Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  The sensories were an inescapable part of 2110, as omnipresent and popular as television had been in Blaine’s day. Larger and more elaborate versions of the sensories were used for theater productions, and variations were employed for advertising and propaganda. They were, to date, the purest and most powerful form of the ready-made dream, tailored to fit anyone.

  But they had their extremely vocal opponents, who deplored the ominous trend toward complete passivity in the spectator. These critics were disturbed by the excessive ease with which a person could assimilate a sensory; and, in truth, many a housewife walked blank-eyed through her days, a modern-day mystic plugged into a continual bright vision.

  In reading a book or watching television, the critics pointed out, the viewer had to exert himself, to participate. But the sensories merely swept over you, vivid, brilliant, insidious, and left behind the damaging schizophrenic impression that dreams were better and more desirable than life. Such an impression could not be allowed, even if it were true. Sensories were vicious, dangerous!

  To be sure, some valid artistic work was done in the sensory form. (One could not discount Verreho, Johnston or Telkin, and Blue Fox showed promise). But there was not much good work. And weighed against the damaging psychic effects, the lowering of popular taste, the drift toward complete passivity . . .

  In another generation, the critics thundered, people will be incapable of reading, thinking or acting!

  It was a strong argument. But Blaine, with his 152 years of perspective, remembered the same sort of arguments hurled at radio, movies, comic books, television and paperbacks. Even the revered novel had once been bitterly chastised for its deviation from the standards of pure literature. Every innovation seemed culturally destructive, and became, ultimately, a cultural staple, the embodiment of the good old days, the spirit of the Golden Age—to be threatened and finally destroyed by the next innovation.

  The sensories, good or bad, were here. Blaine entered the store to partake of them.

  AFTER looking over various models, he bought a medium-priced Bendix player. Then, with the clerk’s aid, he chose three popular recordings and took them into a booth to play. Fastening the electrodes to his forehead, he turned the first one on.

  It was a popular historical, a highly romantic rendition of the Chanson de Roland, done in a low-intensity non-identification technique that allowed large battle effects and massed movements. The dream began.

  . . . and Blaine was in the pass of Roncesvalles on that hot and fateful August morning in 778, standing with Roland’s rear guard, watching the main body of Charlemagne’s army wind slowly on toward Frankland. The tired veterans slumped in their high-canted saddles; leather creaked, spurs jingled against bronze stirrup-guards. There was a smell of pine and sweat in the air, a hint of smoke from razed Pampelona, a taste of oiled steel and dry summer grass . . .

  Blaine decided to buy it. The next was a high-intensity chase on Venus, in which the viewer identified fully with the hunted but innocent man. The last was a variable-intensity recording of War and Peace, with occasional identification sections.

  As he paid for his purchases, the clerk winked at him and said, “Interested in the real stuff?”

  “Maybe,” Blaine said.

  “I got some great party records,” the clerk told him. “Full identification, with switches yet. No?

  Got a genuine horror piece—man dying in quicksand. The murderers recorded his death for the specialty trade.”

  “Perhaps some other time.”

  “And also,” the clerk rushed on, “I got a special recording, legitimately made but withheld from the public. A few copies are being bootlegged around. Man reborn from the past. Absolutely genuine.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, it’s perfectly unique. The emotions come through clear as a bell, sharp as a knife. A collector’s item. I predict it’ll become a classic.”

  “That I’d like to hear,” Blaine said grimly.

  He took the unlabeled record back to the booth. In ten minutes, he came out again, somewhat shaken, and purchased it for an exorbitant price. It was like buying a piece of himself.

  The clerk and the Rex technicians were right. It was a real collector’s item and would probably become a classic.

  Unfortunately, all names had been carefully erased to prevent the police from tracing its source. He was famous—but in a completely anonymous fashion.

  20.

  BLAINE went to his job every day, swept the floor, emptied the wastepaper baskets, addressed envelopes and did a few antique hulls on commission. In the evenings, he studied the complex science of advanced 22nd-century yacht design.

  After a while, he was given a few small assignments writing publicity releases. He proved talented at this and was soon promoted to the position of junior yacht designer.

  He began handling much of the liaison between Jaakobsen Yachts, Ltd., and the various yards building to their designs.

  He continued to study, but there were few requests for classic hulls. The Jaakobsen brothers handled most of the stock boats, while old Ed Richter, known as the Marvel of Salem, drew up the unusual racers and multi-hulls. Blaine took over publicity and advertising and had no time for anything else.

  It was responsible, necessary work. But it was not yacht designing. Irrevocably, his life in 2110 was falling into much the same pattern it had assumed in 1958.

  Blaine pondered this carefully. On the one hand, he was happy about it. It seemed to settle, once and for all, the conflict between his mind and his borrowed body. Obviously his mind was boss.

  On the other hand, the situation didn’t speak too well for the quality of that mind. Here was a man who had traveled 152 years into the future, had passed through wonders and horrors, and was working again, with a weary and terrible inevitability, as a junior yacht designer who did everything but design yachts. Was there some fatal flaw in his character, some hidden defect which doomed him to inferiority no matter what his environment?

  Moodily, he pictured himself flung back a million or so years, to a caveman era. Doubtless, after a period of initial adjustment, he would become a junior designer of dugouts. Only not really a designer. His job would be to count the wampum, check the quality of the tree trunks and contract for outriggers, while some other fellow (probably a Neanderthal genius) did the actual designing.

  It was disheartening. But fortunately it was not the only way of viewing the matter. His inevitable return could also be taken as a fine example of personal solidarity, of internal steadfastness. He was a man who knew what he was. No matter how his environment changed, he remained true to his function.

  Viewed this way, he could be very proud of being eternally and forever a junior yacht designer.

  He continued working, fluctuating between these two basic views of himself. Once or twice he saw Marie, but she was usually busy in the high councils of the Rex Corporation. He moved out of his hotel and into a small, tastefully furnished apartment. New York was beginning to feel like home to him.

  And, he reminded himself, if he had gained nothing else, he had at least settled his mind-body problem.

  But his body was not to be disregarded so lightly. Blaine had overlooked one of the problems likely to exist with the ownership of a strong, handsome and highly idiosyncratic body such as his.

  One day the conflict flared again, more aggravated than ever.

  HE had left work at the usual time and was waiting at a corner for his helibus. He noticed a woman staring intently at him.

  She was perhaps twenty-five years old, a buxom, attractive redhead. She was commonly dressed. Her features were bold, yet they had a certain wistful quality.

  Blaine realized that he had seen her before but never really noticed her. Now that he thought about it, she had once ridden a bus with him. Once she had entered a store nearly on his heels. And several times she had been passing his building when he left work.

  She had been watching him, probably for weeks. But wh
y?

  The woman hesitated a moment, then said, “Could I talk to you a moment?” Her voice was husky, pleasant, but very nervous. “Please, Mr. Blaine, it’s terribly important.” So she knew his name. “Sure,” Blaine said. “What is it?”

  “Not here. Could we—uh—go somewhere?”

  Blaine grinned and shook his head. She seemed harmless enough, but so had Carl Orc. Trusting strangers in this world was a good way of losing your mind, your body, or both.

  “I don’t know you,” Blaine said, “and I don’t know where you learned my name. Whatever you want, you’d better tell me here.”

  “I really shouldn’t be bothering you,” the woman said in a discouraged voice. “But I couldn’t stop myself; I had to talk to you. I get so lonely sometimes. You know how it is?”

  “Lonely? Sure, but why do you want to talk to me?”

  She looked at him sadly. “That’s right, you don’t know.”

  “No, I don’t,” Blaine said patiently. “Why?”

  “Can’t we go somewhere? I don’t like to say it in public like this.”

  “You’ll have to,” said Blaine, beginning to think that this was a very complicated game indeed.

  “Oh, all right,” the woman said, visibly embarrassed. “I’ve been following you around for a long time, Mr. Blaine. I found out your name and where you worked. I had to talk to you. It’s all on account of that body of yours.”

  “What?”

  “Your body,” she repeated, not looking at him. “You see, it used to be my husband’s body before he sold it to the Rex Corporation.” Blaine’s mouth opened, but he could find no adequate words.

  21.

  BLAINE had always known that his body had lived its own life in the world before it had been given to him. It had acted, decided, loved, hated, made its own individual imprint upon society and woven its own complex and lasting web of relationships. He could even have assumed that it had been married; most host bodies were. But he had preferred not thinking about it. He had let himself believe that everything concerning the previous owner had conveniently disappeared.

  His own meeting with Ray Melhill’s snatched body should have shown him how naive that attitude was. Now, like it or not, he had to think about it.

  They went to Blaine’s apartment. The woman, Alice Kranch, sat dejectedly on one side of his couch and accepted a cigarette.

  “The way it was,” she said, “Frank—that was my husband’s name, Frank Kranch—he was never satisfied with things, you know? He had a good job as a hunter, but he was never satisfied.”

  “A hunter?”

  “Yes, he was a spearman in the China game.”

  “Mmm,” Blaine said, wondering again what had induced him to go on his own hunt, his needs or Kranch’s dormant reflexes? It was annoying to have this mind-body problem come up again just when it had seemed so nicely settled.

  “But he wasn’t ever satisfied,” Alice Kranch said. “And it used to make him sore, those fancy rich guys getting themselves killed and going to the hereafter. He always hated the idea of dying like a dog.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Blaine said.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “What can you do? Frank didn’t have a chance of making enough money for hereafter insurance. It bothered him. And then he got that big wound on the shoulder that nearly put him under. I suppose you still got the scar?” Blaine nodded.

  “Well, he wasn’t ever the same after that. Hunters usually don’t think much about death, but Frank started to. He started thinking about it all the time. And then he met this dame from Rex.”

  “Marie Thorne?”

  “That’s the one,” Alice said. “She was a skinny dame, hard as nails and cold as a fish. I couldn’t understand what Frank saw in her. Oh, he played around some; most hunters do. It’s on account of the danger. But there’s playing around and there’s playing around. Him and this fancy Rex dame were thick as thieves. I just couldn’t see what Frank saw in her. I mean she was so skinny, and so tight-faced. She was pretty in a pinched sort of way, but she looked like she’d wear her clothes to bed, if you know what I mean.” Blaine nodded again, this time a little painfully. “Go on.”

  “Well, there’s no accounting for some tastes, but I thought I knew Frank’s. And I guess I did because it turned out he wasn’t going with her. It was strictly business. It even turned out they’d known each other when they were kids at school and she was trying to do him a favor.”

  HE blinked rapidly when he heard this. He wondered how much Marie had helped him for himself and how much out of a lingering loyalty to Kranch’s body. Probably a little of both, he decided.

  “So anyway,” Alice went on, “Frank turned up one day and said to me, ‘Baby, I’m leaving you. I’m taking that big, long trip into the hereafter. There’s a nice piece of change in it for you, too.’ ”

  She sighed and wiped her eyes. “That big idiot had sold his body! Rex had given him hereafter insurance and an annuity for me, and he was so damned proud of himself! Well, I talked myself blue in the face trying to get him to change his mind. No chance, he was going to eat pie in the sky. To his way of thinking, his number was up anyhow, and the next hunt would do him. So off he went. He talked to me once from the Threshold.”

  “Is he still there?” Blaine asked, with a prickling sensation at the back of his neck.

  “I haven’t heard from him in over a year,” Alice said, “so I guess he’s gone on to the hereafter. The bastard!”

  She cried for a few moments, then wiped her eyes with a small handkerchief and looked mournfully at Blaine. “I wasn’t going to bother you. After all, it was Frank’s body to sell and it’s yours now. I don’t have any claims on it or you. But I get so blue, so lonely.”

  “I can imagine,” Blaine murmured, thinking that she was definitely not his type. Objectively speaking, she was pretty enough. Comely but overblown. Her features were well-formed, bold, vividly colored. Her hair, although obviously not a natural red, was shoulder length and of a smooth texture. She was the sort of woman he could picture, hands on hips, arguing with a policeman, hauling in a fishnet, dancing to a flamenco guitar, or herding goats on a mountain path with a full skirt swishing around ample hips and peasant blouse distended. But she was not to his taste. However, he reminded himself, Frank Kranch had found her very much to his taste. And he was wearing Kranch’s body.

  “Most of our friends,” Alice was saying, “were hunters in the China game. Oh, they dropped around sometimes after Frank left. But you know hunters; they’ve got just one thing on their minds.”

  “Is that a fact?” said Blaine uneasily.

  “Yes. And so I moved out of Peking and came back to New York, where I was born. And then one day I saw Frank—I mean you. I could have fainted on the spot. I mean I might have expected it and all, but still it gives you a turn to see your husband’s body walking around.”

  “I should think so,” Blaine agreed.

  “So I followed you. I wasn’t ever going to bother you or anything, but it just kept bothering me all the time. And I sort of got to wondering what kind of a man was . . . I mean Frank was so—well, he and I got along very well, if you know what I mean.”

  “Certainly,” Blaine said.

  “I’ll bet you think I’m terrible!”

  “Not at all!” said Blaine.

  She looked him full in the face, her expression mournful and coquettish. Blaine felt Kranch’s old scar throb.

  But remember, he told himself, Kranch is gone. Everything is Blaine now, Blaine’s will, Blaine’s way, Blaine’s taste . . .

  Isn’t it?

  This problem must be settled, he thought, seizing the willing Alice and kissing her with an un-Blainelike fervor.

  IN the morning, Alice made breakfast. Blaine sat staring out his window, thinking dismal thoughts.

  Last night had proven to him conclusively that Kranch was still king of the Kranch-Blaine body-mind. For last night he had been completely unlike himself. He had
been fierce, violent, rough, angry and exultant. He had been all the things he had always deplored, had acted with an abandon that unnerved him to remember.

  That was not Blaine. That was Kranch, the Body Triumphant.

  Blaine had always prized delicacy, subtlety, the grasp of nuance. Too much, perhaps. Yet those had been his virtues, the expressions of his own individual personality. With them, he was Thomas Blaine. Without them, he was less than nothing—a shadow cast by the eternally triumphant Kranch.

  Gloomily, he contemplated the future. He would give up the struggle, become what his body demanded—a fighter, a brawler, a lusty vagabond. Perhaps, in time, he would grow used to it, even enjoy it . . .

  “Breakfast’s ready,” Alice announced.

  They ate in silence and Alice moodily fingered a bruise on her forearm. At last Blaine could stand it no longer.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “Everything.”

  She smiled wanly. “That’s all right. It was my fault, really.”

  “I doubt that. Pass the butter, please.”

  She passed the butter. They ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Alice said, “I was very, very stupid.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I was chasing a dream,” she said. “I thought I could find Frank all over again. I’m not really that way, Mr. Blaine. But I thought it would be like with Frank.”

  “And wasn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “No, of course not.”

  Blaine put down his coffee cup carefully. He said, “I suppose Kranch was rougher. I suppose he batted you from wall to wall. I suppose—”

  “Oh, no!” she cried. “Never! Mr. Blaine, Frank was a hunter and he lived a hard life. But with me he was always a perfect gentleman. He had manners, Frank had.”

  “He had?”

  “He certainly had! Frank was always gentle with me, Mr. Blaine. He was—delicate, if you know what I mean. Nice. Gentle. He was never, never rough. To tell the truth, he was the very opposite from you, Mr. Blaine.”