The Robert Sheckley Megapack

by Robert Sheckley

  “You’re trying to impress me,” Dennison said.

  “Certainly.”

  “Why did you stop me from patenting my immortality serum?”

  “The world is not ready for it yet,” said Mr. Bennet.

  “It isn’t ready for a lot of things,” Dennison said. “Why didn’t you block the atom bomb?”

  “We tried, disguised as mercenary coal and oil interests. But we failed. However, we have succeeded with a surprising number of things.”

  “But what’s the purpose behind it all?”

  “Earth’s welfare,” Mr. Bennet said promptly. “Consider what would happen if the people were given your veritable immortality serum. The problems of birth rate, food production, living space all would be aggravated. Tensions would mount, war would be imminent—”

  “So what?” Dennison challenged. “That’s how things are right now, without immortality. Besides, there have been cries of doom about every new invention or discovery. Gunpowder, the printing press, nitroglycerin, the atom bomb, they were all supposed to destroy the race. But mankind has learned how to handle them. It had to! You can’t turn back the clock, and you can’t un-discover something. If it’s there, mankind must deal with it!”

  “Yes, in a bumbling, bloody, inefficient fashion,” said Mr. Bennet, with an expression of distaste.

  “Well, that’s how Man is.”

  “Not if he’s properly led,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “No?”

  “Certainly not,” said Mr. Bennet. “You see, the immortality serum provides a solution to the problem of political power. Rule by a permanent and enlightened elite is by far the best form of government; infinitely better than the blundering inefficiencies of democratic rule. But throughout history, this elite, whether monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship or junta, has been unable to perpetuate itself. Leaders die, the followers squabble for power, and chaos is close behind. With immortality, this last flaw would be corrected. There would be no discontinuity of leadership, for the leaders would always be there.”

  “A permanent dictatorship,” Dennison said.

  “Yes. A permanent, benevolent rule by small, carefully chosen elite corps, based upon the sole and exclusive possession of immortality. It’s historically inevitable. The only question is, who is going to get control first?”

  “And you think you are?” Dennison demanded.

  “Of course. Our organization is still small, but absolutely solid. It is bolstered by every new invention that comes into our hands and by every scientist who joins our ranks. Our time will come, Dennison! We’d like to have you with us, among the elite.”

  “You want me to join you?” Dennison asked, bewildered.

  “We do. Our organization needs creative scientific minds to help us in our work, to help us save mankind from itself.”

  “Count me out,” Dennison said, his heart beating fast.

  “You won’t join us?”

  “I’d like to see you all hanged.”

  Mr. Bennet nodded thoughtfully and pursed his small lips. “You have taken your own serum, have you not?”

  Dennison nodded. “I suppose that means you kill me now?”

  “We don’t kill,” Mr. Bennet said. “We merely wait. I think you are a reasonable man, and I think you’ll come to see things our way. We’ll be around a long time. So will you. Take him away.”

  Dennison was led to an elevator that dropped deep into the Earth. He was marched down a long passageway lined with armed men. They went through four massive doors. At the fifth, Dennison was pushed inside alone, and the door was locked behind him.

  He was in a large, well-furnished apartment. There were perhaps twenty people in the room, and they came forward to meet him.

  One of them, a stocky, bearded man, was an old college acquaintance of Dennison’s.

  “Jim Ferris?”

  “That’s right,” Ferris said. “Welcome to the Immortality Club, Dennison.”

  “I read you were killed in an air crash last year.”

  “I merely—disappeared,” Ferris said, with a rueful smile, “after inventing the immortality serum. Just like the others.”

  “All of them?”

  “Fifteen of the men here invented the serum independently. The rest are successful inventors in other fields. Our oldest member is Doctor Li, a serum discoverer, who disappeared from San Francisco in 1911. You are our latest acquisition. Our clubhouse is probably the most carefully guarded place on Earth.”

  * * * *

  Dennison said, “Nineteen-eleven!” Despair flooded him and he sat down heavily in a chair. “Then there’s no possibility of rescue?”

  “None. There are only four choices available to us,” Ferris said. “Some have left us and joined the Undertakers. Others have suicided. A few have gone insane. The rest of us have formed the Immortality Club.”

  “What for?” Dennison bewilderedly asked.

  “To get out of this place!” said Ferris. “To escape and give our discoveries to the world. To stop those hopeful little dictators upstairs.”

  “They must know what you’re planning.”

  “Of course. But they let us live because, every so often, one of us gives up and joins them. And they don’t think we can ever break out. They’re much too smug. It’s the basic defect of all power-elites, and their eventual undoing.”

  “You said this was the most closely guarded place on Earth?”

  “It is,” Ferris said.

  “And some of you have been trying to break out for fifty years? Why, it’ll take forever to escape!”

  “Forever is exactly how long we have,” said Ferris. “But we hope it won’t take quite that long. Every new man brings new ideas, plans. One of them is bound to work.”

  “Forever,” Dennison said, his face buried in his hands.

  “You can go back upstairs and join them,” Ferris said, with a hard note to his voice, “or you can suicide, or just sit in a corner and go quietly mad. Take your pick.”

  Dennison looked up. “I must be honest with you and with myself. I don’t think we can escape. Furthermore, I don’t think any of you really believe we can.”

  Ferris shrugged his shoulders.

  “Aside from that,” Dennison said, “I think it’s a damned good idea. If you’ll bring me up to date, I’ll contribute whatever I can to the Forever Project. And let’s hope their complacency lasts.”

  “It will,” Ferris said.

  * * * *

  THE escape did not take forever, of course. In one hundred and thirty-seven years, Dennison and his colleagues made their successful breakout and revealed the Undertakers’ Plot. The Undertakers were tried before the High Court on charges of kidnapping, conspiracy to overthrow the government, and illegal possession of immortality. They were found guilty on all counts and summarily executed.

  Dennison and his colleagues were also in illegal possession of immortality, which is the privilege only of our governmental elite. But the death penalty was waived in view of the Immortality Club’s service to the State.

  This mercy was premature, however. After some months the members of the Immortality Club went into hiding, with the avowed purpose of overthrowing the Elite Rule and disseminating immortality among the masses. Project Forever, as they termed it, has received some support from dissidents, who have not yet been apprehended. It cannot be considered a serious threat.

  But this deviationist action in no way detracts from the glory of the Club’s escape from the Undertakers. The ingenious way in which Dennison and his colleagues broke out of their seemingly impregnable prison, using only a steel belt buckle, a tungsten filament, three hens’ eggs, and twelve chemicals that can be readily obtained from the human body, is too well known to be repeated here.

  THE LEECH

  The leech was waiting for food. For millennia it had been drifting across the vast emptiness of space. Without consciousness, it had spent the countless centuries in the void between the stars. It was unaware when it fi
nally reached a sun. Life-giving radiation flared around the hard, dry spore. Gravitation tugged at it.

  A planet claimed it, with other stellar debris, and the leech fell, still dead-seeming within its tough spore case.

  One speck of dust among many, the winds blew it around the Earth, played with it, and let it fall.

  On the ground, it began to stir. Nourishment soaked in, permeating the spore case. It grew—and fed.

  * * * *

  Frank Conners came up on the porch and coughed twice. “Say, pardon me, Professor,” he said.

  The long, pale man didn’t stir from the sagging couch. His horn-rimmed glasses were perched on his forehead, and he was snoring very gently.

  “I’m awful sorry to disturb you,” Conners said, pushing back his battered felt hat. “I know it’s your restin’ week and all, but there’s something damned funny in the ditch.”

  The pale man’s left eyebrow twitched, but he showed no other sign of having heard.

  Frank Conners coughed again, holding his spade in one purple-veined hand. “Didja hear me, Professor?”

  “Of course I heard you,” Micheals said in a muffled voice, his eyes still closed. “You found a pixie.”

  “A what?” Conners asked, squinting at Micheals.

  “A little man in a green suit. Feed him milk, Conners.”

  “No, sir. I think it’s a rock.”

  Micheals opened one eye and focused it in Conners’ general direction.

  “I’m awfully sorry about it,” Conners said. Professor Micheals’ resting week was a ten-year-old custom, and his only eccentricity. All winter Micheals taught anthropology, worked on half a dozen committees, dabbled in physics and chemistry, and still found time to write a book a year. When summer came, he was tired.

  Arriving at his worked-out New York State farm, it was his invariable rule to do absolutely nothing for a week. He hired Frank Conners to cook for that week and generally make himself useful, while Professor Micheals slept.

  During the second week, Micheals would wander around, look at the trees and fish. By the third week he would be getting a tan, reading, repairing the sheds and climbing mountains. At the end of four weeks, he could hardly wait to get back to the city.

  But the resting week was sacred.

  “I really wouldn’t bother you for anything small,” Conners said apologetically. “But that damned rock melted two inches off my spade.”

  Micheals opened both eyes and sat up. Conners held out the spade. The rounded end was sheared cleanly off. Micheals swung himself off the couch and slipped his feet into battered moccasins.

  “Let’s see this wonder,” he said.

  * * * *

  The object was lying in the ditch at the end of the front lawn, three feet from the main road. It was round, about the size of a truck tire, and solid throughout. It was about an inch thick, as far as he could tell, grayish black and intricately veined.

  “Don’t touch it,” Conners warned.

  “I’m not going to. Let me have your spade.” Micheals took the spade and prodded the object experimentally. It was completely unyielding. He held the spade to the surface for a moment, then withdrew it. Another inch was gone.

  Micheals frowned, and pushed his glasses tighter against his nose. He held the spade against the rock with one hand, the other held close to the surface. More of the spade disappeared.

  “Doesn’t seem to be generating heat,” he said to Conners. “Did you notice any the first time?”

  Conners shook his head.

  Micheals picked up a clod of dirt and tossed it on the object. The dirt dissolved quickly, leaving no trace on the gray-black surface. A large stone followed the dirt, and disappeared in the same way.

  “Isn’t that just about the damnedest thing you ever saw, Professor?” Conners asked.

  “Yes,” Micheals agreed, standing up again. “It just about is.”

  He hefted the spade and brought it down smartly on the object. When it hit, he almost dropped the spade. He had been gripping the handle rigidly, braced for a recoil. But the spade struck that unyielding surface and stayed. There was no perceptible give, but absolutely no recoil.

  “Whatcha think it is?” Conners asked.

  “It’s no stone,” Micheals said. He stepped back. “A leech drinks blood. This thing seems to be drinking dirt. And spades.” He struck it a few more times, experimentally. The two men looked at each other. On the road, half a dozen Army trucks rolled past.

  “I’m going to phone the college and ask a physics man about it,” Micheals said. “Or a biologist. I’d like to get rid of that thing before it spoils my lawn.”

  They walked back to the house.

  * * * *

  Everything fed the leech. The wind added its modicum of kinetic energy, ruffling across the gray-black surface. Rain fell, and the force of each individual drop added to its store. The water was sucked in by the all-absorbing surface.

  The sunlight above it was absorbed, and converted into mass for its body. Beneath it, the soil was consumed, dirt, stones and branches broken down by the leech’s complex cells and changed into energy. Energy was converted back into mass, and the leech grew.

  Slowly, the first flickers of consciousness began to return. Its first realization was of the impossible smallness of its body.

  It grew.

  * * * *

  WHEN Micheals looked the next day, the leech was eight feet across, sticking out into the road and up the side of the lawn. The following day it was almost eighteen feet in diameter, shaped to fit the contour of the ditch, and covering most of the road. That day the sheriff drove up in his model A, followed by half the town.

  “Is that your leech thing, Professor Micheals?” Sheriff Flynn asked.

  “That’s it,” Micheals said. He had spent the past days looking unsuccessfully for an acid that would dissolve the leech.

  “We gotta get it out of the road,” Flynn said, walking truculently up to the leech. “Something like this, you can’t let it block the road, Professor. The Army’s gotta use this road.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Micheals said with a straight face. “Go right ahead, Sheriff. But be careful. It’s hot.” The leech wasn’t hot, but it seemed the simplest explanation under the circumstances.

  Micheals watched with interest as the sheriff tried to shove a crowbar under it. He smiled to himself when it was removed with half a foot of its length gone.

  The sheriff wasn’t so easily discouraged. He had come prepared for a stubborn piece of rock. He went to the rumble seat of his car and took out a blowtorch and a sledgehammer, ignited the torch and focused it on one edge of the leech.

  After five minutes, there was no change. The gray didn’t turn red or even seem to heat up. Sheriff Flynn continued to bake it for fifteen minutes, then called to one of the men.

  “Hit that spot with the sledge, Jerry.”

  Jerry picked up the sledgehammer, motioned the sheriff back, and swung it over his head. He let out a howl as the hammer struck unyieldingly. There wasn’t a fraction of recoil.

  In the distance they heard the roar of an Army convoy.

  “Now we’ll get some action,” Flynn said.

  * * * *

  Micheals wasn’t so sure. He walked around the periphery of the leech, asking himself what kind of substance would react that way. The answer was easy—no substance. No known substance.

  The driver in the lead jeep held up his hand, and the long convoy ground to a halt. A hard, efficient-looking officer stepped out of the jeep. From the star on either shoulder, Micheals knew he was a brigadier general.

  “You can’t block this road,” the general said. He was a tall, spare man in suntans, with a sunburned face and cold eyes. “Please clear that thing away.”

  “We can’t move it,” Micheals said. He told the general what had happened in the past few days.

  “It must be moved,” the general said. “This convoy must go through.” He walked closer and looked at t
he leech. “You say it can’t be jacked up by a crowbar? A torch won’t burn it?”

  “That’s right,” Micheals said, smiling faintly.

  “Driver,” the general said over his shoulder. “Ride over it.”

  Micheals started to protest, but stopped himself. The military mind would have to find out in its own way.

  The driver put his jeep in gear and shot forward, jumping the leech’s four-inch edge. The jeep got to the center of the leech and stopped.

  “I didn’t tell you to stop!” the general bellowed.

  “I didn’t, sir!” the driver protested.

  The jeep had been yanked to a stop and had stalled. The driver started it again, shifted to four-wheel drive, and tried to ram forward. The jeep was fixed immovably, as though set in concrete.

  “Pardon me,” Micheals said. “If you look, you can see that the tires are melting down.”

  The general stared, his hand creeping automatically toward his pistol belt. Then he shouted, “Jump, driver! Don’t touch that gray stuff.”

  White-faced, the driver climbed to the hood of his jeep, looked around him, and jumped clear.

  There was complete silence as everyone watched the jeep. First its tires melted down, and then the rims. The body, resting on the gray surface, melted, too.

  The aerial was the last to go.

  The general began to swear softly under his breath. He turned to the driver. “Go back and have some men bring up hand grenades and dynamite.”

  The driver ran back to the convoy.

  “I don’t know what you’ve got here,” the general said. “But it’s not going to stop a U.S. Army convoy.”

  Micheals wasn’t so sure.

  * * * *

  The leech was nearly awake now, and its body was calling for more and more food. It dissolved the soil under it at a furious rate, filling it in with its own body, flowing outward.

  A large object landed on it, and that became food also. Then suddenly—

  A burst of energy against its surface, and then another, and another. It consumed them gratefully, converting them into mass. Little metal pellets struck it, and their kinetic energy was absorbed, their mass converted. More explosions took place, helping to fill the starving cells.