Black Gondolier and Other Stories by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online

would have, except for the accident. His money was running out. (There was a month’s rent owing on the trailer at the end.) He had a history of briefly-held jobs alternating with periods of roving or dropping out of sight—or so they claimed. What more natural than that he should have seized on some sudden opportunity or inspiration to decamp?
    I had to admit they had a point, of sorts. It turned out that the police had an old grudge against Daloway: they’d once suspected him of being mixed up in the marijuana traffic. Well, that may have been true, I suppose; he admitted to me having smoked hemp a few times, years before.
    I used to carp at horror stories in which the protagonist could at any time have departed from the focus of horror—generally some lonely dismal spot, like Daloway’s trailer—but instead insisted on staying there, though shaking with fear, until he was engulfed. Since my experience with Daloway, I’ve changed my mind. Daloway did try to leave. He made that one big effort with the car and it was foiled. He lacked the energy to make another. He became fatalistic. And perhaps the urge to stay and see what would happen—always strong, I imagine, curiosity being a fundamental human trait—at that point became somewhat stronger than the opposing urge to flee.
    That evening after the freeway accident I stayed with him a long time, trying to cheer him up and get him to look at the accident as a chance occurrence, not some cat-and-mousing malignancy aimed directly and solely at him. After a while I thought I was succeeding.
    â€œYou know, I hung back of that truck for fully ten minutes, afraid to pass, though I had enough speed,” he admitted. “I kept thinking something would happen while I was passing it.”
    â€œYou see,” I said. “If you’d passed it right off, you wouldn’t have been involved in the accident. You courted danger by sticking close behind a vehicle that you probably knew, at least subconsciously, was behaving dangerously. We can all have accidents that way.”
    â€œNo,” Daloway replied, shaking his head. “Then the accident would have come earlier. Don’t you understand?—it was an oil truck! And if I had got by it, the oil would have stopped me some way, I’m convinced of that now—even if it had to burst out in a spontaneous gusher beside the highway and skid my car into a wreck! Remember how the oil burst out of Signal Hill in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and flowed inches thick down the streets?”
    â€œWell, at any rate you escaped with your life,” I pointed out, trying to salvage a little of my imagined advantage.
    â€œIt didn’t want to kill me there,” Daloway countered gloomily. “It just wanted to herd me back. It’s got something else in store for me.”
    â€œNow look here, Daloway,” I burst out, a little angry and trying to sound more so, “if we all argued that way, there wouldn’t be any trifling mischance that couldn’t be twisted into a murder-attempt by some weird power. Just this morning I found a little gas-leak in my kitchen. Am I to suppose—?”
    â€œIt’s after you too now!” he interrupted me, paling and starting to his feet. “Natural gas—petroleum—the same thing—siblings. Keep off me, it’s not safe! I’ve warned you before. You better get out now.”
    I wouldn’t agree to that, of course, but the couple hours more I stayed with Daloway didn’t improve his mood, or mine either. He set himself to analyzing last year’s Los Angeles catastrophe, when a three hundred million gallon water reservoir broke its thick earthen wall in the Baldwin Hills and did tens of millions of dollars worth of damage, floating and tumbling cars and flooding thousands of homes and smashing hundreds of buildings with a deluge of water and mud—though only a few lives were lost because