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

get that idea for a steel hospital?” Don’t think I was feeling anywhere near that gay. It was reaction, close to hysterical.

Pop was taken aback, but then he grinned. “I had a couple of clues that you and Alice didn’t,” he said. “I knew there was a very sick woman involved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever I told you. They’ve had a lot of trouble with it, I believe⁠—some say its spores come from outside the world with the cosmic dust⁠—and now it seems to have been carried to Atla-Hi. Let’s hope they’ve found the answer this time. Alice, maybe we’d better start getting some water into this gal.”

After a while we sat down and fitted the facts together more orderly. Pop did the fitting mostly. Alamos researchers must have been working for years on the plague as it ravaged intermittently, maybe with mutations and E.T. tricks to make the job harder. Very recently they’d found a promising treatment (cure, we hoped) and prepared it for rush shipment to Atla-Hi, where the plague was raging too and they were sieged in by Savannah as well. Grayl was picked to fly the serum, or drug or whatever it was. But he knew or guessed that this lone woman observer (because she’d fallen out of radio communication or something) had come down with the plague too and he decided to land some serum for her, probably without authorization.

“How do we know she’s his girlfriend?” I asked.

“Or wife,” Pop said tolerantly. “Why, there was that bag of woman’s stuff he was carrying, frilly things like a man would bring for a woman. Who else’d he be apt to make a special stop for?

“Another thing,” Pop said. “He must have been using jets to hurry his trip. We heard them, you know.”

That seemed about as close a reconstruction of events as we could get. Strictly hypothetical, of course. Deathlanders trying to figure out what goes on inside a “country” like Atla-Alamos and why are sort of like foxes trying to understand world politics, or wolves the Gothic migrations. Of course we’re all human beings, but that doesn’t mean as much as it sounds.

Then Pop told us how he’d happened to be on the scene. He’d been doing a “tour of duty,” as he called it, when he spotted this woman’s observatory and decided to hang around anonymously and watch over her for a few days and maybe help protect her from some dangerous characters that he knew were in the neighborhood.

“Pop, that sounds like a lousy idea to me,” I objected. “Risky, I mean. Spying on another person, watching them without their knowing, would be the surest way to stir up in me the idea of murdering them. Safest thing for me to do in that situation would be to turn around and run.”

“You probably should,” he agreed. “For now, anyway. It’s all a matter of knowing your own strength and stage of growth. Me, it helps to give myself these little jobs. And the essence of ’em is that the other person shouldn’t know I’m helping.”

It sounded like knighthood and pilgrimage and the Boy Scouts all over again⁠—for murderers. Well, why not?

Pop had seen this woman come out of the manhole a couple of times and look around and then go back down and he’d got the impression she was sick and troubled. He’d even guessed she might be coming down with Alamos fever. He’d seen us arrive, of course, and that had bothered him. Then when the plane landed she’d come up again, acting out of her head, but when she’d seen the Pilot and us going for him she’d given that scream and collapsed at the top of the shaft. He’d figured the only thing he could do for her was keep us occupied. Besides, now that he knew for sure we were murderers he’d started to burn with the desire to talk to us and maybe help us quit killing if we seemed to want to. It was only much later, in the middle of our trip, that he began to suspect that the steel cubes were jet hypodermics.

While Pop had been telling us all this, we hadn’t been watching the woman so closely. Now Alice called our attention to her. Her skin was covered with fine beads of perspiration, like diamonds.

“That’s a good sign,” Pop said and Alice started to wipe her off. While she was doing that the woman came to in a groggy sort of way and Pop fed her some thin soup and in the middle of his doing it she dropped off to sleep.

Alice said, “Any other time I would be wild to kill another woman that beautiful. But she has been so close to death that I would feel I was robbing another murderer. I suppose there is more behind the change in my feelings than that, though.”

“Yeah, a little, I suppose,” Pop said.

I didn’t have anything to say about my own feelings. Certainly not out loud. I knew that they had changed and that they were still changing. It was complicated.

After a while it occurred to me and Alice to worry whether we mightn’t catch this woman’s sickness. It would serve us right, of course, but plague is plague. But Pop reassured us. “Actually I snagged three cubes,” he said. “That should take care of you two. I figure I’m immune.”

Time wore on. Pop dragged out the harmonica, as I’d been afraid he would, but his playing wasn’t too bad. “Tenting Tonight,” “When Johnnie Comes Marching Home,” and such. We had a meal.

The Pilot’s woman woke up again, in her full mind this time or something like it. We were clustered around the bed, smiling a little I suppose and looking inquiring. Being even assistant nurses makes you all concerned about the patient’s health and state of mind.

Pop helped her sit up a little. She looked around. She saw me and Alice. Recognition came into her eyes. She