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

that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn’t until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren’t used to so much oxygen.

Funny thing, though⁠—I didn’t do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I’d had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me.

I sort of wished they’d all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out.

And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, “But I wouldn’t know how to act there and I haven’t any clothes.”

The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, “It just doesn’t seem right to let this fire go out.”

Well, the strangers are gone, but they’re coming back. It hasn’t been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a “survival school.” Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.

Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I’ve been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.

You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He’s been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.

“It’s different, now that we know others are alive,” he explains to me. “Your mother doesn’t feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.”

I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light.

“It’s not going to be easy to leave the Nest,” I said, wanting to cry, kind of. “It’s so small and there’s just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.”

He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.

“You’ll quickly get over that feeling son,” he said. “The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it’ll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning.”

I guess he’s right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I’ll be twenty in only ten years.

Dr. Kometevsky’s Day

“But it’s all predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets.”

Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title, The Dance of the Planets. There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn’t help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theodor.

He tried to come to her rescue. “Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often.”

“As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,” Celeste chimed in, but she couldn’t make it sound funny.

“Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury,” Theodor continued. “Well, nothing at all like that has happened.”

“But it’s begun,” Madge said with conviction. “Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can’t argue away that stubborn little fact.”

That was the trouble; you couldn’t. Mars’ two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren’t on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock⁠—the merest cosmic flyspecks⁠—yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.

Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced.

People must have felt like this, she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it’s worse for us, because they couldn’t see that anything had changed. We can.

“You need something to cling to,” she heard Madge say. “Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn’t even heard of the man.”

She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse.

“Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations⁠ ⁠…” Theodor