Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “All right, stop nagging, get me a canteen.”

  “Oh, sir!”

  “Eh? What’s the matter?”

  “You know I can’t leave my post here on the perimeter.”

  “Why in hell can’t you?”

  “It’s against orders. And also, because there’s an alien behind those rocks.”

  “I’ll keep watch for you, Max old boy, and you fetch a canteen like a good boy.”

  “It’s good of you to offer, sir, but I can’t allow that. I am a PR robot, constructed for the sole purpose of guarding the camp. I must not turn that responsibility over to anyone else, not even an Earthman or another PR robot, until the password is given and I am relieved of duty.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Halloran muttered. “Any place I start, it still comes out zero.” Painfully he dragged himself behind the rocks. “What’s the matter?” the robot asked. “What did I say?” There was no answer.

  “Mr. Halloran? Jamisdar Alien?”

  Still no answer. Max continued to guard his perimeter.

  Halloran was tired. His throat hurt from talking with a stupid robot, and his body hurt all over from the endless blows of the double sun. He had gone beyond sunburn; he was blackened, crusted over, a roast turkey of a man. Pain, thirst, and fatigue dominated him, leaving no room for any emotion except anger.

  He was furious at himself for being caught in so absurd a situation, for letting himself be killed so casually. (“Halloran? Oh, yes, he didn’t know the password, poor devil, and he died of exposure not fifty yards from water and shelter. Sad, strange, funny sort of end—”)

  It was anger that kept him going now, that enabled him to review his situation and to search for a way into the camp.

  He had convinced the robot that he was an Earthman. Then he had convinced the robot that he was an alien. Both approaches had failed when it came to the crucial issue of entry into the camp.

  What was there left to try now?

  He rolled over and stared up into the glowing white sky. Black specks moved across his line of vision. Hallucination? No, birds were circling. They were ignoring their usual diet of coyotes, waiting for the collapse of something really tasty, a walking banquet . . .

  Halloran forced himself to sit upright. Now, he told himself, I must review the situation and search for a loop-hole.

  From Max’s viewpoint, all sentient creatures who possess the password are Earthmen; all sentient creatures who do not possess the password are aliens.

  Which means—

  Means what? For a second, Halloran thought he had stumbled onto the key to the puzzle. But he was having difficulty concentrating. The birds were circling lower. One of the coyotes had come out and was sniffing at his shoes.

  Forget all that. Concentrate. Become a practical automatologist.

  Really, when you get right down to it. Max is stupid. He wasn’t designed to detect frauds, except in the most limited capacity. His criteria are—archaic. Like that story about how Plato defined man as a featherless biped, and Diogenes the Cynic produced a plucked chicken which he maintained fitted the definition. Plato thereupon changed his definition to state that man was a featherless biped with broad nails.

  But what has that got to do with Max?

  Halloran shook his head savagely, trying to force himself to concentrate. But all he could see was Plato’s man—a six-foot chicken without a feather on his body, but with broad fingernails.

  Max was vulnerable. He had to be! Unlike Plato, he couldn’t change his mind. Max was stuck with his definitions, and with their logical consequences . . .

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Halloran said. “I do believe I have figured a way.”

  He tried to think it through, but found he wasn’t able. He simply had to try it, and win or lose on the result. “Max,” he said softly, “one plucked chicken is coming up. Or rather, one unplucked chicken. Put that in your cosmology and smoke it!”

  He wasn’t sure what he meant, but he knew what he was going to do.

  Captain Beatty and Lieutenant James returned to the camp at the end of three Earth days. They found Halloran unconscious and delirious, a victim of dehydration and sunstroke. He raved about how Plato had tried to keep him out of the camp, and how Halloran had transformed himself into a six-foot chicken without broad fingernails, thus getting the best of the learned philosopher and his robot buddy.

  Max had given him water, wrapped his body in wet blankets, and had produced black shade out of a double sheet of plastic. Halloran would recover in a day or two.

  He had written a note before passing out: No password couldn’t get back in tell factory install emergency bypass in PR robots.

  Beatty couldn’t make any sense out of Halloran, so he questioned Max. He heard about Halloran’s trip of inspection and the various aliens who looked exactly like him, and what they said and what Halloran said. Obviously, these were all increasingly desperate attempts on Halloran’s part to get back into the camp.

  “But what happened after that?” Beatty asked. “How did he finally get in?”

  “He didn’t ‘get in,’ ” Max said. “He simply was in at one point.”

  “But how did he get past you?”

  “He didn’t! That would have been quite impossible. Mr. Halloran simply was inside the camp.”

  “I don’t understand,” Beatty said.

  “Quite frankly, sir, I don’t either. I’m afraid that only Mr. Halloran can answer your question.”

  “It’ll be awhile before Halloran talks to anyone,” Beatty said. “Still, if he figured out a way, I suppose I can, too.”

  Beatty and James both tried, but they couldn’t come up with the answer. They weren’t desperate enough or angry enough, and they weren’t even thinking along the right lines. To understand how Halloran had gotten in, it was necessary to view the final course of events from Max’s viewpoint.

  Heat, wind, birds, rock, suns, sand. I disregard the irrelevant. I guard the camp perimeter against aliens.

  Now something is coming toward me, out of the rocks, out of the desert. It is a large creature, it has hair hanging over its face, it creeps on four limbs.

  I challenge. It snarls at me. I challenge again, in a more pre-emptory manner, I switch on my armament, I threaten. The creature growls and keeps on crawling toward the camp.

  I consult my definitions in order to produce an appropriate response.

  I know that humans and aliens are both classes of sentient creature characterized by intelligence, which is expressed through the faculty of speech. This faculty is invariably employed to respond to my challenges.

  Humans always answer correctly when asked the password. Aliens always answer incorrectly when asked the password. Both aliens and humans always answer—correctly or incorrectly—when asked the password.

  Since this is invariably so, I must assume that any creature which does not answer my challenge is unable to answer, and can be ignored.

  Birds and reptiles can be ignored. This large beast which crawls past me can also be ignored I pay no attention to the creature; but I keep my sensors at extended alert, because Mr. Halloran is somewhere out in the desert. There is also an alien out there, a Jamisdar.

  But what is this? It is Mr. Halloran, miraculously back in the camp, groaning, suffering from dehydration and sunstroke. The beast who crept past me is gone without trace, and the Jamisdar is presumably still praying in the rocks . . .

  DOCTOR ZOMBIE AND HIS FURRY LITTLE FRIENDS

  I think I am fairly safe here. I live at present in a small apartment northeast of the Zocalo, in one of the oldest parts of Mexico City. As a foreigner, my inevitable first impression is how like Spain this country seems, and how different it really is. In Madrid the streets are a maze which draws you continually deeper, toward hidden centers with tedious, well-guarded secrets. Concealment of the commonplace is surely a heritage of the Moors. Whereas Mexican streets are an inverted labyrinth which leads outward toward the mountains, toward openness,
toward revelations which remain forever elusive. Nothing is concealed; but nothing in Mexico is comprehensible. This is the way of the Indians, past and present—a defense based upon permeability; a transparent defense like that of the sea anemone.

  I find this style profound and compatible. I conform to insight born in Tenochtitlan or Tlaxcala; I conceal nothing, and thus contrive to hide everything.

  How often I have envied the thief who has nothing to hide but a handful of game! Some of us are less lucky, some of us possess secrets which won’t fit into our pockets, or into our closets; secrets which cannot even be contained in our parlors or buried in our back yards. Gilles de Retz required a private hidden cemetery scarcely smaller than Pere La Chaise. My own needs are more modest; but not by much.

  I am not a sociable man. I dream of a house in the country, on the barren slopes of Ixtaccihuatl, where there is no other human habitation for miles in any direction. But that would be madness. The police assume that a man who isolates himself has something to conceal; the equation is as true as it is banal. Those polite, relentless Mexican police! How they distrust foreigners, and how rightfully so! They would have searched my lonely house on some pretext, and the truth would have come out—a three-day sensation for the newspapers.

  I have avoided all of that, or at least put it off, by living where I live. Not even Garcia, the most zealous policeman in my neighborhood, can make himself believe that I use this small permeable apartment for secret ungodly experiments of a terrible nature. As is rumored.

  My door is usually ajar. When the shopkeepers deliver my provisions, I tell them to walk right in. They never do so, they are innately respectful of a man’s privacy. But I tell them in any case.

  I have three rooms arranged in line. One enters through the kitchen. Next is the parlor, and after that the bedroom. Each room has a door, none of which I ever close completely. Perhaps I carry this fetish of openness too far. For if anyone ever walked through my apartment, pushed the bedroom door fully open and looked inside, I suppose I would have to kill myself.

  To date, my callers have never gone beyond the kitchen. I think they are frightened of me.

  And why not? I am frightened of myself.

  My work forces me into an uncongenial mode of life. I must take all of my meals in my apartment. I am a bad cook; even the meanest neighborhood restaurant exceeds my efforts. Even the sidewalk vendors with their overcooked tacos surpass my indigestible messes.

  And to make it worse, I am forced to invent ridiculous reasons for always eating at home. I tell my neighbors that my doctor allows me no spices whatsoever, no chilies, no tomatoes, no salt . . . Why? A rare condition of the liver. How did I contract it? From eating tainted meat many years ago in Jakarta . . .

  All of which is easy enough to say, you may think. But I find it difficult to remember the details. A liar is forced to live in a hateful and unnatural state of consistency. His role becomes his punishment.

  My neighbors find it easy to accept my contorted explanations. A little incongruity feels very lifelike to them, and they consider themselves excellent arbiters of truth; whereas all they really pass judgment on are questions of verisimilitude.

  Still, despite themselves, my neighbors sense something monstrous about me. Eduardo the butcher once said: “Did you know, Doctor, that zombies are allowed no salt? Maybe you are a zombie, eh?”

  Where on earth did he learn about zombies? In the cinema, I suppose, or from a comic book. I have seen old women make a sign to avert the evil eye when I pass, and I have heard children whisper behind my back: “Doctor Zombie, Doctor Zombie.”

  Old women and children! They are the repositories of what little wisdom this race possesses. Yes, and the butchers also know a thing or two.

  I am neither a doctor nor a zombie. Nevertheless, the old women and the children are quite right about me. Luckily, no one listens to them.

  So I continue to eat in my own kitchen—lamb, kid, pig, rabbit, beef, veal, chicken, and sometimes venison. It is the only way I can get the necessary quantities of meat into my house to feed my animals.

  Someone else has recently begun to suspect me. Unfortunately, that man is Diego Juan Garcia, a policeman.

  Garcia is stocky, broad-faced, careful, a good cop. Around the Zocalo he is considered incorruptible—an Aztec Cato, but with a better disposition. According to the vegetable woman—who is perhaps in love with me—Garcia believes that I might well be an escaped German war criminal.

  It is an amazing conception, factually wrong, but intuitionally correct. Garcia is certain that, somehow, he has hit upon the truth. He would have acted by now if it were not for the intercession of my neighbors. The shoemaker, the butcher, the shoeshine boy, and especially the vegetable woman, all vouch for me. They are bourgeois rationalists, they believe their own projections of my character. They chide Garcia: “Isn’t it obvious that this foreigner is a quiet, goodhearted man, a harmless scholar, a dreamer?”

  Madly enough, they too are factually wrong, but intuitionally correct.

  My invaluable neighbors address me as “Doctor,” and sometimes as “Professor.” These are honorary degrees which they awarded me quite spontaneously, as a reward to my appearance. I did not solicit a title, but I do not reject it. “Senor Doctor” is another mask behind which I can hide.

  I suppose I look to them like a doctor: huge glistening forehead, gray hair bristling from the sides of my balding head, square, stern, wrinkled face. Yes, and my European accent, my careful Spanish constructions, my absentminded air . . . And my gold-rimmed glasses! What else could I be but a doctor, and a German one at that?

  My title demands an occupation, and I claim to be a scholar on extended leave from my university. I tell them that I am writing a book about the Toltecs, a book in which I will collate evidence of a cultural linkage between that mysterious race and the Incas.

  “Yes, gentlemen, I expect that my book will create quite a stir in Heidelberg and Bonn. There are vested interests which will be offended. Attempts will doubtless be made to represent me as a crank. My theory, you see, could shake the entire world of pre-Columbian studies . . .”

  I had prepared the above personality before coming to Mexico. I read Stephens, Prescott, Vaillant, Alfonso Caso. I even went to the trouble of copying out the first third of Dreyer’s discredited thesis on cultural diffusion, in which he postulates a Mayan-Toltec cultural exchange. That gave me an opus of some eighty handwritten pages which I could claim as my own. The unfinished manuscript was my excuse for being in Mexico. Anyone could glance at the erudite pages scattered over my desk and see for himself what sort of man I was.

  I thought that would suffice; but I hadn’t allowed for the dynamism inherent in my role. Senor Ortega, my grocer, is also interested in pre-Columbian studies, and is disturbingly knowledgeable. Senor Andrade, the barber, was born in a pueblo within five miles of the ruins of Teotihuacan. And little Jorge Silverio, the shoeshine boy whose mother works in a tortilleria, dreams of attending a great university, and asks me very humbly if I might use my influence at Bonn . . .

  I am the victim of my neighbors’ expectations. I have become their professor, not mine. Because of them I must spend endless hours at the National Museum of Anthropology, and waste whole days at Teotihuacan, Tula, Xochicalco. My neighbors force me to work hard at my scholarly pursuit. And I have become quite literally what I purported to be: an expert, possessed of formidable knowledge, more than a little mad.

  The role has penetrated me, mingled with me, transformed me; to the extent that now I really do believe in the likelihood of a Toltec-Incan connection, I have unassailable evidence, I have seriously considered publishing my findings . . .

  All of which I find tiresome and quite beside the point.

  I had a bad scare last month. My landlady, Senora Elvira Macias, stopped me on the street and demanded that I get rid of my dog.

  “But, senora, I have no dog.”

  “Excuse me, senor, but you do have a dog. I
heard it last night, whining and scratching at your door. And my rules, which were also those of my poor late husband, expressly forbid—”

  “My dear senora, you must be mistaken. I can assure you . . .”

  And there was Garcia, inevitable as death, in freshly starched khakis, puffing on a Delicado and listening to our conversation.

  “A scratching sound? Perhaps it was the termites, senora, or the cockroaches.”

  She shook her head. “It was not that kind of sound.”

  “Rats, then. Your building, I regret to say, is infested with rats.”

  “I know very well what rats sound like,” Senora Elvira said, invincibly ingenuous. “But this was not like that, this was a doglike sound which came from your apartment. And as I have told you, I have an absolute rule against pets.”

  Garcia was watching me, and I saw reflected in his eyes my deeds at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt. I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that I was one of the victims, that I had spent the war years as a prisoner in the Tjilatjap concentration camp in Java.

  But I also knew that the specific facts did not matter. My crimes against humanity were real enough: Garcia just happened to be sensing next year’s frightfulness rather than last year’s.

  I might have confessed everything at that moment if Senora Elvira had not turned to Garcia and said, “Well, what are you going to do about all this? He keeps a dog, perhaps two dogs, he keeps God knows what in that apartment of his. What are you going to do?”

  Garcia said nothing. His immobile face reminded me of the stone mask of Tlaloc in the Cholula museum. My own reaction was in keeping with that transparent defense by which I hide my secrets. I ground my teeth, flared my nostrils, tried to simulate the furia espanol.

  “Dogs?” I howled. “I’ll show you dogs! Come up and search my apartment! I will pay you a hundred pesos for each dog you find, two hundred for purebreeds. You come too, Garcia, and bring all your friends. Perhaps I have a horse up there as well, eh? And maybe a pig? Bring witnesses, bring newspaper reporters, I want my menagerie to be noted with accuracy.”