Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  “Call me Myra,” Myra said. “That’s all right, my Hemstet four is fueled and ready to go.”

  “Then we’ll leave tonight,” Arnold said. “Have no fear, Myra. Your little planet is safe in our hands. We’ll radio you as soon as—”

  “Radio nothing,” Myra said. “I’m going along. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

  They arranged for Myra to obtain the clearances and meet them back at the office. As she walked to the door, Arnold said, “By the way, why did you ask if we were armed?”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Since I came back to Terra, something’s been following me. Something wearing gray and purple. I’m afraid it might be the Undead Scarb.”

  She closed the door gently behind her.

  As soon as she was gone, Gregor shouted, “Have you gone completely out of your mind? Skags, Undead Scarbs—”

  “She’s beautiful,” Arnold said dreamily.

  “Are you listening to me? How are we supposed to decontaminate a haunted planet?”

  “Coelle isn’t haunted.”

  “What makes you think not?”

  “Because the original Skag Burrow, according to the very best evidence, was on the planet Duerite, not on Coelle. A Skag ghost would know that. Ergo, what she saw was no ghost.”

  Gregor frowned thoughtfully.

  “Mmm. You think someone wants to frighten her off Coelle?”

  “Obviously,” Arnold said.

  “But the planet’s been deserted for years. Why would someone take an interest in it now?”

  “I’m going to find out.”

  “Sounds like a job for a detective,” Gregor told him.

  “Perhaps you’ve forgotten,” Arnold said. “I am an honor graduate of the Hepburn School of Scientific Detection.”

  “That was only a six weeks’ correspondence course.”

  “So what? Detection is simply the rational application of logic. Moreover, detection and decontamination are essentially the same thing. Decontamination just carries the process of detection to its logical conclusion.”

  “I hope you know what you’re talking about,” Gregor said. “What about this gray and purple creature that’s been following Myra around?”

  “No such thing. A case of overwrought nerves,” Arnold diagnosed. “The poor girl needs someone to protect her. Me, for example.”

  “Yeah. But who’s going to protect you?”

  Arnold didn’t bother answering, and the partners began to make their preparations.

  II

  They spent the rest of the day loading the Hemstet with various devices they had managed to keep out of hock. Gregor invested in a secondhand Steng needler. It seemed a good weapon against the more palpable forms of wizardry. After a quick dinner at the Milky Way Diner they started back to their office.

  After they had walked several blocks, Arnold said, “I think we’re being followed.”

  “You have overwrought nerves,” Gregor diagnosed.

  “He was in the diner, too,” Arnold said. “And I’m sure I saw him at the spaceport.”

  Gregor glanced over his shoulder. Half a block behind he saw a man sauntering along and glancing idly into store windows, his attitude studiously casual.

  The partners turned down a street. The man followed. They circled and returned to the avenue they had been on. The man was still there, keeping half a block between them.

  “Have you noticed what he’s wearing?” Arnold asked, wiping perspiration from his forehead.

  Gregor looked again and saw that the man had on a gray suit and a purple tie—Skag colors.

  “Hmm,” Gregor said. “Do you suppose an Undead Scarb—if there were such a thing—could take on human form?”

  “I’d hate to find out,” Arnold said. “You’d better get that needler ready.”

  “I left it on the ship.”

  “That’s just fine,” Arnold said bitterly. “Just perfect. Someone—or something—is following us, probably with murderous intent, and you leave your blaster on the ship.”

  “Steady,” Gregor said. “Maybe we can shake him.”

  They continued walking. Gregor looked back and saw that the man—or Scarb—was still there. He was walking more rapidly, closing the gap between them.

  But coming down the street now was a taxi, its flag up.

  They hailed it and climbed in. The man—or Scarb—looked around frantically for another cab, but there was none in sight. When they drove off he was standing on the curb, glaring at them, his purple tie slightly askew.

  Myra Ryan was waiting for them at the office. She nodded when they told her about the follower.

  “I warned you it might be dangerous,” she said. “You can still back out, you know.”

  “What’ll you do then?” Arnold asked.

  “I’ll go back to Coelle,” Myra said. “No Skags are going to keep me off my planet.”

  “We’re going,” Arnold said, gazing tenderly at her. “You know we wouldn’t desert you, Myra.”

  “Of course not,” Gregor said wearily.

  At that moment the door opened, and in walked a man wearing a gray suit and a purple tie.

  “The Scarb!” Arnold gaped, and reached for his paperweight.

  “That’s no Scarb,” Myra said calmly. “That’s Ross Jameson. Hello, Ross.”

  Jameson was a tall, beautifully groomed man in his early thirties, with a handsome, impatient face and hard eyes.

  “Myra,” he said, “have you gone completely insane?”

  “I don’t think so, Ross,” Myra said sweetly.

  “Are you really going to Coelle with these charlatans?”

  Gregor stepped forward. “Were you following us?”

  “You’re damned right I was,” Jameson said belligerently.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Gregor said, “but—”

  “I’m Miss Ryan’s fiancé,” Jameson said, “and I’m not going to let her go through with this ridiculous project. Myra, from what you’ve told me, this planet of yours sounds dangerous. Why don’t you forget about it and marry me?”

  “I want to live on Coelle,” Myra said in a dangerously quiet voice. “I want to live on my own little planet.”

  Jameson shook his head. “We’ve been through this a thousand times. Darling, you can’t seriously expect me to give up my business and move to this little mudball with you. I’ve got my work—”

  “And I’ve got my mudball,” Myra said. “It’s my very own mudball, and I want to live there.”

  “With the Skags?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in that sort of thing,” Myra said.

  “I don’t. But some trickery is going on, and I don’t like to see you involved. It’s probably that crazy hermit. There’s no telling what he’ll try next. Myra, won’t you please—”

  “No!” Myra said. “I’m going to Coelle!”

  “Then I’m going with you.”

  “You are not,” Myra said coldly.

  “I’ve already arranged it with my staff,” Jameson said. “You’ll need someone to protect you on that ridiculous planet, and you can’t expect much from these two.” He glared contemptuously at Gregor and Arnold.

  “Maybe you didn’t understand me,” Myra said very quietly. “You are not coming, Ross.”

  Jameson’s firm face sagged, and his eyes grew worried. “Myra,” he said, “please let me come. If anything happened to you, I’d—I don’t know what I’d do. Please, Myra?”

  There was no doubting the sincerity in his voice. When Jameson dropped his commanding voice and lowered the imposing thrust of his shoulders, he became a very appealing young man, quite obviously in love.

  Myra said softly, “All right, Ross. And—thanks.”

  Gregor cleared his throat loudly. “We blast off in two hours.”

  “Fine,” Jameson said, taking Myra’s arm. “We have time for a drink, dear.”

  Arnold said, “Pardon me, Mr. Jameson. How does it happen you are w
earing gray and purple—the Skag Colors?”

  “Are they?” Jameson asked. “Pure coincidence. I’ve owned this tie for years.”

  “And who is the hermit?”

  “I thought you geniuses knew everything,” Jameson said with a nasty grin. “See you at the ship.”

  After they had gone, a deep, gloomy silence hung over the office. Finally Arnold said, “So she’s engaged.”

  “So it would seem,” Gregor said. “But not married,” he added sympathetically.

  “No, she’s not married,” Arnold said, becoming cheerful again. “And Jameson is obviously the wrong man for her. I’m sure Myra wouldn’t marry a liar.”

  “Of course she wouldn’t marry a— Huh?”

  “Didn’t you notice? That purple tie he’s ‘owned for years’ was brand new. I think we’ll keep an eye on Mr. Jameson.”

  Gregor gazed at his partner with admiration. “That’s a very clever observation.”

  “The process of detection,” Arnold said sententiously, “is merely the accumulation of minute discrepancies and infinitesimal inconsistencies, which are immediately apparent to the trained eye.”

  Gregor and the trained eye put the office into order. At eleven o’clock they met Jameson and Myra at the ship, and without further incident they departed for Coelle.

  III

  Ross Jameson was president and chief engineer of Jameson Electronics, a small but growing concern he had inherited from his father. It was a great responsibility for so young a man, and Ross had adopted a brusque, overbearing manner to avoid any hint of indecisiveness. But whenever he was able to forget his exalted position he was a pleasant enough fellow, and a good sport in facing the many little discomforts of interstellar travel.

  Myra’s Hemstet 4 was old and hogged out of shape by repeated high-gravity takeoffs. The ship had developed a disconcerting habit of springing leaks in the most inaccessible places, which Arnold and Gregor had to locate and patch. The ship’s astrogation system wasn’t to be trusted, either, and Jameson spent considerable time figuring out a way of controlling the automatics manually.

  When Coelle’s little sun was finally in sight and the ship was in its deceleration orbit, the four of them were able, for the first time, to share a meal together.

  “What’s the story on this hermit?” Gregor asked over coffee.

  “You must have heard of him,” Jameson said. “He calls himself Edward the Hermit, and he’s written a book.”

  “The book is Dreams on Kerma,” Myra filled in. “It was a bestseller last year.”

  “Oh, that hermit,” Gregor said, and Arnold nodded.

  They had read the hermit’s book, along with several thousand others, while sitting in their office waiting for business. Dreams on Kerma had been a sort of spatial Robinson Crusoe. Edward’s struggles with his environment, and with himself, had made exciting reading. Because of his lack of scientific knowledge, the hermit had made many blunders. But he had persevered, and created a home for himself out of the virgin wilderness of the planet Kerma.

  The young misanthrope’s calm decision to give up the society of mankind and devote his life to the contemplation of nature and the universe—the Eternals, as he called them—had struck some responsive chord in millions of harried men and women. A few had been sufficiently inspired to seek out their own hermitages.

  Almost without exception they returned to Terra in six months or a year, sadder but wiser. Solitude, they discovered, made better reading than living.

  “But what has he got to do with Coelle?” Arnold asked.

  “Coelle is the second planet of the Gelsors system,” Jameson said. “Kerma is the third planet, and the hermit is its only inhabitant.”

  Gregor said, “I still don’t see—”

  “I guess it was my fault,” Myra said. “You see, the hermit’s book inspired me. It was what decided me to live on Coelle, even if I had to do it alone.” She threw Jameson a cutting glance. “Do you remember his chapter on the joy of possessing an entire planet? I can’t describe what that did to me. I felt—”

  “I still don’t see the connection,” Gregor said.

  “I’m coming around to it,” Myra said. “When I found out that Edward the Hermit and I were neighbors, astronomically speaking, I decided to speak to him. I just wanted to tell him how much his book meant to me. So I radioed him from Coelle.”

  “He has a radio?” Arnold asked.

  “Of course,” Myra said. “He keeps it so he can listen to the absurd voices of mankind, and laugh himself to sleep.”

  “Oh. Go on.”

  “Well, when he heard I was going to live on Coelle, he became furious. Said he couldn’t stand having a human so close.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Arnold said. “The planets are millions of miles apart.”

  “I told him that. But he started shouting and screaming at me. He said mankind wouldn’t leave him alone. Real-estate brokers were trying to talk him into selling his mineral rights, and a travel agency was going to route its ships within ten thousand miles of the upper atmosphere of his planet. And then, to top it all, I come along and move in practically on his doorstep.”

  “And then he threatened her,” Jameson said.

  “I guess it was a threat,” Myra said. “He told me to get out of the Gelsors system, or he wouldn’t be responsible for what happened.”

  “Did he say what would happen?” Arnold asked.

  “No. He just hinted it would be pretty extreme.”

  Jameson said, “I think it’s apparent that the man’s unbalanced.

  After the talk, these so-called Skag incidents began. There must be a connection.”

  “It’s possible,” Arnold said judiciously.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Myra said, gazing pensively out a port. “His book was so beautiful. And his picture on the book jacket—he looked so soulful.”

  “Hah!” Jameson said. “Anyone who’d live alone on an empty planet must be off his rocker.”

  Myra gave him a venomous look. And then the radar alarm went off. They were about to land on Coelle...

  The Skag Castle dominated Coelle. Built of an almost indestructible gray stone, the castle sprawled across the curved land like a prehistoric monster crouched over Lilliput. Its towers and battlements soared past the narrow limits of the planet’s atmosphere, and the uppermost spires were lost in haze. As they approached, the black slit windows seemed to stare menacingly at them.

  “Cozy little place,” Gregor commented.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Myra said. “Come on. I’ll show you around.”

  The three men looked at the castle, then at each other.

  “Just the ground floor,” Arnold begged.

  Myra wanted to show them everything. It wasn’t every girl who became the owner of an alien birthplace, period house, and haunted castle, all rolled into one. But she settled for a few of the main attractions: the library—containing ten thousand Skag scrolls that no one could read—the Worship Chamber of Ieele, and the Grand Torture Room.

  Dinner was prepared by the auto-cook Uncle Jim had thoughtfully installed, and later they had brandy on the terrace, under the stars. Myra gave them all bedrooms on the second floor, to avoid as much climbing as possible. They retired, planning to begin the investigation early in the morning.

  The partners shared a bedroom the size of a small soccer field, with bronze death masks of Scarb princes leering from the wall. Arnold kicked off his shoes, flopped into bed, and was asleep immediately.

  Gregor paced around for a few minutes, smoked a last cigarette, snapped off the light, and climbed into his bed. He was on the verge of sleep, when suddenly he sat upright. He thought he had heard a dull rumbling noise, like the sound of a giant walking underneath the castle. Nerves, he told himself.

  Then the rumbling came again, the floor shook, and the death masks clattered angrily against the wall.

  In another moment the noise had subsided.

  “Did you h
ear it?” Gregor whispered.

  “Of course I heard it,” Arnold said crossly. “It almost shook me out of bed.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It could be a form of poltergeist,” Arnold answered, “although I doubt it. We’ll explore the cellar tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think this place has any cellar,” Gregor said.

  “It hasn’t? Good! That would clinch it.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll have to accumulate a bit more data before I can make a positive statement,” Arnold said smugly.

  “Have you any idea what you’re talking about? Or are you just making it up as you go along? Because if—”

  “Look!”

  Gregor turned and saw a gray and purple light in one corner of the room. It pulsed weirdly, throwing fantastic shadows across the bronze death masks. Slowly it approached them. As it drew nearer they could make out the reptilian outlines of a Skag, and through him they could see the walls of the room.

  Gregor fumbled under his pillow, found the needler, and fired. The charge went through the Skag, and pocked a neat three-inch groove in the stone wall.

  The Skag stood before them, its cloak swirling, an expression of extreme disapproval on its face. And then, without a sound, it was gone.

  As soon as he could move, Gregor snapped on the light. Arnold was smiling faintly, staring at the place where the Skag had been.

  “Very interesting,” Arnold said. “Very interesting indeed.” “What is?”

  “Do you remember how Myra described the Undead Scarb?”

  “Sure. She said it was nine feet tall, had little wings, and—oh, I think I see.”

  “Precisely,” Arnold said. “This Skag or Scarb was no more than four feet in height, without wings.”

  “I suppose there could be two types,” Gregor said dubiously. “But what bearing does this have on the underground noises? The whole thing is getting ridiculously complicated. Surely you must realize that.”

  “Complication is frequently a key to solution,” Arnold said. “Simplicity alone is baffling. Complexity, on the other hand, implies the presence of a self-contradictory logic structure. Once the incomprehensibles are reconciled and the extraneous factors canceled, the murderer stands revealed in the glaring light of rational inevitability.”