Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Better grab him. Watch out!”

  Gentle hands surround me as I push two are brown for which is for mother, and one is high for all rest.

  “Stop him from shooting off those guns!”

  I am lifted into the air, I fly, I fly.

  “Is there any hope for that man?” Ellsner asked, after they had locked Nielson in a ward.

  “Who knows,” Branch said. His broad face tightened; knots of muscle pushed out his cheeks. Suddenly he turned, shouted, and swung his fist wildly at the metal wall. After it hit, he grunted and grinned sheepishly.

  “Silly, isn’t it? Margraves drinks. I let off steam by hitting walls. Let’s go eat.”

  The officers ate separate from the crew. Branch had found that some officers tended to get murdered by psychotic crewmen. It was best to keep them apart.

  During the meal, Branch suddenly turned to Ellsner.

  “Boy, I haven’t told you the entire truth. I said this would go on for two years? Well, the men won’t last that long. I don’t know if I can hold this fleet together for two more weeks.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “I don’t know,” Branch said. He still refused to consider surrender, although he knew it was the only realistic answer.

  “I’m not sure,” Ellsner said, “but I think there may be a way out of your dilemma.” The officers stopped eating and looked at him.

  “Have you got some superweapons for us?” Margraves asked. “A disintegrator strapped to your chest? “

  “I’m afraid not. But I think you’ve been so close to the situation that you don’t see it in its true light. A case of the forest for the trees.”

  “Go on,” Branch said, munching methodically on a piece of bread.

  “Consider the universe as the CPC sees it. A world of strict causality. A logical, coherent universe. In this world, every effect has a cause. Every factor can be instantly accounted for.

  “That’s not a picture of the real world. There is no explanation for everything, really. The CPC is built to see a specialized universe, and to extrapolate on the basis of that.”

  “So,” Margraves said, “what would you do?”

  “Throw the world out of joint,” Ellsner said. “Bring in uncertainty. Add a human factor that the machines can’t calculate.”

  “How can you introduce uncertainty in a chess game?” Branch asked, interested in spite of himself.

  “By sneezing at a crucial moment, perhaps. How could a machine calculate that?”

  “It wouldn’t have to. It would just classify it as extraneous noise, and ignore it.”

  “True.” Ellsner thought for a moment. “This battle—how long will it take once the actual hostilities are begun?”

  “About six minutes,” Branch told him. “Plus or minus twenty seconds.”

  “That confirms an idea of mine,” Ellsner said. “The chess game analogy you use is faulty. There’s no real comparison.”

  “It’s a convenient way of thinking of it,” Margraves said.

  “But it’s an untrue way of thinking of it. Checkmating a king can’t be equated with destroying a fleet. Nor is the rest of the situation like chess. In chess you play by rules previously agreed upon by the players. In this game you can make up your own rules.”

  “This game had inherent rules of its own,” Branch said.

  “No,” Ellsner said. “Only the CPC’s have rules. How about this? Suppose you dispensed with the CPC’s? Gave every commander his head, told him to attack on his own, with no pattern. What would happen?”

  “It wouldn’t work,” Margraves told him. “The CPC can still total the picture, on the basis of the planning ability of the average human. More than that, they can handle the attack of a few thousand second-rate calculators—humans—with ease. It would be like shooting clay pigeons.”

  “But you’ve got to try something,” Ellsner pleaded.

  “Now wait a minute,” Branch said. “You can spout theory all you want. I know what the CPC’s tell me, and I believe them. I’m still in command of this fleet, and I’m not going to risk the lives in my command on some harebrained scheme.”

  “Harebrained schemes sometimes win wars,” Ellsner said.

  “They usually lose them.”

  “The war is lost already, by your own admission.”

  “I can still wait for them to make a mistake.”

  “Do you think it will come?”

  “No.”

  “Well then?”

  “I’m still going to wait.”

  The rest of the meal was completed in moody silence. Afterward, Ellsner went to his room.

  “Well, Ed?” Margraves asked, unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Well yourself,” the general said. He lay down on his bed, trying not to think. It was too much. Logistics. Predetermined battles. The coming debacle. He considered slamming his fist against the wall, but decided against it.

  It was sprained already. He was going to sleep.

  On the borderline between slumber and sleep, he heard a click.

  The door!

  Branch jumped out of bed and tried the knob. Then he threw himself against it.

  Locked.

  “General, please strap yourself down. We are attacking.” It was Ellsner’s voice, over the intercom.

  “I looked over that keyboard of yours, sir, and found the magnetic doorlocks. Mighty handy in case of a mutiny, isn’t it?”

  “You idiot!” Branch shouted. “You’ll kill us all! That CPC—”

  “I’ve disconnected our CPC,” Ellsner said pleasantly. “I’m a pretty logical boy, and I think I know how a sneeze will bother them.”

  “He’s mad,” Margraves shouted to Branch. Together they threw themselves against the metal door.

  Then they were thrown to the floor.

  “All gunners—fire at will!” Ellsner broadcasted to the fleet.

  The ship was in motion. The attack was underway!

  The dots drifted together, crossing the no man’s land of space.

  They coalesced! Energy flared, and the battle was joined.

  Six minutes, human time. Hours for the electronically fast chess player. He checked his pieces for an instant, deducing the pattern of attack.

  There was no pattern!

  Half of the opposing chess player’s pieces shot out into space, completely out of the battle. Whole flanks advanced, split, rejoined, wrenched forward, dissolved their formation, formed it again.

  No pattern? There had to be a pattern. The chess player knew that everything had a pattern. It was just a question of finding it, of taking the moves already made and extrapolating to determine what the end was supposed to be.

  The end was—chaos!

  The dots swept in and out, shotaway at right angles to the battle, checked and returned, meaninglessly.

  What did it mean, the chess player asked himself with the calmness of metal. He waited for a recognizable configuration to emerge.

  Watching dispassionately as his pieces were swept off the board.

  “I’m letting you out of your room now,” Ellsner called, “but don’t try to stop me. I think I’ve won your battle.”

  The lock released. The two officers ran down the corridor to the bridge, determined to break Ellsner into little pieces.

  Inside, they slowed down.

  The screen showed the great mass of Earth dots sweeping over a scattering of enemy dots.

  What stopped them, however, was Nielson, laughing, his hands sweeping over switches and buttons on the great master control board.

  The CPC was droning the losses. “Earth—eighteen per cent. Enemy—eighty-three. Eighty-four. Eighty-six. Earth, nineteen per cent.”

  “Mate!” Ellsner shouted. He stood beside Neilson, a Stillson wrench clenched in his hand. “Lack of pattern. I gave their CPC something it couldn’t handle. An attack with no apparent pattern. Meaningless configurations!”

  “But what are they doing?” Branch asked, gesturing at th
e dwindling enemy dots.

  “Still relying on their chess player,” Ellsner said. “Still waiting for him to dope out the attack pattern in this madman’s mind. Too much faith in machines, general. This man doesn’t even know he’s precipitating an attack.”

  . . . And push three that’s for dad on the olive tree I always wanted to two two two Danbury fair with buckle shoe brown all brown buttons down and in, sin, eight red for sin—

  “What’s the wrench for?” Margraves asked.

  “That?” Ellsner weighed it in his hand. “That’s to turn off Neilson here, after the attack.”

  . . . And five and love and black, all blacks, fair buttons in I remember when I was very young at all push five and there on the grass ouch—

  THE END

  TIME CHECK FOR CONTROL

  In the War of the Worlds the fate of the Universe hung upon his answer to the riddle from Space

  Joe Skanlan hesitated, just for a moment, outside the gray plastic door marked General Gordon—Security. He had never walked through that door, and had never expected to. Usually, to be called to Security meant a control examination—hours of monotonous, probing questions, extending over days and even weeks. The questions lasted until Security was satisfied.

  With misgivings, he knocked and walked in.

  “Hello, Skanlan,” General Gordon said. He was a small man, perhaps in his late thirties. Over his face—and over the desk, and the whole dingy little office—there seemed to be a film of dust and weariness. Gordon looked as though he had the worries of the world on his shoulders. In a way, he probably had.

  “Not to waste any time,” Gordon said in a dry, grating voice, “you are not here for a control-exam. So get that nervous look off your face.”

  Skanlan’s face had been expressionless; but he almost smiled, looking down on Gordon’s balding head. The man knew his job didn’t exactly put people at their ease.

  “You’ve heard of Mells, of course. Well, I want you to keep a 24-hour guard on him.” As he talked, Gordon was busy sorting papers.

  “He’s back on Earth?” Skanlan asked incredulously. Mells, one of the outstanding scientists of the day, had been on an unnamed planetoid for close to three years. The name of the place had never been disclosed, for security reasons, nor had Mells’ work. Officially, all that had been admitted was that it dealt with the war effort.

  “He’s back. I’ll bring him to your place this evening. From then on, he’s yours. You’re to guard him constantly until his work is finished.”

  “Just a moment.” Skanlan shifted his weight uncomfortably, noticing that the only chair in the room was the one Gordon sat in. “Why me? I mean, a man as important as Mells—I should think he would warrant more protection than a professor of history could give. I’ll do my best, of course, but—why?”

  Why you?” Gordon stopped sorting papers. He had an annoyed look on his face, as though he knew the question was inevitable but hated to answer it.

  “Why pick a history professor for a job like that?” He hesitated, staring at the floor in front of Skanlan’s feet. “The explanation’s a little embarrassing. It’s almost an admission of incompetency on my part.” He stopped, frowning intently at the floor. “I suppose you know, as well as everyone else here on Earth, that Mells is working on a defense against the control-methods of the Hvai. No amount of security could conceal that. It’s almost done, a device that will make all this time-checking, control-exams and the like, obsolete.

  “Unfortunately, the Hvai know it, too. We pulled Mells off the planetoid because one of his closest helpers there became controlled. Almost blew up the place before a guard shot him down. That’s the fifth attempt on Mells’ life in three years. Five men, Skanlan—men associated with him, around him all the time, carefully checked—became controlled. And in the face of the most stringent hourly schedules we could devise.”

  Gordon looked up from the floor abruptly, straight into Skanlan’s eyes. The effect was startling.

  “Still don’t know why you? Well, here’s the rest of it. I bring Mells back to Earth while he’s still alive. What would be the normal procedure for guarding him? Throw a cordon of trusted Security officers around him, with orders to shoot down anyone who blinked twice? But how would that work?”

  The question seemed rhetorical, but Gordon was waiting for an answer. Skanlan said, “I suppose your men are as liable to seizure as Mells’.”

  “Exactly. That’s the sort of thing the Hvai are counting on; police protection. It’s a certainty they’ve got controlled men in my bureau, just as they had and have in Mells’. What would my next step be?”

  “Hide him away on a desert island,” Skanlan suggested.

  “That was the planetoid idea.”

  “I don’t know, then,” Skanlan said. “If you can’t hide him—and can’t keep him with people . . .”

  “Look at it this way,” Gordon broke in harshly. “Normal safeguards won’t work because of the nature of the problem. There are variables any way you look at it. Dangerous variables, since Mells’ anti-control device is the key to the war.

  “I picked you at random, from a group of similarly qualified men. You have a good time-check record, you’re intelligent and flexible, and, most important, you’re not associated with Mells in any way. That’s the idea, right there. Mells isn’t going near the police, or Security, or his friends and lab-assistants, until his work is done. They’re not going near him. I’ve seen to that. He’s going to be spending his time with you. Not you alone, because that’s dangerous, too. But with your friends and associates as well. They’ll be watching you, and you’ll be watching them. But mostly, you’ll be watching them. You’ll be the key man. You’ll be with Mells every minute of the time. What do you think?”

  Skanlan realized, suddenly, that the General of Security was asking him for assurance. It was a risky thing Gordon was doing. Even knowing that normal precautions could never keep Mells safe, it was an uncomfortable step, to hand over Earth’s top secret to a civilian.

  “Under the circumstances, I suppose it’s the only thing you can do. To vary the variables.”

  “I can’t avoid the damned variables,” Gordon said, staring fiercely at Skanlan. “And I can’t handle them all. So I’m making them as unpredictable as possible. If it doesn’t work . . .” He shook his head.

  “I was throwing a party tonight,” Skanlan said. “Want me to call it off?”

  “No. I’ve notified your friends. They know what your job is.”

  “Have you told my wife?”

  “No. You can tell her yourself. Have you a blaster? No? Then take this one. Use it if you have to.” Gordon lifted a Winfield-Sykes blaster out of a drawer and handed it to him. Skanlan looked at the flat, ugly weapon for a moment, then put it in a coat pocket.

  “I think that’s all,” Gordon said. “I don’t have to remind you of the importance of the job. Remember, anyone can be controlled. Your best friend, your wife. Trust no one until Mells’ work is done. The Hvai are sure to make a move of some sort, and you can’t afford to be caught napping. I’ve told your friends to watch, too. Because even you can be controlled.”

  He dropped his eyes again, first to the floor, wearily, then back to the papers on his desk. He looked terribly worn, a man who suspected everyone. He couldn’t even be sure of himself, and he obviously didn’t trust Skanlan as much as he would like. There were too many dusty papers on the desk, filled with too much work for one man. Skanlan left.

  He found it impossible to get back to work. The unfamiliar weight of the blaster disturbed him, and so did the strange new thoughts it brought. He would have to watch all of them, all his friends. And they would be watching him. Warily, distrustfully. Is he controlled yet? they would ask themselves. Are they, any of them, controlled yet? he would ask himself. And the bulk of the asking would be on his part, because he would be with Mells all the time. He would live with one hand on his blaster—waiting. And it would come. He was as sure of that, as
Gordon was.

  Mentally, he reviewed the outward signs of control—loss of motor coordination, slowness of response, lack of time-orientation, effusiveness of speech. The sort of symptoms any drunk might show, but with one tremendous difference. The drunk was actually experiencing something. The controlled person was not. He wasn’t experiencing anything. An alien peered out of his eyes, trying to see things on a scale his nervous system was never designed for, trying to master a human’s underlying nonverbal responses. Trying to move the automaton fast enough, so it would appear human.

  It took thirteen hours of solitude for a Hvai mind to invade and take over a human’s. Once accomplished, the Hvai was “in” for as long, as he wished. Once “out,” he was out for good. It would take thirteen hours again to establish rapport.

  The struggle usually began in the dark. A man sleeps for eight hours, on the average. He doesn’t appear for work one morning. His wife, or his boss or adjutant, someone, finds the door locked, knocks. The man calls out that he isn’t well; he wants to rest for a few hours more. In the early afternoon he emerges. There is no change in him, unless someone notices a slight trembling of the hands, such as any hardworking person might have. Unless someone notices a tendency to drop small objects, or speak more than usual . . .

  A tendency, one day, to blow up an arsenal, sabotage a plant, kill a president.

  That, Security believed, was how it usually happened. That was control. The key to it lay in the thirteen-hour period of indoctrination, which most psychiatrists thought was required to break down certain neural safeguards. It took that long, they theorized, to smash through a psycho-physiological defense structure inherent in the human nervous system.

  When Security got their hands on this, they set up a time-check. The object was to prevent anyone from being alone too long. On Earth, ten hours was maximum. Anything over that called for a control-exam. Time-check was on a voluntary citizen duty basis. Everyone carried around a notebook to mark down the names and hours of the people he met; everyone made sure that he was never alone more than ten hours.