Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (25 page)

A little corner of Joe’s mind wondered how a live skeleton hung together. Did the bones still have gristle and thews, were they wired, was it done with force-fields, or was each bone a calcium magnet clinging to the next? This tying in somehow with the generation of the deadly ivory electricity.
In the great hush of The Boneyard, someone cleared his throat, a Scarlet Woman tittered hysterically, a coin fell from the nakedest change-girl’s tray with a golden clink and rolled musically across the floor.
“Silence,” the Big Gambler commanded and in a movement almost too fast to follow whipped a hand inside the bosom of his coat and out to the crap table’s rim in front of him. A short-barreled silver revolver lay softly gleaming there. “Next creature, from the humblest nigger night-girl to… you, Mr. Bones, who utters a sound while my worthy opponent rolls, gets a bullet in the head.”
Joe gave him a courtly bow back, it felt funny, and then decided to start his run with a natural seven made up of an ace and a six. He rolled and this time the Big Gambler, judging from the movements of his skull, closely followed the course of the cubes with his eyes that weren’t there.
The dice landed, rolled over, and lay still. Incredulously, Joe realized that for the first time in his crap-shooting life he’d made a mistake. Or else there was a power in the Big Gambler’s gaze greater than that in his own right hand. The six cube had come down okay, but the ace had taken an extra half-roll and come down six too.
“End of the game,” Mr. Bones boomed sepulchrally.
The Big Gambler raised a brown skeletal hand. “Not necessarily,” he whispered. His black eyepits aimed themselves at Joe like the mouths of siege guns. “Joe Slattermill, you still have something of value to wager, if you wish. Your life.”
At that a giggling and a hysterical littering and a guffawing and a braying and a shrieking burst uncontrollably out of the whole Boneyard. Mr. Bones summed up the sentiments when he bellowed over the rest of the racket, “Now what use or value is there in the life of a bummer like Joe Slattermill? Not two cents, ordinary money.”
The Big Gambler laid a hand on the revolver gleaming before him and all the laughter died.
“I have a use for it,” the Big Gambler whispered. “Joe Slattermill, on my part I will venture all my winnings of tonight, and throw in the world and everything in it for a side bet. You will wager your life, and on the side your soul. Your turn to roll the dice. What’s your pleasure?”
Joe Slattermill quailed, but then the drama of the situation took hold of him. He thought it over and realized he certainly wasn’t going to give up being stage center in a spectacle like this to go home broke to his Wife and Mother and decaying house and the dispirited Mr. Guts. Maybe, he told himself encouragingly, there wasn’t a power in the Big Gambler’s gaze, maybe Joe had just made his one and only crap-shooting error. Besides, he was more inclined to accept Mr. Bones’s assessment of the value of his life than the Big Gambler’s.
“It’s a bet,” he said.
“Lottie, give him the dice.”
Joe concentrated his mind as never before,
the power
, tingled triumphantly in his hand, and he made his throw.
The dice never hit the felt. They went swooping down, then up, in a crazy curve far out over the end of the table, and then came streaking back like tiny red-glinting meteors toward the face of the Big Gambler, where they suddenly nested and hung in his black eye sockets, each with their single red gleam of an ace showing.
Snake eyes.
The whisper, as those red-glinting dice-eyes stared mockingly at him: “Joe Slattermill, you’ve crapped out.”
Using thumb and middle finger—or bone rather—of either hand, the Big Gambler removed the dice from his eye sockets and dropped them in Lottieped s white-gloved hand.
“Yes, you’ve crapped out, Joe Slattermill,” he went on tranquilly. “And now you can shoot yourself,” he touched the silver gun,“or cut your throat,” he whipped a gold-handled bowie knife out of his coat and laid it beside the revolver, “or poison yourself,” the two weapons were joined by a small black bottle with white skull and crossbones on it, “or Miss Flossie here can kiss you to death.”
He drew forward beside him his prettiest, evilest-looking sporting-girl. She preened herself and flounced her short violet skirt and gave Joe a provocative, hungry look, lifting her carmine upper lip to show her long white canines.
“Or else,” the Big Gambler added, nodding significantly toward the blackbottomed crap table, “you can take the Big Dive.”
Joe said evenly, “I’ll take the Big Dive.”
He put his right foot on his empty chip table, his left on the black rim, fell forward… and suddenly kicking off from the rim, launched himself in a tiger spring straight across the crap table at the Big Gambler’s throat, solacing himself with the thought that certainly the poet chap hadn’t seemed to suffer long.
As he flashed across the exact center of the table he got an instant photograph of what really lay below, but his brain had no time to develop that snapshot, for the next instant he was plowing into the Big Gambler.
Stiffened brown palm edge caught him in the temple with a lightninglike judo chop… and the brown fingers or bones flew all apart like puff paste. Joe’s left hand went through the Big Gambler’s chest as if there were nothing there but black satin coat, while his right hand, straight-armedly clawing at the slouch-hatted skull, crunched it to pieces. Next instant Joe was sprawled on the floor with some black clothes and brown fragments.
He was on his feet in a flash and snatching at the Big Gambler’s tall stacks. He had time for one left-handed grab. He couldn’t see any gold or silver or any black chips, so he stuffed his left pants pocket with a handful of the pale chips and ran.
Then the whole population of The Boneyard was on him and after him. Teeth, knives and brass knuckles flashed. He was punched, clawed, kicked, tripped and stamped on with spike heels. A gold-plated trumpet with a bloodshot-eyed black face behind it bopped him on the head. He got a white flash of the golden dice-girl and made a grab for her, but she got away. Someone tried to mash a lighted cigar in his eye.
Lottie, writhing and flailing like a white boa constrictor, almost got a simultaneous strangle hold and scissors on him. From a squat wide-mouth bottle Flossie, snarling like a feline fiend, threw what smelt like acid past his face. Mr. Bones peppered shots around him from the silver revolver. He was stabbed at, gouged, rabbit-punched, scrag-mauled, slugged, kneed, bitten, bearhugged, butted, beaten and had his toes trampled.
But somehow none of the blows or grabs had much force. It was like fighting ghosts. In the end it turned out that the whole population of The Boneyard, working together, had just a little more strength than Joe. He felt himself being lifted by a multitude of hands and pitched out through the swinging doors so that he thudded down on his rear end on the board sidewalk. Even that didn’t hurt much. It was more like a kick of encouragement.
He took a deep breath and felt himself over and worked his bones. He didn’t seem to have suffered any serious damage. He stood up and looked around. The Boneyard was dark and silent as the grave, or the planet Pluto, or all the rest of Ironmine. As his eyes got accustomed to the starlight and occasional roving spaceship-gleam, he saw a padlocked sheet-iron door where the swinging ones had been.
He found he was chewing on something crusty that he’d somehow carried in his right hand all the way through the final fracas. Mighty tasty, like the bread his Wife baked for best customers. At that instant his brain developed the photograph it had taken when he had glanced down as he flashed across the center of the crap table. It was a thin wall of flames moving sideways across the table and just beyond the flames the faces of his Wife, Mother, and Mr. Guts, all looking very surprised. He realized that what he was chewing was a fragment of the Big Gambler’s skull, and he remembered the shape of the three loaves his Wife had started to bake when he left the house. And he understood the magic she’d made to let him get a little ways away and feel half a man, and then come diving home with his fingers burned. He spat out what was in his mouth and pegged the rest of the bit of giant-popover skull across the street.
He fished in his left pocket. Most of the pale poker chips had been mashed in the fight, but he found a whole one and explored its surface with his fingertips. The symbol embossed on it was a cross. He lifted it to his lips and took a bite. It tasted delicate, but delicious. He ate it and felt his strength revive. He patted his bulging left pocket. At least he’d start out well provisioned.
Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world.

AFTER THE SUPPER DISHES were done there was a general movement from the Adler kitchen to the Adler living room.

It was led by Gottfried Helmuth Adler, commonly known as Gott. He was thinking how they should be coming from a dining room, yes, with colored maids, not from a kitchen. In a large brandy snifter he was carrying what had been left in the shaker from the martinis, a colorless elixir weakened by melted ice yet somewhat stronger than his wife was supposed to know. This monster drink was a regular part of Gott’s carefully thoughtout program for getting safely through the end of the day.

“After the seventeenth hour of creation God got sneaky,” Gott Adler once put it to himself.
He sat down in his leather-upholstered easy chair, flipped open Plutarch’s
Lives
left-handed, glanced down through the lower halves of his executive bifocals at the paragraph in the biography of Caesar he’d been reading before dinner, then, without moving his head, looked through the upper halves back toward the kitchen.
After Gott came Jane Adler, his wife. She sat down at her drawing table, where pad, pencils, knife, art gum, distemper paints, water, brushes, and rags were laid out neatly.
Then came little Heinie Adler, wearing a spaceman’s transparent helmet with a large hole in the top for ventilation. He went and stood beside this arrangement of objects: first a long wooden box about knee-high with a smaller box on top and propped against the latter a toy control panel of blue and silver plastic, on which only one lever moved at all; next, facing the panel, a child’s wooden chair; then back of the chair another long wooden box lined up with the first.
“Good-by Mama, good-by Papa,” Heinie called. “I’m going to take a trip in my spaceship.”

“Be back in time for bed,” his mother said.
“Hot jets!” murmured his father.
Heinie got in, touched the control panel twice, and then sat motionless in the little wooden chair, looking straight ahead.

A fourth person came into the living room from the kitchen—the Man in the Black Flannel Suit. He moved with the sick jerkiness and had the slack putty-gray features of a figure of the imagination that hasn’t been fully developed. (There was a fifth person in the house, but even Gott didn’t know about him yet.)

The Man in the Black Flannel Suit made a stiff gesture at Gott and gaped his mouth to talk to him, but the latter silently writhed his lips in a “Not yet, you fool!” and nodded curtly toward the sofa opposite his easy chair.

“Gott,” Jane said, hovering a pencil over the pad, “you’ve lately taken to acting as if you were talking to someone who isn’t there.”
“I have, my dear?” her husband replied with a smile as he turned a page, but not lifting his face from his book. “Well, talking to oneself is the sovereign guard against madness.”
“I thought it worked the other way,” Jane said.
“No,” Gott informed her.
Jane wondered what she should draw and saw she had very faintly sketched on a small scale the outlines of a child, done in sticks-and-blobs like Paul Klee or kindergarten art. She could do another “Children’s Clubhouse,” she supposed, but where should she put it this time?
The old electric clock with brass fittings that stood on the mantel began to wheeze shrilly, “Mystery, mystery, mystery, mystery.” It struck Jane as a good omen for her picture. She smiled.
Gott took a slow pull from his goblet and felt the scentless vodka bite just enough and his skin shiver and the room waver pleasantly for a moment with shadows chasing across it. Then he swung the pupils of his eyes upward and looked across at the Man in the Black Flannel Suit, noting with approval that he was sitting rigidly on the sofa. Gott conducted his side of the following conversation without making a sound or parting his lips more than a quarter of an inch, just flaring his nostrils from time to time.
BLACK FLANNEL: Now if I may have your attention for a space, Mr. Adler—
GOTT: Speak when you’re spoken to! Remember, I created you.
BLACK FLANNEL: I respect your belief. Have you been getting any messages?
GOTT: The number 6669 turned up three times today in orders and estimates. I received an airmail advertisement beginning “Are you ready for big success?” though the rest of the ad didn’t signify. As I opened the envelope the minute hand of my desk clock was pointing at the faceless statue of Mercury on the Commerce Building. When I was leaving the office my secretary droned at me,“A representative of the Inner Circle will call on you tonight,” though when I questioned her, she claimed that she’d said, “Was the letter to Innes-Burkel and Company all right?” Because she is aware of my deafness, I could hardly challenge her. In any case she sounded sincere. If those were messages from the Inner Circle, I received them. But seriously I doubt the existence of that clandestine organization. Other explanations seem to me more likely—for instance, that I am developing a psychosis. I do not believe in the Inner Circle.
BLACK FLANNEL
(smiling shrewdly—his features have grown tightly handsome though his complexion is still putty gray):
Psychosis is for weak minds. Look, Mr. Adler, you believe in the Mafia, the FBI, and the Communist Underground. You believe in upper-echelon control groups in unions and business and fraternal organizations. You know the workings of big companies. You are familiar with industrial and political espionage. You are not wholly unacquainted with the secret fellowships of munitions manufacturers, financiers, dope addicts and procurers and pornography connoisseurs and the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of sexual deviates and enthusiasts. Why do you boggle at the Inner Circle?
GOTT
(coolly):
I do not wholly believe in all of those other organizations. And the Inner Circle still seems to me more of a wish-dream than the rest. Besides, you may want me to believe in the Inner Circle in order at a later date to convict me of insanity.
BLACK FLANNEL
(drawing a black briefcase from behind his legs and unzipping it on his knees):
Then you do not wish to hear about the Inner Circle?
GOTT
(inscrutably):
I will listen for the present. Hush!
Heinie was calling out excitedly, “I’m in the stars, Papa! They’re so close they burn!” He said nothing more and continued to stare straight ahead.
“Don’t touch them,” Jane warned without looking around. Her pencil made a few faint five-pointed stars. The Children’s Clubhouse would be on a boundary of space, she decided—put it in a tree on the edge of the Old Ravine. She said, “Gott, what do you suppose Heinie sees out there besides stars?”
“Bug-eyed angels, probably,” her husband answered, smiling again but still not taking his head out of his book.
BLACK FLANNEL
(consulting a sheet of crackling black paper he has slipped from his briefcase, though as far as Gott can see there is no printing, typing, writing, or symbols of any sort in any color ink on the black bond):