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

“No,” she said, “I didn’t,” and she looked at him steadily, as she had that morning. He similarly retreated to driving.

Stopping for a railroad crossing, he braked too hard and the car stalled. His sister grabbed his arm. “I knew that was going to happen,” she said. “I knew that for some reason you lied to me when⁠—” The motor, starting readily again, cut short her remark and Ernie didn’t press his small triumph by asking her what she was about to say.

To tell the truth, Ernie wasn’t feeling as elated about today’s fifty-mile drive as he’d imagined he would. Now he thought he could put his finger on the reason: It was the completely⁠ ⁠… well, arbitrary way in which the white powder had come into his possession.

If he’d concocted it himself, or been given it by a shady promoter, or even seen the box fall out of the pocket of a suspicious-looking man in a trenchcoat, then he’d have felt more able to do something about it, whether in the general line of starting a fuel-powder company or of going to the F.B.I.

But just having the stuff drop into his hands from the sky, so to speak, as if in a crazy dream, and for that same reason not feeling able to talk about it and assure himself he wasn’t going crazy⁠ ⁠… oh, it is rough when you can’t share things, really rough; not being able to share depressing news corrodes the spirit, but not being able to share exciting news can sometimes be even more corroding.

Maybe, he told himself, he could figure out someone to tell. But who? And how? His mind shied away from the problem, rather decisively.

When he checked the blue box that night, the original sodium bicarbonate lettering had returned with all its humdrum paragraphs. Not one word about exhaust velocities.

From that moment, the fuel-powder became a trial to Ernie rather than a secret glory. He’d wake in the middle of the night doubting that he had ever really read the mind-dizzying lettering, ever really tested the stuff⁠—perhaps he’d bring from sleep the chilling notion that in the dimness and excitement of Saturday morning he’d put the water in some other car’s gas tank, perhaps Mr. Jones’s. He could usually argue such ideas away, but they kept coming back. And yet he did no more bathroom testing.

Of course the car still ran. He even fueled it once again with the garden hose, sniffing the nozzle to make sure it hadn’t somehow got connected to the basement furnace oil-tank. He picked three o’clock in the morning for the act, but nevertheless as he was returning indoors he heard a window in Mr. Jones’s house slam loudly. It unsettled him. Coming home the next day, he caught his sister and Mr. Jones consulting about something on the latter’s doorsteps, which unsettled him further.

He couldn’t decide on a safe place to keep the box and took to carrying it around with him day and night. Bill spotted it once down at the office and by an unhappy coincidence needed some bicarb just then for a troubled stomach. Ernie explained on the spur of the moment that he was using the box to carry plaster of Paris, which involved him in further lies that he felt were quite unconvincing as well as making him appear decidedly eccentric, even butter-brained. Bill took to calling him “the sculptor.”

Meanwhile, besides the problem of the white powder, Ernie was having other unsettling experiences, stemming (though of course he didn’t know that) from the other Gifts⁠—and not just the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading, though that still returned from time to time to shock his consciousness and send him hurrying for a few quick shots.

Like many another car-owning commuter, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems a bit too much for comfort and so used the fast electric train to carry him five times a week to the heart of the city. During those brief, swift, crowded trips Ernie, generally looking steadily out the window at the brown buildings and black stanchions whipping past, enjoyed a kind of anonymity and privacy more refreshing to his spirit than he realized. But now all that had been suddenly changed. People had started to talk to him; total strangers struck up conversations almost every morning and afternoon.

Ernie couldn’t figure out the reason and wasn’t at all sure he liked it⁠—except for Vivian.

She was the sort of girl Ernie dreamed about, improperly. Tall, blonde and knowing, excitedly curved but armored in a black suit, friendly and funny but given to making almost cruelly deflating remarks, as if the neatly furled short umbrella dangling from her wrist might better be a black dog whip.

She worked in an office too, a fancier one than Ernie’s, as he found out from their morning conversations. He hadn’t got to the point of asking her to lunch, but he was prodding himself.

Why such a girl should ever have asked him for a match in the first place and then put up with his clumsy babblings on subsequent mornings was a mystery to him. He finally asked her about it in what he hoped was a joking way, though she seemed to know a lot more about joking than he did.

“Don’t you know?” she countered. “I mean what makes you attractive to people?”

“Me attractive? No.”

“Well, I’ll tell you then, Ernie, and I’ve got to admit it’s something quite out of the ordinary. I’ve never noticed it in anyone else. Ernie, I’m sure your knowledge of romantic novels is shamefully deficient, it’s clear from your manners, but in the earlier ones⁠—not in style now⁠—the hero is described as tall, manly, broad-shouldered, Anglo-Saxon features, etcetera, etcetera, but there’s one thing he always has, something that sounds like poetic over-enthusiasm if you stop to analyze it, a physical impossibility, but that I have to admit you, Ernie, actually have. Flashing eyes.”

“Flashing eyes? Me?”

She nodded solemnly. He thought her long straight lips trembled on the