Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

Four weeks had gone by. One day, Edelstein realized glumly that his time was just about up. He had racked his brain, only to confirm his worst suspicions: Manowitz liked everything that he liked. Manowitz liked castles, women, wealth, cars, vacations, wine, music, food. Whatever you named, Manowitz the copycat liked it.

  Then he remembered: Manowitz, by some strange quirk of the taste buds, could not abide lox.

  But Edelstein didn’t like lox, either, not even Nova Scotia.

  Edelstein prayed: Dear God, who is in charge of hell and heaven, I have had three wishes and used two miserably. Listen, God, I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I ask you, if a man happens to be granted three wishes, shouldn’t he be able to do better for himself than I have done? Shouldn’t he be able to have something good happen to him without filling the pockets of Manowitz, his worst enemy, who does nothing but collect double with no effort or pain?

  The final hour arrived. Edelstein grew calm, in the manner of a man who had accepted his fate. He realized that his hatred of Manowitz was futile, unworthy of him. With a new and sweet serenity, he said to himself, I am now going to ask for what I, Edelstein, personally want. If Manowitz has to go along for the ride, it simply can’t be helped.

  Edelstein stood up very straight. He said, “This is my last wish. I’ve been a bachelor too long. What I want is a woman whom I can marry. She should be about five feet, four inches tall, weigh about 115 pounds, shapely, of course, and with naturally blond hair. She should be intelligent, practical, in love with me, Jewish, of course, but sensual and fun-loving——”

  The Edelstein mind suddenly moved into high gear!

  “And especially,” he added, “she should be—I don’t know quite how to put this—she should be the most, the maximum, that I want and can handle, speaking now in a purely sexual sense. You understand what I mean, Sitwell? Delicacy forbids that I should spell it out more specifically than that, but if the matter must be explained to you . . .”

  There was a light, somehow sexual tapping at the door. Edelstein went to answer it, chuckling to himself. Over twenty thousand dollars, two pounds of chopped chicken liver and now this! Manowitz, he thought, I have you now: Double the most a man wants is something I probably shouldn’t have wished on my worst enemy, but I did.

  STARTING FROM SCRATCH

  Robert Sheckley’s new story is, in one sense, a very funny spoof of the perceptions obtained under the influence of “mind expanding” drugs. In another sense, it is about a time of chaos and disaster among a very ancient race, and you should not scratch anywhere until you finish the story.

  LAST NIGHT I HAD A VERY strange dream. I dreamed that a voice said to me, “Excuse me for interrupting your previous dream, but I have an urgent problem and only you can help me with it.”

  I dreamed that I replied, “No apologies are necessary, it wasn’t that good a dream, and if I can help you in any way—”

  “Only you can help,” the voice said. “Otherwise I and all my people are doomed.”

  “Christ,” I said.

  His name was Froka and he was a member of a very ancient race. They had lived since time immemorial in a broad valley surrounded by gigantic mountains. They were a peaceable people, and they had, in the course of time, produced some outstanding artists. Their laws were exemplary, and they brought up their children in a loving and permissive manner. Though a few of them tended to indulge in drunkenness, and they had even known an occasional murderer, they considered themselves good and respectable sentient beings, who—

  I interrupted. “Look here, can’t you get straight to the urgent problem?”

  Froka apologized for being long-winded, but explained that on his world the standard form for supplications included a lengthy statement about the moral righteousness of the supplicant.

  “Okay,” I told him. “Let’s get to the problem.”

  Froka took a deep breath and began. He told me that about one hundred years ago (as they reckon time), an enormous reddish-yellow shaft had descended from the skies, landing close to the statue to the Unknown God in front of the city hall of their third largest city.

  The shaft was imperfectly cylindrical and about two miles in diameter. It ascended upward beyond the reach of their instruments and in defiance of all natural laws. They tested and found that the shaft was impervious to cold, heat, bacteria, proton bombardment, and, in fact, everything else they could think of. It stood there, motionless and incredible, for precisely five months, nineteen hours and six minutes.

  Then, for no reason at all, the shaft began to move in a north-northwesterly direction. Its mean speed was 78.881 miles per hour (as they reckon speed). It cut a gash 183.223 miles long by 2.011 miles wide, and then disappeared.

  A symposium of scientific authorities could reach no conclusion about this event. They finally declared that it was inexplicable, unique, and unlikely ever to be duplicated.

  But it did happen again, a month later, and this time in the capital. This time the cylinder moved a total of 820.331 miles, in seemingly erratic patterns. Property damage was incalculable, and several thousand lives were lost.

  Two months and a day after that the shaft returned again, affecting all three major cities.

  By this time everyone was aware that not only their individual lives but their entire civilization, their very existence as a race, was threatened by some unknown and perhaps unknowable phenomenon.

  This knowledge resulted in a widespread despair among the general population. There was a rapid alternation between hysteria and apathy.

  The fourth assault took place in the wastelands to the east of the capital. Real damage was minimal. Nevertheless, this time there was mass panic, which resulted in a frightening number of deaths by suicide.

  The situation was desperate. Now the pseudo-sciences were brought into the struggle alongside the sciences. No help was disdained, no theory was discounted, whether it be by biochemist, palmist, or astronomer. Not even the most outlandish conception could be disregarded, especially after the terrible summer night in which the beautiful ancient city of Raz and its two suburbs were completely annihilated.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had all this trouble, but I don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  “I was just coming to that,” the voice said.

  “Then continue,” I said. “But I would advise you to hurry up, because I think I’m going to wake up soon.”

  “My own part in this is rather difficult to explain,” Froka continued. “I am by profession a certified public accountant. But as a hobby I dabble in various techniques for expanding mental perception. Recently I have been experimenting with a chemical compound which we call kola, and which frequently causes states of deep illumination—”

  “We have similar compounds,” I told him.

  “Then you understand! Well, while voyaging—do you use that term? While under the influence, so to speak, I obtained a knowledge, a completely far-out understanding . . . But it’s so difficult to explain.”

  “Go on,” I broke in impatiently. “Get to the heart of it.”

  “Well,” the voice said, “I realized that my world existed upon many levels—atomic, subatomic, vibrationary planes, an infinity of levels of reality, all of which are also parts of other levels of existence.”

  “I know about that,” I said excitedly. “I recently realized the same thing about my world.”

  “So it was apparent to me,” Froka went on, “that one of our levels was being disturbed.”

  “Could you be a little more specific?” I asked.

  “My own feeling is that my world is experiencing an intrusion on a molecular level.”

  “Wild,” I told him. “But have you been able to trace down the intrusion?”

  “I think that I have,” the voice said. “But I have no proof. All of this is pure intuition.”

  “I believe in intuition myself,” I told him. “Tell me what you’ve found out.”

  “Well, sir,
” the voice said hesitantly, “I have come to realize—intuitively—that my world is a microscopic parasite of you.”

  “Say it straight!”

  “All right! I have discovered that in one aspect, in one plane of reality, my world exists between the second and third knuckles of your left hand. It has existed there for millions of our years, which are minutes to you. I cannot prove this, of course, and I am certainly not accusing you—”

  “That’s okay,” I told him. “You say that your world is located between the second and third knuckles of my left hand. All right. What can I do about it?”

  “Well, sir, my guess is that recently you have begun scratching in the area of my world.”

  “Scratching?”

  “I think so.”

  “And you think that the great destructive reddish shaft is one of my fingers?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And you want me to stop scratching.”

  “Only near that spot,” the voice said hastily. “It is an embarrassing request to make, I make it only to save my world from utter destruction. And I apologize—”

  “Don’t bother apologizing,” I said. “Sentient creatures should be ashamed of nothing.”

  “It’s kind of you to say so,” the voice said. “We are nonhuman, you know, and parasites, and we have no claims on you.”

  “All sentient creatures should stick together,” I told him. “You have my word that I will never ever again, so long as I live, scratch between the first and second knuckles of my left hand.”

  “The second and third knuckles,” he reminded me.

  “I’ll never again scratch between any of the knuckles of my—left hand! That is a solemn pledge and a promise which I will keep as long as I have breath.”

  “Sir,” the voice said, “you have saved my world. No thanks could be sufficient. But I thank you nevertheless.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said.

  Then the voice went away and I woke up.

  As soon as I remembered the dream, I put a Band-Aid across the knuckles of my left hand. I have ignored various itches in that area, have not even washed my left hand. I have worn this Band-Aid all day.

  At the end of next week I am going to take off the Band-Aid. I figure that should give them twenty or thirty billion years as they reckon time, which ought to be long enough for any race.

  But that isn’t my problem. My problem is that lately I have begun to have some unpleasant intuitions about the earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault, and the renewed volcanic activity in central Mexico. I mean it’s all coming together, and I’m scared.

  So look, excuse me for interrupting your previous dream, but I have this urgent problem that only you can help me with . . .

  1971

  DOWN THE DIGESTIVE TRACT

  The shift into illusions is often imperceptible . . .

  BUT will I really have hallucinations?” Gregory asked. “Like I said, I guarantee it,” Blake answered. “You should be into something by now.”

  Gregory looked around. The room was dismayingly, tediously familiar: narrow blue bed, walnut dresser, marble table with wrought-iron base, doubleheaded lamp, turkey-red rug, beige television set. He was sitting in an upholstered armchair. Across from him, on a white plastic couch, was Blake, pale and plump, poking at three speckled, irregularly shaped tablets.

  “I mean to say,” Blake said, “that there’s all sorts of acid going around—tabs, strips, blotters, dots, most of it cut with speed and some of it cut with Draino. But lucky you have just ingested old Doc Blake’s special tantric mantric instant freakout special superacid cocktail, known to the carriage trade as Specklebang and containing absolutely simon-pure LSD-25, plus carefully calculated additives of STP, DMT, and THC, plus a smidgeon of Yage, a touch of psilocybin and the merest hint of oloiuqui—plus Doc Blake’s own special ingredient—extract of foxberry, newest and most potent of the hallucinogenic potentiators.”

  Gregory was staring at his right hand, slowly clenching and unclenching it.

  “The result,” Blake went on, “is Doc Blake’s total instantaneous many-splendored delight, guaranteed to make you hallucinate on the quarter-hour at least—or I return your money and give up my credentials as the best free-lance underground chemist ever to hit the West Village.”

  “You sound like you’re stoned,” Gregory said.

  “Not at all,” Blake protested. “I am merely on speed, just simple, old-fashioned amphetamines such as truck drivers and high school students swallow by the pound and shoot by the gallon. Speed is nothing more than a stimulant. With its assistance I can do my thing faster and better. My thing is to create my own quickie drug empire between Houston and Fourteenth Streets and then bail out quickly, before I burn out my nerves or get crunched by the narcs or the Mafia—and then split for Switzerland where I will freak out in a splendid sanitarium, surrounded by gaudy women-, plump bank accounts, fast cars and the respect of the local politicos.”

  Blake paused for a moment and rubbed his upper lip. “Speed does bring on a certain sense of grandiloquence with accompanying verbosity—But never fear, my dear newly met friend and esteemed customer—my senses are more or less unimpaired and I am fully capable of acting as your guide for the superjumbotripout upon which you are now embarked.”

  “How long since I took that tablet?” Gregory asked.

  Blake looked at his watch. “Over an hour ago.”

  “Shouldn’t it be acting by now?”

  “It should indeed. It undoubtedly is. Something should be happening.”

  GREGORY looked around. He saw the grass-lined pit, the pulsing glow-worm, the hard-packed mica, the captive cricket. He was on the side of the pit nearest to the drain pipe. Across from him, on the mossy gray stone, was Blake, his cilia matted and his exoderm mottled, poking at three speckled irregularly shaped tablets.

  “What’s the matter?” Blake asked.

  Gregory scratched the tough membrane over his thorax. His cilia waved spasmodically in clear evidence of amazement, dismay, perhaps even fright. He extended a feeler, looked at it long and hard, bent it double and straightened it again.

  Blake’s antennae pointed straight up in a gesture of concern. “Hey, baby, speak to me! Are you hallucinating?”

  Gregory made an indeterminate movement with his tail. “It started just before, when I asked you if I’d really have any hallucinations. I was into it then but I didn’t realize it, everything seemed so natural, so ordinary . . . I was sitting on a chair, and you were on a couch, and we both had soft exoskeletons like—like mammals!”

  “The shift into illusions is often imperceptible.” Blake said. “One slides into them and out of them. What’s happening now?”

  Gregory coiled his segmented tail and relaxed his antennae. He looked around. The pit was dismayingly, tediously familiar. “Oh, I’m back to normal now. Do you think I’m going to have any more hallucinations?”

  “Like I told you, I guarantee it,” Blake said, neatly folding his glossy red wings and settling comfortably into a corner of the nest.

  THREE SINNERS IN THE GREEN JADE MOON

  was it the food, the music or a shameful secret that brought him back to the little cafe night after night?

  THE CHEF

  Dear God,

  The incident which I want to speak to you about took place some years ago, when I opened the best Indonesian restaurant in the Balearic Islands.

  I opened my restaurant in Santa Eulalia del Rio, which is a village on the island of Ibiza. At this time there already was an Indonesian restaurant in the port of Ibiza, and another in Palma de Mallorca. People have assured me that mine was easily the best.

  Despite this, business was not good.

  Santa Eulalia was very small, but there were numerous writers and artists living in the village and in the surrounding countryside. These people were all very poor; but not too poor to be unable to afford my rijstaffel. So why didn’t they eat more often at my place? Surely it was not
the competition from Juanito’s Restaurant, or Sa Punta. Even granting those places full credit for their lobster mayonnaise and their paella, respectively, they could not approach my sambal telor, my sate kambing, and especially my babi ketjap.

  I used to think the explanation lay in the fact that artists are nervous, temperamental people who need time to accustom themselves to new things, and especially to new restaurants.

  I am that way myself, and I have been trying to become a painter for many years. That, in fact, is how I came to open my restaurant in a place like Santa Eulalia. I wanted to live near other artists, and to earn a living also.

  Business was not good, but I was able to get by. My rent was low, I did my own cooking, and I had a local boy who served customers and changed records on the player and washed up the dishes afterwards. I didn’t pay him much for all that labor, but only because I couldn’t afford much. The boy was a marvel of a worker, always cheerful and clean, and with any luck he should someday become governor of the Balearics.

  So I had my restaurant, which I called the Green Jade Moon, and I had my waiter, and within a week I had a steady customer.

  I never did learn his name. He was a tall, thin, taciturn American with black hair. He might have been thirty or forty. He came in at nine o’clock every night and ordered the rijstaffel, ate it, paid, left a ten percent tip, and departed.

  I exaggerate only slightly, for on Sundays he ate paella at Sa Punta, and on Tuesdays he ate the lobster mayonnaise at Juanito’s. But why not, I ate in those places myself. The other five nights of the week he ate my rijstaffel, usually alone, once or twice with a woman, sometimes with a friend. He ate quietly, while Pablo, my waiter, bustled around serving dishes and changing records.

  Frankly, I was able to live in Santa Eulalia off this customer alone. Not well, but I could live.

  Prices were very cheap in those days.

  Now of course, when you find yourself in a situation like that, when you more or less live from the spending of one customer, you tend to study that customer with some care.