Leiber, Fitz - SS - The Oldest Soldier.pdf - Fritz Leiber - przemosta

Scanned by gojukai

From Fritz Leiber’s

The Mind Spider and Other Stories

THE OLDEST SOLDIER

Fritz Leiber

The one we called the Lieutenant took a long swallow of

his dark Lowensbrau. He'd just been describing a battle

of infantry rockets on the Eastern Front, the German

and Russian positions erupting bundles of flame.

Max swished his paler beer in its green bottle and his

eyes got a faraway look and he said, "When the rockets

lolled their thousands in Copenhagen, they laced the sky

with fire and lit up the steeples in the city and the masts

and bare spars of the British ships like a field of crosses."

"I didn't know there were any landings in Denmark,"

someone remarked with an expectant casualness.

“This was in the Napoleonic wars," Max explained.

"The British bombarded the city and captured the Danish

fleet. Back in 1807."

"Vas you dere, Maxie?" Woody asked, and the gang

around the counter chuckled and beamed. Drinking at a

liquor store is a pretty dull occupation and one is grateful

for small vaudeville acts.

"Why bare spars?" someone asked.

"So there'd be less chance of the rockets setting the

launching ships afire,'* Max came back at him. "Sails

burn fast and wooden ships are tinder anyway—that's

why ships firing red-hot shot never worked out. Rockets

and bare spars were bid enough. Yes, and it was Con-

greve rockets made the *red glare* at Fort McHenry,"

he continued unruffled, "while the 'bombs bursting in

air' were about the earliest precision artillery shells,

fired from mortars on bomb-ketches. There's a condensed

history, of arms in the American anthem." He looked

around smiling.

"Yes, I was there. Woody—Just as I was with me

South Martians when they stormed Copernicus in the

Second Colonial War. And just as I'll be in a foxhole

outside Copeybawa a billion years from now while the

blast waves from the battling Venusian spaceships shake

the soil and roil the mud and give me some more digging

to do."

This time the gang really snorted its happy laughter

and Woody was slowly shaking his head and repeating,

"Copenhagen and Copernicus and—what was the third?

Oh, what a mind he's got," and the Lieutenant was say-

ing, "Yah, you vas there—in books," and I was thinking,

Thank God for all the screwballs, especially the brave

ones who never flinch, who never lose their tempers w

drop the act, so that you never do quite find out whether

it's just a gag or their solemnest belief. There's only

one person here takes Max even one percent seriously^

but they all love him because he won't ever drop his

guard. ...

“The only point I was trying to make," Max continued

when he could easily make himself heard "was the way

styles in weapons keep moving in cycles."

"Did the Romans use rockets?" asked the same light

voice as had remarked about the landings in Denmark

and the bare spars. I saw now it was Sol from behind the

counter.

Max shook his head. "Not so you'd notice. Catapults

were their specialty." He squinted his eyes. "Though now

you mention it, I recall a dogfoot telling me Archimedes

faked up some rockets powdered with Greek fire to touch

off the sails of the Roman ships at Syracuse—and none

of this romance about a giant burning glass."

"You mean,*' said Woody, "that there are other gaze-

bos besides yourself in this fighting-all-over-the-universe-

and-to-the-end-of-time racket?" His deep whiskey voice

was at its solemnest and most wondering.

"Naturally," Max told him earnestly. "How else do

you suppose wars ever get really fought and refought?"

"Why should wars ever be refought?" Sol asked lightly.

"Once ought to be enough."

"Do you suppose anybody could time-travel and keep

his 'hands off wars?" Max countered.

X put in my two cents' worth. *Then that would make

Archimedes* rockets the earliest liquid-fuel rockets by a

long shot."

Max looked straight at me, a special quirk in his smile.

"Yes, I guess so," he said after a couple of seconds.

"On this planet, that is."

The Daughter had been falling off, but that brought it

back and while Woody was saying loudly to himself, "I

like that refighting part—that's what we're all so good

fit," the Lieutenant asked Max with only a moderate accent

that fit North Chicago, "And zo you aggshually have

fought on Mars?"

"Yes, I have," Max agreed after a bit. "Though that

ruckus I mentioned happened on our moon—expeditionary

forces from the Red Planet."

“Ach, yes. And now let me ask you something—"

I really mean that about screwballs, you know. I don’t

care whether they're saucer addicts or extrasensory per

ception bugs or religious or musical maniacs or crackpot

philosophers or pychologists or merely guys with a strange

dream or gag like Max—for my money they are the

ones who are keeping individuality alive in this age of con-

formity. They are the ones who are resisting the en-

croachments of the mass media and motivation research

and the mass man. The only really bad riling about crack

pottery and screwballistics (as with dope and prostitution)

is the coldblooded people who prey on it for money. So I

say to all screwballs: Go it on your own. Don't take any

wooden nickels or give out any silver dimes. Be wise and

brave—like Max.

He and the Lieutenant were working up a discussion of

the problems of artillery in airless space and low gravity

that was a little too technical to keep the laughter alive,

So Woody up and remarked, "Say, Maximillian, if you

got to be in all these wars all over hell and gone, you

must have a pretty tight schedule. How come you got time

to be drinking with us bums?"

"I often ask myself that," Max cracked back at him.

"Pact is, I'm on a sort of unscheduled furlough, result

of a transportation slip-up. I'm due to be picked up and

returned to my outfit any day now—that is, if the enemy

underground doesn't get to me first."

It was just then, as Max said that bit about enemy

underground, and as the laughter came, a little dimin-

ished, and as Woody was chortling "Enemy underground

now. How do you like that?" and as I was thinking

how much Max had given me in these couple of weeks

—a guy with an almost poetic flare for vivid historical

reconstruction, but with more than that ... it was just

then that I saw the two red eyes low down in the dusty

plate-glass window looking in from the dark street

Everything in modem America has to have a big plate

glass display window, everything from suburban man-

sions, general managers* offices and skyscraper apart-

ments to barber shops and beauty parlours and ginmills

—there are even gymnasium swimming pools with plate -

glass windows twenty feet high opening on busy boule-

vards—and Sol's dingy liquor store was no exception; in

fact I believe there’s a law that it's got to be that way.

But I was the only one of the gang who happened to be

looking out of this particular window at the moment. It

was a dark windy night outside and it's a dark untidy

street at best and across from Sol's are more plate glass

windows that sometimes give off very odd reflections, so

when I got a glimpse of this black formless bead with

the two eyes like red coals peering in past the brown

pyramid of empty whiskey bottles, I don't suppose it

was a half second before I realized it must be something

like a couple of cigarette butts kept alive by the wind,

or more likely a freak reflection of tail lights from some

car turning a comer down street, and in another half

second it was gone, the car having finished turning the

comer or the wind blowing the cigarette butts away al-

together. Still, for a moment it gave me a very goosey

feeling, coming right on top of that remark about an

enemy underground.

And I must have shown my reaction in some way, for

Woody, who is very observant, called out, "Hey, Fred,

has that soda pop you drink started to rot your nerves—-

or are eyen Max's friends getting sick at the outrageous

lies he's been telling us?"

Max looked at me sharply and perhaps he saw some-

thing too. At any rate he finished his beer and said, "I

guess I'll be taking off." He didn't say it to me par-

ticularly, but he kept looking at me. I nodded and put

down on the counter my small green bottle, still one-third

full of the lemon pop I find overly sweet, 'though it was

the sourest Sol stocked. Max and I zipped up our wind-

breakers. He opened the door and a little of the wind

came in and troubled the tanbark around the sill. The

Lieutenant said to Max, "Tomorrow night we design a bet-

ter space gun;" Sol routinely advised the two of us,

"Keep your noses clean;" and Woody called, "So long

space soldiers." (And I could imagine him saying as the

door closed, "That Max is nuttier than a fruitcake and

Freddy isn't much better. Drinking soda pop—ugh!")

And then Max and I were outside leaning into the wind,

our eyes slitted against the blown dust, for the three-block

.trudge to Max's pad—a name his tiny apartment merits

without any attempt to* force the language.

There weren't any large black shaggy dogs with red

eyes slinking about and I hadn't quite expected there

would be.

Why Max and his soldier-of-history gag and our out-

wardly small comradeship meant so much to me is some-

thing that goes way back into my childhood. I was a lonely

timid child, with no brothers and sisters to spar around

with in preparation for the battles of life, and I never

-went through the usual stages of boyhood gangs either.

In line with those things I grew up into a very devout

liberal and "hated war" with a mystical fervour during the

intermission between 1918 and 1939—so much so that I

made a point of avoiding military services in the second

conflict, though merely by working in the nearest war

plant, not by the arduously heroic route of out-and-out

pacifism.

But then the inevitable reaction set in, sparked by the

liberal curse of being able, however, belatedly, to see

both sides of any question. I began to be curious about

and cautiously admiring of soldiering and soldiers. Unwill-

ingly at first, I came to see the necessity and romance

of the spearmen—those guardians, often lonely as myself,

of the perilous camps of civilization and brotherhood in a

black hostile universe . . . necessary guardians, for all

the truth in the indictments that war caters to irration-

ality and sadism and serves the munition makers and

reaction.

I commenced to see my own hatred of war as in part

only a mask for cowardice, and I started to look for

some way to do honour in my life to the other half of the

truth. Though it's anything but easy to give yourself a

feeling of being brave just because you suddenly want

that feeling. Obvious opportunities to be obviously brave

come very seldom in our largely civilized culture, in fact

they're dean contrary to safety drives and so-called nor-

mal adjustment and good peacetime citizenship and all the

rest, and they come mostly in the earliest part of a man's

life. So that for the person who belatedly wants to be brave

it*a generally a matter of waiting for an opportunity for

six months and then getting a tiny one and muffing it

in six seconds.

But however uncomfortable it was, I had this reaction

to my devout early pacifism, as I say. At first I took

it out only in reading. I devoured war books, current and

historical, fact and fiction. I tried to soak up the military

aspects and jargon of all ages, the organization and wea-

pons, tile strategy and tactics. Characters like Tros of

Samothrace and Horatio Hornblower became my new

secret heroes, along with Heinlein's space cadets and Bu2-

lard and other brave rangers of the space-ways.

But after a while reading wasn't enough. I had to have

some real soldiers and I finally found them in the little

gang that gathered nightly at Sol's liquor store. It's funny

but liquor stores that serve drinks have a clientele with

more character and comradeship than the clienteles of

most bars—perhaps it is the absence of juke-boxes, chrom-

ium plate, bowling machines, trouble-hunting, drink-cadg-

ing women, and—along with those—men in search of fights

and forgetfulness. At any rate, it was at Sol's liquor

store that I found Woody and the Lieutenant and Bert and

Mike and Pierre and Sol himself. The casual customer

would hardly have guessed that they were anything but

quiet souses, certainly not soldiers, but I got a clue or two

and I started to hang around, making myself inconspicu-

ous and drinking my rather symbolic soda pop, and pretty

soon they started to open up and yam about North Africa

and Stalingrad and Anzio and Korea and such and I was

pretty happy in a partial sort of way.

And then about a month ago Max had turned up and

he was the man I'd really been looking for. A genuine

soldier with my historical slant on things—only he knew

a lot more than I did, I was a rank amateur by com-

Leiber, Fitz - SS - The Oldest Soldier.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: