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

eagerly; somehow there was a special warmth about the friendships Ernie had made during the “strange weeks” (Verna and Vivian excepted) that put them in a different class from any other of his human relationships.

“Now what can I give you, Ernie?” Mr. Willis asked. “Anything in the place within reason.”

“I’ll tell you, Bert I’d like to go back in your dispensary⁠—you with me, if you want⁠—and just shop around.”

“That’s a sort of screwy idea, Ernie. I couldn’t sell you any narcotics or sleeping pills, of course⁠—well, maybe a few sleeping pills.”

“I wouldn’t want any.”

“What’s the idea, Ernie? Getting interested in chemistry in your old⁠ ⁠… You know, Ernie, you just don’t look your years.”

“Secret of mine. Yes, in a way I’ve got interested in chemistry.”

“Won’t talk, eh? I remember, when I first met you, I tagged you for an evening inventor. Well, come on back and shop around. Just don’t ask me for elixer vitae, aurum potabile, or ground philosophers’ stone.”

“Not unless I see ’em.”

Afterward, Bert Willis used to say it was one of the most mystifying experiences of his life. For a good half a day, Ernie Meeker studied the rows of jars, canisters and glass-stoppered bottles, sometimes lifting two down together and contemplating them, one in each hand, as if he could weigh the difference. Often he’d take out a stopper and sniff, and maybe, asking permission of Bert with a glance, take up a dab of some powder and taste it.

“You know that game,” Bert would say, “where someone goes out of the room and you all decide on an object, or hide one, and he comes back and tries to find it by telepathy or muscle-reading or something? That was exactly the way Ernie was acting. Dog on a difficult scent.”

A couple of times, especially when the customers came in, Bert wanted to chase him out, except that Ernie was such a special friend and Bert was so darn curious about it all himself.

In the end, Ernie made a good twenty purchases, including a mortar and pestle and two poisons for which Bert made him sign, though the amounts were less than a lethal dose.

“Actually none of the chemicals he bought were very dangerous,” Bert would say. “And none of them were terribly unusual. The thing about them was that, put together, they just didn’t make sense⁠—as a medicine or anything else. Let me see, there was sulphur, bismuth, a bit of mercury, one of the sulfa drugs, a tiny packet of auric chloride, and⁠ ⁠… I had ’em all on a list once, but I’ve lost it.”

After that, Ernie always mixed a little grayish paste in his cup of yogurt at suppertime.

Ernie stopped aging altogether.

After his sister’s coffin was lowered past the margins of green matting into the ground, Ernie shook hands with the minister, walked Bert Willis and Herman Schover to their car and told them he thought he’d better drive home with some relatives who’d turned up. Actually he just wanted to stay behind a while. It was a beautiful blue-and-white summer day; the tidy suburban cemetery had caught his fancy, and now he felt like a quiet stroll.

Ernie followed his little impulses these days. As he sometimes said, “I figure I’ve got plenty of time. I just don’t feel the pressure like I used to.”

The last car chugged away. Ernie stretched and started to stroll, slowly, but not like an old man, now that he was alone. His hair had grown whiter in the last few years and his face a little wrinkled, but that was due to the very judicious use of silvering and theatrical liner⁠—people’s comments about his youthfulness had gotten wearisome and would, he knew, eventually become suspicious.

Keeping himself oriented by a white tower at the cemetery gate, he arrived at an area that had no graves as yet, no trees either, just lawn. He made his way to the center of it, where there was a gently swelling hummock, and sat down in the warm crinkly grass, resting his back against the slope. The sky was lovely, enough clouds to be interesting, but a great oval of pure blue just overhead⁠—a pear-shaped gateway to space.

He felt no grief at his sister’s death, only the desire to think a bit, have a quiet look at his past and another at the great future.

Alone like this, he dared to face his fate for a moment and admit to himself that, all wishful thinking aside, it really began to look as if he were going to live forever, or at least for a very long time.

Live forever! That was a phrase to give you a chill, he told himself. And what to do, he asked himself, with all that time?

Back in the “strange weeks,” he’d have had little trouble in answering that question⁠—if only he’d known then what he did now and realized what was being offered him. For, during his sober decades, Ernie had gradually come to a shrewdly accurate estimate of what had happened to him then. He thought of it in terms of having been offered six Gifts and turned down five of them.

Back in the “strange weeks” and armed with the five rejected Gifts (Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were the only ones that counted, though), he could easily have said, “Live forever by all means! Increase your knowledge and understanding until your mind bursts or is transfigured. Plunge forever into the unending variety of the Cosmos. Open yourself to everything.”

But now, equipped to travel only as a snail⁠ ⁠…

Still, even snails get somewhere. With forever to work with, even four-words-at-a-glance gets you through many, many books. Patient love and dispassionate thought give you human insight in the end, can finally open the tightest shutter on the darkest human heart.

But that would take so very long and Ernie felt tired. Not old, just tired, tired. Best simply to watch the soft clouds⁠—the pear-shaped gateway had become almost circular. To do anything but drift through life, a stereotype among stereotypes, was simply⁠ ⁠… too⁠ ⁠…