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

I don’t think either of us knew exactly what we were saying. Alice in particular I don’t believe was old enough to have experienced almost any of the things the words referred to. They were mysterious symbols of long-interdicted delights spewing out of us.

“Ray,” Alice said, hurrying to me, “let’s get aboard.”

“Yes,” I said eagerly and then I saw a little problem. The door to the plane was a couple of feet above our heads. Whoever hoisted himself up first⁠—or got hoisted up, as would have to be the case with Alice on account of her hand⁠—would be momentarily at the other’s mercy. I guess it occurred to Alice too because she stopped and looked at me. It was a little like the old teaser about the fox, the goose, and the corn.

Maybe, too, we were both a little scared the plane was booby-trapped.

Pop solved the problem in the direct way I might have expected of him by stepping quietly between us, giving a light leap, catching hold of the curving sill, chinning himself on it, and scrambling up into the plane so quickly that we’d hardly have had time to do anything about it if we’d wanted to. Pop couldn’t be much more than a bantamweight, even with all his knives. The plane sagged an inch and then swung up again.

As Pop disappeared from view I backed off, reaching for my .38, but a moment later he stuck out his head and grinned down at us, resting his elbows on the sill.

“Come on up,” he said. “It’s quite a place. I promise not to push any buttons ‘til you get here, though there’s whole regiments of them.”

I grinned back at Pop and gave Alice a boost up. She didn’t like it, but she could see it had to be her next. She hooked onto the sill and Pop caught hold of her left wrist below the big glove and heaved.

Then it was my turn. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the idea of those two buggers poised above me while my hands were helpless on the sill. But I thought Pop’s a nut. You can trust a nut, at least a little ways, though you can’t trust nobody else. I heaved myself up. It was strange to feel the plane giving and then bracing itself like something alive. It seemed to have no trouble accepting our combined weight, which after all was hardly more than half again the Pilot’s.

Inside the cabin was pretty small but as Pop had implied, oh my! Everything looked soft and smoothly curved, like you imagine your insides being, and almost everything was a restfully dull silver. The general shape of it was something like the inside of an egg. Forward, which was the larger end, were a couple of screens and a wide viewport and some small dials and the button brigades Pop had mentioned, lined up like blank typewriter keys but enough for writing Chinese.

Just aft of the instrument panel were two very comfortable-looking strange low seats. They seemed to be facing backwards until I realized they were meant to be knelt into. The occupant, I could see, would sort of sprawl forward, his hands free for button-pushing and such. There were spongy chinrests.

Aft was a tiny instrument panel and a kind of sideways seat, not nearly so fancy. The door by which we’d entered was to the side, a little aft.

I didn’t see any indications of cabinets or fixed storage spaces of any kinds, but somehow stuck to the walls here and there were quite a few smooth blobby packages, mostly dull silver too, some large, some small⁠—valises and handbags, you might say.

All in all, it was a lovely cabin and, more than that, it seemed lived in. It looked as if it had been shaped for, and maybe by one man. It had a personality you could feel, a strong but warm personality of its own.

Then I realized whose personality it was. I almost got sick⁠—so close to it I started telling myself it must be something antigravity did to your stomach.

But it was all too interesting to let you get sick right away. Pop was poking into two of the large mound-shaped cases that were sitting loose and open on the right-hand seat, as if ready for emergency use. One had a folded something with straps on it that was probably a parachute. The second had I judged a thousand or more of the inch cubes such as I’d pried out of the Pilot’s hand, all neatly stacked in a cubical box inside the soft outer bag. You could see the one-cube gap where he’d taken the one.

I decided to take the rest of the bags off the walls and open them, if I could figure out how. The others had the same idea, but Alice had to take off her hook and put on her pliers, before she could make progress. Pop helped her. There was room enough for us to do these things without crowding each other too closely.

By the time Alice was set to go I’d discovered the trick of getting the bags off. You couldn’t pull them away from the wall no matter what force you used, at least I couldn’t, and you couldn’t even slide them straight along the walls, but if you just gave them a gentle counterclockwise twist they came off like nothing. Twisting them clockwise glued them back on. It was very strange, but I told myself that if these boys could generate antigravity fields they could create screwy fields of other sorts.

It also occurred to me to wonder if “these boys” came from Earth. The Pilot had looked human enough, but these accomplishments didn’t⁠—not by my standards for human achievement in the Age of the Deaders. At any rate I had to admit to myself that my pet term “cultural queer” did not describe to my own satisfaction members of a