Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

At any rate, the book I’m now writing disposes in a laughably complete fashion of that crazy theory. A story about fabulous monsters on a planet dozens of light-years away can’t very well be telepathy!

I suppose it was the broadcast last night that started me thinking again about that silly old notion. The broadcast wasn’t silly though—a singularly intelligent discussion of future scientific possibilities—atomic energy, brain waves, new methods of radio transmission, that sort of thing—and not popularized for an oafish audience, thank God. Must be a program of some local university—John says now will I stop disparaging all educational institutions not located in the east!

My first apprehensions about the radio turned out to be completely groundless—I ought to have known that John isn’t the sort of person to go in for soap operas and jazz. He uses the instrument intelligently—just a brief daily news summary ( not a long-winded “commentary”), classical music when available, and an occasionally high-grade lecture or round-table discussion. Last night’s scientific broadcast was new to him though—he was out at the time and didn’t recognize the station from my description.

I’m rather indebted to that program. I think it was while listening to it that the prologue of my story “jelled.” Some chance word or thought provided a crystallization point for my ideas. My mind had become sufficiently fatigued—probably a reaction to my earlier over-keenness—for my churning ideas to settle into place. At any rate, I was suddenly so tired and groggy that I hardly remembered the finish of the program or John coming in or my piling off to bed. John said I looked out on my feet. He thought I’d taken a bit too much, but I referred him to the impartial judgement of the whiskey bottle, and its almost unchanged level refuted the base calumny!

In the morning I woke up fresh as a youngster and ripped off the prologue as if I’d been in the habit of turning out that much writing daily for the past ten years!

Had another snowshoe lesson today and didn’t do much better—I grudge all time spent away from my book. John says I really ought to hurry up and learn, in case anything should happen to him while we were cut off from Terrestrial—small chance with reliable John! The radio reports a big blizzard farther east, but so far it hasn’t touched us—the sun is bright, the sky dark blue. A local cold snap is predicted.

But what do I care how long I’m confined to the cabin. I have begun to create my monsters!

That night: I’m vindicated! John has just seen my violet beam, confirmed its non-auroral nature, and gone completely overboard as to its nearness—he claimed at first that it was actually hitting the cabin!

He was approaching from the south when he saw it—apparently striking the roof in a corruscation of ghostly violet sparks. He hurried up, calling to me excitedly. It was a moment before I heard him—I’d just caught the mumbly beginning of what seemed to be another of those interesting scientific broadcasts (must be a series) and was trying to tune in more clearly and having a hard time, the radio being mulish or my own manipulations inadequate.

By the time I got outside the beam had faded. We spent several chilly minutes straining our eyes in all directions, but saw nothing except the stars.

John admits now that the beam seeming to strike the roof must have been an optical illusion, but still stoutly insists that it was fairly near. I have become the champion of the auroral theory! For, thinking it over, I can see that the chances are it is some bizarre auroral phenomenon—Arctic and Antarctic explorers, for instance, have reported all sorts of peculiar polar lights. It is very easy to be deceived as to distance in this clear atmosphere, as John himself has said.

Or else—who knows?—it might be some unusual form of static electricity, something akin to St. Elmo’s fire.

John has been trying to tune in on the program I started to catch, but no soap. There seems to be a lot of waily static in that sector of the dial. He informs me in his sardonic way that all sorts of unusual things have begun to happen since my arrival!

John has given up in disgust and is going to bed. I think I’ll follow his example, though I may have another try at the radio first—my old dislike of the brute is beginning to fade, now that it’s my only link with the rest of the world.

Next morning — the 10th: We’ve got the cold snap the radio predicted. I don’t notice much difference, except it took longer to get the place warm and everything was a little tightened up. Later on I’m going to help John split firewood—I insisted on it. He enquired with mild maliciousness whether I’d succeeded where he failed at catching the tail-end of that scientific broadcast—said the last thing he heard going to sleep was moany static. I admitted that, as far as I knew, I hadn’t—sleep must have struck the sledge-hammer blow it favors in this rugged locality while I was still twisting the dial; my memories of getting to bed are rather blurry, though I vaguely recall John sleepily snarling at me, “For God’s sake turn down the radio.”

We did run across one more odd phenomenon, though—or something that could pass for an odd phenomenon with a little grooming. In the middle of breakfast I noticed John looking intently over my shoulder. I turned and after a moment saw that it was something in the frost on the window by the radio. On closer examination we were considerably puzzled.

There was a queer sinuous pattern in the frost. It was composed of several parallel rows of tiny, roughly triangular humps with faint, hairlike veins going out to either side, all perceptibly thicker than the rest of the frost. I’ve never seen frost deposited in a pattern like it. The nearest analogy that occurs to me—not a very accurate one—is a squid’s tentacle. For some reason there comes to my mind that description in King Lear of a demon glimpsed peering down from a cliff: “Horns whelk’d and wav’d like the enridged sea.” I got the impression the pattern had been formed by an object even colder than the frost resting lightly against the glass, though that of course is impossible.

I was surprised to hear John say he thought the pattern was in the glass itself, but by scraping off a portion of the frost he did reveal a very faint bluish or lavender pattern which was rather similar.

After discussing various possibilities, we’ve decided that the cold snap—one of the most sudden in years, John says—brought out a latent imperfection in the glass, touching off some change in molecular organization that absorbed enough heat to account for the difference in thickness of the frost. The same change producing the faint lavender tint—if it wasn’t there before.

I feel extraordinarily happy and mentally alive today. All these “odd phenomena” I’ve been noting down don’t really amount to a hoot, except to show that a sense of strangeness, a delightful feeling of adventurous expectancy, has come back into my life—something I thought the city had ground out of me forever, with its blinkered concentration on “practical” matters, its noisy and faddish narrow-mindedness.

Best of all, there is my book. I have another scene all shaped in my mind.

Before supper : I’ve struck a snag. I don’t know how I’m going to get my monsters to Earth. I got through the new scene all right—it tells how the monsters have for ages been greedily watching the Earth and several other habitable planets that are nearby (in light-years). They have telescopes which do not depend on lenses, but amplify the starlight just as a radio amplifies radio waves or a public address system the human voice. Those telescopes are extraordinarily sensitive—there are no limits to what can be accomplished by selection and amplification—they can see houses and people—they tune in on wave-lengths that are not distorted by our atmosphere—they catch radio-type as well as visual-type waves, and hear our voices—they make use of modes of radiation which our scientists have not yet discovered and which travel at many times the speed of the slower modes, almost instantaneously.