Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  Mortonson rubbed his forehead and said in a loud but somewhat shaky voice, “Life is Conflagration!” There was an uncanny silence. After what he judged was a proper discretionary wait. Mortonson asked, “Uh, was that right?”

  “I’m trying it out,” the noble and tremendous voice boomed. “Conflagration is too long. Blaze? Fire! Life is Fire! That fits!”

  “Fire is what I meant,” Mortonson said.

  “You really helped me out.” the voice said. “I was stuck on that one. Now maybe you am help me with seventy-eight across. I need to know the middle name of the inventor of the friction less star drive. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite get it. The third letter is D.”

  Mortonson had been prepared for some freaky revelations, but playing Cosmic Crosswords was not his idea of where anything was at, spiritually speaking. He just couldn’t relate to it, even though it was definitely an extraordinary experience.

  He relates that he thereupon turned and walked away from the voice and the higher mysteries and returned to his pension in Katmandu. Now he has gone back to his job as expediter in his father s gristle-processing plant in Skowhegan, and he takes his vacations in Majorca.

  1977

  SILVERSMITH WISHES

  it was an offer he couldn’t refuse-three requests, no strings attached, frequent bonuses

  THE STRANGER lifted his glass. “May your conclusions always flow sweetly from your premises.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Nelson Silversmith.

  Solemnly they both sipped Orange Julius. Outside the flotsam of 8th Street flowed eastward, to circulate with sluggish restlessness in the Sargasso of Washington Square. Silversmith munched his chili dog.

  The stranger said, “I suppose you think I’m some kind of a nut.”

  Silversmith shrugged. “I assume nothing.”

  “Well spoken,” the stranger said. “My name is Terence Maginnis. Come have a drink with me.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Silversmith said.

  •

  Some twenty minutes later they were seated on torn red plastic benches in Joe Mangeri’s Clam Bar and Beer Parlor, exchanging fragments of discursive philosophy as casual strangers meeting in New York’s Greenwich Village on a slow mild October afternoon will do. Maginnis was a short compact red-faced man with emphatic gestures and a fuzzy Harris tweed suit. Silversmith was a lanky thirty-two-year-old with a mournful face and long tapering fingers.

  “So look,” Maginnis said abruptly, “enough small talk. I have a proposition to put to you.”

  “So put,” Silversmith said, with aplomb. Not for nothing had he been brought up in the bewildering social complexities of Bayonne, New Jersey.

  “It is this,” Maginnis said. “I am a front man for a certain organization which must remain nameless. We have a free introductory offer. We give you, absolutely free and without obligation, three requests. You may ask for any three things, and I will get them for you if it is within my power.”

  “And what do I do in return?” Silversmith asked.

  “Nothing whatsoever. You just sit back and take.”

  “Three requests,” Silversmith said thoughtfully. “Do you mean three wishes?”

  “Yes, you could call it that.”

  “A person who grants wishes is a fairy.”

  “I am not a fairy,” Maginnis said firmly.

  “But you do grant wishes?”

  “Yes. I am a normal person who grants wishes.”

  “And I,” Silversmith said, “am a normal person who makes wishes. So, for my first wish, I would like a really good hi-fi with quad speakers, tape deck, and all the rest.”

  “You are a cool one,” Maginnis said.

  “Did you expect me to portray astonishment.”

  “I expected dubiety, anxiety, resistance. People generally look with suspicion on a proposition like mine.”

  “The only thing I learned at NYU,” Silversmith said, “was the willing suspension of disbelief. Don’t you get many takers?”

  “You’re my first in a long time. People simply don’t believe it can be on the level.”

  “Incredulity is not an appropriate attitude in this age of Heisenbergian physics. Ever since I read in Scientific American that a positron is nothing more than an electron traveling backwards in time, I have had no difficulty believing anything at all.”

  “I must remember to put that into my sales pitch,” Maginnis said. “Now give me your address. You’ll be hearing from me.”

  •

  Three days later Maginnis came to Silversmith’s fifth-floor walkup on Perry Street. He was lugging a large packing case and perspiring freely. His tweed suit smelled like an overworked camel.

  “What a day!” he said. “I’ve been all over Long Island City looking for just the right rig. Where shall I put it?”

  “Right there is fine,” Silversmith said. “What about the tape deck?”

  “I’m bringing it this afternoon. Have you thought about your second wish yet?”

  “A Ferrari. A red one.”

  “To hear is to obey,” Maginnis said. “Doesn’t all this strike you as rather fantastic?”

  “Phenomenology takes these matters into account,” Silversmith said. “Or, as the Buddhists say, ‘The world is of a suchness.’ Can you get me a recent model?”

  “I think I can put my hands on a new one,” Maginnis said. “With supercharger and genuine walnut dashboard.”

  “Now you’re beginning to astonish me,” Silversmith said. “But where’ll I park it?”

  “That’s your problem,” Maginnis said. “Catch you later.”

  Silversmith waved absentmindedly and began to open the packing case.

  •

  Next Maginnis found him a spacious rent-controlled triplex on Patchin Place for $102.78 a month including utilities. With it, Maginnis gave Silversmith five bonus wishes.

  “You can really do that5” Silversmith asked. “You won’t get into trouble with your company?”

  “Don’t worry about that. You know, you’re a really good wisher. Your tastes are rich but not outrageous; challenging, but not incredible. Some people really abuse the privilege—demand palaces and slaves and harems filled with Miss America runner-ups.”

  “I suppose that sort of thing is out of the question,” Silversmith remarked casually.

  “No, I can come up with it. But it just makes trouble for the wisher. You give some slob a replica of the Czar’s summer palace on a ten-acre site in Rhinebeck, New York, and the next thing you know the tax people are buzzing around him like a holocaust of locusts. The guy usually has difficulty explaining how he managed to save up for this palace on the $125 a week he earns as a junior Comtometer operator, so the IRS makes its own assumptions.”

  “Which are?”

  “That he’s a top Mafia buttonman who knows where Judge Crater is buried.”

  “They can’t prove anything, though.”

  “Maybe not. But who wants to spend the rest of his life starring in FBI home movies?”

  “Not a pleasing prospect for a lover of privacy,” Silversmith said, and revised certain of his plans.

  •

  “You’ve been a good customer,” Maginnis said, two weeks later. “Today you get a bonus, and it’s absolutely free. You get a forty-foot Chris-Craft, fully equipped. Where do you want it?”

  “Just moor it at the dock of my Nassau place,” Silversmith said. “Oh, and thanks.”

  •

  “Another free gift,” Maginnis said, three days after that. “Ten additional wishes, no strings attached.”

  “That makes eighteen unused wishes to date,” Silversmith said. “Maybe you should give some to another deserving customer.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Maginnis said. “We’re very pleased with you.”

  •

  Silversmith fingered his brocade scarf and said, “There is a catch, isn’t there?”

  It was one month and fourteen wishes later. Silver
smith and Maginnis were seated in lawn chairs on the broad lawn of Silversmith’s estate at Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. A string quartet was playing softly in the background. Silversmith was sipping a Negroni. Maginnis, looking more harried than usual, was gulping a whiskey and soda.

  “Well, you could call it a catch,” Maginnis admitted. “But it’s not what you think.”

  “What is it?”

  “You know that I can’t tell you that.”

  “Do I maybe end up losing my soul to you and going to hell?”

  Maginnis burst into rude laughter. “That,” he said, “is just about the last thing you have to worry about. Excuse me now. I’ve got an appointment in Damascus to see about that Arabian stallion you wanted. You get five more bonus wishes this week, by the way.”

  •

  Two months later, after dismissing the dancing girls, Silversmith lay alone in his emperor-sized bed in his eighteen-room apartment on the Pincio in Rome and thought sour thoughts. He had twenty-seven wishes coming to him and he couldn’t think of a thing to wish for. And furthermore, he was not happy.

  Silversmith sighed and reached for the glass that was always on his night table filled with seltzer flown in from Grossinger’s The glass was empty.

  “Ten servants and they can’t keep a lousy glass filled,” he muttered. He got out of bed, walked across the room and pushed the servant’s button. Then he got back in bed. It took three minutes and thirty-eight seconds by his Rolex Oyster, whose case was carved out of a single block of amber, for the butler’s second assistant to hurry into the room.

  Silversmith pointed at the glass. The assistant butler’s eyes bugged out and his jaw fell. “Empty!” he cried. “But I specifically told the maid’s assistant——”

  “To hell with the excuses,” Silversmith said. “Some people are going to have to get on the ball around here or some heads are going to roll.”

  “Yes, sir!” said the butler’s second assistant. He hurried to the built-in wall refrigerator beside Silversmith’s bed, opened it and took out a bottle of seltzer. He put the bottle on a tray, took out a snowy linen towel, folded it once lengthwise and hung it over his arm. He selected a chilled glass from the refrigerator, examined it for cleanliness, substituted another glass and wiped the rim with his towel.

  “Get on with it, get on with it,” Silversmith said ominously.

  The butler’s second assistant quickly wrapped the towel around the seltzer bottle, and squirted seltzer into the glass so exquisitely that he didn’t spill a drop. He replaced the bottle in the refrigerator and handed the glass to Silversmith. Total elapsed time, twelve minutes, forty-three seconds.

  Silversmith lay in bed sipping seltzer and thinking deep brooding thoughts about the impossibility of happiness and the elusiveness of satisfaction. Despite having the world’s luxuries spread before him—or because of it—he was bored and had been for weeks. It seemed damned unfair to him, to be able to get anything you wanted, but to be unable to enjoy what you could get.

  When you came right down to it, life was a disappointment, and the best it had to offer was never quite good enough. The roast duck was never as crisp as advertised, and the water in the swimming pool was always a shade too warm or too cold.

  How elusive was the quest for quality! For ten dollars you could buy a pretty fair steak; for a hundred dollars you could get a really good Porterhouse; and for a thousand dollars you could buy a kilo of Kobe beef that had been massaged by the hands of consecrated virgins, together with a genius chef to prepare it. And it would be very good indeed. But not a thousand dollars good. The more you paid, the less progress you made toward that quintessence of beef that the angels eat when God throws his yearly banquet for the staff.

  Or consider women. Silversmith had possessed some of the most intoxicating creatures that the planet could offer, both singly and in ensemble. But even this had turned out to be nothing worth writing a memoir about. His appetite had palled too quickly in the steady flood of piquantly costumed flesh that Maginnis had provided, and the electric touch of unknown female flesh had turned abrasive—the sandpaper of too many personalities (each one clutching her press clippings) against Silversmith’s increasingly reluctant hide.

  He had run through the equivalent of several seraglios, and the individuals who comprised them were as dim in his memory now as the individual ice cream cones of his youth. He vaguely remembered a Miss Universe winner with the odor of the judge’s cigar still clinging to her crisp chestnut hair; and there had been the gum-chewing scuba instructress from Sea Isle, Georgia, in her exciting black rubber wet suit, blowing an inopportune pink sugary bubble at the moment of moments. But the rest of them had passed from his recollection in a comic strip of sweaty thighs and jiggling boobs, painted smiles, fake pouts, and stagey langours; and through it all the steady heaving rhythm of the world’s oldest gymnastic exercise.

  The best of them had been his matched set of three Cambodian temple dancers—brown and bright-eyed creatures, all flashing eyes and floating black hair, sinuous frail limbs and small, hard breasts like persimmons. Not even they had diverted him for long. He had kept them around to play bridge with evenings, however.

  He took another sip of seltzer and found that his glass was empty. Grumpily he got out of bed and crossed the room to the servant’s bell. His finger poised over it—

  And just at that moment enlightenment came to him like a million-watt light bulb flashing in his head.

  And he knew what he had to do.

  •

  It took Maginnis ten days to find Silversmith in a broken-down hotel on 10th Avenue and 41st Street in New York. Maginnis knocked once and walked in. It was a dingy room with tin-covered walls painted a poisonous green. The smell of hundreds of applications of insecticide mingled with the odor of thousands of generations of cockroaches. Silversmith was sitting on an iron cot covered with an olive blanket. He was doing a crossword puzzle. He gave Maginnis a cheerful nod.

  “All right,” Maginnis said, “if you’re through slumming, I’ve got a load of stuff for you—wishes 43 and 44, plus as much of 45 as I could put together. Which of your houses do you want it delivered to?”

  “I don’t want it,” Silversmith said.

  “You don’t, huh?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Maginnis lit a cigar. He puffed thoughtfully for a while, then said, “Is this Silversmith I see before me, the famous ascetic, the well-known stoic, the Taoist philosopher, the living Buddha? Non-attachment to worldly goods, that’s the new number, right, Silversmith? Believe me, baby, you’ll never bring it off. You’re going through a typical rich man’s freakout, which will last a few weeks or months, like they all do. But then comes the day when the brown rice tastes extra-nasty, and the burlap shirt scratches your eczema worse than usual. This is followed by some fast rationalizing, and the next thing you know you’re having Eggs Benedict at Sardi’s and telling your friends what a valuable experience it was.”

  “You’re probably right,” Silversmith said.

  “So why make me hang around all that time? You just took in too much fat city too quick, and you’ve got congestion of the synapses. You need a rest. Let me recommend a very nice exclusive resort I know on the south slope of Kilimanjaro——”

  “No,” Silversmith said.

  “Maybe something more spiritual? I know this guru——”

  “No.”

  “You are beginning to exasperate me,” Maginnis said. “In fact, you’re getting me sore. Silversmith, what do you want?”

  “I want to be happy,” Silversmith said. “But I realize now that I can’t be happy by owning things.”

  “So you’re sticking to poverty?”

  “No. I also can’t be happy by not owning things.”

  “Well,” Maginnis said, “that seems to cover the field.”

  “I think there is a third alternative,” Silversmith said. “But I don’t know what you’re going to think of it.”

  “Y
eah? What is it?”

  “I want to join your team,” Silversmith said.

  Maginnis sat down on the bed. “You want to join us?”

  “Whoever you are,” Silversmith said, “I want to be a part of it.”

  “What made you decide that?” Maginnis asked.

  “I happened to notice that you were happier than I was. I don’t know what your racket is, Maginnis, and I have certain reservations about the organization I think you work for. But I really do want in.”

  “Are you willing to give up all your remaining wishes and everything else, just for that?”

  “Whatever it takes,” Silversmith said. “Just let me in.”

  “Okay,” Maginnis said, “you’re in.”

  “I really am? That’s great. Whose life do we mess up next?”

  “Oh, we’re not that organization at all,” Maginnis said, grinning. “People sometimes do confuse the two of us, though I can’t imagine why. But be that as it may: you have just endowed us with all your worldly goods, Silversmith, and you have done so without expectation of reward, out of a simple desire to serve. We appreciate the gesture. Silversmith, welcome to heaven.”

  A rosy cloud formed around them, and through it Silversmith could see a vast silver gate inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

  “Hey!” he said, “you got me here on a deception! You tricked me, Maginnis, or whoever you are!”

  “The other organization has been doing that sort of thing for so long,” Maginnis said, “we thought we really should give it a try.”

  The pearly gates opened. Silversmith could see that a Chinese banquet had been set out, and there were girls, and some of the guests seemed to be smoking dope.

  “Not that I’m complaining,” Silversmith said.

  SNEAK PREVIEWS

  Peter Honorious looked through his mail one bright September morning and found a peremptory Directive from his local Consanguinity Board demanding that he be married by October 1 or be found in contempt of the State and Federal Pair-Bonding Regulations and subject to various penalties and a possible one-to-five year stretch at Lunaville.