Free Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber by Fritz Leiber Page A

stroked it, letting the strands slip slowly through his fingers. “You know I lost tonight, baby, don’t you?” he said softly.
I stood up. “Come along,” I said to her. “Let’s leave.”
She just sat there. I couldn’t even tell if she was trembling. I tried to read a message in her eyes through the mask.
“I’ll take you away,” I said to her. “I can do it. I really will.”
He smiled at me. “She’d like to go with you,” he said. “Wouldn’t you, baby?”
“Will you or won’t you?” I said to her. She still just sat there.
He slowly knotted his fingers in her hair.
“Listen, you little vermin,” I snapped at him. “Take your hands off her.”
He came up from the seat like a snake. I’m no fighter. I just know that the more scared I am, the harder and straighter I hit. This time I was lucky. But as he crumpled back I felt a slap and four stabs of pain in my cheek. I clapped my hand to it. I could feel the four gashes made by her dagger finger caps, and the warm blood oozing out from them.
She didn’t look at me. She was bending over Little Zirk and cuddling her mask to his cheek and crooning,“There, there, don’t feel bad, you’ll be able to hurt me afterward.”
There were sounds around us, but they didn’t come close. I leaned forward and ripped the mask from her face.
I really don’t know why I should have expected her face to be anything else. It was very pale, of course, and there weren’t any cosmetics. I suppose there’s no point in wearing any under a mask. The eyebrows were untidy and the lips chapped. But as for the general expression, as for the feelings crawling and wriggling across it…
Have you ever lifted a rock from damp soil? Have you ever watched the slimy white grubs?
I looked down at her, she up at me.“Yes, you’re so frightened, aren’t you?” I said sarcastically. “You dread this little nightly drama, don’t you? You’re scared to death.”
And I walked right out into the purple night, still holding my hand to my bleeding cheek. No one stopped me, not even the girl wrestlers. I wished I could tear a tab from under my shirt and test it then and there, and find I’d taken too much radiation, and so be able to ask to cross the Hudson and go down New Jersey, past the lingering radiance of the Narrows Bomb, and so on to Sandy Hook to wait for the rusty ship that would take me back over the seas to England.

A Pail of Air
    PA HAD SENT ME OUT to get an extra pail of air. I’d just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing.
    You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady’s face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air four stories thick. I’d never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn’t, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you?
    Even at that, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma sees some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes.
    When I’d recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn’t a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn’t have the Sun’s protection.
    I tell you, the thought of it gave me the