Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

told the why of them, and through it all was the constant impression that we were dealing with human beings (I almost left out the “human” and I’m still not absolutely sure whether I shouldn’t) of vastly greater scope⁠—and probably intelligence too⁠—than ourselves.

And that was just the basic confusion, to give it a name. After a while the situation got more difficult, as I’ll try to tell in due course.

To begin with, it was extremely weird to plunge from a rather leisurely confab about a fairytale fellowship of non-practicing murderers into a shooting war between a violet blob and a dark red puddle on a shadowy fluorescent map. The voice didn’t throw any great shining lights on this topic, because after the first⁠—and perhaps unguarded⁠—revelation, we learned little more of the war between Atla-Hi and Savannah Fortress and nothing of the reasons behind it. Presumably Savannah was the aggressor, reaching out north after the conquest of Birmingham, but even that was just a guess. It is hard to describe how shadowy it all felt to me; there were some minutes while my mind kept mixing up the whole thing with what I’d read long ago about the Civil War: Savannah was Lee, Atla-Hi was Grant, and we had been dropped spang into the middle of the second Battle of the Wilderness.

Apparently the Savannah planes had some sort of needle ray as part of their armament⁠—at any rate I was warned to watch out for “swinging lines in the haze, like straight strings of pink stars” and later told to aim at the sources of such lines. And naturally I guessed that the steel cubes must be some crucial weapon for Atla-Hi, or ammunition for a weapon, or parts for some essential instrument like a giant computer, but the voice ignored my questions on that point and didn’t fall into the couple of crude conversational traps I tried to set. We were to drop the cubes when told, that was all. Pop had the box of them closed again and rigged to the parachute⁠—he took over that job because Alice and me were busy with other things when the instructions on that came through⁠—and he was told how to open the door of the plane for the drop (you just held your hand steadily on a point beside the door), but, as I say, that was all.

Naturally it occurred to me that once we had made the drop, Atla-Hi would have no more use for us and might simply let us be destroyed by Savannah or otherwise⁠—perhaps want us to be destroyed⁠—so that it might be wisest for us to refuse to make the drop when the signal came and hang onto those myriad steel cubes as our only bargaining point. Still, I could see no advantage to refusing before the signal came. I’d have liked to discuss the point with Alice and maybe Pop too, but apparently everything we said, even whispered, could be overheard by Atla-Hi. (We never did determine, incidentally, whether Atla-Hi could see into the cabin of the plane also. I don’t believe they could, though they sure had it bugged for sound.)

All in all, we found out almost nothing about Atla-Hi. In fact, three witless germs traveling in a cabin in an iron filing wasn’t a bad description of us at all. As I often say of my deductive faculties⁠—think⁠—shmink! But Atla-Hi (always meaning, of course, the personality behind the voice from the screen) found out all it wanted about us⁠—and apparently knew a good deal to start with. For one thing, they must have been tracking our plane for some time, because they guessed it was on automatic and that we could reverse its course but nothing else. Though they seemed under the impression that we could reverse its course to Los Alamos, not the cracking plant. Here obviously I did get a nugget of new data, though it was just about the only one. For a moment the voice from the screen got real unguarded⁠—anxious as it asked, “Do you know if it is true that they have stopped dying at Los Alamos, or are they merely broadcasting that to cheer us up?”

I answered, “Oh yes, they’re all fine,” to that, but I couldn’t have made it very convincing, because the next thing I knew the voice was getting me to admit that we’d only boarded the plane somewhere in the Central Deathlands. I even had to describe the cracking plant and freeway and gas tanks⁠—I couldn’t think of a lie that mightn’t get us into as much trouble as the truth⁠—and the voice said, “Oh, did Grayl stay there?” and I said, “Yes,” and braced myself to do some more admitting, or some heavy lying, as the inspiration took me.

But the voice continued to skirt around the question of what exactly had happened to Grayl. I guess they knew well enough we’d bumped him off, but didn’t bring it up because they needed our cooperation⁠—they were handling us like children or savages, you see.

One pretty amazing point⁠—Atla-Hi apparently knew something about Pop’s fairytale fellowship of non-practicing murderers, because when he had to speak up, while he was getting instructions on preparing the stuff for the drop, the voice said, “Excuse me, but you sound like one of those M.A. boys.”

Murderers Anonymous, Pop had said some of their boys called their unorganized organization.

“Yep, I am,” Pop admitted uncomfortably.

“Well, a word of advice then, or perhaps I only mean gossip,” the screen said, for once getting on a side track. “Most of our people do not believe you are serious about it, although you may think that you are. Our skeptics (which includes all but a very few of us) split quite evenly between those who think that the M.A. spirit is a terminal psychotic illusion and those who believe it is an elaborate ruse in preparation for some concerted attack on cities by Deathlanders.”

“Can’t say that I blame the either of them,”