Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  But if he brought back proof . . . maybe if he proved this place existed, it would exist.

  He hesitated. There was the possibility that if he proved this place existed, the places he had known would no longer exist.

  He didn’t want to think about that.

  Bernstein raised the camera and photographed the street he was standing on. He waited fearfully a moment. Nothing happened. He began taking more pictures.

  Then he heard a sound behind him and he whirled.

  A man was trudging down the street pushing a wide cart. He was a man of Earth. He wore a white apron and a straw hat. His cart was gaily colored in red and green stripes.

  He was calling out something. As the man approached, Bernstein was able to make out what he was saying: “Get yer red hots!”

  A hot dog salesman!

  “Hi, I’m Sam,” the hot dog man said. “Where are the others?”

  “What others?”

  “The others who escaped from Earth. The last pioneers.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why should they want to escape from Earth?”

  “Man, don’t you know?” Sam asked, his voice incredulous. “Everyone knows what’s happened to Earth.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The atomics. A chain reaction. The whole planet is dead.”

  “Wait,” Bernstein said, “that can’t be right. In my world the Cold War is over, no one is threatening anyone with atomic bombs. Blowing up Earth has become inconceivable.”

  “Not here it’s not. It’s happened.”

  Bernstein couldn’t stand this any longer. He backed away from the man, turned, started to run. He ran through the streets of the ancient city and out into the desert. Pushing himself as hard as he could, he moved rapidly across the stony ground. He should have remembered this outcome. It was foretold in one of Bradbury’s stories, “There Will Come Soft Rains.” But perhaps there was still time to avert personal doom.

  Panting, out of breath, he reached the place where the high stone arch had been. But it wasn’t there any longer. Two people were sitting on a pile of rocks nearby. A Martian and an Earthman.

  The woman was Ylla. He had never seen the man before, but he knew it had to be Captain York.

  “What happened to the arch?” Bernstein asked.

  “I tore it down,” York said. “Ylla helped me.”

  “But why?”

  “To prevent your world from continuing.”

  Bernstein sat down on a rock near York and Ylla. He didn’t have his helmet. He must have left it in the city. He didn’t think he would need it any longer.

  “So my world is gone?”

  “It never existed,” York said. “I made sure of that.”

  “It did exist!”

  “Only as an unaccountable fancy. And frankly, it’s no great loss. From what Ylla has told me, your world didn’t sound especially nice.”

  “It was a fine world!” Bernstein said.

  “But incompatible with this one,” York said. “I don’t want to live in a world in which Mars has no air and no life. Then there’d be no Ylla! And no me!”

  “I see,” Bernstein said. “I suppose this is a case of survival of the fittest hallucination.”

  “I suppose so,” York said. He had his arm around Ylla’s shoulder. He seemed pleased with himself.

  “What about the other men of my expedition?” Bernstein asked.

  “What men?” York said. “What expedition?”

  Bernstein was numb.

  “There’s plenty of time for you to figure things out,” York said. “For now, let’s head for the Grand Canal.”

  “What for?”

  “Just to sit beside it,” said York.

  “And watch our reflections in the water,” said Ylla.

  “And drink beer?” asked Bernstein.

  York smiled.

  Bernstein followed York and Ylla back to the Martian city. He was going to drink beer and throw his empties into the Grand Canal of Mars.

  After that, he didn’t know what he would do.

  THE SEAL OF SOLOMON

  Samona had been passing Edwin Lapthorn’s house on Bridlepath Lane and she’d heard soft, heartbreaking moans coming from within. She knocked but no one answered. She’d paused on the doorstep, uncertain what to do.

  She and Amer had been married three years ago. When their first child was due, they’d left Amer’s beloved mountainside home and moved to this town of Rock Harbor, just to the south of Boston. Here there were medical doctors for their baby girl, and Harvard College nearby provided manuscripts for Amer’s researches into the properties of magic. The Crafters kept to themselves. The last thing they wanted was any trouble with their neighbors over witchcraft or alchemy. They needed a chance to rest and take care of their new baby, untroubled by controversies. They especially didn’t want trouble with Edwin Lapthorn, a jeweller who carried an unsavory reputation with him as a skunk carries scent.

  But there was a child crying in Lapthorn’s house. Samona rapped at the door again, louder. “Hello? Is there anyone home?”

  She knew little about Lapthorn, though there was much gossip about him in Rock Harbor in that year of 1685. People said Lapthorn had gotten into trouble in England. Nobody seemed to know just what sort of trouble, but something unsavory and perhaps uncanny was hinted at. He had managed to escape before the King’s constables could arrest him, taking passage on the bark Dora out of Plymouth and coming to Boston. He lived quietly enough in nearby Rock Harbor, but there was that about him people didn’t like. Perhaps it was his lean, lantern-jawed face, black eyebrows that met in the middle, bloodless lips set into a humorless grin.

  Samona wanted nothing to do with the man. But there was a child crying in his house, and she thought it might be in serious trouble.

  She had to go in! She straightened, a tall, beautiful young woman with long black hair, dark eyes, a haughty, arresting face, and a figure of such charm that even her modest costume could not entirely conceal. She tried the door and found it was unlocked. She entered the high old house.

  She came out ten minutes later, shaken, and went directly home. After checking on her own child, Amy, aged fourteen months, sleeping quietly in her crib, Samona went to the drawing room and told Amer about her experience. Her husband listened, dark eyebrows drawing together in the scowl that appeared on his face when he was forced to listen to tales of man’s inhumanity.

  “I’ll have a word with Master Lapthorn,” he said. Putting on his overcoat and hat he went out. He sought out Edwin Lapthorn.

  Lapthorn was just leaving Josiah’s Publick House on State Street when Amer came up. The two men had a nodding acquaintance but had never talked together.

  “Sir,” Amer said, “a little while ago my wife had occasion to pass your house. She heard a child wailing. She took the liberty of entering—”

  “Entered my house, sir? Just walked in?”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  “Quite a sizable liberty, I’d call that,” Lapthorn said. He was an immensely tall man, with a wiry mass of black hair pressed down by a tricorn hat. His face was weathered, reddened under the cheekbones from drink, and badly shaven.

  He had a long upper lip, pulled awry by a puckered scar that ran down the side of his cheek, which gave him a permanent sneer.

  “Your wife had no right to enter my premises, sir.”

  “Perhaps not, sir. But she found the child who lives with you was in trouble.”

  “Douglas in trouble? The child is perfectly able to look after himself.”

  “She found him screaming his head off and hanging by one foot from the top rung of the ladder to the root cellar.”

  “I had no idea he could even get the door open! Clever little fellow despite his idiocy! The experience did him no harm, obviously. Made of India rubber, that lad is.”

  “He’s flesh and blood, sir,” said Amer stiffly. “Like the rest of us. Your youngster deserves bet
ter looking-after.”

  “The idiot’s not mine, you know,” said Lapthorn. “Left to me by my former housekeeper when she died of a sudden fever. Out of the goodness of my heart I agreed to look out for him. He eats better than many in this town. But even if I starved him, sir, yes, and whipped him, too, what goes on under a man’s roof is his own business and nothing to do with you. Your wife had no right.”

  “A child’s safety was at stake,” Amer said stubbornly. “Even if that’s true, it’s none of your concern. Unless you choose to make it so.”

  The man’s callousness, and his suddenly aggressive behavior astonished Amer. Lapthorn had his fists doubled; the scar on his cheek glowed. The situation was threatening to get out of hand. It was plain that Lapthorn was an ugly piece of work, and he was looking for trouble. Was it worth starting what might be a nasty situation for the sake of an idiot child who understood nothing?

  “That’s my last word on it,” Lapthorn said. “And tell your wife to keep out of my house. If she comes in again uninvited, it may not be Douglas hanging by his foot from the root cellar.”

  Amer drew himself up abruptly. He was thin, dark haired, intense. The forward-leaning tension of his body conveyed menace. His eyes were blue and glittery. The hair of his head seemed to bristle. He said, his voice dropping half an octave, “Sir, do you threaten my wife?”

  The two men stared at each other for several moments. Amer’s neck began to swell with a rage he was having difficulty controlling. Then Lapthorn broke the tension, laughing and turning away.

  “ ’Twas but a pleasantry, sir. I would never offer violence to a lady. But I hope she will not essay my premises again, because a nasty shock might await her, and it would be none of my doing. There are defenses to my house, sir, which I had not set into place before this, but which I will do now. You are warned. Good day to you, sir.”

  And doffing his hat, Lapthorn strode away.

  Amer returned home and told Samona of his conversation. Samona thought for a long time. Her eyes were pensive, and her gaze seemed far away. She poked at the fire negligently, barely noticing when the end of the branch she used as a poker caught fire. Then she flung it into the flames and said, “I wonder what he is trying to hide.”

  “His indifferent cruelty to Douglas, as I believe the child is called. What else could it be?”

  “It wouldn’t be that,” Samona said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too trivial. Nobody around here cares about cruelty to an idiot child. Except us.”

  “Come now, my dear. Some of the church folk around here would make it an issue if they knew.”

  “There’s more going on here than that,” Samona said. “I think our Master Lapthorn has other things on his mind. Something is going on in that house.”

  “It’s none of our concern,” Amer said. “Each man is free under the King’s law.”

  For the moment, Samona had to be content with that.

  In Lapthorn’s house, the idiot Douglas sat on a little stool in the comer near the fire. He was big-headed and blank-expressioned with large, drooling mouth and small dull eyes. Douglas was a patient one, who could sit in a comer for hours, intently playing with a spider’s web, winding and rewinding it, never breaking the skein.

  “It’s time,” Lapthorn said to him.

  A look of consternation crossed the idiot’s face. You could have swom he knew what Lapthorn meant. But he made no protest when Lapthorn led him to the special room, put him in his accustomed posture on the flagstones, drew the pentagram around him, and began to chant.

  It seemed to take forever tonight. Then the candles flamed, though the air in the room was still.

  It was the time Lapthorn had waited for, the great moment when the constellations had swung in their great circle to the correct astrological position. With Douglas in place on the flagstones, Lapthorn now made ready. The small altar in his back room, a room kept shuttered and locked to avoid any prying eyes, had long been prepared with the black candles and the specially treated mandrake root in its little pewter bowl. Lapthorn bowed down before the altar. He said, “I pronounce the words, O Shadrach, Asmodeus, and Belial, listen to me, give me this gift and I will repay you a thousandfold. And to bear witness to this, here is my blood.”

  So saying, Lapthorn pricked his thumb with the end of a stylus. A bubble of blood swelled and then flowed down the instrument’s bronze side.

  The candle guttered dangerously in its pewter holder. The window, with its parchment cover, creaked and strained at its latch as the wind pushed and tugged at it. The wind had long been his enemy.

  “Come out,” said Lapthorn, speaking directly to Douglas. A strangeness lit the idiot’s face. His features twisted. His mouth opened. From it issued a fine mist. It hung in the air, picking up rays of light from the dying candlelight, then swirled around his face. When it had cleared, the idiot’s face had changed.

  “What is your name?” Lapthorn asked.

  “I am Caspardutis,” said a voice from the idiot’s mouth. “I was known in ancient Egypt. The laboratories of the alchemists knew me. I have conversed with Paracelsus and the Great Albertus.”

  It was an elemental. These creatures had been known since earliest antiquity. They did not fit neatly into the theories of magic. They could not be said to serve either side.

  “You have come in answer to my spell,” Lapthorn said.

  “That I have. But I beg you to release me.”

  “Not so fast, my fine ethereal friend! You know what I want.”

  “The same thing you wanted last time,” the idiot said.

  “And I will want it next time, too. What have you brought me?”

  The idiot’s hands opened, displaying a handful of precious stones: several uncut rubies, a big sapphire, a small but perfect emerald, and a few lesser stones.

  “Are they good?” asked Caspardutis.

  “They’ll do,” Lapthorn said. “Where did you get them?”

  “I know a back entrance to the treasure of Ali Baba. But it is dangerous to go there.”

  “You must go back at once and bring me more! And more after that!”

  “For how long, Master?”

  “For as long as I say.”

  The idiot’s head nodded. Then his eyes blinked and closed. His head drooped upon his chest. After a few moments, the head lifted again. The signs of intelligence were gone. It was Douglas again, until the next time he was inhabited by the spirit Lapthorn had captured.

  Soon thereafter, Master Lapthorn opened his jewellery store in South Boston. It was an immediate success. People from as far away as Providence came to look at his fine rubies from Ceylon, his emeralds from Colombia, his pearls from the South Seas. To look and to buy. His sales were brisk, because, despite the growing difficulties between the Colonies and England, Boston was a prosperous small city and growing by leaps and bounds. There was money in the colony, and a great lack of goods to buy. Lapthorn’s jewellery was like a reminder of the beauty and decadence of old Europe, from which many had come recently. Despite the Puritan indictment of luxury and extravagance, people found reasons why they simply had to have this brooch or that necklace, or that unique ring.

  The man was a success. And even though Amer didn’t like him, it was hard to begrudge him his good fortune. Amer didn’t think of it again until the cow-killings began. Until children started to be lost in the deep woods, still haunted by recent memories of savage, pagan Indians. There was a bad fire that consumed half the town, and plague moved in to claim more lives.

  Amer’s relations were not good with the elders of the town. They had never liked him or approved of him. He was not a regular churchgoer, and he was rumored to use magic. The magicians and witches of the town didn’t like him either, because he had spoken out boldly against the powers of darkness. But they had need of his services now. There seemed to be some sort of a spell over the town. Things were going badly for everyone except Edwin Lapthorn, who was prospering.
r />   “It all has the look of an unholy pact with the Devil.”

  So Amer was told by Charles Swanson, a well-known local magician who had tried to combat Lapthorn with black magic. Swanson was crippled now. The magic backfired on him. The man Lapthorn obviously had a pact with the Devil. It would take another kind of magic to defeat him.

  “You must do something,” Swanson said.

  “It is not my fight,” Amer told him.

  Next to visit was Obadiah Winter, the head of the local Congregationalist Church.

  “We have heard, sir, that you are a considerable magician. We have need of your powers.”

  This conversation took place in Amer’s sitting room, which was well lit by tallow tapers. Winter was a big, grim-faced man, a pious man without humor to him. He lost no time getting to the point.

  “There is a matter my congregation would have me discuss with you, sir.”

  “Discuss away, sir.”

  “Do you know of this new fellow in town? This Lapthorn?”

  “I have heard of him, though we have not met.”

  “Master Amer, let me speak to you openly. There has been nothing but disaster here in Rock Harbor ever since that man arrived.”

  “Coincidence,” Amer said. “You can’t blame a man for that.”

  “Won’t you do anything, sir? We know you have powers.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Amer said.

  “Superstitious fool,” he remarked to Samona after Winter ‘ departed.

  “In this case, he’s right. You know that Lapthorn is causing all the current problems here.”

  Amer was sitting by the fire studying an old parchment he had bought in Amsterdam, a medieval manuscript which claimed to give the key to the hermetic science of alchemy.

  “Causing what?” Amer said. He turned back to his manuscript. “You know, some of those old alchemists had some pretty good ideas. Let me read you this bit.”

  “Did you hear what I said?” Samona asked.