Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  Gleister Series Initial Termination Recycling:

  Charlie Gleister opened his eyes. The imperial audience room was as he had remembered it. On a table in front of him were the latest statistics: over 12 million Gleisters settled to date, more coming every minute. He shook his head and ran his fingers absentmindedly through his beard. Then he looked at the young man standing in front of him.

  “Good luck,” he said, and handed him the laser gun.

  Egon Gleister said, “Thank you,” pushed the button on his time machine and was gone.

  Alone, Charlie looked around the audience room. He would have to accustom himself to imperial duties, for of course he had to take his turn as Emperor, just as all the others would have to do. He and they would have to take all of the Gleister roles as the termination proceeded, until at last only he was left, in the end as in the beginning.

  But for now he was the Emperor, and that might be interesting. He was grateful that he had gotten the suicide part out of the way. He would have to do it again, of course; but not yet, not until all the others had done it.

  1975

  SYNCOPE & FUGUE

  MISHKIN AND THE ROBOT came to a tree. At the end of its branches there were blue eyes with thick eyebrows. All of the eyes swivelled to stare at Mishkin.

  “I thought you would come by this way,” the tree said, speaking from a speaker in its trunk. “I hope that you will not deny that you are Thomas Mishkin?”

  “That’s who I am.” Mishkin said. “Who are you?”

  “I am a bill collector disguised as a tree,” said the bill collector disguised as a tree.

  “For Chrissakes,” Mishkin said. “Did you follow me all the way to Harmonia?”

  “Indeed I did. It’s rather a curious story. Mr. Oppenheimer, head of the Ne Plus Ultra Collection Agency for which I work, got an inspiration while stoned on acid at his local Tai Chi Chuan class. It suddenly occurred to Oppenheimer that the essence of life lies in completions, and a man can only judge his life in reference to the thoroughness with which he has played his life-role. Hitherto, Oppenheimer had been an easy-going fellow who followed the usual practice of collecting the easily collectible debts and making a few ominous noises on the difficult ones, but ultimately saying to hell with them. Then Oppenheimer achieved his satori.

  To hell with mediocrity, he decided, if I’m head of a bill collecting agency, then I’m going to make an ethic and a goal out of bill collecting. The world may very well never understand me; but perhaps future generations will be able to judge the terrible purity of my motives.

  “And so Oppenheimer embarked upon the poignant and quixotic course that will probably bankrupt him within the year. He called all of us collectors into the Ready Room. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this time we’re going to get it all together.

  To hell with half-measures! Our goal now is 100 percent enforceability, and let the paranoia fall where it may. Go after those debts, be they one dollar or a million. Go to San Sebastian or Samoa or Sambal V, if need be, and don’t worry about the costs. We’re following a principle now, and principles are always impractical. Boys, we’re overthrowing the reality principle. So get out there and collect all of those debits and groove on completions.’ ”

  (“His speech is definitely late 1960s,” said the robot. “Whereas this is the year 2138 or therabouts. Somebody is conning somebody.”

  “Fuck off,” snarled the author.)

  “That was the call to arms,” the bill collector disguised as a tree said.

  “And that is why I am in Harmonia, Mr. Mishkin. I have come here as the result of one man’s vision, to collect your debts regardless of time, trouble and expense.”

  “I still can’t believe this,” Mishkin said.

  “And yet, there it is. I have a consolidation statement here for everything, Mr. Mishkin. Would you care to pay without fuss, or do you want me to get nasty?”

  “What debits are you talking about?” Mishkin asked.

  “To begin with, there is the matter of your back taxes, Federal, State and City. Didn’t quite get around to paying them last year, did you, Mr. Mishkin?”

  “It was a tough year.”

  “You owe eight thousand seven hundred and fifty-three dollars and fifty-one cents to your Uncle Sammy. Then there is the matter of child support. Sorta passed up on that for a year or so, didn’t you, Mishkin? Well, it’s a neat four-figure bundle that you owe to poor abandoned Marcia and little Zelda. Marcia has a new boyfriend, by the way, and little Zelda just flunked out of the Little Red Schoolhouse. Marcia asked me to tell you that she is well, having the best time of her life, and wants every cent you owe her, right now, or she’ll have you into The Tombs so fast it’ll make your teeth spin. She adds that, through psychoanalysis, she finally has the ego-strength to tell you that you were always a lousy lay and that everybody breaks up when she relates how diffidently you tried to pursue perversions.”

  “That sounds like Marcia,” Mishkin said.

  “Next, you owe Marty Bargenfield a thousand dollars. He’s your best friend, in case you don’t remember. Or he was. I mean, he still feels the same, but you’ve unaccountably cooled off. One might even say that you are avoiding him. Yet his only crime was to loan you money in a moment of need, when you were breaking up with Marcia and had to buy an abortion for Monique.”

  “How is Monique?” Mishkin asked.

  “She’s doing very nicely without you. She is back in Paris, working as a sales girl in Galleries Lafayette. She still treasures the eighty-cent string of wooden beads which was your only present to her during a tumultuous four month romance which you have described as ‘the most moving of my life.’ ”

  “I was broke,” Mishkin said. “And anyhow, she always said she hated gifts.”

  “But you knew better, hey, Mishkie? Never mind, I am not standing in judgement over you. The fact that your conduct, judged by any system of ethics you care to name, makes me want to puke, is entirely a personal matter with me and need not concern you at all. Now we come to the Bauhous Drugstore at 31 Barrow Street, run by fat friendly Charlie Ducks, who sold you dexamyl spansules, dexadrine tablets, librium, carbitol, nembutal, seconal, doriden, and so on, in astonishing quantities during your drug years, all of them on the basis of one non-refillable prescription for phenobarbital; who continued to do so until two years ago, when the heat got too hot and he went back to selling excedrin and lipsticks, and whom you ripped off for one hundred and eight-six dollars.”

  “He cleaned up on me,” Mishkin said. “He charged me double for everything.”

  “You always knew that. Did you ever complain about it?”

  “Anyhow, I’m going to pay him as soon as I get a hold of some money.”

  “But there’s never enough money for last year’s drugs, eh, Mish? We’ve all been down that road, baby; but it is loathsome, isn’t it?”

  “I can explain everything,” Mishkin said. “I have a statement which I would like to read into the record. The facts are capable of various interpretations. I only need a moment to pull myself together.” The robot extruded an axe from his left hand. He stepped forward and briskly chopped down the bill-collector, who perished miserably.

  “But I was just about to explain,” Mishkin said.

  “Never explain anything,” the robot told him. “Avoid bummers. Don’t go on other people’s trips.”

  “What is my trip?” Mishkin asked.

  “That would be telling,” said the robot.

  END CITY

  Travel far enough in any direction and you arrive at—

  THE way it can happen is like this: You’re leaning back in your first-class seat on Fat Cat Spacelines with a cigar in your face and a glass of champagne in your hand, going from Depredation City on Earth to Spoilsville Junction on Arcturus XII. Magda will be waiting for you just behind the customs barrier and the party in your honor will be going full swing at the Ultima Hilton. And you realize that, after a lifetime of struggle, you’re finally
rich, sexy, successful and respected. Life is like a ball of chicken liver, rich and tasty and dripping with grease. You’ve worked a long dirty time to get where you are and you’re ready at last to enjoy it.

  Just at this moment the landing sign flashes on.

  You say to the stewardess, “Tell me, pretty one, what is going on?”

  “We’re putting down at End City,” she tells you.

  “But that wasn’t scheduled. Why are we landing there?”

  She shrugs. “That’s where the ship’s computer took us and now we have to land here.”

  “Now look,” you say sternly, “I was assured by my very good friend, J. Williams Nash, the President of this Line, that there would be no unscheduled stops.”

  “End City terminates all previous assurances,” she tells you. “Maybe you didn’t want to come here, but you sure as hell have arrived.”

  You fasten your safety belt and think—just my stupid luck. Sweat your ass off all your life, and just when you’re ready to have a little fun, up comes End City.

  IT’S pretty easy to get into End City. All you have to do is show up. Park your spaceship in the junkyard. There’s nothing to sign. Don’t worry about a thing. Come around later and meet the boys.

  THE Quicksilver Kid swaggers up and asks, “Hey, what do you guys do for kicks around here?” Mort the Snort says, “We take drugs like Hope-’74.”

  “What is the effect of Hope-’74?”

  “It makes you think you got a future.”

  The Quicksilver Kid looks wistful. “Man, I gotta score me some of that stuff.”

  MEET Sweet Lucy, girl of a thousand bodies, all gross.

  “I takes myself down to the Celestial Body Shop nearly every Monday and each time I’m determined to get myself a real pretty body—you know the kind I mean, pretty. But each time it’s like this compulsion comes over me and I pick a big fat saggy number just like I always had. If I could ever lick that weirdo compulsion I’d be in real good shape.”

  Dr. Bernstein’s comment: “Her hangup is her salvation. Down chicks always run true to form. Gentlemen, kick her as you leave. She digs the attention.”

  GIARDANO had done a lot of traveling, but he never did get far. “It’s simple truth to say that this galaxy is just like the inside of my head. The farther you go, the less you see. Been to Acmena IV—looks just like Arizona. Sardis VI is a ringer for Quebec and Omeone VI is a duplicate of Marie Byrd’s Land.”

  “What does End City look like?”

  “If I didn’t know better,” Giardano says, “I’d think I was back home in Hoboken.”

  IN THE END CITY they have to import everything. They import cats and cockroaches, garbage bags and garbage, cops and crime statistics.

  They import spoiled milk and rotten vegetables, blue suede and orange taffeta, they import orange peels, instant coffee, Volkswagen parts. Champion spark plugs. They import dreams and nightmares. They import you and me.

  “But what’s it all for?”

  “That’s a stupid question. You might as well ask what reality is for.”

  “Well—what is reality for?”

  “LOOK me up anytime. I live at 000 Zero Street, at the intersection of Minus Boulevard, just across from Null Park.”

  “Is that address supposed to have a symbolic meaning?”

  “No, man, it’s just where I live.”

  NOBODY can afford the necessities in End City. But luxuries are available for everyone. Ten thousand tons of Chincoteague oysters are distributed every week, free. But you can’t cop cocktail sauce for love or money.

  COLLOQUY in Limbo Lane: “Good day, young man. Are you still caught up in the ways-means fallacy?”

  “Guess I am, Professor.”

  “Thought as much. Good day, young man.”

  “Who was that?”

  “That was the professor. He always asks about the ways-means fallacy.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Don’t care.”

  DR. BERNSTEIN says: “Monism postulates that there’s only one thing—dualism says there are two things. No matter which is true, you still haven’t got much to work with.”

  “Hey!” says Johnny Cadenza. “Maybe that explains why everything around here tastes either like chili or chow mein.”

  GIARDANO opens a pocket notebook and tries to count all the Main Streets he’s walked down. Mort the Snort shoots pure Sealtest ice cream and waits for the hit. The Quicksilver Kid lays out a game of solitaire, but every card is an eight of diamonds. Sweet Lucy bites into a Mars Bar and tastes sunlight, taffeta, a barking puppy.

  Dr. Bernstein looks back at the old stars, the old trips, all used up now, all finished. He looks ahead at the blackness of the gulf, the big leap into nothingness. He sighs, takes Lucy by the hand. They dance.

  You come hesitantly forward at last, clear your throat, say, “Excuse me but this is all some kind of mistake, isn’t it? I mean, I shouldn’t be here at all.”

  “You’re in the right place,” Bernstein says. “Welcome to End City.” He doesn’t even bother to laugh at you.

  1976

  THE NEVER-ENDING WESTERN MOVIE

  Robert Sheckley burst like a meteor in the sky of science fiction 20-odd years ago and achieved in his first few months of published writing a standing he has maintained ever since at the very top. His story “The Seventh Victim” was made into a film starring Ursula Andress called, for reasons known best to film makers, The Tenth Victim. He makes his home in the Balearic Isles with his new wife and even newer daughter.

  THE NAME IS WASHBURN: just plain Washburn to my friends, Mister Washburn to enemies and strangers. Saying that, I’ve said everything, because you’ve seen me a thousand times, on the big screen in your neighborhood theater or on the little pay-TV screen in your living room, riding through Cholla cactus and short grass, my famous derby pulled down over my eyes, my famous Colt .44 with the 7.2-inch barrel strapped down to my right leg. But just now I’m riding in a big air-conditioned Cadillac, sitting between my agent-manager Gordon Simms, and my wife, Consuela. We’ve turned off State Highway 101 and were bouncing along a rutted dirt road which will end presently at the Wells Fargo Station that marks one of the entrances to The Set. Simms is talking rapidly and rubbing the back of my neck like I was a fighter about to enter the ring, which is more or less the situation. Consuela is quiet. Her English isn’t too good yet. She’s the prettiest little thing imaginable, my wife of less than two months, a former Miss Chile, a former actress in various gaucho dramas filmed in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. This entire scene is supposed to be off-camera. It’s the part they never show you: the return of the famous gunfighter, all the way from Bel Aire in the jolly jittery year of 2031 to the Old West of the mid-nineteen hundreds.

  Simms is jabbering away about some investment he wants me to come in on, some new seabed mining operation, another of Simms’s get-richer-quick schemes, because Simms is already a wealthy man, as who wouldn’t be with a thirty percent bite on my earnings throughout my ten biggest years as a star? Simms is my friend, too, but I can’t think about investments now because we’re coming to The Set.

  Consuela, sitting on my right, shivers as the famous weatherbeaten old station comes into view. She’s never really understood The Never-Ending Western Movie. In South America they still make their movies in the old-fashioned way, everything staged, everything faked, and the guns fire only blanks. She can’t understand why America’s famous Movie has to be done for real when you could contrive all the effects and nobody would get killed. I’ve tried to explain it to her, but it sounds ridiculous in Spanish.

  It’s different for me this time, of course: I’m coming out of retirement to make a cameo appearance. I’m on a no-kill contract-famous gunman to do comedy bit with Old Jeff Mangles and Natchez Parker. There’s no script, of course: there never is in The Movie. We’ll improvise around any situation that comes up—we,
the commedia dell’arte players of the Old West. Consuela doesn’t understand any of this. She’s heard about contracts to kill, but a no-kill contract is something new in her experience.

  And now we’ve arrived. The car stops in front of a low, unpainted pinewood building. Everything on this side of it is twenty-first century America in all its recycled and reprocessed glory. On the other side is the million-acre expanse of prairie, mountains and desert, with its thousands of concealed cameras and microphones, that is The Set for The Never-Ending Movie.

  I’m in costume already—blue jeans, blue and white checked shirt, boots, derby, rawhide jacket, and 3.2 pounds of revolver. A horse is waiting for me at the hitching post on the other side of the station, with all my gear tied aboard in a neat blanket roll. An assistant director checks me over and finds me in order: no wristwatch or other anachronisms for the cameras to find. “All right, Mr. Washburn,” he says, “you can go through whenever you’re ready.”

  Simms gives his main-event boy a final rub on the back. He’s bouncing up and down on his toes, excited, envying me, wishing he were the one to be riding out into the desert, a tall, slow-moving man with mild manners and sudden death always near his right hand. But Simms is short and fat and nearly bald and he would never do, certainly not for a heroic gunman’s role, so he lives it vicariously. I am Simms’s manhood, and he and I have ridden the danger trail many times, and our trusty .44 has cleared out all opposition until we reigned supreme, the absolute best gunslinger in the West, the one who finally retired when all the opposition was dead or laying low . . . Poor Simms, he always wanted us to play that last big scene, the final definitive walkdown on some dusty Main Street. He wanted us to go out high, wide and handsome, not for the money—we’ve got too much of that as it is, but just for the glory, retiring from The Movie in a blaze of gunfire at the top of our form. I wanted it that way myself, but the opposition got cautious, and Washburn spent a final ridiculous year in The Movie, riding around looking for something to do, six-shooter ready, but never finding anyone who wanted to shoot it out with him. And even this cameo appearance—for Simms it is a mockery of all that we have stood for, and I suppose it’s that way for me, too. (It is difficult to know where I start and where Simms ends, difficult to separate what I want and what Simms wants, difficult to face this, the end of our great years in The Movie.)