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

I was hurt. She shouldn’t have hidden her bit of baldness, it was something we had in common, something that brought us closer. And she shouldn’t have stopped smiling at just that moment. Didn’t she realize I loved that blaze on her scalp just as much as any other part of her, that she no longer had any need to practice vanity in front of me?

Didn’t she realize that as soon as she stopped smiling, her contemplative stare became an insult to me? What right had she to stare, critically I felt sure, at my bald head? What right had she to know about the nearly-healed ulcer on my left shin?⁠—that was a piece of information worth a man’s life in a fight. What right had she to cover up, anyways, while I was still naked? She ought to have waked me up so that we could have got dressed as we’d undressed, together. There were lots of things wrong with her manners.

Oh, I know that if I’d been able to think calmly, maybe if I’d just had some breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there’d been some hot breakfast to eat at that moment, I’d have recognized my irritation for the irrational, one-mosquito surge of negative feeling that it was.

Even without breakfast, if I’d just had the knowledge that there was a reasonably secure day ahead of me in which there’d be an opportunity for me to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn’t have been irked, or at least being irked wouldn’t have bothered me terribly.

But a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlands than a hot breakfast.

Given just the ghost of a sense of security and/or some hot breakfast, I’d have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettish about her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman to try to preserve some mystery about herself in front of the man she beds with.

But you get leery of any kind of mystery in the Deathlands. It makes you frightened and angry, like it does an animal. Mystery is for cultural queers, strictly. The only way for two people to get along together in the Deathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything and never to make a move that doesn’t have an immediate clear explanation. You can’t talk, you see, certainly not at first, and so you can’t explain anything (most explanations are just lies and dreams, anyway), so you have to be doubly careful and explicit about everything you do.

This girl wasn’t being either. Right now, on top of her other gaucheries, she was unscrewing the comb from her wrist⁠—an unfriendly if not quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit.

Understand, please, I wasn’t showing any of these negative reactions of mine any more than she was showing hers, except for her stopping smiling. In fact I hadn’t stopped smiling, I was playing the game to the hilt.

But inside me everything was stewed up and the other urge had come back and presently it would begin to grow again. That’s the trouble, you know, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. It’s fine while it lasts but it wears itself out and then you’re back with Urge Number One and you have nothing left to balance it with.

Oh, I wouldn’t kill this girl today, I probably wouldn’t seriously think of killing her for a month or more, but Old Urge Number One would be there and growing, mostly under cover, all the time. Of course there were things I could do to slow its growth, lots of little gimmicks, in fact⁠—I was pretty experienced at this business.

For instance, I could take a shot at talking to her pretty soon. For a catchy starter, I could tell her about Nowhere, how these five other buggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after this scavenging expedition from Porter, how we naturally joined forces in that situation, how we set a pitfall for their alky-powered jeep and wrecked it and them, how when our haul turned out to be unexpectedly big the four of us left from the kill chummied up and padded down together and amused each other for a while and played games, you might say. Why, at one point we even had an old crank phonograph going and read some books. And, of course, how when the loot gave out and the fun wore off, we had our murder party and I survived along with, I think, a bugger named Jerry⁠—at any rate, he was gone when the blood stopped spurting, and I’d had no stomach for tracking him, though I probably should have.

And in return she could tell me how she had killed off her last set of girlfriends, or boyfriends, or friend, or whatever it was.

After that, we could have a go at exchanging news, rumors and speculations about local, national and world events. Was it true that Atlantic Highlands had planes of some sort or were they from Europe? Were they actually crucifying the Deathlanders around Walla Walla or only nailing up their dead bodies as dire warnings to others such? Had Manteno made Christianity compulsory yet, or were they still tolerating Zen Buddhists? Was it true that Los Alamos had been completely wiped out by plague, but the area taboo to Deathlanders because of the robot guards they’d left behind⁠—metal guards eight feet tall who tramped across the white sands, wailing? Did they still have free love in Pacific Palisades? Did she know there’d been a pitched battle fought by expeditionary forces from Ouachita and Savannah Fortress? Over the loot of Birmingham, apparently, after yellow fever had finished off that principality. Had she rooted out any “observers” lately?⁠—some of the “civilized” communities, the more “scientific” ones, try to maintain a few weather stations and the like in the Deathlands, camouflaging them elaborately and manning them