Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  SINCE the beginning of mankind, there have been ghosts, but their numbers have always been small. Only a few out of every million people managed to survive after death; and only a tiny percentage of those survivors went insane during the transition, and became ghosts.

  But the impact of those few was colossal upon a mankind fascinated by death, awed by the cold uncaring immobility of the corpse so recently quick and vital, shocked at the ghastly inapropos humor of the skeleton. Death’s elaborate, mysterious figure seemed infinitely meaningful, its warning finger pointed toward the spirit-laden skies.

  So for every genuine ghost, rumor and fear produced a thousand.

  Every gibbering bat became a ghost. Marsh-fires, flapping curtains and swaying trees became ghosts, and St. Elmo’s fire, greateyed owls, rats in the walls, foxes in the bush, all became ghostly evidence. Folklore grew and produced witch and warlock, evil little familiars, demons and devils, succubi and incubi, werewolf and vampire. For every ghost, a thousand were suspected; and for every supernatural fact, a million were assumed.

  Early scientific investigators entered this maze, trying to discover the truth about supernatural phenomena. They uncovered countless frauds, hallucinations and errors of judgment. And they found a few genuinely inexplicable events, which, though interesting, were statistically insignificant.

  The whole tradition of folklore came tumbling down. Statistically, there were no ghosts. But continually there was a sly, elusive something which refused to stand still and be classified. It was ignored for centuries, the occasional something which gave a basis and a reality to tales of incubi and succubi. Until at last scientific theory caught up with folklore, made a place for it in the realm of indisputable phenomena.

  WITH the discovery of the scientific hereafter, the irrational ghost became understandable as a demented mind inhabiting the misty interface between Earth and the hereafter. The forms of ghostly madness could be categorized like madness on Earth.

  There were the melancholics, drifting disconsolately through the scenes of their great passion; the whispering hebephrenics, chattering gay and random nonsense; the idiots and imbeciles who returned in the guise of little children; the schizophrenics who imagined themselves to be animals, prototypes of vampire and Abominable Snowman, werewolf, weretiger, werefox, weredog.

  There were the destructive stonethrowing and fire-setting ghosts, the poltergeists, and the grandiloquent paranoids who imagined themselves to be Lucifer or Beelzebub, Israfel or Azazael, the Spirit of Christmas Past, the Furies, Divine Justice, or even Death itself.

  Haunting was madness. They wept by the old watch tower, these few ghosts upon whose gossamer shoulders rested the entire great structure of folklore, mingled with the mists around the gibbet, jabbered their nonsense at the seance. They talked, cried, danced and sang for the delectation of the credulous, until scientific observers came with their sober cold questions. Then they fled back to the Threshold, terrified of this onslaught of reason, protective of their delusions, fearful of being cured.

  “So that’s how it was,” Melhill said. “You can figure out the rest. Since Hereafter, Inc., a hell of a lot more people are surviving after death. But, of course, a lot more are going insane on the way.”

  “Thus producing a lot more ghosts,” said Blaine.

  “Right, and one of them is after you,” Melhill said, his voice growing faint. “So watch your step. Tom, I gotta go now.”

  “What kind of ghost is it?” Blaine asked. “Whose ghost? And why do you have to go?”

  “It takes energy to stay on Earth,” Melhill whispered. “I’m just about used up. Have to recharge. Can you still hear me?”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “I don’t know when the ghost will show himself, Tom. And I don’t know who he is. I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. Just watch out for him.”

  “I’ll watch out,” Blaine said, his ear pressed to the loudspeaker. “Ray! Will I speak to you again?”

  “I think so,” said Melhill, his voice barely audible. “Tom, I know you’re looking for a job. Try Ed Franchel, 322 West 19th Street. It’s rough stuff, but it pays. And watch yourself.”

  “Ray!” Blaine shouted.

  There was no answer. The loudspeaker was silent, and he was alone in the gray room.

  12.

  THE address Ray Melhill had given him was a small, dilapidated brownstone near the docks. Blaine climbed the steps and pressed the ground-floor buzzer marked Edward J. Franchel Enterprises. The door was opened by a large, balding man in shirtsleeves.

  “Mr. Franchel?” Blaine inquired.

  “That’s me,” the balding man said, with a resolutely cheerful smile. “Right this way, sir.”

  He led Blaine into an apartment pungent with the odor of boiled cabbage. The front half of the apartment was arranged as an office, with a paper-cluttered desk, a dusty filing cabinet and several stiff-backed chairs. Past it, Blaine could see a gloomy living room. From the inner recesses of the apartment, a solido was blaring out a daytime show.

  “Please excuse the appearance,” Franchel said, motioning Blaine to a chair. “I’m moving into a regular office uptown just as soon as I find time. The orders have been coming in so fast and furious . . . Now, sir, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for a job,” said Blaine.

  “Hell,” said Franchel, “I thought you were a customer.” He turned in the direction of the blaring solido and shouted, “Alice, will you turn that goddam thing down?” He waited until the volume had lowered somewhat, then turned back to Blaine. “Brother, if business doesn’t pick up soon, I’m going back to running a suicide booth at Coney. A job, huh?”

  “That’s right. Ray Melhill told me to try you.”

  Franchel’s expression brightened. “How’s Ray doing?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Shame,” Franchel said. “He was a good lad, though always a bit wild. He worked for me a couple times when the space pilots were on strike. Want a drink?”

  Blaine nodded. Franchel went to the filing cabinet and removed a bottle of rye whisky labeled “Moonjuice.” He found two shot glasses and filled them with a practiced flourish.

  “Here’s to old Ray,” Franchel toasted. “I suppose he got himself boxed?”

  “Boxed and crated,” Blaine said. “I just spoke to him at the Spiritual Switchboard.”

  “Then he made Threshold!” Franchel exclaimed admiringly. “Friend, we should only have his luck. So you want a job? Well, maybe I can fix it. Stand up.”

  HE walked around Blaine, touched his biceps and ran a hand over his ridged shoulder muscles. He stood in front of Blaine, nodding to himself with downcast eyes, then feinted a quick blow at his face. Blaine’s right hand came up instantly, in time to block the punch.

  “Good build, good reflexes,” said Franchel. “I think you’ll do. Know anything about weapons?”

  “Not much,” Blaine said, wondering what kind of job he was getting into. “Just—ah—antiques. Garands, Winchesters, Colts.”

  “No kidding! You know, I always wanted to collect antique recoil arms. But no projectile or beam weapons are allowed on this hunt. What else you got?”

  “I can handle a rifle with bayonet,” Blaine said, thinking how his basic-training sergeant would have roared at that overstatement.

  “You can? Lunges and parries and all? Well, I’ll be damned. I thought bayonetry was a lost art. You’re the first I’ve seen in fifteen years. Friend, you’re hired.”

  Franchel went to his desk, scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to Blaine.

  “You go to that address tomorrow for your briefing. You’ll be paid standard hunter’s salary, two hundred dollars plus fifty a day for every working day. Have you got your own weapons and equipment? Well, I’ll pick the stuff up for you, but it’s deducted from your pay. And I take ten per cent off the top. Agreeable?”

  “Sure,” Blaine said. “Could you explain a little more about the hunt?”

 
; “It’s just a standard hunt. But don’t go around talking about it. I’m not sure if hunts are still legal. I wish Congress would straighten out the Suicide and Permitted Murder Acts once and for all. A man doesn’t know where he’s at any more.”

  “Yeah,” Blaine agreed in some confusion.

  “They’ll probably discuss the legal aspects at the briefing,” Franchel said. “The other hunters will be there and the Quarry will tell you all you need to know. Say hello to Ray for me if you speak to him again. Tell him I’m sorry he got killed, but glad he made Threshold.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Blaine said. He decided not to ask any more questions for fear his ignorance might cost him the job. Whatever hunting involved, he and his body could surely handle it. And a job, any job, was as necessary now for his self-respect as for his dwindling wallet.

  He thanked Franchel and left.

  That evening, he ate dinner in an inexpensive diner and bought several magazines. He was elated at the knowledge of having found work, and sure that he was going to make a place for himself in this age.

  His high spirits were dampened slightly when he glimpsed, on the way back to his hotel, a man standing in an alley watching him. The man had a white face and placid Buddha eyes, and his rough clothes hung on him like rags on a scarecrow.

  It was the zombie.

  Blaine hurried on to his hotel, refusing to anticipate trouble. After all, if a cat can look at a king, a zombie can look at a man, and where’s the harm?

  This reasoning didn’t prevent him from having nightmares until dawn.

  EARLY the next day, Blaine walked to 42nd Street and Park Avenue to catch a bus to the briefing. While waiting, he noticed a disturbance on the other side of 42nd Street.

  A man had stopped short in the middle of the busy pavement. He was laughing to himself and people were beginning to edge away from him. He was in his fifties, Blaine judged, dressed in quiet tweeds, bespectacled, a little overweight. He carried a small briefcase and looked undistinguishable from other businessmen.

  Abruptly he stopped laughing. He unzipped his briefcase and removed from it two long, slightly curved daggers. He flung the briefcase away and followed it with his glasses.

  “Berserker!” someone yelled.

  The man plunged into the crowd, both daggers flashing. People started screaming and the crowd scattered before him.

  “Berserker, berserker!”

  “Call the flathats!”

  “Watch out! Berserker!”

  One man was down, clutching his torn shoulder and swearing. The berserker’s face was fiery red now and spittle drooled from his mouth. He waded deeper into the dense crowd; people knocked each other down in their efforts to escape. A woman shrieked as she was pushed off balance and her armload of parcels scattered across the pavement.

  The berserker swiped at her left-handed, missed, and plunged deeper into the crowd.

  Blue-uniformed police appeared, six or eight of them, sidearms out. “Everybody down!” they shouted. “Flatten! Everybody down!”

  All traffic had stopped. The people in the berserker’s path flung themselves to the pavement. On Blaine’s side of the street, people were also flattening against the pavement.

  A freckled girl of perhaps twelve tugged at Blaine’s arm. “Come on, mister, get down! You wanna get beamed?”

  Blaine lay down beside her. The berserker had turned and was running back toward the policemen, screaming wordlessly and waving his knives.

  Three of the policemen fired at once, their weapons throwing a pale yellowish beam which flared red when it struck the berserker. He screamed as his clothing began to smolder, turned, and tried to escape.

  A BEAM took him square in the back. He flung both knives at the policemen and collapsed.

  An ambulance dropped down with whirring blades and quickly loaded the berserker and his victims. The policemen began breaking up the crowd that had gathered around them.

  “All right, folks, it’s all over now. Move along!”

  The crowd began to disperse. Blaine stood up and brushed himself off. “What was that?” he asked.

  “It was a berserker, silly,” the freckled girl said. “Couldn’t you see?”

  “I saw. Do you have many?”

  She nodded proudly. “New York has more berserkers than any other city in the world except Manila, where they’re called amokers. But it’s all the same thing. We have maybe fifty a year.”

  “More,” a man said. “Maybe seventy, eighty a year. But this one didn’t do so good.”

  A small group had gathered near Blaine and the girl. They were discussing the berserker much as Blaine had heard strangers in his own time talk at the scene of an automobile accident.

  “How many did he get?”

  “Only five, and I don’t think he killed any of them.”

  “His heart wasn’t in it,” an old woman said. “When I was a girl, you couldn’t stop them so easily.”

  “Well, he picked a bad spot,” commented the freckled girl. “This corner is crawling with flathats. A berserker can hardly get started before he’s beamed.”

  A big policeman came over. “All right, folks, break it up. The fun’s over, move along now.”

  The group dispersed. Blaine caught his bus, wondering why fifty or more people chose to berserk in New York every year. Sheer nervous tension? A demented form of individualism? Adult delinquency?

  It was one more of the things he would have to find out about the world of 2110.

  13.

  THE address was a penthouse high above Park Avenue in the Seventies. A butler admitted him to a spacious room where chairs had been set up in a long row. The dozen men occupying the chairs were a loud, tough, weatherbeaten bunch, carelessly dressed and ill at ease in such rarefied surroundings. Most of them knew each other.

  “Hey, Otto! Back in the hunting game?”

  “Yah. No money.”

  “Knew you’d come back, old boy. Hi, Tim!”

  “Hi, Bjorn. This is my last hunt.”

  “Sure it is. Last till next time.”

  “No, I mean it. I’m buying a seed-pressure farm in the North Atlantic Abyss. I just need a stake.”

  “You’ll drink up your stake.”

  “Not this time.”

  “Hey, Theseus! How’s the throwing arm?”

  “Good enough, Chico. Qué tal?”

  “Not too bad, kid.”

  “There’s Sammy Jones, always last in.”

  “I’m on time, ain’t I?”

  “Ten minutes late. Where’s your sidekick?”

  “Sligo? Dead. That Asturias hunt.”

  “Tough. Hereafter?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t heard from him.”

  A man entered the room and called out, “Gentlemen, your attention, please!”

  He advanced to the center of the room and stood, hands on his hips, facing the row of hunters. He was a slender, sinewy man of medium height, dressed in riding breeches and an open-necked shirt. He had a small, carefully tended mustache and startling blue eyes in a thin, tanned face. For a few seconds, he looked the hunters over, while they coughed and shifted their feet uncomfortably.

  At last he said, “Good morning, gentlemen. I am Charles Hull, your employer and Quarry.” He gave them a smile of no warmth. “First, gentlemen, a word concerning the legality of our proceedings. There has been some recent confusion about this. My lawyer has looked into the matter fully and will explain. Mr. Jensen.”

  A SMALL, nervous-looking man came into the room, pressed his spectacles firmly against his nose and cleared his throat.

  “Yes, Mr. Hull. Gentlemen, as to the present legality of the hunt: In accordance with the revised statutes to the Suicide Act of 2102, any man protected by Hereafter insurance has the right to select any death for himself, at any time and place, and by any means, as long as those means do not constitute cruel and unnatural abuse. The reason for this fundamental ‘right to die’ is obvious: The courts do not recognize phy
sical death as death per se, if said death does not involve the destruction of the mind. Providing the mind survive, the death of the body is of no more moment, legally, than the sloughing of a fingernail. The body, by the latest Supreme Court decision, is considered an appendage of the mind, its creature, to be disposed of as the mind directs.” During this explanation, Hull had been pacing the room with quick, catlike steps. He stopped now and said, “Thank you, Mr. Jensen. So there is no questioning my right to choose my time and way of dying. Nor is there any illegality in my selecting one or more persons such as yourselves to perform the act for me. And your own actions are considered legal under the Permitted Murder section of the Suicide Act. All well and good. The only legal question arises in a recent appendage to the Suicide Act.”

  He nodded to Mr. Jensen.

  “The appendage states,” Jensen said, “that a man can select any death for himself, at any time and place, by any means, etcetera, so long as that death is not physically injurious to others!’

  “That,” said Hull, “is the troublesome clause. Now a hunt is a legal form of suicide. A time and place are arranged. You, the hunters, chase me. I, the Quarry, flee. You catch me, kill me. Fine! Except for one thing.”

  He turned to the lawyer. “Mr. Jensen, you may leave the room. I do not wish to implicate you.” After the lawyer had left, Hull said, “The one problem remaining is, of course, the fact that I will be armed and trying my very best to kill you. Any of you. All of you. And that is illegal.”

  Hull sank gracefully into a chair. “The crime, however, is mine, not yours. I have employed you to kill me. You have no idea that I plan to protect myself, to retaliate. That is a legal fiction, but one which will save you from becoming possible accessories to the fact. If I am caught trying to kill one of you, the penalty will be severe. But I will not be caught. One of you will kill me, thus putting me beyond the reach of human justice. If I should be so unfortunate as to kill all of you, I shall complete my suicide in the old-fashioned manner, with poison. But that would be a disappointment to me. I trust you will not be so clumsy is to let that happen. Any questions?”