Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber

Author:Fritz Leiber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781597801805
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2010-05-10T14:00:00+00:00

The Inner Circles

AFTER THE SUPPER DISHES were done there was a general movement from the Adler kitchen to the Adler living room.

It was led by Gottfried Helmuth Adler, commonly known as Gott. He was thinking how they should be coming from a dining room, yes, with colored maids, not from a kitchen. In a large brandy snifter he was carrying what had been left in the shaker from the martinis, a colorless elixir weakened by melted ice yet somewhat stronger than his wife was supposed to know. This monster drink was a regular part of Gott’s carefully thoughtout program for getting safely through the end of the day.

“After the seventeenth hour of creation God got sneaky,” Gott Adler once put it to himself.

He sat down in his leather-upholstered easy chair, flipped open Plutarch’s Lives left-handed, glanced down through the lower halves of his executive bifocals at the paragraph in the biography of Caesar he’d been reading before dinner, then, without moving his head, looked through the upper halves back toward the kitchen.

After Gott came Jane Adler, his wife. She sat down at her drawing table, where pad, pencils, knife, art gum, distemper paints, water, brushes, and rags were laid out neatly.

Then came little Heinie Adler, wearing a spaceman’s transparent helmet with a large hole in the top for ventilation. He went and stood beside this arrangement of objects: first a long wooden box about knee-high with a smaller box on top and propped against the latter a toy control panel of blue and silver plastic, on which only one lever moved at all; next, facing the panel, a child’s wooden chair; then back of the chair another long wooden box lined up with the first.

“Good-by Mama, good-by Papa,” Heinie called. “I’m going to take a trip in my spaceship.”

“Be back in time for bed,” his mother said.

“Hot jets!” murmured his father.

Heinie got in, touched the control panel twice, and then sat motionless in the little wooden chair, looking straight ahead.

A fourth person came into the living room from the kitchen—the Man in the Black Flannel Suit. He moved with the sick jerkiness and had the slack putty-gray features of a figure of the imagination that hasn’t been fully developed. (There was a fifth person in the house, but even Gott didn’t know about him yet.)

The Man in the Black Flannel Suit made a stiff gesture at Gott and gaped his mouth to talk to him, but the latter silently writhed his lips in a “Not yet, you fool!” and nodded curtly toward the sofa opposite his easy chair.

“Gott,” Jane said, hovering a pencil over the pad, “you’ve lately taken to acting as if you were talking to someone who isn’t there.”

“I have, my dear?” her husband replied with a smile as he turned a page, but not lifting his face from his book. “Well, talking to oneself is the sovereign guard against madness.”

“I thought it worked the other way,” Jane said.

“No,” Gott informed her.

Jane wondered what she should draw and

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