Free Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber Page B

mind went off at a tangent. Suppose you applied this principle outside bridge? Suppose that coincidence and other chance happenings weren’t really as chancy as they looked? Suppose there were individuals with a special aptitude for calling the turns, making the breaks? But that was a pretty obvious idea — nothing to give a person the shiver it had given him.
    “I wonder what’s holding up the Gunnisons?” Professor Carr was saying. “We might start one table now. Perhaps we can get in an extra rubber,” he added hopefully.
    A peal from the chimes settled the question.
    Gunnison looked as if he had eaten his dinner too fast and Hulda seemed rather surly.
    “We had to rush so,” she muttered curtly to Norman as he held open the door.
    Like the other two women, she almost ignored him and concentrated her greetings on Tansy. It gave him a vaguely uneasy feeling as when they had first come to Hempnell and faculty visits had been a nerveracking chore. Tansy seemed at a disadvantage, unprotected, in contrast to the aggressive air animating the other three.
    But what of it? — he told himself. That was normal for Hempnell faculty wives. They acted as if they lay awake nights plotting to poison the people between their husband and the president’s chair.
    Whereas Tansy — But that was like what Tansy had been doing or rather what Tansy had said they were doing. She hadn’t been doing it. She had only been — His thoughts started to gyrate confusingly and he switched them off.
    They cut for partners.
    The cards seemed determined to provide an illustration for the theory Carr had explained. The hands were uniformly commonplace — abnormally average. No long suits. Nothing but 4-4-3-2 and 4-33-8 distribution. Bid one; make two. Bid two; down one.
    After the second round, Norman applied his private remedy for boredom — the game of “Spot the Primitive.” You played it by yourself, secretly. It was just an exercise for an ethnologist’s imagination. You pretended that the people around you were members of a savage race, and you tried to figure out how their personalities would manifest themselves in such an environment.
    Tonight it worked almost too well.
    Nothing unusual about the men. Gunnison, of course, would be a prosperous tribal chieftain; perhaps a little fatter, and tended by maidens, but with a jealous and vindictive wife waiting to pounce. Carr might figure as the basket maker of the village — a spry old man, grinning like a little monkey, weaving the basket fibers into intricate mathematical matrices. Sawtelle, of course, would be the tribal scapegoat, butt of endless painful practical jokes.
    But the women!
    Take Mrs. Gunnison, now his partner. Give her a brown skin. Leave the red hair, but twist some copper ornaments in it. She’d be heftier if anything, a real mountain of a woman, stronger than most of the men in the tribe, able to wield a spear or club. The same brutish eyes, but the lower lip would jut out in a more openly sullen and domineering way. It was only too easy to imagine what she’d do to the unlucky maidens in whom her husband showed too much interest. Or how she would pound tribal policy into his head when they retired to their hut. Or how her voice would thunder out the death chants the women sang to aid the men away at war.
    Then Mrs. Sawtelle and Mrs. Carr, who had progressed to the top table along with himself and Mrs. Gunnison. Mrs. Sawtelle first. Make her skinnier. Scarify the fiat cheeks with ornamental ridges. Tattoo the spine. Witch woman. Bitter as quinine bark because her husband was ineffectual. Think of her prancing before a spike-studded fetish. Think of her screeching incantations and ripping off a chicken’s head…
    “Norman, you are playing out of turn,” said Mrs. Gunnison.
    “Sorry.”
    And Mrs. Carr. Shrivel her a bit. Leave only a few wisps of hair on the parchment skull. Take away the glasses, so her eyes would be gummy. She’d blink and peer