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

was Pop’s only comment. “I think I’m nuts myself and a murderer forever.” Alice glared at him for that admission, but it seemed to do us no damage. Pop really did seem out of his depth though during this part of our adventure, more out of his depth than even Alice and me⁠—I mean, as if he could only really function in the Deathland with Deathlanders and wanted to get anything else over quickly.

I think one reason Pop was that way was that he was feeling very intensely something I was feeling myself: a sort of sadness and bewilderment that beings as smart as the voice from the screen sounded should still be fighting wars. Murder, as you must know by now, I can understand and sympathize with deeply, but war?⁠—no!

Oh, I can understand cultural queers fighting city squares and even get a kick out of it and whoop ’em on, but these Atla-Hi and Alamos folk seemed a different sort of cat altogether (though I’d only come to that point of view today)⁠—the kind of cat that ought to have outgrown war or thought its way around it. Maybe Savannah Fortress had simply forced the war on them and they had to defend themselves. I hadn’t contacted any Savannans⁠—they might be as blood-simple as the Porterites. Still, I don’t know that it’s always a good excuse that somebody else forced you into war. That sort of justification can keep on until the end of time. But who’s a germ to judge?

A minute later I was feeling doubly like a germ and a very lowly one, because the situation had just got more difficult and depressing too⁠—the thing had happened that I said I’d tell you about in due course.

The voice was just repeating its instructions to Pop on making the drop, when it broke off of a sudden and a second voice came in, a deep voice with a sort of European accent (not Chinese, oddly)⁠—not talking to us, I think, but to the first voice and overlooking or not caring that we could hear.

“Also tell them,” the second voice said, “that we will blow them out of the sky the instant they stop obeying us! If they should hesitate to make the drop or if they should put a finger on the button that reverses their course, then⁠—pouf! Such brutes understand only the language of force. Also warn them that the blocks are atomic grenades that will blow them out of the sky too if⁠—”

“Dr. Kovalsky, will you permit me to point out⁠—” the first voice interrupted, getting as close to expressing irritation as I imagine it ever allowed itself to do. Then both voices cut off abruptly and the screen was silent for ten seconds or so. I guess the first voice thought it wasn’t nice for us to overhear Atla-Hi bickering with itself, even if the second voice didn’t give a damn (any more than a farmer would mind the pigs overhearing him squabble with his hired man; of course this guy seemed to overlook that we were killer-pigs, but there wasn’t anything we could do in that line just now except get burned up).

When the screen came on again, it was just the first voice talking once more, but it had something to say that was probably the result of a rapid conference and compromise.

“Attention, everyone! I wish to inform you that the plane in which you are traveling can be exploded⁠—melted in the air, rather⁠—if we activate a certain control at this end. We will not do so, now or subsequently, if you make the drop when we give the signal and if you remain on your present course until then. Afterwards you will be at liberty to reverse your course and escape as best you may. Let me re-emphasize that when you told me you had taken over for Grayl I accepted that assertion in full faith and still so accept it. Is that all fully understood?”

We all told him “Yes,” though I don’t imagine we sounded very happy about it, even Pop. However I did get that funny feeling again that the voice was being really sincere⁠—an illusion, I supposed, but still a comforting one.

Now while all these things were going on, believe it or not, and while the plane continued to bullet through the orange haze⁠—which hadn’t shown any foreign objects in it so far, thank God, even vultures, let alone “straight strings of pink stars”⁠—I was receiving a cram course in gunnery! (Do you wonder I don’t try to tell this part of my story consecutively?)

It turned out that Alice had been brilliantly right about one thing: if you pushed some of the buttons simultaneously in patterns of five they unlocked and you could play on them like organ keys. Two sets of five keys, played properly, would rig out a sight just in front of the viewport and let you aim and fire the plane’s main gun in any forward direction. There was a rearward firing gun too, that you aimed by changing over the World Screen to a rear-view TV window, but we didn’t get around to mastering that one. In fact, in spite of my special talents it was all I could do to achieve a beginner’s control over the main gun, and I wouldn’t have managed even that except that Alice, from the thinking she’d been doing about patterns of five, was quick at understanding from the voice’s descriptions which buttons were meant. She couldn’t work them herself of course, what with her stump and burnt hand, but she could point them out for me.

After twenty minutes of drill I was a gunner of sorts, sprawled in the right-hand kneeling seat and intently scanning the onrushing orange haze which at last was beginning to change toward the bronze of evening. If something showed up in it I’d be able to make a stab at getting a shot in. Not that I knew what my gun fired⁠—the