Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  After that it was a matter of drawing up his ideal living setup, one he had dreamed of for a very long time. In his mind’s eye he could see the comfortable lines of the house, the big porch, the view of distant mountains. He was able to sketch out exactly what he wanted, down to the split-rail fences. Then he hired a secretary intelligent enough to translate his desires into actualities. I was that secretary, of course, and Arthur’s dream became mine.

  MONEY WILL BUY YOU any dream you want. All that remains is for you to fit yourself to it. This can be desperately hard work, to judge from Arthur’s experience on his world.

  The first weeks went by without difficulty. Arthur was occupied with testing his equipment, making certain that everything worked as it was supposed to. The place was still under warranty, you see. But everything worked as it was supposed to. The artificial gravity, a third less than that of Earth, gave him a sense of lightness and vigor. The robotic servants were silent and self-effacing, reluctant to put forth any sign of “personality,” for personality was what Arthur had come here to get away from. Nevertheless, their silent, programmed self-effacedness and their concern for his wants, programmed though they were, gave him a sense of protection, as if he were living with ideal grandparents.

  The force-seeded forest came up nicely.

  Then plants and the constituents of plants grew, as close to simultaneity as makes no mind. The plants had to have those things without which they could not flourish, even allowing for the irresistible way life has of maintaining itself under difficult conditions.

  Good times in the Arthur rancho! While I sat home on Earth and paid the bills. But never mind, I’m here now, that’s all that counts. And I was well paid for my part in keeping Arthur’s dream operative. I’m not complaining.

  Arthur said he never felt lonely in those days. He was too vigilant to permit that emotion to live in him, too well trained, too self-schooled in the discipline necessary to keep a good thing good without the all-too-human tendency to destroy it by trying to make it better.

  In the evening, after the artificial Sun had set behind the range of purple-topped mountains which Arthur had terraformed, he would take one glass of the incomparable wine he had imported from France—one glass and no more. He was not being stingy—he had wine that would last far behind his own life. He was being careful. Trying to tread the path of the aesthete rather than that of the gourmand. Trying to remember that measure is everything. Some more caviar, my friends? And will someone pass the toast points?

  No, it was not loneliness that assailed him. But it was something. That is to say, he became aware that something in his scheme of things was not right.

  When you live on your own asteroid, my friends, you accustom yourself to putting up on the skies images of what you want to live with. You are after a certain harmony, after all. You don’t want strangeness in this place. You have opted out from Earth and her innumerable mysteries; you have come to live here, a place without any mystery at all, yet something is not right—could it be that there is something inexplicable here?

  When you base your life on aesthetics, little things like “Is there a mystery here?” tend to take on great weight and moment. Something is not right! You take it as a clarion call to action. You don’t doubt it. You assume the truth of the statement. You set out to find out what is wrong. To learn what the mystery is.

  Arthur told me how many days he sat on the glider on his front porch, looking at the range of mountains he had had constructed. They were green now, crowded with growing things, most notably trees and grass, doing nicely with the substitutes for insects that his scientists had come up with. Because once you start trying to create life on a little world, practical difficulties begin getting in your way. You lose all of your time trying to figure out a schedule for moulting season and what the ideal rainfall should be.

  For the sake of simplicity, Arthur had dispensed with insects, considering other ways of bringing their benefits to plants in ways sometimes tortuous and clumsy, ad hoc to say the least. But the cost was containable on a little world, and Arthur got his trees and grass one way or another. The next question was, what else was out there on his world?

  Imagine that thought as a way of shooting yourself in the foot. You’ve gone to the considerable time and expense of building your own world. Nothing can live here except what you brought in. But you become convinced there is something else here, something alien and sinister.

  You determine to find this alien intruder and demand an account of him. But this, proposition-wise, is putting the cart before the horse. The first question is, is there some creature on your world, sharing it with you without your permission or consent?

  The fact that Arthur chose to stake his actions on the inference of otherness shows the character of the man. It was his nature to test such an ultimate conclusion. When you try to prove such a premise, you are staking your life on its importance. If you’re smart, you include the negative of the discovery: You could say that Arthur staked his life on the idea that discovering there was nothing there would be as satisfying as to discover there was someone there; for such became his life ambition.

  I can empathize with Arthur. I have that sort of mind myself. Luckily, however, with a bit more common sense and a stronger instinct for self-preservation.

  Arthur made his choices and I, when my time came, made mine.

  When the time comes to make a choice, initiate an action, produce a defining action, the mind has the bad habit of postponing the point of beginning almost infinitely, making you live Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise.

  Or one’s position is as in Shakespeare’s great speech in Julius Caesar—“Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The genius and the mortal instruments are then in session. And the mind of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of a resurrection.”

  How true those words were of Arthur’s state of mind! He had to find out. And with what iron discipline did Arthur gather a few possessions, set his alarm clock, and, when it had gone off, left his house to explore his asteroid, to find the unknown thing which, he was now convinced, lived in the mountains and ravines on the far side of his world.

  When Arthur went out exploring that morning, he took the little path that led into a weed-grown ditch, scrambled up the other side, and found himself in a small clearing. That in itself was strange: nothing on the ground plan had indicated any such clearing in the dense vegetation that covered this place under its force-dome. He walked into the clearing slowly, although there was absolutely nothing to fear in this place.

  Ahead of him he could see the line of trees where the forest commenced. And there was something else there, something dark and indistinct against the tree line. He couldn’t quite make it out, but it appeared to be about the size of a person or large animal. As he moved closer, the thing, whatever it was, turned abruptly and vanished into the dark woods.

  The presence of this creature gave him an excuse for walking, and so he walked on, hurrying a little to keep the dark object in sight as it slid through the trees.

  He went on. There was no rush. The light was always of an even tenor in this place, and the amount of land to be covered was so minuscule that a man could go around the world twice without tiring himself appreciably.

  The creature ahead of him darted in and out of the underbrush. Arthur only wished he could get a better look at it. Although he seemed to be moving faster than the object, yet it kept obstinately ahead of him, neither gaining nor losing much ground, and giving no evidence of trying to evade him.

  “Hey there! Wait up!” Arthur called, for there seemed no reason to make a chase out of this. But the creature (as he assumed it was) either didn’t hear him or refused to acknowledge his presence. Annoyed, Arthur broke into a trot, and now indeed he seemed to be gaining on the being. He was definitely drawing closer, he could make out the human shape of whatever it was, though he
couldn’t hazard a guess yet as to its sex. It seemed to be dark and shaggy, though it might have been wearing a garment of some sort.

  This was enough to wonder about right here. Let’s stop a moment and consider. If Arthur had had the power, he would have frozen the frame right there, and asked himself, “How did a gorilla creature come to be on my asteroid? I certainly never authorized the creation of such a thing. In fact, I stipulated that no animal-type creature (in which category I included mankind and the insect kingdom) should be created or in any way introduced into my asteroid. So assuming it wasn’t a prank on the part of some flunky in one my subunits—which I doubt, since it would be a very expensive prank . . .”

  The creature must have got here somehow, not of its own will and intention, perhaps, but we will examine that question later. For now we are still in the flush of speculation that accompanies seeing an unnatural thing.

  A gorilla on an asteroid is more of a mystery than a man on an asteroid. The man could have had his reasons, perhaps surrealist or dadist ones, but reasons all the same. The gorilla, so we are told, does not think in this way, not abstractly, not like we do, at least some of us, and at least from time to time. The gorilla has no reason to be there. His case is simpler than that of the man, whose reason must be elicited.

  My stop-action interjection should perhaps be ended now, since we are rushing toward the defining moment, albeit in an Achilles and the Tortoise manner.

  Arthur pushed his way through the underbrush. He could see a rocky outcropping to his left, a steep wall of rock, smooth and without handholds. It served to hem in the thing, for now he saw a precipice to the right, a crack in the asteroid’s surface, not too wide, yet wide enough to make it impossible for the being to jump across. And the outcropping and the precipice angled together, so that, at the point where they met, he’d have the thing trapped and could inspect it at his leisure.

  He hurried on, and noticed that the creature had reached the end of the impasse, and had turned, facing him. Its features were still obscured by underbrush, but Arthur thought he could make out a white face, a pale oval within the dark furriness of the thing. It looked at him, and it made a gesture, which Arthur interpreted as an imploring gesture, for the creature was also making a pushing motion with its hands, as if to beg Arthur to turn back and not pursue this matter any further.

  For one moment Arthur thought of acceding to the creature’s apparent wishes. That would make a fine story! He imagined himself telling me, “And so, seeing that the creature wanted nothing to do with me, seemed in fear of me, I halted, I made a sort of salute, wishing it well, and I turned and came back the way I had come.”

  Yes, a good ending. But Arthur was not content with it. Had he run all this way merely to give up at the end, to give up in response to a presentiment so vague as to be barely mentionable?

  (Here, in case you needed it pointed out, was Arthur’s error. He didn’t accede to the creature’s wishes. Didn’t leave it alone. To do that and live with the consequences of his action afterward would be greater pain than to plunge on now.)

  LESS THAN a dozen feet separated him now from the thing, and he was growing very tired. He must have been running on this asteroid for hours, seduced into believing his strength greater than in fact it was due to the low gravity. But he’d have plenty of chance to rest soon. He tore through the final remaining bushes and came up to the thing itself.

  It was manlike, and it was large, and it had its back to the sheer stone of the precipice. As Arthur came up, the creature suddenly launched itself at him, fangs bared, hooked claws outstretched.

  Before that, however—

  Arthur saw the creature. And then, instead of taking to his heels, which might have saved his life, he pushed his head into the creature’s face, as though trying to look into its deepest soul.

  Maybe they were using different signaling systems. Either way, the creature thereupon proceeded to tear Arthur apart limb by limb.

  An ugly way to go. I don’t want to tell it. But I have sworn to tell everything here.

  “That’s how he died,” Lambert explained later, to his friends, when he met them back in the feasting-place on Earth. “Frightfully torn, with a look of horror on his face.”

  “I see,” the hypothetical friend says. “And you?”

  “Arthur willed everything to me. I was perhaps the only other person he knew who could appreciate his asteroid. And it didn’t hurt that I was his old friend and college chum.”

  “And when you got here—did you go out in search of the creature?”

  Here the questioner might pause and consider for a moment. “No, you wouldn’t, would you? Still, you had to do something, didn’t you? Stands to reason, doesn’t it? What did you do?” At this point in his tale, Lambert always paused, took a drink of whatever was beside him, and, a half-amused smile on his face, said, “I did nothing.”

  “But the ape—”

  “This arrangement seems to suit it. We don’t intrude on one another’s space.”

  “But he could suddenly attack and kill you for no reason, or no reason that you’d understand.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  You shrug. “Shit happens.”

  “I pretend it doesn’t.”

  “But does that work for you?”

  “I figure I’m doing okay. I’ve got my own asteroid. And I have my own perhaps invisible gorilla.”

  “But why do you do that? Why didn’t you investigate, find out?”

  “This is difficult to explain,” Lambert said. “But I have learned one thing in my many travels. In places of danger, it is best to go in courageously and face what comes up. But in places of safety, where you can be sure nothing ever happens or ever will happen, it is best to hang back, take thought, desist. The mysteries of dangerous places are such that a man can explore. But the danger in safe places is uncanny, as if the universe itself decreed that no place is to be allowed to exist without its dark and impenetrable uncertainty. Facing danger is one thing, my friends, and I’ve done enough of that in my time. But when it comes to uncovering mystery—a wise man leaves the mystery in place, and does not try to penetrate to its banal secret.”

  “You think the thing was banal?” the friend persisted.

  “Oh, no doubt. It might have been something as commonplace as a gorilla, living alone and bothering no one, until Arthur’s pursuit drove it to the extremity of attack.”

  “A gorilla,” his friend mused. “But how could a gorilla have gotten on this planetoid?”

  Lambert shrugged, smiling. “That is part of the mystery which I, for one, do not intend to look into.”

  GAME FACE

  Ellie was driving home from the supermarket and brooding about Jake’s lunch. She would make frankfurters and melted cheese sandwiches for him, and add the diced onion and bits of the jalapeno pepper that he loved so well, and then she’d serve the whole thing on toast.

  It was not the idyllic picture she’d been raised to believe that it should be.

  While she was waiting for him to emerge from the recreation room, she would lower the toilet seat (he never remembered), pick his socks up off the floor (ditto), put his slippers and pajamas in the closet (still ditto), rinse the sink clean of the little hairs from his morning shave and the remnants of shaving cream (had he any idea how disgusting that was?), mop the floor around the toilet (she’d seen a sign in a novelty-shop that she had an urge to buy and post on the bathroom wall: “We aim to please. You aim too, please”), and then find out which bills he’d forgotten to pay because he was too busy playing his games the night before.

  Jake worked just a few blocks away, where he was a Master Electrician at Wright Aeronautical. He liked to come home for lunch, because he loved hot dogs in that special way—“Chicago style”—that Ellie made: hot, spicy, slightly burned on the outside, but not charred through. And sometimes (sometimes? always) on those lunch breaks, Jake would get a chance to play one of his games in the rec room. Jake wa
s big on games. Huge, in fact.

  Things seemed to be going pretty well for Ellie after three years of marriage, at least on the surface, but as she counted Jake’s dirty undershirts in the hamper and came up three short for the week, she knew there were some Undecided Issues. She knew this because her mother, Lorraine, told her so often enough. Lorraine was smart. You didn’t get to be a principal of a suburban high school in northern New Jersey without being smart, personable, and savvy. Lorraine’s husband, Mike, was killed in a motorcycle race some years ago. Ever since then, Lorraine hated sports even more than she did when Mike was alive.

  Not that Jake’s sports were the dangerous kind. Ellie thought of him as a Swivel-Chair Potato, which was (to her way of thinking) simply a more sophisticated Couch Potato. He loved the newest computer games, the ones where you would role-play your character, with crescendos of blood and severed limbs.

  So here Ellie was, three years into the marriage. Driving home from the supermarket gave her a chance to consider her life, what was right with it—and (especially) what was wrong.

  Ellie was young, bright, pretty, healthy. She hadn’t had a baby yet. She didn’t have a job, either. There seemed no pressing need for either at the moment. Jake made good money, and how he spent it was his business—wasn’t it? So he had a game room. Big deal. Jake kept Ellie in the things she needed, which was mainly food, cosmetics, magazines, and inexpensive dresses from Target.

  They had a car, but Jake mainly used it to drive the six blocks to work and back. That was one of the Issues Ellie wanted to address today, a minor one but an issue all the same, and she wanted to do it before Jake locked himself into his recreation room, not to surface again until long after the meal was on the table.

  Issues. Ellie was vaguely discontented, but she didn’t really know why. She decided that it was the rec room that annoyed her the most. It had been an expensive addition to their house, and Jake kept on filling it with ever more expensive gadgets and games. He had equipped the room with the latest in interactive game-oriented TV. He had bought a screen that took up most of one wall. But he hardly ever looked at it any more. His latest thing was a recent offering from a Sony clone called YOU ARE THERE! Ellie didn’t know how much it had cost, but they had canceled their trip to Miami Beach after he got the bill for it.