Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  He pushed the papers away. Was it possible to be objective in a matter of this importance?

  Hendricks spent the rest of the night trying to sort out and discard his personal biases, as opposed to his considered judgments. Sternly he reminded himself that civilization has nothing to do with appearance. A civilized race, he told himself, could be eighteen feet tall, speak with a lisp and drool incessantly. While a clever, handsome, cleanly race would be complete and utter savages.

  By morning, he was ready to give up. After sorting his prejudices, he had nothing left.

  “WE HAVE time for one more test, gentlemen,” Jenkins said, when they all met in mid-morning. “Then we will have to decide, once and irrevocably. Mr. Tomlinson and Mr. Carnier have devised this, and I hope it will prove something.”

  They followed Jenkins into a room adjoining Almooroa’s. It had been panelled with one-way glass, so they could see without being seen.

  A volunteer walked “into Almooroa’s room. He looked at the alien scornfully, then said, “O.K., boy. Are you all set?”

  “Set for what?” Almooroa asked, getting to his feet.

  “Set to say your prayers you damned savage. We have conclusive proof that you are a representative of the Sleeret Pack.”

  Almooroa’s reaction was little short of instantaneous. He bellowed with rage, and plucked the man off the ground as though he were a feather. The volunteer shrieked as Almooroa raised him over his head.

  In mid-air, Almooroa checked himself. He put the man carefully on his feet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We soldiers have quick tempers, you know. That was quite foolish of me.”

  The volunteer backed away, his face ashen.

  “I won’t harm you,” Almooroa said.

  “After all, I am a civilized being, even if I do have a quick temper. If your people choose to make a mistake like this, there’s nothing I can do about it.” He sat down again in his reinforced chair.

  “I only hope that your children forgive you for what you are going to do.”

  “You see?” Carnier said, nudging Hendricks. “Primitive, poorly concealed emotions. He gave himself away.”

  “If he were civilized,” Hendricks said, “he might have the same reaction to our stupidity.”

  ’Don’t confuse things,” Carnier said, with desperate certainty. “His reaction was that of a savage.”

  “Now we’ll try the test on Irik,” Jenkins said.

  Although shaken, the same volunteer agreed to go in, in hopes of providing some sort of control factor.

  “O.K., boy,” he said to the scaly Irik. “Are you all set?”

  “What do you mean, set?” Irik asked.

  “Set to say your prayers, you damned savage,” the man said, edging away from the barbed tail. “We have conclusive proof that you’re a representative of the Harrag Horde.”

  Irik just stood for a moment, his antennae twitching. Then he turned and walked to the window, his tail coiled over his wrist.

  “It’s a pity,” he said. “The barbarians will love this planet. Just remember—I tried to warn you.”

  “AH!” TOMLINSON cried, his thin face triumphant. “Now we’re getting somewhere! Did you see it? The cunning with which he concealed his shock!”

  “You think he’s the barbarian?” Jenkins asked.

  “Of course! His unconcern was obviously an act. How could anyone be that calm with the fate of his race hanging in the balance. It was the act of a clever, ruthless, amoral barbarian.”

  “I don’t see it that way at all, “Carnier said. “I thought he showed civilized control.”

  “Not at all,” Tomlinson pointed out patiently. “Almooroa’s honesty is made manifest by the fact that he couldn’t conceal his emotion in a vital moment, like that.”

  “He’s obviously a blunt, honest soldier.”

  “Gentlemen,” Jenkins said, “we have only about an hour left. I suggest that we adjourn to the conference room, and come to a decision.”

  “Now then,” Carnier said, once everyone was seated, “I have decided in favor of Irik, and I’d like to sum up the reasons why. First of all, I believe his control in the last test was a definite sign of culture. Savages don’t hide their emotions that way.”

  “Didn’t you ever hear of primitive stoicism?” Tomlinson muttered.

  “Next,” Carnier said, ignoring the interruption, “biology tells us that Irik has a more highly developed brain. This implies higher intelligence, which is a concomitant of civilization. Finally, his distaste for our arts was certainly a more sophisticated appraisal than Almooroa’s guileful acceptance of everything.”

  “You’re completely wrong,” Tomlinson said, putting down his cigarette and getting to his feet. “I’ve already mentioned the honesty apparent in Almooroa’s reaction to the last test. Think also of his control. He appraised the situation, and put the man down. Irik, you see, reacted exactly as he thought we wanted him to.”

  Hendricks listened, but didn’t find anything to say. It seemed to him that none of the arguments were conclusive. Once again, it was a question of personal interpretation.

  An officer in the uniform of the UN appeared in the door. “We must have the answer now, sir,” he said to Jenkins.

  “All right,” Jenkins said. “Please wait outside.” The officer closed the door behind him. “Now, gentlemen, the decision must be made.”

  All talking stopped, as suddenly as if it had been cut off by a knife.

  “All right, those who feel that Irik is the barbarian. Raise your hands.”

  Several hands went up. Hendricks, after a moment’s consideration, kept his down.

  Jenkins counted the votes, and said, “Now those who feel that Almooroa is the barbarian.”

  Again he counted.

  “You must all vote,” Jenkins said. “Now, again. And please make up your minds one way or the other.”

  Now Hendricks was the only abstention, aside from Jenkins himself. The vote was evenly divided, half for Almooroa, half for Irik.

  “Who has not voted?” Jenkins asked.

  “I didn’t,” Hendricks said.

  “There is a deadlock. Please vote now.”

  “I can’t,” Hendricks said.

  “You must. Whom do you favor?”

  “I don’t favor either of them,” Hendricks said stubbornly. “There isn’t enough positive evidence.”

  “You must vote.”

  “Do you want me to flip a coin?” Hendricks asked desperately.

  “If you must,” Jenkins told him. “We must do something!”

  Sweat was pouring out of Hendricks’ face, down his sides and back. A decision. He had to make a decision. All he had to do was name one, and the pressure was off him.

  “I vote—against both of them,” Hendricks said in a hoarse gasp. “Do any damn thing you like. That’s all I have to say.”

  Jenkins stared hard at him, and for a moment Hendricks thought the rest of the scientists were going to mob him. He knew that he wasn’t playing fair. They had staked their lives on a guess. Why hadn’t he?

  He realized that he was a coward in their eyes for not taking the last blind plunge.

  “I understand how you feel,” Jenkins said. “And I think you have given me the solution.”

  The officer scraped his feet like an impatient stallion.

  “Mr. Hendricks,” Jenkins said, “you will take Irik in your custody and get him on board one of the ships. Stay with him. Have him give the flight commander the coordinates of his forces.”

  IT WAS Hendricks’ first flight into space, but he was so tired, angry and afraid that the thrill didn’t touch him. He delivered Irik to the ship’s officers, and watched the entry port screw shut.

  “Prepare for takeoff!” a loudspeaker blared, and a siren began to wail. Hendricks was shown a cot, and the ship’s doctor filled him up with anti-acceleration serum.

  Suddenly he knew—even without evidence—that Irik was the wrong choke. He tried to cl
imb out of the cot, but the giant hand of acceleration caught him, and he blacked out.

  Hendricks came to, feeling as though a herd of elephants had stampeded across his stomach, leaving their muddy footprints in his mouth. He grabbed the side of the cot and pulled himself upright.

  “Mr. Hendricks?” an officer said, helping him to his feet. “Professor Jenkins is on the radio. He wants to talk to you.”

  Hendricks staggered to the control room, hoping he still had time to tell Jenkins that he was wrong. The officer shoved a microphone in front of him.

  “Hello, Hendricks?” Jenkins voice boomed out, surprisingly cheerful. “How do you feel?”

  “Great. Listen, Irik is the wrong one. He’s a barbarian. I don’t have any proof, but I’m positive—”

  “I know,” Jenkins said. “Now listen. At my suggestion the fleet is moving to a point between the coordinates given by each. That should put us in broadcasting range. I want you to bring Irik into the control room. Tell him to broadcast his people the following message:—If there is any attempt to move into our solar system, the full force of this fleet will be thrown against the transgressor.”

  “Then Irik is from the Horde!”

  “That’s right.”

  “But are we cooperating with Almooroa’s people?”

  “No,” Jenkins said. “I have Almooroa on my ship. He’s going to send the same message to his people.”

  Hendricks just stared at the microphone.

  “I want to thank you,” Jenkins said. “If you had voted one way or the other, we would probably have chosen between them. It would have been easier for you to vote. But the fact that you couldn’t made me reconsider the evidence.

  “Consider. Neither of them knew anything about a galactic civilization. A man who lived in such a civilization, even on its frontiers, would know some details about its traditions, laws, philosophy. Especially a man picked as a representative of that civilization.

  “Neither of them showed any critical faculty on any terms. Both showed numerous tendencies which could be construed as barbaric. To accept one as civilized, we would have to accept the other. There just wasn’t that much difference between them.”

  “I think I see the conclusion,” Hendricks said. “Both are barbarians, and representatives of different barbarian hordes. Of course! But wait a moment. We’ll still be attacked—”

  “I don’t think so,” Jenkins said. “Since both came to us for aid, I think we can assume that they are fairly evenly balanced in strength. They are fighting a life and death struggle, and drawing in as many allies as they can. Why should they fight us? Neither wants more enemies.”

  Hendricks could feel the whole thing take shape in his mind. But there was still something that Jenkins hadn’t thought of.

  “Understand?” Jenkins went on. “If one attacks us, we throw everything we have against him, which might provide the factor necessary for victory for the other. All an aggressor will get out of us is the possibility of a major defeat.”

  “All right,” Hendricks said. “For now. But the battle front will change. One will be pushed back, and then the other will be able to take over our system.”

  “We will have to prepare for that day,” Jenkins said. “We will copy the designs of these ships and build more. We will probably improve on them, because I think we are much cleverer than they.”

  “Beware of pride,” Hendricks murmured.

  “I still think so. And I think we will send out our own representatives. There must be more inhabited planets in this region of space. Planets where the inhabitants will want to unite with us against both of these hordes.”

  Hendricks raised his head, and for the first time looked out on space. Stars, stars, an endless confusion of them as far as he could see.

  It made him feel good.

  “Do you know,” he said to Jenkins, “I think it entirely possible that we are going to become that civilization they were talking about.”

  SUBSISTENCE LEVEL

  It is time to move on when a pioneer sees someone’s smoke—or radar—over the horizon!

  HER mother had warned her. “Are you out of your mind, Amelia? Why in heaven’s name must you marry a pioneer? How do you expect to be happy in a wilderness?”

  “The Cap isn’t a wilderness, Mother,” Amelia had said.

  “It isn’t civilized. It’s a crude, primitive place. And how long will this pioneer be satisfied there? I know the type. He’ll always want some new place to conquer.”

  “Then I’ll conquer it with him,” Amelia had said, certain of her own pioneering spirit.

  Her mother wasn’t so sure. “Frontier life is hard, dear. Harder than you imagine. Are you really prepared to give up your friends, all the comforts you’ve known?”

  “Yes!”

  Her mother wanted to say more. But since her husband’s death, she had become less certain of her own convictions, less determined to impose them on others.

  “It’s your life,” she said at last.

  “Don’t worry, Mother, I know what I’m doing,” Amelia said.

  She knew that Dirk Bogren couldn’t stand crowding. He was a big man and he needed elbow room, and silence, and free air to breathe. He had told her about his father, who had settled in the newly reclaimed Gobi Desert. It broke the old man’s heart when the place got so crowded that land had to be fenced in according to county regulations and he died with his face turned toward the stars.

  That was Dirk, too. She married him, and moved to the desolate Southern Polar Cap.

  But settlers came after them, and soon the Cap was called Cap City, and then it had stores and factories, and neat little suburbs stretching across the atom-heated land.

  It happened sooner than she ever expected.

  ONE evening they were sitting on the veranda, and Dirk was looking over his land. He stared for a long time at the tip of a radar tower on a distant rise of the land.

  “Getting crowded around here,” he said finally.

  “Yes, it is—a little,” Amelia agreed.

  “They’ll be building a golf course next. Figure it’s time to move on?”

  “All right,” Amelia said, after the slightest hesitation. And that was all that had to be said.

  They sold their farm. They bought a second-hand spaceship and filled it with the barest necessities of life. The evening before blastoff, Dirk’s friends threw a farewell party for him.

  They were the old inhabitants and they could remember when the Cap was still partly ice and snow. They kidded Dirk, half enviously.

  “Going to the asteroids, eh?”

  “That’s the place,” Dirk said. “But you’re soft!” an old man cackled. “Easy living’s got you, Dirk.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Think you can still work an honest five-hour day?”

  Dirk grinned and drank his beer, and listened to the women give Amelia advice.

  “Take plenty of warm things. I remember on Mars—”

  “First-aid equipment—”

  “The trouble with low gravity—”

  “Dirk!” a man shouted. “You taking a pretty little thing like her to an asteroid?”

  “Sure,” Dirk said.

  “She won’t like it,” another man warned. “No parties, no new clothes, no doodads.”

  “Folks go crazy from overwork out there.”

  “Don’t you believe them,” an older woman put in hastily. “You’ll love it once you get used to it.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Amelia said politely and hoped it was true.

  Just before blastoff, she called her mother and told her the news.

  Her mother wasn’t surprised.

  “Well, dear,” she said, “it won’t be easy. But you knew that before you married him. The asteroids—that’s where your father wanted to go.”

  Amelia remembered her father as a gentle, soft-spoken man. Every night, when he returned from the bank, he would read through the ads for used spaceships and
he would compile detailed lists of the equipment an explorer would need. Mother was dead set against any change and would not be moved. There were few open arguments, but a bitterness existed beneath the surface—until all bitterness was resolved when a helicopter smashed into her father’s car one day, when he was returning from the bank.

  “Try to be a good wife to him,” her mother urged.

  “Of course I will,” Amelia declared a little angrily.

  THE new frontiers were in space, for Earth was tame and settled now. Dirk had studied the available charts of the Asteroid Belt, but they didn’t tell him much. No one had ever penetrated very far and the vast extent was simply marked UNKNOWN TERRITORY.

  It was a long journey and a dangerous one, but free land was there, land for the taking, and all the room a man could ask. Dirk fought through the shifting patterns of rock with steady patience. The spaceship was always pointed implacably outward, though no route was marked.

  “We’re not turning back,” he told Amelia, “so there’s no sense charting a way.”

  She nodded agreement, but her breath came short when she looked at the bleak, dead spots of light ahead. She couldn’t help feeling apprehensive about their new life, the grim, lonely existence of the frontier. She shivered and put her hand over Dirk’s.

  He smiled, never taking his eyes off the dials.

  They found a slab of rock several miles long by a mile wide. They landed on the dark, airless little world, set up their pressure dome and turned on the gravity. As soon as it approached normal, Dirk set to work uncrating the Control Robot. It was a long, tiring job, but finally he inserted the tape and activated the controls.

  The robot went to work. Dirk turned on all available searchlights. Using the small crane, he lifted their Frontier Shelter out of the ship’s hold, placed it near the center of the dome, and activated it. The Shelter opened like a gigantic flower, blossoming into a neat five-room dwelling, complete with basic furniture, kitchen, plumbing, and disposal units.

  It was a start. But everything couldn’t be unpacked at once. The temperature control was buried somewhere in the hold of the ship, and Dirk had to warm their house with an auxiliary heater hooked to the generator.