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

and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: “Hi, Butch! Sic ’em, Darter, sic ’em!”

A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch’s gray dog.

Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice: “Kill ’em, Brute.”

The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.

Butch yawned.

“What’s the matter?” inquired Darter’s master. “I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.”

“I do like dog fights,” Butch said somberly, without looking around. “I don’t like uninj fights. They’re just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy⁠—and you, too, Hal⁠—when you talk to me, don’t just say Butch. It’s the Butcher, see?”

“That’s not exactly a functional name,” Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: “All right, Butcher, I suppose you’d like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?”

“I certainly would,” the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.

“A kid can’t do anything any more,” he announced dramatically. “Can’t break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can’t get dirty except in the dirt-pen⁠—and they graduate him from that when he’s two. Can’t even be bitten by an uninj⁠—it’s contraprogrammed.”

“Where’d you ever get so fixated on dirt?” Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.

“I’ve been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,” the Butcher replied airily. “A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.” His eyes became dreamy. “He even ate out of a garbage pail.”

“What’s a garbage pail?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds great.”

The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.

“Aw, quit it, Brute,” the Butcher said in annoyance.

Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary’s efforts to renew the fight.

The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. “You’re making too much of a rumpus,” he said. “I want to think.”

He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.

“Look,” Joggy said, “you wouldn’t hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?”

“How can you hurt something that’s uninjurable?” the Butcher demanded scathingly. “An uninj isn’t really a dog. It’s just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.” He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.

“I don’t know about that,” Hal put in. “I’ve heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.”

“I mean if you could hurt an uninj,” Joggy amended.

“Well, maybe I wouldn’t,” the Butcher admitted grudgingly. “But shut up⁠—I want to think.”

“About what?” Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.

The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. “When I’m World Director,” he said slowly, “I’m going to have warfare again.”

“You think so now,” Hal told him. “We all do at your age.”

“We do not,” the Butcher retorted. “I bet you didn’t.”

“Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,” the older boy confessed readily. “All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That’s why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it’s just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can’t appreciate it this year, but Man’s greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You’ll realize that when you’re older.”

“I will not!” the Butcher countered hotly. “I’m not going to be a sissy.” Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. “And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?”

“The Space Fleet would take care of them,” Hal replied calmly. “That’s what it’s for. Adults aren’t conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where nonhuman enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.”

“But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?”

“They can’t. It’s impossible.”

“Yes, but suppose they did all the same.”

“You’ve never been inside the Time Theater⁠—you’re not old enough yet⁠—so you just can’t know anything about it or about the reasons why it’s impossible,” Hal replied with friendly factuality. “The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can’t travel through it because you can’t change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.”

“I don’t care,” the Butcher asserted obstinately. “I’m still going to have warfare when I’m World Director.”

“They’ll condition you out of the idea,” Hal assured him.

“They will not. I won’t let ’em.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think now,” Hal said with finality. “You’ll have an altogether different opinion when you’re six.”

“Well, what if I will?” the Butcher snapped back. “You don’t have to keep telling me about it, do you?”

The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: “Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?”

Butch scowled.

“How about it, Butch?”

Still Butch did not seem to hear.

The older boy shrugged and said: “Oh, well, how about it⁠—Butcher?”

The Butcher swung around. “They won’t let me in the