Short Fiction by Fritz Leiber (top romance novels .TXT) 📕

very handsome uniform with impressive insignia⁠—not the bully old stripes I got on my chest now⁠—and I was very young and handsome myself. We were all very young in that line of service, though a few of the men under me were a little older. Young and dedicated. I remember feeling a very deep and grim⁠—and clean⁠—responsibility. But I wonder sometimes just how deep it went or how clean it really was.

“I had an uncle flew in the war they fought to lick fascism, bombardier on a Flying Fortress or something, and once when he got drunk he told me how some days it didn’t bother him at all to drop the eggs on Germany; the buildings and people down there seemed just like toys that a kid sets up to kick over, and the whole business about as naive fun as poking an anthill.

“I didn’t even have to fly over at seven miles what I was going to be aiming at. Only I remember sometimes getting out a map and looking at a certain large dot on it and smiling a little and softly saying, ‘Pow!’⁠—and then giving a little conventional shudder and folding up the map quick.

“Naturally we told ourselves we’d never have to do it, fire the thing, I mean, we joked about how after twenty years or so we’d all be given jobs as museum attendants of this same bomb, deactivated at last. But naturally it didn’t work out that way. There came the day when our side of the world got hit and the orders started cascading down from Defense Coordinator Bigelow⁠—”

“Bigelow?” Pop interrupted. “Not Joe Bigelow?”

“Joseph A., I believe,” I told him, a little annoyed.

“Why he’s my boy then, the one I was telling you about⁠—the skinny runt had this horn-handle! Can you beat that?” Pop sounded startlingly happy. “Him and you’ll have a lot to talk about when you get together.”

I wasn’t so sure of that myself, in fact my first reaction was that the opposite would be true. To be honest I was for the first moment more than a little annoyed at Pop interrupting my story of my Big Grief⁠—for it was that to me, make no mistake. Here my story had finally been teased out of me, against all expectation, after decades of repression and in spite of dozens of assorted psychological blocks⁠—and here was Pop interrupting it for the sake of a lot of trivial organizational gossip about Joes and Bills and Georges we’d never heard of and what they’d say or think!

But then all of a sudden I realized that I didn’t really care, that it didn’t feel like a Big Grief any more, that just starting to tell about it after hearing Pop and Alice tell their stories had purged it of that unnecessary weight of feeling that had made it a millstone around my neck. It seemed to me now that I could look down at Ray Baker from a considerable height (but not an angelic or contemptuously superior height) and ask myself not why he had grieved so much⁠—that was understandable and even desirable⁠—but why he had grieved so uselessly in such a stuffy little private hell.

And it would be interesting to find out how Joseph A. Bigelow had felt.

“How does it feel, Ray, to kill a million people?”

I realized that Alice had asked me the question several seconds back and it was hanging in the air.

“That’s just what I’ve been trying to tell you,” I told her and started to explain it all over again⁠—the words poured out of me now. I won’t put them down here⁠—it would take too long⁠—but they were honest words as far as I knew and they eased me.

I couldn’t get over it: here were us three murderers feeling a trust and understanding and sharing a communion that I wouldn’t have believed possible between any two or three people in the Age of the Deaders⁠—or in any age, to tell the truth. It was against everything I knew of Deathland psychology, but it was happening just the same. Oh, our strange isolation had something to do with it, I knew, and that Pullman-car memory hypnotizing my mind, and our reactions to the voices and violence of Atla-Alamos, but in spite of all that I ranked it as a wonder. I felt an inward freedom and easiness that I never would have believed possible. Pop’s little disorganized organization had really got hold of something, I couldn’t deny it.

Three treacherous killers talking from the bottoms of their hearts and believing each other!⁠—for it never occurred to me to doubt that Pop and Alice were feeling exactly like I was. In fact, we were all so sure of it that we didn’t even mention our communion to each other. Perhaps we were a little afraid we would rub off the bloom. We just enjoyed it.

We must have talked about a thousand things that night and smoked a couple of hundred cigarettes. After a while we started taking little catnaps⁠—we’d gotten too much off our chests and come to feel too tranquil for even our excitement to keep us awake. I remember the first time I dozed waking up with a cold start and grabbing for Mother⁠—and then hearing Pop and Alice gabbing in the dark, and remembering what had happened, and relaxing again with a smile.

Of all things, Pop was saying, “Yep, I imagine Ray must be good to make love to, murderers almost always are, they got the fire. It reminds me of what a guy named Fred told me, one of our boys⁠ ⁠…”

Mostly we took turns going to sleep, though I think there were times when all three of us were snoozing. About the fifth time I woke up, after some tighter shuteye, the orange soup was back again outside and Alice was snoring gently in the next seat and Pop was up and had one of his knives out.

He was looking at his reflection in the viewport.