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

Stulnikov-Gurevich⁠—a younger, milk-skinned maiden of the steppes, with challenging eyes and fingers that brushed against him with delightful shocks⁠ ⁠…

“So it is for me the great problem,” Vasily’s distant voice continued. “I see in my work only the pure research, the play of the mind. Lev sees money, Ivan sees dragon teeth⁠—fodder for his political cannon⁠—Mikhail sees unshriven souls, Grushenka sees⁠—who knows?⁠—madness. It is indeed one great problem.”

Thunder came again, crashingly this time. The door of the pent-shack opened. Framed in it stood Ivan the Bomber. “Vasily!” he roared. “Do you know what that idiot is doing now?”

As the thunder and his voice trailed off together, Simon became aware at last of the identity of the other sound, which had been growing in volume all the time.

Simultaneously Vasily struggled to his feet.

“The organ!” he cried. “Mikhail is playing the Whirlwind Music! We must stop him!” Pausing only for a last pull at the bottle, he charged into the pent-shack, following Ivan.

Wind was shaking the heavy pipe over Simon’s head, tossing him back and forth in the chair. Looking with an effort toward the west, Simon saw the reason: a spinning black pencil of wind that was writing its way toward them in wreckage across the intervening roofs.

The chair fell under him. Stumbling across the roof, he tugged futilely at the door to the pent-shack, then threw himself flat, clawing at the tarpaper.

There was a mounting roar. The top of the water tank went spinning off like a flying saucer. Momentarily, as if it were a giant syringe, the whirlwind dipped into the tank. Simon felt himself sliding across the roof, felt his legs lifting. He fetched up against the roof’s low wall and at that moment the wind let go of him and his legs touched tarpaper again.

Gaining his feet numbly, Simon staggered into the leaning pent-shack. The pale man was nowhere to be seen, the plush chair empty. The curtain at the other side of the room had fallen with its rods, revealing a bathtub more antique than Simon’s. In the tub, under the window, sat Grushenka. The lightning flares showed her with her chin level with the water, her eyes placidly staring, her mouth opening and closing.

Simon found himself putting his arms around the black-clad figure. With a straining effort he lifted her out of the tub, water sloshing all over his legs, and half carried, half slid with her down the stairs.

He fetched up panting and disheveled at the top landing, his attention riveted by the lightning-illuminated scene in the two-story-high living room below. At the far end of it a dark-robed figure crouched at the console of the mighty organ, like a giant bat at the base of the portico of a black and gold temple. In the center of the room Ivan was in the act of heaving above his head his globular leather case.

Mikhail darted a look over his shoulder and sprang to one side. The projectile crashed against the organ. Mikhail picked himself up, tearing something from his neck. Ivan lunged forward with a roar. Mikhail crashed a fist against his jaw. The Bomber went down and didn’t come up. Mikhail unwrapped his crucifix from his fingers and resumed playing.

With a wild cry Simon heaved himself to his feet, stumbled over Grushenka’s sodden garments, and pitched headlong down the stairs.

When he came to, the house was empty and the Stulnikov moving van was gone. At the front door he was met by a poker-faced young man who identified himself as a member of the F.B.I. Simon showed him the globular case Ivan had thrown at the organ. It proved to contain a bowling ball.

The young gentleman listened to his story without changing expression, thanked him warmly, and shooed him out.

The Stulnikov-Gureviches disappeared for good, though not quite without a trace. Simon found this item in the next evening’s paper, the first of many he accumulated yearningly in a scrapbook during the following months:

Mermaid Rain A Hoax, Scientist Declares

Milford, Pa.⁠—The “mermaid rain” reported here has been declared a fraud by an eminent European biologist. Vasily Stulnikov-Gurevich, formerly Professor of Genetics at Pire University, Latvia, passing through here on a cross-country trip, declared the miniature “mermaids” were “albino tadpoles, probably scattered about as a hoax by schoolboys.”

The professor added, “I would like to know where they got them, however. There is clear evidence of mutation, due perhaps to fallout.”

Dr. Stulnikov directed his party in a brief but intensive search for overlooked specimens. His charming silent sister, Grushenka Stulnikov, wearing a quaint Latvian swimming costume, explored the shallows of the Delaware.

After collecting as many specimens as possible, the professor and his assistants continued their trip in their unusual camping car. Dr. Stulnikov intends to found a biological research center “in the calm and tolerant atmosphere of the West Coast,” he declared.

The Night of the Long Knives I

Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed, stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour, by Herbert Best

I was one hundred miles from Nowhere⁠—and I mean that literally⁠—when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I’d been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.

I’d been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at the same gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judged the girl was going in the same general direction and was being edged over toward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showed dangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men or cattle.

She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like me wearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the