The Best of Fritz Leiber (43 page)

“I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that,” Tom said. “Solid!”

“I don’t worry ‘em or push any of their desperation buttons, though I glimpsed banks of those,” I protested on. “I just encouraged ’em to widen their minds and feelings a little and get some of the comic side-wash of others’ troubles and cheer up naturally.”

“There you’ve hit the nub of it,” Tom asserted, wagging a ringer in my face. “You tried to deliver more than your job called for, instead of learning to do it with a minimum of effort and finding another job to go with it, to swell your income—and then another after that.”

He gave a quick look around—to make sure Ma hadn’t come back, I soon realized—and then, leaning forward, said with a confidential hush, “Oh, Meaghan, my boy, I’ve learned so much of the world since I got away from here and Ma’s no longer firing me with resentments and wild ambitions. The world’s a very tidy comfortable place if only you’ll remember there are three billion other lunatic climbers in it—and do no more than you’re told and watch the smiles and frowns of your superiors and keep your eyes open and your nostrils flared for flicker or scent of another chance to make money. Step fast, keep adding one little job to the next like beads on a necklace, and forget Ma and her wild dreams. Oh, and did I tell you my Katie’s got two jobs herself now too?—and never a one she’d have had with Ma around to hold her down.”

“Ma’s all right,” I told him sharply. “She’s got more courage and determination and vision than the four of us’ll ever have together. And such a fierce self-punishing drive I wonder she’s still alive. How would you ever have got out of here to a place of your own without Ma booting you?”

“True, true,” he agreed. “Nevertheless, Ma’s a hopeless romantic. She wants her four sons to be Dukes of the World, lording it over all.”

I couldn’t help chuckling at that. “When I was still street-smiling,” I confided, “a little man, who thought he was a great romantic, opened his mind to me wanting only to escape from the prison of his life and aim a flashing sword at other men and capture with love their women—and corral all the single girls going around loose, too. After we both looked at this stirring picture a while, we realized that what he really wanted was to have all women mother him and puff him up and lead him through life like a great bobbing red balloon.”

“That’s the way with all romantics, including Ma,” Tom said, taking advantage of me straightway. “She wants her sons to be princes and kings, or board chairmen at all events, not realizing there’s a billion others starting up the success ladder with them—and not one with a genuine ion drive. Not realizing that the competition’s too stiff for any man to dream of being more than an eight-job statistic with his peers. Or ten at most.”

The TV now was sailing over a great pile of gently crumpled bedclothes, which struck me as most pleasant and unlikely. Then I realized it was orbiting the Earth high above the clouds and there low in the foreground were the backs of beautifully barbered heads and now a sign flashing across the clouds: “Vacation Jaunts through Space for Nine-Job Heroes of Democracy.”

“You’re right about the competition,” I agreed quickly with Tom. “I’m no enemy of democracy, I’m one of its darlingest friends, but there’s no question it’s upped the competition more than ever it was in Earth’s history. We’ve got more machines, more health, more freedom of movement, more education, more leisure, more time for making money in our spare time, more almost equal people,
and
more incentives, more quick showy rewards for the quickly successful—with the result that the competition burns us out fast enough to equalize all the longevity created by medical advance.”

“It doesn’t seem to be burning you out,” Tom observed.

“Now listen here, Tom my boy,” I continued, warming to my subject. “Isn’t there something altogether crazy about a world that wants to turn everyone into merchants no matter what their natural psychological class—a world that’s turned even scientists and poets and adventurers and soldiers and priests into merchants busy selling themselves—a world that’s feared so much that the machine would take away all jobs that it’s gone ape creating jobs and financial ventures by the billions. With each reduction in working hours paralleled by an equal or greater increase in time spent on a part-time and sideline jobs—a world that’s so money-conscious that a man who takes his eyes off the dollar for a month or a day or even ten seconds—”

“Your eyes don’t look red with squinting at silver,” Tom observed like a lemon. “Besides, you’re deafening me.”

Just then Ma came lumbering daintily in again and asked Tom, “What’s this wondrous job you’ve got for Meaghan? I can’t wait any longer to hear.” Just as if she hadn’t been hearing every word and writhing at my negativisms.

I groaned as if on the verge of defeat. Tom laughed and said, “I was forgetting about that. What with Mea talking of billions of jobs, my one got lost in the stampede. Well, it seems that the repair robots are getting unpredictable everywhere, spending too much time on some jobs and not enough on others, and passing up still others altogether. One repaired a leak so well it built an armor wall six feet thick around the leak and himself— Fortunata, they called that one. Another found a leak and did nothing but start making identical leaks in all the pipes he followed—until thousands of them were squirting behind him. A demolition robot started shooting rocks at a new-risen glastic building. Yet the circuits of these robots are in perfect order and they always behave properly under factory tests. So what must be done is to have a man follow each metal trouble-shooter and note every move he makes, watch his behavior day after day—taking weeks if necessary so the robot will get used to his presence and not vary his behavior to please or confuse or harm the watcher. Oh, it’s a fine sort of job—no work at all—sort of like what they called Sidewalk Inspecting back in the depths of history.”

I said, “I suppose the robots they’re having the most trouble with are the ones that repair heat-tunnels and sewers and other delightful underground conduits.”

“How did you know that?” Tom asked me very quickly. “Old sunken spillways and aqueducts and chimneys too, though—some of the last poking thousands of feet high into the clear heady air. A most healthful job, my boyo—a regular mountain-climbing and spelunking vacation.”

I said softly, “I think I’d rather drown parboiled in this coffee cup than play psychiatric aide to a manic genius robot with a breakneck wander-urge who’s waiting for his metal consciousness to brighten with its first jeweled unhuman pictures and electricity-loving impulses. The machines are coming awake, did you know that, Tom? All the machines—”

“No, it’s but one machine,” a softer dreamier voice, mournful as a breeze through dead leaves, cut in on me. The adolescent wraith with hair like blond spiderweb, who was Ma’s poet genius and my youngest brother Harry, came drifting in from the bed-closets as if blown rather than walking. I could tell from the light-year look in his blue eyes that he’d conned his remedial psycher out of some pills.

He went on, ‘The whole Earth is one great metal machine, a dull steel marble amongst the aggies and glassies of the other planets. If anyone ever went out there with earth-eyes and not a spaceman’s, he’d see it rolling along, over and over, like a great silver shop-made tumblebug spotted with cities and wet here and there with oceans, blinking the eyes of its ice-caps and smoking its volcanos and folding and unfolding its harrow-footed space-crazy legs in time with the phases of the moon. And if you looked real close you’d see millions of fleas jumpin’ off it and beginning the long fall to the nadir.“

At that moment the TV jumped to a 24-hour satellite starward of Terra and showed us the whole moonlit Earth backed by the Milky Way, as if snared by a diamond-dewy spiderweb. Ma squeaked a proud sigh at Harry’s words thus coming out illustrated.

“Will you take the job?” Tom rasped at me.

“Tomorrow I will for sure,” I told him. “And that’s all the answer you’ll ever get from me—tomorrow or any other day.”

Ma tapped her hoof and flashed a rageful eye at me. “Tom,” she said to him, “if Meaghan scorns it, how about Harry? Think of it, Harry, you always claim you want to be alone. Roaming those cool tunnels and sewers all by yourself except for some witless machine you’ll catch onto in ten minutes. You’ll have all the time and quiet in the world to create your poetry. Why, underground your poetry will sprout like roots, I’m sure, and run fast as crabgrass.”

“Ma,” Harry said, “sooner than take that job I’d head for Beats-ville today rather than tomorrow.”

“You wouldn’t do that, Harry,” Ma wailed menacingly. ‘Tell me you wouldn’t.“ Ma’s always prided herself that no matter how slum-tike we live and close to Beatsville, we’d never get there. In Beats-ville they pretend even worse than in the suburbs, pretend to be supermen and pretend to be animals, and creep each night to the electrified boundary to pick up the food and drink left for them.

But Harry nodded again and then Ma began yelling at Tom that he was trying to break up what was left of her family, having splintered himself off first. Whitey came alive and flapped his hands at her cautiously, like a torero ready to jump the fence. I slitted my eyes as if I were falling asleep. Tom got red as Ma and said the hell with us, he was going for good. So Ma stamped this way and that, now roaring at Harry and me for our sloth, now bellowing at Tom for his disloyalty. Then she lifted her arms to heaven and froze.

At that instant the beetle-man popped into the doorway and pointed his antennae at her. No one saw him but me.

Tom’s face grew redder and he gave a snort and turned on his heel toward the door just as the beetle-man ducked out of sight. Tom had no sooner stamped out than the beetle-man popped in again be-hind him, waving a gray-black transparency he’d whipped from his black belly-box.

“Mrs. Henley,” he piped rapidly, “I got a perfect shot of all your insides, but that’s all that’s perfect about it. You must come to the clinic right away with me. Your heart’s like a watermelon and your aorta and pulmonary like summer squash.” He waggled a finger at me. “Diagnosis by a medspector is permissible in dire emergencies.”

Ma’s face went purple. At that instant I felt the building quiver from the top down and a heartbeat later something burst through the awning and struck Tom as if he were a very thick spike and it a hammer driving him into the ground.

Ma screamed a great single scream and took a step forward and then stiffened and fell back, and I caught her in my arms and lowered her to the floor and pillowed her head. Outside I could hear the beetle-man buzzing into his neckphone for an ambulance like the fool he was—for Tom’s head was smashed to the neck. Then I was wondering how Tom’s blood could have got on Ma, for there was blood on her chest and then more and more of it, like a bull fallen from the final thrust and pumping his heart out, and then I realized it was Ma’s blood from her lungs, gurgling with her Cheyne-Stokes breathing.

Whitey came fluttering down at her other side.

Harry was standing looking at us and he was trembling, and then we heard the siren far off, and then another, and then the two of them coming closer fast, and as they came closer and their angry wailing grew louder, Harry began to tremble more, and as their sound burst into the open of the razed blocks, he cried, “I’m off to Beatsville,” and he was sprinting by the time he went through the door.

I knew what was coming, although there was nothing I could do but hold Ma. Then I knew that what was coming had come, for there was a shout and a great squealing of brakes and a scream and a thud and the brakes still squealing.

Then Ma stopped breathing, but she still looked angry.

It was a long time before anyone came in. I went on holding Ma and wiping her face clean, though it stayed red for all that. I heard one ambulance leave and then the other. Finally a doctor came in, and the beetle-man too, and the doctor looked at Ma and shook his head and said that if only she’d been med-checked regularly it need never have happened, but I told him, “You didn’t know Ma.” And the beetle-man buzzed into his neckphone for an ambulance back.

I said chokily, “She died brave, charging the muleta dead on, and I’m damned if I’ll award society a single hoof of her, let alone the horns or the tail.” No one got it. The beetle-man eyed me and took a surreptitious note.

Then for a while I was signing papers and listening to this and that, but finally they were all gone, the living and dead, and I was alone with Whitey and I remembered we ought to tell Dick.

The TV was showing a great musical review with hundreds of highly talented actors and actresses, all of them seven-job folk and this the eighth job for all of them. Flights of smiles were going back and forth across the screen, like seagulls wheeling at sunset.

The concrete cornflakes were still pattering on the awning. I marched us straight under the hole the rock had made that killed Tom, and they pelted on our hair and shoulders and necks like feathery hail.

We climbed the flake-drift and I paused and turned around. The giant centipedes were busily crawling back and forth, the one swinging aside most cleverly to let the other pass. They’d chewed their way here and there down to the second floor.

I looked down to our shadowed doorway with the faintest flicker of TV still coming out of it, and I thought I’d like to drive a nail a mile long down through the center of that room, pinning it there forever, and engrave in the head of the nail, in letters a foot deep, “A Family Lived Here.”

But that was a little beyond the scope of my engineering, so, pushing Whitey ahead of me, off I went to tell Dick, laughing and crying.

I AM RETURNING to England. I am shorthanding this, July 5, 2000, aboard the Dallas-London rocket as it arches silently out of the diffused violet daylight of the stratosphere into the eternally star-spangled purpling night of the ionosphere.

I have refused the semester instructorship in poetry at UTD, which would have munificently padded my honorarium for delivering the Lanier Lectures and made me for four months second only to the Poet in Residence.