The Best of Fritz Leiber (42 page)

I called sweetly at him, “Are you scared a customer will put a gush of quarters into one of your metal bandits with her own little pinkies if you’re a minute late?”

Dick scowled, gyrating around a stubborn trouser leg. “Don’t you worry, Dickie,” I kept on. “All the women I illicitly psyched were as nervous of machinery as sex; they wanted a man to do it for them.”

Society, graciously, used to let people work vending and other coin-operated machines, like laundromats. But now, like laundromats too, you have to pay an attendant to do it for you—because machines are temperamental and individual enterprise is almost as holy as money and anyway, there aren’t enough jobs to go around more than two or three times.

Dick groggled something at me and got the door open, all set for a spring-heel takeoff. But there in his way was a tiny man, dressed like a respectable beetle, with dimpled fist raised to knock. He had glasses with zoomer lenses; silver antennae quivered out of his gray hat; a flat black belly-box was his ventral carapace. He looked around, especially at the cluttered floor, as if we were a touch unsavory, but he held his ground.

As Dick paused at this coleopterous apparition, Ma came charging out of the bed-closets, red in the face and black was the rest of her. She grappled Dick around the elbows and roared, “Stop! No son of mine is going out to give battle to the 21st Century on an empty stomach.” Grabbing a quarter orange she shoved it between his teeth like a boxer’s mouthpiece and then snatching this way and that she slammed a sandwich in his one hand and a cup in the other and on the next time around poured it steaming full.

No one can deny that Ma stands squarely in back of her four sons, like the manager of a quartet of fistic champions, conscious of our genius and determined that it get recognition in the form of seven-or eight-job careers. Though at the moment Dick was the only one of us with any job at all, except for Tom, who lives away with his wife and two kids. But obstructions and setbacks never daunt Ma. It’s not the money she’s after, mostly, it’s the glory of the House of Henley pitted against the whole bloody world.

Pricked by tender filial warmth, I eyed her—a murderous son-punishing behemoth but my blessed mother—while Whitey gave her an unseen wave. He’s an old admirer she tolerates ever since Pa recognized her superior nuclear power and died.

Dick bit out and swallowed the meat of the orange and tongued aside the peel so as to yell that the coffee was burning his hand and what would it do to his throat? Ma ripped the fridge open against the pull of the great spring I’d fixed outside to keep it shut since the latch broke. She whisked out an ice-cube and tucked it in Dick’s cup. The fridge door thudded shut and the spring whirred like a rattlesnake about to jump loose and strike, but it didn’t.

Then Dick gulped his coffee while Ma held him and screeched in his ear about using lunch hour to scout for a second job and not stalk girls. When he’d finished his drink, she gagged him with his sandwich and let him go.

The beetle-man dodged aside. Dick took off with a straight-line velocity that would have broken his neck and scattered his bones if we’d still been living on the twentieth floor and not in this ground-level flat they tricked us into exchanging for.

The TV blinked and—presto—there was a soldierly file of eight-job men (tabbed for that by the digit on their left shoulder) single-footing with pleasant monotony past the golden plastic statue of a twelve-jobber. Each as he reached screen-center turned head and shouted an inaudible but optimistic something at me and bared all his perfectly tended teeth in a dazzling grin.

I breathed a happy sigh and got set for a spell of quiet—at least until the centipedes decided to start scuttling—but just then the beetle-man poked his head in and piped politely at Ma. “Good morning. Mrs. Henley, I’m your area med statistician, come to take your blood-pressure and photo-snap your insides and all for posterity, like we arranged for a week ago.”

Ma slowly turned her head and glared at him like a bull that spots the matador, or, more likely, a peanut-vendor strolling across the ring. The red in her face went purple and she slowly reached for the bubbling coffee flask and slowly lifted it. The beetle-man innocently watched the lethal globe ascend with its tip-tilting seething brown hemicore, as if all this were a job-indoctrination demonstration in astrophysics.

Whitey started up, but I pushed him back in his chair, saying rapidly, “Not you. Even being an old friend of the family wouldn’t save you from the horns at this moment.”

Then I rasped loud as ambulance-brakes at Ma, “Hold your hand, you murdering old frump!”

She turned at once, as I’d known she would. I cited her and she charged me with the coffee flask high, very much like a small Miura, but armed in a fashion to have made Manolete himself turn pale. But I slipped her with a half veronica and as she went past I kissed her low on the back of the neck, just at the spot where the matador’s sword goes in. I whisked my arms around her beloved thick waist, and the next instant she and Whitey and I were as happy as tin larks together flitting through a sparkling star cluster, and she was pouring fresh coffee for us.

But the beetle-man, never dreaming the deadly peril he’d been in, advanced another step into the kitchen and called, “Mrs. Henley, it’s very needful you have your medical inspection. You’re distorting area med statistics and there are drastic penalties for evading med census. No need for you to undress, just hold still now—”

I pushed the coffee flask back against the wall and I stroked Ma as I held her tight, so she didn’t go quite as purple as she howled at him, “You filthy med-spy!—do you think I’ll submit to your peepings and be stuff for your filthy pictures when I’m not granted decent human med service if I do sicken? Here I have four grand sons, supermen ah
¹
—Meaghan here, who’s a master mind doctor, and Harry who’s still in bed, the greatest poet in the world, and Dick the Prince of Personalities, whom you saw speeding to work and I need not comment on, and Tom, who’s a bloody wonder—and the filthy world takes so little note of them that if I go to the clinic it’s only robot doctors who’ll see me and never a flesh-and-blood physician!”

Whatever the topic of her rant, Ma always gets in a commercial for her boys.

The beetle-man quivered back a little at all that, but not very far, and piped soothingly, “Mrs. Henley, there’s nothing vulgar or inferior about robo-med. The Secretary of Mental Health himself prefers—” He started to take another step into the room.

“That old sham!” Ma roared, palpitating in my grasp and purpling dark. “He’s the same one whose minions are forever sentencing my genius son Harry to the clutches of the remedial psychiatrists.”

“But Mrs. Henley,” the little fellow went on with rash courage, “I can see with my own eyes you’re not in the best of health. An immediate med-check—”

That gave me my opening and I shoved Ma into Whitey’s arms and advanced on the beetle-man quickly, waving my finger like a sword between his bug eyes. “You watch yourself, lad,” I cried, “or they’ll be terminating you for making diagnoses who are only census-taker. That’s what the licensed psychers did to me for adding only a few words of insight and wisdom to my street-smiling.”

At that very moment a ghostly pattering began and swiftly grew louder. It seemed to come from everywhere.

“What’s that?” the little chap asked wonderingly.

“The giant centipedes,” I told him.

He paled and his zoomered eyes searched the shadows under table and sink as he scuttled backwards, and just at that moment, perhaps from the floor being swayed by our movements, the great spring on the fridge came loose and went klishing across the floor very close to his feet—a twenty-inch coil of gray wire. He leaped for the lintel of the doorway to hoist himself out of reach of the venomous monster of his imagination, but he missed and fell and went leaping off as if old Fu Manchu’s whole blessed menagerie were at his heels. In pure pity I followed him under the great awning, polka-dotted now by the shadows showing through of the stuff pattering down on it, and caught up with him just beyond the mounting flake-drift.

“Don’t be frightened,” I told him, grappling him gently and forcing him to lift his zoomers to the ragged-topped wall behind, now only four to six stories high instead of the thirty it had been a week ago. Along its roller coaster margin two sinuous many-legged great silver beasties scampered, chomping great bites out of it and raining the digested fragments down from their rear ends in concrete cornflakes.

“Those are the giant centipedes,” I explained. “Demolishment robots, only.”

I was thinking of how Harry might make a shuddery poem of them —glittery cosmic crawlers nibbling the gray rim of infinity, eating their way in toward us from the ends of the universe—when at that instant a weightier chunk, rejected by one of the creature’s delicate digestive apparatus, no doubt, came thunking down like a meteor not four feet from us, denting the hard ground and raising a geyser of dust. The beetle-man darted off a dozen more steps while I ducked back under the awning, calling to him, “Now be off with you, little official, and trouble Ma no more. She’s too much for you, but let that not cast you down. Look on her as a revenant from a hardier, crueler age— a duchess out of place.”

I’d no sooner got back in the kitchen, where Ma and Whitey were chatting over their coffee, than Ellie, Dick’s wife, came out of the bed-closets full-dressed with bright suitcases in her hands and a dirty dark look in her eyes. She was saying, “Listen all of you, for I’ll not tell it twice: I’m leaving that one-job no-good and going back to my last husband, who’s still got the three jobs I left him with when I thought to better myself by entering this house of mad pride and sloth and poets snoring,” and she brushed past me, the silver spring twinging again as she chanced to kick it.

“Meaghan, let her go, who can’t appreciate the Prince of Personalities,” Ma said to me loftily, her color down to ladylike bright pink again, but I still would have followed and argued with Ellie—Dick didn’t deserve to be deserted when he’d just got a toe on the bottom rung of the ladder, which of course was why she was leaving him though she didn’t know it, a jealous no-job little wifey—except that just then who should appear in the doorway but my eldest brother, Tom, filling it with his big grin and his great shoulders and his aura of three-job success—or would it be four now?—and saying, “Hi, Ma. Ellie leaving Dick again? Who’s the tiny one hanging around outside? Housing official come to coax you once more from this death trap? Hello, Whitey. No, no coffee, Ma, I want to talk to Mea-ghan here. I’ve got something for the lad!”

I knew what that meant, of course, and I was already hunched on my hands and knees, starting to fix the spring to the fridge again— a job that might easily take the rest of the day, I decided—when I felt Ma’s kindly talons on my shoulder, lifting me up, and she saying, “Whitey’U fix that, Meaghan,” and then her beloved claws were propelling me to a seat at the table flush against the blue flexo, with my cup in front of me and beyond that Tom’s great face as full of a smile of eager elder-brother benignity as my cup was of steaming coffee —Ma having poured again and dropped in a pinch of dexy (I saw her) to give me spirit.

All the while I was thinking chiefly,
What job’s he found now that’s so bad he won’t take it himself but offer it to me
? It’d have to be pretty bad, for at last count Tom’s three jobs were grinding mirrors for leisure-time astronomers who hadn’t time to grind their own —that’s one—and selling retailers a brand of all-cornsilk cancer-free cigarets with the genuine coal-tar taste and the nicotine life—that’s two—and answering for a robot answering service whenever the decibel-rating of the caller’s voice began to indicate extreme rage. He still had the third job, at any rate, by the phone-rig hanging around his neck.

“Meaghan,” he beamed, “next to an all-girl squad of revivalist angels, there’s naught so wondrous as brother-love. I got something great for you. By the by, I have Number Four myself now—I travel in ladies’ glow-in-the-dark underthings.”

As Ma raised a cheer at that, I looked around for escape, but Whitey was squatting at the fridge and blocking the door to the outer world, as happy with his tinkering as a great-grandfather cockroach (one of which was walking up his leg) while Ma, cheering still but with a policeman’s eye on me, was taking a cup of coffee big and smoking as a volcano into the bed-closets—to fire Harry’s poetic genius, no doubt, or in lieu of that toss him on his lazy feet.

“Meaghan—” Tom began, but just then his neck phone rang and he twitched it on and I could hear a voice like angry wasps. Tom listened and his face grew pink—he takes after Ma in that—and he said, “Certainly, madam. However—” and then his face grew purple and he began to bubble his mouth like a fish.

I leaned across the table and put my lips to the mouthpiece and shouted, “I love you dearly, unknown, indeed I do. I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that,” and I twitched the thing off.

“That won’t satisfy her,” Tom said when he got his right color back and his breath.

“It will for twenty minutes,” I told him, “and what in this world is good for any longer?” And then I added, reckless in my light-heartedness, “You were saying… ?”

“Meaghan,” Tom began again, “I know you had this trifling street-smiler’s job—”

“Not so trifling or little,” I defended, though I hadn’t intended to. “The sociologists decided people looked too tense and glum going back and forth to work and shopping and so on, so they hired folk like myself to mingle among ‘em and strike up talk, casual-like, to cheer ’em up. Not quite the worst idea in the world, either.”

“Yes, but you went too far,” Tom reminded me. “You pried into people’s minds to find their real troubles and set ‘em straight. That’s psychers’ work, my lad, and you can’t blame that august profession for resenting your competition and having you terminated.”

“I helped the people I talked to,” I countered stubbornly. ‘1 couldn’t have talked to them at all, Tom, if I hadn’t something solid to say.“