Fritz Leiber Best of Fritz Leiber

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masking the signs of its strains in themselves, that they have almost forgotten that those strains are
there. And they love their home and country, and the security of their taut way of life, so deeply that they
have become unaware of the depth of that devotion.
My lecture went off well that night. The audience was large, respectful, and seemingly even attentive.
The number of African and Mexican faces gave the lie to what I d been told about integration being a
sham in America. I should have been pleased, and I temporarily was, at the long, mutedly drumming
applause I was given and at the many intelligent, flattering comments I received afterward. And I should
have stopped seeing the shadows then, but I didn t.
Next morning Emily toured me around city and countryside on a long silvery scooter, I riding pillion
behind her. I remember the easy though faintly formal way in which she drew my arms around her waist
and laid her hand for a moment on one of mine, meanwhile smiling cryptically over-shoulder. Besides
that smile, I remember a charming Spanish-American graveyard in pastel stucco, the towering Kennedy
shrine, the bubbling, iridescent tubes of algae farming converging toward the horizon, and rockets taking
off in the distance with their bright, smokeless exhausts. Emily was almost as unaffected as a British girl
and infinitely more competent, in a grand style. That one day the shadows vanished altogether.
They returned at evening when after dinner we gathered in the living room for our first wholly unhurried
and relaxed conversation, my lectures being spaced out in a leisurely to Americans, not to me one
day in two schedule.
We sat in a comfortable arc before the wide fireplace, where resinous woods burned yellow and orange.
Occasionally Jack would put on another log. From time to time, a light shower of soot dropped back
from the precipitron in the chimney, the tiny particles as they fell flaring into brief white points of light,
like stars.
A little to my surprise, the Grissims drank as heavily as the English, though they carried their liquor very
well. Emily was the exception to this family pattern, contenting herself with a little sherry and three
long, slim reefers, which she drew from an elegant foil package covered with gold script and Lissajous
curves, and which she inhaled sippingly, her lips rapidly shuddering with a very faint, low, trilling sound.
Professor Grissim set the pattern by deprecating the reasons for America s domestic achievements,
which I had led off by admitting were far greater than I d expected. They weren t due to any peculiar
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best of fritz leiber
American drive, he said, and certainly not to any superior moral fiber, but simply to technology and
computerized civilization given their full head and unstinting support. The powerful sweep of those two
almost mathematical forces had automatically solved such problems as overpopulation, by effortless and
aesthetic contraception, and stagnant or warped brain potential, by unlimited semiautomated education
and psychiatry just as on a smaller scale the drug problem had largely been resolved by the
legalization of marijuana and peyote, following the simple principle of restricting only the sale of
quickly addictive chemicals and those provably damaging to nervous tissue Control the poisons, but
let each person learn to control his intoxicants, especially now that we have metabolic rectifiers for the
congenitally alcoholic.
I was also told that American extremism, both of the right and left, which had seemed such a big thing in
mid-century, had largely withered away or at least been muted by the great surge of the same forces
which were making America ever more beautiful and prosperous. Gties were no longer warrens of
discontent. Peace marches and Minutemen rallies alike, culminating in the late sixties, had thereafter
steadily declined.
While impressed, I did not fall into line, but tried to point out some black holes in this glowing picture.
Indeed, feeling at home with the Grissims now and having learned that nothing I could say would shock
them into anger and confusion, I was able to be myself fully and to reveal frankly my anti-American [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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