Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  “—but lays its head in the lap of a virgin,” I finished for him.

  He shrugged it off. “Never mind the figures of speech, old boy. Mouse will unscramble my metaphors when she types up the manuscript. The point is, I can use Hinton’s brilliant discovery of the exploded mandala whose closure produces the ineffable object of endless fascination. I can journey down the endless spiral into the unknown. This is how the trip begins.”

  He pushed a switch on the base of the contraption. The sphere began to revolve, the lucite arms turned, and the cubes on the ends of those arms turned too, creating an effect both hypnotic and disturbing. I was glad when Foster turned it off.

  “My Mandala Machine!” he cried triumphantly. “What do you think?”

  “I think you could get your head into a lot of trouble with that device,” I told him.

  “No, no,” he said irritably. “I mean, what do you think of it as the subject for a book?”

  No matter what else he was, Foster was a genuine writer. A genuine writer is a person who will descend voluntarily into the flaming pits of hell, as long as he’s allowed to record his impressions and send them back to Earth for publication. I thought about the book that would most likely result from Foster’s project. I estimated its audience at about one hundred fifty people, including friends and relatives. Nevertheless, I heard myself saying, “I’ll buy it.” That’s how I manage to stay a small and unsuccessful publisher, despite being so smart.

  I returned to London shortly after that. Next day I drove to Glastonbury to spend a few days with Claude Upshank, owner of the Great White Brotherhood Press. We have been good friends, Claude and I, ever since we met ten years ago at a flying-saucer convention in Barcelona.

  “I don’t like it,” Claude said, when I told him about Foster’s project. “The mandala principle is potentially dangerous. You can really get into trouble when you start setting up autonomous feedback loops in your brain like that.”

  Claude had studied acupuncture and Rolfing at the Hardrada Institute in Malibu, so I figured he knew what he was talking about. Nevertheless, I thought that Charles had a lot of savvy in these matters and could take care of himself.

  When I telephoned Foster two days later, he told me that the project was going very well. He had added several refinements to the Mandala Machine: “Sound effects, for one. I’m using a special tape of Tibetan horns and gongs. The overtones, sufficiently amplified, can send you into instant trance.” And he had also bought a strobe light to flash into his eyes at six to ten beats a second: “The epileptic rate, you know. It’s ideal for loosening up your head.” He claimed that all of this deepened his state of trance and increased the clarity of the revolving cubes. “I’m very near to success now, you know.”

  I thought he sounded tired and close to hysteria. I begged him to take a rest.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Show must go on, eh?”

  A day later, Foster reported that he was right on the brink of the final breakthrough. His voice wavered, and I could hear him panting and wheezing between words. “I’ll admit it’s been more difficult than I had expected. But now I’m being assisted by a certain substance that I had the foresight to bring with me. I am not supposed to mention it over the telephone in view of the law of the land and the ever-present possibility of snoops on the line, so I’ll just remind you of Arthur Machen’s Novel of the White Powder and let you work out the rest for yourself. Call me tomorrow. The fourth dimension is finally coming together.”

  The next day Mimi answered the telephone and said that Foster was refusing to take any calls. She reported him as saying that he was right on the verge of success and could not be interrupted. He asked his friends to be patient with him during this difficult period.

  The next day it was the same, Mimi answering, Foster refusing to speak to us. That night I conferred with Claude and Pam.

  We were in Pam’s smart Chelsea apartment. We sat together in the bay window, drinking tea and watching the traffic pour down the King’s Road into Sloane Square. Claude asked, “Does Foster have any family?”

  “None in England,” Pam said. “His mother and brother are on holiday in Bali.”

  “Any close friends?”

  “Mouse, of course,” Pam said.

  We looked at each other. An odd presentiment had come to us simultaneously, a feeling that something was terribly wrong.

  “But this is ridiculous,” I said. “Mimi absolutely adores him, and she’s a very competent woman. What could there be to worry about?”

  “Let’s call once more,” Claude said.

  We tried, and were told that Mimi’s telephone was out of order. We decided to go to Sepoy Cottage at once.

  Claude drove us out in his old Morgan. Mimi met us at the door. She looked thoroughly exhausted, yet there was a serenity about her that I found just a little uncanny.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said, leading us inside. “You have no idea how frightening it’s all been. Charles came close to losing his mind in these last days.”

  “But why didn’t you tell us?” I demanded.

  “Charles implored me not to. He told me—and I believed him—that he and I had to see this thing through together. He thought it would be dangerous to his sanity to bring in anyone else at this point.”

  Claude made a noise that sounded like a snort. “Well, what happened?”

  “It all went very well at first,” Mimi said. “Charles began to spend increasingly longer periods in front of the machine, and he came to enjoy the experience. Soon I could get him away only to eat, and grudgingly at that. Then he gave up food altogether. After a while he no longer needed the machine. He could see the cubes and their faces in his head, could move them around at any speed he wanted, bring them together or spread them apart. The final creation, however, the coming together of the hypercube, was still eluding him. He went back to the machine, running it now at its highest speed.”

  Mimi sighed. “Of course, he pushed himself too hard. This time, when he turned off the machine, the mandala continued to grow and mutate in his head. Each cube had taken on hallucinatory solidity. He said the symbols gave off a hellish light that hurt his eyes. He couldn’t stop those cubes from flashing through his mind. He felt that he was being suffocated in a mass of alien signs. He grew agitated, swinging quickly between elation and despair. It was during one of his elated swings that he ripped out the telephone.”

  “You should have sent for us!” Claude said.

  “There was simply no time. Charles knew what was happening to him. He said we had to set up a counter-conditioning program immediately. It involved changing the symbols on the cube faces. The idea was to break up the obsessive image-trains through the altered sequence. I set it up, but it didn’t seem to work for Charles. He was fading away before my eyes, occasionally rousing himself to murmur, ‘The horror, the horror…’“

  “Bloody hell!” Claude exploded. “And then?”

  “I felt that I had to act immediately. Charles’s system of counter-conditioning had failed. I decided that he needed a different sort of symbol to look at—something simple and direct, something reassuring—”

  Just then Charles came slowly down the stairs. He had lost a lot of weight since I saw him last, and his face was haggard. He looked thin, happy, and not quite sane.

  “I was just napping,” he said. “I’ve got rather a lot of sleep to catch up on. Did Mouse tell you how she saved what little is left of my sanity?” He put his arm around her shoulders. “She’s marvelous, isn’t she? And to think that I only realized yesterday that I loved her. We’re getting married next week, and you’re all invited.”

  Mimi said, “I thought we were flying down to Monte Carlo and getting married in the city hall.”

  “Why, so we are.” Charles looked bewildered for a moment. He touched his head with the unconscious pathos of the wounded soldier in the movie who hasn’t yet realized that half his head is blown away. “The old think-piece hasn’t
quite recovered yet from the beating I gave it with those wretched cubes. If Mimi hadn’t been here, I don’t know what would have happened to me.”

  They beamed at us, the instant happy couple produced by Hinton’s devilish cubes. The transformation of Charles’s feelings toward Mimi—from fond indifference to blind infatuation—struck me as bizarre and dreamlike. They were Svengali and Trilby with the sexes reversed, a case of witchcraft rather than of love’s magic.

  “It’s going to be all right now, Charles,” Mimi said.

  “Yes, love, I know it is.” Charles smiled, but the animation had gone out of his face. He lifted his hand to his head again, and his knees began to sag. Mimi, her arm around his waist, half supported and half dragged him to the stairs.

  “I’ll just get him up to bed,” she said.

  Claude, Pam, and I stood in the middle of the room, looking at each other. Then, with a single accord, we turned and went into the parlor where the Mandala Machine was kept.

  We approached it with awe, for it was a modern version of ancient witchcraft. I could imagine Charles sitting in front of the thing, its arms revolving, the cubes turning and flashing, setting up a single ineradicable image in his mind. The ancient Hebrew, Chinese, and Egyptian letters were gone. All the faces of all the cubes now bore a single symbol—direct and reassuring, just as Mimi had said, but hardly simple. There were twenty cubes, with six faces to a cube, and pasted to each surface was a photograph of Mimi Royce.

  THE SKAG CASTLE

  Within the offices of the AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service, a gloomy silence reigned. By the faint light that filtered through the dirty windows, Richard Gregor was playing a new form of solitaire. It involved three packs of cards, six jokers, a set of dice, and a slide rule. The game was extremely complicated, maddeningly difficult, and it always came out if you persisted long enough.

  His partner, Mike Arnold, had swept his desk clear of its usual clutter of crusty test tubes and unpaid bills, and was now dozing fitfully on its stained surface.

  Business couldn’t have been worse.

  There was a tentative knock on the door.

  Quickly Gregor pushed his playing cards, dice, and slide rule into a drawer. Arnold rolled off his desk like a cat and flipped open Volume Two of Terkstiller’s Decontamination Modes on X- 32 (Omega) Worlds, which he had been using for a pillow.

  “Come in,” Gregor called out.

  The door opened and a girl entered. She was young, slender, dark-haired, and extremely pretty. Her eyes were gray, and they contained a hint of fear. Her lips were unsmiling.

  She looked around the unkempt office. “Is this the AAA Ace?” she inquired tentatively.

  “It certainly is,” Gregor assured her. “Won’t you sit down? We always keep the lights off. Much more restful, don’t you think?”

  And, he thought, quite necessary, since Con Mazda had shut off their power last week for nonpayment of a trifling bill.

  “I suppose it is,” the girl said, sitting in the cavernous client’s chair. She surveyed the office again. “You people are planetary decontaminationists, aren’t you? Not taxidermists or undertakers?”

  “Don’t let the office fool you,” Arnold said. “We are the best, and the most reasonable. No planet too big, no asteroid too small.”

  “Maybe I’ve come to the right place after all,” the girl said with a wan but enchanting smile. “You see, I don’t have much money.”

  Gregor nodded sympathetically. AAA Ace’s clients never had much money.

  “But I do have a tiny little planet that needs decontaminating,” the girl said. “It’s the most wonderful place in the whole galaxy. But the job might be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” Arnold asked.

  The girl nodded and glanced nervously at the door. “I don’t even know if I’m safe here. Are you armed?”

  Gregor found a rusty letter opener. Arnold hefted a bronze paperweight cast in the shape of the spaceship Constitution—a beautiful piece of workmanship.

  Somewhat relieved, the girl went on. “I’m Myra Branch Ryan. I was on my little planet, minding my own business, when suddenly this Scarb appeared before me, leering horribly—”

  “This what?”

  “Perhaps I should start at the beginning,” Myra Ryan said. “A few months ago my Uncle Jim died and left me a small planet and a Hemstet four spaceship. The planet is Coelle, in the Gelsors system. Uncle Jim bought the planet fifteen years ago for a vacation home. He had just gotten it into shape when he was called away on business. What with one thing and another, he never returned. Naturally I went out there as soon as I could.”

  Myra’s face brightened as she remembered her first impressions.

  “Coelle was very small, but perfect. It had a complete air system, the best gravity money can buy, and an artesian well. Uncle Jim had planted several orchards, and berry bushes on the hillsides, and long grass everywhere. There was even a little lake.

  “But Coelle’s outstanding feature was the Skag Castle. Uncle

  Jim hadn’t touched this, for the castle was old beyond belief. It was thought to have been built by the Skag Horde, who, according to legend, occupied the universe before the coming of man.”

  The partners nodded. Everyone had heard of the Skag Horde. A whole literature had sprung up around the scanty evidence of their existence. It was pretty well established that they had been reptile-evolved, and had mastered spaceflight. But legend went further than this. The Skag Horde was supposed to have known the Old Lore, a strange mixture of science and witchcraft. This, according to the legends, gave them powers beyond the conception of man, powers sprung from the evil counterforces of the universe.

  Their disappearance, millennia before Homo sapiens descended from the treetops, had never been satisfactorily explained.

  “I fell In love with Coelle,” Myra continued, “and the old Skag Castle just made it perfect.”

  “But where does the decontaminating come in?” Gregor asked. “Were there natives on Coelle? Animals? Germs?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Myra said. “Here’s what happened…”

  She had been on her planet a week, exploring its groves and orchards, and wandering around the Skag Castle. Then, one evening, sitting in the castle’s great library, she sensed something wrong. There was an unearthly stillness in the air, as though the planet were waiting for something to happen. Angrily she tried to shake off the mood. It was just nerves, she told herself. After she put a few more lights in the halls, and changed the blood-red draperies to something gayer…

  Then she heard a dull rumbling noise, like the sound of a giant walking. It seemed to come from somewhere in the solid granite upon which the castle rested.

  She stood completely still, waiting. The floor vibrated, a vase crept off a table and shattered on the flagstones. And then the Scarb appeared before her, leering horribly.

  There was no mistaking it. According to legend, the Scarbs had been the wizard-scientists of the vanished Skag Horde—powerful reptiles dressed in cloaks of gray and purple. The creature that stood before Myra was over nine feet tall, with tiny atrophied wings and a horn growing from its forehead.

  The Scarb said, “Earthwoman, go home!”

  She almost fainted. The Scarb continued, “Know, rash human, that this planet of Coelle is the ancestral home of the Skag Horde, and this Castle is the original Skag Burrow. Here the spirit of the Skag still lives, through the intervention of Grad, Ieele, and other accursed powers of the universe. Quit this sacred planet at once, foolish human, or I, the Undead Scarb, will exact revenge.”

  And with that, it vanished.

  “What did you do?” Gregor asked.

  “Nothing,” Myra said with a little laugh. “I just couldn’t believe it. I thought I must have had a hallucination, and everything would be all right if I just got control of myself. Twice more that week I heard the underground noises. And then the Scarb appeared again. He said, ‘You have been warned, Earthwoman.
Now beware the wrath of the Undead Scarb!’ After that, I got out as fast as I could.”

  Myra sniffed, took out a little handkerchief, and wiped her eyes.

  “So you see,” she said, “my little planet needs decontaminating. Or possibly exorcising.”

  “Miss Ryan,” Gregor said very gently, “I don’t mean to be insulting, but have you—ah—did you ever think of consulting a psychiatrist?”

  The girl stood up angrily. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “Not at all,” Gregor said soothingly. “But remember, you yourself spoke of the possibility of hallucination. After all, a deserted planet, an ancient castle, these legends—which, by the way, have very little basis in fact—all would tend to—”

  “You’re right, of course,” Myra said with a strange little smile. “But how do you explain this?” She opened her handbag and spilled three cans of film and a spool of magnetic tape onto Gregor’s desk.

  “I was able to record some of those hallucinations,” she said.

  The partners were momentarily speechless.

  “Something is going on in that castle,” Myra said earnestly. “It calls itself an Undead Scarb. Won’t you get rid of it for me?”

  Gregor groaned and rubbed his forehead. He hated to refuse anyone as beautiful as Miss Ryan, and they certainly could use the money. But this was not, in all honesty, a job for decontaminators. This looked like a psychic case, and psychic phenomena were notoriously tricky.

  “Miss Ryan—” he began, but Arnold broke in.

  “We would be delighted to take your case,” he said. To Gregor he gave an I’ll-explain-later wink.

  “Oh, how wonderful!” Myra said. “How soon will you be ready?”

  “As a rule,” Arnold said, “we need a few weeks’ notice. But for you—” He beamed fatuously. “For you, we are going to clear our calendar, postpone all other cases, and begin at once.”

  Gregor’s long, sad face was unhappier than ever. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten,” he told his partner. “Joe the Interstellar Junkman has our spaceship, due to a trifling bill we neglected to pay. I’m sorry, Miss Ryan—”