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

“Ah?” said Simon tentatively.

“Indeed yes. In my researches, Mr. Gru-ay, I discovered a chemical which will inhibit growth at any level of embryonic development, producing a viable organism at that point. The basic effect of this chemical is always toward survival at whatever level of development⁠—one cell, a blastula, a worm, a fish, a four-legger. This research, which Lysenko scoffed at when I told him of it, I had no trouble in keeping secret, though at the time I was working as the unhappy collaborator of the godless soviets. But perhaps I am being too technical?”

“Not at all,” Simon assured him.

“Good,” Vasily said with simple satisfaction and gulped at his bottle. “Meanwhile my brother Mikhail was a religious brother at a monastery near Mount Athos, my Nihilist brother Ivan was in central Europe, while my third brother Lev, who is of commercial talents, had preceded us to the New World, where we always felt it would some day be our destiny to join one another.

“With the aid of brother Ivan, I and my sister Grushenka escaped from Russia. We picked up Mikhail from his monastery and proceeded here, where Lev had become a capitalist business magnate.

“My brothers, Ivan especially, were interested in my research. He had a theory that we could eventually produce hosts of men in this way, whole armies and political parties, all Nihilist and all of them Stulnikov-Gureviches. I assured him that this was impossible, that I could not play Cadmus, for free-swimming forms are one thing, we have the way to feed them in the aqueous medium; but to make fully developed mammals placental nourishment is necessary⁠—that I cannot provide. Yet to please him I begin with (pardon me!) the egg of my sister, that was as good a beginning as any and perhaps it intrigued my vanity. Ivan dreamed his dreams of a Nihilist Stulnikov-Gurevich humanity⁠—it was harmless, as I told myself.”

Simon stared at him glassy-eyed. Something rather peculiar was beginning to happen inside his head⁠—about an inch under the point where the cool water-filled plastic pipe pressed down on his scalp. Little ghostly images were darting⁠—delightfully wispy little girl-things, smiling down at him impudently, then flirting away with a quick motion of their mermaid tails.

The sky had been growing steadily darker and now there came the growl of thunder. Against the purple-gray clouds Simon could barely make out the semitransparent shapes of the polliwogs in the pipe over his head; but the images inside his mind were growing clearer by the minute.

“Ah, we have a storm,” Vasily observed as the thunder growled again. “That reminds me of Mikhail, who is much influenced by our Finnish grandmother. He had the belief as a child that he could call up the winds by whistling for them⁠—he even learned special wind musics from her. Later he became a Christian religious⁠—there are great struggles in him. Mikhail objected to my researches when he heard I used the egg of my sister. He said we will produce millions of souls who are not baptized. I asked him how about the water they are in, he replied this is not the same thing, these little swimmers will wriggle in hell eternally. This worried him greatly. We tried to tell him I had not used the egg of my sister, only the egg of a fish.

“But he did not believe this, because my sister changed greatly at the time. She no longer spoke. She put on my mother’s bathing costume (we are a family people) and retired to the bathtub all day long. I accepted this⁠—at least in the water she is not violent. Mikhail said, ‘See, her soul is now split into many unredeemed sub-souls, one each for the little swimmers. There is a sympathy between them⁠—a hypnotic vibration. So long as you keep them near her, in that tank on the roof, this will be. If they were gone from there, far from there, the sub-souls would reunite and Grushenka’s soul would be one again.’ He begged me to stop my research, to dump it in the sea, to scatter it away, but Lev and Ivan demand I keep on. Yet Mikhail warned me that works of evil end in the whirlwind. I am torn and undecided.” He gulped at his vodka.

Thunder growled louder. Simon was thinking, dreamily, that if the soul of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich were split into thousands of sub-souls, vibrating hypnotically in the nearby water tank, with at least one of them escaping as far as his bathtub, then it was no wonder if Grushenka had a strange attraction for him.

“But that is not yet the worst,” Vasily continued. “The hypnotic vibrations of the free-swimming ones in their multitude turn out to have a stimulating effect on any male who is near. Their sub-minds induce dreams of the piquant sort. Lev says that to make money for the work we must sell these dreams to rich men. I protest, but to no avail.”

“Lev is maddened for money. Now besides selling the dreams I find he plans to sell the creatures themselves, sell them one by one, but keep enough to sell the dreams too. It is a madness.”

The darkness had become that of night. The thunder continued to growl and now it seemed to Simon that it had music in it. Visions swam through his mind to its rhythm⁠—hordes of swimming pygmy souls, of unborn water babies, migrations of miniature mermaids. The pipe hanging between water tank and pent-shack became in his imagination a giant umbilicus or a canal for a monstrous multiple birth. Sitting beneath it, helpless to move, he focused his attention with increasing pleasure on the active, supple, ever more human girl-bodies that swam across his mind. Now more mermaid than tadpole, with bright smiling lips and eyes, long Lorelei-hair trailing behind them, they darted and hovered caressingly. In their wide-cheeked oval faces, he discovered without shock, there was a transcendent resemblance to the features of Grushenka