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

culture which could create things like this cabin. Not that I liked making the admission. It’s hard to admit an exception to a pet gripe against things.

The excitement of getting down and opening the Christmas packages saved me from speculating too much along these or any other lines.

I hit a minor jackpot right away. In the same bag were a compass, a catalytic pocket lighter, a knife with a sawtooth back edge that made my affection for Mother waver, a dust mask, what looked like a compact water-filtration unit, and several other items adding up to a deluxe Deathlands Survival Kit.

There were some goggles in the kit I didn’t savvy until I put them on and surveyed the landscape out the viewport. A nearby dust drift I knew to be hot glowed green as death in the slightly smoky lenses. Wow! Those specs had Geiger counters beat a mile and I privately bet myself they worked at night. I stuck them in my pocket quick.

We found bunches of tiny electronics parts⁠—I think they were; spools of magnetic tape, but nothing to play it on; reels of very narrow film with frames much too small to see anything at all unmagnified; about three thousand cigarettes in unlabeled transparent packs of twenty⁠—we lit up quick, using my new lighter; a picture book that didn’t make much sense because the views might have been of tissue sections or starfields, we couldn’t quite decide, and there were no captions to help; a thin book with ricepaper pages covered with Chinese characters⁠—that was a puzzler; a thick book with nothing but columns of figures, all zeros and ones and nothing else; some tiny chisels; and a mouth organ. Pop, who’d make a point of just helping in the hunt, appropriated that last item⁠—I might have known he would, I told myself. Now we could expect “Turkey in the Straw” at odd moments.

Alice found a whole bag of what were women’s things judging from the frilliness of the garments included. She set aside some squeeze-packs and little gadgets and elastic items right away, but she didn’t take any of the clothes. I caught her measuring some kind of transparent chemise against herself when she thought we weren’t looking; it was for a girl maybe six sizes bigger.

And we found food. Cans of food that was heated up inside by the time you got the top rolled off, though the outside could still be cool to the touch. Cans of boneless steak, boneless chops, cream soup, peas, carrots, and fried potatoes⁠—they weren’t labeled at all but you could generally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heated when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the time you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffee that heated up hospitably too⁠—in this case the tops did a five-second hesitation in the middle of your unscrewing them.

At that point as you can imagine we let the rest of the packages go and had ourselves a feast. The food ate even better than it smelled. It was real hard for me not to gorge.

Then as I was slurping down my second bottle of coffee I happened to look out the viewport and see the Pilot’s body and the darkening puddle around it and the coffee began to taste, well, not bad, but sickening. I don’t think it was guilty conscience. Deathlanders outgrow those if they ever have them to start with; loners don’t keep consciences⁠—it takes cultures to give you those and make them work. Artistic inappropriateness is the closest I can come to describing what bothered me. Whatever it was, it made me feel lousy for a minute.

About the same time Alice did an odd thing with the last of her coffee. She slopped it on a rag and used it to wash her face. I guess she’d caught a reflection of herself with the blood smears. She didn’t eat any more after that either. Pop kept on chomping away, a slow feeder and appreciative.

To be doing something I started to inspect the instrument panel and right away I was all excited again. The two screens were what got me. They showed shadowy maps, one of North America, the other of the World. The first one was a whole lot like the map I’d been imagining earlier⁠—faint colors marked the small “civilized” areas including one in Eastern Canada and another in Upper Michigan that must be “countries” I didn’t know about, and the Deathlands were real dark just as I’d always maintained they should be!

South of Lake Michigan was a brightly luminous green point that must be where we were, I decided. And for some reason the colored areas representing Los Alamos and Atlantic Highlands were glowing brighter than the others⁠—they had an active luminosity. Los Alamos was blue, Atla-Hi violet. Los Alamos was shown having more territory than I expected. Savannah Fortress for that matter was a whole lot bigger than I’d have made it, pushing out pseudopods west and northeast along the coast, though its red didn’t have the extra glow. But its growth-pattern reeked of imperialism.

The World screen showed dim color patches too, but for the moment I was more interested in the other.

The button armies marched right up to the lower edge of the screens and right away I got the crazy hunch that they were connected with spots on the map. Push the button for a certain spot and the plane would go there! Why, one button even seemed to have a faint violet nimbus around it (or else my eyes were going bad) as if to say, “Push me and we go to Atlantic Highlands.”

A crazy notion as I say and no sensible way to handle a plane’s navigation according to any standards I could imagine, but then as I’ve also said this plane didn’t seem to be designed according to any standards but rather in line with one man’s ideas,