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CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN!Fritz LeiberFritz Leiber has been writing and selling science-fiction, supernatural-horror, and heroic-fantasy stories for thirty-seven years. During some of that time he was a resident of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. For the past six years, however, he has lived in San Francisco in a small downtown apartment building, from the seventh-story roof of which he observes the stars through a three-inch refracting telescope. What with San Francisco?s fogs, lights, highrises and other aerial apparitions (seagulls, he says, like shooting stars before dawn and aircraft seeming UFO?s in sunset glow) this viewing has led to an equal interest in meterology and the roofscapes and general anatomy and ecology of large cities?one thing leading to another. Afternoons he spends in walks about the romantic hilly city.His growing engrossment in San Francisco has led him to write his first full-scale supernatural-horror novel since 1943?s Conjure Wife. It concerns Thibaut de Castries, a modern black magician who has created a new brand of the occult based on the malign influences and ?black music? generated by tall buildings and large cities. Our Lady of Darkness (the full-length novel to be published later in 1977 by Putnam?s/Berkley after the appearance of a two-part excerpt, ?The Pale Brown Thing,? earlier in the year in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) will involve not only the influences of large cities but also real-life characters such as Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Isadora Duncan, Dashiell Hammett and Clark Ashton Smith. Nor will his new novel be the first example of Fritz Leiber?s fascination with real-live real-dead personae. Read on:This year on a trip to New York City to visit my son, who is a social historian at a leading municipal university there, I had a very unsettling experience. At black moments, of which at my age I have quite a few, it still makes me distrust profoundly those absolute boundaries in Space and Time which are our sole protection against Chaos, and fear that my mind?no, my entire individual existence?may at any moment at all and without any warning whatsoever be blown by a sudden gust of Cosmic Wind to an entirely different spot in a Universe of Infinite Possibilities. Or, rather, into another Universe altogether. And that my mind and individuality will be changed to fit.But at other moments, which are still in the majority, I believe that my unsettling experience was only one of those remarkably vivid waking dreams to which old people become increasingly susceptible, generally waking dreams about the past, and especially waking dreams about a past in which at some crucial point one made an entirely different and braver choice than one actually did, or in which the whole world made such a decision, with a completely different future resulting. Golden glowing might-have-beens nag increasingly at the minds of some older people.In line with this interpretation I must admit that my whole unsettling experience was structured very much like a dream. It began with startling flashes of a changed world. It continued into a longer period when I completely accepted the changed world and delighted in it and, despite fleeting quivers of uneasiness, wished I could bask in its glow forever. And it ended in horrors, or nightmares, which I hate to mention, let alone discuss, until I must.Opposing this dream notion, there are times when I am completely convinced that what happened to me in Manhattan and in a certain famous building there was no dream at all, but absolutely real, and that I did indeed visit another Time Stream.Finally, I must point out that what I am about to tell you I am necessarily describing in retrospect, highly aware of several transitions involved and, whether I want to or not, commenting on them and making deductions that never once occurred to me at the time.No, at the time it happened to me?and now at this moment of writing I am convinced that it did happen and was absolutely real?one instant simply succeeded another in the most natural way possible. I questioned nothing.As to why it all happened to me, and what particular mechanism was involved, well, I am convinced that every man or woman has rare, brief moments of extreme sensitivity, or rather vulnerability, when his mind and entire being may be blown by the Change Winds to Somewhere Else. And then, by what I call the Law of the Conservation of Reality, blown back again.I was walking down Broadway somewhere near 34th Street. It was a chilly day, sunny despite the smog?a bracing day?and I suddenly began to stride along more briskly than is my cautious habit, throwing my feet ahead of me with a faint suggestion of the goose step. I also threw back my shoulders and took deep breaths, ignoring the fumes which tickled my nostrils. Beside me, traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York. I cheerfully ignored that too. I even smiled at the sight of a ragged bum and a fur-coated gray-haired society lady both independently dodging across the street through the hurtling traffic with a cool practiced skill one sees only in America?s biggest metropolis.Just then I noticed a dark, wide shadow athwart the street ahead of me. It could not be that of a cloud, for it did not move. I craned my neck sharply and looked straight up like the veriest yokel, a regular Hans-Kopf-in-die-Luft (Hans-Head-in-the-Air, a German figure of comedy).My gaze had to climb up the giddy 102 stories of the tallest building in the world, the Empire State. My gaze was strangely accompanied by the vision of a gigantic, long-fanged ape making the same ascent with a beautiful girl in one paw?oh, yes, I was recollecting the charming American fantasy-film King Kong, or as they name it in Sweden, Kong King.And then my gaze clambered higher still, up the 222-foot sturdy tower, to the top of which was moored the nose of the vast, breathtakingly beautiful, streamlined, silvery shape which was making the shadow.Now here is a most important point. I was not at the time in the least startled by what I saw. I knew at once that it was simply the bow section of the German zeppelin Ostwald, named for the great German pioneer of physical chemistry and electrochemistry, and queen of the mighty passenger and light-freight fleet of luxury airliners working out of Berlin, Baden-Baden, and Bremerhaven. That matchless Armada of Peace, each titanic airship named for a world-famous German scientist?the Mach, the Nernst, the Humbolt, the Fritz Haber, the French-named Antoine Henri Becquerel, the American-named Edison, the Polish-named T. Sklodowska Edison, and even the Jewish-named Einstein! The great humanitarian navy in which I held a not unimportant position as international sales consultant and Fachmann?I mean expert. My chest swelled with justified pride at this edel?noble?achievement of der Vaterland.I knew also without any mind-searching or surprise that the length of the Ostwald was more than one half the 1,472-foot height of the Empire State Building plus its mooring tower, thick enough to hold an elevator. And my heart swelled again with the thought that the Berlin Zeppelinturm (dirigible tower) was only a few meters less high. Germany, I told myself, need not strain for mere numerical records?her sweeping scientific and technical achievements speak for themselves to the entire planet.All this literally took little more than a second, and I never broke my snappy stride. As my gaze descended, I cheerfully hummed under my breath Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles.The Broadway I saw was utterly transformed, though at the time this seemed every bit as natural as the serene presence of the Ostwald high overhead, vast ellipsoid held aloft by helium. Silvery electric trucks and buses and private cars innumerable purred along far more evenly and quietly, and almost as swiftly, as had the noisy, stenchful, jerky gasoline-powered vehicles only moments before, though to me now the latter were completely forgotten. About two blocks ahead, an occasional gleaming electric car smoothly swung into the wide silver arch of a quick-battery-change station, while others emerged from under the arch to rejoin the almost dreamlike stream of traffic.The air I gratefully inhaled was fresh and clean, without trace of smog.The somewhat fewer pedestrians around me still moved quite swiftly, but with a dignity and courtesy largely absent before, with the numerous blackamoors among them quite as well dressed and exuding the same quiet confidence as the Caucasians.The only slightly jarring note was struck by a tall, pale, rather emaciated man in black dress and with unmistakably Hebraic features. His somber clothing was somewhat shabby, though well kept, and his thin shoulders were hunched. I got the impression he had been looking closely at me, and then instantly glancing away as my eyes sought his. For some reason I recalled what my son had told me about the City College of New York?CCNY?being referred to surreptitiously and jokingly as Christian College Now Yiddish. I couldn?t help chuckling a bit at that witticism, though I am glad to say it was a genial little guffaw rather than a malicious snicker. Germany in her well-known tolerance and noble-mindedness has completely outgrown her old, disfiguring anti-Semitism?after all, we must admit in all fairness that perhaps a third of our great men are Jews or carry Jewish genes, Haber and Einstein among the... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN!Fritz LeiberFritz Leiber has been writing and selling science-fiction, supernatural-horror, and heroic-fantasy stories for thirty-seven years. During some of that time he was a resident of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. For the past six years, however, he has lived in San Francisco in a small downtown apartment building, from the seventh-story roof of which he observes the stars through a three-inch refracting telescope. What with San Francisco?s fogs, lights, highrises and other aerial apparitions (seagulls, he says, like shooting stars before dawn and aircraft seeming UFO?s in sunset glow) this viewing has led to an equal interest in meterology and the roofscapes and general anatomy and ecology of large cities?one thing leading to another. Afternoons he spends in walks about the romantic hilly city.His growing engrossment in San Francisco has led him to write his first full-scale supernatural-horror novel since 1943?s Conjure Wife. It concerns Thibaut de Castries, a modern black magician who has created a new brand of the occult based on the malign influences and ?black music? generated by tall buildings and large cities. Our Lady of Darkness (the full-length novel to be published later in 1977 by Putnam?s/Berkley after the appearance of a two-part excerpt, ?The Pale Brown Thing,? earlier in the year in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) will involve not only the influences of large cities but also real-life characters such as Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Isadora Duncan, Dashiell Hammett and Clark Ashton Smith. Nor will his new novel be the first example of Fritz Leiber?s fascination with real-live real-dead personae. Read on:This year on a trip to New York City to visit my son, who is a social historian at a leading municipal university there, I had a very unsettling experience. At black moments, of which at my age I have quite a few, it still makes me distrust profoundly those absolute boundaries in Space and Time which are our sole protection against Chaos, and fear that my mind?no, my entire individual existence?may at any moment at all and without any warning whatsoever be blown by a sudden gust of Cosmic Wind to an entirely different spot in a Universe of Infinite Possibilities. Or, rather, into another Universe altogether. And that my mind and individuality will be changed to fit.But at other moments, which are still in the majority, I believe that my unsettling experience was only one of those remarkably vivid waking dreams to which old people become increasingly susceptible, generally waking dreams about the past, and especially waking dreams about a past in which at some crucial point one made an entirely different and braver choice than one actually did, or in which the whole world made such a decision, with a completely different future resulting. Golden glowing might-have-beens nag increasingly at the minds of some older people.In line with this interpretation I must admit that my whole unsettling experience was structured very much like a dream. It began with startling flashes of a changed world. It continued into a longer period when I completely accepted the changed world and delighted in it and, despite fleeting quivers of uneasiness, wished I could bask in its glow forever. And it ended in horrors, or nightmares, which I hate to mention, let alone discuss, until I must.Opposing this dream notion, there are times when I am completely convinced that what happened to me in Manhattan and in a certain famous building there was no dream at all, but absolutely real, and that I did indeed visit another Time Stream.Finally, I must point out that what I am about to tell you I am necessarily describing in retrospect, highly aware of several transitions involved and, whether I want to or not, commenting on them and making deductions that never once occurred to me at the time.No, at the time it happened to me?and now at this moment of writing I am convinced that it did happen and was absolutely real?one instant simply succeeded another in the most natural way possible. I questioned nothing.As to why it all happened to me, and what particular mechanism was involved, well, I am convinced that every man or woman has rare, brief moments of extreme sensitivity, or rather vulnerability, when his mind and entire being may be blown by the Change Winds to Somewhere Else. And then, by what I call the Law of the Conservation of Reality, blown back again.I was walking down Broadway somewhere near 34th Street. It was a chilly day, sunny despite the smog?a bracing day?and I suddenly began to stride along more briskly than is my cautious habit, throwing my feet ahead of me with a faint suggestion of the goose step. I also threw back my shoulders and took deep breaths, ignoring the fumes which tickled my nostrils. Beside me, traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York. I cheerfully ignored that too. I even smiled at the sight of a ragged bum and a fur-coated gray-haired society lady both independently dodging across the street through the hurtling traffic with a cool practiced skill one sees only in America?s biggest metropolis.Just then I noticed a dark, wide shadow athwart the street ahead of me. It could not be that of a cloud, for it did not move. I craned my neck sharply and looked straight up like the veriest yokel, a regular Hans-Kopf-in-die-Luft (Hans-Head-in-the-Air, a German figure of comedy).My gaze had to climb up the giddy 102 stories of the tallest building in the world, the Empire State. My gaze was strangely accompanied by the vision of a gigantic, long-fanged ape making the same ascent with a beautiful girl in one paw?oh, yes, I was recollecting the charming American fantasy-film King Kong, or as they name it in Sweden, Kong King.And then my gaze clambered higher still, up the 222-foot sturdy tower, to the top of which was moored the nose of the vast, breathtakingly beautiful, streamlined, silvery shape which was making the shadow.Now here is a most important point. I was not at the time in the least startled by what I saw. I knew at once that it was simply the bow section of the German zeppelin Ostwald, named for the great German pioneer of physical chemistry and electrochemistry, and queen of the mighty passenger and light-freight fleet of luxury airliners working out of Berlin, Baden-Baden, and Bremerhaven. That matchless Armada of Peace, each titanic airship named for a world-famous German scientist?the Mach, the Nernst, the Humbolt, the Fritz Haber, the French-named Antoine Henri Becquerel, the American-named Edison, the Polish-named T. Sklodowska Edison, and even the Jewish-named Einstein! The great humanitarian navy in which I held a not unimportant position as international sales consultant and Fachmann?I mean expert. My chest swelled with justified pride at this edel?noble?achievement of der Vaterland.I knew also without any mind-searching or surprise that the length of the Ostwald was more than one half the 1,472-foot height of the Empire State Building plus its mooring tower, thick enough to hold an elevator. And my heart swelled again with the thought that the Berlin Zeppelinturm (dirigible tower) was only a few meters less high. Germany, I told myself, need not strain for mere numerical records?her sweeping scientific and technical achievements speak for themselves to the entire planet.All this literally took little more than a second, and I never broke my snappy stride. As my gaze descended, I cheerfully hummed under my breath Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles.The Broadway I saw was utterly transformed, though at the time this seemed every bit as natural as the serene presence of the Ostwald high overhead, vast ellipsoid held aloft by helium. Silvery electric trucks and buses and private cars innumerable purred along far more evenly and quietly, and almost as swiftly, as had the noisy, stenchful, jerky gasoline-powered vehicles only moments before, though to me now the latter were completely forgotten. About two blocks ahead, an occasional gleaming electric car smoothly swung into the wide silver arch of a quick-battery-change station, while others emerged from under the arch to rejoin the almost dreamlike stream of traffic.The air I gratefully inhaled was fresh and clean, without trace of smog.The somewhat fewer pedestrians around me still moved quite swiftly, but with a dignity and courtesy largely absent before, with the numerous blackamoors among them quite as well dressed and exuding the same quiet confidence as the Caucasians.The only slightly jarring note was struck by a tall, pale, rather emaciated man in black dress and with unmistakably Hebraic features. His somber clothing was somewhat shabby, though well kept, and his thin shoulders were hunched. I got the impression he had been looking closely at me, and then instantly glancing away as my eyes sought his. For some reason I recalled what my son had told me about the City College of New York?CCNY?being referred to surreptitiously and jokingly as Christian College Now Yiddish. I couldn?t help chuckling a bit at that witticism, though I am glad to say it was a genial little guffaw rather than a malicious snicker. Germany in her well-known tolerance and noble-mindedness has completely outgrown her old, disfiguring anti-Semitism?after all, we must admit in all fairness that perhaps a third of our great men are Jews or carry Jewish genes, Haber and Einstein among the... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]