Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “It’s too crowded, please hurry!” Gerston cried.

  The policemen searched through Gerston’s mind. They swept memory-objects off simulated shelves and knocked down the portraits of ancestors so remote that Gerston hadn’t known he had them. Their boots made marks on the pink scuff-sensitive surface of Gerston’s mind. Their crude remarks lingered near the virtual ceiling like clouds of ill-smelling gas.

  “Is this going to take long?” Gerston asked through gritted teeth.

  “Better get used to it,” the sergeant said.

  There was a crash. “Sorry, chief,” one of the policemen said. “I dropped one of his golf trophies.”

  “She’s not here,” another policeman reported. “We’ve searched all of the way down to the rotting depths of the stupid insanity he calls his deepest self.

  We’d a found her if she’d been hiding there.”

  “Damnation!” the sergeant said. “She got away again! But at least we got you, sucker.”

  They exited Gerston’s mind. A smile of great amusement appeared on the sergeant’s tough cop face with the little busted red veins and the tufted eyebrows.

  Gerston opened his mouth to speak. Suddenly he froze. Everything around him was arrested in mid-motion. There was a flash of light.

  The policemen disappeared. Gerston goggled, unable to make sense out of this.

  And then a voice spoke in his head.

  “Hi!” the voice said. “We have interrupted your entry into Deep Blue Sleep to bring you a preview of our unlimited psychic adventures for the young at heart.

  Did you enjoy what you just experienced? Want more like it? Just signify your assent. Trained operators will pick up your inference and put the charge on your credit card.”

  So that was what all this was, Gerston thought. This was outrageous!

  Aloud he said, “I demand to see someone in charge.”

  A tall thin man with glinting spectacles appeared in his mind.

  “Supervisor Olson at your service. Is there a problem?”

  “Damned well right there’s a problem! I never chose any psychic adventure program. A little sleep was all I was after! And even if I had selected an adventure, what right did you have to humiliate me by sending this Myra person to invade my mind? And what was this police thing?”

  The supervisor said, “Let me just look at your record, sir.”

  Swiftly he plucked a card out of Gerston’s mind, read it, replaced it.

  “It’s all right, sir, we do have your assent, right here. That is your signature, isn’t it?”

  Gerston squinted. “It looks like it. But I never agreed to anything like this.”

  “But you did, sir. I hope you won’t force me to tell you when you in fact signed for the service.”

  “Go ahead, tell me!”

  “It was just before you died.”

  “I’m dead?” Gerston asked.

  “That is the case, sir.”

  “But how could I be dead?”

  The supervisor shrugged. “It happens.”

  “If I’m dead,” Gerston said, “how come I’m still here?”

  “We have our ways of keeping the dead alive.”

  “I don’t want to be dead!” Gerston wailed.

  “Sir, please be quiet, you’ll wake up the others.”

  “The others? What others?”

  But the supervisor was gone and the lights were beginning to fade.

  Lights in his own apartment? In his mind? Fading? At first he thought he was going to die. Then he remembered he was already dead. Or were they lying to him about that? And if this was death, what lay beyond it? And anyhow, how could he be sure he was dead? Might this not just be the continuation of one of their dream adventures? It would be just like them to lie to him, tell him he was dead, when actually he was just . . . just . . .

  Suddenly Gerston didn’t know what to think. For now something rather strange seemed to be taking place.

  VISIONS OF THE GREEN MOON

  Avery drove up New York State Highway 41 on a dark day with low clouds and rain already splattering his windshield. He almost missed McDougald’s place. The little sign tacked to a tree was modest to the point of invisibility. And the house itself was smaller than he’d expected, tucked under the crest of a hill and almost lost in a fringe of trees. He had to back up to get into the long dirt driveway that snaked up to the house. When he got there, he stopped and looked it over. It was definitely on the small side for a farmhouse, but nicely cared for, with a mowed lawn bordered by birches. It looked like it had been a long time since it had been a working farm. The place might have been a city man’s retreat of fifty years ago when the Adirondacks were a popular holiday destination.

  Avery stopped his rental car just past McDougald’s house. He was in his early thirties, a large, soft-looking man, going bald, with a fringe of curly black hair around his round head. He was of average height and a little overweight. He had a pleasant, round, studious face. His hands, tapping nervously on the steering wheel, were small and well cared for. A graduate of Julliard, he had produced his first professional musical in his early twenties at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey—the critically acclaimed An Evening with Erik Satie.

  A Manhattanite most of his life, Avery rented a car when he needed one, which was rarely. This was one of those occasions. He was off on what he considered a wild goose chase. Or rather, a wild dream chase. It would waste a couple of days that he couldn’t really spare. But he had to do something.

  McDougald’s house looked pleasant enough, but hardly luxurious. Not the sort of place Avery would ordinarily spend an afternoon, much less overnight.

  He sat in his car for a few minutes, just looking at the house, tempted to turn around and go back to New York City. He’d had his doubts ever since Alex had told him about it. Alex was his manager, and had handled all the arrangements for Avery’s two previous shows. Avery’s new one, Moon Follies, was due to open off-Broadway in less than a month. The cast was all in Manhattan, doing final rehearsals. Everything was ready except for one thing. The lead song, which was both the opener and the finale number. Alex still didn’t have it.

  Finally, he got out of his car and went to the front door. McDougald was there to greet him. He was a tall man, white-haired, perhaps in his sixties. He had faded blue eyes beneath tufted eyebrows. They went with his craggy face and work-toughened hands. He wore a red-checked lumberjack shirt, ironed blue jeans, and black lace-up work boots.

  Avery introduced himself, and McDougald offered his hand, saying, “I was expecting you.” His speech was the curiously inflected speech of upper New York State, a mixture of Midwestern and New England.

  “I’m not sure I made myself clear over the phone,” Avery said. “It’s not a prophetic dream I’m after. It’s an artistic one.”

  “The two can be much the same,” McDougald said. “Anyhow, I don’t make any claim for the ones you get here. If you get any at all.”

  “I’m still not sure of this,” Avery said. “I don’t think I understand exactly what it is you’re peddling. No insult intended . . .”

  McDougald was amused. He sat Avery down in a wooden chair in his kitchen. Poured him a cup of coffee without asking first if he wanted it. Then he lit a battered brown pipe, and when it was drawing nicely, addressed himself to Avery’s question.

  “I don’t know myself what it is I do,” McDougald said. “Or if I do anything. My wife and I used to farm here, back when she was alive. But the climate is too bitter most of the year to compete with southern agriculture. I quit while I was ahead, sold most of my land to a resort chain. They went bust, too, but I got my money before they folded. My wife and I always loved this spot. Indians used to live here, Mr. Avery. Iroquois. Claimed it was a power spot. We turned our farmhouse into a small hotel, and when that didn’t go, made it into a bed and breakfast place for folks on their way to Lake Placid and A usable Chasm.”

  “But what about the dreams?” Avery asked. McDougal
d shrugged. “Everyone told us about what great nights of sleep they got, and what wonderful dreams they had.”

  “So it’s the place that’s magical, not you in particular,” Avery said. “Please understand—”

  “I know, no insult intended,” McDougald said. “It’s just that I didn’t come here for a refreshing night’s sleep, though God knows I could use one. I’m looking for—let’s call it inspiration. And my manager, Alex Zibirsky, thought I ought to come here. Said he’d had some amazing insights from dreams he’d had in this place. Never told me what they were, though.”

  “I remember Mr. Zibirsky,” McDougald said. “Nice man. Excitable, but nice. He complimented me on his dreams. As if I had anything to do with them!”

  “Didn’t you?”

  McDougald shook his head and put his pipe into a dark glass ashtray. “How in the hell should I know? I’m a farmer—an ex-farmer—not a dream expert. All I know is, people seem to have dreams here, and they seem happy to get them. If that’s inspiration, I guess that’s what I’m peddling.”

  Avery was disappointed. He had been expecting a pitch, although he had steeled himself against buying into it. “Well, I’m here, so I guess I’ll try it out.”

  “Suit yourself,” McDougald said.

  “What do you charge. Mr. McDougald?”

  “The room’s eighty-nine dollars a night,” McDougald said.

  “That seems reasonable enough.”

  “It’s what the Mountain Inn two miles up the road charges. I’m not as fancy as them. But I make better coffee, the sheets are clean, and you get eggs and home fries in the morning.”

  “Fair enough. And what do you charge for the dream?”

  “I have nothing to do with the dream,” McDougald said. “Consequently, you get that for nothing.”

  Avery stared at the man for a moment, then lowered his eyes. He hadn’t been expecting this. After a moment, he said, “I was expecting something more.”

  “I can’t help that,” McDougald said.

  “Do I talk to you first about what I want to dream?”

  “It isn’t customary,” McDougald said. “That’s your business. And it wouldn’t help anyway.” He stood up. “Let me show you your room.”

  The guest bedroom on the second floor was small but pleasant, with familiar farm smells and a view across the valley. The bed seemed firm and there were plenty of blankets. Avery unpacked his overnight bag, then drove to the North Woods Inn and had dinner. The North Woods Inn served a pretty fair streak. The atmosphere was low-key, and the lighting was subdued. Avery had two drinks with dinner. While he ate, he looked over his notes, reading them over again for the millionth time, chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette. No ideas came, no happy inspiration. He hoped the dream would do something for him, because he was dead in the water.

  Avery needed a dream about the Moon.

  What he had in mind was a loving evocation of the Moon throughout the ages—the Moon of lovers, dreamers, visionaries, little children. The song would be tender, loving, and a little wry. It was to be performed by Ernst Carson doing his Maurice Chevalier imitation—strolling around the darkened stage in a straw hat and swinging a bamboo cane, while groups of children and lovers were spotlighted around the stage. It had to be a delicious song, a catchy song. Avery had the rest of the numbers nailed. But somehow he had missed on this one, even though it should have been the simplest of the lot.

  Maybe the trouble was it was too simple, too direct, too cliched. It should have been a simple problem, but unaccountably, his mind had seized up. Moon, June, spoon, that’s all he’d been able to think. Alex had told him not to worry, it would come. How could the man heralded as the new Gershwin fail? How could a man whose cleverness and originality was something you could take to the bank not come up with what he needed?

  Avery had tried. He’d locked himself in his brownstone apartment near Grammercy Park. A nearby diner delivered food to his door. As often as not it congealed into an unsavory mess while he sat at the piano, in his shirtsleeves, his hair wild, unshaven, banging out one tune after another, one concept after another, and hating them all.

  He’d gone a little crazy in those last weeks. He’d ignored his friends, paid no attention to the news. What did the world have to do with him or he with it? Crop failures in the Midwest—so what? He had his own crop failures to contend with. He’d been unmoved by the report that a big chunk of Antarctica that had been threatening to shelve off and raise the ocean levels had refrozen. Great, more power to it. Science talks on television by learned and affable scientists on the new cooling phenomenon hadn’t interested him. He had his own cooling phenomenon to contend with. It had to do with his own brain. To hell with the world, his own brain was cooling down, seizing up, grinding to a stop. The inspiration that had seemed never to fail, the happy and useful thoughts that came to him as sure as clockwork, all seemed to have deserted him. Moon, June, spoon, doom. He had his own personal catastrophe to contend with, and the world would just have to take care of itself.

  When he returned to the farmhouse near midnight, the lights were out except for one over the front door. Avery let himself in with the key that McDougald had given him. The house was quiet. By the light of a forty-watt bulb he found his way upstairs to his room. He undressed, put on his bathrobe, went down the hall to the bathroom and brushed his teeth, and returned to his room. Although it was early July, there was a chill in the air, and a light sheen of frost on the window. The house was very quiet. Just the soft creak of a board as he crossed to his bed. He got in and propped himself up with a couple of pillows. He had brought pencils, a pad, an electronic keyboard, and several books, just in case he couldn’t sleep. He always had trouble sleeping in unfamiliar surroundings. But tonight he dozed off almost immediately, tired out by the long drive from the city. He slept, and he dreamed.

  He was standing on a road somewhere. The details were hazy. He didn’t know where he was. Just a long blacktop road winding between low hills. He was alone, but someone was coming down the road. First it was no more than a tiny dot, but as it got closer, he saw a huge hairy man driving up in a vehicle that looked for all the world like a Batmobile. The person behind the wheel was very large and covered with yellowish-white hair. He looked somehow familiar. In a moment, Avery identified him from artists’ conceptions. It was an abominable snowman!

  In his dream, Avery was not surprised. When the vehicle stopped, he asked, “What are you doing here? And why are you in that?”

  The abominable snowman stretched, and eased a kink in his neck. He got out of the Batmobile, stretched, then said, “Hey, have you got a smoke?” Avery just stared at him. He wasn’t surprised or frightened. In the uncanny way of dreams, this seemed to be business as usual.

  “What do you want?” Avery asked.

  “Hey,” the snowman said, “I just want something to smoke. It’s difficult to keep any cigarettes on you when you don’t have clothes. Now, come on, be a sport. Do I have to ask again?”

  Avery found one last cigarette in his pack and handed it to the snowman.

  “Light it for me, would you? I don’t want to set my fur on fire.”

  Avery found his lighter and did so. He told himself, This isn’t happening. It was just beginning to occur to him that something very strange was going on. “Where are you going?” Avery asked.

  “To the Moon,” the snowman said.

  “In that?” Avery asked, jerking his thumb at the sleek black Batmobile.

  “Of course, in this.”

  “But how will you be able to breathe?”

  “I’ll close the canopy,” the snowman said.

  “But you’ll freeze out there.”

  “Naw. Got a pretty good heater in this contraption.”

  There were other things Avery wanted to know, but the snowman gave an impatient grimace, got back in the Batmobile, put it into gear, and took off, the cigarette clenched in his long yellow teeth. Avery watched the vehicle pick up speed as it mo
ved down the road. Then it extended bat wings and soared into the air. Was a Batmobile supposed to be able to do that?

  Avery wasn’t sure. Anyhow, it was only a dream.

  The next thing he saw was someone on a bicycle coming down the road. Only it wasn’t just anyone, it was a tall man, his skin a dark reddish-brown, naked to the waist, and his head was the head of some animal. A dog? No, Avery recognized the creature as a jackal. So this had to be Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god, whom Avery remembered from the statue in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  “Where are you going?” Avery asked.

  Anubis stopped and got off the bicycle. He mopped his muzzle with a clawed hand.

  “Mighty hot work, this,” Anubis said.

  Avery wanted to tell Anubis that he shouldn’t be riding a bicycle. Everyone knew that Egyptians gods didn’t ride bicycles. But he decided to keep that to himself.

  “I asked where you’re going,” Avery said.

  “It’s no secret,” Anubis said. “I’m on my way to the Moon.”

  “On that?”

  “As you see.”

  “But it’s going to take a very long time.”

  “There’s no rush,” Anubis said.

  “You’d have done better in the Batmobile,” Avery said.

  “That’s someone else’s territory,” Anubis said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?”

  Avery thought he was out, but when he checked his pack there was still one remaining. He shook it out and lighted it for the creature or deity or whatever it was.

  “So what’s on the Moon?” Avery asked.

  “Don’t know. Haven’t been there yet.”

  “Then how come you’re going?”

  Anubis shrugged. “The directive came down. ‘All imaginary creatures report to the Moon.’ Mine not to reason why.”

  “Who puts out such directives?”

  “How the hell should I know? I just follow orders. Nice talking to you, fellow.”