Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  His life fell into a pleasant routine built around the boatyard and the white bungalow, filled with Saturday night movies and the microfilm Sunday Times, quick visits to the undersea farms and to other islands in die Marquesas Group, parties at the mayor’s house and poker at the yacht club, brisk sails across Comptroller Bay and moonlight swimming on Temuoa Beach.

  And, through it all, the zombies of Taiohae stayed close, and watched him, and waited.

  One morning at the boatyard, Mr. Davis came over with a worried frown.

  “Say, Tom, there was a fellow around here just a little while ago looking for you.”

  “Who was it?” asked Blaine.

  “A mainlander,” Davis said. “Just off the steamer this morning.

  I told him you weren’t here yet and he said he’d see you at your house.”

  “What did he look like?” Blaine asked, feeling his stomach muscles tighten.

  Davis frowned more deeply. “Well, that’s the funny part of it. He was about your height, thin, very tanned. He wore some kind of surgical mask, but the skin didn’t look right And he stank of chlorophyll.”

  “Sounds peculiar,” Blaine said.

  “Very peculiar. And he limped pretty bad.”

  “Did he leave a name?”

  “Said his name was Smith. Tom, where are you going?”

  “I have to go home right now,” Blaine said. “I’ll try to explain later.”

  He hurried away. Smith must have found out his own identity and what the connection was between himself and Blaine. And, exactly as he had promised, the zombie had come visiting.

  31.

  WHEN he told Marie, she went at once to a closet and took down their suitcases. She carried them into the bedroom and began flinging clothes into them.

  “What are you doing?” Blaine asked.

  “Packing.”

  “So I see. But why?”

  “Because we’re getting out of here.”

  “What are you talking about? We live here!”

  “Not any more,” she said. “Not with that damned Smith around. Tom, he means trouble.”

  “I’m sure he does,” said Blaine. “But that’s no reason to run. Stop packing a minute and listen! What do you think he can do to me?”

  “We’re not going to stay and find out,” she said.

  She continued to shove clothes into the suitcase until Blaine grabbed her wrists.

  “Calm down,” he told her. “I’m not going to run from Smith.”

  “But it’s the only sensible thing to do,” Marie said. “He’s trouble, but he can’t live much longer. Just a few more months, weeks maybe, and he’ll be dead. He should have died long before now, that horrible zombie! Tom, let’s go!”

  “Have you gone crazy or something?” Blaine demanded. “Whatever he wants, I can handle it.”

  “I’ve heard you say that before,” Marie said.

  “Things were different then.”

  “They’re different now! Tom, we could borrow the cutter again—Mr. Davis would understand—and we could go to—”

  “No! I’m damned if I’ll run from him! Maybe you’ve forgotten, Marie, Smith saved my life.”

  “But what did he save it for?” she wailed. “Tom, I’m warning you! You mustn’t see him, not if he remembers!”

  “Wait a minute,” Blaine said slowly. “Is there something you know? Something I don’t?”

  She immediately grew calm. “Of course not.”

  “Marie, are you telling me the truth?”

  “Yes, darling. But I’m frightened of Smith. Please, Tom, humor me this once—let’s go away.”

  “I won’t run another step from anyone,” Blaine said. “I live here. And that’s the end of it.”

  Marie sat down, looking suddenly exhausted. “All right, dear. Do what you think is best.”

  “That’s better,” said Blaine. “It’ll turn out all right.”

  “Of course it will,” Marie said. Blaine put the suitcases back and hung up the clothes. Then he sat down to wait. He was physically calm. But in memory he had returned to the underground, had passed again through the ornate door covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese ideographs, into the vast marble-pillared Palace of Death with its gold and bronze coffin. And he heard again Reilly’s screaming voice speak through a silvery mist:

  “There are things you can’t see, Blaine, but I see them. Your time on Earth will be short, very short, painfully short Those you trust will betray you. Those you hate will conquer you. You will die, Blaine, not in years but soon, sooner than you could believe. You’ll be betrayed, and you’ll die by your own hand.”

  That mad old man! Blaine shivered slightly and looked at Marie. She sat with downcast eyes, waiting. So he waited, too.

  After a while there was a soft knock at the door.

  “Come in,” Blaine said to whoever was outside.

  32.

  BLAINE recognized Smith immediately, even with the tan surgical mask. The zombie came in, limping, bringing with him a faint odor of decay imperfectly masked by a powerful chlorophyll deodorant.

  “Excuse the disguise,” Smith said. “It isn’t intended to deceive you or anyone else. I wear it because my face is no longer presentable.”

  “You’ve come a long way,” said Blaine.

  “Yes, quite far,” Smith agreed, “and through difficulties I won’t bore you by relating. But I got here. That’s the important thing.”

  “Why did you come?”

  “Because I know who I am,” Smith answered.

  “And you think it concerns me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t imagine how,” Blaine said grimly. “But let’s hear it.”

  Marie said, “Wait a minute. Smith, you’ve been after him since he came into this world. He’s never had a moment’s peace. Can’t you accept things as they are? Can’t you just go and die quietly somewhere?”

  “Not without telling him first,” Smith said.

  “Come on, let’s hear it,” said Blaine.

  Smith said, “My name is James Olin Robinson.”

  “Never heard of you,” Blaine replied after a moment’s thought.

  “Of course not.”

  “Have we ever met before that time in the Rex Building?”

  “Not formally.”

  “But we met?”

  “Briefly.”

  “All right, James Olin Robinson, tell me about it. When did we meet?”

  “It was quite brief,” Robinson said. “We glimpsed each other for a fraction of a second, then saw no more. It happened late one night in 1958, on a lonely highway, you in your car and me in mine.”

  “You were driving the car I had the accident with?”

  “Yes. If you can call it an accident.”

  “But it was! It was completely accidental!”

  “If that’s true, I have no further business here,” Robinson said.

  “But, Blaine, I know it was not an accident It was murder. Ask your wife.”

  HE looked at his wife sitting in a comer of the couch. Marie’s face was waxen. Her gaze seemed to turn inward and not enjoy what it saw there. Blaine wondered if she was staring at the ghost of some ancient guilt, long buried, long quickening, now come to term with the appearance of the zombie Robinson.

  Watching her, he slowly began piecing things together.

  “Marie,” he said, “what about that night in 1958? How did you know that Robinson and I were going to have an accident?

  She said, “There are statistical prediction methods we use, valence factors . . .” Her voice trailed away.

  “Or did you make us have the accident?” Blaine asked.

  Marie didn’t answer. And Blaine thought hard about the manner of his dying.

  He had been driving over a straight, empty highway, his headlights probing ahead, the darkness receding endlessly before him . . . His car swerved freakishly, violently, toward the oncoming headlights . . . He twisted hard on the steering wheel.
It wouldn’t turn . . . The steering wheel came free and spun in his hands, and the engine wailed . . .

  “By God, you made us have that accident!” Blaine shouted at his wife. “You and Rex Power Systems—you forced my car into a swerve! Look at me and answer! Isn’t it true?”

  “All right!” she said. “But I didn’t mean to kill you. It was Robinson we were after. He’s the man your present body was intended for, Tom. In 1958 he was a liberal religious leader. Rex decided to snatch him, show him the scientific hereafter, the Threshold, reincarnation. We thought he’d endorse Rex. We could make a breach in the organized religions by using Robinson. But the calibration was off and we got you instead. And Robinson took over Reilly’s body.”

  Blaine said, “You’ve known all along who he was.”

  “I’ve suspected.”

  “And never told me.”

  “I couldn’t, Tom, I just couldn’t All right, it was wrong. I tried to make it up. I smuggled your recording to the religions. I helped you, watched out for you—”

  “But you didn’t help me,” Robinson said.

  WITH an effort, Marie turned and looked at him. “I’m afraid I was responsible for your death, Mr. Robinson. When the cars came together, your body must have died at the same time as Tom’s. The Rex Power System that snatched him into 2110 pulled you along, too. Then you took over Reilly’s body. It’s worked out horribly, but we had no idea that all this would happen. We thought you’d appreciate being brought into the future and receiving actual assurance of a life after death. If the experiment had turned out right—”

  “But it didn’t,” Robinson broke in. “And you have given me a very poor exchange for my former body and my former life.”

  “I know. But what can I do? The hereafter—”

  “I don’t want it yet,” Robinson said. “I was a married man with children when you killed me. I had a mission in life. That mission must be fulfilled, my life lived out as it was meant to.”

  “But how?” she asked desperately.

  Robinson hesitated a moment, then said, “I want a body. I want a man’s good body that I can live in, not this decaying thing that I drag about Blaine, your wife killed my former body.”

  Blaine said, “And now you want mine?”

  “If you think it’s fair,” Robinson said.

  “Now wait just a minute!” Marie cried.

  Color had returned to her face. With her confession, she seemed to have freed herself from the grip of the guilt in her mind.

  “Robinson,” she said, “you can’t ask that from him. He didn’t have anything to do with your death. What’s done is done! Get out of here!”

  Robinson ignored her and looked at Blaine. “I always knew it was you, Blaine. When I knew nothing else, I knew it was you, I watched over you, Blaine, I saved your life.”

  “Yes, you did,” Blaine said quietly.

  “So what?” Marie screamed. “So he saved your life. That doesn’t mean he owns it! One doesn’t save a life and expect it to be forfeited upon request. Tom, don’t listen to him!”

  Robinson said, “I have no means or intention of forcing you, Blaine. You will decide what you think is right and I will abide by it. And you will remember everything!”

  Blaine looked at the zombie almost with affection. “So there’s more to it. Much more. Isn’t there, Robinson?”

  Robinson nodded, his eyes fixed on Blaine’s face.

  “But how did you know?” Blaine asked. “How could you possibly know?”

  “My life has revolved around you. I’ve thought about nothing but you. And the better I knew you, Blaine, the more certain I was about this.”

  “Perhaps,” Blaine admitted.

  Marie said, “What on Earth are you talking about? What more? What more could there be?”

  “I have to think about this,” said Blaine, his gaze distant. “I have to remember. Robinson, please wait outside for a little while.”

  “Certainly,” the zombie said, and left immediately.

  Without even glancing at Marie, Blaine sat down and held his head in his hands. Now he had to remember something he would rather not think about. Now, once and for all, he had to trace it back and understand it.

  Etched sharp and raw in his mind still were the words Reilly had screamed at him in the Palace of Death: “You’re responsible! You killed me with your evil murdering mind! Yes, you, you hideous thing from the past, you damned monster! Everything shuns you except your friend the dead man! Why aren’t you dead, you murderer?”

  Had Reilly known?

  Blaine remembered Sammy Jones saying to him after the hunt: “Tom, you’re a natural-born killer. There’s nothing else for you.”

  Had Sammy guessed?

  And now the most important thing of all, that most significant moment of his life—the time of his death on a night in 1958. Vividly he remembered:

  The steering wheel was working again, but Blaine ignored it, filled with a sudden fierce exultancy, a lightning switch of mood that welcomed the smash, lusted tor it, and for pain and cruelty and death . . .

  Blaine shuddered convulsively as he relived the moment he had wanted to forget—the moment when he might have avoided catastrophe, but had preferred to kill.

  He lifted his head and looked at his wife. He said, “I killed him. That’s what Robinson knew. And now I know it, too.”

  33.

  CAREFULLY he explained it all to Marie. She refused at first to believe him.

  “It was so far back, Tom! How can you be sure of what happened?”

  “I’m sure,” Blaine said. “I don’t think any person could forget die way he died. I remember every detail of my death. That was how I died.”

  “Still, you can’t call yourself a murderer because of one instant, one fraction of a second—”

  “How long does it take to shoot a bullet or to drive in a knife?” Blaine asked. “A fraction of a second! That’s how long it takes to become a murderer.”

  “But, Tom, you had no motive!” Blaine shook his head. “It’s true that I didn’t kill for gain or revenge. But then Pm not that kind of murderer. I’m the grass-roots variety, the ordinary average guy with a little of everything in his makeup, including murder. I killed because, in that moment, I had the opportunity. My special opportunity, a unique interlocking of events, moods, train of thought, humidity, temperature, and Lord knows what else.”

  “But you’re not to blame!” Marie said. “It would never have happened if Rex Power Systems and I hadn’t created that special opportunity for you.”

  “Yes, but I seized the opportunity,” said Blaine, “seized it and performed a cold-blooded murder just for fun, because I knew I could never be caught at it. My murder.”

  “Our murder,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “All right, we’re murderers,” Marie said calmly. “Accept it, Tom. Don’t get mushy-minded about it We’ve killed once. We can kill again.”

  “Never,” said Blaine.

  “He’s almost finished! I swear to you, Tom, there’s not a month of life in him. One blow and he’s done for. One push.”

  “I’m not that kind of murderer.”

  “Will you let me do it?”

  “I’m not that kind, either.”

  “You idiot! Then just do nothing! Wait. A month, no more than that, and he’s finished. You can wait a month, Tom—”

  “More murder,” Blaine said wearily.

  “Tom! You’re not going to give him your body! What about our life together?”

  “Do you think we could go on after this?” Blaine asked. “I couldn’t. Now stop arguing with me. I don’t know whether I’d do this if there weren’t a hereafter. Quite probably I wouldn’t JBut there is a hereafter. I’d like to go there with my accounts as straight as possible, all bills paid in full, all restitutions made. If this were my only existence, I’d cling to it with everything I’ve got. But it isn’t! Can you understand that?”

  “Yes, of course,” Marie
said unhappily.

  “Frankly, I’m getting pretty curious about this afterlife. I want to see it. And there’s one thing more.”

  “What’s that?”

  MARIE’S shoulders were trembling, so Blaine put his arm around her. He was thinking back to the conversation he had had with Hull, the elegant and aristocratic Quarry.

  Hull had said: “We follow Nietzsche’s dictum—to die at the right time! Intelligent people don’t clutch at the last shreds of life like drowning men clinging to a bit of board. They know that the body’s life is only an infinitesimal portion of Man’s total existence. Why shouldn’t those bright pupils skip a grade or two of school?”

  Blaine remembered how strange, dark, atavistic and noble Hull’s lordly selection of death had seemed. Pretentious, of course, but then life itself was a pretension in the vast universe of unliving matter. Hull had seemed like an ancient Japanese nobleman kneeling to perform the ceremonial act of hara-kiri, and emphasizing the importance of life in the very selection of death.

  And Hull had said: “The deed of dying transcends class and breeding. It is every man’s patent of nobility, his summons from the king, his knightly adventure. And how he acquits himself in that lonely and perilous enterprise is his true measure as a man.”

  Marie broke into his reverie, asking, “What was that one thing more?”

  “Oh.” Blaine thought for a moment “I just wanted to say that X guess some of the attitudes of the 22nd century have nibbed off on me. Especially the aristocratic ones.” He grinned and kissed her. “But, of course, I always did have good taste.”

  34.

  BLAINE opened the door of the cottage. “Robinson,” he said, “come with me to the Suicide Booth. I’m giving you my body.”

  “I expected no less of you, Tom,” the zombie said.

  Together they went slowly down the mountainside. Marie watched them from a window for a few seconds, then started down after them.

  They stopped at the door to the Suicide Booth. Blaine said, “Do you think you can take over all right?”