Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “He won’t like it,” the ferra said doubtfully.

  “Try it anyhow,” Bob suggested.

  “I’ll try,” the ferra said, and vanished.

  “How much do you think we can charge?” Janice asked.

  “Oh, give him standard rates. After all, we’ve built this store on fair practices. We wouldn’t want to discriminate. I still wish I knew where he was from, though.”

  “He’s so rich,” Janice said dreamily. “It seems a shame not to—”

  “Wait a minute!” Bob shouted. “We can’t do it! How can there be refrigerators in 2,000 before Christ? Or air-conditioners?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It would change the whole course of history!” Bob said. “Some smart guy is going to look at those things and figure out how they work. Then the whole course of history will be changed!”

  “So what?” Janice asked practically.

  “So what? So research will be carried out along different lines. The present will be changed.”

  “You mean it’s impossible?”

  “Yes!”

  “That’s just what I’ve been saying all along,” Janice said triumphantly. “Oh, stop that,” Bob said. “I wish I could figure this out. No matter what country the ferra is from, it’s bound to have an effect on the future. We can’t chance a paradox.”

  “Why not?” Janice asked, but at that moment the ferra appeared.

  “The king has agreed,” the ferra said. “Will this pay for what I’ve taken?” He held out a small sack.

  Spilling out the sack, Bob found that it contained about two dozen large rubies, emeralds and diamonds.

  “We can’t take it,” Bob said. “We can’t do business with you.”

  “Don’t be superstitious!” Janice shouted, seeing their marriage begin to evaporate again.

  “Why not?” the ferra asked.

  “We can’t introduce modern things into the past,” Bob said. “It’ll change the present. This world may vanish or something.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” the ferra said. “I guarantee nothing will happen.”

  “But why? I mean, if you introduced a washer in ancient Rome—”

  “Unfortunately,” the ferra said, “King Alerian’s kingdom has no future.”

  “Would you explain that?”

  “Sure.” The ferra sat down on the air. “In three years King Alerian and his country will be completely and irrevocably destroyed by forces of nature. Not a person will be saved. Not even a piece of pottery.”

  “Fine,” Janice said, holding a ruby to the light. “We’d better unload while he’s still in business.”

  “I guess that takes care of that,” Bob said. Their business was saved, and their marriage was in the immediate future. “How about you?” he asked the ferra.

  “Well, I’ve done rather well on this job,” the ferra said. “I think I’ll apply for a foreign transfer. I hear there are some wonderful opportunities in Arabian sorcery.”

  He ran a hand complacently over his blond crewcut. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said, and started to disappear.

  “Just a minute,” Bob said. “Would you mind telling me what country you’re from? And what country King Alerian is from?”

  “Oh, sure,” the ferra said, only his head still visible. “I thought you knew. Ferras are the demons of Atlantis.”

  And he disappeared.

  COAST TO COAST

  AFTER Albuquerque, Route 66 is flat and hot. It shoots like a searing pain through the Mojave Desert, into southern California. Route 66 is a road that knows where it’s going.

  I knew where I was going too. My gas tank was full, and I had a water bag strapped to my front bumper. The radio wasn’t working, of course, and the air was like the kiss of a blast furnace. On top of that, I was lonely. But it didn’t matter. I was on my way to Alaska, Hawaii, Tahiti—or any other place you could name.

  Then I saw the hitchhiker. He was standing on the shoulder of the road, ninety miles from nowhere. He wore a dark suit, and he was carrying a worn, brown suitcase.

  I was fifty yards past him before I could stop. He came up to my car at a full sprint, evidently afraid I might change my mind.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you not to get dumped in the middle of a desert?” I asked him.

  He got in and leaned back, catching his breath. “Man picked me up outside of Albuquerque,” he said, “took me out here, then turned off to some Indian village in the desert. Said he was a schoolteacher.”

  “You’ll learn,” I said. I judged that he was about twenty-two, only a few years younger than I. He was a big guy with neat features and carefully combed hair. “You sound like a New Yorker,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Going far?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah. California, I guess.”

  I liked him right off, probably because he reminded me of myself four years ago. I’d wanted to travel too, and yet I’d been scared—leaving my home and girl and job. When people asked me, I hadn’t been able to tell them where I was going or what I was going to do once I got there. But I went. I traveled and worked all over the country, and except for scenery, one place was about like another. Now I was going to Alaska, Hawaii, Tahiti . . .

  We drove all day without talking much. I gave him a turn at the wheel and took a nap. Then I drove again. When we stopped for gas we got in the shade and had some pop, and he said, “Are you going through Pasadena?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Want to get off there?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I know some people in Pasadena, and I thought maybe I’d drop in and say hello. But I don’t know if I should.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, they moved out here from New York three years ago, and they probably wouldn’t remember me.”

  “Might as well try them for a free meal,” I said.

  THE sun was almost down when we got started again, and the desert was beginning to cool off. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, after we had been driving a while, “where are you going?”

  “I don’t mind. Alaska, first.”

  He said, “Gee! Why?”

  “I’ve never been there. Haven’t you ever wanted to go to a place you’ve never been to?”

  After a very long pause he said, “I’d kinda like to see them myself.”

  “Okay, come along,” I said.

  He knotted his hands together, like something was bothering him. “I don’t have much money.”

  “You can work. I’ve done everything, everywhere. In Alaska maybe I’ll chop trees or pull a fishing net or wash dishes. If you’re not afraid of hard work, you can be your own man anywhere in the world,” I said. I left out the loneliness. He could find that out for himself.

  “You’d take me along?”

  “Why not, if you want to come? I figure on selling the car, going up to Alaska and then working a tramp to Hawaii. Spend some time there and then ship for Tahiti.”

  He was impressed. In New York he must have thought that Hawaii and Tahiti were as distant as the craters of the moon. But he still didn’t accept.

  And then I knew what his trouble was. “Is she very pretty?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “That girl in New York.” He didn’t answer, which was answer enough. “I figured that was it,” I said. “But believe me, it can’t be helped. I left a pretty nice girl in New York—a nurse. I suppose she’s married by now.”

  “Are you ever sorry?” he asked me cautiously.

  “Sure. But you can’t have everything. I chose the road.”

  We were both quiet then. I suppose he was thinking about his girl, and I was remembering mine. We had been nearly engaged, but I had the traveling fever. One night I wrote her a long, incoherent letter about how much I loved her and how I had to travel. I tossed a bag in my car and set out. A thousand miles from home, I had almost turned back. Almost.

  My f
riend sat quiet for a long time, staring ahead into the darkness. Finally he sighed and leaned back. “I’d like to stop in Pasadena first,” he said.

  “Suit yourself,” I said. He wanted to have his last look at familiar faces, his last taste of normality before the big jump. I didn’t blame him.

  IT WAS morning when we got to Pasadena. He hadn’t spoken for hours, except to give me his friends’ address. Now he smoked and stared out the window, not seeing anything.

  “Well, here we are,” I said, stopping the car.

  “Wait for me,” he said.

  The house was small. There were two middle-aged people sitting in metal chairs on the front lawn, soaking up the California sunshine. They both stood up when they saw him. “Why, Roy Ellison!” the man said, getting up.

  “Roy!” his wife said. “Whatever are you doing out here?”

  “Well, I was just passing through,” he said unhappily, jamming his hands into his pockets. “I just thought I’d—”

  The front door opened, and a girl came out with a tray of cold drinks. She was about nineteen and pretty, if you like blondes. “Roy!” she said, and the tray slipped out of her hands and crashed on the porch floor. She just stood there staring at Roy Ellison.

  “I was just passing through,” he said, with desperation in his voice. “I just thought I’d drop by for old times’ sake—”

  “You’re staying, aren’t you?” the girl asked.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Roy said, glancing back at me.

  “You’re staying,” she said firmly. They looked at each other. Then they began to smile.

  I slipped the car quietly into gear, but Roy remembered me. Hand in hand, he and the girl walked over. “This is a friend of mine,” Roy said.

  “Won’t you come in and have some root beer?” the girl asked, and then blushed, remembering that she had dropped the tray.

  “I’ve got a long way to go,” I said.

  I leaned out the window and punched Roy on the arm, winked at the girl and gunned the motor.

  What an idiot he was, I told myself, gripping the steering wheel very tightly. This was the New York girl—moved to California! He’d hitchhiked three thousand miles, just to find out if she was married or engaged, or in love with someone else . . . What an idiot he was.

  But it was no use. The loneliness had swallowed me now, and I knew that, except for scenery, Alaska, Hawaii and Tahiti were the same as Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania. All places were the same.

  I slowed the car and made a sloppy, four-corner turn. But going back to New York was a terrifying thought. What if she were married, engaged, or in love with someone else? I would just have to find out the hard way.

  I had three thousand miles to go, but I detoured around the girl’s block. I didn’t want Roy to see me going back, after all I had said.

  WARM

  It was a joyous journey Anders set out on . . . to reach his goal . . . but look where he wound up!

  ANDERS lay on his bed, fully dressed except for his shoes and black bow tie, contemplating, with a certain uneasiness, the evening before him. In twenty minutes he would pick up Judy at her apartment, and that was the uneasy part of it.

  He had realized, only seconds ago, that he was in love with her.

  Well, he’d tell her. The evening would be memorable. He would propose, there would be kisses, and the seal of acceptance would, figuratively speaking, be stamped across his forehead.

  Not too pleasant an outlook, he decided. It really would be much more comfortable not to be in love. What had done it? A look, a touch, a thought? It didn’t take much, he knew, and stretched his arms for a thorough yawn.

  “Help me!” a voice said.

  His muscles spasmed, cutting off the yawn in mid-moment. He sat upright on the bed, then grinned and lay back again.

  “You must help me!” the voice insisted.

  Anders sat up, reached for a polished shoe and fitted it on, giving his full attention to the tying of the laces.

  “Can you hear me?” the voice asked. “You can, can’t you?”

  That did it. “Yes, I can hear you,” Anders said, still in a high good humor. “Don’t tell me you’re my guilty subconscious, attacking me for a childhood trauma I never bothered to resolve. I suppose you want me to join a monastery.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the voice said. “I’m no one’s subconscious. I’m me. Will you help me?”

  Anders believed in voices as much as anyone; that is, he didn’t believe in them at all, until he heard them. Swiftly he catalogued the possibilities. Schizophrenia was the best answer, of course, and one in which his colleagues would concur. But Anders had a lamentable confidence in his own sanity. In which case—

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” the voice answered.

  Anders realized that the voice was speaking within his own mind. Very suspicious.

  “You don’t know who you are,” Anders stated. “Very well. Where are you?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” The voice paused, and went on. “Look, I know how ridiculous this must sound. Believe me, I’m in some sort of limbo. I don’t know how I got here or who I am, but I want desperately to get out. Will you help me?”

  STILL fighting the idea of a voice speaking within his head, Anders knew that his next decision was vital. He had to accept—or reject—his own sanity.

  He accepted it.

  “All right,” Anders said, lacing the other shoe. “I’ll grant that you’re a person in trouble, and that you’re in some sort of telepathic contact with me. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “I’m afraid not,” the voice said, with infinite sadness. “You’ll have to find out for yourself.”

  “Can you contact anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you talk with me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Anders walked to his bureau mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, whistling softly under his breath. Having just discovered that he was in love, he wasn’t going to let a little thing like a voice in his mind disturb him.

  “I really don’t see how I can be of any help,” Anders said, brushing a bit of lint from his jacket. “You don’t know where you are, and there don’t seem to be any distinguishing landmarks. How am I to find you?” He turned and looked around the room to see if he had forgotten anything.

  “I’ll know when you’re close,” the voice said. “You were warm just then.”

  “Just then?” All he had done was look around the room. He did so again, turning his head slowly. Then it happened.

  The room, from one angle, looked different. It was suddenly a mixture of muddled colors, instead of the carefully blended pastel shades he had selected. The lines of wall, floor and ceiling were strangely off proportion, zigzag, unrelated.

  Then everything went back to normal.

  “You were very warm,” the voice said. “It’s a question of seeing things correctly.”

  Anders resisted the urge to scratch his head, for fear of disarranging his carefully combed hair. What he had seen wasn’t so strange. Everyone sees one or two things in his life that make him doubt his normality, doubt sanity, doubt his very existence. For a moment the orderly Universe is disarranged and the fabric of belief is ripped.

  But the moment passes.

  Anders remembered once, as a boy, awakening in his room in the middle of the night. How strange everything had looked. Chairs, table, all out of proportion, swollen in the dark. The ceiling pressing down, as in a dream.

  But that had also passed.

  “Well, old man,” he said, “if I get warm again, let me know.”

  “I will,” the voice in his head whispered. “I’m sure you’ll find me.”

  “I’m glad you’re so sure,” Anders said gaily, switched off the lights and left.

  LOVELY and smiling, Judy greeted him at the door. Looking at her, Anders sensed her knowledge of the
moment. Had she felt the change in him, or predicted it? Or was love making him grin like an idiot?

  “Would you like a before-party drink?” she asked.

  He nodded, and she led him across the room, to the improbable green-and-yellow couch. Sitting down, Anders decided he would tell her when she came back with the drink. No use in putting off the fatal moment. A lemming in love, he told himself.

  “You’re getting warm again,” the voice said.

  He had almost forgotten his invisible friend. Or fiend, as the case could well be. What would Judy say if she knew he was hearing voices? Little things like that, he reminded himself, often break up the best of romances.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a drink.

  Still smiling, he noticed. The number two smile—to a prospective suitor, provocative and understanding. It had been preceded, in their relationship, by the number one nice-girl smile, the don’t-misunderstand-me smile, to be worn on all occasions, until the correct words have been mumbled.

  “That’s right,” the voice said. “It’s in how you look at things.”

  Look at what? Anders glanced at Judy, annoyed at his thoughts. If he was going to play the lover, let him play it. Even through the astigmatic haze of love, he was able to appreciate her blue-gray eyes, her fine skin (if one overlooked a tiny blemish on the left temple), her lips, slightly reshaped by lipstick.

  “How did your classes go today?” she asked.

  Well, of course she’d ask that, Anders thought. Love is marking time.

  “All right,” he said. “Teaching psychology to young apes—”

  “Oh, come now!”

  “Warmer,” the voice said.

  What’s the matter with me, Anders wondered. She really is a lovely girl. The gestalt that is Judy, a pattern of thoughts, expressions, movements, making up the girl I—

  I what?

  Love?

  Anders shifted his long body uncertainly on the couch. He didn’t quite understand how this train of thought had begun. It annoyed him. The analytical young instructor was better off in the classroom. Couldn’t science wait until 9:10 in the morning?