The Best of Fritz Leiber.
by FRITZ LEIBER.
The Wizard of Nehwon
WHEN I was first asked to write an introduction to a volume of Fritz Leiber stories-the most important of such collections at that-my reaction was inappropriately inelegant: "Huh?" I still think it had a fundamental tightness. How can anybody properly comment on the work of one who is not only his senior in the profession by a good many years, but is universally acknowledged to be among its three or four all-time t.i.tans?
Yet this was an honor I could not decline. It was like being in a physics department back around 1935 and invited to introduce a series of guest lectures by Einstein. A person hi that position realizes the audience hasn"t come to hear, or read, him. But he"ll try to avoid boring plat.i.tudes. If he"s lucky, he"ll even convey a slight extra insight, which will help that audience appreciate the visitor and what he"ll say a little bit more than they might otherwise have done. Maybe I"ll luck out.
Let"s first make a few remarks about the man himself, before going on to his writing. They will be only a few-despite the keyhole school of criticism, the facts of a creator"s life are not required for an understanding of his or her work; or if they are, then that person has to that extent failed as an artist. Fritz Leiber does employ a certain amount of autobiography hi his work, perhaps more than any other maker of science fiction or fantasy. But he"s far too skillful for you to need to know what the personal element is. Besides, he lets you in on some of it himself, for your pleasure, in his afterword to the present volume.
And I can"t claim deep knowledge of him in any event. We have been friends for a long time, guests in each other"s homes, and so on; but until recently, geographical separation prevented frequent encounters, and we never happened to strike up one of his extended correspondences which have delighted a number of people. Therefore, a mere scattering of reminiscences and data: I first met Fritz Leiber at the 1949 world science fiction convention in Cincinnati. The author of such cornerstone tales as Gather, Darkness! and Conjure Wtfe seemed even more awe-inspiring In person, towering, cla.s.sically handsome, altogether theatrical. The last of these qualities was not deliberate- rather, he was conventionally clad and soft-spoken-but he couldn"t help it; personality will come through. He talked to me, a beginner with half a dozen stories in print, as graciously as he did to the biggest-name writer or editor present, or the humblest fan. Here "graciously" is used in an exact sense which is best defined by an example.
From time to time we are all afflicted with bores or boors. Some of us give them the brutal brush-off; most of us suffer them for a short while, then escape on a mumbled excuse. Fritz Leiber has repeatedly been seen to listen to such characters, respond to them, actively, sympathetically, and patiently enough that they never suspect the toleration. He cannot have an enemy in the world; instead, there is a worldful of people who all hope to be worthy of his friendship.
It is etymologically wrong but psychologically right to define a gentleman as one who is gentle, yet very much a man. Leiber has been a championship fencer and a chess player rated "expert." To see and hear him recite Chesterton"s bravura "Lepanto" is an unforgettable experience. And, of course, in his writing he has stared down- or laughed down-death, horror, human absurdity, with guts worthy of a Tetters, Kafka, or Cervantes.
Born in Chicago near the end of 1910, his father a famous Shakespearean actor for whom Fritz was named, he grew up in the atmosphere of the stage, which doubtless has a great deal to do with the highly visual and dramatic quality of his work. But he took his degree in psychology, which also shows. Variously a lay preacher, actor, college teacher of drama, and staff writer for an encyclopedia, he tried free-lancing sporadically. His first published story appeared hi 1939, in that l.u.s.trous and mourned magazine Unknown. During World War II he reached a painful decision-that the struggle against fascism was more important than the pacifist convictions which he had long held, and still does-and he accepted a job in aircraft production. Afterward, he was on the staff of Science Digest for a dozen years. During all this time he acquired a wife and son and, between dry spells which readers regretted, wrote a lot of the best science fiction and fantasy in the business. Eventually he moved from Chicago to southern California and started writing full time. Since his wife"s death (everybody who knew her misses Jonquil) he has lived hi San Francisco.
" So now Fritz Leiber is hi his sixties, an age when most artists have either retired or are sterilely repeating themselves. The years show on him a bit-but not too much, and only physically. Inside, while possessing all the wisdom of a lifetime, he"s younger than the average man of thirty. To give a small personal ill.u.s.tration: not long ago, in his rambles around his newly adopted city, he discovered a walking tour that will take you to every place where action occurs in Dashiell Hammett"s The Maltese Falcon. Or... recently my wife gave an elaborate dinner to honor the memory of E. R. Eddison, upon the date of Lessingham"s translation into Zimiamvia. Only those who would understand what that means were invited, and they were expected to come hi costume. Fritz graced the party as the oldest, most sharply humorous, and best-dressed man present.
If anything, he keeps growing younger, more actively creative. His past unproductive periods seem to have been times during which, consciously or unconsciously, he was preparing himself to strike out hi a different direction. The results were always surprising and consequential. Though ever aware of and sensitive to the great issues of the real world around him, he has never been a merely "relevant" writer. Instead, he has always been in the forefront in both themes and treatment. In these past several years we have been witnessing a new burst of pioneering, which looks as if it will continue while he lives. That makes especially appropriate the book, both retrospective and contemporary, which you are holding. And it brings up our real subject, Fritz Leiber"s achievement.
I do not propose to offer you a critique. For one thing, while mildly disagreeing with a few of her judgments, I couldn"t better the one by Judith Merril.* Besides, I lay no claim to being a critic, simply a working writer.
To be sure, that distinction is far from absolute. Thus Merril published excellent fiction in earlier days, while Leiber has done a certain amount of criticism. The question to consider is where the emphasis of a life-in this case Leiber"s-has lain-or, at least, what an essayist is trying to do. I"ll say little about the stories hi this volume. They speak for themselves; moreover, you have the author"s own notes. Rather, I"d like to consider in a very informal fashion, and from the viewpoint of a fellow pract.i.tioner, some of those items which are not on hand. You who already know them may enjoy a revival of memories. You who don"t may get a better idea of Leiber"s accomplishment and, I hope, will be led to read further.
It"s too bad that we have no tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser here. Not only did that charming pair of rogues-the tall Northern barbarian and the small city-bred trickster-launch the author"s career; they are still going strong, to the joy of everybody who appreciates a rattling good fantasy adventure. But by no means are these stories conventional "sword and sorcery." The world of Nehwon is made real in wondrously imaginative detail, its human aspects as true as in any conscientious job of reporting. To visit the city of Lankhmar is to learn what decadence in fact means; to roam with our vulnerable vagabonds is to experience pity and terror as well as suspense, wry humor, and uproarious hilarity. Here Leiber hi his way-like the late J. R. R. Tolkien in his, and not vastly different-has done, and is doing, for the heroic fantasy what Robert Louis Stevenson did for the pirate yarn: by originality and sheer writing genius, he revived an ossified genre and started it off on a fresh path.
I could likewise wish that this book held a sample or two of Leiber"s horror stories. In my opinion, which Fritz modestly does not share, Lovecraft and Poe himself never dealt out comparable chills. The typical Leiber frightener gains tremendous power by its economy, * In The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for July 1969, a special issue honoring Fritz Leiber. Previously, in November 1959, Fantastic had run an all-Leiber issue. These, and the awards voted him, indicate the esteem in which his work is held by those who know the field.
its evocative contemporary setting, and its bleak brilliance of concept-like "Smoke Ghost," to name a single tale, whose phantom is in and of the corrupted air pervading a modern industrial city.
And you would have enjoyed "The Sixty-Four-Square Madhouse" and/or "The Moriarty Gambit," both masterly chess stories, the latter also a grand Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Well, look them up. All the omissions I have mentioned are not the fault of author or editor, but merely due to lack of s.p.a.ce. They would have crowded out equally vivid pieces that you do find here.
The novels were inevitably excluded. But any discussion of Leiber"s work, or of science fantasy as a whole, must consider them. They are few in number, but each is unique and, with two exceptions, of major significance in the development of present-day imaginative literature.
The first exception is Tarzan and the City of Gold, "only" a delightful continuation of Burroughs. Come to think of it, though, a scholar of English letters would find it most interesting to trace out how Leiber managed to convey the flavor of his model while avoiding all its crudities, outdoing Burroughs hi every way that counts, and throwing occasional philosophical and moral issues into the bargain. Does anybody need material for a master"s thesis?
Doubtless many will argue with my a.s.sertion that The Green Millennium is not a landmark. It is, in the sense of being a fine book, highly recommended. But it carries further the world of "Coming Attraction" and "Poor Superman," both hi the present collection, and thus does not break new ground-by Leiber"s standards-however inventive and often astoundingly witty it is. All the rest of us, from Heinlein on down, would rank it among our own best, had we written it.
Heinlein offers a natural starting point for a few words about Gather, Darkness!, that prototype of the interplay of ideas which has always given vitality to science fiction. In 1940 appeared his serial // This Goes On-, wherein the United States has fallen under a totalitarian regime posing as the church of a new faith and using technological devices to work suitably impressive "miracles." A year later, under his pseudonym "Anson MacDonald," he brought forth Sixth Column. There, the United States has been invaded and occupied by a foreign power which allows the people freedom of religion but of nothing else. A small underground takes advantage of secret scientific knowledge-gathered just before the collapse, so that it was never brought to bear in the war-to give the priests of a stalking-horse faith similar capabilities.
Heinlein stopped with those two books, but Leiber saw that the theme was still full of potential. Suppose such a church came to power, then never stepped down again and never was overthrown for centuries. In Gather, Darkness! it has built a neo-medieval world of ignorant commoners dominated by a hierarchy that really can invoke "supernatural" sanctions in the name of its G.o.d. A liberation movement finally does start. But in this environment it calls itself "witchcraft" and claims to serve the Devil! There are many magnificently funny details (e.g., since the priesthood rides around in aircraft built to look like angels, the aircraft of the opposition are bat-winged and horned) but the story isn"t simply a romp. Its account of brainwashing by chemical and electronic means is fast becoming a foul reality.
Gather, Darkness! was followed by a swarm of dull imitations. But surely, hi due course, it partly inspired Philip Jos6 Farmer"s seminal work The Lovers. That"s what I mean by a landmark work.
I wonder how Women"s Lib would react to a reissue of the fantasy novel from this period, Conjure Wife, with its a.s.sumption that all women are witches but they don"t tell their men. Probably there"d be general pleasure. It was popular enough to get two filmed versions; and I know several ladies hi the movement who still love the original story. As often elsewhere, Leiber doubled his strength by combining dazzling imagination with unsparing realism. The princ.i.p.al setting is a small college community, and I have since observed for myself how vicious the infighting can get in such a place. By the way, the hero, Norman Saylor, reappears in this collection. Leiber likes to interconnect tales whenever possible.
Likewise, several of Leiber"s stories are part of a series incorporating the many-branched time-lines whose origins were described hi the short novel Destiny Times Three. Ranging from a placid Utopia through a cruel dictatorship to a freezing ruin of an Earth-and beyond-this novel is more than a fast-paced chase story; it is a vatic study of power over nature and over man, so easy to misuse and so nearly impossible to use rightly.
Similarly, Leiber wrote a number of stories hi what has come to be known as the Change-War cycles- this series has rather overshadowed the one mentioned above. A couple of the Change-War stories are reprinted here. The heart of the cycle is in another novel, The Big Time. Few comparable tours de force exist anywhere in literature. The action takes place continuously in a single setting, a station outside the cosmos to which half-crazed soldiers from all time and s.p.a.ce are sent for a little rest and recreation. Beneath the flamboyancies, tension racks up notch by notch toward a breaking-point climax followed by an ironic denouement. It"s fantastically good theater- literally. How I wish to see it staged!
Being such a virtuoso performance, The Big Time doesn"t seem to have had any followers. I admit to keeping it in mind while writing my own A Midsummer Tempest, but cannot claim that that employs the dramatic unities as the former book did. Evidently n.o.body in our field can match Fritz Leiber here.
He went on to a different technique, the out-and-out satirical, hi The Silver Eggheads. This account of an ultra-mechanized future lacks the misanthropy of a Swift but bites just as hard. I really think its blend of sardonicism, earthy (even slapstick) mirth, and underlying compa.s.sion is best likened to Aristophanes. For instance, consider what might be done with pseudo-female robots- "Can you imagine, Flaxy, having it with a girl who is all velvet or plush, or who really goes all hot and cold, or who can softly sing you a full-orchestra symphony while you"re doing it "t or maybe Ravel"s Bolero, or who has slightly-not excessively -prehensile b.r.e.a.s.t.s or various refreshingly electric skin areas, or who has some of the features-not overdone, of course-of a cat or a vampire or an octopus, or who has hair like Medusa"s or Shambleau"s that lives and caresses you, or who has four arms like Siva, or a prehensile tail eight feet long, or... and at the same time is perfectly safe and can"t bother or involve or infect or dominate you in any way?"
-consider this machinery, and when you are done laughing, consider the latest issue of Playboy.
A slightly similar minor motif occurs hi The Wanderer. This novel concerns the effects on a large and varied cast of characters of a mobile planet coming near Earth. All kinds of things happen, all fascinating. But I have a reason for singling out the relationship, which eventually becomes erotic, between the human Paul and the highly evolved, feline-like Tigerishka. Leiber flinches no more from the fact that we are s.e.xual beings than he does from the fact that we are limited, usually ridiculous, and ultimately mortal. This quotation will at least give you some extra words of his: After a s.p.a.ce he came slowly floating up out of the infinite softness of that bottomless black bed, and there were the stars again, and Tigerishka lifted up a little above him so that very faintly, by starlight, he saw the violet of her petaled irises and the bronzy green of her cheeks and her mulberry lips parted, careless that she showed her whitely-glinting fangs, and she recited: "Poor little ape, you"re sick again tonight.
Has the shrill, fretful chatter fevered you?
Was it a dream-lion gave you such a fright?
And did the serpent Fear glide from the slough?
You cough, you moan, I hear your small teeth grate.
What are those words you mutter as you toss?
War, torture, guilt, revenge, crime, murder, hate?
I"ll stroke your brow, poor little ape-you"re cross.
Far wiser beings under far older stars Have had your sickness, seen their hopes denied, Sought G.o.d, fought Fate, pounded against the bars, And like you, little ape, they some day died.
The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep.
Look at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep."
"Tigerishka," Paul wondered with a sleepy puzzlement, "I started to write that sonnet years ago, but I could get only three lines. Did you-"
"No," she said softly, "you finished it by yourself. I found it, lying there in the dark behind your eyes, tossed in a corner. Rest now, Paul. Rest..."
To be thus aware of mortality, and of the ancient deeps within us while we live, is not morbid but mature. Leiber can even laugh with them-not at them, which is an evasion, but with them. He does so in A Specter Is Haunting Texas. The satire there is more stark than in The Silver Eggheads, more reminiscent of Huxley or Heine though with a strong dash of... shall we say Buster Keaton? The hero, born and reared on the Moon, has in its low gravity grown up excessively tall and thin. Forced to visit Earth, he must wear a skeleton-like supportive framework which, with his black garb, makes him Death discarnate to the inhabitants of a crazy-quilt of nations formed after a nuclear war. One of his loves is equally a Death figure, the other Flesh itself. Needless to say, the author never puts it this crudely or obviously, and the overtones are infinite. Perhaps no other modern writers except James Branch Cabell and Vladimir Nabokov have gotten such fun out of the human tragicomedy; and they, for all their wit, have never had Leiber"s uninhibited gusto.
Let us hope for much more from this man, in whatever vein he may next select. Meanwhile, the volume in your hands gives a good overview. If you are already familiar with Fritz Leiber, you know you have a treat hi store. If it will be your first encounter with him, I envy you.
-POUL ANDERSON.
Gonna Roll The Bones
SUDDENLY Joe Slattermill knew for sure he"d have to get out quick or else blow his top and knock out with the shrapnel of his skull the props and patches holding up his decaying home, that was like a house of big wooden and plaster and wallpaper cards except for the huge fireplace and ovens and chimney across the kitchen from him.
Those were stone-solid enough, though. The fireplace was chin-high, at least twice that long, and filled from end to end with roaring flames. Above were the square doors of the ovens in a row-his Wife baked for part of their living. Above the ovens was the wall-long mantelpiece, too high for his Mother to reach or Mr. Guts to jump any more, set with all sorts of ancestral curios, but any of them that weren"t stone or gla.s.s or china had been so dried and darkened by decades of heat that they looked like nothing but shrunken human heads and black golf b.a.l.l.s. At one end were cl.u.s.tered his Wife"s square gin bottles. Above the mantelpiece hung one old chromo, so high and so darkened by soot and grease that you couldn"t tell whether the swirls and fat cigar shape were a whaleback steamer ploughing through a hurricane or a s.p.a.ceship plunging through a storm of light-driven dust motes.
As soon as Joe curled his toes inside his boots, his Mother knew what he was up to. "Going b.u.mming," she mumbled with conviction. "Pants pockets full of cartwheels of house money, too, to spend on sin." And she went back to munching the long shreds she stripped fumblingly with her right hand off the turkey carca.s.s set close to the terrible heat, her left hand ready to fend off Mr. Guts, who stared at her yellow-eyed, gaunt-flanked, with long mangy tail a-twitch. In her dirty dress, streaky as the turkey"s sides, Joe"s Mother looked like a bent brown bag and her fingers were lumpy twigs.
Joe"s Wife knew as soon or sooner, for she smiled thin-eyed at him over her shoulder from where she towered at the centermost oven. Before she closed its door, Joe glimpsed that she was baking two long, flat, narrow, fluted loaves and one high, round-domed one. She was thin as death and disease hi her violet wrapper. Without looking, she reached out a yard-long, skinny arm for the nearest gin bottle and downed a warm slug and smiled again. And without a word spoken, Joe knew she"d said, "You"re going out and gamble and get drunk and lay a floozy and come home and beat me and go to jail for it," and he had a flash of the last time he"d been in the dark gritty cell and she"d come by moonlight, which showed the green and yellow lumps on her narrow skull where he"d hit her, to whisper to him through the tiny window in the back and slip him a half pint through the bars.
And Joe knew for certain that this time it would be that bad and worse, but just the same he heaved up himself and his heavy, muf-fledly clanking pockets and shuffled straight to the door, muttering, "Guess I"ll roll the bones, up the pike a stretch and back," swinging his bent, k.n.o.bbly-elbowed arms like paddlewheels to make a little joke about his words.
When he"d stepped outside, he held the door open a hand"s breadth behind him for several seconds. When he finally closed it, a feeling of deep misery struck him. Earlier years, Mr. Guts would have come streaking along to seek fights and females on the roofs and fences, but now the big torn was content to stay home and hiss by the fire and s.n.a.t.c.h for turkey and dodge a broom, quarrelling and comforting with two house-bound women. Nothing had followed Joe to the door but his Mother"s chomping and her gasping breaths and the clink of the gin bottle going back on the mantel and the creaking of the floor boards under his feet.
The night was up-side-down deep among the frosty stars. A few of them seemed to move, like the white-hot jets of s.p.a.ceships. Down below it looked as if the whole town of Ironmine had blown or but-toned out the light and gone to sleep, leaving the streets and s.p.a.ces to the equally unseen breezes and ghosts. But Joe was still in the hemisphere of the musty dry odour of the worm-eaten carpentry behind him, and as he felt and heard the dry gra.s.s of the lawn brush his calves, it occurred to him that something deep down inside him had for years been planning things so that he and the House and his Wife and Mother and Mr. Guts would all come to an end together. Why the kitchen heat hadn"t touched off the tindery place ages ago was a physical miracle.
Hunching his shoulders, Joe stepped out, not up the pike, but down the dirt road that led past Cypress Hollow Cemetery to Night Town.
The breezes were gentle, but unusually restless and variable tonight, like leprechaun squalls. Beyond the drunken, whitewashed cemetery fence dim in the starlight, they rustled the scraggly trees of Cypress Hollow and made it seem they were stroking their beards of Spanish moss. Joe sensed that the ghosts were just as restless as the breezes, uncertain where and whom to haunt, or whether to take the night off, drifting together in sorrowfully lecherous companionship. While among the trees the red-green vampire lights pulsed faintly and irregularly, like sick fireflies or a plague-stricken s.p.a.ce fleet. The feeling of deep misery stuck with Joe and deepened and he was tempted to turn aside and curl up in any convenient tomb or around some half-toppled head board and cheat his Wife and the other two behind him out of a shared doom. He thought: Gonna roll the bones, gonna roll "em up and go to sleep. But while he was deciding, he got past the sagged-open gate and the rest of the delirious fence and Shantyville too.
At first Night Town seemed dead as the rest of Ironmine, but then he noticed a faint glow, sick as the vampire lights but more feverish, and with it a jumping music, tiny at first as a jazz for jitterbugging ants. He stepped along the springy sidewalk, wistfully remembering the days when the spring was all in his own legs and he"d bound into a fight like a bobcat or a Martian sand-spider. G.o.d, it had been years now since he had fought a real fight, or felt the power. Gradually the midget music got raucous as a bunny-hug for grizzly bears and loud as a polka for elephants, while the glow became a riot of gas flares and flambeaux and corpse-blue mercury tubes and jiggling pink neon ones that all jeered at the stars where the s.p.a.ceships roved. Next thing, he was facing a three-storey false front flaring everywhere like a devil"s elbow, with a pale blue topping of St. Elmo"s fire. There were wide swinging doors in the center of it, spilling light above and below. Above the doorway, golden calcium light scrawled over and over again, with wild curlicues and flourishes, "The Boneyard," while a fiendish red kept printing out, "Gambling."
So the new place they"d all been talking about for so long had opened at last! For the first time that night, Joe Slattermill felt a stirring of real life in him and the faintest caress of excitement.
Gonna roll the bones, he thought.
He dusted off his blue-green work clothes with big, careless swipes and slapped his pockets to hear the clank. Then he threw back his shoulders and grinned his lips sneeringly and pushed through the swinging doors as if giving a foe the straight-armed heel of his palm.
Inside, The Boneyard seemed to cover the area of a township and the bar looked as long as the railroad tracks. Round pools of light on the green poker tables alternated with hourgla.s.s shapes of exciting gloom, through which drink girls and change-girls moved like white-legged witches. By the jazz-stand hi the distance, belly dancers made their white hourgla.s.s shapes. The gamblers were thick and hunched down as mushrooms, all bald from agonizing over the fall of a card or a die or the dive of an ivory ball, while the Scarlet Women were like fields of poinsettia.
The calls of the croupiers and the slaps of dealt cards were as softly yet fatefully staccato as the rustle and beat of the jazz drums. Every tight-locked atom of the place was controlledly jumping. Even the dust motes jiggled tensely in the cones of light.
Joe"s excitement climbed and he felt sift through him, like a breeze that heralds a gale, the f aintest breath of a confidence which he knew could become a tornado. All thoughts of his House and Wife and Mother dropped out of his mind, while Mr. Guts remained only as a crazy young torn walking stiff-legged around the rim of his consciousness. Joe"s own leg muscles twitched in sympathy and he felt them grow supplely strong.
He coolly and searchingly looked the place over, his hand going out like it didn"t belong to him to separate a drink from a pa.s.sing, gently bobbing tray. Finally his gaze settled on what he judged to be the Number One c.r.a.p Table. All the Big Mushrooms seemed to be there, bald as the rest but standing tall as toadstools. Then through a gap in them Joe saw on the other side of the table a figure still taller, but dressed in a long dark coat with collar turned up and a dark slouch hat pulled low, so that only a triangle of white face showed. A suspicion and a hope rose in Joe and he headed straight for the gap in the Big Mushrooms.
As he got nearer, the white-legged and shiny-topped drifters eddying out of his way, his suspicion received confirmation after confirmation and his hope budded and swelled. Back from one end of the table was the fattest man he"d ever seen, with a long cigar and a silver vest and a gold tie clasp at least eight inches wide that just said in thick script, "Mr. Bones." Back a little from the other end was the nakedest change-girl yet and the only one he"d seen whose tray, slung from her bare shoulders, and indenting her belly just below her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, was stacked with gold in gleaming little towers and with jet-black chips. While the dice-girl, skinnier and taller and longer armed than his Wife even, didn"t seem to be wearing much but a pair of long white gloves. She was all right if you went for the type that isn"t much more than pale skin over bones with b.r.e.a.s.t.s like china doork.n.o.bs.
Beside each gambler was a high round table for his chips. The one by the gap was empty. Snapping his fingers at the nearest silver change-girl, Joe traded ah1 his greasy dollars for an equal number of pale chips and tweaked her left nipple for luck. She playfully snapped her teeth towards his fingers.
Not hurrying but not wasting any time, he advanced and carelessly dropped his modest stacks on the empty table and took his place in the gap. He noted that the second Big Mushroom on his right had the dice. His heart but no other part of him gave an extra jump. Then he steadily lifted his eyes and looked straight across the table.
The coat was a shimmering elegant pillar of black satin with jet b.u.t.tons, the upturned collar of fine dull plush black as the darkest cellar, as was the slouch hat with down-turned brim and a band of only a thin braid of black horse-hair. The arms of the coat were long, lesser satin pillars, ending in slim, longfingered hands that moved swiftly when they did, but held each position of rest with a statue"s poise.
Joe still couldn"t see much of the face except for smooth lower forehead with never a bead or trickle of sweat-the eyebrows were like straight snippets of the hat"s braid-and gaunt aristocratic cheeks and narrow but somewhat flat nose. The complexion of the face wasn"t as white as Joe had first judged. There was a faint touch of brown in it, like ivory that"s just begun to age, or Venusian soapstone. Another glance at the hands confirmed this.
Behind the man hi black was a knot of just about the flashiest and nastiest customers, male or female, Joe had ever seen. He knew from one look that each bediamonded, pomaded bully had a belly gun beneath the flap of his flowered vest and a blackjack in his hip pocket, and each snake-eyed sporting girl a stiletto in her garter and a pearl-handled silver-plated derringer under the sequinned silk hi the hollow between her jutting b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
Yet at the same time Joe knew they were just tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. It was the man in black, their master, who was the deadly one, the kind of man you knew at a glance you couldn"t touch and live. If without asking you merely laid a finger on his sleeve, no matter how lightly and respectfully, an ivory hand would move faster than thought and you"d be stabbed or shot. Or maybe just the touch would kill you, as if every black article of his clothing were charged from his ivory skin outwards with a high-voltage, high-amperage ivory electricity. Joe looked at the shadowed face again and decided he wouldn"t care to try it.
For it was the eyes that were the most impressive feature. All great gamblers have dark-shadowed deep-set eyes. But this one"s eyes were sunk so deep you couldn"t even be sure you were getting a gleam of them. They were inscrutability incarnate. They were unfathomable. They were like black holes.
But all this didn"t disappoint Joe one bit, though it did terrify him considerably. On the contrary, it made him exult. His first suspicion was completely confirmed and his hope spread into full flower.
This must be one of those really big gamblers who hit Ironmine only once a decade at most, come from the Big City on one of the river boats that ranged the watery dark like luxurious comets, spouting long thick tails of sparks from their sequoia-tall stacks with top foliage of curvy-snipped sheet iron. Or like silver s.p.a.ce-liners with dozens of jewel-flamed jets, their portholes atwinkle like ranks of marshalled asteroids.
For that matter, maybe some of those really big gamblers actually came from other planets where the nighttime pace was hotter and the sporting life a delirium of risk and delight.
Yes, this was the kind of man Joe had always yearned to pit his skill against. He felt the power begin to tingle in his rock-still fingers, just a little.
Joe lowered his gaze to the c.r.a.p table. It was almost as wide as a man is tall, at least twice as long, unusually deep, and lined with black, not green, felt, so that it looked like a giant"s coffin. There was something familiar about its shape which he couldn"t place. Its bottom, though not its sides or ends, had a twinkling iridescence, as if it had been lightly sprinkled with very tiny diamonds. As Joe lowered his gaze all the way and looked directly down, his eyes barely over the table, he got the crazy notion that it went down all the way through the world, so that the diamonds were the stars on the other side, visible despite the sunlight there, just as Joe was always able to see the stars by day up the shaft of the mine he worked in, and so that u a cleaned-out gambler, dizzy with defeat, toppled forward into it, he"d fall forever, towards the bottom-most bottom, be it h.e.l.l or some black galaxy. Joe"s thoughts swirled and he felt the cold, hard-fingered clutch of fear at his crotch. Someone was crooning beside him, "Come on, Big d.i.c.k."
Then the dice, which had meanwhile pa.s.sed to the Big Mushroom immediately on his right, came to rest near the table"s center, contradicting and wiping out Joe"s vision. But instantly there was another oddity to absorb him. The Ivory dice were large and unusually round-cornered with dark red spots that gleamed like real rubies, but the spots were arranged hi such a way that each face looked like a miniature skull. For instance, the seven thrown just now, by which the Big Mushroom to his right had lost his point, which had been ten, consisted of a two with the spots evenly s.p.a.ced towards one side, like eyes, instead of towards opposite corners, and of a five with the same red eyespots but a central red nose and two spots close together below that to make teeth.
The long, skinny, white-gloved arm of the dice-girl snaked out like an albino cobra and scooped up the dice and whisked them on to the rim of the table right in front of Joe. He inhaled silently, picked up a single chip from his table and started to lay it beside the dice, then realized that wasn"t the way things were done here, and put it back. He would have liked to examine the chip more closely, though. It was curiously lightweight and pale tan, about the colour of cream with a shot of coffee in it, and it had embossed on its surface a symbol he could feel, though not see. He didn"t know what the symbol was, that would have taken more feeling. Yet its touch had been very good, setting the power tingling full blast in his shooting hand.
Joe looked casually yet swiftly at the faces around the table, not missing the Big Gambler across from him, and said quietly, "Roll a penny," meaning of course one pale chip, or a dollar.
There was a hiss of indignation from all the Big Mushrooms and the moonface of big-bellied Mr. Bones grew purple as he started forward to summon his bouncers.
The Big Gambler raised a black-satined forearm and sculptured hand, palm down. Instantly Mr. Bones froze and the hissing stopped faster than that of a meteor p.r.i.c.k in self-sealing s.p.a.ce steel. Then in a whispery, cultured voice, without the faintest hint of derision, the man in black said, "Get on him, gamblers."
Here, Joe thought, was a final confirmation of his suspicion, had it been needed. The really great gamblers were always perfect gentlemen and generous to the poor.
With only the tiny, respectful hint of a guffaw, one of the Big Mushrooms called to Joe, "You"re faded."
Joe picked up the ruby-featured dice.
Now ever since he had first caught two eggs on one plate, won all the marbles in Ironmine, and juggled six alphabet blocks so they finally fell in a row on the rug spelling "Mother," Joe Slattermill had been almost incredibly deft at precision throwing. In the mine he could carom a rock off a wall of ore to crack a rat"s skull fifty feet away in the dark and he sometimes amused himself by tossing little fragments of rock back into the holes from which they had fallen, so that they stuck there, perfectly fitted in, for at least a second. Sometimes, by fast tossing, he could fit seven or eight fragments into the hole from which they had fallen, like putting together a puzzle block.
If he could ever have got into s.p.a.ce, Joe would undoubtedly have been able to pilot six Moon-skimmers at once and do figure eights through Saturn"s rings blind!olded.
Now the only real difference between precision-tossing rocks or alphabet blocks and dice is that you have to bounce the latter off the end wall of a c.r.a.p table, and that just made it a more interesting test of skill for Joe.
Rattling the dice now, he felt the power in his fingers and palm as never before.
He made a swift low roll, so that the bones ended up exactly in front of the white-gloved dice-girl. His natural seven was made up, as he"d intended, of a four and a three. In red-spot features they were like the five, except that both had only one tooth and the three no nose. Sort of baby-faced skulls. He had won a penny-that is, a dollar.
"Roll two cents," said Joe Slattermill.
This time, for variety, he made his natural with an eleven. The six was like the five, except it had three teeth, the bestlooking skull of the lot.
"Roll a nickel less one."