Uncanny Tales

by Robert Sheckley

  Dukakis and Watkins walked on and at last came out of the dark passageway and into a brightly lit area.

  Dukakis thought it looked quite like an immense airplane hangar at night. It was lit brilliantly. Several 747s were parked in corners of the hangar. Big as they were, they were dwarfed by the size of the structure itself.

  An open-sided bus came out of a passageway and speeded toward Dukakis and Watkins. At the last moment it skidded to a halt. A door opened in the bus. A man came out, and said to Watkins, “Is that the new president there?”

  “Yes, Budkins,” Watkins said. “He’s here.”

  “We need to confer with him at Central Planning at once.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no time for that,” Watkins said. “He’s seen the feeding vats. I think I’d better get him back to Washington immediately.”

  “Couldn’t he just come to the meeting, and tell us what he thinks about Evacuation Plan Craven B?”

  “My dear fellow,” Watkins said, “he’s only just learned about the alien conspiracy. There’s been no time to brief him on the evacuation plan.”

  “Even a snap judgment would be useful.”

  “Out of the question,” Watkins said.

  “No, wait a moment,” Dukakis said. “I want to hear this. What is the evacuation plan, Mr. Budkins?”

  Budkins said, “The proposition, Mr. President, was that in the event of attack and takeover of America by aliens, all male government officials from the level of GSC 04 and higher would be led to the secret spaceships and taken to our secret Mars colony.”

  “What about their families?” Dukakis asked.

  “No time for that, sir. Sometimes it’s better to begin again. On Mars the male government personnel would begin a program of breeding, using for that purpose the bodies of secretarial female personnel who would be transported to Mars for that purpose.”

  “I’m not sure what I think of that,” Dukakis said. “Government officials should stick to their posts, even if the ship is sinking.”

  At that moment a diminutive figure with a bald head, standing about three and a half feet high, wearing a black uniform with silver markings, and carrying on his back a small backpack, stepped out of the wall, crossed the corridor and stepped into the wall on the opposite side, disappearing into (or perhaps behind) it.

  “What was that?” Dukakis asked, startled.

  “I didn’t get a good look,” Watkins said, “but I think it was one of the Very Short Grays from Belletrix. What they call the Small Men from Belletrix.”

  “But he walked through the walls!”

  “Yes, sir. It was made possible by that special backpack you might have noticed he was wearing. I sure wish we could get our hands on a couple of those things.”

  “What could you do with them?”

  “They’d enable us to search the aliens out and find out for ourselves just what they’re up to. It’s very confusing not knowing for sure.”

  At that moment Dukakis suddenly had had enough. “I gotta get out of here,” he said. He looked at Watkins and Budkins. Their faces were pale, fanatical, inhuman. Budkins raised a hand in which there was something white and soft and ugly. Dukakis turned and ran. He heard a splintering explosion behind him. He continued running, turned a corner, and found a branching of the ways. He chose the left branch and continued down the polished steel tube.

  Ten minutes later they had Dukakis cornered. He turned to face them. Suddenly a smile broke out across his glum face. He raised one hand. In it was a Wand of Power.

  “My God!” cried Watkins. “Where did he get that?”

  “More to the point,” Budkins said, “who is he, really?”

  “No time to find out,” Watkins said. “Have you got your laser cane?”

  “Of course.” Budkins took the small rod out of his right-hand jacket pocket. Pressing the expansion stud, he caused the rod to extend to its full three feet. Watkins had done the same.

  “Ready?” Watkins asked.

  “Ready!” Budkins said.

  “Then let’s fire!”

  Caught in the intersecting laser beams, the figure of Dukakis leaped and kicked, transfixed by the twin beams like a bug on a pin. He struggled and writhed, but he did not fall. His face changed, lengthened, whitened, became unfamiliar. His hands grew, changed color from hairy brown to glassy green. Those hands grasped the twin laser beams, and their touch seemed to render the energy beams palpable. Dukakis’s hands twisted, and the laser beams fell apart like shattered glowing glass-strands. Dukakis straightened and turned toward Watkins and Budkins, his body hunched over in a posture of aggression. He started toward them and they cowered back. Budkins dropped his laser rod and pulled out a .45. He fired, and the slug recoiled from Dukakis’s chest. Laughing horribly, Dukakis reached out with his terrible hooked hands… .

  And at that moment Watkins pulled out a strange-looking handgun. He squeezed the firing stud. A white light shot out, touched Dukakis, and instantly covered him with coruscating energy. Dukakis screamed as his body fluids boiled off. His body moisture vaporized, and the paper-dry nerves and flesh flared up briefly and died away. A few wisps of black ash floated to the floor.

  “Are you all right?” Watkins asked.

  “Yes, I think so,” Budkins said. “But who or what was that?”

  “Something or someone we hadn’t anticipated,” Watkins said.

  “A new player in the Earth game?” Budkins asked.

  “Yes,” said Watkins. “There always was the possibility that the Teal Greens of Aldebaran, who have hitherto showed no interest in Earth, would take a hand.”

  “As if we didn’t have enough problems,” Watkins said. “Now the Teal Greens!”

  “But I think we can still do something about it,” Budkins said. “You must contact the Master Programmer at once. Tell her it’s essential she take a couple of months off the Earth Main Sequence Time Clock and reset for a Bush victory.”

  Watkins wasn’t sure. “You know how she hates to redo human history. You know what she says: too many anomalies spoil the construct.”

  “She’s got to do it,” Budkins said. “The time-line of the Bush presidency is now the only available one that doesn’t have the Teal Greens taking over. It’ll give us a breathing-space to mount a defense against them.”

  “All right,” Watkins said. “I’ll do it. But you know the time-line forecast: with Bush we get the Kuwait invasion and the Persian Gulf War.”

  “I know,” Budkins said, “but what can we do? It’s either that or the Teal Greens.”

  “All right.” He went to the door, then turned. “What do you want us to do about Dukakis in this new time-line?”

  “Don’t worry about him. It’s Bush we have to worry about now.”

  Mirror Games

  Mirrors are uncanny things. It’s amazing, not only what they can reflect, but also what they can miss. A lot of us have suspected, more so in our younger years, that there is an entire civilization in the mirror, and if conditions allowed, we could get into that world. Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Here I explore some of the more somber possibilities of that notion.

  Edwards was the only tourist off the cruise space ship. This was neither the year nor the season for Alcenor. Trendy people went to the Rim Worlds. Those with a taste for adventure tried out Hotar or Leni, primitive planets with plenty of flora and fauna and little or no civilization. Food lovers went to Gastor TV, where skilled chefs turn the local produce into delicious concoctions. Lovers went to the twin moons of Askenai. Only those crazed by loss and grief went to Alcenor.

  After he cleared customs and immigration at Alcenor, Edwards saw, in the Hall of Arrivals, gigantic mirrors showing typical sights from some of Alcenor’s tourist zones. There was Roppo, an island in the south Sclemerian Sea, green and lush and famous for its white sand beaches, its many restaurants, and its underwater grottoes, where, in scuba gear, you could meet the Osculti, an intelligent underwater race long resident on the planet. Yo
u might even take tea with them in a watery interzone, since the Osculti are famous for their hospitality.

  This was not what Edwards had come for, however. He was not here to sightsee, not until and unless he could do so with Elena. But Elena was dead, and all that remained of her was her image, captured in the old hand mirror that she had been looking into just before death came to her suddenly, that last day of her life on Earth.

  On Earth, death is irrevocable. But in Alcenor, Edwards had been told, it was sometimes reversible—especially if a mirror had been involved at the time of passing. You couldn’t return to your body: but you could pass into a mirror, there to live indefinitely.

  The people of Alcenor were the great scientists of mirrors, and unusual effects were possible with mirrors here. This was due to the somewhat different properties of matter locally, to say nothing of a slightly different space-time setup.

  Others have written extensively about these matters. Edwards had only a layman’s interest… No, not even that. All he wanted was his Elena back, or to rejoin her, and he didn’t care how the thing was managed. Science or magic, it mattered not to him as long as he got the result he sought.

  It was inevitable that he met Lobo immediately after clearing customs. Lobo was loitering in the hall of arrivals, a tall, sandy-haired young man with the look of a street arab. He was there to meet new arrivals, find them hotel rooms, recommend restaurants, and suggest other services.

  Spotting the tags on his luggage, Lobo came up to Edwards, and addressed him with the jaunty insouciance of his breed.

  “You want a woman, am I right? Sir, you’ve come to the right planet and the gods of fortune have steered you to the right man, for I have respectful contact with many ladies of surprising loveliness and unassailable virtue. The particular one I have in mind for you, honored sir, has secondary sexual characteristics of a universally approved type and has been saving herself for an Earthman of a certain right sort, exactly which sort to be left up to my own judgment. In my view, sir, you are that man. There is no money involved in this, though you might like to buy the lady a nice dinner at a reasonable price, perhaps a bedroom banquet as we call it, catered by my cousin, Tomas of The Frying Pan—”

  Edwards had been waiting for a break in this non-stop flow of specious sounding verbiage. Now, disregarding manners, he broke in anyhow.

  “No, no, no!” he said. “I do not want a woman!”

  Lobo raised sandy eyebrows. “A boy? Or perhaps a creature of an entirely different species from your own? We have a guest race here in Alcenor who are famed for their pulchritude, even though it does take some getting used to…”

  “I’m not interested!” Edwards cried. “I only want my Elena!”

  Trying to understand, Lobo said, “This Elena—did you by chance bring her with you?”

  Edwards nodded. He opened his backpack and took out a large narrow leather case, zipped it open and showed, nesting in it, a small silver-backed mirror.

  “I have her here,” Edwards said. “This is what she looked at last.”

  Lobo nodded in instant comprehension. “So she still lives in the mirror!”

  “Not on Earth,” Edwards said. “But perhaps here in Alcenor—”

  “On Alcenor,” Lobo said, “anything is possible—as long as it involves mirrors.”

  “So I have heard,” Edwards said.

  “As it turns out, I can help you,” Lobo said. “You are very lucky to have met me.”

  “You can bring her back to life yourself?”

  “No. But I know someone who can.”

  Edwards took a room for a week in a smart but modestly priced hotel recommended by Lobo. Once alone in his room, he unpacked, propped the mirror up at the dressing table, and sat down to write a letter to Elena.

  He told her that he had never realized how lonely life could be without her, how unsatisfying, how bleak. He said that he knew he hadn’t always been good toward her, and, especially toward the end, had been impatient, insulting, even violent. All that was over now, he assured her. It had been a temporary madness, brought on by too much love, not a deficiency of it. As proof, she should consider the steps he was taking to rejoin her. He ended by writing that he had every expectation of meeting her again very soon.

  The letter completed, he held it up to the mirror, waiting until he was sure the mirror had absorbed it. Then he carefully packed away the letter and the mirror, and went to bed.

  Finally Lobo comes to him. “I have the perfect person! Come, we need to talk to her at once, before she leaves town again.”

  “Where is she going that’s so important?”

  “Mirrors in different parts of our planet have different properties. Elia has vowed to study them all, to penetrate to the deepest secrets of mirrors, to bring out the full properties of mirrors whether by the white light of science or the black light of mysticism.”

  The next day, Lobo brought him to meet Elia, a witch woman skilled in all aspects of mirrors. Elia lived alone in furnished rooms in one of the poorer quarters that had sprung up around the spaceport. She was a tall, grave woman. She listened to Edwards’ request, examined the mirror, and said she thought something could be done. Elena could not be resuscitated from the mirror. That was beyond the present abilities of anyone on Alcenor. But Edwards could, with suitable preparation, enter the mirror himself, and, living, rejoin the living Elena.

  There would be a charge in money, of course, payable in advance; and another, perhaps graver cost in that he would have to give up his current, corporeal life, which would cease the moment he entered the mirror.

  Edward said he was well content. Elia said she needed to do some work on the mirror, to peel off some of the images that had accumulated on it since Elena’s death, so as to facilitate Edwards’ passage.

  The next day, Lobo came around to see how Elia was doing.

  “So how is it going?” Lobo asked.

  “All right. A few of the images are a little tenacious. I’m having difficulty peeling them away. Nothing I can’t handle, however. But this whole thing is a little puzzling.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “This woman, this Elena—you say he loves her very much?”

  “Very much! That is why he has come all the way to Alcenor—to be with her again.”

  “That’s what I thought. It’s the puzzling part.”

  “Could you explain further?”

  “If he loves her so much,” Elia said, “why did he kill her?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “His image is right there in the mirror with hers. It’s the last image made on Earth. It shows Edwards strangling her.”

  “You are sure of this?”

  “You can see for yourself. I have set up the image in a copy mirror.”

  “No, don’t bother showing me. I take your word for it.”

  “And what about the other man?”

  “I know nothing about another man.”

  “There is another man in the mirror,” Elia said. “From the scenes I have peeled, she appears to have loved him, too.”

  “Damnation! What happened to the other man?”

  “He appears to have been killed, too. Someone shot him with a handgun.”

  “Who?”

  “Our client, Edwards, I suppose. But the mirror does not reveal this. This other man is in the mirror, too.”

  “Well… It is none of our business.”

  “I agree. Edwards is our client, and we are neither the police nor the moral authorities. There is perhaps a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened. But I shall have to ask him a few questions.”

  “I don’t understand why.”

  “First, to ascertain whether, in light of what I have seen, he still wants to go into the mirror. And secondly, to secure our payment before he does so.”

  “You said yourself we are not the moral authorities.”

  “It presents a personal moral problem. You should never have brought this
man here!”

  “You told me to bring customers. You yourself advised me to work the spaceport.”

  “But I thought you would use a little discretion, a little judgment.”

  “What does it matter what you thought? You and I wanted income, and we have it now.”

  “But also a problem.”

  “Consider the problem the price you pay for the income.”

  “And what about my moral dilemma?”

  “If it bothers you so badly, you can always tell him to go away.”

  “No, I can’t do that, either. I am bound by the vows to my profession to continue this thing once I have accepted the assignment. I shall have to take it up with Edwards.”

  “Saw that, did you?” Edwards said after Elia told him what she had seen in the mirror. “Well, it was all a misunderstanding. I never meant to hurt Elena. I love her! It’s just that I have a violent temper. But I have it under control now. When I see her, I can explain everything. She will understand. She has always understood me, always loved me.”

  “So you still want to go into the mirror to join her?”

  “More than ever!”

  “And it makes no difference that there is another man there?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw another man in the mirror. A man who had died violently.”

  “Yes, of course. That would be Rodgers.”

  “And he presents no problem for you?”

  “Rodgers was a mistake,” Edwards said.

  Elia nodded.

  “He shouldn’t have been there in the first place. In Elena’s apartment, I mean. Pestering her. Confusing her. If he had gone quietly away, as I told him to, all that unpleasantness could have been avoided.”

  “But he did not go away.”

  “No, he did not. He said he loved her. And the silly girl thought for a while she was in love with him.” Edwards laughed. “As if she could ever love anyone but me! We were made for each other, Elena and I, and we both said so, back in the wonderful days at the start of our relationship.”

  “I see,” Elia said.

  “I told her then that I was a serious person. I was a person who loved once and forever. I told her I would always love her, in this world and in the next. I didn’t know about mirrors then, but of course I meant in any mirror world, too. She said she loved me the same way. But time passed, there was the matter of my violence, there was Rodgers with his blandishments, and she became confused.”