Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  He was so startled that he put down the binoculars for a moment to orient himself.

  When he looked through the glasses again, it was just as before: he seemed to be inside an apartment. He caught a glimpse of movement to one side, tried to locate it, and then the part rattled and the binoculars went dark.

  He turned and twisted the binoculars, and the part rattled up and down, but he could see nothing. He put the binoculars on his dinette table, heard a soft clunking sound, and bent down to look again. Evidently the mirror or prism had fallen back into place, again, for he could see.

  He decided to take no chances of jarring the part again. He left the glasses on the table, knelt down behind them, and looked through the eyepieces.

  He was looking into a dimly lighted apartment, curtains drawn and the lights on. There was an Indian sitting on the floor, or, more likely, a man dressed like an Indian. He was a skinny blond man with a feathered headband, beaded moccasins, fringed buckskin pants, leather shirt, and a rifle. He was holding the rifle in firing position, aiming at something in a corner of the room.

  Near the Indian there was a fat woman in a pink slip sitting in an armchair and talking with great animation into a telephone.

  Quintero could see that the Indian’s rifle was a toy, about half the length of a real rifle.

  The Indian continued to fire into the corner of the room, and the woman, kept on talking into the telephone and laughing.

  After a few moments the Indian stopped firing, turned to the woman, and handed her his rifle. The woman put down the telephone, found another toy rifle propped against her chair, and handed it to the Indian. Then she picked up his gun and began to reload it, one imaginary cartridge at a time.

  The Indian continued firing with great speed and urgency. His face was tight and drawn, the face of a man who is single-handedly protecting his tribe’s retreat into Canada.

  Suddenly the Indian seemed to hear something. He looked over his shoulder. His face registered panic. He twisted around suddenly, swinging his rifle into position. The woman also looked, and her mouth opened wide in astonishment. Quintero tried to pick up what they were looking at, but the dinette table wobbled and the binoculars clicked and went blank.

  Quintero stood up and paced up and down his room. He had had a glimpse of what people do when they’re alone and unobserved. It was exciting, but confusing because he didn’t know what it meant. Had the Indian been a lunatic, and the woman his keeper? Or were they more or less ordinary people playing some sort of harmless game? Or had he been watching a pathological killer in training; a sniper who in a week or a month or a year would buy a real rifle and shoot down real people until he himself was killed? And what happened there at the end? Had that been part of the charade, or had something else occurred, something incalculable?

  There was no answer to these questions. All he could do was see what else the binoculars would show him.

  He planned his next move with greater care. It was crucial that the binoculars be held steady. The dinette table was too wobbly to risk putting the binoculars there again. He decided to use the low coffee table instead.

  The binoculars weren’t working, however. He jiggled them around, and he could hear the loose part rattle. It was like one of those puzzles where you must put a little steel ball into a certain hole. But this time he had to work without seeing either the ball or the hole.

  Half an hour later he had had no success, and he put the glasses down, smoked a cigarette, drank a beer, then jiggled them again. He heard the part fall solidly into place, and he lowered the glasses gently onto a chair.

  He was sweaty from the exertion, and he stripped to the waist, then bent down and peered into the eyepieces. He adjusted the focus knob with utmost gentleness, and his vision zoomed across the street and through the outer wall of the Chauvin Arms.

  He was looking into a large formal sitting room decorated in white, blue, and gold. Two attractive young people were seated on a spindly couch, a man and a woman. Both were dressed in period costumes. The woman wore a billowing gown cut low over her small round breasts. Her hair was done up in a mass of ringlets. The man wore a long black coat, fawn-gray knee-pants, and sheer white stockings. His white shirt was embroidered with lace, and his hair was powdered.

  The girl was laughing at something he had said. The man bent closer to her, then kissed her. She stiffened for a moment, then put her arms around his neck.

  They broke their embrace abruptly, for three men had just entered the room. They were dressed entirely in black, wore black stocking-masks over their heads, and carried swords. There was a fourth man behind them, but Quintero couldn’t make him out.

  The young man sprang to his feet and took a sword from the wall. He engaged the three men, circling around the couch while the girl sat frozen in terror.

  A fourth man stepped into the circle of vision. He was tall and gaudily dressed. Jeweled rings flashed on his finger, and a diamond pendant hung from his neck. He wore a white wig. The girl gasped when she saw him.

  The young man put one of his opponents out of action with a sword thrust to the shoulder, then leaped lightly over the couch to prevent another man from getting behind him. He held his two opponents in play with apparent ease, and the fourth man watched for a moment, then took a dagger from beneath his waistcoat and threw it, and it hit the young man butt-first on the forehead.

  The young man staggered back, and one of the masked men lunged. His blade caught the young man in the chest, bent, then straightened as it slid in between the ribs. The young man looked at it for a moment, then fell, blood welling over his white shirt.

  The girl fainted. The fourth man said something, and one of the masked men lifted the girl; the other helped his wounded companion. They all exited, leaving the young man sprawled bleeding on the polished parquet floor.

  Quintero turned the glasses to see if he could follow the others. The loose part clattered and the glasses went dark.

  Quintero heated up a can of soup and looked at it thoughtfully, thinking about what he had seen. It must have been a rehearsal for a scene in a play . . . But the sword thrust had looked real, and the young man on the floor had looked badly hurt, perhaps dead.

  Whatever it had been, he had been privileged to watch a private moment in the strangeness of people’s lives. He had seen another of the unfathomable things that people do.

  It gave him a giddy, godlike feeling, this knowledge that he could see things that no one else could see.

  The only thing that sobered him was the extreme uncertainty of the future of his visions. The binoculars were broken, a vital part was loose, and all the marvels might stop for good at any moment.

  He considered bringing the glasses somewhere to get them fixed. But he knew that he would probably succeed only in getting back a pair of ordinary binoculars, which would show him ordinary things very well, but he could not be expected to see through solid walls into strange and concealed matters.

  He looked through the glasses again, saw nothing, and began to shake and manipulate them. He could hear the loose part rolling and tumbling around, but the lenses remained dark. He kept on manipulating them, eager to see the next wonder.

  The part suddenly fell into place. Taking no chances this time, Quintero put the glasses down on his carpeted floor. He lay down beside them, put his head to one side, and tried to look through one eyepiece. But the angle was wrong and he could see nothing.

  He started to lift the glasses gently, but the part moved a little and he put them down carefully. Light was still shining through the lenses, but no matter how he turned and twisted his head, he could not get lined up with the eyepiece.

  He thought about it for a moment, and saw only one way out of his difficulty. He stood up, straddled the glasses, and bent down with his head upside down. Now he could see through the eyepieces, but he couldn’t maintain the posture. He straightened up and did some more thinking.

  He saw what he had to do. He took off his shoes,
straddled the binoculars again and performed a headstand. He had to do this several times before his head was positioned correctly in front of the eyepieces. He propped his feet against the wall and managed to get into a stable position.

  He was looking into a large office somewhere in the interior of the Chauvin Arms. It was a modern, expensively furnished office, windowless, indirectly lighted.

  There was only one man in the room—a large, well-dressed man in his fifties, seated behind a blond wood desk. He sat quite still, evidently lost in thought.

  Quintero could make out every detail of the office, even the little mahogany plaque on the desk that read, “Office of the Director. The Buck Stops Here.”

  The Director got up and walked to a wall safe concealed behind a painting. He unlocked it, reached in, and took out a metal container somewhat larger than a shoebox. He carried this to his desk, took a key out of his pocket, and unlocked it.

  He opened the box and removed an object wrapped in a silky red cloth. He removed the cloth and set the object on his desk. Quintero saw that it was a statue of a monkey, carved in what looked like a dark volcanic rock.

  It was a strange-looking monkey, however, because it had four arms and six legs.

  Then the Director unlocked a drawer in his desk, took out a long stick, placed it in the monkey’s lap, and lit it with a cigarette lighter.

  Oily black coils of smoke arose, and the Director began to dance around the monkey. His mouth was moving, and Quintero guessed that he was singing or chanting.

  He kept this up for about five minutes, and then the smoke began to coalesce and take on form. Soon it had shaped itself into a replica of the monkey, but magnified to the size of a man, an evil-looking thing made of smoke and enchantment.

  The smoke-demon (as Quintero named it) held a package in one of his four hands. He handed this to the Director, who took it, bowed deeply, and hurried over to his desk. He ripped open the package, and a pile of papers spilled over his desk. Quintero could see bundles of currency, and piles of engraved papers that looked like stock certificates.

  The Director tore himself away from the papers, bowed low once again to the smoke-demon, and spoke to it. The mouth of the smoky figure moved, and the Director answered him. They seemed to be having an argument.

  Then the Director shrugged, bowed again, went to his intercom, and pressed a button.

  An attractive young woman came into the room with a steno pad and pencil. She saw the smoke-demon, and her mouth widened into a scream. She ran to the door but was unable to open it.

  She turned and saw the smoke-demon flowing to her, engulfing her.

  During all this the Director was counting his piles of currency, oblivious to what was going on. But he had to look up when a brilliant light poured from the head of the smoke-demon, and the four hairy arms pulled the feebly struggling woman close to his body . . . At that moment Quintero’s neck muscles could support him no longer. He fell and jostled the binoculars as he came down.

  He could hear the loose part rattle around; and then it gave a hard click, as though it had settled into its final position.

  Quintero picked himself up and massaged his neck with both hands. Had he been subject to a hallucination? Or had he seen something secret and magical that perhaps a few people knew about and used to maintain their financial positions—one more of the concealed and incredible things that people do?

  He didn’t know the answer, but he knew that he had to witness at least one more of those visions. He stood on his head again and looked through the binoculars.

  Yes, he could see! He was looking into a dreary furnished room. Within that room he saw a thin, potbellied man in his thirties, stripped to the waist, standing on his head with his stockinged feet pressed against the wall, looking upside down into a pair of binoculars that lay on the floor and were aimed at a wall.

  It took him a moment to realize that the binoculars were showing him himself.

  He sat down on the floor, suddenly frightened. For he realized that he was only another performer in humanity’s great circus, and he had just done one of his acts, just like the others. But who was watching? Who was the real observer?

  He turned the binoculars around and looked through the object-lenses. He saw a pair of eyes, and he thought they were his own—until one of them slowly winked at him.

  BODY GAME

  It was a prime corpus, complete with reconditioned heart, lungs, and enriched glands

  Dear Senator, I’m writing to you because you are our senior Senator and because you said at election time last year that you were our servant and that we should write to you immediately, if we had had any grievances You were very definite, and you even got a little huffy and said it was actually a citizen’s duty to write to his Senator and let him know what was going on Well Senator, l thought about that a lot Naturally I didn’t believe the part about you being our servant what with you earning 50 times, or 100 times or for all l know 1000 times what we do. But the thing about writing to you. which you were so insistent on, that part got to me.

  Your words puzzled me at first when you said we should let you know what was going on here l mean, you were raised in this city same as me and a man would have to be blind, deaf, dumb, and stupid not to know what’s happening here But I decided that I was being unfair you’ve got to spend a lot of your time in Washington so maybe you are out of touch Anyway I’m taking you at your word and taking the liberty of writing to you. Specifically I want to tell you about my grandfather’s retread body because it’s a specific grievance something you ought to know about and maybe even do something about.

  At the time all this began Grandfather was a healthy sprightly 92 year old with all his own teeth sill a full head of white hair and not an ounce of spare meat on his bones. He’d always taken care of himself hadn’t even had to wear glasses until he was 60-something The old boy had worked for 50 years until they retired him at age 60 with a pretty generous pension considering that he had been a second grade comptometer operator. With the pension and social security and what he’d saved Grandfather was able to pull his own weight and not be a burden to the rest of us which was lucky since we were barely afloat monetarily speaking.

  The old boy just lay around the apart merit for a while sleeping late and watching television He always made his own meals and he always washed up afterwards. Afternoons he went down to the park and sat with some other old timers Then home to bed He was very good with our kids on Sundays he’d take them to Sheepshead Bay and they’d walk along the shore and look for nose cones He went fishing too just to pass the time and once he caught a sane shark though how it got close to shore through all the garbage and chemical junk is beyond me. We boiled up for a couple of days and ate it and it wasn’t bad it you used enough ketchup.

  But the old guy was getting bored. He’d worked for 50 years and he simply didn’t know how to retire gracefully. He moped around for a while then made, up his mind and went out looking for a job.

  Well of course that was just plain silly and we told him so. A man of 40 can’t find anything these days much less a man of 70 which was Grandfathers age at the time. But he went on trying. He’d wake up every morning and take his longevity serum prescribed by the Medicare people wash and shave and off he’d go.

  He didn’t find a thing of course and finally he had to swallow his pride and rent a job as a garbage sorter s assistant. It didn’t cost him much which was lucky because he didn’t have much. But he could never get used to the idea of paying money every day in order to work when the government was willing to pay him to not work. It’s a useful job and I do it damned well he used to tell us. Why in God s name must I pay in order to work a useful job I do well? As if that had anything to do with it.

  Well he held that job or others like it for nearly 20 years But then someone invented self-consuming garbage and my grandfather and a lot. Of other men were out of work Grandfather was about 90 now and he still had a lot of ideas about useful jobs but he wa
sn’t feeling well. This was the first time in his life he hadn’t felt well. We took him to Doc Saunders at the U Thant Memorial Socio Medical Center on East 103rd Street. It took us the better part of a day to hike up there. Those moving sidewalks cost five bucks a ride and that’s too much just to get around Doc Saunders had an office filled with one hell of a batch of instruments He ran a three day checkout on Grandfather. At the end of it he said, “There’s nothing wrong with you except old age. Your heart is just about used up and your arteries can’t stand up to pressure. There’s more but that’s the most important part.

  “Can you replace anything Doc?” Grandfather wanted to know Doc Saunders shook his head. But in a new heart and it’d blow out your arteries Patch and mend your arteries and your lungs couldn’t oxygenate the blood now. Do something about that and your kidneys would declare a holiday. Fact is your whole internal system is just plain worn out.”

  Grandfather nodded. He read the Daily News every morning. He knew about this stuff.

  “What should I do,” he asked.

  “Get a new body,” Saunders said.

  Grandfather thought it over. “Well by God,” he said, “maybe a man my ago ought to be ready to die but I’m not. Still too many things to look at you, know what I mean? Sure I’m ready to put or a new body But the money.”

  “That’s the problem,” Saunders said “Medicare doesn’t handle corpus replacement you know.”

  “I know,” Grandfather said sadly.

  “Could you meet the price?”

  “Don’t see how,” Grandfather said.

  For the next couple of days Grandfather sat on the curb near our apartment and thought. It wasn’t too nice for him there. The kids would come by after school and shout at him. ‘Die old man, why don’t you die? Selfish old bastard using up air and food and water Lousy old pervert why can’t you die decent like old men are supposed to do? Die, the greedy son of a bitch die.’