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

garage to garage, in-chanting a conformist serenity and stripping illegal armament from cars. On the advice of a rogue psychiatrist, who said it would channel off aggressions, a display of bullfighting was announced, but this had to be canceled when a strong protest was lodged by the Decency League, which had a large mixed Wheel-Foot membership.

At dawn, curfew was lifted in the Slum Ring and traffic reopened between the Suburbs and the Center. After a few uneasy moments it became apparent that the status quo had been restored.

Smythe-de Winter tooled his gleaming black machine along the Ring. A thick steel bolt with a large steel washer on either side neatly filled the hole the little old lady’s slug had made in the windshield.

A brick bounced off the roof. Bullets pattered against the side windows.

Smythe-de ran a handkerchief around his neck under his collar and smiled.

A block ahead children were darting into the street, catcalling and thumbing their noses. Behind one of them limped a fat dog with a spiked collar.

Smythe-de suddenly gunned his motor. He didn’t hit any of the children, but he got the dog.

A flashing light on the dash showed him the right front tire was losing pressure. Must have hit the collar as well! He thumbed the matching emergency-air button and the flashing stopped.

He turned toward Witherspoon-Hobbs and said with thoughtful satisfaction, “I like a normal orderly world, where you always have a little success, but not champagne-heady; a little failure, but just enough to brace you.”

Witherspoon-Hobbs was squinting at the next crosswalk. Its center was discolored by a brownish stain ribbon-tracked by tires.

“That’s where you bagged the little old lady, Smythe-de,” he remarked. “I’ll say this for her now: she had spirit.”

“Yes, that’s where I bagged her,” Smythe-de agreed flatly. He remembered wistfully the witchlike face growing rapidly larger, her jerking shoulders in black bombazine, the wild white-circled eyes. He suddenly found himself feeling that this was a very dull day.

A Hitch in Space

Once when I was doing a hitch with the Shaulan Space Guard out Scorpio way, my partner Jeff Bogart developed just about the most harmless psychosis you could imagine: he got himself an imaginary companion.

And the imaginary companion turned out to be me.

Well, I’m a pretty nice guy and so having two of me in the ship didn’t seem a particularly bad idea. At first. In fact there’d be advantages of it, I thought. For instance, Jeff liked to talk a weary lot⁠ ⁠… and the imaginary Joe Hansen could spell me listening to him, while I projected a book or just harkened to the wheels going around in my own head against the faint patter of starlight on the hull.

I met Jeff first at a space-rodeo, oddly enough, but now the two of us were out on a servicing check of the orbital beacons and relays and rescue depots of the five planets of the Shaulan system. A completely routine job, its only drawback that it was lengthy. Our ship was an ionic jeep that looked like a fancy fountain pen, but was very roomy for three men⁠—one of them imaginary.

I caught on to Jeff’s little mania by overhearing him talking to me. I’d be coming back from the head or stores or linear accelerator or my bunk, and I’d hear him yakking at me. It embarrassed me the first time, how to go back into the cabin when the other me was there. But I just swam in, and without any transition-strain at all that I could observe Jeff looked around at me, smiling sort of glaze-eyed, and said warmly, “Joe. My buddy Joe. Am I glad they paired us.”

If Jeff had a major fault, as opposed to a species of nuttiness, it was that he was strictly a speak-only-good, positive-thinking guy who always deferred to me. Even idolized me, if you can imagine that. He’d give me such fulsome praise I’d be irked ten times an orbit.

Another thing that helped me catch on was that he always called the other me Joseph.

At first I thought the whole thing might be a gag, or maybe a deliberate way of letting off steam against me without violating his always-a-sweet-guy code⁠—like happy husbands cursing in the bathroom⁠—but then came the scrambled eggs.

I’d slept late and when I squinted into the cabin there was Jeff hovering over a plate of yellow fluff and shaking his finger at my empty seat and saying, “Dammit, Joseph, eat your scrambled eggs, I cooked ’em ’specially for you,” and when he crawfished out toward the galley a couple seconds later he was saying, “Now you start on those eggs, Joseph, before I get back.”

I thought for a bit and then I slid into my place and polished them off.

When he floated in with the coffee he gave me another of those glaze-eyed God-fearing looks⁠—but just a mite disappointed, I thought⁠—and said, “Dammit, Joe, you’re perfect! You always clean your plate.”

Apparently when I was there, Joseph just didn’t exist for Jeff. And vice versa. It was sort of eerie, especially with the hum of space in my ears like a seashell and nobody else for five million miles.

Beginning with the scrambled eggs, I discovered that Jeff didn’t exactly idolize Joseph⁠—or even take with him the attitude of “My buddy can do no wrong,” like he did with me. I overheard him criticizing Joseph. Reasonably at first; then I heard him chewing him out⁠—next bullying him.

It made me wistful, that last, thinking how good it would feel to be full-bloodedly cursed to my face once in a while instead of all the sweetness and light. And right there I got the idea for some amateur therapy, Shaula-Deva help me.

I waited for a moment when we were both relaxed and then I said, “Jeff, the trouble with you is you’re too nice. You ought to criticize things more. For a starter, criticize me. Tell me my faults. Go ahead.”

He flushed a little and said, “Dammit, Joe, how