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

I figured it this way: the moving star must stand for the plane, the other green dot must stand for where the plane had just been. For some reason the spot on the freeway by the old cracking plant was recognized as a marked locality by the screen. Why I don’t know. It reminded me of the old “X Marks the Spot” of newspaper murders, but that would be getting very fancy. Anyway the spot we’d just taken off from was so marked and in that case the button with the green nimbus⁠ ⁠…

“Hold tight, everybody,” I said to Alice, grudgingly including Pop in my warning. “I got to try it.”

I gripped my seat with my knees and one arm and pushed the green button. It pushed.

The plane swung around in a level loop, not too tight to disturb the stomach much, and steadied out again.

I couldn’t judge how far we’d swung but Alice and me watched the green stars and after about a minute she said, “They’re getting closer,” and a little while later I said, “Yeah, for sure.”

I scanned the board. The green button⁠—the cracking-plant button, to call it that⁠—was locked down of course. The Atla-Hi button was up, glowing violet. All the other buttons were still up and locked up⁠—I tried them all again.

It was clear as day used to be. We could either go to Atla-Hi or we could go back where we’d started from. There was no third possibility.

It was a little hard to take. You think of a plane as freedom, as something that will carry you anywhere in the world you choose to go, especially any paradise, and then you find yourself worse limited than if you’d stayed on the ground⁠—at least that was the way it was happening to us.

But Alice and me were realists. We knew it wouldn’t help to wail. We were up against another of those “two” problems, the problem of two destinations, and we had to choose ours.

If we go back, I thought, we can trek on somewhere⁠—anywhere⁠—richer by the loot from the plane, especially that Survival Kit. Trek on with some loot we’ll mostly never understand and with the knowledge that we are leaving a plane that can fly, that we are shrinking back from an unknown adventure.

Also if we go back there’s something else we’ll have to face, something we’ll have to live with for a little while at least that won’t be nice to live with after this cozily personal cabin, something that shouldn’t bother me at all but, dammit, it does.

Alice made the decision for us and at the same time showed she was thinking about the same thing as me.

“I don’t want to have to smell him, Ray,” she said. “I am not going back to keep company with that filthy corpse. I’d rather anything than that.” And she pushed the Atla-Hi button again and as the plane started to swing she looked at me defiantly as if to say I’d reverse the course again over her dead body.

“Don’t tense up,” I told her. “I want a new shake of the dice myself.”

“You know, Alice,” Pop said reflectively, “it was the smell of my Alamoser got to me too. I just couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t get away from it because my fever had me pinned down, so there was nothing left for me to do but go crazy. No Atla-Hi for me, just Bug-land. My mind died, though not my memory. By the time I’d got my strength back I’d started to be a new bugger. I didn’t know no more about living than a newborn babe, except I knew I couldn’t go back⁠—go back to murdering and all that. My new mind knew that much though otherwise it was just a blank. It was all very funny.”

“And then I suppose,” Alice cut in, her voice corrosive with sarcasm, “you hunted up a wandering preacher, or perhaps a kindly old hermit who lived on hot manna, and he showed you the blue sky!”

“Why no, Alice,” Pop said. “I told you I don’t go for religion. As it happens, I hunted me up a couple of murderers, guys who were worse cases then myself but who’d wanted to quit because it wasn’t getting them nowhere and who’d found, I’d heard, a way of quitting, and the three of us had a long talk together.”

“And they told you the great secret of how to live in the Deathlands without killing,” Alice continued acidly. “Drop the nonsense, Pop. It can’t be done.”

“It’s hard, I’ll grant you,” Pop said. “You have to go crazy or something almost as bad⁠—in fact, maybe going crazy is the easiest way. But it can be done and, in the long run, murder is even harder.”

I decided to interrupt this idle chatter. Since we were now definitely headed for Atla-Hi and there was nothing to do until we got there, unless one of us got a brainstorm about the controls, it was time to start on the less obvious stuff I’d tabled in my mind.

“Why are you on this plane, Pop?” I asked sharply. “What do you figure on getting out of Alice and me?⁠—and I don’t mean the free meals.”

He grinned. His teeth were white and even⁠—plates, of course. “Why, Ray,” he said, “I was just giving Alice the reason. I like to talk to murderers, practicing murderers preferred. I need to⁠—have to talk to ’em, to keep myself straight. Otherwise I might start killing again and I’m not up to that any more.”

“Oh, so you get your kicks at second hand, you old peeper,” Alice put in but, “Quit lying, Pop,” I said. “About having quit killing, for one thing. In my books, which happen to be the old books in this case, the accomplice is every bit as guilty as the man with the slicer. You helped us kill the Pilot by giving that funny scream and you know it.”

“Who says I did?” Pop countered, rearing up a little.