Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “But why were they doing all this?”

  “It was their intention to implant their own race into our universe with a view to taking it over. They’ve already trashed their own universe and now want to fool around with ours. Melchior was the opening campaign, the thin edge of the wedge.”

  “And you knew all this?” Sforza asked.

  Alfonso smiled. “We in Central Government have known it for a long time. They are insatiable, you know, the evil Balderdash beings of the dark universe.”

  “Their behavior,” Toma said, “is like that of certain birds long known to the folklore of Earth. The cuckoo, who puts her eggs into other birds’ nests, and the shrike, who impales birds on her long pointed beak.

  The Balderdash combine the worst features of those two.”

  “It would have been a mess,” Count Sforza said slowly.

  “And you would have been responsible,” Toma pointed out.

  Soon thereafter, Count Sforza delivered his revised judgment. He had to admit that Sal had done well.

  “You disobeyed my orders,” he said, “but your instincts were good. It has all turned out very well. Princess Hatari, whose presence is expected momently, will be restored to the throne of Melchior. We’ll sort out the technicalities later. And there’ll be a raise in pay for you, Sal, and I’ll promote you to bubaldar first-class.”

  The princess entered now, in a sweeping ballroom gown that accentuated her lush figure. Smiling sweetly, she said, “I, too, have a proposal to make to you, Sal. Perhaps you should hear me out before accepting the Count’s offer.”

  “I’m listening,” Sal said.

  “I hereby propose a marriage between us,” the princess said, blushing.

  “I had not expected this,” Sal said.

  “I know it’s a little sudden. But it makes sense. There’s a way about you, Sal, that appeals to me. Frankly, I’m crazy about you. You will make a fine regent for the throne of Melchior.”

  “Princess,” said Sal, “I must admit that I am not insensitive to your charms. But you forget the disparity in age between us.”

  “That is easy to take care of. You could take an Age Enhancement Package, or I could take an Age Slow-down Package. Either way, we could get together at appropriate ages.”

  “Hmm, interesting,” Sal said.

  Sforza said, “Now Sal, consider: Do you really want to leave the Sforza Condottieri? We could talk about a bonus, and a further jump in rank. When you wanted to marry, I could find a princess for you—one with a better planet to her dowry than Melchior.”

  “So he says,” Hatari said. “But can you trust him? He was ready to exile you to Trabajo before even hearing your side!”

  “And what about you?” Sforza said. “You wanted to use Sal to further your own ends!”

  “Just a minute,” Sal said. Turning to the princess, he said, “Hatari, you are a fine woman and you have made me a generous offer. But I think Em not quite ready yet even to consider it. Give me some time. If the offer remains open, we can discuss it again in a year.”

  “I knew you’d see it my way,” Sforza said.

  “Not quite,” Sal said. “Yes, I do want to continue as a fighting man of the Condottieri. It is the only trade I know. But first, I think I need some time off. I want to relax and be childish. Count, what I would really like is a year away from my duties. I’d like to spend that year on the Play Planet, for now that you have mentioned it, it intrigues me greatly. And I’d like you to pay for it.”

  “The Play Planet? But that’s for kids!”

  “I know, Sir. And I am something more than a kid, but something less, too. Give me a year to play, and then let me make my decision.”

  “And I,” said Toma, “will accompany you to the Play Planet or wherever you go. We spider robots are faithful creatures.”

  “Well then,” said the Count, “so be it. I will pay all your expenses, Sal. It is the least I can do for one who has saved our universe from the vile machinations of the Balderdash.”

  And so it was.

  Sal left soon thereafter for the Play Planet, accompanied by the faithful Toma. What his decision would be at the end of a year, he did not know. That would come later. For now, there were new and wonderful games ahead of him, and that was sufficient for the present.

  MINOTAUR MAZE

  1. How Theseus got his first Minotauring job.

  It is said that Theseus was passing through Delphi, a little town west of the Corinthian Pecos, and went into a saloon for a glass of beer and a hamburger. He noticed a newspaper which someone had left behind on the mahogany counter. He began leafing idly through it.

  He was broke, as usual, an out-of-work hero, and totally unqualified to do anything but kill monsters and have trouble with women. He had been drifting through the high country on the old Dorian trail, eating small and sleeping lumpy. He was a long way from home and not planning to go back there anyway, heroes doing their best work on the road, it’s in the nature of the calling. But nothing had turned up so far and, without much hope, Theseus turned to the classified ads. There he read:

  “Hero wanted for dangerous job of a mythic nature. Must be fully qualified. Undying fame for right man.”

  “Well, now,” Theseus said, rubbing a finger gently along the unshaven left side of his jaw.

  Theseus went to the address given in the newspaper. It was a large, gloomy red brick office building on the edge of town. Theseus was directed to an office on the second floor. There Theseus saw filing cabinets, a gooseneck lamp, a coffee maker, a bald man, and a redheaded woman, all arranged in a standard way.

  “Take a seat,” said the man. “You’ve come in answer to the ad? Very good, we’re in need of qualified sales personnel on Rigna II and Fortis Minor. Our line of hydrostatically stabilized comfort-controlled woolen outerwear sells itself, though we do need someone to accompany the goods and collect the money. Have you ever had a selling job before, Mister—?”

  “My name is Theseus,” Theseus said, “And I think there’s some misunderstanding. The ad I’m answering called for a hero, not a salesman.”

  “Oh, of course, the hero ad,” said the man. “Have you any credentials, Mr. Theseus?”

  Theseus showed his graduate certificate from the Famous Hero School of Maplewood, New Jersey, his letter of recommendation from Achilles, with whom he had apprenticed for six months, and his other papers, commendations, proclivities, engagements, statements of exhortio and the like.

  “Yes, we do have an opening in the hero line,” the man told him. “It concerns one of our customers, Mr. Rhadamanthys, a very important man in these parts, a Justice on the Supreme Court of Hell and a brother of King Minos. Rhada, as we call him, had a good-sized ranch nearby where he raised filet mignons. They came completely encased in a living animal, of course, and there was quite a lot of work involved in extracting them. But Rhada had invented a process which he called slaughtering and it handled that nicely. Anyhow, Rhada’s business was going along just fine when all of a sudden this Minotaur appeared in the vicinity and started raising merry hell with the filets in their primary stage, when they are known as cows.”

  “I see,” Theseus said. “And what is a Minotaur?”

  The man explained that the Minotaur was one of those beast-men or men-beasts who used to inhabit the earth together with real men, until Solon passed the Freedom of Suppression Act which allowed the humans to get rid of them.

  Theseus later learned that all this had begun in The Age of the Hybrid Monsters, a socially relaxed time when you wouldn’t be afraid of being seen in public with a chap half goat and half bear, even if he had a pair of eagle’s wings thrown in for good measure. That was back in the Golden Age, when people had no standards at all and thought everything was wonderful because they didn’t know any better. It was a pleasant enough time in its undiscriminating way, but then the spirit of æsthetics was born out of the cauldron of undifferentiated good times, and people became ashamed of having conversations wi
th creatures who grew fur and turned to eating or wearing them instead.

  And so began the Last Vast Roundup, when the beast-men were captured and taken to Animal Corrective Hotels, where they were transformed into atoms and molecules and sent out to try again. But the Minotaur and a few other monsters escaped and took to the woods and mountains and lonely places. There the Minotaur lived and planned his revenge upon mankind, a sort of prefiguring of the Caliban figure, sinister, animalistic, cunning, savage, treacherous, disloyal, a mirror reversal of a Boy Scout. And now this creature had come down to the habitations of men and was playing hell with the filet mignons, giving them ideas above their station and even mounting raids against the meat packing plants, as the places where the filet mignons were put into cardboard boxes were called.

  “So that’s the situation,” the man said. “Think you can handle it?”

  Theseus knew that at this point he was supposed to express his detestation of the Minotaur, and his hatred of the rule-breaking bestiality that he stood for, and to further express his great pleasure at the high honor bestowed on him, a simple hero, for this chance to rid the earth of an embodiment of a detestable principle that rendered human life incomplete, flat, stale, tasteless, the Albanian in the woodpile, as the Hellenes say, the evil principle that keeps us from achieving our oneness.

  But in fact, Theseus had a soft spot in his heart for monsters. It was inevitable, heroes and monsters share a special understanding since they are in the same line of work. Heroes and monsters also have this in common, that they are constitutionally unable to live on their income.

  “Oh, yeah,” Theseus said, “Minotaurs, nasty customers them critters; I’ve never tackled one before; chimæras are more in my line, but what the hell, a monster’s a monster and I reckon I can cut it. I recollect this chimæra I was tracking out in Apache country near the Pæonian Gulf—”

  “We’d love to hear about that some other time,” the woman said. “But right now we need an answer.”

  “Oh, I’ll do it all right,” Theseus said.

  “How soon can you start?”

  “Well, now,” Theseus said, sitting back in the batwing chair and putting one of his high-heeled Josiah Starke handtooled cordovan boots on the barrail nearby. “I reckon we ought to have a drink on it before I go out and start reading sign.”

  “Reading sign?” the man inquired. He turned to the redheaded woman. “My dear, do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”

  “Why shucks,” Theseus said, “it ain’t no special thing, reading sign, but when you deal with Indians, especially them Minotoor Indians, you got to have some savvy or import some right quick.”

  “Theseus,” the woman said, “I think you’re slipping out of context.”

  “Them Minotoor Indians,” Theseus said, blowing the head off his mug of beer, “can move across bare rock without making a sound except a scuffle from their moccasins. When they’re on the warpath they can equip their moccasins with silencers.”

  “Hey, snap out of it,” the man said.

  Theseus looked up, dazed. Heroes frequently dream of being allowed to change some of the basic rules of the hero and monster game, like changing the context, sending the spectators away, combining forces and assaulting the castle of love, heroes and monsters together, we’d be unbeatable. But it could never happen, the hard wiring of the universe wouldn’t allow it, so if you can’t love a monster, the next best thing is to kill a monster.

  “Sorry,” Theseus said, “just a momentary lapse.”

  “You’re not by any chance mentally disaffected, are you?” the redheaded woman asked.

  “I’m normal for a hero,” Theseus said. “You have to be a little weird to do this job.”

  Theseus signed a provisional contract, to be read, approved, and finalized by his agent, and received the customary monster-hunt advance check. With the preliminaries completed, everyone was hungry and it was time to go to lunch. Lunch with the impresario after signing the contract is usually the best part of the monster hunt.

  2. Mann. T. goes forth after the Minotaur.

  After lunch they went straight to the command post. The redheaded woman did not go with them. Between chapters, she received a telegram telling her that she had won the Miss Abilene beauty contest and that oil had been discovered on the family estate in Sulk City, Florida. So departs a sulky and uncooperative character. Let it stand as a warning to others.

  The Command Post was filled with that air of tension and imminent disaster that accompanies so many bestsellers. Updates on the location and predilections of the Minotaur were flashed on television screens. Technicians hurried back and forth with equation-laden clipboards, making science fiction possible. There was a low hum of electricity, and the odd stuttering sound of the Phase Two Synthesizer, sending forth its mood forecasts. In spite of all this, Theseus did not fail to notice the dark-haired girl carrying a small stack of computer printouts, which were created for the sole purpose of giving her something to dp with her hands. She was adorable, the short skirt, the high heels, the pertness, and a look passed between them, not even an entire look, more of a looklet, or even a glancelet, and yet what future spells of sexual discombobulation were revealed in that stomach-twisting glance that tells you that she has noticed you and is considering thinking about you.

  Theseus didn’t know that now. He had just noticed that the green and red indicators on the Minotaur sweep search indicator had crossed and locked. The Minotaur had been located!

  The high priest of the Technical Scribes, in his green and orange uniform, with the flared gloves and pleated cape, wrote the numbers on a piece of paper and gave it to him.

  “Coordinates these the,” he said, his odd construction and sibilant delivery marking him as an Asper Futile from Gnagi Prime.

  Theseus studied the numbers, committing them to memory. Theseus didn’t really have a very good memory. Things never stayed in it for long. Theseus shouldered his knapsack, filled with Minotaur finding and killing equipment, and headed for the outskirts of town where the trail of the Minotaur began, stopping only at a grocery store on his way out of town to cash his Monster Advance. It was a Greek grocery store, as you might imagine.

  3. I hate to blame Dædalus for everything,

  but a lot of the present complication was his fault. Before he introduced uncertainty and gave us a maze contemporaneous with all space and time, we’d been doing all right, we Hellenes. Our history was a little complicated, but straightforward, even though people have made a lot of work over it. After Dædalus broadened our horizons there was high confusion. Before Dædalus there was just the normal confusion.

  Nowadays I’m anyone who happens to pick up the Theseus archetype. I’ve been universalized, and I don’t much like it. But in the old days, before Dædalus decided that Hume was right, Sequence did not imply Causality.

  Theseus’ history, which is also mine: My father was named Ægeus, and he was a son of Pandion, whose father was Erectheus, King of Athens. Erectheus was killed by Poseidon and his sons fell out over the succession. Cecrops was chosen, but was forced to flee to Megara, and then to Euboea, where he was joined by Pandarus, another brother. Grandfather Pandion came to the throne, but could not hold it against his brother Metion, and, after Metion’s death, against his sons.

  Grandpa had to flee from Athens, and he went to Megara, where he married Pyla, daughter of Pylus, the king. He eventually took on the kingship when Pylus had to go away for some years.

  After Grandpa Pandion’s death, his four sons marched against Athens and drove out the sons of Grandpa’s other son Metion. These four cast lots for the country and my father won the main portion, Athens itself. The others inherited outlying regions.

  Of course, I didn’t know this as a child. I was raised without knowledge of who my father was.

  Dramatists usually portray my childhood and the famous incident of the sword and the stone. But for the purposes of brevity I’m going to tell the other part of the tale
, the part you usually don’t hear, why and how my father, Ægeus, was put into a position in which he could not acknowledge me.

  Dad had tried marriage twice, but had been unsuccessful in having a son. His first wife, Melite, was cute, but barren, and his second, Chalciope, despite her husky voice and winning manner, proved no more fertile.

  This was worrisome, and Dad consulted the oracle at Delphi. He learned that he was not to untie the mouth of his wineskin until he had reached the highest point in Athens, lest he die one day of grief. Ægeus couldn’t figure out what this meant.

  He stopped at Corinth on his way back from Delphi. There ensued the famous scenes with Medea.

  But to go on, next he stopped at Troezen, where his old friend Pitheus was king. His brother Troezen was there, too. They were both sons of Pelops and had recently come from Pisa to share a kingdom with King Ætius.

  There was a problem with Pitheus, and that was his daughter, Æthra. My mother. If Æthra had married Bellerophon, as had originally been planned, mine would have been a very different story. But Bellerophon got into trouble and had to be sent away. And that left Mother in a spot. She had to have a child in order to fulfill her destiny, which was a divine one, but there was no suitable consort in sight. My father’s coming was a godsend. Not that my father could be expected to look at it that way.

  Pitheus succeeded in getting Dad drunk, and got him into Æthra’s bed. After that, according to the story, the god Poseidon had intercourse with my mother. Which raises the interesting point that if I really were Poseidon’s son, I would be semi-divine, which, in ancient Hellas, was a very good thing to be.

  In any event, Poseidon waived any claim on me, or on my mother. I mention the incident only because it’s part of the record.

  Dad told Mom that if she were to have a child, she was to keep quiet about whose it was. He was trying to protect her from the fifty children of Pallas. Pallas himself was a brother of Dad’s old enemy Metion. He would try to kill Mom if he suspected her of carrying Ægeus’ child, with his inherent claim to the kingship of Athens.