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

I have to do is crawl out my bedroom window and along the gutter a little ways. It’s safe as houses.”

The Professor’s question beginning with, “Son, how do you know⁠—” died unuttered and he refused to notice the words his daughter was voicing silently at her brother. He glanced at his wife’s sardonically composed face, thought once more of the Fire Department and of other and larger and even more jealous⁠—or would it be skeptical?⁠—government agencies, and clutched at the straw offered him.

Ten minutes later, he was quite unnecessarily assisting his son back through the bedroom window.

“Gee, Pop, I couldn’t see a sign of him. That’s why I took so long. Hey, Pop, don’t look so scared. He’s in there, sure enough. It’s just that the bathtub’s under the window and you have to get real close up to see into it.”

“The Martian’s taking a bath?”

“Yep. Got it full up and just the end of his little old schnozzle sticking out. Your suit, Pop, was hanging on the door.”

The one word the Professor’s Wife spoke was like a death knell.

“Drowned!”

“No, Ma, I don’t think so. His schnozzle was opening and closing regular like.”

“Maybe he’s a shape-changer,” the Professor’s Coltish Daughter said in a burst of evil fantasy. “Maybe he softens in water and thins out after a while until he’s like an eel and then he’ll go exploring through the sewer pipes. Wouldn’t it be funny if he went under the street and knocked on the stopper from underneath and crawled into the bathtub with President Rexford, or Mrs. President Rexford, or maybe right into the middle of one of Janey Rexford’s Oh-I’m-so-sexy bubble baths?”

“Please!” The Professor put his hand to his eyebrows and kept it there, cuddling the elbow in his other hand.

“Well, have you thought of something?” the Professor’s Wife asked him after a bit. “What are you going to do?”

The Professor dropped his hand and blinked his eyes hard and took a deep breath.

“Telegraph Fenchurch and Ackerly-Ramsbottom and then break in,” he said in a resigned voice, into which, nevertheless, a note of hope seemed also to have come. “First, however, I’m going to wait until morning.”

And he sat down cross-legged in the hall a few yards from the bathroom door and folded his arms.

So the long vigil commenced.

The Professor’s family shared it and he offered no objection. Other and sterner men, he told himself, might claim to be able successfully to order their children to go to bed when there was a Martian locked in the bathroom, but he would like to see them faced with the situation.

Finally dawn began to seep from the bedrooms. When the bulb in the hall had grown quite dim, the Professor unfolded his arms.

Just then, there was a loud splashing in the bathroom. The Professor’s family looked toward the door. The splashing stopped and they heard the Martian moving around. Then the door opened and the Martian appeared in the Professor’s gray pinstripe suit. His mouth curled sharply downward in a broad alien smile as he saw the Professor.

“Good morning!” the Martian said happily. “I never slept better in my life, even in my own little wet bed back on Mars.”

He looked around more closely and his mouth straightened. “But where did you all sleep?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you stayed dry all night! You didn’t give up your only bed to me?”

His mouth curled upward in misery. “Oh, dear,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake somehow. Yet I don’t understand how. Before I studied you, I didn’t know what your sleeping habits would be, but that question was answered for me⁠—in fact, it looked so reassuringly homelike⁠—when I saw those brief TV scenes of your females ready for sleep in their little tubs. Of course, on Mars, only the fortunate can always be sure of sleeping wet, but here, with your abundance of water, I thought there would be wet beds for all.”

He paused. “It’s true I had some doubts last night, wondering if I’d used the right words and all, but then when you rapped ‘Good night’ to me, I splashed the sentiment back at you and went to sleep in a wink. But I’m afraid that somewhere I’ve blundered and⁠—”

“No, no, dear chap,” the Professor managed to say. He had been waving his hand in a gentle circle for some time in token that he wanted to interrupt. “Everything is quite all right. It’s true we stayed up all night, but please consider that as a watch⁠—an honor guard, by George!⁠—which we kept to indicate our esteem.”

Bread Overhead

As a blisteringly hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy Products (“Spike to Loaf in One Operation!”) began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.

The walking mills resembled fat metal serpents, rather larger than those Chinese paper dragons animated by files of men in procession. Sensory robot devices in their noses informed them that the waiting wheat had reached ripe perfection.

As they advanced, their heads swung lazily from side to side, very much like snakes, gobbling the yellow grain. In their throats, it was threshed, the chaff bundled and burped aside for pickup by the crawl trucks of a chemical corporation, the kernels quick-dried and blown along into the mighty chests of the machines. There the tireless mills ground the kernels to flour, which was instantly sifted, the bran being packaged and dropped like the chaff for pickup. A cluster of tanks which gave the metal serpents a decidedly humpbacked appearance added water, shortening, salt and other ingredients, some named and some not. The dough was at the same time infused with gas from a tank conspicuously labeled “Carbon Dioxide” (“No Yeast Creatures in Your Bread!”).

Thus instantly risen, the dough was clipped into loaves and shot into radionic ovens forming the midsections of the metal serpents. There the bread was baked in a matter of seconds,