Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  “But the spices, where do you put the spices?” Cordle demanded, taking a long swig of burgundy-colored liquid from a rusted canteen.

  “Baby, you’re asking questions that can be revealed only to a thirteenth-degree Mason with piles, wearing sandals. Sorry about that. Just remember that everything goes into The Stew.”

  “Into The Stew,” Cordle repeated, smacking his lips.

  “And, especially, stick with the carrots and onions; you were really grooving there.”

  “Carrots and onions,” Cordle repeated.

  “That’s your trip,” Thoth-Hermes said. “Hey, we’ve gotten to Corunna; you can let me out anywhere around here.”

  Cordle pulled his rented car off the road. Thoth-Hermes took his knapsack from the back seat and got out.

  “Thanks for the lift, baby.”

  “My pleasure. Thank you for the wine. What kind did you say it was?”

  “Vino de casa mixed with a mere smidgen of old Dr. Hammerfinger’s essence of instant powdered Power-Pack brand acid. Brewed by gnurrs in the secret laboratories of UCLA in preparation for the big all-Europe turn-on.”

  “Whatever it was, it surely was, “Cordle said deeply. “Pure elixir to me. You could sell neckties to antelopes with that stuff; you could change the world from an oblate spheroid into a truncated trapezoid...What did I say?”

  “Never mind, it’s all part of your trip. Maybe you better lie down for a while, huh?”

  “Where gods command, mere mortals must obey,” Cordle said iambically. He lay down on the front seat of the car. Thoth-Hermes bent over him, his beard burnished gold, his head wreathed in plane trees.

  “You okay?”

  “Never better in my life.”

  “Want me to stand by?”

  “Unnecessary. You have helped me beyond potentiality.”

  “Glad to hear it, baby, you’re making a fine sound. You really are okay? Well, then, ta.”

  Thoth-Hermes marched off into the sunset. Cordle closed his eyes and solved various problems that had perplexed the greatest philosophers of all ages. He was mildly surprised at how simple complexity was.

  At last he went to sleep. He awoke some six hours later. He had forgotten most of his brilliant insights, the lucid solutions. It was inconceivable: How can one misplace the keys of the universe? But he had, and there seemed no hope of reclaiming them. Paradise was lost for good.

  He did remember about the onions and carrots, though, and he remembered The Stew. It was not the sort of insight he might have chosen if he’d had any choice; but this was what had come to him, and he did not reject it. Cordle knew, perhaps instinctively, that in the insight game, you take whatever you can get.

  The next day, he reached Santander in a driving rain. He decided to write amusing letters to all his friends, perhaps even try his hand at a travel sketch. That required a typewriter. The conserje at his hotel directed him to a store that rented typewriters. He went there and found a clerk who spoke perfect English.

  “Do you rent typewriters by the day?” Cordle asked.

  “Why not?” the clerk replied. He had oily black hair and a thin aristocratic nose.

  “How much for that one?” Cordle asked, indicating a thirty-year-old Erika portable.

  “Seventy pesetas a day, which is to say, one dollar. Usually.”

  “Isn’t this usually?”

  “Certainly not, since you are a foreigner in transit. For you, one hundred and eighty pesetas a day.”

  “All right,” Cordle said, reaching for his wallet. “I’d like to have it for two days.”

  “I shall also require your passport and a deposit of fifty dollars. “

  Cordle attempted a mild joke. “Hey, I just want to type on it, not marry it.”

  The clerk shrugged.

  “Look, the conserje has my passport at the hotel. How about taking my driver’s license instead?”

  “Certainly not. I must hold your passport, in case you decide to default.”

  “But why do you need my passport and the deposit?” Cordle asked, feeling bullied and ill at ease. “I mean, look, the machine’s not worth twenty dollars.”

  “You are an expert, perhaps, in the Spanish market value of used German typewriters?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then permit me, sir, to conduct my business as I see fit. I will also need to know the use to which you plan to put the machine.”

  “The use?”

  “Of course, the use.”

  It was one of these preposterous foreign situations that can happen to anyone. The clerk’s request was incomprehensible and his manner was insulting. Cordle was about to give a curt little nod, turn on his heel and walk out.

  Then he remembered about the onions and carrots. He saw The Stew. And suddenly, it occurred to Cordle that he could be whatever vegetable he wanted to be.

  He turned to the clerk. He smiled winningly. He said, “You wish to know the use I will make of the typewriter?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well,” Cordle said, “quite frankly, I had planned to stuff it up my nose.”

  The clerk gaped at him.

  “It’s quite a successful method of smuggling,” Cordle went on. “I was also planning to give you a stolen passport and counterfeit pesetas. Once I got into Italy, I would have sold the typewriter for ten thousand dollars. Milan is undergoing a typewriter famine, you know; they’re desperate, they’ll buy anything.”

  “Sir,” the clerk said, “you choose to be disagreeable.”

  “Nasty is the word you were looking for. I’ve changed my mind about the typewriter. But let me compliment you on your command of English.”

  “I have studied assiduously,” the clerk admitted, with a hint of pride.

  “That is evident. And, despite a certain weakness in the Rs, you succeed in sounding like a Venetian gondolier with a cleft palate. My best wishes to your esteemed family. I leave you now to pick your pimples in peace.”

  Reviewing the scene later, Cordle decided that he had performed quite well in his maiden appearance as a carrot. True, his closing lines had been a little forced and overintellectualized. But the undertone of viciousness had been convincing.

  Most important was the simple resounding fact that he had done it. And now, in the quiet of his hotel room, instead of churning his guts in a frenzy of self-loathing, he had the tranquilizing knowledge of having put someone else in that position.

  He had done it! Just like that, he had transformed himself from onion into carrot!

  But was his position ethically defensible? Presumably, the clerk could not help being detestable; he was a product of his own genetic and social environment, a victim of his conditioning; he was naturally rather than intentionally hateful—

  Cordle stopped himself. He saw that he was engaged in typical onionish thinking, which was an inability to conceive of carrots except as an aberration from oniondom.

  But now he knew that both onions and carrots had to exist; otherwise, there would be no Stew.

  And he also knew that a man was free and could choose whatever vegetable he wanted to be. He could even live as an amusing little green pea, or a gruff, forceful clove of garlic (though perhaps that was scratching at the metaphor). In any event, a man could take his pick between carrothood and oniondom.

  There is much to think about here, Cordle thought. But he never got around to thinking about it. Instead, he went sightseeing, despite the rain, and then continued his travels.

  The next incident occurred in Nice, in a cozy little restaurant on the Avenue des Diables Bleus, with red-checkered tablecloths and incomprehensible menus written in longhand with purple ink. There were four waiters, one of whom looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo, down to the cigarette drooping from his long lower lip. The others looked like run-of-the-mill muggers. There were several Scandinavian customers quietly eating a cassoulet, one old Frenchman in a beret and three homely English girls.

  Belmondo sauntered over. Cordle, who spoke a
clear though idiomatic French, asked for the ten-franc menu he had seen hanging in the window.

  The waiter gave him the sort of look one reserves for pretentious beggars. “Ah, that is all finished for today,” he said, and handed Cordle a 30-franc menu.

  In his previous incarnation, Cordle would have bit down on the bullet and ordered. Or possibly he would have risen, trembling with outrage, and left the restaurant, blundering into a chair on the way.

  But now—

  “Perhaps you did not understand me,” Cordle said. “It is a matter of French law that you must serve from all of the fixed-price menus that you show in the window.”

  “M’sieu is a lawyer?” the waiter inquired, his hands perched insolently on his hips.

  “No. M’sieu is a troublemaker,” Cordle said, giving what he considered to be fair warning.

  “Then m’sieu must make what trouble he desires,” the waiter said. His eyes were slits.

  “Okay,” Cordle said. And just then, fortuitously, an elderly couple came into the restaurant. The man wore a double-breasted slate-blue suit with a half-inch white pin stripe. The woman wore a flowered organdy dress. Cordle called to them, “Excuse me, are you folks English?”

  A bit startled, the man inclined his head in the barest intimation of a nod.

  “Then I would advise you not to eat here. I am a health inspector for UNESCO. The chef has apparently not washed his hands since D-Day. We haven’t made a definitive test for typhoid yet, but we have our suspicions. As soon as my assistant arrives with the litmus paper...”

  A deathly hush had fallen over the restaurant.

  “I suppose a boiled egg would be safe enough,” Cordle said.

  The elderly man probably didn’t believe him. But it didn’t matter, Cordle was obviously trouble.

  “Come, Mildred,” he said, and they hurried out.

  “There goes sixty francs plus five percent tip,” Cordle said, coolly.

  “Leave here at once!” the waiter snarled.

  “I like it here,” Cordle said, folding his arms. “I like the ambiance, the sense of intimacy—”

  “You are not permitted to stay without eating.”

  “I shall eat. From the ten-franc menu.”

  The waiters looked at one another, nodded in unison and began to advance in a threatening phalanx. Cordle called to the other diners, “I ask you all to bear witness! These men are going to attack me, four against one, contrary to French law and universal human ethics, simply because I want to order from the ten-franc menu, which they have falsely advertised.”

  It was a long speech, but this was clearly the time for grandiloquence. Cordle repeated it in English.

  The English girls gasped. The old Frenchman went on eating his soup. The Scandinavians nodded grimly and began to take off their jackets.

  The waiters held another conference. The one who looked like Belmondo said, “M’sieu, you are forcing us to call the police.”

  “That will save me the trouble,” Cordle said, “of calling them myself.”

  “Surely, m’sieu does not want to spend his holiday in court?”

  “That is how m’sieu spends most of his holidays,” Cordle said.

  The waiters conferred again. Then Belmondo stalked over with the 30-franc menu. “The cost of the prix fixe will be ten francs, since evidently that is all m’sieu can afford.”

  Cordle let that pass. “Bring me onion soup, green salad and the boeuf bourguignon.”

  The waiter went to put in the order. While he was waiting, Cordle sang “Waltzing Matilda” in a moderately loud voice. He suspected it might speed up the service. He got his food by the time he reached “You’ll never catch me alive, said he” for the second time. Cordle pulled the tureen of stew toward him and lifted a spoon.

  It was a breathless moment. Not one diner had left the restaurant. And Cordle was prepared. He leaned forward, soupspoon in shoveling position, and sniffed delicately. A hush fell over the room.

  “It lacks a certain something,” Cordle said aloud. Frowning, he poured the onion soup into the boeuf bourguignon. He sniffed, shook his head and added a half loaf of bread, in slices. He sniffed again and added the salad and the contents of a saltcellar.

  Cordle pursed his lips. “No,” he said, “it simply will not do.”

  He overturned the entire contents of the tureen onto the table. It was an act comparable, perhaps, to throwing gentian violet on the Mona Lisa. All of France and most of western Switzerland went into a state of shock.

  Unhurriedly, but keeping the frozen waiters under surveillance, Cordle rose and dropped ten francs into the mess. He walked to the door, turned and said, “My compliments to the chef, who might better be employed as a cement mixer. And this, mon vieux, is for you.”

  He threw his crumpled linen napkin onto the floor.

  As the matador, after a fine series of passes, turns his back contemptuously on the bull and strolls away, so went Cordle. For some unknown reason, the waiters did not rush out after him, shoot him dead and hang his corpse from the nearest lamppost. So Cordle walked for ten or fifteen blocks, taking rights and lefts at random. He came to the Promenade des Anglais and sat down on a bench. He was trembling and his shirt was drenched with perspiration.

  “But I did it,” he said. “I did it! I was unspeakably vile and I got away with it!”

  Now he really knew why carrots acted that way. Dear God in heaven, what joy, what delectable bliss!

  Cordle then reverted to his mild-mannered self, smoothly and without regrets. He stayed that way until his second day in Rome.

  He was in his rented car. He and seven other drivers were lined up at a traffic light on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. There were perhaps twenty cars behind them. All of the drivers were revving their engines, hunched over their steering wheels with slitted eyes, dreaming of Le Mans. All except Cordle, who was drinking in the cyclopean architecture of downtown Rome.

  The checkered flag came down! The drivers floored their accelerators, trying to spin the wheels of their underpowered Fiats, wearing out their clutches and their nerves, but doing so with eclat and brio. All except Cordle, who seemed to be the only man in Rome who didn’t have to win a race or keep an appointment.

  Without undue haste or particular delay, Cordle depressed the clutch and engaged the gear. Already he had lost nearly two seconds—unthinkable at Monza or Monte Carlo.

  The driver behind him blew his horn frantically.

  Cordle smiled to himself, a secret, ugly expression. He put the gearshift into neutral, engaged the hand brake and stepped out of his car. He ambled over to the hornblower, who had turned pasty white and was fumbling under his seat, hoping to find a tire iron.

  “Yes?” said Cordle, in French, “is something wrong?”

  “No, no, nothing,” the driver replied in French—his first mistake. “I merely wanted you to go, to move.”

  “But I was just doing that,” Cordle pointed out.

  “Well, then! It is all right!”

  “No, it is not all right,” Cordle told him. “I think I deserve a better explanation of why you blew your horn at me.”

  The hornblower—a Milanese businessman on holiday with his wife and four children—rashly replied, “My dear sir, you were slow, you were delaying us all.”

  “Slow?” said Cordle. “You blew your horn two seconds after the light changed. Do you call two seconds slow?”

  “It was much longer than that,” the man riposted feebly.

  Traffic was now backed up as far south as Naples. A crowd of ten thousand had gathered. Carabinieri units in Viterbo and Genoa had been called into a state of alert.

  “That is untrue,” Cordle said. “I have witnesses.” He gestured at the crowd, which gestured back. “I shall call my witnesses before the courts. You must know that you broke the law by blowing your horn within the city limits of Rome in what was clearly not an emergency.”

  The Milanese businessman looked at the crowd, now swollen to perha
ps fifty thousand. Dear God, he thought, if only the Goths would descend again and exterminate these leering Romans! If only the ground would open up and swallow this insane Frenchman! If only he, Giancarlo Morelli, had a dull spoon with which to open up the veins of his wrist!

  Jets from the Sixth Fleet thundered overhead, hoping to avert the long-expected coup d’etat.

  The Milanese businessman’s own wife was shouting abuse at him: Tonight he would cut out her faithless heart and mail it back to her mother.

  What was there to do? In Milan, he would have had this Frenchman’s head on a platter. But this was Rome, a southern city, an unpredictable and dangerous place. And legalistically, he was possibly in the wrong, which left him at a further disadvantage in the argument.

  “Very well,” he said. “The blowing of the horn was perhaps truly unnecessary, despite the provocation.”

  “I insist on a genuine apology,” insisted Cordle.

  There was a thundering sound to the east: Thousands of Soviet tanks were moving into battle formation across the plains of Hungary, ready to resist the long-expected NATO thrust into Transylvania. The water supply was cut off in Foggia, Brindisi, Bari. The Swiss closed their frontiers and stood ready to dynamite the passes.

  “All right, I apologize!” the Milanese businessman screamed. “I am sorry I provoked you and even sorrier that I was born! Again, I apologize! Now will you go away and let me have a heart attack in peace?”

  “I accept your apology,” Cordle said. “No hard feelings, eh?” He strolled back to his car, humming “Blow the Man Down,” and drove away as millions cheered.

  War was once again averted by a hairbreadth.

  Cordle drove to the Arch of Titus, parked his car and—to the sound of a thousand trumpets—passed through it. He deserved this triumph as well as any Caesar.

  God, he gloated, I was loathsome!

  In England, Cordle stepped on a young lady’s toe just inside the Traitor’s Gate of the Tower of London. This should have served as an intimation of something. The young lady was named Mavis. She came from Short Hills, New Jersey, and she had long straight dark hair. She was slender, pretty, intelligent, energetic and she had a sense of humor. She had minor faults, as well, but they play no part in this story. She let Cordle buy her a cup of coffee. They were together constantly for the rest of the week.