Citizen in Space ssc-2

by Robert Sheckley

  The inspector and Mr. Grent were still in the mayor's house.

  Night came. Tom slipped into the village and stationed himself in an alley between two houses. He drew his knife and waited.

  Someone was approaching! He tried to remember his criminal methods, but nothing came. He knew he would just have to do the murder as best he could, and fast.

  The person came up, his figure indistinct in the darkness.

  "Why, hello, Tom." It was the mayor. He looked at the knife. "What are you doing?"

  "You said there had to be a murder, so —"

  "I didn't mean me," the mayor said, backing away. "It can't be me."

  "Why not?" Tom asked.

  "Well, for one thing, somebody has to talk to the inspector. He's waiting for me. Someone has to show him —"

  "Billy Painter can do that," said Tom. He grasped the mayor by the shirt front, raised the knife and aimed for the throat. "Nothing personal, of course," he added.

  "Wait!" the mayor cried. "If there's nothing personal, then you have no motive!"

  Tom lowered the knife, but kept his grasp on the mayor's shirt. "I guess I can think of one. I've been pretty sore about you appointing me criminal."

  "It was the mayor who appointed you, wasn't it?"

  "Well, sure —"

  The mayor pulled Tom out of the shadows, into the bright starlight. "Look!"

  Tom gaped. The mayor was dressed in long, sharply creased pants and a tunic resplendent with medals. On each shoulder was a double row of ten stars. His hat was thickly crusted with gold braid in the shape of comets.

  "You see, Tom? I'm not the mayor any more. I'm a General!"

  "What's that got to do with it? You're the same person, aren't you?"

  "Not officially. You missed the ceremony this afternoon. The inspector said that since I was officially a general, I had to wear a general's uniform. It was a very friendly ceremony. All the Earthmen were grinning and winking at me and each other."

  Raising the knife again, Tom held it as he would to gut a fish. "Congratulations," he said sincerely, "but you were the mayor when you appointed me criminal, so my motive still holds."

  "But you wouldn't be killing the mayor! You'd be killing a general! And that's not murder!"

  "It isn't?" Tom asked. "What is it then?"

  "Why, killing a general is mutiny!"

  "Oh." Tom put down the knife. He released the mayor. "Sorry."

  "Quite all right," the mayor said. "Natural error. I've read up on it and you haven't, of course — no need to." He took a deep breath. "I'd better get back. The inspector wants a list of the men he can draft."

  Tom called out, "Are you sure this murder is necessary?"

  "Yes, absolutely," the mayor said, hurrying away. "Just not me."

  Tom put the knife back in his belt.

  Not me, not me. Everyone would feel that way. Yet somebody had to be murdered. Who? He couldn't kill himself. That would be suicide, which wouldn't count.

  He began to shiver, trying not to think of the glimpse he'd had of the reality of murder. The job had to be done.

  Someone else was coming!

  The person came nearer. Tom hunched down, his muscles tightening for the leap.

  It was Mrs. Miller, returning home with a bag of vegetables.

  Tom told himself that it didn't matter whether it was Mrs. Miller or anybody else. But he couldn't help remembering those conversations with his mother. They left him without a motive for killing Mrs. Miller.

  She passed by without seeing him.

  He waited for half an hour. Another person walked through the dark alley between the houses. Tom recognized him as Max Weaver.

  Tom had always liked him. But that didn't mean there couldn't be a motive. All he could come up with, though, was that Max had a wife and five children who loved him and would miss him. Tom didn't want Billy Painter to tell him that that was no motive. He drew deeper into the shadow and let Max go safely by.

  The three Carpenter boys came along. Tom had painfully been through that already. He let them pass. Then Roger Waterman approached.

  He had no real motive for killing Roger, but he had never been especially friendly with him. Besides, Roger had no children and his wife wasn't fond of him. Would that be enough for Billy Painter to work on?

  He knew it wouldn't be… and the same was true of all the villagers. He had grown up with these people, shared food and work and fun and grief with them. How could he possibly have a motive for killing any of them?

  But he had to commit a murder. His skulking permit required it. He couldn't let the village down. But neither could he kill the people he had known all his life.

  Wait, he told himself in sudden excitement. He could kill the inspector!

  Motive? Why, it would be an even more heinous crime than murdering the mayor — except that the mayor was a general now, of course, and that would only be mutiny. But even if the mayor were still mayor, the inspector would be a far more important victim. Tom would be killing for glory, for fame, for notoriety. And the murder would show Earth how earthly the colony really was. They would say, "Crime is so bad on New Delaware that it's hardly safe to land there. A criminal actually killed our inspector on the very first day! Worst criminal we've come across in all space."

  It would be the most spectacular crime he could commit, Tom realized, just the sort of thing a master criminal would do.

  Feeling proud of himself for the first time in a long while, Tom hurried out of the alley and over to the mayor's house. He could hear conversation going on inside.

  "… sufficiently passive population." Mr. Grent was saying, "Sheeplike, in fact."

  "Makes it rather boring," the inspector answered. "For the soldiers especially."

  "Well, what do you expect from backward agrarians? At least we're getting some recruits out of it." Mr. Grent yawned audibly. "On your feet, guards. We're going back to the ship."

  Guards! Tom had forgotten about them. He looked doubtfully at his knife. Even if he sprang at the inspector, the guards would probably stop him before the murder could be committed. They must have been trained for just that sort of thing.

  But if he had one of their own weapons…

  He heard the shuffling of feet inside. Tom hurried back into the village.

  Near the market, he saw a soldier sitting on a doorstep, singing drunkenly to himself. Two empty bottles lay at his feet and his weapon was slung sloppily over his shoulder.

  Tom crept up, drew his blackjack and took aim.

  The soldier must have glimpsed his shadow. He leaped to his feet, ducking the stroke of the blackjack. In the same motion, he jabbed with his slung rifle, catching Tom in the ribs, tore the rifle from his shoulder and aimed. Tom closed his eyes and lashed out with both feet.

  He caught the soldier on the knee, knocking him over. Before he could get up, Tom swung the blackjack.

  Tom felt the soldier's pulse — no sense killing the wrong man — and found it satisfactory. He took the weapon, checked to make sure he knew which button to push, and hastened after the Inspector.

  Halfway to the ship, he caught up with them. The inspector and Grent were walking ahead, the soldiers straggling behind.

  Tom moved into the underbrush. He trotted silently along until he was opposite Grent and the inspector. He took aim and his finger tightened on the trigger…

  He didn't want to kill Grent, though. He was supposed to commit only one murder.

  He ran on, past the inspector's party, and came out on the road in front of them. His weapon was poised as the party reached him.

  "What's this?" the inspector demanded.

  "Stand still," Tom said. "The rest of you drop your weapons and move out of the way."

  The soldiers moved like men in shock. One by one they dropped their weapons and retreated to the underbrush. Grent held his ground.

  "What are you doing, boy?" he asked.

  "I'm the town criminal," Tom stated proudly. "I'm going to kil
l the inspector. Please move out of the way."

  Grent stared at him. "Criminal? So that's what the mayor was prattling about."

  "I know we haven't had any murder in two hundred years," Tom explained, "but I'm changing that right now. Move out of the way!"

  Grent leaped out of the line of fire. The inspector stood alone, swaying slightly.

  Tom took aim, trying to think about the spectacular nature of his crime and its social value. But he saw the inspector on the ground, eyes glaring open, limbs stiff, mouth twisted, no air going in or out the nostrils, no beat to the heart.

  He tried to force his finger to close on the trigger. His mind could talk all it wished about the desirability of crime; his hand knew better.

  "I can't!" Tom shouted.

  He threw down the gun and sprinted into the underbrush.

  The inspector wanted to send a search party out for Tom and hang him on the spot. Mr. Grent didn't agree. New Delaware was all forest. Ten thousand men couldn't have caught a fugitive in the forest, if he didn't want to be caught.

  The mayor and several villagers came out, to find out about the commotion. The soldiers formed a hollow square around the inspector and Mr. Grent. They stood with weapons ready, their faces set and serious.

  And the mayor explained everything. The village's uncivilized lack of crime. The job that Tom had been given. How ashamed they were that he had been unable to handle it.

  "Why did you give the assignment to that particular man?" Mr. Grent asked.

  "Well," the mayor said, "I figured if anyone could kill, Tom could. He's a fisher, you know. Pretty gory work."

  "Then the rest of you would be equally unable to kill?"

  "We wouldn't even get as far as Tom did," the mayor admitted sadly.

  Mr. Grent and the inspector looked at each other, then at the soldiers. The soldiers were staring at the villagers with wonder and respect. They started to whisper among themselves.

  "Attention!" the inspector bellowed. He turned to Grent and said in a low voice, "We'd better get away from here. Men in our armies who can't kill…"

  "The morale," Mr. Grent said. He shuddered. "The possibility of infection. One man in a key position endangering a ship — perhaps a fleet — because he can't fire a weapon. It isn't worth the risk."

  They ordered the soldiers back to the ship. The soldiers seemed to march more slowly than usual, and they looked back at the village. They whispered together, even though the inspector was bellowing orders.

  The small ship took off in a flurry of jets. Soon it was swallowed in the large ship. And then the large ship was gone.

  The edge of the enormous watery red sun was just above the horizon.

  "You can come out now," the mayor called. Tom emerged from the underbrush, where he had been hiding, watching everything.

  "I bungled it," he said miserably.

  "Don't feel bad about it," Billy Painter told him. "It was an impossible job."

  "I'm afraid it was," the mayor said, as they walked back to the village. "I thought that just possibly you could swing it. But you can't be blamed. There's not another man in the village who could have done the job even as well."

  "What'll we do with these buildings?" Billy Painter asked, motioning at the jail, the post office, the church, and the little red schoolhouse.

  The mayor thought deeply for a moment. "I know," he said. "We'll build a playground for the kids. Swings and slides and sandboxes and things."

  "Another playground?" Tom asked.

  "Sure. Why not?"

  There was no reason, of course, why not.

  "I won't be needing this any more, I guess," Tom said, handing the skulking permit to the mayor.

  "No, I guess not," said the mayor. They watched him sorrowfully as he tore it up. "Well, we did our best. It just wasn't good enough."

  "I had the chance," Tom muttered, "and I let you all down."

  Billy Painter put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "It's not your fault, Tom. It's not the fault of any of us. It's just what comes of not being civilized for two hundred years. Look how long it took Earth to get civilized. Thousands of years. And we were trying to do it in two weeks."

  "Well, we'll just have to go back to being uncivilized," the mayor said with a hollow attempt at cheerfulness.

  Tom yawned, waved, went home to catch up on lost sleep. Before entering, he glanced at the sky.

  Thick, swollen clouds had gathered overhead and every one of them had a black lining. The fall rains were almost here. Soon he could start fishing again.

  Now why couldn't he have thought of the inspector as a fish? He was too tired to examine that as a motive. In any case, it was too late. Earth was gone from them and civilization had fled for no one knew how many centuries more.

  He slept very badly.

  Citizen in Space

  I'm really in trouble now, more trouble than I ever thought possible. It's a little difficult to explain how I got into this mess, so maybe I'd better start at the beginning.

  Ever since I graduated from trade school in 1991 I'd had a good job as sphinx valve assembler on the Starling Spaceship production line. I really loved those big ships, roaring to Cygnus and Alpha Centaurus and all the other places in the news. I was a young man with a future, I had friends, I even knew some girls.

  But it was no good.

  The job was fine, but I couldn't do my best work with those hidden cameras focused on my hands. Not that I minded the cameras themselves; it was the whirring noise they made. I couldn't concentrate.

  I complained to Internal Security. I told them, look, why can't I have new, quiet cameras, like everybody else? But they were too busy to do anything about it.

  Then lots of little things started to bother me. Like the tape recorder in my TV set. The F.B.I. never adjusted it right, and it hummed all night long. I complained a hundred times. I told them, look, nobody else's recorder hums that way. Why mine? But they always gave me that speech about winning the cold war, and how they couldn't please everybody.

  Things like that make a person feel inferior. I suspected my government wasn't interested in me.

  Take my Spy, for example. I was an 18-D Suspect — the same classification as the Vice-President — and this entitled me to part-time surveillance. But my particular Spy must have thought he was a movie actor, because he always wore a stained trench coat and a slouch hat jammed over his eyes.

  He was a thin, nervous type, and he followed practically on my heels for fear of losing me.

  Well, he was trying his best. Spying is a competitive business, and I couldn't help but feel sorry, he was so bad at it. But it was embarrassing, just to be associated with him. My friends laughed themselves sick whenever I showed up with him breathing down the back of my neck. "Bill," they said, "is that the best you can do?" And my girl friends thought he was creepy.

  Naturally, I went to the Senate Investigations Committee, and said, look, why can't you give me a trained Spy, like my friends have?

  They said they'd see, but I knew I wasn't important enough to swing it.

  All these little things put me on edge, and any psychologist will tell you it doesn't take something big to drive you bats. I was sick of being ignored, sick of being neglected.

  That's when I started to think about Deep Space. There were billions of square miles of nothingness out there, dotted with too many stars to count. There were enough Earth-type planets for every man, woman and child. There had to be a spot for me.

  I bought a Universe Light List, and a tattered Galactic Pilot. I read through the Gravity Tide Book, and the Interstellar Pilot Charts. Finally I figured I knew as much as I'd ever know.

  All my savings went into an old Chrysler Star Clipper. This antique leaked oxygen along its seams. It had a touchy atomic pile, and spacewarp drives that might throw you practically anywhere. It was dangerous, but the only life I was risking was my own. At least, that's what I thought.

  So I got my passport, blue clearance, red clearanc
e, numbers certificate, space-sickness shots and deratification papers. At the job I collected my last day's pay and waved to the cameras. In the apartment, I packed my clothes and said good-bye to the recorders. On the street, I shook hands with my poor Spy and wished him luck.

  I had burned my bridges behind me. All that was left was final clearance, so I hurried down to the Final Clearance Office. A clerk with white hands and a sun lamp tan looked at me dubiously.

  "Where did you wish to go?" he asked me. "Space," I said.

  "Of course. But where in space?"

  "I don't know yet," I said. "Just space. Deep Space. Free Space."

  The clerk sighed wearily. "You'll have to be more explicit than that, if you want a clearance. Are you going to settle on a planet in American Space? Or did you wish to emigrate to British Space? Or Dutch Space? Or French Space?"

  "I didn't know space could be owned," I said.

  "Then you don't keep up with the times," he told me, with a superior smirk. "The United States has claimed all space between coordinates 2XA and D2B, except for a small and relatively unimportant segment which is claimed by Mexico. The Soviet Union has coordinates 3DB to LO2 — a very bleak region, I can assure you. And then there is the Belgian Grant, the Chinese Grant, the Ceylonese Grant, the Nigerian Grant —"

  I stopped him. "Where is Free Space?" I asked.

  "There is none."

  "None at all? How far do the boundary lines extend?"

  "To infinity," he told me proudly.

  For a moment it fetched me up short. Somehow I had never considered the possibility of every bit of infinite space being owned. But it was natural enough. After all, somebody had to own it.

  "I want to go into American Space," I said. It didn't seem to matter at the time, although it turned out otherwise.

  The clerk nodded sullenly. He checked my records back to the age of five — there was no sense in going back any further — and gave me the Final Clearance.

  The spaceport had my ship all serviced, and I managed to get away without blowing a tube. It wasn't until Earth dwindled to a pinpoint and disappeared behind me that I realized that I was alone.