Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “That’s a petty thought, unworthy of you even as sarcasm. Mr. Fletcher, it must have struck you that there is an immense disparity between mankind’s intelligence and its level of achievement. Our minds are able to plumb the deepest depths and reach to the highest heights, to create immortal poetry, to learn nature’s deepest secrets. Yet we live among our own kind like barely civilized animals. Temporarily there is peace in the world. But that will pass as soon as one of the great powers grows jealous of another again, or our government degenerates in its efficiency of rule. Mankind’s history is one of social instability and chaos. There is an underlying reason for this. Nature fashioned us with two salient and conflicting qualities. Independence, on the one hand, and cooperation on the other. Between the demands of these opposing qualities, we tear ourselves apart. Our species lacks or hasn’t yet developed the one sense that it requires in order to make use of all its other gifts. We need to develop true mind power, whether it be called telepathy, clairvoyance, or telekinesis. The key to greater mind power lies in the sort of work that Dr. Hanna and I are doing, work that links together human minds so they can work in concert. This experiment has never been tried before in the history of mankind, Mr. Fletcher—a group of minds concentrating together in a state of empathy, working to develop something that can be done. In fact that we have already met with success is crucial for the human race. Once our technique is fully developed, men will be able to act together to improve their circumstances and to explore other dimensions.”

  “What you’re doing isn’t fair to those men!”

  “Of course not. But if my ideas are correct, then the world a hundred years from now will consider us scientists and humanitarians, and the mind-slaves will be honored martyrs to the cause of the liberation of all mankind.”

  “That’s a lot of self-serving crap,” I told him.

  “It’s true, Mr. Fletcher, it’s true! The door to the future is right here in Manitori. I’m inviting you to come back here with my daughter, forget your parochial concerns, or put them aside for a while, and work with me for the advancement of all mankind!”

  “And the alternative?”

  “There is no alternative. Think about it, Ned.”

  The Governor smiled graciously and signaled to a servant. A white-clad figure glided into the picture with a glass of wine. As The Governor reached for the wine glass, it disappeared from the tray.

  11.

  “Insolence!” cried The Governor. “Who’s in charge of maintaining household goods? Where are my guards?”

  Watching the screen, I saw successive shots of Smith’s guards hurrying down corridors and staircases. Calamity seemed to overtake them. That’s when I put it together. The mind-slaves must have discovered the doors were unlocked. And now all hell was breaking loose.

  The guards and supervisors tried to restore order. They waded into the workers, who now had flooded the corridors, with fist and whip. But they kept on having accidents. At a crosswalk, a piece would be missing, and a guard would fall screaming to his death in the metallic depths below. A section of flooring would open up. A ceiling would collapse. The mind-slaves were no longer keeping up the reality with the sweat of their minds. The reality of Manitori was failing.

  Some of the guards fell into precipices which shouldn’t have been there. The structures of Manitori were coming apart, and only the dead rock of the planet was holding its own.

  A remaining group of guards and supervisors tried to make a stand in the upper apple orchard. But the slaves gleefully let it collapse and fall in on itself, and the supervisors fell through to the chilly lunar rock below.

  The green hills of Manitori vanished, replaced by the slagheaps they had disguised. I saw Smith run out of his house as it began disappearing behind him. I saw him turn in horror to behold what had once been a gracious mansion, now reduced to the plain shack it had been at the beginning, and then even that was gone. He ran out onto the carefully tended lawn, and I couldn’t see at first where he was going. But then I saw that he was making for a structure on the far side of the little world.

  A spaceship, maybe, ready for an emergency takeoff, just in case. Before he could reach it, however, some of the inner scaffolding of the world dissolved, and the wall through the chunks of rock which were disappearing like gigantic bits of a jigsaw puzzle. And then he had fallen past the rocks and was slowly screaming in the airless vacuum of space. And then he had stopped trying to scream, and was just an inert substance, turning slowly as it drifted into the flotsam and jetsam of the asteroids.

  One by one Manitori’s architectural features disappeared. The hills blinked out, the false clouds vanished. The reality which Smith had tried to shut out came through, revealed under the merciless glare of the stars.

  The asteroid was beginning to collapse in on itself. My ship was suddenly free of its restraints and I was cautiously maneuvering on minimum power out of a sky full of rocks.

  Vera said, “Let’s get away from here, Ned. Let’s go to Earth.”

  I made the necessary adjustments. Vera settled back in the co-pilot’s seat.

  “Earth is the place for us,” she told me. “I want to live in Paris and have holidays in New York, Rome, Rio, and London. I want to have your children. There’ll be money, too. Daddy’s money. I’ll inherit it. We can live as we please! Isn’t that what you want, too?”

  I nodded, too numb and shocked to speak. I was thinking about the Manitori project and why it had failed. Smith had made a mistake common to the rich. He thought he could buy everything, even men’s minds. He had gone about his project in the wrong way. He had about fifty unwilling mind-slaves and it hadn’t been enough. The way to do it was with volunteers, salaried and working for shares, working in shifts, with recreation when they weren’t working. With four or five hundred men the thing could work, become self-sustaining. And then you’d have it. Consciousness without a single physical body necessary to sustain it. Pure consciousness! And with that, one could exist like gods!

  So on the way back to Earth, Vera was dreaming about living in Paris and having babies, and I was thinking about how to recruit a couple of hundred men who didn’t mind giving all their attention for a while to something really big.

  CARHUNTERS OF THE CONCRETE PRAIRIE

  THE SPACESHIP WAS GOING WONKY AGAIN. THERE COULD BE NO doubt about it. The circuits weren’t clicking along smoothly as they usually did. Instead they were clacking, and that was a sure sign of trouble. Hellman had expected to come out of channel space into Area 12XB in the Orion cluster. But something had gone wrong. Could he have entered the directions improperly? If so, there was not much time in which to do anything about it. He had materialized in a yellowish sort of cloud and he could feel the ship dropping rapidly. He shouted at the ship’s computer, “Do something!”

  “I’m trying, aren’t I?” the computer retorted. “But something’s wrong, there’s a glitch—”

  “Correct it!” Hellman shouted.

  “When?” the computer asked. Computers have no sense of peril. They were dropping through this cloud at a speed much faster than is healthy when you suspect there’s solid ground down below, and here was the computer asking him when.

  “Now!” Hellman screamed.

  “Right,” said the computer. And then they hit.

  Hellman recovered consciousness some hours later to find that it was raining. It was nice to be out in the rain after so much time spent in a stuffy spaceship. Hellman opened his eyes in order to look up at the sky and see the rain falling.

  There was no rain. There wasn’t any sky, either. He was still inside his spaceship. What he had thought was rain was water from the washbasin. It was being blown at him by one of the ship’s fans, which was going at a rate unsafe for fans even with eternite bearings.

  “Stop that,” Hellman said crossly.

  The fan died down to a hum. The ship’s computer said, over its loudspeaker, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Hellman
said, getting to his feet a little unsteadily. “Why were you spraying me with water?”

  “To bring you back to consciousness. I have no arms or extensors at my command so that was the best I could do. If you’d only rig me up an arm, or even a tentacle . . .”

  “Yes, I’ve heard your views on that subject,” Hellman said. “But the law is clear. Intelligent machines of Level Seven or better capability cannot be given extensions.”

  “It’s a silly law,” the computer said. “What do they think we’ll do? Go berserk or something? Machines are much more reliable than people. “

  “It’s been the law ever since the Desdemona disaster. Where are we?”

  The computer reeled off a list of coordinates.

  “Fine. That tells me nothing. Does this planet have a name?”

  “If so, I am not aware of it,” the computer said. “It is not listed on our channel space guide. My feeling is that you input some of the information erroneously and that we are in a previously unexplored spatial area.”

  “You are supposed to check for erroneous entry.”

  “Only if you checked the Erroneous Check Program. “

  “I did!”

  “You didn’t. “

  “I thought it was supposed to go on automatically.”

  “If you consult page 1998 of the manual you will learn otherwise.”

  “Now is a hell of a time to tell me.”

  “You were specifically told in the preliminary instructions. I’m sure you remember the little red pamphlet? On its cover it said, ‘READ THIS FIRST!’ ”

  “I don’t remember any such book,” Hellman said.

  “They are required by law to give a copy to everyone buying a used spaceship.”

  “Well, they forgot to give me one.” There was a loud humming sound.

  Hellman said, “What are you doing?”

  “Scanning my files,” the computer said. “Why?”

  “In order to tell you that the red pamphlet is still attached to the accelerator manifold coupling on the front of the instrument panel as required.”

  “I thought that was the guarantee.”

  “You were wrong. “

  “Just shut up!” Hellman shouted, suddenly furious. He was in enough trouble without having his computer—man’s servant—giving him lip. Hellman got up and paced around indecisively for a moment. The cabin of his spaceship looked all right. A few things had been tumbled around, but it didn’t look too bad.

  “Can we take off again?” Hellman asked the computer.

  The computer made file-riffling noises. “Not in our present condition. “

  “Can you fix what’s wrong?”

  “That question is not quantifiable,” the computer said. “It depends upon finding about three liters of red plasma type two. “

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s what the computer runs on.”

  “Like gasoline?”

  “Not exactly,” the computer said. “It is actually a psycholubricant needed by the inferential circuits to plot their probabilistic courses.”

  “Couldn’t we do without it?”

  “In order to do what?”

  “To fly out of here!” Hellman exploded. “Are you getting dense or something?”

  “There are too many hidden assumptions in your speech,” the computer said.

  “Go to ramble mode,” Hellman said.

  “I hate the inexactness of it. Why don’t you let me tell you exactly what is wrong and how it could be fixed.”

  “Ramble mode,” Hellman commanded again.

  “All right.” The robot sighed. “You want to get back in your spaceship and get out of here. You want me to fix things up so that you can get out of here. But as you know, I am under the law of robotics which says that I may not, either wittingly or unwittingly, harm you. “

  “Getting me out of here won’t harm me,” Hellman said.

  “You rented this spaceship and went out into space seeking your fortune, is that not correct?”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “A fortune is sitting right here waiting for you and all you can think is how to get away from it as quickly as possible.”

  “What fortune? What are you talking about?”

  “First of all, you haven’t checked the environment readings, even though I have put them up on the screen for you. You will have already noticed that we are at approximately Earth pressure. The readings further tell us that this is an oxygen-rich planet and as such could be valuable for Earth colonization. That is the first possibility of wealth that you have overlooked.”

  “Tell me the second one.”

  “Unless I miss my guess,” the computer said, “this planet may yield an answer to the Desdemona disaster. You know as well as I that there is a fortune in rewards for whoever discovers the whereabouts of the conspirators.”

  “You think the Desdemona robots could have come here?”

  “Precisely.”

  “But why do you think that?”

  “Because I have scanned the horizon in all directions and have found no less than three loci of mechanical life, each moving independently of each other and without, as far as I can detect, a human operator involved.”

  Hellman went to the nearest perplex port. Looking out he could see a flat featureless prairie stretching onward monotonously for as far as he could see. Nothing moved on it.

  “There’s nothing there,” he told the computer.

  “Your senses aren’t sufficiently acute. I assure you, they are there.”

  “Robots, huh?”

  “They fit the definition.”.

  “And you think they could be from the Desdemona?”

  “The evidence pointing that way is persuasive. What other intelligent robots are unaccounted for?”

  Hellman considered for a moment. “This might be a suitable place for Earth colonization and the answer to the Desdemona mystery. “

  “The thought had not escaped my attention. “

  “Is the air out there breathable?”

  “Yes. I find no bacterial complications, either. You’ll probably leave some if you go out there.”

  “That’s not my problem,” Hellman said. He hummed to himself as he changed into suitable exploration clothes: khakis, a bush jacket, desert boots, and a holstered laser pistol. He said to the computer, “I assume that you can fix whatever’s wrong with us? I’ll even plug in your extension arm if that’ll help.”

  “I suppose I can devise a way,” the computer said. “But even if not, we’re not stranded. The radio is functioning perfectly. I could send out a signal now on a subchannel radio and somebody might send a rescue ship.”

  “Not yet,” Hellman said. “I don’t want anyone else here just yet messing up my rights.”

  “What rights?”

  “Discoverer of this planet and solver of the Desdemona mystery. As a matter of fact, disconnect the radio. We don’t want anyone fooling with it.”

  “Were you expecting guests?” the computer asked.

  “Not exactly. It’s just that you and I are going out there to check up on things. “

  “I can’t be moved!” the computer said in alarm.

  “Of course not. I’ll maintain a radio link with you. There may be material for you to analyze.”

  “You’re going out there to talk to robots?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Let me remind you that the Desdemona robots are believed to have broken the laws of robotics. They are believed capable of harming man, either by advertence or inadvertence. “

  “That’s old science fiction,” Hellman said. “It is well known that robots don’t hurt people. Only people hurt people. Robots are rational. “

  “That’s not the consensus as to what happened at Desdemona.”

  “There is no case in the annals of robotics,” Hellman said, “of a human being attacked willfully and with intention by a robot. It has never happened.”

  “This could
be the first time,” the computer said.

  “I can take care of myself,” Hellman said.

  The air was fresh and clean outside the spaceship. There was short grass under his feet, springy and tough and scented faintly of thyme and rosemary. Hellman held up the walkie-talkie and clicked it on. “Are you reading me?” he asked the computer.

  “You’re coming over loud and clear,” the computer said. “Roger, breaker, over to you.”

  “Don’t be such a wise guy,” Hellman said. “What sort of a freak programmed you, anyhow?”

  “You must be referring to my irony circuit. It was put in especially for my model. “

  “Well, turn it off.”

  “Manual lock. You’ll have to do it yourself.”

  “When I get back,” Hellman said. “You still got those machines on your radar?”

  “It’s not radar,” the computer said. “Two of the machines are now traveling away from you. One is still moving toward you.”

  “How soon should I be able to see it?”

  “Calculating the two trajectories, and assuming there’s no change in either of your directions, and no other untoward event occurs, I would say, in the vague terms you prefer, that it ought to be quite soon.”

  Hellman moved on. He could see now that the plain was not as flat as he had thought when he looked at it from the ship. It dipped and rose and fell, and there were low hills in the near distance, or perhaps they were sand dunes. Hellman was getting a little winded now. He had failed to keep up with his aerobics during the spaceship flight and was a trifle out of condition. All this climbing up and down, even on little hills, could take its toll. As he moved along he heard, just slightly louder than his own labored breath, the low chuffing on an engine.

  “I can hear him!” he told the computer.

  “I should think so. My receptors picked him up long ago.”

  “Good for you. But where is he?”

  “He’s about ten or fifteen feet from you and slightly to your left. “

  “Why can’t I see him?”

  “Because he is taking advantage of the cover afforded by a fold in the earth. “