Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  Pid dissolved his legs with a sigh of relief.

  But the main door was closed! Pid hoped the Detector wouldn’t try to open it. That was not in the nature of Dogs.

  Another Dog came running toward Ger. Ger backed away from him. The Dog approached and sniffed. Ger sniffed back.

  Then both of them ran around the building.

  That was clever, Pid thought. There was bound to be a door in the rear.

  He glanced up at the afternoon sun. As soon as the Displacer was activated, the Glom armies would begin to pour through. By the time the Men recovered from the shock, a million or more Glom troops would be here. With more following.

  The day passed slowly, and nothing happened.

  Nervously Pid watched the front of the plant. It shouldn’t be taking so long, if Ger were successful.

  Late into the night he waited. Men walked in and out of the installation, and Dogs barked around the gates. But Ger did not appear.

  Ger had failed. Ilg was gone. Only he was left.

  And still he didn’t know what had happened.

  By morning, Pid was in complete despair. He knew that the twenty-first Glom expedition to this planet was near the point of complete failure. Now it was all up to him.

  He decided to sally out boldly in the shape of a Man. It was the only possibility left.

  He saw that workers were arriving in great numbers, rushing through the gates. Pid wondered if he should try to mingle with them, or wait until there was less commotion. He decided to take advantage of the apparent confusion, and started to shape himself into a Man.

  A Dog walked past the woods where he was hiding.

  “Hello,” the Dog said.

  It was Ger!

  “What happened?” Pid asked, with a sigh of relief. “Why were you so long? Couldn’t you get in?”

  “I don’t know,” Ger said, wagging his tail. “I didn’t try.”

  Pid was speechless.

  “I went hunting,” Ger said complacently. “This form is ideal for Hunting, you know. I went out the rear gate with another Dog.”

  “But the expedition—your duty—”

  “I changed my mind,” Ger told him. “You know, Pilot, I never wanted to be a Detector.”

  “But you were born a Detector!”

  “That’s true,” Ger said. “But it doesn’t help. I always wanted to be a Hunter.”

  Pid shook his entire body in annoyance. “You can’t,” he said, very slowly, as one would explain to a Glomling. “The Hunter shape is forbidden to you.”

  “Not here it isn’t,” Ger said, still wagging his tail.

  “Let’s have no more of this,” Pid said angrily. “Get into that installation and set up your Displacer. I’ll try to overlook this heresy.”

  “I won’t,” Ger said. “I don’t want the Glom here. They’d ruin it for the rest of us.”

  “He’s right,” an oak tree said.

  “Ilg!” Pid gasped. “Where are you?”

  Branches stirred. “I’m right here,” Ilg said. “I’ve been Thinking.”

  “But—your caste—”

  “Pilot,” Ger said sadly, “why don’t you wake up? Most of the people on Glom are miserable. Only custom makes us take the caste-shape of our ancestors.”

  “Pilot,” Ilg said, “all Glom are born Shapeless!”

  “And being born Shapeless, all Glom should have Freedom of Shape,” Ger said.

  “Exactly,” Ilg said. “But he’ll never understand. Now excuse me. I want to Think.” And the oak tree was silent.

  Pid laughed humorlessly. “The Men will kill you off,” he said. “Just as they killed off the rest of the expeditions.”

  “No one from Glom has been killed,” Ger told him. “The other expeditions are right here.”

  “Alive?”

  “Certainly. The Men don’t even know we exist. That Dog I was Hunting with is a Glom from the nineteenth expedition. There are hundreds of us here, Pilot. We like it.”

  Pid tried to absorb it all. He had always known that the lower castes were lax in caste-consciousness. But this—this was preposterous!

  This planet’s secret menace was—freedom!

  “Join us, Pilot,” Ger said. “We’ve got a paradise here. Do you know how many species there are on this planet’ An uncountable number! There’s a shape to suit every need!”

  Pid shook his head. There was no shape to suit his need. He was a Pilot.

  But Men were unaware of the presence of the Glom. Getting near the reactor would be simple!

  “The Glom Supreme Council will take care of all of you,” he snarled, and shaped himself into a Dog. “I’m going to set up the Displacer myself.”

  He studied himself for a moment, bared his teeth at Ger, and loped toward the gate.

  The Men at the gate didn’t even look at him. He slipped through the main door of the building behind a Man, and loped down a corridor.

  The Displacer in his body pouch pulsed and tugged, leading him toward the reactor room.

  He sprinted up a flight of stairs and down another corridor. There were footsteps around the bend, and Pid knew instinctively that Dogs were not allowed inside the building.

  He looked around desperately for a hiding place, but the corridor was bare. However, there were several overhead lights in the ceiling.

  Pid leaped, and glued himself to the ceiling. He shaped himself into a lighting fixture, and hoped that the Men wouldn’t try to find out why he wasn’t shining.

  Men passed, running.

  Pid changed himself into a facsimile of a Man, and hurried on.

  He had to get closer.

  Another Man came down the corridor. He looked sharply at Pid, started to speak, and then sprinted away.

  Pid didn’t know what was wrong, but he broke into a full sprint. The Displacer in his body pouch throbbed and pulsed, telling him he had almost reached the critical distance.

  Suddenly a terrible doubt assailed his mind. All the expeditions had deserted! Every single Glom!

  He slowed slightly.

  Freedom of Shape...that was a strange notion. A disturbing notion.

  And obviously a device of The Shapeless One, he told himself, and rushed on.

  At the end of the corridor was a gigantic bolted door. Pid stared at it.

  Footsteps hammered down the corridor, and Men were shouting.

  What was wrong? How had they detected him? Quickly he examined himself and ran his fingers across his face.

  He had forgotten to mold any features.

  In despair he pulled at the door. He took the tiny Displacer out of his pouch, but the pulse beat wasn’t quite strong enough. He had to get closer to the reactor.

  He studied the door. There was a tiny crack running under it. Pid went quickly shapeless and flowed under, barely squeezing the Displacer through.

  Inside the room he found another bolt on the inside of the door. He jammed it into place, and looked around for something to prop against the door.

  It was a tiny room. On one side was a lead door, leading toward the reactor. There was a small window on another side, and that was all.

  Pid looked at the Displacer. The pulse beat was right. At last he was close enough. Here the Displacer could work, drawing and altering the energy from the reactor. All he had to do was activate it

  But they had all deserted, every one of them.

  Pid hesitated. All Glom are born Shapeless. That was true. Glom children were amorphous, until old enough to be instructed in the caste-shape of their ancestors. But Freedom of Shape?

  Pid considered the possibilities. To be able to take on any shape he wanted, without interference! On this paradise planet he could fulfill any ambition, become anything, do anything.

  Nor would he be lonely. There were other Glom here as well, enjoying the benefits of Freedom of Shape.

  The Men were beginning to break down the door. Pid was still uncertain.

  What should he do? Freedom....

  But
not for him, he thought bitterly. It was easy enough to be a Hunter or a Thinker. But he was a Pilot. Piloting was his life and love. How could he do that here?

  Of course, the Men had ships. He could turn into a Man, find a ship....

  Never. Easy enough to become a Tree or a Dog. He could never pass successfully as a Man.

  The door was beginning to splinter from repeated blows.

  Pid walked to the window to take a last look at the planet before activating the Displacer.

  He looked—and almost collapsed from shock.

  It was really true! He hadn’t fully understood what Ger had meant when he said that there were species on this planet to satisfy every need. Every need! Even his!

  Here he could satisfy a longing of the Pilot Caste that went even deeper than Piloting.

  He looked again, then smashed the Displacer to the floor. The door burst open, and in the same instant he flung himself through the window.

  The Men raced to the window and stared out. But they were unable to understand what they saw.

  There was only a great white bird out there, flapping awkwardly but with increasing strength, trying to overtake a flight of birds in the distance.

  BESIDE STILL WATERS

  Mark Rogers was a prospector, and he went to the asteroid belt looking for radioactives and rare metals. He searched for years, never finding much, hopping from fragment to fragment. After a time he settled on a slab of rock half a mile thick.

  Rogers had been born old, and he didn’t age much past a point. His face was white with the pallor of space, and his hands shook a little. He called his slab of rock Martha, after no girl he had ever known.

  He made a little strike, enough to equip Martha with an air pump and a shack, a few tons of dirt and some water tanks, and a robot. Then he settled back and watched the stars.

  The robot he bought was a standard-model all-around worker, with built-in memory and a thirty-word vocabulary. Mark added to that, bit by bit. He was something of a tinkerer, and he enjoyed adapting his environment to himself.

  At first, all the robot could say was “Yes sir,” and “No sir.” He could state simple problems: “The air pump is laboring, sir.” “The com is budding, sir.” He could perform a satisfactory greeting: “Good morning, sir.”

  Mark changed that He eliminated the “sirs” from the robot’s vocabulary; equality was the rule on Mark’s hunk of rock. Then he dubbed the robot Charles, after a father he had never known.

  As the years passed, the air pump began to labor a little as it converted the oxygen in the planetoid’s rock into a breathable atmosphere. The air seeped into space, and the pump worked a little harder, supplying more.

  The crops continued to grow on the tamed black dirt of the planetoid. Looking up, Mark could see the sheer blackness of the river of space, the floating points of the stars. Around him, under him, overhead, masses of rock drifted, and sometimes the starlight glinted from their black sides. Occasionally, Mark caught a glimpse of Mars or Jupiter. Once he thought he saw Earth.

  Mark began to tape new responses into Charles. He added simple responses to cue words. When he said, “How does it look!” Charles would answer, “Oh, pretty good, I guess.”

  At first the answers were what Mark had been answering himself, in the long dialogue held over the years. But, slowly, he began to build a new personality into Charles.

  Mark had always been suspicious and scornful of women. But for some reason he didn’t tape the same suspicion into Charles. Charles’ outlook was quite different.

  “What do you think of girls?” Mark would ask, sitting on a packing case outside the shack, after the chores were done.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You have to find the right one,” the robot would reply dutifully, repeating what had been put on its tape.

  “I never saw a good one yet,” Mark would say.

  “Well, that’s not fair. Perhaps you didn’t look long enough. There’s a girl in the world for every man.”

  “You’re a romantic!” Mark would say scornfully. The robot would pause—a built-in pause—and chuckle a carefully constructed chuckle.

  “I dreamed of a girl named Martha once,” Charles would say. “Maybe if I’d looked, I would have found her.”

  And then it would be bedtime. Or perhaps Mark would want more conversation. “What do you think of girls?” he would ask again, and the discussion would follow its same course.

  Charles grew old. His limbs lost their flexibility, and some of his wiring started to corrode. Mark would spend hours keeping the robot in repair.

  “You’re getting rusty,” he would cackle.

  “You’re not so young yourself,” Charles would reply. He had an answer for almost everything. Nothing elaborate, but an answer.

  It was always night on Martha, but Mark broke up his time into mornings, afternoons, and evenings. Their life followed a simple routine. Breakfast, from vegetables and Mark’s canned store. Then the robot would work in the fields, and the plants grew used to his touch. Mark would repair the pump, check the water supply, and straighten up the immaculate shack. Lunch, and the robot’s chores were usually finished.

  The two would sit on the packing case and watch the stars. They would talk until supper, and sometimes late into the endless night.

  In time, Mark built more complicated conversations into Charles. He couldn’t give the robot free choice, of course, but he managed a pretty close approximation of it. Slowly, Charles’ personality emerged. But it was strikingly different from Mark’s.

  Where Mark was querulous, Charles was calm. Mark was sardonic, Charles was naive. Mark was a cynic, Charles was an idealist. Mark was often sad; Charles was forever content.

  And in time, Mark forgot he had built the answers into Charles. He accepted the robot as a friend, of about his own age. A friend of long years’ standing.

  “The thing I don’t understand,” Mark would say, “is why a man like you wants to live here. I mean, it’s all right for me. No one cares about me, and I never gave much of a damn about anyone. But why you?”

  “Here I have a whole world,” Charles would reply, “where on Earth I had to share with billions. I have the stars, bigger and brighter than on Earth. I have all space around me, close, like still waters. And I have you, Mark.”

  “Now, don’t go getting sentimental on me—”

  “I’m not. Friendship counts. Love was lost long ago, Mark. The love of a girl named Martha, whom neither of us ever met. And that’s a pity. But friendship remains, and the eternal night.”

  “You’re a bloody poet,” Mark would say, half admiringly.

  “A poor poet.”

  Time passed unnoticed by the stars, and the air pump hissed and clanked and leaked. Mark was fixing it constantly, but the air of Martha became increasingly rare. Although Charles labored in the fields, the crops, deprived of sufficient air, died.

  Mark was tired now, and barely able to crawl around, even without the grip of gravity. He stayed in his bunk most of the time. Charles fed him as best as he could, moving on rusty, creaky limbs.

  “What do you think of girls?”

  “I never saw a good one yet.”

  “Well, that’s not fair.”

  Mark was too tired to see the end coming, and Charles wasn’t interested. But the end was on its way. The air pump threatened to give out momentarily. There hadn’t been any food for days.

  “But why you?”

  “Here I have a whole world—”

  “Don’t get sentimental—”

  “And the love of a girl named Martha.”

  From his bunk Mark saw the stars for the last time. Big, bigger than ever, endlessly floating in the still waters of space.

  “The stars...” Mark said.

  “Yes?”

  “The sun?”

  “—shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore.”

  “A bloody poet.”

  “A poor poet”

  “And girls?”

&nbs
p; “I dreamed of a girl named Martha once. Maybe if—”

  “What do you think of girls? And stars? And Earth?” And it was bedtime, this time forever.

  Charles stood beside the body of his friend. He felt for a pulse once, and allowed the withered hand to fall. He walked to a corner of the shack and turned off the tired air pump.

  The tape that Mark had prepared had a few cracked inches left to run. “I hope he finds his Martha,” the robot croaked.

  Then the tape broke.

  His rusted limbs would not bend, and he stood frozen, staring back at the naked stars. Then he bowed his head.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” Charles said. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me...”

  SILVERSMITH WISHES

  The stranger lifted his glass. “May your conclusions always flow sweetly from your premises.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Nelson Silversmith.

  Solemnly they both sipped Orange Julius. Outside the flotsam of 8th Street flowed eastward, to circulate with sluggish restlessness in the Sargasso of Washington Square. Silversmith munched his chili dog.

  The stranger said, “I suppose you think I’m some kind of a nut.”

  Silversmith shrugged. “I assume nothing.”

  “Well spoken,” the stranger said. “My name is Terence Maginnis. Come have a drink with me.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Silversmith said.

  Some twenty minutes later they were seated on torn red plastic benches in Joe Mangeri’s Clam Bar and Beer Parlor, exchanging fragments of discursive philosophy as casual strangers meeting in New York’s Greenwich Village on a slow mild October afternoon will do. Maginnis was a short compact red-faced man with emphatic gestures and a fuzzy Harris tweed suit. Silversmith was a lanky thirty-two-year-old with a mournful face and long tapering fingers.

  “So look,” Maginnis said abruptly, “enough small talk. I have a proposition to put to you.”

  “So put,” Silversmith said, with aplomb. Not for nothing had he been brought up in the bewildering social complexities of Bayonne, New Jersey.

  “It is this,” Maginnis said. “I am a front man for a certain organization which must remain nameless. We have a free introductory offer. We give you, absolutely free and without obligation, three requests. You may ask for any three things, and I will get them for you if it is within my power.”