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

a little, but Hank only kicked the animal aside without taking his eyes off them.

“Even that business of carrying the wristwatch in your pocket instead of on your arm,” he went on with channeled hysteria. “A neat bit of camouflage, Effie. Very neat. And telling me it was my child, when all the while you’ve been seeing him for months!”

“Man, you’re mad; I’ve not touched her!” Patrick denied hotly though still calculatingly, and risked a step forward, stopping when the gun instantly swung his way.

“Pretending you were going to give me a healthy child,” Hank raved on, “when all the while you knew it would be⁠—either in body or germ plasm⁠—a thing like that!”

He waved his gun at the malformed cat, which had leaped to the top of the table and was eating the remains of Patrick’s food, though its watchful green eyes were fixed on Hank.

“I should shoot him down!” Hank yelled, between sobbing, chest-racking inhalations through the mask. “I should kill him this instant for the contaminated pariah he is!”

All this while Effie had not ceased to smile compassionately. Now she stood up without haste and went to Patrick’s side. Disregarding his warning, apprehensive glance, she put her arm lightly around him and faced her husband.

“Then you’d be killing the bringer of the best news we’ve ever had,” she said, and her voice was like a flood of some warm sweet liquor in that musty, hate-charged room. “Oh, Hank, forget your silly, wrong jealousy and listen to me. Patrick here has something wonderful to tell us.”

Hank stared at her. For once he screamed no reply. It was obvious that he was seeing for the first time how beautiful she had become, and that the realization jolted him terribly.

“What do you mean?” he finally asked unevenly, almost fearfully.

“I mean that we no longer need to fear the dust,” she said, and now her smile was radiant. “It never really did hurt people the way the doctors said it would. Remember how it was with me, Hank, the exposure I had and recovered from, although the doctors said I wouldn’t at first⁠—and without even losing my hair? Hank, those who were brave enough to stay outside, and who weren’t killed by terror and suggestion and panic⁠—they adapted to the dust. They changed, but they changed for the better. Everything⁠—”

“Effie, he told you lies!” Hank interrupted, but still in that same agitated, broken voice, cowed by her beauty.

“Everything that grew or moved was purified,” she went on ringingly. “You men going outside have never seen it, because you’ve never had eyes for it. You’ve been blinded to beauty, to life itself. And now all the power in the dust has gone and faded, anyway, burned itself out. That’s true, isn’t it?”

She smiled at Patrick for confirmation. His face was strangely veiled, as if he were calculating obscure changes. He might have given a little nod; at any rate, Effie assumed that he did, for she turned back to her husband.

“You see, Hank? We can all go out now. We need never fear the dust again. Patrick is a living proof of that,” she continued triumphantly, standing straighter, holding him a little tighter. “Look at him. Not a scar or a sign, and he’s been out in the dust for years. How could he be this way, if the dust hurt the brave? Oh, believe me, Hank! Believe what you see. Test it if you want. Test Patrick here.”

“Effie, you’re all mixed up. You don’t know⁠—” Hank faltered, but without conviction of any sort.

“Just test him,” Effie repeated with utter confidence, ignoring⁠—not even noticing⁠—Patrick’s warning nudge.

“All right,” Hank mumbled. He looked at the stranger dully. “Can you count?” he asked.

Patrick’s face was a complete enigma. Then he suddenly spoke, and his voice was like a fencer’s foil⁠—light, bright, alert, constantly playing, yet utterly on guard.

“Can I count? Do you take me for a complete simpleton, man? Of course I can count!”

“Then count yourself,” Hank said, barely indicating the table.

“Count myself, should I?” the other retorted with a quick facetious laugh. “Is this a kindergarten? But if you want me to, I’m willing.” His voice was rapid. “I’ve two arms, and two legs, that’s four. And ten fingers and ten toes⁠—you’ll take my word for them?⁠—that’s twenty-four. A head, twenty-five. And two eyes and a nose and a mouth⁠—”

“With this, I mean,” Hank said heavily, advanced to the table, picked up the Geiger counter, switched it on, and handed it across the table to the other man.

But while it was still an arm’s length from Patrick, the clicks began to mount furiously, until they were like the chatter of a pigmy machine gun. Abruptly the clicks slowed, but that was only the counter shifting to a new scaling circuit, in which each click stood for 512 of the old ones.

With those horrid, rattling little volleys, fear cascaded into the room and filled it, smashing like so much colored glass all the bright barriers of words Effie had raised against it. For no dreams can stand against the Geiger counter, the Twentieth Century’s mouthpiece of ultimate truth. It was as if the dust and all the terrors of the dust had incarnated themselves in one dread invading shape that said in words stronger than audible speech, “Those were illusions, whistles in the dark. This is reality, the dreary, pitiless reality of the Burrowing Years.”

Hank scuttled back to the wall. Through chattering teeth he babbled, “… enough radioactives⁠ ⁠… kill a thousand men⁠ ⁠… freak⁠ ⁠… a freak⁠ ⁠…” In his agitation he forgot for a moment to inhale through the respirator.

Even Effie⁠—taken off guard, all the fears that had been drilled into her twanging like piano wires⁠—shrank from the skeletal-seeming shape beside her, held herself to it only by desperation.

Patrick did it for her. He disengaged her arm and stepped briskly away. Then he whirled on them, smiling sardonically, and started to speak, but instead looked with distaste at the chattering Geiger counter he held between fingers and thumb.

“Have