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

instrument panel. In getting himself off it he must have braced his hands against half the buttons at one time or another and I noticed that none of them went down a fraction. They were locked. It had probably happened automatically when the Atla-Hi button got pushed.

I’d have stopped him messing around in that apish way, but with the ultra-queasy state of my stomach I lacked all ambition and was happy just not to be smelling him so close.

I still wasn’t taking too great an interest in things as I idly watched the old geezer rummaging around the cabin for something that got misplaced in the shakeup. Eventually he found it⁠—a small almond-shaped can. He opened it. Sure enough it turned out to have almonds in it. He fitted himself in the back seat and munched them one at a time. Ish!

“Nothing like a few nuts to top off with,” he said cheerfully.

I could have cut his throat even more cheerfully, but the damage had been done and you think twice before you kill a person in close quarters when you aren’t absolutely sure you’ll be able to dispose of the body. How did I know I’d be able to open the door? I remember philosophizing that Pop ought at least to have broke an arm so he’d be as badly off as Alice and me (though for that matter my right arm was fully recovered now) but he was all in one piece. There’s no justice in events, that’s for sure.

The plane ploughed along silently through the orange soup, though there was really no way to tell it was moving now⁠—until a skewy spindle shape loomed up ahead and shot back over the viewport. I think it was a vulture. I don’t know how vultures manage to operate in the haze, which ought to cancel their keen eyesight, but they do. It shot past fast.

Alice lifted her face out of the sponge stuff and began to study the buttons again. I heaved myself up and around a little and said, “Pop, Alice and me are going to try to work out how this plane navigates. This time we don’t want no interference.” I didn’t say a word more about what he’d done. It never does to hash over stupidities.

“That’s perfectly fine, go right ahead,” he told me. “I feel calm as a kitten now we’re going somewheres. That’s all that ever matters with me.” He chuckled a bit and added, “You got to admit I gave you and Alice something to work with,” but then he had the sense to shut up tight.

We weren’t so chary of pushing buttons this time, but ten minutes or so convinced us that you couldn’t push any of the buttons any more, they were all locked down⁠—all locked except for maybe one, which we didn’t try at first for a special reason.

We looked for other controls⁠—sticks, levers, pedals, finger-holes and the like. There weren’t any. Alice went back and tried the buttons on Pop’s minor console. They were locked too. Pop looked interested but didn’t say a word.

We realized in a general way what had happened, of course. Pushing the Atla-Hi button had set us on some kind of irreversible automatic. I couldn’t imagine the why of gimmicking a plane’s controls like that, unless maybe to keep loose children or prisoners from being able to mess things up while the pilot took a snooze, but there were a lot of whys to this plane that didn’t seem to have any standard answers.

The business of taking off on irreversible automatic had happened so neatly that I naturally wondered whether Pop might not know more about navigating this plane than he let on, a whole lot more in fact, and the seemingly idiotic petulance of his pushing all the buttons have been a shrewd cover for pushing the Atla-Hi button. But if Pop had been acting he’d been acting beautifully, with a serene disregard for the chances of breaking his own neck. I decided this was a possibility I could think about later and maybe act on then, after Alice and me had worked through the more obvious stuff.

The reason we hadn’t tried the one button yet was that it showed a green nimbus, just like the Atla-Hi button had had a violet nimbus. Now there was no green on either of the screens except for the tiny green star that I had figured stood for the plane and it didn’t make sense to go where we already were. And if it meant some other place, some place not shown on the screens, you bet we weren’t going to be too quick about deciding to go there. It might not be on Earth.

Alice expressed it by saying, “My namesake was always a little too quick at responding to those drink me cues.”

I suppose she thought she was being cryptic, but I fooled her. “Alice in Wonderland?” I asked. She nodded, and gave me a little smile, not at all like one of the eat me smiles she’d given me last evening.

It is funny how crazily happy a little touch of the intellectual past like that can make you feel⁠—and how horribly uncomfortable a moment later.

We both started to study the North America screen again and almost at once we realized that it had changed in one small particular. The green star had twinned. Where there had been one point of green light there were now two, very close together like the double star in the handle of the Dipper. We watched it for a while. The distance between the two stars grew perceptibly greater. We watched it for a while longer, considerably longer. It became clear that the position of the more westerly star on the screen was fixed, while the more easterly star was moving east toward Atla-Hi with about the speed of the tip of the minute hand on a wrist watch (two inches an hour, say). The pattern began to make