Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

The news brought by the junketters tabled all that and electrified the convention. The general secretary eyed elater was on his back three times running and then on his feet again—click, click, click, click, click, click! The president Colorado potato beetle goggled his enormous eyes. It was decided by unanimous vote that the imprisoned beetles must be rescued at once. Within seconds Operation Succor was under way.

A task force of scout, spy, and tech beetles was swiftly sent off and dispatched into the museum to evaluate and lay out the operation. They confirmed the observations and deductions of the junketters and decided that a rare sort of beetle which secretes fluoric acid would be vital to the caper.

A special subgroup of these investigators traced out by walking along them the characters of the word Scarab. Their report was as follows:

“First you got a Snake character, see?” (That was the S.)

“Then you get a Hoop Snake with a Gap.” (That was the C.)

“Then Two Snakes Who Meet in the Night and have Sexual Congress.” (That was the A.)

“Next a Crooked Hoop Snake Raping an Upright or Square Snake.” (The R.)

“Then a repeat of Two Snakes Who Meet in the Night, et cetera.” (The second A.)

“Lastly Two Crazy Hoop Snakes Raping a Square Snake.” (The B.)

“Why all this emphasis on snakes and sex we are not certain.”

“We suggest the Egyptian delegation be consulted as soon as it arrives.”

Operation Succor was carried out that night.

It was a complete success.

Secreted fluoric acid ate small round holes in the thick glass of all cases. Through these, every last scarab in the Egyptian Rooms were toted by carrying beetles—mostly dung beetles—down into deep beetle bunkers far below Manhattan and armored against the inroads of cockroaches.

Endless atempts to bring the drugged and hypnotized beetles back to consciousness and movement were made. All failed.

Undaunted, the beetles decided simply to venerate the rescued scarabs. A whole new beetle cult sprang up around them.

The Egyptian delegation arrived, gorgeous as pharaohs, and knew at once what had happened. However, they decided to keep this knowledge secret for the greater good of all beetledom. They genuflected dutifully before the scarabs just as did the beetles not in the know.

The cockroaches had their own theories, but merely kept up their picketing and their chanting of “Blat, blat, go the Blattidae.”

Because of their theories, however, one fanatical Egyptian beetle went bats and decided that the scarabs were indeed alive though drugged and that the whole thing was part of a World Cockroach Plot carried out by commando Israeli beetles and their fellow travelers. His wild mouthings were not believed.

Human beings were utterly puzzled by the whole business. The curator of the Met and the chief of the New York detectives investigating the burglary stared at the empty cases in stupid wonder.

“Godammit,” the detective chief said. “When you look at all those little holes, you’d swear the whole job had been done by beetles.”

The curator smiled sourly.

Speedy said, “Hey, this skyrockets us beetles to the position of leading international jewel thieves.”

For once Big Yank had to agree. “It’s just too bad the general public, human and coleopterous, will never know,” she said wistfully. Then, brightening, “Hey, how about you and me having another adventure?”

“Suits,” said Speedy.

God shouldered open the swollen back door and amidst the plosive shower of rust and dust sneaked a quick squint upward.

There wasn’t a star or planet in sight. They were all masked by an opalescent gray blanket. An invisible gray thread snaking down to His nostrils informed Him of the blanket’s advanced industrial origin—not honest coal smoke so much as the sulphuric stench that was a by-product of the manufacture of plastics, high-grade fuels, and steel.

While the music of the spheres drowned by a restless, incessant throbbing like the grumbling of a thousand distant dragons and the hissing of ten thousand serpents.

God squared His chin surlily. That was the trouble with meditating on His creation, Zen or no Zen. It gave the Adversary a chance to undo it. He’d dozed off dreaming of a glittering city with silver spires climbing toward a bespangled Heaven and swarms of His happy creatures, rainbow-clad, dancing on the greensward between the skyscrapers. And while He’d slept, the Adversary had devised smog and freeways.

It was a wonder that when He’d originally rested on the seventh day, He hadn’t waked on the eighth to find everything redesigned. The Adversary had been sluggish then, but now he was carrying the contest to His very door.

God backed away without closing it. There was an old cloak hanging beside it, and a slouch hat that had seen better days, and a black eyepatch dangling by its worn elastic. God’s shaggy white head brushed a large, empty birdcage and set it swinging.

He’d have to re-think this Adversary business very carefully. He told Himself as He turned. Maybe He’d been too quick in letting his cozening creatures woo Him away from gnosticism and convince Him that the Adversary was only a paper devil, who’d crumple and flare to nothing like flash paper on Judgment Day, or the Japanese fleet before Pearl Harbor. Ahriman might be a better name for the Adversary, an evil strong as His own good. In which case He’d damn well better do the Persian again and be Ormazd fast.

A pair of sleazy stretch pants and an old bra hanging on the back of a kitchen chair made Him remember Venus. There was a lot to be said for polytheism, He had to admit, especially when He woke lonely as this. The trouble was He couldn’t trust the pantheon, which He had fathered during his Zeus phase, to stick by Him. He had a vivid vision of Venus, last to leave Him, turning in the kitchen door, glorious in her sandals, denims, sweater, long golden hair, and inimitable vase-curves.

“It’s been the most, Dad,” she’d said simply, “but now I gotta drift. The beach, Dad. I always had an affinity for surf.”

Nor could he trust or find security in any of His mortal creatures. He’d guided them to atomic energy and spaceflight and computers, and then thought He could turn Himself off awhile, at least for this sector of the cosmos—and He’d come back to find them almost unrecognizable: talking a jumble of new scientific and artistic and social jargon (though many of them no longer thought, they dug), haring off after extrasensory perception, creating brief rainbow microcosms in the inner space of their brains with new alphabet drugs, peering up at quasars rather than stars, tweezering out the molecules of heredity, insanity, sanity—that list was almost endless—inventing languages for machines, reducing ultimate particles to flickering clouds of sub-particles—or wavicles!—devising new human relations by the hundred (they were fantastic social inventors) and new human arts by the thousand.

Of course He could keep an eye on them all the time. He could watch each sparrow fall, each overworked ant collapse from heart failure, each microbe dissolve in the grip of a posse of leucocytes, each unstable atom give up its pale radioactive ghost, each restless particle put on its quick-change act, each idea flicker and die, not missing the one idea in a billion billion billion that lived. But would that grandiose busy-work bring Him any closer to His Creatures or really keep Him in touch with them? They’d still all go on changing and developing through the cycles of seemingly sterile repetition. And He’d be dead inside.

A scrawny black kitten came, mewing at God’s shapeless, soft-soled slipper. Well, at least one of His creatures still depended on him. God levered open two triangular holes in a small can, poured the condensed milk into a dirty saucer, set it on the warped floor, and went off to inspect His four rooms.