyes!” with a shrug of the shoulders and a skeptical growl. Just the same, he ducked his head as he moved off and he pulled the brim of his hat down sharply.
* * * *
Afternoons, hurtling home in the five o’clock rush, it was not Vivian but Verna who frequently occupied the seat beside him, taking up rather more space in it than the Panther Princess. Verna was another of his newly acquired and not altogether welcome conversation-pals, along with Jacob the barber, Mr. Willis the druggist and Herman the health-food manufacturer, inventor of Soybean Mush—conquests of his Flashing Eyes or whatever it was.
Verna was stocky, pasty-faced, voluble (with him), coy, and had bad breath—he could see the tiny triangles of pale food between her incisors and canines whenever her conversations became particularly vehement and confidential, which was often. She always had a stack of books hugged to her stomach. She worked in a fur-storage vault, she said, and could snatch quite a bit of time for reading—rather heavy reading, it seemed.
It wasn’t very long before Verna was head-over-heels (fearful picture!) infatuated with him. Somehow his friendliness had touched a hidden spring in this ugly, friendless, clumsy girl and for once she had lost her fear of the world’s ridicule and opened her hulking heart to another human being. It was touching but rather overpowering, especially since she always opened her mouth too. He learned a great deal about herself, her invalid father, Elizabethan and Restoration poetry, paleontology, an organization known as the Working Girls’ Front, Mr. Abrusian, and a brassy Miss Minkin who sounded like a fiendish caricature of Vivian.
He felt that deliberately avoiding Verna would be a dirtier trick than he liked to think himself capable of. Nevertheless there were times when he seriously wished he’d never acquired whatever power it was—except for Vivian, of course. What the devil, he asked himself for the nth time, could that power be?
That night, in the bathroom, the question came back to him and he impulsively switched off the light and looked into the mirror. He gasped and seemed on the point of shrieking out something, but he only grasped the washbowl more tightly and stared into the mirror more intently.
After about a minute, he tugged on the light again. He was pale. He had convinced himself of the actual existence of the phenomenon that was in reality the third of the Little Gifts: Flashing Eyes.
He couldn’t notice anything in the light, but in the dark his eyes gave off a faint blue flash about every five seconds, just as Vivian had said, lighting up his cheeks and eyebrows like some comic-book vampire!
It might be attractive by day, when it just registered as an impalpable hint, but it was damn sinister in the dark! It wasn’t much, but it was there—unless the flashes were inside his head and he was projecting them…blue…something called the Purkinje effect?…but then Vivian had actually seen…oh, damn!
* * * *
Suddenly he wildly looked around, a little like a trapped animal. Why did it always have to happen in the bathroom, he asked himself—the bicarb, the flame, the blade (if that counted), and now this? Could there be something wrong about the bathroom, something either in the room itself or in his childhood associations?
But neither the bathroom walls nor his minutely searched memory returned an answer.
It was dark in the hall outside and he almost bumped into his sister. He recoiled, stared at her a moment, then threw his hand over his eyes, darted into his bedroom and shut the door.
“Is there something wrong, Ernie?” she called after him.
“Wrong?”
The door muffled his voice. “How do you mean?”
“I mean about your eyes.”
“My eyes?” It was almost a scream. “What about my eyes?”
“Don’t shout, Ernie. I mean are they painful?”
“Painful? Why should they be painful?”
“I really don’t know, Ernie.” She was being very patient and calm.
“I mean did you notice anything about them?” He was trying to be the same without much success.
“Just that you put your hand up to them as if they hurt.”
“Oh.” Great relief. “Yes, they do smart a little. I guess I’ve been using them too much. I’m putting some eye-drops in them now.”
“Can I help you, Ernie? And shouldn’t you see an opto…ocu…optha…I mean an eye doctor?”
Ernie answered “No” to both those questions, but of course it took a lot more lying and improvising and general smoothing out before his sister would even pretend to be satisfied and stop her general nagging for the evening. She was getting uncomfortably cagy and curious lately, addicted to asking such questions out of a blue sky as:
“Ernie, when we were visiting Uncle Fabius, did you actually believe that you went out and bought gas?”
That one momentarily brought Ernie’s stammer back, something which hadn’t troubled him for years.
And when she wasn’t asking questions, her quiet studying of him for long minutes was even more upsetting.
* * * *
Next morning, on the way to the electric train, Ernie made a purchase at the drugstore. When he sat down beside Vivian, she took one look at him and gave a very deliberate-sounding hollow laugh.
“Black glasses!” she said. “I tell him he’s attractive because he has Flashing Eyes and withi
n two days he’s wearing black glasses. I suppose I should have guessed it.”
“But my eyes hurt,” Ernie protested. “Sensitive to sunlight, I think.” He wished he could explain to her that he’d bought the glasses not only in case he got caught out at night, but also to convince his sister he hadn’t been lying about sore eyes. He hadn’t intended to wear them by day and hardly knew why he’d put them on before joining Vivian.
“Spare me your rationalizations,” she said. “Your motives are clear to me, Ernie, and they happen to be very commonplace.”
She leaned toward him and her voice, little more than a whisper, took on an unexpectedly gloomy, chilling, hopeless tone.
“See these people all around us, Ernie? They’re suicides, every one of them. Day by day, in every way, they’re killing themselves. People love them, admire them, and it only makes them uneasy. They have abilities and charms by the bushel—yes, they do, even that man with the wen on his neck—and they only try to hide them. The spotlight turns their way and they goof. They think they’re running away from failure, but actually they’re running away from success.”
Ernie looked at them, he couldn’t help it, her voice made him, and the ability of Page-at-a-Glance Reading chose that moment to come back to him, only applied to faces instead of letters, and there seemed to be another ability along with it, unclear as yet but frightening. He felt like a very old detective scanning the lineup for the thousandth time.
The black glasses didn’t interfere a bit—the dozens of faces in this speeding electric car were suddenly as familiar as the court cards in a deck—and he had the feeling that, like a bunch of pink pasteboards, they were about to be hurled in his face.
My God, he asked himself, flinching, how could you go on living with so many faces so close to you, so completely known?—each street you turned into, each store you entered, each gathering you joined, another deluge of unique features. Ugly, pretty, strong, weak—those words didn’t mean anything any more in this drenching of individuality he was getting, and that showed no signs of stopping.
So he hardly heard Vivian saying, “And it’s true of you, Ernie—in spades, for your black glasses,” and he hardly remembered parting from her, and when he found himself alone he did something unprecedented for him at that time of day—he went to a bar and drank two double whiskies.
* * * *
The drinks brought the downtown landscape back to normal and stopped the faces printing themselves on his mind, but they left him very disturbed, and the suspiciousness with which he was treated at the office didn’t improve that, and Ernie began to wish for ordinariness and commonplaceness in himself more than anything in the whole world. If only, he silently implored, there were some way of junking everything that had happened to him in the past few weeks—except maybe Vivian.
Verna on the train home positively terrified him. She was unusually talkative and engulfing this evening and he thought that if the faces-forever feeling came to him just as she was baring her food-triangles and all, he wouldn’t be able to stand it. Somehow, it didn’t. Yet the very intensity of his distaste frightened him. Not for the first time, the word “insanity” appeared in his mind, pulsing in pale yellowish-green.
Half a block from home, passing his parked car (with an unconscious little veer of avoidance), he spotted three figures in close conference in front of his house: his sister, a man in dark blue—yes, Mr. Jones, and…a man in a white coat.
Almost before he knew it, he was in his car and driving away. He truly didn’t know what he was going to do, only that he was going to do it, and found a trivial interest in trying to guess what it was going to be. Whatever it was, it was going to dim that yellowish-green word, decrease its type-size, make him a little more able to face the crisis waiting him at home…or somewhere.
He had a picture of himself getting on an airplane, another of renting a room in a slum, another of stopping the car on a lonely, treeless country road and getting out and looking up to the coldly glimmering Milky Way—why?
That last picture was the most vivid, and when he realized he had actually stopped his car, it was a moment before it would go away. Then he saw he was parked in front of a demolished old apartment building a few blocks from his home. Only yesterday he’d watched the last wall going down. Now, just across the littered sidewalk from him, the old cellar gaped, flimsily guarded in front by a makeshift rail and surrounded on the other three sides by great hillocks of battered bricks. Tomorrow probably (and in fact that was the way it happened) a bulldozer would tumble them forward, filling the cellar with old bricks and brick-dust, leveling the lot.
* * * *
Now he knew what he was going to do. He unlatched the top over the windshield and pushed the button. Slowly the top folded back over his head, showing the smoke-dark sky, almost night. He hitched up a little in the seat, reached inside his coat, pulled out the blue box he always carried and pitched it into the dark pit across the sidewalk.
He was driving away almost before it landed. Yet through the hum of the motor he thought he heard something call faintly, “Good-by.”
The material of the filled-in cellar stayed fairly dry for many years and the atom-bombing, when it finally came, created a partial surface-seal of fused stone over that area. However, the bicarb box fell apart in time; water reached it in little seepings and was accumulated as a non-evaporating fuel-and-oxydizer mix. The amount of this strange fluid grew and grew, eventually invading and filling a now-blind section of the city’s old sewer system.
Many tens of thousands of years after that, the buried pool was sensed by the fuel-finders of a spaceship from up Polaris way, which had made an emergency landing on the ruined planet. A well was drilled and the mix pumped up and the centipedal Polarians, scuttling about the bleak landscape, had a fine time trying to explain how such a sophisticated fluid should occur in a seeming state of nature. However, they were grateful to the Cosmic All-Father.
Long before that, Ernie had arrived home in something of a daze. He told himself that he had cast off the most tangible element of his “insanity,” but he didn’t feel any the better for it. In fact, he felt distinctly apathetic when his sister confronted him and only with an effort did he manage to brace himself for the trial he knew she had in store for him.
“Ernie,” she said hesitatingly, “I’ve come to a decision about something—about a change in our arrangements here, to tell you the truth—and I’ve gone ahead with it without consulting you. I do hope you won’t mind.”
“No,” he said heavily, “I guess I won’t mind.”
“I’m doing it partly on Mr. Jones’s advice,” she added slowly. “As a matter of fact he suggested it.”
Ernie nodded. “Yes, I’ve noticed the two of you conferring together.”
“You have? Then maybe you know what I’m talking about.”
“Oh, yes.” Ernie nodded again and smiled grimly. “The man in white?”
She laughed. “Exactly, the man in white. For a long time, I’ve thought it was just too much bother for either of us to carry the milk home, and the eggs and my yogurt too. So I decided to have the milkman that Mr. Jones uses make deliveries. Mr. Jones brought him over half an hour ago and it’s all arranged. Four quarts a week, one dozen eggs, and yogurt Tuesdays and Fridays.”
* * * *
The Invisible Being and his Coadjutor, backtracking for a checkup, summarized the situation.
The latter said, “So he’s already thrown away the Everlasting Cosmetic Knife and the Water Splitter; he seems to be trying to reject the third Little Gift and the first Big One, while he still isn’t even conscious of the other two Gifts.”
“Cheer up,” said the Invisible Being. “It’s his life and he’s doing what he thinks best.”
“Yes,” the Coadjutor said, “but he doesn’t know he’s making these decisions for his race as well as himself. Sometimes I think Galaxy Center makes it too hard for chaps like him. For instance, that trick of having the images on the
box fade back to the old ones.”
“Nonsense! We have to take all reasonable precautions that our activities remain secret. He knew that the powder worked. He should have had faith.”
“Sometimes it takes a lot of faith.”
“You’re right, it does.” The Invisible Being smiled his Cheshire smile. “You feel a lot for these test subjects, don’t you? That’s fine, but you’ve got to remember you can’t accept the Gifts for them; that’s one thing they have to do themselves, however long they take about it. Which reminds me, I think we ought to set up a recorder here to report the final outcome of the test to Galaxy Center.”
“Good idea.”
“And cheer up, I say. This test isn’t over yet and our featherless biped isn’t necessarily licked. If he thinks to link up the third Little Gift with the two Big Ones, he has a pretty sweet setup for making psychic progress—and his race will be Galactic Citizens in a jiffy.”
“You’re right.”
“Moreover, it stands to reason he’s soon going to become aware of the Great Gift, and that generally gives a person a jolt and makes him think seriously about other things.”
“True enough—though I still have the feeling you intend some sardonic trick in conjunction with the Great Gift. Are you sure you’re not planning to leave some other setup here along with the recorder? I notice you’ve got a spare Juxtaposer in the ship and it bothers me.”
“That, dear Coadjutor, is my business. Whatever I do, it won’t interfere in any way with the fairness of the tests.”
“Sometimes I think the tests are too fair,” the Coadjutor observed. “I’d like to be able to ease them up a bit in special cases.”