Dimension of Miracles

by Robert Sheckley

  Seethwright must have mishandled the transition, for, after a brief blank spell, Carmody found himself in the back seat of a taxi. He was in a city very much like New York, and he seemed to be in the middle of a conversation.

  ‘What didja say?’ the driver asked.

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ Carmody replied.

  ‘Oh. I thought you were saying something. Well, what I was saying is, I was saying that’s the new Flammarion building over there.’

  ‘I know,’ Carmody heard himself say. ‘I helped build it.’

  ‘Is that a fact? Some job! But now you’re finished, huh?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carmody said. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and frowned at it. ‘I’m finished with these cigarettes, too.’ He shook his head and threw the cigarette out of the window. These words and actions seemed perfectly natural to one part of him (the active consciousness). But another part of him (the reflective consciousness) was watching with considerable amusement.

  ‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’ the cabby said. ‘Here, try one of mine.’

  Carmody looked at the open pack in the driver’s hand. ‘You smoke Kools, eh?’

  ‘It’s my regular smoke,’ the cabby said. ‘Kools have that light touch of menthol and the taste that’s right!’

  Carmody raised both eyebrows to show disbelief. Nevertheless, he accepted the pack, extracted a coffin nail and lit up. The smiling cabby was watching him in the rearview mirror. Carmody inhaled, looked surprised and pleased, exhaled slowly and luxuriously.

  ‘Hey!’ Carmody said. ‘You got something there!’

  The driver nodded sagely. ‘A lot of us Kool smokers think so … Here we are, sir. The Waldorf-Astoria.’

  Carmody paid and began to step out. The cabby leaned back, still smiling. ‘Hey, mister,’ he said. ‘How about my Kools?’

  ‘Oh!’ Carmody said. He gave back the pack. He and the cabby smiled at each other. Then the cabby drove off and Carmody stood in front of the Waldorf-Astoria.

  He was wearing a sturdy Burberry topcoat. He could tell this by reading the label, which, instead of being inside the collar, was sewn securely to the outside of his right sleeve. Now that he looked, he saw that all his labels were outside: anyone could tell that he had on a Van Heusen shirt, a Countess Mara necktie, a Hart, Schaffner & Marx suit, Van Camp socks, and Lloyd & Haig cordovans. Upon his head was a Borsolino made by Raimu of Milan. His hands were encased in deerskin gloves from L.L. Bean. His wrist was covered by a self-winding chronometer (Audemars Piccard) which had a slide rule, a timer, an elapsed-time indicator, a calendar, and an alarm; all this in addition to keeping time within a guaranteed accuracy of plus or minus six seconds a year.

  Finally, he smelled faintly of Oak Moss men’s cologne from Abercrombie & Fitch.

  He considered it a fairly good outfit, though by no means first-rate. It would pass muster, but he expected more of himself. He was ambitious, he planned to move up, he expected to become the sort of man who serves Chivas Regal on days other than Christmas, wears Brooks Brothers shirts, blazers from F. R. Tripler, uses Onyx after-shave lotion by Lentheric, slips into Country Warmer jackets by Paul Stuart …

  But he would need a class A-AA-AAA Consumer Rating for goods like those, instead of his commonplace B-BB-AAAA which a mishap of birth had stuck him with. He needed that rating! Wasn’t he good enough? Why, damn it, at Stanford he’d been first in his class in Consumer Techniques! His Use-Index for three years now had been in the ninetieth percentile! His car, a Dodge Ferret, was immaculate! He could cite other examples.

  Why hadn’t they moved him up?

  Was it possible that they did not have their eye on him?

  Carmody quickly put such heretical thoughts out of his mind. He had more immediate concerns. Today he had a thankless task before him. What he had to do in the next hour might well cost him his job, in which case he would be relegated to the empty-faced ranks of the proletarian users of Irregular Oriental Merchandise Seconds (IOMS).

  It was still early, but he needed fortification for the ordeal ahead. He walked into the Men’s Bar of the Waldorf.

  He caught the bartender’s eye. Quickly, before the man could speak, Carmody said, ‘Hey, friend, do it again.’ The fact that the man had not done it for him previously, and therefore, technically, could not do it again, was of no significance.

  ‘Here you go, Mac,’ the bartender said, smiling. ‘Ballantine’s got the deep-brewed flavour and the taste that’s right.’

  Carmody knew that he should have said that himself. He had been caught napping. He sipped his beer thoughtfully.

  ‘Hey, Tom?’

  Carmody turned around. There was Nate Steen from Leonia, New Jersey, an old friend and neighbour, drinking a Coke. ‘It’s funny,’ Steen said, ‘but did you ever notice? Things go better with Coke.’

  Carmody was caught without a line. He drained off his beer at a gulp and called to the bartender, ‘Hey, friend, do it again!’ It was a poor expedient, but better than nothing at all. ‘What’s new?’ he asked Steen.

  ‘Wife’s gone on vacation. She decided to come on down to Miami and sneak a week via American Airways, number one to the sun.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Carmody said. ‘I just sent Helen to Nassau; and if you think the Bahamas are lovely from the air, wait until you land. And do you know, I was asking her just the other night why, in this fast-moving world of ours, would anyone want to take the time for an ocean voyage to Europe? And she said –’

  ‘Nice idea,’ Steen interrupted. He had a perfect right, of course; the Holland-American bit was entirely too long for verisimilitude. ‘Now me, I thought I’d pack us all off to Marlboro Country.’

  ‘Fine thought,’ Carmody said, ‘after all –’

  ‘– you really do get a lot to like in a Marlboro,’ Steen finished (his privilege: he had begun the plug).

  ‘Sure,’ Carmody said. Hastily he slopped down his beer and called out, ‘Hey, friend, do it again! Ballantine beer!’ But he knew that he wasn’t holding up his end. What on earth was wrong with him? For this very moment, this particular situation, there was an obligatory dialogue. But he couldn’t remember, he couldn’t seem to find it …

  Steen, calm and collected with new improved ice-blue Secret clinging to his hairy armpits, came to it first. ‘With our wives away,’ he chuckled, ‘we get to do the wash.’

  Beaten to the punch! Carmody could do no more than to string along. ‘Yeh,’ he said. He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Remember that stuff about “my wash is whiter than yours”?’

  Both men indulged in scornful laughter. Then Steen looked at his shirt, looked at Carmody’s shirt, frowned, raised his eyebrows, opened his mouth, portrayed disbelief, incredulity, amazement.

  ‘Hey!’ Steen said. ‘My shirt is whiter than yours!’

  ‘Gee, so it is!’ Carmody said, not bothering to look. ‘That’s funny. We used the same model of washing machine set for the same cycle. And we also used the same bleach … didn’t we?’

  ‘I used that Clorox stuff,’ Steen said carelessly.

  ‘Clorox,’ Carmody said thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, that’s gotta be it! My bleach was too weak!’

  He portrayed mock exasperation while Steen feigned triumph. Carmody thought of ordering another beer, but he hadn’t enjoyed the last two. He decided that Steen was too quick for him.

  Carmody paid for the beers with his American Express credit card and then continued to his office, which was on the fifty-first floor of 666 Fifth Avenue. He greeted his fellow workers with democratic camaraderie. Several people tried to involve him in their gambits, but he ignored them. Carmody knew that his situation, life-positionwise, was desperate. He had thought about his alternatives all last night. Worry had brought on an acute migraine and an upset stomach, and he had almost missed the Charleston contest. But his wife, Helen (who hadn’t really gone on vacation), had given him an Alka-Seltzer, which had fixed him up in a jiffy, and they had gone as planned and had taken first prize tha
nks to Alka-Seltzer. But the problem had remained. And when Helen told him, at three in the morning, that Tommy and little Tinker had had 32 per cent fewer cavities this year over last, he had replied, ‘Do you know … I’ll bet it’s the Crest!’ But his heart hadn’t been in it, although it had been sweet of Helen to feed him the line.

  He knew that no wife could feed her husband enough lines to make any real difference. If you wanted to advance in the Consumer Ratings, if you wanted to show yourself worthy of the things that counted in life – a Tech-built Swiss-type chalet deep in the Untrammelled Wilderness of Maine, for example, and a Porsche 911S, which people who considered themselves a breed apart purchased, and an Ampex for people who couldn’t be bothered with anything less than the best … well, if you wanted that sort of thing, you had to deserve it. Money wasn’t enough, social position wasn’t enough, simple-minded perseverance wasn’t enough. You had to prove that you really were of that Breed Apart for whom those goods were intended. You had to risk everything in order to gain everything.

  ‘By jingo!’ Carmody said to himself, striking his right fist into the palm of his left hand, ‘I said I’d do it and I will do it!’ And he boldly advanced to the door of Mr Übermann, his boss, and boldy threw open the door.

  The room was empty. Mr Übermann had not arrived yet.

  Carmody entered the office. He would wait. His jaw was tight, his lips were compressed, and three vertical lines had appeared between his eyes. He fought to keep himself under control. Übermann would be here any moment. And when he came, Tom Carmody would say to him, ‘Mr Übermann, you could have me fired for this but you’ve got bad breath.’ He would pause, ‘Bad breath.’

  How simple it seemed in contemplation, how difficult in execution! Yet still, a man must stand up, must fight for cleanliness and its extensions, must scramble for advancement. At this very moment, Carmody knew, the eyes of those half-legendary figures, the Manufacturers, were on him. If he were found worthy …

  ‘Morning, Carmody!’ said Übermann, striding long-legged into the room! He was hawk-faced and handsome; his temples were streaked with grey, a mark of privilege. His horn-rimmed glasses were a full three centimetres wider than Carmody’s.

  ‘Mr Übermann,’ Carmody began in a quavering voice, ‘you could have me fired for this –’

  ‘Carmody,’ the boss said, his diaphragmatic voice cutting through Carmody’s weak chest tones as a Personna surgical-steel blade cuts through flab, ‘today I have discovered the most amazing mouthwash. Scope, it is called. I believe my breath will be sweet for hours and hours.’

  Carmody gave an ironic smile. What a fantastic coincidence! The boss had lucked into the very mouthwash that Carmody had been about to recommend. And it had worked! No longer did Mr Übermann’s breath smell like a rubbish pit after a heavy rain. Now it was kissing-sweet (for girls, of course; Carmody himself was not interested in that sort of thing).

  ‘Ever hear of it?’ Übermann asked, and then left the office without waiting for an answer.

  Carmody smiled even more ironically. He had failed again. And yet, he could feel an unmistakable sense of relief at the failure. Executive consumption was terribly trying, fantastically wearing. It was proper for a certain kind of man; but perhaps he was not that kind. Suppose he had made it? He could sense even now the regrets with which he would have given up his fifty-eighth-percentile consumption artifacts – his Raleigh coupons, his pigskin suede cap, his light-up Christmas tie, his Executive ‘Quick-Trip’ Business Case made of Skai, his KLH Model 24 stereo music system, and particularly his Lakeland top-of-the-line coat of imported, soft, supple New Zealand Sueded shearling with the framed collar and lapels. And he would have had to dispose of all the rest of his dear, familiar objects as well.

  ‘Sometimes things just work out right even when you think they’re going wrong,’ Carmody said to himself.

  ‘They do? Just what in hell are you talking about?’ Carmody replied to himself.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Carmody said to himself.

  ‘Yeah,’ Carmody’s self answered Carmody. ‘Acclimatized a little too quickly, didn’t you?’

  The two Carmodys looked at each other, compared notes and reached a conclusion. They coalesced.

  ‘Seethwright!’ Carmody shouted. ‘Get me out of here!’

  And Seethwright, that faithful man, did just that.

  CHAPTER 26

  With his usual punctuality, Seethwright sent him into another of Earth’s probability-worlds. The transition was somewhat faster than instantaneous. It was so rapid, in fact, that time became ever so slightly retrograde, and Carmody had the eerie experience of giving a response before receiving the requisite stimulus. That was a contradiction, of course, a very small one, but still illegal. Seethwright took care of it by a standard obliteration procedure, and no one bothered to report it to the proper authorities. Its effect was nil except for the wear and tear on the space-time continuum, which Carmody didn’t even notice.

  Carmody found himself in a small town. Superficially, there was no problem of identification; this town was, or purported to be, Maplewood, New Jersey. Carmody had lived here between the ages of three and eighteen. This was his home, in so far as he had a home anywhere.

  Or, more precisely, this was his home if it was what it seemed to be. But that remained to be proved.

  He was standing on the corner of Durand Road and Maplewood Avenue, at the upper end of the town. Straight ahead was the shopping centre. Behind him were suburban streets rich in maple, oak, chestnut, elm, dogwood, and others. On his right was the Christian Science reading room. On his left was the railroad station.

  ‘How now, voyager?’ said a voice near his right thigh.

  Carmody looked down and saw that he was carrying a fair-sized transistor radio. This, he knew at once, was the Prize.

  ‘So you’ve come back,’ Carmody said.

  ‘Back? I never left.’

  ‘I didn’t see you in the last probability-world.’

  ‘That’s because you weren’t looking very hard,’ the Prize said. ‘I was in your pocket in the form of a badly forged denarius.’

  ‘How am I supposed to know that?’ Carmody inquired.

  ‘All you have to do is ask,’ the Prize said. ‘I am metamorphic by nature, and unpredictable even to myself. But you know that. Must I announce my presence each and every time we go somewhere?’

  ‘It would help,’ Carmody said.

  ‘My pride would not allow such anxiety-ridden behaviour,’ the Prize said firmly. ‘I answer when called; when not called, I do not assume that my presence is required. It was quite obvious that you didn’t need me in the last probability-world. Therefore I took the opportunity to go to Sloklol’s Restaurant for a decent feed, and then to the Haganicht Proparium to have my hide dry-cleaned, and then to Varinell’s Solar Beacon Pub for a few drinks and a chat with a friend who happened to be in the neighbourhood, and then to –’

  ‘How could you have done all that?’ Carmody asked. ‘I wasn’t in that world for over half an hour.’

  ‘I told you that our duration-flows are quite dissimilar,’ the Prize said.

  ‘Yes, so you did … But whereabouts are those places?’

  ‘That would take quite a little while to explain,’ the Prize said. ‘As a matter of fact, it’s easier to go there than to explain how to go there. Anyhow, they’re the wrong kind of places for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well … there are many reasons. But to cite only one, you would disapprove of the food eaten at the Solar Beacon Pub.’

  ‘I’ve already seen you eat orithi,’ Carmody reminded the Prize.

  ‘Yes, of course. But orithi are an infrequent delicacy, morsels to be eaten once or twice in a lifetime. Whereas at the Solar Beacon Pub we Prizes and related species eat our staple subsistence diet.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘You Wouldn’t want to know,’ the Prize warned him.

  ‘I do want to know.’

&
nbsp; ‘I know that you do want to know; but after you hear, you will wish that you didn’t know.’

  ‘Out with it,’ Carmody said. ‘What is your staple diet?’

  ‘All right, Mr Nosey,’ the Prize said. ‘But remember, you insisted upon knowing. My staple diet is myself.’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Myself. I said you Wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Your diet is yourself? You mean that you feast off your own body?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Damn it all,’ Carmody said, ‘aside from being repulsive, that’s impossible. You can’t live off yourself!’

  ‘I can and I do,’ the Prize said. ‘And I’m quite proud of the fact. Morally, it is an outstanding example of personal freedom.’

  ‘But it just is’t possible,’ Carmody said. ‘It violates the law of conservation of energy, or mass, or something like that. It sure as hell violates some natural law.’

  ‘That’s true, but only in a specialized sense,’ the Prize said. ‘When you come to examine the matter more closely, you can, I think, see that the impossibility is more apparent than real.’

  ‘What in hell does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the Prize confessed. ‘It’s the answer in all our textbooks. Nobody ever questioned it before.’

  ‘I want to get this straight,’ Carmody said. ‘Do you mean that you actually and literally eat portions of your own flesh?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Prize said. ‘That’s what I mean. Though you shouldn’t confine it solely to my flesh. My liver is a tasty morsel, especially when chopped up with a hard-boiled egg and a little chicken fat. And my short ribs have served me well for a quick, casual sort of dinner; whereas my hams ought to be mild-cured for several weeks before –’

  ‘Enough,’ Carmody said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the Prize said.

  ‘But just tell me this: how can your body provide enough food for your body (this sounds ridiculous) throughout a lifetime?’

  ‘Well,’ the Prize said thoughtfully, ‘for one thing, I’m not a particularly heavy eater.’