Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Yeah, sure, OK,” Ritchie said, not sure what was going on.

  The rabbi said, “You’re not Jewish yourself, are you, Mr. Castleman?”

  “No, I’m not,” Ritchie said. The rabbi didn’t give him any particular look, but Ritchie felt it was somehow not OK for him not to be Jewish. He restrained himself from apologizing.

  “Let’s get on with the ceremony,” the rabbi said. He coughed and cleared his throat. “It has been brought to my attention that you wish to be separated from Moses Grelich, your mind mate. If this is so, please state it.”

  “You got it,” Ritchie said. “I wish to be separated from Moses Grelich.”

  The rabbi picked up a little memorandum pad, opened it and indicated that Ritchie should repeat after him. “Moses Grelich sold me his body, to be my exclusive possession. A medical ceremony was made, but I didn’t get the unencumbered body. When I got in, Grelich was still there. Despite this breach in the arrangement, I let him reside in the body with me while he made other arrangements. It is now time for him to vacate.”

  After Ritchie had finished saying the words, he could hear the dry scratching of the scribe’s pen on the parchment.

  “Therefore,” the rabbi said, “I, Rabbi Schmuel Shakovsky, empowered by the civil law of this state and by my congregation, do demand that you, Moses Grelich, tell us you are here.”

  “I’m here, rabbi,” Grelich said. “But you know I’ve never been a believer. I don’t even believe in God.”

  “You are not bound by God. You are bound by tradition.”

  “I accept that, rabbi. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “On my command you will vacate your body, which, by your own assertion and willful act, is no longer yours.”

  “I was in a weird mood when I made the agreement,” Grelich said. “Life had been a disappointment. But this half-life isn’t exactly paradise, either.”

  Rabbi Shakovsky said, “I will now sign my name to this document. When the last stroke of my name has been written, you will vanish, Moses Grelich, and go wherever you are to go to next.”

  The scribe handed the rabbi the pen and pushed the parchment toward him. The rabbi began, very slowly, to sign his name.

  And Ritchie began to think. He was remembering that he hadn’t had a chance yet to question Grelich about Nietzsche or Camus. They both sounded important. There was Jakob, the waiter-translator-agent. Ritchie knew that on his own, without Grelich he’d never go back to Ratstein’s. He’d convince himself that the agent thing was nonsense, how could a broken-down old Rumanian waiter in a Jewish restaurant do anything for him in the American market? And he’d probably never see Solomon again. Or if he did, what could he say to him? He wanted to ask Solomon about his life, but Solomon wasn’t likely to talk about the good old days back in Addis Ababa and how black people became Jews when he knew Ritchie was responsible for his friend Grelich’s death.

  Grelich, of course, had no one to blame but himself. He had set himself on the path of death all by himself. But was it the act of a friend to go along with it and help him out when the suicide didn’t go right in the first place? Was it even the act of a compassionate stranger to help Grelich complete what he had begun, probably not in his right mind?

  Ritchie thought about his own small and non-interacting family. His mother was dead. His father had passed away a few years ago in an expensive rest home in Arizona. His younger sister was studying Library Sciences at Vassar. He never saw her, they didn’t correspond.

  This new family, which had sprung up around Grelich and included him, was a strange and exciting experience. He’d have to give up all that once he got rid of Grelich.

  It was suddenly in Ritchie’s mind to call off this ceremony, cancel the execution. There was enough room in his head for Grelich and himself!

  The rabbi finished his signature and looked at him with his eyebrows raised.

  “Nu?” the rabbi said.

  The rabbi made a gesture. The flame of the candle flared, and died out.

  Ritchie sat up in bed. Wow, what a dream. He looked around. He touched his face—the new familiar face of Moise Grelich.

  Ritchie said, “Grelich, are you there?”

  No answer.

  “Grelich! Come out! Don’t sulk. Let’s talk.”

  Still nothing from Grelich.

  “Oh, Grelich,” Ritchie said, his heart breaking, “where are you? Tell me you’re still here!”

  “So nu, where else would I be?” Grelich’s familiar voice said in his head.

  “Christ, you had me scared. I had this dream. I dreamed a rabbi was divorcing us.”

  “Are we husband and wife that a rabbi should divorce us?”

  “No, but we’re pretty close. Roommates. Mindmates. In some ways, closer than husband and wife.”

  “What a line of gab you’ve got.”

  “It’s not gab! I want you here. I want you to call Solomon and Esther and have them meet us at Ratstein’s this evening.”

  “Consider it done. You want to talk to that Rumanian agent again? Ritchie have you no common sense?”

  “If I think he’s too much of a shyster,” Ritchie said, “I won’t ask him to represent me. But maybe he’s an honest schlemiel. We’ll see.”

  “I got some stories you could write,” Grelich said.

  “I’ll be pleased to hear them.”

  “That’s for tomorrow,” Grelich said. “For tonight, what do you say we get some more sleep?”

  Ritchie grunted his assent. Again, Grelich fell asleep almost at once. Ritchie lay on the bed and watched the lights and shadows on the ceiling. At last he fell into a slumber. His last thought was, more than likely there would be a tomorrow for him as well as for Grelich.

  CONVERSATION ON MARS

  The ship came down in a flurry of red dust, which the pilots saw through their tinted windscreens. The added correction of their tinted sunglasses made the dust appear green-gray. There was a moral to this, but it was not immediately apparent.

  In the main cabin, the passengers sat in long rows, in state-of-the-art chairs that permitted all postures. Each seat was equipped with a small television monitor that could swing out on the release of a catch. These monitors replaced windows, which were deemed superfluous. The fact that everything that happened outside was not shown in its true colors was considered unimportant. There was a moral to this, too.

  The two men in BC-112 and BC-113 looked at each other. Piotr spoke. “Ivan Makhailovich,” he said, “we have landed on Mars.”

  “So it would seem, Piotr Dembrosky,” the other responded.

  “And soon we will disembark,” Piotr added.

  Ivan shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. It is not inconceivable that they will start the engines again and fly us back to Earth.”

  “Most unlikely. This landing is the end-result of long and careful planning. And now we are here, and can consider ourselves Martians.”

  “I detect a note of triumph in your voice, Piotr. Do you really think it is a great thing to come to Mars?”

  Piotr looked at him in amazement. “Is it not, then, a triumph for the human race? And a rare expression of the indomitable Russian spirit?”

  “If you say so, Piotr.”

  “I do say so! Ivan, consider, our ancestors worked for this day. Now it is here at last!”

  Ivan shrugged. He looked unwell, miserable in fact. There was a greenish tinge to his fair skin. His lips were liverish beneath a large shaggy moustache that gave him a resemblance to a young Freidrich Nietzsche. His eyes were bloodshot.

  Piotr resented Ivan for looking so bad. Ivan’s appearance seemed a commentary on the entire Mars enterprise, the great adventure that had taken them far from their ancestral village near Omsk, out into the greater world of the solar system, to be a part of mankind’s expansion into the universe.

  The spaceship came to a complete stop. People around them were unstrapping, getting out of their seats, folding their complimentary in-space magazines and putting th
em in their pockets. Some were wrestling luggage out of the overhead compartments. Others were already in the isles, shuffling toward the exits.

  “They are leaving!’ Piotr said.

  “So they are.”

  “Let us join them?”

  “You always were a joiner, weren’t you?” Ivan said. “Someone gets off a spaceship, you want to get off, too.”

  “What’s the harm in that?”

  “Sheep to the slaughter!’ Ivan said.

  “There is no slaughter here,” Piotr said. “Merely an orderly procession going out to the new land. Come, let us join them.”

  “I am perfectly comfortable right here.” Ivan said.

  “How can you say that? You were complaining only last night that your back ached!” Piotr said.

  “What has that to do with leaving this perfectly comfortable ship? And besides, how do we know this is Mars? Have you seen any signs or billboards? Maybe the ships made an unscheduled stop at a satellite.”

  “We already stopped at a satellite. Don’t you remember? We took on fuel, food.”

  “The satellite’s version of Chicken Kiev is not what I would call food,” Ivan said.

  “I didn’t like it much, either,” Piotr said. “What I want is some fish, but there’s no fresh fish on the satellites or on Mars. They have a water shortage, you know.”

  “How much water does it take to fill a tank with fish?”

  And then the spaceship captain himself, Ilya Schmirensky, came out of the pilot’s compartment.

  “What’s this?” Schmirensky said. “Why haven’t you men left the ship?”

  “I’m waiting for him,” Piotr said, pointing to Ivan.

  “I’m waiting for I don’t know what,” Ivan said.

  “Listen, boys, Schmirensky said, “you have to get out. I need to get this ship into space again, back to Earth to pick up another load. I can’t hold things up because a couple of men are frightened of a new planet.”

  “Who’s frightened?” Ivan said.

  “It must be you,” the captain said. “It obviously isn’t me. I have done what I was hired to do, what I was trained to do. I have brought our ship to the Red Planet.”

  “You’re an executive, you have special privileges, that’s why you have no fear. And we were told Mars was red, but look, it’s grayish-green.” Ivan pointed to the TV screen.

  “That’s a natural color distortion,” the captain said.

  “And what other natural distortions are we likely to encounter?” Ivan demanded.

  Just then a man appeared behind the captain. He had a camera held up to his eye and was filming everything.

  “The camera is rolling!” the captain said. “Get off, this is shameful.”

  “If you don’t want to see it,” Ivan said, “let them edit the film.”

  “Not one inch of film will be omitted,” the captain declared. “We will show this disembarkation in its entirety, no matter how long it takes.”

  “It’s taking too long,’ the cameraman said. “We’re running out of film.”

  “He’s lying,’ Ivan said. “It is a video camera, it’s filled with an endless supply of video tape.”

  “Nothing is endless,” the cameraman said. “Not even video tape.”

  “Do you know what I think?” Ivan said. “I think we have never left Earth. We have been circling some big desert for months and months-the Sahara, perhaps. And now our masters have ordered us to land. We are to be sold as indentured labor to the Arabs! That’s what I think.”

  “Absurd,” the captain said. “There’s not an Arab within ten million miles of here.”

  “You look a little Arab yourself, Captain,” Ivan said.

  “I am Georgian.”

  “Aha!’ cried Ivan.

  “Aha what?”

  “Never mind,” Ivan said.

  “Excuse me,” the cameraman said to the captain. “This man is crazy, but not completely crazy. It is common knowledge that a great mass of negative energy has accumulated around Mars. A leading cosmonautical expert recently explained that Astrogation was finding it increasingly difficult to find windows of opportunity through the dense cover of information that occludes and distorts so much of space. We could be anywhere.”

  “I heard that too,” a voice behind the cameraman said. He was a shock-haired young man with a large camera bag slung over his shoulders. He was the assistant cameraman..

  “My name is Misha,’ he said. “I have been listening to your discussion with interest. It occurred to me that once upon a time oxymorons and unusual juxtapositions charmed us. But we would have been amazed to see a man with a parrot for an arm, like that fellow over there.”

  Misha gestured at the TV screen. It showed a tall man in dark clothing, who seemed to be waiting for a bus. He was in no respect unusual except that his left arm terminated in a parrot.

  “Startling, you think,” Misha went on. But there have been articles on this in several magazines on Earth. CNN ran a special on it not too long ago. Psychic psittacosis, I believe they called it. It first sprang up in Madagascar, or maybe it was Dahomey. Africans are subject to this sort of thing. It is an objectification of hysteria.”

  Sasha, the cameraman, said, “How can you know this, Misha? You have proven to my satisfaction that there exists an impenetrable sphere of unknowingness. But we are within that cloud, so how can you know about it?”

  Sasha said, “We know it because we are Russians, my friend. This sort of talk is mother’s milk to us. What we’re dealing with here is the veritable context of science fiction. Once this context was the possession of the English-speaking races. Only they could think in science fiction. But we Russians have always had certain advantages in the thinking and speculating departments, and so now we have surpassed them.”

  “How do you suppose the present state of affairs came about?” Piotr asked.

  “Physics has shown that something is always born of nothing. Not just some of the time, but always and exclusively. And what else could something be born from if not nothing?

  “So nothing is real?”

  “On the contrary,” Ivan said, suddenly joining the conversation, “everything is real. But we are not equipped to react to it, because reality has entered the sphere of the banal, which by definition is not worthy of consideration. But now we are bound by some categorical imperative to examine even the previously unnoticed banal.”

  “Bravo,” Ivan,” Piotr said. “It took a lot of courage to say that. About the man with a parrot for an arm—did you notice he is smoking a cigarette with his parrot?”

  “How very Russian of him!”

  The captain now said, in a loud and annoyed voice, “You men!”

  “Yes, sir!” Piotr and Ivan replied almost simultaneously.

  “Enough playing around. Have you received your assignment papers yet?”

  “No, sir,” Ivan said.

  The captain took two papers out of his pocket and handed one to each man.

  “Take these outside with you. Show them to the sergeant. He will assign you to a place in the Defense Corps. Do not concern yourselves with questions of real and unreal. Just follow orders.”

  “Yes sir,” Piotr said. “Can you tell me what we are defending against?”

  “Don’t ask. There will be a lecture on it as soon as you have been assigned quarters and fed.”

  The men nodded and moved out into the greenish-gray land of Mars.

  THE OMEGA EGG

  Chapter 4: Smoke and Mirrors

  Spencer heard Patsy gasp, saw her freeze in the doorway.

  “What is it?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he walked up to see for himself.

  The doorway didn’t open into a narrow corridor, as it had when they entered. Now, as though some demonic stage-setter had been at work, the corridor was gone and in its place was a room so long he could barely see the end of it. There was what appeared to be a glow of light from a row of French windows at the rear.

 
The sole object of interest in the room was a huge pipe organ.

  The organ towered up to the ceiling. It was roughly rectangular, painted in garish colors, with multiple keyboards, and above them, a triple row of stops. Its great pipes towered above it, and there were more pipes bristling out from either side. It was a madman’s three-dimensional conception of what an organ should look like.

  In front of the organ was a raised dais, and upon that dais was a piano bench. Seated on that bench was a tall creature in black evening clothes who looked almost human, except that he seemed to have extra arms. These grew out of his sides and chest. This man or thing was seated on the piano bench in front of the gigantic pipe organ.

  Spencer closed his eyes and opened them again. He did this several times, almost believing the impossible organ wouldn’t be there the next time he looked. Each time it was still there, and seemed to grow larger each time.

  The man, the entity, the player, rocked back and forth on his piano bench, playing the organ in a frenzy of movement. He not only played it, he seemed to adapt to it. Spencer could see extra limbs extruding from his body during certain passages.

  It was a stunning performance, but, uncannily, it was all done in perfect silence. Spencer could hear no sounds coming from the organ. Without sound, the performance was terrifying rather than stirring.

  Beside him, Patsy Klein was moaning softly, hugging herself, and gasping for breath.

  Then the organist began to fade. His firm outline turned fuzzy, hazy, and slowly vanished. The organ itself began to fade. Next, the outlines of the vast room started to waver. Spencer blinked repeatedly to clear his vision, but inexorably, the room faded away. Between one blink and the next, the organ, organist, and the vast room that contained them were gone, and Spencer was looking at the dull gray walls of the corridor.

  Beside him, Klein’s knees buckled, she sagged, and Spencer put an arm around her to support her.