Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Where is everyone?” Sal whispered.

  “Watching the midnight spear-fishing competition,” Alfonso said.

  “A break for us,” said Sal.

  “I hope so,” Alfonso said. “I have to get back to the mines now. Good luck!”

  After he departed, Sal and Toma entered the factory.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Inside the factory, there were rows of bassinets, temperature-controlled, under dim overhead lights.

  Sal walked down one of the aisles between the rows of bassinets, where the eggs lay, three or four to a basket.

  Sal recognized the Simi eggs, having previously looked them up in his Egg Identification Book. The Simi eggs were colored reddish-brown, about four inches long, pointed on one side, rounded on the other. But there was another kind of egg in the bassinets, too. These were slightly smaller, colored grayish white with purple specks. They were perfectly round in shape.

  Now what were these eggs? Sal stared at the purple-specked eggs. There was something disturbing about them. He lifted one of them in one hand, and held a regular reddish-brown Simi egg in the other: The purplish eggs were heavier, and faintly greasy to the touch.

  “These are not Simi eggs,” he said to Toma.

  The spider robot touched one of the purplish eggs with a delicate tentacle. “You are right, Sir. They do not appear to be Simi at all. But what are they’ ?”

  “I think we know the answer to that,” Sal said. “Did you bring the Egg Identification Book?”

  “I have it right here,” Toma said. He took the book out of the small day-pack he had strapped to the widest part of his frame. “Let’s see now, purplish, perfectly round . . .” He flipped the pages quickly. “Here it is, Commander!”

  There on page 44 was a perfect reproduction of the egg. Beneath it, the text read, “Reproduction of Balderdash egg.”

  “So!” said Sal.

  “Yes, indeed,” Toma said. “You have penetrated to the heart of the mystery, Sir.”

  “It’s obvious enough now,” Sal said. “The Balderdash have given all those good things to the Simi in order to have access to their egg factories. Once in charge, they have put their own eggs into the bassinets along with those of the Simi.”

  “And the purpose of that . . .?”

  It came to Sal in a blinding flash of horrified insight. “When the Balderdash fledglings hatch out, they will kill the Simi fledglings. Then the Balderdash will be able to take over all of Melchior and populate it with their own noisome spawn.”

  Toma curled one tentacle in a thoughtful gesture. “Why didn’t the Simi notice the different eggs.”

  “You know how hard of seeing they are. The Balderdash must have counted on that.”

  Toma nodded a tentacle. “We must report this to the proper authorities at once.”

  “There’s no time,” Sal said. “Listen.” He held the Simi egg out to Toma.

  The spider robot took the egg and turned it carefully in his tentacle. “What am I listening for, Sir?”

  “Hold it to your ear,” Sal said.

  Toma did so. “Something inside is moving!” he exclaimed.

  “Exactly the case. These creatures are within a few hours of hatching. Once they’re out, it will be too late.”

  “What are we to do?” Toma asked.

  Sal looked around. In a corner of the factory, he saw a barrel filled with brass stock. He took a piece about two feet long, heaved it, then strode purposefully to the nearest bassinet.

  “I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” Toma said.

  “Never mind what you think. Help me.”

  He bent over and tapped at one of the Balderdash eggs. He tapped a second time. He gave a third, firmer tap, and the egg began to fissure. Crazed lines appeared on its spherical surface. Then it split in two, and from its interior poked a bald, beaked face with a curiously folded mouth.

  “Mon Dieu!” the robot exclaimed. “It is coming at me!”

  The fledgling had bared its long teeth. Its little eyes flashed an angry red. It advanced on the spider robot, who backed away.

  “Why is it pursuing me?” Toma asked.

  “It is the nature of the Balderdash,” Sal said. “In the Egg Identification Book, it says that the Balderdash are at their most ferocious just after birth. Some say it is their anger at having been born into a world of pain and baffled desire. But that is just a theory. It is certain that they attack anything that moves except each other.”

  “That is interesting” Toma said. “But isn’t there anything you can do about this one? It is trying to eat one of my tentacles.”

  Sal pulled out his blaster, set it for narrow beam, and quickly converted the fledgling into smelly charcoal. Then he and Toma walked up and down the aisles of the egg factory, smashing and destroying the Balderdash eggs.

  At last the task was done. “We’ve succeeded,” Sal said. “These creatures will never breed out into an unprepared world.”

  “Amen to that,” Toma said. “Now we must explain all this to Count Sforza.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Back in his camp, Sal sat alone in his two-story Command Post and pondered his next move, sipping the cup of Ovaltine that Toma had prepared for him.

  He fell into a deep concentration. He came out of it only when he noticed a shadow crossing the room, and then a quiet sound behind him. Sal got quickly to his feet and turned. He saw three men coming down from the ceiling. They were dressed entirely in black, with most of their faces concealed in hoods. They had swords strapped across their backs. They had on lightweight super-adhesive sneakers which enabled them to walk right down the walls, though the strain on their back and hip joints was considerable. Moving with sinuous grace, they came to the floor and reset their suction cups. And then they were ready.

  The three Ninja advanced shoulder to shoulder on their gray sneakered feet. They were all smiling, a sign that Sal found ominous. He glanced quickly to either side and saw that his accustomed weapons were out of reach. There was his ray sword, hanging from a peg on the wall. There was his blaster, its bulbous Lucite butt glowing with restored energies, just the weapon for cutting these suckers down. But it, too, was out of reach.

  It occurred to Sal that he could perhaps sidle up to the blaster while diverting the Ninjas with conversation.

  “Hi, fellows, what’s happening’? he asked, skillfully feigning the manner and disingenuous gaze of an adolescent.

  “We come to get you,” the foremost Ninja said.

  “Is that a fact?” said Sal. “And where do you want to take me?”

  “Don’t go sidling up to them weapons,” the foremost Ninja said.

  There was no time for delay. The blaster was almost within his reach, there in the suddenly stifling hot room, with the view of Melchior’s double moons visible in the upper left-hand quadrant of the window.

  Sal made his move, but it was too late. The Ninjas were all around him. There was a sharp rap behind his left ear. His vision exploded into light and jagged color, and that was all he remembered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sal returned to consciousness with a pain in his head. He was lying on a cold stone floor in a room about ten feet square. There was just one window, high up on the wall. It was barred.

  Sal got to his feet and paced up and down the room, regaining his energy, He realized that the gravity was lighter, and there was a freshness and tang to the air. He was no longer on Melchior.

  There was a grating sound of a key in the lock. The door opened. A man in plain battle-dress, with a blaster in his hand, entered cautiously.

  “You there! Come with me.”

  Sal asked him, “Where am I?”

  Once in the corridor, the guard gestured. “Know you not the characteristic groined architecture of the imperial Palace of the Sforza on the planet Rienzi?”

  “So I’m on Rienzi. I was afraid of that.”

  Count Sforza had him in his grasp! A thousand thoughts s
wept through Sal’s mind. Could he overpower the guard and run? But where could he run to? Sforza had the power to pluck him from any planet, no matter how distant, and bring him here. He would not be safe anywhere.

  Sal followed the guard down a long, dimly lit corridor, and then through a doorway to an interior courtyard. In niches along the walls, there were antique marble statues of stem-looking Roman types.

  They entered a room where Sforza sat playing with toys. Sal remembered now how much Sforza loved new and complicated toys of all sorts. These new ones looked fascinating, all black and silver. Sal didn’t know how they worked, but he longed to find out.

  The Count put down his toy and turned to Sal. He was a big man, with a prominent belly partially concealed by his flowing ermine robe. His face was round, self-indulgent and a little cruel. He wore a small moustache and pointy beard.

  “Sal, Sal,” he said, “what am I to do with you?”

  “Where’d you get the new toys?” Sal asked.

  Sforza smiled. “You like them, don’t you? They’re the latest import from the Play Planet.”

  “I’ve never heard of the Play Planet before.”

  “It’s just recently begun operation in the Delta Sigma system. Their motto is, ‘A place for the young in heart and heavy in pocketbook.’ ”

  “These look neat,” Sal said.

  “They are,” Sforza said. “I have them here with me now so that you may know what you are going to miss. There’ll be no toys where I’m sending you, my lad.”

  “Where’s that?” Sal asked.

  “You’re going to the Dullsville Camp on Planet Trabajo. There you will pick lima beans with the slave peon robots and listen to self improving lectures every evening. You will not like it, Sal. It will be dull and tiring work, just the kind you hate. My heart goes out to you. But there’s nothing I can do about it. You disobeyed my order, and you must be punished.”

  Sal shrugged and looked stoical. Sforza sighed and played with one of his new glittering toys. It made satisfying squeaks when he turned it one way and giggled when he turned it another.

  “I could forgive almost anything else, Sal,” Sforza said. “But why did you have to lose my spaceship?”

  “What are you talking about? I left it parked in orbit when I went down to Melchior.”

  Sforza shook his head. “When my Ninjas grabbed you, the Endymion took off soon after, and has not been seen since. I assume you had left orders to that effect.”

  “I did not!”

  “Of course you’d say that,” Sforza said. “Whatever happened, you’re responsible.”

  “Of course I am,” Sal said. “If the ship’s lost, I’ll pay for it.”

  “Out of what? Your salary as a commander for the next thousand years wouldn’t cover it. And you’re not going to be on commander salary any longer.”

  Sal shrugged, “Then there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You can tell me what you did with the ship. You must have left some kind of standing orders. You must know where they were going.”

  “I really don’t have a clue,” Sal said.

  Sforza crossed the room and sat down on a low pedestal. “I should have listened to my advisors. They told me it was crazy to entrust a trillion dollar spaceship to a fourteen-year-old kid,”

  “I’m sixteen!”

  “But you were fourteen when I turned the ship over to you.”

  “You know yourself,” Sal said, “that we teenagers have proven far more reliable than mature men like yourself.”

  “Don’t you go getting smart with me, young man,” Sforza said.

  Sal hung his head, but peered up defiantly through his tousled red-orange curls. The freckles on his cheeks glowed like battle stars.

  Sforza said, “I see that I am going to have to give you a taste of the agonies you will soon endure. I have prepared a documentary of the sorrows and discomforts that await you on Trabajo.”

  “Why bother when I’ll soon enough be enduring the real thing?”

  “Because I want you to brood over what’s going to happen to you on Trabajo before it actually happens.”

  “If that’s a Renaissance subtlety, it’s beyond me,” Sal remarked.

  Count Sforza glared at him. Fury colored his face and engorged his neck. It was a crucial moment for the two. The Condottieri ruler and his young commander were on the verge of saying words that would have wounded each of them to the quick and rendered impossible any chance of compromise. But at that moment, a guard ran into the room, his unbuttoned gorglet sign enough of his haste.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Sire!” the guard cried. “The battleship Endymion has just reappeared!”

  The occupants of the room stared at each other in wild surmise, for at that moment the receptor plate of the Instantaneous Transfer Machine glowed. Three figures appeared in its field, shadowlike at first, then swiftly taking on substance. They were Alfonso, Toma, and Kukri.

  Sforza’s surprise quickly gave way to rage. “What did you do with my ship?” he thundered at the new arrivals.

  “What any lover of mankind would have done,” Toma said. The spider robot advanced to the center of the room. Fatigue was evident in his drooping central tentacles. But he held his spherical body proudly erect and said, “I took over the Endymion and followed the Balderdash when they fled from Melchior. This was soon after your Ninjas kidnapped Commander Sal, not long after he had destroyed the Balderdash eggs.”

  “Destroyed whose eggs?” said Sforza. “I was not told of this.”

  Sal explained how the Balderdash had been substituting their own eggs for the Simi eggs, obviously with the intent of killing off the entire new generation of Simis and replacing them with Balderdash.

  Count Sforza mused for a moment. Then he said, “That was well done. And then you followed them?”

  “Yes, Sire,” said Toma. “To see where they would go.”

  “And where did they go?”

  “I will let Kukri explain that,” Toma said.

  The badger-faced little alien stepped forward, cleared his throat, and said, “I know I am a mere under-species to you, and it is true that my race was born without an opposable thumb. Some have thought to heap defamy on us for that, contending that in the thinking department we are out to lunch, and other cruel metaphors of an inaccurate but compelling nature. And so—”

  “Would you please get on with it?” Sforza said. “Before I have you stuffed?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Kukri said briskly. “I just wanted to explain that though unintelligent myself, nevertheless it seemed to me worthwhile to bring to your attention the Balderdash location. So that you could apply your own unquestioned intelligence to it, the intelligence which emanates from your possession of two opposable thumbs.”

  “Enough of thumbs!” Sforza roared. “Tell me what happened!”

  “We followed the departing Balderdash fleet in order to ascertain where they were going, on the off-chance that they might come back again. They took a spiral route, north northwest toward the constellation of the Lattice, then east past the Grade Latrine, and then south again past the constellation of the Almond. After that . . .”

  “I don’t want to hear their whole bloody travel route!” Sforza said. “Where did they go, finally? Back to their own stupid little world, I suppose.”

  “No such thing, Sir,” Kukri said quietly. “You know the black hole in Perseus Major?”

  “Of course. Everyone knows that one.”

  “They went directly to that.”

  “Did they enter the black hole?”

  “Yes, Sir. They disappeared below the event-horizon. And you know what that means.”

  “Of course I know,” Sforza said. “The black hole leads to the Dark Universe.”

  “And that,” Kukri said, “is their home.”

  “You can’t be sure about that!” Sforza snapped.

  “I can, Sire. Look at this.” Kukri held out a handkerchief. There were several lump
y objects wrapped in it. “What is it?” Sforza asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It was then that Alfonso brushed past the guards and stepped forward.

  “And who are you?” Sforza demanded.

  “My name is Alfonso,” Alfonso said. “I am a minerals explorer for a large commercial company, and zygote-brother to Salvatore. But I am also a secret financial agent of the Central Government. We were on the trail of these.” He took the handkerchief from Kukri and unfolded it. Inside were half a dozen gold coins.

  “Well, they’re just coins,” said Sforza. “Gold, it looks like. What’s the matter with that?”

  “It is not real gold,” Alfonso said.

  “So it’s fake gold?”

  “Not that, either. This is anti-matter gold. It is gold identical to what we have in our universe, but with its particle charges reversed. It is also known as Contraterrene gold.”

  “Contraterrene matter,” Sforza mused. “It is explosive when it comes into contact with normal matter, is it not?”

  Alfonso nodded. “Gram for gram, CT matter is the most explosive substance in the universe.”

  “And you are saying that the Balderdash introduced these coins into our universe?”

  “That is correct, sir. We found these coins on Melchior. They had been brought in by the Balderdash to pay the expenses of their egg-substitution operation. They have no access to our universe’s normal gold, because it’s all in the hands of other people, but in their own antimatter universe, they can get unlimited quantities of it.”

  “‘Why didn’t this stuff blow up as soon as it got there?” Sforza asked.

  “Feel the surface,” Alfonso said, “Each coin is coated in Neutral Wax, a substance found only in the interface between their universe and ours. Using this wax, the gold will remain inert long enough for the Balderdash to spend it. But after a few months; the wax wears off and the coin explodes.”