Shortstories 1 E-Book

Fritz Leiber

• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: the green adventuresbook
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 207

Beschreibung

Fritz Leiber is one of the most widely read authors of fantasy. He is an author who was influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and influenced many authors himself. His most famous characters are Ffahrd and the gray mouser, as they are called in Germany. Leiber's work is characterized by diversity. He knew how to express himself with equal artistic energy and quality in different genres or to mix the genres - for example, horror with science fiction in the story The Oldest Soldier, 1960 (Engl. Nachhutgefechte, 1974) - seemingly effortlessly. Leiber did not see science fiction, horror, and fantasy as distinct genres, but rather as narrative possibilities that could be freely combined.

Leseprobe

Herausgeber

Erik Schreiber

Fritz Leiber

Shortstories 1

e-book 183

The Green Adventurebook 15

Fritz Leiber - Shortstories 1

Erstveröffentlichung:

Erste Auflage 01.10.2023

© Herausgeber Erik Schreiber

An der Laut 14

64404 Bickenbach

Titelbild: Simon Faulhaber

Vertrieb: neobooks

Herausgeber

Erik Schreiber

Fritz Leiber

Shortstories 1

Contents

Later Than You Think

What's he doing in there?

Bullet With His Name

Nice Girl With 5 Husbands

No Great Magic

The Last Letter

Later Than You Think

Obviously the Archeologist's study belonged to an era vastly distant from today. Familiar similarities here and there only sharpened the feeling of alienage. The sunlight that filtered through the windows in the ceiling had a wan and greenish cast and was augmented by radiation from some luminous material impregnating the walls and floor. Even the wide desk and the commodious hassocks glowed with a restful light. Across the former were scattered metal-backed wax tablets, styluses, and a pair of large and oddly formed spectacles. The crammed bookcases were not particularly unusual, but the books were bound in metal and the script on their spines would have been utterly unfamiliar to the most erudite of modern linguists. One of the books, lying open on a hassock, showed leaves of a thin, flexible, rustless metal covered with luminous characters. Between the bookcases were phosphorescent oil paintings, mainly of sea bottoms, in somber greens and browns. Their style, neither wholly realistic nor abstract, would have baffled the historian of art.

A blackboard with large colored crayons hinted equally at the schoolroom and the studio. In the center of the room, midway to the ceiling, hung a fish with irridescent scales of breathtaking beauty. So invisible was its means of support that--also taking into account the strange paintings and the greenish light--one would have sworn that the object was to create an underwater scene.

The Explorer made his entrance in a theatrical swirl of movement. He embraced the Archeologist with a warmth calculated to startle that crusty old fellow. Then he settled himself on a hassock, looked up and asked a question in a speech and idiom so different from any we know that it must be called another means of communication rather than another language. The import was, „Well, what about it?“

If the Archeologist were taken aback, he concealed it. His expression showed only pleasure at being reunited with a long-absent friend.

„What about what?“ he queried.

„About your discovery!“

„What discovery?“ The Archeologist's incomprehension was playful.

The Explorer threw up his arms. „Why, what else but your discovery, here on Earth, of the remains of an intelligent species? It's the find of the age! Am I going to have to coax you? Out with it!“

„I didn't make the discovery,“ the other said tranquilly. „I only supervised the excavations and directed the correlation of material. _You_ ought to be doing the talking. _You're_ the one who's just returned from the stars.“

„Forget that.“ The Explorer brushed the question aside. „As soon as our spaceship got within radio range of Earth, they started to send us a continuous newscast covering the period of our absence. One of the items, exasperatingly brief, mentioned your discovery. It captured my imagination. I couldn't wait to hear the details.“ He paused, then confessed, „You get so eager out there in space--a metal-filmed droplet of life lost in immensity. You rediscover your emotions....“ He changed color, then finished rapidly, „As soon as I could decently get away, I came straight to you. I wanted to hear about it from the best authority yourself.“

The Archeologist regarded him quizzically. „I'm pleased that you should think of me and my work, and I'm very happy to see you again. But admit it now, isn't there something a bit odd about your getting so worked up over this thing? I can understand that after your long absence from Earth, any news of Earth would seem especially important. But isn't there an additional reason?“

The Explorer twisted impatiently. „Oh, I suppose there is. Disappointment, for one thing. We were hoping to get in touch with intelligent life out there. We were specially trained in techniques for establishing mental contact with alien intelligent life forms. Well, we found some planets with life upon them, all right. But it was primitive life, not worth bothering about.“

Again he hesitated embarrassedly. „Out there you get to thinking of the preciousness of intelligence. There's so little of it, and it's so lonely. And we so greatly need intercourse with another intelligent species to give depth and balance to our thoughts. I suppose I set too much store by my hopes of establishing a contact.“ He paused. „At any rate, when I heard that what we were looking for, you had found here at home--even though dead and done for--I felt that at least it was something. I was suddenly very eager. It is odd, I know, to get so worked up about an extinct species--as if my interest could mean anything to them now--but that's the way it hit me.“

Several small shadows crossed the windows overhead. They might have been birds, except they moved too slowly.

„I think I understand,“ the Archeologist said softly.

„So get on with it and tell me about your discovery!“ the Explorer exploded.

„I've already told you that it wasn't my discovery,“ the Archeologist reminded him. „A few years after your expedition left, there was begun a detailed resurvey of Earth's mineral resources. In the course of some deep continental borings, one party discovered a cache--either a very large box or a rather small room--with metallic walls of great strength and toughness. Evidently its makers had intended it for the very purpose of carrying a message down through the ages. It proved to contain artifacts; models of buildings, vehicles, and machines, objects of art, pictures, and books--hundreds of books, along with elaborate pictorial dictionaries for interpreting them. So now we even understand their languages.“

„Languages?“ interrupted the Explorer. „That's queer. Somehow one thinks of an alien species as having just one language.“

„Like our own, this species had several, though there were some words and symbols that were alike in all their languages. These words and symbols seem to have come down unchanged from their most distant prehistory.“

The Explorer burst out, „I am not interested in all that dry stuff! Give me the wet! What were they like? How did they live? What did they create? What did they want?“

The Archeologist gently waved aside the questions. „All in good time. If I am to tell you everything you want to know, I must tell it my own way. Now that you are back on Earth, you will have to reacquire those orderly and composed habits of thought which you have partly lost in the course of your wild interstellar adventurings.“

„Curse you, I think you're just trying to tantalize me.“

The Archeologist's expression showed that this was not altogether untrue. He casually fondled an animal that had wriggled up onto his desk, and which looked rather more like an eel than a snake. „Cute little brute, isn't it?“ he remarked. When it became apparent that the Explorer wasn't to be provoked into another outburst, he continued, „It became my task to interpret the contents of the cache, to reconstruct its makers' climb from animalism and savagery to civilization, their rather rapid spread across the world's surface, their first fumbling attempts to escape from the Earth.“

„They had spaceships?“

„It's barely possible. I rather hope they did, since it would mean the chance of a survival elsewhere, though the negative results of your expedition rather lessen that.“ He went on, „The cache was laid down when they were first attempting space flight, just after their discovery of atomic power, in the first flush of their youth. It was probably created in a kind of exuberant fancifulness, with no serious belief that it would ever serve the purpose for which it was intended.“ He looked at the Explorer strangely. „If I am not mistaken, we have laid down similar caches.“

After a moment the Archeologist continued, „My reconstruction of their history, subsequent to the laying down of the cache, has been largely hypothetical. I can only guess at the reasons for their decline and fall. Supplementary material has been very slow in coming in, though we are still making extensive excavations at widely separated points. Here are the last reports.“ He tossed the Explorer a small metal-leaf pamphlet. It flew with a curiously slow motion.

„That's what struck me so queer right from the start,“ the Explorer observed, putting the pamphlet aside after a glance. „If these creatures were relatively advanced, why haven't we learned about them before? They must have left so many things--buildings, machines, engineering projects, some of them on a large scale. You'd think we'd be turning up traces everywhere.“

„I have four answers to that,“ the Archeologist replied. „The first is the most obvious. Time. Geologic ages of it. The second is more subtle. What if we should have been looking in the wrong place? I mean, what if the creatures occupied a very different portion of the Earth than our own? Third, it's possible that atomic energy, out of control, finished the race and destroyed its traces. The present distribution of radioactive compounds throughout the Earth's surface lends some support to this theory.

„Fourth,“ he went on, „it's my belief that when an intelligent species begins to retrogress, it tends to destroy, or, rather, debase all the things it has laboriously created. Large buildings are torn down to make smaller ones. Machines are broken up and worked into primitive tools and weapons. There is a kind of unraveling or erasing. A cultural Second Law of Thermodynamics begins to operate, whereby the intellect and all its works are gradually degraded to the lowest level of meaning and creativity.“

„But why?“ The Explorer sounded anguished. „Why should any intelligent species end like that? I grant the possibility of atomic power getting out of hand, though one would have thought they'd have taken the greatest precautions. Still, it could happen. But that fourth answer--it's morbid.“

„Cultures and civilizations die,“ said the Archeologist evenly. „That has happened repeatedly in our own history. Why not species? An individual dies--and is there anything intrinsically more terrible in the death of a species than in the death of an individual?“

He paused. „With respect to the members of this one species, I think that a certain temperamental instability hastened their end. Their appetites and emotions were not sufficiently subordinated to their understanding and to their sense of drama--their enjoyment of the comedy and tragedy of existence. They were impatient and easily incapacitated by frustration. They seem to have been singularly guilty in their pleasures, behaving either like gloomy moralists or gluttons.

„Because of taboos and an overgrown possessiveness,“ he continued, „each individual tended to limit his affection to a tiny family; in many cases he focused his love on himself alone. They set great store by personal prestige, by the amassing of wealth and the exercise of power. Their notable capacity for thought and manipulative activity was expended on things rather than persons or feelings. Their technology outstripped their psychology. They skimped fatally when it came to hard thinking about the purpose of life and intellectual activity, and the means for preserving them.“

Again the slow shadows drifted overhead.

„And finally,“ the Archeologist said, „they were a strangely haunted species. They seem to have been obsessed by the notion that others, greater than themselves, had prospered before them and then died, leaving them to rebuild a civilization from ruins. It was from those others that they thought they derived the few words and symbols common to all their languages.“

„Gods?“ mused the Explorer.

The Archeologist shrugged. „Who knows?“

The Explorer turned away. His excitement had visibly evaporated, leaving behind a cold and miserable residue of feeling. „I am not sure I want to hear much more about them,“ he said. „They sound too much like us. Perhaps it was a mistake, my coming here. Pardon me, old friend, but out there in space even _our_ emotions become undisciplined. Everything becomes indescribably poignant. Moods are tempestuous. You shift in an instant from zenith to nadir and remember, out there you can see both.

„I was very eager to hear about this lost species,“ he added in a sad voice. „I thought I would feel a kind of fellowship with them across the eons. Instead, I touch only corpses. It reminds me of when, out in space, there looms up before your prow, faint in the starlight, a dead sun. They were a young race. They thought they were getting somewhere. They promised themselves an eternity of effort. And all the while there was wriggling toward them out of that future for which they yearned ... oh, it's so completely futile and unfair.“

„I disagree,“ the Archeologist said spiritedly. „Really, your absence from Earth has unsettled you even more than I first surmised. Look at the matter squarely. Death comes to everything in the end. Our past is strewn with our dead. That species died, it's true. But what they achieved, they achieved. What happiness they had, they had. What they did in their short span is as significant as what they might have done had they lived a billion years. The present is always more important than the future. And no creature can have all the future--it must be shared, left to others.“

„Maybe so,“ the Explorer said slowly. „Yes, I guess you're right. But I still feel a horrible wistfulness about them, and I hug to myself the hope that a few of them escaped and set up a colony on some planet we haven't yet visited.“ There was a long silence. Then the Explorer turned back. „You old devil,“ he said in a manner that showed his gayer and more boisterous mood had returned, though diminished, „you still haven't told me anything definite about them.“

„So I haven't,“ replied the Archeologist with guileful innocence.

„Well, they were vertebrates.“

„Oh?“

„Yes. What's more, they were mammals.“

„Mammals? I was expecting something different.“

„I thought you were.“

The Explorer shifted. „All this matter of evolutionary categories is pretty cut-and-dried. Even a knowledge of how they looked doesn't mean much. I'd like to approach them in a more intimate way. How did they think of themselves? What did they call themselves? I know the word won't mean anything to me, but it will give me a feeling--of recognition.“

„I can't say the word,“ the Archeologist told him, „because I haven't the proper vocal equipment. But I know enough of their script to be able to write it for you as they would have written it. Incidentally, it is one of those words common to all their languages, that they attributed to an earlier race of beings.“

The Archeologist extended one of his eight tentacles toward the blackboard. The suckers at its tip firmly grasped a bit of orange crayon. Another of his tentacles took up the spectacles and adjusted them over his three-inch protruding pupils.

The eel-like glittering pet drifted back into the room and nosed curiously about the crayon as it traced:

RAT

What's he doing in there?

_He went where no Martian ever

went before--but would he come

out--or had he gone for good?_

The Professor was congratulating Earth's first visitor from another planet on his wisdom in getting in touch with a cultural anthropologist before contacting any other scientists (or governments, God forbid!), and in learning English from radio and TV before landing from his orbit-parked rocket, when the Martian stood up and said hesitantly, „Excuse me, please, but where is it?“

That baffled the Professor and the Martian seemed to grow anxious-at least his long mouth curved upward, and he had earlier explained that it curling downward was his smile--and he repeated, „Please, where is it?“

He was surprisingly humanoid in most respects, but his complexion wastextured so like the rich dark armchair he'd just been occupying that the Professor's pin-striped gray suit, which he had eagerly consented to wear, seemed an arbitrary interruption between him and the chair-a sort of Mother Hubbard dress on a phantom conjured from its leather.

The Professor's Wife, always a perceptive hostess, came to her husband's rescue by saying with equal rapidity, „Top of the stairs, end of the hall, last door.“

The Martian's mouth curled happily downward and he said, „Thank you very much,“ and was off.

Comprehension burst on the Professor. He caught up with his guest at the foot of the stairs.

„Here, I'll show you the way,“ he said.

„No, I can find it myself, thank you,“ the Martian assured him.

Something rather final in the Martian's tone made the Professor desist, and after watching his visitor sway up the stairs with an almost hypnotic softly jogging movement, he rejoined his wife in the study, saying wonderingly, „Who'd have thought it, by George! Function taboos as strict as our own!“

„I'm glad some of your professional visitors maintain 'em,“ his wife said darkly.

„But this one's from Mars, darling, and to find out he's--well, similar

in an aspect of his life is as thrilling as the discovery that water is

burned hydrogen. When I think of the day not far distant when I'll put

his entries in the cross-cultural index ...“

He was still rhapsodizing when the Professor's Little Son raced in.

„Pop, the Martian's gone to the bathroom!“

„Hush, dear. Manners.“

„Now it's perfectly natural, darling, that the boy should notice and be excited. Yes, Son, the Martian's not so very different from us.“

„Oh, certainly,“ the Professor's Wife said with a trace of bitterness. „I don't imagine his turquoise complexion will cause any comment at all when you bring him to a faculty reception. They'll just figure he's had a hard night--and that he got that baby-elephant nose sniffing around for assistant professorships.“

„Really, darling! He probably thinks of our noses as disagreeably amputated and paralyzed.“

„Well, anyway, Pop, he's in the bathroom. I followed him when he squiggled upstairs.“

„Now, Son, you shouldn't have done that. He's on a strange planet and it might make him nervous if he thought he was being spied on. We must show him every courtesy. By George, I can't wait to discuss these things with Ackerly-Ramsbottom! When I think of how much more this encounter has to give the anthropologist than even the physicist or astronomer ...“

He was still going strong on his second rhapsody when he was interrupted by another high-speed entrance. It was the Professor's Coltish Daughter. „Mom, Pop, the Martian's--„

„Hush, dear. We know.“

The Professor's Coltish Daughter regained her adolescent poise, which was considerable. „Well, he's still in there,“ she said. „I just tried the door and it was locked.“

„I'm glad it was!“ the Professor said while his wife added, „Yes, you can't be sure what--„ and caught herself. „Really, dear, that was very bad manners.“

„I thought he'd come downstairs long ago,“ her daughter explained. „He's been in there an awfully long time. It must have been a half hour ago that I saw him gyre and gimbal upstairs in that real gone way he has, with Nosy here following him.“ The Professor's Coltish Daughter was currently soaking up both jive and _Alice_.

When the Professor checked his wristwatch, his expression grew troubled. „By George, he is taking his time! Though, of course, we don't know how much time Martians ... I wonder.“

„I listened for a while, Pop,“ his son volunteered. „He was running the water a lot.“

„Running the water, eh? We know Mars is a water-starved planet. I suppose that in the presence of unlimited water, he might be seized by a kind of madness and ... But he seemed so well adjusted.“

Then his wife spoke, voicing all their thoughts. Her outlook on life gave her a naturally sepulchral voice.

„_What's he doing in there?_„

Twenty minutes and at least as many fantastic suggestions later, the Professor glanced again at his watch and nerved himself for action. Motioning his family aside, he mounted the stairs and tiptoed down the hall.

He paused only once to shake his head and mutter under his breath, „By George, I wish I had Fenchurch or von Gottschalk here. They're a shade better than I am on intercultural contracts, especially taboo-breakings and affronts ...“

His family followed him at a short distance.

The Professor stopped in front of the bathroom door. Everything was quiet as death.

He listened for a minute and then rapped measuredly, steadying his hand by clutching its wrist with the other. There was a faint splashing, but no other sound.

Another minute passed. The Professor rapped again. Now there was no response at all. He very gingerly tried the knob. The door was still locked.

When they had retreated to the stairs, it was the Professor's Wife who once more voiced their thoughts. This time her voice carried overtones of supernatural horror.

„_What's he doing in there?_„

„He may be dead or dying,“ the Professor's Coltish Daughter suggested briskly. „Maybe we ought to call the Fire Department, like they did for old Mrs. Frisbee.“

The Professor winced. „I'm afraid you haven't visualized the complications, dear,“ he said gently. „No one but ourselves knows that the Martian is on Earth, or has even the slightest inkling that interplanetary travel has been achieved. Whatever we do, it will have to be on our own. But to break in on a creature engaged in--well, we don't know what primal private activity--is against all anthropological practice. Still-„

„Dying's a primal activity,“ his daughter said crisply.

„So's ritual bathing before mass murder,“ his wife added.

„Please! Still, as I was about to say, we do have the moral duty to succor him if, as you all too reasonably suggest, he has been incapacitated by a germ or virus or, more likely, by some simple environmental factor such as Earth's greater gravity.“

„Tell you what, Pop--I can look in the bathroom window and see what he's doing. All I have to do is crawl out my bedroom window and along the gutter a little ways. It's safe as houses.“

The Professor's question beginning with, „Son, how do you know--„ died unuttered and he refused to notice the words his daughter was voicing silently at her brother. He glanced at his wife's sardonically composed face, thought once more of the Fire Department and of other and larger and even more jealous--or would it be skeptical?--government agencies, and clutched at the straw offered him.

Ten minutes later, he was quite unnecessarily assisting his son back through the bedroom window.

„Gee, Pop, I couldn't see a sign of him. That's why I took so long. Hey, Pop, don't look so scared. He's in there, sure enough. It's just that the bathtub's under the window and you have to get real close up to see into it.“

„The Martian's taking a bath?“

„Yep. Got it full up and just the end of his little old schnozzle sticking out. Your suit, Pop, was hanging on the door.“

The one word the Professor's Wife spoke was like a death knell.

„_Drowned!_„

„No, Ma, I don't think so. His schnozzle was opening and closing regular like.“

„Maybe he's a shape-changer,“ the Professor's Coltish Daughter said in a burst of evil fantasy. „Maybe he softens in water and thins out after a while until he's like an eel and then he'll go exploring through the sewer pipes. Wouldn't it be funny if he went under the street and knocked on the stopper from underneath and crawled into the bathtub with President Rexford, or Mrs. President Rexford, or maybe right into the middle of one of Janey Rexford's Oh-I'm-so-sexy bubble baths?“

„Please!“ The Professor put his hand to his eyebrows and kept it there, cuddling the elbow in his other hand.

„Well, have you thought of something?“ the Professor's Wife asked him after a bit. „What are you going to do?“

The Professor dropped his hand and blinked his eyes hard and took a deep breath.

„Telegraph Fenchurch and Ackerly-Ramsbottom and then break in,“ he said in a resigned voice, into which, nevertheless, a note of hope seemed also to have come. „First, however, I'm going to wait until morning.“

And he sat down cross-legged in the hall a few yards from the bathroom door and folded his arms.

So the long vigil commenced.