continue to exist, the hole leading to home - had pounded down it across time, across space, pumping with desperate legs as the real Earth of that unreal time came under him, his course as certain as the twisting dash of an animal down its burrow, he a cosmic mouse on an interstellar, intertemporal race for his nest with the wrongness of everything closing round the rightness of that one course, the atoms of his heart, his blood, his every cell crying Home - HOME! - as he drove himself after that fading breath-hole, each step faster, surer, stronger, until he raced with invincible momentum upon the rolling flickers of Earth as a man might race a rolling log in a torrent. Only the stars stayed constant around him from flash to flash, he looking down past his feet at a million strobes of Crux, of Triangulum; once at the height of his stride he had risked a century's glance upward and seen the Bears weirdly strung out from Polaris - but a Polaris not the Pole Star now, he realized, jerking his eyes back to his racing feet, thinking, I am walking home to Polaris, home! to the strobing beat. He had ceased to remember where he had been, the beings, people or aliens or things, he had glimpsed in the impossible moment of being where he could not be; had ceased to see the flashes of worlds around him, each flash different, the jumble of bodies, shapes, walls, colors, landscapes -some lasting a breath, some changing pell-mell - the faces, limbs, things poking at him; the nights he had pounded through, dark or lit by strange lamps, roofed or unroofed, the days flashing sunlight, gales, dust, snow, interiors innumerable, strobe after strobe into night again; he was in daylight now, a hall of some kind; I am getting closer at last, he thought, the feel is changing - but he had to slow down, to check; and that stone near his feet, it had stayed there some time now, he wanted to risk a look but he did not dare, he was so tired, and he was sliding, was going out of control, fighting to kill the merciless velocity that would not let him slow down; he was hurt, too, something had hit him back there, they had done something, he didn't know what, back somewhere in the kaleidoscope of faces, arms, hooks, beams, centuries of creatures grabbing at him - and his oxygen was going, never mind, it would last - it had to last, he was going home, home! And he had forgotten now the message he had tried to shout, hoping it could be picked up somehow, the important thing he had repeated; and the thing he had carried, it was gone now, his camera was gone too, something had torn it away - but he was coming home! Home! If only he could kill this momentum, could stay on the failing course, could slip, scramble, slide, somehow ride this avalanche down to home, to home - and his throat said
Home! - called Kate, Kate! And his heart shouted, his lungs almost gone now, as his legs fought, fought and failed, as his feet gripped and skidded and held and slid, as he pitched, flailed, pushed, strove in the gale of timerush across space, across time, at the end of the longest path ever: the path of John Delgano, coming home.
A PAIL OF AIR
Fritz Leiber
I sincerely hope that the name, work and reputation of Fritz Leiber (1910-92) does not fade. He was one of the most accomplished writers of science fiction and fantasy in the years from 1939 to his death and one of the most honoured. According to the Locus Index to SF Awards he won six Hugos, three Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, two Locus Awards, one British Fantasy Award, one Geffen, one Worldcon
Special Convention Award, one Balrog and one Gandalf, as well as the World Fantasy Award Life Achievement, Stoker Life Achievement and the SFWA Grand Master. He is perhaps best known for his sword-and-sorcery series featuring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, collected in seven volumes starting with The Swords of Lankhmar (1968). He is also renowned for his supernatural fiction, of which "Conjure Wife" (1943) has been filmed three times. His science fiction perhaps takes a back seat to his other work, yet he won a Hugo