Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  They put down the telephone and stared at each other. The Meldgen Free Producer was cheerfully blasting out its stream of worthless powder. Two chairs and a radiator had disappeared into it, and the gray Tangreese was approaching desk-top level.

  “Nice little wage earner,” Gregor said.

  “We’ll think of something.”

  “We?”

  Arnold returned to his books, and spent the rest of the night searching for another use for Tangreese. Gregor had to shovel the gray powder into the hall, to keep their office from becoming completely submerged.

  The morning came, and the Sun gleamed gaily on their windows through a film of gray dust. Arnold stood up and yawned.

  “No luck?” Gregor asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Gregor waded out for coffee. When he returned, the building superintendent and two large, red-faced policemen were shouting at Arnold.

  “You gotta get every bit of that sand outa my hall!” the super screamed.

  “Yeah, and there’s an ordinance against operating a factory in a business district,” one of the red-faced policemen said.

  “This isn’t a factory,” Gregor explained. “This is a Meldgen Free—”

  “I say it’s a factory,” the policeman said. “And I say you gotta cease operation at once.”

  “That’s our problem,” Arnold said. “We can’t seem to turn it off.”

  “Can’t turn it off?” The policeman glared at them suspiciously. “You trying to kid me? I say you gotta turn it off.”

  “Officer, I swear to you—”

  “Listen, wise guy, I’ll be back in an hour. You get that thing turned off and this mess out of here, or I’m giving you a summons.” The three men marched out.

  Gregor and Arnold looked at each other, then at the Free Producer. The Tangreese was at desk-top level now, and still coming steadily.

  “Damn it all,” Arnold said, with a touch of hysteria, “there must be a way of working it out. There must be a market! It’s free, I tell you. Every bit of this powder is free, free, free!”

  “Steady,” Gregor said, wearily scratching sand out of his hair.

  “Don’t you understand? When you get something free, in unlimited quantities, there has to be an application for it.”

  THE door opened and a tall, thin man in a dark business suit walked in, holding a complex little gadget in his hand. “So here it is,” the man said. Gregor was struck by a sudden wild thought. “Is that a Laxian Key?” he asked.

  “A what key? No, I don’t suppose it is,” the man said. “It’s a drainometer.”

  “Oh,” Gregor said.

  “And it seems to have brought me to the source of the trouble,” the man said. “By the way, I’m Mr. Carstairs.” He cleared sand from Gregor’s desk, took a last reading on his drainometer, and started to fill out a printed form.

  “What’s all this about?” Arnold asked.

  “I’m from the Metropolitan Power Company,” Carstairs said. “Starting around noon yesterday, we observed a sudden enormous drain on our facilities. So much power was being siphoned off that we felt it wise to search out just where it was coming from.”

  “And it’s coming from here?” Gregor asked.

  “From that machine of yours,” Carstairs said. He completed his form, folded it and put it in his pocket. “Thanks for your cooperation. You will be billed for this, of course.” With some difficulty he opened the door, then turned and took another look at the Free Producer.

  “It must be making something extremely valuable,” he said, “to justify the expenditure of so much power. What is it? Platinum dust?”

  He smiled, nodded pleasantly, and left.

  Gregor turned to Arnold. “Free power, eh?”

  “Well,” Arnold said, “I guess it just grabs it from the nearest power source.”

  “So I see. Draws power out of the air, out of space, out of the Sun. And out of the power company’s lines, if they’re handy.”

  “So it seems. But the basic principle—”

  “To hell with the basic principle!” Gregor shouted. “We can’t turn this damned thing off without a Laxian Key, no one’s got a Laxian Key, we’re submerged in worthless dust which we can’t even afford to truck out, and we’re probably burning up power like a sun gone nova!”

  “There must be a solution,” Arnold said sullenly.

  Gregor thought sadly of their diminishing bank account. They had made a small profit on their last two jobs, but it was being converted rapidly into gray sand. Still, there was nothing he could do about it. Arnold was his partner. They had gone this far, they might as well go the rest of the way.

  Arnold sat down where the desk had been and covered his eyes. There was a loud knock on the door, and angry voices outside.

  “Lock the door,” Arnold said.

  Gregor locked it. Arnold thought for a few moments longer, then stood up.

  “All is not lost,” he said. “Our fortunes will still be made from this machine.”

  “Let’s just destroy it,” Gregor said. “Drop it in an ocean or something.”

  “No! I’ve got it now! Come on, let’s get our spaceship warmed up.”

  THE next few days were hectic ones for AAA Ace. They had to hire men, at exorbitant rates, to clear the building of Tangreese. Then came the problem of getting the machine, still spouting gray dust, into their spaceship. But at last everything was done. The Free Producer sat in the hold, rapidly filling it with Tangreese, and their ship was out of the System and moving fast on overdrive.

  “It’s only logical,” Arnold explained later. “Naturally there’s no market for Tangreese on Earth. Therefore there’s no use trying to sell it on Earth. But on the planet Meldge—”

  “I don’t like it,” Gregor said. “It can’t fail. It costs too much to transport Tangreese to Meldge. But we’re moving our entire factory there. We can pour out a constant stream of the stuff.”

  “Suppose the market is low?” Gregor asked.

  “How low can it get? This stuff is like bread to the Meldgens. It’s their basic diet. How can we miss?”

  After two weeks in space, Meldge was sighted on their starboard bow. It came none too soon. Tangreese had completely filled the hold. They had sealed it off, but the increasing pressure threatened to burst the sides of the ship. They had to dump tons of it every day, but dumping took time, and there was a loss of heat and air in the process.

  So they spiraled into Meldge with every inch of their ship crammed with Tangreese, low on oxygen, and extremely cold.

  AS soon as they had landed, a large orange-skinned customs official came on board.

  “Welcome,” he said. “Seldom do visitors come to our unimportant little planet. Do you expect to stay long?”

  “Probably,” Arnold said. “We’re going to set up a business.”

  “Excellent!” the official said, smiling happily. “Our planet needs new blood, new enterprises. Might I enquire what business?”

  “We’re going to sell Tangreese, the basic food of—”

  The official’s face darkened. “You’re going to sell what?”

  “Tangreese. We have a Free Producer.”

  The official pressed a button on a wrist dial. “I am sorry, you must leave at once.”

  “But we’ve got passports, clearance papers—”

  “And we have laws. You must blast off immediately, and take your Free Producer with you.”

  “Now look here,” Gregor said. “There’s supposed to be free enterprise on this planet.”

  “Not in the production of Tangreese, there isn’t.”

  Outside, a dozen army tanks rumbled onto the landing field and ringed themselves around the ship. The official backed out the port and started down the ladder.

  “Wait!” Gregor cried in desperation. “I suppose you’re afraid of unfair competition. Well, take the Free Producer as our gift.”

  “No!” Arnold shouted.

  “Yes! Just dig it out
and take it. Feed your poor with it. Just raise a statue to us sometime.”

  A second row of army tanks appeared. Overhead, antiquated jet planes dipped low over the field.

  “Get off this planet!” the official shouted. “Do you really think you can sell Tangreese on Meldge? Look around!”

  They looked. The landing field was gray and powdery, and the buildings were the same unpainted gray. Beyond them stretched dull gray fields to a range of low gray mountains.

  On all sides, as far as they could see, everything was Tangreese-gray.

  “Do you mean,” Gregor asked, “that the whole planet—”

  “Figure it out for yourself,” the official said, backing down the ladder. “The Old Science originated here, and there are always fools who have to tamper with its artifacts. Now get going, and quickly.”

  Halfway down the ladder he hesitated. “However,” he said, “if you ever find a Laxian Key, come back. We’ll erect ten statues to you!”

  MINORITY GROUP

  The girl and the man wanted to belong . . . to be a part of the big majority. Why was hating hard?

  Take a flying seminar in comparative ethnology, borrow a futurescope and stare through it long and steadily, and imagine yourself on an island torn by the stress and strife of fifty centuries of topsy-turvy living and something of the magic that is in Robert Skeckley’s hilariously satiric yarns will flow into you, and you’ll understand why they are now appearing everywhere—in the slicks and on TV, radio and the silver screen.

  STEEF SAID, “Remember, you have to watch what you say very carefully.”

  Veri nodded, watching the water glide past the bow of their rowboat. They were approaching the shore of Yawk now, and Steef paddled more rapidly, his young muscles rising and stretching with every stroke.

  “Do you remember all the hate-words?” Steef asked. Veri nodded again, trailing her hand in the water, watching the ripples. From her expression, Steef knew she was daydreaming. He frowned.

  “Please, Veri. You know this is probably our last chance. If they don’t accept us this time, they never will.”

  “I know, Steef. I’ll try.” But she was looking back now, at the little island in East River where Steef’s father had built his house.

  “You’d better repeat some of the words,” Steef said, knowing they would be needed as soon as they landed. “The hate-words first.”

  Veri shook herself out of her dream and tried to think of the ancient words. She began haltingly, “Hate-words—louse, dog, pig—”

  “Go on,” Steef said.

  “I can’t think of them,” Veri said mournfully, her pale face turned away.

  “Veri! You know how important they are! Have you memorized the insult list?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Remember,” he told her. “Don’t show them you’re nervous. We’re still the Minority, and they’ll call us Commies and Negroes, and Catliks and Jews, and Soshulists and Griks. But we deny everything.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re Good Guys, just like everyone else, and don’t you forget it. What do you say when they ask us what we are?”

  “I say we’re Good Guys,” Veri said. “Pals . . .”

  “Chums, Buddies, Friends,” Steef filled in for her. “You should be able to reel them right off.” He paddled harder, trying not to show his annoyance. He knew that she hadn’t been studying. In his father’s old house on the island, Veri had been looking out the window too often when she should have been learning the ancient words, the all-important words.

  But sometimes the girl acted as if she didn’t even care if they were the Minority. She reminded him of his poor crazy father; completely indifferent if he was called a Catlik or a Soshulist, or any of the other terrible Minority names.

  Sometimes he suspected that she didn’t even want to be what everyone else in the world was—a Good Guy.

  They reached the shore and pulled the rowboat up on the bank.

  “Come on,” he said, taking Veri’s hand and helping her up the refuse-strewn bank. “And please remember—you have to hate to be a Good Guy.”

  He hoped she wouldn’t let him down. She had been acting so funny of late—sometimes gay, more often sullen and dreamy, like now.

  Well, she’d have to snap out of it. Their whole future depended on what the Good Guys thought of them. And he was so tired of being the Minority.

  They walked down the crumbling street. On either side were the great buildings of Yawk, which had once been filled with people, according to legend. But that, Steef knew, was back in the times when there actually were such detestable people as Demcrats and Anarkists, and other strange tribes.

  Before they had gone a block, the Good Guys found them. A mob gathered, packed as tightly together as they could get. They were cursing and shouting at each other, in true Buddy fashion, and Steef felt a pang of regret at not being a part of them.

  “Hey you worms, look at this!” one of the Good Guys shouted. “It’s that Commie guy!”

  “He’s no Commie, you pig! He’s a damned Roylist!”

  It was impossible to see who was talking. The Good Guys always shouted from the middle of a crowd.

  “He’s a Commie and a Roylist, horseface! And a Demcrat!”

  “The girl’s a Zarist!”

  Steef’s face went white while the ancient, terrible names were hurled at them. The Good Guys were soon quarreling among themselves, screaming ancient, meaningless curses at each other.

  “Brother of a rat!”

  “Cousin of swine!”

  But Commie, Roylist, Catlik—the really bad names—were reserved for the hated Minority.

  “I’m a Good Guy,” Steef shouted above the din. “We want to join you, Veri and I.”

  The mob backed away a few feet, keeping well away from Steef. They were uniformly small and brown-haired. All of them had narrow brown eyes and wide mouths filled with decaying teeth. It was impossible to tell one ragged man from another.

  “Lookit how funny he looks!” one of them screamed.

  Steef flushed, bitterly ashamed of his blonde hair and Veri’s black curls. They were too tall, also.

  “I can’t help how I look,” Steef said. “But I don’t want to be the Minority. I’m not a Soshulist or a Zarist or a Demcrat, or anything else. I’m a Good Guy, a Chum, a Buddy.”

  The sweating, close-packed mob roared with laughter.

  “Him! A Good Guy!”

  “I guess I know an Anarkist when I see one!”

  “He’s the son of that organizing guy, isn’t he? The crazy one?”

  “Stop shoving, you miserable worm.”

  “Stop it yourself, you dog, you louse, you rat.”

  “Let me join,” Steef said. “I’m tired of being alone. I want to be just like everyone else, really I do.”

  “Aaaah,” one of the Good Guys said. “You’d probably want to be a Leader. A Genral, a Dictator, a Presdent.” He spat out the hate-names venomously.

  “No I wouldn’t,” Steef said. He was beginning to have hopes. The last time they had just ignored him. Now, at least, they were talking to him. “I want to be a Good Guy, like everyone else.”

  “How about her?”

  “She’s Regular, too,” Steef said. “She damned well is.” He used the ancient word hopefully. “Aren’t you, Veri?”

  “What?” Veri said. She had been staring at the great buildings, lost in her dream again. “Oh yes, yes, I certainly am.”

  “You should have said I damned well am,” Steef whispered. He feared she wasn’t making the right kind of impression.

  More Good Guys were coming, little brown-haired men, pushing and crowding their way into the crowd, snarling and shouting and cursing each other.

  “I don’t think he’s Regular!” someone said.

  “I am!” Steef cried.

  “We’ll have to talk it over,” a man said. “Won’t we, fellas?”

  Everyone agreed that they would have to talk it over.
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  “We’ll see ya tomorrow, yellow-belly,” another man said. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

  The mob wandered off, but Steef and Verdi could hear them, shouting and screaming, for a long time.

  They found a ruined building, and camped on the bottom floor. Veri had brought some food for their supper. A Good Guy wouldn’t have thought of that, Steef told himself disapprovingly. But he ate.

  “Look, Veri,” Steef said, after they had eaten and stretched out on the floor. “You’ll have to speak up more. Use the hate-words. Swear. Show them that you’re regular. Otherwise—”

  “Steef—” Veri began hesitantly.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Don’t you think—wouldn’t it be possible for us to go away somewhere and find other Minorities? There must be a few others left.”

  “Go away?” Steef asked. “But aren’t you sick of being hated?”

  “It wouldn’t bother me if we were someplace else,” Veri said shyly.

  “No,” Steef said flatly. That was the sort of talk Veri’s father had used before he died, and Steef s father also, and the other men who had come to the house. And that was why they were a Minority.

  He remembered his father explaining to him about the wars, and how they had killed off most of the intelligent people, the honest ones, the courageous ones. His father had told the lie with a perfectly straight face.

  And then, according to his father, the inferior stock had bred and bred. Cowards begot knaves, and fools spawned idiots. Everything worthwhile was bred out of the race over a thousand generations of hatred. And after a thousand more, all that was left was the slag of mankind, the homogenous Good Guys.

  The Good Guys, looking alike, thinking alike, swearing alike, running in packs, detesting each other but needing the herd-security. Incapable of leading (and here his father’s face had become really stern), but unwilling to be led. Too cowardly to fight, too stupid to stop arguing.

  The Good Guys. Starving, dying like flies in the midst of honey, because they were too busy to plant, unwilling to cooperate and share.

  But they were united by a common bond of hatred for the Minority, a hatred that superseded even their detestation for each other.