Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  When I heard about that I swore I was going out there with a stick and raise some welts. But Grandfather wouldn’t allow it.

  “They’re just repeating what their parents say,” he told me. “There’s no harm in a child; no more than in a parrot. And besides they’re right probably I should die.”

  “Now don’t start that,” I said.

  “Die die,” Grandfather said. “Hell, I’ve been worthless for 30 years and if I had an ounce of guts I damned well would die and good riddance to me.”

  “That’s crazy talk,” I tell him. “What do you think that longevity stuff is for if they meant for old men to die?”

  “Maybe they made a mistake,” he’d say.

  “Like hell they did.” I came back. “They taught me in school that people have been aiming for long life for hundreds and hundreds of years. You’ve heard of Dr. Faustus haven’t you?”

  “Famous Austrian doctor, wasn’t he?” Grandfather asked.

  “German,” I told him. “A friend of Freud and Einstein and smarter than both of them. He put longevity on the map. You wouldn’t argue with a brainy guy like that would you?”

  Maybe I didn’t have all my facts straight but I had to say something. And I didn’t want the old man to die. I don’t know why because it didn’t make any sense to have an old man in the house with things getting tougher every year. But I wanted him to live. He was never any trouble and the kids liked him and even May, my wife, said he was nice to talk to.

  Well, he didn’t pay any attention to my Faustus talk which I guess was about what it was worth. He sat with his chin on his fist and thought he must have thought for ten full minutes. And then he looked up and blinked like he was a little surprised I was still there.

  “Sonny,” he asked, “how old is Arthur Rockefeller?”

  “One hundred and thirty or so,” I said “He’s in his third body.”

  “And how old is Eustis Morgan Hunt?”

  “Must be about the same age.”

  “And Blaise Eisenhower?”

  “Must be a good 175. He’s gone through four bodies.”

  “And Morris Mellow?”

  “Around 210 220. But what’s that got to do with anything?”

  He gave me a pitying look. “The poor are like children. It takes them nearly a hundred years just to grow up and then they still can’t do anything because they’re dying. But the rich can try to live forever.”

  He didn’t say anything for awhile. Then he spit into the street got up and went inside to the apartment. It was time for his favorite afternoon show.

  I don’t know how or where he got the money. Maybe he had savings tucked away or maybe he went to New Jersey and held up a candy store. Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is three days later he came up to me and said, “Johnny let’s go body shopping.”

  “Body dreaming, you mean.” I said.

  “Shopping,” he said again and showed me 380 dollars in his fist. And he wouldn’t tell me where he got it either—me his own grandson who’s going to need a new body one of these days.

  So we went body shopping.

  Senator, I guess you know how it is with the poor. Everything costs more and is not as good. When you are poor like us you don’t want to go downtown to Saks’s Body Shop, for example, or Lord & Taylor s Relife Center. You figure they’ll laugh at you or arrest you for loitering. You simply don’t shop there. You shop in your neighborhood.

  In our case that means that we bring our business to Dapper Dan’s Living Models store. Which is located at 103rd Street and Broadway. I’m not trying to get that company into trouble. It just happens to be where we went.

  Maybe you’ve read what those places are like. Plenty of neon; three or four good-looking bodies in the window junk inside. Always a couple of salesmen in sharp suits telling jokes on the videophone. These salesmen must sell to each other because I never see anyone else in there.

  We walked in and started locking over the goods. One of the salesmen, came drifting over nice and easy smiling while he was still 50 feet away.

  “Looking for a nice body?” he asked.

  “No just looking for a fourth for bridge,” I told him.

  He laughed. I was a very witty fellow.

  “Take your time,” he said “But if there is anything specific—”

  “How much is that one?” Grandfather asked.

  “I see that you’re a man of taste,” the salesman said. “That is our Eton model—part of General Dynamics’s new spring line. The Eton is six feet tall 170 pounds reflexes rated AA. All its organs have received the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. General Clay Baxter occupies a modified Eton, did you know that? The brain and nervous system are by Dynaco and have been rated a best buy by Consumer Queries. Sculpturewise this particular model came out very nicely—notice the facial flesh tones and the crinkly laugh lines around the eyes You don’t always get that sort of detail.”

  “How much is it?” Grandfather asked.

  “I forgot to mention it comes with a ten-year guarantee on parts and labor; backed by a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”

  “How much?”

  “Well, sir, this week we’re having our annual clearance sale. Solely because of that I can let you have this number for eighteen thousand nine hundred dollars; twelve percent off list.

  Grandfather shook his head. “Do you actually expect to soil that thing up here?”

  “You’d be surprised,” the salesman told him. “Sometimes a man hits it on the numbers or comes into an inheritance—”

  “For eighteen grand it’d pay me to die,” my grandfather said. “You got anything cheaper?”

  The salesman had plenty of cheaper models.

  There was a Ronault-Bofors Hombre for $10,000 and a Secony GM Everyman for $6500. There was a Union Carbide Chrysler Go Man with plastic hair and glass eyes for $2200 and a Texas Instrument Veracruzano without voicebox, gyrocenter or protein conversion unit for $1695.

  “Hell. I wasn’t interested in a new synthetic anyhow,” Grandfather said “You got a used-body department?”

  “Yes sir we do.”

  “Then show me some good retreads.”

  He took us into a back room where the bodies were stacked against the wall like cordwood. It was like one of those old-time chamber of horror things. I mean, honestly, you wouldn’t have worn one of those bodies to a dog fight. There really ought to be a law against selling that sort of thing—lopsided bodies with chewed ears bodies still bloody with a new heart sewed in quick lab bodies that hadn’t worked out bodies assembled out of parts found at wrecks and other disasters suicides bodies with the wrists taped and a couple of quarts of new blood pumped in lepers bodies with flesh tone plastic sprayed over the sores.

  We hadn’t been expecting the rereads to be pretty but we hadn’t expected any thing like this either. I thought Grandfather was going to turn around and march out of that store. But he didn’t. Shaking his head a little, he picked out a pretty good-looking synthetic with an extruded arm and a leg missing. God knows it was no beauty but at least it didn’t look as if it had just been pulled out of a tram wreck.

  “I might be interested in something like this,” Grandfather said cautiously.

  “You have a good eye for merchandise,” the salesman told him. “It just so happens that this little number will outperform a lot of the high-price new jobs.”

  “It looks sickly,” Grandfather said.

  “Not a chance. This is a prime corpus my dear sir and it comes complete with reconditioned heart extractor type lungs heavy-duty liver and enriched glands. This model comes with four kidneys as standard equipment a double-insulated stomach and two hundred feet of Armour’s finest intestine. What do you think of that sir?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Grandfather said.

  But the salesman knew. It took about fifteen minutes for him to sell the lopsided body to my grandfather.

  You get a one month guarantee on retreads. My grandfather got
into it the following day and it lasted him three weeks. Then the heart began to race and flutter, one kidney shut down completely, and the other three only worked part time. A lung patch blew out, the intestines started leaking and the liver began to shrink.

  Grandfather is in bed now and Doc Saunders says it’s a-day-to-day thing. The company won’t make good on the body. They got some pretty nifty clauses in that contract of theirs and our block legal advisor says we could fight it in the courts for ten years and not be sure of the outcome. And in the meantime, Grandfather would be dead.

  So I’m writing to you first and primarily, Senator, to ask you to do something about this quick while there’s still time. My grandfather says that all I’ll get from you is a form letter or maybe even a real letter from your secretary expressing regret at your inability to rectify this grievous wrong and that you’ll probably mention how you’ve introduced or sponsored a bill before Congress that’ll do something about it if it ever gets passed. And all that crap. So I and Grandfather expect he’ll die because he hadn’t the price of a decent body and nobody will do anything about it. That’s business as usual right? Then that what always happens to the little people.

  But that brings me to the second reason I’ve written you. I’ve been talking it over with my buddies, Senator and we all agree that my grandfather and all the rest of the poor have been conned long enough. This Golden Age is not so nice for people like us. It’s not that we want anything so much we just can’t go on knowing that other people nave privileges—like long-life—that we don’t have. We figure that that stuff has gone on long enough.

  We’ve decided that if you and the other people in power don’t do something about it then we’re going to—The time has come to take a stand.

  We’re going to declare war.

  You may think this is sort of sudden, Senator. But it isn’t really. You’d be surprised how many people have been think mg about this sort of thing. But each of us has thought we were alone and that every one else was satisfied. And now we learn that a hell of a lot of us have been thinking the same thoughts as Grandfather and doing a slow burn about it.

  Before this we didn’t know what to do. Now we do know.

  We are simple men, Senator, and we don’t have any big thinkers among us. We figure that all men ought to be roughly equal. And we understand that no laws are going to do that.

  So our program is to kill rich guys. Do away with them entirely. That may not sound very constructive as the tv says. But to us it looks simple straightforward and we think it’ll be effective.

  We’re going to kill the rich when and how we can. And we’re not going to discriminate either. We don’t care how the money was made nor what he uses it for. We’ll kill labor leaders as well as bankers, high-class criminals, as well as, big deal oil men. We’ll kill anyone and everyone who has a lot more than we do. We’ll kill the rich until they like us; or were like them or until we all meet in the middle. We’ll kill our own people if they profit off of this thing too. And we II sure as hell kill senators and congressmen too.

  So there it is, Senator. I hope you help my grandfather. If you do, it’ll mean that maybe you see things our way and we’ll be glad to put you on the deferred list; and give you three weeks to get rid of the wealth you’ve been able to accumulate.

  You know where to reach my grandfather. Me, you can’t reach at all. However this thing goes I’m dropping out of sight. Don’t bother locking for me.

  Remember—there’s a hell of a lot more of us than there are of you. We’ve never been able to bring this thing off before my grandfather tells me—never m the history of the world. But what the hell, that’s got to be a first time la everything. Maybe we’ll even make it this time—pull down your Golden Age and build our own.

  I don’t expect you’ll see it our way. So here’s looking at you, Senator—right down the sights of a gun.

  1979

  GOOD-BY FOREVER TO MR. PAIN

  It’s easy!

  Joseph Elroy was nicely settled back in his armchair on this Sunday morning in the near future, trying to remember the name of his favorite football team that he was going to watch later on the tv while reading the bankruptcy notices in the Sunday Times and thinking uncomfortable thoughts.

  It was a normal sort of day; the sky outside colored its usual blah beige which went well with the blah browns which Mrs. Elroy, now grinding her teeth in the kitchen, had decorated the place during one of her many short-lived bursts of enthusiasm. Their child, Elixir, was upstairs pursuing her latest discovery—she was three years old and had just gotten into vomiting.

  And Elroy had a tune going in his head, he had ‘Amapola’ spinning just now, and it would continue until another song segued into it, one song after another, all day, all night, forever. This music came from Elroy’s internal Muzak system, which came on whenever inattentiveness became necessary for survival.

  So Elroy was in a certain state. Maybe you’ve been there yourself: the kid cries and the wife nags and you drift through your days and nights, well laid back, listening to the secret Muzak in your head. And you know that you’ll never crack through the hazy plastic shield that separates you from the world, and the gray mists of depression and boredom settle in for a nice long visit. And the only thing that prevents you from opting for a snuffout is your Life-Force, which says to you, “Wake up, dummy, it’s you this is happening to—yes, you, strangling there in your swimming pool of lime-flavored jello with a silly grin on your love-starved face as you smoke another Marlboro and watch the iniquities of the world float by in three-quarter time.”

  Given that situation, you’d take any chance that came along to pull out of it, wouldn’t you? Joseph Elroy’s chance came that very afternoon.

  The telephone rang. Elroy picked it up. A voice at the other end asked, “Who is this, please?”

  “This is Joseph Elroy,” Elroy replied.

  “Mr. Elroy, do you happen to have a tune or song going through your head at this moment?”

  “As of matter of fact, I do.”

  “What is the name of the song?”

  “I’ve been humming ‘Amapola’ to myself for the last couple hours.”

  “What was that name again, Mr. Elroy?”

  “Amapola. But what—”

  “That’s it! That’s the one!”

  “Huh?”

  “Mr Elroy, now I can reveal to you what this is all about. I am Marv Duffle, and I’m calling you from THE SHOT OF A LIFETIME SHOW and you have named the very tune going through the head of our genial guest for tonight, Mr Phil Suggers! That means that you and your family, Mr. Elroy, have won this month’s big synchronicity prize, The Shot of a Lifetime! Mr. Elroy, do you know what that means?”

  “I know!” Elroy shouted joyously. “I watch the show so I know! Elva, stop freaking out in there, we’ve won the big one, we’ve won, we’ve won, we’ve won!”

  What this meant in practical terms was that the following day a group of technicians in one-piece orange jumpsuits came and installed what looked like a modified computer console in the Elroy’s living room, and Marv Duffle himself handed them I he all-important Directory and explained how all of the best avenues for personal growth and change and self-realization had been collated and tied directly into this computer. Many of these services had formerly been available only to the rich, talented and successful, who really didn’t need them. But now the Elroys could avail themselves of them, and do it all via patented superfast hi-absorption learning modalities developed at Stanford and incorporated into the equipment. In brief their lives were theirs to shape and mold as they desired, for free, and in the privacy of their home.

  Elroy was a serious-minded man, as we all are at heart, and so the first thing he did was to search through the Directory which listed all available services from all the participating companies, until he found Vocationeers, the famous talent-testing firm of Mill Valley, California. The were able to process Elroy by telephone and get the results back
to him in fifteen minutes. It seemed that Elroy had the perfect combination of intelligence, manual dexterity, and psychological set to become a topflight micropaleontologist. That position happened to be open at the nearby Museum of Natural History and Elroy learned all he needed to know about the work with the help of the Bluchner-Wagner School for High-Speed Specialized Learning. So Elroy was able to begin a promising career only two weeks after he had heard of it for the first time.

  Elva Elroy, or Elf, as she called herself in wistful moments, wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She looked through the Directory until she found Mandragore, Inc., makers of Norm1Hi, 24 hour timed-release mood-enhancement spansules. She had them sent over at once with the Ames Rapid Dope Delivery Service—‘Your High is our Cry.’ Feeling better than she had in ages, Elva was able to face the problem of dinner. After careful consideration she called the Fancy Freakout Food Merchandisers—‘Let Us Administer to the Hungry Child in Your Head.’

  For their little daughter, Elixir, there was BabyTeasers, a crack service that cajoled the spoiled scions of oil shieks, now available to the Elroys on round-the-clock standby basis to get the kid out of her temper. Elixir was delighted. New big soft toys to order around! What could be so bad?

  That left the Elroys with world enough and time in which to discover each other. They went first to the Omni-Pleasure Family Consultants, the ones who revitalized a marriage pronounced terminal on television in Houston last month. One counselling session brought the Elroys a deep and abiding love for each other whenever they looked deep into each other’s eyes and concentrated, and it gave them the necessary maturity to take the Five Day Breakthrough with the Total Sex Response People of Lansing, Michigan. And this, too, was a success in terms of new highs reached and plateaus maintained, yet a certain anxiety crept into Elroy’s performance and he felt the need to avail himself of Broadway Joe’s Romantic Sex Service—‘Illicit meetings with beautiful sexy broads of a refinement guaranteed not to gross you out.’