Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Mun, mun, mun,” Erum stated firmly. “Mun, mun mun mun. Mun mun.” He paused, and in a somewhat nervous voice asked the mayor: “Mun, mun?”

  “Mun . . . mun mun,” the mayor replied firmly, and the other officials nodded. They all turned to Jackson.

  “Mun, mun-mun?” Erum asked him, tremulously, but with dignity.

  Jackson was numbed speechless. His face turned a choleric red and a large blue vein started to pulse in his neck. But he managed to speak slowly, calmly, and with infinite menace.

  “Just what,” he said, “do you lousy third-rate yokels think you’re pulling?”

  “Mun-mun?” the mayor asked Erum.

  “Mun-mun, mun-mun-mun,” Erum replied quickly, making a gesture of incomprehension.

  “You better talk sense,” Jackson said. His voice was still low, but the vein in his neck writhed like a firehose under pressure.

  “Mun!” one of the aldermen said quickly to the borough president.

  “Mun mun-mun mun?” the borough president answered piteously, his voice breaking on the last word.

  “So you won’t talk sense, huh?”

  “Mun! Mun-mun!” the mayor cried, his face gone ashen with fright.

  The others looked and saw Jackson’s hand clearing the blaster and taking aim at Erum’s chest.

  “Quit horsing around!” Jackson commanded. The vein in his neck pulsed like a python in travail.

  “Mun-mun-mun!” Erum pleaded, dropping to his knees.

  “Mun-mun-mun!” the mayor shrieked, rolling his eyes and fainting.

  “You get it now,” Jackson said to Erum. His finger whitened on the trigger.

  Erum, his teeth chattering, managed to gasp out a strangled “Mun-mun, mun?” But then his nerves gave way and he waited for death with jaw agape and eyes unfocused.

  Jackson took up the last fraction of slack in the trigger. Then, abruptly, he let up and shoved the blaster back in its holster.

  “Mun, mun!” Erum managed to say.

  “Shaddap,” Jackson said. He stepped back and glared at the cringing Naian officials.

  He would have dearly loved to blast them all. But he couldn’t do it. Jackson had to come to a belated acknowledgement of an unacceptable reality.

  His impeccable linguist’s ear had heard, and his polyglot brain had analyzed. Dismayingly, he had realized that the Naians were not trying to put anything over on him. They were speaking not nonsense, but a true language.

  This language was made up at present of the single sound “mun.” This sound could carry an extensive repertoire of meanings through variations in pitch and pattern, changes in stress and quantity, alteration of rhythm and repetition, and through accompanying gestures and facial expressions.

  A language consisting of infinite variations on a single word! Jackson didn’t want to believe it, but he was too good a linguist to doubt the evidence of his own trained senses.

  He could learn this language, of course.

  But by the time he had learned it, what would it have changed into?

  Jackson sighed and rubbed his face wearily. In a sense it was inevitable. All languages change. But on Earth and the few dozen worlds she had contacted, the languages changed with relative slowness.

  On Na, the rate of change was faster. Quite a bit faster.

  The Na language changed as fashions change on Earth, only faster. It changed as prices change or as the weather changes. It changed endlessly and incessantly, in accordance with unknown rules and invisible principles. It changed its form as an avalanche changes its shape. Compared with it, English was like a glacier.

  The Na language was, truly and monstrously, a simulacrum of Heraclitus’s river. You cannot step into the same river twice, said Heraclitus; for other waters are forever flowing on.

  Concerning the language of Na, this was simply and literally true.

  That made it bad enough. But even worse was the fact that an observer like Jackson could never hope to fix or isolate even one term out of the dynamic shifting network of terms that composed the Na language. For the observer’s action would be gross enough by itself to disrupt and alter the system, causing it to change unpredictably. And so, if the term were isolated, its relationship to the other terms in the system would necessarily be destroyed, and the term itself, by definition, would be false.

  By the fact of its change, the language was rendered impervious to condification and control. Through indeterminacy, the Na tongue resisted all attempts to conquer it. And Jackson had gone from Heraclitus to Heisenberg without touching second base. He was dazed and dazzled, and he looked upon the officials with something approaching awe.

  “You’ve done it, boys,” he told them. “You’ve beaten the system. Old Earth could swallow you and never notice the difference; you couldn’t do a damned thing about it. But the folks back home like their legalism, and our law says that we must be in a state of communication as a prior condition to any transaction.”

  “Mun?” Erum asked politely.

  “So I guess that means I leave you folks alone,” Jackson said. “At least, I do as long as they keep that law on the books. But what the hell, a reprieve is the best anyone can ask for. Eh?”

  “Mun mun,” the mayor said hesitantly.

  “I’ll be getting along now,” Jackson said. “Fair’s fair . . . But if I ever find out that you Naians were putting one over on me—”

  He left the sentence unfinished. Without another word, Jackson turned and went back to his ship.

  In half an hour he was spaceworthy, and fifteen minutes after that he was under way.

  VI

  In Erum’s office, the officials watched while Jackson’s spaceship glowed like a comet in the dark afternoon sky. It dwindled to a brilliant needlepoint, and then vanished into the vastness of space.

  The officials were silent for a moment; then they turned and looked at each other. Suddenly, spontaneously, they burst into laughter. Harder and harder they laughed, clutching their sides while tears rolled down their cheeks.

  The mayor was the first to check the hysteria. Getting a grip on himself he said, “Mun, mun, mun-mun.”

  This thought instantly sobered the others. Their mirth died away. Uneasily they contemplated the distant unfriendly sky, and they thought back over their recent adventures.

  At last young Erum asked, “Mun-mun? Mun-mun?”

  Several of the officials smiled at the naiveté of the question. And yet, none could answer that simple yet crucial demand. Why indeed? Did anyone dare hazard even a guess?

  It was a perplexity leaving in doubt not only the future but the past as well. And, if a real answer were unthinkable, then no answer at all was surely insupportable.

  The silence grew, and Erum’s young mouth twisted downwards in premature cynicism. He said quite harshly, “Mun! Mun-mun! Mun?”

  His shocking words were no more than the hasty cruelty of the young; but such a statement could not go unchallenged. And the venerable first alderman stepped forward to essay a reply.

  “Mun mun, mun-mun,” the old man said, with disarming simplicity. “Mun mun mun-mun? Mun mun-mun-mun. Mun mun mun; mun mun mun; mun mun. Mun, mun mun mun—mun mun mun. Mun-mun? Mun mun mun mun!”

  This straightforward declaration of faith pierced Erum to the core of his being. Tears sprang unanticipated to his eyes. All postures forgotten, he turned to the sky, clenched his fist and shouted, “Mun! Mun! Mun-mun!”

  Smiling serenely, the old alderman murmured, “Mun-mun-mun; mun, mun-mun.”

  This was, ironically enough, the marvelous and frightening truth of the situation. Perhaps it was just as well that the others did not hear.

  1968

  I SEE A MAN SITTING ON A CHAIR, AND THE CHAIR IS BITING HIS LEG

  This is not your usual post-World War Three story. (Understatement No. 1.) It is about a disease with startling (and contemporary) effects, a disease that, as explained by a doctor in understatement No.2, “causes a radical change in relationship bet
ween the victim and the external world.” The victim is a post-W.W. III harvester named Joe Pareti; the external world becomes fully as outrageous as the title implies and as might be expected from a collaboration by two writers whose fiction has been notable more for its invention, humor and excitement than moderation. Harlan Ellison’s latest book is the anthology DANGEROUS VISIONS (Doubleday), reviewed here last month. Robert Sheckley’s new novel, DIMENSION OF MIRACLES, will be published later this year by Dell.

  BEHIND HIM LAY THE GRAY Azores, behind the Gates of Hercules; the sky above, the goo below.

  “Screwin’ goof Screwin’ goo!” Pareti yelled at the fading afternoon sunlight. It came up garbled, around the stump of cigar, and it laced the vigor Pareti usually brought to the curse, because it was nearly shift’s end, and he was exhausted. The first time he had yelled it had been three years before, when he had signed up to work in the goo fields as a harvester. He had yelled it when he’d first seen the mucous gray plankton mutation spotting this area of the Atlantic. Like leprosy on the cool blue body of the sea.

  “Screwin’ goo,” he murmured. It was ritual now. It kept him company in the punt. Just him, alone there: Joe Pareti and his dying voice. And the ghostly gray-white goo.

  He caught the moving flash of gray out of the comer of his eye, light reflecting in the eskimo-slit glasses. He wheeled the punt around expertly. The goo was extruding again. A grayish-pale tentacle rose above the ocean’s surface; it looked like an elephant’s trunk. Skimming smoothly toward it, Pareti unconsciously gauged his distance: five feet from it, right arm tensed, out comes the net—the strange net on its pole, that resembled nothing so much as the butterfly nets used by the Indians of Patzcuaro—and with a side-arm softball pitch of a motion he scooped it up, writhing.

  The goo wriggled and twisted, flailed at the meshes, sucked toothlessly up the aluminum handle. Pareti estimated the chunk at five pounds, even as he brought it inboard and dumped it into the lazarette. It was heavy for so small a fragment.

  As the goo fell toward it, the lazarette dilated and compressed air shut the lid down with a sucking sound on the tentacle. Then the iris closed over the lid.

  The goo had touched him on the glove. Pareti decided it was too much trouble to disinfect immediately. He swiped absently at his thinning sun-bleached hair, falling over his eyes, and wheeled the punt around again. He was about two miles from the Texas Tower.

  He was fifty miles out into the Atlantic.

  He was off the coast of Hatteras, in Diamond Shoals.

  He was at 35° latitude, 75° west longitude.

  He was well into the goo fields.

  He was exhausted. Shift’s end.

  Screwin’ goo.

  He began working his way back.

  The sea was flat, and a long, steady swell rolled back toward the TexasTower. There was no wind, and the sun shone hard and diamond as it had ever since the Third World War, brighter than it had ever shone before. It was almost perfect harvesting weather, at five hundred and thirty dollars a shift.

  Off to his left a ten square yard film of goo lay like a delicate tracery of gray, almost invisible against the ocean. He altered course and expertly collected it. It offered no fight at all. Stretched too thin.

  He continued toward the TexasTower, gathering goo as he skimmed. He rarely encountered the same shape twice. The largest chunk he collected was disguised as a Cyprus stump. (Stupid goo, he thought, who ever saw a Cyprus stump growing fifty miles out?) The smallest was a copy of a baby seal. Cadaverously gray and eyeless. Pareti gathered each piece quickly, without hesitation; he had an uncanny aptitude for recognizing goo in any of its shapes and a flawless harvesting technique that was infinitely more refined and eloquent than the methods used by the company-trained harvesters. He was the dancer with natural rhythm, the painter who had never taken a lesson, the instinctive tracker. It had been the impetus that had led him here to the goo fields when he had graduated Summa Cum from the multiversity, rather than into industry or one of the cattle-prod think-factories. Everything he had learned, all the education he had gotten, of what use was it in a clogged choking jam-crowded world of twenty-seven billion overcrowded people, all scrabbling for the most demeaning jobs? Anyone could get an education; a few less got their degrees; even less got their gold seals, and a handful—like Joe Pareti—came out the other end of the multiversity slide-trough with a degree, a doctorate, a gold seal and the double-A rating. And none of it was worth his natural instinct for goo harvesting.

  At the speed he harvested, he could earn more than a project engineer.

  After twelve hours of shift, out on the glare-frosted sea, even that satisfaction was dulled by exhaustion. He only wanted to hit the bunk in his stateroom. And sleep. And sleep. He threw the soggy cigar stub into the sea.

  The structure loomed up before him. It was traditionally called a TexasTower, yet it bore no resemblance to the original offshore drilling rigs of pre-Third World War America. It looked, instead, like an articulated coral reef or the skeleton of some inconceivable aluminum whale.

  The TexasTower was a problem in definition. It could be moved, therefore it was a ship; it could be fastened irrevocably to the ocean bottom, therefore it was an island. Above the surface there was a cat’s cradle network of pipes: feeder tubes into which the harvesters fed the goo (as Pareti now fed his load, hooking the lazarette’s collapsible tube nozzle onto the monel metal hardware of the TexasTower’s feeder tube, feeling the tube pulse as the pneumatic suction was applied, sucking the goo out of the punt’s storage bins), pipe racks to moor the punts, more pipes to support the radar mast.

  There was a pair of cylindrical pipes that gaped open like howitzers. The entry ports. Below the waterline, like an iceberg, the TexasTower spread and extended itself, with collapsible sections that could be extended or folded away as depth and necessity demanded. Here in Diamond Shoals, several dozen of the lowest levels had been folded inoperative.

  It was shapeless, ungainly, slow moving, impossible to sink in a hurricane, more ponderous than a galleon. As a ship, it was unquestionably the worst design in nautical history, but as a factory, it was a marvel.

  Pareti climbed up out of the mooring complex, carrying his net-pole, and entered the nearest entry port. He went through the decontamination and storage locks, and was puffed inside the Texas Tower proper. Swinging down the winding aluminum staircase, he heard voices rising from below. It was Mercier, about to go on-shift, and Peggy Flinn, who had been on sick call for the last three days with her period. The two harvesters were arguing.

  “They’re processing it out at fifty-six dollars a ton,” Peggy was saying, her voice rising. Apparently they had been at it for some time. They were discussing harvester bonuses.

  “Before or after it fragments?” Mercier demanded.

  “Now you know damn well that’s after-hag weight,” she snapped back. “Which means every ton we snag out here gets tanked through and comes up somewhere around forty or forty-one tons after radiation. We’re getting bonus money on tower weight, not frag weight!”

  Pareti had heard it a million times before in his three years on the goo fields. The goo was sent back to the cracking and radiation plants when the bins were full. Subjected to the various patented techniques of the master processing companies, the goo multiplied itself molecule for molecule, fragmented, grew, expanded, swelled, and yielded forty times its own original weight of goo. Which was then “killed” and re-processed as the basic artificial foodstuff of a population diet long since a stranger to steaks and eggs and carrots and coffee. The Third World War had been a terrible tragedy in that it had killed off enormous quantities of everything except people.

  The goo was ground up, reprocessed, purified, vitamin-supplemented, colored, scented, accented, individually packaged under a host of brand names—Savor, VitaGram, Deelish, Gratifood, Sweetmeat, Quench-Caffe, Family Treat-all—and marketed to twenty-seven billion open and waiting mouths. Merely add thrice-reprocessed water and
serve.

  The harvesters were literally keeping the world alive.

  And even at five hundred and thirty dollars per shift, some of them felt they were being underpaid.

  Pareti clanked down the last few steps, and the two arguing harvesters looked up at him. “Hi, Joe,” Mercier said. Peggy smiled.

  “Long shift?” she asked archly.

  “Long enough. I’m whacked out.”

  She stood a little straighter. “Completely?”

  Pareti rubbed at his eyes. They felt grainy; he had been getting more dust in them than usual. “I thought it was that-time-of-the-month for you?”

  “Aw gone,” she grinned, spreading her hands like a little girl whose measles have vanished.

  “Yeah, that’d be nice,” Pareti accepted her service, “if you’ll throw in a back rub.”

  “And I’ll crack your spine.”

  Mercier chuckled and moved toward the staircase. “See you later,” he threw over his shoulder.

  Pareti and Peggy Flinn went down through sections to his stateroom. Living in an encapsulated environment for upwards of six months at a stretch, the harvesters had evolved their own social relationships. Women who were touchy about their sexual liaisons did not last long on the TexasTowers. There were seldom shore leaves for the harvesters—who referred to themselves as “the black gang”—and consequently all conveniences were provided by the company. Films, gourmet chefs, recreational sports, a fully-stocked and constantly-changing library . . . and the lady harvesters. It had begun with some of the women accepting “gratuities” from the men for sex, but that had had a deleterious effect on morale; so now their basic shift wages and bonuses were supplemented by off-shift sex pay. It was not uncommon for a reasonably good-looking and harvesting-adept woman to come back after an eight or nine month TexasTower stint with fifty thousand dollars in her credit account.

  In the stateroom, they undressed.

  “Jesus,” Peggy commented, “what happened to all your hair?”