The Ship Sails At Midnight

By Fritz Leiber

This is the story of a beautiful woman. And of a monster. It is also the story off our silly, selfish, culture-bound inhabitants of the planet Earth. Es, who was something of an artist. Gene, who studied atoms—and fought the world and himself. Louis, who philosophized. And Larry—that’s my name—who tried to write books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Release date: Apr 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781952438127

Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was the highly acclaimed author of numerous science fiction stories and novels, many of which were made into films. He is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won many awards, including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

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The Ship Sails At Midnight

Fritz Leiber

Start Publishing LLC

Copyright © 2020 by Start Publishing LLC

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

First Start Publishing eBook edition.

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ISBN 978-1-952438-12-7

The Ship Sails At Midnight

This is the story of a beautiful woman. And of a monster. It is also the story off our silly, selfish, culture-bound inhabitants of the planet Earth. Es, who was something of an artist. Gene, who studied atoms—and fought the world and himself. Louis, who philosophized. And Larry—that’s my name—who tried to write books.

It was an eerie, stifling August when we met Helen. The date is fixed in my mind because our little city had just had its mid-western sluggishness ruffled by a series of those s cares that either give rise to oddity items in the newspapers, or else are caused by them—it’s sometimes hard to tell which. People had seen flying disks and heard noises in the sky—someone from the college geology department tried unsuccessfully to track down a meteorite. A farmer this side of the old coal pits got all excited about something big and shapeless that disturbed his poultry and frightened his wife, and for a couple of days men tracked around fruitlessly with shotguns—just another of those rural monster scares.

Even the town folk hadn’t been left out. For their imaginative enrichment they had a Hypnotism Burglar, an apparently mild enough chap who blinked soft lights in people’s faces and droned some siren-song outside their houses at night. For a week highschool girls squealed twice as loud after dark, men squared their shoulders adventurously at strangers, and women peered uneasily out of their bed room windows after turning out the lights.

Louis and Es and I had picked up Gene at the college library and wanted a bite to eat before we turned in. Although by now they had almost petered out, we were talking about our local scares—a chilly hint of the supernatural makes good conversational fare in a month too hot for any real thinking. We slouched into the one decent open all-night restaurant our dismal burg