Fritz Leiber - The Best of Fritz Leiber

He glanced at his timepiece.

“Excuse me,” he said curtly, striding past Phy’s chair, “I’d like to continue this conversation, but I have to get along to the first meeting of the new Central Managerial Staff.”

“Oh but you can’t!” Instantly Phy was up and dragging at his arm. “You just can’t do it, you know! It’s impossible!”

The pleading voice rose toward a scream. Impatiently Carrsbury tried to shake loose. The seam in the side wall widened, became a doorway. Instantly both of them stopped struggling.

In the doorway stood a cadaverous giant of a man with a stubby dark weapon hi his hand. Straggly black beard shaded into gaunt cheeks. His face was a cruel blend of suspicion and fanatical devotion, the first directed along with the weapon at Phy, the second— and the somnambulistic eyes—at Carrsbury.

“He was threatening you?” the bearded man asked hi a harsh voice, moving the weapon suggestively.

For a moment an angry, vindictive light glinted in Carrsbury’s eyes. Then it flicked out. What could he have been thinking, he asked himself. This poor lunatic World secretary was no one to hate.

“Not at all, Hartman,” he remarked calmly. “We were discussing something and we became excited and allowed our voices to rise. Everything is quite all right.”

“Very well,” said the bearded man doubtfully, after a pause. Reluctantly he returned his weapon to its holster, but he kept his hand on it and remained standing in the doorway.

“And now,” said Carrsbury, disengaging himself, “I must go.”

He had stepped on to the corridor slidewalk and had coasted halfway to the elevator before he realized that Phy had followed him and was plucking timidly at his sleeve.

“You can’t go off like this,” Phy pleaded urgently, with an apprehensive backward glance. Carrsbury noted that Hartman had also followed—an ominous pylon two paces to the rear. “You must give me a chance to explain, to tell you why, just like you asked me.”

Humor him. Carrsbury’s mind was deadly tired of the drone, but mere weariness prompted him to dance to it a little longer. “You can talk to me in the elevator,” he conceded, stepping off the slidewalk. His finger flipped through a U-beam and a serpentine movement of light across the wall traced the elevator’s obedient rise.

“You see, it wasn’t just that matter of prohibitory regulations,” Phy launched out hurriedly. “There were lots of other things that never did work out like your official reports indicated. Departmental budgets for instance. The reports showed, I know, that appropriations for Extraterrestrial Research were being regularly slashed. Actually, in your ten years of office, they increased tenfold. Of course, there was no way for you to know that. You couldn’t be all over the world at once and see each separate launching of supra-stratospheric rockets.”

The moving light became stationary. A seam dilated. Carrsbury stepped into the elevator. He debated sending Hartman back. Poor babbling Phy was no menace. Still —the cunning of the insane. He decided against it, reached out and flipped the control beam at the sector which would bring them to the hundredth and top floor. The door snipped softly shut. The cage became a surging darkness hi which floor numerals winked softly. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.

“And then there was the Military Service. You had it sharply curtailed.”

“Of course I did.” Sheer weariness stung Carrsbury into talk. “There’s only one country in the world. Obviously, the only military requirement is an adequate police force. To say nothing of the risks involved in putting weapons into the hands of the present world population.”

“I know,” Phy’s answer came guiltily from the darkness. “Still, what’s happened is that, unknown to you, the Military Service has been increased in size, and recently four rocket squadrons have been added.”

Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Humor him. “Why?”

“Well, you see we’ve found out that Earth is being reconnoitered.

Maybe from Mars. Maybe hostile. Have to be prepared. We didn’t tell you. well, because we were

afraid it might excite you.“

The voice trailed off. Carrsbury shut his eyes. How long, he asked himself, how long? He realized with dull surprise that in the last hour people like Phy, endured for ten years, had become unutterably weary to him. For the moment even the thought of the conference over which he would soon be presiding, the conference that was to usher in a sane world, failed to stir him. Reaction to success? To the end of a ten years’ tension?

“Do you know how many floors there are hi this building?”

Carrsbury was not immediately conscious of the new note in Phy’s voice, but he reacted to it.

“One hundred,” he replied promptly.

“Then,” asked Phy, “just where are we?”

Carrsbury opened his eyes to the darkness. One hundred twenty-seven, blinked the floor numeral. One hundred twenty-eight. One hundred twenty-nine.

Something cold dragged at Carrsbury’s stomach, pulled at his brain. He felt as if his mind were being slowly and irresistibly twisted. He thought of hidden dimensions, of unsuspected holes in space. Something remembered from elementary physics danced through his thoughts: If it were possible for an elevator to keep moving upward with uniform acceleration, no one inside an elevator could determine whether the effects they were experiencing were due to acceleration or to gravity—whether the elevator were standing motionless on some planet or shooting up at everincreasing velocity through free space.

One hundred forty-one. One hundred forty-two.

“Or as if you were rising through consciousness into an unsuspected realm of mentality lying above,” suggested Phy in his new voice, with its hint of gentle laughter.

One hundred forty-six. One hundred forty-seven. It was slowing now. One hundred forty-nine. One hundred fifty. It had stopped.

This was some trick. The thought was like cold water in Carrsbury’s face. Some cunning childish trick of Phy’s. An easy thing to hocus the numerals. Carrsbury groped irascibly about in the darkness, encountered the slick surface of a holster, Hartman’s gaunt frame.

“Get ready for a surprise,” Phy warned from close at his elbow.

As Carrsbury turned and grabbed, bright sunlight drenched him, followed by a griping, heartstopping spasm of vertigo.

He, Hartman, and Phy, along with a few insubstantial bits of furnishings and controls, were standing in the air fifty stories above the hundred-story summit of World Managerial Center.

For a moment he grabbed frantically at nothing. Then he realized they were not falling and his eyes began to trace the hint of walls and ceiling and floor and, immediately below them, the ghost of a shaft.

Phy nodded. “That’s all there is to it,” he assured Carrsbury casually. “Just another of those charmingly odd modem notions against which you have legislated so persistently—like our incomplete staircases and roads to nowhere. The Buildings and Grounds Committee decided to extend the range of the elevator for sightseeing purposes. The shaft was made air-transparent to avoid spoiling the form of the original building and to improve the view. This was achieved so satisfactorily that an electronic warning system had to be installed for the safety of passing airjets and other craft. Treating the surfaces of the cage like windows was an obvious detail.”

He paused and looked quizzically at Carrsbury. “All very simple,” he observed, “but don’t you find a kind of symbolism in it? For ten years now you’ve been spending most of your life in that building below. Every day you’ve used this elevator. But not once have you dreamed of these fifty extra stories. Don’t you think that something of the same sort may be true of your observations of other aspects of contemporary social life?”