Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber by Fritz Leiber

and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another mostly white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.
Of course, all the parts of the air didn’t freeze and snow down at the same time.
First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you’re shovelling for water, you have to make sure you don’t go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there’s the nitrogen, which doesn’t count one way or the other, though it’s the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there’s the oxygen that keeps us alive. It’s pale blue, which helps you tell it from the nitrogen. It has to be colder for oxygen to freeze solid than nitrogen. That’s why the oxygen snowed down last. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen, but we’re used to it and don’t notice.
Finally, at the very top, there’s a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases are in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa laughingly says, whatever that is.
I was busting to tell them all about what I’d seen, and so as soon as I’d ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the hand where she’d lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one, as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted to explain it all away quickly, yet I knew he knew I wasn’t fooling.
“And you watched this light for some time, son?” he asked when I finished.
I hadn’t said anything about first thinking it was a young lady’s face. Somehow that part embarrassed me.
“Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor.”
“And it didn’t look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?”
He wasn’t just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world that’s about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat—that’s the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally died.
“Not like anything I ever saw,” I told him.
He stood for a moment frowning. Then, “I’ll go out with you, and you show it to me,” he said.
Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have triple-pane plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and so on.
Ma started moaning again, “I’ve always known there was something outside there, waiting to get us. I’ve felt it for years—something that’s part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the Nest. It’s been watching us all this time, and now it’s coming after us. It’ll get you and then come for me. Don’t go, Harry!”
Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up on the roof to check if it’s working all right. That’s our worst trip and Pa won’t let me make it alone.
“Sis,” Pa said quietly, “come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air, too. If it gets low or doesn’t seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the cloth to pick up