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

of efficient warning by motorcycle police and a helicopter cruising with a bullhorn.
    â€œThere were oil wells by the reservoir,” he said. “Even the purblind officials admit that soil subsidence from oil drilling may have started the leaks. But do you remember the east west bounds of the flood? From La Brea to La Ciénega—the tar to the swamp! And what was the substance lining the reservoir? What was the stuff that craftily weakened from point to point and then gave way at the crucial moment, triggering the thing? Asphalt!”
    â€œMen did the drilling, Daloway,” I argued wearily. “Asphalt is inert . . .”
    â€œInert!” he almost snarled back at me. “Yes, like the uranium atom! What moves the dowsers’ wands? Do you still think that men run things up here?”
    By the time I left I was glad to be gone and disgusted with myself for wasting too much time, and very irked at Daloway too and glad I had an engagement the next evening that would prevent me from visiting him.
    For the first time in weeks, going home that night, I wondered if Daloway mightn’t be an all-out psychopath. At the same time I found myself so nervous about the very faint stench of oil in my car that I opened all the windows, though there was a chilly fog, and even then I kept worrying about the motor and the oil in it, as it heated. Damn it, the man was poisoning my life with his paranoid suspicions and dreads! He was right, I’d better keep off him.
    But the next night a thunder stroke woke me about two; there was rain sizzling and rattling on the roof and gurgling loudly in the resonating metal drain pipes, and right away I was thinking how much louder it must be pounding on Daloway’s trailer and wondering how apt lightning striking an oil well was to cause a fire—things like that. It was our first big downpour of the season, rather early in the fall too, and it kept on and on, a regular cloudburst, and the lightning too. I must have listened to them for a couple of hours, thinking about Daloway and his wild ideas, which didn’t seem so wild now with the storm going, and picturing Venice with its canals filling fast and with its low crowded houses and oil wells and derricks under the fist of the rain and the lightning’s shining spear.
    I think it was chiefly the thought of the canals being full that finally got me up and dressed around five and off in the dark to see how Daloway was faring. The rain had stopped by now and of course the thunder too, but there were signs of the storm everywhere—my headlights showed me falling branches, fans of eroded mud and gravel crossing the street, gutters still brimming, a few intersections still shallowly flooded, and a couple of wide buttons of water still pouring up from manholes whose heavy tops had been displaced by the pressure from brim-filled flumes.
    Hardly any private automobiles were abroad yet, but I met a couple of fire trucks and light-and-power trucks and cars off on emergency errands, and when I got to Venice, Daloway’s end was dark—there’d evidently been a major power failure there. I kept on, a bit cautious now that my headlights were just about the only illumination there was. Venice seemed like a battered city of the dead—a storm-bombed ruin—I hardly saw a soul or a light, only a candle back of a window here and there. But the streets weren’t flooded too deep anywhere along my usual route and just as I sensed the eastern sky paling a little I crossed the narrow high-humped bridge—no need to tap my horn this time!—and swung into my usual parking place and stopped my car and switched off the lights and got out.
    I must be very careful to get things right now.
    My first impression, which the motor of my car had masked up to now, was of the great general silence. All the sounds of the storm were gone except for the tiny occasional drip of the last drop off a leaf or a roof.
    The