The Best of Fritz Leiber (45 page)

She did not come into my room, but after a pause during which I sat up jerkily and she became again a shadow, she beckoned to me.

I snatched up my dressing gown and followed her as she moved noiselessly down the hall. My throat was dry and constricted, my heart was pounding a little, with apprehension as well as excitement. I realized that despite my near week with the Grissims, a part of my mind was still thinking of the professor and his wife as a strait-laced colonel and his lady from a century ago, when so many retired army officers lived in villas around San Antonio, as they do now too around the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area.

Emily’s bedroom was not the austere silver cell or self-shrine I had sometimes imagined, especially when she was scoring a point against me, but an almost cluttered museum-workshop of present interests and personal memorabilia. She’d even kept her kindergarten study-machine, her first CO
₂
pistol, and a hockey stick, along with mementos from her college days and her Peace Corps tours.

But those I noticed much later. Now pale golden light from a rising full moon, coming through the great view window, brimmed the room. I had just enough of my wits left to recall that the real moon was new, so that this must be a tape of some past night. I never even thought of the Communist and American forts up there, with their bombs earmarked for Earth. Then, standing straight and tall and looking me full in the eyes, like some Amazonian athlete, or Phryne before her judges, Emily let her kimono glide down from her shoulders.

In the act of love she was energetic, but tender. No, the word is courteous, I think. I very happily shed a week of tensions and uncertainties and self-inflicted humiliations.

“You still think I’m a puritan, don’t you?” she softly asked me afterward, smiling at me sideways with the smeared remains of her crimson mouth, her gray eyes enigmatic blurs of shadow.

“Yes, I do,” I told her forthrightly. “The puritan playing the hetaera, but still the puritan.”

She answered lazily, “I think you like to play the Hun raping the vestal virgin.”

That made me talk dirty to her. She listened attentively—almost famishedly, I thought, for a bit—but her final comment was “You do that very well, dear,” just before using her lips to stop mine, which would otherwise have sulphurously cursed her insufferable poise.

Next morning I started to write a poem about her but got lost in analysis and speculation. Tried too soon, I thought.

Although they were as gracious and friendly as ever, I got the impression that the other Grissims had quickly become aware of the change in Emily’s and my relationship. Perhaps it was that they showed a slight extra fondness toward me. I don’t know how they guessed—Emily was as cool as always in front of them, while I kept trying to play myself, as before. Perhaps it was that the argument about puritanism was never resumed.

Two evenings afterward the talk came around to Jack’s and Emily’s elder brother Jeff, who had fallen during the Great Retreat from Jammu and Kashmir to Baluchistan. It was mentioned that during his last furlough they had been putting up an exchange instructor from Yugoslavia, a highly talented young sculptress. I gathered that she and Jeff had been quite close.

“I’m glad Jeff knew her love,” Emily’s mother said calmly, a tear behind her voice, though not on her cheeks. “I’m very glad he had that.” The professor unobtrusively put his hand on hers.

I fancied that this remark was directed at me and was her way of giving her blessing to Emily’s and my affair. I was touched and at the same time irritated—and also irritated at myself for feeling irritated. Her remark had brought back the shadows, which darkened further when Jack said a touch grimly and for once with a soldier’s callousness, though grinning at me to remove any possible offense, “Remember not to board any more lady artists or professors, mother, at least when I’m on leave. Bad luck.”

By now I was distinctly bothered by my poetry block. The last lectures were going swimmingly and I ought to have been feeling creative, but I wasn’t. Or rather, I was feeling creative but I couldn’t create. I had also begun to notice the way I was fitting myself to the Grissim family—muting myself, despite all the easiness among us. I couldn’t help wondering if there weren’t a connection between the two things. I had received the instructorship offer, but was delaying my final answer.

After we made love together that night—under a sinking crescent moon, the real night this time, repeated from above—I told Emily about my first trouble only. She pressed my hand. “Never stop writing poetry, dear,” she said. “America needs poetry. This family—”

That broken sentence was as close as we ever got to talking about marriage. Emily immediately recovered herself with an uncharacteristically ribald “Cheer up. I don’t even charge a poem for admission.”

Instead of responding to that cue, I worried my subject. “I should be able to write poetry here,” I said. “America is beautiful, the great golden apple of the Hesperides, hanging in the west like the setting sun. But there’s a worm in the core of that apple, a great scaly black dragon.”

When Emily didn’t ask a question, I went on, “I remember an advertisement. ‘Join all your little debts into one big debt.’ Of course, they didn’t put it so baldly, they made it sound wonderful. But you Americans are like that. You’ve collected all your angers into one big anger. You’ve removed your angers from things at home—where you seem to have solved your problems very well, I must admit— and directed those angers at the Communist League. Or instead of angers, I could say fears. Same thing.”

Emily still didn’t comment, so I continued, “Take the basic neurotic. He sets up a program of perfection for himself—a thousand obligations, a thousand ambitions. As long as he works his program, fulfilling those obligations and ambitions, he does very well. In fact, he’s apt to seem like a genius of achievement to those around him, as America does to me. But there’s one big problem he always keeps out of his program and buries deep in his unconscious—the question of who he really is and what he really wants—and in the end it always throws him.”

Then at last Emily said, speaking softly at first, “There’s something I should tell you, dear. Although I talk a lot of it from the top of my mind, deep down I loathe discussing politics and international relations. As my old colonel used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter much which side you fight on, Emily, so long as you have the courage to stand up and be counted. You pledge your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor, and you live up to that pledge!’ And now, dear, I want to sleep.”

Crouching on the edge of her bed before returning to my room, and listening to her breathing regularize itself, I thought, “Yes, you’re looking for nirvana too. Like Jack.” But I didn’t wake her to say it, or any of the other things that were boiling up in my brain.

Yet the things I left unsaid must have stayed and worked in my mind, for at our next fireside talk—four pleasant Americans, one Englishman with only one more lecture to go—I found myself launched into a rather long account of the academic Russian family I stayed with while delivering the Pushkin Lectures in Leningrad, where the smog and the minorities problems have been licked too. I stressed the Rosanovs’ gentility, their friendliness, the tolerance and sophistication which had replaced the old rigid insistence on
kulturny
behavior, and also the faint melancholy underlying and somehow vitiating all they said. In short, I did everything I knew to underline their similarity to the Grissims. I ended by saying “Professor Grissim, the first night we talked, you said America’s achievement had been due almost entirely to the sweep of science, technology, and computerized civilization. The people of the Communist League believe that too—hi fact, they made their declaration of faith earlier than America.”

“It’s very strange,” he mused, nodding. “So like, yet so unlike. Almost as if the chemical atoms of the East were subtly different from those of the West. The very electrons—”

“Professor, you don’t actually think—”

“Of course not. A metaphor only.”

But whatever he thought, I don’t believe he felt it only as a metaphor.

Emily said sharply to me, “You left out one more similarity, the most important That they hate the Enemy with all their hearts and will never trust or understand him.”

I couldn’t find an honest and complete answer to that, though I tried.

The next day I made one more attempt to turn my feelings into poetry, dark poetry, and I failed. I made my refusal of the instructor-ship final, confirmed my reservation on the Dallas-London rocket for day after tomorrow, and delivered the last of the Lanier Lectures.

The Fourth of July was a quiet day. Emily took me on a repeat of our first scooter jaunt, but although I relished the wind on my face and our conversation was passably jolly and tender, the magic was gone. I could hardly see America’s beauty for the shadows my mind projected on it.

Our fireside conversation that night was as brightly banal. Midway we all went outside to watch the fireworks. It was a starry night, very clear of course, and the fireworks seemed vastly remote—transitory extra starfields of pink and green and amber. Their faint cracks and booms sounded infinitely distant, and needless to say, there was not a ribbon or whiff of chemical smoke. I was reminded of my last night in Leningrad with the Rosanovs after the Pushkin Lectures. We’d all strolled down the Kirovskiy Prospekt to the Bolshaya Neva, and across its glimmering waters watched the Vladivostok mail rocket take off from the Field of Mars up its ringed electric catapult taller far than the Eiffel Tower. That had been on a May Day.

Later that night I went for the first time by myself to Emily’s door and pressed its light-button. I was afraid she wouldn’t stop by for me and I needed her. She was in a taut and high-strung mood, unwilling to talk in much more than monosyllables, yet unable to keep still, pacing like a restless feline. She wanted to play in the view window the tape of a real battle in Bolivia with the original sounds too, muted down. I vetoed that and we settled for an authentic forest fire recorded in Alaska.

Sex and catastrophe fit. With the wild red light pulsing and flaring in the bedroom, casting huge wild shadows, and with the fire’s muted roar and hurricane crackle and explosions filling our ears, we made love with a fierce and desperate urgency that seemed almost—I am eternally grateful for the memory—as if it would last forever. Sex and a psychedelic trip also have their meeting point.

Afterward I slept like a sated tiger. Emily waited until dawn to wake me and shoo me back to my bedroom.

Next day all the Grissims saw me off. As we strolled from the silver station wagon to the landing area, Emily and I dropped a little behind. She stopped, hooked her arms around me, and kissed me with a devouring ferocity. The others walked on, too well bred ever to look back. The next moment she was her cool self again, sipping a reefer.

Now the rocketship is arching down. The stars are paling. There is a faint whistling as the air molecules of the stratosphere begin to carom off the titanium skin. We had only one flap, midway of freefall section of the trip, when we briefly accelerated and then decelerated to match, perhaps in order to miss a spy satellite or one of the atomic-headed watchdog rockets eternally circling the globe. The direction comes, “Secure seat harnesses.”

I just don’t know. Maybe I should have gone to America drunk as Dylan Thomas, but purposefully, bellowing my beliefs like the word or the thunderbolts of God. Maybe then I could have fought the shadows. No…

I hope Emily makes it to London. Perhaps there, against a very different background, with shadows of a different sort…

In a few more seconds the great jet will begin to brake, thrusting its hygienic, aseptic exhaust of helium down into the filthy cancerous London smog, and I will be home.

All I ever try to write is a good story with a good measure of strangeness in it. The supreme goddess of the universe is Mystery, and being well entertained is the highest joy.

I write my stories against backgrounds of science, history and fantasy worlds of swords and sorcery. I write about the intensely strange everyday human mind and the weird and occult—about which I am a skeptic yet which interest me vastly. I always try to be meticulously accurate in handling these backgrounds, to be sure of my facts no matter what fantastic stories I build from them.

The tales in this volume are predominantly science fantasy. They are arranged in the order in which they were first published, all except “Gonna Roll the Bones.” It seemed best to lead off with a story that displayed to advantage all my talents, such as they are. It was actually written next to the last of the twenty-two stories in this book.

I’m sure you’ll agree that authors’ remarks are egotistical effusions at best, so I’ll devote this space to telling a bit of the history of the stories—and to effusing egotistically.

“Gonna Roll the Bones” was written to a dull anticlimax and set aside for six months. After this fortuitous opportunity for subconscious growth, it was rewritten under pressure to meet the deadline of Harlan Ellison’s monumental anthology
Dangerous Visions
. The story luckily won the Hugo and Nebula novelette awards for 1967. Theodore Sturgeon said of it in a review, “Fritz Leiber is at his cadenced, ringing best in a completely successful blend of science fiction and myth, adventure and horror.”

“Sanity” and “Wanted—An Enemy” were done for
Astounding Stories
(now
Analog)
and its master editor John W. Campbell, Jr., who taught me more about plotting and motivation than any other individual. These two stories reflect my wry worries about war, pacifism, and world government.

“The Man Who Never Grew Young” seemed to write itself (Ray Bradbury told me he wished he’d written it. Do all
his
stories write themselves? I doubt it) for my first hardcover book, published by Arkham House and the ever-helpful August Derleth.

“The Ship Sails at Midnight” is the romantic tale of a love that was unconventional, at least then. The goddess Mystery makes an appearance, perhaps. I picked it as my best single story for a Derleth anthology.