Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

Wait, he told himself in sudden excitement. He could kill the inspector!

  MOTIVE? Why, it would be an even more heinous crime than murdering the mayor—except that the mayor was a general now, of course, and that would only be mutiny. But even if the mayor were still mayor, the inspector would be a far more important victim. Tom would be killing for glory, for fame, for notoriety. And the murder would show Earth how earthly the colony really was. They would say, “Crime is so bad on New Delaware that it’s hardly safe to land there. A criminal actually killed our inspector on the very first day! Worst criminal we’ve come across in all space.”

  It would be the most spectacular crime he could commit, Tom realized, just the sort of thing a master criminal would do.

  Feeling proud of himself for the first time in a long while, Tom hurried out of the alley and over to the mayor’s house. He could hear conversation going on inside.

  “. . . sufficiently passive population.” Mr. Grent was saying, “Sheeplike, in fact.”

  “Makes it rather boring,” the inspector answered. “For the soldiers especially.”

  “Well, what do you expect from backward agrarians? At least we’re getting some recruits out of it.” Mr. Grent yawned audibly. “On your feet, guards. We’re going back to the ship.”

  Guards! Tom had forgotten about them. He looked doubtfully at his knife. Even if he sprang at the inspector, the guards would probably stop him before the murder could be committed. They must have been trained for just that sort of thing.

  But if he had one of their own weapons . . .

  He heard the shuffling of feet inside. Tom hurried back into the village. Near the market, he saw a soldier sitting on a doorstep, singing drunkenly to himself. Two empty bottles lay at his feet and his weapon was slung sloppily over his shoulder.

  Tom crept up, drew his blackjack and took aim.

  The soldier must have glimpsed his shadow. He leaped to his feet, ducking the stroke of the blackjack. In the same motion, he jabbed with his slung rifle, catching Tom in the ribs, tore the rifle from his shoulder and aimed. Tom closed his eyes and lashed out with both feet.

  He caught the soldier on the knee, knocking him over. Before he could get up, Tom swung the blackjack.

  Tom felt the soldier’s pulse—no sense killing the wrong man—and found it satisfactory. He took the weapon, checked to make sure he knew which button to push, and hastened after the Inspector.

  HALFWAY to the ship, he caught up with them. The inspector and Grent were walking ahead, the soldiers straggling behind.

  Tom moved into the underbrush. He trotted silently along until he was opposite Grent and the inspector. He took aim and his finger tightened on the trigger.

  . . .

  He didn’t want to kill Grent, though. He was supposed to commit only one murder.

  He ran on, past the inspector’s party, and came out on the road in front of them. His weapon was poised as the party reached him.

  “What’s this?” the inspector demanded.

  “Stand still,” Tom said. “The rest of you drop your weapons and move out of the way.”

  The soldiers moved like men in shock. One by one they dropped their weapons and retreated to the underbrush. Grent held his ground.

  “What are you doing, boy?” he asked.

  “I’m the town criminal,” Tom stated proudly. “I’m going to kill the inspector. Please move out of the way.”

  Grent stared at him. “Criminal? So that’s what the mayor was prattling about.”

  “I know we haven’t had any murder in two hundred years,” Tom explained, “but I’m changing that right now. Move out of the way!”

  Grent leaped out of the line of fire. The inspector stood alone, swaying slightly.

  Tom took aim, trying to think about the spectacular nature of his crime and its social value. But he saw the inspector on the ground, eyes glaring open, limbs stiff, mouth twisted, no air going in or out the nostrils, no beat to the heart.

  He tried to force his finger to close on the trigger. His mind could talk all it wished about the desirability of crime; his hand knew better.

  “I can’t!” Tom shouted.

  He threw down the gun and sprinted into the underbrush.

  THE inspector wanted to send a search party out for Tom and hang him on the spot. Mr. Grent didn’t agree. New Delaware was all forest. Ten thousand men couldn’t have caught a fugitive in the forest, if he didn’t want to be caught. The mayor and several villagers came out, to find out about the commotion. The soldiers formed a hollow square around the inspector and Mr. Grent. They stood with weapons ready, their faces set and serious.

  And the mayor explained everything. The village’s uncivilized lack of crime. The job that Tom had been given. How ashamed they were that he had been unable to handle it.

  “Why did you give the assignment to that particular man?” Mr. Grent asked.

  “Well,” the mayor said, “I figured if anyone could kill, Tom could. He’s a fisher, you know. Pretty gory work.”

  “Then the rest of you would be equally unable to kill?”

  “We wouldn’t even get as far as Tom did,” the mayor admitted sadly. Mr. Grent and the inspector looked at each other, then at the soldiers. The soldiers were staring at the villagers with wonder and respect. They started to whisper among themselves.

  “Attention!” the inspector bellowed. He turned to Grent and said in a low voice, “We’d better get away from here. Men in our armies who can’t kill . . .”

  “The morale,” Mr. Grent said. He shuddered. “The possibility of infection. One man in a key position endangering a ship—perhaps a fleet—because he can’t fire a weapon. It isn’t worth the risk.”

  They ordered the soldiers back to the ship. The soldiers seemed to march more slowly than usual, and they looked back at the village. They whispered together, even though the inspector was bellowing orders. The small ship took off in a flurry of jets. Soon it was swallowed in the large ship. And then the large ship was gone.

  The edge of the enormous watery red sun was just above the horizon.

  “YOU can come out now,” the mayor called. Tom emerged from the underbrush, where he had been hiding, watching everything.

  “I bungled it,” he said miserably.

  “Don’t feel bad about it,” Billy Painter told him. “It was an impossible job.”

  “I’m afraid it was,” the mayor said, as they walked back to the village. “I thought that just possibly you could swing it. But you can’t be blamed. There’s not another man in the village who could have done the job even as well.”

  “What’ll we do with these buildings?” Billy Painter asked, motioning at the jail, the post office, the church, and the little red schoolhouse. The mayor thought deeply for a moment. “I know,” he said. “We’ll build a playground for the kids. Swings and slides and sandboxes and things.”

  “Another playground?” Tom asked.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  There was no reason, of course, why not.

  “I won’t be needing this any more, I guess,” Tom said, handing the skulking permit to the mayor.

  “No, I guess not,” said the mayor. They watched him sorrowfully as he tore it up. “Well, we did our best. It just wasn’t good enough.”

  “I had the chance,” Tom muttered, “and I let you all down.” Billy Painter put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Tom. It’s not the fault of any of us. It’s just what comes of not being civilized for two hundred years. Look how long it took Earth to get civilized. Thousands of years. And we were trying to do it in two weeks.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to go back to being uncivilized,” the mayor said with a hollow attempt at cheerfulness.

  Tom yawned, waved, went home to catch up on lost sleep. Before entering, he glanced at the sky.

  Thick, swollen clouds had gathered overhead and every one of them had a black lining. The fall rains were almost here. Soon he could start fishing again. Now wh
y couldn’t he have thought of the inspector as a fish? He was too tired to examine that as a motive. In any case, it was too late. Earth was gone from them and civilization had fled for no one knew how many centuries more. He slept very badly.

  UNCLE TOM’S PLANET

  All up and down the whole galactic plantation, there were no old folks at home—until the Aingoes came along!

  ONE must remember that, in its sixty years of political existence, the Galactic Council has succeeded almost completely in destroying the institution of slavery. This accomplishment becomes even more remarkable when one considers that the anti-slavery laws had to be made acceptable to the differing mores of eight hundred and two independent governments of the Confederation.

  Because of this practical necessity, the Slavery Act was based not on birth equality, but on the more expedient doctrine of relative inferiority. Thus, the inferiority of an enslaved race, relative to its enslaver, must be proven. The Council has always found grounds, even in the most backward of races, for a grant of independence.

  Indeed, there is only a single instance where all the Council’s work has been in vain. This case, naturally, is an exceptional one. The Council unofficially approves of this particular enslavement!

  Morally, this would seem indefensible; but a Galactic Council must take the long view. And when one considers the unusual benefits accruing from this particular enslavement . . .

  Aspects of Confederation,

  de Mantset

  THE men aboard Council Cutter 8432 thought their radar was having hallucinations. Forty-two pips! It was impossible. Even Bill Sims, the Council agent, didn’t believe it when he ordered the pips intercepted.

  But there was no doubt, once the speedy little cutter came into range. There were forty-two Delgen ships, spaced in regular order, running at close to top speed.

  Sims stared at them thoughtfully. He was young and tall and his coloring marked him unmistakably as a native Earthman. This patrolling assignment was his first. He didn’t want to make any mistakes.

  Especially, he didn’t want to make any mistakes with Delgens.

  He told the radioman to relay full information to Council Headquarters, just in case. A fleet in space could be up to no good. Then he contacted the flagship of the fleet.

  “This is Council Cutter 8432,” he said. “I request permission to board you for a routine inspection.”

  “Certainly you can board us,” the answer came promptly. “Inspect as much as you like, as long as we can maintain course.”

  That seemed reasonable—at the time—for a fleet burned a lot of fuel.

  “Request granted,” Sims said. “Please show a light at your fentry port.” He hesitated, then added, “The Galactic Council has been informed of this fleet movement.”

  “We were about to notify them ourselves. And this isn’t a fleet. It’s a rescue mission.”

  Sims exchanged a look with his radioman. Delgens weren’t known as rescuers. Just the opposite, in fact.

  During the first great expansion wave from Earth, a small, tough core of colonists had pushed forward until they found an ideal planet. The planet was Delge, in the extreme northeast quadrant of the Galaxy. And Delge was worth waiting for.

  The Earthmen—now Delgens—thrived on the planet’s perfect climate, its disease-free atmosphere, and grew rich on its fruitful soil. Adaptation and change came with startling speed, once Earth was left behind. But Delge was far off the mainstream and isolation can breed bad habits. Although the Delgens were physically splendid, they left something to be desired in the matter of ethics.

  Delge, in common with a number of other places, found that machinery was singularly unyielding in its demands. Curse a machine and it ignores you. Refuse it shelter and it rusts. Feed it too little lubrication and it burns out. Run it too fast and it founders. Starve it for fuel and it quits.

  But slaves! Slaves can be worked under conditions that no machine would tolerate. Slaves eat what there is, sleep where they can. When one dies, the taskmaster doesn’t suffer the deep monetary sadness he feels upon the demise of an expensive machine—for slaves beget more slaves, which is more than can be said of machinery.

  Twice in ten years, Delge had violated the Slavery Act. Sims was thinking of this as he entered the Delgen flagship.

  A PAIR of big guards led him to the Captain’s quarters. The ship, with its massive construction and oversize appointments, made him feel puny and out of place. Captain Olche intensified this feeling. Olche was a normal enough Delgen, but his ruddy seven-foot bulk and his air of genial superiority made Sims feel insignificant and, accordingly, resentful. The Captain didn’t appear to notice.

  “I suppose you’re interested in the cargo holds?” he asked.

  “If you please.”

  “Of course.” The Captain escorted Sims down a long corridor and opened a door.

  Sims stepped in—and caught his breath.

  The hold was packed with small and despondent-looking grayish-green creatures.

  “Did you ever see a sorrier bunch?” the Captain asked, as though discussing an inferior herd of cattle. “They call themselves Aingoes.”

  At first, Sims thought they were stunted descendants of Earth. He quickly saw that he was mistaken. The Aingoes were non-humans, about four feet tall, skinny, with round alien heads and tiny, narrow bodies. They sat on the floor of the hold in complete and abnormal silence, as though all spirit had been drained out of them.

  “Every ship is filled with the things,” Captain Olche said. “I think we managed to remove every one of them from their scrubby little planet.”

  “For what purpose?” Sims asked.

  The Captain raised both eyebrows. “Why, slavery, of course,” he stated, as though it were the most natural thing in the Universe.

  Sims looked at the Captain with amazement. Sims was new in the Council service. Like most agents, he had had personal experience with slavers. As a boy, he had seen Anderson’s Apes working on Earth farms. The polite fiction was maintained that these mute, soft-eyed inhabitants of Anderson’s Planet were merely clever beasts. But the Council scientists proved their rationality and eventually they were emancipated. Sims had known it all along, had played with the young ones—until they were punished for playing with him—and the ruling came too late to mitigate his hatred of their owners.

  Sims had always thought that slavers were debased and furtive people, well aware of the wrong they were doing, but too greedy to stop. This Delgen, though, had a perfectly genuine conviction that slavery was the natural, inevitable condition for a whole species!

  SIMS found this attitude disconcerting. He took a form out of his pocket and began to fill in the pertinent data.

  The Captain watched for a while, then said, “We aren’t breaking any law, so what’s the point of acting as if we are?”

  “You’re violating the Slavery Act,” Sims said with flat-voiced violence, forcing his hand, which wanted to make a fist, to write steadily and clearly.

  The Captain shook his head.

  “Slavery is regulated by the relative-inferiority ruling. Examine these creatures more closely. You’ll see right off that they’re about as inferior as anything can get and stay alive. Sure, we know we’ll have to get a court decision, but it’s only a formality in this case.”

  Sims wanted to retort, but he made himself continue writing his report. Legally, slavery was possible; actually, nobody had ever been able to make inferiority stick. Tough, dedicated men, the Council agents stopped most attempts before they got started. Those that came to court were up against the equally dedicated thoroughness of Council scientists and the shrewd resourcefulness of Council lawyers.

  Between them, the scientists and lawyers always won in court. They could prove every time that a tentacle was equal to a hand, disorganized functionality was every bit as good as a centralized nervous system, ten legs were more stable than two on rocky planets, rudimentary wings helped balance desert-runners, and a nose didn’t
have to be used for smelling—or even exist in the case of anerobic life-forms.

  They could prove anything they had to prove. Not by trickery, but by proving that races intended for slavery were as well adapted to their environment as the would-be slavers were to theirs. If the life-forms were repulsive in human terms, as they sometimes were, the lawyers could be counted on to build up sympathy for them.

  Knowing that no case had ever been lost, Sims relaxed and even let himself smile a little as he finished his report. The Delgens were-making a bold move, but it didn’t stand a chance. All precedent was against it, for there was no slavery in the entire Confederacy.

  And meanwhile, the Delgen fleet was moving at close to top speed toward the planet Moira II.

  “YOU imbecile!” Sims’ Chief roared, three days later, when Sims reported in. “You moron! You complete and abysmal idiot! Didn’t you learn anything in training school?”

  Sims stood stiffly at attention. “I don’t understand, sir. What have I done wrong?”

  The Chief was an Earthman, like Sims, although from a different political subdivision of that venerable planet. Large, pale, fleshy, the Chief was famous for his relentless hatred of slavers.

  “I’ll tell you what you did wrong,” the Chief said. “You didn’t think. That can be fatal in the Service. You knew the Delgens were going to make a court fight out of this?”

  “Yes, sir, and I reported—”

  “You also knew, or should have known, how important it is for us to try our cases in friendly courts.” The Chief opened a chart of the Northeast sector. “You intersected them here. You should have ordered them to Danton IV, which was not only the nearest Confederacy planet, but it’s also strongly anti-slavery. Instead, you let them go into custody at Moira II.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Sims asked.

  “Two years ago, we forcibly separated Moira II from their own little chattels, that’s what’s wrong.”

  “Oh,” Sims said. “Oh, Lord!”

  The Chief began to pace up and down the length of his small, cluttered office. “Not your fault. Someone at Headquarters should have told you. Well, it’s not irreparable. All we need is an airtight case.”