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

made a purchase at the drugstore. When he sat down beside Vivian, she took one look at him and gave a very deliberate-sounding hollow laugh.

“Black glasses!” she said. “I tell him he’s attractive because he has Flashing Eyes and within two days he’s wearing black glasses. I suppose I should have guessed it.”

“But my eyes hurt,” Ernie protested. “Sensitive to sunlight, I think.” He wished he could explain to her that he’d bought the glasses not only in case he got caught out at night, but also to convince his sister he hadn’t been lying about sore eyes. He hadn’t intended to wear them by day and hardly knew why he’d put them on before joining Vivian.

“Spare me your rationalizations,” she said. “Your motives are clear to me, Ernie, and they happen to be very commonplace.”

She leaned toward him and her voice, little more than a whisper, took on an unexpectedly gloomy, chilling, hopeless tone.

“See these people all around us, Ernie? They’re suicides, every one of them. Day by day, in every way, they’re killing themselves. People love them, admire them, and it only makes them uneasy. They have abilities and charms by the bushel⁠—yes, they do, even that man with the wen on his neck⁠—and they only try to hide them. The spotlight turns their way and they goof. They think they’re running away from failure, but actually they’re running away from success.”

Ernie looked at them, he couldn’t help it, her voice made him, and the ability of Page-at-a-Glance Reading chose that moment to come back to him, only applied to faces instead of letters, and there seemed to be another ability along with it, unclear as yet but frightening. He felt like a very old detective scanning the lineup for the thousandth time.

The black glasses didn’t interfere a bit⁠—the dozens of faces in this speeding electric car were suddenly as familiar as the court cards in a deck⁠—and he had the feeling that, like a bunch of pink pasteboards, they were about to be hurled in his face.

My God, he asked himself, flinching, how could you go on living with so many faces so close to you, so completely known?⁠—each street you turned into, each store you entered, each gathering you joined, another deluge of unique features. Ugly, pretty, strong, weak⁠—those words didn’t mean anything any more in this drenching of individuality he was getting, and that showed no signs of stopping.

So he hardly heard Vivian saying, “And it’s true of you, Ernie⁠—in spades, for your black glasses,” and he hardly remembered parting from her, and when he found himself alone he did something unprecedented for him at that time of day⁠—he went to a bar and drank two double whiskies.

The drinks brought the downtown landscape back to normal and stopped the faces printing themselves on his mind, but they left him very disturbed, and the suspiciousness with which he was treated at the office didn’t improve that, and Ernie began to wish for ordinariness and commonplaceness in himself more than anything in the whole world. If only, he silently implored, there were some way of junking everything that had happened to him in the past few weeks⁠—except maybe Vivian.

Verna on the train home positively terrified him. She was unusually talkative and engulfing this evening and he thought that if the faces-forever feeling came to him just as she was baring her food-triangles and all, he wouldn’t be able to stand it. Somehow, it didn’t. Yet the very intensity of his distaste frightened him. Not for the first time, the word “insanity” appeared in his mind, pulsing in pale yellowish-green.

Half a block from home, passing his parked car (with an unconscious little veer of avoidance), he spotted three figures in close conference in front of his house: his sister, a man in dark blue⁠—yes, Mr. Jones, and⁠ ⁠… a man in a white coat.

Almost before he knew it, he was in his car and driving away. He truly didn’t know what he was going to do, only that he was going to do it, and found a trivial interest in trying to guess what it was going to be. Whatever it was, it was going to dim that yellowish-green word, decrease its type-size, make him a little more able to face the crisis waiting him at home⁠ ⁠… or somewhere.

He had a picture of himself getting on an airplane, another of renting a room in a slum, another of stopping the car on a lonely, treeless country road and getting out and looking up to the coldly glimmering Milky Way⁠—why?

That last picture was the most vivid, and when he realized he had actually stopped his car, it was a moment before it would go away. Then he saw he was parked in front of a demolished old apartment building a few blocks from his home. Only yesterday he’d watched the last wall going down. Now, just across the littered sidewalk from him, the old cellar gaped, flimsily guarded in front by a makeshift rail and surrounded on the other three sides by great hillocks of battered bricks. Tomorrow probably (and in fact that was the way it happened) a bulldozer would tumble them forward, filling the cellar with old bricks and brick-dust, leveling the lot.

Now he knew what he was going to do. He unlatched the top over the windshield and pushed the button. Slowly the top folded back over his head, showing the smoke-dark sky, almost night. He hitched up a little in the seat, reached inside his coat, pulled out the blue box he always carried and pitched it into the dark pit across the sidewalk.

He was driving away almost before it landed. Yet through the hum of the motor he thought he heard something call faintly, “Goodbye.”

The material of the filled-in cellar stayed fairly dry for many years and the atom-bombing, when it finally came, created a partial surface-seal of fused stone over that area. However, the bicarb box fell apart in time; water reached it in little