Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online

self-sacrifice it represented on Mr. Fitch’s part when he agreed to forego supervising the photography of my model in the Lovelybelt Imp or Vixen or whatever it was we finally used.
Next morning she turned up on time according to her schedule, and we went to work. I’ll say one thing for her, she never got tired and she never kicked at the way I fussed over shots. I got along okay except I still had the feeling of something being shoved away gently. Maybe you’ve felt it just a little, looking at her picture.
When we finished I found out there were still more rules. It was about the middle of the afternoon. I started down with her to get a sandwich and coffee.
“Uh uh,” she said, “I’m going down alone. And look, baby, if you ever try to follow me, if you ever so much as stick your head out that window when I go, you can hire yourself another model.”
You can imagine how all this crazy stuff strained my temper—and my imagination. I remember opening the window after she was gone—I waited a few minutes first—and standing there getting some fresh air and trying to figure out what could be back of it, whether she was hiding from the police, or was somebody’s ruined daughter, or maybe had got the idea it was smart to be temperamental, or more likely Papa Munsch was right and she was partly nuts.
But I had my pix to finish up.
Looking back it’s amazing to think how fast her magic began to take hold of the city after that.
Remembering what came after, I’m frightened of what’s happening to the whole country—and maybe the world. Yesterday I read something in Time about the Girl’s picture turning up on billboards in Egypt.
The rest of my story will help show you why I’m frightened in that big general way. But I have a theory, too, that helps explain, though it’s one of those things that’s beyond that “certain point.” It’s about the Girl. I’ll give it to you in a few words.
You know how modern advertising gets everybody’s mind set in the same direction, wanting the same things, imagining the same things. And you know the psychologists aren’t so skeptical of telepathy as they used to be.
Add up the two ideas. Suppose the identical desires of millions of people focused on one telepathic person. Say a girl. Shaped her in their image.
Imagine her knowing the hidden-most hungers of millions of men. Imagine her seeing deeper into those hungers than the people that had them, seeing the hatred and the wish for death behind the lust. Imagine her shaping herself in that complete image, keeping herself as aloof as marble. Yet imagine the hunger she might feel in answer to their hunger.
But that’s getting a long way from the facts of my story. And some of those facts are darn solid. Like money. We made money.
That was the funny thing I was going to tell you. I was afraid the Girl was going to hold me up. She really had me over a barrel, you know.
But she didn’t ask for anything but the regular rates. Later on I insisted on pushing more money at her, a whole lot. But she always took it with that same contemptuous look, as if she were going to toss it down the first drain when she got outside.
Maybe she did.
At any rate, I had money. For the first time in months I had money enough to get drunk, buy new clothes, take taxicabs. I could make a play for any girl I wanted to. I only had to pick.
And so of course I had to go and pick—
But first let me tell you about Papa Munsch.
Papa Munsch wasn’t the first of the boys to try to meet my model but I think he was the first to really go soft on her. I could watch the change in his eyes as he looked at her pictures. They began to get sentimental, reverent. Mama Munsch had been dead for two years.
He was smart about the way he planned it. He got me to drop some information which told him when she came to work, and then one morning he came pounding up the stairs a few minutes before.
“I’ve got to see her, Dave,” he told me.
I argued with him, I kidded