Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  And yet, how responsible were the psychologists who had given him the test? How responsible was Mike Terry for offering a poor man so much money? Society had woven the noose and put it around his neck, and he was hanging himself with it and calling it free will.

  Whose fault?

  “Aha!” someone cried.

  Raeder looked up and saw a portly man standing near him.

  The man wore a loud tweed jacket. He had binoculars around his neck and a cane in his hand.

  “Mister,” Raeder whispered, “please don’t tell!”

  “Hi!” shouted the portly man, pointing at Raeder with his cane. “Here he is!”

  A madman, thought Raeder. The damned fool must think he’s playing Hare and Hounds.

  “Right over here!” the man screamed.

  Cursing, Raeder sprang to his feet and began running. He came out of the ravine and saw a white building in the distance. He turned toward it. Behind him he could still hear the man.

  “That way, over there. Look, you fools, can’t you see him yet?”

  The killers were shooting again. Raeder ran, stumbling over uneven ground, past three children playing in a tree house.

  “Here he is!” the children screamed. “Here he is!”

  Raeder groaned and ran on. He reached the steps of the building and saw that it was a church.

  As he opened the door, a bullet struck him behind the right kneecap.

  He fell, and crawled inside the church.

  The television set in his pocket was saying, “What a finish, folks, what a finish! Raeder’s been hit! He’s been hit, folks, he’s crawling now, he’s in pain, but he hasn’t given up! NOT Jim Raeder!”

  Raeder lay in the aisle near the altar. He could hear a child’s eager voice saying, “He went in there, Mr. Thompson. Hurry, you can still catch him!”

  Wasn’t a church considered a sanctuary? Raeder wondered.

  Then the door was flung open, and Raeder realized that the custom was no longer observed. He gathered himself together and crawled past the altar, out of the back door of the church.

  He was in an old graveyard. He crawled past crosses and stars, past slabs of marble and granite, past stone tombs and rude wooden markers. A bullet exploded on a tombstone near his head, showering him with fragments. He crawled to the edge of an open grave.

  They had deceived him, he thought. All of those nice, average, normal people. Hadn’t they said he was their representative? Hadn’t they sworn to protect their own? But no, they loathed him. Why hadn’t he seen it? Their hero was the cold, blank-eyed gunman: Thompson, Capone, Billy the Kid, Young Lochinvar, El Cid, Cuchulain, the man without human hopes or fears. They worshipped him, that dead, implacable robot gunman, and lusted to feel his foot in their face.

  Raeder tried to move, and slid helplessly into the open grave.

  He lay on his back, looking at the blue sky. Presently a black silhouette loomed above him, blotting out the sky. Metal twinkled. The silhouette slowly took aim.

  And Raeder gave up all hope forever.

  “WAIT, THOMPSON!” roared the amplified voice of Mike Terry. The revolver wavered.

  “It is one second past five o’clock! The week is up! JIM RAEDER HAS WON!”

  There was pandemonium of cheering from the studio audience.

  The Thompson gang, gathered around the grave, looked sullen.

  “He’s won, friends, he’s won!” Mike Terry cried. “Look, look on your screen! The police have arrived, they’re taking the Thompsons away from their victim—the victim they could not kill. And all this is thanks to you, Good Samaritans of America. Look folks, tender hands are lifting Jim Raeder from the open grave that was his final refuge. Good Samaritan Janice Morrow is there. Could this be the beginning of a romance? Jim seems to have fainted, friends; they’re giving him a stimulant. He’s won two hundred thousand dollars! Now we’ll have a few words from Jim Raeder!”

  There was a short silence.

  “That’s odd,” said Mike Terry. “Folks, I’m afraid we can’t hear from Jim just now. The doctors are examining him. Just one moment . . .”

  There was a silence. Mike Terry wiped his forehead and smiled.

  “It’s the strain, folks, the terrible strain. The doctor tells me . . . Well, folks, Jim Raeder is temporarily not himself. But it’s only temporary! JBC is hiring the best psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in the country. We’re going to do everything humanly possible for this gallant boy. And entirely at our own expense.”

  Mike Terry glanced at the studio clock. “Well, it’s about time to sign off, folks. Watch for the announcement of our next great thrill show. And don’t worry, I’m sure that very soon we’ll have Jim Raeder back with us.”

  Mike Terry smiled, and winked at the audience. “He’s bound to get well, friends. After all, we’re all pulling for him!”

  THE GUN WITHOUT A BANG

  Making the ultimate anything takes the ultimate thought—and how ultimate is ultimate?

  DID a twig snap? Dixon looked back and thought he saw a dark shape melt into the underbrush. Instantly he froze, staring back through the green-boled trees. There was a complete and expectant silence. Far overhead, a carrion bird balanced on an updraft, surveying the sunburned landscape, waiting, hoping.

  Then Dixon heard a low, impatient cough from the underbrush.

  Now he knew he was being followed. Before, it had only been an assumption. But those vague, half-seen shapes had been real. They had left him alone on his trek to the signal station, watching, deciding. Now they were ready to try something.

  He removed the Weapon from its holster, checked the safeties, reholstered it and continued walking.

  He heard another cough. Something was patiently trailing him, probably waiting until he left the bush and entered the forest. Dixon grinned to himself.

  Nothing could hurt him. He had the Weapon.

  Without it, he would never have ventured so far from his spaceship. One simply didn’t wander around on an alien planet. But Dixon could. On his hip was the weapon to end all weapons, absolute insurance against anything that walked or crawled or flew or swam.

  It was the last word in handguns, the ultimate in personal armament.

  It was the Weapon.

  He looked back again. There were three beasts, less than fifty yards behind him. From that distance, they resembled dogs or hyenas. They coughed at him and moved slowly forward.

  He touched the Weapon, but decided against using it immediately. There would be plenty of time when they came closer.

  ALFRED Dixon was a short man, very broad in the chest and shoulders. His hair was streaky blond, and he had a blond mustache which curled up at the ends.

  This mustache gave his tanned face a frank, ferocious appearance.

  His natural habitat was Terra’s bars and taverns. There, dressed in stained khakis, he could order drinks in a loud, belligerent voice, and pierce his fellow-drinkers with narrow gunmetal-blue eyes. He enjoyed explaining to the drinkers, in a somewhat contemptuous tone, the difference between a Sykes needier and a Colt three-point, between the Martian horned adleper and the Venusian scorn, and just what to do when a Rannarean horntank is charging you in thick brush, and how to beat off an attack of winged glitterflits.

  Some men considered Dixon all bluff, but they were careful not to call it Others thought he was a good man in spite of his inflated opinion of himself. He was just overconfident, they explained. Death or mutilation would correct this flaw.

  Dixon was a great believer in personal armament. To his way of thinking, the winning of the American West was simply a contest between bow and arrow and Colt .44. Africa? The spear against the rifle. Mars? The Colt three-point against the spinknife. H-bombs smeared cities, but individual men with small arms took the territory. Why look for fuzzy economic, philosophical or political reasons when everything was so simple?

  He had, of course, utter confidence in the Weapon.

  Glancing back, he saw that half a dozen do
glike creatures had joined the original three. They were walking in the open now, tongues lolling out, slowly closing the distance.

  Dixon decided to hold fire just a little longer. The shock effect would be that much greater.

  He had held many jobs in his time—explorer, hunter, prospector, asteroider. Fortune seemed to elude him. The other man always stumbled across the lost city, shot the rare beast, found the ore-bearing stream. He accepted his fate cheerfully. Damned poor luck, but what can you do? Now he was a radioman, checking the automatic signal stations on a dozen unoccupied worlds.

  But more important, he was giving the ultimate handgun its first test in the field. The gun’s inventors hoped the Weapon would become standard. Dixon hoped he would become standard with it.

  HE had reached the edge of the rain forest. His ship lay about two miles ahead in a little clearing. As he entered the forest’s gloomy shade, he heard the excited squeaking of arboreals. They were colored orange and blue, and they watched him intently from the tree-tops.

  It was definitely an African sort of place, Dixon decided. He hoped he would encounter some big game, get a decent trophy head or two. Behind him, the wild dogs had approached to twenty yards. They were gray and brown, the size of terriers, with a hyena’s jaws. Some of them had moved into the underbrush, racing ahead to cut him off.

  It was time to show the Weapon.

  Dixon unholstered it The Weapon was pistol-shaped and quite heavy. It also balanced poorly. The inventors had promised to reduce the weight and improve the heft in subsequent models. But Dixon liked it just the way it was. He admired it for a moment, then clicked off the safeties and adjusted for single shot.

  The pack came loping toward him, coughing and snarling. Dixon took casual aim and fired.

  The Weapon hummed faintly. Ahead, for a distance of a hundred yards, a section of forest simply vanished.

  Dixon had fired the first disintegrator.

  From a muzzle aperture of less than an inch, the beam had fanned out to a maximum diameter of twelve feet. A conic section, waist-high and a hundred yards long, appeared in the forest. Within it, nothing remained. Trees, insects, plants, shrubs, wild dogs, butterflies, all were gone. Overhanging boughs caught in the blast area looked as though they had been sheared by a giant razor.

  Dixon estimated he had caught at least seven of the wild dogs in the blast. Seven beasts with a half-second burst! No problems of deflection or trajectory, as with a missile gun. No need to reload, for the Weapon had a power span of eighteen duty-hours.

  The perfect weapon!

  He turned and walked on, re-holstering the heavy gun.

  There was silence. The forest creatures were considering the new experience. In a few moments, they recovered from their surprise. Blue and orange arboreals swung through the trees above him. Overhead, the carrion bird soared low, and other black-winged birds came out of the distant sky to join it And the wild dogs coughed in the underbrush.

  They hadn’t given up yet. Dixon could hear them in the deep foliage on either side of him, moving rapidly, staying out of sight.

  He drew the Weapon, wondering if they would dare try again. They dared.

  A SPOTTED gray hound burst from a shrub just behind him. The gun hummed. The dog vanished in mid-leap, and the trees shivered slightly as air clapped into the sudden vacuum.

  Another dog charged and Dixon disintegrated it, frowning slightly.

  These beasts couldn’t be considered stupid. Why didn’t they learn the obvious lesson—that it was impossible to come against him and his Weapon? Creatures all over the Galaxy had quickly learned to be wary of an armed man. Why not these?

  Without warning, three dogs leaped from different directions. Dixon clicked to automatic and mowed them down like a man swinging a scythe. Dust whirled and sparkled, filling the vacuum.

  He listened intently. The forest seemed filled with low coughing sounds. Other packs were coming to join in the kill.

  Why didn’t they learn?

  It suddenly burst upon him. They didn’t learn, he thought, because the lesson was too subtle!

  The Weapon—disintegrating silently, quickly, cleanly. Most of the dogs he hit simply vanished. There were no yelps of agony, no roars or howls or screams.

  And above all, there was no loud boom to startle them, no smell of cordite, no click of a new shell levered in . . .

  Dixon thought, Maybe they aren’t smart enough to know this is a killing weapon. Maybe they haven’t figured out what’s going on. Maybe they think I’m defenseless.

  He walked more rapidly through the dim forest He was in no danger, he reminded himself. Just because they couldn’t realize it was a killing weapon didn’t alter the fact that it was. Still, he would insist on a noise-maker in the new models. It shouldn’t be difficult. And the sound would be reassuring.

  The arboreals were gaining confidence now, swinging down almost to the level of his head, their fangs bared. Probably carnivorous, Dixon decided. With the Weapon on automatic, he slashed great cuts in the treetops.

  The arboreals fled, screaming at him. Leaves and small branches rained down. Even the dogs were momentarily cowed, edging away from the falling debris.

  Dixon grinned to himself—just before he was flattened. A big bough, severed from its tree, had caught him across the left shoulder as it fell.

  The Weapon was knocked from his hand. It landed ten feet away, still on automatic, disintegrating shrubs a few yards from him.

  He dragged himself from under the bough and dived for the Weapon. An arboreal got to it first.

  DIXON threw himself face-down on the ground. The arboreal, screaming in triumph, whirled the disintegrator around its head. Giant trees, cut through, went crashing to the forest floor. The air was dark with falling twigs and leaves, and the ground was cut into trenches. A sweep of the disintegrator knifed through the tree next to Dixon, and chopped the ground a few inches from his feet. He jumped away, and the next sweep narrowly missed his head.

  He had given up hope. But then the arboreal became curious. Chattering gaily, it turned the Weapon around and tried to look into the muzzle.

  The animal’s head vanished—silently.

  Dixon saw his chance. He ran forward, leaping a trench, and recovering the disintegrator before another arboreal could play with it He turned it off automatic.

  Several dogs had returned. They were watching him closely.

  Dixon didn’t dare fire yet His hands were shaking so badly, there was more risk to himself than to the dogs. He turned and stumbled in the direction of the ship.

  The dogs followed.

  Dixon quickly recovered his nerve. He looked at the glittering Weapon in his hand. He had considerably more respect for it now, and more than a little fear. Much more fear than the dogs had. Apparently they didn’t associate the forest damage with the disintegrator. It must have seemed like a sudden, violent storm to them.

  But the storm was over. It was hunting time again.

  He was in thick brush now, firing ahead to clear a path. The dogs were on either side, keeping pace. He fired continually into the foliage, occasionally getting a dog. There were several dozen of them, pressing him closely.

  Damn it, Dixon thought, aren’t they counting their losses?

  Then he realized they probably didn’t know how to count.

  He struggled on, not far from the spaceship. A heavy log lay in his path. He stepped over it.

  The log came angrily to life and opened enormous jaws directly under his legs.

  HE fired blindly, holding the trigger down for three seconds and narrowly missing his own feet. The creature vanished. Dixon gulped, swayed, and slid feet-first into the pit he had just dug.

  He landed heavily, wrenching his left ankle. The dogs ringed the pit, snapping and snarling at him.

  Steady, Dixon told himself. He cleared the beasts from the pit’s rim with two bursts, and tried to climb out.

  The sides of the pit were too steep and had been fused into
glass.

  Frantically he tried again and again, recklessly expending his strength. Then he stopped and forced himself to think. The Weapon had got him into this hole; the Weapon could get him out.

  This time he cut a shallow ramp out of the pit, and limped painfully out.

  His left ankle could hardly bear weight. Even worse was the pain in his shoulder. That bough must have broken it, he decided. Using a branch as a crutch, Dixon limped on.

  Several times the dogs attacked. He disintegrated them, and the gun grew increasingly heavy in his right hand. The carrion birds came down to pick at the neatly slashed carcases. Dixon felt darkness crawl around the edges of his vision. He fought it back. He must not faint now, while the dogs were around him.

  The ship was in sight. He broke into a clumsy run, and fell immediately. Some of the dogs were on him.

  He fired, cutting them in two and removing half an inch from his right boot, almost down to the toe. He struggled to his feet and went on.

  Quite a weapon, he thought. Dangerous to anyone, including the wielder. He wished he had the inventor in his sights.

  Imagine inventing a gun without a bang!

  He reached the ship. The dogs ringed him as he fumbled with the airlock. Dixon disintegrated the closest two, and stumbled inside. Darkness was crawling around his vision again and he could feel nausea rising thickly in his throat.

  With his last strength, he swung the airlock shut and sat down. Safe at last!

  Then he heard the low cough.

  He had shut one of the dogs inside with him.

  His arm felt too weak to lift the heavy Weapon, but slowly he swung it up. The dog, barely visible in the dimly lighted ship, leaped at him.

  For a terrifying instant, Dixon thought he couldn’t squeeze the trigger. The dog was at his throat. Reflex must have clenched his hand.

  The dog yelped once and was silent.

  Dixon blacked out.

  WHEN he recovered consciousness, he lay for a long time, just savoring the glorious sensation of being alive. He was going to rest for a few minutes. Then he was getting out of here, away from alien planets, back to a Terran bar. He was going to get roaring drunk. Then he was going to find that inventor and ram the Weapon down the man’s throat, cross-ways.