Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  “Gee,” said Raeder.

  “Don’t thank me. There’s a thousand dollars if you win or place second, and a consolation prize of a hundred dollars if you lose. But that’s not important.”

  “No sir.”

  “Spills is a little show. The JBC network uses it as a testing ground. First-and second-place winners on Spills move on to Emergency. The prizes are much bigger on Emergency.”

  “I know they are, sir.”

  “And if you do well on Emergency there are the first-class thrill shows, like Hazard and Underwater Perils, with their nationwide coverage and enormous prizes. And then comes the really big time. How far you go is up to you.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir,” Raeder said.

  Moulian stopped chewing gum for a moment and said, almost reverently, “You can do it, Jim. Just remember. You’re the people, and the people can do anything.”

  The way he said it made Raeder feel momentarily sorry for Mr. Moulian, who was dark and frizzy-haired and popeyed, and was obviously not the people.

  They shook hands. Then Raeder signed a paper absolving the JBC of all responsibility should he lose his life, limbs or reason during the contest. And he signed another paper exercising his rights under the Voluntary Suicide Act. The law required this, and it was a mere formality.

  In three weeks, he appeared on Spills.

  The program followed the classic form of the automobile race. Untrained drivers climbed into powerful American and European competition cars and raced over a murderous twenty-mile course. Raeder was shaking with fear as he slid his big Maserati into the wrong gear and took off.

  The race was a screaming, tire-burning nightmare. Raeder stayed back, letting the early leaders smash themselves up on the counter-banked hairpin turns. He crept into third place when a Jaguar in front of him swerved against an Alfa-Romeo, and the two cars roared into a plowed field. Raeder gunned for second place on the last three miles, but couldn’t find passing room. An S-curve almost took him, but he fought the car back on the road, still holding third. Then the lead driver broke a crankshaft in the final fifty yards, and Jim ended in second place.

  He was now a thousand dollars ahead. He received four fan letters, and a lady in Oshkosh sent him a pair of argyles. He was invited to appear on Emergency.

  Unlike the others, Emergency was not a competition-type program. It stressed individual initiative. For the show, Raeder was knocked out with a non-habit-forming narcotic. He awoke in the cockpit of a small airplane, cruising on autopilot at ten thousand feet. His fuel gauge showed nearly empty. He had no parachute. He was supposed to land the plane.

  Of course, he had never flown before.

  He experimented gingerly with the controls, remembering that last week’s participant had recovered consciousness in a submarine, had opened the wrong valve, and had drowned.

  Thousands of viewers watched spellbound as this average man, a man just like themselves, struggled with the situation just as they would do. Jim Raeder was them. Anything he could do, they could do. He was representative of the people.

  Raeder managed to bring the ship down in some semblance of a landing. He flipped over a few times, but his seat belt held. And the engine, contrary to expectation, did not burst into flames.

  He staggered out with two broken ribs, three thousand dollars, and a chance, when he healed, to appear on Torero.

  At last, a first-class thrill show! Torero paid ten thousand dollars. All you had to do was kill a black Miura bull with a sword, just like a real trained matador.

  The fight was held in Madrid, since bullfighting was still illegal in the United States. It was nationally televised.

  Raeder had a good cuadrilla. They liked the big, slow-moving American. The picadors really leaned into their lances, trying to slow the bull for him. The banderilleros tried to run the beast off his feet before driving in their banderillas. And the second matador, a mournful man from Algiceras, almost broke the bull’s neck with fancy capework.

  But when all was said and done it was Jim Raeder on the sand, a red muleta clumsily gripped in his left hand, a sword in his right, facing a ton of black, blood-streaked, wide-horned bull.

  Someone was shouting, “Try for the lung, hombre. Don’t be a hero, stick him in the lung.” But Jim only knew what the technical adviser in New York had told him: Aim with the sword and go in over the horns.

  Over he went. The sword bounced off bone, and the bull tossed him over its back. He stood up, miraculously ungouged, took another sword and went over the horns again with his eyes closed. The god who protects children and fools must have been watching, for the sword slid in like a needle through butter, and the bull looked startled, stared at him unbelievingly, and dropped like a deflated balloon.

  They paid him ten thousand dollars, and his broken collar bone healed in practically no time. He received twenty-three fan letters, including a passionate invitation from a girl in Atlantic City, which he ignored. And they asked him if he wanted to appear on another show.

  He had lost some of his innocence. He was now fully aware that he had been almost killed for pocket money. The big loot lay ahead. Now he wanted to be almost killed for something worthwhile.

  So he appeared on Underwater Perils, sponsored by Fairlady’s Soap. In face mask, respirator, weighted belt, flippers and knife, he slipped into the warm waters of the Caribbean with four other contestants, followed by a cage-protected camera crew. The idea was to locate and bring up a treasure which the sponsor had hidden there.

  Mask diving isn’t especially hazardous. But the sponsor had added some frills for public interest. The area was sown with giant clams, moray eels, sharks of several species, giant octopuses, poison coral, and other dangers of the deep.

  It was a stirring contest. A man from Florida found the treasure in a deep crevice, but a moray eel found him. Another diver took the treasure, and a shark took him. The brilliant blue-green water became cloudy with blood, which photographed well on color TV. The treasure slipped to the bottom and Raeder plunged after it, popping an eardrum in the process. He plucked it from the coral, jettisoned his weighted belt and made for the surface. Thirty feet from the top he had to fight another diver for the treasure.

  They feinted back and forth with their knives. The man struck, slashing Raeder across the chest. But Raeder, with the self-possession of an old contestant, dropped his knife and tore the man’s respirator out of his mouth.

  That did it. Raeder surfaced, and presented the treasure at the standby boat. It turned out to be a package of Fairlady’s Soap—”The Greatest Treasure of All.”

  That netted him twenty-two thousand dollars in cash and prizes, and three hundred and eight fan letters, and an interesting proposition from a girl in Macon, which he seriously considered. He received free hospitalization for his knife slash and burst eardrum, and injections for coral infection.

  But best of all, he was invited to appear on the biggest of the thrill shows. The Prize of Peril.

  And that was when the real trouble began....

  The subway came to a stop, jolting him out of his reverie. Raeder pushed back his hat and observed, across the aisle, a man staring at him and whispering to a stout woman. Had they recognized him?

  He stood up as the doors opened, and glanced at his watch. He had five hours to go.

  At the Manhasset station he stepped into a taxi and told the driver to take him to New Salem.

  “New Salem?” the driver asked, looking at him in the rear vision mirror.

  “That’s right.”

  The driver snapped on his radio. “Fare to New Salem. Yep, that’s right. New Salem.”

  They drove off. Raeder frowned, wondering if it had been a signal. It was perfectly usual for taxi drivers to report to their dispatchers, of course. But something about the man’s voice...

  “Let me off here,” Raeder said.

  He paid the driver and began walking down a narrow country road that curved through sparse woods. The trees were to
o small and too widely separated for shelter. Raeder walked on, looking for a place to hide.

  There was a heavy truck approaching. He kept on walking, pulling his hat low on his forehead. But as the truck drew near, he heard a voice from the television set in his pocket. It cried, “Watch out!”

  He flung himself into the ditch. The truck careened past, narrowly missing him, and screeched to a stop. The driver was shouting, “There he goes! Shoot, Harry, shoot!”

  Bullets clipped leaves from the trees as Raeder sprinted into the woods.

  “It’s happened again!” Mike Terry was saying, his voice high-pitched with excitement. “I’m afraid Jim Raeder let himself be lulled into a false sense of security. You can’t do that, Jim! Not with your life at stake! Not with killers pursuing you! Be careful, Jim, you still have four and a half hours to go!”

  The driver was saying, “Claude, Harry, go around with the truck. We got him boxed.”

  “They’ve got you boxed, Jim Raeder!” Mike Terry cried. “But they haven’t got you yet! And you can thank Good Samaritan Susy Peters of twelve Elm Street, South Orange, New Jersey, for that warning shout just when the truck was bearing down on you. We’ll have little Susy on stage in just a moment....Look, folks, our studio helicopter has arrived on the scene. Now you can see Jim Raeder running, and the killers pursuing, surrounding him...”

  Raeder ran through a hundred yards of woods and found himself on a concrete highway, with open woods beyond. One of the killers was trotting through the woods behind him. The truck had driven to a connecting road, and was now a mile away, coming toward him.

  A car was approaching from the other direction. Raeder ran into the highway, waving frantically. The car came to a stop.

  “Hurry!” cried the blond young woman driving it.

  Raeder dived in. The woman made a U-turn on the highway. A bullet smashed through the windshield. She stamped on the accelerator, almost running down the lone killer who stood in the way.

  The car surged away before the truck was within firing range.

  Raeder leaned back and shut his eyes tightly. The woman concentrated on her driving, watching for the truck in her rear vision mirror.

  “It’s happened again!” cried Mike Terry, his voice ecstatic. “Jim Raeder has been plucked again from the jaws of death, thanks to Good Samaritan Janice Morrow of four three three Lexington Avenue, New York City. Did you ever see anything like it, folks? The way Miss Morrow drove through a fusillade of bullets and plucked Jim Raeder from the mouth of doom! Later we’ll interview Miss Morrow and get her reactions. Now, while Jim Raeder speeds away—perhaps to safety, perhaps to further peril—we’ll have a short announcement from our sponsor. Don’t go away! Jim’s got four hours and ten minutes until he’s safe. Anything can happen!”

  “Okay,” the girl said. “We’re off the air now. Raeder, what in the hell is the matter with you?”

  “Eh?” Raeder asked. The girl was in her early twenties. She looked efficient, attractive, untouchable. Raeder noticed that she had good features, a trim figure. And he noticed that she seemed angry.

  “Miss,” he said, “I don’t know how to thank you for—”

  “Talk straight,” Janice Morrow said. “I’m no Good Samaritan. I’m employed by the JBC network.”

  “So the program had me rescued!”

  “Cleverly reasoned,” she said.

  “But why?”

  “Look, this is an expensive show, Raeder. We have to turn in a good performance. If our rating slips, we’ll all be in the street selling candy apples. And you aren’t cooperating.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you’re terrible,” the girl said bitterly. “You’re a flop, a fiasco. Are you trying to commit suicide? Haven’t you learned anything about survival?”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “The Thompsons could have had you a dozen times by now. We told them to take it easy, stretch it out. But it’s like shooting a clay pigeon six feet tall. The Thompsons are cooperating, but they can only fake so far. If I hadn’t come along, they’d have had to kill you—air-time or not.”

  Raeder stared at her, wondering how such a pretty girl could talk that way. She glanced at him, then quickly looked back to the road.

  “Don’t give me that look!” she said. “You chose to risk your life for money, buster. And plenty of money! You knew the score. Don’t act like some innocent little grocer who finds the nasty hoods are after him. That’s a different plot.”

  “I know,” Raeder said.

  “If you can’t live well, at least try to die well.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Raeder said.

  “Don’t be too sure....You’ve got three hours and forty minutes until the end of the show. If you can stay alive, fine. The boodle’s yours. But if you can’t, at least try to give them a run for the money.”

  Raeder nodded, staring intently at her.

  “In a few moments we’re back on the air. I develop engine trouble, let you off. The Thompsons go all out now. They kill you when and if they can, as soon as they can. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Raeder said. “If I make it, can I see you some time?”

  She bit her lip angrily. “Are you trying to kid me?”

  “No. I’d like to see you again. May I?”

  She looked at him curiously. “I don’t know. Forget it. We’re almost on. I think your best bet is the woods to the right. Ready?”

  “Yes. Where can I get in touch with you? Afterward, I mean.”

  “Oh, Raeder, you aren’t paying attention. Go through the woods until you find a washed-out ravine. It isn’t much, but it’ll give you some cover.”

  “Where can I get in touch with you?” Raeder asked again.

  “I’m in the Manhattan telephone book.” She stopped the car. “Okay, Raeder, start running.”

  He opened the door.

  “Wait.” She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. “Good luck, you idiot. Call me if you make it.”

  And then he was on foot, running into the woods.

  He ran through birch and pine, past an occasional split-level house with staring faces at the big picture window. Some occupant of those houses must have called the gang, for they were close behind him when he reached the washed-out little ravine. Those quiet, mannerly, law-abiding people didn’t want him to escape, Raeder thought sadly. They wanted to see a killing. Or perhaps they wanted to see him narrowly escape a killing.

  It came to the same thing, really.

  He entered the ravine, burrowed into the thick underbrush and lay still. The Thompsons appeared on both ridges, moving slowly, watching for any movement. Raeder held his breath as they came parallel to him.

  He heard the quick explosion of a revolver. But the killer had only shot a squirrel. It squirmed for a moment, then lay still.

  Lying in the underbrush, Raeder heard the studio helicopter overhead. He wondered if any cameras were focused on him. It was possible. And if someone were watching, perhaps some Good Samaritan would help.

  So looking upward, toward the helicopter, Raeder arranged his face in a reverent expression, clasped his hands and prayed. He prayed silently, for the audience didn’t like religious ostentation. But his lips moved. That was every man’s privilege.

  And a real prayer was on his lips. Once, a lip reader in the audience had detected a fugitive pretending to pray, but actually just reciting multiplication tables. No help for that man!

  Raeder finished his prayer. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he had nearly two hours to go.

  And he didn’t want to die! It wasn’t worth it, no matter how much they paid! He must have been crazy, absolutely insane to agree to such a thing...

  But he knew that wasn’t true. And he remembered just how sane he had been.

  One week ago he had been on the Prize of Peril stage, blinking in the spotlight, and Mike Teny had shaken his hand.

  “Now Mr. Raeder,” Terry had said solemnly, “do you understand
the rules of the game you are about to play?”

  Raeder nodded.

  “If you accept, Jim Raeder, you will be a hunted man for a week. Killers will follow you, Jim. Trained killers, men wanted by the law for other crimes, granted immunity for this single killing under the Voluntary Suicide Act. They will be trying to kill you; Jim. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Raeder said. He also understood the two hundred thousand dollars he would receive if he could live out the week.

  “I ask you again, Jim Raeder. We force no man to play for stakes of death.”

  “I want to play,” Raeder said.

  Mike Terry turned to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have here a copy of an exhaustive psychological test which an impartial psychological testing firm made on Jim Raeder at our request. Copies will be sent to anyone who desires them for twenty-five cents to cover the cost of mailing. The test shows that Jim Raeder is sane, well-balanced, and fully responsible in every way.” He turned to Raeder.

  “Do you still want to enter the contest, Jim?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Very well!” cried Mike Terry. “Jim Raeder, meet your would-be killers!”

  The Thompson gang moved on stage, booed by the audience.

  “Look at them, folks,” said Mike Terry, with undisguised contempt. “Just look at them! Antisocial, thoroughly vicious, completely amoral. These men have no code but the criminal’s warped code, no honor but the honor of the cowardly hired killer. They are doomed men, doomed by our society which will not sanction their activities for long, fated to an early and unglamorous death.”

  The audience shouted enthusiastically.

  “What have you to say, Claude Thompson?” Terry asked.

  Claude, the spokesman of the Thompsons, stepped up to the microphone. He was a thin, clean-shaven man, conservatively dressed.

  “I figure,” Claude Thompson said hoarsely, “I figure we’re no worse than anybody. I mean, like soldiers in a war, they kill. And look at the graft in government, and the unions. Everybody’s got their graft.”

  That was Thompson’s tenuous code. But how quickly, with what precision Mike Terry destroyed the killer’s rationalizations! Terry’s questions pierced straight to the filthy soul of the man.