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

came along below, made the ride rhythmically bumpy, you see. I remembered how lonely and strange that old sleeping car had seemed to me as a kid. This felt the same. I kept waiting for a hoot or a whistle. It was the sort of loneliness that settles in your bones and keeps working at you.

“I recall the first man I ever killed⁠—” Pop started to reminisce softly.

“Shut up!” Alice told him. “Don’t you ever talk about anything but murder, Pop?”

“Guess not,” he said. “After all, it’s the only really interesting topic there is. Do you know of another?”

It was silent in the cabin for a long time after that. Then Alice said, “It was the afternoon before my twelfth birthday when they came into the kitchen and killed my father. He’d been wise, in a way, and had us living at a spot where the bombs didn’t touch us or the worst fallout. But he hadn’t counted on the local werewolf gang. He’d just been slicing some bread⁠—homemade from our own wheat (Dad was great on back to nature and all)⁠—but he laid down the knife.

“Dad couldn’t see any object or idea as a weapon, you see⁠—that was his great weakness. Dad couldn’t even see weapons as weapons. Dad had a philosophy of cooperation, that was his name for it, that he was going to explain to people. Sometimes I think he was glad of the Last War, because he believed it would give him his chance.

“But the werewolves weren’t interested in philosophy and although their knives weren’t as sharp as Dad’s they didn’t lay them down. Afterwards they had themselves a meal, with me for dessert. I remember one of them used a slice of bread to sop up blood like gravy. And another washed his hands and face in the cold coffee⁠ ⁠…”

She didn’t say anything else for a bit. Pop said softly, “That was the afternoon, wasn’t it, that the fallen angels⁠ ⁠…” and then just said, “My big mouth.”

“You were going to say ‘the afternoon they killed God?’ ” Alice asked him. “You’re right, it was. They killed God in the kitchen that afternoon. That’s how I know he’s dead. Afterwards they would have killed me too, eventually, except⁠—”

Again she broke off, this time to say, “Pop, do you suppose I can have been thinking about myself as the Daughter of God all these years? That that’s why everything seems so intense?”

“I don’t know,” Pop said. “The religious boys say we’re all children of God. I don’t put much stock in it⁠—or else God sure has some lousy children. Go on with your story.”

“Well, they would have killed me too, except the leader took a fancy to me and got the idea of training me up for a Weregirl or She-wolf Deb or whatever they called it.”

“That was my first experience of ideas as weapons. He got an idea about me and I used it to kill him. I had to wait three months for my opportunity. I got him so lazy he let me shave him. He bled to death the same way as Dad.”

“Hum,” Pop commented after a bit, “that was a chiller, all right. I got to remember to tell it to Bill⁠—it was somebody killing his mother that got him started. Alice, you had about as good a justification for your first murder as any I remember hearing.”

“Yet,” Alice said after another pause, with just a trace of the old sarcasm creeping back into her voice, “I don’t suppose you think I was right to do it?”

“Right? Wrong? Who knows?” Pop said almost blusteringly. “Sure you were justified in a whole pack of ways. Anybody’d sympathize with you. A man often has fine justification for the first murder he commits. But as you must know, it’s not that the first murder’s always so bad in itself as that it’s apt to start you on a killing spree. Your sense of values gets shifted a tiny bit and never shifts back. But you know all that and who am I to tell you anything, anyway? I’ve killed men because I didn’t like the way they spit. And may very well do it again if I don’t keep watching myself and my mind ventilated.”

“Well, Pop,” Alice said, “I didn’t always have such dandy justification for my killings. Last one was a moony old physicist⁠—he fixed me the Geiger counter I carry. A silly old geek⁠—I don’t know how he survived so long. Maybe an exile or a runaway. You know, I often attach myself to the elderly do-gooder type like my father was. Or like you, Pop.”

Pop nodded. “It’s good to know yourself,” he said.

There was a third pause and then, although I hadn’t exactly been intending to, I said, “Alice had justification for her first murder, personal justification that an ape would understand. I had no personal justification at all for mine, yet I killed about a million people at a modest estimate. You see, I was the boss of the crew that took care of the hydrogen missile ticketed for Moscow, and when the ticket was finally taken up I was the one to punch it. My finger on the firing button, I mean.”

I went on, “Yeah, Pop, I was one of the button-pushers. There were really quite a few of us, of course⁠—that’s why I get such a laugh out of stories about being or rubbing out the one guy who pushed all the buttons.”

“That so?” Pop said with only mild-sounding interest. “In that case you ought to know⁠—”

We didn’t get to hear right then who I ought to know because I had a fit of coughing and we realized the cigarette smoke was getting just too thick. Pop fixed the door so it was open a crack and after a while the atmosphere got reasonably okay though we had to put up with a low lonely whistling sound.

“Yeah,” I continued, “I was the boss of the missile crew and I wore a