by Fritz Leiber
Still, even snails get somewhere. With forever to work with, even four-words-at-a-glance gets you through many, many books. Patient love and dispassionate thought give you human insight in the end, can finally open the tightest shutter on the darkest human heart.
But that would take so very long and Ernie felt tired. Not old, just tired, tired. Best simply to watch the soft clouds—the pear-shaped gateway had become almost circular. To do anything but drift through life, a stereotype among stereotypes, was simply…too…much…work.…
At that very moment, as if his thought had summoned the experience into being, another scene filmed over the blue sky and white clouds above him. The sudden humming in his ears—a kind of “audible silence”—informed him that his second sight was at work, warning him of some deadly danger. But this was a more gentle instance of it, for not all his consciousness jumped somewhere else. All through the experience, he was still aware of himself leaning against the grassy hummock, of the restful melancholy of the scene around him, and of the sky overhead. The second scene only superimposed itself on the first.
He was poised many hundreds of miles above the Earth, a ghost-Ernie immune to the airlessness and the Sun’s untempered beams. At his back was black night filled with stars. Below him stretched the granulated dry brown of Earth’s surface, tinged here and there with green, clumped with white cloud, and everywhere faintly hazed with blue.
* * * *
Up there in space with him, right at his elbow, so close that he could reach out and touch it, was a tiny silver cylinder about as big as a hazelnut, domed at one end, reflecting sunlight from one point in a way that would have been blinding enough except that Ernie’s ghost eyes were immune to brightness.
As he reached out to examine it, the thing darted away from him as if at some imperious summons, like a bit of iron jumping through a magnetic field.
But in spite of its enormous acceleration, Ernie’s ghost was able to follow it in its downward plunge. It kept just ahead of his outstretched fingertips.
The brown granules that were Earth’s surface grew in size. The tiny metal cylinder began to glow with more than reflected sunlight. It turned red, orange, yellow and then blazing white as atmospheric friction transformed it into a meteor.
Ernie’s ghost, immune to friction and incandescence alike, followed it as it dove toward its target—for even though Ernie had never heard of a Juxtaposer and how it brought objects together, he had the feeling, from the dizzy speed of the meteor’s plunge, that it yearned for something.
He knew most meteors vaporized or exploded, but this did not, even when Earth’s brown surface grew rivers and roads. Suddenly there was a cloudbank ahead; then, in the white, there appeared an almost circular hole toward the very center of which the meteorite plunged.
Everything was happening very fast now, but his ghost senses were able to keep pace. As they plunged through the cloud-ring and the green landscape below grew explosively, he saw the white tower, the trees, the curving drives, and the clearing which was now the target.
There was still time to escape. Lying on the warm grass, with death lancing down from the sky at miles a second, he had merely to roll over.
But it was simply…too…much…work.…
* * * *
Elsewhere near Earth, a recorder sped toward Galaxy Center a message which ended, “Six Gifts tendered, all finally refused. I will now sign off and await pickup with one Juxtaposer.”
A little later, a Receiver in Galaxy Center passed the message to a Central Recorder, which filed it in the Starswarm 37 section with this addition: “Spiritual immaturity of Terran bipeds indicated. Advise against enlightenment and admission to Galactic citizenship. Test subject humanely released.”
* * * *
Police, digging into the turf under Ernie’s shattered head two days later found the bright bullet, cold now, of course, and untarnished.
“Looks like silver!” one cop said, scratching his head. “Haven’t I heard somewhere that the Mafia use silver bullets? So bright, though.”
Lieutenant Padilla, later on, lifting the bullet in his forceps to re-examine it for rifling marks, had the same thought about its brightness. By now, however, he knew it was not silver. (What alloy was never satisfactorily determined. Actually it was made of the same substance as the Everlasting Razor Blade.)
This time, although he still found no rifling marks, a tiny dull stretch on the flat end of the cylinder caught his attention. He took up a magnifier and examined it carefully.
A moment later, he put down the magnifier, snatched up the pocketbook found on the dead man and rechecked some cards in it. The bullet dropped from the forceps, rolled a few inches. The lieutenant sat back in his chair, breathing a little hard.
“This is one for the books, all right!” he told himself. “I’ve heard a lot of people, soldiers especially, talk about such bullets, but I never expected to see one!”
For under the magnifying glass, finely engraved in very tiny letters, he had read the words: ERNEST WENCESLAUS MEEKER.
THE BIG ENGINE
Originally published in Galaxy Magazine, February 1962.
There are all sorts of screwy theories (the Professor said) of what makes the wheels of the world go round. There’s a boy in Chicago who thinks we’re all of us just the thoughts of a green cat; when the green cat dies we’ll all puff to nothing like smoke. There’s a man in the west who thinks all women are witches and run the world by conjure magic. There’s a man in the east who believes all rich people belong to a secret society that’s a lot tighter and tougher than the Mafia and that has a monopoly of power-secrets and pleasure-secrets other people don’t dream exist.
Me, I think the wheels of the world just go. I decided that forty years ago and I’ve never since seen or heard or read anything to make me change my mind.
I was a stoker on a lake boat then (the Professor continued, delicately sipping smoke from his long thin cigarette). I was as stupid as they make them, but I liked to think. Whenever I’d get a chance I’d go to one of the big libraries and make them get me all sorts of books. That was how guys started calling me the Professor. I’d get books on philosophy, metaphysics, science, even religion. I’d read them and try to figure out the world. What was it all about, anyway? Why was I here? What was the point in the whole business of getting born and working and dying? What was the use of it? Why’d it have to go on and on?
And why’d it have to be so complicated?
Why all the building and tearing down? Why’d there have to be cities, with crowded streets and horse cars and cable cars and electric cars and big open-work steel boxes built to the sky to be hung with stone and wood—my closest friend got killed falling off one of those steel boxkites. Shouldn’t there be some simpler way of doing it all? Why did things have to be so mixed up that a man like myself couldn’t have a single clear decent thought?
More than that, why weren’t people a real part of the world? Why didn’t they show more honest-to-God response? When you slept with a woman, why was it something you had and she didn’t? Why, when you went to a prize fight, were the bruisers only so much meat, and the crowd a lot of little screaming popinjays? Why was a war nothing but blather and blowup and bother? Why’d everybody have to go through their whole lives so dead, doing everything so methodical and prissy like a Sunday School picnic or an orphan’s parade?
* * * *
And then, when I was reading one of the science books, it came to me. The answer was all there, printed out plain to see only nobody saw it. It was just this: Nobody was really alive.
Back of other people’s foreheads there weren’t any real thoughts or minds, or love or fear, to explain things. The whole universe—stars and men and dirt and worms and atoms, the whole shooting match—was just one great big engine. It didn’t take mind or life or anything else to run the engine. It just ran.
Now one thing about science. It doesn’t lie. Those men who wrote those science books that showed me
the answer, they had no more minds than anybody else. Just darkness in their brains, but because they were machines built to use science, they couldn’t help but get the right answers. They were like the electric brains they’ve got now, but hadn’t then, that give out the right answer when you feed in the question. I’d like to feed in the question, “What’s Life?” to one of those machines and see what came out. Just figures, I suppose. I read somewhere that if a billion monkeys had typewriters and kept pecking away at them they’d eventually turn out all the Encyclopedia Brittanica in trillions and trillions of years. Well, they’ve done it all right, and in jig time.
They’re doing it now.
A lot of philosophy and psychology books I worked through really fit in beautifully. There was Watson’s Behaviorism telling how we needn’t even assume that people are conscious to explain their actions. There was Leibitz’s Monadology, with its theory that we’re all of us lonely atoms that are completely out of touch and don’t effect each other in the slightest, but only seem to…because all our little clockwork motors were started at the same time in pre-established harmony. We seem to be responding to each other, but actually we’re just a bunch of wooden-minded puppets. Jerk one puppet up into the flies and the others go on acting as if exactly nothing at all had happened.
So there it was all laid out for me (the Professor went on, carefully pinching out the end of his cigarette). That was why there was no honest-to-God response in people. They were machines.
The fighters were machines made for fighting. The people that watched them were machines for stamping and screaming and swearing. The bankers had banking cogs in their bellies, the crooks had crooked cams. A woman was just a loving machine, all nicely adjusted to give you a good time (sometimes!) but the farthest star was nearer to you than the mind behind that mouth you kissed.
See what I mean? People just machines, set to do a certain job and then quietly rust away. If you kept on being the machine you were supposed to be, well and good. Then your actions fitted with other people’s. But if you didn’t, if you started doing something else, then the others didn’t respond. They just went on doing what was called for.
It wouldn’t matter what you did, they’d just go on making the motions they were set to make. They might be set to make love, and you might decide you wanted to fight. They’d go on making love while you fought them. Or it might happen the other way—seems to, more often!
Or somebody might be talking about Edison. And you’d happen to say something about Ingersoll. But he’d just go on talking about Edison.
You were all alone.
* * * *
Except for a few others—not more than one in a hundred thousand, I guess—who wake up and figure things out. And they mostly go crazy and run themselves to death, or else turn mean. Mostly they turn mean. They get a cheap little kick out of pushing things around that can’t push back. All over the world you find them—little gangs of three or four, half a dozen—who’ve waked up, but just to their cheap kicks. Maybe it’s a couple of coppers in ‘Frisco, a schoolteacher in K.C., some artists in New York, some rich kids in Florida, some undertakers in London—who’ve found that all the people walking around are just dead folk and to be treated no decenter, who see how bad things are and get their fun out of making it a little worse. Just a mean little bit worse. They don’t dare to destroy in a big way, because they know the machine feeds them and tends them, and because they’re always scared they’d be noticed by gangs like themselves and wiped out. They haven’t the guts to really wreck the whole shebang. But they get a kick out of scribbling their dirty pictures on it, out of meddling and messing with it.
I’ve seen some of their fun, as they call it, sometimes hidden away, sometimes in the open streets.
You’ve seen a clerk dressing a figure in a store window? Well, suppose he slapped its face. Suppose a kid stuck pins in a calico pussy-cat, or threw pepper in the eyes of a doll.
No decent live man would have anything to do with nickel sadism or dime paranoia like that. He’d either go back to his place in the machine and act out the part set for him, or else he’d hide away like me and live as quiet as he could, not stirring things up. Like a mouse in a dynamo or an ant in an atomics plant.
(The Professor went to the window and opened it, letting the sour old smoke out and the noises of the city in.)
* * * *
Listen (he said), listen to the great mechanical symphony, the big black combo. The airplanes are the double bass. Have you noticed how you can always hear one nowadays? When one walks out of the sky another walks in.
Presses and pumps round out the bass section. Listen to them rumble and thump! Tonight they’ve got an old steam locomotive helping. Maybe they’re giving a benefit show for the old duffer.
Cars and traffic—they’re the strings. Mostly cellos and violas. They purr and wail and whine and keep trying to get out of their section.
Brasses? To me the steel-on-steel of streetcars and El trains always sounds like trumpets and cornets. Strident, metallic, fiery cold.
Hear that siren way off? It’s a clarinet. The ship horns are tubas, the diesel horn’s an oboe. And that lovely dreadful french horn is an electric saw cutting down the last tree.
But what a percussion section they’ve got! The big stuff, like streetcar bells jangling, is easy to catch, but you have to really listen to get the subtleties—the buzz of a defective neon sign, the click of a stoplight changing.
Sometimes you do get human voices, I’ll admit, but they’re not like they are in Beethoven’s Ninth or Holst’s Planets.
There’s the real sound of the universe (the Professor concluded, shutting the window). That’s your heavenly choir. That’s the music of the spheres the old alchemists kept listening for—if they’d just stayed around a little longer they’d all have been deafened by it. Oh, to think that Schopenhauer was bothered by the crack of carters’ whips!
And now it’s time for this mouse to tuck himself in his nest in the dynamo. Good night, gentlemen!
RECOGNITION OF DEATH (poem)
Originally published in The Acolyte #10 (Spring 1945)
I
It is a wonderful train ride
With the farms sliding by in the cold dusk
And animals grazing in the yellow sun
And little wooden-floored stations,
The boards brushed with frost or odorous with rain,
And strange turbulent cities by night
With steel bridges over rivers reflecting lights
And vast mysterious depots.
But the conductor is always coming up behind me.
I can hear the click of his punch.
And I wonder if he will pass me by,
Or if he will take up my ticket
And I will have to get off and enter the landscape
Become stationary forever.
So I gaze more greedily
And talk to the person opposite
And rummage in my baggage,
And insincerely yawn,
And furiously think.
II
Death is my real friend,
Always doing things for my own good
Whether I like them or not.
He prods me toward the future,
He goads me to accomplishment,
He keeps reminding me of my unfulfilled potentialities,
Promises, hopes, intentions, and resolves.
He makes no promises.
He never threatens.
Yet he is eloquent.
If I lived ten thousand years,
His voice would only be more urgent.
III
Death, a stern counsellor, is always at my elbow, whispering,
“The time is, was, and shall be,” in his clipped accent.
“You died ten years ago, tomorrow, now.”
Often I have refused to see him, calling others to mask him from me.
Sloth and placidity are fat councilmen.
Their gross bodies easily cover his lean one.
But were I to put granite walls between us,
His words would be as true.
Forget moral counselors.
Death is the only true ally.
He deals in verities.
He recognized accomplishment.
He knows there are things he cannot kill.
Or, killing, must remember and so make immortal.
IV
The killers creep toward me through the dark, red-smeared with hate in their hearts.
But death is dignified and does not hate me.
The killers are ignorant and cruel.
But death knows all and regards me fairly.
The killers are not his agents—
It may happen that they will die at the hand of their intended victim.
Death will not kill me, but something that has life or movement—
A stone, a force, a micro-organism, the macro-organism.
Life will mangle me, and then death will befriend me.