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

the maniac in the company. She’s the one who terrorized you with the boning knife in the shrubbery, or sicked the giant tarantula on you at the dark end of the subway platform, or whatever it was, and the others are covering up for. She’s going to smile the devil-smile and weave those white twig-fingers at you, all eight of them. And Birnam Wood’ll come to Dunsinane and you’ll be burnt at the stake by men in armor or drawn and quartered by eight-legged monkeys that talk or torn apart by wild centaurs or whirled through the roof to the moon without being dressed for it or sent burrowing into the past to stifle in Iowa 1948 or Egypt 4008 BC. The screen won’t keep her out.

Then a head of hair pushed over the screen. But it was black-bound-with-silver, Brahma bless us, and a moment later Martin was giving me one of his rare smiles.

I said, “Marty, do something for me. Don’t ever use Miss Nefer’s footsteps again. Her voice, okay, if you have to. But not the footsteps. Don’t ask me why, just don’t.”

Martin came around and sat on the foot of my cot. My legs were already doubled up. He straightened out his blue-and-gold skirt and rested a hand on my black sneakers.

“Feeling a little wonky, Greta?” he asked. “Don’t worry about me. Banquo’s dead and so’s his ghost. We’ve finished the Banquet Scene. I’ve got lots of time.”

I just looked at him, queerly I guess. Then without lifting my head I asked him, “Martin, tell me the truth. Does the dressing room move around?”

I was talking so low that he hitched a little closer, not touching me anywhere else though.

“The Earth’s whipping around the sun at 20 miles a second,” he replied, “and the dressing room goes with it.”

I shook my head, my cheek scrubbing the pillow, “I mean⁠ ⁠… shifting,” I said. “By itself.”

“How?” he asked.

“Well,” I told him, “I’ve had this idea⁠—it’s just a sort of fancy, remember⁠—that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing room and sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it. Actors can fit in anywhere. They’re used to learning new parts and wearing strange costumes. Heck, they’re even used to traveling a lot. And if an actor’s a bit strange nobody thinks anything of it⁠—he’s almost expected to be foreign, it’s an asset to him.”

“And a theater, well, a theater can spring up almost anywhere and nobody ask questions, except the zoning authorities and such and they can always be squared. Theaters come and go. It happens all the time. They’re transitory. Yet theaters are crossroads, anonymous meeting places, anybody with a few bucks or sometimes nothing at all can go. And theaters attract important people, the sort of people you might want to do something to. Caesar was stabbed in a theater. Lincoln was shot in one. And⁠ ⁠…”

My voice trailed off. “A cute idea,” he commented.

I reached down to his hand on my shoe and took hold of his middle finger as a baby might.

“Yeah,” I said, “But Martin, is it true?”

He asked me gravely, “What do you think?”

I didn’t say anything.

“How would you like to work in a company like that?” he asked speculatively.

“I don’t really know,” I said.

He sat up straighter and his voice got brisk. “Well, all fantasy aside, how’d you like to work in this company?” He asked, lightly slapping my ankle. “On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you’re ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks you never take him seriously.”

“Pardon me while I gasp and glow,” I said. Then, “Oh Marty, I can’t really imagine myself doing the tiniest part.”

“Me neither, eight months ago,” he said. “Now, look. Lady Macbeth.”

“But Marty,” I said, reaching for his finger again, “you haven’t answered my question. About whether it’s true.”

“Oh that!” he said with a laugh, switching his hand to the other side. “Ask me something else.”

“Okay,” I said, “why am I bugged on the number eight? Because I’m permanently behind a private 8-ball?”

“Eight’s a number with many properties,” he said, suddenly as intently serious as he usually is. “The corners of a cube.”

“You mean I’m a square?” I said. “Or just a brick? You know, ‘She’s a brick.’ ”

“But eight’s most curious property,” he continued with a frown, “is that lying on its side it signifies infinity. So eight erect is really⁠—” and suddenly his made-up, naturally solemn face got a great glow of inspiration and devotion⁠—“Infinity Arisen!”

Well, I don’t know. You meet quite a few people in the theater who are bats on numerology, they use it to pick stage-names. But I’d never have guessed it of Martin. He always struck me as the skeptical, cynical type.

“I had another idea about eight,” I said hesitatingly. “Spiders. That 8-legged asterisk on Miss Nefer’s forehead⁠—” I suppressed a shudder.

“You don’t like her, do you?” he stated.

“I’m afraid of her,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be. She’s a very great woman and tonight she’s playing an infinitely more difficult part than I am. No, Greta,” he went on as I started to protest, “believe me, you don’t understand anything about it at this moment. Just as you don’t understand about spiders, fearing them. They’re the first to climb the rigging and to climb ashore too. They’re the web-weavers, the line-throwers, the connectors, Siva and Kali united in love. They’re the double mandala, the beginning and the end, infinity mustered and on the march⁠—”

“They’re also on my New York screen!” I squeaked, shrinking back across the cot a little and pointing at a tiny glinting silver-and-black thing mounting below my Willy-ball.

Martin gently caught its line on his finger and lifted it very close to his face. “Eight eyes too,” he told me. Then, “Poor little god,” he said and put it back.

“Marty? Marty?” Sid’s desperate stage-whisper rasped the length of the dressing room.

Martin stood