Short Fiction - Fritz Leiber (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

he lost track of the husbands and failed to attach Mary, Rachel, Simone and Joyce to the right owners.

He did notice that Jokichi was an Oriental with a skin as tight as enameled china, and that Rachel was a tall slim Negro girl. Also someone said, “Joyce isn’t a Wolver, she’s just visiting.”

He got a much clearer impression of the clothes than the names. They were colorful, costly-looking, and mostly Egyptian and Cretan in inspiration. Some of them would have been quite immodest, even compared to Miss Tosker’s famous playsuits, except that the wearers didn’t seem to feel so.

“There goes the middle-morning rocket!” one of them eagerly cried.

Tom looked up with the rest, but his eyes caught the dazzling sun. However, he heard a faint roaring that quickly sank in volume and pitch, and it reminded him that the Army had a rocket testing range in this area. He had little interest in science, but he hadn’t known they were on a daily schedule.

“Do you suppose it’s off the track?” he asked anxiously.

“Not a chance,” someone told him⁠—the beard, he thought. The assurance of the tones gave him a possible solution. Scientists came from all over the world these days and might have all sorts of advanced ideas. This could be a group working at a nearby atomic project and leading its peculiar private life on the side.

As they eddied toward the house he heard Lois remind someone, “But you finally did declare it a holiday,” and a husband who looked like a gay pharaoh respond, “I had another see at the mood charts and I found a subtle surge I’d missed.”

Meanwhile the beard (a black one) had taken Tom in charge. Tom wasn’t sure of his name, but he had a tan skin, a green sarong, and a fiercely jovial expression. “The swimming pool’s around there, the landing spot’s on the other side,” he began, then noticed Tom gazing at the sooty roof. “Sun power cells,” he explained proudly. “They store all the current we need.”

Tom felt his idea confirmed. “Wonder you don’t use atomic power,” he observed lightly.

The beard nodded. “We’ve been asked that. Matter of esthetics. Why waste sunlight or use hard radiations needlessly? Of course, you might feel differently. What’s your group, did you say?”

“Tosker-Brown,” Tom told him, adding when the beard frowned, “the Fellowship people, you know.”

“I don’t,” the beard confessed. “Where are you located?”

Tom briefly described the ranch house and cabins at the other end of the valley.

“Comic, I can’t place it.” The beard shrugged. “Here come the children.”

A dozen naked youngsters raced around the ranch house, followed by a woman in a vaguely African dress open down the sides.

“Yours?” Tom asked.

“Ours,” the beard answered.

“C’est un homme!”

“Regardez des vêtements!”

“No need to practice, kids; this is a holiday,” the beard told them. “Tom, Helen,” he said, introducing the woman with the air-conditioned garment. “Her turn today to companion die Kinder.”

One of the latter rapped on the beard’s knee. “May we show the stranger our things?” Instantly the others joined in pleading. The beard shot an inquiring glance at Tom, who nodded. A moment later the small troupe was hurrying him toward a spacious lean-to at the end of the ranch house. It was chuckful of strange toys, rocks and plants, small animals in cages and out, and the oddest model airplanes, or submarines. But Tom was given no time to look at any one thing for long.

“See my crystals? I grew them.”

“Smell my mutated gardenias. Tell now, isn’t there a difference?” There didn’t seem to be, but he nodded.

“Look at my squabbits.” This referred to some long-eared white squirrels nibbling carrots and nuts.

“Here’s my newest model spaceship, a DS-57-B. Notice the detail.” The oldest boy shoved one of the submarine affairs in his face.

Tom felt like a figure that is being tugged about in a rococo painting by wide pink ribbons in the chubby hands of naked cherubs. Except that these cherubs were slim and tanned, fantastically energetic, and apparently of depressingly high I.Q. (What these scientists did to children!) He missed Lois and was grateful for the single little girl solemnly skipping rope in a corner and paying no attention to him.

The odd lingo she repeated stuck in his mind: “Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so. Gik-lo, I-o⁠ ⁠…”

Suddenly the air was filled with soft chimes. “Lunch,” the children shouted and ran away.

Tom followed at a soberer pace along the wall of the ranch house. He glanced in the huge windows, curious about the living and sleeping arrangements of the Wolvers, but the panes were strangely darkened. Then he entered the wide doorway through which the children had scampered and his curiosity turned to wonder.

A resilient green floor that wasn’t flat, but sloped up toward the white of the far wall like a breaking wave. Chairs like giants’ hands tenderly cupped. Little tables growing like mushrooms and broad-leafed plants out of the green floor. A vast picture window showing the red rocks.

Yet it was the wood-paneled walls that electrified his artistic interest. They blossomed with fruits and flowers, deep and poignantly carved in several styles. He had never seen such work.

He became aware of a silence and realized that his hosts and hostesses were smiling at him from around a long table. Moved by a sudden humility, he knelt and unlaced his sneakers and added them to the pile of sandals and digitals by the door. As he rose, a soft and comic piping started and he realized that beyond the table the children were lined up, solemnly puffing at little wooden flutes and recorders. He saw the empty chair at the table and went toward it, conscious for the moment of nothing but his dusty feet.

He was disappointed that Lois wasn’t sitting next to him, but the food reminded him that he was hungry. There was a charming little steak, striped black and brown with perfection, and all sorts of vegetables and fruits, one or two of which